31 December 2008

Indiana Jones fights on a flying wing which is devoid of any national markings, hmm. I’d be more interested in the cars in the other set, but LEGO® has already felt the pinch: the budget category I designate as Fun had its lowest total ever for 2008, while Food and, er, other categories went up. In preparation for the plan to rebuild the Norfolk Southern locomotives, I’ve updated LEGO® Digital Designer, placed it in the Dock, and downloaded all the instructions for the Hobby Train set. Oh, right, I should have done that on the MacBook Air.

People twirl an index finger and say whee when they hear it, but I’ll be changing the copyrights on all my websites tomorrow to deal with dos mil nueve. It would almost be worth it for the Movies link at the top of the page to vanish, but there’s that release next May about which I am guardedly optimistic.

Southern California has all the fun.

30 December 2008

The Flickr user EvThoMcC who recently favorited my images of the then-new GMC RTS bus on F Street is the author of a book on the GMC RTS. Oh, and thanks for the reminder, Flickr, but I’ll be renewing my pro account next year.

29 December 2008

People are watching: early this morning a commenter on the page for the Loew’s Palace Theater at Cinema Treasures linked to my photograph of Metrobus 9051 GMC RTS on Flickr. More than fifty visitors have followed that link so far, and the demolition date for the movie theater (which had been stated as 1978) has been edited by someone in view of my evidence. I’ve edited the caption of my photograph to return the favor.

Maybe I should tape over the SONY (to avoid questions) like this lady here does with her Nikon. She’s hardcore, man, even the model designation is taped (D200?).

28 December 2008

I fully agree that the issue of unofficial parts in LDraw files is a headache. This multi-part file of a Canadian Pacific GE ES44AC that has appeared in WamaLTC displays as built by Bob Hayes is something I hope to build in the, er, color of the Norfolk Southern, but first I had to get past all the PART NOT FOUND errors thrown by MLCAD. Two turned out to be because of ordinary tiles which had an unneeded suffix on the part number! Then there’s the business that the opaque part has a different number from the transparent part. Now just to get my 8-wide models out of the display case at the National Toy Train Museum…

You can’t see my vehicles in Google Maps Street View because they’re garaged.

The Rotunda of the University of Virginia sometime in 1943, part of the Library of Congress’s Flickr stream which features similarly aged color views of Lowell, Massachusetts and Lincoln, Nebraska and other places.

27 December 2008

The Tamrac 5273 Expedition 3 Backpack that I bought at the Springfield Commons Penn Camera in the wake of purchasing the KonicaMinolta Maxxum 7D over 2 years ago has not adapted well to changing circumstances. The interior depth is inadequate to cope with an attached vertical grip and the general size is ill matched with the current lens selection (although I am not quite at this stage). The 7D hasn’t seen use since a month ago when it was called upon to create a profile pic for Facebook with me carrying its successor (which itself is already past five hundred captures), so a pack that carries 2 SLRs may not be strictly necessary. WamaLTC has no events or meetings scheduled.

Chevy Chase® Bank wants its customers to know about the impending acquisition by Capital One. Wachovia is slightly terser about the merger proposal by Wells Fargo, and affords it a less prominent place on the home page.

Google Translate can detect Hungarian but not translate it (the Detect language option is at the top of the dropdown).

26 December 2008

I was building again this evening, something derivative according to an LDraw file I had open on the MacBook Air (hint). To perfect the model, I could have purchased a current set but I chose instead to place an order with LEGO®’s online Pick a Brick. That still doesn’t get the doors in the right color, so I’ve registered with BrickLink and maybe one of these days I’ll place an order!

25 December 2008

Now it can be told: I have been using the Apple aluminum keyboard for 3 weeks.

If you checked out my page of compact disc purchases from the link in yesterday’s dispatch, please look again. I had neglected to upload the images for the two purchases last month.

Madison, Wisconsin-based wife and mother blogs about Serbian cooking.

24 December 2008

The package has been delivered safely (via Indianapolis), the DSL has been persuaded to work again (no calls needed), and the Girls Aloud Christmas Disc is playing in iTunes, but… no hug for me today :-( I don’t think anybody could have predicted that.

I’m not missing Tower Records, much, but the compact disc purchase rate continued to slide this year.

It’s been more than a month since I purchased some Sony CycleEnergy® Blue rechargeable batteries and with three WamaLTC displays since then I have yet to be concerned about finding them drained.

23 December 2008

Maybe it’s nothing, but the last time I saw Alexandria Police cruisers headed northbound at that speed, it was in reaction to an officer being shot.

The weather has delayed delivery of a package shipped from a warehouse in Cook County.

I do not want to be spending time on the phone with Verizon again, so could the DSL at my technical support client be back to working tomorrow, please?

22 December 2008

Five months ago, I wrote that I didn’t know the significance of this Friday. That’s changed in the meantime.

Apparently I need to scope out the situation before I open the door in the morning, in case this visitor shows up on my front step. As it was, the example of Procyon lotor was content to lick the neighbor’s doormat while the biped took the picture. The cat which has been spotted in the area is much more wary. Twenty minutes before sunrise, I don’t remember it being that bright, ISO 800 is a funny thing.

Blogger fails to identify the jurisdiction in a tale of police work in the vicinity of Purcellville.

Facebook in Serbian is a work in progress: the chat bar today made a transition from Доступни пријатељи (0) to (0) пријатеља на вези to indicate the number of friends online. My dictionaries are inadequate in the face of the phrase Нико није доступан за ћаскање. but it means no one is available to chat.

21 December 2008

Duh. There are no curtains in a digital SLR and thus no trailing curtain sync. The option for rear sync exists though but it’s on the camera and easy to miss in the instructions. Finding the option before taking this exposure might have improved its look.

Yahoo! has followed up on the earlier reports of its desire to make the email Inbox more of a social network but there’s a snag: there’s no justification for thinking I want to prioritize messages from my most frequent correspondent. What a relief to find the new preference option to get rid of the annoying invitations to connect.

Forgotten Books is quiet about who they are but seem to use Google Books to do their online publishing. I rely on the Muppets to keep up with classic literature.

20 December 2008

For that matter, the Alexandria DASH Bus system could put 40-footers on the AT8. Just sayin’ the demand is there, seven days a week.

The phrasing of And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here is too geographically specific and the tone too hyperbolic to describe Thursday’s photographic results but the speech in Henry V came to mind because some individuals weren’t in town and it’s a good picture. The product of the 8.3 megapixel FinePix A820 now looks veritably impressionistic at 100% (not so apparent in the downsample) by comparison. Our driver needed a bathroom break in the 8700 block of Little River Turnpike and I was tempted to snap the driver’s station of the old Orion V (I wouldn’t be the first to do so but you’ll note that the Flickr user linked to did so on a bus in retirement not one en route) but I didn’t.

I hear the question What kind of camera is a Sony? and I have to say that the impression one might get from looking in the big box stores wouldn’t be too favorable. They stock the models in the lower part of the range (200/300/350) and one or two lenses designed for the APS-C sensor size having exaggerated zoom ranges. Circuit City has a couple of those lenses on display and they might as well be made of paperboard! I’m still getting used to seeing the light of the flash through the viewfinder, but I need to try the one lens that has ADI with the flash, and look to see if it’s possible to enable trailing curtain sync.

19 December 2008

It took holding the camera against the fixture holding the schedules to the pole at the bus stop to get this shot: an old Orion V in the new color scheme for the Fairfax Connector. I’d been keeping an eye out for one for a while now. Here’s a hint of where some of the Orion V buses in the South fleet come from: even after a refurbishment that replaced the floor, seats, and windows, the back bulkhead of 7856 still had two stickers from its days as part of the Metrobus fleet. A roster for the Fairfax Connector confirms the all-diesel operation. I’m thinking it’s time to buy some 60-footers for the 401 route.

18 December 2008

A recent target of the drive to declutter the third floor. Ten years ago was the last month I would be buying the periodical.

Facebook is serious about its translations. A friend confirmation e-mail arrived today entirely in my current language selection.

An outing for lunch (plays sound) wouldn’t be complete without a photograph of some vehicle, right? Another ancient (1997) Orion V bus in the Metrobus fleet, preparing for a turn in Old Town and displaying DRIVER TRAINING on the destination sign. I made no promises regarding other photographs taken today, but you have to be my friend on Flickr to see one (I so appreciate that family is orthogonal to friend on the photo-sharing site) anyway.

My feed appreciates the new trim trailing whitespace option in BBEdit 9.1.

17 December 2008

Information about the Ivy Hill Lithograph Building seen in this photograph taken from a rooftop garden at Rockefeller Center was swamped by references to the company’s location in Glendale, California. According to Google Street View, every building in this capture is still extant. There’s been a change in the logotype at the top of 200 Park Avenue, of course.

The poster and commentors at Balloon Juice have missed another flaw in the argument by Pat Buchanan: Mazda builds cars in Michigan.

Seriously. One of the books I’ve donated in my project to reduce the clutter on the third floor. You’d think the Super 8 film which expired in 1994 sitting in the refrigerator would be next, but you’d be wrong.

16 December 2008

Nope, not a Plymouth… the silver Neon I spot here and there is a Dodge.

15 December 2008

Cinema Treasures says that the Loew’s Palace Theater was demolished in 1978, yet there it is in the background of a photograph I took in the summer of 1979. The GMC RTS bus was a big change with its curvy plastic-looking exterior and this may have been my first look at one, so the presence of the gentleman standing in the median of F Street escaped my attention until the prints came back. The phone booths look to have the Bell System logo of 1964 on them.

This site has been useful in identifying the buses I photographed in the Los Angeles area the summer of 2007.

14 December 2008

Some bus systems change their look from time to time, the Charlottesville Transit Service has kept their logo and their scheme the same for at least thirty years (previously uploaded capture shows both in color). I share the tag O309 with only one other user (who sought to build the vehicle in LEGO® elements).

Our venue for yesterday’s display was carpeted and the chairs were padded, a nice contrast with other locations. The Wikipedia page for the municipality seems to have been subject to some vandalism recently. Maybe someone is not happy with the performance of the local police. Inspired by Charlotte Geary and her lessons, I took this photograph of a T. Rex chomping down on a minifig at an exposure compensation value of -1. How’s my bokeh?

13 December 2008

Good times today. More later. Must sleep…

12 December 2008

I credit the Moody Broadcasting Network and the big letters WMBI on its building for getting me started on geolocating this view of Chicago from a hotel window on a summer morning 30 years ago. The TravelLodge we were in is now the Best Western River North Hotel on 125 West Ohio Street, the vacant lot with the Hunts U-Drive Truck Rental company truck is now (the entire block is) the Rock N Roll McDonald’s, and the Amoco is now the BP at 631 North LaSalle Drive. No doubt EveryBlock Chicago will be scooping up the capture any minute now. (The letters of the radio station can’t actually be read in my downsampling, but the building is at the center of the frame.)

This is personally welcome but does nothing to encourage shopping.

Dead squirrels? Yes, I’m seeing them.

11 December 2008

The plumbing work done this afternoon should presage hot water every morning and not just when I run the dishwasher overnight. In the best of all possible worlds, that is. I got sold on the latest thing in potable hot water supply, a thermal expansion tank.

10 December 2008

The reports of the demise of Orpheus Records are premature: it’s hanging on, open weekends. Neighboring businesses, including this Indian restaurant which was the site of a birthday dinner, are close to gone, and this row of shops next to the Hard Times Cafe is pulverized. A CVS/pharmacy has occupied one of the buildings left standing.

Bebo redesigns its homepage. Whee.

The Shirlington Bus Station has been open since June, it has been a while since I’ve ridden the 10B, so it came as a surprise. Thank you, Arlington, for refusing to identify the CNG buses in your fleet (answer found here).

09 December 2008

American corruption the Serb way: it’s good to see another Serb in the news, no? Maybe not. End of the line for .YU: note that the publication Blic is already forwarding to the proper .RS domain.

Шта тренутно радиш? Facebook now available in Serbian.

I acceded to herb tea today.

08 December 2008

A holiday letter arrived today with a surprise—copyright infringement! The sender must know that I would recognize my photographic artistry. What to do… what to do…

I have uninstalled Nikon Scan 4 from its seldom-used spot in the Windows XP Home virtual machine. I will remove the troublesome software from its hold on the boot volume any day now.

I suspected as much when I found the notification sent to my entire friends list.

07 December 2008

My capture of Holmes Middle School preceded the renovation of its entrance (scroll to bottom).

When the presidential portrait for Clinton was unveiled the sniggering jokes were made by the press; at yesterday’s unveiling for the current occupant of that constitutional office the jokes were made by the sitter… and people laughed.

06 December 2008

The free accounts at Flickr are subject to deletion after 3 months of inactivity! However, this account has escaped their notice and will now be supplied aperiodically with new content from the impressive series of photographs taken with my Minolta Maxxum 7000i and the Minolta AF Zoom 28-85mm f3.5(22)-4.5 lens earlier this century. The first upload is a familiar sight.

Snow is falling tonight, maybe that has something to do with all the snowballs!

AOL has been unresponsive this evening but earlier I was able to log in to bebo.

Maybe if I’d read the manual for my camera more completely I’d have known, but just from the sales page for the AC-VQ900AM Adapter and Battery Charger I had no idea it would plug into the DC IN port.

05 December 2008

I’ve been ignoring it for years, but big changes are in store for MOCpages in 2009. Maybe the proprietor could hookup with Facebook Connect or OpenID.

The previously mentioned Blank Top Chronicles is gone.

It would be a double standard to think less of someone for driving a Jeep Patriot. I’ve been reading The Truth About Cars too long, Allpar has a second opinion.

04 December 2008

The statistics provided by MyBlogLog generally confirm that the interest in this page is low. For Tuesday, though, the service reports a flurry of visits from several online e-mail providers and a Yahoo! Group.

I can’t blame the cashier at Radio Shack for trying to get me to buy something, anything, but the only reason I set foot in one is to recycle rechargeable batteries.

An online retailer has given me the tracking number for a shipment which was delivered to Laredo, Texas in June. That can’t be good.

Yet another headache of consolidation.

03 December 2008

Now I’ll never know how close the Mustangs I built in LEGO® elements came to the original: I am informed that new files in the LDraw format ain’t gonna happen.

02 December 2008

Some people like MySpace more than Facebook (via). So, how’s that third album coming along then? Coming soon… mm-hmm, it’s been nearly 7 months since the release of the pre-single/Buzz track.

01 December 2008

Cyber Monday? Hmmm… don’t know anything about it. This would normally be the time I mention the Apple Store for Federal Government Employees like I did in 2007, 2006, and 2005 but, nothing must-have there now. Also, no MacSanta for 2008 yet.

Looks like Spencer Rezkalla has made a Ford Flex. If only I knew someone in that club who could prod him to make more LDraw files.

The release date for the tricorder replica is now set for late February next year, a few more slips of the schedule and I could be watching the new movie first.

30 November 2008

For over three years I’ve had the word enthusiasts misspelled on the large sign I place on the WamaLTC display. Oops. Visitors read it out loud!

29 November 2008

WamaLTC will be displaying in the Council Chamber of the Town Hall at 130 East Main Street in the Town of Purcellville, Virginia from ten-thirty to three on Saturday, December 13, 2008, as part of the municipality’s A Christmas to Remember [PDF] event.

I would not be enjoying the weekend nearly so much if gasoline was still selling at the prices it was during the summer. The Focus achieved its best mileage ever these two days: 39.26 miles per gallon. Its composure at 65 miles per hour is still excellent. Sure, maybe not like the Audi R8 I spotted heading south on I-95, but smooth and steady nonetheless.

28 November 2008

It’s not often that the Focus gets an opportunity for highway driving, but today was such a day. The Escape got 26 mpg for this route, I expect something in the mid-thirties for the car. It’s not clear to me why the museum bothers to remain open an extra hour, but the foot traffic was vigorous earlier in the day. Still bringing out the 17-35mm zoom, obviously.

27 November 2008

That makes three people using a photograph I took as a profile pic on Facebook. Anyone else would be looking for a way to monetize the situation…

I’ve not been able to come up with an address for this Roy Rogers restaurant in Cockeysville, Maryland that I ate lunch at in 1995.

Even displayed full-screen on my Apple Cinema Display, the advertiser-supported video available from Hulu qualifies as acceptable. I can see where people with smaller monitors might find its selection of movies from a decade or two ago good enough to lose interest in DVDs. Which is just as well, because I haven’t bought a DVD in 7 months.

26 November 2008

This is the roof hatch on an Orion V bus. You tell me how hard it is to figure out how to operate.

25 November 2008

When I set out my Exxon station model in LEGO® elements for this weekend’s display on Sunday, I realized that none of the price signs I’ve made in the past apply. I’ve used the station at the corner of Van Dorn Street and Edsall Road as my prototype, and tonight I see that the price of regular gasoline there is $1.99⁹ which is much closer to the original label from 2002 than the first replacement in 2006. This summer’s label is unusable: all the prices had the numeral 4 as the first digit.

I’m pretty sure that slurping your drink through a straw is diagnostic of being lower class.

Have you been to the storage houses for snow and hail?

24 November 2008

A parent explains the negatives with the location of this weekend’s display: (1) cold, (2) cost, and (3) danger. I cannot argue with the first two reasons, I wrote about the temperature in the roundhouse last year and appreciate my ability as an exhibitor to enter for free (eep). As for the third, checking the local newspaper’s guide to Baltimore homicides for this year, I find one stabbing in July a few blocks to the west.

The Washington Auto Show® has been pushed back into February, I wonder if WANADA is being optimistic about who will show up. I go for the cars, others bring the kids for their own reasons.

Spock’s mom gets the Go Fug Yourself treatment.

23 November 2008

There’s been no change to the interchange of I-95 and I-695 that I pass through on the way to the B&O Railroad Museum. The local newspaper was describing the interchange of the same roads on the north side of Baltimore. Never mind.

One would think that when a Nobel Prize-winning economist tells you that your understanding of the Great Depression is wrong, you’d remember and not repeat your mistake. George Will must think his audience won’t remember, because he was offering the same misguided analysis this week. At least by listening to this drivel on C-SPAN radio, I avoid exposure to commercials.

The last time I completed a project, I found the time to edit pages at the WamaLTC site. Hmm, not happening so far, based on the number of placeholder images (going back to September of 2007 at the time of posting). My setup for the Holiday Festival of Trains display is largely done, so Friday won’t be quite the before-dawn experience it was last year. I have two passes but haven’t been led to expect any familiar faces. :-( That narrow depth of field is thanks to f2.

22 November 2008

The local example closed some time ago, so there was no reason to know: the corporate parent of Steak & Ale filed for Chapter 7 and closed all corporate locations four months ago. Some see a future in the franchised locations.

My trip through the self-service checkout today was not nearly so poignant, just some mature lady staring into my basket and muttering a product category. I told her, you’re snooping! with a smile on my face because I’m used to nosy busybodies (that’s why the product category is not identified). All she wanted, she protested, was the cheapest price. There’s no answer to that, I do not chase the lowest price.

A story of typography with a New York setting, but most of the action happens after I left: The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway (via).

21 November 2008

The display by WamaLTC at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum is a week away, and this weekend looks to be as good a time as any for exhibitors to refuel. For the visitors, there’s a coupon for $1 off everybody’s admission.

20 November 2008

Zastava Automobili celebrated its 55th anniversary this August as an independent manufacturer in a continent awash with foreign investment and control, but this month in Kragujevac the last Yugo leaves the line (via).

If I had content publishing rules, they might include periodic content retirement assessment reviews.

The woman in the hologram who goes unidentified in the Wikipedia page for Lloyd Cross was Pamela Brazier (The Kiss II).

19 November 2008

The screencaps at this spoiler-ridden analysis of the trailer are about the same size as the video appears on my iPod touch.

I’m adding an <image> element to my RSS feed.

18 November 2008

The Every Day Carry Forums would seem to serve a comparatively narrow niche.

17 November 2008

Maybe it’s time to pony up for QuickTime Pro: the official trailer for the 2009 Star Trek. In HD 1080p I can see that those are Iowa plates. Um, never mind, it’s available for free through the iTunes store. Say, when did that eluding kid lower the convertible top on the Corvette?

They may be inconsequential musicians, but I’m not sharing the Facebook Pages of which I am a Fan outside of the social network.

There is one photograph of my Minolta DiMAGE 7 taken when it was new.

16 November 2008

There is a ramp from northbound I-95 in Maryland to the inner loop of I-695 that I’ve been using to reach destinations north of Baltimore for decades. This weekend it was replaced. That will reduce the number of lane changes needed. I like being in the appropriate lane for what’s ahead.

Richmond Highway has a number of bus routes operating on Sunday, although the WMATA Trip Planner is loath to suggest the REX. While I waited for my destination to open, I had a chance to snap the National Amusements Mount Vernon Multiplex Cinema where I saw Star Trek IV The Voyage Home in 1986 (and Wayne’s World 2 in 1993). It closed more than a year ago.

To buy a Chrysler now, I was thinking, would be like buying a Studebaker in 1964, or a Packard in 1956. But I don’t have to reach back so far, really, when was the last time I saw an Eagle, or a Plymouth, for that matter? I see a Ford Contour nearly every day so it’s not just the age of the cars.

If incompetence has consequences what am I to make of the two adults who could not figure out how to close the roof vent on a bus yesterday as rain began to fall even as I said no every time they touched the emergency exit release. Maybe they couldn’t read English, because the instructions have been the same for years. Fine, I’ll do it.

15 November 2008

When I mentioned the Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi two years ago the last of over 1,500 captures had already been taken.

My neighborhood is not the only one where the Giant Food Store has yet to change its branding.

One would hardly know the economy is in trouble from the number of people in Tysons Corner Center. It matters whether they are buying anything, of course, and the score there is uneven: I found a dime and bought nothing (Sony doesn’t stock all of its α line in its stores). Both the 28A Metrobus on the way there and the Fairfax Connector 401 on the way back were crowded on their long-haul routes. 3832 is the new 29N, though :-) (there was some problem with the destination display that showed the wrong number but spoke correctly).

14 November 2008

Some people are still jazzed about appearing on TV. Been there, done that. Star Trek III The Search for Spock premiered locally at the K-B Cinema Fine Arts and I was among a group of fans in costume who were interviewed by WRC-TV’s Arch Campbell for the late evening news. I never saw the result but word of the appearance (complete with on-screen identification as Trekkie ) reached a mature relative through a medical professional.

A year ago I would not have believed how many people would expend even the minimal effort to click the link on Add as Friend for someone they hadn’t seen in one or more decades. I don’t even show up in the yearbook pictures of the senior class in high school (after the dour visage in the junior year picture, who would have paid for another). Maybe it’s the unique name people remember… and just like that, the disappearance of a friend is reversed as if nothing had happened.

Do you switch between keyboard layouts often? Perhaps the Das Keyboard Ultimate Edition is for you.

13 November 2008

The Google Street View of local streets is before the installation of the IMAX® sign. There also seems to be some blurring of human figures and their facial features.

So. Do I put up with a James Bond movie just because the trailer for the 2009 release of Star Trek is attached? I wouldn’t want to spoil the one movie only every other month streak I’ve got going.

12 November 2008

Want the senior citizen discount on Metro? The new, yellow Senior SmarTrip® card is in your future. From earlier this year: Seniors who currently have the senior ID card will be able to continue to use their card until it expires. However, cards will not be renewed or replaced after they expire.

Useless fact: I never took a picture with the FujiFilm FinePix S9100 where I held the camera vertically. The final frame of nearly seven hundred was no exception. Photographing the equipment is not something I’ve been consistent on, I can’t find any image of the Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi, for example.

I did spot a new red and silver Metrobus articulated bus yesterday while ignoring the mileage budget again but didn’t make any opportunity to capture it. It would be vaguely cheating to hang out at the Four Mile Run garage, anyway. These mockups preview some advertising soon to be seen in the system.

The Google Street View for my neighborhood is now available.

11 November 2008

There is no longer a photos folder at this webspace. The scanning project and its followup in renaming files from the digital cameras have rendered it superfluous. It has been a while since I’ve noticed hotlinking, I guess this just moves the target.

The sign says Best Buy Coming Soon but I deny any interest. And when it does open, they’ll have to change all the branding anyway.

How interesting that this tag should exist on Flickr. Yes, she’s writing another book (source of bio pic).

I’m a Fan on Facebook of several inconsequential musicians, but when the NewsFeed reported that someone had become a fan of Sears… oh, that could explain it. Other organizations need to work harder for support.

First official view of new Enterprise, hmm, dubious.

Unapproved variation in the typography of WamaLTC on display this previous weekend.

Exactly none of my GTalk buddies has been asking for this: GMail to add voice and video chat .

10 November 2008

Now, it would be wrong to just poof Nikon Scan from the Dock precipitously. It can wait a few hours. Three hundred eighty rolls’ worth of 35mm transparencies in less than a year. Maybe I should re-do them all in 14-bit…

People were searching yesterday for boeing super-80 and one hundred ninety-six of them feeling lucky perhaps clicked through to my photograph on Flickr. Interestingly, the search without the hyphen pushes me to the second page of results—even though I don’t use the hyphen! I wrote down what American Airlines said I was flying, but apparently it is more correctly known as the Boeing 717.

This is the blue IMAX® sign I wrote about earlier.

Just as my order from Tower was supposed to ship: DHL to shut down its air and ground operations in this country by the end of the year. More: Circuit City files for Chapter 11. The Circuit City store at Tysons Corner was among those already set to close. I’ve had no reason to be in a Circuit City for years, er, except for the memory cards, oh, and a generic battery for the Maxxum 7D two years ago. Blink and you’ll miss it: Tweeter is liquidating. I only went there the one time, to buy a replacement for the Super-VHS deck that failed.

Sometimes it’s tempting to lean a bit and not look so tall.

The photograph of a neighbor’s cat which adorned the cover page on 02 March 2002 was taken with my recently purchased Minolta DiMAGE 7 at a resolution of 640×480 and my resampling to 599×403 robbed it of what little detail it possessed: this is the original.

09 November 2008

The glass matters: the results from the Olympus Trip Junior live up to its billing as an affordably priced and easy-to-use automatic compact camera. The scanning project’s sequel’s end is in view.

After Sony abandoned laserdiscs I didn’t expect to be buying anything with that brand name again, for sure, and we know how that turned out. But if it means I can avoid a Ritz Camera, so be it, I am ready to buy again: Sony CycleEnergy® Blue rechargeable batteries.

From last year: Capital City Symphony Chamber Ensemble performs Grieg’s Holberg Suite.

08 November 2008

The liberal media at work: a profound, shocking, hugely disturbing level of ignorance. Surely Hugh Hewitt deserves to be in that roundup.

A week ago it was Virginia State Police troopers on the side of the roads. I ignored the mileage budget again today and instead observed deer carcasses.

FireWire FTW… compared to USB 1.1! I should have figured it out sooner after a 1.47 GB folder took more than half an hour to transfer from an external drive. There’s five rolls left in the scanning project’s sequel, then the bidding war for the scanner can begin. I have been so impressed with the results that I looked up which lens I had lent the mature relative along with the Minolta Maxxum 7000i and the answer is the Minolta AF 28-85mm f3.5-4.5(22) zoom from the original purchase of an autofocus system in October of 1989 at this shop. At this rate, I won’t have any lenses I would be willing to sell.

Maybe someone else knows the significance: twelve days from today is Thursday, November 20, 2008.

Low self-discharge rechargeable batteries? Tell me more. Sanyo Eneloop are available in Serbia among other countries and domestically as well. I am not looking forward to entering a Ritz Camera again. If these, er, LSD batteries work as advertised, I could be using them in my Mini Maglite flashlights. Just checking what batteries are used in this product.

07 November 2008

For the last frame of the last roll through my Minolta Maxxum 7 I asked a colleague to take my picture.

06 November 2008

The Serbian Caucus is an informal group of lawmakers who meet to discuss issues related to Serbia and the Serbian people and not a guide to the ethnicity of its members.

Online registration verification yields a Selective Service Number I obtained in 1980.

Anything is possible this week, it seems… the author of Track Designer reports locating the source code thereof.

05 November 2008

My shoulders have recovered from yesterday’s activities. It doesn’t compare with being in the Marines or anything like that but the stuff I have in my backpack… even if some of it is lightweight magnesium alloy… it adds up after 2½ hours of standing. A new map to replace the bad memories.

Dynax to α: Chronicle is part of an extensive look from Sony UK at how the Minolta AF SLR legacy unfolded (via). One way I can get a Sony Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* 24-70 F2.8 ZA SSM zoom lens. ;-)

04 November 2008

Yes we can.

Canal 24 Horas has another Ana (Ana Pastor) on its staff.

03 November 2008

This is the season to find out the political leanings of your friends on Facebook.

This webpage is useless without pictures. Ana Blanco, correspondent for Spanish television, is blogging from Washington tonight. If one of the comments there should link to hannaher.net, uh, it wasn’t me. Why is this page blank?

02 November 2008

There is nowhere you can go by passing me that you can’t get to by following me. Some people just prefer to tempt the Virginia State Police. This was not the weekend to be doing so.

Unlabeled photographs from the reunion out of someone else’s camera. The presence of a couple from Lancaster, Pennsylvania can be confirmed now. You’re asking yourself why I wasn’t touching the ladies more.

I neglected to source the quote in yesterday’s dispatch.

Did I miss having a built-in flash? Actually, no. Today’s results at ISO800 were improved by selecting a tungsten white balance and stopping down past f8 (which used to work on my cameras with smaller sensors). Also, 17mm is a fun focal length for photographing LEGO® creations with its wide field of view and close focusing capability. Sony Super SteadyShot is much improved over the stabilization in the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D, it did this at 210mm.

01 November 2008

The price of gasoline is about where it was a year ago, so today I put aside my mileage budget and headed south. WamaLTC’s display at the LEGO® Brand Retail store in the Potomac Mills Mall was the work of eight contributors. I quickly decided that the Sony Grip Belt STP-GB1AM was not working out, I liked the Holding Strap HS-700 on the Minolta Maxxum 700si but this modern incarnation is in the wrong place for my hand and also interferes with memory card removal and insertion. I wonder now if it’s supposed to be connected in position when the camera is held vertically… hmm, something to try tomorrow. The photographs I took with the Minolta AF 24mm lens are hazy, it had been a while since I used it last, I wonder if I should have cleaned the filter on the front of it! I have yet to try the Konica Minolta AF 17-35mm zoom lens on the full-frame camera. Conclusions: no immediate need for the Sony Angle Finder FDA-A1AM and the Fuji FinePix S9100 is after 18 months immediately surplus. I’ll throw in a carrying case, mechanical cable release, 2GB xD memory card, and xD/SM reader.

This promotional placard was visible to those leaving the mall by the Sears outlet entrance. I only applied a scale action to the file using Graphic Converter, yet the files display here in a vertical orientation as taken. I passed up the chance to look through the touted selection of Lands’ End merchandise.

When I arrived in the mall’s parking lot at 12:23 p.m., the septuagenarian candidate for President had yet to arrive at his event in the adjacent county (C-SPAN was promising live coverage as I headed south at 65 mph in the express lanes). While I was inside the mall having fun with my new toy and being recognized by a store employee, he is reported to have said Fairfax County is key to this election. You know that. Sorry, but Fairfax County went for Kerry last time around. I wonder how I remember that…

31 October 2008

It’s all about the views: hundreds of my coworkers gathered in the sun, and I head down the shady side street for the Dodge Charger in the service of the local police. Considering Chrysler’s current situation, there will be fewer such opportunities. Earlier this month I caught a silver Dodge Challenger on a local street.

Market differentiation: on MySpace, the Hilary Duff album mentioned below is due next week, on Facebook the Page update says November eleventh. Girls Aloud has yet to figure out the update functionality.

WamaLTC will be displaying in the LEGO® Retail Store in Potomac Mills Mall this weekend, I should practice using my new camera before the big show in Baltimore later in the month.

30 October 2008

There’s two ways I could go with this: either business is slow at Interstate Van Lines and there’s unused warehouse space available, or there’s not enough school children to bus in on a Saturday so less space is needed. People with CallerID like me don’t pick up the phone for unknown numbers, so I heard about this event second-hand. That’s my story.

In searching for the expression Oh, you’re good. You’re very, very good. I did not expect to end up with Quark on Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

It turns out there was more than two pieces of foam in the box, and of the six, I couldn't figure out where two would go, but now I can offer one Zero Halliburton case (in black) with a complete set of replacement inserts.

29 October 2008

Since I don’t watch broadcast television, I had to use this link at YouTube. About half an hour went by before the site was able to stream the video.

Three done, nineteen to go. The scanning project’s sequel continues. Early results are encouraging.

Sony left a camera on my doorstep earlier but Zero Halliburton demands a signature for a couple of pieces of foam. That’s why my status tonight is not Constantine is replacing the foam in his Zero Halliburton cases with an eye on selling them sometime.

More music scheduled for release next week. Wikipedia link for the album mentioned yesterday.

28 October 2008

One week to go… seems like something else more important might be happening next Tuesday, hmm.

Maybe this is a service I should look into. There is a big box of Super8 film on the third floor that may or may not deserve another viewing.

27 October 2008

I’ve tossed the two unexposed rolls of film which were on the premises. Their expiration date was back in August, anyway. As much as it pains me to retire the Minolta Maxxum 7 after only twenty-one rolls, it’s been overdue. The twentieth roll took eleven months to finish.

Tropicana goes generic.

Post Office jokes are so 1977. One of the people who was at the smaller gathering the day after the reunion is a mail carrier, she appreciates my continued use of the mail instead of the greener option of online bill payment. I figure the agency has been around for over two hundred years and is likely to remain around, and there’s no guarantee I’ll have an Internet account, or even electricity, forever. The cessation of Sunday delivery is, like the addition of under God to the Pledge of Allegiance, an artifact of the twentieth century.

26 October 2008

So it’s been a week and I have yet to learn of any other public galleries from the reunion earlier this month. My own publicity efforts have been limited to the well-known love Google has for my Flickr account, messages to people on Facebook (some answered, some didn’t), and a few e-mails to others (ditto). I know, I should have made business cards, but I don’t have any blank sheets left in stock (supplying WamaLTC must have wiped me out). It doesn’t help that the PowerPoint file distributed that evening manages to mangle my URL, the Excel file similarly obfuscates the spelling of an e-mail address (which is outdated anyway, but my current e-mail is found at the bottom of the worksheet). There’s been no complaint about identifying the individuals and just one lament that the result is not flattering. Are you disappointed that my photostream on Flickr has a white background? Flickr Leech is what you want, then. Want to embed a slideshow? There’s competition: SlideFlickr, Flickr on Slide, and the Flickr slideshow functionality. In view of the XHTML validation on these pages, I thought I couldn’t use the <embed> element, but check this out.

A million hits on YouTube and climbing (via). I don’t remember the advertising campaign, I was watching television eight years ago but I’m not in the beer-buying market. The production’s website.

More analysis of the illustration from which Rob Ullman drew inspiration for a Hallowe’en pinup. I had the idea that Elvgren used models who were underage but can’t prove it for this particular image.

I’ve been asked to extend the scanning project so that photographs taken with the Minolta Maxxum 7000i by a mature relative (like this one or this one) get the Nikon treatment. There’s already been an inquiry for this discontinued model.

It took two days, but the photographs of my visit to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center have definitely been upgraded (original look preserved at this entry).

25 October 2008

Workers in the rain install a new sign and cover it up with the current name of the bank on the corner. Commerce Bank is being rebranded as TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank® because of an inconvenient competitor in Massachusetts.

The scanning project is in its last days (two rolls of my own remain). As there is still a roll in the Minolta Maxxum 7, I am loathe to give up the transparency scanner, but, hey, if you could use one, let’s talk. The Maxxum 7 has made a small contribution to my Flickr photostream.

24 October 2008

Another search engine dedicated to people (via). It found me this blog post linking to the internal anchor for the Metrorail cars on my Build page.

A reader inquires about my archiving strategy. A strategy woiuld require having a goal, and I do not admit to having any goals. For now I have the one terabyte drive that I installed in March, several external hard drives, and a big pile of DVDs… and Flickr.

The concierge at the Apple Store in Fashion Centre at Pentagon City knew what she was talking about, a little rubbing alcohol and my wireless Mighty Mouse is scrolling again. She was so persuasive I should go home without buying another mouse that there wasn’t any opportunity to be tempted by Aperture. The Sony Store next door had an α900 on display in the cabinet, too late, but the selection of Memory Stick media cards was limited and I went to Circuit City to fill the second slot with a SanDisk® Ultra® II 2GB Memory Stick PRO Duo™. At the current quality level, that capacity is less than one hundred images, but the intent is to use the card only when the CompactFlash® card gets full (and even then, I have a SanDisk® Extreme® III 8GB card ready).

Are You Living in the Constitution-Free Zone?

23 October 2008

I wish I had remembered the white balance control earlier… and that the setting was stickier. A double cello concert recital requires ISO 800.

Digital Photography Review takes on the Sony α900. Funny, the first depiction shows it with a Minolta AF 50mm f1.4 lens mounted (my lens of that type colors the AF on the front red). One aspect which goes unremarked amidst the otherwise exhausting comprehensiveness: the system is made in Japan.

22 October 2008

Metro to eliminate paper transfers in January The increase in time for which the first fare is valid to 3 hours will be welcome. Metro will roll out its new red-and-silver buses Monday, October 27. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen one yet.

The last remaining images on this site not yet replaced by the scanning project are from my visit to the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in 2004. That will change shortly.

21 October 2008

The domain name that I wrote about last year is now in someone else’s hands. Oh, wait, those would be my hands. :-)

My photographs of those attending the reunion this past Saturday are accumulating views on Flickr, nearly two thousand yesterday, but this may just be first mover advantage. There was a fellow there (you can see him standing on a chair holding his Nikon aloft) who identified himself as a spouse and seemed to be taking a comprehensive approach.

The scanning project was disrupted in view of the activities but has resumed.

20 October 2008

Time machine? From the sound of it, lady, what you need is Scalosian water.

19 October 2008

The Flickr set for the Thomas Jefferson High School of Alexandria, Virginia Class of 1978 30 Year Reunion that people will be searching for, including the one capture previewed yesterday (which depicts me unrealistically: I don’t have a camera in my hands). Another set on Flickr for the Thomas Jefferson High School of Alexandria, Virginia Class of 1978 20 Year Reunion has been uploaded in view of the potential viewing demand. And the Facebook friend count goes higher…

An upload to Brickshelf for the WamaLTC display yesterday under the pavilion in the Reston Town Center reveals another antiquated aspect of the site’s functionality: the backend programming doesn’t make use of the Exif tag for image rotation. I had to rotate this particular image of a certain publisher of a magazine devoted to LEGO® in the comparatively antique Corel Photo-Paint program before uploading it again, because programs which do understand the Exif tag like Preview and Graphic Converter simply display the file properly straight out of the camera. May I just say, though, that the red-eye reduction in Graphic Converter could use some improvement?

18 October 2008

My alpha-mount compatriots in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club are envious. This is good. The number of times I didn’t confirm focus this evening, not so good. It’s late, so this unclickable tease (the original is in focus) is all for now. Yesterday I wrote that the iPod touch held photographs of the twentieth reunion, but what I forgot was that it also held all the photographs I took senior year.

17 October 2008

I think one of my contacts on Flickr might not appreciate this too much: the Flickr LOLCATS feed (via).

The publisher of BrickJournal has a new home for his blog. The LEGO® Retail Store in the mall in King of Prussia that I entered on Monday has been open not even a month.

Nearly five hours in a smoky bar, was it worth it? There were quite a few faces that seemed happy to see me and even one hug. The prelude to the thirtieth reunion of the Thomas Jefferson High School Class of 1978 was on the way home from the barber. Note to self: remember to bring the iPod touch tomorrow (for the photographs of the twentieth reunion).

16 October 2008

No signature release required. I let someone else take the first capture, if you’re friend or family on Flickr, go have a look. Flickr is slow on the draw, try it yourself. Halfway through the rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7, I was still using ISO 100 film in that camera (and would continue through 2005) but I discover today that speed is no longer recommended ( The available luminosity limits for an image (dynamic range) are a little narrower in the range less than ISO 200 ). A surprising amount of vitriol for something I plan to do, but the adjustable length of the wide Maxxum strap just works for me. My lenses are all going to remain Minolta too. However, KonicaMinolta DiMAGE Viewer 2.37 is flummoxed by the α I put in the name of the folder for the new images and complains that the 24.4 megapixel files are too big, anyway, but for its part, Sony Image Data Lightbox SR 2.0 ignores the JPEG files created by other cameras. So, the Dock just got more crowded.

15 October 2008

I last purchased an issue of Cinefantastique nearly 6 years ago. The long-standing promise of the magazine which is now solely online to publish an article on the making of the first Star Trek movie (30 years old next year) remains unfulfilled. More information on this and other lost books about Star Trek. New photographs from the set of the movie set to open next May.

14 October 2008

So begins another week of, er, frequent refreshing of the FedEx tracking page. No guidance yet on when this superlative will be obsolete.

13 October 2008

It’s true, a certain something is on its way via free ground shipping because overcoming my previous disdain for the Sony Style Retail store format twice today was without much result. Exactly how much of a market for angle viewfinders can there be that the store in Fashion Centre at Pentagon City has multiples in stock? Meanwhile, the grind resumes: thirteen more rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7 to go.

ChatFilter. CatFilter.

As if you needed more incentive: McCain opposed $98,440 for the Lee-Fendall House (for Restoration of the Lee-Fendall House outbuildings), Alexandria, VA. Senator Warner and Senator Webb both voted for the provision. [OMB] [HR2764, VN 325, 9/6/07] (via (via)).

Keystroke substitutes: I wonder if fn+control+up will give me the effect I want… I already found Control-Up and Control-Down.

12 October 2008

Having confirmed that MLCAD will launch under WINE and X11, I wanted to find out whether the program would be useful. I am satisfied that the program is capable to edit files in the LDraw format (I started with the WMATA pickup truck) while in that environment. Something for me to do while WamaLTC is displaying at the Holiday Festival of Trains in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum next month.

11 October 2008

So I’ve been observing the prevalence of the ClearviewHwy font in other states (finding it used more elsewhere than I’ve seen locally) and listening to advertising-supported radio, and I noticed something: listeners to English-language radio are encouraged to purchase HD Radio (plays sound) receivers at Best Buy and Crutchfield, while listeners to Spanish-language radio are steered to Walmart and Radio Shack. Coincidence, or something more?

10 October 2008

I was persuaded to have some wine today with lunch as part of a belated birthday celebration. Can’t say I got any pleasure out of it.

I might have taken a few photographs of one set of highway signs, but if you want more: the Millennium Highway.

09 October 2008

As long as there’s a route 29K, WMATA will run its oldest buses on it. Metrobus 4354 is an Orion V from 1998. Uh-oh, I haven’t seen one of these yet.

Are you using Internet Explorer? The all-purpose question when someone is having trouble viewing a web site.

Serbia appears on a list of Top 40 Fastest Growing Countries on Facebook in 3Q08 (%)

Hilary Duff is only one of the known personalities appearing in public service announcements (via).

Red Dawn: the gift that keeps on giving.

Shh, unannounced blog betrayed by the referrer it left here.

Your urgent questions about Brickfest in 2009, answered.

08 October 2008

Some things are better left not known… I am led to believe that there is such a thing as Hooters crayons. I’ve yet to enter one, despite the well-known attractions, so I had no idea. Something to do when traveling, perhaps.

07 October 2008

It must be Combined Federal Campaign season (the charity advertised on the back of this Metrobus has been previously mentioned).

Some people think I don’t get enough sun. So much for that theory.

I’ve been using the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D this week… it occurs to me now that Sunday’s highway sign photography was handheld at an effective focal length of seven hundred fifty millimeters… because I might as well use it just a little more before replacing it, eh… but today I was carrying only the 17-35 zoom lens and that was, ah, inadequate for my, er, purposes, this afternoon. I am so looking forward to a full-frame body and being able to carry the 24-105 zoom and have it mean what it says.

Muddy shoes no more. The bus stop on the north side of Little River Turnpike at Oasis Drive has been fully paved with concrete sidewalks.

06 October 2008

It’s not exactly fair to go back to old writings and make fun of the lapses in prediction, but I’ve been rereading Arthur C. Clarke’s The View From Serendip as a prelude to tossing it on the pile, and another reverse anachronism caught me by surprise: in writing for Time in 1969 on the promise of the moon and Earth orbit, Clarke suggests that there are countless articles of commerce… whose cost per pound is so high that even today Earth-orbital freight charges would be unimportant but of the three examples he comes up with, one is the hairsprings of good watches (the others are drugs and microelectronic components). I purchased the book my first year of college at a second-hand bookshop in Charlottesville, and in the 30 years since, hairsprings and good watches have not gone together. By the time digital watches came along just a few years later, the quartz revolution was already underway.

With the scanning of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7 underway, the gallery of photographs from the construction of the AMC Hoffman Center 22 is completely refurbished.

05 October 2008

The Minolta AF 500mm Reflex lens and the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D Anti-Shake feature cooperate to bring you the use of Clearview® on a local highway as previously mentioned. This could be at a distance of a thousand feet, and while I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t all that steady either. The shutter speed was 1/1000s at ISO200 so the appearance might reflect atmospheric scintillation. The film camera used for the same project was loaded with ISO800 film and its program came up with a shutter speed of 1/4000s. It will be a while before the results of that are known.

Apple touts the wireless ability of Remote Disc to permit the MacBook Air to transfer files from an optical disc in another computer, but I can tell you it works with a wired connection as well.

Chevy Chase Bank approves of browsers that support 128-bit encryption and SSL3, but try using Firefox and you end up on a page asking you to download Netscape 6.2 instead? This page says the optimal browser is Netscape 4.77!

So, who’s buying Wachovia this week?

04 October 2008

One of the services I posted about on Tuesday allegedly left Beta on Thursday. It’s services like this (via) that lead Flickr users to desire secret favorites.

FedEx Home Delivery operates Tuesday through Saturday. You wouldn’t know that from reading Yahoo! Answers. I can confirm that the claim regarding MLCAD and Darwine pans out largely as advertised, with a boost from X11. The LDraw installer is given every reason to think that it’s acting upon a drive C:. Scary! It turns out the actual folder is hidden, using a UNIX dot-filename. Because MLCAD can navigate the folder tree upwards, I will be able to use Finder to copy over unofficial parts and completed models.

Whew! The Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro is reported to perform better in an iChat A/V connection than the built-in iSight camera on an Apple notebook.

03 October 2008

5100 block of 16th Street NW. The quality of all the photographs on the Police Vehicles page which were scanned from film has been upgraded. The zoom on this one was inadequate for inclusion.

The quality of all photographs on the Cinemas page has been upgraded.

Four years ago, I described a takedown. This was the consequence thereof before the scrubbing.

02 October 2008

My earlier upload to Flickr of the interior of a Rohr car on the Metrorail featured the original orange and brown colors for the seating. Tonight’s upload of the interior of a CAF car on the Metrorail offers the newer blue and maroon colors for the seating, with the seats at the ends in the legacy orange. I have yet to be in a car with the reduced number of seats and the overhead handles which is empty enough for my purposes.

01 October 2008

And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and understand the world? (YouTube, via). In that situation I might hem and haw and not mention the name of the local free tabloid that I pick up every day and instead mention some of the community blogs that keep me informed like MetaFilter, Slashdot, Daily Kos. Extended version. The Supreme Court decision question is trickier because it’s not about naming one—I could pipe up fairly quickly with Griswold v. Connecticut or Loving v. Virginia—but about naming one with which one disagrees and eventually I might be able to sputter something about the one that said you as an individual had no right to know how much was the CIA’s budget.

The collision that ended my relationship with a 1988 Mazda 626 LX 5-door was over 5 years ago (photographic followup). The twenty-second roll through the Minolta Maxxum 700si tracks its loss, the visit to the collision site, the purchase of the Ford Focus ZX5, the visit to Washington Dulles International Airport, Giuliana Depandi for E!, and yet another Roy Rogers Restaurant. Seven rolls to go for this camera.

A third post on my Wall at Facebook.

30 September 2008

A timely rundown on birthday messages these days doesn’t exactly comport with my own experience today: two posts on my Wall at Facebook, one instant message, one email, and one greeting card website. Well, two e-mails but the second one might have been pro forma. And the greeting card website demanded I upgrade my Flash install… mm-hmm, yeah, that’s happening. A few took the retro route with a face-to-face greeting.

I wonder what this is all about, and what’s all this then.

29 September 2008

So, Citi is poised to buy Wachovia, or at least its banking operations. I looked to see what the current presence in the local market is for this company and it is limited to surcharge-free ATMs at 7-11 stores.

28 September 2008

I’ve neglected to mention that I have seen the Clearview® typeface (previously mentioned) in the wild on overhead signs along I-395 northbound between the beltway and Edsall Road. Digital cameras are too slow in starting and focusing and exposing for this sort of work, hmm, it might be time to dig out the Minolta Maxxum 7 for a twentieth roll.

A Boy and His Dog in the public domain? Huh (via this roundup of post-apocalyptic movies at an otherwise political site). A quick check and, yes, I have all four featured titles on laserdisc. Laserdisc has started showing up in the thrift store I visit (they’re asking $10 for a single disc, $15 for a double disc title, and $60 for the JFK box set, all of which seems optimistic: We pay from 5 cents to 1 dollar for laserdiscs ; more along those lines).

27 September 2008

My photograph of Norfolk Southern caboose 555616 was taken before the taggers got to it (other side).

26 September 2008

Ford is looking to blunt the message of an upcoming movie.

What good would Apple’s third model of notebook be in households with no WiFi base station? I ask you.

MetaFilter discovers CDARS (previously mentioned) and MeFites are hostile to the idea. Here’s my take on it, though: there’s people this program would appeal to that would never in a million years or even 50 million buy stocks or bonds or invest in mutual funds.

This is so predictable… I continued to use older cameras after buying a Minolta Maxxum 7 on 02 December 2000. Already halfway through the rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 700si.

25 September 2008

The candidates of the Republican Party just can’t get a break these days (more) but even so the tabloid Examiner endorsed that ticket today. Now that’s what I call journalism: the adjacent headline is First debate postponed? Obama balks at delay. Pages updated (1, 2, 3, 4), scanning resumes tomorrow.

24 September 2008

What is it with people? The thirteenth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 700si offers updates to various categories (1, 2) but I can’t get to them all today. :-(

It’s hard work, everybody knows it’s hard work. Is it a slip of the tongue to say the next guy’s responsibility begins 40 days from now? I wish every site had a way to hide the comments…

23 September 2008

See, I told you: the new courtesy shuttle at Jerry’s Ford which replaced the Freestar they used to use. Oh, great, yet another thing which demands an e-mail address and password.

The scanning project has caught up with the visit to the Washington Auto Show which found me enjoying the driver’s seat of a 2001 Audi S4 Avant.

22 September 2008

I did not receive any notification, no e-mail, no press release, nuttin’, and this is too new to have shown up in my website’s stats, so it was just a random verification of a link on the Diversions page: the Scrope site unveiled yesterday a significantly remodeled look, and these here Dispatches are the first link in the blogroll. Hmm, the site finally has an RSS feed.

Andrew Probert interviewed on the subject of the Cylons in the original Battlestar: Galactica (via).

21 September 2008

The addition less than 3 months ago of the Street View feature to the Google Maps for Swarthmore, Pennsylvania has helped identify some addresses I visited in a 1999 trip that included multiple visits to the local police. The identity of the ice cream place remains a mystery.

20 September 2008

Four virtual machines upgraded and VMware Tools installed and updated. I needed to attach winPre2k.iso and not windows.iso for the final holdout install of Windows 98 Second Edition. VMware Fusion version 2.0 seems to pass the Command key (which launches the Windows Start menu in the guest) when Command-Tabbing away from the virtual machine’s window in a way that 1.1.3 didn’t.

19 September 2008

They’re blaming this on the mayor, too: the Wendy’s at 3300 Duke Street that I photographed last year (its sign this year) is reportedly closed. A PNC Bank branch is planned for the location.

I guess my homeowners association won’t be using that pool management company anymore, I wonder how long before the recruiting profile at MySpace has no friends.

A LUGnet post claims that MLCAD runs on Intel Macs using Darwine.

Yesterday’s link, despite its length, was not a permanent one to the story about the Pan Pacific Open and how Russia’s Nadia Petrova defeated Ivanovic 6-1, 1-6, 6-2 in the tournament’s first major upset. Thanks a lot, Yahoo! Sports, for confusing any readers who follow the link and find a story about Jankovic losing.

18 September 2008

More bad news for Ivanovic, I am the first to buzz it up.

What happens when one ignores the teleprompter.

There’s a few minutes between buses so I’m looking at some headlines and, wait, what? Why is the name Wachovia in two of them? Hmm…

Microsoft is set to complain that the PC has been made a stereotype, but what is it that limits the maximum RAM of any notebook I might buy? The 32-bit Windows operating system.

Jerry’s Ford has started using a Flex as its courtesy shuttle.

17 September 2008

I am not happy that the iChat Video Chat feature doesn’t remember where I move the window to.

Downloading the PowerPC port of Debian over a dialup connection… not my idea, but if I wanted to try a Linux, I certainly could. A project for another time. Currently I’m making sure my four virtual machines have survived the upgrades that came with version 2.0. Not such a good idea on the older operating systems.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania gets its own Apple store this Saturday. If I were, accidentally, to be shopping for some Apple hardware I would order it through the Federal Employee Store, right?

16 September 2008

I’m impressed with how the Nikon Scan Recovery of Color feature has taken the dismal atmosphere of the ground level of the Landmark Mall parking deck and transformed this cruiser into a jewel. The software cannot fix a failure to focus, however, nor my stinginess in using Kodak Kodacolor Gold Max 800 for the first roll through the Minolta Maxxum 700si back in 1997, so this single view of motion picture photography on the Key Bridge remains inadequate. The alleged presence of Téa Leoni and the silver Saab 900 makes the production a scene for Deep Impact (which I never saw). I was using the Minolta AF 500mm Reflex lens while standing on the north side of M St NW.

15 September 2008

The scanning of the film that went through the Minolta Maxxum 8000i is completed. The actual last roll through this camera I scanned in January along with most of the other slides, but the penultimate roll was a negative film, Fujicolor Press 800, which has contributed to the upgrades of pages in multiple categories: construction, reporters, police, cinemas. This Ford Expedition in the service of the Alexandria Police with the 250th anniversary scheme is too blurred to be included in the gallery, while this attempt to capture Maria Luisa Busi failed. Looking ahead, my note-taking for the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 700si was less diligent.

14 September 2008

Julie Brown (web site, MySpace, and YouTube) is still alive and performing but… not so funny compared to these two veterans from Mean Girls (via).

Yes, that’s pretty much how the movie Red Dawn goes, all right.

ING advises me to avoid splurging; identify and cut out unnecessary expenses and save for what’s essential but can’t help me with finding things on the premises to sell…

Maintidget is a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that simplifies running the periodic tasks. Although Leopard is supposed to take care of them even if the computer wasn’t on at 2 a.m., that wasn’t happening for me and it had been six months since my last use of the Terminal to sudo periodic daily.

13 September 2008

Jem and Pizzazz spotted at Dragon*Con this year. The convention’s tale of expansion may inspire local organizers. I’ve made the set of photographs of my Hasbro Jem collection that I took 12 years ago public, earlier this week the photographs elicited an unexpected positive response among recent college graduates. I continued to use the Minolta Maxxum 8000i for various projects such as this into this century even as I added the Minolta Maxxum 700si in 1997. A similar project included this charming vignette of uniformed police officers apprehending a suspicious character. I’m liking the white point tool in Graphic Converter. There’s three rolls to go for the 8000i before the next multiyear leap backwards.

It’s for real, then. That it’s called the α900 comes as no surprise to anyone. There’s no live view, but the static preview might be adequate for the LEGO® construction shooting where I could use it to confirm my aim. Let’s see, which projects can be put on hold…

12 September 2008

Yesterday’s dispatch was more mysterious than necessary. It needed a link to a recent upload to my Flickr account.

11 September 2008

My contribution to the mystery that is the Toynbee tiles.

10 September 2008

It’s been a year since I signed up for Facebook. The website’s new look has some people upset, and Flickr wants a part of that action.

The scanning project in the twentieth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 8000i has caught up with the photography that adorned a couple of dispatches over 4 years ago with Jem and the Holograms dolls and the photograph that was the source for my mockup of Markup Barbie. Those earlier scans weren’t too bad, either. My notes for that roll required an update in view of additional information. There’s a convention in Los Angeles at the end of the month (via).

My Saturday is already spoken for, but for everyone else there’s Home Movie Day 6.

This morning I was induced to eat Moon Cake but I am unable to identify the filling.

09 September 2008

If it’s on the Internet, I will find it… Mister U+D45C has a middle name: U+AD11 (광).

08 September 2008

In view of the eagerness with which the search engines follow my Flickr photostream I have to be scrupulously correct in what I write there. I cannot speculate that the brunette model in the Hanes campaign was Yasmeen Ghauri even if the fallacy of the Argument from Probability would suggest otherwise. The Arlington Cemetery station on the Blue Line, 21 December 1995.

My credentials as a chronicler of local architecture are suspect if this is the best I can come up with for the building at 2900 North 10th Street in Arlington (on the extreme left edge). I remember it as Cherner Lincoln, in 1996 plainly it was Clarendon Kaleidoscope (allegedly with an accessible 18-hole outdoor miniature golf course, indoor bumper cars, air hockey, and an arcade ), later CVS and a succession of restaurants including Sala Thai shared the building. What happened to the Garfield Park at Clarendon Village project? I haven’t been past there in a while.

07 September 2008

These days, we might analogize this to a mash-up. The Beverly Hills 90210 Brenda Doll (one of a set of five) in the uniform of the Marine Corps, courtesy of the Barbie Doll in that service. (Amazon’s ability to spell the name of the manufacturer is inconsistent.) Look who’s back in the news.

Halfway through the rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 8000i, the scanning project passed a frame from August 1995 of a cruiser in the service of the Fairfax County Police responding to the wreck of a T. Silver Mazda 626 LX 5-door (not mine, the wheels were different) and my notes were that the jurisdiction had a new design for its fleet. Because that particular frame was blurred, this scan will have to do until this page with the scheme they’ve retained for over a decade now gets updated but it got me wondering if I had ever taken a photograph of the previous design. I had, with less than stellar results, obviously (the other had no wiper arm blocking the view but the cruiser was in motion and blurred). That vast expanse of parking lot at the Pan Am Center in the background is where the Safeway gas station is now, I’m thinking (currently Yahoo! Local Maps is up to date with the construction at this shopping center while Google Maps is not).

The Classic McDonald’s in Woodbridge is a pretender, this building in Annandale was the real thing. This example may be a guide as to its previous appearance.

06 September 2008

Some local businesses make concessions to the surrounding community by using English words in the name. Others do not. The one I’m thinking of turns out to be the Lotte Plaza in the Fairfax Circle Shopping Center.

05 September 2008

Reddit points to a Flickr account with a single image. There used to be a comment linking to this response. The vexillogical naïvety deserved comment (we’ll see how long it lasts). Some people can’t figure it out even after you draw them a picture. Previous discussion of the number of stars seen in local flags.

04 September 2008

Maybe it’s just as well it’s only the radio that’s on… Say what? People can live without television? Preposterous!

03 September 2008

I’m regretting listening to the radio tonight, let me tell you. Oh, look, more Boogie Knights uploads.

02 September 2008

It would be funny if it wasn’t dangerous: the Google Safe Browsing page identifies the site of the local LEGO® users group as suspicious (PDF). I apologize for linking to it yesterday. Google has not visited the site of the local LEGO® train club recently enough to evaluate the safety thereof.

Other Google news that I wasn’t planning on mentioning: the Google Chrome browser (pfft, for Windows, learn more in Serbian); Picasa name tags (which is getting billed as face recognition ); and Webmaster Tools (although Set your canonical domain at Google looks like it might be useful).

01 September 2008

Intellectually I suppose I knew that the McDonald’s which served as a prototype for my construction in LEGO® elements last year didn’t always have a red roof. But now there’s proof which could help to narrow the time in which the remodeling occured. The scanning project has also caught up with the 23 May 1995 capture of the McDonald’s at 7265 Arlington Boulevard where the sign still said Over 99 Billion Served last seen on this website over 4 years ago. That previous scan wasn’t terrible.

Hmm… the tricorder replica is now expected in January…

Pages at the current site of WAMALUG link to the Home page with an absolute reference to the current URL. The pages that I wrote (which remain available if you know the folder name) linked to the Home page using what I called the dot-slash trick 5 years ago. Upshot: the pages I wrote have Home links that survived the change of top level domain. How future-proofed is your site?

31 August 2008

A Mercedes-Benz W110 was used to install standpipes in the Washington metropolitan area subway tunnels, according to this caption at Flickr. The engine in my Focus has more displacement than was available in that fine example of German engineering.

Surely they have to invite me to the Roy Rogers pool now…

30 August 2008

I was persuaded to eat phở today.

Two people saw fit yesterday to ask if I had heard about the pick for vice president by the presumed Republican candidate for president. Maybe they could, like, get together and chat about mutual interests or something.

BBEdit alerts me that a new version (9.0) is available. Already know about it, and to the extent that I don’t use Unity mode in VMware Fusion, I’m having difficulty seeing why I shouldn’t stick with 8.7.2. It probably means I’m way underqualified to be using this particular text editor.

Tonight I concluded the scanning of the one hundred ten rolls I shot in the Minolta Maxxum 7000i and scanned the first roll through the Minolta Maxxum 8000i. The five-year jump back in time puts me in the Arlington Courthouse Plaza address again.

29 August 2008

I am reminded that this is the weekend of Brickfair.

The one hundred ninth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i also had a frame ripped, but this time the photofinisher created a copy negative. The Nikon COOLSCAN V ED always puts up a fuss when I change modules (the single frame of negative must be mounted in a slide holder, the film module removed, and the slide module inserted). I think they must have made the copy negative from the print, though, based on the crop and the slightly worse resolution and color tone. I’m displaying the original negative of my visit to the S.S. United States at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’ve rotated the corner of the frame to align the date imprint and road patterns. I was aboard this ship twice in 1966.

28 August 2008

Facebook passes 100,000,000 active users and Yahoo! gives 30-day notice that its Mash social network will shut down.

The scan of the one hundred eighth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i means that the refurbishment of the photo series documenting the construction of the AMC Hoffman Center 22 can start. The last rolls I shot through this camera were Fujicolor Press 800.

A mis-directed upload yesterday delayed the appearance of the dispatch.

27 August 2008

I have no reason to go, so I rely on a report: there is a Fresh Farmers’ Market Wednesday afternoons in the King Street Gardens Park.

DASH is encouraging ballot stuffing of its entry in the 2008 BUSRide/Oracal USA MotorVision Competition but I think I’ll have to go with the entry from Fargo and the North Dakota Soybean Council wrap. If I didn’t have to complete a form first, that is.

26 August 2008

The WamaLTC display in Brunswick, Maryland last year was not the first time I photographed a cruiser in the municipality’s police fleet. That happened 8 years earlier when I came across a Ford Crown Victoria in a parking lot near my old apartment. I’ll say this for the force—they stick with their graphics… not like those guys in another jurisdiction.

25 August 2008

Editing my AIM Profile is the first step towards a profile at bebo, the social network that AOL bought earlier this year. Sorry, that’s social media network.

24 August 2008

The last obstacle to my abandoning the ZIP format has been persuaded to switch to using the built-in compact disc burner. A generous quantity of Iomega stuff can be made to disappear now.

Did I not say Just say no to Eurostile ? I did. The Baltimore Sun was not listening.

As the number of rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7000i left to scan dwindles into the single digits, the arrays of photographs on each of the cinemas page, the trains page, and from the police menu continue to expand. The one hundred sixth roll promises additions to each category and to another as well.

23 August 2008

This page has helped identify more specifically some of my photographs of Metrobus at Flickr. Also, photographs of Metrobuses by other people.

I continued to use the Minolta Maxxum 7000i past the purchase of the Minolta Maxxum 700si. I’ll have my staff get back to you on just how many cameras I ended up with over the years.

22 August 2008

So, are you going to finish that comment, or what?

The demand to install Service Pack 3 for Windows XP finally arrived.

21 August 2008

These two photographs ought to get me invited to the Roy Rogers Restaurants pool at Flickr… Bonus upload of the Roy Rogers in the Burke Town Plaza.

The uploads to Flickr of Boogie Knights performances from years ago achieved some popularity yesterday in part, I suspect, through one or more e-mail messages.

Lustine Dodge found someone to take a Dodge Ram 1500 off their hands recently. Lucky dealer, as of the end of last month there was a supply which would last more than 5 months at the current sales rate. Lucky buyer, too, with 17 mpg on the highway! No new full-frame digital SLR for you!

20 August 2008

One of the members of the Boogie Knights has commented at my Flickr account that my tentative identifications are correct. The photographs of former members at the band’s website make it tricky to ID some of the men. Sorry, their page at WikiPedia was deleted in March for, you guessed it, lack of notability. The commenter knows.

19 August 2008

With one hundred rolls through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i scanned, it’s time for another break. The next roll will allow me to update the scans of the photographs of the Roy Rogers which was at 5603 Leesburg Pike. The ever-reliable Wikipedia now asserts as fact that this location was the first for the fast food restaurant.

18 August 2008

What a classy guy… wearing his Seven-Up watch to a wedding. Now you just know there are people out there stealin’ these photographs to use as desktop backgrounds… so here’s a cropped version with fewer bathroom accoutrements.

17 August 2008

Another never before seen exclusive! From the scrap at the end of the ninety-eighth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i I find this previously unprinted view of Al’s Motors at 3910 Wilson Boulevard in Ballston. Now a Gold’s Gym, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places for its Streamline Moderne construction and detailing (supporting documentation for the registration). The Virginia Department of Historic Resources considers the change of use to be one of its success stories. The next roll has another location on the register (already scanned and uploaded).

16 August 2008

Oh, yay, everyone’s favorite electronics and appliances retailer is remodeling where the CompUSA was. </sarcasm> I don’t plan on visiting the establishment which eventually moved in to where Chi-Chi’s was, either.

Where could I find out when the 2008 Democratic National Convention was? I wonder…

How am I able to caption my photographs of WMATA’s New Look GMC buses? I was using a list of surplus property, but the Ohio Museum of Transportation has a more comprehensive list.

15 August 2008

The previous scan of this frame didn’t have the quality needed to check, but this Ford Crown Victoria in the service of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department in 1997 was not one of those that went missing, either.

I wasn’t part of her cult following, my notes misspell her name.

My high school graduating class is having its thirtieth reunion this October. It’s not my first impulse to join them, I’ll tell you. It’s easy to think that my attendance at the twentieth reunion exhausted the possibilities. Maybe my friends on Facebook can persuade me otherwise…

14 August 2008

Just doing my bit to help the Flickr community. The building’s architecture is unmistakeable, but I wasn’t absolutely confident until I saw the address in the front door.

Labelscar is a blog about retail history named after a term I’ve been seeing at Flickr (meaning what gets left behind when a sign changes), it treats local examples of declining retail Landmark Mall and Springfield Mall.

13 August 2008

Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 is supported until 13 July 2010. Which means anyone hoping that an End-of-Life would force an upgrade anytime soon is out of luck. There’s a Service Pack 3? My install of Windows XP Home is still reporting Service Pack 2… and Internet Explorer 7 is reporting 7.0.5730.13. Hmm.

All is right with the world? You exaggerate.

12 August 2008

It still bore the logo of the Bell System from 1964 a generation after it was changed and years after the breakup of the company in 1984. When I took a photograph of the last phone booth in Arlington County, Virginia it still had more than a decade to go. I used a lot of words in the caption on Flickr to avoid saying Post.

I have a suspicion that the occasional delay in reaching the desktop has something to do with VMware Fusion. Today I waited it out (where previously I had tried restarting upon reaching the blue screen and experiencing no shifts in hue thereof) and while it took 6 minutes, the desktop was reached.

11 August 2008

I drove past this Maryland State Police trooper on the local Beltway one day in 1996 and thought: that is one freshly washed cruiser. Look at the reflection of the Honda Civic in its side!

Metrobus in transition: the protoype scheme used all-capital solid lettering. I’d first spotted the Orion V in the new striping over a month earlier. They’ve basically kept that scheme ever since.

10 August 2008

I may have mentioned previously that there seems to be a Flickr group for everything… I can only hope my latest upload gets invited. I cannot hope to rival this collection of local movie theaters and successor uses.

A 1996 Chevrolet Lumina in the service of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department and bearing license plate number 96104 was not one of the ten vehicles (out of more than six hundred purchased in FY96 and FY97) which the agency could not locate.

Even dogs have heard of MySpace (in the comics, anyway). Those of you who couldn’t figure out that I’d signed up for an account in April… what did you think it meant when you read about my mood on MySpace (again)? I can forgive not knowing about Friendster, there are people on Facebook who identify themselves as MySpace users (not me) but I have yet to find anyone who admits to a Friendster account. It would be wrong to out a long-abandoned Friendster account I’ve managed to identify.

09 August 2008

It’s easy to add to the collection of photographs of trains and to the collection of photographs of movie theaters (it looks like I could have had another page for the photographs of buses) but the lineup of police cars where each thumbnail links to another page is more problematic. But 11 months after capturing the new scheme of the Maryland State Police using high-speed film I came across an example of the older scheme in tan which deserved its own page. That was easy enough so the Manassas cruiser at sundown get its own page, too. Another page at this site has new entries as well. The ever-reliable Wikipedia says Lexy Hickok was the weekend meteorologist but on 12 June 1996 she was reading something about the District’s mayor. She seems to have been at Baltimore’s ABC affiliate WMAR-2 next, but she is no longer among the station’s talent.

The 5.2 version of the disc burning software Toast was released in the days of System 9 (while running on OS X as well), I suppose we should be lucky it runs at all in Leopard. Roxio is now on Toast 9.

08 August 2008

At long last the misidentification of this police cruiser can be corrected and the visit by a K-9 officer from the city of Orange, Virginia to Fair City Mall in Fairfax, Virginia can be properly commemorated. See the PetsMart store in the background…

Today Flickr changed how it reports geographical information.

What is your plan tonight? It’s just a question.

The Wendy’s in the Van Dorn Plaza wants you to know that they’re now open.

07 August 2008

One day 12 years ago I found myself on the Blue Line between the Pentagon City and Pentagon stations realizing that I was alone and managed to take two photographs of the interior. Although it can’t be read in the 900×600 resampling I uploaded to Flickr the number on the door at the end of the car looks to me like 1076 (the 1 is good enough to identify it as one of the original cars built by Rohr). The car with that number was damaged in the 03 November 2004 crash at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan station which wrecked 1077. I can’t read the number on this car which inspired some building in LEGO® elements previously.

The entrance side of the Bread & Circus Whole Foods Market at night. Yesterday’s frame of the west side was damaged before prints were made by the photofinisher, so the post below was a never before seen exclusive.

Oops, Sunday was the eighth anniversary of something.

06 August 2008

The day a black hole appeared in the sky over Arlington, or
, er… someone took a hole punch to my negative and ripped it, too. I have several photographs of the front of this store at 2700 Wilson Boulevard but so far this is the first of the east side. The acquisition of Bread & Circus by Whole Foods Market was in 1992, so the initial branding of this store that opened 4 years later is a bit of a mystery. Incompetent or malicious processors aside, scanning the rest of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i will be slightly more tedious: from the winter of 1996 to the fall of 2000, I only bought 36-exposure rolls.

Look what’s this Saturday for some people.

Shouldn’t this have a konicaminolta tag? ;-)

05 August 2008

My municipality now keeps its hazardous materials and electronics recycling facility open on Saturdays as well. I delivered the keyboard, mouse, and webcam yesterday anyway reaching the facility on foot. While the Wendy’s in the Van Dorn Plaza is almost ready to re-open, the sign for the one on Duke Street has seen better days. Maybe it’s not so good on the inside, either.

04 August 2008

The Recovery of Color feature in Nikon Scan 4 is working overtime on the eighty-seventh roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i. Whether the film was defective or was fogged before processing or was improperly processed (note the ghost of sprocket holes in the complete frame) the negatives are dark and prints from them had a heavy orange cast. Result: yet another blurred image of a City of Fairfax Police cruiser and it’s different.

03 August 2008

Kodak Royal Gold 1000 was not fast enough to capture this Arlington County Police wagon on Wilson Boulevard, yet an equally blurred Falls Church Police cruiser made it into the gallery. The film bore an expiration date for the previous August (these photographs taken in January) but there hadn’t been much choice. When the snowstorm of 1996 closed the federal government for days, I bought what I could find at the Giant Food on Monroe Street. Yes, the ISO on this page has been wrong for years.

The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service® is something I would have known about years ago, if only I read Parade magazine.

Ten minutes of Clara Bow in Call Her Savage (1932).

02 August 2008

You say that you don’t like the flash feature of Photo Booth? No one does, and holding the Shift key will suppress the feature. The only way to find about that in the Photo Booth Help is the See all topics option. The more adventuresome way is to invert the screen colors using the Command-Control-Option-8 key combination.

Another unfortunate blur, this one shows the City of Fairfax Police on Pickett Road northbound approaching Arlington Boulevard (US-50). The design is the words FAIRFAX POLICE flanking the city’s seal over a reflective white stripe outlined in blue. The subject of attention would appear to be an older Chevrolet Camaro. Fujicolor Super G Plus 400.

I must have thought this photograph of a police cruiser in Manassas, Virginia was too dark to include in the gallery even though it’s no darker than the one I took of the police at Washington National Airport. One can’t drive around anymore without displaying the area code of a phone number. The page for the K-9 version of Manassas’s cruisers awaits its update a few more rolls down the road. My link to the Manassas Police web site has been bad for almost 4 years.

Cinema Treasures has been useful in putting an address to some of my photographs of movie theaters. The new scan of the United Artists Fairfax Towne Center 10 marquee (compare) allows one to read what was playing at the time.

01 August 2008

In September of 1995 I started using Fuji’s 800-speed Fujicolor Super G film. The Alexandria Police Department had confiscated a 1986 Mercedes-Benz 190E a few years earlier and placed it into service, but this exposure is too blurred to be part of the gallery.

Sometimes when I’m updating my record of where a photograph was taken, I can use the 4000 dpi scan to just read the address. (In the original size of the scan, the number is plain above the door.)

31 July 2008

You won’t catch me getting sentimental about it: the iBOT™ FireWire® Desktop Video Camera from Orange Micro was always inadequate with its 640×480 resolution and hazy color rendition. The company seems to have disappeared at least 3 years ago.

BuddyUpdates from AIM (via).

A random commenter speaks the truth: Paulina Porizkova likes Star Trek.

30 July 2008

Whew. The National Do Not Call Registry list that I signed up for 5 years ago was made permanent in February.

The Federal Ballpark E$timate® lets me see if my projected Federal annuity and Thrift Savings Plan benefits are enough to fund a comfortable retirement.

What do you really know about your family? Your co-workers? Your neighbors? An eye-opening search of public information. I can afford to tut-tut because my own failure to pay due attention 5 years ago is not retrieved.

29 July 2008

My scanning project policy of every roll, every frame is not a chore, it gets results: a Metro Transit Police cruiser with an earlier design that I neglected to include in the gallery of police vehicles (itself updated for the new link to the Postal Inspection Service).

U R DOING IT WRONG: The Mac is Not a Typewriter.

Find out how Blue Coat has categorized your favorite website (via).

28 July 2008

Two more updates to the menu of police vehicles from a visit to Pennsylvania Avenue 13 years ago. The avenue had been closed to vehicular traffic for just over 2 months at the time. Were pedestrians still hesistant to walk on the road, or did I deliberately wait until it was clear? A couple more photos of a Metrobus and its advertising uploaded to Flickr.

I responded to the first commenter at my photo of the derelict State building by FlickrMail but d00d… seriously, did I set the Exif in Graphic Converter for nothing?

Now this is a Flickr set! Similar selection of vintage police cars. This one probably best represents what I would remember from growing up in Queens. Allpar advises on the difficulties of collecting police cars.

27 July 2008

I backed off the high-speed films and next loaded the Minolta Maxxum 7000i with Konica Super XG 200 which was still in that body when I went to see the Yugo Next exhibition at Union Station in the District. Low resolution video. The moving company explains how they made it a national tour. Actually I went the other drection on film speed, the Minolta Maxxum 8000i I also brought to this exhibition was loaded with Kodak Royal Gold 25; those negatives await another day.

For the Novacon convention later in the month, I had Kodak Kodacolor Gold Ultra 400 in the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (and Kodak T-Max 400 in the Minolta Maxxum 8000i). It had been over a year since the final episode of Star Trek The Next Generation and Marina Sirtis could pack a room. I was close enough to the stage, and the film wasn’t as grainy as the Ektar 1000 I’d been using in previous years, that the results from the Minolta AF 500mm Reflex lens look better than those from the 70-210mm zoom lens. The scanning project is the first opportunity to see these without the distraction of red-eye (not everyone is so considerate). Sirtis has taken to wearing looser, more lower-cut clothing recently (hem length seems about the same, though).

26 July 2008

LEGO.com Customer Service has downloads of building instructions.

My next foray into high-speed films in the summer of 1995 was with Konica Professional SR-G 3200 with which I captured this cruiser of the Maryland State Police. Updated page for this image.

My aim with the camera when I wasn’t holding it up to my eye was not always so successful, maybe I can pass off the bad aim as art.

25 July 2008

Go ahead and laugh: No fax modems were found. I cannot take advantage of the Fax PDF option in the Print dialog in Mac OS X because I was too cheap to order the $50 Apple USB modem when making my purchase last year.

The page for photographs of movie theaters has been upgraded with four new scans. Because I am scanning the rolls from each camera in the order of the camera’s purchase, there will be some backtracking because of the overlap: I bought a Minolta Maxxum 8000i in February of 1995 but continued using the 7000i for another 5 years.

I used the phrase I’m Audi in an instant messaging chat this week and I was not understood. I first heard the phrase when I saw Clueless at the United Artists Fairfax Towne Center 10 on 19 July 1995. I took a picture of the promotional stand-up for that movie in the first floor lobby of that movie theater earlier in the month (I watched Smoke that day). The film was Fuji Fujicolor Super HG 1600, the next step in my experimentation with high-speed films, which I used earlier in the roll to snap this traffic stop by the Virginia State Police on I-66 eastbound approaching the ramp to Fairfax Drive.

24 July 2008

Silly radio station. Didn’t they know that evolution doesn’t operate at the level of the individual? The summer of 1995 I experimented with high-speed films, starting with Kodak Royal Gold 1000.

It has been 2½ years since I designed a wordmark for WamaLTC.

Trek booth babes, uh, I mean promotional models from Paramount.

People are trying to get me to join them at the movies, but the superhero genre is leaving me cold. It’s about a month away, but this looks more my speed.

23 July 2008

Your patience is rewarded. I have instructions to update the WamaLTC website to reflect the plan for four displays in the coming months. We have a meeting this Saturday.

Suzie Plakson has surpassed the previous holder of the most-viewed upload to my Flickr account. This shot of the Oshkosh P-15 firefighting apparatus on display at Washington National Airport’s 50th Aniversary celebration on 16 June 1991 is the latest to be invited to a pool.

22 July 2008

Tonight’s roll in the scanning project was exposed with the Minolta Panoramic Adapter in the Maxxum 7000i. From April 1995: The Biograph at 2819 M Street NW; Palace Radio & TV at 2907 Wilson Boulevard.

21 July 2008

Generic error: the long-expected revision to the Facebook site is now available to me. There are some glitches: {actor} uploaded {=a photo} to {=Flickr}Flickra photoConstantine. (They mean this one of a costume call contestant at Farpoint in 1994.) Unfortunately the Always show these friends tool as currently deployed is too literally a Top Friends clone which pins the profile pics of those friends to a specific corner of the array (rather than dispersed among those on display). There are at least three places on the home page to logout.

Maybe I should wear my eyeglasses more often.

20 July 2008

A year ago today, I was returning from a trip with colleagues to Los Angeles. I wouldn’t be blogging absolutely daily for another three weeks. For what it’s worth, I don’t know the significance of this: one hundred fifty-nine days from today is Friday, December 26, 2008.

From the Post of September 18, 1994: A 93-year-old Bethesda woman was killed in a head-on collision Saturday night on rain-slickened MacArthur Boulevard in Bethesda, Montgomery County police said. The next day, I drove that curve just west of the District line and took this photograph of the scene.

Terry Farrell modeled swag from the U.S.S. Enterprise (CVN-65) at the Sunday session of the Shore Leave convention in 1994.

Blogger links to photo on Flickr by the file’s URL which technically is not a violation of the Flickr Community Guidelines because the image is not displayed in his blog. Flickr Services documentation on URLs. Flickr API to get information about a photograph. Flickr API Explorer using flickr.photos.getinfo. Result: Anita on Flickr.

19 July 2008

Mmm, the young women in the orange tees greeting me at the entrance of the Apple Store in Fair Oaks Mall, they weren’t ugly. (Their shirt color makes them concierges apparently.) The store has no barrier to entry with a store-width opening at the front, and the specialists carry their credit card swipe devices around with them. I purchased the fixed-focus LogiTech QuickCam Vision MP for Mac, but maybe I really wanted the recently heralded Vision Pro with auto-focus. Comprehensive rundown of the Apple Store as a retail business links to an image of an old web page listing the first two: Tyson Corner Center and Glendale Galleria. (Image of me taken using the Video -> Take Snapshot command in iChat has been flipped in a photo editor.)

There were a number of actresses who appeared at Star Trek conventions who could be considered photogenic—Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Suzie Plakson, Denise Crosby, Robin Curtis—but none induced such a room-wide case of beauty intoxication in the male audience as Terry Farrell. She was 30 at the time.

Serbia will get to see the next Star Trek movie a day earlier.

18 July 2008

Micro Center in Fairfax couldn’t accept credit cards this evening. That’s got to put a crimp in business.

Oh, look who has an album coming later this year.

17 July 2008

See, I told you: the preview of the upcoming profile design for Facebook users exposed more than it should have.

16 July 2008

I’m sure the residents are grateful: a certain hotel heiress asserts I haven’t been to Glendale in months.

The CBS HD Gallery for Star Trek Remastered offers advertiser-supported streaming of remastered episodes, two for now. Ha! In HD I can see that Captain Kirk in approaching Balok is holding his phaser one backwards! View of the black and white phaser one held properly.

From Sunday, the slash fiction just writes itself: Cassandra… offered to let Slylock Fox search her… .

15 July 2008

When the self-service checkout at Shoppers shortchanged me by a penny last week, I counseled myself to be calm and said nothing. When I found a nickel and two pennies in the change dispenser today, again I said nothing. (When I found a dime in the change dispenser at Safeway on Saturday, I did mention that something was left behind—then pocketed the coin.) After all, that medical tricorder toy has to be paid for somehow!

14 July 2008

De-friended again! It’s nothing personal, I hope, since said friend seems to have deactivated the account.

What is the likelihood that this exhibit at the Star Trek Earth Tour at Paramount’s Kings Dominion in 1993 was an authentic screen-used prop? The label for the prop on the left is dubious, too, the props in the second movie were rentals and never seen again. The exhibits currently on display at Star Trek The Exhibition in San Diego are identified as replicas. I’m on the front page of TrekWeb again.

13 July 2008

Revision of my Upgrades page has been long overdue, it was last edited the fifth of August last year. Rather than a dual Windows|Macintosh listing, I’ve changed it to list each computer and virtual machine separately. Scrutiny will reveal that I don’t keep the older machines completely updated and I’ve not bothered providing links to some of the older software sources (indeed, quite a few no longer exist). With automatic updating now a part of the newer browsers and Apple Software Update installed everywhere it can be, the need for the page is reduced.

Thanks to image search engines, the views on Flickr of my photograph of Suzie Plakson at the 1990 Shore Leave wearing an above-the-knee dress and flats have surged to make it the second most-popular upload at my account.

Speak for yourself, candidate: Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. An old man who doesn’t know how to use the Internet. I don’t know about you, but I read web pages, not watch them. Ok, maybe YouTube pages are watched, mostly.

12 July 2008

Yeah, this looks authentic </sarcasm>.

I’m at the halfway point of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i; the fifty-sixth was taken on Sunday at Shore Leave 15 in 1993. Robin Curtis wore the same oversize jacket she had on Saturday but what a difference a pair of glasses makes. Shore Leave 30 was this weekend.

Allpar can barely keep up with the police departments buying the Dodge Charger, this includes the Virginia State Police which had a trooper design new graphics.

11 July 2008

So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia? (via).

How long has a blue IMAX sign been hanging off the side of the AMC Hoffman Center 22? The announcement of a joint-venture agreement to install 100 IMAX® digital projection systems at AMC locations in 33 major U.S. markets was last December, and the AMC Hoffman Center 22 (misidentified jurisdiction notwithstanding) may be one of three to be the first to offer the system this month. Now if only they had something to show.

I have been exploring the new Facebook design scheduled to go live next week and found one data leak among my friends on the social network, a birthday which is not displayed on the current version of the site. It bugs me that I can’t find the logout link. MySpace used to play games by having the Sign Out link on only a few pages but the recent refresh of that site’s appearance has placed it on every page now.

The fares of the local municipality’s bus system will move to a two-tier structure on the twentieth.

For those who liked Darth Vader until they sat through the prequels this is a little funny (via).

10 July 2008

A 35mm lens like the one on my Olympus XA was no good for celebrity photographs at a distance, but by 1993 Robin Curtis had taken to dressing more demurely, so I dug out the snaps from her appearance at Shore Leave in 1986.

I suppose his biggest fan already knows: Nadal has a girlfriend. So does that other guy.

09 July 2008

What hold does Italy have on the manufacture of sponge mop components, I wonder?

08 July 2008

See, now there’s a reason that will convince everybody why I don’t watch television.

As I approach the summer of 1993 in the scanning project and near the halfway point of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (through that camera under my command, that is), Flickr has given up on displaying a specific number on the map and simply states lots at the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn when I’m assigning a location to my recent uploads.

This Ask MetaFilter thread links to descriptions I can’t read with a dry face.

07 July 2008

Um, just no. Not a potential replacement. Something more like this maybe…

TrekWeb’s criteria for including a Flickr upload are… somewhat tenuous.

When the mood strikes me to use FAIL again, Tim Gould offers an animated GIF for the occasion.

06 July 2008

If I was smarter and thriftier, I would not have a pair of gardening gloves in the back of the Focus.

05 July 2008

While my attention was elsewhere: The AMC Springfield Mall 10 closed on February 14, 2008. The mall is due for a total makeover (more details).

My page for a certain E! News reader was once upon a time the number one hit for her name. The scanning project has caught up with that day and the result is definitely an improvement over the previous incarnation (thumbnail).

For his appearance at OktoberTrek in 1992, Star Trek The Next Generation actor Brent Spiner requested no flash photography. I abided by his wishes (others did not) so most of my photographs are blurred even as I was using Kodak Ektar 1000. I have no idea what is going on here.

04 July 2008

The traffic to my Flickr set was coming from TrekWeb. The front page there has a display of uploads to Flickr, today’s leads to what I would call unclear on the concept : four people (employees of a bank?) in the town of Vulcan in Alberta (Canada) give individual interpretations of the Vulcan salute.

My notes for the first picture I took at Shore Leave 14 on Sunday, 12 July 1992 were: Skipper of Navy’s Enterprise. I was able to locate a list of commanding officers for that aircraft carrier which included the individual assigned to the ship in 1992. I was even able to find the vessel’s report for 1992 with the command organization on page 4, and I’m pretending that I can read MR RICHARDSON/EXECUTIVE OFFICER on the badge of the man in uniform (er, Navy uniform, that is) in the next photograph I took that day. The trouble with Google is that within a matter of hours these men’s names are going to be associated with an appearance at the convention in a way that may or may not be justified. If I knew that I had retained the program for the convention I might be persuaded to look for it…

A steampunk keyboard (of course via)… with Eurostile® on the keys. FAIL.

03 July 2008

WamaLTC plans a meeting on Saturday the twenty-sixth.

Food & Friends provides meals, groceries and nutrition counseling to people living with life-challenging illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and cancer. This is their twentieth year of operation. There was an advertisement in the City Paper I picked up this morning for their TEAM Food & Friends Cycling Event the same weekend.

Yesterday’s upload to Flickr of a selection of photographs from my visit to the Star Trek exhibit in the National Air and Space Museum has been receiving attention (that is, views, but so far no comments or favorites). I used Fujifilm’s FinePixViewer program to resize the selections (which seems to have shortchanged the vertically-oriented compositions) and the Graphic Converter program to set the Exif date of each JPEG file to April 19, 1992 which left just the mapping to do upon upload.

02 July 2008

The gas mileage spreadsheet has yet to confirm this, but I don’t see how I can maintain an average of under 5 miles a day of driving in the Focus when, y’know, I drive a minimum of 8.2 miles a day in it.

01 July 2008

Aww, and I had gotten used to typing Control-W, 6, comma, 112 in WordPerfect to insert the Character Number for the star.

So, was the communicator on display in the exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum 16 years ago authentic? If you believe these are the only possibilities then signs point to no. Gregory Jein’s involvement in prop collection is amply documented, but I’m unable immediately to locate anything on the third entity mentioned as loaning items in that case.

30 June 2008

How do people stand it to drive a vehicle with no wiper for the rear window? Anyhoo, for now no more kittens are being harmed.

29 June 2008

I’m about a third of the way through the rolls out of the Minolta Maxxum 7000i which, in the early nineties, I seem to have used only for special occasions. Months would go by between conventions without a single frame exposed. In comparing my uploads to Flickr with those of other people with the same tags, I can’t help but notice that my photographs are from long ago, Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton and Gates McFadden were all in the middle of their employment on Star Trek The Next Generation and Nichelle Nichols was still going with black hair (she looks this way now).

With the last roll from OktoberTrek in 1991 finished, the next three rolls are from my 19 April 1992 visit to the National Air and Space Museum for its Star Trek exhibit. I know, it’s not as exciting as skydiving, but negative scanning is a low-cost hobby if you discount the stress caused by how worthless Nikon Scan 4 is. I used Kodak Ektar 100 for my visit to the museum. What a shame someone was allowed to restore the paint scheme. No red-eye reduction needed on these ;-)

28 June 2008

Parisians Under Occupation is a controversial exhibition of photographs taken by a French photographer, André Zucca, using Agfacolor film for a German magazine considered to be a Nazi propaganda organ (via). The caption in Russian at this LiveJournal identifies the automobiles depicted as having been modified to run on charcoal and compressed natural gas, respectively. I don’t understand Russian all that well but I can copy a phrase into a search.

Sony announces HVL-F58AM flash in advance of the expected full-frame camera.

Hey, cousin (from a year ago). Meanwhile, I find myself referred to (the photographer showed up for our table building day 3 years ago).

The Wendy’s that burned last year is rebuilding and the banner in the window says they’re hiring.

Faith Baker recognized her mistake at Shore Leave 13 and her costume at OktoberTrek later in the year proved much more popular. There were multiple views on Flickr before I’d clicked the button to save the upload. Google has subscribed to the feed for the tag faithbaker (it’s the third result for the search oktobertrek).

27 June 2008

Leaving one’s sex indeterminate on Facebook (as I did for a while upon signing up) is no longer acceptable.

26 June 2008

This file of the insert art of all the compact discs I’ve ever purchased hasn’t been updated since the last such purchase prior to the transition to the Mac Pro. Surely the purchase of this title was obvious 10 days ago.

I’m late to the party in downloading Firefox 3.

The Internet Broadway Database® allows me to revisit the venue and the cast of a play with unexpected nudity which I saw on a high school field trip to Manhattan (via).

25 June 2008

Do you imagine that watching Ratatouille has made me more sentimental about domestic rodents? Not a chance. One spot of qap’la this week (I’m not saying where).

More commenting possibilities!

24 June 2008

In my stressed condition last week, I overlooked the Wachovia in the Pan Am Center in Fairfax—even as I drove right past it.

23 June 2008

The Egg Yolk Yellow hatchback managed to escape scrutiny another day.

The origin of my buddy icon on Flickr has been reached by the scanning project.

22 June 2008

I don’t know what search terms a Blackberry user was trying tonight (no iPhones for North Dakotans), but there is a Piedmont Virginia Community College on the south side of Charlottesville. Because you just can’t trust everything people say.

The review in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review of The Two Kinds of Decay caught my eye because of the author’s photograph (the one found in the review and in the reading guide), but the kinship of the author’s illness to my own (in the summer of 1981) kept it.

It looks like I’ve spent the weekend uploading to Flickr, and that is not a good impression to leave. Fortunately no one is reading…

21 June 2008

I haven’t called long distance in so long that my alleged provider decided it was no longer interested in granting me access to their network.

20 June 2008

The towing contractor for the homeowner’s association was active this afternoon, but my otherwise eye-catching Focus escaped their notice, and it’s back in a newly mold-free garage.

19 June 2008

It’s worse again.

You know how it seems like there’s banks everywhere but when you’re a cheapskate and want to avoid ATM fees there’s never one of yours to be found? Fortunately my habit of walking to the barber from where the 29K makes its turn onto University Avenue allowed me to remember the location of one when it was needed.

18 June 2008

I didn’t have the chance today to say the word thirty-nine but maybe that would have been mean.

Mmm, don’t think that’s canon, either (via).

17 June 2008

The recovery of color feature of Nikon Scan 4 is doing its heroic best with my photographs of Gates McFadden at OktoberTrek ’90, but I was shooting through a handheld 500mm lens at the back of a long, crowded ballroom with Kodak Ektar 1000… this one isn’t too bad.

16 June 2008

So I’m flipping through that local education and media conglomerate’s free tabloid thoughtfully left behind by a previous rider on the subway and see that Đoković has lost again. I don’t suppose the proximate Nadal/Lakers booster will let me forget it. El último punto del Roland Garros.

Actually, Laura Linney’s dress at the Tony Awards reminded me of the Chromoite from the The Mice episode of The Outer Limits. Wow, if I hadn’t been searching for links for the previous sentence, I wouldn’t have known: fifteen years later, the follow-up soundtrack album release.

Still no. I’ve come to appreciate the upright seating in the Focus and Escape and don’t foresee a return to the kind of seating where basically I have to push off the rocker panels with my hands to get upright upon leaving. Unfortunately that would mean compromising my no foot-operated parking brake rule. Dilemma.

15 June 2008

Oh, please, lady, there’s no need to turn and stare, I know it sounds like I’m strangling kittens under this Chrysler. My theory: it’s the air conditioning.

Now is not a good time for fans of the Los Angeles Lakers.

14 June 2008

So what is the deal with these new dollar coins? The Sacagewa at least had some dignity, these look like foil-covered chocolates. Eh, the self-serve checkout recognizes them. That’s what we need, more pennies.

I had the opportunity to drive a 2003 Chrysler Sebring today. V6, pfft. How can anyone stand a three-speed automatic anymore? For a vehicle with five thousand fewer miles on the odometer than my Focus, it sure sounds like something is about to expire under there. (Seems like my judgment is flawed, the automatic in the MY2003 Sebring was a four-speed.)

This isn’t my first photograph of Faith Baker and it’s not the last. She was still at it 8 years later. (I am so far the only person to use faithbaker as a tag on Flickr. I’m also the only person to use lisaputmanwhite as a tag.)

I have decided not to join WamaLTC’s display tomorrow. I know everyone is disappointed that Alexandrians and other visitors to the Oronoco Bay Park will not be able to see miniatures of the public service vehicles of the municipality.

13 June 2008

Okay, it got worse.

12 June 2008

I imagine there’s good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. The former owner of the airplane I linked to below points out that in its more recent condition the tailcone is also missing. Almost a tenth of the way through the one hundred and ten identified rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (I’ve interpolated one more since the last count) and there’s a particular ex-wife that limits the market for the scanning results. Uh, not my ex-wife, someone else’s ex-wife.

This prototype has led to building activity today, so that’s another new construction one could look for at Sunday’s display.

11 June 2008

My mood on MySpace is currently stressed but I suppose I shouldn’t complain, it’ll just be getting worse. I still haven’t rebuilt the back of my HM202 in LEGO® elements to match the real thing and WamaLTC’s display at the 27th Annual Alexandria Red Cross Waterfront Festival is scheduled for this Sunday—oops, that didn’t take long, all fixed now.

If you’d asked me, I would have said it’ll never work: a free digest-sized biweekly magazine of book excerpts for local commuters.

10 June 2008

Today looked a little like this:

1. Ride the Metrobus 38B for free
2. Return books to the library
3. ?????
4. Profit!

What’s that? Finding three pennies doesn’t make up the fare for the subway ride to Rosslyn and back? Oh, well… if I’m asked again how to get to Annandale from Rosslyn I should say the 3A.

09 June 2008

Today was a Code Red day, and I saved my employer some commuting dollars by riding the local municipality’s bus for free both ways. It was not a good day to be riding the subway or to be choosing to ride the Metrobus too early.

08 June 2008

The photofinisher who processed the fifth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i simply didn’t care where the frame divisions were. It’s not the most important thing on my mind today, but there it is. I am keeping to my every roll, every frame policy but for some of these frames the hope is that no one ever asks to seem them complete.

Let’s try that again:

The day started foggy, then turned hot and sunny. Ed’s house burned again and no firefighting apparatus was even on its way. People recognized the McDonald’s by the sign towering over the franchise and I worried that the adjoining fast food establishments went noticed less. Even with prices at the gasoline station valid from last Tuesday, some weren’t satisfied and thought they should be higher (even though, again, through the fog I could see that local prices were lower). Sorry, no links to photos in this entry, I have an appointment with zzz…

Complete album on Brickshelf from yesterday and WamaLTC page for the display.

tl;dr: Serbian scientists apply their investigatory impulses to the phenomenon of Facebook. Another Serb publication celebrates a recent victory: Лепотица с инстинктом убице јуриша на Вимблдон (Beauty with the killer instinct assaults Wimbledon). Đoković lost to some Spanish guy…

07 June 2008

The day started foggy, then turned hot and sunny. Ed’s house burned again and no firefighting apparatus was even on its way. People recognized the McDonald’s by the sign towering over the franchise and I worried that the adjoining fast food establishments went noticed less. Even with prices at the gasoline station valid from last Tuesday, some weren’t satisfied and thought they should be higher (even though, again, through the fog I could see that local prices were lower). Sorry, no links to photos in this entry, I have an appointment with zzz…

06 June 2008

Almost forgot… I needed to print a sign for the Exxon station in LEGO® elements which will be displayed tomorrow with this year’s prices.

05 June 2008

Some people treat the photo-sharing site Flickr as a dumping ground for their unfocused, unrotated pics of buddies at the local drinking hole… and others look to upload only art. This frame might be my first upload that could qualify as the latter (although I think the one of the B-58 has some majesty to it).

Ana Ivanović on top of the world. Silly IBM… the Share on Facebook feature offered some self-promotion instead of, say, any portion of the article. Maybe I should have respected the English-language text I am quoting. ;-)

Seems like it was just yesterday that I was installing Corel® WordPerfect® Office X3 Professional Edition and already there’s a version X4.

04 June 2008

After a day’s break, scanning of negatives has resumed with the first roll through the Minolta MAXXUM 7000i from 04 November 1989.

A search on the N-number on this airplane in which I was a passenger a few months earlier led to its more recent condition under a different owner (it seems to have had some previous history as well) and allowed me to give the upload to Flickr a title. That’s the airplane in which I was flown over Fort Worth, Texas and from where this photograph of that city’s convention center was taken with the SRT-202.

03 June 2008

The young redhead with the accent wanted to know how to get to Edsall Road and first I say the 8 but then, I correct myself, Edsall Road goes out all the way to Backlick Road, so… ah, she understands, I need the number, yes, maybe not knowing the word for address. She pulls out a daybook and turns to a page with the address and I recommend the Fairfax Connector 321. What she wanted with the Social Security Administration at that location we did not discuss.

02 June 2008

It was a little hole in the line leading to the icemaker/water dispenser in the refrigerator. The community has other concerns. The wait for a plumber, though, means that the scanning of frames from the Minolta SRT-202 has been completed. I’ve changed my mood.

The domain maj.com is redirecting to majhost.com?

01 June 2008

I have changed my mood on MySpace to gloomy and it’s not just because of the waterfall in my garage.

BrickBuildr is a way to view LEGO® creations that have been uploaded to Flickr.

Offered without comment.

31 May 2008

The page for the Arlington County police cars that I photographed in 1988 has been updated. Taking advantage of yesterday’s opportunity, I have prepared and applied stickers to a construction in LEGO® elements to represent the new look of my current jurisdiction’s fleet. It’s been a year in the making. Look for it next Saturday when WamaLTC displays at the 14th Manassas Heritage Railway Festival. At the time of posting, that’s still a photograph of our display in 2006 that they’re using to decorate the page.

I have been using the scanning project to catch up on identifying the date, location, and subject of each frame. That’s not always possible, and my apparent abandonment of data entry about the rolls through the Minolta SRT-202 after the one hundred and sixth isn’t helpful. However, the cards I pulled from the Rolodex when they were no longer valid have been useful a few times, as has the ability to type an aircraft’s N-number into a search engine and positively identify an airframe. In 1988 the name of the person who coauthored the spec script that led to the Tin Man episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, once missed, would have been impossible to research. Now, it’s a few search terms away.

30 May 2008

I have replaced the fifteen thumbnails in the menu and all the photographs in the gallery of my visits to the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility with new scans.

They have more than one. Opportunity finally knocked, and I chose the one without an officer inside.

29 May 2008

If only the person who commissioned this series of photos of two fetch humanoids in original series costumes (via) could have held out a few more months or paid more for a Master Replicas version… but no, the photo shoot went ahead with one of those Playmates tricorders.

Oh, please, like anyone is going to believe this!

The ugly American (hey, don’t look at me, I disagree, but… that’s what she said) is headed abroad. Oh, she meant this kind of ugly, never mind.

28 May 2008

Google Maps has a memory? Beckman Coulter lists its Fullerton, California location as 4300 North Harbor Boulevard but when we visited the predecessor company Beckman Instruments in 1987 they explained to us that the out of place address of 2500 North Harbor Boulevard was the result of the company’s early settlement there and the town growing up around them.

I remember it taking a long time, in 1987, to find the right reference book that would lead me to the Vasquez Rocks (you’ve seen a scan from the print before). Now it’s just a matter of typing vasquez rocks into the search box at maps.google.com. In my notes about the pictures I took on my last full day in Los Angeles that summer this subject was recorded as the pedestal house on Mulholland Drive but now it is a matter of seconds to identify it exactly. The residence is as old as I am, and when I took the picture its condition had just begun a downwards slide.

27 May 2008

Change is good. I no longer need to fret over undesired exposure. Should my other Facebook friends want me to help them obtain a new profile pic… any time is fine with me.

Ha-ha, Wegmans thinks I’ll drive 25 miles to shop at a grocery store. More specifically, they think residents in my ZIP code might do so.

I thought this Convair B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber was supposed to be displayed indoors now so I don’t know what to make of the date this photograph from the same perspective is alleged to have been taken.

26 May 2008

Evidence that I have been in the presence of Ubiquitous Red Cup.

On the recommendation of someone who went to the university in Carbondale, my companion on the 1987 vacation and I sought out what we were assured was an interesting place to eat lunch. The Pomona General Store was at the only intersection in town (which wasn’t even on my Rand McNally map) and while there was no indoor plumbing or telephone inside, the store was well-stocked and even had Seven-Up fountain syrup available. Our lunch included bags of potato chips with Scripture on the back. A fellow came by to get ice cream for his dogs. Twenty years later the building has deteriorated and the business has closed. I prepared the upload to Flickr by rotating clockwise two degrees.

Over 7 years ago, I put up a scan of a photograph of me standing at an overlook in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. This is what that scan needed to look like. The L. L. Bean Gore-Tex® fabric jacket still hangs in the closet and I have yet to toss the Fuji binoculars that I’m holding. Fewer than twenty rolls of manually focused exposures to go. A maximum of 190 rolls of autofocus exposures await.

Consultant? More like a wedding photographer who hasn’t updated her blog in a while. Fred changed his relationship status on Facebook today, so I guess it’s official.

25 May 2008

When I bought a (28 to 85) mm zoom lens for the Minolta SRT-202, I used its wide angle setting on the lineup of cars parked on the street outside my first apartment.

Scientific American passes along a report of a study that found that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not (via). The online magazine does not link to the actual paper which does not appear to mention blogging, although many will want to read the results that way. The primary author of the study works at a facility whose name I recognize, I recognize the name of the last coauthor, too.

We can safely assume that the Apple Pro (M7803) Keyboard which is now on the premises will never serve again, but the disassembly, cleaning, and repair procedure has been documented (found by searching m7803 clean but previously mentioned at Ask Metafilter).

24 May 2008

The Facebook Import feature for the Mini-Feed which I previously set to accept updates from Flickr and Picasa (without mentioning it) can now accept the items in an RSS feed. I set the Mini-Feed to import the RSS feed for these Dispatches which includes the full text and absolute URLs a little past midnight this morning and saw that the importation creates Notes and, okay, this is dangerous: people can comment on them. People who are on Facebook, anyway. I have previously expressed my resistance to permitting comments here (1, 2, 3) and the ability is limited depending on the settings I apply but still… the ability to tag a friend can lead to no good, either.

It’s just my imagination, right, that the Metrobus schedules are designed to prevent connections with the CUE bus of Fairfax? Non-trivial amounts of walking today. Counting down the frames left on that memory card in the 7D with my scalp, eyes, and arms protected from sunlight. The strength of the Staples WiFi at this bus stop was inadequate, while Economy Auto Parts and the Kemper Carpet headquarters further west both require a password.

23 May 2008

I recently read a discussion about why 200-speed film gets no respect (can’t find it now) and as it happens this week’s scanning included a roll of Kodak VR 200 followed by a roll of Kodak VR 100 and the difference is immediately apparent… and I’m not just saying that just because young women in bikinis holding science-fictiony guns in the costume call is full of win. The summer of 1986, the Shore Leave VIII convention was at (what was then called) the Omni Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. Before the year was out, I was using Kodak VR-G 100.

22 May 2008

My municipality may have thought the event constituted culture but the Alexandria Fire Department’s tractor-drawn aerial ladder truck T208 was the subject of my repeated visits today. That’s its tire in the background behind the random bystander. R206 and an older KME pumper (E205) were on hand, too, but the Alexandria Police only brought vehicles with the old paint scheme. Boo.

Oh, right, Miss I-don’t-recycle is going to teach me about global warming! What a day.

The Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D, especially hooked up to the vertical control grip VC-7D and with the (17 to 35)mm wide angle zoom lens mounted, attracts attention for its serious bulk and intimidating array of controls. After almost 2 years and just over one thousand photographs, the two gigabyte memory card is almost full. I had to fix the Exif date and make up some times for the later frames taken today because of a battery swap. I think it’s time to stop trying to use AA batteries in the grip. A conversation on the bus led to a recommendation to see WamaLTC’s display at the Waterfront Festival next month where I hope to display every Alexandria-themed MOC I have in stock (the festival is scheduled for two days but we’ll be there only on Sunday).

When I created the file in the LDraw format of an Alexandria Union Cab sedan, I was unable to find a URL for the taxi cooperative.

My real estate tax dollars at work?

21 May 2008

I’ve been without a status on Facebook for—gasp!—three days, but tonight I can type in Constantine is running low on spare keyboards. I’m thinking maybe I should look into this Griffin iMate Universal ADB to USB adapter (via).

There’s a second reason I’m uncomfortable in Joe Theismann’s Restaurant. Last week it was because people drink in there. Today, I am reminded that people smoke in there. So some futbol in Moscow can go on without me, thanks, no matter what the company.

Not everyone is impressed with the results at HeroComm.com. Could it be because they would like to sell a communicator or tricorder or phaser from the original series and are now having trouble persuading potential buyers that they’re actual screen-used props?

A year later, the Minolta SRT-202 was having difficulty cooperating with the flash, yet the scanner is able to develop something from the thin negative. What she looked like behind the face paint, I don’t know.

Working together to make a difference.

20 May 2008

So… there’s this movie coming out soon… National Public Radio sure had a jones to tell listeners about it yesterday (with bonus promotion for LEGO® products!)… people are asking me to join them (where by people I do mean more than one person)… but I’m not feelin’ it.

19 May 2008

The word for today is zaftig. Further than that, I sayeth not, I mean naught.

It is a given that there are no RSS feeds at Brickshelf (but see): my album for the past weekend’s display.

That same page at HeroComm has been updated to add details as to how the Alpha communicator was found, describing a purchase a decade ago by an anonymous someone at a California memorabilia store of a shoebox-worth of assorted props that looked altogether different from any replicas or fakes he had ever seen before: a hero communicator, one midgrade P1 and P2 phaser, a hypo spray, plus the hero medical scanner, Garth remote and Scalosian weapon. That would be this hero medical scanner (via, all those sold-off props viewable in Todd Mustachio’s YouTube account).

18 May 2008

My Escape cannot show me the odometer and the trip odometer at the same time like the Focus can. My Escape cannot lock the doors like the Focus does when I peel out. What my Escape can do is warble if I’ve left the turn signal on too long while continuing to drive straight. At least that’s what I think it was doing today. But can its modest titanium green exterior turn heads? That’s what the passenger in the blue Plymouth Neon looked to be doing this morning but there was no opportunity at 45 miles an hour to ask. :-(

I hear tell from the hinterlands that people still read the comics on dead-tree media. How quaint. I rely on a Baltimore blogger and direct links to comics.com and, shh, the occasional mooching of the Sunday Sun.

I’ve referred to the inadequacies of the Art Asylum/Diamond Select toy representing the phaser prop from the original series, but seriously, just place it and the communicator toy in the right hands and they sell themselves. After all, they’re screen accurate! A wife might have to draw the line at stuff from Master Replicas, though.

A few more brave souls found their way to the basement of the museum today. Sometimes there was more than one family at a time! It’s funny, though, we had up a detective list and one parent advised the child that to find the McDonald’s on the layout he should look for the Golden Arches. Nope, that’s not going to work, that’s one thing I left out of my model.

This page at HeroComm has been edited to no longer mention any child of John Dwyer.

17 May 2008

The wireless network in the Brunswick Railroad Museum is protected by a password. Boo. The eatery I have yet to enter, Beans in the Belfry, is not so stingy with its WiFi. While the financial pain of driving there and back will be felt another day, my finding a nickel and a penny upon the streets of Brunswick means that I have squeezed more cash out of the town than the town has gotten out of me. The low attendance today means they have a long ways to go to reach their goals. This is one of the pictures I was trying to get last year when the memory card wasn’t fully inserted; this year the camera decided to be even flakier (mirror locking up, failure to capture image). This behavior certainly firms up my plans!

16 May 2008

They’ll sell anything at Amazon, but so far no one has admitted to finding the sentiment worthwhile.

My presence in the basement of the Brunswick Railroad Museum tomorrow means I’ll be missing Fiesta Asia.

15 May 2008

The Perfect Pita is a local chain of places where people can go to eat, what a bizarre concept, I know, but I suspected more vegetarian offerings than some other local chain (not so local anymore, it turns out, after the franchising). The owner of the pita place wanted to franchise, too, but it’s been several years since then.

Advice from an earlier age: a marital rating scale from the 1930s lists Wears red nail polish as a demerit for wives. I don’t see the problem, exactly.

John Phillip Law is dead. His costar in Barbarella is, however, still alive. She took up drinking again after her second hip operation when she was 60 because she found it much harder to recover from than the first one.

I’m continuing to scan negatives from Shore Leave V—these guys are still around?! At least that filk singing group lacks notability. I’m still surprised by how often when other people used my camera, they used the same hand to support the camera and work the shutter. Not me.

I first noticed it this evening, people who’ve defriended me showing up in the people you may know array. Pfft, not going down that road again, I know where I stand. Wait, maybe it’s over here. Here?

14 May 2008

By the time I learned of this Facebook search box hack, the programming had already shifted to make the list my first five friends alphabetically by first name. I eventually recognized the pattern because that’s how SuperPoke! lists them. That was the pattern at home, anyway. Elsewhere, for a while, the list was not alphabetical and did not include any men… or as Spock said, The women! (TrekCore may prevent you from following links to its screencaps but provides no way to designate a particular image from among the eighteen displayed on a single page, just use the context menu to copy the link location and paste into a new tab.)

Google Transit seems to have been integrated with Google Maps last October but I haven’t been looking at any areas where the feature is active.

When I arrived at the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn in Cockeysville, Maryland for 1983’s Shore Leave V, the Minolta SRT-202 was loaded with Kodak VR 1000 film, newly introduced that year.

13 May 2008

Now that I’m resigned to having Firefox open for at least one tab, the planned ability to use Facebook Chat through a Jabber/XMPP application seems less important. Also, it’s not like anyone has ever responded to a message I’ve sent through Facebook Chat (I’ve had much better luck sending links to photographs in a Facebook message). The ability to set Facebook status through iChat is just a disaster in the making what with its Current iTunes Song setting. Ahem, it remains my policy to ignore the friend requests of Facebook users still in high school… if the request is unexpected, anyway.

Here’s that smart car I was talking about earlier.

When the Space Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise arrived at Dulles International Airport aboard its carrier 747 nearly 25 years ago, the shutter curtain in my Minolta SRT-202 was misbehaving, and this is the only shot for which the darkening of the right side of the frame worked. I must have taken the camera to Newberry’s for a cleaning afterwards because the results from the convention a month later don’t exhibit the flaw.

12 May 2008

I don’t see what the problem is—it’s obviously a Starfleet utility belt (scroll down or search for Galileo ) and the model has just forgotten the requisite accessory.

Some people don’t like the rain, others have legitimate difficulties on account of it.

I take pictures of cars. I was so sure that the author of Black Sunday was mistaken to have a character in the novel drive a Dodge Dart station wagon. But a month after purchasing the Minolta SRT-202, I came across this example from more than a decade earlier (it’s a 1965 model, I remain confident that there were no Dart station wagons from MY 1968 onwards). My albums at Google Picasa™ are made possible by the 600×400 pixel resamplings I make for my iPod touch.

11 May 2008

WamaLTC plans a display in Brunswick, Maryland next weekend. WamaLTC plans displays in June in Manassas, Virginia, in Alexandria, Virginia, and in Washington, D.C.

The scanning project has finally caught someone famous… er, someone who has met the Wikipedia requirement for notability, anyway, in the background of this photograph taken at the spring cocktail party for The Cavalier Daily on 29 April 1983. How and why the name of the person who would become an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor in The Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin was in my notes for this frame is a mystery. She has hundreds of friends on Facebook. As for the subject of the photograph, I met her again the next year with a different camera, and Google says she’s wife, clutter-cutting mother, newspaper writer, and published author. What have you accomplished lately?

My iTunes library includes Weird Al Yankovic’s reminder.

Because anyone who would predict the reunification of Yugoslavia has got to be nuts, amirite? Commenters start to notice. What it means that the protagonist of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV is identified as a Serb, I have no idea. Elections in Serbia today, Đokovic wins, Lakers lose.

10 May 2008

Oh, yeah, it occurs to me some time after seeing a hand-wringing report, I’m probably scheduled to receive this, too, even if the targeted Windows XP installations are virtual.

09 May 2008

Facebook says they’re recently single and they’re not wasting any time: two moms out having fun at a club last month.

The Armada Group does not admit to any vessel built before 1984 so the fate of the South Faith seen here docked in Alexandria 2 years earlier is not known.

On the other hand, if they want me to call the shopping center something different, maybe the sign shouldn’t say Plaza at Landmark.

08 May 2008

The Sony SL-5600 Betamax videocassette recorder seems to have been fitted with a Sony Cassette Auto-Changer AG-300 after my departure from Charlottesville (it’s not apparent in a photograph from a month earlier). I may have been unemployed and without prospects but there was also a Sony ICF-2001 on my desk.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it Plaza at Landmark anymore.

I have my Unicomp Classic (Customizer) 104 keyboard currently attached to the Pentium 3 on the middle floor. The vinyl recording project was extended recently to accommodate a relative. The Metro commercial shelving on wheels supporting the computer and my leaving the audio cable plugged into the back of the receiver smoothed the preparations for recording but I’d forgotten the keyboard shortcuts for Audacity. See, it’s not just me (via) that pays attention to the keyboard.

Sheesh, another blonde personality who does nothing for me.

07 May 2008

I found the cardboard tricorders and in the same box was a set of vacuformed plastic pieces, I must have bought a kit and never got around to building it. Gee, maybe the metal parts are in another box somewhere. I notice that I used three colors for the crystals under the speaker instead of the blue as found on the prop on display when the National Air and Space Museum had a display. Hmm, I wonder what the provenance of the tricorder and communicator on display with the Star Trek Earth Tour was.

The scanning project is past the undocumented college graduation.

I’m flipping through the recent uploads at that tightlipped image sharing site when I think I recognize the people in a thumbnail: aw, two Facebookers have found each other. But what happened to Christian and the true LEGO® love story, eh? You know, this guy (from the same account). Maybe there’s a mother in Quebec who would want to know the answer to that.

06 May 2008

The Alexandria Police have a Dodge Charger. Still no opportunity for photography.

If it’s on the Internet, I will find it. Sometimes I just need a hint.

Just a little earthquake across the street from where the Erol’s Video Club that stocked capacitance videodiscs used to be.

What no one mentions is that the first iMacs arrived with System 8.6. Shudder.

05 May 2008

Today, by contrast, was a perfectly ordinary day. I do not admit to sighting any fox, let alone two.

As a first-born, I suppose I could weigh in on the discussion over the sociological study on parental discipline variation by birth order. Uh-unh, not in public, man.

Maybe it’s time to change the encoding on the pages of the WamaLTC site (via).

04 May 2008

Today was special: two sightings of Vulpes vulpes fulva (more information about foxes in Virginia).

While I slowly sift through the debris on the third floor setting aside the stuff that’s complete and unbroken to donate and tossing much of the rest, I find some items are good to play with again, others boggle the mind in their inaccuracy. People have tried to talk to me about eBay and Craigslist (this may be one reason why) without much success, but to just throw away the Zero Halliburton cases would give even me pause. Yes, that Halliburton, I bought them before they were chic (Gabrielle Union is one thing, this hotel heiress quite another). The two cases currently protect my replica prop collection but that seems less important now. A new set of foam inserts, though, and they’d be perfect for their original purpose of carting around photographic equipment.

Because it’s perfectly normal for a few guys and a toddler to gather in a messy warehouse, listen to old music, and fondle a phaser alleged to be a screen-used prop from the original series with no explanations. The YouTube poster’s web skills need help but he does seem to make a good-looking phaser.

03 May 2008

Janet Peckinpaugh retired from television news in 2006 and founded a production company. A little over twenty-six years ago, I paused the Sony SL-5600 Betamax videocassette recorder which I’d had for 15 months and photographed its display on a Sony KV-1945RS television. The page now updated is no longer as prominent a search result, and the Fuji Fujicolor F-II 100 film I used turned out to be a one-time thing. What I was doing twenty-eight years ago yesterday is not recorded, but tomorrow is another story.

You know, the URL fits because she was. I wonder if she means this marina.

Looks like I made my keyboard purchase (and held onto it) at the right time.

02 May 2008

I did not add gasoline to either vehicle in April, and neither tank is below half. I will not be able to maintain that status with the WamaLTC display in Brunswick, Maryland coming up later this month.

01 May 2008

Some people are so out of touch they still think that the Star Trek movie is due in December: bzzt.

30 April 2008

DASH was among Northern Virginia transit systems participating in RIDE FREE Preview Day. I notice that they’re no longer mentioning Code Orange days.

The NMRA convention is in Anaheim, California this year and ILTCO plans a LEGO® display at The National Train Show. You might think this is something participants in WamaLTC would have heard from one of their representatives, but then again, this is an organization for which the 2007 show simply didn’t happen.

Time to start watermarking your images, Tom.

Pierre Normandin gave the armored services truck that he built from my instructions red hubs!

29 April 2008

The FAA N-Number Inquiry search form previously mentioned was no good for this sequence of images from 31 May 1981: the N5811 registration no longer applies to the Freedom Airlines Convair CV-580 seen departing from Washington National Airport. This photograph was so striking in its clarity and detail that I chose to get an enlargement in the relatively newish 9×12 size to maintain the aspect ratio. The day was a cavalcade of airlines with a decade or less to go: Pan American, Eastern, Braniff International… but Delta, American Airlines, Northwest Orient, Allegheny Commuter, and Piedmont seem to have survived in one form or another.

28 April 2008

New policy: self-portraits taken in the mirror will be routinely flipped. The plaza of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., during spring break of my junior year. I look grim, 1981 would not be a good year.

Why I was on the women’s lacrosse field a month later, I do not remember. I’ve been reminded since that I had dinner with No. 8 around this time, I’d forgotten that and barely remember anything about it now. You’re thinking, what an idiot, she’s now an internationally acclaimed empowerment coach currently in New Zealand. I’m wondering how reliable my notes are if I identify her in a photograph from August of 1978 by her married name… her first married name, that is.

How would someone get the idea that I have an A3 flatbed scanner and bitmap editing software? Fun facts: the thumbnails of photographs taken by a SLR display here at close to A10 size (source) while the (900×600)px size is slightly larger than A5.

27 April 2008

Another fine neighborhood in Manhattan, as seen from the hotel window on a vacation in December of 1980. I searched automotive clutches 692 new york and got a result because of Apple Brake & Clutch Repair and here is the block of 10th Avenue at West 48th Street today. The address of the clutch shop is now a bar. On Street View my vantage point looks vacant but there does seem to have been a hotel there once. It’s been 3 years since Google Maps added the aerial view and 11 months since the Street View feature was started. I have updated the scan of the view of a Manhattan avenue from the same vacation which I compared to art earlier but the clues are even thinner on this one and I have yet to identify the avenue. I am now halfway through the rolls I exposed in the SRT-202 and am past the last of the Tri-X.

Check out the Amazon sidebar: for some things, there’s no reason to pay full price.

26 April 2008

I agree with this comprehensive list of deficiencies in the Art Asylum/Diamond Select phaser pistol and would add that the status light atop the phaser one went missing. Also, those ribs should be straight although looking through the rest of these screencaps I’m no longer so sure. The marketer’s choice to make the smaller phaser one operational is interesting (I still find it hard to believe the trigger is on the bottom) but it leaves the phaser two with no heft and the combination is unable to stand upright on its handle. Some people just aren’t satisfied.

The way I understand it, the remastering of the original series of Star Trek has omitted the colored panels on the bottom of the secondary hull, seen here in my first visit with color film in the camera to the National Air and Space Museum to see the shooting miniature. I have just one thing to say about that: not CANON! The degradation of knowledge is inexorable and the Smithsonian is not immune: despite getting it right 3 years ago the institution can no longer keep straight what WAMALUG stands for.

They’ll establish a pool at Flickr for just about anything. Another failed search result.

My guess is I won’t be seeing this John Deere or these Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders licensed products at the local Minnesota-based retailer anytime soon. The aisle for Barbie® has been looking rather thin this year, the turnover in the aisle for LEGO® is not much better. My most recent purchase was late last year (the only one for the year, I discover upon checking the database, and there was only one for 2006 as well) when I found the Jeff Gordon NASCAR Barbie® Doll at Kmart for a discount. I may not have been in a Kmart since.

25 April 2008

The phrase made famous by its utterance in every episode of the original series was being edited way before the Next Generation came along (or even The Wrath of Khan). That’s the front cover of a flyer (to dealers touting the lineup of models offered by AMT to coincide with the first movie) which I photographed sometime Thanksgiving weekend in November of 1979. A side effect of the scanning project I hadn’t anticipated is viewing the images with proper orientation. As negatives in Print File Negative Preservers or as prints in Pioneer albums, the shots where I held the camera vertically always required a turn of the head. No longer. I’ll throw EveryBlock Chicago another view of same intersection (different corner) which I took while returning from Minnesota 1½ years later. Unfortunately, when I returned to Virginia, the camera didn’t advance the film between frames and there were several unplanned multiple exposures on the rest of the roll.

24 April 2008

Let’s try that again: yesterday’s re-scanned self-portrait flipped horizontally. If I knew the date I took this photograph of the Rotunda undergoing roof maintenance, I could satisfy the Flickr form using the time on the clock. My photographs of buses and firefighting apparatus are attracting attention there.

23 April 2008

Tomorrow is the big day. That is all.

This used to be my playground. The human adventure is just beginning. Another self-portrait re-scanned.

Grr. I am not happy that Facebook Chat requires Firefox or Safari. I am not the only one. It’s just a user agent block on Facebook’s part, as demonstrated by installation of the User Agent Switcher… and it’s not like Safari is so great: it responded to the appearance of a friend logging in, but not to that friend’s logging out. Firefox needs a click on the bar before reevaluating the number on Online Friends.

I thought this guy was in Canada to stay (hence my advice 3½ years ago) but he seems to have been back last May and his friends keep asking when he will be in the States again.

22 April 2008

Not everyone appreciates the need for the scanning project since I do own and use digital cameras. Ah, but I have been shooting film for nearly 30 years. Digital cameras were not an option back then. Video cassette recorders had barely reached the home. These are the total number of rolls through each of my cameras (keeping in mind that I sold some rolls and ruined others): Minolta SRT-202 (116); Olympus XA (44); Minolta Maxxum 7000i (109); Minolta Maxxum 8000i (33); Minolta Maxxum 700si (29); Minolta Maxxum 7 (19). As promised, the photograph of my elementary school rescanned. The scanning of the rolls which went through the Olympus is done, clearly there are plenty left yet.

There’s enough loose money in the area to support a fourth Apple Store, it seems. but the overworked posters at The Unofficial Apple Weblog can’t figure out just where it will open this Saturday.

21 April 2008

I’m more than a third of the way through the negatives from the Minolta SRT-202 and a single strip from the forty-second roll has yielded replacements for the three images that anchor the bottom of the Trains page. I mentioned the Turbotrain almost 4 years ago and the scan with improved resolution of my photograph of the doomed trainset (promotional copy from an earlier date) led me to geotag the distinctive structure in the background.

I was prepared to use Street View to drive up 8th Avenue to find this intersection (as seen from the window of the Ramada Inn in Manhattan where we stayed on that vacation in 1979), but then I just searched for the name of a restaurant visible at the left side (like so: olympic restaurant 8th ave) to find the address and here’s the intersection of 8th Avenue and West 49th Street. Looks a lot cleaner now, doesn’t it? The newsstand is gone, too. The hotel—still around a decade later but then a Days Inn—is now a Hilton Garden Inn®.

Sigh. My Yahoo! is no longer invoking the Reader for my feed.

20 April 2008

I can’t be sure of the date this photograph of the North Portico of The White House was taken, and even if I was, I couldn’t specify it in the Flickr interface because the form demands to know the HH:MM:SS as well. It could easily have been after the President of the time gave a speech on a fundamental threat to American democracy with a six-point energy policy. Three decades later, you can see how well that worked out for him.

The announcement of the Diamond Select Toys replica toy of the Tricorder from the original series is the last straw, I’m supporting an advertiser at TrekMovie and ordering the set. My copycat prop of the communicator falls quite short in various details of proportion and accuracy in view of my new knowledge of the originals, but is still acceptable for display, as I recently pulled out the Playmates toys and… they are disgusting. The undersized tricorder is notorious, but the mirrored moiré and oversized connection of the hinge wheels to the solid grid on the communicator is… inadequate. Maybe by the time it arrives, the project to dispose of some of the clutter on the third floor will have allowed me to see if I still have the tricorder replicas which I built out of cardboard (my interpretation of the original on the left, the one on the right according to the Franz Joseph Technical Manual). Someone with more ambition has a tricorder built out of wood. Considering how much hay is made out of the fact that Wah Chang billed the production for ten communicators, the fact that the June 21, 1966 invoice reproduced on page 119 of Star Trek The Inside Story is for two tricorders seems less well-known. Maybe additional examples were built (comprehensive look at auctions of original props over the years).

19 April 2008

Even if all you do is send and receive email, if you do it through a web-based provider of email, you might eventually become part of a social network anyway.

18 April 2008

By your command… A Cylon from the Battlestar Galactica movie appears at Springfield Mall. I’ve written about the Cylons before. Although the movie premiered May 18, 1979, this photograph follows those from the weekend in Delaware, so I’m not sure when it was taken. The name of the movie is in the overexposed marquee.

There was some excitement at work today. My insistence on a camera that takes AA batteries and on always wearing a Maglite® flashlight that runs on AA batteries paid off today when the camera stopped working and I was able to continue using the batteries from the flashlight. I only managed pictures of apparatus today: this one is the third result tonight on a Google search for arlington county fire e-one, I sure hope I’m right about what I wrote! The opportunities for pictures of people today? None taken.

I’m looking forward to Facebook Chat and hope no one bothers with finding the Go Offline selection.

17 April 2008

The Federal Aviation Administration Registry N-Number Inquiry Result reveals the description and current owner of this experimental airplane which I photographed on May 20, 1979 at a small airport near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. (The form identifies its single text field as required.) I had joined a friend at his parents’ cottage after the school year was over. This last day with my hosts also included a little pawing of the minnows by their cat.

I’m going to take credit for changing a mood from disappointed to fabulous yes, I am (whether I deserve it or not). Something about an earlier dispatch is no longer operative. On the other hand, there is something about a friend request approved in 10 minutes that I have yet to comprehend.

My street-level photograph of an intersection in Chicago one summer day 30 years ago (earlier dispatch) has been slurped up into EveryBlock Chicago (via, Yahoo! login required). There’s a similar website for New York which leads to a photograph of my first elementary school as it looked earlier this month. I’m nine rolls away from scanning a replacement for this photograph I took of the school in 1979.

16 April 2008

What could be more natural after an afternoon of four-wheeling through the woods around Observatory Hill than finding a gasoline can in the back of the Land Rover and setting my Minolta SRT-202 atop it and letting the self-timer do its work on the last frame of the roll? By my notes on the previous roll, the owner of the Land Rover also had an MGA. The prohibition on having cars was only for the first semester, you see.

15 April 2008

First-year came to a close with a mudfight in front of the dorm. Apparently I was asked to photograph the results but I don’t remember participating.

The Safeway in Kingstowne has self-service checkout machines. Imagine my disappointment when I was asked by a cashier to join her at register 7.

14 April 2008

It’s street photography… er, it’s a photograph of a street, anyway, and there’s a human element, but it wouldn’t get me invited to the really hardcore groups on Flickr. There is a GMC Fishbowl bus at the back, though. I had used two rolls of film already that day when I had to rush to Mincer’s and buy another roll to keep going. Of course I stuck with Tri-X.

I wouldn’t associate a name with a face, no, not me.

Ha-ha, My Yahoo! Reader trying to make sense of yesterday’s second paragraph got really confused by the word code in a code element! What you should take away on this subject is that Safari, no matter how pretty its display might be, is worthless for validating feeds or understanding how they might be displayed elsewhere. However, I have started the best practice recommendation.

13 April 2008

BEHOLD THE FALLACY OF STUDENT SELF-GOVERNMENT: the WTJU-FM contingent of the time reporting at the scene of what my notes called the Easters’ protest rally on the Lawn of the University of Virginia. From the left: Sally Hawkridge, Jim Shine behind her, Marcia Doran, Teresa Lazazzera with the microphone, and Mark Bradley (two of them participated in last year’s 50th anniversary programming). A more comprehensive retrospective on the buildup to the gathering on the Lawn gives me the date which was missing from my notes: April 5, 1979.

I republished the feed this morning to make the URL to the image absolute and it showed up fine in the My Yahoo! Reader… but the letter q between named entities representing angle brackets that I’ve put in a <code> element had disappeared. It can’t be the semantics of the element because the word alt in the previous sentence is visible.

12 April 2008

The My Yahoo! Reader finally understands that my feed supplies the full text of these dispatches (this has been true since last December) but the feature doesn’t display the photographs. Maybe it’s because of the relative URLs to the image files, an issue of longstanding frustration. While I have no plans to supply absolute URLs, I do need to pay more attention to the content of the alt attribute. The quotation marks created by the <q> element aren’t seen, either.

At the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network national convention last October a CREW Washington DC team was recognized for their work on the CityVista redevelopment project as led by Eileen Circo of Lowe Enterprises. I’m going to guess she doesn’t drive a Ford, if you know what I mean, even while the Internet tells me to which Democratic candidate she made a contribution in last year’s presidential campaigning. This particular evening in early 1979, though, her night out wasn’t complete without stopping by my dorm room for a photograph of her and her date.

The rest of the story on the actress who played the yeoman in Star Trek’s second pilot (via).

11 April 2008

A serious photographer has made me a contact on flickr, but he hasn’t geotagged this photograph which includes buses. I’m now a fifth of the way through the Minolta SRT-202 negatives, today’s scanning yields another late night visit from Christine.

10 April 2008

When Hallowe’en came around first-year, the third-floor residents of my dorm took to the theme of hookers without any difficulty, really, no problem. She was pretty. Christine made it a point to stop by late in the evening for my camera (I did not participate in my floor’s antebellum theme). If only I’d been able to have an autofocus camera that evening.

09 April 2008

I am prepared to handle frames which were sliced right through or abandoned by themselves at the end of a roll (the mechanism of the scanner requires at least two frames in a strip) with a box of glassless slide mounts and a mounting tweezer from a Swedish manufacturer. Because I did take pictures of guys, too, and it wouldn’t be fair to leave them out of the scanning project just because 21÷5 has an odd remainder.

I may look happy here one day in September of 1978 with a borrowed bicycle on the way to Monticello… but when on the way back the chain slipped off and my buddies rode on ahead unawares as I carried that bike through Charlottesville before giving up and dragging the bike (the chain restored itself eventually)… well, that was the first day I let loose with the f-bomb out loud. Kodacolor II at ASA 100. I am not responsible for the pathetic composition, which even fails at being face-centered.

yup See, that wasn’t so hard. What was I talking about again?

08 April 2008

Yikes. Commander, it is our judgment we run from a reflection (except that, listening to the audio I am persuaded the actor actually uttered the words the reflection). You learn something new every day.

07 April 2008

This is what the Main Street Theater in Sauk Centre, Minnesota looks like now. A different set of cars entirely in October 1958. I’ve looked at my photograph of the movie theater in the birthplace of Sinclair Lewis before, but never thought of the main street as a four-lane highway. That’s the difference between a normal lens (like I was using at the time) and a wide-angle.

Have I noticed this police vehicle before? It hadn’t even been a month since the first photograph to include one. A local police agency is responding with a 1977 Plymouth Volaré cruiser to a tractor-trailer truck stuck at the McCormick Road bridge over Emmet Street (the crop is easily one-hundredth the size of the original). Another frame from the sixteenth roll. Maybe I borrowed the flash.

With as little explanation as it departed, the free image sharing site maj.com is back. She… looks dubious.

06 April 2008

The incident at the West German Consulate in the building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and East Monroe Street in Chicago, Illinois on August 17, 1978 was on the evening news programs of all three national television networks. I was there because of a family vacation without knowing what was going on in the building, shooting the journalistically appropriate emulsion Kodak Tri-X 400 at 11:45 a.m. I continued to use Tri-X through the fifty-eighth roll two years later. Rolls 61 and 81 were Kodak Plus-X 125. What I’m saying is there’s a lot of black and white left to scan. But I found what I need to restore that snap I was missing in some of the new scans: a gamma of 0.5 hits the spot (compare to scan from Olympus scanner). My page for the Chicago Police cruiser is updated.

I earlier mentioned that the scanning project would reach photographs of Christine Painley. Scanning Tri-X goes quickly with the Digital ICE inactive, and no gamma adjustment was needed on the results from the scanner’s operation on the fourteenth roll. Apparently can’t has changed to maybe if it’s just a thumbnail… and then came the last frame of the fifteenth roll. It could be that the scanner was just having a spell earlier… or the strips of five frames each are treated more seriously than the ones with just four.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop and predictably dismissive response from Slashdotters.

Spoiler inside.

05 April 2008

The Nikon Coolscan V ED is not at its best scanning black-and-white film. Not only is the Digital ICE ineffective, the Nikon Scan 4 software is so brain-dead it switches back to the Calibrated RGB mode after every frame. Hey, guys, how likely is it that a single strip of film would have frames in a mix of color and grayscale? Of course, the menu dropdown for choosing between color and grayscale scanning is separate from the menu dropdown for choosing between color and monochrome films… ?

04 April 2008

People are still talking about the penny.

The image sharing site previously touted as a substitute for Brickshelf? (Later contradictory message from the proprietor.) Yup, it’s off the air. I used the downforeveryoneorjustme.com site that I linked to last month, too, a few days ago just to be sure. Every image I’d saved there is found in my Flickr photostream so no biggie on that account, but no more flipping through galleries of pretty girls having fun in eastern Europe? Boo.

During this primary campaign when I hear a reference to the senator from New York I usually think of someone else.

03 April 2008

Offered at $1,250,000… no mention of the neighbors.

Wireless High-Speed Internet Access at Arlington Public Library lists a few more Wi-Fi hotspots than are mentioned in an article describing the reactivation of Wireless Alexandria in today’s issue of the Gazette Packet. When I first mentioned the wide area, free wireless Internet zone I had nothing with which to test the connection. That has changed.

It’s been a while since I used the word yikes here: I am not nearly as stressed as Mikhail Youzhny (via IM buddy).

WamaLTC plans a display on April 25-27, 2008 at the Day Out With Thomas™at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Musuem. I may sit this one out.

02 April 2008

Why, yes, I do keep track of that: 82¢ last month.

Maryland still demands the difference when a resident buys something in another state where the sales tax rate is lower. They expect payment in full on a quarterly basis for everything else bought untaxed. Wait, what? Canned computer software ? I always buy fresh. ;-) I am so glad Virginia switched to an annual accounting (they used to be monthly) and there’s even a $100 exemption for purchases from out-of-state mail order catalog(s). I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I link to information for residents of Maryland.

Hmm, Drinking the Kool-Aid is not an available SuperPoke! Maybe I should try this out…

TV Ownership May Be Good for Well-Being (via). That’s television ownership not watching so my advocacy of optimism this week is not inconsistent with the upcoming second anniversary of abandoning television broadcasting.

01 April 2008

I thought it was a little funny. Not everyone agrees.

The new Flickr Find Your Friends tool (announced on the Flickr blog) has located for me a photographer with a more congenial eye for the subject matter.

I buy fewer home video titles these days, but this site looks good for planning future purchases.

31 March 2008

The endurance of local business Smith’s Center is unheralded. Nearly 30 years separate these two photographs. I have used Graphic Converter to shift the timestamp in the Exif in the later one. I was out along Little River Turnpike just after dropping off the Focus for service at Jerry’s Ford at seven o’clock, not six. It turns out at that time in the morning it’s faster to walk east to Duke and Walker Streets (where Passport Chrysler has yet to drop the Plymouth from its sign and all the vehicles on the lot seem to have red tag clearance signs in them) and catch the DASH AT1 than to wait across from the 35 year-old dealership for the 29K Metrobus. That explains half the walking I did that day.

I don’t suppose that discounted sales of the remaining copies of her book at Tower Records/Video/Books in Fairfax Towne Center more than a year ago made a difference one way or the other.

This upcoming event at a local agency is being advertised in the Express. Previous heads-up.

30 March 2008

My mechanically-assisted coin restoration effort was successful in getting the penny accepted in the self-service checkout.

The People You May Know feature on Facebook has not led to any friend requests. Shocker. The list is not static, either, and can go beyond friend lists to include (in one example) a match in high school and graduation year.

Like I was saying: serious and serious. Oh, so the guy carrying the F3 does have a digital camera (Brains!). My ID of the other guy’s equipment was spot on. A quick look through both Flickr accounts and not one municipal bus or police vehicle, so there you go.

29 March 2008

There was a spot of excitement in the neighborhood earlier this evening as tractor drawn aerial ladder truck 208 made a circuit of our streets. I had neglected to set the clock in the FinePix A820 ahead for Daylight Saving Time, so this photograph of the truck departing the scene incorporates the wrong time in its Exif (which means that three weeks of photographs from the A820 have the wrong hour). For today’s earlier photography at the 42nd Annual Smithsonian Kite Festival I have tried Google’s Picasa™ Web Albums service with this currently unlisted album. For the even earlier photography of The Orange Line with a View which took me from Ballston to Farragut Square, check my Flickr account (subscribe). While on the Mall I was in the presence of people who are serious about their photography, insisting on film, one carried a Nikon F3 with 50mm lens and the other had a Voigtländer rangefinder.

28 March 2008

The self-service checkout at Shoppers Food & Pharmacy refused to accept one of my pennies today. Okay, it was one of the pennies I found alongside the road in—Fairfax City? Lincolnia? I’ve been walking a lot this week and there were eight all told—and maybe it was scratched down to the interior alloy, maybe it was no longer round from the gouges on the rim, maybe it was bent. I may not have the opportunity to hand the roughed-up coin to a unionized cashier when it comes time to shop for groceries again (the local Safeway has no self-service lanes). So it was time for the locking pliers to come out and do their stuff, and I have the temerity to call others penny-pinchers. What’s that? Picking up pennies is not the way to financial freedom? Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Local blogger admits to his thoughts upon entering a salon for his haircut. I used to go to a chain operation staffed by women for my haircuts (I had no idea its origin was local) without incident until my brother convinced me I should use a real barber. (Earlier, I used a barber who worked in a sort of half-room at the back of a more traditional salon, he gave me this Vulcan look in 1984.) I’ve followed my current barber from Rosslyn to Fairfax City, which means it’s been more than 10 years, and he has to retire sometime: the spot vacated by the guy who did eventually leave that shop has been taken up by a Vietnamese woman.

27 March 2008

Mashable reported the friend suggestion feature about six hours before I did… Original Communicator is 3-D Laser Scanned now at a new URL… MyFace University was a student-led community education class discussing the ins and outs of social networking internet sites like MySpace and Facebook for the old people of Fargo-Moorhead… The 42nd Annual Smithsonian Kite Festival is planned for this Saturday, my last attendance was when the festival was in the single digits…

26 March 2008

I should get at least $20 back once the state that demands use of the www. figures out how.

The People You May Know feature of Facebook appeared in the sidebar today. The suggestions are based on their presence in the Friend lists of multiple friends of mine. This means that my mug will be confronting those people the next time they log in.

People can be so mean and still you wonder why there’s no comments here. Oh, wait, that’s just jealous people among the commenters at little-read Valleywag. More snark about the companion of undetermined ethnicity.

25 March 2008

It’s been 4 years since I paid off the Focus and 35 years since I started watching Star Trek seriously.

24 March 2008

The website of the local transit company is always slow to respond (seriously slow), but the DASH About service is no more. A rubber-tired trolley operated by the Gray Line is replacing the free service between the King Street Metro Station and the waterfront.

Just sharing the titles of my iTunes library playing on Shuffle via the status in iChat can be embarrassing enough—not that there’s any chance of this happening.

23 March 2008

I have completed the scanning of the forty-four rolls of film which passed through the Olympus XA. This has allowed me to replace some of the images on the pages for self-portraits, cinemas, and trains. Because my transfer of the original TIFFs to the new terabyte drive removes them from the drive I have automatically duplicated on a weekly basis, I burned the files to DVD-R… seventeen DVD-Rs. (I could have reduced that number somewhat by giving up the folder structure.) Obviously I would find it difficult to use any of the photo-sharing sites which The Baltimore Sun reviewed today for these files in their original form. My system uses QuickTime to display a TIFF file in a browser viewport, YMMV. So it’s on to the rolls which I shot using the Minolta SRT-202… but my fingers are still reaching for the X and the A when using the File Save dialog.

One could celebrate logos (via) or one could celebrate logos (via).

22 March 2008

Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware site is linked by Kottke. From the D2CA News: Stephen has been donating legacy software and hardware to Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware for over five years! Thank you, Stephen! I first mentioned the project in 2002 and the appreciation of donor Stephen H. of Virginia in 2005. Mark S. from Minnesota is this guy.

21 March 2008

Record & Tape Exchange is still in business. How, I don’t know.

I was tired of seeing my use of this file served from my local drive for editing in the site statistics at MyBlogLog so I’m trying to exclude that based on the results at whatismyip.com (lazy typists: wimi.com).

20 March 2008

I’ve used my Yahoo! account to establish an OpenID identity. Boo, Peeron offers an OpenID login but Yahoo! insists on the use of OpenID 2.0. Why did I bother again?

This single-purpose site would be useful… if it was up. Relax, it’s a joke.

At least there’s some Serbs who are winning. Meanwhile, Russia raps U.S. over Kosovo arms, to hold NATO meet.

19 March 2008

You’re used to the scan of the print with the blocked-up shadows made on a 150dpi flatbed over 6 years ago (page at my Comcast webspace simulates the look of my old webspace at Erol’s) because the Olympus scanner was unable to handle the dynamic range of the flash-lit shot of two people in a large room. You are not ready for the 4000dpi scan of the original negative (original size). The scanning project hits another milestone (that sequined shoulder topped with blonde hair is Maine businesswoman Genie Francis). Another 4½ rolls to go and the scans of photographs from the Olympus XA will be completed.

The Mercury Seven Foundation 30th Anniversary of the Flight of Alan Shepard as the First American in Space fundraising dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel on May 3, 1991 brought a number of personalities to the nation’s capital. If you count yourself as a fan of Star Trek The Next Generation but don’t know the names of Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, then all I can say is: EPIC FAIL. Gates McFadden is not a man. (The foundation has changed its name—to something they’re ambivalent about me using—since its founding and the fundraiser that I attended, but its timeline fails to note exactly when. This page says 1995.)

18 March 2008

If contributors only knew what was in store for them at the hands of the editor of BrickJournal…

Alpha has been scanned.

Sequins! That’s the word I was trying to remember for the shiny discs on a woman’s garment a week ago.

Last week marked 6 months since joining Facebook. The social networking site plans to add more granular privacy controls and an instant messaging capability.

What would Web Developer Barbie look like? I see that a certain blogger with outdated ideas regarding the technology of talking dolls has not learned anything in the meantime.

17 March 2008

Rate My Cop has been the subject of recent controversy, this site strikes closer to home.

There’s one thing about my clicky keyboard—there’s no disguising from someone on the telephone that it’s in use.

16 March 2008

The WiFi networks which can be found at the Inova Alexandria Hospital all require passwords. Boo. Fifteen years ago, at Fairfax Hospital, I can remember a big fuss being made about wireless telephones with signs at every visitor entrance but now all I can find is a slim pamphlet of Visitor Information at the reception desk which includes a request for them to be turned off in patient areas. The pamphlet writer has yet to catch up with WiFi-enabled not-phones.

Yet another website seeks to capitalize on the desire to find people.

I could make it a statement of principle that I can no longer be bothered with hard drives that are measured in mere gigabytes, or admit that I just couldn’t find a 750GB model in stock. The fourth bay in my Mac Pro is now occupied with a Western Digital Caviar® GP SATA hard drive in the 1 TB capacity version. That’s one terabyte. Those uncompressed TIFF files from the scanning project were beginning to add up.

15 March 2008

There’s a reason I don’t remember the brunette Kelvan in the episode By Any Other Name , she’s not a part of the story. She’s only there because George Takei was away for his role in The Green Berets. No one tries to arouse her emotions in the scheme to retake the ship. Within the past year, I’ve denied knowing somebody, only to discover from looking though albums and finding photographs that I’ve been in the same room with that person for an entire weekend. The story is important.

Facebook has made it easier to browse Pages (Car Talk has a Facebook Page) and I’m looking through the Celebrities/Public Figures and noticing how many are Turkish… but if I wanted to be a fan of the three Serbian tennis players in the news recently, I could.

14 March 2008

Alternatively, the next time I need a screen capture from an episode of the original Star Trek I could just employ Command-Control-Shift-4 on the advertising-supported playback at CBS.

I’ve finished a book (and plan to return it early) about a family that chose to try living in a self-imposed 1900. Earlier I chided the movie The Village for its weak grasp on what the last decade of the nineteenth century offered; this author selected the year based on the availability of toilet paper then but struggled all year with pen and ink for his correspondence, there is no mention of considering a typewriter.

13 March 2008

I say I want full-frame so I can use my prime lenses again and not have to resort to repeated mental calculations while using a zoom lens. I go on about the artistic choices of focal length and the reasons why one might choose normal over wide angle or telephoto… but when I’m using a pocket camera like the FinePix A820, I’m using the zoom ring to make the subject fill the screen just like anybody else. (It was important to get the other side of the bus.) Challenged to identify the focal length while viewing the image on the back of the camera, I was at a loss, but viewed at its native resolution, the image is plainly taken in the telephoto range. As such, I find it less satisfying than the previous bus image.

12 March 2008

When did Sony get Live View in its DSLR models? A little over a month ago. Now I could hold out for a combination of this feature (which I find essential for photographing LEGO® constructions at our displays) with those of the A700 which I enjoyed handling earlier this year, or … I could accept a promised model with a 24.6 megapixel full-frame sensor as an adequate substitute (video from PMA 2008 shows people talking about a prototype on display there). I would say that the list has a new entry even though it’s been almost a week with no new photographs taken. Blog about Sony Alpha and its predecessors.

There is currently no place local among the places to get rid of your Sony stuff for free (via) which would be more important were my municipality not to offer this service when I tire of the CPD-E500. Commenters blast wishful thinking on the Sony electronics blog about the similarities of the company with Apple, I know I felt uncomfortable in the Sony Style store.

The first thing I did this morning was check Yahoo! Sports for the score of an NBA game which was played last night. Such is the power of the Away message.

11 March 2008

There is no Mazda 6 in my future, not if it looks like this.

This site seems like it would be handy if one ever needed to convert, say, wavelength to frequency or stuff like that.

I am on the first page of results for a MSN (Windows Live) search for the name of a planned set of houses I mentioned 3 weeks ago.

10 March 2008

It’s just as well I have reduced my exposure to the temptation of buying replica props and escalating to authentic screen-used props, otherwise I might be reading blogs like these. It’s better for the wallet, too.

09 March 2008

Wow. The premiere Star Trek classic communicator information center (via), for The Original Series (TOS) Star Trek classic black body flip-open communicator that is. The son which is mentioned is a contemporary (we did illustrations for the college newspaper) and he’s in my AIM Buddy List even though we haven’t been in touch since 1983. Something the Chang Gang shares with John Long is the inability to spell the word pore when describing the intensity with which one would study original props. Less exacting guide to the phasers. Presumably I have one or more of the items in this illustrated guide to copycat props.

08 March 2008

Someone who doesn’t hate The Postman, part of a My Year of Flops blog at the A.V. Club.

The library of an adjoining jurisdiction has accused me of returning books a day late, that is, on a day I didn’t even leave the house. Grr.

07 March 2008

My free ticket at AMC expires Tuesday, it would be a shame to let it go unused. Oh, good, a few possibilities lose their no-passes status on Monday.

Facebook promises its users that regardless of where you live one can now identify political affiliation from a list of national political parties. We’ll just test that theory, shall we? (Typing demok was enough to expose the inadequacy of the list.)

06 March 2008

The iPod touch can surprise and delight, pfft, until someone else pulls out an iPhone. Today I let myself handle the phone that represents nearly three-quarters of browser use from mobile devices (I skipped my opportunity the last time I was near one, the AFOL from Michigan has one). As for checking for missed calls that’s no good when I leave the mobilni off all the time like I do.

I’ve had an LDraw file available of the Richmond Highway Express Orion VII CNG bus for more than a year (to my knowledge no one has built one) so it was time I had a reference image of my own with which to compare. Tab Preview Tooltips arrived with SeaMonkley 1.1 last year and I’ve usually found them annoying but recently I found a use for them: they’re useful to compare the contents of two tabs (for example, the MLCAD view of the LEGO® construction on the earlier page with today’s photograph).

05 March 2008

The over-eager clock has resumed its sync with standard time.

Maybe the next time my accomplished neighbor sends me a file authored in Microsoft PowerPoint, I should grumble less about it.

I suspect an agenda at work… and, yes, that’s a pun on at work and has nothing to do with the email wishing that comments were enabled here.

The scanning project has reached April of 1987 and the launch of the cross-country drive in the 1985 Mazda 626 LX. I’d forgotten that the steering wheel identified it as a Touring Sedan. This is the morning of the second day at rest area 10-14 along state route 550 in Barlow, Ohio. I was equipped: fog lamps, mask, Passport radar detector from Escort, and aftermarket high-mount third brake lamp. (We had a CB radio and antenna along, too, although the antenna isn’t on the roof in this picture.) I still have the sweater and the license plates. An indispensable part of the scanning project is the neg HANDLER ™ or Apparatus to Move Negatives.

I think the water temperature might be too cold for boat rentals right now… depends on the boat, I suppose. What would happpen if you fell in.

04 March 2008

The radio-controlled clock on the second floor has already leapt forward. Hmm. Daylight Saving Time is supposed to start next Sunday morning.

Last year I went to some effort to create screen captures from episodes of Star Trek (1, 2). TrekCore is a source of Star Trek Multimedia and Information including the relevant scenes from What Are Little Girls Made Of? and A Taste of Armageddon but their coverage of Balance of Terror is lacking the exact frame I found interesting.

Constantine would subscribe to your tweets, for small values of the number of members in the class of you.

03 March 2008

Ha… I do that all the time. You’re walking along, thinking your own thoughts, then someone unexpectedly greets you, and you blurt out—the wrong time of day.

02 March 2008

A single issue blog on a subject which bugs me, too (via). MeFites are not impressed.

I was not happy Friday to discover that my Bluetooth had disappeared. Not just the connectivity, but the feature itself. System Profiler did not admit that I had Bluetooth installed. While a restart cured that disappearance, I set to searching and quickly discovered a user-formulated scheme to reorder the antenna wires inside the Mac Pro which lead to the Bluetooth module (and to the Airport module). I’m really hoping all the difficulties of using a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse with a Mac Pro are over now that I have accomplished this reconfiguration. As an aside, I’m not super pleased that when one searches for mac pro Google returns results about macbook pro. They’re completely different things!

01 March 2008

People ask, why a dedicated transparency scanner? Looking at the result of my first attempt to use the transparent media adapter one might be forgiven for thinking that I was wearing taupe pants. With the superior resolution and improved color processing of the Nikon scanner, we can now reveal that my trousers that day in September were gray. Three years into the job, and I had already bought my own chair (I had two others like it at home). People still scoff at the expense of the Herman Miller Aeron chair that replaced this predecessor from an unidentified manufacturer (after a brief experiment with an employer-supplied mesh wannabe from Canada) but it remains unmatched for long-term comfort.

If comments were enabled here, someone would have pointed to the scene where Randal jiggles his take-out container and makes a joke about how he and Caitlin both eat Chinese. So… that’s pretty specific… the wrong specific, but specific nonetheless…

29 February 2008

Some people hear what they want to… but I’ve just watched Clerks (again) and the phrase used repeatedly is Asian design major and anyone who hears a specific ethnicity is confused.

28 February 2008

iChat allows the user to set alerts for events like Buddy Becomes Available and for some I have chosen the option to Play sound and today my speakers have had a workout. I bought the desktop multimedia speakers from Cambridge SoundWorks years ago because a relative worked there, his new venture doesn’t really offer a desktop solution: even the ZVOXMini wouldn’t fit in adjacent the Apple CinemaDisplay like the two small satellite speakers do. The cords are a pain, though, the company’s got that right.

There hasn’t been any change in the relative popularity of several files at this webspace. Someone has added the feed to a My Yahoo! page and visits weekly (see, the statistics at MyBlogLog are not entirely a waste of time). The existence of the feed means that I can add it anyplace that takes a feed like new social networks (I joined one 2 days ago) or home pages like iGoogle.

27 February 2008

On May 18, 1986, a half-life-size model of Quetzalcoatlus northropi was towed into the air at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. This is what it looked like after not so much flying as plummeting. Apparently it was more successful earlier. I was part of group of friends from college who arrived at the base late and saw the fall from the shuttle bus on the way there.

26 February 2008

I haven’t driven one like a new switcher in WamaLTC has, but I did see a smart car in the Shoppers Food & Pharmacy parking lot this evening. As is typical of most other cars in this lot (one yellow exception to the contrary) it was pulled into the space so that the nose was almost to the dividing line. Since the vehicle is barely over 8 feet long to begin with, that leaves about half the space empty. Does this seem smart to you?

I still haven’t been able to upload a new profile pic to the Yahoo! social network, but the prepared portrait fits in at the U.Va. HoosOnline Network. There’s a heavy emphasis on hiring and careers so I don’t expect the network to keep my attention. Changes are coming to the Facebook profile page, though.

Well then… this looks dangerous. Allegedly Google Talk chatback would allow visitors to this page to IM me. Too bad the XHTML DOCTYPE in use here doesn’t recognize the <iframe> element, yep, too bad.

Christine Painley Gustafson gets a page in the March issue of Arts & Sciences magazine, another contemporary clearly doing well for herself. She was in the same dorm first-year and I did take a few photographs with the Minolta SRT-202, eventually the scanning project will reach them. In the Spring issue of Virginia magazine, Rob Ullman keeps some of the bills at bay with another set of illustrations of clothed collegians.

Comprehensive look at the musical output of Star Trek personalities.

25 February 2008

I don’t know how people manage to have several games of Scrabulous going at once, I barely eked out a win by concentrating on the one. Ah, maybe I’m not supposed to try so hard to win?

24 February 2008

WamaLTC has been displaying at this location for almost a decade and still we get visitors who have never heard of LEGO® trains. I let others capture the details and new elements in the display (Arthur said he’d rebuilt his fire station, Clifton built a movie theater on-site) and stuck with the KonicaMinolta 7D. The club’s other user of a 7D has a Flickr account (Exif says… he hasn’t upgraded to Leopard). I brought only the basics this time (no taxis or police cars) but did get recognition on the buses, with one guest correctly identifying the Orion VII.

I stayed awake this weekend, partly by arriving at the show after it opened (I had completed setup of the basics on Friday) and partly by remembering this report: Regular unintentional daytime dozing may be an early warning sign of stroke in elderly people, say US researchers. (via).

23 February 2008

Yahoo! Mash isn’t letting me upload a new profile pic (the error message is Xin lỗi, vừa xảy ra lỗi. Xin vui lòng thử lại. ) even as I try SeaMonkey, Safari, and Firefox repeatedly. You’ll have to make do with the last entry in today’s use of the 7D. Yes, all the photographs taken of WamaLTC participants are composed horizontally, but the vertical control grip allowed me to use 6 AA batteries to power the camera.

22 February 2008

This morning the uninterruptible power supply did its job. There was a dip in the power severe enough to extinguish the fluorescent desk lamp but the computer didn’t falter.

Found using the Random link at maj.com, the image-sharing site with no user privacy controls: self-examination is good.

The Star Trek episodes Miri and The City on the Edge of Forever give viewers of The Andy Griffith Show a different look at the town of Mayberry (via (via)). The Flickr gallery of DVD captures from the original series episodes does not include Ensign Tamura or the guests at the wedding.

21 February 2008

Excellent. San Francisco has a WiFi-equipped bus. Cisco offers a tour of The Connected Bus which looks to be a hybrid Orion VII with four PCs (for the touchscreen interactive displays) and a Mobile Access Router (for the web connectivity).

This isn’t good.

20 February 2008

It’s bad enough that the Nikon CoolScan V ED has difficulty finding the gaps between photographs. The scanning project has revealed (or rediscovered) that some sloppy photofinishers were no better at it and simply sliced through frames.

19 February 2008

MetaFilter mods decree: not Best of the Web. If the purportedly rehabilitated Lindsay Lohan non-accidentally topless doesn’t qualify… what does?

Devotees of capacitance videodisc weigh in on the demise of HD-DVD as a video format.

In the era of Spotlight (the indexing and search tool for hard drive content built into the Mac operating system) no one can afford to give up possession of the hard drive. Seriously, the hide-the-files-you-don’t-want-your-wife-to-see-in-an-obscure-folder trick is worthless in the face of the Finder sidebar and the links to All Images and All Movies found there.

Lest you think nothing ever goes wrong on a Mac… also known as the spinning beachball of death (more).

18 February 2008

WamaLTC plans a display this weekend at the Greenberg’s Train and Toy Show at The Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. I have indicated that I will participate notwithstanding that I haven’t built anything in months. I haven’t edited any pages at the website in months, either, and the facilities are not described as offering WiFi and I have no computer which qualifies as portable.

I shouldn’t mention the purchase of the March issue of Vanity Fair because I might be accused of not being serious about reducing my expenses. Hmm, my new eyeglasses are going to be a problem…

Mientras ella está trabajando, i se dejara en paz. I am trusting Google Translate again.

17 February 2008

It’s been a long day of scanning negatives and documenting their contents. I can see why people might not like to do it. On the other hand, consider the fine Detroit iron on the streets of Charlottesville over 20 years ago: a Dodge Aspen and a Dodge Omni O24. Down the street there was a Ford Maverick with thoroughly faded paint. At the time, they must have seemed like reasonable propositions but in retrospect they were part of a parade of horribles which make me wonder how the manufacturers survived. The future had already arrived, though, at the near curb is the Honda Civic CVCC. The sisters in the white shoes are on their way to a wedding at the chapel on the grounds of the University of Virginia.

16 February 2008

I was just getting a replacement seal for the fill valve on an upstairs toilet… oh, the police response in the Home Depot parking structure is for someone else.

Oak Run Reserve is planned for lots adjoining Indian Run.

Apple’s Aperture photo editing and management program supports the RAW format of the KonicaMinolta Maxxum 7D (and its successors marketed by Sony) and with an eight-megabyte CompactFlash® card on hand the ability to shoot RAW+JPEG(Fine) means… it’s on the list. I should take advantage of the free trial first.

15 February 2008

Maybe when I wrote of an artistic project this is the tool I was thinking of.

14 February 2008

I would say that it is a safe guess that I prefer the company of someone who is comfortable with domestic and international travel rather than someone who is confused about the Inner Loop and Outer Loop labels for the Capital Beltway. An eminently safe guess, no matter what day of the week it is.

13 February 2008

Painful as the evening commute may have been yesterday, it wasn’t delayed. Today I heard stories of delays for drivers that lasted for hours.

I haven’t written about the proposed purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft, but you can guess. Yuck. I use Yahoo! Mail of course and Yahoo! Search has proven useful on occasion and there’s my Flickr account (new upload yesterday) and some Yahoo! Widgets on my 2560×1600 desktop and the My Yahoo! page and the Yahoo! Mash page. The Microsoft mouse might be the only purchase where I made a positive choice to go the Microsoft way. All those operating systems? To run WordPerfect and test browsers and build in MLCAD. All those versions of Word and Excel? To share files with the people who don’t run WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. Today I discovered that my trick to make the desktop icon labels transparent in Windows XP no longer works, so, yeah, I’m not impressed with how Microsoft stuff works. So to people who pay attention to economics this may seem like a great deal, but faced with the prospect of a Microsoft Flickr would I remain a captive set of eyeballs… or investigate Picasa instead just to get away?

12 February 2008

My walk to the polling place in the morning today was on dry sidewalks… I should have brought along my YakTrax for the evening commute, however. I guess I’ll be following up that lead on a used vertical control grip some other evening!

Greenberg’s Train and Toy Show thinks that something called the Wama Lego Train Club will be exhibiting at the show later this month. Google returns WamaLTC as the first result anyway (the Train Shows Inc. page is the second result) because we’re awesome that way.

So why is Scrabulous still around? It was supposed to disappear.

11 February 2008

Brr. Today’s drop-off with the bundled-up folks of Care Environmental leaves me with but four physical computers.

It’s just another Thursday. There has never, never, never, never been an occasion to mention it before.

The Harold and Kumar sequel is now scheduled for release on April twenty-fifth. The red tag trailer I pointed to 2 months ago is gone from YouTube.

10 February 2008

Today’s donation of a Zoom PC Card V.92 modem and tomorrow’s planned removal of the Compaq notebook leaves but one modem on the premises (it’s in the generic box previously used for DVD screencaps). It also leaves me without any PC Card slots, so the adapters which accept CompactFlash cards are now useless. Meanwhile, the transparency scanning project continues notwithstanding the roadblocks Nikon Scan 4 attempts to establish, like quitting unexpectedly mid-scan or being tuckered out after one strip of negative and the like. When the scanning software is operating, it’s completely capable of bringing Flash playback in an adjoining browser window to a stuttering uselessness. I’ve been scanning all the blurs and underexposures in this project, too, because besides making the sequential file naming in the save dialog easier, the images might serve as fodder for an artistic project some day. Or not.

With Whose engrams? and Error? Error? it was a good weekend to be catching up.

I can say that the find yourself feature in the Google Maps application on the iPod touch works. Trying to use a WiFi connection from a moving bus, not so much.

09 February 2008

The hard drive upgrade only lasted a few years. Today, I took the Fujitsu 3.2 gigabyte hard drive languishing empty and unused in a CompUSA enclosure and returned it to its original home in the Compaq Presario c1681. A run of Compaq QuickRestore Utility v3.08a returned the computer to its condition on the day I first started it up (20 May 1998, which was the same day I was watching the Time’s Orphan episode for the first time) except for the missing battery, of course. The plan is to drop it off for recycling, newish RTC battery and all. Joining it will be an Apple Multiple Scan 15 Display because its loose bezel and broken control door make it a better candidate for disposal than the Compaq V710 monitor that was part of the Desktop Replacement Bundle.

08 February 2008

How rude… the WiFi at the Staples at Fairfax Circle blocked access to Facebook. The store didn’t block MetaFilter, hmmm. I was waiting for the 29N long enough that I could have checked for Left Behind Friday and been able to read all the comments.

07 February 2008

I’m informed that my Comcast Personal Web Space is, or soon will be, expanded to one gigabyte. At the beginning of the year I took down the links to website makeovers that used to be in the menu there, but I don’t have a good idea for what should go there instead (this website is currently at 117 megabytes). I thought maybe I could install Gallery and present some of my new scans, but Comcast doesn’t offer any server-side programming like the PHP which would be needed.

The Year of the Rat is upon us. You know another Year of the Mouse? That’s right… 1960.

06 February 2008

Only one murder last year along the route we take to reach the B & O Railroad Museum (via). That’s good, right?

Serbs rude, arrogant, conceited? Unpossible!

05 February 2008

I know a few people with Canon cameras, so they appreciated this link to a B&H blog describing a 1200mm telephoto lens (via). The wives of these people had second opinions.

I think it is funny that the person who invited me to Google Mail is taking longer to authorize me as a GoogleTalk buddy than, um, the others I have in my Jabber List.

04 February 2008

I was able to log in to the homeowner’s association content management system and edit a file to indicate the date of next month’s meeting using the iPod touch. Qapla’! No one believes me when I say I bought it to see how the WebClip icons I designed look.

Exxon is not on the list of suppliers of TOP TIER-certified gasoline. Does that make a difference? *shrug* I like the convenience of using Speedpass at a no-mileage-penalty location (it’s on the way to a certain remote desktop).

An Apple document hosted at the National Security Agency: Mac OS X Security Configuration For Version 10.4 or Later Second Edition (via, earlier guide for configuring Mac OS X 10.3 Panther). The advice from the third chapter is to remove Mac OS 9 or, if you must, run it from a CD or DVD or a disc image.

How to disinfect the Apple internal or external keyboard, trackpad, and mouse.

Local agency plans to hold National Trademark Expo in April. The third roll through the Olympus XA was started at the July 1984 edition in the Hoover Building downtown.

03 February 2008

Serbian Election Colored by Kosovo’s Future : Sylvia Poggioli reports from Belgrade for Weekend Edition Sunday. You could think something important was going on over there. Over here it’s just some sports news… oh, my bad, wrong sport for today. Depends on who’s watching what, though.

I did a trial today up to the door of the club house and on the other side of the building—I think I’m going to be able to attend my homeowner’s association meeting tomorrow and surf the Web on the iPod touch using the WiFi connection to my AirPort Extreme wireless router.

The missing manual.

02 February 2008

Comcast sends me a postcard with Important Information About Your Account. They have forgotten that my account doesn’t include television.

Now I have seen two of the movies which received the Best Picture nomination. Not super impressed so far.

Sync in Progress. No one was responding to my inquiry about the appearance of the WamaLTC WebClip icon and when I was reminded (by walking past that aisle across from the selection of LEGO® sets) that Target is an authorized retailer of the iPod touch…

01 February 2008

Orpheus Records, the shop in Clarendon where I bought the soundtrack LP of The Stunt Man last year, plans to close upon the expiration of its lease at the end of March.

The transparency scanning project using the Nikon CoolScan V ED began with rolls representing cameras I had very briefly (Nikon EM, Olympus Trip Jr., a disposable panoramic) and moved on to the smaller 110 format and is currently in the second roll (of forty-four) that passed through the Olympus XA. Already one of the self-portraits has been replaced in view of the improvement through the use of the ROC processing.

31 January 2008

Reconstruction has begun on the local Wendy’s that burned last year. I have eaten at a Wendy’s in the meantime. Once.

Kokoro’s Actroid DER2 will be in the Hall of States at the Kennedy Center as part of the Robotopia Rising portion of the JAPAN! culture + hyperculture festival next month. (Of course the robot is an official cheerleader for Hello Kitty.) I was just trying to keep the DASH AT8S bus clean when I picked up the advertising supplement to the local daily.

WamaLTC will be exhibiting at the Great Scale Model Train Show and Railroad Marketplace at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Maryland this weekend.

30 January 2008

To be fair, I see in the iChat Preferences, Accounts pane, Security tab, that Privacy Level can be set, so my ability to observe the arrivals and departures of AOL IM users from the instant messaging service is at their mercy. My new buddy icon.

I only took photographs of cars at the Washington Auto show, although I certainly understand the motivation to aim the camera elsewhere. I don’t confess to any if-only-I-had-the-money fantasies about any of the flashier vehicles which were on display, either, although I did notice that BMW made sure we knew that all their sedans are available with a choice of transmissions. The toe room in the back of the Volvo S80 isn’t terrific.

29 January 2008

Nikon Scan 4 is so pathetic on the Mac (requiring at least two launches before the software realizes there isn’t any error in the hardware) that it eventually occured to me to install the program in one of the virtual machines. Of course in Windows XP Home it launches and scans without a hiccup, but on a 1024×768 desktop there’s no good way to switch to the window with the result to save the scan. Comprehensive list of current Nikon Software. Does Nikon meet ISO standards? Signs point to no.

WamaLTC.org has a WebClip icon.

28 January 2008

I suspected that might be the case… while I can add AOL Instant Messenger users to my buddy list freely and observe their arrivals and departures from the service, the phrase Waiting for Authorization in the Jabber List of iChat means a mutual agreement is needed to know when someone is online and available for chatting.

You may have heard or read or seen something about a multi-orificed tubular toy construction block today.

27 January 2008

I was banishing software CDs from the first floor today and saw that the stack included two examples of the PhotoCD format. Since the photographs on the two discs (an index print is included in the jewel box) weren’t part of my Pictures folder, I inserted the first PhotoCD disc and found that while GraphicConverter couldn’t do anything with the files in the PCD format, iPhoto would launch and offer to import them. This extracted the 3072×2048 scans (from the multi-resolution package) as JPEG. Yay. Comprehensive resources for the PhotoCD.

Leave it to people who use the mouse for everything to think that dragging a file from a Finder window to a Mail window would delete the original file from the filesystem. It’s true, that’s what would happen when dragging between Finder windows (option+drag is used to copy files across Finder windows) but… .:headdesk:.

A check of my basic stylesheet here confirms the Unicode values for Serbian quotation marks: *[lang=sr] { quotes: "\201E" "\201C" "\201A" "\2018"; } . My stylesheets are full of the tricks which were needed in the face of the behavior of Netscape Communicator 4 and the incompetence of Internet Explorer 6, enough so that the idea of CSS Naked Day could serve as an excuse to start over. I see from this month’s statistics that MSIE 7 prevails over MSIE 6 while users of Firefox are overwhelmingly on the latest stable version (2.0.0.11). I do have some visitor(s) using Netscape 7.2, though.

Join my community on MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! service acquired a year ago. Or don’t. Their About Me and Recent Readers widgets don’t seem to survive the XHTML delivery of this page to SeaMonkey but the tracking script seems to be active.

26 January 2008

I was willing to see myself driving a Jeep Liberty (despite those nay-saying co-workers) when it looked like this… but not so much when it looks like this.

25 January 2008

Maybe I just missed it last year… but this time around I found the assist handle in the Dodge Sprinter: it’s at the top of the door. I was disappointed to find that the Taurus and Taurus X have the push on, push off style of foot pedal for the parking brake. That’s a big no-no in my book. Ford may have abandoned the hatchback Focus, but other manufacturers see potential in the body style: besides the Mazda 3, there was the Suzuki SX4 and the Saturn Astra. There’s also a redesigned Pontiac Vibe. While you wait for my photographic evidence that the 2008 Jeep Liberty has been hit with the ugly stick, Ford has a Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photostream and Social Media Press Releases.

24 January 2008

The photo scanning project continues. I’m wondering if choosing 1600 ppi resolution was the smartest choice for scanning the prints from a DISC camera because that makes for a 40 megapixel scan and a 113 megabyte file size.

The Employee’s Guide to Reduction in Force. Um, just in case.

With an excess of 5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world’s largest blog on social networking. The website promoted in this post is real.

23 January 2008

What do I hate? That’s a stumper. I would be no good at those one-page interviews that show up at the back of Vanity Fair (turns out it’s called the Proust Questionnaire).

Science is applied to the question I struggled with earlier. MeFites do not take the paper seriously.

22 January 2008

I knew that the local transit company had rearranged the bus routes this week, but I didn’t realize that the destination sign of the westbound AT2 would read LINCOLNIA. You see what I did there… destination… Lincolnia… but according to Wikipedia it’s a census designated place.

The 25B goes past the Alexandria Campus and the 29K/N goes past the Annandale campus, but there was no reason for me to know that the Northern Virginia Community College even had a Woodbridge Campus. The things you learn from MySpace profiles.

21 January 2008

The Micro Center in the Federal Plaza in Rockville is all wood cabinetry and spot lighting but the selection of PCIe cards was inadequate and to satisfy my desire for more USB and FireWire ports I had to visit the store in Fairfax with the less upscale look. The Rockville location did offer, though, a Sony Alpha A700 for palpation.

The Federal government offers you guidance about the upcoming transition to digital-only television. I do not plan to request a coupon (which would offer a discount off the price of one of the approved digital-to-analog converters).

20 January 2008

I wrote about the guides at iFixit over a year ago when I suggested that owners of a Mac mini could add Bluetooth after purchase. That didn’t happen (I haven’t downloaded any LEGO® software, either) but replacing the RAM is another potential project.

I haven’t forgotten the prognostications (however misguided) that my glum Facebook profile pic would make me unapproachable so here’s the antidote. What could be more adorable than me and a friendly dog?

Paramount Pictures embraces the Facebook Page for its upcoming Star Trek movie.

Just because I panned A Cinderella Story mercilessly and say I am re-evaluating anyone who says they like it doesn’t mean I refuse to watch it again.

19 January 2008

I’m temporarily geographically displaced from my primary system and in the absence of a MacBook Air or other Apple-branded notebook computer I am relying on the previous system (the Power Macintosh G3 with Panther installed) and my fingers keep looking for the right-click functionality and the scroll ball of the wireless Mighty Mouse. The precipitous change from one system to the next (unlike when the Compaq notebook and the recent arrival Performa shared website editing duties for a few months) left the folder of files for the website on the hard drive in the state it was in on 17 December 2007. I had, however, sanitized the system (user account icon, desktop background, browser bookmarks) in advance of its use at my host, and the recently installed wireless card has found no networks it can use. The mushy keyboard and wired Mighty Mouse that accompanied the Mac Pro on its arrival have found a new home.

18 January 2008

Svetlana is not all that unusual a name, but it is weird to see in a doodle by Robert Ullman (it’s on the sign the bum is holding in what is otherwise supposed to be a page of sketches of some redhead the illustrator saw on television).

Office 2004 for Mac was available in a Student and Teacher Edition that was bought by people who were neither students nor teachers because it was a lot cheaper than the regular edition (I did pay full price, once upon a time, for Office 2001 for Mac, it’s still installed on the Performa). Office 2008 for Mac arrived this week in a Home and Student Edition and a quick glance at the box suggests that the previously onerous eligibility requirements have been reduced to an insistence on noncommercial use.

So, fine, what’s in my Dock these days, now that my 2 year-old plans have been realized? Finder, Dashboard, iChat, Address Book, iCal, SeaMonkey, Safari, Camino, Firefox, Opera, BBEdit, Fetch, iTunes, VLC, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Reader, Retrospect, VMware Fusion, huey™PRO, Nikon Scan 4, ScanWizard Pro 7, CorelDRAW 11, Corel PHOTO-PAINT 11, Flickr Uploadr, DiMAGE Viewer, FinePixViewer, GraphicConverter, Preview, iPhoto, iMovie, QuickTime Player, Toast Titanium, DVD Player, Spaces, Time Machine, System Preferences, Activity Monitor, Documents, Downloads, Trash. Except for retaining a second monitor for the display of Windows as a virtual machine and a different virtualization solution, the plans have mostly come true. I even run most program windows at a maximum of 1024×768.

17 January 2008

Just say no to Eurostile… :-)

The new WebClip Bookmark icon I prepared yesterday from the favicon for this site would normally be an opportunity to discuss Colossus: The Forbin Project (Internet Movie Database, Wikipedia) but someone else has beaten me to it. This is why I don’t buy DVDs of every title I have on LaserDisc: according to this review (sound) and others, the DVD of this aggressively widescreen movie is pan-and-scan! A trailer on YouTube and a distinctive desktop (via).

This search engine (it seems to be less than a year old) substitutes a bit for my not being on MySpace. I knew that linking to the Virginia Diamond Club would eventually be handy… oh, and if it’s on the Internet, I will find it.

16 January 2008

I have created a bookmark icon for those using Safari on the iPhone or iPod touch and saving a WebClip Bookmark visiting this page. Since I have neither of these devices, I have no idea how the icon looks after Safari applies the rounded corners and glassy highlights.

15 January 2008

So I was going through the preferences for Camino and discovered the checkbox for Block web advertising and when I saw how it worked on Facebook (which recently had a banner advertisement with sound) I thought that I should use this browser for that purpose all the time but it’s not necessary—the way Camino does it is with userContent.css based on the work of this guy and it’s available for all Gecko browsers, and for Safari.

14 January 2008

The credit card bill with the entries for APL*APPLEONLINESTOREUS 800-676-2775 CA arrived today. The Macworld Expo keynote is tomorrow.

13 January 2008

This is something I would have to be watching Italian television to know anything about. Her audience needs usage instructions on how to handle a blog. Maybe she knows that some of her ardent fans don’t even have a computer and only know about blogs from what they read in the free tabloids… hmm, 802.11g wireless networking is now standard on the Mac mini (802.11n is standard on the iMac line).

It took leaning on the keyboard to realize the secret: the way to move between tabs in SeaMonkey is Control-PageUp and Control-PageDown (works in Firefox, too, but not Camino or Safari).

I’ve replaced the desktop background in the Windows XP Home virtual machine with a new scan of the photograph of Gail Stanton from 1979. The camera was a Minolta SRT-202, a manual-focus, match-needle exposure SLR camera which I’d been using about a year (the film was Kodak Tri-X used at ASA 400). Digital ICE is not supposed to be effective with black and white emulsions, so I didn’t even try to use the feature. It occurs to me that the scratches apparent in the new scan might have been in the negative the last time it was scanned and the scanner I was using then just wasn’t good enough to pick them up.