Wireless gateway resources

Apple hasn’t adjusted its price points downwards on its wireless networking gear to compensate for the general industry trend. This is ironic, because Apple was a prime mover in making WiFi more popular and therefore driving prices down. The net effect is that I&8217;m wondering whether I should look elsewhere for a replacement wireless router.

I started trying to find a comparison matrix of the different models on the market through Google. Fortunately for me, the 802.11b/WiFi blog has already done the legwork to compare the feature sets, though their comparison chart needs to be updated to cover Microsoft’s entry into the market. Adam suggests the SMC model with print server in the discussion group (registration required). It looks like one of a couple of good entries.

Wireless hiatus

The good news: Doc got his base station back (the one that was lost a month ago at Linux World).

The bad news: my original graphite base station has bitten the dust. It continuously flashes amber and red lights (before now it would intermittently cycle into red and then back to normal functioning). It’s outside the range of known bad serial numbers, which means we’ll have to pay for a new one. Maybe I’ll have to put off that new DVD player for a month or two.
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Birth of the Bush Doctrine

Greg points to the Al Gore speech and points out some interesting parallels between now and 1991, when the campaign was under way and Gore was part of a team hammering Senior about the economy.

Because of Greg’s link, I finally went back and read Gore’s speech. And I have to say, I’m actually pretty impressed. The speech echoes my thoughts of the past six months:

At this fateful juncture in our history it is vital that we see clearly who are our enemies, and that we deal with them. It is also important, however, that in the process we preserve not only ourselves as individuals, but our nature as a people dedicated to the rule of law …

What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.

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Lyric revisionism in service of products

Just heard the first commercial to use music from Moby’s new album 18 (as opposed to his completely licensed album Play): an Intel commercial using “We Are All Made of Stars.” To begin with, using Moby’s song for a commercial promoting burning mix CDs is pretty cool. However, they revised the chorus: Instead of “People they come together/People they fall apart/No one can stop us now/Cause we are all made of stars,” they substitute “We are all made of stars” for “People they fall apart.”

Why the substitution? I think it makes it a weaker song. Is it to avoid any mention at all of negative things, fearing that we weak consumers will freak out? It’s very sad, I think, that advertising agencies think so little of us. After all, Windows 95 was sold with a song whose chorus featured the line “You make a grown man cry,” and people bought it in droves. (Granted, they cut the song before the line. But at least they didn’t alter the parts that they played.)

Later: Just heard the commercial again, and damned if they didn’t play the song unaltered. So much for punditry.
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Food porn blog: the Julie/Julia Project

Pointed to by Scott Rosenberg: the Julie/Julia project. Julie Powell is cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: “365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.” A series of priceless quotations, including my favorite:

“How in God’s name do people do multicourse meals? This is French Cooking for the servantless American cook, remember?!” (menu: Potage Veloute aux Champignons, Coquelets sur Canapes, Pommes de Terre a L’Huile, Crème Plombieres Pralinee)

Somebody give that woman a job at Gourmet. This is more entertaining reading than that magazine has been for a long time.
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Senate blocks firefighting initiative, saves trees

Follow up to my previous article: Greg reports that the Senate is sitting on Bush’s proposal to fight forest fires by giving the logging companies authority to clear old growth forests and immunity from enforcement suits under the National Environmental Policy Act. Tom Daschle has forced a “supermajority” vote to pass the bill, meaning that it won’t go anywhere for a while, if ever.
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Home improvement continued

Working from home this morning. Our long awaited window replacement contractors are here. They’re starting with the windows with broken seals in the skywall; next week, they’ll move on to replacing the old windows in the original part of the house. I’m amazed at how much work I’m getting done…

Irony strikes again

As I was writing the previous item, Adam was complaining that Outlook’s support for turning email into calendar items isn’t intuitive. Why? Because it uses drag and drop.

As I wrote there, figuring out how drag and drop worked as a Windows programmer was one of the hardest things I had to do. Admittedly, that might have had more to do with the development environment I was using than the Win32 APIs…
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Brent: RSS on the Clipboard

Brent continues to chug along, gearing up for a new NetNewsWire Lite beta that will support a published clipboard format for RSS items. This means you can use cut and paste and drag and drop to connect stuff from NetNewsWire Lite to other apps. Maybe it’s time to get off my butt and figure out what’s wrong with Manila Envelope–and see if I can get the new Drag and Drop in AppleScript Studio working.
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Winning the sensitivity award…

…members of the Alabama GOP accused the Democratic governor there of wrangling an endorsement from Charlton Heston by taking advantage of his recent announcement that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know. According to the record, he was endorsed because of a strong pro-gun and pro-conservation record, Heston’s two hot buttons. The NRA is required by its charter, apparently, to give any candidate an endorsement who gets an A on their annual scorecard.

I don’t know if Heston was “grossly manipulated” by the Democrats, but I do think that State GOP Chairman Marty Connors (“a gross manipulation of Mr. Heston”) and Republican candidate Bob Riley’s campaign spokesman David Azbell (“you have got to wonder if people are acting in Mr. Heston’s best interests”) have together done more to destroy Heston’s political capital than his disease has.
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Random weekend sound bites

The wedding was a ton of fun. Apparently I missed the most fun of all, the bridal party night out, which happened the day before I got to Maine (I will pay good money to anyone involved for footage of my wife dancing with Kelley’s sister in law to an Eminem tune).

We had a good time at the rehearsal dinner. During the long wait for food (familiar to anyone who’s had a rehearsal dinner for 30 people at a restaurant not used to serving that many at once), we got a little creative with the nametags Kelley’s friend Dan had gotten. He apparently couldn’t find proper nametags at the grocery store (there being no close office supply store at the Maine/Canada border), so picked up a stack of the store’s special pricing stickers. We all tried to figure out what kind of “special pricing” the bride and groom were under, with the result that their nametags were emblazoned with the legends “Low mileage,” “Original woodwork intact,” “Available for a limited time only!”, and “Make best offer.”

The wedding itself was smooth, with two exceptions. The flower girls had been told to get rid of all their flower petals, resulting in a much lengthier than expected trip down the aisle and a lot of banging on the bottom of their flower baskets to dislodge the remaining petals. And the bride dropped the groom’s ring. While picking it back up, she said, “All you folks with video cameras can use your fancy digital rigs to edit that out!” Not a chance, Kelley. The highlight of the reception was probably the minister returning in full Elvis regalia, though the bride dancing with her father to a recording of his college group singing a song he had arranged many years before was a close second, as was the ten-year-old cousin who kept telling Lisa she had to come dance with him when the DJ played the Britney Spears song.