a crank’s progress

Economist.com | Weblogging
For all the costly and failed efforts by media companies to create and charge for online material, blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people—and a way of finding and raiding their content.

Now that I have some idea how far and fast I am going on my bone shaker, I took a quick spin today: 13.6 miles. I used the speed information to gauge what cadences and gear combinations felt comfortable. I found 14/15 mph to be pretty easy to ride along at, but I couldn’t [...]

Quiz: Does Your Weblog Own You?

12.5 %

My weblog owns 12.5 % of me.Does your weblog own you?

A Computer’s Eye View (from 1972)
How far has computer technology advanced since this was written in 1972? In the proceeding chapter, Kemeny describes the then-new GE 635 machine that ran the Dartmouth Time Sharing System: the “dual processor system is capable of some 10 million multiplications per minute.”
That works out to be 166,166 multiplications per [...]

I was doing some shopping at my local Fred Meyer and as I left, I was greeted by a fellow handing out flyers, saying something about a “burger giveaway.” As a vegetarian, I’m not going to be interested, but rather than get into that, I took the flyer and dropped it into the cart. As [...]

Matt Stephenson, the maintainer of the samba package for OS X, liked my docs and based on my feedback will move the package into the stable tree. It seems he has gotten no feedback from anyone, and never knew if it just “worked for him” or just worked.
So send an email to the author [...]

“Mother died yesterday. Or was it today?”
So runs the opening of Camus’ “l’etranger”, variously translated as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider.”
It was today, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, that my mother died. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in 30 years, so we weren’t exactly close.
The best summation I have [...]

I ended up returning my cycling computer/odometer this weekend and getting a new one. I have the Sigma BC 400, a really basic one.
It turns out the first one may have been OK, but Sigma evidently cuts corners (and costs) on the parts. The salesguy at REI mentioned that sometimes the magnets are duff, [...]

I decided to migrate to Apache 2. No compelling reason. I noticed that a portupgrade run had done something nasty to my existing Apache 1.3 installation and decided I’d rather switch than fight.
I think it’s more responsive but it could just be that new car smell . . . I’m sure I’ll never put [...]

I like rpm even less than netinfo, but FreeBSD supports it, in a way, through its Linux emulation layer.
I was trying to install KRSS and after running into the usual issues with KDE apps not being able to find the QT libraries (the most popular query in the KDE support forums), I decided to [...]