I have to admit to occasionally having difficulty understanding why the line “it was a dark and stormy night” is subject to such derision in literary circles. I mean, seriously: it doesn’t sound that bad. It almost sounds like something I might write. Oh…
Last night when I went to sleep (a couple of hours after Irene), I found one of Irene’s greatest fears scurrying across the bathroom floor…a spider.
This one stopped as soon as I turned on the light. I swear it was staring at me. I pondered my options. My usefulness as a husband in Irene’s eyes basically boils down to taking out the garbage on Wednesdays and dealing with any spiders in the house. But not killing them- she doesn’t want them killed, just removed from the house. But this spider was pretty big, and so I had to improvise a trap.
My wife and I have a lot of animal companions. Seven cats and a dog share our house, and a horse is stabled a few minutes away. Most of the critters are healthy and easy to get along with. But there are exceptions.
Microsoft has been working on their next generation operating system, codenamed “Longhorn”, for several years now. Its been delayed several times, had features stripped … and now has been given a poofey sounding name: Windows Vista. That name smacks of desperation, as in “dammit, this is so late we can’t use a year, and it has no really compelling features that suggest a good acronym, so we better come up with some buzz or spin that will get people to buy it without any practical reason…”
Its hot today. I think it must have gotten up to maybe 30 degrees celsius. You folks from tropical climates are probably shivering at the thought, but 30 degrees is up in the upper 80’s on the farenheit scale, and I don’t have air conditioning in my house.
James Doohan, better known to the world as Montgomery Scott or just “Scotty”, passed away on Wednesday.
I actually met the man himself once, although only in passing. It was at a science fiction convention in about 1989, and I think he was “three sheets to the wind” at the time. But no one at the convention really cared- he hugged a few convention goers and told a couple of jokes, and mostly was a real live human- not a character in a movie, but a boisterous and very alive man.
Anyone who runs a website has undoubtedly seen it. Hundreds of errors in the logfiles saying “File does not exist: /../favicon.ico”
Years ago, someone in the browser world came up with this idea that it would be neat if each website could have a little icon that would represent that site. If it was named and placed in a standard location, browsers could pick up that image and use it if the user added the site as a favorite, for example. Its a neat idea.
When Irene and I were at Harrison Hotsprings last weekend, we noticed a beautiful golden coloured dog laying near where some conference-type people had set up their sign-in table. We walked past this dog several times- she was obviously a service dog, and lay on the floor near one of the tables with statuesque grace. She watched us when we passed, obviously interested in what was going on, but dedicated to her job and her human.
I’m still awake, and its 1:00 am on a work day. Why am I still up, you ask?
Well, its like this. The other day I edited one of my website configuration files…Vhosts.conf, which will be meaningless unless you’ve ever configured an Apache web server. Anyway, I fixed a problem whereby my “default” virtual website was solstice.kgadams.net, instead of www.kgadams.net. And in the process, I apparently broke my log file configuration.
My main personal computer crashed last week, as I mentioned on July 12. I managed to get everything working again, with one exception- standby mode.