Ten years ago, Korey Stringer died at the Minnesota Vikings training camp in Mankato, MN. This year, the team is marking the practice field with (now retired) #77 in his honour.
August 2, 2011
August 1, 2011
Vocabulary test
Another one of those “test yourself” websites: Test Your Vocabulary. I did fine on most of the test, but a few of the words in the right column are ones I’ve never encountered:
H/T to James M. Bryant for the link.
Update: On the same list, John Lennard points out this possibly cautionary note: “It is interesting, but without knowing how they’re performing their calculations I’m kinda suspicious. [. . .] Shakespeare’s total recorded active vocabulary (all words used in all his printed works) is 29,066.”
QotD: Redefining guilt
I’m aware that Obama, Napolitano, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a host of organized collectivists have been working hard for a long time to defame and smear everything and everybody that once made this nation great. They want as many of its people as possible to believe that knowing the Constitution, or calling upon its provisions at need, is as good as a criminal act. I have been concerned that in television dramas from CSI, through NCIS, to Castle, whenever the accused demands to see a lawyer, it’s considered a confession of guilt.
L. Neil Smith, “Madison’s Ghost”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-07-31
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Since 1992, the Vikings have made AARP stand for “Always Available to Retire in Purple”
I think it’s safe to say that Jim Souhan has missed football during the lockout. Here he is, discussing the Vikings’ long-term habit of bringing in older quarterbacks:
Our local football franchise has become the Mystic Lake Casino of NFL quarterbacks, bringing you the biggest names of the ’80s and ’90s today.
While other franchises roll the dice on unproven talent, the Vikings would rather comfort you with the football equivalents of Stevie Nicks and Foreigner.
[. . .]
Since Denny Green wrongly benched promising young Rich Gannon in the middle of the 1992 season in favor of the always regrettable Sean Salisbury, the Vikings have made AARP stand for “Always Available to Retire in Purple.”
[. . .]
Randall Cunningham won the Player of the Year that season, taking the Vikings to the NFC title game. That’s when he should have retired, again.
In ’99, Cunningham quickly lost his job to Jeff George, who coined the term “Slappy” for backstabbing backups, rallied the Vikings to the playoffs, and then was banished by Green.
In 2000, For the second time since Gannon’s benching, the Vikings gave the starting job to one of their own, Daunte Culpepper, who took them to the NFC title game and might have won it if not for the New York Giants stealing the Vikings’ plays and asking nicely that Wasswa Serwanga not cover their receivers.
[. . .]
Brad Johnson bridged the gap to another Vikings draftee, Tarvaris Jackson, who, understanding the Vikings’ role as a nursing home for decrepit quarterbacks, helped find playing time for Kelly Holcombe, Brooks Bollinger, Gus Frerotte (again!), and finally Lord Favre, King Of The Undead.
Since Brett Favre started his first game, Green Bay has used three starting quarterbacks (including Matt Flynn’s cameo). The Vikings have used 16, with the likes of Johnson and Frerotte serving multiple tours.
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A quick plug for a useful EFF plug-in for Firefox
I’ve mentioned this before, but I was just reminded about it as I started using the new laptop with its new install of Firefox:
This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:
- Google Search
- Wikipedia
- Twitter and Identi.ca
- EFF and Tor
- Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines and lots more!
Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.
As always, even if you’re at an HTTPS page, remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and an unbroken lock icon in the bottom-right corner, the page is not completely encrypted and you may still be vulnerable to various forms of eavesdropping or hacking (in many cases, HTTPS Everywhere can’t prevent this because sites incorporate insecure third-party content).
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Back to the drawing board
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer utility to move 100Gb of files and settings from my old laptop to the new one, but between technical glitches and thunderstorms, it still hasn’t completely worked. When the initial estimate ballooned up from a few hours to nearly two days, I started to suspect things were not going to go according to the script . . .
Today’s plan is to do it in two stages: back up the old machine’s files to the NAS, then install the files from the NAS to the new laptop.
