In honour of this news item, I felt it appropriate to buy this (actually, I downloaded it from iTunes).
I always thought it’d have been more appropriate if she’d tried to do this at the Lincoln Centre, just for the symmetry . . .
August 15, 2009
Computers . . . can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em
It’s been a bad week for electronics around here. Last month, I bought an external 20″ monitor for Elizabeth to use with her laptop. It worked great — until last week. Then, she started getting BSOD issues and the external monitor would start flashing until she disconnected it.
Off to the shop it went. We’d bought the laptop and the monitor from the same place, with a verbal assurance that they’d work together (and really, in this day and age, how unusual is it to connect an external monitor to a laptop?). The technician was rather dismissive, telling Elizabeth that she probably just needed to download new drivers (she already had, with no improvement). He said they’d run some tests, install updated drivers and run it for 24 hours to verify that it was working properly. She got a call on Thursday to come in and pick up the equipment — it was working fine now.
On Friday, she got there after work to discover that the laptop had exhibited the same reported symptoms during the day, so it was back to the drawing board. So she continued using my laptop.
Which started to have problems first thing this morning . . . the mouse wasn’t showing up on the screen, and the screen itself was very dim (as though it was on battery power). A shutdown-and-reboot cycle seems to have fixed the problem, but it’s a bit of a concern: the laptop is my primary business machine. I’d definitely be delayed if it needed any extensive repair/reconfiguration work.
August 14, 2009
EFF slaps Burning Man around over “creative lawyering”
The annual Burning Man event has a reputation for quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) anarchy, but this year the event organizers are attempting a quick legal coup:
In a few weeks, tens of thousands of creative people will make their yearly pilgrimage to Nevada’s Black Rock desert for Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community celebrating radical self expression, self-reliance, creativity and freedom. Most have the entirely reasonable expectation that they will own and control what is likely the largest number of creative works generated on the Playa: the photos they take to document their creations and experiences.
That’s because they haven’t read the Burning Man Terms and Conditions.
Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. This “we automatically own all your stuff” magic appears to be creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined “notice and takedown” process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet.
It’s not particularly anarchic to use one of the most restrictive pieces of post-modern fascism legislation to attempt to control the way event attendees use their photographs and video footage.
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Philadelphia signs Michael Vick to 1-year contract
I didn’t think they’d be the team which would eventually sign Vick, but the Eagles are his new employers:
According to Fox Sports, Vick will be paid $1.6 million this year, with a chance for the three-time Pro Bowl quarterback to make $5.6 million as part of a 2010 option. None of the money is guaranteed, according to an Eagles source.
Vick, 29, was the first overall pick in the NFL draft by the Atlanta Falcons in 2001. He received a 23-month federal sentence after being convicted for running a dogfighting operation in Newport News, Va. He spent 18 months in prison and was released from federal custody July 20.
The Eagles’ decision was driven by coach Andy Reid, who made it clear after the 27-25 loss that he felt as though Vick deserved a chance to turn his life around.
“I’m a believer that as long as people go through the right process, they deserve a second chance,” Reid said. “Michael has done that. I’ve done a tremendous amount of homework on this, and I’ve followed his progress. He has some great people in his corner, and he has proven that he’s on the right track.”
I’m not in the least surprised that Vick has caught on with a team: he’s still a very talented quarterback, regardless of his legal woes. I didn’t think it would have been anyone in the NFC East, however. I’d rather imagined it would have been a team in the AFC West . . .
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August 13, 2009
If they won’t voluntarily read lit’rit’cher . . .
. . . repackage it as sleaze:
“Years ago, a PI out of Chicago brought justice to a dirty town. Now he’s going to pay,” trumpets the cover copy for US publisher Hard Case Crime’s new take on the classic novel, which it will release in December. “The man needs the help of a great detective … but could even Sherlock Holmes save him now?” The cover shows a scantily clad, backlit blond, reacting in terror to a muscled man showing off a brand on his forearm. Arthur Conan Doyle becomes AC Doyle, “bestselling author of The Lost World”, while the reader is further enticed by the tagline that “They All Answered to… The BODYMASTER!”
Publisher Charles Ardai said he had been looking for a classic novel to “playfully repackage” in Hard Case Crime’s pulp style since he launched the press five years ago, keen to follow in the footsteps of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw a cleavage-revealing cover dreamed up for 1984 (“Forbidden love … Fear … Betrayal”), and a “bosomy lipsticked redhead” on the cover of Frankenstein. “This is the tradition we wanted to revive with our edition of The Valley of Fear — presenting something ‘good for you’ in ‘bad for you’ garb,” he said.
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QotD: Interpreting the Fed’s message
After two days of satanic worship, no-safeword BDSM and blackface minstrel performances, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced today that it will stay the course on currency manipulation. According to the post-meeting press release, the Federal Reserve will maintain its effective negative target range for the federal funds rate. With economic activity “leveling out,” “signs of stabilizing” in household spending, “tight credit,” continued business cutbacks and a “gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth in a context of price stability,” the Fed expects inflation to “remain subdued for some time.” But the Fed is also standing by its plan to discontinue purchases of Treasury debt this fall [. . .]
The plan to phase out Treasury purchases is a bet that inflation will be kicking in by the fall, as Americans gear up for the harvest festival that marks their winter solstice. Will Santa be bringing you a wallet full of degenerated dollars? Some early signs: The greenback spiked right after the FOMC’s announcement, but has been falling against the currencies of countries with adult supervision. Demand for the the 10-year Treasury note followed the same pattern — with the FOMC’s statement triggering a brief flurry after a disappointing auction of $23 billion in new government debt earlier in the day. Maybe the market took the boilerplate about “subdued inflation” seriously. Or maybe it’s easier to believe the economy will heat up when the Fed doesn’t say so.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Fed Thinks It Has Conjured Inflation”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-12
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This is a mind-boggling level of debt
As soon as the money being discussed passes a billion dollars, for most people it might as well be imaginary . . . here’s a bit of perspective:
To put some context on a new estimate that puts this year’s federal deficit at $1.8 trillion, consider this: That amount had never been spent by the federal government in a single year until 2000, let alone borrowed.
That’s right. As the decade began, the US government spent $1.8 trillion in a year for the first time. Now it’s poised to spend that much in excess of its tax revenues.
The Treasury released the latest figures Wednesday, showing spending of about $3 trillion in the past 10 months, and revenues of only $1.74 trillion.
With two months to go in the fiscal calendar, the Obama administration is projecting that the imbalance will end up totaling $1.84 trillion, more than four times last year’s record-high. The monthly deficit for July, also reported this week, came in a bit above what economists had expected.
Now all the talk about replacing the US dollar with some other currency as the international reserve makes rather more sense. The US government is going to be a long, long time paying off all that new debt . . . or repudiating it and triggering a world-wide financial melt-down. Either way, prudent investors will be looking at non-US investments for future attention. This will make it that much harder for the US economy to grow its way out of debt.
It will take a lot of political courage to stay the course, pay down the accumulated debt and avoid going for what the domestic audience will see as the easy option (declaring national bankruptcy). It’s hard to imagine any current American politician with the fortitude to take the hard option (cutting government spending and paying off the debt).
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Sorry for the downtime this morning
My new host had some problems with the database connections this morning, resulting in a loss of access to the blog (both for you and for me . . . I couldn’t get access on the admin side either). Service appears to be back to normal now.
If you didn’t notice a problem, feel free to ignore this post.
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August 12, 2009
Woodworking tools from Altoids tins
Over at the Woodworking Magazine blog, they challenged their readers to come up with tools using Altoids tins as raw materials. The readers rose to the challenge, and then some:
I was worried this would happen. Some of the entrants to our contest to build a tool from an Altoids tin built tools that actually worked. Sigh. Woodworkers are so practical.
We’re also practical. And so the winner of our contest is Tom Bier, who built a working router plane from an Altoids tin. The tool is impossibly clever – you open the lid to store the iron and thumbscrew. Heck I’d buy one.
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Final appearance of the Free Agent drive
In February, 2008, I bought a Free Agent USB hard drive to use as a backup device for the various computers in our home network. It lasted a month before failure started to set in. A few tweaks, a few visits to the support website, and it worked … until April. This time, it really was dead, so I got an RMA number, shipped it back, and eventually got a replacement drive.
The fact that I’m posting yet another tale of woe should tell you that the replacement was no better than the original. In fact, the replacement drive timed its failure to be almost as inconvenient as possible, failing just before it was needed to move files off a failing internal drive.
So the replacement drive has been sitting around for nearly a year, gathering dust. Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a problem that it wasn’t designed to work with Windows XP (why some deep thinking designer might have made that decision, I’ve no idea, but bear with me for a second). So I plugged it into my laptop, which is running Vista. It was recognized and configured immediately. I tested basic functionality by copying a few files over to the USB drive, then verifying that they were identical to the originals. Having passed that rudimentary test, I then dumped a medium-sized backup to the USB drive.
Twenty-six gigabytes of data went down … and 56 bytes were recorded on the USB drive. Yep. Bytes. Not Gigabytes, Bytes.
Now I’m going to borrow a sledgehammer, to ensure that this particular Free Agent drive never bothers anyone else . . .
Update, 14 August: Misery loves company: James Lileks posted a couple of tweets on a similar note.
Just had my fourth pocket hard drive go south. It won’t mount. Why does tech-talk sound like a robot’s sex-chat transcript?
It’s a Maxtor drive, btw. Apparently I enabled Daisy Mae Mode: looks hot, but can’t read or write.
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Even more “rejected from the App Store” tales
Lore Sjoberg joins all the other sad-sack would-be iPhone/iPod Touch developers, having had all of his application rejected by those capricious Apple gatekeepers:
I, myself, have submitted several applications to the iPhone Developer Program, and have been rejected every time. I think if you look over my list of apps and the supposed reasons for their rejection, you’ll see that Apple’s decisions are pure whimsy, drawn up from the whimsy mines deep beneath the company’s headquarters in sunny Cupertino, California.
Low-Fat Chicken Breast Recipe Book
Apparently, Apple can’t even handle the word breast, because it rejected this app, which is nothing more than a guide to cooking healthful, delicious, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Each recipe comes with detailed instructions and a helpful video showing the dish being prepared by a naked porn star.[. . .]
Steal Me!
This handy app uses motion detection to determine when your iPhone has been set down for three minutes or more, at which point it begins to yells a recorded message: “Steal me! Just grab me and run! You can get a hundred bucks or so, easy! Spend it on drugs! Anyone who buys an iPhone has too much money anyway! Go for it!” I have no idea why Apple rejected this app, but I suspect the company is working on its own version and didn’t want the competition.
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Cellaring your wine in restricted spaces
Liam sent me this link, which may be of interest to wine fans who don’t have a lot of space for a proper cellar:
What is a Spiral Cellar?
It’s the quickest, cheapest and easiest way of building a wine cellar for your house.
A watertight, pre-cast cylindrical system that’s sunk into the ground, it can be located anywhere from kitchen to conservatory, workshop to study. It can be installed into an existing ground floor room, or incorporated into the build of an extension or new property.
If you’re the sort of person who never keeps any wine for more than a week or two then a cellar might not be necessary. But if you always like to have a few dozen bottles around the place and tend to keep bottles for months or years before drinking them, then you need a Spiral Cellar.
Perhaps of less use for apartment and condominium dwellers, however.
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