Geezer

There are 380 posts filed in Geezer (this is page 37 of 38).

Ten year anniversary

Exchanging Rings - 11 September 1999

On this day ten years ago Kelly and I were married. The luck that allowed our picture-perfect wedding to take place between two hurricanes (Dennis and Floyd) has continued to serve us well. As the man standing before that beautiful bride, it would’ve been hard to fully comprehend how blessed I would become – how blessed we would become. Even now I can’t fully comprehend it.

Thanks to everyone who helped make that day special, and to my lovely wife who has made every day special ever since. I love you!

I’m on a Boat

Navy-Im_On_A_Boat

My friend Jamie sent a link today to a music video made by officers of the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). It’s set to the parody rap song I’m on a Boat by The Lonely Island (YouTube). The John Paul Jones version is a pretty good copy, considering the guys were limited in their props.

This video and another version of I’m on a Boat made by different sailors goes to show you what pulling six months worth of 12-hour shifts can do to one’s sanity. It’s a long way back from the Persian Gulf to California and sailors get a little slap happy. This is the kind of thing I would’ve put together on the end of a deployment if I’d had a MacBook back then.

Check out this version of Pump It by the VAW-116 Sunkings and the British Royal Navy doing Bohemian Rhapsody. Good times.

Warning: some videos contain explicit language.

Update 7 Oct 2009: The John Paul Jones video is also available here.

Happy Birthday, Linux!

150px-Tux.svg
Today is Linux‘s 18th birthday. On August 26, 1991, Linus Torvalds announced Linux to the world:

Hello everybody out there using minix –

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

(h/t Warren Myers)

Cheviot Hills Golf Course virtual edition

Cheviot Hills Golf Course

I put up the last webpage of the now-defunct Cheviot Hills Golf Course that formerly stood on Capital Boulevard between Gresham Lake Road and Durant Road. I’ve had this floating around for three years and figured I’d finally find a home for it. The webpage mirroring isn’t perfect as it missed some of the Javascript mouse-over graphics, but most of the content and photos are there.

Revisit the long, gone Cheviot Hills here.

Facebook is the new AOL

Remember in the early, dot-com days of the Internet there were two classes of Internet users, dialup users and AOL users? The dialup users had access to the full Internet (well, full for the time, anyway) and AOL users got a sanitized, prepackaged version of the Internet at best. We dialup users looked down on the AOL users and their “walled-garden” system.

It dawned on me today that Facebook is the new AOL. Facebook has this whole environment where things are controlled and it’s set apart from the rest of the Internet. There are some people whose online experience consists almost completely of Facebook. It’s a walled-garden just like AOL.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1992, the same year that AOL for Windows debuted. Seventeen years later we are back where we started.

(You clever MT.Net readers are different, though. The fact that you’re reading this shows you’re not part of the unwashed masses. Pat yourselves on the back.)

Q+E Photos

I blogged about these before but wanted to share some of my Q+E software photos again:

QE_Support-1QE_Support-2QE_Support-3QE_Support-4

If you know/remember who’s who, drop a comment and I’ll try to get everyone labeled.

The Onion has been “sold” to the Chinese

This week, The Onion (formerly “America’s Finest News Source”) was “sold” to the Chinese. Since then, The Onion has been running articles as if they were written by the Chinese Communist Party. Some bits miss the mark but some are quite clever.

In that theme, The Onion posted this status update on Facebook and made me laugh out loud:

The Onion NEWSWIRE: Disgusting U.S. Citizen Allows Saliva To Collect In Mouth.

As one person commented:

Chris Ross
Whoever is writing this I think has been to China – yes, that’s right, saliva (with the various “additives” they can add to it) belongs on the sidewalk and if that isn’t possible – indoor potted plants.

Any Westerner who has visited China nods knowingly at this fake headline. I saw it myself when I visited China. Thanks, Onion, for the memory and the laugh!

Journaling filesystems

I was geeking out a bit while I was cleaning this morning, thinking about how wonderful journaling filesystems are. My computers here at home occasionally lose power and crash, yet their filesystems almost always repair themselves.

Back in the Ancient History days, dropping power on a DOS and Windows 3.x box meant almost certain file corruption. That changed when Microsoft’s Windows 2000 added journaling to the NTFS v3.0 filesystem, and from that point on most every filesystem had a journal. (NTFS wasn’t the first journaling filesystem, but the first one for the masses. I believe the first was IBM’s JFS, released for AIX in 1990 and then for OS/2 Warp Server in April 1999.)

Now with improved manufacturing techniques and journaled filesystems, filesystems seem to last until the drive itself wears out. So now you whippersnappers know how good you’ve really got it!