Saturday, 30 December 2006 at 21:56
The down-low on Hussein's execution.
My new USB audio recorder rocks all known sheep. I'm currently recording the third tape of.. who knows.. and the damage done to the tapes from listening to them so much over the years aside, the recordings are very clear and clean.
Well, there are slightly more than twenty-four hours left in the year 2006 of the common era, and I am still figuring out what in the hell happened to my vacation.
More under the cut...
Friday, 29 December 2006 at 22:04
Wow.. are there only three days left in 2006?? It feels like time's been flying by faster than even the most sensitive of clocks can account for.
Lyssa and I have been back in DC for about two days now, and it's been a hell of a vacation thus far. On the 26th, while we were still in Pennsylvania, Lyssa spent some time at home with a friend of hers while I trekked back to Pittsburgh to see my family some more, and catch up with some close friends thereof who have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Unfortunately, this sort of messed with the plans I already had set out but there isn't much that can be done about that when it comes to folks helping out when they really don't have to. That afternoon I spent the afternoon with Chuck, Judy, and John (Judy's son). The family and I headed over to celebrate Yule a day after the fact and hang out, a day which turned into an afternoon of munching on leftovers, re-burning CDs that didn't take quite right, and catching up on everything going on back home. We got back around 1700 EST/EDT that day, and my mother and I spent some time in the basement, my old laboratory, cleaning stuff up, throwing stuff out, and digging out some stuff to bring back to DC with me.
Since Lyssa got me that USB audio recorder, I've been planning on converting my collection of audiocassettes (which numbers in the high triple digits from my days as a DJ) into .mp3 files for archival, so that I can get rid of most of them to free up space in my apartment as well as in my folks' house. This would also mean that I could listen to them more (at all, really) by loading them into my iPod. To that end, I picked out a couple of score of tapes, disconnected the dual-slot high-quality tape deck from my PA rig, and loaded the whole lot into the trunk of my TARDIS for the trek back to DC.
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 27 December 2006 at 22:05
Back in DC, safe and sound and dead tired.
Congratulations to John Barrowman and Scott Gill,
who were wedded in a civil ceremony this morning. Barrowman and Gill have been together for sixteen years and are still going strong.
Monday, 25 December 2006 at 22:10
James Brown, requisat en pace When I get home, I'll play some good, old fashioned
LA Style
in your memory, because it was That Song, the first track of
Best of Rave volume one that got me listening to you after all.
Lyssa and I got up around 0800 EST/EDT, when our circadian rhythms had decided that we'd gotten enough sleep, and got ourselves going for the long haul back to Pittsburgh to visit my family. Lyssa's father had gone to the nursing home to visit Grandma Pat before we'd awakened, so we waited for a while until everyone was up and around and then exchanged gifts. Lyssa got a new digital camera, a new crockpot, and a Joy of Tea Collection for her headline gifts, while I got
the Doctor Who season 27/1 boxed set, and a new jumper and pair of jeans (which I'm wearing right now).
More under the cut...
Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 22:17
It's been an interesting trip back to Pennsylvania, to say the very least. Lyssa and I finally got the TARDIS loaded up and set course for Pittsburgh around 1130 EST/EDT yesterday morning, stopped off for a quick lunch at the local deli, and then headed for the northbound beltway for the long haul.
I'm very glad that I was able to talk Lyssa out of driving home on Friday night because driving conditions were so bad in the DC area. Between the rain, the darkness, and all the headlights of people trying to do last minute shopping it really wasn't worth going out on Friday night. On our dinner and errand running jaunt on Friday, we had a hell of a time just getting anywhere safely, let alone in a timely manner.
Traffic on route 270-north was pretty bad yesterday, in the form of stop and go and stop once again patterns from the beltway onward. Many travelers were probably running late and impatient to get to their destinations, and it showed.
More under the cut...
Saturday, 23 December 2006 at 22:20
One Todd Shriber, age 28, press aide to US Representative Denny Rehberg,
tried to hire a couple of hackers to edit his college transcript so that he'd look like a better student. The thing is,
he e-mailed the guys at attrition.org, who have having a field day with this.
Friday, 22 December 2006 at 22:34
An old chewing gum commercial says "Double your pleasure, double your fun," but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.. one hannah Kersey, age 23 from the UK have birth to triplets.
Triplets carried to term in her two uterii. I'm not pulling your leg, folks, she really does have two wombs. The three girls (two identical twins, and an odd one out) were born by cesarian section seven weeks early.
Does anyone out there have a USB scanner that I can borrow? Mine just died in the middle of something important...
More under the cut...
Thursday, 21 December 2006 at 00:00
I got it!!
Thread pools!
Here's something you don't see every day, but I sincerely hope will become common in the next couple of years:
Books On Demand, both a principle and the name of a company (well, it's called On Demand Books, actually... I tried) that manufactures automatic printing press/bindaries. Their first model, called the Espresso Book Machine, costs $50kus, but can print, cut, trim, bind, and fit into a laminated cover two books simultaneously inside of seven wallclock minutes, or 15-20 library quality books per hour. There are two in public right now, one at the World Bank Infoshop in my home town of Washington, DC, and one at the public Library of Alexandria, Egypt (make what jokes you will). The cost of a single paperback book is about $0.01us per page. They are at this time working on setting up a digital library of texts that can be freely printed and purchased by anyone who uses an Espresso Book Machine in just about any format and with respect to copyright laws. They don't say, however, if you can walk up and print a file on some storage medium you happen to have with you, though...
I'm going to track down the World Bank Infoshop and see what it's all about.
Wednesday, 20 December 2006 at 00:00
It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network.
They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called
EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's guess as to whether or not it'll work for long. Rumours are already going around that IP addresses that scrape data from the Google net (rather than pull it using the AJAX search API) are getting banned.
Why not use the AJAX search API? First, it'll take time for people to figure out how to use it and document everything. Second, it has only a fraction of the features of the SOAP API. Third, the AJAX API places unreasonable search limits (only eight hits per query). Your average Google search returns an order of magnitude more than that.
This can't be good.
They started filming a remake of WarGames.
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 19 December 2006 at 00:00
See you next time, Crusher.
Last night Lyssa, Orthaevelve, and I decided to go out to dinner to celebrate things looking up at work these days after work. It was something of a snap decision, you see - I got a call from my boss while I was at the Metro station headed for home, and immediately told Lyssa as soon as she arrived. After going to the doctor's office so that she could get her weekly allergy inoculation, we called up Orthaevelve and asked about the wherabouts of any good Chinese restaurants in the area. Much to our surprise, there was one within a comfortable driving distance.. I wish that I'd thought to pick up a menu while I was there becaue I don't remember the name of the restaurant off the top of my head. The food there is excellent, easily the best Chinese I've had since leaving Pittsburgh. The pot-stickers were tasty, even without dipping sauce; the egg rolls were to die for, Lyssa tells me; the egg drop soup is well worth the trip; let me tell you, the General T'sao's Chicken was amazing. The portions are a little on the generous side, so if you've got the option to order the small of each dish, use it. Prices are decent, about $13us per person for dinner.
Overall verdict: One and a half flareguns, name of restaurant to come.
EDIT: The name of the restaurant is China Star (9600 G Main Street; Fairfax, Virginia, 22031; phone number 703-393-8822).
More under the cut...
