1) The motherboard on my primary laptop died, six weeks after the end of a four-year warranty. I cannot renew the warranty -- because Dell only offers warranties up to 5 years, only sells warranty periods in units of one year, and the laptop is four years plus six weeks old ( Read more... )

Again, a USB2-connected (through a PCMCIA card) storage tower vs. a dedicated Intel NAS box.
The Addonics tower is using three drives, while the NAS uses 4 drives; both are RAID-5.

tdb@bow:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/AddonicsRaid/zerofile bs=1024 count=1000000 ( Read more... )

Note: During this process, I emailed Addonics Tech Support for assistance, and in addition to their (quick) email response I received a phone call the next day to discuss the situation. Apparently this was a configuration they had not encountered before and so I offered to write up the results. (If you are not here for that technical information ( Read more... )

[full article from the Seattle Times is here]

The unsettling thing about living in a surveillance society isn't just that you're being watched. It's that you have no idea ( Read more... )

... or, How Not to Discover the End of Ice Fishing Season!


( Read more... )

Yes I am back home -- sharing living quarters with Laurie, eating like a pig, and consulting to start building up the bank account again. My life in a nutshell. :) Perhaps at some other time I will expand on that, but everything else is trivial (i.e. "it's all small stuff". :) )

The reason for reactivation of this blog: my thesis project has ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I have earned all the credits and passed all the courses I need for the degree, other than the thesis itself ( Read more... )

I shouldn't be posting this because I have an exam tomorrow but I already know I'll be up late anyway... There's a news story I've been following because of some issues of personal interest to me, and I ran across some comments which were so jaw-dropping I couldn't resist exposing them to the light of day ( Read more... )

I've been in Amsterdam for a year and a half now, and in terms of Dutch food I've primarily been exposed to snackish stuff:

• french fries with mayonnaise-like sauce
• the "cheese souffle", cheese wrapped in a packet of something which is sort of halfway between pasta and dough, then breaded and fried
• and of course herring -- pretty good smoked, but ( Read more... )