Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/27/rhetorical-question/
I am recovering from a sick day, listening to NPR mid-day. I have always thought that “Talk of the Nation” is lame, but:
CALLER: What can common listeners do?
HOST: Every last one of our listeners is extraordinary!
CALLER: What could the extraordinary listeners do today about climate change? Call their air-quality districts? That’s just a rhetorical question.
They’re just trying to remind us working stiffs what exciting days we are missing out on.
Several minutes later the Guest mentions that you could WALK TO THE STORE insted of driving. That is what I have been doing ever since I asked myself what I could do . . .
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/27/tsunami/
Two years ago, I spent Christmas in the South of Thailand, but not on the coast. I heard Phuket, on the Indian Ocean, got hit hard. I had stayed several days mid-December, 2002 at a place in Kata, which was very nice. I was curious if I could get any news of Kata. Well, the Seattle Times has a dispatch from a tourist. The destruction in Thailand’s tourist areas has been severe:
Tonight I went to Patong again. It’s the largest beach and shopping area and where the largest group of tourists are. It’s about a mile long and four blocks deep and full of big stores and small shops. Big hotels. The Sheraton and everything — and I mean everything — is destroyed.
The author is visiting ex-pats in the local hospitals. Thailand’s public health system is not the greatest, and being in a foreign country in bad times just adds to the stress. And there is plenty of tragedy to go around:
The first room we went in was a young Swedish man with a major cut all the way down his leg. His Thai wife was sitting next to him with a large bandage on her chin. We asked him how he was doing, and he said that this was nothing because they had lost their 3-month-old daughter. Just washed away. The woman just started crying uncontrollably. It was heart wrenching. We gave them a hug, and they were very appreciative that we came by.
Read the article. Thailand, America, wherever, we are all so many peas in the same pod. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/27/last-mile/
So, Christmas was awesome. But here I will kvetch about the return trip.
I got a good deal on Southwest Airlines for a one-way flight. Unfortunately, Southwest doesn’t fly to San Francisco, so I booked for San Jose. When I got to the airport, I tried the automated check-in thingy: credit card … okay … flight number? Gee, well, I have that … okay … confirmation code?
Look, silly computer, if you know my name and my flight number, what need have you of a string of random digits? (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/27/ron-avitzur/
What do you do when you enjoy the project that you are working on so much that you want to see it completed even after it is cancelled by your employer and your position has been terminated? If you’re Ron Avitzur working on a graphing calculator program for Apple in 1993, then you start sneaking in to the office to keep working.
I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.
A funny, and interesting story. This was just before the Internet boom so I suppose in those days they could get away with living in the Bay Area without income.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/howto-mpg123-random-mp3s/
Assuming your mp3 collection is in $HOME/mp3s:
find $HOME/mp3s -name '*.mp3' | mpg123 -Z -@ -
The find command generates a list of .mp3 files in your $HOME/mp3s, and that mpg123 command says play songs randomly (-Z) from the list (-@) that I am feeding you via stdin. (-@ -)
To skip a song you are not enjoying, press control-C.
-d
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/married-geek/
How to tell I am a geek.
I am forsaking my employer-provided mobile phone for the latest and greatest Sidekick II deal on Amazon.com. That the phone costs -$50 after rebates helps. I got spoiled by my previous two sidekicks, and I just can not get to grips with a conventional mobile phone.
How to tell I am married.
I am purchasing two of these devices. One for me and one for Yayoi. Awww!!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/general/
Are you tired of stumbling over cryptic technical posts? You can filter out most of them by going over to the right, under “Categories” and clicking “General” . . . this will show you only articles that are marked “general,” which will exclude those article which are solely technical in nature.
The URLs for this are:
http://dannyman.toldme.com/category/general/
And, if you are in to RSS feeds:
http://dannyman.toldme.com/category/general/rss2/
Love,
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/two-wordpress-plugins/
I was stumbling around the Internet this evening, and stumbled upon two neat plugins:
- Related Entries Plugin
- Does some magic to link to “related posts,” as you can see below. So far, it seems mostly to amount to navigational funness.
- Spam Stopgap Extreme
- A quick little hack that involves MD5 hashing, and JavaScript. Will purportedly kill off all spambots. We shall see, but unlike a lot of the anti-spam solutions, this thing wsa a trivial install.
UPDATE: March 8, 2010. These days I use Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WordPress’ built-in Akismet Anti-Apam system.
-d
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/29/passing-thought/
You know, it must be weird, working for Yahoo!‘s branding department, to be re-writing grammar rules around the use of an exclamation mark mid-sentence.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/30/google-groups-gripes/
I don’t like the new Google Groups. There’s a smaller reason and then there is a bigger reason.
The smaller reason is that the “old” Google Groups has worked well for several years. The new Google Groups, it is a wee bit harder to navigate, but even more than that, it is frequently broken. See http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=gmirror — as of this writing, 9/10 of the hits from this search yield a message that says:
Topic not found.
We’re sorry, but we were unable to find the topic you were looking for.
Perhaps the URL you clicked on is out of date or broken?
Yes, perhaps google Groups is broken. I e-mailed them about it yesterday.
But this points to the bigger reason, which is that I use Google because it is the best search engine, hands-down, and it is the best search engine, because they focus, not on the “interactive portal” thing, like Yahoo!, but on search. (more…)
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