I have been posting on Quora since April of 2014, earning top writer status in 2017 and 2018 and running up, as of this writing, 5.6 million views by Quora readers. While many of my posts are of limited interest, I'm inordinately proud of some of them. With this post I will begin retrieving some of my particular favorites from Quora and reposting them here on my blog. There is some fun history behind this particular post. Back when I was a grad student at CMU back in the 1980s I was friendly with Jeff Schrager, a fellow grad student at the time, and he posted a hilarious item in, as I recall, rec.humor.funny, an early netnews group. The item was titled "How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb" and I admired it so much that I tracked it down and put it up on this blog some years ago (https://nygeek-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-many-ai-people-does-it-take-to.html). Several years ago someone posted the question, "What are common stages that PhD studen...
A week or two ago I took the plunge and ordered a pair of Intel NUC systems. Here's what happened next as I worked to build a pair of Ubuntu servers out of the hardware: I ordered the components for two Linux servers from Amazon: Intel NUC D54250WYK [$364.99 each] Crucial M500 240 GB mSATA [$119.99 each] Crucial 16GB Kit [$134.99 each] Cables Unlimited 6-Foot Mickey Mouse Power Cord [$5.99 each] for a total of $625.96 per machine. Because I have a structured wiring system in my apartment I didn't bother with the wifi card. ... Assembly was fast, taking ten or fifteen minutes to open the bottom cover, snap in the RAM and the SSD, and button the machine up again. Getting Ubuntu installed was rather more work (on an iMac): Download the Ubuntu image from the Ubuntu site. Prepare a bootable USB with the server image (used diskutil to learn that my USB stick was on /dev/disk4): hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ubuntu-14.04-server-amd64.img ubuntu-14.04-server-amd64.iso diskutil un...
Increasingly the various businesses that I pay monthly (rent, garage, credit cards, phone bill, newspaper bill, and utility bill) are only notifying me that I have a payment due by email or worse, not notifying me at all. Combined with a shrinking window between when the bill is issued and when late charges start to accrue, there is increasing pressure on me to track my bills. In the past I would accumulate unpaid bills on a designated spot on my desk at home. The presence of paper bills there told me that I had bills to pay. When a paycheck rendered me sufficiently liquid to write checks, I would pay them. As the transition to email notification and non-notification has progressed, many of these bill issuers have offered to help me out with this scheduling problem. All I had to do was give them the ability to directly take money from my bank account in whatever amount they desired and at whatever time they liked. You’re kidding, right? Not all of these...
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