Feb 29 - Happy Birthday to Tim Powers

• February 29th is the birthday of Tim Powers, brilliant author and close friend of Philip K. Dick. I recommend pretty much all of his work, but Last Call has been particularly influential in my life.
  

Weightlifting and chess

• I originally got the idea from chessboxing.
  The problem that Scott and I were facing is that the time between sets were getting a little boring. That is to say, each of us had a bit of downtime while the other was doing his set, and reading the aging bodybuilding magazines weren't cutting it anymore. And both of us hate shouted encouragement. ("Come on! One more! You can do it!" ugh.)
  So I bought myself a magnetic chess set. The pieces stick to the board pretty securely, and it is not easy to dislodge them. Now, while one of us is doing his set, the other is looking the board over and perhaps making his move.
  This eliminates boredom, and I am engaged enough that I don't feel like ending the session early. And it gives me something to focus on and exercise my brain, instead of getting irritated by the loud idiots at the gym that scream and throw down their weights loudly.
  So there you have it. I doubt that this would be useful or fun for many others, but perhaps this is my one minor contribution to weightlifting.
  

CT Castle - Dave and crew

CT Castle - Dave and crew
Originally uploaded by Alhazred
Gavin's head just poking out of the opening to a storage room that had been excavated a little while before.

edit 12/31/2013: I think that this was in December 1987 or thereabouts.

Windows slow: spoolsv.exe high CPU

• I came across this problem at work today. On one computer spoolsv.exe would intermittently eat up CPU time and thus slow everything down. These two articles in combination seemed to resolve the issue: first on tim's journal page and a Computing.Net one.
  

CT Castle - cool guy

CT Castle - cool guy
Originally uploaded by Alhazred

CT Castle - excavated room

CT Castle - excavated room
Originally uploaded by Alhazred

CT Castle excavation - view of mountain

CT Castle excavation - view of mountain
Originally uploaded by Alhazred

A couple of recommendations

• If you need to mail order any of the excellent South African punk or industrial CDs that are only available in that country, and that would be pretty much all of them, I highly recommend Rhythm Online. My most recent purchase from them was the recent Van Coke Cartel album. It cost only R100 (divide by around 7 for USD amount) plus postage, and got to me in around a week. Excellent!
• If you never get around to writing postal letters anymore because either writing or printign the letter out, then addressing an envelope and having to find a stamp is too much hassle, I highly recommend Postful. You can send the letter to them as an email, ad they will do the rest of the mailing process. And they're very reasonably priced.