Assorted Nuts
*** Yes, BJ has it right in her recent email. There's a disconnect in the image: the Slow Living Potentate of Goose Creek, sitting on the front porch, cradling an American Business Icon (The T42 Thinkpad) in his lap. But it's on its way, two to four weeks on backorder, direct from IBM. The Pentium M 1.7 and 1.86 chips are scarce, so I'll have to wait a while. But the phonecall to place the order was quick and painless. The rep tallied up the total cost and added "plus $96 tax."
Tax on an internet order? I yelped and balked, having already stepped over my budget. "Heck, I can get it other places without tax" I told her. "Wait just a minute" she said, and came back with "I can give you $100 off on this system." And I was pleased and impressed. So my first encounter with IBM has been a good one. Except I am still waiting for an email confirmation of this order and their customer care office is closed on weekends. Ah well.
*** This weekend was going to be the time I overhauled the tiller and walked it through the creek from the barn to the garden while the water was low. I would till the garden while the soil was moist but not wet. But the rains overnight put an end to that idea. There are some outside jobs I can do in-between showers. Unless, of course, that good fairy I keep hoping for has come along and cut, split and stacked the mountain of walnut at the top of the drive.
*** Newly-released images from the Hubble have been posted. In my next life, I wannabe an astronomer.
*** Wish I'd had this tiny tip over the past academic year during which more than once, a student has not been able to use a link because a long url got mangled in campus mail. TinyURL will take a long and complex web address and turn it into a short, easy one. Neat!
*** And did you realize (as I did NOT) that XP has its own compression program built in? If I keep taking uncompressed RAW image files, I'm going to need to squeeze as much space as I can on my hard drives until the guilt of my recent spend-binge has passed. Some day I may be following in Mr. Thompson's wake and have a TERABYTE hard drive or three stacked on my overflowing desktop. But not this VISA cycle.
Comments
Phred:
I'd be careful with XT's compression. Compression programs have little effect on graphics. Very little compression. They are also prone to data loss. Better tp go with affordable mass storage and reliable backup.
BJ is right about the irony. We wax endlessly about the simple life in the country but document it with digital cameras and report it on computers and the networks of technology. Yet it is that same technology that allows many of us to return to the country and still make a living by serving clients hundreds and thousands of miles away. I can talk day and night about getting back to nature and enjoying the basic pleasures of the country and then crawl into a computer-controlled hot tub with programmable heat and surround sound stereo. Ah, the complex irony of the simple life. :)
Posted by: Doug Thompson | April 30, 2005 8:42 AM
Fred, about that mountain of walnut. Are you really going to burn that? Walnut is mighty hard to come by, and awfully pretty to burn. You might find someone, like say, a woodcarver, who would love to get a hold of it.
FWIW,
Larry
Posted by: lghunsucker | April 30, 2005 9:22 AM
I love the images from HUbble; I want to be an astronomer too, and then an archeologist, and then an Egyptologist and then a volcanologist.
Posted by: kenju | April 30, 2005 6:16 PM
I'm wondering if the TinyURL.com will work for citations, which my 9th graders covered this past week. I told them to include the page URL in their source cards, and a few of the kids had to attach more than half a Word page of characters. We usually tell them to shrink it, but of course this defeats the purpose of the citation since the kids' readers can't find the cited page. The site looked promising.
I enjoyed the Hubble page. Thanks. Consider this for the next VISA cycle -- the camera the page describes that allows sharp detail even when its pictures are the size of billboards. I imagine my grandchild saying to his child, "That camera you have has more pixels than the best camera NASA could put in a telescope earlier this century." I imagine also a world in which the PB (personal billboard) is as common as the PC is now.
Posted by: Peter | May 1, 2005 12:09 AM