My mother just informed me that her greyhound Dawnie was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma today, and had to be euthanized.  She had been in pain since late last week, and although it’s possible that she could have been kept alive for a few more weeks, it would have just been more weeks of pain.  Mom [...]

From the Too Surreal to be Fiction Department: The Society of American Archivists has decided to delete the archive of their own mailing list! [via BoingBoing]
I hadn’t even heard of the SAA, or I’d have joined many years ago, as I’m very interested in archiving computer history.

NASA asked the U.S. Navy to end Nowak’s detail to NASA as an astronaut “because the agency lacks the administrative means to deal appropriately with the criminal charges pending against Nowak. Because Nowak is a naval officer on assignment to NASA, rather than a NASA civil servant, she is not subject to administrative action by [...]

In CSC 387 class, we were offered extra credit points for participating in a Core War style challenge, with entries were required to run on the machine defined in Appendix C of Computer Science: An Overview by J. Glenn Brookshear.  Luke and I developed several programs, including a self-relocating program, but ultimately submitted a very [...]

I may be called to jury duty this week. According to the court’s web page:
Please do not bring the following items with you: mace, hair spray, laser pointers, knitting needles, scissors, nail files/clippers, or pocket knives. These items will be confiscated.
Since I can’t take those items, perhaps I should take:

oven cleaner
oxy-acetylene torch
laser [...]

From a speech given by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson before the start of the first World War:
We want one class to have a liberal education.  We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of  a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
The shocking thing [...]

Several years ago I tried to get a Linux system to connect to a Cisco VPN concentrator. There is a proprietary Cisco client for Linux, but it uses a closed-source kernel module, and I an not willing to use such things. At the time, it was claimed that Cisco used standard IPsec and [...]

In response to one of my recent dreams, Richard wrote:
I hereby decree that, henceforth, the expression “leaking blue liquid” shall be mean “I did something wrong, but I don’t know what it is.”
Examples:

“I seem to have leaked blue liquid in the boss’ office.”
“I’ve been trying to clean blue liquid out of my computer all day, [...]

Seen on a forum:  [someone] might get a wild hair up their alien probe-hole