31 December 2004

Emily Browning > Emma Watson

My opinion of the operational quality of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows needs no repetition. But really? Not understanding the <![CDATA[ ]]> element?! The comment delimiter in the current default resource at the wamaltc.org domain, which is currently served to all requests for files at the former location because the nameservers have changed, is now the HTML version. I’m not saying that anyone should view-source. (I wonder if only Gecko-based browsers honor a CDATA element outside of the HEAD, as Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Macintosh and Safari display the element’s contents, too.)

There will be a Greenberg’s Train, Toy & Hobby Show at the The Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Maryland on February 26-27, 2005. Will there be a LEGO® train display at that show? Who knows? The programming at the PHP-driven website of an international organization of LEGO® train clubs seems to have taken a nosedive, losing its stylesheet and navigational options, so there’s no way to navigate to the version of WamaLTC found there which might be expected to plan a display.

The weblog I established at the WAMALUG domain is… broken. It never attracted much interest, and only two people besides myself even signed up for posting privileges. (Make that also broken… I wonder if the common host is having problems with PHP or MySQL.) Seems to me that the WAMALUG Members page should be getting less populated soon enough, but I wouldn’t hold my breath until it does. After all, Margaret Keys plans to give a presentation on the chronological variation in LEGO® elements at the January meeting, but you would look in vain for any notice of that on the WAMALUG site.

With the installation of an ATi 5YR VGA-to-Mac adapter, the lesser-known cousin of the Mac-to-VGA adapter, I am able to play DVDs on the first floor without the purchase of another monitor. The Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display only offers 800×600 at 60 Hz when supplied with video converted in this way from the VGA connector on the recently installed video card, but it’ll do for now. (The ATi adapter is actually a product of Wieson Technologies Co., Ltd., a connector and cable manufacturer headquartered in Taiwan.)

29 December 2004

I abandoned Netscape for Mozilla over 2 years ago, but some people can’t shake the habit of downloading the browser with the venerable brand name. But accepting the Recommended installation may not be the smartest move… unless you want a weather report in your Windows system tray.

The winner of the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation gets the hi-res treatment I usually associate with starlets.

27 December 2004

This is not a sales call or a solicitation. Whatever you say, Mr. 312-470-2620.

26 December 2004

Photographs by Abe Friedman on Brickshelf Direct link to thumbnail representing the December meeting. Notwithstanding what you might read at the WAMALUG web site itself or elsewhere, the next meeting is January 15, 2005.

The Seventh Army’s 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion mission in the postwar period was to screen (interrogate) refugees entering the US Zone.

The target date for the end of the transition from analog to digital television signals is December 31, 2006. Sites of the local federal government (including the FCC) are among the worst offenders for not behaving without the www. prefix. Even the Federal Highway Administration site doesn’t work without it. I wonder who I could complain to about that…

The change of computers in use on the premises means that I now meet the system requirements for using MSN Messenger for Mac.

24 December 2004

To be fair, the procedure for implementing the system recovery disc from Quantex Microsystems includes a Do you want to continue? prompt, but even supplied with the invoice, I was unable to make the disc work. Also, that Quantum ST Fireball hard drive? It took over an hour to format its 4110.71 megabytes, so it’s found a new home—in my wastebasket.

CNN wasn’t too impressed with the IBM Aptiva Series 2137 Model E84 but that didn’t stop the creation of a comprehensive support site for this top-of-the-line (at the time) offering in consumer desktops. I’m less than impressed by the fact that to access the banks of memory it is necessary to remove the power supply. It’s also disappointing that there are only two banks, which limits the total memory to 256 megabytes.

I’m having trouble reaching Radio Televizije Srbija no matter which ISP I use—or browser.

23 December 2004

The holiday message for 2004 went out today to addressees foreign and domestic. There was no incoming mail for me today.

The Quantum ST Fireball hard drive which began life in the Beige G3 Desktop just causes trouble wherever it goes… is it slow.

Did you know that if you have two computers running Windows 98 Second Edition, with a network interface card in each and a crossover cable between them, you can share a dial-up connection to the Internet?

22 December 2004

I have been neglecting the computers on the premises to tend to a visiting system. It’s a beige box from Quantex, which seems to have gone out of business a few years ago. One particularly nasty feature of the system recovery disc from that company is that it’s keyed to an individual serial number found on the invoice. Start a system recovery without that number and it’s already erased the entire hard drive including any partitions. With nothing to accomplish forensically once someone had already tried the system recovery route, I cleaned and vacuumed the case, replaced the two 32 MB sticks of RAM with a 128 MB module, inserted a NIC, established a single partition on the 20 GB hard drive, installed the operating system the owner supplied, equipped the Program files folder with Mozilla Suite 1.7.5, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, and various plug-ins and free media viewers, and, to cap it off, installed two spiffy, knurled aluminum thumbscrews to close the case properly. There were nineteen critical updates and service packs awaiting this fresh install of the operating system at Windows Update.

Aye, the haggis is in the fire fer sure. The holder of the wamaltc.org domain, which was last renewed in June when it was about to lapse, is planning to use that beachhead to start a new club. What sort of good and valuable consideration did people suppose would be effective to give up the domain once the membership of the holder in that other club was terminated? Maybe if you view the source and search for id="m05"… I have burned a CD of how the wamalug.org domain appeared at the beginning of the month, so I have no ego remaining in the appearance of the site from now on and my successors should feel free to change whatever suits them. I am shocked (shocked, I say!) to learn that lax stewardship of club assets seems to have left me in sole possession of the login and password to the domain! Mwahahahahaha!

16 December 2004

Did I miss anything? Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope Something tells me it’s going to get more difficult to find out what happened at a meeting.

I see that Beyond the Book has obtained a logo… but don’t see how it would make a good favicon.

13 December 2004

Too bad for the people clicking through on search results for HVC-2200 pointing to a page which used to be part of this web site back when it was hosted on my dial-up ISP’s webspace allotment. I tossed the Sony color video camera onto the pile in my municipality’s electronics recycling container today, along with a Sony Betamax SL-2700 video cassette recorder. I noticed that someone had tossed a Beige G3 Desktop! Obviously not knowing its capacity for accommodating upgrades! The Quadra 610 hadn’t moved from where I left it last week.

12 December 2004

In case any skeptic thought I might not have reestablished a working 10.2.8 partition. Creating an image of the desktop is much easier now that I know that the Preview application can open the PDF files created by Command-Shift-3 (use Command-Shift-4 to designate a specific screen area) and export those files to another graphic format like GIF or JPEG or PNG. Also, the sites for the music of young women like Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan work a lot better once the Macromedia Flash Player and Shockwave Player are installed. You bet, but you won’t figure it out from any error messages provided by the sites—there are no error messages. Stare as long as you want, I suspect there are no freckles to be found. Meanwhile the world is headed for ruin with a mandate-wielding imperator at the helm (via MetaFilter).

That is, there are no error messages about a missing or outdated plugin on the Macintosh. In SoftWindows98 an unupdated Mozilla install requested the Flash 7 player. Let’s not forget that a previous, Democratic administration attacked Serbia with such eagerness that one might be forgiven for thinking that the goal was to build the largest base constructed since Vietnam where peacekeeping is a 24×7 mission.

11 December 2004

I can resist the compact disc, but pass up a souvenir postcard? Apparently not. Scanning on the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6100C performed in 9.2.2 with DeskScan II 2.4, as the TWAIN Acquire option isn’t active in the Corel Photo-Paint 11 menu in system 10.

It pains me to report that the Teleport Gold™ II for Macintosh® Performa™ Model PL510P on the premises does not work (it does not detect, nor pass along, a dial tone). As a modem that relied on the Macintosh serial port for power, it would have eliminated yet another power supply beyond the two made irrelevant by the FireWire ZIP 750 drive and the internal CD burner associated with the Power Macintosh Desktop.

It’s somewhat startling to see the Macintosh boot on my Compaq monitor, but connecting a VGA monitor was made necessary by the installation of an ATi RADEON® 9200 Mac Edition (PCI bus version) video card and the desire to play DVDs in the new DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive replacing the CD-RW drive. The Pacifist program made simple installation of the DVD Player application possible. I haven’t succeeded in persuading the System 9 version, Apple DVD Player, to recognize the existence of any DVD hardware (even though Apple System Profiler properly reports the presence of a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive). The local thrift store has a row of VGA monitors of approximately the same vintage as the one from Compaq, none of them for more than $20. With the Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display restored to the built-in video port connection and taking over the menubar and mounted volumes, the Compaq monitor gets the Dock and any program windows I care to drag over to it… or the two monitors can be mirrored. A third monitor… now, there’s an idea.

07 December 2004

On this day of remembrance, it would be wrong to buy a compact disc from a troubled teen.

Woo-hoo! Thanks to United Parcel Service and Other World Computing the video RAM for the Power Mac Desktop arrived a day early. Much rearrangement of the Metro shelving ensued, and now the Desktop is ensconced as the primary computer, running at 1024×768 in millions of colors, playing a Susanna Hoffs CD from 1991 in iTunes.

The Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL with Transparent Media Adapter TMA 1600 looks like it’s just the ticket to consolidate flatbed scanning and transparency scanning in one machine, on the Macintosh with any one of three possible connections, while also affording the ability to scan laserdisc jackets.

06 December 2004

While the Office Depot recycling program I took advantage of last summer may have ended (an Associated Press article in today’s Northern Virginia Journal states that the program overwhelmed some stores) my locality offers weekly acceptance of electronics for recycling (from city residents). Therefore, the Quadra 610 is no more. While I identified it as a C.P.U. for purposes of registering my drop-off, I retained the actual 68040 chip. I’m sure that the floppy drive, the 2× CD-ROM drive, and the 160MB SCSI hard disk can serve as sources of fine, tested pieces of equipment for future sales of software licenses. Or not.

Just say no to cat-blogging.

05 December 2004

Not to worry. Had to keep repeating that this weekend. Like when the startup screen reported HFS partitionno bootable Can't open disk label package can't OPEN and so forth. Or when the SCSI symbol appeared instead of a startup screen on the PowerBook. Or when the Installer lost video in the last minute. Or when the subsequent install destroyed my account and I couldn’t login. Or when the Finder mounted the same volume from the Microtech SCSI card reader on the desktop seven times… and refused to eject them. Or when starting to verify the boot disk from the Disk Utility on Install Disk 1 led to partitionno bootable again. Or when Apple System Profiler no longer recognized that a CD-RW drive was attached. Or when the DiMAGE Viewer Installer ran without asking for my passphrase… and thus was rendered utterly incapable of moving files to Extensions (although based on page 13 of the manual for the domestic marketplace, excerpted here in a scan of a printout of the PDF found online, the actual destination folder is /Library/CFMSupport). Encouraged by the book Learning Unix for Mac OS X which I picked up in its second edition for the same price as a pile of clearanced first editions, I tried as sudo the command /developer/tools/cpmac filename /library/cfmsupport and this worked to copy individual files, but the program cannot initialize any of these files (I tried changing groups and permissions without result) and always quits.

The Performa has served for nearly 3 years now and if it is to be replaced this serves as a good time to re-evaluate the installed suite of software. Setting up the new Desktop machine (over and over and over it seems like…) I established a dial-up Internet connection in OS X as a nostalgic move, but installing old browsers like Netscape Navigator 3.04 and Netscape Communicator 4.8 and 4.x versions of Internet Explorer (either in the 9.2.2 partition or in Classic) seems much less useful. When I still had the Quadra 610 assembled and operational, I ascertained that Netscape Navigator 3.04 was especially vulnerable to JavaScript errors (because of its old interpreter), while Netscape Communicator 4.04 was unstable and quit at the slightest provocation. Internet Explorer 4.01 downloaded rather than displayed XHTML files. Even if Netscape Communicator 4.8 is stable, is it time to abandon its users? My answer will most likely be yes. SillyDog offers a comprehensive archive of Netscape browsers.

Even in System 9.2.2 (and 10.2.8, this post edited in both operating systems), I can’t use BBEdit past version 7.0.3 because the syntax checker doesn’t recognize Unicode characters.

What kind of Serbian keyboards for Jaguar don’t include the ж? Fortunately, I retained files I wrote in BBEdit some time ago (the date of the first such file is November 17, 2002) to generate Unicode keyboards for Mac OS and my Keyboard Input Menu now includes two new Unicode keyboards. Apple Developer Connection Technical Note TN2056 Installable Keyboard Layouts gave me the idea that the uncompressed contents of the SerbiankbdsforJaguar.sit file would prove useful for one feature: a simple renaming of the .icns files gives me the flags to appear in the drop-down menu.

03 December 2004

That didn’t take long… from satisfaction to despair required only one mistake. Let this be a lesson to owners of Beige Desktop machines: before attaching devices to the external SCSI port, attach a ribbon cable and a terminator to the motherboard connector! (The entry for a passive terminator includes an image.) The instructions for the PCI controller card mention the need for termination of the SCSI chain upon its installation, but in the context of removing an original internal SCSI hard disk drive. The Beige G3 machines (as they were known for their original processor) both Desktop and MiniTower were the first delivered by Apple with IDE hard disk drives, so disconnecting an internal SCSI hard disk drive just won’t occur in most cases (as it didn’t in mine). Here’s the upshot: I have a file in the System 9 partition ( Language Kit Preferences as it happens) which reports a file size of 23178.43 GB. Considering that the entire drive is 250 GB, that’s a remarkable achievement. The file cannot be emptied from the Trash. Disk First Aid in system 9, Disk Utility in system 10, Norton Disk Doctor, and Tech Tool Pro all stumble upon an unrecoverable error when examining the partition. The partition with 10.2.8 booted normally, and subsequent to the ministrations of the various disk tools, the system 9 partition stumbled through the startup process to completion with the one file occupying the Trash. Still, I purchased another drive, partitioned it identically, copied over the files in the system 10 and non-system partitions (about 5,000 files in the latter partition, and over 70,000 in the former), installed 9.2.2 on the second partition, and currently am reinitializing the misbehaving drive with all options (low level format, zero all blocks) effective. I have confirmed that the SCSI Microtech memory card reader will mount (using Software Architects DOS Mounter 3.0.5) and that the SCSI Hewlett-Packard 6100C ScanJet will scan in the new system 9 partition. Maybe I can place the troubled drive in a FireWire/USB enclosure… and aren’t I lucky that the Performa remains my working computer through this adventure.

01 December 2004

Yes, I have been preoccupied lately. It was an epic struggle to get 10.2.8 installed on the gift computer. That was after the purchase of a PCI controller card and new hard drive (which was partitioned and re-partitioned to placate the picky Installer) and repeated installation of system 9.2.2 in the second partition. Fiddling with the jumper settings on the CD-ROM drive seems to have been less important than having only a single bank of memory occupied, and dragging around the Installer window periodically, during installation. That, and reaching 10.2.8 through the 10.2.5 combo update (the oldest available at Apple Support Downloads) and the 10.2.6 update. The 10.2.8 combo update collapsed (complete with loss of video) with 5 minutes left in the installation which had already taken over an hour. Next time, buy the faster CD drive before installation rather than after… :-) But isn’t it pretty? Mozilla Seamonkey Navigator 1.7.3 has the Pinstripe theme installed (follow the link found in the May 20, 2004 entry in the sidebar to the beta version). It was just my luck, too, that the overpriced processor upgrade had been sitting on the shelf so long that the CD that came with it did not install Startup Disk X.

A certain photographer posted his photographs too late for inclusion on the wamalug.org site while I was still a dues-paying member. Here are a few links: Abe took pictures. …with Christina, Abe, Margaret, Judy, Mike, Todd, Steve DeCraemer, and guests from ParLUGment Jason Allemann and Paul Langille. Abe has pictures on Brickshelf and pictures at Scrope. Photographs by Abe Friedman on Brickshelf Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope

25 November 2004

I am so happy that the politics of my municipality have prevented the construction of another connector between Eisenhower Avenue and Duke Street. A water main broke Tuesday morning and closed Van Dorn Street between Edsall Road and Eisenhower Avenue. This leaves… uh, Telegraph Road (3 miles to the east) and I-395 (normally jammed with commuters headed south). Happy Thanksgiving Day, everyone!

23 November 2004

I’m really out of the loop by now, and I have to find out in an Associated Press article in the local free tabloid that a certain blonde actress with less-than-challenging choices of roles joined Mattel to promote the Fashion Fever line of Barbie Dolls two months ago.

22 November 2004

Sometimes it feels like more than one person has drunk the stuff, you know?

People are watching. The forum at De Bouwsteen noticed my upload of a photograph of the box for the LEGO® set City 7239 Fire Truck which I took at the November meeting of WAMALUG.

I wonder who this Chris is who joined Meetup.com some 4½ months after I added a link to the site from wamalug.org and who on the very day of the November thirteenth meeting specified a dinner meeting next Wednesday (the twenty-fourth). Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it’s a fact that by Monday the fifteenth a dinner was scheduled for the seventeenth (last week, that is; there was a dinner on that day but there’s still no report on who attended). It would be far too conspiratorial to think that what Chris is looking for at this dinner meeting is new members who don’t know any of the other current members, who won’t have heard of this dinner. Chris also hasn’t joined the no-www bandwagon.

My photographs from the display WAMALUG put on this past weekend were moderated overnight.

21 November 2004

Once again the Performa came through. The gift computer with the overpriced processor upgrade, even with its hard drive initialized and with System 9.2.2 installed on the basis of starting with a 9.2.1 disc from AppleRescue, having made all too plain that the requirement of Virtual PC for Mac for a native G3 or G4 was meant seriously, continued to disappoint by refusing to copy Windows XP Service Pack 1a and Windows XP Service Pack 2 to my network attached storage. Downloading the second patch of 272 megabytes to my Windows computer proved problematic until I cleared space of twice the file’s size, but even so since the file size was larger than what a ZIP 250 disk could hold, and there are no FireWire ports on the 1998-era notebook to connect a ZIP 750 drive, and the network attached storage declines to be mapped, and my archiving (.zip) utility refused to work on the file, and my online account is not that large… there was no way to remove the file from the notebook’s drive. Finally I removed some files remaining from my failed efforts to install networked printers inside SoftWindows and started a download to the external drive. Both patches were downloaded from pages for IT professionals, and with each attempted download the transfer speed from Microsoft slowed. The download completed overnight apparently successfully, and a burn to CD-R of both service packs and the Windows XP Serbian (Cyrillic) Interface Pack and the Windows XP Serbian (Latin) Interface Pack (no longer available from the page at the national office I wrote about last year) was added to the box of Connectix Virtual PC 6 for Mac (the connectix.com domain no longer responds, either, now that the program was bought by Microsoft) that happened to arrive on the premises in the meantime. There’s no real barrier to installing the program elsewhere now, for no matter how long I hang onto the purchase, it’s never going to run on a G5.

16 November 2004

The amber turn signals were the first clue… it is now my opinion that the 8-wide HMMWV built of LEGO® elements which was seen at BrickFest in August is, in fact, one of the gray slopeback models seen in the LOWLUG display in Leiden earlier this month. Studying the list of BrickFest attendees (still available 3 months after the convention was over) and of those from the Netherlands discounting Casper van Nimwegen because his MOCpages account is mostly devoted to imperial Rome my suspect is Jan-Albert Van Ree. What couldn’t be seen in the photograph by Eric Sophie or the photograph by Abe Friedman was that this table held train models built by Van Ree and was even identified as a LOWLUG display: he photographed the table once, twice, three times over the course of the weekend. It’s not like there’s more than one degree of separation, either, in view of his photograph of Kevin Loch contemplating a computer or his photograph from 1000steineland this year of the then-Chairman of WAMALUG or an earlier photograph from when she was just director of public relations. I can just imagine Jan-Albert’s disappointment upon arriving in America and learning that I would not be in attendance at that premier gathering of AFOLs.

15 November 2004

Why would Matthew Mullenweg feel a sudden need to install Windows Media Player on a Macintosh? I wonder…

14 November 2004

I strongly deny that I repeatedly prowl the recent folders at Brickshelf looking for instances of my 8-wide HMMWV. As it happens, the LEGO® User Group of the Lowlands (LOWLUG) this past weekend had a 9 by 4 meter display at RAIL 2004 which seems to be an international model railroad convention held this year in the Groenoordhallen in Leiden, and the first image in the gallery of Brickshelf user oppienokki is unmistakable. Like the example that was seen at BrickFest, these Netherlanders have built their HMMWVs (yes, more than one is on the layout) with amber turn signals. I wonder if military forces in Europe equip their trucks in that manner? Those Lowluggers also built a four-door pickup version in dark gray and more than one of the light gray slopeback models. Should my personal constructions find a spot on the WAMALUG display at the Greenberg’s Train, Toy & Hobby Show at the Dulles EXPO & Conference Center in Chantilly, Virginia next weekend, it will be hard to convince others of their origin. (So far, I haven’t found one built in UN white, though.)

13 November 2004

I built Bram Lambrecht’s model of the AM General HMMWV for my private personal use in contemplating its proportions about which I had previously speculated and displayed it at the WAMALUG meeting today (I have blocked out the background in the photograph for display on this page). That the model is listed among double-wide minifig scale vehicles becomes a curiosity given that the tires are taller than a minifig! Considering its exposed drivetrain and the height of the floorpan set above the axles, in my feebly researched opinion, it’s the monster-truck version of a HUMVEE compared to a minifig (conveniently posed for comparison’s sake). What with the computer running MLCad and the LEGO® elements being on separate floors, I was sore by the end of the building session. The instructions themselves are typical of the sort of file written by the big lights in the AFOL world… the less said about them (the kind of instructions that they write, that is), the better. A pleasant building experience, of the type generally offered by the company’s instructions, it was not. For your sand-table training needs an 8-wide HMMWV which nevertheless still seats four minifigs is, I might suggest, your better choice.

12 November 2004

It’s the sort of rainy, windy day that leads a cat, which has shown every sign of wanting to leave a house, when it gets a chance to see outside through the storm door, to turn around and scurry back.

Living in another country does not remove the requirement for male citizens of the United States of America to register with the Selective Service System upon reaching the age of 18. Just a note to potential future veterans.

11 November 2004

With a specific date in hand, it is a simple matter to visit the library and, in a neglected corner on the second floor of the central facility, pull out the rolls for that week of the two local daily newspapers in stock. The front-page articles in each newspaper confirm that the discovery of the crime occured on the Saturday morning.

09 November 2004

The location at Mount Vernon Plaza might be closed, but Roy Rogers Restaurants is the brand that will not die. I can’t prove that this example just east of Baileys Crossroads in Virginia of the once-numerous chain restaurant, seen as it was in 1997 before the turnover of the corner lot to McDonald’s, was the very first one that opened in 1968, but the drive-up carport section in back is suggestive. Back when I was eating out more often, I liked Roy Rogers for its roast beef sandwiches and Fixin’s Bar and the variety of convenient locations around the area. But the purchase of this chain of quick-service restaurants by Hardee’s (for the locations’ real estate) in 1990 was so ill-considered that in the reconversion of those locations back to Roy Rogers just two years later, Hardee’s locations in the area became Roy Rogers outlets as well. Proving that brand is more important than location, I’ve not been to any of the restaurants that replaced Roy Rogers at its locations.

The name of the restaurant is also associated in my mind with the word massacre because of the largest mass killing in Fairfax [County] history. Thanks to this retrospective of the career of Fairfax County prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. from last year, I can now date the weekend morning I was delivering the Washington Star in Orleans Village as emergency vehicles responded to the discovery a block away: March 6, 1976. (Or would it have been Sunday the seventh?) The restaurant remained in operation as a Roy Rogers for another two decades, and the location is now a KFC.

The Richmond Highway Express features specially branded buses bearing a purple and yellow REX lion logo, special bus stop signs, new shelters, improved schedule information at stops and signal priority measures. So even if the eleven stops along US-1 don’t give you the impression of a limited stops operation, the signal priority measures suggests that express may yet be a valid description of the renamed route 9A. No comment on the misfit between <title> and content on the linked page.

Something called Mozilla Firefox reached version 1.0 today.

Who would have guessed what it would take to induce me to download and install Windows Media Player 7.1 for Macintosh? Amy Poehler reminds us in the Only the Strong Survive featurette on the Mean Girls DVD of the lesson her character delivers during the course of the film: don’t get [breast implant surgery which is] so bad you can’t feel anything. Like your dress falling off…

07 November 2004

My cousin’s daughter has left the hospital and returned home.

04 November 2004

This photograph sure makes one want to ride the local subway again, doesn’t it? The operator of the train with passengers aboard (the train without passengers is the one that left its trucks behind and popped its body up and over in the collision) is reported to have said Everybody off this train as fast as possible—run if you have to! No word yet as to whether the training of a Metro Citizen Corps foresaw an emergency situation of quite this nature, or whether the program would have prepared its participants to respond quickly.

Local Democrats continue to assess their lot in life given the results of Tuesday’s voting (another map scanned from a newspaper at MetaFilter folds in population density) but I cannot assist anybody with the planned drinking. (I have no idea which is the closest ABC store, for example.) The Virginia State Board of Elections reports only two districts as favoring that party’s candidate. My locality used the Hart InterCivic eSlate™ Direct Record Electronic system.

I was channel-surfing Saturday and saw that the twins were on C-SPAN and alighted for a minute. The pronounced resemblance on the part of the blonde to the father, and her repeated smirking while giving the speech, was cringe-worthy, and I moved on to Brock Peters in To Kill a Mockingbird elsewhere in the channel lineup. Maybe the brunette could yet redeem this family.

02 November 2004

I wonder what I was up to today…

The WordPerfect for DOS Updated site now has a comprehensive page for the Macintosh version.

01 November 2004

The DCist reports that a local transit website has redesigned and the result at wmata.com seems to have taken its color palette from… somewhere. :-) But their description of the new look doesn’t even try to justify the low contrast gray text in use. There is now a Trip Planner feature (the site’s internal link to the feature betrays a ColdFusion installation) but as long as the Ride Guide still works, those of you who put together info for the web site of WAMALUG can leave the links to that predecessor of the feature as they are… Why would anyone use maj.com for their free image hosting once they had seen the features available at flickr.com? Plus there’s a favicon at the site even though it’s still in Beta … See, there was this other magazine that had a cover gallery, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, but that gallery is gone… :-( Three years after opening, the AMC Hoffman Center 22 has installed Descriptive Video Service and Rear Window Captioning. Currently, The Grudge is offered in the theater with these features…

31 October 2004

The tank in the Focus is down to fumes and I am not driving this weekend, which may have contributed to my less than charitable reaction at the movies yesterday… My municipality is behind the times in not choosing for its new backlit street signs the font that will sweep the nation (via Kottke and Typographica)… An atlas of New York City in aerial photographs… Another magazine celebrates its history by offering a gallery of covers but there must be a reason this issue never spoke to me…

28 October 2004

Now that’s more like it! Camino gets some branding. What is it with the non-standard sizes for badges and banners from the Mozilla Foundation, anyway? You don’t suppose they are trying to avoid users who have blocked ordinary advertising banner sizes?

Are mature Serbs more sensitive to artificially colored hair because they see so much of it on their state television? (Just a thought. I don’t know for a fact that any on-air personality anywhere uses a hair color.) Nataša Miljković reports today on the pressing political problem of drinking in the republic. Radio Television Serbia supplies some of its programming as downloadable or streaming files in the Real format on its Programs you have missed page.

If one were, accidentally, to visit the Apple Store online and outfit a Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with 4 GB of RAM, two 250 GB hard drives, a 30″ flat screen display and corresponding video card, a Bluetooth module and wireless keyboard and mouse, and an AppleCare plan… it pretty much would cost as much as a used car.

26 October 2004

I’m losing patience with some of the older Macintosh models on the premises. The PowerBook was able to dial a local number for my ISP when I was out of state recently, but just couldn’t stay connected long enough even to check my e-mail. As for the gift Desktop G3, after paying way too much for a 500MHz G4 processor upgrade card at a retail store (especially now that a 1 GHz model is available) I have decided that the 4 GB hard drive is too flaky to install any system higher than 9.0 and have it boot reliably. I struggled with this system (succeeding in adding a FireWire/USB card and connecting ZIP 250 and ZIP 750 drives) so intently, and was so disenchanted by the lame Weekend Update from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, that I missed the alleged lip-synching incident which spawned a developing scandal among the pop-culturally obsessed even though the television was on and tuned to NBC at the time. An external SCSI hard drive works fine, but running 9.0.4 and with only 160 megabytes, it cannot support an installation of Virtual PC, and the particular ROM revision makes installation of system 10 problematic so the utility of this computer is vanishingly small. The latest disappointment is a Buffalo LinkStation 160 GB network attached storage device which appeared as a mapped network drive in Windows Explorer all of one time so far. What interested me in the product was the promise on the box that it supported Windows 95 and Mac OS 8.6 when other NAS devices insisted on 98SE and X. The documentation is utterly silent on how to mount the network drive to the desktop in the Macintosh system. Here’s how I did it in 9.1: from the Chooser, I clicked on AppleShare, clicked on Server IP Address… , specified the IP I had assigned to the drive manually (as it eagerly took the 192.168.1.100 position when allowed to use DHCP, but I like to have my primary printer at that location), connected as Guest, and highlighted the shares. I deny that I am flipping through Macintosh catalogs on a regular basis.

21 October 2004

When I ordered earlier this year the last elements LEGO® made in the old colors it had already been a year since my last routine visit to the company’s outlet in the Potomac Mills Mall and it served as a handy time to take a break from more purchases. If the action passed along in this message at LUGNET proves true, my attention to the brand will follow the pattern I took with Lionel. I’m not ready to give up electricity, however.

My evangelism for Mozilla is not having lasting results. Overseas, the very mention of Mozilla, two years after I started writing about it, is met with expressions of ignorance from ordinary computer users—even as they chatter for hours decrying their suffering under the onslaught of worms and other cyber ills. Maybe the publicity from Mozilla Europe so far has been inadequate? More startling is the reaction of an in-home computer repair service: installation of Mozilla will require study to see if it meets the users’ requirements but might be too complicated . Please! It’s not like it requires a class to figure out how to use a browser! Closer to home, the obliquely referred-to married pair allowed a change of ISP and the launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer upon activation of their new Dial-Up Networking shortcut to banish any memory of Mozilla’s pop-up blocking and cookie management tool. There’s no telling how long their new install of Mozilla Suite 1.7.3 will continue to be used but at least now I’m not the only person in their life reminding them of the need for online safety.

20 October 2004

I generally allow e-mail from Allume (formerly known as Aladdin Systems) to remain in the Bulk folder at my Yahoo! Mail account. Flipping through a MacConnection catalog, though, alerted me to the curious fact that the Macintosh edition of the CorelDraw Graphics Suite 11 is now Allume Systems Creative Essentials. This just gets more and more bizarre: on Thursday, Corel announced the acquisition of Jasc and its line of Paint Shop software.

19 October 2004

A conversation I started today about the flat-screen television which emitted a 121.5 MHz distress signal (there was a short article on the back page of the A section of the Washington Post about it) turned to the story of Sputnik 2 and the fate of its canine passenger. The references section of the Wikipedia entry on the dog Laika allows one to follow the course of the piecemeal revelations including the 1999 article at space.com and the BBC report on the Houston conference where Dimitri Malashenkov of the Institute for Biological Problems in Moscow revealed the details of the stray’s early demise. I first came across the Encyclopedia Astronautica during the hubbub over the discovery of a Buran vehicle in Bahrain last month.

13 October 2004

Isn’t it amazing how the web site of a local LEGO® users group just seems to work by itself? Activities are planned (or dropped), locations chosen (or not), timing established (or not), and yet somehow the default resource largely manages to provide current information. One is left to wonder how much longer that can continue… it is a completely unremarkable coincidence that the last meeting for which I am a paid-up member is exactly a month away.

12 October 2004

So it seems Dazed and Confused is the subject of a lawsuit, which is a good enough excuse to give it another try. Purchased on laserdisc sight unseen, the depiction of the last day of high school in a Texas town in 1976 was sufficiently alien to my own experience as to preclude much more reaction than recognition of some of the cast. This time around, at least I think I recognized Renée Zellweger. If Milla Jovovich has a Russian mother and a Serb father and was born in the Ukraine, which nationality gets to claim her? (Her birth name looks so ugly Latinized but Milica Jovović wouldn’t be comprehensible to most, let alone Милица Јововић).

10 October 2004

Really, I have no idea. But the earlier home of one of my movie reviews is the eleventh result in an Ask Jeeves search for what size clothes does naomi watts wear?

08 October 2004

Damn straight there is no comments problem here.

From page 318 of The 9/11 Commission Report:

Preparedness of Individual Civilians. One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike. Clearly, many building occupants in the World Trade Center did not take preparedness seriously,. Individuals should know the exact location of every stairwell in their workplace. In addition, they should have access at all times to flashlights, which were deemed invaluable by some civilians who managed to evacuate the WTC on September 11.

As someone who routinely wears a flashlight (the 2-cell AA Mini Maglite® flashlight which was once sufficiently menacing that I was asked to leave a theater at the AMC Potomac Mills 15 to allow the Prince William County police a look) I found this interesting to read.

Of course it’s going to stink. (Metacritic already gives it a 31, hey, that’s better than Taxi!) It’s been a few weeks since my last movie, though.

That’s funny. Put that in there. Director Mark Waters, in the commentary on a recent DVD release on the premises, states that he instructed Rachel McAdams to watch Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross to get an idea of the sense of ruthlessness he was looking for in the character of Regina. Baldwin, for his part, in the audio commentary to the DVD for that movie, relates that he was asked to watch George C. Scott in Patton as guidance for his character. He even indulges in a few impersonations from the opening speech. (Imagining Hilary Duff as Regina George is taxing.) Inspired by Lileks’ Bleat and its mention of Distort-O-Vision today, I wrestled with Corel Photo-Paint and its Distort mode to try to recreate what the Paramount Home Video poster might look like viewed at a normal to the plane.

See, I told you the 2005 look was a disaster. The Five Hundred, which I saw at Fall for Fairfax, is fairly blah as well. I backed into my garage recently and managed to snap a connector on the exterior mirror. The body shop manager said that mirror had been replaced before. Interesting.

The word minion has generated some excitement recently. I was thinking of sycophant actually, but looking it up and discovering that I didn’t even know how to spell it suggests I should maintain silence. Now that I’ve seen Glengarry Glen Ross choice epithets are far too close to the tip of the tongue in some situations anyway.

05 October 2004

Isn’t this the sort of thing we should have heard from our representatives to the relevant international organization?

29 September 2004

If the answer is so easy, why did contestant Kraft think it was -1?

26 September 2004

Now that I have a scanner attached to the Performa, I am always on the lookout for scanning opportunities. This small advertising placard picked up at Tower Records/Video has topped the stack on my desk for several weeks, but only now do I recognize that the Katy Rose depicted therein must be the Katy Rose whose Overdrive is part of the soundtrack of Mean Girls.

I’ve had the chance to watch my most recent DVD purchase *cough* a few times now. My first impressions of wit, pace, compassion, and general cuteness are confirmed, but to label the result as another Lohan-goes-to-high-school movie is unfair given that I have yet to purchase either Freaky Friday or Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Having listened to the commentary by director Mark Waters, screenwriter Tina Fey, and producer Lorne Michaels, I must disagree that the changes made to achieve a PG-13 rating were somehow harmful to the movie. By changing the question Jason poses as a lunch-time poll, for example, from Is your cherry popped? to Is your muffin buttered? his sexual advance is made less crude and thus less obvious to Cady and furthermore by inventing a slang the audience is afforded some share of the confusion that newcomer Cady is experiencing in her first week of school. The commentary itself is somewhat of a disappointment as much time is taken up with the three being silent, impressed with their efforts. From the sound of it, the commentary was recorded before the movie’s release, so it cannot address any of the issues that consumed the chattering classes after its release. Still, there are interesting remarks regarding some of the performers. The closed captioning folks outdid themselves in identifying the musical cues that accompany the chapters in the feature about the production of the movie using two adjectives each. The deleted scenes all are weak in tone or pacing and were properly omitted. The blooper reel is a highlight: Regina wriggling in her Hallowe’en costume and saying Do you like it, Daddy? is just sick. :-)

WAMALUG will be displaying at Fall for Fairfax this Saturday. If you are an adult fan of LEGO®, even if you’re not a member of this local users group, you are invited to contribute to the display!

If your printer stops responding, don’t forget to check all the connections.

Konica Minolta announces its new digital interchangeable-lens SLR. The new Maxxum 7D has a 6.1-megapixel CCD sensor and anti-shake technology inside the camera body but now I’m dubious about digital cameras recreating the film camera experience by using an optical viewfinder. I have very definitely gotten used to shooting at a distance by relying on the display on the back of, or just using the built-in angle viewfinder on, my DiMAGE 7Hi.

24 September 2004

Today Lileks, following up on the image in his 404 error page, discovers the soundtrack to the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine by Sol Kaplan. Star Trek soundtrack albums on long-playing record dried up in 1989 with the release of the score to Star Trek V The Final Frontier, so this volume is only available on compact disc (which I purchased at Shore Leave 13 in July of 1991). The Bleat links to Amazon, but the album’s label GNP Crescendo Records has recently redesigned their site… and they sell for less!

22 September 2004

Breaking news not yet confirmed at the website of the Visions Cinema Bar Noir Lounge: the movie theater and eatery is closing on Sunday with a party, according to DCist… A published author of science-fiction novels derides judging an artist by politics… From time to time, I have heard the current head of the executive branch talk about the upside of one military adventure or the other, and thought of Sarek’s question to Kirk in Star Trek III The Search for Spock: But at what cost? I am not the only one asking this question… Sometimes you just need to know the status of a famous person, or a semi-famous person whom I decline to name, which led me to The Smoking Gun and the detailed report from the Los Angeles County coroner which made me feel more sympathy for the father…

21 September 2004

I wonder what I was up to today…

20 September 2004

I can’t prove that the camera Gwyneth Paltrow handles as unflappable reporter Polly Perkins in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is an Argus C3 because the shots-remaining counter on the top of the brick emphasized throughout the movie doesn’t appear to be prototypical. D’oh! The fact that the counter showed shots remaining should have been suspicious! Shh… it’s just a movie.

18 September 2004

You know, the Focus was handling somewhat poorly yesterday as I traveled the Beltway in the rain. This afternoon I discovered that the front right tire has no air pressure. The importance of tire safety was the subject of a nationwide public awareness campaign in 2002 using money from a settlement from my tire’s manufacturer but www.safetrip.org is not a currently operative domain. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers a tire safety page.

16 September 2004

What does Aaron McGruder have against Haylie Duff? That is, what might he and Huey Freeman have against her that they wouldn’t also have against the sister named in today’s installment of The Boondocks?

The advertisement from Tower Records in the local free weekly newspaper promises a soundtrack compact disc release on the same day as the DVD release of that movie I keep mentioning. I guess that availability on iTunes is about to lose its exclusivity.

I don’t know what the fuss is about, but some people seem to go for that Firefox browser thingy…

Deutsche Welle for Klingons, in tlhIngan (English and German also available) (via Boing Boing).

14 September 2004

Someone has taken advantage of my free to a good home pile of electronics discards and reports that the Netgear wireless network card has given him better reception strength and increased range over his previous configuration… Some searchers landing at these pages have a negative attitude: overexposed teen queen lindsay lohan; as for what was cady s party song? mean girls that information is readily available elsewhere as the question gets asked over and over… The Veterans Administration offers a grave locator but seems not to have heard the advice about not tying URLs to specific server technology…

13 September 2004

The daughter of my cousin survives. She is undergoing a series of skin transplantations. Months of physical therapy, pressure therapy with compressive clothing and silicon inserts, and laser therapy await her.

12 September 2004

A LEGO® users group dissolves due to internal conflicts between the members… could happen anywhere, really.

I finally took the time to flip through AFOLs #1, a comic book about adult fans of the construction toy originally created for internal use to educate LEGO® employees but later printed and distributed to train clubs, users groups, and BrickFest™ attendees, and discovered that it depicted (in minifig form) only one real human and identified this non-fictional personality by position and name.

08 September 2004

Sean Kenney responds to the hubbub at Lugnet about the reviews at MOCpages. What I miss most in how MOCpages works now is the ability to respond directly. I don’t mean e-mailing the reviewer, since I’d rather not in most circumstances, but rather making a public comment on the review. Sort of like the forums at the Internet Movie Database. I left a comment on the page for Josh Jenkins’ arctic white H1 pickup along the lines of Your photos are huge but unfocused, a headache for sure, but at least my HMMWV creation and instructions as found here at MOCpages and at Brickshelf have allowed you and others to build this distinctive vehicle and within a day that page was gone.

Those Firefox fanboys still have work to do…

06 September 2004

Thanks to a Mac OS X-using relative I can show off how the website of my homeowners association looks in Camino 0.8.1 with the specification of an OS X-specific font in the stylesheet. Mac weenies will appreciate the opportunity to have the question What’s On Your Dock? at that user’s location answered.

WAMALUG will have its next meeting as scheduled on Saturday, September 11, 2004, as announced by the Chairman rather than the Director of Public Relations. Read the description of the meeting on September 16, 2001 which was expanded during the renovation of the web site last year.

05 September 2004

For the searcher who loves Carly Schroeder: her professional and personal website. Oh, my, the photo on the index page right now makes her look like a certain hotel heiress. (I don’t like linking to a photograph directly, but Schroeder’s site uses iframes and there’s no other way to point to that specific resource. See the image in context on the frame from Sundance for her Scrapbook page.) The filming of Mean Creek during the summer of last year clearly meant a lot to her, and the final product rewards her participation.

The 17th annual Virginia Film Festival has chosen speed as its theme for this year. The oversize postcard I picked up at the Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row promises a tenth anniversary presentation of Speed with special guests, but the current state of the website does not confirm this. I know not everyone likes the movie starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in which a GMC fishbowl bus is driven at high speeds through Los Angeles, but its no-cutaways-every-shot-advances-the-plot editing was distinctive in the year that saw my movie attendance increase tremendously.

While MozillaZine commenter pbreit badmouths the Mozilla suite and badmouths Camino, Firefox is still annoying experienced users. Camino is a Gecko-based browser for Mac OS X which I have installed on the machine of a relative using that operating system in response to the repeated remarks about the ugliness of the Mozilla suite. There has at that location never been a user-based desire to see Firefox on Mac OS X.

04 September 2004

I wish the movie Tae Guk Gi The Brotherhood of War hadn’t shown a Hershey chocolate bar, for on the back of the wrapping was a Nutrition Facts panel. It was like seeing the penny in Somewhere in Time, I had to shake my head, I was so thrown out of the movie, which is otherwise extremely intense in the manner of Saving Private Ryan while omitting the dumb parts (like the whole saving of the private segment). For those having trouble keeping up, the presence of the Nutrition Facts panel on foodstuffs made for sale in the United States is somewhat after the action in Korea depicted, set in the fall of 1950. I braved a Regal Cinemas to see this film, very popular in South Korea from what I hear, about two brothers torn by the upheaval wrought by the war, for the first time since the über-disaster that was the screening of Gladiator at the Ballston Commons 12 on August 9, 2000. I was joined in the mid-afternoon screening by families and gaggles of young women who may not have been sufficiently warned by the R rating applied in these states. The particular example of the latter next to me was constantly calling upon her deity during the battle scenes and eventually resorted to covering herself with a handkerchief, whether against the chill air in the auditorium or the better to cover her eyes I could not tell.

Afterwards, I went right downstairs to Tower Records/Video #822 and bought the 293-minute version of Das Boot. How dare they! The whiteboard announcing upcoming DVD releases extends as far as September 21st and admits that besides some useless space fantasy trilogy being released that day that also Mean Girls is due, also, hmph.

My host Dr2 merged with Mesopia recently and for a few days the statistics reverted to those last run on August 24th. The logs are back up to date, and searchers reaching these pages have some very specific needs: alexandria metro blue and yellow lines photos images pictures; hilary duff multimedia download santa claus lane; and pdf files of service manual for 2003 mazda 6. The searches for giuliana depandi and wendy rieger continue. And someone was ticked off: procedure for sending a complaint to mazda about the b3000 trucks.

03 September 2004

After eighteen weeks, Mean Girls has left local movie screens, just over two weeks’ shy of its video release. Napoleon Dynamite advertises its fourteenth week (but it’s been on local screens only since June 18th so it’s only in its twelfth week here). I’ve had the Focus for a year.

02 September 2004

Seems like I am not the only person annoyed at the comments left at MOCpages by Josh Jenkins.

01 September 2004

The Brickshelf account holder using the moniker sdfg now has a MOCpages account identified as belonging to Josh Jenkins. Meanwhile, the undercarriage of the 8-wide HMMWV in the Brickshelf folder of darkdesire seems real. Both contributors to Brickshelf like large photographs!

29 August 2004

So, I was tidying up one of the spaces on the premises used for storage and came across a photograph of the sign at the entrance of the local planned unit development in which the residence was built and thought to myself, that looks typographical, I wonder if…. Flipping through the WordPerfect Office 2000 Libraries Catalog, I decided that Bauer Bodoni was a terrific match for the letters on the sign, and added these fonts to my Windows system. Scanning the photograph and importing the bitmap into a new CorelDraw document, I applied a text element, moving and stretching letters to match the arrangement on the sign. Exporting to an antialiased GIF and transferring to the Performa by diskette, I removed the edge in Graphic Converter to maintain the transparency. Image uploaded, templates edited, and the stylesheet reflecting a sequence of colors chosen to harmonize with the color of the stone (concrete) in the sign, and the makeover is done. The advertisement placeholders [and the favicon] still sport the lime and cream hues of the previous look, though.

The comments at my MOCpages account seem to have been edited recently, as I was convinced that sdfg was boasting of constructing a better (more minifig-proportioned, too) HUMMER, but only praise for my models is found in the comments from that individual now. Now that sdfg has the 25,720th account at Brickshelf we can only lament the inability to focus a camera in trying to discern the effort involved in adapting my design. The arctic white version compares favorably with my own rendering of a four-door pickup version of the HMMWV.

28 August 2004

They Lie. They Cheat. They’re Your Friends… Watch Your Back. As already reported, coming to DVD and VHS on September 21st. Still screening at 18 (weeks).

From time to time in these dispatches I comment on the innards of a web page design. I have found that being responsible for more than one site, each with a different look, has been a source of inspiration in which a problem observed and solved at one site might lead to a desire and the expertise to change an aspect of another site. Which, upon reconsideration, might just mean (I have way much) more time and experience. But, seriously, if you are working on but one web site design, you’re cheating yourself. I have continued to work on the secret installation of WordPress and one step towards eliminating numeric entities and achieving XHTML 1.0 Strict validation has been—saving the index.php file as UTF-8! D’oh!

French actress Sandrine Bonnaire is no stranger, as it were, to playing the role of a troubled soul. Almost twenty years ago, she won a César for her portrayal in Sans toit ni loi of Mona, an aimless drifter whose wanderings through France doing odd jobs for cigarette money end with her frozen to death in a vineyard’s ditch. As interest in the format waned with the introduction of the DVD, laserdisc prices were falling in 2000 when I ordered The Criterion Collection title Vagabond (as the film is known in the U.S.) for 40% off, sight unseen. Depressing, yes, for we learn of Mona’s unwitnessed death first thing, but a comprehensive look at a society nonetheless. Her sturdy demeanor belies her age which seems to have been just about 18 at the time of filming. It is also an intriguing coincidence that Bonnaire had a role in a 1994 film in French and Russian called Ispoved neznakomstu… otherwise known as Secrets Shared with a Stranger! (I wish I had a flatbed scanner capable of imaging a videodisc cover in one pass. I promised myself after The Hospital I wouldn’t try to patch together two scans again.)

Man, I should have taken a screen shot! When I searched for analysis early Friday morning of Gogol’s Dead Souls (I have started the second part) an AdWords box to the side of the Google results page included a link for Search for Dead Souls on eBay! but I can’t repeat the result tonight.

26 August 2004

I thought that the web site statistics provided by Wusage 7.0 for the homeowners association were broken in some way but a direct examination of the logfile in BBEdit reveals that user agents and referrers simply aren’t recorded. The host is so lame that it expects monthly payment for turing [sic] on the referrer log which is described as providing the ability to view regular domain names in [the] traffic report rather than IP addresses which led me to think that it must refer to some reverse DNS lookup for REMOTE_ADDR rather than for HTTP_REFERER values (which aren’t normally logged as IP addresses since they’re URLs). Wusage already does this sort of reverse DNS lookup for the visitor’s IP address (the option to view them is labeled Top Visitor Sites ) but a quick search suggests that this sort of extra charge for referrers is routine (with agent logging thrown in). Ridiculous! User agents, operating systems, referring pages, and searches are the most interesting data, far more so than time-of-day or other such nonsense. :-( Additional monthly payments are also expected for PHP and MySQL! I have finally figured out how the advanced_search template gets used and brought that file and the file returned for 404 errors into the style of the rest of the site. An id="summersgrove-org" attribute allows a per-site user stylesheet.

It’s not my fault that the WAMALUG archives page is the third result currently in a Google search for lego tysons after two results from shoptysons.com for the new LEGO® Brand Retail store opening at the huge regional mall tomorrow. I suppose I should update the WAMALUG links page… Argh, another domain (lego.com) that has adjusted its site structure.

25 August 2004

The default body color of #808080 that was in use at the website of my homeowners association has been replaced by #333. Also, I prepared some blank GIF images in standard advertising sizes and adjusted the templates to include them. The community involvement is very low, but perhaps someone will see the images and step forward to either have the site participate in the Google AdSense program or otherwise sell advertising.

I suppose I should be grateful that my HMMWV image survived the upload process, then. The president of Brickshelf explains today in a post to the WAMALUG list that folders with a title image (no matter how creative) especially those that use words are moderated as having the category Avatar [clearly Mozilla does not implement inner quotes yet] so the folder does not display in the recent view. Not only is this a quirky aspect of Brickshelf, but I suspect it is undocumented as well… I was just looking at the site’s homepage today and thinking the cluttered look cried out for a makeover. I also checked the site in Netscape Navigator 3.04 and Netscape Communicator 4.04 on the 68k Macintosh on hand (Quadra 610) and while each browser attempted to download show_ads.js neither crashed when the download was cancelled and the page displayed with a blank spot where the Ads by Google would have been.

My instructions to build a M1026 HUMVEE don’t include amber turn signals on the back! Something tells me that’s not prototypical… oh, great, AM General changed the structure of its web site.

23 August 2004

More goofiness from the Firefox bunker—a plan to remove the style sheet switcher from version 1.0! A helpful commenter points to the relevant Bugzilla thread and to be fair if the feature is buggy then maybe it should be removed… temporarily. (The site navigation bar was removed from Mozilla upon reaching version 1.0 for performance reasons and returned in version 1.1 beta, after all.) But the phrasing was most unfortunate. Add the site of WAMALUG to the list of sites which offer a plurality of style sheets with no page-based UI for switching between them. :-) A special treat for club members who read these dispatches. Discuss.

22 August 2004

It’s nothing I want to place my web design badge upon, but I have wrestled with the templates in the content management system installed at the website of my homeowners association to the extent that I can take a pause and not be embarrassed. Aside from the favicon implemented last October, and the link hover color and external style sheet added earlier this month, I have significantly reduced the number (and degree of nesting) of tables (one table was used solely to draw the thick gray line under the green banner, this is now a border-bottom declaration) and adjusted URLs to avoid the www. prefix (through the inclusion of a <base> element, for example), but I cannot avoid the unencoded ampersands created by the CMS so the site’s pages will never validate. Although the external style sheet is currently linked it is largely ignored by Netscape Communicator for unknown reasons which is just as well. My initial impulse was to duplicate the earlier appearance (as if anyone would notice a change) but discovering attributes which only Internet Explorer parses (bordercolor) and invalid attribute values (valign=center) and attributes which simply don’t exist (borderwidth) tempted me too much. The side columns have been adjusted for clarity in the default and hover states. The Main Menu include even had a template cell to distinguish the selected category; by placement of a class on the paragraph enclosing that category name, stylesheet declarations are now used to highlight that category. The colors #9C6, #FFC, and #808080 have been used throughout. The printer-friendly style of article display has been completely overhauled to banish the small margins and tiny fonts.

The previous template wrangler denies a default resource at his personal website and attempts a redirect to a family site which fails (the domain no longer exists) but Google locates a new index page abandoned in 2001. The site of the gourmet dog treats business that he started with his wife is a compendium of ancient techniques despite the more recent copyright date: capitalized element names, document-level styles on elements with a class attribute, text size specified in pixels (which prevents resizing in Microsoft Internet Explorer), JavaScript to disable browser functions, <table> and <font> elements like there’s no tomorrow, links opening in a new window (using target="blank" and frustrating users of tabbed browsers), and an ilayer element which only works in Netscape 4! A positive note: the logo links to the default resource / rather than a specific index file. Reality check: Mozilla 1.7+ has a preference to prevent a web page from disabling or replacing context menus. People using a browser under constant development have a choice and they don’t like ham-fisted attempts to control the browsing experience. My BugZilla searching skills are inadequate to find out if a fix for a script-based denial of selecting text in the web page is under development. When the homeowners association approved the expenditure to buy a license for the content management system late in 2001, the supplied templates were the latest word in cross-browser compatibility written at a time when Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape Communicator 4.7 were the latest and greatest, but even the software company has moved on. The freshening of the templates looks especially good on Safari and Camino on Mac OS X because I specified Lucida Grande as the default font.

That’s just splendid. Having enabled the troublesome PowerBook 1400 to access the Internet over an Ethernet network earlier this year, now I discover that it won’t access the Internet over dial-up. The Global Village card will dial out and connect, but the connection is immediately dropped. Guess I won’t be needing that Starpower access number in Lancaster, Pennsylvania after all. Grr.

21 August 2004

I am now definitely maxed out on the SCSI chain from the Performa. With the internal hard drive and bus controller taking up IDs 0 and 7, the external hard drive using ID 2, the internal CD-ROM drive at ID 3, the external CD-R burner with ID 4, the external ZIP 250 drive at ID 5, the external PC Card reader using ID 6, placing the flatbed scanner at ID 1 exhausts the available locations. With DeskScan II v2.4 installed under System 9.1 and the preference for resolution of the path to screen set to 96 dpi, the scanner works, as is apparent from the image of the most recent souvenir of a visit to Tower Records/Video #195. Hewlett Packard does not support the use of DeskScan II v2.4 under any version of System 9 (also see a chart of minimum and recommended system requirements) but my speculation that such restraint was a cover for a reluctance to explain the difference between NuBus and PCI Macs paid off. TWAIN acquire does not work, however.

I leave links to The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times on my Diversions page even though I never visit anymore due to the requirements for registration at the newspapers’ sites. BugMeNot.com is a site devoted to bypassing compulsory web registration (and currently the Post and the L.A. Times are the second and third most actively requested sites right after the New York Times) and it disappeared last week. The story is that their host dropped them and the service was unavailable until another host was located.

I continue to use Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) even though I only install the Browser component because Firefox is not available for a Macintosh running System 9 and Firefox has a pedestrian look in its default installation. This week a plan surfaced to remove the user interface (menu option) to View Source from Firefox. What was the thinking? Now with fewer features than Netscape 1.1! The proposal to move the View Source and JavaScript console out of the primary end user UI has been RESOLVED as WONTFIX but the fact that the idea occurred at all is worrisome.

At seventeen weeks, Paramount’s most successful movie in a long while is displaced by King Arthur at the University Mall Theatres 3 and its only local exhibition is as an afternoon screening each day this weekend at the previously mentioned Cinema and Drafthouse. Apparently only the promotional materials for King Arthur had surgery whereas the star of the former is alleged to have had actual surgery.

20 August 2004

Speeding gets you nowhere. Not only do I catch up to those impatient people who pass me on the Beltway as I indulge in traffic un-jamming procedures when they get stopped by traffic up ahead or at the first traffic light after the off-ramp, but a bicyclist can catch up to me on local streets as I wait through the traffic signal cycle at an intersection.

18 August 2004

Which BrickFest attendee built and displayed a gray HMMWV which is clearly built in accordance with my design? The MOC also appears behind some brown box cars (that’s Joe Meno’s red roadster in front) and transported on a flat car in a display which was presumably seen by hundreds of people on Sunday, if the reports of crowding during the public access portion of the festival devoted to LEGO® bricks are to be believed. It can’t be the putatively Canadian Marksman because it’s built without swinging doors like my first model. Curious.

My design for the HMMWV is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a version with a slightly lengthened hood, customized front and rear, fatter tires, and steering elements which look fairly real even if the overall imagery is assembled virtually. The 8-wide HUMVEE rules, Adam, admit it… I don’t recall a rash of copycats for Bram’s or anyone else’s 10-wide versions. ;-)

I’m supposed to be disposing of electronics this month not accumulating more. But when the availability of a SCSI flatbed scanner was made known I expressed an interest. The unit turned out to be a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6100Cse which in its original configuration of bundled hardware and software was a Windows-only solution but as basic SCSI-2 hardware was largely identical to the 6100C which was sold to Macintosh users. The DeskScan II v2.4 software is not supported on any version past System 8.6, the hp website emphasizes in making the scanner control software available for free from their FTP site, but isn’t it convenient that I happen to have a System 7.5.5 Macintosh on hand today?

17 August 2004

Last week, local newspapers reported that the entire Metrobus fleet is now equipped with SmarTrip fareboxes. I have been reaching all of my routine medical appointments this year using public transportation and plan to continue doing so to save gasoline and make a point about urban living.

The Quadra 610 turns out to be not so useful, so despite its Ethernet connector the 68040 Macintosh running System 7.5.5 on 53+ meagbytes of RAM might not be staying. Netscape Communicator 4.04 crashes upon visiting wamalug.org (but not upon visiting wamaltc.org) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 downloads (instead of rendering) any page that has an XML prolog.

I have neglected the website of my homeowner’s association for so long that the copyright date still stated 2001-2003. I established a favicon some time ago and no one noticed. I have moved the content of the document <style> element and the attributes of the <body> element into a stylesheet and established a hover color for links.

15 August 2004

I have been taking advantage of the Office Depot Electronic Recycling Program (although the in-store display doesn’t suggest any particular termination date, the web page identifies Labor Day) and now that there’s a link on Boing Boing maybe everyone else will. So far I have delivered the NEC SuperScript 650C color ink jet printer which printed well with new tanks (the original series of train club containers from WamaLTC was printed with it) but was unsatisfactory when not used for a while; an NEC CRT monitor which, while offering a larger screen size, didn’t deliver the image quality I achieve with the Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display, especially in SoftWindows; and the NEC Pinwriter P6 24-pin dot matrix printer which served me since 1987 but became superfluous once the office no longer made use of multi-part forms.

Next up: most likely the Quadra 605 which I restored to its original state with 8 MB of RAM and System 7.1 installed, as I wouldn’t appear to have the patience to install Linux on it although the writer of that paean to the little pizza-box computer did eventually replace the Quadra 605 as a server… with a 6100! How fortunate that Command-Shift-3 worked in that old system software for one last screenshot. Other candidates: the NEC Silentwriter2 Model 90 and the Quadra 610 (although that has an Ethernet port and might stay).

The prognosis for my cousin’s daughter remains shaky.

I haven’t seen a movie repeatedly so often since Speed (four times) and Star Trek Generations (three times) in 1994. While Napoleon Dynamite ably filled one of the smallest theaters in the AMC Hoffman Center 22 late Saturday night when I used a free night at the movies pass to see it for the third time, fully two-thirds of the audience missed out on the added scene tacked on between the end of the credits and the rating (spliced in upside down). Saved! had enough pulchritude to warrant a second look, and it wasn’t so annoying that time, but its performance in domestic box office after 2½ months can hardly compare with the comedy juggernaut. Last year, there was Bend It Like Beckham where my first experience was somewhat spoiled. Kissing Jessica Stein I saw twice in 2002 for reasons which by now must appear all too obvious. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back had too many jokes for one screening in 2001. Actually, I’d forgotten the details, but Bring It On was totally worth a second look at University Mall Theatres 3 in December of 2000 (what a shame about Dushku’s face if Awful Plastic Surgery is to be believed). (I’m not including movies like The Wedding Planner or Chocolat when I joined someone else for a movie. No, the memory of the sweaters Lopez wore was insufficient to warrant the purchase of the DVD.)

It is just too funny that Microsoft Internet Explorer, because it displays all of a page’s internal links (anchors to a fragment identifier) as if they were of the pseudo-class visited, the <h2> elements I use to enclose the date of each dispatch appear, in that browser, in the default color for visited links.

Did M. Night Shyamalan think that setting The Village in the last decades of the nineteenth century sufficed because, gee, it was a long time ago and no one can tell one century from another? As I continue to plow through Dead Souls the only really glaring thing about the novel (written about 1840) from the modern perspective is the use of horse-drawn carriages for transportation (aside from the whole serfs thing, of course, and materials science doesn’t play a big role in the action). The writer, producer, and director might have been better off setting the movie 200 years in the past so that the absence of a railroad or a telegraph might be better explained. Not to mention steam engines, electrical generation and DC distribution, lightbulbs, typewriters, observation balloons, photographic apparatus, telephones, umbrellas, bicycles, safety matches, rayon, sewing machines, phonographs, toilet paper, cylinder pin-tumbler locks, barbed wire… it was a hopping good time for invention. Depending on what kind of history books are in use at the schoolroom, the hamlet is awful close to the date of invention for rigid lighter-than-air craft. Those last two decades were also a ferment of freethought as well.

14 August 2004

The most relevant result for the search brickshelf.com usage. use it or lose it. would appear to be the sig of user Xanthos at BZPower which links to a thread where two administrators of the site caution its users against using Brickshelf for images which are not LEGO®.

BrickFest is this weekend. The local newspaper of national stature features the event on page 56 of its Weekend section:

On Sunday, the group will open its doors for the second year in a row to give the public a chance to see the intricate creations displayed at BrickFest, a celebration of all things Lego that will bring together more than 200 Lego aficionados from throughout the world.

That group finds its antecedent basis in the previous paragraph in a description of a meeting of LEGO users at George Mason University in Arlington. You wouldn’t know it from Sara Gebhardt’s article that the group is the LEGO users group known as WAMALUG, nor would you grasp from any of the quotes supplied by the organizer of BrickFest that WAMALUG doesn’t have anything to do with BrickFest anymore. The BrickFest site uses a <font color="#CC0000"> element to lament an error at the Washington Post misidentifying the day of the Public Expo, but maybe that is referring to the online version of the newspaper, since Sunday is correct. The use of the definite article in attributing the quotations is quite appropriate: the BrickFest contact page has been, at the time of posting, pared down to include but a single name; everyone else has been banished between comment tags! The ugliness of the source (that particular long-suffering page features triply-nested <blockquote> elements and an anchor wrapped around a <br> element) throughout the site is typical.

Sixteen weeks in release and hanging on at two local theaters. This week, I decided to watch it through my new bifocals. Still not available in Serbia and Montenegro.

12 August 2004

Okay, as I proposed earlier, I have edited the entire series of pages for my photographs from my visit in January to the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center to link to the official home page thereof. We’ll see if it ever makes a difference in my pages’ ranking at various search engines. Yahoo’s cache of this very page turns out to be from the first week of this year!

There have been minor adjustments to the Diversions page since, for example, a visit to Low End Mac was no longer a daily experience. Given the Mother-safety promised in the <meta> element attribute on the home page, the real sequence of daily visits cannot be revealed. The index page itself got a makeover a little while ago to imitate the structure of a WordPress installation and experiment with the CSS styling thereof. It is true that there is no longer a mailto: link anywhere (this was especially necessary to make an earlier dispatch true) but it’s a domain… I’m sure anyone who wants to reach me will think of something.

It might not be buildable, but these renderings of a U.S.S. Enterprise in LEGO® elements are pretty.

Some unusual searches this month: filter of importation of archives in coreldraw 12, amc hoffman center alexandria police activity, brickshelf.com usage. use it or lose it., sweden toy batmobile 1 18 scale, olivia bonamy nude scene, 2001 mazda b3000 2 door vin number, gallery girl next door, united states capitol police, lego hummer instructions, and the ever-popular wendy rieger. Couple that with some of the hosts ( loc.gov, dreamworks.com, gannett.com) and it’s a mystery.

11 August 2004

Her personal web site Charlotte’s Web is now the home of Charlotte Geary Photography. If you are in the Colorado Springs area, or can afford to fly her to your location, why not check it out?

Get the fascist pigs out of our nation. Sheesh. If that’s a real Democratic canvasser at the entrance to my subway station this morning, the party’s irrelevance (which I first sensed in 1998) is assured. Given the viewpoint expressed by the incumbent’s father the Republican party can hold no interest for me, either. We now return you to our regular dispatches which are largely free of politics and religion.

08 August 2004

I’m told I am no longer the most generous contributor to the operations at the websites of Brickshelf LLC, but I am nevertheless asked what improvements I might like to see. My immediate response is fairly lame: I’d like to see the sites have a favicon (I think there might be a candidate at a page I wrote last year linked from my moribund Comcast webspace), an off-site status blog might be nice; and having a UI to at least explain, if not immediately afford, the possibilities inherent in customview.cgi would allow more people to make use of them.

In the face of massive indifference from the membership, the augury is that a wiki for WAMALUG is on the way. Whether it will be the PHPWiki recently put into use at the site of Brick Events LLC (on Saturday, although the domain appears to have been around for over 2 years, I just never thought to search WHOIS for brick events before) or MoinMoin or one of the seemingly innumerable others is not yet known. What is a Wiki?

That’s just great. The telephone I bought Friday for the desk on the first floor is one of those that, when the play button is pressed, utters in a warbling modulation, You have no messages. I didn’t consciously set out to get an answering machine that operated like the one in Bridget Jones’s Diary but once the tape transport mechanism on the Sony® Integrated Telephone Answering Machine IT-A650 failed, its days were numbered. Purchasing an ATLINKS telephone sold under the General Electric brand has allowed me to combine the telephonic, Caller ID display, and answering machine features which up to now have required three power supply-using components on the desktop. The details on the 29893GE1 speakerphone with digital messaging system and call-waiting Caller ID are available at an inhumanly specific URL. It’s getting tougher to find corded telephones, and Sony seems to have abandoned the market entirely.

06 August 2004

Box Office Mojo is another source for domestic box office information, including detailed information of the day-by-day fortunes of a favorite.

05 August 2004

The Numbers is just the kind of site I’ve been looking for (via the sidebar at Defamer, although I wish the HTML was more conducive to a print-out) especially with its chart of the domestic box office for the current week which extends to ninety movies in release (even if only at one reporting theater). Naturally I check in on the performance of my favorite movie this year: hanging on in 32nd place (down from 28th). Just under a third of its domestic box office take of $85.5 million came in the first 3 days of release. Interestingly, Napoleon Dynamite is the only film in the top twenty to rise in ranking last weekend. Presumably, the rise of Maria Full of Grace and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is the result of additional theaters in new markets (Napoleon Dynamite itself returns to the AMC Hoffman Center tomorrow, although I’ve already gotten to see some portion of the new scene).

Okay, so, um, yeah, clipping advertisements with a pretty girl in them is fairly déclassé—but what exactly is being sold here? The image I’ve excerpted appears within a full-page ad in today’s Post for a promotion by Nordstrom for Nike Speed ( A collection of cutting-edge styles designed with your fast-paced life in mind ) which is supposed to be Fun… for the whole family. The multiple necklaces and dropped shoulder don’t exactly suggest speed to my aging eyes, and the way the model is pointing with her left hand and hiding what her right hand is up to doesn’t exactly suggest to my jaded brain that the whole family is intended to get in on the fun. Not nearly as scandalous as the usual fare at sex-obsessed Adrants or a certain billboard on Sunset Boulevard but still… that second link is edging towards NSFW territory, so all you visitors whose IP resolves to units of the United States military in locations around the world, stop goofing off at work!

04 August 2004

The caption writer for the Washington Post company publication Express in its edition on Monday may think that teen actors ’sploit teen viewers, but in its fourteenth week of release, Mean Girls is playing at the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, where visitors must be at least 21 or accompanied by a parent. (My attempt to direct your attention to page 15 of the linked PDF inspired by Phil Ringnalda’s report on the linkability options of the file format. Be sure to check out his report on the unusability of popups, dialog boxes, modal error messages, or anything else that is not the main window of a program or web page.) The theater with a history must be counting on the appeal the film holds for adults according to Stephanie Zacharek at Salon… I wonder if Apple, or Spike Lee for that matter, has any complaints about the packaging for the Clerks Tenth Anniversary Edition Region 1 DVD due on September seventh… Two tales of car theft I came across recently: Jeremy Zawodny passes one along and Amy Alkon’s shares her Return of the Pink Rambler… WAMALUG’s next monthly meeting is Sunday; the potential presence of a photographer for a local newspaper of national stature is floated. You can’t tell just by looking at the founder’s site but he was returning a 404 for most of this week (one has to piece the story together from the blogger’s comments)… I’m cautiously optimistic that buying a replacement Iomega ZIP 250MB USB-Powered Drive has removed any evidence of the incipient Click-of-Death I was experiencing with its predecessor. The new drive zings where the previous drive clacked so maybe, maybe there’s been a mid-production improvement? I may like my Focus but I can’t help but notice that there are quite a few Mazda 6’s on the road. If only the 5-door didn’t have the ugly Sport body-color slatted grille… Don’t neglect to update your installations of the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite (now at 1.7.2) and Firefox Mozilla Browser (now at 0.9.3).

31 July 2004

I’m sure there’s nothing political about Warner Bros. releasing the DVD box set of the television series V in this season of a Republican campaign for re-obtaining an electoral college majority. The debut episode on October 26, 1984 came on the Friday night that I rented a Ford LTD from Dollar Rent-a-Car ($78.59 total for the weekend) and flew down I-95 south to Orange where there was a The Big Chill party. We suspected that Marc Singer contracturally required that he wrestle the female star, in this case Jane Badler, to the ground. The election day that retained Ronald Reagan in the White House was eleven days later. Ooh, shiny box cover… Say, those Visitors liked their Chrysler and Jeep products, didn’t they? TheVisitors.info led me to an exacting comparison of laserdisc and DVD releases for V.

29 July 2004

Why you shouldn’t be using passwords of any kind on your Windows networks… (Via Simon Willison blogmark.)

I am at somewhat of a loss to specify why the screenplay of a high school comedy in its thirteenth week of release should identify Varsity Blues as the favorite movie of the queen bee. Aside from its tired theme of a sensitive young man pressured by an overbearing parent compensating for a frustrated childhood in a small community where football is everything, and the odd crudity of the sex education class and the consequence-free violence of Tweeder and the utterly bizarre religious explorations of the younger brother, the stars are personable and the nudity sufficiently periodic. The alacrity with which Ali Larter’s cheerleader Darcy switches allegiance after the first-string quarterback injures his knee and attempts to transfer her affection to the sensitive Vonnegut-reading bench-warming Jonathan Moxon (James Van Der Beek) has its own zest. Speaking of tired themes, Amy Smart plays the brunette Julie whose affection for Mox is no less strategic than Darcy’s. I might have bought this earlier if the names of Larter and Smart had been on the DVD sleeve instead of those of the men.

So it’s not the worst movie ever made.

24 July 2004

Sounds like Cole Porter to me. What Tank Girl is doing in the Must See list at the back of Rosalind Wiseman’s parenting book, I have no idea, but playing the laserdisc conveniently already on the premises since 1995 reveals that the movie features a dance number set to Let’s Do It, the normally blonde Naomi Watts playing the very brunette Jet Girl, and the phrase Whoop! There it is! A bizarre artifact of another era.

AMC Entertainment Inc. to be acquired and taken private.

23 July 2004

A fire in Belgrade has injured a cousin’s 10 month-old daughter.

The site’s approach doesn’t satisfy everyone, but if you insist on a numerical basis for film criticism, the film section of metacritic.com might suit you. Mean Girls edges into the green with a 62 rating while A Cinderella Story earns a glaring red with a 23 rating. Not included in the reviews is this pan of Mean Girls from Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune which would surely rank in the single digits.

The Jack Kerouac Bobblehead dolls that I last wrote about in December showed up in the sports-themed comic strip daily Tank McNamara on Monday and Tuesday this week.

David Edelstein writing for Slate finds the turn in Mean Girls where the girls are gathered in the gym and encouraged to recognize their self-destructive behavior actions very peculiar, but the scene is straight off page 21 (of the paperback edition, anyway, of the parenting book which forms its basis) including Regina’s proposition that some of us shouldn’t have to take this workshop … some of us are just victims in this situation when she’s the meanest. Page 37 offers up most of the rules that Gretchen lays out that first Tuesday. Is Karen supposed to be a Messenger?

The domain maj.com has revived. When I first wrote about the site over two years ago, it was devoted to solar system mysteries (and I figured the three-letter domain might have something to do with Majestic Research —maybe because it was the name of the site). Now it’s an image hosting site on the Brickshelf model (like Geekshelf before it) from the same herein unnamed webmaster and the three-letter domain is now spun as a play on the sound of image.

I’m told that the pursuit out of Fairfax County that ended on my doorstep last month also included a cruiser of the Virginia State Police.

18 July 2004

On the subject of blondes playing brunettes, which is advice I have dispensed previously, I’ve just finished watching the DVD of Final Destination with Ali Larter and… a bunch of guys and Kristen Cloke. Now I get it, the Internet Movie Database lists this movie among the connections made by Mean Girls because of the bus hit. Grool. Another inexpensive treat from Target. The inclusion of Cloke in the actors’ commentary track results in an unexpected detour regarding womens’ prison movies.

17 July 2004

The WAMALUG website, now packed with more nuance! I must be the only one to notice that it’s now two months in a row that the local LEGO® user’s group is pushed in the direction of vendors who do business with BrickFest. Must be just a coincidence. I finally fixed the failure to center the thumbnails.

Twelve weeks later, Lindsay Lohan and a screenplay by Tina Fey are still your best value for the entertainment dollar at the movies. Lohan is apparently entertaining in other venues as well. The special features on the DVD for Abandon made me hopeful that Paramount Home Video would do right by this movie, please let it be true on September 21st.

I’ve heard the taunt that my 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 is a discontinued model. Fair enough, the 2005 model of the Focus has what Ford must be calling a freshening but ew! the attempt to make a little Taurus out of it is just pathetic. And yes, I do open the moonroof. The best time to do so is after seeing a movie when it’s late at night, with the windows open too so everyone can hear, and playing the second track from the soundtrack of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan ( Surprise Attack ) on the CD player. Er, on second thought, I deny ever doing that.

Me too! Celebrity Journal with John Black appears on the second page of the Northern Virginia Journal and in Friday’s edition interviewing Hilary Duff (illustrated with this image as found at the Internet Movie Database) she identifies her favorite movie as Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. The listing at imdb.com confirms her memory that Our Lips Are Sealed is part of the soundtrack, I’ll have to watch the movie again (I mostly remember Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth as the helicopter takes off at the end). Black’s chat (presumably with a live Duff on the other end of the line) didn’t stop him from mercilessly panning her new movie.

From those wacky MeFites comes the discovery that the promotion for the new Warner Brothers movie includes the ability to send a personalized message from Hilary Duff as a telephone call or e-mail message.

I installed WordPress around here somewhere - no! the URL is seekrit! - and played with the index.php template and other files for a while. I’m not ready for the spontaneity of entering posts in a blog, or to give up the control which typing in a Unicode keyboard affords me. If it’s one thing which bugs me it’s having entities in a file ostensibly sent as UTF-8. Presumably the WordPress people can’t rely on users knowing to FTP the files in a way which preserves the double-byte Unicode characters.

12 July 2004

One by one, the neighborhoods in my life turn rough: the latest is Orleans Village, where a shooting early Saturday morning in Lafitte Court left two people wounded… Let’s try not to make gratuitous references to Lizzie McGuire in reviews of my creations at MOCpages, m’kay? The star of the Disney Channel series finally has her (apparently delayed) A Cinderella Story open this Friday… One of the guests at the WAMALUG meeting Saturday has his own gallery of photographs from a visit to the Udvar-Hazy center and this particular shot including the prototype for the Boeing 707 doesn’t look too much different from my shot of the same view a few weeks earlier. The ability to leave comments, which Dylan provides, is a scary thing indeed. Besides the utter viciousness displayed by the commenters for this photograph taken on one of his bar crawl evenings spent drinking there’s the astoundingly clueless visitors to Simon Willison’s complaint about downloading a Hotmail Inbox (he’s slipped to fifth in the Google results for hotmail inbox; add problem and his page moves up to third place!)… The URL www.erols.com finally redirects to RCN which apparently has not heard of the campaign to deprecate the www subdomain: the problem I had in reaching the personal webspace of an Erol’s subscriber at the domain of another RCN property earlier was a result of failing to prepend www. on a URL that already had a subdomain! Visit the remains of my RCN webspace and the somewhat stale RCN webspace of a mature relative… A recent newsletter for city residents identifies a plan to redevelop Landmark Mall, but the full extent of the plans, which include the elimination of the Foxchase Cinema 3, is not described. Landmark Mall used to be called Landmark Center ( Shopping can be fun, when you shop at Landmark Center! ) and was an open-air mall to begin with, although definitely a pedestrian mall. Those who know of the Foxchase movie theater have their own reason(s) for liking it, but it did provide me an opportunity to see The Girl on the Bridge four years ago.

11 July 2004

Markup Barbie exists only in the fevered minds of the markup-obsessed. I don’t know enough about the Talking Barbie of the early seventies to say, but the technology in the 5745 Teen Talk Barbie Doll of 1992 definitely eschewed the pull-string. Each doll had a set of four phrases which were activated by a press of a button in the back, and while the series (which was released in at least blonde, brunette, and this fetching green-eyed redhead versions) was most notorious for allegedly exclaiming that Math is tough! mine only ever said such less controversial utterances as We should start a business! and Help me pick out a new car! 12290 Super Talk! Barbie Doll of 1994 was a further refinement that permitted at least 144,144 phrase combinations, some of which could include driving that new car. Starting a business was no longer a possibility, however. It’s one of the charms of the comedy in its eleventh week of release that the main character’s proficiency in math is seen as a problem only by the shallow people.

The July meeting of the local LEGO® club was yesterday and I didn’t get around to publicizing it here. I would forgive anyone who attended the business portion of the meeting and thought of the song in 1776, the musical about the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence, where John Adams sings …piddle, twiddle, and resolve, not one damn thing do we solve…. Except that we’re weak on the resolve part, too. Now that scrope.com is back online, dare we hope for new photographs?

While Awstats provides a list of search phrases by which visitors land on these pages, which is interesting as far as it goes, it omits to hotlink the search phrases to the actual searches performed which obscures the corresponding search engine. So I looked at the raw logs for the past week and discovered that no one had reached these pages using Google, but rather through searches at Yahoo! and MSN. One searcher was inhumanly persistent, for my review of Kissing Jessica Stein is the 506th result for a Yahoo! Search for Jessica Westfeldt. Unfortunately, I am on the first page of results for the name Stephen Udvar-Hazy let alone for the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum Center, which suggests I should edit the pages illustrating my January visit there to link to the center’s official home. Far creepier is that someone was searching Yahoo! Japan for piercing by Dr. Evil and thought the page for movie reviews for July 2002 was a likely destination.

If you thought the What’s New page hadn’t been updated in a while, there was a flurry of updates just over a week ago featuring new images and new categories. One photograph I took from the train on the way to New York City while on a family vacation in August of 1979 portrays, according to this dense compilation of facts about Amtrak locomotives, three examples of the inheritance of equipment that the national passenger rail corporation had to work with in the early days: an E-60, a few GG1s, and an E series. Check the menu for train photographs, from the same trip is a shot of the Turbotrain sidelined in Philadelphia.

03 July 2004

The Wednesday arrival of Spider-Man® 2 pushed Mean Girls off of first-run screens locally, but yesterday in its tenth week of release the movie with the red-haired star arrived at the local second-run theater (which may love us but needs to improve the search engine ranking for its web site, there isn’t even an address anywhere)… A sentimental portion of our readership thinks that a nice photograph of myself and a personal greeting to my visitors would be an improvement on the home page over the baffling image of two Windows operating systems trying to repair themselves that’s there now. Self-satisfaction? Friendliness? How much has this visitor read on the site? This is exactly why there’s no e-mail address mailto: link or contact page anywhere…

30 June 2004

Maybe Mozilla 1.7 won’t display UTF-8 in the <title> element of a page on Windows 98, but it will on Windows NT 4. Hmm.

29 June 2004

One of the frames in the roll I just finished in the Minolta Maxxum 700si is this shot of the façade of the new AMC Potomac Mills 18. The movie theater chain has decided locally, in the ninth week of release, to drop the Paramount picture I keep mentioning.

A mature relative has returned from a trip which included a visit to the Saint Louis Union Station mall in Missouri where she took a photograph of an old diesel locomotive on display there (it looks like an F3). When I made my April 1983 trip to Minnesota, I started from the Union Station in Alexandria, Virginia and while I waited, I took two photographs of passing railroad equipment. The equipment and road names were, as it happened, largely on their way out. The original prints of these two photographs blew out the highlights, I have never seen these images with a blue sky before. The single photograph of the Chessie System extended vision caboose inspired my construction in LEGO® elements eighteen years later.

I am finding the automatic image resizing and the button in the cookie dialog of recent releases of Mozilla Suite offering to allow the cookie for the current session only to be very handy. What a shame no one was found to extend the life of the releases for Macintosh in System 9 past version 1.2.1.

Although it’s not a success every time, I can still be amazed at the result when I try to hand-hold a long exposure.

26 June 2004

Installed in the dispiriting environment of Windows 98 Second Edition running in emulation on an old Performa, the Mozilla Firefox browser lacks any immediately noticeable advantage, stylistic or speed-wise, over the Mozilla Seamonkey suite. Even at version 1.7 for the suite and 0.9 for the technology preview of Firefox, <title> elements written in UTF-8 are still not displayed in the programs’s title bar.

24 June 2004

The South African a cappella vocal group mentioned by Cady’s parents in Mean Girls, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, is in the news currently for the death by gunfire of a former member last week in a suburb of Durban.

Takedown, 1:28 a.m. A Fairfax County Police Department K-9 officer, supported by his dog and a helicopter unit and assisted by multiple officers of the Alexandria police, stopped an older model Ford F-150 pick up truck with two suspects inside in the 900 block of Harrison Circle this morning. The driver attempted to flee but was apprehended and subdued on the sidewalk, while the passenger was taken into custody without incident. A paramedic treated the driver for an injury at the scene and the vehicle was searched… so if you see me scrubbing at blood on the sidewalk, you’ll know why. I was reviewing my site statistics after designing an icon for the WAMALUG site which would indicate off-site links when I heard a commotion outside, the helicopter overhead, the dog barking, and the classic demands to get down and don’t move.

23 June 2004

The Building Instructions Portal was contributing a staggering number of hits to my statistics, based on my storage at this domain of the 60×60 icons displayed with each entry of mine in the portal, so having emptied the .html files at my RCN webspace of any useful content (and having deleted all but one of the .htm files) I redirected all the links to the icons from the portal to the files now copied over to the RCN webspace.

Proxy applicances from Blue Coat Systems are your solution for finely granular control of the Internet-based communication in your organization. Look for them at a workplace near you.

I have been reading my paperback Penguin Classics edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls which, from my all-caps inscription inside the back cover, I appear to have purchased on 20 March 1979, a date which turns out to be the Tuesday after the end of spring break that year, my first year of college. I have reached page 102, Chichikov is just mulling his encounter with the nice little wench, and found there a scrap of card suggesting a long-dormant bookmark. Alas, the novel is no more compelling now than it was 25 years ago. How did I fake my way through that class anyway? Certainly the literature is much less fun than the nostalgic trip offered by Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter Biskind.

22 June 2004

When did saying the entire phrase Social Security Number become such a burden that bank employees can only bear to utter the first word?

My review of Napoleon Dynamite gave no special emphasis to the actress playing the popular blonde in the junior class. Yes, she’s the sister of the blonde would-be pop princess I wrote about earlier, and the two of them have collaborated on a cover of a Go-Go’s song. Clearly the identification of a June 16th opening day for the movie A Cinderella Story was optimistic. The pop-up window to start a media player simply nukes Mozilla 1.2.1 on System 9.1 (the page does function to embed RealPlayer 10 on my other computer).

Some visitors to these fine web pages arrive from some rather unexpected hosts. What, for example, is someone at wmata.com doing here? That new machine at the Van Dorn Street station next to the Farecard machines that looks vaguely like a telephone with no handset is a SmarTrip card vending machine. SmarTrip cards will be required to pay for parking at Metro lots starting Sunday, June 27th.

Here’s an interesting take on a phenomenon which has affected my locality as well…

21 June 2004

A Paramount Pictures release that includes the musical signature made familiar by so many home videos on laserdisc and which credits a 17-year-old redhead above the title, with a screenplay by a 1992 graduate of the University of Virginia, has, in its eighth weekend, slipped out of the top ten. (The future 2002 graduate from the drama department pictured working her way through an improv game in the article about the 1992 graduate is herself known for a number of roles including that of Stacy on Daria.) Sometimes one wants to write for Google, other times… you notice I haven’t mentioned any names. MSNbot is visiting. A lot.

20 June 2004

Thursday, 14 May 1987, along US-20 between Arco ( First City In the World To Be Lit By Atomic Power ) and Idaho Falls. When I write in my review of Napoleon Dynamite that there’s something about Idaho that can bring the spirit down this is the day I was thinking of. Lunch in Arco was not a terribly pleasant experience it says in my memoir of the trip.

The entire town was under a sort of dust ball storm, and these collected on the floor of the restaurant. We were given a choice of rooms, but the far room had blue-painted walls, crépe ribbons hanging from the ceiling, and several mannequins wearing bridal gowns along the walls. The food wasn’t too good either.

Ten years ago on this day I rented Joe versus the Volcano (on laserdisc). Five years ago on this day I called relatives in Beograd where they were removing tape from the windows, after the conclusion of the bombardment that year.

Quite a few military Jeeps in this gallery of photographs from a World War II Airshow this month in Reading, Pennsylvania at Venik’s Aviation, including an example from the Navy. How long before this Philadelphian meets the same fate as the Californian proprietor of the former airbag.ca?

19 June 2004

Is it time to vote myself off the island yet?

Advantage: Performa. When setting my hp LaserJet 4200dtn to a task worthy of its capabilities (a consolidated project including over 1,200 sheets printed double-sided) the weak link among the individual PDF files, Acrobat Reader 5, and the monochrome laser printer turned out to be the Windows laptop, which choked repeatedly on generating the job for the page-sized graphics in some of the chapters. By contrast, printing under System 9.1 went so smoothly that I wondered why I had even bothered with the other computer. I spotted an example of the same type of printer in the offices of Al Jazeera in the movie I saw yesterday afternoon. The system requirements for Mozilla 1.7 (newly released at the time of writing) appear to still permit the sorry excuse for a computer to have the latest release of the suite installed, but the system requirements for Adobe Reader 6 exclude all computers in the household.

14 June 2004

How interesting. An unprotected folder at a local event’s website served up as a directory listing of files despite the presence of an index.html file therein reveals an amazing coincidence: a file named 0-2001-folder-icon.gif (compare with the image at this page in my Brickshelf account). I created the folder icon in CorelDraw for my personal use at that account from the original submission of the logo in that file format by Bram Lambrecht which was obtained by me when I was among the volunteers for the event in 2002. I couldn’t help myself from invoking View Source upon visiting the site’s home page and was looking for the file art/studtop_yellow.gif intended as a background for a table cell containing an <h3> element (wrapped in a <font> element anyway, the new webmaster has no greater interest in web standards than the previous one did) because the image was not showing up. It turned out that the art folder doesn’t even exist and I started trying to look in other folders to locate the file. Well, that particular folder wasn’t in the www domain, anyway: see the file in the art folder under the dc subdomain. I wonder if MasterCard knows about this image. I have already been asked and no I am not among those planning to attend. I was asked by someone who no longer appears among those listed as staff.

I am informed, and a WHOIS search confirms upon refreshing, that the wamaltc.org domain is renewed.

13 June 2004

Thanks to the comment at f.u.b.a.r for letting me know that the LL episode of SNL (first shown May first) would be repeated last night. Fey’s GWB impression isn’t bad at all.

12 June 2004

I call a plowed ground alert on this thread at Stephen F. Roberts’s site. Allowing comments on a personal site is not for the weak-hearted. Here’s a sample of what has been written at my MOCpages account:

Trust me im a real humvee + Hummer H1 know it all. Your hmmwv is allmost perfict but for one thing.It is not wide enogh. You probably made it 8 wide becase the real hmmwv is allmost 8 feet wide and im geusing that you made it 15 long becase it is allmost 15 feet long in the real world.Try to make it 10 wide and 17 long and so on.It would make it look more realilistic form the front and back that way.The worst part of your truck is the fornt but I understand that it is the hardest part to make.It shold look better a little wider.One more thing the brush gard on the grill should be taken off becase yours dose not look right it is way way to big. THANK YOU

Where to begin, Adam? I built the HMMWV 8-wide as a consequence of the remarkable coincidence I wrote about earlier. As I pointed out in that dispatch, others have already built 10-wide versions of the HUMVEE, and I am not at all persuaded that these models look better from the front or back than my creation. Lambrecht makes it difficult to get a bead on the front of his design, leaving the front of his military HMMWV in darkness while his civilian version has a brush guard which is too small obscuring the proportions. That’s right, civilian edition (as seen in the photograph) or military, the brush guard is the full width of the vehicle. (To be fair, Lambrecht does supply a multi-part file for building his model, so speculation about the creation’s proportions is unnecessary.) I eyeball the grille on the protoype as 3× the width of a headlight, so the fact that the grille on my creation is only 2× the width could be seen as a problem, but consider that the grille is only about one-third of the vehicle’s width, so the proportion of widths of 2:8 (0.25) on my creation strikes me as better than the 4:10 (0.4) on Lambrecht and Garcia’s models. Don’t forget that a 10-wide model won’t fit in a lane even on the newest road plates from LEGO® and would, at that size, overpower a model of a tank built using the traditional Technic Link Tread (3873). Plus the minifigs inside would lose their sense of how cramped the interior of a HMMWV is. But thanks for playing.

WAMALUG has its next meeting tomorrow. See, publicity. You won’t find that at a site which uses height and width attributes to create the thumbnail on its front page. You won’t find id attributes at that other site, either, so look for the entry for May 28-38, 2004 .

The entrance to the AMC Potomac Mills 15 in 1995; the theater closed when its 18-house replacement opened.

The last time I was at a Springfield Mall cinema seems to have been on June 28, 1987 for Full Metal Jacket. Visiting again for the first time after the takeover from General Cinema by American Multi-Cinema didn’t evoke any particular memories. The long staircase to the theaters in the basement, the seven-foot ceilings down there, and the red lighting over the seats on the sides of the house, coupled with the low turn-out for the 9:50 p.m. screening of a top-ten release in its seventh week made me wonder why it’s kept open at all. The theaters at Skyline Mall were closed as part of the construction of a new Target store there, so maybe the pressure on the Hoffman Center 22 is too much to give up just yet. Hoyts Cinemas seems to have sold its theaters in the area to Regal Entertainment Group.

For those highway-rail grade crossings which remain, there’s Operation Lifesaver.

11 June 2004

The Northern Pacific depot on Main Street in Fargo, North Dakota was renovated and dedicated as a Senior Center in 1984 on the proceeds of bricks purchased by volunteers. When I visited relatives in the area in April the next year, I was the first member of the Hannaher family to actually find the bricks bearing the names of my grandparents in the plaza .

10 June 2004

I surprised myself with how much I disliked the French romance currently at theaters but it’s not like I cannot enjoy a movie where people get hurt or die. Case in point: The Hospital. I first saw this bitter comedy, starring George C. Scott and Diana Rigg, which depicts life in a Manhattan hospital, on local channel 20 in 1981 when I was a patient just out of intensive care and assigned to the cardiac floor at a local hospital and thought it was just about the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I’m told one can just briefly see the actual name of the working medical institution where it was filmed, although I haven’t been able to figure out which scene that is. There is an acknowledgment to a New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, so it’s not a complete secret, and the movie concludes with an image of the classic, dark green and white, NYPD cruiser. I bought a Key Video Beta videocassette in 1990 and the laserdisc in 1997. The title is currently available on DVD.

08 June 2004

The Fairfax County Police Department reports in an update of five sentences mostly in the passive voice to its previous report of the larceny of the Legs Folded sculpture that a search of an apartment in the Herndon area (just south of the toll road) led to the recovery of numerous stolen items, including the sculpture.

07 June 2004

The power of coincidence… not a day after I uploaded photographs of items in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, there is a post at Lugnet announcing the construction of a Convair XFY-1 Pogo in LEGO® elements. This aircraft caught my eye on my first visit to the facility in Suitland, Maryland in 1986.

Lileks features some railroad logo history at a page in his series of matchbook covers. One reason he might not notice waiting for trains anymore is the massive undertaking in this country over what seems like the past 40 years to separate the transportation systems by removing grade crossings. Trains pass through my locality all the time, massively long freights of the CSX, commuter trains of the VRE, and speeding Amtrak passenger trains, but it seems like I would have to go a ways west or south before coming across a grade crossing.

06 June 2004

The tenth-anniversary edition Clerks DVD is due this September… The director of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! has a book out in November… Speaking of critics who can’t pay attention at the movies, my use of the phrase presumably in some suburb of Chicago in a review for a certain movie currently in its sixth week of release should be replaced by Evanston (the character Cady Heron says so in her first visit to a bathroom stall for lunch). I made my first visit to the new AMC Potomac Mills 18 and couldn’t decide on anything newer or longer…

Photographs from the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility on the occasion of my visits there in 1986 and 1988 are now scanned and available. My memory is that my visit to the open house on April 27, 1986 included kind treatment by employee Janice Hill upon her observation of the excitement of myself and a companion reacting to the discovery of the Paramount miniature of the Klingon vessel in a cabinet. The Silver Hill Museum was renamed in 1980. Public tours began in 1977 and the first open house was in 1983 but with the preparation and opening of the Udvar-Hazy Center the facility no longer offers even the public tours. I don’t have good evidence for the date of the open house in 1988 but I have provisionally assigned it the date of April 9, 1988. The gallery of photographs has some educational value, as I have where possible linked to a description of the aircraft at the site of the National Air and Space Museum.

05 June 2004

The most prolific photographer in WAMALUG has, at the time of writing, yet to make public any of his photographs from the May meeting of the local LEGO® user’s group. The expected location of his gallery for the May meeting. The expected location of his Brickshelf gallery. He’s been busy, though, photographing the General Dynamics President’s Technology Awards dinner where he received one of the awards and managed to get into one of his own photographs and Anime Mid-Atlantic 4 where he comprehensively documented the costumes and cosplay. If one were in a Watch Your Back mood, these two might satisfy. (I’ve done what I can to strip the particular default resource from the href attribute in the links to the two main photo galleries, I spent most of yesterday afternoon addressing the fact that we still get visitors at wamalug.org/index.htm because a web page last updated in 1999 links to the club’s site by specifying that particular file.) The photographs from Anime Mid-Atlantic remind me of my own camera-toting attendance at Star Trek conventions like Shore Leave in the 1980s. Shore Leave is a fan-run science fiction convention which has scheduled its twenty-sixth operation for next month. Ten years ago, I would have been looking forward to seeing, hearing, and photographing Nicole deBoer and Chase Masterson (two of the scheduled guests in July) but the alternatives of a lengthy daily drive and a costly hotel room no longer have any appeal. The image of the Vulcan with a slight smile on his face and his hand on the shoulder of a game fellow convention-goer is a souvenir of Shore Leave 6 in 1984.

Another WAMALUG personality, the founder of the users group, recently changed his web site wildlink.com from PHP-Nuke to b2evolution. My occasional visit (sometimes daily) from my link to his site on the Diversions page (sorry, no purple anchors to guide you to the exact <li> element with that link) is enough to put me in the top 10 referers, but from some of the company I keep there, I hope he has Antispam Deluxe installed. I mean, really, who is visiting him from http://www.wamalug.org/archives/index_old.htm? Which, I realize now, thanks to the addressing I refer to in the previous paragraph, is a file that no longer exists. Sweet! Plus, I’m sure its just a coincidence how we have styled the <blockquote> element.

02 June 2004

Hooray for Target… and at a discount, too. The previous weekend I’d seen Jane Austen’s Mafia, Disturbing Behavior, and Saving Private Ryan, while the next weekend I would see BASEketball and π, but the week that the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap opened (on a Wednesday along with The Negotiator) I skipped going to the movies altogether. Long overdue.

01 June 2004

Last month I saw more movies than in any month since December, 2001. A remarkable seven theaters contributed to this spike in interest: Cinema Arts Theatres 6, AMC Hoffman Center 22, Fairfax Corner 14: Cinema De Lux, AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, University Mall Theatres 3, Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema 8, and Visions Cinema. That doesn’t even count the, er, at least one repeat visit for a certain Paramount release. Unfortunately, I read that the featured 17 year-old is a smoker.

When my Serbian-langauge site map uses the word помоћ ( help ), not everyone grasps in which direction such help is supposed to flow.

30 May 2004

MTA bus on Shawan Road on June 9, 2000. Route 8 travels between the Hunt Valley Mall and downtown Baltimore.

An undisclosed but apparently wealthy suburb ? Do critics for Washington City Paper keep their eyes closed when reviewing a movie? How many Maryland license plates, and buses bearing the notation BALTIMORE COUNTY on them, are needed to wake one up? Those details aside, no actual Maryland scenery seems to have been involved in the filming of Saved! From the looks of it, no actual Maryland Transit Administration bus paint scheme made it to the shooting location, either.

29 May 2004

Fujicolor Super HG 1600 film on March 1, 1998 at the AMC Rivertowne in Oxon Hill.

Montgomery County, Maryland Department of Police Media Services Division Archived Crime Summaries for 2004. Prince George’s County, Maryland Police Department News Releases. Metropolitan Police Department for the District of Columbia News Room. For our pals across the Potomac.

26 May 2004

The AOL City Guide for Washington, D.C. entry for the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival in Reston last weekend used a phrase (based on the Google cache of the page, excerpted in the image) which, in retrospect, may have been inappropriate: Scoop up some stellar artwork. According to a Washington Post article today, someone did just that, stealing the sculpture Legs Folded by picking up the life-size, bikini-clad, painted polymer resin image of a 21 year-old human female and carrying her away. The sculptor, Marc Sijan, was written up in the September/October 1998 issue of Serb World U.S.A. but the Post does not report on his ethnicity.

The news releases of the Fairfax County Police Department are in .doc format, including the release for Larceny of a Lifesized Statue issued yesterday. The document opens in WordPerfect without much trouble and happens to include an image which appears small on the page, but when saved separately to a file and opened in a graphics editing program offers decent resolution. (I have slightly cropped and resampled the 748×1175 pixel image for display on this page.) Fairfax County is a large jurisdiction, but seeing the titles of the releases arrayed like that is disconcerting especially as I recognize many of the locations. Alexandria makes you dig to find out what happened in each daily incident report but at least each report is delivered as HTML. Hmm… seems like there was a prisoner escape on the thirteenth… something my employer forgot to mention. I do not envy the officer working the AMC Hoffman Center 22 late yesterday who was called to House #11 to have a friendly chat with the loud unemployables in front.

25 May 2004

It is my feebly researched opinion that Brickshelf does not work in the legacy browser Netscape Navigator 3.0+. The presence of the show_ads.js file will crash the old browser on the Macintosh regardless of the user’s choice of reaction to the download prompt, and the Windows version of the browser is only barely more functional. One is left to wonder just what other legacy browsers were in mind that made their abandonment by the Brickshelf Viewer so problematic.

June thirteenth is a Sunday? What kind of clueless volunteer webmaster does the local LEGO® user’s group have, anyway, that would get that wrong? I think we know the answer to that question. Sorry about that, guys. Users of browsers with known aggressive penchants for caching should refresh.

23 May 2004

Wouldn’t it be something if Brickshelf had an offsite status blog? My host has a server uptime and status page but if it wasn’t for BlackICE PC Protection’s panicky reaction to the favicon when I log into cPanel, I still wouldn’t know specifically which server I was on, and not even that is good enough for diveintomark.org. It might cut down on these sorts of posts at LUGNET.

What part of There are no plans for a second run could be made clearer? Sorry, Melbourne, but my proposal at the meeting earlier this month garnered no attention. We are told that the Manassas Heritage Railway Festival will go on this year (Saturday, June 5th) without an exhibit from WAMALUG or WamaLTC. Was membership in an international organization of LEGO® train clubs worth it? Eight months into their term, and still no reaction to the silence of our representatives to that august body (other than my rant on 11 February).

Samuel Goldwyn Films offers for the movie Stateside a download of a Press Kit (a lifesaver document, as the scrolling facility in the otherwise Flash-based site is mired in geologic time) and of four photographs. I wanted to include one of the photographs on this site, yes, yes, one of Rachael Leigh Cook, never mind that now, but resampling the huge 300dpi image down to a 96dpi thumbnail didn’t come out so pretty. I see I’m not the only one who’s had this happen to me, does Lindsay Lohan look vaguely Romulan in the image included with the review of Mean Girls at Filmgoing in Kansas City?

22 May 2004

I tore up the envelope because the company name sounded like it was in another line of business, but Good Impressions is actually a source of parts for NEC printers. The correspondence was as a follow-up to my purchase of an ozone filter for the NEC SilentWriter2 Model 90, sufficiently long ago that I didn’t recognize the name, but as reported earlier (I should be supplying id attributes to all the <p> elements I suppose) I no longer use that NEC printer.

At first I thought it was a Toyota commercial I was seeing at the AMC movie theater this month. It didn’t take too long before I recognized the voice at the end conveying the pitch for Goodyear Assurance tires as that of Patrick Stewart, known for his roles in I, Claudius and Dune. Or for some other roles over the years. An Akron, Ohio television station reports on the activity of the locally based company. I drove on Goodyear Aquatred tires in the Mazda 626 even though mounting such long-lived tires on an old car often came as a surprise to the tire shop. The music sounds much like the work of Hans Zimmer for The Peacemaker.

From the first person to post to LUGNET on Friday the fourteenth about the curious images of a previously unknown set in a folder at Brickshelf (newsflash: nothing at Brickshelf remains a secret) taken on the thirteenth to the official announcement of the new set and confirmation of its availability to ordinary folk on Monday to the order at the LEGO® Shop At Home site that night to its delivery late yesterday evening and its assembly this morning… has taken 8 days, and the person building it for the photographs on the box was in a rush, too, as the bricks and stickers are crooked.

21 May 2004

Today’s theme is loss of sanity, thanks to Rachael Leigh Cook and her turn as an adorable actress-rock star with schizophrenia in Stateside and some blonde would-be pop princess whose CD single has a copyright notice so emphatic I dare not quote any of the text like the title… d’oh! The word text is on the jacket! (In the course of the single, the performer asks the rain to wash away her sanity.) Anyway, good to know that Command-Shift-3 still works under these circumstances.

20 May 2004

So fetch you’ve got to see it again says the advertisement. Yes, I have.

19 May 2004

The President of Brickshelf announced a password recovery form. This is a start. I finally figured out what e-mail address I used to establish my Brickshelf account years ago, but the e-mail created by the form will bounce as that domain has expired in the meantime. I look forward to the day when a full panoply of account management tools is announced.

The allure of the Asian-American Aja, guitarist for Jem and the Holograms, predates Asia Carrera and Lucy Liu. Enjoy the inline rectangle size for advertising on the web.

18 May 2004

The Washington Oculus catches up with the issue of escalator usage in our local subway. One talking point I would like to add to yesterday’s dispatch is that I don’t ask combinations of a parent and a child to move over to let me pass, but instead I move to the right and stand behind them. Moving across a step sideways without being able to hang on to a handrail is just too chancy a thing to ask of a child and there’s no good answer to whether a parent might better stand in front of or behind such a child.

I’ve just finished a book (The End of Detroit) about the decline of American nameplates in the automotive industry which mentions that someone of my age and my income is considered the ideal customer for a Lexus. So why am I happy with a Ford Focus? Besides the affordability issue, that is. Who knows? Just another mystery of the mind of Constantine… ¿A quien le importa lo que yo haga? Someone came up to me in Fischer’s Hardware this very evening, having seen me get out of my Egg Yolk Yellow ZX5, to ask my opinion because this person was considering a second car for around town to complement a Toyota Avalon. I was positive, remember, 2002 model year or later.

Internet Explorer for Windows is having some problem displaying the text of these dispatches when run maximized on a 1600×1200 display. If you know someone using that browser who brings this up, and talking about Mozilla and Firefox has yet to have any effect, tell that person to hit the Restore button.

The personal webspace of Erol’s customers seemed like it could be found at the URL of another RCN property, interport.net, for example, http://users.interport.net/s/s.godjevac/, but the domain is not resolving now. I’m hanging on to my Starpower account as backup to the Comcast connection at home (which was needed once) and for their expansion of local telephone numbers to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area.

How could I forget? The complete first and second seasons of Jem and the Holograms are now available as a DVD box set. Truly Outrageous! The 12-inch dolls were unusual at the time for their ability to stand unassisted. Just experimenting with a standard size ( skyscraper ) for advertising on the web.

17 May 2004

Today’s Washington Post reports in a page A1 article on the subject of tourists standing on the left side of the steps on the escalators in the local subway system, Metro. (Link subject to decay or requirement for registration.) (Via Swamp City and LiveJournal user kestrel127.) One talking point I have on this subject is that the speed of the escalators has been reduced over the years so much that it is now faster to stop the escalator and have everybody walk than it is to stand on a moving escalator. Would these tourists assert a right to stand and block a staircase? I hope not. Then why stand and block a slow-moving escalator?

Wired News reports on a PowerPC emulator which permits running Apple’s OS X on a machine with an Intel or AMD processor chip. (Via LiveJournal user monkey.) A curiosity for now, as a 233 MHz Pentium with less than 400 megabytes free is not going to support this use.

16 May 2004

What a shame that, over one month into his 6-month term after the election on April 11th, the new Director of Public Relations for WAMALUG has yet to have an opportunity to show that he can write.

The royal wedding of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Miss Mary Elizabeth Donaldson of Australia last Friday had absolutely nothing to do with my pulling out the DVD of Smilla’s Sense of Snow to accompany the ironing this morning. (They were both set in Copenhagen.) And it is sheer coincidence that Tom Wilkinson portrays a suspicious professor therein, when the other DVD I played this weekend was Girl with a Pearl Earring (in which Wilkinson plays Vermeer’s patron). And no part of this paragraph has anything to do with the previous paragraph.

There’s no danger of cat blogging taking over these dispatches. A newly scanned photograph of one favorite feline, however, is now available at another subdomain at this site.

Spencer Rezkalla has added a Mustang to his MOCpages.com account. I count only one part that is not available anywhere in the LDraw system (including the Parts Tracker) but maybe I built it wrong… ;-)

15 May 2004

Um, apropos of nothing, but—in Mean Girls, what was the math teacher’s third job?

From the sound of phaser fire blanketing the Indian Run valley this afternoon, I’d say that the local emergence of Brood X has occurred.

09 May 2004

The inside of a McDonald’s may no longer have any attraction for me, but the buildings and signage have been a part of the landscape for decades now. From May 23, 1995, a sunny afternoon along US-50 just west of Annandale Road where the restaurant had hung on to the over … billions served type of sign with the maximum numerical value of 99 even as most of the others had switched to the billions and billions served type of sign which didn’t require any labor to change the numbers as time went on.

The replacement lens seems to have gotten the Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi working properly again. I dropped the digital camera in February and all subsequent images were overexposed (no longer stopping down upon taking an exposure was my guess). Estimator 8444 at Konica Minolta Photo Imaging U.S.A., Inc. Camera Division billed me the standard rate of $200 and Technician 502 had the camera back to me in just under a month. By the way, sending an e-mail to the President of Brickshelf has never gotten me an answer, so let’s just say I am disappointed that the .zip files I create in Stuffit Deluxe 6.5.1 no longer satisfy the Brickshelf site and I appreciate uploading sixty photographs one at a time.

06 May 2004

The Stanford Prison Experiment (via Rafe Colburn) was a 1971 simulation of prison life intended to study its psychological effects on prisoners and their guards. It’s highly inappropriate to do so, but I found this description of the volunteers’ taking to guard life very funny:

Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work.

Employers dream of such commitment. The experiment, planned for 2 weeks, was ended after 6 days in view of …ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners and a visiting Ph.D.’s outraged reaction to a toilet run that involved bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's shoulders. The site is updated to note parallels to prisoner abuse in Iraq.

05 May 2004

The link anchor text in yesterday’s dispatch exaggerated the drama involved—the photographs at Jon Palmer’s site from the time of BrickFest 2004 PDX are merely (potentially) embarrassing to one or more of their subjects, not the stuff of international opprobrium. But a reporter in today’s Style section of The Washington Post used pretty much the same phrase to describe the photographs from Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq, so I thought I should clarify.

Spooky. Some of the lyrics to Thalia’s A Quién Le Importa (which the jacket on the CD of its original release renders as a question, thus ¿A Quién Le Importa? using U+00BF) might as well serve as a colophon for me. Quizá la culpa es mia / Por no seguir la norma / Ya es demasiado tarde / Para cambiar ahora… Thing is, I don’t much like the rest of the compilation, and I really don’t like Track 12.

New LEGO® sets not only have new colors, but new places of manufacture. Korea and Sweden join Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic with this week’s purchase. I had to add another field to the Paradox database I use to keep track of purchases (and add Sweden to the lookup list of countries).

04 May 2004

Maybe it’s why her website went without updates for so long. Charlotte Geary is engaged. Go congratulate her.

Someone in LUCNY may have a soft spot for the movie UHF.

Some photographs for which it might have been better that they had never seen the light of day. The link is to a page with a table-based layout and no id= attributes to serve as targets, so a visitor must scroll or search for the name of the new Chairman of WAMALUG. Now we now where this cropped version came from and why it was so… flattering. Keep scrolling to see why, if you’re too drunk to focus, it’s best to put the camera down. The default resource at asphodel.org is the very model of reticence, but the site hosts Bram Lambrecht’s Brickshelf Viewer.

Mean Girls is described as having the best opening for a Paramount Pictures release in 2 years. That must include, make that it definitely includes, Star Trek Nemesis. While I haven’t bought the DVD of the lamest, most disastrous Star Trek movie ever, I did notice that a Super Audio Compact Disc of the soundtrack is available. I have outlived a number of audio and video formats which have been found at Tower Records over the years. Which is not to say that SACD will follow Beta, Laserdisc, 8mm, and Mini Disc.

A mature OS X-using relative claims to have just discovered that pressing Option enables typing a whole new set of characters from the keyboard. My guess that this feature was discoverable since at least System 6 with the Key Caps desktop accessory turns out to have been… inadequate. Key Caps was a part of the original Macintosh, System 1.0.

03 May 2004

About a month after I pointed to Ghostzilla in a January dispatch the program’s author decided that making the program available was irresponsible.

Are you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer? Everything in a dispatch I wrote 11 months ago when I passed along the news that development on that browser was over is still true. Besides the download location for the latest Mozilla application suite release linked to in that dispatch, there was the link to the site of the User Agent Switcher for Firebird and Mozilla in my December 6th dispatch, a pointer to the site mozdev.org in my dispatch for November 18th, and a link to the Mozilla Foundation in my dispatch of July 16th. Because I do not make much use of bookmarks what with all the computers available here and the dizzying variety of browsers installed thereon, a big feature of Mozilla which has the power to captivate escaped my attention before: the ability to bookmark a group of tabs. Don’t forget the ability to view Portable Network Graphics files in all their alpha-channel masking goodness.

What LEGO® describes as the last elements made available in the old colors of light grey, dark grey, and brown arrived today. The bags each have a different EAN code and a different Item number but all include a ®2002 marking. LEGO® still does not charge sales tax for its shipments. Lands’ End now does charge sales tax on its shipments, so that’s one record-keeping responsibilty for the purposes of consumer’s use tax removed. (The sourceid=mozilla-search part of that Google search I have linked to is a marker of another handy feature of Mozilla and its ilk—searching from the Location field.)

01 May 2004

Finally track 11 rewards my random guesswork in purchasing Thalia’s Greatest Hits CD on a whim at Target and my patience in listening to the first ten tracks: A Quién Le Importa is the energetic song I’ve heard from time to time on local Spanish-language radio station WBZS-FM Mega 92.7 .

I wrote my opinion of the new movie Mean Girls while listening to the soundtrack of Heathers with the score by David Newman. While establishing Winona Ryder as a star and giving Shannen Doherty a boost (she’s been working so long, she can be seen on capacitance videodisc) that movie did nothing for the other members of the cast playing the high school-ruling clique. Yikes! One is already dead.

28 April 2004

Seeing locomotives of the CSX and the Norfolk Southern connected together in the same train is just… weird. The Norfolk Southern Dash 9-C40W bearing road number 9337 has been extensively photographed.

Maybe a valid business reason is that the USPTO is to cease supplying paper copies of U. S. patents and U. S. patent applications with office actions (PDF). Do you think?

Brr. Ok, it was windy last night. Blew the bus transfer right out of my jacket pocket. I’m trying to get by on one tank of gasoline this month, so now that the trip odometer is past 355 miles it’s back to shopping for groceries on foot this week. Not everyone out waiting for a bus was prepared for the sudden drop in temperature. I don’t expect anyone from Minnesota to understand the concept of doing without a car. :-)

The containers that WamaLTC built in 2002 continue to pop up. Thanks, Joe, for the close-up on 4505 at a recent NCLTC show and thanks, too, to some other guy who doesn’t need any more Google juice for this close-up of 4508 at a recent MichLTC show.

23 April 2004

Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself.

Philosophy from a television series, yes. But a mother’s work is never done, eh?

21 April 2004

An advertisement on the subway for Zipcar spotted this morning featured the Lincoln Futura, and it turns out that currently the first result in a Google search for lincoln futura is a page at The Original 1966 Batmobile website. The second result shows that I was not the only one for whom the origins of the Batmobile used in the 1966 television series were originally a mystery. The author of The Official Batman Batbook largely omitted any reference to the vehicle, and expressed disinterest when this omission was pointed out. (Not the only reason Adam West might have had to add Un- to the book’s title upon autographing it in 1988.) Finding the 1955 Lincoln Futura pictured in Dream Cars, a coffee table book I bought in 1984, had allowed the pieces to fall into place for me. It is chilling to have it confirmed that not only is the Batmobile built for the television series which debuted to much hoopla early in 1966 (with me still in kindergarten) based on the show car of a decade earlier (Barris applied for a design patent within months of the series’ premiere), it is the Futura cut into and sculpted upon. Still, with the wheel wells opened up and the body painted a glossy black, it was the epitome of dash at the time.

20 April 2004

Yes, summer has arrived. Temperatures in the eighties! Yesterday morning’s ride on the subway was an eye-opener. There was one passenger who reminded me of someone I met first semester at U.Va while volunteering at the student radio station WTJU (now with new studio location, new transmitter location, and new frequency). A little searching in the alumni directory once I had remembered her name and on Google with her married name and I see she is now a trustee of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. She wouldn’t be the only graduate of the Class of 1982 who could be considered well off, but I’ll console myself that I have at least one fan for my designs in LEGO® in India (he’s mentioned in this 1999 article in Business Week as an 11-year-old lover of computers and building with LEGO®). I can’t publish any photograph of this long-ago acquaintance so I’ve dug up a frame from the same album, the same year. August 15, 1978, and the Main Street movie theater in Sauk Centre, Minnesota is still playing Star Wars. Incredibly, the Main Street movie theater is still in business! It’s a four-plex now.

Following up my renewed attention to the Building Instructions Portal earlier this month, I have turned to my account at MOCpages by adding pages devoted to my HMMWV, the HUMMER H2, and the HUMMER H1. MOCpages is set up to automate the importation of images in support of a single creation from only one Brickshelf folder. To add images to the page from another Brickshelf folder and have the captions appear alongside, the way I have done to show photographs of my HMMWV in addition to the POV-RAY renders, requires a knowledge of HTML somewhat in excess of the tips offered by the site in a pop-up window during the editing process. Did a certain comrade complain about this knowledge requirement a few months ago? Ah, the tyranny of relying on Dreamweaver. But being limited to HTML 3.2 makes for some heavy lifting. I am so happy I’m not using tables for layout on any personal project anymore. Yikes! Does MOCpages now host the thumbnails and use the e-mail address login as a folder name, readable in the clear in View Source?

My complaints about how LPub works are but the faintest echo of how John Gruber rips into how the UI of open source software gets designed. Make no mistake, LPub is not open-source software, but it is a UI wrapper around the command line tool L3P (and not the only one, either).

18 April 2004

Marksman adds the Avenger configuration to his Brickshelf gallery of HUMVEE models based on my instructions.

The Avenger Pedestal Mounted Stinger system is a lightweight, mobile and transportable surface-to-air missile and gun weapon system, mounted on a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV).

GlobalSecurity.org, a locally based organization, offers a page which can help make sense of all the different HMMWV configurations. The organization’s news archive also includes a Voice of America dispatch about Saturday’s deadly firefight between nationalities in the U. N. peacekeeping forces stationed in a compound in Mitrovica.

17 April 2004

Oops! I have uploaded a corrected set of instructions for the c.1930 Studebaker because I discovered in creating a POV-RAY render that the Tile 1 × 1 with Groove (3070b) I was using as a license plate at the back was on backwards.

The façade of Public School 144 (Queens) as it appeared when I traveled to New York City in 1979.

The Ungovernable City is such a compendium of strikes, riots, and student uprisings that it makes it sound like a wonder that anyone stayed at all. The first strike of the UFT is described as happening in September 1967 (second grade). The second strike (considered the first of the season, third grade) is described as starting Monday, September 9, 1968 and lasting through Tuesday. The third strike (the second of the season) is described as starting Friday, September 13, 1968, with schools reopening Monday, September 30. The fourth strike (the third of the season) is described as starting October 14, 1968, and extending until the strike was over and all teachers returned on Tuesday, November 19. I can’t imagine that at age 8 I understood the situation which caused the strike (an experimental school district in Brooklyn embroiled in racial conflict and charges of anti-Semitism and other prejudices) and it’s apparent my parents didn’t know that schools outside of that district remained unlocked and teachers were running classes anyway because this must have been the interim school we did eventually learn about. And, yes, we did laugh when we first saw Sleeper. Was Mrs. Lilian able to teach me anything that season? Don’t carry scissors pointy end out.

Marksman has kept at it, adding a M1026 Armament Carrier configuration to his Brickshelf gallery of HUMVEE models based on my instructions. This builder really, really likes the configurations with the self-recovery winch.

My frustrating and ultimately fruitless effort to install the two networked Hewlett-Packard printers in the Windows 98 Second Edition running inside SoftWindows 98 5.1 on the Performa a while ago turns out to have been pointless as well, and today’s reconnection of the decrepit NEC SilentWriter2 Model 90 was unnecessary. The Insignia (!) printer driver calls the regular dialog of the printing system on the Macintosh side, from which any available printer can be chosen. D’oh! It’s slow, but it works. How come I never tried it before? Now if only I could get it to recognize CDs while SoftWindows is running…

16 April 2004

No sooner had I uploaded yesterday’s dispatch than I learned that the author of LPub had just updated the file available for download at his eponymous site. Notwithstanding what the documentation still available at that site might say, LPub is able to handle MPD files. Which is good, since they’re about the only kind of LDraw file I write these days.

I uploaded the instructions to build the 8-wide High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HUMVEE) almost a month ago, and it looks like someone in Canada whose Brickshelf account name is Marksman and who is a visitor to MonLUG displays liked it enough to build the HMMWV in a variety of body styles. The Federation of American Scientists offers a page which can help make sense of the series numbers and body configurations. I uploaded updated instructions addressing the drivetrain tunnel enlargement and other issues, but not yet uploaded anywhere are the instructions which include an exhaust along the driver’s side. Share and enjoy. A low-key post to lugnet.build.military alerting its followers to the adaptation awaits any response.

The new Chairman of WAMALUG is a Comrade of the blue-shirted folks at rtlToronto. Now we know where she got the idea that the WAMALUG members’ page should include photographs of individuals, or that WAMALUG should actively generate publicity for its activities.

What’s the point anymore? Still, I like experimenting with the camera settings in LPub. Also, the Canadian changed the grille to horizontal slats, and this is an unseemly change in view of the anguish the vertically slatted grille gave Daimler Chrysler when they failed to prevail last year in their trademark infringement suit against General Motors over its design of the H2 grille. The instructions for the HMMWV which I have already uploaded and which I used for the renders up to now has a one LDU (LEGO® Distance Unit) error in the placement of the front subassembly.

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Completing the roll of film in the Minolta Maxxum 7 by taking pictures of my Hummer vehicles and one MonLUG-inspired SUV at the April 10th meeting of WAMALUG allows me to add four additional images to the gallery of my visit to the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Only the Ford Tri-Motor represents a new view of the museum possessions.

15 April 2004

Wait for the walk signal before crossing the street. Pedestrians at the crosswalk across Diagonal Road at King Street Station must listen to this mechanically-produced, endlessly repeated admonition now that the crosswalk is controlled by a traffic signal. Surely drivers could benefit from a phrase targeting them every few seconds? Something like: Wait for the green light before plowing through the crosswalk.

I gave LPub a try last night. (Don’t be misled by the existence of a kclague.net domain with pages purporting to offer a download of LPub and to document its operation. That software and that documentation is out of date. LPub lacks any mention on the lugnet.cad homepage and interestingly, a search at ldraw.org for LPub yields a single result for downloads which leads to the old page.) Without having bought LEGO Software Power Tools and relying only on the single page of instructions and troubleshooting information at the download site, I found the operation of the program lacked feedback and was generally opaque as to process flow. For example, I had not set the path and set LDRAWDIR statements that L3P requires (plus I had installed L3P one folder deeper than expected) but instead of returning the DOS error Bad command or file name or otherwise halting the program, LPub allowed POV-RAY to launch and it was this other program, not finding the file it was expecting, that provided an error message. Once L3P and POV-RAY were communicating, and a render had been performed, neither LPub nor POV-RAY made it apparent how the image created is saved. It turns out, upon inspecting the relevant folder, that LPub saves the images on its own initiative, with no notice and no opportunity to choose another folder or adjust the filename to avoid a conflict, for example. Anyway, my first attempts to use LPub resulted in images of the 1912 S&M Simplex and the 8-wide HMMWV.

14 April 2004

The Windows 98 Second Edition running in emulation on the old Performa kept crashing every time I tried to export a picture from the multi-part file of my Breda manufacturer adaptation of the Metrorail cars that the President of Brickshelf designed back in 2001 so, after a discouraging Blue Screen of Death this morning and yet another full run of ScanDisk this evening, I have resorted to the Print Screen key on the keyboard. A cross-platform paste of the clipboard into Corel Photo-Paint 10 on the Macintosh side and a 1024×744 screenshot of MLCad’s display of the file is exported to JPEG and uploaded to Brickshelf. Perhaps someone with a sturdier system will take pity and do some exports. No one else in the club I have talked to reports having so much instability in MLCad, but I am certainly chary of ever installing the program on a real Windows box. Also, the 438 pieces MLCad reports for an individual car turns out to be an undercount because of the many sub-models I used to simplify creating the file (the .mpd is half the size of the .ldr file I created last year for the same model), most of which are used repeatedly. My best guess as to the part count for an individual car is just over 600 pieces. Not including stickers. :-)

There’s an internal newsletter at work which usually ends with the phrase Think Big, Start Small… Then Scale! but what does it mean that Brickshelf has over twenty thousand user accounts?

13 April 2004

Rain and wind are not a pleasant combination, and the Monday screening of Професионалац (The Professional) was sold out by the time I reached the theater. Tickets had been on sale since April second. Then I got caught up in authoring the Metrorail cars in MLCad and struggling with the LDraw matrix and I seem to have slept through my alarm this morning… Much calculation of sines later, the multi-part file authored directly in MLCad is completed, reflecting (only) 438 pieces per car, but the combination of MLCad 3.00 and Windows 98 Second Edition running in emulation on an old Performa is so flaky that Explorer crashed, hard, before exporting a picture. What’s really annoying is that Second Edition will run the full ScanDisk including disk surface scan after every time that Explorer crashes, not just when the Shut Down process fails to complete.

10 April 2004

If I don’t think about it much, Dogville makes an interesting double bill with The Girl Next Door (2004 edition). A winsome lead character with blonde hair, a minor character named Athena , an earnest moralizer with a rescue fixation, an unconventional past that still holds its attractions…

09 April 2004

Too bad the first review of my Hummer H2 at the Building Instructions Portal is anonymous, lacking even the city and state which might suggest a LEGO® employee writing:

I love it! It’s simple without compromising on detail. The best minifig scale hummer I’ve seen yet!

(I have quoted the review in full because reviews have been known to… disappear. Oops, today the second review of my United States Postal Service truck is back.)

08 April 2004

There are no jury trials scheduled for Friday in Alexandria.

After almost a year of inattention, I have just added more links to my instructions at the Building Instructions Portal. A quick rundown of the selection in the category of Vehicles suggests that interest in my United States Postal Service truck (based on the number of click-throughs to the instruction file posted on Brickshelf) is second only to James Mathis’ WWYM Cargo Truck. As an experiment, I created a set of images of instructions to build the Norfolk Southern Top Gon to accompany the multi-part file. I have also shifted the location of the 60 × 60 pixel icons from Brickshelf to a folder at hannaher.net.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to any of the screenings, but The Prism: The New Cinema from Serbia and Montenegro presented by the Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro is playing at Visions Cinema next week with seven films of very recent vintage.

07 April 2004

There is a three-page advertisement in today’s The Washington Post for the 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid unveiled today at the auto show in New York. Viewed on its own merits as a car-based SUV, the Escape has seemed to offer little more than ride height over the Focus I already have, but I measured the tailgate at the auto show in Washington last December and it’s wide enough for those club layout tables I keep mentioning. The gas mileage and range would be about what I was used to with the 626. My only concern is the electronically controlled continuously variable transmission (eCVT) because I find driving with an automatic transmission less congenial than driving with a manual transmission. (The standard gasoline Escape offers a manual transmission only in the most basic, two wheel drive, trim line.) The photograph of the interior shows a floor-mounted shift lever, like all 2005 Escapes, with P-R-N-D visible.

I have been inspired by the SUVs which were on display at a show put on by MonLUG early this month to build and adapt. I suspect the creator of this assortment of vehicles as seen on Brickshelf is responsible.

06 April 2004

There are no jury trials scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday in Alexandria.

People are watching. The very night I posted to Brickshelf instructions and two images exported from MLCad for the Hummer H2 I built last month, a guest blogger on the blog of Jake McKee’s Building Instructions Portal posted a positive reaction. I wonder how he knew the identity of the holder of the Brickshelf account channaher? Thanks, Tim.

05 April 2004

There are no jury trials scheduled for Tuesday in Alexandria.

So let me get this straight. The proposed schedule of WAMALUG meetings distributed at the November meeting last year left the April meeting scheduled for the second Sunday as required by the Bylaws, without noticing that the second Sunday was Easter, but the date of the October meeting, similarly automatically set in the Bylaws for the second Sunday, is moved to the previous Sunday… to avoid the Columbus Day Monday holiday? How did it take me so long to notice? :-)

Hee. With yesterday’s image (a button from my elementary school days, it’s union-made) I get to experience the famous failure of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows to properly handle alpha-channel transparency in PNGs.

04 April 2004

At the Book Market in the former Zany Brainy’s at the Pickett Shopping Center I mentioned earlier I purchased The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York because it seemed like one way to learn more about the decade when I was resident there. Lindsay’s election on November 2, 1965 would have found me living in what the book identifies as the Jewish neighborhood of Forest Hills, albeit on the top (third) floor of an apartment building at the corner of a street on the south side next to the stables and the swimming pool club, and attending kindergarten at Public School 144. I wouldn’t start keeping lists of my classmates until the second grade. Although the transit strike which started January 1, 1966 wouldn’t have had any effect on me, the repeated teachers’ strikes later in the decade did, with the concept of interim school particularly irritating.

02 April 2004

There are no jury trials scheduled for Monday in Alexandria.

Awww… someone in the Northern Illinois LEGO® Train Club liked my United States Postal Service truck, which was displayed at BrickFest 2002 and received an award there, enough to build an adaptation: shorter, with different wheels, and lacking some details, but recognizable. I’d followed a link from a LUGNET post by Ken Nagel to his MOCpages.com page about the display at the All American Rail Road Show that NILTC created, and from there followed the link to Ken’s Brickshelf folder for the March 13, 2004 show where I halted on the fourth image showing a bicyclist and a delivery truck. Those Plate 1 × 2 with Handle (2540), I may have thought to myself, are folded back, just like happens with my postal truck. The presence of Tile 1 × 1 with Clip (2555) aroused some suspicion, but it wasn’t until I looked over the gas tank on the underside of the truck that recognition came. This adaptation appeared earlier at the Cantingny 2003 1st Annual Midwest LEGO® Show (Ken’s Brickshelf folder for the Cantingny show) last December; the Political Statement is a commentary on the change in the color of gray recently perpetrated by the LEGO® company.

The President of Brickshelf recently used my folder on Brickshelf as an example of the new contributor recognition program at the site.

31 March 2004

I wrote earlier about the postcards of Fargo put together by James Lileks, but his entire site rewards exploration, especially if you are in the mood for ruthlessly sarcastic commentary about 20th Century ephemera. This installment of The Unbearable Sadness of Vegetables, with its conflicting perspectives, had me in stitches. This is too much! Check out his 404 page!

30 March 2004

Some time ago I was led to the Traffic Waves: Physics for bored commuters pages at Science Hobbyist (I don’t remember from where) and was tempted to make use of the suggestions while driving the Beltway on a Saturday some weeks ago. The morning run on the inner loop of I-495, especially, I was able to drive through without ever coming to a stop! During the afternoon, I remembered the techniques too late and did have to stop occasionally. Give it a try.

In anticipation of not achieving a quorum at the next meeting, which is a Semi-Annual meeting automatically called on the second Sunday of April by our Bylaws at Article III, Section 4, paragraph B, and in cooperation with the Chairman and Bookkeeper, I call a Special meeting under the same paragraph of the bylaws for the purpose of conducting our Elections under Article IV, Section 3 for the subsequent Saturday, that is, April 17th, at the same location.

Quite. What might have been, if we lived in some parallel universe where members of the club embraced the rules rather than fear them. Instead, ignoring the express protests of more than one member, and in the face of the indifference of over half of the current membership, the next meeting of WAMALUG is moved to be on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. (In fact, it’s Easter Sunday in both the Gregorian and the Julian calendars this year.) Election Coordinator Bob loses a day in which he can try to round up candidates.

28 March 2004

Could product placement have had anything to do with it? As may be surmised from my previous entry I paid off the loan on my 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 this month and received the title thereto last week. This afternoon I was finishing up a library book and tracking down one of the actresses in interMission by playing my DVD of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and I discovered that the suspiciously new Ford Focus I wrote about in my review of the film upon seeing it in 2001 was specifically a ZX5 model in CD Silver. Aside from its inability to carry our club’s tables, the hatchback Focus has served me well for 6 months, and the urgency to replace it has subsided. (A little like how Bridget Jones’s Diary grew on me with repeated viewing.) Carmax doesn’t even list the 6 as a choice in the dropdown menu for Mazda models.

The renditions of a Jeep Wrangler which I built in LEGO® elements have had another refinement which is so far undocumented as I discovered that turn signals appeared under the headlights only in those model years in which rectangular headlights were used. My renditions already had the fender-mounted turn signals of the prototypes with round headlights. Flipping through a book on SUVs at the Book Market in the former Zany Brainy’s at the Pickett Shopping Center I came across a photograph of the interior of a Hummer, so those models now have a bulkier drivetrain housing down the center of the vehicle between the seats.

Dude, chill on the angry gestures just because I won’t run a yellow light for you before you harm your passenger. Especially when the license plate on your silver Passat is so easy to remember.

25 March 2004

Don’t laugh, it’s paid for.

20 March 2004

The reaction to the Hummer H2 at the WAMALUG meeting a week ago was sufficiently positive that, after a day struggling with my DVD player (despite the assurance of The Outer Limits set disc menu that there is nothing wrong with your DVD player ) and eventually managing to watch eight episodes of The Critic (three of which were accompanied by an audio commentary which goes unmentioned in the packaging), a search of the news photos at the U.S. Department of Defense site confirmed the idea of using some of the building tricks embodied in the H2 model to build a military HUMVEE. Which I did Monday evening. The comments of picky colleagues, and additional research by printing out a number of images from the extensive photo gallery at AM General , contributed to modifications over the course of the week. The coincidence that the size of the tires in the AM General photo of the M1025 (when printed out) matched the size of the tires Peeron identifies as Tyre 30.4 × 14 (x142) was very helpful in refining the proportions of the model which ended up as 8-wide. By Friday, I was satisfied and the last hurdle in presenting images exported from MLCad of the HMMWV was the absence of an LDraw file for the tire. I followed a link from the LDraw.org Part Author Links page to Thomas Burger’s unofficial parts page where he offered a part he identified as x505 Tyre Large Wide and this proved to fit Wheel 30.4 × 14 (30285) for which I had already downloaded the unofficial part already on the Parts Tracker which Burger identified as Wheel Centre Large Wide.

Who says I write convoluted sentences? I should clarify that a Professional version of WordPerfect Office suite version 11 may very well have existed, but it wouldn’t have been apparent on local store shelves, and on top of the system requirements for the word processing component (WordPerfect) exceeding the specifications of my Windows computer, discovering that it included Paradox 10 would have made it forgettable. With a military High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) completed, with multiple configurations possible and a number of accessories built, and the folder title at Brickshelf triggering Google advertisements for Hummer parts, building a HUMMER H1 was inevitable. I don’t actually have any such parts, but the Clear Brick 1 × 1 (3005) I have placed in the instructions at the back do exist. An 8-wide model, though, while it seats four minifigs and captures the wide look of the prototype, just barely fits in a lane of the even the newest road plates so versions of the HMMWV in 6-wide (which can be built in dark gray, too) and the HUMMER H1 in 6-wide seating one minifig each followed up. We’re going to need more Brick 1 × 2 without Centre Stud (3065) in Clear. :-) I also brought out my adaptation of Sean Kenney’s H1 which I had built earlier and brought to the April, 2003 meeting of WAMALUG and prepared an LDraw file (yes! just a single file!) and image exported from MLCad.

For comparison’s sake, there is Bram Lambrecht’s 10-wide military HMMWV and 10-wide civilian Hummer , Patrick Ian Garcia’s 10-wide Hummer H1 (he built a 4-wide version, too), a yellow 8-wide Hummer found on Brickshelf, and an interesting folder on Brickshelf of a number of body configurations for an 8-wide HMMWV from Bryce Rollins. The Brickshelf folder by Piglet might be from James Bacon of Ireland, but the now-famous abandonment of real name identification at Brickshelf in view of COPPA precludes confirmation. I’m more certain of identifying Rollins in view of the highly specific subject matter of military aircraft and the results of a search at Lugnet. I could have just looked at the sidebar at lugnet.build.military I suppose. There’s a 12-wide version on Brickshelf , too, in addition to even wider versions built with Technic parts and a gargantuan 24-wide version with many moving features. An early registrant at Brickshelf offers a different take on what it means to be a 6-wide Hummer. Best results are searching Brickshelf for the term hummer.

Tower Records is supposed to have emerged from bankruptcy this week, with the Associated Press reporting that its creditors now own 85 percent of the company and that the chain remains for sale.

My friendly cashier at Toys R Us yesterday evening was Lauren (it says so right on the receipt in a way that Shoppers abandoned some years ago) but management puts up so many roadblocks to just making a purchase (a request for a telephone number which over a decade since they started doing that has contributed exactly nothing to my life, and an invitation for some other promotion that I didn’t hear well enough to be interested) that the prospect of an automated cashier seems preferable.

14 March 2004

Misplaced priorities: last night I prepared a multi-part file in the LDraw format of the HUMMER H2 I built Friday instead of updating the WAMALUG site after the meeting. The file uses three unofficial parts and one unofficial subpart and includes eight subassemblies. Whoo! …Paradox does not currently generate sufficient revenues to warrant further investments in development at this time. I suppose that explains the absence of a Professional edition of the WordPerfect Office suite for version 11… A post in a LiveJournal community reports that taking photographs on the Metro is prohibited. I haven’t been able to confirm this prohibition at the WMATA site and I wonder if the poster ran into the same mindset that my brother encountered in California long before fear of terrorism sent America into lockdown mode. Photography, especially moviemaking, by professionals is prohibited in a variety of places, like that California shopping mall my brother was lensing with a Super 8 camera and in the Metro (which is why Baltimore substitutes for it so often in the movies), and security guards and police officers have a hard time telling who is amateur and who is professional and may choose to harass everyone. Also, the difference between carrying a camera and photography for news, commercial or advertising purposes escapes at least one local security guard with inadequate training. Download the flyer The Photographer’s Right and carry it with you.

06 March 2004

Clearing the (physical) desktop… The National Imaging and Mapping Agency changed its name last year to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency… Konica Minolta Interchangeable Lens Digital SLR Camera (the 1.53 crop factor is something that gives me pause) announced in press release dated February 12th… D.C. Metro Blog Map… An ambitious attempt to make Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows behave.

03 March 2004

Since Train Window 2 × 6 × 2 with Clear Glass (6567c01) is not available as a part in the LDraw system, I’ve had to resort to illustration in CorelDraw again. At least this time I figured out how to use the Trim command. This model of a Wrangler incorporates the longer wheelbase I mentioned below but the doors’ shape (which starts high at the hinge then dips to match the rear fender top) represents the style used for the open-topped variety (which lack glass windows or window frames). Opportunistic study of prototype vehicles in the past week has also led to changes in the external mirrors and internal rollbars, a smoothing of the back bumper, and the addition of a high-mount brake light. I have developed a model of the military predecessor of this vehicle, and I’m hoping I can reuse the objects I created in CorelDraw to simulate the windshield. I would have described the Train Window 2 × 6 × 2 with Smoke Glass (6567c02) that’s included in 4512 Cargo Train as dark gray rather than black, but what do I know? LEGO® may have shaken up the world of adult fans by changing the color balance of the grays, but they still don’t make any green suitable for military use.

As it happens, Spencer Rezkalla adapted his police cruiser into a taxi without any apparent changes to the interior, so it’s still impossible to see light through it when viewed from one end or the other. While I have built a Yellow Cab version, the local variety uses yellow bumpers, plus I’ve made it a station wagon. (I haven’t adopted the use of clear Slope Brick 45 2 × 1 (3040) as headlights, either, since they were mostly available only in the seventies.) I also offer a Red Top edition of the sedan.

29 February 2004

Seeing as how I drive a Ford Focus ZX5 riding on Firestone Firehawk GTAs, it might not have been the smartest thing, emotionally, to borrow Adam L. Penenberg’s Tragic Indifference: One Man’s Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs from the library. Although Penenberg’s blog (no permalink to the November 20, 2003 entry available) mentions a recall of 671,000 Focus vehicles, the 2002 model year remains unaffected.

No Turn On Red EVER! The driver of the white Z is oblivious to the sign prohibiting his maneuver. The new sign is even topped with WARNING on a red background. This driver is the third to run the red light in this manner while I have the intersection in view Friday night, but the first to do so while pedestrians have the Walk symbol. With criminals like this on our streets, is it any wonder that automobile manufacturers can prevail in lawsuits by asserting driver error as their response? Also, what is about No Turn On Red When Pedestrians Are Present that allows drivers to run the red light while I stare at them from the corner? The plural?

25 February 2004

No, I haven’t become a part author overnight. I merely imported the image saved by MLCad into Corel Draw and used the Bezier curve tool to create a few lines to render the appearance of Wedge 4 × 4 Curved (45677) atop my model of the Ford Focus ZX in LEGO® elements.

Slashdotters defend the Herman Miller Aeron chair.

The history of modeling Jeep® vehicles in LEGO® includes Fredrik Glöckner’s example of a Vietnam-era open-topped version in gray 6-wide announced to LUGNET on December 4, 1999, which inspired Shaun Sullivan in his series of military vehicles which included a howitzer-equipped version from the North Africa campaign announced to LUGNET on April 25, 2000 and Mattias Martensson in his announcement to LUGNET on January 17, 2003 of the famous U.S. W.W. II Willys jeep . Martensson also credits Toshiaki Nisiyori, who posted pictures to Brickshelf of an intriguingly 5-wide version.

I have already modified the Jeep® I mention below to lengthen its wheelbase and raise the beltline between door and window on the sides. Argh.

23 February 2004

Circumstances have led me, as a follow-up to creating my current automobile in LEGO® elements only a few days earlier, to building the current vehicle of someone else in the extended family. Can you guess what it is? Looking around Brickshelf, MOCpages and the Building Instruction Portal and searching for the most appropriate keyword that identifies this vehicle, I’m fairly pleased with how the result of a few hours’ building compares to how others have attempted this vehicle (especially at this scale). I was just thinking it’s time to install MLCad on my real Windows machine when something went wrong with closing the program (fortunately not before completing the multi-part file of instructions—which includes rotation steps even—and exporting the image of the final result) and now the Windows 98SE running in the Softwindows 98 5.1 emulation is asking to be reinstalled. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to use that drive image file again.

21 February 2004

James Mathis never got any public answer to his search for a .dat file for the part Wedge 4 × 4 Curved. It sure would be nice to have this part (which Mathis used twice in the building of his What Will You Make, Americas? Road Show Truck) because I have used a yellow one in building a representation of my 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 in LEGO® elements. Perhaps it was the impact of seeing two Egg Yolk Yellow Focus sedans at the same intersection yesterday morning that inspired me. I surmise the the color is no longer exclusive to the hatchbacks. Oh, and earlier this month at the PMA show in Las Vegas Konica Minolta included in its display a prototype of a Maxxum 7 digital SLR.

20 February 2004

My first file in the LDraw format authored in MLCad depicting the Virginia State Police cruiser I completed Thursday night is a multi-part file, no less. The body is built from the bottom up largely monotonically and features a Minifig Seat 2 × 2 (a minifig will fit if headgear is omitted), a Car Steering Wheel, a prisoner cage suggested by using Fence 1 × 4 × 1 , a radar gun suggested by a few black parts hanging off one side, an Antenna Whip 8H, a dual exhaust using Plate 1 × 2 with Handles, front bumper guards of the type needed to push disabled vehicles off the Wilson Bridge (to one end or the other, that is, not off the side), and a top hat style light (using Brick 2 × 2 Round) that the force abandoned a number of years ago but which I felt was more iconic. Besides the Chassis/Body file, additional files are used for the Rear end (which has taillights like the Impala even though that’s incongruous with the style of light on top), the Front end, and the Roof.

19 February 2004

Save your money.

The President of Brickshelf is quoted in a case study at his new host Carpathia Hosting.

I have been looking for a Plate 4 × 6 without Corners in Blue since the early hours of Monday morning. I knew I had to have one such plate because I had purchased the Soccer 3408 Super Sport Coverage set, but the assembly had been tossed into one of the ever-growing number of multi-gallon tubs of unsorted LEGO® elements infesting the second floor here. But which one? I had come across Spencer Rezkalla’s Police Cruiser and once I had built one got the idea to build another in the colors of the Virginia State Police. The particular plate in the specific color was necessary for the roof. While I liked the appearance of the model, I found the building instructions to be roundabout and unintuitive and couldn’t resist making modifications to the interior. I finally found that piece at 11:35 last night.

Lest anyone think all my concerns are petty, here’s a chilling timeline of the events of September 11, 2001 and a sobering description of the fate of civilization in the very near future.

12 February 2004

The excitement is building for BrickFest PDX 2004 writes Larry P. As well it might. The list of attendees for BrickFest PDX 2004 this weekend includes smart, fun-loving people who all enjoy the brick. But even though at least seven current members of WAMALUG are scheduled to attend (only one of the five who could have done so chose to admit it upon registering) no WAMALUG club banner will make it to this BrickFest, nor will WamaLTC be providing any exchange containers to its putative fellows in the international organization of LEGO® train clubs. There has not been an agenda for any meeting since October and there have not been minutes promulgated for any meeting since November, so maybe I missed the request for a WAMALUG banner to join our membership in Portland, Oregon. Anyway, the presence of the club’s banner is not something an Assistant Event Coordinator can decide—that would be a conflict of interest, right? Building and decorating exchange containers runs into money and energy, neither of which the train club seems to have a lot of, so our distribution at the 2003 BrickFest was the last of the first run and there’s no more where they came from. That would require a working color printer, after all. ;-) I wonder what happened to the Call for BrickFest 2004 Event Graphic? The same announcement on LUGNET apparently resulted in all of one response. Over 2 months later, not a word. That’s public relations for you! I will be slowly trimming the home page of the WamaLTC site in the absence of any new activity. Maybe by the time I get to the paragraph announcing our membership in that international organization of LEGO® train clubs I persist in leaving unnamed we’ll have failed to maintain a visible active presence in the community as demanded by Section 4.04 of that organization’s Bylaws and dire consequences will ensue.

11 February 2004

Great. Now the scanner won’t work. Update: the document HP Scanjet Scanners - Solving Scanner errors, 'Scanner in use by unknown application,' and 'Sorry, could not access your scanner,' or Software Freezes in Windows 98 or Windows ME as found at the hp.com site helped me restore scanning capabilities.

When I was one of the representatives of the local LEGO® train club to an international organization of LEGO® train clubs (which used to be touchy about its name being used) I would be routinely harassed about not passing along news and information which was supplied to such representatives. Now that it has been over 3 months since we were replaced, and over 3 months since we heard one word from the new representatives about the activities of the organization, how many times would you suppose they (the new representatives) have been berated for their silence? That’s right, zero times.

The parent company of Tower Records has filed for bankruptcy protection. At the local store, it’s business as usual: prices $5 to $10 higher than at Target.

07 February 2004

The IE Factor? Stupidest program on Earth, is more like. Testing in Internet Explorer for Windows led to the frustrating discovery that the document.getElementById('footer').style.marginLeft = "160px"; line in the script I prepared last night for the footer at wamaltc.org pages also affected the div with id=navbox! Fortunately, changing marginLeft to paddingLeft seems to have placated the ossified rendering engine.

06 February 2004

It took but a few minutes after shutting down the computers, er, early this morning to get an idea about the diskette in question yesterday: the diskette had been formatted recently in a Windows NT 4 machine. Coincidence, or something more? Another perspective on writing mathematical expressions using inline elements. A new article at A List Apart about Exploring Footers inspired me to adapt the suggested JavaScript (for placing a footer at the bottom of the main content or, if the main content is smaller than the viewport, at the bottom of the viewport) to the needs of the WamaLTC site. When, for example, the Build page is viewed in a browser running full-screen on a 1600×1200 display, the footer follows the main content and appears underneath the navigation. By obtaining the heights of the <div>s with id attribute values of main and navbox, and testing for the condition that navbox is taller than main I could, in that situation, apply a style to the <div id=footer> of margin-left: 160px; and that way have the footer centered on the main content (and not extending into the navigation) rather than the centered on the viewport. Naturally I tossed the variable declarations and whittled the script down to two if tests and a style declaration. Also, the font-size declarations for the paragraph following the thumbnail images have been adjusted to, sigh, not leave the text Greeked in Netscape Communicator when Internet Explorer is sent an xx-small (where Mozilla and Safari and Opera and all the rest of the browsers under continuing development get sent an x-small).

05 February 2004

Maybe moribund is too strong. But when Lands’ End Business Outfitters called me today to see if they could help with planning any additional purchases, the word was on my lips. The online clothing retailer has a previous business relationship with me because of last May’s order of embroidered Mesh Polo shirts for the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club (don’t we look just spiffy in them?) but I’m no longer a director of the parent club WAMALUG, the train club has had only one meeting in the past 6 months and one high-traffic show and one low-traffic show in the same time, and now we learn that we are not registered for the Greenberg show scheduled at the Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro at the end of the month. (Let’s all yell at Bob for leaving his domain parked at Dotster.) So prospects for another apparel order at Lands’ End are not exactly looking up (I could go for the Half Zip Fleece Pullover in True Navy for the winter show, definitely). With no major changes to the content of wamaltc.org in store for a while, this was a good time to revise the stylesheets at the site and mitigate the remaining pain of viewing the site in Microsoft Internet Explorer. I previously rescued the collection of links about the display installed in 2002 at the National Toy Train Museum by creating a new page at wamalug.org.

You would think that a real company would have a plan to prevent this sort of thing (domain name expiration). But you would be wrong. Maybe I better do a WHOIS search on a few domains, just in case. Well, well, well. Given our current energy level as a club, June 21, 2004 is not that far away.

Freaky. Usually, when I’ve left a diskette in the drive of the Presario when it tries to start, I get a message about a non-system disk. Tonight, however, came the mysterious message NTLDR is missing . Since I do not possess any version of Windows 2000 natively or in emulation that is not the answer. Fortunately, removing the diskette allowed the normal boot to resume. Over 5 years on the same install! Looks like I am not the first to experience this curious phenomenon.

03 February 2004

Deutsche Welle knows to create a biography page for its on-air talent. The Corel WordPerfect Office 2002 Service Pack 4 has re-emerged.

29 January 2004

This WordPerfect Universe forum thread may have finally given me the solution to my difficulty with printing from WordPerfect (10) to a Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 2500tn, specifically, the suggestion to run printserver100.exe before launching WordPerfect and invoking a Print command. My strenuous effort to eliminate usbmon.dll (which involved booting from a Windows 98 Startup Disk) may have been unnecessary. Considering that my Windows computer, at one point in the last week, was unable even to boot into Safe Mode, I have to wonder how anyone who, say, buys at Best Buy, manages. The Quadra 605 I mentioned last year required fruitless visits to the service department at its point of purchase and hours of calls to Apple before an on-site replacement of the entire main board set it right. Now if only printserver100.exe would remain stable enough to use in this manner.

Eep! The Corel WordPerfect Office 2002 Service Pack 4 that I discovered on Monday has disappeared as discovered yesterday in this post at WordPerfect Universe. While it lasts, Microsoft has a Support Center for Windows 98. The PowerBook misbehaves no more: with the installation of a Farallon EtherMac PC Card and a little searching for the proper software for this card with the blue arrow, the previously recalcitrant PowerBook obtained a DHCP lease and was connected to the Internet. Two printers installed on the Desktop and sample pages sent to each successfully.

26 January 2004

Not even running the Corel WordPerfect Office 2002 Service Pack 4, which has a file date of last Friday bringing the version number up to 10.0.0.990, has permitted me to print from WordPerfect with both printers installed. There are as yet no complaints, however, about my suppression of the many processes by the printer manufacturer from running.

25 January 2004

The previously announced preliminary discussions of a possible business combination of AMC Entertainment, Inc. with Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation have been terminated as advised in Thursday’s news release from AMC. Thanks to Studio Briefing for helping to keep me up with this corner of the business of entertainment.

My hopes for a wireless network environment are dashed. The Netgear 54 Mbps Wireless Router with 4-port 10/100 Mbps switch WGR614 gave me a zippy surfing experience, but while the Netgear 54 Mbps Wireless PC Card 32-bit Cardbus WG511 claimed Windows 98 as a supported operating system, the utility which was supposed to lodge in the system tray never obliged. Then I discovered that my printer was unsuccessful in obtaining an IP address from the router. Fortunately, restoring the Linksys Ethernet Cable/DSL Router BEFSR11, the Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 5-port Network Hub NH1005, and the Siemens SpeedStream PCMCIA 10/100 Ethernet Card 32-bit CardBus SS1012 reestablished the previous connectivity.

My attempt to add color to the networked printing environment has had mixed results. While the Performa added the second printer to the desktop with no complaints, the attempt to install the additional printer on the Windows computer clobbered the ability of WordPerfect to print at all. So far, I re-ran the third service pack for the Wordperfect Office suite, uninstalled and deleted whatever I could find of the previous printer installations, and managed to re-establish the ability of WordPerfect to print to the monochrome printer. I wonder if the purchase of a color printer from the same manufacturer as the monochrome printer has anything to do with it, or the number of processes from this manufacturer running simultaneously, or what. Sometimes it’s all you can do to keep calm in the face of such adversity.

My use of Unicode characters to display a fraction below didn’t work so well on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (I first noticed on Windows NT 4, but it’s also true of the local Windows 98 installation where Mozilla displays the subscript properly). Too bad. I would give a new trick to allow this old browser to recognize the <abbr> element a try but BBEdit’s syntax checker does not like the <html:abbr> element. Only subsequently do I notice that Dean Edwards is declaring a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1.

18 January 2004

The pace of software development has finally started to make itself felt with my Compaq notebook computer. My first reading of the Windows System Requirements for the Mozilla 1.6 final release (on Friday evening, the day after release) showed that the latest version of the open-source suite for web browsing, mail, news reading and more demanded Windows 98 Second Edition and a 233 MHz Pentium processor. Even though the requirements seem to have reverted to Windows 95 and a Pentium processor, I wonder if this is a bit of cut-and-paste from earlier releases. I am looking to reduce the number of electrical devices plugged in on the first floor, and the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router seemed just the thing to replace my current router and hub. However, looking at the system requirements for 802.11g notebook adapters, they all required Windows 98 Second Edition, and I only found two 802.11b notebook adapters that admitted Windows 98 as a supported OS. One was from Microsoft. Still, with a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 switch, the WRT54G could consolidate the functions of my current router and hub combination, have the Performa and printer(s) wired into the switch leaving a port free for connecting either the Compaq or the misbehaving PowerBook, and leave open the opportunity for a 802.11b adapter for the Compaq and a wireless Ethernet bridge for the Performa. Except that the Linksys WET11 Wireless-B Ethernet Bridge requires a power supply. D’oh!

This weekend Tower Records/Video has a 25% off all DVDs sale, but even with recent releases like Johnny English, Swimming Pool, and some really cute young women on the jacket of Bring It On Again, I was unable to find any title sufficiently compelling to purchase. But I could find it in my heart to add to my collection of full-color photographic 12″ jacket art from the currently reigning (marriage-annulling) pop princess.

I know absolutely no one who could take advantage of Ghostzilla, the invisible browser.

An old Toshiba notebook (manufactured back when they were more often called laptop computers) was unearthed recently by a colleague preparing for the move of the office. The Arachne WWW Browser probably wouldn’t run on such an old system but it’s an intriguing possibility for installing on RealPC™ 1.1. The T1000 managed its laptop form factor in 1987 by squashing the aspect ratio of the pixels in its monochrome 640×200 CGA display, embedding the operating system (MS-DOS 2.11) in ROM, and including only a single 720kB floppy drive. The T1100 was slightly thicker with its second floppy drive. Rather than despair of the uselessness of such an old computer, here’s one family that is using a T1000 as a boiler time switch. More glamour photography of the T1000.

The photographs from my visit to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on the third. Remarkably, I hand-held each shot at shutter speeds of ¹⁄₁₀ second or longer. (Eric Meyer worked valiantly in a recent Thought to display a fraction using <span> and the inline elements <sup> and <sub> but I’ve avoided all that in the previous sentence and the attendant styling, too, by using U+00B9, U+2044, U+2081, and U+2080. Hooray for Unicode!)

11 January 2004

A recollection of Fargo through the medium of postcards (slightly defensive splash page) from Fargo-born, Macintosh-using Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune columnist James Lileks.

05 January 2004

Just today a pal was telling me about his recent purchase from Cambridge SoundWorks, but a forwarded e-mail opened this evening lets me know that cousin Tom no longer works there. Tom is now President & product developer at ZVOX Audio, a company so new that they are not yet shipping their first product and their business address is Tom’s home! The DreamWeaver template-driven site, loaded with tables, <font> elements, spacer.gif files, and graphical navigation items (depicting text!) may be copyright 2003–2004, but it reeks of 1999-style web design. Oh! Classic! The logo in the corner links to index.htm ! If their web design staff ever needs an extra hand, there are one or two members of the LEGO® users group I am still a member of who could lend one, no problem. One of them even has Netscape Communicator 4.8 installed on a new notebook with Windows XP, perfect for testing such page designs. ;-)

I have been typing these dispatches using Unicode keyboards (especially the Unicode Hex Input keyboard) for some months now, and I wouldn’t be able to do so without frequent consultation with print-outs from Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources. I have memorized U+2019 for the right single quotation mark, but almost any other character requires a quick check of the binder.

I spent most of last Saturday at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center with people who were taller and smarter than me. I suppose one could walk through the exhibits in 2 hours, as the building is hardly stuffed in the manner of the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility (which I had the fortune to visit in 1986 and 1988 at least), but a leisurely stroll that includes reading the captions and stuff takes longer.

01 January 2004

I have transferred my updates to the new subdomain http://c.hannaher.net/.