Now that the Duke Nukem Forever project is dead (until it’s sold off and picked up by someone else), there’s a lot of renewed interest in the hilarious list of things that took less time than the Duke Nukem Forever development process. It lists things such as the Beatles’ entire music career and World War …
Author Archives: Randall
A Problem
I think I have a Bash problem. What follows is an actual command from my history. cat /usr/share/dict/words | fgrep -v “‘” | perl -ne ‘chomp($_); @b=split(//,$_); print join(“”, sort(@b)).” “.$_.”n”;’ | tee lookup.txt | perl -pe ‘s/^([^ ]+) .*/1/g’ | awk ‘{ print length, $0 }’ | sort -n | awk ‘{$1=””; print $0}’ …
Miscellaneous Friday Notes
For quite a while I’ve done a bad job of managing my email. I’m finally getting my inbox back in order, but there are still tens of thousands of messages — spanning the last year or so — that will probably go unread and unanswered for the near future. I’m going to do some sifting …
The Pursuit of Laziness
Since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for the perfect way to read in bed. The ideal position would involve no sustained muscle effort, so I could just let my eyes drift shut as I read, without the book falling shut or my hand slipping or anything. One way is to sit up against …
A Date Idea Analyzed
I don’t do conventions very often, but I recently went to ConBust out in Northampton, MA, while visiting some friends. While I was there, I had a guy propose something fascinating to me. I can’t remember the guy’s name, so if he or one of his friends sees this, post your info in the comments. …
Omegle
Since last night I’ve been obsessively connecting to Omegle. It’s a simple site that just connects you to a random person, anonymously, for a conversation. It feels like that scene in Fight Club where the narrator sits down next to Tyler on the plane. Two strangers meeting, laying out their personality and sizing each other …
What Happened to my Laptop
For the people who wanted to know the chain of events causing the laptop problems in the last post: Safe search won’t disable, and login for regular Google services is broken. I decide it’s a cookie conflict between Google services and file a bug report with Google. Google says “can’t reproduce”. I discover that clearing …
A brief pair of notes
1) Dvorak typists: I’m sorry if the paper I relied on has some potential flaws. If you want to share your extensive rants on the merits of various keyboard layouts, send them to me at doctorow@boingboing.net and I’ll be sure to read them over carefully. 2) You know how sometimes trying to fix one problem …
Kindle 2
First, the results of my laptop hunt. Thank you so much for all the suggestions — there are a lot more ultraportable options than I realized. I narrowed it down to two wildly different possibilties: The Lenovo ThinkPad X200s. I missed the 200s on my first survey — I didn’t realize Lenovo had one under …
Ireland
I will be in Ireland this Saturday, at SkyCon at the University of Limerick. I’m guessing they found me through my LimerickDB project, which may not be what they think it is. Since they rejected my original idea for a talk, which was based on John Cage’s 4’33” I will be talking about doing internet …
xkcd 