The birds nesting in the trees near my bedroom window wake me up earlier than I’d like in the morning, and at night they keep me awake, singing past 2 AM. I’ve taken to sleeping with earplugs, but then my alarm clock doesn’t wake me up. It occurred to me that there might be watches [...]

I just bought a cap and gown, so I guess I will go to commencement after all.
Herff Jones apparently must make them from some ridiculously cheap fabric, since they say not to wash or dry clean them.  I presume they must use better fabrics for the rental ones so that they can at least be [...]

Les brought to my attention that Google seems to think my blog hosts or links to malware, as shown here. I certainly don’t deliberately host any malware nor have any links to such, and a brief investigation doesn’t turn up any evidence that my site has been compromised, so I’m baffled as to what [...]

On the way to a friend’s house, I went to a drive-through and ordered a burger and a shake. I still had the several-day-old remainder of a beverage in the cupholder that I needed to dispose of, but there was a waste can just beyond the pickup window, so after I got my order [...]

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]

The California Lottery is running advertisements claiming that over a million Californians win the Super Lotto Plus each month. Obviously their definition of “win” is different than mine. I don’t think it can be counted a “win” for the month unless the player is cash-positive for the total of all his or her [...]

I wanted to clone an image of the internal hard drive of a new Mac Mini before booting it up. It is common knowledge that a putty knife is the tool to use, as long as it has a thin blade. However, I found a posting to one of Apple’s own forum claiming [...]

I was on Frontier Airlines flight 169 from Denver to San Jose this morning.  It was scheduled to be a nonstop departing Denver at 8:25 AM MDT and arriving in San Jose at 10:06 AM PDT.  We departed a few minutes late, but the real reason we didn’t arrive in San Jose until 12:06 PM [...]

One of the earliest uses of punched card tabulating machines, the forerunner of modern computers, was the US Census, as described by Wikipedia:
[Herman] Hollerith built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in only one year. The 1880 census had taken eight years. [...] In [...]