iPhone haiku
August 7th, 2009
Archive
Archive for the ‘humor’ Category
Harper’s Index and Underwear
August 4th, 2009
Via Harper’s index:
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata revealed that for a month in space he wore the same underwear, which was flame-resistant, controlled odors, killed bacteria, and absorbed water. Wakata said that he also ate a number of curries. “My station crew members never complained,” he said, “so I think the experiment went fine.”
pushd, I hardly knew you
July 1st, 2009
From a tech/geeky point of view, this is embarrassing enough that I probably shouldn’t mention it. There is hope, however, that some other soul will benefit from my pain.
If you use the *nix (or OS X) command line, you probably know about pushd. It and its companion popd let you push and pop (duh!) a stack of directories so that you can jump from place A to place B and then quickly jump back. Cool.
The embarrassing part is the way in which I was using pushd. I thought that I had to push the directory I wanted to come back to before I went there. So I would:
> pushd .
> cd /someplace
> ... do stuff ...
> popd
This works, but it (obviously) looks sort of, well, dumb. Somehow, when I learned about pushd, I never learned that it acts just like the change directory (cd) command. I.e., that the argument to pushd was the directory to which you want to move and that it saves your current directory automatically. Thus, the correct (more efficient) way to use pushd is:
> pushd /someplace
> ... do stuff ...
> popd
It only eight fewer keystrokes but it’s conceptually much cleaner. The morass of the story: use pushd but use it correctly. Alternately, keep reading the manual, you’ll probably still learn something!
Seeing, Believing, not.
June 27th, 2009
[Too cool for words][wb]
“WASHINGTON, D.C. (ISNS) — The three best visual illusions in the world were chosen at a gathering last weekend of neuroscientists and psychologists at the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Florida.”
(via Dynamic Diagrams)
Be careful, be very, very careful
June 9th, 2009
Computers Can Send You to the ER, Study Shows – ABC News
“Emergency room visits from computer injuries increased sevenfold between 1994 and 2006, according to a report published June 9 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.”
so torqued up
March 31st, 2009
A conversation in pictures
It’s funny to me how people get so torqued up over IP stuff when nobody cares what they’re doing.
John Gruber or Merlin Mann
something to get really worried about…
January 20th, 2009
Dementia isn’t funny but there is something nicely reflexive about being worried about being worried…
BBC NEWS | Health | Staying calm ‘prevents dementia’
“Those who were calm and relaxed had a 50% lower risk of developing dementia during the six years of the study.”
winner: mailbox most likely to be unfulfilled
January 1st, 2009
Ummm, you think? Winner “Obvious Headline of the Day”
January 1st, 2009
From InformationWeek
Microsoft Scrambling To Thaw Zune Freeze
The incident is unlikely to help Microsoft gain ground against Apple’s iPod, which accounts for about three-quarters of the digital music player market.
That is what I’d call inspired reporting: deep, incisive, and way out on a limb. Go figure.