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Quite a number of years ago, I was given a cuckoo clock. I found it a few months ago, and last night I hung it up and gave the pendulum a push. It worked! The poor little cuckoo has no idea what time it is, or perhaps he’s so happy at being alive again that he just doesn’t want to stop singing. This clock has a cuckoo, a dancing couple and a mill wheel, over which water “flows.” The hour is reached, the cuckoo and chime announce the time, a music box plays a tune while the couple dance and the water flows.

I guess I didn’t expect anything to work. Fact is that it’s keeping very good time but I had to latch the cuckoo’s door until I can figure out how to synchronize him again.


In other news, George over at Brewed Fresh Daily quoted my comments about geeks. He’s absolutely right about the terminology. What I think of and call geeks are rightly called “hackers”

Contrary to the popular press, a hacker is not a person who breaks into other people’s computer systems. That is a cracker. A hacker could be said to be a consummate programmer, someone who has earned the respect of his fellows by programming well or coming up with an elegant way of programming a computer to do a certain job. For programmers, being a hacker is a great honor, and it can only be bestowed upon you by another hacker. Crackers are also often hackers, but their intent and nefarious activities put them into a different category. (suncoastlug.org) or go here for more definitions.

Geeks are more properly described this way:

Someone who knows a lot about computers and very little about anything else. See also nerd.

So I hereby promise to call a hacker a hacker and a geek a geek henceforth. But everything I said about liking the real hackers I’ve known – totally true. And if they’re mostly geek-like – that’s ok with me too. Go here to learn more about hackers

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