Comments of kernelm (48)

Comment on post Farewell sweet Prius (2004-2013):
2013-07-06T08:34:41+00:00
:( We're renting a Prius for the weekend here in Cali and we're really loving it. It or something like it will probably be our next car.

Comment on post link friday: terrible charities, sleep is important, VR sistine chapel:
2013-06-23T13:11:19+00:00
51 on the quiz. :) Only really had to guess for Breyer/Kennedy on the Justices since the others all have more identifying characteristics, including Scalia's "I'm an asshole, look at me" face.

Comment on post Google Reader is closing - try Newsblur instead!:
2013-03-14T17:23:57+00:00
I seriously thought I was hallucinating when I saw the popup on Reader last night. Like... WTF GOOGLE?!?

Comment on post links: traffic fatalities visualized, lead is bad, comment trolls are also bad:
2013-01-18T15:27:32+00:00
Bioware's not really handling the publicity well, and I wish they had the time and resources to make it more widespread in the game, but I'm still pretty excited about seeing how same sex romances will work on Makeb. I mean, knowing Bioware they'll be cheesy and mostly just fade to black like all their romances, but still... :)

Comment on post reviews: Fitbit One, Nokia Lumia 920, Lenovo Thinkpad T430:
2012-12-18T08:59:59+00:00
Heh, the old one was a more traditional design (I'm not really fond of this "chiclet"/island thing) but also had more spacing and rows, I believe. Aha, found a good comparison here. Main thing I like about the old layout is the little gaps between sets of Fn keys and also Home/End/PgUp/PgDown where I'm used to them.

I'm sure when the time comes I'll get used to the new keyboard though.

Comment on post reviews: Fitbit One, Nokia Lumia 920, Lenovo Thinkpad T430:
2012-12-18T08:32:48+00:00
Thinkpads really are the best. I'm still a little wary of the new keyboard design (why fuck with something established and that just works, Lenovo?) but I won't have much of a choice when I eventually have to update my X201, I guess.

Comment on post theocracy on the march:
2012-03-21T19:35:16+00:00
Who is this Rich Dunbar and why does anybody care what he thinks? His post is so loaded it's ridiculous. Assuming that all beliefs are equally valid immediately invalidates the rest of his argument and makes it pointless. You might as well say, "assuming that not getting maimed or killed and getting maimed and killed are equally good choices, why do people care about auto safety?" That makes as much sense as his post. I note his refusal to answer the slavery question somebody brought up in the comments.

Looking at his Twitter, he regularly looks down on women's rights, retweets the usual Fox News lineup, etc, so it's not a surprise.

Comment on post Samsung Focus S w/ Windows Phone 7 - initial thoughts:
2011-12-21T16:38:29+00:00
I'm really thinking about getting a WP7 phone (specifically one of the Lumias, probably). I like that Microsoft actually worked with unlockers to set up an official unlocking tool. Still though, as far as I know there's no way to sync or even transfer files with Linux, which would be a deal breaker. *sigh*

Comment on post Nokia Lumia 800 - probably my next phone:
2011-10-27T15:26:50+00:00
I really wish Nokia went forward with Meego. I love their hardware, and WP7 actually looks interesting, but I don't want a walled garden. I'm really having trouble figuring out what kind of phone I want to get, and I'm way overdue for an upgrade. I have an E71 that I still love, but it's getting really long in the tooth. *sigh*

Comment on post Exciting thing #1! and lots of links:
2011-09-27T19:38:19+00:00
Ha! The video was hilarious throughout, but the Flash line would have made me snort my drink out my nose if I had been drinking something.

The logic comic was good too.

Comment on post jumping on the complaining bandwagon (re Netflix):
2011-09-19T11:41:21+00:00
The speculation I've heard is that they're going to sell off the DVD side, which I guess makes some sense. Or maybe they're even eyeing having both components sold off, and having them separate makes it more palatable for potential suitors to buy one or the other?

We finally canceled our DVD account because we've had one DVD out from them for like, months. Just never got around to it and streaming is so much more convenient, even if the selection is limited.

Comment on post Torchwood: is it sci-fi?:
2011-08-04T11:25:04+00:00
TW season 1 is definitely a mess. The characterization is all over the place and hardly anybody is even likeable. Season 2 is a lot better and actually enjoyable.

Then there's Season 3, the CoE mini. Everybody else loved it, but I hated it. Character assassinations left and right, inane logic leaps, etc. Technically well made, but ugh. Obviously YMMV.

Haven't watched any of the new series yet. Not sure I want to, honestly. RTD has done so many amazing things, but seems to always manage to fuck it up. (See also: the beatification of Rose.)

Comment on post monday is for linking: financial geekery, NY same-sex marriage, DVR sports:
2011-06-13T17:20:49+00:00
Gah, cold showers. A couple of weeks ago the gas company (without notice!) turned off our gas to do some work on the line and so we didn't have hot water for like, 8 days. The cold showers sucked. I guess at least it wasn't during winter or something so the water wasn't bone-chillingly cold, but man was I glad to get hot water again.

Comment on post Public life/private life:
2011-05-13T12:41:46+00:00
I guess, I dunno... it's hard to explain, but to me opposition to gay marriage is just that much more beyond the pale than being pro-death penalty or anti-choice. Like, I can sort of see how somebody might rationally adopt those latter viewpoints, even if I disagree vehemently, but opposing gay marriage is something that's on the racism/misogyny (big fucking no) side of things to me.

Actually, now that I think about it, if I found out he had gone picketing at a Planned Parenthood or something, I would be pretty damn angry at him too.

And again, this guy would have been representing the US to the world. If he was in some position that had nothing to do with PR, I probably wouldn't care as much.

Anyway, those are just my two cents. I don't expect everybody to feel the same way I do. And it's not like I've never been hypocritical. I did buy Shadow Complex even though I swore to never add a cent to OSC's coffers. And we did go to Chick-Fil-A once recently too.

Comment on post Public life/private life:
2011-05-12T20:29:12+00:00
Eh, I'm not that bothered by it. He would have been representing the US to the world at large. What if he was a virulent racist? Misogynist? Bigotry is bigotry.

Comment on post Queen! (and me):
2011-04-15T14:57:21+00:00
Oh man, I've always loved "Flash". Well, most of Queen's songs, honestly. But whenever I hear somebody say the word "flash" I start singing (either to myself or aloud, depending on the company) "Flash! a-aaaaa. Savior of the Universe!"

I really do think Freddie was the greatest rock frontman ever. And that's from somebody whose favorite band by far is U2. Bono and company are great live too, but Freddie was at another level.

Comment on post San Francisco trip:
2010-10-13T23:46:31+00:00
Jelly Bellies! I think you were the one who first introduced them to me, actually. I was in the Taste Bud club for a while... wonder if they still have that.

Comment on post cordoba house, ricky gervais:
2010-08-21T00:30:10+00:00
My favorite Extras bits, other than the pervy Patrick Stewart one: Daniel Radcliffe trying to act macho and adult.

Orlando Bloom trying so hard to get the main girl to like him. His expression at the end is priceless.

Comment on post quick linkies:
2010-07-09T16:23:12+00:00
If the DOMA case actually makes it to the Supremes though, I have a feeling it would get overturned. The conservative block is too strong right now. We need some of those judges to be retiring rather than all the more liberal ones.

Comment on post MetroRail and links:
2010-05-04T13:16:12+00:00
Oh yeah, I heard about the limited hours thing from my mom. Hopefully they'll be adding to it as time goes on. Here the main complaint about the TRE (commuter train between Fort Worth and Dallas) is that it only goes to midnight or so so if you're going on a bar crawl or something in Dallas it's easy to get stuck. *g*

Comment on post MetroRail and links:
2010-05-04T12:30:43+00:00
Ooh, I definitely want to try out MetroRail next time I'm in Austin. I'm amused by the Howard stop, since it reminded me a lot of one of the major Chicago L stations that I stopped at/passed through a lot. It was also the terminus of the Red line.

There's 12 planetariums in Dallas?? I wonder if that's counting the whole metroplex. I know we have one here at the newly rebuilt Science and History Museum which I still need to check out. The photos I've seen of it look neato.

Comment on post official wedding pictures up! and yogurt:
2010-04-14T10:26:04+00:00
Hmm... I don't really see anything in their bento boxes that seem too weird, but then I'm pretty crazy about sushi. *g* I think the only thing I haven't really liked is sea urchin and that was more because it didn't really taste like anything to me, and it's super expensive (even for sushi). Sadly, sushi is always so expensive. And the selection of restaurants around here isn't the best. In Chicago I had at least 5 different places within walking distance, and one of them even delivered. :-)

Comment on post links n' such:
2010-03-11T14:34:10+00:00
Wait, you're a Michigan fan? How'd that happen?

And I really need to get back into boardgames. The only ones people here play are Settlers (and the gazillion variants) and Bohnanza. Which are fine games, but I want to get back into the meatier stuff. My copy of Puerto Rico hasn't been played in years, and I've never even had a chance to play Caylus or Agricola or the other big new games.

Comment on post rethinking the plan:
2009-11-24T10:49:43+00:00
Hmm... I don't remember the comment system being _too_ tricky when I wrote a bot that would have theoretically helped mod a comm, but which was never deployed. Though, now that I think about it, I had access to stuff like CURL, which I don't know if you have to access to in WebOS.

Comment on post up yours, Maine:
2009-11-04T10:06:23+00:00
Ugh, that was the first thing I checked on my phone this morning and it definitely lead to some profanity on my part.

Comment on post browser of choice?:
2009-03-21T17:43:48+00:00
None of the above: Opera!

Comment on post the advantages of living in a medium-sized city:
2009-03-09T11:30:03+00:00
Yeah, it's 16th or so last I checked. Though, if you start looking at metropolitan areas, it goes down farther quite a bit because of a lot of cities that have huge suburban populations.

Comment on post the world is depressing links:
2009-02-03T11:47:46+00:00
Wow, Dirk Benedict is still going on about that shit? I remember him saying that stuff years ago after nuBSG first started airing. At first I thought you'd found an old article before I looked at the datestamp. What a blowhard.

Comment on post attention world:
2009-01-26T20:42:00+00:00
From what I've heard, that's not too crazy. The big worry would be if vendors/venues that you really wanted are already booked, but there should be plenty of choices in Austin. We're giving ourselves a year but that was just so we could take it easier and be more relaxed.

Comment on post computer miscellany:
2008-09-03T13:44:14+00:00
How old is the motherboard? Do you often turn off the box? There's a CMOS battery that keeps the clock ticking when power is off.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000239.htm

I'd also think about just using NTP.

Comment on post public service announcement: *salmon is an AIM bot:
2008-02-25T10:36:22+00:00
That's why I set Pidgin to "buddies only". :)

(And yeah, Northcross is the one on Anderson. Highland is down near I-35 where East 290 splits off.)

Comment on post laptop debate:
2008-02-04T15:10:52+00:00
They can't clean/replace the keyboard? My girlfriend's Mac you can just pop the keyboard right out. On my Dell you have to work at it a bit to get to the keyboard, but it's not impossible.

Comment on post puzzle pictures:
2008-01-23T16:53:27+00:00
I'd try HowardForums.

I briefly glanced through it but it seems like it might be possible with some kind of modified ROM. Or a higher data plan?

Comment on post puzzle pictures:
2008-01-23T16:11:02+00:00
What? Apps can't access the network? That's ridiculous. The J2ME Google Maps is pretty cool, though my phone unfortunately can't do the new self-location feature.

Wait, that means you also can't use Opera Mini? I love that browser so very much.

Comment on post I do not heart huckabee:
2008-01-18T10:52:31+00:00
Huckabee is such an ass, and I hate how he's seen as this populist "cool guy" by a lot of people. I think more and more people are becoming aware of his fundieism though, thankfully.

Comment on post T-Mobile blocking Twitter. Egads!:
2007-12-17T10:29:37+00:00
Oh, certainly. I way prefer GSM too. Right now I have my normal AT&T phone (the Sync, which is pretty good though it has a few annoyances) and a backup cheap unlocked phone (Motofone, which is actually pretty cool) that I could just pop my SIM card into at any time. Even with AT&T's less than stellar network, never again will I subject myself to stupid CDMA carriers.

Comment on post T-Mobile blocking Twitter. Egads!:
2007-12-15T14:58:54+00:00
Just a note, while AT&T is also GSM, your current SIM card almost certainly wouldn't work on their network, since it's tied to your T-Mobile account.

Comment on post unstuck not in st. louis:
2007-09-24T00:32:35+00:00
We got gas in Hillsboro yesterday on the way to Waco! And yeah, from there it should be no more than two or three hours to Austin barring crazy construction. It's about exit 370 there and downtown Austin is 235ish so only about 140 miles to go.

Comment on post clue solver!:
2007-08-21T15:37:56+00:00
Oh god, Clue. I've only ever played it once, and it was at camp. At Bamberger Ranch, actually. (You know, I was all about to say math camp and mention something about how "yes, I did go to math camp" before I remembered who I was commenting to. :-P )

I totally hated it. I was horrible. Haven't played it since.

BTW, I've somehow become addicted to Scrabble on Facebook. *headdesk* There really needs to be a Brettspielwelt app on Facebook so I can play Carcassonne or Citadels all day. *g*

Comment on post Haskell wearing me down:
2007-08-15T10:48:22+00:00
I doubt most browsers would support PPM. I haven't worked with Haskell in a long time, but I can definitely see any sort of I/O beyond simple text being difficult to work with. I should really play with Haskell again. I miss functional programming.

Comment on post weekend, wow, project:
2007-07-09T09:46:39+00:00
Javascript, eh? I've had lots of fun playing with DOM and AJAX stuff. I want to learn more with XML and try out stuff like XSLT.

Comment on post Yay holiday week!:
2007-07-03T09:19:21+00:00
Ugh, don't get me started on the Transformers movie. Michael frickin' Bay. And the robots are just so totally wrong. Wrong! :-P

Ooh, those are cool backgrounds. I almost never bother to actually get a background these days since I pretty much never see my desktop(s).

Comment on post Mothers, lock up your hard drives:
2007-06-29T12:15:52+00:00
I'm really bad at backups. Eep.

Hey, I don't know if you've seen this, but I just found a "Friends Wheel" app on Facebook that shows sort of the topology of your friend relationships. If they can do that, then I think it should be possible to do what you had been thinking about for an app.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=94ba36904a0a7f278ab5b1436e5e9e4b

Comment on post Mothers, lock up your hard drives:
2007-06-29T10:04:38+00:00
Ugh, dying hard drives are the biggest pains in the ass EVER.

A couple of years ago while I was still at ND, all of a sudden I started getting intermittent I/O errors on my laptop's drive. Then the drive started making weird clicking noises. I knew it was trouble, especially since I couldn't afford to buy an external to copy everything off to right then. Thankfully I had a nice pipe to one of my departmental servers so I immediately started scping over everything I could think of that I needed. In the end I got most of the really important stuff, but there were still some painful losses.

I'm still scared as heck now of losing my old laptop's drive or the external. One of these days I'm gonna build my dream RAID-10 multi-terabyte array. Muahahaha.

Comment on post camping, facebook:
2007-06-11T11:55:01+00:00
I've been trying to think of a good idea for a Facebook App. Everything I come up with seems to already exist though. Doh.

Comment on post A Tale of Two Stories:
2007-05-24T15:47:00+00:00
Sadly, the culprit was pretty much my own inept driving... Back then I had a habit of running into the curb when trying to park and sometimes even when cornering. *headdesk*

Yeah, I hear you on the tinkering thing. That's part of the reason I've been so lazy and haven't gotten Linux on the new laptop yet. That, and the Linuxy stuff I need to do I can still use the old laptop.

Comment on post A Tale of Two Stories:
2007-05-24T09:16:27+00:00
Ick, flat tires. I haven't had one in a while, thankfully. *knocks on wood* But when I lived in Houston that time for the IBM internship, I had a flat like, every other week. I learned to be very good with changing into the spare tire. And I knew the NTB guys way too well.

Dude, yeah, not having DMA is huge. On my old laptop DMA kept turning off randomly on the DVD drive which meant all of a sudden playback would be horrid. What distro are you using these days? I've got Gentoo on my old laptop but I really need to do an emerge update soon. I'm still trying to decide what distro I want to put on the new laptop. Gentoo is fun, but just a bit too much of a PITA sometimes.

Comment on post vi, ngrams, hats:
2007-05-23T17:01:52+00:00
I love vi so very very much. (Well, ok, vim, but regular vi is good too.) It's pretty much the only thing I use for any kind of text editing, including all my code. I often find myself wishing I could use vi style editing on things like web form fields. I've also got vi mode enabled for everything that uses readline. :-D

If you want some tips on vim, let me know. I'm still by no means a true guru, but I've accumulated quite a few cool things. I used to use control-[ to Esc, but I mapped 'jj' in insert mode to it as well, and it's so useful. (Of course my caps lock is remapped to control.) I've also got some things to help manage tabbed windows. And stuff.

This backup was done by LJBackup.