Month: August 2005

At least I’ve got something going for me: I’ve since gotten a “supermaster”, which I think is higher. It took me a while to figure out that Make-a-Word was not Boggle. However, I’m not actually that dumb:

Dunuh dunuh dunuh. Dunuh. Dunuh. Dunuh dunuh dunuh. Dunuh. Dunuh. Doot doo-dee doo! Doot doo-dee doo! Doot doo-dee doo… deet doo!!! (For those of you who don’t read music, that’s the Knight Rider theme) I did my first night biking ever tonight on my way back from Amy’s apartment, where there were many SWIL alumni,…

I was tagged by . List ten things that make you happy, then tag five friends. Star Trek (in almost any form) A freshly opened can of Mountain Dew Steve Jobs unveiling a new Apple product Building stuff with Lego The Lord of the Rings (in any form) Playing in a snow fort that I…

On Monday I learned that my immediate supervisor, and the only person in the group who has been devoting their entire time to the question-answering project, is going on at least a 3-month leave. She’ll be gone starting the first week of September. A newly-minted Ph.D. will be starting the first week of October, and…

I learned a new word at the all-hands quarterly meeting on Tuesday: “billability”. It’s the percentage of one’s salaried hours that can be billed to a specific contract. It is therefore a reflection of how effective a given individual, group, or department is. If one’s billability is high, it means you’re not wasting time. If…

All I want is some decent genealogy software. GRAMPS is it. Unfortunately, GRAMPS depends on everything and the kitchen sink: The following package will be installed or updated: gramps The following 163 additional packages will be installed: atk1 atk1-shlibs audiofile audiofile-bin audiofile-shlibs autoconf2.5 automake1.9 bonobo-shlibs compress-zlib-pm581 db3 db3-shlibs db42-ssl-shlibs default-icon-theme docbook-xsl eel2 eel2-shlibs esound esound-bin…

Reason #13,501 Why I Hate Windows This is not strictly a Windows issue, per se, but a PC issue. I almost assuredly could have embarrassed myself as badly using linux. I forgot that curl, unlike wget, helpfully defaults to outputting the file you’re downloading to the shell. I honestly have no idea why this would…

Passed randomly today in the halls at work: Ray Tomlinson, who among other achievements proposed using ‘@’ as the name/address separator for e-mail. “Mudge” Zatko, one of the former members of LØpht Heavy Industries, a hacker group in Boston. It helps that company policy requires everyone to have their ID badges displayed…

I need some sort of magical massage ray. Or a girlfriend. In other words, ow, I must have terrible posture. The entire back right part of my neck has decided to become a solid knot of tense muscle. I am currently ice-pack-in-towel-ing it, but I’m not certain that’s the best fix. I am also freaking…

I reported on my failed tab key last October (hard to believe it was that long ago). My spacebar is now suffering from a failure. For the last week or so, it hasn’t been registering about 1 in 10 keypresses, roughly. If any of you log IMs, you can probably see examples from my typing…