Voder-Vocoder

Convoluted Story:

I had an hour or so to kill on the westside between shifts this week, so I stopped in the big bookstore they have. Glancing through the new fiction paperbacks, I saw Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Someone had recommended it some time ago, saying “it’s more political than I would have expected.” I forget who.

So I picked it up, read the first two chapters, and fell asleep in the comfy chairs they have. After they called me back into work, I bought the book.

I don’t know why I liked the book, but here’s a guess: the protagonist is flawed in ways that I can identify with.

I wanted to read up on the source material, which has fallen into the public domain. So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg.

The best way I have to read ebooks is on my palm m105. I can do this flat on my back, which is how I like to read anyways. I’d get a fancier PDA, but I can’t justify spending money if all I do is read books on the damn thing.

The m105 has some advantages and disadvantages. It was relatively cheap at the time it was released, and made a nice graduation present from my parents. It uses 2xAAA batteries, so I don’t have to worry about the lifetime of a rechargeable.

On the other hand, it uses old-fashioned RAM for its memory and when the batteries die, the memory is all lost. So every time that happens, I have to reinstall databases and applications. I’ve tried to make that as easy as possible: The directories $HOME/Palm/Docs and $HOME/Palm/Apps contain PalmDoc ebooks and Palm applications. The pilot-link tools make re-installing everything easy. PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyS0 PILOTRATE=115200 pilot-xfer -i ~/Palm/Docs/* ~/Palm/Apps/*

I do wish I had one of the models that relied on a removable Flash drive and not RAM.

For my birthday, the folks gave me a radio with built-in dynamo. I’ve wanted one of these for years. 90 seconds of cranking is supposed to provide an hour of music.

One can also charge a cellphone with the dynamo. But not my cell phone, because every cell phone uses a unique connector.

As some point last night, I realize that this guy is playing his soul out on that guitar and only four people in the bar are paying real attention.

It’s a sad world.

Last night, I won five dollars in five-cent poker. Rock!

Yet another thing I hate about myself.

I’m clumsy.

I just spilled a glass of chocolate milk on the carpet. It would be one thing if this only happened once in a bluemoon, but it happens all the time and I hate it.

“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner”
—Internal Revenue Service publication 525

Just so you know.

Things will get seriously fracked up when two differnet operating systems try and access the same HDD partition at the same time.

How can this happen?
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Note to self: How to force links that open new windows to open in a new tab.

(Below the fold)
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