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is this thing on?
Just a quick question … who all is reading this thing? Sound off by leaving a comment. Be sure to let me know in some way who you are, especially if I don’t already know you. I’d also like to know if you are using an RSS reader to watch for new articles or if…
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could you describe the ruckus, sir?
My oldest daughter is now officially a teenager. Not because she turned 13 four months ago, but because yesterday she went missing for a few hours, giving us all a major scare. About 1:30 PM I was in a meeting at work and got a phone call from my ex-wife, frantic because Melanie should have…
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we hates it
If Sméagol were to ever design a firewall, the perfect ad campain would be this: What’s it got in its packetses? I suppose others on the internet might have had this same thought, but I came up with this one all by myself.
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stupid signs
When someone in the department of public safety decided to create the neighborhood signs pictured below, did they have any notion of how insulting it might be? I’d like to know what ubiquitous signs other people have seen that have an unintended meaning.
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zero stones … ZERO CRATES!
Tonight I was going to create a couple of titles for later blog entries. This was at about 11:00 PM. Now it’s 1:22 and my blog is finally back online. I was having a segmentation fault in PHP related to MySQL fetching. After recompiling PHP several times and not figuring out what was wrong, I…
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man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything
Every day I am in a chatroom organized by my friend Marv. It is an informal environment where a bunch of Marv’s friends get together and discuss technical problems and life in general. I met Marv at Convergys, where I spent five years of my life, escaping in August 2004. Marv is one of the…
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leeloo dallas multipass
I have no idea what to write about, but I have been itching to write something. So prepare for completely mindless comments. The last few years have seen a proliferation of products (particularly hair-care) claiming to have pro-vitamins, complex or otherwise. I did look it up and learn that a provitamin is a vitamin precursor,…
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with your bad knee ed, you shouldn’t throw anybody
Today Kathy and I installed sprinkler pipe for the lawn in the back yard. We are sunburned in many spots and sore all over. Kathy’s feet are even sunburned where they showed through her sandals. Yesterday Kathy did a fair amount of work as well, installing most of the valves for the drip system. I…
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shawshank redemption
Today as I was driving to work, the magic smoke escaped from my car stereo. Everyone knows that electronics require electricity to run. What is less commonly known is that the crucial component in ALL electronic devices is a small quantity of what technicians call magic smoke. Clever engineers have enslaved vast quantities of the…
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28 days … 6 hours … 42 minutes … 12 seconds
That is … when the world … will end.
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who’s gonna drive you home
It’s amazing how quickly storage sizes have jumped on computers. The first hard drive I ever owned was 80MB MFM drive for my 8086 computer – purchased in 1989 or 1990. It was a full height 5.25 inch drive that had to have an external enclosure built because there was no way it would fit…
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mummy bling
Earlier tonight I was sort of watching one of the national news shows as I worked on my computer. They had a story about a new mummy that has been uncovered in Egypt. They don’t know who it is yet, but the level of decoration on the sarcophagus suggests that it was somebody very rich…
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i’m ready for my closeup, mr. demille
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m having fun resizing my pictures and posting them. Here are some pictures that I made by zooming in on small objects.
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laws, yes!
The other day I took some pictures of the moon. I went through them and found one with a good balance of brightness and detail. After I cropped the black parts of the sky out of the image, the resulting picture was only 400×400 pixels. Given the small size of the finished image, it might…
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i got cat class and i got cat style
My cat chases mice. About 1:45 this morning, I was woken up by my wife to deal with a dead mouse that he had brought in through the cat door, chased around my bedroom, killed, and proudly left as a present. I know this means my cat loves me, but I do wish he would…
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a nice reliant automobile
In the first picture of my previous post, you can just make out my license plate. I’ve had a vanity plate on my car for something close to 15 years now. My first car was a 1976 Nova, purchased from Nat’s family in 1987. That car did not have a vanity plate, but I can…
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but not a real green bike, that’s cruel
Okay, so it’s more yellow than green… but that wouldn’t be nearly as amusing. Thanks to some recent purchases, the bicycle portfolio now includes everybody but Melanie, who refuses to learn to ride one. We have offered to buy her a bike and teach her to use it, but she has so far turned us…
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what i learned from tv
I’m one of those people with a very strong gag reflex. The tongue depressors that doctors use when looking down throats are almost enough to induce vomiting. If someone throws up near me, there’s a good chance that I will lose my lunch too. I have a hard time cleaning rotten food out of the…
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open the pod bay doors, hal
If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that today is April 1st. Most of the big websites put up something to commemorate the day, and naturally the Internet has a new RFC. I engaged in my own bit of fun today as well, though at the time I actually was not thinking about it being April…
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new url and name
I’ve changed things around, and probably completely broken RSS. I’ll try to get URL rewriting to work, but I’m not going to make any promises. This is my first public use of the atory.org domain. I have some other name ideas, but can’t really think of anything interesting that could be hosted on them.