By Guus , 21 July 2009

Tuesday

Whole Foods course.

By Guus , 20 July 2009

Catch-22

This was an assault of funny craziness and bureaucratic madness.

Catch-22 was an funny book; I especially enjoyed the dialogues. A beautiful example:

By Guus , 19 July 2009

Saturday afternoon run

In the morning I wasn't sure what kind of run I wanted to do, but the nice weather forecast convinced me to go for the 12.6 course in Umstead. Maximum temperature was 85, low humidity, and indeed it was wonderful weather for a run.

Got a phone call at 0:52, answered an e-mail. At the water stop at 1:18 pm, left at 1:21 pm.

I finished strong. At 2.15 pm I was just before the dam, and continuously ran the next 15 minutes until almost the finish. On my previous runs the last 15/20 minutes I couldn't run continuously.

85 degrees, 35% humidity.

By Guus , 16 July 2009

64

Whole Foods course, wonderful. Saw a raccoon. Almost caught a disk. 82 degrees. 70% humidity.

By Guus , 15 July 2009

The Brothers Karamazov

I've wanted to read this book for a long time. In 1998, when I just moved to Amsterdam to go to college my roommates talked often about Dostoevsky. Recently I reviewed a couple of 'top 100 novel' lists, and it invariably scores very high.

I'll keep the review short -- this is an absolutely brilliant novel. There is nothing I can add in this review that hasn't been said many times before by much better reviewers.

What struck me were the huge differences between how the rich lived and how the poor lived; it may give some insight into why the Revolution happened in Russia years later.

By Guus , 14 July 2009

South Carolina & Argentina

South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems: education, unemployment, Argentina.When we were in South Carolina last week the political and personal problems of Governor Sanford got plenty of attention.

A T-shirt said it nicely:

"South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems:

- Education
- Unemployment
- Argentina."

A local city paper had a picture of the governor with the title "Don't cry for me South Carolina".

South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems: education, unemployment, Argentina.

Don't cry for me South Carolina.

"Don't cry for me South Carolina"

Topic
politicsnews
By Guus , 13 July 2009

Books on a phone

The Mobi Reader on my phone.When we visited a museum in Washington three months ago I saw the Kindle for the first time in real life. The Kindle is a hand held device for reading books, connected to Amazon's bookstore. I'd like to be able to read books digitally, but $399 is way too expensive and I don't like to be "locked in" to Amazon's bookstore.

I read newspapers on my phone every day. The screen is fairly small, but it's certainly readable and the other day I found out how to read books on my phone as well. I've started reading a classic a few weeks ago, The Brothers Karamazov, and in addition to the hard copy I now have the entire book with me where ever I go.

I installed "Mobipocket" on my laptop and cell phone, and downloaded a free copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. It's free since the copyright on the book has long expired. It works great! Obviously, reading a physical book is still a lot nicer, but if I have some time to kill and my phone with me, I can now continue reading my book.

The Mobi Reader on a laptop.

The Mobi Reader on my phone.

Topic
internet
By Guus , 12 July 2009

Run after the gym

Went for a run after the gym session from 4.20 pm to 5.20 pm. Boy that was tough, not because of the exercises earlier on the day but because of the temperature. 87 degrees, 50% humidity.

By Guus , 11 July 2009

Canceling a Windows shutdown

Virus.One of our computers got a virus Thursday night. Of course we have virus scanners and malware scanners, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks. We were able to track down the source of the virus, an infected website.

Our virus scanner (AVG) did not fully protect the computer but it did find the originally infected HTML file. I used the excellent HijackThis tool to manually clean up the resident processes and start-up tasks of the virus.

The symptoms were as typical as they were annoying: errors on Windows start-up ("Services and Controller app encountered a problem and needed to close") and an slow and unstable system. This time something else happened also: Windows would automatically shutdown after a 60 seconds count-down.

I learned this trick: to cancel a pending shutdown run the following command.

shutdown -a

Virus.

Topic
internet