Group effort

Working together as team with no “I” in sight these four blurbs make up a single post. Let us applaud their selflessness.

• I received an e-mail today congratulating Ascent Stage on being a rare Googlewhack, a search result wherein two terms exist only on that page. My whackedness? Jabberwockys and biosphere. Not jabberwocky singular, mind you; that returns lots of results. But the plural plus biopshere is all mine, baby.
• Coming home from Sunday dinner at my sister’s last night I spotted a Macintosh G4 sitting, crying really, in the middle of our alley. As my wife recounted to me later — I blacked out a bit in excitement — I swerved into our garage nailing a few lawn chairs and boxes, jumped out of the car without shutting the engine off, and neglected the children in their seats to save the lonely tower. It has no video output and something in it shakes around, but everything is where it should be: HD, memory, chip, etc. It is almost certainly hot as it has Property Control bar code on it, but if I found it in the alley it’s mine right? I mean, this is the law of the street. The alleydwellers who pilfer our trash are part of our ecosystem. We don’t call them thieves. How do I get this thing repaired without getting thrown in jail?
• As I have a Marco Polo-esque (perhaps Alexander-esque?) series of travels coming up I have ripped a bunch of DVD’s to my laptop hard drive. Really this was a series of tests on the Mac and PC to see what’s the best way to do it en masse. The short answer is that it is a !@*&load harder to do than MP3’s. Sony, for instance, renowned for being reasonable in their anti-copying efforts, load their DVD’s up with blank dummy cells that throw most rippers for a loop. This is surmountable, but only after hours of corrupt ripping and a healthy dose of cussing.
• I’ve begun blogging internally inside IBM. Like I need another timesuck, but hey I gotta tell some people the stuff I can’t tell the loyal readers of Ascent Stage (yet)!