A few days ago, I received three identical spam messages, one to each of three different e-mail addresses (clickable areas removed): From: Spock Team Subject: Head Geek wants you to check out spock.com I am testing out this new people search search engine called spock.com. It seems pretty interesting and you might want to do [...]
Archive of entries posted on June 2008
500 Posts!
When I published the last entry, WordPress informed me that it was my 499th post, so I decided to add this celebratory 500th one.
Upgrade: Ubuntu Linux 8.04
In the wee hours of last Sunday morning, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my copy of Ubuntu Linux. I’d been using the previous major release (7.10) since it came out, eight months ago. I’d wanted to wait and upgrade Mini-mEee to 8.04 first, before subjecting my main work system to it, but [...]
Dell Repair-Guy Visit
My Dell XPS 1210 laptop has been having an occasional problem recently: random pixels have started changing to random colors when it gets warm. I bought a laptop stand with a couple fans in it, to help reduce the heat buildup, and didn’t think anything further of it — until the system started crashing when [...]
Ubuntu 8.04 for the Eee PC
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my main system over the weekend (I’m preparing a blog entry about it now). I’d hoped to try it out on the Eee system first, but that hadn’t been possible yet. The Ubuntu-Eee project finally posted a Release Candidate for the 8.04 upgrade a week ago yesterday, on the second. [...]
“New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging”
This New York Times article suggests that longevity drugs might be not only possible, but developed fairly soon. As I’ve heard that there are already more humans alive right now than have died in all of history combined, that suggests some interesting and disturbing things… I want to live a good long time as much [...]
“The 5 Creepiest Urban Legends (That Happen to be True)”
I especially like “the Funhouse Mummy.”
“Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better”
We humans think that we’re the be-all and end-all of evolution… that our bodies are mere support systems for our brains. Maybe we’re right, but some fascinating recent experiments suggest that we’ve survived despite our intelligence, not necessarily because of it.
In Pursuit of Powerful, Puzzling, and Private Passwords
(Pardon the excessive alliteration in the title, I got a little carried away. ) Last night, I got a message from my instant-messaging program, indicating that it had been logged out of one of my IM accounts because I’d “logged in from another location.” I’m pretty sure that it was an error in the program [...]
“Painting by numbers: NASA’s peculiar thermometer”
More information on NASA’s temperature data, and why it points to a major global warming trend despite the Earth actually being in a twenty-year-long “cooling period.”