31 December 2006

Starship Troopers is still able to provoke discussion 10 years after its release as a movie and more than 40 years after the novel’s publication. Who needs an excuse to put the DVD in the player again? Not me. With composer Basil Poledouris having passed away this year, the difficulties Denise Richards is facing in her marriage and her employment, and Neil Patrick Harris’s recent foray back into the news, it’s more poignant than ever. Snif.

Adjustment of the site’s .htaccess files means I no longer have to keep a build folder around in case people add a trailing slash when typing out c.hannaher.net/build to reach my Build page. Also, I have been able to suppress the addition of www. for visitors who leave off the trailling slash to my backup page for WamaLTC and a new page for another local club. Yes, the logo I’m using is (900×180) pixels big, why do you ask?

So… a Service Ready Date actually means Service Sometime on the Horizon Date? We should count ourselves lucky that it was just 3 days.

Washington’s City Paper has its own take on the demise of Tower Records and focuses its print and YouTube-hosted video efforts on the store in the Pike 7 Plaza just west of the Tysons Corner Mall in Virginia where I started buying compact discs and laserdiscs nearly 18 years ago. A different opinion of one of the co-authors and the newspaper itself.

30 December 2006

Mmm… tire codes. Normally, you wouldn’t think of them as very interesting, but hearing about premature wear on tires fitted to the Chrysler 300C got me to looking at my own. Find out about your own tires (if you know the brand and style) using the lookup at SaferCar.gov from NHTSA. The Chrysler’s Continental TouringContact tires have a better treadwear rating than anything I have on the Focus, but the pair of Goodyear Eagle RS-A tires I had installed do have a speed rating of V. Key tire care message: You can’t tell correct tire pressure just by looking. I try to check mine every week.

29 December 2006

It is my theory that a modem, say, of the DSL type, is utterly unconcerned with the kinds of computers on its LAN when the attempt to reach the WAN is made. So when my problem is, hypothetically, that the DSL light on said modem blinks and never steadies, it is not reassuring when I call, for example, Verizon Online Services, to hear gasps of incredulity and an immediate desire to transfer my call when I admit that I’ve connected one of them thar’ Macintoshes to their modem. And so we wait… on hold. Interesting, though, that of all the browsers installed on that computer, only Safari can get past the authorization demand and display the modem’s router home page.

28 December 2006

My dictionary does not approve of the verbifying on this page even if the e is silent. Ha! I had to check… verbifying is in the dictionary. The narrator with an eye for the young girls in spiffy uniforms and an indifference to odometer precision has a new book out. She has written about the river before. The river flooded earlier this year.

26 December 2006

Too old for the panto, too young for the sauce. Girls Aloud calendar for 2007. Did I know what a panto is? No, I heard something else.

I ended up with the General Electric TL26132 Modular Plug Crimping Tool With 6 Modular Plugs and using it was just as easy as everyone said it was. The status quo ante is restored. Yay.

The plan at the WAMALUG headquarters now is to wait for the domain to become available again and purchase it then.

25 December 2006

The mini wall-mounted model 1654 telephone. By now I am well aware that they do not work in a wall-mounted DSL filter. Argh. Upside: I get to look for a new tool, one with which to crimp RJ11/RJ14 modular plugs (registered jack). Oh, look, there was one such plug rattling around in the phone!

24 December 2006

Cortelco inherited the legacy of manufacturing standard telephones with the basic wall-mounted model 2554. As explained at the Wikipedia link, no rotary dial model is found in their line-up even as the manual includes instructions on how to place the telephone number underneath the dial. Does the push-button model offer pulse dialing? The brochure from one of the largest manufacturers of US-made telephones doesn’t say. Rotary dial telephones still have an enduring appeal and even wall mount models can be found if you look.

The Model 902 donut telephone had a name, Sculptura, that works in a number of languages.

23 December 2006

The local movie theaters available through the My Yahoo! page are a strange mix. The list includes those theaters which have closed ostensibly temporarily (Alexandria Old Town Theater) and others which have ceased operations more permanently (Cineplex Odeon Outer Circle, Foxchase Cinema, Loews Cineplex Cinema, Visions Cinema and Bistro Lounge). Some have been renamed since their inclusion (AMC Union Station 9, Hoyts Cinemas Potomac Yard 16). It’s tough to keep up, looks like the American Film Institute no longer offers screenings at the Kennedy Center, either. More interestingly, the feature offers listings for various museums and cultural centers in the District (National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian: Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery). My page of photographs of cinemas include a number of those mentioned in this <p> element.

If there ever is a time to highlight the Smart Playlist titled Holiday in the iTunes sidebar and let shuffle mode do its work, this weekend is it. Tween she may have been, at least this particular artist didn’t choke on a Kennedy Center stage recently (comments at previous link may not be kind, agreeable, or even safe for work) and while she may or may not have been misquoted regarding the merits of Waldorf, Maryland (the two later broke up), she didn’t sing a duet on the debut album of the younger sister of a certain red-headed contemporary, either.

I didn’t expect that any of my purchases made while Tower Records swirled the drain would end up on a critic’s list… but see, some people find unexpected depths in anything.

22 December 2006

Local free tabloid headlines BUSINESS: Local malls prepare for last-minute shopping escalation. No, wait, the paper actually uses the word surge, never mind.

21 December 2006

The WAMALUG site managed to stay up for 2 weeks, but today it is back to the Network Solutions expired domain page.

I was tempted to forgo the holiday photocard this year, but I placed an order for some (using an image from the DSLR) anyway. This year there’s not even a sticker, just a URL. I can’t be bothered to retrieve the box office for this year (which would be necessary to note which high-grossing movies I’ve skipped) and I will probably retire the Movies category next year. Since I didn’t take the opportunity tonight to see the last screening of Bobby at the AMC Courthouse Plaza 8, this is shaping up to be the third month this year without a visit to a movie theater.

To whom it may concern: when young female celebrities leave their underwear at home, that’s not an accident, that’s a plan.

19 December 2006

If I had ordered a MacPro and wanted to license programs anew, the limited-duration MacSanta promotion would have been welcome.

Verizon Yahoo! for DSL currently asserts as a minimum system requirement MacOS 8.6! This could make some people’s life easier, as Verizon DSL requested from the source demands as a minimum OS X ( or 10.3 or higher, but whatever).

17 December 2006

How to take apart a LinkStation, for when it’s been over a year since it’s been turned on and it’s time for it to be tossed into the recycling bin but some files just don’t want to be deleted so the hard drive must be removed first.

No, really, it is the last time for store #0195 (today was the last day, and the Thalía artwork is marked SOLD) and probably for store #0822, too (it promises to close before five o’clock on the twenty-second). The cashier who logged in as Amanda scanned one of the singles I was looking to buy at almost twenty five thousand dollars. Hmm. Maybe the green clearance tag confused the system. The actual price after the 90% discount was 50¢. From the box they come in, I saw that the yellow bags are made in Vietnam.

16 December 2006

Google has a new service. An example of a search result for a particular search (which I’ve removed from the URL). Unfortunately the service does not include published applications, which supply a lot of the recent humor in the field.

Snap Preview Anywhere™ looks like a popup but is intended as a feature for web sites to preview for visitors to a web page the destination of an outbound link. The product of a another search company has been available for a month. I first encountered it at the site of a blogger who paraphrases the Control Voice from The Outer Limits.

Tom emblazons his site LGauge with the phrase Member of [WamaLTC (100×100)px Seal] but must not use his full name anywhere, because Brickshelf user dan-147 credits the 6-wide inspiration for the center-beam flat car built in 7-wide using LEGO® Digital Designer and made available at LEGO® Factory to one Tom (?).

15 December 2006

The soundtrack for Herbie Fully Loaded was one of the compact discs I left behind for others this week. I do believe it took me only a few paragraphs into this post to make the connection. (Note that this post, unlike the earlier ones linked to, does not specify the sex of the mystery artist in question.) Also, rap and hip-hop had the most aggressive discounts during the Tower Records liquidation.

12 December 2006

For that matter, when did the name of WAMALUG lose the D.C. ? Check out the title attribute of the acronym element enclosing the club’s name in the Who We Are section of the home page.

Six more days for store #0195 and the artwork for El Sexto Sentido RE+LOADED is still bolted to the wall above the stairs, although they do have a poster for La Mujer de mi Hermano (unfortunately already mounted to a rigid backing) for 50¢. DVDs are now at 70% off but I must resist lest a certain title with a particular commentary show up in my list of those recently purchased. My seventy-fifth 5-inch CD single included this seasonal message, intended for last year. After sixteen years of the compact disc format, I note that my average price per disc fell from its initial high of about $16 to a low of $12.55 in March of 1999 before climbing again to its current value of $12.79.

11 December 2006

Hail the mad spelling skillz of the WAMALUG webmaster! He’s identified a personality of some reknown not just locally as a member of the club since 2000, but in the larger LEGO® fan community as well, Whatever anyone in my circle thought of her personally, we always knew that the proper spelling of her name is Christina. Maybe I should have taken it to e-mail, but there’s a lesson here: ignoring the history of the club has consequences. My next target :-) those who spell it WamaLUG. Since I haven’t watched the new Battlestar Galactica, though, what do I know? Could be the aliens aren’t called Cylons anymore. But probably not.

If I know so much about the club’s history, shouldn’t I be able to figure out who this is? Eh, maybe not. The number of people on the WAMALUG mailing list is not a direct reflection of the actual membership.

The name of LEGO® an innocent bystander in the unauthorized work of two advertising creatives in China.

10 December 2006

How could I have forgotten about the Hess Toy Truck this year? It’s a tradition! The 2006 model, Toy Truck and Helicopter, has been for sale since November fifteenth but I was able to purchase one today at the station in Annandale. One explanation for my lapse is that there are no Hess filling stations along my regular routes. With driving currently holding at 16.9 miles per day, there are plenty of other retailers which find themselves in that boat.

The bones are showing in the carcass of local Tower Records stores. They’ve sunk to peddling defective product and begging to move otherwise immobile product either for $2 each or by the boxload. And still the price of a DVD can be higher than that at Target! This weekend was probably my last visit to the stores in the District (#0130), Rockville (#0154), and Tysons Corner (#0152) and I probably won’t return to the store in Fairfax (#0822).

09 December 2006

What is your problem now? The spirit of holiday cheer is upon us.

LEGO® embraces the 8-wide chassis. (The turn of the wheels on the front axle in the painting on the box cover is a bit of license on the manufacturer’s part.) It’s a low-slung two-seater (although minifigs wouldn’t fit) with gull-wing doors and no obvious engine location.

07 December 2006

Language courses developed by Foreign Service Institute made available free in electronic format (PDF and MP3). From this post at a personal finances blog I expected to find another language included, but I find no evidence of it. The Foreign Service Institute is part of the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington.

06 December 2006

WAMALUG is back online! Not once did the webmaster explore linking to the hosted site by IP or have anybody post messages to the LUGNET newsgroup.

DVDs are now at 50% off and compact discs at 60% off and the local Tower Records store’s shelves are noticeably more bare. Maybe they are sending their stock to other, larger stores in preparation for closing. There is *cough* one category of goods, though, that reflects importation. Store #0866 was the store on Broadway in Manhattan. (To update an earlier comment: the store in Rockville did have the Danity Kane album.)

Via Kottke, a game to test your knowledge of geography.

03 December 2006

A random Wikipedia link to test a new graphic, using a[href*="wikipedia.org"]::after { content: url("images/wiki_icon_14x20.png"); } in the stylesheet. The Hoefler Text font that Wikipedia uses is identified among the classics in this roundup of Web 2.0 logos.

Kevin Maynes built a double-track bascule bridge and displayed it at the Great Edmonton Model Train Show on September 28 and 29 in 2002, and again at the Great Edmonton Train Show on September 20 and 21 in 2003. The Northern Alberta LEGO®Users Group used the multiple motors and RCX command of Kevin’s construction to automate the stopping of the trains and the raising and lowering of the movable span. Another bascule bridge in LEGO® elements from Kim Toll of PNLTC (a LEGO® Train Club which no longer exists) was built sometime before 2004. Bob’s response to our experience with the soiled floors in The Cow Palace in Timonium, Maryland in October of 2005 may be less ambitious in relying on fallible humans to control the train and bridge operations but it is motorized and continues to amaze visitors.

01 December 2006

The discount on compact discs in the Tower Records liquidation is now at 50% (DVDs remain stuck at 40%) and while the sign may say that there is no new product, it’s not like I would have passed up this title earlier. Ah, that explains it, from the price sticker I can see that this purchase at store #0152 is a transplant from store #0156. Tower Records #0156 was the Chicago store on North Clark Street (it takes a visit to the sitemap of the site to find the store locator now). An enlargement of this image has been up at the local store #0195 for a while now, they are taking bids for the light boxes, but it’s the first I see of the disc itself.

I received this missive as well.

As happy as I might be with the DVD burner that came in a plastic bag it must be said that, in addition to its aversion to DualDiscs, it cannot handle a Hybrid SACD: Jerry Goldmsith’s Timeline on Varèse Sarabande.

29 November 2006

The expiration of the wamalug.org domain means that the image in the sidebar of the newsgroup at LUGNET doesn’t load, but guess what… thanks to our frames-based kludge around a DNS problem for wamaltc.org, neither does the image for our newsgroup. I also seem to have lost my curatorship.

27 November 2006

The article on page 8 of today’s print edition of the Baltimore Examiner gets the full formal name of WamaLTC correct. In describing our layout in the roundhouse at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum this past weekend, the author sweeps up all of the trains built by Tom Cook, Bob Hayes, Tony Perez, and Ian Rabusseau as a colorful assortment and identifies only one: a Washington, D.C. metrorail. This example is the Yellow Line pair built by Margaret Keys for our display in Philadelphia last July from the instructions I make available on my Build page. I am authorized to link to my Build page in toto from the WamaLTC site.

Brickshelf user belugger has galleries depicting a HUMMER H2 pickup and a HUMMER H2 stretch limousine. Both models orient the slats of Tile 1×2 Grille with Groove (2412b) vertically.

26 November 2006

Today’s article in The Washington Post on the subject of the Master Builders at LEGOLand California also includes a few paragraphs about the activities at the WAMALUG meeting on the tenth. With the website unavaliable, what does it mean to ask: what is the name of the club? An international organization has one answer.

25 November 2006

They’re so mean. Overheard at a local Tower Records/Video: Should we get this for Dad? It’s an import. While albums and DVDs remain at 40%, singles are now at 70%. The particular single held up for sarcastic consideration is from the Australia/New Zealand market.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum has an inconspicuous policy regarding photography that asserts posting to the Internet among those subsequent activities which are forbidden. Let us assume that this photographer had permission… and this photographer… and this photographer… what are the odds? WamaLTC’s display this weekend is on the turntable in the roundhouse.

I am so tempted to follow the link on the Backorder Now button: the wamalug.org domain has expired!

Vincent Cassel is the Ben Affleck of French cinema. That is my opinion.

21 November 2006

One aspect of the current music scene which has been brought to the fore by the shrinking inventories at local Tower stores is all-female acts: while The Pussycat Dolls (I photographed one of their music videos off a television last summer) are six (6) Americans according to Wikipedia, Girls Aloud (5) and Sugababes (3) are from the United Kingdom. (Domestic act Danity Kane (5) may have released too late to enter the system of the failing retailer.) Wild would appear to be yet another such girlband, with the long hair, ragged hemlines, and depilated legs, but two of the performers are identified as Serbian (the remaining three from the UK) and were actually born in the capital. Their shtick appears to be instruments rather than vocals, which would remind some of Bond (4), and it’s been long enough since the website was updated, their Wikipedia page is on the brink of deletion. Ristic’s first name is spelled like using a typewriter (Andjelika) rather than typographically (Anđelika) and, by the way, the word they’re looking for on her biography page is leitmotif (sheesh, not light motif ). The prices of albums from UK artists with the current discount are almost brought down to where domestic albums used to be.

The themes that SeaMonkey ships with are so unbearable (now, anyway, I used Modern for years) that the first thing I try to do is install the Mostly Crystal theme (there, now I linked to it and don’t have to search for it each time I install the browser somewhere).

No matter how depressing the news gets at The Oil Drum, pretty people meet each other and decide to marry anyway and Charlotte Geary is there to photograph them.

Време је за љубав. Ford advertises in Serbia its passenger cars like the Ka, new Focus, and Mondeo, and for businesses, the Transit (in latinica, unfortunately). The history of GM in the former SFRJ (also in latinica) is mostly Opel and, more recently, Chevrolet. Article 10 of the new constitution for Serbia (version in English) calls for the Cyrillic script in official use and regulation of the use of other scripts.

Yes, it’s amusing that someone did fan art of a character in Mark Trail, but what kind of camera is she carrying?

20 November 2006

I shouldn’t let the recent swell of compact disc purchases lead me astray in other venues… that would be wrong.

I last linked to the Apple Federal Employee Purchase Store in May of last year… nothing to see here, move along, it is entirely coincidental that I link to it again. Joy to the wallet, BF06 is on the way.

The Flickr badges I worked on last year now operate in SeaMonkey and the other Gecko-based browsers as well as in Safari (but not in Opera 9), and the <script> elements still fool the W3C validator. If only I took more pictures…

Today, participants in WamaLTC set up tables in the Roundhouse at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in preparation for the first weekend of the Holiday Festival of Trains at the B&O Presented by Constellation Energy and CSX Transportation starting this Friday. Each weekend after that, through to the end of the year, will feature a different model railroad club. I missed the display in the LEGO® store in the Potomac Mills Mall earlier this month.

19 November 2006

Those wacky Wikipedians even have an entry for the song ¿A Quién Le Importa? which I earlier described as a potential colophon. That based on its performance by the original artists it’s known as a gay anthem is just perfect. ( From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in sharing their vision of American society. Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. To whom does it matter, indeed.) There’s a typo in the link at the bottom of the Wikipedia page but fortunately Yahoo! also owns the geocties.com domain. Tú Y Thalía somehow links to the music video off the Thalía site, but the video is also on YouTube. Some people have never heard of Thalía.

Fine! I bought the Fawlty Towers The Complete Collection DVD set when the discount at Tower Records/Video was at 30% because the folding cardboard jacket freed up shelf space compared to the three plastic keepcases that the individual volumes used. Over 20 years later, it’s still knee-slappingly funny, and knowing more about how mechanically awful the Austin Maxi was (the Fawltys drove a red one) just adds to the humor. Definitely not recommended if you’ve recently had hernia repair surgery. The discount is now at 40%.

The bankruptcy sale at Tower Records/Video has led to the availability of features from the era of the former Yugoslavia, including Hey Babu Riba (Bal na vodi) and When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu), both of which saw theatrical release in this area upon their release 20 years ago. I already have these titles on laserdisc, so their unexpected presence in the racks wasn’t important. But why did the brain trust at KOCH Lorber Films think that a domestic release last year of Do You Remember Dolly Bell? would find a market? The jacket quotes the Los Angeles Times as saying One of the most phenomenal debuts in recent world cinema but that’s for values of recent that include a theatrical release 25 years ago, because Sjećaš li se, Dolly Bell is Emir Kusturica’s theatrical directorial debut from 1981, and the jacket doesn’t admit to any year. The synopsis which KOCH Lorber supplies is true enough, but doesn’t really capture the mood and pace of the film, which finds 16-year-old Dino that summer when his delinquent tendencies attract the attention of the director of local community center and it is decided he should start a band, while Dino’s pigeon house will do nicely when his thuggish pal fresh out of prison needs a place to stash a sex worker ready to emigrate. Slavko Stimac and Liljana Blagojević both continue to be active in film roles. Google Answers says that it was Émile Coué (1857-1926) whose autosuggestion method included the phrase Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better.

Sometimes it seems like all bloggers do is read The New York Times: this article on preparing bread without kneading was discussed at MetaFilter last week.

Local blogger makes his way to Crystal City and survives to tell of his brief moment with Edward Tufte. Maybe there is a McDonald’s underground there, my visit to get a wristwatch battery replaced recently didn’t take me into the food court, but the truth is the description sounds more like the area felt like a long time ago (before the backlit advertising was installed, anyway). Um, that’s not exactly the name of the relevant agency which moved away from Crystal City. Is it possible I have never before visited the Wikipedia page for this agency?

18 November 2006

Dis-GUST-ing. I was exposed to this advertisement for DirecTV while waiting for today’s movie. The campaign using characters and scenes from a Star Trek movie seems to be a month old. Alternate YouTube link, also available on Yahoo! Video and iFilm. Update: the movie is identified as Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.

14 November 2006

The LaserDisc database has recently added capacitance videodisc (CED) and VHD titles.

Shoppers Food at Landmark better watch out… the new Harris Teeter #133 at Foxchase is 0.3 mile closer.

11 November 2006

One thing a reflective scanner has trouble with is mirrors. I have put up with a dark, vaguely gold-colored image of the Raiders March (Edit) promotional single in the album view of iTunes 7 for a while now, but today decided to see what composing in Corel Draw using a few gray circles with text in Zurich Ultra Black Extended could accomplish. (Compare the font with Univers™ 93 Extra Black Extended.) It’s not a pixel-for-pixel match, and I only later searched for the tiny Warner Communications W (used now by Warner Music Group) to place inline in the ℗ statement, but clarity-wise, it’s an improvement.

Tower Records/Video is expected to close in December, according to the FAQ posted at the Pike 7 Plaza store (but they don’t know when). Bizarrely the website betrays nothing of the shrinking inventories, the milling browsers, or the inexperienced cashiers. While I have purchased the performances of a certain divorce-serving text-messaging mother of two on vinyl before, today’s purchase of a German-manufactured single might be the first compact disc in the array by this… artist.

Looked to me like Plant Flower Stem (3741) and Plant Flower (3742) make an appearance in Flushed Away.

10 November 2006

About a month after I made mention of the change of brand at local Crown filling stations, Crown Central Petroleum explained the situation following its sale of the stations to independent operators 2 years ago. Some of the former Crown stations have received the Texaco name, as part of a revival of the brand as the exclusive property of Chevron.

Moon Bloodgood and Jessica Cutler… separated at birth? (Helpful Google Images search to make up for the Wikipedia entry’s lack.) There might remain a copy or two of Cutler’s novel at a local Tower Records/Video. I was completely wrong on the ethnicities in Bloodgood’s heritage.

A plowed ground to be sure.

Maglite® finally delivers on its promise of LED flashlights. While it’s a mite disappointing that they were not able to retain the form factor of the originals (the 2AA model is ¾ inch longer and has a noticeably elongated head) there is no comparison with the third-party replacement I tried earlier: the light is much brighter and whiter, and the beam is adjustable.

Deputy Chief Earl Cook of the Alexandria Police Department is among those honored in Serving with Distinction: African Americans in Alexandria Public Safety, an exhibit at the Alexandria Black History Museum.

IM IN UR BROWSER VIEWPORT WASTING UR TIME: I am grateful to Boing Boing pointing to an explanation of this construction which has recently become popular on MetaFilter.

Turns out the iTunes importing project is not done. The sense that in shuffle mode I should have heard some music from the Star Wars soundtracks already led to locating the box for the trilogy soundtrack anthology released in 1993 on another shelf. Also, the compact disc of the soundtrack for Jaws was a benefit of the deluxe laserdisc edition. The slow importing speed of iTunes 7 and the tight spiral of the last track of a disc led to repeated disc copy procedures to get something listenable. The downloading of album artwork from the iTunes store has been inconsistent recently; I extracted what I could from what was already downloaded and resampled all my scans to create a page depicting in thumbnails all of the audio CDs in my collection. Wow, 2002 was a bad year for CD purchases. I did not expect the scan of the black-on-black CD insert to come out so well.

LUGNET has a new map: LUGMap. Sadly, WamaLTC is identified with all-capitals and a few of its name’s characters missing.

03 November 2006

Metrorail’s Next Train announcements for mobile devices and Internet users are now available linked from the page for each individual station (list of stations).

WamaLTC will have a display in the Potomac Mills LEGO® store this weekend. The active web site for this LEGO® train club is reachable again.

28 October 2006

From a draft for a law on the survey of properties promulgated in July by the Republican Geodetic Authority (RGZ) of Serbia:

18) ″clausula intabulandi″ јесте изричита изјава, односно сагласност лица чије се право уписом ограничава или преноси, дата безусловно или под условом или орочено, у исправи о правном послу или у посебној исправи, да пристаје на укњижбу којом се његово право ограничава, оптерећује, укида, или преноси на треће лице. Исправа у којој је дата изричита изјава, односно потпис њеног даваоца мора бити оверен пред надлежним органом

27 October 2006

The official announcement that my municipality’s bus system is testing the SmarTrip card.

The End of Suburbia as a 52 minute video on YouTube.

Jasper Fforde would appear to be an author, and his site’s Emergency Boss Approaching Procedure page wouldn’t fool anyone, what with its Platinum appearance. Canadian psychologists report a correlation between recognizing the names of authors of fiction (considered a proxy for having read fiction like, er, detective novels) and measures of empathy and social acumen and also for the opposite: those judged to read more non-fiction were assessed with lower measures of empathy and social acumen (preprint available free). That’s consistent with my opinion of local dog owners.

It really is the original series: The Outer Limits in the iTunes Store (via The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which lumps it with other sitcoms ).

26 October 2006

When my shoelaces come undone, and they do, I tend to assign blame elsewhere, but maybe I just don’t know how to tie shoelaces (via Ask MetaFilter thread).

22 October 2006

The Sony SLV-R1000 Super-VHS Hi-Fi video cassette recorder is the next candidate for flinging onto the pile at the electronics recycling location of my municipality. Purchased in 1993 for $1,253.95 at Palace Radio & TV along Wilson Boulevard in Arlington at a time when I lived in the neighborhood, I noticed it was out of commission and set it aside over a year ago. In the absence of an impulse to play a VHS tape as strong as that afforded by Michelle Krusiec the last time, there’s been no motivation to get it repaired. That, and I replaced it with a Mitsubishi HS-U748 from Tweeter in Fairfax for $188.99. Both vendor and customer in that transaction recognized that the market for Super-VHS had vanished. The clock sets itself, eventually.

I was flipping through the PDF of the fifth issue of BrickJournal last week—116 pages!—and asked myself, do I want to be a part of this? (There is a section in this magazine about the hobby of building with LEGO® which features instructions to build an AFOL’s MOC.) Yesterday I was confronted with this possibility in person. Sometimes I wonder that the editor finds the time to breathe (no, here he is hogging all the good pieces with fellow WamaLTC participant Michael Collaco at yesterday’s display and play area at Autumn Adventure in the Reston Town Center) but we had a chat and he showed off his new Sony Alpha 100 DSLR. There can’t be any harm if he takes a look at my Build page and sees something he might like to include… Joe Meno has an AOL Journal, too. Who knew? Maybe you can be the first to comment.

Tower Records/Video was at 20% off by Friday and still that wasn’t enough to bring any interesting titles below with $20 mark.

18 October 2006

What do people talk about when they let me listen in? Getting older, jewelry stores that serve beer, a television series I did not admit to watching 3 years ago, cooking classes… if you’re a hermit and get all your information from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, you’re not missing out on anything.

Spencer Rezkalla tries his hand at the Ford Focus ZX4 and SVT. I like what he has done for the headlights and taillights with Slope Brick 33 1×1×⅔ (50746), a brick I did not have when I built my own Focus in LEGO® elements (entry for this MOC on my Build page) over 2 years ago. His choice of a one-brick high greenhouse, though, while it worked well for his model of the Chrysler 300, in my mind doesn’t fit with the proportions of the smaller Focus.

I have written a simple default resource in the folder hannaher.net/wamaltc.org/ to tide us over until the DNS issue is resolved.

Never say never. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, available for download to select operating system versions. Maybe when I install that spare Windows XP Home disc into a VM established with Parallels Desktop for Mac…

15 October 2006

This new federal laboratory, it vibrates? The Baltimore Sun reports concerns that the Biomedical Research Center now under construction at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center at Bayview will not be able to house the delicate microscopes planned for use in gerontological studies. (The phrase it vibrates? is a recurring joke amongst MeFites based on its first use in reacting to a toy broom.)

Annandale, Virginia has its own flag and its flag has its own URL. The diagonal stripes represent Columbia Pike and Little River Turnpike, the intersection of the two roads is considered to be the center of the unincorporated community. I used a neighborhood road pattern to design the favicon for the site of the local homeowners association three years ago, but I doubt it would pass muster with the North American Vexillological Association. On the other hand, the pattern is better matched to the guidelines of Good Flag, Bad Flag than the proposal to add the name of the state to the flag of Pennsylvania (via Flagwire).

I’m grateful there is no list of recently purchased compact discs anywhere on this site (there is such a list for DVDs which has not had any additions for a while in 2 weeks) because then I would have to admit to the result of combining a 15% discount with the inventory yesterday at Tower Records/Video #822. Now I understand the nostalgia expressed upon their release… say, wouldn’t this normally redhaired chanteuse be about due to release a third album? (Maybe, but the official site hasn’t had any news since December of last year. Last week, her younger sister released an album of Christmas songs.) Album artwork downloaded from the iTunes Store and extracted from the .itc files using an AppleScript droplet.

I mentioned the blog of a local cab company’s dispatcher almost 2 months before Michael Grass writing for the Express did. But he gets paid for doing that… hmm.

13 October 2006

The liquidation at Tower Records has begun with 10% off the marked price of compact discs and DVDs and no one is impressed.

11 October 2006

Another thing MeFites argue about: cursive writing. I abandoned cursive writing even for my signature somewhere between getting my first Social Security card and college. When I printed my notes in class, I didn’t bother with one line of text per printed line on the sheet, either, I doubled up. My signature has only raised a question with one potential employer, and there’s an upside: American Express refused me a card on that basis, and now I get to refuse their offers for the rest of time. As for reading cursive? Fuggedaboutit. Especially with writers who made creative letterform substitutions, who has time for that? Other bloggers respond to the article in The Washington Post: Kottke, Marshall.

08 October 2006

Some people might think there is more important news today… but I learn that Tower Records is liquidating.

MLCAD had other plans for the weekend, but I persevered through the General input/output error! messages which meant that the file’s length was being changed to zero bytes, so the long-awaited Richmond Highway Express conversion of the Orion VII CNG bus is ready.

Apple has updated its U.S. site to include the new advertisements previously seen on television in Canada. Gisele Bündchen? No, I prefer the Self Pity video. What could be funnier than Just let me lie here and depreciate ?

07 October 2006

The site wamaltc.org is not resolving, one can visit the site using the current IP address but I can’t FTP there, so updates will be delayed. I once had a plan to reduce my driving to 10 miles a day (as a move towards a more sustainable life, not a cost-saving measure) but for now I’m just under 16 miles a day. The plan will be sorely tested this month and the next as WamaLTC is invited to display at a number of locations: Timonium, Maryland; Reston, Virginia; Woodbridge, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland. Some WamaLTC participants plan to assist Habitat for Humanity of Montgomery County with its Lego-Blitz Build in Bethesda on Sunday, October 22nd. At today’s event, of all the vehicles I had on display, only one was the object of desire, and it happened to be one for which I have yet to create a file in the LDraw format: my three-axle hi-rail WMATA boom crane truck. The desire was weak, though, and I withheld my new business card extolling the availability of the Build page. There does seem still to be some minor clamor for that Richmond Highway Express bus I was teasing about earlier so that’s two reasons to be using MLCAD this weekend.

05 October 2006

The end of the fiscal year is past, but, no, I haven’t ordered a MacPro with additional RAM and multiple hard drives and a second DVD burner or anything like that. Yet. (As of Release Candidate 2, Parallels Desktop for Mac no longer has a RAM limitation.) Which is just as well, given that the LEGO.com Factory: Pick a Brick part selection is now available. Mmm, transparent parts… on the other hand, the sooner I do locate a newer computer on the premises, the earlier I’ll be able to use LEGO® Digital Designer.

01 October 2006

Oh, sure, in theory a Compact Flash card would be the next-to-last resort in moving files from my decaying notebook, but msgsrv32 put up a half-hour’s fight at first.

My first DualDisc purchase wouldn’t play the CD* side in a DVD writer, so I made, uh, alternative arrangements to get the twelve tracks into iTunes.

So, was WAMALUG at yesterday’s Fall for Fairfax like the Connection newspapers announced? The home page of the local LEGO® users group remained mum about their plans. WamaLTC has a number of events scheduled for this month and the next.

30 September 2006

I see Chrysler is using the sales bank again… I leave the discussion of serious issues to others.

24 September 2006

There are no local television stations presenting the version of the original Star Trek remastered for high-definition.

I took the battery from the PowerBook 1400 to the closest Home Depot, which the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation identifies as a local retailer participating in the Call2Recycle™ program, and it took a while to find someone who knew what I was talking about. I am clear on the concept, however, I give these batteries to you, and I walk away.

21 September 2006

I admit to being a change manipulator.

MacInTouch lists the Rosetta compatibility of PowerPC Applications on Intel Macs.

A place to look up numbers that appear in the Caller ID display.

18 September 2006

Tilda Swinton rides a cab for art.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will continue to provide the public with regular updates on the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak each day until further notice. So many brand names, one source, but who knows how many farms.

Sure, I made fun of diskettes earlier, but when I started my Windows notebook Friday, the USB ZIP 250 drive spun continuously (and ejected inserted disks) and the external hard drives refused to mount, so the floppy drive is the last refuge to perform backups and retain the file dates (which are changed when uploading using FTP). A swap of the hard drive and omitting the USB hub made no difference, so I suspect a more profound hardware failure. Today the battery was left with a local retailer participating in the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation’s Call2Recycle™ program. Maybe I waited a month too long to replace the aging computer, but I don’t like the idea that the current version of Parallels imposes a cap on the amount of RAM usable in a MacPro.

The project to supply artwork for the albums in my iTunes library is complete. Not only did I scan quite a few covers to make up for the titles lacking any image, but I scanned covers for those titles where the image supplied by iTunes and the iTunes Store just didn’t match what was on my shelf. Revisiting all those compact discs also made evident the sloppy work by the contributors to Gracenote and the former CDDB. While the impulse to retain fidelity to the original language may have been sincere, the title of this particular soundtrack album is the improbable mix Trois Couleurs Red.

15 September 2006

FDA Warning on Serious Foodborne E.coli O157:H7 Outbreak. FDA advises that consumers not eat bagged fresh spinach at this time.

13 September 2006

Whee! After denying Apple its peek at my collection by not enabling the iTunes MiniStore, the prospect of a pain-free way to obtain album artwork using the freshly released iTunes 7 was enough to induce me to establish an account at the iTunes store right away. I was encouraged by its ability to locate an appropriate image for an offbeat title like Orbital’s The Saint CD single, but later discovered how many titles remained without an image, and even more bizarrely, how many titles had something completely irrelevant supplied. Apparently, the iTunes store has Black Flag’s TV Party but not the Clueless soundtrack? Looks like my flatbed scanner will be getting some use. Then I’ll use the program minimized anyway.

11 September 2006

Juno (Natalie Mendoza) and Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) from THE DESCENT. Photo credit: Alex Bailey

Five years ago I had just seen a horror movie in which the actresses didn’t show skin, so from that perspective not much has changed. My anxiety on watching a Ford Bronco being driven fast over muddy roads was justified. Also justified: the local reviewer’s reaction to Mendoza (which I recall being much more effusive in the print edition).

10 September 2006

There’s a debate in the newsgroups at LUGNET (started by this follow-up to Todd Thuma’s announcement of a desire for a convention in California) about the BrickFest™ finances. I remember months of discussion at WAMALUG meetings about whether the dues that members were paying at the time were intended as a discount against the registration fee. The transition from a club effort to one by specific individuals was not a happy one and the issues raised then have not been resolved even this many years later. The 2006 coordinator isn’t interested in the role for 2007? Say it isn’t so, Joe!

09 September 2006

Timothy Gould offers instructions for his GAZ M20 Pobeda creation under the GNU Free Document License version 1.2, so I feel free to redistribute a modified version (entry on the Build page) as my attempt to fix the issues of fragility, conflicting parts, and assemblies held in place by gravity or friction. Just as I did with Spencer Rezkalla’s car, I changed the insides quite a bit without altering the exterior (much). It reminds me a little of the Ford Vedette. By comparison, because my review of Bob Hayes’s GG-1 yielded no opportunities for revising the part selection or part locations, I was tempted to revise only the assembly sequence of the well-built creation.

A random photograph found at smugmug.com, a for-pay photo-sharing site proud of its profitability, for values of random that include following the Photos link of this page of results for the local 16th Annual Run vs. Row 10K last March and looking through multiple galleries. This guy looks like he’s still putting an effort in reaching the finish line.

Uploading to my new host has gone a lot smoother since I realized that the password I used at the previous host was in the Keychain.

03 September 2006

Previously I lamented the access the designers at LEGO® get to pieces and colors… in person, it’s apparent that the hippopotamus is yellow, not orange. I split up my BrickFest™ coverage between WamaLTC’s display and what caught my eye among the creations in the big hall. I remember being very frustrated with the synchronization of the older flash (5600HS-D) and newer camera (7D) but only a few images needed a boost in brightness and contrast. Although WamaLTC’s site might be moribund right now, pages are being edited to link to Tony Perez’s recent upload of photographs from the display in Reston in June and photographs from BrickFest™.

01 September 2006

WAMALUG’s webmaster continues to update the site’s pages, which is encouraging, but maybe someone should tell him that Brickshelf hasn’t been spelled camel-case… oh, my, look at that… since at least 2002.

31 August 2006

Sometime Tuesday, in between uploading an edit to WamaLTC’s site in the morning and attempting to upload an edit to this site late in the evening, all of the sites hosted at Netbunch like this one, wamaltc.org, and others disappeared. It’s just as well I never got serious about my installation of WordPress.

27 August 2006

I had a chance to converse with the new webmaster of WAMALUG today while I visited BrickFest™ and came away with one idea which was worthwhile after enduring the dismissal of the entire history of the one of the longest-running LEGO® users groups (at least among the first ten clubs founded, anyway): link to the Yahoo! Group of the club on every page. My repetitious use at WamaLTC and at WAMALUG before that of We had a meeting|display on day, month date, year as link anchor text is for usability, accesibility, and search engine ranking so I need not apologize for it.

The latest discovery in the MLCAD menu is the Sort command… it’s handy when you’re confronted with a file in which the parts are listed without STEP commands. I suppose I could just have bought a book.

No, no one displaying at the 2006 edition of BrickFest™ built anything according to my directions. Snif.

25 August 2006

I am not happy with a number of things about MLCAD 3.2, the editor for files in the LDraw format that I currently use, not least its inability to omit the WRITE command when the checkbox to include it is left unchecked. Anyway, I was authoring this Virginia Railway Express locomotive in the program and noting the creation’s inclusion of Tile 1×4 with Control Panel Pattern (2431px1) when I discovered that the Parts Tree in MLCAD is configurable. No more slogging through the T parts to get to Tiles for me.

24 August 2006

Apropos of nothing, there is a My Yahoo! Widget for Dashboard. One more taxi and three more police cruisers added to the Build page.

23 August 2006

The instruction file for the Virginia Railway Express Incident Response Van required the unofficial part for Round Dish 3×3 Inverted (43898). I have yet to supply any images for the stickers I apply to some of my models. With the upload of the revision of the instruction file for the Orion VII CNG (Metrobus) previously mentioned nearly a month ago, there are now more than fifty such files on the Build page. (It’s painful to look at my first draft of the model, no? My photography may have helped.) Today I noticed that Bob Hayes has uploaded an instruction file for the GG-1 and upon reviewing the file wondered why I bother with including STEP commands…

22 August 2006

Tower Records is for sale. Apparently, the company didn’t pay its bills earlier in the month and some distributors stopped shipments to the chain, so they’re giving themselves 60 days under Chapter 11 to find a buyer. In retrospect, I wonder if that is why they didn’t have the Remington Steele DVD set in stock last week.

Brickshelf user GrapeApe (Thomas Burger) features a number of useful unofficial parts, including Car Mudguard 2×4×⅔ with Front Studs (52038) (my original source for x505!).

21 August 2006

My Pierce Dash Rescue Pumper is not yet suitable for release as a file in the LDraw format in view of the absence from the part library of Tile 1×2 with Red 82 and Yellow and White Gauges Pattern (3069bpx19), Tile 1×4 with Control Panel Pattern (2431px1), and Car Steering Wheel Large (30663), and my inability to figure out the flexible hose generator. Some files have also been revised to specify Medium Stone rather than Light Stone. It would be unseemly to suggest to look out for one of these creations at the BrickParty this weekend.

20 August 2006

I added some more instructions to my Build page, with another premiere (the Chevrolet Tahoe that I used as a basis for two models on display in Manassas and Philadelphia, a file I first authored in May) and catching up with creations that could re-use older files. Unfortunately, my version of the HUMMER H2H Hydrogen Powered prototype relies on Wheel 30.4x14 Spoked (51377), so I derived the SUT version to upload instead. Yes, all the instruction files are still free.

19 August 2006

Before I forget… or it disappears… this is the new look of WAMALUG. You’ll notice that the branding is diminished considerably. One week until BrickFest™.

18 August 2006

For what it’s worth—I have gathered together more than forty of my files in the LDraw format, including several I have not previously uploaded to Brickshelf, then reviewed them, revised them, or completely reauthored them as necessary in MLCAD 3.2, used Stone colors as applicable, written a page to link to them, and given the page an easy-to-say URL.

I appreciate that the Southern California LEGO® Train Club now credits me with the design of the HUMMER H2 they built in 2004 but not that all the links I made last year fail because their web site requires the www. to work.

15 August 2006

The new look of WAMALUG is up… check it out. Although index.html and index.htm are history, the rest of the site survives for now.

I get so little mail addressed to me as a person (as opposed to me as a temporary repository of cash) that even a hand-addressed envelope arouses suspicion. We should be grateful that I didn’t open today’s mystery envelope the usual way—tearing it in half. Hmm… eBay-er since 2000, eh?

With the final box set of Remington Steele released today, I wonder what I shall be doing… I wonder… with the replacement monitor attached to the video card, I can play DVDs in DVD Player, so multi-tasking may ensue.

One of the features of SeaMonkey that I’m seeing the benefit of is the ability to force popup windows into a new tab instead.

13 August 2006

Progress continues on preparing the page collecting links to my files in the LDraw format. Internet Explorer for Windows required hand-holding because it requires a value for a negative margin which is half of the true value (adding display: inline; before the true value works). Having reached the time when I was building a lot of taxis, I’ve been searching for the web sites of the local companies I depicted in LEGO® elements and found a very funny blogger writing The Blank Top Chronicles (don’t read this if you can’t enjoy cursing at customers).

08 August 2006

From the Q&A: Using Microsoft for Mac Products with Intel-Based Macs (as recently updated regarding the future of Virtual PC):

The Macintosh Business Unit has decided not to make further investments in a Universal version of Virtual PC at this time. Building a high-quality virtualization solution, such as Virtual PC, for the Intel-based Mac would be similar to developing a version 1.0 release due to how closely the product integrates with Mac hardware, and it’s simply not feasible with available development resources. We believe that Virtual PC for Mac Version 7 is still the best emulation solution for PowerPC-based Macs users, and we will continue to support current Virtual PC customers in accordance with Microsoft product support policies. As new virtualization solutions are available for Intel-based Macs, we will continue to work closely with our partners and customers to address the needs of users who wish to run Windows on the Mac.

Ahem, one of those new virtualization solutions isn’t nearly so hobbled as Virtual PC for Mac became, once Microsoft bought it, as to which versions of Windows it can run. With an export using Norton Ghost of my current installation on the Compaq of Windows 98 SE, and a ludicrously overqualified Mac Pro equipped with a newly more affordable 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, I could run Windows in a 1024×768 window and still have half the screen left over for OS X applications. Such a setup could make a serious dent in the number of computers and monitors and keyboards on the premises. Not to mention the number of mouses, power strips, Ethernet cables…

I am making progress in preparing a page to host the latest versions of my files in the LDraw format (there’s almost forty of them). My first pass at styling the page doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6. Should I care?

Photographs of my Virginia Railway Express set in LEGO® elements might make an appearance in a presentation at BrickFest™ later this month. Do I really need this kind of publicity? Hmm…

07 August 2006

More celebrity gossip from the hivemind that is the MetaFilter commentariat.

05 August 2006

I have caught up with updating the WamaLTC site pages, at least for those shows and meetings for which I had found photographs.

The summer edition of the Commuter Connection newsletter published by Alexandria’s Office of Transit Services & Programs reports on its second page that DASH will this fall begin testing fare boxes which accept SmarTrip cards as a prelude to installation on all of the 57 buses in service. Meanwhile, at the DASH website, there’s been no news since 2004.

03 August 2006

This week’s edition of the Alexandria Gazette Packet reports that Frank Kozuch, owner of Whistle Stop Hobbies, plans another LEGO-palooza next month. His partner is identified as Amy Parkers. WamaLTC participated the first time but this is the first I hear of this follow-up.

There’s a new look for the WAMALUG website on the way from Abe Friedman and Todd Webb. The look is very much like a blog template from a year or two ago, but the need for refurbishment has been felt long enough. I wish they wouldn’t use www. unnecessarily.

I finally noticed that Mozilla Suite 1.7.13 had been released and when launched, the landing page complains that the build is over 4 months old. Is it time to switch to SeaMonkey? Like its predecessor, SeaMonkey doesn’t display the favicons at Brickshelf or Maj.

30 July 2006

A look at what a Richmond Highway Express Orion VII bus might look like in LEGO® elements. I have attempted to use only parts which Peeron identifies as being available in Medium Lilac (making whatever wasn’t available in that color in Bright Blue) but I don’t pretend to have kept track of how many LEGO® Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban