Musings

Ahh - brings back memories of me playing NetHack on my trusty Atari ST… |!/[)[) +.@%/]) |)?+%)) If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever I think you need me to be - it might look like I’m here to help you, but really you’re here to help me. Which NetHack Monster Are You?

I have to do some things on a Sun Solaris box where the only scripting languages available are sh and perl. No python, no ruby, no … well you get the point. I don’t like PERL a lot, even though the monks are chanting it’s praise. Granted, it can do amazing stuff, but then a horde of monkeys typing away on their keyboard would probably sooner come up with a syntactically valid PERL program, than with a Shakespeare sonnet or even a simple haiku. ...

When everything is gloom, when your mood is dark, when work seems to much like work and to little like fun. When the sky is gray (or at least when it seems so), there is only one Cure. You have to listen to Happy Music. I continued to rip my CD collection and got to rip all the Béla Fleck CD’s I own. They went on the iPod and I cheered up to pieces like UFO TOFU or my favorite one Sinister Minister which comes with a gorgeous bass solo by Victor Wooten on the Live Art [US | DE ] CD. ...

No mention of .txt files could go without the mention that Emacs is my favorite editor. Tim Bray gives us a glimpse into his .emacs and there are a number of things that I will try out to see if they fit my style of working.

Wunderschön: Mein Leben mit .doc und .txt und besser kann man’s nicht sagen [via bronski.net]

In this technological mess, that we tend to call home, there’s a new addition to the machinery: He’s big, he’s black, he’s ugly and he’s loud. My wife already hates him with a vengeance. Right now he sit’s in the living room, but he will find a new home as far away from the civilized parts of the flat as possible: Welcome SAURON, our new home-file server. He has 480 GB in RAID 5 array, dual P3 processors (who will bore themselves to death), a new network card (that, and plugging in the ethernet cable into the new card (!) helped with my network problems). ...