Year: 2002

Enterprise: Carbon Creek

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I watched the Enterprise episode “Carbon Creek” over the weekend. I’m quite a fan of Enterprise, and I find that many of the episodes are just as good as TNG from years back.

In this episode, T’Pol tells the story of how Vulcans made First Contact with humans in Pennsylvania back in the ’50s. Spoilers follow.

There wasn’t much plot in the episode, and it was more of a character study (but, that’s ok, as sometimes that can turn out well). T’Pol tells of how a Vulcan ship crash-lands on Earth and, with little hope of rescue, the Vulcans start living among humans.

After several weeks of human life, they hear that their distress call was received after all, and that a Vulcan ship will pick them up. At this point, one of the Earth-living Vulcans mentions to his captain (T’Mir) that he would like to stay on Earth.

Cut to the rescue-ship landing scene, and the captain of that ship asks why only two Vulcans are at the landing point. T’Mir explains that two of her comrades died in the crash and that their bodies were cremated (really, only one body was cremated). So, she was covering for the Vulcan that wanted to stay behind — but she lied. And, Vulcans can’t lie, right? Bleh.

Voting Suggestions?

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Tuesday is voting day. And, being relatively new to the area, I haven’t yet made up my mind about who I’m going to vote for. So, if you feel strongly about a particular candidiate, please add a comment below. Even a one-line comment along the lines of “Please vote for candidate xx because he feels yy about issue zz” would be fine.

I’ve already found a few voters’s guides, and those do help a bit:

One issue that interests me is each candidate’s stance on the War on Drugs. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much in that regard.

According the Dallas Morning News’ “how to read your voter card”, I believe I’m in Congressional District 32, State Senate District 16, State House District 108, Justice of the Peace / Constable District 3, School District DA02, and City District DA13 (if any of that helps).

I’m also in precinct number 1210, so I’ll have to find out where the polling place is for that. Oh, here we go — Election Day Locations.

“28 hour Days”

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From the recent Slashdot story on work attire is this post about 28-hour days:

On one of my first big projects, we ended up working so much that our “days” extended to about 28 hours. We would work for 20 hours or so, sleep 6, waste an hour or two getting to and from work and eating, showering, etc. As a result, our hours rotated and we had to distinguish between “yesterday” and “virtual yesterday.” […]

Yikes, that would just about kill me. But, it does bring a whole new meaning to the term “death march” ;).

Workrave Typing-break Reminder

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

Workrave is a free (GPL) app for Linux and Windows that reminds you to take typing breaks (with configurable timing, of course).

I found out about it from the Gnome-announce mailing list, of all places. Obviously, their focus was on the Gnome/Linux version, though I’ve used just the Windows version so far. Unsurprisingly, because the Windows version is based on the GTK toolkit, it’s still very… Linux-looking ;).

If you care about preventing RSI, it couldn’t hurt to give Workrave a try. By default, it comes configured to suggest a 30 second “micro-pause” break every 3 minutes, and a 10 minute rest break every 45 minutes (those numbers are from memory, but I think those are about right).

I’m not expert on typing-injury prevention, but that seemed awfully frequent to me (?). If anyone can speak to what kind of numbers are suggested in the scientific community, let me know (for all I know, perhaps that’s how Workrave derived its defaults, but I’m not sure). In the meantime, I’ve configured to the micro-break interval for 10 minutes, which seems a bit less intrusive.