I've added a Christmas-themed stylesheet to the pulldown on the left, for those who are able to use the customized styles.

I'm blogging from my old Pentium III 500Mhz computer (named Styrona, after the Everquest character I used to play from this computer.) My main computer (AMD 1200, named Styrogur) is in the shop at CompUSA, where they will attempt to recover the data from the hard drive and transfer it to a new computer that I bought (AMD Athlon XP... read more »

The C: drive on my main computer at home has a read error and won't boot. Over the past couple of days I've tried various corrective measures, but apparently the directory structure is corrupt (and by this, I don't mean it has been taking bribes.) It looks like I will have to seek professional help. [Insert your own joke about... read more »

Following the precedent set by Los Angeles County's brave stance against master/slave labels on technological devices, the City of San Francisco is demanding reform by the electronic plug and cable industry. A memo to all of the city's electronic suppliers said that the use of connectors on electronic cables and equipment "must accurately reflect the diversity of San Francisco society,... read more »

The Cowboys were destroyed on Thanksgiving Day. I just hope they can bounce back from the loss, rather than let it crush the rest of the season. My Klingon Warriors are back in their rightful place at the top of our family fantasy league, after beating my brother Jonathan's team, the Filthy Beasts. My team has now clinched a playoff... read more »

The day after Thanksgiving I drove down to Arizona and visited my sister Angie. My sister Carolyn was there as well, and it was fun to spend some time with them. The highlight of the weekend was Saturday night, when we went down from Phoenix to Tucson to see Duran Duran in concert. It was a great show: they sang... read more »

This won't be of much interest to most people, but I've updated the website for my family's fantasy football league and moved it to its own domain name: StonesThrowLeague.com. The "Current Standings" portion of the index page is being automatically pulled and parsed from Yahoo by a Perl script.

Things (and people) that I am grateful for (in random order): Lasagna Cars Firemen The Manhattan Project The smallpox vaccine Orson Scott Card The Interstate Highway System Abraham Lincoln My job Airplanes Winston Churchill The Declaration of Independence The Mormon pioneers A & W Root Beer The original Star Wars trilogy Antibiotics Good friends Eric Frank Russell The Armed Forces... read more »

This entry by Stephen Den Beste brought to mind some thoughts I've had over the past couple of years about Islamic extremists and deterrence, so I figured I might as well blog those thoughts. There are two elements that are necessary for deterrence to work. One is that the threat of retaliation must target something that the party being deterred... read more »

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