Oh my god! Pink Hello Kitty Laptop Just the thing for people like Fi 🙂
The Decline of brands
Office Space
The first time I saw this movie it was about 3am and I had come home from the pub. Normally when I get home from the pub I fall asleep on the sofa (sad but true! what do you do?) but when this was on I could not fall asleep until I had seen y way through to th end. I’ve been telling people about it but noone else I know claims to have seen it.
So what do I do? I buy a copy of the DVD of course so I can inflict it on everyone I know. All I have to say is… you took my stapler and I want it back.
But for heaven’s sake don’t think that this corresponds to where I work. We don’t have cubicles, we don’t have to fill in arbitrary TPS reports and normally we only have to report to two bosses.
On the plus side we’re only expected to work from home at weekends, and that’s when we’ve got deadlines looming. Every morning I get into the office. There are about 120 emails in my inbox, another 120 mixed and matched amongst my other mailboxes. Trust me when I say I do not read all the email I get. I have been known to just tag whole reams of email as deleted if I’m not in the mood. This can cause problems – people damn me with faint praise and I miss it! I will say, for the record, that project related email gets the highest priority in the morning, followed by email that’s in my inbox that is either (a) from someone who I recognize or (b) contains a useful subject line. An example of a useless subject line is not having one, or please help – dear god people do you have any idea how mush utter shite I have to wade through every day?
Well that turned into an unintentional rant.
Katamari Damacy
Ever wonder what it would be like to roll around and collect everything you touched in one massive heap? Well that’s exactly the premise of Namco’s strange action game Katamari Damacy. In it, players assume the role of the Prince of the Cosmos as he undertakes a quest to right the wrongs of his father who accidentally knocked the stars out of the sky. The only way to fix it is to roll around the world and collect as many items as possible in one gigantic clump. Both a single player story mode and two-player battle feature are included for the romp, and gamers will be able to accumulate hundreds of different items of various shapes and sizes.
And for those of you who don’t have PS2’s we’ve got the utterly addictive TUMIKI Fighters
Of dead disks and mail
I got an emergency call from my housemate this afternoon – his computer had hanged and was not rebooting. it kept bluescreening. He is of course using windows.
The problem lies in his hard drive. He’s only had the pc for a few months but the hard disk has started failing. It took several hours of trying chkdsks and running the maxtor drive utility before it was accepted that the drive was on the way out.
The only problem is of course that he has all of his vital email on it. And he does not have a recent backup of any of it; it’s all on the one .pst file on the hard drive. Thank you lords of outlook.
I’m a bit paranoid about my data. I have about 3 copies of everything important, one on the laptop I wander around with, one on a remote server and another on the PC I have at home. Then I’ve an almost complete duplicate of everyting on an external USB hard drive. I think I’m about 80% insulated from failure. I know if I lose one of the devices I may lose a few days work, but at least I have a chance of recovering most of it.
Dell and AMD chips?
AnandTech
AMD has been surging for the past year and a half or so and enthusiasts are pretty hyped about their x86-64 architecture. But the fact that enthusiasts (and some major manufacturers) are taking the Athlon 64/Athlon FX/Opteron plunge, Dell is still one of the more prominent holdouts:
Dell’s stance on this is that they don’t see a strong demand from their customers and thus won’t consider AMD based PCs just yet. Dell’s CEO, Kevin Rollins, makes it very clear that Dell won’t be offer AMD based PCs anytime soon, by stating ‘We’re the most successful PC company on the planet and we don’t have AMD’.
Pretty strong words there from Dell’s CEO. He is right and Dell’s sales have been up for the third quarter, but good times don’t always last and relationships can be broken…
The real reason is, of course that AMD can’t manufacture the chips in enough quantity for Dell, which is a shame, I’d love if Dell started selling alternates to intel boxes
#define evil
It’s funny to see things defined as nothing, so they are ignored. Aparently for nice-reading code. This gives me some good ideas; you could do:
#define please #define also #define thanks #define let
then you can write code like:
also please let a = 1 thanks
Review of the w2100z workstation
The Review, with the best quote of the article being:
Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design.
Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?
The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.
The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether sleep(1) should take fractional second arguments, Poul-Henning Kamp < phk@FreeBSD.org> posted a long message entitled “A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass…”. The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.
“What is it about this bike shed?” Some of you have asked me.
It is a long story, or rather it is an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960s, called “Parkinson’s Law”, which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management.
[snip a bit of commentary on the book]
In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book.
Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.
Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.
A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.
In Denmark we call it “setting your fingerprint”. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say “There! I did that.” It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.
–Poul-Henning Kamp < phk@FreeBSD.org> on freebsd-hackers, October 2, 1999
Firefly – DVD collection
First impression – jeez what kind of lame ass makes you pick the episodes one by fscking one? Oh, yeah, that’s right it’s only a short series so they have to make it last as long as possible. I’m giving it to the end of the first DVD before I make a judgement, but so far, I’m not impressed.