The following are the table of contents of the book The art of close up magic by Lewis Ganson along with a brief synopsis/comment. These tables used to reside at magicref.tripod.com . But seeing as to how tripod.com is now defunct (this turned out to be a rumour; see comments), I thought it worthwhile to archive a copy of this handy page on this site.

I have gotten used to relying on Opera's tab recycle bin feature to reopen closed tabs. However, earlier today, I found myself accidentally closing a tab in Google Chrome, and what's more I had an unfinished forum comment which I had worked on for 20 minutes in said tab. When I saw no recycler icon in the tab bar and no obvious feature in the preferences or options sections, I panicked.

I had to do a clean install of Eclipse today and found myself stuck with a dodgy plug-in (subversive). However, when I went to the Help menu, I did not find any option to uninstall software. IIRC, there was something along the lines of Manage configuration here where you could go to makes changes and uninstall plug-ins.

Over the last few months, I have run through the entire list of episodes for Star Treks TNG, DS9 and Voyager. As you can imagine, not all episodes are very good and some are downright insipid. The following are the rules of thumb that I have arrived at when deciding whether to skip an episode:

Earlier today, I wanted to prefix a number of image files on a server with a 0. If this was on my desktop, I would have simply used a graphical tool such as the excellent Métamorphose. However, in this case, only a command-line was available. While Google threw up a number of bash scripts, I was curious to see if this could be done in a cleaner and more concise manner. Following the excellent reference to sed and more Google magicking, I arrived at

When (re)installing httpd today, I ran into the following error message:
(OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

I just finished upgrading Eclipse from Galileo to the new Helios release. I performed the upgrade by adding Helios to the software sources list and updating and all seemed to go well. However, when I restarted Eclipse, I got a splash image which indicated that the upgrade had gone through and then ran into the following error message:
Failed to create the Java Virtual Machine

When I attempted to make a commit using TortoiseSVN today, I was told that there was a problem and that I would have to run the cleanup command to sort things out. Running the command, however, resulted in the following further error message:
Cleanup failed to process the following paths:

Today's Song of the Day, and the same for the last few weeks in my car has been Rush's The Trees, off their 1978 album, Hemispheres. While the song is interesting musically, what truly captivates are the lyrics which are pasted below:

There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas

I ran into an error message today that only specified the character number in a configuration file without making any reference to the line number. Rather odd. In any case, since Vim (and my usual preference, GVim) is an excellent editor, I expected this to be a cinch. Unfortunately, a few minutes of head-scratching later, I was still quite clueless as to how to accomplish this seemingly routine task.

I do know that typing:
:1000
will move the cursor to the 1000th line in the file.