Peter Ueberroth, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball, has added his name to the long list of famous and not-so-famous gubernatorial hopefuls in California’s recall election.
Month: August 2003
shoulda bought new RAM, perhaps
I bought some RAM ( 2 64 Mb DIMMs, supposedly Gateway surplus or pulled parts) on eBay, but the box doesn’t recognize either as good. It doesn’t hang or complain, it just ignores them completely.
One reason to recommend buy a PC with a Dell or Gateway brandname — even if you buy it used and let someone take that initial loss of value — is you can use the serial number/production tag to find out what kind of parts are/were in it and what you need to upgrade. That was a big help to me as I tried to work why kind of RAM this machine needs and was why I was confident the DIMMs I found would work.
Trouble is, I don’t want to buy more than I need: you can buy 32 Mb or 128 Mb, but not 64. If you install in pairs, as the docs suggest, that means I can either double or quintuple the RAM. I was looking for triple by adding the two 64s.
Now of course since there are pulled parts (and were shipped in bubblewrap in a paper envelope, not an anti-static bag or anything) there are no refunds, just returns and exchanges.
reporter dies in hypergravity experiment — and writes about it
It isn’t until later, during a photo shoot, that I find out I had flatlined – I actually died – in the centrifuge. Even though my heart stopped for only three or four seconds, a possibility that Pelligra had described at the prebriefing, the discovery shakes me. I have second thoughts about my willingness to do more experiments.
I got motion sickness just reading this, but then I can’t even sit on a child’s swing anymore (vertigo: bleacgh).
I hadn’t realized zero-G had that much effect on the body: it would be a bad idea to have our Mars explorers become amoebas en route.
Bicycle laundering
So I’m not completely happy at how this whole bike theft thing has played out.
<from an email I just sent to a senior assistant attorney general>
The issue here is that the bike shop is out the cash they paid the thief, I mean, person of interest (whose name and city I have tracked down, by the way). This seems unfair. But if any shop declines to pay on receipt of the goods, they’ll lose trade, putting them at a disadvantage to those who are less scrupulous. What I think would be more fair is to have a waiting period, 10 business days to a month, where no money can change hands, but the serial number can be checked against the police case database. Once it’s clear no reports have been filed, the transaction can take place.
This takes one of the big incentives for bike theft off the table and doesn’t stick bike shops with the tab for stolen goods they have to return to their rightful owners.
What do you think are the odds of the Bicycle Laundering Act passing?
bicycle recovery
I just verified that the recovered bike is indeed mine. And while I was there, I managed to learn the name of the “person of interest” who sold the bike to the shop. A couple of minutes of Googling and I learn that a person with that name lives just up the road in Bothell, where I have ridden that very bike many times (the Burke Gilman trail goes through Bothell).
Since the phone listing makes this “person of interest” look respectable — a real address and a spouse’s name suggests stability to me — makes me wonder if the thief didn’t just use someone else’s name.
Or is this otherwise ordinary person the kind of person who frequents bike racks with bolt cutters?
More details as they become available.
justice is served
I got a welcome phone call from one Officer DeJesus of the University Police Department: my stolen bike has been found. It was sold to a bike shop about 5 minutes walk from where it was stolen the very same day, and it was coming out of its one month “hold before re-sale.” Sadly, the bike shop is out the money they paid the thief. I’m hoping to provide enough detail about the various aftermarket additions to the bike to allow the police to make a case.
The shop keeps bikes it takes in for cash or trade in quarantine, but they’re retrieving mine tomorrow so I can see if there’s any damage. At the very least, they’ll get to do a service on it: it was due anyway.
Now it looks like I need to refund contributions from my supporters, but I sure don’t mind.
like tall buildings?
I just found this while looking for an address of a building: Googled the name and stumbled into this distraction.
is OS X the Anti-Mac interface?
The basic principles of the Anti-Mac interface are:
- The central role of language
- A richer internal representation of objects
- A more expressive interface
- Expert users
- Shared control
This was written in 1996 but it sounds like a rough approximation of today’s OS X.
Users have a choice of gestural or verbal commands, as appropriate. Moving one file is trivial, but moving all files in several folders that are more than 30 days old or that contain .html in their title is a little more complex.
Visual display technology has improved to allow more useful representations of onscreen objects: I see this more in applications like PhotoShop than in the OS.
One of the big knocks on the Mac was that the learning curve was gradual and short: expertise was gained in days, not years. The flipside of this was the Mac users generally knew more applications since the basic commands were consistent with the OS they already knew. But now, we have the prospect of a consistent easy-to-use interface with the power of a command line and helpful items like cron and various command shells. As noted in the article, the downside of direct control is that you have to directly control everything: there is no delegation or automation. Undergirding the Mac’s UI with UNIX changes all that.
I think it’s interesting that this predates the release of OS X by two years but foreshadows it pretty well.
the hardware fairy visits
I installed one of these monstrous drives in one of my machines tonight. I don’t know what to make of an 80 Gbyte disk drive costing about $1.00 a Gigabyte when I can recall paying $20.00 a Megabyte once upon a time. What’s the price/performance rule on storage? Is it like Moore’s Law, where a given amount of storage will both half in price and improve in speed every 18 months?
The hardware fairy returns later this week with 2 64 Mb DIMMs for this resource-challenged webserver . . .
another take on physical vs virtual workplaces
Boeing move to Texas hurt shuttle analysis-report
Some 80 percent of the 500 Boeing technical engineers in Huntington Beach, California, declined to move to Houston with the NASA program, requiring Boeing to hire and train engineers locally that lacked the experience of the existing team, the [Los Angeles] Times reported.
The Boeing team’s assessment that Columbia was relatively intact helped NASA leaders decide to continue with normal landing procedures.
According to the Times, Boeing engineers in Huntington Beach have said they would have reached a different conclusion, which Boeing denied.
“The Huntington Beach engineers were part of the analysis, so it would be hard to come up with a different conclusion,” Memi said. “If there were engineers at Huntington Beach not involved in the analysis who felt otherwise, they never made their concerns known.”
An interesting story to follow to see if the lack of continuity doomed the crew of Columbia . . . .
But it does raise the old question about work, even knowledge work, requiring one’s physical presence. What would the costs have been to keep the team together, despite the distance between management and the engineers? And if all the engineers stayed within Boeing, that sounds like the replacements were hired as additional staff — 80% of 500 is 400, so something doesn’t make sense.