Saturday marked the third birthday of this log, from its humble beginnings as a text-based, manually updated .HTML file to, well, a text-based, manually updated .HTML file. A lot has happened since then—I fell in love, got laid off, found a job, and met lots of new people. It’s been an interesting experiment, and I’ve had a lot of fun. Stick around and we’ll find out what happens this year.
Interesting. I read in an article on Salon this afternoon that out of the 535 elected representatives in Congress, there’s only one who has a son or daughter fighting in this war. There’s something wrong there.
Let us all hope this is the end of our nightly timeshare and telco sales pitches.
Geek Update. My attempt to get the AppleTalk printer working is successful. I hooked up the 8500 and re-connected the cabling (AppleTalk -> DaynaPrint -> AAUI transceiver -> RJ45) and magically, the printer appeared in the Chooser. Now I just have to bring it to Jen’s house and set up her laptop.
Anybody remember this show? For some reason this popped in my head this morning.
Album of the Day: I’m between the Pogues’ Peace and Love and Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. Ah, this brings me back. (one of the many things that originally drew me to Jen was the fact that she had a lovingly worn, paper-thin Pogues Peace and Love concert shirt.)
Hint. I got prescription lenses put in my diving goggles today. Besides a slight pull to the left eye (a mild astigmatism), they are like looking through my glasses. I can’t wait to try them out underwater. Also in the works is a plan to get an Ikelite housing for one of the digital cameras—either the company’s Nikon or a (possible) Canon G3.
Röyskopp’s Melody A.M. Good chillout music, or as Pitchfork says, music for the Jetta-driving 30-year-old set. Whatever.
4:05 PM. No more downtempo. Van Halen to rock out to. Must get work done.
Smoking Crack, Take 1.Tonight I’m taking apart the innards of a surplus Pelican case I got from an old employer and replacing the foam (fitted for an IBM laptop) with new stuff for my Powerbook. I spent a day or so chasing closed-cell foam down locally, after getting a quote from an Internet source for over $450 for a 4×8′ sheet. Who knew that foam was so expensive? Anyway, I was able to get a whole bagload for $36 from a local supplier in town (cheerfully named the “House of Foam”.) It’s lighter, more pliable, and easier to work with than the original stuff. Today I did a search for “Pelican case” for this post and found that they have an option to buy foam directly. I want to hit myself in the head repeatedly. But I did get to experience the House of Foam, so all was not lost.
Smoking Crack, Take 2. I went to the CompUSA a few days ago and found a copy of Retrospect Express for the low low price of $59. I got it home and excitedly tore the wrapper off to find that it’s mainly just an installed reminder service for one machine, not the centralized multiple backup utility I was hoping for. (Read the box, stupid.) Having ripped off the plastic, I voided the store’s return policy. (Read the receipt, stupid.) I called Dantz and found that I can upgrade to Desktop for another $59, but I was feeling pretty dumb about the whole thing today.
Last night, while toying with some more interesting navigation for the photo archives, I finally got around to submitting a photo to the Mirror Project. It was a shot I took in Ellicott City last year, actually by accident, in the windshield of a Model T Ford.
Album of the day: The eponymous first album by the B-52’s.
ThinkSecret has a bit of information which illustrates a very good point. In an article on the upcoming Illustrator 11, Adobe concedes that most owners of versions 9 and 10 still use version 8 because it’s faster. I agree, and I’m one of these owners. At the release of 9, the interface, upgrades, and modifications to the application began to drag down an otherwise powerful tool to the point where I ditched for 8 it two weeks after installing it. For the same reasons that I still use older versions of MS applications (I have a copy of Word 4 for the Mac that I use on a Powerbook 100, and it does fine), I avoid some newer versions of popular software, because the tradeoffs can be too great. I hope Adobe, and other vendors, learn this lesson. (PS. It’s about time they rolled the poor orphan Streamline into Illustrator. The path was clear six years ago. Let’s hope they’ve refined the recognition sensitivity.)
The report on the MusicBrainz tagger is that it works, but the amount of information re-written to the meta tags is minor. I was hoping for more individual information like year, genre, and track numbers, and I got just the track numbers. Maybe as more and better information is written to the site, the quality of the tags will improve.
Another very good link I found this afternoon is Constantin Von Wentzel’s Base Station page, for all things AirPort, including some crafty solutions to heating problems (avoid frying that pair of capacitors) and uploading your firmware without hosing the unit. Also included are some handy links to repair outfits who will fix your ailing ABS.
The Smartdisk USB hard drive I bought at Cidera three years back is not supported under OSX 10.2, but every iteration of the OS before that. I don’t know if it’s a vendor-specific driver issue or an OSX issue, but it’s damned annoying. I think I’ll have to definitely boycott Smartdisk from here on out, because that’s just ridiculous.
Now that I re-hung the bathroom door to be level, close correctly and open the right way into the room, I found that there’s whole lot more space in there for people and storage. I found a real nice cabinet down at the antique store down the street, so I picked that up today to replace the small Target-bought cabinet currently jammed full of towels and bath sundries. I think it will make the room work even better. Meanwhile, work on the hallway and living room molding continues. I’m shooting for getting the interior of the house cleaned up in time for spring, when I can focus all energies on rebuilding the backyard.
PS. My neighbor Dick was sent home from the hospital two days after the operation. Bless his heart, they can’t kill him—he’s too stubborn.
Doing research on codecs and video playback, I found dvdrhelp.com this morning, which is a very comprehensive and informative guide to all things video, be it DVD or PC-playback. (And no, I’m not telling you what awesome movie I just got an *ahem* copy of.)
I read, as most other folks have, about Salon being on shaky financial footings, to the point where they are pleading for more subscriptions to pay their rent. I was a longtime reader of the magazine, and as with other folks who have weighed in on the subject, I enjoyed their early lead in the online journalism market. Two years ago their reporting was on time, interesting, deeply researched, and often very balanced. With the dissolution of venture capital, their features became smaller and their focus became fuzzy. Last fall I stopped visiting every day, preferring to scan the ‘recently’ headlines once a week, and rarely found a reason to dive into the site. (This was roughly about the time Garrison Keillor quit writing Mr. Blue.) Did I buy a subscription? No. I considered it, but at that time, the range and quality of articles had decreased to the point where I didn’t care to buy into it. Do I regret the decision? Partly, because without my subscription, and those of the other internet heads who were weaned on the free teat of the early Web, it may have had a chance. Raise a candle, tip your flag, and dip your hat to another vessel of the New Economy as it sinks off into the western horizon.
Behind the Curve Dept., Report No. 317: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an interesting, challenging, intriguing album that deserves more than one listen. I like it more as I hear it more.
Wired has a very interesting and thought-provoking essay on the exploding world of digital archiving; the author brings up several points I hadn’t considered before. Jim Lewis reminds us that mechanical memory degrades, and this very process of aging gives items of importance value and worth, as well as a critical placeholder in the timeline of life.
I heard on the radio about The Smoking Gun exposing some pictures of a contestant on the Joe Millionaire show. Apparently she had done some light bondage movies a few years ago “to put herself through law school”, but forgot to mention this to the show’s producers. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little kink, but you have to ask yourself, in this day and age, when nothing is secret anymore, why would she not mention this before she was on the show? I’m willing to accept the answer “She went on the show knowing somebody would find out, and this would catapult her acting/modeling career,” or maybe “She never expected to get as far on the show as she did (the final three),” or even “She told the producers and they kept it quiet, hoping somebody would find out to boost ratings for the show,” but could anybody possibly be that stupid?
In doing a little more searching, I found an even better option for keeping our two Pismos in service longer: PowerLogix has a service where they will replace your 400 or 500MHz G3 with an 800MHz G3. From what the benchmarks say, the performance is better by far (in some cases double that) of a 500MHz G4. (this does not take into account the Altivec optimized applications that are slowly being rolled out by software companies.) It seems to get good reviews as well; some of the reviews I’ve read about the Newer offerings are less than stellar—problems with return times and unit malfunctions are nothing to take lightly.
Finally, in the last of the geek news, the EtherPrint arrived today, and I found to my dismay it did not include an RJ-45 connector, just BNC and AUI connectors. I tracked down an AUI to RJ-45 transciever for the low price of $15 on Amazon, so that should come next week. Still, we’re at a total of $47 total for the printer, which I still think is a great deal.
After a four-year dependency, I’m moving away from the usage of a blind HTML page on my site as a bookmark site; every morning when I wake my Powerbook from sleep (or boot my PC workstation at the office) all my browsers point to the same page. This way I avoid migrating troublesome bookmark files from one browser/platform/version to another, and I don’t spend days formatting them to fit my peculiar workflow. With the advent of Safari as my main browser, and its beautiful method of organizing bookmarks, I’m slowly migrating all my favorite links into the browser.
The financial planning meeting went very well, and I left with one very important goal: Sell the house. Fix it, clean it, paint it, sell it. Quickly.
Today is Old-School Van Halen Day. Fair Warning: Women And Children First. (the latter is also nominated for the title of Best Rock Album Cover.)
Happy 30th Anniversary, Roe V. Wade. Ladies and Gentlemen, please consider your rapidly dwindling rights as an American citizen and support the 1973 decision. Please don’t let a group of old white men dictate women’s rights.
Another example of how real creative people think. I’ve not taken a lot of pictures these days because it seems like the only time I see the world is when I’m in the car, driving to or from work. And that’s a pretty boring stretch of road. Michael Sippey found a way to make the situation a little more interesting, from a west coast perspective.