wiredfool

So recently I bought tickets from that monopolist that we all know and sometimes tolerate, Ticketmaster. And being the paranoid techie that I am, I gave them a tagged unique address. If there were obvious “spam me” check boxes, I unchecked them.

Well, they either sold or gave that unique tagged email address to the House of Blues. Ticketmaster’s privacy policy is that they sell the list, but they do give it to the promoter of the concert. I’ve looked around, but I can’t tell if the House of Blues is the prometer of the concert I’m going to. It’s not on the Ticketmaster website.

At any rate, I don’t believe that I have a business relationship with the House of Blues. Yet they’ve now sent me 2 pieces of web bugged, html heavy email, with subject lines in all caps followed by !!!.

I guess it’s time to bounce that address. Good thing it wasn’t my real one. They join amazon.com, warehouse.com, etrade, usair, and visorcentral.com as businesses who’ve landed in my blackhole list. To be fair, the others are (for the most part) ones that email without my permission, not necessarily sellers of addresses.

If only it was so easy to bounce the psychic spams. You would think that they would just know that I’m not going to respond.

I just started a site at weblogger.com, which has the Esoteric Settings Plugin installed. I discovered that if I change the name of the site from the name I gave it when I created it, turning on the “Require Membership” feature fails. The work-around is to change the name of the site back to the name at site creation time, turn on Membership, then rename the site.

E.g., created site “mysite”, so URL will be mysite.weblogger.com. Changed name in Appearance prefs to “My Site”, so title on hom page looks good. Try to turn on Require Membership in Esoteric Settings plug-in–fails with an error (that I don’t recall). Rename site back to “mysite”, turn on Require Membership, rename site again–works.

Thoughts?

Ed

I did Folklife on Saturday this past weekend. It’s a wonderful collection of where we all come from, and some of where we’re going to. Jason Webley (pictured) was busking a bit, and will be having a CD release party at the Paradox on Saturday. Some of the better ones that I heard were: Mango Son, a really fun Carribean/Latin dance band, the Guarneri Underground, a wild afro celtic electric band, and some Samba players.

I’ve got a few more publishable pics from the weekend, but they’re not quite ready yet.

We’re pretty sure that the answer isn’t Bertrand Russel.

Or Ernest Hemmingway.

But 2 teams put that down for “Who are Bert and Ernie named after”

Vermont seems to be a safe bet for anything having to do with a state. And I’m embarassed to admit that of the 4 longest bridges in the world built after the Verrazano Narrows, I only got the country right for 2, and didn’t get any of the bridges. (Although in further research, I did know the expressway that goes over the one in Japan, and there is a 5th bridge that didn’t make the answers. Not that I knew that one either.) But I did know that they crashed more cars in The Blues Brothers than in any other movie.

But in the last round of the night somehow my team came up with a winning combination of knowing something about e-bay, the relative abundance of blood types, and the masonic symbol.

So I guess being a repository of useless information can be useful sometimes.

Did a couple of days work on the garden this weekend, now that we actually have spring weather. This one is minus three pricker bushes, a bunch of weeds, some irises that will be transplanted, and a bunch of evergreen bush encroaching from the neighbor’s yard.

And now there’s a foot or more of compost spread all over it. This is going to be for things that like some shade, since after April, this garden gets no direct sun.

The weather has finally warmed up. The sun is sort of out. The cats are out. And I get 3 bars of signal to the airport hub inside.

I’ve finally moved my daily use desktop machine to OSX. 14 months after it first came out, 14 months after installing it once, and after 26 months of having OS9.04 be what I looked at every day for 10 hours.

I’ve moved other machines already. The laptop. Servers. Random testing on light use machines. But not the one machine that if it stopped working would throw me into disarray. I’m not normally someone to upgrade. I’ve been bitten by the transitional downtime more than making up for any gains that get from the new system. So what’s changed this time?

Well for one, I’m forging ahead without regard to downtime. But apart from that, everything I need is now on OSX. 10.1.4 is fast enough on a g4/400. Frontier is stable. Postgres is nice. Adium is better than AIM. I have three browsers in the dock, and none of them are MSIE. It no longer looks new and wierd, now that I’ve lived with it on the laptop for a while.

In short, it’s fast enough and it does everything I need it to on 2 year old equipment. Which is more than I can say for OS9 anymore.

OsX was not the only unsable process on the machine that was having freezes and a kernel panic. One of the frontier processes running on that machine was suffering from about 3 unexplained quits or freezes per day. I”m not really sure what was happening, since my monitor scipt doesn’t report the difference between a quit and killing and restarting a hung process.

I replaced a 512 meg stick memory on that machine on friday.

Since that time, I’ve had no unexplained quites, freezes or crashes. None. In this time, I would generally expect about 9 interventions by the monitoring script, and possibly one crash resulting in a log from the os crash logging process.

To be sure, this is only 72 hours of data, but it looks very promising. I need to wait about a month to see if the os stability improves.

I managed to wade through the lines for ‘Star Wars 32, the search for more money’ to see ‘About a Boy’ last night.

It’s a riot. The entire theatre was roaring at times. Especially at the dead duck incident. Hugh Grant is the perfect ass. (and he has the coolest toys. A g4 cube with apple studio display (15″) and OSX. A perfect modern condo. A tt coupe.)

They captured the feel of the book just perfectly, even better than the rather good screen adaptation of High Fidelity (also written by the Nick Hornby). For one, they actually set it in Britain. And Hugh Grant carries more of the emptiness of being a nobody that just didn’t come through as clearly in High Fidelity.

Happy Syttende Mai! Happy Birthday Grandpa!

Syttende Mai is Norwegian Constitution Day, so that’s kind of like being born on the 4th of July.

*** Osx Crashes.

First time: Hmmm, that’s wierd.
Second time: I bet it’s hardware.
Third time: Time to replace the memory.
Fourth time: Gives me an opportunity to replace the memory during unscheduled downtime.

Of course with os9, you never thought that it was hardware, since there were so many other things that could go wrong.

FWIW, this one of the screens you don’t want to see.