/dev/random

I just took this quiz at BeliefNet (via WiredOpinion) and here are my results:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (89%)
3. Secular Humanism (88%)
4. Liberal Quakers (87%)
5. Theravada Buddhism (75%)
6. Neo-Pagan (71%)
7. Nontheist (64%)
8. Bahá’í Faith (61%)
9. [...]

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I have a simple command in my .bash_profile to list events which occurred on this date in history. Today it shows absolutely nothing. For anyone interested, the command is: alias today=’cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.* | grep `date +”%m/%d”`’
On most days it will show something like this:
01/28 First ski tow, Woodstock VT, 1914
01/28 Space [...]

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I got my PowerBook back today. They had to replace the motherboard. Since it’s still under warrantee, there was no charge for the repair.
I notice that System Profiler no longer reports a serial number. Poking around with IORegistry Explorer shows that the serial number strings aren’t present. I didn’t deauthorize it for iTunes Music Store [...]

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I’m now getting 20 or more spams a day at my gmail address. At least Gmail’s spam filters catch all of them. When one of my addresses gets too much spam, I usually abandon it. I took advantage of my spare invites to give myself another gmail account.
Today I found 5 spams in my new [...]

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Wil Wheaton: torture is not an american value
While it is vital that we defeat our enemies, we must not become them in the process. As a nation, we must stand united against Albert Gonzales and everything he represents. Torture is not an American value.
Are we becoming like the old Soviet Union? We attempt to [...]

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I’ve ordered a Mac Mini with an 80G drive, Combo Drive, 512M RAM, Bluetooth & Airport plus a S-Video adapter cable. It will be connected to my TV & stereo as a media center. It can probably replace my DVD player, except for the lack of a decent remote control. There are now several media [...]

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My powerbook is now in the shop to have its motherboard replaced. It will be at least a week before I get it back. Before I brought it in, I backed up the entire drive to a FireWire external drive. I’m now using my G4 Minitower with my user directory on the external drive as [...]

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Yesterday was my last full day in Vancouver. I’m now at the airport waiting for my flight home. It didn’t rain yesterday so I got a chance to walk around and explore downtown Vancouver after work. I found the mall on Granville street and had dinner at the food court. The majority of the restaurants [...]

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For the first time since I’ve been here, it hasn’t rained. When I left work this afternoon it started raining again. I walked around Robson street for a while. I found a huge bookstore and a great used CD store, where I bought a CD. Later I went to Starbucks & 7-11.
Here are two pictures [...]

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It’s been raining since I got here, although the temperature is very mild - in the 40s & low 50s. Again I was in the office all day so I didn’t get to see anything. I didn’t do any walking or exploring this evening because it was raining pretty hard.
Everything here seems to close very [...]

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A new standard HTML tag supported by Google and other search engines will help eliminate the incentive to post comment spam. When the attribute rel=”nofollow” is added to a link, that site won’t be credited for the link and its search engine ranking won’t be raised. Ideally, blogging software should automatically append it to any [...]

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I arrived at 11:30 last night exhausted & hungry. The flight was OK, except I had to change planes in Houston. Unfortunately the flight to Vancouver was at the opposite end of the airport from the gate where my first plane landed. I had only 45 minutes between flights, so I had to run most [...]

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I’m leaving for Vancouver this afternoon. I’ll be working in Absolute’s office for the week.

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My nearest Apple service center wasn’t able to work on my PowerBook before my trip next week, so I decided to try to fix the memory problem myself. Fortunately I found a screwdriver that will open the PowerBook at Radio Shack (in the Kronus Electronics Screwdriver Set, part #64-2967).
I was able to get it open [...]

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As some readers may recall, I started the South Beach Diet in early June. I haven’t written too much about it lately but I wanted to post a final update.
I’ve held steady at 155-157 pounds for several months now and I’m down to a size 33. When I started the diet, I weighed 191 [...]

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My PowerBook G4 suddenly froze, and when I restarted I found that I have only 512M of RAM now instead of 1G as I should. System Profiler says the lower DIMM slot is empty. One DIMM either became unseated or became bad. Unfortunately I don’t have the right tool to open it, so I’ll have [...]

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Everything is deathly quiet in the Macintosh world the last few days in anticipation of MacWorld Expo next week. Very little new announcements are being posted and most of the big news is related to the Expo, Apple’s lawsuit against Think Secret, and various leaks. I won’t be going this year and Steve isn’t webcasting [...]

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This item at Daily Kos sums up my opinions perfectly:
I would cringe — and continue to cringe — when politicians and religous figures cite scripture to justify hatred towards gays or any other class of people. But I don’t cringe when scripture is used to justify poverty relief, or conservation (”protecting God’s creation”), or social [...]

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One of my co-workers told me:
“We have a unusual situation here in Vancouver. Suddenly it’s snowing and it’s like national emergency situation. “

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I decided to try Linux on my iPod. It was sort of fun, but I found that it will only play MP3s, while most of my music is AAC. Even though it doesn’t mess up anything on the iPod and you can still run the standard OS, I completely restored my iPod to make sure [...]

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