BoomFlag

Cool.

As of yesterday, the mainline Linux kernel will no longer support 386-class CPU’s. Here’s the commit note from the kernel source tree:

What’s funny is in early 1991, I actually had an Intel 80386 DX-33 processor in my computer. It was the successor to my trusty Apple IIgs, which was a great machine but ended up being problematic at college. For a little over $2,000 I bought what was known at the time as an “IBM PC”. It had the screaming fast 33Mhz processor with an amazing 4MB of system memory. Sweet!

I remember upgrading my 386 processor to an incredible 486 chip about two years later. I bought the CPU from my friend Chad for a bargain price of $450. I think I may have also upgraded my memory to 8MB for a few hundred dollars more. Then my computer was really humming along.

Of course I’m writing this on a computer that has a quad-core processor roughly 100 times faster with 4,000 times more memory. Ahh, progress.

Ahh, the annual white elephant gift exchange: a time-honored tradition during the Christmas season. The challenge of a good white elephant gift, of course, is to find something that’s obnoxious, but strangely attractive. It should be something that you don’t really want, but can’t really give away either.

After some thought, this year I decided to make a gift of five dollars in cold hard cash.

In pennies.

Taped together.

Zack and I carefully placed 500 pennies on a single strip of packing tape, then placed another strip of tape opposite. This sealed the pennies nicely, making them a real pain to extract. All told, the strip was around thirty feet long. I rolled it into a nice spool and placed it in a box.

Disclaimer: this idea isn’t actually all that new. Back in high school I owed my friend Bech around ten dollars after a bad night at poker, so I took 200 nickels and put them inside a strip of duct tape in the same fashion as this. Not to be outdone by my cleverness, Bech paid off later poker debts by tearing off pieces of the tape: if he owed fifty cents, he’d count off ten nickels’ worth of duct tape and hand over that part. Nice.

I just sent an email to a client’s agency. There was a 1.8MB zip file attached to it, and the woman wrote back to say the message had failed because her mailbox was over quota.

Wow, companies still have email quotas? In an age where storage costs 8 cents per gigabyte, it’s hard to believe there are system administrators who limit the mailboxes of employees like this.

Two SAAS systems that I hate: Salesforce and Basecamp. Both of them are wildly popular and seem to be used by people and companies everywhere. Salesforce is so sluggish it makes me feel like I’m wading through molasses as I attempt to do something simple like search for and edit a single contact record. And today I’m reminded again of why Basecamp is on my short list. I’m typing a comment for a client who uses the system, and in the comment box I can’t type the number 6 or the letter X. Seriously.

I’m trying to write about a “1651px JPEG image” and it comes out as “151p JPEG image”. It’s not my keyboard. In the end, I had to write my comment in a text editor and then cut and paste it into the Basecamp widget. Wow.

I laughed out loud.

This is a story about a toe. Well, two toes.

Back in June, I was playing ultimate and wearing shoes. It was probably one of perhaps three times all summer I wore shoes to play… most of the time I’m barefoot, and I only get out the old cleats when the ground is too wet and slick, or if it’s just been aerated and those pesky chunks of sod are everywhere. In any case, I made a particularly sharp cut and hurt the toenail on my right big toe. It was pretty ugly after the game: most of the nail was black with blood beneath it.

For the past six months, that crusty blood has remained beneath the nail. There was really nothing to be done about it. It didn’t really hurt, but it looked kind of nasty. Well, earlier this week I noticed it looked a little different, and a bit of poking and prodding revealed that the nail was actually separated. A second nail had grown beneath it. I pulled off the old crusty top one, leaving a rather tender under-nail. Over the next few months I imagine everything will grow out and be fine again. This happened a few years ago as well– my right big toe takes a beating, apparently.

Today I was playing ultimate and since it’s fairly chilly (mid-40’s) the ground is getting cold and hard. So I put on cleats, ran around, made a cut, and… hurt my left big toe. Sure enough, there’s blood under the nail now. Sigh. I’m guessing it’ll linger for a few months while a second nail grows, and in the spring I’ll be able to yank the top layer.

I share this story not because I want to be gross, but rather because I find it amusing that people always ask me why I play barefoot. Isn’t it dangerous? Don’t people stomp on your foot? Can you really move and cut as well as you could with cleats? Well, my experience is that wearing shoes is actually more dangerous to my poor toes. I don’t get hurt when I’m barefoot, although I occasionally take a painful cleat to the top of my foot.

Bare feet rock.

Looking for new developers at Zing is a bit of a comical adventure at times. Today I received my first-ever image resume. Here’s what the candidate wrote:

And the sweet resume, complete with grammar and spelling errors:

I can’t help but wonder if these sorts of people ever score an interview. I mean, who teaches this sort of approach when applying for a job?

December 4, sunny and almost 60 degrees. What a gorgeous day for ultimate. Too bad I’ve missed the past few weeks due to meetings and stuff… I’m woefully out of shape. Why is it that if you don’t exercise for two weeks you end up tired and flabby? Sheesh.

Zing built a Facebook app for one of our clients, White Wave. It’s a recipe contest for Silk soymilk, and people are encouraged to submit their own recipes using Silk products. The winners receive a year of Silk or something, so it’s pretty serious. It’s been running for a couple of weeks, and we have a lot of fairly nice entries. And then we have Dean W.

This is awesome for three reasons:

1) It has nothing whatsoever to do with Silk. Bravo for entering a contest and not following the rules.

2) It involves bacon.

3) Hey, Statue of Liberty costume.