Today is Field Day, part of the purpose of which is to practice amateur radio communications by methods that would be used in emergencies, when normal power sources and communications systems might be unavailable.
Today at home I’ve experienced two power outages, apparently due to utility transformer failures, and an unrelated internet outage.

Who else but George Carlin could have gotten the “seven dirty words” shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits into a Supreme Court decision? Carlin truly was a Man for the Millenium.

Some years ago, a cryptographer proposed a “Chinese Lottery” in which some consumer good such as televisions sold in a particular country (e.g., China) would have an embedded chip that would be used by the government for brute-force cryptanalysis. The television that successfully decrypted a message would indicate to the user that they had [...]

I wish I could say that I was surprised at how many female students at Padua Academy were willing to sign a petition to end women’s suffrage. The issue seems to be controversial at UVM.
Personally, I’m in favor of women’s suffrage.

I’m just starting to learn about printing in GTK+. The documentation provides a good API reference, but is a bit intimidating, and I didn’t find much in the way of sample code. There’s a sample called “printedit” in libegg, but it is somewhat out of date. I updated it for renamed functions [...]

I needed some relatively minor medical care, and wanted to get it done today rather than wait for an appointment to see a doctor.  It wasn’t serious enough to require a trip to the emergency room, so I drove to an urgent care clinic in Cupertino.  It’s not that close to where I live, but [...]

I’m still making progress towards a new release on Nonpareil.  Sometimes it seems like the more work I do, the more I find that needs to be done.

I first met George Michael at a conference, and on several occasions we had interesting discussions about various computers including the DEC PDP-1. He had been in poor health for several years, and passed away last Thursday. Some of his computing stories may be found at Stories of the Development of Large [...]

Two friends and I went out to dinner and a movie in Palo Alto tonight. We had a wonderful dinner at Evvia; I had the Katsiki Yiouvetsi, which is a goat casserole braised with pearl onions, artichokes, and feta cheese. I’d never had goat meat before, and found it to be quite tasty.  [...]

Years ago, Steve Martin described the great new drug he was taking, “placebos”. Starting June 1, you’ll be able to buy them too, under the Obecalp brand name, though medical experts don’t think it will work.  [h/t Monday Evening]