Front page

Are you afraid of the dark?

(Click to invert colors, weenie.) (Requires JavaScript.)




All email will be assumed to be for publication unless otherwise requested.


What's in the banner?


Thursday, January 19, 2006



Happy Kitty Catta Loggie


Last month I mentioned some presents I got, among them Mike Nelson's Happy Kitty Pony Bunny. Well, I just found out today that the name of the book is Happy Kitty Bunny Pony. I discovered this when I was cataloging my new books and, being too lazy to scan in the cover, I searched for it on the web.

Happy Kitty Pony Bunny turned up only two hits. One of them was my blog. And the other was a site that put my blog through a "landonizer". Unfortunately, that site is down for "maintenance" (and lawsuits, maybe). I won't link. You can google "happy kitty pony bunny" if you're curious. I couldn't find out much about it, except that Mahmood of Mahmood's Den put his site through it, and says it's "how you'd read this site if you were stoned". I just want to know who Landon is. It turns out, by the way, that this blog is not funnier when you're stoned. Don't know if that's good or bad. (UPDATE: And now the landonized Machinery of Night is gone! Spooky.)

Anyhow, did I mention I was cataloging my books? I have many books. Lots and lots of books. And it's hard to keep track of them all, who wrote what and where they are and so forth. Long, long ago I started keeping an index card catalog (which I still keep). Then, several years ago, I bought some inexpensive cataloging software called SmartTracker Books, which, as you see, has been discontinued. I spent many happy evenings entering the information from the index cards into the catalog.

SmartTracker was OK, especially for the money, but it was kind of limited as to the kinds of things you could catalog (when I bought it, at least). But its biggest drawback was that it ran under Windows, which I rarely use for anything. I think I hadn't booted to my Windows95 partition for something like two years, until the other day.

So I get this new computer, and I install Suse 10.0 on it, which comes with Tellico, a collection organizer that runs under KDE (a Linux windows manager). (Man, you gotta love a site that calls itself "periapsis". Look it up! It's fun!)

I am in love. Tellico is much more flexible than SmartTracker was, and lets you add and name fields. It also lets you add an image of the cover, which is great for those books which have been reprinted a billion times, so that you're never quite sure which edition you have (for those pedantic enough to care about those things). And you can format some fields as tables, which means, for example, you can do a track listing on your CDs, or list the contents of your short story collections. This way, for example, I can finally determine how many different recordings of "Quiet Village" I have (too damn many), or find out which book contains Mirian Allen deFord's "Slips Take Over" (although that's unnecessay, since I already know it's in Worlds of Maybe).

Even better, you can make several different kinds of collections! It comes with options for books, comic books, bibliography, music, videos, coins, stamps, cards, or wine, OR you can make a custom collection. Most of the collecting software I looked at required separate licenses for different kinds of collections.

Now I'm a catalogin' fool. I've got coin, paper money, stamp, and postcard collections, in addition to my books and music. Can't wait to catalog those babies. Or, hey! I could catalog my magazines. And my software! And my data CDs! And my ephemera collection! Oh, and the canned goods! I have to catalog the canned goods.

What's that, honey? Put the computer down and come watch TV? No, no, I'll bring the computer in. That way I can get a start on cataloging those VHS tapes...

Friday, January 13, 2006



BEHOLD THE APOCALYPSE

Yesterday the Respect MP [George Galloway] was pretending to be a cat, purring and licking imaginary milk from the hands of actress Rula Lenska as he missed the vote in the Commons on the Crossrail project which affects his voters.

The Daily Mail has the story. And the pics. See this? That's what the End Times look like. And gouge out that vile jelly rather than view this.

This is it, people. This is the beginning of the rout of civilization. Fly, you fools!

Brought to you by Dr. Frank.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006



Feliz Año Nuevo!


Niles and I don't go out on New Year's Eve. I'd want to, if we could go to the kind of party Jimmy Stewart and Carole Lombard went to in Made for Each Other, with shining silver decorations and good music and no ugly, screaming singers.

And that's why we don't pay any attention to New Year's Eve, TV, either, except for a minute or so to watch the ball drop in Times Square. The NYE shows are full of people dressed like thugs screaming their lungs up. That ain't music, kids.

(Yes, I am Officially Old.)

But a couple of years ago we found a show we did like to watch on New Year's Eve. It's on Univision, one of the Spanish language networks. This despite the fact that my Spanish is very iffy and Niles's is nonexistent. (Though he does watch soccer in Spanish. I believe he finds that being unable to understand the color commentary enhances his enjoyment of the game.)

The Univision NYE show takes place on a what seems to be a talk show set. The host is a guy who looks like Gerhard Schroder, and he always has a couple of oily young men with bad haircuts, a handful of jiggly young women in skimpy costumes, and is occasionally joined by some leathery old geezers for sentimental moments. After a few minutes of talk the host introduces a band, they play a song, and afterwards chat with the host for a couple minutes. Then it's off for a commercial, and when we come back there's more corny yuks (this is clear even across the language barrier) with the bouncy young women and the over-moisturized young men.

I like this show because of its old-fashioned innocence. Last year the audience was full of everyone from teens to old ladies, and they all seemed to be having a swell time. This year the audience seemed mostly young folk (we figure it's filmed in August or something).

But all good things must come to an end, and at 12:30 Gerhard and Co. sign off, leaving us to the tender mercies of the NYE program for the young and hip, hosted by a couple of thuggishly-dressed young people.

Now, when you take your headphones off, what you see is pretty much what's on the English-language shows: singers in odd costumes backed by pretty young people dressed in rags and convulsing to sweaty dance routines. Put the headphones back on, however, and you get music. We saw one young feller in red leather pants leaping about the stage, his back-up dancers thrusting and presenting, but when we could hear the music we found he was singing a beautiful ballad.

And this was true of the two or three other numbers we hung around for. I guess criminal couture is so fashionable it can't be dispensed with, even for crooners. Anyhow, it's a relief to know there's someplace they're still playing music, as opposed to obscene screamings, even if I can't understand the words in either case.

(Back in my day, sonny, we had real singers, like David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman and that nice little Michael Jackson...)

That second show had one of those "Cavalcade of Stars" intros, where they name all the acts you're going to get to see for 2.3 seconds each. (Daddy Yankee! Shakira! Tonny Tun Tun! Christian Castro! Gabriel Garcia Marquez! Queen Latifah! John Kenneth Galbraith! and Carrot Top!) (OK, so some of those I kinda made up.) It reminded me of the intro to the Star Wars Holiday Special (Bea Arthur! Harvey Korman! Art Carney! and Starship!). It's good to know that there's a world where cheese (or queso) still lives. I should learn Spanish.

Oh, and I found out, from that second show, that "Gerhard Schroder" is actually Don Francisco (WARNING! Wikipedia!), ne Mario Kreutzberger, whose parents feld Nazi Germany for Chile. He's the host of Sábado Gigante, which I'd heard of but never seen. It sounds fun. And cheesy.

Sunday, January 01, 2006



LIVE FROM THE LIVING ROOM!


Well, not from the living room per se, but from the "dining area", which is sort of in the living room.

Natalie Solent posts a stirring tale about do-it-yourself furniture assembly, in which the Solents assemble a couple of beds using only their native wit, a few little allen wrenches, and metal shop fit for a Navy yard.

(However, I have to ask: couldn't you have just found a compatible metric-threaded screw and used your own taps?)

Anyhow, this little episode from Chez Solent has made me feel much better about my new computer.

My on-again, off-again career has suddenly switched on again (temporarily), and I needed to buy a new computer to handle the work. So I got an HP zv6270us notebook (my first laptop computer), which has an AMD Athlon 64-bit processor. Here's where the theme from Jaws should be playing.

Windows set up was uneventful, of course, but I keep Windows around only for laughs, and because it came on the computer. I don't think I've booted Windows95 on my old computer for two years. The thing is to get Linux installed on it, and after that all the scientific software which was the entire reason for buying the damned thing.

So, Linux. We were RedHat users in this household, but Niles (part of whose job is system administration) says they've become stupid and expensive, so he's switched to Suse. This may turn out to be ironic.

OK, first step, install Suse 10.0, which is the latest release. Well, unfortunately, it installs as far as probing the PCI bus, and quits.

We google up some stuff which suggests this may be a clock problem, and that a new version of the BIOS would fix it. The latest version of the BIOS is F.1B, which is also the version we have. BUT, the date for the BIOS release on the relevant HP webpage is Nov. 18, while the ship date on the computer is Nov. 8. How can it have the latest BIOS when it was shipped ten days before the BIOS was released?

We decide HP may be trying to pull a fast one (upgrading the BIOS without changing the version number), so we download and flash the new BIOS. When we unpack the Windows executable, it gives a date of Nov. first, so our BIOS could be the right one after all.

In any case, there's no change.

We try installing the 32-bit version Suse, and it goes in smoothly. That's a relief, but it would be nice to have the 64-bit version running. More googling discovers that other people have solved this problem by passing the boot parameter "noapic". We try that and experience sweet, sweet success.

Huzzah! However, those other people have also noted that this disables the on-board wireless card. I cannot use the wireless network.

We try, anyway. Ndiswrapper is a snare and delusion. For one thing, there is no ndiswrapper module added, but there is a wlan. We're not sure how to proceed from there. I read a couple of things which suggest an older version of ndiswrapper might work better, but Niles's patience has run thin. PCMCIA wireless cards are cheap, he says. Let's go get one of those. So last week we picked one up for a song. Then we plugged that puppy in, booted the computer, and...

It didn't work.

So in desperation Niles removed the card and stuck it back in again and WHOA NELLY! IT'S ALIVE! After that, it took a mere three hours more to get the network configured so that it would actually come on again at boot, and to get the computer to remember its name when running off the wireless, and other trivia.

ADDENDUM: Actually, it took more than that. We tried to make it so the ethernet and/or the wireless could be turned on manually, but this never worked -- rather, it would work once, and not again. We finally set the network to start at card/cable insertion, and that seems to do the trick. Although we're not sure what would happen if we accidentally left the ethernet cable plugged in when we inserted the wireless card. We figure it'd be something like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."

So, W00T! I'm mobile! Except, of course, that if I want to move the computer I have to unplug the power cord, the mouse, the keyboard, and the ZIP drive. And the battery life is only so long, which is why I typed almost all of this on the old computer.

The other reason is that I don't know for sure that we won't have to take the poor thing back, in the end. I installed my primary scientific software OK, but the secondary package, which I absolutely need, barfed at the 64-bit libraries. If I can't get all this stuff installed, I'm going to have to try it all again with the 32-bit version of Suse (oy!), and if that doesn't work, I'll have to get a different computer. So all this must be done before the exchange period runs out.

On Christmas Eve, while others had visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, I dreamt that we were having a Christmas party, in which every associated item -- decorations, food, drink, guests -- had to be "downloaded" and "installed". No, I'm not kidding.

UPDATE: The secondary scientific package was installed simply by using the binaries pre-built for RedHat. They seem to work. Magic! Some other stuff, still vitally important, does not, but I'm pretty sure this will be a simple fix. So it looks like this thing is here to stay. Now all that's left is paying the bills.