Igonore those Johnny-Come-Lately posers at timbuk2.com, get a Courier Wear bag from www.courierwear.com and stick yer laptop in that.
They were making courier bags at Courier Wear before courier bags were cool: the founders rode themselves & had a delivery company, and have since retreated to a farm in Vermont to sew bags and not dodge oblivious Peoples' Republic of Cambridge Volvo-pilots.
When I was a dispatcher in Boston, I asked the smelliest and fastest riders I knew [Hi, guys at NSS!] what bag to buy -- presuming that any package they carried that a Hale & Dorr secretary would sign for was good enough for me -- and they sent me up Mass. Ave. to Courier Wear. I've had my bag for a dozen years now, and the strap's only starting to fray a little. I used to ride home from the liquor store in Brighton with half a case of longnecks in it, so I know it is (was?) strong; it's waterproof; and you can get an option for an inner pocket that'll cradle Your Precious. They also do trade-ins, repairs, and custom work.
Spend your money at courier Wear and you'll be happy -- and you won't have those lame reflective flag-football tapes hanging from the flap, either.
> > Or they could call it Fez. >
Wouldn't the network who produced (and still syndicates) "That Seventies Show" sue? They've been known to be a little trigger-happy in the past -- just ask Al Franken.
Mike Meyers: "Dad -- how can you hate *The Colonel*?" Mike Meyers: "Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fort-nightly, smarrrrrrrtass! Oh, I hated the Colonel, with his wee, beady eyes: 'Ooooh, you're goin'ta buy my chicken, oooh!'"
> > Go to download it, and they insist on charging me $20 for the > download with the opportunity to mail in rebate forms for a refund. Screw them. >
And we just got our refund check last week. After filing four (or was it five?) times. Whatta bunch of tools.
Actually, Cyan, Magenta, and blacK are all at 30 degree angles to each other, and Yellow is 15 (?) degrees. That is, the "grid" of C dots is aligned along 0/180 and 90/270 degrees; M is on 30/210 and 120/300; M is on 60/240 and 150/330; and Y is on 15/105 and 105/195. Or something -- you get the idea, however, that the grids should have a minimum of intersections.
Anyway, if these angles are off (and the guys, called strippers -- and stop that giggling -- who used to make printing plates from film negatives *never* drank on the job, so this *rarely* happened) then you get moire patterns. Moires are visible swooping curves of no ink intertwined with other swooping curves -- admittedly less noticeable -- of more ink. These are tremendously entertaining to observe by holding two negative film exposures of the same image -- the C and M separations, say -- and rotating them back and forth in relation to each other. (Note: may cause nausea in pregnant women, accountants and the elderly; children are likely to enjoy it.)
As stated, they would either stack four layers of the cells with transparent dividers, or come up with an alternative to four-color/process color-- to which I say "Har. Let's see it."
Well, my exposure to "Foucault's Pendulum" was a good friend thrusting it at me and saying, "Here, I hated this, now you read it." I, too, hated it by the end -- what with the claustrophobic jabber about Rosicrucians and Jesuits -- but I finished it.
Come to think of it, I do believe I passed it on the same way.
Stephenson, on the other hand, is a joy to read.
> > In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than > their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult their owners. >
Dude, I thought my VCR was flashing *midnight*, not noon.
Does anyone know how the NetBackup Java GUI runs on a Mac OS X system, launched from a Sun Solaris NBU server?
I'm looking into getting a PowerBook to use as my only system (instead of a PC plus a laptop running Mandrake), and I'm curious whether my applications will work; also of interest is admintool and the NBU 3.4 X apps.
Thanks!
> > Why not a scripting language that does all that applescript does > and is also crossplatform? >
AppleScript can do stuff at the OS level that cross-platform scripting languages can't -- that's what the trade-off inherent in being "cross-platform" means.
Now, if there was, say, a Perl module that handled calls into an application's scripting dictionary, like AS has, I'd be mightily impressed.
I've never really written AppleScripts, but when I got a script from someone else, its power always surprised me. Why, it's almost like the OS & applications are written with the intent of being open and scriptable!
> > My father has a Case IH sprayer which he > modified to be 105 feet wide >
Possibly the biggest case mod ever (har).
My relatives have a farm in western Minnesota and we visited a couple of summers ago. Even the combines are cool, and those are pretty small compared to the really big stuff: my dad just visited a farm in Nebraska that has tractors pulling 60'-wide plows! Christ, I'd want mechanized control of something that big, too.
I saw a magazine ad from Sharper Image for this, if I recall. A "stack" of color-coded units each with a button that actives a beeper (within, oh, 30 feet IIRC) on the color-coded keyring you attached to your keys/sunglasses/peg-leg.
> > Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire > instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible. >
Didn't I read that the USB port on recent Macs _is_ an USB 2.0 port, and that only the driver was missing? > > Bad grammar.. >
Careful where you pont that thing, son. You might shoot your own self. > >...but optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry > but this sounds like wishful thinking. >
The Macs will do whatever you want: calling them a "graphics machine" only shows that _your_ vision is limited. I mean, they're not the front-end console for a drum-scanner or a Cray, fer chrissakes. Think the old "digital hub" idea, and imagine one of these Bad Larrys plugged right into your home stereo.
These books have a _lot_ of stuff in them: a UN (and de facto global government) run by the French (who everyone hates), people living in orbit, good technology (like a subplot about hacking the ecryption key out of the Moon's WAN in order to bust it out of government control), etc; given that the books were first published more than a few years ago, Moran developed some novel angles on fairly traditional sci-fi topics.
I dig these out and re-read them every couple of years, they're so good.
It looks like a bunch of the books were re-released in the summer of 2002, and I suggest that people give them a look.
There's a Daniel Keys Moran fan site which lists its most recent "Late-Breaking News" from sometime in 2001: http://www.kithrup.com/dkm/ Anyway, you can read up on him there, as well as check out some non-published stuff.
> > OK, ultimately they'll get the cash value of a futon and an old stereo....$15...and the > student declares bankruptcy. Are they attempting a deterrent...? >
Exactly! College students might be _pleased_ to declare bankruptcy, and ditch their student loans *and* the laundry list of minimum-monthly-payment credit cards they've been using to buy all that computer hardware in one fell swoop! I mean, what's it cost to go to Princeton or RPI these days? These kids get free tunes _and a free ride.
> > Bob The Builder is an excellent role model for small kids. >
He's a contractor, for cripe's sake! You want your son to look up to *contractors*? I like Bob, too -- note the lunchbox, VHS tape, and Christmas tree ornament at my house -- but I'll pick another brand of congenital liar for my child to emulate. At least Thomas has a top-hatted plutocrat to look up to.:7)
BearITBBH is a Jim Henson production, and I like it a lot. Cailloux is a good show, too; my almost-four-year-old daughter hates the puppet segments. 9Me, too.)
I was at Tufts then, too. I left after Fall semester of 1991 and transferred across town. Small world...
Did you ever have Prof. Brown? I took a religious history class from him on Lutheranism, and he told us all sorts of stuff like how was a retired Marine, and was a Pentecostal minister who sometimes spoke in tongues: *awesome* class.
Throw "The Forever War"on there for some serious relevance. It packs in a whole bunch of takes on the issue of faster-than-light travel, as well as lots of asides that will blow the minds of many kids (like the ways cultural atttitudes change over time, and the military experience, and child-rearing attitudes and...).
I took a Literature of Fantasy course at Boston College as an elective for my English degree, and while good, it tended to ease kids in via "Alice in Wonderland" and such. n the other hand, the prof. included Borges, which I'd never read before, so that was good.
Anyway, consider the Haldeman book.
Pretty much every new administration issues an Executive Order about the (de)classification of documents, usually as soon as they take office. Sometimes it's a big deal but most people usually don't notice.
Did anyone notice the new "Restore FOIA" Act being proposed? Here's something from the H-NET mailing lists: ----- On 12 March 2003, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), James Jeffords (I-VT), Joseph Lieberman (D-C T), and Robert Byrd (D-WV) introduced the "Restore Freedom of Information Act" (S. 609), legislation that would replace the broad FOIA exemption for "critical infrastructure information" presently included in the charter for the new Department of Homeland Security. The Restore FOIA bill is designed to protect Americans' "right to know" while simultaneously contributing to the security of the nation's critical infrastructure. The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration.
According to the bill's sponsors, the legislation embodies the compromise that senators Leahy, Levin, and others reached with the White House during the Senate's earlier work on the homeland security bill. Last November, a bipartisan compromise was stripped out of the underlying bill and House language was enacted.
The Restore FOIA legislation would limit the FOIA exemption to relevant "records" submitted by private entities, so that only those records that actually pertain to critical infrastructure safety are protected. The bill also seeks not to limit the use of such information by the government, except to prohibit disclosure where such information is appropriately exempted under FOIA. It also seeks to protect the actions of legitimate whistleblowers, rather than criminalizing their acts. The measure does not forbid use of such information in civil court cases to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing or to protect the public. Another provision seeks to respect, rather than preempt, state and local FOIA laws. For more information about the bill, tap into: . -----
How do people format the ASCII texts? That is, if you don't just open the.txt file in in editor, but instead mark it up as HTML (or whatever) to improve its readability, how do you do this? Got any scripts or filters to share? (If so, maybe the PG folks can post them to their web site.)
After all, the ASCII should just be a starting point -- you take that, add a little layout, and have yourself as pretty a book as you'd like to read onscreen or print out.
I have tried this in the past, adding sparse HTML tags to, say, a Willa Cather book, but it was too distracting to read while I marked up, and just too dull to mark up an entire novel. That's why I think borrowing a script or filter would be cool.
This is obviously a fake: it's the first Gobbles post that I can remember that is written in standard English, instead of the usual stream-of-gibberish langauge they use.
Once again, The Atlantic has a very good piece about this. In the 12/2002 issue, which arrived last Friday, there's a long piece detailing just how whacked-out Bobby Fischer is; look for it here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/
After reading it, I can see why the FBI kept an eye on him, just on general principles: he seems crzy as a bedbug. In addition to this, there's a fact that the article points out: "...[in 1992 Fisher played] Spassky again, in Yugoslavia. That got Fischer indicted: The Justice Department alleged he had violated U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia. If Fischer reenters the United States, prosecutors say, he faces arrest."
> > This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun >
Hardly: I have an A1000, and two of its IBM drives died in September. They were replaced with...wait for it...Fujitsu's!
Slashdot Mirror
Igonore those Johnny-Come-Lately posers at timbuk2.com, get a Courier Wear bag from www.courierwear.com and stick yer laptop in that.
They were making courier bags at Courier Wear before courier bags were cool: the founders rode themselves & had a delivery company, and have since retreated to a farm in Vermont to sew bags and not dodge oblivious Peoples' Republic of Cambridge Volvo-pilots.
When I was a dispatcher in Boston, I asked the smelliest and fastest riders I knew [Hi, guys at NSS!] what bag to buy -- presuming that any package they carried that a Hale & Dorr secretary would sign for was good enough for me -- and they sent me up Mass. Ave. to Courier Wear. I've had my bag for a dozen years now, and the strap's only starting to fray a little. I used to ride home from the liquor store in Brighton with half a case of longnecks in it, so I know it is (was?) strong; it's waterproof; and you can get an option for an inner pocket that'll cradle Your Precious. They also do trade-ins, repairs, and custom work.
Spend your money at courier Wear and you'll be happy -- and you won't have those lame reflective flag-football tapes hanging from the flap, either.
>
> Or they could call it Fez.
>
Wouldn't the network who produced (and still syndicates) "That Seventies Show" sue? They've been known to be a little trigger-happy in the past -- just ask Al Franken.
Mike Meyers: "Dad -- how can you hate *The Colonel*?"
Mike Meyers: "Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fort-nightly, smarrrrrrrtass! Oh, I hated the Colonel, with his wee, beady eyes: 'Ooooh, you're goin'ta buy my chicken, oooh!'"
>
> Go to download it, and they insist on charging me $20 for the
> download with the opportunity to mail in rebate forms for a refund. Screw them.
>
And we just got our refund check last week. After filing four (or was it five?) times. Whatta bunch of tools.
Actually, Cyan, Magenta, and blacK are all at 30 degree angles to each other, and Yellow is 15 (?) degrees. That is, the "grid" of C dots is aligned along 0/180 and 90/270 degrees; M is on 30/210 and 120/300; M is on 60/240 and 150/330; and Y is on 15/105 and 105/195. Or something -- you get the idea, however, that the grids should have a minimum of intersections.
Anyway, if these angles are off (and the guys, called strippers -- and stop that giggling -- who used to make printing plates from film negatives *never* drank on the job, so this *rarely* happened) then you get moire patterns. Moires are visible swooping curves of no ink intertwined with other swooping curves -- admittedly less noticeable -- of more ink. These are tremendously entertaining to observe by holding two negative film exposures of the same image -- the C and M separations, say -- and rotating them back and forth in relation to each other. (Note: may cause nausea in pregnant women, accountants and the elderly; children are likely to enjoy it.)
As stated, they would either stack four layers of the cells with transparent dividers, or come up with an alternative to four-color/process color-- to which I say "Har. Let's see it."
Well, my exposure to "Foucault's Pendulum" was a good friend thrusting it at me and saying, "Here, I hated this, now you read it." I, too, hated it by the end -- what with the claustrophobic jabber about Rosicrucians and Jesuits -- but I finished it.
Come to think of it, I do believe I passed it on the same way.
Stephenson, on the other hand, is a joy to read.
>
> In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than
> their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult their owners.
>
Dude, I thought my VCR was flashing *midnight*, not noon.
Does anyone know how the NetBackup Java GUI runs on a Mac OS X system, launched from a Sun Solaris NBU server?
I'm looking into getting a PowerBook to use as my only system (instead of a PC plus a laptop running Mandrake), and I'm curious whether my applications will work; also of interest is admintool and the NBU 3.4 X apps.
Thanks!
>
> Why not a scripting language that does all that applescript does
> and is also crossplatform?
>
AppleScript can do stuff at the OS level that cross-platform scripting languages can't -- that's what the trade-off inherent in being "cross-platform" means.
Now, if there was, say, a Perl module that handled calls into an application's scripting dictionary, like AS has, I'd be mightily impressed.
I've never really written AppleScripts, but when I got a script from someone else, its power always surprised me. Why, it's almost like the OS & applications are written with the intent of being open and scriptable!
Bah -- tht's just so they could promise twelve months of coverage, but not make it apply to current customers for as long. I hate those guys.
>
> My father has a Case IH sprayer which he
> modified to be 105 feet wide
>
Possibly the biggest case mod ever (har).
My relatives have a farm in western Minnesota and we visited a couple of summers ago. Even the combines are cool, and those are pretty small compared to the really big stuff: my dad just visited a farm in Nebraska that has tractors pulling 60'-wide plows! Christ, I'd want mechanized control of something that big, too.
I saw a magazine ad from Sharper Image for this, if I recall. A "stack" of color-coded units each with a button that actives a beeper (within, oh, 30 feet IIRC) on the color-coded keyring you attached to your keys/sunglasses/peg-leg.
> ...but optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry
> Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire
> instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible.
>
Didn't I read that the USB port on recent Macs _is_ an USB 2.0 port, and that only the driver was missing?
>
> Bad grammar..
>
Careful where you pont that thing, son. You might shoot your own self.
>
>
> but this sounds like wishful thinking.
>
The Macs will do whatever you want: calling them a "graphics machine" only shows that _your_ vision is limited. I mean, they're not the front-end console for a drum-scanner or a Cray, fer chrissakes. Think the old "digital hub" idea, and imagine one of these Bad Larrys plugged right into your home stereo.
These books have a _lot_ of stuff in them: a UN (and de facto global government) run by the French (who everyone hates), people living in orbit, good technology (like a subplot about hacking the ecryption key out of the Moon's WAN in order to bust it out of government control), etc; given that the books were first published more than a few years ago, Moran developed some novel angles on fairly traditional sci-fi topics.
I dig these out and re-read them every couple of years, they're so good.
It looks like a bunch of the books were re-released in the summer of 2002, and I suggest that people give them a look.
There's a Daniel Keys Moran fan site which lists its most recent "Late-Breaking News" from sometime in 2001: http://www.kithrup.com/dkm/ Anyway, you can read up on him there, as well as check out some non-published stuff.
Yeah, it's dual-platform hardware, but it looks like you have to pay extra for the USB 2.0 dongle while the FireWire is built-in.
>
> OK, ultimately they'll get the cash value of a futon and an old stereo....$15...and the
> student declares bankruptcy. Are they attempting a deterrent...?
>
Exactly! College students might be _pleased_ to declare bankruptcy, and ditch their student loans *and* the laundry list of minimum-monthly-payment credit cards they've been using to buy all that computer hardware in one fell swoop! I mean, what's it cost to go to Princeton or RPI these days? These kids get free tunes _and a free ride.
> :7)
> Bob The Builder is an excellent role model for small kids.
>
He's a contractor, for cripe's sake! You want your son to look up to *contractors*? I like Bob, too -- note the lunchbox, VHS tape, and Christmas tree ornament at my house -- but I'll pick another brand of congenital liar for my child to emulate. At least Thomas has a top-hatted plutocrat to look up to.
BearITBBH is a Jim Henson production, and I like it a lot. Cailloux is a good show, too; my almost-four-year-old daughter hates the puppet segments. 9Me, too.)
I was at Tufts then, too. I left after Fall semester of 1991 and transferred across town. Small world...
Did you ever have Prof. Brown? I took a religious history class from him on Lutheranism, and he told us all sorts of stuff like how was a retired Marine, and was a Pentecostal minister who sometimes spoke in tongues: *awesome* class.
Throw "The Forever War"on there for some serious relevance. It packs in a whole bunch of takes on the issue of faster-than-light travel, as well as lots of asides that will blow the minds of many kids (like the ways cultural atttitudes change over time, and the military experience, and child-rearing attitudes and...).
I took a Literature of Fantasy course at Boston College as an elective for my English degree, and while good, it tended to ease kids in via "Alice in Wonderland" and such. n the other hand, the prof. included Borges, which I'd never read before, so that was good.
Anyway, consider the Haldeman book.
Pretty much every new administration issues an Executive Order about the (de)classification of documents, usually as soon as they take office. Sometimes it's a big deal but most people usually don't notice.
Did anyone notice the new "Restore FOIA" Act being proposed? Here's something from the H-NET mailing lists:
-----
On 12 March 2003, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), James Jeffords (I-VT), Joseph Lieberman (D-C T), and Robert Byrd (D-WV) introduced the "Restore Freedom of Information Act" (S. 609), legislation that would replace the broad FOIA exemption for "critical infrastructure information" presently included in the charter for the new Department of Homeland Security. The Restore FOIA bill is designed to protect Americans' "right to know" while simultaneously contributing to the security of the nation's critical infrastructure. The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration.
According to the bill's sponsors, the legislation embodies the compromise that senators Leahy, Levin, and others reached with the White House during the Senate's earlier work on the homeland security bill. Last November, a bipartisan compromise was stripped out of the underlying bill and House language was enacted.
The Restore FOIA legislation would limit the FOIA exemption to relevant "records" submitted by private entities, so that only those records
that actually pertain to critical infrastructure safety are protected. The bill also seeks not to limit the use of such information by the government, except to prohibit disclosure where such information is appropriately exempted under FOIA. It also seeks to protect the actions of legitimate whistleblowers, rather than criminalizing their acts. The measure does not forbid use of such information in civil court cases to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing or to protect the public. Another provision seeks to respect, rather than preempt, state and local FOIA laws. For more information about the bill, tap into:
.
-----
How do people format the ASCII texts? That is, if you don't just open the .txt file in in editor, but instead mark it up as HTML (or whatever) to improve its readability, how do you do this? Got any scripts or filters to share? (If so, maybe the PG folks can post them to their web site.)
After all, the ASCII should just be a starting point -- you take that, add a little layout, and have yourself as pretty a book as you'd like to read onscreen or print out.
I have tried this in the past, adding sparse HTML tags to, say, a Willa Cather book, but it was too distracting to read while I marked up, and just too dull to mark up an entire novel. That's why I think borrowing a script or filter would be cool.
This is obviously a fake: it's the first Gobbles post that I can remember that is written in standard English, instead of the usual stream-of-gibberish langauge they use.
Once again, The Atlantic has a very good piece about this. In the 12/2002 issue, which arrived last Friday, there's a long piece detailing just how whacked-out Bobby Fischer is; look for it here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/12/
After reading it, I can see why the FBI kept an eye on him, just on general principles: he seems crzy as a bedbug. In addition to this, there's a fact that the article points out: "...[in 1992 Fisher played] Spassky again, in Yugoslavia. That got Fischer indicted: The Justice Department alleged he had violated U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia. If Fischer reenters the United States, prosecutors say, he faces arrest."
I imagine he uses a foil-wrapped cucumber: "Is that an armadillo in your trousers?" a la _This Is Spinal Tap_.
>
> This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun
>
Hardly: I have an A1000, and two of its IBM drives died in September. They were replaced with...wait for it...Fujitsu's!