Category: Fundamentals

General stuff.

  • Batten down the hatches!

    Our first Winter storm of the season will be hitting us sometime tomorrow afternoon. NOAA has issued a hazardous weather outlook, a winter storm warning, and a winter storm watch for our area. I guess I’d better panic, run to the store, buy $500 worth of milk and bread, board up the windows, and create an overall unwarranted disturbance. Then, just to make sure I’m following the herd, I better go out and crash my car after the first snowflakes start falling.

    mtds644e.jpg Feh. Welcome to New England. Whether we get a foot or three feet, I’m sure the media will be touting this as the storm of the century, just like they do every year. Luckily, we’re just barely into the century/millennium, so just about anything over two feet will top the record books. On the other hand, I can guarantee that this storm will be a flop because we just bought a Yard Machines MTD S644E snow thrower. So you can thank me later when the storm misses us completely.

    Regardless, since I have no life whatsoever, I spent the evening preparing the yard for whatever snow we do receive. All loose debris, tools, and perimeter decorative fencing was removed from the driveway and front yard, the swings were brought in, the trellis was tipped over and laid flat on the ground, and all miscellaneous crap was cleaned up and moved out of the prospective path of the snow thrower. I even went as far as to actually test the snow thrower to make sure it was working. After all, spending all afternoon in a potential blizzard trying to fire up a motor would add insult to injury.

  • We’re in hot water…

    One of the steam return pipes on our oil burner rusted through and blew up tonight. Feh. We have heat, but at low pressure. Hopefully the repair guys will show up early tomorrow and apply some pipe wrap to limp us through until we do a full system replacement. I’m assuming we’re looking at upwards of $10k for a full burner replacement. At least Kelly’s parents said they’d help us out when the time came.

    Well, the time has come.

  • Is Apple calling Microsoft and Windows users poseurs?

    rockstarbounce.jpg Disclaimer for the easily-offended OS zealots: Let me start out by saying that this is not a dig against Windows or Windows users. I’ve got Windows XP and Windows 2000 on my desk, in addition to Mac OS X, OpenBSD, and Linux. I’m simply pointing out an observation that I made with Apple’s latest ad campaign.

    So, Apple has finally released iTunes for Windows and updated their respective ad campaigns with dancing silhouettes of trendsetters bumping and grinding to a selection of music from different genres. The ads are named Dance, Hip Hop, and Rock, and I found something rather interesting with the spliced lyrics in Dance.

    The soundtrack to Dance is a remix of Jason Nevins’s Rockstar Classic Club Blaster-Edit, which is a remix of N.E.R.D.’s Rockstar. Not only did I immediately recognize the lyrics the first time I saw Dance, but I also made a note of the fact that the ad starts in on the second chorus! I also remembered that the original song had something to do with “fucking poseurs” and how “it was your dream to be like us”.

    Maybe I’m reading too much into the ad and I’m giving Apple’s ad agency way too much credit. Maybe this is Apple’s way of giving Microsoft a subliminal jab in the ribs? Who knows…but it’s damn funny!

    iTunes. Now for Windows.
    (more…)

  • Happy turkey day!

    “After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the major women’s magazine in the 19th century, were desperately seeking a holiday that would bring the nation together. Thanksgiving had been a local holiday in some places in New England,” explained Dr. Abrahams. “Lincoln declared it a national holiday two centuries after the original Thanksgiving.” And, with it, the turkey regained respect and visibility.

  • Grass Cowboy – Music to tip cows by

    grasscowboytreason.jpg Grass Cowboy has released Treason. Click. Buy. Listen.

    August, 1996…four engineers and a doctor of Pharmacology from Dublin are trapped in a basement studio in Watertown, MA with nothing but beer, smokes, and a thirst to rock.

    Weeks later, out crawled Grass Cowboy, lean and mean, and ready to inflict songs of hope and desperation on the world. Satisfied fans have witnessed Grass Cowboy’s music excellence at Boston clubs like Mama Kin, the Linwood Grille, and O’Brien’s. Grass Cowboy’s diverse musical sound is inspired by everything from Punk to Rhythm and Blues, leading to a truly unique and interesting sound.

    Grass Cowboy features:

    Tony Espy – Lead Guitar and Vocals
    Bill Filler – Lead Guitar
    Jeff Cawthorne – Drums
    Cormac Taylor – Lead Vocals
    Steve Prowten – Bass

    Grass Cowboy…music to tip cows by…

  • Subaru WRC 2001 Review – The Road to Victory

    I’m selling a few copies of Subaru WRC 2001 Review – The Road to Victory. You know you want it! Bid now! Bid often! Heck, just bid once. I’m cleaning out the office and don’t want my extra copies to go back into storage…I’ll basically let go of them for the cost of mailing. You know you want them. Glorious WRC cars and the dead sexy Petter “Hollywood” Solberg in full living color! What more could you ask for?

  • I’m a closet gamer…

    And I’ve been outed! There’s a reason I don’t own a Playstation 2 or a Windows PC capable of actually playing the latest breed of 3D multiplayer games. I’d get absolutely lost in them. I’d get addicted to them. I wouldn’t leave the house. Or bathe. Or go to work.

    I’m at a LAN party right now, but I showed up a little late. The party started Friday at 6:00 PM and I didn’t show up until Saturday at 8:00 PM or so. It’s now Sunday morning, 9:00 AM, and I just woke up. I’m up bright and early with a refreshing three hours of sleep in me. I’m the only one awake; everyone else is still comatose and passed out on miscellaneous beds and couches around the house. At least, the lucky ones are. The latecomers got the carpet with their sweatshirts for pillows.

    Sometime between 6:00 AM and now the local Battlefield 1942 server went down and I’m unable to get connected to it. Deacon was kind enough to let me take over his machine to play and, since I can’t get back to sleep, I figured I’d get some practice in on the game. It’s the first time I’ve ever played it and it’s fantastically addicting.

    Either way, since the wife has one of her girlfriends over, I may be here for a while getting the gaming thing out of my system.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go sit back down and become a zombie…

  • Welcome Slashdot Readers

    Wow. Slashdot, Slashdot, Salon, and Wired, all on the same weekend. My upstream is going to love me.

    My SDSL bridge is pegged at 100%…so the slow speeds are due to a bandwidth bottleneck, not a server bottleneck. The Web server isn’t even breaking a sweat.

  • Welcome Salon.com Readers

    I guess the Low Carb Hackers article featuring yours truly finally came out because my servers are getting totally slammed. Luckily, it’s a bandwidth bottleneck and not a server bottleneck. Unfortunately, Katharine linked directly to my Eat Watch page instead of my blog, but no worries.

    Anyway, I feel almost guilty that you’re reading my site this week. Work has been quite hectic with a beta software release the past two weeks and I haven’t had a chance to regularly update the site. Ohwell…enjoy! Feel free to browse around!

  • Friday all-hands meeting…

    We’re half an hour late for our Friday 4:00 PM all-hands meeting. Why? No beer. Out of Guinness. One of our guys needed to do a beer run before we could kick off the meeting. I love my job.