How To Make 3-D Photos, chez engadget. No special gear required beyond a digital camera and Photoshop. Are you lissnen mobstas? I’m loookin’ at you, Mr. I8M.
six feet from the O. P. to the Prompt Side
I’ve embarked on my annual peregrinations in the company of that amiable nitwit Bertie Wooster, and for some reason, the voices of the excellent Fry and Laurie are echoing in my head more clearly than they have in the past. Wodehouse casts the whole oeuvre in Bertie’s wildly flighty voice, and consequently I hear Hugh Laurie’s piping, bug-eyed take on the pride of the Woosters flibbertigibbeting about in my skull.
It’s quite pleasant, really.
I found the television adaptations that the comedians starred in hilarious; I haven’t seen them for years, and of course, there are now DVDs available. Viv tells me she hasn’t ever seen any of the episodes, so I think I might be ordering them soon.
That aside, the incessant prattling inside my head led me to wonder: is it possible that Mr. Laurie executed any audiobooks of Wodehouse’s original confections? Garishly polluted Google results make the answer to this unclear, but the sparse examples of Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster audiobooks I unearthed did not feature Laurie reading, so I rather doubt that this item was ever produced, what what.
Bit of the stiff, that.
OilFilter
Ask MetaFilter covers cooking oils, with a great answer from madman.
buoyancy
The white fish is swimming upside down more now than last night. Before I fed them tonight, he was swimming normally. As soon as he ate the food, he became unusually buoyant, like an underwater balloon. None of the other fish in the tank seem to have this problem.
I noticed him struggling to swim down to the bottom last night after feeding, and as he tired, he’d bob to the top of the tank, slowly rotating until his belly brushed the surface of the water, then seeking to right himself in a frenzy. In all other respects, he appears healthy.
But as he tires, he swims upside down more and more. I am reasonably certain the white fish will follow the call of an impossibly beautiful black fish looming
in the distance sometime in the next couple of days.
Ooooh Nooooo!
Stolen from Museum in Norway [NYT]
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Edvard Munch’s famous paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” were stolen from an art museum Sunday while stunned museum-goers watched armed men threatening the staff at gunpoint as they took the artworks to a waiting car, police said.
As an art historian, several things come to mind:
- The Scream should be visualized making the Mr. Bill expression I have titled this entry with.
- Somewhere a supervillain strokes a long-haired Persian cat, chuckling.
in the whale's eye
Pursuant to an interesting discussion, In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick is hereby bookmarked, or rather linked.
The book is said to be based upon the incident that became the basis for Moby Dick. I’m starting to lean into nineteenth-century readings again and this sounds tasty.
Given my towering pile of on-deck matter, however, it may be a few moons before I get to this one.
The City at 500 feet
Sky Above, Hubbub Below [blogerated NYT link] is a mid-length appreciation of NYC, as seen from a light plane on a summer’s day. It’s a sweet bit of flight writing that I quite enjoyed.
Unwired
Manny’s junking his Wired archive. He highlights a 1996 article by Neal Stephenson. Interestingly, this story was the moment that Wired shortcircuited, for me. Of course, my disenchantment with the mag first crystallized with the terrible, faux-fad cover story on the Zippies. My suspicions deepened at the obvious shill job on Walter Wriston (We’ve seen the future – and middle-aged bankers will lead us there, french cuffs shining whitely in the bitstream!).
But Stephenson’s long, sloppy French kiss to the ideals of Ayn Rand really did me in. It’s one long love-blind poem to global capitalism, romantically propagandizing for an adolescent fantasy of tax-free offshore data havens, and I threw it across the room, cursing, several times as I read it. I believe the most commonly used word was “Bullshit!” I have a recollection of telling someone that I expected to see headshots of fiftysomething white men in suits, jauntily puffing cigars, adorn the covers shortly (trawling the cover archives, the Wriston cover appears to be the closest fit, although this comes close; so, um, I guess I got that wrong).
In hindsight, Stephenson successfully described Enron’s business model. Boy howdy, we should be glad that no-one has implemented the apparently-frictionless hyper-exchange he visualizes. Imagine a world run by countless Enrons! I’d rather die!
Instead of possiblities, I saw lies; instead of a grand vision I saw the death of community; instead of liberation I saw failed nation-states and global war.
Of course, I can’t make it through one single article in The Economist without the same enraged, stuttering profanity. I am not unaware that I’m an edge case; of course that by no means changes the fact that I’m right. 😉
a happy ending
I just spent the last half-day trying to fix my father-in-law’s e-machines desktop Windows XP box. He can’t clearly explain what happened, but somehow he became concerned that a new scanner he’d purchased had installed bad stuff on the computer, and I think he sought to remedy this by hand-removing some of the items he thought the installer had put on the disk. Hand-removing stuff under Windows is a bad idea.
At any rate, the upshot of all this was a non-functional sound card – the system thought it was running fine but no audio was produced. After walking through the unhelpful, very basic audio troubleshooter built into Windows, I took a deep breath, cleared my calendar for the day, and initiated a support call and ticket with e-machines.
After a brief intake, it was determined that the never-registered machine was out of warranty, and that the ticket would run $20 to initiate. I had been expecting some sort of charge, so I okayed it and we began.
After a few followups and verifications, we were recommended to run a full system install, wiping the HD, after pulling my father-in-law’s documents to a backup. Happily, we were able to do that with no gnashing of teeth, and I initiated the system restore.
When the initial-boot Windows XP setup appeared, it appeared over soothing music! Hurrah, the card’s fixed, I thought. After reboot – nothing. Alas.
One more phone call, and I was advised that the physical sound card was bad and that I should simply replace it. Now, my father-in-law really enjoys his computer, but rather than learning about it by reading or becoming a tech-nerd, he has evolved an elaborate personal set of metaphors that suffice to allow him to use the machines. However, that means he’s likely to blame the last person who touched the machine if things start going awry, and thus, the last thing I wanted to do was pop the case and start rummaging around in the guts of the machine.
I may understand how to assemble and disassemble computers but my level of expert Wintel knowledge dates to 1993, the first year I could afford to buy a Mac and get the hell outta Dodge.
After some frowning thought, I realized that the support person who advised me to buy a new soundcard had missed a clue: the machine played audio when booted into the setup routine. The card, physically, was fine. There had to be a way to address whatever tangled thing had cut off the circuits from the software.
One more call back to e-machines and I was told, in this order:
a) your machine is still in warranty for another year
b) we’re refunding your $20 ticket fee
c) use the device manager to uninstall the modem, then reboot
d) we’re going to reinstall the audio drivers from the restore CD before the modem drivers are re-enabled at startup
As it happened, due to a slight accident, the machine booted into Windows directly, with the startup chime!
I’m happy that the emachines support people were able to help; each time I placed a call I was connected to a real, live human within 30 seconds of having navigated the intake telephone tree.
On the other hand, I was told that the machine was out of warranty and that the audio card was dead, inaccuracies that would not have been corrected had I not pushed back, something that makes me reluctant to recommend the manufacturer to naive PC-users.
Finally, I have to note that the whole experience occupied me for four hours. Yeesh. I’m sticking with my Macs until they pry ’em outta my cold, dead hands.
UPDATE: One reboot later, the sound output is AWOL, again. On a clean install! Man! How do you people live with it?
The City Rises
(Construction crane near Madison, dusk, early August 2004)