31 December 2010

It survived the arrival of the camera which made the S9100 immediately surplus but even so its small size and use of AA batteries was insufficent to avoid displacement in the role of every-day-carry and it’s time to retire the FinePix A820 after almost a year of disuse.

My pencil sketch of the plots of photographs taken ( previously ) significantly understated the variability of the quantity taken on a monthly basis. Whatever the details, it would have been fair to state that the purchase of the Minolta Maxxum 7000 i made the Minolta SRT-202 immediately surplus. Even if I had hung on to that heavy body the issue of the battery would have eventually made its use a chore.

30 December 2010

It’s time to give up on Netscape Communicator 4 and Internet Explorer 5 for Mac no matter how amusing or nostalgic . With the demise of the G3 I don’t even have IE5 Mac installed anywhere. Comprehensive table of CSS filters . Time for a reset .

29 December 2010

The search is what the grumbling a week ago was about: Amazon.com announced on Monday that the third-generation Kindle is now the bestselling product in Amazon’s history ( via ).

28 December 2010

A year ago, Google Scholar added full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts and the service shows the Federal Reporter pagination .

The surge in picture-taking from the purchases of digital cameras over the past 8 years has led to me to decide that the frames deserve the same annotations as to date, place, and content that the previous film-based exposures got during the scanning project. While the current WAMALUG site won’t tell you what happened on 23 March 2002, my local archive of the site as it was in 2004 will and it’s a good thing, as I cannot tell a MOC by Fradel Gonzales apart from one by Aaron Sneary from memory.

Enough with the puppies already, I got your daily cute right here.

27 December 2010

Some things are transitory: the jog in US-1 depicted in the local municipality’s bus system map prepared for the route changes made in July no longer exists with the completion of the Monroe Avenue Bridge last year ; some things are more permanent: Jim Vance and Doreen Gentzler as co-anchors of the evening news programs on the local NBC station . Since 1989! The advertising in the Metro system may or may not have anything to do with her signing a new long-term contract last year .

26 December 2010

I evaded the buildup to the theatrical release of today’s discard but took a $10 chance on seeing what the fuss was about. This is not a title that people see a second time, is it? One of these days it will be a laserdisc which will be hard to part with, but today is not that day.

25 December 2010

My weather widget tells me that it’s already snowing in Blacksburg and Charlottesville. I have already swapped out my off-site backup, so no biggie when it gets here.

24 December 2010

The Parking Lot Movie is a documentary about life at the business on the Corner in Charlottesville.

There have been a number of requests by people who want to have WamaLTC apparel but would like to be able to wear it at their job so I placed an order earlier this month for a low-contrast version that only includes the WamaLTC wordmark in the less flashy blue on a black garment. The shipment arrived today UPS 2-day Air but as WamaLTC is taking a bit of a break they’ll be delivered later. I’m reserving judgment until I see them unfolded but I’ll probably authorize them for everybody who wants one.

23 December 2010

Someone is optimistic: banners promise a kabob restaurant and a banquet hall for 5951 Stevenson Avenue, a location which has previously seen the Havana Grill Lounge , Floyd’s Bar and Grill , and Chi-Chi’s , and is thought to have been an El Torito Mexican Restaurant before that.

22 December 2010

This story on All Things Considered describes a new urban Walmart in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County, Va. without shedding a tear for the long-ago Kmart it has replaced with an inflated version of the McDonald’s eyebrow styling .

This is some meaning of the word available with which I was previously unfamiliar. So, the website was lying, was it? Excellent.

21 December 2010

Now there’s a logo I did not expect to see again, after tossing the last issue on the premises and earlier noting the decrepitude of the website , but today in the mail arrives an opportunity to resubscribe to what is still called The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter . Alas, although the home page now has a 2010 copyright and a few pages past it actually operate (the ColdFusion programming still missing in action, though) the utility of reviews of standard DVDs and Blu-ray DVDs remains miniscule. There have been no DVD purchases since 21 August 2009 and no Blu-ray capable player is on the premises, either.

20 December 2010

From a few years ago: find out what the job is like from the supervisors , mmm-hm. I think Kim does a good job of not looking and sounding like she’s reading a prepared statement.

How to Turn Off the Walled Garden is something to remember. I’m dubious about the search domain being the URL of the modem’s manufacturer, but I’m told that’s normal.

The people in this neighborhood who think that all cars should have enough traction without sand obviously still have tread on their tires. Have I really been driving the Focus for 7 years?

19 December 2010

No one likes to be told they left no impression, I imagine. There is a woman from a college chemistry class, I’ve been told, that knows how that feels. The list of the ignored gets longer.

I used the oblique view at Bing maps as a guide to arrange the equipment on the roof but I wasn’t tall enough to match the angle.

18 December 2010

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. One cannot rely on any specific MOC appearing in any specific WamaLTC display. Thus was a scavenger hunt spoiled.

When the batteries were exhausted in the gear house in the display today, I was inspired by this tale of a reporter on a stopped train to suggest that the minifigs caught in their seats were tweeting in panic now that the wheels had stopped.

17 December 2010

Now the blame game begins in earnest: who gave me a Dutch 5 € cent coin instead of a penny? Hmm, at the current exchange rate, that’s an extra nickel.

I had no idea those displays could show anything other than the route designation and NOT IN SERVICE.

16 December 2010

At the beginning of the year, I abandoned MyBlogLog , now Yahoo! will make it sunset . MeFites decry the same fate for delicious, worry about Groups and Flickr.

A Mini Maglite® LED flashlight that can’t remain lit more than a few seconds doesn’t have a bad switch, it just needs a change of batteries .

DASH Bus says it’s not serving Ripley Street tonight.

15 December 2010

The search for what CIE meant was in the wrong language but I found it anyway: The International Commission on Illumination - also known as the CIE from its French title, the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage - devoted to worldwide cooperation and the exchange of information on all matters relating to the science of art and light and lighting, colour and vision, photobiology and image technology. The links in the sidebar include LEFTMENUE but the URLs resolve with LEFTMENUG or with LEFTMENUF instead and, indeed, with nothing at all, weird. (The fragment index.php is required.) I tried G first because the commission’s headquarters is in Austria.

Added a few cities to the Weather app on the iPod touch, the chill in Florida is bad and Blacksburg is colder than Fargo.

14 December 2010

The manufacturer of my toothpaste no longer applies drops of glue to the box flaps or a foil seal to the tube’s nozzle. Has the threat of domestic terrorism passed ? Turns out, dentifrices were never subject to regulation for tamper resistant packaging and glued paperboard cartons do not meet the TRP requirements anyway.

13 December 2010

This link to a Facebook Page for a homeowners association works better.

The new elements in HTML5 may appeal semantically but even as they simplify they require significant changes to the page structure and the targets of CSS rules. The page cannot be served as application/xhtml+xml and thus cannot exist at the same site as these XHTML pages. Internet Explorer 8 invokes the IE8 Browser Mode with the IE8 Standards Document Mode and the result is… party time with Netscape Communicator 4.8 ! Sheesh.

12 December 2010

The latest inductee to the set of the thousand views is of the interior of my Focus parked on a quiet street in the suburbs of Lancaster seven years ago.

Today’s discard in the laserdisc purge project is inexplicable. Its purchase was subsequent to that of the DVD, which must not have satisfied as it doesn’t seem to be on the premises anymore.

11 December 2010

The sound of the Chorus of the Old Dominion ( previously ) warming up got me out of the Town Council chambers and onto the streets of Purcellville with the usual results . The singers, like the balloon twister, actually ended up doing their performance outside Town Hall. WamaLTC’s last scheduled display of the year is this Saturday at the Lyceum in Alexandria.

10 December 2010

The WamaLTC display in Purcellville, Virginia tomorrow will have to compete for space in the Town Council chamber, which isn’t all that big , with the Chorus of the Old Dominion , Face Painting by Dee Vinchey , Balloon Twisting by Presti Entertainment , the Purcellville Preservation Association folklore and sale, and the Purcellville Women’s Club Bake Sale. There’s supposed to be stuff happening outside the building, too! Scenes from Christmas in Purcellville 2009 ( via ).

The focus-grabby new iTunes has been bugging me, too, reinstallation has suppressed those messages.

The alleged compatibility of a bank’s mobile app with the iPod touch is worthless if there is also a requirement for a SMS-capable phone.

09 December 2010

The counters in the iPod touch confirm it, the number of frames exposed through the arrival of 2 years ago has dwarfed the number through any other individual camera in my hands over the past 22 years. I sketched a chart, and it’s apparent that not having to pay for film and developing changed everything starting in 2002 , although the DiMAGE cameras were used primarily for AFOL events.

My what really big ear muffs you have.

08 December 2010

You are false data. This third printing of Alan Dean Foster’s novel adapted from the script for Dark Star is surplus to the second printing despite the cover art. The film is out on DVD again .

The Find Friends Browser is showing me people who defriended me and those I’ve defriended. Awkward.

What a bolt with a Robertson head is doing on an old radio I don’t know but I have a driver to deal with it .

07 December 2010

Eventually they will disappear: Verizon contract for payphones on WMATA properties to expire in March ( via , since searching verizon on the newspaper site didn’t locate the article *shrug*). This view from October 21, 2008, I was still using the Minolta AF 50mm F1.4 [New] .

This looks better the smaller it is.

06 December 2010

The new release of a soundtrack compact disc set for Star Trek V The Final Frontier is described as a limited edition, I can tell you that this afternoon iTunes was not able to retrieve any track information from Gracenote. I no longer let iTunes retrieve album artwork and prefer to scan my own . This should be the last purchase of that type for this year . The Star Trek V The Final Frontier album was the next to last purchase on vinyl over 20 years ago before I bought something which could play compact discs.

This looks to be in focus , too, despite the wide aperture and the moving vantage point. It's the first time I see the local scheme in use at this location, and it much better suits the indicated route. At 100% in the original file the CAUTION words on the label are readable.

05 December 2010

With the release of new firmware last week and its alleged benefits in focusing speed and accuracy , I have been trying it out, right, especially with the 85mm lens? Er, not so much, but here is a Duncan Solutions Pay-and-Display Multi-Space Meter on a local street, and it looks to be in focus.

The sensitivity of the Apple Mouse (actually the use of the scroll gesture to implement zoom instead) makes it a less than ideal match for Google Maps , especially with this tool that attempts to show the real-time locations of Metrorail trains . Now if that could be done for buses…

04 December 2010

Today’s discard is identified by some story analysis and generation site as a smart story that is conceptually complete and logically comprehensive. Maybe its cast has something to do with its appeal, too. It’s the first title in this watching them in reverse order of purchase project to have been purchased on DVD.

What are the two public displays that WAMALUG participated in this year ? Not my problem.

03 December 2010

Some Facebook Page administrators just have to delete the occasional add me up, guys :) comment, but the White House has given up on allowing comments entirely at its Flickr account since July.

Version 2.0 of this app sometime next week is supposed to fulfill the promise of compatibility with the iPod touch.

02 December 2010

Mmm, firmware . After two years , I’m seeing some brassing at the edges on the back of the body. In the meantime I ended up retiring most of the Minolta lenses, in shelving its predecessors I put the 50mm on the Maxxum 7 and the 17-35mm on the Maxxum 7D. One wide angle lens could be replaced , but austerity is the plan.

01 December 2010

Do you really want to be fingering a communal iPod touch in an Old Navy store? ( via ). Ew !

A less than faithful rendition of a Metrorail car catches my eye…

30 November 2010

That was fast, last year I could barely contain my disgust at Iomega’s association with Retrospect , then earlier this year EMC sold Retrospect to Sonic Solutions , the company that aroused my suspicions 5 years ago . Still running Toast 8, Roxio.

Oh, dear, another person who hasn’t noticed the abandonment of camel-case by Brickshelf ( previously ).

29 November 2010

With the passage of this month, the name of a principal member falls from the active participant list at WamaLTC . Hmm, no update in over two years. I wonder if I should change another name on the inactive list on the basis of this search result . Two displays are planned for December.

The chilly weather in a large metropolitan area to the west finds some of its citizens coping and others not .

28 November 2010

There is no point to planning a gasoline purchase in Baltimore when there is a home game, all the gas stations along Russell Street are used as parking. I can thank a multiple jurisdiction police response to the interchange with MD-32 for delaying my southbound route along MD-295 for an hour.

The B&O Museum Photography Policy has been revised since my mention of it on the occasion of our first display there. The sign in the building actually calls it an imaging policy and posting to the Internet is no longer identified as a forbidden activity. The museum’s Facebook Page describes the MARC 7100 F7-A as the latest addition to the site.

27 November 2010

I just discovered it by viewing 6302 Little River Turnpike , but it’s been true since earlier this year: Flickr Photos In Google Street View .

This view of a 1966 Chrysler 300 convertible doesn’t show the gas pedal or I might have used it to bolster my answer about the car in this video . Dodge Dart was so obviously wrong as an answer, but my search started with Edsels and Fords before a Flickriver result led to the Mopar contingent.

26 November 2010

So all these pulleys and strings, what’s that all about? What are they for? With that one exception, today’s audience at the B & O Railroad Museum was better versed in the engineering of moveable bridges than the one in September , correctly explaining the principles of vertical lift.

25 November 2010

Is it a LiveJournal craze for Sheila Jetta Burns or just referrer spam?

Today’s discard has been mentioned previously and it offers Tara Reid before the wardrobe malfunctions and other indignities here and indignities there . Hey! What happened to the E! True Hollywood Story ? Oh, it’s called THS now. See what happens when I don’t subscribe to cable.

This looks like an entirely legitimate business to keep in mind if I ever have an antique vehicle.

24 November 2010

This link alleged to be for a Page at Facebook doesn’t go anywhere useful for me. Oh, good, feeds have shown up at the community blog .

23 November 2010

A Republican senator withholds unanimous consent and delays legislation which has already passed the House and is also expected to pass the Senate easily, and he doesn’t even know why because he’s objecting as a favor to another Senator. An everyday occurrence these days, you say, but obstructionism in the Senate is a long-standing tradition. The Franklin Pierce Center for Intellectual Property at the University of New Hampshire School of Law hosts a variety of documents including the relevant passages from the Congressional Record of the Senate leading up to the passage of The Patent Act of 1952 in July that year. Senator Robert C. Hendrickson (R-NJ) stood to object after H.R. 7794 with amendments had just been passed already , and this must be what comity is all about, there was no objection to his request that the vote be reconsidered! He was not prepared to withdraw his objection even as he thought it was a very meritorious measure which he was in favor of because his objection was on behalf of the Senator from North Dakota. Senator William Langer (R-ND) objected to bringing the act up for a vote again later in the day. He was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and he had just listened to Sen. Hendrickson and Sen. McCarran (D-NV) tell the presiding officer that the bill had been approved by the Judiciary Committee, and that the approval had been unanimous. It took a third attempt the next day before there was no objection and the bill could pass (again). His birth was before the admission of North Dakota as a state so picky people would say he was born in the Dakota Territory .

22 November 2010

An email message from the webmaster of WAMALUG was recently found in my Spam folder at Yahoo! Mail, he was seeking information on the logo which while shrunken still retains a place on the site’s home page. I wonder, has the club lost track of the ten-foot banner ? What I called the least disliked logo submission had its origins in a 2002 project to replace the logo with the Washington Monument as the l but there was a revision to the color values the following year.

WamaLTC is falling behind in its social media strategy, here’s a club with a Twitter account and a Facebook Page . On the other hand, here is a club which is more reticent.

I remember this face from my movie-going days, back when AMC Hoffman Center 22 projected slides instead of video , which means it was taken more than a few years ago. She is reaching out to Neighbor with a Thanksgiving Day card and a magnet-backed business card with 2011 calendar appended.

21 November 2010

West Pratt Street in Baltimore is served by the Orange route of the Charm City Circulator and by the MTA Maryland’s Route 35 which runs between the University of Maryland Baltimore College and White Marsh Mall . The press release from Monday last week about the placement of five new hybrid buses into service is inadequate for me to tell whether this example is one of them. That driver was booking . I could have used my SmarTrip card to ride it. Unfortunately, the XHTML 1.0 Transitional page served as text/html uses the deprecated name attribute rather than id so Gecko won’t locate the internal anchor for the answer that explains the cross-compatibility of the CharmCard and SmarTrip. The Holiday Festival of Trains at the B & O Railroad Museum begins this Friday.

20 November 2010

When shopping for a webcam, I shouldn’t find it distubing that a product’s box translates the laudatory blurb into many of the languages of eastern Europe and Central Asia. Alternatively, maybe there is a Kazakhstani somewhere who one day will be shopping in Micro Center and need the reassurance of a familiar language in choosing such a fine product.

I have not checked the local Marshall’s to see if they are selling something .

Today’s discard .

19 November 2010

Well, boo , I dropped off the thermostat installed by the builder of the premises a few years ago:

The City of Alexandria and Covanta Energy invites residents to drop off thermometers, thermostats, and/or any mercury-containing measuring devices on Saturday, November 20 between 7:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. at the City’s household hazardous waste collection center located at 3224 Colvin Street. Covanta will be distibuting $5 gift cards to City residents and City-based HVAC contractors who turn in these devices at this special collection event being held to encourage proper recycling and to prevent these potentially hazardous items from entering the waste stream.

When Art Imitates Life: Suing for Defamation in Fiction .

18 November 2010

Filed away against the day it’s needed: it is entirely prototypical to run a VRE train with two locomotives at one end. The double-decker passenger coaches I built last year are heavy and have lead a single electric motor to give out prematurely.

The new Dodge , now with less goat male sheep . Which one is the Caliber, I can’t tell?

17 November 2010

Today’s Facebook craze is the Johnston’s Auto Paint and Body Works . That corner of the intersection of Lee Highway and Gallows Road has been leveled.

Less than two weeks after I had a new battery installed, my fine piece of wrist-borne Swiss engineering (a LEGO® watch with Japanese movement) has stopped.

Huh, the URLs nasepismo.org and nasepismo.net which were off-line the last time I looked revived less than two weeks later and now redirect to a Blogger site . Ha, my graphic from 7 years ago is still there.

16 November 2010

There’s a new broom in town and he finds the design of the community’s website to be quite outdated. Fair enough, it’s been six years since I last did anything significant to the design, but I don’t find anything as up to date as even an RSS feed at the hosted blog.

15 November 2010

The normal desire to sleep last year has deprived me of channaher@facebook.com , snif.

A faster iPod touch is no match for crappy WiFi.

14 November 2010

In a week, WamaLTC will begin preparing our display in the B&O Railroad Museum , so it might be time to check the Baltimore Homicides viewer at the The Baltimore Sun . A shooting down the street, hmm, in a month that is quiet compared to last year’s.

Here’s hoping that CNQL2410_ClassicNotSeize.kext isn’t important. Some fancy restarting instructions missed the first time around. Closer to home, I didn’t even let the job sudo chflags -R nouchg / finish but the two programs I wasn’t able to install previously have now both been installed successfully and the Software Update window is empty.

Someone is optimistic: Macy’s is Hiring! says the sign at Landmark Mall.

13 November 2010

Yesterday I watched as a lady with a phone to her ear look ahead as she backed her car into a crosswalk where a man was walking and I did nothing much but slow down and stare from another crosswalk as he narrowly avoided being hit. This MetaFilter discussion on the reactions to a smokestack falling the wrong way links to a recent book on the subject of reactions to disaster and other stresses, which confirms that denial is the first stage of the survival arc.

Oh, sure, it’s all a big hoax or at least just a few disgruntled employees . O RLY? ( previously ). People are still seeing things in the frescos of the Sistine Chapel (plays sound) ( via ) even if this analysis of Michelangelo’s art may have missed something really blatant .

12 November 2010

I was never really tempted to restore the BBEdit951.app that I rescued from the Trash, but 9.6.1 is out and it doesn’t add blank lines in Strict Hierarchical in Markup Format, so yay.

The Combined Federal Campaign for the National Capital Area does not permit selective disclosure of personal information to recipients.

BeyondDC evaluates Top 10 bus paint jobs for the region. The diagonal bit noted for the low-rated DASH scheme is an artifact of their first purchases, the Orion I .

11 November 2010

I took my photograph of the then-new Plymouth Horizon the same month as finding the Imperial , the span between their manufactures was a bit longer . A low-resolution view of a late model Plymouth Horizon shows the change in the grille. Another one that isn’t in Garnet Red !

10 November 2010

A Curbside Classic essay on the 1960 Imperial very nearly like the one I found curbside almost 32 years ago .

The updates Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3 and Mac OS X Update 10.6.5 are not cooperating with my desktop computer. Well, this stinks, both installed fine on the notebook.

Peak oil? Why do you insist on looking backwards ?

09 November 2010

Planning for the WamaLTC display at the B & O Railroad Museum later this month is already underway but since I can occupy many tables on my own where will everyone else get to put their MOCs ? ;-) We’ll also be in Rockville this weekend, directions to the location on our website.

Mapnificent ( via ) doesn’t have a buses only option. A Seattle to Vancouver journey ( via ) on municipal buses.

Editorial from The Brothers Brick .

08 November 2010

Pennies are so worthless now that people are losing them in pairs.

The readership of the International LEGO® Users Group Network has declined to the point where a report of an arrest in New Jersey stirs no reply (today anyway), a more typical set of commenters at this version . The local ABC station also reports . Journalists know enough to click around MySpace it looks like.

07 November 2010

I’m continuing to use BBEdit 9.6 with the workaround I tweeted about , it’s a bug which is promised to be fixed in the upcoming 9.6.1 . A few pages at WamaLTC updated to include thumbnails.

06 November 2010

Ten tables at today’s display and that wasn’t enough to show anything even close to all of my vehicle MOCs .

Today’s discard was the last purchase of a laserdisc made at regular price, over ten years ago. The title has been previously mentioned for comparison with a later role by the lead actress.

One of the young ladies in line behind me at a local grocery was suddenly curious and asking her pals why Van Dorn but I kept my knowledge to myself.

05 November 2010

No lens cap. It’s true, while I store my lenses with a cap front and back, I don’t use a front lens cap in the field and that’s been true for decades, no living dangerously about it.

04 November 2010

The full name of WAMALUG may have lost a part or two over the years but this piece on its meetings cuts it down some more, not my problem really. Meanwhile, the calendar entry The Whistle Stop and Friends of Beatley Central Library sponsor an exhibit of LEGO TRAINS from the D.C. Metro Area LEGO Train Club. calls for the Picard Facepalm , the full name of the club is at the top of every page at the website .

03 November 2010

Tempted to use ⌘-+, it wasn’t my imagination, Facebook has shrunk its font size . The Groups icon in the updated application for iOS devices is only for the new kind. The Tag More Friends functionality is overdue.

02 November 2010

The name of the fruit of Pyrus pyrifolia would appear to be the subject of contention among competing ethnicities.

01 November 2010

It’s harder and harder to avoid Star Trek no matter where you go .

The project to have WamaLTC participants wearing branded apparel has at least one self-satisfied holdout , I’m not going to mention his name.

31 October 2010

The old URL for WAMALUG is now in the hands of someone displaying Japanese placeholder content, if Google Translate is to be trusted. A client in Japan is confirmed by a WHOIS search, the activity on the domain was nearly daily for the four weeks bridging March and April this year, Sedo ® is handling the sale of the domain which was allowed to lapse nearly 4 years ago .

Today’s discard was roundly condemned at the time of its release 12 years ago but with that out of the way it evokes now more of a gee everyone’s so young response.

30 October 2010

I avoided the subway and the crowds today, other bloggers go places though.

29 October 2010

The usual blogs and aggregators have been captivated by the idea that photographs of somewhat oddly dressed people in relatively ordinary situations are actually of time travelers. What are we to make, then, of the appearance of a Starfleet captain identified by name riding in the back of a Pontiac GTO convertible in a silent black and white video of a parade in Columbia, South Carolina on November 29, 1968 ( via )? The sources make a fuss over the episode which was broadcast that day (a reference to the primitive twentieth-century entertainment known as television ) but Shatner’s appearance on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day was between the production of The Way to Eden and the Requiem for Methuselah episodes.

There are at least two anachronisms in Heinlein’s novel from almost 30 years ago. The plans to change the name of a city to Mumbai were already in motion at the time of publication, but the official name change was made the same year (1995) that the United States shifted to a 20-year patent term . I suppose I bought the paperback (the hardcover had a much less salacious jacket ) to fill myself in on the backstory of a hall costume worn by an attendee at the Shore Leave convention of 1984 who did not do anything about the zipper pulls.

28 October 2010

It hasn’t changed for me yet, but the new logo I was trying to simulate typographically yesterday is supposed to be on its way.

WamaLTC plans a display this weekend, but no bridges have been requested. :-(

27 October 2010

First MySpace, sorry, my ⌊_____⌋ , now Flickr wants to suggest People You May Know and allow importation of Facebook friends. A seasonal boo to those who haven’t created a Buddy Icon.

The page for the Norfolk Southern Museum is a little scant on what there is to see and do there.

Immediately upon recharging after barely a week’s worth of use. Bluetooth menulet reporting Battery Level: 88%. These Apple rechargeable batteries are not going to work if the spare set is just as drained as the set I was using.

26 October 2010

It wouldn’t be WAMALUG if its Yahoo! Group wasn’t roiling in contention, this time because of an unironic linking to the Citizens Against Government Waste advertisement discussed on MetaFilter earlier. A description of the production made at a local venue. Is something happening next Tuesday?

BBEdit 9.6 now with HTML5 . Maybe it’s time for me to look into this.

25 October 2010

The aftermarket in fuser assemblies for the Laserjet 4200 series printers would appear to remain vigorous, one company promises AntiTear™ technology while another has engineered a metal replacement .

A potential connection of a famous abduction story with The Outer Limits is part of a theory of cultural disposition .

Do you have a light? What a question. No.

24 October 2010

So I endured Iron Man and Iron Man 2 this weekend and have confirmed that there’s a reason I don’t watch even the popular movies anymore. The Great Circle Mapper tells me (with a code from World Airport Codes ) that there are nearly eight thousand miles between Malibu and Afghanistan. Even granting supersonic speeds, where did Tony Stark eat?

23 October 2010

Identifying iPod models tries to make sense of the 9 year history of the device .

Google Maps sent me through downtown Baltimore past a large number of police vehicles without losing any time over using I-695, interesting.

22 October 2010

Friday Random 10 :

1. Ab Fab (I Am Thin and Gorgeous) (Original Instrumental) (Junior Vasquez, Ab Fab (I Am Thin and Gorgeous) (single) [12″] )
2. To Trap a Spy: The Kiss Off/Main Title (Jerry Goldsmith, The Spy With My Face Music From The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Movies )
3. UHF ( Weird Al Yankovic, UHF )
4. The Knife (Jerry Goldsmith, Star Trek: Nemesis )
5. Nr. 75 Arie (Baß): Mache dich, mein Herze, rein (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus Passion )
6. Sesame Street (David Frye, Richard Nixon Superstar [LP] )
7. Feelin’ Me (Jonathan Peters Sound Factory Vocal Mix) (Kim Sozzi, Feelin’ Me (Single) [12″] )
8. One of Those Days ( Weird Al Yankovic, Polka Party! )
9. Dead Again (John Beal, Coming Soon! Previews of Coming Attractions (Disc 1) )
10. Nr. 8 Rezitativ (Evangelist, Jesus): Da das Jesus merkete (Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus Passion )

Bluetooth menulet reporting Battery Level: 62%.

21 October 2010

It is a gross and monstrous injustice, which admits of no defence, of no palliation, and which cannot fail to shock the moral sense of all who, in the heady current of political life, can be induced to pause long enough to contemplate its revolting features. Joseph Holt writing in the Report of the Commissioner of Patent for the Year 1858 on the subject of his agency lacking the power of subpoena . Holt is also known for his role in an emerging technological order where the disinterest of legal detail and bureaucratic practice proved to be dominant realities.

It turns out that I’m not the only one re-reading an old novel . While one sees the cover of the paperback edition and wonders why it doesn’t reflect the putative heritage of the title character , another sees that title character as trans .

Bluetooth menulet reporting Battery Level: 67%.

20 October 2010

FaceTime becomes a desktop application (currently at 0.92) so now what? Also dubious of the value of full-screen apps in the forthcoming 10.7 .

The FAQ at the FDIC’s Electronic Deposit Insurance Estimator (EDIE) tells me that there’s a difference between single accounts and POD / ITF accounts .

It turns out that people who know their way around a context menu can discover the name and offense of the individuals depicted in an online mug shots gallery (including this category previously linked ) so a search result or two for a recently tweeted example is just a few keystrokes away: and talked to my pub defender and the dui prob wont be as bad as i thought!

Bluetooth menulet reporting Battery Level: 74%.

19 October 2010

Hmm, a flashing amber indicator is not a good sign. I was having doubts about whether the Apple rechargeable batteries are really of the low self discharge type because of a Battery Level: 68% reading, although to judge by the answers at the product page maybe Battery Level: 81% is all that can be expected even after a successful recharging.

18 October 2010

New version of Skype for Mac OS X coming soon ( via ) including the group video calling that’s already a part of the program on Windows .

Oh, so CBS.com will let me watch These Are the Voyages but not In a Mirror, Darkly ? I’m not supposed to be watching any television !

17 October 2010

The camera caught the wooden edge of the set on film but it was cropped out of broadcasts and home video until the remastered edition made it visible again .

A Greater Greater Washington contributor is getting pushback for yet another contentious opinion .

Facebook is already degrading the user experience with old Groups, maybe it’s only a matter of time before WamaLTC needs to rebuild.

Today’s discard was a purchase made on a recommendation, the movie’s reliance on IBM desktop computers for office decor and GMC New Look buses for public transit in the anonymous municipality may have been attempts to avoid contemporaneity.

16 October 2010

I had deprived the little girl of even one minifig of the many she could see were in my tub ( these are mine ) so later she made sure I saw how she had built a man out of the pieces available to her. Today’s display which was beset by wind.

15 October 2010

MeFites get around to discussing the crisis which I tweeted about last week .

This includes the Bradlee Center where the signal reaches to the bus stop across the service road: WiFi at company-owned Starbucks locations is free and has been since July first. The shopping center’s iconography has changed somewhat since these 1996 photographs .

14 October 2010

Now I see the family resemblance: the Curbside Classic: 1961 Ford Thunderbird Convertible offers this view of the front of a survivor while the Random link at Majhost brings up this three-quarter’s view of a scale model of the 1961 Lincoln Continental .

A published author turns to Twitter (not yet verified).

The weather widgets are no longer promising sun for Saturday.

13 October 2010

A month later Michelle Rhee announces that she will move on , these days that requires a fresh URL , Twitter account , and Facebook Page .

The Skeptic’s Dictionary helps me understand what sham acupuncture might be.

12 October 2010

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month and a local employer appropriates Nikola Tesla in the cause of neurodiversity . The URL in the poster is of last check parked at GoDaddy, Twitter account similarly unhelpful.

The weather widgets are predicting sun for Saturday.

The Gap blinks . Less than a week ? The logotype has been around a while .

11 October 2010

The Gracenote-supplied titles for the tracks of a recent addition to the library don’t include the titles of the individual episodes , but it’s not like I would remember much about them 20+ years later.

They can expire? This public photo link has expired. To see these photos, please ask the owner to generate a new public link.

My collection of issues of Cinefantastique has yet to be scheduled for removal. This guy bought the artwork for the cover of the Star Trek The Motion Picture double issue that never was published .

10 October 2010

I am developing another theory that in this camera the Nikon electronic VR is just a contrasty edge-finding sharpness boost, perhaps image processing is all it has. The thumbnail may reverse the impression of quality, link is to crop at 100%. Of the evolving automatic functions touted by the company, the food mode is one which a number of acquaintances might find nifty.

Oh, now everyone will want one .

09 October 2010

Twelve years ago today’s discard was able to find a screen at the AMC Skyline 7/12. I don’t suppose it could do so today.

The iPod touch has decided that maintaining filename order for every single one of the nearly ten thousand photographs thereon is too much trouble. Upon further investigation, the sort order been changed with iOS4 to rely on the Exif! This is especially idiotic for scans, but camera exposures can be found out of order, too. Grr.

08 October 2010

The number of views for my LEGO® MOC of T208 with red hubs has surpassed that of Suzie Plakson at Shore Leave 12 ( previously ) .

There is a new Editor at the website for the local planned unit development so there may be more activity there than before. I last devoted any attention to the styling of the site 6 years ago. The site is no closer to validating now than it was then , but the demand to add some space between an image placed in the summary field of an article and subsequent summaries has been satisfied with the adjacent sibling selector p+table because, BBEdit tells me, under HTML 4.01 Transitional the paragraph which wraps around the table is implicitly closed at the opening <p>. Oh, goody, I still have to check the site performance in Internet Explorer 8 *grumbles while adding the clear="both" attribute to a linebreak element*.

07 October 2010

The red light is off right now, but I wonder if it’s time to start thinking about replacing the battery in the uninterruptible power supply.

From last week (the postcard arrived today): the IRS will no longer mail paper tax packages .

06 October 2010

Maybe it is just linkbait , but xkcd’s Online Communities 2 ( view large ) goes past the usual suspects to include Brickshelf, it’s just west of Tumblr (h/t Rich).

05 October 2010

From neologism to desuetude was barely a decade, Ruly English was one of many dead ends in developing a mechanical approach to search.

I am developing a theory that the self-service cashiers at Shoppers are accepting only dollar bills from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond .

Not super impressed with the reliability of Facebook’s RSS Import to Notes function.

04 October 2010

Big things built of LEGO® elements at the Great Western LEGO Show and at BrickCon .

A local employer advertises the National Trademark Expo in a free daily tabloid (page 13) while its Facebook page ( previously ) becomes a magnet for cranks (who may have been deleted by now).

03 October 2010

I can’t imagine finding joy here , but whatever.

Today’s discard is inexplicable.

02 October 2010

So which is it, Mattel? The usual boilerplate phrase Manufactured for Mattel on the back of the blistercard has been joined in the section relating to the licensed use of Ford trademarks with Manufactured by Mattel.

ZVOX Audio tries not to rely on specifications which are under some other company’s control .

WMATA 2665 Metrobus Orion VII CNG has been available as a paper bus for almost a year. Meanwhile, a commenter with the single-minded fixation of the average MOCpages user has reached Flickr.

01 October 2010

This is what I’m talking about, a good afternoon sun but the New Flyer (running express route 17M despite its local branding) is hiding behind the 12-year old Orion V working the long-haul 29K. The crop is less aggressive and the link is to a resampling.

Vancouver photographer reminisces about a job for a local magazine .

You say your sound output is reverting to internal speakers after restart and you have to choose the setting for Output in the Sound Preferences pane each time you boot up?

1. Don’t restart. Repeat to yourself it just works .
2. Option-click the Sound menulet to choose the Output setting every time.
3. Open /Library/Preferences/Audio/ and discover that com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist are dated from before you ordered the computer, and that com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist~orig and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist~orig are dated from the first boot-up. Delete the .plist files and try to rename the .plist~orig files. You don’t have permission to rename those files, use the Sound Preference pane to choose the settings, one .plist file will be created. A restart to create the other file, delete the .plist~orig files, and you should be done.

I had a similar issue with the Sound Preferences pane after a Software Update on November ninth last year (10.6.2).

30 September 2010

The New Flyer DE42LFA Hybrid-Electric Low Floor has been elusive for that perfect combination of light and pose, so the link to a crop at 100% from the center of an image taken at 70mm through a rainy windshield will have to do for now. The Metrobus routes along that road are the 18E and 18F. The dazzle from the right headlight is enough to obscure the number, I’m sure it would have been much worse with a translucent mirror ;-)

29 September 2010

The project to digitize the archives of The Cavalier Daily has led to them being tossed into the pool from which the Google News Archive Search draws its results. Browsing the archive of this college student newspaper brings up this attempt by Victor Lavenstein to pass off a Chrysler LeBaron as a fleet vehicle. In that era most fleets that used an M-body chose the Dodge Diplomat .

The next-generation global Ford Focus 5-door , when driving something representative of one’s station in life is of no concern.

28 September 2010

I saw the drive of a Minnesota-based discount retailer to become a grocery as a boondoggle even before I visited every aisle of the Springfield Mall location twice looking for the electric shavers. The schedule is for the remodeling to be done by October seventeenth.

27 September 2010

If it was up to me, stopping for green lights would be suspicious behavior.

The temperature out west is getting some complaints on my social networks. Meanwhile, other stuff going on and more ( via ) merits only silence.

26 September 2010

I did not know that VA-110 assumes the role of the street carrying US-1 northbound through Arlington County ( via ).

Over a week ago, the editor of The Truth About Cars reflected on a year’s passage and thanked the readers and the contributors, with one exception . The anonymous blogger has not updated her own blog in a while, either.

You know, for an operating system billed as offering refinement, not reinvention the move to Mac OS X Snow Leopard disabled way more software than is found on this list . Grr.

25 September 2010

A few years ago I was rescuing Virtual PC 7 images to use with VMware Fusion but with the precipitous departure—the American Heritage Dictionary tells me I should use precipitate —of all PowerPC hardware from the premises such a rescue can no longer be accomplished.

The MySpace My Visitors feature would let me know who, among users who had also made the feature active, was checking out my profile. No thanks, it’s moribund.

Wouldn’t you know it, the technical support queries are resuming.

24 September 2010

First the birds got to talking , then the trees got in on the act .

Elmo is in the news recently for his collaboration with a brunette of some notoriety and as a counterweight to the manufactured outrage over some comedian testifying before Congress. I don’t dislike Elmo exactly, but I do have trouble discerning what Elmo is saying.

23 September 2010

Taking a break from the technical support calls tonight.

The list of exhibitors at the Vienna Oktoberfest includes something called the Wash. Metro LEGO Train Club. Paul T. Gernhardt and Reston Heights are able to write longer words. What a miserable day that was.

A tiny blip of interest among Facebookers for the Burger Delite . Thanks to redirects ( via ) I can’t have any idea who.

22 September 2010

I was all set to complain about another Apple-only connector , but Wikipedia tells me that the mini DisplayPort is also used by Toshiba and HP.

21 September 2010

Preaching to the converted: DASH is using the destination boards on the buses to urge participation in Virginia’s Try Transit Week .

The submini jack on the back of the Power Mac G4 was only useful with the Apple Pro Speakers . No proprietary jack, no use for those speakers.

20 September 2010

The decluttering project has reached a stack of Soundtrack! magazines from 1992 and in flipping through them prior to tossing I read about The Film Music of Joe Harnell , a limited release private pressing that included the soundtrack of the first V miniseries. At the time maybe I could have ordered it from Belgium for $40 but now the estate of the composer sells what must be CD-Rs for $20 and the album is available on iTunes for $10, so, my first purchased digital download.

19 September 2010

Parents have a lot on their mind, so not knowing the principles behind the engineering of movable bridges is not something they can be faulted for. Saying the wrong principle to a child, however, is another matter entirely, but I kept quiet as truss spans that were clearly rigid even as they were hinged and lifted were described as suspension bridges. Cantilever? Nope.

Today begins observation of Unmarried and Single Americans Week and the U.S. Census Bureau is ready with Facts for Features .

Wikipedians still haven’t found that perfect image of Terry Farrell to use on the page for her and this is the second time I’ve been asked to change the license on one of mine .

18 September 2010

Minifigs trapped in building façade collapse! Emergency responders struggle to save lives while writing off the structure as a complete loss! Normally WamaLTC welcomes contributions from new participants but when an established participant brings the same MOC again and again in disrepair, some mocking may ensue. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I myself need to make a small change to the gearing of the bascule bridge.

Today’s discard features a Nikon camera.

17 September 2010

The page you’re looking for can’t be found. Say buh-bye to M9179LL/A . I can hear the taunts of discontinued model ( again ) already. There’s only a 27-inch LED Cinema Display in the Apple Store now. The 30-inch LCD display was introduced 6 years ago , I don’t suppose Apple will be hosting the Pfeiffer Report’s The 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display Productivity Benchmark for much longer.

16 September 2010

Firefox Main Window Heatmap is a guide to how the interface of Firefox 4.0 Beta was used on Windows 7/Vista for one week last July and it looks like people used the Back function most often but clicked on the vertical scroll bar twice as often. Really, clicking on the vertical scroll bar? Beta users of the next Firefox clicking on the vertical scroll bar? A mouse with a scroll wheel is less than… ok, it’s a little more than a Taco Bell Chicken Burrito Meal Deal . Hmm, more than a Wendy’s Deluxe Value Meal . Ah, finally, it’s less than the Arby’s $5.01 combos . Arby’s problems run deeper than menu prices .

15 September 2010

From an issue of Star Trek The Official Fan Club from 20 years ago: Sometimes it gets to be a little too much. I’m a very private and secretive person. I’m not into everyone knowing everything about my life. You know, everyone has the right to be curious but there are just some things that are personal and are my own things that I don’t think everyone needs to know about. Wil Wheaton has relaxed a little in the meantime.

14 September 2010

Today’s primary in the adjoining capital city may decide whether the region’s most visible Korean American remains at her job . My feelings on the subject are mixed in the wake of the endorsement by the if-it’s-in-there-it-must-be-nonsense tabloid.

The big Ford dealer I take my vehicles to for maintenance blocks access from the service lane access points to www.apple.com as Ecommerce/Shopping. Boo.

13 September 2010

The cropping by Aziz in this image , whether intentional or otherwise, leaves a rather generic midsection for the sedan with the signs, but today I’ve been able to make an identification repeatedly.

This month marks 7 years of driving the Focus and 5 years of driving the Escape . Be fair, they’re used less than any computer.

Left the factory on Thursday.

12 September 2010

With the placement of the Power Macintosh G3 in the trunk of the Focus, there are no longer any second-hand computers in the habitable portions of the premises. Its arrival at the end of September of 2004 led to much stress as recounted in these pages but served adequately enough until the arrival of a replacement nearly 3 years ago . The Beige Desktop itself displaced a Performa that had arrived in December of 2001 and slowly taken over the website editing duties from a Compaq notebook. So here’s hoping a three-year lifespan for used computers is no guide to longevity for computers purchased as new.

The removal of the Mini-Feed story importer over a week ago did not halt the previously established importation of this site’s feed into Facebook Notes. There is a little less than a day’s delay for each post to show up.

Both of my double track railroad bridges are expected at WamaLTC’s display at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum for the KidsFEST Weekend.

11 September 2010

The hard drive cages have a spare set of four screws each , I never noticed them. Then again, not everyone has a Micro Center in the area, how convenient that the Sonnet 6-pin to 9-pin Firewire Adapter ( previously ) is found on the racks there. I am looking forward to removing the last vestiges of user-oriented internal ribbon cables on the premises, as the Power Macintosh G3 (Beige Desktop) valiantly offering up its parts for a rescue attempt hasn’t worked.

10 September 2010

Apple sweats the details? Unacknowledged in this explanation of how to remove the optical drive cage from a Power Mac G4 MDD is the existence of four spare screws installed on the far side against the day the end user wants to install another drive.

09 September 2010

WamaLTC has updated the location of the display on the first weekend of November. While the sponsor gets its brand new, dynamic website ready, there is a Facebook Page .

No need to link to my own capture, others have struggled with the gray screen of death too.

08 September 2010

USA Today launched 28 years ago this month , I recently counted how many times the name of the newspaper appears on the distinctive dispensers and the answer was six .

It wouldn’t even make a good band name: poor editing at the Star Trek The Official Fan Club magazine in its exclusive interview with William Shatner on the occasion of the release of Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country has him describing Costa Gravis as one of the great abject prop filmmakers of this generation….

07 September 2010

A Flickr contact turns his attention to a local movie theater , interior shots seem a little unsteady.

From the U.S. Social Security Administration Office of Policy a few years ago: The Never-Married in Old Age: Projections and Concerns for the Near Future .

06 September 2010

A revision of the LDraw Color Chart last year substitutes Transparent Black for the LEGO® color Transparent Brown. I wonder what happens when one loads the file for my R206 .

The Fairfax Connector has a list of routes operating today but the printed version appearing in the kiosks did not include the 402 in that list.

Sony no longer sells branded CompactFlash media and hasn’t seen fit to offer any SD cards, either. The store at Tysons doesn’t stock low self-discharge rechargeable batteries and they’re not so easy to find on their sonystyle.com website . I noted Sony’s abandonment of the wired telephone market six years ago, oh, but for Kmart, they will slap their brand on a $12.99 FM/AM pocket radio . Hmm, No longer available for purchase at Sony Style.

05 September 2010

By contrast, the LDraw file for the CVS/pharmacy which has no interior and a simple roof came together in about half the time of the complicated casual dining creations from yesterday.

WamaLTC will be displaying next month at several venues with no access to electric power, so I’m told if I want to exhibit any track-borne creation, it needs to be battery-powered. Fine, done. There will be electric power at this month’s display location , though.

04 September 2010

I have finished an LDraw file for my serious Burger King MOC , the franchise has embarked on an ambitious remodeling effort ( Gizmodo ). Might as well as create an LDraw file for the McDonald’s , too, before it gets the Forever Young treatment. It’s one thing to have a creation, quite another to figure out how to get there. What I’m saying, no matter how many shows the McDonald’s has been at, the roof had to be changed before it was buildable .

Today’s discard is a title which, since I purchased the 25th Anniversary release, has been deemed culturally significant and worthy of being listed in the National Film Registry .

03 September 2010

The availability of Slope Brick 45 2×2 Double Convex in a recently issued LEGO® game has spurred some use of MLCAD that isn’t complete yet.

02 September 2010

Paul M. Newitt, author of the Star Fleet Assembly Manual , is still in business . The fourth installment of the series has yet to fall victim to decluttering. The actual plastic model kit of the Enterprise from Star Trek The Motion Picture which the modeling guide was for I do believe left the premises some time ago.

After a quick lookaround, I had turned off the new social network before the Welcome to Ping e-mail arrived.

The Mini-Feed story importer ( previously ) is gone again.

01 September 2010

I don’t know how reassuring it is to hear the bus driver speaking of points and suspended licenses even if the discussion is supposed to be about the past.

Just feels like this page should have a dedicated feed or something.

31 August 2010

Shoppers has reacted to the recent concerns regarding Bisphenol-A on thermal paper by doubling the length of the receipts.

There are new bulbs in the ceilings of the elevators this week.

About the first thing that New Breed Logistics wants you to know about them is that they’re union-free. I just wanted a new battery for my mobilni and this company does the fulfillment for my carrier.

The list of ethanol-free gas stations in the United States ( via ) reveals none in the vicinity.

30 August 2010

The last gasps of irrelevance as MySpace Now Letting Users Syndicate Status Updates to Facebook but why would I want to grant access to my photos and videos? Where’s the value proposition there ?

Late-Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality ( via ) hmm.

29 August 2010

Last year I was working my way towards building a Richmond Highway Express (REX) bus in LEGO® elements and while the initial result received some dismissive commentary elsewhere the building style now has a name: Existing Pieces, Ignoring Color (EPIC) .

28 August 2010

Among the visitors to the Dulles Town Center today, there was a nontrivial derisive opinion of WMATA operations. This is the end result of the evolving MOC , the last mutation was to separate the cab and the bed and apply stickers.

27 August 2010

A lot of comments about an old memorandum , but no one finds the presence of the name Julia Nickson on the list interesting?

26 August 2010

The author of the Technical Book of Science Fiction Films ( previously ) is identified in the eighth issue of Enterprise and it’s not the name which appears on this list .

Captain Morgan Avery didn’t care for the standard Starfleet padding .

Ana Invanovic is not included in this New York Times gallery of slow-motion videos of female tennis players ( via ), oh, the article may explain why.

25 August 2010

Let me see if I have this right:

1. Successfully enroll in eBill Automatic Payment Plan
2. Utility does not withdraw payment on due date
3. ?????
4. Someone’s profiting and it’s not me. Grr.

The Husian Gambit lasted over 4 months in a syndicated newspaper comic strip where the normal story arc was barely 2 months (although it’s rivaled in length by a later arc ). Captain Vera DiMarco didn’t believe in hairspray .

24 August 2010

You’d think with all the discussion about destination boards earlier this year, I would be reading them before I boarded a bus. Hmm, not so much, it turns out.

There’s a new sign that says one line for all four self check out stands, yeah, good luck with that, Shoppers #52.

Evolution of a MOC : (1) photograph a likely prototype; (2) crib off someone on MOCpages ; and, (3) actually look at the photograph and realize changes are needed. For one thing the bed needs to be longer, so it’s not quite ready for a project card yet, for Saturday I have the bus in 8404 built using red rather than lime. WAMALTC will have a large model train display and an interactive lego display set up for everyone to check out and explore.

23 August 2010

Who is Darrell Green and why does he want me to be… longer ? It wasn’t enough to advertise in the subway station, Inova had to send a postcard. Football references are not the way to get my attention.

22 August 2010

The wraps which say Chevy Chase Bank ( previously ) have to hang on for less than 3 weeks now.

The Geosocial Universe ( via ) is a misleading graphic to the extent that it makes the Skype mound look smaller than the Facebook mound.

21 August 2010

The count of my tweets has shrunk! Do other accounts have some ability to delete conversations?! No, since my @ reply to Lands’ End Business Outfitters is still visible individually, the problem would appear to be with Twitter .

I find myself with 20 Facebook credits . I will pay just as much attention to that as I do the points accruing on any credit card of mine.

The Mini-Feed story importer that disappeared this week ( previously ) has returned.

20 August 2010

The link to pay for Tweetie for Mac no longer works, maybe the program became freeware after Twitter bought the iPhone/iPod touch app from the company and moved to prevent any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

19 August 2010

The home is not a Place in the Facebook scheme. Their sources for local businesses are so old they’ve missed that BLT Shirt Printers have moved.

18 August 2010

Tomica is set to return to this continent ( via ) but it sounds like the miniatures will be tied to purchases of sets , boo. Autoblog is always slow, goes the story, the reintroduction was reported a month ago . Majorette moved to Thailand, Tomica moved to China . Once upon a time, in Charlottesville, grocery stores sold Pocket Cars at the checkout racks. What it takes to keep the basic die-cast miniature like Matchbox selling for 97¢ on store pegs decades later is not something I want to look too closely at.

I see people are driving the new Ford Fiesta.

The Mini-Feed story importer announced over 2 years ago is gone : The Imported Stories feature is no longer available. Most of the sites supported by this feature now allow you to publish stories to Facebook directly from the site. So while I’m writing this, the withdrawn feature works to bring yesterday’s post to my Wall. Another well-handled transition, Facebook.

I hope the cost was worth it, maj.com is redirecting.

17 August 2010

I’ve reconsidered my stance on the future of the postal system, perhaps, and have been converting to online statements and automatic debits for my utility bills, yes, including the one for electricity.

So Hilary Duff gets married while that reheaded contemporary tries to leave a second stint in rehab early. It’s been over 3 years since Duff’s last new album .

16 August 2010

The multicolor logo which WAMALUG has yet to abandon completely required modification for the Brick Engraver to tackle it ( example brick is second from bottom ), but now that Tommy Armstrong is the Brick Printer maybe the club can give it another try. My multicolor brick is a printout from a color printer taped to the brick.

A couple of amendments to the values in the previous dispatch . See, slowly changing facts.

15 August 2010

The science fiction novel by Gordon Williams The Micronauts starts with a hiccup on the first page by describing a Manhattan location as the old Pan Am building . The identification is for the benefit of readers in 1977 not the inhabitants of a New York in a world ravaged by the results of germ warfare research in the middle of the century. Did I really buy it for the Boris Vallejo painting on the cover? Apparently that was just an excerpt .

Mesofacts : the blog of slowly changing facts ( via ). I really, really would not have believed that when I got a mobile phone in 1997 ( 1999 ) that I was part of only 4% 8% of the population worldwide, the world has changed since then .

14 August 2010

The tradeoff with bridge motorization as pursued so far is that the spans may not be raised or lowered manually anymore. Children are captivated by the autonomous operation but no more quick dashes in or out of the display while trains are still running. WamaLTC has a display in two weeks at Family Fest 2010 but the next opportunity for the public to enjoy a movable bridge may be next month. I gather this is the bridge that ended up 16 studs shy at last weekend’s display at BrickFair, an otherwise fine double track through truss with no overhead bracing.

Today’s addition to the discard pile has been analyzed before .

13 August 2010

Low End Mac evaluates the new Microsoft page comparing PCs and Macs and I’ll mention one difference in how the mouse works that bugs me: on a Mac, the ability to scroll follows the location of the mouse pointer, but on Windows, oh no, I have to make that window active first. Grr.

No link: WMATA confirms the clamor created by the story led them to take down their Facebook page .

Note to self: after a power outage, check what direction the ceiling fans are turning.

12 August 2010

Someone is optimistic: BMW of Alexandria has a sign up where the Buick/Pontiac/GMC dealer used to be .

The new Twitter button ( via ) does not play nice with XHTML because of the additional attributes for the anchor tag.

11 August 2010

There must be a reason this was on the front page yesterday, the he said, she said journalism also has an agenda . Your liberal media at work.

10 August 2010

Sony is an also-ran in everything now: among a select group of humanity , those who have a profile pic taken with a Sony dSLR are less hot than those who choose a Panasonic, Leica, Canon, Pentax , or Nikon ( via ). Better than a Minolta dSLR, though.

WMATA reacts to people with an agenda by killing its Facebook Page . The link on this page is no longer operative, it lasted about 18 months .

09 August 2010

Ooh, scary, Microsoft wants you to know ( via ) that the mouse works differently on a Mac so maybe you should stick with a PC. I wasn’t aware that using the mouse was such a hurdle, certainly no one I’ve introduced to Mac has mentioned it. Funny how there’s no buy a Mac and install Windows 7 on it also message to be found. Instead, it’s inanities like Macs aren’t available in your favorite color so buy a PC instead. This is satire, right? No?

From last weekend: eight years after their debut, Kevin Loch’s Metrorail cars get another run. I’m having trouble finding evidence of the 112-stud long bridge for a 128-stud long gap that I’ve heard was in the WamaLTC display.

More of that Star Trek music that was promised for this year is expected next month.

08 August 2010

My first attendance at a WAMALUG meeting 9 years ago was part of a post-BrickFest bounce and I haven’t been keeping track much since then of how the annual festival affects the local monthly operation, but the club cannot afford to have even 1% of the public admissions to this weekend’s BrickFair show up at next Saturday’s meeting.

The latest in a series about why owning a vintage Porsche might be a very bad idea indeed.

07 August 2010

10214 Tower Bridge unveiled at BrickFair is described as LEGO®’s first bridge, maybe they mean the first in the consumer line because they’ve built this bridge before , and it’s of the movable type. The Tower Bridge is a road bridge which combines two bascule leaves and two suspension spans, but the LEGO® model omits the upturn in the suspension cables and the smaller towers to which they lead. A search of the Lugnet set database for bridge yields some results, including examples in Duplo.

06 August 2010

The vertical lift bridge earlier seen in manual operation at last month’s WAMALUG meeting has subsequent to the motorization ( previously ) been modified to adjust part selection and replace the links joining the two towers with a truss. A final color shift for the span awaits. The discovery that the axles linking the counterweights to the support cables have experienced a deformation from the weight has not led to a corrective action plan yet.

I discover that something on my shelves has been retroactively categorized as steampunk . It’s on its way to a growing pile already.

05 August 2010

Just as well I never learned what Google Wave was about: We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product …

04 August 2010

The iPhone reached South Korea last November and is said to be popular there, despite its inability to support Flash and ActiveX which I’m led to understand are indispensable parts of websites in that country .

03 August 2010

As promised earlier the web site of the international organization of LEGO® train clubs has folded and I’ve removed links to it from the WamaLTC site. Someday someone might notice . If WamaLTC was more organized we’d have taken up the question of why we’re still not represented at Brick Railroader . If only more participants in WamaLTC were gathering at some big event this weekend …

02 August 2010

Besides the sore fingertips from assembling the innards of the counterweight, a victim of the bridge electrification projects is one motor I discovered to have a stuck shaft. This failure of the LEGO® Technic 9V electric mini motor 71427 is an old problem . Comparison of old and new motors in this form factor and much more besides. Bob has left his bridge assembled for over 4 years now, but a motorized bascule bridge was on the layout of the Greater Midwest LEGO® Train Club over 9 years ago. They used string as a truss ! Single-track swing bridge means no bridge type has gone unbuilt by somebody. More at MOCpages .

Timequake! John Varley’s novel of time-traveling body snatchers ( previously ) who limit themselves to stuff that won’t be missed has the Titanic decaying in the ninety-ninth century because no one ever found it.

01 August 2010

I never believed for a moment that the protagonist of today’s discard was a good guy gone bad and it’s not just the casting of Woody Harrelson as Harry Barber, it’s the script, too, maybe even the direction. Sadly, the Internet Movie Car Database has no result for searching this movie’s title or I would have more to say about the fine product of the Ford Motor Company seen therein.

Another thing I have exhausted the surplus of besides straight track is train 9V controllers ! I have yet to engage with any Power Functions motorization, and this most recent project requires speed control available only with the IR Speed Remote Control accessory , anyway.

31 July 2010

Amateurs have trouble distinguishing fonts and so do professionals, if this comparison of a Cosmopolitan cover from July 1979 with Gia Carangi and a mockup using Angelina Jolie prepared for the HBO telefilm is to be believed. Alternatively, something about trademark law might have led to the choice of a different font. By the time Gia told the story of the troubled cover model, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine had changed and the font had gotten bolder, and if you wanted to tell me that this cover photo had been sweetened since Patrick Demarchelier took the original, I’d believe you.

I was ready to make use of the quotation ( previously ) but no, there are now two single-leaf bascule bridges in the WamaLTC inventory that are motorized. That is, unless Bob has disassembled his.

30 July 2010

For future reference: the large Pick a Brick cup will hold about a thousand unassembled Brick 1×1. Remember, BrickFair is still a week away. Visitors to the location this weekend are encouraged to enjoy their Second Amendment rights while they still can .

29 July 2010

I am so happy to be receiving catalogs from Lands’ End Business Outfitters in the name of a WamaLTC participant, a name which is not my own. Maybe I should follow his Twitter .

Cookies the size of tortillas, I didn’t partake.

28 July 2010

For the truth table that has the two models of bus in the DASH fleet as propositions and the two destinations seen so far for the westbound AT7 as expressions all results have the value TRUE. A training issue?

Another day, another counterweight. I’m going to need more Brick 1×1. Again .

27 July 2010

With its foray into branded rechargeable batteries , Apple is following Sony into a market niche, but I should say that Sony’s e-mail marketing is landing in my Spam folder.

My LEGO® MOC of the local municipality’s tractor-drawn aerial ladder has surpassed Suzie Plakson in the number of views.

The Mattel Hot Wheels 1973 Ford Falcon XB is what I think it is, the basis for the Mad Max car . More views of the diecast toy .

I am convinced that Facebook plans to suggest as a friend every single person born in Keyser, West Virginia .

26 July 2010

The usual practice in bascule bridge construction is to use a single massive concrete weight extending across the bridge with connection at each side of the bridge… but when such bridges are traversed with electric cars the towers must be abnormally high to avoid interference of a single cross weight with the trolley wires… so it’s just as well that WamaLTC does not run trolleys across its bridges. The author turns out to be an engineer of some reknown mostly for elevators who turned to movable bridges late in life, but the author of Movable Bridge Engineering explains that he had little success , so the bridge I built last year may not have a real-world prototype at all, whereas single-leaf heel trunnion bascules are just everywhere , really . The Johnson Street Bridge threatened with demolition .

Three years ago I had the opportunity to eat at In-N-Out and wasn’t impressed , now the food recreation blogger at A Hamburger Today has turned his attention to the Double-Double, Animal-Style ( via ).

25 July 2010

Localization in operation: when I followed the link to the Microsoft knowledgebase (about how to move the Standard toolbar in Windows Internet Explorer 8, previously ) using a Windows XP Professional virtual machine with a language pack installed , Microsoft redirected me to a support page based on the installed language which did not include the Microsoft® Fix It button and demanded A4 paper to print.

Project card, BrickLink orders, the usual… apparently my latest creation is on its way to being (largely) monochrome even if it won’t be at BrickFair .

24 July 2010

Sidewalk from station entrance to Duke Street Tunnel is too narrow, I’ll agree with that. Planning for improvements to access at the King Street Station continues. My municipality wants you to know that West Nile Virus has been detected.

Bob had it easy, his bridge lifts by running a gear along a rack , lifting a bridge using cables strings that snag on everything and wrap around each other and argh is a whole ’nother level of pain. Then the bridge has to come down again, more strings! But it has been accomplished for at least a few cycles. Someone asked at the WAMALUG meeting asked if I’ve run a train through it and the answer is no, after a Metro station and two bridges I have no straight track left . I suppose I could send the battery-operated WMATA switcher …

23 July 2010

The creator of Pearls Before Swine chose in yesterday’s installment to depict someone in aquatic distress and not someone drowning ( via ).

The difference in the AT7 destination boards may have something to do with the equipment installed in the two types of buses in use. Yesterday’s capture shows a Gillig Phantom with a flip-disc display, while the one from Monday is of an Orion V with a LED display. Why they would be programmed differently remains a mystery.

22 July 2010

So much for my theory based on a single example , they can fit HOLMES RUN PARKWAY on the destination board, but the sign is still blank. A year later, the buses still don’t have bike racks .

If a user of Internet Explorer 8 activates the Developer Tools (F12) and switches to IE8 standards mode while viewing this page, the quotation marks show up again. The effect is not permanent, though.

21 July 2010

After implementing a fix for the <q> element a while back, I got complacent with how this site rendered in Internet Explorer 6, but my small audience of visitors using that browser is shrinking and I discover that Internet Explorer 8 renders these pages in IE7 quirks mode which really means no better than Internet Explorer 5 did! The fix for quotation marks is nowhere to be seen and the generated content which IE8 standards mode is supposed to be able to render is also missing. The downgrade probably has something to do with writing in XHTML but serving HTML to Internet Explorer because I’ve tried the X-UA-Compatible meta statement for document compatibility with no improvement.

This is how I moved the Standard toolbar to above the Address bar . Microsoft’s resource for installing, reinstalling, or uninstalling Windows 7, Vista, XP.

Korea Post has Postal Service The People’s Love as a slogan on its English page . There is no mention of any forwarding service for residents who’ve moved. This blog post tagged moving post is not helpful.

While MOCpages upgrades its hardware the site is crashing Mobile Safari.

20 July 2010

My state senator exaggerates —it’s a SLOW DOWN MOVE OVER law that recently became effective in this commonwealth.

All I could find at the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s site was the press release for her booking in 2007 but since I ran the arrest photograph 3 years ago… The Smoking Gun® fills in the gap in my collection .

I’m thinking the phone lines to the Regional SmarTrip Center melted in the wake of the announcement of an enhanced SmarTrip® web site. If there are no other calls ahead of me, why isn’t mine being answered? Ah, all done, it turned out that the hiccup was the telephone number at work… which changed in 2004 .

19 July 2010

It will take a while to change all the signs, but there is no longer a municipal bus route that routinely has LANDMARK MALL as a destination. (There will be the occasional AT8S.) As it happens, despite the earlier prediction , the destination board for the westbound AT7 is showing DUKE & RIPLEY even though the route proceeds past that intersection and ends at Duke and Pickett.

There’s a July 19th I remember from 15 years ago because I went to see Clueless that afternoon. (I had photographed a promotion for the film at the United Artists Fairfax Towne Center earlier in the month.) Research says I went to see this 2 years later but Jackie Chan is not nearly so memorable. As if! Twenty-nine years ago it was The Hospital ( previously ).

18 July 2010

The messages in my AOL mailbox are mostly spam #firstworldproblem so it’s time to change the setting from Medium to High.

There were only a few more years to go for Woodward & Lothrop when the local department store chain sent this flyer for Estée Lauder in 1990. Despite the existence of the Lauder for Men line (which at the time included besides the fragance a shaving gel and a shampoo), the unsolicited mailing did not lead to any sales in the addressed household. The face of the eighties ( previously ) was 2 years into her contract. I discern from Wikipedia that writing her name diacritically requires U+0159, U+00ED, and U+00E1.

Today’s overwrought contribution to the discard pile .

17 July 2010

The behavior of Yahoo Updates! to Facebook ( previously ) has been tweaked to consolidate uploads .

It’s not as easy to find a low priced monitor as it was 6 years ago , 4 years ago , even 1 year ago .

16 July 2010

People are talking about it, but I must have slept right though it . The previously reported earthquake in this region 2 years ago was not significant enough to remain on the USGS site.

Serco announcement from May does not identify when the agency should expect delivery of the… VTOL ? Hunter-killer ? depicted in the brand awareness advertising in the corner of the local subway station.

Wachovia has taken the baby step of adding A Wells Fargo Company to its branding. Because I had seen the installation work earlier, the presence of a new ATM at an area location did not come as a surprise . A standard feature of the newer machines is the choice of six languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Hmong, Korean, Vietnamese).

Someone wearing a Wrath of Khan costume in the audience ( post ) at Shore Leave last weekend, it wasn’t me.

15 July 2010

The relaunch of StarTrek.com means that the banner ad I was linking to on the Diversions page is gone.

14 July 2010

It may well have been in the children’s Star Trek novel Mission to Horatius that I first came across the word Doppelgänger . I passed up the facsimile publications of the late nineties of this minor work because my edition was obtained in 1975 at a sale of deaccessioned volumes from the library of my high school.

13 July 2010

Do I engineer with a safety factor? I do not. There are trackplan designers who think two studs is a perfectly adequate space in which to build, something about a four-studs-from-the-edge rule, grumble, grumble.

12 July 2010

Oops: Make sure you deauthorize your computer before you upgrade your RAM, hard disk or other system components, or reinstall Windows. If you do not deauthorize your computer before you upgrade these components, one computer may use multiple authorizations.

What’s this?! Oh, the reverse of the penny has been redesigned for this year.

11 July 2010

The perils of too much inventory: the name of the country changed in 1963 but 3 years later, I have reason to believe, passports were still being issued in the name of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Of course there is an edit war over whether that should be Federal or Federative . On BookTV and heard on WCSP-FM: From the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jason Vuic discusses his book , The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History . Similar story on All Things Considered in March plays in SeaMonkey in a way that the BookTV video doesn’t.

10 July 2010

Asimov’s Science Fiction is the current incarnation of a publication which began in 1977 as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine . The premiere issue included the pseudonymously published short story Air Raid that led to John Varley’s novel and screenplay Millennium . The full-page advertisements are for the game StarForce , spoken word recordings from Caedmon and Alternate World Recording, Kent Golden Lights cigarettes from Lorillard, paperbacks from Ace Books , a subscription to Analog , and membership in the negative-option business The Science Fiction Book Club , but there’s also a classified section at the back with less-targeted offers of money for stuffing envelopes and Free details of beautiful Mexican girls wanting American Boy-Friends and information for only $1.00 on the many Japanese girls who were interested in marriage. More clutter on its way out, because I can’t justify keeping this mug while tossing the face of the eighties .

The penultimate parking place . Two thousand, two hundred and forty Brick 1×1 later and I’m still not counterbalanced. One problem at a time. One week until the WAMALUG meeting.

09 July 2010

It’s still the analog hole when using a digital camera to take pictures of a digital monitor playing a Windows Media video where Snagit sees only a blank.

About that LDraw Parts Update, you are strongly encouraged to re-install it to get the new version of mklist .

08 July 2010

I’m building instead of documenting but I suppose I should download this update for LDraw Parts anyway.

07 July 2010

Are the Chevy Chase Bank signs just wraps now? Maybe they are close to making the switch.

This The Price of Liberty episode of The Six Million Dollar Man might be the one where Steve Austin told Oscar Goldman he needed to visit the federal penitentiary in Annandale, Virginia . There is no such facility now, of course, and there wasn’t one then, either, but I am unable to prove right now that any establishing shot of the locale included a Union 76 ball.

06 July 2010

Ok, it’s hot. It’s 85 ℉ just in the garage.

05 July 2010

This cries out for a caption contest , the actress may or may not have been directed as to how to react to the actor’s move in Space Checkers . Maybe her character was tired of outranking the crewmen with whom she played.

WamaLTC layouts normally require double track so the Union Pacific Vertical-lift Rail Bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota can only provide inspiration rather than prototyping.

04 July 2010

I should have known that Sonnet would have what’s needed to avoid headaches with the Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors). Ten minutes with that machine can be stressful. I like that there are no user-oriented internal ribbon cables in the Mac Pro. With the Mac Pro sold now, though, this Firewire 400-to-800 adapter would be useful.

What Color Is The Classic Enterprise ? is a question which has troubled some for decades. No reason to think this answer will satisfy. I recognize only a small fraction of these blueprints . Shore Leave 32 is this weekend.

03 July 2010

The current look of the building at 6565 Little River Turnpike doesn’t back me up much on the assertion that this was a Phillips 66 location. The look I remember was the New Look introduced in 1960 so maybe it was remodeled subsequently; by 1983 it was a First American Bank of Virginia branch ( previously ). First Union and Wachovia followed in turn.

Throw another one on the pile .

02 July 2010

Hmm, copying 861.11 gigabytes of Time Machine files is going to take a while. I don’t suppose Restore System from Backup will be quick, either. Mac 101: Time Machine . It was time to have a boot volume of 1TB, and that called for a new, larger Time Machine volume. Maybe it would have been faster if I hadn’t bought WD Caviar Green . Should I be worried that Micro Center was removing all the boxed WD Caviar Black 1TB drives and I went and bought the bagged version? I was told the boxes were mislabeled. Looks like it’ll be tomorrow before I find out.

01 July 2010

The USB EasyConnect feature of VMware Fusion can recognize my iPod touch and call it Apple iPod but other items are identified more obscurely. Case in point: the CameraMate CF Card Reader comes up as the Genesys Logic USB to IDE . Genesys Logic does not admit to any CompactFlash card reader controller.

Metrobuses equipped with the deactivated light scanner ( previously ) are showing up in Virginia.

I’ve been switching to paperless billing for my utilities recently, the remaining holdout is a company that started a Twitter account only last week.

Matthew Coughlin’s Top 10 Reasons to Ride DASH are even less serious that the previous set .

30 June 2010

The bus stop information panels at local subway stations have already been updated to reflect next month’s changes to the city’s bus service. The westbound destination for the AT7 will be known as HOLMES RUN.

2600 maintains a gallery of photographs of payphones from around the world.

29 June 2010

The AT7 Realignment Info I have been waiting for is now available, yes a day after the transit system promised next month . The AT7 will no longer leave or reach Landmark Mall, and all the bus stops along Holmes Run Parkway westbound will be discontinued. The walk from Ripley Street to Landmark Mall is not pedestrian-friendly.

I could be tempted by this ( via ) assuming it’s true. There’s a persistent caller which doesn’t display CallerID and doesn’t leave a message, I figure my contract expired a year or two ago and Verizon Wireless just can’t figure out how to get through to me. Trouble for them is they no longer offer my plan and every current plan is more expensive.

28 June 2010

The local bus system has pushed back the reveal of specific information for the AT7 Realignment to early July. My interest in those segments remains academic.

More grumbling about how Apple handles apostrophes (in iOS 4) but I must say that for me Safari has yet to display anything other than chicken scratches for the <q> element. By now they’re at version 5.0!

27 June 2010

Today’s IT crisis is of a type that others dealt with by baking but my lame fix was to replace the Ethernet connection with a USB cable. No more printing for guests! The network connection lasted 2½ years .

2010 IRA Contribution and Deduction Limits - Effect of Modified AGI on Roth IRA Contributions .

26 June 2010

The director’s commentary in this week’s addition to the discard pile is defensive about the production but doesn’t say a word about the origin of the actress playing the title character.

25 June 2010

Specific information and route maps for the AT7 Realignment and the AT4 Peak Extension to the King St. Metro will be made available on this website by June 25th. The one-way routing for the AT7 planned to begin next month ( previously ) must be so complicated that the reveal date has slipped.

24 June 2010

IDE? Ultra-ATA 133? How am I supposed to know? My Mac Pro only uses SATA and the memory of earlier architectures dims. Micro Center reordered the ½AA battery, this is good.

Today’s Facebook craze is the Giselle Dvorak doll, fifteen visitors.

23 June 2010

Microtek finally manages to establish compatibility with Snow Leopard on my machine with the release of ScanWizard Pro 7.71. It’s been almost 10 months since the release of 10.6 clobbered the program and a lot of scheduled release dates have slipped past in the meantime. VueScan needn’t leave my Dock immediately, though.

Homage to the spaceplane from 2001: a space odyssey treats it as reality but says nothing about the nuclear reactor the Aurora model said was back there. A time traveler’s tale of introducing the electronics of this century to the woodgrained 1977 neglects that there was no manufacturing capability in place then for such products. The RCA SelectaVision players were made of DIP ICs on single level boards and laserdisc manufacture required years before clean-room manufacturing managed to create acceptable products. Taking this too seriously, but where would you build a 500GB 2.5″ hard drive in an era that could barely do fuel injection?

22 June 2010

All the files in the LDraw format at my Build page are still free… after the 6-hour experience of preparing a file for the Pizza Hut getting me to prepare another file for one of of my quick-service restaurants I think will run into money. After five years, my memory had inflated the writing time by two hours.

21 June 2010

Previously I would regret not switching away from VMware Fusion before attaching the iPod touch, but a recent update to the program now grabs such an attachment whether or not a virtual machine is frontmost. Grr. They call it USB EasyConnect and it’s a part of version 3.1 . Unless I choose the Remember my choice and do not ask again option, it will happen every time I attach a card reader, too.

20 June 2010

When I purchased the Focus from Carmax almost seven years ago it immediately required a new taillight bulb . Yesterday the other bulb in the package of two I bought that long-ago weekend was needed for the taillight on the other side. In the meantime Ford has shed everything except Mercury (which even so is scheduled for termination ) and Lincoln.

19 June 2010

The Compaq PointView V710 monitor served one last purpose but after 12 years its performance became erratic and it was time for it to go. The municipality no longer collects batteries at unmanned recycling drop-off locations on the basis of an alleged recommendation of the United States Department of Transportation, although it points out that newer alkaline batteries do not require collection . Besides the advantage of avoiding fire from batteries making electrical connections, the use of a manned collection location prevents scroungers from digging through the pile of discarded batteries looking for those which are still good.

18 June 2010

Even more select WamaLTC participants will be displaying at the Taste of Reston tomorrow. Google keeps trying to send me down a toll road in its directions.

Vernon D. Buerg died last year at 62 , he had never cashed the $15 check I wrote out in 1988 for LIST version 6.1a.

17 June 2010

The Mac Mini Mid 2010 Teardown by ifixit ( via ) explains how the computer can shrink in height : it’s no longer the size of five stacked CD jewel boxes .

Select WamaLTC participants are in Wheeling, Illinois for Brickworld this weekend.

16 June 2010

The 100th Anniversary Issue from 1992 with ten supermodels on the cover. I’ll admit to still being able to identify seven of them without looking inside. Puzzling, it’s listed as the victim of a previous decluttering.

A work in progress . It’s ridiculous how often home video companies started out thinking the packaging design had to reflect the company rather than the content, MCA DiscoVision was one of the bigger offenders.

If it wasn’t meant to inspire outrage , the local free tabloid not published by the educational test preparation company wouldn’t print it. What would they say to finding out that college students used their real names for photographs published in nationally distributed publications?

15 June 2010

The change didn’t register at first, but the trees in the neighborhood which remained bent from the heavy snows this winter were cut down today. It was neighbors reading the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions that forced the issue.

14 June 2010

The ramp from northbound Telegraph Road which lands on Stovall Street at Eisenhower Avenue has been open since Saturday. Pedestrians who are used to that direction being empty should take note, as should drivers leaving the Holiday Inn.

Nothing incriminating in this photo album .

13 June 2010

The touted connection of Flickr and Facebook through Yahoo! Updates sends an update every time you upload a public photo or video. Again, that’s every time you upload a public photo or video . I’ll be sticking with the RSS based importer for now.

I am unable to find anything redeeming in today’s addition to the platters on the discard pile.

12 June 2010

Maybe I didn’t sign in, but I was at the WAMALUG meeting today avoiding the press and taking stuff apart and exhibiting a representation of the Apple Store in Clarendon based on photographs taken 4 years ago. The actual location on an Arlington street is larger than I have depicted it in LEGO® elements.

11 June 2010

A bit of clutter that won’t even get opened has made its way onto the premises.

The Crystal Screen theme for this summer is a familiar one.

The building on the corner at 10th & F Streets NW deserves to be built in LEGO®.

The long tail of the automotive marketplace last month .

10 June 2010

The local bus system has buried the results of recent contests ( previously and previously ) in its DASH About… Rider News Bulletin for Summer 2010 found only aboard the buses: from the responses to the Top 10 Reasons for Riding DASH contest about a dozen winners have been selected and they have selected two winners for the photo contest.

More than you wanted to know about Starfleet ranks . Apparently, it’s impossible to be pip-free in the uniform of the 2350s .

09 June 2010

It’s getting so listening to C-SPAN during the week is difficult. Chairman Bernacke worries about interest rates, but from where I sit, looking at passbooks from decades ago, interest rates now might as well be zero . The really well-off have investments, not savings.

08 June 2010

Star Trek The Wrath of Khan reached theaters twenty-eight years ago this month. When principal photography began the previous year with the actors Shatner and Nimoy in new costumes both had reached the age of 50. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

07 June 2010

It’s not true that the entities to which I wrote checks in the first year of having an account have all disappeared, Ed Miarecki is still in business. Also discovered, evidence relating to a Mini MagLite® purchase in 1985 places my possession within a year of introduction ( previously ).

06 June 2010

Needling the President of Brickshelf about perceived inadequacies in web authorship is a long-standing tradition in these pages, eight years ago this prompted a muted reaction , but more recently my suggestions of an off-site status blog or a full panoply of account management tools have been ineffectual. With the site’s copyright date stuck in a previous decade and mindshare occupied by the social networking at Flickr , new features like RSS feeds, a status Twitter account, signups with Facebook Connect, or even just the Like button for galleries and images are unlikely. A mobile site? iPhone/iPod touch/iPad apps? Pfft. Tonight, I’d settle for a successful upload. :-( I did finally change all the links from maj.com to majhost.com.

05 June 2010

Google offered a third way with its directions between the premises and the site of the 16th Annual Manassas Heritage Railway Festival (this year including a Civil War Weekend as well), so I avoided the interstates and ended up on an official Virginia Byway . Maybe the display was a little sparser than last year, the curves made of straight tracks ( demonstrated at a meeting earlier ) eat up real estate and hinder road layout and building placement. It’s good to see at least one familiar face .

04 June 2010

DASH Bus adjusts service and increases fares next month. It’s not clear to me at this point what one way service might mean but I normally don’t ride those segments.

03 June 2010

Massimo Vignelli, designer of the picnicware on the premises ( previously ), is scheduled to speak this Saturday about his collaboration with Metrorail system architect Harry Weese as part of the annual conference of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design being held at the Gaylord National Hotel. However, I will be on this side of the river .

02 June 2010

If the candidates are in a Republican primary in Fairfax County (there are no Democratic primaries in Virginia next Tuesday ) why are their campaign signs on the streets in my municipality?

Last month my walkaround of the Focus at the gas station while filling up found that the grill had come loose. This month all seems nominal.

End of the line for Mercury. The first-generation Cougar was not a family car.

The conclusion that the Entertainment Earth catalog is unremitting kitsch is inescapable, but which marketing niche is served by a flirty Dorothy ?

01 June 2010

The Facebook Page of the Virginia Railway Express has been quiet today, inbound and outbound trains were using the Norfolk Southern terminus near the Van Dorn Street Station today instead of the Alexandria Union Station, but the disruption was because of the CSX reconstruction of a bridge this weekend and not the impending change of contract personnel .

Twitter had already given the Times read and write access to my account as a result of my attempt earlier. Revoked.

31 May 2010

The difficulty yesterday which affects Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino) on Mac OS X is the use of Zapfino to display characters in the U+2070 - U+209F range . The display of the dispatch in Facebook using Firefox on OS X, however, does not use Zapfino, and the display of the dispatch using Firefox on Windows XP does not use the decorative font, either.

SmugMug ( previously ) is now available for free as a trial for 2 weeks. The photosharing site does not appear to have anything like the Filters that Flickr has. Just an observation.

30 May 2010

The readers of the May 3, 1993 issue of People were treated upon turning the cover to a primer from Apple Computer, Inc. on the subject of How to buy your first personal computer. The answer was Performa.™ The family Macintosh.® Performa was said to be available at BizMart,¹ Circuit City,² Dayton’s and Hudson’s,³ Incredible Universe,⁴ Lechmere,⁵ Office Depot,⁶ OfficeMax,⁷ Silo,⁸ Staples,⁹ Tops,¹⁰ WORKplace¹¹ and selected Good Guys,¹² Montgomery Ward¹³ and Sears¹⁴ locations.

¹Kmart’s OfficeMax division had agreed to acquire BizMart earlier in the year. ²Circuit City liquidated in 2009. ³Target rebranded its department stores, then sold them, in the early 2000’s. ⁴Incredible Universe closed all its stores in 1996. ⁵Lechmere liquidated in 1997. ⁶Office Depot, founded in 1986, remains in business. ⁷OfficeMax, founded in 1988, remains in business. ⁸Silo closed all its stores in 1995. ⁹Staples, founded in 1986, remains in business. ¹⁰Tops Appliance City closed in 2000. ¹¹WORKplace was acquired by Staples in 1992. ¹²Good Guys closed all its stores by 2006. ¹³Montgomery Ward went out of business in 2001. ¹⁴Sears remains in business.

The Gecko-based browsers are not doing well with the UTF-8 characters for my superscripts in the preceding paragraphs. Webkit and Opera have slightly different character heights for the various numerals but do not expand the line spacing. Everything works as it should in BBEdit, both in the editing window and in the BBEdit preview window. My point, weak as it might be, was that the lame Performa line was sold at a whole lot of places that didn’t have a future, either. I made my Performa disappear a year ago . The Microsoft search engine Bing was needed to locate anything on the subject of the generically-named WORKplace, although once I had the connection to Staples, I was able to get results with Google, too.

Today’s contribution to the deaccession pile included a small role played by Bridget Fonda.

29 May 2010

The Starfleet 1701st Star Trek Uniform Club has very demanding standards of authenticity and craftsmanship and nothing in my possession would qualify. This post in the forums refers to but does not identify the author of a booklet … called the Technical Book of Science Fiction Films , put out by the old Enterprise Incidents publication at least in part because the booklet did not include the name of any author.

People on Facebook are sharing this photograph of a civilian on the stage at the Shore Leave convention 20 years ago, twenty-three times yesterday.

28 May 2010

Future famous-last-words: no, I haven’t thought about a Porsche, and not just because their dealers haven’t shown up at the Washington Auto Show for two years ( previously , previously ).

The website of a chain of franchised medical testing facilities (actually, draw centers) that plans a location in the area is currently rendering poorly in SeaMonkey.

My barber is on maternity leave, so the other barbers in the shop have been pinch-hitting. I could do with less giggling when I request my bangs be cut in the style of Mr. Spock.

27 May 2010

This one I really did send from the Twitter client for iPhone/iPod touch.

20 out of 20 ( via ).

26 May 2010

Manly resistance fails to endure upon spousal exposure to the iPad in a published author’s household.

The URL for Star Trek design patents has changed, although the previous link still works , let’s see, 1985 plus 14 years makes… just one less thing to worry about.

25 May 2010

My complaints that it takes half an hour to put on have been to no avail, the consensus is building that an upcoming event is the opportunity to deploy a previously mentioned accouterment . One more item needed to complete the project.

The promise of last year’s quote regarding Star Trek music continues with a soundtrack album for the third movie .

24 May 2010

My lack of knowledge regarding a Carlyle Hotel this morning was legitimate, the establishment at 2345 Mill Road is known by another name . That’s why I try to ask Do you have an address?

The current target of decluttering is a stack of magazines with a famous model of the past century on the cover but I’m ambivalent about tossing this one out. Francesco Scavullo had been photographing the cover for Cosmopolitan for twenty-five years when this issue hit the stands in 1990, and it catches Cindy in about her sixth year of full-time modeling, before the first husband, before the cosmetic surgery. It’s pretty much a given these days that magazine cover photography involves post-capture editing, with this alleged exception .

WamaLTC’s mixed case brand is getting mangled on smartphone keyboards. Our next display is in two weeks.

23 May 2010

Laserdisc Forever - The LD Collector’s Resource has gone largely without updates for five years, but Laserdisc Planet survives for the moment. With AOL® Hometown and GeoCities gone, how long does EarthLink plan to keep the MindSpring addresses going? Today’s candidate for deaccession has the trappings of an important movie in its Pioneer Special Edition form, presumably the texture of canvas for the image on the box cover did not survive to the DVD release.

22 May 2010

Your word for today is trapunto . The actual wrist communicator used in Star Trek The Wrath of Khan ( slightly different example from this page ) shows up my cardboard DIY project from 27 years ago, but how was I supposed to know that visible screws were back in fashion for Starfleet design? I’ll have to watch again to be sure that only the crew of the Reliant wore them , of course in the scene that features the equipment Kirk picks up the one dropped when Terrell dematerialized and utters his scream. The other communicator from that movie is getting a toy version sometime.

21 May 2010

It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin . I’ve discovered that I have to sign out of the AIM app I recently installed in order to go offline because closing the app and shutting down the iPod touch isn’t enough. Seriously? Actually, there’s a choice of time durations to remain connected after Exit, and the default was 24 hours! Changed to immediately.

This seems to have been established this week.

I’ve noticed that Sears will round down the amount of a purchase while corporate sibling Lands’ End will round up. This is not mathematical rounding, either, Sears will forgive 0.0095¢ and Lands’ End will tack on a penny or two. I have no data upon which to form an opinion on the Kmart format.

20 May 2010

The lime-accented website might still be live, but the LEASE signs on the premises at 5951 Stevenson Avenue confirm it’s over for this particular establishment ( previously ). It didn’t even last a year? Screen capture made because it will disappear just like the site for Floyd’s Bar and Grill ( previously ) did.

There is a way, it turns out, to specify a search at a previously linked engine .

19 May 2010

I downloaded the official Twitter app for iPhone/iPod touch ( via ) and while I was in the App Store anyway downloaded the AIM app (old-school link found at the AIM for iPhone page, redirects to new style ) and discovered it answered a question: Buddy Lists I’m On . Still no reason to visit the iPad versions of these apps.

18 May 2010

The fifty-one characters in the revised Wikipedia logo suggests that the glyphs I did not recognize earlier might be Armenian.

Ars Technica finds five lame DMCA takeovers ( via , I searched DMCA ).

Now that’s just silly—what good would providing a stand-alone DICOM viewer on a CD-ROM be if it only runs in OS X ? Guide to free medical imaging software (viewers, converters, PACS clients) if you insist on compatibility with Windows or Linux instead (or in addition to).

17 May 2010

Is a five minute clip of a movie fair use? The uploader’s screen name translates to something… Is the cropping and flopping by a patent law blog of a Flickr upload labeled as © All Rights Reserved fair use? It’s so easy these days to see infringement everywhere ( previously ).

The model number of my ancient electric power tools decodes as Ryobi.

16 May 2010

An electric drill was one thing, but what need did someone who wasn’t a homeowner have for a 7¼ inch circular saw? People are so nosy. Nineteen years later, and the original blade continues in service to reduce household possessions to trash bag-friendly sizes. The name of the store appears in the designation of the trim level, which began in 1986 on socket wrenches . The location in Arlington where I purchased the Made in U.S.A. power tool was also slow to adapt to logo changes, if this image from 1992 is to be trusted.

Brought to my attention by targeted advertising: Tamo i Ovde now playing in New York. It was at Filmfest DC a month ago .

15 May 2010

The ⅜ inch electric drill that I bought in preparation for my apartment-dwelling days includes the name of the store on its label. They don’t do that anymore, the tool brand is stronger than the store brand and its evolving logo . Twenty-five years later, I don’t regret choosing a variable-speed, reversible model. You can safely assume that the local store has yet to meet the brand identity guidelines which are now nearly 6 years old. Ah, but which version of the all caps logo do they use? From last October, the inevitable answer (the older one).

First a working website , now PennLUG has a banner . What next? Custom minifigs?

14 May 2010

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options . I tried sharing this link on Twitter and the Times demanded an e-mail address and a password so I closed the tab and moved on.

It’s been over a year since I was tempted to see a movie so the utility of picking up City Paper has faded. I’ve added the feed for Ben Claasen II ( previously ) to My Yahoo!

13 May 2010

Built-up versions of prop replicas from Roddenberry.com are the source of the somewhat pricey additions to the Entertainment Earth catalog .

12 May 2010

Today the last issue of The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter in my possession left the building. I let my subscription lapse with the December, 2001 issue. There had been no laserdisc releases in a year and DVDs seemed to be put together competently enough that a reviewer was no longer needed. While the website bears a 2009 copyright, the database is gone, and the editor’s The Ultimate DVD Geek column seems similarly moribund.

I was once asked to remove a dog from a photograph, the new Adobe Photoshop CS5 content-aware fill tool looks like it would make such requests easier to fulfill .

I see nothing that can go wrong with this plan: a restaurant that serves beer in the middle of a long block directly across from a source of potential customers with no mid-block crosswalk .

11 May 2010

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and Regulations do not appear to have anything to say about rear impacts.

10 May 2010

The answer It’s north of here may not have satisfied, but then I was asked where Duke Street is, not how to reach it. If you don’t know where north is, not my problem.

The local heavy rail transit system can’t catch a break, while it has the longest station name in the country, its average station name length is not so superlative .

Landmark Mall is slowly trying to fill in the potholes, but that doesn’t explain what an AT1 was doing southbound on Van Dorn Street turning west on Edsall Road.

09 May 2010

I wouldn’t say it has failed, yet, … but it hasn’t worked. The Chief Operating Officer of BP may take solace at this difficult time in the fact that Exxon is still in business. The quote seems like it might be appropriate for other occasions.

At least now I have something new to display at the Manassas show which isn’t a representation of a franchised quick-service restaurant.

08 May 2010

What color was my 1988 Mazda 626 LX 5-door? Because the Mazda catalog only lists color names and does not include chips, I can’t be sure . I no longer have access to the label on the door, and this image of a paint chip chart isn’t all that helpful.

07 May 2010

Seeing these size comparisons led me to recall my own work in the genre which led the owner of the pictured Taurus to complain that I’d made his car look like a peanut by comparison to the 1988 Mazda 626 LX 5-door.

06 May 2010

No chance of seeing a familiar face at the local transportation hub today—a nontrivial portion of the participants in WamaLTC are headed south for the BrickMagic Festival for LEGO® Fans in North Carolina this weekend. We will have to wait another month to see my traffic lights in use at a display.

Congratulations to Jessica Killeen for managing to win a DASH Bus contest, this one asked for reasons to ride in honor of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the service. The announcement I linked to previously has been sent down the memory hole. I have yet to find any announcement regarding the outcome of last year’s photo contest , evidence of which remains on the site at posting time. But really, On time ? I’m going to guess that Jessica doesn’t ride the AT1 in the afternoons.

Absent Cell Phone Syndrome .

05 May 2010

All right… a pile up! Who’s your friend? There was a bit of a meme yesterday on Facebook with movie quotes and my contribution was one from Dr. Strangelove , but this morning called for something more obscure.

Oh, sure, now that some non-friend has clicked the Like button below I’m less interested in Facebook maintaining the privacy of its users.

04 May 2010

The McDonald’s that I rebuilt last year has a removable roof and a basic interior, but I don’t have the dedication of this guy (nor did I have the access) .

You must not use shall … if you take to heart the lessons of Plain Language ( via ).

03 May 2010

Who are you going to trust, some obsolete analog format or the flimsy successor? My laserdisc disagrees on the subject of the image beneath the card crediting Doohan, Takei, and Koenig (and others on the next card) at the end of The Lights of Zetar as found at TrekCore ( anchor page ) but apparently that’s how the DVD plays . I wouldn’t know because I never bought the season box sets on DVD .

Linking policy of CBS Interactive is reasonable (allowing my link in the previous paragraph to the Content) compared with the earlier linking policy of Paramount Digital Entertainment .

I have one less contact at Flickr today as precipitated by an assertion of rights. Another addition to the uploads with this tag .

02 May 2010

The Villagers must like Politico , because they ain’t laughing at that part. They had no trouble laughing when the predecessor had a slideshow about looking for weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office. It’s not enough for some people, and others have their mind entirely elsewhere .

Facebook has sought to make public all of the aspects of the Information tab on a profile—except for Groups. If there’s a way to share those anymore, I’ve missed it.

01 May 2010

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation : Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline . I suppose I could have used the Share on Facebook button but then Zuckerberg would know I read Slashdot and ThinkProgress . Oh, no, Virginia! Think of the children !

WAMALUG has its monthly meeting tomorrow and the previous week has been spent deciding where to eat. Ultimately the choice came down to two franchise operations.

The problem with film: this single angle is inadequate to make out exactly what the badge on the grill says. Is it a flourish-y Mini Cooper 1000 ? That particular roll lasted less than a week.

30 April 2010

It took me hours today to remember that my tweets are visible in Google Buzz , there are now more than 50.

29 April 2010

No Korean, no Vietnamese, no Chinese, but Serbian is among the thirty-five languages in which Google search will provide a virtual keyboard ( via ).

28 April 2010

A vaporware list! When the editor of The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter gave up on listing planned laserdisc releases with the February 2001 issue, this was the list the previous month: The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle , Angela’s Ashes , The Best Man , Bring It On , Dragonheart II A New Beginning , Erin Brockovich , The Flintstones Viva Rock Vegas , The Hurricane , Isn’t She Great , The Original Kings of Comedy , The Limey , Man on the Moon , Mission Impossible 2 , The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps , Pitch Black , Rules of Engagement , Shaft , The Skulls , Snow Falling on Cedars , The Talented Mr. Ripley , U-571 , Wonder Boys . The purchase of Bring It On on DVD merited a writeup, Erin Brockovich and Wonder Boys not so much. The decluttering continues.

27 April 2010

About the time I wrote about the fate of the Galileo shuttlecraft set piece, it disappeared again . Consensus is that it’s been destroyed .

26 April 2010

The scanning project came to a close more than a year ago and I’ve been satisfied with the 4000 dpi results but 14-bit is no longer an adequate goal as a follow-up. The Hasselblad Flextight scanner has 16-bit color depth in models offering optical resolutions of 6300 dpi (X1) and 8000 dpi (X5). Very affordable, too, I’m sure!

I’m no stranger ( also ) to running nested virtual machines , apparently it would be the only way to invoke the Windows XP mode if Windows 7 is run virtualized .

25 April 2010

Today’s candidate for deaccessioning ( previously ) might well have been worth the $2.99 but even its pretty cast and the earnest commentary track won’t save it.

What do people Like ( via )?

24 April 2010

Among the trinkets at a recent Green Fair was a color-changing card to measure water temperature . There can no longer be any concern that I am heating my water excessively, it’s taken repeated attempts just to get a tan 120 to show up. Tan means that the actual temperature is lower than stated.

23 April 2010

Good to know: I stopped to read the fine print at the entrance of a local grocery which I visit only sporadically despite its proximity and find that the store explicitly bans photography.

22 April 2010

Surfing the web with a browser that is not logged in to Facebook may prove advantageous . Refusing to admit to any hobbies and interests may also be a good move . I’d put a Like button here, but iframes aren’t allowed in XHTML. The <object> element is supposed to be its successor:

21 April 2010

Hmm, coincidence … or something more ? That is, I wonder if the inability of LEGO® Shop At Home to conduct business today has anything to do with the McAfee antivirus program disabling some large number of Windows XP machines around the world. Comcast offers Norton Security Suite to its broadband customers (and Norton Internet Security Mac Edition) in a switch that occurred in January.

I see $100 bills so rarely, it’s easy to lose track of what they’re supposed to look like. New $100 bill introduced today ( via ).

Now you don’t even have to create the icons: Iconize Textlinks with CSS ( via ) is something I started doing with the revamp of the WAMALUG site in 2003.

20 April 2010

Seeing the United States Marshals Mobile Command Unit leads me to Farber Specialty Vehicles . They use the Freightliner chassis for some of their offerings, so the galleries might serve as inspiration.

19 April 2010

Serbia in the news again! Automotive News reports a plan ( via ) to build a Chrysler-branded subcompact in Kragujevac. Zastava Automobili made its last Yugo about a year and a half ago .

On Friday the President issued a Proclamation deeming today as National Day of Service and Remembrance for Victims and Survivors of Terrorism . My state’s Governor, recently in the news for other proclamations, offers a page for the status of the flags .

18 April 2010

My purchases of recorded music are dwindling , and the online source for the most recent acquisition has yet to change its tax policy . The Record Store Day locator for independently owned retailers finds four qualifying locations in the Northern Virginia area, one of which seems very newly established , another very long in the tooth indeed ( previous disbelief in its longevity ).

Anonymous blogger now an anonymous columnist . Formerly anonymous blogger now planning his second book .

17 April 2010

Time to thin the herd in the laserdisc department, maybe. I played the last title catalogued as a retail purchase over 8 years ago and despite the significant discount Ripe was not worth even the $2.99 clearance price. DVD Planet is still in business but it’s time to shut down the list of DVD purchases , too.

More car identifications are possible in The Day Einstein Died ( via ), a photogallery from LIFE magazine of one photographer’s pursuit. The hearse is very similar to this 1951 Cadillac Limousine-Style Hearse/Ambulance but with more rake in the C-pillar. One of the mourners is driving a 1953-1955 Corvette with an extra rear bumper and another had a 1955 Oldsmobile.

16 April 2010

Back formation from mobilni maybe? Looks like the Serbian slang for a landline is fixni ( via )… Maybe someone wasn’t so optimistic as Landmark Automotive Services looks abandoned… There was a kid on the bus today with a paper UZI and no one else seemed to notice… If it wasn’t for Graphic Converter and its Shift the EXIF Timestamp… command, Daylight Saving Time and I would not be on speaking terms.

15 April 2010

The laserdisc edition of the 1998 version of The Parent Trap featuring a recently mentioned redhead has features not found on the DVD I purchased at a discount from a Minnesota-based retailer nearly 6 years ago.

The editor of The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter must have needed material that month, because the September 1999 issue printed my letter with a question about the difference between English subtitling and closed captioning. The decluttering continues.

14 April 2010

The local Holiday Inn down the road is changing its signs, it’s not even been three years since the announcement of the rebranding .

But, Project Wonderful is what led me to use the Block Images from… context menu command!

13 April 2010

I had no difficulties riding the 10B today, in marked contrast to 2 months ago . Thanks, Cosi , for reducing your login to one I agree button! NextBus does work , it would be nice if other systems besides Metrobus participated, oh, one local system already does .

12 April 2010

Maybe the fine print is too small, but this is not reaching some people: whatever you buy these days from Apple, iPod , iPhone , and now iPad , out of the box you’re expected to have a computer running iTunes. All specifications from the U.S. English storehouse of specifications , comprehensive country selector does not include Serbia. My final hint: iTunes is not available for Windows ME .

If I played more games I might know this already: the upcoming 505 Games release of Mean Girls for Nintendo DS has a cover based on the poster for the movie which doesn’t include a certain redhead whose future looked bright once upon a time ( via ).

The site for PennLUG has come to life since I last looked at it .

11 April 2010

A misplaced reverence for the colors of late twentieth-century roofing may continue to cost me in the future. That roofing materials which don’t absorb as much solar radiation as black asphalt shingles do might be a better idea is not new . More from The Cool Colors Project and the Heat Island Group .

A lament for the absence of curbside classics in Towson .

10 April 2010

WamaLTC’s display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps was today only, the facility was to host some after-hours gala tonight and we were asked to break the display down and the club made the decision not to return for tomorrow. The name of an intelligence agency was mentioned. If I watched more television or had more children, I might have recognized Sesame Street’s Rosita in attendance among the attractions on Family Day.

09 April 2010

So there’s not even a Plan A so far, but WamaLTC will be displaying something this weekend at the National Museum of the Marine Corps . We were snowed out last time we were invited.

Mactopia is the Mac Business Unit’s site for Macintosh software from Microsoft ( previously ). I knew that Excel started as a program for the Macintosh , my knowledge of the history of Microsoft Word was hazier.

08 April 2010

All of the Virginia Megaprojects are in the Northern Virginia part of the state. The Virginia Department of Transportation notified the city last Friday that it was scrapping proposals to ease traffic from the ongoing BRAC development at Mark Center that would have damaged parts of the Winkler Botanical Preserve .

Someone owes an explanation: the McDonald’s at 5311 Duke Street is open again, and it retains the current ubiquitous mansard roof design that the municipality has found to be dated . According to the ad in this week’s Alexandria Times , the location is offering a 50% discount on all food items, eleven to seven o’clock next Monday.

First sighting in the wild for something I’ve expressed no interest in.

07 April 2010

WikiPedia is your friend : Gulf Oil may have left this area, but it legitimately operates in other states .

06 April 2010

How interesting, certain 2000 through 2003 model year Focus vehicles have an extended warranty on the front coil springs ( via ). Mine would expire August of 2012, as there’s zero chance of my driving to reach 150,000 miles.

05 April 2010

What happens when you let a mature relative friend you on a social network . Who couldn’t see that coming ?

04 April 2010

Another anonymous single-subject blogger ( via ) with some relevant advice and some perspective on the situation at the Chrysler displays this year ( previously ).

03 April 2010

Did I earlier oversell the ambiance of the Micro Center in Rockville? Maybe. I can still point to woodgrain paneling, and the spot lighting is still there, a G-scale train is running along an elevated track above the camera department, but other sections of the store do have more of a warehouse vibe.

CSX decided to temporarily stop service on the tracks near the incident . On a busy holiday weekend , it takes a threat closer to the tracks to get the other local heavy-rail operator to interrupt service. What a day to start the job .

02 April 2010

What I knew as the Museum of History and Technology, or was it the National Museum of History and Technology already, hmm… anyway, it’s now the National Museum of American History Kenneth E. Behring Center , but I seem to have missed the Cameras Before Digital exhibit. Okay, that guy’s name is up there because of money . There are no current plans to reinstall the Foucault Pendulum which was there until 1998.

01 April 2010

Not a word to be found about it here , but dare I hope that the problem with desktop background automatic boot change is resolved ( previously )?

The effort it takes to keep Pure Mac updated is staggering, it even has last week’s update to Flip4Mac noted but not this week’s update to SeaMonkey . Previous link to Pure Mac was almost 5 years ago.

31 March 2010

Microsoft Online Safety invites you to check the strength of your passwords ( via ). The company is announcing another joint project with Ford and while I wasn’t impressed by last year’s project that was before I put my trust in the company’s antivirus program .

This probably breaks a lot of the Human Interface Guidelines but isn’t enough to get me interested.

30 March 2010

Traffic congestion and a poor road network shrink the mind: a 50-mile radius from my location actually reaches north to Towson, east past Annapolis, west almost to Front Royal, and south to Spotsylvania. Make your own .

29 March 2010

To the Editor of The Laser Disc Newsletter in its April, 1998 issue, a victim of today’s decluttering:

How does the brief but rewarding making of featurette, not available on the LD of the DVD Das Boot Director’s Cut (Mar 98) differ from chapter 70 of the LD?

The Editor’s reply was (A-ha! We thought it seemed familiar!)

I think someone forgot to identify the value proposition today.

28 March 2010

I searched to identify the model year of the vehicle in this capture and was really expecting something older. It’s a hardtop coupe which was called a Sport Coupe , but the angle is wrong to see any of the badging which would identify the engine or trim level. This similar car in worse shape , for example, has a 327 badge and Malibu on the rear fenders. The Special Collections of the municipality’s library include The Tax Assessor’s Handiwork: Alexandria’s Historic Structures Online and the vehicle may be in the photograph accompanying the assessment prepared in 1972 for a specific address which is, frankly, not old, historic, or in Old Town.

When do they sleep? ( via ( via ( via ))) is only slightly less intrusive than Please Rob Me was. It also gives a hilariously wrong answer for my account.

27 March 2010

Support for Windows 2000 ends on July 13, 2010! Exclamation original to Microsoft. I would have thought that compatibility with the decade-old operating system would be problematic, and that’s partly the truth ( Microsoft Security Essentials does not include 2000 among its supported systems ) but also based on my experience with Mac software that regularly abandons previous systems . This screenshot utility , for example, lists support for everything since Windows 4.0 but stops short of 7.

26 March 2010

That the invitation is voiced by Mirage (Elizabeth Peña) helps I wrote over 5 years ago without saying anything about the delivery mode (h/t Greg).

25 March 2010

ILTCO remains mum on its imminent demise: The ILTCO committee has agreed to migrate all the ILTCO media content, articles, news bits, and images, etc… from the ILTCO web site to the RAILBRICKS web site and will be shutting down the ILTCO web site and mail lists. ( via ). A local independent LEGO® train club is yet to be found at Brick Railroader . I see that editing the WamaLTC Links page is in my future.

24 March 2010

An uptick of interest today in an ordinary capture of R206 from 3 years ago. Apparently state employees have access to Flickr and Facebook. Watch this space . Now, if the Governor’s webmaster could just do something about the silly need to type www. to reach the page…

More than 2 years after I noted a switch from glass to plastic bottles , local stores are including the glass version of the company’s offering on their shelves again.

23 March 2010

My purchase last season was a few days too late for the holiday promotion by LEGO® .

I resist visiting Best Buy but a research foray shows a heavy slant in the printer department towards the home user with a row of inkjet all-in-one’s and two small USB monochrome printers (the website lists other models as available online only). I have yet to regret buying printers of the type with an input tray that can take a whole ream of paper at once.

ATM skimmers can hit anywhere .

22 March 2010

They may have noticed that the donations have stopped, so the development task fell to someone who created her own major . It is true that I cannot remember when I last visited Charlottesville.

21 March 2010

I ask for unanimous consent to revise and expand my remarks on this… what? Some of the speakers this afternoon had trouble sticking to the script : bill? health bill? healthcare bill? healthcare reform bill? One might think they should all be used to public speaking. #ptdb #hcr

20 March 2010

Someone is optimistic: banners from Bill Page Toyota have appeared on the building that used to be Cherner Lincoln-Mercury and Dave Pyles Lincoln-Mercury before that.

Uh-oh, he’s back .

Because I don’t check my Twitter so often, I missed that there had been an acknowledgment of my complaint .

19 March 2010

Tower Records has started to send me e-mails again, they seem to have a new President who is hoping to revive the fortunes of the online retailer. It’s been over three years since the company went online-only, and you know who hasn’t had an album in that time? Promises, promises .

18 March 2010

The neighborhood multimodal transit hub is named after a local street honoring a Confederate officer ( previously ). The parts of Lincolnia Road inside the border after the city’s annexation of the area in 1952 were renamed in 1953, according to this week’s issue of the Alexandria Times (page 21). A visit to HistoricAerials.com and its 1949 view of Duke Street ( previously ) showing the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway under construction confirms that the route north of Edsall Road now taken by Van Dorn Street came later.

That explains why I haven’t seen the cylon scanner before . Alert readers will note that this D6 and this D6 are both headed westbound and the really persistent snoopers in the Exif will find hardly more than a 10-minute separation between them. I was walking towards M Street because I had found out that there would not be an eastbound D6 for another 40 minutes (when one is expected every 20)! Thank you, NextBus and the unlocked WiFi I managed to snag.

No use mumbling now, fellow, you just didn’t see that penny in time.

17 March 2010

The SeaMonkey project is discontinuing support for the SeaMonkey 1.x series the first release of which was over 4 years ago . Yahoo!’s YUI Graded Browser Support page has moved, but SeaMonkey’s name ain’t on it even though the 2.x series is the same Gecko codebase as the contemporaneous Firefox . I’m loathe to abandon SeaMonkey, though, but keeping a Power Macintosh G3 which can only run Panther is making less and less sense. Yahoo! can hardly be bothered by Leopard and doesn’t bother with Tiger at all. Oh, that’s right, no one uses Yahoo! anymore, right? Except for mail , that is.

16 March 2010

It’s sunny and warm and I shouldn’t be fingerpointing… but the stupid, it burns . Better to stop following the referrers in my Flickr statistics.

Some people ride the same bus day after day. Some people ride a different bus every day. Sneaky.

15 March 2010

It’s not enough to test just your fixed broadband access: FCC Mobile Broadband Test .

14 March 2010

The gallons of Technic are slowly receding, but that doesn’t mean anything is being accomplished. Staples had a place on the shelf for empty display boxes of Windows 7 Ultimate but the tag said Kiosk only and I couldn’t be bothered to find out what that meant. (Just as well, the shelf price was $20 over the retail price available online .) The Windows XP Home virtual machine is in daily use without significant problems, but the language switching feature of the newer edition of the operating system remains tempting. The Windows XP Professional image rescued from Virtual PC 7 for the Mac gets very little use, so Microsoft Security Essentials complains whenever I launch that virtual machine. I launch the virtual machines of earlier systems only for nostalgia and web development testing in old browsers .

13 March 2010

Maybe the black hubs spoke to other people, too, the latest addition to the set of the thousand views has been made a favorite six times.

Still trying to figure out how my results with the test of connection quality at broadband.gov compare to the tiers of service alleged to be available with Comcast High-Speed Internet. Some dubiety regarding the company’s behavior . My bill for the service this month reflects the change of name for the service announced earlier.

LEGO® sets have included extra pieces for some time, but they’re usually the smallest ones. My most recent order from the Pick a Brick selection online had an addition which I hadn’t requested: five Brick 1×8 in Medium Stone.

12 March 2010

Alexandria urges completion of the 2010 Census in English and Spanish (on the other side of the bus) and in a script I took to be Arabic and another script I can’t immediately identify . Spot metered.

The 18,000+ stitches in the WamaLTC brand is nothing compared to the 78,000 in this embroidery .

11 March 2010

WUSA9 reports on my municipality’s use of the Mobile Plate Hunter 900 (via Facebook post corresponding to this tweet ). I wrote about the license plate scanners two months ago .

10 March 2010

Blast from the past: I had the opportunity to revisit the Tiger iteration of Mac OS X today and laughed at the indication that the second of two restore discs included OS9. The inclusion of the Classic environment, the failure by iCal to show the current date in the Dock, all ancient history now. Apple Support page for the old system. Hmm, one should be able to configure iChat in Tiger for Jabber ( via ).

09 March 2010

For completeness’ sake: the name of the color of the interior of this Focus may be medium graphite .

Welcome VIC card customer! Why am I not surprised that Harris Teeter has a comprehensive selection of flavors for Kettle chips?

08 March 2010

Boo, nothing of mine here: The Cover version LEGO Pool at Flickr. I could probably make a contribution or two. The idea that Flickr has replaced Brickshelf and Lugnet still takes some getting used to.

The self-publishing author ( previously ) is planning to do it again .

07 March 2010

The post at a blog about military-themed LEGO® constructions titled A fist full of Hummers includes a nod to my derivative work in the 6-wide arena. My 8-wide contribution to the genre which goes unmentioned was built almost 6 years ago. The author of the blog post is too kind for this construction bereft of any innovative building techniques : most of the trailer and undercarriage is adapted from an earlier postal vehicle and the landing gear is of similar vintage . One child at the meeting yesterday was sure something on the tractor-trailer had to be operational but eventually accepted that there was not.

Steve Benen and commenters update the political dictionary . I might add: Sunday talk show is a television ritual where Republicans get to say whatever they want and Democrats are vigorously interrupted when their answers aren’t agreeable to the host.

06 March 2010

The local bus system has a new contest without any hint of what happened to the last contest (that is, no winner to the photo contest was ever announced).

I exaggerate only slightly when I state that half of the travel time to today’s WAMALUG meeting was spent stopped on Maple Avenue. There is consensus on which of the four proposals for traffic signals which I displayed there should prevail.

05 March 2010

The S.S. United States ( previously ) may be sold for scrap . Nothing which would be relevant to my memories remains aboard, so I’m not particularly moved by the appeals to save it.

04 March 2010

The event at which WamaLTC had a display last Saturday was in support of the museum ’s educational offerings and the care of its artifact collection. The Alexandria Times (newly shrunken to tabloid size) had in this week’s issue a photograph taken at the event, but it was of the children at the Thomas the Tank Engine play table.

I asked myself What would Tony do? too late today.

The eight gigabytes of RAM in my computer doesn’t seem nearly as impressive once I realize that the most basic iMac these days has four as standard. Tempus fugit.

03 March 2010

Virginia Railway Express has changed the profile pic at its Facebook Page to some artwork that depicts the new locomotive planned for deployment later this year. It’s not nice of VRE to try to send the mobile version of the site to SeaMonkey.

The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area LEGO® Train Club is pleased to provide participants in its displays the opportunity to purchase apparel embroidered with the WamaLTC brand.

02 March 2010

If I had a dime for every time I’m met by a blank look when I suggest looking at a browser’s location bar… I could buy a copy of one of those dead-tree newspapers people are buying less of these days. Web developers continue to react to the bewildering inability of, er, ordinary people to understand what they’re up to when they use the Internet.

Newest inductee to the set of the thousand views .

01 March 2010

Yeah, I got nothin’. Announcement from WamaLTC later this week. WAMALUG meeting this Saturday. From the gallons of Technic have arisen a few proposals for traffic signals, whee.

28 February 2010

A search for the subdomain finds a variety of organizations making use of a Lands’ End Business Outfitters company store to offer embroidered apparel. NASA goes them one better by also providing a link for its Solar Dynamics Observatory Team Members to a DESIGNbyME LEGO® model of the spacecraft that launched earlier this month .

AFOL: A Blocumentary . I regret the necessity Akro-Mils saw to abandon the polystyrene type of small parts storage, because clarified polypropylene just isn’t the same . Tepid response from the MetaFilter commentariat .

27 February 2010

The LEGO® 10211 Grand Emporium was expected last week, then next Monday , maybe in three weeks . I’ve yet to purchase any of the Modular Buildings.

26 February 2010

How to create a Quartz filter and use Preview’s Save As... command to reduce the file size of PDFs .

25 February 2010

I’ve complained about what it’s like to listen to C-SPAN but that’s nothing—imagine what it’s like for the President today at the health care summit to listen to these same people for hours and all he can do is rest his cheek in his hand because he can’t turn the radio off .

24 February 2010

Silver Eagle Bus Manufacturing seeks to keep the legacy of the buses built for Trailways going . I rode intercity buses (probably Trailways) on round trips between Springfield and Charlottesville several times in the early eighties but never thought to photograph the ride. A project card inspired by the Model 05 has been completed, but if there’s a way to model tag and drive axles in LEGO® I haven’t figured it out. This Saturday’s display has an admission fee only for the children.

Because Excuse me didn’t occur to me: Do you have a plan?

23 February 2010

I always thought of it as gray: the name of the color of the interior of this Escape is flint .

The destination board follies continue: this morning, a Richmond Highway Express bus calls itself a Volvo ( S80 ), and this afternoon, a 29 lacks a letter and heads for… a town in Maryland ?!

22 February 2010

I’d been vaguely aware that symbolic links were a part of the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X , but did not know that they showed up in Windows only with Vista. Freeware utility to create symbolic links in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The influence of WamaLTC participants is felt again in a display at LEGO® World 2010 in Denmark this past weekend (h/t Bob).

From last September: was the participant at Dragon*Con with the Eat Mor Pyrates costume making a reference to PBS ?

21 February 2010

I didn’t even spin the wheels in the snow all that much: in the past month the Escape has delivered its worst mileage ever. Its next assignment will take it to the Lyceum on Saturday for the WamaLTC participation in a display there .

Here’s a LEGO® train club that’s not afraid to use Twitter.

20 February 2010

Interactive map of Belgrade doesn’t help me understand why one particular street does not show up in searches for its PAK .

WamaLTC did not manage one at all last year, but today fifteen individuals attended a meeting hosted by Rich and Linda Schamus. A railroad station MOC was exhibited. There was a demonstration of the Holger Matthes technique of building curves from straight pieces of track as published in the premiere issue of Railbricks (pages 32-33). The fate of our display in the National Toy Train Museum was discussed. Apparel was modeled and plans for more were made. A certain ZVOX promotional cap was entered into evidence as to the possibilities for caps.

19 February 2010

The presence of Adobe Reader is still necessary in view of a previous difficulty and I am not surprised (in replacing 8 with 9) that the installer chooses the system-level folders as its target.

18 February 2010

There is no Plan B ( via ). The narration from so very long ago is still a cultural touchstone, if a recent Facebook comment is any guide, as is the music .

17 February 2010

I don’t suppose finding a dime on the floor of the bus would qualify: a neighbor searches for joy .

He does look a little like James Earl Jones , in Admiral James Greer mode, maybe it’s the glasses, as part of an opportunity for progressive bloggers to be told they’re not clapping hard enough .

16 February 2010

The Shirlington Bus Station ( previously ) may have an indoor waiting area with customer seating but I should have used NextBus earlier—the driver of the southbound 10B breezed past without stopping! Grr. At least that old Orion V had a working destination board.

15 February 2010

Every year LEGO® introduces new elements, but I haven’t been keeping up enough to know whether or not this hairpiece is one of them. Tempting , last year it was a bus . The company is managing to overcome my scaled-back level of purchasing.

Some people like Elmo, and some people really, really like Grover .

14 February 2010

Today is just another Sunday , which means that the driver of a MINI at the prototype for an old creation can’t be who I think it was. I made the mistake of leaving the radio tuned to WCSP-FM, but at least there was one sane voice ( also ) among the usual bobbleheads. So much water-carrying .

Remarkably well-preserved for her age , now on Facebook .

With a change in top-level domain , Pošta Srbije hides its postal code search behind an acronym .

13 February 2010

One person claimed to recognize it but the others at today’s meeting of WAMALUG needed an extra clue. I’m still working on identifying the font used by the restaurant in the sign above the front door, the fact that the recent rebranding uses Clarendon is not helping, if only there was a puffy version of Perpetua Bold .

MetaFilter discovers LEGO® Trains in a non-specific way. The WamaLTC Group on Facebook is only for participants.

12 February 2010

Maybe Fairfax County has more employees who can be assigned to snow removal , because Alexandria is keeping its nonessential facilities like libraries closed , so the WAMALUG meeting is on as scheduled!

That slow realization that the only way that photograph could have been taken is… I’ve felt it .

11 February 2010

Facebook Chat Now Available Everywhere and I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t guessed that the announcement would be at the blog because the San Jose Mercury News certainly didn’t link to anything official and neither did the link target from John Gruber’s spot-on description of how confused people approach the web . I chose iChat . It’s much more responsive than the recently introduced ajax-y website display .

The past week’s weather is one of the reasons why I bought an Escape, so why haven’t I seen the 4WD indicator light up yet?

10 February 2010

Oh, very nice, matching hubs , too, following in my footsteps from last month (purchase of a set last week for its black mudguards means I also have the Slope Brick 65 2×1×2 (60481) to better recreate the set we are both emulating). But will Fairfax County Public Library branches be open?

Liberal blogger gets it wrong ! The depicted individual known for her anti-vaccine stance was not a Bunny though reading the Wikipedia entry I can see where there was a cover which could lead to a misremembering (autoplay ad with sound).

09 February 2010

This Metrobus operating on the route 25B was one of more than three hundred which were in operation this morning , a number that later increased to about five hundred by afternoon after a hiatus that’s lasted since Friday. All of them are expected to remain parked tomorrow . The route 25B experiences hilly conditions throughout its run so it’s an unusual choice to keep in service. The local system significantly altered the routes for its buses today.

Google Buzz ( via )? I wonder what that also-ran free email company thinks about that. I hardly ever log in to GMail, anyway, relying on the iPod touch to check for new messages and on iChat for GTalk.

08 February 2010

The supersonic Eagle is among the first designs I printed in color on glossy photo-finish sticker paper , back when I had an inkjet printer, and I haven’t exhausted the print run yet. The design itself has been in use since 1993 .

The suggestion that MLCAD had expired was premature, version 3.3 now available .

07 February 2010

There’s that word again, used by a northener in assessing the local reaction to the snowfall this weekend. Grr. My municipality has a Google Maps mashup of road condition information .

It’s 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want reading notes off the palm ?

The nuclear-powered bus Cyclops from The Big Bus depicted in LEGO® elements .

06 February 2010

So much for that plan: The Household Hazardous Waste and Electronics Recycling Collection site will be closed on Saturday, Feb. 6, and Monday, Feb. 8. The local bus system did not operate today and will not operate tomorrow . Dominion Virginia Power outage map . The city gives me until tomorrow evening to clear my sidewalks. Fortunately I am not expected to deal with the eight-foot high pile of snow diligently prepared next door by our community’s contractor.

05 February 2010

WamaLTC has nothing to cancel this weekend. There’s no call to update anything at my Build page, either. That leaves tax returns.

There’s some complaints about the Hollywood issue of a magazine I no longer buy , but the absence of Zoë Saldana shouldn’t be one of them: she was on the cover 2 years ago .

04 February 2010

The desire for mudguards in black is satisfied . One week until the WAMALUG meeting.

A new era of entertainment is about to begin ? I think not, but apparently my bills for internet service will have a new image on them soon. The company forgets sometimes that I canceled my television service and sends me notices about changes to the channel line-up.

03 February 2010

Why should the builders of fire trucks in LEGO® elements have a monopoly on reciting the technical specifications of their creations? From 2008: Invitation for Bid Procurement of Two Armored Trucks .

02 February 2010

The mint lobby must have the toothpaste companies over a barrel, I figure, or maybe it’s just a store thing, the shelf label says the cinnamon flavor is discontinued.

No, not really. Not this time.

01 February 2010

What HistoricAerials.com does for the country ( previously ), New York City does for itself with the NYCityMap • DoITT • City-Wide GIS ( via ). The selection is a little limited (1924, 2006, 2008).

31 January 2010

The currency converter at Yahoo! Finance ( previously ) doesn’t know about the Serbian dinar , but the search box at Google does ( built-in currency converter ).

I let doppelganger week on Facebook pass without participating.

30 January 2010

Was the report of the demise of the 28B ( previously ) exaggerated? Probably not, for a search yields the definitive There were no matches found. Selecting the message on the destination board seems to be a manual operation still, but why a Richmond Highway Express bus was displaying TTT instead of REX last week goes unexplained.

I thought the Honda Accord Crosstour was supposed to be hideous ! In the metal, not so much.

One could say I used a lot of Brick Yellow in my most recent construction.

29 January 2010

No Pontiac, of course… no Saab, no HUMMER, Porsche dealers didn’t bother, neither did Land Rover or Tesla… nothing really new automotively, Hyundai is touting some rear-wheel drive, V-8 powered sedan… ha, ha, I forgot Saturn, no more Saturn. The Washington Auto Show confirms my opinion .

Is your system ICC Version 4 ready? Mine is not :-(

28 January 2010

What’s better than having a memory position for a 1/400s shutter speed? Engaging it about a minute before the unpredictable opportunity to use it, which lasts only a few seconds, happens. Two weeks until the next WAMALUG meeting.

27 January 2010

A Brobdingnagian iPod touch ? MSNBC headline writer disagrees ( via ).

I don’t like the sound of this: Restructure the AT7 weekday service . The list of proposed changes is a reduction from those presented last month which would have changed the AT7 only by adjusting the route east of the King Street Station.

My problem with downloading an eStatement from an online bank was with Preview and its in ability to display the content of the PDF.

26 January 2010

Two more deaths of transit system employees , more details and a roundup of recent troubles at WTOP. I built a WMATA high rail truck in anticipation of our display in Philadelphia nearly four years ago.

Speculation as to tomorrow’s announcements continues ( via ). Oh, you were thinking about some other presentation ?

Now the WAMALUG webmaster doesn’t even have to create an RSS feed— Google Reader will do it for him ! Grr.

25 January 2010

National Archives to Ban Photography . It would be the wrong place to argue that my camera doesn’t even have a flash!

The LUGNET page for WAMALUG has the correct URL but is otherwise dated, the more austere page for WamaLTC has survived the loss of curatorship. Hmm, ILTCO is not the only site with a home page stuck in last summer .

Hint for yesterday: previously .

24 January 2010

From quick-service to casual-dining , three weeks to the next WAMALUG meeting. I should be sorting. I disagree with a Wikipedia contributor that there is a typical building for the chain I chose to build but am not identifying yet.

The bullet-counting scene from Dirty Harry ( previously ) from a different perspective .

23 January 2010

The developing standard for track beds and streets in PennLUG is something I learned about at the last WAMALUG meeting. I contrasted the effort going into making detailed ballast and brick-built pavements to a typical WamaLTC event where we all look at each other and someone asks, Um, who brought track?

22 January 2010

Files in the Poser format based on some of my LEGO® creations now available for free . I don’t know what happened to the grille on the Antique Roadster .

21 January 2010

There’s a plan to build a LEGOLAND® in Florida but seeing as how I passed on visiting the one in California when I had the opportunity I expect Florida to remain an unvisited state.

20 January 2010

That’s a shame: MLCad is effectively dead development-wise … Reminds me of Track Designer and TrackDraw . Whither BlueBrick ?

Just an idea: iPods with logo engraved on the back .

19 January 2010

As you can see, the client configuration currently at risk is Windows XP running IE6 . Nope, not running any configuration like that at home.

18 January 2010

The CVS might have closed and Borders Express is liquidating, but otherwise Park City Center looks to be doing ok. The things that pass for books these days can give pause.

17 January 2010

Joe Meno’s microscale Eagle is a worthy follow-up to this exhaustive MetaFilter post on Space: 1999 . The report is that only 300 sets of laserdiscs were made which makes the reviews by The Laser Disc Newsletter in the early nineties somewhat irrelevant. None of the ColdFusion programming past the homepage of the successor periodical seems to work anymore. Still no DVD purchase in months.

16 January 2010

A definitely appreciated side benefit of all new Macs including Bluetooth and AirPort even if the owner doesn’t use them: Internet Sharing obviates any requirement for an AirPort Base Station for any visiting MacBook Air or iPod touch, and Bluetooth File Exchange works, too. I definitely need to find a better way to synchronize the folders on the notebook, though.

15 January 2010

Four years after I changed the wordmark for WamaLTC we are making progress on having the team look catch up to the change… those Steam Heather colored shirts are now over 6 years old … and the second batch with different colors now in use nearly 4 years… I did a lot of clicking this afternoon!

Shh! An unlicensed use of the Metro logo ! Whoever built that needs to change the gray details along the cab roof, mm-hmm.

14 January 2010

WMATA General Manager John Catoe met with bloggers yesterday , today it’s announced that he’s resigning the position . Just another coincidence.

13 January 2010

Presumably this page about McDonald’s Wireless Connectivity will change once the charges are dropped later this month . My only interest is while standing at an adjacent bus stop, of course.

12 January 2010

That explains the things on the trunk lids of the local constabulary, it might be the Elsag North America MPH-900 Mobile License Plate Recognition system. This Transit Police vehicle drove past me three times this morning, coincidence… or something more ? The installation of the Mobile Plate Hunter and a whole lot of other stuff is paid for by homeland defense grants to jurisdictions in the National Capital Region.

Some furniture store’s name is on the permits for the location where Tower Records/Video #195 was.

11 January 2010

The domestic Focus has been lame for a few years , Ford is using the opportunity of the 2010 North American International Auto Show to debut the new model . The 5-door hatchback is part of the lineup again, and this is the first I’ve seen of the sedan. The bite out of the hood taken by the blue oval will be less polarizing than the fake side vents of earlier years, I expect. But Chrysler has nice models , too! someone might complain. Yes, they do .

I learn today that there is no longer a 28B. I liked saying B. Apparently this change is the first result of the Metrobus Leesburg Pike Line Study … you know something, WMATA? That photograph is damn familiar ! I also notice that there are no stops for the Metrobus along King Street between the high school and the subway station.

The other side of the Mobile Commuter Store ™.

10 January 2010

Early praise for my most recent quick-service restaurant construction , I have to credit the BrickLink store which had most of the Slope Brick 45 2×2 Double Convex (3045) I needed and in New condition, too. The most recent set the part appeared in Blue was 30 years ago.

09 January 2010

It’s no longer my concern, but the use of ITC Korinna ® to express the name of the local LEGO® users group does not merit my approval. The website still uses Futura Extra Black , though.

The Brickish Association has aims and objectives , four in all! How is WamaLTC supposed to compete with that? Ahem .

08 January 2010

The guys at Trek Prop Zone have discovered my Flickr account but they don’t allow the unregistered to view forums or topics, boo. The Fairfax Connector Orion V LEGO® MOC has entered the set of the thousand views . Should I be suspicious of people who join Flickr just to comment ?

I am disappointed that Slope Brick 75 2×2×2 Quadruple Convex (3688) is not available in Orange.

07 January 2010

The Windows media stream offered by Radio Television Serbia of its satellite programming plays in QuickTime. Surely I am missing some fine products of the domestic programming there by not visiting more often.

The WAMALUG meeting on Saturday should be interesting.

06 January 2010

Aigo , it’s not just me having trouble finding evidence of two public displays in 2009 on the part of WAMALUG. (The National Building Museum display was in 2008 but their participation in Space Day that year goes unmentioned.) Why would that little detail hold up the rush to participate, though? Looking at the haul from the first round to the UK’s Brickish Association isn’t encouraging.

05 January 2010

Viewing the Rules for LEGO® LUGBULK Program 2010 in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac required the download of Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2 and reading the result of the conversion reveals one requirement to become a registered LUG which WamaLTC may not meet: the need to have at least a one page description of the LUG and the goals . Maybe the first answer here would be good enough because I don’t see any goals here .

There are now enough appointments in my life that I’m going to give iCal a try.

I have complained about the need to Detect Displays but today I realize that the change with Snow Leopard to relocate programs which would otherwise launch on the nonexistent monitor is smart: Windows (the XP Professional edition, anyway) does not know when a monitor has failed.

04 January 2010

Microtek has released a beta of ScanWizard Pro 7.7 but it returns the same error code that 7.62 repeated .

03 January 2010

It’s been almost four years since I’ve made any changes in the header graphic at the top of WamaLTC pages. The header graphic used to be longer but there’s a width: 40em; declaration in the style sheet which prevents every browser from seeing any of it past 640px. Every browser, that is, except Netscape Communicator 4.8, which I tested along with previous versions of Internet Explorer using old Windows 98 virtual machines. The layout used to be liquid, exposing the rest of the graphic at large window sizes, but the width declaration improves readability by preventing the long lines of text at such sizes. A neglected page at the site .

Downloading thumbnails for inclusion on WamaLTC pages is readily accomplished from Brickshelf accounts, I’ve yet to come up with a workflow which makes sense regarding our participants who upload only to Flickr.

Oh, Endorsed by ILTCO, very nice. I wonder why I don’t hear more chatter about this publication and its building instructions . Maybe if I attended more WamaLTC meetings…

02 January 2010

The roster of pages commemorating the shows in which WamaLTC has participated is once again as up to date as it can be, in the absence of anyone admitting to photographing the displays in April, 2006 , April, 2008 , and August, 2008 . Our most common link target might disappear again as was threatened in 2007 but the thumbnails are in place.

I agree but wonder if it’s already too late.

01 January 2010

I see that I will not be buying Windows 7 Ultimate at Office Depot, either. The store’s display does not admit even to the version’s existence.

It occurs to me that a desktop client for Twitter would make more sense if I was following anybody.

The inability of MyBlogLog to distinguish reliably between script access at my server or from my hard drive has led me to delete the script from these pages and the bookmarks to the service in my browsers.