Wee lass was completely engrossed in this virtual sandbox that my brother linked to me. She made the picture you can see below or in the gallery at thisissand.com.

Who's the bitwise instruction that's in state machines on all your chips? SHIFT! Can you dig it?

They say that cat SHIFT is one bad input MUXer! (Shut your mouth!) I'm just talkin about SHIFT! (Then we can dig it!)

(Yes. I *could* do the rest. But WHY?)

Slackerwood has the scoop. Of course, I *liked* The Man With the Screaming Brain, although I'll admit that it may have been the antics of Comrade Joxer that saved the movie for me. It was Alien Apocalypse that left me feeling betrayed.

Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far:

1. Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won't make new Office 2007 documents, but I haven't tried doing that in the other solutions either.
   
2. NeoOffice 2.2.4-Patch 3 is known to open at least some non-trivial DOCX documents. NeoOffice only runs on Mac OS/X.
   
3. OpenOffice 3.0 can now open Office 2007 files, but I haven't tried it. OpenOffice runs on Windows and Linux, as well as other platforms.

Feeling uncertain? Gain the confidence you need with our Large Hadron Collider!

In these uncertain times, we all need results we can trust. At CERN and Fermilab, scientists are working around the clock to address these problems, taking very precise measurements which, by their very nature vary nature. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will introduce further uncertainty in the velocity of countless Higgs Bosons, which may or may not exist, and may or may not have mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c².

LHC: Putting the UN in uncertainty. :)

So, yesterday some of you may have noticed that sessrumnir.rootaction.net was down. Today you might notice that it's back up. I bet you are wondering what happened. Or not. That's ok, I'm going to give you the short version anyway. :)

The system experienced multiple concurrent physical failures. Specifically, the connector on one of the disk drives crumbled (not the cable, the SATA II connector block with the "pins") and the mainboard failed. It is possible, but unlikely, that the two are related. Read on, if you dare...

So, after much deliberation, I have installed Leopard. So far, I am quite encouraged. It "feels" a little zippier. It looks a little better (Apple has been slowly re-vamping the look since at least the release of Panther, and it's finally beginning to look consistent again.)

This is the ongoing checklist of things I need working under Leopard (Mac OS/X 10.5) and the list of steps of taken to meet it.

Things that must work:

- Gimp a post about some X11 tricks and Gimp and a thread about inkscape, X11, and GImp, and one on fixing the Gimp

i am so totally signing a petition to ban this.

two cleanups on my property in two years. totally done with it. up the irons!

click here to see the most recent carnage...

A friend of mine pointed me to a book swap site, where you just pay the shipping for books you want. I haven't figured out entirely how it all works nor had time to really browse it, but it sounds really neat...

They use some sort of point system, you accrue points based on books you have that people want. Then you spend them on books you want, and pay only the shipping.

Neato!

:)

That's Icelandic / Old Norse for "Are you learning Icelandic?" If you really want to know more... you can learn Icelandic for free (registration required) online courtesy of University of Iceland.