I’m trying to decide between these two nominees for the award of “Losers of the Century” (play dramatic Oscar theme here): On the one hand we have Mensa, a society for people with IQs in the top 2% of the population (*getting nauseous*) and on the other hand we have the International High IQ Society, in this case for people in the top 5% of the population. This society claims to foster “intellectual thinking”. Snigger.
Whooohoooo! We’re1 here at the IEEE Visualization 2005 conference in the Minneapolis Hilton.
It being Sunday, we’re nursing our 7-hour jet lag and relaxing with a light tutorial, General Purpose Computing on GPUs. The team presenting this tutorial are some of the heavy-weights in the field and so far it’s quite interesting.
During the next few days, I’ll try and post an update or two. Rubbing shoulders with the Visualisation world’s Who’s Who obviously takes precedence over abusing the conference WLAN to blog like a nerd.
I don’t have the time to explain to you how much SORBS sucks and how I wish that their servers and their whole organisation would just disappear from the face of the internet, so I’ll point you at some other reports:
One of the GMail MTAs (qmail.gmail.com) has been listed in the SORBS database (due to one jackass sending a mail to a SORBS spamtrap address) and now I haven’t been able to send mail to a number of my friends and family. Many GMail users will be terribly inconvenienced by this. If I want to have the IP delisted, I’m supposed to pay SORBS $50. That’s extortion!
I’ve lost at least 5 hours of my life to the frikking euro key on my Microsoft Natural (old-style) keyboard. It seems that Gnome 2.10 on Ubuntu 5.04, otherwise a great combination, enjoys torturing its Dvorak keyboard layout users with the euro-symbol on the “5” key. It simply doesn’t work, no matter what you try.
After sacrificing the prerequisite 5 hours to the Linux gods of Ultimate
Non-Usability, I came up with the following solution. Make the following change
to your /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/dvorak file:
So, as some of you might know I had a sort of make-over on monday morning, september 12, 2005. Here are some before and after photos: Before and after.
The first photo shows all the wonderful people that showed up to watch me defend my work and the esteemed gentlemen (in fancy garb) who opposed me. The second photo was taken right after I received that red thingy. The red thingy means that you may now call me Doctor Charl if that sort of thing takes your fancy.
You will remember that a while back I asked you to do me a favour and ask GMail to add the possibility to change the “From:” address on outgoing mails. Well, boys and girls, it seems that they’ve gone and done this!
Read all about it here.
WHOOOOOOOP!
If you’re wondering what kind of music you should try next, and you’re in a post-punkish dance-punk-funkish mood, you could do much worse than try History, the debut album by Canadian Controller.Controller.
I just realised why I don’t really LIKE my keyboard at home… I used to type on Microsoft Natural Elite keyboards, at home and at work. These were great: split layout, great feel and affordable.
Eventually, it was time to replace my keyboard at home. I bought the Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, thinking it would offer more of the same typing goodness. Unfortunately, as is the case with good things, and especially good things in Microsoft’s possession, they come to and end. These keys have the new patented Spongy Feel(tm). The major feature is that it sucks.
Yesterday morning, my laptop refused to start up. No bios, no boot, not good…
Fortunately the HP NC6000 is a business laptop, so it came standard with a 3-year international on-site warranty. I phoned HP support and within 10 minutes they had scheduled an HP engineer to come by today. This morning the engineer appeared with a new system board. In no time flat he had disassembled the whole laptop, replaced the system board and re-assembled the whole dang thing. Kaching, one working laptop.
