The Empty Soda Can

You may have noticed that I’ve removed the overtly spiritual posts from my blog. This is intentional. From here on out, I’ve decided to make my own “Small Plates,” as it were—virtual though they may be. These “Small Plates” are to be known as The Gospel According to Jeffrey, and are available to subscribers at bookofjeffrey.blogspot.com . If you’re interested in reading them, just let me know in the comments and I’ll send you an invite. Until then, L8Rs!

Douglas Adams wrote: If one coincidence can occur… then another coincidence can occur. And if one coincidence happens to occur just after another coincidence, then that is just a coincidence. ( The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , 172). As if to prove his point, I just randomly flipped through the pages of the just-quoted book, hoping to find the right page so that I could properly cite it. My random flip stopped on page 172 exactly, where my eyes immediately fell upon the word “coincidence” about two thirds down the page. Is this too a coincidence? Regardless, the reason I got to thinking about this is because about ten minutes ago, as I was reading Berke Breathed’s Bloom County Babylon , I came across this panel in a comic from 1985: Given current events, I must ask again: is this just another coincidence? I can only assume so, since it was probably also just a coincidence that some guy tried to sell Dave a screenplay about a late-night talk-show host that was sleeping ar...

For the last two days, I’ve been bombarded with RSS feeds about a recent study from the NPD Group. According to the NPD Group’s report (and about a thousand blogs regurgitating the information), “Nearly 85 Percent of All Apple Households Also Own a Windows PC.” While this could certainly be possible, nobody seems to have seen the original report; they’ve just seen NPD’s resulting press release . it really makes me wonder how well the release reflects reality. Let’s take my household, for example: I don’t think myself a Mac bigot, but at present, all of our functional computers happen to be Macs. Specifically, we currently own 11 computers: 10 Apple Macintoshes (ages 2-18), plus one partially assembled “white box” (read: generic) PC. The “white box” is one of my eternal projects and just sits in the closet; it doesn’t even have a motherboard or a hard drive at the moment, let alone an operating system. So that leaves us with the ten Macs. Here’s the OS breakdown, in numbers of instal...

I guess it’s probably just as well that I neglected to post this yesterday, since my customer support manifesto was long enough as it was. However, the subject of iTunes reminded me of a rather humorous scenario I ran into, a while back. Perhaps two, maybe three years ago, I received my weekly e-mail from iTunes informing me of some of the new releases to hit the store that week. One of the new items was a five-track compilation of some of Paula Abdul’s greatest hits. Curious, I clicked the link to see which five they considered to be her “greatest.” What I didn’t expect was the hilarity of the comments. While a few people that rated the compilation had some decent things to say—whether positive or negative—the great majority were along the lines of, “Paula Abdul is such a loser. She thinks that just because she’s a judge on American Idol , all she has to do is record her own material and she’ll become a pop star, too!” I could not stop laughing—as evidenced by the fact that even years...

A few months ago, I was horrified to discover that the RAID I use to store our family’s iLife—photos, movies, web sites, and music—had suffered severe header corruption. For those of you that don’t know what this means, the header is sort of like the index to the drive. Imagine a 10,000-page reference book that you use every single day. This book includes a 500-page index, so you can easily find what you need. Then one day, you notice that some of the page numbers are suddenly wrong: about 10% of the time, if you look up term A, it gives you the page number for term L, or Z, or W. That’s a pretty good description of header corruption, except that at least with a book, you can flip through until you find the right page. Without an accurate disk header, the computer can’t find the right data at all . Now, all this shouldn’t be so bad, since I’m extremely conscientious about backing things up. Unfortunately, the backup software I was using at the time was so good that it dutifully backed ...

Once again, I love today’s  Urban Dictionary  term (@2008 Aaron Peckham) and just  had  to share: adorkable Both dorky and adorable. A higher state of being all dorks strive toward. That dork is so adorkable I could just hug him till I die.