My manager just came up to me and handed me a ticket to the Man-U/Celtic game tonight! Turns out his girlfriend has to cancel, and since we were talking about the game earlier…
…I’m in.
Too.
Freaking.
Cool.
See y’all after the game!
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Manchester U vs. Celtic
Tonight’s the Man-U vs. Celtic game here in Seattle. One of the few times I wish I could go to see a major sporting event.
Anybody know if there might be a webcast of the game anywhere?
Ah, the memories…
Kookaburra asks “will Longhorn eat RAM?”
My “official Microsoft approved answer”: too early to talk about minimum or recommended requirements. We probably won’t talk about minimum requirements until right before launch.
The answer I give my friends after they get me drunk: “yes.”
The rest of his answer is worth reading, where he explains his answer a bit more in depth, without running afoul of the Powers That Be at Microsoft. Still, this got me thinking about how much I miss the days when computers weren’t as powerful as they are now. Not because I’d like to go back to the days of 286’s and Motorola 68000 processors (ick), but because the limited resources forced programmers to weigh features against bloat, to code for small sizes as well as functionality, and so on.
The first computer I owned was a Mac Classic, with 1Mb RAM (that’s not a typo — one megabyte) and no internal hard drive. My senior year of high school, I did all my papers on that machine. I had two 1.4Mb floppys: one with System 6.0.7 to boot the computer, and one that had Microsoft Word v4 and every paper I wrote that school year.
Let me stress that: one floppy. Microsoft Word and every paper I wrote in a school year.
I miss that.
You know, as it stands right now, I won’t buy Microsoft Word. But if they could dig into their archives, pull out the source code for Word v4 for Mac and update it to run on Mac OS X, I’d pop down cash for that in a heartbeat. Best damn word processor I ever used, mainly because it was a word processor, not a over-priced, over-featured, kludgy, pain in the ass piece of bloatware with every conceivable feature tossed in merely because it could be.
But that’s just me.
English
English is the preacher’s language, because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
— Garrison Keillor
Boy, ain’t that the truth. I know I talk like that. Sometimes I blog like that, too, though I try not to do it on too much of a regular basis. ;)
In general…
…what’s the point?
Is the day over yet?
Today is just dragging on, and on…and on. Woke up with a bit of a headache, and it hasn’t gone away all day. Not enough to be extremely painful or debilitating, just enough to sit a couple inches behind my forehead and make sure that I don’t forget that it’s there. Urgh.
On the bright side, work is slow. On the down side — well, work is slow. I’m the only one in the department tonight, there’s nothing overly pressing coming down the pike, and I’m bored out of my mind. Hence this otherwise pointless post. I’ve bounced around some of the TypePad blogs on the recently updated list, randomly hit a few other sites, and so far, everything has completely failed to catch my attention. Just one of those days, I guess.
Okay, enough of this. Back to pretending I’m paying attention to work.
Maybe.
Convert Kmph to Mph
Note for Americans, that the speed is kilometers per hour not miles. To convert you multiple by 5 and divide by 8 then add 32 less the number you first thought of and then cross out the answer and write “really fast for an old car” or something like that.
— Jon Wright, in Blog Roundup
Turn down the heat!
On the bright side, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous all this weekend. On the downside, I haven’t wanted to leave the apartment — once temperatures hit the mid-80’s to 90’s, I’m quite content to lay in a near-comatose puddle on my bed. ;) However, this being the weekend for the Bite of Seattle food festival, I couldn’t very well stay indoors in the shade all weekend.
Prairie had come in to town to visit for the weekend, so Saturday morning we got up around 11, wandered downtown to see Pirates of the Caribbean (which rocked — more on that later, most likely), then walked from the Temple of Avarice to the Seattle Center to wander around the Bite for a while. As I mentioned above, it was gorgeous weather, so Seattle was out in full force. Lots of people, and at times a little overcrowded (does nobody ever pay attention to where they are walking at these things?), but aside from that, not bad at all. I even went out and soaked myself in the fountain — and boy, did that make the sun more bearable for the rest of the afternoon!
After grabbing some food and finding a seat in the shade to eat, we each grabbed an ice cream cone, and sat down at one of the music stages to watch The Retros play — if the name hasn’t given it away already, they specialize in 80’s pop, and are a blast to see. We finished our ice cream about the same time they finished their set, and, deciding that we didn’t really want to risk sunburn any more than we already had, we hopped on the monorail and came back to the apartment.
The rest of the weekend was spent mostly here at the apartment, resting and trying to avoid the heat as much as possible. Movies were watched, laundry was done, and not much else. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes for a perfect weekend.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.
Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Buddha: If you meet the chicken on the road, kill it.
Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: ‘Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Mr. T: If you saw me coming you’d cross the road too!
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately…and suck all the marrow out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Molly Yard: It was a hen!
Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
Morally deficient
Ooooh — you know it, baby! :)
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent family values makes you dangerous, but we can count on some right wing nutter blowing you up if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
(via Iki)