Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yesterday And Today

Yesterday: headache + nausea. Feh.

Today: better so far, trying not to get bogged down in stuff while still managing to avoid imminent disasters related to overdue utility bills.

Terminology

I ran across the sentence "[...] weblogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) [...]", and thought that sounded wrong. Isn't the blogosphere more of a noosystem than an ecosystem? Hmm. OTOH, does 'noosystem' convey the interconnectedness that I think the author wanted to emphasize by choosing the word 'ecosystem'? Perhaps 'noocology'?

Computer Perceptions

In my house I have machines running Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, BSD, and a couple versions of Linux ... and MacOS 8.6 and 9. Most of these are capable (if I move the speakers to them) of playing recorded music. But the job of organizing playlists and doing playback has gotten lodged in my head as "a Mac thing". I'm reluctant to do much music-library stuff under Windows, not because the tools are lacking there, but because "that's a Mac job".

Am I reacting to the differences between the tools I've seen on each platform, or am I just stuck in an obsolete headspace, a leftover from way back when the lists of things Macs and MS-DOS machines were good for overlapped less than they do now?

Testing Questions

I've got a big pile of SIMMs that were given to me by folks who upgraded (or found a forgotten stash in the back of a desk drawer), or that I've pulled out of older machines. In some cases I've been told exactly what they were when they were given to me; others are from mystery piles. So far the ways I have to identify these are to Google part numbers or to put them into a computer and fire it up to watch the POST count the RAM. Both of these methods are tedious and slow. Is there a better way? Some RAM-testing machine that'll tell me the size and error-detection setup while telling me whether the SIMM is functioning correctly? (Of course there's still the matter of guessing compatibility with motherboards that I've no manuals for ...)

Similarly sorting power supplies into known-good, marginal, and scrap piles would be useful. ISTR that one does not test a switching supply unloaded, so I think what I've done in the past was plug each supply into a motherboard, fire it up, and check the voltage on the various pins of an unused connector. But how close to the nominal voltage is close enough? I guess I really ought to be using a sillyscope¹ instead of a meter ...

A Dissenting Opinion

In TV Guide [ISSN 0039-8583; vol. 54, no. 45, 7-13 Nov. 2005, issue 2745, p. 37, "Is It Just Me?"], Rochell D. Thomas wrote, regarding a Hallowe'en M&Ms ad, "Candy should not conjure images of cannibalism, you know?"

Says her. Some of us like our chocolate ... dark. ;-)

Dust Bunnies In The Mailbox

I recently got around to installing CRM114 on the Linux box where I read mail at home, and fed it 18,000 old messages that I'd been meaning to get around to sorting. (This took several hours, so I had time to train it on the errors I found as it went.) Now I'm finding all sorts of interesting messages that I'd either completely overlooked before or had seen and put off dealing with then never found again. Every so often I go through the flagged-as-spam file looking for mistakenly-sorted messages and deleting a hundred or so spam messages at a shot. This afternoon I found email from an old friend who had written me in March to say, "Hi, long time no see." I'll probably be sending out a large number of "sorry it took me months and months to notice you'd written to me" messages as I work through the backlog.

I'm now down to 4,026 messages in the probably-spam box, 2,670 in mail inbox, and 3,121 that I've shovelled off to be archived, of the 18,000 I started with. This is a) since the start of 2004, b) not counting LJ-mail, mailing lists, or mail from automated services, c) not counting several thousand spams I deleted by hand over the past few months before installing CRM114. I wonder what I'd find if I told the filter to sort my archived mail from 2003 and earlier.

Whatever

[1] Yah, yah, I do of course mean an oscilloscope. Saying "sillyscope" makes me happy. You want me to be happy, right? Be glad I didn't twist the pronounciation to "osculascope" instead and make an obscure reference to measuring kisses.