Memoirs of a Geisha - Peter Goulden

T's Rates IT: T T T T T

The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West - Gregory Maguire

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Belwether - Connie Willis

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Failure To Launch

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Mission Impossible 3

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X-Men III

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Name:
Location: Houston, Texas, United States

It ain't the years, It's the mileage. I was raised a military brat, and wanderlust still comes over me every 3 or 4 years. Still love to travel.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Quote of the Day


"There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity."
- General Douglas MacArthur

Science Fiction Author Bruce Sterling's Latest Effort

The Interoperation is published online at the Technology Review website.

The Interoperation

Architecture had given way to software management. So he turned buildings into construction programs.

It is an okay read. Certainly not Mr. Sterling’s most stirring work, but definitely not a waste of time.

Via Beyond the Beyond

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Back in the Stone Age


I acquired my first Macintosh Computer. It was a MAC IIx. One of the first models where they made the case separate from the CRT (monitor). Even back then, Apple still had it all over any other machine.

I had had the machine a year or so, and started getting some funky I/O errors. Seemingly random, they would cause the machine to crash at the most in-opportune times. I finally got frustrated enough after working through all my Mac owning friends and they were far and few between (We were all clueless about these) that I called Appel Tech support.

I described my issue to the support tech on the other end of the line. He listened patiently while I ran through my rant. When I fianlly wound down, he asked me if I was ready to try something a little un-orthodox.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, but so frustrated that I was indeed open to suggestion. He asked me if the monitor was sitting on top of the case (It was) and would I power the system down and set the monitor aside? I didn’t see what this had to do with anything as when I asked him if we were going to open the case he answered no. But I powered down and moved the monitor.

He: This is going to be a very low tech solution.

Me: OK.

He: Please pick the case up about two and a half to three inches off the desk top. [I did this] OK now drop it! he said.

Me: Are you sure about this?

He: Yes sir, quite sure. So I dropped the case back to the desktop. He had me do it two or three more times. The he had me power it back up.

At this point I was kind of laughing, but the machine seemed to be humming along. We chatted for a minute or two and then rang off.

Turns out the expansion cards were spring loaded and dropping the unit to the desktop a time or two reseated the cards. I did this every 3 or 4 months after this call.

I never had another problem with the mac.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Now This is Just a Little Weird

Art collective Henry VIII's Wives restaged historic photographs with elderly volunteers as the models. All of the models in the series, titled "Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century," live in a home for the elderly in Glasgow. From the Henry VIII's Wives site:
A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. Each of these images represents an immediately recognisable cultural leitmotif of its époque, the representation that overshadows the event it documents.

Via boingboing.net