01.14.05
Posted in General
at 7 pm
This post brought to you on the 365th anniversary* of the “ratification” of the Fundamental Orders.
Excerpted from The Avalon Project : Fundamental Orders of 1639:
“… And the rest of the Magistrates or public officers to be chosen in this manner: the Secretary for the time being shall first read the names of all that are to be put to choice and then shall severally nominate them distinctly, and every one that would have the person nominated to be chosen shall bring in one single paper written upon, and he that would not have him chosen shall bring in a blank; and every one that hath more written papers than blanks shall be a Magistrate for that year; …”
I find it fascinating that in 1639 they had the concept of voting _against_ someone. In this case, the “they” are the three towns in “Connectecotte” that participated in this early Constitution.
*Just how long ago was this? At this time, as an English colony (Not “British” as England and Scotland had not joined up) the authors of the Orders were using the Julian calendar, (which was off by 11 days at the time from the now widely used Gregorian Calendar) __and__ at the time, they considered the first day of the year to be March 25, so they signed the document as 1638!
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01.12.05
Posted in General
at 11 pm
From the document entitled: INCH-POUND MIL-C-44072C 30 April 1990 SUPERSEDING MIL-C-44072B 9 December 1987 W/CHANGE 12 February 2003
3.2.2 Oatmeal. Oatmeal shall be the commercial product known as quick cooking oatmeal. It shall have natural rolled oat flavor and odor and shall be clean and free from burned particles, rancid, musty, sour, or other undesirable flavors and odors.
Got that? Natural rolled oat flavor or we’ll bust you down to private!
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01.10.05
Posted in General
at 12 am
It was at least this long ago that I mentioned that I wanted a LaserDisc player, but I’ve actually had 4 Depeche Mode LaserDiscs for 6 or 7 years or more. Devotional, Strange Too, and older items have been awaiting their moment in the sun. This weekend, thanks to SurplusGizmos I now have my own player for just $20. It’s a Pioneer deck and pretty straightforward. So far it’s worked pretty well and I’m thinking I’ll be able to digitize some frames from the discs in the nearish future.
Now I’ve just got to find that Japanese release of Strange…
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01.08.05
Posted in General
at 10 am
N.C. councilmen accused of using PDAs to violate open-meeting law
HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. — Two town council members have been accused of violating open-meetings laws by using electronic devices to communicate during board meetings.
Mike Gering and Eric Hallman used personal digital assistants, or PDAs, to send messages during meetings, according to Paul Newton, chairman of the Hillsborough Planning Board.
Their “communication of text messages over their PDAs during official town meetings represents a certain level of disrespect to their peers on the town board and the citizens of Hillsborough,” Newton said. “Their actions may be considered unethical and, at the very worst, be considered illegal or fraudulent.”
Hallman and Gering said they tried to use the devices, but they didn’t work.
“It crashes all the time,” Hallman said. “It was just more playing with the technology. Mine crashes every time I try to use it.”
“Eric and I have the same PDA and we attempted once, maybe twice, to see if they could communicate, but we couldn’t make it work so, no, we don’t communicate during board meetings with the PDAs,” Gering said.
Funny. Saved by the fact that their PDAs suck.
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01.07.05
Posted in General
at 11 pm
Okay, I’m looking for the perfect ‘headphone’ and hoping that maybe if I suggest it enough you guys will make it.
Anyone with an iPod who wants to use it all day long has to have headphones. That’s a given. But I don’t want to block out the rest of the world; when I’m on my bike, or walking, or driving, or at work, I don’t want to have headphones in both of my ears. I just want one.
That’s the key for me. I want to get a single ‘headphone’ that will allow me to listen to my iPod, though i’d like to still listen to both the left and right channels, with having them cancel out.
Right now, I’ve taken a cellphone ear piece, attached a 3.5 mm to 2.5 mm adapter to it and have ended up find out that “Sgt. Pepper’s” has a very distinct use of the stereo channels, since the right channel ends up playing out of the little microphone.
I want a headphone that will have the following:
1) A single headphone that can play both stereo channels mixed together.
2) An inline cord management device, like those Zip-Linq cords or something that will keep the wires cleaned up when I take the the iPod out of my jacket when I get to work.
3) Some sort of small pass-thru jack so that I don’t have to plug and unplug cables into my iPod to get to play through speakers at work. Those headphone jacks always get loose and flaky, rendering the music portion of the iPod worthless. Or make it wireless. That would work too.
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01.06.05
Posted in General
at 4 pm
Writing good driving directions is an under-appreciated art.
The directions of “[Place] is located in Hillsboro on Cornelius Pass about 2 blocks North of Baseline.” are not ‘directions’ as any reasonable human being would define them.
And they’re all but completely worthless for someone outside of the local area. Or someone who is driving.
(This moment of frustration brought to you by your vendor who’s trying to give you a web site worth using.)
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01.03.05
Posted in General
at 9 pm
From the Uk’s Daily Telegraph article we learn:
“She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.
“Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.”
This is the kind of thing that could really push me over the edge. Amy and I had been talking about the devastation last night.. I was almost to tears myself. If I had read this I would have gone right over.
Send to the Red Cross, Northwest Medical Teams or Mercy Corps.
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Posted in General
at 8 am
Man, things are really moving fast in my little corner of the tech world. In the last 24 hours I’ve seen the following:
1) My 12-year-old niece has become comfortable with FTP in a 10 minute session, as she starts building her own web site from scratch. She picked up how to do external style sheets from a bit of sample code along with font and background colors, plus how to access images that are in a subdirectory.
2) My 10-year-old nephew compiled his first Java program. From a command line. A basic “Hello World” type thing, but it’s the kind of thing that is where you start and no doubt he’ll be able to follow along in his intro to Java book.
3) Paul Guyot, Newton programmer extraordinaire, has released an early alpha of a Newton Hardware emulator that runs the Newton ROMS in an X11 environment. No kidding. This is incredible. This pushes his work 10 times further than any other emulator project that has ever seen the light of day in the past 8 years.
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01.01.05
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Although some people have had problems setting up their Airport, I had no problem at all. I plugged the white semiregular polyhedron with curvilinearly-truncated edges into a spare plug on a power strip, opened up my Airport Setup Assistant (which had been updated recently when I took my iBook from 10.3.5 to 10.3.7) and it found the defaultly named airport Express without a problem.
No cross-over cable or router wiring needed. The only machine of consequence that can’t send music to the AX is my Blue&White G3. I need to either A) run an ethernet cable from one end of the apartment to the other to hook the AX into the wired network, or B) find a /cheap/ WiFi PCI card that will work in the G3.
One is ugly and cheap the other is elegant and more expensive. Isn’t that how it always is?
Added a couple hours later:
I finally figured out *exactly* what’s missing: an iTrip that connects via AirTunes. Com’on Griffin, you can do it! (Belkin, I’m still not speaking to you after that whole pop-up ad packets debacle.)
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Posted in General
at 2 am
What did you do on your Christmas Vacation?
I migrated 2 web sites to a new host and set up and configured a reseller’s account and set up 2 web hosting accounts for loved ones.
I turned our robotic cat box into a remote control robotic cat box.
I got an AirPort Express that I’m using to stream music to our stereo.
I figured out that our stereo is pretty crappy and should be replaced with a 2nd hand Sony receiver from Stuff for $89. Soon.
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