After 10 Years, Knoppix Still Kills Dell + M$

Well, to be fair, I was using a 10 year old reinstall CD to get Win XP up and running. Knoppix has gotten me out of tight spots before - when I desperately needed to look something up online and Windows just couldn't hack it.

But, here's the kicker - M$ cannot get me internet access via Ethernet on a platform (D600) that swears by M$ and Knoppix can. Sure, the page renditions are not very pretty, but WTH? You can see why M$ and Dell are both going nowhere..

What's Important to Know About Self-Control

aka Willpower :

• It's a mind-body response, not a virtue
• Is a limited resource - like muscle strength - use a lot of it at work during the day and you know why you need a shot or a smoke or a quickie when you get home
• Temptation and stress hijack the brain's systems of self-control, but the brain can be trained to withstand higher levels without giving in
• Guilt and shame over your setbacks lead to giving in again, but self-forgiveness and self-compassion boost self-control
• Giving up control is sometimes the only way to gain self-control
• Willpower failures are contagious - you can catch the desire to overspend or overeat from your friends - but you can also catch self-control from the right role-models

Don't believe me? Then read "The Willpower Instinct" by Kenny McGonigal (interesting combination of Scotch-Irish and Prussian there)

Never Guess About Your Finished PCB Again

Thanks to this maestro (Jerome really impressed me with huge abstraction and adaptation skills even in the stressful setting of a MMO development; he quickly became someone you can rely on, which is very rare for a first position!) you can (if you're unlucky enough to be on Windows V or higher, actually 7 isn't that hot a hell) drag your gerber file onto GBRV and see what it's going to look like - in 3D.

For the record, this is written in Lua.

Raspberry Pi Consultant Takes on ADT for Home Security

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Hc0JWI4I0

So You Want to Be an Analog Designer

Where can you learn this stuff without wasting your time in a university? Note that, at a university, you usually get free access to Cadence. The EE world has not (unfortunately) benefited from open-source the way software has.

Dr. B. Razavi's slides (No guarantee they'll still be there). BTW, Behzad has a nice PPT on his site about what life is like as a professor - I highly recommend it.
Hans (late) Camenzind's book : Designing Analog Chips (inventor of the 555)
Dr. Phillip Allen's course slides (see, he's nice, not like Dr. Leach, who pulled his stuff off)
Dr. Phil Allen's short-course slides (NOTE, in general, I feel the slides are poor-quality from the point of view of presentation, but they're good for documentation - so, my all beans, go through them once then know where to look in future when you want some info. Don't expect to learn from them them easily, the way you can from Behzad. Sorry, Philly, I owe you a cheese bake)
Satish Kashyap's ripoff site - wonder how long this guy can run this. Never mind putting sir (lowercase) at the end of each prof's name to mollify.
Berkeley's EE 240 Adv Analog IC's course lectures. Let me know if they're any good.

Perl Resources - Potential Keepers

http://altreus.blogspot.com - the guy who QC'd Peteris Krumins' one-liners book.

Perl is "There's more than one way to do it" and "Make hard things easy without making easy things hard."

What are one-liners : "At your fingertips when you need it"

Finding Out What Hard Work Really Is

From Vile's autob :

People have often asked me what I did with all the money that came into my possession. A little impromptu party we gave offers a good example of how the cash melted away. We often entertained on a lavish scale.

(In that case, the 2 day long party blew up about $25k in the roaring twenties)

[ But, considering the meticulous planning that went into some of his schemes - you really wonder why he failed with the hotel business. At one point, Vile decided to put his savings into a legitimate business (to his wife's delight). ]

Perhaps I should have known then that my hotel venture was jinxed. I did change the name again, this time to the Hotel Martinique. One of my early projects was a landscaped roof garden. I had big plans, but perhaps I didn't know enough about the hotel business.

The hoodlums often staged parties and became noisy. The permanent guests, who paid their bills on time, eyed them distastefully and began to move out. As these people vacated rooms, more criminals moved in; thugs of various descriptions, safe-crackers, and robbers. Some I knew by sight and many I did not know at all.

Before I realized what was happening the underworld was regarding the Martinique as a hide-out. I soon learned I was expected to cover up for criminals whose only relation to me was that we had both operated outside the law.

( He even got victimized by simple bad-cheques. I can't help feeling for the man. But, considering his genius - as he puts it - his grasp of foreign affairs, domestic troubles and human nature - why couldn't he succeed at something so relatively simple? Here's my answer - which I first heard in "The Science of Wealth" - there is no task from which people shirk as much as sustained purposeful thought. You have to think things through in your mind. A thought - literally any thought - becomes an animal in your mind - it lives in a bunch of neurons and tries to gain your attention. But, in the course of your life, you have trained your mind with all the thoughts you have entertained thus far - so, this new thought - legitimate or otherwise, will have severe competition - unless it is a matter of life and death. So, you can see how it was with Vile - there was no hope from the beginning since his mind would tire easily from honest labour. Pity. The second or third time a man tries to go straight and fails. Atleast he lived to be a 100)

A Vile Understanding of Human Nature

Vile was acknowledged as a master study of human nature - he could size almost anyone up in a few minutes :

The same group was on hand, going through the same motions. McHenry, like Hotchkiss, was very much impressed. But there was a difference between the two men, Hotchkiss frankly admitted he didn't know his way around gaming circles. But McHenry was the type that would today be called a "wise guy." He looked upon everything with a knowing eye.

It Don't Make Sense Mr. Vile

How do you spend $1000 in a single evening? Here he only mentions half that figure, but at other places in the book, he does mention a k.

I RETURNED TO MY FAMILY IN CHICAGO. I HAD ACCUMULATED SOME money, but I got rid of it even faster than I got hold of it. When I spent an evening at one of the gay spots, it was not unusual for me to spend $500. This was in the days when the average worker considered $500 fairly good pay for six months' work.

Another Name for Jail

You have to love Vile's style. One wonders, is it peer pressure, or are Jews raised to be perfectionists? :

For two months I carpeted Chicago with deeds to lots in the
Elysium Development Company. I even gave lots to two detectives
who later rose to prominence in the police department. Both men paid
the recording fee before they discovered that the land was practically
valueless. Both were furious and if there had been anything they
could have done about it, I would have found free lodging promptly.
But I had not taken money from them: they had not been compelled
to have the lots recorded. So far as the law was concerned, I was clean.
__

According to the Tribune, he told one judge: "The dastardly fabrications of the metropolitan newspapers, the reprehensible conduct of journalists to surround me with a nimbus — er — a numbus of guilt, is astonishing." Yet in his "Autobiography of a Master Swindler," he acknowledged his chosen profession, even as he bemoaned its decline. "There are no good confidence men anymore," he wrote, "because they do not have the necessary knowledge of foreign affairs, domestic problems, and human nature."

Weil was, in his own way, civic-minded. In 1928, doing time in the Leavenworth, Kan., federal prison, he sent letters to Chicagoans appealing for funds so fellow inmates might properly celebrate Passover. He signed the letter: "Joseph Weil, president Jewish congregation."