Wednesday, January 05, 2000
Sick, part N
Still sick. Blah. It seems that most people (if not all) that attended Friday night's little Y2K party is sick. Perhaps it was being outdoors all night long that might have done something. Or all the smoke from the bonfire. Or something.
The local Internet2 POP
Curiousity got the better of me, and I found out that my old college, FAU, is part of the Internet2. Ah, to be part of a non-commercial highspeed network.
But in looking over FAU's proposal for hooking up to the Internet2, I notice that not one of the projects requiring use of the Internet2 is from the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Sadly, I don't find that at all surprising, especially when they're having all students turn in ANSI C programs in Microsoft Word format. I kid you not.
I, or my friend Mark, could go on and on about it all, but I'll stop here.
A Clockwork Orange Owl
Now, about that logo.
![[A Clockwork Orange Owl]](/2000/01/05/owl-brown-transp.gif)
The mascot of FAU is the burrowing owl, a small owl (perhaps six inches in hight) that lives under ground in burrows. To say that it actually burrows is an overstatement, since it actually doesn't burrow at all, but appropriates (read: steals) already burrowed burrows.
Around FAU they are the prime target for a large population of feral cats.
I don't know who came up with the picture but somehow I can't picture a burrowing owl hanging out with his fellow droogs at the local milk bar listening to Beethoven and engaging in a bit of the old ultra-violence.
But perhaps that's just me …
Linux bite) the Watt Tripoli!
My friend Hoade just got some speech recognition software and sent me a dictated email. Part of it reads:
I wonder if I didn't go a little too fast on the speech training. It seems that anything I say is clearly Miss Understood by this bucking basedface phase space based. OK at night wasn't saying octane no not octane docking note not docking awk and known not awk and octane octane you CK e u c k d you see today got the met at up
A delete this lettersentence the descendants to the descendants please delete this sentence
It gets more incoherent if you can believe that.
I think this technology needs a bit more work. It took what? Five years or so for the handwriting recognition on the Newton to actually work most of the time?
This is almost as amusing as the time Hoade ran his novel through Microsoft Word's “Summarize” feature. He ends his letter with:
The lecture h the lecture h the laughter h a the vector eight of the let tear that tear letter and
The letter H
The letter O
The letter A
The letter D
Will air EI'm typing this part–AIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
