njr 3.0

Finally got my replacement hiptop today (the wheel broke on my first one), complete with a broken speaker. Sending it back now. Time to wait another week for a second replacement.

I've been having RSI-related problems this week, seemingly brought upon by my incorrect technique at Kuk Sool on Saturday. It's curtailed my research work and meant that I couldn't type in my free time. As I type this I can feel the shooting pains in my forearms, which I hadn't experienced in at least two years. My body is certainly not letting me get off easily from half an hour of poor bong-dol-li-ki form.

6:39 PM | Radio
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Wish I wasn't so busy this week, so I could play with this some more.

6:44 PM | Radio
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The Mac is certainly gaining visibility as of late. On the way back to school a few minutes ago I passed a man walking his dog with the same OS X T-shirt I was wearing. We exchanged the obligatory “Nice shirt” comments.

I got on the bus, and the driver immediately commented on seeing two people with the same T-shirt in the space of 30 seconds. More amazingly, the bus driver couldn't stop talking about the music and spoken word recordings he'd bought at the iTunes Music Store in the past week.

As if the sales figures don't say enough, I think it's pretty clear Apple has a hit on its hands.

4:32 PM | Radio
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Transferred sabi.net from easyDNS to pairNIC today. easyDNS was once a good value, but is now quite overpriced. I was paying easyDNS $25 a year for registrar-only service, in comparison with pairNIC's full DNS service and optional mail/web forwarding at $16 for the transfer and first year, and $13/year for a 5 year extension? Given pair's proven reliability and constant improvement, it's no contest.

And in the brain-dead UI department (this example courtesy OpenSRS):

I wonder what would have happened, had I submitted the form after checking both boxes?

6:33 PM | Radio
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Why must so many Unix utilities mysteriously fail when you don't end the last line of a configuration file with \n? Why why why why why? The answer is not “because your text editor doesn't insert one automatically”. I finally figured out after several weeks of pounding my head against the problem that was the reason why my cron job wasn't running to remount the MO disc on calamity after my parents changed it, was that “00 04 * * * /bin/mount /mnt/mo” wasn't followed by a newline. (Someone remind me why cron's syntax is so obtuse, too?)

Maybe I should just give up and configure emacs and vi to add terminating newlines automatically. It just feels like giving into the user-hostile insanity of it all.

Actually, I need to get some sleep; back to hacking on gprof (it's research, really!) in the morning.

4:12 AM | Radio
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