So, last night I get out of class at about 9 and decide that, as I skipped dinner again, that I wanted some foodstuffs. By the time I get home to my town it’s about 9:15 and most of anything that is still open is mostly ready to close… long lines, skeleton crew, etc. since they close their doors in about 45 minutes. Now I’m thinking, hey… Taco Bell is open late – I was just there last week and they said their Drive Thru is open until midnight on a weeknight. Since I was looking for foodstuffs, as opposed to something defined simply as “food” and requiring silverware (Taco Bell offers sporks!), Taco Bell would do nicely – the quesadillas are mostly real food! In the attempt at dinner last week, I spent about 15 minutes the Drive Thru line – they were that crowded. As I waited, I’m seeing people pick up their food, and since TB has that external “Pay this Amount” thing going on, I see the people in front ordering $10 to $20 worth of food. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with TB, $20 worth of food from their menu is nearly impossible.
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Warning: New Weather is A-Comin’
This past year, the weather has finally gotten to me. This comes as a surprise to myself because one of the reasons why I like New England is the varied seasons. For those of you not from the area, we typically get all four, with winter and summer sometimes bleeding into spring and fall respectively. I personally like spring and fall the most, which is why I have an attraction to San Diego – perpetual Spring. Anyway, the last decade or so seem to have shortened springs and falls, but not too bad. The fact is that in addition to the “nice” weather of sun and clouds, at any given time, we can have any of the following weather snafus…
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Patriot’s Day
Well, it’s one year later. How could you miss it, actually. The media, as usual, has over done an obvious point… All of the channels around here are pulling a full 24 hours of remembrance and memorials and services. What I can’t tell is whether or not it’s because I live so close to New York or not. I mean I haven’t heard much more than a blurb or two on the PA crash and I think the government wants to let us forget that the Pentagon was ever damaged. What I hear most of is NYC – obviously the hardest hit, but it’s also about 80 or 90 miles away from where I work, so I do wonder if our closeness to the city is what’s making it so “in our faces”; we could see the smoke and dust clouds rising from one of our neighboring buildings… So what was Sept 11, 2001 for a programmer working so near, yet so far, from NYC?
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Sarum – The Novel of England
This was a novel that was suggested to me by a co-worker that knows I’ve read books from all over the spectrum of topics and countries… It’s a national bestseller, but I can’t tell you if that’s from the US or the UK because the book is very English. Sarum – The Novel of England, written by Edward Rutherfurd, is a rather large paperback and one that is mostly made up by a group of short stories with some common ties between them. It is, loosely put, the story of England, with a number of side plots.
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Last In, First Out?
Heard a good little news bite on the radio today… one that derailed what I had originally planned to write about this morning (by the way, I’m back to work, so once I forget that I ever took a vacation (which should be by 9am this morning) things should return to normal) and this is probably more a rave than Rant, because I’m pretty impressed.
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Vatican II++ required
Totally off topic time… just how off topic? Well, I’m sitting in one of the local Starbucks again (third visit in 36 hours – a bit daft that) and I brought this trimester’s text book and I was just sitting down to work on my class plan (which I think needs much less work than I’ve planned on – a good thing) and it started raining. I know, what does that matter, right? Maybe it was the restless night of sleep following a bunch of good hours of laughing that did it… I doubt it’s the rain or the music I’m listening to… but I’ve recently realized that I’ve got a stone in my shoe… and it’s with the Church.
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Resistance: DENIED – Say Hello to iRandy
Didn’t I say, just last week, that someone had to prevent me from dipping into the Mac universe? Well someone fumbled. My used G4 tower is already on it’s way to CT, along with a set of G4 System discs (for OS 9) thanks to eBay and a copy of Jaguar/OS 10.2 from Apple. I also discovered that since I am a professor, albeit part time, that I qualify for the Education discounts at Apple – I could have gotten the new 10GB iPod for $369 – that story just doesn’t seem to want to end!
Continue reading Resistance: DENIED – Say Hello to iRandy
Happy Labor Day
Happy belated Labor Day – a bit water logged in the Northeast US are we? Scary thing, actually. For most of Saturday, when it was cloudy (yet without rain) I was most reminded of Seattle. See, a lot of people think of Seattle as this dreary and always-wet type of place. Having been there (and been preached to by the residents of WA) I can say that yes, for three out of four seasons, it is typically cloudy… however, it’s not a simple monotonous gray – their skies actually are a mosaic of gray. Think about the skies of CT on over this past weekend… there were rolling and fast moving clouds the whole time; on Saturday there was an occasional blast of sunshine as well… Welcome to typical Seattle weather.
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The Slave Trade
This is a post-dated Rant. Well sorta, anyway. The topic that set me off is sorta dated, and there was an “Episode” that occurred but the Rants site didn’t exist yet, but it’s something that stuck with me all the same… and it still might be an active topic today, but I haven’t heard anything on it for a while. In any event, I find the issue stupid enough to rehash it, even thought it’s been few months after I first heard it on CNN. This is with regards to the Slave Trade Retribution group. What slave trade, you ask? Didn’t all that stop with the US in the mid-1800’s? Yup. So what’s the uproar? You’ll love this: there’s a group of African-Americans that are suing “historical” companies that profited from the Slave Trade in the 1800’s.
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OS X: A Cry for Help!
Someone needs to stop me from moving to a Mac. I’ve looked at the applications I use lately, and with the exception of MSN Chat (which I’m told is being Mac-ified soon), my compilers (Visual Studio 6.0 and .NET), and CityDesk, everything else that I use is already ported to OS X. What’s OS X? That’s the latest version of Apple’s operating system, with a new user interface (known as Aqua) built on a version of Unix (mostly a flavor of Linux) – I’m assuming you’ve heard of it already, but if you haven’t Apple explains it better than I can in this little Rant. So not only do you get the warm and fuzzy feeling of stiffing the “monopoly company” of the PC world, but you also get the “hippie” feeling of OpenSource, Linux, BSD, etc. I think you get to show off not only an Apple Logo, but you also get to show off the Penguin – I don’t know for sure what’s proper in Geek-Etiquette.
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Baseball’s Strike Out
I’m wondering if someone has the time and panache to explain the pending baseball strike to me. I mean, I understand how and why Unions are needed – to protect the rights and benefits of labourers. It made sense in the factories when they were first formed and where you still find them, in most cases they are still needed today. If there’s one constant throughout history, it’s the greediness of business owners: they never appear to have a limit in any business.
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Springsteen and the E-Street: The Rising
I’ve always been told that I have “eclectic” tastes in music. I personally believe this is a person’s way of politely saying “What the hell is the matter with you” but I’ve yet to prove it. Anyway, what it technically means is that I tend to like music from all over the spectrum – today I’m talking about Springsteen which is a notable departure from what I’ve talked about in the last review of Rush! Now before you moan and grown and start with the “he sounds like he’s tryin’ to take a crap!” and “he’s only had one album that got overplayed!” bit, let me get some myths outta the way: I was listening to him before Born in the USA. Tunnel of Love was in fact an album of ass. And he’s been around long before 1983 – he was playing music from before I was born – and he was just as surprised as everyone else was when Born in the USA took off.
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Train Etiquette – A Case Study
I’m currently on a semi-express to Stamford which makes about seven stops. I got on an earlier train because I figured it couldn’t hurt to get to work a little early – mistake one I guess, but there’s a really attractive woman that takes this train now-a-days… wears Movado and Coach – two of my favourite brands – and flip flops with a gold toe ring. It’s hard to find normal people on the train lately, much less a kindred spirit, so I figure it’s well worth the extra seven minutes of my morning, and who knows how long she’ll be on this train, so yay me – I caught the earlier train. Anyway, after the first stop, the bulk of the PTA got on board.
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Welcome to Yankee Stadium
This is a Rant that has been about three years in the making. It’s not so much a Rant, either, as it is an answer to “who designed this stadium and where are the bloody ushers?!” while sitting in the box sections of Yankee Stadium. See, this weekend was my first home game in a while (as per normal, they lost) so I was “re-introduced” to some things after about a month of not seeing the boys play live. The trip to the Bronx was per normal – I take the Merritt to the Hutch to the Cross County to the Major Deagan and *zoop* right into the Stadium parking lot. This beats the piss outta sitting in the normal five mile back up of the George Washington Bridge if you take i-95. In fact, were it not for this traffic pattern, there’s no way I would have agreed to the Saturday season ticket package that I signed on for; 12 games a season is good times but if it consistently takes three hours to get to the stadium, then it’s bollocks.
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iPod version 1.2 + Calendar
Got iPod 1.2? If you don’t you can upgrade either with a Mac or a PC. The first release from Apple was the 1.2 OS X based Upgrader. This is in a new format exclusively for Mac’s OS version 10, or higher. Shortly there after, they posted a release of the Firmware Upgrader for version 9.x of the OS. This is the version that most PC users are using to get the 1.2 version of the Firmware onto their iPod. Of course the new iPods already come with 1.2, so if you’re just buying an iPod now, you’re already all set. If not, I recommend the new version of the Firmware – they’ve added a bit of stuff to the iPod with this release.
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