Very Local News

• Again, this morning, I wake moments before my alarm goes off. I do this all the time, but today I didn't have to get up for an extra hour and a half. Normally it is 5:30. This time it was 7:00. I woke exactly at 6:59. You have got to be kidding me.
• When I'm out and about I will text myself notes through email. Some of them are reminders to do things. Others end up as bullets under Very Local News headings.
• There are a whole bunch of file names you cannot use in FAT32 drives. These names are stuff like 'lpt', 'con', 'prn' and the like. These are old DOS left overs. They were reserved words and had to be bounced from the file system permanently. We just hit this trouble with a USB key drive that was FAT32. I wonder if VFAT has the same issues. It is supposed to be similar, but upgraded version of old FAT.
• I had some files in mht format. (mhtm, mhtml) These were saved out of IE. I'm on Linux using Firefox. Firefox does not support mht natively. It is a Microsoft thing apparently. There is an experimental extension called unMHT that seems to work. In order to download the file and not install it on the Windows box, I had to use IE. There has got to be a trick to downloading those extension files using firefox without installing them. They are in a folder under Program Files, after they are installed I'm pretty sure. Since it is experimental, I would kind of like to not install it on the kiosk machine.
• Microsoft is finally going to get in to the anti virus business. MS claims they will give it away for free. This means virus writers will only have one software to defeat in order to get their software out there.
• Dell makes fare desktop computers. I would say they are good except I don't think any one makes good desktop computers any more. Good as in will last and are built to work on and modify. Dell among others make good servers and larger business systems. Some of the best I'd say. I like the after sale support from Dell. I also like their boxes. We use them in the attic. They are rugged. Hey, keeping some cardboard out of a land fill for a bit. Just doing our part.
• The list of podcasts I listen to was wiped out with the system crash. I have an old backup, but I've decided to start fresh and go from memory. This will hopefully filter out some of the crap that I only kept downloading in order to fill my day with some kind of news. This action also encourages me to look up some new podcasts. I've found a couple of Sci-fi links. If they are any good, I'm sure I'll link them here.
• One hundred parts per million can make for massive changes. For example, four nails might weigh 100 grams. A small car might weigh one ton, or 1,000,000 grams. if you put the four nails under the tires, you suddenly get a huge change in the performance of the car. Something relatively small affecting something relatively large.
• I was pretty busy this week. It went by quick. Between work and Nat feeling sick, the week just disappeared.
• Got the second drive hooked up last night. I'm slowly putting the machine back together. Learning a few things as I go. Knoppix will mount LVM systems, but only after jumping through some hoops. I also got livna installed and can play the xvid movies once more. Baby steps.
• I listened to the guy who is the artist who let people shoot a paint ball gun at him online. He gamed the system to avoid military service in Iraq. One brother was killed by an American air to ground missile. Another brother pretended to be crazy to avoid military service. He is a New York university level art professor. For as interesting a story, he was so boring I couldn't finish the podcast. I nearly fell asleep.
• Google Docs just might work for storing blog entries. I don't really understand why I want to store all the blog entries. I feel I must for some reason. I cannot embed videos, but I can write the rest of the entry and just paste the object/embed code in the document like text. At the last minute, I paste the code in the proper place in Blogger. For pictures, google docs lets you link to online pictures. No linking from an image 'yet'.
• The Onion has a 'news' story about a robot salesman that sells itself. "If you find me at a lower price, I'll match it."
• It really sounds like our government has no idea what it is doing financially. This is one of the side effects of only having lawyers running a country. They know lawyering and not much else. They understand making and bitching about rules. They do not know manufacturing, plumbing, programming, or practically any other living what so ever. I would like to know what percentage of the upper federal government is not now and never has been a lawyer, or even gone to law school.
• I added a DVD-ROM to my work machine. It was a device taken from a system that had been decommissioned a while back. Normally I would not even mention something this droll. I had to hide the device in a box under my desk for a couple weeks. I'm not steeling it. I'm using it in another work system. I must be careful about moving equipment around. I didn't really need a DVD-ROM until recently when I got involved in making virtual machines.
• The human eye, and I suppose others, has rods and cones. Cones sense color. There are a couple different cones. A) sens red and green. B) sense yellow and blue. I think there is a third one, but I cannot remember. Look it up. You know that color that is florescent green or maybe yellow? Sometimes it is one and sometimes it is the other. The way it works is it trips both sets of cones at the same level. The one that gets the most umph wins. They trade off back and forth because they detect almost the exact same level so the brain picks one then the other every time you look at the color.
• Gmail has themes. Sweet. There is one called 'terminal' that is green text on a black background. They go out of their way to make the graphics look like the all green lines and text from way back in the monochrome Apple days. I tried it. It is very nerdy. It is very annoying. I use one called sunset. It is warm evening tones of orange and browns. The background of the mail area is still white. It works in the sunset version. The white background of the compose area is painful in the terminal theme. Nat was tickled by how excited I got by the terminal theme. Now if they would only propagate the themes to docs et al.