


Drinking whiskey clear!
“If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.”
– Socrates
So the other day I was looking for some info about a Braves game, so I went to my former hometown newspaper’s site: ajc.com. While there I discovered that my favorite section of the paper – “Q&A on the News”, where people can write in any marginally newsworthy question in hopes of getting an answer – not only still exists… but that there’s an extensive archive of old topics, too!
Here’s some of the fun stuff I found:
Georgia is the only state to be admitted to the Union three times. (link)
Of course, Georgia was the fourth state, ratifying the U.S. Constitution on January 2, 1788. And, like most Confederate states, Georgia was readmitted after the Civil War on June 26, 1868. However, widespread violence led Congress to re-impose Reconstruction on the state (another dubious honor, this being the only state to have this happen). Georgia was readmitted for the third and final time in July 1870.
Atlanta’s Northside Hospital delivers more babies than any other hospital in the United States. (link)
Over 18,000 babies are born there every year… including me (although that was a looooonng time ago!).
St. Mary’s, Georgia is the second oldest continually-inhabited city in the United States (link)
The city was founded “sometime in the mid 1500s” by the Spanish. It became an incorporated city in 1792. Only St. Augustine, Florida is older.
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Fans of Georgia author Flannery O’Connor probably know that she had a lifelong love of birds, especially peacocks. What you might not know is that her love of birds might have started with a chicken her family owned when she was very young. She loved the bird so much that she even taught it to walk backwards!
There have long been stories that Flannery and her famous “backwards chicken” once appeared in a newsreel. However, despite several exhaustive Internet searches, I was never able to find it… until now. Here is the clip, called “Do You Reverse?”, which shows a young “Mary O’Connor” for about two seconds. Note that the other animals walking backwards in the clip are simply shown in reverse.
Look at how cute she was! 🙂
OK, so I’m about two years too late with this, but yesterday I wanted to copy all 100+ GB of my music from my desktop computer to my netbook, and this came in really handy!
Robocopy is a command-line file copying tool from Microsoft that has been included with Windows since Windows Vista. Its name comes from “Robust File Copy”, and Robocopy offers a lot of features that are unavailable with most command-line file copy apps. For instance, you can have Robobopy include NTFS permissions on copied files, so if you need to move a file share from one server to another, you can use the /SEC switch to include all the appropriate permissions. And my favorite switch – /MIR – can create a mirror of a folder at another location, which is excellent for backups.
One of the longtime complaints about Robocopy was that it was single-threaded, meaning it would only copy one file at a time. However, the version of Robocopy shipped with Windows 7 is able to copy up to 128 files at a time using the /MT switch!
By default /MT generates 8 threads, but you can change this by adding the number of threads you want, such as /MT:6 for six threads or /MT:24 for 24 threads. As mentioned, the maximum you can do at one time is 128, so /MT:128 is the most you can do.
You might need to play with this to how many threads works best in your situation. I started copying my music with twenty threads, and my poor netbook just couldn’t keep up. In fact, file copying seemed slower with twenty threads than it did with one! So I reduced the threads to six, and it copied all my music in record time!
Sadly, unlike previous versions of Robocopy, the Windows 7 version doesn’t work on earlier versions of Windows, like Windows XP. So if you STILL haven’t upgraded, here’s one more reason to do so.
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“It sort of came at a bad time in my life, when I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to think about working. It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas.”
– John Malkovich,
on turning down the
role of Jimmy Conway