William Adams' WebLog

What the heck? Well, I'm making a statement about blogging. How does a frog laugh? I'm sure you can fing it on someone's blog somewhere. I can tell you that the frogs in a backyard pond in Hawaii make a more raspy croaking sound when they think they can...

This was the headline on an article I read at “The Register”. It's funny how the mind works. My first thought after I read that was, “hay, Anand Tech probably has the new buyers guide for the mid-range system of the month online now”...

Right now I'm listening to the local radio station http://www.kuow.org online. I could just as easily be listening to some Brazilian music from half way down the other end of the planet. I only have a lowly DSL connect at 384K download. I could have a...

It's funny how life has a way to throw inspiration our way from the oddest directions. We bought Yasmin a ton of computer gear recently because: a) It was her birthday, b) she had a science project to complete, c) I want her to grow up to be as geeky...

Say that a few times fast, and you begin to understand the fun you can have with a 9 year old with just 5 words of English. So, build vs buy. Recently I decided to build a PC for Yasmin. I had purchased her one a few years back. It was from a British...

That is the question. Be it nobler to pull up your sleeves than to bow to the will of the component provider? So, here's the deal. This past weekend, Yasmin and I finished the path around the back yard. It took 20 bags of bark hauled from the hardware...

During the winter in my neighborhood, the begetation looks pretty baren. Things become really simple. Everything but the evergreens, loses it's leaves, dries up, and kinda disappears. You can see everything clearly without all the clutter in the way....

I didn't actually watch the whole super bowl. I watched some of the first half, and walked away as soon as the half time show started to make a phone call. The call lasted through the half time show, and pretty much through the second half, and I got...

As Jimmy Carter used to do, I consult my daughter Yasmin on many an issue of great and deep importance. The subject this weekend was why computers crash, have bugs, and all that sort of stuff. I made a bold statement because I wanted to see where we could...

What is “legacy data”? I thought about this because at work we talk about 'legacy data' all the time. As if the data being stored in the future will be current, and the data stored today is old crufty and undesirable. Having installed another...

I've archived a large number of DVDs to my hard disk. If you have non-copyrighted material, say weddings and whatnot, on DVD, you can use DVDDecrypter to store the content on your hard disk. It has this neat mode (ISO Read) that pretty much just copies...

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince Penguin Classics - ISBN 0-14-044752-0 I've been reading this of late. It's interesting. This Machiavelli guy (1469-1527) is talking about statecraft, and makes many observations as to how things have come about in...

So, This past weekend, I pushed further ahead with my home office rearrangement project. Having detreasured the downstairs, and having move my center of computing upstairs, there was just one more thing to move. I left one of the computers downstairs...

Pokemon; Ed, Edd, and Eddy; Masters of the Universe; Zoids. These are the cartoons you get to watch, either because you woke up at 6am, or so happen to be watching at 9pm like I am. Why am I watching TV right now? Because I was typing some schema...

Through the closets and shelves downstairs, what do I find? Selective issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal, dating as far back as 1993, to 1998. At some point I think I had a subscription, and I thought I'd be referring to these things over time. Turns out that...

About 3 years ago I went through a transformation. I discovered that there was a ton of music that I wanted to listen to. I never was much for the Napster craze, so I actually went out and bought a bunch of CDs. I just counted, and I have about 100 of...

As I'm perusing various blogs, I'm reminded of two things. BBS, and “Snow Crash”. The first one reminds me of my Commodore PET, and my 300 baud modem. Of course there was FidoNet also operative at the time. But, it was basically a “community”...

So, I removed them. I'll have to find a better location than MSN to put them so that I can link to them without causing problems.

Between an 'article' and a regular post? I don't know, so I thought I'd write one and post it and see where the weblog server puts it on my page. I don't really want to write an article, but if I were to write one, it would be about the pleasures and...

As I look outside into the cold gray sky, I remind myself that it is probably sunny and 80 degress somewhere in the world. With the advent of modern flight, I could possibly be in that sunny warm place within 24 hours if I'm willing to pay enough money...

As I was contemplating de treasuring various of my computer books last night, I began to get nostalgic, and I suffered a bit of panic. What if what I wanted was NOT available on the internet? So, I went look. A very long time ago, I compiled a set...

What do these books have in common? CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae, Numerical Recipes in C, Seminumerical Algorithms, Applied Cryptography, The Twofish Encryption Algorithm For starters, they are all published earlier than 1999, mostly...

I've been bumping around the computer industry for about 20 years now. I've worked with everything from a Commodore PET, to a PDP 10, VAXen, Sequent, PCs, and lots of other little boxen in between. I've worked on all operating systems big and small, including...

I live in a two story rambler sort of house. I have MSN Broadband at home, and I use a LinkSys wireless router thingy to allow me to get on the internet from anywhere in the house, from 3 or 4 different computers. In the beginning, I had the broadband...

So, I'm what they call a dev manager. It's the most interesting and powerful job in all of Microsoft. I fly air cover for the men and women who are on the ground grinding out the code that makes this company great, and makes the world go round. Programmers...