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8   8                            eeee eeeeee eeeeee eeeee 
8   8 eeeee eeeee eeeee e    e      8 8    8 8    8 8   8 
8eee8 8   8 8   8 8   8 8    8      8 8    8 8    8    e' 
88  8 8eee8 8eee8 8eee8 8eeee8   eee8 8    8 8    8   e'  
88  8 88  8 88    88      88     8    8    8 8    8   8   
88  8 88  8 88    88      88     8eee 8eeee8 8eeee8   8

The Salvador Dalí Museum:

…in St. Petersburg:

Siesta Beach:

Woo for rainy and thundery Christmas Day!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/12/21/wired.airlines/index.html

In January, Emirates airline plans to launch mobile phone usage in its planes, making it the first airline to allow passengers to make cell phone calls on its flights.

The requirement for my next headphones upgrade will include state of the art noise-reduction capabilities…

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/08/2238220.shtml

A subset I thought were winners:

What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies):

1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else.  I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still?  It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado.  Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened).

Top 20 Hackers in Film History:

10. Michael Bolton & Samir Nagheenanajar, Office Space (1999)
Famous Quote: Michael - “PC Load Letter? What the f*ck does that mean?” Samir - “Back up in your ass with the resurrection.”

Servers in the Movies - Our Top Ten:

8. HAL9000 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Hal9000 The HAL9000 or SAL9000 (the earthbound female counterpart) was responsible for making decisions and carrying out orders aboard a spaceship when humans were not willing or capable of doing so.  The break-through on this server was the AI, supposedly the most sophisticated artificial intelligence man could produce.  When the movie was released, it was believed that this level of intelligence could be created by the year 2001 - but we now understand that it's much further away than anticipated.

“I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.”

I think I need to move farther south:

Maybe it's time for some compiling?  Maybe it's time to turn on the fake fireplace:

Also, speaking of cold, how do people typically deal with dying video card fans?  I have an old eVGA e-GeForce 6800 AGP card in tacolinux, that seems to be losing its fan.  The whole card is vibrating, not to mention the rumbling noise that's heard from even outside the case.  I have a feeling failure is imminent.

I've contacted eVGA about this, asking if there's any way they can help, or at least suggest a place where I can purchase a replacement fan.  Of course, they've been completely silent so far, since my card is out of warranty, no doubt.  It just seems silly to purchase a completely new video card (this one still retails for $200+) when $5 fans decide to buy the farm.

</rant>

Update: I actually fixed this, mostly.  It's amazing how much difference a couple minutes of compressed air can make…

I picked up a pair of Bluetooth headphones the other day, mostly because I was tired of becoming tangled up in a mess of wires.  Also, while at work, I routinely slide away from my main PC, which requires taking off headphones.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the bluetooth-alsa project was recently updated, and no longer requires inclusion of the emu10k1 driver, which provided snd_hwdep_new.  I compiled the necessary daemons and libraries, but couldn't get Audacious to use the a2dpd ALSA device.  However, VLC worked nicely.

Only downside is lack of distribution support, and some crashing and random blips.  I have to keep a2dpd running at all times, and sometimes I'll hear a blip in the audio stream.  I couldn't get alsamixer to control the audio on the headphones, however VLC's volume control seems to do the trick.

You never know what's hidden in your parents' garage:

Remember when mice were $5 at computer shows?  I guess they might still be, I just haven't been to one in several years…