Category: Misc

Astoundingly simple, totally elegant: Place a clay pot inside a larger clay pot and line the space between with sand. Dampen sand with water, cover with cloth. As water evaporates, the sand is cooled; basic thermodynamics. Result: Eggplants inside now last three weeks rather than three days, and a region that had no refrigeration now does. Inventor Mohammed Bah Abba wins this year’s Rolex Award for his pot-in-pot system (and can now, ironically, afford an electric fridge).

Took a weekend to play in the snow. Shirtsleeve weather at Kirkwood, perfect blue skies, ten feet of spring sugar on the ground, not too crowded. Except for the fact that I was alone, an almost perfect weekend. Decided to find out for once and for all whether I’m a skier or a snowboarder at heart.
Continue reading “Planks vs. Boards”

Torrential rains through the night, woke to the sound of wind whipping our awning, rain pelting through the screen and onto glass. I love to run in the rain, wrapped the iPod in a baggie and took off for two miles in the downpour. I’m in heaven when you smile. On the way out the door to work, discovered that our backyard had overflowed and water was running through the garage, an improvised stream. Fortunately Amy’s murals were up on palettes. At work, found that the normally gentle trickle of Strawberry Creek had turned into a brown, gushing torrent, little creek bursting at the seams. Came back with a camera two hours later and it was already receding. The mashed-down grass shows the creek’s high-water mark. I love these striations of color showing activity of the earth.

Just completed a major rewrite of my Adding Multimedia to Web Pages tutorial (six pages), covering a variety of techniques for compressing, linking to, and embedding QuickTime audio and video. This is part of our ever-growing Multimedia and Convergence course work and tutorial collections.

Just learned the nifty .qtl trick recently — also, just found out that QuickTime can take a palindrome parameter (wiggy!), and that you can use Apple’s JavaScript library to jump the user to an arbitrary point in a movie. Works equally well with http and rtsp (with the obvious advantage that teh user won’t have to download intermediate material via rtsp).

Between semesters we format the student FireWire drives for the new students to use. I get a stack of them and re-initialize partitions (faster than deleting 20,000 files and emptying trash on each). Usually there’s someone who hasn’t yet backed up and needs me to save something. Working quickly, I got through the stack of drives until I got to the “marked for save” drive and found… the wrong data. Double-check that email… Sure enough I had marked the wrong drive for saving, and had just re-initialized the wrong drive. Ulp.

Spent the rest of the evening and this morning trying Tech Tool Pro, Norton Utilities, and Disk Warrior. None of them were able to find data on the reinitialized partition. Then mneptok came to the rescue with a URL he dropped into my phone (amazing!) — BinaryBiz’ Virtual Lab. Took an hour to scan the 80GB drive, but it found everything that had been there before the wipe. And the angels up above sang hallelujah.

Interesting licensing method – you can scan any volume for free, but then have to purchase a quota-per-GB you want to save. We’re buying a 5GB quota for $120. One use is all you get. Sounds pricey, but not when compared to what you can pay for professional data rescuing services.

Update: A few days later we lost power in our home office. When power came back, my 120GB MP3 drive wouldn’t mount. DiskWarrior was able to rebuild and restore the master directory, and I got my music back. Lesson: Journaling may make drives come up faster after a power outage, but it won’t protect from all types of damage.

I have not seen a better single article summarizing Copy Left and the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig and tribe, the deep doo-doo in which the whole concept of public domain finds itself today, Thomas Jefferson’s original thinking on copyright in the Constitution, contemporary “permission culture,” etc. than Robert S. Boynton’s The Tyranny of Copyright for the NY Times. Print it out. Pass it on.

Just wrapped up a long-simmering project to replace the J-School’s Events listings with a home-brew PHP/MySQL system which allows events staff to publish events (duh), centralize ticket and reservation info, generate announcement email, and separate public and private events between our public site and the intranet.

With that launched, today wrote a script to generate an Events RSS feed. Until now, all the RSS we’ve published has been MT-generated; this is the first time I’ve cooked it myself.

Maybe we’ll get to a redesign sometime in 2008.

I have been authorized to have my own University credit card (called a P-Card, P is for procurement), so I can do my own purchasing of software, domains, misc hardware, etc. That’s wonderful. But here’s the “Brazil” bit: Before they’ll issue it, I have to attend a three-hour training seminar. Three hours to learn how to… what? Shop responsibly? Pay off my monthly balance? This is so typical of the red tape and “hurry up and wait” m.o. of the UC system (which is only partially govt). I am so looking forward to tomorrow. I’d rather have my colon cleansed.

Decided finally to stop being a total phone luddite. A and I currently share one phone, with an emergency-only calling plan. Anything over 15 minutes / month and we pay through the nose. We’re going to get a pair of phones that we will actually carry around and use, and a plan with real, usable minutes.

Interested in good reception / coverage, bluetooth / Mac sync compatibility, small form factor, and a built-in camera. Turns out that’s a bit like a quest for the holy grail. Three major transmission technologies, four or five major carriers, dozens of this-and-that features, and hundreds of phones to choose from. Overall, found the shopping experience totally overwhelming. An embarrassment of riches.

“Freedom from choice / is what you want

Freedom of choice / is what you got”
–Devo

Although Bluetooth / Mac sync sounds attractive at first, I think that’s probably the feature I can most easily dispense with. It’s the wee camera that I really want :) And after palming a bunch of phones, have to admit I’m really into the idea of very small, unobtrusive, lozenge-like. Samsung E715 is at the top of my list as of right now. Is T-Mobile a decent network in the Bay Area?

Speaking of phones, went to see Monster with Amy the other day (disturbing, intense) and the woman sitting next to us not only failed to turn her phone off when the movie started, she actually answered it! She sat there talking on her phone right next to us. Amy tapped her arm and asked her to pipe down. When she didn’t I shot her a look and a hushed epithet. For this she flipped us the bird. What goes on in people’s heads? Seriously messed up, dude.

Update: Finally decided on a pair of LG VX6000 camera phones on the Verizon network. Details in the comments.