Reverse The Curse | CafePress: a joint project of pfrank industries and yours truly. Based on a pic of a Boston roadsign. Buy early, buy often.
What was that other submission-based tee shirt site?
Pork and pears
I finally got around to taking a whack at Manny’s pork and pears or pork and apples recipe. I had expected to do the apple and calvados version, but to my surprise, we only had pears in the house.
The recipe calls for whipping cream and lots of buttah. I used the buttah and skipped the cream, using nonfat milk and yogurt at the finish (I mostly don’t care for high-fat foods). But I blew my timing and the yogurt curdled. Still, it was very tasty. Mindful of Manny’s concern for the shallots, I used a few less and added a quarter of a regular onion.
I was also a bit lazy and did not pound the meat, choosing to use a slightly more tender chop cut and to slice it in quarter-inch strips.
Viv says “It was very peary.” And so it was, it was yummy.
Pix still in camera, to come.
Thrift
Yesterday we went thrifting. This place, J. T.’s Attic, is up on Greenwood near 85th. It’s only open on Saturdays from 1 to 5. It’s a real mixed bag, and the store suffers from that overstuffed, cluttery feel that some secondhand shops can fall prey to. It’s easy to get snagged on something and wind up pulling a lamp off the shelf. While such places are hazardous and hard to take in, they are also my favorite kind of secondhand shop, because the noise of the clutter means things get overlooked, and suprises can be found.
This Cue Cat, marked as a “computer mouse,” is five dollars. It was the only dot-com excess item I noted. It looks like that’s about right, going by eBay.
This old Singer, in nearly-new mechanical and cosmetic condition (you should see the finish), hideaway sewing table included, was fifty bucks. Needless to say, we now have a new sewing machine. The table’s finish is extremely rough, but other wise it’s in great shape. It looks as though the machine and table were folded up and stored somewhere dry but prone to chemical spills for fifty years. We’ll need to get the cord on the machine replaced, though, as it is pretty chewed up. The actual machine itself runs like it was serviced yesterday, though. I haven’t researched the serial number of the machine to see when it was made, though.
I’m pretty sure it’s a Model 15. Here’s the manual as a PDF (!).
Piping hot
Moving drives and cards around as a part of the machine migration. That’s Socrates on the left, and Bellerophon on the right. Bel is the machine serving you you bits at this moment.
Heavy Lifting
Seven days, 8170 words, eight posts, and hundreds of links investigated. This lighter-than-air stuff makes a man’s arm sore. Posting will be light for a bit.
I don’t think I mentioned it here, but I was running Blimp Week – Monkeyfilter edition all week over there, too. The posts there were short and generally drawn from the longer posts here, but not in all cases.
The posts were, in order:
- Zeppelin rides. In Switzerland.
- Stereoscopic Images of Lighter Than Air Flight
- Zep Sims!
- From Rio to Akron aboard the Graf Zeppelin, 1933
- Your Zep: Buy it or Build it?
- Zep-plans.
In the fifth link, fellow-monkey anagramophone pointed out both Nagy Airships and the striking spherical craft of 21st Century Airships Inc..
You know, I have this feeling that I’m gonna sound like Donald Duck all next week. Oh well, better to have a bit of helium in the lungs than nitrogen in the joints, I always say.
Regarding the beta of ecto 2: the only way to get to the old photo-sizing dialog now is importing from iPhoto, which I guess I can live with. It adds a step to asset wrangling for the kind of folders full of internet finds I was doing this week, though, and so I’m still gonna have to rule it a feature loss, not a best practice for software development.
I may more closely review ecto 2 beta this week, because it does some stuff very differently than ecto 1, and while I think I grok the dev logic, I’m not entirely happy with it. It’s still great at what it does and I have a hard time imagining a competitor product. This makes it unlikely we’ll see any shortcomings in the final product definitively addressed, especially if they stem from underlying structural decisions.
So far, I’m happy to report, the peculiar perl-killing problems I saw associated with ecto 1 on my server have not reappeared.
Did I mention my forearm hurts? Ow, ow, owie.
Oh yeah
Oh, and I got that wiki working. Go me!
Web Hosting Candidates
Review sites and hosting providers list assembled September 23, 2004. For further investigation.
Overall, I’m astounded at the way that the continued plummeting of storage cost has completely undermined the previous service-level pricing structure – pair.com, for example, has long been a standby among pros, but the pricing structure seen here is totally obsolete by comparison with the current crop. Just over a year ago, I was amazed at the pricing seen at No Hassle Hosting, but this trawl places their pricing structure solidly in the middle of the pack.
Providers
Globat.com: 2500MB Web Space, 2500 Email Accounts, 75Gig Transfer $7.95/mo. Overkill, but no apparent disabling of basic functionality such as SSI.
Infinology: 9gb basic plan, $6.95; no SSI at this level, though.
Canaca: $4.95 base, 5gb/40gb, uses spam and security as an upsell (which is bullshit), no SSH or MySQL on base plan. $9.95 mid, 10 over 80, SSH, MySQL, no Python, ecommerce(!).
No Hassle Hosting: from 30mb/1gb @ $3.50 to 1.2gb/60gb @$30.
Living Dot: from 250mb/10gb @ $9.95 to 1.5gb/25gb @$24.95. Ugly clip art included, apparently.
Typepad: 50mb/1gb @ $4.95 to 200mb/5gb @ $14.95, just blogs. No clear information about email or other services.
Bloghosts 100mb/5gb @ $3 to 1gb/25gb @ $20.
Review sites (this may be the spammiest Google topic of all time)
FindMyHosting.com: comprehensive-looking review and plan information aggregator.
epinons web hosting reviews: epinions consumer reviews.
Hosting Comparison: looks up to date. Clean site layout; looks ‘bloggy,’ but there’s little information about the site itself obviously available. Suspiciously boosterish copy.
Looking over this, I keep coming back to wondering about e-mail only. But of course, looking for hosting plans to that subject may very well eat another day of my life.
hosting references and thinking out loud
AskMe hosting and webcommerce threads. An old free hosting offer. No Hassle Hosting, part 1, part 2.
Lessee now, what are my reqs?
Email: up to five domains, low traffic, global redirects, unlimited aliases, webmail for up to five users, server-side effective spam filters, IMAP, optional whitelists.
Hosting functionality, required: multiple domains and unlimited subdomains, shell access, web-based control panel, backups, traffic analysis, PHP, MySQL, perl, no required change of registrant for domains.
Hosting functionality, desired: python, WebDAV (for direct mounting of the volume, very convenient), integrated iCal publishing would be cool but I can figure that out on my own, provider-maintained MT (or something) deployment (or go with TypePad, but I’d prefer to keep all online services through a single provider), provider maintained Gallery deployment (maybe; I think it might be easiest to keep that here, actually).
Hosting metrics, desired: 2gb storage, transfer unknown but not great. (my current footprint for non-cgi assets, not counting online photo albums and audio and movies, is 988mb).
Do I have a budget? Hm. Apple’s pricing is about right, but the storage is not acceptable and while the virtual desktop and synch features are cool, I don’t think they offer access to the server-side goodies I believe I want. Additionally, they are well known for an unpublished bandwidth limitation, so they are off the list.
Out of Body Experience
I’m posting this from a copy of Windows XP that lives inside my Powerbook, as illustrated below. It’s been many years since I tried to use Virtual PC. Happily, except for fighting my way though an obtuse thicket of networking config dialogs to diagnose and correct an odd default networking setting that prevented this OS from seeing the intarweb via that OS, et al, everything’s working swimmingly.
Now, for the endless round of Windows system updates, and (naturally) Firefox. Avaunt!
I suppose, for the sake of posterity, I should go into a bit more detail about fixing the networking. VPC treats the host machine as a DHCP server, and assigns an arbitrary, fixed number to the the host on the subnet it sets up (this is an informed guess, so ymmv). That IP is the same for the gateway value and for the DNS value. Well, the DNS was not doing its’ job; reliable servers were unpingable.
I set the computer to use the same DNS that my home LAN does, and that appears to have resolved the issue.
One troubling point that undermines my ‘bad DNS’ thesis is that I was able to ping the good DNS under the default networking setup, but only once. Immediately after, on implementing the new DNS, I was unable to ping the same IP. Perhaps I was falling victim to the notoriously slow setup processes within VPC, and the connection had not yet been established. Whatever. It works now.
I only hope it doesn’t burn the CPU out downloading all the updates.
the pain
Today has been a day of cursing and troubleshooting, brought about by my insufficient documentation practices. I’ve had two first-gen Apple Airport base stations for a very long time; sometime within the past couple of months I took one down for whatever reason and only today set it up again.
I had some sort of solution in place that allowed them to work together simultaneously, something that they are not designed to do (later versions of these things can do this handily). Today, of course, I cannot figure out what the solution was. I can’t even find discussions of how to solve this problem, as it was current over three years ago.
Given the time, I’m not going to be able to solve the problem today, which makes me surly at best.
Further entertaining me has been the activity of troubleshooting my Mom’s iChat setup. She uses a Powerbook and for some reason the internal mic does not appear to be turning off when iChat’s AV features are engaged. The mic is close enough, apparently, to one or both of the internal speakers that the resulting audio includes a distracting, tinny echo.
Apple’s discussion boards suggest tossing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat.plist to allow internal hardware sensing to correctly deal with this problem. We tried this with no result.
Foo!