I’m blind!

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Well, crud — it appears that the video card on my computer just died.

The computer froze, and when I restarted, while it sounded like the computer was starting up, I got no video feed. I’ve shut down and restarted again with the same result, and can confirm that the computer is up (by creating a network connection from Prairie’s iMac)…but no video.

I’m about 80% sure that it’s the video card and not the monitor, which has its good and bad points. While I’ve been wanting to replace my monitor for some time now (it’s aging, darker than it should be, and I can’t color correct it to what I should be able to), video cards are cheaper than new monitors (especially since I’m determined that my next monitor is going to be a flatscreen, and not another huge, heavy, power-hungry CRT). However, I don’t really know the video card market, so I’m not sure what I should look for in a replacement (not to mention the question of whether I’d be able to find a decent mac-compatible card at the Best Buy that’s just a few minutes walk away).

The biggest reason I’m pretty sure that it’s the video card is that there was a known issue with first generation Dual 2.0Ghz G5 PowerMacs that would create problems with them going to or waking up from sleep mode that was in some way tied to the video card. Unfortunately, it’s been long enough since I’ve tried to research this issue that I can’t find any of the relevant links rather quickly (though I’m finding a few references…‘G5 Nightmares’, Power Supply Noise and Wake From Sleep, Several G5 Problems, Richard Earney’s note in Hardware Failures, Peter Lovell’s note in Display Problems…there’s probably more, but that’s enough to refresh my memory). In any case, it’s an issue I’ve been dealing with for quite a while now (by not using sleep mode, and avoiding restarting the ‘puter as much as possible, as sometimes that will kick the bug in also), so I’ve known that a new video card might be a future necessity.

I just wasn’t expecting that future to come today. “

So…I guess part of my day’s plan is now to walk down to Best Buy and see if they have a decently priced Mac-compatible AGP 8x video card. Oh joy, oh joy….

Update: Well, so much for that idea. All of the video cards at Best Buy had “Made for Microsoft Windows” logos on them, and the guy working that area didn’t have any idea as to whether they’d work on Macs also (since both platforms use AGP you’d think that the cards would be cross-platform, but without knowing, I wasn’t going to plunk any money down). Grrrr.

I wonder how long it’d take me to get to one of the four local Apple Stores (Four? When did that happen?) and back via the bus system during week-before-Christmas holiday traffic?

Update: Well, I’m glad I called before hopping on a bus — the official Apple Stores don’t even carry video cards. The machine would have to be taken in as a service request, parts and labor charges…meh. All I want to do is buy a verschluggin’ video card so I can drop it in the case.

As much as I love being a Mac user, sometimes I really hate the “all Mac users are clueless” mentality…especially when it comes from the Mothership itself.

Update: Called The Mac Store, and they have two video cards in-stock that will work with my Mac. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I have a choice between the Raedon 9800 Pro for $329 or the Raedon X800 XT for $399. Ouch.

Looks like I’m not getting a working computer tonight…and even the near future might be a little bit doubtful.

Joy.

Lens Lust

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The other day, I had a customer come in looking for a specific lens — Canon’s 85mm f/1.8. It wasn’t one we had in the store, so as we started placing the order for the lens, we got to talking. Turns out she had a Digital Rebel XT, and she said that she had “a lot of photographer friends on the internet” that had recommended this lens to her.

“Do you have a photolog on the ‘net or anything?” I asked.

“Actually, I use a site called Flickr.”

I grinned. “Nice…I’m on there too.”

“What’s your name on there? It would be funny if we knew each other.”

“djwudi.”

Her eyes got a little big, she grinned, and held out her hand. “I’m Myla Kent!”

We’d been watching each other’s photos for some time now, and it was fun to actually run into each other. We chatted for a bit, and she even gave me a very nice compliment, remarking that she was surprised that I didn’t have a digital SLR after I mentioned that I was still using my little Canon A95. “They don’t look like point-and-shoot photos.” Hehe — yay!

Last night during a slow point at work I got a little curious, and found a similar lens to pop onto the store’s Nikon D70s (my current dream camera) — Nikon’s 50mm f/1.4 (about a 75mm after the digital conversion). Oh, wow…such a nice lens. I spent a good half hour shooting randomly around the store and experimenting. Man that lens has a nice shallow depth of field. I want!

Heh.

I can’t even afford the camera, and I’m lusting after a $320 lens to add on to it.

Someday…

iTunes “Lucky” by Girls Under Glass from the album German Mystic Sound Sampler Vol. I (1989, 4:07).

I’ve got the blues…

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…but in this case, it’s a good thing.

I’ve been wanting to move away from the (slightly tweaked, but still) stock template included with Movable Type 3.2 for some time now, but just haven’t been able to find the time and energy to tackle the project.

Today I actually managed to find both at once, and here’s the result — the return of the “Blue Distressed” theme for my site. I’ve missed this one, and apparently, so have at least a few of my readers, from comments I’d gotten from time to time. The theme has been slightly tweaked from its last appearance on the site, but it’s still essentially the same: blue-grey colors, and a kilted me up in the corner.

Of course, that picture is quite out of date — I’ve got a bit over a year and a half’s worth of hair now — but fixing that will have to wait for a while yet. For now, I’m just happy to have this place looking a little more “me” than it has for the past few months.

As always, feel free to let me know if anything seems obviously buggy, or cries out for further tweaking…unless you use Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE, get out of the ’90’s and upgrade to a browser that works (unless, of course, job restrictions restrict you to IE…in which case, I pity you). ;)

iTunes “Hallowed Ground” by Erasure from the album Innocents, The (1988, 4:05).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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Prairie and I just got home from seeing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We were a little nervous going in: not only was this a movie adaptation of a favorite childhood book (something which all to often suffers when translated to the screen), but Prairie’s sister Hope had seen it last week and hadn’t been terribly impressed. Once all’s said and done, though…

So. Very. Good.

The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeStory-wise, the movie is very nearly — and quite successfully — a direct adaptation of the book, with only a very few changes made along the way. The most major change is the addition of a few minutes of prologue to the film, expanding a single sentence from the book (“This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.”) in order to help modern audiences get a feel for the time period and the reasoning behind the children’s visit to the country. A later addition — a confrontation at the base of a frozen waterfall — doesn’t insert itself quite as smoothly, but still doesn’t come across as too jarring.

Effects-wise, the film does wonderfully. Aslan, while not perfect, is quite acceptably realized, but the real standouts are the creatures created by Lord of the Rings veterans Weta. From Mr. Tumnus and his fellow fauns to the centaurs, from the Minotaur to the harpy, from the gryphons to the phoenix…across the board, absolutely stunning creature effects. Both the centaurs and the phoenix were deemed “better than in the Harry Potter movies” by Prairie and me, and the harpy in the White Witch’s army was, for me, a true jaw-dropper. So much stuff, so beautifully realized.

Last — but, of course, far from least — the characters themselves. The children were wonderful (especially Georgie Henley as Lucy), James McAvoy was suitably charming as Mr. Tumnus, and Tilda Swinton as the White Witch…oh, I got such a kick out of her, especially during the ending battle as she drives her polar bear-drawn chariot across the battlefield with Aslan’s shorn mane fashioned into a battle headdress. Simply gorgeous.

And as for the “Christian element”…eeeh. Sure, the allegory’s in the movie as in the book, but without it being pointed out, I don’t think most people would care one way or the other. Those who look for it will find it, but it’s certainly not like there’s a big neon “Christ Figure” sign pointing at Aslan every time he comes on screen. If anything, there’s a bit less overt references to Christian mythology in the movie than in the book — while both refer to the children as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, the movie never mentions the White Witch’s origins as the daughter of Adam’s first wife Lilith and a giant.

All in all, both Prairie and I came out quite satisfied. Some small quibbles here and there, to be sure (neither of us particularly cared for the stylized approach to the moments after Jadis is defeated), but on the whole a marvelously successful job of translating the book to the screen. Hurrah!

And now I’m off to find some turkish delight…

iTMS Affiliation is a pain in the butt

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First, the good: I’ve gone through, bug-checked, and slightly tweaked the code for automatically linking to the iTMS in ecto to ensure that it works and performs searches as it should (something I’d been meaning to do for a bit now, as that page seems to be referenced fairly often by people working on that particular issue).

Then, the bad: while I love the idea of iTMS affiliation — and if I got more traffic, it might even bring me more than a few pennies here and there — I’ve got to agree with Scot Hacker that the whole shebang is really a pain to deal with. While I haven’t had to fight with the POST/GET issues that Scot is, some of his issues sounded very familiar to me…

It turns out that a lot of the links provided through the LinkShare back-end (Apple partners with LinkShare for the affiliates program; you have to use their back-end to generate your custom links) simply don’t work. See the six (currently static) album covers in the left column of the site? Only two of them actually take you to that album in iTMS. The other four take you to the iTMS homepage. All six links were pasted directly out of the LinkShare link maker, and should work as-is. This problem is totally unrelated to the POST problem — they’re just dishing up broken links to affiliates, period.

[…] I was expecting to find some kind of ad rotation mechanism for affiliates. See those static Stevie Wonder banners at the top of all the lyrics pages? I should be able to drop in a block of code and have those rotated out automatically from iTMS. Instead, the only option is for me to return to LinkShare every few days and grab some new static code. …why should this be so difficult?

[…] I’m trying to sell music for Apple here. You’d think they’d welcome all the help they can get. This whole process has been incredibly frustrating. Maybe I’ve drunk too much of the Apple Kool-Aid, but I really expect better from them.

iTunes “Insane in the Brain (Hot Tracks)” by Cypress Hill from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 5:18).

Poseidon

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Apparently, there’s a big-budget remake of the 70’s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure being made, and the first trailer just hit the ‘net.

As I was watching the trailer, a shot of the huge wave bearing down on the ocean liner made me wonder about just how likely such an event really was. To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, waves such as that are generally associated with tsunamis, where waves that might be unnoticeable on the ocean grow to incredible height as they progress into shallower water near shore. Large waves away from shore are generally associated with storms or hurricanes. So, to see a wave large enough to capsize a modern ocean liner in the open sea on an otherwise clear night seemed to be straining, if not outright breaking credibility.

In my head, then, I decided that part of the remake should be the question of where such a wave would come from and what could generate it. In my version of the movie, the survivors of the capsized cruise ship would make it to the surface, find a life raft or some other craft, and make it in to shore…only to discover that the wave had been generated by a huge meteor or asteroid crashing into the ocean not far from their ship, and by the time they’d escaped the ship and made it to land, huge tsunamis had wiped out entire coastlines across the world, practically destroying the world as they’d known it. Kind of a modern-day Planet of the Apes ending, only without the sci-fi time travel element.

What really surprised me when starting to write this post, then, was noting these two passages on the IMDB’s trivia page for The Poseidon Adventure:

Paul Gallico was inspired to write his novel by a voyage he made on the Queen Mary. When he was having breakfast in the dining room, the liner was hit by a large wave, sending people and furniture crashing to the other side of the vessel. He was further inspired by a true incident which occurred aboard the Queen Mary during World War II. Packed with American troops bound for Europe, the ship was struck by a gargantuan freak wave in the North Atlantic. It was calculated that if the ship had rolled another five inches, she would have capsized like the Poseidon.

Such mid-ocean “rogue waves” were previously thought to occur only once every ten thousand years. A 2004 study of satellite radar images showed they can happen as often as hundreds of times every decade.

Whoa. Such waves are real? Apparently so!

Rogue waves are freakishly large waves, much bigger than the surrounding swell. They seem to rear up out of nowhere, sometimes out of a fairly calm sea, and disappear just as quickly. Mariners have recounted tales of such waves for centuries, but until recently oceanographers discounted them, along with sightings of sea monsters and mermaids. Naval architects, however, have analyzed the wrecks of ships sunk in recent decades, and have found that a large proportion of them have damage consistent with an encounter with a rogue wave, which can reach heights of a hundred feet. Even supertankers have been sunk by these monster waves. Now the evidence is too great to ignore, and physicists are trying to understand how rogue waves are generated. The issue is important not only for our understanding of the ocean, but also because rogue waves seem to be responsible for the loss of many lives at sea.

Hot damn that’s cool. Freaky and scary, but really cool. Guess I should be giving the scriptwriters a tad more credit than I had been!

My favorite random facts about…

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…Vin Diesel:

  • If you rearrange the letters in Vin Diesel it reveals his credo: “I End Lives.”
  • There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Vin Diesel allows to live.
  • In an average living room there are 1,242 objects Vin Diesel could use to kill you, including the room itself.
  • Crop circles are Vin’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down.
  • Vin Diesel is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis.
  • Vin Diesel can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night.
  • Vin Diesel can divide by zero.
  • Magnetic compasses do not point toward true North – they point in the direction of Vin Diesel. He just likes to sit on a lawn chair and shout, “Jackets are for pussies!” at the Acrtic researchers.
  • Vin Diesel invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.
  • When Vin Diesel runs with scissors, other people get hurt.

…Chuck Norris:

  • Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
  • Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
  • If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
  • Bullets dodge Chuck Norris.
  • A Handicap parking sign does not signify that this spot is for handicapped people. It is actually in fact a warning, that the spot belongs to Chuck Norris and that you will be handicapped if you park there.
  • The quickest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist.
  • Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.
  • Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
  • Chuck Norris frequently donates blood to the Red Cross. Just never his own.
  • Superman owns a pair of Chuck Norris pajamas.

…Mr. T:

  • The last man who made eye contact with Mr. T was Ray Charles.
  • Every time a church bell rings, Mr. T pities a fool.
  • Mr T. and Chuck Norris decided to spar, they travelled to the only safe place in the Universe, the beginning of time. They bowed to each other and Chuck launched in with a roundhouse kick. Mr. T blocked it, and the resulting pressure wave is commonly called the Big Bang.
  • When Mr. T folds his arms, the U.S. Terror Alert Level is raised to gold.
  • Ever have a sharp pain in your chest that you can’t explain? That was Mr. T, and it was a warning.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the ancient world knew of 5 elements, not 4. They were earth, air, fire, water and pity. Mr. T invented them all.
  • Twenty-three. That’s the number of people Mr. T has pitied in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.
  • On the A-team, Face, Haniabal, and Murdoch were all masters of disguise. Mr T didn’t have to wear a disguise. The bad guys didn’t recognize him out of fear.
  • Mr. T is not black. It’s just that the sun is to afraid to shine on him.
  • Mr. T’s edition of the VH1 show ‘Where Are They Now’ was the shortest in the show’s history. It was 10 seconds long, and consisted of a black screen with the words “Right Behind You” written on it.
  • If you were born before 1980, there is a good chance that Mr. T is your father. If you were born after, it’s guaranteed.