Month: January 2003

“Can you hear that sound? No, it’s not a broken fan, it’s Windows sucking.” When our new “computer guy” restarted our servers this morning (he’s working on email) both came up with a different Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

This is unacceptable. These servers are fine reliable Dell hardware, running only standard, recent Microsoft software. We haven’t done anything non-standard. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this, either. And moving from the M$ proprietary stuff off to Unix is annoying enough that we haven’t done it. Better bump up that priority.

So now every five minutes someone runs into the office asking, “Are the computers working yet? ‘Cause I tried mine and it still doesn’t work.”

This morning, Apple announced two new powerbooks – a 17″ and a 12″.

The 17 is just gratuitous. Sure, it looks nice – how big a monitor do you need to schlepp around with you? How much can you afford to lose if you drop the thing? Love the auto-adjusting backlit keyboard tho.

On the other hand the little 12 is cool, slightly smaller than the iBook I’m using. I’d still like it smaller, of course, a Mac version of the Sony U3. I’d have one of these by now, if I didn’t have to run Windows on it (shudder). Of course I love my iBook, especially so since I can run the web server, mysql and php for application development.

Oh, and new and improved versions of the iApps. Final Cut at a reasonable price. And a new browser, which I’m using now. And an Apple version of X11 which they didn’t mention but the Unix geex appreciate it.

I bought some Apple stock the other day, for the long term. It’s the only computer company I actually like. In fact, I think they should be making consumer electronics products – VCRs, DVD players, home stereos, clocks, whatever. Heck, most of their recent products look sort of like sex toys anyway (not that I’d know) (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

Note new link to the left, to Nicholas Corwin’s webpage. He’s been creating trivia at www.trivia-savant.com for some time now; so I set him up a blog, which you may notice looks remarkably similar to this one – non-surprising, since I used the same code (and you can, too!).

Nicholas isn’t a link-blogger; he’s a content-blogger. That is, although there’s the occasional link to some bit of web-based material, for the most part it’s all his own writing (or at least his own quoting!). There’s no flash, no wacky java animations, and not even any pictures (yet!), just the good old written word (5500 years and still going strong!).

Congratulations to John Scalzi (a classmate of mine from Webb) on getting his novel Old Mans War bought, after publishing it on his website! I think it’s still there for the reading, or you can wait a year and shell out for it from Amazon.

Heard George W. on the radio today, talking about an agreement with China to keep “nucular” weapons off the Korean peninsula.

Too bad what we’re actually worried about is NUCLEAR weapons.

Too bad this is the person whose finger is on the trigger.