Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: February 2017

  • Review: Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas

    Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas by Michael Bishop My rating: 5 of 5 stars An excellent Dickian story in the irreverence that he would appreciate. The current fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the current environment made this a compelling read. The parallels between the Richard Nixon character and US politics reminded me of the…

  • Tinkering

    Another Rands In Repose gem. Tinkering is a deceptively high-value activity. You don’t usually allocate much time to tinkering because the obvious value of tinkering is low. You don’t start tinkering with a goal in mind; you start with pure curiosity. I’ve heard about this thing, but I’ve never used it. How does this thing…

  • If in doubt; then delete

    The title is a joke. I hate deleting things. A digital packrat, it takes knowing that deleting something will likely fix an actual problem to delete it. And my delete is to move it out of the way not actually destroy the file. Anyway, I discovered this blog was hosed. I had noticed Gotcha Jerks…

  • Gotcha Jerks Part II

    If you have not read Gotcha Jerks, then please do first. I recently ran across The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb which goes further. Here is my favorite quote from it. Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug…

  • Buffer Feature Requests

    Dual Window LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ have significantly different character number restrictions than Twitter. Naturally, Twitter limits posts to their notorious 140 characters. LinkedIn allows 700, and Google+ / Facebook allow about five thousand. I like to post things with a quote from the articles I share that captures what I found most interesting about it.…

  • Fun With Regex

    We replaced the old ticketing system with a new one. Naturally there are people who are concerned about losing access to old tickets. So we looked at exporting all the tickets. My coworker had the better method of getting out the data with one issue. Because the old sytem used an HTML editor for a…

  • Return of the Auroch?

    Move over bison burgers, the ancestor of cows is coming back. Scientists edge closer to bringing back the aurochs, the fearsome cattle breed last seen in the 1600s The creature, the ancestor of modern cattle, once roamed forests and marshlands from Britain to the Balkans and beyond to Asia and North Africa. But it disappeared from…