fedward, tumbling

goes on, and the heat goes on
~ Wednesday, March 17 ~
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Every now and then I have to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, but even then it’s satisfying to get things to work.  This is still not done, but I’m on the homestretch in the preparation portion.
Next comes the tedium of upgrading eight servers, but with this working that should be less painful. And also? Dealing with kickstart on a “foreign” distro (I’m a Debian guy by preference) is probably some useful work experience.

Every now and then I have to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, but even then it’s satisfying to get things to work.  This is still not done, but I’m on the homestretch in the preparation portion.

Next comes the tedium of upgrading eight servers, but with this working that should be less painful. And also? Dealing with kickstart on a “foreign” distro (I’m a Debian guy by preference) is probably some useful work experience.

Tags: linux Mac OS X X11 CentOS RedHat Kickstart screenshot
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~ Tuesday, March 16 ~
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unhappyhipsters:

No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry just ran.
(Photo: Unknown; Dwell, July 2009)

unhappyhipsters:

No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry just ran.

(Photo: Unknown; Dwell, July 2009)

Tags: reblog flee run away escape strewth
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reblogged via unhappyhipsters
~ Sunday, March 14 ~
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The other day I suggested this would be a useful thing.  Lo and behold, there it already was, in the View menu where I wasn’t looking for it (it’s a submenu item under Developer).
Chrome, I now want to buy you another cupcake.

The other day I suggested this would be a useful thing.  Lo and behold, there it already was, in the View menu where I wasn’t looking for it (it’s a submenu item under Developer).

Chrome, I now want to buy you another cupcake.

Tags: chrome Google chrome browser awesome screenshot
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Daylight Saving Time: Cui Bono?

I’m no fan of arbitrary adjustments to time, but I’m actually somewhat more ambivalent about Daylight Saving Time (note: “saving,” not “savings”) than a lot of people I know.  But I should probably rewind a bit.

I’m an insomniac.  Anything that messes with my ability to get enough sleep is unwelcome in my life.  Changing the clocks by an hour twice a year always messed me up pretty badly, to the extent that I’d sometimes even fall asleep at work during the first week of DST.  For the same reasons, I’m pretty badly affected by jet lag, and whenever I travel across time zones I now try to prepare a few days early so I’m already better-adjusted to the new time before I even arrive.

So a few years ago when DST started I tried something new: I didn’t reset my clocks.  I’d been going through a rough stretch with the insomnia and it was just One More Thing to deal with, and I announced to my manager at work that I was probably just going to be late for a week, since the alternative was worse.

A curious thing started that week, though: I had quit using an alarm the week before in an attempt to reset my body clock, and I kept not using it that week.  I slowly came into line with the rest of the world, and I never turned the alarm back on.  And for the most part, years later, I still haven’t turned the alarm on for daily use.

My sleep cycles are more regular without an alarm clock than they ever were with one.  I now have a so-called “dawn simulator,” an alarm clock that uses light instead of noise, and I use it when I have to get up earlier than usual (for me), but my mornings are almost entirely free of wretched beeping.  Not everybody can go without an alarm, but it has worked better for me than any other single approach to sleep regulation.

Anyway, back to Daylight Saving: by common practice and law, we all agree to set our clocks forward by an hour in the Spring and set them back an hour in the Fall.  What this means for the alarm users among us is a lost hour of sleep and several days of, well, jet lag.  What happens when you’re jet lagged?  Your reactions are slower, your mind is fuzzier, you’re a little bit clumsier, and you probably have more coffee than usual in an effort to perk up.  This is supposed to save energy, but it turns out that the difference is within the margin of error, and all the best guesses were estimated anyway.  So if we’re not actually saving energy, why are we losing sleep over it?

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Tags: daylight saving time daylight saving DST sleep insomnia baseball barbecues summer
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~ Thursday, March 11 ~
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3. HOW TO ENTER

Visit your Twitter account and confirm that you have read and agree to these official rules. You may enter the sweepstakes by incorporating “#Macallen12” and “#Macallen15” in your Macallan tasting notes twittering, derived from current or previous Macallan tasting experiences. The content of all twittered tasting notes will be featured in a topic cloud hosted on the http://themacallan.com website.

The Macallan Tasting Notes

Um. If it’s your own brand, wouldn’t you know how to spell it properly in the hashtags you’re using for your sweepstakes?

Tags: Macallan Macallen whisky WTF FAIL
~ Wednesday, March 10 ~
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One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.
Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.
None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).
Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.

One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.

None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).

Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.

Tags: Google Chrome Google Chrome New York Times NYT nytimes.com
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Permalink Tags: reblog page views Slate NYT
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reblogged via mrgan
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How good is the new breed of decaffeinated coffee? To find out, The New York Times held a blind tasting of seven decaffeinated coffees. Some were rare, single-origin beans, others were more familiar blends. For reference, there was a pot of Chock Full O Nuts. All coffees were ground fresh and brewed in press pots for four minutes using water that had just come to a boil. Over all, the tasters were disappointed with the coffees, but did find some worth trying.

New Breed of Brewers of No Buzz - NYTimes.com

Ha. I should go ask my local roast monkey what sort method his decaf is.

And for the record, while Kate claims she has fooled me with decaf, I don’t think she has, although maybe me pronouncing a cup “weak” or “terrible” and muttering something about decaf under my breath still counts as my being fooled in her book. That said, I’ve been known to order a decaf gelato affogato for dessert, but I think that’s more about the gelato than the espresso anyway.

Tags: coffee decaf caffeine