Vonnegut on our Current Times
I fear the day when we will no longer have Kurt Vonnegut around to cast his cynical eye on current events and lets us know how it looks through his jaundice colored lenses. Case in point: this essay entitled “Cold Turkey”. It’s hard to limit myself to tasty bits to quote because the whole thing [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Thermal Depolymerization
A little over a year ago, I blogged about the thermal depoloymerization process that turns any carbon based refuse into oil. Well, the first plant using that process is online, according to this press release. It’s only doing between 100 and 200 barrels of day, but that’s all material that would have entered the waste [...]
Popularity: 11% [?]
O Degrees
I’m not necessarily the most gregarious person in the world, but through luck of the draw I tend to know a lot of people. It’s kind of a joke around our house about how often we’ll walk into some off the wall place and I’ll know somebody there. Tonight we went to a soup party [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Gavin King and Scott Stark Talk
The CJUG meeting last Tuesday was pretty good, but not as good as I was expecting. Part of it just had to do with the topics. Gavin King talked about EJB, Hibernate and the EJB 3.0 spec. Much of the talk was about the history of EJB, how Hibernate solved some of the problems and [...]
Popularity: 11% [?]
RIP, Tony Randall
Actor Tony Randall is dead at age 84.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Popularity: 7% [?]
Roomba Cinema
Roombas make an appearance in Achewood. What could be better?
Popularity: 8% [?]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Seven open source business strategies
Here’s an interesting article that describes seven ways in which companies can make money from an open-sourced codebase. I’ve always said that I liked the strategy of giving away the product but charging out the wazoo for consulting from the highly knowledgable people on the development team. I know that, for example, this is how [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Hibernate at CJUG
Tomorrow is the Chicago Java Users Group meeting with Scott Stark (CTO of JBoss) and Gavin King (chief Hibernate dude.) Tomorrow, Tuesday May 18th at 6:15 PM at 111 N. Canal Street, for those of you in the Chicago area that want to attend. Don’t eat ahead of time, there will be pizza at the [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Week 7
This morning I weighed 233, down 2 pounds from last week and 13 from baseline. I had a couple of lapses, including allowing myself 3 of the big triple chocolate cookies from Dominick’s (Safeway). Man those are tasty! By and large, I’m just eating less (but not enough less to be hungry), drinking more water [...]
Popularity: 16% [?]
iBook vs. PowerBook
JonnyX sent me this link to an interesting article comparing the iBook line to the PowerBook line. The ultimate conclusion is that the iBooks are pretty durned good, and the delta is not as big as it once was. Good to hear, since my iBook is coming regardless what the article says.
JonnyX also tells me [...]
Popularity: 7% [?]
“Windshield Wiper” Scanner
Correspondent Mike emailed me to tell me about these cool and small scanners that really do look like windshield wipers. Their web page says a Mac version is on the way. The thing has 2 megs of flash ROM onboard and according to the webpage brochure-speak can store “up to 100 pages” which you can [...]
Popularity: 4% [?]
Spotted in the Server Logs
There is one other person who aggregates this blog with Shrook. I wonder if this means we’ll both see new items appear approximately twice as fast now as I used to see them. On average we’ll have twice the opportunities for one of us to have seen the new entry and posted that fact to [...]
Popularity: 9% [?]
Your Guide to Spotting the North American Rock Critic
Here’s a funny essay that I found randomly whilst googling for something. It’s a pissy guide to the various classifications of rock critics. These include The Indie Thug, The Zeitgeist Obsessive, The Harmless Shill and others. My favorite, because I think it is the funniest and truest to life (also the most annoying of all [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Music, RIAA, Financial Monkeyshines
Another post of stuff that I’m clearning out of my Shrook saved list, this time all about music and downloading and the RIAA. Let’s start off with the prototypical RIAA story, one that puts it all their moralizing in perspective:
Via BoingBoing comes this story of how major record companies had to be sued to actually [...]
Popularity: 5% [?]
Spanish Crash
It only makes sense that every class is the hardest one yet. This week, though, my Spanish class competely kicked my ass. There is some kind of linguistic Peter Principle at work, and I feel like I have risen to my own level of incompetence. I need more studying, that’s for sure. I only take [...]
Popularity: 5% [?]
Freecycle
Via Gapers Block I first heard about Freecycle. It is an interesting idea - a group of people who give away stuff that they would otherwise pitch and put into the landfills. I like the idea, but balked when I see that the way you get involved - at least in Chicago - is by [...]
Popularity: 5% [?]
Geek for Change
If you are a LAMP type programmer and live around Washington DC or are willing to move there, they are looking for a programmer for the Kerry campaign. This at least assures that you have a job for 6 more months. I remember seeing a similar job posting for the Clark campaign the day before [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
New Plugins Part 2
Well, it did set the cookie correctly. Now to see if a new entry gets flagged as such. This might be quite cool!
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Popularity: 4% [?]
New Plugins
While I was in with the plugins anyway, I fixed a problem with my date that may have been causing some of you to see this page never refresh unless you manually hit reload. For some reason, my lastmodified plugin was always setting a time of 0 (Jan 1, 1970) in the heading. I fixed [...]
Popularity: 8% [?]
Just for Chris
I went into the writebackplus plugin code and altered it so that HTML links can be written into the comments. By default, all the less than characters get escaped unless they are followed by a “p” or a “br” (either with or without a “/” between). I added “a” as something to exclude, as well [...]
Popularity: 5% [?]
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