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 really 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