Expressway to Yr Skull

My brand new Airport Express is now happily parked downstairs next to my stereo, where it’s streaming tunes from my PowerBook into the receiver and out through my B&W speakers.

And it’s interesting, because I can tell a definite difference with the digital tunes. I always play jazz for audio “firsts”—first time in a new house, first tune on new PowerBook, first tune for new speakers—and this time I chose the Brad Mehldau version of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” from the iTunes store, meaning it’s encoded as 128-bit AAC.

And yeah, it was flat, even through those speakers. No bounce in the bass, no life in the piano. I can probably tweak the eq and get some life back in it, but I can already tell I’m going to need a lot of hard disk space if I want to take my CD library digital, because I’m going to need a higher bit rate. Maybe even lossless.

Oh, the setup? I wish it had been easier. I plugged in the unit and connected it to my stereo using an (analog) Monster cable to the tape inputs (which were available), then installed the included software, rebooted, connected to the unit’s wireless network, and tried to use the Airport Express Assistant, which appears automatically, to connect it to my network. Only it didn’t want to. The assistant is programmed to set up a standalone network only, as far as I can tell. And I couldn’t get it to connect to my 128-bit WEP network the first time; I had to reset it, then reconfigure it. Finally it connected.

So my updated network topology (see this post for the previous version):

network map with audio

The Existential Sox

I’ve often thought that the eternal struggle of Boston’s fans, their faithfulness in spite of the losses and the “curse” and the occasionally unbelievable stupidity of the management, was one of the best things about this town. The French may have invented existentialism, but this is the city where it’s practiced in its most refined form.

But what’s a desperate fan to do when his team not only starts winning, but handily slams the Yankees 2 out of 3, and twice by 7-run margins?

I may have to trade in my Camus for some more cheery reading. Kierkegaard, perhaps.

Inspired by a slightly sour-grapey post on Wunderkinder by David Ellis. At least we see eye-to-eye on Virginia football—4 and 0 after last Saturday’s 31–10 steamrolling of Syracuse. I’d say something about the poll (whaddaya mean we’re still #12???) but I don’t want to jinx the team…

Monday morning music notes

I can’t believe I waited this long to buy a Ramones recording (yes, Johnny’s death prompted me. I’m a ghoul, I can’t help it), but Ramones Mania was worth it—30 tracks of pure rock goodness, with the longest track the caustic Reagan kiss-off “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” at a sprawling 3:53 and 25 other tracks that are less than three minutes in length. It’s almost available on the iTunes Music Store, but they haven’t gotten around to adding “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” (track 3), which actually exists in the store but hasn’t been linked to the album yet. I recommend waiting until they complete the album lineup so you pay $10 instead of $28.71.

The new U2 single, “Vertigo,” is available in the iTunes Music Store. This isn’t so much of a non sequitur as you might think—there’s a strong punk influence on the track, from the opening four-count in Spanish to the first guitar and bass riff. After that it goes some different places, including some very nice angular guitar work in the bridge, which for all the world sounds like the Edge quoting himself circa October. It sounds like the boys are having fun, which is something of a relief after the self-consciously earnest All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

I’m currently listening, while I try to get some work done, to the amazing Low outtakes and rarities box set, A Lifetime of Temporary Relief. The polar opposite, in size, mood, and tracklength, of the Ramones recording, the set chronicles ten years of mournful beauty from the amazingly consistent and downbeat trio from Duluth. Too many highlights to mention, but I will say that they do more justice than I would have thought possible to the George Harrison-penned Beatles classic “Long Long Long.”

Weekend o’ projects

Last Thursday I installed a programmable thermostat to replace the old mercury-filled dial-down model. This turned out to be a pretty simple project, though once again the age of the house complicates any project where we try to rely on advice from on-line sources and books. To wit: the new thermostat manual and all the on-line advice said to label the wires coming from the wall according to the labels on the old thermostat’s terminals. Good idea, except there were no labels on the old terminals. I guessed based on the color of the insulating fabric wraps around the old wires, crossed my fingers, and hooked up the wires accordingly. I guessed right, as it turned out; after cutting the power back on, I turned the thermostat up to 90° and was rewarded a few minutes later with the telltale whistle of extra air blowing out the relief valves in the radiators. (This, by the way, appears to be designed to eliminate knocking and the need to bleed the radiators. Based on the one cold day we’ve had so far, it appears to be working, though it does make one want to turn off the teakettle.) Now I need to find a place to dispose of the old thermostat (this program in western Massachusetts gives me some hope).

Yesterday was mostly a shopping expedition. We picked up some glaze to mix with the paint we used for the bottom half of our dining room; we’re going to try to add a little sophistication to the top half, which in its current baby-blue color looks a little too little-kid for the room. And we picked up a replacement light fixture for the dining room so I’ll stop braining myself on the chandelier. And we bought a little more than 30 pounds of tomatoes—it’s sauce time.

This morning while Lisa started to make sauce I installed new weatherstripping on the bottom of the garage door—hopefully that will give us some relief from the water that floods in during heavy rains. This afternoon I’ll clean and reinstall some storm windows, blow the maple seed pods off the driveway, and mulch the existing leaves. My neighbor’s tree has already started to turn, so our big maples shouldn’t be too far behind.

Another blogging friend

Another childhood friend of mine has started a blog, Fury (as in the Eumenides, not the car or the Salman Rushdie novel). Good writing. I particularly like the most recent post about the H2, entitled “I Just Can’t Decide”: “We are back to the same old deal, where if you can shell out $55K for a car, then you can get it tax-free. God bless America.”

Star Wars DVD notes

After two prequels and several years away from the original movies, it’s interesting to come back to the original (albeit in a twice-revised form; see these notes on changes to key scenes). It’s interesting that there are some things that I remembered in radically different form, to wit:

C-3PO’s dialog. The femme half of science fiction’s first gay robot duo was pretty damn bitchy in the first film. He was also inaudible a lot of the time, at least to my ears—though that may be an artifact of listening to the DVD in stereo rather than 5.1 surround. But I think there was a whole lot of snotto voce goin’ on.

The first Millennium Falcon vs. TIE Fighter battle. You know, after waiting 27 years since this movie came out, and going through two digital revisions, you’d think that they’d fix the big rectangles around the TIE fighters where they were superimposed for this sequence. Look at this picture and tell me I’m not seeing things:

But it’s a lot of fun anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some documentary features to watch.

Aaron Swartz, College Student

Aaron Swartz has been such a key part of the blogging (and web services, and XML syndication) world(s) for so long that it’s always a shock to remember that he’s so young. To wit: he’s starting undergrad at Stanford this month. Today’s update finds him making some of the discoveries many of us made ten years ago, like how professors don’t always understand your insights; parties are sadly funny when you look at them as anthropological rituals (and don’t participate); and how phony patriotism is used to build group identities.

(I will note, however, that it’s grimly funny to find a leading proponent of RDF, the leading (and still mystifying) XML-based semantic taxonomy, and of Atom, which proposes an alternate notation and representation for the syndication data presented by RSS, totally baffled by the transition from the Dewey Decimal System to the Library of Congress system.)

But the series is still highly readable. The alienation of a smart autodidact confronting his peers in the brew of the most intense period of peer interaction—well, it’s awfully familiar to me, and I suspect to many of my readers as well.

Local update

I’ve been struggling to take a good picture with my digital SLR of the view we get from our park; fortunately, the good folks at the Friends of Robbins Farm Park website got a good shot for me. I think we need to join that organization, given how much joy we’re getting out of the park.

In other local news, looks like I have a Googlegänger in Sudbury: “The offensive highlight for the game came in the first half on a 70-yard drive, featuring two clutch, long third-down passes from quarterback Tim Jarrett to end John Kelley and running back Derek Lowe.” Just for the record, folks, if you ever see the word “quarterback” next to “Tim Jarrett,” it ain’t about me.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

…I placed a pre-order for the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. On Tuesday, the trilogy was released. Today, my pre-order was delivered.

Expect blogging to be light. For at least the next couple of days, since I don’t have six or seven contiguous hours where Lisa and I can watch it together any time tonight.

—Incidentally, am I the only one that had the Star Wars storybook with record as a kid? I remember playing that record to death. It was one of those ones where the record made a sound effect for you to turn the page—the effect was an R2-D2 sound, in this case. I mention it because Google searches on the only thing I can remember from the intro, “the hope of freedom was kept alive… but the Rebel forces were pitifully small compared to the might of the evil Galactic Empire,” turn up nothing.

Erm, geek off.

Fixing the Safari spinning beachball

spinning beachball of death

Safari users know about the “spinning beachball”—when using the browser, Mac OS X’s modal wait cursor appears for no reason, sometimes while you’re in the middle of typing or scrolling a page. I had been experiencing the beachball periodically over the last few months and my fix had been to quit and restart the browser—or, when it got especially bad, my PowerBook. Then I installed the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 and for the first time noticed the same beachball activity there. That inspired me to seek a fix.

I thought the two might be related, since the new built-in browser in NNW 2.0 uses WebKit, the browser framework classes that also underpin Safari. I wondered whether the same cause was at the root of both SBODs.

I first tried the number one suggestion for the problem from Google, which was disabling auto-fill for forms in Safari (choose Preferences from the Safari menu, click AutoFill, and turn off the third checkbox). This didn’t do anything. I then tried emptying Safari’s cache. Also nothing.

The last thought I had was that there was a problem with the underlying WebKit libraries. The only problem is that there wasn’t a clean way to rebuild them that I was aware of. So I went for a brute force method: I downloaded and re-installed Safari 1.2. After a reboot, I tried to run Safari, and it was fast, no beachball. I then tried running NNW, and it worked smoothly as well.

I don’t really like this solution, because it doesn’t isolate a fix. The problem could have been corrupted binaries, or it could have been prebinding that needed fixing—the reinstallation accomplished both. It also might leave me vulnerable. I don’t know whether the Safari 1.2 standalone download includes some of the security fixes that have been made since the browser was released. Finally, I am noting some irregularities with pop-up menus reporting “Localized String Not Found” in the place of some options. Nevertheless, my browsing experience is generally faster, so I thought this might help some others.

NetNewsWire, MarsEdit public betas

Ranchero Software (aka Brent Simmons) just announced public betas for NetNewsWire 2.0 and MarsEdit 1.0. I’ve been privileged to be a tester for both apps, and I can say without reservation that NNW 2.0 is the finest news aggregator I’ve used on any platform.

And MarsEdit? Well, I’ve used it to compose my weblog entries for the past several months. Multiple document interface, multiple blogs, flexible HTML support, live previews, in a clean, lightweight application. Plus image support, which I will rave about once it is fully supported on my platform (Manila doesn’t support the NewMediaObject verb for the MetaWeblogAPI). Fabulous stuff, and multiple well deserved cheers to Brent (and Sheila).

Housework

The workload over the last two days:

  • Remove and clean all the window screens
  • Remove and clean all the first floor storm windows
  • Figure out that a baking soda paste removes the years-old nasty dirt on the glass of the front windows (thanks, Lisa)
  • Move the demolished kitchen cabinet to the floor of my storage room cum workshop for extra storage
  • Install two pegboard panels on the exposed studs in the storage room
  • Try to get our tub draining better. We must have the only tripwaste linkage unit around that can’t be removed by removing the overflow plate. (Ours appears to be permanently in residence in our tub, possibly because the drain has a sideways jog.)

Enough. Time to catch our breath. The Lucadamos are hitting the road tomorrow, so we’ll celebrate tonight with burgers and corn.

Reaping some benefits from the Big Dig

Boston Globe: Barrier Comes Down on Hanover: After five decades, a section reopens. The change “marked the first time since the 1950s that pedestrians and drivers could pass directly from the cafes of Hanover Street to Haymarket’s fruit and vegetable stalls.”

I’ll definitely have to go and check out the new street configuration. For one thing, it’s the start of the end of the North End’s isolation, as I predicted three years ago.

Miscellaneous Virginia news

Quick link roundup from the land where I was born:

Photo publishing request

I’m almost out of space on my .Mac account. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good photo publishing methodology? My constraints:

  • The method has to work pretty well with iPhoto
  • It should leave the photos on my server, not a hosted service (I believe this rules out Flickr)
  • It should produce clean index pages that include captions and thumbnails with links to larger images
  • I have access to a server that supports FTP, but can’t do solutions that rely on FrontPage extensions
  • Solutions that rely on server-side CGI are going to be tricky because I don’t know if I can install anything on my server

Surely someone out there has done something like this before. Ideas?