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It lurks, just at the border of seen and unseen.

Words of wisdom which I mentally revisit from time to time:

Freddy, as a younger man, I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn’t very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful. I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent. I knew my limitations. We all have our limitations, Freddy. Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style were commodities that people desired. Freddy, what I am saying is: know your limitations. You are a moron.

I have a not-superfancy 21″ iMac at home. It’s got an old Dell 24″ DVI display attached with a Thunderbolt adapter. I’m generally a big fan of multiple displays on any computer I’m using, and this works out well when I want it, especially if I’m doing something with VMware Fusion that could use a full extra screen. But here’s the thing: In this particular setting, I don’t need or want the external display all the time. It’s connected via VGA to an old Mac mini that we occasionally use, which complicates things a bit more because of input switching. The display is from something like 2007, so it does nothing automatically.

Say you need to md5sum 46 files, all ending in “.foo” in a single directory. You might use your standard md5sum *.foo > md5sum.txt command to checksum them all in one process. Get coffee, it’s done, move on.

“I wanna watch the man paint the girl!”

This is what Simon, age two years and eight months, is saying as he sits in my lap. He means that he wants to watch this for the third fourth time: