I’ve been wrapping up our tax returns, running reviews and reviewing an actual paper copy. One document (well, two) that I couldn’t find were the bills from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for the car registrations. But I was very pleased to find that they have an online retrieval system to help you find your vehicle license fee (VLF) for 2004 – 2006.
I bet I filed the registration bills in a “special” folder… which I’ll find in August.
The Wall Street Journal has an article, “Clever Gags Score High On Super Bowl Ads”, with best and worst polls to accompany the online edition. We, for a change, actually watched the SuperBowl this year—with appropriate TiVo gymnastics to cover the grossly underestimated duration given in the television listings—and so can comment on the advertisements. The popular FedEx cavemen-and-dinosaurs ad was a hit with Benjamin, as was the offspring-of-monster-and-robot bit from Hummer. My favorite? I think Stunt City [Degree] was underappreciated: the admonishment to the motorcycle deliveryman who has just crashed through the window (”no helmets”) was silent, low-key, and clever.
Oh, and we liked the meteoroid-geologically-becomes-PEBL [Motorola] ad, too.
A while back, I was speculating about getting a new camera. I finally gave up using the S30 with the broken screen and decided to act. Although I showed some recent system-administration-confererence-action shots, indoor snapshots are never as much fun.
So when we decided to go see the visiting reindeers—from central Oregon apparently—at the San Francisco Zoo, the camera went along for the ride. One of the guests of honour:
Note the ground-scraping horn extending well over the left brow.
Nathaniel thought the reindeer were cool and kept trying to pass through the outer fence to get a closer look:
Next up was seeing the bears, but the playground is a mandatory stop on this route:
Since our trip to San Diego, Ben has been very interested in the state of the Alaskan Brown Bear at that zoo. If the bear’s blogging I don’t know about it, but I was able to convince Ben that seeing the young grizzlies get larger was just as interesting—and they are getting bigger:
Down the way, at the spectacled bear grotto, I noticed some writing on a railing:
The bear dens were built by the WPA, so this railing’s Bethlehem Steel parentage is not surprising. (Apparently, these grottos and the other WPA-built exhibits are some of the earliest “barless” zoo exhibits in the world. I’ve noticed that children’s books often render cagebar zoo displays, even when written many years after such displays were common.)
On the way out, we noticed the otters were enjoying a light lunch:
One tip with electronic viewfinder cameras: turn off the review period to make the camera feel faster. (It is often set to about 2 seconds.) For outdoor shots, where the flash isn’t a factor, you’ll be much less likely to miss a good photo.
I ordered an additional drive for our long running Series 1 Tivo last week from one of the firms that specializes in such things. The drive “marriage” didn’t go well, and the unit was stuck at the Green Screen of Death—and, since these upgrades are supposed to just work, I didn’t have a backup. Scrambling through various forums searching made it clear that finding a software image was unlikely, but also pointed to a solution: PTVupgrade’s InstantCake.
InstantCake is a CD-based program that, if you reconfigure a PC such that the CD-ROM boots as the primary IDE and the drive or drives for your TiVo are on the secondary IDE, will format the drives and install the necessary software to operate your TiVo. For most PCs now, this procedure is at matter of swapping cables around and waiting for a little bit. You’ll lose all your programs and settings, but it means that you can pick any pair of drives as replacements. (Remember that the Series 1 can’t use more than 137GB of its drives, so going past 160GB is pointless.) And you can restore regardless of whether you have a drive or not; you have a read-only image on stable media.
Highly recommended.
[ T: TiVo ]
Now that the Shuttle system appears unsalvagable—no activity, even with a nice fresh BIOS chip—I suppose I should record the emergency server rebuild from a few weeks ago. On Saturday, Dina noticed she wasn’t getting any email. We had houseguests, so I didn’t slip out to Central Computer until Sunday, with a plan to wrap a new system around the old disks. I ultimately ended up with
all in a CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case, and which is now running Solaris 10. The motherboard works well, although I’m only using the IDE controllers and none of the SATA or RAID functionality. (I also couldn’t match a driver to the onboard Gigabit Marvell Ethernet.)
Like any project at our place now, willing helpers materialize, tools in hand, even for a no-tools case:
I’ve built enough systems now that we shortly were ready for action, and blueslugs.com and highmaintenancemom.com were back:
cooler lives in the office closet, which it shares with the UPS which selflessly filters PG&E’s rot gut, leaving only nicely distilled power:
(Without the Shuttle as a new desktop, I’m deciding between building another A8V-based system in a CoolerMaster Cavalier 4, or buying an Ultra 20.)
[T: Solaris]
Ben and I biked to GeoKids and then I carried on to the Menlo Park campus yesterday, perhaps in honour of Canada Day. Ben was pretty happy for the first few miles, but I suspect was bored by the time we made it to downtown Menlo. (Google Maps has the distance at about 5 1/2 miles, although our route was longer—but on bike-friendlier streets.)
Dina took a photo of us setting forth from the driveway:
(For Peninsula readers, the main roads we used were Virginia-to-Woodside-to-Alameda de las Pulgas-to-Avy-to Santa Cruz. There appear to be some neighbourhood roads that we can use to skip Woodside—California Highway 84—and make the route safer still.)
The Digital Photography Review just posted its review of Canon’s PowerShot S2 IS, a 5 megapixel camera with 12 × zoom and image stabilization.
Hard to resist; I’m leery of going the full prosumer (or even professional) SLR route, and this camera has almost everything I would want.
I had an enjoyable half hour assembling a piece of furniture from IKEA, before returning for some late night text composition. It goes much faster with a power screwdriver and a good set of bits. (Also, a 16oz hammer makes tapping in dowels directly satisfying.) But if you want to grab hold of ingenuity in a tangible sense, go build some Cubitec.
Dina and I are building a wall’s worth to hold the books in the office; great fun.
Recommended.
I’ve been using a dual Opteron as my primary desktop lately, but Solaris doesn’t support the sound device included on its motherboard. After asking around about the likelihood of support arriving, I was told that one possible path was to use a USB Audio device instead.
So I drove off to Fry’s to look around and found, as is always true when I look at PC peripherals, that there is a wide variety of such devices, ranging from a cheap plastic version with only a few features to US$100+ options from Philips and Creative.
I ended up selecting from the midrange, and bought the Hercules Gamesurround MUSE Pocket, which is a little chrome number with a big volume dial (which Solaris supports) that doubles as a mute button (which it doesn’t) and 5:1 surround sound (which I can’t test). (Generally the Gamesurround gets middling reviews, but as a USB Audio pod when no sound support is available, I like it.)
Recommended.
I sent the following email to Design Witin Reach. It’s opinionated, making an almost drunken attempt to spray bile at manufacturers and retailers in various markets–but they have each failed in mediocre fashion, so I’m maintaining my position.
From: Stephen Hahn Date: Tue Nov 18, 2003 21:52:05 US/Pacific To: sales[@]dwr.com Subject: Telephones?
DWRians,
A class of items I would like to see offered by DWR is modern, design-conscious telephones, philosophically similar to the Modern Fan Company ceiling fans you’ve offered: a high quality, appropriately featured phone for the small/home office.
Other vendors’ products have limitations:
Bang and Olufsen have generally overpriced models that are occasionally elegant but can be awkward, even clunky. The materials and colors are uninspired.
The “retro” models from Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and the like, are minimally featured and only rarely well made.
The consumer electronics companies are pursing a button-based roadmap (more buttons: better phone?) and are almost exclusively cordless.
I’ll skip the “my entire office should be made of wood” manufacturers who entomb helpless telephones, laser printers, and computers in a cherry shell.
Something like an updated version of the Taurus telephone (Andy Davey for Browns Holdings, 1988), with a caller ID display and a headset jack. Perhaps an aluminum base or a stainless steel handset, like Vertu/Nokia is offering in the mobile space.
(If you know of a manufacturer who is already producing such items, but you don’t believe the product fits in the DWR catalog, please pass along a link or other contact.)
Thanks for listening, Stephen
DWR responded promptly, promising to be on the lookout. But I hypothesize that someone must be already making such a telephone–so I open up this topic for comments, suggestions, and links to manufacturers of a modern design telephone.
Cutbacks at work over the past few years have forced me to take action. As the coffee and teas supplier has moved the offerings from a wide selection of Bigelow teas to a small selection of Bigelow teas to an alternate tea vendor (nameless), the quality of my tea break has dropped so that, now, the tea dust captured by each desiccated bag was only a distant echo of the resonant saga of teas (and tisanes) through the ages.
Something had to be done. Knowing of no obviously heroic possibilities, I turned to ecommerce.
Stash Tea carries a variety of loose and bagged teas. Although I brew from loose teas when deadlines allow, my current workload insists on the highest possible efficiency–a second or three could be the difference between “above average” and “more than satisfactory”. My current favourite bagged tea is the peppermint, which is made from dried Oregon-grown mint leaves. (The Darjeeling is nice, but needs multiple bags to brew anything beyond a small pot; the batch of triple ginseng is weaker than I expected.)
Recommended.
