I may not be the biggest Fred Saberhagen fan, but I’ve read through many of the Berserker collections in addition to my long-dead fascination with the Books of Swords. So, imagine the moment of horror I enjoyed when I went downstairs and was faced with the following, emblazoned on a bag of cat food:
Does anyone else get a “To Serve Man” vibe from this, or is it just me?
I wouldn’t say that I’m addicted to my Twitter account, nor would I say that I can quit any time I want. After all, it’s one of the best tools available to me for staying in touch with friends whether I’m in front of a computer screen or out-and-about, so until something genuinely better comes along (or it gets bought out by some corporate behemoth and subsequently trashed) I’ll be sticking with Twitter for the time being.
Yes, I’ve heard of the telephone. I just don’t like talking on the damned things.
Anyway. Short of refreshing the Twitter webpage every few minutes, and since the IM integration has gone the way of the dodo bird, a desktop application seems like a useful way to manage one’s Twitter interactions. I’m a big, big fan so far of Twhirl… and now, thanks to these instructions, I can run Twhirl under Kubuntu (the current Linux installation on my laptop).
I suppose that I’ll miss seeing the Fail Whale…
No, on second thought, I won’t.
I’ve stated over the years that I’m something of a dilettante. Among the interests in which I dabble you’ll find the fascinating field of etymology. Words are fun. History is interesting. Therefore, the history of words is an endless joy… to me, anyway. A case in point:
Kyla and The Roomie and I were in the kitchen yesterday morning, eating and fixing breakfast respectively, and my eye chanced upon the cat food bag on a nearby windowsill. One of the featured fish caught my eye: Albacore tuna. For some reason I thought next about the albatross (and refrained from quoting Monty Python, I’ll have you know), at which point I mused aloud about the similarity in naming. “What does the ‘alba’ prefix mean?” I knew that it was going to bother me until I found out.
Late last night I indulged in a few minutes’ research. Turns out that one of the sources of ‘alba-‘ is our old dead friend Latin, “albus” for white. Albacore? The “only tuna species which may be marketed as ‘white meat tuna’ in the United States.” Albatross? A mostly-white seagoing bird. (Granted, the etymology is a bit mixed here, being a weird morphing from an Arabic origin having to do with being a “diving bird” to a Latin-influenced final product.)
Thus educated, I could sleep peacefully.
The Spud’s computer went sort of kerblooey, in a software-ish sort of way, a week or so ago. Luckily it’s a Compaq D310 (well, most of it is, anyway) and I have all of the restore CDs, still in the big fancy ziploc bag they came in. I booted off of a handy-dandy “Bart” DVD, copied off everything that I deemed worth saving onto the network drive (wasn’t about to use the USB drive on a machine that old), and swapped out the two smaller drives for a newer, bigger model I happened to have kicking around.
You’ll be amazed to know that I can see eight unused IDE hard drives from where I’m sitting, without even turning my head, won’t you? Right.
Sorry, that’s ten. And two SCSI drives. Anyway…
Say what you will about PCs built by megacorporations, but HP/Compaq restore disks have saved my bacon dozens of times in the last half-dozen years. You have to go in afterward and tweak a few things, it’s true. If you leave out the “supplemental software” disk, however, there’s surprisingly little garbage to worry about. Among the nifty benefits is that you don’t have to worry about entering the license key. Any time I don’t have to stress about typos is a good time.
The next step is to install video drivers (you don’t think it’s using the motherboard video chipset, do you?), throw on some of the key software that no Windows PC should be without, and haul those files back off of the network drive. When I’m done the machine will be cleaner (dust bunnies? try dust elephants) and leaner (less leftover cruft from years of installing and removing software) and feature greater capacity on a single drive instead of two drives so it’ll also run cooler and on less power.
All I need to do is complete it by the weekend. I can do that, right?
Here are the answers from last week’s meme post, and the Excel spreadsheet you’ve all been waiting for. First, the songs: (more…)
I’ve been… busy. Making contraptions, that is. Intermittently. After work, mostly.
Allow me to show you my bizarre creations, won’t you? Note that the only contraptions I’ve bothered to save are those which satisfy some “above and beyond” quirk of mine. For instance: Don’t Stop completes the goal in mere seconds, but the fun part is watching it climb the hill and throw itself off the side. Four Plus 1 is an exercise in very, very slowly removing all four of the accessible orange balls. As with all of my creations, the trick is to click the “back” button when prompted as the goal is reached.
For her part, Erica managed to get three of them in the same challenge with her Push and Roll. That’s right, I hooked my darling daughter on Fantastic Contraption. You know what? She’s not doing too badly. Her solution for “Mission To Mars,” Chain Reaction, elicited a forehead slap from me. “Why didn’t I think of that?” (My solution to that puzzle didn’t warrant posterity, I assure you.) Her Push-Over is a much more creative contraption to solve “U-Turn” than what I’ve done so far, too. (I have an idea, I just haven’t been able to make it work yet. Argh.) Erica showed promise right from the start with her straightforward yet amusing LastMinuteSave.
Other contraptions of note that I’ve cobbled together include Brick Bridge, Goal & Clear, Latch & Chain, Tilt & Go and the Humpmobile. I’m probably not done yet, either…
