This set was given to me by a friend and business partner as a Christmas gift somewhere around 1997. The Sears company produced this set in the 50’s (this fellow dates it at 1956) but it still has a lot of characteristics left over from the late 40’s-brown bakelite case, inventive use of the material for the grille (and use of grille cloth), and retro script on the dial. It shares several design elements from older sets—for example, the GE radio I have, but with more class. Mechanically, there’s nothing wrong with it; it has great sound and pulls in distant stations easily. There’s also a helpful metal badge on the back with a unique serial ID; the original owner would call Sears, give them this number, and they would be able to run down parts and service for that specific model. It’s not a radio that would have stopped me in my tracks, but as I’ve owned it, I’ve grown to appreciate its lines and condition, and I’m happy to have it in my collection.
Date posted: May 25, 2006
| Filed under radios | Comments Off on Silvertone 2015
Jen and I are groggily sipping (nay, gulping) coffee this morning and attempting to wake up. Last night’s curtain call came at 4AM, after a long day of edits and new page layout for her and pre-production Photoshop work for me. She’s been pulling these hours for two weeks now—we were talking via iChat at midnight PST last week while I was in Oregon—but this is the final stretch. The client is still trying to stuff new pages, pictures, and random changes into the mixture this morning, but she has slammed the door on their little fingers (the deadline is Friday) and we are in cleanup mode from here on out.
At one point last night, she asked me if all this was worth it, and I had to remind myself that we aren’t working for someone else on a salary, we get to work together (shockingly well yesterday, I might add), and we get to make the decisions as to how far we’ll go for our clients (which is usually pretty far).
Yeah, 4AM sucks, but the commute is pretty sweet.
Date posted: May 25, 2006
| Filed under general | Comments Off on Still On PDX Time.
Preview Vs. Acrobat Worth its weight in gold. I hate the fact that Acrobat Reader takes 15 minutes to start up and another 15 to shut itself down, after it’s gummed up my system looking for web updates.
Date posted: May 23, 2006
| Filed under apple, shortlinks | Comments Off on Preview Vs. Acrobat
I landed in BWI at 6:10 this morning after taking a red-eye from PDX, with a whirlwind layover in Vegas. (Note: the Vegas airport blows. It seems the only thing they are interested in doing is putting as many slot machines in between you and your connecting flight as they can. Good times.) After Jen picked me up from the airport, we returned home and crashed for two hours of restless half-sleep before getting the day started. The front half of the lawn is now mowed—just in time for a meeting with one of our larger clients—but the back half is two weeks overdue. I’m sorting through a pile of cords, peripherals, papers, mail, and the remains at the bottom of my carry-ons trying to jump-start my brain, but it’s pretty slow going. I’m going to need massive quantities of coffee and red wine to self-medicate my sleep cycle back to Eastern Standard Time.
Date posted: May 23, 2006
| Filed under travel | Comments Off on Home Again.
MacBook Review. This looks like a VERY nice update to the iBook line, something I could easily purchase to replace my 2005 iBook (1920 x 1200 external monitors with true spanning is enough to sell me. The Core Duo processors are a nice bonus.) I’ll have to see how I like a 13-inch display running 1280×800 though.
Date posted: May 22, 2006
| Filed under apple, shortlinks | Comments Off on MacBook Review.
The Dot And The Line. Norton Juster changed my life with The Phantom Tollbooth. This is a cartoon, directed by Chuck Jones, based on another Juster book. I’m buying the entire Juster catalog for my kids. (via)
Date posted: May 22, 2006
| Filed under humor, shortlinks | Comments Off on The Dot And The Line.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
