Since I have just come into our house and have all but collapsed prostrate on the bed, I’m tempted to declare the ability to nap at 3 pm on a Monday afternoon the best part of the vacation. Of course, I’d be lying. It’s somewhere in between a fresh ear of corn just picked out of a field and steamed/roasted over a fire, laughing with my grandfather, and having my young first cousin (once removed) grab my index finger with a chubby fist… and then attempt to maneuver said finger to his mouth where he could eat it. I swear, the child almost had his feet in his mouth at one point.
Month: August 2003
Heading back
More detailed notes, including Rough and Tumble, soon. For now a quick link to photos of the picnic and the Brackbill farm—and the newest cousin, my cousin Catherine’s son Johnathan. And probably the best picture I’ve ever taken of my grandfather, right.
I’ll get to post this entry, started in Baltimore where I had WiFi, when I get home. Right now I’m waiting in Chicago, which is obstinately WiFiFree, and so have a chance to look over some of the photos I took this weekend with my phonecam. The major thing that strikes me (and has probably already struck any more photography-savvy readers of this blog) is the color balance problem. The Nokia 3650 appears to do some image processing, including at least color and level correction—what I see in the viewfinder before I snap the photo isn’t exactly what I see afterwards. And the results can be uneven. I already noticed this with the Tradiscantia photos I took in my garden last weekend, and am noticing it more with the series I took of the farmhouse. Though I took the photos from more or less the same vantage point, the color of the grass is dramatically different in the photos I took from the tree shade than the ones I took closer to the house. Not ideal. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it off either.
A small regret: the picture I took of the dedication stone in the center of the farmhouse’s wall didn’t come out clearly enough to show the engraving. I could only see a little from the ground, but it was something along the lines of “Hershey, 1857” with a good deal of text before and after. I never noticed it before, and when I asked my mom about it she confessed she hadn’t either. Something to check out another time.
Kudos for Weblogger
Dave points to a review of Weblogger, my hosting service, in PC Magazine. Big, big shout out to Erin and his team for keeping this site up and running and happy since I cut over from my free site at Userland late last year.
In commemoration of the moment, I’m adding the button I should have had all advertising their services along the button list. Which just reminds me: I really need to clean up this site. The left nav wasn’t designed for all the crap I’m trying to cram into it.
Here we go again
More than twelve hours after my last post, I’m back in SeaTac. As Esta alluded earlier, our plane taxied away from the gate, only to pause before getting to the runway, turn around, and start heading back, to the pilot’s somewhat apologetic explanation, “We got a light on the hydraulics, folks, and we just need to head back and check it out…”
We waited at the gate for over an hour, while the kids in front of me got crankier and nastier at their mom, and the mom got crankier and nastier at Dad, until finally the pilot announced that the plane needed hangar maintenance and that we needed to deplane. In confusion, with no explanation of where to go, we ended up at a sort of confused huddle line around the American Airlines ticket counter, where we got no acknowledgment except for a guy handing out pieces of paper with the 1-800 number for the booking department.
I decided to try the Yahoo travel number first, since I had booked my tickets through them. Big mistake. The voice recognition software, which is OK if you’re calling from a quiet office, got hopelessly confused with all the background noise around me and so asked for corrections twice after every thing I said. You’d think they’d program it to default to number entry after a certain number of failures. Eventually I hung up in disgust and called the airline number. Our line still hadn’t moved. I got through to an agent after a minute, who started checking out possibilities. A promising itinerary, which would have put me at Dulles at the same time as my original arrival in BWI, turned to a blind alley after the American agent was unable to raise United. Finally I got rebooked on a red-eye, went home, slept, had dinner with Lisa and her folks, and came back to the airport.
And here I am, again, enjoying(?) the WiFi and a Black Butte Porter, waiting for a time when it’ll be late enough to merit going down to the gate. I have an hour and a half until I board, almost enough time to watch a movie on the PowerBook. Maybe I’ll start looking at the Weblogs.com data.
Oh, the punch line: I at least got upgraded to first class for the first leg of my journey. I might get some sleep tonight after all.
Don’t forget to be Fair and Balanced
It’s Fair and Balanced Day, as I mentioned yesterday. The best outcome for today would be if we could bump Fox News to the second or third result for Fair and Balanced in Google. Just remember: If Fox News can call themselves “Fair and Balanced,” so can anyone!
Julie Powell and Tin Man: blackout survivors
Julie: Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a Blackout. “With a flashlight wedged under my chin and candles everywhere, I sautéed rice in butter—would have used some onions there but I had none, or if I did they were lost in the dark refrigerator…”
Tin Man: “ I stood on the Hudson River promenade. I listened and looked at the water lapping against the rocks. I leaned against the railing and stared east at the Manhattan skyline. Most of it was dark, but much of Lower Manhattan had power. It was an eerie reversal from two years ago.
“It was like Lower Manhattan had suffered enough and was finally getting a respite.”
Blaster Roundup
Official and unofficial pages about fixing the infection. Note that Windows 95, 98, and ME machines are NOT affected by the worm.
- Official page of Blaster info on the Microsoft.com security site. Contains really good step by step instructions on how to clean your system and prevent re-infection.
- Scoble posts an abbreviated list of instructions courtesy Jeff Sandquist.
To recap, if the official site is unreachable:
Step 1 – Patch the machine and turn on the XP Firewall
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp
[Steps inline:
- Turn on your firewall.
- Update Windows—using either Windows Update or the information in this Security Bulletin.
- Make sure your antivirus software is up to date.
- Remove the worm using a utility provided by, for example, Symantec.]
Step 2 – Remove the Virus from your machine
Copy this file to a floppy disk before you go, run this utility on your mother’s machine and it will scan for the Virus and remove it.
If you forgot to copy it, you can download it from here:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.blaster.worm.removal.tool.html
Step 3 – Turn on Auto update
Your mother got the Virus because her machine was not properly patched. Turn on automatic download and installation of updates by completing the following steps:
- Open Control Panel, select the System icon
- Select the Automatic Updates Tab
- Turn on Keep my computer up to date option by selecting the check box
- Turn on Automatically download the updates, and install them on the schedule that I specify, by selecting the radio buttons
- Set the date to every day and a time when you know the machine will be turned on.
Now your mother’s machine will automatically check each night if there are any new patches and install them for you.
On the road again
A few quick notes as I begin my brief vacation:
- I normally fly Delta, or United when absolutely necessary. But if I had not flown American today I would never have known that there’s an enormous Robert Rauschenberg piece hanging in Terminal C at SeaTac.
- You know you’re in Seattle when the line at the Terminal C Starbucks is longer than the line for the security checkpoint. I was especially impressed with their demand management system, though: one barista came out pushing a cart full of different sized cups, took everyone’s order, noted the order on the cups, then went back and had the order made by the time we got to the front of the line.
- The WiFi in Terminal C is good. Thanks to the really large Intel Centrino signs everywhere, it’s easier to find a strong hot spot than a power outlet. Go, go, Wayport membership…
- Finally, the irony of traveling to the recently blacked out East Coast to attend a celebration of steam power has not escaped me.
Onward…
Fair and Balanced Day
As you can see from my new tagline, I’m jumping on the “Fair and Balanced” bandwagon. After all, if Fox News can claim to be fair and balanced, just about anyone can. See this post from Neal Pollack about making August 15th Fair and Balanced Day on the Internet to protest Fox’s bogus suit against Al Franken’s new book for using the words “fair and balanced” in the title. And go pre-order a copy of Al’s book while you’re at it…
Miscellaneous listening: live rarities and booty-shaking
I’m swimming in so much music these days, between the iTunes Music Store and eMusic, that I occasionally have to remember to stop and think about what I’ve heard recently that I liked. Quick notes on two recent finds:
Lounge and Dance: There are three collections available from Miami DJ Ursula 1000 (eMusic carries two of them), including Kinda Kinky (which features what must be the most nakedly ironic reading of the line, “Now that is kinky”), the remix album All Systems are Go-Go (with a phenomenal lead track remix of ECD’s “Direct Drive”), and my new favorite,
The Now Sound of Ursula 1000, which has such surreal moments as an aerobics instructor’s direction to “Breathe in” dissolving to a lounge organ mix and a call and response chant of “I am not a pleasure unit.”
Alternative: This week’s iTunes Just Added listing included a new “single” from Jeff Buckley: a live cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Night Flight.” Sadly, like much live Jeff that I’ve heard, the truly astonishing vocal moments (like one sustained full-voice high note right at the end of the song) are matched by an equal number of off-pitch melismatic moments. But it’s still good stuff—and, according to the official web site, is going to be on the reissued double-cd release of Live at Sin-é in the fall, featuring the full sessions from which emerged that staggering early live recording of “Mojo Pin.”
Around the block
It isn’t a true keiretsu update because I don’t know all of these folks personally, but cut me a little slack:
- Greg is now licensed to practice law in DC, and his rant about walking and driving in the District reminds me of why I miss the Beltway environs—and why I left. For the record, Corner Bakery came in 1999, a year before we left; almost far enough away to keep me from gaining another ten pounds. Almost.
- At Justin’s Links, an hommage to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” I did a hyperlinked art project around the song a while ago, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, which in light of everything else that has happened since seems uncomfortably prescient (even if some of the links have gone stale).
- Craig points to a great post with photos from BrickFest 2003, the Lego convention. I particularly like the Star Destroyer Speed Build competition—as I reported a while back, the Lego Star Destroyer kit is the largest (and most expensive) ever.
- It seems that on the same day I found out about the Star Destroyer kit, I discovered the Julie/Julia Project. Now, almost a year later, the project is nearing its end and the well deserved publicity is starting to roll in. Huge congrats to Julie Powell for her write-up in the New York Times Food Section, following close on the heels of her audio interview with Chris Lydon. I love the way the Times discusses her, um, sailor’s mouth: “Some of Ms. Powell’s language, in person and on her Web log, is very rough. Some of it is very funny. So that this report may be welcomed at breakfast tables and in classrooms, the word ‘cookie’ has replaced the occasional expletives.” —Incidentally, note the careful two-word, initial capped use of Web log. Can you imagine how long it took the guys who do the style guide for the Times to come to an agreement on that one?
Another excuse for slow posting
My inlaws came in yesterday and we had a great relaxing outdoor dinner with them (though it started to get pretty cold toward the end of the evening). We’ll be doing some fun things with them (when we aren’t working) over the next few days, and then they’ll keep Lisa company while I fly East for the family reunion and Rough & Tumble.
George is back
George leaves some notes from San Francisco, having (quite sensibly) not blogged his way across country. And somehow I missed his post from August 1 about getting XM Radio. Jealous=me.
Patch your systems: Blaster is loose
If you run Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003, and you haven’t gone to Windows Update in the last few weeks, you may be vulnerable to a new worm that started spreading yesterday, W32.Blaster.Worm. This nasty little worm is spreading on machines that didn’t apply the MS03-026 patch, then replicating itself and apparently mounting an attack against WindowsUpdate.com. This post on Slashdot suggests that one sign of infection is that your machine will start showing a 60 second shutdown timer, and the comments provide some really good tips about dealing with the worm, including a way to abort the shutdown (by typing shutdown /a at a command prompt) so you can apply the patch that works on some systems (though maybe not on Windows 2000). There’s also a worm removal tool on Symantec’s advisory page, if you suspect you’re already infected (though I would suggest downloading the patch first).
Tip: If you haven’t already patched your system and you can’t get to Windows Update to apply the patch, you may want to try going to the security advisory on TechNet, which points directly to the patch download location for your OS.
On a personal note, I wonder if this has something to do with the dog-slow performance I was having at home (Comcast DSL) yesterday and this morning.
My tomato plants: “We’re bigger than the Beatles”
I spent part of yesterday afternoon finally staking some of our indeterminate tomato plants. —Yes, I know. When the seed salesman informed us of the difference between “determinant” plants, which grow straight up, and “indeterminate,” which just kind of sprawl everywhere, I thought she was having a joke on us. As it turns out, the joke was on me. Some of the plants have been growing over the sides of our garden boxes, and all the way down the eight inches or so to the ground, where they’ve started producing. So staking them was a little tricky, especially since the longest stakes I had were about eight inches long and I needed something about three times that.
Unfortunately, the tomatoes on the plants are still wee little things. And if yesterday’s weather (cold and rainy for the first part of the day, after two evening rains during the previous week) was any indication, the growing season isn’t going to last forever. So it’s a race between the tomatoes and the weather.
Don’t know how much blogging there will be this week. Work is crazy busy, and I’m flying on Friday back east to a family reunion. But I’ll try to squeeze in a few moments along the way.