the art of writing is discovering what you believe
A seven year old wonders where her mother is.
Finally, due to the efforts of some folks in Philly, this is getting some attention.
Continue reading “modern milk carton”
Dental surgery today. The periodontist removed the roots of my left front tooth (I was surprised at the size of it), packed the socket full of bone chips (provenance not specified), and sealed the whole schmutz with a collagen membrane and some sutures. Took an hour or so, most of the time being spent on filling the socket with osseous goodness.
Surprisingly painless: the anesthetic wore off as the stitching was going on, so I could feel that, and that’s really all I have felt. They have me taking ibuprofen regularly, whether I need it or not, and that seems to work.
So eating and talking are discouraged for today, especially the latter: the vibration/movement/whatever makes the whole mess bleed and that’s messy
The surgeon said I could have copies of the before and after pictures she took: if I post them, I’ll put them below the fold.
Continue reading “fun day”
Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel?:
Trusted Computing in the kernel is like a rifle on the mantelpiece: if it’s present in act one, it’ll go off by act three.
Cory Doctorow gives a brief but illuminating overview of what ‘features’ we may find in new Mac hardware. Given we don’t even know what chips will be in the new Intel Macs and that the issues raised could be artifacts of the Pentium4 chips used for the Rosetta tools. it still bears watching.
Continue reading “With the switch to Intel comes data lock-in?”
I took a look at my network’s signal strength with MacStumbler. The 26 is what I see most of the time, sitting 20+ feet away (the AP is downstairs, mounted to a beam), and the 74 was when I walked up and physically touched the AP with my iBook screen bezel.
Hmm, perhaps those antennas I have been reading about are a good idea.
Speculation on the explosive reports that Apple is going to switch the Mac to Intel processors.
As usual, he offers a good, if pungent, analysis.
I have to wonder if the move isn’t to x86 but Itanium (would it have to be recast as iTanium?). It’s 64 bit, where x86 is not, and there is considerable work being done on the FreeBSD community for it. If Apple’s software engineers can make gcc 4 available for a mainstream architecture before anyone else (as far as I know), who knows what they can do with Itanium by mid summer of next year?
[composed and posted with ecto]
Tim Bray on owning your work product:
Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheets
or presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them, independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice: OpenDocument.If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-value
data that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, well
there’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page at
ongoing.
Kieran Healey from a day or so earlier on managing it with a ponderous toolchain: seems like a lot of work, but it still ties back to owning the stuff you make.
Never put information into something if you don’t know how you’re going to get it back out, unmunged. I usually apply that to database schemas — you should know what queries you plan to run against a database before you start — but in these days of format and version creep, perhaps it extends more broadly.
[composed and posted with ecto]
Gee, it makes people want stuff . . . and it’s often stuff they don’t need/can’t afford. But they see that their fave celebrities have one (or more) so they want to burnish their lives with one as well.
In the last 30 years or so, however, [Professor Juliet Schor] said, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups. A “horizontal desire,” coveting a neighbor’s goods, has been replaced by a “vertical desire,” coveting the goods of the rich and the powerful seen on television, Professor Schor said.
“The old system was keeping up with the Joneses,” she said. “The new system is keeping up with the Gateses.”
It’s not as easy as just buying stuff . . . .
“Class now is really like three-card monte,” [Professor Conley] said. “The moment the lower-status aspirant thinks he has located the nut under the shell, it has actually shifted, and he is too late. “
The bottomline seems to be how many people you have waiting on you, how much time you spend being served by others.
Perversely, it also signifies how much control you surrender to these providers. Do you really want to offer any advice to someone giving you an $800 haircut? Or do you assume they know what they’re doing? Likewise, Masa, a restaurant in New York that offers a $350 prix fixe meal: are you likely to make any requests about how the food should be prepared?
Who imagined being a high-roller would also entail being a hostage to these rarefied servitors?
Are you trying to win an argument or solve a problem?
[appropriated from a sticker I saw on a backpack today]
My eight year old had bronchitis with all the attendant coughing and unhappiness. At the visit confirming that today, his doctor was asked what could used to help with sleep, and he recommended a tablespoon of wine.
And as it turned out, we gave it to him too early, so instead of a mellow sleepy guy, we got a goofy, giddy guy. Turned out we ended up in the ER later that night anyway, only to leave without seeing anyone (we would have been there for breakfast is we had waited that long). But the cool night air — and the lateness of the hour — seemed to help, and he did sleep when we got home.
Now playing: Symphony no. 8 in B minor “Unfinished” (Unvollendete) Andante con Moto | Get it