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And in the “Why didn’t I think of this?” category: UPS CIO: Driving cost savings by eliminating left-hand turns | CNET News.com

This Staples printer cartridge, clearly labeled “compatible with Epson T027201 color” didn’t work in my Epson Photo 820. The printer couldn’t detect any ink in it. Not only didn’t the cartridge work, but it also hosed the printer. When I switched to a new Epson cartridge, it still couldn’t detect any ink. Oh, I did the obvious things: I cleaned the contacts, I even bought Epson’s special use-this-and-no-other cleaning solution to soak the inkjets. No good. “‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PRINTER!” I should have known better. The electronics and the jet mechanicals are all designed for ink with a specific viscosity, the right amount of surface tension and with precise electrical characteristics. All so that the right size drop of ink will hit the paper at the right speed and splatter on t...

You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an… Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test I resent being called a Democrat. I have a backbone, which is more than I can say about the post-9-11 Democratic party.

I graphed my salary from the Social Security Statement this morning. After diagnosis and meds, my salary increase faltered and I began to have steep drops in salary, usually corresponding to a period of unemployment, every three years. Just for giggles I’ve uploaded a gif of the graph. I let Excel do a logarithmic extrapolation based on the pre-diagnosis data and it predicted the same salary as the salary reports in the tech journals say I should be making. A quick guesstimate by counting blocks in the graph shows that my lifetime earnings have been about half of what they would have been if I wasn’t mentally ill. I like to play with numbers when I’m bored. Can you tell? There is no doubt in my mind that I benefited from being bipolar. I could think quickly, I had a great visual memory, and when I was hypomanic I could work long hours on very little sleep. There are times when I miss what the meds have taken away.

I was babbling about the early days, before the web and search engines. Remember Archie and Gopher servers? And WAIS and Veronica? It was *still* hard to find what you wanted. The first search engine I came across, I mean the first *spider* type, was Lycos at CMU. Except back then there was no fancy news page, just a picture of a hairy spider and a box to type the search term in. But still, what a thrill that was! You newbies don’t know how good you’ve got it… ;-) I don’t even bother to read news portals any more unless for some reason I want to kill time. It’s far faster to subscribe to newsfeeds and read them in a news aggregator. You can even subscribe to lots of special-interest site feeds so that you don’t have to wade through pages of irrelevant information. If something looks useful, then click and read the article. There are some nice RSS apps – news aggregators – that run on the Windows desktop. I will look into RSS apps ...

The Internet is big. No, really BIG. It is possible to look online for a recipe, follow a link to the history of the recipe and the culture of the people who created the recipe. Before you know it, dinnertime is a distant memory, bedtime is long past, and tomorrow morning is shining right into your tired, bloodshot eyes. The problem is one of information overload. Information, you see, doesn’t create wisdom. Wisdom comes from choosing which information is useful for the task at hand, whether that task is cooking dinner or writing an essay on the funerary practices of the Fore tribe in New Guinea. Or both. When I first had net access – and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet – information was limited and it was sometimes difficult to locate it. There were several types of indexing, with special command-line programs to access them. Gopher was the very apt name of a commonly-used program used to dig into the information indexes. When you eventually fo...

I’ve been listening to Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Konsciousness on SoundsTrue the last couple of days, and am trying to sort out levels and lines. This isn’t what he wanted me to get out of it at all. It is my understanding that a spirit can be limited by the vessel it finds itself under some circumstances. It says something important about my unrealistic expectations that everyone can evolve. Some just can’t, they don’t have the proper structures for it. I just have to figure out exactly what that all means in terms of human potential . Can it be true that large numbers of humans don’t have the potential for enlightenment? When do we accept that we’ve gone as far as we can? Isn’t it a sort of surrender to settle into complacence, when we can’t know whether we’ve hit the glass ceiling, vs. whether we are merely at a plateau? It also comes back to a previous conversation I had about animal intelligence. Some animals may happen to have ...

Eat your heart out, DSL users. I just upgraded my Comcast Internet service, and data roars down into my computer. Before the upgrade it was at around 4000kbps. Results of the Speakeasy.net Speed Test . See larger picture . I’m not terribly pleased with the stability of Windows XP Professional. I guess I’ll have to add another Gig of RAM and think about upgrading the video card. There’s enough cache RAM in the processor, I think, at least for my evil purposes. My evil purposes being engineering apps like Altera Quartus II. I’m not going to go into the politics of buying… uhhh, renting… internet from a monopoly. And yes, I do think it’s overpriced. I’d feel much better about it if I thought they’d bring fiber into my working-class neighborhood sometime soon. I would feel better about it if I knew they’d stop charging me to help them upgrade to fiber once they have it all in place. The only drawback to the Comcast upgr...

Update 11/6: My buddy Jim gave me some good hints on getting the Wifi card running on the laptop under Linux. He has his own Wifi tale of terror . Plus he pointed out that I can compile the driver, drop it into the file system, then use modprobe to tell Linux to look for it. Great! XP is up and running. I am in the process of re-installing software. It refused to upgrade Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP Professional so I had to install XP in a different directory, which happened to be the default directory for XP. It didn’t bring in any of the settings. I was afraid it would clobber user Application Data so I created a new user and am copying settings from the 2000 user to the XP user, like Eudora mailboxes. What a pain in the @55. Now the computer is dual-boot, which isn’t at all what I wanted. During the install, XP warned me I couldn’t do a dual-boot system in the same partition. WTF? Of course, if I *wanted* a dual-boot system, XP probably would ...

I’m not so sure about this. I hung out at the computer lab, all right, but I was definitely not an A scholar. I didn’t do homework, I cut just about every class to go to the computer lab. This was 1973-74, btw. There weren’t any home computers yet. Brainy Kid In high school, you were acing AP classes or hanging out in the computer lab. You may have been a bit of a geek back then, but now you’re a total success! Who Were You In High School?

I’ve been dragging my feet as far as the soon-to-be Linux Laptop goes. There are a couple of issues that I haven’t quite resolved. First, Knoppix came up in the GUI. It didn’t seem to support the wireless card. But it communicated with it, which is better than Windows 98 did. I found what might be the ADM8211 chipset driver on SourceForge , then promptly lost the info again. I’m unclear on how to integrate a new driver. Do I have to recompile the kernal – which I’ve never done – or can I simply compile it as a stand-alone driver that I drop into place somewhere in the file system? Maybe a reference goes in what in uCLinux is called (I think) /etc/.rc? That file has startup info for things like ipconfig. I can prevent it from coming up in the GUI by entering a run-level command in /etc/inittab. RH 5.2 used to come up with the command line and if I wanted to play with the GUI I’d type startx. I did it for my Senior Project , upgra...

Halloween, in case you aren’t a history freak, is a remnant of pre-Christian rituals – a night when the spirits came back to walk among us, and a chance to make up for the wrongs we committed against them when they were alive. “All Hallows E’en”. It seems that the urban folks were converted to Christianity but that more isolated country folk – farmers and the like – maintained their pagan rituals in conjunction with the new religion. In some cases, the local church created a festival for some saint to coincide with the Pagan festival in order to try to absorb it. The Christmas tree and the Easter bunny and Easter eggs are prime examples of co-opted Pagan imagery. We talk about this at our Solstice celebrations. The point of religion is to give us the illusion of control over a world that we don’t understand. Rituals, magic, prayer, all of them are based on faith rather than on empiricism and an understanding of cause and effect. Anyw...