The Beetle has finally cleared 60,000 miles. Driving back from the shop, I notice that the almost-ping sound is gone. It’ll be interesting to see, once I run a full tank of gas thru the post-maint engine, to see if I’m getting better mileage. It’s been a good car so far.
When I unsubscribed from the paper version of Asimov’s, I specifically suggested letting me know when they had kindle support. I just happen to be browsing the magazine selection for kindle today, and find that they are now available.
In addition to the traditional calls from Mom, Dad, and Sister1, I got a birthday greeting from the robot at HR Block. It was a little creepy. I wonder if they make those calls to all people who file with them, or just the ones with birthdays close to tax season.
One of the, to me, stranger bits of the consolidated music biz are all the corporation-style cover albums. For example, someone put together a well produced set of cover songs done in simlish, the fake language of the video game Sims. Talk about a strange cross-marketing plan.
I’m watching the end of Fox News’ election coverage, waiting for the local news to start up, and they are interviewing Ralph Nader. The fox anchor brings up a statement Ralph made to someone else earlier, that it remained to be seen if Obama would turn out to be all americans have hoped for, or “just an Uncle Tom for big business”. It seemed pretty obvious that the fox guy thought Ralph had just mis-spoken, and tried to give him a chance to reword his worries in a little less offensive manner, but Ralph was having none of it, and really making a total ass of himself. I can understand once again, how my friend who used to work with Ralph back in the ’70s, could have such a low opinion of the man. It was pretty obvious that his pride was more important than the message he’d intended to send. It DOES remain to be seen how well Obama will turn out in practice. George W said a lot of stuff about uniting the country in his acceptance speech too.
But everyone knows, you won’t get anyone to listen that far into your statement, if you start it off with racist shit like that.
In one of those odd places where, if I’d known the author of the original book, I probably wouldn’t have ever given the TV show enough of a chance, there lies the CBC produced J-Pod and the book of the same name by Douglas Copland.
I love the CBC. Compared to American TV, I think it’s far more witty, capable of poking fun at foibles on all sides of the political fence. When I discovered they had a show about computer programmers who did drugs and had sex, I was almost sold. When I found out one of their character’s drug-of-chocie was robotusin, I knew I had to watch it all. Add in the fact that Alan Thicke plays a hard-drinkin, oblivious, wanna-be actor, opposite an amazing Sherry Miller, playing a pot-growing just-a-little-nonsense mother, and it all sorts of delicious comedy gravy. I was more than a little annoyed when they ended the season with a cliff-hanger.
Wanting to know how it all works out, without having to wait, and hope that the tv show gets a 2nd season, since I had some extra audible credits, I bought the unabridged audiobook version, and started listening. It was pretty obvious early on, that there were some significant differences between the book and the show. One of the characters is completely missing from the TV version, and more importantly-to-me, alot of the characters turn out to be much more developed and involved, in the TV version. And the book is FULL of fake-disses of Douglas Copland, whereas I don’t think he’s mentioned once on TV. In general, I think the TV version is much better. It seems odd to my American eyes/ears, how the book has more product placement than the TV show. And I hate the book’s happy ending shtick. I much prefer the extended consequences of the TV version, though now, I’m just as stuck for finding out how it all ends.
Dear CBC, you so better have approved a second season of j-pod.
I’m impressed with the level of self-deception it must take a christian with even the most passing interest in the bible, to actually re-create the scene of praying to the golden calf.
Another photo sharing site. The more free backups of my photo library out there, the better I always say.
UPDATE: After uploading the pics, going thru all the options for sharing settings, I hit the save button, and it deleted all the photos. I would NOT trust installing their software or active-X control on a machine with access to important data. Be WARY.
Between Dan Akroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka and Danny Devito’s Limoncello, I think one could have an enjoyable evening of inebriation. Too bad neither one will ever show up in the state run liquor stores we have to pick from up here in the Northwest.
I’ve been semi-remembering a dinosaur remote access feature from the days when you couldn’t guarantee an 8-bit path between client and server at all times, where you could manage a login to your mixed-case username/password, if you entered the initial username in all CAPS.
Googling for “unix login uppercase” just gave me a bunch of pages encouraging people to make passwords that mixed upper and lowercase letters with numbers and symbols. Good advice, but not what I was looking for. Then our security guru here at work suggested replacing uppercase with 7-bit, and sure enough I was able to find documentation that something like my memory existed, at least in aix 4.
I’m still not entirely convinced that an admin couldn’t enable this feature on a modern system somehow. I guess the program “adduser” would be an easy place to look, since it would have to enforce case-free uniqueness.