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, accessibility, 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 4755 Knight Bus sets would be needed to build it. Actually, since the slope bricks 45 (3038, 3039, 3045, and 4445) were available in yellow at various points in the past, this model would be more for the adventurous user of BrickLink. This image comes from a modification of a file prepared to document the Metrobus compressed natural gas Orion VII bus MOC I have displayed earlier, a file I have yet to make public. Since the show in Philadelphia, for example, I’ve decided that the window at the driver’s side should be smaller. An earlier trip on the Orion VII model had me on the tour bus version, with high-back seats, adjustable head rests, luggage shelf, and reading lights. But I looked at the floor and wondered how I had not noticed before that it was blue. I am considering adding a folder to this site to maintain the latest versions of my various files in the LDraw format, because little changes like this (color of the floor from black to blue, unofficial to official parts) are too much trouble to make with the moderation of uploads at Brickshelf.

Browsing to http://wamalug.org/ today serves up the index file with the .htm extension rather than the index file with the .html extension (which still exists). Interesting… maybe what I left behind was too daunting to overhaul. I do know that when I first got the login and password for the site, the default resource was changed that afternoon.

The onboard video in the Power Macintosh G3 was giving me trouble, so I found a Sony Trinitron Multiscan CPD-E500 Color Computer Display for $35 in a thrift store and attached it to the VGA connector on the ATi RADEON® 9200 Mac edition (PCI bus version) video card installed almost 2 years ago, moving from 1024×768 to 1600×1200. With the Fill Screen setting in System Preferences active, OS X smoothly enlarges the desktop wallpaper images to match the new size. I had to turn the brightness down to the minimum setting during the calibration procedure. It’s good to see my widgets without having to move windows or invoke F8.

26 July 2006

With my free ticket expiring at the end of the month, sure, I chose the movie with Keira Knightley in it. My expectations were low. It is funny to see Tom Hollander and Knightley square off again, though.

25 July 2006

I have heard before that life is unfair… no, not from this person… but now from a post on LUGNET comes evidence that the designers at LEGO® in Billund have access to Wedge 4×4×⅔ Curved (45677) and to Wedge 4×6×⅔ Curved (52031) in colors like Bright Orange! Argh.

Hmm, if I did have a new Macintosh, I would be able to take advantage of LEGO® Factory and its palette of elements, or at least be able to look at the files it produces. This creation named Army 4×4, for example, looks suspicious. Such a change would also allow me to use the new Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Have a Mac mini already but didn’t include Bluetooth when you bought it? Install it yourself using one of the guides available for working with recent Apple models.

23 July 2006

The people who comment at MOCpages are very demanding… and very dumb. Does an LDraw file not count as instructions? Or is it the following the link to the folder on Brickshelf which is proving to be difficult?

Oh, naughty: the LEGO® users group in Hungary (MALUG) is using two of my photographs from the WAMALUG meeting on September 11, 2004 to accompany its own description of Akos Kostyan’s visit (scroll to the bottom) without any apparent credit.

The Brickshelf forum I wrote about earlier is no longer to be found.

My lapse in Philadelphia notwithstanding, the Q&A page deserved an edit in the wake of my participation in TV Turnoff Week earlier this year.

Despite the existence of a passad.ru domain and the ability of Google to return results for a search on volkswagen passad, there is no real reason to believe that the name of the Volkswagen Passat has ever been spelled differently. Volkswagen offers customized content for Croatia but nothing for Serbia.

21 July 2006

I finally got around to resizing the photographs I took of the layouts and MOCs at The National Train Show® and, while we’re waiting for those folders at Brickshelf to be moderated, this is how my three-axle hi-rail boom truck in yellow with the WMATA logo turned out (compare with the prototype).

19 July 2006

I exposed myself to television while I was in Philadelphia (the radio in the hotel room was inadequate) and took photographs of the screen ostensibly as a test of the shutter-priority mode of the new camera. The television displayed closed-captioning when the sound was muted, which is how I know that Apple’s advertisements do not include any closed-captioning. Cut off as I was from National Public Radio by the poor radio, I relied on the local morning anchors for my major news stories, which that week were some budget crisis in New Jersey and the missile launches from North Korea. Since I wasn’t driving, the traffic reports were even less useful. Contrary to its reputation, MTV used the early hour to show music videos.

Abe Friedman has started to upload his photographs from The National Train Show® (photographs of me, me, me, me, me for those so inclined). He relied on the automatic ISO setting and the Anti-Shake feature of the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D for his shooting.

18 July 2006

My morning walks in Philadelphia’s Center City were not entirely aimless… upon my arrival at the truck ramp to the convention center I forgot that I carried a telephone and had gone in search of parking, so I knew that the 6th District of the Philadelphia Police was located at the next corner to the east. It wasn’t until Saturday that I managed to be on the scene when there wasn’t a shift change in progress! An earlier stint of pausing on a bench on Market Street yielded this opportunity to freeze a SEPTA Transit Police cruiser in motion. By the way, I was able to find an open metered curbside parking space in Chinatown on 9th Street just south of Vine Street.

17 July 2006

For a builder in LEGO® elements, the variety of buildings in Philadelphia’s Center City section is inspiring. Rather than uploading photographs from the WamaLTC display at The National Train Show®, I prepared in Flickr Uploadr a set of photographs which I took walking through the neighborhood waiting for the convention center exhibit hall to open. Flickr allows free users of the photo sharing service only three sets, however. Enjoy my photostream instead, then.

Pierre Normandin turns his experienced hand to the task of building a 6-wide fire truck.

16 July 2006

AMC Theatres introduced the A.M.Cinema program this past weekend and Saturday I took time out from my efforts to assure a reliable boot partition to catch something at what is now the AMC in Shirlington (although the Loews name survives in the description of the theatre). Whether I ever get around to writing about it is another matter. If I had known that PATA is a retroactive renaming of the standard IDE connection in my Power Macintosh G3 I would have been less confused about the hard drive selection at Micro Center. As it was, I purchased a Western Digital Caviar SE EIDE drive because it had a 250GB size matching its flaky predecessor, and it wasn’t until this evening that I was able to boot to a OS X partition on the new drive. I have yet to locate any folder of photographs from the National Train Show by a WamaLTC participant beyond Kevin’s Brickshelf folder (in which he focused on my bank building again) so the delay in revealing my photographs is not unusual.

12 July 2006

A hard disk making clicking noises is never a good thing. Apple says seeing You need to restart your computer in a bunch of different languages is a sign of kernel panic but I can’t start the Power Macintosh G3 from an optical disk with the 1 GHz processor upgrade installed. Therefore, I am grateful that I have a second hard disk installed which has been kept reasonably up-to-date using Retrospect. The System 9 partition is reachable by holding down the Option key, and XPostFacto can boot into the duplicate System 10 partition. Disk Utility couldn’t mount the partition I normally use to boot, so I’ve erased it and used SuperDuper! to restore the partition. I mention all this as a cautionary tale for those not yet convinced of the necessity of backing up. I suppose I need to be shopping for a replacement drive.

When laserdiscs were still on the retail market, I would have known that there was a Tower Records/Video in the center city before spending a week in Philadelphia. Now it just merits a shrug.

10 July 2006

Apple’s television advertising is NOT closed-captioned. That is all for now.

04 July 2006

There’s a section of I-83 between Hunt Valley, Maryland and the Pennsylvania state line which has repeatedly caused the engine in my Escape to stumble. It happened again Sunday evening, and ever since then the Check Engine light has been on steadily. A random guy reached at the service department of my local Ford dealer says it’s nothing to worry about, and indeed the ride has been as smooth as ever since that minute of stumbling, despite my apprehension over the light. This morning’s visit to a local filling station to refuel with E10 reveals that this vehicle, unfairly accused as a gas guzzler, achieved just over 30 miles per gallon on this trip, its best performance ever.

29 June 2006

Yesterday’s dispatch may have made for a good story… but I was relying on the listings in a free local tabloid, and the truth is, er, inconvenient as it may be, that screenings of the two movies I mentioned have been reduced at the location identified, not eliminated. Grr.

My Google-fu fails me, but local stations of Crown Petroleum are being rebranded as Shell.

28 June 2006

The first day in a while that could be fairly described as sunny and AMC Select features A Prairie Home Companion and An Inconvenient Truth are displaced from the AMC Hoffman Center 22 by Superman Returns. Boo.

26 June 2006

Too much rain has consequences. While I am PlanBdextrous, the continuing absence of SmarTrip card readers from DASH buses is getting old.

25 June 2006

More rain this morning. Boy, am I off the hook. ;-)

Spencer Rezkalla builds a pumper fire engine. The lack of any identification of a prototype is most apparent. But he’s removed the original police car (and LDraw file) which I drew inspiration from for a whole slew of derivatives starting over 2 years ago. Same for the taxis. Google cache remembers what once was but the file police_car.ldr is no longer hosted at Brickshelf.

The Hybrid view in Google Maps cannot be printed from any browser.

The Car Mudguard 4 × 2½ × 2 (50745) elements that were set aside for me yesterday are already in use: a three-axle hi-rail truck, in yellow and with articulated boom, based on this prototype found in a field off a local street. The logo was printed on a clear label sheet for application to the sides of the model.

Another downpour this evening.

24 June 2006

There was no embargo on photography today at the WamaLTC meeting of my model in LEGO® elements of a CSX hi-rail truck. The President of Brickshelf discussed with me the possibilities for branding his multistory bank building (for which only teaser images are currently available) and we came to an agreement for a number of stickers. This recently named individual has also started a forum for builders in LEGO® elements at a URL that takes a stand. In light of the absence of the forums at LEGOFan for more than a week, I wondered about the timing, but I’m told it’s just a coincidence. My first serious use of the digital SLR (a discontinued product) had me trying out the Anti-Shake and white balance features but forgetting to use aperture priority. The SLR experience extends to the 3:2 proportions of the results, and while the WamaLTC site was prepared for 128×85 thumbnails (as created by Brickshelf upon uploading), this site was not (I have been using 150×100 thumbnails for images originating from film)!

The coordinator for the ILTCO contribution to the National Train Show reports the availability of the press release I linked to on Tuesday, he is going to be one busy guy for the next 2 weeks. With the latest revision of the layouts now available, it’s easy to see that we won’t have the biggest yard. My remaining hope is that the other clubs continue to use official sets for their vehicles.

23 June 2006

More rain overnight. The ground fault circuit interrupter in the garage tripped again. Coincidence? UL recommends regular testing of GFCIs.

Friday Random 10:

1. Whatever Happens (Vanessa Williams, The Right Stuff )
2. Hold That Snake (Ry Cooder, Streets of Fire )
3. Alma (Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was )
4. Solving the Puzzle (Ennio Morricone, In the Line of Fire )
5. Passed (John Beal, Coming Soon! Previews of Coming Attractions (Disc 2) )
6. African Waltz (Johnny Dankworth & His Orchestra, Scandal: Music from the Motion Picture )
7. Whenever, Wherever (Shakira, Laundry Service )
8. The Encampment (Jerry Goldsmith, Masada Music from the Original Soundtrack )
9. Bonus Track: Alternate Open for Episode 2 (National Public Radio, Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama )
10. Bond Underwater (John Barry, A View To a Kill )

As part of the general tune-up in preparing for the show next month, I lengthened my model of the Orion VII Metrobus to render some proportions better but this left me with an unprototypical window arrangement. Seeing as how the model was longer than a baseplate already, I could be tempted to cut it down to the size of this prototype, found sidelined on Hayes Street in Arlington recently.

If there is someone in your family who simply must know if there will be a replacement for the Chrysler Sebring, the wait is over: official photographs and press release for the 2007 Chrysler Sebring on Autoblog.

21 June 2006

Opera 9.0 displays the graphical headings on my home page correctly.

20 June 2006

WAMALUG is struggling once again with what it means to be a member presumably because LEGO® Brand Retail wants to clarify to whom it extends a discount on purchases made at the local stores. I have consistently emphasized to store employees that I have not attended a meeting of the local users group since November of 2004. A recent message in the club’s Yahoo! Group quoted the Club page regarding participation in meetings and activities; except for the capitalization of every letter in the name of the club, the words are exactly as written by Kevin Loch in the message I identified by number on that page. My last visit to the store in Tysons Corner Center, I found myself explaining the Window on the Community featuring creations by local builders, but couldn’t find an identification of the builder of this month’s display (Galen Fairbanks). Meanwhile, the company plans massive layoffs (potentially insightful reaction to the outsourcing and asset divestiture).

With the show in Philadelphia only 2 weeks away, I think it is the wrong time to be experimenting with the clearances on the mainlines. If only WamaLTC had some standards… some published document everyone could refer to and rely on… rules were made to be broken, though. The show’s site recently added a two page document extolling the world’s largest LEGO® display and while the publicists get our club’s name right, I wonder who is building and bringing those stationery trains which will be featured.

19 June 2006

There was rain today, in case someone should be visiting the Kenwood Towne Centre Apple Store in Ohio and think to read this page. There is no Apple Store in Kentucky.

The Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi continues to be uncooperative. I wish I hadn’t dropped it (08 February 2004 in the parking lot of Ruffino’s in Arlington where WAMALUG had a dinner gathering after its meeting that day) about a year after purchase. Sony’s form is prepared to take credit card information and then, once I had given up the same, refuse to complete the online request for service. The 7Hi remains the most expensive camera that I have ever purchased, and not just because I bought the others from discount retailers (Kmart, Vienna Camera Shop) and an outlet store (Ritz Camera in Potomac Mills). Yes, even after last week’s arrival of a mystery replacement… I wonder what it could be. Yet I still find the ever-ready nature of a film camera powered by ordinary batteries to be convenient, and with a photofinisher’s scanner (Kodak CLAS Digital Film Scanner / HR 200) doing the work, the quality and utility is the same notwithstanding the delay.

A week without updates and I wasn’t even using my new digital camera as an excuse? With a handy bench to rest the vertical control grip of the Minolta Maxxum 7 on, Anti-Shake was not needed for me to photograph the Apple Store in Clarendon as a prelude to building it some day in LEGO® elements. I added a flag (cut out from a sheet originally printed to equip the bank building first displayed at the show in February of 2002) to the 2002 Pierce Dash Rescue Pumper model in LEGO® elements among other changes made upon seeing the photographs taken a month ago. I saw Cars on Thursday and liked it better than I did Monsters, Inc. though perhaps not as much as The Incredibles. What I saw next, it’s just as well it was in second run. Acting upon a request made at the show in Manassas, I built a CSX hi-rail truck (from a prototype I photographed late last year) for a spot on the layout that otherwise had no motivation. Whether the truck is an improvement over the attempt at a Norfolk Southern hi-rail vehicle exhibited earlier awaits the WamaLTC meeting this Saturday. I went to Tower Records/Video and they had all DVDs at 20% off and I couldn’t find a single one I wanted to buy. I was assured that my RCN account was canceled despite the arrival of a notice of automatic renewal in the mail (the user webspace remains for now).

I removed the drop-down menus from the WamaLTC site. They were getting too long. Now if only more photographers would make their work available, there wouldn’t be so many blank spaces in the menus for Meetings and Shows.

MetaFilter discussion on the relative merits of manual transmissions and automatic transmissions reaches a comment count rarely seen even regarding the most contentious political subjects.

11 June 2006

There are plenty of well-heeled amateurs who are buying very expensive cameras… Wherever does Mark Weir, Senior Product Manager for Digital-SLR Cameras at Sony Electronics, get his ideas?

09 June 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. Exploring (Leonard Rosenman, Beneath the Planet of the Apes )
2. Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Vanessa Williams, Star Bright )
3. No More Cry (The Corrs, In Blue )
4. The Huns Attack (Score) (Jerry Goldsmith, MuLan )
5. Freezing M. Foster (The Firesign Theatre, Dear Friends )
6. The Monorail Song (The Simpsons, Songs in the Key of Springfield )
7. Orientation (John Carpenter, Escape from New York - Expanded Soundtrack )
8. The Phone Booth (Bernard Herrmann, North by Northwest )
9. Caravan (Frank DeVol, The Flight of the Phoenix )
10. The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota ( Weird Al Yankovic, Dr. Demento’s 30th Anniversary Collection (Disc 1) )

WAMALUG plans a display at Fair City Mall again, it’s tomorrow. I could go see a movie like I did last year.

08 June 2006

The flag of the Republic of Serbia flies on the East River less than 2 weeks after my speculation.

The U.S. Global Leadership Campaign considers DaimlerChrysler an American business.

Discussion at Slashdot regarding Firefox to Drop Pre-Windows 2000 Support leads to a defense of those still using Windows 98 (and another). I actually uninstalled Firefox 1.5 from my Windows 98 Second Edition notebook because I no longer browse with that machine. When I need a new file to use in MLCAD, for example, I download on the Power Macintosh G3 and bring it over via ZIP disk. Anyway, similar people can be found defending Mac OS 9 in the comments at Mac Night Owl.

06 June 2006

Look who built a 6-wide school bus and used Technic Liftarm 1×6 in yellow and black as the elements behind the lights at the roof line. I made a similar choice in February.

A fascinating analysis of Eyes Wide Shut (via) reminds me that it’s one movie directed by Stanley Kubrick which I do not have on home video… then I remember who the male lead is.

The Digital Camera resource page® says: Sony will not be offering a battery grip for the A100 (the model number of their first release). Boo.

04 June 2006

The global launch of Sony’s new digital SLR camera, α, is Tuesday. The replacement brand name for cameras, lenses, and accessories compatible with those previously made by Konica Minolta and Minolta before that under the Alpha, Dynax, and Maxxum brands has been known for more than a month. Maybe they’ll offer a vertical control grip that’s backward compatible with the 7D. A guy can hope, right? Uh, not that I have a Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D or anything…

Zombie. Actually, for having been awake for 20 hours and on my feet for 12 of those hours yesterday, I feel normal. The rain started after five o’clock just as I was sweeping my driveway in preparation, but by the time I had arrived at the corner of Grant Avenue and Prince William Street (not Grant Street as the access pass would have it) 49 minutes later, the weather had settled down. A few sprinkles made it through the gap in the pavilion’s roof, but the big weather-related difficulty as the skies cleared was the wind. Our display for the Manassas Railway Festival was intended as practice for the National Train Show next month and it delivered. The layout required… tinkering, let’s say, to deal with its weak approach to known dimensions and clearance requirements. Grr. I’d like to think that my section (a slice based on Alexandria which served some as a civics lesson: look, there’s a fire truck, a police car, a post office truck, a bus…) was popular. People were also keen to read the prices on the sign for the Exxon station, good thing I had printed those labels on Thursday. The additional pair of Metro cars, built by Margaret from Tom’s use of LPub on my file in the LDraw format, helped the action quotient as the two trains made their way on separate loops in and out of the tunnel entrances. Because of the table’s arrival a mere 2 hours before the show opened to the public, I didn’t array many minifigs beyond those already in vehicles. These workers about to embark on track maintenance and their handsome pickup truck loaded with tools is the last picture from my Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi before it stopped cooperating. You have failed me for the last time.

01 June 2006

Golden Shpleem bills itself as a polite and unassuming LEGO blog ; it linked to WamaLTC (properly, without the www.) in the entry for 15 May 2006 which generated a number of click-throughs.

I returned today to discover that the clean recycling bin which I had labeled with my address on the bottom was gone and in its place was a recycling bin with dried soda and sticky paper scraps lining its inside. All I’m saying is that now is a bad time for a household to display a recycling bin with one-quarter of its bottom painted over. Yes, I gave the replacement a bath with a scrub brush.

Does someone need ideas for building something to display at the show on Saturday? Who’s got time for building, I’m already packing the Escape in preparation! I have heard, though, that a Fairfax Connector bus on the layout would hit the spot, or something like that.

29 May 2006

My neighborhood’s trash contractor operates on Memorial Day. True story.

Dispatches have been on hold while I prepared the Potemkin village needed to hide the planned change in elevation scheduled for display at the 12th Manassas Heritage Railway Festival this upcoming Saturday. I snuck up on the need for 64 studs’s worth of coverage by building a tow truck on Saturday, intended as a replacement for the one that has accompanied my Exxon station since 2002, then creating a multi-part file of the SUV intended to represent a Chevy Tahoe (just barely visible at the right edge of this photograph), and building an Alexandria Fire Department Battalion Chief’s vehicle (scroll down for units 211 and 212, link deduced from image gallery at the site of Alexandria Fire Department Local 2141, one of the more bafflingly structured sites one might come across) on Sunday. The first version of anything I build is usually junk, so it’s just as well to place a rendition of the Terrazza condos on 11th Street at the back of my section, but I now have more reference material so I should be able to revise the structure for more faithfulness to its prototype before Philadelphia.

The Parliament of Serbia offers its symbols of state mostly in Corel Draw 12 format. (Whew! My installation of Corel Draw 11, the last version made for Macintosh, did open such a file.) Now that Crna Gora has decided to leave the union, there will be no distinction necessary between Serbia the country and Serbia the state.

Control-5 and Control-8 are keyboard commands which toggle the menu structure of Word for the Mac. Beware the contents of Help if you have the Word 5.1 Menus option active in Word 2004 (version 11) and don’t see what you expect.

This weekend’s temperatures called for air conditioning. My Focus, which returned to the garage on Saturday with exactly 29,000 miles on the odometer (13,097 more than when I drove away with it from Carmax more than 2½ years ago), couldn’t make a dent in the result of parking at Potomac Mills Mall on a cloudless day. Kind of like the day they took this picture, but with more cars in the lot.

My alumni magazine brings to its readers the story of a formerly anonymous blogger. The Waiter and the Bouncer remain anonymous so far.

25 May 2006

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager charts that my name ( Constantine ) was given at a time of a slight resurgence which came nowhere near its all-time height of popularity at the turn of the preceding century.

22 May 2006

Seriously, no one will be looking at the WamaLTC layout… Seven-and-a-half foot building scheduled to be included on the adjoining display. The inclusion of the metal piping to keep the crowds back (as seen at last year’s display) may make it more difficult for visitors to see the WMATA-branded vehicles I have prepared, but I am led to understand that they’re adorable. If I get bored, or am desperate to get something that could make use of the hotel’s Free high speed Internet access, the Apple Store in Suburban Square is a $3.75 SEPTA R-5 ride away.

What if I don’t have any LEGO® shirt, let alone a favorite one as mandated by the primary coordinator?

21 May 2006

WamaLTC’s display in the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia this past Saturday seemed like the perfect occasion to include the fire truck I have been building, along with the revised DASH bus and Alexandria Police cruiser built earlier. Just possibly its prototype was a few house numbers down the street from our display location, which began life as a bank in 1852. The recently lengthened Metrobus made an appearance, too, and the CNG Orion VII is back in my hands, fated to have the tanks in its roof hidden by tiles. As it happened, it was the Metrobus vehicles which got the most recognition. Bob’s Union Pacific streamliner met a less happy fate. The family-owned business which sponsored the event, rented the hall ordinarily used for ballet lessons and artist exhibits, and supplied food and drink to our participants, sold some sets during the 4 hours the gallery was open. The event was on the calendar at the city’s site for tourism, and attracted a mix of visitors who had heard of the event from shopping previously at the store, those who just normally wander the neighborhood with their toddlers, and a few souls who were just there to see new works by Sheep Jones. My digital camera may have a sticky aperture, it again required switching to manual mode to get the exposure working.

The National Train Show® is less than 2 months away, and the 12th Manassas Heritage Railway Festival is less than 2 weeks away. We have an ambitious plan for a large layout, but weak commitments for table transport and display items. We hope to use Manassas, where we’ll finally get to take advantage of the pavilion promised us in 2003 until torrential rains canceled the festival, as a rehearsal for the event in Philadelphia. By prepaying my hotel reservation, I might fairly be described as committed. Yay for online transactions. If I didn’t have to bring some of the ancillary materials like curve track and train club containers and if my 8-wide locomotives were unwelcome, I could be good for three tables if no one else showed up. It wouldn’t be competition for the club adjoining our space at the show… but we can’t let that bother us. My taxis and police cars have interior details. ;-)

19 May 2006

See what I mean about a crowded field… Roy Gal announces his model of a 1993 Pierce in 6-wide based on a pumper at the department where he volunteers in Charlottesville. I came across the Brickshelf folder while preparing yesterday’s dispatch. Looks like someone forgot to unfold the mirrors before starting photography… ;-) I am not the first to build a ladder gantry, though I would say that mine is more faithful to the mechanics.

18 May 2006

If one were to be headed to Poland, it would be wrong to read Maciej Ceglowski’s memoir of a curse-filled day with the Warsaw police in Attacked by Thugs!

The field of builders of 6-wide firefighting equipment is much more crowded: example, example, example, example, example, example, example, and so on. I have taken as my prototype a Pierce Dash Rescue Pumper in the inventory of my local jurisdiction (the cab is visible on the general information page). I had a chance today to get a look at it, at leisure and from street level, which means that tonight my version in LEGO® elements is on its third incarnation. This one features a rendition of the hydraulic ladder gantry. See it this Saturday at the Athenaeum, from one to five o’clock, when WamaLTC puts on a small display.

In any event, it appears that the NSA is doing its monitoring from the seven locations in the United States where the American Telephone and Telegraph Company operates international phone exchanges—New York City; White Plains, N.Y.; Springfield, Mass.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Oakland, Calif.; and Denver, Colo. AT&T officials insist that if the NSA is listening to its international traffic, it is being done without the company’s official knowledge or cooperation. Technicians say, however, that the NSA surreptitiously plugs its own monitoring lines into the seven AT&T exchanges while the company conveniently looks the other way. It’s a case of seeing no evil and hearing no evil, an expert said.

Tad Szulc writing about America’s Intelligence Community for the June 1975 issue of, uh, a skin mag that someone left on the premises. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

16 May 2006

Am I old fashioned? When I hand someone a screwdriver, I do so with handle out, just as I would with scissors. So it’s disconcerting to get one back tool end first.

14 May 2006

Oh, the ignominy of it all! The blue W is in my Dock. I deny that its long put off installation was prompted by the desire to read the newsletter of my homeowners association, distributed last month only as a Word file. The Equation Editor available as an optional component of Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is a product of Design Science which hopes users would see their way clear to purchase MathType. Available for Windows, too.

13 May 2006

Bárbara Mori plays Zoë in La Mujer de mi Hermano.

Wednesday’s free local tabloid included a choice of photo from this page at Lionsgate’s site for publicity which made me think I gotta see this movie. La Mujer de mi Hermano was presented at the AMC Courthouse Plaza 8 as part of AMC Select in what turns out to have been its sole week of release locally (eh, in Virginia, anyway). AMC has shrunk the hours when matinee prices are effective, and now all shows after four o’clock Friday through Sunday are full price. While my screening was after the six o’clock cut-off on a weekday, I did not regret the $8.50.

The Colorific™ Color Reference Cards bearing a copyright from Sonnetech, Ltd. which somehow came into my possession are completely useless now notwithstanding that the successor program is Windows-only.

I had a reason to visit MacFixIt recently, normally its endless litany of the problems Mac users encounter is depressing, but embedded movies (like the pages at Apple with their new advertising campaign) no longer played after updating to QuickTime 7.1. As recommended, disabling VLC Plugin.plugin among the files in Library/Internet Plug-Ins has restored functionality. The plugin is an experimental new feature with VLC 0.8.5 as released last week.

08 May 2006

Coincidence… or something more? Not six months after I reported, somewhat disapprovingly, the use of the Latin alphabet by a relatively new publisher in Serbia, the covers switched to Cyrillic.

07 May 2006

I have one of the original Anti-Monopoly games from 1974, and the image on the box cover is nothing like the images found at the web site (which might be of a later re-issue) of its current incarnation, but it’s too long to fit even my scanner (via).

04 May 2006

Another trademark that just won’t quit.

Durn. I am not the only one to notice. By the way, Mac is played by the guy who was the mechanic in Herbie Fully Loaded.

Last month, when I was watching television, I came across the E! True Hollywood Story on Olivia Newton-John but didn’t watch to the end. Others keep an eye on the ball.

Blog about movie posters has been around more than a year (via). Font Spotting the Thank You for Smoking Titles. Shouldn’t everyone quit?

02 May 2006

AMC Launches New Program For Specialty Films. Even though I managed to get to the Landmark E Street Cinema theater twice last weekend, the program called AMC Select (current real URL) holds some interest. Locally, the Dupont Circle and Shirlington locations were always primarily showing independent films, so the fact that right now aside from them there’s a grand total of one movie in the program isn’t terrific. Mmm, Lindsay Lohan.

This new television campaign for a certain computer hardware manufacturer… the avatar of PCs… a resemblance to the founder of a certain software company convicted of monopoly… or just a coincidence? Now that’s humor!

01 May 2006

I’m led to understand that it may not be so easy, but I’ve made my intention clear: my account at my first ISP (which currently is known as RCN) is to expire when the prepaid period ends on or about 22 May.

30 April 2006

I was exposed to a little television on Friday… I was walking through a household paying close attention to the vote in the Italian Senate… but my own have remained off since a week ago.

Another thing banished to the third floor recently is my collection of diskettes. I mean, really, who uses floppy disks anymore? The last time I needed one was to install Hewlett Packard’s System 7-era DeskScan II 2.4 software almost 2 years ago on the Performa. This example labeled Adaptec Windows 95 Drivers 1.0 for APA-1450A SLIMSCI FOR REMOVABLE DRIVES KIT is completely useless. As it happens, Adaptec is still in business under that name and still offers support for the APA-1450A, but the adapter which I used to connect my Compaq notebook to a SCSI ZIP 100 drive purchased so that it could be shared with a Quadra 605 left the premises some time ago.

Iomega no longer offers a FireWire edition in its lineup of ZIP 750 drives… I wonder why.

The reason why withdrawing money from a bank account using a withdrawal slip presented to a teller should be an object of the fascination reserved for an era long past is that by the time I was gainfully employed, automated teller machines were already in place at the branches of the bank where I opened my first checking account. The first machine withdrawal recorded is for $100 on 04 August 1983.

27 April 2006

Instead of watching television today, I walked to a branch of the bank with the Engravers Bold logotype. This took 35 minutes, and I found the ATM out of service. Grr. After some time dawdling watching the Orion buses headed up and down the street and taking pictures of the Lee-Fendall House, it occurred to me to enter the financial establishment and explore the idea of withdrawing cash in person. Why, yes, was the response, they do that! So, mission accomplished.

I got I got nothin’ from the Ron Stoppable character on Disney Channel’s Kim Possible.

26 April 2006

Instead of watching television today… yeah, I got nothin’.

25 April 2006

Instead of watching television yesterday, I banished the Performa to the third floor and actually got it running after a few attempts at starting. It has been a while (of course I did also use it more recently in the iTunes importation project). But the fact that the SoftWindows workspace had Mozilla Suite 1.2.3 and Firefox 0.9.3 installed is telling. I had been toying with the idea of using the older Macintosh running System 9.1 as a workstation for display of LEGO® projects using MLCad, where it would be used on the second floor as a guide to building, but the 250 MHz G3 card that’s in there now (I took out the 500 MHz card thinking it could be sold but haven’t made any steps in that direction…) is so slow it might be just as well to run up and down the stairs as usual instead.

Instead of watching television today, I bought a compact disc written up in a local tabloid. Wasn’t I supposed to be boycotting Sony BMG? Anyway, since it was $13 at Tower Records/Video, there was enough folding money in the wallet for groceries and a cardboard-encased CD of pop music from the sixties sung by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. Yes, I’ve imported the tracks into iTunes already and the Gracenote CDDB has the track information. And, who is Teddy Geiger that I should read his name three times this week: in the most recent post from a New York City taxi driver, in the aforementioned local tabloid, and among the artists on the soundtrack for Aquamarine? Earlier, I cleaned the rack in the shower of all the encrusted soap which had built up on it, dis-gust-ing. See, not watching television gives you time to do other stuff. More seriously, the time I would normally have been watching Newschannel8 is now spent listening to National Public Radio.

It’s a new low for us! How much longer can the business model for Tower Records/Video as a bricks and mortar store hold out? Now that Target is selling unrated editions, the last unique selling proposition that Tower had (selection) is minimized. And if I won’t buy Proof or Red Eye for $20, why would I pay $30 or $40 for a Criterion Collection release?

I replied in a thread at LUGNET about favicon display because I am sensitive to the difference between a browser locating the file and the file properly inviting the browser to use the file. I neglected to mention that my testing of the series of browsers was all in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. I am told that maj.com and Brickshelf added the respective favicon.ico file (a couple of months before I noticed them) mainly to get rid of the 404 errors created by browsers demanding the file. Firefox usage at BoingBoing now more than 45%. Safari now identified as 3% of browsers in use.

23 April 2006

A neighborhood feline, gray with a bushy tail, considered today a good day to inspect my garage. I had treated my driveway, such as it is, as just another parking space at a shopping center rather than trying to turn first, then back straight in—this actually worked with the Focus better than expected—and the cat took the opportunity to cross the alley and begin exploring. Afterwards, as it stood wondering where to go next, its tail was enough to block the beam, preventing operation of the garage door. Technique 1 applies in this situation.

WamaLTC is once again a member of an international organization for LEGO® Train clubs. The images which the organization operating under a democratic process cannot find yet are located in the gallery. Some plucky individual who is a member should work to get the (88×31) px image with the Futura Extra Black lettering replaced by our current button with Stymie. I have already updated the club’s website to an extent commensurate with my excitement over this milestone (which is apparently non-zero).

An attempt to answer a different question from that which concerns searchers obssessed with Naomi Watts: has the size of women changed over the years? A comment leads to NIST’s unlikely foray into apparel sizing.

Is it funny or sad that the trailers in front of Scary Movie 4 were for a sequel, a remake, and another remake?

In retrospect, it is a unfathomable coincidence that the first broadcast of the Steele in the Family episode of Remington Steele guest starring Nancy Everhard on Tuesday, 5 February 1985, should be followed on Friday by my purchase of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. TV Turnoff Week starts tomorrow. I also bought a small shortwave radio that week (a Sony ICF-4910) which still serves on the first floor of the premises but cannot compete with the longevity of the Panasonic RC-65 clock radio on the third floor (purchased before 1982).

18 April 2006

A temptation admitted to earlier is satiated. See you next week some time…

I would link to Pearls Before Swine more prominently but none of the offered link icons really features Rat.

The actual product available at a local Minnesota-based discounter is underwhelming. The promise of the push-button switch offering the ability to turn the converted flashlight on/off without adjusting focus is rather moot, since the conversion can’t focus in the first place. And by comparison with my daylight-balanced fluorescent lighting I would call the color lilac not white.

17 April 2006

Did someone say copyright-free? Symbols from AIGA and the United States Department of Transportation. AIGA might be the professional association for design, but their website fails to do anything useful if you leave off the www. The symbols available on the Corel Graphics Suite compact discs are different, so these will be useful when authenticity is required. What is the main difference between the folder of signs for Canada and the folder of signs for the United States in the clipart collections? The folder of signs for the United States contains none that are permissive, only signs that are informative, cautionary, or downright prohibitory. None that say, sure, drive your dangerous goods down this way, why don’t you.

16 April 2006

The apartment complex in which lived when I was in college is going condo… the description of mature plantings and on-site laundry facilities in the brochure suggests to me that they haven’t changed much. As early as 1985, when I took my Tornado Silver Mazda 626 LX and struck out on my own, the trend in apartment renovations was to install a washer and dryer in each unit. By now, I imagine it’s expected. See, even this rental community has changed its tune (from decades ago under different management) and now features an in-home washer and dryer.

Denise wore her WamaLTC shirt to the WAMALUG event. Four years after adoption of the logo, the set of colored letters in lowercase Futura Extra Black still serves.

The neighborhood lost power again on Saturday and I have yet to purchase an uninterruptible power supply. I must be saving my money for something. (Ten days until the local real estate tax rate is set.) It does seem like I should cut down on the number of electric clocks, though; I ought to be grateful that the dishwasher doesn’t have a clock in its display. Isn’t there supposed to be a battery back-up in the alarm clock upstairs? Yes, there is, it expired in 2002. I should change it at the same time I do the ones in the smoke detectors (same 9V size).

Wasn’t Mag-Lite supposed to have an LED flashlight by now? Yes, it was. But now that we’re in the second quarter of 2006, early is no longer an appropriate adjective. Their delay has allowed others to step in. I’ve been carrying Mag-Lite flashlights for 20 years, but did not know that the founder, Anthony Maglica, was born of a Croatian mother and raised in Zlarin (no mention of the father at the page for the company’s history). Can I prove that I purchased a AA Mag-Lite upon its introduction in 1984? No, but multiple copies were along for my travels across the nation in 1987 and merited mention in my memoir for day 23, Sunday, 17 May at the Dry Cove Campground, Keyhole State Park, Wyoming:

What did we expect for our two dollars? These were not so much numbered campsites along a paved loop (as we had become accustomed to) as places under the trees at the side of a bare rut in the ground. There were scattered picnic tables and fireplaces. We pitched the tent in a darkness relieved only by a few of my Mag-Lites. When it came time to eat dinner, Fred was disturbed by the red lensed night vision model I had chosen to place on the table, and stalked off, muttering about eating in Hell, to fetch his clear-lensed model.

So for now 20 years is what critics of Wikipedia would call unsourced.

12 April 2006

WAMALUG will be one of the participants in Explore the Universe Day at the National Air and Space Museum this Saturday with a display of space models and a building area located at the Rocket Pit on the first floor in front of the Food Court.

DjVu from LizardTech is a document compression and viewing technology available as a browser plug-in which offers small file sizes while retaining the appearance of printed documents. It is not available for OS9. Cheeky of them to supply the same documents in PDF with the file sizes identified. If I were to host any such files, I would have to have a link icon prepared.

The local Examiner chose today to drop Get Fuzzy and add an overtly political strip I was already ignoring in the other paper. Boo.

10 April 2006

I may have lucked into another sparsely populated niche in LEGO® constructions… the modern Orion bus in 6-wide. This builder’s folder depicting an Orion VII shows work in 8-wide (and what looks like keyword spamming, same thing in the folder for the Orion V). My rendition of the Orion V in the colors of Alexandria’s DASH (seen a week earlier at the show in Timonium) was perfected before last weekend’s show in Westminster and I built a Metrobus rendition on-site on Saturday. A significantly revised version of the low-floor CNG Orion VII (it’s longer than a baseplate now) remained on display on Sunday with the one remaining participant. The Escape achieved 30 miles per gallon in highway driving to and from the shows this month (Westminster is about an hour north along Georgia Avenue). Those who clamor for a rendition of the wackily unsymmetrical Orion VI in the colors of the Richmond Highway Express (and you know who you are) are in luck: the 4755 Knight Bus set has a selection of parts in Medium Lilac which may prove useful, including the crucial Slope Brick 33 3×1 Inverted (4287) I would use to depict the uptick in the body at the back. The one day I want to find out what color the seats are aboard the Fairfax Connector, though, and they dig up not one but two Orion I buses while I was hanging out looking! Anything to do with a rally in the city today? Taupe seems to be the answer, I chose Old Gray for the relevant parts.

The DiMAGE 7Hi refused to cooperate on Saturday so I have no photos from the show (the camera managed sixty shots in Timonium before lapsing into the overexposure mode). As of April first, Sony takes over service for Minolta, Konica, and KonicaMinolta cameras (same information at Sony site), and their current flat rate charge is $211. It never occurred to me to try manual mode… grr.

05 April 2006

Ah, here’s a way to put that purchase of Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2 which wouldn’t install on my ancient Compaq notebook to use… if only I knew someone with an Intel Mac.

04 April 2006

Oink, oink… the Escape got 23 miles per gallon in March.

Here’s a survival tip… when the power goes out, there’s enough charge left in a wired mouse to keep its LED lit for a while, certainly for long enough to find a flashlight. Remind me why I don’t have an uninterruptible power supply yet?

The result of the week’s work in Corel Draw. On the way to the show, I spotted a Baltimore County cruiser; on the way back, a Baltimore City cruiser. I’m not happy with the Metrobus I built but it’s the rendition of my municipality’s bus that was significantly rebuilt after its display. I figure once I get a good look for representing the Orion V, I can revisit the Metrobus MOC and complete the low-floor CNG model VII. Other local jurisdictions make use of the products of DiamlerChrysler Commerical Bus North America, too.

So, who’s planning the spectacular dynamic LEGO® Fantasy Land promised for The National Train Show®, anyway? Like DaimlerChrysler, they insist on the www.

31 March 2006

Easier said than done, apparently. My source material for Baltimore’s police vehicle scheme was less than ideal for reproducing the image of the badge. Corel Trace created eight thousand, four hundred and forty objects in an attempt to recreate the design, which includes the Great Seal of Maryland and the Battle Monument of Baltimore. I went with another trace of somewhat lower quality to get the basic shapes because the size of the final image is about a quarter of that depicted. Now all I need are two more Wedge 4×4×⅔ Curved (45677) in white.

Friday Random 10:

1. Got to Have U (Color Me Badd, Beverly Hills, 90210 - The Soundtrack )
2. Garrison’s Obsession (John Williams, JFK )
3. Nr. 59 Rezitativ (Evangelist, Chor, Pilatus): Sie schrieen aber noch mehr (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion )
4. Episode 13: Force And Counter Force (National Public Radio, Star Wars: The Radio Drama )
5. More for Susan (John Williams, The Towering Inferno )
6. Runaway Horses (Belinda Carlisle, Runaway Horses )
7. Sleigh Ride (Hilary Duff, Santa Claus Lane )
8. Cry (Hilary Duff, Hilary Duff )
9. High Wire (Edwin Astley, Secret Agent )
10. Temporarily Humboldt County (The Firesign Theatre, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him )

26 March 2006

Some people have to know whether the television they’re watching is satellite or cable… I don’t get it.

Morbid? I prefer to think of it as not ignoring what’s going on outside. I built a 2-man HMMWV in camouflage based on this photograph of a line of military HUMVEEs bearing a casket each in the bed (which was published in the local newspaper, see the other photographs from that release last year) to match the minifig-scale casket.

A random AFOL visits the Pick a Brick at the LEGO® Retail Store at Tysons Corner Center and sees windows in one of the bins and thinks, I could build a building; I see window panes in another of the bins and think I could build a glass and mirror truck! I must be relying on one of the other participants at the WamaLTC meeting to get a decent photograph of that building, which can barely be seen in the distance beyond my sad start at a piece of Norfolk Southern non-revenue equipment. My expansion of the MOC representing the Lee-Fendall House represents a modification of something I’ve been displaying for over a year. From among the many new and modified vehicles and refurbished railroad equipment I displayed at the meeting, the Baltimore County Police cruiser will be making its way to the display this weekend at the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium. Its presence at the Great Train Expo in Westminster (Carroll County) the weekend after that will be less relevant. Michael’s urban block currently hosts a cruiser of the New York Police Department (from the 4850 Spider-Man’s First Chase set) but if there was a way to get the display to the WamaLTC layout at the NMRA convention in July, why, a Baltimore (City) Police cruiser would fit right in… a blue, slanted Peignot Bold (found in Corel products as Exotic 350) over a silver stripe with a complicated badge graphic found online, totally do-able.

23 March 2006

WamaLTC meets this Saturday, and Bob has something which is large and colorful ready.

The National Transportation Safety Board is preparing a report on the collision of two Metrorail trains in 2004.

20 March 2006

There is no Book Market in the state just now, but not to worry, the entire text of Pride & Prejudice can be read for free! (Via Kottke.)

19 March 2006

When I prepared the labels for my selectively compressed gasoline station a few weeks after its first display at the Manassas Railway Festival in 2002, I took my prices from those prevailing at a local vendor. The continued display of these inappropriately low prices has been remarked upon. Today, I took a look at that vendor’s prices and the regular grade is up by exactly one dollar (while the higher grades are up by $1.02). I used Helvetica to prepare the file in Corel Draw, a previous month’s purchase made to seal the choice of WAMALUG logo four years ago.

All that trouble Mattel went through trying to suppress Barbie Girl… a snippet is heard in the new Amanda Bynes movie as a ringtone, and it’s by yet another cover band.

17 March 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. The T. B. Guide (The Firesign Theatre, Dear Friends )
2. President’s Speech (Chapell Recorded Music Library, The Prisoner Volume Two )
3. The Legend (Jerry Goldsmith, The Wind and the Lion )
4. Home Computer (Kraftwerk, The Mix )
5. Tango Urilla (Basil Poledouris, Starship Troopers )
6. Flowers (Basil Poledouris, Red Dawn )
7. (He’s Got) The Look (Vanessa Williams, The Right Stuff )
8. Shore Leave: Knight/Joust (Gerald Fried, Star Trek Volume Three )
9. En La Fiesta Mando Yo (Thalia, Thalia )
10. Cry Baby (Madonna, I’m Breathless )

RCN quietly changed the dial-up access number for this area—without apparent notice to its subscribers, which include me still.

16 March 2006

This post at LUGNET came one day too late… I had already ordered some of the 90-element bags of Plate 1×1 (3024) (which LEGO® calls a stud ) thinking they were the new grays… looks like I might have to buy Rescue of the Merpeople after all if I want the part in DkStone. Moving right along, my local police force would appear to use a slanted Folio Medium, perhaps slightly bolded, on the sides of its cruisers. I thought it was lame that the Metro Transit Police use Times New Roman Bold Italic on their vehicles… until I turned my attention to the home of Integrity… Fairness… Service itself: Baltimore County, Maryland uses Arial of all things (it’s the tail of the R that helps to distinguish it from Helvetica in this complaint about Jeopardy). My photograph of the WMATA police cruiser doesn’t show it, but all three jurisdictions now display the logo of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, how handy that the home page includes a generously sized image. Very useful, that. Oh, and Dunbar Armored uses round mirrors on their trucks. Stay observant!

11 March 2006

With the very recent release of the LEGO® Batman™ 7781 The Batmobile™: Two-Face’s Escape set, Car Mudguard 4 × 2½ × 2 (50745) is available in Black, and LEGO® Racers 8663 Fat Trax supplies four Wheel Wide with Notched Axlehole (6014b), so the distinctive colors of Dunbar Armored armored cars can finally be properly applied to the vehicle I built last year. Unofficial parts are now found in the LDraw Parts Tracker for the two elements I wrote about then, as well as Slope Brick 45 1 × 1 × ⅔ (50746), so I refined the LDraw file I have held in reserve to include these parts, revise the external mirrors, and add roof detail based on, er, personal observation. Files depicting the construction of the double-door variant I started out with and a single-door alternative I worked up to avoid SNOT in trying to create a .ldr are uploaded to Brickshelf and linked to from the Building Instructions Portal. The LDraw file for the 1921 Monitor I built slightly earlier underwent less revision (to change the color of the window inserts) and is also available.

07 March 2006

This Brickshelf user misterzumbi does some interesting work, a Unimog and a detailed boxcar for example, but the Hummer H3 looks very familiar ;-) Does s/he get the Tile 1×2 Grille with Groove (2412b) in ChromeSilver to stick on the front just by friction? Have you noticed that Brickshelf now uses the width and height attributes of the <img> element to resize images for display?

In updating the WAMALUG Members page to create a super-secret WamaLTC page with the 4-1-1 on our participants, I came across a preview of the mosaic a local AFOL is planning to unleash upon BrickFest℠ attendees later this summer.

06 March 2006

It would be so much easier to simply delete the Movies category entirely and not have to admit what comedy with young females led me back to the AMC Hoffman Center 22 this past weekend, but the write-ups, sparse and disappointing as they may be to those few individuals who bother to read them, are a resource for myself as well. Every time I pick up the DVD of The Girl Next Door with the face of Elisha Cuthbert above the plain brown wrapper, and the title is down to $10 now, I remind myself that I didn’t like the hero using her character’s real name at an industry event, and I put the DVD back. Anyway, it was worth it just to see the previews for additional comedies of the type already identified, this one looks like it might have potential: Manhattan setting, injury humor, and a red-headed starlet whose real life is so sad her clothes drape her body inadequately. Elisha Cuthbert, now, I may not watch 24 but I know her name, and I know the ethnicity of the villains in the show’s first season, too.

The Serbian Orthodox cross is among those emblems of belief available for placement on government headstones and markers (via MetaFilter post).

28 February 2006

Through a strange twist of fate (via L.A. Observed) the different driving patterns with which I drove my two vehicles this month had me getting better mileage with the Escape than with the Focus. The mileage in the Focus hasn’t been this bad since… last March. Maybe there’s something in the fuel at this time of year.

…and, no, I didn’t see any movies this month. But for $17 at Tower Records/Video, I did succumb. To find another month in which I saw no movies whatsoever we must reach back to… hmm, February 1990, when I saw nothing between The Little Mermaid on January seventeenth and The Hunt for Red October on March sixth. The AMC Courthouse Plaza 8 had been open almost a year.

27 February 2006

It must be nice to be the webmaster of a less demanding LEGO® train club… the website can go without updates for 2 years… yet the club can remain a member of an international organization.

23 February 2006

Bob Hayes has started building the Union Pacific M-10000 streamliner in LEGO® elements. But has he chosen a font appropriate for the time of its introduction? Like others before him, sadly no, ITC Bauhaus® Medium is part of a family of faces designed in 1975. Its inspiration may have looked something like this. If it was me, I might have built the windshield out of Brick 1 × 2 without Centre Stud (3065) in Clear or Smoke rather than Window 1 × 2 × 2 (7026) in Red. But then, I’m keeping quiet about what I’m building.

21 February 2006

J. Spencer Rezkalla tries his hand at the Hummer H2. Compare to mine of two years ago. I chose the same wheels as soon as I got the 4883 Gear Grinders set but seem to have neglected photographing it at the most recent show. The angle I took in my photograph of the Hummer H2H at the auto show last month is useless for comparison’s sake.

I haven’t seen any movies theatrically in a while, and I haven’t bought a DVD in longer. I now resist titles priced at $20 so Proof remained on the shelf, yet Target’s first week sale of Red Eye for $17 didn’t help its chances. Next week’s release of Pride & Prejudice may test my resolve, however.

19 February 2006

How are people supposed to react to a message like this? Unfortunately this station does not support the Netscape browser. We apologize for any inconvenience it says, heedless of the error message’s appearance in Safari the very pinnacle of a non-Netscape browser. The link, found at the portal of UK ISP Virgin and meant to invoke a stream of the output of UK radio station Classic FM, doesn’t seem to work in any browser even faintly related to Netscape (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Camino) but reveals a purpose behind having Opera in the dock: version 8.5 of this also-ran browser is able to launch the page for the custom playback tool and start streaming. A little poking around in View Source and inside a JavaScript file and I am able to locate a URL of the form http: … .asx which can be invoked in Windows Media Player directly. This option leaves out people with only QuickTime and Flip4Mac installed , but earlier I had looked inside a different .asx file and found an mms: URL therein which can be entered into QuickTime (and it will play). The domain associated with the streams links to radio stations all over southern England. Opinions on the value of ClassicFM… vary.

Looking through the JavaScript file at virgin.net again (to make sure the previous paragraph has some semblance of veracity) I see that the Netscape browser error message is a hard-coded string which is intended as the result of any request for files not in Real format by browsers which are not Internet Explorer. This could most charitably be described as a way to guess at the presence of Windows Media Player… on the principle that any user of Internet Explorer also has Windows Media Player installed… but seeing as how I have yet to banish the blue e from the dock, I gave it a try and wouldn’t you know, no error message, and the page for the custom playback tool launched. That is, the browser passed the if-then test, but as no stream was forthcoming, this just shows the fragile nature of the script that virgin.net is using for its popup. To the searcher who reached my site using the terms microsoft internet explorer for mac mirror, really, give it up, it’s dead—it’s a weird month where there are more searches for huey freeman than for mean girls :-) It’s also possible that my previous installation of Flip4Mac has confused attempts to launch Windows Media Player (not relevant in the previous paragraph) since .wmv files now display as text in the IE window.

A number of people were in suspicious proximity to Bob at the show on the eleventh, journalism students he called them, and this quote-filled post would appear to be the result.

17 February 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. Detaching/Separation (Dennis McCarthy, Star Trek The Next Generation Vol. 1 Encounter at Farpoint )
2. Grateful (The Bangles, Doll Revolution )
3. Engulfed Cathedral (John Carpenter, Escape From New York )
4. Theme from JFK (reprise) (John Williams, JFK )
5. Tin Man: Meet (Jay Chattaway, Star Trek The Next Generation Vol. 4 )
6. Introduction (Click & Clack, The Tappet Brothers, The Best of Car Talk )
7. Tell Me A Story (Hilary Duff & Lil’ Romeo, Santa Claus Lane )
8. At the Cricket Match (Albert Elms, Original Soundtrack from The Prisoner )
9. General Esperanza (Michael Kamen, Die Hard 2 )
10. World Without You (Belinda Carlisle, Heaven and Earth )

Based on what I saw at the auto show last month, Chrysler and DUB Publishing have some deal where Chrysler vehicles match the Dub City diecast representation thereof from Jada Toys—I didn’t take any photographs of them, thinking myself more clever for emphasizing the isolation of the lone Sebring model on display—but I did take a picture of the Dodge Magnum Police vehicle now available as a Matchbox miniature (the official product showcase hasn’t been updated for the actual graphics as manufactured). However, I do read that while the Sebring had lost traction (become less popular) in the past, the Sterling Heights, Michigan factory where they’re made is back to cranking them out. A 2007 edition is expected later this year.

More photographs and (Windows Media Player) videos from the WamaLTC display last weekend, from Tom Cook. Because my tripod is smaller than Tom’s, I go in for the close-up.

15 February 2006

The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action has compiled a list (via Xavier Thoughts) so I should say that my lack of movie-going (now in its seventh week) is not a boycott.

14 February 2006

Page 102 of the third issue of Brick Journal identifies a WamaLUG as a participating club in the Train/Town layout displayed at BrickFest™ last year. Hmm… dubious. Not a comment.

Camino, the Gecko-based browser for the Mac, is released in a 1.0 version today. It doesn’t even show up in the Yahoo! Developer Network Graded Browser Support Browser Grades table.

13 February 2006

We were just discussing it among the crew yesterday, it’s so easy to get all the Brick-whatever names confused. It’s also a fact that the poster in question was suspended from BrickLink. Maybe he’s forgotten. ;-)

You can’t buy irony either is the title of the MetaFilter post, but the comments are comedy gold.

12 February 2006

Why is the WamaLTC banner hanging at the show this weekend (seen last year at the NMRA convention) a funny color? Turns out, it’s not a matter of Pantone Reflex Blue turning a different color in converting to PDF or moving a file across platforms. The color seen in the banner is an effect of CMYK Blue (100, 100, 0, 0) translating to Pantone Violet CVC 2X with CMYK values of 100, 100, 1, 0.

Hmm… not a single flash of the 4WD indicator today or yesterday. This weekend would have been the time for it.

10 February 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. Psych (LaTour, LaTour )
2. Spotlight (Madonna, You Can Dance )
3. Happy Ending (Disney Orchestra and Choir, The Little Mermaid )
4. Friends (Jerry Goldsmith, Total Recall Deluxe Edition )
5. Leaving the Judge (Sinfonia Varsovia, Trois Couleurs·Rouge )
6. Ice Chase (John Barry, The Living Daylights )
7. No. 6 Encounters the General (Albert Elms, The Prisoner )
8. Get Up and Go (The Rutles, The Rutles )
9. The Ingrate Sold Your Car (Click & Clack, The Tappet Brothers, the Best (& 2nd Best) of Car Talk: Used Calls from Click & Clack )
10. My Baby’s In Love With Eddie Vedder ( Weird Al Yankovic, Running With Scissors )

Google Maps, that is to say, Google Local, would appear to have extended its photographic coverage of the earth’s surface a bit.

09 February 2006

WamaLTC plans to display on February 11-12, 2006 at the World’s Greatest Hobby on Tour at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. It figures that the prediction would be for snow.

08 February 2006

The suspense is over. Inspired by the spotting of the Black River locomotive yesterday and by learning from flipping through Classic American Railroads Volume III that the font was used by the Lackawanna, and guided perhaps by Daring Fireball’s link to the Linotype Typeface Catalog A-Z, I looked through a lot of serif faces, thinking it might be one or another based on the letter C before landing on Engravers Bold.

07 February 2006

An idling southbound CSX freight this evening included, besides three road diesels, a switcher bearing the wordmark BLACK RIVER . Follow the link from this page to see that the lettering is in the Wachovia font, judging by the A and the C . (The same photo with a different credit. The Black River Railroad System offers another look at the lettering at the bottom of its Freight page.) The 1200 horsepower EMD NW-2 was built in 1949 and purchased by Black River in 1995 and #820 would seem to have strayed a bit from its current assignment.

03 February 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. Nr. 52 Rezitativ (Evangelist, Pilatus, Jesus): Sie hielten aber einen Rat (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion )
2. Bridge Scanner (Star Trek Sound Effects )
3. End Credits (Elmer Bernstein, The Good Son )
4. Over the Rainbow (Olivia Newton-John, Warm and Tender )
5. Hollow Pursuits: Madame Troi/Blissful/Out Of Control/Warp Nine (Dennis McCarthy, Star Trek: The Next Generation Vol. 3 )
6. Nr. 43 Rezitativ (Evangelist, Chor): Da speieten sie aus (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion )
7. Change (The Lightning Seeds, Clueless )
8. Caverns (Dennis McCarthy, Star Trek The Next Generation Vol. 1 Encounter at Farpoint )
9. Concerto No. 6 in B-flat Major - I. Allegro (Johann Sebastian Bach, Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 4-6 )
10. I Want A World (Ira Newborn, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear )

WamaLTC plans to display this weekend at the Great Scale Model Train Show and The All-American Hi-Rail & Collectors Train Show at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Maryland.

01 February 2006

Unfortunately, Constantine is a little too muddled… unfortunately Constantine is a problematic person… unfortunately, Constantine is a throwback to the days of old… unfortunately, Constantine tries for the very least… all part of the fun when I search Google for unfortunately and my first name.

Isn’t that interesting? The image sharing site maj.com has a favicon and the LEGO® MOC sharing site brickshelf.com has a favicon but because the sites don’t link to them in their respective parsimonious <head> elements, Mozilla Suite has never shown them to me and I don’t know long they’ve been available. I discovered them after downloading and fiddling with the settings in newly released Firefox 1.5.0.1 and confirmed their appearance in Camino 1.0b2 and Safari 1.3.2. Do these browsers really request the file for every page view? (Apparently so, at least for Firefox, and people are not happy. I was not happy, either, because IBM put the character string .doc in their URL. What I needed was to replace the style rule selector a[href*=".doc"]::after with a[href$=".doc"]::after. Thanks, W3C! But otherwise only Safari handles the change properly.) Mozilla Suite’s share of the browser-using populace is so small now that it no longer matters.

31 January 2006

SeaMonkey 1.0 is released. But was it the smartest thing for the internet suite to come with the the look and feel familiar to users of its predecessors, the Mozilla Application Suite and Netscape Communicator packages ? I hardly think that there is any remaining brand equity left in the appearance of Netscape Communicator as it looked in 1998, and the appearance of the Mozilla Application Suite (the Modern theme from 2000) on Mac OS X has no goodwill behind it either. Since SeaMonkey does not appear to accept installation of the Pinstripe theme from Kevin Gerich, I will resist using it for now. Or maybe it is time to take another look at Camino… which has no site navigation bar and doesn’t show favicons for pages served from disk. Grr.

28 January 2006

The first reaction to my proposed wordmark for WamaLTC was not positive. That’s ok, it’s certainly more helpful than a I like it without a supporting rationale. A number of railroads used a wordmark which was significantly different from the font used for the railroad’s name in the company’s logo, so a clash is not impossible to live with. For example, consider the Great Northern Railway’s Empire Builder , the font used for the railroad’s name has no stylistic relation to the railway’s famous mountain goat logo. Still, the reaction led me to consider another of the Great Northern’s distinctive looks and to locate the font known as Stymie. I’ve removed some serifs, fattened others, and adjusted the kerning mercilessly while keeping the small-capitals with welded serifs look of my previous proposal. Before I forget, I’ve been using Pantone 274 for the blue and Pantone 729 for the gold. I was using Pantone Reflex Blue and while this worked well for my billboards and revamped ambassador car when printing using Corel Draw at home, when a PDF was submitted to a print shop for a banner the results were not so pleasing. My suspicion is that there is some shrinkage of the color gamut in making the conversion.

Apple offers three methods of ejecting a misbehaving CD.

27 January 2006

Friday Random 10:

1. Who Do You Love (The Jesus & Mary Chain, Earth Girls Are Easy )
2. Human Nature (Madonna, Bedtime Stories )
3. Thinking of… Him! (Ira Newborn, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear )
4. Dialogue (Bill Ziggy Siegesmund, China Beach )
5. The Hologram (Jerry Goldsmith, Total Recall Deluxe Edition )
6. The Doomsday Machine: Commander Matt Decker/The Crew That Was (Sol Kaplan, Star Trek Original Television Soundtrack Vol. 2 )
7. Dangling Feet (Mark Mancina, Speed )
8. Sleep… (The Firesign Theatre, Dear Friends )
9. Dark Page: Painful Revelation (Jay Chattaway, Star Trek: The Next Generation Vol. 4 )
10. Arie (Alt): Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand/mit Chor: Wohin? (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion )

All guests shall be passengers. Where’s the fun in that? Camp Jeep at the Washington Auto Show placed some limits. Also, can anyone guess which vehicle was the most forlorn based on distance from any other model of that manufacturer and the fewest people checking it out? (So the Ford Ranger doesn’t qualify because it was close by the other trucks even though it was at the edge of the display.) It was the Chrysler Sebring Touring.

26 January 2006

Record any video stream to disk using VLC. Seems like that might be useful… to somebody… somewhere.

23 January 2006

How long has it been true that Control-F2 gives a Macintosh user access to the menu using just the keyboard? This changes everything…

22 January 2006

The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club currently has a logo which is a refinement of the original work in 2000 of Dan Boger, Jennifer Boger, and Tom Cook, and a wordmark which I had accompany the logo on the (88×31) px web graphic and which would have appeared on a (3×10)′ banner if the club had ever purchased one. The wordmark also appears on our polo shirts which were made while we were still a part of WAMALUG. With the club’s independence, however, the use of lowercase Futura Extra Black as the wordmark has lost its relevance. The Arial used in the logo was never a candidate for a logotype, and my initial doodlings using ITC Lubalin Graph somewhat like the CSX currently uses generated zero interest. The brutalism of the letterforms wasn’t attractive in depicting the seven letters in the club’s name.

At the Helen Wilson Community Room of the Franconia Government Center (which was the location of our meeting in December) there hangs a sign for the Franconia railroad station, and it uses a font which reminded me of that used for Wachovia Bank as part of its rebranding strategy after the merger with First Union. Riding the energy of the club meeting yesterday which included planning for the two shows next month and an order for 12 polo shirts for show participants who have joined us since 2003, I started with a small graphic from the Wachovia home page and used Goudy Extra Bold as the foundation for a proposal for a new wordmark for WamaLTC:

Goudy Extra Bold doesn’t have slab serifs, and the Wachovia logo only provided prototypes for the W, the A, and the C (although the H helped for the size of the M), so what followed was a lot of what passes for hand-drawing in a vector graphics program: tracing massed rectangles for the bulk and sharp edges and applying Bezier curves for the corners. Today, I realized that any eventual use of the wordmark on a 10-foot banner requires an improved smoothness for all the curves and edited every node of the choppy polygonal Bezier curves on the letterforms, discovering that after switching each node to the curve type and choosing the smooth variety, just deleting the node allowed Corel Draw to trace an appropriate arc. Sweet.

A review of the brands that other LEGO® train clubs have developed is very encouraging that a new WamaLTC wordmark as proposed would provide a distinctive identity. Just using serifs sets it apart from the majority. With our fealty to a fallen flag (the Baltimore & Ohio) established by the circular logo, the wordmark need not be associated with any particular railroad, yet the tie to the railroading era is there in the resemblance to the font on the station sign. My own progress in logo design, such as it is, is most evident in the custom letterforms and custom kerning. The differences from Goudy Extra Bold are most apparent in the W and the L, although I have stretched the C horizontally and flattened and extended its tail for extra sweep at the end.

20 January 2006

Even the OS9Forever site has given up… I am hoping that a replacement of the PRAM battery will banish the booting to 9 that I have been experiencing all week. Some people think moving past System 7 was a mistake, indeed, that moving past System 6 was a mistake (this site includes a screenshot with a misspelled filename of the Croatian version, my guess based on the word for time in the General preferences Control Panel). Macintosh System 7.0 simulated in your web browser. I’m not aware of any similar love for System 8.

Friday Random 10:

1. End Credits (Elmer Bernstein, The Good Son)
2. Flight (Bernard Herrmann, North by Northwest)
3. Dress You Up (Madonna, Like A Virgin)
4. Rrarr (Joseph LoDuca, Xena: Warrior Princess, Volume 2)
5. She Never Told Me She Was A Mime ( Weird Al Yankovic, Alapalooza)
6. Sarah in the Bar (Brad Fiedel, The Terminator (The Definitive Edition))
7. Viewing Screen Magnification (Star Trek Sound Effects)
8. The Man Who Was Never Born: Andro Appears - Teaser (Dominic Frontiere, The Outer Limits)
9. The Cafeteria (Bernard Herrmann, North by Northwest)
10. Kreuzigung/Arie (Baß): Komm, süßes Kreuz (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion)

19 January 2006

A Slashdot post to a BBC article leads to the official news releases from Konica Minolta: Konica Minolta Announces Withdrawal Plan for Camera Business and Photo Business and Partial Transfer of Certain Assets Related to Digital SLR cameras. My own use of film cameras has plummeted, perhaps I can finish out the roll currently in the Maxxum 700si at the Washington Auto Show next week, what with the Dodge Challenger concept on display and all. The admission would cost less than a movie if I time it right and am willing to show my ID…

18 January 2006

In the absence of useful updates at the WAMALUG site, one could do worse than peruse the Brickshelf galleries of Philip Moyer. I see that the pastime of putting LEGO® constructions atop Christina’s head has not been forgotten (scroll to the bottom of the page for the August 10, 2000 get-together). Well, isn’t this a smidgeon suspicious! It sure looks like Bob Hayes used my Kawasaki Bi-Level model file as a guide to building a new passenger railroad station. We got a preview at the WamaLTC meeting last month.

17 January 2006

The Blackberry is described by its manufacturer as an all-in-one mobile phone, email device, web browser and organizer. Available in Austria for now, not in Serbia. I would assume that the wireless connectivity through a service provider costs some money.

13 January 2006

A Slashdot comment leads to the solution for the crashing I was experiencing earlier: version 2.0.1 of Flip4Mac. As of tonight, the download from Microsoft has yet to be updated. I didn’t send a crash report to Apple when offered the opportunity, after all, I’m not even supposed to be running Panther on this ancient hardware, but I wonder how many did that the update should happen so soon.

The Apple Publications Style Guide 2006 (via Daring Fireball) sees fit to include this ancient hardware and specifies its name as Power Macintosh G3 on page 175. It’s one thing I find disappointing about the video advertisement Apple prepared for its first desktop model with an Intel microprocessor: the word Macintosh is never used.

12 January 2006

There has been some hullabaloo about the MiniStore that is included with the iTunes 6.0.2 update (BoingBoing, Slashdot, ArsTechnica). I was curious why I hadn’t seen it even though I had installed the 6.0.2 update. The answer: I had previously disabled the iTunes Music Store in the Parental Control pane of the iTunes preferences! So, ha! Apple won’t know when I click on one of my 4,245 tracks.

Kottke points to a post with a surprisingly civil and informed set of comments regarding the new logo for Kodak. The entire Branding category at Speak Up > Design Dialog especially looks like it might reward reading at leisure. The WAMALUG logo is quietly approaching its fourth anniversary and I’ve not heard of any desire to rebrand, but surely something could be done to update the WamaLTC identity… ;-) No, really, it remains very stylish among its peers. Our next meeting is on the twenty-first, and our first show of the year is 3 weeks away..

11 January 2006

Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X was released over 2 years ago. Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows Media® Components for QuickTime as a free download (via Digg, earlier original and later dupe). I didn’t have much luck with the plug-in when I downloaded the trial version of Flip4Mac almost a month ago, so I might stick with the player. I wonder… is there no plan to make a Universal Binary of WMP9? Anyway, why would I propose to anyone with a dialup connection a video player other than QuickTime? I assure you that there are completely legitimate reasons why someone might want to download and play videos in .wmv format, like this MetaFilter post linking to a skit with Patrick Stewart from Ricky Gervais’s Extras. However, I am told that streaming radio is playable over a dialup connection. Radio Television Serbia, for example, provides its programming exclusively in the Real Player format, while Viva La Voce offers the additional choice of a Windows Media Player stream. (Local NPR station WAMU 88.5 FM goes the extra distance by also providing an MP3 stream playable in iTunes.)

Upon installation of the Flip4Mac 2.0 version downloaded from Microsoft, QuickTime sees Windows Media files, opens them, and plays them without incident. Only upon closing such a file does my installation of QuickTime 7.0.4 routinely quit unexpectedly. (The video is allegedly from a patrol car in a Texas municipality where the officer was shot at, via maj.com gallery with photos of a different shooting.)

10 January 2005

A busy day for Apple Software Update… Mac OS X Update 10.4.4 (55 MB)… QuickTime 7.0.4 (49 MB)… iTunes 6.0.2 (19 MB)… no wonder they leave the modem out of their newest model.

09 January 2006

With all that is known about hearing loss these days, the use of earphones or headphones seems less and less advised, yet the Bone Fone came and went.

Some discontent with the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Uninstaller program. If the trial version of Office 2004 for Mac that is installed on new Macs these days offers any upgrade path, it’s not apparent. The install seems to be there solely to tempt people into buying a full edition at whatever price prevails upon purchase.

Presumably it’s just a clock… but one can imagine a variation that chirped It’s another beautiful day in the Village based on the weather widget. (The chime turns out to be McGoohan’s voice: …be seeing you! )

Purchasers of the Mac mini from last fall onward would appear to benefit not only from a small bump in processor speeds, but also in a doubling of the DVD writer speed, and a switch to 5400rpm hard drives. I know I appreciated switching from a 4200rpm drive to a 5400rpm drive last year.

08 January 2006

I had the opportunity to spend some time with an installation of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger this weekend, and while the appeal of Spotlight remains low, Dashboard’s might be growing on me. Yahoo! Widgets extends to users of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther the feature of small standalone applications available with the press of a hot key. Which is just as well, as one of the barriers to installing Tiger on a Beige G3 would be the very real possibility of the default installation exceeding the 8GB limit on the home partition. I have been wanting to see what’s playing in iTunes when the program is in shuffle mode since completing the import project (turns out the default iTunes controller widget offers a slide-out display).

05 January 2006

There will be a quiz after the second paragraph…

04 January 2006

The web site of the Greenbrier Hotel makes no special effort anymore to mention the congressional relocation site which the local newspaper exposed in 1992. Ah, it seems to have been closed for renovations and is expected to open again this year.

03 January 2006

From almost a month ago: Breakthrough Chip Delivers Better Digital Pictures For Less Power. The two researchers have founded a company. Because the assistant professor is a Serb, Glas Javnosti interviews Željko Ignjatović with some exaggeration surely (Genius from Odžak will change the world) and identifies him with the proper diacritical marks but omits the use of latin small letter nj (U+01CC). The publication compares him to Tesla, who is well known, to Pupin, who is less well known, and to Milutin Milanković, who I do not remember hearing of.

02 January 2006

I used my free night at the movies reward to see King Kong last night. The eight o’clock screening was packed. Did it offer the usual benefits of theatrical exhibition? Glaring telephone display in the front row? Check. Talkative people who wouldn’t be shushed? Check. Telephone ringing multiple times? Check. Children too young for a movie rated PG-13 for its frightening adventure violence and some disturbing images ? Check. But the screenplay did offer an answer to that age-old question: the character Naomi Watts plays is asked to join the cast of the movie on the basis that she can wear the size 4 costumes the production has already made. Unfortunately vanity sizing or renormalization or whatever excuse is offered for why sizes don’t describe the same body shape decade to decade prevent using the size 4 of 1933 to describe today’s shopping. I wrote my feeble assortment of comments while listening to the Something Like This… the Bob Newhart anthology double-CD set in iTunes (the importation of which required both platters to be copied first) and as it happens the King Kong track came up. Newhart plays the role of a security guard on his first day of duty at the Empire State Building when an ape toe comes in through the window…