As seen on Slashdot: Dell

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As seen on Slashdot: Dell to drop floppy. Well, it's about time. I've been trying to wean my users from floppy drives for a while now. All of their machines are equipped with Zips, and all of them bought in the last 18 months have CD-RW drives as well, so there's really no reason to use floppies anymore, other than their mental attachment to them. It may be my imagination, but I swear that floppies are a lot shoddier now than they were back in the olden days. I used to use disks for years, now it seems that any disk I grab from my bin has a 75% chance of having errors on it, even if it's only a few months old and was never abused.

I had an amazingly productive

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I had an amazingly productive day today. I organized all thirty of the faculty requests for new machines, estimated their cost, and prioritized them all to determine which to fund, then I spent 3 hours cleaning my filthy office. Why the sudden burst of productivity? I think it's because I had music playing all day. Last night, I was moving some files around, and realized "Hey, you know, I've got a lot of good music on my work machine, I should listen to that more often", so I set up Windows Media Player 9 today, and just threw my entire CD collection (ripped to .wma files on my hard drive) at it, and set it to random play. Having some tunes playing really made me a lot more productive, or at least that's my excuse for when the neighboring faculty will inevitably ask me to knock it off. :)

The arching sky is calling

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The arching sky is callingSpacemen back to their trade. All hands! Stand by! Free falling! And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra, Far drives the thundering jet, Up leaps the race of Earthmen, Out, far, and onward yet.

We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth; Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.

--Robert A. Heinlein

I've been watching CBS this

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I've been watching CBS this morning, Dan Rather seems to me to be the most human of the news anchors, never afraid to let some emotion show, while not wallowing in it. The latest video shows the orbiter as a brilliant shining star, shooting across the early morning Texas sky, it's beautiful, and tragic.

I wonder how the three people on the ISS will get home, I doubt the March shuttle mission will launch on schedule, and while they've got a lot of extra supplies, it could be years before another shuttle launch, if there is ever another one. They have an escape pod vehicle, a russian capsule, but that was really only for an emergency, and of course, it's never been done before.