This comic by Gabby Schulz forecasts a recent dustup over a presentation by Rebecca Watson at the 2011 World Atheist Convention in Dublin. Basically, Watson explains she doesn’t like it when anonymous men hit her up for sex at...
I really want this thing to work out with President Obama. He’s smart. He’s a constitutaional scholar. His adminstration has taken steps to advance the welfare of US citizens and the welfare of people worldwide. So I don’t get...
With Snow Leopard, Finder started reporting file sizes in base-10 rather than base-2. This means that when 10.6 users install a 500 GB hard drive, Finder will report that there are 500 GB available on the drive. The practical...
In an Age Before Web-Based Student Information Services In 1998, a faculty at the University of Virginia English Department ran into a problem many academics will recognize. A former student of his had asked him for a recommendation. The...
In the last month, there’s been a lot of mainstream media attention on the borderlands between paper print and digital print, between text and etext. Google seems to be the focus of much of this interest, and my guess...
Codex Books, Audiobooks, and Assistive Devices: A Tale of Near Misses The last book I checked out of Alden Library while still a faculty at Ohio University was Clay Shirky’s 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without...
After finishing the major work for a new web page, I discovered the page wasn’t properly rendering on Internet Explorer. I expected some discrepancies because the page layout used some moderately advanced CSS. What I didn’t expect was that the...
I am praying some of the information in a New York Times article regarding pacemakers (implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, or ICDs) is in error, is fabricated, is untrue, is a lie or a dream. How can it be thatdevice makers have begun...
Apparently, iPhone applications will only allowed to run one at a time and never in the background. Whenever a user leaves an application to answer the phone or to open a new application, the last application has to quit.1While this...
I've decided to index, as much as I can, comments I make as mistersquid on the Internet. I will eventually add a subdomain that keeps track of such items, sort of like "'type = "Internet postings"' AND 'author = "mistersquid"'...
One of the pleasures of being an academic (as distinct from an intellectual or smart person, etc.) is occasionally gathering with colleagues for an evening of conviviality and camaraderie.December is a season of stress for many US academics. The weather...
I lived with Leopard as my only operating system during 28 October - 8 December 2007. Yesterday, I spent a few hours reverting the data on which Apple's Mail and iCal depend into formats suitable for Mac OS X v....
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