Category: General
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Eggcorn, or possible computer-spellcheck-gone-wild?
Saw this in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal and it made me snerk: “In the case, Leegin Creative Leather Products Inc., a maker of womens’ purses and accessories, was sued by Kay’s Kloset, a Dallas retailer, after Leegin cut off shipments to Kay’s. Kay’s had been discounting Leegin’s wears.”
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IT Groaner
Q: What’s the last thing you do when you know your hard drive’s about to die? A: Read its last writes…
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Haulin’ Gluteus, and maybe kickin’ some!
So, this weekend was the weekend of much furniture and other Stuff hauling, helping Kr* move into the World’s Tiniest Apartment in Waltham. Here is where our childhood Tetris addictions paid off. Budget Rent-a-moving-truck was supposed to have the 10-footer we reserved, but, whoopsie-doodle, didn’t. So the options were either a smaller van, or a…
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Garden stuff!
So, we’ve been tearing weeds (once in a while) out of this garden for a while now, but few people have actually seen it. So here it is! [Our Garden] It’s in a great spot since directly behind our house is a ballfield, which means a) plenty of light (no tall houses behind it blocking…
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Only in Medford…
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House wiring, A Beautiful Mind style
Our power went out sometime in the last couple days’ raging thunderstorms and reset all the computers/clocks in the house, so I figured before I reset them, this was an excuse to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: map out the breaker box. (Exciting, ya? Well, this anti-electrocution research is…
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Evil thought of the day…
When I noticed more and more Web sites trying to detect and block ‘bad’ or otherwise unprofitable users (e.g. those using ad- or popup-blockers, privacy tools, etc.), and banking sites like the one I use trying to detect potentially compromised machines, I thought, “How long will it be until some unnecessarily clever dickface just adds…
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My Fossil Collection
Fossils in ironstone nodules I collected near my folks’ place on a strip-mine lake near the Mazon Creek in Grundy County near Morris, Illinois. This area is sometimes referred to as one of the Lagerstätten (i.e. mother lode) – one of few places on earth where conditions were just right to preserve a rich deposit…
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The Pomp Room
Near my parents’ house in IL. Laugh, it’s funny (in Afrikaans, anyway – a good name for a place that might rent rooms – and companions – by the hour).
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Couch denting at a 14th grade level
Some random observations on being back in my hometown for the week of the 4th… I know it’s not the first time I’ve felt this way, but I was particularly amazed at how this place… no longer feels like home. Yeah, a few things have changed – buildings where there were no buildings before, a…
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Entropy Is
Destroying information. I’ve never had an easy time with this. Feeling in a productive mood the other day, I made a plan for my next side-project* (picking back up my interest in building gas discharge tubes, i.e. those decorative plasma globes, except doing it right this time), and set my sights on clearing some space…
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Camping in Maine
Kr* an I went camping/hiking in Acadia for this weekend…her first time in South Canada Maine. So we made camp on Friday evening, and ran up to the top of Cadillac Mtn. on Saturday, followed by a trip back down the steep side to Bubble Pond (~6mi). This was just after the Corporate Challenge (the…
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And speaking of malware…
Overzealous AntiVirus Programs. How the hell much work do you have to do in order to keep over-zealous antivirus programs from deleting your old virus/spyware samples, saved evidence, cracks for old abandonware you’ve been hanging onto since high school, and harmless nuisance/prank programs? I suppose I could zip them, then RAR them (replace these with…
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DIY Magnetic Fridge Poetry
Like the idea of magnetic poetry kits, but they don’t come with the types of words you want? Here’s an easy way to make your own, specialty kits. Supplies needed: Printer in working condition Magnetic Sheeting – any kind that will feed thru your printer (such as Staples Inkjet Magnetic Sheets), or most any kind…
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My next art project…sane?
Given an original piece of music, slice it into arbitrarily small time slices and perform FFT. From a corpus of (1000+) copyrighted songs similarly sliced, find the slice whose frequency content most closely matches the original slice. By pulling in such slices in place of the originals, reconstruct the piece, still sounding recognizably like the…
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[citation needed]
[citation needed] This should be made into a bumper sticker. It would be applied to the cars of 1) Wikipedia editors, 2) Reckless drivers you don’t like. Real updates coming soonish, I promise.
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Fixing Gmail, FTP, VNC, p2p, and other legitimate traffic not working in a Comcast Town (part 1: solutions)
As fate (or rather, failure to research local broadband monopolies and factor them into my home-buying decisions) would have it, I am a Comcast cable internet customer, in a Comcast town. As you might now, Comcast has for some time been quietly blocking…er, the polite term is “throttling”, certain types of bandwidth-intensive traffic. While that…
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LOLplants
Probably not funny unless you’re a horti/carnivore freak, but I just about rolled when I saw this.
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More disappearing…
So, all my last minute work shizzle is for the most part done. Some guys in Cali and a guy in DC will be receiving some (entirely unrelated) totally awesome, kick ass hardware. (The latter, also a hundred-plus-page brick of a Final Report, which he in all likelihood will not read.) So on Saturday, I…
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Some very bulk
OK, this has been a busy little while here, and I forgot that here is where I write what I’ve been up to so I don’t forget :-P And now I’ve forgotten. So, this is the last few months of real-life events… We last left off with Xmas in Massena, with Kr*’s folks (and, from…