Google News: now offering customization.

Add your own saved searches, delete sections (bye-bye, Sports!) rearrange the pagelayout. And no login. Pretty cool.

Mount St Helens erupts, notes The Australian. The USGS notes that the event took place at about 5:30, sending ash up to about 36,000 feet. Based on images I saw on TV, the eruption was clearly visible from downtown Portland as the sun began setting on an amazingly warm spring day.

I poked through the Volcanocam recent images archive and it appears that they did not get the pix, although I was hurried (I’m in the middle of cooking dinner).

UPDATE: Well, maybe it did get some pix. But the blurring – is that from the quake?

Huh. Actually, that’s pretty cool. The eruption coincided with sunset, so the camera gets blurry and fades out as the light goes over images 20, 19, 18, and so on. Compiled as a movie, the camera would appear to have been affected by the eruption into a loss of signal.

Air kisses, people – the sole won’t wait! Tell me if I missed something!

UPDATE: Paul Freankenstein points out this Flickr photoset.

I read the paper on the back porch in my shirtsleeves yesterday evening under a bright and cloudless sky. In the sun, it must have been seventy degrees.

While Southern California is experiencing an unprecedentedly wet winter (with the concomitant landlslides), we’re facing an imminent drought. Twice so far this winter we’ve experienced long sunny stretches that essentially melted nearly all the snow off of the Olympics, at least as far as I can see them across the sound.

Rainier still has a white mantle this time, though.

I’ve been thinking about the work schedule for my editor, and while I think it’s vital to produce for him, I can’t see how it’s possible on the schedule we’re facing. My day job makes it effectively impossible for me to conduct any business at all but the job itself for about nine to ten hours a day on most days. In order to clear the decks to be accessible for sources, I would need to go to work at about 3 am and get off around noon for at least two weeks of March.

The P-I ran a short interview with Pete Bagge yesterday, apparently the official release date for the Buddy Bradley book I wrote about a few days ago. I had seen this as I read the paper, but Paul Beard was also kind enough to call it to my attention.

Another correspondent, Per Egil Kummervold, the developer of personal fave Chordie, thoughtfully dropped a line.

He has revamped the website and is adding a multiple-instrument chording engine, to allow one to select the particular string voicing one wishes to see the chords for. He pointed out the guitar-based iteration as the initially-deployed incarnation of the tool.

While I’m running down this list, I should note that I ran into official friend of the Donk Patrick Murphy at the bus stop the other day. He looked well, and we exchanged a few words about Ken’s recnt visitor. My bus came before I was able to suggest getting a drink, but I feel certain we’ll bump into each other again.

And finally!

The amp we picked up the other week lacked a dedicated phono line in, and so I forked out about $20 on ebay for an external, powered phono prre-amp. The results are satisfactory. However, either my hearing is going in the low end, or the amp itself is waaay skewed to treble. The old, non-functional amp had an integrated graphic equalizer and I miss the feature – this one only has three generic audio presets, “jazz,” “hall,” and “concert,” singularly uninformative.

Right. Time to swap the laundry about. Ta-ta!

Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

ASPEN, Colo. – Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Well, this makes me really quite angry. It’s absurd of me, but honestly, HST’s seventies material is a source of constant inspiration. I wish I could say it was a source of constant influence, but judged on the effects alone, my demons are clearly less affecting than his.

F***.

(Paul hipped me to the passing via IM.)

I’m roping some sort of posse in for vague social activities, probably in the University District, this Saturday. I wanted to throw the floor open for self-inviters who are regular readers. I don’t have the time to ride too much herd on this, however, so in all probability, after a brief consultation with my brain trust, I will name a time and a place to hook up. If you’re interested, leave a comment on this entry and an email address I can contact you at. In the comment, let me know if you want me to publish it or not.

This reminds me, someone sent me an evite I haven’t gotten around to evaluating from a scheduling perspective. I wonder if it’s for Saturday! If so, perhaps this idea is moot.

UPDATE – ah ha! It was for February.

So here is how I did. Strikeouts represent incorrect predictions and italics represent the film or person nominated instead.

Director:
Marc Forster – Finding Neverland
Mike Leigh – Vera Drake

Film:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Ray

Lead Actor:
Paul Giamatti – Sideways
Clint Eastwood – Million Dollar Baby

Lead Actress:
all correct

Not bad! I have the impression that I was more accurate than I would have been in previous years, but of course, I didn’t try this previously.

I should note that this summer I ran into the now-nominated Ms. Moreno while attending Folklife at the Seattle Center.

So a Snowstorm among the century’s worst has dumped gobs of snow on everyone between Chicago and New York City, and a subway fire has limited service on two lines in the City.

Meanwhile, here in Seattle, the sun was up before I left home yesterday morning and the mild, sunny weather smelled of spring.

For a project I’m working on, I had occasion to compile reasonably comprehensive lists of award nominations and winners for the film industry this year. The lists are not as extensive as the lists maintained by the Oscars Guy, but they are pretty decent.

I developed a simple formula that weights the nominees based on how well the associated film has done over all in category, and as a result, find myself with a list of nomination predictions. This is the first year in several that I find myself having only seen one of the films producing probable nominations, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so rest assured that this represents nothing more than cold, hard mathematics.

Don’t rush out to your bookie or anything, though. I can’t reveal my methodology until after mid-March, unfortunately, so if I’ve made some sort of gross error, we’ll only know on Tuesday when the nominations are announced. The underlying theory is that the Academy voters overlap significantly with many of the voting bases for other awards-season nominations and that generally speaking, a voter in one of the other awards will also favor the film they voted for in the Oscars balloting.

Director:
Alexander Payne – Sideways
Clint Eastwood – Million Dollar Baby
Marc Forster – Finding Neverland
Martin Scorsese – The Aviator
Taylor Hackford – Ray

Film:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Finding Neverland
Million Dollar Baby
Sideways
The Aviator

Lead Actor:
Don Cheadle – Hotel Rwanda
Jamie Foxx – Ray
Johnny Depp – Finding Neverland
Leonardo Dicaprio – The Aviator
Paul Giamatti – Sideways

Lead Actress:
Annette Bening – Being Julia
Catalina Sandino Moreno – Maria Full of Grace
Hilary Swank – Million Dollar Baby
Imelda Staunton – Vera Drake
Kate Winslet – Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

The Mac mini is making a big noise, predictably enough. Rob from Macosxhints had the good sense to shoot a pic with his mitt on the coffee-warmer for scale. Others immediately saw the unit as the long-rumored Mac media center; of course, one question in that incarnation is “How do you get NTSC out to the tube?”

Apple’s thoughtfully provided a DVI-to-Video adapter as an option, although the store’s product page lacks the image seen on the Mini’s product page. Scroll down to near the bottom; it’s on the lower right, and, confusingly, it links to a page touting the Mini’s graphics which also lacks an image of the dongle. Neither page links to the dongle’s product page.

On the Mac Addict forums, the debate centers, as it has elsewhere, on the extortionate pricing Apple reports for a loaded Mini with a full gigabyte of RAM. Adding the memory to the 80gb model results in a price of $1,024, an astonishing jump of over $400 for RAM which can currently be found independently for less than half that cost.

(Updated) Apple is People think Apple is deploying the dreaded “no user-serviceable parts” clause here to milk folks, which is too bad. The purchase documents clearly indicate that installing the RAM yourself voids the warranty, something which is certainly sufficient to keep most folks grubby paws right outen thar.

Eric Sinclair, in the comments, notes that Macintouch remarks that the RAM is user upgradeable, which is in line with previous Apple product and policy. The technical specs are pretty clear, though: “Memory upgrade must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider.” For comparison, here is the tech spec page for a G5 tower. Alas, there is certainly no Apple-certified tech restriction on that page, and I’m forced to conclude that the squawking is justified.

Happily, someone at the MacAddict forum dug up a nekkid pitcher of the Mini (from here):

If this image, posted without original attribution, is accurate, I’d have to say that swapping the RAM outgha be a piece of cake. The single stick is the green object on the left face of the item in the photo. Man, I really can’t wait to see the takeaparts of this thing.

According to current coverage of today’s Stevenote, iPhoto has added movie support. About freakin’ time!

iChat will have the expected conferencing features: up 10 audio participants and up to 4 video participants. Given how often my family uses iChat video, this is likely to sell some more iSights.

I’ll probably update this after getting some work done.

“Mac Mini” rumors confirmed (quoting from MDN as they are clearly experiencing server issues):

– “Mac mini” height is about half the size of an iPod mini. Ships January 22 in a smaller box than the regular iPod box.

– “Mac mini” better model: UIS$599 with 1.42GHz G4, 80GB drive, combo drive…

– “Mac mini”base model: 1.25GHz G4, 256MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive.

– “Mac mini” will retail for US$499. Jobs, “Priced so that people wanting to Switch have no more excuses.”

– “Mac mini” comes without a keyboard or mouse and uses any industry standard display. FireWire, Ethernet, Modem, and USB. Comes with Panther and iLife ’05.

– The “Mac mini” fits in the palm of your hand and looks like a 3″ tall CD drive. A short cube featuring DVI and VGA connections.

– The Headless Mac is now known as the “Mac mini.”

– “Mac mini” announced. (1:33 PM EST)

It’s the return of the cube! That sounds great! Can you say “media server / internet services box”?