Well, I didn't really want to make the switch just yet, but as of yesterday, I realized it was time for me to move to OS X 10.3, so I bought a copy on eBay. There are too many new features in Panther that I want but don't have under Jaguar. The main ones are: iChat AV, document encryption, and greater flexibility in scripting. Yesterday, I spent some time trying to write a script that would launch Safari and automatically open all the sites (in tabs) that I visit regularly, but it turns out that that functionality isn't fully supported in Jaguar.
There are some other things, too... I'm told that 10.3 is faster and more stable, and there are some apps that aren't being updated for 10.2 anymore. Safari, for instance, is now up to version 1.2 in Panther, but it's no longer being updated for Jaguar. (That's very annoying, and IMO, a bad decision on Apple's part... in fact, lately, they've been making a lot of decisions that seem to be aimed at getting users to upgrade more frequently. I don't like that. There's no reason, for example, that I shouldn't be able to get Safari 1.2, iChat AV, and the more powerful AppleScript in Jaguar.)
Plus, too, if I end up getting a job with Apple -- which is not outside the realm of possibility -- they'll want me to be using the latest OS, so I guess it's time to leave Jaguar.
Damn. You know, it seems like I just bought this PowerBook yesterday, not... jeez, has it already been over six months? I guess it has, hasn't it?
Happy Wednesday morning to all, and a special public "thank you" to reader "Annaah2000" who sent me an email this morning informing that, at long last, the identity of the artist who composed that Geico guitar solo is finally coming to light. The young lady's name is Candace Harrison -- no word yet on whether this piece will become commercially available, or whether she also performed the piece for Geico.
*sigh* I'm supposed to go to the post office today to mail some stuff that I sold on Amazon, but I don't know whether I feel up to it. Maybe I'll know better after I finish my coffee and hit the shower.
Yesterday, someone sent me an email that included, in his sig, his location in degrees of latitude and longitude. In Googling the location to find out where he was, I stumbled onto The Degree Confluence Project, which is a project to visit, and take photographs of, all locations on the globe (on or near land) where lines of latitude and longitude cross -- confluence points. Confluence points that are too far at sea to see land are excluded.
The United States is pretty much done -- there are only a few confluence points in this country that haven't been visited. Other countries have quite a few unvisited confluence points, and in some cases, I can understand why -- Iran and Libya, for example, have almost no confluence points at all that have been visited. I wouldn't go, either.
The DCP, in turn, led me to The CIA World Factbook, which has all kinds of interesting information on all the nations in the world, as well as some unusual and remote locations such as Howland Island (which is where Amelia Earhart was headed when she disappeared).
For a while, I was into the JFK assassination (a bit, anyway), and I bought a CD-ROM of miscellany on the subject back when I was in college. As I was going thru my old boxes of belongings, I came across it and took a look at it, and it got me thinking about an old conspiracy theory that I had read.
In his book "Behold a Pale Horse" (which is a truly bizarre and surreal read), William Cooper claims that the driver of the convertible shot Kennedy in the head, and that the act is "plainly visible" in the Zapruder film. I looked over the Zapruder film, particularly frames 280-320. What you can see is that the driver of the car turns and looks, and he points something in JFK's direction. From its appearance, it is almost certainly a stainless steel handgun, and while the driver is pointing it in JFK's direction -- apparently right at his head -- JFK receives the final gunshot wound to the head. However, I don't agree with Cooper's assertion that the driver shot JFK.
First of all, it's not exactly surprising that the driver had a gun -- he was a Secret Service agent assigned to drive the president. To the contrary, it would be surprising if he didn't have a gun. It's also not surprising that he drew his gun and turned to look behind him. The president had just been shot (for the first time; the second shot would come shortly thereafter), the people in the car were no doubt screaming in panic, and the agent, recognizing that there was a major problem, would have drawn his weapon and turned to see whether he could fire on the attacker. Also, if the driver had shot JFK, the others in the car would have known about it and said something about it, which, of course, never happened. (One also wonders why the driver would choose such a public moment for the shooting.)
More esoterically, I know a bit about firearms, and there doesn't appear to be any evidence that the driver shot the president. The gun the driver was holding would probably have been a .45 caliber (or possibly a nine millimeter). When you fire one of those -- especially if you're firing one-handed, which the driver would have been -- the gun recoils, snapping upward sharply (this is known as "muzzle flip"). The gun that the driver is holding doesn't flip at any time. Second, the head wound that JFK receives explodes forward, in the driver's direction, and JFK's head moves toward the driver on the bullet's impact -- if the driver had fired the shot, it would have been the back of Kennedy's head that showed the wound, and Kennedy's head would have snapped in the other direction. Finally, the head wound that Kennedy received was very devastating, indicating a relatively high-powered weapon. Handguns are pretty weak... in fact, it's not unheard of for a handgun round to bounce off a victim's skull instead of penetrating, and when they do penetrate, they don't cause the kind of explosive mess that we see with JFK's head wound (by way of comparison, think of Eddie Adams' Pulitzer-prize winning photo of the Vietnamese war prisoner being shot in the head, which shows nowhere near the kind of head damage that Kennedy received). Kennedy's extremely violent head wound could probably not have been caused by a handgun.
OK, yes. Being unemployed does give you a lot of free time...
Cooper's book, by the way, is way out there. His theory on JFK's assassination is tame in comparison to the other stuff. He's a big proponent of Illuminati-type conspiracy theories, including the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (which have been known for quite some time to be an anti-semitic hoax). And his stuff on UFOs and aliens is... colorful, to say the least.
Well, as everyone knows, I got laid off from the Pentagon job about six weeks ago, a situation that is almost, but not quite, wrapped up. I've received my final paycheck from them, and my claim for unemployment has been approved. There's only one footnote left, and I have to say I'm pretty annoyed.
You may recall that the Pentagon job required me to apply for and receive a "Secret" security clearance. I just received word (several weeks after my being laid off, that is) that my security clearance was declined. And why would you think that is...? Those of you who know me well enough can think of a few different things that might be problematic, right? (All of which I dutifully and truthfully reported on the paperwork to apply for the clearance, of course.) So the government looked into all of it and reviewed it, and out of any of the potentially problematic items, what was the reason they thought I couldn't be trusted with a Secret?
Thirteen years ago -- thirteen years ago! -- I had my name legally changed, and the government thinks that's fishy.
Nice to know that our federal government has its priorities straight. *grumble* There's an appeals process, and I'm going to do it just as a matter of principle, even though I'm not at the Pentagon anymore.
From what I understand, Secrets used to be easier to get until 9/11 happened... they're quite a bit more restrictive about it now. My ex-boss told me that he knows a guy who's in danger of losing his Secret just because his wife is French, which is pretty far out. But jeez, this is really ridiculous... a name change from thirteen years ago, done properly, in accord with all the appropriate state laws, including publicizing it in the local newspaper? And for which I still have all the legal documents if anyone should want or need to review them?
What's the matter with these people? Anyone who knows anything at all about my family history can easily understand why I changed my name. I mean, ferchrissake, if your last name was "Hitler", you'd change it, too. *grumble*
I subscribe to a daily newsletter from ComputerWorld called "The Shark Tank", which tells some of the tech support stories that you've no doubt heard elsewhere on the web (famous ones being the guy using the CD tray as a coffee cup holder and the woman using her mouse as a foot pedal). This was one of the ones from today's digest:
Virus invades the network at this real estate agency's main site, so IT consultant pilot fish advises disconnecting the agency's remote office. Fish cleans up main office, then heads for the other site -- and finds a baffled staff. "We got the message to disconnect, but we didn't know exactly what to disconnect, so we disconnected everything," office manager says. And it takes fish all night to reconnect every network cable, mouse, keyboard, monitor and power cord.
My reaction to this one is, well, these folks may have been computer illiterate, but they did show some common sense -- they recognized that they were computer illiterate didn't know what to unplug, so to be safe, they unplugged everything. So the support fish had to spend all night plugging stuff back in... a nuisance, to be sure, but still better than dealing with virus-infected systems. Having dealt with both a fair amount, I can definitely say that resolving Layer One-type issues is usually a lot less of a headache.
There hasn't been a heck of a lot to report on for the past several days. I've mostly been sticking around the house, relaxing, and getting a few other things done around here, as usual.
I did manage to capture that Geico commercial with the nice guitar music that I've been talking about. QuickTime format, 7.3 MB download because I was too lazy to reduce it. But that shouldn't matter, because nobody's on dialup anymore, right? Right.
This is my first time trying to turn a TV commercial into video. It worked reasonably well, considering that I was just recording the screen with my webcam (I don't have any real video hardware or software other than QuickTime Broadcaster). There are a few odd clicking sounds and "burps" whose source I can't identify... I'll have to play around with that some more to see if I can find out what's causing it.
Not a heck of a lot going on lately. The biggest event personally was that I had a massive alcohol craving attack Saturday, just about the worst I've ever had, but with a lot of help from Denise, I successfully fought it off. Which was a good and positive thing in more ways than just the obvious -- Saturday was my three-month anniversary of sobriety, so "falling" on that date would have been demoralizing enough in itself (even if it hadn't been for the much more immediate, obvious, and important reasons that I can't drink anymore).
Continuing to work with my new hard drive and an app for OS X I've found called Carbon Copy Cloner. Thus far, it's done everything that I've wanted or expected, except that it hasn't been able to make the external hard drive bootable. I've still got a few more tricks up my sleeve to try before I start asking for help on the CCC discussion forums.
Spent a little time yesterday amusing myself by Googling "Sliders rip off". Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to notice that the scripts had become somewhat, er, "derivative". Some fans even refer to that entire season simply as "rip off season".
The big news, found this evening on Slashdot, is that astronomers have discovered a new body, much farther out than Pluto but fairly close to it in size, that is tentatively being called "Sedna". There's going to be an official NASA announcement about it tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern time. This discovery is going to reignite the debate about what a "planet" actually is. Big fun.
I'm making good progress on reading my books on candlemaking and should be ready to start ordering some supplies within the next day or so. I've registered a domain name for use further down the road if I ever start selling these things... wishful thinking, perhaps, but domain names are free thru certain registrars, so it's not a big deal. Besides which, having your own domain name has a lot of advantages, even if you just end up using it for personal stuff.
The fifth season of Babylon 5 is being released on April 13th, and I'm starting my bidding for it on eBay... once that's here, the collecton will be complete, except for some of the movies. Woot. :-)
My weight is now down to 175 pounds. I can definitely feel the difference. I also dug up some photos of myself from a few months ago, and I can see the difference pretty clearly as well. I don't remember for sure how much I weighed back in October (which is the date of one of the photos I was looking at), but I can definitely see the difference in my weight between now and then.
So in the last nineteen months, I've lost about 45-50 pounds. I don't recall for sure how much I weighed at my heaviest, but I do remember weighing 220 pounds at one point, and I may have weighed even more than that. What a relief to be getting rid of all this flab.
"Sliders" is out. Today's rip-off was... well, let me explain with a quote from the show (with my addition):
Maggie: We're going to meet "the doctor"?
Rembrandt: Let's hope his last name isn't "Frankenstein".
Me: No, more like "Moreau".
This time, the rip-off was so blatant that "Dr. Moreau" (actually Dr. Vargas in the show, but who cares?) was played by Michael York, who starred in the 1977 film version of "The Island of Dr. Moreau". For an added rip-off benefit, Maggie told one of the animals to "keep your stinking paw off me." To which I automatically mentally added, "you damn dirty ape!"
So the VCR is losing its Monday thru Friday 10:00 AM entry...
Only other fun thing going on is that last night I spent some time transferring MP3s to CD-Rs to see how my DVD player would handle them. Turns out it can take any format I can burn -- including Macintosh format, which rather surprised me. I also spent some time trying to burn my own bootable CD, which didn't work out. I also wasn't able to make my new external hard drive bootable, which I don't like. Apple, for some reason, makes it very difficult to boot from anything other than either the internal hard drive or a properly configured network boot device. Probably a security measure, I'd think, but I don't like the idea of not being able to boot from another device if for any reason my hard drive should fail. I do have a bootable DVD that came with the PowerBook, but its usefulness is pretty limited -- all I can do is boot from the DVD and do a clean install. I prefer more flexibility than that.
Today's "Sliders" ripoff was "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Tomorrow's your last chance to redeem yourself, guys...
My new external USB 2.0 60 gig hard drive arrived today. It took some fussing to get it to mount properly, and my backup software refuses to recognize it. Nevertheless, it's spacious and fast... I manually backed up all my documents and apps, and the 18 gig backup took about 35 minutes. Definitely faster than my old USB 1.1 external hard drive, no question. There are a few things that wouldn't copy, though -- probably something to do with the permissions. Either that or OS X doesn't like to copy certain files from the hard drive when the hard drive is the boot volume. I'll have to try booting from a CD to see whether that makes any difference.
So I'm downloading a song from Gnutella, and it reports that my download is proceeding at infinite kilobytes per second.
*snicker* Talk about high-speed Internet connectivity...
OK, I'm giving "Sliders" two more eps before I delete the setting from my VCR. Today's ep managed to rip off both "Jurassic Park" and "Jaws". (Hmm, both Spielberg flicks. At least they're stealing from a good source.) Briefly, the sliders are being pursued by a T-Rex, and they kill it by throwing a high-pressure oxygen tank into its mouth and shooting the tank, causing it to explode. Jeez.
Also -- and admittedly, this is a more personal pet peeve, and I know it's too late, since the show is no longer in production -- but would someone please give Kari Wuhrer some firearms training? Her character is supposed to be a career Army officer, and she obviously knows absolutely nothing about handling guns. First of all, she doesn't know how to shoot -- I wouldn't expect her to know all the ins and outs, but half the time when she fires a rifle or shotgun, she doesn't even place the butt against her shoulder. That kind of error is too fundamental to overlook. She violated several gun safety rules as well -- including one of the most basic ones, which is that you don't put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to fire. (Ironically enough, she was in one scene with Jerry O'Connell, whose character is supposed to be a total science geek who knows nothing about guns. They were both carrying M-16s, and O'Connell did have his finger off the trigger, but Wuhrer didn't.)
I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, but like I said, I'll give it two more eps. I also have to admit I'm hoping to catch the ep that David Gerrold wrote, since I know it's got to be a quality ep. Maybe I'll just start keeping an eye on the TV listings and just tape that one when it rolls around.
I've been trying to catch that Geico commercial on tape so I can make an MPEG out of it, but I haven't had any luck so far. I'll keep looking for it.
I'm starting to read, in earnest, my candlemaking books. In a few days or so, I should be ready to start buying some supplies and taking my first stab at it. I must admit that I'm rather surprised at how much there is to know... for example, there are about seven or eight different kinds of wax that are used in candlemaking, each with different advantages over the others depending on what type of candle you want to make (there are also candles that aren't made with wax at all). Additives are also a surprisingly complex topic. Of course, I was pretty sure there'd be a lot to learn, which is why I bought the books.
I checked eBay for prices on a few of those old coins that I dug up the other day, but none of them are worth much. There's even a 1923 silver dollar that my mother's boss gave to her when she became pregnant with me, but it's so worn that it's probably not worth more than six or seven dollars. My double-headed dime doesn't appear to be much of a high-demand item, either.
And that's the latest...
I finally got started on going thru all the old boxes in my closet that I haven't looked at since I left Brattleboro... I obviously didn't pay much attention to my packing when I left -- probably just threw everything into boxes -- because I'm finding stuff in there that I should have just thrown away instead of packing. I made some good progress this time around on throwing away stuff that needs to be thrown away.
The really weird thing was finding a receipt and instruction manual for a cordless phone that I had never seen or heard of before, paid for by someone I had never heard of before either, dating back to 1991. I may lose sleep at night wondering how the hell I ended up with that in my possession.
Those boxes haven't been looked at in over four years, and it's amazing what all is in there that I had forgotten about. Getting it cleaned up and organized -- and into a smaller number of new boxes, instead of the ratty old ones that are currently falling apart -- is going to be quite a relief. When I started, it was seven boxes, and when I'm done, it'll probably be down to three.
I've done some searches on this, but I haven't been able to find anything, so I'll ask here. There's a TV ad for Geico car insurance that has a really beautiful soundtrack. The ad shows a family in a car at night, the father driving and the rest of the family asleep. The music is a guitar solo. Does anyone know the artist and/or the title? If it will help, I'll try to do a webcam capture of the ad the next time I see it.
Hmm. Yesterday's ep of "Sliders" was another rip off, this time of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". I'm beginning to wonder about this. My friend Rob and I (Bookstore Rob, not Marine Corps Rob) discussed this on a few different occasions, the difference between a "rip off" and a "tribute". He's more generous in this department than I am -- to me, a tribute is a very subtle thing, typically something that only people "in the know" will even recognize as a tribute. For example, two of the main characters in the "War Against The Chtorr" series are named James Edward McCarthy and Theodore Andrew Nathaniel Jackson. Those names are tributes, but you won't know that unless you're a big SF fan, and even then, it's not immediately obvious. Rob was more generous than that, but I don't think even he would say that the last three eps of "Sliders" were tributes.
This is very disappointing. "Sliders" had great stories, and now this. I wonder whether one or more of their best writers left the show or something like that. Or maybe it's not a coincidence that the scripts suddenly went south when they replaced John Rhys-Davies with Kari Wuhrer? Dunno.
Parrish, why do you keep watching TV shows that you're always bitching about? Good question. It's usually because those shows used to be good, and I'm hoping they'll become good again -- even though that rarely, if ever happens. Call me stubborn, call me a hopeless dreamer, whatever... there are so few shows on TV that are any good that I hate to see one of them go to pot, and I keep hoping that one of the good ones will be able to recapture its "spark".
I returned the wireless keyboard and mouse to Amazon and replaced them with far-superior USB-based input devices that I won on eBay. My workstation area is therefore just about complete. I've never set up or used any arrangement like this before... one interesting effect I've noticed when I have my keyboard, mouse, second monitor, and external speakers attached is that it almost feels like I'm using a different computer.
So the tax returns have all been filed... including my 2002 returns, which I filed ten months late (don't ask). I received my refunds electronically for Maryland a few days ago. I guess they decided not to bother hassling me about the lateness of the 2002 return. I also received my IRS refund for 2003 electronically yesterday, so that's all squared away. The only thing left is to find out what the IRS is going to say or do about the 2002 federal return, on which I did owe some money. I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.
Like many people, I'm following the gay marriage debate, and I'm still waiting for someone to come up with even the smallest legitimate reason that gay marriage shouldn't be permitted. Tom Tomorrow did a great cartoon this week on the so-called "traditional definition of marriage", and Dan Savage responded to some anti-gay marriage activists (considering he's gay, and considering the subject at hand, and considering how he usually responds to most people who write to him, I think he showed admirable restraint).
I've been greatly enjoying "Halo", although last night I ran into a glitch with it... for some reason, a switch that I needed to flip for the game simply didn't flip when I hit the appropriate key (on either keyboard), even though that key was doing what it was supposed to do during all the rest of the game. That really upset me. *grumble* I've also tried "Aliens vs. Predator Gold", which I'm having a harder time enjoying because it's much more difficult than "Halo".
No further news on my brother. I don't know what the full story is, since he won't tell anyone, but knowing him as I do, I think jail or prison is probably inevitable. He's already on probation and has a restricted driver's license, and I'm sure he's not handling any of that well. My mother suspects that, if he's had any scheduled court dates, he's probably missed at least some of them, an assessment that I agree with completely. *sigh* If he goes to prison, he's fucked -- literally and metaphorically. He's 23 years old, pretty thin, and very good-looking, so the other inmates would just love him. Especially in Florida, where the prison system doesn't care much what the prisoners do to each other. I can't help but wonder whether he'd even make it out of prison at all.
And that's the news from Chez Chevalier...
Not a heck of a lot has been going on the past several days, so I'll just make a short entry to keep my blog from going blank again. *chuckle* I've just doing various things around the house, cleaning, getting rid of (or making plans to get rid of) a bunch of deadweight, blah blah blah. I digitized my entire CD collection, about 125 or so discs, and am getting ready to unload them. They'll be going on eBay or Amazon in a week or so. Or sold to a local used book/music/magazine dealer. Same goes for my Playboy collection and my Bizarre collection, both of which are sitting in my bedroom gathering dust. Some of them are actually worth some money, such as the Jan 2000 issue, the Carmen Electra issue, and a few others. I also need to go thru my closet and pick out all the old clothes I don't want anymore or that don't fit and take them to a local Goodwill. I also need to go thru all the spare computer parts that I don't want or need anymore and get those auctioned off as well. I hate having bric-a-brac sitting around the house.
OK, I know I've bitched about this before, but I need to do it again. Yesterday's ep of Sliders was a cheap ripoff of Night of the Living Dead (yes, again... I've lost count of how many times that idea has been stolen), and today's ep is a cheap ripoff of Species. Sliders started off pretty good, but if this is any indication, I think I may have found the point at which it "jumped the shark".
I spent several days trying out a Bluetooth-based keyboard and mouse and was unimpressed. I'm sending them back and getting USB-based devices instead. I've also set up my computer cart and all my equipment there as a workstation -- very nice to have a second, 17-inch monitor and a good set of speakers, especially since the Hieronymous Bosch supports multiple monitors.
