2005-8-28
SCOTS INVENT "WONDERLIQUID"
The Scots invented a liquid that makes everything better. Apparently they did it at least a year ago, because my Queen Anne is a year old. Anyways, why doesn't our society recognize the qualities of this liquid more often? BTW, it's now referred to as SCOTCH or SCOTCH WHISKEY. Yanks have their own version, which is okay I suppose, but doesn't hold a candle to the Scottish version in my opinion. It goes very well with american cigarettes, but oddly enough I think it would go better with French ones. Gauloises or Gitanes would definitely go better with it.
Not to be outdone, I seem to recall that our Carribbean friends have done a decent job with rum and cigars. While in Mexico I sampled some cigars that supposedly were from Cuba, and some rum from somewhere, although the cigars had a similar taste to all of the Mexican tobacco I tried. Somehow Camels taste like the other tobacco there, too. Hmm. Turkish tobacco? Try Mexican tobacco in a Camel carton.
I smoked the hell out of those cigars. They told me they were Cuban, and I chose to believe them. They were damn good, especially in the Cancun air on the balcony at night, accompanied by rum and coke and a breeze from the Gulf. Looking out a Mexican flag the size of a football field seems to enhance the "I'm not in Kansas anymore" effect, as well.
You're growing out of some of your problems, but there are others that
you're growing into.
Fortune seems to have my number tonight.
I will be sampling Yet Another Tumbler of Scottish Wonder Liquid soon.
Buenos noches, amigos.
... more like this: [scotch]
Not to be outdone, I seem to recall that our Carribbean friends have done a decent job with rum and cigars. While in Mexico I sampled some cigars that supposedly were from Cuba, and some rum from somewhere, although the cigars had a similar taste to all of the Mexican tobacco I tried. Somehow Camels taste like the other tobacco there, too. Hmm. Turkish tobacco? Try Mexican tobacco in a Camel carton.
I smoked the hell out of those cigars. They told me they were Cuban, and I chose to believe them. They were damn good, especially in the Cancun air on the balcony at night, accompanied by rum and coke and a breeze from the Gulf. Looking out a Mexican flag the size of a football field seems to enhance the "I'm not in Kansas anymore" effect, as well.
You're growing out of some of your problems, but there are others that
you're growing into.
Fortune seems to have my number tonight.
I will be sampling Yet Another Tumbler of Scottish Wonder Liquid soon.
Buenos noches, amigos.
WARNING - OPERATING HEAVY MACHINERY UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Yes, I have gotten into the hooch tonight. I can't explain myself. I was kind of at loose ends today, and feeling kind of bad. Psychologically and physically. But now I have had a couple of tacos and beers, and pulled the scotch out of the cupboard. I'm doing much better, thanks :)
Mikko the cat was extremely interested while I made my second scotch. Maybe he thought there were more tacos?
The Rally from Germany is on. Scary crashes.
Before I forget, I had a couple of things I thought of to say while on my last smoke break on the porch.
First off, I was bored and feeling bad earlier, and I tend to read a very small portion of the internet. Pretty much Slashdot (which I hate now, to the extent that at one point my hosts entry for 127.0.0.1 included slashdot.org, he who has an ear to hear, let him hear), www.lemis.com/grog/diary.html, and the links on my blogroll. Maybe a little newsforge which I also hate, and occasionally I see what ESR and RMS are up to.
But I digress. I decided to explore the internet. I went to blogspot.com, and had a hard time finding blogger blogs. Don't they want people to browse their blogs? Anyways, found the "next blog" button and rode that for a while. Drek of the worst kind appeared in my browser. Attractive young Japanese girls don't necessarily write interesting things. It was like reading my girlfriend's womens magazines or watching the big 4 networks. It didn't make me feel better, reassure me about the state of the world. It honestly made me feel like erasing my blog. Like blogs should be nuked along with the pres and network television. Yes I am a voting, sometimes tax paying american and I think Bush is a lying bastard.
Okay, to non-digress for a second (what is the opposite of digressing?), the people dying in Iraq is starting to bother me. The whole "war" has always bothered me in a background-noise sort of way. I have seen "Wag the Dog", this seems to be the situation. I have always voted against Bush. He is an old money blue blood
(Hold on, I have to kill some jobs on my server, it is crawling. And my scotch is down to cubes).
Okay, Limewire seems to have sh@# the bed, and I couldn't easily kill all the Java vm's sitting there hogging memory. In my state I just rebooted.
Colin McRae does not have a ride this season. It's sad to see him on the sidelines commenting about how smooth the cars get through the corner. I agree with my friend Rod, Colin has magic hands. He gets through a stage smoother than anybody.
Here's to BSMOOTH, Rod's old vanity plates :)
Okay so the war Bush lies blah blah blah...
The reason I was posting was that I have been investigating Google quite a bit this week. I have streamed video presentations from uwtv.com University of Washington, I highly recommend it. Once in a while I remember that I'm no longer on dialup, and I can do things like stream video from universities... Bob Cringely wrote this week that Google may have peaked, or may conquer the world. I have to agree. But I think what all the people squawking about them as the latest Wall Street Darlings might be missing is this... That Google has the stale smell of old-school pure science about them. Science for science's sake, technology for technology's sake. And god love them for it. This is raw technology, raw mathematique; no one can beat them on their servers/$ or transactions per dollar ratio. They have them all beat. They have done the math. That is one part of why their search is better, they can afford to have more data to work with than anybody. Anybody but Microsoft, if they cared. But it would cost Microsoft at least 3 to 4 times more to have the same amount of data to work with. Because Google don't run bloated software on their servers. They run a Linux kernel and some small servers that they have hand-written to work with their algorithms, which were painstakingly designed to be minimalist by their collection of Ph.D. engineers. Which brings us to the other part, not only do they have the hardware part nailed down, working from pure numbers, but they have the software part too. They leveraged an open-source Unix kernel (but better) and wrote some C and Python code, and they have the whole thing bummed to a minimum, like the MIT guys in the '50s, like Greenblatt and Gosper writing floating point routines.
As an aside, (sigh I am not staying on topic), check out the Duff's Device. It's a loop unroller in C that will make you retch. Tom Duff wrote it in '83 working at Lucasfilm, trying to make Unix talk to some film related computer in real time. Since Unix doesn't DO real time, it took tweaking. Check it out. I found out about it in Dr. Dobbs', unfortunately I am not able to plumb the depths of K&R C, my time is devoted elsewhere. Basically it takes your loops and makes them about 8 times more efficient. Well, that was the common practice before the Duff's Device, which gets rid of cleaning up the modulos. Awesome.
Anyway Rob Pike works at Google now and has recovered from his bike crash, if you don't know nothing about him, he worked on Unix in the '70's at Bell Labs, and spent the '90's at Bell Labs developing Plan 9. He is one bad mutha.
I feel safe in the fact that I have now diluted the schlock on the Web by about 0.1% by talking about cool shit, which is more than should be asked of one man. Selah.
This night methinks is but the daylight sick.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
Well said, Billy. BTW, I don't know Robert X. Cringely, but I call him Bob anyways.
Later, Slick.
... more like this: [foo]
Mikko the cat was extremely interested while I made my second scotch. Maybe he thought there were more tacos?
The Rally from Germany is on. Scary crashes.
Before I forget, I had a couple of things I thought of to say while on my last smoke break on the porch.
First off, I was bored and feeling bad earlier, and I tend to read a very small portion of the internet. Pretty much Slashdot (which I hate now, to the extent that at one point my hosts entry for 127.0.0.1 included slashdot.org, he who has an ear to hear, let him hear), www.lemis.com/grog/diary.html, and the links on my blogroll. Maybe a little newsforge which I also hate, and occasionally I see what ESR and RMS are up to.
But I digress. I decided to explore the internet. I went to blogspot.com, and had a hard time finding blogger blogs. Don't they want people to browse their blogs? Anyways, found the "next blog" button and rode that for a while. Drek of the worst kind appeared in my browser. Attractive young Japanese girls don't necessarily write interesting things. It was like reading my girlfriend's womens magazines or watching the big 4 networks. It didn't make me feel better, reassure me about the state of the world. It honestly made me feel like erasing my blog. Like blogs should be nuked along with the pres and network television. Yes I am a voting, sometimes tax paying american and I think Bush is a lying bastard.
Okay, to non-digress for a second (what is the opposite of digressing?), the people dying in Iraq is starting to bother me. The whole "war" has always bothered me in a background-noise sort of way. I have seen "Wag the Dog", this seems to be the situation. I have always voted against Bush. He is an old money blue blood
(Hold on, I have to kill some jobs on my server, it is crawling. And my scotch is down to cubes).
Okay, Limewire seems to have sh@# the bed, and I couldn't easily kill all the Java vm's sitting there hogging memory. In my state I just rebooted.
Colin McRae does not have a ride this season. It's sad to see him on the sidelines commenting about how smooth the cars get through the corner. I agree with my friend Rod, Colin has magic hands. He gets through a stage smoother than anybody.
Here's to BSMOOTH, Rod's old vanity plates :)
Okay so the war Bush lies blah blah blah...
The reason I was posting was that I have been investigating Google quite a bit this week. I have streamed video presentations from uwtv.com University of Washington, I highly recommend it. Once in a while I remember that I'm no longer on dialup, and I can do things like stream video from universities... Bob Cringely wrote this week that Google may have peaked, or may conquer the world. I have to agree. But I think what all the people squawking about them as the latest Wall Street Darlings might be missing is this... That Google has the stale smell of old-school pure science about them. Science for science's sake, technology for technology's sake. And god love them for it. This is raw technology, raw mathematique; no one can beat them on their servers/$ or transactions per dollar ratio. They have them all beat. They have done the math. That is one part of why their search is better, they can afford to have more data to work with than anybody. Anybody but Microsoft, if they cared. But it would cost Microsoft at least 3 to 4 times more to have the same amount of data to work with. Because Google don't run bloated software on their servers. They run a Linux kernel and some small servers that they have hand-written to work with their algorithms, which were painstakingly designed to be minimalist by their collection of Ph.D. engineers. Which brings us to the other part, not only do they have the hardware part nailed down, working from pure numbers, but they have the software part too. They leveraged an open-source Unix kernel (but better) and wrote some C and Python code, and they have the whole thing bummed to a minimum, like the MIT guys in the '50s, like Greenblatt and Gosper writing floating point routines.
As an aside, (sigh I am not staying on topic), check out the Duff's Device. It's a loop unroller in C that will make you retch. Tom Duff wrote it in '83 working at Lucasfilm, trying to make Unix talk to some film related computer in real time. Since Unix doesn't DO real time, it took tweaking. Check it out. I found out about it in Dr. Dobbs', unfortunately I am not able to plumb the depths of K&R C, my time is devoted elsewhere. Basically it takes your loops and makes them about 8 times more efficient. Well, that was the common practice before the Duff's Device, which gets rid of cleaning up the modulos. Awesome.
Anyway Rob Pike works at Google now and has recovered from his bike crash, if you don't know nothing about him, he worked on Unix in the '70's at Bell Labs, and spent the '90's at Bell Labs developing Plan 9. He is one bad mutha.
I feel safe in the fact that I have now diluted the schlock on the Web by about 0.1% by talking about cool shit, which is more than should be asked of one man. Selah.
This night methinks is but the daylight sick.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
Well said, Billy. BTW, I don't know Robert X. Cringely, but I call him Bob anyways.
Later, Slick.