Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

MS-DOS 5.0 to Windows 7 in a number of easy (though time consuming) steps

The one thing the video glosses over is that there’s no way that you would ever do this in real life, since you were almost guaranteed to have had to reinstall Windows at some point.

“Heard it from Chet”:http://mischeathen.com/2011/03/im-having-nerd-nostalgia-palpitations.html

I’m a man and need nice work clothes. WTF do I do?

I don’t generally hang around on Reddit, but this thread is full of useful info about where to get good grown-up clothes that’ll last. I think it’s pretty credible because I, too, have had insanely good experiences with Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts.

“Give it a browse”:http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/f9fa7/im_a_man_and_need_nice_work_clothes_wtf_do_i_do/.

Wow, the things you don’t remember

I just ran across a mention of my name in the Changelog to memcached, from 2004. I had forgotten ever contributing anything. In fact, I was having a hard time figuring out what I would have been working on in 2004 that would have been using memcached.

Mind you, I remembered after a moment or two, but it took some serious thinking.

The interesting thing is to realize that I was apparently a fairly early adopter–the entry for my bug report is almost exactly one year after the first entry in the changelog.

ZOMG, Wikipedia truly knows everything

“Here is a link”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_of_Rock#1983_2 to the Wikipedia entry for the 1983 German Monsters of Rock concert, which was my first ever concert.

I have vague memories of _Whitesnake_, but couldn’t even tell you what they played.

_Blue Oyster Cult_ was what I was there to see, though I remember it being somewhat anticlimactic–I think I knew a lot less of their music than I had thought. I would probably enjoy it more now.

I remember enjoying _Thin Lizzy_ a lot, though it’s only in retrospect that I am glad I saw them in their last show with Phil Lynott.

I remember one _Saxon_ song, but I won’t name it for fear of dying of embarrassment.

I have remember “Paradise by Dashboard Light” only because the female performer ended up very scantily clad. John Scalzi recently tweeted wondering what a collaboration between Jim Steinman and Philip Glass would be like–I can tell you it would likely make my head explode.

_Motorhead_. I am sad to realize that I have seen Lemmy in the flesh and have no memory of it. Maybe that’s appropriate, though.

I suspect that I left before _Twisted Sister_ made it on stage, and I don’t have any idea who the hell _Cheeta_ were.

Thanks to my dad for dropping us off and picking us up afterward.

Jake Shimabukuro covering Bohemian Rhapsody. On ukelele. Solo. Wow.

You know, I haven’t seen any ukelele covers that have been less than respectful of their source material. Sometimes they are obviously showing off technical acumen–there’s a couple of places in this video that might qualify–but it all seems done with a lot of affection for the original.

Strange Disclaimer

An interesting point about the thoughtlessness of some of our legal forms–the silliness of standard boilerplate suggesting that Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle wasn’t connected to actual events and persons…right after many pages detailing exactly how it was.

“Noted by Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/strange-disclaimer/

Axe Cop: The Movie – Part 1

Ummmm…yeah.

The “Axe Cop”:http://axecop.com/ comic strip is deeply, deeply weird–as you might expect given the author is 5. The movie is astonishingly good at capturing that weirdness–that sense of things just happening one after another with no actual, err, plot–and even a lot of the visual style of the original.

Look at it this way, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the upcoming _Green Lantern_ film is likely to be.

Michael Ford: Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers

It doesn’t surprise me in the least to find that Ayn Rand abandoned her principles when the time came that they were truly tested–many, perhaps most, people would do the same.

The thing that annoys me is that she, and her followers, would actively seek to deny others the same option of which she took advantage, justifying it with a “philosophy” suited only to tedious jeremiads masquerading as novels.

“Read it and weep”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ford/ayn-rand-and-the-vip-dipe_b_792184.html.

What we’re really getting at…

I still can’t read this short bit of rumination without feeling shivers down my spine. I can’t speak it aloud without a hitch in my voice. “Go read it all”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/06/wanderlustwarning-sign.html, and think about how anything–[*anything*]!–can challenge you to dig deeper.

bq. Strip away pretension, propriety, insecurity, fear and the bills you have to pay.

From 0 to thunderstorm in 1:40…

You’ve probably seen “this video”:http://www.hs.fi/thickbox/video/1135259206031?KeepThis=true already, but if not, check it out. The speed with which the beach goes from “nice day” to “black as night” is pretty intimidating.

Incidentally, I already had a category for “weather”. WTF?

A thing of beauty it is…

I’ve spent about the last three weeks converting much of the infrastructure code for AnteSpam to use AnyEvent.

One of the small bits of fallout from using AnyEvent is that we now have a large number of anonymous code references as callbacks, and in our logging code, these all have the same name: @__ANON__@.

This makes debugging output a little less useful.

In browsing some code in AnyEvent::SMTP, I happened across the trick of locally setting the @__ANON__@ typeglob to the name you want to use used in stacktraces and the like:

bc. my $var = sub { local *__ANON__ = ‘What::ever::you::want’; … };

So, this is kinda ugly, and I couldn’t find any official documentation of it, so I went looking around, and found @Sub::Name@, which is a module to make this a little more palatable. Now we can do:

bc. my $var = subname ‘What::ever::you::want’ => sub { … };

Still perhaps not beautiful, but not totally covered in warts, either.

Now to go retrofit this onto all of our code…

Mister Rogers

I vaguely remember being entranced with the show when I was very young. At some point, I guess I started to feel that it was stuff for “little kids”, and came to view it with something a little like contempt.

I kind of wonder what I’d make of it now, because “the person behind the show is someone I might have liked to meet”:http://www.pittsburghinwords.org/tom_junod.html.

Perhaps I should watch Animal House again sometime

I don’t think I’ve watched any significant portion of Animal House in two decades or more. But I happened across a note in “Wikipedia’s page on Robert Cray”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cray that notes that he was the bass player in the band performing “Shout” at the party.

That, plus the always amusing scene of Donald Sutherland dissing John Milton seems worth a re-watch.