A blast from the past…

Just a little something that amuses me. Though I’ve been posting regularly since November 2000, and have a few old weblog-style posts going all the way back to December 1995, it wasn’t until February of 2001 that I actually stumbled across the term ‘blogger’.

So it appears I’ve (without really knowing or planning it) become one of the growing number of ‘bloggers’ on the web. Blogger? Well read on…

It’s kind of fun to be able to pinpoint the very day that I realized there was this “weblogging” thing going on…and to know that I’d been doing it for a good while before that.

Yeah. I’m an old-timer. :p

Seattle Polite

Sometimes the Seattle Polite attitude (mentioned at the beginning of this article about its flipside, the Seattle Freeze) really amuses me.

On my way home for lunch, I was just standing at the corner of Pike and 8th by the Convention Center waiting for the light to change. As I stood there, the car coming down the hill slowed, stopped, and the driver nodded for me to cross. I pointed at the light — “You’ve got the green, buddy…” — and he just waved me across.

Well, whatever. I crossed, and he went on his way. His good deed for the day, maybe?

iTunesTomorrow Wendy (Green Eggs and Hammond)” by System Syn (2002, 5:12).

Flip der Svitch!!!

Flip der Svitch!

If you’re seeing this entry, then the switch has been thrown, and Eclecticism has successfully transferred over to its new server!

Michael was kind enough to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse (the good kind, not the horse-head-in-the-bed kind), and we got all the details finalized today. I’ve spent the evening transferring things over, and…oh, man, but this is an improvement.

Last time I had to rebuild my weblog, I couldn’t import all of my entries into Movable Type in one swell foop, because the 11 megabytes of text choked my server, and I had to break things down and do them month by month to avoid getting timeouts. Just a little while ago, I tossed my entire backup file — a whopping 13.78 megabyte text file — at the server, and it chewed through the entire thing and imported all my entries in just about thirty seconds.

So, many, many thanks to Michael!

There may be a few odds and ends that aren’t quite right as I finalize everything (for instance, I need to figure out how I’m going to get my del.icio.us bookmarks back into the sidebar as a linklog), but hopefully nothing too troublesome. If you do come across something that’s obviously broken, please feel free to let me know.

Otherwise, assuming all goes well, we should be in far better shape around these parts than we have been in quite a while. Yay!

(Bonus points if you can identify the movie that the above screencapture comes from….)

100+ Things Meme

I picked this up from Terrance.

I’ve always wanted to do one of those “100 things about me” posts, but I’ve never been able to think of 100 things that I wanted to list. This seemed like an easy way of doing it.

If you want to participate, here’s what you do. Copy this list to your blog. Bold the ones that are true for you. Add something that’s true about you.

(I’m also italicizing things that are ‘somewhat’ true, and including an explanation below. That’s not part of the original instructions, though….)

Here goes.

Read more

Initial thoughts

Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…

  • There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.

  • IBM just got spanked. Hard.

  • From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680×0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.

    From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680×0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680×0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.

  • This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).

  • I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.

    That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.

  • I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box‘ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.

  • I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!

Any other thoughts?

Slashdot Slashdotted

Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…

Slashdot slashdotted

Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.

iTunesMy Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).

In Search of a Sugar Daddy

Y’know, all I need right now is for some kind wealthy benefactor to drop about six grand in my bank account. That would essentially cover my income through the end of August, allowing me to quit my job and spend the summer working on my writing and photography, apartment hunting for the upcoming move, and investigating grants and loans for my eventual return to school.

Of course, that’s not exactly likely. Possible sure…but improbable enough that as I don’t have easy access to the Heart of Gold, I don’t expect it’ll happen.

Pity, that.

iTunesTalk on Censorship/Letter to Tipper Gore” by Biafra, Jello from the album No More Cocoons (1987, 26:04).

The IRS is more thorough than I thought…

Amusing bits from IRS Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, Other Income:

Bribes. If you receive a bribe, include it in your income.

Found property. If you find and keep property that does not belong to you that has been lost or abandoned (treasure-trove), it is taxable to you at its fair market value in the first year it is your undisputed possession.

Illegal income. Illegal income, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

Kickbacks. You must include kickbacks, side commissions, push money, or similar payments you receive in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner.

For all those honest criminals out there. ;)

(via Jacqueline)