The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Garrett Fitzgerald:

Show all comments by Garrett Fitzgerald.

Posted on entry What's still broken? ::: May 05, 2008, 12:22 PM:
I have a cron job running on my machine every night that mails the database dumps to my gmail account.

http://worldcommunity.com/opensource/utilities/mysql_backup.html

Not terribly secure, but it's pretty much all public data anyhoo.
Posted on entry The Rather Difficult Font Game ::: April 28, 2008, 04:26 PM:
21 here, but I realized NoScript was turned on about 10 fonts in. :-)
Posted on entry Pope Rat, Professor X, red-state politician sex ::: December 18, 2007, 01:43 PM:
Oh, phones. Anybody else remember those high-tech autodialing phones that stored the numbers on punched cards?

I saw them at an expo at the Providence Civic Center once, but never in actual use...
Posted on entry Pope Rat, Professor X, red-state politician sex ::: December 14, 2007, 05:09 PM:
Born in 1968, I don't remember news events earlier than going out to a field near our house to see Apollo-Soyuz going overhead. I watched the moon landing, but have no memories of it, or of Apollo 13. I definitely remember Reagan getting shot, and I remember Carter pulling us out of the Moscow Olympics. I remember when "mini-series" meant Roots and Shogun, not a two-night movie that needed commercials to pad it to four hours. (I knew The Thorn Birds was on, but didn't care about watching it.) The first movie I remember going to see was a drive-in show that had a Beetle Bailey cartoon as the first show -- I was asleep by the second one. I read all the Danny Dunn books in the library, and Donald Keith's Time Machine series too. (Anybody else remember how Kai Beezey Tentroi got his name? :-) )
Posted on entry Open thread 91 ::: September 21, 2007, 01:52 PM:
Ray@858: congratulations. You've written some of the most offensive content ever seen in a deletion discussion. *rolls eyes*
Posted on entry Open thread 91 ::: September 19, 2007, 07:24 PM:
And the latest from Wikipedia: Elf Sternberg isn't notable.

It must have been someone else I've been reading for 17-odd years...
Posted on entry The fluorosphere bends back in upon itself ::: June 13, 2007, 10:50 AM:
My weirdest connection that easily comes to mind is:

In '98 or '99 I fell in love with Jeff Hitchin's "Tech Support". In '99, I moved out to the West Coast, living near Seattle. I got involved with a community theatre group called Eastside Musical Theatre. The third show I played in the band for was Man of La Mancha. At the first performance, I grabbed a program and was browsing through the cast list, and discovered that one of the Muleteers was... Jeff Hitchin. :-)

I went up to the dressing room and complimented him on the song. He was floored, because his filk and theatre activities had never collided before. :-)
Posted on entry Open thread 85 ::: June 13, 2007, 10:29 AM:
Hmm, 1985? That was my freshman-sophomore year at Brown, and also the year I finally graduated from high school. I skipped 12th grade, but they wouldn't give me the diploma until I transferred an English credit back from college...
Posted on entry Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: May 30, 2007, 01:38 PM:
Have you seen this one yet? :-)

I is a kitty and I has good fun
I is entertaining everyone
Dint used to be an internet icon
Till my mom got a digital Nikon
Posted on entry Open thread 82 ::: March 15, 2007, 01:46 PM:
Bruce@566:
I can still remember how depressing and scary it was the last time I was unemployed and looking for work: Scanning the ads, and the jobs bank listings, trying to find something to fit your meager experience and odd interests.

What's really disgusting is when you have over 10 years of programming experience, and you still can't find that next job, because people look at the "Visual FoxPro" and go "Oh, we don't need that," ignoring the fact that I'm smart enough and fast enough to learn just about anything you throw at me...

And when your state benefits run out in 6 weeks unless you start doing volunteer work, and nobody is interested in having you volunteer in your field...
Posted on entry Stumped by Microsoft Word ::: March 08, 2007, 08:47 PM:
I <3 Perl RegExps. :-)

Especially when you can do something complicated in one line, like:

$ perl -ln00e 'print join ",", map qq["$_"], split /n/' addr.txt

(What that does, believe it or not, is reformat addresses so that instead of looking like they belong on an envelope, they're all on one line with the pieces separated by commas.)
Posted on entry Geek test ::: February 26, 2007, 11:19 AM:
Geeky enough to recognize the original poem, not geeky enough to figure out what language it was translated into. :-)
Posted on entry ATTENTION US MILITARY PERSONNEL ::: October 02, 2006, 02:41 PM:
Posted and linked back. Thanks.
Posted on entry Jim Baen ::: June 15, 2006, 11:33 PM:
Not good. Happy thoughts etc. in transit.
Posted on entry Here We Go Again.... ::: February 14, 2006, 05:26 PM:
Re: Chris Clarke's comment about behavior mod without drugs not working -- our psychologist agreed with that, and pointed out studies that supported the theory.
Posted on entry Here We Go Again.... ::: February 14, 2006, 05:23 PM:
I have a recent data point on ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADD a year back (or so), and started taking Strattera. I wish I had looked into this in college, but I had been heavily indoctrinated with "he's not ADD, he's gifted". I was able to slide through high school easily, but I just got out of college by the skin of my teeth, and spent a lot of the next decade being either out of work or close to it.

In any case, once I accepted the diagnosis for myself, I was willing to look at it as a possibility for my younger daughter. I was concerned that it would be a case of "I think my daughter has ADD" - "Here's your Ritalin prescription, bye", but our pediatrician gave us a referral to a local psychologist who ran her through the WISC test. In abstract reasoning, she scored in the 99th percentile -- but when it came to digit sequences and ordering pictures to tell a story, she was scoring in the single digits. He explained to us that the Arithmetic, Coding, Information, and Digit Span scores were correlated well with a diagnosis of ADHD, so recommended that we start treating her, and told us about treatment options. Our pediatrician gave us a prescription for Concerta, so we're giving that a try. She's only been taking the Concerta for a few days, so we don't know if there will be a long-term benefit. However, the second day, she said "I don't think this is helping me think about things first." I think that the awareness to make this statement means that it's actually starting to work after all.
Posted on entry The Enfield ::: September 20, 2005, 07:48 PM:
I'm surprised nobody's brought up Captain Nemo yet.
Posted on entry Two Thousand Years and it's Still True ::: September 19, 2005, 04:22 PM:
Vicki, I keep trying to make that scan to:

Excuse me, my lord.
May I request, my lord,
Permission, my lord, to speak?
Forgive me if I suggest, my lord,
You're looking less than your best, my lord,
There's powder upon your vest, my lord,
And stubble upon your cheek.
And ladies, my lord, are weak.
Posted on entry If I had a boat ::: August 17, 2005, 04:56 PM:
I have an irresistable urge to quote 1776. :-)

"Dear sir, you are without any doubt a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief, a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking, pimping, pocket picking, Christable no-good son of a bitch -- and you sign your name."

"I'll take a dozen."
Posted on entry Interesting technique ::: August 10, 2005, 04:53 PM:
Kitten Poker, anyone?

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