Month: September 2006

Categories
Critters Music

Olivia: hero of the Rebel alliance

Olivia got into a spot of trouble on Tuesday afternoon for destroying daddy’s new Death Star. 😯 Seriously, there was no major damage, but it convinced me to go ahead and take all of the newly disassembled pieces and put them back in the box until I have a more permanent place for it to go.
I'd just as soon kiss a kitten
Laugh it up, fuzzball!
So...you have a sister
A rare non-playful brother-and-baby-sister shot.
In other news, I have a new CD to add to my album anticipation list – well, okay, technically it’s already out. It’s Peter Frampton’s new instrumental album Fingerprints, which I didn’t even know about before Kent insisted on playing Frampton’s cover of “Black Hole Sun” over the phone to me. Normally I’d shake my head at anyone trying to introduce me to an album that way, but I was amazed at how Frampton, of all people, rocked it out, complete with his trademark “talkbox” effect.
Kent’s also wondering when the next OVGE is. Aren’t we all?
I was under the weather Tuesday so I stayed home. I’ve had a very sore throat since Sunday and today I just woke up feeling like crap. Hopefully I’ll feel better Wednesday, but curiously, I didn’t miss work all that much…… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Home Base

Color organ transplant II.

Just got back from feeding horses in the middle of a thunderstorm. I think I actually did start singing “I’m feedin’ in the rain…” a couple of times for the benefit of the babies. I was moving the farm’s stallion today on a halter and lead rope and he reared up on his back legs right in front of me. I just froze (for the record: not a smart thing to do). Two thoughts occurred immediately:

  1. My God, that looks spectacular to see a real horse doing that up close, even better than the movies.
  2. So this is it, I’m going to die.

Fortunately he wasn’t actually striking with his front hooves, or I doubt there’d be enough of me left to sit here typing this. He was just showing off. The stuff I put up with for the love of four-legged critters…
Disco infernoIn the words of Servalan from Blake’s 7, “That’s not Orac! That is a box of flashing lights! I will kill you for this!” (Orbit, season 4.) Right after OVGE, I was glowing with happiness about procuring a little disco light at the show, and finding a place for it (in the same display cabinet as my Coleco mini-arcades), but I hadn’t quite found a way to integrate it into my entertainment system so it had something to respond to on a consistent basis. Well, now it does. With a little bit of creative wiring, I’ve tied it into the sound mixer I have in my game room, so it responds to whatever’s running through that – and that includes the PC’s sound. So basically, any sound the PC throws out there, even event sounds, cause the colorful little thing to light up. (Man, there’s just no way to say that where it isn’t a double entendre.) Other things which send sound to the mixer include the CD changer and the sound output from my game consoles. The original idea of the mixer was that one could listen to music and play games at the same time, but now that the color organ is plugged into an otherwise-unused headphone jack, there’s a whole other light show going on in my room. (The mixer also drives my Atari Video Music, which probably has gotten more use since I’ve owned it than in the entirety of 1976 to 2005.) Yes, both of these arcane disco lighting devices will respond to the sound of someone playing Yars’ Revenge. (And since the consoles run through an analog stereo reverb to make the room sound like a football arena when it’s all pumped through the surround speakers, the light patterns get pretty funky.)
Click here to see a short flash video of some of my blinky game room lights in action. If you’re so inclined or even remotely interested. 😀… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Home Base Serious Stuff

Pizza, upgrades, and other adventures in pure exasperation

Saturday is really my one day to rest. I work Mondays through Fridays, and I get to slave away on the farm all day on Sundays (and at some points in the year, I’m expected to work on Sundays even after I do the farm thing). Saturday is it for me. This hasn’t been the best Saturday in the world.
I’m trying to install an upgraded WordPress on my site and my FTP client isn’t just rebelling, it’s crashing with enough force to leave a hole in the floor. You can’t just hit the red X and kill it, you have to go to the task manager and kill it. And it crashes doing the damnedest things – it’ll upload a directory with a dozen subdirectories just fine. Ask it to refresh its view of the remote directory? Splat! I’ve been trying to do this for something like four hours now.
I’ve also been eating pizza during that four hours – pizza that was delivered around 7ish PMish. My wife and I each ate a couple of slices when it arrived, and both wound up in digestive distress not very long afterward. She went to bed after that, and I went back to doing whatever the heck it is that I do around here. I ate three slices later, and they didn’t cause me nearly that much trouble. You know what I think the difference was? The grease. The grease ran off into the wax paper in the bottom of the box. So I guess in the future, if I want pizza, I need to order it with about 12 hours’ notice. 😆
Diet Rite Strawberry KiwiOne bit of good news so this entry isn’t all grump: I can affirm that the drink seen here, Diet Rite strawberry kiwi, has completely rocked my world all weekend. There’s lots of stuff on the market that purports to be strawberry kiwi flavored, but so often it winds up being a slightly sour strawberry flavor. This drink gets it right on the nose. My wife found a case of this stuff at a local “damaged freight” store – i.e. where some of the local retailers consign stuff that’s been damaged not to the point where it’s unsafe for human consumption, but just to the point that it’s cosmetically imperfect. (We shop there a lot.) The price averaged out to a few cents a can. I hope they get some more of this in soon, or maybe Wal-Mart will start carrying the stuff – it’s mighty tasty.
OK, now back to my final rant of the night, as I kill WS_FTP in the task manager again. 🙄 For reasons that some of my closer friends know right now (and reasons that I don’t plan on going into in a public blog, at least not for a while), I don’t exactly love the institution of the bank right now. In fact, I’m getting close to hating banks, everywhere, period. I don’t have a problem with the people who are just doing their jobs there, but whoever the ones are in the head office who are coming up with ways to bilk us, those are the ones who need to die several nasty deaths over a painfully protracted period of time. My wife and I have three accounts at our bank – one is more or less her “vehicle fund,” for fueling, maintaining and insuring her personal vehicle, which she also uses heavily at work. One is the joint account which pays our bills. The third is mine, though it’s also referred to as the “site account” – any revenue from the website goes in there, and any expenses on the website’s behalf come out of there, but that account also fuels up the car I drive and occasionally feeds me. (Not that I’m making enough dough every quarter from Amazon to do that – a portion of each of my paychecks also goes in there. 😆 )
Anyway, here’s the deal. I need gas. The kind I can’t get from eating greasy pizza. I’m going to need it tomorrow. There’s about four bucks left in my account. That won’t cut it. So, after making sure my wife knew about it, I got online and moved about $35 over to my account from the joint account, and went and put the gas on my debit card. Well, okay, I put it in my gas tank but paid for it with my debit card. No sweat, eh? Just the way it’s supposed to be. Not so fast! I checked my balance online tonight, and saw that I’ve drawn an NSF for that gas – apparently the $35 won’t “officially” be moved until Monday. Which is “officially” bullcrap. That just negated the entire point of online banking. I would’ve been better off writing a check which couldn’t be deposited until Monday. But it sure as hell made the bank $25 for an NSF fee, didn’t it?
Oh, wait. Writing a check won’t always do it either. I used to have the “site account” at an entirely different account until they instituted a hairbrained policy whereby, when a check comes to them for payment, they don’t pay it against the balance in your account at that moment – they backdate it and use the balance that was in your account on the date that’s written on the check. So, for example, I write a check Thursday night for an amount that would cause an NSF, except that payday is on Friday, the check won’t hit the bank until Friday at the earliest, so I’m okay, right? Wrong! The bank backdates the $20 check to Thursday, sees that I only had $10 in the account on Thursday (never mind that there’s $70 there now), and uses that as an excuse to steal $25 from me. Oops, so sorry, charges me a $25 NSF fee.
I think you can see why I closed the account at that bank. And why I now want to close an account at this one and just start keeping it all in a frakkin’ jar under the bed.
Don’t get me wrong, folks, living beyond your means is bad – a highway to hell paved in bling that you couldn’t afford in the first place. I’ve always tried to play by that rule and not overextend myself, at least not for something completely frivolous. But every once in a great while, you have to play a game of “float the check” that should be resolved by the start of the next business day; I know that the days of doing that are numbered, with the rise of the debit card, smart cards, and even doing instant electronic funds withdrawal via check, so we might as well get used to it. But it looks like we also might as well get used to the high probability that someone at the corporate level of the banks with whom we do business is actively dreaming up ways to make up their own shortfalls – due to a dropoff in the loan business with rising interest rates – by getting it from the little guy any way they possibly can.
Maybe they wouldn’t be seeing a dropoff in business if they’d show even a modicum of respect for their customers.… Read more

Categories
Critters

Fuzzball recuperation update

Looks like everything is back to normal:
Othello and Olivia
Though he spent her first 36 or so hours back home hissing at her, Othello has now resumed his post as both guardian and pesterer of the kitten. (A warning for you Livejournal people: I post a lot of pet pictures. I mean, a lot. You have been warned.) Here I caught him red-handed, grooming her face. For the first day or so after she came home from the vet, Olivia’s body did have a chemical smell to it, and she cleaned herself obsessively during that time too, so I’m sure she knew it was there. I’m just glad that inter-feline relations are back to normal.… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Serious Stuff

A fundamental disconnect from the connected world

And now an explanation of why I bothered with the Livejournal plug-in.
In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten e-mails from a couple of folks I worked with or knew otherwise who had just stumbled across my blog for the first time, and one asked me a question that I found a bit odd – “Why don’t you have a Myspace site?”
It’s time I owned up to my virtual sins: in case you hadn’t guessed it, I’m way behind on the whole “social internet” thing. Which is odd, isn’t it? I was an early adopter of the online world (back in the BBS days) and then of the internet, and then of having a web site. These days, compared to the folks who are on Myspace, Livejournal, Xanga and just about every other “social networking” site out there, it’s actually a bit alarming to find out how far behind the curve I really am. I can say I probably read fewer than 15 blogs every week, and quite a few of those are in the (soon to be extinct) blog section at Digital Press. Quite a few of the friends whose blogs I would read are even further behind that curve than I am.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s more to the blogosphere than “dear diary” (though I’ll admit equally to not having found much more interesting stuff to post in my own blog that doesn’t meet that description) – there’s political and technical and ideological discourse aplenty. But the Myspace thing I’m not sure I get. Some of my friends have Myspace pages set up, or Livejournal, but I seldom see much from them on how they’re doing – all the action is in the area where your friends leave you messages. Or, actually, to be more precise, where your friends (and, in all likelihood, total strangers) leave you huge animated GIFs that basically say “Have a nice day” over and over again. Color me old and cranky, but I just don’t see the value of it. Maybe I’m missing something here.
So am I an antisocial social networker? I could actually see that being part of the answer. I’m no social butterfly in person. I put my whole site together so other folks can see and enjoy it, but I don’t expect much feedback. It could just be that my generation – in online terms at least – is falling by the wayside. After reading “Commodork” recently, I was struck by Rob talking about maintaining close friendships with his old BBS buddies, and I got to thinking about it – and nearly the entire staff of my web site consists of people I’ve known for years, back to the Fidonet days at the very latest. Rob’s book also makes a mention of how the old BBS days represented a bit of a technical meritocracy: if you could figure out the modem commands, you were in the club. If not, you were a prehistoric forerunner of today’s net n00bs. These days, that meritocracy doesn’t exist, and it seems like the inmates are running the asylum. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a great force for good, free thought, free speech, the spreading of ideas, and the spamming of the masses. But it’s also like network television – you’ve got to wade through a lot of Jackass and Blind Date before you get to, say, the first couple of seasons of West Wing.
The internet, in short, has become a Popular Medium. It’s not mine anymore. Not mine alone, anyway. Which means I have to adjust to some new ways of doing things.
I took a look at plugins that might crosspost Scribblings to a Myspace account as well, because there’s some appeal to finally caving in and creating such an account…and then leaving it alone until further notice, posting my dispatches from afar. (See? Antisocial.) As it turns out, there’s no stable way to achieve that; the one WP-to-Myspace plugin that used to work, XrisXros, seems to have fallen by the wayside due to changes made to both platforms, and its programmer got tired of trying to keep up with those changes. Can’t blame him. I hope someone cracks that problem in the future.
If only so folks will stop asking me when I’m going to sign up for Myspace. I just don’t really plan on it until then. Sorry if that’s just me being antisocial.… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code

Live simulcast

Wahey, look, I’m on Livejournal now.
Actually, I’m not planning to live here. But some friends of mine have been telling me I need to get with the program and try some of these social networking shenannigans.
Would it be utterly antisocial to just direct you toward the blog I run on my own site? Quite possibly. Actually, I’m posting this as a test of an add-on module to my blogware over there that will update this blog too, kind of automagically. It’s hard enough for me to (A) find the time to make a blog entry to begin with, (2) make it somewhat coherent and, well, not-sucky, and (iii) then turn around and cut-and-paste these all-too-infrequent miracles of blogitude to a bunch of different places.
Hopefully that makes some kind of sense. So in other words: social networking = I’ll give it a shot, but I’m not exactly diving in head first. Or feet first. I’m wading in. With a sort of inflatable thing bearing only a very slight resemblance to a disfigured duck attached to me to keep me afloat.
Now let’s see how this works.
(Edit: Wow, it works better than I expected, even directs folks back to my real blog for comments. Perfect. Special thanks to Evan Broder for the WordPress-to-Livejournal crossposter plug-in. That’s really cool!)… Read more

Categories
Music

Album anticipation – fall ’06

It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but maybe once a year there’s a confluence of musical talent, old favorites, and stuff I’m Just Curious About all hitting at roughly the same time. (There was a time, long ago, when this was more of a quarterly thing.) Some stuff I’ve already ordered, some stuff I’m still slobbering over, and other stuff I’m just thinking about. Here’s a rough rundown of this fall’s candidates for curing my mystery melody malady. … Read more

Categories
Critters

Rewiring the kitten

Othello, moping.So yesterday Olivia went to the vet to get “fixed.” (I didn’t really think she was broken.) At the same time, she’s also being front declawed – she’s not going to be an outside kitty, and besides, every other living creature she shares space with can offer a testament to how careless she can be with her claws. In other words: we’re not doing anything to her that hadn’t already been done to Othello, Iago or Chloe. Still, it’s amazing how much the mood of the whole household plunged overnight without her here. Othello moped around the house listlessly. Xena whimpered and whined because she hadn’t seen her new best friend pop up in any of the windows to say hi. And yeah, the humans in the household moped too.
Getting her to go certainly wasn’t easy – she already had other plans, such as playing with the drain plug in my bathtub:
Olivia plays in the bathtub (water not included)
When she figured out why we were trying to catch her, she went into hiding:
Hide, Olivia!
But she couldn’t get away…
Hide, Olivia!
I look forward to her return today. That way we can all stop moping.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Well damn. What do I come to work for, then?

So, sometime back at work, they swapped two PCs: a “public” computer in the newsroom, frequently used by photogs, cam ops, or anyone else, and seldom used to actually look at anything work-related; and the specially equipped computer I used to send video to the station’s web site. Now I have to go to the newsroom and chase people off of the web video machine so I can do what I need to do there, and in the meantime, I now have in my office the buggiest, most spyware-and-virus-filled machine I think I have ever set eyes on.
Simply having the thing turned on is a hazard. The spyware that’s embedded deep into the machine’s brain constantly tries to pop up browser windows, even while the machine is sitting, unattended, with an empty desktop and no programs running. And then a browser will open of its own accord and try to go to a specific URL. That’s when the mighty Hearst-Argyle content filter kicks in to strut its funky stuff:
Hearst-Argyle - purveyors of fine internet porn since 2006
In the time it took me to type this, the above window popped up no fewer than six times. 😆 And just think – the same cam ops and photogs who got this ex-newsroom machine so clogged with malware that it can barely function? They’re now doing the same to a machine that’s vital to the operation and security of our website content!
Yes, this switcheroo was a brilliant plan.… Read more