Category: blog

  • Grocery Shopping Theatre – The beer selection

    The local Fry’s Foods is a smorgasbord of people watching. A few days ago, I was in the mood for beer, so I maundered in the alcohol aisle. In front of the cooler with the microbrews and imports was a gentleman (and that is a loose interpretation) who was idling in front of the good…

  • Web Content Management Systems

    I have used several CMS’s over the years, from my time at Cisco with their internally developed system, and again starting in 2009 or so when I started working with WordPress and later Joomla! They are wonderful tools, but they do have some drawbacks. First the positives. Someone who is technically minded can setup a…

  • Glad and Sad

    While I am not a religious watcher of The Daily Show, I do take in 2 or 3 episodes a week captured on the Tivo, and I have long enjoyed it. Jon Stewart does a phenomenal job of entertaining, while actually achieving some semblance of journalistic integrity (mixed in with a healthy dollop of humor,…

  • Woo hoo! I am a security Risk!

    A post I entered earlier got flagged by a friend’s work internet filter. I have been blocked! How awesome is that. He gets this when he tries to surf to this site: Clicked the link to read your post… while here at KT. Here’s what I got: Your requested URL has been blocked by the…

  • Some thoughts

    I have been doing a lot of reading of history, deep into European history from the middle ages to present, as well as a pretty deep dive into US history. Sparked by a conversation with a colleague in Europe who was showing me where many historical events happened in Frankfurt-Mainz during a day of sightseeing…

  • Hmm, it’s about time

    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…

  • A lot of Microsoft Hate this afternoon

    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…

  • Pleasant Memories: Necco Wafers

    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…

  • What a way to waste a Sunday – troubleshooting edition

    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…

  • What I am reading: 1984

    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…