Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Just found out through many LJ friends in the filk community that Greg McMullan, aka filkergem perished in a house fire last night.

I'll post a longer remembrance later, as soon as I find a picture of him that I can post here.

Greg McMullan
Greg McMullan
Greg McMullan

I've been wanting to upgrade the 3 Gb hard drive in my laptop for a while.

( Last week, I bought a 6 Gb hard drive on eBay. The gory details follow. )

Lessons learned: 1) Make sure I start with a clean disk, including any hidden system files. 2) It's ideal to take out the hard drives and hook them up to another machine to perform the copy. 3) Give it lots of time.

Now I wish XP Home had an FDISK command to take care of disk work. It doesn't. And my copy of PartitionMagic doesn't work on XP. :( [Updated 22:23] PartitionMagic does indeed work on XP; I need to call the NT flavor and not the 9x flavor.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday calamitysam!

There's talk about the Government giving every taxpaying American a check for $800 in order to stimulate the economy. My reckoning is that in most cases, the money will be used to pay off debt -- credit cards, home equity loans, etc. -- instead of making new purchases.

On an unrelated note, I don't think Dr. Phil should have blabbed about Britney's condition. Just because one is a celebrity doesn't mean they lose their right to privacy.

I was just reading this story about how Time Warner is planning to try a pricing model based on consumption, rather than a flat fee. The test market is Beaumont, TX.

I remember Robert Metcalfe, in several of his articles he wrote for InfoWorld, advocated a pay-as-you-go Internet.

Can this be done? Do we finally have the technology to do this? And would you support such a billing paradigm (i.e. vs. free sites or flat-fee sites)?

Maila Nurmi, who was better known as Vampira, one of the original TV horror movie hostesses, has died.

Here's the obit from msnbc.com.

It's old news, but I think I should mention it.

The seal -- yes, it was a seal -- whose picture started the "walrus and the bucket" saga died over two years ago. Here's a news clipping.

Once again, I'm unable to afford the time off to go to a weekend filk convention, as much as I'd like to go. It's about the only time I get to see some of you in real life, albeit briefly or in passing. And sometimes it's the only chance I get to sing or play.

Ditto this for Conflikt, and quite possibly FKO as well.

At least amazon_42 can't razz me about wasting my money going to cons. :-P

For those of you who are going....have a great time!

My alma mater had a CDC Cyber mainframe computer from at least 1981 (when I started there) to 1986, when it was replaced with an IBM mainframe. I was loosely affiliated with the College of Mathematical Sciences, which was a unit of the university that had a lot of aspiring computer geeks like me. I wonder where they are now.

In 1985, there was a group of us that used the Cyber's messaging system (written in APL) to communicate with each other. We had "handles" -- mine was Cerebus, after the aardvark of comic book fame -- that we used on the system instead of our real names. Those were fun times. I wonder where they are now.

The Cyber was a great vector processor -- it excelled at mathematical calculations, which was required by the science and engineering communities of the university. Even though the OS was a little cryptic, it wasn't as cryptic as Unix.

I haven't seen any stats, but I'm guessing today's desktop computers are more powerful than some of the top-of-the-line Cray supercomputers of years ago. And they don't require liquid cooling.

Other than museums, are there any Cyber machines still around? Or have they all been scrapped?

If you went to college and was a computer geek like me, what machines did you have at your school? Did you spend any time on them? Any amusing stories?

I was going to expand this list to 10 items, but I couldn't come up with enough items to fill the list. Maybe later.

5) Not using their turn signal.
4) Driving slow in the passing lane.
3) Tailgating.
2) Driving on the shoulder. (What's your hurry, people?)
1) Tossing lit cigarette butts out the window.

What are your driving peeves? Let's hear 'em.

Last weekend, I noticed that there is an Abitibi Paper Retriever dumpster in the parking lot of my local supermarket, which is about 1/2 mile away from me. This will make my paper recycling runs a lot less time-consuming, since I no longer have to drive 10 miles to the county dump to recycle my paper.

What's not clear to me are the types of paper they'll accept. I've been recycling nearly everything made of paper or paperboard, including toilet paper spindles, cereal boxes, glossy junk mail, old catalogs, magazines, and (of course) newspapers.

I'm guessing one of the local schools is using this project as a fundraiser. And I'll be more than happy to supoprt it.