Requiem

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine

Pass the word, it's a call to arms

Midnight man at your door

Blackened faces run in the night

Daybreak under the floor

Bring my bow

Fill my head with flame, and we must

Let them know that the torch is lit again

Crystalize the pain behind your eyes

Are you ready to fight?

(You hear the drum and) run for your life

(Sweet Avalon the heat is on)

In other words, I hope and pray

That time and tide wash the hate away

A simple man with simple thoughts

Who turned to force as a last resort

All around us, chaos rings

Buildings crumbling down

Silhouettes in the fiery rain

Timbers crash to the ground

Bring my spear, invested with my youth

Bring the children near, they must now be told the truth

Old and young and those of foreign tongue

Are you ready to fight?

(You hear the drum and) run for your life

(Sweet Avalon the heat is on)

In other words, I hope and pray

That time and tide wash the hate away

A simple man with simple thoughts

Who turned to force as a last resort

In other words, I hope and pray

That time and tide keep the day away

When simple men with simple thoughts

Will turn to force as a last recourse.

Call to Arms

Mike and the Mechanics

Class Participation

I attended the quarterly meeting of the Jacksonville Information Technology Council this evening. I'm grateful I still get to participate, since I probably don't really fit the profile for membership anymore. I do pay my dues though, so that has to count for something!

Tonight's presentation was on Jacksonville's comprehensive telecommunications plan, which is a pretty intelligent effort judging by the folks presenting tonight. Apparently MS is very interested in the plan, one of the presenters mentioned he had met with a senior VP of a large software company this afternoon, whose name he couldn't mention - but we probably run their software on our computers.

They opened the panel up to questions from the floor, but it's such a broad-based topic, I didn't think there were very many good questions. I always like to contribute, because I seldom miss an opportunity to open my mouth, but I don't like to talk just to hear the sound of my own voice. I tried to think of a good question.

One of the presenters kept referring to telecommunications infrastructure in the same context as other traditional forms of physical infrastructure, including roads. So I thought about roads and I thought about what I would do differently if I was designing the highway systems around Jacksonville for the first time. That got me to thinking about hurricane evacuation, which is a nightmare around here. That got me thinking about disaster recovery, and that got me thinking about 9/11.

So I raised my hand and asked how much thought was being given to designing a system that was robust enough to survive a natural disaster, like Hurricane Andrew; or a man-made one, like 9/11? The first presenter fended off to the presenter from JEA, the utility company, and she stressed the utility's focus on reliability. Of course, that immediately made me flash on all the power lines that are above ground and how there are always thousands of utility trucks from all over the country converging on areas where hurricanes have come ashore and taken down the power lines. Restoring power completely sometimes takes weeks. So I threw that back at her and mentioned that we may want to look at different ways of building out the infrastructure so we're not looking at significant delays in reconstitution following a catastrophe, and that a robust system would be a marketable quality.

That happened to be the last question of the evening, but as I was leaving some reporter asked me for my name and who I worked for. I gave him my card and told him everything was wrong on it but the e-mail address (I have to get new cards!), but the folks at that number could find me. So who knows, maybe I'll get a mention in the local fish-wrapper? That's better than a sharp stick in the eye, I think.

I was going to say something...

...but I forgot what it was.

Oh well, that's never stopped me before.

Busy as hell again. Not doing anything terribly important, which is why it is so frustrating. It'll pass.

I read a note at Accelerate Your Mac that Apple offers limited price protection to people who buy a new computer immediately before Apple releases a newer model. I went to Apple's site and read all the fine print, which was essentially already posted at AYM, and laughed.

In order to be eligible, your computer had to have been shipped within 10 days of the new product release. Mine shipped 12 days before the new models were out. I called anyway, I figured the worst they could say was, "No."

Hold time was about 10 minutes, telephone music wasn't bad, frequency of interruptions by recorded "Your call is important to us," (which isn't what they said, but don't recall the specific words) wasn't too irritating. I got a nice young lady on the phone, gave her my order number and briefly described my situation. She said she couldn't do anything for me, but that she'd put me through to her supervisor who perhaps might be able to offer me some consideration.

I already had in mind what to ask for, since it's always best to tell them what you want first. We danced around a bit and then I said I'd like a copy of Keynote. He at first said, "Sure! That's $49.99, right?"

Like a dummy, I said, "Uh, no, it's $99.00."

"Oh, right. I was getting that confused with iLife. How about I give you $49.99 credit toward Keynote?"

"No, I'd really like not to spend more money, I think Keynote is half the difference in the price between the two models and that seems fair."

"Okay, let me see what I can do. I'm going to put you on hold."

More music for a couple of minutes...

"Dave? Done deal! I'm putting in an order for you for Keynote."

That was cool.

In hindsight, I'm thinking I might have been further ahead asking for iLife and a Quicktime Pro key. I've got Office now, which has PowerPoint. In any event, it was a pleasant exchange and I get a new application to play with.

As if I had the time...

Inspirational? Not Hardly.

Dave Winer called Bush's speech "inspirational." I don't think so.

It was a well written speech, very well written. But it wasn't inspirational. It was manipulative, as indeed all rhetoric is ultimately intended to be. Dave confuses that with inspiring.

I found Bush's use of sotto voce an affectation, insincere and intended to deceive. I found his uncertainty regarding war feigned in "If war is forced upon us." And, of course, his speech writers found all the correct words to express the Commander in Chief's seemingly intimate knowledge of the horror and tragedy of war, and the heavy weight he bears in that role. Again, I found that not credible.

In order to be inspired, you have to look beyond the rhetoric to the individual offering the words. There is little in Bush's character to find inspiring. There are clever and intelligent writers putting words into his mouth that his heart could never utter. He played a role, and he played it fairly well, stumbling badly only a couple of times in his recitation. But it's all just a charade.

While I am persuaded that Bush has probably experienced some personal growth in the months he has been in office, confronting the events of 9/11, I'm also fairly certain it hasn't fundamentally changed him.

But if people want to be inspired by him, I suppose that's okay. Everyone needs heroes. He's not one of mine though.

Well, War But No Nuclear Rocket to Mars

I'm bummed.

Mars is the god of war, maybe that's where the confusion came from.

It was a well-written speech, (I ended up listening to the stream from NPR - still am in fact, works great) but it didn't offer anything truly compelling I think.

Well, we'll just have to wait and see how things work out. In the mean time, try to live in the moment.

Nervous Energy

I don't know why I'm sitting here blogging away. I've got the Tinderbox tutorial to do, the reply to Karl Martino's piece, the budget to revise, the bills, the taxes, the dishes...well, the list just goes on forever.

I think it's just that I finally got this sucker working right and I want to reward myself a bit by using it. I'm not sure if I'm going to watch the SOTU address tonight. I can read it later. I think I really need to just focus and get the dishes done, the floors swept, and the bills organized.

I'm taking the car into the base auto shop tomorrow for an oil change and tire rotation. While they're doing that, I'll hit the credit union, post office, Navy Exchange and barber shop. By the time I'm finished, they should be nearly finished. I've got to drive Caitie down to Daytona Friday night to meet Maria and I want to finally have clean oil in the car. I've been neglecting it terribly. Coincident with my lack of productivity, has been my lack of discipline in using Life Balance. Well, that and the distraction of this new toy.

I'm not going to beat myself up here. Well, actually I was, but I'm stopping now. Sometimes you just get these periods where you kind of take your hands off the wheel and hope everything turns out okay. Except I know there's no such thing as hope. I'll get back in the groove here shortly. I need to sit my butt down on the floor in the morning too and try to be still, and that'll come too. Nobody's perfect. Least of all me.

Hi-Fi

Dr. James Vornov has been writing a bit about music, vinyl albums, Warren Zevon, Rumi, Rilke, Murphy's Law, and his home entertainment system research. $250.00 for a powered subwoofer seems a little steep to me, but maybe I'm just a little uninformed on the subject.

Valentine's Day Comes Early for Some Folks

Not even Ground Hog Day yet, and some men's thoughts turn to...

Well, let's just say Cecil's got it bad.

Martial Arts, Baby

No "deep-vein thrombosis" for me, thank you very much. Last Thursday we did over 250 kicks in a 45 minute lesson. Oddly enough, the supporting legs seem to suffer more than the kicking legs. Today was stances, forms and lots of leg raises.

Down to 214 this morning too. Probably could have done a couple of pounds better, but the new computer kept me off the LifeCycle all weekend. It's a poor excuse, I know.

Oh yeah, there's this report too. Exercise more, kill fewer brain cells.

This Kind of Sucks

Vivendi is looking to sell its games division, which includes Blizzard, the WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablog (freudian typo?) guys. Guess who's expected to buy?

Why yes, Microsoft.

Another game developer that got its start on the Mac gets assimilated.

I'm still waiting for Halo on the Mac.

Of course, some people think this is just peachy.

You'd think with $40B they could do something more creative than just buy companies.

I hate Microsoft.

Opera, Chimera, iCab, OmniWeb...

There's some chattering from the hand-wringing crowd that Safari is "killing" third-party browsers.

Really?

I'm reminded of the Parrot in the Monty Python sketch.

For the most part, there are two browsers people use with the Mac, especially on OS X: IE and Mozilla, although Chimera would have probably overtaken Mozilla. I tried Opera once, it didn't do anything significantly better than any of the free browsers, and it kept "expiring" because it was seemingly perpetually in beta. iCab? Tried it. Had some neat features, but it was pretty ugly and didn't work on X right way. OmniWeb? Gorgeous, but it barfed on a lot of sites I visited, and it couldn't play Quicktime if you visited Apple's trailer page. I had just installed Chimera before Safari came out, and it looked promising. Mainly I used Mozilla, and occasionally IE for those sites that I had to access that Mozilla couldn't handle.

These were all admirable efforts, but really, they weren't going to seriously overtake Internet Explorer on the Mac. First, Opera, OmniWeb and iCab are all pay-ware, they aren't free. Second, they simply don't work well enough on the Mac.

If any one of these pretenders to the throne had actually delivered the goods, it's my bet Apple never would have undertaken Safari. But they didn't, so Apple did what it had to do, and has to do, to try to maintain the viability of the platform. A browser is just too key a piece of application infrastructure to rely on MS, who haven't seemed overly interested in keeping the updates coming; or an open-source effort that has cross-platform compatibility as its primary goal.

Somebody is going to offer that Apple just should have thrown money and tech support to the third parties. Maybe that would have paid off, but it's a gamble and Apple isn't sitting on $40B in loose change like Microsoft.

I pay for third party software when it's worth paying for. I bought LaunchBar, even though the Finder is "free." I bought MoosePad, even though Stickies are "free." I bought Corel Graphics Suite 8, 10 and 11, even though Graphic converter is much less expensive and AppleWorks came with my iMac and iBook, for "free." I paid for .Mac even though iTools was free, and there are free alternatives to .mac. I paid for Palm Desktop back when it was Claris Organizer. I paid for Tinderbox because there is simply nothing else like it. I paid for Radio even though it never worked as well as Manila on Editthispage.com, which was "free." I paid for Disk Warrior, even though Disk First Aid is "free." I paid for MS Office, even though it is from the spawn of Satan, because with a deep enough discount, and a strong enough need, it was worth it. I paid for QT Pro 4 and 5. I paid for Via Voice. I paid for Jaguar. I paid for Tax Cut.

I'm tired of hearing third party developers whining about Apple competing with them. Deliver something of enough value and people will buy it. Otherwise, find something else to do.

Like pine for the fjords.

Of Course the New Macs Are Out...

I'm not too disappointed. I could have had the dual 1.25GHz machine, with a faster system bus for about $180.00 more than I got the dual 867. And, let's not kid ourselves, I would have too. But you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Actually, I'm very happy with the dual 867. You can always use a few more megahertz, but this meets my needs for now. As events unfold, perhaps a PowerPC 970 will be in my future. Who knows?

I am pleased the 17" LCD display dropped to $699.00. That's within striking distance. I'll have to get a new desk and reconfigure my workstation before I could run a dual-display setup anyway and by then they may be a little less dear as well.

War Plans

It's beginning to look as though hostilities won't begin next week. For a while, it felt as though the administration was hurrying, but the pace seems to have slackened a bit.

I still believe this administration has set the course for war and fully intends to "stay the course," but I think they're being a little cautious about starting before everything is ready. I believe nearly everything is in theater, but I'm quite certain the military is welcoming a few additional weeks to work out the command, control and communications bugs. I expect we're re-configuring a great deal of our communications architecture, and there are always some unexpected hiccoughs whenever you're standing up a new comm plan. We can use this time to our advantage.

I don't think we'll start in the middle of February. We'll have enough moonlight, but it'll be waning. Maybe we figure we can get the job done in two weeks and we won't need to fly close air support at night under a new moon. Or maybe GPS-guided munitions can get the job done without any moonlight. I really don't know anymore, I'm not in those loops anymore and I was only on the periphery even when I was.

So don't get your hopes up there's a peaceful way out of this. The train has left the station, I'm not sure we can call it back.

Cold as Hell

Like Doug, I'm getting pretty tired of this weather. We don't have his snow; in fact, it's been downright sunny. But it's been below freezing every night now for the past several days.

I've got a problem with the water pressure in the house. I called the city, but they say no one else is reporting any problems. I put the tanks on the water softener on bypass, so it's got to be the filters. I don't know if they've frozen and not completely thawed, or if they're clogged with something. I just changed them a few weeks ago, so I'm disinclined to believe they're clogged with particulates. But, you never know, so I'm going to try to remember to pick up some replacements this afternoon and see if I can't get the water flowing better again.

It's cold enough that I don't want Chris riding his bike to school, which means I have to give him a ride every day. That kind of adds to the aggravation because not only do I have a longer commute every morning, I have to leave work early to go get him.

I'm ready for it to be warm again.

Honest to God, It Really is Fixed This Time...

Sometimes, you just want to kill these machines.

Long story short, the TB file that is Time's Shadow was broken again. I had to dig into the documentation because this application has so many friggin' moving parts, and I am now pretty certain it works.

As time affords me the opportunity, which is to say, perhaps not soon, I will document how to produce a weblog using Tinderbox, because it is by no means as easy as the template files and the out-of-date documentation suggests. I have some self-interest in this, I don't want to have to go through this again, so I am somewhat motivated to get it done sooner rather than later.

I fixed the links to Al Hawkins' and Dr. James Vornov's places over there in the list o'links. I've got some other maintenance to do, but everything's working for now.

I went out on Saturday and picked up a 7-port USB hub so I can connect nearly all of my USB peripherals at the same time now. Not all of them, but nearly all. I had to get some speakers, so I opted for the JBL Creature speakers. They're very cool, and they sound pretty good too. The green LEDs under the satellite speakers don't add much of an effect, but they're nice. I'm surrouned by green LEDs anyway, so they're just part of the visual background noise.

I also picked up a copy of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Game of the Year package. Played with that a bit on Saturday, but not much. A lot of thinking in that game, not just point and twitch. That's going to take a while to learn.

It was also time to pick up a tax program, I've been using Tax Cut the last couple of years and it seems to do the job, so I brought that home.

I'm going to keep the ViewSonic A90f+ 19" monitor. I went to CompUSA to look at some other models, but they were all connected in a kiosk setup and you couldn't assess how text would look on the screen. This is much better than the iMac, and my thought is that if Apple produces a reasonably priced 1240x1024 LCD display (like, about $500.00 instead of $1K), I'll just get one of those and run two screens.

So far, I'm pretty happy with the speed; but I need to get smarter on some issues that I think are related to the network. Often when I do something that may have something to do with the network, I get the Spinning CD of Infinite Futility and I have to wait, and wait and wait. This is not why I bought a dual-processor G4, so I'm going to have to get smarter on what is going on and see if I can't improve that situation. I often see something similar on the >1GHz Compaq I have to use at work, where I can't even switch IE windows without getting a wait cursor for several seconds. Irritating.

I've got a ton of other things I've got to get done. Buying a new computer is expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of one's time, and it's a huge distraction from other goals and duties...must play with the new toy, you know. So I'm going to bow out and attend to things like the dishes, the bills, that sort of thing.

Okay, Maybe It's Fixed Now...

Argh! Next item of business is to document the process of how to create a weblog in Tinderbox. I keep having to re-learn this stuff the hard way.

Tinderbox is not easy, but all the parts are accessible. You can make it work. There are some things that are absolutely maddening in their obtuseness, like the "Update" button in the HTML View of a note.

The problem has been that all of my notes got their export template shifted to the XML file of the basic January Tinderbox. So when it exported, it just dumped everything, every piece of text in this thing. Ugly. I went through and reset all the templates yesterday, but I must not have hit "Update" on all of them in the HTML View, and I probably didn't save the file because all of them were back to pointing to the January file as the template. I've been having problems getting the two Macs to play nice together on the network and I forced a restart yesterday which is probably where I lost all the changes I'd made. If these changes I've just made don't stick, something is seriously broken in Tinderbox. I'll do a restart this afternoon and then export to a local file (always a good idea, even if I seldom do it), and see if everything looks good.

I've got to create a February Tinderbox file soon anyway, so maybe I'll document all those steps and then publish it as a separate page.

Well, Let's See if This Works...

It's been a busy weekend, with little time for fixing things here in the Shadow. I think the lights are on now though.

I've moved the new computer to its permanent location and relocated the iMac and the 6500. I've got to get rid of some computers now, it's getting absurd.

I moved over thee thousand photos into iPhoto. I'm guessing about 10% of those are dupes. It works fine once they're in there, but it started gakking on import once I had over 2500 of them imported. I'd have to break the imports down to groups of 10 to 20 or so, and even then it sometimes took two efforts. Hopefully iPhoto 2 will fix that, although I hope to never have to do it again.

I've finally begun organizing them into albums. On the iMac it was such a slow process it wasn't worth the effort. I plan on going through the albums and culling the pictures that really aren't worth keeping, and burning the keepers to CD-R.

WalMart opened a new "super-center" here and, of course, we had to go check it out. I'm glad I did because I've got my annual WalMart experience out of the way. Ugh. What an experience. It's too crowded, both with people and merchandise, and the prices aren't any better than anyplace else I've seen. Though they did beat Home Depot on the spiral saw attachment for the Dremel moto-tool, so I bought one of those, and an Enya CD. I was done shopping in an hour, but Maria and Caitlin were in there for another hour and a half.

Chris's computer died at a LAN party. It may have been a power hit, a transformer blew in the neighborhood and they were without power for several hours. Not much of a LAN party with no juice. It boots, runs for a little bit then spontaneously reboots. He's going to end up building a new computer again by the time he gets done easter-egging the parts. We're starting with the power supply, if that doesn't fix it the next thing is a new mobo. I'm going to have to think of some heavy-duty chores for him to earn this one.

I watched about a total of one quarter's worth of the Super Bowl. I managed to catch the commercials for The Matrix Reloaded (woo-hoo!) and The Hulk (um, no). Did the usual laundry folding and ironing, and watched most of Grumpier Old Men on FX with the family. It's nice having Chris around when his computer isn't working.

Well, let's see if this posts and doesn't melt the site down...(fingers crossed)

Dadgummit!

That stupid "Update" button in the HTML view of Tinderbox hosed me again. If you've been by here lately, it's been a mess. Sorry. I shudder to think if anyone polled the RSS file...

Sorry again.

That "Update" button really is counter-intuitive and ought to go away. I've still got to fix a few things, but I think the worst is over now.

Famous last words...

Rip...Mix...Burn, Baby, Burn!

"I've seen the light!" (Belushi in Blues Brothers)

Oh, this is too cool for words.

I'm so late to the game, but I get it. I GET IT!

I just dragged all my live Springsteen tracks to a new playlist, stuck a blank CD-R in the drive, answered a dialog to open iTunes, clicked the "Burn" icon in iTunes, told it I wanted MP3s and away we went. It took about 5 minutes to burn 50 live numbers to the CD.

Stuck the CD in the DVD player, it brings up a nice menu on the screen, and we've got 4.7 hours of live Springsteen coming through the stereo speakers!

Woooooo-hoooooo!

Rock on.

Fuckin'-a right, rock on!

I have seen the light!

All that vinyl in my closet...all that vinyl...

Yes!

Hard Freeze

I think we did manage to get below 26 degrees for more than two hours last night. The wind is blowing and my wind chimes are chiming, which is cool.

I'm really not a fan of cold weather.

With recent speculation about whether or not President Bush will announce a new initiative within NASA to develop a nuclear powered space propulsion system, this article at New Scientist is interesting. I reminds me a great deal of Heinlein's "torch ships" from the Scribner's Juvenile, Time for the Stars where the twins are used to maintain communication with star ships sent out from earth and Heinlein explicates time-dilation relativity effects to adolescents. I also noted Ginny Heinlein's passing the other day. In a foreward to a Heinlein novel she had editted after his death, she appended "Atlantic Beach" after her name. I often wondered if she lived at the Fleet Landing facility here. It's a retirement home, assisted living facility for a lot of ex-Navy types.

Test Three...

Okay, had to reset a few more templates. I think I've got it now.

Well, I didn't. But I do now.

Got the iTunes library moved over. I have to buy speakers this weekend, I'm using some old battery-powered speakers that I used to use way back with the Performa 635. Better than nothing, but not by much.

It's late so I think I'm going to skip experimenting with burning my first CD. I want to see how my DVD player does playing MP3s through the Panasonic bookshelf stereo (we spare no expense here at Shangri La).

In my previous post, I wasn't being clever about the monitor size, just wrong. It's a 19 inch monitor, not 18 inches (except for the "18 inches viewable" caveat).

Steve Vore concurred with the name issue. I explored a bit more in the System Preferences after he recommended looking in the Network control panel (we don't have "control panels" anymore, Steve. They're "System Preferences.") It wasn't there, but that pane did tell me I could change the computer's name in the Sharing system preference. I changed the name and I could talk to the iMac with no problem. Very nice. It's not like you never have problems with a Mac, it's just that when you do, you can usually solve them yourself without getting an ulcer. Macs rule.

Of course, I had to play Quake III last night. That was a trip as well. I downloaded the OS X version but it would launch and immediately quit. At one of the Mac update sites, a reviewer commented that he moved PAK0.PK3 into the baseQ3 folder on his HD and it worked. So I tried that, and it worked. Very cool. I'm feeling pretty good right now because Chris says it looks better on the Mac than it does on his machine. Of course, he's only running a GeForce 2 right now.

I popped a 512MB DIMM into the G4 yesterday evening after verifying it would boot and so I'm running at 768MB. I may buy another DIMM in the not-too-distant future, but for now it doesn't seem to be suffering for lack of RAM.

After verifying I had good RAM, I hooked up to the router and got online. Had a few hiccoughs there, I had to bump the Linksys up to 4 DHCP clients before the G4 would grab an IP address, it should only have required three as the iBook wasn't online. In any case, I got it online and brought up Software Update and installed 10.2.3 and a few other updates to get the system software and basic apps up to speed. Then it was on to Apple's goodies, Safari, iSync, AppleScript GUI Scripting, the new Script Editor. I used iSync and got Address Book populated with my contacts from the iBook. That was cool.

Next was installing MS Office and updating that sucker. Then Corel Graphics Suite 11. Launched OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner and updated both of them. Drivers for the Wacom Graphire and the Kensington TurboBall. Then it was on to the games! I've got Red Faction, Aliens vs. Predator and Quake III up and running. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

I've got to import my iPhoto library, and then kind of glean whatever else I care to move over from the iMac. That'll probably take a significant chunk of my free time this weekend. I'm trying to get this right because the iMac got kind of cluttered and disorganized in the shift from OS 9 to OS X. I'm going to burn backups of all my deathless prose too (probably a waste of CDR media). Once I've got everything the way I want it, I may slick the iMac's drive and start from parade rest on that box. I'm not sure how much life it has left in the CRT, it looks really yellow compared to the ViewSonic, and I'm unable to make the screen go dark using the contrast and brightness adustments in the Display system pref. It will brighten and dim over a very narrow range and I'm not sure if that's a sign of a problem on the analog board, or if I might be able to recover some control by zapping the PRAM. In any case, I'm not going to worry too much about it until I get the G4 up and stable.

In any event, it's exciting and refreshing to be working on some more substantial hardware for a change. Sorry to bore you all with the trivia, but it's obviously in the foreground of my thinking at the moment. With that, I'm going to Export as HTML and verify I have corrected the last of my problems here.

Test Too

Let's see if this works...

Technical Difficulties

Well, I got the new G4 yesterday and that kind of became a time sump for me. I'd started writing what turned out to be a rather lengthy response to Karl Martino, but didn't finish before the new box showed up. I probably won't get to it again until the weekend.

The new box is great. There is fan noise, and it's noticeable mostly because the room had formerly been very quiet. It's not horrible, but it's definitely there.

I bought a ViewSonic A90f+ 18" monitor. It set me back about $215.00 after rebates and coupons and before taxes. I thought I would have to take it back because the image "swam" at 1280x1024. I wanted to run it at 1600x1200, but the refresh rate is only 65hz and you get some flicker. It swam at that resolution too. I configured the G4 with a Radeon 9000 and it has two connectors, and ADC and a DVI. Apple includes a DVI-VGA adapter for connecting conventional monitors, and I'd read of some people having problems with this video card and waking from sleep. They solved it by switching to the Dr. Bott ADC to VGA adapter. On a hunch, I wrapped some aluminum foil around the connector between the two cables and the image became rock solid. The adapter likely needs better shielding.

I need some Unix or Mac OS X guru to tell me if there is a problem connecting to another machine with the same name. When you set up your computer in Mac OS X, the setup application asks your name, and then gives that name to the computer, so naturally the iMac and the G4 are both named David Rogers's computer. Would this preclude them from talking to one another? When I try to connect to the iMac as a server, I can see it but it gives me an AFP error -36. I haven't figure that out yet.

I'm already spoiled by the 18" monitor, it's so bright and clean, the iMac looks dirty by comparison. I had to go back in and adjust the video on the iMac and it's better, but it's still dim compared to the ViewSonic. Well, it's over three years old and it's been used damn near every day in those three years.

I'm out of time. I'm just doing this to fix a glitch I created trying to post from the G4.

It's supposed to go below 20 degrees tonight, so it's still damn cold!

Still Cold

But it'll get warmer. Usually does.

I like the quiet hours of the morning, which last a little longer on days when the kids have no school. I have more of an opportunity to have my thoughts kind of follow one another in some sort of logical order, as opposed to when there are dozens of little distractions competing for my attention.

This won't last long, so I guess I'll have to hurry.

I was reading something over at Karl Martino's place, Paradox1x that kind of resonated with something Elaine was writing about, which resonated with something I read in the introduction to the copy of Meditations I'm reading.

Karl pointed to a review of a book on the evils of the SUV. Elaine commented on the evils of testosterone. And the author of the introduction to Meditations criticized stoicism because it seemed to focus on the internal life to the neglect of the external life; meaning, I think, things like justice.

But I don't think that's a flaw of stoicism, I think it's a virtue.

Elaine thinks the world would be better if men had less testosterone. Karl supposes the world would be better with no SUVs. But it doesn't matter, because even if those things were to come to pass, there would just be a new difference to declare unfair, or unjust or unfit. In other words, the world would still be unfair, unjust and unfit.

Following this to its logical conclusion, the world will only be fair when everything is exactly, identically the same for everyone. Assuming for a moment that that was even possible, it would be a very dull world indeed. If life were what we seem to believe "fair" is, would it be worth living?

I don't think so.

Of course, anyone who opposes some particular issue will tell you that they have no problem with any of a thousand other issues. The problem is, there are thousands of other people, and a lot of them are going to have problems with those issues. Anytime there is a difference, someone is going to look at it as being unfair.

Stoicism, at least what little I know about it, acknowledges this and says, in effect, "Get over it." You can't change the world. You do have an opportunity to change yourself though, and that's hard enough.

Now, before anyone has an aneurysm, this is, after all, Martin Luther King Day, this doesn't mean that we don't work for social justice. It just means that we do so with a different perspective, one that permits us to have a certain detachment from success, and charity toward those we disagree with. And that's not to say we can't be passionate about it either, but it seems to me that we can be passionate about all of life, including its unfairness and inequality, instead of just the narrow view we take.

But it also means that we do have a much greater opportunity to effect change within ourselves, and we might more profitably use our limited resources of time and attention to work on that. Imagine how the world might be different if everyone spent more time trying to perfect themselves than to perfect "the world." But we usually focus our attention on externalities.

We seem to default to this zero-sum view of life, that if I'm right anyone who differs with me has to be wrong. And, these days, it is never a matter of simply being wrong, all manner of other deficiencies and nefarious intent are ascribed to our opponents. Unsurprisingly, we become polarized on issues and, it seems to me, this often just adds to the harm brought about by the issue, and sometimes causes more real harm than the issue itself.

Now, I'm not trying to teach anything to Elaine and Karl, I'm trying to teach something to myself. This, I'm sure, has something to do with resolving how I feel about warbloggers and chicken-hawks. I'm reading a lot of the warbloggers today, and, unsurprisingly, they're focusing on this group A.N.S.W.E.R. to negate the fact that thousands of people expressed opposition to the coming war with Iraq.

I can choose to get upset by that, get angry about it. Anger comes from fear. Do I live my life in faith or in fear? If I live it in faith, what does that say about this? Well, I guess it says that people do things like this, and that's okay. They think men should have less testosterone, and people who drive SUVs have psychological problems. But they're not really much different from me, and I think some pretty harsh things about people too from time to time, especially when I'm acting out of fear. So I shouldn't focus on all the mean, petty and silly things people say, and just be grateful I have the opportunity to share this brief time and space with them. I should focus on my own soul and see how I can work to make it live more in the light of faith than the darkness of fear. And while it may be cold right now, it'll get warmer.

It usually does.

Friggin' Frigid

I should go out and take pictures of the ice hanging off the trees, but it's too cold. It's not a lot of ice, the sprinkler system came on automatically, but it's not a common sight here in north Florida.

I got most of my domestic chores done yesterday, including mopping the kitchen floor, so all I really have to do today is buy groceries. There are few things that satisfy an old salt more than a clean deck.

I went to Books-a-Million yesterday, but that turned out to be not such a good idea. There's a new kids' card game craze going around, and BAM hosts "tournaments" to drag the unlucky parents into the store. Every seat was taken throughout the store, and there were these two whining, fighting kids running around everywhere. "Jiiiiiiiiimmmmmmeeeee, I'm going to tell your dad if you won't be friends with meeeeeeeee!" Over, and over again. I may go back Monday morning when it's likely to be quieter.

I only stayed a few minutes, but I ended up buying two books. I got another translation of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Jon Kabit-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living. I got Catastrophe because I need to get back on track with the meditation/mindfulness thing, I'm falling back into old habits. I noticed this first on the road where I'm beginning to take other drivers' behavior personally again. I can usually interrupt it, but there was a time not long ago when I didn't even notice it, and that was very pleasant indeed. So I need to get back into a routine here, and maybe some new reading will help make the transition.

While folding laundry yesterday I watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and Tremors. (I had a lot of laundry to fold.) I hadn't watched either movie in a long time, so it was a worthwhile diversion. And because I'm so familiar with each one, I can afford to divide my attention between folding clothes and catching the parts of the movies I love. I noticed an interesting Pepsi connection in the movies. The Hong Kong Cavaliers have a Pepsi machine in their tour bus, and the refrigerator that makes so much noise in Wang's store is a Pepsi case. Of course, I was drinking Diet Pepsi. Well, except for the cold Ice House I had toward the end of Tremors.

Today I'm just going to goof off, I hope. Maria is up here and she wants to paint the TV room. I suspect I'll be enlisted in helping to move furniture around, but hopefully, little more than that. I want to read and give my arms a rest. Left arm is feeling good right now, but it flares up now and again.

So, do you think we're going to go to Mars? I have to say, I'm not optimistic. I don't think the congress will fund it; and if they do, at first, it'll probably die in subsequent congresses and administrations. But I would welcome any effort to develop new means of getting about the solar system.

HOLY SHIT!

There are probably only one or two things that could really make me sit up, take notice and reconsider just who the hell is running this country.

This is one of them.

If this is true, and it's by no stretch of the imagination even plausible, if you go by Washington's approach to space exploration for the past 30 years, well, I don't know what I'll think.

I know I'd sure as hell try to glom onto this project somehow, some way.

Kind of makes my brother's company getting an F-1 for "reverse engineering" a little more interesting.

Freezing

We were supposed to have a hard freeze last night, which means the temperature was supposed to go below 26 degrees F, for at least two hours. I'm not sure we actually got that here at the beach, but it was pretty damn cold this morning when I went to the store. About 33 on the thermometer on the garage.

It's Saturday morning cleanup here at Shangri La, with the kidlets filling out part of my cleaning crew. Chris has already completed his assignment, and he didn't do too badly. Caitie is working on hers.

My brother Eric sent me a note. It seems NASA sent his company an old F-1 rocket engine to play with. That's the monster that went on the first stage of the Saturn V. Some guys get all the cool toys to play with, electromagnetic rail guns, rocket engines...sheesh. They don't make 'em like that anymore; and by some accounts, they can't. It's amazing how you lose some technology even as it advances. We couldn't build a battleship today, even if we wanted to. Of course, one could argue, why would we want to? But I just think it's kind of interesting and a little disappointing that we've lost some abilities.

Mandy wants to play this morning. She keeps bringing her tennis ball over and dropping it at my feet. I've already taken her for a walk, tossing the ball is going to have to wait. She was cracking me up the other day. She'd take the ball over to one of the cats and drop it on the floor and they would just look at her and run away.

I'm really anxious for the new G4 to get here. I've got to order RAM today, and scout out a new monitor. Of course, I'll also have to pick up some new software (like Warcraft III) as well. The G4 ships with OmniGraffle, which looks like it is going to be a lot of fun to play with.

Of course, all this materialism competes with other goals, especially the spiritual ones. Trying to figure out how to balance them is something I'm going to have to do, and soon. One goal is fairly well underway, I'm down six pounds from the first of the year. Of course, those are the easiest pounds to lose. It'll start getting harder the more they come off. I'm really anxious to lose the weight because so many of the kicks I'm supposed to demonstrate now involve jumping, usually off of one leg, often while spinning, and the extra weight complicates things a lot. I don't spin well, at least in part because I've got greater mass to rotate, and the friction between either the ball of my foot or my heel and the floor is greater because of my weight, so I don't get the kind of momentum I need to execute the kick properly, and forget about jumping very high with one leg when you're carrying extra weight.

The numbness in my left hand seems to be resolving itself. I'm guessing I aggravated an injured nerve in Krav Maga last weekend. I'd been having the tingling before last weekend, but it's been really bad this week with weakness in my third and fourth fingers, and a numb spot on the back of my hand about an inch above and between those two knuckles. I'm thinking it may have been the elbow strikes or some of the knife defense activity when I was the attacker, or the bare knuckle punching on the target pads aggravated them, as I had it in both arms. Normally you're gloved for serious punching drills, but we didn't do so in this workshop. Something for me to keep in mind the next time I try something like that. The right resolved itself quickly, the left is still present but seems to be getting better. I'm going to look at getting an ergonomic keyboard and a better chair to address RSI issues. I'd really like to avoid the surgery thing.

Well, that's about enough of all of that. We're nothing if not All Dave, All the Time around here.

Wind Tunnel

I had been following much of the noise issue with the new G4s because I'd been hoping to get one. Now that I am, I went through and reviewed everything I could find up to date. The good news is the noise issue seems to be much improved. I plan on having the cpu on the floor anyway, so I don't think it would have been much of an issue in any case.

Of course, being on the floor poses its own problems, chiefly those of pet hair and dander. Chris's homebuilt AMD 2GHz box died the day before yesterday. We suspected bad RAM, one contact looked burnt. We ordered new RAM but that didn't fix the problem. Turns out it was a tiny fan on top of yet another device with a heat sink on the motherboard. Chris's friends identified the problem and the correct solution, I installed it. But I also noted his heat sink on top of his CPU was clogged with dust, so I blew that out too. It works fine now, and he says it's much quieter too. I'll have to keep a can of air handy for the G4 and blow it out once a month or so.

Also in the literature on the G4s is an issue with the DVI to VGA adapter shipped with the computer. A number of people have reported problems with various monitors and the Radeon 9000 video card with the computer waking from sleep. I'm hoping I won't encounter it, but we'll see.

Back to the noise issue. Before I put the 60GB hard drive in the iMac, the 10GB drive would make a high-pitched whine that was just awful. What made it so bad was that the iMac rests on a stand by Contour Design, and the sound emitted from the bottom of the iMac bounced off the plastic shelf and reflected out to my ears. I found if I put a terry dish cloth on the shelf, it cut the level of the sound to a tolerable level. The new 12" G4 AlBook uses rear-firing speakers with the screen acting as a reflector to direct the sound back to the user. All of which is simply to say if you have a noisy machine and you don't care to build a sound isolation box or modify the fans, you can sometimes do some easy fixes by positioning the cpu in a way that causes the sound to be reflected away from you, or by strategically placing some baffle material to keep the sound be from be reflected efficiently in any direction.

Incoming!

The new G4 shipped yesterday, should be here by Wednesday.

Happy.

Safari, Services and Applescript

Apple's new Script Editor 2.0 (beta) affords a Script Editor service in the Services menu. So with a Cocoa-based browser, like Safari, you can highlight the text of an Applescript on the web (like this one) and select Script Editor->Make New Applescript, and it will open Script Editor, create a new script window and enter all the text for you.

Pretty cool.

Too Little, Too Late

A couple of pieces in the Christian Science Monitor paint a picture of a growing anti-war movement. I don't know how accurate that picture is, but I suspect it may be largely irrelevant.

The U.S. is the key player in this, and we've pretty much painted ourselves into a corner. Right now, it appears as if the majority view in the U.S. is that toppling Sadam by means of force is the way to go. The pieces are nearly all in place. If that support is perceived as eroding, it is likely that it would only accelerate any decision to commence hostilities.

Parenthetically, some anti-war bloggers make a point of claiming that the stepped-up bombing in the no-fly zones means that hositilities have already begun, some even claiming they never ceased. I don't buy that argument. What's been going on in the no-fly zones of late likely has been driven by preparing the battlefield, but it's not the level of violence one may expect in general hostilities. Not by a long shot.

Having talked so tough for so long, failing to follow through now poses serious challenges for the administration. Those could be overcome, perhaps, but it would be antithetical to what appears to be the central belief system of this administration, that U.S. power is the central arbiter of all conflicts in the world. Abandoning that notion is not likely to happen. Whatever cushion there may have been in the plans for this conflict, in terms of addressing U.N. Security Council concerns and the inspection teams, will likely evaporate in order to go while domestic support remains high. The expectation will be that everyone loves a winner, and we expect to win, in the words of our distinguished Veep, "Big time."

There's a new moon on the first of Feb, the next one would be four weeks later. I'm guessing there are two windows for commencement, either in early February or early March. I'd say early February is looking far more likely. It depends on whether we have everything we need in theater by then, and I don't know any more than you do what's there and what's on the way. I want to say it feels like it'll be enough for early Feb, but I don't know. I'd still wager it's early Feb.

The thing is, once the shooting starts, we want to win quickly and minimize the loss of life and the chance for chaotic events to spiral out of control. Regardless of how you feel about the conflict, I'd say your prayers would be best used asking for a swift victory. Once that's secured, if we're so fortunate, there will be time for opposition groups to organize around how we want to shape what we have wrought going forward.

There's No Business Like Snow Business

Syracuse is the snow capitol of New York.

I lived in upstate New York for seven years before heading off to USNA. Canastota was the nearest population center of any size, all 5,000 or so, and I went to school there. It's 19 miles east of Syracuse and we did get a lot of snow.

The snow I didn't mind so much; in fact, you get used to it, and it was often a lot of fun. What wasn't fun was what happened when the snow melted: Mud. And the sand they spread on the roads made a mess as well. But it sure was pretty after a fresh snowfall. Especially on a night with a full moon.

Cry "Material Breach!"

...and let slip the dogs of war.

You can almost hear the sound of the warbloggers high-fiving each other.

Let the spectacle begin.

Buyer's Remorse?

Sometimes I get an itch that just demands to be scratched and no amount of self-control is going to be sufficient, I'll scratch.

I had told myself that after I retired from the Navy I'd buy myself a "no-compromises" Mac, but the ensuing lengthy period of unemployment kind of put those plans on hold. Now, things are a little bit better, financially, if just a little, and there are many cases to be made for holding off a bit longer. I'm reasonably certain Apple will introduce a new desktop machine this summer that will really make the current crop obsolescent, and I'm going to guess the prices won't be a great deal higher, either. So there are some very good reasons to wait.

But each day I type away on my trusty, stout little iMac DV, all 400Mhz of it's little G3 processor fully engaged making my OS X experience a reasonably happy one. But I can't play new games because I have only 8MB of VRAM, to say nothing of a suitable graphics coprocessor and the requisite number of megahertz. And I'm growing weary of a 15" screen and only 1024x768 pixels, I think I need some more room.

I figure the only way to get the most out of any G4 processor you're willing to pay for is to ensure it has an L3 cache, so that rules out the 17" iMac. A TiBook or one of the new 17" AlBooks might be sufficient, but I don't need to pay a premium for portability, my iBook works fine for what I use it for. So that leaves a desktop G4.

The best bang for the buck in the current configuration appears to be the 867MHz DP, the low end unit. I bought mine through the federal employee program, as my current situation meets the requirements, so I saved about $100.00 on the price. I substituted the ATI Radeon 9000 for the GeForce 4MX, which added that $100.00 back in. I kept the standard combo drive, I figure I can install a DVD-R/RW in the open optical by at some point when I can make better use of one (and the prices are down a little).

Then hell froze over.

I also ordered MS Office X at the discounted price of something like $193.00. I did feel dirty doing it though. I figure it will probably make my life easier in some respects, and there are occasions when other people who use my Mac require Office compatibility.

I have no shame.

I elected the free shipping, and financed it through the Apple Loan, MBNA financing. Don't believe the 9.9% interest either. But they were offering 180 days same as cash, and in 180 days, I intend to pay cash, barring misfortune.

So now my task is to seek a worthwhile, inexpensive 19" monitor to go with it. And a little more RAM.

Enter the Pizza

Like any parental authority figure, when I come home from a tough day at the office, capped off by a trip to the vet to have feline stitches removed, I address the sustenance issue by calling on those deeply-ingrained hunter-gatherer instincts.

I send out for pizza.

Which should be here in 35 minutes.

Please forgive the excessive number of typographical errors. Apart from my usual inability to spell or type accurately, I'm dealing with some numbness in the third and fourth fingers of my left and right hands. The right hand seems to be resolving itself just fine, the left hand may be getting worse. I may have to actually avail myself of the health care system. I am a guy though, so I will wait until my left arm rots off and the stench offends everyone within 50 yards of me. Just so you know.

But I digress.

I could almost make a case for going to war to make the world safe for pizza-delivery. It's an invaluable escape valve. It's Tuesday, so in my book it's Spaghetti Night. Alas, I have nothing but ungrateful critics surrounding me; and I did have to drag an unwilling cat to the vet to have her stitches removed, so I'm not exactly enthusiastic about boiling the pasta and nuking the sauce. Plus, neither doing the dishes, nor cajoling the offspring into doing them is high on my list of fun things to do tonight. So, I fall back on every parent's contingency plan - order delivery pizza.

I know, it's hardly worthy of the name, but the kids like it, and I don't have to do anything other than hand some guy some greasy money. I'm a good tipper, so maybe it's a karma thing, too.

Regime Change!

Libya, you're next!

Well, maybe after Iran and North Korea.

The Libyans are probably still smarting from not making the Axis of Evil cut.

Maybe there's an Axis of Nefariousness they're on that we keep in a secure, undisclosed location. Once we knock out the Axis of Evil, we'll move on the nefarious, then on to the "Axis of the Merely Wicked," followed by the "Axis of the Very Annoying" (France), then I guess all that will be left is Canada (Axis of Mild Irritation).

So all you hosers mind your p's and q's! We'll get to you too! We've got another Bush in hot standby too, so don't get comfortable thinking things will get better in 2008!

Who Shall We Save Next?

I'm always amused when the people who support going to war against Iraq make the case that liberating the Iraqi people is a noble effort on our part, and a good reason to support the "not-necessarily-inevitable" war.

I don't think it's a good thing that Sadam Hussein runs Iraq, and that people suffer because of it. But I think it would probably be better if the Iraqi people themselves decided they'd had enough of tyranny and did something about it. It's unsurprising that there are any number of Iraqi exiles who are only too happy to have the United States come in and do their fighting, killing and dying for them. I say let's put all those brave Iraqi ex-pats in the first helicopter over the beach, shall we? Let's see how much enthusiasm they have for that idea.

Not going to happen, but it would be nice.

Isn't one of the arguments put forward by the "right" that the welfare state fails because people ultimately develop this notion that they're entitled to the assistance, but at the same time resent it?

We may well be welcomed as liberators. We'll see how long our welcome lasts. Maybe things will go fabulously, I sure hope so. But I expect it won't be long after the occupation begins and we'll be the bad guys again.

And if we are successful, which oppressed people will be the next to demand that the United States go in and forcibly overthrow their tyrant? Iran? North Korea? Why not China? I mean, if you're looking at the moral case, it seems sheer numbers alone make China a compelling case. Let's go liberate them! How's Africa looking these days?

Of course it's all just horse shit. The folks who are in favor of doing something unprecedented in U.S. history, and inconsistent with our values (at least, as I know them), will seize any argument, however fatuous, to justify their position. Why aren't they out there leading the crusade to flourinate the world's drinking water? Think of all the misery and suffering that we could alleviate there! And we probably wouldn't have to bomb anyone either.

"I see," said the Blind Man

Want to know how your retinas work? Check this out.

Stating the Obvious

More houses = More impact on the environment

No news there. Here's a tip for those of you considering buying homes, though. Unless you make so much money that you can afford to hire people to clean and maintain your home for you, buy about 500 square feet less than you think you need, then learn to make the best of it.

Quality of life is one of those kind of indeterminate measures that go into people's decisions for buying homes. Neighborhoods and size of homes seem to go together in most places in America, particularly with our habit of tract development. But a big house in a "nice" neighborhood can actually subtract from your quality of life when you have to devote a sizable portion of your time to maintaining it and the yard that surrounds it.

Handwriting on the Wall

This is kind of an interesting story about where PalmSource (the Palm OS people) is going with handwriting recognition.

Apple's cursive recognizer for the Newton was developed by a Russian outfit called Paragraph (now owned, just like damn near everything else, by Microsoft), and it was actually pretty good if you were patient enough to train it and wrote fairly consistently. In doing some reading about the Newton a long time ago, I came across something that seemed kind of interesting.

Apple and Paragraph were struggling to make the recognizer more reliable. One of the thoughts was to do something similar to the way speech recognition works and have the user write in some pre-selected text and then let the Newton analyze it, to improve its recognition. The analysis was to be more than the quick little bits of analysis that took place when you corrected a misrecognized word. It was a neuro-network kind of algorithm, if I recall correctly.

Okay, maybe that wasn't very interesting.

Apple eventually added a print recognizer it developed within its own Advanced Technology Group, called Rosetta, and that has made its way into InkWell in MacOS X.

Left Brain Never Knows What the Right Brain is Doing

Meant to point to this report yesterday. It's another piece of the puzzle on how all this stuff works. It's about how the emotional content of messages is processed by the brain.

Digital Philosophy

Before we go into the detail about the soul, as we shall define it, we will mention some conclusions revealed by our study. In general, the conclusions are not about what is true today, but about what could be true in the future regarding the nine questions posed earlier:

Digital Philosophy

On The Soul

Cold Sore

It's cold, and I'm sore.

We had a front pass through on Saturday that dropped the temperature down into the 40s and 50s, yech. I didn't do much yesterday because I was pretty stiff and sore from Saturday's workshop. My hands were even sore. Partly from a couple of abrasions on the knuckles from punching the targets, partly from the repeated impacts, and partly from all the grabbing you do in Krav Maga. They're still a little stiff today.

I played around with the iBook yesterday, installing Safari and some of Apple's new Applescript goodies. More about them after I have a chance to play with them, but it looks like Apple has built a player-piano engine for Applescript in OS X. That might obviate the necessity for Youpi Key, and is probably not welcome news for CE Software, makers of QuicKeys. But I may be speaking out of turn here, I haven't done much more than take a look at the read me yet.

While one of Apple's new AlBooks is probably a little out of reach for me, I'm probably going to get myself a smaller cousin, the new Game Boy Advance SP. Like I have time to play games.

Death Penalty

I was happy to see the action by Gov. Ryan of Illinois to commute the sentences of the inmates on Illinois' death row.

Interesting table at the bottom of the article. Those Texans sure take their executions seriously.

Black Beauty

The 2003 Ford 427 concept car reminds me a lot of Black Beauty, the car the Green Hornet road around in, chauffered by Bruce Lee as Kato.

A Sea Story

I've been reading in a lot of places about how safe depleted uranium is. Some of the writers have done a great deal of research, and seem to make a pretty compelling case that it is no more radioactive than other everyday materials. They may be right, but I'm not so sure.

I was the Combat Systems Officer in USS BAINBRIDGE (CGN-25) once upon a time. The only significance of this is that BAINBRIDGE was a nuke. The nuclear-trained people are called, affectionately, "nukes." The nukes all wore personal dosimeters, which are read periodically to track each person's lifetime exposure to radiation. It's not a lot, usually, even over a career, I think I've heard it compared to a day at the beach. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

One of the weapons systems I was responsible for was the CIWS (Christ! It Won't Shoot! - or, Close-In Weapons System), R2-D2 with a hard-on. The gun was a 20mm Vulcan Phalanx gatling gun, and it fired a round made out of depleted uranium. There are good technical reasons for using DU in this application, but we need not go into them here.

The ammunition for the CIWS is stored in a magazine near the mount. The mount only held enough ammunition for two or three engagements, and in a shooting war it was likely you would confront more than that in a single action. So you want your reload ammunition close at hand, which put it in a space at the top of the ship.

When I became CSO in BAINBRIDGE, I noted some lead plates on the deck of the CIWS magazine, and asked why they were there, and here is the story I was told. This happened long before I came onboard, and for all I know it may be bullshit, but it wasn't presented to me that way, and the lead was really on the deck.

In a regular reading of TLDs, two nuke officers seemed to have been exposed to a much higher dose of radiation than any other officer working in the plant. This raises all kinds of concerns, so the source had to be located. It turns out, the only thing the two had in common was that they shared the same stateroom, so there was some thought that there might be a radioactive source in their stateroom. There wasn't, but it turns out their stateroom is right below the CIWS magazine. Right after that, the lead was ordered put on the deck of the magazine.

Just a couple of other anecdotal points. The CIWS round is a discarding-sabot round. That means that the DU penetrator is smaller than the barrel of the gun, and so a platic sabot encloses the DU round and gets shed by areodynamic forces after the round leaves the barrel. They often blew back onto the ship. Operating guidance held that we were not to pick up or collect the plastic pieces of sabot as souvenirs or for any other reason. The CIWS crew would police the decks following a firing and sweep, or pick up with gloves and toss any sabot material found on deck. The issue was the slight amount of radioactivity that may be present. I never worried about it, I just made sure we got rid of it if we fired any DU. The other point is that the Navy transitioned from DU for the CIWS to tungsten, which truly isn't any more radioactive than anything else. Is there a connection? I don't know.

DU is used in the Army's M1A1 tanks, if it were a problem, wouldn't we not be using it in that application? You'll have to ask the Army, but here's something to consider. The way you limit your exposure to a radioactive source is through time, distance and shielding. The DU in the CIWS rounds wasn't shielded to any special extent. It was surrounded by a plastic sabot, held in a sheet-metal ammo box, stacked in a compartment made out of aluminum. The DU in the Army's tanks is sandwiched between two layers of armor, one of which is between the crew and the DU. I'm guessing that that would be somewhat more effective than the stuff surrounding the CIWS rounds.

Probably of greater significance, time also differs in exposures in the CIWS application and the tank application. Basically, the DU was located in these officers' house. One slept on a top bunk, probably about 28 inches from the stacks of ammunition in the compartment above. You spend a pretty significant amount of time in your stateroom and bunk on a six-month deployment, and every fourth or fifth night in port, when you have duty. I don't think tankers spend as much time in proximity to the DU in their tanks as these officers did, as well as the operators who manned the Local Control Panels for CIWS every day.

Distance, I'm guessing, is probably close to the same in both applications. It's not like the source is touching you, but you do have to work in some proximity to it. Of the three factors affecting exposure, time and shielding seem to be the most significant variables that may make DU more of a hazard in one application than the other.

So, all that being said, I don't know for a fact that DU is hazardous. I certainly never lost any sleep over it. But I wouldn't be quite so sanguine as so many of our weblogging brethren seem to be regarding its safety. I might be able to make some inquiries, but I suspect this is a topic that the folks who really know carefully manage the information they share; and I while I might be able to obtain better information in confidence, I wouldn't wish to break that confidence either. I would just say there is some reason to be skeptical of claims that DU is a harmless substance.

Die Another Day

I saw the latest Bond thriller last night. The reviews I read were generally favorable, but I didn't care for it as much as any of the previous Pierce Brosnan outings. Hovercraft were very cool in, like, the 70s. The swordplay was good. It had a lot of potential, but it didn't live up to it.

Two stars.

Argh-argh-argh-arrrrrrgggggghhhhh

The evolution that precluded me from mindlessly sitting here and refreshing the browsers until I got a connection that actually allowed me to purchase tickets was a Krav Maga workshop at my TKD school. Krav Maga is a style of self-defense fighting developed in Israel. I had never heard of it before beginning TKD.

There is usually a KM class before my TKD class, so I've had many opportunities to observe. The course is about half conditioning, half fighting instruction. That's just a guess, I usually catch the last part of the class. The fighting style is meant to be practical and effective; there are no forms, this is pretty serious stuff. I liked what I saw, but I'm nowhere near ready, in terms of my aerobic fitness and overall level of conditioning, to take the formal course. It's an ass-kicker.

But the school sometimes offers a KM workshop to attract new students and it offers something new and interesting for the TKD students as well. I'd missed the last few because of scheduling conflicts, but I wanted to make this one. Then I found out it was at 10:00 AM, which was right when I was going to be ordering my Springsteen tickets. Well, you already know the rest of that story.

I did get to the workshop about 15 minutes after it started, the school is just around the corner from my house, maybe a mile away. We did some basic instruction in elbow strikes and knee strikes, and then "fatigue drills" in those two areas. I'm familiar with "fatigue drills," we do those in TKD too. It's a conditioning exercise where you repeat the basic move over and over and over again. That wasn't a lot of fun, but then we went outside and did some of the practical stuff.

Today we focused on two types of knife defense and a bat defense. Those were pretty instructive, the bat defense was much more effective than I would have imagined - if you do it correctly. The knife defenses were less novel, but very effective. Again, if you do them correctly. Do them wrong, you'll probably end up dead. Fortunately, it's not like somebody sticks a knife to my throat every day. Or ever.

But it's something interesting to do, and I do enjoy it. We did some more fatigue drills combining some of the defenses with an extra player (two attackers, one defender), and two other fatigue drills that simply involved moving toward a target. One required you to be spun around for 15 seconds until you were pretty dizzy. This was supposed to simulate receiving a blow to the head that may disorient you. I don't think it has a great deal of fidelity to actually getting hit. I've been hit hard enough to see stars on a few occasions and it's not something you want to do just for fun, and it does take a second or two to re-boot, during which you're very vulnerable. I also took a shot to the nose about about 1/3 speed from my partner. It should have been like, no-speed, no-contact, but you get kind of excited in these things. He's actually a good guy, and I've got about 80 lbs on him, so I was bouncing him around pretty good on some of the other drills. I really don't think he meant to do it because he seemed genuinely contrite.

But that was my exercise for the day. Took me up to noontime. I ran home and reloaded the Ticketmaster page and finally got a ticket. Then it was off to Home Depot!

Ostensibly, I was only going for the large, $29.99 tool box. I ended up walking out with over $200.00 worth of stuff. Probably just too much testosterone flowing around today. I bought a B&D 14.4v cordless drill/driver. I can't afford the Makitas and Ryobis (I know, good tools pay for themselves), but B&D usually gets the job done for me. I bought another toolbox/step-stool thing, because I knew I wasn't going to get everything in the big box. I picked up a Ryobi set of drill-driver accessories, various bits and nut-drivers and hole saws and such; and an off-brand package of moto-tool accessories. The packaging suggests its the same OEM that produced the Ryobi kit (which wouldn't be Ryobi), so I'm hoping the cutting disks won't fly apart instantaneously. I want to use the Dremel to try and clean up some of the surface rust on my other tools, so the accessory kit will come in handy very soon.

All my Versa-Pak tools actually fit in the step-stool box, which came as a pleasant surprise. I may go back and buy one more of the larger toolboxes later on, depending on how things shake out. I'm going to dismantle the peg-board behind the workbench because I did it wrong the first time. It's not like I'm going to be living here long-term, but it's kind of embarrassing so I want to get that right. The new cordless drill will come in handy for that. The Versa-Pak probably had plenty of torque for the job, but it'll go quicker with the big one and I'll enjoy myself more.

Now it's the end of the day and I'm tired, sore and broke. It's been a good day.

That sounds about right.

Ticketmaster

I'm pretty disappointed with Ticketmaster as a means of buying tickets to concerts. I managed to get one, finally, but it's behind the stage and I could only buy one. It's not like I planned on having a date or anything, but it might have been nice.

Tickets went on sale at 10:00 AM. I had already registered, and I kept refreshing the screen until the Find Tickets field came up. As soon as it did, I submitted an order for 2 tickets and it kept timing out. I kept trying and even ran three separate browsers, but they all timed out. After 10 minutes, I gave up because I had another event I wanted to attend. I figured I'd try again after I got back.

$86.00 too. I think this is the last time I'll ever use Ticketmaster. I should have just camped out like everyone else.

Accessories

SanDisk will produce a Secure Digital card that has both memory and WeFi built in. This is cool, but only if it'll work in the Garmin GPS organizer. I can have GPS and WiFi!

Emotion and Philosophy

If this article is any indication, philosophy, as a discipline, has a lot of work to do catching up with psychology and neurology. And I disagree with the author's assertion that the Stoics "wanted us to get rid of our emotions."

Class War, Drug War, Get a Better Metaphor

That's my new slogan to chant at the CRT. We really do need to think about what we want to call a "war," otherwise we forget (and we have forgotten), what a war really is.

This is just in response to seeing a reference to "class war" in the Christian Science Monitory, and a "health war" in the NY Times.

Seems like a failure of imagination to me.

Update: Truthfully, I hadn't yet read wood s lot when I wrote that. Probably not synchronicity, the air is thick with this stuff.

Time On My Hands

This is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor on differing cultural conceptions of time. I don't agree with a lot of it, but it makes some interesting points.

Fear of Flying

Science News asks "Scared to Fly After 9/11?" and goes on to make the rather predictable point that even with the 9/11 events, air travel remains far safer than driving.

I don't think people are afraid of flying. I think people are afraid of getting cross-threaded with the Transportation Safety Administration.

miscellanea

Just some idle chatter because I feel like doing something here, yet lack the energy for anything very challenging. Probably not worth your energy to read it. How's that for a disclaimer?

I don't mind the brushed metal look of Safari and the other iApps.

Spending an hour in the car to travel five miles will suck the life right out of you.

I think one of the reasons why so many religious and spiritual people embrace an ascetic lifestyle is to help stay awake, spiritually. I think when you begin to get comfortable, you kind of drift off to sleep in a way. I may be far too comfortable, I don't know.

A ride on the Mayport Ferry about 9:30 in the morning can be very beautiful. I have to bring my camera down there some sunny day.

I need to mop the kitchen floor tonight.

I brought a can of Planters Deluxe Nuts to work to snack on today, and while I was at a meeting, somebody helped themselves to nearly all the cashews. I hate that. What's a good thing to sprinkle into a decoy can to teach them to ask next time? Alum? Suckers aren't cheap.

The growth of the weblogging phenomenon has yielded a plethora of people who write about the things I'm interested in far better than I do. Kind of takes some of the fun out of it.

This is interesting, I think: when you copy text in Safari, it also copies the style of the text. It's also kind of a pain in the ass.

Here is something I wanted to play with if I found the time: The tension between intention and attention. (The Tension Between At and In) I thought that was pretty clever. Basically, you have to align your attention with your intention, or you'll have difficulty achieving anything. That seems to be my problem of late.

I'm thinking of enrolling in the instructor program at my Taekwondo school. It's a big expense, but I think I might enjoy doing this. I usually enjoyed being Den Leader and Assistant Scout Master, and I definitely enjoyed being a volunteer instructor for Presidential Classroom (which is far more difficult to volunteer for when your company makes you use vacation time to do so). We'll see.

Riding a Lifecycle at 8:00PM is not a good idea if you want to go to sleep by 10:00PM. I was up until after midnight, despite being in bed by 10:30. I'll have to change that to riding the bike in the morning.

Well, that's probably enough about all of that.

Mmmmm...GPS

I'm going to want one of these. (Must...be...desireless...)

It's got all the cool stuff cats crave: Nice screen resolution (320x480 - Newton MP2K anyone?), ARM processor, color, Secure Digital slot, and built-in GPS. I've often thought of getting a GPS Springboard module, but there were always too many compromises - screen resolution is a big one for me.

Dr. Vornov Returns!

James of On Deciding...Better returns to writing, at a new site!

Cool.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Today is my dad's birthday, he's 76 years young.

Happy Birthday Dad!

MWSF Thoughts

Safari looks very cool so far ("You're soaking in it." i.e. - I'm using it as we speak.). No tabbed windows, and no contextual menu support for navigation. I'm quite accustomed to right clicking and hitting the "Back" item. Loads my bank page and lets me log in. Seems to have a problem with some security certificates, Mozilla and IE allow me to ignore the certificate if I want to.

It's a beta, but I like it.

12" G4 Powerbook looks cool. Let's think about this for a second:

iMac (17") or Powerbook (12")?

Powerbook has a slightly faster processor, neither has L3 cache. iMac has more USB and Firewire ports. iMac has larger screen, but Powerbook supports monitor spanning (I can hook it up to an external monitor and use both screens.) iMac has Superdrive, can add one to the Powerbook for $200.00. iMac comes with cool little speakers, but Powerbook comes with an audio line-in jack. iMac 80GB hard drive, Powerbook 40GB hard drive.

Hmmmm...if the iMac breaks, lug the thing down to CompUSA. If the Powerbook breaks, Applecare Fedex service.

I don't know...looks like it could give the iMac a run for its money.

Grammar Trouble

Yes, in fact I do have a problem with verb agreement. I'll fix them later.

MWSF

We'll see if Apple has any tricks up its sleeve today. I'm offering no predictions. Mainly, I don't want to be disappointed. I've read about the possibility that they're going to start charging for some of the i-Apps, and that doesn't particularly trouble me. I'd certainly pay for iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto. iChat you can replace for free with AIM, so suspect that will remain free. Same thing with iCal, Palm Desktop is free and does some things better than iCal. I didn't get around to playing with iSync last night, but I expect that will likely remain a "free" application, inasmuch as it's integral to the notion of a "digital hub."

Whatever happens, at least it'll be interesting for a little while.

Nightmares

A story in today's NYT about sleep disorders called parasomnias is interesting, and a little disturbing.

More on Dividend Taxes

Here's another take on what tax-free dividends would mean. It's never very simple, is it? In any case, I'm still not hard-over on either side of this issue. Maybe it is a case of Bush sucking up to his wealthy constituents, but maybe it also happens to be the right thing to do anyway. Dividend tax policy just isn't something that touches on one of my core beliefs.

Watch though, and you'll see how spin-meisters for both sides try to tie it to a core belief people do feel strongly about.

Paying Attention

It's late and I need to get to sleep, but for once I feel like doing this - so here I go.

A week ago, I was feeling pretty bad. Just to prove, yet again, irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe (well, it may be the sixth now, we're seeing evidence of "dark energy" in cosmology), feeling bad was a good thing. If you feel bad enough, you do something to stop feeling that way. Sometimes people do things that they or others regret, when they're feeling that bad; but sometimes things turn out in ways that are less painful.

I discovered that I had stopped making progress, and I discovered the reason why. I had grown comfortable again. Being comfortable can put you to sleep, it keeps you from paying attention to the kinds of things that keep you moving forward in the ways that matter most. Your attention goes to things in the temporal dimension and you begin to embrace old habits and patterns of thought.

One of the reasons we humans affiliate in groups is to feel more comfortable. When we belong somewhere, we feel better about ourselves. This has been, for the most part, a "good" thing. It has allowed us to survive and thrive as a species. But we must remember that what it serves is the species, not the individual. The individual is only important in this context as a means to further the species.

One of the things that suffers in this circumstance is the faculty of reason. Sometimes, one person can alter another person's view on a particular issue through the faculty of reason. Through the use of logic and evidence, someone may abandon an old view and embrace a new one. My experience, and I don't think it's uncommon, suggests this normally only holds for issues that aren't especially important to an individual.

Views are beliefs, and shared beliefs are what hold social organisms together, and we're all members of social organisms. How we feel about ourselves is determined, in part, by how we feel about our group. The social organism "knows" this, and so our behaviors are such that we usually try to reinforce positive views about our own groups, and ignore or deny the negative ones. This is where reason fails, I think. And I think it fails for everyone here, regardless of what your belief about a particular issue is, if it's close to how you view yourself then you're going to hang onto that belief as hard as you can. There's no good guys or bad guys here, everyone fails when it gets to beliefs about ourselves and our group.

To say there is no reasoning with warbloggers is probably an accurate statement. But it would be equally accurate to say there is no reasoning with peacebloggers either. Each believes they are correct, and each believes the other suffers from a lack of reason. What I think the fact is, is that each is simply behaving as human beings have always behaved, and that our capacity to exhibit such lofty notions as "free will" are far more limited than we presently understand.

People do change their views, they do alter their beliefs, but the circumstances are not common. Something extraordinary usually has to occur. Sometimes that extraordinary thing can have the opposite effect and serve to crystalize or harden existing beliefs, as 9/11 seems to have done. But sometimes we'll confront an extraordinary event and we'll change our minds. This isn't necessarily good or bad either, it's mostly just a polarity reversal. You're still stuck with a failure of reason when the belief is challenged.

Sometimes though, I think you can have an experience where you begin to question everything. That's a very uncomfortable place, and it's difficult to form a group like that. But that may be a good thing, from the standpoint of trying to advance as a human being.

I'm an authority on nothing, least of all Zen, but my impression of Zen is that it is a systematic means of attempting to dismantle as many superfluous beliefs as possible; and to make an accomodation with being uncomfortable.

If you don't understand anything I'm talking about, don't worry about it. I'm probably just babbling. But here's something I read tonight that I've read before and it resonates with me, kind of in this context especially:

The obvious lesson...is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think - and their name is legion - that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think - as do many - "Let me first correct society, then get around to myself" are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God's peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they shall always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned to live in it in the joyful sorrow and the sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

Joseph Campbell, from Myths to Live By, as quoted in Reflections on the Art of LIving A Joseph Campbell Companion, Edited by Diane K. Osbon

Which, to me, is a hopeful message. I cannot perfect society. No matter what change we make, it will always be imperfect. I can work on learning to live in an imperfect society, with the sorrow and the joy. That I can do. But I shouldn't count on being comfortable.

Springsteen in Jacksonville

It's going to happen. Tickets go on sale Saturday. Melissa says my best bet is getting them online. I haven't been to a concert in more than two decades, but I'm going to try to make this one.

Dividend Tax Relief

I'm pretty ignorant about things like tax policy, (amazing, an admission of ignorance from me - somebody mark this day on the calendar) and my initial reaction to reading about Bush's plan to essentially eliminate taxes on dividends was that it was more of the same looking after the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

But maybe not.

This editorial in the Christian Science Monitor makes some points I hadn't considered. By removing the tax on dividends, you remove some of the incentive to manipulate stock prices and to engage in wildly speculative trading. It might actually encourage what I would consider are more conventional approaches toward investment, instead of these day-trading gambling addictions. Of course, I have no idea how this plan would affect institutional programmed trading, or if it would at all.

I'm not an investor. I've liquidated all my mutual funds staying solvent during my inter-employment period. It's not like I was Joe Moneybags anyway. If this change comes to pass, it certainly wouldn't benefit me in anything like the near term, but I think it might actually encourage me to invest. My perception has been that stock market investing was more like betting than anything else, and there are more fun ways to lose my money, at least for my money.

So maybe this isn't such a bad idea.

iSync, Therefore, I am...or something

I played around a bit with iSync on the iBook for the first time this afternoon. I'd read some others' experiences getting it set up, so I knew to go into my Conduit Settings in Palm Desktop and turn on the iSync Conduit, which is probably the trickiest part of the whole evolution. Synchronization was much slower than with Palm Desktop, but that may have been because it was the first time. I'll be able to tell the next time I try.

My copies of Address Book and iCal were essentially unpopulated. I had a few entries in Address Book from using Mail on the iBook, but it had more than 200 after I was finished. Seems to work okay, although neither Address Book nor iCal pay any attention to categories in the Visor.

If I have a little time later, I'm going to try to synchronize the iBook and the iMac via .Mac and see how that fares.

Return to Routine

Kids go back to school today. Holiday leave is over for most of the folks in the navy, traffic should be back to its usual levels of aggravation.

I managed to get most of the essentials completed yesterday, except doing the bills. Tonight is probably better anyway, there'll be a rush at the credit union with the post-holiday vacation crowd trying to get all their banking done.

I ironed, and ironed and ironed yesterday. I hate ironing, so it builds up. It built up a lot. "Permanent press" is one of those lies like, "This won't hurt a bit." Well, except for the creases that you don't want, they seem pretty permanent. I tried to do New Age ironing. I got this little battery powered dingus that makes various sounds found in nature. The one that it does fairly well is the ocean wave sound. I plugged it into some external speakers, lit a bunch of scented candles and some incense I got for Christmas, and started ironing. I'm not sure how much it helped.

When my feet started hurting, I decided to throw a roast in the oven and fold the pile of laundry on the couch. I stuck Big Trouble in Little China in the DVD player and watched that as I folded. Caitlin had never seen it before and she watched it with me. She said she thought it was going to be "stupid," but she actually liked it. I knew she would. After I finished folding, the roast was still roasting and the movie was still on, so I got horizontal on the couch (notice how this avoids the whole "lay-lie" conundrum?), and closed my eyes. Caitie thought I was sleeping. Silly girl.

After dinner, I ironed some more and watched Fox with the kids. The good news from yesterday is I can pretty much walk around my bedroom without stepping over stuff.

It's the little things.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Beware the alien coder! Insist on American software, written by trustworthy Americans!

Rosie Thomas

Check this out.

I love NPR.

RSS Mess

It was pointed out to me that my RSS feed was broken, which was nice to know.

So I tried to fix it.

What you do to generate an RSS feed in Tinderbox, assuming I haven't got this all wrong, is create a new agent (note), called RSS. This little sucker will gather your most recent postings according the criteria you establish in the agent. In my case, it is supposed to gather the four most recent posts.

In the HTMLView of the RSS agent-note, I establish what the file is to be named when it is exported (news.rss), and what template to use when it creates the exported file.

This I have done.

Oddly, it insists on exporting two files. One called news.rss which contains only the most recent entry, and another one called news_1.rss, which contains the last four, as instructed.

At the moment, I'm somewhat confused and perplexed. I'm sure it's some kind of trivial error, but the single greatest criticism of Tinderbox as a weblog-creation tool must be that there are so many places one can make a trivial error.

It's going to have to wait until I can spend some more time on it. Right now, I've got domestic duties that can no longer be ignored. I'm not going to do everything I have to do, I'm still feeling lazy, but there are some things that have to be done so that tomorrow isn't totally aggravating.

Procrastination

Trying to get used to the new glasses. I may just keep them as spares and continue wearing the old ones, my prescription didn't really change. They feel crooked, I ought to go get my torpedo level and check. But then, I'd have to make sure my head was level first, and we're pretty sure that's not the case.

Picked up Squeaky this morning. I dropped her off yesterday at the vet's to be spayed. She seems to be doing okay. I need to get a pill in her mouth in a little while, that'll be interesting. The "grind-it-up-and-stick-it-in-some-tuna-trick" is recommended.

I've got to start de-decorating here shortly. Fortunately, there isn't as much to do as in years past. I've also got a pretty fair amount of other housework to do, like cleaning my bedroom. I'm putting it off, as you can tell. I also need to do this month's bills and review the miserable excuse I call a budget. Putting that off too.

Caitlin wanted to bake a cake this afternoon, so I assisted her and she baked a nice white cake (from a mix, of course) and frosted it (from a can, of course). I had a piece, even though I shouldn't. It was very nice.

Corel Graphics Suite 11 arrived yesterday, and I installed that this afternoon. I'll play with it a little later and see if the pressure-sensitive drawing feature works with the Graphire this time, it didn't in 10. Pressure-sensitivity works fine in the sketch pad portion of InkPad, so I know the pen and tablet are good.

I'm anxious to see what turns up at MacWorld. If nothing else, I'm hoping for a price reduction of the current product line. I'm thinking, if I can swing it, of buying the low-end G4 tower with a 19" CRT monitor, which are pretty affordable these days. That might come in about the same price as the high-end iMac. I wouldn't have the SuperDrive, but I'd have another processor, along with L3 cache and a faster bus - plus I could upgrade somewhere down the road. The iMac has the "cool" factor going for it, I really do like the design, but I just want more horsepower these days, as well as screen real estate. You put 2700+ pictures in iPhoto and see how far 400Mhz gets you.

Well, that was exhausting. I think it's time for a nap. I am such a slug today!

Goofing Off

I'm sitting here waiting to head off to Pearle Vision to collect my new spectacles. I've been waiting since 12:30. My son said he'd like me to drop him off at a cybercafé to meet some of his Counter Strike friends. I said sure. Chris said he'd be ready to go about 1:00. He's dying his hair again, and it's not ready yet.

People and their hair.

In the mean time, I've installed 10.2.3 on the iBook, as well as the latest versions of iCal and iSync. Haven't played with them yet, I've been too busy trying to figure out why my permalinks weren't working.

But I am anxious to get these glasses picked up. I think it's time to go holler at his red-hairedness and get him moving.

When I Fix Something - It Should Stay Fixed, Dammit!

Just discovered Permalinks were broken again. Nobody ever tells me these things, which is okay (I don't like bad news), but it does make me wonder sometimes.

Anyway, I love Tinderbox and all, but it does have a lot of moving pieces. I set up the month of January and neglected to name the file for the monthly archive export in the HTML View of the January topic. In the notes for each entry, I established "jan03" as the file for the permalink, and then number of each note is appended to create the proper URL for the permalink. Except, on export, the jan03 file isn't created. Instead, the application defaults to the name of the topic as the file, in this case January 2003. Hence, permalinks were broken, you'd get a 404 error if you clicked on one.

Okay, that's easy to fix, I go back into the HTMLView for the January topic and this is what you see:

The "File name" field was empty, so I typed what you see in there, and then saved my Tinderbox file, thinking my problem had been solved.

Later on, I tried getting back to something via a permalink to my site and got the 404 error - argh! Opening the HTMLView for the January topic revealed a blank in the "File name" field. Damn! I fixed that!

So I type it in again, I save, and then I export my file to my site. This time I look to make sure it worked.

It didn't.

ARRRGGGGHHHH!

Go back to HTMLView again. Field's blank again. Head pounds against desk.

Hey, what's this "update" button here?

Oh yeah, you have to "update" to get these things to stick.

This is a user interface problem. Usually when you fill in a field, the value just sticks when you save the file. Sometimes, you might do it in a dialog box and you'll get an "Okay" button, or maybe an "Apply." "Update" kind of makes sense, but it's not something you encounter very often in the user interface. It doesn't leap out at you that when you make a change, you need to "update" to get it to stick. Adding to the confusion, I believe Tinderbox uses "Apply" in a similar context in other windows. I think, if nothing else, it should use just one term, either "update" or "apply" so that one gets into the habit of hitting these buttons when changing certain fields. Oh yeah, it's the Browse Links window that uses "Apply" in largely the same context - to make a change stick. There might also be some kind of visual cue to remind the user they need to confirm the change by clicking "update" or "apply" - a dialog box might even be a better way to go.

The trouble is, I only screw around with this part of my Tinderbox file once a month or so, which isn't often enough to cause me to reliably recall what to do each time. I keep thinking I'll make myself a checklist, but I never seem to make the time.

Anyway, permalinks should be fixed now. Finally. For good.

I mean it.

This time.

Interesting Toys

I'm playing around a little bit with DEVONthink this morning. It looks pretty interesting. I imported my Documents folder and it sucked everything it could read into its database. One disappointment is that it doesn't read AppleWorks files, and a lot of the stuff I've written is in AppleWorks.

It's kind of like iPhoto for documents, though it handles graphics as well, with a lot of other tools built-in. One thing I like is that it can help organize a large number of pdf files I've collected. You can view pdf files in the application, but it's not an exceptional pdf viewer. I've also collected a number of e-texts I've been intending to organize with Tinderbox, but this looks like it might be a bit more appropriate for that purpose.

Its functions somewhat overlap Tinderbox's, but it is not a document creation too per se, the emphasis is on organization.

It's reasonably priced at $39.95 for the personal edition. I'm going to play around with it some more before I make a purchase decision, but I think it has some worthwhile potential.

The other tool I'm playing with is AquaMind's NoteTaker 2003, another information management tool. This one has greater emphasis on document creation, and its feature set overlaps that of Tinderbox as well, though not in the same way that DEVONthink does.

At $69.96, it's a little pricier than DEVONthink, but it's worth taking a look at.

In both cases, as with Tinderbox, the wonderful thing is we're seeing new and interesting software for Mac OS X.

Moral Clarity

For those of you still up for wrestling with this idea, here is a piece that makes the argument for a "just war" view of pre-emptive war.

I don't happen to agree with it, but it's more readable than a lot of the other stuff dealing with this topic on the web.

Don't Stop

It's a wonderful world. You just have to be prepared to accept it on its own terms, instead of always comparing it to your expectations. Things happen that we don't expect, that we don't want, and we get angry or unhappy. The miracle of the world is that there is something there for you, if you're open to it. Being open to it is something you have to learn.

You know, I write these things, and I suppose it sounds as if I know them, but I don't. I'm an authority on nothing. I get to re-learn them all the time. The re-learning gets a little easier though, even if the things that happen don't.

As always, a little perspective is probably in order. I have trivial problems in the grand scheme of things. They're large to me, simply because they're the only problems I think I have right now. Something larger could come along tomorrow, or a minute from now, and I'd forget all about these. But that's the nature of attention.

The other day, I was chatting with a friend of mine. It being the end of the year, we were discussing goals for the new year. I was in a pretty good mood, I thought I had a pretty good list and things had been going pretty well the past several days following the chaos of Christmas. My friend asked me about one of my goals in a way that I hadn't considered. Well, I had, but I didn't like that interpretation, so I had discarded it. (Denial) Apparently, something in the way I worded it revealed that very interpretation, so I had to confront it again then and there, and my friend kind of challenged me on it. Long story short, I was really angry by the end of that conversation. Stayed angry too. (Anger) It was one of those occasions when I go into near-obsession, and become excessively self-critical. Which is all just fear, but it's never "just" fear, is it?

Anyway, I didn't do much about it, just kind of stewed over it for a long time. (Bargaining) Didn't take the time to do any of the things I've learned to do, perhaps because the nature of those feelings took me back to a time before I knew what to do. But I am a little more open now - I've allowed a few chinks in my armor so something a little special can get through even in some of my darker moments.

Trying to find some things to write about in this place, I had gone back to the early part of last year and read what I'd written at the original site. And there were some things there that started to take some of the edge off, but not much. It wasn't until later that those things came together with something else - jumping into the ocean.

One of the reasons I almost skipped Pete's party was because I was still in a pretty bad mood. (Depression) I didn't feel like partying. But for whatever reason, I changed my mind. I'd tell you it was the little voice, but I wasn't really listening to the little voice and hadn't been for a long time. Had pretty much forgotten about the little voice, in fact. But maybe the lines of communication remain open in ways we aren't aware of, because I changed my mind and went.

It is a bear jumping into cold water. Ingrid relies on Pete to get herself all the way into the water. The first time I did it a few years ago, I almost didn't. You get up to your thighs and you're thinking it's so cold, there's no way I'm putting my head and chest in there. But then, where's the fun in that? The whole idea is to go swimming in the ocean in January, which admittedly, in Florida, isn't that much of a stretch. I found out the water temp was 58 degrees yesterday. But still, it'll really make you pause if you stop and think about it.

If you stop, you realize you're kind of comfortable and what you're about to do is going to make you very uncomfortable. But that's where the fun is, that's where the adventure is, doing something novel - and we're not talking anything radical here, it's perfectly safe - that goes beyond your comfort zone. So if you want to have that experience and share that experience, you have to embrace what makes you feel uncomfortable. (Acceptance)

None of which actually occurred to me yesterday. I just knew I felt a lot better after I went to the party.

Some of the things I had been reading in last year's Shadow were some quotations from Joseph Campbell and, while I found them somewhat comforting at that moment, they weren't doing that much to improve my state of mind. But after the party I recalled them again, and this afternoon I decided I needed to go pull out A Joseph Campbell Companion and re-read them again. Tonight, just as I did that, all this became clear to me again.

This may not be clear to you, but it is to me. The process that brought it back to me is something I do not control, but it is a part of the universe we all inhabit. You experience it too. Call it God, the Tao, logos, I'm not sure it makes any difference, but it's there. You've just got to pay attention; do the work; and, above all - don't stop.

I've been getting comfortable.

What Will I Do With My Life?

Via Karl and Cam, this is probably one of the most worthwhile articles one could link to in this season of renewal: What Should I Do With My Life?

Just a Note

I don't know, but I'm guessing taking a dip in the ocean is a better tonic than just about anything you could name. I'm feeling much better now.

Everybody needs a beach.

Happy New Year

Didn't do much here at Shangri-la last night. Watched a little Comedy Central, which was good because I needed a laugh. Several of them, actually. Went back to reading the web, wrote something and then discarded it. Saw the new year in with Caitie, gave her a kiss and went to bed.

Before all that, I ran up to Home Depot because Chris needed a plunger to resolve an issue in the upstairs bathroom. While I was there I picked up some pin-end scroll saw blades. I guess I must be feeling serious about this. I also looked at various tool boxes. I need to get certain of my tools into a more benign environment because the workbench in the garage seems to be equivalent to leaving them laying out on the lawn in terms of the rust they develop. There was a fairly large one with wheels and a telescoping handle for pulling it along that looked promising. I ended up passing on it, I may go back and look at it again after I get the workbench cleaned up. One question that needs to be answered is where would I park it?

Pretty exciting, eh?

We had thunderstorms yesterday evening, so 02 went out with kind of a bang. It's a beautiful day today though. I ran this morning and worked up a pretty good sweat in just a t-shirt and shorts.

A friend of mine called and invited me to their annual Polar Bear Party. Of course, it's Florida, so it's not a very cold polar bear party. I had run into Pete at the grocery store a few weeks ago and I mentioned to him that I wanted to try to keep in better touch because every now and then I look around and notice all my friends are gone. I called him a couple of days ago to wish him a happy holiday but just got the machine. His wife called yesterday to invite me to the party, but Caitie took the call and forgot to mention it to me. Fortunately, Pete called just before the party started and invited me again.

I made some excuse that I had a lot to do here, and he said that was okay, but I was welcome if I could make it. After I hung up I kind of kicked myself and decided that if I wanted to have more friends in my life I ought to work at it. All the crap I have to do around here would still be here when I get back.

So I went.

I'm glad I did. I've known Pete for eight years now and we were never terribly close, but he's a great guy and we did get along well together. We were on staff duty together and we shared a similar sense of humor. I'm going to figure out how to have him and his family over here sometime in the not too distant future.

The air temp was a comfortable 68 or so, I'm not sure what the water temp was, but it felt COLD. The air feels remarkably warm after you get out of the water. The secret is not to stop, you just keep running until it's deep enough to dive in, dive - and then you're done. If you stop with the water up to your thighs you just chicken out. Pete says I was at the inaugural party when he had it with the staff many years ago, but I don't recall that one. I did make the one in '99 and I was invited last year but didn't go.

Here's a shot of the crew:

Pete and Ingrid are the couple fifth from the left. Don't look for me, I'm holding the camera.

Here's me:

I think they call that "barrel distortion." Or something.

Okay, That Worked

If you're looking for anything from the last few days, you'll find them here in the December archive.

Not that anyone would be looking for anything.

New Year Test

What happens if I do this?

Everything should be fine, except the December entries will only be found in the archives. Anyone who linked to a permalink should be okay (I fixed the permalinks yesterday between power outages). I'll have to figure out a way to transition recent items between months.