12.09.01
Posted in General
at 2 am
My paycheck from my PSU class came in yesterday night.
I bought an iPod this afternoon. The first store I went to was sold out. The second store said they had 100 on hand. Now they have 99.
Playing with it has led me to the following conclusion: It is the most advanced form of recorded audio technology in existence. It’s got the whole package when it comes to audio clarity, power supply, storage, physical size, interfaces and aesthetic. It will be in my Fetish section (new window).
Two things that must be noted:
1) The screen itself is a work of art. The pixels per inch on the screen must hit upwards of 120 dpi. This is amazing. Although the screen is the secondary output device on importance, it’s given the kind of quality that you would hope. Color would be nice, but it would offer no additional value in terms of the device’s function or aesthetic.
2) The industrial design of the device is art like, right down to the vertical symmetry that occurs with the headphones plugged in. The plug is in the center of the top panel, equally flanked by the firewire port and the ‘hold’ switch. And there’s an underlying female energy (new window) to it, as opposed to some other products (new window).
Now if I can rescue some mail I accidently deleted, upgrade from MacOS 9.1 to 9.2.1, and get IE5 to work again, I will be a happy camper.
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12.06.01
Posted in General
at 11 am
Bad-seed.org is finally back after nearly a week of outages. Woo Hoo! This is such great news!
This week was Hectic with a capital H as work was Monday’s 12 hour day of preping for the next two days, Tuesday was a marathon meeting from 8:30am to 5:00pm, followed by the final class of the term from 6:00pm to 9:30pm.
Wednesday was a second all day meeting 8:30am to 5:00pm and from 6:30pm to 10:00pm was a presentation at the Multimedia | Internet Developer’s Group (http://www.oregon.org/) where Nick Finck and I gave a presentation on Web Standards (http://www.nickfinck.com/words_webstandards.html).
Yes it’s been a bad time to have my host down for a week. However, OrderSomewhereChaos.com has been up, so it’s half good/half bad, rather than all bad.
In case you tried to e-mail me this last week, assume that I didn’t get it. Resend it and I’ll follow up as soon as I can.
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11.27.01
Posted in General
at 11 am
I really wish that Microsoft’s dictionary that is is included with their products would stop spelling Photoshop with a capitalized ‘S’. It’s just so wrong. Even MicroSoft dropped their intercap a long time ago. Can’t they update this? Anyone know where to write?
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11.26.01
Posted in General
at 3 pm
I Predict:
Someone will invent a handheld, wireless device that will swipe a credit card and debit amounts in 10 cent increments.
It will be a boon for pan handlers, once everyone stops carrying cash.
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11.24.01
Posted in General
at 11 am
This Thanksgiving saw me driving to Grants Pass on Wednesday night and back to Portland on Friday afternoon. A nice quick trip. I got to spend some great time with my parents and with Bo and Bob and Jan, and with TJ.
My family had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with 4 other families, a hosted dinner/potluck that goes back 20 years now. It’s not as big now as it was as the Hostess put it, “Some years it’s just us old geezers.”
In the meantime, I’ve got some work to do: It’s Amy’s Birthday! Yay! Happy Birthday, Love!
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11.20.01
Posted in General
at 2 pm
Someone should make a regular USB desktop keyboard that has an integrated PDA cradle. Put the PDA in, flip a switch and now you’re typing on your PDA. Flip the switch again and you’re typing on your machine.
Someone should make a CD player that will automatically “rip and remember” every CD that is put in it. That way all the music ever played in that CD will be available.
Prediction: Every CD player *will* be able to read discs full of MP3s. Two years, max, until this happens.
I want a flowchart program that helps me sketch and lets me make mistakes. I shouldn’t have to think things out *and then* put them into the system. The system should help me and not make it more difficult.
I want my parking garage to use a debit card like those pre-paid phone cards. Drive up, slide the slip that I got when I came in, slide the pre-paid parking card, and I’m off.
Olson’s 1st law of technology: every player shrinks until it reaches one of two limits: The size of the medium it plays, or the size that is easy for a human to keep track of. Examples: No cell phone will shrink below the size of a keypad that is typable until voice activation is reliable. No CD Player will ever be smaller than a CD. No Cassette Player will be smaller than a cassette. No Minidisc player will be smaller than a minidisc. No MP3 player will be smaller than it’s medium. Compact Flash? Multimedia Card? SD card?
I would love to see a Minidisc player that simply clips onto a Minidisc. Could you do the same with a CD?
I did see an MP3 player that was simply a pair of headphones. Almost small enough.
Ramble, ramble…
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11.19.01
Posted in General
at 10 am
Not a common place for me to read from, but there’s a pre-Exciter tour interview with Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode at something called askmen.com.
A number of interesting questions being asked. It’s always pretty cool when you find those interviews that clear up a number of little details. I’m sure it makes for a strange interview, jumping back and forth on topics, but it clears up a lot of things like, “Why have some of the songs from the Brickhouse recording never been released?” and “What was up with the Gap commercial?”.
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11.18.01
Posted in General
at 1 pm
A lot of stars were out last night. Wonderfully beautiful.
It was the Leonid show last night and since it was the night of a New Moon and it was a Saturday night, everything was aligned to go watch them, which we did, out at Rooster Rock.
Heh, heh. Rooster Rock… Yeah. Ask me about that place sometime.
Anyway, Amy and I watched the stars from the hood of the Honda which was warm from the drive and kept me toasty.
This was all after I went to the 5th Year Party for http://www.bornmagazine.org and saw Gabe (who leads the thing), Molly, David and his friend James. The one person I really expected to see what Nick Finck, but he was there earlier than I was and had left by the time I arrived.
Any why had I arrived so late? Because I’m so hopelessly devoted to Depeche Mode that I sat through 2 and a half mind-numbing hours of the MTV Europe Video Music Awards to see their performance of Never Let Me Down Again, and got it recorded to VHS. That didn’t happen until 11:30pm. I walked over to the party which lasted till about 1:00am. It was pretty cool, being held in the basement of It’s a Beautiful Pizza.
It’s was strange for me. When I first heard that BornMag was going to have a party I figured it would be in NY or DC or SF. Then it turns out to be 12 blocks from my house. Very cool. 🙂
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Posted in General
at 12 pm
Cam at Camworld posted a link to http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/8009/unix.admin.horror..html which collects a bunch of horrid stories, the sort of things that when they happen to you (And they will!) they give make a huge pit open up in your stomach and cause your throat to plummet well into the nether regions of the earth.
It reminds me of the time when I was cleaning out a particular directory on one of the Sun boxes at Exact Interactive. Every time a Mac that was connected to the network deleted a file that actually resided on the Sun server, a temp file was created. These temp files never got cleaned up so I went in every few weeks and deleted them. Well what’s done by hand on a regular basis is sure to fail at some point.
It just so happened that one day my fingers slipped and I didn’t actually get the ‘ch’ change directory command to take, and I was still at the root when I ended up typing “rm -r *” Oh yes. Oh no. I just typed in a command that would progressively delete every singe file and sub directory on the server.
Not good.
My one saving grace was the Steve had *just* inserted a CD-ROM into the machine and it ended up mounting it’s un-writable self on the machine just after my command had finished wiping out the /bin directory. Suddenly my runaway command tried to delete each file on /cdrom and ended up stopping dead in its tracks.
The day was saved by shear luck as Steve was able to transfer the /bin from Server-B to Server-A and no one was the wiser. Steve even kept it quiet to this day.
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