Author Archives: OGHD

I am, I suppose, the worst sort of computer user. I know so much about this stuff that I am acutely aware of the sheer magnitude of what I do not know, and I know that it is hopeless to attempt mastery, because I do not care that much. So everything is hard and futile, but if you ask me I have a thousand opinions, and each one is the definitive answer.

I am currently enjoying another attempt at learning emacs and trying in general to get back into the unix swing of things. I also just bought a Microsoft Surface Pro (AKA Surface 4). The sweet spot is supposed to be the i5 with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage. The i3 is … Continue reading →

Mott The Hoople 00 All the Youg Dudes

and

He aint Heavy — Hollies

CSN Almost cut my Hair

and

EWG Frankenstein (yes, Frankenstein)

I’m going to clean out the stables.  I’ll turn registration back on before too long.

I write from a Starbucks in Japan, on a tiny little Amazon Kindle Fire 7 tablet.  I purchased a ZAGG auto-fit keyboard, which works great.  I am connecting through my iPhone, so that I don’t teach my Fire a bunch of bad habits on wi-fi hotspots.
I will add pictures to this post.
I now have a magnificent mini-office set-up; a peripheral office made up entirely of peripherals.
I husked an old Case Logic CD carrier by taking the CD-page insert out of it.  That was easy — just hinge the “book covers” backwards and wiggle the plastic page roots out of the covers.  Try it, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.
This CD case has a medium pocket on front, which was … Continue reading →

has been topsy-turvy around here, including an unexpected reassignment in one of my lines of employment, some crucial deadlines being miracles off of me, and not least, a collapse in my email and hosting.  Long story, basically my fault, but they don’t make it easy.  This site was offline, and all email sent to me beginning 01FEB has simply been dropped, not delivered.  I hope fail notices went out — I have no way to know.

Anyway, going skiing this weekend.  I’ll post pics!

PARADISE – TOP 50 PROGRESSIVE TRANCE 2014 by Paradise on Mixcloud

I just cannot say enough good about this monster track. I can’t do anything about the girly pictures (nothing too bad, but not really family friendly), but that’s not the point.

I have a utility database  that tells me what my inbox looks like.  You see many people asking how to get a count of mails BY SENDER.  It’s the ultimate spam-whacking tool.  This is why places like Gmail don’t support it and never will. They want that spam sitting right where it is, spilling metadata.  The more junk mail sits on your Gmail account, the more they know about you.

Well, long story short, here’s a pivot table of the whole thing.  This is mail received by week, but with an important caveat — this is only what remains after some mail is moved, and some is deleted.  The dip at the end of 2014 is not a reduction in inbound mail, but the result of a cleanup … Continue reading →

It’s been a while.  I’m in the States right now, on the way back home.  I’ve intentionally stayed away from politics and blogging in general while deployed overseas as a mobilized reservist.

I probably won’t have much to say about the current deployment — the previous one was far more interesting.  I was able to accomplish a couple of goals on this one, however, so I’ll be happy to describe some of that.

It’s great to be back.

I have more to say about this, but I am still learning.  My impression so far is that Windows has really grown up and acquired a shell worthy of the term.  I’ve always been a DOS fan in the Microsoft camp, but at the same time really miss the power of a shel like bash.  Well, Powershell may be thought of as an object-oriented shell with much of the power and philosophy of bash.  Note that a huge difference is that is typical unix shells “everything is a file”, whereas in PowerShell, “everything is an object”.  And yes, that means, methods, properties, and an infrastructure for referring to and invoking them.

Yay.

Continue reading →