Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

On This Day: Feb 8

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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 32 posts previously published on February 8th

  • 2024
    • Year 50 Day 282 The quiet of the afternoon was almost eerie. ➡
    • All Your Images Are Belong to Zuck If you have what you consider to be a hard-line stance against AI-generated images, and you post your photos and/or artwork to Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, you should likely either rethink that hard-line stance or stop posting your images. ➡
  • 2022
  • 2021
    • Samer Recognized A Fart Online: “This afternoon in Slack, our work chatroom, Patrick shared a cute little viral video, as we do from time to time. None of us were prepared for what happened next.” ➡
    • The two top things I want from Apple’s Music (formerly iTunes) app: Functional search. The drastic decrease in functionality in the iTunes to Music transition is incredibly frustrating. Either a ‘tag’ field, or for the ‘Genre’ field to be tags, rather than single-value. 🎶 ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 2021.02.06 Unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants, let's-see-what-happens mixing. You never know what might fall into one of these! ➡
  • 2020
    • At the next to last ConCom planning meeting before Norwescon 43. We’re getting closer! ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 8 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 8 ➡
  • 2019
    • 🖖 #StarTrekDiscovery S02E04: A marked improvement over last week (no Klingons makes a big difference). Mysteries, science and technobabble, pissy fungus blobs, Number One, and reasons for no holograms on the Big E and (potentially) for no spore drive! Much better! ➡
    • Seattle Snowpocalypse 2019 status check, Friday afternoon. ➡
    • I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of four-wheeling as a recreational activity; it seems to me wasteful and often damaging to the environment. That said, I can allow a little leeway if you have the chance to do it on the moon (gorgeous stabilized 60FPS video). ➡
    • Prepping for Snowpocalypse 2019 Survived my first experience with pre-*pocalypse shopping last night. The shopping itself wasn’t actually all that bad – we knew what we were getting into, and apparently so did most other people; it was definitely unusually busy, but people weren’t being unusually obnoxious – and it was amusing to see the many empty shelves where ... Read more ➡
  • 2017
    • So done with this. That big pile (top left) is actually taller than me. So freaking much snow! I left Alaska for a reason, dammit! 🌨❄️😜❄️🌨 ➡
  • 2016
    • 2016 fitness update: Finished level one of the Gorilla workout app yesterday (again), and moved on to start level two tonight. Graduated from modified push-ups (from the knees) to real push-ups…yay? Exercise is healthy and good, though. My weight’s been holding steady at 170 for the past two weeks, and Prairie says that she can ... Read more ➡
  • 2014
    • It snowed at least two inches while we were in the show; here at home, the snow is deeper than the car’s clearance (as evidenced by the marks between the tire tracks). We’re getting much more of a dump than I expected! ➡
    • Braving the winter weather for a night out at the opera! ➡
    • It’s been snowing all day, but it’s coming down nice and strong now that we’re out and about! ➡
  • 2009
    • Vinylicious Introducing a new blog: Vinylicous! I'm no hardcore vinyl collector, but I do keep an eye out for fun oddities to add to the collection I do have, and I'm planning on using Vinylicious to share some of the goodies I've found. ➡
  • 2007
    • PostSecret If you haven't run across [PostSecret][1] yet, you really should check it out. The concept is incredibly simple: people write their secrets on a postcard and send them in. Every Sunday, a new batch of secrets is posted on the site. ➡
  • 2006
    • The IT Crowd British humor and geek jokes (_lots_ of 'em, too, from Flying Spaghetti Monster posters to RTFM t-shirts to EFF 'Fair Use Has a Posse' stickers...essentially the entire set dressing) combined. ➡
  • 2005
    • Laurie Anderson: Mach 20 Now imagine, if you will, four hundred million blind and desperate sperm whales departing from the Pacific coast of North America, swimming at fifteen thousand miles per hour, and arriving in Japanese coastal waters in just under forty-five minutes. ➡
    • What about [some other blogging tool]? After reading my rant about comment spammers, Joel asked me if I'd thought about switching over to another weblogging system. Here's a (somewhat expanded) copy of what I sent back. ➡
    • The Al-Can Highway is no more! At least, according to Google's nifty new Google Maps page, that's the story. Realistically, I'm quite sure that this is simply because Google Maps doesn't have the Canadian highway system in their database at the moment. Hopefully that's only a temporary thing, as that is a search that returns good results in both Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps. ➡
    • The Spammers Have Won (for now) Until I have time to get in and do some rather major work on my webserver, I'm afraid that comments and TrackBacks are turned off. I really don't like doing this -- I like the interaction aspect, both getting into discussions and just knowing that people stop by here from time to time -- but the attacks on the server have been too severe and too regular, and I'm tired of battling them. ➡
  • 2004
    • So much for that secure entrance… Hey…could you help me? There's this crazy guy wandering the halls. He keeps banging on the doors…I don't know what to do. ➡
    • This is so juvenile. I’m very sorry. My computer doesn't like my Prick. ➡
    • Uff-da After fourteen trips down and up six stories to get three loads of laundry done, I really wish that they'd just go ahead and get the damn elevator in this place fixed. ➡
    • Geek backlash It was bound to happen eventually. It actually probably started happening a few years ago, but now it's actually getting news stories — 'geeks' are tired of fixing people's problems. ➡
  • 2002
    • Search back up Okay, the new search engine is installed and running. The pages don't mesh visually with the rest of the site yet, but I'll get that fixed up some other time -- Candice should be over sometime soon, and I wanted to be done with tonight's 'geeking out' before she got here. ➡
    • Search disabled I've just temporarily disabled the search function as I upgrade to a more powerful and full-featured search system offered by the same company. It should be back up within a couple hours at most (if all goes well). ➡
  • 2001
  • 1994
    • [From Usenet: 2.8.94 0325] If it's the same 'Cold Hearted Snake' as I'm thinking of, it was Paula Abdul, a few years back. Is the cover good? Might be interested in hearing it... ➡
by

Just a quick note of kudos to Malia M. at Dreamhost customer support, who was able to recover a directory I accidentally (and quite foolishly) deleted this morning, and did so with a backup from yesterday. Great customer service!

On This Day: Feb 7

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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 30 posts previously published on February 7th

  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2021
    • I AM THE DESIGNER OF THIS RESTAURANT’S OUTDOOR SEATING SPACE, AND THIS IS MY ARTIST’S STATEMENT: “… the elaborate act of justifying why all of this is okay takes about as much energy as the rest of it.” ➡
  • 2020
    • 📚 nine of 2020: The Outside, by Ada Hoffman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee Humankind is out in space, limited to mid-20th century tech while super advanced AI gods control advanced tech, FTL flight and comms…oh, and Lovecraftian energies are destroying people. Fun! ➡
    • The Erasure of Elizabeth Warren Continues: I’ve been noticing this in a number of the articles I’ve seen — not just post-Iowa, either, though it’s become more obvious and egregious — and it’s been ticking me off. ➡
    • Just a quick note of kudos to Malia M. at Dreamhost customer support, who was able to recover a directory I accidentally (and quite foolishly) deleted this morning, and did so with a backup from yesterday. Great customer service! ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 2020.02.06 Week three of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 7 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 7 ➡
    • 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, ... Read more ➡
  • 2018
    • Book eight of 2018 (and second #pkdickaward nominee): All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • Gotta keep practicing! (38/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • A book and a fancy hot chocolate. Not at all a bad way to spend a Friday evening. ➡
    • The first decent snow of the winter, and rain is predicted by the middle of next week! ➡
  • 2009
  • 2007
  • 2005
  • 2004
    • Don’t drop out, Dean I'd love to see Dean stay in the race even if he doesn't pick up Wisconsin. I think it would be great if he could do essentially what Sharpton has been doing the entire time — just doggedly hang in there, show up for the debates, and make sure that his voice gets heard and that the questions that need to be asked are asked and don't get brushed under the carpet. ➡
    • Caucus Time My particular precinct had twenty-four people show up, split roughly 2/3 for Kerry and 1/3 for Dean, which ended up being the final delegate split (two delegates for Kerry and one for Dean). I'm expecting that that was probably the rough result for the rest of the precincts in the room. ➡
  • 2003
    • Just in case things weren't tense enough North Korea is entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against the US rather than wait until the American military have finished with Iraq, the North's foreign ministry told the Guardian yesterday. ➡
    • Blacker than black Researchers have created the blackest black ever made on Earth, by bubbling a shiny metal plate in nitric acid for a few seconds. It reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections in instruments. ➡
    • Rebutting Powell If one believes everything Colin Powell said to the Security Council on February 5th, one's first response ought to be that there's no reason to fight a war, since US surveillance capabilities are so awesome that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) can easily be found. And one's first question should be why has the United States for over two months withheld this apparently so damaging evidence from those weapons inspectors, who could have verified conjectures and destroyed WMD stocks and production facilities. ➡
    • better a terrorist than a republican better a terrorist than a republican…at least the terrorists are fighting for a real cause ➡
    • Saying what you feel Y'know, sometimes, whether or not it's polite, whether or not it's 'politically correct,' you just need to say what you feel, in all its uncensored glory. ➡
    • Following in Lott's footsteps Rep. Coble needs to apologize. And the rest of America's electorate really need to realize that these short-sighted, racist, and inflammatory remarks are neither likely to 'slip under the radar' as they did in pre-internet days, nor are the people they affect going to just shrug them off. It's time to grow up. ➡
  • 2002
    • Do you have slack? The only difference I've been able to see between Discordians and SubGeniuses, is that SubGeniuses get laid. ➡
    • Who wrote the bible? Here's some fascinating stuff courtesy of The Straight Dope -- a five-part series covering the primary theories on who wrote and edited the Bible. ➡
    • Word of the day: amanuensis I generally think of myself as having a fairly good vocabulary, but yesterday at a department meeting Carrie tossed out a term that I hadn't ever come across before -- _amanuensis_, which she said was a synonym for secretary. ➡
  • 2001
    • Shadow of the Vampire Not bad at all, though not quite as good as I'd hoped it would be. The previews had made it out to be a little more creepy than it ended up being -- while it wasn't strictly played for laughs, it wasn't as much of a 'horror' film as I thought it might be. ➡
by

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. ➡

On This Day: Feb 4

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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 21 posts previously published on February 4th

  • 2024
  • 2023
    • 📚 Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell 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
    • What is a Blade Runner? How Ridley Scott’s Movie Has Origins in William S. Burroughs’ Novella, Blade Runner: A Movie: This is fascinating; I had no idea. And now I want to see if I can track down copies of both Nourse’s and Burroughs’ books. ➡
    • Twitter Helps Spread Disinformation During Iowa Caucuses: “A Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo that the company does not believe viral tweets falsely claiming people’s votes are worthless in the hours preceding an election will discourage them from voting.” ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 4 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 4 ➡
  • 2019
    • The Seattle area got a good dump of snow last night! Here’s what we woke up to in Renton. Of course, I work from home, so no snow day for me…. ➡
  • 2017
    • Book twelve (and second #PKDickAward nominee) of 2017: Graft, by Matt Hill. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • Will you get ALL THE RIBBONS! at #nwc39? (35/366) ➡
    • Today’s office view. Mostly just testing posting to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook natively rather than piping through IFTTT. ➡
  • 2014
    • It’s cold out here, and the next few days are just going to get colder. Brrrrr! ➡
  • 2009
    • Links for February 4th from 14:21 to 18:52 Sometime between 14:21 and 18:52, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • Why Your Avatar Matters • The 20 Worst Foods in America of 2009 • Exclusive: Stephen King on J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer • Ancient Fossil Find: This Snake Could Eat a Cow! • Masked Man Robs Stores With Klingon Sword ➡
    • Links for February 2nd through February 4th Sometime between February 2nd and February 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • Cash 4 Gold Would Like to Melt Down and Recast Their Reputation • Princesses Preen in a Pauper Economy • Passport RFIDs Cloned Wholesale by $250 eBay Auction Spree • How Twitter Was Born • Untouched East Germany Flat Found ➡
  • 2006
  • 2004
    • Suit measurements? Anyone in Seattle know of a place in the downtown/First Hill/Capitol Hill area that I could go get measured for a suit without having to buy one? Or, failing that, what measurements are generally needed so I could do it myself? I'm quite clueless in these matters. ➡
  • 2003
    • WTC finalists chosen The two finalists for the project to rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center have been announced. Which do you prefer? ➡
    • The speed of what? A CNN caption that really needed some editing before going live. ➡
    • The pervert motto That's like the pervert motto…they make you put your right hand in the air, your left hand down your pants, and recite that. ➡
    • Nothing to see here. Really. Pablo Picasso's anti-war painting 'Guernica' has hung in the lobby of the U.N. since 1985. It serves as a sobering reminder of the horrors of war to those in the U.N. who may be faced with making decisions as to whether or not to sanction attacks against one country or another. Unless, of course, it's politically expedient not to remind them what war can do, in which case we'll just cover it up. ➡
    • Photographic glitches? Lightning? Alien death rays? I think the thing that bugs me the most about this is that even though NASA has set up a page for people to upload images and video that they may have taken during the shuttle disaster, rather than do that (or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe in addition to that), this guy decided to run to the media and stir up a little controversy. ➡
    • MT: SimpleComments Thanks to a clever little hack by Adam Kalsey, all comments and TrackBack pings that I receive are displayed as a single list on each entry's page, sorted by the time they were received. Much nicer visually than having two seperate listings of responses to one of my posts. ➡
  • 2002

On This Day: Feb 3

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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 26 posts previously published on February 3rd

  • 2024
  • 2021
  • 2020
    • Old CSS, new CSS: “I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it.” This is a wonderful rundown of how HTML and CSS web design has changed over the years. I still have a few mid-’90s pages on my site ... Read more ➡
    • NSW and Victoria just jumped 1.8 metres north: Added to the list of “things I didn’t know about Australia”: It sits on a particularly fast-moving (~7cm/yr) tectonic plate, and due to a lack of updates since 1994, the GPS system is currently off by about six feet (but is soon to be fixed). ➡
    • Story Time From Space: Astronauts reading STEM-focused children’s books from the International Space Station to kids on earth! ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 3 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 3 ➡
  • 2019
    • As seen on Capitol Hill in Seattle on Friday Night, not far from the Mercury: the world gets hard to live in with an open spirit. But risk is the spice of life. Be legendary. ➡
    • Book twelve of 2019: Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman. #PKDickAward nominee. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚 Neat near-future exploration of interpersonal connections and intimacy, through the lens of research into the sexual habits of bonobo apes. ➡
  • 2016
    • Had a “all these photos look doofy” evening. This is as good as it gets today. (34/366) ➡
    • Got a nice handwritten thank-you note from a prospective LAJ student that I chatted with. #CWUpride :) ➡
  • 2014
    • Survived another Monday! Time to get Prairie and head home. ➡
  • 2013
    • Difficult Listening Hour 06 (110BPM) After taking last weekend off (but hey, I gave you almost four hours in two mixes last time I updated), here's another new practice mix. Every song in this mix is somewhere between 105 and 115 BPM. ➡
  • 2010
    • Comparisons Countries that forbid gays in their military: Cuba, China, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Jamaica, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, Yemen, the USA. ➡
  • 2009
  • 2006
    • The 24.6 Second College Degree Every day, we're spending enough money in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for _3,503_ four-year public school college degrees. ➡
    • Trademark this, Aggies! Someone needs to make t-shirts with the following: √144th Man ➡
    • Gored for Women! Another example of organizations that should check their web site addresses a little more carefully. Today's case in point: The American Heart Association's Go Red for Women site, promoting heart disease awareness. ➡
  • 2005
    • Me and a Gun and a Man on my Back This is without a doubt one of the most powerful things I've come across lately — an eight-shot series of photographs and poems by selkie decrying abuse. ➡
    • Three hours on one post I just spent three hours on a single post -- and I wasn't even writing a new post, but just reading and responding to comments prompted by my rambling grumbles about the State of the Union. I'm going to be so behind in NetNewsWire tomorrow… ➡
    • Dan Rather’s replacement Every so often over the past day or so, I've seen headlines like this 'Schieffer is interim replacement for Rather', only my brain would conveniently drop the 'e', turning the name into 'Schiffer'. So for the past day, I've had the vague notion that Dan Rather's replacement would be Claudia Schiffer. ➡
  • 2004
    • Bush’s Budget The president's budget reveals his priorities, what he truly cares about. It is not a reassuring picture. ➡
    • The MS Mac BU Last Friday, the Seattle P-I ran a nice story on the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft, which included a photo of some of the Mac BU staffers seated in front of racks of Mac computers. ➡
  • 2003
    • geek*muffin Ladies and gentlemen — please stop by and welcome my good friend Kirsten to the weblogging world. ➡
    • Desktop images from Columbia There are some gorgeous images taken by the crew of the Columbia before it broke up on reentry, courtesy of NASA. I've taken two of my favorites and turned them into 1024x768 desktop images, which you can grab here if you like. ➡
    • Creative Commons I took a look at the Creative Commons licences when they first appeared, and considered adopting one of them for my weblog, but in the end, also decided not to. At the bottom of every page on this site, you'll see the standard copyright line, and that's how I intend to keep it. ➡
    • Tired of the 'renovations' Grrrrrr.... I woke up this morning to find a note slipped under my door telling me that the power to the building was going to be cut off again today, due to the construction/renovation work currently going on. Fat lot of good that note did me, though, considering the power was already off when I woke up. ➡

On This Day: Feb 2

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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 25 posts previously published on February 2nd

  • 2024
  • 2023
    • 📚 The Legacy of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson 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. ➡
  • 2021
    • All of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees have arrived! Two months to get through them all (plus two more that are predecessors of books in this stack). Will I make it? 📚 ➡
  • 2020
  • 2018
    • Well, what else would we be watching tonight? ➡
  • 2017
    • Saw this while walking on the Ganges. Either this bridge (which carries one of the campus steam heating pipes) has a pretty severe leak, or the winter river gods were very happy to see me! 😉😂 ➡
    • Last week I got brave/foolish enough to climb down to walk along the frozen Ganges (the irrigation canal that runs through campus). Figured I might as well do it once while I could! ➡
  • 2016
    • Some nights you just need to build a cute little #Lego #mixels guy. (33/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • Did a photo a day all January, then missed yesterday. Meh. Ah well, there were some days I did more than one, so my average will still be on point. Meanwhile, this is what happens when I get lazy about shaving for a week. Scruffy! Time to take care of that. ➡
  • 2009
  • 2007
    • Throwing down the gauntlet… Bill Gates: Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. ➡
  • 2006
  • 2005
    • Amazon Prime I am very excited to announce Amazon Prime, our first ever membership program, which provides 'all-you-can-eat' express shipping. It's simple: for a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free on over a million in-stock items. Members also get overnight shipping for only $3.99 per item -- order as late as 6:30PM ET. ➡
    • No more combined feeds While I'd been considering this for a little while, Dave's 'Information Aversion' post prompted me to un-splice my Flickr photos from my RSS feeds. Having done that, I've updated my feeds page to list my current available syndication feeds, all broken out to allow readers to subscribe to as much or as little of my drivel as they please. ➡
    • State of the Union 2005 'Liveblogging' (though I won't actually post this until afterwards) the State of the Union. I'm not sure why, all it's going to do is annoy me. But still... [Speakeasy had sudden network issues midway through the SotU, so I didn't get to see all of it. Lots of grumbles about what I did see, though.] ➡
    • Jumping the gun? All this, and it's just barely into February. That just doesn't seem right. Okay, so I'm not in Alaska anymore, where February tends to be the coldest and most bitter weeks of winter, but isn't it just a bit early for weather like this, even here in Seattle? ➡
  • 2004
    • Happy Blogaversary! Congrats to Kirsten on her one-year 'blogaversary', complete with spiffy new site design! ➡
    • Teaching? Technical writing? Every so often, a topic pops up in the TypePad User Group forums that I feel I can add my own particular little brand of insight into, and I'll spend some time doing my best to explain (often in excruciating detail) what's going on. I recently got a very nice comment from Doc in response to one such post. ➡
    • Only Just Beginning There once was a boy who remembered that his heart did not ever really belong to him. So he tried to give it back to the sky. ➡
    • RSS feeds updated I've updated, rearranged, and cleaned up the RSS feeds for Eclecticism. Hopefully I haven't just screwed things up too horribly for those of you who subscribe to one feed or another. ➡
    • New category, design tweaks Following up on my thought process, I've added a 15Minutes archive category that collects all posts related to my experiences with blogging my way out of a job. I've also made some other slight design tweaks. ➡
    • One more mention I need to set up a 'fifteen minutes' category… ➡
    • That’s no pastie! Ah, well -- my views aren't about to change anyone's mind. Still, I'm constantly frustrated by a culture that glorifies violence and vilifies sexuality (unless it's being used to sell something). Seems pretty backwards. But that's just me. ➡
    • Welcome, Katya! Many congratulations to Casey and Jennifer, who became the proud parents of Katarina Anne Scott on the 19th! ➡
  • 2001
    • Balls and beats I also may have an opportunity to start spinning again...albeit in sort of a cheezy fashion. The bowling alley in Muldoon is one of the ones in town that does Neon Bowling on weekend nights, and they're looking for a DJ for their Saturday nights. ➡

On This Day: Feb 1

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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 16 posts previously published on February 1st

  • 2024
  • 2022
  • 2020
  • 2019
    • Book eleven of 2019: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, by Vandana Singh. #PKDickAward nominee. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚 One of the best collections I’ve read in a long time. Fascinating, sometimes haunting stories, not a dud in the bunch, and a definite pleasure throughout. ➡
  • 2016
    • I know exercise has benefits. It’s just hard to remember that some evenings. (32/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • Always a little amused at how much difference a few minutes trimming and shaving can make. ➡
    • This bin at Fred Meyer was like some kind of plush horror film. As Teddy sunk ever deeper into the writhing mass of giant pink caterpillars, he cursed the cruel gods that had fixed a permanent grin on his horrified, screaming face. ➡
  • 2010
  • 2007
    • Nobody Likes a Quitter As we enter this first day of February, I've now officially been one month entirely without cigarettes. ➡
    • Harry Potter, Year Seven: The Deathly Hallows The publication date for the next -- er, that is, _last_ -- Harry Potter book has been announced. Don't expect Prairie or I to answer calls or be available in _any_ way this July 21st. Our day is planned. ➡
  • 2005
    • Stating the obvious I brought up the Flickr page for photos tagged with 'alaska' tonight to show it to Prairie — lots of gorgeous shots of my home state — and had to laugh at the “related” tags that Flickr automatically generates. ➡
  • 2004
  • 2003
    • Space Shuttle Colombia lost My heartfelt condlences to the families of the seven astronauts of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which was lost today during reentry. ➡
  • 2001
    • DJ Wudi strikes again! For the third year in a row, I'll be DJ'ing at UAA's Dance Marathon benefit fundraiser for the Providence Children's ICU. ➡