Not too long ago I was shopping in my local grocery store when I ran into an old friend whom I had not seen in some time. She and I had been out on the streets of San Francisco on the night of Barack Obama’s election to witness the electric atmosphere and celebration. She and I wrote slogans in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the Ninth Circuit that night and a few other times. She was there at … Read the rest
It’s probably a bit late in the game to be reviewing the performance of a four year old product, but one more set of benchmark results in the world can’t hurt much, and may shed some light on more general questions about RAID performance in different configurations.
Testing was performed on an 8‑core 2008 Mac Pro with the Apple Mac Pro RAID card and four 15,000RPM SAS drives. The drives were formatted in between tests and … Read the rest
The Moon was very near to Venus in the sky tonight. It took me by surprise as I had not been following the Moon’s phases closely but with my western-facing living room windows it was very difficult to miss an unusually bright Venus next to a bare sliver of a crescent Moon in the evening sky tonight.
Through the binoculars the Moon was stunning. Usually even with earthglow it’s difficult to make out features on the shadowed side of the … Read the rest
I took the binoculars out into the yard tonight for some planetary observation. Following my father’s advice, I focused the binoculars on a star before looking at Venus and despite the difficulty getting the image to stay still I could make out the crescent shape. It looks like Venus is getting much closer to its transit of the Sun. I think that Venus will start getting less bright in the sky as the crescent gets thinner. Of course it … Read the rest
Last night I made a late night run to the grocery store and was surprised to see a woman with a clipboard by the front entrance asking people coming in and out to sign some form of petition. It’s not uncommon to see this at Safeway; the entrance is a bottleneck for all traffic in and out and a favorite spot for pollsters and panhandlers alike. What was odd was that there would be someone collecting signatures at nearly midnight.… Read the rest
Venus has been very bright in the evening sky lately, as you may have already noticed. A friend of mine was playing with an astronomy program on his iPod Touch while we were walking the other evening and asked what «that bright star» was. I said that an object in the sky as bright as the one we were looking at could only be Venus (correct) and I speculated that Venus might be brighter when farther from us, because we’d … Read the rest
For years I’ve been a fan of the first suggested practice in Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way program: morning pages. The suggestion is to do three pages of automatic writing (writing without stopping to think) the very first thing every morning. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve done the morning pages faithfully, and months on end where I haven’t done them at all. Faced with the litany of things I usually feel I have to do, it is a challenge to … Read the rest
Here’s my recommended where-to-live list from http://www.FindYourSpot.com’s quiz. Some surprises, others not surprising at all. The questionnaire was thorough without being tedious. My compliments to the developers of the site. I’m very curious about the business model, but that’s beside the point.
- Baltimore, Maryland
- Providence, Rhode Island
- New Haven, Connecticut
- Norfolk, Virginia
- Boston, Massachusetts
- Long Island, New York
- Hartford, Connecticut
- Charlotte, North Carolina
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- New York City, New York
- Worcester, Massachusetts
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Chesapeake-Virginia Beach, Virginia
- Manhattan, New York
- Portland, Oregon
The first rule of Photoshop club is: don’t let Photoshop use the system disk as a scratch disk. It’s a good rule of thumb and it has helped many people get much better performance from their Photoshop systems. It’s helped even more people think they were getting better perfomance from their Photoshop systems.
The principle is straightforward: Photoshop is prone to using more memory than the systems on which they run have. When modern operating systems run out of memory, … Read the rest
A few days ago on my way out of the bank after making a deposit for a client (not the sort of thing I usually do, but if it helps the checks clear it’s time well spent) the branch manager (an overly friendly man, but that’s preferable to the alternative) said to me, «enjoy the game!»
I stopped to think and turned to him. «Game?»
«Yeah,» he chuckled. «There’s a football game. You might have heard?»
Of course by now I knew … Read the rest