I'm certain that legal changes-of-name aren't public records...
Depends on the jurisdiction. I changed my name a long time ago, and at the
time you had to run a legal
ad in the newspaper as part of your application. Since mine was of the form "I, boyname
am applying to change my name to girlname...", it was fairly obvious what was going on. I got some weird
phone calls, since boyname was in the phone book. Some of them were looking for advice on doing
what I was in the midst of doing.
This was long before the Internet in its present form, so boyname doesn't come up in Google at all. Nor
does girlname plus any of the search terms one might use, though girlname comes up related
to other things I've messed with, as well as references to other women with the same name as me.
That was certainly the case for me. I spent the first 20-odd years of my life pretending
to be somebody I wasn't.
I hit the wall when I was 21, and just couldn't do it any more.
My choice was clear: transition, or suicide. I'm still here, so you know what I chose.
I like being myself. And, yes, I like being a girl. Which is what I should have been all along, but somebody screwed up on the assembly
line and put a girl's brain in a boy's body...:-(
Since I couldn't get one locally, I bought an ATSC converter at Radio Shack in Portland, Oregon. Hooked it up to an antenna when I got home, scanned, got a bunch of local stations. All but a couple of the local Vancouver stations are on digital now, and I get three stations from Bellingham, Washington. An independent (KVOS), a home shopping channel (KBCB) and a repeater of a PBS station (K24IC, repeating KBTC, Tacoma, PBS and MHz Worldview).
The system works as advertised. I get DVD quality video with many channels in HD, though my el cheapo POS converter dumbs everything down to 480i NTSC.
Everybody knows now that dead air when you answer == telemarketer.
The ones that drive me nuts are the robodialers that hang up as soon as you answer.
At least if there is somebody there I can make all sorts of inappropriate comments
to them. Asking guys what colour their panties are is usually effective.
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals.
Some words are spelled phonetically in kana. Some company names are spelled in katakana (e.g. Toyota, Suzuki),
while others are spelled in kanji (e.g. Mitsubishi).
I've managed my personal information for a long time, being careful what's public and what's not.
For example, I make no secret about my home phone number. My home address, on the other hand, is strictly confidential,
and only a handful of people know it.
If you type my name in to a search engine you will find me, as well as lots of other people with the same name
as me. You will find what I want you to know about me. There is information about me that is not on the Internet
(one biggie in particular),
and I make damned sure it stays that way.
I routinely shoot the other way around: old Pentax and Nikon lenses on my DSLR (Canon Digital Rebel series), with suitable lens adapters.
The best adapters are the M42 to EOS adapters, which let you use Pentax screwmount lenses. The digital imaging doesn't cut you any slack,
a crummy lens makes crummy pictures, while a good lens makes good pictures. Plus all that old-fashioned lens flare, cool bokeh, and
more. Fun.
The Nikon adapters aren't as solid.
Maybe it's the fault of my cheap Ebay adapter. Nikon made some amazing lenses in the F2/F3 era.
Forget automation, of course: stop down metering, manual focus.
I find the 1st person view in Gran Turismo 4 to be a decent driving simulation. I've driven a couple of cars similar to real ones I've driven,
and they seem about right. You can easily tell the difference between front/mid/rear-engine cars. My
favourite is the Honda Beat, a car I could never drive in real life, because I'm
far too tall.
I also have X Plane 9 on my Mac, and find it limited compared to the real thing. The cockpit visibility
is inferior, you can't feel the plane or (easily) determine its attitude, there is little (if any) force feedback,
and I've seem some major discrepancies between
the performance of the models and the real thing. The Cherokee 140 falls out of the sky in slow flight, and won't stall. The real
one stalls very nicely, thank you, and you can putt-putt-putt along hanging off the prop all you like.
The 172SP stalls about like a real Cherokee does (albeit with no buffeting), and will spin if you insist.
You can do all the VOR navigation and ILS approaches you like in X Plane, however. That works fine. This is common, that they
work better for instrument flight.
FWIW, the first time I heard "gynoid" was in a review of Blade Runner, so
this isn't that new a neologism.
I've also read stuff about how too-realistic computer-generated images of people weird
people out, which is why Pixar et al could make their animated features look a lot
more realistic, but don't. The subject of this article is firmly in weird-out territory.
When I was a grad student (late '90s) laptops were big and clunky and expensive enough that they weren't effective classroom
tools, and nobody used them.
I didn't go back to school for a career change, BTW. I went back to school because
I was bored with the work I was doing, and felt I had reached a career plateau that would make it difficult
to do anything really interesting without some more letters after my name.
I wanted a timeout from the rat race. I wanted to do something interesting.
I'm taking a night school course now, ground school for my pilot's license (yes, it's interesting). The course setup is high-tech, with
all lectures being delivered with a laptop and overhead projector. We still use the whiteboards for diagrams and discussions,
and nobody uses a laptop for notes. How do you do navigation problems on a laptop? You get out your charts, your ruler,
your protractor and your E6-B.
I don't live in Vancouver. I do not, repeat not live in Vancouver. I live in Burnaby,
a suburb of Vancouver. A quiet leafy green residential cul-de-sac, where you would never know anything was happening.
The daffodils are coming up.
With that said, I feel the Olympics have lost their way. The athletics have become secondary to money and hype. I also feel that it's completely unfair to expect the entire province to assume financial responsibility for the Olympics, when only Vancouver residents
were consulted on holding them.
A major part of the weather issue is all the media pundits being from back east, not really understanding
what winter means in Vancouver. How quickly they forget what else goes with the snow in Edmonton or
Winnipeg. I was born here, one of the few. I understand rain.
The best datum I can offer is a course I took a few years ago on error control coding.
Each week the prof got somebody to volunteer to take very good notes, type them up in LaTeX, then
he would distribute them to the rest of the class for reference. The "scribe", as he called the role, got extra credit.
The week I volunteered to be scribe it took 8 hours to turn 2 hours of lectures in to something presentable and machine-readable. This included
28 diagrams in Xfig, plus numerous equations.
I started a night school course last week (private pilot ground school, if you're curious).
My notes are by hand, plus some highlighter work in the textbooks.
I haven't the slightest interest in transcribing them. Why would I? They're
my notes, written by me.
My favourite algorithm for passwords is the classic first letter of each word in a phrase. My standard example is "Tbontb,Titq!". It looks like garbage if anybody watches over your shoulder while you type it, but
you think "To be or not to be,That is the question!". You remember it. They don't.
No, I have never used this as a password on any system.
What problem do we need to solve here? If it ain't broke...
Just for the hell of it I've toyed with hooking my geiger counter up to my computer, generating a couple of DVDs full of random numbers
(really random) and using them for one-time pad
encryption to send email to my Mom. Which cannot be cracked, by anybody.
There is also the issue that if you lock things down too tight you risk locking yourself
out and can't get back in.
This is old stuff. I remember reading it in The Macintosh Way. Guy Kawasaki's thesis
was that by making yourself a good source the press were less likely to burn
you.
I subscribed to Mondo 2000. The premise looked great, but it fell apart quickly. I
didn't resubscribe. It sounds like nobody else did either.
Nowadays I subscribe to New Scientist, buy Sky & Telescope at the
news stand, and have fond memories of how un-cool Scientific American
used to be. Omni never really did it for me.
Junior developers: no, unless they had a pressing need for it.
Senior developers: yes.
There is a responsibility and trust issue here. If you have root/admin access, the general
idea around here has always been "you break it, you fix it".
I loved the first batch of Star Wars movies, but have never watched any of the second batch in their entirety. From the excerpts I've seen on TV, they really do blow, and I find it impossible to pay attention to them.
Lousy dialogue (just plain lousy, not the original hokiness), no plot, no characters. The whole question, "who are these people and why should I care?", goes unanswered.
Slackware does a number of things differently than other distros. It doesn't hide the fact that it's a clone of Unix (among other things, you configure it by editing text files), and it allows you to install as much or as little of the distro as you want. If all you want is a box that boots to a command prompt, you can do that easily with Slackware. I view it as a construction set for building Linux boxes, rather than a pre-assembled system that you pour out of a can.
Slackware is well-behaved, and makes very few assumptions about the system it's running on. The distro CD will boot on anything, and the text-based installer will run on anything. GNU/SourceForge/etc. applications generally compile and run without modification. This includes kernels. Some people think I'm a little extreme (or just plain nuts...:-), but I view the distro kernel as solely for bootstrapping the system, after which you build a custom kernel to match your hardware and operating requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certain that legal changes-of-name aren't public records...
Depends on the jurisdiction. I changed my name a long time ago, and at the time you had to run a legal ad in the newspaper as part of your application. Since mine was of the form "I, boyname am applying to change my name to girlname...", it was fairly obvious what was going on. I got some weird phone calls, since boyname was in the phone book. Some of them were looking for advice on doing what I was in the midst of doing.
This was long before the Internet in its present form, so boyname doesn't come up in Google at all. Nor does girlname plus any of the search terms one might use, though girlname comes up related to other things I've messed with, as well as references to other women with the same name as me.
That was certainly the case for me. I spent the first 20-odd years of my life pretending to be somebody I wasn't.
I hit the wall when I was 21, and just couldn't do it any more. My choice was clear: transition, or suicide. I'm still here, so you know what I chose.
I like being myself. And, yes, I like being a girl. Which is what I should have been all along, but somebody screwed up on the assembly line and put a girl's brain in a boy's body... :-(
Since I couldn't get one locally, I bought an ATSC converter at Radio Shack in Portland, Oregon. Hooked it up to an antenna when I got home, scanned, got a bunch of local stations. All but a couple of the local Vancouver stations are on digital now, and I get three stations from Bellingham, Washington. An independent (KVOS), a home shopping channel (KBCB) and a repeater of a PBS station (K24IC, repeating KBTC, Tacoma, PBS and MHz Worldview).
The system works as advertised. I get DVD quality video with many channels in HD, though my el cheapo POS converter dumbs everything down to 480i NTSC.
I have no complaints.
...laura
Everybody knows now that dead air when you answer == telemarketer.
The ones that drive me nuts are the robodialers that hang up as soon as you answer. At least if there is somebody there I can make all sorts of inappropriate comments to them. Asking guys what colour their panties are is usually effective.
...laura
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals. Some words are spelled phonetically in kana. Some company names are spelled in katakana (e.g. Toyota, Suzuki), while others are spelled in kanji (e.g. Mitsubishi).
...laura
I've managed my personal information for a long time, being careful what's public and what's not. For example, I make no secret about my home phone number. My home address, on the other hand, is strictly confidential, and only a handful of people know it.
If you type my name in to a search engine you will find me, as well as lots of other people with the same name as me. You will find what I want you to know about me. There is information about me that is not on the Internet (one biggie in particular), and I make damned sure it stays that way.
...laura
I routinely shoot the other way around: old Pentax and Nikon lenses on my DSLR (Canon Digital Rebel series), with suitable lens adapters. The best adapters are the M42 to EOS adapters, which let you use Pentax screwmount lenses. The digital imaging doesn't cut you any slack, a crummy lens makes crummy pictures, while a good lens makes good pictures. Plus all that old-fashioned lens flare, cool bokeh, and more. Fun.
The Nikon adapters aren't as solid. Maybe it's the fault of my cheap Ebay adapter. Nikon made some amazing lenses in the F2/F3 era.
Forget automation, of course: stop down metering, manual focus.
...laura
I switched to a major I like.
Bingo! Doing something you like is always a good plan. If you don't like it, why are you doing it?
I'm currently learning to fly, and an all-too-common reason to do so is "because my parents want me to". This is a guarantee of failure.
...laura
I find the 1st person view in Gran Turismo 4 to be a decent driving simulation. I've driven a couple of cars similar to real ones I've driven, and they seem about right. You can easily tell the difference between front/mid/rear-engine cars. My favourite is the Honda Beat, a car I could never drive in real life, because I'm far too tall.
I also have X Plane 9 on my Mac, and find it limited compared to the real thing. The cockpit visibility is inferior, you can't feel the plane or (easily) determine its attitude, there is little (if any) force feedback, and I've seem some major discrepancies between the performance of the models and the real thing. The Cherokee 140 falls out of the sky in slow flight, and won't stall. The real one stalls very nicely, thank you, and you can putt-putt-putt along hanging off the prop all you like. The 172SP stalls about like a real Cherokee does (albeit with no buffeting), and will spin if you insist.
You can do all the VOR navigation and ILS approaches you like in X Plane, however. That works fine. This is common, that they work better for instrument flight.
...laura
FWIW, the first time I heard "gynoid" was in a review of Blade Runner, so this isn't that new a neologism.
I've also read stuff about how too-realistic computer-generated images of people weird people out, which is why Pixar et al could make their animated features look a lot more realistic, but don't. The subject of this article is firmly in weird-out territory.
...laura
In Soviet Russia ASCII art animates you.
When I was a grad student (late '90s) laptops were big and clunky and expensive enough that they weren't effective classroom tools, and nobody used them.
I didn't go back to school for a career change, BTW. I went back to school because I was bored with the work I was doing, and felt I had reached a career plateau that would make it difficult to do anything really interesting without some more letters after my name. I wanted a timeout from the rat race. I wanted to do something interesting.
I'm taking a night school course now, ground school for my pilot's license (yes, it's interesting). The course setup is high-tech, with all lectures being delivered with a laptop and overhead projector. We still use the whiteboards for diagrams and discussions, and nobody uses a laptop for notes. How do you do navigation problems on a laptop? You get out your charts, your ruler, your protractor and your E6-B.
...laura
In Soviet Russia applications export you!
Music covers you!
XP users do not need big hard drives to have problems.
...laura
...what's next a near fatal curling accident????
The mind wobbles...
I don't live in Vancouver. I do not, repeat not live in Vancouver. I live in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. A quiet leafy green residential cul-de-sac, where you would never know anything was happening. The daffodils are coming up.
With that said, I feel the Olympics have lost their way. The athletics have become secondary to money and hype. I also feel that it's completely unfair to expect the entire province to assume financial responsibility for the Olympics, when only Vancouver residents were consulted on holding them.
A major part of the weather issue is all the media pundits being from back east, not really understanding what winter means in Vancouver. How quickly they forget what else goes with the snow in Edmonton or Winnipeg. I was born here, one of the few. I understand rain.
...laura
The best datum I can offer is a course I took a few years ago on error control coding.
Each week the prof got somebody to volunteer to take very good notes, type them up in LaTeX, then he would distribute them to the rest of the class for reference. The "scribe", as he called the role, got extra credit. The week I volunteered to be scribe it took 8 hours to turn 2 hours of lectures in to something presentable and machine-readable. This included 28 diagrams in Xfig, plus numerous equations.
I started a night school course last week (private pilot ground school, if you're curious). My notes are by hand, plus some highlighter work in the textbooks. I haven't the slightest interest in transcribing them. Why would I? They're my notes, written by me.
Old-tech really is the best tech some times.
...laura
My favourite algorithm for passwords is the classic first letter of each word in a phrase. My standard example is "Tbontb,Titq!". It looks like garbage if anybody watches over your shoulder while you type it, but you think "To be or not to be, That is the question!". You remember it. They don't.
No, I have never used this as a password on any system.
...laura
What problem do we need to solve here? If it ain't broke...
Just for the hell of it I've toyed with hooking my geiger counter up to my computer, generating a couple of DVDs full of random numbers (really random) and using them for one-time pad encryption to send email to my Mom. Which cannot be cracked, by anybody.
There is also the issue that if you lock things down too tight you risk locking yourself out and can't get back in.
...laura
This is old stuff. I remember reading it in The Macintosh Way. Guy Kawasaki's thesis was that by making yourself a good source the press were less likely to burn you.
...laura
I subscribed to Mondo 2000. The premise looked great, but it fell apart quickly. I didn't resubscribe. It sounds like nobody else did either.
Nowadays I subscribe to New Scientist, buy Sky & Telescope at the news stand, and have fond memories of how un-cool Scientific American used to be. Omni never really did it for me.
...laura
Junior developers: no, unless they had a pressing need for it.
Senior developers: yes.
There is a responsibility and trust issue here. If you have root/admin access, the general idea around here has always been "you break it, you fix it".
...laura
The other possibility is that it's working as a ground plane. It's just about the right size to be a short backfire antenna.
...laura
I loved the first batch of Star Wars movies, but have never watched any of the second batch in their entirety. From the excerpts I've seen on TV, they really do blow, and I find it impossible to pay attention to them. Lousy dialogue (just plain lousy, not the original hokiness), no plot, no characters. The whole question, "who are these people and why should I care?", goes unanswered.
I do like Weird Al's take on it, though.
...laura
Slackware does a number of things differently than other distros. It doesn't hide the fact that it's a clone of Unix (among other things, you configure it by editing text files), and it allows you to install as much or as little of the distro as you want. If all you want is a box that boots to a command prompt, you can do that easily with Slackware. I view it as a construction set for building Linux boxes, rather than a pre-assembled system that you pour out of a can.
Slackware is well-behaved, and makes very few assumptions about the system it's running on. The distro CD will boot on anything, and the text-based installer will run on anything. GNU/SourceForge/etc. applications generally compile and run without modification. This includes kernels. Some people think I'm a little extreme (or just plain nuts... :-), but I view the distro kernel as solely for bootstrapping the system, after which you build a custom kernel to match your hardware and operating requirements.
...laura