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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

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Week three of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. As a way of getting back into practice and doing something regularly, I’ve started doing regular Twitch broadcasts on Thursday nights. These are the results. Anything goes.

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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. ➡
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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. ➡