I saw a license tag that read "N2SPIN" in a Virginia Tech parking lot. At first I thought it belonged to a physicist. Then, given the lot location near some publishing offices, I thought it might be owned by a journalist. But, there were also some architecture offices nearby, so maybe it belongs to a potter.
A friend of mine, who lives in the southwestern part of Virginia, received a flyer from an auction firm. One item to be auctioned was a "1500 lb wench". Now, that's some woman! (It's not unusual for "wench" and "winch" to be pronounced the same here.)
I recently overheard a university faculty member complaining about one of his student's use of grammar. He said, "The word 'data' is plural." I immediately corrected him, "That's not correct. The word 'data' am plural." :-)
Dictionary.com defines "twitterpated" as "confused by affection or infatuation". It made me think that some people are twitterpated with Twitter.
A friend sometimes sends me the word of the day and its definition. He recently sent the word au fait. So I sent him the definition of au jus. It literally means "with the juice" as in "I was riding in a slow white Bronco au jus."
I recently read an article that said that people who drank a certain amount of coffee were at reduced risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. I've also read that there might be an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's if you drink well water. Since I make my coffee with well water, I wonder if the two effects cancel.
I bought a Honda Fit in December of 2009 while there were ongoing talks about bailing out U.S. car manufacturers. Since my tax dollars were going to go to the U.S. car makers and I was buying a Honda, I felt like I was getting one car for the price of two.
I was going to get a personalized license tag for the Honda Fit I bought. I would ask for a tag that said "Hissy". But I decided to stick with my ham radio tags.
I came to work on the morning of 2/11/2009 and noticed that an ssh session to an old Sun workstation had closed. I logged in and noticed that the system had been rebooted by root at 2 a.m. and oddly didn't reboot until 7 a.m. "I've been hacked," I thought and spent an hour looking at logs and trying to figure out what happened. Due to some clues, I decided that the machine was not down for 5 hours. The time zone had been changed.
I'm running Solaris 2.7. Sun would not provide a free patch to handle the newer DST dates, so I have some cron jobs that run each year to reset the timezone and reboot the system. But why on 2/11? That was the cron job that was meant to go off on 11/2/2008. I had switched the month and day fields in the crontab table.
I have met the hacker, and he is I.
Copyright © 2009 Ben E. Cline (benjy at tuxcat.com)