So everything has arrived from Apple for the big landwater changeover - 2 iMacs, AirPort cards, Office X boxes, external FireWire Orb drive, Quicken, AppleCare packets, StudioDisplay. The dual G4 is in shipment now.

That means the only piece that hasn’t shipped is the AirPort base station. I just found a box under the chair in the living room that looked like it might be the right size.

Me to wife: “What’s in this box under the chair?”

Wife to me: “That antique human skull we were going to give to Mike.”

Me to wife: “I wonder if I could substitute it for an AirPort base station.”

Cat amusement by laser has been patented since 1995 (thanks baald).

I’m changing the planet, ask me how!.

Which reminds me, I heard on Click and Clack (The Tappet Brothers) last Sunday that they’re running an anti-SUV info campaign. I respect that they have the cajones to take a stand from their position of respect and authority and media prominence. Way too rare. What rocks even more is that rather than just pointing to problems, they’re suggesting genuine, practical alternatives.

I really love Mozilla 1.1 and switched to it as a default browser the other day. But no matter what I do, it won’t seem to remember that I’m logged into LiveJournal, which makes commenting on other journals a big pain. It drops cookies all over the place. This is almost but not quite a showstopper. Next morning… scratch that, just switched back to IE. One more rev and Mozilla should be there. I like a lot of other things about it - tabbed browsing is wonderful once you get the hang of it.

Caught this at /. yesterday : Fraunhoffer and co. have always charged for MP3 encoders, but have now changed their licensing terms so that MP3 decoders will now cost implementers .75 each. Red Hat has already pulled all MP3 decoders from their distro. This is going to be a big boost to Ogg-Vorbis. But does iTunes support OGG? Nooo… I suggest that people who care about this drop a note to Apple letting them know you want OGG support in iTunes.

Emmett Plant of the Ogg-Vorbis team has written a letter to Fraunhoffer thanking them for boosting the Ogg technology’s chances of wider adoption.

And what can we learn from this? Nets made by spiders fed on drug-dosed flies

Australians skew census by naming Jedi as their religion.

iRumors.net has posted a rumor that Apple may be working on their own Rendezvous-based MP3 home stereo device. If this turns out to be true, I may be glad I didn’t pounce on the SliMP3 a while ago.

ORA blog: Choosing the Right Blogging Package for Students

What is it about the word “kernel” that tempts people to spell it “kernal?” This seems to be one of the most commonly misspelled words I’ve seen in the past few years. It’s so common in fact that sometimes it seems like it’s misspelled more often than it’s spelled correctly. But why just this word? Why isn’t “computor” also a common misspelling, or “memary” or “motherbored” or anything else? Why just “kernal?”

–

A P.S. to a piece of old email I just happened on:

BTW, the Command, clover, or splat key was originally called the “feature” key. The symbol is used on European maps to denote features, except in Finland where it means “campground”.

When I first heard that our birthing classes were going to require eight 3-hour sessions, I wondered how we could possibly fill that much time talking about the birthing process. Now that the 6th class has passed, I know.

For example, tonight we learned that if you have a problem with overflow while breast feeding, you can fix it with cabbage leaves. Take a fresh cabbage leaf and slip it into your bra like a lettuce cup. After about one hour it will have wilted and can be replaced with another. Lather, rinse, repeat until breasts disengorge. Ancient Chinese method, confirmed by modern western science wizards!

Not everything we learn is so whimsical, but it really is amazing how much there is to learn about something I’ve more or less taken for granted my whole life.

You know when you’re on hold waiting to tallk to someone at the bank, or phone company, or whatever, and the robot lady voice asks you to enter your account number followed by the pound sign? And then 10 minutes later the person comes on and asks for your account number? And you say, “I just typed it in!” And they say, “I’m sorry sir, I don’t have it in front of me.” You know what I’m talking about?

I can understand how this could happen from time to time, but it’s, like *all* the time!

Why is betips down today? Now my cheapthrills image from last night’s post isn’t working. Urgh.

There was this record store in SLO when I was growing up — baald knows it — Cheap Thrills. I can’t describe what a profound effect that store had on me… not your typical cut-out record store. Actually it’s still in business, but in a different building with no remaining redeeming qualities.

Every quarter Cheap Thrills put out a new wall calendar, always with art by a different local artist. I have a collection of about 20 of these, all different, all rolled up for the ages. There was one that was a forever favorite - Spring 1978 - this floppy astronaut standing on the moon looking towards you, in a sort of Robert Crumb hand, if R. Crumb drew in more detail. If you look closely at that hockey puck / biscuit thing in his hand, it says “Pay Attention” (you can’t see that in this pic). There’s something else funky about the image. Something that your parents never got around to seeing because parents don’t notice that kind of stuff. That was what was cool about it. Only teenagers ever dug the secret detail.

(click for larger version)

In 1986 they re-released the same calendar, but with the secret detail missing. What is it?

“But if that light’s under a bushel, it’s lost something kind of crucial…”

I’m finally going to get around to framing the 1978 one. Been meaning to for ages.

When you bring MP3s from one iTunes 3 machine to another, the Play Count attributes are preserved. This means the Play Count is stored as ID3 data, not in the iTunes database, as I had thought. And this in turn means that iTunes is using ID3v2 rather than ID3v1, even though there’s no preference for ID3v1 vs ID3v2.

I’m actually not very interested in the Play Count data, though it’s kind of cool to have a Smart Playlist consisting only of tracks I’ve never played before. What I actually am using that I didn’t expect to is the star-rating system. When tracks come through that I really dig, I give them 4 or 5 stars. A Smart Playlist aggregates these, and I can use this playlist as a source for quick compilation CD gifts, etc. Likewise, poorer tracks get 1 or 2 stars, and a “worst tracks” playlist lets me quickly cull deadwood for archiving or deletion. You can set ratings quickly by Ctrl+clicking iTunes in the dock.

baald says: “Google supports many languages, such as english, french, croation, etc. It also supports Elmer Fudd.”

Clean out your nose!

Well, we weren’t really sure whether we wanted too much influence on our baby naming decision, but finally decided what the hell, and posted a baby naming poll at babycenter, where Mike works. Please vote. We reserve the right to totally ignore public opinion ;)

Speaking of baald, he recently picked up this amazing 3-CD compendium of Burt Bacharach tracks - baby, this music is huge!

“Don’t send him off with your hair in curlers, he may never return….”

Finished building an online Journalism Job Bank including a complete editing and publishing back-end, 30-day auto-expire with overrides, 3-part submission/edit/expire process, generation of a weekly email feed that gets sent to other jschools… all in PHP/MySQL. Very fun project. My boss has been doing all of this by hand for ages. I just automated this task away from him.

The ORA community came through with the golden answer - the reason for the slow lookups from some machines was that HostnameLookups was set to On in httpd.conf. Turning it off made the site as fast to visit from Macs as from PCs. The question now is, why are Macs so different in this respect?

“Humble Pie” may quite possibly be the best band name ever. Either that or “Foghat.”

My blackness is deep.
How deep?
Deeper than Atlantis.
Deeper than the sea floor, travelled by the mantis.

- X-Clan

If you’re in doubt about angels being real
I can arrange to change any doubts you feel
Wait till you see my Gidget
You’ll want her for your Valentine
Your gonna say she’s all that you adore
But stay away, Gidget is spoken for
You’re gonna find, that Gidget is mine

Listen!

What a weekend. Insane amount of work getting Amy’s darkroom and office torn down, finding places for everything. Great cleansing experience letting go of material stuff to make room for us to share an office space. Then up till midnight Friday scrubbing walls and spackling.

Up at 6:30 the next morning spackling again in my underwear (mmm, that doesn’t sound quite right ;), then off to Josh and Minette’s for early morning wedding in a Redwood Groove in the Berkeley Hills, near the botanical gardens. About 100 people, most of them buddhists. Josh is my oldest friend - since junior high - and lives right next door. Celestial light streaming through the redwoods, much chanting and music. Lovely ceremony, then up to the park for reception - hours in the sun seeing old friends, including the old Milky Way crew - feasting, dancing. Yassir and Fuson played live Moroccan Gnawa music, amazing. Other friends of Josh’s put together a more-or-less impromptu dirty blues band - gritty Son House / Leadbelly stuff.

Napped for a couple of hours, then got out the paint and rollers and got the wall coat done in the baby’s room - entire ceiling and walls, minus trim - cranking the Pretenders, righteous work music. Finished painting at midnight, totally exhausted. Tonight after work and after swimming and after dinner will do all the trim and baseboards.

What happens when you shop at the hippy grocery store? Amy just returned with a box of cereal which posts as a bragging right in a big purple splash panel on the front, “Flakes, Twigs, and Granola!” That’s right folks, you read correctly. This cereal has twigs in it. And that’s supposed to be a good thing. OK, let’s see how these twigs taste… hey, not bad! I take it all back. Those hippies sure know how to live.

I’ve been going back and forth for a year on whether to keep up my Wired magazine collection. I have 90 issues, going back to issue 2.08, August ‘94. I think if the mag was still good, I’d keep on collecting without hesitation, but it’s gone all Fetish, no Revolution. Funny, because they finally emerged from that 18-month stretch where there was nothing but CEOs on the cover, and I really thought it was going to make a turn for the better, but no. So I just put the whole thing on craigslist. I have no idea what something like this is worth.
Wish boing boing was still in print.

Clearing out the office closet so Amy can share it with me so we can make her office into the baby’s room. On a cleaning binge, throwing out tons of old software boxes. Just found:

- Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1
- ColdFusion Application Server 3.1
- Kai’s Power Tools 3
- No less than five separate Win95 installers, some of them legal

and so on and so on…

Another tough one : revisiting the floppy disk boxes : around 300 floppies - BeOS R3 boot disks, antique Linux and FreeBSD boot disks, WinCIM and CompuServe and Prodigy and ZD Interchange installers, DirectoryFreedom (my old favorite DOS directory navigator), XyWrite installer (my favorite DOS text editor), tons of games, Photoshop on floppy, zillions of drivers for sound, video, and network cards I no longer have, setup disks for long-defunct ISPs, all those new hard drive setup disks you never use, ancient terminal communication apps, paint and morph programs sent to me at Ziff, which no one ever heard of and never got off the ground, games like Heretic and Descent, BIOS updaters, old embarassing writings, about 14 MS Intellipoint driver disks (none ever installed, as far as I can remember), CD-ROM ATAPI drivers, SCSI scanner drivers, and on down the road. I kept about 20 — the rest, into the crapper. Too much trouble to get rid of them. I haven’t touched a floppy in a couple of years now, except to booting or rescue drivers on the odd x86 box. But I’ve eliminated almost all the x86 from my life, and convinced everyone I support (family members, landord, and now the law firm) to go Mac. This stuff is groovy history, but it’s gathering dust. Sentimentality and attachments bog me down. Things that once seemed important no longer do.

Just got a spam formatted exactly like a porn spam, which led to a site formatted exactly like a porn site, except it’s not about porn, it’s about watching homeless people beat each other up — ebumfights.com. “It’s a train wreck you can’t turn away from!” “Angry and drunk? Wanna fight?”

I swear we’re headed for cultural implosion.

Attended Macromedia seminars in SF today. Kind of large - like 700 people in a room, not hands-on like I had hoped. Sort of a feature by feature intro to all the goodies in the MX suite. I am constantly tempted to do more work in Dreamweaver. And every time I try, I find myself running back to the comfort of BBEdit. To watch the pros, you’d think you could do everything in Dreamweaver. But every time I sit down to work, I find that there’s still no replacement for a really powerful text editor (please, no comments about Dreamweaver’s code mode). Of course Macromedia claims that 80% of professional web developers use Dreamweaver. I believe that 80% may have it installed. But how many actually use it as their primary development tool? Would be curious to hear feedback from other web devs out there on this topic.

In the city, encountered this fellow on Market St., who seems to have excellent sign-making skills!

Lots of excellent cult movies wallpaper.

So last night there’s a message on the machine from a woman who is “very concerned” about some “untruths” on Birdhouse related to Liberace. I assume the call is from someone at the Liberace Foundation contesting my claim that the photos I have posted there are used with permission (they are).

Called her back today and it turned out to be the wife of a one-time Liberace impersonator who has been stalked by a rabid Liberace fan ever since doing a rousing impersonation in Nevada once. I have a page : The Best of Birdhouse Mail, on which I had posted an email from someone claiming to have witnessed the living reincarnation of Liberace. Turns out the email was from this stalker dude, and the wife just wants to do all she can to protect her husband from the stalker, including not giving him air time. Of course, the email has been up there for five years, so it’s kind of late, but I thought she made a good case. Not a big deal, I took it down.

Perhaps I need a raccoon penis bone amulet to protect me from the kooks. Or a conference bike I can use to better understand them. Perhaps I shall meet them at the most beautiful motel in America.

Perhaps old news to some, but I just came across the thelongnow site.

It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the beginnings of civilization. Progress lately is often measured on a “faster/cheaper” scale. The Long Now Foundation seeks to promote “slower/better” thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

They are considering designs for a clock to last 10,000 years, as well as a library. Brian Eno is heavily involved with this project and has created some of his generated musics to accompany. According to my friend Mal, the organization is a sort of think tank and Eno sits on the board, “along with Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson and others.”