My main domain, tralfaz.org was a compromise. When I first registered it in 1999, the tralfaz.com domain wasn’t available, so I grabbed the .org variant. I have often kept an eye on the .com domain to see if it expires, but the scummy domain squatter hasn’t budged. I wouldn’t have minded, but over the last 14 years, the owner has done nothing with that domain. It has moved...
I have seen lots of friends and respected news sources bashing Microsoft today with the announcement that the CEO, Steve Ballmer, will be retiring in the next 12 months. First and foremost: I am not a microsoft fanatic. I am a Mac user, and am far more productive on the Apple platform, so take this with a grain of salt. Many of the messages I have seen are lamenting that Ballmer should have...
I have had late calls all week, which has prevented me from cycling in to the office. I have been jonesing to ride in during the week ( a good stress reliever after a long day, even if it is 105F). This morning, I headed out to the garage after walking the dogs, and bam, flat tire. Sigh. Since it has probably 2800 miles on it, I shouldn’t be disappointed that it finally got too thin to...
My grandfather on my mother’s side passed when I was pretty young. I don’r remember when, but I do remember fishing trips, and an annual weekend in Yosemite to play in the snow. Driving the big Ford pickup truck, with a camper on it, we would head out. And there was always an adequate supply of Necco wafers in the cab. We would probably go through 2 rolls each way. All us kids would...
On our trip last week, my wife (again) dropped her laptop. After that, it stopped working. Oops. First thoughts were that it was a failed hard drive. All my utilities failed to find it. So I replaced it with a known good drive. It had a clean install of OS X Lion on it, and was pretty lightly used before I replaced it. I know it was good. The system wouldn’t boot. So I thought maybe that...
I remember seeing Brazil when it first came out in 1986. It was one of those relatively rare times when I actually went to a theatre to see a first run movie. Being a long time Monty Python fan, I was entertained on many levels by Brazil, from intellectual stimulation, to marveling at the cinematography, to the comical story line. There is something for everyone in the movie Brazil, and every...
With all the buzz lately about the NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, and the surveillance state, I thought I would pick up my copy of 1984 and re-read it. Set in the year 1984, it is a masterful piece of fiction that is remarkably prescient in many of its predictions, given that it was published in 1949. The two way telescreen is particularly poignant, with the amount of listening that is...
I got an email in my inbox today that seemed to imply that I ‘missed’ a big announcement last week. Well, I certainly didn’t remember any big announcement, but if I had I probably would have ignored it. This startup has called themselves “Alpha Software”. Really? ‘Alpha’? Now I love playing with new and edgy things on my ‘puter, and have installed...
Yesterday was my 30th High School Reunion. I hadn’t been to any of them prior, so this was my first. I was unsure what to expect, but I did look forward to it. I am so glad I went, because it was a blast. 30 years is a long time, and it turns out that we all had a lot more in common that we did in school (or apparently). Great to see some old friends, to meet many more people, and to have a...
You know you are an old time computer geek when you notice special numbers. 2^8 is something we geeks all know, it is the number of different bytes there are. 2^8 is 256, and the maximum value of a single byte of computer memory is 255. 2^10 is 1024. I am guessing that most kids today see that number and scratch their head wondering why the old fogeys didn’t just call 1000 bytes a kilobyte...