Fray Day!
No blogging today (except for this post), because we're going to Fray Day 6. See you there!Caffeine + chocolate + mint = Yum
Given the Great Mt. Dew Disaster, I've been thinking about finding a new caffeine delivery system. Here's my answer: chocolate caffeinated mints from Penguin. I had one of these at Web Builder, and now I need to buy some of my own. Oh my.Too darn many servers
Aha! Via Have Browser, Will Travel, it's Ever Find Too Many Servers In Your Connect To Server Dialog Box? Dr. Mac Knows A Fix... . We've been complaining about this one for a long time; it'll be nice to finally have a fix.Home again, home again, jiggety jig
For those of you biting your fingernails with impatience and curiousity, yes, I have made it home safely. I'm home for a whole 2 1/2 weeks until the O'Reilly OS X Conference.
Oh, and the cutoff for hotel reservations is now tomorrow, September 13th. If you want to share a room with me at the conference (please? someone? anyone?) drop me a line.
Alton's Airstream
Heads up, Good Eats fans; according to the Good Eats mailing list, Alton Brown's Airstream trailer is up for sale. He used to use it as his office, and wrote his book and Season 5 in it. Only $10,000. Maybe I can buy that while Dori's out of town, too...We like...
There's a combination Internet Café and Kosher Deli a couple of blocks away down the Strip. General consensus: many of us could be perfectly happy spending the rest of our lives there.QOTD
Quotes from Web Builder (really, you ought to be here):- Molly E. Holzschlag: Visio this, Motherfucker!
- Porter Glendinning: I see a crack in your future.
- Jeffrey Zeldman: Day-um! Who wants more beans?
- Porter Glendinning: You shouldn't be branding people's eyes.
SFTV List
If you enjoy science fiction or fantasy shows on TV, and you don't already know about the SFTV Schedule List, you should check it out. Every two weeks, it gives you a list of shows, titles, and airdates, for genre shows and specials (though their criteria for genre is flexible; they list info for shows like 24 and Alias). I get it via e-mail, but there's a Web site, too. The list is good in conjunction with a PVR like the ReplayTV or Tivo, because it alerts you as to what upcoming shows are reruns, something the PVR's internal program guides don't always do.Computing at molecular scales
Molecular-scale computing, where information storage densities are increased to as much as a trillion bits per square centimeter (current densities are on the order of 500 million bits/cm2) just got closer. Maybe I spent too much time in Worldcon sessions about the Vinge Singularity (Google that term to find out more), but things happening lately sure seem like the precursors to a technological takeoff.While the cat's away...
Dori's out of town. I've just bought a new subwoofer. I'm sure there's no connection. Since the shipping weight of this thing is 66 pounds, I'm having it delivered to the home, instead of our usual shipping address. It'll be here on Friday. Booming will commence shortly thereafter. If you're in striking distance of Sonoma County, and you're interested in buying my former subwoofer (a high-quality-for-its-time AudioPro), let me know. It's too heavy to ship, so it will need to be picked up. it's a nice powered sub; I had it re-coned about 2 years ago.Kernel extensions
Dori's scary kernel extension dialog explained.Bad hotel, no biscuit
What has truly impressed me about Caesars Palace isn't the way that when I called on Saturday to confirm my reservation, they had no record of my reservation.
Nor was it that today, when I tried to check in (after confirming with the conference that they had, in fact, reserved me a room), that they still claimed that I had no reservation (and then things went downhill).
It was the way that every employee I've dealt with here (and there's been plenty of them), showed no surprise whatsoever that I was unhappy. It just didn't appear to be a cause for concern. Okay, in theory, I may have been doing a good job of hiding how pissed off I was, but as many people will tell you, subtlety is far from my strong point.
So far as I can tell, unhappy customers are par for the course for the staff of this hotel. For an average person in a customer service position, the larger the percentage of the people that they deal with that are unhappy, the less they feel that they need to make an effort to improve the situation. After all, if the norm is unhappiness, then that's what you get used to.
These folks didn't feel any need to make me happier, not on my first, second, or third attempt to check in today. It wouldn't have taken much (delivering my bags to my room and the key to me via the conference would have gone a long way), but so far as I could tell, they didn't think of me as anything more than an average customer. And that's sad.
Life is good
I'm sitting here in a session at Web Builder, and the wireless bandwidth is flowing freely. Life is good.Antigravity?
Here's a respected defense analyst that thinks that it's possible that the US military may be seriously working on antigravity and something called "zero-point energy," both of which could be incredibly significant and change the world in almost unimaginable ways: Into The Black.Stupid slanted journalism
This won't come as a surprise, but dumbass journalism lives at PC World. This article about Apple's Switch campaign begins:Aaron Adams never wanted to be a TV star. A Windows network administrator from Dayton, Ohio, he simply wanted to tell Apple how much he enjoyed the iBook he bought last year. But before he knew it, he was starring in his own television ad, and his face was posted all over Times Square.I just love that "before he knew it." Poor Aaron. He writes just one e-mail, and the guys from Apple's Black Ops teams swoop into Ohio, shove a cattle prod up his butt, and force him to do a TV ad for Apple. The rest of the article is filled with the usual stuff about Apple's "faltering market share" and FUD from analysts about how pissing off Microsoft might be real bad.
All entries © 1999-2008 Tom Negrino and Dori Smith