I just arrived in Austin, and headed to the Hertz car rental to pick up my car. My first hint that something was unusual was when I saw that the car keys were on the dash, instead of in the ignition, and the key looked… funny. Then I noticed the power button, and the lack of a standard instrument cluster, and it dawned on me. I was going to have a chance to drive a Toyota Prius as my rental car!

Rachel Katz is an optical engineer who is selling a split-prism focusing screen for Canon cameras (10D, 20D, Digital Rebel, Digital Rebel XT). It looks like this started as some custom work for an Sigma SD-10 owner, but it’s since blossomed into a business with its own website. So for only a hundred bucks or so, I can get my camera to be much more reliable at manual focusing, with the only downside being that the spot/partial (but not evaluative or center-weighted) metering will be slightly off (pictures will be slightly overexposed if you don’t compensate).

I’ve finally gotten around to playing with an RSS agregator. The one which I first picked, Liferea, seems to be the best of the bunch. It’s definitely going to be a time-saver. I don’t know what took me so long, except for the fact that these days it’s hard to find the time to experiment with new programs, even if in the long run they end up being time-savers.

I spent a good part of last night assembling some cabinents, drawers, and a workbench for my garage. $300 dollars for a full-height cabinent, two wall-mounted cabinets, a half-height base cabinet, a half-height four-drawer, and a workbench; a pretty good deal from Costco. Too bad the kit was missing two shelf-holders, and the doors to one of the cabinents was missing one of its hinges (the plastic was sheared off, apparently before it was packed, since I didn’t find any additional bits in the box).

I was shocked to find a Y2K bug in Solaris 9, half a decade after Y2K, but I don’t know how else to explain this…. The following program prints a date with a year in 1905 under Solaris 9. Under Linux it displays a date of 2005, and my reading of strptime specification, as well as the Solaris 9 man page, indicates that strptime %Y is supposed to parse a 4 digit year correctly.

While some Debian-related e-mails this morning, I started thinking about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian: Cast List ========= Judean People’s Liberation Front…. will be played by Debian. People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea…. will be played by the FSF. Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea…. will be played by people who just want to get work done and use device drivers with firmware. The Roman Empire… will be played by Microsoft.

As write this entry, I’m sitting in First Class (seat 2A), on the absolutely, positively, very last non-stop American flight between San Jose and Boston. This is the red eye, and starting tomorrow, American has stopped all of the non-stops between BOS and SJC, and there will only be two non-stops in each direction between BOS and SJC. Given that I live in Boston, and Stacey lives in Santa Clara, this is very sad.

… besides the fact that their cables are generally ripoffs:

Q: When is a frivolous lawsuit not frivolous? A: When it’s filed by a corporation.

Monster fiercely protects its name: Cable products company sues those who use M-word

It was an incredibly busy and stressful week, so by the time I took the train down to New York City today, I was in some definite need for some pampering. So first, a visit to [ John Allan’s]1, for the full service treatment (a scalp massage, hair cut and styled, a hot towel treatment, a manicure, and a shoe shining). Then Stacey and I went to Aquavit. The last time we had gone to Aquavit was for my birthday, where we had

I understand the concept of scheduling an average of 199 takeoffs and landings every hour continuously between 10am and 3pm at Chicago, when the airport can only sustain 200-202 flight operations per hour, and then when even the tiniest thing goes wrong, the resulting commercial aviation gridlock paralyzing flights over all North America is the fault of the weather, and not the fault of the airlines for over-scheduling. Really. I get it.