Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Month: September 2010

  • Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!

    Here’s an interesting way to make yourself lose any faith you had in ever winning the lottery by playing the same numbers every week: Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!. It lets you select five numbers, then plays them against a random drawing, simulating two tickets a week for ten years.  I just tried it and…

  • Sunburn oracle

    Here’s the latest time machine for me: I got this stupid sunburn on Sunday, which isn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s an annoyance, mostly because I’ll be sitting here during the day, staring at a FrameMaker window, and then suddenly realize I’m scratching my arm like a crank addict trying to break…

  • Pantone is not a shampoo

    I think this sunburn is fucking with my head. I went to the Rangers-A’s game yesterday and it was hotter than hell out for the end of September. I think part of it is the Oakland Coliseum is such a horrible place, all concrete and built by the same architects that turned out prisons in…

  • Moving (again)

    We are moving again.  This will be the sixth time I move in five years.  But, as I said last time, this will be the last time I move for a long time. Let me first preface this by saying I am not moving back to New York.  I work in New York, but I…

  • Memory

    I’ve been working in VMware all week, and constantly swapping virtual memory, even though this computer has four gigs of RAM.  And it’s not like I configured my virtual machine to use four gigs of memory and then wondered why I can’t run that and iTunes and iPhoto and iEverythingElse at the same time.  So…

  • HD is the new SD

    What happened to the allure of the HDTV?  I was thinking about this the other day, as I tried to shoehorn some more crap in my storage space and realized that the little 15″ analog CRT TV I have in there is probably never going to see service again and is just wasting a couple…

  • The drive

    Last week, I drove 40 miles each way to work, which is 400 miles a week, which is about 20,000 miles a year, or maybe a hair less when you count in the various holidays and days I break an arm or wreck a car or get sent to a trade show where, instead of…

  • Obsession cycle is not a Calvin Klein-themed Harley

    When I was maybe ten, I became obsessed with the Elephant Man.  I think the movie came out around then, or maybe it was the play, and Mark Hamill was playing the role of Merrick in the Broadway version, and because I was so infatuated with Star Wars at the time, I absolutely had to…

  • iOS 4.1, semi-portable computing

    iOS 4.1 came out yesterday, and I updated my iPhone 3G, which has been plagued with slowdowns and randomness since I updated it to 4.0.  It was almost so bad that I thought I was running a high-end Windows Mobile phone.  (Okay, not that bad.)  But it appears that the fixes in 4.1 alleviate any…

  • The Deal

    Okay, as I mentioned, a lot is up right now.  One of the big things is that my work geography is about to get very complex and very simple.  Let me try to explain. I was essentially offered my old job in New York, with a couple of differences.  One is that I won’t work…