'merica! f' yeah!

Thought of that Planet Money episode as soon as I saw the title. The TL;DL (too long; didn't listen) of the podcast is coins aren't continually circulated like paper bills. People throw them in jars and leave them there for months, years. So *more* coins than bills are actually needed in order to keep the normal supply circulating.

Amen. I discovered these by accident then bought a couple boxes last year from Amazon. I'm partial to the 0.4. I write small and these give the best, quickest lines of any pen I've used. By quickest meaning I don't have to slow down on rougher paper. Ink always lands on the paper nice and evenly.

Four years ago, single, bored, and lonely but financially ok.

Three years ago, met a great lady.

Two years ago, I proposed.

One year ago, we were married.

Now I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. Two stepsons, wonderful wife. Same great job as 4 years ago.

Life is good.

Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.

Was a so-so environment on HP-UX back in the day. Gloriously ugly.

As a spouse to a public school teacher and a volunteer in said underfunded schools, the schools would be better served if you sent them the $1 (or more) directly. Then all the other hands aren't skimming off the top.

We gave two Costco cubes of Kleenex as a Christmas gift to our school. You wouldn't believe the effusive thanks we got. Donate a box of printer paper and you'll be worshiped for a month.

(Yes, I bought a lottery ticket yesterday anyway. No, I still have to go to work on Monday.)

Maybe if we all wrote them a letter on the back of a US$10 bill they'd notice.

I "work" with color science. We have an X-Rite spectrophotometer just sitting around. Takes an artist's thinking, I suppose.

I ran into a paper a while back where the author captured spectrum of 100s of "natural" objects. Rocks, leaves, skin, etc etc. Made for an interesting chromaticity diagram.

I can't even remember when I signed up for /. Been a long long time.

I visit several times a day, nearly every day. Even when out in the boonies of the world (Yachats, OR), I found a way. Dial-up and Links were enough to get my slashdot fix.

I jokingly say I have a living will: if I don't check /. for six days consecutively, consider me brain dead and unplug the machines.

Thank you so much for being a huge part of my geek life these last many years. Best of luck in your future endeavor.

(bows head)

Used Kermit from a 286 running MS-DOS 3.3, dialing 300 baud to our college's VAX. Ahhh, memories.

Programming.

The convention in C/C++ programming is to put preprocessor symbols in all caps.

#define THIS_IS_A_PREPROCESSOR_SYMBOL 42

What he said! I love numpy+scipy+matplotlib. Makes my life soooo much easier.

> Heard the same arguments with the W2K-to-XP process

The only reason I upgraded my work machine(s) from Win2k to WinXP was WinXP rebooted faster.

Vista, Win7 don't run my tools any faster, don't reboot any faster. So I really don't have any reason to upgrade.

I upgraded Win2k -> WinXP -> Vista -> Win7 at home for games. But here at work, WinXP works the same as Win7.

USB is an astonishing pain in the @$$ compared to the simple TX/RX/GND of US232.

You have control interface, bulk in/out, a complete PHY with all its weirdness (DMA IO maybe?) and required code.

New boards with flaky USB have crashed my systems more time than I can count. I have to reboot USB hubs on a regular basis.

RS232 I've never had any trouble.

I'm now logging off the internet, forever.

I will never EVER again read anything simultaneously so true, so sad, and so funny.