dhosek

“Best efforts” is a legal term. Its definition can vary from state to state, but it is not just, “oh we tried, sorry, lol” and it defines the highest standard of implementation in all jurisdictions.

In college during the late 80s, working at the campus computer lab, I remember telling one student that she needed to use the mouse to move the cursor. She lifted it up and waved it in the air.

Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but close.

He grew up in Naperville. Wikipedia says he was born in Berwyn, which I assume just means he was born at McNeal, but I don’t think he ever lived there or there’d be a bigger deal made of it by the local gentry. But that voice is hardcore inner suburbs/southwest side. I had no difficulty believing Jimmy McGill grew up in Cicero.

And at least Odenkirk sounds like he’s from Chicago (because he is). Colbert’s time in Chicago was a short part of his life.

And no one mentions the Monty Python sketch about woody and tinny words? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg

I’ve found that Claude is really helpful for finding patterns in my web logs and identifying bad traffic patterns. Meta was ignoring robots.txt on a wiki that I run and generating so much traffic that it was effectively DOSing the site until I blocked their crawler.

What’s been really handy is being able to identify “stealth” bot traffic by the request patterns (e.g., not requesting CSS/JS/favicon when loading the page).

Costco made a decision a few years back that they were going to only sell books as part of their Christmas seasonal offerings.

It’s worth noting that it’s not “paperbacks” in general but the mass-market paperbacks in particular (despite the headline). The print book market (excluding technical books and textbooks which are a whole separate thing) had effectively three segments: hardcovers, trade paperback and mass-market paperback. The distinction between TP and MMP comes down to price, production quality and to a lesser degree target audience. A trade paperback will have somewhat larger pages, typically the same size as the corresponding hardcover and often printed from the same plates as the hardcover. Mass-market paperbacks were typically smaller, on cheaper paper¹ with smaller margins. Back when there were racks of books in supermarkets and drugstores, these were all MMPs and while bookstores would sell MMPs, they are geared more towards TP and HC sales since the lower price also came with lower margins (hardcovers make the most money for everyone involved and MMPs the least).

Since a large fraction of MMPs sold were genre fiction and a large fraction of that has shifted to ebooks (romance readers were the biggest early adopters of the kindle), along with the decline of book sales outside of bookstore channels, the loss of MMPs isn’t the cultural cataclysm the article claims. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the trade paperback space has expanded. It’s not uncommon for a new writer’s first book to be released as a trade paperback rather than hardcover (Emily St John Mandel is one notable example of a writer who debuted in TP but had later books released in HC).

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1. It was typically pure wood-pulp paper with high acid content, leading these books to be described as “pulp novels” and since a large fraction of these were genre novels, genre fiction would be referred to as pulp fiction and yes, that’s where the movie gets its name from.

(Correction: Wertherian is in Barchester Towers which I read in a Signet Classics paperback. Most of the later books from the Barsetshire novels I read in Penguin Classics, although some I bought in cheap Oxford hardcovers.)

Nope, they destroy digital records as well, at least banks do. If you ever work for a financial institution, you’ll have mandatory training about data retention timelines.

I went on a big-time Trollope binge around 1990. The mis-hyphenation of “wertherian”¹ in the Penguin classics edition of one of his books led to my first contribution to the TeX hyphenation exception list.

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1. The OED gives him first prose² usage credit for the word which later appeared in Russian in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which, I discussed over email with the translator of the edition I read and he said that Tolstoy was a big Trollope fan and likely picked up the word from him.

2. The first recorded usage was in a poem, whose name and author I forget and I’m too lazy to bother going through the steps to access the OED online via the Chicago Public Library to look it up now.

There’s a biography of Graham Greene published in the 90s which had a gross editing error where a section was copy-pasted from one part of a chapter to another but the original was left in place.

I’m reading a novel at the moment which aggravated me when in the first chapter the narrator talked about knowing when another character had after-school activities and then two pages later talked about how that character had no after-school activities. It made me much less forgiving about “AP Geometry” and “dual” for “duel.” Overall, the book is ok, but not great.

Although that omits the paper check era.

My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.

I’m on the mailing list where errors related to TeX are submitted and the level of scrutiny behind submissions is truly mind-boggling.

Yeah, when I first saw the headline, I was momentarily confused because I thought she was already dead and didn’t know that she had a career beyond acting but then anything is possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

Ever hear of the Nestene consciousness and the autons?

It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.

Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.

Of course. There are a bunch of dialects referenced in the Wikipedia article on BASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

Other than a few functions written in Excel’s BASIC, I haven’t written a line of BASIC in over 40 years, so I can’t really speak to the relative strengths of the various compilers and interpreters that are available.

It’s definitely what I would do, but I can see the disadvantage if your goal is to get in and out quickly and the switch is on the second floor and the breaker is in the basement.

The light in the room where you’re changing out a wall switch.

A few years back, we hired an electrician to do some relatively small things for us—things I could do like replacing light switches with timer switches and the like, but didn’t have time to do. The thing that really blew me away was when I asked him if he wanted me to shut off the power at the breaker box and he said no and did all the work with live current in the wires. Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.

I remember religiously reading his Infoworld columns back in the day.

Apple-NeXT is probably the most successful acquhire in the history of modern business.

I had a $.20/month recurring charge from AWS that I could only remove¹ by completely deleting my AWS account. That was enough to get me to give up on AWS for personal projects.

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1. The key word was “I.” Maybe someone more skilled at navigating AWS’s menu structure than I could would have done it quickly and easily, but even though I knew what it was for, turning it off and not getting billed for it turned out to be a huge challenge. Thankfully it was only $.20, but if I were using the service for something that generated actual bills, that $.20 (and possibly more) would end up quietly siphoning money out of my pocket into Amazon’s).

The local library app is painfully slow on login to show my library barcode (it preloads all sorts of stuff it doesn’t need) and somehow never manages to stay logged in for any appreciable amount of time. It’s bad enough that it’s faster for me to open the library website, login, go to the menu item to display the library barcode and use that to check out books. Creating a new pass on my phone for the library took less time than logging into their app did. It’s really great for that.

One gotcha with some of the app stuff is that, especially for scan and pay, the barcode is dynamic and you can’t avoid the app. I know that’s the case for the 7-eleven app and its barcode for loyalty/scan and pay.

They have the resources to be able to do what Jobs described as “hobby projects” (he was referring to the Apple TV which definitely is the best streaming interface for video available, albeit one which is on the expensive side). They did kill their car project after spending a decade on it (and reportedly having thousands of people working on it).

I just showed it to my kids and it’s wild to think that he has been working on this since before they were born.

I don’t know that I would be willing to identify a “best” book, and while I’ve read the Bible in its entirety multiple times in a number of different translations (New American, New Jerusalem, Today’s English, King James, Douai-Rheims, Knox, much of the Anchor Bible, and currently working through the Vulgate), I don’t know that I would necessarily put any of those in the best book category (although I think it’s kind of essential cultural background reading regardless of one’s beliefs). It’s kind of hard to decide, for example, the relative rankings of say Chekhov vs. Calvin and Hobbes and I don’t think I want to try. I have included my favorite reads of each year for the past few years at https://www.dahosek.com/category/reading/ (although that also includes other blog posts about reading).

I read at a rate of 1–3 minutes per page, depending on the material. But here’s the thing: if you make time to read a bit every day, it adds up. Read 30 pages before bed every night, that’s almost 11,000 pages per year. When I commuted, I would read for about 60–90 minutes a day just riding back and forth on public transit. I’d guess my daily pace is maybe in the neighborhood of 30–100 pages a day depending on what I’m reading and what else is happening in life.