IEEE Spectrum article on The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.
This was an interesting read, especially for the cloak-and-dagger tactics they had to resort to not only to create the OS in the first place, but to do things like distribute bugfixes (because management was afraid that distributing bugfixes would be considered “support”). Literally on the level of “go to the mailbox on such-and-such street after 2pm.”
(Rescued from my Google+ archive)
Seriously? Bacon flavoring syrup?
While I was looking for cinnamon, someone else spotted it and said, “Bacon? You might as well have beef!” (He was looking for peppermint.)
Would you buy this? What would you make with it? A bacon latte? A bacon margarita?
You’ve probably seen it: comments that say something entirely vague and either flattering or condescending, that could apply to just about any article. And then they link to an “escort” site, or a pill seller…or some small-town insurance office in the middle of nowhere who hired a black hat “SEO expert” who promised he’d get them backlinks and doesn’t care about the site’s reputation.
I got a great one last week: Somehow instead of getting one randomly-chosen message from a set, I got all of them in one comment: Continue reading
I’ve lost some confidence in USPS’s delivery confirmation service.
Even though we put mail delivery on hold while we were on vacation, USPS claims that delivered a package at 4:08pm on Saturday.
So, either they didn’t honor the mail hold and delivered it…in which case who knows where it is now…or they did honor the mail hold and falsely marked the package as having been delivered…in which case who knows where it is now.
At least it wasn’t anything important.
My suspicion is that it was “delivered” to the local post office, and that they haven’t sent us the accumulated mail like they were supposed to. Which means now I need to figure out which office handles our incoming mail and get there during business hours.
Update:
That package I mentioned finally showed up — three days after the end of the vacation hold and five days after delivery confirmation tracking claimed it had been delivered.
So now I know that delivery confirmation doesn’t actually confirm delivery. I wonder what it does confirm.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Comikaze Expo, and I’d just been to Long Beach Comic-Con the weekend before, but I was curious about the new show, and for $12 a day, I figured I’d check it out. Getting a discount on that already-low price through Goldstar clinched it, and when I found out my friend Wayne was going, we decided to carpool.
What we found was a surprisingly big show, with a wide variety of exhibitors, though I’d hesitate to call it a “Comic-Con.” More of a general geek pop culture show. There were certainly comic book artists and dealers (a few of whom I recognized from last week), but it reminded me a bit of the last Wizard con I went to (Anaheim 2010). There were actors & celebrities, artists, indie publishers, authors, dealers, T-shirt and nerdy craft sellers, costumers, fan groups for everything from G.I. Joe to Firefly, tattoo artists (that’s a new one), a giant card game area, a giant tabletop game area, and a video game demo trailer. All in all, it was somewhere between Wizard and San Diego without the big names.
After looking through zillions of bounce messages for patterns, I’ve got to say:
“unknown or illegal alias” is now my official favorite way of saying that an email address doesn’t exist.
