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.]

Postal rates go up January eighth.

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!

These aren’t the ’droids you’re looking for…

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

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 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. 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.

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 distribute publicity material…

Keira Knightley stars as model-turned-bounty-hunter Domino Harvey in 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 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. 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 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.

Photocatalysis? Sure, it’s being studied…

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 × 6 with 3 Panes with Smoke Glass (x39c02) so the multi-part file is not ready for sharing (an unofficial version of 30179 is available for the adventuresome).

16 August 2005

One thousand iBooks, twelve thousand people: iBook sale erupts in chaos, stampede. Henrico County misjudges the allure of a notebook computer priced at $50.

Updates now that I look again: the price differential between Crown and Exxon has returned to 9¢; the page anchoring my third link to scltc.org below admits to Original vehicle design found on Brickshelf ; and, the Egg Yolk Yellow SVT remained on the Laurel Carmax lot over the weekend, indeed, both SVTs at local Carmax stores have the F mark which indicates a vehicle sitting around too long.

I looked but didn’t buy. The Math isn’t one of the tracks included.

15 August 2005

Lohan Still A Redhead On Toy-Store Shelves, In Cartoons reports MTV, two days after I alerted my own dedicated readers to the release of this miniature… however many that may be! Now that’s just mean… but does indicate the risk Mattel is taking with this product. Not even the internal anchor-free, celebrity-obsessed can keep on top of things all the time (scroll to about a third down the page of the post from yesterday).

WamaLTC participant Michael Harrod is first on the draw to post to LUGNET regarding the article in The Washington Post this morning about BrickFest™. The credited photographer is a man, so the identity of the individual behind the displays on Sunday remains unknown.

14 August 2005

Busted! In the Train/Town Room at BrickFest™ today in Arlington, Virginia, Thomas and David Michon displayed what they called an InterRail Metro Elevated Station. But what I see waiting for the train at the crossing is a vehicle built according to my instructions for a 6-wide Hummer H2! David had the decency to react to seeing my name on the show participant badge I was carrying when I introduced myself. This is the second year in a row that one of my MOC designs has shown up at BrickFest. Seems like the fine folks at the Southern California LEGO® Train Club actually built multiple editions of the H2. The windshield wipers are their own addition (the choice of wheels is theirs as well). The Downtown Avenue Rally seems to have been a part of their layout since May last year. If Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Owner and Vice Chairman of the Board, the LEGO® Group and attendee of BrickFest this year, had asked the Michons who made this, what would they have answered?

I had the ear of the president of Brickshelf for some time this afternoon—and it slipped my mind to ask why the site redirects to the www subdomain! Argh!

13 August 2005

Why don’t I use bookmarks? Because there is no perfect browser… while one web designer praises Safari for its rendering of Unicode characters, another software writer complains that Safari’s rendering of Unicode characters is flawed. Where Safari completely falls down for me, though, is in its handling of the <q> element. Not only does Safari provide the chicken scratch character (") for both the leading and the closing quotation character, it also ignores the lang attribute. Here’s my CSS:

q::before { content: open-quote; }
q::after { content: close-quote; }
*[lang=en] { quotes: "\201C" "\201D" "\2018" "\2019"; }
*[lang=sr] { quotes: "\201E" "\201C" "\201A" "\2018"; }

My dispatch for August ninth has examples of quotation elements, one each in the two languages I have specified in the stylesheet. Users of Internet Explorer for Windows see no quotation marks at all since all versions of that browser on that platform skip over the <q> and </q> tags entirely yet display the element anyway. (Internet Explorer for Macintosh manages to get the “ U+201C and ” U+201D but applies them regardless of the language attribute value.) Mozilla and Firefox and Camino behave as expected as to the <q> element but add a spurious space after the double prime (″ U+2033).

Someone beat me this morning to the 2005 Ford Escape XLS 4WD with 5-speed manual transmission which had been at the Dulles Carmax a few days. Oh, well. WamaLTC has nothing planned, really. But it might have been nice. (On the other hand, how much longer are dealers in toy trains going to be able to continue driving up and down the coast chasing the remaining dollars in a hobby that is getting older and—when it comes down to plain survival once all the peak stuff makes itself felt—extremely marginal? The price for a gallon of gasoline is now the same at Crown as it is at Exxon at one local intersection.) It is interesting to know that all wheel drive is available on the manual transmission models of that model year (because it wasn’t earlier, the manual transmission was saddled as the cheapest version in the lineup, with front wheel drive only). A number of local dealers cannot be bothered even to include the two manual transmission models (front wheel drive and all wheel drive) among the <option> values for the Trim field in their new inventory search forms. Pass on them, eh? The color choices for MY2006 are limited: Dark Shadow Grey, Redfire, Black, Silver Metallic, and Titanium Green… oh, no, no, blast that Flash navigation that Ford uses, that selection’s only for the Limited. The 2006 Ford Escape XLS Manual colors are: Gold Ash, Dark Shadow Grey, Titanium Green, Redfire, Norsea Blue, Sonic Blue, Black, Silver Metallic, Oxford White, and Blazing Copper. There’s no yellow anymore. The Escape is built in Kansas City, Missouri. For those willing to buy new, the Ford Family Plan runs until September sixth.

A MeFite points to Angelina Jolie’s journals from her field missions for the UNHCR including one from her December 2002 visit to Kosovo.

10 August 2005

Turns out Mattel had let us know the My Scene goes Hollywood Lindsay Lohan doll was coming… it’s not quite as faithful a portrait as with the Colleen Fitzpatrick doll, but the red hair and the freckles help. Baseline goes into some detail as to why the My Scene line exists at all. Hooray for a 12″ wide scanner bed.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes three-volume box set is now due in October.

The Modern Library edition of The Prince and The Discourses by Niccolò Machiavelli was a high school graduation gift (originally $1.95, found at a used book store for 75¢, the volume was No. 65 among The Best of the World’s Best Books ). Some excerpts from Chapter III of The Prince in the translation from the Italian by Luigi Ricci:

Thus you find enemies in all those whom you have injured by occupying that dominion, and you cannot maintain the friendship of those who have helped you to obtain this possession, as you will not be able to fulfil their expectations, nor can you use strong measures with them, being under an obligation to them; for which reason, however strong your armies may be, you will always need the favour of the inhabitants to take possession of a province.

But when dominions are acquired in a province differing in language, laws, and customs, the difficulties to be overcome are great, and it requires good fortune as well as great industry to retain them; one of the best and most certain means of doing so would be for the new ruler to take up his residence there. Being on the spot, disorders can be seen as they arise and can be quickly remedied, but living at a distance, they are only heard of when they get beyond remedy. Besides which, the province is not despoiled by your officials, the subjects being able to obtain satisfaction by direct recourse to their prince; and wishing to be loyal thay have more reason to love him, and should they be otherwise inclined they will have greater cause to fear him.

For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance. But by maintaining a garrison instead of colonists, one will spend much more, and consume all the revenues of that state in guarding it, so that the acquisition will result in a loss, besides giving much greater offense, since it injures every one in that state with the quartering of the army on it; which being an inconvenience felt by all, every one becomes an enemy, and these are enemies which can do mischief, as, though beaten, they remain in their own homes.

The dust jacket proposes that these books, written in the early 1500s, have become required reading for an understanding of our daily newspaper headlines. You don’t say.

Roy Gal announces his return to the area (by posting to the WAMALUG Yahoo! Group about his move to Charlottesville) and promises to return to WAMALUG when it resumes meetings in September (for the first time since 2000, the club will not even pretend to hold a meeting in the same month as the behemoth in time and effort that is BrickFest™). Roy, you never left. ☺ Members of the public have a chance to join the festivities on Sunday for a mere $7.

09 August 2005

If one cannot tell the difference between Helvetica Heavy and Futura Extra Bold, then the difference between New York and Garamond will be elusive indeed.

Where is the outrage? (The sites nasepismo.org and nasepismo.net are not responding.) A well-known title in magazine publishing prints its edition for Serbia and Montenegro (available since January of 2004) in the Latin alphabet! Radi se o umetničkim fotografijama i nije mi bila frka da se skinem. says model Jelena Jakovljević to Blic . Artistic photographs, mm-hmm. At least the magazine’s production staff know enough to use the capital letter d with stroke (Đ, U+0110) properly. Yet Blic does not use latin small letter lj (lj, U+01C9) where it is clearly called for. This orthography stuff is not for the timid.

The alleged popularity of Svetlana Ceca Ražnatović (on the cover of the August issue, not the one pictured) was explained by On the Media in terms English-speaking peoples might understand on the occasion of her arrest in 2003 following the assassination of Zoran Đinđić. Ražnatović released another album last year (I like the samples better than a certain winsome Texan’s self-titled effort) but this year Australia followed Canada in refusing her an entry visa. She thus follows other faded pop-cultural stars like Belinda Carlisle and Debbie Gibson onto such covers, and from her more recent photographs one might suspect the full panoply of cosmetic improvements have been applied.

Make maps of the political jurisdictions like countries and states of the United States you’ve visited (via East Ethnia).

07 August 2005

It’s not the greatest television series ever made (the movie and television series mentioned by Ted Rall in a recent column aren’t either but both have a home on some form of video on the premises) but for someone in their twenties Remington Steele could be a fun mix of mystery, action, comedy, and romance. The first season had among its guest stars Annie Potts and Sharon Stone and it tied with Monday Night Football and Webster for 25th most popular show in its third season (moving it from the death slot of Friday night against Falcon Crest to follow the much more popular The A-Team and Riptide must have helped). In simpler times, a grocery store only had one type of Coca-Cola on the shelves.

The fifth anniversary of the beginning of this web site passed unremarked last week… There is now an Apple Store in the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City… The rebranding of my webhost as Netbunch is but one of the things which have been delayed this month… Fetch may have reached version 5.0.2 but I still get error 10006 so I’ll stick with 4.0.3 for now.

04 August 2005

The updates here have been on hiatus while I watched the Remington Steele Season One DVD set. I was supposed to be interested only in the third season… but the title was discounted at a Minnesota-based retailer… watching the series again evokes nostalgia for my post-collegiate years, but what a shame that the production design of the box is so sloppy that the important co-star (actually the character which was the impetus to create the series in the first place) is relegated to a sticker ( also starring Stephanie Zimbalist ) and the selection of stills is so lame that they’re from a later season.

I did not know that. The semi-circular tabs on the sides of Apple mouses these days, including the Bluetooth Wireless model on my desk, allow a user to keep the mouse clicked while repositioning. Apple Mighty Mouse is a multi-button trackball mouse from the company famous for sticking with the single-button mouse for over 20 years. Ars Technica has already given it a workout.

I posted to the WAMALUG Yahoo! Group with a message entitled Fake WAMALUG logo used on ILTCO T-shirts and a long-standing member of the adult LEGO® fan community just couldn’t figure out what I was complaining about. Apparently I was optimistic about anybody but I didn’t have to respond, go check out the pictures of the smart guy who told him they’re different fonts. My guess it’s a Neue Helvetica 85 Heavy or something like that.

Maybe I am happy…but looking? There was an Egg Yolk Yellow 2004 Ford Focus SVT ZX5 at the Laurel Carmax this week. Other than the black leather interior, different wheels, and the most minor of fascia differences in the front and back, who would have noticed the exchange? It’s gone already but there’s a black SVT ZX5 with cloth seats, more muscular wheels, and lower odometer reading at the White Marsh location now… my miles per day has crept up to 18.

What do you do when you buy a DVD for less than the price of a movie theater ticket (which has gone up recently due to a local tax) and after watching it decide that, eh, it’s ok, but you wouldn’t buy it on DVD? D’oh!

One of the attendees at the WamaLTC meeting on Saturday found it to be an awesomely educational experience. Yup, Virginia makes its money by importing trash.

I added Yahoo! Search to the default template of the summersgrove.org website.

29 July 2005

Am I happy with my car? Perhaps Ford should be worried that only old women ever ask me that question. (The answer, after almost 2 years, is yes.)

This driver of a Honda Insight doesn’t find the police cars in Paris the slightest bit intimidating. Mmm, Peugeots.

The maximum price for a fully tricked-out Mac mini model has come down, all models now have 512 MB of RAM as standard, and still some people aren’t satisfied. You’d think they were happy with the shrinking whitelist of sites they could safely visit using (the ancient) Netscape 7.02. The base model is less than four times the list price for the operating system alone!

A transplant from Madison, Wisconsin doesn’t find her new neighborhood all that impressive. On the other hand, she likes the idea of the Cinema Arts Theatres 6.

26 July 2005

Latin tutor… and a gymnast? I could be tempted once the third season of Remington Steele is available on DVD.

25 July 2005

The Kojo Nnamdi Show with guest host Mary Tillotson is on top of the Daylight Saving Time controversy today with the author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time and the co-sponsor of the recent bill on the subject, Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass). With individual programs available for streaming playback in Real Player format, there’s no longer a need to stay in the car to listen to a complete hour. The first Tuesday next month is the second.

Bouyed by finally establishing an external backup drive for the Compaq notebook of the same size as the recently installed internal drive (through perserverance in swapping drives, swapping enclosures, swapping boot diskettes, and swapping computers) I took advantage of the increased drive size to install Firefox for the first time on that machine. But it could only see the default resource at this website (c.hannaher.net) and gave an error for any other page. D’oh! The Ethernet card was loose. How it was able to rely on some cache to display the home page without an error, I have no idea. It really is one of the ugliest programs I have installed.

A driver’s license in this commonwealth no longer displays the bearer’s weight.

Pseudogenization of a Sweet-Receptor Gene Accounts for Cats’ Indifference toward Sugar (via MetaFilter front page post). Also heard on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning. Letting a cat near your computer’s keyboard can be bad news.

24 July 2005

Time Zone Editor Available on OEM Service Release 2 CD-ROM and in the tools/reskit/config folder of the Windows 98 CD lets a user of one of these operating systems adjust the start and end dates for daylight savings time. (Users of Windows ME need not bother looking… unless they live in Brazil the program is not included.) Because someone really likes sunshine.

19 July 2005

Reporting-MTA: dns; prserv.net
Arrival-Date: 20 Jul 2005 1:01:11 +0000
Final-Recipient: rfc822;
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
522_mailbox_full;_group_quota_sz=3145598/3145728_ct=602/100000
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Permanent Failure: Other undefined Status
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 01:01:11 -0000

18 July 2005

Who was I kidding? Asking Windows 98 to do something for hours, let alone days, is an invitation to disaster. The operating system experienced some fault overnight and now I have a unresponsive external hard drive (not even fdisk sees it). Why don’t I just get a new computer (or two)? I get asked. One, new is no guarantee of no trouble and two, I’m pretty sure someone once told me that life is tough and that there’s no escaping that.

17 July 2005

96 megabytes does indeed seem to be the maximum. Oh, well.

There would appear to be 2,441,282 clusters in an 80GB drive. ScanDisk looks at them 64 at a time. Taking about 6 seconds to do so. Accordingly, a conservative estimate is that it will take more than 2½ days for ScanDisk to complete its job. Given that the melting point of aluminum is over 1000 degree Fahrenheit there is no danger of the enclosure of the external drive dripping off the edge of the desk, but still… why do I get the idea that running ScanDisk cuts into what remains of a drive’s MTBF? I also really appreciate that the default action once ScanDisk starts is Cancel and that to press the spacebar to wake the monitor from sleep activates the default action. That is sweet.

16 July 2005

I don’t remember graduation day nearly so well.

Some desultory searching and I do not locate any information on whether the Compaq Presario 1681 notebook can really run Windows XP (it just meets the minimum requirements of a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM when the extra memory module is installed). Neither do I locate any reports of whether 96 MB of RAM is really the maximum (although crucial.com treats it so). Am I not happy with the new hard drive and operating system upgrade already? It would be nice if a simple file transfer from ZIP disks didn’t require restarting over and over for hours. But of course there would be no guarantee that all of my programs would survive the transition. The Windows 3.1-era programs that came bundled with the Olympus ES-10 transparency scanner come to mind (their installer doesn’t even know about the Program Files folder). That’s where multiple hard drives and Norton Ghost come in… for experimental purposes. ;-)

A meeting of WamaLTC is planned for the thirtieth at the home of Tom and Holly Cook.

15 July 2005

Does the man ever sleep? Although this announcement at LUGNET yesterday that the event graphic for BrickFest™ 2005 had been chosen does not identify the successful entrant, the announcement at the BrickFest™ site itself (despite the out of date title attribute value) does: Joe Meno. He designed the commemorative model for this year, too (it’s the Lincoln Memorial)… oh, how cute, they designed a favicon but only have it show up on the index page.

12 July 2005

Confirmed: Nate Jacobs was in Cincinnati and he made his contribution to the display last weekend.

Whither LUGNET? The co-founder starts planning.

10 July 2005

A ham radio operator of my acquaintance (about whom QRZ provides lots of details, not my fault they do that) once passed along page 50 of the February 1990 issue of Popular Communications ( The Monitoring Magazine ) because the RTTY column by Robert Margolis included a report from The New York Times that three more letters are being added to the Cyrillic alphabet to approximate the sounds of the Arabic language heard in the Tatar SSR with an accompanying figure depicting blocky glyphs representing the sounds kH, gh and wooh. (The Times report was on page A4 of the August 3, 1989 edition of the newspaper.) As one might imagine, the continuing relevance of this act on behalf of the Tatar Soviet Socialist Republic is small. Like those in other republics of the former Soviet Union, Tatars seek to de-Russify their language and alphabet by switching from Cyrillic back to a Latin alphabet. Unicode appears to include codepoints for the ka with hook Ӄ and ghe with stroke Ғ but I am unable to locate any u with breve. Georgians retained their distinct alphabet (comprehensive list of font resources) which has its own Unicode range.

The Canadian Marksman, builder of HMMWV variants, has built again: a civilian firefighting variant in Bright Red. If this builder had followed the advice to move to maj.com I would never have known about it. How can anyone compete against the Yahoo! company Flickr’s features without even a favicon?

Interesting. The WAMALUG brand identity is weakening… the font was changed (anyone can tell by the lowercase a ) in preparing the T-shirt commemorating the display of LEGO® railroading at the NMRA convention in Cincinnati this weekend. Whether the use of the logos in the first place is a licensed use I cannot know.

MTV’s The 70s House is one of those reality television series I hear about from time to time and then ignore, this one takes as its premise the placement of 12 young individuals in a house equipped only with technology which was available in the seventies. While the series description takes the easy route with No cell phones, no iPods, no Britney! Only rotary phones, 8 tracks and Farrah. a serious approach would have to establish a specific year (and income level). Consider that pushbutton phones have been around since 1964 and the problem is evident. The Apple II shipped in 1977 and laserdisc players made their first foray into the marketplace in December of 1978 and videocassette recorders with wired remote controls were also available before the end of the decade. While the importance of cable television and a microwave oven in my own life have diminished considerably, I don’t know that I would last long in a house that didn’t have a circular saw, a reversible multi-speed power drill, a stapler, a dispenser of transparent tape, or even a box of manila folders at the ready somewhere inside. On the other hand, I have bought a hexalobular (TORX®) driver against the day that my rechargeable shaver fails and I want to open the housing and remove the batteries for recycling so maybe I just like to be prepared.

The initialism for Teenage Girl President (TGP) has another meaning on the Internet. From the twisted mind of Francesco Marciuliano, coincidence… or something more?

09 July 2005

Those wacky Minnesotans really know how to hurt a girl. Not everyone in that state likes Garrison Keillor, either. And isn’t a third album a little early for a greatest hits compilation? The release date is not my birthday.

At least two WamaLTC participants will not be at the WAMALUG meeting today because they made it to Cincinnati and the NMRA convention this weekend. The section of the layout set aside for WamaLTC may be height-challenged by comparison with the other clubs’ contributions but Todd Thuma has his circus and Tony Perez has his mountain hideaway, red pagoda, a little garage, and a new diner and it looks like Nate Jacobs might have arrived with his corner building with Starbucks on the first floor.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History still has the elephant in the rotunda and is quite the tourist magnet on a holiday weekend, as was the 2005 Smithsonian Folk Festival. Sometimes when I am with the parents of young children I wonder how they remember their own names. ;-)

The twins employment index needs revisiting.

The MPC ClientPro 365 might provide value to an organization’s IT department but… an end-user might want something quieter. A wireless mouse would be nice, too.

05 July 2005

Ew. I found a gift in my trash can today. Remind me again why I should be empathetic to dog owners?

03 July 2005

Ten new scans from 1996-1997. Jurisdictions: Richmond, Virginia; United States Army; Pennsylvania State; Arlington County, Virginia; United States Secret Service Uniformed Division; Mount Rainier, Maryland; Greenbelt, Maryland; Charlottesville, Virginia (pictured); Metropolitan Police Department (Washington, D.C.); and Baltimore County, Maryland.

28 June 2005

The Made on a Mac web badge program by Apple has reduced the options to one style which uses the Myriad Pro typeface. No more colors.

25 June 2005

The Super-VHS deck on the premises apparently hasn’t worked in years but until now this has had zero impact. Today, though, I took a break from the WAMALUG display at the Fair City Mall in Fairfax, Virginia to watch a romantic comedy set in the Chinese-American community in New York City and somewhere in my subconscious I must have known I had seen the name of Michelle Krusiec before… and I had, according to the imdb, in the credits for the Time’s Orphan episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine which I taped 7 years ago. (The Paramount Digital Entertainment page for the episode confirms but the terms of use still demand linking only to the home page.) Which, not to put too fine a point on it, I cannot watch without a working Super-VHS deck. Grr.

In the absence of any progress from WamaLTC’s other photographer, I have added pages for the meeting in May and the display earlier this month using only my own photographs.

24 June 2005

Oh, sure, if it’s a matter of glory for the editor/publisher of BrickJournal then nothing is too good: MetaFilter, Boing Boing, and Slashdot (where he’s actually mentioned by name) all in the same day. But if you’re one of more than ten participants in a WAMALUG activity tomorrow, not a peep on LUGNET and the club’s home page remains silent, too.

23 June 2005

My first impression that it’s not nearly as bad as say, the remake of The Stepford Wives, is really too faint a praise. Also, the local (blood-and-guts) reviewer overplays the erotic charge that the red-headed star might generate in a short skirt and pumps. Even so, Metacritic currently assigns the result a 46 which is a respectably higher score than that assigned to the current release from a certain blonde now allegedly sporting a set of caps.

22 June 2005

Attica! Attica! The AFI continues to celebrate 100 years of movies by presenting a list of 100 movie quotes. It’s easier to count the movies I haven’t seen. I am surprised to see at least one spoiler.

Is the world ready for a full-color magazine devoted to LEGO® enthusiasts? There are so many secret projects underway these days… but how difficult can it be to get the non-www site address working properly?! (The site appearance degrades even more with a directory appended!) Maybe I’m cranky because I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out how to redirect requests for hannaher.net/c to c.hannaher.net while maintaining the current ability to redirect www.hannaher.net to hannaher.net. As it happens, all I needed was the line Redirect 301 /c http://c.hannaher.net in the .htaccess file for the directory.

21 June 2005

AMC Entertainment Inc. and Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation to Merge. Here we go again almost 17 months after they gave up earlier.

20 June 2005

If you want to start a blog… start a blog already. If you don’t find what I write interesting, read someone else. I haven’t been sharing for 10 years like Jeffrey Zeldman has, but still nearly 5 years is not nothing. I don’t think of myself as a writer but it’s undeniable that I’ve been putting one word after another and leaving the unruly heap of them out in public in a way that others have not… at least, not in over 2 decades. You could learn a lot, reading my dispatches.

Earlier I was reaching for some explanation as to why one cheerleader movie was more satisfying than another. I finally found my answer on pages 98-99 of On Writing Science Fiction, a 1988 purchase at Heartwood Books in Charlottesville which I’ve been idly re-reading recently. D’oh! The explanation is plot: situation, complication, climax, resolution, anticlimax. The publisher and first author of the book, George H. Scithers, are still around. From the comments at Making Light, it looks like the third author, John M. Ford, is also active.

Fairfax County offers its citizens the opportunity to use the I-66 Citizens’ Recycling and Disposal Facility but oh the horror the place charges a whole dollar to accept appliances. The county is silent on what to do with televisions. Sheesh! Arlington County demands $20 per television! The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality offers a comprehensive list of programs in localities in the state.

Apple Recycles offers to its customers take-back recycling of its computers for $30.

17 June 2005

WAMALUG may not have updated its website to announce the planned display yet, or posted to LUGNET about it either (the only reason I know about the plan is because of the messages anyone who joins can read at the Yahoo! Group) but Fair City Mall is pouring it on for the LEGO® Show Saturday, June 25th in the Mall. They’ve placed a message on the marquee at Pickett Road, posted full-color signs at both entrances, had stores inside the mall post the signs (prepared in two sizes) in a window, and the hobby store has monochrome take-away flyers on pale blue paper. See amazing LEGO® displays built by the Washington Metropolitan Area LEGO® Users Group (so they left out the D.C. part). The signs include a photograph by Todd Thuma depicting Joe Meno and a very red Moonbase module and another photograph of a space shuttle by David DeVorkin both taken at the display at the National Air and Space Museum in April. The logo of the club manages to survive placement against a deep blue background. Fun for the whole family! All day event!

15 June 2005

Participants in previous WamaLTC activities plan to have a small display this Saturday (the 18th) at the Manassas City Recreation and Parks Department special event Train Rec (flyer in PDF). You wouldn’t know it from the WAMALUG site yet, but they plan a display at the Fair City Mall on Saturday next week (the 25th). The Cinema Arts Theatres 6 has directions.

The desktop wallpapers available at the Russian-language site for the transliterally named Мистер и Миссис Смит are exactly the same as those found at the English-language site for this bullet-soaked romantic comedy.

13 June 2005

See, no one tells me the important stuff: Windows+L locks a computer (at least the kind that can be locked, using Windows XP).

Maybe there is a Food Peak in our future? Humans consume 40 percent of the plant mass created each year. Via MetaFilter comment.

11 June 2005

Yes! This weekend’s project was to install a DVD recorder in the Beige Desktop on the premises. A dispiriting aspect of reading the system requirements of DVD recorders that come properly packed in four-color boxes is their demand for some outrageously advanced equipment like a 1.2 GHz Pentium 4 and the like. So one benefit of buying an optical drive packed in a clear plastic bag is—no pesky list of system requirements! The Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Korea Corporation TS-552U DVD±R/RW Drive (my purchase from Micro Center has a black bezel) was quickly installed and put to use burning the contents of the hard drive which came out of the Compaq notebook last month and the contents of the Jaguar partition left on an external drive and the contents of the current Classic folder.

While rendering the Hummer H2 and instant messaging Thursday evening, I was missing MTV’s 2005 Movie Awards. Thanks to Studio Briefing I already knew that Mean Girls and its cast was well represented among the awards distributed. Others may disagree about how deserving they are (the absence of something as popular is one of the reasons the box office receipts are down this year) but Rachel McAdams and her channeling of Alec Baldwin are a special treat in a movie filled with good performances.

So what to do with the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Korea Corporation TS-H492 CD-RW/DVD Drive which was in the Beige Desktop previously? Well, there is that other Windows computer on the premises which is capable of accepting IDE drives of the 5¼″ form factor… and which had been serving as the home of the cheapest optical drive ever: the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Korea Corporation TS-H292 CD-RW Drive which introduced me to the advantages of faster CD drives last year for $25. After an initial hiccup where choosing the wrong CD to test with (Madonna’s True Blue) brought Explorer and Windows Media Player to a halt, I installed the bundled application CyberLink PowerDVD and I was playing a DVD in Windows! (Guess which one.) And despite what CyberLink requires now for version 6, version 5 as supplied with the drive runs fine on a 400 MHz Pentium III. The program includes a capture function, although in view of the horizontal compression of the resulting bitmaps (which I have attempted to correct in the displayed thumbnails), I shan’t be implementing that function too often.

Reminder to self: when preparing screen captures, do not include the name of the actress in the filename. It’s one way of making the job of an image search engine harder.

09 June 2005

Say, I can try my hand at this prognostication thing, too… No Apple-branded computer with an Intel microprocessor inside will be sold with a floppy drive… or PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard… or parallel and serial ports… or a game controller port… and no hack to get OS X to run on a generic white-box computer with those parts will get the operating system to understand them, either.

My request for a CD with the images from the most recent roll of film I left for developing at my local Shoppers Food & Pharmacy has left me with a Konica Minolta PC PictureShow® CD which allows me to compare this photograph (taken last October) with the H2 I built in LEGO® elements last year more easily (no negative scanning required). Getting the render of the 6-wide construction in LEGO® elements meant tracking down the unofficial part Wheel Centre Large Wide (30285) again and tracing the part number changes for the tire to locate Tyre 24 x 14 with Shallow Staggered Treads (30648) and its required unofficial subpart. The software on the CD which Konica Minolta manages to offer to its Macintosh customers has yet to make the 68k to PowerPC transition—this software will never run on Apple-branded computers with an Intel microprocessor inside. Fortunately, and unlike the floppy-based version of this service, the JPEG files themselves are accessible from the Finder directly.

08 June 2005

Totally. This important word is used several times in the cast commentary for D.E.B.S. but, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, your speling of this word on the DVD jacket is busted!

Like the local subway system doesn’t already have enough problems, today I saw the signs announcing eight car trains which, upon arrival, only had four cars.

07 June 2005

XPostFacto 4.0b3 now allows Tiger to be installed on a Beige G3 Desktop. I can barely remember what’s supposed to be special about 10.4, losing steam after Spotlight (yawn) and Dashboard (another yawn) and… iChat AV? I suppose I felt the same way about Windows 98 Second Edition when it was announced and released.

06 June 2005

Did the earth’s movement in its orbit jitter today? Apple to use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006.

Note to self: the eth (ð, U+00F0) is different from the letter d with stroke (đ, U+0111).

The Toma Rosandić Memorial Museum is but one component of the Belgrade City Museum. You guessed it, they don’t know what street they’re on, either.

05 June 2005

So I was wrong. At least according to this Hungarian mapmaker. I’m not the only one making this mistake in spelling so I think there’s more to the story than my alleged ignorance of grammatical form. The question is, why has no one complained in the 10 years I have been sending holiday messages to residents at a particular address along that street? And, why haven’t they noticed that the name of the street changed on February 20, 2004 to ulica Ljube Jovanovića? This street name restoration has been published in Serbian and published in English (in the latter, presumably prepared for foreigners, special emphasis is added that the changes undo those made by the Communist Party in 1945). I had supposed that I could trust the embassies of China and Cuba to know what street they are on, but maybe not in this case. ;-) If only I knew someone who could take a picture of a street sign… and had a strong computer which could upload or e-mail such a picture… if only…

Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware site is now The 20th Century Software Preservation Archive.

If what this guy does is art then why not what I have done? Kodak Tri-X 400 on an unspecified avenue in Manhattan in December of 1980. As long as I have the transparency scanner on, additions have been made to the gallery of self-portraits. I mention it here so as not to spoil the moribund What’s New page for this year.

I can foresee a time in the not too distant future when I myself will not be able to check web design in OS9 so easily. The Performa has made its way to the floor and its behavior is erratic and about the only thing stopping me from wiping the drives of my licensed software is the absence of a FireWire-to-SCSI converter on the premises. (I could reinstall the internal terminator in the Desktop but where’s the fun in that?) There is no emulator of the Mac OS as it ran on the PowerPC processor which would run on a Windows computer. But recent reports of discussions between Intel and Apple have some in suspense.

04 June 2005

The Arlington County Library is making life difficult for those who remain steadfast in their use of Mac OS 9. This week, the new library catalog ACORN demands for its visual browser these components: Panther (10.3), Safari (1.2), and Java (1.4.2). Because Netscape Communicator 4 hangs once it has painted the background of the viewport, and Internet Explorer 5.1 hangs upon the message that the AquaBrowser Library is loading, users of these older browsers on the previous operating system can’t even reach the classic tab to see if it works for them. Those who have installed Mozilla 1.2.1 on their OS9 system don’t get the word cloud in the Discover panel upon making a search, the associations, translations, spelling variations, and synonyms appear instead as unordered lists. Users of Panther with Java 1.4.2 already installed who just don’t want to use Safari to visit one web site can try the Java Embedding Plugin to make the LiveConnect link of JavaScript to Java work in Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Camino to display the word cloud.

The CSX Track Geometry Unit GRMS-2 was tooling through the area southbound yesterday afternoon.

Journey through Hallowed Ground is the result of a partnership of agencies and organizations which seeks to draw attention to various historic places in an area from Leesburg to Charlottesville which may be threatened by development. The map that The Washington Post used yesterday in reporting on the project specifically emphasized the route I happened to use to drive to Charlottesville and back in the eighties: US-29 from Gainesville, US-15 to Orange, VA-20 to Pantops Mountain.

02 June 2005

Sigh. Just another unlicensed use of the WamaLTC logo.

30 May 2005

Now everyone will want to go… BrickFest™ mentioned on BoingBoing. It is interesting to me that the author of the post sees through the persistent attempt to paint the convention as happening in Washington, D.C. (now in its sixth year) and correctly places the gathering in an adjoining jurisdiction.

29 May 2005

Mmm, Bluetooth. Wireless file transfer. Unfortunately, most Bluetooth devices claim to require Windows XP. An exception or two can be found in the Macintosh room…

28 May 2005

The phrase All users are encouraged to migrate their files to maj.com on the home page of Brickshelf (my link target redirects to the www subdomain) is generating some discussion. To the extent there’s no apparent business model to distinguish the two sites, it’s not clear to me what the motivation is for the encouragement.

The winners in 2003 of the Colors of the World ballroom dance competition of fifth graders in the New York public school system who participate in the American Ballroom Theater Dancing Classrooms curriculum were from Public School 144 in Forest Hills, Queens. They lost to another school in 2004. The websites ps144global.org and promiseofthepark.org no longer exist, but the New York City Department of Education offers comprehensive information about the school where I spent kindergarten through the beginning of fifth grade. My address at the time is still zoned for the school. I’m not surprised that its accessibility status is not.

25 May 2005

More concretely, the setting to Use drop shadows for icon labels on the Desktop is found in Windows XP in the Custom section of the Visual Effects pane. This may be reached through the Performance and Maintenance task in Control Panel, or through System Properties, Advanced, Settings, Performance Options.

I suppose it did not help that the exhibition at the Regal Cinemas Bethesda was less than ideal: the light of the EXIT signs cast a red glow on the screen and the audio system was driven to the breaking point… but it was mildly amusing to see so many vehicles I had previously known only in their LEGO® rendition.

23 May 2005

Transparentis from Nix Software Solutions does what it says… make the desktop of Windows systems transparent so that the background wallpaper can show through the captions of the shortcuts. Thanks to BlackICE Application Protection, I know what file they patch upon installation. ;-) This can be achieved out-of-the-box in Windows XP (search the Help for drop shadow ) but it’s neat to get nearly the same visual effect in an earlier version of the OS.

MSN Messenger for Mac 4.0 is installed in response to a report that a cousin has established an MSN account.

21 May 2005

Something I should have done some time ago, I suppose… replace the original, seven year-old, hard drive in my Windows notebook with something larger and upgrade the almost equally old operating system to Windows 98 Second Edition. One might consider the preparation to have started on December ninth last year with the purchase of a shrink-wrapped copy of Norton Ghost 2001 for $3.93 and tax at a local thrift store (originally someone’s $70 purchase at Best Buy). My possession of a parallel port file transfer cable from a long-ago purchase of FastMove! (the program is available still, now as a $20 download from SmithMicro Software) helped somewhat, connected to another Windows computer which has found itself on the premises at a somewhat greater expense, to make use of Ghost’s function to create its ghost image file on another system’s hard drive through the connected parallel ports. Since that transfer of 3 gigabytes took just over 5 hours, it further amused me to have an external enclosure for 2.5″ hard disk drives on hand to connect through USB to that other Windows computer so that the clone from image to disk could take just 70 minutes. With instructions for replacing the hard drive in my specific model of computer found in a number of locations on the Internet, and my collection of tools yielding the proper Torx T8 driver, the swap was made and it was freaky to see my desktop background appear knowing that it was a completely different drive inside. For now, it seems a little faster and the volume is no longer muted upon bootup. I was able to connect with the network attached storage (when its built-in FTP server was activated) to upload and download files using Windows Explorer. I attached and detached a 3.5″ hard drive in an external enclosure without incident.

At no point was I concerned by the language of the notice that Western Digital includes with its bare drives:

This drive is designed for professional installation. The hardware, software, and instructions typically supplied with internal drive kits are not included.

With their domain now in the hands of a reseller, my guess is that Starfish Software is no more. When I bought the EarthTime program at version 2.0, I got the edition that included diskettes for the stand-alone version and the plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0, but apparently it was also available as an ActiveX control. The utility allows Windows to match the functionality which the Mac OS has long had built-in, the ability to correct its clock from a network time server. I try to use it about once a month.

18 May 2005

First the wife, then the husband. The honoree is heard in an audio interview at his local public radio station.

I suppose I would have enjoyed it more if the screen hadn’t been incorrectly masked down to an aspect ratio of about 3.5:1. Experience the difference indeed.

16 May 2005

Yesterday’s gathering in the name of WamaLTC did, as I speculated a month ago, provide the opportunity to display (and photograph) my more modern armored car. My photographs of the meeting on Brickshelf. The Helen Wilson Community Room in the Franconia Governmental Center has a FRANCONIA sign which is a relic of the local railroad station, but what struck me about it was the font: it’s very close to the one Wachovia Corporation uses.

15 May 2005

The function to contact the folks at BrickFest™ is not currently working but the change to the stated ownership of the trademark suggests one ought to follow the money… Unfortunately, the District of Columbia requires a telephone call to find out more about locally registered corporations.

How pathetic is it that I recognize pretty much every clip from the Cops television series used in this episode of VH-1 Goes Inside? Good times.

12 May 2005

No, seriously, Internet Explorer for the Macintosh is dead. But you knew that.

The site statistics claimed that visitors were looking at pages in the subdomain www.c.hannaher.net and it turned out that the .htaccess needed a little tweaking to its 301 redirection rule. For starters, it needed to refer to this domain and not to wamaltc.org. Oops. Better late than never.

If you are not too busy, WAMALUG meets this Saturday and WamaLTC gathers this Sunday. All I’ll have new to display at the Trains gathering is the two armored cars from a month ago, but with the planned length of track, maybe there’ll be a quiet spot along the side somewhere for my 8-wide locomotives to run without too many switches to negotiate. The aerial view of the location doesn’t make clear that most of the parking which surrounds the Franconia Government Center with the Helen Wilson Community Room is behind a fence. (The fact that the parking lot at the Potomac Mills Mall is largely empty in the Google Maps aerial view makes me think that the overflights were made early on a Sunday morning.)

Mark your iCal calendars, LL on SNL a week from tomorrow.

09 May 2005

To place a Get Adobe Reader graphic on a website, or renew one placed on the site of a homeowners association, one starts by reading the guidelines for the use of certain materials. Even though Adobe has abandoned the Acrobat moniker for the Reader member of its Portable Document Format family of tools, the legacy of so many links means that the name survives in the URL and in the name of the graphic itself (as offered at the Adobe site, which may not be the name to which I saved it).

John Gruber’s list of changes made by Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) includes a couple so far which may or may not induce anyone to upgrade or purchase: PNG now default for screenshots (the previous default, PDF, was a pain as only Preview was able to change the file to a more usable graphic format without too much fuss) and Canadian English keyboard layout (just the thing for those who left/will leave because of the last election). Federal employees are offered a discount for online purchases by starting at the Federal Employee Purchase Program page at either of two apparently equivalent URLs: federal/howtobuy (which uses Myriad Pro and the full array of site navigation links) or r/store/government (which uses a Garamond Condensed and lacks any site-wide navigation).

06 May 2005

I should clarify that my incredulity below is directed not so much at what Eric Meyer has written but at the poor performance of the parser in the old Microsoft browser.

05 May 2005

Un-bee-lee-vable. When Eric Meyer writes in the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets The Definitive Guide that The child combinator is optionally surrounded by whitespace. You can use or omit whitespace as you like he must have meant modern browsers because even though Internet Explorer for Windows through IE6… does not support child… selectors the problem in displaying the pages at wamaltc.org in Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows that I wrote about earlier turned out to be not so much because of specific rules applied to the mispositioned <ul> elements but because of rules like div#navigation ul li:hover > ul which it’s supposed to ignore! Thanks to the article Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones and the handy archives of older IE versions at evolt.org I installed standalone versions of Internet Explorer for Windows in the Windows 98SE image running under Virtual PC 7 and worked through the style rules one by one until I determined the culprit: Internet Explorer 5.01 was applying declarations to any element found in a rule after the child combinator and its trailing space. (SoftWindows running in Classic cannot set a shared folder, so while the older emulator can view sites already on the Internet, the program is not useful to view local files, hence the new installations.) With the whitespace around > removed, the display in Internet Explorer 5.01 (and Internet Explorer 4.01, for that matter) is copacetic or nearly so. Anyone still using Internet Explorer 3, though… you’re in the same no-style, no-Unicode, no-PNG boat as Netscape Navigator 3 users. Interestingly, it is enough to remove the whitespace before (but not enough to do so after) the child combinator. Why I bother, I have no idea.

04 May 2005

It is just swell that the Macintosh versions of Corel Photo-Paint have the Batch Process… command on the File menu, but not the Dockers (or scripting capability) which would make the command usable. That explains the utter silence of the manual and help on the subject of that command. Ever since the turn of the year, I have been unable to reduce the file size of thumbnails below about 30 kilobytes in either Photo-Paint or Graphic Converter running under OS X, and it is not a happy situation that I might have to do my resampling in the Windows version of Photo-Paint from now on (but there I’ll have a script to implement the batch process command). Apparently, I owe it to my dial-up visitors to use 4 KB thumbnails.

Isn’t that interesting… Corel has finally made a connection with the embroidery market. I would have preferred a plug-in, but in the way that many Barbie Doll fashions include a doll, the embroidery edition includes a full version of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 12. The price does not make it competitive with just paying a vendor to perform the digitization of one logo to a stitch pattern.

03 May 2005

Suppose you are a customer of a We Are Mac Friendly ISP still using Windows despite the presence of a Macintosh-oriented store in your vicinity and you wish to make use of the 5 megabytes of filespace generously offered with your account, but you don’t want to spend any money on an FTP client. No one told me, but according to Windows Me Annoyances, a new feature in Windows Me is that the My Network Places folder supports FTP sites and allows the user to navigate to an FTP site in (Windows) Explorer and drag-and-drop files between folders.

This feature remains functional in Windows XP: navigate to My Network Places in Windows Explorer, switch to Task View, follow the link on Add Network Place, and follow the prompts of the wizard. There’s no need to struggle with locating, downloading, and installing an FTP client which will just demand payment after 30 days anyway if all you need to do is upload a few files. I needed to know this four months ago, but better late than never, eh? I don’t expect anyone to be helped by the screenshot of the wizard using the Serbian Language Interface Pack (Cyrillic) but, hey, that’s my local installation.

Recent releases of the Mozilla Suite have the GUI to accomplish file uploads when logged into an FTP site, and an extension is available for Firefox, too. Internet Explorer is also supposed to support drag-and-drop over FTP but I didn’t have much luck with that earlier. Mac OS X still doesn’t ship with any FTP client Aqua applications (even as it includes a command-line utility like earlier versions of Windows did and also has an FTP server). The Finder’s Command-K Connect to Server command permits file browsing and downloads but not uploads.

Does it worry anyone else that there is already a QuickTime 6.5.2 Reinstaller for Mac so soon after QuickTime 7 is made available for 10.3.9 users?

The commenters at This Is Broken make fun of the idea of left-handed keyboards but Matias, distributor of the Tactile Pro™ USB keyboard, makes just such a thing. They also offer a keyboard with the letter order in each row reversed (allowing one-handed typing). The Tactile Pro™ keyboard (it’s noisy, all right) prints the characters which are available with the option and shift-option key combinations on the individual keys; with that keyboard, it would no longer be necessary to switch to the Unicode keyboard to type, for example, the trademark symbol (U+8482). But the power key cannot start the Beige Desktop, so there’s reason to continue using the Apple Design Keyboard.

02 May 2005

While a certain dominant discount retailer is reported to litter the countryside with abandoned stores, two locations where Ames used to do business in this area have been torn down and are currently rubble.

29 April 2005

To justify my absence from work this afternoon I should have said I was headed for an Apple Store… something about a new version of the operating system?

In expressing my disappointment with Robots earlier, I neglected to mention the one real-world intrusion therein: the logo of the United States Postal Service.

The Unicomp Classic (Customizer) 104 keyboard arrived today. First impression: the spacebar is detached (simply fixed). Second impression: it’s sufficiently big that there’s no longer any room on my desk for the wristpad; the cable is short and (contrary to the specifications) the coil therein is strong, so the connector can’t reach its port without awkward stretching in inconvenient places. Looks like the product of Thailand (a Compaq-branded peripheral with a cord connected in the center of the keyboard—not its end—and a cable that really is straight) is going back in for now. Third impression: it is nowhere near as heavy as an authentic Model M from decades past.

25 April 2005

The local Shoppers Food & Pharmacy has marked a number of the cashier’s stations as Customer Bagging Lane. When Shoppers first entered this market, customer bagging was a demand, not a choice. One paid for the privilege, too! ( 3¢ our cost. ) Now it’s necessary to avoid having one’s purchases, which might well fit in two or three bags, scattered among seven or eight of them.

The used IBM® Model M keyboard on the premises cost me $50 at the thrift store on May 29, 1993 and the new cable which was ordered on June 22nd and arrived on July 9th cost $42.75. It wasn’t brand new in box or anything, but it was accompanied by its foam shipping tray and a set of blank templates, and even now only betrays slight soil on the keytops. By comparison, the Compaq keyboard accompanying the notebook purchase in 1998 (and thus used for a similar length of time) shows significant polishing of the tab, shift, control, and alt keys and of the space bar and the A is almost completely gone. My only regret with this particular Model M (especially now that I can compare the expenditure with the prices for used examples at clickykeyboards.com) was that it lacked the lights for the shift states.

24 April 2005

Entering the last week of the month, and not wanting to purchase gasoline again before it’s strictly necessary, I did my shopping and library patronage as a transit-using pedestrian today. Leaving from the central library of an adjoining jurisdiction and heading towards the nearest junction of subway lines, I discovered (or re-discovered) that Orpheus Records is now on Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon . It’s just like it was but less hectic and they even have the soundtrack album for The Stunt Man which I was looking for maybe 10 years ago when the store was in Georgetown (didn’t buy it this time, though). The clerk was going through a stack of albums from a performer who got very popular in the mid-seventies and wiping the platters. Moving along, I saw that The Apple Store nearby had a good supply of the Belkin adapter which allows plugging in two PS/2 peripherals into one USB connection. Earlier, I had found replacement lamps for the AA 2-cell Mini Maglite® flashlights at a certain discount retailer at the shopping mall at the end of the subway line, which saved a walk to Fischer’s Hardware.

The IBM® model KB-8923 is a basic rubber-dome switch 104-key keyboard suitable for light use when a picky visitor insists on having the Windows® keys available. But I know whereof the website clickykeyboards.com speaks: I purchased a IBM® Model M (silver logo, Part No 1390120 S/N No 2101467 Date 23SEP86 Plt No F2) at a Salvation Army thrift store in Baltimore and once I had cajoled IBM Parts to sell me the necessary cable I made use of this keyboard for some time at work until the switch from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups to Windows NT 4 made the absence of the Windows® keys a liability. I still prefer this formidable keyboard to, say, a Microsoft® Natural Keyboard Elite which might arrive with a guest computer. Unicomp sells new keyboards in this style… tempting.

23 April 2005

Command-Option-U does reveal the raw message in Apple Mail, and the HTML e-mail in question calls upon a file in the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery… it is funny that the purveyor of this type of greeting card e-mail is confident that the resulting messages will always land on a hard drive somewhere which will always be the same as that on which Windows is installed. The idea that such a message might end up as webmail or on a Macintosh apparently wasn’t a consideration.

Argh! Another line drawn in the sand brushed away by the reduced prices at everyone’s favorite Minnesota-based discount retailer.

The Samtron 75E was part of the Economic series of CRT monitors which the Korean company made in Mexico a few years back. For the moment, the company maintains a full set of specifications, driver downloads for Windows (the monitor is definitely plug-and-play using the VGA port on the ATi video card here), and the operating manual as a PDF on its website. What a shame the site doesn’t work at all if one doesn’t include the www. prefix.

21 April 2005

Inflammatory. Huh.

The BrickFest mirror sites are back to being under construction. The subdomain dc is back, too.

No, Safari 1.3 does not handle position: absolute; any better than 1.2 did, so the prospects that I can change the stylesheet rules for WamaLTC for Safari 2.0 (arriving in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger) are poor.

The Director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies has some of her work product in the Google Print Beta.

20 April 2005

Everybody needs a hobby? Preferably not the one suggested by this URL…

19 April 2005

The inability of SoftWindows98 to use the CD drive while running in Classic has been known for years, so never mind.

It occurs to me that the WamaLTC logo would look very nice on what Coins for Anything makes (which I found out about from this report of the company’s production of a 25 million downloads coin for Firefox) but the prices and the Your die will … fall under our copyright are impediments. Since ITC Lubalin Graph Bold is among the fonts included with CorelDraw, something more modern would be tempting…

Since I don’t use any e-mail client, I cannot confirm that Command-Option-U is the proper command in Apple Mail to view the raw message in that program (which insists on establishing at least one mail account upon startup) but it might be useful as a forensic technique for any recipient of HTML e-mail messages in my readership who does use that program.

18 April 2005

Absolutely hysterical. Three months after the local LEGO® users group abandoned all of its structure, a club of similar vintage based in New England, NELUG, announces its introduction of by-laws, an executive committee, membership requirements, and dues.

Whether the 10.3.9 update has anything to do with it or not, when I ran SoftWindows98 5.1 under Classic subsequently, the program ran so slowly (and so failed to see the CD drive) that it was largely unusable. With the Desktop Beige booted into System 9, the response of Windows 98 Second Edition inside the emulator was positively snappy (it should, what with the installed 1 GHz processor upgrade) and there was no problem accessing the drive.

Except for the fact that it would make the greeting on my telephone answering machine too long, I would want to add By not leaving a message, you agree that I may publicize your telephone number and CallerID label and draw attention to the likely non-legitimate nature of your calls.

Notwithstanding, the participants in Saturday’s event look happy. The discussion I came across today at Airbag about what it takes to make a logo work put me in mind that WAMALUG has been using the logo I designed for almost 3 years now. The logotype can be used in black-and-white as well as grayscale and the logo graphic reduces to a favicon, while the combination in color has been applied as website graphical elements (at various sizes), used on business cards, emblazoned on large banners, and now embroidered on polo shirts. Now that’s a club asset.

17 April 2005

Totally. There was at last a price for the Saved! DVD that balanced my interest in what Jena Malone and Mandy Moore had to say on the second commentary track with my disappointment in the limp screenplay and allowed me to purchase it even under scrutiny. Guess which word Malone uses repeatedly.

In constructing the official website for Romanian-born actress Alexandra Maria Lara one of the two stills chosen to illustrate her performance in Der Untergang is of the secretary leaving the bunker wearing a Wehrmacht helmet. Trademark concerns prevent me from saying more. (The frames-based site allows linking to an image file but does not permit directly opening the HTML document including the image file. Go figure.)

More evidence of disarray among the BrickFest team: yesterday the mirror sites brickfest.org and brickfest.net pointed to a Northstar Computer Systems Under Contruction page… and this morning they do not resolve at all. Now whose research is feeble?

Whenever a relative newcomer to this area reveals an uncertainty or lack of knowledge about the local geography, I appreciate the advantage I take from living here since 1970. To the extent that I’m down to driving an average of 16 miles a day (down from 30 miles a day 20 years ago up to as recently as the fall of 1998) that advantage can only wither. Update: because my multi-state journeys in 1987 and 1988 overwhelmed the vertical axis in a chart (that included all my cars) and made the trend more difficult to see, I revised the chart to show just the past 10 years of driving. The gap followed by a 38 miles/day spike is the 6 weeks I went without a car after the collision in 2003 and the driving on the first tank in the Ford Focus.

The recently released update Mac OS X 10.3.9 could be the end of the line for this PowerMac Desktop Beige model. The next revision of the operating system requires built-in FireWire (and a DVD drive to accept the install disc). The PC Retro Computer Warehouse at Tysons Station has a whole stack of examples of the model.

16 April 2005

It was a kitchen logic moment that called for forehead slapping: I had been so agitated at discovering that all the links to archives of the BrickFest site which I had established at various pages at the WAMALUG domain were now useless in the face of the absence of the link targets that it took a while to register that brickfest.com was hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) server. Looks like Northstar Computer Systems has another client and no one at Brick Events LLC has yet thought to ask for the 404 Custom Errors Properties to be edited. Normally the customers of Northstar with complimentary LEGO®-related sites are asked to display a link to the host… so in the absence of such a link one could conclude that the account is paid for.

15 April 2005

BrickFest is 4 months away… and it’s at George Mason University in Arlington again. I think it’s funny that the dc subdomain of the BrickFest website is gone (that’s why the image at the bottom of the LUGNET post does not appear) but the joke wears thin when I realize that no directory outside of the root seems to have survived. Here’s the image the poster was looking for squirreled away at a random website.

14 April 2005

It was pretty much inevitable that I would want to build a modern armored car in LEGO® elements (having built an antique armored car earlier this week), and I have done so, but my plan to demonstrate that by a render from the file in the LDraw format is thwarted by the continuing absence of ‘Train Window 2 × 6 × 2 with Clear Glass’ (6567c01) and the absence of new part ‘Car Mudguard 4 × 2 1/2 × 2’ (50745) from the parts libraries official and unofficial. Even though vehicles are not specifically invited to the gathering of WamaLTC participants next month, maybe my new constructions will show up anyway. The recent official set inspired me not at all. By stepping out in pursuit of the thief, the security service minifig in that set (I realize now from reading the book) is violating industry standards by leaving the vehicle unoccupied.

13 April 2005

When Dave Hyatt writes about the Acid2 test that Every browser fails it spectacularly. :) he’s not kidding! Internet Explorer 5.2.3 for Mac OS X doesn’t even display anything in the viewport! Gecko-based browsers are close, Hyatt is improving Safari for versions subsequent to the release of Tiger (10.4) at the end of the month, and versions of Internet Explorer for Windows at least manage to display something… Netscape Communicator 4.4 sputters out two statements of ERROR and four list-item bullets, but the test isn’t meant for something so old and creaky.

12 April 2005

Maybe the club’s name was changed and I just didn’t hear about it? There’s a curious parenthetical in this announcement on LUGNET about WAMALUG and its participation in Exploring the Universe Family Day at the National Air and Space Museum this Saturday. Nope, the web page by the Smithsonian Institution has the name just like it still reads in the club’s logo.

11 April 2005

When I was leaving CompUSA after my purchase of the Apple wireless peripherals yesterday, a Dunbar Armored truck was outside. I’ve been reading Bulletproof, a history of the industry of armored cars which it turns out is currently featured on their home page, so I took the afternoon to build this 1921 Monitor model by the Providence Body Company of Rhode Island as found among the photographs in the book.

10 April 2005

Mmm… Bluetooth adapter, wireless mouse, wireless keyboard. Silly Apple, insisting on the www prefix.

06 April 2005

On the other hand… it’s not like WamaLTC makes use of its LUGNET newsgroup, so maybe the communication channels are underused. But for better or worse, in its current incarnation the local LEGO® Train club has ex-membership in WAMALUG as the common characteristic of its foremost personalities (ooh, someone’s website has been updated recently but another’s website has not) so any outreach will be minimal.

Hmm… I might have to reconsider my brand of bottled water…

05 April 2005

What getmapping® has done for New York City and environs in New York The Photo Atlas, Google Maps now does for the entire United States (via Slashdot and MetaFilter).

When a Macintosh user asks Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down? one might answer that it’s just as goofy as dragging a floppy disk to the Trash to eject, or one could get the answer from someone who knows. When I read this somewhat interesting tale of debugging a login failure using Internet Explorer and came across a mention of a rusty old Windows 98 image I thought the writer might have, like me, managed to make the old OS work in the latest version of the emulator. But, no, I realized later, unlike the edition for the Macintosh, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 for Windows has no restrictions on what is a supported OS.

04 April 2005

There’s nothing sadder than a Shoppers Food cashier turning a fruit over and over trying to find the code… and nothing more frustrating than when a cashier gets it wrong (when the label is missing or is never applied). Grr. There’s a reason I was waiting for an unoccupied self-service lane, you know. I have in my hand a list of the PLU codes I use.

Very occasionally my referrer logs yield a value which does not reflect a referrer spammer. It would appear that Yahoo! has thoroughly spidered this domain for the purposes of updating its index for an Images search… which means that I am currently very highly featured as a result for, oh, say, the name of the DVD I bought last year featuring a freckled young star-in-the-making or, more eccentrically, for the name of a fictitious variant of a famous 11½″ fashion doll or, even more alarmingly, two highly famous trademarks which combined for an advertising campaign last year. But Yahoo! does not distinguish between URLs found as the value of the src attribute of an <img> element and URLs found as the value of the href attribute of anchor elements. The upshot is that when I only link to an image in a page (as I did for a blonde actress that impressed me or when I found an amusing bit of advertising parody) the image is nevertheless returned as a result as if it appeared in that page. Boo.

My local Tower Records/Video will abandon the last vestige of Open Until Midnight starting Friday next week when the store will remain open only until ten o’clock every day. (How interesting. The map included on the Store Locator page places the branch right on top of Cherner Lincoln-Mercury! The store is actually located just off the right edge of that map.)

02 April 2005

What a train wreck! With a meeting of WamaLTC participants today having built a number of tables with high camaraderie and the design of the club’s web site having a decent appearance in a number of browsers modern and aging, including Internet Explorer 6 for Windows thanks to Virtual PC 7 running either Windows 98 Second Edition or Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2, I turned to the SoftWindows98 installer to create a new default hard drive file for the older emulation program in order to examine the behavior of the site in Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows. The older browser appears to have much difficulty with the style rules applied to the <ul> elements in the navigation and body portions of the page. My legacy of HTML and CSS at the WAMALUG site poses the outdated browser less difficulty. Since Internet Explorer 6 can be installed in pretty much any system which has IE 5.0 installed the relevance of the creaky rendering engine in that version should be nil—but last month this subdomain had more hits from IE 5.0 than from all versions of Opera combined.

01 April 2005

I am ashamed to know who Kimora Lee Simmons is. Damn you, swimsuit issue of Vanity Fair!

31 March 2005

Be afraid, be very afraid… or not. It’s just a movie.

27 March 2005

Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Macintosh might be dead, but I couldn’t resist finding out what the exact problem it was that was causing the menu bar at wamaltc.org to display oddly and as it turns out only two display: block; rules have to be hidden from that browser and all is well again.

Ted Rall writes in Wake Up, You’re Liberal!:

It’s a big Democratic problem: lack of organization, lack of vision, lack of energy, lack of guts, lack of follow-through.

Aw, gee, if I’m going to make the pages of WamaLTC safe for Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Macintosh (available for all PowerPC systems using 8.1 through 9.2) I might as well see what’s needed to make them safe-ish for Netscape Communicator 4.x (all it took was moving a few of the rules to a style sheet the ancient program can’t see).

26 March 2005

WamaLTC and hannaher dot net are now on the no-www bandwagon thanks to a 301 redirect rule in the .htaccess file. Give it a try and see! One of the advantages of not being hosted on a Windows server. The commenter Scott at this blog clearly never gave his suggestion a try and does not understand the problem: too many times leaving out the www. leads to failure to connect to the domain.

24 March 2005

Both of this week’s movies were filmed entirely on location in the United Kingdom…

I sense a cross-blog conflux of snark potential in the making: a certain winsome Texan will be a guest co-host of The View on ABC the week starting April fourth. The program’s site doesn’t admit to it yet but since everytime I install a security update of Firefox I have to uninstall the previous edition and thereby lose the Flash plug-in I might as well visit a site I know requires Flash to operate to obtain the plug-in again…

That no-www bandwagon is having a little difficulty getting everyone on board.

23 March 2005

So far, the site statistics for wamaltc.org bear out my disinclination to address any issues IE/Mac might have with the site’s design: Internet Explorer 6.0 (71.5%); Mozilla (20.8%); Netscape 7.1 (1.7%); Firefox 1.0.1 (1.5%); Firefox 1.0 (1.1%); Safari (1.0%). There’s more hits for Unknown or Opera than for all Internet Explorer version numbers which would represent Macintosh visitors combined.

22 March 2005

I suppose that means I have to watch them again… Aunt May’s house in the Spider-Man movies was a location two blocks to the west of my second Queens address.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found little change overall in stopping behavior or pedestrians yielding to turning vehicles, despite the use of highly visible fluorescent yellow-green reflective sheeting for the WHEN PEDESTRIANS ARE PRESENT plaque in a study that compared that sign to another which prohibited right turn on red (RTOR) during specified hours. Pedestrian yielding is considered a problem because it leaves pedestrians in the crosswalk longer.

21 March 2005

Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style. Now with its own website.

20 March 2005

St. John’s Queens Hospital was the result in 1961 of a move and new name for the St. John’s Long Island City Hospital which had first started operation in 1891. In 1964 it would have required a drive from our neighborhood to reach the facility at 90-02 Queens Boulevard. There is a hospital in the neighborhood now (the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System Forest Hills Hospital but I cannot determine when its predecessor the LaGuardia Hospital was built). Later St. John’s became a division of Catholic Medical Centers and is now merged with Saint Vincents Hospital and Medical Center and Sisters of Charity to form Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers.

My first neighborhood in New York had deteriorated seriously by the time I revisited it in the summer of 1979 (the same trip that had me photographing my elementary school) but from the aerial perspective of New York The Photo Atlas it looks just as arboreous as any prosperous area. Indeed, I am surprised to see that the Unisphere of the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair was closer to that walk-up apartment than St. John’s was and that we were but one block from Meadow Lake of the Flushing Meadows Corona Park (but this opened in 1967 after we moved).

This page presenting the exit signs along the Long Island Expressway (which confirms that there is a Queens Boulevard exit as described in the St. John’s directions and the navigation in the photo atlas) uses document.write to split up the <script> element tag to create a window which bypasses the Mozilla pop-up blocker. The source suggests that this was intended as a pop-under but because I insist on being alerted to all cookie creation activity the pop-under is brought to the front so I experience it as a pop-up. Fastclick offers an in-beta opt-out cookie creation facility. The particular advertisement I experienced was designed to look exactly like a Windows XP dialog box requesting initiation of a scan for some purpose. Although the look of the advertisement (the word did appear in the title bar along with the name of the browser) was out of place on my OS X system, I can just imagine the anxiety it could arouse in Windows users who are slower readers less prepared for aggressive advertising finding the window after closing their browser. The document.write technique seems to have been around a while.

SuperDuper! did the trick.

19 March 2005

When Carbon Copy Cloner doesn’t work out, maybe one can try SuperDuper!

17 March 2005

That’s a curiosity… when I saved a Brickshelf page in Mozilla Suite on Mac OS X in preparation for completing the page at the WamaLTC site for the display in February all the thumbnails got the file extension .jfif even though the actual files on the Brickshelf server have the extension .jpg. Since the other source of photographs has suspended uploading to Brickshelf, his 160×120 thumbnails are displayed at 128×96 because I can’t be bothered to resample them just now. One aspect of site design I have bothered to implement, however, is the omission of www. in the href attribute where possible. I am getting tired of numeric entities, though, even if they’re necessary as long as the site is ISO-8859-1.

There’s a glaring exception to the list of items in my Dock below: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. Although I bought Office 2001 at a time when I had to read, edit, and share Excel files in OS 9, that time is past and I’ve never bought the version for OS X. The specific Excel file I’m thinking of was last updated a year ago.

16 March 2005

After months of tenaciously following the domestic political scene, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo sneaks in a short link to a Guardian article reporting that Russia is harboring Bosnian Serb indicted war criminals.

14 March 2005

What’s in my dock? Finder. iChat. Mozilla. Safari. Firefox. Camino. Internet Explorer. BBEdit. Fetch. Retrospect. Virtual PC. Acrobat. Draw. Photo-Paint. DiMAGE Viewer. ScanWizard Pro. GraphicConverter. Preview. Toast Titanium. Iomega Tools. BasiliskII. Classic Startup. DVD Player. XPostFacto. System Preferences. Trash.

13 March 2005

It wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t a challenge, right? As the site of the WamaLTC lurches to life again, I might have decided to ignore the design’s appearance in certain older browsers (IE/Mac is dead and has been for a long time) but this Safari… grr. My choice for the site navigation grafted Eric Meyer’s CSS popout menus onto a horizontally-displayed <ul> like I made for WAMALUG. With the drop-down <ul> set to position: absolute;, its parent <li> is set to position: relative; and this works real clean in Mozilla. Now, while Safari behaved as if the drop-down list was positioned absolutely with respect to the parent list item, it displayed the drop-down list only to the extent that it would overlap with where the drop-down list would display if position: relative; was applied to a grandparent instead. In the example shown in the screenshot, the About menu is usable, the Shows menu is cut off so the titles are incomplete, and the Meetings menu is completely invisible even as the Status Bar displays all the link destinations as the mouse is moved over where the drop-down menu would be if it were displayed properly. I gave up and placed position: relative; on the grandparent <ul> and made the drop-down list wide enough to be reachable from the entire navigation bar.

Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope These are from the WAMALUG meeting yesterday, not January like it might still say on the site’s home page :-)

The Plymouth brand lives! Or, I wonder why DiamlerChrysler hasn’t taken the opportunity to make Mattel change the name of the Matchbox miniature of the Prowler in creating the 35th Anniversary series of Superfast models.

12 March 2005

When Sony introduced its Betamovie model BMC-100 in 1983, it was described as the world’s first consumer color video camera with recording capability. To emphasize its dimunitive size, considering that the unit contained a standard Beta cassette, a promotional card the actual size of the camera was distributed. I picked this one up in a local Erol’s Video Club at the time.

11 March 2005

And there was much lamentation… there will never be a final release of Mozilla Suite 1.8. My position is clear: Firefox (notwithstanding the millions and millions of downloads so far) looks awful in Windows 98 and looks anemic in Mac OS X; Firefox wastes my efforts as webmaster to establish relevant <link> elements by not having site navigation; Firefox’s extensibility through themes and extensions is a complete non-starter since I have more than one computer. Just on this beige desktop alone I have six operating systems and while admittedly Firefox can’t be installed in System 7.5 or 8.0 or 9.2, that’s still three installations (Mac OS 10.3, Windows 98, Windows XP). I could barely be bothered this week to update to Firefox 1.0.1 across those three systems. I resent the time it takes to edit the Preferences in the suite every time I install it in another computer or partition, I wouldn’t have the patience to chase down any extensions or themes as they often require updating anyway with each point release. It turns out I never installed Firefox on my actual Windows machine in the first place! I suppose I will hang on to 1.7.5 the way I did to 1.2.1 on Classic.

10 March 2005

Or, maybe… just maybe… Bare Bones could update its FAQ entry to mention the Open Hidden… command. D’oh! Ah, looking at the entry again, I see it is directed to the initial creation of the file, so the command is not relevant. Never mind.

08 March 2005

Linking to something mentioned on Boing Boing usually seems too easy, but this column at Wired about the commerce in counterfeit goods in an Eastern European capital hits close to home.

Fine, except for navigating to the proper folder, it’s easier to run bbedit .htaccess in the Terminal than to start Virtual PC and Windows in emulation.

07 March 2005

Frustrated that BBEdit 8 is unable to see dot files like .htaccess? While Bare Bones Software offers command line utility and script solutions, this is what I’ve done to get around the inability of Cocoa programs to see invisible files:

• Boot into System 9. The open/save dialog provided to Carbon programs by the Finder is indifferent to the Unix rule that dot files are invisible. BBEdit 7 creates, edits, and saves an .htaccess file without difficulty (which Fetch then is able to upload to a remote server).
• Use BBEdit 8’s Open from FTP/SFTP Server… command to retrieve the file from the remote server. BBEdit can save the edited .htaccess file back to the remote server without difficulty even if it can’t save the file locally.
• This seems a bit of a cheat since it’s not a Macintosh-only solution but it serves to edit the local copy of such a file to match the version on the server while not leaving the OS X partition: use Notepad in Microsoft Windows running in Virtual PC to open, edit, and save any dot file in a shared folder.

With WamaLTC having made its first step out of hiatus, the web site is poised to lurch to life once again. Since I haven’t installed Netscape Communicator 4 on any partition in the Beige Desktop, my concern for that old browser (and similarly old user agents like Netscape Navigator 3 or Opera 6 or Internet Explorer 4.x, let alone Internet Explorer 5.x on Windows) will be low and satisfied only by rare visits using the Performa. I spent most of yesterday trying variations on the CSS popout menus by Eric Meyer and ran into mysterious difficulties in Safari 1.2 when I wanted the topmost <ul> element to have a display: inline; rule.

I have been assured repeatedly that the noun Алат is collective and takes no plural ending. Pfft. Microsoft disagrees with the Serbian dictionary: the menu item Tools in Internet Explorer is translated as Алатке.

05 March 2005

I got my wish…

03 March 2005

Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope I’m heartened by how readily most show participants took to the clip-on badges I printed. Say, is that the lone holdout handling my Kawasaki Bi-Level car? Sure looks like it. As for this guy, does his wife know about this look?

02 March 2005

What’s in their dock? The story is that a version of LEGO® Digital Designer for the Macintosh is due later this year (a screenshot of the progress so far at LEGOfan.org). Hmm… a program with no menu commands?

01 March 2005

I haven’t been to the public library in a while, so I ended up reading a robot story by Isaac Asimov from 1944. It’s a strange world where the crucial parts of robots are condensers and relays and the photoelectricity of their eyes is remarked upon, while their designers are famed for their slide-rules. Furthermore, there’s no videotape (Powell and Donovan stare at a surveillance display for hours at a time), no transistors, and no software.

26 February 2005

The first time it was asked to do real work, the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Viewer 2.33 running under OS X functioned as expected, opening the folder of newly-taken images and allowing me to resize them and save them. There is still no way to use the keyboard to set the compression. If you’re reading this on Sunday, there might still be time to see our display before the show closes at four o’clock.

25 February 2005

Since Wednesday morning, my telephone’s Caller ID display has returned to listing the cavalcade of callers I have no interest in hearing from. The particular telephone number I mentioned earlier is the top search result bringing people to these pages.

Er, the self part of an earlier dispatch turns out to have been a mistake on my part. Now that I have been told who wrote that page (and its successor for the February meeting which I thought was just a placeholder but it’s still there) and there’s more than one exuberant identification of a photographer for the links on the January page, it’s easier to discount the possibility that the first-named attendee is the author.

24 February 2005

A little preview of what I plan to release upon a hitherto unsuspecting world this weekend… I rebuilt the Kawasaki Bi-level car this week because I came across a photograph I had taken of a VRE locomotive earlier and noticed it included the end of one such car. The vestibule might be a bit long but minifigs are fat for their height and I like the proportions of the car as it is. We had snow fall the Thursday night before the Greenberg’s show in 2003 (like snow fell today) and the temperature and the plowing worked out by Friday afternoon that the show went on. I saw a mixed consist of a Mafersa coach and blue-topped Pullman Gallery cars this morning and noticed that the Pullman cars used a different logo—a little work with the ellipse tool and Gill Sans text in Corel Draw 10 and the stickers on that model are replaced.

21 February 2005

Like it’s not bad enough that the neighborhood is wired so poorly that modems can at best achieve 28k… since at least Saturday night telephone calls to my number have been ringing at the desk of the director of alumni relations at a local college-preparatory religiously-affiliated K through 12 school. Our telephone numbers share an area code and the last four digits. Interestingly, a call to that person’s actual telephone number works normally. The local telephone company acts as if my repair request today is the first they’ve heard of it.

I don’t use telephone lines to connect to the Internet any more, anyway, but if you set your Macintosh to confirm the time with a network server and the Internet connectivity of your cable modem has failed, the Finder will take a long, long time to launch and may stop responding entirely. Because I have another computer in the house, the lack of connection to the net was more apparent. Not everyone can have multiple computers available, and I couldn’t find a motherboard diagram for the Mirrored Drive Doors Power Mac G4, but the Power Management Unit reset button was well labeled and following the procedure found at Apple’s site for the Gigabit Ethernet model got this other household’s sole computer functioning again after having its power cut while it was sleeping.

We all know who’s being talked about when 8-wide trains are mentioned in the context of creating trouble on the layout. Just to keep things interesting, for this weekend’s show I plan to bring 6-wide creations—but they’re longer than 42 studs! And they have stickers covering multiple pieces! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! I may have had a printout from Bob Hayes’s Brickshelf gallery for the Kawasaki Bi-Level available while building one of the new cars but I had a more specific commuter rail line in mind than this one. The LEGO® Brand Retail Store in the Potomac Mills Mall is displaying a flyer I put together describing our upcoming display in acrylic stands at the cashier’s station and atop the boxes in the Train section.

15 February 2005

A change of direction for Microsoft? Two years after saying there would never again be a stand-alone version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft in the form of the IEBlog the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog states that a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers is on the way. The comments are not kind. As for anyone using anything other than XP Service Pack 2, relax… no changes are planned for you.

14 February 2005

Photographs by Abe Friedman at Scrope

12 February 2005

If WamaLTC stirs again after its hiatus and is now an independent entity, then the 88×31 logo at an ILTCO gallery purporting to supply imagery from a member club having the same name needs to be changed. Today I de-WAMALUG-ified the ambassador car (by building another one to look just like the previous ambassador car and applying new labels) and billboards, prepared show participant badges, and printed eight business cards.

The trailer for The Pacifier establishes the military bona fides of its protagonist (played by Vin Diesel) by stating that he has seen action in every corner of the globe—of the three corners that are identified, two are republics of the former Yugoslavia.

11 February 2005

It’s as official as it gets—WamaLTC will have a display at the Greenberg’s Train, Toy & Hobby Show at The Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Maryland on February 26 and 27, 2005. Relieved of any responsibility for the continued functionality of the site of the erstwhile sponsoring organization, I have been building. But that hasn’t stopped me from seeing a few movies.

So much for drawing lines. It’s from Argentina… and the typography (using something like Swiss® 721 Light) and production design is austere and restrained compared to the domestic edition. The artist’s not mentioned in the pamphlet The Best Discs of the Year 2004 available at Tower Records… even though a certain known lip-syncher’s album was the 25th top selling CD title at that world-wide chain. The local daily newspaper, in reviewing the debut album of her red-headed competition of similar age, was nostalgic for this artist’s vocal stylings—and I’m going to have to agree on the basis of The Math.

I deny that I gratuitously mention likely search terms just to increase traffic here (Yahoo! Search just likes me is all) but I wonder why anyone is surprised that someone might. Anyone who has used the Next Blog link at a Blogger page knows that, aside from all the bloggers who are foreigners to the particular country of my residence, quite a few alleged blogs look just like keyword density experiments.

Abbreviations! I’m going to guess that OBE is overtaken by events while EPK is electronic press kit.

07 February 2005

My Egg Yolk Yellow Ford Focus ZX5 might, at last, be subject to a recall. According to the NHTSA Office of Defect Investigation summary of the recall which was publicized yesterday, which involves almost 359,000 Focus models from the 2000 through 2002 MYs (model years) with four or five doors and originally sold or currently registered in a list of 20 states and D.C., corrosion might eventually prevent the rear doors from latching properly. Although Virginia is not a state in the list, Maryland is.

06 February 2005

There’s a mutual admiration society forming between builders of HMMWVs in LEGO® elements but I see a lot of Bram Lambrecht’s design in Michael’s 10-wide construction… I just happen to have one on hand to compare.

05 February 2005

So this is the last season for Enterprise. It’s hard to miss something that hasn’t been paid attention to in such a long time.

The site of WAMALUG stirred once again this week with a little editing of the home page to indicate that future meetings will revolve around eating and a write-up of the January meeting that is long on self-congratulation and short on implementation. Apparently the contents of the <head> element are not a pressing concern. ;-)

A poster on the wall in a group photograph of the staff of The Criterion Collection in the new Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair raised my hopes, but Trafic is not on their list of releases.

03 February 2005

Photographs by Joe Meno on Brickshelf The next meeting is Sunday, February 13th.

For anyone who has suspected that literary analysis can be conjured up from nothing… a published author analyzes his daughter’s first story. This is even funnier if one has been reading literary analysis recently. Like I have.

02 February 2005

The first group of LEGO® Ambassadors has been announced and the local silence is pronounced. Hungarian Akos Kostyan attended the meeting which was held last September.

One Hannaher who isn’t afraid to have his politics known, located using the new MSN Search.

01 February 2005

Were I to be dissatisfied with my station in life, I could console myself that at least I don’t have my work product scrutinized by law-abiding, peaceably-transiting citizens.

31 January 2005

I think Patrick has his fast food joint advertising campaign memories mixed up… and MetaFilter agrees with me.

The editor of The DVD Laser Disc Newsletter soldiers on.

29 January 2005

You say all you have are PS/2 devices? The Belkin USB to PS/2 Adapter allows you to link two PS/2 devices, such as a keyboard and mouse, to a single USB port on your computer. Only a fanatical devotion to the G5 (and any potential disappointment in laptop-speed drives) stands in the way of everybody buying a Mac mini.

If a particular telephone number calls daily without leaving a message, I’m going to assume the purpose is not fully legitimate.

The ZVOX 315 Sound Console is now available at Best Buy locations…uh, so I hear, since no rational person would set foot in one, right? Too bad the Dreamweaver-template based website has no blog component to it to react quickly to news like this. Tom’s home address is printed on the side of the box.

28 January 2005

A second company can now take an interest in Lohan’s (alleged) after-hours escapades. At least Duff’s association with Mattel warranted an actual press release.

25 January 2005

The Papertech Marketing Group may have no Internet presence, as the site www.cram.com does not respond, but their PermaCharts™ brand does. The comprehensive product list does not include the wallet-sized chemical periodic table I obtained earlier.

The American Heritage Dictionary which I keep close at hand admits to the noun enjambment but not to any other word type with that root (apparently enjamb is an XML element, though). I am usually the source of new vocabulary among those with whom I converse, and am rarely provoked to learn something myself. Something tells me this particular word is of somewhat limited utility…

A caution to anyone who would hide images in a folder under Windows XP within the My Pictures hierarchy—it creates thumbnails of files in the folder and displays them on the folder icon!

SoftWindows 98 5.1 will run under Classic in OS X. DeskScan II 2.4 will not.

22 January 2005

Some people already have one. I got to touch and heft one myself yesterday. Just reading six inches square was inadequate to prepare me for the experience. It’s like holding five CD jewel cases. I wonder how much they cost in Serbia…

Remember how Windows Activation wouldn’t inconvenience honest users who upgraded their computers? Just changing the RAM allocation and disabling the USB integration to the guest OS in Virtual PC 6 triggered Windows XP Professional to demand activation within 3 days. Because I didn’t think to reboot before letting the Activation Wizard start, there was no installation ID displayed. My inability to state an installation ID confused the AI at Microsoft (over the telephone) and eventually connected me to a human. Certainly sounded like a boiler room operation on some subcontinent…

I’m not much help to other users of Windows XP when I describe to them the route to reach the Windows Security Center, new in Service Pack 2: старт > Контролна табла > Security Center.

20 January 2005

A new direction for WAMALUG… revolves around eating, apparently.

Will I be buying a Mac mini? Apparently my reference earlier to already possessing USB peripherals has led to some speculation. If I was still relying on the Performa 6118 CD, this would be a no-brainer. Every feature of the Mac mini overwhelms the System 7.1-era computer notwithstanding the internal upgrades to processor, memory, hard drive, and video and the external peripherals for another hard drive and for CD-R burning that I’ve put in over the past two years. A NuBus computer, furthermore, can never have USB or FireWire connections. Compared to the Power Macintosh Desktop in its current condition, however, the Mac mini fares less well. While the processor is marginally faster, the (single) hard drive is smaller and slower, the RAM would require immediate upgrading, and there is only one FireWire connection (but presumably it could boot from a drive connected to the FireWire port). If I wanted to burn DVDs with the Desktop, I could buy a internal burner for $80 (or an external burner for more if I didn’t want to lose the 52× CD-ROM reading speed of the current optical drive) and if I wanted Bluetooth for some reason, I could buy a USB dongle. A single PCI slot remains as well in case I get the idea again to network wirelessly. So there is no performance-based reason for me to buy a Mac mini just now. Now as to the entertainment value of a modern Macintosh in a tiny form factor (it would fit under my Rolodex® rotary file) with a wireless keyboard option…

Adobe Reader 6, BBEdit 7, and Virtual PC 6 are all deleted from the Panther partition, leaving me with more space free in that 7.81 GB partition that I have as the entire drive capacity in the Compaq notebook.

The good news is they didn’t get run over. The bad news is they’re still flat. Look, as anyone who’s watched the Word Vomit blooper reel on the Mean Girls DVD knows, Lohan is reacting to Daniel Franzese reporting the fate of the three girls who represent the new Plastics as the end of the movie. Now you know.

17 January 2005

The Placement dropdown selector in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preference pane in Panther is a fragile thing indeed… the wrong choice of image makes it disappear. Without the control, the only answer seems to be to select an image which matches the display resolution.

The Windows port of Basilisk II includes the startup chime. It could be nostalgic for some people.

The answer to my question is that Virtual PC for Mac version 7 can co-exist with version 6 of the program. They can’t run simultaneously but because of differences in file packaging and folder naming conventions they can be installed separately and maintain separate preferences while sharing the Virtual PC List folder in the user’s Documents folder. Also, while this is an unsupported use of the latest version of the program, it will convert a Windows 98 Second Edition drive image from version 6 and run it. My experience so far is that a loss of screen size and color depth is the end result of the massive series of Windows has found new hardware messages.

Windows се покреће… Молим причекајте When one virtual machine is paused to let another launch, there is no possibility of inter-machine messaging, but there is now a local, activated copy of Windows XP Professional on the premises. So slow, granted, the 1 GHz processor upgrade is another unsupported use of the program. With all the messages and balloons that XP throws up in a newbie’s face, it’s a wonder anything can get done, but in my utter inability to find the command to delete a user account (even with frequent recourse to Windows XP in a Nutshell given that the OS must be read in Serbian Cyrillic since I installed the Language Interface Pack) somehow the Administrator account has disappeared instead of the new account I had created.

Surely the background downloading of updates is some part of the slow operation of Windows XP Professional. A measure of how long I have been preparing for the newer operating system is that I printed out the errata for the book Windows XP in a Nutshell on July 9, 2003! One of the spiffy features in Virtual PC for Mac version 7 when run on system 10.3 is the zero-configuration printing. This is confirmed now that WordPerfect Office 11 and its Service Packs 1 and 2 are installed (I did eventually manage to uninstall the suite from the Windows 98 drive image) and operational. The VM Additions Printer is not installable in Windows 98.

I’m sure that her appearance at the America’s Future Rocks Today concert tomorrow is because she’s a Texan.

Who’s to say through what mystery it happened but by evening the Windows 98 Second Edition launched from the Virtual PC for Mac version 7 disk image file would, in full screen mode, use a resolution of 1024×768 at a 32-bit color depth removing the last reason to keep the version 6 disk image file. The inability to install the VM Additions printer driver is now moot since I’ve been able to install the drivers for the two network printers (something I was unable to do in SoftWindows 5.1 or earlier versions of Virtual PC for Mac).

16 January 2005

Yes, Mike, I do have a suggestion: stop designing your web pages in Internet Explorer for Windows. All it gets you is the knowledge that your HTML works in one browser on one platform. After all that effort you still have no idea if it works in Internet Explorer for Mac… and there’s no Internet Explorer for Linux. :-) There’s no guarantee (as you’ve discovered) that your design will work in a Gecko-based browser which means that, if you’ve made a mistake, you stand to irritate users on multiple platforms. Firefox is now past 18 million downloads. You also are running blind as to the performance of KHTML-based browsers like Safari and Konqueror. It’s not just me and Dan saying this either, it’s people who design web sites for a living. Apple offers a page devoted to Web Page Development Best Practices. All that being said, Mike, your first descendant of the <body> element is a <table> element which is not as wide in a Gecko-based renderer than in IE/Win6. Once you understand why… oh, I see you’ve already updated that page. Never mind.

15 January 2005

WAMALUG has abandoned its bylaws and rules and ceased collection of dues. Read ’em while you can. (I should so set up a archival subdomain.) How long can the club continue to have meetings every month on the same pattern knowing that each meeting at the current location would normally cost more money than has ever been collected in dues in a month? The current location is also scheduled for demolition… in a few years, anyway. Also it looks like Steve DeCraemer became a member at the December meeting. No one who didn’t attend could have known since a month later there are no minutes to the December meeting yet promulgated. Mmm, minutes. Another relic of the past, obviously.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled yesterday in its opinion in Martin v. Ziherl that Virginia Code 18.2-344 is unconstitutional. Just sayin’. A tiny fraction of liberty while the rest of the world lurches toward lockdown.

Lack of an Ethernet implementation in the Aqua-fied port of Basilisk II getting you down? Install the Windows port of Basilisk II in a drive image under Virtual PC for Mac and surf away! (It is somewhat annoying that MacOS keyboard combinations are picked up by the Macintosh running the Windows emulator, rather than the Macintosh run by the Windows emulator.) The manual by Marc R. Hoffman, available for download at his new domain, was helpful in getting the networking going and leading me through the installation of OS 8 which I had previously purchased from AppleRescue. W00t! Now I can run Netscape Navigator 4.08!

When a hard drive must be absolutely erased, there’s SuperScrubber from Jiiva. When I bought the Quadra 610 which I pitched not long ago the 160MB hard drive was sufficiently complete to determine the owner’s name and daughter’s name and ISP login information and more.

Completely on a whim, now that I have been running Panther a few days, I tried installing the DiMAGE Image Viewer again. Just like last time I tried this I was not asked for my password or passphrase at any point before, during, or after the installation but afterwards the program launched and ran and exited without incident (so did its updater to the KonicaMinolta-branded version 2.33). Which is just as well now that I have a Lexar Multi-Card USB 2.0 Card Reader attached for access in OS X to any products of digital photography in the future. This 12-in-1 reader (there are four slots) removes the rationale for having the Microtech card reader attached to the Desktop and it’s probably time to detach it and remove the internal ribbon and terminator installed last year. Unless I plan to attach the Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL using its SCSI connection… ?

So who can tell me whether Virtual PC for Mac versions 6 and 7 can co-exist? From the way version 6 took over the ancillary folders and drive image files from version 5 my trepidation is that they won’t. I suppose I’ll just have to boot to my backup drive and install there and give it a try.

A new year, a few changes… there is a new electromagnetic spectrum chart hanging on the wall at the office. The previous one had fallen behind the times in designating wavelengths in centimeters rather than meters and for not indicating where terahertz and gigahertz are. (My proposal that we replace ultraviolet with petahertz is going nowhere.) Remarkably, numerous online retailers displayed an image of the old poster, so I passed those by and made my purchase at a retailer that offered an especially detailed view. There is a new Planck curve representing the background radiation of the universe at 3K. Replacing the credit card-sized chemical periodic table from Papertech Marketing Group which I found at the University of Missouri at Rolla in the cross-country drive I made with my brother in 1988 was more difficult. Papertech has no Internet presence but it helps while searching to realize that credit cards fit in wallets and despite the utter absence of confirming details this product LCH-02W [ISBN 1-55080-424-3] is exactly what I was looking for. I ran out of years in the line dater on the premises and, faced with a dearth of choice at the two chains of office supply stores in the area, made my way to Shachihata and ordered the 52212 Julian (day number-first) version of the Large Line Dater.

11 January 2005

Some people are never satisfied: the Mac mini does not offer a G5 but… suddenly my Kensington Keyboard-in-a-Box USB keyboard and Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box USB/ADB Mouse no longer seem so surplus.

10 January 2005

It’s mostly useless for me by now, but Basilisk II, the open source emulator for 68k Macintoshes, has been ported to the Aqua UI. I caught the screenshot and adjoining drop shadow by using Command-Shift-4 against the white field of a Mozilla window denuded of most of its bars.

More importantly, will my freshly downloaded BBEdit 8.0.3 and its spiffy handling of Unicode leave the characters in my documents unmolested upon running the HTML Syntax Checker? Врло сумњиво. Yes, it will. Sweet. It will be nice to see characters like U+00D7 (×) and U+00E9 (é) in the BBEdit document editing window from now on. BBEdit 8.x is, as expounded upon at some length elsewhere, available only for system 10.3.5 and later.

09 January 2005

So. There it is. Panther running on a Beige G3 Desktop… using the onboard video, no less. That is to say, Mac OS 10.3.7 Build 7S215 running on a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 Sonnet Encore/ZIF processor upgrade with 768 MB of RAM so it’s still beige and still a desktop. I can thank XPostFacto 3.0b12 from Ryan Rempel at MacSales.com which made the installation possible at all and Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3 from Mike Bombich which gave me the confidence (on the basis of creating a working bootable cloned drive which is something that Dantz Retrospect Backup is unable to accomplish) to give the installation of M9227LL/A Mac OS X Panther v10.3.5 Retail from The Apple Store Tysons Corner a try.

I am enjoying the list view in open/save dialogs and the application switching graphics. So far, the Corel Graphics Suite 11 programs wouldn’t launch (in preparing the screenshot) and they have had to be uninstalled and installed again. There were a few stumbles along the way, too, like forgetting to Bless Old World target volume in the cloning program, or when launching Adobe Reader 7 in a system with 128 MB of RAM left the screen dark, or when the Installer froze in the last minute while installing Traditional Chinese resources at the end of Install Disk 2, or seeing the prohibited symbol upon restarting after I used Startup Disk rather than XPostFacto to switch to System 9.2.2… but try, try again has been the attitude. Sonnet’s instructions for the processor upgrade used the same photographs of a computer’s interior to illustrate the installation in the G3 Desktop as in the G3 Tower, a potentially misleading shortcut as one finds from the text that the fans must be removed from the heatsink before installation in the Desktop version.

Apple Retail has reached Bethesda Row. The next time you’re marking time at the Barnes and Noble waiting for a movie at the Landmark theater to begin, why not take a few steps and see what they have on display?

Some or all of the combination of Panther and a processor upgrade card of double the speed managed to bring Virtual PC 5 to a lethargy that hindered programs from even launching. Taking a chance on the box of Virtual PC 6 touting Speed Improvement! Up to 25% faster on Mac OS X the upgrade seems to have made enough of a difference as to make the emulation usable.

06 January 2005

Now that the current Chairman of WAMALUG has stepped down (surely it will be a while before the relevant page at the web site gets updated) where could the club find a suitable replacement? Let’s hope that this announcement that the LEGO® company is looking for ambassadors doesn’t lead to a lineup of the same old faces.

04 January 2005

Mr. 312-470-2620 is persistent in his wish that I call Ken Hughes at 888-249-4134. With the repetition it’s more evident that the request is a recording. The envelope from them which arrived with someone else’s name in the address block has been returned to the mail stream unopened. I should have labeled it Undeliverable as Addressed—Addressee Not Known .

There is a 2002 Ford Escape XLS at the Rockville Carmax with a manual transmission, less than 18000 miles on the odometer, and a price under $14000. So tempting. Most of the recalls for that MY (model year) were for the V6 version (offered only with an automatic transmission). Seeing as how I barely drive 16 miles a day as it is, and with all the doomsaying going on, it wouldn’t be a wise purchase just to carry a few layout tables a couple of times a year. I went to the auto show last week without much enthusiasm, skipping most manufacturers entirely (like Mercedes-Benz and Lexus and Subaru and Honda and Toyota and Buick and BMW and…), and came away thinking that the Jeep Liberty was really uglier this year with the change in front turn signals, the driver’s seat in the Mazda 6 was lower than what I am used to in the Focus, and the Freestyle’s interior is fairly pedestrian. Oh, and the seating in a Hummer H1 is cramped. The whole vehicle is barely as tall as I am.

Say, this goes some way to explain why the Chairman of WAMALUG has just stepped down… talk about conflict of interest!

03 January 2005

Lest anyone think that I am insensitive to the current situation in southeast Asia, I already contribute to a relief charity at work in the area through the Combined Federal Campaign.

I played my laserdisc of Flirting with Disaster yesterday and chose Téa Leoni over Ben Stiller. Big surprise.

02 January 2005

There’s a new web badge for the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club with the same name as the old one but without the extraneous elements which are no longer relevant.

I resolve not to top-off at the gasoline pump this year.

Why do I punish myself? The relaxed system requirements of Virtual PC 5 as compared to Virtual PC 6 led me to try installing it and its Windows 98 Second Edition operating system hard drive file in the 10.2.8 partition. There were only fifteen critical updates and service packs awaiting at Windows Update. So far I have been unable to install a port and driver for a network printer or to launch, update, or uninstall WordPerfect Office 11. Plus, I had to edit a registry entry to restore the Folders view in the Explorer bar of Windows Explorer (which had gone to a blank gray) because an upgrade from Internet Explorer 5.5 to IE 6 Service Pack 1 failed to change the registry entry to refer to shdocvw.dll rather than browseui.dll. However, I did install LDRAW and MLCAD 3.11 and L3P and LPub 2.2 and managed to get them working together after reviewing my experiences last April. The part x176 which I used for Wheel Centre Spoked Small is now known as 30155 so anyone opening one of my .ldr or .mpd files including those wheels needs to make that substitution. Now I suppose people will expect me for real to learn how to use Track Designer.

There wasn’t any booing in the theater when this particular advertising segment ran in front of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events but its reappearence after an absence of at least several months was odd considering its promise of a tidal wave of fun. AMC has abandoned the slides and film-based advertising for its pre-show entertainment and established the MovieWatcher Network as a video projection. The Digital Theatre Distribution System (DTDS) brought the independent film Evergreen and brought the inconsequential The Final Cut to exhibition markets across the country as well as other promotions from time to time. The press release from National Cinema Network is curiously undated.

The specific appreciation of Stephen H. of Virginia is no longer found on Dan’s 20th. Century Abandonware site but last month it noted that this individual has been donating software to the archive for 3 years. I last mentioned Dan a little over 2 years ago.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events takes place in an uncertain time and place (as exemplified by its vehicles and its costuming) but there is an envelope seen in the course of the movie which is addressed to the mansion and it gives Boston, Ma. as the municipality and state. The MA uppercase symbology for the state is an imposition of the United States Postal Service to allow machines to sort mail, but civilized writers abbreviated the name of the state as Mass.