The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:32 PM on July 19, 2008

Personally I feel that both facials and anal sex (at least male on female anal) is not about degradation, but about ownership. A buddy of mine said once, "I just don't enjoy anal - I don't like doing that to a girl." I responded, "You don't like paying your mortgage either, but your sure like owning your own condo, don't you?" End of discussion.

Can someone explain this one to me? You have to do these things to own your girl? What... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 5:25 AM on July 18, 2008

1 GB memory with Vista is not just "kinda light", it's pretty much unacceptable. Bump it up to at least 2GB if possible.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 5:56 PM on July 11, 2008

Something similar happened to me once a couple years ago, an error message flashed up for half a second or so and then it rebooted, and repeat. The error message was too fast to read so I used my digital camera to get a picture of it. It took 3 tries to get a picture. In my case, it said that gdi32.dll wasn't found or was corrupt or something. I replaced the file somehow, I don't remember now. Maybe using the recovery console on the original XP disk. Anyway, it was fine after that. Probably one... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:59 PM on June 24, 2008

Definitely reinstall if you have a real XP disk, and are comfortable reinstalling the necessary drivers. If all you have is a restore disk, it may or may not help, since it will have all those cruddy applications installed with it. Stay away from Vista unless you have, or want to install 2Gb of memory.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 1:42 PM on June 18, 2008

Randy Pausch's Time Management lecture (google video) or summary here.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:31 AM on June 17, 2008

Yes, try a keyboard. It's easier, imho, than a guitar to get around to the different notes for a beginner. Your humming/whistling may not sound good because they aren't likely to be really on pitch or to get the intervals right. The black keys sound nice.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:23 PM on June 15, 2008

One problem is defining what one means by "benefiting society". Does it mean full employment, or protecting the environment? Some of each? Well, how much exactly; what's the trade-off? If it's making people happier, then perhaps one might want to emulate Denmark (the supposed happiest nation) or Bhutan's concept of Gross National Happiness. But since the rich and powerful have a greater hand in the economy than the rest of us, perhaps their happiness is allocated a greater degree... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:19 PM on May 31, 2008

If you can deal with plain text and are unix-savvy, look into m4.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:57 AM on May 30, 2008 marked best answer

You may (or may not) be interested in You Are Here. This is firmly on the "artistically rendering the experience" side of things, but might be good inspiration material.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:45 PM on May 12, 2008

What tool are you using to check the email for your regex patterns? That's important since there's no single regex specification. Different tools support different regex patterns.

I'm not sure that regexes are really the way to go with spam filtering; much of the spam I receive is garbled in ways that would defeat most regex filtering schemes. For example, a spam I recently received contained: Pre scriptionz. It would be hard to write a regex that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:36 AM on May 12, 2008

I'd say contour drawing. There's an exercise that could be called "blind contour drawing" in various books like The Natural Way to Draw. You look at your subject, but not at the paper as you draw. It can yield results like some of those drawings.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 1:57 PM on May 7, 2008

Marketing has buried its messages deep into your psyche.

Simply eating vegetables never has this effect.

There's your clue.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 8:30 AM on May 5, 2008

Probably too obvious to mention, but other Salinger stuff: Nine Stories, Frannie and Zooie, etc., might be of interest.

Or how about some of Joan Didion's work in Slouching Toward Bethlehem?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:50 PM on April 26, 2008

Could it have been this "Sister Fuzz" article here?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:21 PM on April 21, 2008

Okay, I can't find my copy of GOF. Can someone please tell me which pattern he's talking about?

The Interpreter pattern, at least in my hardcover copy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:19 PM on April 16, 2008

but I still find the idea of a 5000-line file depressing

I would too. Any time I ran across a procedure/method as big as that I'd suspect that there were some abstractions that could be pulled out of it that would make if easier both to conceptualize and to edit/debug/navigate. Your initial design with DataManager.getInstance().init(), etc., is far preferable, imho, to a flattened 5000 line procedure.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:21 AM on April 17, 2008

If you like programming, you might like csound.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:31 PM on April 15, 2008

Uuencode and uudecode are the old-style unix way of doing it. Nowadays, yenc encoding is popular because it produces smaller encoded files. Versions of these programs exist for the PC.

You may want to consider converting your wav files to MP3 files if the amount of SMS text is important.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:30 PM on April 8, 2008

Yes, I see now. Ignore my comment. I doubt you'll find very good quality speech to text without spending a lot and having very good audio, and spending time training the software.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:47 PM on April 8, 2008 marked best answer

30 years ago I got some pretty good pictures of protein crystals (for x-ray crystallography) through a microscope using a 35mm rangefinder camera on a tripod lined up with the microscope eyepiece. No adapter was used. It took a few minutes to get the alignment right. To get the focus right I opened up the back of the camera and focused it like you would with a view camera (except that the main focus control was the one on the microscope). You won't be doing it this way of course, but my point is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:10 PM on March 31, 2008

If the amount of light is an issue, use a longer exposure. Using a film camera can be a help here. When I did this, I couldn't meter the light, so I just bracketed the exposure +/- 5 or so stops from my estimate. Using an old film camera with a shutter release cable can be a help here. Oh, and keep the aperture wide open.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:28 AM on April 1, 2008

Google your model number and add the terms xp and downgrade. You'll find some forums where people talk about doing the downgrade. If you;re lucky you'll find the whole procedure written up with links to the drivers you'll need. You really don't sound techy enough to do this if things get difficult. Try to have some help available.

I did this with my toshiba laptop recently. I had to integrate a new hard drive driver into the xp install disk to get xp installed. nlite can... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 11:19 AM on March 24, 2008

There was a recent discussion about godaddy problems over at metachat. I wouldn't recommend them.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:46 AM on March 2, 2008

There's always Laurie Anderson.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 5:54 PM on March 1, 2008

Seconding 45moore45 and gimonca. I find the day goes better if I don't even have that first bit of anything sweet. If I have anything sweet early in the day, I'll be certain to return to it later. And having a nice fresh feeling in the mouth is a disincentive for me towards eating.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:48 PM on February 17, 2008

Um, how about this using a pipe?
dir *.whatever | thingy
That way thingy wouldn't have to be a device.
Surely someone has done something like this. If not, it might be a fun little project.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:43 PM on February 16, 2008

Until about 6 months ago, I ran a 900mhz celeron laptop with XP. I used AVG free antivirus on it. You might also want to look into the noscript add-on for firefox. The best way to make that thing run faster is to get it's memory up to 512mb (assuming it's running XP). Mine ran much better after I did that. I also used spybot search&destroy and ad-aware for spyware scanning. I used the free zone-alarm firewall, but that might not be good for a less than expert user. You'll have to decide if... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 2:47 PM on February 16, 2008

Read about people who underwent sudden conversions, like C. S. Lewis.

Surround yourself with religious people, suspend disbelief, and practice. Just drop any counterargument thoughts that come up. Give it time.

Not all faiths are fundamentalist. They don't all take the bible literally. Noah's flood? Genesis? Loaves and Fishes? Resurrection? Some view these as metaphorical. Perhaps this is the sort of religion you could take.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 3:27 PM on February 10, 2008

The Reader's Digest Guide To Places In The World is a surprisingly good book. It gives a page up to a few pages on each country, with smaller entries for cities, regions, and geographical features. Nice pictures. Culture, geography, etc. Published 1987, so kinda out of date now.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:56 PM on February 6, 2008

topcoder.com? local linux or windows user groups? Are you only looking for a place to find people to develop with, or do you want to discuss ideas in an open forum for all to see?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:01 PM on January 22, 2008

Two non-research type books that you might be interested in which focus on what little you really need to live are:
Your Money Or your Life
Living The Good Life
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:12 PM on January 20, 2008

When there were floppy disks, you put the floppy disk into the disk drive. The term is just handed down even they are no longer separate.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 5:11 AM on January 20, 2008

I think it will be hard unless you physically separate yourself from the computer, just as it would be hard for a foodie to leave a pile of chocolate chip cookies alone if they were sitting right there on the table.

Consider shutting off your home internet entirely or getting rid of the home computer. Find something to do outside the home in the evenings (I know you said that's not the answer, but maybe you're just bored being at home in the evening). Cooking, playing an... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 7:29 AM on January 19, 2008

I do mail art projects. www.mailart.org.

Your domain has expired.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 8:06 AM on January 19, 2008

This thread might be of interest.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 5:44 AM on January 17, 2008

Here is a BBC story about the language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:36 AM on January 15, 2008

Here is someone who had this problem and used a solution like kdern's but with a different program.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 1:38 PM on January 14, 2008

I probably wouldn't run a batch conversion

Right. You want to keep the original files. You just want to find out which ones are bad. The point of running the converter as a batch is just to quickly find out which files are corrupt, via error messages, so you can weed them out. That's what they were doing in the link I posted earlier.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:04 PM on January 14, 2008

You seem to be describing beautifulagony.com. Look there maybe?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:35 AM on January 14, 2008

Write some C and C++ programs for windows using the win32 API. See Petzold's old Programming Windows books. You can do C++ using the win32 API or use Microsort's MFC. Beware that the win32 and MFC APIs are pretty ugly. But you can still learn some useful C/C++.

Write some console programs, no GUI needed, and you exercise your C/C++ skills. Work though Kernighan & Richie, or work through Kermighan & Pike's "The Practice Of Programming". There's tons of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:50 PM on January 13, 2008

I just use a little bash script to move my files from the camera to a directory based on today's date, and then open an explorer window on the target directory. I'm on windows so I use cygwin. My camera always connects as the k: drive. If you don't know bash or cygwin, this won't help much, but here's my script:


if [ ! -d /c/home/photo/`date +%Y` ]
then mkdir /c/home/photo/`date +%Y`
fi
if [ ! -d... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:17 AM on January 12, 2008

Hmmm. I guess the <pre> tag doesn't work all that well here... If some mod wants to clean that up for me, please do.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:19 AM on January 12, 2008

Cygwin also has an exif command available for extracting exif data from jpegs. You could use this to use the actual exif data to set the target directory for each file, though you'd have to rewrite the script.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:40 AM on January 12, 2008

I always assumed hairs grow for a set length of time and then fall out. After all, if you shave body hair, or your short-haired pet, the hair grows back. I doubt that the hair follicle 'knows' how long the hair is. The only mechanism I could see for this is a programmed growth rate and lifetime for each hair. Short hairs grow more slowly and/or fall out sooner. Programming courtesy of your genes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:10 PM on January 10, 2008

The First's First Blog
Sunnydale Postmortem
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 9:09 AM on January 2, 2008

family is such a disaster
pretty extreme sense of humor
I’m pretty smart and a really good debater

I'd start by considering these things. Hard to say without more details or seeing your performance on a date. Have you talked to a friend about this? Someone who knows you in person might have some insights. Humor and debating are fine, if kept to a friendly level. I always get a funny feeling about people who self-describe as smart. Could ego be a problem here?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 12:27 PM on December 30, 2007

Here's the first hit for google search of quantum+observer. According to this, an observer can be a measurement device.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:30 PM on December 29, 2007

You'll probably find 8mm film and developing hard to find and expensive. My dad had that camera, or one closely related, which was used for all our old home movies.. You don't want super-8 film, it won't work in that camera. It's spring driven. You wind it up and then press the button to shoot. I believe exposure is handled by a photocell. Film came in 50-foot rolls which needed to be flipped over after the first half was exposed.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 4:51 PM on December 28, 2007

Oh, and the ones I've gotten recently don't have that annoying 1-2 second delay before lighting up that older ones had.

I still have a mix of incandescent and CF bulbs in my house. They'll have to get a bit better before I'm likely to completely switch over to CF.
posted to Ask Metafilter by DarkForest at 6:48 AM on December 22, 2007