Posts by Mike Flugennock 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
Oh, and y'know what else: I really dig those little miniature chickens they invented there. When our family was stationed in Europe, we'd order them a lot when we went out -- like having a whole chicken to yourself, thighs, breast, light meat, dark meat, but it didn't fill you up too much; it was, like, just enough chicken. Awesome.
...not another goddamn' "in the future your car will drive itself" story. I've been seeing this crap on a regular basis since I first saw it in My Weekly Reader back in the mid '60s, when I was about seven years old. I've become increasingly skeptical in leaps and bounds as each new automotive technological "advance" has only caused more headaches.
Even inasmuch as drivers -- at least on US roads -- have become increasingly retarded by rising orders of magnitude, I'd still rather have humans in control of cars rather than computers, whose instruction sets are written by _humans_ who, experience teaches us, have an amazing propensity towards fallibility.
I think the problem with the current generation of "futurists" is that they're of a generation who spent a large number of hours watching Star Trek, The Jetsons, and Wonderful World Of Disney. Too much goddamn' unfounded optimism, too goddamn' much gee-whizzery, not enough sober, rational realism.
I don't know if just having breakfast at destination local morning would really be enough, especially for a sporadic breakfast-eater like myself. I'd think that going on a sleep/wake cycle based on destination local time a few days before departure would work better.
Interesting suggestion, though; not that I expect to be flying to South Africa again anytime soon (see my comment a ways down the scroll), but if I do, I'll give that a try.
...were, as I recall, living on Martian time for the first few months of the mission; JPL had even gone to the trouble of having a bunch of special watches built which ran on Martian time. A Martian day -- or "sol" as they call them -- isn't much longer than an Earth day, but just enough longer that over time, the MER flight controllers' sleep patterns were fairly weirded out.
Never mind that; back in college, during the Late Mesozoic (late 1970s) I was able to easily reset my "internal clock" with small judiciously-applied doses of LSD. No, really.
But, seriously...
Most of my air travel these days is to and from the West Coast of Mexico, once a year, during which I cross a grand total of one time zone, so no chance of serious jet lag.
However, the wife and I have just recently returned from two weeks in South Africa -- approximately 18 hours' flight each way between Johannesburg and Washington, DC. Going there wasn't too tough to deal with (aside from the ordeal of 18 hours flying over water), but coming back was a whole different story. Left Jo'burg in late-ish afternoon Friday, arrived Washington DC shortly before sunrise Saturday, having had only three hours' sleep -- and really piss-poor quality sleep at that. My waking state on arrival home was about what it usually is when I've had to be up at 5:30 or 6am EDT, and I made it through to mid-afternoon OK, but around 4pm, it was like hitting a wall. I desperately craved a good nap, but I knew I wouldn't be able to go to bed at my normal time (around 2am), so I made a pot of coffee and slogged through the rest of the day and evening.
Problem is, the wife and I have found ourselves snapping wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at around 4:30am every morning since Saturday (when we arrived home), so there we were having our regular coffee and morning news and feeding the cat at 5am (poor confused kitty). Our sleep patterns are still a bit distorted nearly a week after flying home, though we're waking at slightly more normal hours (6:30 or 7am). However, I'm still nodding at around 7pm. We sure could've used some of that sleep-pattern "boffinry" then (or, in my case, a quarter blotter of American Beauty).
It doesn't help that I already keep what a friend of mine calls "hacker's hours", so flying east for eighteen hours from Jo'burg to DC hasn't helped things any.
I, too, have been using Macs since forever (early '85) but have been anything but a Jobs "Fanboy". I still remember the sudden application memory bloat following the introduction of the IIcx, at a time when SIMMs cost not just an arm and a leg, but both arms and both legs. Greedy bastards.
"This release lets you own and control your personal Web experience by syncing your data across devices, and by helping you organize your tabs in order to juggle and prioritize your busy online life,"
---
Ouch, my brain just exploded.
Am I the only one here who's sick of press-release patois which yammers on and on about my "Web experience"? If my online life is "busy", it's because I'm having to fight through all the added bullshit that's supposed to enhance my "Web experience".
I'm looking for news and information on the Web. I'm not here to have a goddamn' "experience". An "experience" is what I just had for two weeks in South Africa. An "experience" is what I had the first time I took acid and went to see the Grateful Dead. An "experience" is what Jimi Hendrix had. Web development dorks who blab about the "user experience" need a good smacking around, if you ask me.
Hell, I'm still trying to figure out what FF3.x gives me over FF2. FF3 has needlessly complicated and generally fucked up the process of syncing bookmarks between my desktop and my laptop. Used to be I could just drag over my bookmarks.html file and confirm the "replace existing" prompt, but, nooo-oooo, not any more.
Anybody else here remember a piece posted on the Web about ten, fifteen years ago by a guy who used flies to power a small model airplane by first freezing the flies, gluing them to the wings of the model airplane and then, when the flies revived, presto! Instant model airplane engines!
"Rat free, well...except for Calgary. There's still a small nest of the little blighters there that they've been having trouble eliminating. I think it was a few years back, a couple of lab rats got loose and started breeding..."
Theyyyy're Pinky And The Brain -- YES,
Pinky And The Brain...
Alright, alright, I'm gone.
ZYNGA? Stop me if I'm wrong, but weren't they the outfit that was busted running some skeezy phishy scam involving adware, spyware, premium-rate dialing, unwanted subscriptions, or some combination of those? Way to be, Google.
Also, as I've had to set up a couple of Gmail accounts to keep my comms open in case my own domain's email server falls over, I suppose I'll be surreptitiously opted-in to this bullshit without my knowledge or consent -- again.
Ph'wah.
During my latest round of job-hunting, I established accounts on at least half a dozen job-search sites, including SimplyHired and CareerBuilder. To my total lack of surprise, about a week or so later, the spam started trickling in (with imaginative subject lines like "about your resume") and, also to my lack of surprise, at least half of them were from skanky outfits offering thinly-disguised "job offers" looking for what was basically a laundered-money mule or such like.
What's really sad is that -- once again, to my lack of surprise -- is that things have gotten so bad that people are actually willing to give this a shot.
Are they shitting us? They actually told us to go fuck ourselves.... uh, that is, get our clips by sitting our cameras on a tripod in front of a monitor?
Cripes. A friend of mine had to pull that, once; luckily, along with a decent MiniDV cam, he also had a 16:9 LCD (or TFT?) flatscreen with nice, sharp fidelity, relatively faithful color, and no discernible flicker. Otherwise, he'd have been sunk.
I've done that once or twice, with a camcorder pointed at the screen of my iBook turned up to full bright, in order to capture embedded video I couldn't get any other way from TV station sites that don't allow for the downloading of video files. There was no flicker to deal with, but the resulting footage took some cleaning up in FinalCutPro to make it halfway presentable.
You see it on YouTube sometimes, too -- people with LCD flatscreens just grabbing a Flip cam or something and pointing it at the screen when whatever they want to grab comes on. The image is solid and reasonably clean, but still has that unmistakable Shot Off A Monitor Look.
That said, yeah, that's a pretty goddamn' insulting suggestion coming from the likes of the pigopolists -- _especially_ after all that whining about the "analog hole".
I'm sorry, but that's one of the major reasons I've refused to buy an iPod, iPhone, or MacBook Air: when the battery runs out, you throw the whole goddamn' device away (or, iirc, in the case of the MacBook Air, you send the whole damn computer back to Apple to have the battery replaced).
Jeezus, that's just wasteful as hell, man. After forty-odd years of warnings about pollution, resource depletion and "throw-away society", producing devices like that is just goddamn' criminal.
I trust this will be a traditonal New Orleans jazz funeral band. I can only think of what they could play, given the occasion. Perhaps "Saint James Infirmary Blues"? Who knows what for the "second line"?
Pint of Dixie Beer, as I'm sure all those laid-off workers will need many of them.
...by pissing away 13 grand on a diamond-encrusted Jesus Phone. Be tracked by marketing scum in style.
Dog only knows what effect all those diamonds will have on the reception issue.
Y'know, I've used MacOS exclusively and loved it since 1985 -- my first computer ever was a Mac 512K -- but I've gotta tell ya, Steverino's been nothing but an embarassment and a big, fat pain in the ass for the past five or six years.
This isn't big news to me, in so many ways.
When I first got my G4 Tower, which shipped with iTunes 4.7, the first thing I did was go to iTunes' Preferences and shut off any connections it might make to the iTunes store or the Internet at large (Little Snitch, FTW), followed by turning off auto-update and figuring out how to close out all those useless frames that do nothing but show advertising. I've also deliberately chosen not to upgrade iTunes.
Same thing when my wife and I got our G4 iBooks, which shipped with iTunes 6. Hit the Prefs first thing, switched off any options that involve iTunes connecting to the Internet or iTunes store. Haven't upgraded there, either.
Pure peace. iTunes does what I need it to do -- play my music and burn my mix discs -- and that's it. Still, it's a shame there isn't a version of Audion for OSX. I used it as my main mp3 player back when I had an old beige G3 (upgraded from a 7500) running OS9 doing "tune server" duty in my studio.
Are you sure you're not actually thinking of Gemini -- and not Apollo -- as the manned spacecraft originally proposed for the use of the Rogallo gliding 'chute for CM recovery?
Mark Wade writes at:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemlider.htm :
"'Gemini Paraglider'
Manufacturer's Designation: McDonnell-Douglas. Class: Manned. Type: Spacecraft. Destination: Maximum Payload Orbit. Nation: USA. Agency: NASA. Manufacturer: McDonnell.
The paraglider was supposed to be used in the original Gemini program but delays in getting the wing to deploy reliably resulted in it not being flown. McDonnell proposed that additional Gemini missions be flown to fully test the paraglider, which was planned for the follow-on Big Gemini."
Illustrations at:
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/g/gemparag.jpg
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/g/gemvar1.jpg
AC 1 July 2010 10:49 GMT sez:
"If I download the clip and play it through VLC it's fine, which suggests a problem with the Flash plug-in rather than bandwidth or the video itself."
That's something I've taken to doing more often, especially if it's something really interesting -- or controversial that may be yanked soon -- that I think might be worth saving. I go to the YouTube page the clip is playing at, let it run a few seconds, pause it, then use the ClipNabber bookmarklet to suck down an MPEG4 copy to my local drive, where I can watch it in smooth, non-choppy, ad-free comfort.
AC 1 July 2010 03:17GMT sez:
"--What's easier than being able to copy a URL out of raw HTML code? It's much easier than all the crap people have to go through to download video from YouTube now."
As I mentioned a little ways up the scroll, the ClipNabber bookmarklet works like a champ for me.
Kinda reminds me of the early days of Web advertising; it was pay-per-click back then, as I recall, and many of us out there took revenge on advertisers and their annoying bilge by clicking on every banner we saw, repeatedly, at every opportunity. You should've heard the pissed-off shrieking from the marketing types over the way we "broke" their business model. Ahh, memories
I still have my copy of the Star Fleet Tech Manual, circa 1976, with complete plan and section views of every class of Federation starship, along with cutaways and diagrams of, among other things, various types of tricorders -- showing then-current electronics inside, with the note "Equivalent 20th Century Terran early development shown IAW UFP Prime Directive".
I'd still love to get my hands on the Chilton's Apollo LM manual.
Throughout most of my adolescence, I lived in a neighborhood under the approach/takeoff flight paths of Dulles International Airport, and had gotten quite used to the likes of DC9s, 707s and 747s passing "low and slow" over our house. In the mid '70s, I was part of a local campaign to prevent the Concorde from being flown in and out of IAD owing to noise concerns. Once the Concordes started using IAD, though, I was forced to reconsider my position, at least partially; while the Concorde's noise level was about the same as "traditional" jetliners, its frequency range was quite different. While regular jets had most of their roar and rumble in the low end, the Concorde's engine noise was mostly in the midrange, with a sound not unlike someone ripping a sheet of paper -- only louder -- and was a bit more annoying, although not enough to make a huge difference. Also, IAD took measures to mitigate noise issues by routing approach/takeoffs of the Concorde over more lightly-populated areas west of the airport.
Of course, I don't really know what it was like for neighborhoods near major airports in England and France.
Nixie tubes.
My only desktop calculator now is the one that pops up on the screen on my Mac, and it's certainly handy as hell, but I still get all misty-eyed when I think of the first desktop calculator I saw: an HP about the size of your average high-school algebra book (circa 1971) with nixie tubes, not LEDs.
I suppose LEDs and quartz LCDs are more efficient and all, but they couldn't touch nixies for sheer coolness.
Talk about not useful, but still cool... I'm wishing to hell I could get hold of an old NeXT Cube with the glorious 8-bit grayscale monitor and MachOS (the original OSX). I remember getting to fool with one of those at Macworld '89. Talk about "made of awesome"... I was practically creaming in my jeans and hoping to find $10k laying on the sidewalk so I could score one. I'm sure a Cube in working condition with software would probably go for ten times that much on eBay now.
Not that I could do anything useful on it, but it'd look cool as hell fired up next to my G4.
Oh, hell, yeah, I'm _sure_. After all, in 1992, I never thought I'd be nostalgic over my old Mac IIsi, but listen to me _now_. (sigghhh)
Hell, I'm already nostalgic for the PowerBook Duo and the Mac Cube. I'm kinda' bummed that the Cube didn't take off; it seemed like the perfect form factor at last -- at the time.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
