Anyway, the palette problem went away, which was good. But now I have all kinds of malware, right out of the XP .CAB files, that keeps popping up. Something called "MacAffee" popped up yesterday afternoon, and wanted to protect me from viruses on the internet. It's a standalone computer running an inventory control application and a compiler, I don't have any steenkeeng internet. There was no "X" button to close the window, so I clicked the "NO" button. Then it ground around a while, and told me it had installed itself anyway. And there's something called "BIGFIX" that keeps wanting to do something. And it keeps popping up windows wanting me to buy AOL. And it does them all SEVERAL TIMES PER DAY.
This is a Gateway box, so it's probably Gateway malware. I haven't felt like taking the time to track down where all this crap is hidden - you can't delete it in any obvious fashion - but it sure has given me the urge to pick the box off the desk and throw it across the room...
The movie is a 23-year trip back in the Wayback Machine. Man, things have certainly changed... we saw rotary dial phones, acoustic modems, ancient hooded mainframe terminals, and the other daily paraphernalia of years past. But it was still a decent movie.
Some researchers develop hardware - essentially a giant VCR - that lets them read sight and sound from one person's brain, store the data, and play it back to someone else. We'd call it VR today. The project leader is in the lab alone one night, has a heart attack, and puts on one of the recorder headsets just before she dies. Her partner (Chistopher Walken) fights Faceless Corporation and The Military for the tape, so he can see what it's like to die. That part of the plot only makes sense from the Berkeley-hippie-antimilitary point of view, but what the heck.
What made the movie for me were the props and sets. Usually when a producer needs some "laboratory" props, he just has the set people drag the standard bits out of a shed somewhere, as far as I know. The lab set in the movie looked pretty much like what you'd expect for a crew of electronics-oriented fanglers circa 1984; expensive high tech equipment strung together with duct tape and patch cords, wire-wrapped boards with tendrils leading off elsewhere, and Post-Its and adhesive labels all over everything.
I'd give it a 3 on the 1-to-5 scale.
The handlebars were over four feet long. That meant that sharp corners required passing the left grip to the right hand, then extending it at arm's length while leaning out of the seat. Minor road curves didn't require as much work, but still took a lot of bar movement.
It just idles along, "let the torque do the work." Unfortunately the cam was *way* too big, enough to hose idle and low speed, which is 99% of the operating range. Kenney had just got done putting a new engine in, and nobody else was willing to take it for a test ride. I thought hard about it myself; little details line the long bolts that held the front fender on had carved big troughs in the sides of the front tire, or the single master cylinder to the rear-only brakes, or the brake and gas pedals, of which "peculiar" is the best description. There were no controls on the handlebars, which was probably a good thing.
However, common sense was overruled and I took it for a spin, and made it back without anything actually falling off.
> Takes us back full circle to the idea of guaranteed > annual income to all, of barely enough to survive, then work for all > additional income.Mack Reynolds probably wrote thirty SF novels around that basic idea, from the '50s to the '70s. I haven't run the numbers in a few decades, but given the enormous bureaucracy running the welfare system nowadays, I suspect it would actually be cheaper to do it that way than to support the current system.
I figure it'll eventually come about in some form. The political power is just too much to resist. Several states manage their own Welfare programs with state-issued credit cards, to track every single purchase, as opposed to the old way of simply writing checks.
Eventually, those new HTDVs will probably be watching us back, just as Orwell predicted in "1984." A book which I re-read last year, and is *much* scarier now than it used to be.
As a popular TV show used to say in its voiceover when it came on, "We *have* the technology."
If you ever saw the old "Get Smart" TV series of the 1960s you might remember Max Smart's "shoe phone." That's 1990s technology... phones are much smaller than that now.
Like James Lileks once said, "progress is what happened when you weren't paying attention."
We have a group of criminals who band together to rob a casino during a convention of Elvis impersonators. All dressed Elvis-style, they make the hit, withdraw, fall out over dividing the money, and the leader shoots one, then the other two while they're burying the first one. The leader returns to the hotel to collect the loot, is involved in a car crash, and doesn't make it back until the next day. Meanwhile, one of the guys he shot was still wearing the flak vest he wore on the holdup, had played possum until the coast was clear, and had already made it back to the hotel and taken off with the money, as well as the pretty hotel manager. The rest of the movie is the two bad guys hunting each other, while the money and the girl get swapped back and forth between them.
It could have made it... but it started off with K00L VIDEO EFX! Weird morphs, computer animation, digital stutter... the compositor had some powerful software, and he used it ALL, at a rate that would likely gag even someone who grew up on MTV. I spent the first ten minutes mostly watching the wall. I guess the compositor got tired after a while, because most of the defex went away after a while, and I was able to resume looking at the screen.
I could lead you through a whole chain of too-stupid-to-suspend-disbelief blunders in the plot, but there's no real need for it. The material was there; it was strung together moronically.
I'm pretty sure digital cameras were used instead of 35mm, or else it was all digitized for editing. There have been a bunch of movies lately where focus and motion looked wrong. Focus is different on the digital stuff; I don't know if it's in the camera or if it's corrected by software, but the added depth of field makes a lot of it look cartoonish. A lot of stuff, the movements are weird; some of it is variable speed playback, some is what I call "digital stutter" where they speed up action by dropping frames. It gives an odd Nintendo effect to motion.
The red Cadillac that was the main prop... it always looked strange. Highlights were off, and it never showed any sign of dirt. I'd make a modest wager that the car wasn't red at all; I think they changed it to red during the image processing.
Finally, if you were making a movie set mostly in Nevada and Wyoming, about a stone killer and a multiple murderer, taking place on the open road and in tiny Western towns, with heavy Elvis influences, what kind of music would you use? Why, you'd use hey-nigga boppa-thumpa RAP music, of course! Slammed in randomly and inappropriately at about 200 decibels, making you lunge for the MUTE button on the remote. But just for variety, we'll interleave some half-ass trance music in there too.
"Hello? Are we reaching?" WTF?
I used to think I was just so far off the norm that I don't "get" modern filmmaking. But I've finally come to the conclusion that most of the people who make these films are total drooling idiots. They *are* all out of step...
http://www.sacdelta.com/semaphore.htm
Bandwidth is low, but it's simple... a semaphore font would be useful to keep people from reading over your shoulder while you were at work. After all, more people probably read Klingon than semaphore nowadays.
We start with the Fuhrer coming to Nuremberg for the 1934 Party rally. Though there's some footage of Hitler, it's mostly a travelogue of Nuremburg. Or not... maybe I'm not up on old German architecture, but it looked like a lot of it was the same four or five areas shot from different angles.
Next is a mini-documentary of the Hitler Youth and German Youth encampments near Nuremburg. Hundreds of tents lined up in rigid precision, and by color, too, best as I can tell from a black-and-white film. We see the Youth shaving, washing, doing laundry (or maybe it's cooking, it's hard to tell), roughhousing, and having a high old time. Except a lot of them look awfully old for "youth," in their twenties or so. Curiously one shot shows someone eating something that looks like a slice of pizza. They had pizza in Germany in 1934?
That's followed by the "march of the farmers" in antique German costumes, who are to present the harvest to the Fuhrer. By and large they don't seem all that enthusiastic about it. Maybe they didn't care for the dirndls and Big Hats O' Fruit.
Hitler with Robert Ley, and the German Labor Front, which was the Nazi equivalent of Roosevelt's CCC. The workers all have uniforms and stand at attention. We also get to see Baldur von Schirach, Rudolf Hess, a little boy chewing on his fingers, Josef Goebbels, and lots of older fellows with really bad haircuts.
Up until this point the only sound has been some crowd noise and some utterly banal brass. I've never been a fan of horns, and though it's hard to make them sound like Muzak, they managed. Urk.
Next we get some speeches. In German, with subtitles. I dunno, maybe it's just me, but German always sounds like someone trying to yack up a big wad of phlegm. And with the popping labials... you know, German sounds a whole lot like Klingon. Hm, er...
The Nazi Congress Hall, where Hess gives a memorial to President Hindenberg. We see what appears to be at least one Japanese among the foreign dignitaries. Hess is followed by Hitler, the gauleiter of Berlin, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Todt, Julius Streicher, Robert Ley, Hans Frank, Josef Goebbels, and others. It must have been hot, all of them worked up quite a sweat. We get mild doses of propaganda from each speaker. It was probably stirring and inspirational if you spoke German.
Back in high school in the 1970s, my ROTC class watched a propaganda film about our very own town. The film was made in the late 1960s. It was commissioned by the Air Force, to inform incoming airmen at the air base about their new town. That's when I learned what you could do by picking your camera angles, cropping shots, and carefully selecting bits of fact without actually lying. I kept thinking of that movie when I was watching this one... the Nazis didn't have to lie, though. National Socialism was rocking right along in 1936.
How large is the world now?
Simulacron-3 : ~/txt/work [ronin] ping pravda.ru PING pravda.ru (88.212.196.100) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from host-196-100.netflow.ru (88.212.196.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=238 time=172 ms 64 bytes from host-196-100.netflow.ru (88.212.196.100): icmp_seq=2 ttl=238 time=171 ms 64 bytes from host-196-100.netflow.ru (88.212.196.100): icmp_seq=3 ttl=238 time=175 ms --- pravda.ru ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2005ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 171.168/173.066/175.582/1.915 ms173.066 milliseconds, is the answer...
"All your packets are belong to .us!"
I tried the local parts stores, no luck, so I went to the Ford dealer. The counter guy took half an hour to come up with F4ZZ-6E086-A. They come in packs of two, but they're priced at $15.43 each. So that's $30.86, plus shipping, plus tax, probably close to $40.
Um, no. I went back home dug some 5/8-11 all-thread out, sawed off a couple of pieces, faced, chamfered, drilled, countersunk, and tapped, and half an hour later, I had a pair of threaded bushings.
Have lathe, will fangle.
The repair seemed simple enough. I pulled the driver's side head, where the water came out. #5 cylinder had been full of water. I found a couple of pinholes where I had welded a pressure pickup bung into the cylinder. I guess they were just below the surface, because they don't show up on the pictures I took when I first welded them. No problem; I ground to fresh metal in the area, drilled the pinholes, heated the area with a torch, and welded them up. A little cosmetic grinding, some cleanup, and pop it back on the car.
It blows solid steam out the back, now. I suspect I may have split a cylinder when the engine locked up trying to crank through a chamber full of water.
[sigh]
Someone gave me two Lexmark combination printer/fax/scanner machines a few months ago. They won't work with Linux. So I started looking around the Web for a cheap scanner on the SANE compatibility list.
Finally, it struck me - just put together a Windows machine and use it as a scanner accessory. Well, duh. I don't think "Windows", so it took a while.
I had an older Compaq P3/400 with 384Mb of RAM and 50Gb. It had been set up as a Linux mail and web server, but I ran out of round tuits somewhere around, uh, last year. So I installed a copy of Windows 2000, Service Pack 4, the Service Pack Roll-Up, the Lexmark drivers (which took almost as long as Windows to install!) and the free printer both prints and scans.
Now I need to configure some shares on the Windows box and Samba on the workstation - that's easy enough - and set up VNC. Then I can save the files directly to the Linux box and operate the scanner software in a spare window.
Scanning, tweaking, naming, and organizing the paper may take me several years. A 30-year collection of magazines got razored apart and the good articles kept, but this merely turned several 4x8 bookcases into 15 feet of boxes and binders. Well, at least I won't be able to claim "I don't have anything to do" for a while...
The boot-up time is *much* better than my old HP. A 1GB SD card holds 790 medium-resolution pictures and cost $17. Process-and-save time between shots is much better than the old camera. It also came with a USB cable and the camera appears as a USB storage device to the computer.
Downsides: no documentation at all, and the various controls on the camera are mystery icons. I can make it take a picture and I can cycle it through various icon collections, but I have no idea in fuck what the icons might mean. It came with a CD saying "requires Windows XP or Vista"; no indication of what might be on there, so I threw it in the trash with the packing material. There's also no viewfinder; the LCD comes on by default, and that is your viewfinder. The LCD on the old HP was a battery-sucking hog and you could turn it off it you wanted, but this one seems to draw much less power. Another annoying thing - when the camera boots, the LCD tells you to go to some web site. But fortunately the message goes away in a couple of seconds.
Like the old HP, this is a "shop camera" that will get handled with greasy hands and get banged up. It's fine for my purposes. If you have photographic aspirations you might want something fancier.
Special bulletin : There is still no news from New Zealand. If they ever have any, we'll be sure to let you know. -- Max HeadroomI just finished "A History of New Zealand," written by a Zed and published there in 1959; this was the 1988 edition. It was rough going in some spots, as it kept alluding to things that were probably common knowledge to Zeds in 1959. It started off with a history of the early explorers, and the Maoris, and early colonial days. The later stuff was almost entirely a history of the various political parties, with not much about what they actually *did*.
In a nutshell, the Crown chartered companies that promoted immigration to NZ. These companies promised immigrants big chunks of land they could own outright, instead of renting as in England. However, the Crown also granted the Maori citizenship and recognized their territory since they were now British subjects, so there was no free land to give to the immigrants. The NZ colonial government then went into collusion with the immigration companies to defraud the Maori out of their land. Variations on land grants and land reform take up about 50% of all NZ history. Meanwhile, NZ's economy was never all that steady, and the government spent most of its time either nearly bankrupt, bankrupt, or revaluing its currency. During several periods they floated the whole economy by taking out massive loans from institutions in other countries; apparently the USA was a major creditor.
England never wanted NZ much anyway, and rather than allow them representation in Parliament as part of England, simply cut them loose. According to this particular book, anyway.
The author clearly had a few axes to grind, but mostly the book bummed me out.
I plugged the printer into the 2000 box. 2000 doesn't have drivers for it... and though they were apparently a free download from HP's web site for years, the Apple OSX drivers are still available, but HP wants you to send them money for a CD with the Windows drivers on it. One CD for each version of Windows, too.
The driver file name was on the site, though, so I found a site in Czechoslovakia with the drivers and installed them. Then I "shared" the printer in Windows, configured it in YaST, and sent a test page. Bingo!
Well, yes, it's about the same level as drilling holes in my head to let the evil spirits out...
I put together the Windows box so I could run the Lexmark scanner, rather than buying a real scanner. That might not have been a good idea. My old UMAX SCSI scanner on an ancient P200 with Windows 98 was slow, or so I thought. The Lexmark 5270 on a P2-400 scans about the same speed... but every time I scan a page its menu thingie pops up and I have to:
click on "Magazine" click on "Display Advanced Scan Settings" click the "Color depth" spinbox, move the cursor down from "Color" to "Gray" click again to set the spinbox click the "Scan Resolution" spinbox, move the cursor from "150" to "300" click again to set the spinbox click to move the "Size" radio button from "Select area" to "auto-crop" click twice to move the slider to "scan more area" click OK click "Scan Now"HOLY F***ING SHIT!
There's nothing I can find in the program or docs about setting defaults. The old UMAX kept its damned settings...
I dug the old Adaptec 2940 card out and installed it and the latest UMAX drivers onto the machine. Nope, the latest thing they support is Windows 95, though I used to run them on a 98 box. I tried anyway, and 2000 can't deal with the old drivers.
There's an old P200 in the other room with 98 still on it, I think. I might dig it back out and bang my head against the ASPI driver install hassle again... but not tonight.
> > http://www.movie-page.com/movie_scripts.htm > > Heavy Metal - By Dan Goldberg & Len Blum. [In Progress.]Huh. This says "Final Draft", but it's not the movie as produced. It has the "Neverwhere" sequence, which never made it past the first storyboards (and having seen them, good riddance) and it's missing "Soft Landing", which is the Corvette/Space Shuttle sequence. Instead of "Soft Landing", there's an extension to "Grimaldi" (the house/scientist/little girl sequence right after "Soft Landing" in the final movie) where Grimaldi is futzing with the green globe in a lab.
"Soft Landing" is missing, "Grimaldi" is extended, and, oddly enough, the rest of the sequences are in the opposite order, starting with "Taarna" and finishing with "Harry Canyon." In the final movie, "Harry Canyon" starts us off in a dystopian but recognizeable future, while "Taarna", the longest sequence in the movie, is also the most memorable, and loops back to the girl in "Grimaldi." I think the as-produced sequence works fine; if "Taarna" had been first, everything else would have been anticlimactic.
That's all I noticed in a 10-second skim of the script, anyway...
Finally, in 1996 or so, it was released on DVD. I went to the video store and bought it, then I went on to buy a DVD player to watch it on. THAT is how much I liked the movie.
Every couple of years I'll turn the stereo on, slide the disc into the player, and watch it again. My 20-year-old collection of stereo equipment isn't a "home theater"; it's just old stuff connected by RCA jacks and a modest TV set. But the old stuff is four Carver magnetic amps driving two Carver Amazing speakers that stand five feet tall, plus the satellite speakers. That's over two thousand watts RMS, and the lights flicker when there's a lot of bass. And I just kick back and let the whole experience seep in, right down to the bone...
You could get crazy from the things that I can see. You can't hear them only talking at me. Living on the outside looking inside to be free.
The web-form-thing wanted my web site URL, if I had one. Okay. I type my bacomatic.org address in - bacomatic.org/~dw/index.htm. The form comes back in angry red, "ONLY A..Z, 0..9, /, -, _ ALLOWED."
It doesn't like the '~' tilde in the URL. Bozoids; half the home pages on the Web have a freaking tilde in them...
I used to see a lot of this sort of thing in database programming, often for things like addresses, where the programmer runs a check to cross the ZIP code to the street address to "verify" it. Even allowing for the fact that the USPS ZIP code database contains some errors (a friend of mine lived at one of those addresses, which made every letter or package to him a hassle), they usually fall flat for the US territories or (gasp!) Canada.
Input verification is one of those things that superficially looks like a good idea, but can bite you in the ass. Another common screwup is to require all address fields to be filled out, or to require a phone number. Some people don't have a telephone number, and some addresses can be odd, like "John Smith, General Delivery, 32091" When the software rejects the input, the operators usually wind up putting gibberish in, just to get the computer to accept the damned form and let them move along.
One (maybe apocryphal) programming story of that sort is about a large retail firm that had a system that allowed for shipments out, but didn't allow for returns. In the glass house, custom software days, when programming was a capital expense, such minor quirks were simply put up with, like Microsoft Windows is now. The software was extensible enough to allow for new warehouses, so some operator created a "Warehouse 13", and assigned the returns to W13 as new deliveries. W13 eventually became enormous enough to attract the attention of middle management, who wanted to know why they were ordering new stock when 13 was full to bursting. I never heard how it was supposed to have come out. In a perfect world, this would have led to correcting the software. In DaveWorld, they would have simply passed a memo around and kept on using 13.
Through my own experience at database programming, I've learned to leave things free-form as much as possible, and to prompt "are you sure?" for whatever might look really weird. Verification, yes... but to let the operator override and insert the record if they want, otherwise they'll just type any random trash in there until the record is accepted. "It is very difficult to make software foolproof, because fools are so ingenious." I save the login ID of whoever creates the record; if there's too much trash data, that's a management problem, not a programming problem.
The NWS will give you 5-day forecasts refined down to your individual town. Which would be convenient... if they had some relation to reality. I understand the nature of chaotic systems and how it's hard to predict things accurately, and that they're going to be off some percentage of the time, and that each forecast is spread over a geographic area somewhat larger than my house, so "rain" might be a couple of miles away instead of in my front yard, etc.
On the other hand, they're *consistently* off. They're seldom closer than 10 degrees on temperature, and rain and cloud predictions seem to be little better than random.
"Brought to you by the people embracing global warming..."
"Lloyd Bridges was Gene Roddenberry's first choice to play Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, but he turned it down due to having appeared in a poor science fiction movie called Rocketship X-M (1950)"
That would have put a serious twist into the shorts of Reality... I don't believe it unless I see some corroboration from a reliable source. Bridges would have been in his mid 50s then, and Trek's cast was heavily slanted toward the youth demographic. Compare how much younger the regulars were than the original cast of the pilot, sometime.
On the other hand, Lloyd Bridges actually *could* act, despite his limited repertoire. William Shatner always acted like he didn't quite know what he was doing in front of a camera.
With reference to the two-part episode "The Living Legend," the one where Bridges showed up in another battlestar called the Pegasus,
"Lloyd Bridges (Commander Cain) died on 10th March 1998, aged 85. It is reported that Glen Larson wanted Jack Palance to play Cain in a remake, and I think he'd be an excellent choice. I reckon Kirk Douglas would make a smashing Cain. Pick any surviving western star over 75 and you'd be well served. Sean Connery would also do at a pinch."
Probably true. On the other hand, Palance could have been a direct replacement for John Colicos; he would have enjoyed the role of Balthar. But he would probably have had to fight Colicos for it...
Almost anything with Jack Palance in it is worth watching, just to see Jack having fun. It's not often you see an actor who took such obvious pleasure in his work. His short bit in that hideous Batman remake was the only part of the movie worthy of note. And his part as the evil overlord Skeletor in "Masters of the Universe" was good, even though his face was hidden by a rubber mask. I saw that one, and thought, "That's Jack Palance." But his name didn't show up in the credits, so I backed it up and watched again... for some reason, he was credited under his real name instead of his Screen Actor's Guild name. His real name is some Eastern European monicker with no vowels.
First, the door panels - hard plastic. Which would have been fine, except there was no armrest, so I wound up with my elbow wedged up by the window. Damn, that plastic gets hard after a while. There was also the apparently-mandatory ledge just below knee height, swooping out of the door at the perfect height to cause agony. I have a small bruise below the kneecap, and a sore spot on mid-shin, where a second hard plastic "storage bucket" swooped out into my space.
With the usual "aero" styling and windshield layback, I wound up looking just below the sunvisor, which meant I had to duck to see stoplights. The rounded side window and windshield joined at a big triangular area at the top of the A-pillar, which was shaped like a giant inverted funnel, so I had to bob back and forth to see around the blind spot.
The seats were leather, and therefore hard, as seems to be the rule for leather seats. There was a "lumbar" thing, but it was positioned just under my shoulderblades instead of down where it would do some good. My back was hurting after fifteen minutes. There were big sporty side bolsters, apparently reinforced with steel. The seats might have been sporty for someone with an ass six inches narrower than mine. I was numb in spots when I rolled out of the car three hours later; the sporty seats made it impossible to shift positions.
There was a "center console", also of hard plastic. It had a hard plastic lid about six inches below my elbow. If I let my arm hang down, the corner pressed a nerve on my forearm and my hand would go to sleep.
The steering wheel has the usual modern style, with fat rungs that prevented me from using my normal 4-and-8 hand positions. The rim area above was too thick and had weird lumps that made it hard to hold on to.
The "aero" styling left the usual triangular entry space. Place butt on seat, lean all the way to the left, and duck around the A-pillar. Getting in wasn't as bad as some. The tall side bolsters made it hard to get out, though.
I brought some CDs to listen to. The radio has various EQ presets; the only thing that came out of the speakers was BUMP BUMP unless I used the "news" equalization, which neutered the bass, but at least the rest of the music was audible. I *like* lots of bass, but it sounded like they were getting it by clipping off all the higher frequency stuff instead of boosting the bass. The volume control reminded me of the old $30 "Sparkomatic" tape player I had in high school - there was about a 15-degree range between "too soft" and "too loud."
I don't know what engine the car had. It was turning about 2000 RPM at 70-ish. Power was nothing to brag about, but at least it didn't go through the psychotic shifting and convertor unlocking some of the GMs do whenever you touch the pedal.
I'm still sore after driving that thing. No wonder cops get gripey after a while...
The page has an image at the top and a block of four in the middle. The top image and the top two in the block show a lake and a dam. There is indeed a lake; it's called "Paradise Park" and has picnic tables and stuff. It's not as big as the pictures imply. The city stocks it with fish, which people catch and eat. I wouldn't. A few years back that lake was an EPA "disaster area" where Vertac (pesticides) and US Steel's plastics division dumped chemicals. The lake used to be white, with fluffy plastic foam floating on top. And people claimed to catch fish from it then, too... brr.
The bottom left picture shows a large building from a low angle. The building is actually much larger than the picture indicates. It looks like a hospital. It's two or three years old. However, it's a dormitory for retards. "Pathfinders" is Jacksonville's largest industry, as far as I know. They have buildings all over town.
The obelisk-thing at the right is the "Veterans of All Wars" memorial. We *used to* have a WWI doughboy and a cannon, which was a valid war monument. But I guess nobody cares about WWI any more, so we got the Nerd Spike.
The photo has been Photoshopped. The flag is on the right; we're looking south. There are no trees there; we'd see the edge of a Captain D's on the left, and mostly the parking lot for the Post Office, with "Jacksonville Towers" (old folks home) behind that. Indeed, we see some cars left from the Post Office lot...
The "index" page has some dead-end thumbnails on it. The rightmost is the scum lake again. The middle one is apparently an aerial view of City Hall from the east. City Hall used to be some offices in back of the police station. Every election the ballot would have a tax levy to build a new city hall, and it was voted down every time. Finally they built it anyway, claiming they used "other funds", which I never found the origin of. It's about ten times bigger than the one they had before, and they're already pouring slabs to expand it. I'm not quite sure why, the whole city government is probably a couple dozen people.
There are some links to "Telecommunications" (the phones still go crackly when it rains; GTE abandoned ship, some mom 'n pop telco took over, closed the offices, and has an answering machine in Dallas), "Utilities" (some of the highest in the nation), "Health Care" (a couple of doctors, and a shithole clinic; if you have an emergency, call an ambulance from Cabot or NLR and go to a real hospital), "Tax Information" (second-highest city taxes in the state), and "Top Employers" (Pathfinder, a plant that makes those whirlybird things you put on your roof, Wal-Mart, and Burger King).
It's a sorry excuse for a web site; whoever did it was probably too depressed to put much effort into spiffing it up.
There's a Circuit City on the route to work, so I stop there. Never been there before. Some interior design and marketing people have been *hard* at work inside. Just walking in, I'm struck be how carefully everything is arranged, plus the insufficient but glary lighting, which seems to be standard for so many places nowadays.
I find a middle-of-the-range Compaq. The "sales associate" takes the tag from the display and runs off. Then she comes back. They don't have any more. But she can let me have the display model if I want. I ask if they'll give me a discount. She runs off. Comes back. Nope, no discount for the one with no box or paperwork. Okay, I'll shop some more. Found an HP that looked suitable. Sales associate runs off with the tag, comes back, yes, they have them, but the "flat screen" monitor that comes with it isn't the 15" LCD hooked to the display, it's the 1980s-looking tube monitor a few machines over. But I can upgrade the to an LCD for $80... or I can step up to a more expensive computer that already comes with an LCD.
Welcome to DaveWorld.
I briefly considered leaving, to either send AB to shop, or to bring the laptop and set up a speadsheet. I finally picked a different HP and monitor that came to $819, with $200 in rebates - I hate that crap - making the eventual price $619.
Wow, computers are cheap. I paid more than that for a bare processor, more than once. That's a "4000+" GHz AMD, which means it's probably something like 2.4GHz, 2Gb of RAM, 300GB hard drive, DVD burner, and a 17" widescreen LCD display. You could buy an Acer with no monitor for $434.
So, that taken care of, I find a floppy drive, take all the 12V case fans in stock (three), and find they have 17" wide-screen monitors on sale for $149. Damn, can't pass that up. The perky girl runs off again... nope, none of them in stock either, but the computer says the store in Little Rock has some. So I wrote a check for $963 for all the bits plus tax (I declined a 2-year warranty extension for $280) and went to the "loading zone." Circuit City operates on a modified Soviet system - they don't sell major stuff from the "showroom", you have to go to the side and wait for them to dig some more out of the storeroom.
Now, off to the other store, on Markham in LR. I take the Markham exit, drive, drive, drive... I call a friend and ask him where the Circuit City in LR is. Oh, it's on the *other* side of LR, about as far as you can get across the width of the city. I figured turning around and getting back on the freeway would be a wash, so I got to see a bunch of Little Rock I hadn't seen in years.
Get to the other Circuit City, ask about the monitors. No, they don't know anything about the 17" widescreen on sale, do I know the SKU? Well, no, I didn't think of that, considering the one at the other store was in a prominent display. The guy looks in his sale paper, finds they have a 19" widescreen on sale for $149. Would I want one of those?
Well, sure.
I grab all the case fans they have (three), pay for them and the monitor, go off to the side, and wait. And wait. And wait. Finally a mangerial sort walks out carrying a somewhat abused box.
"We had an inventory error with the computer, and we don't have the monitor you bought."
SHIT.
"This is the one we had under that part number. The box is damaged, but if you have room for a 21.6" monitor you can have this one at the same price."
BONG!
"Do you have any more?"
"Sorry, this is the only one."
A 21.6" Samsung flatscreen for $149.
The polyester of Reality is severely malfuncted.
I thought seriously about keeping it and buying one of the 19s for work. I'd planned on a widescreen for when I went to triple monitors, to put the widescreen in between the two 18" monitors I use now. But I don't have a triple-head video board, and xorg is sort of snickety about multiple video cards in its newer versions, which is why I finally gave up and bought a dual-head ATI card.
So, what the hell, I took it back to work and set it up. Erin sits at the front desk and does both sales and billing; she was using two PCs and two monitors on the old network. With the new system, she was using one PC and one crummy 12" monitor, but she had windows open to three or four copies of the various programs. A few minutes later and she had a 21.6" desktop at 1680x1050, 16.7 million colors, and her customized KDE themes.
This time last week, she was running DOS 6.22 on a 1997 IBM PS/2...
> The book he used as a textbook is fascinating to read and I highly > recommend it: "The Ancient Engineers: Technology and Invention from > the Earliest Times to the Renaissance" by L. Sprague De Camp.Yep. I have that one. I ought to put it in the "read it again soon" stack.
The weird thing is that, other than shipbuilding and some minor metalsmithing, "technology" consisted mainly of digging holes, chipping rocks, or stacking rocks throughout most of history.
Then we get this sudden bloom of technology starting around 1600, centered primarily in England. New kinds of guns for the Royal Navy, new methods of making those guns, new processes to make the brass, iron, and steel needed to make the guns, new machinery to work with those metals, new mining techniques to get the ores, the development of the steam engine to pump water from the mines... we get this big snowball of interlocking technologies.
It was at least half an hour too long, and in typical Japanese fashion, it spent way too long blowing things up, but it was freaking amazing. It more or less followed the idea of things that *could* have been possible in 1866, with a few fictional things for the plotline. Character development was very weak, and the plot wasn't all that hot either, but...
Imagine... The old "Wild, Wild West" TV show, set in England, done in Japanese anime. More in the Jules Verne tradition than HG Wells. It's one of the few movies where the execution overcomes its inherent weakness. It could have been a *lot* better, but I liked it anyway.
Googling around, I guess I didn't have the right keywords or something. It turned out the tool I wanted was already on my computer - Kate, the KDE "Advanced Text Editor".
I'd blown Kate off when it first showed up, and kept on using the older KWrite editor for the times when vi didn't cut it. Kate comes up and demands to know about "Sessions" and stuff, with no explanation of what it wanted. The other day I dicked around with it... and though it was awkward to figure out from cold, you create a "session" of related files, and then when you bring Kate back up, it asks if you want to load the session - there's a pick list of sessions - create a new one, or just edit a single file.
Well, duh.
When you have a session group open, there's a list of the session's filenames to the left. You just cut some text from a file, click on the name of the file you want to paste to, and drop it in. Or click between several files looking for stuff.
Mongo like! I have one instance of Kate with some of my Linux notes files up, and another with the notes for the new book.
We don't have Thanksgiving over here, so I was thinking again in black helicopters and stuff like that ;)Thanksgiving is an annual American feast and holiday, in celebration of a group of religious deviants who were exiled from England to the colonies, and managed to nearly starve to death due to lack of knowledge of agriculture, eating their seed grain, and so forth. The indigenes took pity on them and helped feed them through the winter. In typical European gratitude, the new colonists repaid their benefactors by waging a war of extermination against them.
I'm not precisely sure *why* Thanksgiving is a national holiday. We get Robert E. Lee's birthday as a state holiday in Arkansas. Lee was a traitor who led a rebel army against his own government, and was defeated. It would make some sense if he'd actually *won*.
>>Indeed , look at the way the army camoflages things and do the >>exact oposite. >Look at the paint jobs on a lot of modern sportsbikes and the colours >of fashionable riding gear to see how successfully to be camouflaged >in an urban environment.You have the punkers who are into black or very dark colors. Then you have the cartoon bikes and riders with clown suits. The clowns are not particularly visible in an urban environment, where clown-colored advertising is competing for your attention.
Since I refuse to even look at billboards or identifiable advertising any more, I've had trouble picking out official road signage from the visual clutter. And now that everything from mail trucks to ad signs seems to have flashing strobes, and third-brake lights wink on and off everywhere, it's hard for me to pick out traffic lights from the light show.
I was sitting at a red light the other day, counting ads. I was up to 50-something, visible right from behind the steering wheel, before the light changed. It takes a small but finite amount of time to pick out traffic signs from ad signs; enough that I've missed turns or exits trying to find the right sign.
I'd turn the unwanted function off, then a few days later I'd see the damned LED blinking again. Both phones, otherwise functional, went into the trash. We had to go to more than one store to find a cordless phone that did *not* have an answering machine function. We might as well not have bothered; it won't reach forty feet to the shop, so it doesn't get answered unless someone is actually in the house.
One reason we changed cellular providers recently (Xcingular to Alltel) was the damned Xcingular account kept acquiring "voicemail." We had to keep negotiating their tedious customer-disservice people to get it turned off.
Now the new Alltel phones started doing it, randomly - sometimes they wouldn't even ring, just instantly dropping callers into voicemail. Sometimes they *would* ring. Yesterday I looked at the phone and it had six voicemail messages on it. Except I had no way to retreive them, even if I was willing to try.
I just got off the phone with the Alltel rep a few minutes ago. Supposedly, the function is turned off. Again. For how long, I don't know. I forgot to have him turn off "text messaging". I assume the unwanted voicemail function will be back soon enough, and I'll tell him then.
I don't talk to answering machines. I don't listen to answering machines. I'm not going to pay CenturyTel sixteen dollars a month for "Caller ID." Why is that such a major fucking big deal? The way the telcos act, you'd think I was demanding a telegraph instead of a telephone.
Perhaps the telcos are in bed with the telemarketers, and they want to fill your "voicemails" with spam.
It's called "Blue Coast Burrito." It's in a little strip mall (those aren't common at all here, unlike some places). You walk in and there's a long counter with a clear plastic shield, reminescent of a Subway sandwich shop. You pick your meat and condiments, and they build a football-sized burrito to your specification, moving along station to station until you reach the cash register.
Nothing unusual so far. Generic decor - get some tables and chairs from the local restaurant supply, hang some Blue Coast artwork from the Mothership (it's all Baja themed), lease a Coke dispenser from the local bottler, add a trash can, and you're in the restaurant business.
So what makes it different? I just happened to notice that everything comes prepackaged in 5-gallon plastic buckets. Precooked meat, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, etc. They dump the buckets into the warming or cooling compartments of the assembly bench, which is another generic restaurant-supply item, and use a microwave to warm anything that requires it. No cooking or non-assembly food handling; the only people who work there are the ones you see behind the counter.
I suspect places like Subway work much the same; I'd just never noticed it before. You could start a franchise by having a local company make up the big sign over the door, get a box with the official company wall art, and the rest is a matter of renting some common equipment and then unloading the food truck when it comes in. Total investment, probably as close to zero as you can get. Overhead is also minimal, since the only employees are the ones dealing with the customers. It makes the assembly-line tech like McDonalds' look positively ancient.
Thinking about it, I guess the only thing that makes it not-a-Subway is the Mexican theme; it's the same type of operation. And probably the reason there are half a dozen Subway-style sandwich shops in the area nowadays. But I was still impressed with the business-in-a-box idea.
So, a while ago I'm checking out the Museum of Bad Album Covers at http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/hallofsh17.htm
There's a picture of an album called "Lie", supposedly by Charles Manson. Hmm. Hit a search engine, and
http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/cabaret/4359/
Apparently Charlie and the Family have done *several* albums, including some after he went to prison.
I'd thought I was immune to musical amazement after hearing William Shatner slaughter "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," but I guess I'm not as jaded as I thought I was.