soapbox

It’s raining here in Maryland again which wouldn’t be an issue if my lawn wasn’t in serious need of a mow. It was semi-torrentially raining last weekend too. I’m actually wondering if I’m going to have to do a quick cut really long and then come back and cut it again mid-week at the right height just so I don’t take off too much at once.

I should have mowed after work yesterday when it was marginally dry. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a shower right now and the prospect of getting sweaty didn’t seem like fun.

It looks like it’ll be partially sunny on Sunday. Of course, they’re still predicting heavy rain for tomorrow, which happens to be the Preakness.

A post in which our hero basically bitches at length about the fact that he’s not made of money and the fact that backups are incredibly important.
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A recent quote from The Superficial:

“… It was sort of magical, you know? Like seeing the Aurora Borealis. Or, no, wait, that’s bush league. I got it: A really awesome chicken wing shaped like Abe Lincoln that you try to tip a stripper with. Swish! Count it! Northern Lights, you just got served.”

- The Superficial

It hurts having my research be so degraded… Then again, maybe the rest of the post makes up for it.

A london man was fined 225 quid and (more importantly) given a criminal record for having a rubbish bin (big wheeled trash can) full enough that the lid wouldn’t quite shut.  Keeping in mind that things are only collected every two weeks, and… meh, can’t be bothered to make a good post.  Read the whole nonsense yourself.

Last week Whitehaven magistrates convicted him in his absence of “over-filling the receptacle used to dispose of waste” - a criminal offence.

Yeesh.

(1) a 5.4 earthquake in southern ill. wow.  In other news, a recent study reported that there is a 99% chance of a 6.7 quake in CA in the next 30 years.  Given Californian’s laziness, this was met with derision instead of preparedness.  (For those unfamiliar with decade-math, a 6.7 is 20 times stronger than a 5.4.)

(2) racist cubbies - not cool. maybe they can blame the earthquake for disrupting their sense of right and wrong?

(3) Red Sox pitchers are cheaters!  clearly they have taken some weird potion to turn themselves into Mr. Stretch.

Last night I was backing up my computers and I came to a realization that any hard drive smaller than 500 GB is a waste. I have a collection of cute little bus-powered 20, 30, and 60 GB portable drives that are too small to back up any of my computers. Even the 200 GB drive that I bought when I was finishing writing my thesis is now too small to back up all the pictures that I have.

Even worse, if I want to do fancy Time Machine backups using the features in MacOS X 10.5, I really need 3 times the space of the hard drive being backed up just to ensure that incremental backups are kept well into the future. For my iMac, this means that I need to get a 1 TB drive.

Luckily, those drives are for sale now and don’t actually cost any more than the 200 GB drive did 2 years ago.

Not to sound like some grumpy old man, but RFID just scares me.   It just seems so vulnerable to hacking while simultaneously too convenient for Big Brother-style monitoring; not a combo I like.  (Then again, I guess it’s better for it to be easily hackable in that case, beats the alternative.)  And plus, you can get the animal rates for pay-access public beaches!

[RFID implant]

Anyway, it’s probably silly, but there’s no way I’m getting a speedpass anytime soon.