After giving the matter deep and thorough consideration, I can, with utter confidence, recommend against kidney stones. No, sir, I didn't like it. You know how people are always telling you that you need to drink an unreasonable amount of water every day? It turns out that's so you won't get kidney stones. Women who have had them say it's the closest a man can experience to the pain of childbirth. It impressed me. Oddly, the symptoms didn't at all match what the books said about kidney stones, but the nurses and doctors all instantly pegged it. The pain wasn't in my back, but seemed to be in my colon. Apparently all those prostaglandins sloshing about inflame everything nearby. I can also say that hydrocodone (Vicodin) works very, very well on kidney stone pain.

Has everybody else noticed that Google Maps doesn't work as well as once did? Often, lately, it leaves tiles unfilled. But it seems better than it was a couple of months ago.

I never had any real doubts about whether the new Systemd replacement for init.d and Upstart was a good idea. Certainly, the architectural justification for its design seemed sound. Then, I saw on Linux Weekly News that it cannot function if your partitioning isn't just so. In particular, it seems, you'd better not have /usr mounted on / from another drive or partition. Yes, really. Now, on most of my machines /usr isn't mounted, so that doesn't affect me directly, but such choices drain confidence. (That, and PulseAudio still doesn't work right.) It makes me wonder what other crazy bits are in there.

I've finally taken up Git. I know I'm late to the party, but I can already say without fear of contradiction that the correct solution to every problem, difficult or trivial, begins with creating one or more branches, in much the same way that every cake recipe begins with washing your hands and preheating the oven. If you're not creating an improbable number of branches, you must be doing it wrong.

The weird failures on Intel i5 ("Arrandale") display hardware, on laptops, continue. Apparently the fixes aren't expected to make it into mainline linux until 2.6.39. The kernels in drm-intel-next have been getting worse, so I'm still on a snapshot based on 2.6.37-rc8.