Only in Alaska…

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Apparently, my hometown has been in the midst of a Mayoral campaign. Since I don’t live in Anchorage anymore, I didn’t know anything about this until today, when a short post on my Dad’s site listed the current vote tallies.

I have to admit, I’m a little bummed. It looks like current Mayor Mark Begich has won re-election, with 55% of the vote — and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

What disappoints me is that while the runner-up got a fairly respectable 41% of the vote, by not electing him, Anchorage, Alaska (the largest city in a state known primarily for the ice and snow of its winter months) has lost the opportunity to have Jack Frost as a mayor.

You know, you couldn’t introduce an Alaskan mayoral candidate with the name of Jack Frost in a fiction novel without your editor kicking the manuscript back to you with his name circled in bright red permanent mark and a “you’ve got to be kidding me” notation in the margin. And yet here we are, with the real thing.

Now I just have to figure out which Anchorage political race amuses me more: the 2006 Mayoral election with Jack Frost as a candidate, or the 2002 Republican primary for Turnagain district 26 which gave voters a choice between Strait and Gay.

I’m glad I don’t live there anymore — but as I often say, Anchorage really is a wonderful place to be from.

iTunes “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)” by Eurythmics from the album Eurythmics Greatest Hits (1985, 5:22).

Boot Camp

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As part of an effort to streamline things while I’m in school, I’ve been working here and there on paring down the number of newsfeeds I subscribe to. One of the steps I took a couple weeks ago was removing the majority of my mac-specific site feeds (Macintouch, MacFixit, and various others), figuring that if any big news broke, chances are good that I’d hear about it from plenty of other places.

Boy was I right on that assumption. I can’t count the number of different places I’ve seen mention Boot Camp, and I’m only up to around noon yesterday in my newsreading. Crazy.

Boot Camp, on the off chance it hasn’t crossed your radar yet (not likely, but possible), is Apple’s just-released official methodology for setting your new Intel-based Mac up as a dual-boot Mac OS X/Windows XP system.

You’ve got to love the language they chose to use in their promo materials (emphasis mine)…

Developers can learn all about the sixth major release of Mac OS X this century at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, to be held August 7-11 in San Francisco.

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

Heh. No, no snark there. None at all.

Of course, since this is an option only available for Intel-based Macs, it’s something I’m not able to take advantage off — my first generation dual 2.0Ghz G5 PowerMac just won’t cut it. Not that (still) being unable to run Windows natively on my Mac is really a crushing blow to me…as long as I can run my math class software under Virtual PC, I’m good to go.

In the meantime, PC world has a ‘first look’ at running Windows natively on Mactel hardware.

It works. Impressively well. With games, even. That’s our first impression of Windows XP running under Apple’s Boot Camp on our 20-inch iMac.

[…] Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on.

In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to “High.”

Our 20-inch iMac came with a 2.0-GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. That’s roughly equivalent to a high-end laptop machine, and anecdotally the performance I obtained was about what I’d have expected from that type of PC.

iTunes “Roadblock, The” by Ridgway, Stan from the album Earphoria (1991, 4:40).

Calico (AutoStitch for Mac OS X)

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Panoramic photography is something I’ve been playing with for years — long enough that Prairie was amused to see that I was taking multi-shot panoramics back when I visited Europe during my high school years, long before I had any way to assemble them together with anything more sophisticated than scissors and tape.

Unfortunately, the state of panoramic software on the Mac has been less than I’d like for quite some time now. Apple’s excellent Quicktime VR Authoring Studio is long out of date, without any sign of it being updated for OS X (in fact, searching for it on Apple’s site only returns references to it, with no official product page listed). Canon’s Photostitch is used fairly frequently, but I’ve never been that thrilled with it. Functional, but it doesn’t really “feel” like a true OS X application, and it doesn’t allow for much tweaking or fine-tuning. Other Mac OS X panoramic tools are either commercial and expensive, or command-line ports that I’ve never taken the time to investigate fully (such as Panorama Tools). For a time when I had a working PC I used The Panorama Factory and was quite happy with its range of options, but since my PC finally gave up the ghost, TPF’s performance under Virtual PC wasn’t good enough for me to continue using it.

For the past year or so, though, I’ve been keeping an eye out on AutoStitch. It looked to be the “holy grail” of panoramic creation software: originally created as a research project at the University of British Columbia, it produces truly automatic panoramic photos, stitched from multiple photos that don’t even have to be aligned or all taken with the same exposure (a 57-shot example is shown on the AutoStitch page). The problem, of course, was that AutoStitch is PC-only. Still, I kept seeing incredible panoramas that AutoStitch had produced, so I’d occasionally check in to see if a Mac OS X port had popped up yet.

This morning, my persistence paid off. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but Kekus Digital has produced a pseudo-port of AutoStitch for Mac OS X (licensing the AutoStitch technology in a Mac OS X package) called Calico.

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Penguin Floozies

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The shocking truth about penguin’s sex lives, photo by downtempo, found on Flickr today.

For years penguins have been regarded as the conservatives of the avian world. Always attired in formal evening wear, they have become symbols of literature and family values.

Recent studies, by Otago University lecturer Lloyd Davis and colleague Finoa Hunter of Cambridge University have shown this veneer of respectability to be a sham. During a summer camped on the ice watching Adelie penguins mate around the clock, Dr. Davis and Dr. Hunter observed prostitution and wife-swapping.

The most bizarre aspect of penguin sexuality is the female’s penchant for prostituting herself to acquire pebbles to line her nest. In the ice and snow of Antarctica pebbles are useful insulation, crucial for survival of broods, but they are at a premium.

Often the only way to get pebbles is to take them from other nests at the risk of severe pecking. Females have figured out that a good way to get pebbles is to swap sex for them, says Dr. Davis, who has been studying the penguins since 1977.

“Occasionally females who have pair-bonded with a male will go off for a quickie.”

Dr. Davis says penguin prostitutes usually manage to get a stone without having sex. In many instances females will go through a courtship ritual, then abscond with a stone after the male gets out of his nest, expecting them to lie down on it.

Natural history documentaries have always described penguins as mating for life. Dr. Davis says that is clearly not so.

“My work shows they swap partners regularly, often in the same season.”

Fresh Hare / All This and Rabbit Stew

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Some days, it’s really surprising what you can get for a dollar. Prairie’s long been a dollar store shopper, as it’s a convenient and cheap way to pick up little bits and pieces for around the home. Last Christmas as part of my stack of presents, she picked up a good-sized stack of dollar store DVDs. None of this is high-quality stuff, but that’s not really the point: it’s fun stuff. Old, bad movies make up a lot of it (we had fun watching The Lady and the Highwayman, an old TV movie featuring Hugh Grant in a mullet), but she also picked up a lot of compilations of old cartoons: Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, and quite a few others.

A couple of nights ago, we popped in Cartoon Craze presents: Bugs Bunny: Falling Hare, mostly a collection of Bugs Bunny cartoons, with a few other non-Bugs cartoons as well, and settled back for a fun evening of cartoon silliness.

What we didn’t expect to discover was that two of the cartoons on the disc are shorts that have been either edited or outright banned for many years due to racist content. They’re fascinating from a historical context, and I actually think it’s kind of neat to have them and be able to see them — but man was it a surprise when we weren’t expecting them to pop up!

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2006 Emerald City Comicon

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I spent a few hours wandering around this years’ Emerald City ComiCon today. Most of the pictures I’ve posted to Flickr are of the costume contest, but there’s quite a few from my wanders through the showcase floor as well.

Two things definitely stood out as I made my rounds.

Jetfire, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAFirst was coming across what appeared to be a mint condition, still in the box version of Jetfire, my all-time favorite Transformer toy. Probably only as good as it was because it was a pretty direct rip-off of the Robotech Valkyrie, but I never cared. I’d have loved to have grabbed this, but at $225, it was a bit out of my reach.

Shel Silverstein's Different Dances, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAThe second find was a copy of Shel Silverstein‘s ‘Different Dances‘, which I’d never heard of before. It’s definitely not one of the kids’ books that Shel is most famous for, as I quickly discovered when I started flipping through it and immediately found a four-page spread titled “The Deadly Weapon” (pages one and two, pages three and four, both Not Safe For Work if cartoon drawings of naked people fall into that category). While I couldn’t afford the $125 that the book was priced at, it turns out that Xebeth might have a copy that she could send my way. Neat!

The rest of the Con was pretty much as to be expected, with the usual Stormtroopers, Jedi, and other assorted oddities wandering around. Not at all a bad way to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.