The last echoes of Big Star: Chris Bell, I Am The Cosmos

I found a lost gem in my aggregator last night: in the iTunes Just Added feeds was a listing for Chris Bell’s I Am The Cosmos. Without thinking, even though I had only heard one song from the album, I clicked and bought it.

And am I glad I did. As many of the Amazon reviewers commented, there are echoes here of John Lennon’s 1970s work (in particular, “Better Save Yourself” sounds like it would be at home on Shaved Fish), and the whole album admirably showcases why Chris should be remembered as Alex Chilton’s equal partner in making the first Big Star record the incredible musical moment it was.

Silver Queen? Not really

I miss eating Silver Queen corn, which we used to get in Pennsylvania in the summer when I grew up. Or at least I think I miss Silver Queen; this article in the New York Times Dining & Wine section suggests that the sweet white varieties being offered commercially—and even being grown by small farmers—in the Mid-Atlantic aren’t Silver Queen at all, but several modern descendants of the sweet, white-kerneled corn. (Apparently the real stuff converts its sugars to starches within 24 hours of being picked and stored in hot weather, which makes it unsuitable for grocery sale.) How disillusioning. Kinda. Whatever they’re selling still tastes good.

Once more: wireless printing

It seems that every time we move I spend a few hours reconfiguring our network so that we can print over WiFi to our LaserJet 2100M. This time, as I mentioned last week, the issue was physical; I couldn’t physically connect the printer to the wireless access point as I did before, so I ordered a wireless-to-Ethernet adapter, the SMC 2671W.

The adapter arrived last night, but what with the skunk attack and everything else, it took until this morning for me to get the box open and start working on it. As the reviewers on Amazon have commented, the setup for this thing is non-intuitive via the Web, so here’s how I went about it.

  1. Power up the adapter and connect it to my laptop via the enclosed Ethernet cable. (You may need to toggle the switch on the back between a standard and crossover Ethernet connection until you get a steady green light in the middle indicator.)
  2. Configure your laptop’s Ethernet address to something in the same range as the SMC’s default Ethernet address, which is 192.168.2.25 (I used 192.168.2.20).
  3. Open your web browser and point it to http://192.168.2.25.
  4. Use the Site Survey to find your wireless network and click on the SSID to join (note: if your wireless network does not broadcast the SSID, you’ll need to type this information in).
  5. Reset the IP address of the adapter via the Web interface to a valid address on your network. Because my base station serves as a NAT, all the addresses on my LAN are 10.0.1.* addresses, so I gave the adapter the address 10.0.1.254, and told it to use my base station (10.0.1.1) as a gateway.
  6. Reset your laptop’s Ethernet connection to obtain an address via DHCP.
  7. At this point I could connect to Internet sites through the adapter, meaning that the adapter had successfully joined the network and was accessing the Internet through the base station.
  8. I now disconnected the adapter from my laptop and connected it into the WAN port of my 10-port router, and connected the printer into the router. And darned if it didn’t work the first time.

So my network topology is now clusters of wired functionality connected only by 802.11b:

network map

Things come in threes…

…so after our dogs narrowly escaped getting sprayed by a skunk on our front steps last night, I don’t want to know what the other two things to come are going to be.

I opened our front door and our storm door at 10:30 last night, and the dogs bounded out the door and down the steps, where in a second I saw them start barking at something that looked like a big black raised tail. I saw the white in the fur a second before I desperately hauled the dogs back in, but it was too late for the front stoop. Lisa has hit it with a Clorox solution but there’s still a residual stink. And we washed the dogs, just in case. Twice.

Speaking to our neighbors, we learned that skunks are not uncommon in this neighborhood, and there may even be an albino skunk wandering around. So I guess that’s my cue to keep a sharper eye out.

Legal

I am, finally, legally recognized as a resident of Massachusetts. As I wrote on Friday, I’ve had some adventures with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Lisa and I went together on Monday with the objective of changing our Washington State drivers’ licenses, and getting our cars registered in the state. That’s four transactions (two drivers, two cars). On the first date, we managed exactly one transaction: Lisa’s driver’s license. We had a cable bill in her name, but at that point, no proof that I resided in Massachusetts; and our insurance agent hadn’t signed our proof-of-insurance papers.

The next day I took care of some preliminary insurance stuff, and then returned to the RMV. I got my car registered, but not Lisa’s (we didn’t realize she had to sign her form). And I couldn’t get my drivers’ license, because I had an as-yet-un-notarized copy of our mortgage papers but no other proof of our identity. So far: two trips to the RMV, each time waiting at least two hours; two transactions in total completed. I was scoring one-for-one.

A smart man would have concluded that I had two more trips to the RMV coming and planned accordingly. I optimistically returned with different proof of residence and Lisa’s signed paperwork on Wednesday. Result: Lisa’s car was now registered, but my drivers’ license was not yet issued, as my other proof of residence was not accepted either.

Today I returned with our checkbook, which had my name and address in it, and got my driver’s license issued.

Four RMV visits, four successful transactions. But we’re finally legal.

Slow progress

Setting a land speed record in reverse, it took us two weeks and two days before we painted a room in the Arlington house. Our living room, previously an anonymous cream color, is now a nice yellow. (Compare this with our Kirkland house, where we painted the living room on my second day in the house.)

I also assembled a manual, “reel”-style lawn mower and mowed our grass for the first time. If possible, this house has even less grass than the Kirkland house.

Finally, I started to get the storage and workbench area into shape today. For one thing, there’s now power in the room, in the form of an extension cord.

If you’re getting the feeling that things are starting to get a little slow here…well, yeah, it was a slow weekend. But I can’t say I’m not glad to have a day go by without demolition or plumbing problems.

Everything put together falls apart

It is one of the undeniable, though bittersweet, joys of homeownership that the bad times make you remember how wonderful your life is when all the mundane things that you take for granted actually work. For instance, I remember a time when we could flush a toilet in our house and not have unmentionable muck bubble out of the storm drain in our driveway. Such an innocent time.

The plumber’s already been here and it’s not our inside pipes, so now the city guy is striding down our driveway to the back of the house (where the garage entrance is), a pickaxe over his shoulder. This is going to hurt, I can tell.

I think I’ll go sit in the local RMV office for the fourth time this week to see if they’ll accept my newly arrived checkbook or notarized deed of quitclaim as proof of residency, since they wouldn’t accept our duplicated unsigned mortgage papers or the mailer from the bank that had my debit card. Maybe I’ll have a Massachusetts drivers’ license by the end of the day.

Hey, it beats unpacking boxes, right? Right?

Faces of Bush supporters

Interesting juxtapositions popping up around the administration’s supporters today. First, word that the official DOD record for Kerry’s Bronze Star commendation supports his version of events, not “Swift Boat Veteran” critic Larry Thurow’s:

Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, has strongly disputed Kerry’s claim that the Massachusetts Democrat’s boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day.

But Thurlow’s military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to “enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire” directed at “all units” of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat “despite enemy bullets flying about him.”…

Last month, Thurlow swore in an affidavit that Kerry was “not under fire” when he fished Lt. James Rassmann out of the water. He described Kerry’s Bronze Star citation, which says that all units involved came under “small arms and automatic weapons fire,” as “totally fabricated.”

Now, someone is lying here. And my money says that the DOD, which would have every reason to cast Kerry in a bad light following his war protest activities, is probably telling the truth. Which makes Thurlow, in plain speech, a bad actor and a liar.

Then from Beaverton, Oregon, comes this lovely photo of reasoned rebuttal from a Bush supporter (courtesy Oliver Willis):

An unidentified supporter of President Bush tries to silence protester Kendra Lloyd-Knox (right) outside Southridge High School in Beaverton.

An unidentified supporter of President Bush tries to silence protester Kendra Lloyd-Knox (right) outside Southridge High School in Beaverton.

It’s good to know that the administration’s record on civil liberties is setting a positive example for its supporters.

John Eddy steps up to the mic

Over at my old work blog, the Microsoft.com Community Kitchen, John Eddy has posted about his job as Newsgroup Administrator for Microsoft. In the process, he conveys a little bit of emerging philosophy about software support:

I believe in the newsgroups.  I believe that NNTP is a good solution for technical support.  I do not believe it is the only one.  I believe there are places for IM, chat/IRC, mailing lists and good old phone support, and yes, even blogs and wikis.  Heck, I really think MUDs and MUSHes could be utilized too (yes, I still mud in this day and age) and would make a great forum for online conferences, in this day and age when physical attendance at conferences seems to be down. 

When I interned at Microsoft in 2001, helping to work on the first iteration of executing Microsoft’s online community strategy, we called this “finding where the party is and making sure we were there with the beer.” In other words, it’s most helpful to our users if we can engage where they already are.

Boston blog meetup

On Anita’s suggestion, I got out of our house last night and down to the Trident Cafe on Newbury Street for the Boston Blog Meetup. In attendance:

Had a good time, even though the free wifi was a little low-powered. No complaints, though, especially since the provider, Michael Oh of Tech Superpowers, popped up on my Rendezvous list in iChat!

Likes and dislikes, twelve days in

I’ve had a while to get accustomed to this Cape Cod and am starting to warm to it, now that I don’t trip over boxes everywhere I turn. I’m going to try to list balanced “like/dislike” lists, with the goal of starting to figure out what works for me in the house and what should be addressed with future projects.

For this week, we have:

Likes

  1. Really solid original wood doors and fixtures (including door frame moldings!) throughout
  2. The main floor seems to hold temperature really well. We’ve consistently kept well below the outside peak temperatures.
  3. Dining room built-in. Nice corner cabinet (that unfortunately sits over the only place we’ve seen in the house where settling has occurred, with the result that there’s a crack in the plaster on the wall behind the cabinet).
  4. Practical basement layout: garage to utility room to storage room/workshop.
  5. The master bedroom. I love the Cape Cod slanting rooflines, which don’t pose too much of a problem with headroom thanks to a shed dormer in the rear that spans almost the entire width of the house), and the whole bedroom is spacious and feels bigger than it is thanks to the nook formed by the shed dormer where the bed resides.

Dislikes

  1. Most of the outside doors, and all the ones in the basement, stick. Some are really tricky to open; the front door cannot be unlocked and opened one handed, which is a problem when you walk dogs a lot.
  2. The second (bedroom) floor gets very hot and muggy on hot days. I think the uninsulated attic opening (not really a trap door, just a panel) and lack of attic fan are to blame. A couple of projects right there…
  3. No fan in the upstairs bathroom, which means an opportunity for me to get very dusty installing one.
  4. No easy access to the back where the garbage cans live. To get there, I have to go downstairs, through the media room and the utility room and out through the garage door. Which is heavy, and sticks. (Pattern?)
  5. In general, there are far too few electrical outlets in the house. There are none in the full bathroom upstairs, for instance, and only one in the dining room.

Rewiring the wireless network

smc 2671W wireless ethernet adapter

Now that all the major appliances are in and working (we had a plumber out on Monday setting up new pipes for the washing machine and cutting a vent for the dryer), we’re turning our attention to finer points. Like printing.

In the Seattle house, we had cable running to our bedroom, and had a little network corner there. On one Ikea mini-bedside-table (really four two-by-two pieces of Ikea wood in a sort of box shape), we had:

  • The cable modem, connected to:
  • An old Asante ten-port Ethernet router (courtesy Glenn Fleishman’s office move and $5), connected to:
  • Our SMC Barracuda 802.11B wireless router, and
  • Our HP LaserJet 2100 with an Ethernet print server card
  • A barely working HP DeskJet color inkjet printer (connected to the Barracuda)

With this setup, we could print to either printer wirelessly from anywhere in the house. Lisa could also jack into the router if she was working on sensitive stuff that she didn’t want to transmit wirelessly. I described the process of hooking up the SMC, and getting the printer to work, earlier.

Fast forward to the Arlington house. Here we have set up a bedroom that does not have cable as our office space. We’ve accordingly hooked up the cable modem and wireless router in the living room, where they’re more or less discreetly tucked in among the audiovisual equipment. This means we need a new solution to hook in the laser printer, since we do not want it sitting out in the living room. (We’ve all but given up on the DeskJet. We just don’t need color very often and the consumables are expensive, and tend to dry up if you don’t use them for long periods of time.)

I wanted to do an AirPort Express, but I’m not sure it would work to put the LaserJet on the network (if I have time, I’ll check this out at the Apple store). Also, at $130 it’s a little more than I wanted to spend just to get the printer back on line. So I’m looking at SMC’s 2671W EZ Connect 802.11b Wireless Ethernet Adapter. For a product with such an ungainly name, it only does one thing: get Ethernet only devices onto a wireless network. And it’s almost exactly half the price of the AirPort Express.

I should have an update in a few days about how the install worked.

(Incidentally, 802.11b is one reason that going all-out on structured wiring hasn’t made sense to me. But the fact that we still have Ethernet only devices is giving me cause to rethink that point, though buying an adapter is cheaper and easier than snaking cable up through walls that we’ve never opened. Maybe when we do a big remodel.)