dannyman.toldme.com

You may already know about /usr/dict/words, /usr/local/share/dict/words, /usr/share/dict/words or wherever it is on your local system that the list of English-language words is installed. I don’t know how many times I have egrepped this file to check my spelling.

Apparently though, there’s been a handy command available since Version 7 AT&T UNIX. It is called “look” and it is handy for looking up words. (more…)

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From Yahoo! News …

A black bear was found passed out in a campground, after having punctured and drunk 36 cans of Rainier Beer. The bear had tried Busch, but stopped after the first can. “He drank the Rainier and wouldn’t drink the Busch beer,” said campground bookkeeper Lisa Broxson. (more…)

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So, you may already know about electoral-vote.com, which shows the current state of Bush versus Kerry, based on all the latest polls, and Kerry has a wonderful lead just now. Then you start thinking about 2000 and you might start whining that you want popular elections.

Well, how about a compromise solution? The Fake Is The New Real Electoral Reform Map re-aligns the map of the United States so that we have fifty states that are roughly equal in size. (more…)

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The other tech support guy is out this week, so its all me, all day.

And of course, because its Monday, we have to be slammed by dumb people. (more…)

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This weekend I was asked for my recommendation for digital prints. I had to scratch my head and cast about my e-mail archives because I had forgotten their name, and they were not in the top results returned by Google. But if you ask me, I am very pleased with dotPhoto. Why? (more…)

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I keep messing with how the database table should work, and I had a hard time figuring out how to create a new key within a class referring to an object that I am hash-tieing to the lnkto table with Tie::DBI, but the good news is, that I’ve actually gotten started. It is a little frustrating at the moment, but the knowledge that I am building a class that will make writing the actual web site so much easier is good for morale. (more…)

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This morning it was so chilly that I had to don a turtleneck. I had to wear a sweater atop that last night, but that was excusable because I was out on the lake, aboard my boss’ Dad’s company’s boat. We got to see the fireworks at Navy Pier, which Yayoi loves. It was extremely groovy. I’ll try to post some pictures later, if any of them came out alright.

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So, after two failed attempts to upgrade eSupport, frustrated that a company that sells a support/helpdesk product doesn’t have all of its useful information right there in their own install of their own helpdesk product … I could go for a burrito. I call the girlfriend, do we have any cash? But no, she has a dollar, after I handed her the $25 in my pocket for her trip with the neighbor to Target last night.

“I could make pasta.”

“Dude, I could tell you didn’t want pasta,” my colleague admits. That is okay … we’ll get paid Friday. (more…)

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A bite of Milky Way chased by a sip of hot, French Roast coffee.

“Yeah, chocolate and coffee go great together, it’s like a mocha in your mouth,” says Dennis.

I’ll testify to that!

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You know what’s lame? I frequently log in to Linux boxen and try to invoke “vim” only to get “command not found.” Now, this would be reasonable on Solaris or BSD, where they maintain their own version of vi, but in Linux, vi is vim, only it is vi, and not vim. Why? … It seems so pretentious. “Vim? You mean ‘vee eye?’ I got one of them, sure, although it is just vim … but you’ll have to type vi. You know, that’s how it is done on Unix systems.”

Or is there some GNU vi that is going around?

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Best article lead I have read in a very long time:

Back in the good old days, strong men such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey went screaming across the great American highways with heads hopped full of sour mash and benzedrine. They performed lewd acts, taunted the police, harassed the stiffs and produced great art. These days we’re left with four twenty-something geeks traveling country roads at 10 mph with their Segways, iPods and blogs.

Okay, get this. A guy is going to journey across this great land of ours … on a Segway scooter.

That could be a respectible adventure in and of itself, but he’s going to be followed, at ten miles an hour, by three buddies in a “support car” holding 16 backup batteries, and a bunch of toys, merrily blogging their adventures the whole way through. The Register continues to pound out great copy:

Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were also said to have debated the use of text messaging on their trip across the US. In the end, however, they decided that a fridge full of acid-laced orange juice would be a more profound use of technology. For Kerouac, there was but a typewriter, gallons of red wine and meth.

(more…)

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Jon Roma got me thinking, by quoting a speech from Senator Robert Byrd:

We are at a dangerous time in our Republic. The Constitution — the very foundation of this great country — is under attack by a presidency that is bent upon secrecy, that has to be dragged kicking and screaming to answer questions, and that follows a path of utter recklessness. Its policies have changed the face of America around the globe from that of a giant peacemaker to that of a schoolyard bully. People who once declared strong allegiance with America now question our purpose.

I supported the war. A lot of that is because the Middle East has been dangerously stuck in the past, and the few Iraqis I’ve met all seemed seriously haunted by Saddam Hussein, and the unfinished Gulf War in 1991, when they thought “liberation” may have been at hand. I even defended the distasteful way that Bush went about starting the war — by being a unilateralist bully — because we have had a tendancy to invade other countries, throughout our history, whenever we found it politically convenient, and I don’t see this changing any time soon. The “benefit” is that Americans and those in other countries who love America are reminded that, despite our martyrdom on 9/11, we are not perfect — we are a reckless, arrogant people, and there should be some wariness in dealings with America. (more…)

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