Blog

Last night, I was a witness to a rare event. Last night, I saw quality theatre.

My copy of UNIX Power Tools (Third Edition) arrived today. And it’s embarrasing how excited I was when it arrived. Newly updated to acknowledge the existence of OSX and the huge presence of Linux, it is an ADD sufferer’s worst nightmare–over a thousand pages of tips & tricks, code snippets and info for the UNIX user. You find yourself making one cool discovery after another, then get involved in a chapter that’s way over your head but you still feel like you’re learning something. Then you skip to another page and learn some other thing. Then you wish you had a good content management system to file all this stuff away, because you feel the discoveries you made at the beginning of your session are falling off the back of the memory tailgate as you make new ones. (I’ll tell ya, this book in digital form with a Google-powered front-end? Now THAT would be something else!)

I experienced a bit of age-panic. A hair or two may have gone gray. I think I even gained a pound. Then, to make matters worse, I suddenly realized that I actually HAVE one of Steve Raichlen’s books, and to make matters worse, it’s a damned low-fat cookbook!

I love it when two of my passions overlap. Here’s an example.

Well, I have to say I’ve never been a fan of Red Hat linux, but their new version 8 (V8) seems to finally be what the “Linux People” have been claiming about earlier distros for years—an easy to install operating system that works as advertised.

Tonight’s installment of Mass (transit) Hysteria was one of those moments where you pretty much throw your hands up in the air and go: “yep, this planet is crawling with people who are so totally self-absorbed, that they make life miserable for everyone around us.”

A friend sent me the link to the ‘swtich’ commercial parody last week. It portrays a guy complaining about his shitty experience going from OS9 to OSX. It’s funny, but in a sad way, because the guy doing the complaining represents the voice of everything wrong with the Macintosh community. I was a mac head for years, defending the company and the platform for years even as my PC garnered more and more quality time from me, and ran more applications that I needed to run. All the while I was getting tired of staring at the bomb icon. A co-worker developed this odd habit of wiggling his mac’s mouse every time an intuitive time period elapsed between commands. Let’s face it, folks, MacOS < X sucks, it always did .

I was race-walking down thirty-second street tonight, trying to make the 6:37 home. As I approached Penn Station, I focused on the digital clock embedded in the concrete awning that theoretically serves as a useful indicator as to How You're Doing, with respect to catching your train.

I am a commuter. I commute. I ride on the New Jersey Transit rail “system”, the Northeast Corridor line. I use this expensive conveyance to deliver myself a mere 15 miles to Penn Station, New York, and it sucks ass.

Today, a park dedication took place in Hoboken, NJ, USA. The Debbie Williams Memorial Playground was dedicated today, in honor of one of the many Hoboken residents who fell victim to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9-11-01. Some very special people were there, and it was a moving and important event for many. Many family and friends of Mrs. Williams were in atendance, from all over the world. They came to see a playground enter service, in her honor. This was a park that Mrs. Williams took her child to many times, located in a city that she had adopted from her native Canada. Plenty of children were on hand, and seconds after the ribbon was cut, they were crawling all over the playrgound apparatus, putting the park to work making children happy. Despite the truly dismal weather, one could almost feel a ray of sunshine beaming out as those kids faces lit up and they lost themselves in the fun of exploration.

The next time a toddler asks you “why is the sky blue?”, how about answering “why Junior, the answer is simple. Rayleigh scattering is the reason.”, instead of your usual “Because it’s not green.”

OK, so the Yankees are out of it. Sure. In a fit of needed diversion, I immediately latched on to the other series. I was thrilled to see the Twins beat the A’s, and am looking forward to seeing the strange Metrodome ventilation tubes in the background of a playoff game once again, it will remind me of 1991, a glorious year when the Twins beat those annoying miscreants from Atlanta.

Well, after a fantastic week in Switzerland, we are home again. The train ride home from Newark Airport really slammed that fact right down our throats. After a week of timely departures, clean & quiet trains, and pretty scenery zipping past the windows, here we were on New Jersey Transit’s Trenton Local. A quick look around revealed a pile of french fries on the floor and a gruff ticket taker. Sigh. While still my favorite place to be, every time I leave New York I discover a few ideas for the suggestion box, you know what I mean?

The hotel here in Zurich has a web kiosk, so we just HAD to try this out. Don`t worry, it was all my idea.

I’ve been wanting to rebuild my site with Movable Type for a while now. My wife does not understand this. My friends are amused. Family members are concerned.

After discovering a coherent discussion about the nature of blogging, I perused a bit more of the author’s site this evening.

Just watched a commercial for “The Banger Sisters”. I mean I watched the entire thing. Good Lord-a-Mighty, what in the hell happened to Goldie Hawn? Clearly, she was experimenting with the joys of silicone years ago (see “First Wive’s Club), but she seems to have reached a new level of tolerance for the magical levitating expanding goo. It’s in her lips, her tits, and Kurt knows where else.

I went to a Pie-Off tonight. Never been to one of those before. Apparently, it’s Canadian. Good excuse to have friends over, have a party, and then judge some pies. Brenda was a judge. I will have to locate the original application letter; she cited her status as a Libra (the scales of justice and all that) and the fact that she hails from Minnesota as bullet points in her list of reasons why she should be a judge.

Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman had a fiasco installing OSX 10.2 this weekend. Glad I read the article. Apparently if you don’t have OS9.2 installed, when classic runs everything goes to hell, possibly leaving you with a trashed OSX partition as well. Not good.

Jeff Zeldman had a link to this site. It’s unbelievable. Steven Champeon has created a bunch of renderings of photographs, via CSS.