C. Douglas Hall was on hand for this summer’s “Starship Exeter” shoot, and provides a visual record of the bridge being constructed.
Scaled
Scale corrected satellite tsunami before and after photos. Many of you will have seen these, but there are some that were new to me, and it’s quite amazing.
Both ends
My candle gutters, for I have been overly employed this week.
I have also been reading and very much enjoying Gene Wolfe’s “The Wizard,” but I’m mighty sad that I can’t seem to lay hands on the prequel, “The Knight,” which I am certain I purchased and devoured ‘long about springtime.
Did I perchance loan it to a loyal reader?
The biggest Bunyan
I have written about my love for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry here, quite some time ago.
Among other things, I wrote
My personal favorite was the little room off one of the stairs into which one stumbled upon discovering the floor had been faceted in many crazy angled slabs. These slabs simulated random motion, as though the room were being turned and rocked this way and that – architectural cubism!
The impetus for such a wonder of danger and insanity? Why, look out the window! there’s the GIANT HEAD OF PAUL BUNYAN, his 24″ eye-globes rumbling and clacking llleft, then rrright, as he surveys the interior of the little cabin he holds aloft and its’ ever changing cast.
The sole link, to an undersized scan of a pencil drawing of the interior of the room, has succumbed to linkrot.
Therefore, great was my joy when a fellow Vulgar Boatmen enthusiast, unknown to me by sight, emailed a terse note informing me of our shared appreciation for not only the music of the VB but also for the past wonders of the Bunyan room.
Attached to the note was this handsome souvenir image, clearly demonstrating why it is that terror and giants have always been synonymous.
My correspondent further noted that he and a family member searched the museum for the missing woodsman, concluding, “we finally found Paul’s big mute face hung on a wall in the basement,
opposite a snack bar.”
Clearly, the next time I am in town, another expedition must be arranged.
Murph!
On my way home from work today, I ran into fellow KG-appreciator Murph, who was hurrying home to tend to his ailing spouse. We discussed Ken’s recently-revealed secret career. It was great to see him, and hopefully I’ll run into him again at the bus stop.
PNWuary Mefi Meetup
Hey look! It’s blurry pictures (and a very dark 11mb video) from last night’s MetaFilter Meetup.
In attendance: kindall, agropyron, cirocco, astruc, alexgb, caitlinb, mwhybark, non-MeFite Adam, black8, Danelope, Keyser Soze aka Frito, fatllama.
Here are the photos. (Alas, I found that ecto won’t play nice with MT3.x + Blacklist while attempting to upload these pix here. Bye, ecto! I’ll miss you! Maybe I’ll miss you enough to try to troubleshoot, but not tonight!)
Passive tech
As part of my techno-wrangle yesterday I beat on my router for a portion of the afternoon. It appears that the dropped-connections issue I was experiencing was indeed the result of a badly-configured router. Thanks so much to the inattentive support staff at my ISP!
To be fair, I’m their client because of legacy ISP purchases and they are really not set up to support residential DSL. Still the problem of the misconfigured router came about because they’d failed to rebuild the network interface once Qwest had reset their fiddly bits. Amusingly, Qwest’s forwarded support number for my account goes to the old ISP’s former CTO’s voicemail box.
At any rate it’s a relief to have stable connections again.
Ok, once more, from the top
I took the time to reconfigure my DSL router from scratch today, as we’ve been slowly losing our minds due to connection instability since the router was set up. So far, it appears to be performing much more successfully than it had been. It’s set to bridge mode, which means that its’ extended features are disabled. That’s kind of a drag, as it has inbuilt DHCP and wireless; but we already have both of those via four-year-old Airports. The primary thing I wish I could do is use the wireless to get better coverage – this summer, for example, a third access point could be located by the back window to get solid coverage on the deck.
Ah well, neighbors’ wireless has worked fine for the past couple years – I bet this will still be the case this summer.
I was also able to fine-tune some aspects of MT3 and Blacklist 2.x, and see some slight performance benefits.
Not yet tackled are
- use-testing the ported blogs for functionality and comments (I dropped a bunch of test blogs and inactive sites)
- adding the MT3x templates for the new UI bits
- merging the MT3x style sheets with the active stylesheets
- troubleshooting the apparent inability of MT + Blacklist to recognize and remember a moderator-authorized commenter
- troubleshooting SmartyPants and Markdown
(UPDATE: Oh, look, an aborted attempt to implement the dynamic features of MT3x has replaced all my files with new files named “foo.html.static,” breaking searches and old links! HOORAY!)
(UPDATE 2: As it turns out, the rebuild that produced the “*.static” pages also helped identify a troublesome post in which non-ASCII dragons lurked, and have been blowing up Perl good for over 2 years now. So all’s well that ends well.)
It’s interesting that three friends – Jerry, Dan, and Adam – all mentioned either their implementation of hand-rolled commenting systems or their use and customization of a bolt-on element to improve comment spam resistance.
Like my desired “Simple Email” provider, I think there’s a product opportunity here.
Returning to consider the saga of bellerophon, my internet services box, there’s a problem in the Perl install that makes me think I should probably rebuild that – I first noticed it last year when Markdown started blowing up on certain blank replacement strings. That and the generally sloooooow performance of certain long-list-item activities (adding an album to Gallery 2.x, waiting for Blacklist to parse all n-thousand entries) on the server are arguments for a server rebuild and migration. I do have a spare box to move everything over to, which would make the rebuild invisible. What I do not have is endless time and patience.
I have a backup system implementation to develop first, though. I’m being herded in the direction of hard-drive-based backups, which just makes me grit my teeth and shake a little bit. I have come to the point where I actively loathe the idea of yet another piece of computer gear.
Doctor Steel
Doctor Steel, a mad toymaker. Flash-based, but very worth your time. Fantastic!
I, for one, welcome our mad toymaker overlord.
[via the Cartoonist.]