Finally! A 100-kg Canadian gold coin. A coin that weighs considerably more than I do. Via jeff_duntemann.
Heavy Metal
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Monday Night Television
We are watching An Grá Faoi Ghlas in my Monday night Irish class. We saw Mír a Deich (Part 10) last night.
There was nothing like this in my High School German or College Russian classes :-)>
Politicians and Science
6000 years of Republican debates. Is there anybody around who can channel H.L. Mencken???
Conspiracy Theories
Somehow I am not surprised…..
The Way the Universe is–Anthropic Selection
Not quite as planned
The Microsoft Tax
The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk–perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No–the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.
But, don’t you need Windows? No, you don’t. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.
Good Saturday
Slept long and well last night. Between camping in Chas. City, my cold, and work, it was the best sleep in over a week.
colgaffneyis quarterly membership meeting was today. This went quickly and smoothly under the circumstances. Several concerns about money, other resources, and personalities are very much with us, but the organization is coping so far this year. Despite limited publicity, quite a few members showed.
I rebuilt my main home computer this afternoon after Thursday’s hard disk failure. I had some hassles with hardware issues but none with the software (Slackware Linux) itself. I have a little configuration still to do but the system is usable now. Much easier than the last few times I have done a Windows install.
Watched The Producers (the original 1960’s version) on TV after dinner. It has been a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years, but I had not seen it in a while and had forgotten just how funny it really is.
Technologies New and Old
After I got home tonight I did a little work for my employer. Nothing terribly difficult–just a system test that could not be done in normal business hours.
Meanwhile, using another computer (my own, not my employer’s) I tried to check e-mail. Unfortunately, it failed to boot. Looks like a hard-disk problem. I will try a file-system repair (this is a Linux box) from a rescue CD tomorrow night. I have a recent backup of my data, so I am not really worried even if that fails. I have another hard disk I can put in the machine and reinstall everything (I am writing this on yet another machine).
I did not do anything about that tonight because mia_mcdavid needed help with her new loom. I made a raddle, a gadget to aid her in the process of warping. This appears to be working quite well, so I have accomplished something. The computer will keep until tomorrow.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 