HP 35s

I've been wanting another RPN calculator to use at work so after months of ignoring the HP35s that was sitting in my Amazon wish list, I finally ponied up and bought one.

It arrived today and boy is it disappointing. I don't know if it's supposed to harken back to HP's glory days but its RPN mode is pretty hobbled. The stack is only 4 levels deep(!) and the top and bottom positions clone when the stack is shifted up and down. Very annoying and quite different from the HP that I bought about 15 years ago (and still use at home).

Old issues of Wired

Fuck. A bad day.

One positive thing: I drew up a list of old issues of Wired that I’d like to have because they featured articles by Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson. Then, I ransacked the library of back issues that someone has discarded here at the office. I found most of the isses I was looking for. The articles themselves I’ve mostly already read on-line but this way I get the photos and layout.

David Foster Wallace article on talk radio

Brilliant.

Desk

The desk I’m stitting at is a featureless white rectangle with rounded corners. It supports a pair of giant flat-panel monitors, taller than they are wide and with edges flush, so the pair looks like a giant, luminous book, opened before me. The rest of the surface looks like a battle ground between the Rectangles and the Cylinders. The Rectangles have piles of paper, a notebook, the monitors, a clipboard and no fewer than three sizes of sticky paper pads. The Cylinders count among their members: a cup, a tin of tea leaves, a medicine bottle (with one tiny cyindrical pill inside), a can of compressed air and a handful of pens. I seem to be in league with the Rectangles. Every day I produce more of them and drain the contents of the Cylinders.