After giving the matter deep and thorough consideration, I
can, with utter confidence, recommend against kidney stones.
No,
sir, I didn't like it. You know how people are
always
telling you that you need to drink an unreasonable amount of
water
every day? It turns out that's so you won't get kidney
stones.
Women who have had them say it's the closest a man can
experience to
the pain of childbirth. It impressed me. Oddly, the
symptoms
didn't at all match what the books said about kidney stones,
but the
nurses and doctors all instantly pegged it. The pain wasn't
in my
back, but seemed to be in my colon. Apparently all those
prostaglandins
sloshing about inflame everything nearby. I can also say
that hydrocodone (Vicodin) works very, very well on kidney
stone pain.
Has everybody else noticed that Google Maps doesn't work
as well as once did? Often, lately, it
leaves tiles unfilled. But it seems better than it was a
couple of months ago.
I never had any real doubts about whether the new Systemd
replacement for init.d and Upstart was
a good idea. Certainly, the architectural justification for
its design seemed sound. Then, I saw on
Linux Weekly News that it cannot function if your
partitioning isn't just so. In
particular, it seems, you'd better not have
/usr mounted on / from another drive or
partition. Yes, really. Now, on most of my machines
/usr isn't mounted, so that doesn't
affect me directly, but such choices drain confidence.
(That, and PulseAudio still doesn't work right.) It makes
me wonder what other crazy bits are in there.
I've finally taken up Git. I know I'm late to the party,
but I can already say without fear of contradiction that the
correct solution to every problem, difficult or trivial,
begins with creating one or more branches, in much the same
way that every cake recipe begins with washing your hands
and preheating the oven. If you're not creating an
improbable
number of branches, you must be doing it wrong.
The weird failures on Intel i5 ("Arrandale") display
hardware, on laptops, continue. Apparently the fixes aren't
expected to make it into mainline linux until 2.6.39. The
kernels in drm-intel-next have been getting worse, so I'm
still on a snapshot based on 2.6.37-rc8.