Once again, short on time, enough so that I regret to report that his entry shall undoubtedly suffer. In the machine migration I appear to have left some nifty Word macros behind that allowed me to do a certain amount of basic HTML in that app without having to resort to cleaning up the beast's unruly, overfeatured HTML. So I'll take a crack at using the new-ish version of ecto, which in the past has had some uncomfortable interactions with my (certainly crufted-up) server-side perl. Well, it's still early days yet, a bit of trial and error, which happily brings us to the subject of today's Blimp Week II installment.
A word about vocabulary, here: while this series is collectively referred to as Blimp Week, in fact I hope to write only about rigid airships this week. Rigid airships are known collectively as dirigibles, and the specific dirigibles designed by the airship company founded by Ferdinand von Zeppelin and associated engineers are known as Zeppelins. Today, a new company with the same name (almost) builds and flies the modern airships called Zeppelin NT. As Viv pointed out in a comment yesterday, you can purchase one, if you like.
So how does one build an airship? Well, in January I highlighted the card model of the never-built Vickers Transoceanic Airship from the terrific Currell’s Card Models. He also offers the British R-101 airship and more, but we've covered all of this already. For these airships, a true ruler, a sharp blade, keen eyes, and a steady hand will get you far. Elmer's glue will close the gap. Of course, cardmodeling leaves something to be desired in the didactics, since the paper itself provides the rigidity for the models. (More on the ill-starred British aviation programme may be taken in at the Airship Heritage Trust or, for Francophones, Les dirigeables R-100 et R-101.)
I'm sorry to keep pointing out prior art, but the next links due for perusal were covered here in July. Dannysoar, (an amazing storehouse of aviation gimcrackery) provides the basic info on some antique stick-and-tissue model dirigibles at Zepps, while Building Airships and Flying-Machines comes to us from the good offices of one Glenn Curtiss, noted aviation pioneer. Lucky for us, we can fact check his ass with the slightly more modern Details of Modern Airships, 1927.
For a more hands-on approach, the preferred methodology is the rustlin' up of historical photos and obtaining plan drawings of the ship you are interested in building. The good news is that there are many places to view images of the historical ships on the web. The bad news is that there are very few plan drawings available online. Here are two.
(Apologies for the too-small thumbs. ecto didn't have an obvious image-upload options dialog.) The image above is from this page of construction views of the USS Akron; it's a part of this U. S. Navy collection of vintage aviation equipment photos. The image below is from a forgotten source, but is clearly a comparison drawing showing the Shenandoah and a proposed but not-yet-built airship.
Where do you get plans? Well, many libraries list collections of lighter-than-air related material online. Interesting collections of ephemera surface for auction, as well. But the only places I found that offer access to a wide range of plans are the somewhat related ABAC ("THE ASSOCIATION OF BALLOON AND AIRSHIP CONSTRUCTORS") and one "G. Wright - Airships." The ABAC apparently has a collectively-maintained library that you pay dues to get access to, and Mr. Wright sells plans - lots of plans - of any kind of airship, as well as a wide range of LTA-related stuff. The ABAC notes that issue 27-1 of their newsletter is available online, in PDF. The page does not mention that issues 22-1 and 27-2 are also available. 27-1 has a highly detailed overview of "Great Britain’s 23X Class Rigid Airships," by Kent O'Grady, which appeals to me greatly but which may also be too technical for me to properly absorb. I look forward to it.
Given that you've plan in hand, however obtained, what's next? In general, the accepted practice would appear to be one of obtaining large amounts of balsa wood, and pinning the wood to the plan to be shaped and cut. A large number of intermediate steps then take place, which we shall leave as an exercise for the reader. The finished product may not, in all cases, be quite as remarkable as this World War 1 combat zeppelin, the L31 (see the Dawn of Aces section in How to Fly a Zeppelin).
These model pages, by the way, come from the The Zeppelin Library, a venerable collection of zeppelinalia. The highlight of the model pages, though, is clearly the work seen here, by Ed Gailliot. Featured on the page are three model sets, so detailed and of such scale that they clearly deserve a home in a museum display. The first of the models depicts the crew quarters and aircraft hangar bays of the USS Macon and USS Akron, complete with aircraft and tiny beds, and appear to contain elaborate moving parts. The scale 1/32, but is not visually given. In a picture of Ed standing next to his handiwork the bay model appears to be about four feet wide, making it something like five or six feet long.
The next model is of the great airship hangar in Akron, Ohio, home of Goodyear, and featured on the logo below. The model appears to be several feet long and includes the Akron, a mooring mast, and a tiny Navy patrol blimp, of the kind we think of when the Goodyear Blimp comes to mind.
Finally, and in some ways most fascinating, are the images of Ed's quite large model of the Hindenburg's passenger decks, including both the crew quarters and the staterooms, smoking area, dining room, and so forth. More detailed images of all of these models would be a great and wonderful thing, as would a chance to hear Ed discussing his creation process. Here's hoping that they are safely stored away and destined for a warm, well-budgeted museum display somewhere.
This concludes the modeling portion of our flight this week.
My original game plan called for "How to build a Zeppelin" to run today, the natural followup to "How to fly a Zeppelin." Alas, a plethora of resources has led to a dearth of editing and composition time, and I therefore deem it meet to instead feature a first-person account of a journey at the pace of the clouds.
From Rio to Akron aboard the Graf Zeppelin, 1933, by Alicia Momsen Miller, is a memoir recounting the author's childhood voyage from South America to Ohio, home of the Goodyear Company and the Zeppelin company's most important international technology partner. Amusing me, the number one Google result for "Goodyear Akron 1933" is this page concerning the 1931-1933 career of the USS Akron, the third great U. S. Navy rigid airship. It met its' end in April of 1933; Mrs. Miller's flight took place in October, 1933.
In 1933, when I was eight, my parents were planning a vacation by ship to the U.S. I don't know whether it was my father's idea or that of the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp., but my father and his family were offered a free trip on the Graf Zeppelin from Rio de Janeiro to Chicago. Our trip would be part of a triangular flight, Germany-Brazil-U.S.-Germany. With the Graf Zeppelin we would visit the Chicago World's Fair, "A Century of Progress." But my father had to convince my mother to travel by air...They drove to the airfield the next day, and my mother told us later, "There was the huge airship, tied to the ground. It was a very windy day, and its outer covering was shivering. The fabric looked like you could poke a hole through it with your finger." She was horrified, deciding never to trust her children in such a thing. But my father insisted they look at the accommodations in the gondola, and they ascended the short sturdy ladder.
"What a surprise!" my mother said, "The large living room with its big windows had a number of attractive chairs and tables, and down the hall were wonderful roomy double staterooms." She felt the mattresses, and found them comfortable. The wide bunks were made up with linen sheets and warm fluffy blankets. "If anything happens, at least we'll all be together," she said.
In the instance, however, Mrs. Miller's mother had nothing to worry about. Graf Zeppelin met with her end only in 1940, when the increasing demands of World War II led the German state to disassemble the surviving ships, grounded since the Hindenburg disaster.
I have previously linked to the fascinating Larry's U.S. Navy Airship Picture Book (now back in print!), but I had a hard time coming up with other first person narratives. I found plenty of stuff about some rock band, though.
(...onscreen, anyway.)
Blimp Week II continues with this surefire crowd pleaser! What wild-eyed wannabe airshipman hasn't dreamt of moseying through the air in a lighter-than-air leviathan? While a bit of searching did not yield a super-detailed, insanely accurate simulation of any specific lighter-than-air craft, there are two reasonably detailed flight sims that offer a good start. One, Dawn of Aces, is a largely-moribund massively-multiplayer flight sim that did not include a zeppelin in the most recent public beta, so I'll be suggest a fairly old version of the game. The other, X-Plane, is a bonafide sim-genre phenomenon. It allows enthusiasts for the sim to design and develop their own aircraft, imaginary or otherwise. This means, that in theory, airship enthusiasts could develop accurate and detailed flying models of the older ships. In practice, the user-contributed models I have seen have tended to the fanciful.
A final word before we begin: flying these aircraft is very unlike flying a plane. They are quite slow. They take forever to turn, and stop even more slowly. Remember, just because your ship has the buoyancy of a child's balloon does not mean it's massless.
Download a game
Download either the terrific - and daunting - X-Plane flight sim or the creaky, but still pretty cool, Dawn of Aces II. X-Plane pretty much requires a fast computer of recent vintage - it's also a HUGE download. DoA II will work well on most any computer, although Mac players will be disappointed to learn that the game is OS9-only and does not offer the lovely rendering and texture mapping seen in the PC screenshots. (There is an OSX/Wintel DoA III - but alas, development is stalled and there is no zep in the model set. It's available on the same page as DoA II.)
If you have chosen X-Plane
Wait for your download to conclude, read through the documentation, and launch the application. When you move your cursor to the top of the screen, a menubar will appear. Select the "File" menu, then "Open Aircraft." A dialog will open in which you can select a range of possible aircraft types. Pick "Airships." and "Hindenburg."
You'll find yourself on the runway of a Southern California airport in a slowly listing giant of the air. Let's skip takeoff and get right to the main act.
Activate the menubar, select "Location," and then "Get me lost." You'll find yourself at about 10,000 feet, and will immediately enter a steep dive. In the center of your control panel is a little group of three controls, two with wheels and one with a sliding lever. The sliding lever is at the bottom of the control group. Push the flat knob on the lever to the top of its' track. Immediately after, place your cursor over the lower end of the wheel control at the top of the control group (it's to the right of the window labeled vertically "ELEV TRIM") and press until you see the little indicator in the ELEV TRIM window go all the way to the bottom of the window.
The flat lever at the bottom of this group appears to control your nose attitude and the ELEV TRIM wheel sets the attitude in stone. It's possible, however, that the lever is a bouyancy control. As you play with them, you'll see how they control the climb and dive of the ship.
Once you feel like you've learned to avoid a diving death on the California scrub, the next important task is to admire yourself in flight. Hit the "a" key to switch your viewpoint to the aft chase camera. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to slide the camera around your vessel.
That's it! There's more to the zeppelin, of course, and much more to X-Plane, as well. For example, there's this range of third-party airships to try, including the Flying Pig, an updated Hindenburg, and a blimp each for Goodyear and Fuji.
If you have Chosen Dawn of Aces II
Once you've installed the application as required, launch it, and when the initial menu screen appears, click the button marked "Practice Offline." Your main screen will blink and you'll see a graphic of a rifle leaning on a wooden railing. At the top of the view are a series of buttons; click "Select."
A dialog will open providing several choices of vintage aircraft accessed via the drop down menu under the large graphic that says "Planes." Near the bottom of the list is a line labeled "LZ30." Select that. You'll see a preview of the ship, low over an aerodrome. With it selected, click "Setup," and then the tab labeled "Flight." The starting altitude should be set to 5000 feet. You can change it if you wish, but to learn the ship, some height is best. Click OK, and the Setup dialog should vanish.
Now click the button marked "Fly." The view should change to a primitive, silhouetted view out the front windows of your airship. In white on the black are the airship controls. You should be cruising straight and level with all engines at full power. You can vary their power by hitting the numeral keys from 1 to 10 (these also cause you to jump though the gunnery positions; hit '1' to get back to the control cabin), and stop or start them by hitting the 'e' key. More control info can be seen by hitting the 'F4' key.
While the controls seen here are as different from the actual controls of early Zeppelins as X-Plane's, as far as I can tell, they also offer you control over the same things, and in more or less the same way, as all the early zeps. You control your bouyancy by venting gas or dropping water ballast. Your dirigible is divided into sections for the gas and you can control the bouyancy of each section. The in-game, fictional LZ30 has six gasbags; real ones had more. Your climbing and turn are controlled by your elevators and rudder. "K" and "I" control your elevators, while "A" and "D" control your rudder. That's not it, of course, but it's the basics.
Now, let's look at ourselves!
Hit the "option" or "alt" key at the same time as the "v" key. you'll be positioned as a far rear chase camera. Zoom in by using the "[" key and out with the "]" key. Rotate around the ship by using the numpad keys.
Like X-Plane, both versions of DoA have more to offer. Flying the WW1 combat planes that are Dawn of Aces' reason for existence is definitely more exciting than flying the zeps, which are very slow and hard to maneuver.
DoA II once hosted a small but dedicated community of online pilots, but the game has aged and the players have largely moved on.
For comparison
Curious about the user interfaces the games use to present the control of the airships to the user, I dug around to find a few images of zeppelin control cars. I did not know in detail the arrangement of the controls, but mostly recalled that the rudder and attitude controls were connected to two separate ship-style wheels, and in a large ship, each would be manned by a separate sailor.
I found four small images of Zeppelin control cars, one each from the LZ127 Graf Zeppelin, the LZ129 Hindenburg, and the LZ130, the Graf Zeppelin II. I also found one apparently taken at the Aeronauticum, an aviation museum located in Nordholz, Germany. The photo taken in the museum shows what I believe to be the control car arrangement for the Graf Zeppelin in flight with a full crew complement. However, the mannequins wear what appear to be military uniforms so this could represent a scene aboard a naval vessel.
Aeronauticum mockup
LZ127 control car view
LZ129 control deck view
LZ130 control car view
As you can see, the control arrangements are quite different from the sort of controls that we commonly associate with aviation. This is at least partially because lighter-than-air aviation was seen as a naval technology, and therefore steering and crewing approaches derived from mariners' solutions.
For the first scheduled entry in Blimp Week II here at mike.whybark.com, a simple, link-oriented post. Sure, you watched the Hindenberg III slide by last week in the theater, and it was a peculiar mix of grandiose and intimate. But something was missing, nonetheless. What could it be?
Well, in part at least, the answer is nothing less than binocular vision! Thanks to the wonders of modern electron transmission technology, today's 'always-on' intarweb can help to rectify your balance due. At least two sites specialize in presenting 3-D images of airships past to the world.
Zeppelin-3d.de is a German-language frame-based website devoted to a selection of red-green 3D images from the entire history of the initial development of the German rigid airships known as Zeppelins. Lucky for us non-German speakers, the Union Jack to the lower right of the bottom frame opens an English-language menu that points to the rough-and-ready English translations of the web site's pages, such as this brief set of views featuring the U. S. Navy's Akron and Macon.
The cross-linked site Stereoscopic Images of Lighter Than Air Flight concentrates on double-print stereographic views, rather than the superimposed images seen at the German site. However, it should be noted that it's likely that many of the images seen on the German site originated as double-print stereographs, as the Zeppelin company apparently published or sponsored several viewer-integrated stereoscopic souvenir kits.
The preceding links were found via a trip to the invaluable Airship website, maintained for nearly a decade by John Dziadecki.
I have a favorite spice mix commonly used in Western Europe to flavor butter, served on steak. The mix is known, in French, as "Café de Paris," and I've seen it called "Dip Frankreich" in German; I also have a jar in front of me that is marked "Gewürtzmischung für Kraüterbutter." I'm pretty sure that the French name for the spice mix translates to "Cafe of Paris," while the German monikers render as "Frankie dip" and "Gross mistakes for buttering Krauts."
Be that as it may, the jar has a list of ingredients in French and German. Since the list of ingredients for buttering Krauts is presumably less appetizing than that found in a Parisian cafe, I'll concentrate on the French list.
The label says, and I quote, "persil, coriandre, poivre, ail, muscade, gingembre, romarin, feuilles de laurier." Googlefish helpfully clarifies this to mean "parsley, coriandre, pepper, garlic, nutmeg, gingembre, rosemary, sheets of bay-tree."
Well, it's a start. I'm gonna take a wild guess here and express my sentiment that "coriandre" is corn on the cob, whilst "sheets of bay-tree" must refer to laundry drying in a rural seaside community. This only leaves the mystery of "gingembre" to parse.
Because "gingembre" looks and sounds much like "December" and "November," I deduce that the spice must then be also the name of a month. While I could look up the names of all twelve French months in a book or even online, moving the mouse to the top of my browser and initiating a fresh Google query is simply too much effort. Heck, remembering the names on my own is even too hard. So we're going to do this the easy way, by using free association and guesswork.
"Gingembre" must be the month named after gin, which in turn gave its' name to gingivitis. As gingivitis is a well-known disease of the bloody gums, it must be, like gin, associated with the British. Since this clearly establishes a link to "scurvy dogs," "gingembre" must therefore be the month in which scurvy was most commonly known to affect a crew at sea in the days before the invention of Rose's Lime Juice. As clearly no-one with a lick of sense would ever set foot on deck between October and March, we've narrowed the choices down to the remaining three months of the year: June, July and August.
Gin, of course, was invented by Father Junipero Serra, as a means of keeping the Indians drunk and near the California missions that still bear his name (which, in English translation, is "Taco Bell"). The Hammerin' Friar, as I have just dubbed him, used the waste-product from his many bark-cloth production facilities. These factories primarily used the Friar's namesake plant, the Junipero bush, and junipero berries and stems are the basis of most gin produced in the world to this day. The father's industrial empire, of course, gave us the common coinage we still use today. Who can employ the phrase "gin mills" without summoning the adobe walls of those early palaces of industry to mind?
And here, of course, we find the key. "Gingembre" is clearly the French word for both "June" and "juniper." Our mystery ingredient must, therefore, be: "gin".
Download, Peel and Stick, and All the World's a Gallery [blogerated NYT link]. ex-Seattle blogger Samantha Storey lands a piece in the NYT about sticker street art, and brings Cold-K aficionado Jeff Sharman along for the ride.
Army Floats a Trial Balloon (washingtonpost.com):
Brandreth said American Blimp is promoting the use of airships as airborne surveillance. Many people wrongly assume blimps are vulnerable to bullets fired by, say, drug runners or terrorists."Almost everything people think they know about blimps is wrong," said Brandreth, citing the misconception that a bullet can bring down a blimp. The envelope is rip-proof. And many people seem to consider blimps moving targets.
"We often discover bullet holes when the airships are brought to our hangar for maintenance," he said. "People shoot at them. Particularly in the country. We think it's kids, not urban warfare. We just patch it up and go."
The WaPo (reg status unknown) kicks things off here at Blimp Week II a day early, with this article introducing DC-area residents to their own Blimp Week. The 178-foot blimp, apparently manufactured by Oregon's American Blimp Corporation, will be performing flight trials for the Army of the metropolitan area of the nation's capitol. ABC maintains facilities in Hillsboro, Oregon and some space at the Northwest's surviving former naval LTA base in Tillamook, a location Viv and I visited in spring, 2003, just as the war started.
American Blimp appears to be the non-advertising and tourism arm of Lightships, the primary supplier of lighter-than-air advertising and publicity ships to corporations such as Sanyo, whose vessel stopped by Seattle earlier this year.
Viv and I caught Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (link advisory: flash, loud SFX) this afternoon. Following the film we ate at the lovely Le Pichet, a tiny French bistro on First, next to the Virginia Inn. The meal was quite pricey but the food was very good.
Sky Captain, as you must know by now, is interesting formally for other reasons than its’ simple cinematic existence. First, the great majority of what you see on screen is wholly rendered via computer; and second, it’s intended as a kind of retro-cinema, not unlike the initial Indiana Jones film, or The Rocketeer. Both Sky Captain and The Rocketeer are fascinated by that long-vanished dinosaur of the sky, the dirigible, and provide contemporary audiences with the closest thing we’ll ever have to seeing the faceted, fragile leviathans slide by our wondering eyes.
Unlike Indy or The Rocketeer, however, Sky Captain is also trying to recreate the cinematic experience of watching a film shot between 1925 and 1940, and goes to great lengths to emulate the visual experience of the older films. This is mostly via post-production desaturation and a gauzy glow that is perfectly recognizable as a sort of filmic seme for High Hollywood. Viv turned to me as we were watching and wanted to know if the film had originally been shot in black-and-white and then colored, a reasonable question based solely on the look of the film.
The good news for retro-tech geeks is that the CGI is fantastic. Thanks to strategic framing, there is nearly no "grounding" problem (seen when computer-rendered elements appear to 'float'). Unfortunate for everybody is the combination of hyper-realistic detailing in the CGI with the flattening, overall, blended look of the post-processing filters. In non-character-oriented shots, we're presented with a flurry of edits intended to convey the richly detailed environment. Sadly, the glowing, washed-out look overwhelms the CGI detail, and leaves the viewer wondering if a plot-point just sailed by there in that 10-frame sniplet.
The real bad news is that the dialog and performances are queerly flat, lacking a sense of investment and urgency. This stems partially from the frantic pace of the non-character shots. Mind you, this is nitpicking; none of the leads appear to be sleepwalking. But Gwyneth Paltrow's Polly Perkins, a reporter, is clearly an homage to Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson from the 1940 His Girl Friday. That's all to the good. Yet, Jennifer Jason Leigh's Amy Archer, another Russell homage (from The Hudsucker Proxy) captures the stacatto vocal rythms that are crucial to the thirties mise-en-scene. Alas, Paltrow's dialog and interplay with Jude Law's mercenary aviator, while lazily amusing, has nowhere near the verbal power of her character's forebears.
Much of the relative slow pace of the dialog, oddly, appears to be an artifact of editing. Where the film clips and snips to the detriment of plot in the sequences that include no identifiable human, adding a well-known actor to the frame guarantees a sixfold drop in the cutting rate, and the consequence is that fat remains between the lines. When the DVD for this is released, some enterprising wannabe will trim a solid forty minutes of silent facial tics from the ins and outs of each headshot cut-to and cutaway. I, for one, welcome our volunteer editors, and despite my harsh words here, will anxiously await the DVD of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. With IMDB estimating that the film cost $70m, and with the film making $17m on opening weekend, Box Office Guru [not a permalink] notes that the film saw revenue drop from Monday to Tuesday of next week, and projects $8m for this weekend. Judging by the nearly empty theater at our showing, that seems possible. Alas, that bodes ill for the movie to break even on a six week-run.
It seems probable, however, that the specialized visual content and production processes of Sky Captain open additional revenue possibilities for the film, and the sheer visual and referential density of the piece will lend itself well to DVD (and, one hopes, to video game).
Outside the boundaries of the sketchy review here offered, some notes are in order. I am happy to report that beginning Monday I will be presenting the first sequential series of Blimp Week entries in a couple of years.
A post on Monkeyfilter has inspired this, and consequently I shall address specific information requests from that thread first; I will be providing mirrored links with drastically shorter entries on Monkeyfilter as well. Here's one geeky tidbit: the dirigibles seen at Joe Sullivan's base exhibit an "X" control surface configuration which was only ever widely deployed on postwar U. S. Navy blimps, to my imperfect knowledge. Most historical dirigibles (both the German Zeppelins and the rigid airships designed and built elsewhere) used control surfaces arrayed in a vertical and horizontal cross configuration. Contemporary blimps more frequently employ the cross.
Last weekend, as the film opened, a flurry of referrals came to this website for a variety of topics, including "Sky Captain zeppelin" and "Sky Captain Moorcock." Regarding these referrals from Google that imply some people are wondering about Michael Moorcock's association with, influence on, or input to the story of Sky Captain: I'm making an uninformed guess that while Moorcock probably had no direct input on the story, some of his retro-pulp fictions directly inspired the film-maker. He wrote a terrific neo-pulp trilogy, The Warlord of the Air, which envisions things not that unlike Angelina Jolie's airborne aircraft carriers.
Mr. Moorcock himself appears concerned about this. I'm not sure I'd say that he should be, but he's certainly justified in his desire to learn more.
Despite this, the whole point of The Warlord of the Air is the romantic rehabilitation of discredited and abandoned technologies and ideologies. Moorcock's central historical figure is the obscure Russian revolutionary Nestor Mahkno, who (as I understand these matters) sought to invoke modernist anarchism as the native, culturally-determined ideology of the Russian revolution, in parallel with the Barcelona-based anarchists of the CNT during the Spanish Civil War. Where anarchism took root in the twentieth century, it always reflected long-standing cultural traditions. Moorcock's resurrection and celebration of early twentieth-century technology, fantasy, and ideology could not be more at odds with the cultural attitudes displayed by the filmmakers of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Instead of a band of revolutionaries, Jude Law's Joe Sullivan leads a military corporation explicitly identified as a "mercenary" "army-for-hire" in the film's voice-over. The Hindenburg III is seen to dock at the legendarily-unused mooring-post atop the Empire State Building. Joe Sullivan's base is clearly home to multiple zeppelins, something which no nation of the thirties accomplished without the willing assistance of the German state. Among the many lovingly recreated montages is a sequence in which the smoking remains of the Reichstag are shown. The implication is that the giant robots did it. (Historically, a Dutch Communist was swiftly executed for the fire, and it's been argued that the Nazis themselves set the fire, to justify the wholesale suspension of civil liberties that followed.) A newspaper winks in and out of existence in a parade of front pages, spinning by; the Nazi eagle is clearly shown, but the swastika it grasps is obscured. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that in a few years Col. Lindbergh will become the president of this alternative America?
I do not intend to imply that Sky Captain is a Nazi film. In fact, aviation adventure fantasy as a whole frequently exhibits similar attitudes and tropes. The best example is, of course, the comic-book aviator Blackhawk, a Polish nobleman disenfranchised by the Nazis themselves but partial to black uniforms, peaked caps, and cool aerotech just the same. In the late eighties, the terrific Howard Chaykin took an explicit crack at this aspect of the character and by extension, the whole presence of extreme rightist politics within the aviation-adventure fantasy genre. Like Moorcock's work, however, Chaykin's revisionist take simply can't ever be regarded as mainstream within the genre.
The credited works of real-life pilots such as famed German combat aviators Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) and Oswald Boelcke (Richthofen's predecessor as commandant of Jagdstaffel 11) helped to create the genre itself. Richthofen's autobiography was in itself a heavily romanticized work intended for public consumption in Germany during the war, and released as an explicit propaganda device by the state. Events such as Lindbergh's personal embrace of the Nazi state on the eve of World War II and the development of the military doctrine of bombing civilian populations helped cement a set of genre assumptions that must be viewed as right-leaning.
It's most typical of postwar works in this revival genre to combat the preceding critique by positing that the hero of the piece is primarily occupied by the challenges of fighting Nazis, even on the eve of World War II (see all the Indy films, for example; The Rocketeer, of course, and, yes, Blackhawk). Perhaps it's only made notable in Sky Captain by its' absence.
The mainstream pulp works of the time, like Sky Captain, simply disregard the political milieu of the motivating technology. This disregard, in the end, undermines the appeal of the fantasy world. While we are clearly informed that Joe Sullivan was in Nanjing helping cover the Allied retreat from Shanghai, another conflict is conspicuously not mentioned. I find myself shifting uncorfortably, wondering how much fun would it be to live in a world with giant robots and the Hindenburg III when it's easy to picture Joe flying for Franco in Spain.
Of course, in the case of a sequel, I could easily be proved wrong. Surely the film's creators don’t wish for such an interpretation. Choosing to struggle with the conflicting obligations of the twentieth century in ways that reflect on our current predicament might conceivably be profitably explored in a film that mixes Franco's war with the fantasy world of Sky Captain. Here's hoping.
NPR : 'Smile': Greatest Record Never Heard. Certain fellow-Wilsonians who may have missed this will certainly want to hear this. We're finally gonna hear it!
This AskMe question prompted a spontaneous essay from me on our Roomba, which I repost here. The original questioner wanted info about door jambs, pet hair, and furnishings.
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1. Door jambs, unknown. I have a 1" marble jamb at the entry to my bathroom. It's got a square edge, and the machine won't climb it, that I recall. No other jambs in the house.
2. Pet hair, not a problem, in the sense that it won't break the machine. The machine will cope with it. The machine started life as a non-vacuuming sweeper and thus does well with such, mostly. However, I find that the carpet my cats prefer to use as a shedding device usually needs multiple attacks - this appears to be specific to the carpet, a fine-knap, deep-pile area rug. I often end up vacuuming it with the regular vacuum. If you have an area of your home in which the cat-shed sort of 'sticks,' and which is a challenge to clean using either a regular broom or a conventional vacuum, Roomba will not clean it as efficiently as either.
3. The floor plan does need to be open, but most furniture is not a problem. The machine goes under most of our furniture. How much room is available under your couch?
Other points:
1. Fringes on rugs are murder, and will halt the 'bot unless hermetically sealed away. I still have not found an optimal methodology for doing this. I taped several 6" strips of medium-weight carpet-pad, backed with a light adhesive, together, and lay these over all the fringes in a given room before releasing the hounds.
2. Pet hair may not be a problem for the machine in terms of harming it, but strings, thread, tooth floss, and human hair certainly are. Every time I use the machine, I scrape and pick at the guts of it (a brush and a rubber beater) to get the windings off. I tried doing this once a week or so and some floss actually sliced through the beaters all the way though the metal before the roller-parts simply jammed up. Not a happy experience, either part.
3. The cleaning process is extremely dusty. My machine does not hold the crud in a disposable bag, like a full-size cleaner, but in a series of compartments, all of which must be cleaned each time you use the machine. I am usually lightly coated with fine grit by the time I'm done.
4. The machine offers three 'room-size' settings. Our 80-year-old apartment is prodigiously dusty. I find I only ever run it on the 'large' setting, which maximizes run-time, and therefore multiplies cleaning effectiveness. Roombas are not 'smart.' They run a randomized pattern that provides a high statistical likelihood of providing one-pass coverage in a given area. Restrict the area and increase the run time, and you can achieve multiple-pass coverage.
5. Stereo cables and extension cords on the floor can also disrupt the Roomba; it can run over them and get them tangled in the rollers.
Even considering these caveats, I find that the overall cleanliness of our living environment is very considerably increased. We try to run it once every other day. It takes 24 hours to recharge unless you spring for the fast charger. We rotate it through the living areas of our home. Once I learned how to prep the rooms, getting each area ready only takes about a minute, and cleaning it takes less than five. It's significantly less time consuming than using a conventional vacuum. Keep in mind, however, that the manufacturer repeatedly emphasizes that the Roomba is not a vacuum replacement and that one should not use it as such.
We do, of course. Our pre-Roomba vacuuming frequency was somewhere between biannual and never. Now it's approaching quarterly. This is partly because in attempting to understand the Roomba as a technology gadget, cleaning became a technical problem, and therefore fun and subject to systemic problem-solving.
Hope this answers your questions.
Oolite: "Retro space gaming with modern technology." Of the 'space trader' genre, but where Nova relies on sprites, this renders all. Thus far, it makes docking a rather time-consuming procedure, but once the booze is out of your system, all should be well. The game's discussion board.
(why is there not a Mir docking game?)
Chocolypse Now: Charlie don't burp. [memepool]
Hm, it may be time for an Apocalypse Now shindig. Halloween's coming up!
Review sites and hosting providers list assembled September 23, 2004. For further investigation.
Overall, I'm astounded at the way that the continued plummeting of storage cost has completely undermined the previous service-level pricing structure - pair.com, for example, has long been a standby among pros, but the pricing structure seen here is totally obsolete by comparison with the current crop. Just over a year ago, I was amazed at the pricing seen at No Hassle Hosting, but this trawl places their pricing structure solidly in the middle of the pack.
Providers
Globat.com: 2500MB Web Space, 2500 Email Accounts, 75Gig Transfer $7.95/mo. Overkill, but no apparent disabling of basic functionality such as SSI.
Infinology: 9gb basic plan, $6.95; no SSI at this level, though.
Canaca: $4.95 base, 5gb/40gb, uses spam and security as an upsell (which is bullshit), no SSH or MySQL on base plan. $9.95 mid, 10 over 80, SSH, MySQL, no Python, ecommerce(!).
No Hassle Hosting: from 30mb/1gb @ $3.50 to 1.2gb/60gb @$30.
Living Dot: from 250mb/10gb @ $9.95 to 1.5gb/25gb @$24.95. Ugly clip art included, apparently.
Typepad: 50mb/1gb @ $4.95 to 200mb/5gb @ $14.95, just blogs. No clear information about email or other services.
Bloghosts 100mb/5gb @ $3 to 1gb/25gb @ $20.
Review sites (this may be the spammiest Google topic of all time)
FindMyHosting.com: comprehensive-looking review and plan information aggregator.
epinons web hosting reviews: epinions consumer reviews.
Hosting Comparison: looks up to date. Clean site layout; looks 'bloggy,' but there's little information about the site itself obviously available. Suspiciously boosterish copy.
Looking over this, I keep coming back to wondering about e-mail only. But of course, looking for hosting plans to that subject may very well eat another day of my life.
AskMe hosting and webcommerce threads. An old free hosting offer. No Hassle Hosting, part 1, part 2.
Lessee now, what are my reqs?
Email: up to five domains, low traffic, global redirects, unlimited aliases, webmail for up to five users, server-side effective spam filters, IMAP, optional whitelists.
Hosting functionality, required: multiple domains and unlimited subdomains, shell access, web-based control panel, backups, traffic analysis, PHP, MySQL, perl, no required change of registrant for domains.
Hosting functionality, desired: python, WebDAV (for direct mounting of the volume, very convenient), integrated iCal publishing would be cool but I can figure that out on my own, provider-maintained MT (or something) deployment (or go with TypePad, but I'd prefer to keep all online services through a single provider), provider maintained Gallery deployment (maybe; I think it might be easiest to keep that here, actually).
Hosting metrics, desired: 2gb storage, transfer unknown but not great. (my current footprint for non-cgi assets, not counting online photo albums and audio and movies, is 988mb).
Do I have a budget? Hm. Apple's pricing is about right, but the storage is not acceptable and while the virtual desktop and synch features are cool, I don't think they offer access to the server-side goodies I believe I want. Additionally, they are well known for an unpublished bandwidth limitation, so they are off the list.
I'm posting this from a copy of Windows XP that lives inside my Powerbook, as illustrated below. It's been many years since I tried to use Virtual PC. Happily, except for fighting my way though an obtuse thicket of networking config dialogs to diagnose and correct an odd default networking setting that prevented this OS from seeing the intarweb via that OS, et al, everything's working swimmingly.
Now, for the endless round of Windows system updates, and (naturally) Firefox. Avaunt!
I suppose, for the sake of posterity, I should go into a bit more detail about fixing the networking. VPC treats the host machine as a DHCP server, and assigns an arbitrary, fixed number to the the host on the subnet it sets up (this is an informed guess, so ymmv). That IP is the same for the gateway value and for the DNS value. Well, the DNS was not doing its' job; reliable servers were unpingable.
I set the computer to use the same DNS that my home LAN does, and that appears to have resolved the issue.
One troubling point that undermines my 'bad DNS' thesis is that I was able to ping the good DNS under the default networking setup, but only once. Immediately after, on implementing the new DNS, I was unable to ping the same IP. Perhaps I was falling victim to the notoriously slow setup processes within VPC, and the connection had not yet been established. Whatever. It works now.
I only hope it doesn't burn the CPU out downloading all the updates.
Dear pal Ken of the The Illuminated Donkey updates us on his quest to belong. It's not going well.
Tutorials - Stencil Revolution [via MoFi] is if interest to me, as a prolific former stenciler.
Oddly, this appears to be the only example I have online. I have a satchel full of them in the closet. I used to go to rock shows without a dime, sell the stencils for a buck a pop to paint on to people's tee shirts and jackets, and make bank, often about a hundred bucks in a night on a well-attended show.
For some reason, all day I have been wanting to be able to selectively remap my MX records to gmail, so that I'm not doing forwarding with a local copy here anymore. I realize this is probably a dumb idea.
I think it really indicates that I am ready to find outside hosting and mail for certain purposes.
Oh, the technofun just continues! Here's a list:
- a currently untraceable PHP pathing error in an attempted deployment of PHPwiki
- audio feedback problems on my mom's iSight/Powerbook combo
- a failed MT3.0 demo deployment over the weekend (rendered truly unfixable by the new keyword-only forum search at MT: no more exact error-string search hits for you, self-hosting fools!)
- The gordian knot of dual first generation Airports on a fixed IP, no DHCP LAN. To date, the solution appears to be (big surprise here) buy more hardware
Isle of Tortuga: it may be late in the day, mateys. But arr, I not be swingin from the yardarm yet.
(Really, I just stumbled into this site via one of the bibliographies, and it's pretty great. For example, here are a few Letters of Marque for your consideration.)
Great gawd amighty!
Today has been a day of cursing and troubleshooting, brought about by my insufficient documentation practices. I've had two first-gen Apple Airport base stations for a very long time; sometime within the past couple of months I took one down for whatever reason and only today set it up again.
I had some sort of solution in place that allowed them to work together simultaneously, something that they are not designed to do (later versions of these things can do this handily). Today, of course, I cannot figure out what the solution was. I can't even find discussions of how to solve this problem, as it was current over three years ago.
Given the time, I'm not going to be able to solve the problem today, which makes me surly at best.
Further entertaining me has been the activity of troubleshooting my Mom's iChat setup. She uses a Powerbook and for some reason the internal mic does not appear to be turning off when iChat's AV features are engaged. The mic is close enough, apparently, to one or both of the internal speakers that the resulting audio includes a distracting, tinny echo.
Apple's discussion boards suggest tossing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat.plist to allow internal hardware sensing to correctly deal with this problem. We tried this with no result.
Foo!
Apologies for the outage this afternoon. I downed the server to do some gut swapping with the former primary desktop machine. Everything went smoothly enough.
For my next trick, a clean server rebuild onto the former desktop unit under 10.3! Thank you, I'll be here all week!
TouchStream MacNTouch: Laptop KeyBoard Replacement for Apple PowerBook and iBook. [via Ted Leung]
Speaking of piles of hardware, here's something I would scavenge to try in a second. But given that my marching orders involve getting rid of some of the aged gear I have, one more oddball peripheral is a no-go, as much as I love my strange input devices.
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner may be of help when I finalize my transition away from the venerable Eudora. I would love to keep my mail archives accessible. The archives are now well over ten years' worth of mail.
I may fiddle with Eudora a bit before I do this - many of the email addresses I have in it are old and the filters are so crufty that it's not all that useful anymore for autofiling.
Of course, I have to pick a client to move to. Mail is in consideration (for support reasons, mostly) as well as Entourage (for platform compatiblity and to better understand the PC version, which baffles me in classic Microsoftian ways).
I have actually found myself using Gmail almost exclusively of late, primarily because of the superior spam filtering. I would love to be able to hide and reveal messages by label in that UI, though. Certain other limitations make it not quite perfect, such as the inability to map my domain to gmail for email and the related problem of address-based segmenting. All of this points, once again, to selecting an email and hosting provider rather than doing the provisioning myself.
However, these matters are not for resolution today. Today I intend to work on my big pile of hardware, something that will probably take all weekend just to plan.
Jack T. Chick, noted graphic madman for Christ, makes a significant number of his oddities available in full online. I once new a fella who was later rumored to have gone to work producing these sweaty-browed exercises in fundamentalist paranoia. The combination of hateful caricature and saccharine cute makes these things worth perusing.
[via this comment at MeFi. The post itself refers to this LJ entry, which is hilariously worth reading.]
For some reason I had occasion to closely examine the hardware specs on my new Powerbook. It's a new-reconditioned machine from Apple, and I had thought that I was getting something like a 15% discount on the configuration with one important bell and whistle, the DVD-burning superdrive.
To my shock, it became apparent to me that the machine is the default high-end configuration on the model that I purchased, and includes multiple items not specified on my original order. What can I say but "thanks, Apple!"
'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow': Fending Off Alien Robots, but Still Time to Flirt [NYT] - One of the most positive reviews of an SF film I've ever read at the Times, by Stephen Holden. He complains only of the murk ("at times the film is hard to see"), and that perhaps you darn kids won't get what's so special about 1939, and damns it by noting that Jude Law's presence is not as earthy as that of Harrison Ford as Indy (well, duh).
Maybe I'm reading this through rose colored glasses, but these are the kinds of things I find myself writing when I review a film I really, really love, and find it hard to come up with meaningful critical things to say.
So: GOODIE!
Two years ago today I began to write about something that happened to my family sixteen years ago this week.
As usual, I found myself puzzled all day today concerning the source of my blues. Mystery solved.
In happier news, the Big Easy got a reprieve. Hope those down the coast that received a visit from Ivan will recover quickly.
This was Googled up whilst searching for the Beatles/Ramones mashup "I Wanna Be Your Sedated Man."
August Strindberg and helium. [memepool].
I laughed and laughed and laughed. "Strindberrrrrg!"
Johnny Ramone Dead, reports CBS. First spotted here, via MoFi.
Well, kids, that's a wrap. Kind of a drag. Ramones message board, for those a-feelin' it.
Virtual PC 7.0 released under pressure, lacks planned features, sez rumor site AppleInsider.
Shoot. Whilst I'm G5-less for the foreseeable future, a bunch of that other stuff woulda been nice.
With Outside Chances, Editor B. signs off for the duration, noting that the city is safe from a direct hit. What he doesn't note (as Matt does, from the safety of Indiana) is that the winds from the hurricane will continue to be dangerous for over one hundred miles in every direction.
Hurricanes all around this evening. What a season for my sat-tv provider to have bounced the Weather Channel.
On Septemer 8, 1900, 8,000 Americans perished in the worst hurricane of the century, in a small town off the coast of Texas named Galveston. Here's a map - the Galveston storm is the topmost track.
Given the worried eye I cast upon the fair city of New Orleans today, I thought a bit of historical fear-mongering was well called for.
The storm was recognized in advance, and the populace was warned, as I understand it. The storm's ferocity was greater than anything that had been seen within living memory, and therefore these warnings were ineffective.
The NOAA site about the storm notes that "Waves were higher than 15 feet and winds howled at 130 miles per hour." Currently, Ivan features winds of 140 mph.
The personal account of Isaac Cline, the top U. S. Weather Bureau official on hand for the events is a good place to start. Sensitive readers please note: In the excerpts below, Mr. Cline recounts losing his wife and children to the storm.
"The public was warned," he writes, recounting his interactions with the citizenry on the early afternoon of the 8th, "over the telephone and verbally, that the wind would go by the east to the south and that the worst was yet to come. People were advised to seek secure places for the night. As a result thousands of people who lived near the beach or in small houses moved their families into the center of the city and were thus saved. Those who lived in large strong buildings, a few blocks from the beach, one of whom was the writer of this report, thought that they could weather the wind and tide."
He went to his home for a late lunch, and while there, his co-worker showed up.
"About 6:30 p.m. Mr. J. L. Cline, who had left Mr. Blagden at the office to look after the instruments, reached my residence, where he found the water neck deep. He informed me that the barometer had fallen below 29.00 inches; that no further messages could be gotten off on account of all wires being down, and that he had advised everyone he could see to go to the center of the city; also, that he thought we had better make an attempt in that direction. At this time, however, the roofs of houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper, and it appeared suicidal to attempt a journey through the flying timbers. Many people were killed by flying timbers about this time while endeavoring to escape to town."
By eight o'clock things had taken a turn for the worse:
"By 8 p.m. a number of houses had drifted up and lodged to the east and southeast of my residence, and these with the force of the waves acted as a battering ram against which it was impossible for any building to stand for any length of time, and at 8:30 p.m. my residence went down with about fifty persons who had sought it for safety, and all but eighteen were hurled into eternity. Among the lost was my wife, who never rose above the water after the wreck of the building. I was nearly drowned and became unconscious, but recovered through being crushed by timbers and found myself clinging to my youngest child, who had gone down with myself and wife. Mr. J. L. Cline joined me five minutes later with my other two children, and with them and a woman and child we picked up from the raging waters, we drifted for three hours, landing 300 yards from where we started. There were two hours that we did not see a house nor any person, and from the swell we inferred that we were drifting to sea, which, in view of the northeast wind then blowing, was more than probable. During the last hour that we were drifting, which was with southeast and south winds, the wreckage on which we were floating knocked several residences to pieces."
In the morning, the sun rose on a city that had literally been swept away.
The city of Galveston maintains a website that collects a number of information resources on the storm at 1900storm.com. Not terribly long ago, NPR's Lost and Found Sound did a segment on the storm.
Galveston's Rosenberg Library has consolidated the contemporary lists of the persons who perished, and published it online, as a part of their online resources concerning the storm.
In a charming thread entitled Hurricane Risk for New Orleans at MeFi, posters expand upon similar concerns of Editor B.
UPDATE: Of course, never ones tomiss a chance to fan the soggy waves of hysteria, CNN reports:
"Those folks who remain, should the city flood, would be exposed to all kinds of nightmares from buildings falling apart to floating in the water having nowhere to go," Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Public Health Center, said Tuesday.LSU's hurricane experts have spent years developing computer models and taking surveys to predict what might happen.
The surveys predict that about 300,000 of the 1.6 million people living in the metropolitan area would risk staying.
The computer models show a hurricane with a wind speed of around 120 mph or more - hitting just west of New Orleans so its counterclockwise rotation could hurl the strongest surf and wind directly into the city - would push a storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain over the city's levees. Ivan had sustained wind of 140 mph Tuesday.
New Orleans would be under about 20 feet of water, higher than the roofs of many of the city's homes.
Holy shit, notwithstanding that those maps show Ivan (not Ivor) hitting to the east of the city. The article also highlight the potential for serious chemical contamination due to factories and refineries in the area. What, no active nuke plant?
(Confidential to Editor B: consider maerking the location on the maps, we're American, and geography is not our strong suit.)
Wifimaps.com informs me that there are no known free hotspots within walking distance of where I work. Sadly, the map renders aren't bookmarkable, but there are some static maps available.
Walking to work from the bus stop this mnorning I noticed an unspectacular beer ad, for Michelob, featuring a man and woman cuddling, kind of, on a couch. The ad read "Ang lasang malakas ang dating," under the photo. That's Tagalog, a Filipino language. I can't recall ever having seen any Tagalog display ads in Seattle before. I wonder if there's a big Filipino employer or community center near where I work.
macosxhints - 10.3: A script to create a segmented disk image is intended to partially resolve the oversize disc image problem I have. The updated version of the script will split extant images as well. I need to go back to AskMe and post this (someone also suggested Disk Copy, which I misunderstood), but the site's down, dang it.
The great computer migration of 2004 proceeds apace.
I sought assistance on Ask MetaFilter in the matter of burning large disk images to DVD in segments, to no avail (yet).
However, the MetaFilter user known as ethylene responded in such a manner as to make it clear that she knows who I am. The headscratching among you should be informed that circa 1989 I made a brief video of myself screaming at the top of my lungs into the camera. No words are used, and I shot the piece over several takes in varying states of dress and undress. I don't believe I have digitized it yet, but could be mistaken.
Interestingly, as well, ethylene appears to refer to another video work featuring young male nudity shot in Bloomington in the late eighties; her "mohawk" may refer to Bart's tonsorial splendor on the day in question.
I think I do know who ethylene is, and if so, we've never met. I believe she's worked with Chris and Eric.
Insofar as the data schleppery itself, well, it's a slog. I've more or less got my desktop user-data transferred to the Powerbook. I've hit a snag, however, in iSynching my Palm info. iCal, for example, has duplicated all my events and stuffed them into the "Home" calendar in both the Palm and the application. I know it's some sort of synchronization setting that's misconfigured, but the real question has to be, "How do I get rid of the junk?"
An additional complication has been the need to lay hands on the user data in Viv's old machine, a creaky old tangerine iBook with one (count it) USB port and no firewire. That means I can't boot the machine as an external drive, which is the standard way to glom gobs of data from Mac laptops. I've previously used a dual-bus 10gb external hard drive, hooking it up via USB and then plugging the same drive into my larger system via firewire. Naturally, however, it seems the USB port on the drive is dead, so I had no way to directly mount an external drive.
Some stumbling around seeking network-capable backup solutions unearthed Data Backup 2.0, which also offers a 30-day fully-functional trial. A bit of the ol' network-cable Laocoon ("Note the writhing serpents, one of whom bites Laocoon's left leg, and pained expressions"), and glommage pursued.
A final, unsettling discovery is that it's possible to connect computer A to firewire chain C via plugging A and C into computer B's top and bottom firewire ports. The chain will be visible to A while C is not booted.
Forgetting that you've done this and booting computer C up will not disrupt the chain. This may prove overly unsettling for veteran of SCSI external drive mounting technology. I can't even describe the crawling flesh I had when I realized what I'd done.
The last item bringing a furrow to my brow in these matters is the problem of storage in general. I avoided using Apple's iApps (with the exception of iTunes) for years because I viewed them as marketing devices. As such, they will always steer the user away from a fiscally responsible technology decision, and are to be deeply mistrusted, even feared.
In the matter of users such as myself who have media storage requirements that can easily be viewed as excessive, the only reasonable strategy is networked storage for all the consumer media assets (music, personal photos, movies). My photo assets occupy about 14gb. My movie assets occupy about 55gb, my music and audio assets occupy about 70gb, and my DVD project assets occupy about 47 gb.
Given these numbers, it's totally unrealistic to contemplate local-drive storage of these items except on a temporary basis. Additionally, all the household computers should have direct access to all the assets, such that when Viv rips a CD on her computer, it's directly available to all the other machines in the house.
Currently, none of the iApps support any form of multiple-user open-access. You can store your iPhoto pics and iTunes music to a common directory, but you cannot tweak the apps to write their metadata to the same database.
There's an argument to be made about limiting the use of networked storage for large-scale rich-media assets, in that it's harder to guarantee a constant datastream to either a burnable medium such as DVD or to the screen and audio output of the consumer's computer. But really, except for extremely dense A/V material such as 6.1 DVDs, the rise of the internet has led to the development of all sorts of strategies for manipulating rich media via thin pipes. The user-protection justification doesn't wash anymore.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a product opportunity here for either Apple or independent software developers. That product would duplicate iPhoto-iDVD-iMovie-iTunes' functionality but enable true networked datastorage, so that Viv can dowload her latest pics and clips over there, and then I can assemble and author a DVD for the family over here, using our library of music assets.
While reverse-engineering Apple's databases to enable user-level networked data-manipulation is probably illegal, it's also an idea whose time has come. I don't think you'd even need to hack the interfaces of the applications. There are a wide range of plugins that show how easy it is to add interface elements to every one of these applications. I should note that I did not go over Apple's plug-in APIs for the cited applications to determine whether or not there are hooks into the databases, so I might very well be talking through a big, woolly hat.
A Day at the Races: Three Years Ago Tomorrow. Some words of wisdom from someone who was in Tower Two when the plane hit (if I recall correctly). This short little post bears reflection, and is the best thing I've read about 9/11 in weeks.
Viv and I ran in to Tom and Rachel at dinner tonight, at the li'l neighborhood Mexican jernt.
On the whole, I'm gonna say I have had worse September 11ths.
Well, it's a real boon to have a new, fast machine. But it's also hugely distracting, because I have an irresistible urge to re-nest on the machine and spend two or three days immediately fixing my home work area, schlepping files around, and so forth.
Because I'll be migrating from the first machine I used as a primary Mac OS X machine, it's not going to be a simple matter of plunking my home directory and root library over onto the new machine - I fought tooth and nail against the Apple-assumed organization scheme when I came over and as a result I have crap scattered across about ten volumes.
Those volumes also represent a wide range of additional drives, both internally and externally connected to the old machine, and of course I cannot pop my internal 250gb drive into the laptop.
I kinda doubt I'll have a budget for more goodies anytime soon, but here are some I'll bookmark.
Villagetronic PCI video card - I have two desktop monitors I'd like to continue using. By default the Powerbook only supports one external monitor. This is a moderately unlikely purchase.
Some kind of stand for desktop use, like this, this, or this. Inexpensive, non-computer-market alternatives will be explored, as well. I'm currently using a plastic copy-holder. Unfortunately, the Powerbook's hinges prevent opening the screen beyond about 75 degrees, and the slant of the copyholder means that the screen tilts in at about 15 degrees.
A sleeve for finish protection. I love these Acme designs, but instead of the zip closure and handles, I want a simple flap. Closure is only moderately important, so velcro or even ties would be ideal. I thought I remembered seeing very simple sleeves made of wetsuit neoprene with no detailing, but it looks as though the market has moved on.
A bit more Googling brought me to a Tom Binh product, the Mitre. Binh is locally based and even has a retail store in town, so this is promising. More closely reflecting my initial vizualization is this Tucano sleeve.
But Binh's social factors are predominating, I have to say.
A Digital Generation's Analog Chic [NYT] takes a look at retro-stylie in poptech culture, from Verbatim's CDs dressed as singles to vintage radio casemods for PCs.
The piece is not especially deep, but I enjoyed it. I still await the marriage of evolved form with today's miniaturization. My ideal PDA would combine camera and mp3 recording and playback with basic PDA functions, act as a wifi web client and network storage device, and operate as a cell phone.
Additionally, the object must reside within a fully-functioning antique pocketwatch case. Digital display information should either be presented via a collapsible screen, or projected beyond the device onto a non-physical screen, something like an SF movie's holographic projection.
Today, a rash of new computers arrived. I'll be busy for the next couple of weekends transferring stuff and figuring out to do with the current batch.
Viv's got a shiny new iBook 14" and I am going to spend some time with a 15" Powerbook. I considered waiting for the probable g5 but given the supply problems with that chip and the less-than stellar track record for first-gen products outta Cupertino of late, I'll hang back fearfully for the nonce.
I'm thinking about jettisoning in-house primary mail service, as I have just not had the time to hack through the underbrush of setting up under qmail with various server-side spam-combat measures in place. Doing so would prompt a server rebuild with limited mail support and a greater degree of centralized datastorage.
On the other other hand if I'm looking for outside mail services perhaps I should look at outside primary hosting as well, and reduce the amount of public-facing webservices on offer too. Hm.
Time to count hard drives and do some math.
Dan notes the new version of one of my indispensibles, DragThing, which in turn reminds me about last week's release of a new version of BBEdit.
I'll certainly be on board for DragThing; I may fork out for BBEdit, depending on how much of the next month is spend doing various site building activities.
Coral is a web-based server-load-distribution app that can help mitigate bandwidth spike for lightweight content providers.
The instructions are simple:
"Just append .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname of any URL, and your request for that URL is handled by Coral!"
[via MeFi.]
This rings a bell on a blog-chat b/t Tom Harpel and myself about a year ago, but i couldn't dig up the linkies.
I spent yesterday evening in Tacoma eating the best fried oysters ever in the world, along with southern-style fish-fry food the likes of hush puppies, catfish, and corn.
I had promised Bart I was going to shoot for the next episode of Rox at the fry; alas, my nerve failed me and I shot not a thing. I still intend to shoot in the manner I'd intended, though. We have about a gig of flash ram, and in theory, I should be able to get enough material at 320 x 240 using the Dimage to provide editor B with what his jones is for.
It strikes me that certain scalawags hereabouts may be prepared to provide an appropriate venue for a shoot.
In other news, I've been heads down pushing and poking at the Yahoo! Store, in an attempt to get a multi-thousand item store up and live by the end of next week. Alas, the good people at Yahoo have adopted a 'simplified' approach to deployment and setup within their commerce environment. While significant help docs are available, and a 384-page Merchant Solutions Getting Started Guide is available as a PDF, no straightforward sample templates for large-inventory sites are readily available.
Of course, there are many folks ready to take your money to provide the solution to the conundrum. The triumph of commerce, providing that open and even playing field, yet again.
I'm a day late with this.
A few days ago, I received a note in my email. It read, in large part, "In case you haven't located a recorded version of the 'Wreck of the Shenandoah' I have attached a copy."
Attached to the email was an mp3.
The very first year I was blogging, I wrote a long piece about the loss of the USS Shenandoah, the first US-built rigid airship. The airborne giant was torn apart in a violent storm above Ohio in the very early morning hours of September 3, 1925.
Subsequent to the original piece, I posted the lyrics to a song by Vernon Dalhart, The Wreck of the Shenandoah, which I had mentioned in the original essay.
The mp3 I received via email is that song, as recorded by Dalhart and withdrawn from commercial circulation within a month of the accident.
The original post is also worth checking out for the various comments it's drawn.
Powell's prowling Seattle for used books [via BrainLog]
I can feel the gravitational force from here, and while my sell-bags are usually destined for Jamie, I might venture to the center... of... used-book gravity... in... the... UNIVERSE!!!
Reported presence of long-range acoustic device (LRAD) at protests - is Xeni's BB entry passing on indymedia linkage of an experimental crowd control acoustic weapon at the RNC protests in The City. Much to Xeni's (and presumably the blogosphere's) credit, the post then pulls all the available web-published coverage of the LARD (sic fucking hoc, okay?) together, including a publicity pic of the device, and concludes with an indymedia shot of a police truck (gone downtown, probably not to pick up drunks) which appears to show the device ready to go.
Hot damn, now that's a blog post.
I asked MetaFilter about Project Gutenberg selections. Stavros points out ReadPrint. I hope the thread hangs around long enough to keep growing!
Saw this at BB, and can't let it pass: Tactics by Police Mute the Protesters, and Their Messages [NYT]:
"The demonstrations, too, have thus far been more restrained than many recent protests elsewhere; five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson and window-smashing, none of which has occurred here. Lacking bloody scenes of billy-club-wielding police or billowing clouds of tear gas, the cameras - and the public's attention - have focused elsewhere."
(Bold mine.)
Widespread arson?
Well, I suppose so, if ONE DUMPSTER constitutes "widespread." Here's an HTML version of the SPD wrap-up report (PDF), in which the word arson occurs once, in conjunction with an arson incident on November 1 at the main GAP store in downtown Seattle, a month before the WTO protests got rolling. I did note anecdotal reporting of "trashcan arsons" as I Googled, but no primary sources, and I sure don't recall any media coverage of it. I very stongly suspect that the burning dumpster at Pike and Third was the only verifiable incident.
But hey, what to I know? It's not like I'm being paid to avoid groundless assertions in my writing here (or typos, for that matter).
RadioLovers.com, " Old Time Radio Shows," free, online. Dig in.
Via J-Walk Blog.
Which reminds me:
WFMU's The Hound, linked before, also as a secondary item. Seriously, these shows (and the archival work on the site) are amazing.
