Category Archives: General Blather

Closing up for Ed

My uncle passed away late last month. He was my father’s older brother by about three years. When my dad died this past winter, Ed was going to set things up so that I would have all the necessary legal power to act as his heir and access his accounts to pay off his debts and so on. Unfortunately, he fell ill himself and didn’t get a chance to get things done before he was no longer mentally fit to do so.

I’m down in Dallas with my mom now, with a folder full of papers and the phone numbers of two of his surviving friends. So far, we’ve been able to make arrangements with the funeral home for Ed’s cremation and with his landlord to get his stuff out of his apartment.
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Work Dream

Latest work dream: I was trying to troubleshoot a professor’s computer, but because it was a dream, all of the text on the screen kept changing. So I told the prof. “This will be easier to fix when we’re awake” and then woke up.

False Positive for Bad RAM

Hey! If you ever want to create a false-positive for bad RAM in the new MacBook series, I’ve got a foolproof way to do so!

You’ll need two MacBooks. Put them both on a flat surface. Close one of them, then set the other MacBook on top of it. Power up the top MacBook. It will start up, and a few seconds later the power light will start gently pulsing but the screen will remain black. No matter what keys you hit, it won’t wake up.

Ta Dah! Those are the symptoms of a failed Power On Self Test due to bad or missing RAM.

What’s actually happened is that there’s a little rare-earth magnet in lid of MacBook that closes a switch in the body of the MacBook when the lid is closed. The magnet in the bottom MacBook is closing the switch in the top MacBook. The top MacBook will not wake up – as far as it is concerned, its lid is closed.

St. Patrick’s Day

So, here’s a quick update on the weekend so far….
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It will never sound the same…

Cinematic dream

The scene opens from the driver’s point of view in a car, with a folded newspaper on the passenger’s seat. There’s an advertisement reading “Drivers Wanted!” in colors very similar to that of a major pizza chain. Just above the fold, the ad continues: “No experience necessary! Our hardened mercenaries will teach you.” The driver unfolds the paper revealing the rest of the ad copy: “Everything you need to know about delivering pizzas in the post-zombie world!”
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Digital Housekeeping

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here on a regular basis.

Here’s the deal. I’m going to try to post here more often, but no promises. I’ve been doing some server maintenance that had fallen by the wayside, and it kind of kicked off my urge to vent more in public. Y’see, the hosting company got hacked back in January and I needed to reset my login passwords. Then I checked the server logs and found that I had an insecure installation of some gallery software that had become a link farm for spam sites. And some Russian streaming music site had somehow sucked up half my bandwidth.

So obviously I haven’t paid enough attention to this place for far too long. To make up for it, I’ve just gone through and back-linked a whole slew of comics. Read, enjoy, comment on them here. I’ll post other stuff too, I promise.