BunkBlog

There was an ad in the paper yesterday for an external Hitachi hard drive. The drive was less than 300 bucks and had one terabyte of capacity. That used to be a number listed just below “kajillion” in computer terms. It made me look at my current gadgets and toys and put them in perspective.

For Christmas in 1980, I got my first computer, a VIC-20 – it had 5000 bytes of memory (3000 for the user) and no storage other than a cassette drive. I don’t know what the capacity of a 90 minute cassette was, but I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t a lot.

In 1984, I got the Commodore 64. As indicated by the name, it had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory, of which 39k was available for use. I traded in the cassette deck for a massive 1504 floppy drive, which was larger than a shoe box and recorded to 5.25 inch floppies with a capacity of 170 kilobytes. Combine that with my 1200 baud modem to connect to the River Conditions BBS, and I was styling. RC had the largest hard drive of the underground C64 scene in Los Angeles when I was in high school – 20 megabytes. Oh, yeah.

In 1992, I belatedly saw the writing on the wall, as Commodore continued to find ways to make superior products fail in the marketplace (I can also tell you about the Atari Lynx if you want further proof of my lack of prognostication ability). I bought a CompUSA 486DX3, with 120 megabyte hard drive and 4 megabytes of RAM.

In 1994, I bought one of the Quantum Bigfoot drives that were so cheap that I was able to get 500 megabytes for less than 300 dollars.

So, let’s compare a few things from the past 15 years or so. On my desk right now is a defunct Sony Clie. Sony no longer supports it, the battery is dead, and I can’t take it to work anyway. But, in 2002, it was brand new and had better specs than that 486 for one quarter the price. And, unlike the 486, I could put the Clie in my pocket.

I recently bought a Nokia N770, because it was on clearance and the N800 is far outside my price range. The N770 has 64 megabytes of memory (16x the 486), I’ve got a 2 gigabyte RS-MMC card in it (16x the 486), and it has wifi. The screen is about twice the resolution of the 486, and I could buy over a dozen of them for less than the 486’s price. Oh, and it fits in my pocket.

My DVR, desktop computer, and external backup drive for my desktop now have a combined capacity of something close to two terabytes of space.  And Alex was worried about having too many shark shows recorded.  🙂

No wonder nobody can predict technology for crap. Who could have imagined, looking at this game of the 1980s, that we’d have all the cool toys we have today?

As if there hasn’t been enough evidence that two of our branches of government are at war, Scott Jennings actually claimed today that his job description was covered by executive privilege. WTF? His job is secret?

One of my cow-orkers delights in learning things that are relatively old news and then acting as if he’s sharing something of earth-shattering importance.  Among his recent discoveries: Agile Development, AJAX, Six Sigma, and Ruby on Rails.

It’s always cute to hear him espouse the way something from 3 years ago will change everything. And it’s always buzzword-compliant too.  For good or ill, he is on to the next old new thing often enough that he rarely implements much.  Well, there was that Agile Scrum thing, but I avoided it.  Meanwhile, I just put together a database documenting the capabilities of all the disparate simulations the programmers have built this year.  Not a word of appreciation from the boss-types.  *sigh*

From my local elected representative:

Democrats in Congress are once again attempting to take on the role of Commander in Chief and make the irrational decision to pull out of Iraq without any sort of post-pull out strategy.

This implies that the Republicans made a rational decision to a) invade, b) occupy, c) de-Baathify, d) disband the Iraqi military, e) Everything Else. You can’t bitch about your opponent being irrational if you have no rational response.  By the way, why does nobody in the media seem to bring up the 1993 Congressional vote to defund and withdraw from Somalia, as a comparison?  We forget even recent history, it seems.  The Republicans want to portray the desire to get the heck out of Iraq as something unprecedented, when it is actually very precedented.  For that matter, why has Congress completely abdicated its responsibility for declaring war?  We haven’t had an actual declared war since 1945, yet we’ve been shooting at other people almost every day since then. Separation of powers?  That Constitution sure is a pesky thing.

Ratatouille is a cool flick. The Boy was very amused, naturally. I can’t believe how awesome the water looked. I know, that makes me a huge geek, looking at the rendering. Sue me.

Anyway, the story is very cute, and the animation is awesome.  The end credits are a great retro look, and the short film played before the main movie is also quite funny.

Oh, and the wifi at McAlisters Deli almost reaches the theater, but is very usable at the ice cream parlor. 😉

And, now I’ve gotten the N770 to post on my main site, too. Geek Power!

There’s a great deal of scientific information in this interview, but it’s interesting enough even for laymen to read, I think. The basic story is that fructose and sucrose are not the kinds of sugars we evolved to consume in large quantities, so they mess up our body chemistry and make us pigs. The good doctor even demonizes orange juice (any kind, including organic fresh-squeezed).

Good news, though – eating oranges is good for you. Some of this is sort of common sense, if you think about how we ate 20,000 years ago compared to now. Our bodies haven’t changed in that time, but our diets have changed vastly. Nobody drank orange juice before industrialization; they ate oranges. Nobody drank sodas; they drank water. So, those people who decry processed foods, here’s another data point to use in your quest to return to a diet better designed for our natural metabolisms.

I thought I saw this headline on my newspage this morning: IKEA set to approve new nuclear mission to N.Korea.

IKEA, IAEA, what’s the difference, right?

OK, since some people have actually asked, here’s my abbreviated description of my trip, with photos linked for the bandwidth challenged.

More »

I’m not going to bore anyone with the details of our week in Southern California, nor the four days of driving to and fro. But, I will share a few entertaining bits and random mind drippings from the travel here.

We passed a number of military vehicles (construction-type mainly) on the way through Arizona, and not far behind them were some buses. The juxtaposition was merely a coincidence, but the buses have covered windows and the Department of Homeland Security emblazoned on their sides. It made me think of obvious plots of conspiracy theory movies based on some version of the Argentinean Disappeared.

While crossing the Californian desert, I saw billboards advertising special sales on breast implants (only 3500 dollars!), followed closely by billboards advertising artificial turf for the lazy homeowner. Fake boobs and fake lawns.

Although I continue to not find El Paso appealing, they do have a Paulina Rubio concert coming up next week. Yum.

The Morongo tribe has a name just made for a casino. “Yes, Kemosabe, moron go to casino, Morongo Casino.”

Social Distortion has a new album out. Well, a new song on a greatest hits album.

We made it back home, all safe and sound.  Whew!

More details later.

Because people are paranoid about (mostly) imaginary threats, we’ve become so afraid of the boogey man that our children never leave home except under armed guard.  An article in the Daily Mail indicates that this is not isolated to the United States, but is seen in the UK as well.

When I was in elementary school, I walked to school without parental escort, even in the winter (snowbanks six feet high, so far as I could tell).  I even wandered over to my Great Aunt’s house, which ended strangely as I miscounted the number of blocks and ended up at a stranger’s house who got me back to my family.

Later, we moved to an even smaller town, and I could wander anywhere in town when I wanted to.  My brother and I would go to the creek with the other kids, and jump in the rock-infested waters off the abandoned and rust-crusted bridge. David ended up with one of his many head wounds this way, but that didn’t stop the mud-sliding fun the next week, no way.

Even when we moved to southern California, when I was 14, we didn’t end up incredibly restricted in our movements. We would ride our bikes to school, all of two miles away on suburban streets in Los Angeles County (the horror).  We would ride our bikes down the L.A. River, all the way to Seal Beach (13 miles). We never even ran into the Terminator once.  We did see pelicans, though.  And terns.

And now our kids are put in cars to take them to parks.  No wonder we’re all getting fatter.

Note to self: fix bicycle.

La Tienda is having a sale on whole Serrano hams. I love that stuff, but even on sale, it’s not really cheap. The cheapest is a 12 pound boneless ham for a mere…$189. Sure, let me get two!

Oooh, pretty.  I want one.  My Clie is about dead, the Palm “next big thing” is a useless piece of telephone-tethered nonsense, and laptops tend to be not very portable these days (19 inch screen, really?).  So, an ultraportable for less than the cost of a new car is very neato.  Too bad it’s just a reference design so far.  Hopefully it’ll show up soon.

In good news, Heroes is definitely coming back next year (cliffhanger season finale tomorrow!). In stranger news, there will be a show based on the one-liner Geico caveman commercials. If you thought it was hard to stretch a Saturday Night Live character to a movie, imagine stretching a slightly-funny ad to an entire season of television.

CBS is going to add a reality show that has a bunch of kids creating an entire town with no adult supervision, but they are cancelling Jericho and The Class. Go figure. And, I’m annoyed that Fox is killing off The War at Home – there are far too few good comedies on television as it is. Guess they have to make room for more episodes of American Idol.

Looking like the DVR will have plenty of free space this fall.

Anyone using an online dating service should watch this and then really think about how accurate photos might or might not be.

Every time I see a headline such as MILF Leader to Run for Governor, I have to remind myself that some acronyms have different meanings in the Philippines than in the States.

I was pointed to the creepy ad site today, and this one I have to share with the three people who read my site:

XKCD has posted this awesome map, comparing various online communities based on their subscriber base, rendered as an old D&D campaign map or “here be monsters” style navigation chart.

Most headlines I’ve seen are trumpeting the second veto of President Bush’s 6+ years in office as him vetoing the “Iraq withdrawal bill” or “troop pullout bill.”  Strange how few of them (looking through Google News, um…ABC and VOA) call it the Emergency Spending Bill or Iraq War Funding Bill, which are also accurate (possibly more accurate) pseudonames for the thing.

The President has used every rhetorical trick in the book to make himself look principled on this, including asking all network television stations to carry his explanation this evening.  Is it really appalling that the only two vetos this man has on his record are for two things that a substantial majority of Americans oppose him on? Most people are in favor of increasing funding for stem cell research; the Religious Right oppose it so the President opposed it.  Most people are in favor of some form of drawdown in our failed adventure in Iraq; the Project for the New American Century is opposed to it so the President opposed it.

Two vetos, two statements to the American people that are equivalent to a pair of upraised middle fingers.  What a legacy.