Dirac Angestun Gesept

In many cases, you can tell whether someone of a particular age group was a watcher of US children’s television shows just by saying a word or two. “Conjunction” is a good marker to spot those who watched Schoolhouse Rock, for example.

Another favorite is “The Year Without a Santa Claus”, by Rankin-Bass Productions. Of course, nobody remembers it by that name…but if you say “Heat-Miser” or “Snow-Miser” they’ll recognize it.

“But so what?” you may ask. “This sounds like random pointless nostalgia to me.” Well, yes, but if you’ve been reading Slashdot or Groklaw lately, you know that there’s a new Miser in town.

Yep, Darl McBride is the SCO-Miser!

Here, revealed for the first time, is his theme song. Read more about SCO Miser »

The Guardian has a lovely little story of why working in retail, particularly computer retail, can be less boring than you’d think.

In Computer’s chips turn into potatoes, we see:

Staff at a department store in the German city of Kaiserslautern called detectives after an angry customer tried to return a computer stuffed with potatoes to the shop twice on the same day.

and my favorite quote, from one of the techs at another computer store:

“If they are running for a long time they get hot and in theory it would be possible to cook a potato in a computer, but who would try that?”

Who indeed?

Perhaps this guy has some insights.

UPDATE 2003-01-14 14:40 -0500: CNN also has the story but their shorter version doesn’t have the fun quotes from Roman Zukoan.

Making Light has an interesting article on the correlation of knitting with geekdom. Of the 19 people in my department at work, there are five who knit; I can definitely see the correlation.

The Boston Globe has an article on the role of medical evacuation helicopters in Iraq. The medevac or “DUSTOFF” crews get to fly around Iraq with nice big red crosses on their unarmed UH-60s, which some folks on the ground seem to take as aiming marks and not the Geneva Convention protection they’re supposed to be.

As the son of a retired DUSTOFF pilot, and brother of an active-duty DUSTOFF pilot, I want to take a moment to remember those DUSTOFF crews who have been killed in action over the past 40 years, from Major Charles Kelly to Spec. Michael A. Diraimondo, Spec. Christopher A. Golby, Chief Warrant Officer Philip A. Johnson Jr., and Chief Warrant Officer Ian D. Manuel, of the 571st Medical Detachment (Air Ambulance), as well as their patients.

Mike Kozlowski writes in Unmistakable Marks (via Electrolite):

I’ve never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here.

Gee, I guess that DVD that my wife and I gave to her parents, made from a video transfer of their old family 8mm movies, must have been an illusion.

After all, nobody really uses iMovie and iDVD; we must not have paid the $50 for the last iLife box just to get the iDVD upgrade.

I’m not particularly musical (my last music “production” was playing cello in 6th grade), but I’ll certainly play with GarageBand when it ships. Sure, I might produce the musical equivalent of one of those old Mac-printed newsletters that used the “San Francisco” font, but I might not….

UPDATE 2004-01-11 02:02: Mike Kozlowski has updated his comments (pointing both to the Electrolite post and this as well) and is now more clearly saying that he thinks the “content creation” focus is sapping energy they could be using for more “integration of the computer with digital media devices” (a list which includes cell phones and PDAs, which are nicely supported by iSync; cameras, handled by iPhoto; and iPods, handled by iTunes. The only devices on his list not already having an iApp are TVs and stereos…but my PowerBook already has audio and S-Video out!).

Me, I actually remember the MacTV and the Performa-with-a-tuner-card. Only students in cramped dorm rooms, or my gadget-crazy father, ever bothered watching TV on them. (Or perhaps I’m just “permitted to play the odds here”, to quote Kozlowski.)

Steve Wozniak’s story of his secret service interrogation (spotted from a Slashdot comment) reminded me of the joys of $2 bills (and Sacajawea dollar coins, for that matter), including the infamous Taco Bell story.

It’s time to get another roll of dollar coins, I think.

UPDATE 2004-02-16 01:40: the entry title, which seems to generate a fair number of Google hits, is from the movie Better Off Dead.

The surprise British best-seller by Lynne Truss is, quite simply, the punctuation pedant’s delight. It (humorously) covers such topics as the history of the Apostropher Royal; the misuse of the comma (particularly in the titular joke); the wonders of the semicolon, which was invented by Aldus Manutius the Elder; and, of course, the misplaced comma that was left in the British government’s “dodgy dossier” on Iraq.

Emerald City did a nice review of the book as well; if you buy it, use their referral link, perhaps.

(The US edition is reported to be due in April.)