Friday, February 18, 2005

Tune In, Turn On, Check Out

A wonderful tidbit about Timothy Leary, courtesy Wikipedia:

Leary was convicted of a drug possession charge, fled, and was eventually imprisoned for several years. When he arrived in prison, he was given a standard psychological test that the prison used to assign inmates to appropriate work assignments. Having written the test himself, he was able to give the answers that got him a job working in the prison library.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Recipe for American Pie

Don McLean's "American Pie" is one of my favourite tunes. Of course, just about everyone knows about the Buddy Holly references, but this website offers a startlingly detailed deconstruction of all of the deceptively nonsensical lyrics.

You Say Potato, I Say "Ni!"

I noticed this interesting note today in Dictionary.com's listing for "cretin":

/kret'in/ or /kree'tn/ n. Congenital loser; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right.

It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation /kret'in/ over standard American /kree'tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus."


A nerdy Shibboleth!

Word of the Moment: Oneiric

Oneiric, adj.

Of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Gaaaah!

My love affair with Firefox was dealt a big bucket of cold water yesterday, and the ice bath continues today. As Murphy's law prescribes, I had about 20 tabs open when the freakin' browser decided to quit on me, but to add insult to this injury, FF refused to restart.

I was ticked off enough to start with, knowing that I had to reinstall all my extensions, and re-fiddle with the search engine .prcs that I'd modified/added. I was doubly ticked off when, after doing all this, FF insisted on loading up a "default user" instead of the profile I had created. So colour me TRIPLY pissed today when the same thing seems to have happened again (with about 15 tabs nuked this time, grr!)

So in the interest of "I don't ever wanna hafta do this again" chronicling, I present to you (and for my own records): My Big Fat List of FireFox add-ons:

Stock Ticker
Session Saver
Flash Block
Disable Targets for Downloads
Context Search
Blog This
Ad Block

For search engines, I like to add Wikipedia and IMDB from this website, and Google Maps, Google Images, CDDB (any field), RecipeSource and Babel Fish translations from here.

For the record, Context Search makes these search engines unbelievably useful. Now if only I could get the browser to FUNCTION...

Cool(idge) Quote

History hasn't looked kindly upon Calvin Coolidge, but what I've read of him makes me think he was one of the US's slyly wittier Presidents. He also appears to have been a bit of a crank, but, being a crank myself, I find that more endearing than most. Here's a neat crank-y quote from Silent Cal:

'Nothing can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; un-rewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.' - Calvin Coolidge