It’s been a long (albeit fruitful) day at work, and I’ve had no time to blog at all. All I have to say is, this is an interesting week in the blogosphere to be away from the blog. More later.
If I’m to be your camera…
It was only a matter of time before the spectacular image quality evinced by sites like Then You Discover and 101-365 made me look twice at my photo equipment. Which currently consists of my trusty Nokia 3650 camphone, whose images, while occasionally artistic, are generally oversaturated and a little smeary, and the still camera on our Sony Mini-DV camera, which turns out images which are usually flat and lacking in detail. Both cameras max out at 640 x 480 resolution.
Put that together with an unexpected gift card to Best Buy, and I’m thinking about picking up some gear. The catch is that I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg. I’m not going to be printing photo quality stuff, so I don’t think I really need a five-megapixel camera. I just want something that will take decent quality, high(er) resolution images. I’m thinking about the Olympus Camedia D-395, which is a 3.2MP camera, but it’s new enough that no one has any feedback about it. Ideally $150 is the most I’d want to spend. Anyone else got any suggestions?
The miracle of caulk
Another project (nearly) completed. I finished caulking the new baseboards in the guest bathroom. The caulk serves two purposes: it prevents water from running down behind the baseboards in the event of splashes, and it also hides the fact that some of the walls weren’t exactly flat by filling any gaps between the boards and the walls. Everything looks really good now. Except for the transition between the bathroom tile and the hallway floor. I need to lay a transition trim piece over that. Tonight.
Wrinkling
It’s weird to see A Wrinkle In Time as a kid’s Disney TV movie. Good weird, some of the time. But the transformation to the screen makes even the mean stuff of the book, the scenes on Camazotz (which used to give me nightmares as a kid) look cheap and somehow funny.
NEWSWEEK: So you’ve seen the movie?
Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve glimpsed it.And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.
But for all that, it’s actually not awful. Watching it recalls the power of the book, the tremendous contrast between family and awful hate, the fierce cynicism of IT and its servants and the aching love of family no matter how fragile.
One down, twenty to go
I’m speaking of course about the items on my “fix the house” list. Yesterday’s porch repair went pretty easily, if tediously. After verifying the extent of the damage yesterday, I squared off the damaged section to a 33″ x 4″ rectangle using my trusty jig saw, then trimmed a 3/4″ x 6″ x 6′ hardwood board to match the dimensions and nailed it to the floor studs. When I was done, the patch had less give than the rest of the sections of original flooring. I spent the rest of the late afternoon, until about 7 pm, cutting the replacement carpet to shape and getting it snugly into place with my trusty staple gun. It now looks a hell of a lot better than it did. I was even able to fix a loose step or two while I was at it.
Tonight’s project: either clean up the library (where months of processed bills wait for me to file them) or finish the trim in the guest bathroom. Both, maybe, if I’m lucky.
Hide your vinyl, I’m on the loose
Today’s listening comes courtesy of Cellophane Square, the excellent used music store in Seattle’s U-District about which I’ve written before. I grabbed a handful of really nice vinyl there Thursday, including today’s listening, the Beatles’ Help!. Judging from this guide, the record I got was not an original pressing—it probably dates from after 1976—but it’s still a kick to listen to the music the way it was meant to be heard.
Other finds included the Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, Get Happy!! by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and David Byrne’s Music from the Knee Plays, a soundtrack of sorts to a Robert Anton Wilson play that I don’t believe has ever been reissued on CD. In fact, as luck would have it, I have never heard any of these albums (except excerpted on greatest hits), so I’m in for some good listening if I ever get some time near my record player.
Homework
I finished cleaning out the rotted wood on the porch today. When all was said and done, the only damage was confined to a 33″ x 4″ strip along one edge. It strikes me as safer and easier to square-cut the hole and drop a replacement board in than to pull up the remaining 4 foot by 5 foot by 1″ board—especially now that I realize it’s (a) got the railings nailed into it and (b) is tongue-and-groove mated to the adjacent piece of decking.
So it’s off to get my jigsaw to cut the board out and then some nails and I should be done.
New mix: I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs
New theme mix, catalog number JHNCD009, “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs.” Inspired by too many Friday nights listening to Shake the Shack on KEXP. It actually covers a lot of ground, from British dancehall comedy to Swedish drinking songs to country and western to the inevitable Tom Waits. Not sure how well it coheres but I’ve been sitting on it too long already.
CD copies are on the way to all subscribers. Others can purchase a subset of the songs on the iTunes Music Store.
Ha! The magic power of the Kinja is about to reveal itself
I’ve been using Kinja on and off for the last few weeks, ever since I made a Kinja digest for both Hooblogs (see here) and Sloanblogs (see here). The digests were an afterthought, inspired by the press that Kinja was getting, but now (to my surprise) they’re the most useful features of both lists.
What’s cool about Kinja is that it’s lightweight, loads quickly, provides an attractive UI, is intelligent about providing excerpts of the item descriptions, and provides a “read anywhere” view of your set of sites. Radio, which was the first aggregator I ever used, provided an attractive UI but wasn’t especially lightweight (particularly in its Mac OS 9 incarnation) and provided full descriptions of the items in each feed. It’s funny how much I like the abridged description feature, in fact, since my own feed provides full text descriptions and since I normally hate having to click through to get the full story. But Kinja’s apparently simple algorithm of grabbing the first two or three sentences of the description if it’s above a pre-set length is remarkably effective. It’s also made me more conscious about not burying the lead of my posts; in short, it’s improved my writing.
Estonia, moving forward with WiFi
Catching up on an item I pointed to almost two years ago: a new BBC article today discusses the progress made toward unwiring Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Currently over 250 free public WiFi hotspots have been deployed throughout the country. Interesting note at the bottom: “Many Estonians, especially the younger ones, are embracing wireless internet access wholeheartedly. That is especially true now that the economy is starting to improve, and more can afford laptops.”
Measuring RSS gets its own page
I combined all my posts from last year about measuring RSS usage and the spread of blog content into one page and gave them a permanent home. I think the points are still relevant today.
Congrats to John and Kathy
It’s turning into Old Home Week here, with lots of updates about Virginia classmates. The latest update is the best, though. I got an email last week from John “G Money” McLaughlin, who preceded me as the secretary of the Virginia Glee Club. He said something interesting about getting engaged.
Yesterday I got the engagement announcement, including a picture of John (who doesn’t look like he’s changed at all in the years since I last saw him) and his lovely fiancée, Kathy. Congrats to the both of you, and looking forward to the big day.
Oh, the ironic part is that John’s lived in Seattle the whole time that we’ve lived here. We just never found out until last week.
One month til the 10th Reunion
We bought our plane tickets last night. The hotel has been booked since last month. We just have to confirm that our dogs can stay with their mom, to line up a rental car, and to find some kind friend in DC or the burbs with whom we can crash on Sunday night prior to our early morning flight out of Dulles. A month from today, I’ll be back in Charlottesville for my ten year college reunion.
As I noted a while back, this will be an interesting one. In addition to catching up with the publishing crowd (Michelle, Fox, Greg, et al: anyone up for a COUP Refugees Happy Hour on Friday night?), I’ll get to ask Kate about the Fox vs. Franken case, listen to Justin, maybe meet Don Webb’s little girl.
Also looking forward to seeing George and Bethany again. The reunion will be the five year anniversary of our meeting Bethany; we bumped into them (almost literally) on the Corner on the Saturday night of reunion weekend back in 1999.
And what will people find in me? Ah, there’s the rub. Though I’ve been to b-school at MIT, lived in Boston and Seattle, and worked at Microsoft since the last reunion, I’m feeling a lot more humble, somewhat less sure of myself, than I did five years ago. Maybe that’s better. I seem to recall being borderline insufferable at the last reunion.
Justin rocks
I got my copies of Justin Rosolino’s new album last night (see this post for background). As I wrote on his discussion board, the album is fantastic. I was prepared to be skeptical of the remake of “Legacy” since that’s one of my favorite tracks from the last album, but I think the new arrangement heightens the building tension that was already in the acoustic version. It’s like hearing Jeff Buckley’s pre-signing acoustic stuff and then listening to Grace—the song is the same but somehow more so.
The album, Wonderlust, is available from cdfreedom.com.
Almost forgot: it looks like I’ll have a chance to give Justin my feedback in person at my UVA reunion. (Wonder how Justin feels about providing “an evening of relaxing, nostalgic entertainment.” Also wonder if he’ll take requests. Yes, I’d like to hear the a cappella version of Prince’s “Kiss,” please.)
Turn on those firewalls: Sasser on the loose
Public service advisory: there’s a new worm out nicknamed “Sasser” that exploits the LSASS vulnerability reported and patched two weeks ago. The worm, like Blaster, spreads directly from machine to machine, so make sure to enable your firewall (it hits on ports 445 and 5554). Details about Sasser here, here, here, here, etc.. Removal tools here, here, here, here. First posting about the worm, from a Microsoft MVP blogger, here.