Category: General

I was stumbling through a big pile of mail this morning and wanted to search for all messages whose subject did not contain a certain keyword. It turns out you can do some decent searching in Mail.

Straight from the Help:

When you search entire messages, you can refine your search by using logical symbols to represent “and” (&), “or” ( | ), “not” ( ! ), and parentheses. For example:

“cat & dog” finds messages containing both “cat” and “dog”

“cat | dog” finds messages containing either “cat” or “dog”

“cat ! dog” finds messages containing “cat” but not “dog”

“cat & (dog | newt)” finds messages containing both “cat” and “dog” and messages containing both “cat” and “newt”

On a black board in the math tutorial room someone wrote:

“For Paternity Test Results call 1-800-RUMYDAD. www.rumydad.com”

Below it, someone else wrote:

“Translation: Is your family Pareto Optimal? Prune your family game tree at www.rumydad.com”

For some reason, this amused me.

Must be high blood sugar levels, or something.

I realize that SCSI is pretty much dead. It makes me cry, as a whole number of my shiny Sun systems, like dara, an Enterprise 4000 server, all take SCSI.

If, for some reason one still wants to hook up an IDE/ATAPI DVD burner or somesuch to a SCSI bus, comrades from the field are recommending Acard Technology AEC-7720U SCSI to IDE bridgeboard.

link, which might die whenever Acard folks decide to change format of their site).

At 69 USD per board, somewhat costly.

As I’ve mentioned before, I also own a Promise UltraTrak TX8, which is an IDE RAID tower with SCSI interface to the host system.

So I wonder if there is a dongle or somesuch that can convert SCSI to firewire, so I could start using my 800 gig storage array with an iBook 🙂

Any suggestions?

Looking for a book of poetry (I can imagine surprized groans now. Poetry? What poetry? stany can read?)
Specifically this one

Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works by Anatoly Liberman (Editor)

It is an out of print book of poetry translations of Michail Lermontov :

I write to you and truly wonder:
What in the world has made me write?
For you, I’ve gone away and under
And must have forfeited this right.
You know that, though we are asunder,
Your image was too much to lose.
Of course you do! — Such boring news…

Between attacks and other dangers
We live in God-forsaken holes.
But do you care? Our souls are strangers:
Indeed, the normal case for souls.
[…]
(my source only quotes the beginning of this piece. Sorry)

So, here is a funny thing. If I search for this book on Amazon US site, I get two listings for a used book, one for 30$, one for 135$. If I look for it on Amazon Canada site, I get one used book for 284.55 CAD.

Global economy. Go figure.

Oh, and author of the book, Anatoly Liberman, contributes to an Oxford University Press Blog.

While doing a mock midterm I had a realization.

It’s March already.

That means new recurring expenses – cell phone, phone, real estate taxes, hydro, electricity, you name it. But that also means that we survived one more winter, scarred, jaded, yet alive.

Snow will start melting. Buds will start opening, and flowers will start blooming. Birds will come back.

Something ends, and something begins….

I am looking forward to the future.

P.S. And I believe that those of you who haven’t read Andrzej Sapkowski‘s novels, do miss out.

It seems that Richard Ostrofsky published a book.

Subject seems sufficiently interesting that maybe I should stop by his bookstore on Sunnyside, look at the book, and maybe even buy it.

Of course right now my interest is more due to attempt to “understand” Gödel’s completeness (Everything that is ‘true’ can be logically ‘proven’, and everything that can be logically ‘proven’ is ‘true’.) and incompleteness (in any description of ‘reality’ it is possible to construct some statement that is ‘true’ in the context of reality, yet can’t be proven) theorems. Of course Kurt Gödel went insane. I, on the other hand, am doing this as part of MATH 4802 course at Carletonia.

I am generally not a big fan of LiveJournal – it is way too annoying to use if one is not a member of LJ, and vast majority of folks using LJ tend to be not the folks whose posts I want to read. There are folks who throw hissy fits over being “friended” or “defriended”, and some of the users seem to have nothing more productive to say then the fact that they drank alot and then threw up. Reading people’s comments on LJ is about as essential as reading comments on slashdot – vast majority is drivel.

Occasionally there are great exceptions to the above that sadly just underscore the general mediocrity of interweb in general and LJ specifically. I came upon travelogue of stickgirl who writes of her experiences in Cambodia, while touring it on a dirt bike for a week.

She signed up with Hidden Cambodia Adventure Tours in Siem Reap and went on a 6 day tour of Cambodia country side on dirt bike, accompanied with two local (English speaking) guides. In process, she took tons of great photos, and her background explanations are fascinating and captivating read.

So, without firther ado, some (direct) links:

Day 1 – Arrival in Siem Reap

Day 2 – Pol Pot and Pot Holes

Day 3– Monkeys and Mountains

Day 4 – The Eating Kind

Day 5 – I haven’t met anyone who woted for him

Day 6 – End of the Road

Day 7 – Temples, Monkeys and Monks

Day 8 – Big Lake, Big Birds, Big City

Days 9-10

What do you know about Cambodia? Were you to ask me this question yesterday, I’d say that not much: It was a colony, it was called Kampuchea at one point (I think the switchover happened around 1989 as I have stamps labeled Kampuchea from around then), there was a civil war between monarchists and Pop Pot lead Khmer Rouge, and that’s about it…

What do I know now? Well, carrying pigs on motorcycles seems to be a Cambodian national sport, with bonus points for squeals being heard way in advance of a rider. Blunt weapons are a better option when one needs to kill off 20 – 25% of the population, as bullets are expensive. 7th century temples are sadly neglected, and big trees can grow right over them (Actually that is kind of creepy. There were some shots similar to this in “Baraka“). I’ve actually ate snake in the warmer climates many moons ago (This was not in a chinese or french restorant, and it probably want’s prepared “properly”, but with all the vertibrae it resembled chicken or goose neck), so I now wonder which snakes are not “the eating kind”.

BTW, CMAC is Cambodian Mine Action Center (one of the photos on Day 3). “This minefield is funded by French Government”

I were curious what kind of gear one takes with him/her on a tour like that. Turned out that she took five 1 gig CF cards and 4 sets of batteries.

P.S. stickgirl did a 3 week trip to africa in 2004, and also posted tons of photos and apropriate descriptions. Finding them using LJ interface is left as an excercise for the gentle reader (not sure if reader will be gentle by the time s/he is done)

In previous post I gave a link to David Gerrold’s The Martian Child.

The Martian Child is supposed to be light fiction. In other words, most of the elements in it are supposed to be real. So when I’ve read in that story a reference to Jeff Duntemann, a Hugo award nominee turned programming book writer, I got curious, and googled.

The results didn’t disappoint.

Reading STORMY will take you at most 3 minutes, yet I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I did.