jason thurber's blog

Not sure what’s wrong with me, but I thought this (ISO 9000) was really funny.

No, what our tribe needs is a clear mandate lest we be dragged into the sediments of Floridian illegitimacy and the concomitant self-induced terror attacks needed to superglue the crown to the pate de coup d’etat. We must drudge up from the toxic sludge of history the ancient traditions that echo dimly in the hollow skulls of our ancestors and resonate along the beer-soaked corridors of our medulla oblongadadavida.

(NOTE: You should really sound out that last word.) Reminds me of a bit of HST.

ExplodingDog.com

Found here

Thanks Alex, this (it’s flash animation) kicks ass! You really need to watch the whole thing to absorb the sheer quality of stupid goodness…

After an interminable wait (a year? more?) Old Man Murray is back online! An interesting side-note is that Slashdot’s link to the site has never been removed or modified… very up to the minute, that Slashdot.

Anyway, the first three paragraphs of this are probably the thing most worth reading on the site (it’s fairly offensive, if you don’t like it you’ll hate the rest of the site).

This Blog links to this story on the BBC’s website. It’s an interesting read.

This article starts out good and just gets better.

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed, goddamned fashion of shutting your goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happended again today.

Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys
Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
A letter to the gas company; February 12, 1891

Found it here.

I enjoyed this Editorial. I sort of wish it wasn’t about Macs (the religious aspect clouds the underlying content), but there you are.

These may be _really_ old, but I saw it for the first time this morning (via this Review):

-Sun made toasters…
The toast would burn often, but you could get a really good cuppa Java.

-Does DEC still make toasters?…
They made good toasters in the ’80s, didn’t they? – More of the same

Nothing like geek “humor” on a Saturday morning.

New Stephenson Book (for the uninitiated he’s the guy who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon)

From Doc Searls:

I’ve signed so many nondisclosure agreements in my life that I’m surprised my reflection still appears in mirrors.

Most of those agreements were required by a corporate paranoia about competitors – or anybody – “stealing” an idea. In most cases, however, there was no real cause for fear, because everybody qualified to steal the idea was 1) too busy trying working on their own ideas, and 2) possessed by the belief that their own ideas are, prima facie, better than everybody else’s ideas.

I used Fink (install linux packages on OSX) to install Subversion (a CVS improvement/alternative) on the 12in PowerBook on Wednesday. The process went quite smoothly, particularly when you consider that this is the only install/compile I’ve ever seen where the compile took 4 hours. In my experience something that takes 4 hours to compile doesn’t usually finish, but at the end of all that time I had a handful of subversion binaries that work on OS X. (Now, I’ve written 3000 line PL/SQL procedures that ran for 24 hours, but that’s a whole different ball game. My stored procs were simply free of any hint of optimization while I think Fink’s approach to creative de-optimization was to compile everything in the world… the darwin kernel, itself, do a bit of seti, encode some mp3’s, then compile svn 😉 … then discard 9.9/10th’s of it… but it did work, so I’m really not complaining.)

As an aside, Subversion may have jumped the gun a bit in shutting down their cvs repository while still requiring that you get an svn binary in order to bootstrap and get latest… bit of a chicken and the egg problem that could have been avoided by putting an old source tree on cvs? I say this only because it looks like they specifically shut down their cvs repository a few releases ago. I don’t know the whole story, but it looks like the client-side of the binaries totals to a grand 2mb zipped. That’s a lot of Fink compiling for a little app…

This afternoon I was back at the Fink site reading their docs to see if Fink was a simple method for creating OSX installers (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s not) and found this email exchange between the Fink and OpenOSX project owners. Some highlights:

Well, what you did can be roughly compared to downloading RedHat Linux from their ftp site, making some minor modifications (say, new boot disks and a streamlined installer), and then selling the result on CDs without mentioning RedHat in any way.

>Fink doesn’t install XDarwin or X-Windows for you, our product does.

Look again. Fink _can_ install XFree86 for you, even the months-old
version you’ve used. (So much for assumptions.)

Anyway, I thought it was a good read.

Reminds me of some of the fun Alex has been having recently.

After losing about 2 1/2 paragraphs of blog as a result of a badly timed Command-Q this afternoon I decided to follow Alex’s advice and author my blogs in Tasks. That involved a bit of installation-type fun on the PowerBook, but it’s all working now.

Save works so now I just click the blog button and…

Bought the D-Link “AirPlus Xtreme” Wireless Broadband Router from Fry’s (aka Outpost.com) last night for $99 (which becomes $79 after $20 mail-in rebate). This is an excellent price when you consider that the Airport Extreme base station from Apple costs around $250. The D-Link doesn’t offer as many features as the Airport (I’m thinking of a Printer connection, AppleTalk and built-in Modem), but if all you’re looking for is 802.11g this is definitely the way to go. D-Link is also the only manufacturer (other than Apple, obviously) to specifically support Macs (claims Windows, Mac and Linux compatibility on the box) they even sell this thing in the Apple retail stores.

Setup took all of 5 minutes and was accomplished via my 12in Powerbook over Airport. Pretty slick. I then copied a 700mb movie from my desktop to my laptop which took about 6 minutes. Not blindingly fast, but MUCH better than the old 802.11b Linksys box. Biggest positives: great intra-network connection speed and ease of setup. Biggest negative: doesn’t look as cool as the Airport Extreme Base Station and supposedly has trouble with some of the Dell internal wireless cards (sorry Scott).

Before I left for NZ I planned to sell my iPod and miss the price drop resulting from the new ones. Sadly I waited to long and must know the pain of selling too late…

I placed an ad on craigslist.org, we’ll see how it goes. There is some really funny stuff out there. I particularly liked this jewel (someone had already responded):

YOU:
-now are holding an OBSOLETE iPod music player in your hand because today the new iPod came out and the file format has switched from MP3 to AAC (mac only) to be compatible with the new Apple Music Store and the new iTunes 4.
-have an iPod that is at least 10gb harddrive and it must be a touch-wheel or scroll-wheel model from before April 18, 2003 without a dock connector or it’s from after April 18,2003. (I’m using a software update, must be correct model type)
-recognize that your iPod is pretty much worthless at this point so you need to unload it. Sorry to say it, trust me I just moved, I feel your pain. I had to sell my old iMac for $30. (sniff) I loved that thing. And even if you don’t view your beloved iPod as worthless, you…
-are going to buy the new iPod, maybe you already have, because you’re a super-cool hipster who must keep up with the progress of technology.
…a bit further down…
NOTE: sorry but I’m really not looking to pay more than $50 for either of these items; in fact I’d prefer less than that. You must recognize that it’s very tough to unload old equipment and be thankful to get even that much. Don’t mean to insult you, but trust me this market sucks and it’s near-impossible to get what an item’s really worth.

Hope this guy emails me, he seems cool.