08.07.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 12:41 pm
We have this coffee machine at my workplace. I want one, it works great. You just push a button, and out comes hot, fresh-brewed real coffee.
I’m surprised it’s advertised as an “espresso and cappuccino machine”, though, as it doesn’t make a true espresso, since it doesn’t use high-pressure steam to brew the coffee. As near as I can tell, it super-heats water and then drip-brews it, which is even less of an “espresso” than moka (which is also a wonderful way to brew coffee, and does use steam, but also fails to be a true espresso because the steam pressure isn’t high: if you can’t “pull” a shot of it, it ain’t espresso).
At any rate, though, it makes damn-good coffee, and very quickly. You press a button, it grabs some whole beans for grinding, heats some water, and you’ve got a cup of coffee in about a minute, maybe less. You can’t adjust the quantity of beans used, but you can adjust the amount of water used. I tend to put mine fairly low; about the second “big dot”, and then hit the brew button two or three times to make the amount I want, at the strength I want.
Amazon seems to be sold out, though, so maybe Saeco doesn’t make these any more. At any rate, though, it has given me a fairly high opinion of the company. Maybe when I have a little extra money to throw around, I’ll buy one of their current products.
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08.05.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 4:16 pm
I wrote in a previous post about a project I’d been working on, called Eseq, that translates terminal escapes and control sequences to something a little more descriptive, and readable by humans.
Well, after roughly a month of work on it, including features for an “interactive” mode of operation, and a 30-page manual, it’s release-ready. It’s now called Teseq (someone pointed out the confusion Eseq might cause that it might mean “extended seq”, seq being a program from the widely-deployed GNU coreutils package), is an official GNU project, and has seen its official release as of 4 Aug.
The website is at http://www.gnu.org/software/teseq/, the manual is online there, and there’s a discussion mailing list.
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06.26.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:06 pm
I keep on seeing those stoopid television commercials for HeadOn: “Apply directly to the forehead!” The commercials feature plenty of folks praising HeadOn for its effectiveness (“it really works!”). Great. But, works at what? I thought it was kind of strange that they went to the trouble that “it really works great”, without telling you what it actually does that it does so well. I had no idea. Do you?
I just saw the commercial again a few minutes ago, and finally worked up the curiosity to look it up on Wikipedia, and finally found out what it does: nothing. It doesn’t do anything. Its manufacturers want you to believe that it treats headaches, but they can’t actually claim that on TV, because there’s no evidence that it’s true.
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06.05.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:06 pm
I don’t watch a helluva lot of TV, I’m more of a DVD-watching kinda guy. ‘Swhy I’ve got my Netflix. But, I love to watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Pucca. My wife likes to watch King of Queens, and the kids like various cartoons and such.
A disturbing trend I’ve been noticing, is the increasing use of distracting and interruptive advertisement techniques, used during the show, usually to advertise other shows on the same network. The slim bar animations at the bottom of the screen are barely tolerable, but they often obscure parts of the show I want to see. Some of them get around this problem by squishing the whole show vertically while they do their business on the bar below, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s worse. Several notches below that, is when they add audible noises to the stupid animations. Explosions are the worst.
But now, now they’ve not only crossed the line, they’ve smashed it into tiny, tiny pieces. While I’m watching Family Guy on TBS, a Bill Engvall bar comes across the bottom of the screen. He grabs a remote, reaches behind him, and actually pauses Family Guy while he pimps his new show, then unpauses it so you can watch the final 10 seconds before the actual commercial break starts.
Un-friggin-believable. Now, we not only have to deal with commercials between slices of our favorite show, we have to freaking watch commercials during our favorite shows.
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04.28.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 7:13 pm
So, friends might perhaps be amused to know what some of the highest-volume links to my site are.
One of the top hits on my site is Snails do it, to…, which features a frame from a scene in the excellent documentary, Microcosmos, which features two snails copulating. 
It apparently comes up on Google searches (especially image searches) on phrases like “snails”, “sex animation”, “sex movies”, “how to do sex” (I am not kidding!). I’ve even had a couple hits come in from searches on just “sex”.
Another popular destination is my setting of Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars, for which I’m right up around the top results in Google (I was the second link, when I just checked). I’m not sure if these people are largely Mark Twain fans, or it’s a popular school assignment, or what.
By far my most popular page from web searches, though (web searches as a whole make a fairly small portion of my traffic: most of my incoming traffic comes from non-search sites that link directly to me) is my post on the Best Pacman Strategy Guide. Which is a short paragraph that comes up #2 in Google searches for “pacman strategy”, and essentially links to Google’s #1 hit for that search. Go figure.
One page that used to get quite a few hits, but doesn’t any longer because I’ve added it to my robots file, which tells web spiders not to index the page for web searches, is this one. It’s a link to a harrowing tale of parents accused of child pornography over some very innocent family photos, taken during a camping trip. The brief paragraph describing the link apparently contained just the right words for my site to come up in web searches such as “naked children photos”… I’d just as soon my site not be found by such queries. Hell, maybe most of them come from diligent FBI workers and the like trying to sniff out the bad stuff, I don’t know. And I don’t care. I’m more than happy to lose that traffic…
(Originally, I wrote the above paragraph in such a way as to try to avoid invoking the same problem terms, so I wouldn’t end up with the same problem for this post, as I did the camping photos one. It then dawned on me, however, that talking about “snail sex” in the first paragraph and “children” in the last, pretty much guaranteed that problem anyway, so I’m resigned to just preemptively adding this post to my robots file before there’s a problem.)
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04.25.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 11:47 am
So, Wired has a story on an email that Jack Thompson addressed to the mother of the chairman of Take-Two Interactive (Strauss Zelnick). Includes comparisons with Zelnick and “the Hitler Youth”, and scolds her for her failures to follow Biblical wisdoms like “train up the child the way he should go”, and sparing the rod, spoiling the child.
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03.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 10:43 am
From Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe:
[A] District Attorney in Texas is on trial for building himself a sweet rig on the county dime. This machine in question sports “two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light.” It’s a crime, yeah, but it’s an awesome crime. I make an exception for awesome crimes.
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03.02.08
Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:55 pm
Looks like spambots are starting to exploit a flaw in my aging version of WordPress to post links in my sidebar; guess it’s time to upgrade soon.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:48 pm
This being Dr Seuss’s birthday, in addition to my daughter Joy’s, someone felt inspired to write an atheist’s tributory piece. Following is an excerpt.
In a place known as Whoville the folks got distraught
When Horton the elephant said what he thought.
“The oddest of oddities isn’t as odd
As people believing that there is a god.”
The Who Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists
The Who Vegetarians, Wiccans, and Nudists,
The Who Presbyterians, Baptists, New Agers:
All spread the sad news on their cell phones and pagers.
A Who Evangelical fell to his knees
And he said, “Oh no, Horton! I beg of you, please!
We always have liked you. We all think you’re swell,
And we can’t stand the thought that you’re headed to hell!”
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