Dispatches : 2009

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31 December 2009

A premature hope: Door 1×4×6 Frame Type 1 (30179) is still unofficial, but the 1869 Bank and fifteen other files have been revised to replace unofficial parts where possible.

A couple of notes on the local scene: Landmark Honda is using the lot of the former Buick-Pontiac-GMC dealer for its overflow, and FYE is giving up on its Landmark Mall location. FYE’s recommendation of their location in the Ballston Common Mall means that the Springfield Mall location closed first!

30 December 2009

LDraw.org Parts Update 2009-03 was announced today, aw, how many of the files on the Build page do you suppose use Slope Brick 45 6×1 Double Inverted with Open Center (52501)? The file for the 1869 Bank could soon be added to the ranks of those that no longer rely on unofficial parts.

A commenter (on Facebook) points out that the target of yesterday’s link states Limit 5 per customer which is not something I noticed myself.

AMC Theatres has abandoned the moviewatcher.com URL and established the MovieWatcher® Network and now expects a new registrant to find friends with no assistance from Facebook Connect or Google friend connect? Lame.

29 December 2009

I heard a story that there were blue baseplates…

28 December 2009

A Movie Quotes Search Engine that can’t identify the origin of I’m walking here! I’m walking here! ? No hurry on losing the BETA tag, then.

I don’t have an answer for you. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so pathetic, how desperately credit card companies think I’ll be interested in the features of any particular card. As for what I might be interested in using one for, yeah, see the first sentence of this paragraph.

27 December 2009

It’s not just a matter of using the Rotate tool: the author of this Ate Up With Motor article on the AMC Matador is at the mercy of the source photographs.

Information from the Fairfax County Department of Tax Administration: the Domino’s I say used to be a McDonald’s is identified as constructed in 1961; the McDonald’s I used as a prototype for a construction in LEGO® elements is listed as from 1964; and the structure at 5701 Backlick Road which I’ve used as inspiration for this weekend’s build is ultimately from 1968. An aerial view from 1962 reveals that the intersection with Hechinger Drive itself still lay in the future. Since the Burger King Corporation sold the property last February, I’m hoping the building style is more iconic than, say, the Popeye’s at 25 South Pickett Street, which a photograph in a high school yearbook confirms to have been a Village Inn Pizza Parlor.

This is what happens when I skip WAMALUG meetings: the Toy Story Jeep.

26 December 2009

The volatility of the local commercial radio market may explain why there is a preset in one vehicle for ESPN Radio and a preset in the other vehicle for Fresh FM. The freshness on the latter can be debated, I heard on there a track which I have on vinyl.

25 December 2009

More evidence, as if it was needed, why it’s no longer safe, in the sense of maintaining a normal blood pressure, to listen to C-SPAN. Some calls to Washington Journal on C-SPAN are suspected of being a hoax, however.

A redesign for these web pages would seem to be overdue.

24 December 2009

Alexandria’s choices in quick-service franchised restaurants continue to decrease, the faded sign (previously) has been removed and the Wendy’s at 3300 Duke Street is closed for real.

I see that I will not be purchasing Windows 7 Ultimate at Staples, either. Dissatisfied with the edition of Windows 7 you have now? Microsoft has an answer for that, too, with the Windows Anytime Upgrade editions.

It’s not fair to pick on my scanner manufacturer, software development is hard, right? Next month for sure!

A perfectly ordinary snapshot of a derelict store leads to unexpected sharing from someone who signed up just to leave that comment.

23 December 2009

So the LDraw parts library in my Windows virtual machine was up to date, but what about the version running under Wine and X11 on the notebook? The parts library executable available at ldraw.org runs under Wine just as easily, it turns out, and copying Orion Pobursky’s grp file was a matter of using the Go to Folder command and remembering the first slash. The demise of Darwine, though, means future updates are a project for another day…

When I say that there’s no television reception on the premises, I mean it—I never did buy a decoder for digital transmissions.

22 December 2009

A month later, there is no longer any need to resist… a cursory inspection of a local Minnesota-based discounter yields no Star Trek DVD or BD.

I say a video-sharing site’s Full Screen mode that quits when I click on an application window on another display is not satisfactory.

21 December 2009

There will be a quiz later: I only noticed this feature of MLCAD yesterday? Today’s efforts exhaust the inventory of MOCs in the tub I label Fire. Forty-five files revised, four new files created.

The DASH Bus scheduled the start of service this morning for eight o’clock and I wondered what that meant for anyone who has to get to work by that hour. For me it meant a lot less diesel noise. A normal schedule is expected for tomorrow.

19 December 2009

Much as I did for the President’s Day snow event of 2003, I have taken the opportunity provided by the blizzard to significantly revise the files available at the Build page to update part references, replace official parts where available, and revise the constructions where appropriate. Special attention was paid to apply 54200 and 50746 correctly. The Top 15 Snowstorms on record in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland needs updating.

18 December 2009

When repaving work is done on the ground level of the parking at Landmark Mall to fill in the craters formed by bus traffic, that’s not someone being optimistic, that’s overdue maintenance.

Or, maybe WamaLTC will not have an opportunity to display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps this weekend, it’s been cancelled.

17 December 2009

The nearest Home Depot location had a high-profile visitor on Tuesday who made a speech.

The lack of lights in the parking lot on a night that is supposed to have Free Texas Holdem’ Poker makes me think that the Havana Grill lounge (previously) is not really in business anymore even if their online calendar extends into the future indefinitely.

15 December 2009

It’s traditional in the industry to call them armored cars but WMATA’s new equipment in that category has dual rear axles so I’m going to call it a truck. A predecessor LEGO® MOC was basically a rebuild in white of the Dunbar Armored vehicle (previously) this time I’m thinking the Freightliner M2 underpinning my MOC of the local ambulances.

14 December 2009

I don’t disagree, but it’s not something I’m likely to pursue. Modeling my source material (previously) would require more Plate 1×2 with Door Rail (32028) in Dark Gray.

13 December 2009

The suspense is over, looks like WamaLTC will have a display this weekend in the National Museum of the Marine Corps as part of Family Day Santa Visits the Museum.

I’ve sorted out the nested folders in my LDraw directory and MLCAD is showing me the parts in the recent updates, so this may or may not lead to revisions of the files available on the Build page.

It’s still not safe to listen to C-SPAN on Sunday, I certainly appreciate the sentiment. Funny that Bob Schieffer thinks he has to bring on someone other than Senator Lieberman to get the Republican stand.

12 December 2009

This may be part of why the hobby of model railroading is where it is: some residents of Purcellville, Virginia have no idea what trains look like. I heard three different parents tell their children that the red, white, and blue lineup of locomotives and passenger cars (visible in the background) was… Amtrak! Maybe it is time for more stickers. What Amtrak looks like these days. It’s also true that the VRE goes nowhere near their town. I suppose I should be grateful I no longer hear choo-choo noises from the parents when a LEGO® MOC of a diesel engine passes by.

BBEdit doesn’t get to complain anymore (previously).

11 December 2009

The new automatic updates feature in VMware Fusion 3 is pretty slick and is a welcome improvement over the tedious old way that demanded a log-in every time.

From last month: City Dedicates New DASH Transit Facility in honor of William B. Hurd.

More entrants to the set for a thousand views.

08 December 2009

The Star Trek™ Phaser™ Star Trek: The Motion Picture toy type-2 phaser with removable type-1 hand phaser arrived a day late to be truly celebratory. The seller’s exclusivity does not extend to the instruction sheet inside, which is the same as the one accompanying the previous purchase. A look at merchandising this movie, then and now.

07 December 2009

Sony strives to create a sustainable future it says on the back of a recent in-home sales booklet, but I barely recognize some of the photogenic personalities within, and then only because I read Valleywag. Still no Blu-Ray on the premises.

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the regular premiere of Star Trek The Motion Picture.

06 December 2009

This weekend I did not shop locally, despite the repeated encouragement this year and previously to do so by free newspapers. Do any of these categories seem like they would be interesting?

LEGO rendition of a tractor-drawn aerial ladder truck.

MLCAD and the Magic Mouse do not mix, nevertheless, six hours later, a new file. Peeron has slipped, Technic Axle 8 with Stop is now known as 55013 as found in the Ldraw.org Parts Update from last September. I thought I had kept my parts library up to date, but the May update included Car Mudguard 4 x 2 1/2 x 2 (50745) so I shouldn’t have had to include it as a submodel. I laboriously identified all the Stone colors in the file in Bricksmith (otherwise they remain as wireframes) and took a screen capture of the result for this image, the program displays Pearl Light Gray better than MLCAD does.

No doubt most of the files on the Build page require similar updating for newly official parts and the like, but I’ve granted permission for one or more of those files to be converted by this guy who creates files for 3D animation programs such as Poser.

05 December 2009

The Federal Trade Commission recently revised its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and since participants in WamaLTC’s most recent display received some thank-you gifts from the host venue, looks like I would have to mention receiving a book for free were I to review it, even though they’re not able to ask for a lot of money for this particular commodity.

Don’t miss it! The LEGO® train display next Saturday in the Town Hall of Purcellville, Virginia is only from ten-thirty to three o’clock. A Schedule of Events has been posted as a PDF.

04 December 2009

The mileage with the Focus this past holiday weekend was not nearly as good as last year’s, the Escape did better by reaching 29 mpg.

03 December 2009

The Virginia Indoor Clean Air Act and its prohibition of smoking in restaurants in the state became effective earlier this week.

02 December 2009

That explains the Mobile Command Unit of my municipality’s police department headed westbound along Eisenhower Avenue with lights and siren on Monday.

The discussion of the search for a new location for a federal agency after conditions in the Hoover Building became untenable omits a plan to construct a new building in the Howard-Anne Arundel County area of Maryland.

Kottke has advice: Just Don’t Look.

01 December 2009

There’s another Holiday Festival of Trains on the other coast that lasts longer and has a section from the Southern California LEGO® Train Club with bigger bridges, taller buildings, and pretty much more of everything except for any examples of quick-service national franchises. I had to look, my H2 design still in use.

The Little Sister: The Mercedes 190SL (via) includes more details on the Mercedes-Benz 180 upon which it was based, including pricing and dealership structure in the years before the company set up its own distribution in North America.

연

30 November 2009

Before it gets pulled again: buried in this MetaFilter post is a link to something that disappeared previously.

How convenient: the Car Talk guys on How to Drive Stick Shift.

29 November 2009

Finally, someone on the Beltway slower than me! This morning the driver of an ermine white 1965 Chevrolet Impala fastback coupe was keeping it below the posted limit.

28 November 2009

Maryland’s capacity to enforce the speed limit on the Beltway in Prince George’s County is not up to the challenge of 100% noncompliance (with an insignificant outlier in Egg Yolk Yellow). Recent legislation allows automated speed enforcement in that state in school zones and work zones.

27 November 2009

Someone is optimistic: construction on The Intercounty Connector continues. Contract C covers the interchange with I-95.

The White House uploads to its Flickr account as if the depicted individuals are not the subject of international reportage and domestic scandal and second-guessing.

Discussing Brickshelf on Flickr.

26 November 2009

Has it been 3 years since Tower Records went under? There are Hess gasoline stations that stock the toy truck (this year it’s a race car actually) that remain open 24 hours, but it wouldn’t be the same.

Obviously, other people are taking up the slack.

25 November 2009

My community’s trash hauler will close its offices tommorow and not run its trucks, but it seems like I could be adding more to the recycling bin than I have.

There’ve been inquiries, but no, despite availability in grocery stores, still resisting.

24 November 2009

Week by week, Microtek’s schedule to ship updated drivers for its scanners slips, it’s now set for the first week of next month.

If Apple were to make a tablet, they would just include its crashy mobile Safari in it, right?

Less than 2 weeks ago. Baltimore City Paper keeps track weekly.

23 November 2009

From three years ago: HBO’s The Wire was set on Baltimore’s west side, but was filmed on the east side (via). The local newspaper’s interactive microsite is still available (previously) and reports 205 homicides so far this year, including one last month near enough to the museum as might alarm some parents. The microsite’s focus on homicides omits other crimes plaguing the city (via).

21 November 2009

When Stephen Jay Gould wrote the columns which were collected in Ever Since Darwin, the theory of plate tectonics was of sufficiently recent formulation that it had to be explained and justified repeatedly. The volume seems to be still in print but my example, purchased 25 years ago next month, is the latest addition to the pile.

20 November 2009

There’s an awkward spot on my MP39PH, I see the same solution on Ralph Savelsberg’s London Routemaster bus (via), so that’s ok then. Striping and VRE diamond shields went on today. The first example of the real thing is reported to have started construction and is expected to be in service next year in June. If the prototype arrives wearing the Gill Sans Bold shields, I’m ready for that. As the commuter railroad sells its old locomotives, I suppose I’ll be expected to disassemble my previous MOCs.

With weekly newspapers folding, cartoonists do what they can to pay the bills: Ben Claassen III does spot illustrations for Express, Rob Ullman contributes to the alumni magazine Virginia, and Derf plays up his proximity to serial killers in the news. Actually, Claassen is financially secure enough to leave money on the ground, this is how he got there.

19 November 2009

Then again, maybe not: Metro will delay SmartBenefits changes by one year. Streetcars for the District, also.

The Holiday Festival of Trains has its own page for this year and they get the club’s name right.

No hours? The McDonald’s at Duke and Paxton Streets is fenced off. My municipality’s staff has reviewed the application for a special use permit and finds that the new building design is a vast improvement over the dated 1970’s design and the site is enhanced by a reduction in impervious surface area and a significant increase in landscape plantings. The location was previously a Roy Rogers Restaurant, seems like it must have been a Gino’s before that. Although McDonald’s is known for razing buildings, the Forever Young rebranding may just involve remodeling to look like the building that replaced the Roy Rogers Restaurant at 40 Glebe Road in Arlington.

18 November 2009

A new project card is started, the hiatus in visiting BrickLink is over. While the most recent construction (hint) is parts complete, it’s again a matter of getting the right colors. Availability confirmed. Still no innovative building techniques, however.

16 November 2009

I’m building again, solving one problem at a time. I have images of one MP39PH in LEGO® elements as guidance.

15 November 2009

I could throw away a VHS tape if only I bought the Blu-Ray of the third season but no, still resisting… people watch television so I don’t have to.

14 November 2009

There have been many changes over the years in the Potomac Mills Mall, the store I mention previously is called Short Stop, but one constant remains: Burger King on the corner where Neighborhood 2 meets Neighborhood 3. I’m not surprised the Burger King website makes you work to find out about it.

There should no longer be a modem on the premises.

13 November 2009

Flickr doesn’t like fingerpointing. Courtesy of Chilling Effects, the entire 17 USC 512.

That fixed it.

12 November 2009

Someone is optimistic: the lot adjacent to the AMC Hoffman Center 22 on its south side (Block 8) is closed to parking with promises of 440,000 square feet of office and retail.

This may be the Gillig Trolley that my municipality was mulling earlier this week.

I’m told my use of subway instead of Metro to describe the local heavy-rail conveyance is diagnostic of being a New Yorker.

11 November 2009

The Microsoft Terminology Blog does not feature any posts tagged Serbian. Windows 7 language packs are available for computers that are running Windows 7 Ultimate or Windows 7 Enterprise but what are the 35 languages? Microsoft makes that harder to find out, but Serbian Cyrillic is among the available Language Interface Packs (via) in addition to those which are built-in.

Whatever would the local Arby’s do if they didn’t have the orange newspaper dispenser anymore? It could happen.

A recent change of practice at Flickr.

10 November 2009

This roundup of the past twelve years in Google home pages wouldn’t include the links to other search engines for comparison, those would have been on a result page. I’m not imagining those, right?

09 November 2009

There’s a new link target for the Built with BBEdit campaign. Built with BBEdit.

If I never have to read PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge again, it will be too soon.

08 November 2009

I stopped watching Enterprise after its first season and haven’t revisited that decision despite the entreaties that a few later episodes were worth the time. Views from the sets of a classic-era starship in one of those episodes at Doug Drexler’s blog.

BBEdit 9.3 brings, in addition to the nagging about text encoding mismatches, the requirement to use Command-` to cycle among windows, as the Command-[number] shortcuts are gone.

07 November 2009

VMware seems to have gotten its act together since the debacle last month, so it’s Fusion 3.0 that’s running my virtual machines now. I discovered that not everything iomega was made to disappear as previously reported, and there may be another virtual machine on the way if I can remember how to migrate a physical machine which is too old to make use of the official importer. Norton Ghost 2003 will be doing its work overnight.

Yet another look for the Chrysler logo (via).

Still resisting Blu-Ray…

06 November 2009

This has been bugging me about the RSS reader in Safari, the dispatches.xml file I use for an RSS feed here only includes 14 items, but it’s like the browser never forgets and it shows many more. Prompted by its presence in Google Dashboard, I took a look at Google Reader and added my feed, and it can show items back to 05 February 2008! Someone must have subscribed that day, the feed started 25 September 2007.

The slide continues.

I treat art like a Curbside Classic clue at The Truth About Cars. The successful strategy was a Google Images search on [year][make], but next time I might visit these galleries first.

05 November 2009

The world is a better place because of the Internet? Not feelin’ it today. However, there are some Flickr account holders who are upstanding guys, and you won’t find them contributing to that Flickr Group mentioned yesterday anymore.

From an observation made last month, the Ritz Camera in the Potomac Mills Mall has been replaced (it closed in April, actually) by a sports collectables shop.

04 November 2009

I never was invited to the Roy Rogers Restaurants Group on Flickr but photographs from my Roy Rogers set have ended up there anyway (previous incident of infringement).

My plan to install applications in ~/Applications/ has run into a snag on the notebook—I’m not able to find such a folder on that machine.

03 November 2009

I saw you: No, so sorry, Election Day is not a holiday in America. I’m pleased you could leave with a smile on your face, though.

With apologies to Harry Callahan, but the arrival of the Star Trek™ Phaser™ Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan toy type-2 phaser with removable type-1 hand phaser and its product design philosophy mandates some adjustment:

I know what you’re thinking. Did he press the settings panel twice for stun or three times for kill? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a type 2 phaser, the most powerful sidearm in Starfleet, and would just vaporize you, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

ICANN might not be ready for this much internationalization (via).

02 November 2009

Remember how outraged Mattel was at that Barbie Girl song? Yeah, not so much any more (via (via)).

They still call it Kosovo? Statue of some guy unveiled in Priština (via), h/t to a coworker.

Almost forgot to turn the clocks in cameras back.

01 November 2009

WamaLTC has plans for this month: a small display in Rockville this weekend, then another display in LEGO® Retail store in the Potomac Mills Mall the weekend after, and then our fourth year at the B&O Museum after Thanksgiving. (The museum gets our name right where the store does not.) In particular there’s an ambitious track plan for the Baltimore show that will require a number of bridges.

I expect my answering machine to get more political robocalls tomorrow and Tuesday.

31 October 2009

The internationalization of the Internet most recently in the news is actually a small detail long in arriving: now even the domain name extension may be in non-Roman alphabets.

Just an observation: looks like Target will not be the source of any Windows 7 purchase. I didn’t buy XP Home until Service Pack 2 was included, anyway.

30 October 2009

The Apple Magic Mouse is available only in a wireless version. That must mean there is no longer a choice… every Mac has Bluetooth included.

Someone is optimistic: a third track is being built between Fredericksburg and the District, this requires a bridge to be replaced.

29 October 2009

Very timely. Don’t make me break out the rubbing alcohol again, peripheral formerly-known-as Mighty Mouse®.

There’s a group on Flickr for anything, this particular shade of green might bring back memories for some.

28 October 2009

The inadequate rendering of the Facebook widget by SeaMonkey is over, now that the browser suite is at 2.0. They’ve missed the opportunity to update the logo for Google but Hangeul in the tab title has been fixed. Now if only there was a theme I could install… the look on Mac OS X is a clumsy pastiche of the gradient header from Firefox and the toolbars from Netscape Communicator.

USAccess allows federal agencies to outsource the provision of credentials to employees and contractors.

27 October 2009

No upgrade for you. People are not happy. It can wait.

The Website Manager and Grassroots Organizer for the Coalition for Smarter Growth has sought permission to use my photo of the basking REX bus… somewhere. That image has been used without permission enough times that I replied, Sure. Also, the website claims no copyright that I can find.

26 October 2009

Still no announcement of a winner in that photography contest I didn’t enter. DASH passengers are asked not to drink aboard the buses, it’s long past the time where I would remind violators personally.

Share

The implementation of Facebook’s new Live Count Share Widgets leaves something to be desired in SeaMonkey. Where the BBEdit syntax checker complains is with the values for the type attribute. This page seems to already have a count of one.

Actually there was a security update for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) a little over a month ago, so there’s no sense in being smug about my Windows XP virtual machines still receiving similar patches. Windows XP is available as a download for purchasers of the expensive versions of Windows 7.

25 October 2009

When I followed the link and got 404, I was worried by the generic look of the error landing page, but the Star Trek History site has been completely revamped and it’s just those URLs which have disappeared. The soundtrack over the intro screen is the short final track Additional Credits on the Star Trek The Cage & Where No Man Has Gone Before album.

The Spring Green started out in 1967 as a fancy restaurant, decades later it’s just a café in the visitor’s center for Taliesin. I can easily believe that my visit was when the restaurant was in foreclosure!

This Ephemeral World.

24 October 2009

Custom license plates on LEGO® tiles (via (via)) from the AFOL answer to Justine Ezarik and some guy.

His name has been on the bottom of my plastic tableware all this time, but when I was shopping in the Crystal City Underground more than 20 years ago*, the clerk told me the plates were for picnics! That’s designer picnicware, then, that I bought in blue that day, made by a company that moved on to make furniture. Available again since a few years ago although only in white, I should just pick some up at the museum store. I’m not alone in the search. *Too long ago to retain the receipt, but the register for credit card transactions suggests it was The Design Store.

It’s unlikely Mattel would ever turn its attention to a small, landlocked country, but fashion dolls in Serbian national costume are available. Still not discounted, boo.

23 October 2009

A grinning first-year student climbs the door of a Land Rover.

The iconic Land Rover is soon to be no more (with additional speculation as to why). This particular example has been mentioned previously. The vehicle has been the subject of several Matchbox miniatures over the years.

It’s getting difficult even to listen to C-SPAN anymore because of some of the stuff they’re willing to carry. Also can you believe the nerve of some people?

Oh, yay, a redesign for the Facebook news feed, I’m still baffled as why my own contributions should show up in it.

22 October 2009

Introducing Minolta Maxxum Autofocus System.

From 1985: the advertisement appeared in the April issue, it never says 7000 although of course one may read it on the body of the camera. There are four buttons on the top of the camera at the film supply end, and three of the functions (+/-, ISO, and DRIVE) survive as buttons on the top of the α900 (via). The MODE button is now taken care of by a dial on the other side of the pentaprism, the Sony uses the fourth button for WB which, in the film days, was set for you by the choice of emulsion.

Ugh, I recognize that flat windshield (previous assessment of a character who drives a Geländewagen).

21 October 2009

Flickr adds a People in Photos feature. It’s like tagging friends in Facebook. Tagging by others of the Official White House Photostream is going to get old. More complaints about the changes to the Profile page, what is it with Flickr and the insistence on sharing Favorites?

I was quick to buy an Apple operating system upgrade recently but what about the imminent release of Windows 7? That takes a back seat to another upgrade next week. Yesterday saw some tempting hardware announcements, certainly. I’m loathe to be separated from my scroll mouse, but the actual device itself (now known only as Apple Mouse) has its shortcomings in view of the physical ball. Also, an iMac just 160px short of my display? That could clear away a lot of clutter at some locations where I do technical support…

20 October 2009

Toyota really is the new GM. The business of pushing the same button to do two different things was just stupid when Donald A. Norman wrote about slide projectors, but it is deadly in automobiles. I said it years ago after driving GM vehicles and it’s still valid: accomplishing opposite goals must be done through opposite actions. That’s why I resist foot-operated parking brakes.

They’re not even dressed in purple and yellow?! I mean, I’m outraged by this scandal. HAMBURGER

I thought maybe BlueCoat had been updated to handle apps, but it was just that the Flickr API was down for a few hours today.

18 October 2009

Yesterday’s WamaLTC display exposes a gap or two in my wardrobe, maybe because it hadn’t occurred to me earlier to remain outdoors in such weather. Half the month’s precipitation fell on Saturday!

Nice Job If You Can Get It? There’s some lefty blog reaction (via) to a column and its followup in The New York Times recently about how the super-rich are reacting to the economic downturn. But the column wasn’t a one-off, it’s what the columnist does: Paul Sullivan writes about strategies that the wealthy use to manage their money and their overall well-being. It’s like the story of Dr. Gall specializing in diseases of the rich in the prologue to In Old Mexico on An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer to which the audience reacted with great laughter.

17 October 2009

The biography of a controversial actress (previously) skips one production: The Blue Bird. Thirty years later, one can determine that it opened at Radio City Music Hall on May 13, 1976…

16 October 2009

All this time I’ve been saying Daewoo wrong (via).

We’re told that tomorrow’s Festival on the Square is rain or shine.

15 October 2009

The roster at the page for the CUE is even more out of date, so sad. There’s even some source material readily available. I’ll become an editor of Wikipedia right about when I start using Creative Commons, mm-hmm.

This is a metropolitan area (mostly) without billboards, so I don’t get to see stuff like this.

14 October 2009

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Paramount Pictures Corporation. It was awesome while it lasted, anyway. I’ve removed the anchors for those link targets in yesterday’s post that have been made to disappear.

LEGO® Factory is now LEGO® DesignbyME (via).

Scary scrawny. Worrisome. Much hotter. Previously.

13 October 2009

An Irish Spock? That was awesome. Blooper reel from some movie that was popular last summer. We’ll have to leave it there (via).

12 October 2009

The details of urban life can be overlooked in the speed of a passing bus, sometimes they require a pedestrian’s perspective. Generous George’s Positive Pizza & Pasta Place has closed its original Duke Street location known for the big toy soldiers, recently enough that the sugar and seasoning dispensers are still filled. The other location is around the corner from where WamaLTC will be displaying this Saturday, and the company has big plans for franchising. I am at a loss as to how Johnson City, Tennessee may be described as being in the Washington Metro area, though.

The new maintenance facility for the local bus system would appear to be near completion. I only saw through the open door one bus inside. The roster at Wikipedia needs to be updated, the 1996 Gillig Phantoms won’t be going anywhere without logos or numbers.

The last time I described my backup procedures was a few years ago. There are no more Windows computers, er, that is, none that I keep a backup for, anyway, just virtual machines, and of course I use SuperDuper! now instead of Retrospect. Having a cloned backup disk proved useful less than a year later. I have yet to have anything off-site, though.

11 October 2009

An essay by Roger Ebert on the subject of owning books brings out the contentious commentary. For several years I have been participating in a local book and DVD drive and the pile for this year’s donation continues to grow, but I feel no pressure to reduce the number of laserdiscs on the premises even as they are effectively worthless. While another biography of some controversial actress is the next candidate for the pile, the laserdisc of the movie of some recently-arrested director remains on the shelf.

WamaLTC will have a display at the Festival on the Square this Saturday at an address which places the event in the front yard of a couple of hotels.

This is the repaired item I was referring to previously.

10 October 2009

What I miss by not watching television, but other people watch so I don’t have to. I was searching for Jenny Slate based on this video (via)—she looks a little like Katie Holmes did, right?—and discovered her recent notoriety which slipped past me while I wasn’t reading. She’s on Facebook.

Oh, okay, it’s the Associated Press, that’s why this non-news about a stale serial is in the NPR app on my iPod touch. No doubt perishable Yahoo! News link to the story of the cover of that November issue (alternate link) but there would appear to be no students of magazine history at the wire services. The first cartoon character? What was Jessica Rabbit if not a character, hmm? The publication is reaching back 38 years for inspiration, the original model is no longer with us. MetaFilter snark arrives before I posted.

The 17″ Apple Studio Display, now just a $25 item at the thrift store. Tempting, but for the ADC connection and the little cracks around the Apple logo on the front, so I’ll stick with my E500.

Looks like that new haircutting establishment displaced a location of The Countertop Company (link target displays a copyright of 2003, so this report from a local television station from 3 years ago makes sense).

09 October 2009

U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History, 1913-2009. Someone was showing these charts to me recently, as a way of countering the recent hyperbole over restoring rates to where they were in previous administrations.

07 October 2009

In an update to the update (previously), John Carlyle Square Park is now completely open.

Boo to Facebook and other RSS readers for stripping out the multiple U+2002 en space characters in yesterday’s post. Kinda ruins the joke, guys.

I call the closest airport Reagan and I’m going to continue doing so until the phonemes are as meaningless as those of Dulles are.

06 October 2009

Months after it closed, my local   ICK PON     GMC dealer is keeping some of the lights on.

What a piece of junk that was! I became very familiar with the route to 1358 Holton Lane in Langley Park where Sony had a Service Center. The single story strip mall at that location has been replaced, though, and Sony would seem to no longer have a Service Center there. The big store at the intersection with New Hampshire Avenue a little to the west was an A&P supermarket, A&P itself is no longer in Maryland.

05 October 2009

Selectavision Digital Command Center offered total control of the system from RCA.

The beginning of the end: RCA’s Digital Command Center joined with a compatible RCA VideoDisc Player. Production of players like the pictured SJT400 model was to end a few months later. From the same month: Total Decision-Free Photography only from the mind of Minolta, and another I wonder what this ad was selling (previously).

You’d think people were still reading magazines (previously) from the outcry over some more biting the dust.

Alpha’s Survival - Explicated! I notice they don’t blur the facial features of the fresh-faced twenty-something future wife of the Star Trek fan.

04 October 2009

Flickr user mobycat beat me to documenting the old sign on the side of a local grocery. But he did not describe or tag his capture of the Sorak Garden Korean Bar & Grill quite the way I did mine. SeaMonkey falls down on rendering the syllables in the tab title, boo! Firefox and Camino have no trouble displaying the characters at any location.

Bob used the widest focal length available on his Nikon Coolpix 4300 but that doesn’t look like 38mm (35mm equivalent)—I suspect that Exif cannot know if the WC-E63 is attached.

03 October 2009

The Vienna Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce might have thought that it was WAMALUG - LEGO dudes! that signed up for a spot in section H of the Oktoberfest today but those who showed up flew the banner of WamaLTC. What is up with the festival marketplace including so many jewelry vendors?

Did I omit a candidate when I was looking for a barber earlier this year?

02 October 2009

Metro Access van with previous decoration scheme.

For comparison’s sake, this is the previous decoration scheme for Metro Access vans.

I haven’t bought gasoline for the Focus since July. The steadiness of the low-fuel warning led to a week’s hiatus at the end of last month. Today’s fill-up of 11.8 gallons is the most ever. There may have been 35 miles left to go! Hey, it’s the same price as 2 months ago.

01 October 2009

Not a peep about it on the community Yahoo! Group, maybe they’re saving their comments for the annual meeting tomorrow: Thirty gallons of liquid ethanol spill at Norfolk Southern facility on the West End.

Next-generation Ford Focus based on all-new C-car platform to debut at the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in January 2010. Whether it will show up among the displays at the Washington Auto Show the same month is another question entirely.

One face of the Secret Service.

29 September 2009

Selectavision Video Monitor was but one part of the system from RCA.

This advertisement from RCA in the issue for May of 1983 includes the SGT-250, a stereo capacitance videodisc player introduced the previous year. The final generation of player development would be released later in the year.

A tale well-calculated to keep you in suspense! Will WamaLTC have a display on December 19-20, 2009 in the National Museum of the Marine Corps? Stay tuned…

27 September 2009

Earlier this month the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released a video depicting an offset crash between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu which set off all the sentimental types, especially when The Truth About Cars found the source of the 50-year-old car. More before-and-after photographs and normal speed version with sound (advertisement autoplays). Back when that Bel Air was still newish, I was riding in a Mercedes Benz 180 of similar vintage when it was T-boned by a big American car. Was the culprit a 1957, or a 1958, Dodge? The Dodges for 1956 and 1959 don’t evoke any memories. Some wrecks among the otherwise junked examples of the Ponton confirm I experienced a much lower speed of crash.

More nostalgia: the 1972 Dodge Dart and Dart Demon brochure.

26 September 2009

After one hundred nineteen issues, it might be time to give up on cinefex, the magazine of motion picture special effects technique. It’s taken me from the first Star Trek to the most recent installment in that franchise but otherwise it’s been years since I’ve seen even a single subject in an issue.

When someone looks at my α900 and thinks it has a motor drive it’s safe to say they’re aging. Such an accessory was a big deal in the manual-focus era but became totally irrelevant in the autofocus era with the built-in motorized film advance of the Minolta Maxxum 7000 that arrived in 1985. They’re called vertical grips now, they offer an extra battery and additional controls but no motor.

25 September 2009

Maybe it’s time my local dry cleaning establishment started carding people before accepting items for repair. The person who used my surname and telephone number to leave an item there didn’t include anything which could establish identity and now that months have gone by (long enough for the color of the tickets to change) I’m getting the call. Of the clerk’s handwriting on the yellow ticket, the only character I think I can discern is 루. The requirement to have a receipt in hand to take an item is not so ironclad, clearly.

22 September 2009

The co-designer of the new CUE scheme announced the arrival over a month ago (and wrote about it some more). There are non-hybrid Gillig low floors in Montgomery County, but I’m in that county even less than in Fairfax.

I’ve paid for SuperDuper! and hope to implement the Scheduling feature as a replacement for EMC Retrospect 8 despite paying for an upgrade from 6.1 earlier this month, because while the purchase last year was of Iomega by EMC, a blank page tells me all I need to know about the continuing value of the Iomega brand (this page works). I made everything Iomega disappear over a year ago.

21 September 2009

My Mac Pro and its little brother.

So cute, like a miniature Mac Pro.

Installing applications in ~/Applications/ sounded like it might be a good idea, transferring the applications led to trashing some (Microsoft Messenger, SuperScrubber) and updating others (Opera, VLC) but the first hints of trouble to come had GraphicConverter insisting on writing its Application Support files to the System /Library/ anyway, then the move of BBEdit’s app bundle confused the program until I installed it again, and this morning, VMware Fusion insisted it was unlicensed! Stress.

20 September 2009

It's Profeel. And it's here today from Sony.

So simple, it’s naked. Another bit of advertising which may have led to a later purchase. A modern appreciation for the KX-20PS1; in Europe the tube dimension includes parts of the screen under the bezel!

JAJAH Brings Telephone Calls to Twitter is not a substitute for Skype in view of the rather involved requirements (currently in beta) and 2-minute limit to the length of such calls. Whew, I haven’t told Twitter any of my phone numbers, so it wouldn’t be possible for a random Twitter user, verified or not, to reach me this way.

19 September 2009

The new CUE buses (previously) are already out. They would appear to be forty-foot diesel-electric Gillig Low Floor Hybrid models with the BRT styling option. Comprehensive coverage (except for the roof).

There’s a festival this weekend in the parking lot of the Kmart in Annandale, it’s the seventh annual KORUS Festival.

I managed the whole week without including Ima let u finish in a post.

18 September 2009

New paint for MetroAccess paratransit van.

Even the MetroAccess vehicles are getting the swoop or whatever they’re calling it. This and the police car few days ago are the result of reading the α900 manual and establishing settings for the first memory position to make a successful off-the-face grab shot more likely. The continuous focus and continuous drive have helped but ISO 3200 gave me the smeary look of my Fujifilm cameras, so I’ll change that to shutter priority. Finally got the hang of the Live Rotation tool in GraphicConverter. :-)

My barber is too young to remember the swine flu scare of 1976.

One thing I appreciate about VueScan that ScanWizard Pro does not do is the adjustment for skew.

17 September 2009

Microtek announced on Monday that drivers compatible with Snow Leopard would be available in 2 months for at least some of its scanners (including mine). VueScan is doing the job in the meantime.

The photograph of the multihued trial build of an Orion VII CNG bus in LEGO® elements is the fifth entrant to the set for a thousand views.

16 September 2009

The view of the Enterprise used on the recent cover of Cinefex is now available as 6412 × 6347 PNG (via) which would require cropping and resampling to fit even my monitor.

15 September 2009

Fairfax County Police have a Dodge Intrepid.

I had no idea the Fairfax County Police even had a Dodge Intrepid in its fleet. Yeah, yeah, I need to get out more.

Pulitzer Prize winner took exception to standard interview questions.

When you have to drive something with a badge that looks like the Star Trek The Next Generation communicator.

14 September 2009

It’s Monday, so that must mean… yup, still pathetic (previously). The Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement traveling exhibition completed its national tour earlier this year. Coincidence. Timing. Hmm.

The TV-B-Gone® universal remote control may take up to 69 seconds to do its work.

I see that the more serious tone of the fourth season of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. didn’t stop the production from using Mopar convertibles.

13 September 2009

Come in, Planet Earth, Sony ad for shortwave radio.

Is this the advertisement that led me to purchase the ICF-2001? Mine was eventually done in by spilled apple juice. Anyone who’s tried to photograph LEGO® constructions built in black will understand why Sony had to use a line of fine print to explain the sheen in the image of its product.

The Five Daughters Affair starts with the AMT Piranha under attack by gyroplanes with at least one valid FAA registration among them. This episode’s screen captures were uploaded today! The assignment takes our dashing and sensitive heroes to Japan where I wondered if the ethnicity of character and cast matched. As I suspected, they did not. She’s on Facebook and while not in the original like yesterday’s link has appeared on a later Star Trek series. Is this Tsu in an earlier episode (previously)? Her real estate site crashes SeaMonkey every time, maybe it’s the Java applet.

12 September 2009

Aerial view of the Shirley Highway interchange at Duke Street in 1949.

HistoricAerials.com by NETROnline, a division of Nationwide Environmental Title Research LLC, is proving helpful in identifying the location of some of my photography as it offers views from previous years for the area. Looking at the 1962 view, I see that the Shirley Highway existed, but the interchanges were built differently. The one with Duke Street, for example, was a traditional cloverleaf (already started in the 1949 view) built at a different alignment (as made apparent by using the swipe or dissolve tools) that explains the post-1962 date of the current overpass. My high school was yet to be built and Landmark Mall was in the planning stage, but Edsall Road and Van Dorn Street were also later constructions? I would be one bewildered time traveler.

The typically comprehensive episode synopsis nevertheless elides the details of the torture scene. U.N.C.L.E.’s commitment to a multi-ethnic workforce slipped in the later seasons.

Another source for screencaps of Star Trek episodes.

11 September 2009

It’s more difficult to believe that it’s been 6 years since I bought the Focus.

Vanessa Angel contemplates the Shore Leave bunny. I’m trying to shoot more with the α900 so I can avoid having no choice but to upload an, oops, she blinked, shot.

10 September 2009

Those who complain about the weight of a vertical grip on digital SLRs can, what’s the polite phrase, go pound sand. Today I hefted a representative of the camera with which I shot two thousand, five hundred seventy-one frames in an earlier decade, and oof!

Was I supposed to have heard about pay.gov earlier? Maybe, it started 9 years ago with two agencies and has expanded significantly since then.

I can just imagine how that delivery date is subject to change!

08 September 2009

The United States Postal Service last year began a pilot program offering free recycling of used small electronics which program would appear to be ongoing and the envelope I picked up has been located in case there’s anything interesting announced tomorrow.

Too little, too late: The next movie you see may be on a record.

Oh, so now there is an official Flickr app (via)? Eight months ago there was a long list of reasons why that wouldn’t happen any time soon. The complaints begin…

07 September 2009

Magnavision® is Gourmet Video for people who know and love video. Leonard Nimoy converses with a glowing rock on the subject, in a lull perhaps between Star Trek movies.

A classic answer from my scanner’s manufacturer on the subject of compatibility of the software they supply with that recent update from the computer manufacturer. This scientist profiled at Apple will have to make a decision about how to continue using his Microtek scanner.

The website macfixit.com which took a the-sky-is-falling approach to its subject now redirects (via).

06 September 2009

The promotion for the region 2 release of The Prisoner in High-Definition on Blu-ray due later this month is accompanied by the All-Nighter where the seventeen episodes are screened consecutively in a London cinema.

Website updates: maj.com (previously) now hosts advertising with high-value search terms; theoriginaldrawing.com (previously) lapsed nearly two years ago and is currently available.

The very definition: a young woman in a black Porsche Cayenne waves as she pulls a U-turn in front of me to follow the moving van with Hangeul on the sides.

05 September 2009

Today’s project was to bring the Rolodex file on the desktop up to date. It’s the only technological implement in yesterday’s link to Flickr that remains in use. Time to take out the cards for all Tower Records/Video locations and all the cards for AMC locations which have closed and add a select few new entries.

Introducing Pioneer LaserDisc. Pioneer is still in business but there’s been no reason to think about it in a while. Nope, no Blu-ray® release in 2½ months that would get me thinking, not at all.

04 September 2009

Unexpected evidence from six years ago: my Minolta DiMAGE 7 in the hands of the person I sold it to.

Stereo sound you wear around (previously).

The Sony α850 has hit the streets at two-thirds the (original) price of mine with but a couple of features downgraded. Nearly two thousand frames since delivery, I have no regrets. (This compares to less than three hundred using the FinePix A820, slightly under seven hundred using the FinePix S9100, and just over eleven hundred in the Maxxum 7D, but for now short of the total shots through the SRT-202 and through the 7000i.)

03 September 2009

Buy your Sony from Erol's, not anymore you can't.

Three years after I abandoned the account, my web space at erols.com remains accessible. The shop where I purchased my DVD player, however, did not long survive the death of the founder of the television store started in 1963 (which Wikipedia does not acknowledge as a use of the name) where I first saw the LV-1901 and later bought my first VCR.

The fourth entrant in my Flickr set for One Thousand Views.

02 September 2009

Ars Technica with twenty-three pages on the new operating system and not one word on why I now have to Detect Displays after every boot if I want to have VMware Fusion launch on the second monitor.

01 September 2009

I can confirm anecdotally that Hyundai benefited last month from the C.A.R.S. I can also confirm that Paper Mate® Pink Pearl® Premium Medium Rubber Eraser sets are available at Shoppers.

Who is Nicole Kidman? The Master of Ceremonies for the game today (unlike the previous edition) asked for responses in the form of a question but did not make it mandatory.

31 August 2009

There are still fences up around John Carlyle Square Park, the story is that the park is set to open in mid-October… The lot of unsold inventory at Eisenhower Avenue and Stovall Street (previously) has been cleared of the last Pontiac Solstice… Facebook e-mails honor a user’s choice of language for the quotation marks… Serbia in the news again, for hanging on to Iraqi Air Force MIGs for 20 years (via)… 오.

30 August 2009

In reviewing Abe Friedman’s folder alleged to represent the WamaLTC contribution to the display at BrickFair, I came across this representation of the Quick Stop/RST Video.

A blogger for Greater Greater Washington has sought permission to use one of my Flickr uploads in a post, but as I have yet to develop any interest in Creative Commons he’s out of luck.

29 August 2009

The decluttering project has placed William Brinkley’s final book, The Last Ship, on the discard pile. I understand the complaints about the elaborate, vocabulary-building style of writing, but 20 years later I still found it a good read as an adventure. My appreciation is mixed with memories of the World Civilization course and the desert island assignment. But… why are there no rats on the Nathan James? why are insects ignored? and, why does the captain never question his heteronormative opinion of every member of the ship’s crew? I bought four books at Crown Books #807 that day, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel and Yukon Ho! remain shelved.

The first victim of Snow Leopard after the WiFi Signal Yahoo! Widget is ScanWizard Pro 7.62, failing to display any overview, preview, or scan images with the repeated message Error = -1 . It’s not on the list. A fine time to discover a New Focus in North American Market for Microtek which doesn’t involve all that messy selling a wide portfolio of consumer and professional scanners and digital imaging products and instead favors an emphasis on developing OEM relationships and vertical market opportunities. Interestingly, my scanner is one of five that the manufacturer has seen fit to continue selling despite the new focus. I’m giving VueScan a try (previously), I had to turn off the Restore Colors setting to avoid an extra tint for this scan of my last extra of the postcard version of this promotion. I can confirm about an eight gigabyte reduction in footprint, and the automatic downloading of Rosetta for the first program to require it: Microsoft AU Daemon.

28 August 2009

There is nothing so old and pathetic that it cannot be recycled for a new audience. Behold, Through Space and Time with Schwimmer and Jones has been animated as a 10-episode Flash series.

You never know what your neighbor might be up to. Try to avoid the ones that drive an old rusted Dodge van, though.

27 August 2009

The update for the iPhone/iPod touch app for MySpace, and now for Facebook, refused to install, so OS 3.0 it is, despite earlier resistance.

Dodge Mirada, there’s a reason I don’t remember it. Fiat was still advertising something called the Brava at the time. The AMC Eagle had a more distinctive look and market niche and lasted longer. Sony was feeling the heat of competition. Promotional display for Star Trek The Motion Picture, 30 years ago.

WamaLTC will be at the Dulles Town Center Family Fest Saturday.

25 August 2009

What do I know about shopping for can openers? I haven’t opened a can in decades. Seriously, the manual can opener on the premises was made in West Germany. That places a bound on when it was purchased, Unity was 19 years ago this October, and the kitchen tool hasn’t been used since. I rather doubt one can find a can opener on the domestic market which was not made in China these days, even my source now boasts From German manufacturer to global manufacturer with German heritage as a highlight of company history. Potential candidates.

I’m part of that decrease in Metrorail and Metrobus ridership that was reported recently. There was the subway collision in June, and my choice of a local barber means no more Metrobus rides out to Fairfax City. New schedule for the DASH Bus is effective Sunday.

24 August 2009

Separated at birth? Background extra on Star Trek (previously), extra on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. I’m noticing familiar names and faces in the cast and crew while watching the box set of the latter series. This face was less familiar, on Star Trek she was green.

Another claimant on my time this Friday.

23 August 2009

The yellow toy car, finally. When it was purchased, the Mercedes-Benz Type 300 was no longer in production. The rear window on the product of the Ideal Toy Corporation doesn’t look big enough to be the style introduced in 1955, either.

The United Network Command for Law and Enforcement took its commitment to a multi-ethnic workforce seriously.

Google Web Search makes suggestions which I never see searching from the location bar in SeaMonkey, but the implementation in Safari 4 sounds just as annoying as the Automatic Text Completion in BBEdit 9 (just past Ponies ) and there’s no reliable way to turn it off that I can find. Firefox has a straightforward way of turning off search suggestions.

My first follower on Twitter who isn’t a spambot!

22 August 2009

This toy has seen better days. Another Tootsietoy, the 24 following the Chicago is a postal zone, which dates the dies used to manufacture the little gasoline tanker truck set to before the establishment of the five-digit ZIP® Code in 1963. I am dissatisfied with the performance of the Minolta AF 70-210mm F3.5-4.5 today.

A very comprehensive episode synopsis (home page) nevertheless omits a detail of cash-strapped television production in the sixties: on a train that Solo and Kuryakin take from New York to Washington (that’s no Northeast Corridor seen through the windows), the seat covers are turned inside out. One can tell by the logo of the Southern Pacific!

21 August 2009

I’m thinking that I would enjoy the NPR News iPhone app more if I was able to adjust the volume on my iPod touch.

20 August 2009

BrickFair is imminent. Didn’t go last year, either. This helps the bottom line. Slightly.

The Romanization I used two years ago is the subject of some contention and should have been expressed as Hangeul.

My iPod touch is redirected to the mobile edition of Flickr for individual images, denying access to statistics even though mobile Safari handles the photostream page without complaint. The new m.flickr.com was announced last year. Some WiFi access points just deny access to Flickr altogether.

19 August 2009

When I consider the nonsense going around the political sphere these days, I remind myself that taking the canals of Mars seriously persisted into my lifetime.

Facebook for iPhone/iPod touch 3.0 is expected shortly, I just learned how to delete a comment in the current version this week (it’s swipe left and press the Delete button which is thus revealed).

The black wheels called out to me.

18 August 2009

Reports on unpublished research suggest friendship is closely linked to mutual ignorance.

The question of whether Snow Leopard will include Rosetta is unanswered. Could I do without it? While replacements are available for Microsoft Office 2004 and Retrospect 6.1, that’s not true for Corel Graphics Suite 11 or my scanner’s software (ScanWizard Pro 7.62 and Microtek Scanner ICC Profiler 3.02).

Passport MINI, now open for your convenience.

17 August 2009

The manufacturer of the yellow toy I have yet to photograph has been staring me in the face, it’s on every tire’s sidewalls: IDEAL TOY CORP MADE IN U.S.A. I have to wait for a toothbrush to become available for scrubbing the dirt out of the wire-wheel look. ;-) Maybe I’ll have to dig out the brush with the brass bristles.

It may take a while for search engines to catch up, but Vmail is the name for the new implementation of the e-mail service provided to alumni of the University of Virginia. The service is Powered by Google so one could hope it lasts longer than the hooshome.com address I used to have before Yahoo!. GMail lost its Beta tag last month.

16 August 2009

The Ship Hotel: A Grand View Along the Lincoln Highway is due next year (author’s post of the book cover). The S. S. Grand View Point Hotel along the Lincoln Highway in Pennsylvania closed in 1987 and burned in 2001. Flickr uploads from 1953 and the early 1960s.

This is not my childhood toy. By its condition, it doesn’t seem to have been someone else’s childhood toy, either. The resemblance to the Lamborghini Cheetah places a bound on how old it can be. A mystery.

14 August 2009

She put up with a minifig-decorated cake in the shape of a LEGO® element at the wedding, but the site of the groom’s LEGO® Users Group hasn’t changed since then.

13 August 2009

This is weird. Flickr cannot identify the lens when I prepare an upload in Graphic Converter (even as I use the Exiftool feature therein to confirm which lens was used) but that kind of information does get revealed when I edit the image in Corel Photo-Paint. Maybe the difference is that this upload was only cropped in Photo-Paint and not resampled, because resampling in Photo-Paint sure seemed to destroy Exif data in the uploads during the scanning project.

A is for Apple. One advertiser that’s still around.

11 August 2009

Simply incredible that this issue has to be argued over and over (via). Another reason not to watch television ! Previously mentioned.

Apple opens another store in Virginia. I see that some more stores have been opened in Maryland, too. WamaLTC usually has a small display in that area of Reston in October, no word yet on this year.

Someone is optimistic: there was a Ford Transit Connect in front of Jerry’s Ford this afternoon.

10 August 2009

DASH has extended the deadline in its photography contest to next month. The temptation is still there. The transit system plans to buy approximately seven less-polluting diesel buses. I finally figured out that the Gillig Phantoms are hot in the last row and have ceded that spot to another.

The CDC changed its recommendation for social distancing. Note to self: anything under 100℉ isn’t a fever.

SBA Announces Appointment of Daniel Hannaher as Regional Administrator for Region VIII. The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead plays up the local businessman angle, the name hasn’t made it to the White House Nominations and Appointments list yet. A Schedule C GS-15 position (see The Plum Book). The newspaper’s website wants to charge me ($2.95!) to read the story of another local businessman, but this is something Sandella’s gives away for free.

09 August 2009

More than six hundred people have signed up for BrickFair. What do they know that I don’t? My contribution to Family Day this past Saturday was small. Information regarding the Education Trailer is hard to find, and the map services of both Google and Yahoo! offer images from before the museum was completed (it opened almost 3 years ago).

08 August 2009

The second Saturday of every month is Family Day at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Although I didn’t get to see it, Nathan Sawaya’s sculpture in LEGO® of the Iwo Jima flag-raising is on permanent exhibit in the galleries. Virginia traffic militates against an early return.

07 August 2009

Floyd’s Bar and Grill (previously mentioned for occupying the former Chi-Chi’s location and leaving up the sign) has been replaced by the Havana Grill lounge.

There was another Senate confirmation vote this week (today, actually) you may have missed.

Star Trek is in second run now.

06 August 2009

Bai Ling is wearing Dockers® Khakis for Women Premium Single-pleat Khaki in khaki.

Ten years ago, she was demure and advertising for Dockers® pants. These days I know Bai Ling mostly for her antics in fashion.

Today the Virginia Railway Express uploaded the color scheme for the new locomotives… to Facebook. I have 10 months to get one built for the Manassas show of 2010 (and beat the commuter line to having the new model on the rails).

05 August 2009

I hadn’t noticed Comcast’s Domain Helper landing page and likely never will, because I don’t ever type www. into the URL bar (via)! I certainly know people who do, though.

Sony sent me a catalog today, it includes the α700. The discussions at Digital Photography Review had me convinced that model was discontinued. The latest excitement is over the possibility of an α850.

70 years of Minolta confirms that the manufacturer was willing to try on any film format that Kodak came up with (126, 110, DISC, APS) for all the good that did.

That explains the trucks from television stations in Louisiana.

04 August 2009

The Mercedes-Benz 300 had fewer variations between model years so it’s more difficult to identify the prototype for another toy. I’m beginning to think the toy’s rendition of the taillights is not prototypical. What possessed an anonymous toy manufacturer to model the exclusive 300 in a bright yellow injection-molded plastic is a question left for another day.

03 August 2009

This is so predictable: coffee is just another liquid which fails to elicit any reaction, just like wine and tea and beer didn’t.

02 August 2009

Other households have decluttering projects, too. One artifact from my childhood is Wheels, Sails and Wings: The Story of Transportation by Fred Dietrich and Seymour Reit, with illustrations by Harald Bukor, Karl Peschke and Oswald Voh. Based on a 1959 edition by C. Bertelsmann Verlag, the English language edition from Golden Press of New York was copyright 1961 (Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-13291). The book’s illustration of New Horizons offers this view of an atomic city of the future and it’s apparent that the predictions for the future were way off (even though there’s no personal jetpack) and the emphasis in other sections of the book on contemporary projects that went nowhere (or were already cancelled like the Lockheed XFV-1 and the Leduc 021) such as push-button shifting for cars and the S.S. United States (four pages) is remarkable in hindsight.

Hilary Duff photographed by Mark Seliger for Vanity Fair.

Hilary Duff in the Portfolio section of the next issue of Vanity Fair to head for the recycling bin. She didn’t have enough problems to land a solo cover on a subsequent issue like a certain redheaded contemporary did (accompanying pictorial). I like to imagine the next appearance of Lindsay Lohan in Vanity Fair as part of a cast reunion for Mean Girls double page photograph.

There’s a group on Facebook for alumni of Tower/Records #154, and one of them has found my photo of the original.

The design of the Ford F-150 changed significantly enough from year to year that I can identify the prototype for a dilapidated toy. A look at the Nylint #4100F U-Haul Truck and Trailer Set in better condition. The Structo Vista Dome Horse Van used a less realistic cab.

01 August 2009

Some emotionally sensitive types tear up at the sound of an engine seizing as part of CARS. Today I took apart some furniture that had served me for decades but had outlived its usefulness and the only moisture on my face was sweat.

Having the α900 handy allowed me to capture this Parking Enforcement Unit vehicle before it moved through the intersection and out of view, coincidentally a few days before the Alexandria Police arrested one of the Parking Enforcement Officers. The current Acting Chief of the Alexandria Police, Executive Deputy Police Chief Earl Cook, has been previously mentioned.

31 July 2009

Legends of Hollywood from Vanity Fair of 2001.

I purchased the Legends of Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair two years before I started adding images to these dispatches so the occasion passed without illustration. The image to the side isn’t a scan of the actual cover, even my scanner with the tabloid-sized flatbed isn’t big enough for the three-page gatefold. Back then I would have had a HP ScanJet 4100C scanner with an even smaller (letter-sized) flatbed. The issue is now, notwithstanding all the fashion advertising packed inside, another victim of decluttering.

Flickr does not distinguish between Minolta and KonicaMinolta, a significant misbranding in the face of the easily found evidence.

30 July 2009

Everyone looks so serious. Some people say that wristwatches are outmoded because of cellphones, but plainly two people in this event disagree.

The ludicrously inaccurate sight makes it hard to tell if she has the phaser on (via).

29 July 2009

The home video revolution from the perspective of 1976 includes a photograph of Engineering Model 3 from RCA.

Ask a friend about Minolta. The model is shown holding his left thumb to the rewind crank, presumably so as not to obscure the front of the camera, which means the image has a chance of being real compared to the advertising for the Canon AE-1 on page 33. The camera in the Minolta ad is equipped with a MC Rokkor-X 50mm F1.4 which means I remembered the name of my first lens correctly. The MD version.

28 July 2009

When you are the camera and the camera is you. My methodical, chronological review of the archives on the premises locates the first advertisement from Minolta in the collection to include the SRT-202. Shoot first, read later.

Is this Flickr Group really necessary? I could join and upload this, or this, or this. He’s upgraded his camera body since those were taken. This makes it look like LEGO® will license Best Buy and the Geek Squad Beetle?!

27 July 2009

The American Granada site is inadequate to identify an exact model year—or is it? Look for a clue in the review of the snap-together model kit.

If I had any money to replace the two Star Trek The Next Generation standees currently avoiding decluttering: Star Trek Nyota Uhura Life-Size Cardboard Standup Standee Cutout Poster (via).

The Global Fiducials Library from the United States Geological Survey (via) and the vanishing sea ice of the Arctic because obviously there’s been no global warming in 11 years.

26 July 2009

If it’s not true, it ought to be: How Fake Luxury Conquered the World (via), an entertaining read about how General Motors destroyed its brand differentiation.

25 July 2009

Oh, naughty, Screen Archives Entertainment ships from a Virginia address but didn’t charge me sales tax. The total number of compact discs so far this year has exceeded that of the previous reporting period. The worst year ever remains 2002. Someday it’ll all be over, like 1989 was for (new) LPs, but not this year.

24 July 2009

The Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment booth at Comic-Con is a classy boyzone but our local reporter on the scene somehow missed it and was otherwise captivated by the LEGO® stuff. Will the Toy Story license help or hurt military modelers? Modelers of miltary items in LEGO® elements will join the Military Modelers Club at the Family Day event August 8th in the Education Trailer at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Robert O’Reilly enters the pantheon of the Thousand Views following Gates McFadden and Suzie Plakson.

23 July 2009

Reports that Apple dominates sales of expensive computers follows the water-is-wet news that highly paid people get most of the money.

Unexpected praise from the source of the 6-wide HMMWV which I displayed at the March meeting of WAMALUG. It has been a while since the previous addition to the Build page.

22 July 2009

LEGO Systems Announces Recall of Remote Controls Due to Burn Hazard. A poster at LUGnet passes along a somewhat embellished version. I did not purchase the identified item.

The B&O Railroad Museum launches a YouTube channel.

I think companies that install fencing might be getting work these days.

21 July 2009

SeaMonkey moves on, with plans to drop support for Windows 95, 98, Me, and NT4 and for Mac OS 10.3 Panther. My Windows Me machine isn’t even connected to the Internet! I couldn’t find a wireless adapter that would fit in an ISA card slot, go figure. I have updated the Windows 98 virtual machines to 1.1.17, but some time ago I removed the program from the Windows XP Home virtual machine (leaving Safari if I really have to browse in there).

Commas are nifty, but not always appropriate.

20 July 2009

Forty years ago, the first human footstep on the moon was past my bedtime. It pretty much still is.

A soundtrack album which is not not available at the iTunes store! The Film Score Monthly publication was an early victim of decluttering, but the magazine’s label for soundtrack releases on compact disc remains appreciated. Who would have guessed that there was a market for a remaster of the score for The Omega Man?

Trekmovie reviews the latest Tricorder and once again is way too kind. There is no portion of the write-up which cannot be derived from the reading the box the toy came in, and even amongst the commenters there is no mention of the squeaky vocal tone.

19 July 2009

The inflatable packaging previously mentioned. Whee.

18 July 2009

The Schools Issue.

The glossy magazine arrived in the mail seeking to increase my exposure to advertising and assuage any anxiety about the schooling of offspring and/or the care of pets, but the cover of the August issue reminded me of something else.

No reason to shop at Target for a few months, then. It’s been 15 months since the last DVD purchase.

The Victory Center at 5001 Eisenhower Avenue is claimed to be accessible by a variety of transportation modes including specifically the DASH bus service. The aerial photography at Google Maps is sufficiently old to show a sidewalk between the bus stop and the front entrance, but after the renovation… ? Not so much. Noticed it Friday. That sward is a block long.

17 July 2009

Sending a message to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is getting more popular. But… how would I test such a message?

VMware Fusion, a Windows 98 Second Edition virtual machine (the installation that used to run on my Compaq notebook), and the BBEdit command Save a Copy to FTP/SFTP Server, that’s how.

I discover that it’s possible to link to a particular second of a YouTube video, so the dispatch from a few days ago is edited.

I appreciate that Sony likes to have a presence in everything, likes cables and batteries, to contribute to the all-Sony experience, but really… Sony|Sony Style-branded Sealed Air Fill-Air® inflatable packaging in its shipments?

16 July 2009

Now I can see what I’m missing… well, I wouldn’t exactly say missing it… the Comcast Mobile app for iPhone/iPod touch.

15 July 2009

You’d think they had people beaming down every day. The site where The Andy Griffith Show and Star Trek shared a location (previously) had just around the corner another familiar location (about a quarter of the way down, the Arab village).

That failure to crash I mentioned earlier? Totally a first-time thing. There’s also a new timer for the lamp warming up that has calculated out at over 13 hours.

Windows Defender says that my Windows XP Professional virtual machine is running normally, just as it’s set to be discontinued.

13 July 2009

Aw, felgercarb, the journal article Swearing as a response to pain has attracted the usual lowbrow commentary: Scientific American, Slashdot, BoingBoing.

People with no sense of direction keep posting to Ask.MetaFilter (1, 2, 3) and finding like-minded others. The passage through Baltimore last month along the mile between the southern end of I-83 and the northern end of I-395 was unplanned and without benefit of map or GPS so that’s not me.

The experimental HTML5 validator says this page is not compliant (via). Ok, start with removing <acronym>…

11 July 2009

The decluttering project has located the program for Shore Leave Fourteen, this has allowed me to correct the name of the captain of USS Enterprise (CVN-65) who appeared at that convention. The program uses a diminutive for the name of the Executive Officer, I’ve edited the caption to include that.

The new Diamond Select Toys Tricorder toys take a surprising number of their quotation sound effects from one episode: Arena.

10 July 2009

Microtek released version 7.62 of ScanWizard Pro a while ago and promises it’s compatible with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). The revised software’s acceptance of multi-character filenames and failure to crash every time I click Scan has unsettled my routine. (The answer to the question Is my scanner supported by the Macintosh OS 10.5 Leopard system? has been modified since I last linked to it.)

One thousand views as of today: Gates McFadden in 1990.

It’s good for parents to stay cognizant of the tax consequences of gifts and how to avoid them.

09 July 2009

Classilla is a free, open source browser for Mac OS 9 (via). An answer to a question I haven’t been asking. Slashdot reacts!

Search results make it easy to find out how to lock the column headings in Microsoft Excel, but what if you want to do so in the version for Macintosh? Microsoft does not link the two explanations.

08 July 2009

The Fairfax City CUE can expect a new scheme with its next equipment order. The codesigner makes use of my Flickr photostream to illustrate other local bus routes (1, 2).

I don’t suppose I’m doing this Twitter thing right, I keep blocking followers I don’t recognize.

Must credit MetaFilter! Commenters on another blog chastise the author of a post for not doing so (or doing so, inadequately). Minnesota Public Radio interviews the MetaFilter user whose skepticism led The New York Times to, er, abandon a photo essay of abandoned construction sites. It’s just $5, why am I not a member yet?

07 July 2009

The Star Trek™ Classic Science Tricorder Authentic Star Trek Tricorder Action Replica has arrived. Who is that squeaky voice coming from the speaker? It’s supposed to be voice of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. Why does the door flop open if one tilts the item forward? It’s too small.

Maybe it’s just a hiccup amongst the Facebook servers, but the Live Feed in the iPhone/iPod touch app is empty tonight. Snif.

06 July 2009

The Associated Press reports on the thirtieth anniversary of the Sony Walkman. There remains a product on the premises with this brand name, a small battery-operated radio for listening to official information during emergencies, like when the big flu pandemic hits this fall (via). The allure of the Sony brand faded some time ago and only the Minolta legacy keeps me interested now. I mentioned my previous Walkman earlier.

05 July 2009

Usually the complaint about the bus system is that service is much reduced on Sunday, but WMATA’s Trip Planner is able to figure out two bus-only itineraries to get me to 840 E St. N.W. today (one would be via Franconia, Tysons Corner, and Rosslyn, the other via Library Lane, Seven Corners, and Rosslyn, and yes either trip would take several hours) but the Penn Camera at that location is closed on Sundays. :-(

The name Superscope and its relation to other companies was a mystery when I was growing up, an explanation from the current owner of the brand.

There’s plenty of reporting today (example) about a post to a Facebook Page, but it takes a blogger to link to the actual note. There’s over a half million fans of that politician *shudder* whose speech on Friday reminded me of the flashing necklaces and smoking ears of an old television episode.

04 July 2009

Declare your independence, the advertisement exhorts from the days when a patent number started with a 2 and bona fides for being in a mens magazine were established by a line like Don’t depend on a dame to iron your slacks! The company has gone out of business in the meantime (the name survives in the successor to its credit union) as did almost all of the other advertisers. I would share more were it not for the copyright police, but someone has done that for me already.

03 July 2009

Oh, man, I remember that episode of Cops, good times. Alaska first! She was in Kosovo last week? That’s right, she was trading barbs with veteran John Kerry.

A Minnesota politician has gotten worked up on the subject of the census. From the 1960s: exploitative advertising for cigars includes a depiction of a pair of census takers.

An excuse to visit Chicago again? The Sears Tower (set to be renamed later this year) has installed The Ledge which are glass balconies at the 103rd floor.

Windows Update has seen fit to install Internet Explorer 8 in my Windows XP Home virtual machine. Will I launch it? Signs point to no.

Frank Cho is still in the illustration business even if Liberty Meadows is largely moribund.

02 July 2009

Facebook for iPhone 3.0 is expected shortly and will remove the old News Feed that contained useful information.

Still not much of an express.

Graphic Converter includes ExifTool, a utility which can report what lens was mounted on a camera. For this image of the WMATA 2665 Metrobus Orion VII CNG bus booking too quickly for 1/80s to catch it starting its morning run as the northbound 25B, the utility reports Lens Type: Minolta/Sony AF 28mm F2.8 which is close enough. The lens Flickr cannot name which was used to capture this Fairfax Connector bus is also identified correctly.

01 July 2009

A Windows-only solution for the Sony reticence about mounted lenses.

Metro is willing to let you use NextBus again.

This page devoted to licensed Space: 1999 toys from Azrak Hamway International is incomplete—I have located my squirt gun! Oh, there it is in the 1976 catalog. Better view.

30 June 2009

The new Firefox 3.5 brings with it a replacement for the outdated favicon in the Google search box.

Caliente.

For those Hannahers who remain in Minnesota (and everyone else resident there), a second senator.

My first tweet is thanks to Flickr2Twitter integration.

29 June 2009

No improvement since then. That is all.

The link target at Flickr in this post has been deleted, the photostream retains this view of the participants. The roving photog uses a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi which reports the mounted lens in the Exif. It’s just as well that my camera is more discreet, it could be any lens that included 35mm. I am disappointed, though, that newer zoom lenses no longer mark the 28mm setting.

28 June 2009

The Fargo City Commission is reported (registration may be required) to be about to agree to Mattel applying the graphics of the city’s police department to a die-cast miniature (h/t Dan). What, do they have only one Impala in service? The graphic offered by the local newspaper is the same vehicle 72 that I photographed two weeks ago. About a decade ago, something similar must have happened in the municipality across the river, with the release of the Moorhead D.A.R.E. Corvette in the Matchbox Collectibles line.

One zoom lens, disassembled.

One lens in, one lens out. No one really thought I could fix a zoom lens, right? The shallow depth of field cannot disguise the presence of a phaser toy on the desktop.

The Library of Virginia offers us this image of a Richmond, Virginia Weights & Measures inspector on the job in 1959, getting out of his Volkswagen Beetle. There were no Buy American rules back then? Unidentified group, guess they weren’t Koreans.

Community Based Social Distancing Interventions. Oh, is that what they’re calling emergency police powers now? ;-)

27 June 2009

This is the comparison you’ve been waiting for, my cardboard tricorder from decades ago up against the recent Diamond Select Toys release.

I have made no progress in replacing the camera case that had already outlived its usefulness last year, I am looking for the perfect case that is made for something bigger than the baby SLRs all the ones in the local Penn Camera seem to be intended for. It would be nice if it qualified as a carry-on, too.

26 June 2009

Newspaper headlines entertainer's death.

I still have every LP I ever bought—save one. When it came time to assign them each an accession number for inclusion in a database, it had been long enough since tossing that one that I forgot to include it. Why the death of the artist should lead the news—domestically and internationally—isn’t a mystery, but it should be.

A firmware upgrade to the AirPort Extreme on the premises has, I hope, restored quick connections to the Internet. It’s always easier to blame Comcast in these situations.

Nancy knows her customer.

25 June 2009

Cover of MAD magazine with parody of Charlie's Angels.

The decluttering project has me picking up a couple of magazines a day to scan the covers and making sure there’s an entry in the database for each possession and then—I toss ’em. Actually, I’m keeping the older issues of MAD, the further back in time I went, the funnier they got. It’s just a coincidence that today’s scan is of the issue with a parody of Charlie’s Angels. The poster came down before the purchase of my first camera, its only vestige this photo of its appearance in, uh, a magazine.

iPhone versions of the hp 12c and hp 12c Platinum calculators expected to be available shortly (via). Since there’ll be a charge, I’ll keep using the ones on my desk.

23 June 2009

Just taking a break, not nearly going Galt yet.

22 June 2009

A bad day for the Metro. My ride on the Blue Line was uneventful and I had no idea until later in the evening.

There’s some concern about the FTC’s proposed revision to its endorsement guidelines (via) and how it would apply to bloggers.

I don’t seem to have ever used Kodachrome and now it’s gone. I abandoned film with the completion of the scanning project just in time, the drop slots for processing at the local Shoppers have been taped over.

21 June 2009

No, Baltimore, I did not consider light rail.

My pics from times gone by continue to strike a chord with visitors to the Flickr account.

20 June 2009

The White House press corps asks for an update on the President’s churchgoing habits or his process in selecting a church (although the word in the reporter’s question might have been progress). The reporter cannot imagine a lack of religious activity and asks if a minister is being brought in, but the answer seems to be no, the President relies on a military chaplain.

19 June 2009

My most popular recent upload is the aerial view of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The flight to Fargo was empty enough that the adjacent seat was empty and I could keep the single permitted carry-on there and retrieve my camera from it. It’s tougher to do that with the carry-on in the overhead bin.

18 June 2009

Now that I have accepted the friend request of someone who lists over one thousand friends, I see that I will be refusing Facebook’s suggestions for a while.

We want you to have the right camera.

I’m saying no to iPod OS 3.0 for now.

17 June 2009

If it’s not one problem, it’s another… I keep forgetting some people have a computer so old it cannot read burned DVDs.

The easy-to-use used camera with easy-to-change lenses. Minolta would abandon the mount used by those nearly forty Rokkor-X and Celtic lenses less than ten years later.

15 June 2009

The Global Airline Resource Center delivered. I haven’t checked to see whether the ZVOX Audio-branded cap survived the delay in reuniting with my checked baggage. I was asked to switch planes in Chicago and not everyone’s luggage managed to make the same switch.

It is getting increasingly difficult to turn the zoom ring of my Minolta 24-105 mm zoom lens towards the wide angle end. I purchased this eight years ago (to accompany the Maxxum 7) for a not inconsequential sum. Perhaps it would be fitting that its optical performance this weekend was its last: lunch, wedding, reception. Facebook’s attempt to anonymize by removing last names when an album is viewed through a public link is completely inadequate for my purposes. It is always gratifying to see one of my captures used as a profile pic.

14 June 2009

I stepped away for a moment, but I’m back. I was going to write Open thread but that would have been mean. There’s more from where this came from. Graphic Converter saves me from my omission to change the clock in the α900.

13 June 2009

I am too late in the Facebook username land rush to obtain channaher, but Carrie, you pushed me.

I wonder what this ad was selling. The Accutrac 4000, by the time the 21st Century came along, LPs were history. The forgotten Volkswagen: Dasher. It was called Quantum, too?!

11 June 2009

Yawn: one day until digital television transition. Less of a yawn: WHO decides to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6 and declares the world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. Cass County reports its first case of swine flu.

10 June 2009

People are still arguing the length of the Enterprise. The commenter Randy H. could be anyone, but I wonder… I wonder if it is the Memory Alpha contributor I linked to earlier.

09 June 2009

The inclusion in the 1995 Yugo Next exhibition of one example as a coin-operated ride (previously) was anticipated by Dan Birtcher’s New and Improved Store Kiddie Rides in issue No. 304 of Mad from July, 1991 (illustration by Al Jaffee).

The Star Trek™ Classic Medical Tricorder Adult Collectible Authentic Star Trek Tricorder Action Replica has arrived. The photo on the back of the box includes a visible screwhead which did not survive to the production version. There are some crude finishes, some sloppy painting on the bottom, and the face with the screen can’t turn past the vertical. This last may or may not be authentic. It’s a little taller and a trifle wider than my cardboard version (comparison with the Master Replicas version).

08 June 2009

The Flickr group for WAMALUG was created by someone too young to remember that the club’s name used to have D.C. in it, but it does eschew the minifig currently on the home page for the graphic of a brick I created as a logo in 2002.

Country first? Not a chance!

07 June 2009

The Alexandria Red Cross is having its 28th Annual Waterfront Festival later this month, but I wouldn’t count on WamaLTC being there. However, we will be represented by the attendance of a participant at Brickworld where they will use LEGO® Serious Play to solve opportunities in LEGO® fandom (from last year, a single-track lift span).

06 June 2009

I had to buy a card reader capable of reading a Memory Stick PRO Duo™ card today, guess I have to pay more attention to what the display on the back of the α900 says.

05 June 2009

Nancy would like me to think that my search for a new barber is over. She’s certainly the first to suggest an eyebrow trim.

I hope to have an opportunity to use Spock’s line Out of the chair tomorrow because it’s mine.

Ok, when printing to a network printer doesn’t work, check to see whose network you’re using.

04 June 2009

Previously unpublished street-level perspective of Tank Man (via).

The medical tricorder is on its way, only 14 months after announcement. Six pennies were found today, making another dent in its purchase cost.

RealD is taciturn on the technology behind the 3-D presentation of Up that I saw on Sunday except for that one word polarizing. The name Lenny Lipton is familiar, though, a few of these have yet to suffer from the decluttering project.

03 June 2009

There’s a referrer today from bing, the Microsoft search engine (or rebranding of Live, whatever). The glyph mutilation in its logo fails to impress (via).

There was litter on the bus today, it turned out to be a newsletter from a local AA group. Every participant is referred to by first name, last initial because anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all their traditions and must be universal. But contributors to the newsletter include their e-mail addresses, their first initial, last name email addresses. Maybe you shouldn’t litter, eh?

I have mentioned possessing an uninterruptible power supply before, today Mac OS X followed the preference to shut down after 4 minutes on battery power.

Links to maj.com no longer redirect to majhost.com, but the retention of the old logo on the home page suggests… wait, what’s this? For real?

02 June 2009

The primary is next week? Oops, never mind.

Facebook to remove regional networks next.

01 June 2009

The first referrer at my Flickr account from Twitter links to this image of Brent Spiner. People searching Yahoo! Images are very interested in the 2010 Ford Taurus (I’m not even on the first page of results).

31 May 2009

Courtesy of *cough* another viewing: how do we know that the thing Kirk uses to record his complaint about Starfleet’s treatment of a prisoner is called a tricorder? Yes, yes, that’s what it’s called in the toy stores, but in the alternate universe’s canon…? Spock at least orders phasers to be set to stun in dealing with intruders, so the name of the sidearm is set in canon.

30 May 2009

Full-page advertising from Minolta in 1977.

Minolta advertising from 1977 includes the SR-T 202 and XE-7 (link depicts a 102, but except for the mirror lock-up lever…). Thirty years ago, legitimate companies were willing to advertise in a magazine they would never agree to today.

So, how do I assess the competition in building a 6-wide bus in LEGO® elements now that I’ve bought the set and built it (first spotted over 3 months ago in Joe Meno’s Flickr photostream)? The six-high doors are part of the everything’s-bigger direction the company’s sets have been taking with 8-wide cars and trucks but it still feels like a brick too high even on the buildings. The bus is low-floor, but it’s that way the whole length: where’s the engine? Also the seats are on bricks so the minifigs can sit next to the windows (without having to raise their arms), that’s hardly ADA compliant! Still, the set came with three of those windshield pieces…

29 May 2009

Remember how silly it was that Laura Holt could get past a lock so quickly? Turns out, those scenes of the private investigator and her invented boss on Remington Steele where they pulled out a file and poked the doorknob with it for a few seconds were close to the truth (via).

Not canon! I always figured the soles of the boots on Star Trek were smooth, not like hiking boots.

28 May 2009

The Flickr community comes through again, identifying a costume call participant in one of my photographs from the Shore Leave convention in 1990. She seems to still be active in the costume convention scene.

25 May 2009

Excerpt of a panel from MAD where the magazine's dirigible crashes into a building.

No one could have anticipated… from the parody of Law & Order in an issue of MAD from 1994. The decluttering project continues. The periodical started to include advertising in 2001 and is now quarterly.

Reverse image search, I should just try it with my pictures of buses.

The cover of New Yorker created in an iPhone app (video of strokes, via).

24 May 2009

There is a card now for the project mentioned yesterday. The difference? Realizing overnight that if you can’t move the counterweight, move the crossmember. Sure, BrickLink would have been cheaper (and will still be needed for some plates) but having a third Technic 8466 4×4 Off-Roader in stock on the premises from years ago has proven useful for those last two each of Technic Brick 1×12 with Holes and Technic Brick 5×5 Right Angle with Holes needed in Black. I’ll probably blab what it is at the Manassas show, but won’t be able to display it until the WAMALUG meeting in July (new location!).

23 May 2009

There was a time when Bob’s lift bridge in LEGO® elements wasn’t completed and he was still working out its operation, so maybe I should take heart. At this point, though, it seems like it would have been easier just to copy it.

Does this have to do with music? The employee helping me load at the Home Depot this afternoon wanted to talk about Meat Loaf. I don’t have anything to contribute to such a conversation.

21 May 2009

Ford recommends BP? News to me, I don’t have one of these despite having a MY2006 vehicle.

Fine, she looks good at 44, but what does she think of the new movie? She’s supposed to be a fan.

Today would have been Community Day but the agency cancelled it. The plan was to squeeze and stretch Uncial to make unity do double duty as itself and as syllables in the name of the day. Last year’s event got me up close to T208 and other less identified photographic subjects. If my municipality has bought any new fire trucks, I don’t know about it. Bus purchases are likewise limited, until the new garage is finished. I’m way past a thousand captures with the α900 after just seven months.

20 May 2009

The prototype for my KFC MOC has made no move to update its graphics since the last time I checked. The creation of an appropriate sticker using the older logo leaves only the Pizza Hut with no identification. Still haven’t been inside. Two weeks to Manassas.

19 May 2009

Despite the promises, Amazon expects the tricorder toys to ship next month. The new movie is so hectic that except for the phaser (barely) none of the props have a chance to make an impression.

18 May 2009

An unsourced story that Facebook plans to be an OpenID relying party. I was suprised recently when I successfully logged into a site, I think it might have been Scribd, using my OpenID credential (via Yahoo!).

17 May 2009

SeaMonkey just doesn’t cooperate with browser-based instant messaging clients (previously). MySpace is planning its own chat feature, but I don’t log in to that social network nearly as often.

16 May 2009

Five years ago I went to see Mean Girls and wasn’t super impressed but I ended up seeing it pretty much once a week until it no longer ran even at the University Mall Theatres 3. I don’t have money to throw around like that any more, what with the mileage budget and everything, but it’s very tempting with Star Trek. The Barbie as Uhura is very cute in her phaser-packin’ pose but not so much at $44. Anyway, it’s anyone’s guess how long the starship Enterprise is (more discussion).

I missed The Habitat Building Block Blitz today.

I appreciate how in BBEdit 9.2 The Selected Text Only setting in the Find window is now remembered across invocations of the window (and runs of the application) but I have to point out that the actual checkbox label in the Find dialog is Selected text only. I still think it would be smarter if it was checked when a selection was active and not checked when there was no selection.

15 May 2009

Detail of kit-bashed movie miniature identified.

The 1979 MPC® Fundimensions™ model kit of Han Solo’s™ Millennium Falcon™ from the original Star Wars™ used a photo of the actual Star Wars™ special effects model on the box top. By then, it was known that the modelmakers had used kitbashing as a detailing technique, but it took me a while to recognize one of the parts: from above the TM at the cockpit and extending forward is the housing for the clutch and transmission of a model kit of the Wankel engine.

Skype is available for the iPhone/iPod touch.

14 May 2009

The Spanish National Research Council finds five classes of drugs in the air of Madrid and Barcelona (via Slashdot and the Star Tribune neither of which linked to the actual report).

When I redid my McDonald’s in LEGO® elements, I knew that my approach to the white ribs on the roof (previous attempt) had been done before. Here is another builder with the same idea. I don’t see any Arby’s or Wendy’s in LEGO® though, I might have pioneered again. Wait, what? How long have Wendy’s/Arby’s been a single company? (The answer is, since last September.)

13 May 2009

WamaLTC’s participation in the 15th Annual Manassas Heritage Railway Festival is a go. The VRE will be there, too. If I only bring the MOCs I’ve built or modifed in the last 6 months, though, would the older stuff be missed?

12 May 2009

Be my fud. These would be tempting if I wasn’t committed to the decluttering project.

Listen to a Movie, it is what it says.

Somehow the release of Star Trek has got people in a bother about what IMAX means. The joint venture agreement I linked to last year was straightforwardly written that it was a plan to install digital projection and nothing more. People are developing a list of the references to previous incarnations, my contribution might be to point out the command Lights said by the Orion ensign (which I associate with Star Trek The Next Generation).

11 May 2009

My Trek cred took a stumble today when I couldn’t remember the names or the order of the movies based on Star Trek The Next Generation. It has been a while.

Facebook wants to know who my relatives are.

There should be some loss of geek cred with this cartoon.

09 May 2009

It couldn’t last. The lack of comments at my feed (as imported to Facebook) has ended.

I am not happy that the Flickr Uploadr no longer honors the order arranged through drag and drop. People are leaving the company, though, I wonder how much longer it will take for version 3.2 to be released.

So that’s what he was on about while looking at my completely revised McDonald’s today: the grand theme for BrickFair this year is FOOD & DRINK (scroll to the entry for January thirteenth, there are no internal anchors). But, yeah, I wasn’t planning to register for BrickFair. I didn’t go to the Public Hours last year.

08 May 2009

Local politician attends agency event.

Local politician appears at agency event with… characters. Earlier in the week, he expressed full faith in BAE’s ability and sincere efforts to do what’s right. I did not recognize the character of Maisy Mouse. The event continues through tomorrow.

07 May 2009

More about Zoë Saldana and her shoes. Yes, I’ve seen the movie. Boo-yah!

I think it’s been tried, actually, plans for traffic signals in the Shirlington rotary. In the print edition, the article is accompanied by a sidebar about the response to a small hydrogen gas explosion which identifies one of the trucks as Alexandria Rescue 109. Fail. By the number that would be an Arlington County unit.

06 May 2009

By this time tomorrow… this looks fairly suspicious. I might have company when I go see it again on Friday.

Another fun way to compare nationalities (via). The dot for me wouldn’t even be on the chart.

05 May 2009

The guy working at FYE in Springfield Mall has hustle, I’ll give him that, but I’m only there for one thing. It’s the first purchase of a compact disc this year.

04 May 2009

Metrobus livery inconsistent with route.

Less than 2 months after first spotting the express scheme, acquisition. Trouble is, the 25B is a local route. Metrobus 2665 Orion VII CNG in motion. Sure, it would have been nice if the α900 had been ready but someone is worried about my carrying it in the open so it was faster to reach for the A820…

Solaris engenders discussion on MetaFilter. I never bought the DVD of the Soderbergh version.

03 May 2009

Will the totally revamped McDonald’s MOC be ready in time for the WAMALUG meeting this Saturday? Will WamaLTC be a part of the Brunswick Railroad Museum Train Fest in two weeks? Will Joe Meno be counted as a participant in this weekend’s just concluded display for uploading this blurry iPhone capture to his Flickr account? Signs are mixed.

02 May 2009

Visitors to the WamaLTC display tomorrow will be deprived of my contributions, I took them back today.

01 May 2009

Premiere of Paramount’s Star Trek Arrivals at Getty Images. You can tell how important an actress is by whether the photographers have taken a picture of her shoes. Sorry, Winona Ryder, your clutch is no substitute.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Commission decided last month to discontinue the Code Red RIDE FREE program (media release). The season would normally have started today. Previously.

The Diamond Select Toys original series communicator found on the shelf in Toys R Us yesterday isn’t the same as the version bought online upon first release a year ago, the grill is dull and the holes in it are too small.

The emergence of a new Chrysler in alliance with Fiat will make them a sibling to Zastava.

Mean Girls is supposed to have been released in Blu-Ray last month. Since I don’t have a player, that’s irrelevant, right? Another recent release one might have thought would have pushed me first…

30 April 2009

Now how am I supposed to stimulate the economy without driving so much? The 993 is advertised on the back cover of City Paper this week as Handcrafted in America but there’s no mention of it on the corporate site.

Energetic supervisor caught smiling.

There’s a satisfying thwack and the camera is ready to go again, so once it’s in someone else’s hands it’s hard to get the α900 back. Sifting through a lot of shots with closed eyes and open mouths afterwards, this one was very much worth it. I caught the energetic perpetrator by not raising the DSLR to my eye.

29 April 2009

Try not to use this man’s way of holding a camera as a model. The Official White House Photostream denies us the Exif, but there’s enough depth-of-field to say, don’t stand there doing nothing when your wife has been doing all the work.

The political cartoonists of the local right-wing tabloid are doing their best to equate swine flu with pork but at least they’re trying to use words knowing vaguely what they mean, which for at least one of the columnists there would seem to be a bit of a problem. (So, cartoonist, about that second-guessing… what was the concept again? Because the budget passed both houses today.) A new logo for the Republican party.

28 April 2009

100 Days! Swine flu! Filibuster! Local Safeway out of yogurt! One of these things is not like the others. I got nothin’.

27 April 2009

T-10: thanks to Movietickets.com, there’s nothing left now but to show up and watch it. Something tells me it won’t be the only time I do so.

Other people are watching that lot with the unsold GM cars.

26 April 2009

That particular McDonald’s location is corporate owned and currently remains open for drive-thru all the time. The interior looks very similar to the Arby’s around the corner, except that the counter is a deep chocolate color instead of a dark blue. Hmm. A complete overhaul of the MOC is underway.

I met some very trusting adults this weekend. The power of the brick?

25 April 2009

Unsold inventory of cars fills a local lot, the LEGO version.

I made it, thanks to a vendor on BrickLink having the assortment of parts needed to complete the twenty vehicles—and getting them to me yesterday. The depiction of a car dealer’s off-site storage of unsold inventory wasn’t immediately grasped by everybody, but visitors did notice the non-random arrangement of colors. A selection of photographs from today to show the layout and my stuff. The only building I brought was the CVS/pharmacy, because I was told they have those in Baltimore, too. The display continues through tomorrow and next weekend.

I was willing earlier to enter the Wendy’s I was using as a prototype to find out what the interior was like, but for Arby’s I went for an early Sunday visit when it was closed to peer through the windows and I’m having trouble finding the hours of the McDonald’s online… I suppose eventually I will be dissatisfied with leaving the CVS/pharmacy MOC empty.

24 April 2009

I was wrong about the economics: the Brunswick Railroad Museum is preparing to install an elevator. A TrainFest is promised for next month.

The NMRA convention is in Hartford, Connecticut this year and ILTCO plans a LEGO® display at The National Train Show but it looks like WamaLTC is taking a pass again.

Шта радиш? I get it now, the prompts to share are in rotation.

Hector International Airport (FAR) is not included on any route of the local metropolitan bus system.

22 April 2009

Microsoft: A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm (via) from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems.

Шта ти је на уму? Serbs keep fiddling with the translations at Facebook.

TrekMovie has a Flickr account. Chase Masterson is green.

What What’s Your Road, Man? looks like. Because I’m not in bookstores so often these days.

21 April 2009

This question has already been answered. Slashdot just ain’t what it used to be.

I see that Tile 1×4 in Tan is going to be a problem.

20 April 2009

My photography from 3 weeks ago has inspired more building… a lot more building, but I might not be in time for WamaLTC’s display in Baltimore these next two weekends.

But for how much longer, that is the question (from a month ago).

19 April 2009

Flipping through a pile of old TV Guide issues is an exercise in Where are they now? nostalgia. I wanted to say that only women were asked to make room for the type on the cover, but it wouldn’t be true. Wait, how long has that cover said Republican ? Another box to scan and I’ll be rid of them all.

18 April 2009

When I took a local eating establishment and squeezed it down to the size of a 32×32 baseplate recently, I didn’t duplicate every newspaper dispenser out front but did include the familiar shades of the Post, the Times, and the Onion. The prototype for today’s building project and BrickLink order has only one dispenser, and it’s for The Washington Times. Hmm. I mean, I can include just the one in the MOC but it’s unusual to see one for the Times without a Post dispenser close by. I believe this roof lurks behind the remodeling at that location.

17 April 2009

Captain, Engineering reports ready for lunch. Well, that’s what it sounds like!

16 April 2009

That explains why the Jabber list was blank this afternoon.

A discussion about the relevance of Kerouac and other Beat authors to contemporary American society last month at the Gravity Lounge in Charlottesville, Virginia with Gordon Ball (66 Frames) and Matt Theado (Understanding Jack Kerouac) is moderated by the co-editor of What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

The operating company for the mall at the top of the hill has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

14 April 2009

It’s not an exercise program, but I do notice that I’m usually the only one in the elevator not leaning on the side of the car.

No recommendations found. Please try later. The MySpace version of the People You May Know feature has been unable to come up with anything for me.

13 April 2009

The testy fellow behind the previously linked WordPerfect for DOS Updated remains vigilant in keeping the old program running under Windows including XP, Vista, and the upcoming successor. A side project to bring WordPerfect for the Mac to modern Macs has resulted in WPMac Appliance which mixes Basilisk II, a ROM from the Quadra 650, and a full set of old versions of the software. I retained the CPU from a Quadra 605 even after making the rest of the computer disappear in the Office Depot recycling offer as justification to be able to run Basilisk II but maybe no one cares anymore. My own saga in downloading WordPerfect for the Mac 3.5e nearly eight years ago before the founding of System 7 Today.

Parade isn’t helping us figure out why television pundits are so anxious about tax cuts expiring, the word is that their cover feature doesn’t include any journalists.

12 April 2009

…and lame, I wanted to say. Flickr user tm8913 shouldn’t go to the 15th Annual Manassas Heritage Railway Festival on June 6th because if WamaLTC is there (I haven’t received the instruction to edit the website yet) every single one of my VRE coaches will have the wrong number of windows and that would be such a disappointment.

11 April 2009

A year ago it was a different story: Inova Alexandria Hospital is pleased to provide high-speed Internet access for our patients and visitors who have wireless-enabled laptops or PDAs. Offering this free access is another way that Inova shows its commitment to providing excellent service. [Source: Spring 2009 issue of InHealth.] Notice how they don’t mention phones.

What happens when your brand manager quits. I trust that the formal name of the club over at ILTCO will be duly changed. No doubt the sign in the Window on the Community display in the retail store in Tysons Corner Center will be changed, too. The use of an inappropriate font to depict the logo has precedent.

Another aisle of the grocery store I don’t go down.

10 April 2009

The Power Macintosh G3 does not need a new battery. Its unresponsiveness in the wake of the departure of the other antiquated relic on the third floor was a mechanical problem, not an electrical one. In the over 4 years it’s been on the premises the elastomeric feet on the bottom chassis have fallen away leaving it resting on one of the really large mouse pads I found at Micro Center and moving the Beige Desktop to another shelf led to that bottom chassis getting rubbed which dislodged the mechanical power switch and made it lose its connection to the consumer-facing power button (sorry, power actuator ). I guess it can stay another week or more.

I like seeing another 8-wide LEGO® HMMWV, but I’m having trouble deciding if the builder has used the tires which are really too big or some other tyre.

09 April 2009

The Star Trek Association of Towson has sent me a flyer for Shore Leave 31. It’s been 14 years since the last one, guys, your persistence is futile. The room rate is $129!

Covers from issues of Marie Claire.

Marie Claire started publishing a U.S. edition nearly 15 years ago, that’s Claudia Schiffer on the cover of the September/October 1994 issue (and Ashley Judd on the cover of the May 1999 issue). Apparently, the magazine is still around, I guess people are continuing to read dead-tree media. With the closing of Tower Records/Video over 2 years ago, I’m no longer near a magazine rack on a regular basis. I suppose there would be one in the grocery store, hmm, I don’t go down that aisle. Rachel McAdams is on the cover for May.

Someone is optimistic: The United States Patent and Trademark Office will present a National Trademark Expo May 8 and 9.

The web site for my city’s bus system doesn’t seem to mention the latest addition to the equipment aboard its buses.

08 April 2009

National Public Radio devotes almost five minutes to the whining of its listeners about… spoilers. MetaFilter has to deal with such behavior repeatedly. (Largely television-free explanation of what the fuss is about.) I actually played the DVD of Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle this past weekend (because of Malin Akerman) and noticed that Harold is identified as an investment banker. An innocuous detail in 2004, freighted with more meaning these days.

The link for me to find out which upload to Flickr to add to the One thousand views set is found in the Help Forum. Fewer than 400 to go for the next one.

07 April 2009

I may get the chance to photograph a Orion VI again before the model is retired (even if my opportunity to capture one with the REX wrap is gone) as I see tonight that one had been saddled with the 29K route. I wonder if it has anything to do with the change in garages two weeks ago. A few years from now, the ability to exchange a regular SmarTrip® card for a senior SmarTrip® card will be important. Why you may never see a Metrobus numbered in the 7000s again.

That was snow hitting the windshield this evening.

Pathetic. That is the word for today, all right. Blonder cover was linked last year.

I applied style="text-align: right;" to the Flash object in yesterday’s post. Facebook strips out the <object> element entirely, Safari doesn’t display it, either, so my followers using RSS won’t know the difference. The FEED Validator complains about an earlier post in which I applied style="text-transform: uppercase;".

06 April 2009

Like I said, one month to go.

A marriage this past weekend changes the name of a Peeron.com co-founder. Facebook is smoothly redirecting.

Barcelona is currently, hm, six hours ahead. Hawai’i is six hours behind. That is all.

05 April 2009

A project largely completed (prototype) with no need for a BrickLink order! Various weights of Swiss 721 were stretched to design the stickers. WAMALUG meeting this Saturday.

Demotivational exposes that, while the URL may have changed, the graphic has yet to follow suit.

I’ve been noticing this.

One month to go.

The appearance of a typewriter in a thrift store leads me to take note of a lacuna: I’m not sure what typewriter I used in college, I suspect it’s one of these. Post-college, though, I bought an Olivetti Praxis 35 (announcement in The New York Times from 1981). I sold the electronic daisywheel typewriter before the decade was out, and don’t seem to have photographed either one. It hasn’t occurred to me to photograph my keyboards, either.

Uploads to Flickr are not showing up in the Feed, boo.

03 April 2009

My barber has packed up and moved on. Time to look for one that is not so far away, I should think.

01 April 2009

It’s old news, but DASH is taking pride in some magazine’s list of top ten transit companies to work for by applying a banner sticker to the back of bus #99.

Why does Alexandria hate pedestrians? Oh, maybe today it’s just part of the Street Smart campaign. But putting crosswalks one thousand feet apart and forcing people to double back to reach a destination might not be so smart, either.

A break in the fence. Flickr has been hiding my recent activity, the incomplete construction is now part of a group for the MARC. For now I’m foregoing any attempt at the big diagonal.

31 March 2009

March makes another month this year I’ve gone without purchasing gasoline. WamaLTC has an ambitious plan to display two weekends at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland for the Day Out with Thomas 2009 Hero of the Rails Tour (April 24-26 and May 1-3) which would be perfect to debut a venue-specific MOC which deserves to be seen there, but we’ll see.

30 March 2009

Unsold inventory of GM branded cars fills a local lot.

Five weeks ago I mentioned that the Buick-Pontiac-GMC-Saturn dealer had closed. From today, this is a view of about a third of what looks like its unsold inventory. (That’s a fence pole along the right edge.)

That was as stupid as one might expect: the cast of Star Trek The Next Generation on Family Guy.

I built a Wendy’s in LEGO® elements seven years ago and while it might look like I did no research whatsoever before building it it turns out I had taken a series of photographs of the example at 3040 Gatehouse Plaza Drive in Merrifield the previous month (the roll wouldn’t be finished until after I displayed the construction). Every single Brickshelf folder for the February 2002 show is still available. The earlier construction survived the Manassas show later in the year and I’m unable to report when it was disassembled. My more recent build will not include salt and pepper shakers on the tables inside as personal reconnoitering reveals these are no longer provided.

Associated Press photograph of a cousin.

29 March 2009

I would have recognized a few faces at the Brickfest in Portland… there’s a person in the front row whose Facebook profile keeps showing up in the People You May Know field (except for me it says Особе које можда познајеш ). In the reciprocal situation, I’m sure she’s clicked the X already.

Coast Guard operations in Fargo and the Red River valley. BNSF continues operations a few feet above the water level. People are sleeping a little easier tonight.

28 March 2009

I may have waited too long to sort the tub of LEGO® plates, they’ve started to self-assemble! I am satisfied with today’s building session and have initiated an order on BrickLink for the remaining parts in Sand Red to complete the construction, but some people aren’t—they’re already demanding photographs when the next WAMALUG meeting is only two weeks away. It’s not like there are any innovative building techniques involved or anything.

27 March 2009

The situation in Fargo reached the front page of the otherwise unreliable tabloid I pick up most weekdays. There is a Hannaher volunteering on the sandbag line, with temperatures in the teens and snow falling. A group on Flickr.

The National Cherry Blossom Festival gets underway tomorrow. It will be less obvious that I’m not there either.

Stay classy, Paramount. The training the performers received on the Vulcan salute was clearly rudimentary.

The Ford Flex that Jerry’s Ford uses as a shuttle to the subway station is safe—vehicles under twenty-six feet will be allowed to use the Kiss and Ride lot at the Van Dorn Street Metro Station. That was true today, anyway. This follows a fluid situation for private carriers where they were first asked to use the bus bay, then forced to unload at the curb on Eisenhower Avenue. This seems to be a result of some Federal Transportation Authority changes which started to be addressed last year. Now when WMATA follows through on its proposal to charge for a private carrier to load and unload at the station…

26 March 2009

Tonight I was in the Apple Store at Tysons Corner Center (with no mileage expenditure on my part) and caught myself thinking, I should have brought my iPod touch so I could… tweet. Not super impressed with the speaker on the new model.

The BrickFest in Portland, Oregon is this weekend. Obviously, I’m not there.

25 March 2009

No one could have predicted that: the ship date for the tricorder toys has slipped again.

Murder in Loudoun County.

My use of the word turns out to have been the consensus opinion, really.

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer, not even Microsoft bothers with anything older than IE6.

A phrase I used today seems to have some history. How to tell if this is happening to you. Okay, as far as I know there’s no pet grooming service… wash your own dog, though, that’s close by.

What is Twitter, you ask? Four minute animated answer (via).

24 March 2009

You can totally trust something called The PhishGuru. These are the tutorial cartoons.

Just checking out the competition in bilevel commuter railcar construction. The Northern Illinois LEGO® Train Club runs multiple cab cars in a consist, interesting.

Facebook: Spammy PicDoodle App Not A Virus, Getting Fixed. The alleged social network makes a few weak changes. Among the author of the post and twenty commenters, only Will (who didn’t use Facebook Connect) understands how the News Feed has been slashed and burned. For now, the iPhone/iPod touch app maintains the previous incarnation. A relic of an even earlier functionality reduction.

23 March 2009

There’s some ongoing controversy over Flickr’s failure to afford/encourage/force its users to create meaningful alt= attribute values. The story is that SmugMug does offer that opportunity to its users, which is a little hard to believe since the only <img> elements on a SmugMug page are all named spacer.gif! Have I been paying any attention to HTML5? No.

Reese Witherspoon almost rockin’ the Vulcan salute.

22 March 2009

Someone is optimistic: the signs at 6499 Little River Turnpike have been replaced and now promise a crab house.

Ho hum, Brickshelf was down. I have placed the order to further my rendition of this. It would be wrong to say complete the rendition when minifig seats that only appeared in one expensive set would best match the interior fittings.

21 March 2009

There is now a MySpace widget on the home page. From time to time I would look for a badge and never did find one, but this Flash-based widget was announced upon yesterday’s login (my status and mood do not seem to have survived the removal of the <embed> element). It’s just a coincidence that the page to make a Facebook badge has been modified recently to suggest placing the result on a MySpace profile (using a locally hosted graphic, hmm, trademark issues). A new project card started today.

20 March 2009

I have been remiss in updating the Facebook badge on the home page, this is what it looks like now. My choice of interface language in using the site has affected the language on the badge and the subdomain assigned to my profile.

My contribution to the tales of car wash woe is decades old, I sent the first Mazda 626 (MY 1985) through a car wash and the attendants had neglected to tape down the rear wiper. Lots of scratches on the hatch from where the wiper arm had been twisted up, had it fixed at Rosenthal Mazda in Arlington. I switched to the Mr. Wash on Glebe Road and haven’t had any unpleasant experiences in the decades since (they use bags for the rear wipers now).

The new home of whatevs (dot org).

19 March 2009

What a surprise: the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) expects to find Internet Explorer 7 installed. The deadline for compliance was February 1, 2008.

18 March 2009

What, was the name Orion VIII in use by some other company? My first sighting of the latest addition to the Fairfax Connector bus fleet with a stale moniker suffix. Now I’m even less convinced by the title of this image.

17 March 2009

The smoking ban in Virginia’s bars and restaurants which the governor signed last week is scheduled to go into effect December 1, 2009 which may make certain venues (1, 2) more attractive regardless of the company. I suppose I’m not doing Guinness any favors by sipping it, but like before, not seeing what the deal is.

It wouldn’t be WAMALUG if there wasn’t something to cause a dust-up. Who’s ready for a users group named after a telephone company? ;-)

Videos of the tricorder toys, still expected next month.

Someone is optimistic: Passport switches its 5990 Duke Street operation to MINI.

16 March 2009

Ritz Camera (the chain of mall stores) is not doing well. Two of the SLR bodies that contributed to the growing collection in my Flickr account were purchased at the store in Potomac Mills Mall, but there’s been little reason to stop in since. The last time I even thought about it was when I was interested in low self-discharge rechargeable batteries.

Not a surprise: the Javascript-powered hide/unhide feature doesn’t work in Netscape Communicator 4.8 (the ancient program is in one of the four virtual machines) but recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer are able to handle it. Internet Explorer 8 is expected this week.

15 March 2009

A tiny little splotch of color is hardly impressive. The Virginia Department of Forestry reports that the state has eight species of woodpecker while identifying only three of them. The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries identifies an additional three species as part of a listing of nuisance wildlife. The subject of the zoom lens inadequate to the situation might have been the pileated woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus.

SmugMug is Facebook Connect-enabled (since a month ago) and not everyone is happy. Would I really want to share Constantine has rated one image on SmugMug (or however the default one-line story would read) about yesterday’s link?

The menu of links to the dispatches of other years was getting to be a liability, not to mention longer. I could go back and change all the maj.com links, but I’m in no position to be checking all the links in the older pages. I don’t want to remove the pages as I make use of them in writing new posts and link back to them on occasion (like in the previous sentence). So, using Javascript to hide and unhide elements dynamically. Did I test in any version of Internet Explorer? Signs point to no.

14 March 2009

A set of photographs from Katsucon spanning a decade, I haven’t recognized anybody yet (except for one very-pleased-with-himself guy letting someone else use his camera on him and two Darkstalkers). The thumbnails for the galleries at Smugmug are randomized, reload and see. Hot. The convention moves across the Potomac for next year. Some people aren’t limited to a camera-mounted flash.

WAMALUG did display something this weekend. Looking ahead to building a new locomotive for the VRE, I bought a discounted Speed Racer set for the windshields.

13 March 2009

О чему размишљате? The new Facebook home page.

Best Buy assimilates another community.

The report of Best Buy rebranding was premature. The arrival of this retailer in Fair City Mall has been expected for some time.

There is a new target to acquire: the express Metrobus scheme. It’s like the local version announced earlier but blue instead of red (but not the same as Metro Extra, either).

12 March 2009

Ana meets President Clinton last week and scandalizes her fans on Facebook by posing next to the President that launched the war against Serbia in 1999 even as her publicists crop out, Facebook-style, that other woman Serb tennis player (the one with the nose). Yeah, what is Ivanovic doing with her hand?

Chi-Chi's sign remains years after the chain shut down.

Floyd’s Bar and Grill has left up the sign of the predecessor business at that location.

Seriously, while only two Crossfires are visible in this capture, there were more in the lot adjoining the new trailer-sized offices. I had no idea it was made in Germany or that sales had declined so precipitously.

11 March 2009

Was DASH Bus feeling the love today? I saw only two other buttons on my three trips today—and one of those passengers paid anyway! On the third trip, the driver handed out letter openers. They’ve dropped the phone number since the twentieth anniversary edition.

Scottsbluff, Nebraska manages to get itself into the news. Actually, based on my experience in that municipality in 1988, a dealership that only combines Ford and Toyota? Completely small-time. The name might have changed since then but the place where I got my Mazda repaired had a lot of other brands on hand.

Back when I was webmaster for WAMALUG, at each meeting I would have to ask for the name of each new attendee. I don’t do that any more, I’m not webmaster and there’s a signup list, and that means there’s people commenting at my Flickr account who were at the meeting on Sunday who I barely remember (except as guy who used stacks of plate 1×2 in clear as windows and guy with long gray military vehicle that reminded me of one of Jeff’s creations ). Sorry!

10 March 2009

WAMALUG plans to display… something… at the LEGO® retail store in the Potomac Mills Mall this weekend. Reaction to a previous display. I do not currently have any plans to contribute.

Google Translate is helpless to tell me what they’re saying about one of my HUMMER models (which the original poster has misidentified as an H2) in Arabic.

08 March 2009

This evening’s upload to Flickr displaces every previous capture from the first page of my account and, as I was telling others at the WAMALUG meeting today, isn’t even all of what I’ve built since late last year.

A photo gallery of a replica of the next U.S.S. Enterprise.

I come to the defense of my work, previously in progress.

06 March 2009

Last year the Boston Public Library had scanned its collection of Foreign Service List, a quarterly publication of the Department of State listing the field staffs of various agencies and the results are hosted at the Internet Archive. The volumes from 1957, 1958, and 1959 are of personal significance.

05 March 2009

Someone sent me the March/April 2009 issue of American Lifestyle magazine because it features an interview with Nathan Sawaya about his sculptures with LEGO® bricks. (This video from CBS News covers much the same ground.) The covers of the magazine published by tight-lipped Digital Grapes LLC are customizable to include a personalized greeting. The sculptor and I are but two degrees of separation on Facebook.

04 March 2009

The anticipated day when I have to build a new locomotive to match a change in the Virginia Railway Express fleet is nearer with their recent contract to acquire the MPXpress® MP36PH-3C from MotivePower. Time to study this builder’s work again.

I have been spoiled by the longevity of the batteries in the DSLR that I neglected the fundamentals: making sure they were charged before the need. :-( It’s a mix of metaphors, but I was running on fumes towards the end today.

02 March 2009

So there was some snow awaiting us this morning.

Chicken Village.

Always check the links: ethnic restaurant reviewer calls the very middle of Annandale (it’s on the flag) West Alexandria. The Chicken Village at 6499 Little River Turnpike (seen here as it was a year ago) with more of a claim on that geography has lost its signs and appears abandoned.

Even with this resource available I cannot determine the identity of the fashion.

Constantine wonders why talk show hosts and guests don’t identify Karl Rove as appearing on the program while in contempt of Congress and not honoring subpoenas. Most of the hosts are too busy worrying about tax increases… on themselves.

28 February 2009

I may not be able to identify what I was eating but at a table of Asian-Americans I was the only one doing so solely with chopsticks (we all used spoons for the soups).

27 February 2009

I continue to be impressed with the results of the scanning project but it would be wrong to share the Shutterfly link.

26 February 2009

For future reference: the nearest Apple store to Austria is in Munich.

First they came for the alternative comics (Dirtfarm is the sole survivor in Washington City Paper), then they came for the daily newspaper strips…

25 February 2009

The pass list for the California Bar exam will be available to the general public on the website of the State Bar in May. This week it’s better to avoid all the people in that state who are freaking out.

24 February 2009

You can forget about carrying your automatic balancing wheeled conveyance on a bus around here.

When me and my pal were preparing for our drive across the country in 1987, it became evident that my companion had difficulty merging, especially into traffic running on a perpendicular. After hearing my it’s ok to go one too many times, he demanded to know whether I was mentally modeling the traffic flow. Why, yes, I was, and it turns out that now there’s a name for that. I used the term situational awareness to title an upload to Flickr yesterday, it depicted my recognition of a vehicle trailing mine. If that’s who I thought it was, it was important to observe first. The Chevrolet is from the sixties, and I think I saw it again last week.

For those individuals in this metropolitan area with limited English proficiency, WMATA says that Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese follow Spanish for prevalence. Serbian is not on the list.

23 February 2009

I may never eat Feta cheese again, it’s protected by an appellation of origin. Serbia is a party of the Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their International Registration but the United States of America is not.

Behind the scenes: Charlotte Geary Photography does weddings.

Tropicana Hits Command-Z . In other Pepsi-related news: Throwback. Packaging update.

MHz Networks doesn’t seem too happy about the delay in their transition to all-digital broadcasting thanks to a Fox-owned station in Baltimore.

22 February 2009

So that’s what the driver was trying to say when I took the I ♥ DASH button: wearing the button means free rides on March 11th.

I can report that WMATA still has that black switcher that I photographed a decade ago and which I built recently, at its Greenbelt yard, along with a beat-up model in white, which I wouldn’t be able to build because this part in not available in that color.

21 February 2009

Southeast Pennsylvania county transit systems like their Gillig Phantoms, this is the only one I caught. I offer my correction of the destination sign based on the weekend schedules for Rabbit Transit. I’ve reduced my contribution to the display at the National Toy Train Museum to a generic hi-rail pick-up truck slapped together in an hour last night.

20 February 2009

From Boom Times to Unsold Cars, Is Chrysler Collapsing? The Voice of America visited Passport Chrysler in December and reported a 70% decline in sales for 2008 for the dealer (passportchryslerofalexandria.com went 403 today). Meanwhile, the Landmark/Van Dorn Corridor Plan soldiers on. They’ll find it easier to deal with the intersection of Edsall Road and Pickett Street: the Buick-Pontiac-GMC-Saturn dealer there has closed. The more you know: Many of the streets were named in the pre-Civil Rights era after Confederate officers: Pickett, Whiting, Van Dorn, Reynolds, Stevens, Jordan and Paxton.

Watch, someone will do it just to mess me up: in the months that I have been using the RSS feed to import this blog to my Facebook page, there has not been a single comment. No word on whether it’s XHTML-compatible, but Facebook announces a widget to place a comment box on any page (via).

19 February 2009

Excerpt from book's marginalia states the nonexistence of Crystal City.

Okay, some fact-checking sure went into this book. True, it’s not a municipality and there’s the argument that it’s not real but Crystal City exists. I’m tempted to send the book straight to the pile.

The website of Passport Chrysler is now redirecting to the content of Safford Auto. Pretty sure that started this week, so I’m not too far behind on local news. Consumer Reports can’t be pleased with the (mis)use of its name in Chrysler’s presentation earlier this week when seeking more money.

I thought the writer for The Superficial was kidding (what with not knowing the difference between leather and rubber) but no, it really is a Hello, Kitty bustier.

18 February 2009

WamaLTC has no rules, so it will be no problem to include an official LEGO® set which is… ten-wide?

When did the lot at Passport Chrysler get so sparse?

When I see someone from a distance and think that’s too skinny to be… and I think of the name of the smallest, tiniest person I know… well, there might be a problem.

After a long time, de-friended again. Maybe it was my linking to reports like this one that proved too much. Actually, looks like the suspect might have have dumped all the liberals from his friend list. ;-)

17 February 2009

The staff for the last issue that spring.

Journalists talking to journalists: Facebook thinks I might know the White House correspondent from The New York Times. She’s been on Charlie Rose (as part of a group interview).

Way too easy, so I left it alone last week, but Microsoft plans to open retail stores. Because their stuff looks so tempting if there’s no competing product in view? If only Target had marketed the Zune in a different aisle, then…

It’s not us: the Lego train layout at the Lyceum later this month is part of Railroad Days presented by the Potomac Division of the National Model Railroaders Association. This year’s convention for that organization is in Hartford, Connecticut, something our ILTCO representative might have mentioned if only we had someone admitting to that job description.

Ralph Savelsberg gets a writeup at Autoblog.

Hmm, a six-wide non-sloped windshield piece.

15 February 2009

Two parts prevent me from retiring the project card for the Richmond Highway Express bus. It’s a waiting game now. In the meantime I have about twenty-five gallons of loose elements to sort…

I don’t know, a geological tricorder is pushing it. Diamond Select Toys has eighty days to beat the movie premiere to deliver on the previously announced versions.

14 February 2009

Finally Flickr notices that there’s been a new model in the Sony lineup.

13 February 2009

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. I had no idea that since 01 January 2005, Serbia has had a six-digit address code to designate every postal delivery address in the country, in addition to the five-digit post code for the municipalities. Search page riskily still using the .yu domain. More obsession on post codes in the region. I no longer have any reason to send mail to addresses in Serbia so the interest is academic. More information on post codes and a postal code lookup.

Spending at Circuit City as it liquidates is not stimulative, ooh, shiny. Huh, I could have done last year’s date calculation with the 12C already on my desk.

At this time we regard our site to finally be 100% complete.

And today the links say Свиђа ми се .

12 February 2009

Do you love the DASH Bus? There should be a button available tomorrow to allow you to express that. Otherwise, the day after is just another Saturday, unless…

The links have changed to Лепо .

11 February 2009

Dodge Challenger in a handsome blue at the Washington Auto Show.

As the years go by, I pick up less and less at the auto show: this year it was just one brochure (from Ford). Flipping through it, I noticed the absence of the Taurus X (previously marketed as the Freestyle), and indeed this is the last month of manufacture for that neglected model. The show didn’t have a Camp Jeep either, and they were letting just anybody sit in the Dodge Challengers. That’s a nice blue, though, Deep Water Blue Pearl it’s called.

Seven years? Really?

09 February 2009

Today’s shipment from Canada brings another project closer to completion. Shipments from Germany, Australia, and Germany again are expected shortly.

I wasn’t around for some of these recessions.

Now that the Tropicana redesign is reaching stores, the complaints continue (via). It’s also true that the product contains juice from Brazil.

What? It is a problem. ;-)

08 February 2009

Tow truck built in LEGO Technic elements.

Ha, ha, you got me, guys at the MichLUG meeting yesterday, I’m stumped as to what this might be. I rarely look at Brickshelf anymore, but after seven hours of disassembling Technic sets, including my attempt to build a tow truck, it seemed normal. There’s no Replace functionality at the photo sharing site, so visitors there have to make do with the earlier scan.

07 February 2009

Is it weird that the subdomain new.facebook.com is still around (and doesn’t redirect)? I’m seeing it as a referrer at Flickr. The need for the subdomain, established last July to preview the redesign of the site, was over by September when the switch was made mandatory.

This was a very last-minute appearance by two WamaLTC participants at the Lovettsville Community Center which I wasn’t asked to mention on the website.

06 February 2009

Chevrolet An American Revolution displays two 2010 Camaros at the Washington Auto Show.

Last year I was complaining about how the big Ford sedans used a foot-operated parking brake. This year I’ll complain about Sync because the emblem also states Powered by Microsoft and who really wants that? Two big halls, many manufacturers (although I think Porsche might have been a no-show), and this is as close as I get to pointing the camera at a person. Because I didn’t ask her a question, I don’t know what model year these Camaros on display are supposed to represent. Three years later, though, this remains idiotic.

05 February 2009

The local bus system is conducting a photo contest. The requirement for digital photographs to be shot at 300dpi or higher would exclude results from my KonicaMinolta Maxxum 7D (were I still using it), and it looks like they’re after more of a people approach, so nothing I have taken in the past would be interesting. You do not want to tempt me into trying to photograph people on the bus.

One person asking is an oddity, another asking, why, that’s a trend! What’s my secret? They want to know.

04 February 2009

If the Virginia Railway Express follows through on its strategic plan (from 2004) I will be building new locomotives soon, as the RP39-2C is judged to be inadequate for the longer, all bi-level consists the commuter railroad expects to be running by the end of the decade.

Completing the LEGO® 8880 Supercar was an accomplishment. When I sought to build a motorized version a few years later, I left the original assembled and managed to find the pieces needed in other Technic sets then available—all but four, the crucial link in the four-wheel drive, four wheel steering hub. Since that BrickFest, the two models have had to share the original set of hubs, with tires on one side and… a few props on the other. Until this week. I’m a little disappointed it didn’t occur to me earlier. There was progress today, but no project cards were retired. Another was started because T208 has red wheels.

The Washington Auto Show began today.

03 February 2009

The ATM screen keeps reminding me: Wachovia is now Wells Fargo.

I get it, the VRE no longer owns those Kawasaki Bi-Level cars that I photographed over four years ago. Other than its non-topicality, though, how do you like the picture?

Perhaps as a family man, this Loudoun County commentator cannot admit to the number one reason to hang out at Tysons Corner Center. Spock says it best at the end of this clip (TrekCore page for audio caps from this episode has no internal anchors).

That’s right, I didn’t buy any gasoline last month. At the last fill-ups before New Year’s, the total of the rolling averages was below twelve miles a day.

02 February 2009

Seriously, last month if you weren’t my barber, a medical professional, a grocery store, a utility, or a BrickLink seller, I didn’t spend money on you (I did renew my Flickr account). I suppose I’ll have to buy some clothes when the holes get really big. Priorities, man. It’s been over a month since I was in the Minnesota-based discount retailer.

On March 22, 2007, the V32 caught fire due to an electrical short while parked at Ivy City awaiting evening train service. Damage occurred to the main and auxiliary generators and inertial blower. I photographed the locomotive in 2004, it was subsequently repaired (pursuant to a later resolution) and back pulling trains. Ivy City is the name of the neghborhood in which the rail yard north of Union Station sits.

01 February 2009

By now television viewers have been exposed to the commercial for Star Trek which I was viewing in HD at YouTube this morning. Shot-by-shot analysis. Ninety-five days.

31 January 2009

The Virginia Railway Express locomotives that I built in LEGO® a few years ago now have the proper blue windows, thanks to a BrickLink seller in Germany who had the quantity needed. I’ve taken to listing a project’s part requirements on an index card, this allows me to shuffle them as I shop a BrickLink store trying to pick off the remaining items on each card. Today’s part replacements allow me to retire one card, another five remain. A rather capable 6-wide HMMWV may inspire another card.

First wamalug.com, now the world.

29 January 2009

New Flyer Metrobus passes one hospital on the way to another.

If the taxi hadn’t been in the way, I’d have put this up on Flickr. The badge with the bird on the front makes it a product of New Flyer. I don’t see them much in Virginia, and guess that the compressed natural gas propulsion makes it a C40LF.

Adobe has done something about its unwieldy URL to download the Reader: the new target.

28 January 2009

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released updated editions of its Special Publication 811: Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) and Special Publication 330: The International System of Units (SI) last year. I don’t have an explanation for how the Dalton managed to get inside the tent of Non-SI units accepted for use with the SI by the CIPM and this Guide, whose values are obtained experimentally since the 1995 edition. No, not that Dalton.

New arrival comments on local reaction to some ice. Hey, I took a few steps out there this morning and turned back for my Yaktrax.

27 January 2009

Yet another way to view a Flickr account (via). Never can have too many ways. Another reason to want secret favorites. That Richmond Highway Express LEGO® MOC in progress is looking better this week. Those last few low-value elements from sellers in Europe with high minimum orders will be a pain—and there are still not enough Plate 1×1 in Dark Purple (Medium Lilac) in all of BrickLink to complete it.

I’m beginning to wonder what road conditions would make the 4WD indicator light up.

26 January 2009

This never happens, either.

An uptick in interest in my photographs of the reunions, and the referrers are from the Facebook profiles of people I don’t know. Hmm.

25 January 2009

The MetaFilter fail-logotype and MetaFilter withdrawal triage recommendations. It’s back.

So Skype is like iChat AV for people who don’t have Macs? Ha! I wasn’t making it up about the Estonian connection. Ok, I see it can do more if you’re willing to pay.

I seem to have a number of MOCs built in Technic elements which got dumped into big tubs over five years ago and never got disassembled; now that I have brought them out and set them in a pile for disassembly, an idea does germinate within.

The Year of the Rat comes to a close, tomorrow starts the Year of the Ox.

24 January 2009

Could the answer to the question be that of the Starfleet command tunic?

I don’t get it, each time I visit the local electronics and hazardous materials recycling drop-off location, I’m asked whether I want to keep the basket or tub I’ve used to carry the stuff in the trunk. Yuh.

23 January 2009

It’s a long-distance shot with a grainy high-speed film but it’s good to have my own shot of a prototype. The Virginia Railway Express group on Flickr is mostly locomotives but a search on vre located what I needed nevertheless it’s all good.

People who watch television are trying to lure me back, but NBC is ahead of them: yesterday’s episode of 30 Rock which featured some LEGO® props is on Hulu.

22 January 2009

Someone listening to NPR’s All Things Considered tonight might think that life in North Dakota is going well. I wonder who got the contract for the office furniture and space planning at the Microsoft facility in Fargo. An expansion was scheduled for completion this year, an earlier story in tonight’s show might cast a shadow on that.

Oh, good, the WMATA GE 44-ton switching locomotive MOC in LEGO® elements comes in at a plate and a half less high than the Metrorail cars.

21 January 2009

The previous Mattel Barbie & Ken Star Trek Gift Set allowed Barbie to carry a communicator and tricorder (Ken got the phaser and a communicator). For the upcoming series of Star Trek figures from Mattel, Uhura is packin’ heat.

Another day, another locomotive. Can you guess which one? I should check to see how it compares to the Metrorail cars, because it would be awkward if this engine couldn’t follow them into a tunnel. At the show in Philadelphia, people never tired of seeing how tight the fit with the tunnel entrances was.

20 January 2009

Aw, President Obama had to go and add and non-believers in his inaugural address. Am I ready for more responsibility now that I’m included? ;-)

After seven years, it was time for my own Metrorail car remanufacturing line. I rebuilt trucks (to use a minifig head rather than a cylinder brick), replaced windows (for a more authentic clear lack of tint), confirmed adherence to specifications (made sure all bricks and plates were in place), and came up with a rig to try to keep them together while in transit to a display. Now if only we had a display coming up…

19 January 2009

The project to update the pages for WamaLTC’s meetings and shows is complete.

18 January 2009

The inventory page has yet to be updated, but 45677: Wedge 4 × 4 × 2/3 Curved is now available in Orange. Now if I could remember what I wanted them for…

The Sunday talk show hosts ask whether the Bush tax cuts might be retained so often I am led to think there’s some personal impact involved if they are allowed to expire.

I finally opened the LEGO® Ultimate Collector Series 10030 Imperial Star Destroyer for its parts, and not only are they guaranteed to be the old grays but another mark of its bygone era is that all the pieces were made in Denmark.

17 January 2009

With today’s upload to Flickr of the state of my MOC of the Richmond Highway Express bus (as of this morning before the mail arrived) I have joined BrickBuildr (previously mentioned).

Looks like I called it correctly, with Star Trek 110 days away, I’m receiving notices that the delivery date for the various DST toys is being pushed back. Another month, and they will follow the movie’s opening.

I found a photostream at Flickr which had copied twelve of my bus photos (and one of Bob’s, it’s possible the entire photostream is likewise). Not happy. Yahoo! asks for a lot of stuff, this forum topic has the template, maybe someday.

16 January 2009

The Origin of Wah’s Bucks: why Star Trek’s communicator is shaped the way it is.

15 January 2009

Apparently it’s true: they really like Facebook in Iceland.

I haven’t been to Potomac Mills Mall since the WamaLTC display there last November and don’t plan to go anytime soon either (no matter what speculation you may read elsewhere) but I’ve been challenged: how would you get there by transit? The PRTC service Prince William-Metro Direct offers a loop between the Franconia-Springfield Station and points south like the mall and the Route 1 corridor through Woodbridge, but it’s weekdays only.

14 January 2009

I do appreciate being informed by people in the western states what the weather’s like there. :p

Officer Marcus Downey has used my upload to Flickr to illustrate the ride the squad’s got these days.

Something I noticed today about the new Google favicon: the Google Toolbar and Google search box in Firefox still retain the old, old version.

13 January 2009

I was voter number 37 at my polling station this morning in an election to choose a new delegate to replace the one planning a campaign for governor. That’s, um, a sixteen vote lead for the winner.

There are not enough parts in Dark Purple in all of BrickLink to build my Orion VII model in the colors of the REX and some of the parts I thought I could plan for have gone missing. Clearly a long term project.

12 January 2009

I suppose it goes along with being a buyer on BrickLink, but I don’t have to like it: I now have an account at PayPal.

The change in description has released my LEGO® Factory creation to appear in the Factory Gallery. See for yourself and let someone know. Model is $23.95 for 246 pieces but is unavailable due to temporary brick stock out. In case I add more.

A lot of fuss over a new favicon for Google. Because I visit most websites using SeaMonkey, if the sites don’t use <link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" />, I never see these.

Ford has your commuter car right here.

11 January 2009

My upload to the LEGO® Factory Gallery earlier this month was denied, for… could they make this non-resizable type any smaller… MODEL IN VIOLATION WITH OTHER TRADEMARKS. Hmm, if HMMWV is a trademark, you’d think the source would mention it. I’ve changed the description to Tough truck with military heritage.

This video is intended as a parody of the reaction to next month’s switch to digital television. I haven’t bothered with the coupon as I figure if I haven’t been tempted in almost 3 years… people have tried but I found hunting for WiFi and napping more interesting.

More Serb genius: fish prosciutto.

10 January 2009

My H2 is MOC of the Day.

I was searching for plans to build an SD40 in LEGO® (here’s one, it’s time for the CSX Maintenance of Way locomotive to reappear in 6-wide) and wasn’t prepared for the home page of the new MOCpages: my Hummer H2 is MOC of the Day! I haven’t been able to find out anything about how that is chosen or which creations preceded me.

I’m not the only one who remembers the speech from Henry V.

09 January 2009

The Fairfax Connector Orion V model is now parts-complete—except for what should be Panel 1×2×3 in red—and the effort to do so spanned the globe. The shipping label on the padded envelope with the LEGO® Factory Pick-a-Brick order which arrived today identifies the manufacturer as Sonoco Poland, the tester as Bureau Veritas Hong Kong Limited, the importer as LEGO System A/S of Denmark, and the shipper as Mercury International of New Jersey. The detailed information may be related to the asserted compliance with 16 CFR Part 1500. Sonoco does custom molding, but the bag inside had parts from Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and the Czech Republic.

Orion V Metrobus awaits a jump start.

It just needed a jump start. Wait, is that pitch they used to seal the destination sign? Today I managed to ride six buses (seven if you count the morning commute) and except at this location (along University Drive in Fairfax) I never waited more than 2 minutes to catch the next one. This wait was almost an hour. They actually drive the charger around in another Orion V.

My photograph of the movie theater in Sauk Centre, Minnesota in 1978 (previously mentioned) is in the Flickr pool Growing Up Star Wars: 1977-1985 (discussed on MetaFilter today) despite the way it barely fits in with the rest of them.

08 January 2009

You can forget about driving in my neighborhood on the twentieth (inbound along the interstates, anyway, inside the Beltway).

07 January 2009

The recording of the music used in the trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie (via) is a video found at Facebook.

I’m reconsidering the model of a VRE Pullman gallery car I built in LEGO® elements a few years ago because it is a plate less high than my new construction (which itself is able to pass one of Tom’s signal bridges with two plates’ worth of clearance) when they’re supposed to match. I’m looking for photographs of the prototypes online and discover a quarter of the search results on the first page are of my VRE models (here’s what I needed). I am reassured that In any scenario, the 30 Pullman Galleries must remain in service until 2011 because it means I can retain the blue-topped passenger car without losing authenticity.

I found my third penny of the year today, but I’m nowhere near being in this league.

06 January 2009

The GMail widget for the Apple Dashboard hasn’t worked in a while.

Go Fug Yourself is back from a holiday hiatus, mmm.

Not my dentist: a testimonial.

05 January 2009

You can forget about parking in my neighborhood two weeks from now.

The fare increase to $1.25 on DASH was approved. The system continues to distribute and accept paper transfers.

There will be a quiz.

The VRE plays less well in our Maryland locations, so I’m just looking and wondering if parts are available in appropriate colors (this one’s not)?

04 January 2009

My new construction is two plates higher than the Kawasaki Bi-Level cars, previously the standard-bearer for outsize rolling stock on WamaLTC displays. I wonder how many tunnel entrances and signal bridges this will run into, I should just build one and find out. But a cab car deserves its horn, no?

03 January 2009

I have been building. No thanks to the VRE for having old, old photos on their site. Now just because I scrapped my Kawasaki bi-level cars (both of them before the day was done) doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t rebuild them with whatever modifications would be needed to reflect service in the MARC.

02 January 2009

I was able to use LEGO® Digital Designer with the Factory theme to get very close to my design for a 4-Man Soft Top M998 HMMWV. The program reports a current cost of $23.70 for 245 elements, mostly in black. Even if the model gets approved for display in the gallery at lego.com, the store reports that one type of part is not in stock, so you wouldn’t be able to buy it anyway. Earlier, I was building less abstractly (this in view of this). Another page gets updated.

01 January 2009

Screenshot from LEGO® Digital Designer work.

LEGO® Digital Designer, hmm, takes some getting used to for someone familiar with MLCAD. This result of attempting to document my most recent build required a mix of themes to get mostly the right colors (windows serving as doors on the other side and the two inverse slopes at the back and the windows at the front remain incorrect) and it rides too high because of the kludge to get the wheels on. The program does not allow proximity without connection, refusing to place a plate on a tile for example, so I couldn’t just place the tires in the wheel wells in the absence of Plate 2 × 2 with Wheel Holder (4488). Interestingly, the instructions mode will place plates on top of tiles! I may have forgotten a steering wheel for the driver so use judgment in trying to build this yourself.

The budget category referred to yesterday is actually called Feed despite the absence of any livestock on the premises.

I had some time earlier today, so here it is: the first page at WamaLTC to be updated with images in a while.

Last updated on: 31-Dec-2009