General

Woohoo! Get your 17-year-old cow ice cream here!

monkeyphonecall.com.

Enough Said…

Beth wrote to tell me that since she and her family are moving away from bucolic town of Boaz, Alabama, to greener, more urban pastures, they need to find a good home for their family cow, Sally. If you’re within driving distance, have a cattle trailer, and you have a good home for Sally [this means you won’t turn her into hamburger], please let Beth know.

After just a few hours playing with my iBook, Rod and Megan have converted to the Mac side: they’re the proud parents of a brand new baby 600Mhz iBook.

I’ve found that Apple’s “Sherlock” tool is rather bloated and annoying when trying to use as a “file find” utility. Rather than using Sherlock, check out the freeware Locator, which is a wrapper for the UNIX ‘find’ and ‘locate’ commands.

How to cut and paste in X11. In case you ever wanted to know.

Some friends of mine were discussing the pro’s and con’s of college. My thoughts:

First, I’ll admit I have a degree.

However, it’s in Geography. I really enjoy the field, but I don’t want a job in it. GIS sucks.

Meanwhile, I used my spare time during college to immersively study PCs and networking. Now I work for a large Internet backbone access provider.

From what I’ve seen here, in this cube farm, all of the people in 5th level have degrees [in CS], and are paid very well to know what they’re doing. Most of the people in 4th level have degrees [some in English or Art History], but even the ones who don’t have degrees are very skilled, and have every intention of obtaining a degree. In my own group, most of the techs have degrees, but again, they may not be directly related to networking.

Have your friends ever received a phone call from Miss Cleo? Al Pacino? They can now with the Celebrity Soundboard!

and hilarity ensued.

Apple unveiled its new 10GB iPod today at Macworld Tokyo. For an extra $49, you can get your iPod personalized. Here’s a preview of my personalized iPod.

Look at the label on the last package you received from UPS, or at the back of your driver’s license. Chances are there’s a rectangular area on there containing tiny rectangles, circles, hexagons, or similar patterns. You’re looking at a two-dimensional barcode, which can store several kilobytes of data as compared to the roughly twelve bytes in the UPC barcode on that bottle of lotion you keep by the bed. Daniel sent me a story at the New York Times about a club in Boston that is pulling and storing the name, age, height, home address, and other specifics of its patrons. So I want to know just what is on the back of my own license. Here is a document that gives a brief introduction to the roughly twenty different types of 2D barcodes in common use today. Read more for further stuff as I find it.