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 [...]

I’ve generally been happy with my Epson Stylus R300 printer.  I chose it because of its ability to print onto printable CD-R/DVD-R media, which wasn’t common at the time.  As with all inkjet printers, though, it subjects the owner to the Inkjet Conspiracy.

On March 6, I went to the Admissions and Records office at Mission College, and turned in two separate things:

An “Application for Degree” form, with math course substitutions from other institutions signed off by the chairman of the math department, and a completed worksheet  (the application deadline was March 7)
A transcript from De Anza College, [...]

I went to Costco on the weekend, and bought, among other things, a 64 oz. jug of real maple syrup. Today I was getting something out of a kitchen cabinet, and discovered that the bottom of the cabinet was covered with syrup. It appears that the jug has a hairline crack on the [...]

In the 1970s I got to visit my grandparents every summer. They had a big house, and sometimes I liked to play in the large basement. My grandfather’s wood shop was down there, though I didn’t spend much time in it when he wasn’t there working on something. There was a lot [...]

In 1990, Bob Pease of National Semiconductor published a “design idea” in the June 14, 1990 issue of Electronic Design for the use of a FET for reverse-polarity protection, with the advantage that it will typically have much lower forward voltage drop than a diode.   Pease mentions this on page 164 of his book Troubleshooting [...]

The DNC ruled that because Florida and Michigan held their primaries earlier than party rules allow, Florida and Michigan delegates will not be allowed to vote at the convention. Apparently the party feels that the voters of those states should be disenfranchised because their representatives broke party rules. Now there’s a big controversy [...]

I’m eating my oatmeal with a fork today.  As was said in The Matrix, “there is no spoon.” At least, not in the break room at work. I was too lazy to go to another floor in search of one.
Reminds me of an outdated joke, that used to be told before 1998:
Why does [...]