Gecko Bloggle

Let’s start at the beginning of this week:

Monday night.

Mad Professor with Aisha at Richard’s on Richards, 8pm.
I thought I was going to an “early/short” show (Doors at 8? Who goes to a club on a Monday at 8pm?) and turned out that I was going to a “full meal deal” with that started at 10:30 on the dot. Wandered around outside for a bit, watched two young guys smoke pot (doesn’t matter how far away you get from other people, if you’re tokin’ people a block away know about it), and talked to the second person in the “will call” line (an Asian lady with one of those little wool toques that makes me think about how itchy/sweaty wool would be on my scalp) who had an Australian accent and…

…wrap your head around that for a minute…
Click here to read more.. »

Looks like they’re finally putting sticky toes to good use in CPU architecture…

IT Week has the full story.

Although they don’t occur naturally, they have similar properties to setae, which are those tiny hairs on the feet of gecko lizards. Actually, the ends of setae split into many nanoscale fibres called spatulas, and these spatulas are so fine that they form molecular bonds with almost anything they touch. Those bonds allow geckos to climb walls and hang from a pane of glass.

…and that would be “gecko lizards,” as opposed to “gecko mammals?”

WordPress 2.0.1 seems to have the same issue mentioned at this place…

testing the idea of using footnotes (I just found out about this, so forgive me if this is extremely boring).

Cause when I say stuff here¹, assuming you know what I’m talking about.

¹ there’s a thingie down here to explain it in a footnote.

Maybe next time I’m about to throw away some little piece of broken hardware, I’ll start sticking it to other broken bits, and make some of these little robot doohickey things.

Dylan Tinlun Chan is a genius, of sorts (and bit and pieces).

Very very cool, and unlike so many of the other do it yourself sites (like Hack-A-Day), this stuff looks like it could be made by non garage-full-of-ex-military-hardware types.

Like me.

So, I was talking to my mom on the phone tonight, and we were just catching up on how our collective weeks went, and after telling me about her trip to Florida (let’s just call a junket a junket, shall we?), and she mentioned that the live bookmark in this blog wasn’t working for her as of late.

My mom, the ultimate beta tester.

My mom is not one of those “bad computer mojo” types, who cause computers to throw themselves down flights of stairs, or spontaneously have bad sectors on hard drives in the middle of your dissertation, or just glitch out for not reason at all.

She’s one of those people that will push all the buttons, and fiddle with the knobs, and generally go wherever she can in a web site (or a network, or a conversation, or a job), just to see if she can. This is a very good thing, and means that she stumbles into things like the fact that my RSS feed has been broken on my blog for… uh, quite a while.

So, without further ado, you can all start reading my RSS feed again, now that I’m

So thanks mom, and maybe next time I won’t mention computers. :)

Was bumbering around tonight looking for “Thunder Snow” because The Colbert Report opened with a great little joke about it (and looking forward to Flood-Nado, Sleetsami, too), and stumbled across some links on there that pointed to this great 14 ways to turn your organization into a mess
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Over at Toren’s blog, he’s talking about Predator and this thing octopi can do.

Go here to see why you’ll never see ME swimming around in no scuba suit…
(Warning: Video Clip of non-dialup-friendly size)…

’cause we all know it’s wrong, and we’d never EVER do that.
Unless, of course, somebody told us we couldn’t.
Finger-wagging by groups like the RIAA directly increases the visibility of piracy.

RIAA: “Don’t download StarWars Episode III, or you’re bad!”
AverageJoe: “Dude, you can download movies?”
RIAA: “Yes, using BitTorrent, you can. So don’t.”
AverageJoe: “Let me get a pen, what’s it called again?”
AverageSteve: “What’re you doing?”
AverageJoe: “I’m gonna download movies!”
AverageSteve: “Awesome!”
RIAA: “Hey, cut that out! Don’t download new movies and music! Give that money to us!”
AverageJoe: “What money? I wasn’t going to see EP3 or buy the new Madonna album anyway – I was gonna wait for the DVD, and listen to the single on the radio 25 times a day if I want to.”
AverageSteve: “My nephew knows how to copy them DVD thingies.”
RIAA: “Cracking DECSS is evil and wrong, and using program like DVD Decrypter to make copies is immoral, so we shut them down, too.”
AverageJoe: “Wait, wait, let me get my pen again.”
AverageSteve: “What’re you doing now?”
AverageJoe: “After I download this movie, I’m gonna make copies of my Rogers rentals using some kinda DVDSS thing.”
RIAA: “STOP IT! Artists are starving in the streets! Look at poor Celine Dion! Bryan Adams!”
AverageJoe: “…”
AverageSteve: “…”
AverageJoe: “Do you have any blanks? I think it’ll only take a few more copies to kill off Celine…”
AverageSteve: “Here’s two, think we can take a chunk outta 50cent, too?”
Click here to read more.. »

You can download the podcast manually here, if you’d like to hear what JV’s been up to. Should also be a valid podcast feed, so if you enter the RSS link (over on the right column somewhere), then your podcast downloader should just grab the mp3 and push it into whatever you use to play.

Oh yeah, and there’s the odd bit of swearing, so maybe wait until the kids are asleep before firing this one up. :)

We’ll see.

And no, that’s not me.

JohnnyVancouver and I will be doing something together in the near future, but he managed to get there before I did (good for him).