General Rambling

From the winter storm warning issued for southern Wisconsin: THIS WILL BE THE FIRST MAJOR WINTER STORM FOR WISCONSIN… AND WILL LIKELY HAVE A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SOCIETY. MONITOR THE LATEST FORECASTS CLOSELY ON THIS DEVELOPING WINTER STORM… AND BE READY TO DELAY OR ALTER TRAVEL PLANS TUESDAY EVENING THROUGH WEDNESDAY. A significant impact on society? Huh? Makes me think of riots, martial law, dogs and cats living together… The number of babies born in September 2010 will probably go up, though.

Fortune interviewed eight business stars about Steve Jobs. Bob Iger’s interview had a section that I liked more than the others: Another piece of valuable advice he gave to me was to build a prototype of the new store on your property — don’t put it in a mall or on the street — build it close enough so that you can visit it often, massage it, and learn from it. And when you’re really ready, roll it out. I think there’s a lesson in that for a lot of people, in a lot of situations beyond just retail.

Laptops, when they get too hot, start throttling the CPU and other components (GPU, etc.) to reduce heat. Of course, this is annoying when you’re trying to use the CPU for something, like photo editing. My Dell Latitude D830 has a fan to cool the CPU & chipsets, but inspecting it yesterday revealed that for all the noise it was making it wasn’t pushing much air through. I use my laptop everywhere, every day, so it’s not surprising that it’s sucked things up into the vent. Figuring I had nothing to lose I took my upright vacuum’s hose attachment to the D830’s fan vent & heat sink last night. Using my fingers to plug the other sections of the back …

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This doesn’t look good: This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting to resolve these problems: You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable. You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared. You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper. You have, it seems, sole ‘Founders’ rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper. When I (Russ) try to call the phone …

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“Hey Bob, check out mailing list X from yesterday.” As many of you have figured out I work at a University. There’s a mailing list with a lot of IT folks on it from around campus, intended for discussions and peer-to-peer assistance. Signal to noise isn’t terribly high on the list so I filter it to a mailbox. I would unsubscribe except for the occasional gem that filters through, pointed out by my coworkers. “What, did you want me to see the message that just has ‘help’ in the body? That is a little odd, I agree,” I replied. How did he get that through? Damned if the list manager doesn’t filter out half of my messages with words like …

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I’m on my way to Peru (hooray for vacations!). In preparation for the hike on the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu I needed to get a new sleeping bag. My old one, a Coleman bag circa 1892 or so, was lost to the Appalachian Trail (AT) last fall. Which was fine, since it was heavy. Really heavy. And not super warm, either, which I discovered when the AT turned into a winter wonderland. 60° and sunny? Nope! Picking a new sleeping bag is sort of daunting. You’ve got a number of different materials, shapes, and sizes to choose from. What impressed me, though, is recent efforts to simplify temperature ratings for consumers. The new EN 13537 standard actually takes into …

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