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"Murphy was an optimist!"

Of Grasshoppers June 3, 2009 10:34 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Grasshoppers, Philosophy
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Student: I was wrong about everything.
Master: At least you are finally right about something.

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Proud Coder’s Moment June 3, 2009 4:24 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Programming, Technology
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I was doing a little debugging and popped into some code completely written by me to discover this gem:

if(1===3){ //REMOVE IN FUTURE
} //REMOVE IN FUTURE

And yes, that is the complete code segment with nothing edited out. Yup! I’ll take credit for that patentable beauty!

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Drowning Out the Decibels with Noise June 3, 2009 4:14 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Family, Gadgets, Of Being Dad, Technology
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My house is noisier than yours. I know this because I think OSHA would require hearing protection in this place.

Our house it has a crowd
There’s always something happening
And it’s usually quite loud
[Source]

I have some wonderful noise canceling headphones but they don’t completely isolate me from the noise. That is, until I decided to pump some white noise through them! http://simplynoise.com/ has some downloadable white noise clips. You can down 30 seconds of white, pink and brown noise that you play in a continuous loop. You can also download a one hour thunderstorm! This works so well I thought I was home alone!

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From the mouths of babes June 3, 2009 11:00 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Amy, Daily Life, Family, From the mouths of babes
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I most often listen to Pandora but chose Slacker Radio today.

Slacker: *playing Low Rider*
Amy, almost 7, skipping down the stairs, exclaims: "George Lopez!!"

*Wow! George Lopez has a nice MySpace page! I didn’t think "nice" and "MySpace" could be combined in a single sentence.

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Preview of Ken Burns’ park film June 3, 2009 8:57 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Interest
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Go watch this moving video. via Michael Silence

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Left mouse button becomes right mouse button June 3, 2009 8:01 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Software, Technology
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Not long ago, I took a computer that was passed onto us, reformatted it, installed a fresh copy of Windows XP, and passed a shiny "new to her" computer onto Cathy. It was faster than her old computer and should have been completely problem free. It was for awhile but it’s developed an odd behavior. Every now and then, the operating system will appear to hang. For instance, this morning her menubar was visible, and I could move the mouse, but clicking on anything did nothing. I could not bring an application to focus. I had Computer Management open to the event log and left clicking on one of the event viewer items, instead of opening the item, showed the context menu (normally seen by right clicking). But unlike right clicking, once the context menu was open, clicking an item in the context menu such as "open log file…" simply closed the log file. The machine has been thoroughly scrubbed of malware, spyware and viruses. All software is updated with the exception of not yet installing Internet Explorer 8. The way I regained control of the machine was to close an open Skype chat window.

The slow downs seem to correspond to this error in the event viewer (\Device\Harddisk1\D refers to the Seagate external USB Freeagent drive):
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.

This is bizarre.

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