Yesterday I went to the optician for my yearly checkup. I still have 20/20 vision (both eyes at 0) and intraocular pressure of 15 mmHg in both eyes, which is normal. Since I have a family history of glaucoma, my optometrist always does the pressure test. I also have a…
Money music
If there’s a silver lining to the current financial crisis, it’s that I prefer the “market down” music on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report to the “market up” music. Markets are up: they play We’re in the Money Markets are down: they play Stormy Weather Markets are a mixture: they play…
How many programming languages do you know?
I had a lecturer in university who claimed to have taught something in the region of 15 languages. I was wondering recently about how many languages I know and how to count them, given that there are many languages out there that are similar. Do C and C++ count as…
Dreamhost backups: the appropriate incantation
Recently, and without much fanfare, Dreamhost introduced backup users. Each account gets a single backup user, whose function is to provide a remote backup. Dreamhost’s TOS states that regular user content must be served on the web: it is not intended to be a backup service. However, clearly the need…
Book sale time again
And this time it seems like it’s been quite a while since the last one. Shelf space in our house is still at a premium, of course. We picked up lots of things for mini-Elbeno, including some really nice non-fiction stuff (a science encyclopedia and a book on weather). Mrs….
(Part of) what I do all day
Lately I’ve been asked what I do at work. What I really do. Well, if Great Biggary can frequently expound on his latest Maya scripts and python excursions, here goes with my explanations… Most of what I do all day is read code. Just like an author or poet will…
Tales of a full hard drive
In between watching the US Open finals this weekend, I had to fix up my PC. My hard drive (300GB) has been filling up with stuff and finally got full. My partitions looked like this: /dev/sda1 (NTFS): 40GB at 80% /dev/sda2 (ext2, /boot): 40MB at 50% /dev/sda3 (swap): 2GB /dev/sda4…
I finally played Portal
It was actually among my professional objectives this year to play Portal. So last night I sat down with it for a few hours. It was enjoyable, and short (which was good); and original, which was also good. Well, the portal mechanic is certainly original (counting Portal as the true…
Adventures with GnuPG
For a couple of years now, I’ve been using GnuPG in my email. But I had a couple of keys out there that were old, and lost, and that I’d forgotten the passphrases for. A while back, I found my old secret keyring (from back in the day when I…