February 1st 1964 - August 23rd, 1995

Ok, so I have already raised the possibility of needing to switch teams in this journal before, and I have been thinking about it alot…

• Reasons to Go Mac
• Finally getting fed up with Microsoft’s DRM shenanigans
• Finally a Unix Workstation with a good user experience
• The excitement of playing with a new OS
• Reasons to continue avoiding Macs
• Flashy UI will grate on my soul
• God-damned “Switch” ads
• Being back in “Not universally supported” OS land
• The punishment of playing with a new OS
• “Apple Tax” (the extra money you pay for the privelege of owning a Mac)

So you pro/anti Mac bigots out there, what am I missing?

No shit, he really said that to me… I now have one permanent crown, but might not get the last one until this “minor process” has been performed… He is going to get back to me after talking to the periodontist…

I started a new project for the amusement for my friends (especially those from the DCS project): Steve Martin Quote-of-the-Unspecified-Time-Period. I started off with a quote from “My Blue Heaven”, since it might be his finest work.. :)

I got a few tracks off the upcoming squarepusher album “Do You Know Squarepusher?”. One of them is entitled “Anstromm-Feck 4”… It could very well be Mr. Jenkinson’s career defining song….

Nighty-night.

Recently a newbie asked a question about formatting numbers into strings in C, and then I received an offline mail about my answer (this message was from some other chucklehead, not the original newbie, who seemed to appreciate my answer)…. The idiot was trying to tell me to only use snprintf “where it was necessary” (and use sprintf elsewhere), while I was arguing that using all the time was good practice and “safer” (if programmers were so good at seeing their own buffer overflows all the time Bugtraq wouldn’t be so necessary)… This joker simply wouldn’t even entertain the thought that the negligible performance penalty was worth it…

To me, while I recognize that sometimes “you know” that your buffer is large enough, but it seems to me that as soon as “you know” this is true, someone will come along and modify your code just enough to make it untrue… To me, good practice means doing your best to make sure your code is maintainable through the annals of time… Of course, I am probably pretty anal about this (since I seem to be the only person who advocates putting braces around one-line if blocks)…

Bitch off…

Update: I am glad to see so many other people do one-line conditionals the “right” way… =)

I just had a bug reported, assigned to me, fixed, and closed in 15 minutes… And it was really Adam’s bug anyway. =)

I must be cool now, right? With my new email address?

grahams@neubauten.org

This isn’t my primary address, but it is the address I got for joining neubauten.org.. I’m off to go run a vacuum cleaner through a distortion pedal, bbl.

Update: This address is now defunct (or more accurately, if it works, the mail isn’t coming to me anymore)

It’s Back!

Many of you know that I used to work for Warner-Lambert (which is now Pfizer), in the Gum division (American Chicle Group, later Adams USA). Through this job I got lots of different freebies, including copious amounts of gum. But one of the more peculiar freebies that I got has mystified me since:

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me, a box cutter decorated like a stick of gum just doesn’t sit well with me.

I am working from home today…. I got the “Most Impressive Hack of the Day” award at work yesterday (ok, it’s not a real award) and ended up getting so into it that I was working pretty late… I probably should avoid the specifics here, but trust me, it was awesome… Anyway, I figured that after my unadulterated genius yesterday I deserved a good night’s sleep, so I slept in. :)

I have been meaning to backup my data here at home for a few weeks now, so I took the opportunity today to do so and drop the CD into my Safe Deposit Box at Fleet.. I looked at the date on the prior backup and it was in April… I have to get a bit more consistent with these, no? I remember used some unix application that read a list of dates in your home directory and reminded you when they were near… I should hunt that down and use it to remind me of backups. :P

I guess UPS rang the doorbell this morning trying to deliver my major award, but it wasn’t loud enough up here to wake me up… Infernal doorbell..

I had another bad dream last night, but this time I remember fragments of it… I remember one of my teeth just falling out for no reason…. I have been probing my mouth with my tongue all day searching for the gap in my teeth… Fortunately it was just a dream…

I should be able to tie SpamAssassin to my .aliases file so that it automatically whitelist_from’s all mail coming from those addresses… I figure that if someone is in my .aliases file then they are probably not spamming me. :)