Buying Gasoline in Fairmont

Not that most folks will likely ever visit Fairmont, but for those who might this could be of some interest.

( Gasoline )

Why 2k?

I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS at home for a couple years now and a few days ago when I fired up the Win2K machine for something (which the Linux machine can now do) I looked at the log that the UPS monitor keeps. I'd used the Windows machine in 2002, but only once or twice in 2003 and 2004. If I hadn't had trouble with the CPU fan on the Linux machine, it would have been the first time in 2005 I'd started the Windows machine.

I've also been pondering a Linux distribution that might not be the one I'm currently running (Mandrake) but I'd like to test things on a real full install first - without taking down my primary machine. The only machine I have that would be considered reasonably new enough to test most modern full featured Linux distributions is the Windows machine. I've been trying to think what reason I could have to keep Windows on it, since a re-install of Windows would be an unwelcome task. The UPS monitor logs show that I certainly don't need Windows regularly. The last thing I needed it for was to make mp3 files and Linux can do that. About the only thing I can think of might be playing games but I don't play games. And the only game I do have is on a CD with a Mac version, so if the bug did bite I could play that on the iMac.

I know this. I've thought it over. And yet I keep having this nagging feeling that I'm overlooking something, and it might even be important. But if it was, wouldn't I have used Windows (at home) more than twice a year?

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Addendum: jmaynard pointed out that I could swap hard drives and not really lose the Windows install. It would be a bit awkward to put back, but not too big a deal. And we do have a couple "small" 20 G drives that would do for what I want. That seems to be the way to go.

Properly Linking to New York Times Articles

Sometimes one runs across a link to a New York Times article and upon clicking the link winds up not at the article but at the wretched registration page. While a person could fill in the registration page, yet again, it's a tiresome bother. Most times some newspaper site wants registration I simply give up and figure anything important will show up somewhere else with less hassle.

There is a way around this, and it isn't bugmenot.com which seems not to work very often. There is the New York Times Link Generator. If you have registered and are looking at an article you'd like to link to, feed the URL of the article to the link generator and it will produce a link unencumbered by registration hassles. Your readers might actually read the article now.

Or if you encounter a registration demanding link, you can recover. Open the link in a new window and remove all the registration crap in the URL. This is two parts. The real article URL is sandwiched between a registration page URL and an identifier. Cut out the registration URL, everything from the very start of the URL up to the "h" (of http) in the real URL. Then after the trailing .html in the real URL, cut that trash out as well. Copy the remaining real URL and feed it to the link generator. This is a bit of a hassle, but for me it's been much more reliable than trying to register yet again.

The only problem is that the article can't be too new or the link generator won't be able to produce a link. It will at least inform you of that, however. While in an ideal world this gyration would be unnecessary, at least this solution exists. Too bad it doesn't exist for other registration-happy papers.