I had a dull throbbing in my head all day yesterday. We cancelled our workout for the day, because the throbbing headache was afflicting us both. Well we were turning into bumps on a log – or a couch, as it were – and I wanted to get us out of that little slump we found ourselves in. So…



Dogs HO!
… we got ourselves up and ready and took the dogs out to the dunes. It’s fun there, because I can go off-roading a little, and the dogs can play in the sand and the water. It’s on the peninsula of the bay, which is rather narrow, so you’re not more than ¼-mile from the bayside to the beachside, so there’s plenty of options for fun times.

It took some convincing. Mostly me convincing The Girl, but we made it up and out, around 2:15 or so. Spent the better part of two hours there.



Nice weather we’re having
Been nice the last few days. Not hot, not cold, just in between. Yesterday it was overcast most of the day, but it wasn’t cold, even at the peninsula. Of course after we got home and took a nap, it cleared right up and was nice & sunny too. Go figure.

Of course it’s supposed to rain today & tomorrow. I am neither pleased nor displeased by this, just mentioning it. Two days of it. Then back to the same ol’ overcast & sunny days for a while.



A week from Today: Ass-kicking training
I start my jujutsu classes next Tuesday. :-) (that’s me smiling). I am happy about this. I am excited and a lil’ nervous, too. I haven’t really done anything like this before, save for a two-week trial when I was like 4 years old or something. I don’t think that counts. No one fears me when I tell them I took karate for two weeks when I was four and achieved white-belt status.

So I need to stop in and pay. And I guess pick out a suit. Oh sh!t there’s another downside to this, too.

You see, I “go commando.” It’s very liberating, as it were. Been doing it for years, so don’t act shocked, and uh, don’t get that weird look on your face that I can tell you have right now. It’s not like they’re going to jump out and grab you just because they’re not in tightie-whities or anything, OK? They’re still safely under wraps, so get over it.

However with all the tussling and stuff I’m going to be doing? I might have to go to the other extreme. That’s right, spandex. Ew. The boys are squirming just thinking about. It’s gross. Ew.



Watched “An Inconvenient Truth” last night
Not going to bother reviewing the thing. It’s a documentary, and if you have been anywhere but under a rock the past 2 years, you know what it’s about. Al Gore? Global Warming? ‘Nuff said.

Anyway, he makes a compelling case. Not that he’s really making it so much as he’s explaining it in ‘real terms’ for people. It’s one thing to hear scientists use big words, it’s quite another to see graphs about the damage we’ve done and be hit with the realities of what our future will hold for us at the current rates. None of this came as a shock to me, I have known for quite some time. But I could see others who aren’t as ‘in the know’ about this stuff as me being quite surprised by some of the factoids presented.

One of the things I was happy to see was the mention of it really more than anything being a function of our exploding population. It’s not mentioned enough I feel, and I think that a lot of the issues we face could be dealt with if we just started to control the population better. I mean, in an extreme sort of example… if there were 1,000 people on earth, would it really matter if we drove 1mpg cars around? The earth’s systems would be more than able to accommodate that sort of usage. But 7 billion people? Things get a little tighter then. I mean, it’s still the same earth with the same capacity for resources, but now you’ve got a lot more mouths to worry about, and a lot more butts putting waste out into the same limited space. It’s a big issue is what I’m saying.

So if you have not seen it, I would recommend watching it. It’s long and feels longer than it really is due to the nature of the material, but it’s not really boring. Just educational.

Peace.

Tags: Technology, Animals

So I popped in a fully-charged battery into the camera today. It opened. Not without struggling and at least an attempt or two. And the first time it opened it got ‘stuck’ closing. But now it seems to work fine. Go figure.



Uh, Maybe Not
Well actually maybe this is something we should watch. We took the dogs out to the Delta today, and whilst there, The Girl’s camera acted up. She pulled it out and turned it on and it… you guessed it: had a lens error. Hers though, rectified itself on the spot a moment later.

But still.

Tags: Technology, Animals

My luck with Canon Digital Cameras has been less than stellar recently, I would say.

Last time – not all that long ago, either – it was a Canon SD870 that saw fit to severely underexpose all images when at 80% zoom or more, regardless of actual lighting conditions (like, say, outdoors on a bright sunny day). This time it’s at least not a software problem, but a mechanical problem: the lens seems to be “stuck shut.” When I try to turn it on, the lens tries to extend out, and fails.

I say “at least” in reference to the hardware failure because that’s easier to troubleshoot; the software failure leaves the “techs” on the other end to question whether you are ‘doing it right,’ with ‘it’ ranging from “turning on the power” to “do you even know what the hell a camera is?” Yes I do, dumbass, probably better with them than you. But I digress. This makes it a simple “oh ok well the mechanism appears to be broken, please send in for warranty repair.” OK I can do that.

What’s really weird about it is that I had the camera out, took some pics, put it away and walked around for a bit, maybe a whole 2 minutes, before a chance for a ‘Miles Movie’ presented itself and I pulled it back out. I am not sure if I by chance had anything to do with its demise, as I pulled it out and hit the on button, then was holding the zoom function down as it was starting up. Could that have confused it or jammed the mechanical mechanism? I don’t think so, but maybe if two gears are fighting to go different directions when they shouldn’t be…

Anyway, a call is to be placed on Monday. Wish me luck.



Tomorrow’s Workout: A marathon affair
It’s going to be some 3 hours. Really. See I had planned to do my shoulders today and my biceps & triceps tomorrow with a day off on Sunday, but I’m so sore today from my chest & back workout yesterday, that the whole shoulder thing was not close to a possibility this evening. Clearly. I could not even feint the appearance of a full range of motion today.

One option was to move everything back a day, but that binds other things from Sunday on forward, and moving them back further means more than two days for some stuff, making my workout routine far too spaced for my liking. So the other option was to combine things that I could get away with, and just lengthen the hell out of the schedule. I opted for this as tomorrow I have nothing going on after work, save for dinner @ The Girl’s work, so even though I never ever do it, I’m going to go the marathon workout route.

I expect it will run anywhere from 2-½ hours to 3 hours long. Wish me luck.

Luckily I have the next day off, for my workouts anyway. Still gotta get up and go to work though, so it’s not like it’ll be a cakewalk of a day still. And I wanted to take the dogs out when I got home too, so we’ll see how it goes.

Peace.

Tags: Gym, Technology

As a good american, I’m sure you have one of them charcoal fire-starting devices. You know, “the chimney” as I call it and probably many others. Well I always manage to still have a hard time getting it to light. Not sure if it’s the location or what, but for whatever reason the newspaper snuffs itself out. The instructions say to insert two newspaper pages crumpled up, but if I do that many it just goes out, and if I do less then I am really just going to stand there lighting newspaper forever.

Well one day I was out of newspaper but didn’t want to go get some just to start this one BBQ adventure. So I reached around the corner and grabbed a brown grocery bag that I had saved. Well it turns out that – at least for me – the brown paper bag works quite a bit better. It seems to light better and stay lit, which is important to the cause.

So anyway here’s the exact routine: I rip a a full-sized bag in half. I then crumple and insert into the bottom, and light. I walk away, put away the charcoal bag and otherwise occupy myself for a minute. Then I go and crumple the leftover half of the bag, and insert it into where the first half used to be, before it burned itself out of existence. I usually don’t need to use the lighter or matches again, as there’s enough ember from the first half that I can just blow and get it to flame and catch the new half-bag on fire as well. At this point I go away, and check back in a few just to make sure that the bottom-level coals are indeed white, signaling that they have indeed caught flame and are going to do the rest for me.

I have no idea why it works better. Maybe it burns hotter I’m not sure, but it does the job faster and better than newspaper. Newspaper just snuffs itself out every time I try it.

So next time you need to light the barbie, and you don’t want to babysit the chimney and the newspaper, try the good ol’ brown paper bag. Works wonders for me.



Grab life by the tail
I have been trying for the last few weeks to force upon myself a “no mouse” policy. However, I think that as of today that policy is over. I prefer the mouse.

But nevertheless the experience has been good. I have made myself more productive on the trackpad than I was previously, and I am more likely to reach for it now. But still, I’m more effective with mouse-in-hand than hand-on-pad.

Yet getting back on the mouse today and doing some unofficial tests, I found that for the most part, I spent less time fumbling when I had the mouse; I can just get right to the place I want to be, faster and more precisely than a trackpad can afford. I like this level of exactness. So when the place I’ll be will have room for a mouse? I’ll mouse it. But I will no longer sweat not having it, nor will I bother to try and take it with me when it might prove an inconvenience. Basically, if I’m at my lair and in “my spot,” it’s there. If I’m not there, it’s no big deal.



Zoey: Irritatingly dumb
I call Zoey “The Dumb One” because it’s a funny-yet-accurate assessment of her critical thinking abilities. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very cute and very lovable and has quite the personality on her. But she’s dumb. This is how dumb she is:

OK so I’ve had the 4Runner for the better part of 3 years now. In that time, we’ve gone everywhere from the mountains & Deserts of So Cal to the Mountains & Beaches of Nor Cal. This whole time, not a problem we’ve had, we get ready, they get excited, we open the back and they jump right up. Crap, since we got up here, keeping them out of the back whilst I get it ready for them has been a real challenge (not an issue any longer with the addition of my $200 floor mats). All of that ended recently, however. At least for Zoey.

A couple of weeks ago, I was getting everything prepped to go, got them around back, and was trying to get them to calm down before allowing them to jump in. Well as I was getting Miles to sit down (he’s really excitable, as you probably know). Out of the corner of my eye, I see Zoey break from her sit and try to jump in. Well the problem is that she missed. She missed, and fell. And then started yelping like… well, like someone kicked her I guess, which was amusing to a degree at the time, but has created issues that really just bug the living sh!t out of me now.

She won’t jump into the 4Runner anymore. She won’t do it. Which means that on occasion, if we’re parked in a less-than-stellar spot, it becomes dangerous because she wiggles and cowers and hides…. Anywhere. And it’s annoying as hell because I have to pick her dumbass up and throw her in myself, which if she’s wet and smelly means I too am now wet & smelly.

What the hell? I mean, this isn’t rocket science, you know? It’s jumping into a car. And, uh, let’s not forget that we’ve done it successfully for…. 3 YEARS! 3 years! So what, we throw away 3 years-worth of success because we failed once? And didn’t even have a bump or bruise to show for it? OK fine. But yes, that makes you unequivocally dumb. Zoey, the Dumb & Irritating One. Oh my. How Frustrated I have become.

Peace.

Tags: Animals, Technology

Most people view their email from a website. They log on to yahoo or maybe hotmail if they're kinda retarded or if they’re more informed, maybe gmail, and then view from their web browser. But there’s a better way. If you have an email client, which you probably do – Outlook on Windows (why are you on Windows, though?), or Mail on the Mac – and your email provider has POP or IMAP access as an option, why not just set up the mail client to log in to your account for you? This way, you save the steps of having to navigate to a website, log in, then find your inboxes or whatnot. Now, you simply start your client up, and it’s all there! Easy as pie. What’s more, you don’t’ have to ever actually quit your mail client; leave it running, and periodically it will check for new mail for you and inform you of its arrival, which is nice.

This is especially useful if you have more than one email address you access. For instance, I have at least seven email addresses I access daily, each serving a different function. I have one that serves this site, one that only friends and family know of, one that’s a throw-away from web forms, one that is for “work” and… well you get it. Anyway, I start up Mail, and it takes care of getting all my emails for me, every 15 or so minutes.

There’s a catch, though. You see, there’s two different ways that you can have your mail accessed, and the two behave quite differently. They each have benefits & drawbacks, so if you have the choice it might come down to being informed. How are they different?


POST OFFICE PROTOCOL (POP)
POP works essentially by downloading your email to your machine. Your email client logs in, queries the email server, and downloads your email for viewing. This means that you will have a local copy of each and every email on your machine.


INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL (IMAP)
IMAP is different. With IMAP enabled, when you start your client, it again queries the server, but this time instead of downloading the message from the server, it is essentially just acting as a window to the messages. When you view an IMAP email, you’re peering through a window into the email server, where the email really is.


PROS AND CONS
The upside of the IMAP setup is that you are not wasting disk space on your machine with emails. So depending on how many emails you have, this could save a lot of disk space. Another positive is that should your computer crash or otherwise be incapacitated, your emails are still safe on the email server. And also, you have the ability to keep your emails synced across machines. The downside is that since you're just viewing the emails, if you are away from the internet you will be unable to download any attachments or sometimes, even view old messages. The other less-likely downside – though it did happen at least once recently that I’m aware of – is that if the email server crashes & burns, you could potentially lose all of your email data with it.

POP has almost equal and opposite pros and cons. POP means storing your emails locally on your machine, but that means that you are able to access them at all times, regardless of whether or not you have an internet connection. Also, though you have the chance of losing all your emails if your hard drive goes kaput, if you are backing up regularly – like you should be – you’re insulated from this as well. And you never have to worry about those who serve your email losing it themselves!

This comes to a head for me because recently, one of the main channels I use for email access – google’s gmail – added in the option of doing either POP or IMAP; usually you get one or the other.

Anyway, I have been using their email access via POP. I prefer POP, because the way I see it, my emails are MY emails, I don’t want to “rent” them from an email provider. Yes it means storing my emails locally, but in this age the space they take up is so miniscule as to be rather unimportant, archives and all. And with gmail’s almost-limitless server space, you can actually get the benefits of the IMAP experience – having your email on the server. If you initiate a POP email account and specify that you want the email server to keep a copy of all emails on the server, they will be there regardless of whether local catastrophe hits your machine.

Anyway, long story short I prefer POP. All of the arguments I see in favor of IMAP usually revolve around the data security & synchronized machines arguments; but if you don’t delete the messages from the server if you do POP, then you can actually achieve almost the same results, but with the added benefits of being able to “own” your messages, and/or access already-downloaded content whenever you want, internet access or no.

I really don’t see the benefit of IMAP, outside of businesses being able to control/regulate/read through all the emails of their employees at any time in a local manner. If that doesn’t pertain to you, then really it’s more a question of whether you’d rather rent, or own?

I prefer ownership.

Peace.

Tags: Technology

What’s most suitable for the average user? Should you opt for the desktop or the laptop equivalent? The difficult part is deciding what is an equivalent for your needs. This is a case for Apple’s machines because they don’t have actual equivalents. Their bottom-tier desktops – the Mini – is not the equivalent of the MacBook, their bottom-tier laptops, at least not in whole. Their top of the line Mini is probably close to their bottom-rung MacBook though, and from the MacBook it’s quite a jump to the next most powerful machine, the iMac, Apple’s flagship consumer desktop machine. From there it jumps to the iMac lineup, and then you have on the laptop side you go to the MacBook Pros, which then leads back to the desktop side, with Apple’s pro-grade Mac Pro machines – towers not built for the average joe, but rather for video editing houses & big-production businesses.

There’s lots of blur about what’s “equivalent” and what’s not. If you’re looking at a Mini you’d probably also take a gander at the MacBook as an alternative, but then again if you were looking at the low-end iMac you might also look at the MacBook too. And if you were looking at a top-level iMac you might eye the MacBook Pro models, so it all really depends on your pocketbook and what your preferences are. But we’re not going to weigh the individual machines here, we’re just going to sort of gloss over some basic fundamentals of what type of machine may be more suitable to the average user. And although it’s framed around Macs, the basic idea of “laptop or desktop” applies equally well if you’re on Windows, though really you shouldn’t be, get with the times people :-)

Anyway. There’s going to be tradeoffs. Some of them are going to be easily spotted on the specs page comparisons, others are not, and you have to be careful to weigh all of them. To start, yes desktops will always be faster & roomier. This is a “well duh” sort of idea, as it stands to reason that with more internal room in the case, there’s more room for higher-powered hardware – faster CPU’s & GPU’s, and more spacious, larger Hard Drives. This comes at a cost mind you, as typically these also require more power consumption. So even though you may pay less for the desktop with a slightly faster CPU rating, you’re going to be paying more with every hour that goes by, as it sucks down more power to fuel that machine.

The spec page comparisons are easy to see; you can see technically what you’re going to get for your money. Laptop A is going to give you 2.4ghz, Desktop B gives you 2.6ghz, etc. You can see that. But what about the stuff not on the sheet? How valuable is it to be able to use a “computer” away from a desk? I have been laptop-only for 4 years now; I know what a desk looks like because I pile things on it to file later. That’s it. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize how valuable it is until you try it for a couple of weeks then try to go without it again. It’s nice to sit comfortably and do my work (or whatever you call it anymore). It’s nice to be able to take my computer with me and work while I eat at a café somewhere. Or how nice it is to be able to sit outside in the shade and get my work done, not confined to a single space when something needs to be done.


It’s very liberating, actually. You don’t realize how useful a computer can be, or even how well you can integrate its usefulness into other areas of your life until you have the ability to take it with you everywhere. Mobile address book. Mobile internet access (and thus mobile shop ‘n compare!). Mobile typewriter. Mobile data store. That information that’s sitting there somewhere in your documents folder that you need right now? With a laptop, it can be at your fingertips no matter where you go. And it doesn’t stop there, either. I use mine as a remote control for my music. My computer stores all my music and it plays through my stereo system wirelessly. So when I want to change a song, I reach over and change the song. Washing dishes? Not a problem, just reach over and hit “next.” Hell you may not want to read this, but I can type up or research what it is I am curious about while on the john (the lower-case, figurative john. You get it, right? Oh come on. It’s a toilet folks).

You do give up some power, and usually some screen size too. Not only that, but typically you give up some hard drive space as well. You lose on the spec sheet war. But the thing is, especially with today’s advanced computers & internals, how much does that really impact you? Most of us – including me anymore – do not do much more than mail, documents, pictures, and watching videos. Oh and the internet thing, too. That does not require a fast processor, nor a gaming-centric GPU. Of course if you are a gamer, then of course you need to look at what specifically will support your habit – er, addiction – er, uh, hobby, but those that require the top of the line rarely realize that they’re not the norm, they are the fringe.

I can say that because I have been the fringe, I have needed the higher-powered machines in the past, and I have also seen the improvements technology has made in a short time, seen it erase the needs for higher-powered machines, and also been victim of the desire to have better than I need.

I used to shoot RAW images until not so long ago. It was fun, and it required better programs and hardware than the typical consumer-level stuff. I shopped around when it was time to get new hardware as mine was aging and showing it, and I made the mistake of thinking that I would again need “Higher-level” equipment. This of course would cost me, but I was shooting RAW, dammit! Anyway, my significant other got a consumer machine for herself – a MacBook – as she did not have the same needs I did. Well I played with hers since it was there, and it turned out that today’s bottom-end was more than enough to run the higher-end needs of just a year ago. So take it from me, unless you’re doing serious video editing (think Pixar) or messing around with 14 megapixel images in Photoshop, or manipulating Gene decoding in a Harvard Medical Lab somewhere, don’t fool yourself into thinking you need the 800lb gorilla.

Weigh your options. Think about how much space you need on the machine. Think about how much a desktop weighs you down, in the sense that the seat you select for your desk is the one your butt will be planted in whenever you need to compute. Think about that especially hard, as that’s the biggest of the specs not listed on a sheet.

It would be my recommendation that for most people, a laptop is more than powerful enough. And though you give up some “power,” it’s like getting the Accord instead of the Mustang – yeah it’s less powerful, but if you’re only doing 55mph, will you even notice the power you give up? Probably not. The hard drive can be upgraded easily – most times before you order it – meaning that you can more than likely get room to grow for many years out of it, if not just a plain excess of space! Though you give up some spec sheet stuff, you gain all the intangibles that a desktop unit cannot grant. Mobility. Lower power consumption. Accessibility (tied to mobility). Convenience. Couple this with the fact that price differentiation between the two has fallen; it used to be that a laptop was two to three times more than a “comparable” desktop machine, especially in the windows world, and they were also far less reliable. However the growing pains of the mobile computing revolution seem to have settled; most come with multi-year warranties, and pricing has fallen as such to be close to in-line with desktop machines. Yes you give up a little, but remember all you stand to gain.

I say this as I post from a laptop of my own, of course. Maybe I’m biased? Hey, maybe it means something that I have done it, and chosen to do it not just once, but twice, with my own money. It might mean something.

Peace.

Tags: Technology

Tags: Technology

Last night while at work, I had eaten all of the snacks & dinner that I had taken with me, and was still hungry. So I grabbed a snack. Heard of Junior Mints? Yeah well someone had purchased some Junior Caramels from me, and I was curious, so I bought some of my own. They’re pretty good! How to describe them? Well, you’ve had Milk Duds, right?

Here’s how I thought of it: I think Milk Duds are re-boxed Junior Caramels, with a caveat: When Junior Caramels get too old and turn stale and hard, then they go back and get re-boxed as Milk Duds. This is how it is, I am sure.



Finally got my Time Capsule
So last week, I got ahold of my Time Capsule finally. I know I said I’d have it by February, but it just didn’t happen quite as I had planned. Mostly because I was buying it through amazon, whom I had a $50 gift card through. And they were out of stock until recently.

And it’s not like we didn’t back up in that time. I have an old 160GB Firewire drive that we were using. But we were using it only occasionally, hence the beauty of and desire to get the Time Capsule: wireless, thought-free, automated backups.

It’s nice, though I just today got it working just right. It was working, just not "just right." See, I had set it up in the office, but since that’s in the far corner of the house (where the laptops rarely – if ever – are), the data transfer speeds were suffering. Then I had the thought that I could set up the TC in the living room (where the laptops spend 90% of their time), and use the old routers to hook up the internet from the office and sound system in the living room, and “bridge” the two networks via the TC LAN port. Did I lose you? Yeah well don’t feel bad.

It took me the better part of two days to figure out why I couldn’t get it to actually work. To bore you more with details you probably don't understand, it was rooted in the fact that the old router in the living room that I was bridging the new TC to was in WDS remote mode, and for whatever reason, it would not pass the internet connection to the TC. Once I redid the old network and set it up as a WDS Relay, all was right with the world.

I actually stumbled across this thought while I was working out, strangely enough. Just sort of hit me to try that. Still not sure why it worked. Think maybe it has to be set up as relay so that all nodes hooked ot it see the network as "one device" basically. Might have been because I was all pumped up when I came in from the workout. Might have just scared the routers straight.

Ha ha, yeah that was a good one.

Peace.

Tags: Technology

Netflix sent this our direction and we partook of it. It’s not too bad. It’s a crime drama, there’s really not much more to say about it. It’s not breaking new ground. The Russian Mafia is sneaking in dope to New York, the cops are trying to stop it, war ensues. Nothing new.

There were a few irritating parts, though. It’s hard to explain without giving the whole movie as background, but if you were in a car behind two cars having a shootout, and one was your friends & the others were not? Would you merely speed up to see it? Or would you, say, try to spin the other car out? Well apparently we only get the option to watch here.

And the final act. You’d think that if cops had a place surrounded, this would mean they had the place surrounded. Apparently not. Nope, here, surrounded means “ok we’re at the front door, please don’t a) shoot at us or b) run out the back doors, thanks.” So yeah there’s a few little dumb things, but the one thing that bothered me most about it was Joaquin Phoenix trying to become a cop…

It's OK. It's not the best, not the worst, yet as much as it's viewable, it's also passable. I say C+. It's a fair assessment. I'm being fair on that.



F’ed up Celebrities we're not allowed to mention, Part 1
Why is it that no one talks about Joaquin’s fucked up shoulder? I was curious as to what it was, but there’s, like, nothing I could find about it. Like it’s a taboo subject or something. Or like everyone’s trying to pretend that no one notices.

Yeah right! C’mon, it’s plain as day! He has a f*cked up left shoulder, dammit! He can’t be a cop! He can’t pass the physical! What the hell!? Why does all of Hollywood ignore this fact?

I want to see a parody of his Johnny Cash Performance in Walk the line. You know how they replayed over & over that “hello, I’m Johnny Cash” line? Yeah well I want to see a skit where someone comes out being him being Cash, and says, “Hello, I have a f*cked up shoulder.”

Can we at least admit it’s there? We can all see the elephant, right?



Archives updated
OK so I did finish my updating of the Archive. However, I did get a little lazy about it. Well, not really lazy, just all historical and stuff.

See, there were some entries I came across that the links were simply too good to get rid of, and there were too many to worry about reformatting everything. Blogs like this one, about Michael Jackson’s 50-foot tall robot with lasers for eyes. So I compromised. I did reformat the spacing to match, but I left the text as it was. So some entries will be a slightly different size & font.

And for the record, I’m never going to do this again. They’re stayin the way they are. That was too damn boring, and I’ll be damned if I ever do that again.

Peace.

Tags: Technology

As of right now, I am nearing completion of the old blog updates. It was actually made easier with the realization that not all would need so much work. I knew I wanted to add an introductory pic for each entry, and a lot were missing, but that’s relatively easy, it’s the text that is the labor.

I have been using this basic “format” since about August of last year, and even before that, I used only a slightly modified version of what I’m currently using. So theoretically, once I get to about June 2007, I’m all but through. I say theoretically because had I gone straight through chronologically, that would be true. However once I skipped ahead to see where I’d have to go to, I started just fixing those small issues to break the monotony of the full-fix entries…

So right now, I have about 2 months of full-fixers, and say one month of slight-fixers.



Seen 2 movies, no reviews
I have seen both Atonement & We Own the Night, and not blogged about either. Those are forthcoming, don’t worry. But I think they will wait until I’m done with the archival updates.



On a sadder note
Miles had been looking a little injured a few days ago. Wasn’t sure, couldn’t figure it out, but he seemed to get suddenly better, I figured maybe he was constipated, who knows. Anyway, off to the beach yesterday, and now he really is injured. Threw the ball along the sand, and I guess he twisted his front right ankle in a funky motion to grab the ball off the ground as re ran passed it.

He’s doing better this morning already, but still….

I was talking with The Girl about how I react differently when Zoey & Miles get injured. I do tend to act more “concerned” when Miles is involved. And it’s not that I don’t care about Zoey, it’s that I know Zoey is young and it’s “just” and injury. Miles is 11-½ years old; is this “just” and injury, or the beginning of the end, you know? So yeah, I am always very concerned with his health, because the older he gets, the less likely he is to bounce back. I know this. I don’t want to admit it, but I know it.

I mean, a week sidelined? No problem for a young dog. For him? He’s really active, but if he has to go a week just sitting around, then it takes a bigger toll on him. The next time out he may injure something else.

I may need to get him on a stretching regimen. Maybe enroll him in Yoga classes or something.

Peace.

Tags: Technology, Animals

I did start reformatting my older blog posts to match the current renditions. Normally something like this would be way too mundane for me, but they were so bad I just couldn’t stand linking back to them. I mean, these have a bit of style & substance to them, but the old ones? Well you could tell I copied them out quick fast and in a hurry, not taking the time to pretty the text up any when I made the move to this new software.

They’re still not right. They haven’t been since day one. A lot of the links were lost, and there’s not much I can do about that except rebuild them, and to be honest? There’s no way I’m going to do that. Sorry Charlie. So if you’re reading along and it seems like I’m probably referencing something and you can’t find it? Yeah that’s probably why. A link gone with the wind or some sh!t like that.



Still some to go though
I’m takling my time on this, I decided. I originally was going to just go without blogging for a few days so I could put that time to fixing the old. But it occurs to me now that my archives will take longer than anticipated, so I’m doing it in waves. Right now, I’m through October 2006. Maybe by later I’ll have gone up to 2007. Who knows how long it’ll take.

But it’s not like you were going to read them anyway, so it’s all the same to you, huh?

Peace.

Tags: Technology

Problem was, it was hard/difficult/impossible to edge any area that (a)the grass was lower than the sidewalk, so nothing “laid over” it to cut, or (b)there was no sidewalk to walk it along. I did the scissors/shears thing for a while, but as I recently hoed the back to give it a break betwixt grass & fence, I had much, much more area that fell into category (b).

I haven’t tried to yet. It’s raining. But I’m so happy already. I play tomorrow.



Movie for the night: Michael Clayton
I keep getting lucky with my Netflix Queue. Last week I got pushed ahead to see No Country for Old Men, which was a ‘Long Wait.’ This week, I get Michael Clayton, another well-received flick that was listed as a ‘Wait’ title.

Well at least I hope I’m getting lucky. I mean, I didn’t particularly care for No Country, so I’m trying to lower my expectations for Clooney’s outing here.



Edit:
Actually I should say that I did not break down and buy a week wacker; rather, I sent The Girl out to to get me one. So I caved and she bought. That’s more correct.



Edit:
Someone on the web pointed out to me a typo on my Miles Bio page yesterday. I was missing a period (oh no I’m late!) at the end of the first paragraph. I thanked this person, and they requested that I give them proper credit. So here it goes:

The random bob, a.r.c. Miles Bio Page Proofread & edited by Action Jaxan, WEE (Web Editor Extraordinaire). Real name redacted to protect the innocent.

Personally I just like having made up the 'WEE.' Makes me laugh every time. I imagine a wee little tyke going down a slide. WEE… How fun.

Oh and I also took the time to add some more pics, since I was there fixing typos. Added some to the Family Album, as well!

Peace.

Tags: Entertainment, Technology

First is its keyword structure. In iPhoto, each keyword is its own keyword and its own keyword only, whereas with Aperture, there’s a Hierarchy. So for illustration, say you have a Keyword called Redwoods. Redwoods are trees of course, and suppose you also have Trees as a keyword. So you put Redwoods under Trees, but Trees is already under Nature, which is itself under Outdoors. What this means is, when you apply the Keyword Redwoods to that shot you got of The General Sherman during your Summer vacation, that photo automatically inherits all the keywords above Redwoods. Make sense? See, this way when you go and search for Outdoors (or Nature or Trees for that matter), the shot of that magnificent General Sherman will pop up, even though you didn’t apply that keyword directly to that photo; since it was a Parent in the hierarchy of the keyword you did use (Redwoods), it’s applied automatically, or assumed.

Second, is the fact that I still do tend to tweak my photos. Yeah it’s not as much as when I was shooting RAW, but since this camera shoots a little more “full-frame,” instead of a more widescreen format, I find I like to spend some time cropping some pics here & there to add a little more ambiance to them. In iPhoto, when you edit a picture, the program keeps the original, but then creates a copy of the picture with the edits you made. This means, if you change the brightness of a picture, now you have two almost identical files, with two almost identical File Sizes, essentially doubling its drain on your Hard Drive space (if the original was 2MB, you make an edit and now you are taking up 4MB for the edited & original files).

Aperture doesn’t do this, it instead displays onscreen what the commands you input for edits will produce. In this way, the original file is kept, but no ‘duplicate’ is made, rather just the instructions for creating it, which take up far, far less room (orders of magnitude less).

So yes, iPhoto is more friendly by a smidgeon than Aperture (especially 1.5, the original version that I own), but it would also lead me to expanded disk usage, and I’d also have to be much more Johnny-on-the-spot with my keywording. Hey, maybe the next iteration of iPhoto will inherit the “non-destructive” editing of Aperture and the keyword hierarchy too, but until then I think I’ll be sticking with Aperture.

Peace.

Tags: Technology

You know, those beasts I paid nearly $200 for? Yeah, those, th