AI

My Gmail spam filter just caught this gem.

Just send us your contact information and our scammers really promise to send you money that you’d lost from those other, less virtuous scammers.

With Rondo on his way to Dallas, Pierce and KG heading to Brooklyn, and Doc moving west, Celtics fans may despair that the once-great team is being shattered.
Rest assured. We’ve been to this movie before.
In 1978, the original Celtics franchise was sent to Buffalo in a baffling deal that brought the then-Braves to Boston. (There was as baseball team called the Boston Braves that played at what is now Nickerson Field at BU. That franchise is now in Atlanta.) Included in that shuffle was one talented and troubled player, Marvin Barnes, whose story is featured in the “What the Hell Happened To” blog.
That same year, GM Red Auerbach had brilliantly drafted Larry Bird as a junior, even though Bird would return to Indiana for his senior year. The great teams of the 1980s had their basis in the train wreck that was the Celtics ownership of the 70s.
Astute readers will note that current GM Danny Ainge was a good basketball and baseball player and a pretty good basketball executive. Red Auerbach, however, Ainge ain’t.
Meanwhile, the Buffalo team moved to California, first to San Diego and then Los Angeles. So Doc River is now coach of what had been the Celtics.

And the winner for the earliest last-chance Christmas deal is …

You might not think that this stream of messages would be caused by character encoding:

I was editing a configuration file and switched to UTF-8 because I needed to add a few unusual characters to a web page. When I did so, the stream of errors appeared. It took a long time of searching before I discovered. this discussion page where ANSI vs. UTF-8 was mentioned.
It’s not a universal law, but experience shows that the bigger the gusher of error messages, the cause is usually quite small and and the least obvious.

Our party was a day after her birthday, but the joy was undiluted.

With Lynn, Krista, Cassie, Joe, and Lily.

Their summer project will be to ride 750 miles into a headwind  from sea level to 9000 ft. where, on a good day, the Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales converge.  These guys are planning to ride bikes to the South Pole.

The South Pole Epic

They’re raising money on Kickstarter. If you pledge $75, you can get a t-shirt.

It’s the first Christmas sale of the the new year. Granted, the offer comes from a suspect source.

But, hey, even spammers need to get an early start.

In our Know Your Laptop class, one of the students asked if he should upgrade his Windows 7 system to Windows 8. I said that it wasn’t necessary. Windows 8 is a stable, fast, and utterly disorienting version of Windows. People who buy new systems will almost always get Windows 8 and will learn to use it and will even come to enjoy it. There’s no need, however, to make the change from Windows 7. (If you’re running Windows XP, make plans to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 now.)
Besides, I told the class, the versions of Solitaire available on Windows 8 are lousy.
There is a way, however, to patch a Windows 7 game so that it plays on Windows 8. The procedure is not for the casual user or the faint of heart, but it works.