So a couple weeks ago I was having trouble with the washer/dryer unit and it appeared that my landlord (who lives upstairs) was out of town so I called the Sears repair people, figuring when the landlord got home I'd 'splain and he'd be cool with it, since he's the sort of person to be cool with me calling the repair people in his absence. Sure enough, the afternoon of the day I called them, he came home. But he had no problem with it after all, and started to wonder aloud if he shouldn't try to get them to come upstairs and look at his washer/dryer up there at the same time.

Anyway, the repair guy comes out, gets the washer opened up, takes one look, calls me over, and says it'll be five hundred bucks to fix. Oops. Plus he doesn't have that part anyway and it's a two-man job, but I can call and reschedule if I think it's worth it. The problem is that the baseplate for the washer bucket is made of really cheap stamped metal, and where the support struts (which are mounted on vibration dampers) bolt on, the baseplate eventually cracks, breaks completely, and the bolts go right through.

Considering that a new unit would only be $700, and that the repair guy said if we take the receipt for the service call by we get $30 off a replacement, it wasn't too hard to talk the landlord into getting a new unit. The good news is, it's full! size! instead of a junior unit like the one it's replacing. The other good news is that it was delivered this morning.

The bad news is that the water is currently turned off. One of the guys upstairs works at a salon and has Mondays off, so generally whenever there's going to be a service call of any sort it happens on Monday. So today was a double call, as not only did the appliance delivery guys show up (at nine, a full hour before the earliest we'd been told to expect them, but I'm not complaining), but there's also a plumber upstairs fixing some leaks. And he's got the main valve for the house shut off while he's doing it.

So the appliance installers are gone, my washer's in place, I need a shower before I can go to work, and there's no water. Plus I desperately need to be in the office as it looks like one of my machines failed last week and I wasn't paying attention. Ugh.

I'll report on the pleasures of a full size washer and dryer soon enough.

link (28 aug)

Free lawn seat ticket to tonight's Lyle Lovett show at Wolf Trap. If you're in DC and interested, send email.

link (25 aug)

I am such a looser¹. I'm terribly suggestible. All you have to do to get me to want something is mention it a couple times in my presence, with the added bonuses that if I know you I'll probably give more weight to the mention, and if you actively recommend something instead of just mentioning it, I'll be all over it.

I do this with music a lot. This is why the Amazon Quick Picks thing gets me so much. Most of the time, all you have to do to get me to spend 12 bucks on a CD is tell me I'll probably like it. You could even lie. But if there's even the remotest probability of that being true, I'll probably buy it soon enough (cf. all the Belle and Sebastian I own now). Case in point is Moby, Play. Nicole told me twice that I'd like it. I listened to a couple of her MP3s and bought the CD the same night I downloaded them.

Do you own it? If not, buy it. You know how in the movie Alien when the Alien inserts himself into your stomach and there's not really way you can get him out? Play did that to my CD player.

Anyway, Tuesday morning when the NPR was going and I was in my usual stupor, something caught my ear and I found myself wide awake listening to the announcer talking about a member of Luscious Jackson and a member of the Breeders who had recorded an album under the name "Dusty Trails" (sounds like a great porn star name to me). They played several tracks and an interview with the chyx, who said that their goal was to emulate the movie background music of B films of the 60s. They hit it pretty close.

So I bought the CD last night. It's not bad, but the best tracks on it are the ones where they do the movie soundtrack thing, and not the ones that sound like Luscious b-sides. Anyway, it wasn't Dusty Trails that sent me to Circuit City.

It was TiVo.

I never met a gadget I didn't like (not true, but true enough for the purpose of this diary), and the TiVo does some spiffy things. But it costs too much and there are some interface things I don't like, and frankly the box is too big too. But I've been keeping my eye on the whole TiVo thing for a couple months now, as I randomly discovered while looking for some basic geeky information that there were some people who were working on hacking the filesystem with the goal of allowing you to use your own, larger disks in place of the ones you can buy.

Not long after I found that topic of discussion on a board, they'd done it. You can't replace the main drive with a larger one (you can replace it with an identical one, or with a larger physical disk imaged with the original's image - but inefficiently losing the extra capacity you paid for), but you can "bless" a new drive and pop it into your TiVo, thus magically adding capacity it didn't have before. Once you've done this you can't go back though, and you can't replace the disk with a different add-on disk, so you have to proceed with caution. I noted this, but the machines were still too expensive, and there was the announcement of the forthcoming DirecTV/TiVo combination unit, which will incorporate one or two DirecTV tuners and record the MPEG stream off the satellite directly, thus ensuring that the recorded product is pristine.

So the DirecTiVo (as it's sometimes been called) was the one I wanted, and I've been waiting. It's supposedly due in September, but I saw something else that said October, and I'm not holding my breath. They also say now that it will only have one tuner enabled, but it seems the second tuner may be there, just disabled. We'll see.

Anyway, the price of the basic, 14-hour TiVo has been $299 for a while, but it's now being discontinued in favor of a 20-hour model (there's a 60-hour one on the way, too). So it's on sale, sorta. If your local Sears has one, it's $199. Or you can go to Circuit City and get one for $299 with a $100 mail-in rebate from the store. Plus (but wait, there's more!) there's another $100 rebate from TiVo themselves, making that $299 unit cost $99 net.

Oh, and instead of the "blessing" process being long and convoluted and involving rebuilding a linux kernel ... it's now down to a boot floppy. Put the new drive in a machine, boot it from the floppy, run a little app on the floppy, and you've got a blessed disk. This whole thing has gotten trivial.

I only made it two days without buying one. Bought it last night after checking the web and finding out that two convenient Circuit City stores were out, but others in the area had them in stock, and then trying Sears first.

Brought it home, opened up the box, unscrewed the Torx screws on the back, and promptly voided my warranty. Ordered a couple disks (one to replace the original TiVo disk, saving it in case of emergency and for further copy generation if I want to do any additional hacking) which I'm hoping will be here tomorrow, and set about backing up the drive into segmented files on my local linux partition.

And since I didn't have the drives today, I did the segmented image again with different settings, just to compare (complete in half the time, only 2% larger). I'm a geek, it seems.

Of course, this means that I'm now short of ports on the new teevee, which was bought largely on the strength of the absurd number of ports it had.

Anyway, the TiVo at $99 fit below my impulse purchase threshold, so it was hard to avoid. The total with drives, rebates, and shipping is $267 for a 52-hour TiVo, which is much better than $299 for a 30-hour one (except for the pesky voided warranty, but I'm knocking on wood here).

Similar recent purchases due to the power of suggestion have included my Visor (ordered just a few weeks after seeing them at Internet World, when I couldn't stand it anymore), my Cannondale, my card wallet and money clip, and most of the shoes I own. Oh, and my DVD player. And I'm sure there's more.

 

 

 

 

loose v. loosed, loos·ing, loos·es.

v. tr.

1. To let loose; release: loosed the dogs.
2. To make loose; undo: loosed his belt.
3. To cast loose; detach: hikers loosing their packs at camp.
4. To let fly; discharge: loosed an arrow.
5. To release pressure or obligation from; absolve: loosed her from the responsibility.
6. To make less strict; relax: a leader's strong authority that was loosed by easy times.

Notice that none of these mean to fail. My biggest pet peeve on the net. The word is lose, (or loser), people.

link (18 aug)

Oh, how I hate mornings.

And today I'm getting to hate the morning more because it allowed me to sleep in, sorta. I'm waiting for an appliance repair person to come take a look at the washer. It's been making squealing noises and not doing a very good job of things like rinsing and spinning the clothes. So I called the Sears repair people on Monday when I was taking a sick day, and they couldn't get anybody here until Wednesday (today). I guessed that was fine.

I had suspected the landlord was out of town, since I never get my mail when he's gone and his car wasn't moving from its parking spot in the back (he works up in Bawlmer and you'd think I'd know if he bought a new car), so I felt free to call the repair people myself. Lo and behold, Monday I got my mail, and Tuesday his car moved. So last night I called him, and as expected he had no problem with me calling the repair people. I'm to call him at work if it turns out to be terribly expensive.

Anyway, there was a message from the Sears repair people last night, saying the technician would be here between 9 and 11am, so here I am awake but not leaving for work. I didn't bother to change the clock settings last night, so when NPR started up this morning I rolled over, put a pillow on my head, and stayed pretty much asleep. And then an hour later the beeping came. Ugh. At that point I realized I'd best be somewhat ambulatory before the repair person arrives (chances of repair person not being a repair man: slim to none, but I will persist in not applying gender because it's morning and I'm cranky and it seems like the thing to do) so I stumbled out of bed and over to the computer in the living room.

The DSL, after another outage last night (affecting all of their customers in DC this time, it seems) is back, so at least I have that.

Maybe I'll have some coffee and something breakfasty.

link (16 aug)

The alignment beasts are vanquished. After I'd walked away from the computer last night, my brain reminded me, "single pixel .gif trick," and since I'm already using a single pixel .gif to space the buttons on the right, it didn't take too long to get a good estimate of how many pixels down to shove the list of older entries.

Also, the DSL is back up, so the images are back at fedward dot org and the email button will work again. It would appear from the apache access logs that it was down for almost exactly 24 hours. Hmm ... coincidence? Or not!

Home today, having taken a sick day due to stomach cramps this morning. I get them about once every two months, it seems. They're really bad for a couple hours, then it seems like my system just flushes itself out completely and I'm fine. I already should see a gastroenterologist about the acid reflux thing (you're not supposed to take a Histamine-2 blocker (Tagamet, Zantac, Axid) at the same time you're taking a "second-generation antihistamine" (I can't find the family to which Claritin, Zyrtec, and Allegra belong right off the bat on the web) due to some strange side effects of the combination that have been seen in some patients, but I take them anyway. I haven't noticed any side effects) but I haven't done so. I'm sure he/she would be able to tell me if there's a cause or a solution for my occasional gastric problems (and the persistent problem of acid, but the Tagamet does seem to take care of that most of the time). Not that you care.

But being home with stomach problems is certainly much worse when I don't have the bandwidthy goodness of DSL to keep me occupied. I took a shower around noon, and felt normal enough to start thinking about going into the office anyway out of sheer boredom, but then my stomach panged again and I decided to scratch the whole day.

I didn't even get to make the day useful house-wise. The washer's been making bad noises and I called repair people, but they won't be here until Wednesday. At some point I'll have to let the landlord know I'm calling repair people, but he appears to be out of town (his car's parked in back all day, and I don't get my mail when he's not home) and the washer needs to be fixed. He's cool enough with stuff like that anyway, so I don't foresee a problem.

Props to Marn for the recipe. (I've never used the term "props" to mean anything besides the things you have on stage (properties) until now. I just wanted to say it at some point). I'm just about done with the snickerdoodles so maybe I'll make up a batch of those in the next couple days.

link (2000-08-14)

Dear Browser Makers:

Please implement tables properly, so if I have a row I want to be a certain height so that something on the left can align with the bottom of the thing on the right, the thing in the middle can use the handy "rowspan=2" tag in order to spill over that alignment line without screwing everything else up.

Do not continue to implement tables so that if the cell with the rowspan tag happens to go longer than the height of the row it's spanning out if, the height of that row is ignored. This is wrong, and whatever average row height your browser thinks it wants to come up with is wrong and inevitably looks ugly.

Crankily yours,

Fedward.

Note to readers: images have been moved to their old location, but I didn't remove the email link or the link to fedward dot org. Neither of those will work right now. I'll let you know.

link (2000-08-13)

In case any of you are interested in this sort of thing, here's some info on the new design:

The images are all mine. Software used was Photoshop 5, Fireworks 2, Dreamweaver 2, and Homesite 4. The photograph used in the top banner is courtesy krapsnart and dates from about this time last year. All other photos were taken with my own camera (an Olympus Infinity Stylus) between 1996 and 1998, and developed to PhotoCD.

The only effects done to the top banner were to blow it up, then gaussian blur the hell out of it to get rid of grain and pixelization, and unsharp mask to distress it a bit. The colors were not adjusted.

All other images were cropped to square, then either enlarged or reduced to 95 pixels on a side (from anywhere between 18 pixels square to about 140 pixels square - the 95 pixel target is the height of the top banner). They were then tweaked with gaussian blur and possibly unsharp mask, depending on the magnification factor. The target appearance was one of slight surreality or airbrushedness (to coin a phrase).

Colors were then adjusted using the "Adjust Color Balance" command in Photoshop, mostly through shadows. "Preserve Luminosity" was checked. There was no pattern as to what target color was used for any image shift. Mostly it was experimentation, as some images lent themselves to becoming reddish or sepia, others went green rather nicely, and so on. There were a total of 18 "usable" eyes, although the one from the 18-pixel image is the least usable of the lot and therefore isn't useful after all.

From Photoshop, all images were saved in .psd format, then edited in Fireworks to add the text (20 point Trebuchet MS). The final images were selected from the original 18 based on contrast and room for text, by process of elimination. From Fireworks they were saved as .png images, as it's a 4.0 browser world now. If you're still using a browser that doesn't support the .png format, (1) send me email, and (2) upgrade, luddite.

The original concept was to use mouseovers to reveal the text on any given "button" eye, but it turns out that the Diaryland upload script makes this impossible (or at least a secret). I suppose it would be possible to use old-fashioned mouseovers without preloads, or create the rollovers as Flash images with the rollover behavior built in, but I don't think I'll go to the trouble at this point.

If you're interested in the particulars on the page colors, well, look at the source.

My concern in going with this design was that it not be too creepy, but slightly unsettling was perfectly fine. Unfortunately the only way to figure out if it would be too creepy was to do the design and look at it, and by the time I got there I'd been looking at the images far too long to find them creepy anymore. If you're totally creeped out, let me know.

Not that I'll change anything, but I'm always curious to find out how my designs are accepted outside my own egocentric universe¹.

 

 

 

 

(1) I actually noticed the same thing back when I was still majoring in Architorture in college. You spend so much time immersed in your idea, honing it and making it the thing it wants to be, that when you're done you have no concept at all what other people will think of it. I think this is how ugly buildings get designed. You become totally detached from the reality outside your studio, because that sort of focus is necessary in order to let the building out. So the ugly buildings maybe were conceived as better ideas, but the idea didn't make it out of the architect's head.

link (2000-08-13)

Bah. The day after I put something on the net that requires my DSL to be there (the DSL that's never been a problem), my circuit goes down.

If it's a Bell Atlantic issue and not a Covad issue (they didn't know yet) it could be out until the end of the strike. Bah.

I'll probably move the images over tonight, so fret not for all those broken image icons. It'll be dealt with soon enough. Bah.

link (2000-08-13)

Grr. I pounded my head against this damn thing for a while before finally thinking to look at the source of the entry that was producing errors.

But perhaps I should start at the beginning. New design. Lovely, isn't it? But I wanted to have mouseovers, and built the page with javascript preloads and everything. So instead of the eyes you see on the right, you'd see the same pictures with no text, like so:

... and when you moused over, only then would you see the text telling you what that eye was.

Won't work that way. Diaryland converts special characters through its little upload function, and two of the characters it replaces are the { and } you need for Javascript. So you get Javascript errors on viewing the page, and the mouseovers don't load. Bah.

I suppose I could do the mouseovers the old fashioned way without the preloads, but the old fashioned way sucks.

My wrists hurt and my fingers are kinda numb. I think I'll step away from the computer now.

link (2000-08-12)

Okay, so the RIAA has been claiming that Napster hurt CD sales "near college campuses." Then the Register reported (as did everybody else) on the Jupiter Communications study - concluding that Napster users buy more music, not less - and pointed out that the data the RIAA was using to attempt to show the dropoff in CD sales predated the advent of Napster (They've got interesting commentary on the RIAA's methodology too).

And in May the record labels got a bit of egg on their faces because it was revealed - because they settled with the FTC instead of having the whole thing go into court - that they'd been fixing prices. So now? They're getting sued over the price fixing. And they're claiming innocence, of course. From that Post article:

The record companies insist that the pricing regime was put in place to protect retailers from being driven out of business and thus reducing competition. "We continue to believe that Minimum Advertised Pricing served a valid business purpose and benefited consumers by substantially furthering retail competition and that it was an appropriate and lawful practice," Warner Music Group said in a statement. Tower Records and Universal had no comment.

MusicLand issued a prepared statement in response to the lawsuit, saying, "We have not been served with the complaint but management believes that any charges in this matter against MusicLand have no basis." The company promised to present a vigorous legal defense. Representatives of other defendants in the case, including Sony, BMG, EMI and Trans World, were unavailable for comment.

Could it be, perchance, could it be that the drop in sales was a natural reaction of the market to artifically elevated prices?

Now, I'm not a big MP3 user. I've never used Napster or Gnutella or FreeNet. I have a few MP3s of things that my friends have told me I should buy, and of that (short) list I've bought my own copies of the ones I liked and deleted the others, with two exceptions: I have an MP3 of the song I sang at my friend Ben's wedding reception, as he wasn't able to get me a tape of it in time for the rehearsal with the band, and I haven't yet purchased one thing (but it's on my list).

That said, I do think the prices for CDs are too high, especially since the people who actually create the content end up with little more than a buck per CD sold, and don't even own the copyright of their own creations. I think the record companies have made their own bed, and now they're trying to get the gubmint to keep them from having to lie in it.

Oddly, I worked at a Media Play (owned by MusicLand, which wasn't yet InterCapped when I worked for them) back in 1995. I remember the price war that happened that year. It was pretty much the last CD price war, too. At one point, in order to compete with the Circuit City next door, we had to match their "every CD on sale for 9.99" advertised prices. We had to go through and put new price stickers on everything when they dropped the regular prices of most CDs to 10.99 or 11.99 ... and then again when they raised them all to 12.99 later the same year. In 1996, after I'd quit and found a much better job, I went in the store occasionally to discover that the regular prices rose to 13.99. The store closed in January 97, so I don't know what they drove the prices up to after that.

I buy a lot of CDs. I've got more than 400 of them now. I really do buy fewer things because of the raised prices. I used to just buy stuff. "Oh, I think I heard some guy say he liked this band, and I know he likes this other band I own a CD by, so why not?" I don't really do that anymore. Much. (I got tired of having people recommend Belle and Sebastian, so I finally bought some without ever hearing any).

I think the recording industry deserves every bad thing that happens to them at this point. Unless they suddenly give the artists back their copyrights, pay them fairly, and drop the prices of CDs without being forced by law to do so. Somehow I don't expect those things to happen.

link (2000-08-08)