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Monday, December 31, 2001
Momento is a great, weird, creepy movie. Highly recommended if you like great creepy movies. Watching it gives one a little insight into what it must be like to have Alzheimer's Disease; having little or no short-term memory. The movie is played out in reverse segments which works suprisingly well, keeping the viewer constantly trying remember what happened during previous segments that occurred in the future. Confusing but interesting. Here's a review. (0) comments Saturday, December 29, 2001
After chopping some firewood and rebuilding my mountain bike rear hub I'm feeling pretty content. It's been a while since I've done any serious work on a bike other than the usual periodic maintenance. With four bikes, when one needs work I usually take it into the shop (Spokes Etc.) and let the professionals handle the task. To get our last ride of the year in, we visited a friend nearby and froze our hind parts. After a couple of hours of being home, I'm just starting to thaw out. Back when I loaded Linux from the Mandrake 7 disks I was a little surprised at how much disk space was required for the basic distribution. This guide to a "lo-fat linux desktop" would have come in handy when I contemplated starting over from scratch. As it is, the Linux box just doesn't get much use. I don't have the time to learn how to be a sysadmin for doing basic tasks. (0) comments Thursday, December 27, 2001
We're back from a visit to Nashville where we spent the holidays with most of the family. Probably gained a couple of pounds from eating rich food and not exercising, although we did take a good hike at Radnor Lake State Natural Area. The park is a lovely pocket of wooded hills in the middle of suburban Nashville. Also checked out the very nicely renovated old post office building in downtown Nashville that is now the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Many people say that although it's a relatively large city, Nashville is more like a small town. As one person noted, "it has all of the disadvantages of a small town and none of the advantages of a large city." Apparantly city services aren't that great, and everyone seems to know everyone else. From what I can tell, it's true. We also wanted to do some country and western dancing but made the mistake of going to the Wild Horse Saloon. We've made the mistake before but had hoped that the conditions would be different. Because the Music City Bowl is played around this time each year in Nashville, the drunk teenages seem to migrate toward the saloon, so they mostly stood gawking on the dance floor while we tried to muscle our way around them. Since our last visit the dance floor has been reduced by about 1/2 to make room for more restaurant tables. We finally gave up trying to dance and asked for our money back. The management was very apologetic, but we'll never go back. I suggest Denim and Diamonds as an alternative, although it's only marginally better. (0) comments Friday, December 21, 2001
The Olympic torch is passing through the neighborhood today, but since the Official Olympics site sucks so badly, I can't use their interactive route map to find out anything about the scheduled route. To begin with, the site takes forever to load. Once I reached the interactive map, I couldn't use it because it requires Flash, which I thought was loaded. I downloaded the latest plug-in, and the site still won't display the map. To top things off, I can't even tell them how bad their site is since I can't figure out how to send them email. They have however spent a lot of time figuring out ways to trick users into clicking on their ads. After that experience, I think I'll skip the event altogether...and take a hot bath. (0) comments Thursday, December 20, 2001
I liked this column in The Guardian Unlimited, America has its advantages, Fifty-two things they do better in America. It reminds of when I was attending high school in England and I pined for all things American. (0) comments Tuesday, December 18, 2001
Reading Sundog by Jim Harrison. It's just the kind of book I was looking for, not too heavy, and intersting enough that I could get into it right away. It's mostly been about Harrison who is suffering from the vagaries of old age and an abused body. I thought I would save the books I just received from Powell's for later...maybe that's why I have so many unread books lying around the house. (0) comments Monday, December 17, 2001
I really need to figure out if Blogger has a spell check function. It's embarassing to look over a previously posted entry and find typos. (0) comments
I highly recommend Powell's Books, a great bookstore, either their online store or the real one in Portland, Oregon. I was looking for a copy of the book A Short History of the Printed Word by Warren Chappell that was mentioned a while back at A List Apart in the article Reading Design by Dean Allen. Dean raved about the design of the book, so I looked for it at my local bookstore and discovered that the trade paperback listed for $24.95. I found a nearly new hardback copy at Powell's for $10.00. While at the Powell's site I picked out a book recommended in the Post Book World, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald. I was surprised to read last week that Sebald died on Dec. 16 in a car accident. (0) comments
Finally finished reading Mountain Time by Ivan Doig. It seemed more superficial than any of his previous novels in this series. I think the quality peaked with English Creek, the second in the original trilogy. I liked Ride with Me Mariah Montana, the third novel, the least of the original three. Mountain Time just didn't have the character development and the depth of story development as the others. Now comes that difficult time of deciding which of the many unread books in my collection do I want to spend the next couple of months reading. Working part time can seem like full time work since 4 hours out of the day eats up a good portion of it, then there's all that other time spent dealing with chores and getting some of that long list of unfinished projects completed. The prospect of going back to full time work is not very appealing, but I may give it a try for a couple of months. (0) comments Friday, December 14, 2001
Yes, thank you, I do believe I will download the latest security patch for Internet Explorer. I was a holdout with Netscape 4.+ for a long time since I used it for email and didn't want to switch to the evil empire browser. Since IE is so much more standards compliant, for the most part I'm glad I switched. However, I was getting real nervous with the proliferation of viruses. I have a dual screening method but am still cautious. The latest patch is said to fix all known security problems. Nothing like throwing down a challenge... (0) comments Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Wish I would have consulted perlmonks.org when I was writing my most recent perl script. I guess I learned from the experience, but reading the FAQs on perlmonks would have helped a great deal. (0) comments
Six tips for creating a sticky site from a study of how users interact with sites. I sometimes miss playing sports; most of my athletic activity these days involves cycling. Then the other night I realized how much like a sport cycling can be in an urban area, dodging pedestrians and dogs, anticipating all possible collision points at intersections, dashing across busy streets where a false move could be unpleasant. This is especially true at night. The only score really is survival. (0) comments Monday, December 10, 2001
During the last life drawing session, I decided to use just a brush and some black ink for some of the drawings. Using that technique, you've got to really see the figure, and be loose at the same time. Once you start to think about the result, it becomes much more difficult to capture a decent representation of the figure. I think it's my favorite way to draw. Here are some examples from last Thursday, under "Brush Studies". Using a digital camera with a wide angle lens isn't the best way to digitize an image, but when it's all you've got... (0) comments Sunday, December 09, 2001
Having missed the Leonid meteor shower, we're going to try to catch the Geminid shower on Thursday night, the 13th. (0) comments
Another typical Sunday: Reading the Sunday Washington Post and wathcing Sunday Morning on CBS. While not as good as when Charles Kuralt was the host, I think Sunday Morning is one of the best shows on TV. The commercials have gotten out of hand in the past year, but it's still worth a look. Besides the weekday news, the only other show that's worth watching is 24 on Fox. (0) comments Friday, December 07, 2001
Looks like the USGS and other Dept. of Interior web sites are still down. That will teach Sec. Norton to mismanage the Indian Trust funds. (0) comments Thursday, December 06, 2001
I really shouldn't be spending so much time fiddling with my new homepage but I can't help myself. If you want to take a look, a beta version is now available. It's appropriate that I've included the current temperature since today's high of around 70 must be a record for Dec. 6. Speaking of the weather, the script loads the current temperature for DC, which really isn't the same as out here in the burbs but it's close enough. If I get a chance I'll use the Dulles temp. Since I don't have shell access to the server because of my wimpy virtual server account, I can't run a chron job and so the script retrieves and loads the temp and forecast data each time the script is run. If you have any comments, send me a message. (0) comments
Spent the morning debugging a new homepage script. It includes the current temperature and weather info extracted from a NOAA ftp site. It also extracts the latest exhalations entry. It's not really ready for prime time, but most of the major bugs are solved. I become obsessed with the debugging process, which is probably similar to someone playing a chess match against the computer. The computer doesn't make many mistakes. (0) comments Tuesday, December 04, 2001
This speech by author Bruce Sterling provides an interesting perspective on cryptography, computer innovation, and spies. (0) comments Monday, December 03, 2001
Re-designing my homepage, based on the reaction from an old friend who couldn't figure out where what I do/did left off and the other stuff began. The page really is a mish-mash of links that I use instead of bookmarks, stuff about which I've written, links to work I've done, etc. The new design should be finished this week, but so should the newsletter and article for the paper. I've almost forgotten how to deal with real deadlines (0) comments
The mysterious design by inventor Dean Kamen, the Segway Human Transporter, was announced today. Kamen had said he was working on a revlolutionary machine but had tried to keep it secret. A drawing was leaked a while back that was very close to the final product. I still think the bicycle was the breakthrough invention that hasn't yet been fully appreciated, but if this new device gets more people out of their cars, then more power to Kamen and the Segway. (0) comments |