Blog: 2003-11

Practice, practice, practice, and on to the big leagues:

boston.craigslist.org > computers & tech >
Cheap PC games, help me out - $20
Date: 2003-11-30, 2:08PM

Leaving for the Army, so i'm selling everything off.
$20 buys you the follwing:

Red Faction - FPS, Sci-Fi warfare.
CTU Marine Sharpshooter - FPS, modern warfare.
Silent Hunter II - WWII Submarine combat sim.
From Dusk 'Til Dawn - FPS, based on the movie.
B17 Gunner, Air War OVer Germany - aerial combat sim.
Sim City 3000 Unlimited

this is in or around Allston
20098335

Update: Friend of a friend is reportedly embarrassed to have helped develop "CTU Marine Sharpshooter."

Watching "Terminator 2" after the California governor recall election, find yourself cheering as Schwarzenegger gets beaten up by the beach boy and then chucked into a vat of molten steel?

Ever wonder where the infamous IBM Deskstar 75GXP series got its name?

Quack 0.23 was released 11-Nov-2003, with a Microsoft Windows workaround due to Bill Clementson.

New server is finally back up, after a bizarre series of cascading hardware failures and tricky firmware bugs, followed by some heroic data recovery gymnastics. Thanks go to dd_rescue (action shot) and a host of other tools. IBM's defunct storage division can burn in hell, and Western Digital's firmware engineers should be kicked in the shins. Seagate worked like a charm (knock on wood).

An E&P editor probably shouldn't have let this out-of-context-quotable slip through:

It began at the chain's Reno Gazette Journal about four years ago, according to Karen Crotchfelt, who says she coined the name.

—Joe Strupp, "New Advertorials Raise Old Ethical Questions Concern Over TV Pay-for-Play Rules" Editor & Publisher, 19-Nov-2003

It appears I can no longer mail hotmail.com and verizon.net addresses from my Speakeasy DSL IP addresses, thanks to ill-considered anti-spam measures by Microsoft and Verizon. If Microsoft really wanted to stop spam, you'd think they'd fix the criminally poor security of Windows, Internet Explorer, Outlook, etc.

"Isn't it incredible that you have so much fundamentalism, retreating back to so much ignorance?" remarked Dr. George A. Keyworth II, President Ronald Reagan's science adviser.

—William J. Broad and James Glanz, "Does Science Matter?," New York Times, 11-Nov-2003

Over the past couple of decades, [Presidential candidate John] Edwards said last week, "the American dream of building something better" has been replaced by the reality of "just getting by."

—Bob Herbert, "Living on Borrowed Money," New York Times, 10-Nov-2003

This is something that used to bother me at MIT: noticing someone leaving the restroom without washing his hands. It was especially troubling when the restroom was near an Athena cluster or Quickstations.

In August, the American Society for Microbiology monitored how many people washed their hands in the bathrooms of several large airports. The study, carried out by the company Wirthlin Worldwide, found that New Yorkers (or New York visitors) are the most likely to have germ-ridden hands — more than 30 percent didn't wash their hands after using the facilities. In contrast, more than 95 percent of passengers in Toronto International Airport washed their hands, probably because the SARS scare was fresh in their minds.

—Kathleen Nelson, "To kill germs, it's simple: Wash your hands," Boston Globe, 4-Nov-2003

Maureen Dowd, "Death Be Not Loud," New York Times, 6-Nov-2003

Matthew Kennedy has added Quack and a few of my other Emacs packages to Gentoo.