Archive for the 'Wisdom' Category

Every editor has its use. Except for pico.

Published
by
Benjy
on Friday May 10, 2002
in Philosophy, Programming, UNIX and Wisdom
. Closed

This UNIX story reminded me so much of The Tao of Computer Programming that I even went and checked multiple versions of the tao to see if it had been added to one of them.

But nope, the story in question doesn't appear to be part of the tao at all. Though it really should be.

It’s isn’t possesssive

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday August 7, 2001
in Confused, Stupidity and Wisdom
. Closed

Oh, can I tell you how foolish I feel? I just realized tonight that for the last several weeks I've been using "it's" as a possessive form. Thankfully, before that, I was properly using "its" as possessive. I don't have a clue what changed in my head, other than having four wisdom teeth removed... But I don't think I'm quite ready to believe that my wisdom teeth held my knowledge of how to use "its" properly.

But this page set me straight. But that page linked to this article, which made me feel a little better by reminding me just how fluid english can be. It made me feel a little better, but not much.

I'll fix all the mistakes later. It's kind of hard to do a global search and replace to fix the problem, because while regular expressions kick ass, they can't distinguish between an "it's" in a possessive context and an "it's" in a contracted context. Which means I'm going to have to get sentient on my database's ass.

Lessons Learned At 7 am

Published
by
Benjy
on Monday April 9, 2001
in Berkeley: City, Berkeley: School, Marketing, Sleep, Vocation and Wisdom
. 2 Comments

I woke up at 7 today for the first time in a long time, in order to put up advertising for our newly open job. And this morning as I was doing my task, there were a lot of words of wisdom which occured to me.

  • If you have to be at Evans by 7 am, don't go to sleep at 4 am and expect to be up at 6:45 and be happy about it. I got up on time, but I am so not happy about it.
  • Taping flyers to the back of chairs is a task which can be broken into several important, time saving steps. Don't try to put tape on each flyer, and then put a flyer on the chair, in one step. There are several good alternatives:
    • The best option is to pre-tape all of your flyers with an easilly seperable tape, which we were too stupid to figure out last night, but will most certainly be doing for Thursday. Alternatively, pre-tape before you make a run down the aisles.
    • The next best option is to put tape on the target chairs in one pass, and in a second pass put the flyers on the tape.
  • If you plan to tape your flyers up, don't put the most important word of your flyer ("money") where it'll be covered up by your tape. Design around your distribution method.
  • If you want to put flyers up in Pimentel, you should probably get there before 7:30, lest the booth operator tell you not to put up flyers there, leaving you with no real choice but to comply.
  • Don't try to compete with Student Government elections, because there's no way you can out-flyer them.
  • And most importantly, Anne's Kitchen at Dwight and Telegraph is a really great place to have breakfast.