Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

Things that annoy me

Posted on by Patrick
No Left Turn

Atten­tion dri­vers in my town: This sign means “No Left Turns”. It applies to you. Yes, even you. If you see this sign, you are not allowed by law to make a left turn.

Not even in the Wal-Mart park­ing lot.

* * *

What right-think­ing, ratio­nal indi­vid­ual decid­ed that, in the VBScript lan­guage, the Boolean val­ue False would equate to 0, and True would equal ‑1? I mean really.

Or were there CInt(False) right-think­ing, ratio­nal indi­vid­u­als on the team that cre­at­ed the VBScript specs and code? Hmmm, that would explain quite a lot.

Notes to self

Posted on by Patrick
  1. Save fre­quent­ly.
  2. Don’t give The Gimp real-time pri­or­i­ty when it’s already run­ning at 99% of the CPU.
  3. Bak­ing bread when you’re hun­gry does­n’t make you any less hungry.

You’d think I’d already know all these things.

Not sure what happened…

Posted on by Patrick

…but my Word­Press had to be rein­stalled. I don’t have time to troll the logs right now, but I’ll have a look tomor­row and see if I can fig­ure out what’s up.

Enjoy the new/old look; it’s prob­a­bly gonna change before too long.

Einstein biography for $3

Posted on by Patrick

Einstein book coverWent down to For­bid­den Flavours tonight to buy my sis­ter a birth­day gift (shhh, nobody tell her), and I nat­u­ral­ly went into the used book­store in the back. They had copies of Greg Bear’s Eon and Eter­ni­ty in there, but the book I end­ed up buy­ing was Ein­stein: the Life and Times. Looks fas­ci­nat­ing, but it’ll have to wait till I’m done the oth­er books in my stack.

From the back cover:

Here is the real Ein­stein: The boy grow­ing up in the Swiss Alps, the young man caught in an unhap­py first mar­riage, the pas­sion­ate paci­fist who ago­nized over his role in the mak­ing of The Bomb, the indif­fer­ent Zion­ist who was asked to head the Israeli state, the physi­cist who believed in God. Here, too, are the mod­ern giants who touched Ein­stein’s life: Franklin Roo­sevelt, Sig­mund Freud, Madame Curie, and Ben-Gurion.

I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed by Ein­stein, though I know rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle about him. I know that his Nobel prize was not for rel­a­tiv­i­ty but for his work on the pho­to­elec­tric effect; I know that he stub­born­ly refused to believe in the impli­ca­tions of quan­tum mechan­ics; and that’s about all. I’m look­ing for­ward to learn­ing more, more, more.