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…

That is … when the world … will end.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

Homewood Suites has an excellent breakfast. Scrambled eggs, sausage, bagels, toast, cereal, milk, three kinds of juice, yogurt, and lots of toppings for everything. Knowing that food is expensive in Disneyland, Kathy and I loaded up on a protien-oriented breakfast so that it would really last. The kids all ate mostly carbohydrates, despite our dire…

The continental breakfast at the hotel in Vegas was decent, but not very filling. The cinnamon rolls, which are a Holiday Inn Express specialty were the best part of the breakfast. Milk, yogurt, and hard-boiled eggs were the only choices in the protein department. We got on the road about 9:00 AM, and headed south…

I left work at about 3:30 PM with the idea that we would be on the road by 5:00. A series of sitcom-like problems conspired to delay that until after 6:30 PM. We had the kids watching movies on our two laptop computers, powered by an inverter and hooked to headphones. We secured the laptops…

This is a backdated post — we’ve already returned from the entire trip. Several other backdated posts will follow. At this point I plan on doing one post for each day of the trip, but that may not be the way it ends up. This trip was my wife Kathy’s idea. On February 21st (President’s…

My friend Nat has posted about a family dinner at which he was thoroughly disgusted by the items that his in-laws brought to eat. The name of both his post and my post matches the name of a forum that used to exist on Lower Lights. When I first set up the forum system on…

I’ve done a little work on making my blog look more like Nat’s. In the end, I want it to look different from his, but he has a great look already that is better than the wordpress defaults. Not knowing CSS, this is a slow-going adventure! CSS looks extremely powerful, and the only way to…

It’s Valentine’s Day. Have you remembered to obtain SOMETHING for your significant other today? For those of the male species who may not be aware, we cannot EVER ignore any Hallmark Holiday (birthdays, mother’s day, anniversary, TODAY, etc.), even if she tells you that you don’t need to get her anything. The fact that you…

The quote in my last post got my brain thinking on a tangent. People waste an amazing amount of energy doing things that are either pointless or harmful, myself included. I have a tendency to get lost in my computer or a movie and ignore everything else around me, especially if it involves getting up…

I came across a quote today that someone on an open source mailing list was using as their signature. Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof. — J.K. Galbraith It is amazing that we have progressed as…