Andy's Crazy Ramblings.
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "The Illustrious Cosyne" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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08:53 am
[Link] | Windows in unlike most products sold in our economy in that if you take good care of it (patch regularly), it necessarily gets slower and crappier over time.
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10:59 pm
[Link] | Today's bastards: Palm. I figured that since you need a special ($3-$15) adapter to listen to music with wired headphones, that at least you could listen to music over bluetooth. Which you can, if you buy some $20 third party software. Add that to the cost of a JVM and some more hacks to restore features that the centro's predecessors had half a decade ago, plus the fact that sprint doesn't actually subsidize it that much, and they're dicks, and i'm going to be super reluctant to purchase any more palm stuff.
I do hear they have a new android phone coming out.
I also hear google voice is awesome. I really wish they'd start opening that up.
Played poker down at MIT tonight with Gregg et al. Pizza and beer and company = good. Losing money and waiting extra 25 minutes in rain for bus less so. But Sarah'll be back soon, and Penny and Sleazy should be around this weekend :)
Current Mood:  optimistic
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09:53 pm
[Link] | On the train to providence. Plus is that they have wifi. Minus is that it goes out sometimes, and then I try a different access point, but forget i have to re-agree not to do whatever bad things i'm not supposed to do.
Other minus is the burning smell. I'd think it was the breaks except it still smells like burning even when we're not slowing down.
Edit:
Another plus is plugs under some tables, the minus being that the ones under my table, at least, are dead.
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03:25 pm
[Link] | ( random )
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11:39 pm
[Link] | Got a CF-IDE adapter today so i can make a 2GB solid state drive out of the compactflash card from my digital camera. Was going to put this in one of the thinkpad carcasses i scored from work, but there's no good way to get it in there without lots of tweezers. So I'm trying to us it in little otter (which has much better drive bay access), but I'm not impressed with the xubuntu installer. Apparently the logic goes like this: I have 2.04 gigs of space, I need 1.9 to install myslef, so lets allocate .15 for swap and the try installing in 1.89. Go! (This does not work so well).
I am also not impressed with chase. I figured we had this pretty good scam going where they skim 3% off all my purchases and give me 1% and keep 2%, even though they're really reluctant to cough up my share and the customer service people lie about it in order to avoid paying up. But apparently even this is not enough so they're upping my interest rates, which I actually don't pay, unless they come up with some even more devious policy. But I'm pretty sure they will come up with a more devious policy. And so now I guess I'll be transitioning to debit purchases. And cash. And not spending so much. Speaking of which I may be getting a lens or two from craigslist soon, which is exciting. Sorta like late birthday presents :) So i guess after that i'll start with the not spending so much.
And speaking of scummy business practices, Sarah's trying to get internet set up at her new place so i was reading through whatever special offer Cox* has, which is actually run by some outside marketing company (similar to the scam I encountered setting internet at my last place which involved phone menu where my only two options were that I lived in texas or that i bought my cable internet at bestbuy) and consists of multiple sketchy mail-in rebates. It doesn't just make me want to vomit, it makes me want to find the lawyer who wrote the terms on that offer and vomit in their BMW.
I suppose that's enough ranting for now. Life is otherwise pretty good. The horrors of moving aside, I'm thrilled to have Sarah living an 80 minute transit trip away instead of a 120 minute car journey, and work is under control :)
*Pretty sure their official slogan is "Get Screwed By Cox!"
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12:58 pm
[Link] | Wired mag has a headline that says "Palm Pre Will Sync Seamlessly With iTunes," which I find odd because I wasted like 2 hours last night trying to get two audio files onto either my ipod or my palm phone and could not manage to do either.
Also, who decided that windows should have a key combination for undock? It's pretty awesome because if you hit it, your computer will stop taking input from the external keyboard. What if they just put an "undock request" button on the dock?
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05:19 pm
[Link] | ( cd burning )
In other news I've had a great birthday weekend so far. My wonderful girlfriend bought me tasty beer around midnight last night and made me yummy breakfast this morning. And got me a cool robot t-shirt. And I get something else too but it's still a surprise. Plus, we're going out for sushi soon. Yay :D
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12:41 pm
[Link] |
reasons i hate outlook: not junk mail
It's annoying that outlook decided that a lot of useful information was junk mail. Kinda painful to think about the problems I've had because I didn't know that a particular database was down. To add insult to injury, I can right click on any one message and say 'not junk' but you have to do that one at a time.
Current Mood:  sad
Tags: reasons i hate outlook
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05:02 pm
[Link] |
Zettabytes, apparently
I didn't even know what the term for a million gigabytes was, let alone that I had that much music.
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05:39 pm
[Link] | ( stuff )
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11:28 pm
[Link] | At what point did it become necessary for me to agree that riots and insurrections are not 3com's problem just so I can install music playing software on my computer? I wonder how much less legalese there would be if I got the same amount of money per hour for having to read it as the lawyers get paid to write it. ( unreasonable )
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12:54 pm
[Link] |
reasons i hate outlook
Although _technically_ correct, it annoys me that if I send a message and then reply to it, the reply just goes to me. Most other mail clients figure out that I usually mean to format the message like a reply but send it to the original recipient. Maybe I'm just being anal.
Current Mood:  irritated
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06:04 pm
[Link] |
Reasons I hate IE: trusted zones
I'm trying to run a report and download the results as a CSV file. It actually takes a few minutes to generate the CSV file. When it's finally ready to download, IE tries to protect me from this nasty dangerous file WHICH IS FROM A SITE IN MY TRUSTED ZONE. It seems to catch the file and then re-request it when I say I really want it, causing the report to run again. So I'm having a hard time seeing why I went through the trouble (and it is an unnecessarily large pain in the ass) of putting this site in my trusted zone.
Tags: reasons i hate ie
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02:18 pm
[Link] |
Reasons I hate IE: half-ass zooming
Apparently if you zoom in on a page in IE7 and then select some text, you're actually selecting the text that would be in that spot if the page were still at 100%. I can totally see how I would do that if I'd been up all night hacking out a demo and was basically keeping myself awake with an unholy cocktail of espresso and mtn dew. But this is supposed to be real software.
While I'm here, lets add this:
If you want to open a new page, you can click the thing to open a new tab, and then go up to the bookmarks menu and select one. But the new tab is taking its sweet time showing up, so you sit there with the mouse down on the bookmark untill the new tab shows up. Once it does and you have a blank page, you let go of the mouse button, still on the bookmark. The new tab stays blank and the page you used to be on, back in the other tab, shows up.
This is even more understandable, but is still annoying. And would be a moot point if it didn't take a significant amount of time to open a blank tab.
Current Mood: sad
Tags: reasons i hate ie
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10:38 pm
[Link] | Reasons I hate outlook:
Apparently, if you rename your quicklaunch shortcut from whatever dumbass thing it likes to be called ("launch microsoft outlook" or something), it will make a new one with the preferred name. Only thing I need less than an outlook shortcut with a long name is one outlook shortcut with a short name plus one with a long name.
You can't always find the search function.
Tags: reasons i hate outlook
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10:46 pm
[Link] |
update
1) Done with taxes. HOORAY. (at least until MA decides to reject my bungled-by-turbotax state return).
2) I hate turbo tax. I probably said that last year, but once again I procrastinated too long. I thought it would at least be helpful because I moved and had moving expenses and jobs in 2 states. Absolutely not. I pretty much gave them $80 for asking me each question on the MA and CA form and filling it in. Adobe Acrobat Reader could do that in 1999. I kinda expected turbotax to use facts+logic to answer the redundant questions, and explain the cryptic questions. No such luck.
3) The Red Cross did a great job of getting me my donation paperwork at the last minute.
4) I did get my IRA deposit in on time, which was a relief but not really that noteworthy.
5) I also got my new passport in the mail. I'd heard this rumor about the us government being stupid and sending a protective sleeve to store your RFID passport in (so people can't just read your personal information anytime they want or make bombs which are triggered by proximity to a US passport), BUT sending the passport and the sleeve next to each other instead of the passport inside the sleeve, thus allowing people to read your passport data while it's in transit. This rumor is false. They don't send you a protective sleeve at all. They are, however, pretty quick about it if you fork over the extra $60.
6) My favorite definition of teabagger from urban dictionary
A conservative republican who protests against income taxes by rubbing their nutsacks in each other's faces.
(Go vote for it ;)
7) I had a good easter weekend- my family and sarah's mom came to boston and we hung out and had good food and stuff. Weather left a bit to be desired, but otherwise good.
8) I went to the gym today for the first time this year. I might even go again tomorrow :O
9) For that and other reasons, I should go to sleep now.
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10:07 pm
[Link] |
product reviews.
Pelegrino fizzy water in plastic bottles: mildly negative. Maybe we got a bad bottle or something, but it was nearly flat.
Lacrosse technology radio clock. the round kind that goes on the wall. I realize that congress changed how time works and all, but the thing does claim that there's a magic signal which tells it what to do about daylight savings time. Only apparently that signal doesn't know about the new laws, and there's no convenient override on the clock. boo.
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07:04 pm
[Link] | Ended up reading an article about this vaccination/autism thing today. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/28/state/n123904D81.DTL
I find it unspeakably frustrating, on a number of levels, that we're comparing scientific studies to the opinion of a former playboy model.
I'm also still incredibly frustrated by flexible spending accounts. Mainly because mine expires tomorrow and I've been lazy and not spent the money yet. (I did opt out of this stupid thing for next year, though, so it's not like I never learn. Although I'm pretty sure that means something horrible and expensive will happen to me in the next year.) I don't understand why nobody's had their kneecaps broken over this legislation, let alone not understanding why this isn't one of the first things to be fixed in healthcare reform.
Faith in humanity is not doing so well today.
Current Mood: frustrated
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09:20 pm
[Link] |
paperless electronic voting = bad
Shockingly, electronic voting machines with no auditable paper records are flawed, and people have been exploiting them.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/03/18/diebold-admits-voting-machine-flaw-had-been-aware-problem-years
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7001
I feel like our governmental system is supposed to be some kind of democracy with secret balloting, where everyone can vote for who/what they want, the votes will be counted, and nobody can pressure you to vote for what they want. This really isn't very hard. You can vote on a touch screen, it can print out a paper copy behind a little plastic window, you can read it, and if you agree, it goes into the box and your vote gets counted. If it prints the wrong thing, it goes into the trash and you try again. That way there's a countable record, and nobody gets to take any record of how they voted which would allow them to sell votes.
Granted, there are problems where people are easily _convinced_ to vote for the wrong thing, and we really should have some kind of instant run-off voting to alleviate the problems of an entrenched two party system, but right now I'd be happy with just a system that can't be easily and undetectably hacked.
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08:08 am
[Link] | Happy St Patty's Day!!!!
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