Plaidophile

"[The Parthenon] is a 20,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and worse, it's a puzzle without any instructions." As opposed to all those jigsaw puzzles which come with detailed assembly directions?

So, when I was a kid, my parents loved I Love Lucy but I never really understood what was so great about it. So when TiVo started recording it as a suggestion I decided to watch it, and... wow, it's actually pretty funny stuff.

Is this another sign that I'm a grownup now? I guess there's worse ways to come to realize that than by laughing at an old sitcom.

so I'm trying to read books on my iPod touch in bed, and rather than use the PDF I made of Dr Moreau (which I found a bit annoying due to the "paper" margins) I tried reading it direct from Gutenberg in Safari. Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to change the font size or to reflow the text based on a zoom level. Basically it's like they never considered that people might want to read text on sites which aren't a column layout. Stupid.

Another gripe: it doesn't do a very good job of saving your position when switching tabs, especially when the screen orientation changes. When I worked on Kindle I spent a hell of a lot of time making damned sure that zooming and pagination and location stability made sense. Clearly Apple didn't really consider a "reading lots" use case for mobile Safari.

Also, not really Appls fault but the Google iPhone portal sucks and won't let me stay logged in. WTF

So, I've had the iPod Touch for a few days, and have been using it pretty frequently. Of course, I didn't buy it as a media player but as an Internet device, so that's how I'll be reviewing it.

First of all, I haven't tried to jailbreak it; I've just been running the stock 1.1.3 firmware, with the $20 application upgrade. My hope is of course that the SDK leads to third-party apps even remotely as awesome as what the homebrew/jailbreak community has come up with. (Hopefully Apple won't go out of their way to prevent people from being able to build and run their own apps on their own devices, for example. I can see them perhaps preventing apps from downloading other apps into the /Applications folder though, which would at the very least make it a little less convenient to have something like Installer.app.)

The answer: probably.

Memed from Yook.

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively. [Only because nerds are fashionable right now though.]
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18. [Technically I did but it was for emergencies only, and I don't think I ever even used it except to make a couple phone calls and the like.]
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs. [Although by "majority" I just mean "more than 50%." I still worked in college and paid for about half of my tuition and most of my food and so on. Also, I willingly went to an in-state college so that I wouldn't be a burden. My tuition was around $1000/semester.]
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. [note: we generally stayed with relatives but we could have stayed at hotels if we wanted to]
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18. [note: not all of it, but certainly most of it]
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course. [I could have if I wanted/needed to, though]
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college .
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up. [of course, these are generally free or cheap...]
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

A Mac-themed filk of "Knights Of The Round Table" from Holy Grail, if only for the line, "I have to zap the PRAM a lot."

So, I went and bought a French press for coffee. The smallest reasonably-priced one I could find was a 3-cup model, which I figured was overkill for me most of the time but, hey, I guess when I have people over I can make multiple cups, right?

Well, I got it today, and it's a pretty wee thing. On the directions it refers to "each 4-ounce cup." I know that for hot drinks, "cup" usually means "cup full" and not "English cup" but, wow, 4 ounces? So I guess this is the perfect size for me after all!

Except I just made coffee in it and even though I filled it up all the way, the resulting "pot" didn't even fill up one 8-ounce coffee cup halfway. What the hell. Now I'm feeling cheated.

So, my reimbursement from my CES travel was downwardly adjusted to the tune of $88, with a note, "Please be advised that your lodging expense has been adjusted to reflect the appropriate limit as stated in the corporate policy." Well, gee, thanks for "bringing my expenditures into compliance with the policy" (did you go back in time and change my credit card bill, too?) when I had actually requested a much less expensive hotel room at Bally's and for whatever reason I was upgraded to Caesar's Palace with no explanation.

As opposed to plaid. (Which I also like, as you well know.)

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So I just watched the MWSF keynote, and out of sheer boredom I decided to watch the Randy Newman performance at the end. What the hell?! Did the Steve actually approve that first song, where basically he ranted about how America might be bad but Europeans like Nero, Caligula, Hitler and Stalin were worse so we're not really that evil, and added some thinly-veiled racist comments about having "a brother" and "two tight-assed Italians" in the supreme court?

Not to mention that the "song" was so musically-similar to "You've Got A Friend In Me," the song he played immediately afterwards. That didn't really help his image, considering he's been parodied so many times as having basically written only one song.

Okay, so during the Stevenote, Time Capsule was announced, but there was no mention made of whether this meant that there was Time Machine on generic NAS, or if you have to buy a Time Capsule for this. However, on the Leopard Time Machine page, there's now this text:

Pick a disk. Any disk.

You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.

So, this means that you can at least use another Mac (perfect for my home ecosystem), and the implication is that any NAS which speaks AFP would also work as well (though SMB/NFS probably aren't). Still, this is very good news, and finally a reason to upgrade my laptops to Leopard.

Okay, nothing terribly surprising (aside from how thin they actually got it, holy cow). I don't think I'll be getting one, though. I don't trust 1.8" hard drives for a constant-load scenario like a laptop (people have experimented with using iPods as boot drives in the past and they've burnt out after a few days, and it's not like magnetic drive technology has really improved that much since the time that was possible), and the SSD option is $1200 (and I don't trust SSD with a continuous-write scenario either, due to the limited write cycle count combined with OSX's tendency to optimize its access patterns for magnetic disks).

Plus, lack of firewire means I can't use it with my Inspire1394 (not that I ever use that anyway but it'd be nice to have the option), so it's not really useful as an ultra-portable music studio or whatever. Really the only compelling thing about it is that it's lighter, which would be nice for those rare times that I have to lug my laptop around, but realistically I think something like an Eee or some other Internet tablet (like, say, an iPod Touch!) would be better overall.

For the last month or so my wrists have been getting really bad again, and for some reason I've been in denial. Argh. I guess this is the same cycle I go through every few years. This time around I think it's a combination of bad ergonomics (my keyboard tray at work kind of sucks and I have no keyboard tray at home) and other stress factors.

In particular, over the last couple weeks I've been playing guitar and drawing a lot, which probably has a lot to do with it. Also I haven't been sleeping with my wrist braces for the last, oh, 6 months. So that's something I'm going to have to start doing again. Meh.

Oh, so this is the difference between bloggers and traditional journalism.

So I'm on my way home via BART (online using my cellphone). After I wrote the Southwest Airlines writeup, I started to occasionally check to see how may WiFi networks were visible (manually, rather than with MacStumbler, which I haven't gotten around to installing on my MacBook). I couldn't help but notice how many people were putting messages into their SSIDs. Apparently a lot of people are trying to sell their old cars using SSID "spam."

I had no idea SSIDs were long and freeform enough to fit a phone number and a reasonable description of a used Mustang.

So, in order to be more "fair" and in order to avoid a mad rush to the gate, Southwest Airlines has tried yet another boarding procedure. This one gives everyone a group (A, B or C) and a number (1-60). Each group is then further split from 1-30 and 31-60. Then the first two A groups are lined up in numerical order, then each group is called to board, in order, then after one group finishes boarding the next group starts boarding and the group after that lines up.

It sounds confusing, because it is confusing. Passengers don't know where to go, the lines are always too close to the wall so half of the groups have to trip on everyone else in order to line up, and people have a hard time keeping track of the separate group and number and so when A31-60 is trying to board, invariably a bunch of people from C45 try to as well. Eventually the gatekeeper just starts calling up groups of 5.

I am really glad I only went for two days (well, one and a half, really) of the actual convention, because holy damn was I ready to kill people today.

(Note to self: Seriously, you're agoraphobic. Stop doing these things.)

On the plus side, the curbside checkin and subsequent security line were really short. (I don't know why everyone was lined up inside when curbside checkin had like 3 people in line.)

I made the mistake of taking my laptop to the show floor with me, which has made my backpack very heavy. On the plus side, it's made it so I can post this post.

So I'm going to CES in Las Vegas this year (to see what our competition is up to, not to be a booth babe or wahtever). As in, I'm sitting in the airport waiting for my delayed flight. The boarding area is getting crowded and pretty much everyone who is talking is talking about CES. I'm also a bit agoraphobic (especially in large crowds). This should be "fun."

Not as shitty as I was expecting!

Amazon Kindle completely 0wned

Welcome to 2008, where random baked-off-their-ass folks at parties "debate" with random strangers about the existence of ghosts, "orbs," and God, and take a refusal to participate in the discussion as "proof" that they're right.

Apparently I need to expand my mind, because I want to actually understand why people believe things that they do rather than just accepting it without proof.

I am so glad that we're in the world of the future with, you know, science and stuff. I wish everyone else would join us here.