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July 31, 2008
My Tax Dollars At Work
We found water on Mars.
Could I allocate more of my tax money to the space program, to universal healthcare, to alternative energy, and less to the war in iraq and paying the salaries of public officials who oppose same-sex marriage on the grounds that it damages family values?
Who do I talk to about that?
Posted by dberger at 9:26 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2008
Wargames and Hot Fuzz
Last night - a one-night only 25th anniversary (my god, that long already?) showing of Wargames - the first movie I ever saw that made it cool to be a computer geek (followed shortly thereafter by Cloak & Dagger which made it cool-ish to be an RPG geek).
The pre-screening documentary sucked (though it did include Capt. Crunch, who I think only part of the audience recognized), as did the trailer for the direct-to-dvd sequel. The only other cool bit was the revelation that the guy responsible for making the WOPR's lights blink was doing it, in real-time, in BASIC on an Apple ][. I got more from the first few paragraphs of the wired article than the cheezy documentary.
Tonight, Hot Fuzz, which was freaking hilarious (albeit gory in the same measure as was Shaun of the Dead). By the Power of Grayskull indeed.
Posted by dberger at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2008
Coffee
We had brunch today with some friends at Chance's Pancake Corral in Bellevue. The food was alright, but the coffee was pretty disappointing. I was particularly disappointed by this, as I've been out of coffee at home for a while, and was looking forward to a good cup this morning.
The last coffee I bought at home was a bag of Kirkland "New Guinea" blend, which wasn't amazing, but at around $4 a pound was hard to argue with. It was robust, tasty, without being acrid.
This afternoon, Dawnise happened to be down the street from Vivace, in Seattle, and got me a half pound each of their three varietals. At more than double the price of the aforementioned Kirkland roast, it's not something I buy every time, but having just finished an iced Americano, damn it's good stuff...
Posted by dberger at 5:54 PM | Comments (2)
What I learned from Dr. Horrible
Neil Patrick Harris can sing. Who'd a thunk.
Somewhere, there's an institution where I can get a PhD in "horribleness" - wonder if that requires field work...
Nathan Fillion does sleazy pretty well - and needs a new IMDB head-shot.
Amusing.
Posted by dberger at 9:10 AM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2008
Coverart and Python and Perl, Oh My!
I started playing around with the MusicBrainz taging application (Picard) - and noticed a plugin that would download album art, something iTunes failed at pretty miserably (finding art for only around half of my albums). I was all excited, 'till I tried it and discovered that Picard didn't know how to write tags to FLAC headers, only into ID3 tags.
Continue reading "Coverart and Python and Perl, Oh My!"
Posted by dberger at 9:20 PM | Comments (0)
Gorram Video Drivers
After a couple months of inactivity, I loaded up the SketchUp drawing I had made of the planned Kitchen remodel to review it and make some small changes.
I spent the next half hour trying not to chuck my notebook out the window in frustration, as SketchUp just refused to do what I wanted (specifically, the push/pull tool wouldn't select faces). I finally gave up on my drawing and tried a simple repro case, figuring something about the geometry in my drawing was screwing things up.
Nope - alone in the drawing field, the push/pull tool just wasn't working.
It work last time, so through the haze of frustration, I realized that my drawing hadn't changed, SketchUp hadn't changed, and the only thing that might have changed that seemed relevant was the video driver version.
So I disabled 3d acceleration and viola, it started behaving rationally (albeit slowly). Seems that ATI's latest Radeon Mobility drivers (8-6-mobile_xp32_dd_ccc_enu_64787) just don't work with SketchUp.
There's a half-hour of my life I'll never get back.
And since ATI doesn't "officially support" their mobile products (they defer you to the OEM, who tends to release drivers once in a dogs age) I'm pretty much screwed. Guess I can just use SketchUp in software rendering mode, but panning/rotating even my relatively simple room drawing is nearly unusable.
I hate computers.
Posted by dberger at 11:51 AM | Comments (1)
July 17, 2008
Digital Photo Workflow - Simplified
Dawnise went out to have dinner with some friends tonight, so I took the opportunity to tinker with my camera again, and get the photos I took at the 4th of July up on flickr.
In the process, I discovered that for most photos, I'm probably going to use exiftool to extract the JPG "PreviewImage" from the RAW image files, and upload them. Oh, and if I don't ask jUploader to resize images, it doesn't eat memory like it's going out of style, and conveniently the preview image is only a bit larger than I'd normally upload, so that seems workable.
The other day (probably around when my eval ended) I got a discount offer from the LightZone folks, but they still don't support my camera, so it doesn't make much sense to spend money on the product.
Posted by dberger at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2008
Eddie Izzard + Ice Cream
Nise snagged us tickets to Friday night's Eddie Izzard show at the Paramount. We've loved Izzard since Scott and Amanda introduced us to him (well, to his material) years back, but we'd never seen him live before Friday night.
It was exactly like his DVDs.
Only live-er.
And every bit as funny.
Continue reading "Eddie Izzard + Ice Cream"
Posted by dberger at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2008
Beer, beer, glorious beer.
Yesterday morning Dawnise and I went to Karen's housewarming brunch, then hopped over to Chris and Rebeca's place in Seattle for a light lunch before heading to the International Beer Fest at Seattle Center.
Hic.
Continue reading "Beer, beer, glorious beer."
Posted by dberger at 10:46 AM | Comments (1)
July 4, 2008
Random And Sundry...
The weather up here's been all over the place. Last weekend it was hot (for Washington - low 90's), two nights ago we had a nearly 24 hour summer storm, complete with thunder and lightning, today it's gone from overcast to partly sunny. We've taken to calling it "weather by Sybil."
Continue reading "Random And Sundry..."
Posted by dberger at 2:08 PM | Comments (0)