Six months. 31.5 times six. 93 days? I’m not particularly mathematically adept at this time. Nevertheless and irregardless– off the wagon. First, it was the party for a friend of my lover. Strong through an hour, maybe two. Then anxious. Then was asked to get a drink for her. Hers were weak. I nod and smile. To the bar. Drop a twenty. “Double vodka.” It was downhill from there. Down into “Proud Mary in the...
Blue Angel. 1930. Before most of our parents were born. In Europe, lusty lust was not lost, but America diluted its fire water into warm milk. I’m gonna try to capture the spirit of Frederick Hollander’s lyrics made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Apologies to the dead for this poor man’s rendering of “Falling In Love Again”. Some side-wise beauty flickers, Some “je ne sais-pas-quoi”. Like fool’s gold, a glimmer, but the shine is faint and dull. And then my eyes catch yours, and then we’re face-to-face, and...
Searching for reasonable values for the *.vt100.geometry[5-6] xterm menu font-menu options in my ~/.Xdefaults file, I re-stumbled a gem of computing history as the top-answer to a question on StackOverflow, and this pretty picture of an old IBM punch-card. Inspired by a perl script within the comments, I ran this shell pipe: 2015-07-23 10:30:00 :: ~ rons@rons-VM$ find /usr/share/terminfo/ -type f -printf ‘%f\n’ | xargs -n1 infocmp | egrep -o ‘cols#[0-9]+, *lines#[0-9]+’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head 489 cols#80, lines#24 58...
Nigh ever day I happen across some gem tucked away in the opaque vista of the *nix command-line shell. While attempting to contrive the proper arguments for a date command interpolation, the following editorial injection from its GNU info entry caught my fancy. 28 Date input formats ********************* First, a quote: Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some...
After a recent Ubuntu upgrade on my home machine, ssh attempts to it from the VirtualBox instance at work stopped working. Here’s what ssh spewed back at me: no matching cipher found: client blowfish-cbc,arcfour server aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com Impatient, I just logged in from another machine. The VM runs CentOS 5.10 so that its environment is comparable with what [used to be] present on the majority of our production servers. I’m an anti-RedHat bigot in the first place, and didn’t...
My precious daughters and I were watching an old Betty Boop cartoon (transferred from the original nitrate to 1080p) which included a sign for an electric razor priced at “6 1/2 bits”. Knowing “two bits” represents a quarter dollar, making one bit ⅛ of a dollar, I wondered if a “bit” in computer-terminology was etymologically related. They are not. The ⅛ of a byte bit is shorthand for “binary digit”– a term which won out over such competing candidates as “bigit” or...
It is very unfortunate to see how casually bad words are spouted publicly these days. This response to an answer on Quora made me viscerally angry. Is this an “I know them when I see them” sort of filter, or does this man have a list of all the “bad” words? In any case, how dare he levy such a judgment against any element of speech between sapient beings! The sanctity of free communication must be inviolable. What could he...
My evening begins with Tinder. Ron right? r you free to hook up for coffee sometime? u seem like my kinda guy. 2 many weirdos on here tho so im gonna delete. Anyway u should text me at 123 456 7890 Spokeo is my friend. Pittsburgh burner, registered to a male. Multiple priors. At least you’re a fellow Pennsyltuckian. Yeah, too many weirdos. Tried to get taxes done tonight. Found out the 401k (early-withdrawal due to previous employer closing its...
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