Just finished up "Black Tulip", by Milt Bearden. It's a military thriller, but written in such a realistic fashion one wonders just how much truth it might contain. As it was written by a CIA employee one wonders about just how close to the truth it might be.
Reading this make me think about how much the U.S. owes to Afghanistan after using them as a pawn in the cold war, and then tossing them to the wind. Of course, like any co-dependant relationship we were being played as well, used for our money and weapons.
October 2003 Archives
Got a few fresh books today. Number one, a friend sent me "Lamb, The Gosepl According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal". He IM'ed me last week and said he was sending a book, which I thought meant that he was sending me his copy. Instead he sent me a brand new copy from Amazon. Wow, that pretty much makes my day. Thanks, Christopher.
Secondly, I took a batch of books back to the library and got a fresh batch. Today's haul included "The Weatherman", by Steve Thayer, "Pattern Recognition", by Willian Gibson, "Walking with Muir Acroos Yosemite", Thomas & Geraldine Vale, and "A New Kind of Science", Stephen Wolfram. "A New Kind of Science" is one of the heaviest bboks I have attacked in a long time, with over 1200 dense pages.
At the moment, I am sitting typing on a laptop watching one of my favorite movies, "Good Will Hunting". Sometimes I still can't believe that such a fabulous movie was written by two unknown kids from Boston, the same kids who turned in really great acting performances. Hat's off to them for creating a real great film. (I also love being wireless at home.)
"So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for
somethin' better. I figure f*** it, while I'm at it why not
just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn
enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby
seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I
could be elected President."
Sometimes I wish I could riff like that.
Here are the top search terms leading people to my web site. I am fascinated by 10% or so who look for palm pilot repair info. I mean, the info is soo old the phone numbers don't work. I really should update it for the poor folks who visit.
1 69 7.96% palm repair 2 37 4.27% evil penguin 3 37 4.27% porsche carrera 4 4 22 2.54% linux t-shirt 5 20 2.31% lake vermillion 6 16 1.85% mel masters 7 15 1.73% palm pilot repair 8 15 1.73% palm upgrade 9 14 1.61% polish grom 10 11 1.27% memorial day race 11 10 1.15% baby pictures 12 10 1.15% sailing lake superior 13 9 1.04% porsche boxer 14 9 1.04% vacation pictures 15 8 0.92% hamilton high school milwaukee wisconsin 16 7 0.81% barbary pirates 17 7 0.81% kaui 18 7 0.81% when i am old 19 6 0.69% fake text 20 6 0.69% hiker cuts off arm
Amazon let's you search through the text of a book now instead of just the title/subject. It's shocking to me that they either scanned so many books or got electonic acess to the text. Now if they just had a link where I could reserve the book at my local library I would be set. Perhaps that would be a bit of a money loser. "Ramsey County Library has eight copies available for free, click here to reserve yours."
I am experimenting with new garish colors.
I use four computers daily each with at least two different web browsers installed on each system. Over time this has led to a fragmented list of bookmarks. Finally, I merged them all. I am still not sure why. Perhaps it was to make me feel like some small part of my life was organized and under control. For a while I thought that I might be able to forego bookmarks all together as Google was sufficient to remember everything. But as good as Google is it still takes some clicking to find just what I am looking for. This seems especially true with seaches for retailers or items sold by retailers.
I am having a program crawl through the links and see which links have rotted. We'll see how that goes.
I am curious about what sights people visit everyday. Here is my list.
There are a few blogs I visit almost daily. But I'll save those for another day.
Courtesy of Research Buzz, a new google syntax. Type in "define:malaprop" and get exactly one definition with a link. Or type in "define malaprop" and get a normal search listing with multiple definition kind of entries. It's amazing to me the infrastructure of the internet, with very complicated routers, OS's, web servers, wires and buttons allows me to define a word faster than I can find a dictionary and look it up by hand. Stunning.
I feel neutral about this movie. If you liked the book, and I mostly did, you'll probably like the movie. I thought Cusack, Hackman, and Hoffman put in work man like performances that won't garner them Academy Awards, but were fun to watch. The movie definitely follows the lead of the book, which is too say it's a good story, won't challenge you much, but will be a nice diversion.
I don't care how bizarre it is that I have a Tivo so I can skip commercials, but then I d/l them from the internet, but everyone really should check out the videos of Terry Tate, Office Linebacker that are available on the reebok web site. (Unfortunately, you'll need flash to navigate reebok's home page, then you'll need to register, then Quicktime or MS Media player to watch them.) They are well worth watching.
I could use an office linebacker in my office.
jill/txt has produced one of the most sweeping definitions a blog that I have seen so far in a post titled, final version of weblog definition.
I like this definition as it includes the notion that posts are free form, may be edited later, and can be fiction, non-fiction and other forms.
I think I have just invented a new word.
... drumroll ...
reado - a misreading, much like typo but for reading instead of typing, especially relevant to instant messaging. It is pronounced "reed-oh".
My quick search of google indicates that I may be the first to use this term at least in this way.ah
I reposted my photos of Yosemite and my Apostle's Islands Sailing Trip. This time the photo's are a much better size I think. However they will take longer to download depending on your bandwidth.
Lately I have had electronics lust. Of particular interest is some sort of bridge between MP's and JPG's on home network shares and the TV/audio in the living room. There are a number of options.1
Perhaps I should just re-purpose an onld laptop to do the trick. It's just the audio out is so horrible and there isn't a good remote control solution. I don't want another PC around the house.
What else do I want? An ipod, a dvd player that will plays vcds (as I now know mine does not), time to re-wire all my gear and make the cords look tidy, etc..
I went to the Minnesota Children's Museum today with a group of my children's peers from ECFE class. I had a lot of fun in an art room which was lit entirely with black lights. They provided paint, glue, paper and markers that glowed. It was very cool. I had forgotten how cool glow in the dark stuff was.
We have had some glorious fall days lately. Cool at night, sunny and almost warm during the day. I love fall. I wish fall would last a lot longer.
I have recently had a run of bad luck playing scrabble. In one game I got four racks in a row with all vowels (well one had a "y" but it's a vowel sometimes right?)
Finished a couple of library items recently.
- Starship Troopers, great, thumbs up, but I can't figure out where the horrible movie came from.
- The Professor and the Madman, thumbs down, it was just not very interesting.
- The Two Towers, unabridged audio on CD, fabulous English narrator, made me really enjoy the commute.
Boy is it annoying to wake up and realize that spammers are inserting comments with links to spammy stuff. First it was usenet, then email, now my web pages! I hope this trickle doesn't turn into a flood.
Arnold won In California, as I predicted. Having survived the reign of Jesse Ventura here are my predictions.
Arnold will hire/appoint some good people around him to make policy. He will be unable to deliver on all his campaign promises. He will likely be more pragmatic and willing to compromise than the other elected officials. He will likely embarass the state with either his past, or by speaking his mind in the future. He will likely by unwilling to simply be governor, but will likely pursue side ventures as well.
I just hope the good folks in California think long and hard about reforming their recall process so this doesn't happen in such a haphazard fashion next time.
The age of character has been overtaken by the age of celebrity.
Well I finally have got some photo's uploaded from my last two adventures. They are not fully annotated yet, but I'm working on it.
First we have Sailing in the Apostle Islands, followed by my my solo backpacking treck down the John Muir Trail in Yosemite. (I am playing a bit the the resolution of my posted photos, as I want a speedy download. I think perhaps I have veered too small. I may repost a bit bigger.)
I sure have had my share of adventure this fall. I'm paying the price now, with work piled up in every direction.
"... on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people ..."
David Weinberger
Fall is definitely in the air now. Leaves are starting to turn and it's almost cold enough to put the heat on at night. I love this time of year. I wish it weren't a portent of winter's fury.
I have a feeling this is going to be a cold winter. It seems like the birds started flocking very early and heading south. I get the feeling they know something.
I recently bought a cheap wireless access point and wireless ethernet card, from my favorite local retailer, for my laptop at home. I installed and configured it. Then as the last step I changed the admin password from the default to something better. When I did this I couldn't log back in. This was a little maddening to say the least. I repeated this about three more time, thinking I had somehow misconfigured or mistyped, or something. Then I d/l the latest flash update for the acccess point. The first defect listed in the readme was something like "fixes the problem where setting the password changes the username to blank".
Arrggh.
People wonder why I don't like paying for software.
The problem is fixed now.
