nogoodnik

Almost all of my books are on paper. I don't mind the space they're taking (six or so bookshelves throughout the house), and I'm past the stage of my life where I moved every other year, so there's no real incentive to get rid of them. They look good, are easy to take care of, and every so often I'll find myself with a few hours of free time and enjoy reading -- or rereading -- them. They are not clutter.

If my kids share my interests, they'll be happy I kept them (discovering my dad's stash of 1970s _Scientific American_ was a high point of my youth), and if not, they'll get rid of them when I'm gone. No worries.

Most of my books are non-fiction. I read a lot of fiction, but tend to use the library for that, except for a few authors I know I'll want to read more than once.

I've got nothing against ebooks (provided they have no DRM) but I guess I just don't need them.

Thank you for writing Apple Writer.

1. I wrote most of my high school reports on it.

2. I once wrote a set of WPL programs to automate the generation of multiple-choice tests, and sold it for $50 to my uncle who was a physics teacher.

3. Apple Writer was the second program I disassembled from beginning to end (the first was Locksmith Fast Disk Copy), learning a lot in the process.

The most interesting thing about all this is the fact that the researchers were required by paper authors to sign non-disclosure agreements and agree not to identify papers with non-reproducible results. This says a lot about the confidence authors have in their papers, doesn't it?

Sorry but this isn't science anymore.

I used to have a Thinkpad T61. Best laptop I ever had. When it came time to upgrade, I looked in disbelief at the current Thinkpad line, and felt the same emptyness in my heart as when my old HP 42S calculator died and I went to HP's site to find what their RPN calculator line was up to these days. How sad it is when a line of beautiful, well-engineered machines become extinct, supplanted by mediocre, cheaper tools.

Cool hack, happy daughter. What's not to like? Oh, hello patriarchy. Now I understand sinfest better.

Ugh, the anti-aliasing kills most of them for me. I realize I'm probably in the minority, and my opinion might change as screen resolutions get better and my eyes get worse, but I vastly prefer crisp fonts for screen use.

When I switched from Windows 2000 to Ubuntu 6, I spent hours tweaking fonts.conf in the hope of getting something that looked as good as the standard Windows fonts, without much success. It's gotten easier now.

In a few weeks, "Don't buy Samsung laptops" is what I will remember from this.

Hey, this gives me a great idea: I could write a program that will gather email addresses on the web and automatically email my sales pitch to every single one of them. And I could sell both this program and my email lists to other companies willing to pay for them.