My childhood bedroom was about the size of my current bedroom, but a bit more square. A closet faced with two bifold doors, I think, was bumped out from the wall that also held the entry door. I suppose the room must have been about fifteen feet square. In the center of the wall to one's right, on entering, was a single dual-frame sash window, double-paned, with faux multi-pane inserts delicately mounted onto the window's frames.
The wood used to construct these multi-pane inserts was a light wood, such as pine, stained transparently brown and dried to a featherweight after twenty years of central heat in the face of Indiana's increasingly brutal winters. I recall taking the struts out and being puzzled, and little bothered, by the fakeness of the inserts. Today, I rather imagine I will require some sort of faux multi-pane inset when we replace the singlepane aluminum frame windows that predominate in our new house. The wood in the inserts in my childhood home rang like a bell when tapped, in consequence of their perfectly dry state.
The walls of my room were a pale blue, as I believe the carpet was. My single bed ran along the wall farthest from the door. On the wall containing the window, my dresser was between the corner and the window, with about three wall-mounted shelves above the dresser.
I have no clear memory of the blank wall opposite the window, the wall I faced if I sat up in bed. I think I must have changed the arrangement of this wall relatively frequently. I had a desk in the room, at which I did homework, and several three-cove portable shelves that my father had made when I was about seven. Therefore I assume these furnishings were ranged against this wall. I believe a reader of this blog possesses both desk and shelves.
As a teen, the walls of the room were quite nearly covered with posters of musicians and shows, only some of which I still have. I do not recall to whom I gave my large collection of large-size photo posters but was surprised when we moved this winter to fond that I had not taken them with me to Seattle.
On occasion, in my teens, I left the house by my bedroom window after feigning sleep, returning after a night out. I do not recall if my parents ever discovered this. I'm reasonably certain that they will only learn that I also surreptitiously brought a girlfriend over one night and spent the night in my bed with her should they chance to read this. I hasten to assure the reader, parental or otherwise, that I did not ask her to engage in such monkeyshines as entering or exiting via the window.
I have a small woven rug from Latin America in my current bedroom which has traveled with me from my childhood room to this one. On first thought, I think it may be the only thing in my bedroom that was also in that one, over twenty years past.
A friend mentioned to me today that in the piece I posted yesterday, my description of the house I grew up in makes it sound like a mansion. It's not; it's a factory-issue Cape Cod two story with two first-floor bump-outs, and each interior room is of modest dimensions. Technically, the largest room in the house is the basement, raw concrete in most places and open from foundation wall to foundation wall. The first year we lived there, I have vague memories of my folks fighting to stem a minor flood entering via the single exterior door in the basement, at the foot of a flight of stairs which were designed to drain into an inset grill and runoff, clogged from neglect.
The basement was where I first tried to play rock and roll, to no avail, with a dear friend who (small town!) later played bass in an early band of the current householder. It's also where my parents' immense pre-parenting grad-student and college-professor paperback collection wound up. This notably included (to my adolescent delight) Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Toffler's Future Shock (you're soaking in it!), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and a post-Supreme-Court publication of Fanny Hill, which disappointingly proved as understimulating as the Supreme Court decision reprinted in full in the frontmatter.
It was also the part of the house my sister decided to sleep in in the months leading up to her death. At that point in her life, she preferred open and undadorned spaces and slept only on a tatami mat, a practice she'd selected years earlier and stuck with.
The basement also housed a relatively well-lit laundry room, a rather gloomy workshop which also provided storage, and in later years, a narrow room my father built by walling a part of the basement off with cinderblock in a largely successful attempt to create a cave-like room with minimal temperature fluctuation - a caveau for wine.
Beginning in the very early seventies, my father determined to become a winemaker, and each year from then until now - that's about 35 years, for those reaching for the abacus - made one or more varieties of wine, usually in batches no larger than a single carbuoy. His first attempts are best considered as learning excercises. But by 1980 he knew what he was doing, and to this day, his skill has only grown.
I also recallbasement retreats in the face of repeated, and ever-more-traumatic, tornado drills. In spring, tornado watches and warnings would recur with increasing frequency, something that must remain the case today. The family would repair to the basement and listen to classical music through the crackle of slight static on the basement radio until the watch was declared over. As my sister entered adolescence, these events became ever-more traumatic. Eventually, it became apparent that she was experiencing a full-blown phobic reaction to the drills, something that may have been grounded in my family's role as spectators of the April, 1974 tornado outbreak.
The year I moved to Seattle, my parents moved to North Carolina, and asked me if I wanted to take any of the stuff that had remained at the house since my departure about fifteen years prior. The material was stored under the basement stairs.
I looked at the pile of stuff. My first stuffed doll, Mr. Bun Rab. My collection of plastic models of space and aerospace technology. A three-foot display mannequin representing an American astronaut obtained from the show windows of a Chilean department store in 1969 at my somewhat frantic three-year-old insistence. Of course I wanted it.
Turning to my mom, I told her that It was trash and that she should just throw it away.
An idle witticism by a friend led me to look, briefly, into the etymology of "alcohol."
As he jokingly suggested, the word comes to English via Arabic:
In general usage, alcohol (from Arabic al-kukhūl الكحول = "the spirit", "the chemical".)
The wikipedia entry takes a pleasant jaunt into free association, worth examining:
However, this derivation is suspicious since the current Arabic name for alcohol, الكحول = ALKHWL = al???, does not derive from al-kuhul. The Qur'an in verse 37:47 uses the word الغول = ALGhWL = al-ghawl — properly meaning "spirit" ("spiritual being") or "demon" — with the sense "the thing that gives the wine its headiness". The word al-ghawl also originated the English word "ghoul", and the name of the star Algol. This derivation would, of course, be consistent with the use of "spirit" or "spirit of wine" as synonymous of "alcohol" in most Western languages. (Incidentally, the etymology "alcohol" = "the devil" was used in the 1930s by the U.S. Temperance Movement for propaganda purposes.)
I'll drink to that!
Fellow MeFite childhood acquaintance Grumblebee is involved in a theatrical production in the NYC environs.
Pella's irritatingly-hard-to-bookmark online custom window design widget is interesting.
Behind my childhood house, there was an immense city park, roughly following the contours of a creek that sat between the cul-de-sac my home was on and the parking lot of the Indiana Bell office building about 500 yards away. The sides of the mostly-gentle hills leading into the valley were uniformly suburban-lawn length grass, cleared years ago and mowed by the city every three weeks or so. In the bottomlands and down some small defiles leading to the creek (unambiguously pronounced 'crick') were a few remnants of what may well have been old-growth forest - a stand of about four immense knotty cedar trees, a couple of beautiful and immense oaks, and a forty-foot stump of a tree that may have been oak.
This stump was entirely hollow on the inside. There was an opening at the base of the trunk large enough to admit a full-grown person, and the interior of the tree was about three feet across. The insides of the trunk had been burned smooth at some point in the past. We referred to it as "the lightning stump," and throughout my childhood I assumed that a stroke of lightning had burned out the trunk's interior.
However, at some point after the tree had been burned out, someone had nailed foot-long two-by-fours to the interior of the trunk all the way to the top of the trunk. For years, one could clamber up the inside of the trunk and perch atop the hollow cylinder, gazing at the brambles and trees and across the park to the inviting spectacle of the half-filled Bell parking lot or onto the undeveloped lots abutting the parklands. To the east, the second growth forest of Mary's farm overtopped the stump.
Other industrious predecessors had likewise labored long over the design and construction of ambitious treehouses in the two tallest of the cedars. In one of these gnarled giants, platforms large enough to hold three kids each had been erected at three heights within the tree, the highest of these large platforms easily 60 feet up. There was one more platform in this tree, at the fey top of the branches, nailed into a multiply-branched juncture where the limbs measured as much as three inches across.
Climbing into this crow's nest caused the entire top of the tree to sway mightily, and a gust of wind would whip the platform back and forth in an arc which certainly seemed to be fifteen feet in section.
It's my understanding that the hollow tree is no longer accessible, the brambles having overtaken the entrance, and the boards on the interior having long fallen away. One would also expect that the wood of the trunk itself would have begun to soften and rot into nothing, forty years down the road. Likewise, the treehouse platforms were largely gone the last time I visited the park, well over ten years ago.
The brambles that formed the underbrush in the defiles were large, arched pricker bushes whose limbs brushed the earth in an apparently impenetrable curtain. To a kid, though, the branches could be pushed aside with care, revealing a natural shelter around the base of each of the plants. The plants clustered and provided extensive tunnels large enough to stand upright within over a bare dirt floor, unencumbered by any undergrowth. These natural clubhouses became a base of operations for the neighborhood kids, storehouses for the peculiar treasures uncovered in the park. These treasures primarily consisted of weatherbeaten issues of Penthouse magazine and the occasional dropped or discarded bag of pot, pipe, lighter, or on one memorable occaison, a peculiar blue device which was embossed with the words "Power Hitter."
It took me years to figure out that this was also a marijuana-consumption tool.
While Viv and I were at the nordic behemoth's caves, I received a voicemail from an old friend in Bloomington, someone I knew in high school and later in the music scene: he and his wife and kids have moved into my childhood home on the far east side of town. Far out. I have no idea how he figured out that it used to be our house.
I have a bunch of stories for him, obviously.
It might be fun to work on them here, too. Writing about that house and my mostly negative feelings about it might be beneficial for me in relation to this place. I really hated living there, because it was so far away from things I wanted to be close to in the center of town. What's a bit odd is that I remember kind of hating it when I was a little kid too, before I could have cared about living on the outskirts of town.
When we first moved there, the subdivision was still partially in development, raw dirt piles, empty lots, road graders and the like just down the road. Playing in the dirtpiles was fun, sculpting cities of mud and riding bikes up and down the transient midwestern arroyos.
It still felt like we were too far from anything to bother even wanting to leave the house. The Mall was a bit over a mile away toward town, but of course these postwar developments are pedestrian-hostile, and that's unbearable for a child. Once I was old enough to walk to the mall on my own, around age 12, I found it essentially repulsive and lost interest in visiting.
Our house was relatively old, having been constructed in the mid-sixties on a very traditional plan. I suppose if Viv and I had seen the place in another context out here while looking for the place we eventually bought I would rather have liked it, although it would have been well beyond our means - the place has two master bedroom suites, three and a half baths, five bedrooms, a living room, a family room with an open plan kitchen, a dining room, fireplace, basement, two-car garage, level RV-size driveway, and a freaking huge lot - the specific reason I hate the very idea of yardwork, actually. It's backed by an immense farm, overgrown back to 80-year forest and apparently owned and under the benevolent protection of a local rockstar in accordance with the wishes of my late ex-neighbor Mary, who was responsible for regrowing the forest as well as keeping a chicken barn full of cats and a semi-feral dog pack back in the wood.
The farm's last buildings burned down in 1983 or 1984, as I recall, but you could still see the lanes the farmer's family had carefully bordered with a profusion of daffodils every spring.
Viv and I spent much of the day at IKEA, trying to come up with a plan for one of the rooms in the house, and after overdosing on nordic set design we may have been able to come up with a plan. On a whim a moment ago, I Googled "IKEA blogs," and, dear god, came up positive.
OHIKEA and Positive Fanatics both fit the bill, with the latter more what I was expecting and the former somewhat more specialized, focusing on a certain geographic area's stores and stores-to-come.
Interesting thread on MoFi about the Challenger shuttle disaster - 20 years ago today.
UPDATE: This morning MetaFilter has one too.
Viv and I also saw Narnia tonight, finally. Viv liked it considerably more than I did. She did not notice the three-hour running time; I did, and I also noticed some scenes which appeared to refer to cut scenes presumably excised to sweeten the DVD, something which irks me a bit. The excisions should be seamless; apparently, though, Viv did not notice and so perhaps I'm being overly critical. Viv did remark, over and over again, how similar the film appears to attempt to be to The Lord of The Rings. I rather thought the filmmakers had tried to push nearly as far away as they could, given the subject matter (and the New Zealand exterior locales and the use of WETA in production). It's more a case of Lewis' book and Tolkien's book having been creatively gestated by two close friends. The similarity of settings and so forth is a direct consequence of the dons having chosen the fantasy milieu to work in.
Like the book, I felt the film was uneven, veering from effective to boring with little warning. Lewis' key insight in the narrative is the juxtaposition of the recognizable tropes of fairy tale and children's literature (Alice in Wonderland meets Rapunzel) with modernity in the form of the jarring experience of war and sacrifice the children undergo. It's a heavy message when read as a kid, and the flaws in Lewis' execution don't lessen the jolts a kid feels on reading it for the first time.
Read as an adult, I got fed up with Lewis' pulled punches and uncontrolled veering from surreal vista to sugary kid stuff, but the essential charm of he book was still available to me. In the film, I was pretty much bored by the climactic events at the Stone Table as visualized by the filmmakers. In the book, the girls' horror at what they see is conveyed by Lewis at least partially by decorous misdirection, as I recall it, which forced me as a child to personalize the visualization and supply the images myself.
Anyway, none of this really adds to anyone's understanding of the film but mine. The animal cgi was mostly great, and I hope someone comes up with a way to use the technology in a film that really will blow me away.
Tonight I had the months-delayed pleasure of booting up a new computer; well before the move, planning to be as broke as I am, I had grabbed a refurbished Mac Mini with the intent of building it from scratch to be my internet services machine once we landed here. It's neat, specifically due to that tiny size and dense specific gravity. I did not opt for the firewire transfer setup - I made so many mistakes when I set up the first ancestor of Bellerophon that it would be a mistake to dump all the cruft onto the new machine.
The first OS X incarnation of Bellerophon was a Mac 9500 with a G3 card upgrade running OS X via Other World Computing's XPostFacto. Prior to that I served pre-blog content from, variously, that 9500, a 4500, and a Power Computing desktop unit, all using a beautiful, Mac-first web server the name of which sadly escapes me. It was not a Tenon product or WebStar or MacHTTP, but some orphanware that dated back to at least OS 8. Boy was it easy to configure, but man was it hard to get it to do modern things such as includes.
Thanks to the Old Apple Web Server Directory, I can more or less guess that it was Netpresenz, but I'm not totally certain of that. zWait a moment; on reflection, I don't think it was. Hm. I bet the app is still on the 9500; I might have to boot it up to see!
UPDATE: the web server application was Quid Pro Quo, but not that version, this one.
At any rate, the next two weeks will find me busily pursuing paid writing tasks and therefore events have conspired to prompt me to set up my new den area in the basement, where the soon-to-be server will provide hours of procrastinating productivity.
Suitsat.org will track the progress of an empty Russian space suit as it orbits Earth for a few days, beginning in early February. To date, reports that the onboard radio will broadcast David Bowie's "Major Tom" have remained unconfirmed.
Spence points out a webservices toolkit installer for Mac OS X, something I'll be needing shortly.
Matt Uhlmannn, who moved away from a decade-plus stint as a doctor of the cool in New Orleans to Philly a couple months before Katrina, is headed back to the Crescent City for a gig. I'm a bit concerned for him; he was obviously depressed and out of sorts after the move and adding insult to injury, was inbound to the city when the hurricane came. I know what it's like to lose a loved one. Matt's hoping he finds her alive. It's not out of the question, and Bart and XY have been busting ass to save the beautiful woman. But what will Matt find?
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World on the subject of Whole Foods. Happily, the man shops Safeway, like me.
The NYT previews an IMAX film, in 3D, about the odds-beating Mars Rover program. Space and 3D: two great tastes that would go great together, if there was any way to actually experience depth perception beyond 100 yards in a vaccuum.
Spencer and Viv and I had the pleasure of viewing the Ron Howard / Tom Hanks jernt aboot ye Luna, which is also a space-themed 3D IMAX film, and I think that Spence and I also screened "Space Station 3D" chez IMAX. Seriously, it's the best.
After much thought on the topic of where on earth I would obtain a large enough chunk of wood to use as a splitting stump, I was pleased to recall that there was an 8-inch by 12-inch by four-foot support beam chunk under the deck, apparently left over from the 1968 remodel of the house. So I lugged it out to the back yard in the gathering gloam to see how my 98-pound weakling stems would manage the task of directing seven pounds of sharpened steel though the evening breeze.
My back hurt, and the moment I attempted to actually apply muscle to the momentum of the axe head, it would deflect from the intended target, but as long as I only attempted to harness momentum and gravity to the whistling downfall of the woodsman's blade, wood splinters flew satisfyingly in many directions. My wrists hurt quite viciously, but I did get a full aerobic workout and drench my longjohns with precious bodily fluids of the perspiration variety.
The curious confluence of minimal exertion and correct control is also my experience with bowling. If I ever attempt to muscle a thrown ball, I am guaranteed to go wide; as long as I release with no directed force, the ball glides as smooth and true as a straight razor.
Things is particularly tasty today. I'd buy them/him/her a pint at the local, if i could. Where the smegging hell is Web 3.0 when you need it?
Seattle swoons over Sweet Nick Licata's trumpsh as City Council Prez today. What? There's some sort of sporting swindle distracting folks from this good news for the paroletariat?
Shocking.
Dan Savage is liveblogging the Seahawks game. He's amusing, unsurprisingly:
UPDATE IV: Miller Light. Coors. Budweiser. What, no commericals for Lillet, l'aperitif de Bordeaux? Am I the only man in America drinking a chilled glass of Lillet during the game?
Now, where are the Pioneer Square webcams at?
Matt's added onboard jabber/iChat support to MeFi! Crap! I will no longer accomplish a single personal goal.
Eric at Fanta points out a new Joe Sacco piece published online by the Guardian as an 8-page PDF .
Brian Chin posts to his P-I Buzzworthy blog, announcing that the online version of the P-I is abandoning their staged, time-based publication strategy ("dayparting") after two years.
I was just pulled out of my weekend slumber by the closing story on NPR's Weekend Edition a profile of a Japanese alternative pop singer called Ayano Tsuji, who specializes in simply presented songs featuring mostly her voice, melodies with an insistent quality, and a ukelele. The segment may have been originally produced for the NPR afternoon magazine The World, which has a more extensive page on a story about the singer by the same producer, Robert Rand. That story aired in November, though, so maybe Mr. Rand is just a fan. It does seem that I'm not alone in my interest in the material.
As I listened to the story, I became more and more interested in the woman's music, which sounded to me very much like some of my very favorite Dale Lawrence songs, the tunes that Dale was writing just at the end of his time with the Gizmos.Certainly, at least, Tsuji's aesthetic lines up with the simplicity of some of Dale's songs from that era.
I am blogging this so that my memory of the songs doesn't erode away under the winds of sleep, and so that I can unearth Tsuji's material for a closer look.
Happily at least one song, Neko no Onagaeshi, is available in transliteration. This song appears to have been used in the anime film "The Cat Returns." Cori Chan also has a few lyrics and a translated song or two. Here are a few more English translations.
Here's an MP3 of Kaze Ni Naru, which may actually be "Neko no Onagaeshi". This does apppear to be that song, which is a fully-orchestrated version. It seems that there was also an acoustic-only release which I have yet to dig up. In general, it seems that her older releases featured simpler, sparer arrangements, based on commentary by others out in the intarweb.
The artist's extensive site at her label, Speedstar Records, includes listenable samples from a recent release, Calendar Calendar, which appears to be a concept album of sorts. Interestingly there is one track (for July, it seems) produced by James Iha, late of Smashing Pumpkins, so perhaps I'm not imagining that Midwestern thing.
The label page also links to the artist's official site. Kawaii!
Happily, she is appears to be an active blogger, which Google semi-successfully translates.
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World weighs in with the kind of blistering hometown critique that warms the cockles of my heart. I see your sucky Frisco, and I raise you by one Puget Sound! There's nothing I love more than this kind of thing.
Spence most kinely points out that a Seattle Public Library card entitles the bearer to free online access to certain tech books. Sweet!
A hearty quack of welcome to WIUX. Wakka wakka wakka!
FWIW, I just had one of those sublime Apple experiences that constitute the technology world's crack equivalent: I stumbled across our Airport Express for the first time since unlimbering our reciever/amplifer and thought, what the hell, might as well plug it in to see what happens. The led on the plug turned green, and I fired up iTunes with a stream from, as it happens, my parents' classical station, the North Carolina-based WCPE, flipped the amp over to aux, and was rewarded with the magnolia-toned accent of the announcer welcoming a station in Bay City, Michigan. Easiest post-move technology experience yet.
Let's hope the printer sharing is as sweet.
Tom Harpel has posted a plea for assistance in the lifting of my wife's bowling ball. We'll be glad to help, as long as it involves a tasty dinner at Cactus. Viv is sick, though, and would like to wait until she is not.
Last night at the Paramount's silent movie, a 1915 adaptation of Carmen directed by Cecil B. DeMille, I was amused to note what appeared to me to be the profile of the cliff known as Dana Point prominently featured in the center of the screen during the opening sequence, a picturesque scene of smugglers landing goods in in a longboat.
MyVu personal media viewer, on show at MacWorld SF and slated to ship in March. For your video iPod.
Much more attractive, although these things are relative, than the single-eye version from a Seattle manufacturer I mocked earlier this month.
Shutting Themselves In - New York Times. Young Japanese men retreat to bedrooms for years a time.
I can relate. Mom! Can I have some more ramen?
Speaking of bedtime reading, I am relieved to - it seems nearly a year later - finally return to Vollmann's now plaudited Europe Central.
I just completed a fugue-like pair of chapters relating the sorry histories of General Vlasov and Field Marshal Paulus, sympathetic yet ironically distanced recountings of war's toll on (in these chapters) those who would be great men. Deliciously constructed and arch in tone Vollmann still manages to gain our sympathies for these characters, one a turncoat Russian, the other a German general who was promoted to the highest Wermacht rank by Hitler on the day before his capture by the Russians, who had encircled his unsupplied remnant of an army at Stalingrad.
Vollmann's point seems to be something along the lines of 'war is bad,' but as ever, his apparent simplicity and insistent naivete are suspect: there's more going on here than meets the eye. What it is, I'm not yet sure.
Tom has apparently conclusively established as fact what''s long been suspected: exercise is bad for you. Be sure to let us know what hospital you end up in, Tom!
Unsanity.org provides some shielding against the effects of the reality distortion field (via Manuel). Some valuable skepticism, but aslo some silly carping about New Things such as the built-in iSight and the remote. The writer's analysis concludes that the new intelMacs were likely rushed into production and chalks up some of the downgraded features on the new machines to that. Sounds about right to me. I'm still considering flipping the current axe for one of the new machines. Better list on eBay soon, though. ;)
The Last iPod Video Guide You’ll Ever Need, at Plastic Bugs, via BrainLog.
UPDATE: Geez, that's a pretty intimidating page for a non-technical user. Apple (or someone) could make a killing by releasing a conversion app that really truly doesn't require a whit of oversight. Let's see, how would it work?
My theoretical user would presumably understand using an iPod as a music playback device. Therefore the video usage procedure should be entirely analogous. My user inserts a video source such as a DVD or locates a video source such as a downloaded rip of the Daily Show. Then, the user drags the source to "Library" in iTunes, and the material is added. iTunes should broker any conversion, if neccessary, and the conversion settings should be tweakable in the iTunes preferences panes.
I would guess that a conversion dialog might be presented at the time the user drags the content over, asking if the conversion should take place as fast as possible or run more slowly, in the background, since ripping video is so timeconsuming on this generation of hardware.
Additionally, if the video source is a DVD, if possible, the raw DVD video should be copied in entirety to the local drive, allowing the user to eject the disc more rapidly than if the conversion process were to be based directly on the data stored on the optical disc.
I am unaccountably pleased by the realization that I can get new reading material on to my otherwise unsynchable Palm V, currently functioning as my alarm clock.
Green on black with no blinding LEDs rules for bedtime reading.
Amidst the mostly tiresome and predictable bash-and-fete chez MeFi was the news that Google Earth for Mac is out today. Today, not next March.
Well, not that this is by any means some sort of unique, oracular reflection on today's semi-surprise announcement of Intel-powered Macs - the scheduled ship date is a tad early - but I might was well offer my thoughts.
This weekend I had a pleasant drink or two with a good friend who was complaining about his current Dell laptop and I ritualistically plugged Apple, hipping him to the possibilities of Apple Certified and the like. As we prepared to move on from our discussion I dredged up the Macosphere rumor of the day, that Intel-based mac laptops were slated fro unveiling today. I passed it along, but scoffed heartily.
Thank you, Mac rumor sites! Today, I yam a ZHEEEHNIUOUS!
Overall, I'm impressed by the new axes. They appear to offer a significantly greater cutting-edge-to-pressure-flake ratio and make impressive use of available materials. I would not be surprised if we uncover traces of these axes in middens far, far afield of the previously recorded distribution. This, of course, implies robust trade networks.
Interestingly, the Axxle Store had not adjusted the base pricing of the previous axes, based on the now-abandonded Eastern Flake technique. Still, the hard-to-locate Cupertino axes and adzes remained available both in refurbished and new units at surprisingly comparable rates to the purportedly four-times-sharper Portland blades.
It will be well noted by veterans of similar digs that no actual instance of a Portland axe has been located despite a great deal of anticipatory research.
It is a peculiar tragedy of history that the genius responsible for three out of four base models of Axxle devices will remain forever shrouded in the mists of the Stoner Age.
MetaFilter user Quatermass shares the thesis written by the user on the topic of MetaFilter with the community.
As Spence and I listened to Dennis James introduce The Ten Commandments at The Paramount this afternoon, I was amused when Dennis quoted David Jeffers' long and wonderful essay on the film that he published earlier this week on SIFFblog.
This bemusement turned to pleasure when Dennis in turn introduced David on stage to do the expert intro to the film.
While it's not available for the Treo, Romeo appears to offer a freeware, opensource app to provide remote control of iTunes and other Mac OS X stuff from your bluetooth phone.
I found this via a linktrawl in search of my preferred configuraton for Airport Express - I blew away the config we had at the apartment and don't recall exactly how I had it set up.
We were using it to share a printer and to control music playback on the stereo. I had the printer set up under the A/V stack, which worked OK.
Here, I haven't set up any A/V gear yet, except for the Victrola. Thus, I could split the Express away from the stereo and just use it to do printer sharing, which I'm leaning toward in order to get to an action plan.
What's got me hung up is that it would be beyond cool if I could stuff the printer into the Victrola cabinet along with the speakers and the Express. However, that's also overkill, since the clamshell iBook that we are currently using to stream to the speakers is also already in the cabinet. Therefore if I can cram the printer in there, I don't need to use the Express. The only functional advantage would be that one could print to the printer via the Express without having to open and wake the iBook, a machine which insists on sleeping when lid-closed.
This train of thought has also led me to note that I do posess not one but two headless Wallstreet PowerBooks, both running an old OS X and neither with native support for Airport or USB. It'd be child's play, if you posit that the child may be both slower than most and a masochist!
Hey, look, Walltreet LCDs are down to $20 on ebay!
Of course, there are one or two maintenance chores about the house that also call for the patience and ingenuity of a specially-abled person such as myself.
Please note, this rumor is passed along for infotainment purposes only.
Spencer Sundell - Web Developer gets jiggy wit de blog, somewheres around fifteen years after beginning his web life. WELCOME!
NYT: "DNA Analyses Offer New Insight on Cat Evolution and Migration: Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species."
What? No pictures of the contributor's beasts?
Newer readers may have noted an occasional tendency on my part to blog upon topics associated with lighter than air aviation. The faithful correspondent and expert medievalist behind Hollyism dropped some blimpy science upon me this morning:
"I saw this article on the hybrid blimp in development and immediately thought of you (wait, that didn't sound right...)"
I, for one, am appropriately thankful that someone whose brain is full has time to mind-sticky something like this, my very favorite sort of blimp news.
The article is about an Ohio-based operation called Dynalifter, which is apparently two guys in a "plastic-sheeted hut" with an expensive 150-foot prototype. The ship's big idea is to combine airfoil lifting surfaces with an LTA central hull. The story notes that the principals do not have an aeronautics background and met while working in the IT department of Mount Union College. The operation's website includes decent pictures of the prototype, which is a full-fledged beam-and-girder dirigible.
That, my friends, is living the dream. Airship flights daily from Lake Union to Mount Rainier, in season!
The UK's ever-delicious Things muses on the (personally much beloved) works of J. G. Ballard. There's nothing like reading a Ballardian landscape in the world; it's as delicious and dizzying as ancient Scotch.
Sunday at the Paramount: Demille's Lost City and "The Ten Commandments."
Longtime Mac-lover David Pogue hates on the new Treo 700W in the NYT. The new Treo uses Windows Mobile (I think) as the underlying OS, and interestingly, reverts to the lower screen resolution of the earlier model, the 600.
The airport is now properly configured, and I can get back to the usual business of monkeyfacing over appearing and diappearing network printers and the like. What a relief!
Jim's backish. I'm glad for this. I have continued to appreciate his personal skew as seen via linkies only, but have missed the prose.
Finally got the router configured to support my fixed IP block, huzzah! But for some reason, the Airport only allows clients to gain full-qualified IP services if the client has one of the five fixed IPs - locally assigned DHCP clients, from the Airport's own DCHP server, appear to gain the appropriate 10.foo.bar.baz number, but can't see any webbiness or even ping the router - the DHCP LAN is walled off from the fixed IP LAN.
I think this may be due to the fixed IPs requiring a subnet mask of 255.255.255.248 while the DHCP is handing out a mask of 255.255.255.0. I don't know if it's possible to configure the Airport's SNM for DHCP. Hm. Time to hit the boards.
Resources for locating antique door-knob set screws:
Robinson's Antiques. House of Antique Hardware. Smallparts.com.
Viv asked me to pull the rotten old carpet off the staircase to the basement today and I'm about a quarter of the way done, after about two hours. I'm finding it utterly dreadful, which is interesting. At one of the parties we attended over the weekend, some friends were volunteering to help with one another's demolition jobs on each other's houses, fairly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect.
My father tried to teach me how to take pride in physical labor well performed, and I did learn how to really throw myself into a task. Yet for me the physical and emotional sensations are very much akin to the physical and emotional sensations I recall from the numerous involuntary physical attacks that were directed toward me as an adolescent by peers, of a sort. I dread the flow of adrenaline and feel only a seething resentment, mixed with regret and a kind of detached curiosity, as I feel my body fail in my demands upon it. Afterward, just as in my many beatings, I will rerun the tasks over and over in my mind in a kind of loathesome savor, dwelling with extreme detail on each way that I failed to perform an action that would have made the experience more successful.
The only way I ever have noted that I can overcome this sense of dread and alienation in physical activity is to fly into a rage, which of course leads to undesirable results and further compounds the negative reinforcement. I find it quite curious that until now I've never made the connection between my experiences of American violence and my own deep-seated hatred and fear of certain kinds of physical activity.
SuprGlu "gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place."
P-I: EyeBud can turn video iPod into big-screen TV for one.
Man, that picture is hilarious. Arrr. Don't steal music - steal TV!
Use the handy Mefi thread to locate the third-party patch for the exciting new WMF bug on Windows machines.
End of print, says Cringely. Interesting analysis, flawed in his argument that websites can't carry as many ads as print publications.
