Author: cosmo

Brawny (the paper towel company) has a new line of ads that are pretty funny. Unfortunately they’re all done in Flash (why?) and while you’re waiting for the file to load you’re treated to a nice little animation showing your progress.

Of course, the animation looks pretty much like someone tearing off sheet after sheet of toilet paper…

Saturday, April 9 : wore shorts and t-shirt, went on bike ride.

Sunday, April 10 : wore heavy coat and gloves, shoveled foot-deep heavy wet snow.

Mmm… new speakers…

It’s hard to believe the factory speakers in my Saturn lasted ten full years before one of them finally blew up and started rattling badly enough to wake the dead. Since I listen to music almost every time I’m driving somewhere, it was really hard to hear that rattle, so I decided to (gasp!) get some new speakers installed.

After a rather lengthy and annoying process involving a friend’s car audio shop, I had four new Alpines in place. Wow, the difference is amazing. All those years I was listening to the el cheapo speakers, and now I’ve got high-fidelity sound. My ten-year-old CD changer never sounded so good…

Today’s riotous spam:

“If you wana have the latest disc for computer operation system or functional discs with least expense, this store is your chance! The discs are provided to you at less expense while supplies you with stable performance! Access to the world of discs with office operation, computer diagnostics, graphic design and commerce!”

Umm, what?

Microsoft is such a riot. They paid for yet another study comparing Windows to Linux, and– surprise!— the study concluded that Windows can be recovered more quickly from a hack or other disaster.

My favorite quote regarding the study comes from some Microsoftian:

“I’m not saying Linux is not reliable, In fact, both operating systems tend to do so well in general uptime comparisons that faults have to be introduced in order to gauge reliability.”

Windows does “well” in uptime? That’s patently false in my experience. I have had Linux servers run for over a year without being rebooted a single time; my current hosting servers have been running non-stop for three months (and that’s only because I physically moved them to a new location in February). On the other hand, I personally know several companies whose Windows servers are scheduled to reboot themselves nightly so there aren’t problems in the morning when everyone comes into the office.

Ahh, Microsoft, we laugh heartily at your games and tactics…

Deep wisdom from Laralee:

“Life is too short to listen to music you don’t like.”

If there’s one thing worse than spam, it’s spam sent by an idiot who can’t even use the crappy spam-generating tools to create their message. Here’s a gem I just received:

From: “Evelyn” <betty0oYv@phreaker.net>
Cc: jeff@bitrelay.net

%GREET
%AD
%SITE
%EXIT

Sheesh. Loser.

Apparently the world’s fastest computer is up and running at the National Nuclear Security Administration, and it’s only half-complete. It hums along at 135 trillion operations per second. Yowza.

Perhaps the best line from the NNSA’s press release, though, is this gem:

“Scientists at LLNL for the first time have performed 16-million-atom molecular dynamics simulations with the highest accuracy inter-atomic potentials necessary to resolve the key physical effects to successfully model pressure induced rapid resolidification in Tantalum.”

Hunh? It probably took a supercomputer just to write a sentence like that. But it sounds cool.

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

About fifteen years ago, when I started college, I had a copy of WordPerfect for DOS. It was a great little word processor (better than AppleWorks, which is what I’d been using since the early 80’s) and I pretty much wrote all of my papers using it. Computers got more advanced, Windows came on the scene, and WordPerfect continued to improve. The DOS version gave way to a nice Windows-based graphic version, and so on.

Then Microsoft released the monstrosity known as Word, and everyone started using it. These days it’s the de facto standard, much to my chagrin. Word sucks. It sucks big time. The menus are confusing and jumbled, I can never seem to do quite what I want, and it remains a fact that WordPerfect simply has more functionality and power than Word ever will. After all, WordPerfect was around long before Microsoft came up with the whole “Office” idea.

So here I am, fifteen years after WordPerfect for DOS, still cranking away (version 11) with all of my documents in WordPerfect. Occasionally I have to open a Word document from a client, but generally I avoid using Word whenever I can.

Enter OpenOffice. Sun recently released their 2.0 version of it, and I downloaded it for a trial spin. It’s great, actually. Not only can it import and export Word documents almost flawlessly, it can also (new feature) handle WordPerfect files. After a couple hours of poking around in it, I’ve decided that its functionality is quite good– better than Word, for sure– and it might be a suitable replacement for WordPerfect.

The problem, really, is that WordPerfect doesn’t have a Linux version. I hate having to boot a Windows computer just so I can edit a contract or proposal or whatever. Long ago, WordPerfect 8 (I think) was converted to Linux but it sucked so bad it gave the good people of WordPerfect a bad name. We loyalists choose to simply forget it ever existed.

But now, if OpenOffice is really as good as it appears, I can run a native Linux version, a Windows version if for some reason I need to, and (oh yes) a Mac version. All of my documents will be cross-platform, and if I need to send something to a client or whatever I can dump it to (shudder) Word. Better yet, I can export it directly to PDF and avoid the use of the terribly expensive Adobe Acrobat suite.

Whee! There’s hope for us Linux guys…