Category: FWIW

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Stuff From the Voices In My Head

Usually, several years go by before someone brings up the “family group” of nudists that lives [in an undisclosed location here in America’s Third World County]. For some reason, [a person who shall not be named] brought the group up in conversation this a.m…. about 9 years early. *heh* Not relaying the context, but the comment had to do with imagining living next door to the group for 20 or 30 years…

Madge: Henry, I just can’t enjoy my morning coffee on the front porch anymore. I mean, when [unnamed nudist] was in his 20s, it wasn’t all that disturbing when he came out to get his paper *wink-wink-nudge-nudge*, but now… OK, his beard covers the worst parts, so that’s not so bad; it’s just the ugly crack he always makes now as he turns to go back inside…

*pa-dump-bump*

(TYVM. I’ll be here all week. Be sure to try the buffet.)

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Life Goes On

Son&Heir has a pair of finches that now reside in our family room, since their constant twittering became too much to endure during his switch to a night shift job. Last week, I noticed that the girl had somehow managed to stick her leg in a crack between the door and the frame of the cage and gotten caught. The leg was severely mangled and hanging on by a thread because of her frantic struggles to get free. No saving it.

She’s learned to manage quite well on one leg in the week since and her annoying twittering continues unabated.

Life goes on.

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Is This Proof?

Or is this just one more data point in support of The Relativity Weight Control Plan?

Oh, wait, you want to know what he Relativity Weight Control Plan is, eh? That’s simple. General relativity holds, among other things, that the faster a particle travels the greater its mass, as observed by an unaccelerated frame of reference until its quasi-local apparent mass is infinite.

Reason would suggest, then, that the slower an object, the less its apparent mass. So…

The fact that, when I took a two-hour nap I lost three pounds would tend to offer evidence of The Relativity Weight Control Plan’s efficacy, eh? Continue reading “Is This Proof?”

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A Little Give, A Little Take

Overall, the Amazon Kindle Fire announced today (available November 15) is net positive on the give/take from what was leaked and speculated about before the release announcement.

Minuses:

Amazon Prime membership is just the one month trial, instead of the rumored year. Add $80 to make it stay (for a year).

Rumored to possibly be available next month. Nuh-uh. November, as stated above, IF one gets in line now.

Pluses:

$200, not $250

Dual core, not the rumored single core

Email app (designed to import email from Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.); was thought that would be missing.

Also, net pluses (with a couple of privacy cavils) for the Amazon Silk Browser. Overall, probably a Very Good Thing for what the Kindle Fire will be asked to do by most users.

All the rest as rumored/leaked pretty much spot on. Tempting, very tempting.

Real cost for optimal use:

$200 for Kindle Fire
$80 for a year’s “membership” in Amazon Prime (something I have already been seriously considering anyway)
$30 for a zip sleeve (why pay $200 for a techie toy and transport it w/o some sort of protection? Yeh, I know people do dumb things like that all the time, but I expect my equipment to last until I tire of it. *heh*)

So, about $310 real up front costs. Back end costs for apps are an unknown at this point. Some will be free, of course; others? No real idea at this point. Books and other Amazon product orders are more than likely just stuff I’d be buying anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtmOApIslE

Mini-update: While reading a Kindle edition of a David Weber book referenced in a later post, it came upon me again just how handy reading ebooks can be. While I prefer reading books in my web browser, the Kindle app for PCs is Good Enough, and does have the added advantage of slightly easier referencing (and syncing across devices), which I imagine would also hold true for any physical Kindle. For example, just now I ran across a word whose root I knew and which, from context and root, I was sure I understood; even so since I had never actually read this particular word before, I I CLICKed on it and immediately had the definition verifying my understanding. That’s slightly more convenient than my old practice of keeping a dictionary handy for similar use, although it doesn’t afford the enjoyment I frequently had from continuing to read on down the page in the dictionary (sometimes for pages and pages… ), etc. *heh*

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Micro-Mini-Life Hack

A case of “Two Very Minor Irritants Solve Each Other”.

Or,

“The Voices In My Head Make Me Do the Strangest Things, Sometimes”.

Irritant #1

I use a nice lil lapdesk with my lil Asus notebook. Moreover, I normally use a nice Logitech M305 wireless mouse with the notebook, and the laptop desk surface makes a nice, smooth, slick surface for mousing. Great little mouse. It’s not as comfy in my hand as the mouse that comes in the Logitech MK320 bundle, but it does have a “nano-receiver” that makes it a good fit for notebook use (dongles hanging off notebook ports=BAD :-)).

But, moving the laptop desk from laptop to coffee table or to the couch beside me, with the notebook and mouse still on it, frequently led to the mouse sliding off that slick surface. Sure, take the mouse off and put it elsewhere. BTDT, don’t like having the notebook/mouse in separate places. Be really careful when taking the laptop desk off my lap and placing it elsewhere (or picking it up, etc.). Right. Not me.

So, pick mouse up off floor every now and then, whatever. *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

Irritant #2

Picked up a cheap notebook bag–$7 cheap–for carrying other things (techie tools, etc.). I already have a nice bag for the Asus and another–a Targus hand-me-down from someone who “diminuted” her computer use to a netbook/smart phone combo–for my primary techie tools (now two bags to carry what used to fit in a padded aluminum case. Oh, well), but this seemed a nice enough way to carry most of the rest.

Except for the really tacky “designer’s” logo patch sewn onto the large outer flap. Made of some of that silicone-rubber-plastic stuff that is kind of “grippy”.

!

Removed patch from cheapo bag.

Applied contact cement to ugly, tacky “designer” logo and

Glued face down on upper right-hand corner of laptop desk.

Now, I can place the mouse on this small, 2″ patch of silicone-plastic-rubber whatchamacallit and the weight of the mouse and the “takiness” *heh* of the patch material holds the mouse in place at up to 30-degree tilts.

Using one irritation to solve another: life-hacking.

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Contemporary “Music”

Since The Guinness Book of World Records just made up a couple of new “world records” for Taylor Swift, I thought I’d once again comment on the state of popular so-called music:

By and large, it’s crap.

Swift has set records in, urm, record sales, etc. with sort of rhythmic, off key renditions of crap like this:

Well, it was kind of cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
She could see the cars roll by
Out on 441
Like waves crashing on the beach

And for one desperate moment there
He crept back in her memory
God, it’s so painful
It’s something that’s so close but still so far out of reach

Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

Oh, please. High school glurge in grade school vocabulary. Simply crappy in every way. And I refuse to post a clip of the nearly atonal crap its rendered in. And that’s the GOOD stuff from Swift, a cover of a Tom Petty piece of crap! *sheesh!* I absolutely refuse to post “lyrics” supposedly “written” (in crayon, perhaps?) by Swift herself. Lobotomizing my reader(s) isn’t a Good Thing, IMO.

Why am I picking on Taylor Swift? As I said, because of her new records demonstrating that it is she who is now the standard bearer of manufactured pop “music”–the best reflection of where the money from brain dead listeners is going. But she’s only a typical example. Most of the crap being excreted from the mouths of performers nowadays is eagerly lapped up by coprophagic morons.

OTOH–and this just occurred to me–perhaps Swift is a brilliant satirist of “kiddie music” and is making atonal existential metacommentary. Is this possible? In a word, no.

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Another (few) Data Point(s) in Favor of the Opera Browser

*heh*

Frankly, my primary reasons for preferring Opera as my primary web browser all revolve around its elegance. Every other browser is klunky and incomplete by comparison. Example? Mouse gestures. I can’t live without them when browsing. Sure, they can be added to other browsers via extensions, but that’s just so very kludgey, and often the add-on is broken with browser updates.

Etc.

But it’d be silly to not prefer Opera for its technical excellence as well. Take for example its standards-compliance, an area where Opera claims to be further along than other browsers. Is this claim true? Could be. For example, its compliance in implementing javascripting (something that’s almost omnipresent on the web) is just one of the many areas where it shines. On the emerging ECMAScripttest262, Chrome, a pretty darned good browser, returned these test results:

Not bad. Almost a 95% pass rate.

What about the Opera install I’m using right now to write this?

Oh, wait. That’s a 99.95% pass rate*

Of course, that’s just one of many test suites for web standards compliance, but my own experience running the standard test suites on the Opera installs I use regularly and installs of other browsers on the same computers (installs that are ALL kept up-to-date) just reinforces my appreciation for the lil browser that could. *heh* Sure, on some HTML5 test suites, Opera lags Chrome by as much as 23 points out of 450 (70% vs 75% compliance), but since that’s a still-emerging standard, I’m willing to play wait and see there. Acid3? On the limited subset of tests Acid3 is designed to look at, 100% pass for both, so that’s a push, although the Webstandards.org site does say,

“In other regards Opera is a clear leader. It is the only browser that supports more than 90 % of the SVG test suite. It is the only browser that implements Web Forms 2.0, currently being merged into HTML 5. They supported media queries and SMIL long before Acid3 came out.”

And for an overview of the extensive SVG Test Suite results for various browsers, including an older version of Opera than the one I now use, see here. Look at all that green (PASS) under the Opera column… 😉

Just sayin’. 🙂

Continue reading “Another (few) Data Point(s) in Favor of the Opera Browser”

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Oh, Please…

*sigh* So people had sooooo much difficulty using the “old” ketchup packets that Heinz spent tons of money and three years developing a new disposable single-serving ketchup packet.

My take? People had sooooo much difficulty using the “old” ketchup packets because people are sooooo stupid. I never experienced the difficulties with the “old” ketchup packets that are referred to in the video, but then I’m not as stupid (though still stupid in my own idiosyncratic ways *heh*) as many (most?) people.

Oh, dear, does that sound arrogant? Who cares? I don’t.

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I Usually Get Away With This, But…

…not today. My Wonder Woman’s ethnic heritage is pure Norwegian (20th Century grandparent immigrants on both sides). While I usually get away with it because it sounds–the way I deliberately pronounce it–like “Sweetie”, today when I called her my “Swedey” she didn’t let it slide… *heh*

Oh, well, another lil grinner down. *sigh*

😉

In related fun, while reading an article on PixelQi’s transflective display retrofit kit for netbooks, I ran across this in comments:

…which earned this response:

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Two More Unrelated Things

*heh* Well, unrelated except in the most passing, glancing relationship…

First, yes I did have 38 tabs open in Opera in the session shown in the screenshot below. So? Wanna make something of it? *heh*

Second, what went wrong? I mean, after the start I had under the first (and arguably, at least one of the very best, as another former student of his while he was at Florida State attested to me 30 years later) director of the band noted in the screenshot below, how in the world have I ended up with a “houseful” (well less-than-full in recent years) of musical instruments… that I no longer play?

Oh, well.

*hmph* We only toured a few hundred miles into the interior of Mexico “back in [my] day”. Still “won” everything in sight in competitions, though, during the first four years the high school was. A high school, that is.

(OK, one of the 38 tabs noted in the screenshot above contains the question someone asked me that spurred me to look up the info noted. That’s the second-order relationship between the 38 tabs and the content of the screenshot. A more distant, ethereal connection exists, though. :-))

And more… (Sounds/looks like a Capshaw designed and rehearsed this program; don’t ask how. Not so sure about the treatment of Holst).

Sadly (or perhaps not? ;-)), none of the old black and white film from the performances 45(?!?) years ago has made it onto YouTube. *heh*

More unrelated (except in the twisted back alleys of my mind)? OK. Linux Turns 20.

Even if you don’t run Linux on your desktop or notebook, you probably use devices that depend on it, and you absolutely certainly *heh* use it daily as you access material on the web that depends on Linux servers and devices with embedded Linux systems.

Like third world county.

Continue reading “Two More Unrelated Things”