Oh, damn...there were a lot of books in that basement. This is bad.
Google says yes, strangely enough...I don't know, I think it would taste too much like antacid.
My father's ex-boss was named Peper, pronounced as you'd expect, and he had a Master's in English Literature. He stopped before he got his Ph.D--he claims it was because all you can get with a Ph.D in English Lit is teach, but we all know the real reason.
Serge: Yeah, in the first season (which would have been fall of 1999-spring of 2000). He was a very left-wing judge who the President and his staff put on the shortlist for S.C. nominee, but people accused them of doing it so they could say they had a (an?) Hispanic man on the shortlist.
They decided to make him their nominee after their original choice, also a liberal judge but one who would have sailed through the confirmation, turned out to not believe in a Constitutional right to privacy.
Of course, he was both extremely outspoken (even when he should have been quiet and let the White House speak for him) and caused no end of problems to the White House before he was confirmed. The Communications Director, who had been put in charge of the nominations, almost had an ulcer--then again, he always felt like that.
*grin* It's the character he played on The West Wing.
Serge: Hey, Edward James Olmos still means "Justice Mendoza" to me, so I'm not surprised.
Actually, this provokes an interesting question. What does Aslan eat? Lions are carnivores, but I don't think it's quite kosher--pun intended--for a religious leader to chow down on his flock.
Pair that with a glass of Christ's Blood, vintage 0 (though that's likely a mislabel).
The one that got me was toward the end of Digital Fortress, where the conclusion Dan Brown seems to push is that computer scientists and mathematicians know no physics at all.
Pace probably will get fired, and if he does, I can't imagine the situation will get better. Can you be a martyr while still alive? We're about to find out...
Paula: Probably loading the Cube as a firewire drive. Hook up a Firewire cable to both, boot the iBook, and hold down...I think it's "T"...as you boot the Cube. The Cube should appear as a drive on the iBook, then just drag.
I'm sorry, I just got the image of Vlad Taltos as a network security consultant for Morrolan...
Graydon: Well, it is diverse, but there's definitely an element of idiosyncracy there, mostly on the part of the users. Distributions, individual tweaks and optimizations, installation of what sounded like a good idea at the time...
That's not even counting entropic fields, like the one my friend has. She can screw over computers by being within ten feet, and using them? She steps very lightly.
At least one friend considered a sign on the door to his server room: "No Chaos Demons Allowed," specifically to keep her out. As it happens, we just make sure she doesn't go near the servery.
Now Steve's using Linux. I assume his setup is idiosyncratic.
I think you repeated yourself there...Linux is the most proof I've ever seen of my theory of techno-animism, specifically that users imbue computers with a bit of their own souls.
Come to think of it, I seem to remember hearing that Brust wrote Jhereg while between mainframe-wrangling jobs?
Actually, I think I may volunteer my services not based on my strength alone, but on my network of friends, at least two of whom have sysadmined for a living...ironic. I'm about to tell Steven Brust that "I don't do work, but I have a friend who does..."
I'm with Graydon. Is there any clue what type of help Brust needs--installations, data recovery, etc? One man's geek is another's guru. I'd be willing to help out, but gods only know how much help I'd be, as I'm probably only in "geek" status myself...
Re: Red/Blue coloring.
According to my grandfather, a former NBC news president:
In 1972 on election night, a subordinate of my grandfather [name removed; it's not important] wanted a big map on the wall with each state colored in for which way they were voting. My grandfather shot it down, saying it would give the wrong idea and make, for example, Montana seem more important than Rhode Island.
By 1976 my grandfather had left and the subordinate did it anyway. He (the subordinate) and John Chancellor jointly decided to make red the color of Republicans because red is the color of radicalism. It was a swipe at Republicans.
Of course, a few times it has switched up. My grandfather remembers Geraldine Ferraro bemoaning a "sea of Republicans"--all colored-blue states--in 1984 during the Reagan reelection.
Now, of course, red/blue has entered the vocabulary, even independent of elections, and my grandfather still likes to tell his (former) subordinate, "Look what you did."
Larry: That's not new, though. I vividly recall my sophomore year in high school reading a front-page Style Section essay by a senior who simultaneously decried the college-obsessed students of our school, then implied that she was the same, but better because she was self-aware. The article, of course, was entitled "Hey Yale, can this be my college essay?"
Everybody at school, however, understood that this was actually the capper in her application to Brown. I wonder if the title was deliberate or not.
I believe, though my memory is faulty, that she got in.
I just had an interesting discussion with my mother which was only sort of about this--she'd only read the Times piece, by the way. She is a person who is very much concerned with the people and the issues as they affect her (and me), and her point was the same as The News Blog: If she hadn't given the mother the link, the nanny could have saved a lot of trouble for everyone. She wanted to make sure I knew that and would be applying it in my own Internet life, and she wasn't concerned with the larger issues. She seemed to think I was (we were?) blowing this out of proportion.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 33 |
| 2004 | 31 |
| 2003 | 5 |
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