Tampa Week #2

My laptop is getting old. It shows a ‘Fan Error’ message on every other boot before shutting down. I hope it survives this trip at least! Maybe it’s time to look at those Macbooks ;-)


Interop standards rock! I use the same USB cable (A -> mini-B) to connect my phone, my mp3 player and my portable HDD to the laptop. Not just that, the phone and mp3 player use the same (USB style) power charger too! My FZ-30 camera would be on the same data cable too if Panasonic hadn’t decided on using an even smaller connector camera-side.


I don’t see many footpaths in Tampa. Clearly, this is a drive around place. I think I prefer denser, high-rise cities to spread out ones.


How would I know that make uses bash internally and not the current ${SHELL} ?!


There are primarily four kinds of commercials on US television: online/telecom services, food, cars and lawyers, in increasing order of obnoxiousness. Others include beauty products and medicines - the latter being less obnoxious and more evil!


I thought the Navy and Air Force ads in Singapore were tacky but after seeing the US versions, I think the Singaporean versions deserve Oscars or something.


If there’s one good thing that’s come out of this blog, it’s the ReiserFS undelete HowTo. Every new comment there makes my day. :-)


At the Tampa office, I’ve been working at a Sun Workstation and since I started banging at that workstation’s keyboard, I’ve wondered more than once why the Caps Lock key and Left Control key are swapped. I got the answer today in this hardcore Effective Emacs essay: it’s because Ctrl is so important for effectively using Emacs that the designers of Unix keyboards put the Ctrl key on the home row! Another of life’s mysteries solved!

Maybe I should ditch vi and learn Emacs, if only to get some hardcore geek cred. ;-)


Hey look, BlogBurst! Another of my predictions comes true! To be fair though, this was a no-brainer. Next no-brainer prediction: one of Reuters & Co acquires BlogBurst.