August 2004 Archives
- Dave Bartols
- Margaret Brunjes
- Misha Cornes
- Holly Gibson
- Fay Ferency
- Valerie Phillips
- Karen Fredericksen
- Simon Walker
- Josh Rosenstock
- Sarah Phillips
- Jenn Guitart
- Kevin Boyd
- Evan Prodromou (Margaret's friend) (found!)
- Kai Quinto
- Mike Rosenberg
- Ken Bobu
- Julie Sullenger
- Miriam Vu (found, then lost again!)
- Rafael Weinstein
- Daniel Pifko (found!)
- David Johnson
- Tom Whittaker
- Ain McKendrick
- Greg Friedman from Microsoft
- Dave Glowacki (check your Friendster mail!)
- Robert Yates, Wheelie Guy
- Andy Turk
- Jim Race
- Dick Rossi
Once in the early 1990s I fell asleep on my hand and it went numb for days. I had been having some carpal tunnel problems in the preceding weeks. I'm sure that had something to do with it. Maybe my brain had gotten used to tuning out of the pain so it ignored my hand screaming that it was being starved of oxygen.
The experience was awful. I couldn't make a fist; I couldn't write; I could hardly type. I remember having to sign a couple documents during that time. They looked like I was writing with my foot. Fortunately before I got around to seeing a doctor about it, it had cleared up.
Woot is a really interesting use of RSS. The company sells one product a day, and as far as I can tell doesn't advertise except through their RSS feed. It's a bare-bones shop; no customer service to speak of, no backorders, no rain checks. If you want today's product, order it now. If not, it's gone by tomorrow.
It's like the best of spam (low-cost marketing) without its many problems (lies, cheating, stealing).
Every one in a while you discover something that is so pitifully basic yet also so marvelously productive that it's worth exposing yourself as an Emacs dummy who's been using the editor for years and thus has no good excuse for not already knowing this. For me, this is one of those times. Here is my discovery:
Meta-q word wraps the current paragraph.
In particular, it wraps comments correctly according to whatever comment-delimiting convention you're using (e.g., // or /* */ or /* with a leading * on each new line). I don't know how many comments I've manually wrapped to 80 columns, painstakingly adding the leading * for each line. Never again, thanks to Meta-q!
(And as long as I have you here, you probably know this one too, but in case you don't, control-R in bash searches your history in reverse. Try typing "<ctrl-r> emacs" at a bash prompt for an example.)
A few weeks ago a coworker introduced me to Cygwin's X server. This was in connection with my gripe that there is no dual-DVI USB KVM currently available that doesn't look like an Altair 8080.
"An historic" is incorrect. Here are the rules:
Use "an" before a word that starts with a vowel sound:
an apple
an egg
an icicle
an orange
Use "a" otherwise.
Some of these words start with a vowel sound, and some don't. See if you can tell the difference:
hour
honor
honest
hat
historic
hick
hit of bong water
It's "a historic event." It's not "an historic event."
If you really want to sound sophisticated, though, and insist on the "an," please, at least don't pronounce the "h" sound. "An 'istoric" at least is a proper application of the a/an rule to a defensibly mispronounced word, but "an historic" with the "h" pronounced both sounds weird and violates the a/an rule.
