If you’ve been using computers for long enough, you’ve probably faced unreadable file formats or changes in distribution media: How do I open this old WordPerfect document? How am I going to read those files stored on a ZIP disk? Photographic prints and print editions of books have much less demanding requirements for seeing their contents. You found a box of slides from the 1960s? No problem; just hold them up to a light. In fact, if you have a good slide scanner or projector, despite their age, the pictures might still be of higher quality than images produced by your compact digital camera! The problems of unreadable file formats and changes in physical media are unique to the digital age. Or so some might have you believe (especially those pushing cloud services).
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TA business as usual
With CUPE 3902 Unit 1 on the brink of a strike last week, a new proposal was put forth that will be voted upon by the general membership tomorrow, next Monday, and next Tuesday. If you’re part of Unit 1, visit http://cupe3902.org/ and read the full memorandum of settlement.
A priest walks into a car…
Priests should be allowed to drive in high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on Sundays. We are trying to promote mass transit, right? Har har.
Going west
Air travel is really quite astounding. In the wee hours of the morning of Friday, I hopped on a plane bound for Vancouver and arrived at my destination before the start of the business day. Some people have jitters about flying but not I. Get on ((No hop ons, though)) and, after zipping through the air in a flying Pringles can, step into an new airport that is at once familiar and foreign.
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Ultrabook fad (follow up)
A few months ago, I disagreed with comments made by Acer’s founder, Stan Shih. I suggested that netbooks and ultra books would merge (or face extinction). It looks like at least some people at Acer now share the same view publicly. Their estimate is for 18-24 months from now; my original prediction would have been for about 30 months from now, but considering their new aggressive pricing strategy for ultrabooks, the disappearance of netbooks will likely sooner rather than later.
Recovering from hard drive woes — Part III
I woke my computer up from sleep and tried to run ssh. Surprise alligators! I encountered the odd error message “You don’t exist! go away!” It turns out that my dying hard drive had trashed some very important system files containing my computer login and password information. Trying to start up Terminal, I got the error “The administrator has set your shell to an illegal value”. I couldn’t access a large chunk of my files (due to lack of permissions) and my Dock was totally trashed. Solution? Start X11 from your utilities folder.
Telemachus, I am your father
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — a retelling of the Trojan War from the point of view of Queen Penelope — is currently playing at the Buddies In Bad Times theatre. This run has been well cast and choreographed and I’m tempted to go watch it for a second time here. Of course, the whole point of this short blog post is as a vehicle for bad Star Wars references. Few other epic tales involve a princess whose face launched a thousand starships, a son who is told by others that his father is dead (and then unexpectedly having an interlocutor reveal himself to be said father), sirens, and visitations by spirits. Yes, that’s right. Go see the production and may the horse be with you.
Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends (follow-up)
This is a quick follow-up to my previous post Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends.
It turns out Path is social networking service that limits users to 150 friends.
Cache-as-cache-can
Thailand was tragically flooded last year. The number of surprise alligators in the region also likely increased. As home to much of the world’s production capacity for hard drives, the shutdown of facilities caused the cost per gigabyte stored on magnetic hard drives to balloon to prices not seen since the middle of the last decade. Demand dropped for hard drives. Value-driven consumers may have opted for alternatives such as more expensive solid state drives (SSDs) or removable media like DVDs. Other purchases may have been deferred, playing catch-as-catch-can with hard drives already owned until prices begin to have some semblance of normalcy. The obvious. But none of this would have merited such a… cache-y blog post title.
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My research on owls
Without further ado or fanfare, I present my research to date on the subject of owls (order strigiformes of the class aves) in the form of a concise visual guide. This research was supported through the generosity of NSORC (Network of Spurious Owl-Related Content).
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