I generally don't go a whole week without posting here, but Carol and I began our summer trek out to Chicago this past Friday, and like a loon I left my Web presence thumb drive in my keyboard groove in Colorado. I have my backups with me, but they do not include the longish entry [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2008’
Odd Lots
Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.) Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in Delphi. A lot [...]
Productivity Theater
Slashdot recently aggregated an article from The New Atlantis suggesting that multitasking makes us stupid. This is old news to a lot of people, myself included, but it's interesting how today's pervasive multitasking culture is finally engendering a healthy dose of backlash. Last November, there was an even blunter piece in The Atlantic Monthly that [...]
Review: Easy Duplicate Finder
I've used a number of utilities to search for duplicate files under Windows in the past few years, but in doing research for Degunking Essentials I've run across the king of the category: Easy Duplicate Finder. I like it for these reasons: It's a “portable” or “no-install” app, meaning a single .exe file that can [...]
Review: Mi Paste
I've been busy for the past few days, and not at my best. I had a “crown lengthening” two weeks ago, which basically means lengthening the amount of tooth above the gum line by cutting away gum tissue and (in my case, at least) shaving away some bone. The surgical site was protected for two [...]
Father’s Day
To the eternal memory of Frank W. Duntemann (1922-1978), engineer, who said, “When you build 'em right, they fly.” You did. And I do.
Odd Lots
After posting my June 13, 2008 entry, I did locate an unofficial list of apps to be included in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix distro: Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, FBReader (for ebooks), Liferea (RSS feed reader), F-Spot (photo viewer) and OpenOffice. No serious surprises here, though I wonder how well a mobile CPU like Atom will [...]
Ubuntu and the 20/80 Application Rule
As time has allowed, I've been downstairs getting a sense for the new Ubuntu 8.04 release (Hardy Heron) in both its Ubuntu and Kubuntu (KDE 4 UI) distributions. My experience with Kubuntu was cut short when the new and rather bleeding-edge KDE 4 system malfunctioned in a weird way just a few days after I [...]
Odd Lots
Aero won his first “major” (a win against at least three other males of his breed) at the Colorado Springs Kennel Club dog show this past weekend. That gives him a total of five points toward the fifteen he needs (and the first of two majors) to win his championship. Shopping a little harder for [...]
Fire Drill! (Update)
The fire has been controlled, and is mostly out. Carol is home. Tomorrow, alas, is going to be very hot here, and very windy, which is always bad news on the fire front. The fire department is soaking down whatever hot spots they can find at the fire site, to keep them from rekindling tomorrow [...]