The Mandelbear's Musings

This, I think, needs no further introduction: The Typewriter - Leroy Anderson And His "Pops" Concert Orchestra - Muppet Version

No walk. Hot. Not much else, either -- read SF short stories online, and watched bits of the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration webcast. It's archived, so I don't feel bad about missing most of it. When I'm physically attending a conference I can stay focussed; there appear to be too many distractions at home.

Quotes of the day:

Vint Cerf: It's like raising teenagers. You don't know how to do it; you just live through it and one day they turn into people.

Paul Saffo: In 100 years we still won't have a computer that can pass the Turing test, but we will have proved that most members of Congress fail it.

Two boxes of books packed from the office, and three boxes of recycling accumulated. The third is still in the office because the recycling bin is, as usual, full.

Linkie: Linus Torvalds Wins Joint Millennium Technology Prize.

Today's xkcd is screamingly funny, at least to anyone who knows the Banach–Tarski Theorem.

Today's xkcd. SFW but highly NSFK, for certain classes of geek.

A good walk, and we finally turned off our bottled water account now that we're using a filter -- much cheaper. On the flip side, my netbook isn't charging its battery. GRUMP!! Works fine on AC power, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the battery itself.

I started upgrading Argo, my Thinkpad A30, to the latest Ubuntu. *sigh* It'll be nice to have a living-room machine with a decent keyboard, though.

Good links under the cut, as usual.

$boss: $coworker's not here. So no 2 o'clock meeting.

me (checking time): We're having our 2 o'clock meeting.

$boss: Guess we're done, then.

The YD went to thaw out some berries to make herself a smoothie. The bag looked like it contained either raspberries or strawberries.

It turned out to be borscht.

(Earlier, Colleen turned up The Apache Cookbook in the cookbook section of the Kindle store -- that turned out to be about the web server, not the tribe of Southwestern Native Americans. At least, as Naomi pointed out, it wasn't the helicopter.)

(17:54:02) ***mdlbear now has a place to put the laptop that runs his tax software. Of course, it's on top of two boxes that need to be taken out and sorted, but... Hmm.
(17:56:09) ***Naomi never wants to hear the word 'box' again..
(17:56:33) ***mdlbear chuckles. Sorry about that..
(17:57:07) mdlbear: The office now contains a large number of Nameless Horrors..
(17:57:30) ***Naomi rotfl..
(17:57:39) ***mdlbear laughs.
(17:58:08) mdlbear: I think that merits QOTD status.
(17:58:25) mdlbear: Cthulhu agrees..
(18:00:11) ***Naomi grins. Yup..

Colleen decided to sort through some of the boxes of stuff from her (former) desk in the bedroom, and ran across a Bear Bell. It says so on the tag. I wasn't aware of the fact that I needed one.

My watch battery died. I'm wondering whether to replace the battery, replace the watch, or join the growing multitude of people who use their cell phone as a pocket-watch.

I finished configuring my work desktop computer, but it's not talking to me this morning. So much for working from home, not that I was planning to anyway. I did, however, find the website with the source code for my favorite calendar program, complete with instructions for building it in Lenny. I win.

Colleen (singing): I'm in love with a big blue frog / A big blue frog loves me...

Me: Hey, you didn't tell me you had a new sweetie!

Colleen: *laughs*

idea_fairy points out that today is, indeed, Not Found Day. It is perversely appropriate that Wikipedia doesn't have an article for it that I can link to.

The Wolfling said she was going to get a pickle out of the fridge, so I asked her to get me one too.

She came out with two pickles, one about 3 times the size of the other. She had her thumb firmly on the larger one.

Last seen heading for her room chortling "I broke the Mandelbear!"

We've been looking all over the house for Colleen's MP3 player, which has been missing ever since she came back from her last Remicade appointment. She wanted me to figure out how to put it into shuffle mode, which I thought I had done.

As it turned out it wasn't in the purple tote bag under the table, which she was positive was the one she'd taken to her appointment. It was in a green Whole Foods tote mostly full of empty Coke cans, which someone had hung up next to the washing machine on one of the hooks we use for bags of cans and bottles to be recycled. There was also a bag of peppermints in there.

I am simultaneously overjoyed that it's been found, mildly annoyed that someone (undoubtedly trying hard to be helpful) would have put it where it didn't belong without looking or asking, and considerably amused.

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009

My trackball is going Republican -- it keeps dashing off to the far right. Where did I go wrong?

Yes, as a matter of fact, Apache rewrite rules do look like a combination of line noise and swearing. This is a problem why?

... sort of like coffee: the stronger and darker it is, the better.

Security is like sex. Once you're penetrated you're ****ed.

(From this comment on a slashdot post titled "Mac OS X Root Escalation Through AppleScript". Punctuation unchanged from the original.)

This morning's earthquake was brought to you by the California TeleTourism Board. TeleTourism: the next best thing to being there.

Six minutes in the making, this Japanese Rube Goldberg-esque machine uses skittles, model cars and what looks like miniature junk sails to make a bowl of steaming noodles with an egg on top. The commentator should have got a medal for keeping up the excitement levels.

look ma! no case!
This is what happens with a bored tech support guy and old parts.
It is suspended by cat5 for the main wires and cat3 for the little stuff.

I am perversely amused by the fact that, without even thinking about it, I managed to re-schedule my upcoming jury duty for the week starting the Fifth of November.

In other news, it was raining when I woke up at the perverse hour of 5am.