Moonshine Run

by

The winter before I left Anchorage, my brother was playing bass for a bluegrass band called “Moonshine Run”. One evening they were performing at a coffeehouse in town, so I headed down to see them. I brought along a MiniDisc recorder, and they were kind enough to let me plug into the soundboard and record them. The next morning they were playing and being interviewed on a local radio station, and I added that to the end of the disc.

A couple months ago, Rick ran his MiniDisc player into the ground. Since I wasn’t using mine, I handed it to him along with a stack of MiniDiscs with one condition — that he get me a copy of that recording.

This weekend Rick stopped by for a bit, bringing with him a CD of .mp3s that he’d made from the MiniDisc. I just got them copied over to my Mac, and now I’m sitting here listening to Kevin and his friends play some good old down-home bluegrass. It’s great — every so often between songs I can hear Kevin laughing in the background.

Comment spam for Dean?

by

Well, this is a shame. It appears that ‘Laura in DC’ has recently started a new pro-Dean weblog (at http://deangrassroots.blogspot.com/ ), and is so excited about it that she feels that spamming weblog comments is the best way to get the word out.

Earlier today, I saw her comment to this BackupBrain post and gave her the benefit of the doubt — maybe she was just being a little pushy. Then, not long ago, I found an identical comment on this Esoterically.net post.

‘Laura in DC’, if you happen to find this — we’re glad you support Dean. We’re glad that you’re excited about him, your weblog, and whatever else in life you might be excited about. But spamming comment threads is just going to piss people off and cause problems for you in the long run. If you’ve got a good site, people will find it. Trust in links and Google, but please — ditch the spam.

Update:

Laura stopped by John P. Hoke’s Asylum too. Damn, now I’m starting to feel left out. ;)

Update:

I just checked back to Laura’s site, and realized that she issued an apology on the 19th — just a case of a “newbie” getting a little over-excited. In the long run, not that big of a deal.

Beware: You might be next!

by

Beware!

Nice editorial cartoon from the New York Times looking at the recent lawsuits by the RIAA against people sharing music files over the internet via file-trading networks.

I particularly liked the disclaimer at the bottom of the cartoon:

WARNING: Do not forward this column through e-mail, make photocopies to send to a child in college, tape it to your dorm-room door or put it on a bulletin board in your office — or you may be receiving an unexpected knock on your door.

(via Anil)

How To…

by

Need to know how to…

How To: By You looks like the place to go. Fun little idea someone’s come up with:

Every now and then, a new topic will be posted. It could be anything from ‘How to eat peas.’ to ‘How to build an areoplane.’ No answer is wrong and it’s up to you, the player, to explain how to do it. Eventually a voting system will be implimented and the answer with the most votes will win. Right now, HTBY is in beta testing and there is no such system. Just have fun. Try to keep it on topic and check back for more updates.

(via Anil)

JetBlue and CAPPS II

by

I don’t know anything about what area of the country they serve, as I’ve never heard of them before, but it seems like the JetBlue airline is going to be the testbed for the blatantly invasive CAPPS II program.

In a secret, off-the-record meeting held recently at TSA headquarters, TSA chief James M. Loy informed an elite audience of conservative opinion-makers that JetBlue Airways is replacing Delta Airlines as the “testing platform” for the CAPPS II internal border control system.  The meeting was attended by former US Representative Bob Barr as well as leaders from several conservative public policy groups.

Don’t fly JetBlue.

(via Kottke)

PCs are Voodoo

by

Well, that was entertaining. In roughly the same way that playing rugby against a team of rabid hyenas is entertaining, but entertaining none the less.

I just spent most of the past hour deciphering IDE cables, master/slave jumper settings, and USB vs. serial keyboards in order to get my PC configured the way I wanted it. The end result is good (the 6GB drive is C:, a 4GB drive I had in my closet from when my iMac died is D:, and the 2GB drive is E:, which should make the CD-ROM F:, I suppose), and I’m in the process of getting Windows 2000 installed (for the third time in three days) on the 6GB drive. Success — but quite a few headaches in the process. And people keep trying to convince me that Wintel PCs are “as easy as” Macs these days?

Puh-leeeze.

However, in the midst of all this, I did figure out my issue with the 2GB drive from yesterday. It turns out that if you boot off the Windows 2000 CD-ROM, the setup utility will let you wipe a system partition. The problem I was having was that since the DOS level didn’t have USB drivers, I couldn’t “hit any key” to tell the BIOS boot menu to boot from the CD, so it was always booting off the drive — which explains why it then refused to nuke the drive. Once I found and plugged in my “old-school” serial keyboard, I was able to hit the “any” key, boot from the CD, and proceed with everything I wanted to do in the first place.

Once I did that, while I was poking around in the BIOS menus, I found an option to “enable USB in DOS” (or some such wording) that may allow me to use the USB keyboard at the DOS-level menus…but I discovered it too late in the process to know for sure. Still, it might help in the future if I have to go through all this again.

But for now, Windows 2000 is installing, and I’ve got one Meat Lovers’ and one Hawaiian pizza sitting on my bed calling my name.

Update: Things I learned that I want to record here for future use…

  • Special IDE cables are needed to use the ‘cable select’ jumper setting on IDE devices. I don’t have those cables. ‘Cable select’ doesn’t work.
  • When two devices are on an IDE bus, the master device should be at the far end of the cable, and the slave device should be at the middle of the cable.
  • Windows 2000 (and, presumably, other versions of Windows) needs to write some boot information to the first available drive — usually the master drive on the first IDE bus (drive 0 on bus 0 in my BIOS screen) — even if you’re trying to install Windows on a different drive. It’s best to make sure that you’re installing the OS on that first drive. If you install the OS on a different drive, then when you use fdisk to format the first drive on the first IDE bus, then Windows will fail to boot as you’ve just nuked those boot files. This is a bad thing™.

Notable me

by

TypadistasNifty — I just got picked as a ‘Notable’ site on the Typadistas directory!

And while it’s really, really geeky, I love the fact that she complimented me on my source code (hey, like I said, it’s really geeky). I actually put a bit of effort into making sure that my code is clean, well-structured, and easily readable — not only does it help me when coding and debugging, but I figure it might also help others looking for examples (which is a large part of how I learned in the first place). Always nice to know that someone appreciates that!

Cauliflower of love

by

Things like this really do make the ‘net worthwhile some days. Only NSFW if you (or your employer) take things way too seriously.

sexysusan: Thats ok. Ok I’m a japanese schoolgirl, what are you.

J-Dogg: A Rhinocerus. Well, hung like one, thats for sure.

sexysusan: Haha, ok lets go. sexysusan: I put my hand through your hair, and kiss you on the neck.

J-Dogg: I stomp the ground, and snort, to alert you that you are in my breeding territory.

sexysusan: Haha, ok, you know that turns me on. sexysusan: I start unbuttoning your shirt.

J-Dogg: Rhinoceruses don’t were shirts.

sexysusan: No, your not really a Rhinocerus silly, it’s just part of the game.

J-Dogg: Rhinoceruses don’t play games. They fuking charge your ass.

sexysusan: Stop, c’mon be serious.

J-Dogg: It doesn’t get any more serious than a Rhinocerus about to charge your ass.

(via MeFi)

New PowerBooks!

by

Well, it finally happened — Apple has finally updated their PowerBook line (Apple’s page isn’t updated yet, though — Steve’s still onstage giving the keynote speech at the Europe Apple Expo).

~~Since the keynote is still in progress, details are a bit sketchy, but~~

Here’s some key points of what MacRumors has posted so far:

  • The G5 will hit 3Ghz by the end of summer ’04.
  • iChat is based on standards and should be compatible with Windows software soon.
  • New 17\” PowerBook: 1.33GHz, 2GB RAM Max, \$2999. Mobility Radeon 9600. 2x Superdrive.
  • New 12\” PowerBook: 1GHz with 512k Cache, \$1599. GeForce FX GO, USB 2.0. Both available today. \$1799 12\”/Superdrive.
  • New 15\” PowerBook: Aluminum. Slot Loading Drive. Backlit Keyboard. 15.2\” TFT. 1.25GHz, G4. Up to 2GB DDR RAM 333MHz. Radeon Mobility, DVI, FW800, 2 USB, Airport Extreme. \$1999 Combodrive model. Superdrive for \$2599. One config has 1GHz, 60GB, 256MB. 1.25GHz has 512MB RAM and 80GB HD.
  • A New mouse and keyboard. No wire, but bluetooth. adaptive frequency hopping – a new technology to keep a better connection. 128-bit encryption.

Update:

Added links to Apple official product info pages and replaced Euro pricing with USD pricing.

Hurricane Isabel

by

Hurricane Isabel from the ISS

Wow.

This picture of Hurricane Isabel was taken from the International Space Station. Just incredible.

Seems like every time the human race starts to get a little egotistical, good ol’ Mother Nature comes along to show us who’s really in charge around here. Good for her. Though, I have to admit to being glad I’m on the west coast right now — and it looks like it won’t be hitting Florida too hard, which is good news for my grandparents.

(from Yahoo! News, via MeFi [lots more good links for both info and pics on that MeFi link, too]).