There she goes, my beautiful world
Today is release day for iOS 11, Apple’s newest version of the operating system for iPhones and iPads. This is not news. As of about 1pm Eastern time, the update is available for download and installation on supported devices. Monochromatic Outlook sacrificed an iPhone1My iPad is stuck at iOS 9. for the glory of being your guinea pig.2No animals were harmed in the making of this blog post.
The update was performed on an … Read the rest
Recently I finished reading a book and went to put the book in my blog. I don’t have the book report written but wanted to at least get a placeholder in the database with the vital statistics: title, author, word count, my rating, and so on. After entering the information, I hit submit and was greeted with the less-than-useful message, The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.
Frankly, this sort of thing is the reason I don’t write. … Read the rest
United States President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum1 today instituting a hiring freeze on Federal civilian workers. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the memorandum «counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.»
This comes as welcome news to millions of people who believe that the Federal workforce has been expanding dramatically under the Obama administration. The White House Press Secretary has said it, and President Trump would never have taken such bold, … Read the rest
As the old chestnut goes, there are three tiny words that every marriage needs to be successful. I’m not talking about I love you. I mean, maybe you’re right.
We are on the precipice of a highly divisive election. I fear that the nation is facing an existential threat no matter who wins. I’m more worried about what happens to the nation because of the election than I am about what any candidate might actually do in office. … Read the rest
Back in 2008, Barack Obama made a comment comparing the longshot odds of an African-American winning a presidential election to the odds of the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series.1 Famously, the Red Sox had won in 2007 for the first time since… well, OK, since 2004. But before that they hadn’t won since 1918.
Obama took some (admittedly light-hearted) jabs for rooting for the Red Sox, and since he is currently rooting for the … Read the rest
An oft-discussed topic among writers of speculative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is how to name characters, places, and ideas of extraterrestrial or otherwise non-human or alien origin. Naming is a difficult part of all fiction writing — it’s more difficult than one might think to make names for characters. Some (myself included) believe that character names ought to suggest something about the characters, the themes of the story, their roles in the plot, or perhaps stand in ironic … Read the rest
Apologies to Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders.
Also, apologies to heroin addiction. Being compared to the 2016 US Presidential Election is unflattering even to heroin addiction.
Somebody called me on the phone
I defaulted on another loan
No big deal! Wanna cop a feel!
Let’s go get some Chinese Steel
I’m living on Chinese Steel
Nobody buying Art of the Deal
I’m living on Chinese Steel
Everything I say is in the newsreel, bigly
Got no pesos for Whoops! OK, that was my fault. I was actually quite surprised at how smoothly and quickly the transition went. As it turns out, it appears to have taken longer than expected for the DNS to update. In fact, the problem may have been in DNS cached in my browsers. When I tested the site with a browser I had no problem accessing it. When I tested the domain with dig and ping it looked like my system was seeing the … Read the rest
As Monochromatic Outlook prepares to celebrate its 21st anniversary, we are preparing to transfer the splicer.com domain to a new registrar. This is a pretty simple administrative change, but it’s quite possible that there will be some time between the change in registration and when the new registrar publishes the name service information and as that information propagates across the Internet.
The servers will be running the whole time, but may not be accessible from some locations. It’s not … Read the rest
I posted a write-up of my Infrared Inhaler project over at Positronic Works.… Read the rest