NYt: The Heyday of the Dead.
Dear God, I am part of the problem.
UPDATE: wait, no I'm not. But GODDAM I can't wait until all that crap goes on clearance! Skull-logo Ralph Lauren alligator shirst that were a commercial flop! I'll buy 'em by the pallet at pennies a shirt!
I have to admit, I am frustrated with my decreasing frequency of posts. For three years, roughly, I posted daily. Since the turn of the new year, I have posted every three days, give or take.
I beleive that the difference has primarily been our move to a new home. It was in quite rough shape and every week brings a new task requiring time or money to address. This only satisfies me partially, however. Prior to our move any wacky rentier challenge would prove fruitful for words; in this new location, the discovery of a gas leak or sprung roof seam generates no desire to write about it whatsoever.
I think that the lack of blab can be laid to two things: solving any given homeowner problem requires a greater time investment than solving a comparable rentier problem, and that I, personally, have no interest at all in reading about or writing about the challenges and problems that property owners face.
Don't get me wrong, I actually do read about such, and even actively seek out sources of information on subects such as the average annualized cost of hydration via hose as opposed to inset sprinklers. But it's literally homework, of no emotional interest or value to me, and I resent it deeply. Every moment I spend learning how to conduct fiduciary analyses of variant home irrigation systems is a moment I have utterly failed to live my life in accordance with my desires.
Expect blogging to dwindle accordingly.
Our porch thermometer reads 104 degrees.
Yesterday was not as hot although I thought today would be cooler. We began our day at 8 am with a brisk hike at Twin Falls State Park, just beyond Mount Si on 90 east of the city. We went with Greg and Stacey, at Greg's suggestion. I actually agreed to the plan without consulting with Viv which led to a great deal of crying and moaning at 7 am as we attempted to rise.
It was not hot on the trail but it was steep enough that we were all sweating heavily. It was interesting to note that the heat of the rest of the day did not seem as hot as it was. Next time I know there's gonna be a heatwave horror, I'll be trying to do some heavy excercise prior to the height of the heat.
NYT: For the Pennsylvania Dutch, a Long Tradition Fades.
200 of 800 Pennsylvania Dutch barn 'hex signs' remain.
Odd, I recall seeing these a great deal in the early seventies as our family drove around the lower northeast. Seems like there must have been more than 800 at one time.
NPR ran a five-minute end-of-the-hour feature on the New Voyages Star Trek fan film crew this morning. As is becoming par for these stories, passing acknowledgment was made that this crew is not the only one making these fan-produced episodes, but the entirety of he reporting was focused on Cawley's project. This is likely as much a reflection os the snowball effect of that initial Wired story as much as a reflection of the skill with which Cawley's assembled his media hook, which is that the project features the original series characters played by new actors with increasing numbers of professional Trek veterans appearing in the New Voyages episodes.
Another factor in the coverage, I believe, must be the continuing delay in release of Starship Exeter's new episodes; Exeter has been acknowledged as the inspiration for New Voyages and the Exeter creative team initially worked with the New Voyages team prior to the production of the first New Voyages episode. Personally, I found the initial Exeter episode to be a more successful translation of the original-series ethos than the first episode of New Voyages. I have been holding off on watching the more recent New Voyages pieces until Exeter releases the full second episode to be better able to compare the teams' work.
However, the rate at which New Voyages has been producing episodes may well make this moot, as practice brings experience and soon the series may no longer be comparable in any meaningful way.
Lindsey ran away to sea, and is home again, but, I think, may be actively seeking ways to become the world's first wind-propelled librarian.
I must admit, I thought of Lindsey as I watched Pirates II, which apparently gave short shrift to the Aberdeen Seaport.
Lindsey, you gots to check out "Two Years Before the Mast."
I hear tell it's hot out there. Here, it is not. I spent my early evening under a cloudless 70-degree sky wrestiling with a mister-tyle soaker hose and recalling heatwaves I have known in the past.
Come visit. It's in the sixties in the basement.
Zidane: to headbutt. Act to verb in three days. See the following: ZIDANE a new way to solve problems.. make it like zidane....
zidaner: je zidane. tu zidane. vous zidanez. nous zidanons. ils zidanes. il zidane.
j'ai zidanait.
tu zidanais. et cetera. et je suppose on peut eventuellement zidanerait.
I happened to hear a great old-time tune from my iTunes pile the other day, "Fair Miss in the Garden," by Roscoe Holcombe from Mountain Music of Kentucky, a fantastic collection of field-recorded tunes laid to tape on the porches of Hazard County in the mid-fifties. To my aggravation, nor Google nor Digitrad unearthed the lyrics. Adding to my frustration, I have not yet found any references to the song but the two-or-so released versions. The song, in form and language, sounds very much like a Childe ballad, medieval ballads that survived into the twentieth century in various backwaters and which form the foundation of the cult of authenticity in folkloric circles, to my personal derisive amusement and pseudohistoricist fascination.
Ah well, I'm reduced to the same technique I employed some twenty-odd years ago in seeking to lean the lyrics of songs by the commercially unsuccessful likes of The Gizmos or the (1980s) Ramones. I'll hafta transcribe 'em.
In the continuing saga of ironing out the bumps in the deployment of the Mini and the EyeHome in the living-room A/V stack, even after the downgrade, the EyeHome has an irritation habit of dropping the audio, stuttering in the annoying manner familiar to internet audio stream listeners. The troubling aspect of this is that the datachannel should be much larger than the amount of data running to the box.
The current setup has the data running through the Mini from an external HD via USB 2 and thence to the EyeHome via 100-base Ethernet. The EyeHome then runs video out via S and audio via optical. Still, it takes a noticeably long - and aggravating - period of time before a song loads and begins to play, and inevitably, it stutters. This is less impressive performance than the wireless streaming device I inherited from Manuel, and much less impressive than the little iTunes/printer-server/ airport widget I was initially using to stream. Currently that's a dedicated printserver but if it can do optical out it might be a better device for audio.
Playing the audio directly from the Mini via iTunes is also, surprisingly, producing some audio stutter, and looking at RAM usage may provide a clue - I did not upgrade the box from the vanilla 256MB config and EyeHome is reported as requesting a staggering 1.5GB of virtual memory, along with an ever-increasing number of threads (25 last time I checked), making me strongly suspect the application of some not-very-neat memory usage techniques.
An additional annoyance when playing audio directly via iTunes is the hushed line-level output of the headphone mini-jack. I am nearly sure that there are iTunes plugins to address this issue.
Oddly, video playback via the device is seamless and stutter-free, despite the memory usage issue. I wonder if it's a function of the size of the asset bases - less than 100 media files in the video-playback archive versus about five thousand in iTunes.
Word on AskMe is that this is a basecamp clone for selfhosters. I wonder if it accepts data from and publishes in iCal formats?
Some anarchist (I take it) examination of Pirate Utopias.
The film was pretty good, but not as great as the first, which has stood up well indeed. Viv and I just watched it yesterday evening and even as familiar as it it is now, there are repeated moments in which I shook my head in wondering appreciation of the spectacle laid before me.
The first film included a wonderful reimagining of the Buster Keaton gag wherein a house's front falls just so, leaving Keaton wonderingly untouched. Verbinski recast this from comedy to destiny as Barbosa strides though the hurricane of battle, his falling mainmast raining rigging about him. In this film, I counted at least one direct Keaton quote and an indirect reference to Keaton by way of Chuck Jones' roadrunner cartoons.
I did find myself rolling my eyes in a couple of places. For pete's sake, can't the filmmakers cast a person of African heritage in a major supporting role other than that of a mystical witchy woman?
Despite that, several of the action sequences were grandly satisfying, and the final image on screen of Captain Sparrow is likely to resonate with me and I imagine the rest of the culture as powerfully as the Wyeth illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson's piratical did in establishing the contemporary visual idea of the 18th Century pirate.
I submit for your consideration, however, that Cthulu might well find the idea that a seaman driven to immortality by a broken heart is the elder lord's primary aspect or incarnation earth - or under seas - demeaning.
From the EyeHome FAQ:
"Originally, EyeHome could also use aliases or symbolic links, instead of full movies, pictures or music."
Meaning, of course, that they've pulled features from the software. I'm downgrading immediately. I noticed that the current version also removed the interactive view-by-view option to invoke shuffle and buried it as a universal option for listening to music, a seriously stupid thing to do.
Oh well. Software companies making stupid decisions? Not news.
Apparently Gmail is finally rolling out a delete-all feature for the spam bucket. Hope it shows up in my account soon!
Adam Engst runs an amusingly-styled look at what may well be dangerously hot running temps in Apple's current MacBook Pro line. Get a CoolPad!
Apologies for the slowdown on bloggery of late - my Now Playing deadlines and an extended visit by the in-laws coincided.
Happily for me, Viv's parents spent a solid week working on the yard - sifting soil, ripping up old grasses, planting new flowers and so forth. It's great to see Viv so excited and happy about gardening and I want to be sure to provide her with all the support she needs to continue developing this interest.
In other news, my Mac Mini, originally obtained with an eye to replacing the current webserver, is now acting as a media server in the living room, with the help of a cheaply-bought EyeHome, a PnP/Appletalk breakout box designed to get the goods from hard drive to A/V system. While it has a few irritations, the cost of the box included software that enables any given Mac as a Plug-and-Play Windows Media server, meaning I can point the streaming media server I obtained from League brother Manuel a few months ago at the smaasset base and get the audio on a secondary amp.
The video playback quality is quite satisfactory. The box's TV-oriented software includes a rudimentary web browser which makes Microsoft's initial WebTV offering look positively polished, but happily also includes some minimal RSS capabilities and http-based streaming audio. I haven't yet gotten it to deliver WFHB, but I will!
The other point to consider in looking at EyeHome is that it provides an optical-audio-out, something that is integrated into the new Intel-based Mini, but not in the model I have; thus I obtain greater audio quality from A/V files than is possible via the two-channel stereo mini jack, in theory.
However, there is one true annoyance in the configuration I have set up. The Mini has a single firewire jack and comes maximally loaded with an 80gb internal drive. It's been well-known for years that nonlinear video - DVD-quality video stored in formats that can can be manipulated and played back from hard drive by a computer - is currently the queen of storage-space requirements. A single season of a popular current TV show requires roughly 20gb; it's easy to recognize the need for additional storage space. I have a 300gb drive on the firewire bus.
One of the objectives I hoped to accomplish by moving the Mini to the living room and hooking it up to the A/V stack was to semi-permanently mount the iSight in the living room while using the tube as the computer monitor. Tests showed that this was a satisfactory solution, bandwidth constraints notwithstanding. However, the camera requires that it be powered by the Firewire bus, and the drive housing I'm using isn't doing so. I'll toy with running the media drive via USB, but won't hold my breath for satisfactory results.
Have a happy fireworks day!
