Month: February 2020

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Magic Debug Values: “…are specific values written to memory…so that it will later be possible to tell whether or not they have become corrupted…. Memory is usually viewed in hexadecimal, so memorable repeating or hexspeak values are common.” Though not a programmer, I’d seen some of these in various other contexts. Particularly fond of 8BADF00D, BADC0FFEE0DDF00D, D15EA5E, DEFEC8ED, and FEE1DEAD.

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For some reason, my micro.blog hadn’t been picking up my posts for a few weeks. @manton has been very kindly dealing with the weirdness in a trouble ticket, even when the answer was nothing more than “well…that’s bizarre…”. But suddenly it’s working again! It’s good to be back!

On This Day: Feb 6

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past.

There are 37 posts previously published on February 6th

  • 2024
  • 2021
    • Lawyer finds a ‘treasure’ of old photos, suffragette portraits in a hidden N.Y. attic: “Among the turn-of-the-century photos and equipment is a framed portrait of Susan B. Anthony” ➡
    • 📚 6/2021: Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The central book of a trilogy, between two #PKDickAward nominees (one in 2018, one this year). More YA adventures on the high seas but in space, in a far-future pseudo-18th century society among a shattered solar system. ➡
  • 2020
    • Star Trek: Picard S01E03 The End is the Beginning 'Engage.' ➡
    • For some reason, my micro.blog hadn’t been picking up my posts for a few weeks. @manton has been very kindly dealing with the weirdness in a trouble ticket, even when the answer was nothing more than “well…that’s bizarre…”. But suddenly it’s working again! It’s good to be back! ➡
    • Daring Fireball: Our Long National Nightmare Is Over: Netflix Makes Preview Autoplay Optional: Oh, thank god. Or, rather, thank you @netflix for finally giving us this option! ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 6 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 6 ➡
  • 2019
    • Idle curiosity: What other biological mutations would Dumbo have needed in order to fly, particularly given an elephant’s weight, the lack of bones to give the ears structure to support the body, and their forward placement meaning the body would tend to droop below the head? ➡
  • 2018
    • Book seven of 2018 (and first #pkdickaward nominee): After the Flare, by Deji Bryce Olukotun. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2017
    • I’m really tired of this (we got around 8″ yesterday), but I’ll admit it’s pretty. ➡
    • Another inch or two, and the wall around our bird feeders and the bird bath stand will be entirely buried. Make it stop! ➡
  • 2016
    • The second funniest thing about watching Grey’s Anatomy (after the completely nonsensical geography) is how often the rain is accompanied by thunder. I’ve heard thunder more times in ten shows than I did in ten years of living in the Seattle area. (37/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • Not actually wearing the mask today, but I wanted to try it out properly. Gotta admit, if I had a need to be out in the cold for a while, this would do a great job of keeping my face warm! Prairie still thinks it just looks creepy. ➡
  • 2009
    • Links for February 5th through February 6th Sometime between February 5th and February 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • Universal Studios Home Entertainment: Caprica on DVD 4/21/09 • Dollhouse: Dollhouse's Sexuality Is Creepy on Purpose • Base System • Movie Review - Coraline - Cornered in a Parallel World • All the Way Through to "Kerplunk" • Neil Gaiman's favorite bad review for _Coraline_ ➡
    • 25 Random Things Meme Oh, alright already. Naysayers be damned, here's my entry into the 'twenty-five random things about you' meme that's currently flying around Facebook (and, to a limited extent, creeping out into the rest of the blog world). Some of these, people will know. Others...perhaps not. ➡
  • 2008
  • 2007
    • Seven Deadly Sins… ...and twenty-one not-so-deadly combinations. ➡
    • Blarch Badness: Me! Admittedly, I'm not quite sure how I ended up in the West Seattle round (will I have to move if I win?) -- truth to tell, I think I've been to West Seattle once or twice, and have only lived on First Hill and up here in Northgate -- but hey, no complaints! ➡
  • 2006
    • ENG101: In-Class Writing: Analysis: Ed Schools vs. Education My second paper for my ENG101 class. This was an in-class essay analyzing an editorial by George Will, 'Ed Schools vs. Education'. Final grade: 100% (plus a smiley face and the notation, 'Couldn't have said it better myself!'). ➡
    • The Ciccones: Lies While most of the all-Madonna mashup album is fairly hit-and-miss, this is by far the standout track. Over the music for "Live to Tell", audio quotes from the justifications for the Iraq war are juxtaposed with the song's original chorus. ➡
  • 2005
    • Network Outage Thanks for calling Speakeasy. Some of our broadband customers in the greater Seattle area are currently reporting a network outage due to a vendor failure. We hope to have this resolved within 30 minutes. (pause) (big sigh) If we're lucky. ➡
    • Comments/TrackBack down until further notice Comments and TrackBack pings are currently disabled at the server level for all sites I host (www.michaelhanscom.com, www.hanscomfamily.com, www.geekmuffin.com). As I've done this at the server level, this is not reflected in the sites themselves: they all still look like they accept comments, but they won't work. ➡
    • Muppets are scary! Remember how I was talking about my overactive imagination about a week ago? I had a conversation with Prairie yesterday that reminded me of a couple of perfect examples of this. The freakin' Muppets used to give me nightmares. How sad is that? ➡
    • Then and now At one time we had sex, drugs, and rock and roll, now all we have are STDs, antidepressants, and techno. ➡
  • 2004
    • Average Monthly Job Growth Robsix and Hurin, knock yourselves out. ;) ➡
    • Marcel Marceau’s Greatest Hits! …while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o' nothing, we're even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. ➡
    • RSS Templates for TypePad Pro/MovableType I just had someone ask how I was able to create the four RSS feeds for my site. Here's a quick rundown, along with the templates themselves, should anyone else want to do the same thing. All the templates are RSS 2.0, and have been checked with the RSS Feed Validator. ➡
  • 2003
    • What if they're right? I'm just not sure if I can unequivocally condemn the drive to oust Saddam. There should be a better way than what we're facing — the concept of the end justifying the means has never sat well with me — but should we enter into this, I just hope it's over quickly, with as little bloodshed as possible, and that this time, it's successful. We didn't get Saddamn out before. We still haven't found bin Laden. I can't even remember if we ever actually ousted Kaddaffi (going back a few years to the Reagan days). If we must go into this conflict, as the powers that be seem to be convinced, can we at least just get it right this time? ➡
    • Solving the problem The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? ➡
    • Surfin' Safari More companies need to realize that this is a real, effective way to encourage their users. We know that Safari is being worked on, we know that it's being worked on by someone who genuinely cares about the project, and we know that they care about and listen to what their customers want to see in the product. I can't think of a better way to build and keep customer loyalty than that. ➡
    • First floor: mens wear, ladies undergarments, and zero-g toilets Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. ➡
    • th3 10rdz pr4y3r Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck! May all 0ur base someday be belong to you! ➡
  • 2002
    • Archive tweaks, search engine online I went into serious geek mode for a few hours tonight (which, unfortnately, caused me to miss Enterprise because I got lost in code and didn't realize what time it was until Candice called at 8:30pm) and have made a few improvements to the site. ➡
    • Archives back online So, for the _truly_ bored (or possibly just masochistic), you can now use the archive links towards the top right of the page to go through a month-by-month listing of everything I've babbled on this site, from November of 2000 to now. ➡
  • 2001
  • 1997
    • [From Usenet: 2.6.97 0000] Discarding the philosophical ramblings being touched on here, I'd say...no. If it's the same promo CD i've got, it's only got two tracks. ➡

On This Day: Feb 5

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past.

There are 24 posts previously published on February 5th

  • 2024
  • 2023
    • 📚 January Fifteenth by Rachel Swirsky No review, as this book is a Philip K. Dick Award nominee, and I am the coordinator for the award ceremony at Norwescon. While I have no input into the selection of nominees or judging, I want to be sure to avoid any appearance of influence. ➡
  • 2020
    • Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open: “I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it.” ➡
    • Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE: “The National Archives is letting millions of documents, including many related to immigrants’ rights, be destroyed or deleted.” This is horrifying and infuriating. ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 5 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 5 ➡
  • 2019
    • I’m as much of a fan of Rent as any other average theatre nerd, but I swear I’ve had that damn earworm stuck in my head for at least 525,600 minutes by now, and I really need all of you to stop making references to it, okay? 🎵 ➡
  • 2016
    • Now this is a good way to wrap up a long week. (36/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • A hat and two hoods (hoodie and jacket) makes for good insulation, but also rids me of any peripheral vision. Prairie kept giggling and poking me in the noggin. ➡
    • Huh. Well, would’ja look at that. Somebody snuck a bootleg @norwescon poster in here. How’d that happen? ➡
  • 2007
    • Initiative 957 If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriages annulled. ➡
  • 2006
    • Steelers take the Superbowl Neither Prairie nor I really know much about football, and we don't really _care_ to know much. However, that didn't stop us from kicking back and having a fun time watching the game and doing our own form of silly armchair quarterbacking. ➡
  • 2005
    • Pigface, Sheep on Drugs, and MY BIRTHDAY The Pigface Free For All Tour is going to be coming through Seattle. Pigface and Sheep on Drugs (and Nocturne, and possibly The Damage Manual and The Countdown) in concert -- and they're performing at the Fenix Underground on Tuesday, May 3rd. ➡
    • Emerald City ComiCon 'I'm not funny — I'm freakishly obsessed!' I burst out laughing when I heard this (thoroughly embarrassing the girl who'd said it, I think), but it seemed as oddly appropriate as it was amusing while I wandered around the Emerald City ComiCon this morning. ➡
    • Naked robbery warning! WARNING: A scam is being pulled, mainly on older men. What happens is that when you stop for a red light, a young nude woman comes up and pretends to be washing your windshield. While she is doing this, another person opens your back door and steals anything in the car. ➡
    • Are we about to be without a Governor? This mess just keeps getting worse and worse. A local judge declared yesterday that the Republican suit to overturn the election will proceed, and might end up voiding the election — but he wouldn't order a new election. Would that leave Washington without a Governor? ➡
  • 2003
    • What Al said, in tiny bits. I've seen this all over the 'net, but had yet to make a link to it. As it's far past time I did so, here it is: Why Al says that 'E' is the same as 'MC2', as told so that each word has four jots or less. ➡
    • Networking sex he average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that. ➡
    • Work, work, work I finally got a chance to talk with my boss about my possible future with Xerox, a conversation that I'd been itching for for a while now. When working for Xerox, a temp such as myself can be used for a maximum of 18 months before the situation needs to be re-evaluated. I've known that the tail end of my 18 months was coming up fairly quickly, but wasn't at all sure about what I'd be looking at when it it. Some of my questions finally got answered today. ➡
    • The case for war Gen. Powell made his presentation to the UN today, giving America's (ahem…Bush's…) case for going to war with Iraq. I haven't had time to look over the full thing yet, but the US Department of State has the entire presentation available on the web. ➡
    • Bush sets new record Well, Bush has gone and set a new record by plunging the U.S. into a $304,000,000,000 deficit, which is only likely to get worse and worse (I've seen some estimates eventually putting us at the trillion level) should we start turning Iraq into a molten slagheap. Can we just get to the next round of elections please? My single vote might not be enough to get Bush out of office on its own, but I'm sure itching to do my part to try. ➡
    • More on Animatrix Back in October, I mentioned an upcoming DVD release called 'Animatrix' — a series of short animated films set in the universe of The Matrix. It turns out that of the nine shorts that will be on the disc, four are going to be released to the web, and the first has just been posted. ➡
  • 2001
    • 1941 toepick cannibal line Now -- the newest additions to my movie library. Big surprise, huh? ➡
    • Occasional downtime I'm working on my CD collection again, which often necessitates switching my 'puter over to Mac OS 9. As my webserver only operates when I'm running Mac OS X...well, no webserver when I'm working. ➡