I’d be a little concerned about going into a house with this doorknob, or these light fixtures.
“Totally Oldies Eighties”?!?
While sorting through our music collection, I ran across a CD titled “Totally Oldies Eighties.” It startled me… the sixties are old, the eighties seem like just yesterday to me.
Now I understand some of the things my mother was always saying during my youth.
“Running the numbers on Vista”
Interesting… according to this article, not only is Vista not selling well, but there has been a huge jump in sales of Office for Mac, which he’s suggesting indicates that a large number of people are switching to the Mac.
I’ve said it before: Windows Vista is the best thing that ever happened for Linux and the MacOS. 🙂
The iPhone — Does it Live Up to the Hype?
Over the weekend, and quite by accident, I saw my first iPhone.
I expected to be underwhelmed. The iPhone, after all, has been so overhyped in the past several months that it would be nearly impossible for it to live up to it all, even though I’ve ignored the vast majority of it. And I have little use for cell phones at the best of times, let alone ones that cost $400 up front and require a two-year contract. I also have little use for Apple products in general, as they’re inevitably nice but have always struck me as way overpriced for what they offered.
In this case, I was dead wrong. Continue reading ‘The iPhone — Does it Live Up to the Hype?’ »
“Flying robot to aid China Antarctic expedition”
Yes, folks, the Probe Droid from The Empire Strikes Back is now a reality.
“Physicists have ‘solved’ mystery of levitation”
Man, I love technology! Even if it’s decades before they can levitate anything bigger than a quarter, just the thought of things like this, or the “invisibility cloak” that the same people came up with the theory for a little while back, interests me to no end.
Technology Rocks!
I love computer hardware. Especially the pace of improvement in it. I’m referring specifically to notebook hard drives.
About a year ago, when I bought this laptop, the most capacious internal notebook hard drive available was a 120GB 5400RPM drive. I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB 7200RPM model. But last night, I was able to install a new 5400RPM drive that holds 250GB, has a 50% faster data-transfer rate, and sucks up less than half the power most of the time! And it’s quieter too!
Moving my NTFS and EXT3 data to the new drive was a cinch, using the “gparted” partition editor from the Ubuntu install disk. Basically just a matter of copy and paste, though I had to pkill gnome-volume-manager first so that it wouldn’t auto-mount the partitions as it created them. Moving the encrypted partitions over was a little more difficult; I had to create them from scratch on the new drive, then manually copy the data over. Fortunately I’d picked up an external drive case a couple days ago, so I didn’t have to copy things to a different system across the network and then copy them back (this notebook, like most, only has room for one internal drive at a time).
So I can now keep my music collection on my notebook (I didn’t have room for it before), and still have room to breathe, digitally speaking. 🙂 Which reminds me, it’s time to start loading my music disks into it…
Comparison Shopping
Proof that it pays to comparison shop: I was in the Staples store here and saw a 4GB flash drive for $109. Then I walked next door to the Best Buy store, and saw the same 4GB flash drive, from the same manufacturer… for $49.
And the most disgusting part of it is, even Best Buy is probably still making a decent profit on it.
The True Power of Lisp
In my previous post, I discussed a very minor thing that I thought should be simple to do with a Lisp macro, but that I’d been working on for the better part of a week without success.
As I’ve said before, once I run into a problem, I can’t leave it alone — I pound my head against it until either the problem breaks or my head does. This one finally broke, and I discovered the true power of Lisp at the same time. Continue reading ‘The True Power of Lisp’ »
Lisp Macro Confusion
From everything I’ve read, Lisp’s macros are most useful for abstracting commonly-used patterns. Well, I quickly noticed a pattern that seemed ripe for abstraction, but after trying to do so for the better part of a week, I haven’t met with any notable success. Continue reading ‘Lisp Macro Confusion’ »