Happy Newton’s Day!

Three cowororks and I from time to time “apply for early retirement” by purchasing California Lottery Super Lotto Plus tickets. Thus far our return on investment has been poor, but yesterday things started looking up. We actually matched four numbers, but not the fifth number or the mega number. Still, that has [...]

School’s out!  We completed the last lab assignment and final exam for General Chemistry I today.  I have an A in Chemistry and in Human Heredity and Disease, and I think there’s a good chance that I’ll have an A in International Films as well, though I won’t be sure until the official grade is [...]

In 1955 at IBM, Alan Shugart was a member of the team that developed the world’s first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC, which stored about five megabytes on fifty 24-inch platters. He also directed the development of the first floppy disk drive. Upon leaving IBM, he cofounded Shugart Associates to manufacture floppy disk [...]

I returned to a city I once lived in many years ago. I was trying to drive to a friend’s house, but the highway exits had been changed somewhat, so I got confused about where to turn. I saw a branch of my bank, and needed to make a deposit, so I stopped [...]

Why there’s no cure for the common cold.

Several people have inquired about the status of Nonpareil, so it’s time for an update.
There are major changes in progress that are mostly “under the hood.” The released versions of Nonpareil install KML, image, and ROM files in a library directory (or with the Program Files in Windows). There has been no clear [...]

Recently I was behind a car on highway 237 that clearly belonged to an Objectivist. The license plate said “B IS B”, and there were two large bumper stickers with quotes from the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.   One was John Galt’s creed:
I swear, by my life and my love of it, [...]

I finally decided to get a cellular data service, Sprint Mobile Broadband (EVDO). Short summary: I’ve only tried using it at my office so far, but the performance is great. I’m getting over 500 Kbps downstream, with round-trip ping times of less than 100 ms. The latency is low enough that [...]