Zhanga: December 23, 2003

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Tuesday, December 23, 2003 (0 comments)

I just read this article about how "master" and "slave" are "unacceptable and offensive" when used in the context of computer equipment. If you know anything about computer innards, you know that IDE hard drives have been labeled as master and slave for about 20 years now. I don't happen to find this label very offensive, anyways. And the master/slave designation doesn't really mean anything. The master drive does not "control" the slave one. The only important differences that come to my mind include the drive ID (like in BIOS setup) and the spin-up order (master spins up as soon as computer is powered on; slave waits a few seconds to reduce stress on the power supply). How unthinkable and offensive it is to have a "master" drive start spinning 5-15 seconds before the "slave" drive.

Courtesy of Ronjon and http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ2859:

Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the "Any" key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859)
The term "any key" does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.

Maybe one major idiot asked about this, but why is this a Frequently Asked Question? America is dumber than I thought. By the way, at least one company did make keyboards with an "any" key. They did it because of this same reason: people were looking for the any key. How ridiculous.

10:50PM

Today was writing class day. We went over the essays we wrote earlier. Charles wrote about learning to tie shoelaces. The teacher kept talking about one of his concluding sentences that began "The pros heavily outweigh the cons..." The teacher kept saying "the pros HEEAAVILLY outweigh the cons?" with his funny Chinese accent. He must have said it over twenty times. I mean, a lot of times. It was hilarious. Then we got to my essay and I stopped laughing.

I rode with Charles coming back from that guy's house. His tire happened to be flat. We took an hour or so to change his tire. The jack was supposed to go under the axle, of all places. The car started moving and almost fell off of the jack two or three times. We had to push it back in place. Charles told me to jack it off instead of jack it up... Ok and the dumb nuts were on so tightly. The dumb wrench was 10 inches long which is definitely not enough. We had to get a guy with a pipe 3-4 feet long to put over that dumb thing, and he had to put basically his entire body weight on the end of that to budge those nuts.

If Eva's awesome Xanga sound won't work for you, you can get it here (MP3, 116KB). For those of you who are like "why would you do such a thing?!?" well, she asked for it. She told me to download Come on Over for her, and I thought she just wanted me to download it so she could download it off of me so she didn't have to fool with Kazaa and half-done downloads because she has dialup. Wow that was a massive run-on. Well, then she told me she wanted the link to put in her Xanga, and I told her no, and she did it anyways. So then the next day I told her to get rid of the link (of course it was a dead link by then) and she said no again. So uh, why leave a dead link on her Xanga? I've gotta fill it up with something, right? haha Oh and I'd like to give credit to Charles for giving me some ideas of what to put in the sound =)

Zhanga: December 23, 2003

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