Geek Drivel

This “Virgin Mary USB Flash drive” is just ridiculous. “Plug her in and ’she comes to life, her red LED heart starts to beat — in passive state slowly, quicker whilst connecting or saving data’ [...]“

Thanks, but I’ll take a USB Rocket Launcher instead. (Oh darn, it looks like it’s Windows-only.)

“Cyber Monday” is apparently the new name for the Monday after Thanksgiving, when workers return to the office and start Christmas shoping online from their work computers. It’s apparently growing in importance, as the traditional “Black Friday” (when stores supposedly “climb into the black,” or start making a profit for their fiscal year) loses ground.

We’ll see how this plays out over the next few years, but I suspect it’s going to continue. The Internet has made it possible for anyone to easily obtain just about any information, and a lot of time-honored industries are discovering that they can no longer rely on the ignorance of the masses to charge a ridiculous markup on their products.

My first computer was a used TI-99/4a, given to me as a gift on my twelfth birthday, just after Texas Instruments abandoned it. It was a wonderful little device, despite the quickly-outgrown 16K of memory. One of the best things about it (besides the hardware speech synthesizer module that I got with it) was that when you turned it on, it was instantly ready to do your bidding. You might have to load a program first, which involved a cassette tape drive, a lot of electronic wailing, and enough time to play a game on our Sears-branded “TeleGames” Atari 2600 clone, but that was a small price to pay.

I’ve never really gotten used to the DOS/Windows/etcetera concept of having to load the operating system from external storage. It makes sense when OSes are regularly updated, but it always seemed to me that there was no reason why the computer couldn’t instantly be ready when we turned them on.

It seems that I’m not the only one who misses those days.

I always got an odd look when I told people that I enjoyed watching the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Something along the lines of “you’d admit to that, voluntarily?” I also really enjoyed the Firefly series, and the Serenity movie that capped it off. So I was interested to read about creator Joss Whedon’s new project Dollhouse as well. It sounds intriguing, and I look forward to seeing it.

Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!

Abduction and brain-washing by a Satanic cult… it’s all just too eighties for me.

“The Kentucky legislature holds hearings on global warming, and forgets to invite any actual scientists.” Un-freakin’-believable.

When I was a child, one of our family’s vacations required driving through Nashville, Tennessee. That was the first place I encountered grooved pavement; my mother said to be quiet and listen, because the road was singing to us (which earned her about three minutes of golden near-silence from myself and my two sisters).

It wasn’t, of course, but it seems that someone in Japan — where else? — has taken the idea and run with it.

After trying for a couple days to get the Squid http proxy software installed on my office CygWin system (to bypass the hotel’s blocking system, so that I can get a secure connection over their open wireless system), I’ve given up on it. I don’t know of any way to have the office machine download the several-megabyte source-code tarball without me manually typing in a dozen or so FTP commands (which isn’t possible in the time I have before my SSH connection is interrupted).

As I still can’t avoid Windows on that machine (due to the VTech Skype phones that only work with Windows 2000 or XP), I’ve decided to create a VMware virtual box on it, running Ubuntu Linux, purely as an SSH server. That way, I’ll have a real Linux system to work with in the future, with useful utilities like wget (which would have solved this problem quite neatly).

Fortunately, this is the last night we’ll be at this hotel. Hopefully the other two on our itinerary won’t be running such a brain-dead system.

And a Happy Turkey Day to our US readers.

“Freelance technology journalist” Don Reisinger has an interesting article here:

As music downloading (and dare I say illegal downloading) continues to rise, these music companies bury their heads in the sand and blow policy out the other end. Instead of understanding customers and realizing that what we want is readily available music without DRM, Warner and its friends have decided to bully us in the hopes we’ll stop. We won’t.

Much more elegantly put (I love the visual metaphor), but the sentiment is exactly what I’ve been saying for nearly a decade.