Ramblings & ephemera
Defense attorney for dictators.
It’s a tough business, being the lawyer that dictators call when they fall on hard times. They never bother to ring my phone when life is all castles and ice cream for every meal. No, they wait until they don’t really have a pot to piss in, and then they get on [...]
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Fiction | Comments Off
“blabbergasted” = blabber-mouthed + flabbergasted
“exasperbated” = exacerbated + exasperated
Related posts
No related posts.
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: On Writing, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
From Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:
‘You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,’ said Alice. ‘Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called “Jabberwocky”?’
‘Let’s hear it,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘I can explain all the poems that were ever invented — and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.’
This sounded [...]
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis from 1985-1989, and a graduate student in English Lit. from 1989-1996. During that time, I racked up my share of library fines (not hard to do when the fines were $0.10 a day, per book), a couple of times into three digits. In fact, I [...]
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: True Stories | Comments Off
In Hollywood there’s a meme known as “high concept”, the idea being that you can explain all there is to know about a movie in just a few words, ideally relating to another movie. So, for instance, you might describe a movie you’re looking to get a greenlight for as “Die Hard on a chicken [...]
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Fiction, Musings | Comments Off
From Dr. Mysterian’s blog:
Joan Collins describes visiting the actress [Mae West] in the Seventies, a tale that surpasses the soiled Hollywood Gothicism of Sunset Boulevard for sheer ghoulishness. In Collins tale, West, then in her eighties, dressed in kabuki-styled makeup, a long blonde wig to cover a developing humpback, and rubber band wrapped around her [...]
Posted on June 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From InfoWorld’s “AT&T plans CNN-syle security channel“:
Security experts at AT&T are about to take a page from CNN’s playbook. Within the next year they will begin delivering a video streaming service that will carry Internet security news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to the executive in charge of AT&T Labs.
The service, [...]
Posted on June 25th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off
From the Wall Street Journal’s “Phisher Tales: How Webs of Scammers Pull Off Internet Fraud“:
The typical phisher, he discovered, isn’t a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag.
If, in the early days, phishing scams were one-person operations, they [...]
Posted on June 25th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off
From Dave Farber’s Interesting People list:
I think there’s a propensity for employees to believe their company’s stuff is secret even when it’s manifestly obviously it isn’t and can’t be. About forty years ago, a friend and I walked into a Western Union office and asked for a copy of the Morse code. (A friend of [...]
Posted on June 18th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
Gad, but this is so British in elocution that it’s almost satirical. Yahoo reports that “Queen plugging into iPod“:
“The Queen loves music and was impressed by how small and handy the iPod is,” a royal insider told the tabloid on Friday.
“Obviously it is quite complicated to download songs, but I’m sure one of the courtiers [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From Neal Stephenson, writing in The New York Times:
Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: “geeking out” and “vegging out.” To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From Slate:
Arabic is a VSO language, which means the verb usually comes before the subject and object. It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders. Some European languages have just as many [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
This is a fabulous list that I’m going to keep in mind as I try to grit my teeth when I hear ignorance on the radio, TV, & in person.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that [...]
Posted on June 9th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
Crypto-Gram Newsletter of 15 November 2003
"I don’t believe that airplane hijacking is a thing of the past, but when the next plane gets taken over it will be because a group of hijackers figured out a clever new weapon that we haven’t thought of, and not because they snuck some small pointy objects through security."
The [...]
Posted on June 6th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Tech Help, Wash U: Social Software, security | Comments Off
The CUPS printing system
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue90/ward.html
The Linux Process Scheduler
http://linuxtoday.com/developer/2003111400526OSHLDV
"Learn all of your favorite Linux scheduling ins and outs: policy, the scheduling algorithm, preemption and context switching, real-time scheduling, and Scheduler-Related System Calls."
The final irony
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,985375,00.html
"’Isn’t it ironic?’ You hear it all the time - and, most of the time, actually no, it isn’t. Hypocritical, cynical, lazy, coincidental, more [...]
Posted on June 6th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Tech Help | Comments Off
This is really old, but if it was true then, think about what must be going on now.
A group of computer programmers at Tsinghua University in Beijing is writing software using Java technology. They work for IBM. At the end of each day, they send their work over the [...]
Posted on June 6th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
This is really old, but it’s still interesting & worth considering.
"So what can content producers do to make their Internet services more valuable? If, as the AEA/NASDAQ study proclaims, the IT industry has already generated $866 billion this decade, how do we get some of that?
[...]
Posted on June 6th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
This comes from a Wall Street Journal article titled “People Believe a ‘Fact’ That Fits Their Views Even if It’s Clearly False”:
… what we remember depends on what we believe. “People build mental models,” explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, Crawley, who led the study that will [...]
Posted on June 5th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, security | Comments Off
Stayed up late finished Charlie Huston's vampire noir Half the Blood of Brooklyn. Highly recommended ... but not for the kiddies.
Yep - The Dark Knight is as good as everyone says it is. Easily the best comic book movie I've ever seen. And Ledger is Oscar material.
Drum solo. Hopefully he won't explode, a la Spinal Tap. Dave Grohl is funny, a good guitar player, & quite the rock 'n roll screamer.
Arrghh! Does anyone know if the Windows desktop client of Google Talk interops with any other IM networks? Besides Jabber? Tks!
Bookmarked 3 links
At a party where we really only know 2 people. Been doing crosswords on my iPhone. Time to go!
Bookmarked 3 links
I think I found the house I'm going to buy. 125 years old in downtown St. Louis, but very modern on the inside. Wish me luck!
Added 2 products to their wishlist:
