Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes battellemedia.com. John Battelle is co-founder of both Wired Magazine and The Industry Standard, as well as a visiting professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Battellemedia.com is host to a blog on his book-in-progress on the search industry. A 2nd blog on the site, Tonic, focuses on “health for grown men.”
Gadget lust strikes: SlimDevices have seriously updated the SliMP3 and renamed it “SqueezeBox” (apologies to The Who?) Now it’s got built-in Wi-Fi, digital outputs (coax and optical) and plays uncompressed WAV/AIFF). Hrmm… on the other hand, we haven’t hooked up the SliMP3 since we moved, which has encouraged us back into CDs and LPs — their own reward. Have to rethink the meaning of “essential upgrade.”
Slim is donating 10% of profits to the EFF – can’t argue with that. On a similar note, received an offer tonight, buried among the seemingly bottomless pile of credit card offers, to get a LinuxFund credit card; a portion of each purchase would go to funding open source programming efforts. At first I laughed. Seemed like hearing a Led Zeppelin song as soundtrack for a Cadillac commercial. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like Aikido; turning capitalist momentum against itself. Hrmm… the APR is same as mainstream cards, why not switch?
Needed to change a primary DNS server to one that would properly resolve .biz addresses, in order to keep the SpamAssassin plugin for CommuniGate from getting all choked up. But OS X client doesn’t let you alter DNS via ssh. Turns out that components of OS X Server work perfectly well when copied over to OS X Client and placed in a parallel path, problem solved. Wonder if this would work with some of the graphical/remote setup tools as well? Probably not without deeper surgery.
Must see BBC: Winner of the World Beard Championship (be sure to see the Follicle Wonders gallery … Can’t afford an iPod? There’s a cheaper way … Many amazing mechanical wonders at World Power Systems … Will Ferrell’s graduation speech to Harvard’s Class of 2003 … Worst album covers ever … You need an airzooka … Cardea : The body of Segway, the head of a robot (because the Segway has too many wheels) … The letter ‘E’ enlarged … Bob Log III had a telephone grafted to his face mask, plays guitar and floor tom at the same time, has boob scotch underwear for sale … Got PHP? Got an image? Build your own stereogram … Dubya has his own blog, and it’s nearly indistinguishable from the dullest blog in the world … Old Ziff-Davis buddy John Hargrave calls Apple support … Wish I was Japanese so I could use this gorgeous wooden keyboard … Robert Fripp offers a blessing … The power of Photoshop … If ever I were to admit there’s such a thing as a perfect car, the 1963 Fiat 500 Cinquecento Giardiniera is surely it … Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, including: “it is heroic to try to stop time” … mac breakdown at UC Berkeley … So wonderful to be reminded of the amazing Pippi Longstocking … Recently heard of people asking for change with cardboard signs saying “Help the ~/less” … Fo shizzle my nizzle.
Since healing up from the busted arm, I’ve ridden with a fluorescent orange safety vest while bicycling. The first couple of days, felt like a total dork. All “cool” goes straight out the window. Trade that in for becoming kinda sorta visible to cars. I use that word with caveat and caution, as I still proceed with the assumption that i am el hombre invisible. Nevertheless, there is this unfamiliar phenomenon: cars come to a complete stop 20 feet away, motion me through the intersection. I never know whether they think I’m law enforcement or “something official-like” on account of the vest, or simply that the vest brings out the dormant courteous driver in some people. But there’s no question it makes a difference in the way cars treat me. I also use a super-spazmodo LED flasher on the seatpost now, which arrests vision from the rear at 50 paces.
Bike aside, my whole attitude toward traffic is permanently altered. Since Matthew’s death, my accident, Mike’s accident, and the eerie confluence of accidents that have affected so many friends and family over the past year, I drive like an old lady. Smell death and damage around every corner. See every merging car as an incoming 2,000-lb smart bomb. Have no lingering youthful sense of invulnerability. Feel lucky to arrive at any destination intact. Freak at every arrogant cell phone using, fast-food-eating, lipstick-applying, radio-twiddling, inattentive driver.
If only people knew what a thin razor’s edge they ride at every moment on the road. An edge that grows thinner with every passing year, as culture accelerates, population explodes, courtesy vanishes.
I think of Matthew every day when I slip that vest over my head.
The Mozart Magic Music Cube is unique in the universe of toys in that its construction utterly resists repair via either crazy glue or duct tape. Oh, sure, you can try, but I promise your fix will not hold. The battery retention panel is severely weakened by the presence of a switch right in the middle of the plastic, which leaves it with almost no structural integrity to resist the pressure of the spring-backed, outward-pushing battery. There is so little surface area to which one can apply glue without permanently sealing the battery in place, and no place to apply duct tape adequately without disrupting the large side buttons which are, after all, the point of the toy.
A two-foot fall is all it takes to snap the battery retention panel. Miles broke Simone’s cube. All repair attempts failed (the only thing I can imagine working would be to encircle the whole unit with an old leather belt, but that would of course ruin the lines, not to mention the functionality) so we replaced it for her. Then Miles went to visit and broke the replacement in the same way within minutes.
Embryonics, you owe us $70.
Miles is crazy for drums, a passion sparked at or near his first birthday by the gift of an actual drum, and by a book called Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, which is about all these beatnik monkeys (with sideburns!) who play crazy rhythms on drums they wear around their necks. Starts with a single monkey beating out a rhythm with his thumb, then evolves to a thunderous chorus created by thousands of monkeys all playing at once. The book itself has a great rhythm. All the way through, meter like this:
One thumb, one thumb,
beating on a drum
dum ditty dum ditty
dum dum dum
Amy and I have fun riffing on this. The drum mallets, of course, don’t confine themselves to the drum head. Mallets on sliding glass door, mallets on daddy’s head, mallets on other toys. Crazy rhythms everywhere.
He’s also way into climbing now. Started with small footstool, then climbing on the drum, now climbing chairs and surfing the arms, riding Simone’s hobby horse every way but the way it’s meant to be ridden, using his schooldesk chair like an acrobatics prop. Seems to be made out of rubber, and is an excellent fall-er. Some bruises, but they don’t deter him, and no really serious ow-ies yet. He’s also taken to upturning chairs (including his high chair) from below, just to hear them thud.
Now that’s he’s moved pretty much fully from jar food to finger foods, cleaning up after his meals has become a home improvement project in its own right. This task consists of the following subroutines: Shake foodstuffs out of his clothes and hair, then wash his his face and hands in the sink. Scrub down the bib, sponge out the high chair, use a broom and dustpan to clean up the wreckage of his meal in a 6′ circle around the epicenter, then sponge same area clean with the “dirty sponge.” Finally, put away all the components of his meal – bean container, cheese block, cracker box, melon half, and so on.
This is why Amy has hung a picture of the wreckage of the 1907 San Francisco earthquake above his high chair.
A previous post chewed on the vast discrepancy between a $300,000 Iraqi estimate to repair a particular bridge and an American bid to repair the same bridge at $50 million. Today, Gilbert sends along a Washington Post piece that helps put such cost discrepancies into perspective. It’s not that the American bids are without greed, but much of the cost difference is taken up in cultural differences. Americans see a bombed out cement factory and see the need to basically scrap it and rebuild from scratch. Iraqis, accustomed to doing a lot with a little, see a chance to clear out the rubble and get the darn thing online, even if at lowered capacity. The Iraqi improv may be more of a Band-Aid than a long-term solution, but still, cement does come out the other end. Then factor in things like insurance – Halliburton has had to waive subcontractor requirements such as hazard insurance, which isn’t even available in Iraq.
Everything is simpler than it seems. No, I mean, more complex.
Apple moved to CUPS (common unix printing system) for Panther. That’s all well and good, but in order to do so, they blotted out currently installed vendor drivers. That might have been all well and good, but some of the CUPS drivers aren’t as capable as the commercial versions. Which meant that Amy’s color Epson no longer had a gamma control, and no longer had an option to use black ink only.
Panther means nothing to Amy. She doesn’t care about a new Finder, doesn’t care about Expose, or any of the other “150 new features.” Things were fine in Jaguar, and now her printer was broken, while she was in the middle of a long-term printing project.
Operating system upgrades should add features not remove them. Apple could at least give you the option of using one driver or the other. Fortunately, I discovered that the old drivers do still work, but you have to remove the CUPS driver first. Here’s what I did:
Go into /Library/Printers/Epson and find SP890.plugin.
Ctrl-click | Make Archive to create a zipped version.
Delete the plugin.
Reinstall Epson’s downloadable driver.
Restart.
Back in business, but what a crock.
