31 December 2007

I am a believer in Digital ICE (more dog food, it turns out). I don’t suppose I ever let the Olympus scanner operate at its best, the closest might have been the 1600×1200 scan of the photograph of the Focus that I would use as a desktop background at work, but even at its maximum resolution of 2400×1600 it was at best a 3.8 megapixel scanner. At 4000 px/in, the replacement qualifies as a 21 megapixel scanner, making it obvious in the resulting scan, which is four times the size of my monitor, that the streak in the upper left corner is a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 in the distance also headed south, while the color balance finally shows the black and the gray of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac properly (comparison with earlier scan). The Digital ICE feature removed a lot of scratches which appeared as yellow dots and streaks in the uncorrected image in this frame and the frame with the Chessie System caboose.

Preview wasn’t able to show me the thumbnail in an image file earlier but maybe I didn’t have the Sidebar open.

30 December 2007

The WAMALUG webmaster finally found a place to use the club’s logo: on a page at the site for next summer’s fest which he is organizing.

The Olympus ES-10 Parallel Scanner for film negatives and slides (Olympus support page, basic review page) served me well earlier (many of the photographs seen on this site were scanned by this scanner) but there was only one computer on the premises with a parallel port and the ES-10 LAB software was barely usable under Windows 98 (besides the program’s instability, the save dialog didn’t understand Long File Names), so even without this comprehensive roundup of the prospects for continued use of this scanner it was time for it to go. I suspect a loose USB jack in the hardware delayed the ability of the Nikon Scan 4.0 software to detect the Nikon Coolscan V LS-50 ED scanner which replaced it today. I’m not super impressed with the software, anyway, everything from the installer to the program windows to the way the save dialog highlights the entire filename including the extension (rather than just the filename) betrays its origins as a program written for System 9.

Activity Monitor can have its Dock icon display features of a Mac’s operation including memory use. With iChat, SeaMonkey, iTunes, VMware Fusion, and Nikon Scan running, three-quarters of my 4 GB of RAM was in use. One gigabyte of that was the RAM allocated to the Windows XP Home virtual machine.

29 December 2007

Las Chicas RBD presentacion sus muñecas BARBIE. Photo gallery of just the dolls from Univision. Mattel’s press release from June: Latin Pop-Rock Favorites RBD Get Dolled Up With Barbie® Doll, Diamond-Selling Recording Artists and TV Stars Are Newest Additions to Mattel’s Celebrity Doll Line. I had never heard of the telenovela, the dolls spotted at the Kmart in Fairfax.

I note that Quattro Pro X3 in Windows XP Home is no more stable than Quattro Pro 10 was in Windows 98 SE.

28 December 2007

Today’s edition is the last copy of The Washington Post for which I will pay 35¢: Post Newsstand Price Going Up to 50 Cents.

With my installation of Mozilla 1.0 on the Compaq notebook on 18 June 2002 and my installation of Mozilla 1.1 on the Performa on 24 July 2002 the relevance of Netscape Navigator as something other than a pain to code around its earlier versions was nil. The brand as a browser comes to an end in February (via).

The Sonnet Aria extreme PCI wireless network card I linked to earlier was too expensive, but I found a cheaper wireless card for the Power Macintosh G3 which allows it to connect to the network from another floor.

27 December 2007

Apple Keyboard Home Keys: Position of Bumps (via). Because I don’t touch-type, I had never noticed that the Compaq keyboard and the Apple Design Keyboard were different in this way. The touch-typist in the family has not said anything about it, either.

Former ’60s Radical Recalls Days of Rage. On All Things Considered tonight, the book I finished reading last week. I keep track of the books I read in a Paradox database, but the program has not been updated since version 11 and it shows: the program is shaky in handling long pathnames, which is a problem in view of the path C:\Documents and Settings\Constantine\My Documents\Paradox\ as found in my new Windows XP Home virtual machine. Workaround: create another My Documents folder at the root C:\ (this also keeps all the validity tables happy).

26 December 2007

The Coverflow option in the new Finder encourages browsing but is hampered by folders which are too organized. I took the folders holding photographs from my first digital camera, a Minolta DiMAGE 7, and rearranged them in as few folders as the numerical sequences permitted and browsed the resulting all-inclusive folder revealing this view of my first Macintosh, the Performa 6118CD on a card table adjacent to my desk, on 25 March 2002. I had been tinkering with the computer for 3 months and using the camera for 1 month.

25 December 2007

The phrase for today is número equivocado.

Anonymity can be reversed by using other public information, so when this page states thao3121 has 1 Fan I wonder who that could be.

Пронађен је нови хардвер … today’s success story is rescuing the Windows XP Professional drive image with the Serbian Cyrillic Language Interface Pack installed. Activation after the operating system found itself in a totally different hardware configuration was a breeze, with a simple click of OK, even as I had to do it twice because I should have checked that the hardware configuration was free of errors in Device Manager before agreeing to activate the first time. The presence of VM Additions (added by Virtual PC) caused a lockup upon using the keyboard (in VMware Fusion), so it was back to the original Virtual PC installation to uninstall that software… of course, it is that software that allows shared folders so after the backup using Norton Ghost 2003, VM Additions was installed again to get the .gho file into a folder on the Mac for burning to DVD and transfer into VMware Fusion. I promise to erase the Virtual PC files, right after I do the same uninstall-ghost-reinstall routine with the Windows 98 SE drive image. ;-)

A new retail copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was installed very recently on that 867 MHz MDD G4 I troubleshoot occasionally using the archive and install option and something weird happened: the icon in the Dock for Mail targeted a version of Mail.app from the Panther installation which had buried itself inside another application’s folder in Applications. Deleting that target, poofing the Dock icon (yeah, that’s a technical term I just used), and starting up the version 3.0 Mail.app in the Applications folder got things working properly. Can we agree that the iCal Dock icon displaying today’s date is totally worth whatever it costs?

24 December 2007

I only noticed today that the USB cable I carry in my backpack devoted to the KonicaMinolta Maxxum 7D and its accessories doesn’t actually fit the USB port on the side of the camera. Oops. I generally rely on card readers rather than a direct camera-to-computer connection. Hmm. Maybe it came from one of the DiMAGE cameras that preceded its purchase a year and a half ago.

Today’s success story is rescuing the Windows 98 SE drive image I was using in Virtual PC 7. I used a Norton Ghost 2003 .gho file created from inside the virtual machine. I should have uninstalled Virtual PC’s VM Additions before creating the Ghost file because attempting to uninstall them now results in a message about requiring a virtual machine to accomplish the task. There was a lot of Windows has found new hardware and restarting and downloading drivers and such like.

It has now been just over a year since one could shop Tower Records in a retail storefront. Clearly my purchases of compact discs took a hit from their absence (although I did use the online retailer with the same name).

23 December 2007

With Corel® WordPerfect® Office X3 Professional Edition installed in the virtual machine and printing from within Windows established to both printers, the rationale for keeping the Compaq notebook on the first floor is removed. This has eliminated another electrical connection and rendered an entire power strip superfluous. Also, it makes more sense for the AirPort Extreme to face me so I can keep track of the light on its front panel, so a general rearrangement of cables was in order. When I mention the Sony Trinitron Multiscan E500 people in the know start talking about its weight, and I haven’t moved that peripheral: at a resolution of 1152×864 running at 85 Hz, it serves well to display the 1024×768 desktop of the virtual machine.

22 December 2007

Ha-ha, did I say within a month earlier? I meant before 3 days was up obviously because after the display at the Lyceum today, it was instant gratification at the Micro Center in Fairfax. I finally reduced the number of electrically-powered devices in the room by replacing the LinkSys router (a veteran from the first days of using Comcast as an ISP over 4 years ago) and Netgear switch with the Apple AirPort Extreme (its three Ethernet jacks taking care of the two printers and the decrepit notebook) and taking the headless Power Macintosh G3 upstairs. It would be wrong to spend more money on the latter. I also have the full version of Corel® WordPerfect® Office X3 Professional Edition in hand so the Compaq Presario’s days are numbered even if I was successful in printing from it in the face of the new addresses supplied by the replacement router.

21 December 2007

People have left town and there is room to park in the lot at Shoppers Food & Pharmacy inside the perimeter for the carts. The last time I was there I was unaware that the perimeter (beyond which the wheels on the carts do not roll) had been moved, oof, that was a surprise. You know who else will be spending time in Glendale, California next week?

Do I know where to get a beer? Boy, am I the wrong person to ask.

I last made a discontinuous jump in computing with the purchase of the Compaq notebook in 1998 and abandoning DOS 3.2 and WordPerfect 5.1+ for Windows 95 and Wordperfect Suite 8 Professional. With the Sony monitor and Unicomp keyboard connected to the relic, though, there is less pressure for immediate replacement and the purchase of WordPerfect X3 can wait. Corel Graphics Suite 11 (a spare copy of the upgrade edition was on hand) installed into the Windows XP Home image without difficulty. Switching the networking to bridged and running Apple Bonjour for Windows (part of the download of QuickTime and iTunes for Windows) along with drivers downloaded from HP have established printing from within the guest operating system.

Tomorrow WamaLTC is scheduled to be at the Lyceum in Alexandria, Virginia for a display sponsored by Whistle Stop Hobbies.

20 December 2007

The appearance of my feed with <content:encoded> which I experimented with yesterday looks quite polished in Safari (shown here running in a Windows XP Home virtual machine created in VMware Fusion from a CD I bought over 2 years ago). Safari otherwise seems to ignore the escaped HTML in the <description> element which the RSS viewer in Yahoo! Mash displays in full. It’s much easier to paste unescaped HTML into the feed than to escape characters and replace elements and entities, so I plan to continue with the one-line excerpt in the <description> element while offering the full text in the content module. I’m not having much luck converting the hard drive in the Compaq notebook to a virtual machine, and Windows Update would appear to be no longer available for Windows 98, so I might as well start over in this Windows XP Home volume by installing only the most necessary programs (like the Treasury Department’s Savings Bond Wizard) and abandoning stuff like Netscape Navigator Gold 3.04. Besides the Public Beta of Safari 3 for Windows I have downloaded Windows Internet Explorer 7.

19 December 2007

The new Coverflow feature of the Finder in Leopard is worth… every penny I spent on the supporting hardware, maybe not, but it has introduced me to the existence of the Exif thumbnail in JPEG images. A thumbnail included in the Exif (previously discussed) is used to display the photograph on the display of the digital camera which took it. If software used to crop the photograph does not overwite this Exif data, the thumbnail remains. Preview won’t show it to me, neither will Corel Photo-Paint, Graphic Converter will happily overwrite it in browsing the folder, but Coverflow will. Sweet. (Enlarging the Finder window enough forces Coverflow to makes its own thumbnail based on the final image.)

The Mac Pro does not arrive with the aluminum slab of a keyboard you will see connected to the iMac models in Apple stores these days, instead it comes with a white version of the mushy trough I struggle with every time I do hands-on troubleshooting of a Mirrored Drive Doors G4. I have replaced it with the Matias Tactile Pro I bought over 2 years ago. The power button on the front of the Mac Pro is more accessible in its current position so that’s no longer an issue.

I was unsuccessful in starting the Power Macintosh G3 in FireWire Target mode (not a surprise) so I located a FireWire drive enclosure on the third floor and installed one of the hard drives therein. Copying the applications and files in my Documents volume using Migration Assistant took 70 minutes. Since then there’s been lots of testing applications (the software for the scanner had to be reinstalled), installing application updates, changing license numbers, recreating preferences and bookmarks. I’m unable to log in to MSN Messenger, so that’s not getting included in the Dock. Oh, and if Apple thinks I would use Spotlight more often than I switch keyboards… I disabled the keyboard shortcut for Spotlight (and changed the one for Dashboard so I could open and close both optical drives from the keyboard). All 6,016 music tracks and music videos in iTunes made it, but there was some adjustment necessary to reconsolidate albums and restore the proper album artwork. Besides the keyboard, I am enjoying the right-click functionality of the Mighty Mouse while using browsers other than SeaMonkey. A wireless version should be expected on my desk within a month. I really enjoy the difference that Bonjour has made in connecting to my networked printers. I remember having to identify IP addresses and specifying PPD files when I first installed the two printers 4 years ago in System 9 and again 3 years ago in Jaguar (which ever since has required a specific order in which to turn everything on so everything would get the right IP) but now locating the specific printers no matter what address they have is just taken care of.

I should say the SeaMonkey® browser because the trademarks were registered earlier this year. The related blog has received new posts.

The website I worked on 4 years ago is now in the hands of a reseller.

If my vocabulary wears you out, then maybe the Simple English version of Wikipedia is for you.

For today’s full-text entry in the feed, I’m going to try <content:encoded>.

18 December 2007

You have caught me in transition. Please stand by. :-)

17 December 2007

A blogger decries Ugly Facebook Profile Photo Trend but isn’t a Christmas tree better than a question mark? I ask rhetorically.

I’ll admit it, I have been taking advantage of the Mac Santa Deals discounts to obtain new licenses for some of my favorite software in preparation for the new machine. It’s tougher to look at the application names I don’t recognize and decide which might be worthwhile at 20% off, but I did try a feed creator this evening and discovered that it changed HTML element names to uppercase (which is inconsistent with how I must write them for XHTML). FAIL. The other feed creator still available for 10% off through the end of the month requires 10.4. Looks like I’ll be continuing to write the feed by hand in BBEdit, but in honor of the trial, today’s <item> will be full-text.

The brand juggernaut that is Hilary Duff has her MySpace, her Facebook Page, and her YouTube channel. Her music site doesn’t play nice with SeaMonkey.

16 December 2007

There is no substitute for user testing. I had the opportunity last week to observe a reader of this page in the act. The individual read the words of the text in Microsoft Internet Explorer without mousing over the links even once to see where they led, let alone following the links, and then had the temerity to be all, oh, I don’t understand. Even so, I’m not persuaded that adding the ability to comment here would be useful. Just this morning I got my first Yahoo! Chat spam message, I’m not interested in creating any more openings for nonsense to reach me. Other people like comments, though.

Serbo-Croatian was the name of a language not an ethnicity, but in the hands of the series Enterprise… ugh. I don’t remember any Floridians building airplanes out of the raw materials and industrial processes available in that one state at the time, either, Trip.

Ha-ha, yes, there is quite a bit of dust revealed in the glare of the flash in a photograph linked to earlier. That’s changing as stuff gets moved around. The Compaq notebook just visible past the uninterruptible power supply has already been relegated to the bottom shelf of the Metro shelving supporting the Power Macintosh G3 and the Sony monitor.

If you sign up with my host through this referral link I’m supposed to receive credit that extends my own hosting term.

15 December 2007

The Complete Starfleet Library is a detailed, year by year, examination of the published Star Trek books. I found it searching for information on Fotonovels after watching A Taste of Armageddon in a sartorially appropriate black turtleneck and discovering that the Fotonovel adaptation of the episode did not include the closer angle on Ensign Tamura and Engineer Scott which appears in the teaser of the episode. I recognize a lot of these books, some I still have, others I have placed in the garage or given away. One I retain is The Best of Trek #9, but because the contribution I keep it for appeared in the Trek Roundtable section of the 1985 book, the name of a Memory Alpha contributor does not appear in the listing of the book’s contents. At the Star Trek wiki, his explanation of Star Trek design patents is a featured article.

My previous screengrabs from an episode were made with the laserdisc paused in view of the movement in the scene, but this was not necessary this time. Ensign Tamura’s ethnicity, based on the character’s name, is Japanese. A performance appraisal from a different point of view, a slashy perspective.

Norton Ghost 2003 was unable to see the CompactFlash® card in DOS mode, so I used Xxcopy to make a clone of the partition in the Compaq notebook.

14 December 2007

Ostensibly my purchase of the SanDisk® Extreme® III 8.0 GB CompactFlash® (no generic term for this memory card is found on the box) is part of the project to rescue the Windows 98 SE installation in the Compaq notebook.

The algorithm for the Flixster Movie Compatibility Test is such that I have only a 97% compatibility score with myself.

13 December 2007

Virtual PC for Mac is one program which is guaranteed not to work on a Mac with an Intel processor. I’m hard pressed to say why I’m bothering but I am trying to use Norton Ghost to rescue the drive images I was using in the emulation software. My Windows XP Professional installation is customized with the Serbian Language Interface Pack (Cyrillic), while the Windows 98 SE installation is the last link to the 68k Macintosh. The drive image used by SoftWindows will be abandoned as I cannot use the CD drive to install Norton Ghost… unless there is one final task for the Performa before it gets carted off for recycling.

12 December 2007

First there was the suggestive advertising, then there’s a report of advertising with toplessness, this morning I see this contextually-appropriate advertisement that nevertheless raises the question as to whether the makers of the application being advertised (application canvas pages are open to the public now) have properly secured the right of publicity.

People living in sketchier neighborhoods may quail at the idea of leaving the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display delivered on my front step for nearly an hour. I took it out of its box before heading in to work, but a careful fellow there asked if it worked. I can now report that the ATi RADEON 9200 Mac Edition card in the Power Macintosh G3 can manage 1280×800 on the new display. This reduces the resolution on the simultaneously connected Sony monitor to 1152×870, and I’m not willing to step back from 1600×1200 even for a few days.

11 December 2007

The Calculator application in Leopard is said to have an improved RPN mode. There is a Hewlett Packard 48GX on my desk but normally I use a Hewlett Packard 12C because of its clearer display. (I have been using RPN at least since I bought the Hewlett Packard 41C after college.) The placement of one or more of these so close at hand might not survive the reconfiguration.

Through the magic of the Random order setting in System Preferences, the erstwhile Power Macintosh G3 started today with a Desktop background which is not a copyright infringement, so I can share with you the current configuration. The Display Background in Windows on the Compaq PointView V710 connected to the Compaq Presario c1681 is also my own photograph, taken at the World of Wheels car show in the D.C. Armory on March 16, 1979 of a model using the name of Gail Stanton.

Coincidence… or something more? I find myself counting the letters in the words Christmas and tree and going hmm…

10 December 2007

Google Maps automatically displays place names in the local language of each country with the prominent exception of the Koreas (from the ever-reliable Wikipedia, north: 조선민주주의인민공화국; south: 대한민국). Also, Google Maps don’t support korean geographical elements including road, building and local names yet despite the high resolution aerial imagery of the capital city displayed on the site. One can be outraged by the obvious dissing of a major industrial powerhouse, or… one could consider the possibility that the lack of information is planned.

I’ve visited the Apple Store at Tysons Corner Center several times (the one doomed to fail when it opened 6½ years ago) since the release of the iPhone and have yet to find any reason to visit that section of the store. With the replacement of my own mobilni and placing the number on my Facebook a month later I have been checking for missed calls more often but so far there haven’t been any.

As long as I am writing the feed here by hand, I’m going to ignore the MeFite consensus on whether or not to have full text therein.

The photograph currently on the home page is quite out of date and fails to take into account the replacement of the computer that started life as a Performa 6118CD with the computer that started life as a Power Macintosh G3 and the replacement of the Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display with a Sony Multiscan E500. With so much screen real estate, though, it’s harder to disguise the desktop wallpaper like I did upon installing Jaguar and upon installing Panther. The pending reconfiguration mandates some acknowledgment of how things were. Hmm, impasse.

09 December 2007

WAMALUG managed its first post-GMU meeting this afternoon in the meeting room on the second floor of the central Arlington County Public Library. I told the people from southern Maryland, pfft, there will be people here today from California (guess he’s back) and Michigan. The visitor from Michigan says he’s a reader of these dispatches and eschews the feed (his own site’s feed is not in good shape right now). Earlier in the day, he shared a table at Slade’s with another AFOL lacking a working feed and the conversation included the usual topics. (Can you say NPOV violation? I knew you could.) He’s a member of the Michigan LEGO® Users Group which may be known for assigning tasks to its members and a fee schedule sufficiently renumerative to afford a trailer to haul the club’s displays… but does their website offer a feed? Signs point to… no.

Alea jacta est: I have placed my order at the Apple Store for Federal Government Employee Purchase Program. Configuration of the room, the remaining peripherals, and all the cords leading in and out of the built-to-order machine will require cogitation.

08 December 2007

It snowed this week. It began weakly on Wednesday but overnight there was a non-negligible accumulation. It’s mostly gone now, and it was raining last night and into this morning. I didn’t need my umbrella today. Just my luck that I chose to carry the one without a shoulder sling. There was a lot of walking and only one bus passenger who talked to himself loudly.

CompUSA to shutter all its stores.

07 December 2007

Three years ago, I was able to resist the vocal stylings of a troubled teen. Two years ago, I maintained my resistance upon the occasion of a second album. One year ago, a minor discount at the liquidating Tower Records weakened my resolve. This year, yeah, still not holding my breath for the third album.

I get ribbed for picking up the Examiner tabloid, but if I ignore the platform it affords the wingnuts and the fetishization of every movement by a Republican politician and its crusade against the transit company’s union, there’s enough to pass the time on a subway ride or half the length of a bus ride and that way I don’t contribute to the circulation numbers of the free tabloid of the dominant local education and media company. I also don’t get exposed to full-page advertising for bedtime fashions by flipping through the Examiner but it’s a risk when picking up a discarded copy of Express as is evident with today’s issue (better online than in print because there’s no bleedthrough from page 6 like in my scan). The exploitative image is from the fall underwear campaign of Sweden-based retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB. I’m sure I’ve never been in an H&M although they seem to have several locations in the area.

Via Reddit, from The New Yorker, The Checklist :

Medicine today has entered its B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what hospitals do—most notably, intensive care—are now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone. I.C.U. life support has become too much medicine for one person to fly.

Some people don’t even have that button. Must be a Windows thing.

Tell me again about how sorry you are that I feel discriminated against.

06 December 2007

You just can’t satisfy some people. I neglected to replace the old badge after establishing a new profile pic which took the photograph of me and the new dopisnik and sliced off most of the married woman therein (this method of preparing profile pics looks to be routine among Facebookers) which shielded such people from the unusual physical intimacy depicted. The complaint with this latest iteration (full view of original made by placing the A820 on the monitor and waiting for the self-timer to do its work) is that this expression is too glum and won’t get me any friends. Well, my hexadecimally-challenged pal, that’s where you’re wrong.

I left the bedroom window of my apartment open for almost a year because of the smell of cigarette smoke. The situation was part of the impetus to leave that apartment 10 years ago.

Red band trailer for Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (if you don’t know what red band trailer means, don’t follow the link). You need The Trek Movie Report to keep up with the latest.

05 December 2007

You knew this would happen: I have been de-friended on Facebook. (It could be worse, I could be breaking up on Facebook.) It was just a matter of time, and I’m sure it will happen again… no, it wasn’t by the person I de-tagged last week. We’re still cool (*checks friends list repeatedly*).

Gmail chat now offers the option to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM buddies from Gmail. I believe that soon enough iChat will allow me to chat with my Google Talk buddies, or buddy, as the case may be.

STAR TREK: THE TOUR will allegedly be in the area some time next year.

04 December 2007

I think it might be serious this time… I’m buying software that requires a later operating system and requires a different processor.

I bought replacement bulbs for the refrigerator at Target in Springfield Mall on Saturday, apparently just before the fire and way before the shooting fatality, but the problem turned out to be the switch at the door. Grr.

03 December 2007

The promised revamp of the site for the alumni association of The Cavalier Daily has arrived, including an archive of the newsletter College Topics including the Fall 2007 issue I wrote about earlier. For now the photograph of a website publisher dressed up for a Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Tokyo appears in color on the site.

02 December 2007

The erotic appeal of the Lands’ End catalog (via) has been done before, months ago, by a local blogger. With online shopping available and a Sears store nearby I no longer look at the multiple catalogs (their proliferation and frequency now a target of activism).

Aw, it’s the time of year again to link to the Apple Federal Employee Store. There’s a Mac Santa promotion again this year.

01 December 2007

The construction I spotted on a QuéLUG display earlier this year was displayed again in August (1, 2, 3, 4) What the talented rebuilder may not realize by substituting a dish for the roof vent is that my instruction to use a square tile was based on, ahem, observation. The bridge from the third level of the parking deck which leads to Slade’s American Bar & Grill at Tysons Corner Center is a good vantage point.

Arrived in today’s mail at a better price from Tower.com in a Super Jewel® Box. (Now that I take another look, the previous album from this quintet came in the same packaging.) I used Google Checkout to place my order. Neither the online merchant nor the Google service participate (for now) in the Beacon feature of Facebook (initial list in the press release) which has been the subject of some controversy in recent weeks, even reaching the local dead-tree media yesterday (that newspaper will put anything on its front page). I have reduced my exposure to gift exchange and don’t miss it and can’t imagine how I would endure the stress of living with someone who put so much stock in the practice.

Over 2 months later and I haven’t been de-friended yet.

30 November 2007

I have visited this site devoted to restoring deleted scenes, trims, and other behind the scenes aspects of the original Star Trek before but may not have linked to it. I wonder about the authenticity of the script excerpts for the deleted scenes, though, a Spock who says he’d be glad doesn’t sound right and a Spock who tells the African communications officer that Vulcans have natural rhythm —maybe the scene wasn’t cut for the usual prosaic reasons like pacing or length is all I’m saying.

Now Washington City Paper needs hawkers? Used to be every single copy in the dispensers would be gone by Thursday night.

29 November 2007

There has been more going on at Washington City Paper than a change in delivery schedule (this week’s edition available tonight, however) and a smaller page size.

The other Hannaher on LinkedIn.

How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes? (a quiz via). I got 48 by cheating and launching BBEdit and going up and down the HTML Tools palette. I shouldn’t even try the followup: How Many CSS Properties Can You Name in 7 Minutes?

A second opinion on the motivations of bloggers. My own motivations for what I do are an enigma sometimes: 죄송합니디.

28 November 2007

You seem happy this week.

My cousin’s preference among the Democratic contenders for the nomination for President is clear. The local paper reports on the planned opening (last Saturday) of the campaign office in Fargo.

A Hannaher on LinkedIn.

27 November 2007

I noticed this myself today following up on a drive in the Focus: Google Maps has added a Terrain feature (via).

26 November 2007

Those who followed the link earlier and wondered about the temporary companion photographed therein, the Fall issue of College Topics, The Cavalier Daily Alumni Association Newsletter informs me that the former advertising page editor has published Japan With Kids since 1999. She founded the website as Tokyo With Kids! and some of the pages still bear that URL. For what it’s worth, she’s still using the same name as when the photograph was taken. There’s supposed to be a new website for the alumni association arriving December first.

Famous Location To Appear in New Star Trek Movie (via). That’s the red Ford Tempo I rented on the 1987 trip to the Los Angeles region parked near this famous location.

But what if it’s true?

What’s worse than listening to Marketplace®? Admitting to listening to Calling All Pets because changing the station on an analog radio is too much trouble.

25 November 2007

The vendor of ABS weapons compatible with LEGO® minifig hands we were trying to remember yesterday is BrickArms.

The traffic this weekend has been remarkably smooth. That doesn’t mean I have the energy to unload the Escape tonight. I’m not the only one who’s sleepy…

Browser usage tip: if the cursor doesn’t change into a hand when mousing over a thumbnail on this site, there’s no link to a larger version. I usually omit such a link to respect someone else’s copyright or to decorate the site without intruding too much upon someone else’s privacy. An exception to the first principle and an exception to the second principle, both in August. Which principle was effective yesterday is left as an exercise.

24 November 2007

In retrospect, I wish I had used my Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D to take this photograph. The pictures I took with it yesterday are quite sumptuous compared to the results from the Fuji FinePix S9100 notwithstanding the latter’s 3 megapixel advantage (the external display on the Fuji is a necessity, though, when taking pictures of the LEGO® creations at awkward angles). Tell me more about the Sony A700 (we saw one in use this weekend) and its 12.2 megapixel sensor and available vertical grip… maybe it is time to sell some of these older lenses and bodies. Whether any anti-shake system can deal with the vibrations from people walking across the turntable in the roundhouse is another matter entirely.

23 November 2007

Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Engine 426 from the station off of Edsall Road responding to a report of a downed power line. Fairfax County Police replaced the fire crew after 1½ hours, Dominion Virginia Power trucks arrived after 2½ hours, and by the fourth hour power was restored. I spent some of the time thinking up just the right Facebook status for the situation. There was a full moon and a friendly black cat as well.

I’m sure the Central Reexamination Unit hates this kind of Slashdot story.

SeaMonkey was unable to upload a photograph to my new Google account, so I used Firefox. Now, as for the photograph uploaded by a GMail-using contact, I’d have bought a CD with that picture on the jacket while Tower was going out of business last year.

The WamaLTC display may be indoors, but the roundhouse is cold. My UV meter has a thermometer and it gave me a reading of 65℉. At least the windows of the building are effective to block UV.

22 November 2007

I’ve received an invitation to GMail and its antique storage limit. There is a Dashboard widget available for GMail which I can’t use in Panther and the version of iChat in Tiger or Leopard would allow me to connect with Google Talk buddies. I think you can see where this is headed: another service I can’t let random busybodies see time for a new Mac.

ECTACO Serbian-English online dictionary can’t handle pasted Unicode, doesn’t comprehend Cyrillic, doesn’t know the word srećan, but it can translate dan. I won’t press my luck by trying blagodarnosti.

It’s time to load the Escape and set my body clock to get up at 4:50 a.m. tomorrow so I can join the setup at six o’clock. It may not sound like a vacation, but WamaLTC’s participation in the Holiday Festival of Trains allows us to put together a big display in the impressive venue of the historic roundhouse at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum and have lots of people see it. Last year’s display.

21 November 2007

I was treated to zongzi today, a leaf-wrapped bundle of stir-fried sticky rice with meat and peanuts and mushrooms. I’ve given up on tasting food, I can’t tell the difference between this and an enchilada. A pumpkin cupcake yielded something distinctive for one bite out of ten. Earlier this year, I disappointed someone when I couldn’t taste any difference between In-N-Out and Wendy’s. I don’t have the vocabulary to tell one chocolate from another, so I skipped the brand-guessing game last week. I’ve decided that if people ask me to eat something I should just go, fine, no matter what it is because it won’t make much difference. Two slices of cheescake with completely different cheese later… still nothing. So a holiday focused on eating… not super interesting. (I could tell, though, that I was eating kimchi [김치] because my body shuddered.)

My bill from Comcast still uses what they’re calling the old logo.

20 November 2007

I’ve had Netflix suggested to me before, and they mail me offers periodically, but seeing as how I went 9 months without buying a DVD, it’s safe to say that I don’t watch one so often that renting would make more sense. The DVD Player software on the Power Macintosh G3 is locking up after 20 minutes or so requiring at least a keyboard reboot, and sitting in front of the television seems so… single-tasking.

Why, yes, I have taken beauty shots of all my cars.

In Girl World, Hallowe’en is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and none of the other girls can say anything about it. More from this user of Slide, yes, please, but I did not need to see this.

19 November 2007

My stomach was rumbling today… I have no idea why… I was just east of the intersection of Duke Street and Wheeler Avenue this morning waiting for a DASH AT8 bus and had a few minutes, so I took this photograph of a Wendy’s restaurant with an older style. That recently replaced ancient printer? My municipality’s electronics recycling drop-off location changed its hours this month (closing at three-thirty instead of six) so I’d taken an earlier bus and walked to the location to drop it off before heading in to work. Surely it’s too late to start building now…

18 November 2007

Now that I am plowing through my lists of movies seen on obsolete home video formats like Beta and VHS and CED more and more titles are not found in Flixster. It seems like I watched a lot of junk on capacitance videodisc in the early nineties with my brother.

The Non-Expert Paul Ford on How To Say I Love You has 100 ways should the need ever arise (via).

Out Monday. I wish I could find some place other than Amazon from which to buy this new album. Meanwhile, that other quintet standing around, attracting attention.

Richmond-based Robert Ullman finds no love in his own municipality and also needs to start moderating comments.

The price of regular gasoline has gone up 40¢ a gallon since I last filled up the Focus 5 weeks ago. I’m going to blame the day I went printer shopping for the mileage per day sneaking up four-tenths of a mile to 5.5 whether it’s true or not.

Awesome. And you thought Facebook Groups were a waste of time (link found on the Boo You Whore Group, via the Glen Coco? FOUR for you Glen Coco, you go Glen Coco!! Group, via the friend of a friend of a friend). Maybe I was too hasty ignoring the friend request of a high school senior…

17 November 2007

I rode the same Orion VII bus twice today. How can I be sure if I didn’t note the number? The driver looked a little familiar… but the clincher was the condiment packs on the floor at the back exit. Yep, I recognized the litter.

Google has found my Flixster account… apparently I made my comment on Syriana on the eighth. Did someone mention an information leak? I discovered a version of the public information regarding my Facebook (the link is different from that suggested for the badge) that exposes thumbnails of the profile pics of a subset of my friends. Oh, crap, the thumbnails are clickable to similar pages for each friend depicted—I’ve removed every link on this page to Facebook-hosted photographs because the pages displaying each photograph include the dangerous URL. I certainly don’t need random busybodies finding out I have a friend who would wear a bebe rhinestone logo tube top in her profile pic. Shutting up now.

After uploading the previous paragraph, I found that the URL on the badge would display the friend profile pic thumbnails. There is no warning that this will happen in the preview alleged for this public search listing. When I checked the make-a-badge page after writing the previous sentence, the p in the URL had changed to people. I might as well link to the photos again. I am not happy.

I have deactivated the ability to View your friend list from the actions a searcher can do with my search listing and this seems to have suppressed the display of the thumbnails from the badge URL . I don’t suppose the questions will be as easy to suppress.

16 November 2007

Another title missing from the Flixster servers…

The targeting of the advertising displayed for me on Facebook tonight is really pathetic, Christian dating and smoking cessation.

15 November 2007

A GMU Original’s Last Days. WAMALUG has taken the loss of its regular gathering place, which the club has used since the meeting on July 7, 2001, with its usual sense of resolve and consensus. Yeah, I didn’t write that with a straight face.

Look who’s back on the continent, it’s the new correspondent I mentioned earlier. There was a baby shower today for the Range Rover-driving colleague (my reaction to the opulence the first time I rode in it) which included a game based on Jeopardy where one of the answers was the make and model of her vehicle and she tried to get away with saying Range Rover which is when I pounced with She didn’t say the model! Range Rover Sport! Because there’s a difference, you know. To be exactly correct, I suppose I should have said Land Rover Range Rover Sport but my team got the points, so… it’s all good. (The Master of Ceremonies did not demand that responses be in the form of a question.)

What has happened to the distribution of Washington City Paper? For the third week, the free weekly is nowhere to be found on Thursday.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum manages to get the name of WamaLTC right.

14 November 2007

The last time I was at the AMC Hoffman Center 22, it looked to me like the Ruby Tuesday in the corner of the building had been replaced but searching for the words on the new, black canopies got me nowhere. It turns out that Ruby Tuesday hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just rebranded.

An old man is caught by the porcelain charms of Megan Fox.

The Yugoslavian Boomerang is another omission from the Flixster servers.

13 November 2007

I totally still have that hat! Whether I look distinguished in it is a question I leave to others to answer.

This is the first I hear of Yahoo! Mash which for now is an invite-only social network which distinguishes itself from the others by allowing users to edit their friend’s pages. When intern Erica explains it, it seems normal, but MySpace already suffers from the reputation given it because users of that network can edit their own pages. A blog at The New York Times reacted in September upon the launch of the beta phase.

I don’t let the applications I’ve added to my Facebook create stories for the Mini-Feed or the Newsfeed (I seem to be the only one among my friends to have recognized this is an option) but deactivating notifications has delayed my reaction to application-facilitated social interactions. Sorry! I know more about Mean Girls than about old Disney movies, who would have guessed? Oh, look, Tina Fey is on Facebook, she only has over 1000 friends. (There’s supposed to be a limit of five thousand.) I’m assuming the Hilary E. Duff of Houston, Texas is a fake…

12 November 2007

The good son supervises the importation by iTunes of a compact disc.

It’s labeled CAT.5 but I wonder what category of networking cable really came with the Farallon EtherMac iPrint™ Adapter LT. Five years ago, that cable allowed communication between a new PowerMac and a eight-year-old Apple Personal LaserWriter 320. Today, that cable choked when it was called upon to connect an hp LaserJet P2105dn. A replacement category 6 cable has restored communication between computer and printer, and I’m left with a bunch of surplus antiques including a Farallon PhoneNET AppleTalk-to-Serial converter complete with hard-to-find terminating resistor.

The display planned by WamaLTC for next Saturday has been canceled. Our participation in the Holiday Festival of Trains at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is the next scheduled event.

11 November 2007

¿Por qué no te callas?

Flixster has some omissions which in view of the absence of one of my favorites I put down to a bias towards titles on home video. But then in adapting my reviews from 2003 I discovered another omission which definitely has had a DVD release (the movie’s website still extant). Mysterious.

10 November 2007

Strange as it may seem, I used the transparent media adapter of my flatbed scanner for the first time tonight. The print of the shot I wanted to upload to Facebook cut off the back of my chair and the face of the other examiner. He’s done well for himself since then.

The Crystal City Watchmaker shop is no more, the proprietor seems to have vacated the premises sometime last month.

Filming of the next Star Trek movie is underway and casting news seems to arrive every day (Rachel Nichols, Bruce Greenwood, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Morrison). I rely on The Trek Movie Report to keep me informed.

09 November 2007

I must have looked forlorn this morning, waiting at the bus stop in the grass across the street from my municipality’s animal shelter as a light rain fell. It’s the closest stop to the adjoining recycling drop-off station, where I had dropped off a bag of AA and 9V batteries. I’d taken a bus to get there because there was no waiting to board it, even though I had been prepared to walk, like I did on Tuesday to reach my polling station (results for Senator, results for Delegate). There might be one or two people at work who insist on driving what would be, say, a seven-minute walk in sixty-degree weather who don’t know what to do about my nonchalance over a half-hour’s walk (I’m going to call them wimps, and excuse the others with similar insistence who wear high heels). My homeowners association community liaison officer reportedly saw me on my Columbus Day experiment in pedestrian travel between home and work and was prepared to offer me a ride before traffic intervened. It was ok, I told him, I was finding out how long it took. This morning, though, I accepted a ride from a DASH bus which should have been out of service.

A Flixster-mediated Movie Compatibility Test (which tells me I should be good friends with someone who can hardly bear to look at me) is all well and good, but today… today the in-person polarization diagnostic is something I was less than impressed with 2 years ago. There’s no rush to learn how to say 사랑해요 now.

This writing RSS by hand is not error-free. I appreciate the reports of a lack of XML well-formedness. I mentioned the establishment of several redirects earlier this year but may have neglected to identify another which links to the current year of these here Dispatches.

08 November 2007

I know people are bored to hear me talk about how things were way back when but maybe it’s time for the Carlyle in Shirlington to let go of Washingtonian readers 2nd Favorite Restaurant in 1997 as a recommendation. I didn’t realize just how old one of the retail establishments in Shirlington is: Mill End Shop, a fabric store, opened March 1, 1948, and is the village’s oldest tenant.

07 November 2007

I installed the Flixster application yesterday and spent way too much time on the Quick Rate feature. Flixster describes itself as a community for movie fans of all shapes and sizes and it’s also available outside of Facebook. Tonight I began systematically repurposing the reviews I have written over the (previous) years. So far Ace Ventura: Pet Detective seems to be the most polarizing item in the Movie Compatibility Test offered.

06 November 2007

Now these are search engines I can use: PeopleData and ZabaSearch.

05 November 2007

Your liberal media at work: this article gets the name of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club wrong four times.

The phrase 미안해요 seems like it would be useful, and the next time I hear gracias from whoever says that to me, I should try replying with 괜찮아요. I’m told the combination 아니오, 괜찮아요 is good for refusing stuff at restaurants, but it’s not like I’ll be wandering into any on my own.

04 November 2007

I suppose I’ll have to retire the phrase now. I even use I deny that the same way Rat does, when I’m caught by a character insight for which there’s no upside to admitting to.

MeFites show their love for the Model M. I wrote about my Model M and how much it cost and my reaction to the Unicomp Classic (Customizer) 104 keyboard 2½ years ago. More recently, the Unicomp keyboard was employed in the vinyl recording project. A Matias TactilePro awaits evaluation should I follow through on the computer purchase multiple colleagues are awaiting—ack, there’s already been an upgrade.

I took German in college decades ago, but it seems more useful now to know how to pronounce xin chào or 안녕하세요. One could start here for the latter…

03 November 2007

Some are behaving as if America is not at war: they’re still arguing the merits of manual transmissions.

I’m developing a theory as to why I am called dude by someone of specified ethnicity, based on my most recent DVD purchase. Other people’s recommendations are a tricky thing, and often I’m meh on them, but glorification of drug use and improbable cheetah musculoskeletal biomechanics aside, this purchase was worth the incorrect scan by the cashier at Target which raised the price by $3. Turned my mood around, too. I could have used some of the publicity art from New Line Home Entertainment for this title to illustrate this paragraph.

Yet more photographs to look through (site plays sound). I am unable to find any tracks at TiaLia for tonight’s headliner, Triệu Baỏ Vy, though there seem to be some at Bên Nhạc. Triệu Bảo Vi may or may not actually be someone else.

It was worth a shot.

02 November 2007

Gracenote maps the top artists and albums around the world (via). Serbia not invited.

01 November 2007

This the cake is a lie is something I would need to be playing games to understand?

31 October 2007

My site statistics suggest a total of 855 unique visitors this month, mostly domestic and using Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. The XML file delivering my RSS feed is already the most viewed file, while the most popular pages are the Build page, this page, and the default resource. The most used inbound links are found on a page of the webspace of a persistent visitor, on WamaLTC’s Build page, and on my Facebook profile. The search terms haven’t changed much since January.

DCist helps an old man understand why someone might be pumped about The Go! Team.

The Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle movie I have yet to see has a sequel on the way (trailers at Apple.com).

Over-the-hill political blogger tries Facebook and is less than impressed. What is funny is to view his friends—a veritable who’s who of somewhat famous bloggers (I recognize the names, anyway).

WamaLTC’s pages have been purged of links to the Yahoo! Photos albums of a participant in some of last year’s displays because the albums no longer exist and I don’t know the participant’s Flickr username.

Energetic? WamaLTC is displaying at the LEGO® Store in Potomac Mills Mall this weekend. As part of my ongoing mileage reduction project, I don’t plan to be there this time, either. (I’m going to say it’s the LEGO® site that’s broken because I can’t view the page for the store in any browser even though I have the latest 9.0 r47 version of Adobe Flash Player installed. Ha! LEGO® FTL: LEGO.com uses the latest versions of the Macromedia Flash Player for important features. Newsflash, guys, Adobe took over Macromedia nearly 2 years ago.)

30 October 2007

Toys R Us is one retailer which has suffered from my reductionist approach. Should there be a next time to visit, the logo will be different.

29 October 2007

Maybe she likes it.

The recent revision to the Macintosh operating system features icons for a variety of computers which might be connected, including a generic PC. There is some reaction to the particular image Apple has chosen to depict such a computer (1, 2) but tell me again what aspect of the Microsoft Windows operating system Apple could have copied into the screen without having the copyright police visit.

28 October 2007

I can cross off buying a monitor color calibration tool from the list of things to do should you happen to have money. Obviously, there is a risk involved in allowing me to wander the aisles at Micro Center. Residents of Rockville now have the opportunity to do the same wandering in their own store! I am impressed that the miniature spectrometer and accompanying software can take a display set to 9300 K and make it behave like it was set to 6500 K, but the difference when the hardware switch is set to 6500 K is less.

I must say that 戒, 色 (syllables presented in the order seen on screen) was underwhelming. To follow up a question of the type asked last Wednesday, I much prefer lead actress Tang Wei in her rustic mode as opposed to her period glamour look or her modern appearance. She turns 29 later this month.

27 October 2007

I have been called out by name… at least the agitated blogger has spelled it right… like I can be bothered to create a Google Account to post a comment… I expressed the futility of minute-by-minute blogging a while ago… I personally am not using the Facebook status as a substitute for Twitter… and have yet to sign up.

The rain stopped sometime this morning in the 3 hours between getting up and leaving the house. A nice day for enjoying the generosity of a friend. Ok, I might not have chosen to go westbound through the intersection of Braddock Road, King Street, and Quaker Lane (a confluence of roads scheduled for another study in a continuing bid to tame a junction so pathetic that a baby was born during the long red light earlier this month) but who am I to argue with the machine.

26 October 2007

It’s been raining since slightly after two o’clock Wednesday morning.

Alexandria’s 100-foot rear-mount ladder truck T204 departs the scene this morning after responding to a call along with E201 and another rescue pumper and a battalion chief’s vehicle. The sidewalk was lined with people who had evacuated from the building yet somehow none made it into the frame.

This morning’s newspaper purchase is only 29¢ net thanks to my finding pennies the rest of the day. The Metrobus and CUE transit systems ran largely according to schedule this afternoon. My doorman’s umbrella was useful, but my memory was worthless: the municipality where my traveling companion and I observed many Vietnamese establishments along US-50 was Garden City, Kansas (making the year 1988 and the companion my brother).

Lars and the Real Girl goes wide today, I could have avoided last Sunday’s experience.

25 October 2007

Apropos of nothing, just because I have the complete script for Full Metal Jacket : Not right this minute.

Updated yesterday: Do Classic applications work with Mac OS X 10.5 or Intel-based Macs? (via). Big surprise, the answer is no.

From 5 years ago: Getting Real: Reflecting on the New Look of National Park Service Maps (via).

Hello Kitty® Barbie® Doll, another overdue natural combination. Spotted today at Target while I was supposed to be shopping for a vacuum cleaner.

Someone of Korean ethnicity with no previous demonstrated interest in Star Trek that I can remember has spontaneously informed me about the casting of Korean-born John Cho as Sulu (in the movie filming next month for release next year). This actor is so old… he’s on laserdisc, but my movie-going history is apparently inadequate for having skipped Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

24 October 2007

Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook (via, Microsoft press release). Microsoft had already contracted to deliver advertising to Facebook users domestically before I joined the social networking site. Microsoft’s pitch to advertisers.

23 October 2007

Create a Photo Collage Using Pictures of Your Facebook Friends (via). Two question marks spoil my own grid view. There’s already so many blogs about Facebook (Inside, All, Observer, Talk, Book, Town) that there’s a Digg-like aggregator. I abandoned Digg for Reddit a while ago.

22 October 2007

The less said the better.

I’ve been using vdict.com for my attempts to comprehend Vietnamese but the site’s translation feature is ill-equipped to handle the txtspk version I found, uh, somewhere, of some song lyrics. Actually, the free machine translation is not so hot on the unabbreviated, diacritic-equipped lyrics themselves, either. Video of Look to the Future on YouTube allows the viewer to follow along with the lyrics but isn’t too forthcoming on the theme of the song.

In 1976, vaccination with the swine flu vaccine was associated with getting GBS. Several studies have been done to evaluate if other flu vaccines since 1976 were associated with GBS. Only one of the studies showed an association. That study suggested that one person out of 1 million vaccinated persons may be at risk of GBS associated with the vaccine. I do not counsel anyone to avoid the flu shot. But I have no desire to risk experiencing GBS a second time.

There was a disabled tour bus blocking both lanes of the ramp to Van Dorn Street from the eastbound lanes of Duke Street this evening. Because of my knowledge of local streets obtained by riding the 25B I knew that Reynolds Street, which serves an otherwise uninteresting lineup of apartments and condominiums, was a through route to Edsall Road. Whoo-hoo! Shaved some tenths of a mile off of using Pickett Street.

21 October 2007

The operation of Landmark’s E Street Cinema early on a Sunday morning like today’s does not reward the early or even the punctual… Ack! Thbbbt! The less said about its clientele at that hour the better. I was just happy I had finally figured out the nearest exit from the subway to reach the theater. The wait while concession stand workers insisted that the place was closed as the time for the first scheduled screening of Into the Wild passed was worth it, the praise received for Lars and the Real Girl (Kenneth Turan for NPR, Bob Mondello for NPR) is deserved.

2nd Night Added To Menagerie Screenings.

20 October 2007

A photographer representing the Observer newspapers waits for the right moment to take a photograph of the little boy with the railroad engineer’s cap as he watches the trains on the WamaLTC display today. Her Nikon D70 and my Fujifilm FinePix S9100 turn out to have been very nearly lined up (I did not know I had her beat by 3 megapixels). I added a jack-o’-lantern and a skeleton to my name badge as my contribution to the seasonal spirit. The editor of BrickJournal took some time out of his whirlwind of a life to build a set, tell us he couldn’t tell us stuff, and otherwise have fun with his Sony Alpha 100 and the attached (75 to 300)mm zoom lens.

I wrote in French last week because I saw the chance to start the paragraph with a line of dialogue from the most recently purchased DVD (a line which, in the context of the film, is a transparent lie). Of course I cannot write in any language of the European continent without it being instantly understood by some reader or other… which is why the word in tiếng Việt for a particular human emotion has been a stumbling block to comprehension.

A naked ampersand instead of an entity reference 2 days ago ruined the well-formedness of my XML and the feed reader in my Facebook stopped updating, all fixed now.

19 October 2007

Disappointed? The WamaLTC display tomorrow at the Autumn Adventure at Reston Town Center will be small like last year’s. It’s just the nature of the space. But it’ll be a spooky small display! WamaLTC plans more displays almost every weekend in November. I may even participate in some of them.

18 October 2007

B&H Photo-Video, a world famous camera store known for the traditional Hasidic dress worn by many of its employees, has agreed to pay $4.3 million to settle a discrimination case. (via).

Readers who do not recognize a word in these multilingual pages can, if I have used the lang attribute to set the value of the language of the element properly, use SeaMonkey and Firefox (but not Camino) to expose that value and at least learn the language in which I am writing down to the individual word. I have written previously that Safari does not understand language-specific quotation marks so it follows that it is incapable of exposing the language of an element. Funny: I neglected to provide the atttribute for any of the times I used Hangul below (all fixed now, and on the home page too).

17 October 2007

The door was open so I saw the aforementioned couch today. It’s red.

I use the phrase published author (1, 2, 3, 4) as a way of needling a person who cannot be fairly described that way (that is, aside from a letter to the editor 7 years ago). With any luck, a former reader. A legal thriller set in the world of patent law was someone else’s first novel published last year, although the description at Amazon doesn’t mention any murders, so how exciting can it be…

Je ne connais pas cette fille. Ou sa cousine. Ou ces candidats pour le site Web plus tôt mentionné. Circulez, rien à voir ici, il n’ya pas de yêu pour moi. Je ne m’attendais pas à écrire l’ensemble de ce paragraphe en français. On ne peut que deviner à quel horreur aurait été si j’avais utilisé Google Translate pour traduire en coréen.

The ninth issue of BrickJournal is the last to be free (website signup required, so I’ll pass).

Bob Dylan and me… separated at birth? Except for the smoking, obviously. An offbeat suggestion from a new correspondent.

16 October 2007

Maybe it’s not a good idea to park on the corner where the bus turns…? I still don’t have a photograph of the new scheme for the local cruisers which would be suitable for designing a sticker.

Mac OS X Leopard available on October 26th.

This video has been removed by the user. The entry at Patently-O that I wrote about earlier this month is gone, too. The performer may have felt like a rock star receiving all those e-mails from an appreciative audience but perhaps her employer had a second opinion on the subject. The Patently-O author forgets that his RSS feed is published elsewhere and that other bloggers wrote about her at the time.

15 October 2007

From earlier this month: Slashdot Turns 10 But You Get The Presents . I’ve been reading the site for at least 6 years and it’s been the top link on my Diversions page for a long time. A person can keep sufficiently busy studying and traveling and eating and moving couches along public sidewalks or whatever as to have never heard of it. Fortunately for a person like that the dot-com redirects to the proper domain.

If one believes the ever-reliable WikiPedia, my use of the phrase I ate my own dog food to describe the purchase of a patented product (its use mentioned earlier) is not so far off the mark.

14 October 2007

My foray into site syndication has suitably impressed enough of the attendees at the WAMALUG meeting today that I have created an RSS feed for the WamaLTC site.

The webmaster for WAMALUG was so impressed with the models for sale at BrickGun that he missed the repeated references to being able to build only one model at a time with any kit which contains instructions for multiple models. Ha-ha, he paid $9.99 more to get the box with the three pictures!

Based on this graphic maybe there’s other social networking sites I should be considering.

This is why I am unlikely to buy a prime lens to achieve the normal view with the APS-C sized sensor in my digital SLR.

13 October 2007

I thought I could sit at the back of the bus to Ballston and snooze for an hour… when I began to realize that a passenger was calling out the turns. I’m awake now.

The windows on a New Flyer D40LFR apparently aren’t easy to open (they’re supposed to tilt in) if you have never done it before. Six minutes late leaving Tysons Corner Center and 20 minutes late arriving at Franconia-Springfield Station and no one with Fairfax Connector other than our driver is concerned. No complaint from me, either.

USF Rumbles Past UCF Knights, 64-12. I’m told that the University of South Florida has a football program which started from nothing 10 years ago. There’s a significant number of colleagues who graduated from USF so I’m probably not done hearing about the Bulls. Uh-oh, looks like there’s at least one who graduated from UCF.

The webmaster for WAMALUG sees an opportunity to start his own LEGO® fest in the absence of the established event in this area next year.

12 October 2007

Google’s translation tool doesn’t include Vietnamese as an option in either direction. Online translators aren’t able to do much without the proper diacritics anyway. Of course Mac OS X provides tools for the writing of Vietnamese.

11 October 2007

I’ve only been on Facebook for a month, but I’m going to guess this never happens.

10 October 2007

Who says that the local bus systems are unreliable? Waiting for the eastbound 29N at Fairfax Circle for 25 minutes under a UV index 2 sun on a Saturday was not so bad. Waiting for a northbound 401 at the Franconia-Springfield Station for 75 minutes while one damn smoker after another lit up… I am not happy with my customer experience with the Fairfax Connector this evening. Eh, it was only $1.

09 October 2007

As someone who owns, er, multiple cameras (including the model which is the target for focusing speed in the new A700) I am disappointed that my newest Facebook friend has no profile photograph.

My Yahoo! Mail server lost its Beta status today and the Send button wasn’t clickable (hovering over it activated the Attach button instead). Keyboard shortcut Control-Enter to the rescue!

The Future of Mirror Drive Door Power Macs in the Age of Leopard (speculation as to the exact release date later this month).

08 October 2007

I took advantage of a UV index 0 cloud cover with fog this morning to find out how long it would take if I was told to go home again. When I drove this route on Saturday, it took 13 minutes to go 4.2 miles; as a pedestrian today, it took me 80 minutes door-to-door. National Preparedness Month was last month, though.

Tangled Up is the name of the album due November 19th. Their MySpace page refers to Jack Kerouac and On the Road , recently honored on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication. The exhibition of the scroll manuscript in Lowell, Massachusetts is through Sunday.

07 October 2007

I am Andrea. You must be Christine. The ship’s nurse is right to be suspicious of Andrea. She is apparently self-aware as an android of limited programming, but when Dr. Korby makes an android duplicate of Captain Kirk, the process requires the existing human captain as input. Was there a human Andrea (however old and injured upon reaching the surface of Exo III) that the researcher neglected to mention to his fiancée who served as input to the duplicating process? Did he specify certain preferred, ah, physical qualities in replacing her before allowing the original to flatline? The substitute Kirk must also be self-aware as an android, he certainly didn’t get the idea that kissing was illogical from the very human captain’s thinking. Asking questions is one of the side effects of watching these episodes over and over, another is noticing background details like this extra of unknown Asian ethnicity in a Sciences uniform attending the wedding in Balance of Terror.

Hiring Efforts Are Not Sufficient to Reduce the Patent Application Backlog is the title of report GAO-07-1102 dated September 4, 2007.

Another drawback to my sticking with Panther: in the most recent version of iChat, I could be displaying as my status the track currently playing in iTunes. Wait, what’s the benefit of that again? My friends on Facebook know what I like to listen to. I have more than the one friend at Facebook but not enough to play The Friend Game.

06 October 2007

The AMC Hoffman Center 22 is one of the theaters which will be presenting the remastered Star Trek episode The Menagerie on the big screen on November 13th for $12.50 (via).

05 October 2007

I can just see how a plan by Metro to no longer charge for SmarTrip cards by next year would lead penny-pinching seniors to hold off on letting go of $5 to have one now. It’s not clear why WJLA’s coverage suggests that only needy riders would be eligible for the free SmarTrip cards once the paper transfers are eliminated.

In the wake of last Saturday’s head-turning incident with Chevy’s budget supercar (a 2004 manual transmission convertible in red was available for thirty-six thousand at the Rockville Carmax earlier this week, er, not that I was looking) I have been trying to reassure myself and others that I don’t envy people with fancy cars, while hoping no one remembers my extreme comfort in the driver’s seat of an Audi S4 6½ years ago. Previous such protestations: 1, 2. Then someone will bring up the long-standing, long-delayed plan to replace the computers on the first floor with something a little more capable. You got me, I just have different priorities. I don’t buy cheap chairs, either.

04 October 2007

Ever since I changed my sex on Facebook from indeterminate to Male (I was tired of reading Constantine has tagged themself… ) I’ve noticed that the advertising has been including a lot more of the hot. The advertisers are taking a risk because I haven’t identified what I’m interested in. Strange that there’s no equally easy way to indicate whether one is a smoker or not. MySpace would appear to make it easy to position oneself as a smoker or as a drinker (I haven’t signed up but I can guess from some of the profiles I’ve looked at). Time to edit my profile…

Here’s a pejorative term for a person with the mindset to read this site with Kremlinological attention every day.

I have removed the Dean Edwards IE7 solution installed yesterday but left the behavior for the <q> element in place. The site is harder to read without the quotation marks, so that fix is important. Use of the actual Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows 7 by visitors here is picking up, but I have no access to it for testing.

03 October 2007

Twenty years ago today I was sitting down in my first apartment across from my Sony Profeel component television with the 19″ screen and Sony BetaHiFi videocassette recorder to watch something new billing itself as Star Trek The Next Generation.

I am trying the Dean Edwards IE7 solution (perhaps temporarily) because I was appalled to discover there is still a reader who insists on using Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows 6 to visit these pages. I wrote about this attempt to make the ancient browser behave 3½ years ago. So far it does not correct the styling on internal anchors as visited, nor supply the graphics specified by the content: declarations, but quotation marks do now show up as open-quote and close-quote. Whether adding another behavior to make the characters for the <q> element show up makes the page easier or harder to read is not clear, I certainly don’t visit this site using that browser. Another solution from Edwards might be fun to use but Browse Happy has not been updated to link to SeaMonkey.

02 October 2007

Local vendors of Gerolsteiner bottled water have switched from glass bottles to plastic bottles.

Intellectual property attorney performs a song loaded with terms from patent law and the response so far has been slow. The lyrics do not appear to be 100% faithful to the performance, but the differences are original to those found on the YouTube page.

01 October 2007

The Future of Trains. LEGO® Trains, that is.

Nope, no misinterpretation, I did read the two letters in the license plate, after all, hmm-hm-hmm, this is me humming Star Trek music themes while not answering your questions. In my work, CT stands for computed tomography.

WamaLTC plans a display on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at the Autumn Adventure at Reston Town Center in Reston, Virginia. It’ll be a small display. I didn’t notice an admission fee last year, I hope that’s just for parents who want a child to participate in the events and not for people who only want to eyeball the spooky MOCs. Last year’s display.

The Director of Development for the Fargo-Moorhead Area Foundation has supplied a pic for his Facebook profile. There are parents on Facebook (another story).

Leopard is expected to demand 867 MHz processors at a minimum (via). Those of you with 400 MHz systems, please, stop trying to make it sound like you’re going to upgrade any day now.

30 September 2007

I have looked again at the second paragraph of yesterday’s post, and still cannot see any reference to the sex of the driver. Something about the tone of my writing has set off the alarms and earned me some questions which (unlike in the comics) I declined to answer. Nope, no reference in the post for August 22nd, either. (Compare with, for example, the post for August 24th.) Imagine the headache if I did have comments enabled here.

For my birthday I took HD’s advice to why not take a crazy chance and sent out a few friend requests on Facebook. Whee! Okay, so only one recipient has confirmed. Informative.

29 September 2007

Hooray for Borders Books and Music #0045 at the Crossroads Center. I used to visit that location more when I lived in Arlington and was still buying stuff regularly and not watching my mileage. Today, their stock of new DVD titles included the one I have been looking for, which means the list can be updated for the first time in over 9 months. The director does his commentary in English, for the first time. Yay for VLC, too. The platter might say The Valet but the disc’s name in the Finder is LA_DOUBLURE (the name of the movie in France).

As predicted, I was in the neighborhood, standing in the street next to my Focus a little after four o’clock, getting ready to leave, when… well, these are my notes from the scene: That sure looks like [initials redacted] driving the red Corvette convertible w/ red DC tags but that’s not possible right? Maybe I wasn’t wearing my glasses and misinterpreted the hair color and the hairstyle and the eyes-forward stare… but one lane isn’t all that far for me to see without them. Across a four-lane intersection, ok, maybe that was a mistaken identification on August 23rd. Hmm.

28 September 2007

I am ignoring my municipality’s contribution to culture this weekend, the First Annual Alexandria International Film Festival, even though I might very well be in the neighborhood.

27 September 2007

Self-expression doesn’t seem to be one of your weaknesses was the right quote at the right time but I got the last word wrong. :-( The experienced admiral reacted to the feisty lieutenant using the word problems.

Movin’ on up… Serbia now at 79 in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index for 2007 (at 90 last year, 97 in 2005).

Tatars Chafe at What the Terrible Ivan Started is the article on the last-ditch addition of Cyrillic letters for the Tatar language that The New York Times has given up on charging you to read.

The My Yahoo! page only shows the <title> elements of feeds, this webpage offers a more complete view.

Ana Ivanović wears platform-soled pumps with a four-inch heel for UNICEF, no one else in the room has a chance! But she can fit into a Peugeot 207. Mmm, Peugeots.

26 September 2007

I expressed no interest in HD radio last January but WAMU has been touting its HD offerings for a while and now Ford announces that HD Digital Radio™ can be installed on most currently-owned vehicles built in model years 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The reporting by El Pais is attracting attention on this side of the Atlantic.

Ana Ivanović (or her publicist) buys books. I enjoyed the movie adaptation of Touching the Void not least because the two protagonists react in an entirely secular manner to their predicaments.

Kottke links yesterday to the August 12th article in The New York Times about the Clearview font which I linked to on the day of publication. He’s a busy guy with a new baby, so he may be forgiven for not linking to his previous mention of the font.

25 September 2007

There is now an RSS feed for these Dispatches. The description I linked to yesterday of Google using such a feed for more frequent updates tempted me into exploring a web technology I’d previously ignored here. A while back, when my updates were less frequent, a feed was suggested (quickly checking the suggester’s website to make sure he doesn’t have a feed yet, whew, he doesn’t) to make keeping up easier. Ha, I’ve added my feed to My Yahoo! page! The XML file is written by hand in BBEdit for now, which takes me back to the days of using CuteHTML to write HTML, with closing tags manually and everything. Currently the feed validates. That link to the Feed Validator in the footer and autodiscovery <link> elements (Safari started responding to those with 10.4) in the <head> element will slowly propagate to other pages as they are updated.

When I was much, much younger and newly arrived in this commonwealth, I exhausted the stock of books at the Woodrow Wilson Library in the Fairfax County Public Library system which related to the next big thing (SSTs) and to the great mystery of the age (UFOs). The one never happened (except for the Concorde, now only fit for museums) and the other turns out to have been equally irrelevant and in one instance a massive misunderstanding.

24 September 2007

I searched Google for spencer rezkalla and my Build page is the third hit. He needs to do more self-promotion. ;-) A random blog found in the image search results for the same search term lists him, misterzumbi, and Pierre Normandin as great car builders.

I commented on the Google finding the addition of Hangul to my home page after a week, people are now expecting updates to the search index after a few minutes (via).

23 September 2007

I like your glasses! Yeah, I get it, I wear old people’s sunglasses. (I was wearing a frameless older style no longer in the current selection of Solar Shield products which fit over prescription eyeglasses while driving the Focus.) I would find you two bouncy young’uns more interesting if you weren’t smoking.

A nice McDonald’s brought in by I-dunno-who. Gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would find the writing of the webmaster for WAMALUG annoying.

I have a reader who thinks the news that Charlie Rose has a website which was revamped starting in April (discussed at MetaFilter last month) deserves more attention, even though I skipped the article about him in the September 1993 issue of Vanity Fair I was flipping through earlier this month prior to tossing it. I barely have the patience to let a video found on YouTube play to the end as it is, although if you are pretty, that helps (via).

The scribbler in me enjoys The Conscience of the King episode of Star Trek because Captain Kirk manually uses a knob to open a door that swings. My brother uses the word to describe people who obsess over the little details, oddities, continuity slips, contradictions, anachronisms and the like of the series. The Captain is not fazed by his visit to a civilian’s house which is equipped with the technology of a previous century.

22 September 2007

Kids love the yellow car. The Focus was going through the car wash this morning and a little girl, she couldn’t have been more than four, told her father that’s what she wanted when she was sixteen. A yellow car? No, a Ford Focus ZX5. I suppose I should be scared her agenda is set so far in advance…

…but Ford is dropping the hatchbacks for the 2008 model year. Boo.

So I’m driving south along Backlick Road approaching Braddock Road this afternoon and pass a Fairfax Connector 401. I appreciate the upright seating posture in the Focus but even so the side windows don’t let me see all that high up through the driver’s window of a New Flyer D40LFR and all I can see is a trim figure and some wrist jewelry. You don’t suppose it was her driving the southbound bus that leaves Tysons Corner Center at 1:05 p.m.? Despite the wasteful trip to the car wash and the library and the mall, the Focus is down to 5.1 miles a day.

21 September 2007

Another franchise food place has opened near where I work, and the Robeks Juice location is closer than the Starbucks. The menu is full of laudatory adjectives but the site (and its twin) is lacking specific nutritional information. Who does this remind me of? Argh, Pinkberry has switched to PHP in the meantime. It’s been a good long time since I ate peanut butter cookies…

20 September 2007

Resolved (07.79), that the Serbian National Registry of Internet Domain Names, and the Government of Montenegro, work to complete the transition from the .YU domain to the .RS and .ME domains, so that it may be removed from the DNS root zone no later than 30 September 2009 (via, via, via).

Uncle Grambo’s most recent post at whatevs.org was the day before I started the daily blogging 6 weeks ago. Coincidence, or something more?

Should I be window shopping instead of reducing my impact (via)?

19 September 2007

Constantine is using power tools.

18 September 2007

I am not the first Hannaher to use the word insane to describe someone (I meant it endearingly but that makes no difference now). Sole result for hannaher on searching the pre-1981 New York Times. (The sole result for a post-1980 search is the political cousin and requires payment to view.)

The list of stations carrying the remastered version of Star Trek has been updated to list WDCA-20. Yay.

When I visited the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility in 1986 and discovered that the Smithsonian had the Paramount miniature of the Klingon vessel in a cabinet (it later went to the Planet Hollywood which was downtown in the District, or not), I had only recently heard of the fate of the Galileo shuttlecraft set piece. Photographs of its dilapidated condition in storage and as displayed at a convention that year.

The DVD for The Valet is expected this month, just… not today. Boo.

17 September 2007

When you say that Jelena Janković is pretty and I cover my face with my hands and say What a nose! I’m not… disagreeing, exactly.

I have updated the WamaLTC site to add a page for the display this past weekend (with link to moderated Brickshelf folder) and add a link on the Build page there to instructions for a GG-1 that I linked to earlier. The website for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum did identify our presence among the attractions, but only on a special page that I completely missed because it was the target of a large graphic in the upper left corner of the home page. :-\ So much for home page usability.

I did observe one visitor carrying an iPhone instead of a child.

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight (via). The report on new Cyrillic letters I wrote about 2 years ago should be part of the archives available for free.

16 September 2007

No photograph of a mother and child looking at the display this time, there was never any room inside the layout for that perspective. Instead, Bob builds his water tower early on Saturday morning with the sunlight coming through the roundhouse windows and shining on the suburban lineup of Seven-Eleven, KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s. The little story I created with the lady in the black Mustang GT who took the curve too fast (note the Alexandria Fire-EMS Medic unit and the Exxon station’s tow truck on the scene, I later moved the Baltimore County Police cruiser closer for traffic management) went over well, too. I stood for six hours straight on Saturday until the WPOC-FM (a country music station in Baltimore) people left and I could grab a chair from their vacated table. Some special visitors got a minifig emblazoned with the WamaLTC shield, but no one I know showed up. :-( The Escape got 29.82 mpg in 3 days of driving to Baltimore and back after 3½ weeks unused. I say, let that check engine light blink! The reopening of the Frederick Douglass Bridge last month helped keep the distance traveled down to 55 miles each way.

15 September 2007

I am getting good name recognition on the three buildings in restaurant row despite the lack of stickers or other signage. With the right perceptive visitor I got name recognition on the DASH bus! The eight other contributors to the display have their own metrics of satisfaction. Some visitors seemed familiar from the last time WamaLTC displayed in this location.

14 September 2007

Bored? Look for WamaLTC’s display in Bay 15 of the roundhouse of the B & O Railroad Museum this weekend.

Another reason not to buy an iPod: the new iPod models require Tiger (actually 10.4.8).

I have been visiting the web site discussed in this MetaFilter thread and was wondering where the writer found his pictures of the head tilts and the hand signs and the barely-there facial hairs and the body exposure and I realized he couldn’t be trolling just ordinary photo sharing sites (like Maj just for example), he needed to be visiting a site like this which concentrates what he’s looking for. The perspective on clubbing from the other side has led one anonymous blogger to becoming a published author.

13 September 2007

From 2 days ago: The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) today adopted rules to ensure all cable subscribers, including those with analog TV sets, can view broadcast television after the transition to digital television occurs on February 17, 2009. The press release does not appear to address subscribers to satellite services.

Are you talking to me? I listed the 1998 version of The Parent Trap as a Favorite Movie, and Girls Aloud is now listed as Favorite Music. Because Facebook is available to anyone with an e-mail address, it’s important to keep in mind that users can reject friend requests and block unwanted users.

12 September 2007

I removed the words among those that from yesterday’s entry. My convoluted syntax can get to me, too.

A gallery of images comparing the special effects shots in Star Trek, original and remastered. I can see where high-definition television could have an appeal, for some people. Update from 3 years ago regarding digital television: The final transition is February 2009. At that point, broadcasting the current analog channels will end and that spectrum will be put to other uses.

The Apple Made on a Mac web badge has changed, again. Happy Mac is back! There have been so many of these badges that Apple gave it the filename with a date in it (about one month after I last mentioned them).

The Yahoo! Photos service is ending, I will have to edit the WamaLTC pages which link there (1, 2). A Facebook photo album can be viewed by anybody with the right link (whew, the tags with the names cannot).

11 September 2007

Once again I leave the heavy thinking to others.

A new reader of these here Dispatches, perhaps reacting to my prediction of friendlessness, has friended me at Facebook. People my age (based on a sample of one besides myself) tend to think of a friend as someone you could call from a police lockup and not hear click *dial tone* so this social networking version of friend is… different. So, thank you, Facebook now tells me You have 1 friend.

Vanessa Hudgen’s compact disc V was one of the titles I purchased while Tower Records was liquidating last year and the tracks haven’t left much of an impression on me. However, her name is in the air again because of a certain photograph making the rounds. In some of the other candids where she wears more clothing, it’s apparent that her panties have a famous bunny logo on them. In other words, she’s an 18 year-old who knows class. (The original set of dolls for High School Musical is now discounted 35% at the favorite Minnesota-based retailer.)

10 September 2007

I can remember visiting the prototype for my McDonald’s in LEGO® elements (it’s been a decade or more, surely, and even so it wasn’t always to eat, since the most notorious visit has to be when I wanted a lot of straws for a high school project and just opened the lid and reached into the dispenser to grab handfuls) but a visit to a Kentucky Fried Chicken place… the sixties? I wasn’t part of a finger-lickin’ family. So maybe attendees at the WAMALUG meeting were skeptical when I joked that I might build a KFC next. Yet there I was yesterday circling the location at 6227 Little River Turnpike (built on the site previously occupied by a Roy Rogers) seeing how I might compress it to a 32×32 baseplate’s size (actually it’s pretty square already). Ha-ha, classic, this location has yet to update its graphics. The MOC has already been through a number of bottom-to-top revisions, and currently is equipped with actual minifig-sized doors and a basic interior (suggested by photographs at a remodeling company’s website as I have no plans to step inside). See it this weekend, if you want.

The announcement of the iPod touch included the statement that it would ship later this month. Accordingly, it was inappropriate for anyone (especially users of OS9) to be wandering into the Pentagon City Apple Store this past weekend looking for it. (There will be a 16 GB model, so there.) I was in the Tysons Corner Center Apple Store on my way from the bus stop to the LEGO® Store (the weekend before the announcement) but made only a few keypresses on the new keyboard, checked the screen resolutions of the notebook computers, and noted that BBEdit was not among the boxed software for sale before leaving.

Facebook.com isn’t kidding about supporting only Firefox and Safari on the Mac, I was unable to upload a profile photograph using SeaMonkey or Camino as the checkbox interface element was not operational. I’ve tried to avoid supplying information which isn’t found somewhere on this website, although I was tempted to list Girls Aloud in the Favorite Music category ( TMI , some might think). Still no name for their next album…

09 September 2007

I wore this badge to the WAMALUG meeting yesterday. The glowering result of the earlier brick modification trying to balance atop the name brick from a BrickFest™ event was supposed to represent me, camera in hand. The McDonald’s creation was well received, the height from baseplate to roof edge is the same as on my earlier Pizza Hut creation. It should be part of the display at the Kids Fest in the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore this weekend. If only there were instructions for this Citroën DS!

I missed it last week: Sony announced an A700 model of digital SLR camera. I’ve actually used my digital SLR more recently than I might have supposed and I’ll admit it worked well enough taking photographs of large things from eye level, it’s just that I don’t do that so often these days. A replacement is not on the list of things to do should you happen to have money. New apparel for the train club is on the list, however, in case someone never gets around to it. I was unfair earlier: the page for LEGO® at scrope.com was updated in June for the display at the store in Potomac Mills Mall.

The tennis player that went unnamed when I contemplated the Serbs playing at the U.S. Open reached the final in mens singles today. Update: Đoković has lost.

08 September 2007

The connection of The Great Allegheny Passage to the C&O Canal Towpath last year created a continuous and non-motorized corridor between Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Four ethnicities are identified as providing the labor for the construction of the canal which extends from Georgetown in the District to Cumberland, Maryland.

Ack! I was unprepared for three multi-page illustrations by Robert Ullman in the fall issue of the alumni magazine. Thankfully (from the publisher’s perspective) all the college students are depicted as clothed.

Yesterday, that’s 4 weeks of daily blogging right there.

07 September 2007

A Starbucks Coffee place has opened around the corner from where I work. Various colleagues have been awaiting the day, but not me. One might note that my presence at the outlet located in the Carson Town Center on the day that was not all it could have been is not identified among the culinary adventures for that week; in the absence of peer pressure, I did not place an order there (I didn’t know about Ethos Water then) and spent most of the time outdoors seeking shade on an afternoon when my UV meter gave its maximum reading.

Just another social networking site to keep track of.

I deny that the recent revision of Blade Runner or the latest remake of a bodysnatching premise has anything to do with my train of thought these days. But it would explain much.

06 September 2007

Gecko is Gecko.

The Flushing Meadows-Corona Park World’s Fair Association reports on The State of the Park 2007 including the assault near the Unisphere last December on a Korean engineering student which left him comatose. Police claim to have captured the assailants (in January).

My local municipality has had a Public Defender Office for 20 years (list of such offices in the state). Since 2005 certification of attorneys is through the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission ( VAIDC ). The Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of Virginia was established in 2001.

Oh, and one more thing… Google has already read my home page and I am now the only result for a search on the jamo for Kan-seu-teon-ta-in He-na-heor.

05 September 2007

When did the iPod Nano get fat? That would be today. Some people try to call it stubby. Too small for my library; the 80 GB iPod Classic would be excess. I still can’t develop any interest in having a portable music player. Listening to the theme song from Enterprise repeatedly (at the end of a Star Trek compilation CD I made some time ago and left in the 6-disc changer of the Focus) has led to the song growing on me, though. Is there an emoticon for sheepish admission?

A list of MetaFilter in-jokes. I have fallen behind in implementing these here.

A note to the U.S. Open and its technology partner IBM: demanding Mozilla 1.7.5 and higher from a visitor using SeaMonkey is ridiculous. The last release branded Mozilla was 1.7.13 more than a year ago and SeaMonkey is the browser suite which uses Gecko 1.8+. So I’m following the action in tonight’s match between Jelena Janković and Venus Williams using the live comments at the Yahoo! UK & Ireland Eurosport site (Janković has lost).

04 September 2007

One might as well eat a donut. Gotta watch those serving sizes, though.

03 September 2007

A published author takes advantage of the long weekend to revise the appearance of his blog. A published artist celebrates blogging at least one sketch of a lass whether dressed or not every day last month. Me, I started making a dent in some of those previously mentioned piles. This photograph has been spared the passage from one of those piles into the large garbage bag long enough to be scanned. It’s a souvenir of a visit to the Star Trek Earth Tour at Kings Dominion on 20 July 1993. I seem to be looking directly at the camera, gesturing emphatically (that is, too quickly for the shutter speed in use), probably trying to say Engage! or something. That expression turns out to be not original to Captain Picard on Star Trek The Next Generation because I discovered earlier this weekend upon the n-th playback of the first pilot that Captain Pike said it first.

02 September 2007

I expect I’ll exhibit my McDonald’s creation at the WAMALUG meeting this upcoming Saturday. The bus riding I’ve done this weekend has reminded me that there’s a great variety of building styles for this brand locally. I’m happy to have chosen as my prototype a location with a long heritage and an iconic look.

Ana Ivanovic by robbiesaurus (Some rights reserved.)

My attention was drawn to the previously mentioned sports event on the basis of searching for serbia at Google News (sometimes I type in srbija instead) as I skip the sports sections of the local free tabloid and the local 35¢ broadsheet and haven’t watched television in 16 months. The USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is just north of the Unisphere and a little farther north of my first neighborhood (the proximity of the first neighborhood to the site of the 1964-65 World’s Fair: previously mentioned). Ana Ivanović lost today to Venus Williams, 6:4, 6:2 (at six-foot-one and 159 pounds, Ivanović could obviously defeat me at anything physical without breaking a sweat). Celebrity-watching at Flushing Meadows. Robbiesaurus’ Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT isn‘t good enough to recognize anyone in Arthur Ashe Stadium today (there’s also a lot more seats to the place).

Plainly I must have zoned out when my mother talked earlier this year about how a hot Serbian athlete had hit the national press. Maybe I don’t trust her judgment on these matters.

01 September 2007

I took the opportunity today to use the Fairfax Connector to return from some shopping at Tysons Corner Center (double stamps at the LEGO® store!) and rode the new low-floor 40-foot New Flyer bus I mentioned earlier. The farebox is turned from its usual orientation on other buses in the fleet so that one is led to sidle up to the driver… oh, hello, there’s something off-kilter when the driver is prettier than any of the passengers. That never happens on a Metrobus.

31 August 2007

Jack Shafer writing for Slate makes fun of the advertising insert in Thursday’s Post but what caught my eye as I flipped through it in the minutes before the recycling truck arrived was the report on the establishment of a symbol for the ruble (the search has been going on for a while and the final selection is expected shortly). When the Central Bank of the Russian Federation manages to establish a Unicode codepoint for it, then let me know. By the way, there’s a Serbian substitute for fantasizing about the Russian advertising model for Canon, Maria Sharapova: 19 year-old Ana Ivanović. Someone writes her diary bilingually, in latinica unfortunately. There’s also Jelena Janković, who’s 22. Then there’s some man who hasn’t embraced the đ in his name, he’s 20. The 2007 U.S. Open started this week, I’m led to believe it’s some form of sports event.

30 August 2007

LEGOFan.org is in a rebuilding process since our server crashed last year. At least the trouble-prone site no longer has a brain-dead reaction to leaving off the www.

The description of seventeenth and eighteenth century life in Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England is a useful antidote to the idea that our current situation is one of burdensome regulation (via).

17 USC § 107 comment: Hillary Duff’s appearance on behalf of milk production in this country 4 years ago included fewer words; her name wasn’t even included in the copy (only in the tagline with the copyright notice). Image scanned from a page out of a magazine found placed in the back of The Milk Mustache Book on the third floor; if I ever saw the one by that redheaded contemporary, though, I didn’t keep it. You want one of your own? Someone is selling one on eBay!

Holy Cow is right, for a certain segment of the population, it doesn’t get better than this. Wait a minute… if that’s the sun behind Cassandra Cat, aren’t the shadows pointing the wrong direction???

29 August 2007

Whew! I’m only guilty of a few of the clichés on this list of Blog Cheese.

I’m going to go with my guide’s suggestion because uniquely named is where I’m at. It’s part of the site branding. V. Carl Hamacher is the one who needs to find a better transliterator (look for section 6.1).

28 August 2007

IM IN UR HANGUL ROMANIZING UR NAME. Er, no, I’m going the other way. Let’s try this: 콘스탄타인 해나헐. My guide says that the Han character I was using earlier better matches the pronunciation of the tradition-bound Serbian version (Ханахер) rather than how the surname is actually said among Anglophones. I’m tempted to add the syllables to the top of every page here with the Cyrillic version to be tri-alphabetical. Still no word on whether it means something terrible.

(Actually my guide suggested 칸스턴타인 for the first name, but Google yields no results for those syllables. I replaced the first syllable using the name of a movie [콘스탄틴] from two years ago and retained the last two suggested syllables on the basis of the name of an actor.)

Do I have a facial expression ? Considering the photographs taken of me on the trip to Los Angeles the suggestion is made (by Господин Кевин Пјо) that I tend not to face the camera directly but rather turn a little to show one ear more than the other. When I wield the camera, the results are mixed, but take another look at the photograph of me taken by another, in the Grand Canyon.

The logo which greets me when I boot my pathetic old notebook computer is now history.

27 August 2007

To select an item in the Dock, just click its icon. Once. ;-)

It starts like this… a little rubbing with a metal polish to remove the printing on a LEGO® minifig torso. That’s just a tiny brick modification, right? Nothing that would sully my reputation, right, eh, beyond where my reputation for applying stickers has brought me to, that is. I was trying to come up with a sig fig for myself (one approach to such customization) and couldn’t locate any plain black or gray minifig torso elements to represent my routine casual attire these days.

I have a Pizza Hut and an Exxon station built so why not a McDonald’s (similar lineup seen at last year’s NMRA display)? I have based my creation on a compression of the long-standing prototype at 6302 Little River Turnpike (company map misplaces the location). The photograph shows its appearance in October of 2001. Our participation in the Kids Fest at the B&O Railroad Museum is less than 3 weeks away.

26 August 2007

I can also see how the transliteration of my family name could be 하나헬.

Slacktivist writes about collaborative journalism as if it’s not already happening (international edition).

I mention HD from time to time but the appeal of some of the more recent would-be starlets escapes me. One of the benefits of avoiding television, I suppose. Slack-jawed bloggers are reacting to the Got Milk? appearance of Hayden Panettiere (The Superficial, Oliver Willis, AdRants) but this is her MySpace blog entry on the subject (written in the third person). Investigative journalism at its finest!

25 August 2007

Reactions to last month’s report regarding laser printer toner dispersal: Slashdot, ars technica (follow up). What it says about the researchers’ procedures that the hp laserjet 4200dtn is in both the medium and high categories is not apparent.

The page for WamaLTC’s display at the store in June and the page for WamaLTC’s display at the church earlier this month. Now if only someone would dig up images from the meeting at Tom’s house in May last year and from the show in April last year.

If you are not prepared to trust the quality of the list of English Names in Korean based in part of the names of entertainers, you can pay $50 to these people for Trusted Korean Hangul Transliteration. The DVD of the movie I saw last March was on the shelf of the local Minnesota-based retailer and the copy on the jacket placed the action along the Han River, which means I have the first syllable of the family name: 한. Maybe mister 케빈표 will tell me if 코니시단딘 한나헬 is completely wrong or means something terrible.

A new observation suggests that the Fairfax County Police cruisers are equipped with The Blade™.

Update from 3 years ago: the Gecko codebase now implements nested quotes.

24 August 2007

Just Bee Yourself says the tee… It feels like it’s been a few years since I promised myself that if I was waiting for a bus (or subway) and there was a trash can available I would pick up litter, and in all that time I can’t remember anyone asking me what I was doing or joining in or anything. This may qualify as a random fact about me.

Let us consider the plight of Rana and her need for a new apartment which involves a lot of calling and leaving her name and repeating her telephone number—on a bus full of sketchy guys.

Adjoining jurisdictions are equipping their emergency vehicles with the clear lighting I first made note of earlier this year.

When it’s this hot, I’ll wait for the CUE bus. Mmm, college students.

Metrobus is still flogging the older buses along the Alexandria-Fairfax line (route 29 K/N). That Orion VII I saw working the route earlier this week must have been a fluke.

No WamaLTC update today, I was up before five o’clock this morning. Zzz…

23 August 2007

The page for WamaLTC’s replacement of the display in the National Toy Train Museum which was installed in March.

Quotes from Dr. Strangelove come to mind quite easily. Another analysis with the one for today. Listen to Dr. Strangelove quotes. With all this information at everyone’s disposal one might wonder how About.com could get it so wrong.

22 August 2007

The story is if you know an address, you can find out what cars the owners have. Tempting. I neglected to obscure my license plates as they appear in the photograph at Flickr of the desktop wallpaper on the dual monitors at work depicting the two vehicles. Oops. If one inserts a 9 in the number of the license plate on the Focus in the right place, I’m told the result matches the birthday of… um, I don’t have any Vietnamese Unicode codepoint handy to disguise this individual’s identity, so never mind.

The page for WamaLTC’s meeting in March at Derek Schin’s house. The page for WamaLTC’s meeting in May at a location shared with WAMALUG.

21 August 2007

It’s been a month since I returned from Los Angeles and there’s only been 6 days without a post (obscure as each might be), I might be forgiven for taking a break. At least no tongues are wagging, er, that I know of. No one tells me anything.

The Escape is less fun to drive, I’ll grant that. Between the two vehicles, I am down to 13 miles/day over the past month. Not even a Hilary Duff CD playing can compensate—wait, her last album was called Dignity? Hard to believe now.

The page for WamaLTC’s display in Manassas last June. There have been no updates at scrope.com since, ahem, the meetings in May.

20 August 2007

I like my Focus… [NOT CLASSIST] …even if it doesn’t have a screen in the middle of the dashboard saying, basically, DO NOT READ THIS SCREEN. It helps to roll out of the garage with The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme) playing through the open windows.

I saw you: to the pretty lady in the silver Honda Civic ahead of me on Duke Street this afternoon, if I can see you rubbing your nose vigorously when I look at the mirror on the outside of your car, that mirror is mis-aimed. (You need to be able to see the next lane over with that mirror, not directly behind you.)

The page for WamaLTC’s display in Brunswick last May, now with thumbnails and layout image.

19 August 2007

The television looks… different without the peripherals atop it. Early this morning I dug out a powered rabbit-ear antenna from the detritus piled up on the third floor and installed it rather than adding it to the stuff (the old cellular phone and its charger) scheduled for delivery to my jurisdiction’s electronics recycling drop-off point tomorrow. Should a visitor suffer from television deprivation, and I don’t know anyone who does, WRC-4 and WTTG-5 came in with some degree of fidelity, the weak reception on WJLA-7 at that hour was for an extended commercial for a religiously-inspired DVD, and nothing was discernible above that. The weekend morning news on channel 4 was anchored by Korean-born, Silver Spring-raised Eun Yang, she talked about the pressures of being the child of immigrants last year.

I do not expect that the remake of Bionic Woman on NBC (which I know about because of AMC’s First Look pre-show advertising) will lead to additional lapses.

I managed to revise two of the pages at the WamaLTC site today: our display in February and our display in April.

Rob Hiassen writes today in the Baltimore Sun on the subject of vacations and ranks the advantages and disadvantages of the choice of duration. The feature may not be entirely serious: those taking a half-day are described as the most diligent and honest workers while three weeks is crazy talk and un-American. The multi-state journey in 1987 which brought me to Idaho among other places took four weeks, as it happens. I was 26¾ and had been gainfully employed for four years when I took the opportunity of a high school pal’s desire to see the Rockies again and visit some of the country’s National Parks to plan the itinerary. There was no e-mail to check but on the tenth day I found a Mountain Bell pay phone at the Phantom Ranch alongside the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and called a colleague. The colleague did not believe me when I told him where I was. In the photograph taken with an Olympus XA while we were crossing the river before reaching the ranch, I’m wearing the Ray-Ban aviators I retired 2 weeks ago (the L. L. Bean jacket of Gore-Tex® fabric hangs ready in the foyer closet). Currently, though, I am at the half-day end of the spectrum.

The whereabouts of the travel companion who took the photograph with my camera are not known.

While a local newspaper raises concerns about several local bridges, the Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Transportation reassures us on the subject of the Commonwealth’s bridges.

18 August 2007

The vinyl recording project has come to a close, 8 weeks after it began, with the importation of the tracks from Can’t Get It Back (Remix Featuring Royce Da 5′9″) by Blaque, the trio who played supporting roles in Bring It On. Their inclusion brings the iTunes library to 5999 items, 15 days, 24.48 GB. Maybe now I can start to catch up with updating the pages at the WamaLTC site.

I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum this evening, and that is not a secret. Second-billed Julia Stiles is 26, and that is not a secret, either. And yet… the AMC Theatres Guest Satisfaction Survey includes the question: why did I choose to see this movie. Hmm… it’s a mystery. (At 36, Matt Damon is too old to play Captain Kirk at the beginning of his Star Fleet career.)

It’s easy to say Replace the RTC battery and in fact I found a maintenance and service guide for the Compaq Presario 1600 Series Portable Computers which did say just that for the symptom of having to set the date and time every time I turned the computer on. I needed to remove the handrest panel, fold back the keyboard, unscrew and remove the heat spreader part, detach the upper bracket of the battery holder, and use tweezers to lift the battery out. I had to point out the proper 3V lithium replacement for the Radio Shack employee who was more interested in selling me a new phone. Too late, dude!

17 August 2007

So much for plausible deniability…

16 August 2007

The Compaq notebook computer from 1998 is no longer keeping time between sessions. I have hung on to it too long. Then again, I’m not like some people, hanging on to abandoned software running on antiquated operating systems as my sole computing resource.

Of course Mac OS X provides tools for the writing of Hangul but the stock of syllables which I can share is depleted.

The USPS Postage Rate Calculator allows one to select a province in Canada or some other international destination and obtain information on postal and shipping rates. The one would have to have access to a computer and the Internet, though. The domestic postal organization has yet to react to the split between Serbia and Montenegro last year.

I have removed the dot from yesterday’s thumbnail. The MySpace generation is used to having its photograph taken and shared.

15 August 2007

Two days ago I should have written that Internet Explorer for the Mac was able to display composed syllables. Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, to the extent that I have convenient access only to version 6, is not able to display composed syllables. Microsoft’s Global Development and Computing Portal has page after page devoted to Hangul syllables but the Korean IME for Windows doesn’t rely on the user knowing Unicode to be able to enter any of the 11,172 possible syllables.

Mister U+D45C 표 has asked for more entries on the self-portraits page. This one would have qualified if my aim had been different.

Reynard Noir: The Seedy Underworld of Shylock Fox has gone to a twice-a-week schedule, so I might as well link to the home page. The identification of the sneaker shop customer as Cassandra Cat is shaky, in my opinion.

I’ll say one thing for dance singles… it’s a lot easier to tell when the tracks stop.

14 August 2007

The page at WikiPedia for my high school is sad. No one has a vested interest in changing the page.

It is no longer safe to follow the Next Blog link at a Blogger-hosted page.

13 August 2007

Looking back, it’s funny to see how I would let a month go by without an entry. Anyway, I have recorded the last set of albums in the collection and those purchases from Best Buy for 49¢ turned out to be just as filled with pops despite never having been opened before as anything I had purchased at The Salvation Army Thrift Store in Annandale. The one unappreciated gem which awaited discovery among those later purchases was on the soundtrack for Endless Love purchased there for 78¢ on October 8, 1993: the first track by Kiss to enter my iTunes library.

I prepared the entry for August 7th by copying the characters from the WikiPedia page referenced therein. While the characters display fine in the BBEdit editing window and in a capable broswer’s viewport, what I would like is to be able to find out the Unicode codepoints for any particular Hangul character. This page helps… enough to decompose the syllables as U+3145 ㅅ U+3157 ㅗ U+3148 ㅈ and U+315C ㅜ. U+1109 and U+1169 combine in the BBEdit editing window as the syllable 소 and U+110C and U+116E combine in the BBEdit editing window as the syllable 주 but the browser still shows 소 and 주 separately. Separately in Gecko-based browsers like SeaMonkey and Firefox and Camino, that is, Safari and Internet Explorer are able to display the syllables. The Opera browser is unable to display the initial and final character forms or their position in the syllables, I should delete the application to regain some space on my startup volume. So what I really wanted was a Hangul to Unicode syllabary and it turns out that U+C18C 소 and U+C8FC 주 were the codepoints I was looking for.

12 August 2007

The New Chrysler is… brushed metal?! Ha-ha, just as Apple plans to bury brushed metal in a few months.

People are linking to an article in today’s The New York Times Magazine about Clearview, the font designed for highway signage (accompanying slideshow). You could have read about it here almost 3 years ago.

11 August 2007

See that part where I haven’t built anything in months? I am not available for custom projects. The effort to respond to strangers who e-mail my AOL IM (f/k/a Netscape) account has never been worth it. In this case, even to say no.

You need to step back. Today’s WamaLTC display of 4 hours included the contributions of eight people and proved to be the usual target of unwanted hands. By contrast with his elders, though, this 2-year-old boy taking in the view with his mom could look without touching and didn’t require the tone. The LOL moment was when I had to deal with a trio of tweens whose idea of a good time was pulling the VRE onto the main line and just as I lamented the inefficacy of our security man, yeah, he’d fallen asleep and the remote control fell from his hand and clattered to the floor. I’m so mean. ;-) Ian of the orange polo managed to stay awake the whole time. We shared the hall with the Crescent Model Railroaders who have participated in this particular event starting 4 years ago.

Would I have used the word tweens if they had not been girls? You decide.

Yesterday, I stopped by the local office of my cable company and requested a change in my subscribed services, to wit, to drop the television part and retain only the Internet connection. A couple of guys in red polos arrived this morning with instructions to change me to Limited Basic or something, but they were completely cool with removing the access to cable television programming and leaving me with just the Internet service. Each step of the way I mention that it’s been more than a year since I had a look at it (those lapses are all off-premises). The television in the kitchen was taken down earlier this year and it ended up being used as a monitor at a couple of displays. The cable to the living room television now used solely for viewing videodiscs I disconnected Thursday evening.

Yesterday also marked my succumbing to the notice received 6 months ago that Verizon Wireless will discontinue analog cellular service on February 18, 2008, by purchasing the most basic model, a Motorola W315. Eight years ago I paid Bell Atlantic Mobile $150 for the BAM-330D model by LG, its replacement came to $30. I expect my use of a mobilni for outgoing calls only to continue. FCC decision of June 15th upholds the analog cellular sunset date of February 18, 2008, after which cellular licenses may, but will no longer be required to, provide AMPS service.

10 August 2007

The Fairfax Connector has painted its New Flyer D40LFR’s in a bold scheme echoing their weak logo.

For the sort of, er, random, innocent searching that I do, Windows Live Search is completely hopeless. Not that Google’s results are any better :-).

Not a peep out of Brickshelf despite the expiration of the July 31st deadline.

08 August 2007

The Street View feature of Google Maps was extended to Los Angeles earlier this week (via Defamer, the local press reacts) and this has allowed me to identify the Beverly Hills landmark in this photograph as the City Hall. I took the photograph at the intersection of South Santa Monica Boulevard and North Canon Drive. Coverage is most comprehensive on the downtown to Santa Monica axis, follows the interstates to the south, and extends north into bits of Pasadena and Glendale—pfft, ending up on Harvey Drive just on the wrong side of the interstate from a previously mentioned eatery.

07 August 2007

You mean I can throw away all those coin wrappers I have left over from before I became a change manipulator ? MeFite says banks no longer require rolling up change.

WikiPedia is not an instruction manual but that’s what the Customs section of the article on 소주 looks like. I don’t drink, either, which puts me among a third of the U.S. population (results of annual poll and results over the years). Being sober does not explain my loquaciousness today.

06 August 2007

Last month, The Wall Street Journal decreed that blogging was 10 years old; whether that is true or not, last Friday was the seventh anniversary of my first attempt to take advantage of my ISP’s offer of 10 MB of space. I struggled for days to use the capabilities of the WEB.SiteBuilder component of Corel Wordperfect Office 8 to replace the Under Construction page. Downloading and installing GlobalScape CuteFTP 4.0 gave me a better tool to manage the files in the webspace which had started to include reactions to recently viewed movies. I managed to survive the dial-up connection and unstable Windows 98 computer enough to be putting one word after another and leaving the unruly heap of them out in public for a tiny audience. I moved to the Macintosh as a web development platform and signed up for a connection through the local cable company and even experimented with blog software but stuck with handwriting my HTML in a text editor as my wordage increased (I don’t regret that decision because programming languages and hosted databases turned out to be vulnerable and fragile). I expect that my audience has remained miniscule once one gets past all the robot crawlers and searchers for starlets and for police departments. Seven years of self-expression! The word seekrit is found in these pages (and I use it often enough in person in response to inconvenient questions) so it’s not like the casual reader could ace a friend quiz or anything. I can’t imagine, though, that it’s very hard to figure out my favorite movie. Eh, some entries are not intended to be understood as they have an audience of one. Who is Number One? (A different theory.)

The vinyl-recording project has reached the point where I have exhausted the stock of platters purchased at retail.

03 August 2007

De nada.

It’s happened a second time now, so it’s as close as anything to being guaranteed: a Fairfax City CUE bus will come along 2 minutes after I’ve given up on it for being 10 minutes late. By then I have walked halfway to the next bus stop. Grr. Still, I found what I wanted at a retailer in that area. It was time to retire the Ray Ban aviators which have been held in reserve for a while in the backpack I wear to work.

01 August 2007

Why should Chrysler owners have all the fun? The Summer issue of myFORD Owner Magazine (sadly, www. required despite the prominent use of the naked URL on the cover) arrived today almost 2 years after my qualifying purchase. There are no articles extolling slow drives through quaint sections of charming European cities in this magazine, that’s for sure. No, it’s more like How does a Crown Victoria become a Police Interceptor?

31 July 2007

I’m shocked, shocked! to find National Public Radio and Morning Edition devoting time to the career prospects of my favorite red-headed Long Islander. But then I remember that not everyone reads the same blogs… can we get a [spoilers inside] on this post, though?

30 July 2007

I find no dispatch for 24 January last year. The words for today are cryptic and variegated.

29 July 2007

The photograph is probably no good for refining my model in LEGO® elements of Alexandria’s tractor-drawn aerial ladder Truck 208 but it does confirm that my days of carrying around a film-based camera have come to a close. I bought the Fujifilm FinePix A820 just before the trip to Los Angeles to have something which could be held in the hand or stored in my suspicious fanny pack and it continues to serve in that role. Also, I dropped the Minolta Maxxum 7 and cracked the housing of the battery grip and even though I’ve glued it back together carrying it around isn’t so much fun anymore. I appreciate the wiper of my Escape staying to the sideline long enough to get this shot.

Gracenote has never heard of Charly McClain and her album Surround Me With Love. It’s safe to say that my buying albums based on the sleeve artwork is nothing new (the album was released when the performer was 25). All of it goes into iTunes because even with thirteen-and-a-half days of audio in there already, shuffle play can get repetitive.

The National Model Railroad Association convention in Detroit this weekend is over and I have updated the WamaLTC home page to refer to our appearances at the B&O Museum planned for September and November. Our four-hour display in the Mount Vernon area is two weeks away. I have not built anything or even sorted in the meantime.

28 July 2007

This week’s episode of the remastered Star Trek is This Side of Paradise which happens to be the origin of the phrase I used a few years ago. This time around, I found the soundtrack annoying for reusing so much music from the Shore Leave compositions.

My hands still smell of grease, and I know more about spiral balance tubes and how to tension them than I wanted to, but for now the upper sash in an upper story double hung window on the premises is staying up without the need for a prop. One of these would have been useful. When the window slid to the bottom of the jamb and the rods came out of the orange bushings at the ends of the balance tubes again it gave me the same feeling as when the computer wouldn’t cooperate. The place to turn to if replacement tube balances are needed.

By contrast with the earlier release, the sides of the platters in the original LP version of the soundtrack for The Empire Strikes Back are numbered for use on ordinary record players.

27 July 2007

Like I was saying earlier: police cars (1, 2, 3), buses (1, 2), Dunbar Armored trucks (1), the gasoline station at 10389 Santa Monica Boulevard at the intersection with South Beverly Glen Boulevard… here’s a freshly washed Pierce Dash Rescue Pumper in service with Station 34 of the Pasadena, California fire department, and a vehicle in the Vestas display currently in Terminal 7 at LAX. I’ve only included photographs of myself (1, 2, 3) in this upload to Flickr. One can now choose to view Flickr pages in Korean.

The ominous music with which yesterday’s imagining is most effective is from the beginning of the track entitled Inner City which appears as the eighth track of the original soundtrack LP for Star Wars.

26 July 2007

Thank you, Yahoo! Search, for totally destroying one of my allusions. If you can imagine Alec Guiness as Ben Kenobi staring out of the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and saying That’s no apartment… then you may begin to assess the depth of my error. I am not sharing the search terms for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.

Confidential to the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department of Materials Science and Engineering: surely by now it’s time to replace the photograph on the Undergraduate Awards and Accomplishments page with, I don’t know, something more recent? Just a suggestion.

When I imagine myself joining a social network like Friendster or MySpace I see the result as Constantine has 0 friends. Maybe that would be just as well: The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years (via).

Strictly speaking, if I have understood the WHOIS correctly, HannahER has let her hosting company buy the domain. This would explain the blogroll.

24 July 2007

The person who uses the online handle HannahER has bought the domain hannaher.com and started a blog there.

Wasted (Santa Monica Police press release). We were in the same ZIP Code on Thursday.

22 July 2007

The symbol for the euro is € (U+20AC) and is invoked on Apple keyboards using Shift-Option-2. Yahoo! Finance Currency Converter.

My nearest Wendy’s burned Thursday morning. It’s been a while since I ate there, but others are already missing it. Photoset on Flickr of the aftermath. New page at the firefighters’ union web site. The lime-colored tractor-drawn aerial ladder truck 208 is still in service.

7200 Hughes Terrace in Westchester, California is now 1 LMU Drive.

21 July 2007

My Sony PS-LX500 turntable is back to playing an LP’s side without hesitation now that I’ve replaced the tonearm motor belt with one purchased from Vintage Electronics. The original belt would slip and the P-mount cartridge would get ahead of the tonearm and start skipping unless the tonearm was given a push. This vendor listed only one belt for this model, while other vendors suspiciously advertised an additional, longer belt for this model. I say suspiciously because the turntable is direct drive. I used a manual for the similar PS-LX55II from The Vinyl Engine for the disassembly and diagnosis.

The sides of the multi-platter soundtrack album for the original Star Wars are arranged to make them playable on a changer. More History, About Design: The Star Wars Logo.

Speaking of entitled restaurant customers, the customer in line ahead of me at the airport Quizno’s yesterday was demanding no tomatoes and a different sauce and only Romaine lettuce on her $6 sub. Sheesh.

I can be pretty random when I’m taking photographs for myself… police cars, buses, Dunbar Armored trucks… but I had to explain myself when I took a photograph of the gasoline station at 10389 Santa Monica Boulevard at the intersection with South Beverly Glen Boulevard. What my companions did not know is that ConocoPhilips has been destroying the iconic 76 ball at the stations it took over from Unocal. Save the 76 Ball.

20 July 2007

Leave for a few days and then comes an explanation. The first feature which could be offered, I humbly suggest, is the ability to edit your account information so that email from Brickshelf can reach the account holder.

The menu board at a recently visited establishment did seem curiously light on the product information… feel free to check the nutrition facts and FAQ to see if that clears up anything. The company’s website does not mention that every entrance is labeled to prohibit photography of the interior design.

When your day is not all it could have been, a visit to Beard Papa can hit the spot. Yes.

Other culinary adventures this week: the United Airlines Snackbox Minimeal, the Trastevere Ristorante Italiano in Santa Monica, the Breakfast Buffet at the Crowne Plaza Los Angeles International Airport, the In-N-Out Burger on Harvey Drive in Glendale, the Manna Korean BBQ on Olympic Boulevard, an unremembered caterer serving the Cypress area, the Grill on the Alley in the Hollywood & Highland Center, and the Quizno’s at Gate B11 of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

I was completely wrong about the history of the Miracle Mile. My report that schlep is a Yiddish word was more reliable (the word is used on the signs of the Farmers Market).

Vestas launched a set of four displays to promote its wind turbine manufacturing starting last month with Los Angeles International Airport. The Danish company looked to the LEGO® companies to prepare the displays.

17 July 2007

Yesterday it slipped my mind to mention the demise of Geekshelf over four years ago.

16 July 2007

Notice: Brickshelf will be shutting down on 2007/07/31. Please save your files to your computer. There is still no word that I can find (not at the LUGNET newsgroup for Brickshelf, not at the founder’s personal web site, and no reply to the question at the founder’s YouTube account) that would let one understand why total annihilation is preferred to potential alternatives like stopping new uploads or restricting new accounts. The thumbnails at the pages I wrote for WAMALUG and the pages at WamaLTC are hosted at the respective domains, so the appearance of those pages is not affected by the destruction of the resource, but all the links to individual photographs and particular folders will be useless. Removing those links is not something I am looking forward to. With the fate of Zerostuds in mind why would anyone trust Maj to stick around? All the LEGO® related content being uploaded to Maj now, though, just gets in the way of finding those galleries of Eastern European devotees of body art who travel to Tanzania to help the orphans… more than once this afternoon, the site has returned a server error message.

Remembering birthdays of close family relatives is something old people do.

14 July 2007

Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.

06 July 2007

Orpheus Records has been keeping this soundtrack album in stock for me for a while (I last looked for it over 2 years ago) and my purchase yesterday would appear to have been from the proprietor himself, judging by the photograph accompanying the description of the 30 year-old shop on this page of Arlington County un/common places (three of those places have already disappeared). The album was never released on compact disc so imagine my surprise when Gracenote recognized the suite of ten tracks barely totaling 25 minutes. It is a measure of the quality control engaged in by the company and its contributors that the album’s title was reported as The Stuntman (I mean a large editorial staff spanning every continent… [whose] sole purpose is to correct and clean our album data… ). I appreciate the advice on how to use the Film Caravan track in your own life: rolling slowly out of the garage and moving on down the road this evening in the yellow Focus with the newly burned CD playing was much enhanced thereby.

This derivative work is what happens when the vigilance of the copyright police wavers.

04 July 2007

The phase of the vinyl recording project devoted to 7-inch product is completed and the next phase is 12-inch product. Despite my inability to have the length of the tracks match the times printed on the sleeve of the album, Gracenote was able to identify it anyway (the LP corresponds to the first disc of the set still available from the composer’s site).

Although his reference is to a subsequent series, the question posed by Andrew Probert is valid for all incarnations: Do you paint the ship as seen on your Television screen,… or as originally intended and painted for the series: Star Trek: the Next Generation?

02 July 2007

Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure does not make a good gift no matter how many times it is given.

To get anything out of the Drudge Report use of Command-plus would appear to be required. (The keyboard shortcut to increase text size works in Safari like it does in Firefox.)

The lapse of domain over at WAMALUG continues to have consequences…

01 July 2007

The exhortation on the next pay stub is late: Lightning Safety Week was last week.

30 June 2007

Good news for some people… others are more irreverent. There were a number of acts in the S bin that I refrained from purchasing while Tower Records liquidated last year. Yay for self-restraint.

Rather than struggle to get the timing of two keypresses just right, I am using Audacity to edit the intro and outro of almost every track in the project to record the 7-inch vinyl, and I expect to use it to separate tracks once I move on to the 12-inch vinyl. The logo of the program is supposed to be an orange electrical arc between the cups of headphones, but it reminds me more of Venom’s mouth in Spider-Man 3. It’s as if it were growling at me from the Dock.

The SmarTrip card is coming to Loudoun County Transit buses next month. Because there are no Metrorail stations in that county, the plan is to have a spare bus on hand at three locations one day a week so that patrons can use the farebox within to add value to the SmarTrip card. Loudoun County Transit eschews maps for its commuter service except for one to depict the route in Arlington County and the District of Columbia. One would have to get up early in the morning to take advantage of the free fare on Code Orange days.

This week’s episode of the remastered Star Trek is famous for its utterance of the Ee’d plebnista and opinions about The Omega Glory are divided, to say the least. This episode has tripped up at least one author with its blatant celebration of the Constitution of the United States after an Anglo-Saxon victory in a battle with Asians, broadcast at a time (a few months after the Tet Offensive) when the country was very much at war in Vietnam. Keep in mind, though, that the screenplay was first written in 1965 just as the ground war was starting, so facile political judgments are suspect. That’s also before any regular season episode was written, so consistency with the rest of the series (the easy way Spock uses the word savages to describe the Yangs, for example, is jarring) is no less suspect. That the planet on which this Constitution is found boasts lifetimes measured in the hundreds of years has also puzzled many. I had developed a theory (and I see that I’m not the only one thinking along these lines) that the episode is consistent with an Enterprise mission many hundreds of years past the era suggested by, say, Tomorrow is Yesterday and today I watched my laserdisc and saw nothing to contradict that. Consider McCoy’s comment about bacteriological warfare experiments in the 1990s and the mention of only two generations (the current inhabitants of Omega IV and their parents), Kirk’s mission need only be… uh, a millennium or so after the launch of some improbable Sino-American colonization ship for the episode to make sense.

28 June 2007

Are you going to take the word of some random publisher that named Saint Louis the Most Dangerous City of 2006? Of course not.

So, there’s this new mobilni going on sale tomorrow, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Yeah, it frustrates my current carrier, but I don’t talk either.

26 June 2007

I have placed the computer’s display, keyboard, and mouse at an elevated position (atop the television, actually) alongside the turntable to better gauge when to click the buttons to record an individual track in the vinyl recording project I mention below. I question my musical judgment before the track is halfway done, but we know that standing is not torture.

Some people are satisfied with a Batmobile in the garage, others go for the last of the V-8 Interceptors (via).

24 June 2007

With the completion of instructions depicting the assembly of a Virginia Railway Express F40PH locomotive in two striping schemes, my Virginia Railway Express MOCs are fully documented.

I have built a blank police cruiser to await better evidence regarding the new scheme for the local department. I have seen it a few times already.

The length of the WAV files does not match the indication of the track’s time on the vinyl record’s label, and I was slow in reaching for stop for the B side, but the workflow for playing a record on the turntable, recording it to a file on the one computer on the premises with an audio card, and importing the file into iTunes on the Power Macintosh G3 is established. I would be happier if I could use a ZIP disk to make the transition between computers… Debbie Gibson’s Foolish Beat was a souvenir purchased to remind me of the radio airplay heard while on the multi-state journey of 1988. The tune is sold for 99¢ at the iTunes Store, so I must be making the effort for the principle of figuring it out.

22 June 2007

Just like that, seven weeks later, Yahoo! Mail Beta is letting SeaMonkey in again. The browser had advanced to version 1.1.2 in the meantime.

Yesterday was the day that the American Public Transit Association hoped to use to encourage riding public transit, and I was out there using multiple systems, riding multiple routes, ticking off the chores accomplished with each stopover, and making my case for retaining the 25B (the phrase eliminate duplication with other services and reduce costs is not reassuring). Today as well: I can confirm that the Fairfax City CUE bus now accepts SmarTrip cards (although one would be hard pressed to prove it from their rider information page). I am starting to recognize some of the regulars, like the mumbler waiting at the Ballston station. What, no coffee cup to write on today? I am starting to recognize some of the buses! I encourage other regions to implement the flat fee, ride-any-bus-you-like-for-the-next-2-hours model used in the metropolitan Washington area. This approach has made a big difference in my willingness to ride.

Some days the local free tabloid has to reach harder to fill the news hole, and today they pass on a short brief from the UPI condensing a press release from the University of Michigan regarding a new genetic test for confirming a common inherited neurological disorder.

18 June 2007

The Unicode code point for the kelvin (U+212A = K) is found among code points for other temperature scales (U+2103 = ℃ and U+2109 = ℉). Decades after the international agreement that fixed the unit symbols, people still treat the degree symbol as separate from the letter. Grr. I don’t know why Gecko-based browsers have difficulty with the glyph for the degree Fahrenheit symbol.

17 June 2007

Over on the Build page, the Rescue Squad has been revised to conform its payload to the prototype I observed earlier this year. I managed to figure out the flexible hose generator in MLCAD enough to release instructions for the Pierce Dash Rescue Pumper in two versions. The ambulance features a 7-wide body and I took the opportunity in preparing the instruction file, as I did with the Rescue Squad, to rationalize the part choices and assembly sequence and also found a way to tie the cab to the body so they wouldn’t be held together by just a single plate. The long awaited Virginia Railway Express RP-39 needed only a change in part color for the slope bricks on the nose cap to match the current state of construction.

My revisions to the model of Medic 207 include interior fittings based on photographs of the rescue squad vehicles in Brunswick last month. When it turned out I had no pictures in the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D because I had managed to shoot all day with the memory card only partially inserted, someone helped me by taking some and passing them along.

Two weeks later, and her movie is in second run. That’s part of why I don’t buy discount tickets. The copyright date of 2006 fits in with three-quarters of the other movies I’ve managed to see this year.

Barbie Doll and Girls Aloud, a natural combination (but so 2 years ago, and UK only, I suppose).

14 June 2007

For the self-proclaimed Security arm of the WamaLTC, life is not all snapping Don’t touch! at the possessors of wayward fingers. Sometimes, it’s grinning and bearing it while posing with visitors who want to have their picture taken with him (1, 2).

There is an Apple Store in the Saint Louis Galleria.

The builder of these MOCs wants to display with WamaLTC. Normally, I would say Always room for another jurisdiction’s apparatus! but… that’s a lot of pumpers, towers, tractor-drawn aerials, and ancillary vehicles. I don’t see anything, though, that corresponds exactly to my Freightliner/Medic Master so maybe there’s still a chance for cross-jurisdictional cooperation. Alexandria’s Company 6, including E206 and R206, was featured in an early-morning report by Kim Martucci on local channel 9, WUSA-TV, a week ago.

13 June 2007

The Reston Town Center Taste of the Town and its Kids Corner are currently using photographs of last year’s WamaLTC display to promote this Saturday’s event. This year’s display of LEGO® creations will be billed as a WAMALUG event, apparently, but you wouldn't know it from the club’s home page. I have added to WamaLTC’s home page that we plan a display at the Annual Peach Festival at the Wesley United Methodist Church in August. Seems like I should know someone who lives in the area…

Metrobus service to change Sunday the twenty-fourth. There will no longer be a through Route 1 bus from Ballston to Fairfax.

11 June 2007

The invitation by the American Public Transportation Association to celebrate the Second Annual Dump the Pump Day on the twenty-first this month is supplied with artwork and logos intended for print purposes rather than web display. Some transit systems are better prepared than others for encouraging use by neophytes. The Red Rose Transit Authority of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, for example, offers a full system map, a detail map of its routes in the urban core, and a helpful guide to how to catch, ride, and leave a bus. Williamsburg Area Transit in Virginia also offers a full system map and a list of regulations. The County of Lebanon Transit however would rather keep its network of routes a secret and the maps for the individual routes are crude. I have attempted to take the map and schedule for the Route 1 bus in that Pennsylvania county and make something a little more to scale and a little more coherent regarding the direction of travel, but I suppose the lettering could have been a little bigger… Sadly, for fans of interurban connections, the COLT route to Manheim was discontinued this year (that’s right, after expanding it to that South Central Pennsylvania town last year).

If you use Windows XP or Windows Vista, Apple now offers the Safari browser for your OS as well.

07 June 2007

There’s no longer a need to rely on anyone else’s photographs of R206. This is the stairwell at the back. At the top, there’s a handcart. E207, the Special Operations Team truck, E205, and a standard buggy were also a part of this public relations exercise. The lighting atop E207 and the sedan has no color when not engaged.

WamaLTC is scheduled to display at the LEGO® Brand Retail outlet in Potomac Mills Mall this weekend. Despite what you might be reading elsewhere, no construction of mine, whether it represents WMATA equipment or otherwise, will be making an appearance at this display.

Twenty years ago next month I had to take a bus to National Airport because the subway didn’t open until eight o’clock on a Saturday (they now open at seven). I flew out on Braniff (in its second incarnation) and rented a Ford Tempo for my sightseeing. The return trip was on Northwest Orient (which survives as NWA). The airport now bears the name of a second president.

03 June 2007

Less of the touching, please. Ed’s burning house (the first due respondents still making their way down the highway) proved a frequent target of exclamation and attempts at hands-on evaluation at yesterday’s display. Unlike with last year’s display the prices at my gas station didn’t elicit comment even though they were a year old. One, I had tucked the station in behind the main street and second, the prices were only 2¢ more for regular gas than those prevailing at several stations along Sudley Road. Because the proportion of new creations was a bit lower this year (Ed brought a large steam engine, Abe had an extended scene of construction and a container ship, Tom had a caboose, and I added a third 7-Eleven to the layout) most of my Brickshelf gallery features WamaLTC participants. My revisions to Rescue 206 and Medic 207 met an appreciative audience with a firefighter and his son.

The SeaMonkey™ Project has a URL (which redirects to its usual page at mozilla.org).

01 June 2007

The web badge that CommuterPage.com offers to webmasters doesn’t work so well served as xhtml+xml: only Safari and the ancient Internet Explorer for Mac would show it when I included it in this page yesterday. Today’s forecast was for Code Orange. DASH buses can have the destination board set to state RIDE FREE TODAY but Metrobus just has the red bag over the farebox. I’m such a helpful guy, I reminded two people fiddling with money that the bus was free today.

13th Manassas Railway Heritage Festival, tomorrow. I may not get around to updating the prices on my gas station.

31 May 2007

According to Doctor McCoy in the episode Shore Leave, beauty intoxication is a legitimate diagnosis. The malady can hit at any time.

Someone made a wrong choice in movies at the multiplex a while ago. Myself, I’ve had a no-one-killed criterion guiding my moviegoing choices for almost as long as I’ve been writing on this site. On the other hand, it’s just a guide, as that criterion would exclude most of the movies I have seen this year! (Maybe it’s more of a no-one-gets-violently-killed criterion.) A recent screening of a Francis Veber film was not as funny as the earlier The Dinner Game from the same writer-director but I’m getting a feeling about what might become my first DVD purchase in a while (once a Region 1 edition appears).

Today was a predicted to be a Code Orange day for air quality and bus fares in Nothern Virginia were free. This is the first year in which rides on local bus systems will be free on Code Orange days. These systems and those in Maryland will continue to offer free rides on days predicted to be Code Red. The prediction of air quality is made by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. My riding the DASH bus home from work does nothing for air pollution as it merely replaces a subway ride, and I find it difficult to believe that people who commute regularly in some other fashion are going to try to figure out how to ride a bus just because it’s free. However, a 2003 report on the program says that the effect on emissions is small but significant. Now, if it’s Code Orange tomorrow…

30 May 2007

More information about R206 and its 20-foot walk-around box from the Fire & Rescue Departments of Northern Virginia Regional Resource Center. I should memorize some more of these numbers so I can talk up the creation at Saturday’s display in Manassas. My recent opportunity to see this vehicle may have something to do with a small event in the area next week…

I only noticed a month ago the 2005 change of name to Fairfax Boulevard. That’s what walking (to the next bus stop) instead of driving will do for you.

Look who’s grown up, I didn’t even recognize her the first time I saw the trailer. Schroeder’s website still features on its default resource (home page) the photograph I wrote about over 2 years ago. She’s on MySpace like everybody else.

Let’s not be holding our breath for that third album from a certain rehab-revisiting redhead, m’kay? Uh, not that I was waiting for one or anything. Not me.

29 May 2007

Pierre Normandin is trying to monetize his creativity.

The founders of DR2 and Netbunch are trying to start over.

24 May 2007

The June issue of FYI Alexandria reports that Alexandria’s police cruisers are getting a completely new look this spring. It looks like it might be a slightly slanted Microgramma Extended Bold, and the shoulder patch replaces the seal of the city.

23 May 2007

Sure, now he’s smiling.

Upgrading Yahoo! Widget Engine (oops, they no longer call it Engine ) to version 4 left SeaMonkey quitting unexpectedly with every page view. I was not happy. Restoring the boot partition from the backup seems to have resolved the issue where downgrading to version 3 and reinstalling SeaMonkey hadn’t.

I can confirm that the Fairfax Connector now takes SmarTrip cards. The Fairfax City CUE Bus promises to do the same on June 1.

The instructions for the Alexandria (Virginia) Fire Department Crimson Gladiator Heavy Rescue Truck uploaded earlier this year are subject to recall. I had the opportunity today to examine R206 from an aerial perspective and a ground perspective and, um… there is no walk-around interior. This way, I have something new to display at the next show. The website is currently using a photograph of our layout from last year to attract visitors to the 13th Annual Manassas Heritage Railway Festival which is on June 2.

21 May 2007

As I drove to the site of The Great Brunswick Train Show where WamaLTC displayed this past weekend and back again six times, racking up over 360 miles at what I hope to be upper-twenties gas mileage rather than lower twenties, there was a traffic pattern in Lovettsville which seemed like it should be familiar… as well it should have. On Friday, the president of the Brunswick Railroad Museum, who had invited several train clubs as a draw to raise funds for installing an elevator in the building, led us to the basement, normally used to host birthday parties, where we found columns and a low ceiling. But our leader was congenial and the tables were set up around the columns and the toddler sit-down train and the 1974 map of Amtrak operations with only minor changes to the track plan. Our presence in the main building, along with Lloyd Rombold upstairs at street level, meant that the layouts of LEGO® trains received a largely steady procession of visitors over the two days. Local businesses, though, failed to derive any benefit from my presence as I do not eat and I do not read.

19 May 2007

I am told by a reliable person, with the TiVo-ed evidence to back it up, that the remastered editions of Star Trek are available in the local market notwithstanding the silence of startrek.com on the subject (previously). The Washington market was the last one in the top 10 to have a station sign up to carry the syndicated series (via). It’s not like the station in question would let anyone know.

16 May 2007

When I edited the home page of WamaLTC to announce our participation this weekend in the First Annual Great Brunswick Train Show at The Brunswick Railroad Museum I created a link to Google Maps as a way to provide directions to the town in Maryland. I only later noticed that the museum’s website provides How to get to Brunswick: Maps and Directions but these were offered as a Web Archive file (also known as MHTML) and it wouldn’t open with Internet Explorer for Mac… double clicking the downloaded file opened it in Microsoft Word, however, revealing nothing which couldn’t have been said just as well and more accessibly in Adobe Reader.

Mattel’s efforts in creating a Hot Wheels Batmobile extend to its authentic scale—the wheelbase and size is the same as the Johnny Lightning Lincoln Futura casting. By comparison, the Corgi Juniors version from decades ago is ill-proportioned in multiple respects.

12 May 2007

Maybe I wasn’t the only one cutting back on the shopping last month (the poster links to the article in his local newspaper, perhaps because the International Council of Shopping Centers doesn’t seem to supply such information for free on its site). Also, I’m not the only one abandoning television…

…but I have been pulling out and playing the laserdisc of the original Star Trek series with the episode to match the one being shown in remastered form in the adjacent market, so there’s that. This weekend’s episode is Errand of Mercy and the remastered edition shows the ships in the Klingon fleet.

WamaLTC’s meeting today disturbed the couch-lounging plans of one television watcher at the location. The display of Bob’s construction of a six-wide diesel-electric locomotive from unconventionally conveyed assembly plans and of Margaret’s build of the LEGO® Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotive atop the new infrared-controlled battery-powered chassis from the 7898 set constituted a train club activity, but otherwise very little progress towards meeting the items agreed upon at the March meeting was to be seen. (When the LEGO® train club in Michigan has a meeting, they put people to work.) Prediction: you won’t see us in new shirts at these shows. At least I personally should be able to handle the event photography and, y’know, upload promptly.

Since I have no other place to put this link: photographs from the WAMALUG meeting in the same location.

10 May 2007

It’s too early for the compact fluorescent lights I installed in the kitchen last week to have made a difference, right? Maybe it’s the light emitting diode night lights which allow me to forgo using the ceiling fixtures in the stairs. Whatever it was, my bill for electricity for the previous four weeks is the lowest… ever, in 9½ years. It’s forty-six kilowatts less than the next lowest consumption month (October of 1998). There it is: a month ago I replaced two 60 watt bulbs with 13 watt fixtures.

Montgomery County’s Ride On is now the first transit agency in Maryland to accept SmarTrip Cards (that’s right, in Maryland, I knew that the local free tabloid had garbled the message although it’s true that no other jurisdiction in the region has Ride On buses).

07 May 2007

The name of a Hannaher is found on a page at WikiPedia, and it’s not mine. Pesky Notability criterion, and all that.

Now that I have scanned all the jackets of my 12″ vinyl platters the effect of buying a player capable of playing compact discs in 1990 is apparent: no more purchases for a year. Subsequent purchases of long-playing records came from thrift stores and specialty shops dealing in used product until a bizarre 49¢ clearance at a Best Buy in 1996. I started buying discounted 12″ singles at Tower Records earlier this decade mostly for the photography of the jackets. The effect of the demand destruction for vinyl in 1990 is less apparent with the 7″ vinyl singles (all the picture sleeves) as my last retail purchase was based on radio airplay heard during my travels in 1988. Eventually it will be time to make some of these purchases… no longer part of the collection.

05 May 2007

Yes, children, even if you’re in your upper-middle twenties, I’ve been riding the bus for longer than that. Some people have even longer memories. Virginia has a bus museum which includes an Alexandria DASH Orion I and, ooh, a restored Charlottesville, Virginia GMC RTS from my senior year in college and a bus they hope to restore as an AB&W GMC New Look. The AM General bus, what a disaster, the windows were too soft a plastic for the bus wash machines so they clouded up just like you see in the picture.

02 May 2007

Yahoo! Mail chose today to deny access to its Beta version (where it’s supposed to look like a desktop application) to the SeaMonkey 1.1.1 that I use as my daily browser with a page that offers a link to download SeaMonkey 1.0.8 as an approved browser.

Let those with Exif-aware apps begin their snooping. (Users of OS X 10.4 can use Finder.) I miss my Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi and its eye-start-enabled tilting viewfinder.

This month, WamaLTC plans to be a part of what is being billed as First Annual Great Brunswick Train Show at The Brunswick Railroad Museum. At least our name is spelled correctly! Lloyd Rombold was a guest at the most recent club meeting.

29 April 2007

ZoomInfo does not fact check its profiles and aggregation errors are possible. No users group is safe from the patented semantic search technology.

28 April 2007

I wonder where Brickshelf user Denix found instructions for a Jeep. I wonder… updated version at my Build page. Someday I will direct Brickshelf visitors to my Build page, I will.

26 April 2007

Federal Transit Benefits Program: Ineffective Controls Result in Fraud and Abuse by Federal Workers . Three and a half years ago, an offer to sell $33 farecards (MetroChek cards at the time included a 10% bonus over the $30 nominal value) posted to the Yahoo! Group of my homeowners association led to several posts of self-righteous indignation at the suggestion there was anything improper with the proposed transaction. (It wasn’t my suggestion, but I supported the admonition.)

Reports are reaching me from people who are not participating in TV Turnoff Week that an episode of the original Star Trek series was viewable in the local area recently. The reports did not have the quality necessary to determine whether it was the original or the remastered version which was being shown. Nor were they able to identify the television station or network participating in this broadcast.

24 April 2007

As if I don’t have enough on my mind… could be situationally aware people will look at me and my ALPS fanny pack and think I’m CCW.

21 April 2007

Fairfax Connector Buses Will Begin Accepting SmarTrip Cards in May. That leaves the CUE Bus of Fairfax City still demanding cash fares (the City of Falls Church GEORGE is described as already accepting the cards). Looking ahead, WMATA will ask me to buy yet another SmarTrip card. Coordination Of Local Transit Systems In Northern Virginia’s Public Transit Network includes charts comparing the local transit agencies.

16 April 2007

If I want people to bookmark the shortcut URL to the c.hannaher.net/build page maybe I should leave off the [R] command in the rewrite rule.

Photographer P. J. Moyer describes the WAMALUG meeting yesterday as quiet and the webmaster attributes the attendance by about a dozen people to the weather (and for sure I saw more than the expected number of vehicles in the ditch yesterday) and the train club had a show in Timonium at the same time. That’s the webmaster who’s building a World Trade Center… that’s exploding. Maybe my replacement sign for the display at the store isn’t needed, this month… that wall is looking pretty orange, though. :-(

Mike Collaco may not have learned how to use MLCAD yet, but he can put together a set of instructions on how to build a GG-1 out of the parts in the new Hobby Train set anyway. But can he monetize his creativity like this guy?

15 April 2007

There was a reason that the photographer who showed up at the WamaLTC display this weekend was unable to say how to find her newspaper on the Internet: the Baltimore Messenger does not have a meaningful URL. Or, maybe even worse, its meaningful URL redirects to the meaningless one so Google will never return it as a search result. I have set up a number of redirects here in addition to the first one of build… making it easier to keep track of my compact disc purchases and my sporadic movie viewing… but I realize most people so inclined will bookmark the landing URL.

The Family Day event at the National Air and Space Museum this Saturday includes the (unnamed) participation of WAMALUG, but there is no mention of it at the club’s active website.

The name of furniture manufacturer This End Up is back in the marketplace.

The sculpture in LEGO® elements depicting the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima installed at the new National Museum of the Marine Corps is the work of certified LEGO® professional Nathan Sawaya. At least I’d heard of the new museum from reading that not everyone is impressed with the building.

Closing the Collapse Gap.

10 April 2007

The new Bally’s Fitness Club at Plaza at Landmark certainly brings more cars to the parking lot than Tower Records/Video #195 ever did.

08 April 2007

From last November: Arlington County Board Approves Campbell Avenue in Shirlington. My inspection yesterday suggests that it’s mostly eating establishments which are inconvenienced by this tribute. Some people like eating. The parking garage behind the new Shirlington branch of the Arlington County library has a great view of the county’s Trades Center which would be good for modelers in LEGO® of that jurisdiction’s vehicles because All County vehicles – including Police and Fire emergency response vehicles and school buses – are maintained and refueled there. I’m happy to model the simple horizontal stripe of the Alexandria apparatus, however, and leave the white zig-zag over red of the newest Arlington apparatus, like the E-One pumper headed to Company 7 after refueling which followed me up the hill in Fairlington, to others. (Company 9 is taking the new prohibition of incident photography hard.)

06 April 2007

When something goes thump in the night… eh, why bother? One can expect to come across the source of the noise eventually. This time it was an old cutting board in the pantry which slid off the shelf and fell down. Seventeen hours from mystery to solution.

I’m not surprised at the reporting that the shift in daylight saving time had no impact on power consumption (via). There are lights on every floor that I use regardless of conditions outside. Actually, my new photoelectrically-controlled LED night light thinks it’s nighttime even when the blinds are up (its reflection off the walls can be seen a floor away with dark-adapted eyes). What I have done is replace two clamp lamps that used incandescent bulbs with daylight balanced fluorescent lamps. There’s some flickering to get them started, but 13 < 60.

The only reason I found myself in an FYE on Tuesday making a purchase is because Target had only a bare shelf where Dignity was supposed to be and I didn’t want to drive to another Target. It’s supposed to be an economically austere month, after all. That album with the last track where the quintet sings I think we’re alone now—totally bought in another month.

If anyone should own the phrase relevant cheescake it might as well be Richmond-based illustrator Robert Ullman.

Our team. Maybe the inhumanly long URLs are what is giving the guy on top such a grim expression.

31 March 2007

On the last day before the ha-ha austerity plan takes effect, in a month in which I kept putting off buying a roll-away, there’s a one-day sale on chests and roll-aways. What are the odds? My tool chest, purchased some 20 years ago in a style no longer found in the catalog, finally gets off the floor, and the circular saw and power drill and tap and die set get a proper home. Another Waterloo Industries product.

So sad. Red Carpet Glam Hilary Duff Barbie Doll is now red tagged to move at $10.48 (a third off). I told you it wasn’t a good likeness, and it couldn’t keep up with what she looks like now. Did I earlier recommend going brunette? Yes I did.

30 March 2007

The calls can come every hour all day. What did people do before Caller ID? What they do now… ignore the telephone.

The LEGO® Factory 10183 Hobby Train set arrived yesterday looking as if it had been handled in the way that Jim Carrey’s character handled a parcel at the beginning of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The loose booklet with the one set of instructions survived the ordeal that left the box cratered and torn, but I won’t know how to build any of the other models—the GP-38, for example, or the gondola with a vaguely eastern European-looking truck I was sure was a Tim Gould model which turns out to be from James Mathis— without that computer I was mentioning.

WamaLTC participants have replaced the display in the cabinet at the National Toy Train Museum (which starts opening to the public next week). Sssh… don’t ask too many questions about what brand of pieces ended up in the remarkably large train station façade which manages to bring together at least three modes of rail transport. And let’s say only kind things about the subway station with a Yellow Line train passing through it but with gray floors. The public telephones in the display are based on the ones I put in my Metro station creation four years ago.

Former member of WAMALUG points to a less than completely positive report on what things are like for workers at LEGOLAND… meanwhile, a post on the WAMALUG Yahoo! Group points us to an uncritical look at what those workers were building.

It should be back to austerity next month, and there wouldn’t be any need to check the CD List page to see if there was any update to the array of album art, but next Tuesday…

26 March 2007

The display by QuéLUG in Montreal this past weekend would appear to have had every variety of vehicle ever built by Pierre Normandin set out upon its streets, that’s four-time LEGO® Ambassador and recent 10183 Hobby Train contributor Pierre Normandin, except… on the edges of two photographs (first, second) thereof… a boxy, 6-wide truck in the red, black, and white of Dunbar Armored.

23 March 2007

The sign currently in the community display window of the LEGO® Brand Retail store in Tysons Corner Center is over a year old. The identification of the first builder to have a display there has been folded over, and no subsequent exhibitor has bothered to edit the original file, print it again, and be identified. The change in the club’s URL has been handled by scratching out the org and scribbling in the com. Maybe it was when I realized that the text of the sign left out the D.C. part of the club’s name that I decided I had to do something. The author of the sign has now made the file available on the club’s Yahoo! Group and I learn that the color of the background (which seemed to match the backing in the display window) is something that Microsoft Word calls aqua. Further exploration of the context menus in the document reveals that this color is not the same as the HTML color by that name, instead its value is R51 G204 B204. The next time someone tells you that’s orangey look at them with a puzzled expression, won’t you? The particular someone is confusing the sign with his own work!

18 March 2007

Instructions for the Alexandria (Virginia) Fire Department Crimson Gladiator Heavy Rescue Truck, the Alexandria (Virginia) Fire Department Seagrave Tractor-Drawn Aerial Ladder Truck, and the Greyhound MC-8 Intercity Bus have been added to the Build page over the past week. The planned replacement of the display in the National Toy Train Museum has been postponed due to some inconvenient snow Friday night. Oh, sure, now I find out that there is a proper crane Ott-Lite VisionSaver Plus desk lamp, will I remain satisfied with Saturday’s purchase from the on-shelf stock at Office Depot? The yellow cast of halogen lighting was too much to bear for long, fortunately lighting the color of daylight is more readily available these days than when I started out 20 years ago with Vita-Lite tubes and fixtures. (Duro-Test no longer serves individuals.) Today’s meeting of WamaLTC spent quite some time marveling at the possibilities of Deflect-O Tilt Bin storage as used in the host’s LEGO® room and observing the assembly of the new 10182 Cafe Corner set and the new 10183 Hobby Train set. By now everyone knows that I do not own a computer that can run LEGO® Digital Designer (an upcoming version 2.0 of the program will be necessary to view instructions for the train set).

11 March 2007

After 5 months, my latest file in the LDraw format is… another taxi. Not everyone at the WAMALUG meeting yesterday recognized the Dark Stone Gray body as representing the Alexandria Union Cab fleet, or even that it was supposed to be a taxi. I chose the model rather than one of the fire trucks because I could (I thought) easily adapt the earlier file for the Washington Flyer taxi. The choice of MLCAD to zero out the file’s length halfway through necessitated subsequent and frequent xcopy commands to another folder. The file uses Slope Brick 33 3×6 (3939) because the Peeron inventories (let alone the LDraw parts library) have yet to respond to the new element of that shape.

08 March 2007

The website for the local independent LEGO® Train Club has moved to another host and all pages may be freely linked to once more. The appearance of the image in our LUGNET newsgroup sidebar is restored.

Fischer Hardware creates a web site that offers a single URL, graphical introduction and transitions, and an awful soundtrack on one of the options.

06 March 2007

You say you can’t afford to have someone build you a replica of the 1966 television series Batmobile? There’s now a 1:64 miniature in the regular Hot Wheels line.

05 March 2007

The University of Virginia magazine reports on the history of The Corner. The article as it appeared in print includes an illustrated guide to the relevant addresses and reveals that very few of the businesses there when I went to college remain.

I don’t know… I think this suburban scene could have used more vehicles. The vehicles on the layout seem to have concentrated downtown somehow, the lone pumper engine unit stuck in traffic. MichLTC display with vehicles by Spencer Rezkalla.

I just built a Greyhound bus based on a toy I bought over 20 years ago (a different toy from that era with the same look, I bought that one, too, compare with the current style) and deny that it looks anything like the model Mike Collaco displayed at our show last month. Actually, it’s the difference between an MC-8 and an MC-9 (latter model still used by Greyhound Canada, black stripe at the bottom included). Maybe the toy is really an MC-7 like the commenters say and I accidentally built an MC-8 when I lengthened the front overhang by one stud and used a Slope Brick rather than Panels for the windshield? A really late model MC-8 with rectangular instead of slanted windows? No, I disagree with the commenters, as the destination display on the toy is in the windshield and not in the roof. It’s funny that I suggested that Mike’s could have been built 4 to 6 studs longer when I ended up adding only two studs net over his model. The bigger difference is the ratio of corrugated to painted portions of the sides. See it this Saturday at the WAMALUG meeting.

The off-kilter look in my most recent photographs comes from extending the neck strap taut and not using the viewfinder of the digital SLR to compose.

04 March 2007

How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007 should you still happen to have older Windows systems. We shall see in a week whether my use of tzedit.exe (previous mention of this program) has any effect.

02 March 2007

First Tower Records, then Sunny’s Surplus, now… CompUSA is closing a number of stores, including every single one in the metropolitan Washington market. You know, the market that retailers trip over themselves trying to break into? CompUSA always had a reputation for indifferent employees, but I think the real slide (loss of focus) started when they turned to selling televisions. Now I see Office Depot remodeling to sell televisions…

While Spencer Rezkalla offers his take on Ford’s V6-powered crossover, I built yet another taxi to represent Alexandria’s newest fleet from the Union Cab cooperative.

Another eight-wide HMMWV appears on Brickshelf. I can’t take credit for inspiring the design which makes use of a number of new parts and has a completely different take on the hinged doors. Maybe the builder doesn’t know you can specify Dark Stone in MLCAD using the hex code 0x02635F61.

The shirt printing and embroidering place on the other side of the CSX tracks from the premises is the subject of a feature in this week’s Alexandria Gazette-Packet.

26 February 2007

Who was first due? I had at least a company’s worth of firefighting apparatus on display at the show this weekend, if not any particular company in my local jurisdiction’s fleet. In this view, BC211, E206, T203, T208, and L&A207 converge on Bob’s new building for purposes that remain mysterious as no flame or smoke was apparent. There wasn’t a jumper on the roof, either, so perhaps the crews were just training. A standard buggy and R206 were down the street, under the camera. Inclement weather limited our audience on Sunday.

Since when has Brickshelf automatically changed filenames to lowercase? I never noticed before.

22 February 2007

I used Univers ExtendedPS to simulate the sign on the ladder of Tower 203 and Univers 57 Condensed for the sign on the ladder of Truck 208 (barely visible from the rear in a nighttime photograph found on a local fire buff’s site, the unit was diverted to a burning Pizza Hut on the very edge of the jurisdiction—scroll to 05 September 2004). The webmaster for ffxfire.com employs a loud siren every time a visitor hits the default resource, so beware. These and other MOCs may find a place in WamaLTC’s display this weekend. That location where the Pizza Hut was burning is now a Saigon Citi and it’s among those Alexandria restaurants that are Proud to be Smoke Free.

18 February 2007

About Daylight Saving Time changes in 2007 (via). Apple responds to the changes in daylight saving time for users of Panther such as myself with an update. Still using Mac OS 9.2? or earlier? You get instructions.

The Brick Instructions Portal is doomed. Or not.

WamaLTC’s next display is this weekend, and we’re also bestirring ourselves to replace the display of LEGO® Trains set up in the National Toy Train Museum. Because the WAMALUG site is hosted at Northstar again, I can link to the page I wrote for the previous iteration of the display 3 years ago. I’ve created a sign to replace the one already in there, since the content of the display is changing and there’s no need to mention WAMALUG anymore (the sign has to come down anyway because it gives the old URL).

The copy editors at the sixth issue of BrickJournal have allowed a description of the attendees at the National Model Railroaders Association convention in July last year to include an entity identified as WamaLUG/LTC. Hmm (page 68 of the publication, seventieth page of the PDF file). The bascule bridge built by Bob Hayes is seen on page 76 in the article about the 2006 BrickFest.

13 February 2007

The bankruptcy liquidation of Sunny’s is much more low-key. It’s only a local chain, and its website already forwards elsewhere. But a recent visit led to a purchase which first found use today: Yaktrax Walker.

More photographs of T208 located. The same page includes photographs of an older tractor-drawn aerial ladder in lime.

11 February 2007

One of the several creations I had on display at today’s meeting of WAMALUG was a work-in-progress of the local jurisdiction’s tractor-drawn aerial ladder truck. As it happened, while driving to the meeting, I had observed that this tiller truck had responded to a call for service at an incident along North Van Dorn Street. There was no good opportunity to pull over and I didn’t have a camera along anyway, but patient exploration of the labyrinthian site of the firefighter’s union has yielded a reward: a page of photographs for the suppression crews that include several of the truck in question.

08 February 2007

I have been peeking in this week and wondering if maybe… it’s true: all DASH buses are now equipped with SmarTrip fareboxes.

05 February 2007

Brr.

Ha! I laugh at your puny four-wide vehicles. Two years ago I pushed the limits of rail car length. Last year I built a bus that was longer than a baseplate. This month, it’s a model of the Alexandria Fire Department’s Tower 203 Truck, an American LaFrance Eagle chassis with the 100′ MidMount Aerial Ladder Platform (the local department insists that the length is 110′). What prevents me from building the department’s Simon/LTI Tiller 208 Truck, besides the lack of reference material, is a shortage of Tile 1×2 with Groove (3069b) in Transparent Red. WamaLTC’s display is less than 3 weeks away. T208 recently was among units responding to the collapse of a concrete slab at a building under construction in Rosslyn.

01 February 2007

If I was a user of Twitter, it would say Building. Would I want anyone to know what I’m doing every minute of the day? Um… no.

Seeing as how I’m sticking with Panther for the time being, I’ll give this unofficial patch (via Geek Patrol and AFP548.com) to the older Mac OS X operating system a try and see if the changes in Daylight Saving Time this year are handled automatically.

29 January 2007

I have removed the links to wamalug.org wherever I could find them, both here and at WamaLTC’s site and elsewhere, and not replaced them. The urgency was required because the domain is now in the hands of SnapNames.

28 January 2007

After being on my feet for over 3 hours yesterday walking around the Washington Auto Show, I keenly felt the absence of assist handles in the cabin of the Dodge Sprinter on display. As for the Chrysler Sebring, it and its stablemates the Mitsubishi Galant and Dodge Avenger (Allpar.com is more equivocal on the relationship among the three) are not Aztek-level ugly. The three examples on display demonstrating three trim lines all featured a four-cylinder engine. This would seem to be a better approach than to launch a new line which offers only V6s.

So, 2 weeks after a web site for WAMALUG sputtered to life using a different TLD, none of the links have changed (Google has discovered the new address in the meantime, I deny that linking to it from wamaltc.org made any difference) and if the sign for the Window on the Community at the store in Tysons Corner Center remains unchanged after next month’s meeting, I may have to speak up.

26 January 2007

What I wrote earlier was a mistake: 2006 Ford Escapes with manual transmissions are all identified with the trim level XLS. We could call it (the absence of an XLT badge) the presumption of XLS. Never mind, then.

25 January 2007

The sudden format shift by WETA-FM has roiled the local radio scene. The web sites of A Prairie Home Companion and Mary Cliff have yet to react to the switch to all-classical programming. WAMU-FM has already announced changes to their schedule, adding the Minnesota-based variety show with Garrison Keillor, adding multiple BBC programs, and moving other programs. No word on the fate of Afropop Worldwide. This shakeup will reduce the need to turn the manual tuning knob on the ICF-4910 on the first floor. I have not developed any interest in HD radio or satellite radio.

Maybe I should consider the local legitimate theater. Amy Hard is now appearing in Anton in Show Business at the Port City Playhouse at the Lee Center for the Performing Arts. (Has she dropped the Miharu?) Ah, never mind… the Washington Auto Show is on again. My opportunity to see if the new Sebring is just as awful as (some) people say.

22 January 2007

Now that I have Gorilla Glue in the house, I am tempted to use it. The metal ribbon with the scale printed on it, adjacent to the control on my toaster, had lifted quite some time ago, but after some Goo Gone (can you say brand proliferation) and with a little glue and two miniature clamps, everything should be secure again. Which is just as well, as this particular model of automatic toaster (which I purchased as a Sunbeam Fully Automatic Two Slice Toaster model 20030 Chrome on 12 December 1988 for $57.94 from Evans) was discontinued in 1996. Sure, the toaster series has its own website.

21 January 2007

It’s the area’s first snowfall this season, and I wouldn’t want to be out there in my Focus with its low-profile tires having no depth left in the tread no matter how correct the pressure.

18 January 2007

Another feature of Verizon DSL service, revealed! Sometimes, they forget you’re a customer and you have to activate your account all over again! Oh, they won’t tell you that, you have to figure it out on your own, because to them, it’s your computer that’s to blame for the lack of a connection. Is it time to say sheesh again?

17 January 2007

Do I carry a lot of keys? It might look that way to an apartment dweller. What keeps me from the fictional ideal of one key ? (Besides the door, the desk, and the file cabinet at work.) Homeowners have responsibility for more than the door and the mailbox, like garage doors. Then there’s stuff like safes and cabinets and tool chests. Doesn’t everyone have a padlock on the Telephone Network Interface outside? No, it’s just me. Upon reconsideration, though, I can remove from the ring the key for the Kensington laptop security cable which I have used in… never.

The car-obsessed writers at Jalopnik report on a stunt employing a red Ford but don’t recognize the name of the source novel for what is plainly a remake of The Omega Man. Because Will Smith is playing the role of the last man on Earth (so he thinks) it figures that the woman he meets would be Brazilian and not black like the character was when Charlton Heston played the role in 1971. (A quick check of the laserdisc: Heston’s character starts the movie in a red LTD which he wrecks, then he takes a powder blue Mustang from the used car shop.)

This entering rehab, it could delay her next album, eh? Lohan would so rock playing Kimber to a Jerrica by Rachel McAdams in a live-action Jem and the Holograms, amirite?

14 January 2007

Halfway through the month, these are some of the search queries that have brought multiple people having the same needs to c.hannaher.net:

• domino harvey (106) The name of the late bounty hunter (which appears in my review of the movie starring Keira Knightley) is the overwhelming favorite this month.
• lindsay lohan (34) It’s been more than a year since her last album, but obviously she’s still popular.
• sandra collins (11) Scan one little promotional postcard and see what it gets you.
• constantine hannaher (7) That’s me, I’m still here. Thanks for spelling my name correctly.
• police cruiser (4) Got a few of those, yup.
• dorothy krysiuk (3) The traffic reporter for the Fox channel in Philadelphia maintains a steady interest.
• hotel heiress (2) I used this circumlocution to identify a blonde known for being rich about whom I otherwise try not to write about.
• bzpower is awful (2) Sorry you feel that way but I’ve got no opinion on the subject.
• is charlotte’s web playing at regal cinema rollins crossings 18th? (2) Two searchers thought I could tell them about showtimes at a Chicago movie theater? (Considering that the Regal website has never heard of Chicago I don’t blame them.) Regal calls it the Round Lake Beach 18 and redirects if one leaves off the www.

Search queries that represent a single searcher fall into a number of categories: LEGO® (minifig-scale boeing), motor vehicles (manual transmission complaints 2006 ford escape xls), the police (virginia state police), more Lindsay Lohan (is your muffin buttered), software woes (printserver100.exe causes pc to hang), old movie cameras (canon 514xl-s short film festival), and questions that make you go huh (will manassas shopping center be torn down on mathis ave. manassas v.?). There’s no such thing as a manual transmission XLS, so ha! That one searcher is out of luck. Oh, and when printserver100.exe stops responding, just kill it. And in what educational jurisdiction is v. a good abbreviation for Virginia? But it’s been almost 2 years since the Post identified that aging strip mall as a key redevelopment site .

13 January 2007

Today, after a hiatus of more than 2 years, I went to a meeting of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Users Group and found a mix of faces familiar and unfamiliar. In case anyone asked for my bona fides, I had brought along the Hummer H3 I displayed at the show in November and my reconstruction of Timothy Gould’s GAZ M20 Pobeda from September. Most everyone was building official LEGO® sets, except for Magnus Lauglo who had brought along a number of his recent military constructions.

I hadn’t really expected Tim to follow-up on our e-mail conversation about my building his Soviet-era automobile creation, but he did—the instruction file now available in his Brickshelf folder is my modification (renamed pobedaredone.mpd) as previously made available on my Build page.

Dominion Camera has been a Falls Church, Virginia landmark since 1969. It occurred to Abe Friedman to drop in and check their inventory, and so it is that he has a Vertical Control Grip VC-7D for his Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D and I don’t.

12 January 2007

The home of WAMALUG on the Internet will be henceforth at wamalug.com. I don’t envy the task of changing links… like at their LUGNET newsgroup page… their ILTCO club page… I have a few links at this site to change myself.

The median extension along Beauregard Street promised slightly over 3 years ago is scheduled for completion this summer but it sure looks like it’s done already. Looking through the most recent quarterly Capital Project Summary Report for the Mason District by the Fairfax County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services, I see that the next step is a second left-turn lane from eastbound Little River Turnpike to northbound Beauregard Street.

10 January 2007

Who would have guessed? Proper measuring of ingredients is important to successful cooking and baking. Imagine the nerve of some people, decrying the use of eating utensils to measure small amounts. Exact amounts… are crucial to the success of recipes? Pfft, not when you have experience. Oh, please, nonchalance is de rigueur.

No local BrickFest this year. Also, WamaLTC’s Links page has been checked recently, but I did so once again in light of this plea.

09 January 2007

It is safe to assume that the version of OS X running on Apple’s just announced widescreen iPod mobilni does not include Classic. I’m going to say that’s a feature, not a bug.

One or more contributors to the Wikipedia article on Tower Records chose to highlight two local stores in the rundown to the final day. Do I miss it? It’s not like I’ll start visiting FYE any time soon.

I do feel some trepidation when I’m riding a subway train that is using a crossover, but on my usual route, the crossover tracks are all outdoors. Being outdoors came as little comfort for Blue Line passengers nearly 4 years ago.

I let other people do the worrying.

08 January 2007

Joe Meno, publisher of BrickJournal, ponders how to renew the LEGO® fan community. Seeing as how it’s at least 10 years since I was last at a Star Trek convention (even so, I remember some of the decline and fall of the Hunt Valley Mall in Maryland because it’s on the way to Pennsylvania) I am not the person to be answering this question. Why shouldn’t a fandom have a natural lifespan like stereographs or amateur radio?

The Deadmalls.com blog has been dead for over a year.

Today’s drop-off with my municipality’s contractor for hazardous waste collection was a basic thermostat labeled as containing mercury. This was accepted even though such an item is not on the list of acceptable items. Nine years I have hung on to the house’s original equipment (having quickly replaced it with an electronic programmable thermostat) just in case but it was time for it to go.

07 January 2007

Bob Hayes, who previously used the LDraw file I made for the Kawasaki Bi-Level Commuter Rail Car, has added my Build page to his bookmarks at del.icio.us. I suppose I should add to the page. For now, I’m just slowly sorting.

05 January 2007

I would have posted another revelation yesterday about the OEMs behind the Craftsman® brand but there were several delays in returning to the premises. Let this be a clue: when the inbound escalators at a subway station are stopped, that means there is a service disruption in progress and the station manager is trying to slow the influx of potential passengers. Turning back at the sight of the crowd on the mezzanine, I let a quick pace and a dim memory of the Orange Line with a View as the only bus into Virginia catch me up with the 38B on K Street. The driver had to reboot the Orion VII when the back door wouldn't close. Hmm. I reached the Ballston Station in time to catch the 25B to my destination, but the older bus on this route lost its hydraulic pressure halfway there and I lost another 40 minutes. I was still on my original fare from two buses back, so I didn’t complain.

When I read about it in the dominant newspaper’s free tabloid yesterday (page 30), that must have been on the D6, I thought maybe they were making it up, but, no, there it is at Target, Red Carpet Glam Hilary Duff Barbie Doll. Apparently it’s difficult to match the quality of likeness as was achieved with Colleen Fitzpatrick or Shakira.

A tap and die set saved me last summer when I was installing a ceiling fan on the second floor, and the head of the screw that was to affix the ground wire to the off-brand downrod snapped off. I drilled out the old screw, found a screw among my loose parts meant for installing hard drives in a PC case, and machined a thread in the hole I’d drilled in the downrod to take the new screw. I recently decided to replace the set (the container was flimsy and never latched well) and found that Sears did not sell its more substantial sets in the stores. The upshot is that my online order arrived in a box addressed to me from Sears, but inside was a box from the manufacturer to Sears. The factory in North Carolina of the Lincolnton Manufacturing Division of the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation is as old as I am, and has operated under the name of Vermont American for most of that time.

03 January 2007

With a recently developed desire to ferry tools from place to place in mind, I purchased a small Craftsman® portable tool box. Tucked away in the Product Research Survey I was prepared to ignore was an identification of Waterloo Industries. The company’s founder is identified as coming to America at age 15 from Yugoslovia but a more specific ethnicity is known and since there was no Yugoslavia even with an a in 1902 or 1906, the country of embarkation would have been known as Austria-Hungary. The tool box was made in Mexico.

02 January 2007

The phrase is If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail but I say, if what you have is a one-handed bar clamp, everything looks like it needs to be squeezed real good. Made in Slovakia, incorporating patented technology from engineers in Germany. Wolfcraft has been manufacturing in Slovakia since before 1990. I wonder where my Craftsman® spring clamps came from… swap in red for the yellow and there you go.

01 January 2007

As threatened earlier, I have deleted the Movies category from the navigation.