Odd Lots
- I didn’t know this until the other day: The instrumental riff in ELP’s “Touch and Go” is not ultimately from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Variations on Greensleeves.” It’s a far older folk melody called “Lovely Joan,” and the song is about a girl who, when asked by some aristocratic lout to hand over her virginity in exchange for a ring and a roll in the hay, keeps her virginity and steals his horse instead. Much better deal.
- Here’s a tool to see if your email was on one of the 400,000 accounts recently leaked from Yahoo.
- One of the big downsides of the ASUS Transformer Prime is that the micro SD card pops out of its slot very easily. I found mine on the cushion of my reading chair the other day, and have no least clue how I managed that, apart from sitting there and looking at some weather maps. I’m evidently not the only one with this problem.
- I haven’t been over to The Consumerist in some time, but when I tried to go there the other day, Google marked it as an attack site. There’s not much to go by in Google’s details page, but it looks like an ad vector. This is why I use AdBlock Plus. (I went there from Linux and nothing bad happened.) UPDATE: They fixed the problem. Lesson: Nobody’s immune. Use AdBlock Plus.
- Be sure to watch for auroras tonight, as far south as (I hope!) Colorado. Look east just before dawn and you’ll catch Jupiter, Venus, and maybe the crescent Moon.
- A ride-em Iron Trilobyte! Yee-hah!
- From the Utterly Obscure But Brilliant Music Department: Hunt down “The Last Farewell” by the New Christy Minstrels, from their ambum Ramblin’ (1964.) Bone-chilling harmony on the ancient melody “O Waly, Waly.”
- From the Found Quotes Department: “It is all but impossible to sit quietly by while someone is throwing salad plates.” –James Thurber
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · hardware · humor · music
"
“July 12, 2012
Dear DevZone User,
NVIDIA suspended operations today of the NVIDIA Developer Zone website. We did this in response to attacks on the site by unauthorized third parties who may have gained access to hashed passwords. ”
Against the system with its own GPUs?
http://hackaday.com/tag/ighashgpu/
Perhaps my favorite Thurber quote (and there are a lot of good ones):
“Don’t get it right, get it written.”
Here is the NCM song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnhN7iv4XY0
I used to have a hard time picking hymns for sing-ability at church. I’m not that good a music reader. Youtube invariably solves my problem. The internets are pretty cool.
We did get some aurora the night of July 16 here in MN, but it was pretty feeble. According to NOAA’s website, it looks like it wasn’t visible as far south as CO, either.
This winter was pretty poor for aurora, too. Better luck next time.
If I try to call up a specific tag (http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?tag=astronomy for example) the page that is returned states the following:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function pp_breadcrubs() in /home/junkbox/public_html/contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/themes/primepress/tag.php on line 5
I’m using Firefox 14.0.1 on 64-bit Windows 7 Home
Confirmed with Chrome 20.0.1132.57 on Windows 7 Pro. Might be a typo in the PHP file.
Yes. This started happening the last time I upgraded the PrimePress theme. Still not sure what’s up.