Yow, whatta day. We finally dropped off the busted teevee and went podunking. Brunch at upper Queen Anne's Paragon, followed by random house-for-sale flyer sampling. We ended up in a couple of antique stores we'd never been in, and I got my gentleman's clothes butler, finally.

On our way south, we pulled over hurriedly and pinched the tire between wheel and curb with force enough to cause a blowout. A call to AAA, and the tow truck appeared just as we hung up. He changed the tire and we were on the road again within ten minutes of the blowout.

Paul noted my feline pentimento of yestereve and, well, connected the dogs, er, dots.

I'd 'shop something up, but, like, it's dinnertime.

Viv was dining in the tender confines of happy hour, so I placed a few calls and wandered down to the specimen of declining urbanity known as Broadway, the cracked jewel of Capitol Hill.

I ended up dining at a small Pakistani establishment, and when I left, I was surprised to hear someone really busting out on a sax. He was standing on the corner across from the Starbucks that faces the newly-remodeled Broadway Market (which now houses a two-story full-city-block grocery store, ex-Seattleites may be interested to know).

I had just gotten set to record the sax when he wound up and fell into deep conversation with a woman who appeared fascinated, her small dog in tow. After much intent gazing and some note-scribbling, she crossed the street. He gazed after her for a moment, saxophone lowered.

He turned to face the stream of people passing on the sidewalk and lifted his ax.

"Harlem Nocturne" erupted from the instrument's bell. Believing that I had previously activated the audio recorder on the phone I am posting this from, I crossed the street, excited.

After several minutes and a few muffed notes, the musician wound the tune up. As he placed his sax into his battered hardshell case, I walked by and gave him a five, saying "thank you," reflecting my appreciation not solely of his playing, but also the beauty and drama of his musical choice following the interaction I had observed.

"God bless you," was the unexpectedly heartfelt response. I watched a moment later as he boarded the number 60 bus.

A bookstore stop later (new Vollmann! The Men Who Stare at Goats!) I was excitedly mulling the prospect of converting my recording to mp3 and blogging it in the context of this entry. I had decided to head home as an economizAtion measure when I ran into my coworker Diana.

Her pals were playing at Julia's, the former Ernie Steele's space, and she was speaking to them outside. I excitedly tried to play my recording, but alas. I had been mistaken, and had actually failed to record the song !

I mentioned to Diana that I had been looking for a place to write, and to my surprise, that's what Julia's has proved to be - this entry was written and posted during her friends' first set.

Now I should probably call Viv.

WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Hasil Adkins dead at 67. [MeFi]

Cat with wings:

This week, we have been so swamped at work that we have actually shipped a higher volume of orders than we did at the peak of Christmas. Apparently, this bolus is not limited to our retail traffic.

On Wednesday, a freelance gig came in on the answering machine - I'm still evaluating the labor requirements versus my free time before committing. Any readers out there with current downtime and agency production experience coding HTML, please drop a line in case I need to pass. It's not a hard job, but may require more time than I have available. You will need to have Photoshop and Dreamweaver and Fireworks and should have experience creating HTML under an art director or within an advertising and design agency as a production person. If you haven't in the past, this is most definitely not the job to learn on.

The other gig is an experienced developer position at a well-known local house that provides varying levels of end-user with real estate tools. The toolkit was specifically identified as 'open-source' and name-checked PHP, MySQL, etc., etc. It's a gig that's too dev-oriented for my skillset, but surely there are candidates out there reading this.

Naturally, this is also the week that the third issue of the magazine is in planning. Most happily, my editor and I knocked out the content definition stuff in about twenty minutes on Tuesday night.

Additionally, I call your attention once again to the Siffblog, which is ginning up. The contributors over there last year had a great time and I know I very much enjoyed reading the blog. A group blog about a film festival the size of SIFF might be expected to provide some amusement.

Finally, I jimmied the header link set, my sidebar, and this blog's about page to more effectively reflect my current range of activities.

As I stepped out of the house into a cool, misty morning, a British racing-green MG TC wheeled round the corner, top down in the dew. The driver sported a leather aviator's helmet with flight goggles and was also wearing a worn leather driving coat, collar secured against the tempest.

I smiled to see such a sight.

In Leaving here, Matt Uhlmann writes about moving away from New Orleans. In Cheap, editor B writes about leaving New Orleans.

I'm sweaty as hell from a fast-paced hour in the kitchen cooking up a mean batch of my spaghetti while bending an ear to the majestic strains of In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. Thank you, New Jersey, for your service to the nation.

My sleep last night was extremely restless and full of nightmares, concluding with a dream that yanked me awake. In that dream I was walking along a wooded bluff above a pebbled beach with a companion. We were discussing the several wrecked buildings that were scattered along the ridge. Apparently I recalled a time when the mossy cul de sac had been the center of a vibrant nightlife, but the lights were long gone.

As we walked down a path leading to the strand, we came across a huge, partially completed building which had never been finished due to an obvious arson. As we looked at it, we were jolted by terrifying screams from the beach below. Two small children clutched each other and sobbed in terror, lying prone and rolled away from the source of their terror.

Behind them, a construction crew worked frantically to free a coworker who was lying, partially crushed, under a collapsed concrete wall. It was his screams that we'd heard up the embankment.

One thousand orders awaited us on arrival at work on Monday morning. We shipped about 350. Blogging will suffer.

A fine saturday beering was had in the company of Dan, Jim, Tom, and for a part of it, Manuel. Viv joined us for nosh at Blue C Sushi to get things rolling.

On the way, Viv and I had a bite at Ivar's fish bar on Lake Union. I dropped in on Dusty Strings as well and made the acquaintance of a killer 1922 tenor banjo, a steal at a mere $1200.

Watching TV Makes You Smarter [NYT blogerated link]: Steven Johnson thoughtfully dissects the increasing use of layered, limited-perspective narrative in television and argues that the increasing use of this strategy "makes you smarter," a pretty shaky thesis. His analysis is pretty interesting, though. I found the bogus cheerleading for the dubious notion that this kind of narrative is necessarily a good-for-your-noggin brain excercise pretty weak.

The depth of analysis applied to the plot structures of the shows he looks at is pretty cool, though. I guess my issue is this: if the writer is capable of such careful work, why not conduct emprical studies that validate or invalidate the thesis? The basic argument is that the use of complex plot structures and narrative methodologies must require more brain work from the viewer. If this is so, and it seems reasonable, does this necessarily translate to "smarter"?

I'd have to guess that it's demonstrably not so. Mastering complexity is a routine feature of traditional responses to comic books, science fiction, baseball and other sports (statistics!) and music. Managing the reams of data beloved by the respective fan-cultures may well be an activity that folks with a certain intellectual bent engage in. But I'm not so sure it makes them smarter. I'd guess that the activity follows the prediliction.

Still, an interesting read.

Recently, for reasons unknown, I noted myself wondering about a couple of old friends from Bloomington, Melissa Overton and Jenna Hanes. I most recently saw Melissa on my last visit to the town, in 1999, I think. It's possible I actually saw her on the prior visit.

I haven't seen Jenna for years and years, though. It was my impression that she was working for Bloomingfoods at the time I was there last but it's clearly possible that that was only true ten or more years ago. Googling for her proved a touch difficult as her name is partially shared by a porn star and a brand of clothing. I suppose creating this post means it's possible that either person might come across it while eGoogling, in which case, hi ladies! Hope you are well!

Eventually, I did come across the minutes of a Bloomington Board of Zoning Appeals meeting in which a mighty battle was fought concerning a person's chicken colony. Jenna appears to have testified in favor of the chickens, noting that she and her daughter enjoyed them. A surprisingly large number of people appear to have attended the meeting, all favoring chicken lib.

A pair of articles in the local paper by editor Carrol Krause were cited, and upon further investigation, I found this recent article on a chicken seminar held by none other than Carrol Krause: Chickens in the City.

This journalist student's work cites one David Rollo, a member of the city's Environmental Council, as recalling the chicken-oriented activism:

"There was one citizen's group, called CLUCK, which stood for Citizens Love Urban Chickens,” he said. “They wanted a change in the municipal code so that they could keep chickens as pets and get their own eggs and such right at home."

Sadly, no further trace of CLUCK was uncovered in using Google to scratch at the dirt of the farmweb. All power to the glorious people's poultry protesters!

Emergent Chaos: Help! Mac Project Management Software: More bloggery on the PM tip. seems as though this man has climbed the mountain afore me. I certainly hope he has found resolution.

So, curious why I had not yet received a cell phone bill, I looked up my account on the Cingular website. You will be unsurprised to hear that the one-month balance approached half a K, approximately $400 of which was in data charges associated with the Treo.

These charges are levied at 3 cents per kilobyte, or $30 per mb. Over the first 30 days of use, my data usage was about 14 mb, primarily in failed atempts to get AvantGo to sync.

Naturally, I renegotiated my service plan. I'm now on an unlimited data-usage plan.

Longtime readers will know in advance that while I'm pleased at my calm and methodical approach to getting a significant portion of the bill credited back in exchange for the upgrade, I loathe having been so smoothly pinballed into the entirely unreasonable total monthly service plan.

You heard it here first: after two years, no more cell phones for me. I've had and rejected them several times in the past, and see no compelling reason to expect that I will ever become reconciled to a one-hundred dollar monthly communication tax.

Cavers smash world depth record (BBC News): "A Ukrainian team has reached a record depth of 2,080m (6,822ft), passing the elusive 2,000m mark at Krubera, the world's deepest known cave. The nine-strong group were part of a project that has made breaking the 2,000m depth its goal for four years. They built on records set by a previous expedition, which blasted through blocked passages in the cave."

I am unaccountably amused by this headline.

Slashdot: Project Management Solutions for Mac OS X?

Noted.

A friend of mine had a break-in tonight. It's a bummer. I'm glad we were able to be there for him; he's understandably unsettled.

Well over a month ago, we inadvertently became a semi no-TV household. Our satellite provider mailed us a replacement 'smart card' for our satellite box, a five-year-old WebTV-integrated PVR which we have never used as a PVR or as a WebTV device but only as a receiver. The smart card managed to disable the device, and so the only reception we have was broadcast. Living in the center of a large city, you'd think that would mean fifteen or twenty channels but realitistically it limits reception to PBS and the local NBC and ABC affiliates. Happily for Viv, that has meant she has been able to keep up with the hypnotic 'Lost,' and happily for me, that means I have been able to catch a 'Nova' and a 'Frontline' here and there.

More happily for me, that has meant that the constant background noise of the TV has been replaced by the constant background noise of WCPE, and I have strongly felt my mood lift. I am frequently occupied with murderous, hateful mutterings when the TV is on constantly, an internal dialogue filled with fantasies of destruction directed at the media icons and humiliatingly-portrayed buffoons who flicker on and off stage in venues such as 'Oprah,' and '20/20.' I have been largely unaware of this dialogue until this month, when it's vanishment occasioned reflection on the cause of my uncharacteristically charitable, forgiving, and pleasant mood.

I view with some trepidation the family negotiation that this calls for; Viv's mood and sense of self have been ever-nurtured by the tube and I am nearly certain that she has felt as deadened and oppressed by the absence of the brainsucking spawn of hell as I have lightened and released. Where I feel as though a stinging, biting swarm of gnats, whose bites produce nightmares of hatred an torture has suddenly ceased to afflict my existence, based on past conversations, I suspect she has felt a sense of suffocating isolation, the solitude of the grave.

I would have to say this is something of a pickle.

I found the A mouse is no substitute | MetaFilter thread to be interesting and thought provoking and was deeply, happily surprised when there was no trolling meltdown. If you use the internet, please read this.

Adobe to buy Macromedia: NYT blogerated link

The document-design software company Adobe Systems Inc. said today that it had agreed to acquire the multimedia software firm Macromedia Inc. for about $3.4 billion in stock.

Huh. You know, this is either really good news for Corel, or possibly bad news for everyone else. I hope they keep Dreamweaver and retire GoLive; but I will welcome Adobe UI discipline in Dreamweaver whenever that inevitability comes to pass.

My weekend has been spent doing the dispiriting task of developing my employer's human resources policies, at least to an initial state. I believe I have it wrangled but I found the experience tremendously disheartening, even though the intellectual and work-relation problems resolved by having a policy in place clearly make it necessary.

How can I put it? It was (and will continue to be) an experience I can only describe as deeply uncomfortable and wrong, a reminder of my apparently permanent alienation from my native society and culture. I found the experience profoundly depressing.

Viv was out of town as well, inspiring musings about all-day-barhopping or 24-hour punk-rock movie festivals, but instead I, um, researched human resources policy on the web from my soft, comfy couch. I left said position to

• a) do laundry
• b) make coffee
• c) go to the liquor store for gin and
• c) eat at Kimchee Bistro in the Alley on Broadway, about three and one-half blocks from my house.

I also had two long phone conversations with my parents, one while walking to the liquor store and walking back, and one while doing laundry. The additional portability of the phone under such circumstances is definitely appreciated. I doubt I would have had time to talk with them had I been constrained to speak with them while within range of the land line.

I was slightly disappointed that I did not meet my personal goal of not leaving the house for 48 hours, always my weekend aim (with the exception of next weekend, nota bene). I was also somewhat puzzled by my personal reluctance to watch one of the several interesting movies I have, unwatched, in the house on DVD or to walk one block beyond the liquor store to attend a theatrical screening of the always-rewarding Chinatown at the Northwest Film Forum.

A bright spot over the weekend was my unexpectedly long email correspondence with Jon Nelson, who I have mentioned here before. Many years ago, one of my truly lasting friendships (with one Eric White) developed in an epistolary fashion and I think that's what happening with Jon and me now. He recently got a memorial tattoo dedicated to our mutual deceased pal Steve Millen, and talked about that and about the Green Tortoise, an alternative bus line that Jon drove for back in the mid-80s and which I once took from Seattle to San Francisco at midwinter. My trip was very memorable in a positive way. Jon does not look at his time with the Tortoise as positively.

Happily, however, Sunday afternoon, Vivian came home from her weekend getaway to Portland with one of her pals. We've just returned from dinner.

As I write, we are listening to the fathead classical programming of WCPE, a classical station I recently noticed in the default Radio::Classical subdirectory of iTunes. It transpires that the station is based near to my parents and may fairly be considered their classical station. It's a public station, but I don't think they run any NPR programming. They do run stuff that was once the mainstay of American public radio programming, such as the Sunday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (if on Saturdays). They have never yet strayed from a certain middle-of-the-road (thus: “fathead”) sensibility in the orchestral and chamber music they play, which is slightly disappointing, if understandable. In many ways, it's like an idealized time-capsule of public radio music programming in the era from 1975-1988.

Having learned to do intellectual work to this style of programming, it's a kind of guilty treat to have discovered the station. I think there's probably an interesting public-sector business story in the station as well, since its' website branding is 'The Classical Music Station.' I presume they must obtain a significant percentage of their pledge drive income from internet listeners.

Things is back, for a moment: "This is a bit of an experiment. We've been away for so long, that accumulated links, ideas and other debris threaten to overwhelm. So here's an epic compilation of things that have passed by our radar in the past four weeks. It'll have to do for now - we'll return on a daily basis at the start of May."

"Epic" is inadequate, I think.

UPDATE: Sorry for the lack of proofing - this was posted from a new tool and I was off to other matters before I looked in here.

I firmly believe I had some blathering in me today. But at the current time my listless sleepiness has limited my actions to staring blankly at the contents of the directory entitled “Games” found on my hard drive. If one of my games could be played by my lying, motionless, and whispering commands such as 'duck' or 'move right,' I could conceivably be motivated to play.

Voice-command-enabled chess does not count. Checkers, perhaps, or tic-tac-toe.

Looking for a real audio copy of British obscurity "the Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde"? Search no further.

I don't much listen to NPR in the daytime anymore, so I missed today's Writer's Almanac. I surely regret it, as will be seen should one peruse languagehat's thoughtful preservation of the text: languagehat.com: THE OLD PILOT.

I spent about two years as a member of a MMORPG called "Dawn of Aces." At some point a number of pilots from another, earlier WWI aviation MMORPG showed up. On one of their sites, someone had comemmorated an all-pilot fly-in in honor of a member who had died.

The screenshots showed hundreds and hundreds of digital SE5s and DVIIs and Camels and Nieuports stacked up into the digital sky, the pilots weeping into their textchat channels. The site, now lost to me, is one of the most moving and stange things I have ever seen.

Did I mention? Mom and Dad gave me a DVD of Hell's Angels. The flight sequences are largely unequaled, and unlikely to ever be shot again with real aeroplanes. I only gave them a cursory review, not wanting to spoil the flick, but I noted a proper otaku insistence on theatrical demonstrations of technical accuracy.

Sometimes I see the biplanes circling in the distance, wings flashing against sunset clouds on the horizon. I love all planes, but only wood and cloth really makes my heart rise.

I finally fixed the comments for the Gizmos site and the Tablet Siffblog from last year. So doing gave me a creative flash. Siffblog is now co-hosted at both the siff.tabletmag.com subdomain and the more-general siffblog.com. I dinked around with date-based archiving to see if I could segment 2004's entries from 2005's upcoming ones, and the date-based MTDirify tags do not support use in filepaths that also refer to non-date archives such as individual page entries or category entries. WIth that in mind, date-based archive pathing is already in place.

I suspect a collaborative weblog devoted to SIFF might be of great community value. If you are planning on SIFFing this year and would like to participate, please email me. Once I have had a chance to discuss this with the Tablet folks, I will probably create a sign-up queue on the Siffblog. Coop, I am looking at you, buddy.

Meet the Author | Book Bites - Brian Aldiss: Greybeard. (Quicktime autoload)

I just started plowing through some early work by one of may favorite UK New Wave SF authors, Brian Aldiss. I have never really plumbed what attracts me to his work, but he shares a commoanlity of tone and certain interests with his peer J. G. Ballard.

I am just beginning his 1964 Greybeard, a book I have no idea how I missed as a kid. It's got me hooked. For whatever reason, a trope of the British New Wave was the 'disaster novel,' in which some never-well-delineated catastrophe has upended human society. The hallmark of these books is the resolute focus on character development and interaction rather than the American Golden Age describe-and-prescribe modality.

This book comes quite early in the writer's career, and so it came to me as a deep an pleasant surprise to come across the link up top, in which the author descibes a bit about how the work came to be.

I adore Aldiss' material, and have stacks and stacks of his books; it truly mystifies me that I never came across this volume previously.

The same site offers clips of the author on essentially all of his best known work, but not, alas, my minor favorite, The Malacia Tapestry:

The Helliconia Trilogy: Aldiss' masterwork, an encyclopedic history covering 5000 years of a world whose seasons change as slowly as ice ages.
Supertoys Last All Summer Long: The short story that inspired A. I.
The Twinkling of an Eye: A work I do not believe I have read.
Trillion Year Spree: Aldiss, who has worked as a critic for many years in the UK, looks at SF. This book helped inspire in me the idea that genre fiction is well worthy of serious critical investigation.
Super-state: A recent work that I am unfamiliar with.
Affairs at Hampden Ferrers: A non-SF novel. I haven't read this but I have read much of his non-SF material and it is quite good.
Greybeard: The catastrophe novel I'm reading today.
Non-Stop: Another work that I'm unfamiliar with; however I suspect I have read it sometime in the deep past.

I had so much fun with those tables yesterday that I decided to do still more number crunching, on that time-tested blog topic, the blogiversary!

It was just over three years ago, on March 24, 2002, when I completed the initial setup on the just-released Movable Type 2 and posted my first entry, a pentimento to be developed into an opera known as "Mr. Red Ears." The piece had originally erupted unbidden in my email to good friend and returned-to-the-East-Coast stand-up comedian Ken Goldstein, who liked it enough to repost.

At about the same time, Eric Sinclair had also begun to experiment with this newfangled bloggy thing. I had long hesitated in the shadow of my locquaciousness, avoiding the call of the pen but suspecting I might take to it. The blog appeared to offer a laboratory setting and once I was off, I was off.

Since then I have held editorial positions at two nationally-distributed magazines and written for regional and special-interest press sparsely but regularly. I think I understand the process, and I have confidence in my ability to develop a story professionally and on deadline. None of this would have happened without the blog, and at least one editor called me to comission a story based at least partly upon awareness of my work stemming from the site.

My bandmate Greg recently challenged my self-perceptions on these matters. I don't think of myself as a writer in the way that I once thought of myself as an artist. He pointed out that my stumblebum determination to date has served me well and that realistically, the experiment has panned out. He has strongly encouraged me to shed my diffidence about identifying with the activity as a profession and to proceed aggressively toward attempting to earn a living from writing. I am still taken aback by the viewpoint but I must admit his arguments were forceful and correct.

At any rate, after tweaking this loonnng list, I was able to plop some data into Excel and get some basic metrics going.

My longest entry is one that came in the midst of what is still the strongest writing on the site: September 1988, part four, 4265 words and posted on September 20, 2002. It's one of a four-or-five part series chronicling the death of my sister in 1988, and written with the deliberate intention of causing the reader's personal grief to chime with my own, I hope in a cathartic and thoughtful way.

As I was writing it, advance publicity for the Wilco film I am Trying to Break Your Heart suffused my mediasphere, and the phrase stuck with me. I had just started my job with my first magazine as their online news editor (essentially a news blogger with a quota of ten daily items). I wrote the series in a frenzy, intercutting my pursuit and evaluation of the most trivial entertainment news with an attempt at serious personal investigation and excavation.

The other thing that ran through my mind that grim September, on the first anniversay of the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was my sister's example as a writer. In the too-short time between her high-school career and her death, she filled countless notebooks with writing of all sorts - poetry, fiction, scholastic research, journals.

I've still only read some of it. But one thing she wrote stuck with me as I wrote of her passage.

"I don't beleive in writing hard anymore," she'd recorded sometime near her death. She went on to note that emulating Kerouac was an immature writer's strategy and that she had no intention of trying to do so any further. She had been there, done that, and moved on. Instead she intended to write as an adjunct and reflective activity.

While writing September, 1988 definitely involved "writing hard," I was cognizant of my sister's dictum, of not mistaking the writing for life itself. To me that has meant both a desire to maintain a clear awareness of craft and narrative strategy in my professional work, to what success I cannot say, and a commitment to writing informally here. To which you owe the pleasure of my occasional vocabularist infelicties and tpyos.

So, whoever you are, thanks for coming. I have no intention of slowing down, and Greg's points are worthy of consideration. Check in three years from now and let's see what's transpired!

A list created as of March, 2004: Open-Source Diabetes tools at sourceforge.net. This list was forwarded as a base of investigation for a Debian-oriented dev list.

I also located a Germany-based product for diabetes tracking in the Symbian OS; unfortunately the screen shots of the product only depict it on the PC side and the UI is too intimidating for the general user, I believe.

There are a passel of tracking programs available for Palm, and have been for years, so the market is pretty well-developed. However it's really a Symbian product we need.

I have been discussing how valuable a blog-like tool for diabetes users would be. I wonder if it's possible to develop a plugin for the main blogging tools that would allow the user to select the kind of entry that they will make. I envision something could capture the dietary and blood-test information separately and allow non-publication, password-based access to the data, easy data transmission from the tool, etc, all while allowing the user to blog in the customary fashion as well.

An ideal use of my imaginary 'diablog' tool would be as a destination for the testing data, synching when the user synchs their PDA data.

Many meters also have onboard data storage and transfer ports. Unfortunately the tools for getting the data out are mired in the high-castle world of medical suppliers, and of course, medical data is a privileged class of information as well, which might well complicate liability for tool-providers aiming to make the datastream transparent.

macosxhints - 10.3: A script to create a segmented disk image. Possibly of use.

I have been thinking about backup for obvious reasons. In an ideal world, I would prefer to back up to nonvolatile, disposable media such as tape or discs, but the fragility and slowness of tape and the relatively small capacity of discs makes these choices currently untenable. Like others, I'm afraid I have concluded that hard drives are the only solution for home backup at the current time.

With that in mind, I conducted a pricing study, using recently completed eBay auctions as the basis. I did not account for shipping, speed or other product details, crunching only the raw closing price. The URLs in the table will not provide the same data I employed, but rather the current set for the searches I employed. The column labeled 'Average price' contains exactly that, a simple average calculated against the first page of results returned from ebay.

Here are the results:

This table corroborates the data seen above. The most economical choice for obtaining backup drives is the 200gb class.

It should be noted that the average sale price reported for the 200gb product class is actually higher than the $89.95 price offered by at least one merchant using the eBay 'buy it now' option.

In conclusion, these are bare drives intended for either internal mounting or for mounting into a separately-purchased case, which will run under $50. I have heard of folks swapping their backup hard-drives like tapes, but I believe that this is an impractical option. I don't have a budget developed for this yet, as I need to tally what I have to address in terms of data. However, I think that an additional 400gb should provide me with sufficient storage space to implement a scheduled full backup and subsequent incremental backups on a weekly /daily schedule.

NYT: New Arrest Adds Unexpected Turn in Child-Killing Case: A little girl was murdered this summer in Southern Indiana, and authorites arrested and charged a methamphetamine user with her death. Mid-week, another arrest in the case has upset the understanding of what happened.

I have a vague memory of seeing the initial coverage of this because of the way the news focused on the problem of meth in southern Indiana, which is where I grew up. The new arrestee is from Seymour, Indiana, one county over from my hometown of Bloomington.

Dan Bjoregren's SpotBus! presents a quick-loading, simplified UI front-end to Metro's Trip Planner transit information service. [via Tom]

He's done this by stripping away the in-Metro navigation chrome, adding some pre-loaded landmark-name data to help populate the form on entry, and setting the default time of travel to the current date and time.

He notes that the project is all his, not affiliated with Metro, and I applaud his effort. Metro has some seriously good stuff available - comprehensive route schedules, the bustracker Java map that display the physical location of all busses in a given area, and more. But the services are implemented in ways that make it difficult for outside developers to do more than what Dan has done here.

I have written about this more than once.

My particular desire is that the real-time bus arrival data be made available in a lightweight, fully parsable format, so that independent developers might be able to, for example, deliver the data to the desktop in a floating ticker window. The same data could than be easily made accessible in several PDA and cell-phone oriented formats (this implementation may actually meet all my requirements), so that the user would set up a list of the usual bus stops they patronize, and on-demand, learn which buses are the next ones to arrive.

The basic code for this is already done; the people who developed Tracker at UW wrote a javascript implementation of the service. Unfortunately, I have been told that there is no way to create ad-hoc location-specific stop tickers; the feeds that power the six stops are custom-parsed server-side and no further location feeds are available, which is a shame. The service itself is physically deployed on several bus-shelters throughout the Metro service area. I corresponded with a member of the development team, who informed me that my feature request would not be met, for several reasons, not least of which being that the grant for the project had been completed and the project had no further allocated development resources. In my recollection, a request that the codebase be made open source was not responded to.

I beleive I have enfixinated the Powerbook.

Thesse notes on my restoration process may help someone. I reinstalled most of the system software. Some updates had to wait intil I had fixed the perms and ownership issues, which I did as follows.

In my home folder, I opened Terminal and became root:

as root:

Certain folders in mwhybark/Library had goofy permissions. They were set to 700, owner read-write-execute and all else barred. Proper Library permissions are 755. I actually hand-corrected one at a time, but I should have said:

I must note that I have not yet thoroughly tested to see if I'm done or not. For example, Missing Sync requests a reinstall; there may be other apps that are similarly wonky.

We had a lovely time at Karla and Diego's birthday party last night. I have some pictures to share but as the computer rebuild is proceeding, I'm limited to moblogging.

Therefore I am posting only a single image.

Viv is watching the fairly creepy Julianne Moore flick, The Forgotten, so this lovely doll wins.

Paul Rademacher: Housing. Amazing [via mefi].

James also notes the Silophone.

Mefi thread on Ricky Gervais' 80's band.

the man page for hdid explains the problem:

Beware that an image you have created and attached is considered an unknown removable device. For HFS filesystems on such a device, being unknown to the system means that the on-disk ownership of files and directories are ignored by default. On 10.2, they were dynamically replaced with the owner of /dev/console and the group unknown (gid 99). On 10.3, the group remains unknown, but the owner is whoever is currently accessing the file (joe sees that he owns the file when he looks; mary sees she owns it whenever she looks). Owners can be enabled for a particular volume permanently (see disktool/"get info" in the Finder) or temporarily (see EXAMPLES section of hdiutil(1)). Aside from whether owners are enabled, being removable means that disk arbitration will mount any volumes with special options such as nosuid.

However, this does not identify the original file ownership settings nor explain the criteria for those files that did not get remapped.

To save an excel file as tab-delimited text into a specific subdirectory, these are the keystokes I have found to be required for this single operation in Office Excel 2003 under Win XP:

alt-F, A
Tab, T, T, Return
Shift-Tab, Shift-Tab, Up arrow, Down arrow, Return
Alt-S, Return, Y, Control-W, N

That's fifteen keystrokes for something that should take one click. Further providing me amusement is the employment of not one, but TWO meta-keys to provide menu-command and window-control access.

Experienced Excel users will also recognize that the use of the "Y" and "N" keys in the final line of this control sonnet are a negative agreement and a positive agreement to the gentle and concerned ministrations of the save-dialog wizard, which forces the user to respond consecutively "Yes" and "No" to two similar questions having to to with Excel data-formats and the lack of support for them to be found in text files.

Before I forget, my current understanding of the problem and repair procedure for Odysseus is:

Problem definition: when the underlying copy tool used by CCC to create images, "ditto," does its' thing, in certain circumstances, file ownership records are changed to 99 from the appropriate ownership status. CCC fora indicate this problem is associated with files created under OS9 and therefore outside of the permissins and ownership management protocols of OS X. In my case, this clearly affects files that have nothing to do with OS9.

User ID 99 is a special ID which causes the files to report, falsely, that they are owned by whatever process it is that is attempting to determine ownership. Determining the proper ownership of these files and resetting them to the correct User ID is the resolution. The problem that arises is isolating and identifying the appropriate and accurate ownership setting. It may actually be impossible to do so, if the UID 99 has been assigned to files which should belong to more than a single user ID or process.

1. Restore from backup via imaging.

2. Hand restore any User directories and preferences. I beleive I may attempt to hand restore Applicaions as well, but if that fails, I can figure out any apps that were updated in the day or two we're looking to restore to.

3. Check for the UID problem.

4. If found (it will be), dig out the initiall installation disks that came with the unit. Perform an install using the archive and restore user prefs option.

This should resolve all system-level UID and perms errors, leaving only any issues associated with user-installed applications and files in the User directory hierarchy. THe files in the User directory, in theory, can then be recursively set to belong to the user associated with that directory.

Any remaining UID errors can be isolated on an application by application basis, presumably via reinstalls.

FIXED: Preference permissions shot after cloning..., says the title of this CCC forum. Hope so!

UPDATE: no good. However, this thread appears to argue that the method for dealing with this is to perform a full system reinstall using Archive & Install with "Preserve User Prefs and Internet Settings".

Oh look! Here's another thread about wandering file ownership settings.

Well, Odysseus is back home after the shortest venture into uncharted territory of all time. The machine is fully operable, but I apparently neglected some homework.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a duplicate of the drive before taking it in, and afterward duplicated the Users folder daily until I took it in.

What I didn't realize was that Disk Utility has a less cumbersome disk imaging feature intended for use as a backup and restore tool. The upshot is that somehow I scrambled the write permissions on the volume, and while it boots properly, prefs and stuff like install records, licensing keys, and the like are not being read or recognized.

So I have a longish round of repeated restores ahead of me to find the correct materials. Hopefully someone's solved this problem previously, and I'll beable to find out more from them.

Gang of Four US tour, 2005: May 6, Seattle, at the Showbox, TSA permitting.

For the uncertain, the first two records by the Gang of Four are at the root of the punk sound that can be heard in the work of Mission of Burma and to an extent the Minutemen. Later work by the band was very "dance-oriented" and therefore not nearly as interesting to me.

There's a well-developed Wikipedia article on the band which may shed light on my excitement.

Man, I love Entertainment and Solid Gold more than nearly any of the other old stuff I have from back then, for what it sounds like and for how rare it was. I suppose that some of the band's aggressively atonal political polemics must have inspired Crass, among others, but I just never really got into Crass in a musical sense, while I can still sing the words to several GoF songs. Really, no-one else ever sounded like this band, not even themselves.

Apparently Rhino is reissuing Entertainment on May 17, although CD Universe claims a one-day ship for an EMI '95 reissue. I am wholly unsurprised to find that there is no GoF music available via the iTunes store.

However, a bandmember has made some killer tracks available here, including Anthrax, Not Great Men, and Return The Gift, although, sadly, they appear to be abbreviated samples.

I thought Sleeve had retired his bloggy self, but I was wrong. Say, daddy-o, there's talk of a crawl up the Willamette with an Ozymandian stop at the Spruce Goose, how's school treating you this summer?

Speaking of email, I am ready to kill Outlook.

First, (didn't I note this previously?), in Outlook Office 2003 under XP SP2, the email program does not make a clearly documented, essential feature - redirection - available to users unless they are running the application in an Exchange server environment, and the help documents make no mention of this whatsoever. At least I have the small comfort of knowing I burned a solid four hours of support time on that ludicrous question.

Second, another crucial feature is disabled for users in non-Exchange environments. There is no way to define and use a range of correspondence templates such that the boilerplate can be easily and directly inserted at the cursor or such that the user can generate replies to inbound email directly from the template. The ideal use-case in this instance should be that a control-click on the "Reply" button would generate a contextual menu that included nested menus for the email templates.

You can define email templates, and even work with them to integrate them into user-facing widgets such as toolbars. But since the majority of boilerplate correspondence in any business environment is responses to the same seven to ten queries, the current necessary workflow - open, select, copy, close, paste - is absurd in the extreme.

I was further embatsinated by the apparent impossibility of duplicating user-created toolbars other than via manual click and point. Since a toolbar is contextually specific, only toolbars bound to a given view are accessible in that view. You can't make your toolbar of templates and then simply drop it into every window that might spawn; you have to recreate it manually each time, as far as I was able to discover.

The upshot of this is that a one-hour setup turned into an endless four hours of miserable help-file spelunking and googlations.

Last week, as I realized I needed to drop Outlook in order to gain access to redirection, I installed Eudora 6.2 on my primary machine at work. I was appalled to see my old friend in such a state; although I was able to do the specific things that Outlook will not permit, the sad truth of the matter is that Outlook now offers a vastly superior user experience, from the comprehensive use of single-click access to the user-interaction elements (including organizational tools such as folders and flags) to the carefully designed three-column default display. By comparison, Eudora now feels irrationally organized and shaky, even recalcitrant.

Perhaps the superior naive-user experience led me to expect a similar polish behind the scenes. I don't know. I can say that my wrists and back hurt needlessly from the stress of wrestling with the odious, abject failure of the deep UI and featureset. It's the worst email client you can use, except for all the rest.

The Apple Store called me today to let me know that Odysseus is ready to be picked up. Given that he is a tricksy one, I half mistrust the word. I do not intend to wear my eyepatch.

bmg://theMike.blogs.here - Why use Gmail? notes that you can use infixed email aliases like "username+foo@gmail.com" to provide tracking on inbound email filtered at the email address.

...And we are off to the Apple store to drop the box off. The new brain arrived safe and sound. I have backed up the Users folder and, although I hesitate to swear to it, I beleive no additional data has entered the directory structure since last night - all my data interaction on the machine has been thin-client, blogging and reading Gmail.

Gmail! Man, what an amazing thing! Bill Gates is surely sleeping badly these days.

I review on ATC of Ian McEwan's Saturday reminded me I had read either an engrossing excerpt or a review of the book several months ago. Whichever it was, I was sold at the time.

How, I wonder, might one go about excavating linkable URLs from within AvantGo?

Today, I came across two stories I'd like to blog, the Beeb on Google's videoblogging announcement, and the P-I's story on the upcoming Silver Cloud Hotel near Safeco Field. A story about the addition of satellite imagery to Google maps on the NYT also caught my eye, but proved too horkulated a pain in the ass to link to, even in-browser and online.

I think I have bitched about this before. It's an unserved need which is generated by my position in the unlikely intersection of three sets: the cheap, the wired, and the bloggy. You might dignify (or ridicule) this absurd self-diagnosis by casting me as a member of the "cheapgnoscenti," but of course I would never stoop to such a callow coinage. To that subprognothean depth of verbal flimflammery and obfuscatory pyrotechnics, I stoutly rejoin: no sir!

I suspect the answer is within spitting distance. The method is to replace the AG feeds with RSS feeds of the same data (and here's the tricky bit), rendered within AG via a multi-format aggregator such as Newsmob. This leaves the problem of getting to the links unsolved, as they resulting feeds are still rendered by AG.

In addition, Newsmob appears to be unfunded. In my experience, the service is spotty (although that may be the fault of feed providers) and has a terrible admin UI that more-or-less guarantees each new user will create a new feed with the desired content rather than locating the extant one.

Mind you, this is all groundless speculation. But it describes my experience to date.

Please note: moblogged sans links, fixed in post.

A remarkable collection of “bawdy songs.”

UPDATE: actually, the site itself is even more remarkable than I had realized. On March 31, the site author was in B-ton for “Extreme Folklore.” It's a shame I was unaware of this; I surely would have alerted Holly.

The site author's précis: “This website is dedicated to traditional bawdy songs, erotic toasts and other recitations. The name, Immortalia, was chosen because it is the name of the earliest unexpurgated bawdy songbook published in the USA.”

Please note, the above is a deliberate nose-tweak aimed at the TOS, which says, in part, “derivative works and other unauthorized copying or use of stills, text, sounds or graphics is expressly prohibited.” I have derived, and I have copied, as noted by the quotes.

The author appears to expressly encourage it, as on the “What's New” page, he states, regarding a song entitled The Motherfucker's Ball, “If you sing this song, please email me.”

Huh, that's pretty obviously a derivative work. I wonder if the invitation is to provide for some sort of copyright enforcement.

The site remains remarkable. Perhaps the site author will exhibit the same sense of humor that much of the material so carefully collected therein does. I simply cannot believe the sheer density of the site.

The House of the Rising Sun may have been found, I learned from this MetaFilter post.

Fastmail users: any drawbacks to the own-domain $39/year plan? I'm nearly sold, and would like to hear negatives. I don't care about the webhosting, just the email. Do I get full access to the underlying mailhandler? How's the integrated webmail? What about the spamfilter?

Eric reminds me about the beautifully-designed ebooks site, ManyBooks. I enjoyed a few works by Robert Louis Stevenson last year, and there are many more, including a nearly forgotten childhood favorite, A Child's Garden of Verse.

Resco Photo Viewer for Palm OS looks somewhat promising, if a bit limited in scope.

I want a mini Photoshop for the Palm, one that I can use to create and draw in as well as look at pics. The most crucial image-editing tool for me would be curves, apart from the imagemarking tools such as brush. The few sketchpad apps I have seen are like thin-featured imitations of MacPaint, very 1985.

Adobe includes Palm as a supported OS for Elements, but I haven't yet figured out if it's more than a simple album-sync.

While I enjoy the challenge of working in two-bit graphics (see below), it's sort of like using a skateboard with steel wheels.

This was drawn on an old-at-the-time Mac SE, using the mouse and looking at Chloe who was atop the warm teevee.

With From the Web: Notes on Halo, the NYT glances in the direction of the New Games Journalism. Why Halo features in the headline but not in the copy must remain a mystery.

So, you know (and I'm sure you do) that I love posting links to paper modelcraft.

Of course, we all know what the problem with paper models is. They simply fly too slow, right?

Where's that modern age of speed and danger that Marinetti celebrated a full century ago? Come on, man, paper models of biplanes - cloth and twigs in the original, mere leaves of a dream-folio in the model - must ultimately be assessed as puerile juvenilia, am I right?

You know, in your heart of hearts, that I am.

That's why it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the exciting, half-century-old practice of scratch-or-kit constructing and hand-launching flying paper or balsa wood models containing and powered by tiny refillable solid-fuel aluminimum rocket motors! What better way for a boy to learn of the hazards that await him on battlefields from Baghdad to Cold War central Europe? Watch those fingers, kid - it's gonna get HOT!

Today, the Jetex tradition is carried on by the brave innovators of Jet-X and Rapier.

Well, having some unexpected free time, we went back to Goodwill and found some glasses. They weren't the ones we'd come up with initially, but they'll do. I can't tell you how much I enjoy picking through the glassware at Goodwill - it's like a giant, transparent, three-dimensional puzzle, and your challenge is to find the items that match. Since the glasses are transparent, generally a bit grungy, and poorly lit, it's quite challenging. The little kids kicking soccer balls around in the aisle behind you as you step back to get a longer view complete this transcendent shopping experience. I highly recommend it, and will continue building matched sets amid the chaos for hours, until pulled away by Viv.

Wandering the cavernous store I took some pictures of interesting gimcracks. I have assembled them here for your viewing pleasure.

This primitive spam machine comes complete with a mailing list.

At the exit, you'll be pleased to know, the management has made a concerted effort to cater to the needs of the post-atomic hipster with these rare Polynesian craft-charms. These “primitive symbols of nature” undoutedly reflect centuries of craftsmen's secrets and the ancient spiritual wisdom of the South Seas.

As we were browsing I happened to come upon what I will argue to be the most radical and confrontational public exhibit of art I have ever encountered in a Goodwill. The pieces were all available for sale, uncredited. I do not think I am wrong in crediting them to a single unknown artist.

The first piece I encountered, which enunciates the theme of the show, is this one. It charges radically past the boundaries of traditional collectible-sculpture aesthetics. The base features a quote from President George Bush - “The advance of human freedom - the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time - now depends on us.” Yet the still-recognizable profile of the Statue or Liberty, defiled and broken, mocks these words. Dangling from the neck are a pair of bare wires. It's a clear reference to Abu Ghraib and ancillary torture policies such as the deliberate deportation suspects to friendly, torture-using states. Rarely if ever has a Goodwill played host to such an evisceration of a sitting American President. Buy it now, and get a gallery show!

Here, the unknown artist has crafted a loving homage to exploitation movies of the past fifty years while simultaneously managing to keep the theme of torture in the air.

In this disturbing diptych, the same artist now tackles the effects of torture - and, it must be noted, makes a glancing reference to Western ideas concerning Islamic jurisprudence. Taking as their starting place a Norman Rockwell painting, the unknown artist has, shockingly, dismembered the child. The infant gazes in shock at the stumps of their forearms while a doctor gazes helplessly on. Only on closer examination do we realize that the beloved professional is himself the victim of dismemberment. Too shocked to acknowledge his recent loss, the now-missing hand is clenched in fruitless determination about the physician's very emblem: his stethoscope. America's turn toward the dark side has removed trust, self-awareness, and competence from the domestic landscape, the sculptor argues.

In what this critic found to be the most disturbing piece of the show, the artist trangresses the boundaries of gender, sexual orientation, and what is delicately known as “the furry barrier” with this image of what is presumably the artist's prescriptive remedy to the degradation and impotence of the preceding works. Like Jimmy Stewart in High Noon, the figure stands at the door to the church, ready for action. The fact that this sheriff is not so much a cowboy as a cow, beteated belly unleashed in what can only be described as the mother of all wardrobe malfunctions, outs the radicality of the artist's approach. The fact that the cow is also dressed in a gay man's fetish uniform, featuring chaps, puts us all on notice: the gay furry cow sherriff is a-comin', and she is pissed!

It's clobberin' time, friends. Are you right with the Goddess?

Fortunately, hir mercy is a fountain, or rather hand-pump, that flows from the heads of angels, and surely our hands will be free from chaps for the rest of our days, ever and ever, amen. May the heavenly angel of hand-lotion (or hand-soap, emphasizing the clean-hands thesis of this critique) remain with you unto the end of your days.

As noted, when we left the Goodwill, each of these items remained available for sale. Hurry!

Oh, I noticed an interesting side effect of the iPod and the iTunes music store today while holding for a support rep prior to going in: the music that was played on hold was the same pablum that gets pushed via promo agreements on the iTunes store. It was enough to make me want to rip my fucking ears off.

Once upon a time, the hold music was generic Silicon Valley technoschmutz, no vocals to allow you to personalize your feelings of violation and hatred as you listen to some ex-American Idol contestant promulgate idiotic, preadolescent fantasies about fate and relationships and rainbows and stormy skies. And ponies.

This new promo program (sources tell is it was code-named "Down Your Throat") raises customer irritation to new heights. By the time the support person came on I wanted to kill them. This change must increase phone rage.

You know what Apple should do? When you get into the hold queue, they should give you a three-part choice of music programming. I bet they'd improve their numbers and at the same time that recent troubling decline in support-case closures would be nipped in the bud.

It's not like it's hard to program for my demographic. Some Ry Cooder, a little Tom Waits - basically anything you can sleep through that at the same time has pretensions of asking you to think is fine with me.

On the way to the Apple Store, we ran some errands. Viv missed a freeway turnoff and we found oueselves in the parking lot of the Goodwill store on Dearborn.

A couple of weeks ago we had carefully picked over the ever-changing selection of glassware for a set of red wine glasses; this morning one was broken as the coffee was made.

So we took the opportunity to run in in search of the same glass. We knew there was a good chance of there being more because we had debated purchasing all twelve glasses we'd uncovered, but decided against that.

See that chair up there? That's a gen-you-wine Herman Miller task chair, pre-Aeron but still serviceable and comfy as hell.

They want $9.99 for it. Get down there, bargain seekers!

In the end, we did not get the glasses. The entire store's computers went down as we stood in line. I tried to give someone ten bucks for our $4.50 worth of merchandise, but that was just asking for trouble, so we split.

So now I am parked at the Apple Store, awaiting my theoretical 5:15pm appointment. The bench seating in the presentation / waiting area is comfy but unfortunately, in my opinion, it has also been the default choice for airport seating for many, many years.

UPDATE: Literally as I was saving this, a Genius called out all the names in the queue before mine with no response. The drive is ordered and on its' way, and when they have it in stock, they'll call to let us know. Then we'll drop the machine off for a theoretical overnight turnaround. I may not have to go through Powerbook withdrawal after all!

Odysseus is off to the Apple Store for a brain transplant today. Cards and letters intended for the Pope but now rendered moot will be welcomed.

Man, I am going to have a serious case of laptop withdrawal. Will I be able to resist the shiny, candy-colored Mac mini? I think so, but I will salivate.

G-Mailto, found at Gmail tools, is a way to allow mailto: links to open a Gmail compose window when clicking the link-class.

The developer describes it as obsolescent due to Google's Gmail Notifier, but given that the Notifier is Windows-only, I'm thinking obsolescent is not a correct description.

Although, in the wake of yesterday's amusing rollout of 2gb of email storage on the service, who knows what other widgets are impending?

Lessee now, I have 50 invites, which is 100gb, and a 70gb HD about to fail, so I can set up a GFS drive. I can back everything up -- in seventy or eighty hours.

Is Lost running an ARG behind the show? This site's URL is a bit obvious, and this fansite has been highlighted elsewhere by someone who claims the show's producers are reading his blog.

It's time to sleep, but I suggest the link buttons seen in the first-linked site might call for investigation, as does the news section at the fansite, which pointedly notes that the site was hacked and “half the content” replaced. Go get 'em!

The Lower Hudson Valley Paper Model E-gift Shop contains some veritable grails of space-happy cardmodeling, including a seven-inch Saturn V and a four-foot one, the Nautilus and Squid, a World War One tank, and most incredibly, a Gulf Oil LEM in versions one and two, which I have only seen previously at an unbuildable size.

There's a great deal more amazing stuff here, including Star Wars, B5, old-skool Battlestar Galactica, an amazing robot thing, Trek, von Braun, a Boeing-drawn blueprint poster of a Saturn V, and a poster I am quite sure I recall as having been from a National Geographic published in July, 1967 (which is clearly credited to NASA and dated May 1967, so I may be wrong).

Link found at the indefatigable Cartoonist.

(Surely I have used this title before)