Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, so I figured it was worth doing it again. With the number of online sites I’m part of, sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of all the ways to find me. So here’s a current rundown as of today.
Update: Thanks to Ontario Emperor’s suggestion, I now have a FriendFeed where you can see (almost) everything I do in one swell foop. Aggregators FTW!
There’s a fun little history of Mother’s Day article that Prairie found with some fun details about how it all got started…
On this 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day, the woman credited with creating one of the world’s most celebrated holidays probably wouldn’t be pleased with all the flowers, candy or gifts.
Anna Jarvis would want us to give mothers a white carnation — she felt it signified the purity of a mother’s love.
Jarvis, who never married and never had children, got the Mother’s Day idea after her mother said it would be nice if someone created a memorial to mothers.
Three years after her mother died in 1905, she organized the first official mother’s day service at a church where her mother had spent more than 20 years teaching Sunday school.
[…] West Virginia became the first state to recognize Mother’s Day in 1910. President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution in 1914 marking the second Sunday in May a nationwide observance.
[…] Jarvis became increasingly disturbed as the celebration turned into an excuse to sell greeting cards, candy, flowers and other items.
Jarvis became known for scathing letters in which she would berate people who purchased greeting cards, saying they were too lazy to write personal letters “to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
Before she died in 1948, she protested at a Mother’s Day celebration in New York, and was arrested for disturbing the peace.
[…] In the end, Mason said Jarvis was bitter about what the observance had become and “wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control …”
“But when you look at Mother’s Day as being her baby of sorts, you can understand her protectiveness of it.”
See? My year-after-year failure to do anything big for Mother’s Day wasn’t being inconsiderate, absentminded or forgetful — I was just respecting the wishes of the woman who started the whole thing in the first place!
(Think that’ll fly?)
(Yeah, me neither.)
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! And, of course, to any other mothers that might read or find their way here. :)
A couple of birthday presents showed up in the mail today. Cool! Thanks to Phil for Mark Twain’s Roughing It and to Fernando for the sci-fi anthology The Starry Rift!
Once again, we are reminded that the true celebration on this day isn’t Cinco de Mayo, but rather Royce’s birthday. Too many people get that mixed up. I have no idea why.
As always, my brother is just a day and three years behind me, so today marked his 32nd birthday. I hope it was a good one!
I’m experimenting with the Aperture free trial right now for photoshoots with my D70s, but I still wanted to use iPhoto for my Casio point and shoot. Apple allows you to set either iPhoto or Aperture to automatically launch when the Finder mounts a memory card, but by choosing either one, I’d have to quit and manually launch the other application depending on which camera I was importing shots from.
However, Aperture also gives you the ability to set any application to launch when a memory card is inserted. I set up this simple little Applescript (saved as a launchable app) to be the app launched on memory card insertion:
tell application "Finder"
if exists disk "CASIO-DSC" then
launch application "iPhoto"
else if exists disk "NIKON D70S" then
launch application "Aperture"
end if
end tell
Now, whenever a memory card is inserted, the Applescript launches, checks the volume name of the memory card (which is set by the camera when you format the card), launches the appropriate photo application, and then quits.
Pretty simple for a lot of experienced Applescripters, I’m sure, but I’m pretty happy that I got it figured out.
This is neither pro-Obama nor anti-Clinton in my mind — I haven’t officially taken a stance yet, though unofficially I’m throwing my vote in with Cthulhu (why settle for the lesser of two evils, after all?) — I just think it’s really funny. It’s also ganked in full from the Slog:
Uh oh. Earlier this week Hillary Clinton instructed supporters to bet on the filly in the Kentucky Derby. In other words: Bet on Eight Belles, the only female in the horse race (and, Clinton obviously hoped, a potentially promising metaphor/omen for herself and her chances of winning the Democratic nomination).
Well, as local sports fanatic Seth Kolloen just pointed out via email (and on his blog), it didn’t go so well for the filly today.
In a development that you couldn’t even make up, Eight Belles finished second, but broke both her ankles during the race, collapsed at the end, and was immediately euthanized on the track.
(Oh — while it shouldn’t need to be clarified, just to cover my bases with the terminally dense: no, the injury and death of the horse is not funny. The “seemed like a good idea at the time” and subsequently horrifically botched political analogy is hilarious.)
As of today, I’m officially old enough to be elected President of the United States — 35. I believe this is my last age-related milestone before official senior citizen status, though there may be something I’m not remembering.
Any birthday festivities are being delayed, though, for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m spending part of the day shooting a wedding for a friend’s daughter. They asked me to be their photographer last year sometime, I agreed, and then later on when they told me the finalized date…well, I didn’t want to back out and disappoint them, and it’ll still be a fun way to spend the afternoon. Prairie and I just figured that we’d do our own little celebration here at home in the evening (though probably saving birthday cake for a later day, as there’ll likely be wedding cake during the day).
Unfortunately, Prairie’s grandmother passed away earlier this week, and Prairie flew down to California to be with her family for the funeral — which is today as well. She says that she’s enjoying the trip, as even though it’s for a funeral, it’s also the first time in years that that entire clan has assembled (they had dinner for 28 people last night). She’s also taken a ton of pictures of everything, and says there’s a chance she might actually fill the 1Gb card we keep in her camera — a major event, as she tends to take about one picture for every 50-100 that I do (I’m so proud of her)!
So, definitely not a Worst Birthday EVAR, but not a Best Birthday EVAR either. Prairie comes back in to Seattle tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll probably go out to lunch somewhere and then come home to let her crash out. We’ll find a time for birthday celebrations and cake later on, perhaps next weekend.
In the meantime, if anyone feels sorry for me has too much money and wants to spend some on me is overly generous feels benevolent and wants to get me a present, I have a couple wishlists available through Wishlistr or Amazon. Hey, it’s my birthday, I’m allowed to do this, right? ;)
A few weeks ago, Prairie and I got our TV Converter Box Coupons from the government, so that we could happily continue to pump propaganda into our brains watch our favorite shows after the analog stations are turned off in February. I wandered down to the seventh circle of Hell Best Buy and picked up two of the converter boxes (the Insignia NS-DXA1). Rather than hooking both up right off the bat (tempting as that was, since I was a geek with new toys), I just hooked up the larger living room TV. This made sense, as it’s the one that has all the other fancy gadgets on it and requires me being home to successfully juggle five remotes — Prairie just sticks to the little one in our bedroom that only uses two remotes.
After a few weeks of using it…well, much as I like the idea of digital TV, the reality — at least as far as over-the-air broadcast goes — is definitely a bit of a mixed bag.
The box itself is fairly nice: simple to set up and use, with only a few minor caveats. For some reason, in addition to the blue ‘on’ light that’s quite standard for electronics, this also has a bright red ‘off’ light that looks oddly like there’s a Cylon staring at you when you’re not watching TV (incidentally, this is another reason we’ve not hooked one up in the bedroom yet). The on-screen guide doesn’t always seem to be accurate, though that may be the fault of the local broadcasters. Aside from that, I’m quite happy with it — the image quality is nice, and a noticeable step up from analog broadcasts, and the audio, while limited to standard 2-channel stereo (one of the requirements of the coupon-eligible boxes), seems good enough to my ears. The box also allows you to choose how it sends the video to your TV screen: letterboxed to preserve the widescreen aspect ratio; cropped to fill the square screen at the expense of information on the sides; or ‘squeezed’, where the widescreen image fills the square screen, making everyone look really really skinny. This is actually my preferred method when a show is broadcast widescreen, as my TV (a Sony Wega KV-27FS17) has an ‘anamorphic’ mode that ‘squishes’ the ‘squeezed’ signal into a 16:9 area, increasing the resolution and quality of the displayed image (geeky tech-speak for “it looks better this way”).
However, our one big issue is simply this: when analog TV signals dropped or had some form of interference, you got a little bit of snow or static, but you could still watch the show. When digital TV signals drop or hit interference…well, if you’re lucky, you’ll just get some ‘blocking’ in the image, like when a video DVD has a fingerprint. More often, though, the signal drops so far that first the audio, then the video cuts out entirely. This ends up being far more frustrating than the old analog issues, as it’s a total disruption of the signal. As interference seems to depend a lot on weather, Prairie and I have taken to watching TV on the little 13″ TV in the bedroom that still gets analog signals on rainy nights rather than even trying to watch the big TV with the digital receiver. A crystal-clear signal is only good when you get that signal, after all!
I keep finding myself wishing they’d tweaked the digital transmission standard so that the video was the first thing to go with a bad signal, rather than the audio. If the video cut out but the audio was still going, you could still follow along pretty well while the video did its little dance of cubist surrealism, but when the audio craps out, it’s just frustrating (especially when watching, say, a show like Jeopardy).
I’ve heard that a good antenna could alleviate the problems, but when we’re living in a rental apartment, there’s not much we can do on that score. Good old-fashioned rabbit ears will have to do.
So, in the end, it’s a mixed bag. It’s great when it works, but when it doesn’t work, it’s a lot more frustrating than the “old-n-busted” system ever was.
Here’s a fascinating program: the Encyclopedia Britannica is introducing Britannica Webshare:
Britannica WebShare is a program that makes it easy for Web publishers to use the information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for their own research and to share it by providing their readers easy access to individual articles.
Anyone who publishes regularly on the Internet—bloggers, webmaster, and writers who publish on the Web—is eligible for a free subscription to Britannica Online, which includes the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well as other encyclopedias, an atlas, a dictionary, thesaurus, links to valuable Web sites selected by our editors, and more.
What’s more, anyone with a Web site can link to a Britannica article—or multiple articles—and readers who click on the links will see the articles in their entirety, even if the article is normally available only to paying subscribers.
Sounds nice, and a welcome companion/competitor to Wikipedia. I’ve applied, now it’s just a question of whether I’ve been regular enough as of late to get accepted. ;)