Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Our breasts are not criminal." -- Liz Book

• What LiveJournal is doing about comment-spam (announcement in lj_biz 2004-03-09)
• Sketching the History of Hypercomplex Numbers, a timeline listing the relevant mathematical developments between 665 CE and 1957 CE. (Found in a comment tacit left in ame_chan's journal.) Apparently coffee catching on in Europe was one of the important steps. (Hmm ... just coincidence that both coffee and al-gebra come from the same part of the world?)
• New lens design mimics human eye, can adjust its focal length from one extreme of its range to the other in ten milliseconds, and has no mechanical moving parts. It's a fluid lens, shaped electrically.
• How To Tell If You're American: "Not long ago, one of those earnest-freshman puppydogs on the Net declared that there was 'no such thing as American culture.' Right. Fish have also been known to doubt the existence of water. The following is a first crack at an ostensive definition of 'American culture'-- things shared by the vast majority (let's say 90%) of native-born Americans. Many of these won't sound 'cultural' at all to Americans; they'll sound like just descriptions of the way things are. But each one of them would be contested in one or more non-American cultures." The page includes links to similar summaries for various other cultures, and a site that attempts to compare several cultures in table form.
• Where are we going?
  Planet Ten!
  When are we going there?
  Real soon!
  But we might have to rewrite that dialogue to say "Sedna" instead of "Planet Ten". (New planet discovered, ten billion km (uh, 10 Tm?) from Sol.)
• Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace (PDF) (There's an HTML abstract, but as expected it amounts to little more than a teaser.) This is the study that a couple of articles elsewhere have referred to, which points out that the most popular blogs are often not the ones with the most original information: "Whereas traditional ranking strategies rely primarily on explicit link structure, iRank successfully folds in implicit routes of transmission to find blogs that are at the source of information. Such, 'patient zero' blogs are not always the highly connected, but are nonetheless critical in spreading information." [Edit: added two related links in comment below.]
• amberfox reposted a metaquotes entry quoting an entry by elfgirl, in which we find out what happens when someone endorses a check using an ancient Sumerian royal title instead of his name. Short. Amazing. Funny.
• Fresh controversy has broken out over the cause of the Black Death (NewScientist.com) "For a century the blame has rested with the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rats and fleas. But the most ambitious effort yet to find traces of Yersinia in the remains of Black Death victims has failed, and the researchers involved argue that a previous study that did report finding Yersinia was flawed." One group thinks the Black Death might actually have been a haemorrhagic virus similar to ebola.
• I haven't tried this yet, but it looks interesting: What The Font: "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!"
• A Wall Street Journal article explaining why we can't get rid of spam. It's because of people like Orlando Soto. "Spammers say they typically need just one buyer per 10,000 spam messages to break even. [...] If this particular solicitation was typical, spam experts say, the spammer probably sent it to about five million people with a commission of about 30%. If 500 buyers averaged spending what Mr. Soto spent on the vitamins, the spammer would bring in about $15,000 in revenue from the mailing." 8% of respondents to a survey admitted to buying products via spam.

Today was a soldering-iron day. I'd been putting this off.

Finally got a replacement power supply fan installed in tipton, my main Linux box. Booted it up and it couldn't mount some important filesystems. So I spent the next couple of hours beating my head against the keyboard in frustration trying to get richards, the file server, to start serving NFS again -- I'm not sure when it stopped. I still need to get rupaul, the Win95 box to boot -- I was thinking that I could do without it for a while if I get either the donated machine that arrived a little while ago or the donated machine due to arrive tomorrow configured to be a Faster Spiffier Linux machine / X server / print server / OpenOffice beast ... and then I realized that I'm depending on Word Perfect for a bunch of stuff, so I need to get it working again anyhow or wrestle with conversions and fine-tuning page layouts and such. Whee. Recently-arrived machine needs a new fan (I was given two; I'll see whether the one that didn't fit in tipton will work in this machine).

Need to figure out how to fit a third monitor on my desk, obtain cables for KVM switch, or convince myself that using Win95 over VNC isn't going to drive me batty long-term. (That third option is not out of the question.) Also need to decide whether to transplant rupaul's drives into a faster machine (one of the donated ones) instead of leaving a more recent OS on the one about to arrive or installing a recent Linux on the recently-arrived one ... how hard will it be to tweak the registry under Win98 to accept all the software currently installed under Win95 if I just transplant the drive with the important software on it? Then there's the idea of transplaning the drives from boygeorge, the NT machine, into one of the faster boxes.

Too bad I can't afford a copy of VMware. Then I wouldn't have to feel silly about running an older OS on a box that'd be happy running a newer one -- I could just make the old OS and all its installed software a guest OS in a virtual machine. Eventually, eventually ...

Slowly machines get upgraded. Maybe soon the file server can get more suitable hardware.

But I never got my nap and now I'm grumpytired and I have to brave rush hour traffic all the way out to Frederick. At least playing a gig ought to cheer me up a bit.

Home from Frederick. Exhausted. Going to scoop litter box, take out trash, and crash. Gig went well. Appreciative audience. Did I mention exhausted? Ran into snow on the way out, right at the same time as I hit a big traffic backup on I70. The snow lasted ten or twelve miles longer than the backup did. Hit more snow on the way home as I got onto the Baltimore beltway. It lasted until I got home. (It's probably still falling.) The air and the ground are both too warm for any accumulation (earlier and now), but it was kind of pretty in my headlights. Not sure how cold it's supposed to get tonight or how long it's supposed to keep snowing.

Washing my hands after dealing with cat box and trash, I noticed spots that stung from the soap. Looking down, I see where I've bled a little at the base of the nail on two fingers. This means that the last time I had my nails done I got them a millimeter or half a millimeter too short. Whoops. I noticed something felt different when I was playing, but at the time I didn't notice what.

Not as bad as the time Ray, my second roommate, the paranoid one borrowed my guitar while we were someplace away from our dorm room, and neither of us had guitar picks handy -- he nearly always used a pick, I almost never did; so he didn't have the nails for it already. He didn't notice when he bled either, and he actually left a fine spatter of blood flecks all over my pickguard. He also didn't stop when we pointed it out to him. This tonight is just barely enough to notice; I've never gone to Ray's extreme, but I've done worse than tonight's damage.

Half a millimeter. Feh. I was playing louder tonight than I did on Saturday, I guess. My fingers being warm enough to move properly probably has something to do with that. And the fact that we were unamplified tonight. *shrug* Annoying, but to put it in perspective, it'll be completely healed in thirty or forty hours, and too little to particularly notice a lot sooner than that. It's just the awareness of an error that annoys me.