May 2004 Archives

This weekend my mom was going through boxes of books from when my grandmother's house was sold. While doing so she found lots of crazy old cookbooks that look like they belong in The Gallery of Regrettable Food. My favorite of the things she found was a book put out by Ballantine beer on how to throw a party. I decided I just had to scan it in to share and realized there were one or two other things I'd been planning on scanning in and so decided to make a project of it. The end result is a new section on my site called: fun stuff. I'll toss pictures and scans of funny things that catch my eye. To start things off there's the party book and the worst rave flyer ever.

I'm catching up on a few days of blog reading while I switched to a new machine. Here's a few things that jumped out at me:

• Goodbye TechTV. Leo writes about the last day of Call for Help and leaves some thoughts on the merger. Personally, I have no idea what kind of crack Comcast/G4 is smoking. From all I can see they're doing their best to alienate most of the TechTV audience. One thing I always liked about TechTV was that they had stuff for everyone. G4 feels like it is targetted towards the 15-25 year old crowd. At first I thought it was kind of charming, but it quickly got on my nerves. Biggest missed opportunity? Not bringing over a Call for Help and not bringing over a Tech Live, a daily tech news show. Rumor has it their own weekly news show will be going daily, but not until July. I dunno, I'd think if you suddenly owned a network like TechTV, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past year, you'd want to keep some of that audience.
• Kasia talks about The Day After Tomorrow. This is one I kind of want to see just for the special effects. From everything I've heard the movie itself was pretty lame beyond that.
• Neil Gaiman talks about Fred the Unlucky Black Cat being sick and inspires a small poem.
• Derek has found that Alpha-Bits may be no more. Dammit, I used to love those (even though I'm more of a Special K guy myself these days).

That's it for now, time to get out and get some fresh air.

One of the projects I've been working on lately is scanning in all the old pictures my parents have collected over the years from various relatives. My grandparents in particular had a lot of old photos. While scanning pictures in this morning I came across a number of them that seemed to be of a flood. I noticed two of them had the processing date on the back of the photo and decided to do a little research. I googled for 'Hartford Flood 1936' and actually came up with a fair number of hits. From one page:

On March 12, 1936, rain began falling across Connecticut. The state had already been covered with a blanket of six to eight inches of snow. Rains poured down for the next nine days and dropped up to fourteen inches on already saturated and frozen land. These incredible forces of nature unleashed on Connecticut the greatest floods in its history to that date. The Connecticut and Farmington Rivers and all of their tributaries became raging torrents. Ice flows added to the destruction. Water and ice tore out bridges, highways, roads, and railways. The dam at New Hartford burst, and homes and buildings were washed away or destroyed. Fourteen thousand people were left homeless, several were dead or missing, and epidemic disease threatened the population. The National Guard was called to action as the ravaging floods paralyzed business, traffic, communication, and home life, as the cities and towns along the rivers became the principal centers of destruction.

I think the thing I'm boggling at the most is how easy it was to dig up all this information. A few words into a search engine and I was greeted with gobs of information about this event. I still find it amazing, even after being online so long.

This is pretty fun. Design your own cereal box!

[via lonita.links.log < Cynical-C Blog < J-Walk Blog < collision detection < jenett.radio]

I seem to have had comments and trackbacks turned off for the last day or so. Oops.

Gainax has announced a life sized, poseable Hikari doll from Konomini. I'm not sure what frightens me more. The idea that things like this exist, or that there are people out there who are probably anxious to own them. The dolls are made by Paper Moon, who offer a number of other dolls (including Sakura and Ryoko). Words cannot begin to describe how wrong I find this. What's next? Real Anime Doll?

We would like to provide mysterious suites constructed by random matching of the words and pictures. Enjoy yourselves in the surrealistic world spun by strange coincidence and eternal imagination. And run your meditation on what "meaning" represents.

For those folks with OS X, here's a very cool looking screen saver called Hotel Magritte. It's quite nice. He's also got some other ones up there that look pretty cool.

The most recent i, cringely is about how people are making new versions of the firmware for some of the new Linksys 802.11g boxes, specifically the WRT54G. I'd noticed the other day that the access point I'd gotten recently, the WAP54G seemed to be running linux also, so did some searching to find out if they were similar. It seems that they are and Sveasoft had just recently released new firmware for it too. It's pretty slick being able to connect to your access point from the command line. The only real issue is that it doesn't have as much memory as the WRT54G, so it doesn't have quite as many features, but the important ones are there, including some bandwidth management tools (something I think these boxes should have anyways).

What I'm thinking about now is getting a WRT54G for our gateway, this will give wireless to the back of the house and the back porch, and using the new WAP54G as a repeater for the front of the house, just to get complete coverage.

Phew. After quite a long time I finally finished Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. I'd zoomed through a bunch of it a while back, but hadn't had as much time to play recently. Overall it was quite fun. At times it was a little challenging, but never so hard that I felt frustrated by it. Definitely one of the better games to get for the Gameboy Advance.

Next up: Advance Wars 2

Freedom to Tinker mentions a company called readnotify.com that also uses web bugs, but also uses IFRAMEs, which cannot be disabled by just turning off remote image loading. There's also a mention of how these places can put tracking bugs in Word Documents.

readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit) and also uses a trick involving IFRAMEs (unlike didtheyreadit). The IFRAME trick cannot be disabled by the standard countermeasure of turning off remote image loading. There may not be an easy way to disable it in today's email software, short of turning off HTML email entirely.

Worse yet, readnotify offers a service that lets anyone put hidden tracking bugs in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other OLE-compliant document formats. When somebody opens a document containing one of these trackers, the time of the access is reported, along with the accessor's IP address (which often reveals their geographic location) and some configuration information about their computer. [Freedom to Tinker]

So my question is, is there an easy way to turn this stuff off in Word/Excel? And I guess I'll have to see if Mail.app supports IFRAMEs.

Johann von Neumann: "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." [Quotes of the Day]

Dan Gillmor mentions a service called DidTheyReadIt and some of his concerns about it.

DidTheyReadIt and Civil Behavior

A company launching a new application claims it can tell senders of e-mail whether the recipient has opened it, and for how long (and even, in many cases, the location of the reader). "Creepy" doesn't begin to do justice to this concept. [Dan Gillmor]

I'd just heard of another service like this called Point of Mail. How do these services work? Easy, they embed a 1x1 image into your message when you send it. So if the person reading the email has a mail reader that supports html, it will grab that image from their site. This isn't anything new really. Spammers others doing mass emails have been doing this for ages. It's a way to get a rough idea of how many people read your messages (and can be handy for pruning email lists).

Dan Gillmor calls it creepy. I agree, but also have problems with how they are selling this. First off, it is easy to block. Just turn off html or image loading for your mail program. I did this ages ago because I just don't trust html based mail. Plus I don't always use Mail.app for reading mail. Sometimes I use pine, which doesn't support images at all. Yet there is nothing on their site about things like this. In the end, this ends up being a potentially very unreliable service for someone.

Oh, and one last thing about pointofmail.com. They have this nice open webmail gateway called sendnow.

pointofmail offers you a world's first web mail service that allows you to send an e-mail right away with no username and password needed. You can send e-mail from anywhere - using your e-mail as a reply address or even stay anonymous.

It's easy to use, free, fast, time-saving. You can send email from anywhere. No long-time logging with username and password. It is perfect when you are not near your computer.

Tell a friend about this exiting and revolutionary service and get confirmation when your recommendation was read.

I wonder how long till their SMTP servers are listed on RBL and similar places.

Jack Benny: "I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either." [Quotes of the Day]

Brent Simmons posted yesterday about NetNewsWire 2.0's support for external weblog editors, including my current favorite one: ecto. He also mentions something he's calling the Collegiality Clause that sounds quite interesting (and shows that I keep missing lots of interesting blog posts).

Now if ecto would just let me attach a class to an image when I'm uploading it I'd be a very happy camper.

I really dig my iSight, but sometimes having it clipped to the back of my laptop feels a little limiting. Someone's come out with a little stand to give your iSight much more mobility. I want one I think. There's also one that just plugs into your firewire port, but I don't like that quite as much.

So thanks to Boston Online's Boston Common I saw this article at Boston.com talking about random ID checks on the T. Buh? Since when was I required to carry around ID to prove who I was? Thank god the T is out of my reach these days.

Sir William Bragg: "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday." [Quotes of the Day]

For those of you with MTV2, tonight we are treated to two episodes of Sifl & Olly. Check the schedule for details. It looks like they'll be showing it on Saturday nights. Finally, something good on MTV again, now they just need to bring back 120 minutes.

Shamelessly stolen from a friend's LJ, The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles. I'm in awe of how bad some of these are. A quick sampling includes: LET'S PLAY STAIN THE COUCH, ABS OF CUM, and ANAL CHIROPRACTOR.

So there are these new Oreos out called Golden Oreos. Instead of a chocolate cookie they're like a vanilla one. And they are SO DAMN GOOD. I keep having to fight the urge to go downstairs and get one or two more.

I was making a comment over on a friend's Blogger hosted blog today and their comment system gives you the option to sign on. Blogger was the first automated blogging service I used, but I hadn't logged in there in over a year and a half. So I tried logging in and it still remembered me. I even found a few old blogs I was playing with. Including the original version of this one. Pretty crazy. I wonder what other old logins of mine are still floating around out there.

It's been a quiet day here in Hartford, so I've been playing with a few different things on my computer. The first was I got Photoshop Elements talking to my scanner, which should be handy. I was using Vuescan but updated to the latest version by mistake, which meant that my license for for a years worth of updates expired. And I didn't have the old copy backed up (as I thought I did). Oops. Elements is where I fiddle with things I scan in anyways, so it is definitely a better fit.

I also kind of redid comments on this and my anime blog. This blog now supports TypeKey when commenting, but it isn't required to comment (at least at the moment). My anime blog now requires TypeKey for comments, since I was starting to get a lot of nonsense comments that I had to clean out. Hopefully this will slow it down a little bit (and not annoy people too much).

Now my sirloin tips just need to finish marinating so I can do some of that grillin' shit on mom's new gas grill.

This morning Six Apart updated their info on pricing and licensing for Movable Type 3.0. I think it's a step in the right direction. I'm glad they are adapting and I hope they keep listening to what people are saying. And I hope they keep doing this. I'm still not sure that the users part of it is that great. I think that most likely a lot of people are still going to be getting stuck on that. I almost think they need to have the free version be 3 blogs/3 users, the personal use one gives you 5/5, and then at the high end an unlimited use one. Maybe even one between 5/5 and unlimited. So the pricing could be free, $60, $120 (for a 15/15), $200. And they can still have special pricing for ISP/hosted situations if they want.

I'm used to seeing software priced by user from being a SysAdmin. But I think most users aren't. They expect to be able to go out, buy a piece of software, and use it however they want (regardless of what the intended purpose of the software is). That's one of the reasons people are so up in arms. The more I think about it the more I think it's okay for them to have limits on the personal use license, but I think the limits have to be high enough that at least 80-85% of their users can get by with that first tier.

I will still stick with Movable Type for the time being. But I'm definitely watching the developments in other systems as well (notably WordPress). Btw, for people out there familiar with WordPress, I saw on one chart that it doesn't support multiple blogs. True? False? Anyone?

I finally feel like it's spring out. We've had a couple of good days and I'm finally really starting to feel that spring fever feeling. Quite nice. I'm also finding that since I've made the work decision I've been able to really focus on a couple of projects that I'd been working on in the background for a while now. Movable Type 3.0 has also inspired me to work on a few others (like maybe making an updated threaded comments plugin.

Timothy Appnel posts some updated comments on the whole Movable Type 3.0 thing and I think gets it more this time. He hits upon a lot of the big issues for me. The biggest being that I have no problem with giving Six Apart money. But they've priced it out of my range. I've paid for blogging software before. I bought Radio Userland and thought it was a very good deal (though switch because feature-wise it wasn't a good fit for me). I've donated to Six Apart for my current copy of Movable Type (for two keys). So I'm definitely up for giving them something for their work.

I also agree that it shows that people like Movable Type a lot and care about the product. I see things as they are now resulting in driving more people away from MT. I was talking to someone last night and said something to the effect of "probably 70-80% of the people who use MT won't be affected by the pricing much. They'll fall within the three blogs and one author category. But it's that remaining 30% who are going to feel screwed. That's the 30% who are power users. They host their own site. They like to tweak MT with plugins. They probably use more than one blog to cover the different parts of their site. Typepad really isn't a good fit for them (especially someone like me who users their shell account for screen and tinyfugue too :)). And they've probably gotten at least a handful of other people to start using it. They're the bloggers who tend to be quite vocal and have a fair number of readers." And these are the people that are feeling alienated right now.

Would I still recommend Movable Type to someone as things are at this moment? Yes. But not as strongly as I have before. I'd make sure they understand the pricing. But I'd also tell them to check out things like WordPress to see what they thought of that. As far as TypePad is concerned, I've recommended TypePad to a lot of people out there too and think it's great for someone just starting out or someone who isn't a control freak like me.

Earlier today Six Apart released Movable Type 3.0 along with information on the pricing of it. There's been a fair amount written about it already that says a lot of what I feel about the subject. Bryant sums it up nicely over at Population: One:

Movable Type 3.0 pricing is, bluntly, horrendous.

I don’t think software needs to be free; I shelled out for Movable Type 2.5, because I thought it was good software and I wanted to pay for it. I also don’t mind paying more for professional versions of the software. However, the new pricing is linked to the release of Movable Type 3.0, which doesn’t feel much like a major version release to me. The important new features, from a user point of view, are comment moderation. That’s not enough to justify a $75 price hike on the basic version of the software. [Population: One]

For me to maintain my current setup would cost me $120 - credit for donations I gave to SixApart a year ago (about $45). That's insane. I have three blogs with four authors. So to go from the free version of three blogs that's $40/author for me. $40/author for software that has some new features, but nothing major enough that I'd want to spend $120. I was expecting much much more from this release. For example, they could have incorporated options for things like threaded comments into Movable Type itself. What I see is Movable Type with a slicker interface and the ability to require comments to use registration. Maybe there is more under the hood, but the changes just don't look that staggering to me.

I also don't agree with Timothy Appnel, who says:

The delineation between TypePad and MT have become clear with this release – TypePad is for general users wanting to blog and Movable Type is for developers and professional organizations wanting to do more then just weblogging. [Timothy Appnel]

The problem is that Six Apart has forgotten one of their biggest customer bases. The people who fall into that category of personal bloggers who want more than TypePad or who run their own web site and want to do everything from that. That's the category I fall into. I'm not a developer. I'm not a professional organization. And I have many friends who fall into this same category. And pretty much all of use feel that this pricing really blows.

I also don't have a problem with Six Apart charging for Movable Type. I still think it's a pretty slick piece of software (and donated around $45 or $50 in the past because of it). I want them to be able to keep updating it and adding new features. So how should Six Apart have done things? I can think of a few ways. The big thing I'd do is charge people for credits that get applied to your install. Each credit can be used to add a blog or an author to your installation. You start off with four free credits (which gives you the setup there is now), and then they charge between $5 and $10 for each additional credit (maybe offer volume purchase deals or something). I think they would find people much more willing to pay money then. In my case it would mean $30 or $40. I'd have no problem at all paying that (though I'd still want credit for my past donation).

So I'm going to play around with MT3.0 on my machine a bit and see if Six Apart rethinks things a bit. It may end up being what sends me off to look at other blogging programs. I wonder if they realized how much this was going to annoy people.

My friend Emily just IMed me with this great link to some very creative bento boxes. I like the Keroppi one (and the PPG one).

Esquire has a page with Brutally Honest Personals. I can't help but wonder what mine would be like. It would probably start with something like "Single guy with broken lungs, living with parents..."

I redid my DVD page today. I'd been wanting a better way to handle DVDs that are part of a series and I think I think this new way works pretty well. You can click on the black arrows to show what is in a series.

Here's a recap of a news segment that appeared on the Chicago FOX news affiliate. I hadn't read pound before, but I like it so far. It's definitely being added into NetNewsWire.

She also a great post about when the reporters came over to film her for the spot on blogging:

So FOX news came to my apartment to interview me and observe me doing bloggery things, like sitting down at my computer. I mean the act of sitting down was carefully recorded. I was instructed to walk across my room and sit down at my computer, and here is where it got complicated.

"Can we see you logging on?" the camera guy said.

"Um, well, I have cable, so it's always on," I told him. My browser window was open on the desktop.

The reporter looked worried. "Can't you... you know," she said. I began to sense they wanted to see something that said AND NOW HERE IS THE INTERNET or THUS WE GO FORTH INTO CYBERSPACE or whatever.

"I could close a browser window and then open it again," I said. They didn't say anything. "I could... put my computer in sleep mode, and then when I sit down the screen comes on... or--"

"Oh yeah. Do that," the reporter said. [pound]

Manga definitely seems to be hitting the mainstream more and more. USAToday has two short articles on it today. The first is just about teens and manga, and the second is about the growing popularity of shoujo manga. Since it is in USAToday they're pretty short, but still a sign of the growing popularity of this format in the US.

I watched the version of A Wrinkle in Time that was shown tonight on ABC. Overall I thought it was okay, not great, but okay. I think it would be a hard book to adapt and really get perfect. Also, I just found a link over on Neil Gaiman's blog to an interview with L'Engle over at MSNBC, pretty interesting. I'm now feeling tempted to re-read A Wrinkle in Time and the other books. I can't wait till my nephew is old enough to read them.

#!/usr/bin/girl has posted a few other cool links recently. The first is a site that explains How To Eat Sushi (it seems that I've been doing it wrong all these years!) The next is Bananaphone. Thank you for getting this damn song stuck in my head. AUGH.

Important safety tip: always pay attention to where you keep your portable oxygen tank. Pulling it off of something and onto your foot hurts. A lot. And may very well gouge a nice chunk of flesh away (OW). Thankfully mom has lots of bandages and stuff so I got it all cleaned up and wrapped up. I don't think anything is broken because I can still wiggle my toes some without it hurting any more or less. But it still does hurt a bunch. OW.

Thank god for laptops.

Ahh, how wonderful it is to hear that sound again. Z Sculpt software has released a small beta demo for their new version of Dark Castle called Return to Dark Castle. Sorry Windows users, this one is Mac only. I want more than just one screen of play though!

Now we just need a bunch of those old games, where's Crystal Quest and Solarian II?

I'm posting this image for my friend ellen so that she can see what it looks like when I post from ecto. She's got a link to the picture on her blog too.

ADV Films has opened up the Super Milk-Chan website. This show is one of the most crack-induced things I have ever seen. It's amazing. I can't wait for these DVDs.

The current Sci-Fi Wire over at SciFi.com has a nice review of Azumanga Daioh, one of my favorite shows of the past year. I hope Tasha, the reviewer, keeps watching it. I found the show really does keep dragging you in more and more. And for me it was a nice break from crazy over the top action oriented shows.

Just read over on The Laporte Report that TechTV has layed off 285 workers today. Supposedly the San Francisco offices will be closing up by July and 100 off the existing jobs will be posted for those willing to move to LA. Once again, I'm dreading how Comcast is going to handle all of this. I personally think they should have gutted G4. I watched it for a little bit months ago and it was okay, but when I tried to watch it again recently I found it pretty much unwatchable. Most of the programming is just spastic and lame. TechTV has its lame bits too, but overall G4 pretty much bites. Good luck to all those people from TechTV.

These days lots of people use services like TinyURL to shorten URLs. Well, I just found a better service: EVILURL.com. It creates unique urls for any url you want. For instance, for my anime blog, you can go to http://evilurl.com/COCKMONKEYPRICK. Much easier to remember than http://tinyurl.com/2fz64 I think.

A friend of mine IMed me this link for a product called the BananaGuard:.

Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.

The Banana Guard was specially designed to fit the vast majority of bananas. Its other features include multiple small perforations to facilitate ventilation thereby preventing premature ripening and a sturdy locking mechanism to keep the Banana Guard closed. The Banana Guard is of course dishwasher safe for easy cleaning.

It even comes in NINE different colors: Raving Red, Outrageous Orange, Mellow Yellow, Sublime Green, Skyhigh Blue, Brilliant Blue, Passionate Purple, Pretty in Pink, Glow in the Dark.

Douglas Adams: "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." [Quotes of the Day]

Wow. The BBC has has announced plans to open up its archives for free. This was first announced last August, but they are finally taking the first step towards making it a reality. The trial program is only open to BBC employees, but this is still quite cool. I wonder if this means they'll have all of Dr Who available.

[Via Gizmodo]

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about my whole work situation and how it fits into the rest of my life. I had a phone interview the other day and it went pretty well, but after I got off the phone I started really thinking about what work would entail. I'd have to make sure it was someplace with good handicapped parking that wasn't much of a walk. I'd have to deal with finding a new place to live that would be good for me after my surgery. And in the middle of all this I could get the call from the hospital anytime.

The thing is, I'm really not sure why I'm looking so hard for work. It just has always felt like the thing to do once you are laid off. But when I am really honest with myself, I'm not sure I could handle the day to day work grind at this point. At my last job they really went out of their way to help me out. And I'm not sure I could handle a job w/out that. But working isn't what is important right now. Getting healthy is. Being in as good health as I can be when I get the call to go into the hospital. So as of last week I'm officially calling off my job search. I'm still doing little one-shot consulting jobs here and there to keep myself sane, but even those sometimes feel like too much stress.

I'm not even really sure why I'm posting this to my blog. I think I kind of just want to record what was going on in these days because it feels like this is a really big step. Next step, new lung.

Due to a very kind person, I got an invite to Gmail a few weeks ago. I signed up, but hadn't had a real chance to use it until just recently. I have to say that I like it. They have some really original ideas that I'd like to see make a move to other email programs. Or even better, have a downloadable version of their code that I can run locally.

The first thing I noticed about Gmail was that there isn't really a concept of folders. Instead they have labels. All of your mail goes into your inbox, and then you can set one or more 'labels' on it. You can then view all the messages in a label. Think of it kind of like how iPhoto/iTunes works where you have your Library and then albums/playlists. It is definitely one of the more original ideas I've seen for email and I hope to see it more.

The thing I'm really trying to figure out is how to fit this into my whole email setup. I currently have all my mail come into my server at home and it all lives there very nicely. I'm using CRM114 for spam filtering which has been kicking ass now that it's done a bit of learning (100% error free (no false positives or negatives) yesterday!), etc. And I use Zoe for archiving my email. The thing is, I like how Gmail does things a bit more than Zoe. But Zoe has the added bonus that it is local to my laptop, which means I can search through my old mail even when I'm not connected to the net.

I definitely think I'd recommend Gmail to someone once it is publicly open. It's pretty slick.

Now playing: The Light Before We Land from the album Hate by Delgados

Today was a good music day. I was at the mall with my mom and while waiting for her to finish up shopping stepped into whatever big music chain store they had there. You know, the ones that usually have a pretty crappy selection of popular music, but every once in a while will have some gem you've been meaning to find forever. This time it was Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92. It's happily ripping away in iTunes to be added to my music library.

And then there was The Brilliant Green, which jam1esp1ark let me listen to some of. I must say they're quite amazing. They sound like a bunch of different music I know kinda smooshed together. They're also listed in TIME.com's 10 best bands from outside of the US.

Oh, and I can't forget the songs by Chara that Lyn gave me, which also helped to rock my musical world a bit.

Lyn had me listen to a song called Coin-Operated Boy by The Dresden Dolls (edit: which I just discovered they have a live version of on their site for download) a month or two ago and I thought it was great, though was too lazy to do much about finding the CD and it wasn't on iTMS either. Thursday, I decided to try a search again and there they were on iTMS! Everyone should check them out, I give it two thumbs up. Their web site is pretty slick too.

It also is showing how much I don't pay attention to the local Boston music scene. They're from Boston and I'm not sure I'd ever heard of them before Lyn pointed me at them. Of course I tend to be a bit of a space cadet. ^_^.