red letter day
gonna be a good day!
Nothing like a good night's sleep followed by a Friday at work (with a
highly defined and ultra-priority goal, no less!) to get your weekend
off to a good start. Yeah baby.
What the hell is wrong with /. this morning, anyway?
information, please
If anybody out there with a knowledge of Mac hardware has a spare
moment or two, I could use a favor. I've got this friend, see, and
he's getting ready to purchase his first computer. He's a bit nervous
about the amount of cash he's plunking down, and wants to make sure
that he does (and buys) the Right Thing. He's a Mac person, and he's
turned to me for advice. Now, I used to be a Mac person, but that was
a while ago, and I haven't really been following the Mac hardware
scene that closely, and so I'm worried about giving him bad
advice.
So I'm appealing to my ultra-knowledgeable reading audience -- help me out here. If you were going to buy a Mac today, and were looking at the "faster" and "fastest" options in the G4 desktop line, which one would you choose, and why? What's the difference between the two models, and is the more expensive one worth the extra scratch? Replies to jacobs@genehack.org, and thanks in advance.
points?
Hey, cool, I got some
points from Lyn. Sympathy points, but points none the less. I
think I'll start giving out points too -- I'll just
steal take inspiration from Isomorphisms.
Okay, expect a more detailed setup later, but for right now, points
are being given out for answers to the Mac question, above.
ego-surfing
From this
entry of Rick's, one could infer that I'm not nice. Damn, I guess
the mask is slipping again...where's that spirit gum...
shout outs
Happy belated birthday to Dr. Hal. Man, I still get a
little shiver down my back every time I see the string "Lyndon, Kansas"
on a web site that's not mine. (Hal and I grew up in the same small
Kansas town, about 20 years apart.)
one for the 'rents
This one is for my parents -- well, more specifically, for my Dad, who
I think will get a kick out of this: the Perry Home Cook
Book, "By the Ladies of Perry, Kansas, and Vicinity, 1920".
Link via Larkfarm, which I also think Dad would get a kick out of.
software round up
I've got several things I'm checking out, to recommend for or against,
but the Penguin heads in the audience might be interested to know that
Opera has a new beta
that recognizes Netscape plugins. Also seems to be a bit zippier
overall, if that's possible. Two big thumbs and a slowly shrinking
swelled ear up for Opera under Linux.
work inappropriate
Well, probably, anyway. But, hell, it's Friday, so here ya go: Nude beer labels. One
day, I'd like to curate a museum exhibit entitled "Stuff that we tried
to get guys to buy by putting nekkid wimmin on it". Hey, it's a goal, okay?
mozilla versus the worm
Code Red has
nailed Netscape. I'm at over 1000 distinct scans and counting on
my little dialup connection here. Actually, I'm not even really
counting at this point; I just keep checking logs as more of a reflex
action than out of any real desire to know how bad things have gotten.
I can name that DNA in...10 bases!
Some Belgian scientists claim to have found a 534 base pair chunk of
DNA in GM soy bean plants that doesn't have any good matches in the
DNA databases. That's funny, I didn't realize that a full sequence of
soy bean had been placed in the public databases -- and that's pretty
much the only way I can see that these scientists could rule out the
obvious alternative explanation, which is that the DNA chunk in
question naturally occurs only in soy bean plants. Points to anybody
who wants to track down the article (which is in today's issue of the
powerhouse European Journal of Food Research Technology) and
send me a synopsis.
Hey, I like this points thing. Maybe I'll make them redeemable for valuable prizes, or something. Hey, Genehack merchandise -- yeah, baby, I'm all about the merchandise. And the points.
womyn born womyn
Yesterday's Washington Post had an
interesting article about the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival,
which has been running annually for over 25 years. The beginning part
of the article is sort of fluffy, but towards the end, it starts to
get into some interesting disputes that occurred a few years ago when
transgendered people started trying to attend the festival. Apparently
the policy on attendees is "womyn born womyn", which (near as I can
tell) means that female to male trannies are okay, while male to female
trannies are verboten.
Leaving aside any issues about the overall workability of this sort of sex/gender-based segregation, that seems to me like a really odd place to draw the line. Anyway, a good read; I'll be curious to see if Debra or Dan have any insight to add.
off to work...
Yep, it's that time again. Hopefully I'll have some time to touch up
the design this weekend, but no promises -- it's looking like I've got
a fairly full slate. I'll leave you with a picture of Flora that I
grabbed this morning:
Do other people's cats have this strange habit of going to sleep with their heads in or on shoes, or is this a unique Flora-ism?