| January 28, 2003 - February 28, 2003 | ||
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USB hotpad! "It is the electric knee applying which you use!"
USB cup warmer! "It is superior in durability and keeps semipermanent function." Ten years ago today, our friends at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began their attack on the Branch Davidians near Waco. (Also, Lillian Gish died).
This letter of resignation from career diplomat John Brady Kiesling says it all better than just about anything else I've read.
The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. I am beginning to settle into my opinion that (1) it would seem to be a very good thing to get rid of Saddam, and (2) it looks like war is the only way to do it, and (3) this bunch of semi-retarded Texanized Nazis in Washington are the worst possible bunch of yahoos to try to prosecute such a war. If they would all resign at once or walk to the bottom of the Potomac, allowing us to vote in a new government, then maybe it could be done right. But these people! These people apparently never read the Consititution, never cracked a history book.
An unsigned opinion "If antiwar protesters succeed" at the Christian Science Monitor challenging the shortsightedness and shallowness of the peace movement.
The Pyra/Blogger FAQ on their purchase by Google. "Google liked our logo. And we liked their food." Yeah, that food pulls 'em in every time.
Good story of an average American man defending home and family from nameless evil...
On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!! This disturbingly amateurish website seems to be an official product of the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. It lists several of Bush's likes (I'm sure these are just the highlights). Democrats and left-leaning independents will really like this. Others will simply wonder if we'll still have a country a year from now.
Little Sally Rountree of Marietta, Georgia, whines that she is shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that Georgian Bush-lovers are a bunch of angry cretins with an average of 1.7 brain cells each. Obviously, she just crawled out from under a rock.
I'm a few days late with this, but this is an astounding story. Get this. A guy walks uninvited into a police party in Ashland, Massachusetts, and attempts to conduct a drug deal with the host. It was like negative entrapment.
Clear, sunny skies, milder temps (about 30°F), no wind, it was a great day for walking. Headed over to George's to loan him a bag for his trip to St. John next week, then headed up to Copley Square for a routine visit to the dentist. After that I stopped in at the Pru mall food court to get a latte at Rebecca's, even though I promised myself I wouldn't go back there after some hugely rude treatment by the staff several months ago. They were rude again today, but not hugely so. Sort of what passes for normal rudeness among sales staffs in Boston. Whilst quaffing the latte who should I spy, but Sam, who I have heard zilch from in over a year. I know he never reads here, so I can tell you he just started some new medication and feels great! So, I expect him to stay in regular touch henceforth, but I've been disappointed before. We discussed the incredible, awesome stupidity of the current administration in Washington without coming up with a practical way to deal with it. My best suggestion is that Bush, his administration, and all his cronies go off to Iraq and fight Saddam themselves, letting our military go home to work on their tans.
From there I walked home, feeling all energetic. This photo of the Orlando YMCA baseball team was e-mailed to me recently. No info on the date, but based on the hairstyles I'm going to guess 1930s, maybe '20s.
WTF?! Yesterday was a record-breaking day for traffic at Ron's Log...but it seems to have been caused by someone searching for the string "www.skidboot.com" every 3 or 4 minutes! He/she/it was using Yahoo search most of the time, but occasionally switched to AOL search. Somebody/thing is totally unclear on the concept. It seems Skidboot was on Oprah's show today and www.skidboot.com is overloaded. skidboot is a finalist on Pet Star on Animal Planet. Since Skidboot is the only contestant on Pet Star to correspond with Ron's Log, I think he should be made the winner by acclamation.
Opera 7.02 for Windows is available and I have finally upgraded to it. So far okay. If there are tremendous advantages, they will make themselves known as I go along, I suppose.
I've let a little backlog of Big Dig photos build up over time, so let's just get them out of the way before that job is all finished.
Here's the statistics on the search engines used to find Ron's Log:
Here's a story that some public school teachers have been dissing the parents of some of their students; specifically, the parents who are in the National Guard. Here's the story on the website of WABI-TV (Bangor) where they use ALL CAPS!
January 22, 2003, signal from Pioneer 10 may have been its very last since its launch July 15, 1972.
Download the Homeland Security Threat Monitor and install it on your Windows PC and you will instantly and continuously the current level of threat as set by Our Department Of Homeland Security without having to slog to their site manually. Here's a similar item for Mac. Sorry for you Linux guys. It blinks when the threat level is increased...although I suspect that if it went from orange to red I don't think I'd need a blinking icon to tell me.
For those of you who don't want to download such trash, here for your security info is the current threat level: Or this Enhanced Terror Alert Color: Tasteless t-shirts. Buy several!
The State of Ohio is all set to ratify the 14th amendment, which will make it unanimous. Kentucky previously ratified it in 1976.
New rescue tool: baseballs. Baseballs equipped with microphones and wireless transmitters. They could be thrown into a collapsed building and used to listen for signs of life. They're cheap enough, you wouldn't have to worry about retrieving them. Plus, they would provide justification for sending rescue squads to baseball pitching practice a couple of times a year!
Here is a person who doesn't like Opera. 6.0, that is. The author never quite says, but I think he means Opera for the Mac, because why else would he be installing 6.0, when it's up to 7.01 for Windows. Nonetheless, I can be fairminded enough to say that it sure looks like the Mac version is a pile of shit. But they have Safari now, and are completely happy therewith.
Intel is working to get rid of the BIOS?!?! It never occured to me that such a thing could be done. It's sort of like getting rid of, uh, dirt or sump'n. They plan to replace it with EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). Right away, you can see the acronynm is one letter shorter, and that's nice. But wait there's more. EFI will support high-res graphical displays, so we won't be embarrassed seeing those text messages scroll up our screen. You're reeling, I know, but I'll keep going. EFI will be able to emulate BIOS, it will be written in C and have networking built in. They're also talking about the EFI storing some data on the hard drive. Uh oh, I see trouble coming! How about letting me insert some flash memory onto the motherboard, instead of relying on my hard drive?
Winners of the Photobloggies. Winner of Bestkeptsecretphotoblog is Redscreen
This company I never heard of before, ComScore Media Metrix, purports to measure the popularity of websites. It has just "corrected" its figures based on serious underreporting of web usage in work locations. According to this more reliable [?] information, Lycos is a more popular site than Google?!?! Maybe I am seriously out of touch, but who uses Lycos? If you do, please let me know. Also, the most popular website above all is weather.com, according to these people. Comscore's site here. Nielsen also rates website traffic. From the NY Times article:
ComScore and Nielsen each insist that their methods are more statistically rigorous. ComScore says that its sample of people at work has 30,000 people, far more than the 7,000 claimed by Nielsen.In other words, Comcast bases its data on reports from users who actually read and respond to spam! Well, that would explain the bizarre positioning of Lycos. But, perhaps those are exactly the gullible morons who web marketers like to target. First AIDS vaccine trial fails...maybe? Among those who received the vaccine, 5.7% became infected with HIV, while 5.8% of those receiving the placebo became HIV positive. BUT when we eliminate white people from the study (the majority of participants) the numbers are very different: 3.7% of the vaccinated became infected, while 9.9% of those getting the placebo became infected! No idea why the difference! One must bear in mind that when the white people are eliminated, the number of participants in the study is too small to make it reliable, so this may just be a statistical fluke, but obviously a study with more non-whites in it is called for.
iPod battery problem solved for only US$30! What a great country this is. Now, the question is...will iPod owners prefer to stick with visual elegance and shortened battery life, or will they embrace this ugly looking piece of hack that will allow them to listen to many, many more hours of music in more places? I'm betting on form over function.
Finally! The USB toothbrush!
No further info on this breakthrough yet. What a doofus! Everybody knows that when you drink beer and ride your bike simultaneously, you've got to be drinking canned beer. It's more discreet if it slips from your hand, and you avoid giving yourself a flat tire. Oh, yeah...you should also not do this next to the Sheriff's office, and when the law enforcement people ask questions, do not pull a bag of dope out of your pocket.
Daypop is now offering Top Word Bursts, meaning "heightened usage of certain words in weblogs within the last couple days." One theory of why Google bought Pyra was that they want to enhance their ability to watch weblogs for word bursts. That was somebody's theory, anyway.
I'm a tad late on this story about a 9-foot snow phallus erected on the Harvard campus. It seems a buncha women didn't like it (Letter 1, Letter 2). And another article here. It's disheartening that these women are bright enough to get into Harvard but think a penis is a bad thing. Maybe they don't know how babies get made.
The first organizing meeting for this year's Outriders Boston-Provincetown bike ride will Monday, March 3 at the Nicolas Cafe, 1628 Beacon Street at 7 o'clock pm. This is for you who want to be in on the basics of organizing the ride. This year will be my last for arrowing and mapping, so if you want to be my apprentice so you can take over in 2004, just let me know.
"The white people go skating.."
Apparently, almost everything worn by your average skater reflects a lot of infrared. Nice sunny day, so I put on the infrared filter and went a-lookin' for some leafy, deciduous trees. I apologize for my failure to find any. But it seems, even the wood of bare trees is highly reflective of infrared light. Here's a sample:
University City, Missouri, city council passes a resolution directing "city employees to refrain from taking part in activities they believe may violate constitutionally protected civil liberties." This has angered the U.S. Attorney for eastern Missouri who says it "puts all citizens at risk" and could result in "catastrophic loss of life." Yes, indeed, those civil liberties are dangerous things, which is why the people get to hold onto them. Safer that way.
"Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians favour the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana." "76 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 50 and 59 support decriminalization while 72 per cent of the 40 to 49 age group agree the laws against smoking dope should be relaxed."
Safer America: all the products you need to protect yourself from nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. And with the Executive Chute you'll be all set to escape from your highrise.
But $179 for this hookah/bong is just way to effin' much! 
Last fall I got a bit of postal mail about an AIDS fundraiser bike ride in 2003. The letter was from the AIDS Action Committee, and the ride was to be called the Red Ribbon Ride (like the 2002 fundraiser), but this one would be joint with the Fenway Clinic. The letter was a call for those who wanted to be in on the ground floor of this thing to come forth and help organize. I didn't save the letter, and I'm sorry for that. I didn't want to volunteer, and I assumed I would soon be inundated with more similar letters and that plentiful information would be on their websites. I was wrong. I heard nothing more about it. Nothing appeared on the websites. Then yesterday I got the little AAC newsletter in which they mention the ride. No mention of "Red Ribbon" or the Fenway Clinic! Here's all they say:
8/8 - 8/10 — AIDS ACTION Ride 3-Day Bike EventWhen I went to www.aacevents.org yesterday, there was absolutely no mention of the ride, although it did list a triathlon. That, plus the gaff calling it a "race" does not bode well. And what happend to the Fenway? Surely they won't have competing bike rides! A search on the Fenway's website turns up nothing about bikes. I didn't want to be the only one not talking about the weather! It has certainly made a turnaround. Going from an absolute all-time record-setting snowfall on Monday and Tuesday to 48°(F) today. I saw a biker going down Causway Street bareheaded (shaved head, too!), short sleeve t-shirt, no gloves.
 Here is the Charles Ski Park (formerly known as a "River") today. How to make a CD case out of a plain sheet of paper. Or, use this technique (PDF).
What I prefer to do is use an 8 cm CD, which can fit inside a small standard paper mailing envelope. Not often am I mailing more than 180 Mb. Use two envelopes for security. Doesn't look like a CD and weighs less than 1 ounce. 
Orwell had this to say on pacifism in his essay "Notes on Nationalism" written in May 1945:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered. "Is that a 2 Gb flash drive, or are you just happy to see me?"
 Only $1249. Unfortunately, it's only USB 1.1. They expect to have USB 2.0 in the future, as well as a 3 Gb model. Stupid Security Competition. I might nominate the process that would allow me to get on board a plane with a gun if I put the gun in a lead bag that said "Film Bag" on it, and it was the Palm Springs airport, and I got Eduardo to do the inspection.
 Man seen playing chess in Espresso Royale, January 2003.  Old bike seen in Cambridge, December 2002  The main stairs at the Museum of Fine Arts. Another snow day! I have taken this unexpected free time to finally catch up (or give up) on an old unfinished task: AIDS LifeCycle 2002. Yes, I had promised my supporters a fully-detailed story with photos, and that just hasn't happened. So I've gone and put up all the photos from LifeCycle on my Fototime site. Go there, even if you've seen some of my LifeCycle photos already. Now there are photos from every day, including the closing ceremonies in West Hollywood.
Google buys Pyra Labs, which owns Blog*spot and Blogger which is the most popular weblog tool. Story here. I can't imagine where this will take things.
Film to digital. It hasn't even been a full year since I got my Minolta Dimage X (March 17). I fooled around with 2 or 3 little cheap digital cameras before I got that, but never got much from 'em. After getting the Minolta my film usage dropped considerably. And since getting the Canon Powershot G3, film use has dropped to nearly zero. The only time I need to use film is when I want a shutter speed longer than 15 seconds, which pretty much means night photography. My fridge, however, still has dozens of rolls of slide film, and a few rolls of print film. (I'm giving away the print film, BTW.) For the first time since I started getting into photography (about 20 years ago) I leave my film cameras unloaded. Occasionally I will pick one up and try to take a photo or two, just so I can finish that roll and get it out of there before the next ice age. I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when I opened one camera to find I had put a roll of black and white slide film in it (probably a year ago) and completely forgotten it. Sent it off for processing, and got it back yesterday.
 A panorama along the Muddy River near Longwood shot last spring.  A San Francisco rooftop apartment, May 2002  A San Francisco sunrise. I have learned that if you buy your first infrared filter for your camera in the middle of the coldest February in years, it can be very frustrating. It was sunny today, so I tried a few IR photos of my cactuses in a sunny window, and then I put on my layers to take a short walk around the neighborhood. By the time I got outside, a thin bit of haze had moved across the sun that (apparently) cut out some infrared. So the resulting photos are a bit disappointing, but they do serve to prove the G3 can do it. Come warmer weather and more foliage I'll be out with the tripod and get better ones.
So go here to see 6 small samples of what little infrared I got today. Retired Sergeant Red Thomas offers non-panicky advice on surviving chemical, biological or nuclear attacks. His basic advice? Stay calm. You're gonna live.
And in case you don't want to trust ol' Red, he's backed up 99% by Snopes, and if you don't know Snopes then you're walkin' around the internet blind and probably forwarding bullcrap about how we can stop buying Saudi oil if we just boycott Conoco or somethin'. Another site with great photos from a Canon G1.
And another. Infrared images on the G1 (and possibly also the G3). Infrared with a G3, G2 and G1. A forum for the discussion of the Canon G3. Good name. Clean design. Content could use some beefing up. Dong-Resin.
Good name. Clean design. Excellent content, and lots of it. Subject: New York City. The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum.
The software to manage the windmills [a gov't employee with too much time on his hands has written to let me know they are more properly termed "wind turbines"]...but anyway, the software for the windmills comes from a company right here in Somerville, Mass.
An article in the NY Times purporting to be all about how our information gets trapped on obsolete computers or media, and we just can't move it to a newer format.
Ms. Sturm, 32, graduated from college 11 years ago, and all her papers are on 3½-inch diskettes that she holds on to like so many LP's. "The disks are an integral part of what I move from place to place whenever I move," she said. Yet she no longer has a computer with a diskette drive. "That's a really bad situation," she acknowledged.See how this is not about technology, but about people being stupid airheads? Even when diskettes were the thing, anybody who knew anything knew they weren't reliable places to store important info. A copy on the hard drive, plus a couple of back ups on diskettes was usually the minimum. But what's her excuse now? Does she live on a desert island where none of her friends have diskette drives and there are no Kinko's. Buy a blank CD, lady. Go down Kinko's with it and your diskettes and copy them all over. If you need help creating folders, call me. At Dissecting Leftism, John Ray says libertarians and conservatives are the same, except the conservatives are a bit cleaner. There are a few libertarian conservatives, but most conservatives don't give a shit for civil liberties, which I think is a pretty important difference. But I can see why a conservative wouldn't care about that.
Susan Lee gets it right. Palm Springers ho-hum about nudist bridge. [Thereby demonstrating they are libertarian, not conservative].
Weblogs are fucking stupid includes this chapter:
He said I should sign this, so okay: 
The 10 most romantic albums of all time include nothing by Barry White...or the Chef, for that matter.
I went nuts amongst the windmills in Palm Springs. I've got 21 photos, some of them very large. They're at Fototime. Here is a thumbnail of my favorite. If you click on the thumbnail, you'll go directly to the full size image (744 Kb).
Raed is blogging from Baghdad itself. (In English)
A few excellent photos taken with a Canon Powershot G2 on the website of Burkhard Jahnen.
And here are some gorgeous ones taken with a G1. Here are some nightshots with a G2. (Other subjects here). When I'm flying in the western U.S. I am fascinated by the things I see on the ground. How high is that butte? Where does that tiny road go in the middle of nothing? What does it all look like from the ground? On my flight to Palm Springs in December I had great conditions for photography when we passed over the Grand Canyon. The air was dry and clear, it was late afternoon, I had my G3. And with just a bit of help from Photshop, I got some great photos. There are 31 of 'em, and most of them are big. About half are of the Grand Canyon itself, while the rest are nearby areas. They're at Fototime (no registration, no ads, no fees), so please go take a look.
In case you were under the illusion that before launch the Columbia looked like one of those shiny white virginal shuttle models you always see, here is a very large (nearly 2 Mb) NASA photo of the Columbia on the launch pad looking rather bruised and ragged.
And here is a NASA map of the Columbia's debris field (as of February 1) stretching from the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth to Leesville, Louisiana. Here's a thing called Weblogs At Harvard, and I think it's only going to be a weblog about weblogs, a directory, a meta-weblog. I don't think it's going to host weblogs, but I could be wrong, and this would not be the first time someone at Harvard has been slightly unclear.
If you used to like to burn ants with a magnifying glass, you won't have any trouble watching this.
This is a video taken in 6000 feet of water. An undersea robot is sawing a 3mm wide slit (1/10th of an inch ... remember that width) in a pipeline. The pressure inside the pipeline is 0 psig, while the pressure outside is 2700 psi, or 1.3 tons per square inch. Then a crab comes along.... Bill introduced in Oklahoma to require barbecue restaurants to provide cloth napkins! Hell, if it's good barbecue they should provide showers!
The survival kit:
Q: What's the most important item in a disaster kit? This is, no shittin', the Total Information Awareness thong. Only $9.99. I think the strategy is that you would wear this after one of those terrorist attacks in order to get assistance from the police or fire departments more speedily. Warning, your results may vary.
The BBC is soliciting photo submissions from the millions of digital camera owners worldwide. It doesn't necessarily have to be hard, hard news: "if you think you have a picture worth looking at, if you found yourself in the right place at the right time, send it to BBC News Online." Send 'em to yourpics@bbc.co.uk
blitzg
blo.gs bloghop blogchalking blogtree blogwise blogstreet blogwise globeofblogs eatonweb Soul of the Web wander-lust weblogs The City of San Diego bought a Google box to handle searches on their website. Go test.
agon \AH-gahn; ah-GOHN\, plural agones \uh-GOH-neez\
noun: A struggle or contest; conflict; especially between the protagonist and antagonist in a literary work. Conflicts about moral claims are part of what it means to be human, and a political ideal stripped of sentimentality and the utopian temptation is one committed to the notion that political life is a permanent agon between clashing, even incompatible goods. —Jean Bethke Elshtain, Real Politics It is the irresolvable love-hate agon between men and women that drives all cultures. —Lawrence Osborne, "False goddess," Salon, June 28, 2000 Almost every poem Auden wrote in the weeks before and after his arrival in New York portrayed the agon of an artist in combat with his gift. —Edward Mendelson, Later Auden Agon comes from Greek agon, "a struggle or contest." It is related to agony. Dictionary.com Word of the Day Two genuine traffic signs in Washington, DC.
Parking Spots. This is good if you need to learn to understand depth of field, or if you just have too much time on your hands. Take photos of toy cars positioned so that they look like they are parked among real cars. Take a look.
Snow Day!
North Carolina congressman Howard Coble (a Republican, if that needs to be clarified) thinks the Japanese-American internment camps in WW2 were a fine thing. "Some probably were intent on doing harm to us," he explains. Solid logic indeed. In fact, I suspect some North Carolinians are intent on doing us harm now, so let's round up the entire state. Into the camps right now. Arbeit macht frei, y'all!
One evangelical Christian has begun to grasp why Americans despise evangelical Christians: "We are loathed, caricatured, avoided and disliked because we often deserve it."
$8000 will get you monitor with the "highest resolution currently available in the world": the ViewSonic VP2290b LCD. 22.2 inch, 3840x2400. If you check around, you'll find it's available for less than $7000.
Natsuko Murakami acknowledges that her "English still it is not complete." And so she writes her weblog for practice. Here, she clarifies an issue before the Security Council.
He? Not finding the decisive evidence that S kept accompanying the scientist of the Iraqi weapon to the interview person of escaping from the country, you call the Blix. The Iraqi representative being the scientist of the weapon shaking it denies the Blix. The inspection team of that weapon in addition as for him it denies permeating due to the representative of the Iraqi. The bush of that state of onion message insisted both request. Great idea, lousy execution: the Meade CaptureView binoculars with digital camera. It's a pair of 8x22 binoculars with a digital camera built in. Their stats say the focal length of the camera is the equivalent of 400 mm on a 35 mm camera. "The built-in digital camera captures what you see in the 8-power view of the binocular," they say on their site. Well, in this review we find that's not really true. It seems that the camera does not zoom with the binoculars. Worse, the resolution is no better than 640x480 and it comes with only 8 Mb of unremovable memory. Holds 45 photos at 640x480. Not many. At least it supports USB. Done right it would be nice thing for birders, sports fans, or (of course) voyeurs (that's where the money is!). It needs higher resolution, the zoom should actually synchronize with the binoculars, and it should use some kind of expandable memory. It should cost $300-$400 if it's good. If you're nuts, you can actually buy this piece of junk for about $95 from B & H (have they no shame?).
The Odyssey 1000 is obviously intended to compete closely with the iPod. It's not just a 20 Gb MP3 player. Let's compare it to the 20 Gb iPod. $349 for the Odyssey, $499 for the iPod. They both have scrollwheels, but sight unseen, I'm willing to bet the iPod's works better. Odyssey uses USB 2.0; iPod Firewire. Both have equalizers. They don't actually say, but I'm willing to bet the Odyssey's lithium-ion battery is replaceable, unlike the iPod's. With the iPod you get iTunes, which is probably more sophisticated than whatever software is on the Odyssey. The Odyssey includes FM, a microphone, and voice commands. None of those are on the iPod. OTOH iPod has contact list and calendar software. iPod has a remote control; no remote mentioned in the description of the Odyssey. That would be a serious weak point. (Do not confuse the Odyseey 1000 with the Browning Odyssey 1000.)
Found a panoramic photography Yahoo group: Panorama-Stitching.
Deptford Township, New Jersey, boys assert their right to wear skirts to school. They were plaid. If they had also been pleated, they might have made the claim that they were kilts. Absolutely no one is saying anything about what was worn beneath the skirts.
loricate (LOR-i-kayt) adjective
Covered with an armor, such as scales or bony plates on reptiles. [From Latin loricatus, from lorica (protective covering, corselet), from lorum (strap).] "The period movie stuffed with loricate soldiers, gladiators and emperors didn't need to defend itself against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Sunday, as 'Gladiator' walked off with the Oscar for Best Picture at the 73rd Academy Awards." Kevin V. Johnson, Spizzerinctum Website, Mar 26, 2001. Wordsmith Ran across a Yahoo group for G1 cameras today: CanonG1UsersGroup. Also a webring for G1 users. Presumably, a G3 user will be welcome both places.
Trends we like to see:
From the over-excited folks at Xoxide comes caffeinated soap at $8/bar. Product testing and review here.
We have arrived at the 30th anniversary of the invention of the cellphone, and the 20th anniversary of their entry into the market. Here "cellular service" is defined by the reuse of frequencies and the handing off of calls from one trasnmitter to another. In 2002 the total number of cellphones worldwide surpassed the total number of wired phones: 1.5 billion versus 1.3 billion. In South Korea there are more cellphones than people; which reminds me of the ratio of hogs to humans in Iowa. According to the FCC 1.2% of American households with phones have only cellular service.
The Iraqi opinion on the Columbia break up: "God's Vengeance." This recalls those who say AIDS is god's vengeance. How come the god of fundamentalists has such lousy aim? (I mean, Roy Cohn was the only person who "deserved" to die with AIDS, so I guess everyone else has been collateral damage). If I was an Iraqi with a god who takes vengeance for me, I'd want my god to crash Air Force One, or maybe drop a few military transports into the ocean. Maybe the Iraqis were afraid we had a plan to fly all of the shuttles across their airspace simultaneously and shower them with, uh, space debris, or sump'n.
Okay. The Iraqis are satsified that god has taken vengeance. Fine. Got that out of the way. On with the war. I don't read Time magazine (as if I need to state that), mostly because it's shallow, uninteresting, and so very wrong much of the time. But this article by Gregg Easterbrook about the shuttle is really a piece of work. What a mess of misinformation and non-logic. I mean, he seems to suggest launching an unmanned shuttle? What would the point be?
I had hoped to get by without even addressing it, since the media are doing so well saturating us with non-information about the Columbia, but I guess I ought to put my sorry ass on the line:
The photo on the left is supposed to be Saddam Hussein swimming in the Tigris. Doesn't he look like one of the Hat Sisters? I mean, except for that hat.
DVD rot? Here is the DVD Rot List. Details here. So far it affects only Reverse Spiral Dual Layer discs from Warner Advanced Media Organization.
3 new photos:
I have received e-mail from a friend suggesting that I should make Ron's Log into something else. There are lots of weblogs out there, ranging over every subject in every style imaginable. Some are dry and technical. Others are so juicy you can hardly look at them. I have enjoyed some of the juicy ones, but I could never write like that. Most of it is that I just don't have a very juicy life. Some guys are proud of going out for some binge drinking on Saturday night, and then writing all about it the next day after having a bit of the hair of the dog.
I write about what I find exciting, interesting, funny and/or maddening. If it's not here, then I either don't know about it, or am bored by it, or it's being covered better elsewhere. A teeny tiny fly in the ointment for Canon Powershot G3. If you use a custom white balance and RAW format, the software that comes with the camera will not handle it correctly. Whew! I guess I'm lucky I haven't ventured into the wild and wooly world of custom white balance yet.
Opera 7 for Windows has been out for a few days. I've downloaded it, but not installed it yet.
250 Gb hard drive on its way. Still not big enough to contain the entire Library of Congress.
Here's Charles Busch posing with me for a photo completely voluntarily! Bill and Emrys from California had flown in to NYC to see Charle's latest production: Shanghai Moon. I had to join 'em. Carl came with us too. It was all quite fun and very refreshing after Allergist's Wife (ahem). Click here to see the full photo.
Finally! A product we all really need: a 301 disc DVD/CD/MP3 jukebox from Sony for only $500.
It's been awhile since I took the Greyhound/Peter Pan to NYC, but now I am prepared to report on their security procedures:
While waiting in line for the bus at the Boston depot three men wearing Pinkerton outfits came along and in barely understandable English explained that they were going to search our carry-on bags and give us a wand-scanning. They had a 4-wheeled, 2-shelved cart; the sort of cart delis use to deliver meals. They had me put my carry-on bag on the cart and take the metal from my pockets. While one guy randomly pawed through my bag, another wanded me. It seemed to be a pretty insensitive wand as it never picked up my belt buckle or watch. After a minute of searching, the man who was pawing through my bag asked me if I had any knives in there. Poor timing. Fortunately for him, I had packed all my knives in baggage to check. After I was cleared, they bumbled slowly along the line. They hadn't widened the little lane we stood in, so it went pretty sloppily. The guy with the wand got way, way ahead of the bag inspector. Once inspected, there was no attempt made to prevent anyone coming up to me to hand me a bag from, say, McDonald's containing a Big Mac, a grenade, and a couple of small handguns. There was also no attempt to verify that the bag we voluntarily identified as "carry-on" was in fact the only bag we carried on. Ours was the only bus being screened. Apparently people busing to Portland, Maine, or Hyannis are expected to be less violent. There was no similar security check at NY Port Authority for the return trip. However, as a more realistic security measure, Greyhound/Peter Pan no longer allows seating in the four front seats. Anyone who wanted to make an attack on the driver would have to stand up completely in the aisle first, giving the driver a moment of warning. On the up side, the round trip ticket is only $40 (have to leave Boston no later than 6:30 PM) and the driver on the return trip was pretty funny. Besides the usual rules, he forbad the eating of fish on his bus. He also instructed us not to take off our shoes because that would smell like fish...or broccoli. He had introduced himself as Ben "...just Ben, not Ben Laden" I don't know where he was from, but judging from his accent he wasn't born anywhere in this country.
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"ROFL"
