Why is it, do you think, that rechargeable tools are never charged when I most need them to be?
Category Archives: Uncategorized
MacBook Pro
I received my new MacBook Pro at close of business on Tuesday. I didn’t take it home with me. I worked on it briefly yesterday, and am now all the way migrated. The migration was almost disappointingly easy. All my data migrated over firewire, and only stuff that I had installed from source was missing at the end of it – which amounts to Apache, and very little else. I imagine I’ll run across things that are missing as I go along, but so far that’s been the only one, and I didn’t have to turn on the old laptop once today.
Unread
I’ve been using Apple’s Mail.app as my primary mail client ever since Thunderbird gave up the ghost about 6 months ago. No, I don’t remember what the problem was with Thunderbird.
Lately, and with increasing regularity, messages which I have read get marked unread when I’m off looking in another folder. When this happens, I have to mark them as read multiple times before they stay marked that way.
I’m not sure if this is a problem with the client or with the server, but it happens on two different mail servers, one of which is running Exchange, and the other is running Cyrus imapd, so I tend to lean towards blaming the client.
I’ve been unable to find reference to anyone else having this problem, but it’s pretty hard to know what to search for.
Anyone else seen this?
Five things you didn’t know about me.
I got tagged by Ken. Hmm. Let’s see. Five things? Who started this, anyways?
Consider two sets. A is the set of all things that you, my loyal reader, don’t already know about me. B is the set of things that I am comfortable telling to the entire population of the Internet. A ∩ B is vanishingly small. But I’ll give it a shot.
1. My first job, when I graduated with a Masters degree in Mathematics, in abstract algebra, was as grounds keeper for a large church in Lexington
2. I was, I believe, the youngest instructor ever hired by Asbury College – I started teaching College Algebra at Asbury when I was 22.
3. I used to play violin for the Tallahassee Junior Chamber Orchestra.
4. I won the Kenyan national secondary school poetry recitation contest in 1987, reciting “To An Old Lady, Asleep At A Poetry Reading”, by James Kirkup. My phony English accent was convincing enough that the judge was quite distraught to find out afterwards that I was American.
5. In 1983, I won the North Florida, South Georgia, Road Racing Grand Prix, which means that I won more first places in 5K road races than anyone else in the 13-and-under age group.
Passing the baton, I think I’ll tag Ruth, Paul, Moose, Chris, and Tony.
So there.
Yeah, that’s what I said
Clay Shirky has an interesting article about Second Life, and it’s gratifying to know that I’m not the only one.
Yes, I tried Second Life. No, I didn’t get it. I mean, sure, I got it, but I didn’t see what the appeal was. It felt like a MUD, but a lot harder to use, and not nearly as gratifying.
I was a dedicated, perhaps even addicted, LambdaMOO user for a couple years. I spent *hours* there, when I was working at Lexmark. I’d start test scripts, and they’d take 30 minutes to run. While I was waiting, I was building stuff on LambdaMOO. And one or two other MUDs.
But after a while, the only point of it was the people that were there. That’s what it always comes down to. The Internet, for me, is about communication. Turning communication into an elaborate game doesn’t make communication less the goal. Particularly when the game has no point. MUDs were games, in one sense, but there wasn’t an objective, really, other than creating cool stuff. And I got pretty good at creating cool stuff and scripting it to do interesting things.
Second life was interesting while I had a handful of friends there. But now when I log in, there’s nobody there I know, and so therefore nothing interesting to do. And because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how to build anything, and I don’t have anywhere to build it, there’s absolutely nothing of interest to do.
If, as Second Life claims, there are 2 million people there, I have no idea where they are, since I can never find anybody.
Airplanes and treadmills
The airplane/treadmill problem seems to assume that the wheels provide thrust for a plane that is trying to take off. They don’t. The thrust is provided by the jets (or propellers) against the air, not against the runway. Spinning the wheels of an airplane doesn’t result in air flow over the wings. A plane becomes airborne due to the Bernoulli effect of airflow over the wings, not because of spinning wheels, or any other motion with respect to the ground. The arguments that I’ve seen offered about this so-called problem seem to completely lack understanding of how aerodynamic lift actually works.
Because the jets exert thrust against the air, and not against the runway, the fact that the runway is a treadmill – assuming that could actually work – would be to hold the plane stationary in the air, and there would be no resulting airflow over the wings, and thus no resulting lift. The blowing of the jets (or propellers) would have all the resulting upwards lift of a box fan.
Actually, the more I think about it, I’m not at all sure what assumptions folks are making. But they don’t involve any understanding of lift. If the wings don’t move relative to the air (or vice versa) there will be no lift.
Origami
Sarah and I did some origami. That was lots of fun. But what I find even more fascinating is the bizarre random assortment of stuff in the background of these photos. These photos feel like my mind of late. Presumably something important in the foreground, but lots of strange and inexplicable things jockeying for attention just outside of focus.
What kind of a reader?
Via my sis …
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And, like her the HTML given to me by that site doesn’t render quite right. Bummer.
Update: Hmm. I think I’ve made it render right. 🙂
Once Upon A Time
How best for him to be brave?
He cleared his throat. He let go of his tail. He stood up straighter. “Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.
— From “The Tale of Despereaux“, by Kate DiCamillo
Taking requests
Now that I’m done with the Just So Stories, O Best Beloved, I need suggestions of where to go next.
(Actually, I omitted “The Beginning of the Armadillos”, and should go back and run that one at some point. I recorded it, but have misplaced the file.)
I’m looking for short stories, out of copyright, preferably in the 20 minutes or less range.
I’m leaning towards the short stories (and possibly the poems) of E.A.Poe. I would like to do some Lovecraft, but, thanks to the accursed Mouse, that’s all still under copyright.
So, other than Poe, any suggestions are welcome.