So, last week the brake light on our car comes on and won't go away. We plan on taking the car in on Saturday. Being slowpokes, we miss the chance but find a place that will work on it Sunday.
With luck, we'll get the car back around five. Between this car work and that gas outage and repair work it's a wonder we can pay the mortgage.
Oh, and maybe you've noticed that my ISP is not providing satisfactory connectivity of late. What's next?
Paul of A Crank's Progress ruminates on the death of film, informatively and (despite his self-perception that the post is long) with admirable efficiency.
While I certainly understand the potential threat to our visible heritage in the disappearance of photographic prints from our patrimony, I myself celebrate it as one less burden to drag toward the grave. As someone who has seen the surfeit of family prints commonly available in any given antique store, it's clear to me that people never intended to keep the images for the ages. As a member of a family that inherited a large shoebox full of unlabeled shots dating back to the 1840s and realizing we had no way of identifying the subjects, it's equally clear to me that the archival problem had us beaten two generations ago.
Flickr, the visual future of our history is in your hands.
Also, I did too much yard work today to try to figure out the head-plaguing home LAN problem I'm still working.
On a related note, Treo 650's are still holding at about $200 on eBay. So I'll continue my waiting game.
As you may have noticed, I'm experimenting with using the replacement phone to moblog, as i was with the Treo more and more. Unhappily, the results-to-date are unsatisfactory. For example, I have not found a way to title the posts as they are sent; the phone-side app refuses to permit the alteration of the subject line. Additionally, using the phone-style keypad entry technique is far less intuitive than the Treo's full QWERTY. On the plus side, the Nokia's imaging chip does a much better job with color reproduction than that in the Treo.
Headdress for OS X: Simplifying desktop web development. (thanks, Tom, and congrats on the anniversary!)
This looks like another one-click, local-LAN only Apache configurator widget. Where O where is the live, world-facing implementation?
Viv and Trish, last Sunday at Don and Trish's for a tasty meal of halibut and veggies.
Fremont art walk, last Saturday. Brad made me stand in the round opening and play guitar, and I was just getting started when our wives all walked in. It was a kind of deer in the headlights moment.
I tried to post this last weekend, but something was goofy on the new phone and it didn't take.
I spent a long year of my adolescence in Switzerland with my family, living in a city on the northern coast of Lake Geneva, or lac Leman as the locals have it. Lausanne is the capital of the canton of Vaud, with the Valais just to the east one of the two primary centers for Francophone Swiss agriculture, primarily vineyards and orchards (not, of course, considering dairy, a much larger segment of the economy).
Both the Valaisiennes and the Vaudois produce a characteristic regional wine. As I recall, in The Valais, it's a dry red known as Dôle. In Vaud, it's a snappy dry white called Fendant (which is also made in the Valais). A similar wine, from the same species of grape, is vinted to the west of Switzerland in france where it's called Chasselas. I believe the names in each case are drawn from the grape varietals, but not being a wine expert, really don't know.
The Fendants are vinted from community-managed vinyeards that line the northeastern shores of the lake, steep terraced slopes that are unbeleiveably scenic to drive through. Every couple of miles you wind through a little cluster of neat, thick walled buildings, and somewhere nearby you'll find the village's caveau, where the wine is available. I think the wine is also made in the caves, but can't recall.
This wine is commonly available durring the summer and served at the various community festivals in the region and is treated informally as the correct complement to a midday meal of sausage and cheese and the like. I suppose in some ways one could liken it to the way Americans drink beer in the summertime. Unlike beer, however, the Swiss drink it in tiny, near cylindrical glassed that I suppose must hold about two shots of liquid. It's common for these glasses to be emblazoned with the heraldry of the town holding he festival or the location of the dining establishment. The wine, in essence, formed my palate for white wine, and to a greater or lesser extent the degree to which a white diverges from this crisp, apple-like dry white with some overtones of salt and sometimes a hint of sulfur determines the personal attraction to the wine.
As the wine is primarily produced for local consumption, it's quite rare for it to be exported in any quantity, and in the twenty years since I was last in Switzerland, I have only had Swiss Fendant a couple of times, most recently about six years ago at Le Gourmand in Ballard. Since then, I have made a habit of pestering wine stewards all over the city for news of any imported Swiss fendant. I just missed a few bottles last fall, I understand, to my frustration.
Imagine my joy, then, when last week I found a bottle of Puget Sound produced Chasselas, made by Mount Baker Vineyards, an outfit sadly lacking in web presence. Priced at a reasonable nine bucks, the bottle is a slightly sweeter incarnation of this than the pseudoplatonic ideal resident in my memory. But it's pretty close and I'm thrilled to see it being produced here. Vaud is at approximately the same latitude as Mount Rainier, not Mount Baker. Baker is aligned with the French region of Alsace, where the grape is also vinted. The Alsatian versions are also sweeter. The Mount Baker Vineyards approach seems to me closer to the Swiss than to the Alsatian. I look forward to more.
R. W. Apple in the NYT takes a crack at Salumi, to which i was happy to bring my parents and Viv last week. Yummmm.
After much fussing, I have our turntable fully operable. It's amazing what the crackle of vinyl adds and subtracts from the listening experience. I swear that it was bar for the course to get better dynamic range off the grooves than that I hear today, but maybe thathas to do with a few years of gigging in front of amps. Who knows. Hearing the crackle is delicious and organic, each side my own and known by skips at learned places in the song.
Man, what a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, high seventies, a mild breeze.
I finally got up on the ladder and started cleaning my gutters, after I hung some plant baskets for Viv.
I owe Patrick and others a roundup and writeup on my findings concerning video post-and-host services; my take appears to be in opposition to the direction most providers are heading toward.
Anyway, hope your afternoon is as pleasant as mine has been.
I'm losing my mind over a home LAN problem, so here's the gory bits to help me know if I've properly defined the problem.
My current LAN topology is roughly this:
ISP access point, no DHCP --> fixed IP DSL modem, bridged --> 5-port 10/100 Ethernet switch --> 2 fixed-IP desktop units, 1 fixed-IP Airport acting as DHCP for both wired and wireless network, 1 DHCP IP desktop unit.
The desktop DHCP box picks up the Airport IPs just fine and everything in the Airport cloud behaves properly, which allows all the client machines to use a printer made available via an Airport Express unit.
I have run a 50-foot ethernet cable from the point of entry / modem / switch up through the floor to the center of the building on the top floor where the Airport sits, giving housewide coverage. What I need to do is add another 10/100 hub or switch in that location to allow me to add more top-floor cabled devices to the LAN.
I have successfully inserted three 10/100 hubs into the network in the following topology:
5-port 10/100 switch -> additional n-port 10/100 hub device -> Airport
This works so long as the in port on the additional device is in uplink mode or connected to the first router via crossover cable. The Airport, in this configuration, remains connected to the second hub by the long cable.
So far so good.
When I tote the new hubs upstairs and add the hub to the LAN via the long cable, the hubs report linkstate. However, when I plug the Airport into an available port, the hubs do not report good linkstate to the Airport, all the Airport client devices, wired and wireless, lose connectivity.
As far as I can tell, the only change in the topology is that in the first instance, the cable out from the first hub into the uplink port on the second hub is about 4 feet long, and the cable out from the second hub to the Airport is fifty feet long. In the second case, this is reversed, such that the cable out from the first hub is fifty feet and the cable out from the second hub is about four feet. It's my understanding that the rated length for the hubs and most similar devices is 100 meters. I just do not get what is going on.
Combimouse - Combination Keyboard and Mouse, via Things. Cool or absurd? Let's split the difference.
Pursuant to our vapor-provisioning crisis, I had dinner with my folks and one couple of my aunts and uncles tonight. My uncle's career was in welding, specifically as a pipefitter, and worked on the Alaska Pipeline back in the seventies. As soon as he heard my tale of gas-pipe woes, he first asked me a bunch of technical questions that, of course, I could not answer as I was unfamiliar with the terminology. Then he said, "It's probably a good thing you had all that taken care of. Slow leaks like that can lead to gas pockets in the house that can blow a structure completely off the foundation slab."
I suppose I knew this and all, but when a man who spent fifty years building pipe-based mechanisms for transporting flammable material over long distances tells you this, you hear it.
As an aside, I caught a really interesting American Experience a couple weeks ago which was about the construction of the Pipeline. My uncle tells me that he knew three of the guys that were interviewed for the show, and that he felt it accurately captured his experience on the project. I was glad to hear it, because watching the documentary had made me proud of my uncle.
As we returned from my parents' one-night hotel room around the corner, we saw a PSE van pull up, and - oh happy day - hhe restored our gas services.
Two-thousand-odd dollars later, a more responsive HVAC company has identified and repaired no less than five additional leaks in our internal gas piping. Puget Sound Energy, of course, can't be here until tomorrow. While I'm pleased that the gas infrastructure now hold water, I'm a little peeved that my wallet has been relieved of that unsightly bloat.
PSE, sweet talked into inspecting our new pipes, found another leak and on those grounds did not reactivate the gas. We have a different service company coming tomorrow at 8am.
My parents are currently on the tarmac at SeaTac, taxi-ing into their gate before coming here.
Still no heat, hot water, operable stoves or working dryers over here at Hard Luck Acres.
Friends of labor will be saddened to hear that three days into the bathing strike, forces greater than the massed will of the workingman (my wife) intervened to direct me to a cold shower - rimshot puhleeze!
Thank you! I'll be here all week!
Of course, this would all go down the same week my folks are swinging by for their first visit to the house. I called and gave 'em the lowdown this afternoon. I hope we have all the mod cons up and running before they show up. My folks are tough - heatless homes and cold showers are no new events in their experience of travel - but if I recall correctly they are both over seventy and might prefer heated air and warm water.
Per Jon's suggestion, the bathing strike plan is in effect.
I actually made a gas company phone person cry last night after she had told me there was no way for them to come out to turn the gas on (we got the repair done and it's kinda cold). After she told me that it wasn't possible for them to come out I pretended I was getting a hacksaw out of my toolbox as I rummaged around in the silverware drawer. I told her I was going out to the gas meter to hacksaw the gas company's lock off the feedpipe. Then I told her I was reporting a gas leak and that would she please send someone.
She told me that she didn't beleive me so I made more sawing noises.
In the end she told me that we needed a certificate of inspection from the plumber that did the work, something that the plumber evidently did not know, as he was puzzled why our insurance company would send him out on a gas line job.
So currently we have a new pipe but no gas to the house still. Viv is trying to get the city inspector to come out and certify it. It strikes me that the inspector can't actually verify it unless there's gas in the pipe, and that the gas company has told us they won't turn the gas on until the pipework has been verified.
I did apologize to the poor woman, by the way, and I did not curse or speak impolitely to her. I still feel bad about it.
As you may have gathered, this is the stack o' seventies speakers that arrived from that estate sale on Saturday. They had more speakers and some LPs too but I felt uncomfortable pawing though the deceased's stuff.
There was a bocce set that I shoulda snagged too, though. Oh well.
This is also the first test of the Nokia 6620 for moblogging. There's apparently no way to apply rotation to images stored on the camera, so when this post first appeared, the image was sideways. The image resolution is pretty low, too. Wonder if that's configurable.
One of the things that made it into my car at that estate sale was a vintage Sony tape deck with analog VU meters. Happily, it works just fine. I still have many many tapes from twenty years ago, often of LPs I had checked out of the library. It will be fun to pick through them and hear some stuff i haven't bent ear to in about fifteen years, I think. First up: Tom Waits' Rain Dogs.
Yesterday Viv and I smelled gas in the house and called Puget Sound Energy to check for the source. The technician found a leak in a pipe that appears to lead to the kitchen. PSE then cut our gas at the meter until the leak is repaired.
We called an insurance carrier we've used for house issues in the past and they referred a plumber. Unfortunately, they were no-shows all day yesterday and expressed confusion over why they were called as opposed to a furnace shop when we contacted them.
It's cold in the house without heat this morning. I worked in the yard all day yesterday - I'm rather ripe.
Cold canned beans for dinner tonight as we shiver under ragged blankets tented over a can of Sterno loom.*
*Hyperbole.
Happily, I have been able to get iSync to work with the substitute phone that Eric was kind enough to send to me, the Nokia 6620. Aggravatingly, the phone is officially unsupported by Cingular. This seems to be the source of some peculiar issues and flakiness in connectivity for data. Also, at first blush, there are some issues with the way that Opera renders GMail and other Google Services pages. I'm guessing this is some kinda AJAX javascript deal and that possibly the version of Opera on the phone needs to be updated.
Similarly, I can't find a decent SMMTP/POP mail client in the apps on the phone. This makes sense as steering the phone user to operate the SMS client on the phone builds revenue for the carrier. The fuckers.
Finally, numeric keypad text entry is clearly proof that Satan is active in the world today.
Yesterday evening as I stood outside at Greg and Stacey's house, I heard a bagpiper in the far distance playing Atholl Highlanders (warning: iffily-timed midi file autoloads).
Today, I went to a neighbor's house to peruse an estate sale, and obtained a number of things, including a decent Sony tape deck, a silent 8mm Bell and Howell projector for Spence if he wants it, a 40" glass-bead projector screen with stand, and most importantly, a set of four of the weirdest 1970s speakers I have ever seen.
Grooved blue cases and bright red grille covers carry the promising JBL insignia. The grooves are designed to allow the cases to stack and interlock - the effect is tremendously Moonbase Alpha, if the bright blues and reds might not work so well in that monochromatic interior.
A bit of research reveals that the speakers are JBL L25 Primas. The foam components in the speakers are pretty trashed, dried out and crumbly to the touch. I have stacked them up in the basement awaiting testing and possible deployment in the basement room we hope to devote primarily to music.
As I loaded these items from the dead man's house into my car, I heard another piper, this time performing Amazing Grace. I looked up, and at the end of the street, noticed a flotilla of cars parked in the nearby cemetery, presumably gathered in consolation and ceremony as the pipes wailed.
Yesterday evening I stapled 25 feet of chickenwire to the outside rails of our deck, to create an outdoor area for our cats. I inadvertently left a basement door open as I put away the ladder and tools, a fact i discovered as I prepared for bed a few hours later. One of our cats, an eleven-year old male who survived the transition from outdoor alpha male to indoor pillow critter after a full year of hiding in a closet, made his escape.
I slept in the living room on the couch last night so I could hear noises by the doors more clearly, and at 2 am, I was awakened by our other cat, Chloe, puking by the door. Suspecting that this was some sort of cat communication, I rose and looked out the door to the deck, where Simon sat patiently.
This afternoon, as I vacuumed the basement, Viv came downstairs to tell me she'd found the porch gate knocked askew and no sign of Simon. I'm considering a leash for the beast.
Today I received word that all my active writers over at SIFFBlog will be granted press passes for the festival. I'm kind of in shock.
I do not have time to use a pass, so I did not apply - I suppose now it's incumbent upon me to figure out what events I am to attend. I need to get in touch with a couple of folks who haven't been writing for the blog but should be, too.
Seattle Gas Prices. It don't look like no web 2.o winding wingding, but that's a user-driven site if'n I e'er did see.
Dang Linksys is inflicting misery upon me. Countervailing, Mr. Sinclair's kind contribution of a phone has arrived and is charging.
