today

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

 Went to work around 9:00 this morning, having slept until 8:30.  There
     are a couple of missing dongles I was suspected of losing; it seems
     that our prime contractor (to whom we are the sub) has taken them
     by accident.  (They won't do them much good!)

 Haven't read usenet in quite a while.  Randal Schwartz congratulated me
     on having reduced my posting level to a reasonable level; this made
     me feel rather depressed.  Apparently he hadn't noticed the
     "reasonable level" he had commended was zero.

 Marilyn and I are adopting a dog; we went to Petsmart today after work
     to buy dog paraphernalia.  Marilyn bought a leash, a collar, and a
     bowl; we also bought cat food, dog food, and chewy bones.

 Afterward, I went to Barnes and Noble to get _How to be Your Dog's Best
     Friend_, and also Computer Shopper.  Computer Shopper appears to
     have been eviscerated; the magazine I got was barely 400 pages
     long, instead of the usual 800 or so.  My childhood is gone!

 But I learned 
      (a) it's essentially impossible to find a laptop computer with a
	  processor faster than 400 MHz or with more than 128MB of RAM.
	  For my work, I'm looking for a laptop with a Xeon 500 or
	  better, and at least 512MB of RAM.  A few of the laptops
	  mentioned they were expandable to 384MB.

      (b) you can supposedly get an inkjet printer for $50, a PCI NE2000
          Ethernet card for $10, an 8-port FE hub for $70, a 14" monitor
	  for $130 (or a 17" for $250 or a 20" for $1000), jewel cases
	  for $0.20 each and CD-Rs for $0.86 each, a 486 notebook for
	  $300, a 320x240 USB Quickcam Express (from Logitech?!) for
	  $50, a whole new motherboard with a 400MHz K6-2 but without
	  RAM for $135, 60W speakers with built-in amplifiers for $7,
	  hot-swappable hard-disk bays for $50 (plus $10 per cartridge),
	  PC100 SDRAM for about a dollar a meg, a 4MB S3 ViRGE for $30,
	  AT cases for $25-$50, the soundcard I spent $40 on at Best Buy
	  for $25, 36-bit-color 600x1200 parallel-port scanners for $70,
	  etc.  I am filled with greed.

      (c) Microsoft has no competition, as far as Computer Shopper is
          concerned.  Zero.  In each of "Office Automation Software",
	  "Personal/Home Use Software", "Project Management", and
	  "Windows/GUI Environments", there is one listing: Microsoft.

      (d) There are currently video cards that support three-megapixel
          2048x1536 mode.  On my 9"-tall 14" monitor, that's more than
	  150 dpi -- more than twice what was standard ten years ago.

      (e) the magazine's writers are numerically illiterate.  It says
	  "IPv6's 128-bit address scheme will accommodate billions more
	  addresses than IPv4's 32-bit system."  Actually, it will
	  accommodate 2^128-2^32 = 
          340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,427,473,244,160 more
	  addresses.  They were off by 28 orders of magnitude.  That's
	  the most spectacularly wrong statement I've seen in a while.
	  To convey how wrong this is, here are some other examples of
	  statements that are wrong by 28 orders of magnitude:
	     "My body is a couple of times bigger than an atom."
	     "The universe has existed for thousands of picoseconds".  
	     "The Earth has a mass of several tenths of a milligram."
	  This is so silly it ought to end up in NTK.

      (f) Epson is still selling 9-pin dot-matrix printers, notably the
          FX-880.  Claims "Up to 455 cps" -- i.e. five and a half lines
	  per second, or five pages per minute.  They cost almost $300.

      (g) the difference between the high and low end of Intel's product
          line is very small.  Celeron-300's go for $75, while
	  Xeon-550s go for $1050.  Primary difference: twice the clock
	  speed, and the Xeons have much bigger caches.

 For dinner, I dropped by Chicken Louie's -- the kind of fried chicken
     place where all the employees weigh at least 300 pounds (45 pounds
     more than me!) and are separated from you by a thick partition of
     stainless steel and bulletproof glass.  
     
 I got two barbecued drumsticks.  The gal behind the armor-plating
     pushed them out through the hole; I asked the gal in front of me in
     line, "Are those your legs or my legs?"  I guess that was the
     funniest thing she'd heard in a while.

 When I got home, I discovered several of the magazines I spent absurd
     quantities of money sitting around, begging for me to ignore them.
     I did.