Having made a snide comment or two about engineers earlier, I feel like I should relate a positive experience today: Over the Christmas break, there was a power outage in my lab. Not an accidental outage, but a planned outage that nobody told me about– a contractor cut the breakers in order to do some… Continue reading What I Love About Engineers
Category: Technology
Hey to Mike Kozlowski
1) Kate and I went to a New Year’s party at the home of a colleague in Math, whose kids got a Wii for Christmas. We spent a while playing with it, and it’s way more interesting than any other gaming system I’ve seen in years. 2) Windows Vista sucks ass. Evidence: It is incapable… Continue reading Hey to Mike Kozlowski
No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
I love getting toys for Christmas: Chateau Steelypips is now GPS-enabled. That’s from our drive home last night (GIMPed to within an inch of its life, because the light level was really low)– bonus points for anyone who can identify where it was taken. It’s a Garmin c340, for those who want specs with their… Continue reading No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
Google Passeth All Understanding
As previously mentioned, I plan to end the book with a chapter on quantum flim-flam. As research for this, I’ve been looking at kook sites on the web, and Googled “quantum healing,” which turns up all manner of gibberish from Deepak Chopra. It also includes a helpful little item at the bottom of the page:… Continue reading Google Passeth All Understanding
Idle Consumer Electronics Question
Why does my new car stereo (with spiffy direct iPod connection) come with a remote control? Just where do they think I’m going to go?
Tree of SCIENCE!!! #4
Here’s where things on the Tree of SCIENCE!!! start to get more interesting, and somewhat more obscure: Yes, that’s a small wooden Christmas tree ornament hanging on our full-size Christmas tree. What’s this have to do with SCIENCE!!!? Well, obviously, it represents recursion.
In Which I Am Thwarted by Computers
1) I downloaded the demo version of Corel’s Grafigo program, which a colleague really likes on his tablet, and earlier this week, I spent a short time playing around with it. A very short time, because there are controls on the top menu bar that simply disappear when you have the tablet in portrait mode–… Continue reading In Which I Am Thwarted by Computers
My New Tablet PC
Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed “helpiness” (in analogy with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”) namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don’t want to hear about how I really should’ve bought a Mac, or ought to be running Linux,… Continue reading My New Tablet PC
Tablet PC Software Query
As mentioned a while back, I recently obtained a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which I’ve been playing around with a bunch. I like it quite a bit– the handwriting recognition is a whole lot better than the older Toshiba model I used for a while last year, and the interface works a little more… Continue reading Tablet PC Software Query
Social Networks Do the Darnedest Things
I’m currently getting trounced in Scrabble on Facebook, though I’m playing the game under protest: How can they possibly say that “ZA,” “KA,” and “AE” are English words, but “KABOOM” is not? The stupid thing is rigged. Anyway, I’ve been playing around with this social network business for a little while now, and it’s kind… Continue reading Social Networks Do the Darnedest Things