Dispatches : 2005
31 December 2005
The buddy icon I added to my Flickr account on Monday is a photograph taken by my brother with my Minolta Maxxum 7000i at the Washington National Airport 50th Anniversary open house in June of 1991. We were walking through a Trump Airlines 727, and I am carrying a Canon 514XL-S Super 8 sound movie camera equipped with the BM-70 boom microphone (link found at the Canon Camera Museum).
Feliz dos mil seis.
30 December 2005
People don’t react well to a pedestrian hitting a car even when the pedestrian is a police officer buffeting the hood according to the training at the San Antonio Police Department Bicycle School. [The police officer may have been on a bicycle.]
28 December 2005
I recognized the blogosphere depicted cartographically as the Balkans even before reading that it’s based on a map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (via (via (via))). A self-described Red-State Serb is pleased at being placed at his birthplace, Serbia’s capital.
26 December 2005
My water heater decided to overflow yesterday. The driest spot on the floor was around the drainhole. While I had the water draining today, I turned my attention to the subject of the
Flickr badge. Both of the table-based HTML versions which a Flickr user can obtain by requesting a specific orientation (vertical or horizontal) are hopeless candidates for inclusion in an XHTML 1.0 Strict document, the BBEdit syntax checker makes many complaints. I calibrated my scanner, scanned a photograph of me holding a movie camera, resampled and cropped the image file to 48×48 pixels, and added a
buddy icon
to
my Flickr account
before turning my attention to the orientation
None
option for the HTML version. This edition can be made to placate the BBEdit syntax checker, and the use of the
<script>
element allows the W3C validator to pass the results. I thought it was clever to replace the
<nobr>
tags with a U+00A0 (no-break space). As it turns out, my testing in Mozilla Suite and Safari on local files gave no hint of the trouble to come. Irritatingly, only Safari will run the
<script>
elements
from the actual web site. It probably has to do with the
.htaccess
file
supplying the files with a MIME type of
application/xhtml+xml. Maybe I should learn how to use the built-in server on Mac OS X. Today’s entry has undergone many changes.
25 December 2005
Skype is a free download which allows a user to communicate by voice or text message for free with any other Skype user in the world. The current state of the Wikipedia page is more cautious because Skype is a proprietary peer-to-peer Internet telephony (VoIP) network. The peer-to-peer nature of the bandwidth use makes it an odd recommendation for a user on a dialup connection… fotoLibra is a free photo sharing site with a twist—they’re not interested in any image file smaller than 5 megabytes… I am so sure DiamlerChrysler cries every time it thinks about how it lost the lawsuit over the HUMMER grille to General Motors…
24 December 2005
Where is the post office in Fairfax City? Now there’s a question, posed by a passing driver on yesterday’s penultimate opportunity for shopping and shipping, I can answer. Having seen the crowded parking lots and the desperate drivers, though, I would hesitate to venture out today. The Oil Drum turned its eye on population recently; take a look at the second graph: the world’s population has more than doubled since I was born.
21 December 2005
It’s true that I possess multiple vehicles, but in my defense I might say that they aren’t the same vehicle, and I can’t drive them simultaneously. But even combined, the engine displacement would be no match for that of a 2005 Chrysler 300C and its 5.7-liter V8. Even with cylinder deactivation, the mileage of this model is none too good. Reading the list of standard equipment one sees why the plutocrats among us are having difficulty distinguishing themselves. Ah, but even the tilt-down back-up aid exterior mirrors which were standard last year are no match for the ParkSense™ Rear Park Assist System available this year with its ultrasonic sensors and lights-and-sound-equipped interior mirror. Meanwhile, I mutter about the absence of an upshift light or seatback pockets in the Escape…
I have mentioned previously that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead. On Monday, Microsoft made it official:
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER FOR MAC USERS
In June 2003, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit announced that Internet Explorer for Mac would undergo no further development, and support would cease in 2005. In accordance with published support lifecycle policies, Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance updates.
Additionally, as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac will no longer be available for download from Mactopia. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.
Apple’s Safari, or the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, or Opera, or Camino…
digg
leads to the
important stuff: Paramount Digital Entertainment is going away
and the
future of the
startrek.com
website is uncertain.
Liner Notes for David Frye’s I Am The President/Radio Free Nixon. The customer service at Collectors’ Choice Music is not exactly terrific, but the double-CD set has arrived.
My resolve to avoid the local mail collection boxes has had results: mail is arriving at its destination overnight!
20 December 2005
The
Battlestar Galactica Cylon Centurian Limited Edition Collectible Figure
is
exclusive to Tower Records in its Gold version, 50% off today through Saturday (in-store only apparently). Did you know that the week the
Battlestar Galactica
movie opened in 1979 marked the shift from Wednesday to Friday for the first day of new movies? Also opening that Friday, according to my research of the
Weekend
section in the microfilm rolls at a library in an adjoining jurisdiction:
Dreamer,
Grease
(in its second run),
Hanover Street, and
Winter Kills.
17 December 2005
So does calibration make any difference? I wasn’t tempted to change anything about the resulting file. Hooray for the Microtek Downloads page for updated scanning and calibration executables and the confirmation of the Kodak FTP site for the data files. The holiday message for 2005 has shrunk to a sticker on the back of the photocard.
MOVIES I SOMEHOW MISSED* THIS YEAR: Meet the Fockers, Hitch, The Pacifier, The Longest Yard, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, Fantastic Four, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chicken Little, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. *even though they each had more than $100 million (US) in gross receipts domestically. This list has been a feature of the holiday message since 1998 but there was no room for it this year.
15 December 2005
In lieu of anything else, I would just like to say that the thin, unlabeled, sealed cardboard envelopes that accompany the documentation for the Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL contain calibration targets. To think I was tempted to throw the envelopes away.
11 December 2005
It is
literally
true that the appellation
A New Hope
was never heard in the radio dramatizations of
Star Wars. But the bonus tracks, once they’re listened to, make evident that the rebroadcast in 1983 had the narrator saying
Star Wars The New Hope.
Weird. But
don’t take the word of Wikipedia for it; the indefinite article is very much a
part of the official site for that installment in the movie serial.
Community Day is the one day a year I can bring a camera to work and no one can say anything about it. I used only two rolls of film all this year, so the selection from which to create the holiday photocard was limited. Since I still use my digital camera mostly for LEGO®-related photographs there might not be enough to choose from next year. Feliz Navidad is the result of a miscommunication from my using an old order form. Oops. After 10 years of accompanying the photocard with a message I may skip it this year and just include a URL. Anything I’m willing to say in public is already here in these Dispatches.
10 December 2005
There is still no plan to purchase an iPod, but the project to import my compact discs (which began just over a month ago) has continued to the point where it can be considered completed: 4123 songs, 9.9 days, 13.08 GB. I was unprepared for the recalcitrance of some titles and the wheezing of the optical drive became a dreaded refrain. Trust me, importing at sub-1.0× speeds never leads to a good result. Once again I wonder how households with a single computer manage it. The True Blue album which caused my Pentium 3 trouble earlier was one of the stubborn discs which declined to be imported directly. I was able to copy it and some of the other difficult titles using Toast 5 on my Performa running OS9, though, and the copies imported quickly and cleanly. It was convenient sometimes to use Roxio Easy Creator 6 on the Pentium 3 running Windows ME to copy a few titles, and these copies also imported quickly and cleanly.
Roxio is now a division of Sonic Solutions. An email from Sonic this week marketing version 8 of Easy Media Creator did not inspire confidence, as I had not heard of the
purchase of Roxio’s consumer software division
and the big link to the otherwise unknown
sonic.com
domain was suspicious. The effort is wasted anyway—no computer on the premises can
make use of the latest version.
The most resistant title was Disc Fifteen of the Collector’s Limited Edition of the Complete Trilogy of Star Wars as a radio drama and its Episode Six: Blood of a Jedi. The last disc, the last track, pretty much, of the whole importation project. iTunes 4.2 on the Desktop was inadequate. The disc locked up my Pentium notebook (which can’t burn anything, but goes to show how troublesome the platter was). Easy CD Creator on the Pentium 3 claimed an error had occurred in copying. Toast on the Performa refused to copy the disc. Trying to import using iTunes 2.0.4 on the Performa locked up the computer to where Control-Command-Power was useless. What ultimately worked was to drop the tracks from the disc onto the Toast 5 window on the Performa, extract the tracks to AIFF, then burn the extracted AIFF tracks as an audio CD to a CD-R still using Toast. This copy imported quickly (at speeds in excess of 7.0×) and cleanly.
Because Star Wars: The Radio Drama was first produced for National Public Radio in 1981, the production was known simply as Star Wars and the appellation A New Hope is nowhere to be found (or heard) even upon its rebroadcast in 1983 to accompany The Empire Strikes Back or its reissuance in 1996 with Return of the Jedi.
PatchBurn is supposed to allow Finder and iTunes to use a disc burner even if it’s not one that Apple installed.
06 December 2005
A year later, it is necessary once again to
Just Say No
to the
vocal stylings of someone from Long Island. No promotional postcard spotted yet.
01 December 2005
For the first time in over a decade, I have been assessed a finance charge on a credit card. My check in payment took 9 days from its placement in a mailbox in the vicinity to reach the card issuer. This follows the 8 days it took my real estate tax payment to get postmarked back in June (which led to a late fee). I am not happy. Solution: stop using the local mail collection boxes.
Voice impressionist David Frye recently had a release on compact disc: I am the President/Radio Free Nixon. Er, why not shop at the source.
30 November 2005
This tale of woe regarding an attempted purchase from a Brooklyn-based retailer (digg, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter) immediately reminded me of this gallery of storefront photographs and my own attempts in 1989 (with my brother) to visit some of the advertisers in Shutterbug magazine and Popular Photography. B&H is frequently mentioned in the comments of the various threads, that’s where I got my 12-inch wide flatbed scanner earlier this year.
29 November 2005
The Asterix Annotations Version 3.0 attempts to explain some of the humor, subtle and unsubtle, of the translations into English of this venerable series from France (via Metafilter comment). Le Site Officiel. From Asterix Around the World (the Many Languages of Asterix), Asterix in Serbian. Wikipedia page for Asterix. Apparently I have some catching up to do.
Now I know why I am sometimes charged a lower price for a ticket at the AMC Hoffman Center 22. The ticket sellers think I’m old.
28 November 2005
Actually, the graph paper found at the WAMALUG site which
this LUGNET post about creating paper designs which interlock with LEGO® pieces
refers to is (as plainly stated on the page)
NOT a product of LEGO®, nor is it endorsed or supported by the LEGO® company! It is purely a fan-created item and is intended for personal use only.
I described my suspicions as to the original author and my updating of the files in 2003.
23 November 2005
Maybe I’m the last to hear about this… but
VLC is a free cross-platform open-source media player. The playback is choppy, but Version 0.8.2 allows a Beige Desktop to play DVDs using the onboard video. Yes, I do have only the one title in duplicate to
test
DVD players and find out whether Command-Shift-3 works to obtain a screenshot (it does).
Honestly, I first read about them at The Unofficial Apple Weblog but Boing Boing also points out the new LaCie Brick Desktop Hard Drive. Available in white (2×2), blue (2×3), and red (2×3) depending upon capacity, the studs are way too flat to fool anyone, and while the smallest capacity drive could pass as a plate, the drives with larger capacities are not tall enough to pass as a brick. Still, they’re supposed to stack. Slashdot and LUGNET have relevant threads.
There is no OSHA regulation between 1910.37(e) and 1910.38. That is all.
22 November 2005
The Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use is the creation of a project coordinated by the Center for Social Media and the Project on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest at American University to address the issues related in Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers. Via MetaFilter Projects.
20 November 2005
Experience the Difference at AMC Theatres: they tried to show Get Rich or Die Tryin’ to an audience primed for another movie.
You are the audience, I am the writer, I outrank you!
Having seen the trailer for the new
Producers, I thought to place my
ancient Criterion Collection laserdisc
of the
1968 original
in the player. The quotation is the perfect retort for bloggers who don’t like their commenters. I know this was a musical as an intermediary step, but how could the fundamental problem that the original milieu of small-time Broadway producers is so set in the sixties have been dealt with? Even setting aside the potential comedy-deadening effect of hiring Will Ferrell as the crackpot author of the surefire flop of a play, what is the continuing relevance of someone who remembers the Third Reich fondly? In 1968, the character was part of an aging generation which had grown up during the war—what could he possibly be in 2005? Ah, kids these days have no sense of history…
19 November 2005
Mild-mannered
associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris
Paul Z. Myers
points
to a
page hosting five short movies of thylacines
at a
site devoted to the Australian marsupial. Earlier
Kathryn Cramer had commented on the condition of the mounted specimen
at the Smithsonian Hall of Mammals in the Museum of Natural History. Eric Harshbarger is credited for the animation Java applet used to display the movies, but in Mozilla 1.7.12 on 10.3.9 I get only
exception: java.lang.NullPointerException.
upon visiting the pages for the individual films. Works in Safari, though.
Harshbarger’s applet depot
hasn’t been updated in a while; he’s been experimenting with
ambigrams,
pentominoes, and
puzzle parties
after
cutting back on his acceptance of commissions
for LEGO®
sculpture
and
mosaic
work.
The New Noah’s Ark of Rare Animals
by Helen Haywood (Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., London, 1964) is a souvenir from childhood. Published a few years after the
founding of the World Wildlife Fund, the book used illustrations and short descriptions to identify fifty-three animals threatened by extinction. The fifty-third was described in the present tense:
The TASMANIAN WOLF, or thylacine, is the largest of the meat-eating pouched animals. It can open its jaws wider than any other warm-blooded animal.
Considering that the last reported shooting of a thylacine in the wild was in 1930 and the last thylacine in captivity died September 7, 1936, the tense would have been optimistic even then. On the other hand, the ivory-billed woodpecker is on the list as #33 (
Only about six are thought to be still alive…
) and
its potential rediscovery was in the news
recently.
Links to reports on a 2000 conference on the subject of swearing in a mother tongue.
I suppose a recall is better than a stonewall: the 2006 Ford Escape is among the vehicles subject to recall due to the possibility that the windshield wiper motors were assembled without grease on the output shaft.
17 November 2005
I last purchased a compact disc from a label with the name
Sony
in it over 5 years ago, when I picked up the
Shakespeare in Love
soundtrack (Sony Classical, SK63387) at Kmart #3963. That’s the Kmart in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, it turns out. I hadn’t even noticed that Sony and BMG had merged, let alone buy any of the
titles encumbered with a digital rights management regime
so the
hullabaloo over XCP content protection technology
has passed me by. I have puchased all of three compact discs this year (all from
guess who) and four last year (including another soundtrack). The Nineties are so over. Still no iPod on the premises, though.
16 November 2005
Sometimes MetaFilter is all about the comments. I passed on this celebrity gossip to my dental hygienist, and she remembered the unusual assortment of teeth from watching one of his movies (the distraction took away from the idea that his character was handsome). She was less familiar with the caps-wearing blonde.
Even a 12-inch scanning bed isn’t quite enough to capture the full width of a capacitance videodisc sleeve, but I have no laserdiscs (or DVDs) with this particular performer. I knew that Risky Business was somewhere in my collection of this obsolete format, but it turns out his debut role was in another title in my collection.
Phil Ringnalda says it’s okay to post a link you saw at Boing Boing… just in case anyone tries to tell you different.
WamaLTC plans to meet on Sunday, December fourth at the Helen Wilson Community Room of the Franconia Government Center which seems to have changed its URL since the last time we were there.
13 November 2005
Revolt. Build. Rise. Parts from Ford Performance Racing are not available for just any Ford, there’s an entire catalog just for the Focus.
07 November 2005
So yesterday I was flipping through the book
Mac OS X Tiger Pocket Guide
which I had purchased on Saturday in case I needed it to help a pal who’d
just switched… I haven’t upgraded myself so there was no reason to buy it or the
latest edition of the Nutshell book
earlier… and besides finding out that Command-Space no longer switches between keyboards, something I use
all the time
in composing these dispatches, there came the suggestion that I should buy
another book
for
tips on how to relocate the iTunes Library to another partition…
Because the partition where I have OS X installed is only 8 GB, I have hesitated to make use of the Import feature of iTunes, but I have been asked one too many times whether I’ll be buying an iPod and it was time to find out how the
various capacities thereof
compared to my compact disc collection. Actually, the iTunes and Music Store Help Viewer entry for
Changing where your audio files are stored
explains what needs to be done without, ahem, anyone having to buy any book. With the Library moved out of the cramped quarters of the home partition to the comparative bounty of the partition with 220 GB, it was time to start ripping to 128-kbps AAC files. With the various original soundtracks, symphonic recordings, and singles for the various series and movies involved, including
Star Trek Voyager Main Title
on the
GNP/Crescendo label, 383 tracks of
Star Trek
music comes to 1.14 GB, 20.7 hours. Hmm. I don’t plan on buying an iPod, but considering that there are
eight more shelves
of compact discs on the premises means that a Shuffle just wouldn’t cut it.
Elections: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed is the title of report GAO-05-956 dated September 21, 2005.
06 November 2005
SPOILER ALERT: MetaTalk threads about movie spoilers (from August last year and June this year) left me short of breath from laughter.
05 November 2005
LaCie offers an external FireWire drive to match the Mac mini. Belkin is ready with a USB/Firewire hub. Ars Technica had a four-page mini-guide to OS X for new mini owners in January.
I would just like to say that removing the crossbars from the roof rack of the Escape did absolutely nothing to improve the gas mileage on the open road (or what passes for it on those parts of I-83 which are not under construction). But it does give the vehicle a different look.
03 November 2005
Backup, backup, backup. People keep saying it, following the advice is another matter entirely. On the Windows side, I use Norton Ghost 2001 to clone to one of several drives (each in a USB enclosure), while in the Desktop, I use Retrospect to update two partitions to a second internal drive (originally prepared with Carbon Copy Cloner). The other two partitions (OS9 and a separate Classic environment) have been burned to DVD. How frequently these procedures are employed is not exemplary. The Macally PHR 250CC FireWire/USB 2.0 external enclosure is a very handsome solution for an external drive to backup a notebook computer, but for owners of the Mac mini, the MicroNet minimate might be a cuter choice. The advantage of a FireWire connection for an external hard drive with newer Macs is the bootability.
02 November 2005
My grandmother passed away today, in her home, at the age of 94 (by the Serbian reckoning). She was in good spirits before her midday rest.
29 October 2005
The friendly game scheduled for next month brings together teams from two countries with wildly divergent levels of self-esteem.27 October 2005
Hmm, not so good. The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for 2005 ranks Serbia and Montenegro at 97th among 146 countries.
25 October 2005
The base (1.25 GHz) Mac mini, the two iBook notebooks, and the three Powerbook notebooks are the last computers from Apple to include a modem in the default configuration (a modem is available as a build-to-order option on the faster Mac mini and as a USB dongle for the iMacs and PowerMacs). The page for PowerBooks at the online store does not so much as mention the inclusion. The United States lags in broadband penetration compared to its neighbor to the north (via the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus) but Apple’s kick to those on the bottom rung of Internet connectivity is consistent with its past moves like dumping floppy disk drives and the SCSI interface with the first iMac.
It doesn’t take much google-fu to locate one of the winners of a Chemical Society of Washington College Chemistry Achievement Award last year and absolutely confirm the identity of a colleague.
An in-store display promises to those who buy the DVD of Saving Face at Tower Records/Video that if the purchaser doesn’t like the movie it can be returned within 5 days for full store credit. I won’t be collecting :-)
24 October 2005
Users of a Pocket PC who discover that a spouse has ordered a Macintosh may wish to investigate The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile from mark/space or the line up of software products offered by Pocket Mac.
Pennsylvanians have been
graced with the presence of an Apple Store, but two of them are in Pittsburgh. The
third store is in King of Prussia
which seems to put it
about 3 miles north
of a
Micro Center in St. Davids.
MacHeads remains Lancaster’s only
Apple
store
but they should update the
photographs of the store’s interior.
Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac is a standalone word processor for switchers who are sure they have no need for spreadsheet, presentation, and information management software. Where the Standard Edition of Office 2004 has a retail price of $399, the single program may be found for about half that, a useful alternative for those who do not meet the eligibility requirements for purchasing the student and teacher edition of the full suite.
21 October 2005
The
Made in NY
logo seen at the end of
Saving Face
is a
Via
L. A. Observed, FilmStew uses the release of the
Saving Face
DVD as an occasion to
interview Joan Chen. Maybe the marketing hook is why the
second page includes photographs of the director and the other two leads
of the film.
Mark of Distinction
… awarded to projects where at least 75% of the overall production was made in New York City and … used in the production credits of all shows participating in
the
Made in NY
program.
It is less important to report that more attention paid to smoother starts in first gear and to remaining in the speed-appropriate gear has yielded 23 miles per gallon (two weeks of local driving, 45 miles per hour maximum with mostly fourth as the top gear, at an average of 11.5 miles per day). Yay to exceeding EPA estimates!
The price of the limited edition DVD of Memento reached a point where I was willing to buy it, and the navigation guides downloadable from The Muted Horn helped me locate the chronological edit of the film. My suspicion is largely borne out.
18 October 2005
This Tuesday’s DVD purchases finally push last September’s purchase of Mean Girls off the page. When I don’t see what I want at Tower Records, it helps to ask.
The Cuba Diet provides a look at one country’s reaction to losing most of its oil inputs.
The
Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies
includes a
list of 50 movies it calls the Canon:
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
•
Akira
•
Alien
•
Aliens
•
Alphaville
•
Back to the Future
•
Blade Runner
•
Brazil
•
Bride of Frankenstein
•
Brother From Another Planet
•
A Clockwork Orange
•
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
•
Contact
•
The Damned
•
Destination Moon
•
The Day The Earth Stood Still
•
Delicatessen
•
Escape From New York
•
ET: The Extraterrestrial
•
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers
(serial) •
The Fly
(1985) •
Forbidden Planet
•
Ghost in the Shell
•
Gojira/Godzilla
•
The Incredibles
•
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) •
Jurassic Park
•
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
•
The Matrix
•
Metropolis
(1926) •
On the Beach
•
Planet of the Apes
(1968) •
Robocop
•
Sleeper
•
Solaris
(1972) •
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
•
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
•
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
•
The Stepford Wives
(1975) •
Superman
•
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
•
The Thing From Another World
•
Things to Come
•
Tron
•
12 Monkeys
•
28 Days Later
•
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
•
2001: A Space Odyssey
•
La Voyage Dans la Lune
•
War of the Worlds
(1953). I just yesterday played my laserdiscs of
Back to the Future
and
Back to the Future II
because having recently re-read
Future Shock
and in the midst of re-reading
The Sheep Look Up
and re-starting
Stand on Zanzibar
I was struck that we were closer to the
future
of Hill Valley, California (2015) than the present (1985). Closer in
time, that is, not closer technologically.
15 October 2005
The Avalon Theatre in cooperation with the Serbian National Federation and The Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro presents Prism 2005: THE NEW CINEMA FROM SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO starting Thursday, October 20th. I missed last year’s edition of Prism which was held at the Visions Cinema.
The Ridgid 3′ Heavy Duty Toilet Auger is what’s needed for today’s 1.6 gallon-per-flush toilets.
His hometown newspaper reports on the only character in Good Night, and Good Luck. identified by nationality.
I think you can wait.
© 2005 Daniela Scaramuzza/New Line Productions
The publicity photograph doesn’t appear to represent any particular scene in the movie; for one thing, Knightley is smiling. From the costuming and hair design, I would say that the actor is filming scenes from when her character was in college. I used a re-admit pass from the botched presentation of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (the sound was out for the first few minutes) to indulge myself in seeing a movie for free on the first day of release. Now if only I could figure out how other movie studios distriubute publicity material…
Keira Knightley stars as model-turned-bounty-hunter
Domino Harveyin New Line Cinema’s release of Tony Scott’s wild action thriller, DOMINO.
12 October 2005
They’re so sharp, I just can’t get anything past my colleagues. The day I change my desktop background at work (replacing the
image which has been there almost 2 years) the questions begin. Why new? I do know that the
Magliozzi brothers
recommend
buying a used car
but
Carmax
just
can’t keep manual transmission Escapes in stock. (And calling ahead is so… anticipatory. I figure if a particular vehicle’s not there when I arrive, then I get to go home without buying anything. Whee!) Also, the manual transmission models have only been available with four wheel drive with the 2005 model year, so the supply in the used market is small. Why a Ford? Hey, you want an automotive brand saddled with a reputation for unreliability, look to one with the initials
V
and
W
, buddy. I have put nearly ten thousand miles on
my Focus since I bought it 2 years ago
and it’s doing well.
I liked the interior accommodations of the Toledo-built Jeep Liberty, but it has an externally mounted spare tire (which means a swinging door rather than a lifting gate) and
I would prefer not to have that. Because it’s only offered with a six cylinder engine, the
mileage of the Liberty even with a manual transmission (ooh, a six-speed) is worse. Besides, I’m already using my local Ford dealer for service so why complicate life by buying another brand—and
local Jeep dealers
are
not nearly as conveniently located. Why not the Escape Hybrid? The
Ford Escape Hybrid is equipped with an electronically controlled continuously variable transmission. Also, it basically takes my engine (the 2.3 liter four-cylinder) and adds a lot of batteries and while the ability to shut off the gasoline engine when the vehicle is stopped or driving slowly is neat and helps reduce gasoline consumption in city driving, the hybrid drivetrain is really intended as a substitute for the V6 models. The
EPA rating for the 2006 hybrid model in four wheel drive
on the
highway
is
exactly
what I achieved last weekend because, basically, at those speeds it’s the same car. For that, I should pay $9000 more? I have made some notes from the owner’s manual regarding the proper shift points and gear engagements at various speeds and look forward to pulling up my city mileage.
Ford Motor Company has joined with the Governors Highway Safety Association to establish Driving Skills for Life, a site to help teens learn to be better drivers (also available at another URL). Each page of the lessons reminds the visitor that it is made possible by the Ford Motor Company. That explains the yellow Focus ZX3 and the black Escape used in the video clips, then. Locals may appreciate that one of the lesson pages includes a video clip plainly showing a drive along Wilson Boulevard through Ballston (the bank building on the corner with Quincy Street is seen twice). Drivers who learned their lessons in another century may not be aware that recovery from a skid where the rear wheels lose contact requires a different approach depending upon the vehicle’s drive axle. Letting go of the steering wheel has never been an option.
By the way, Click and Clack say:
Some members of our extended family seem to enjoy driving around with, say, 200 pounds of
I think they mean
trunk. Canada’s online
auto magazine disputes the accusation
(made by
Forbes) that the Chevrolet Chevette is among the ten most notorious automotive
dead
weight in the back of their cars. And, as it turns out, each 100 pounds in the truck will reduce your fuel economy by 1-2 percent.
duds
of all time.
11 October 2005
This doesn’t sound good. Via Slashdot, Konica Minolta reports:
We have recently been made aware that a component in a limited number of products may, in some instances, fail affecting camera performance and/or operability. The symptom may appear as a freezing or distortion of the electronic analog exposure display. The following digital products may be affected: A1, 7i, 7Hi, Xi, Xt, X20, S414 and F300.
Konica Minolta will service cameras experiencing this problem free of charge. But I have to blame something else for the failure of my photography (with a 7Hi) at the homeowners association meeting yesterday.
10 October 2005
Once again I deny prowling Brickshelf looking for my constructions in LEGO®. Of course it is a LOWLUG display.
09 October 2005
How much more obvious could it be? Three weeks ago, I purchased a 2006 Ford Escape new from a local dealer in manual transmission models having more options installed than the state-required front license plate bracket and the roof rack. It’s Titanium Green. This single word
ESCAPE
is the
only identity mark of which I am aware on the vehicle. In case the link to the Ford site disappears, this is
the
4WD
mark
found in the
vehicle’s interior. Driving through the heavy rains to Timonium where
WamaLTC had a display
in the
Cow Palace at the Maryland State Fairgrounds
among
many other model railroading clubs in a huge show
and driving at 65 miles per hour only on the return trip, I seem to have achieved 29 miles per gallon (local driving has been at 20 miles per gallon,
YMMV).
05 October 2005
With all the chatter about avian flu and peak oil, it is useful to be reminded that one of the great scares from back before I was born is still around… the Doomsday Clock of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Obviously, someone is having fun anyway. (The same photographs of a bet lost also available on flickr.)
04 October 2005
Ford’s U.S. Sales Declined in September. The company reported double-digit declines in sales last month compared to a year ago for most of its brands. Of the cars under the Ford brand, only the Five Hundred (apparently so-called so that its moniker fits the
F
requirement for car names) and Mustang (which escapes the requirement by being a legacy of the 1964½ MY) showed improvement. The
crossover utility vehicle Escape
showed a 4.1% decline in monthly sales and was down 6.0% for the year to date. Of the larger trucks, only the Excursion and the Econoline/Club Wagon nameplates (and Heavy trucks) showed improvement last month, and the large van nameplate is up for the year to date. The
fall of sales of the Ford Ranger by 26.2% concerns its Minnesota factory location. The Edison, New Jersey plant which used to build the Ranger and the Mazda B-series pickup trucks closed in 2003.
Curiously, the corporate sibling to the Escape, the Mazda Tribute, saw a double digit decline in September sales. Mazda’s results are mixed (cars up, trucks down) and while its car sales are a match for those of Mercury and Lincoln combined, this year Ford has sold more Focus cars than Mazda has sold cars, period. It’s just too bad for Mazda that the five-door Mazda6 arrived too late (and with an ugly grill and with the manual transmission only available locally with the V6 and, after 2 years of driving the Focus, the driving position seems low) and the local dealers are two times to three times as distant from the premises as the local Ford dealer. Proximity is plainly not the sole criterion.
Another thing missing from the manual transmission 2006 Ford Escape XLS aside from badges is a
Built with Pride
sticker. As discussed earlier, the vehicle is built in
Claycomo, Missouri at the Kansas City Assembly Plant
by
United Auto Workers Local 249.
03 October 2005
That pesky Safari on Mac OS X is the only browser at my disposal which I have tried that can handle all the characters in this MetaFilter post about symbols.
02 October 2005
Does the
lady protest
too much? If by
sucks beyond belief
she means
only runs once an hour making connections either impossible or a complete bore
she may be on to something. But that inconvenience failed to prevent me yesterday from making use of
WMATA’s Trip Planner tool
(also available at the
regional transit company’s home page) to schedule my crossing the street, paying a fare of $1.00, spending the next 1½ hours sitting in buses and picking up litter at one connection, and reaching Tysons Corner Center where I do believe
Serenity
is playing at the
16-theater AMC megaplex
in the
new part of the mall which opened on Friday. From the crowds on Saturday thronging the three levels of the new wing, one would hardly suspect the looming spectre of peak oil. Red-headed ticket seller Anne Marie needed a reminder to return my MovieWatcher card, and the construction of the theater is plush like at Potomac Mills. Even the soap dispensers are controlled by infrared sensors. The return trip cost $2.25 and took more time because the subway’s King Street Station was closed and I had to wait for a city bus (and I hadn’t asked for a paper transfer upon boarding the first bus). Rather than
Serenity
I saw something else
(yes, for the second time, I missed the
whole first minute
the first time, the rest of it is that good).
I always used to think of the quote as
methinks the lady doth protest too much
but a check of
Hamlet
Act III, Scene 2 confirms that the Queen actually says
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The
quotation’s inspiration is in the air today.
Crash test results for the 2006 Ford Escape. The weird thing about the
manual transmission model
is the lack of badging…
Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!
…even with four-wheel drive. Aside from the Ford ovals front and back and a chrome
ESCAPE
on the hatchback,
nothing on the outside. On the inside, there is an oval on the steering wheel and but
one small
4WD
in a black plastic panel. Let those who bought the V6 or one of the higher trimlines or
even the Mercury version
have their badges, a stealthy modesty may yet prove useful. While the
EPA’s Green Vehicle Guide
has yet to catch up with the 2006 models, the
results for the 2005 models of the Ford Escape
show that the five-speed gets better mileage than the automatic in either drivetrain and the four-cylinder has a much lower score for pollution than the six-cylinder. See the
results for the 2005 model
at
fueleconomy.gov, I didn’t expect the score for pollution (reflecting pollutants that cause health problems and smog) to be better than the
results for the 2002 Focus
(but the calculation of greenhouse gas production favors the Focus).
…and most important! My visit to Tysons Corner Center meant that I had the opportunity to stroll into the Apple Store there, walk up to a PowerMac G5 on display, and hit the eject key on the keyboard. Ha! Ha, I say! The SuperDrive in the PowerMac G5 is a tray-loading unit! Ha, again!
30 September 2005
Just goes to show you how much a free tabloid can be trusted… two and a half months later, he still hasn’t left. My own barber is someone else in that shop is how I know.
The first retailer I tried didn’t have any PowerMac G5 models on display. Grr.
29 September 2005
I visited one of the shopping centers at the identified intersection Friday afternoon for the Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, but others visited later that evening for different reasons. A fatal shooting early this morning near where I used to work must worry local residents.
I was loaned Tyrannosaur Canyon earlier this week and the thing that gnawed at me most in reading the novel was the description of a character sliding a disc into the optical drive of a PowerMac G5. Although the Mac mini, notebooks, and iMac models are advertised as having slot-loading optical drives, without the presence of a PowerMac G5 on the premises, I am unable to confirm that the PowerMac G5 has such a drive. It will take another visit to a retailer to find out for sure if a keypress is necessary to expose the drive for disc insertion (a move that the author does not include) regardless of whether it is slot-loading or tray-loading. Thank goodness caddy-loading is but a dim memory!
We are a week away from the Great Scale Model Train Show where WamaLTC plans to have a display.
Government star ratings are part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) New Car Assessment Program (www.safercar.gov). The program does not appear to have included the 2002 Ford Focus ZX5 (crash test results for the 2002 Ford Focus ZX3 and crash test results for the 2002 Ford Focus sedan).
26 September 2005
I came across a
Mercedes R-class
yesterday…
what were they thinking?
Is the world really ready for a melted Pacifica? (Oh, and insisting on the
index.jsp
is so not cool, MB.)
25 September 2005
When I purchased
Alvin Toffler’s
Future Shock
for $2.50 at a used bookstore on 11 February 1978, it’s quite likely that its
dust jacket computer font
was already dated. (The font is not
Amelia, see the squarer letter-ends and especially the
y
.) Keeping in mind, though, that
production of crude oil in the United States had peaked in its year of publication, the most fascinating oversight (100 pages into re-reading it) in its description of the super-industrialization of society through the engine of technological innovation is the utter lack of curiosity as to what fueled the hyper-accelerated society it breathlessly chronicled. Instead, the rough calculation on page 24
that half of all the energy consumed by man in the past 2,000 years has been consumed in the last one hundred
is given as merely another facet, otherwise unimportant on its own, of the accelerative tendency the rest of the book seeks to describe. The
source of the calculation, Dr. Homi Bhabha, had thought that
nuclear fusion would arrive in a few decades
as reported by J. Carlton Ward, Jr., president of Vitro Coporation of America in a presentation to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces on 02 November 1955 entitled
Science and National Power
in which the inevitability of the exhaustion of oil was an argument for a national program to develop nuclear power. Fifty years later, there is no good reason to think that we are closer to controlled nuclear fusion with a positive return on energy invested.
Lightning, on the other hand, seems to have been fusing deuterium atoms all along.
22 September 2005
Opera the browser
is
now free. But version 8.5 as available for Windows and Mac OS X doesn’t react to the
image replacement technique I use for the
<h3>
elements
on the
subdomain’s default resource
and it doesn’t display the icon following links to a PDF which I call for using the style declaration
a[href*=".pdf"]::after { content: url("images/pdf_icon_14x20.png"); }
.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7
and
Mozilla Suite 1.7.12
both operate as expected. So does
Safari 1.3.1.
Why bother?
20 September 2005
So, the end of civilization is not quite yet… Scrope is back online.
18 September 2005
Preview of the new fonts for The Baltimore Sun from the designer.
Another street which changed its name on February 20, 2004:
Улици 27. марта од раскршћа са Улицом Старине Новака до Булевара краља Александра - враћа се стари назив: КРАЉИЦЕ МАРИЈЕ. Recently
someone complained in
Vreme
about the
change
(when a
restoration
is in question) but the column is accompanied by a clear photograph of both signs.
17 September 2005
You mean to tell me… there’s more than one black Ford Ranger in the area with a crooked back bumper? That’s just great.
My
municipality claims
the
first wide area, free wireless Internet zone in the Washington, D.C. region, and the largest in Virginia.
I have nothing with which to test the zone.
Because my Netscape e-mail address is publicly posted at my personal LUGNET page, I occasionally receive messages from complete strangers at that account. Usually there’s no follow-up to my response and the one time there was I became suspicious and tired of the exchange quickly. Then last week came a request to identify the locations in the instructions for the 10024 Red Baron at which a long list of parts were employed. Cathy Seipp, in discussing her own supplicants, completely captures my reaction to such a request (which I deleted without reply).
Do I look like I might work at Trader Joe’s? Some people just have weak eyesight, I guess. I did not know that they had a pedestrian-accessible location in addition to a location accessible by bus. Ack! They’re close by in the waning days of the automobile!
15 September 2005
Not a good idea to link directly to my image of the Mean Girls soundtrack and DVD… conveniently I have several weights of Futura on hand to prepare a replacement with the same name and pixel dimensions.
One hundred fifty two miles of city driving in 24 days, 28 miles per gallon. I guess I’ll hang on to it. It would help if the local bus systems were to install the SmarTrip readers which were promised earlier. Notwithstanding the optimism of the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, June 2003 came and went without the anticipated installation. But this notice dated 16 August 2005 from the adjacent county is encouraging. The news releases for the local municipality’s bus system don’t happen all that frequently.
10 September 2005
So… it is possible to patronize the Cinema Arts Theatres 6 on a Saturday using public transportation.
09 September 2005
Attitude. Hmm.
The website of the
Great Scale Model Train Show
has been changed to point to WamaLTC rather than WAMALUG. I have updated the
default resource at
wamaltc.org
to list our plan to have a display at the show on October eighth and ninth at the
Maryland State Fairgrounds
in
Timonium, Maryland. My promised attendance on at least one day of the show for relief and photography is somewhat dependent on the price of gasoline.
More websites of WamaLTC participants which do not respond or are otherwise not available: Scrope (Abe Friedman) and Nate Jacobs
08 September 2005
Argh, the pesky Internet keeps changing and the
personal corner of the web
I
refer to below
is back online as if nothing had happened; all I have is
my screenshot as proof—proof, I say!—of how things were. (The
other site, however, gives a 403 Forbidden.)
07 September 2005
Uh-oh, the account for hosting
wildlink.com
and
wildbrick.com
has been suspended and
wubwub
has disappeared as a member of the Yahoo! Groups for WAMALUG and WamaLTC.
Google’s cache of
wildlink.com
is from August 31st. Stephen F. Roberts was the instigator who set events in motion in 1999 which led to the founding of WAMALUG later that year, but the last meeting at which he can be reliably placed is the one in August last year.
06 September 2005
With the United States struggling with caring for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons and with gasoline prices rising, does Canada provide better prospects for the future for its inhabitants? For now, Canada’s population is about 11% of that in the United States (and only about 3× that of Serbia and Montenegro in a land area that is 170× as great). As long as tanker truck operators are willing to work, however, wholesale prices for gasoline in Canada are expected to remain linked to those in the United States. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is confident that with some pipeline construction Canada can remain self-sufficient in crude production and continue as an exporter to the world market. Canada has an army which is all-volunteer and its current operations find its soldiers in, um, the United States, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Haiti, Israel, Sudan, and other countries. Canada routinely reports statistics about itself including those for crime in 2004.
05 September 2005
Madison, having snagged a small role in a film shooting in Manhattan without anyone bringing up the question of SAG membership, and with her head turned by spending an evening with the
majorly big mega-movie star
playing the high school aged female spy and the new season’s
It
Boy playing the love interest, has ditched her erstwhile friends with the trademarked names Barbie, Chelsea, Nolee, and Delancey to follow Ryan for more after-hours fun. To avoid the paparazzi chasing them, Ryan hails a passing
Checker Cab…
…and they ride off in a Peugeot 306??? (Say, what is that Volkswagen Golf doing on the other side of the double-yellow, anyway?) The DVD jacket is coy regarding the identity of the
majorly big mega-movie star
but
it doesn’t take much to figure it out.
She makes it sound like the lower-level entrance to Target in Springfield Mall is a bad place. But, yeah, if you’re car-less, the walk to Fischer’s Hardware would be non-trivial.
A recent DVD purchase assures me that Mad Hot Ballroom (still in theaters, I saw it in May) is coming soon. The blog at Stay Free! describes how the documentary handled the hurdles of copyright clearance.
MetaFilter discovers the site devoted to the capacitance videodisc which I have linked to for many years now.
An
M1026 in camouflage built in LEGO® elements
by
you know who. The URLs are not redirecting to the
www
subdomain anymore?
01 September 2005
Today is the first day that residents of this commonwealth could place an order for a free credit report through the
annualcreditreport.com
website. Oh, great, the message at the bottom of the first report I ordered:
File previous address is a restaurant/bar/nightclub
. As if.
Hil-D has a special relationship with the Minnesota-based discount retailer but the site offers no search function.
I’ve been thinking that movie studios must have some way to distribute the photographs that wind up in newspapers and on web pages; this is the site for New Line and FineLine.
31 August 2005
So I succumbed… which makes me rather ordinary this week.
The original paper presented by M. King Hubbert in 1956 is… interesting. My insight into where various forms of energy fit into the solar cycle? Pages 5 and 6. Peaks in production of crude oil in the world and in the United States and in production of natural gas in the United States predicted? Figs. 20-22 on page 32. Energy content of initial fossil fuel reserves for the world and the United States estimated and amount consumed already noted? Figs. 16 and 17 on page 28.
The
local Barnes & Noble Bookseller
keeps the books related to
doomsaying prognostication on the fate of humanity
in the
Nature
department. Who’d have guessed?
30 August 2005
Gloomy? Who has time to be gloomy? There’s enough bread and circuses around to distract anyone…
So, anyway, I’m re-reading one of the several books on the premises, Going for Broke: The Chrysler Story by Michael Moritz and Barrett Seaman which I bought in 1983, and came across this paragraph on page 169:
As far back as 1959, the United States government had protected the nation’s domestic oil industry from cheap foreign competition by holding the imports to 18 percent of the market. By 1971, domestic production had clearly peaked; Texas and Oklahoma crude were becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. The trade-off facing the Nixon administration was whether to suppress domestic production by unleashing the cheaper imports or to accept higher fuel prices at a time when inflation was an increasing worry. Nixon went with cheap oil, and by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, 30 percent of all oil consumed by Americans came from overseas.
By 1971, domestic production had clearly peaked… if two journalists in the automotive industry knew this and could mention it almost off-handedly 10 years later (in a long litany of troubles which faced the automobile manufacturer whose story they relate up to the bailout over 20 years ago) what took the rest of us so long to grasp it?
Not everyone is convinced, because, you know, we’ll never run out of passenger pigeons, each one killed gives the others more space and food to breed… oh, wait, we did run out. Without having given the book more than the briefest glance, I suspect authors Huber and Mills will gloss over how each shift in energy source (to take their example, the development of the steam engine making increasing coal extraction possible in England) comes along after the previous source has been devastated (as the forests of England and its colonies were by shipbuilding, home construction, and use as a combustible fuel).
The attraction of fossil fuels was their concentration of the solar energy of millions of years in a compact, portable form with a shelf life. If a solar panel represents the energy of solar irradiation right this minute, then wind and water represent the solar energy of a few days to a few months, and trees represent the solar energy impinging on a chemical factory for decades. Plotted that way, the utter implausibility of substituting anything else for fossil fuels is more blatant (leaving aside nuclear fission which generally has been used only to create electricity and lacks the portability of fossil fuels). A society which relies on walking, bicycles, horses, steam automobiles, trolleys, interurbans, and coal-fired steam locomotives can be a vigorous combination of urbanity and agriculture, it’s the world of 1900, after all (your mileage may vary based on locality), but is there room in it for 6 billion? More and more it looks like economic costs have little to do with the energy input involved.
28 August 2005
Revisiting a link I made a year ago, I read something I’m not sure I knew before: the global peak for oil discovery was in 1962. (Kevin Drum did a five-part series on peak oil last spring.) Who will survive in a world in which the reliance of every agricultural and technological advance of the twentieth century on cheap petroleum for its existence will be largely unsustainable? There aren’t enough tortoises anymore to make combs out of their shells, after all.
I had a chance to try LEGO® Digital Designer 1.4 on a Macintosh that is not quite as cobbled together as mine and it worked.
27 August 2005
BrickWiki
is a
recently established resource
(the
URL changed subsequently) which happens to already have a stub
page for WamaLTC
(and
another for WAMALUG).
Who struggled with how to edit the page
three weeks ago
and even considered
someone from one of the clubs
without thinking to mention it on the
club’s Yahoo! Group?
You guessed it.
26 August 2005
LEGOFan.com, you say? Yeah, that works. Better than brickfest.org does and more helpful than www.brickfest.org is, and okay, so www.brickfest.net is clearly in business. But if one wants to read the messages in the LEGO® Factory forum, one is better advised to start at www.LEGOFan.org.
Has it been 10 years already? Whatever.
25 August 2005
Oh, but it’s not true that the
contact information for LEGOFan.org
is hard to find… just because right now all it says is
content
doesn’t mean it’s being neglected.
The blank display of Bricksmith I experienced earlier was the result of the antiquated onboard video in the Beige Desktop. Connecting the monitor to the installed ATi Radeon 9200 video card permitted the program to display models. The program’s author couldn’t have been expected to test for such an edge case, but really… if he didn’t test at the 1024×768 resolution I use with the onboard video, then for sure he didn’t test at the 800×600 I have to use with the Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display connected to the video card. Time for a Cinema Display?
Downloaded and unpackaged LEGO® Digital Designer 1.4.1908 and the program’s system requirements explicitly require a particular degree of graphics performance: NVidia GeForce 5200/ATI Radeon 7500 or better. While it crashed at first when using the video card, the program did launch the second time, loaded 183 brick types, and then stopped responding. Oh, well. Force Quit and back to my regular resolution.
Google Talk… should I have been more interested in obtaining a GMail invite earlier? I am not clear on how I, as a user of iChat, can add a Google Talk user as a Buddy. Maybe it requires Tiger anyway.
The
Canadian
Marksman, builder of HMMWV variants, has built
again: a
civilian police variant in black and white. My files in the LDraw format include my name in a comment… it’s not like I’m hard to locate on the web.
24 August 2005
The actor Brock Peters died yesterday. Although his entry at the Internet Movie Database is updated the listing of performances omits his taking on the role of Darth Vader for the National Public Radio drama Star Wars (Wikipedia’s contributors highlight that role, however, and the one he played in Soylent Green). Wikipedia has more on the Star Wars radio series which ran in my last year of college.
Bricksmith 1.0 is described as an LDraw editor for Mac OS X. I wasn’t able to get it to display a model using my Panther-equipped Beige Desktop, but other people have had success with it. Dare I wonder how happy Apple will be with the program’s icon? LEGO® plans to release version 1.4 of LEGO® Digital Designer in a Mac OS X-compatible edition (as previously announced) later this week, er, tomorrow.
Because of all the
hoopla surrounding the relaunch of LEGOFan.org
all links to the site from before then are no longer valid. (This link rot has caught even the
developers of LEGO® Digital Designer
themselves!) Conversely, any site content at LEGOFan.org
now
was not there even 6 months ago. More specifically, the description of WamaLTC which was found at LEGOFan.org in the first week of March was the first paragraph of the
wamaltc.org site as it was before the hiatus
(when the club was described as a Special Interest Group) verbatim. That description is gone and in its place I found earlier this week one that described WamaLTC as
LEGO Train enthusiasts unite in Washington State
and another that described WAMALUG similarly. Given all the effort WAMALUG, at least, went through to rename itself and redesign its logo to
avoid
exactly that geographic confusion, what a shame that it wasn’t effective in this instance. As it happens, one of our more energetic participants has, in response to the thread arising from my report on the train club’s mailing list, added new entries to more properly describe the local clubs.
Tower Records admits the release is in the record chain’s Top 1000. What a world, what a world…
22 August 2005
Another 8-wide HMMWV in LEGO® elements found on Brickshelf
is missing the
W
from the folder name and looks somewhat like a scaled down version of Bram Lambrecht’s model. The new
model from a military-minded builder offers substantial wheel travel. 8-wide HUMVEEs rule!
21 August 2005
It took 6 hours to create a multi-part file in the LDraw format of the Pizza Hut model I built in LEGO® elements in 2002 (I displayed the start at the March meeting of WAMALUG, showed continued progress at the May meeting, and had it largely complete for the Manassas Railway Festival that year and the June meeting). The LDraw part library is missing Bicycle with Clear Wheels and Black Tyres (41719c01) and Plant Brick 1 × 1 with 3 Bamboo Leaves (30176). It wasn’t until the release of the 4403 Air Blazers set in 2003 that the roof was entirely red.
Not only is the Sony Style Retail store in the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City in the same mall as an Apple Store, it is on the same floor in that mall as the Apple Store, and is right next to the Apple Store on that floor, and uses the same aluminum frame, backlit white plastic logo, and glass doors and windows as the Apple Store next door. The Sony Style Retail store does not display any shortwave radios, telephones, or Super-VHS decks. The company was quick to abandon the laserdisc player market, too. So what’s the point? Televisions? Computers that run Windows? Digital cameras that rely on Memory Stick?
18 August 2005
Sony Style Retail Stores plans to open locations in Virginia in the same malls that currently include Apple Stores.
I used MLCad on the actual Windows computer on the premises for the first time (to document a creation that may, or may not, show up on another club’s layout) and only had to exit and restart the program once when certain aspects of the UI starting flaking out by displaying different bitmaps. So far, so good. The official LDraw Parts Library does not yet include the Door 1 × 4 × 6 Frame (30179) and Door 1 × 4 ×