Recent blog entries for ds

I've had a on-again-off-again cold for the past week or so, and today, the symptoms were stuffed up nose and sinus pain. So I wandered down to the local pharmaceutical (drug) and pharmaceutical accessory (drug paraphernalia) shop and bought a neti pot. And used it. My nose is now the clearest it's been since, well, ever. It will probably get stuffed up again in a few hours, but hey, I'll just neti again.

I'm tired of clicking, like, 7 times to download a patch from Bugzilla, and then get a file whose name does not include the bug number and has funky characters to boot. Enter Scrapezilla. Enjoy.

Hire Me!

This week begins my self-[un]employment. Due to a strange convergence of giving notice at my old job, and several people emailing me about contract opportunities, I'm now sitting comfortably in my home getting paid to do cool shit all day long. My office's sound system kicks your's ass.

(Didn't know about double-possessive pronouns? Now you do.)

I'm only participating in this because the nearest book (89.8 cm) is significantly more interesting than the second nearest book, Quantum Chromodynamics at 96.5 cm.

And now I was in Las Vegas as the motor sports editor of this fine slick magazine that had sent me out here in the Great Red Shark for some reason that nobody claimed to understand.

JFleck, American vintage car enthusiasts and British vintage car enthusiasts in the US don't overlap much. The former group never could figure out what a trunnion or a gudgeon pin is, even after they found the tyre in the boot of the saloon. The latter group has always had difficulty with pronouncing carburetor correctly when it only has one 't', which may have stunted their ability to grasp that it has more than 2 moving parts.

For those who have not been exposed to the clever marketing strategery behind Girl Scout Cookies, it basically goes like this: About this time every year, thousands of young girls sell boxes of cookies on heavily-trafficked street corners for fundraising. The cookies are only moderately tasty. The girls are of course much too young to be interesting to even a dirty old man such as myself (although they are often accompanied by mothers who are). The trick is that the cookies only have limited availability -- not only are they only sold a few weeks in each year, but the scouts also seem to have this uncanny ability to disappear from street corners exactly when you want to buy a box.

Being denied something repeatedly, of course, means that I crave it even more. The box of Thin Mints than I bought at lunchtime is almost gone. I blame my officemates.

I need encouragement to work on a bunch of various projects. People tell me that liboil is cool and that everyone should use it. I'd like to pretend it's not vaporware, but realistically, it is. I've got the oven; throw some mud my way, and I'll make bricks.

Uraeus, I think you're looking for this.

On 20 Jan, I predicted that it would take me a few weeks to fix my car. I should have predicted 1 month, since it was exactly one month when I finally replaced the alternator on Friday. I also readjusted the rear brakes, an evil necessary every few thousand miles on my car.

The exception unknown software exception (0xc00000fd) occurred in the application at location 0x7c2d1dd5.

This is what I get when I run Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 on a fresh install. The question: Should I actually try to fix this, or use it as an excuse to not work on Windows?