Don’t have the money for a Mac, and therefore cannot get Garageband?

Well, check this out for a cheaper (but cool) alternative.

‘nuff said.

And now I will play The Bells of St. Marys

I work with this guy, and he seems to be pretty talented.

His site, Fluent Images, has some very striking photography. The framing and subject matter are the things I notice the most.

Now, he needs to crosslink back to me and say something like “his lack of focus and lack of subject are most interesting to me, but give me headaches if I think about it too much.”

Google hacks you can perform on yourself.

I tell you, it’s surprising what Google knows about you and your site.

Thanks, Ralph. Thanks a lot.

Free, remixed music, with a Creative Commons license.

ccMixter.org

Current personal favorite? The Message, by SHAD0W_C

You never go back.

Go ahead, admit it. You’re Mac curious… not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Jupiter has acquired a new red spot.

No word on whether Saturn is up to date on it’s vaccinations.

Public Domain torrents of movies that are, well, in the public domain.

Might be useful if – just if – you happened to recently aquire an iPod with Video.

You can, of course, always get more movies at the Prelinger Archives.

Oh! And here are some good compression recommendations for video on iPods.

Paul Graham’s essays.

Interested in tech? You need to read these.

It seems that Hollywood has been busy buying votes again and has managed to get legislation introduced to make it MORE illegal to steal music and videos.

Oh, well, one of the unavoidable bits of collateral damage will be your ability to have any control over the electronics you purchased. Does it piss you off that you can’t fast forward through commercials on DVDs that you already paid for? Well, just wait! It’s going to get even worse.

Or, I guess you could contact your congressthing like I did and express your sincere intention to never vote for anyone who votes for this bill.

More here.

Like we need an excuse to buy more on eBay…

Here is a site called Last Minute Auction – the idea is that they watch eBay for auctions that are going for a very low price and ending soon and present them to you in time to take advantage of some great deals.

I really, really don’t need this site, but I can’t help looking. You know, just in case…

This site has a neat idea behind it – it automatically lists all of the auctions that have very little time left and are for very little money.

It’s actually rather surprising to see what crops up here. Today’s lot seems to be mostly jewelery..

What surprised me about this article comparing Californians to Hobbits is not that comparison; I’d actually came to a similar conclusion myself, although it never involved Tolkien’s characters as a comparison point.

What surprised me is that this article is coming from the San Francisco Herald. I thought the peninsula had purged itself of all DoublePlus UnGood thoughts by now.

If you use this service to impersonate the White House then don’t call me when they’ve got you in a secret prison under a secret warrant with a secret court date.

And C for Cookie

So, the new job will allow me to use a Macintosh as long as I can get my job done. This doesn’t mean they provide one; as I had covered in an earlier post, they provided me with an IBM T43 giganto-laptop/room heater.

I happen to have an extra Powerbook, which works out perfectly. Rather than let it gather dust at home I’ll use it at work.

So, just as I’m getting a handle on what I can use the Powerbook for and I’m getting ready to take it into work, a minor crisis happens to one of our friends.

Our friend (whom I will call Judy) has an iBook; she has the opportunity to go to L.A. and help her singing career; she has a whole bunch of data (songs, etc.) on her ‘Book, and she had to have it with her.

However, her iBook developed a classic problem: the video display logic board went out, and as a result she could no longer see anything on the screen, even when plugged into an external monitor.

I offered to help her out, hoping that I could fit her data on an older (but still precious!) iBook I had kept around. This is one of only two machines I have still capable of booking into OS 9 natively so we could play the Mac version of Total Annihilation. (I told you it was precious!)

This was not to be. The old iBook only has a 20Gb drive, and Judy’s iBook had nearly 25Gb of data, not including the OS. No way it was going to fit.

So, I was left with a choice: Tell her “I can’t help you”, and her chance at grabbing a brass ring potentially blown due to, as she put it, “a broken pencil or the equivalent thereof”... or I could loan her the Powerbook for her trip to L.A. and I could either do without a Mac or try to use the iBook myself in the Powerbook’s absense.

Well, we Mac cultists have to stick together, so I took a chance and loaned her the Powerbook.

You have to understand what a big thing this is for me – I almost never loan anything to anyone. This probably goes back to middle school where I made the mistake of loaning a genuine Rubik’s Cube to some random idiot (whom I thought was a friend) who eventually returned my Cube… with all of the stickers pulled off and re-applied because he was not able to figure out how to solve the puzzle. Apparently he’d done the pull-and-reapply trick a number of times as the stickers very much liked to fall off.

I think I threw that Cube away not too long after that.

This don’t-share-your-stuff mentality was recently enhanced by the condition that my iBook was in when returned by my daughter – scratched, with makeup marks on the power brick and a broken leg on the wire wrap for said power brick. This is what I get for letting her have it in her possession while her dumbass boyfriend was around… this being the same boyfriend who broke another laptop’s PCMCIA slot (but denied it) and managed to ding my guitar but just kind of neglected to mention it until I confronted him about it. (Sidenote: I can’t believe I ever let that moron in my house – the moron, in this case, being the boyfriend.)

Anyway, long story short (too late!); I loaned Judy the Powerbook, and I kept the iBook for my own use. I actually have set up the IBM T43 at work as a server (yes, you read that right) and I just leave it at work and let it run; a couple of other people have access to this machine and it would do them no good if I took it home every night.

Also, as it is still running Windows (the servers are under VMWare, running on a Windows host), I have wisely learned to fear Windows Schlorosis… the creeping tendency for a Windows box to become more and more unstable until it becomes so unreliable that you have to reload it. For what I do, that amounts to about 3 months between reloads. Not acceptable.

Instead, I leave the Windows portion of the machine in stasis while the VMWare portion does all of the heavy lifting.

This means I need a desktop machine… so I put Ye Olde iBook to to work while I waited for Judy to return the Powerbook.

In short: It has held up quite well. It only has 640Mb of RAM, but even so it doesn’t swap too much.

Apps I run:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• NoteBook (TK based personal Wiki)
• X-Chat (IRC client)
• Yahoo! IM client)
• Terminal (command line client)
• sidenote (a note app)
• Codetek Virtual Desktop
• QuickSilver

These run 24×7 on this machine, and I don’t have too much swapping unless I open a bazillion Firefox windows.

What’s amazing to me is a G3 processor based machine from late 2002 is still quite usable; it may not be super speedy, but it is certainly powerful enough to do what I need in my day-to-day work.

The only place where it falls down is Java-based apps. While the JVM works just find, the apps are more than a little bit S L O W. I will be glad when the Powerbook returns.

Now I’m off to play some Total Annihilation. Cliff, feel free to make snarky remarks in the comment section of this post.

Update: The Powerbook came back today, and Judy took perfect care of it. Not a scratch or ding. But, as Pam went over to get it and Judy powered it up, the LCD backlight stopped working. Judy was, of course, mortified. However, it seems this is a common problem with the 12” Powerbooks, and it saved me from having it happen while I was depending on it for work – plus, it’s covered under AppleCare anyway. Judy had a great time in L.A., and the laptop was a lifesaver for her. Her original iBook is back from the repair center and I’ve already cloned her data onto the iBook.

It’s nice to do something nice for someone who appreciates it. You’re welcome, “Judy”!

The train ride in to work yesterday was CROWDED - it was like being on the JR line in Tokyo, packed in like sardines. The difference this time was I could actually understand the banter going on between other people. But, just like the JR line, the person I sat next to was asleep. Also, no guy with white gloves pushing & compressing people into the train car so everyone would fit…

Also different was the fact that this person wasn’t a suit & tie wearing salariman, but someone who either thought he was in The Matrix (all black, black trenchcoat, small, black sunglasses) or he thought he was a technomage from Babylon 5.

Either way, I can’t imagine one of Neo’s compatriots or a technomage sleeping on the BART, so that’s where the image falls apart.

So, after a month of observation and the very day after I post about her, the homeless person I wrote about in the last post fails to show up for her morning shift at the BART station.

She is SO fired.

Each morning, when I go into work in San Francisco, there is a (supposedly) homeless or street person sitting right in front of the upper portion of the escalator that takes me up and out of the BART station.

Now, this has been true – without fail – every morning I have gone into work; which, it turns out, is all but one working day this month.

That means she (I’m pretty sure it is a she) is up and sitting or kneeling down in front of this escalator every morning before 9am.

That is dedication.

When I had no job you barely ever saw me before 9am. Ok, I probably had a much more comfy bed to sleep in, but what I’m asking is this:

If she can manage to be in the same place at the same time every morning, don’t you think it would be possible for this person to hold down a job? I would think so. I’m just sayin’...

Changing the subject: the gloomy weather continues, but the rain has mostly stopped. Just gray and overcast. The forecast always says: Sunny tomorrow. Somehow tomorrow never gets here. I’ll let you work out the metaphysical angle on that one.

And… this last weekend we took some time to try to do some lawn work that we had avoided for nearly a year. It’s true – I did not touch my weed eater for a year. It was still in the original box I had packed it in when we moved from Illinois.

Phil had a great time. Yes, I paid him a little (grubbing around in the dirt is not easy work), but he quite obviously enjoyed himself as well. His job: remove weeds, something he did a fantastic job at. Ok, some weed patches were not removed due to the fact that they had “snail families” and had to stay. Well, I’m not going to argue with him over the relative worth of some snails; I’ll let the weeds stay until the snails decide to move on.

The other yard incident was the fact that I got a little overzealous with the lawn mower a while ago and snapped off one of the tubes that is part of the irrigation/sprinkler system for the lawn. As a result we now have to track down the parts we need and hope that they fit – otherwise I get to call the property management agency and say “please send over someone so that they can charge me large sums of money to replace this”. Pam is on the hunt for the parts, and she’s pretty good at that, especially when it will save us some money.

And, some good news: my daughter’s boyfriend’s car no longer darkens my driveway. They left some time ago for Indiana, and I got left with his car. And a wonderful car it was: covered in stickers, both inside and out. Smelling like a smoking room, and the carpet quite obviously had never been vacuumed and cleaned. It never did pass California smog, and the constant velocity (drivetrain) joints were shot.

So, we debated a number of options and finally settled on putting a post on Craigslist detailing what was wrong with the car and how much we wanted.

Bluebook value: $1850
Estimated repairs: $1550
We wanted: $300

$300 for a car that runs, starts easily and can actually move under its own power!

It sold in 25 minutes.

And a new 1GB memory SIMM for the 12” powerbook is now on the way to my house. See? Sometimes you can trade up.

If only my daughter knew this.

I didn’t want to like Spongebob Squarepants.

“It’s very juvenile. He is so annoying. How can anyone let their kids watch that?”

Here my plea, oh glorious Internet, as I make my confession:

I love Spongebob. It is one of the more clever and well-written cartoons on the air. The plethora of cultural references fly right over the child’s head and smack the parents square in the forehead. The fact that each of the characters is in some way unique and flawed (except the nematodes, who are just flawed) is a wonder in the variety it affords the stories.

Plus it is darn funny.

I know that many of you refuse to give Spongebob a chance – you noticed that David Hasselhoff was in the Spongebob movie, and that you can’t forgive.

Well, it’s totally unfair for you to punish the poor sponge for that. It was his first movie! He had a lousy agent! HE’S A LOUSY SEA SPONGE FOR CRIMINY’S SAKE!

So give the sponge a chance. You won’t regret it. Join us. JOIN US…