Friday, February 21, 2003

How many parents call their baby "it?"

This is funny as hell. Via Metafilter.

Perspective

Just heard from Steve Roberts from the Microship Lab, who finds blogging kinda continuous with the sorta stuff he's been doing since before the Web. Here's his next project.

Security you can hear at home

Iraqwar.info: Listen to DC combat air patrols. Here's the audio. The background is utter silence broken by aircraft chatter. Here's what I've heard in the last two minutes:

Fourfivetwo?

Cccccchh.

Hrrlwwlenken.

Cccchhwelcome.

Tower to Tinker?

CccchNrdlschoolbreak.

Nordabout onefiveseven.

Number two complete and we are swapping raids.

Fivefourtwo.

Thirtyfourfortyfive grwonswor five rrgon slowly please.

Information window parameters. You're going to have to ree ... the background noise.

What I have is about six x instrumentation window parameters appear to be over water.

Fiveonefive ronseddiwood look attem.

Confirm Ron. He's workin those parameters and is lookn ta fixem.

Fourfivetwo disconnect. Five two would be out low to the south.

Leh.

Tooz um twentyone thousand.

No that's fine.

Yellowjackets twofour oh.

Ccch linproceedem.

Y'know they have the miniDVD players inna make me one of them so you can listen to your CDs while you play around.

Maybe I'll do that.

Steel flow guages and my eyeballs are getting fried cuz it's so late.

Onefortytwo twothousand climbing to four thousand nnrndr roll.

Rrrn.

Makes me feel safer already.

Who needs Alzheimer's when you're like this anyway?

Just before I got on the train to come here I realized I had forgotten the power adapter for my laptop. Fortunately, I had the one that went with the rental my friend was about to return for me. So I borrowed it. Then, five hours ago, as the Desktop Linux Summit was closing for the day, I forgot the borrowed adapter, the power bar I had also brought into the press room (just in case, which turned out to be a good idea) and the power adapter of the new MobilePC that the Lindows people had loaned me to review. I realized all this after dinner with a bunch of folks. Since I'm giving the opening keynote tomorrow and I'm using the laptop, and haven't finished preparing, and my batteries were dead, I needed that power adapter. So I spent several hours trying to find somebody with one that matched, or to get back into the building where I forgot the thing. Finally a security guy let me in.

Now here I am, at almost midnight, getting ready to start what I was going to do at 7pm.

Believe it or not, this is all after taking a number of measures to "simplify" things since my last misfortune with a laptop, which followed forgetting another power adapter at somebody's house in my last trip up to Palo Alto.

Well, one small grace of aging is giving a much smaller shit about the faults that make me more human than I'd like. Ten or twenty years ago I would have been speeding around town and beating my head against the steering wheel along the way. This time I just punched up the jazz station and drove around practicing tomorrow's talk with a nice soundtrack.