GRE, a (radio) scanner company that makes a lot of the scanners Radio Shack sells, also sells some under their own name.
This new one advertises an “Intuitive ‘Object Oriented’ User Interface Design,” which brings all the fun of OOP to a GUI. The picture of the radio reads “Press NEW to create objects,” and has three softkeys, labeled “NEW,” “EDIT,” and “GLOB.”
I’ll reserve final judgment until I play around with one, but, on the surface, this seems anything but intuitive.
I’m learning German. You could stick learning in air quotes, though: I have a million more important things on my plate, and my strategy of playing it in the background while I work, rather than “language through osmosis,” seems to result in nothing but me becoming distracted and irritated.
I signed up for Live Mocha tonight, a neat (free) online service with language lessons. And I decided that learning languages is neat. I learned Spanish in high school, but never enough to be fluent. What’s interesting is that podcasts and VoIP are playing a role, as people can chat in real time with other speakers, and language lessons can be put onto iPods easily.
I’d like to work on picking up a little more German. After that, I’ve come across a decent number of pages in Polish and Slovak (which, to an untrained completely oblivious eye, look similar), not to mention French. And my interest in the Netherlands continues, so Dutch continues. (Not to be confused with Deutsch, the German word for “German.”) Learning either Chinese or Japanese would be helpful, as would Arabic. (Unfortunately, none of these languages really have anything in common, unlike the Romance languages, and supposed similarities between German and Dutch.)
And after learning all those, I’ll move onto Luxembourgish.
Here are the types of things my mind picked up on today that no one else on the face of the planet would notice, much less care about:
The photos of this rental home are so stereotypical of fraternity housing that it’s not even funny?
Advice: before selling your home, take down the pot-leaf posters, the “Free Weed” sign, get rid of the keg, remove the beer funnel from the floor, and don’t take pictures of the sink if it’s overflowing with dirty dishes.
Even if you have no clean spoons, eating out of measuring spoons is not a good idea. They’re pretty deep, which makes it hard to eat out of.
The good news is that I know exactly how many teaspoons of Dip n’ Dots I had.
I was thinking last night about solid-state drives. In their current form, they’re really not that much faster in terms of throughput: a decent amount are actually even slower than ATA disks if you measure them in terms of MB/sec throughput. Where they shine (100 times faster, at least) is seek time, though. So where they’re ideally suited for in a server environment right now is something with lots of random reads, where you might find yourself jumping all over the disk. For example, a setup with lots and lots of small files scattered across the disk.
Many implementations of a database would be similar. Something like the database for this blog will have a lot of sequential reads: you’re always retrieving the most recent entries, so the reads tend to be fairly close. But there are lots of ways to slice the data that don’t result in reading neighboring rows or walking the table. (And what really matters is how it’s stored on disk, not how it’s stored in MySQL, but I’m assuming they’re one in the same.) Say I view my “Computers” category. That’s going to use reads from all over the table. Using a solid-state disk might give you a nifty boost there. So I think it’d be fun to buy a solid-state disk and use it in an SQL server. I wager you’d see a fairly notable boost in performance, especially in situations where you’re not just reading sequential rows.
But here’s the cool link of this post. I’m not sure exactly what goes on here in a technical sense, but they use solid-state drives, getting the instant seek time, but they also get incredible throughput: 1.5GB/sec is the slowest product they offer. I think there may be striping going on, but even then, with drives at 30MB/sec throughput, that’d be 50 drives. The lower-end ones look to just be machines with enormous RAM (16-128 GB), plus some provisions to make memory non-volatile. But they’ve got some bigger servers, which can handle multiple terabytes of storage on Flash, and still pull 2GB/sec of throughput, which they pretty clearly state isn’t counting stuff cached in RAM (which should be even faster).
I want one.
One of my professors mentioned an e-mail her coworker just received from a student (a junior!).
It began, “sup hom.”
Like most enlightened geeks, I love freeze spray. Err, canned air. The stuff you use to blow dust out of your computer’s fan. It’s very handy in that use.
But turn it up side down and you’re blowing something cold enough to give you frostbite. This is the off-label use, and it probably accounts for a three-quarters of what freeze spray–canned air, I mean–is used for. You can harass friends (this is actually pretty dangerous), or deal with misbehaving components. My external hard drive, which has been acting flaky, is running extremely warm, to the point that I worry I might burn myself if I touch it again. So I hit it with some freeze spray. (This is probably not sound practice: I have a feeling hard drives don’t like going from 110+ degrees to -30 in a second’s time. But then again, a short blast of freeze spray doesn’t do much but lower the temperature slightly.
The real problem, though, is inhalant abuse. I’m really not sure why people would do this, as it’s so incredibly useful that you’d have to already be high to think it was a good idea to waste it. But companies have started adding a “bitterant.” I know for two reasons. The first is that they mention it on the label. The second is that the bitterant floats around the room. After cooling down the hard drive, I had a disgusting bitter taste in my mouth. So now, as a legitimate user of their product, I’m trying to find ways to get it without bitterant. Because it leaves me disgusted every time I use it.
Tonight I went to an Obama rally in Boston. Or, more accurately, I tried to go to an Obama rally in Boston.
We took the T in, and noticed a couple people carrying big Obama signs. A group of people got on at the next stop, and chatted with the sign-holders. Pretty soon I realized that almost everyone on the T was going to see Obama. As we got closer, this become clearer and clearer, until truly everyone on the Silver Line with us was going to the Obama event.
Per the advice of the people carrying the signs (who we all assumed to be leaders of some sort, but, in actuality, were not–an interesting psychological exploration for another day), we got off two stations early. And were greeted by the longest line I’ve ever seen. We must have walked by literally thousands of people before we got to our line. It was essentially folded on itself three times, and each one must have stretched for close to half a mile.
What’s more, I’m only counting the people I could see. Where the people “ended” was around the bend from the T stop. It turns out that we weren’t even halfway there; where Obama was speaking was several blocks down the road.
We got there before 7:30, initially confident that getting there that early would guarantee us a spot when the doors opened at 8. 8 o’clock came and went, and we had hardly moved. 8:45 and we’d moved up to the second line. Around 9:30, we were even with the T station, freezing cold, and only newly aware of the fact that we still had a long way to go. Rumors were circulating that the building was near its capacity, so we decided that it was pretty unlikely that we’d make it in, so we decided to cut our losses and leave.
Inside the T station, we found a steady stream of people making the same decision. The train we got on (actually a long bus that drives around in a tunnel… I don’t get it either) was jam-packed, and I ended up standing right next to the driver. “Why did you leave so early?” she asked. Early? It was 90 minutes after the doors opened. “The Transit Police said that he wasn’t going to take the stage until 11.”
Eleven? Sure enough, on our way back we stopped in a restaurant to eat. The news cut to a live feed shortly after 10:30, when John Kerry was on stage talking about Obama. I’m sad I didn’t get to see him, and yet thrilled at the turnout. I’ll try to get some pictures up tomorrow, but pictures really don’t do the crowd justice. It was enormous.
In the local newspaper that mysteriously appeared on our kitchen counter, there are two letters to the editor in a row. (Actually, the second reads more like an article and has no name signed, but is under the “Letters to the Editor” section.)
The first starts off, “Granite Staters have always been among the first to stand up against discrimination of any kind, including opposing slavery, expanding women’s suffrage and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. Adopting civil unions continues this proud tradition of standing up for what is just and fair.” It’s short, concise, and just praises voters for standing up for the rights of same-sex couples.
The next is about a Right to Life march. What an ironic pair of letters!
What I find strange is that the second letter/article never once mentions, “Killing unborn babies is wrong,” but is instead comes across as a rant on a slew of unrelated issues. One person is quoted as saying, “We’ve got to put the moral order back the way it should be… Reverse Roe v. Wade. Reverse civil unions…” He goes on to add, “There are more people coming in from Mexico and other places, and we’re killing ourselves off. That changes the voting demographic… They’ll wipe out the Constitution.” He goes on to complain about how “birth control has been proven to be extremely detrimental to those who use it… You have sex to have babies. If you don’t want babies, don’t have sex.”
A second person mentions, “I heard on EWTN that after an abortion, females can get sick–cancer of the breast, cancer of the uterus.” The problem is that she says this right after the article includes a big paragraph about how no one has ever found a link between cancer and abortions.
Reasons to oppose abortion, then:
Never mentioned:
To me, the latter argument would be a little more convincing. I really can’t understand what they were thinking with this letter. It’s also not as if I skipped over the section with the good arguments. I’ve basically given you a recap of the article, minus peoples’ personal backgrounds (neither of which involve abortion.) They just rant about irrelevant stuff, throw in a lot of incorrect statements, and even resort to some arguments dripping with racist sentiment. And yet, it’s very easy to present a strong case against abortion. They just fail–miserably–to do so.