bohnsack.com

Lyrics to Mass Nerder from the Descendents' Cool To Be You:

Don’t got no goatee
Don’t got no tattoo
Don’t got no nose ring
Don’t wanna be like you

See I got these glasses, so I'll never be cool
Always get my ass kicked when I get to school

Don’t worry about an image
Don’t got no attitude
I know I won’t get laid
If I won’t be like you
Don’t got no biceps
Don’t got no pecs
But I'll read you under the table
With my thick specs!

See I got these glasses, so they kick my ass
But I'll kick their asses when I get to class

I got these glasses, so I can’t wear shades
But I'll kick their asses – I'll get good grades

Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna get good grades!

I can’t get with the times…
Can’t spout the party line…
Don’t know what the scene’s about
Don’t tell me to mellow out!

Don’t got no goatee
No fucking safety pin
No I ain’t no junkie
Don’t got no heroin

Don’t got no stylish notion
Don’t wanna live by the ocean
Just wanna be myself
All you posers go to Hell!

Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna kick their asses in class
Gonna get good grades

Asses in class
Asses in class
Asses in class

We must read...

Steve Hoffmann has some great photography articles (and photos) on his website.

Leo Kottke

I recently received this letter in the mail:

It contained a puzzle. It had to put it together, before I could read the message on the back.

There were also some pictures.

Nice.

Because of the 'leet GeoURL service, you can now click on the button below and see websites that are "physically" within 100 miles of me in Albuquerque.

GeoURL

Never mind that this site is hosted in Dallas.

I'm going shopping today. I'm looking for two things:

1. A circular fisheye lens
Sigma's Fisheye 8mm f/4.0 EX Circular Fisheye Autofocus Lens for Canon EOS looks about the best I can do. If I had the full frame 1DS, images would look like this. With the 1.6x magnification of my 10D, images will look like this or this. With the 1.3x magnification of the 1D Mark II, which unlike the 1Ds is in striking distance, I imangine it will capture enough of a scene for me to be happy with it. Some interesting links on this lens: 1, 2, 3, 4.

2. An air filter to get rid of the damn Juniper pollen
I hope I can find this thing at the mall:

another link and another.

SCO is now going after the DOE (specifically LLNL and NERSC), according to this news.com story:

SCO targets federal supercomputer users

Next to building giant banks of computers on Mars, crushing these SCO parasites is the number one plank on my political platform. It starts to get real personal when SCO calls Linux's role in defending this nation into question. Will they sue Sandia and LANL next? Are they serious? When will the US courts, the SEC, and IBM crush this worthless piece of s&$t company? The politician, party, or regulatory body that puts McBride and Sontag in prison and then goes after their funding source gains my favor forever.

Update: 2004-03-20 9:46AM - Slashdot is now running a discussion on this story

In Albuquerque, I get hay fever this time of year worse than I've ever experienced. I'm running on twice the recommended dosage of Claritin and it's still horrible. Here's an Albuquerque Tribune article about this topic. I'm thinkin' it's mostly the Junipers. Same thing, same time last year.

I finally finished posting photos from the Mexico vacation. Here are some samples from the final batch:

Proper descriptions and categorization for the whole lot will have to wait a bit more.

Also, check out some of Lyla's photos from the trip.

Hitachi has just announced a 400GB ATA hard drive. I remember buying a 424MB (.424GB) drive around 1994. This represents a thousandfold capacity increase over ten years. Interpolating: 400TB drives by 2014 (although I expect capacities will be much greater than what linear interpolation shows).

Hitachi press release, slashdot story.

Sometimes I get worked up about small things. An excellent current example would be the serial comma. This is the grammatical rule that every American speaker of English should have learned early in their education. The rule says that a series of items are separated by commas, including the item before the terminating conjunction. Recently, more and more people think that the last comma is not required, despite what they were taught in the 8th grade.

An example of the rule applied correctly:

Figs, apples, oranges, and pears are fruits.

An example of the rule forgotten, never learned, or assumed deprecated by all too many of today's idiots:

Figs, apples, oranges and pears are fruits.

The canonical example of how failure to use the serial comma causes confusion:

"I dedicate this work to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Perhaps I'll rant about this at length in the future, but for now, I have plenty of Internet allies: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A paraphrased excerpt from 1:

The Chicago Manual of Style, Follett's Modern American Usage, Strunk and White, the Gregg Reference Manual, and Scientific Style and Format all say to include the last comma. One does not argue against such authorities.

These are among the highest authorities on American English usage. I could list many second-level grammarians — such as the delightful Karen Elizabeth Gordon — who follow these authorities in their own prescriptions. Indeed, let me be so bold as to declare that any American grammarian who dismisses the serial comma as a matter of personal taste is plainly ignorant.

...

So unless you are writing copy for the newspaper or are publishing in the UK, always use the serial comma.

I'm thinking of writing a rule for Spamassassin that will put heavy spam weight on email that gets the serial comma wrong. That way, I won't ever have to see emails from people that can't follow this simple rule. I'm quite serious.

My squeezebox is the bomb, but this Roku HD 1000 looks pretty interesting.