Geek Drivel

Good tips on a subject that few of us know how to handle at all, let alone how to handle well.

Bah. Humbug.

GoddessJ and I have been married for ten years today. Here is an open letter from me to her:

GoddessJ, the last ten years have been amazing. You’ve taught me a lot, and I’ve grown to be a much better person for it. I’ve always admired your openness, your enjoyment of life, your sense of humor, and your social skills, among many other traits.

It hasn’t always been easy, or comfortable, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I’m proud to have as my wife and best friend. Here’s to the past decade, and to the even-better decades yet to come.

You don’t need to worry about rare and exciting problems like terrorist attacks. The odds are that mundane and boring things like not eating right or getting enough exercise will kill you.

Some useful statistics on “one of the most lethal flu outbreaks in recorded history.” Reading that should calm all but the most germophobic people.

As you can probably see, I’ve made some updates to the blog. Some are visible, like the new “favicon” and a new theme; some aren’t, like removing some junk plugins and making some security improvements.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with the results, but let me know if you see any weirdness.

This evening, as I was working away on the laptop that has been my main system for the last couple years, things got suddenly much quieter in the office — my desktop system, which had been running near-continuously for most of its five and a half years of life, had shut itself off very abruptly. It wouldn’t respond to the power button, and a second later I detected a faint electrical burning smell. I strongly suspected that it wasn’t just resting.

A few minutes of troubleshooting narrowed the problem down to either the power supply or the motherboard — both easy enough to replace, and relatively cheap these days. But I’m debating whether it’s worth resurrecting. In the past few years, I’ve used it less and less… its duties were down to acting as an interface for our Skype phones, holding archives of seldom-used files, and occasionally being pressed into service for a networked game of Age of Empires III when a guest comes over (which it was barely powerful enough for anymore). And it is a desktop, from near the you-can-fry-an-egg-on-it generation — it’s far more wasteful of electricity than most laptops.

So I think it’s “so long and thanks for all the files,” at least for now. Maybe I’ll replace it eventually, but for now I just don’t see any need for a desktop system.

It’s a day late and a dollar short, but nobody’s perfect. GoddessJ and I both hope that you had a good one.

GoddessJ and I were with some friends at a mall yesterday, and we decided to stop by the Apple store. I wanted to see the iPod Touch in action; I was considering replacing my aging Palm TX with one, and at all the other stores that carry them around here, they’re never charged and running.

I was very favorably impressed. The touch screen on it is ridiculously good, and the software seems very well thought out. But I also discovered a fatal flaw: there’s no external speaker on it at all, so it can’t duplicate the most often-used function of my Palm, which is sounding an alarm to notify me of upcoming appointments.

It also tops out at 32GB (at least 10GB too small for my entire music collection), still doesn’t have cut-and-paste capability, and Apple is keeping a stranglehold on the applications the company allows to run on it. So I’m sorry to say that I won’t be buying one. Maybe the next generation will remedy these lacks. If so, I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.

UPDATE: As described in the comments, it seems that the Touch does have a working external speaker, at least for notifications of events and such. Rumor has it that there’s a hardware refresh on the way, but I’ll probably be picking one up today anyway. One of the less expensive models, so I won’t feel so bad about replacing it with an updated version in a year or two.

GoddessJ and I attended a friend’s wedding over the weekend, for our friends B and L. It was… interesting.

It was held in a very small town. There was only one chain hotel anywhere near, and it was booked solid before the wedding date was even set because there was some other kind of gathering going on in the town at the same time. The wedding guests were forced into the smaller privately-owned hotels. Ours was named the “Save Inn.”

The seventies-era all-metal sign in front advertised “color TVs, telephones, air conditioning, and electric heat.” I can’t vouch for the heat, but it definitely had air conditioning, which rattled almost loudly enough to drown out the all-night-long drunken party that a group of twenty-somethings held in the parking lot directly outside, the first night. (I had to ask the front desk to ask them to turn down the pounding bass music from a car stereo around midnight.) Internet access, high-speed or otherwise, was not an option.

The rooms were decorated in early cinderblock, and even included two unadvertised bonuses: an ancient (and empty) mini-fridge that stank of stale beer, and a pair of houseflies to give it the perfect touch of home. On the plus side, the room was clean, the flies were the only creatures we had to share it with, and the bathtub was deep enough to have a really relaxing soak, so I don’t really have much to complain about. It was very good to get home yesterday though.

The wedding went well, and the reception was tolerable even to me. I managed to get the first dance with the bride (after groom and the bride’s father had their traditional dances with her, that is). Not that I had much competition, the two of us constituted half of the people on the dance floor for that number. The community center they’d rented for the reception included a sign inside the door that had an… interesting… use of quotation marks:

“NO” Alcoholic Beverages Beyond This Point

GoddessJ suggested that it was deliberate, that the first word was in quotation marks as a kind of written form of a wink and a nudge, because everyone was ignoring the sign anyway.

I don’t know how widespread the practice is, but at most weddings I’ve attended around here, there’s a tradition that when the guests tap silverware against their glasses, the couple has to interrupt what they’re doing and kiss. At our wedding, GoddessJ and I had trouble eating our dinner because of the constant demands for this. L and B had an interesting solution though… they brought out a hula-hoop, and said that anyone who wanted them to kiss would have to get up and hula first. A few people (including me) did so, but most wouldn’t embarrass themselves, so they got to eat their dinners in relative peace.

GoddessJ was a bridesmaid (brides-matron?), so we heard a lot of interesting stories about the guests. The annoying childhood friend of the bride, who had to be carefully placed at a table where she didn’t know anyone so she wouldn’t make an ass of herself (she managed to anyway)… the group that refused to sit with so many people that the couple just put them at a table by themselves (which they then complained about)… the one cousin who had said she would show up alone, but then decided to bring her new boyfriend and couldn’t be bothered to ask the couple about it first… the cousin’s histrionic mother, who called up the groom’s mother at 4AM that night demanding that she come and pick them up from their hotel, for reasons still unknown to us… I’m sure there are other stories that will come out as well, once we hear from the happy couple again.

All in all, I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend.