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Sounds

I recorded a bunch of pretty pristine audio this weekend. Bugs chirping and loons whooping and unknown faux feral beast howling in the night. But alas. The signal, though clean, is so low in the mix, I don’t have the time to post a usable selection of mp3s here tonight. Here is the best I can do.

Close your city-dazzled eyes, plug up your traffic-deafened ears, and imagine layers and layers of birds shrieking and chirping and disputing and fussing and fighting over their turf. Now add an exponentially-larger number of insects, all doing the same thing, at an individually lower volume that collectively challenges the numerically-inferior cohort of winged dino descendants.

Vary by time of day over several twenty-four hour periods but make note of the relative lack of human-produced sounds. If you wish to emulate my personal reaction to this spring soundwash, desire to live outside of an urban area.

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Quick

Apple’s QT7 upgrade breaks QT6 Pro. You have to shell out for a new serial number. Sadly, activating the copy of 7 that has auto-updated on your system will not necessarily provide access to the features you need. From Apple’s online fora (quoted, as Apple does not provide permanent online posting of the discussions):

Nick:

Since I’ve installed Quicktime 7 Pro it crashes every time I try to open ‘Show movie properties’. I’ve tried it on a variety of Quicktime movies, old and new. I’ve now repaired permissions and repaired my disk – but to no avail.

russblaise:

This workaround is from “blinkmedia”, it was posted yesterday. And it worked for me.

With QT Player not running:

Open System Prefs > International & change your language setting. Then quit and re-open System Prefs and change your language setting back to what it was/should be. QT Player’s “Movie Properties” should now behave as expected.



I can confirm that this successfully allows access to “Movie Properties.”

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Crudski

Crap! I just realized gmail has been filtering inbound comment notifications straight to spam! Sorry, friends, I’m not deliberately sitting on your comments.

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War Room

Viv and I walked into The War Room, a new club on Capitol Hill, recently. I had noticed that the deck was open, but when we walked in, the interior space was completely empty.

All of the hung art – and possibly the club logo – is by Stewart Fairey of “Obey Giant” fame. The club adertises free wifi. Geeks of Seattle, abandon forthwith the locked-down wifi at the Elysian!

Of course, I must note we just stuck our noses in, thought about helping ourselves to the unattended bar, and then went on to Bill’s for pizza. So who knows what sort of tax Mr. Fairey’s art imposes upon the drinks.

We did not go upstairs, but it sure seems to me that the whole roof is an open deck, and one thing the $ill always needs more of is outdoor public drinking establishments.

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heat

After some research, I have concluded that the 2-inch-long red pepper I inadvisably consumed in a single bite was probably the much-feared Habanero. It did, indeed, feel as though the lid of my skull was lifting away from my brain.

habanero.jpg
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The whale

Viv and I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide this evening, expecting nothing, and came away reasonably happy. Like many old-skool geeks, I had a particular relationship with the radio and book incarnations of this series and subsequent to last year’s disastrous rental of the eye-scorchingly terrible BBC-TV series. The elegiac tone – and subsurface, if you will, presence of departed creator Douglas Adams – caught me by surprise and appealed, shamelessly and with success, to my own sense of loss.

However, the I did find the predominance of American accents in this version of Adams’ tale somehow not right.

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The Nation

Hey look, ma! I’m an academic reference or possibly case study!

“Late in September, 2004, Mike Whybark, a resident of Seattle, began researching the background story to the original flier and reported his findings in The Nation (see Whybark 2004).”

Sadly, however, The Nation (later in the paper cited as a Seattle-based publication) has never seen fit to send me a check for my work. If only I knew which Nation it might be that Ms. Knobel cites!

Could it be the venerable organ of the Left? If so, the slow-pay might well be understood. Perhaps it was Bangok’s The Nation. Or maybe Pakistan’s.

At any rate, I know that I did not report my findings in The Nation. However, pursuivant to the Articles of the League in fulfulling my obligation toward grandiloquence and overreaching, the next time I have hard, cold water to toss in the face of an internet meme, Katrina gets first right of refusal with up to twenty-four hours turnaround on a no-reply opt-out. After that, it’s Hilly’s turn.

What’s really odd is that John and Mikey’s shirts are cited, and Jeff’s initial post about Terry is also quoted. I really want to understand where the citation forThe Nation originated,