Yeah, even geeks have to pay lip service to this day. Go ahead: don't be shy. Kiss your MacMini today.

I don't know if my first attempt to "spread Firefox" last night was successful. I managed to at least convince a co-worker to try out Firefox. My first experience as a Firefox evangelist tells me that the browser's features are pretty much non-obvious to people whose browsing experience has largely been limited to Redmond's finest. The target platform was Mac OSX, which comes with the Safari browser, which my co-worker described as slow. I tried to highlight what I felt were Firefox's killer fea

I'm suffering from what I sometimes think are just the psychomatic symptoms of hypochondria. But the thing is, I'm not sure, and that feeds the hypochondria. Maybe I just need a visit to the doctor. But who wants to go to the doctor for some vague complaint? What I need is the more comprehensive equivalent of, say, the off-the-shelf pregnancy test kit, something that could diagnose whatever ailment or non-ailment I'm feeling with a 90% or better success rate. Color blue: you're OK. Color red: du

A friend has decided to exchange her old cellphone for a newer one with a camera. Years ago I would have thought it the stuff of science fiction for a device not much larger than a pager to allow you to receive short messages (the pager's forte), call your friends, calculate your groceries, schedule your appointments, play games and shoot your own porn clips. I'm now convinced that the most stunning -- if not the greatest -- advances in technology will be in the field of small consumer electroni

I'm terribly unimpressed by iTunes. My chief complaint is the way iTunes seem to treat music files from different sources like they were all in one place. I must confess I haven't used the program that much. But from the praises I've read from satisfied users, it seems that my "beef" against the program is the desired behavior, a "feature." I want to know that the music I'm hearing is stored in /media/music/foo or in /media/cdrom1 and not say at http://foo.com

Why is it that the greatest advances in technology are in the fields of entertainment? I'll be visiting the dentist RSN and yet I still have that same childhood fear of the drill. I've long tossed out the casette tape players and Ataris of my youth. But for something as essential as good teeth, you still have to endure the wonders of 19th century medicine. A casual Google search reveals that the dental drill was invented anywhere from -- gasp! -- 1790 to 1872.

I don't know how true the rumors are, but I'm now kind of ambivalent over the Hubble retirement plan. It seemed like a good thing to free up cash for the space fan's holy grail, a crewed mission to Mars. But if they can't risk what seems like a routine mission in low earth orbit, how likely is it that in the end -- after the press announcements and the Discovery documentaries -- the NASA

I finally had the chance to use Amazon. I downloaded a couple of free mp3s. I needed to register and supply an email address. But that's just what my two dozen email addresses are for. I guess I now have to throw one away.

06:21:48 up 35 days, 8:19, 7 users, load average: 0.33, 0.84, 0.58

I can already see my future.

I see myself living, as I do now, onthe nth floor of a tall building. I see myself staring out of the window at other tall buildings. The horizon is filled with tall buildings. Tall buildings are the horizon. Unimpressed by the sight, I turn from the window and walk the few meters to one of the room's few pieces of furniture, my work table. On the table is a sheet of what looks like frosted glass, rising from its base at a 45-degree angle.

I've started to encode my collection of classical music CDs into Flac format. I will archive the flac files onto cheap DVD+R media with the goal of duplicating the DVDs after, say, a year, i.e. making a backup of the backups to avoid the consequences of optical disk rot. I don't have any short-term plans of giving away the Flac files (the physical equivalent, I guess, of filesharing). I plan to pass the files on to my descendants (or maybe some close relative or friend who will promise to act as

I find myself wondering what is lost in writing without hard copies. In our digital age, it's quite possible for a manuscript never to see the paper stage. When I print, say, a story and blue-pencil it, I see the revisions as something like the brush strokes on a painting -- not that I'm necessarily a good painter. Sure there are word processing programs that let you see concurrent versions of your manuscript. But none of them can yet capture the desperation of a scribbled note on the margin of

I'm writing this while waiting for the Sun registration 'bot to finish my registration. I need to fill in some forms in order to get to the download page for the Solaris 10 installer CD's. The registration page is taking some time to load because I'm on dialup and I have a background wget process targeted at a site that hosts free Classical music mp3s. I clicked thru the Sun click-thru license without reading. What you don't know can't possibly hurt you.