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.

Filling the outliner gap on Windows

I was recently reminded of the gap on the Windows platform in really good outlining tools. I am a long-time OmniOutliner user on my Mac, and haven’t really found a good, cheap, lightweight tool for managing structured outlines on Windows. According to this thread on Outliners.com, the leading candidates are probably Inspiration and NoteMap. NoteMap knows about hoisting, and Inspiration allows for some unstructured brainstorming in addition to pure outlining. But it’s not apparent that either has one of the elegant simple features I would need: the ability to convert an outline into a structured to-do list (which is desperately needed for our house projects).

Enter OneNote. I’ve had this app installed since I got Office 2003 but hadn’t really played with it until the last few days. It uses a notebook metaphor, automatically saves notes, allows for placement of multiple text and graphics blocks on the page, and has some really good outline features, including quick and intuitive numbering mechanisms and the ability to set to-do checkboxes. No hoisting and no ability to create columns on outline items, but otherwise pretty nice.

Miscellaneous links: Andrew May has a draft MSDN article about new import features in OneNote 1.1; Josh Allen wrote an OPML importer that works with the preview of OneNote 1.1; Omar Shahine writes an RSS to OneNote PowerToy that basically allows you to easily copy items from RSS feeds to an outline for later reading.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

So: this weekend was the weekend of mulch. More specifically, “Pacific Fertile Garden Mulch,” also known (after the sniff test) as an approximately 50-50 mixture of compost and steer manure. More specifically yet, 15 cubic yards of this stuff. In our driveway, delivered Friday afternoon.

Lisa had called a landscape contractor after we realized the state the beds in the front yard were in. They recommended 20 cubic yards of mulch and 30 of topsoil. We decided they were out of line, so we cut back the request for mulch by 5 cubic yards and eliminated the topsoil. Good decision, in retrospect, but not nearly enough.

I knew we were in trouble when by Friday night at 6 (after two hours of work) I had shifted hardly any of the pile and only succeeded in covering a few beds. The next day I mowed the lawn, helped Lisa prime and sand some more paint on the exterior of the old part of the house, then we moved about a third of the remaining pile. I was so sore by 5 pm that I could hardly stand. So we called in reinforcements.

Today our very special friends Ed and Gina gamely showed up with a shovel and a rake and helped us move the rest of the pile. All of it. It ended up in the beds under the trees where the pine needles had built up for twenty years, the beds around the fence, the back beds, a bed against the house, my clothes, Ed’s clothes, Gina’s clothes, Lisa’s clothes, our wheelbarrow, our neighbor’s wheelbarrow, and most of all my driveway, where Lisa was able to wash most of the remaining dust into the gutter.

I don’t hurt too much yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Ah well. As Lisa said, “Never again will we order 15 cubic yards of anything.”

The miracle of electrician’s tape

To paraphrase William Burroughs: “Warning to young couples with Select Comfort beds: watch out for the family dog!” To be more specific, watch out for dogs that like to sleep under the bed and like to chew things.

Last night I went to adjust the pressure in my side of the mattress, using the wired remote. The partly-wired remote. One of our dogs managed to chew through the really tough insulation on the remote and short out the controls.He also made a real mess of our front room carpet, dangers of having pets! We called area rug service to help us with that mess, but for the remote I found another solution.

Tonight I managed to fix it, using a multi-gauge wire stripper, a large set of diagonal pliers (a.k.a. “dikes”), and electrician’s tape (and a little bit of help from my friend who works for Electricianinperth.com.au). Here’s how:

  1. Unplug the pump from its electrical connection.
  2. Cleanly cut the control wire at the chewed part, using the dikes.
  3. Using the wire stripper (or the dikes if necessary), strip the thick insulation from both sides of the cut control wire, revealing the five small (22-gauge) wires inside.
  4. Strip all the small wires using the multi-gauge stripper.
  5. Matching colors, twist the cut ends of the bare control wires around each other (white to white, red to red, and so on), and wrap each with a small twist of electrician’s tape.
  6. Once the five wires are reconnected, wrap the whole shebang with electrician’s tape.
  7. Douse liberally with bitter apple spray or the anti-chew remedy of your choice…

Once I plugged the pump back in and checked the control, it worked on the first try. It’s great, I won’t be needing to call on Contractors Today! I guess those wild summers as an electrician at CEBAF (now Jefferson Labs) weren’t spent in vain.

Jack Valenti meets The Tech

I had to point to this item about MPAA chairman and anti-DVD-piracy bigmouth Jack Valenti being interviewed by the savvy staff of The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT. As one might expect, Valenti came away… schooled, but there’s no evidence of forward motion:

TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They’re still not available — it’s been four years.

JV: Well why aren’t they available? I don’t know, because I don’t make Linux machines.

Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can’t fuss at people, because you’re one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

TT: About two million.

JV: Well, I can’t believe there’s not any — there must be a reason for… Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question — I don’t know the answer to that… Well, you’re telling me a lot of things I don’t know.

TT: Okay. Well, how can we have this dialogue?

JV: Well, we’re having it right now. I want to try to find out the point you make on why are there no Linux licensed players. There must be a reason — there has to be a reason. I don’t know.

[Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the MPAA, later pointed to one company, Intervideo, that has a license to sell GNU/Linux DVD software, although the company does not actually sell a product that Linux users can purchase. Linux users who want to watch DVDs should “perhaps buy a DVD player instead,” Taylor said, or “write to Intervideo and others, encourage them that they’re the market,” he said. Will Linux users ever be able to view DVDs on their computers without breaking the law? “I’m sure that day is not far away,” Taylor said.

A spokesman for Intervideo, Andy Marken, said the company’s product is only for embedded systems and that Intervideo has no plans to release a software player for end users.]

Link credit: Pho, Creative Commons blog, others.

From Motown to poetry to just plain weird: obscure audio downloads

Generally under-reported yesterday: some long out of print singles are now available on the iTunes Music Store. Specifically, the first 45 singles ever released by Motown. Hopefully this leads to more deserving out of print material being made available.

Moving quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous: I voted yesterday for KEXP.org in the Radio category of this year’s Webby Awards. Looking in some of the other categories, I came across weirdomusic.com. What sublime weirdness and wonderfulness: links to the MP3 archive at Ubu.com, including tons of readings by Burroughs, Bukowski, Plath, and even William Carlos Williams; to April Winchell Multimedia, featuring the broadest collection of just plain weird music ever (special favorite: “Keep Your Restrooms Clean, Men” by the Red Lion Gasoline Company); and to Dana’s Downloadable Album of the Month. Which, for (I guess) one more day, features Sheldon Allman’s Folk Songs for the 21st Century.

Fugazi live CDs on demand

DC’s Fugazi is the latest band to make a deep catalog of their live shows available for purchase to their fans. It looks like even with only 20 shows, they’re already running into production difficulties. Small wonder, what with the killer pricing (two CDs for $10 for US addresses).

I’m not a huge obsessive fan, but I might have to cough up for a live version of “Bed for the Scraping.” There are some great reactions by more obsessive fans at Technorati.

Some party

I just used the new Party Mix feature of iTunes 4.5 for the first time. The first song was “Son of Sam” by Elliott Smith, followed by…“Sister Ray.”

Man, that’s some kind of party.

Thom Gunn, to rest

Thom Gunn, British writer transplanted to San Francisco, formalist poet of highly informal topics, is dead. New York Times, SF Chronicle obituaries. Neither captures the full impact of the man and his poetry.

As a young soon-to-be-ex-poet in 1992, I was blown away by The Man With Night Sweats. Such highly formal structure (rhymes, even), on such highly personal subjects. Love, AIDS, mature relationships, all through a lens I had never experienced before (at that point in my life, I didn’t know that I knew gay people), through such highly disciplined language that I didn’t understand it for years. But I already knew it trumped whatever meager potential for highly distilled language I had in me.

Keyword searches + iTMS: bliss

I switched to Safari on my Mac a while back, and I hardly miss the Mozilla platform at all. —OK, that’s a lie. I miss the rapid updates, the cool features like being able to browse the DOM tree on pages I’m developing, and most of all the keyword searches. God, I miss the keyword searches. Typing “az” + a book’s name in the address bar, and getting the Amazon page for the book, is just brilliant.

I missed the keyword searches in Safari until yesterday, when I downloaded and installed Sogudi, a free plug-in that allows you to create customized search terms that can be used in the Safari address bar. And then today I grabbed a search string from MacOSXHints that allowed me to construct an iTunes Music Store search from Safari’s address bar. Bliss.

New playlist sharing in iTunes

iTunes 4.5 is out, with support for lossless imports (via Quicktime 6.5.1), WMA import on Windows, music videos…and shared playlists. You can click any playlist in iTunes and publish it to the iTunes Music Store. You can also click any song title, album title, or artist and jump to the appropriate content in the iTMS.

I don’t have any good playlists on my work computer (mostly random shuffle things) but I have a ton at home, and will publish them in the store tonight. I’m curious to see how the feature (which appears to be called iMix) will handle tracks that aren’t for sale; probably it will just omit them.

Update: Behold, my first iMix playlist, a version of this mix. The difference is all the songs I listed as “missing” (i.e. not available in the iTMS). Vote for it, won’t you? I also noted looking at some other mixes that user submitted mix names get passed through the same profanity filter that song titles do, but that it appears to be possible to elude the filter by choosing your slang appropriately.

Aftermath

It was pretty nasty yesterday afternoon and evening, the first real East Coast-style wind/thunderstorm we’ve seen since we moved out here two years ago. My first clue of the intensity of the storm was a lightning strike directly outside the office across from mine, so close that I could feel the hair on my arms stand on end and my forearm muscles clench. (As my next door neighbor said, “Suddenly I don’t mind not having a window office so much.”)

The drive home was slow, compounded by downed branches. Fortunately, having recently had our trees pruned, the damage in our front yard was minimal—lots of downed leaves but only one branch. The back yard didn’t look too bad, a lot of small clusters of branches off the enormous pine tree, but as I fed the dogs I watched and heard more and larger branches fall. Then a few minutes before Lisa came home we lost power. A few minutes later the storm was over, and it still took an hour and a half to restore the power, but it was still a little adventure.