Happy October, kids!
Two important things to keep in mind: this is both Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Both of those are bad. Feel Your Boobies, and don’t smack around your significant other. Okay?
Use your Twitter stream for Mac OS X’s RSS Visualizer screensaver
Just a quick little tip for OS X users. Nothing fancy, and others may have figured this out already, but a quick Google search didn’t come up with answers, just questions…so here we are.
For the uninitiated, one of the default screensavers in OS X is the RSS Visualizer, which shows a slick ‘floating text’ presentation of the text from any RSS feed against a cloudy blue background.
I wanted to put my Twitter timeline in, so that even when my ‘puter’s not doing anything, and I’m across the room reading on the couch, I can keep an eye out for updates. Seems simple, but on first blush, it didn’t seem to work, as I just got the background, and no tweets.
That’s an easy fix, though. Twitter password protects your RSS feed, so that other people can’t ‘hack’ into your feed and see updates from those of your contacts who have protected their feed from public view — and the screensaver options don’t give a way to enter your Twitter username/password combination.
Twitter does, however, respect RSS-embedded passwords. So, in order to get the screensaver to work correctly, change the RSS feed from the default
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
to a customized
https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss
format, and you’re off and running.
Note that I’ve changed the protocol from http to https to avoid transmiting my Twitter username and password in cleartext. With the standard http protocol, in theory, if someone was really determined, there’s a chance that they could intercept the TCP stream between your computer and Twitter and see your Twitter login credentials. Using https (the ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’), the information between your computer and Twitter is encrypted, so that packet sniffers wouldn’t get anything.
And that’s it! One Twitter-enabled RSS screensaver.
Links for September 29th through September 30th
Sometime between September 29th and September 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- Poll: Eyman Initiative 1033 Looks Likely to Pass: "As I've said before, Eyman's initiative would fuck the state of Washington, even though the language seems innocuous. It would essentially limit the amount of money the government can collect from taxpayers based on how much it collected the previous year, adjusted for inflation and population growth. Any surplus the state collects would go toward reducing property taxes. But in practice, the measure would lock Washington into its current budget–the worst budget the state has had in decades, owing to the recession–and prevent the budget from expanding when the economy improves. So the state at its leanest–like right now, with a budget requiring the state to lay off roughly 3,000 teachers and cut basic health services for 40,000 people–would become the most robust the state could ever be."
- JK Rowling Lost Out on US Medal Over Harry Potter ‘Witchcraft’: "A memoir by George W Bush's former speechwriter claims that Bush administration officials objected to giving JK Rowling a presidential medal of freedom on the grounds that her Harry Potter books 'encouraged witchcraft'." Huh. I'd have figured it was because in the later books, she rather shamelessly and not very subtly mocked the Bush Administration and general U.S. post-9/11 paranoia.
- Reminder: Roman Polanski Raped a Child: "Roman Polanski raped a child. Let's just start right there, because that's the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in 'exile' (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.). […] Can we do that? Can we take a moment to think about all that, and about the fact that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, before we start talking about what a victim he is? Because that would be great, and not nearly enough people seem to be doing it."
- Rare Important Instantaneous Photograph: "It became necessary, one day, at Willet's Point, to destroy a worthless mule, and the subject was made the occasion of giving instruction to the military class there stationed. The mule was placed in proper position before the camera and duly focused. Upon the animal's forehead a cotton bag was tied containing six ounces of dynamite….."
- Vikings ‘Were Warned to Avoid Scotland’: "Scotland is full of dangerous natives who speak an incomprehensible language and the is weather awful. That was the verdict of a series of 13th century Viking travel guides that warned voyagers to visit at their peril."
- Steampunk’d: Diana Vick’s Victorian sci-fi dream for Seattle.: "'IT'S MASSIVELY CREATIVE, insanely inventive, and extraordinarily unique.' That's Diana Vick (pictured) describing steampunk, which she's certain will be the next subcultural wave to hit the Emerald City. She's banking on that certainty as cocreator of Steamcon, a convention celebrating the hottest movement in sci-fi."
Links for September 22nd through September 28th
Sometime between September 22nd and September 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- IIHS Celebrates 50th Anniversary by Crashing Modern Malibu Into ’59 Bel Air: "Most of the time, we like to think of our old automobiles as tank-like hunks of metal with full frames and acres of dead space in front of the driver and the massive chrome front bumper. While that may often be the case, all those thick bits of steel don't automatically equal safety. This point is driven home by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary by crash testing a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air into a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The results were eye-opening." Eye-opening indeed. See also the followup post with before-and-after pictures.
- Kiriko Moth’s Blog: Gorgeous art-deco inspired illustration.
- Largest Hoard of Anglo-Saxon Treasure Found in UK: "An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday. One expert said the treasure would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures. 'This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue,' Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. 'It will make us rethink the Dark Ages.'"
- Jeffrey Thomas’s Portfolio: Twisted Princess: Incredible dark, twisted takes on the Disney princesses. Creepy and very, very cool.
- Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law: Oooooh, I like this. "During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled. But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have."
Summer Vacation ’09 Part IId: SeaWorld
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Previously: A quiet evening at Grandpa Lindberg’s.
The second ‘big thing’ on Prairie’s list of places to take me was SeaWorld. Once again, we got up early, hopped in the car, and made it to the park right as the gates were starting to open. In a very kind (and successful) attempt to console me for the disturbing lack of penguins at the San Diego Zoo the day before, Prairie had mentioned that SeaWorld had a penguin or two in an exhibit that might be enough to keep me entertained. We grabbed a park map on our way through the gate, oriented ourselves, and went straight for the Penguin Encounter.
Okay, kidding aside (for a moment), that really is an impressive exhibit. What looks to be a couple hundred adélie, gentoo, macaroni, king, and emperor penguins in a huge room, hanging out on the ‘ice’ and zooming through the water, with a slow-moving conveyor belt shuffling the human viewers by and a raised stationary viewing area behind. We had a lot of fun watching all the penguins, and I took two trips along the conveyor, watching the penguins play and snapping pictures.
From there, we just started wandering around SeaWorld, checking out the many exhibits before and between hitting the four main daytime shows. I think Prairie’s favorites were the manatees and the beluga whales, while I’d probably choose the sharks as my favorite (after the penguins, of course).
Of the four shows we hit (The Shamu Show Believe, Dolphin Discovery, Sea Lions LIVE, and Pets Rule!), my pick for top marks is nearly a tie between Shamu and the dolphins…but I think for sheer “wow” spectacle, Shamu wins out. While I’ve certainly been aware that killer whales are by no means small animals, I never really had a clear real-world concept of their size. But wow, is it incredible to see one of these huge animals go rocketing up out of the water! Really impressive stuff.
We ended up spending the entire day at SeaWorld, longer even than we’d spent going through the San Diego Zoo (though being able to duck into the penguin exhibit again in the afternoon to guzzle water and soak up the air conditioning was a huge help), and we saw everything, save only the Sesame Street themed little kid’s play area and the Clydesdale horses (which just don’t make sense to me, even with Budweiser’s ownership of the parks…for some strange reason, beer and horses aren’t foremost in my mind when I think of an ocean wildlife theme park).
When planning for this trip, we’d gone back-and-forth as to whether SeaWorld or DisneyLand was going to be our big theme park for the trip…I gotta say, much as I think it’d be fun to go to DisneyLand, I’m totally a fan of SeaWorld. Definitely the right choice for us.
Once again, here’s a slideshow of my photos from SeaWorld, in semi-random order (actually ordered by whatever Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ algorithm chooses), or here’s a link to just the SeaWorld photos. Of course, you can always look at the full set of vacation photos, too!
Next: Exploring Balboa Park.
Summer Vacation ’09 Part IIc: Evening
Previously: the San Diego Zoo.
This is actually quite a short little entry, but as I’m posting to match the divisions I made when sorting out my photos in Aperture, this is what I end up with.
After our day at the zoo, we came home to another nice dinner and evening with Prairie’s grandpa, and once again, Carl stopped by on his evening walk. I made a couple of attempts at getting shots of a hummingbird that was flitting around the backyard, and we said hello to a grasshopper that got curious about the inside of the house. Then, off to bed.
Next: SeaWorld!
Links for September 16th through September 21st
Sometime between September 16th and September 21st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- The Rise of the Flapper: "Being a flapper wasn't all about fashion. It was about rebellion. In this article from 1922, a would-be flapper (but still a 'nice girl') explains her lifestyle choices to her parents. Flappers did what society did not expect from young women. They danced to Jazz Age music, they smoked, they wore makeup, they spoke their own language, and they lived for the moment. Flapper fashion followed the lifestyle. Skirts became shorter to make dancing easier. Corsets were discarded in favor of brassieres that bound their breasts, again to make dancing easier. The straight shapeless dresses were easy to make and blurred the line between the rich and everyone else. The look became fashionable because of the lifestyle. The short hair? That was pure rebellion against the older generation's veneration of long feminine locks."
- Microsoft Matches Snow Leopard Price With Windows 7, but Only for Students: "Microsoft yesterday launched a Windows 7 campaign website announcing a discount program aimed at college and university students, bringing the cost of Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for eligible customers down to $29.99 to effectively match Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard pricing. The offer, which expires January 3rd, 2010 is valid for the download version of Windows 7, and users wishing to purchase a physical disk will be required to pay an additional $13.00."
- Photosounder Image-Sound Editor & Synthesizer: "Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds. Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn't be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain. Ultimately, knowing how sounds look and how images sound, you'll be able to create images that sound like what you want to hear, or like what you couldn't imagine to hear."
- MacRumors Apple Buyer’s Guide (Time-Ordered): "This page provides a product summary for each Apple model, ordered by the amount of time that has past since its last update, relative to the average amount of time that has passed between previous updates to that model, historically. The intent is to clearly indicate which products are most likely to see updates in the coming weeks and months. Disclaimer: This page is based on rumors and speculation and we provide no guarantee to its accuracy. We take no responsibility for purchase decisions made based on this information."
- Local Museums Rethink No-Photos Policy: "Sad you couldn't get a shot with the original Death Star on your last visit to the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum? Starting Sept. 26, you'll be able to strike a pose with the relic of a galaxy far, far away — not to mention Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock Stratocaster, Captain Kirk's Enterprise chair and every other object in the museum's permanent collection. EMP/SFM is about to change its photo policy. And if you ask staff, it's about time. "
Summer Vacation ’09 Part IIb: San Diego Zoo
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Previously: Ashland to Carlsbad by way of Fresno. Mostly a lot of driving.
Having grown up with frequent visits to her family in this part of the country, Prairie had a few things that she knew she wanted to introduce me to while we were down here. First thing on the list, for our first full day, was the San Diego Zoo. We got up nice and early, borrowed her grandpa’s little Garmin GPS navigator (which was usually handy, occasionally frustrating, and often amusingly bad at pronouncing the Spanish streetnames of southern California), and found our way down to the zoo.
Prairie had told me a lot about how good the San Diego Zoo was — how big, how well-renowned, how many animals, and so on — and for the most part, I do have to agree…that’s a really impressive zoo! My only complaint was simply that we each have our favorite animals, and while Prairie was treated to not just one, but two kinds of hippos (regular and pygmy, which she’s sure is small enough to live quite happily in her bathtub, and expects hers to be delivered any day now)…well, there’s a sad and disturbing lack of penguins at this zoo! Harrumpf. Quite disappointing, I tell you.
(Well, okay…maybe not that disappointing, since there is this place called Sea World not terribly far away, which we just may have visited the next day, and which possibly has an extremely good penguin display. Perhaps. But. Still. No penguins.)
Lack of penguins aside, though, that’s quite a zoo. We spent the entire morning and a good chunk of the afternoon wandering around, starting with the hippos (for Prairie), finding the bonobos for Shelly, and then just striking out randomly to see what we could see. One of the nice things about getting there right when the doors opened was that many of the animals are more active in the cool of the morning, so we were able to see things like the grizzly bears playing in their pool and two of the zoo’s pandas exploring their area. Some of my favorite photos ended up being of the meerkats (which are just too cute not to be perfect subjects) and the silvered leaf-langurs.
All in all, quite a fun day! Here’s a slideshow of just the shots from the zoo, in semi-random order (actually ordered by whatever Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ algorithm chooses), or here’s a link to just the zoo photos. Of course, you can always look at the full set of vacation photos, too!
Next: A quiet evening visit.
Summer Vacation ’09 Part IIa: Travel
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Previously: Kent to Ashland, the Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The next couple days weren’t the most exciting, but in order to go from point A to point B, you’ve gotta get there somehow, so we settled in for a long two days of driving. When planning the trip out on Google Maps we’d decided that the 12+ hour day of going directly from Ashland to Carlsbad (where Prairie’s grandpa lives, just north of San Diego) didn’t sound terribly fun. We couldn’t see anything off of I-5 around the midpoint of the drive that looked like a good overnight spot, so we chose what looked to be the next-best option: a detour on Hwy 99 to overnight in Fresno.
Well, that turned out to be a very un-fun option. I’ve known for a long time that the stretch of 99 that goes through the Seattle metro area is just not a pretty road, and that certainly continued to be the case for most of these two days. Mile after mile of highway alternating between empty stretches of farmland and warehouses, all of it ugly, all of it jam-packed with semis using 99 as their main shipping corridor, and a few big slowdowns, especially through Modesto.
We finally made it to the Fresno exit, started following the directions to our hotel, and realized that we might as well still be on 99, as everything around us was just as pretty as the seedy areas of Aurora in North Seattle, or 99 in South Seattle. Things were not looking promising at all, but we eventually made it to the hotel. Thankfully, that was a Best Western, and while the world outside the hotel wasn’t very pretty, the world inside the hotel was just fine (hooray for chain hotels), especially when enhanced with a quick jaunt across the street to get a big ol’ bag of greasy comfort food from Carl’s Jr.
Not terribly anxious to spend any more time in Fresno than we had to, we were up and out the door pretty early the next morning. Once again, another long day of driving, much of it through the wasteland of 99. Surprisingly, we did find a stretch of 99 a ways south of Fresno that wasn’t too bad, going through orchards instead of warehouse districts or bare, open farmland. Since we’d left early in the morning, aside from some slowdowns getting through L.A., traffic was bearable, and we ended up heading into Carlsbad and pulling into Prairie’s grandpa’s house about 2:30 in the afternoon.
We took a couple hours to rest (Prairie reading, me napping), had dinner with Prairie’s grandpa (complete with visit by a wild bunny that stops by his backyard from time to time), and then were about to head out to find a beach for the sunset when her uncle Carl arrived on his nightly stop by his dad’s place during his walk. By the time we were done visiting with him and made it down to the beach the sun had set, so we came back to the house, took a short walk around the neighborhood, and went to bed.
Next: the San Diego Zoo!
Summer Vacation ’09 Part I: Ashland
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This year’s summer vacation was so big, and resulted in so many photos (somewhere over 4,500), that rather than waiting until I have all the photos sorted, tagged, edited, and processed to upload them and make a post about the trip, I’ve decided to break the trip into several chunks. This, then, is chunk number one: Ashland.
Up bright and early at the crack o’ dawn on the day we left, we packed everything into the car, made couple quick stops for breakfast (Burger King), ice for the cooler, and gas for the car, and were on I-5 by about 7 in the morning. Aside from the occasional rest stop, this was pretty much a straight shot down I-5 to Ashland, where we set up camp at the Glenyan RV Park and Campground. While we weren’t entirely thrilled with the campground — it was a little shabbier than we had hoped, the showers flooded and were unusable, and I picked up about two packs worth of cigarette butts from our campsite — it wasn’t really that bad, giving us everything we needed (a campsite and restrooms) plus some extras (a pool and WiFi).
Since we were kind of tired from the drive (though it went well, with no major delays or traffic jams), we made a short run into Ashland, found a cute little local pizza joint, and brought a large pizza back to camp for dinner. We spent the evening relaxing with books, and once the sun went down, I took advantage of being far enough away from the light pollution of big cities to make a couple attempts at photographing the night sky before we crashed out for good.
(Click to view larger on a black background.)
The next day, we decided to head out to one of the local roadside tourist attractions, which Prairie had visited on a trip a number of years earlier: the Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery! In the words of the website…
The Oregon Vortex is a glimpse of a strange world where the improbable is the commonplace and everyday physical facts are reversed. It is an area of naturally occurring visual and perceptual phenomena, which can be captured on film. No matter your education or profession you will find a challenge to all your accepted theories.
This was a lot of fun. Totally silly and goofy, as we watched people appear to grow and shrink depending on where they stood, brooms stood on end, golf balls rolled uphill, and lots of questionable ‘science’ was spouted. I’m definitely a skeptic, chalking all the “mystery” up to a combination of optical illusion, perspective shifts, and simple human suggestibility, but that didn’t make the day any less enjoyable!
After our trip through the Vortex, we headed into Ashland to explore the town and spent a few hours just wandering around. It’s a cute little town (though, for some reason, there’s a definite Shakespearean theme to the business names), but as is often the case when traveling to new places, be very cautious about drinking the water!
For the evening, we had tickets to Much Ado About Nothing, which was playing in the gorgeous Elizabethan Stage. As is traditional, the setting of the play had been updated, this time to post-World War II Italy, with the action taking place in and around an Italian villa, complete with decorative pond at center stage. Or not so decorative, as upon Benedick’s frantic attempts to hide from Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato, he leaps into the pond, soaking himself and giving a good splash to the first couple rows of the audience! He then spent his monologue talking himself into wooing Beatrice splashing around, in, and out of the pool, adding a delightful bit of physical slapstick to an already amusing scene.
Also amusing (for us, at least, as we have an admitted tendency to be somewhat elitist) was how easy it was to identify the sections of the audience who only knew Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation as opposed to the sections who were able to follow the entire play, based on who laughed at which jokes. Everyone enjoyed the bits that were in the film, but there was a definite subset of the audience (of which we were part) who laughed at the jokes and wordplay in the sections that didn’t make it into Branagh’s script.
Once the play was done, we went back to camp, I made another couple attempts at shooting the sky, and we crawled back into our tent.
Here’s the photoset of the trip. Not much there yet, but it will grow as I continue to work my way through the photos.
Next: we continue down California to Carlsbad, just north of San Diego, by way of Fresno.