closest book meme

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The following comes the book that, I think, was closest to me at the time, although it was hard to tell for sure since there tend to be books strewn around my apartment:

"Taking Burgundy and Provence peaceably by marriage, he proceeded to make Italy the fulcrum of his new empire."

The quote comes from
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment.

well, that went by fast

I arrived in Mexico City, to live, four years ago to the day. These four years have been a lot better than the preceding four were, and, the occasional grumble notwithstanding, I would be lying if I said that this place hasn't treated me pretty well overall.

'sif you didn't already know

openSUSE 11.0 is out today.

virtual kidnapping

I just received a phone call. Here's a transcript, translated into English:

"Dad?"

"Who is this?" [I don't have any children, so I assumed it was just another wrong number. I get lots of those.]

"Dad? [crying] Two men kidnapped me. [crying] Dad?"

Realizing that it was a scam, I hung up.

Fake calls like these are common in Mexico, although I'd never received one until today. My wife's uncle received one a few months ago; unfortunately he was taken in.

Quite chilling, even though nothing happened—to me. I hope the people with the adjacent phone numbers weren't duped.

That history meme

I've run that command line showing my most frequently used commands a few times. Maybe I've held off from posting because the results would be embarrassing. I also noticed that its results differ wildly, because only when you close a shell is its history saved.

One command remains constant, though:

mw@quill:~> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -n 1
297 ls

Update: Benjaman Weber reminds me that you can make your history be saved more often by setting

PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

.

Packaging Day ][

I've neglected to mention it here until now, but here it is: the second openSUSE Packaging Day is today. Tomorrow too, because it's really a pair of packaging days, not just one.

So if you're interested in having your favorite program available for openSUSE, please do join in!

flashblock

Why I waited so long to install flashblock I may never know. But I'm glad I finally did.