Category: Miscellaneous

A cool page on overcoming procrastination

If you Google “overcoming procrastination“, this page is the first one, so this link is probably extraneous, but I liked it.

And then I read some of the rest of the site for the next three hours.  Or maybe more, I forget.  Very interesting stuff, if you like his style.
And if you don’t, well, he doesn’t care.  For some reason, that amuses me.  🙂
But he makes the point with pretty simple math: “I get 1M hits a month.  Out of that, some people are bound to hate what I’ve written, and frankly there’s nothing I can do about that.  So I write what I write, and if you like it, come back, and if you don’t, don’t.  What could be fairer than that?”  (Paraphrased.)

Good lines …

Maurice Sendak, Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ Dies at 83.  🙁

The NY Times had this to say about him, among other things:
“Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts … .”

I love that line.  🙂

Rapture Saturday, sort of like Super Bowl Sunday …

… except that the Super Bowl actually happens.

So how come “The Rapture” is always supposed to be soon, like this year, next year, maybe five years out … and never, you know, 500 years out?

Even if it IS this Saturday, that still means that 1000 years ago it was 1000 years in the future.  And yet I’m gonna guess that believers back then thought it was around the corner just like they do now.

Of course I’ve never studied the history of prophecies of the end of the world, so maybe there’re some out there that DO say we’re cool for another thousand years.  See you then.  (Except that I’ll be dead, of course.  🙂

Unintended consequences

Problem: Editor creates “backup” files.  Solution: create a script to find all “*.bak” files and delete them.  Run it manually whenever appropriate.

Problem: Files are too big.  Solution: Use the “split” command to split them into 10k line chunks.  Files are big enough that the “split” default (foo => foo.aa, foo.ab, etc) needs to be changed to a 3 character extension, thus foo => foo.aaa, foo.aab, etc.

Solutions collide: foo.bak gets deleted the next time I clean up my backup files.  Oops.

More than one Apple

What’s a good plural noun meaning “my iPhone and my iPad”?  I like “my iPhads”.  🙂

I made this up myself.  But Googling it reveals that I’m far from the first with this idea.  Bummer.  But not surprising.

QFTD, 5/17/11

“Life is too long to know C++ well.”  — Erik Naggum, via Peter Seibel

Interesting factoid: I coulda sworn that said “too short”.  To the point that I half-suspected it’d mutated in my cut-and-paste buffer and went back to check.  It’s weird when you mis-read something consistently.  It’s like those experiments where you can read short to medium length words, even if they’re scrambled, as long as the first and last letters remain the same.  I didn’t see “long”, I saw “life is too X” and filled in the blank.