Sadly, not the Verge command center. From Lost Bulgaria.com.
There is so much to love in this image. The hair. The chunky control panels. The fucking ceiling. Yes, this was a real place. This place, I think.
There’s not really a non-boring way of talking about this, so uh: you can still buy a 6502 processor. That’s a 37-year-old design. That’s, from like, medieval IT times. I guess you could still use it for some things. The patent has expired, and in some tasks, you only need a teeny bit of CPU power.
Say my name
This is a sweary diatribe about my name.
My name is Glenn.
And yet, for some reason, people keep hearing “Greg”.
Fine, I can live with it, it’s an occasional irritation.
“Greg?”
“No, Glenn.”
Where I currently work, my computer was set up for me before I started. Despite meeting me, interviewing me, and having a copy of my CV and several emails from me, I had to log on as “Greg” onto a machine called “Greg-PC”.
I changed my username, now it’s Glenn, but the user folder is still called Greg. Every time I see the full path to a file, and in my line of work, that’s a lot, I see “C:/Users/Greg/” and then I miss the rest of the path because I remember that they got my name wrong for absolutely no reason. Then I flip my desk over in rage and storm out.
Okay, despite my rage, I’m working through it, and I think I’m dealing with it.
But this. Oh man. Are you ready for this?
I usually finish emails with:
“-Glenn”
at the end. I don’t really like full signatures on emails, and generally, the people I’m talking to already know who I am. Usually, it’s freelance clients, and usually, after ending an email with “-Glenn” they reply with:
“Hi Glen,
Thanks for your email-“
I’m sorry, who the fuck was that “hi” for? It sure wasn’t me. That’s not how my name is spelt. I get this a lot. An awful lot. Some people seem incapable of conceiving of a version of the name “Glenn” with two n’s.
I can see why, I suppose. There’s a lot of famous Glens with only one n. Why there’s…
- Glenn Hoddle. Oh, no, wait. Two n’s.
- Glenn Close. Oh, two n’s again. And yes, my name is apparently unisex. Back off, alright? It’s better than Leslie.
- Glenn Miller. Huh.
- US TV idiot Glenn Beck.
- Glenn Medeiros.
- The fictional Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy.
Actually, there’s as metric shit-ton of famous “Glenn”s. In fact, I could find just one famous “Glen”. Glen A. Larson.
And that might explain it. People of a certain age will have grown up seeing the name “Glen” at the end of… well… everything. Quincy M.E., Knight Rider, Battlestar Galactica, The Six Million Dollar Man, Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century… I bet everyone aged 30-45 has probably seen the name “Glen A. Larson” written on screen more times than all the other “Glenn”s put together. I now believe that this one famous Glen has ruined it for all the other, cooler, Glenns.
Fuck you, Glen A. Larson.
-Glenn
Today this blog was brought to you by the letter N and rage.
You’re welcome
I just wrote a long post romanticising the car ferry journeys I used to go on as a child. I clicked “Save to Drafts” instead of publish. I just did you a favour. You owe me one.
Are you a Geek or a Nerd? This infographic from Brandflakes for Breakfast will help you decide for yourself, regardless of what your older brother thinks.
I seem to fall exactly in the middle - I love and hate and do and don’t do stuff from either “camp”. This means I am a new, undefinable social class of human who is unique and special. Or a dork.
Wow, dork has several other meanings I was not aware of.
In November, NASA launched the Mars Curiosity Rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). This video shows how it is going to gently touch down on the Martian surface. Curiosity is about the size of an SUV, so it needs a slightly gentler landing than Spirit and Opportunity’s slow bounce (which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiEoGUHEobo from 1m onwards).
Later today, MSL’s spacecraft will perform some engine burns to properly target Gale Crater, the rover’s landing site.
It never ceases to amaze me - a spacecraft is lining up to hit a target 8 months away on a planet that’s still a full quarter of its orbit away from being in the right place. And it’s spinning, just like Earth, where it was launched from. I know, at the end of the day, it’s just maths, and the movement of the planets is entirely predictable, but I’m still impressed that all these factors can be taken into account and turned into a workable flight plan just from observations of the planets taken from Earth’s surface, while both planets are spinning and orbiting another, third body, at different speeds. And with different gravitational pulls.
Attempts to target other planets were being made alongside the first human beings going into space. Before any human eyes had been up there, just to check and say “yup, it’s what we thought”, primitive automated probes were already going much farther (with varied success!)
Too much information
I’m getting to grips with Java and just did a quick Google search to find out how to get a Unix timestamp. Please, bear witness to what happens when you go too far back when explaining something.
“Time is a physical property. For Physicists it is a dimension tightly coupled with space (spacetime). Time as a physical property (or dimension) passes uniformly.”
Yeah, I just need that timestamp example…
“We simply can’t define how fast time passes - we live inside of it. Just like a piece of driftwood in a river is unable to change its speed relative to the current we can not change our speed within time.”
I had to scroll to back up to ensure that, yes, this page really is entitled “Date and time in Java”. I feel like Brian Cox is explaining Java to me.
2012, I am in you
I hate the idea of New Year’s resolutions. As if I have to wait until 1st January to start being awesome. I started being awesome in 1978, fools. AND DID NOT STOP.
However, this apparently did not stop me from posting this last year:
“My new year’s resolution is to have a witty and insightful blog. That may be kind of a tall order, but it’s up against my other doomed new year’s resolutions: drinking less, running more…”
SCORECARD
The blog thing: 2011 was better. 7/10
Drinking less? Started off well, then… no. 3/10
Running more? For three glorious months around summer, this was looking like it was in the bag for good. Then I got made redundant, which sort of messed everything up, and now I have a job that requires more travelling, leaving less pre/post work running time. On the plus side, I am now (temporarily) living somewhere that I feel okay about stepping out the door and just running, rather than having to drive somewhere that I don’t feel I’ll get stabbed. So, I need to get on with that. Rather than posting about it on the internet. 4/10
Overall: 5/10. Must do better.
Going to try the running more/drinking less ones again this year. And I’m going to replace the blogging one with buying a house that doesn’t suck. Which indirectly means sourcing all the freelance work I can possibly fill my spare time with. Which will probably make me drink more and run less.
