***Dave Does the Blog

Upgrade

I’ve installed MT 2.63 here. You shouldn’t see much of significance change from it — I’m not adopting Textile or other formatting tools, etc. With the new Sanitize feature, though,…

I’ve installed MT 2.63 here. You shouldn’t see much of significance change from it — I’m not adopting Textile or other formatting tools, etc. With the new Sanitize feature, though, it’s possible that some HTML tags won’t work in comments you submit. If it’s something that should work, let me know, though I think I’ve enabled most of the ones that are okay from a security standpoint.

I may do something with a Creative Commons copyright. We’ll see.

And I do have the most insidious temptation to install the MovableJive plug-in.

I am looking forward to MT Pro. I’ll be curious to see what sort of “photo blog” tools they fold into it, as well as the remote blogging capabilities.

Ruh-roh, Reorge

How evil are you? (via InstaPundit)…

How evil are you?

(via InstaPundit)

UK03 – Film at 11

We got back the “real” film, along with CDs for each roll, so I should have those pics up in the next day or so (depending on other workload, ahem)….

We got back the “real” film, along with CDs for each roll, so I should have those pics up in the next day or so (depending on other workload, ahem).

Some interesting observations on the new Kodak B&W film which can be processed with the normal C-41 color:

The prints (on color stock, I assume) have an odd sepia quality to them. The CDs don’t, thank goodness.
The film, ISO 400, did a really crappy job in low-contrast or dark conditions. The best photos by far were with good, high-contrast exteriors.

It’s possible, of course, that some of this was due to the CostCo processing.

Fortunately, only one of the rolls, a B&W one, seems to have been damaged by x-rays.

One other thing which must be noted: even though I tend to think of myself as the “artistic” member of the household, Margie is a damn fine photographer. Even if the pictures she takes of me make me look fat.

The Great Karnak Predicts …

Prediction 1: Iraq will hem and haw and make loud, outraged noises about the al-Samoud missiles, and then, at the 11th Hour (Saturday) will announce it’s beginning to make plans…

Prediction 1: Iraq will hem and haw and make loud, outraged noises about the al-Samoud missiles, and then, at the 11th Hour (Saturday) will announce it’s beginning to make plans to start proceeding on eventual action to negotiate the terms on how to initiate destruction of the missiles.

Prediction 2: Hans Blix will report this as substantive progress.

After all, if Iraq suddenly “discovering” some old papers and a mysteriously “overlooked” bomb counts as “positive signs,” surely announcing agreement in principle to considering yet another demand — or perhaps even declaring the start of a time table for the missiles’ future destruction — would surely be all that it would take to prove once again that inspections are “working.”

Right?

Change of plans

Well, I was going to watch Katherine tonight, whilst Margie went off to a business dinner, but after I’d picked up Katherine from her office, taking the van of course,…

Well, I was going to watch Katherine tonight, whilst Margie went off to a business dinner, but after I’d picked up Katherine from her office, taking the van of course, the snow started coming down-down-down.

Katherine tried her best to sing, “Rain, rain, go away // Come again some other day,” on the way home, as inspired by Nona, but it didn’t do much good.

Bottom line, Margie, left with the ultra-light-weight Saturn, and finding an inch of snow on it already, decided not to drive downtown and then back home later tonight.

Smart girl.

Color commentary

The Supreme Court has agreed that you can’t stack the jury with whites, even if you think blacks will be more sympathetic to the accused — and if there’s evidence…

The Supreme Court has agreed that you can’t stack the jury with whites, even if you think blacks will be more sympathetic to the accused — and if there’s evidence that you have, that’s valid grounds for a defendent’s appeal.

Well, duh.

Another example of why I’ve lost faith in capital punishment in this country. Not that it’s wrong per se, but that we’ve got way too much margin for error.

Interestingly enough, the only dissenter in the 8-1 opinion was Justice Thomas.

Insecurity

Yeesh. One can only hope that this story (with follow-up here) at least causes a few red faces. If not firings. A few canings might be in order, too. Meanwhile,…

Yeesh. One can only hope that this story (with follow-up here) at least causes a few red faces. If not firings. A few canings might be in order, too.

Meanwhile, I still can’t carry a pen knife on my key chain if I want to fly anywhere.

(via InstaPundit)

A splash of color

Mutter, mutter, mutter. So some months ago, my Exchange message store got moved from the local server here in Denver to one of our data centers. There were sound practical…

Mutter, mutter, mutter.

So some months ago, my Exchange message store got moved from the local server here in Denver to one of our data centers. There were sound practical reasons for this, and I was assured that other folks had done it, and it would actually be faster for me for some things (remote dial-in, for example), and etc.

One thing they didn’t tell me was that my Outlook performance would go in the bloody toilet.

I mean, going from one folder to another was taking 20, 30, 40 seconds, with all the Outlook windows freezing during that process.

I’m easily distracted. In that amount of time I’ve jumped over to an IE window and started blogging something, or reading an article, or something else that then sends me back to Outlook a few minutes later.

I mentioned this lag to some folks, and they clucked their tongues and opined that was a pretty sad state of affairs, but, darn, naught to be done for it.

So finally, this morning, I said, “Screw it.” I really like organizing my mail into folders for the different content areas I oversee, but I can’t keep bouncing back and forth between them now with that sort of latency. So I started archiving stuff out, and merging the folders into a single “In” folder.

(I don’t leave everything in the Inbox for a couple of reasons. First, older versions of Outlook occasionally lost the Inbox contents. Second, and more important, if I reply to a message in a non-Inbox folder, Outlook lets me save the reply in the same folder. If I do it in the Inbox, the reply can only be saved in Sent Items. Which is really dumb, if you ask me. Which they didn’t, obviously.)

It was in the process of doing this that I noticed something very odd. The new folder I was moving things into was accessible at a (relatively) blinding speed.

But it had lots of messages, right? And so it should have been dog slow, right? The only difference between that folder and all my others was …

… the Custom View I had, which elegantly and very helpfully had different font sizes and colors for messages from different folks. So messages from my boss showed up big and blue and, thus, insistent on being answered, and Internet messages were clearly different, and my reports showed up distinctively, and …

I turned Custom View off on a folder that was dog slow. It was suddenly greyhound fast.

Son of a —

Clearly what happens is that the Outlook client is evaluating, one at a time, every single message in a folder when it is opened, so that it can be displayed properly (if the folder’s View is set to do that). For messages that have a simple binary, like opened/not, that’s easy. For messages that have a View based on sender, it’s not.

So I can use this Very Useful Tool of Custom Views, or I can get reasonable performance.

Frell.

I can route messages from some folks into certain folders, but that breaks up message threads. I can flag messages from my boss as high priority, but that attribute carries to any replies I send, too, which is not what I want.

Hrm.

Mysteries

You know, this sort of thing explains a lot about life. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a big parking lot ……

You know, this sort of thing explains a lot about life.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a big parking lot …

Debate

Just when you think Saddam is out of tricks to delay or obfuscate, he comes up with something new: challenging Bush to a televised debate. CBS News anchor Dan Rather,…

Just when you think Saddam is out of tricks to delay or obfuscate, he comes up with something new: challenging Bush to a televised debate.

CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who conducted the interview, said he asked Saddam if his offer was a joke.
“This is something proposed in earnest,” Saddam said in response. “Out of my respect for the people of the United States and my respect for the people of Iraq and the people of the world, I call for this because war is not a joke.”

And he should know.

If this gambit fails, will he next suggest a duel at twenty paces?

Loss of a loved one

Certainly when I think I’ve lost some critical data, I can get depressed, or furious, or wildly oscillate between both. So I guess it only makes sense that a data…

Certainly when I think I’ve lost some critical data, I can get depressed, or furious, or wildly oscillate between both.

So I guess it only makes sense that a data recovery company would hire a crisis counsellor to intercede on calls they get when the caller is just too overwrought to talk to a techie.

Chessin, 29, says her suicide hot line experience is invaluable in helping distraught computer users handle a data disaster.
“It’s similar,” she said. “But when people call a hot line, you need to help them find their own solutions. Now I can offer solutions to people’s problems.”
Another key difference: People who call a suicide hot line usually don’t call back. That would be for one reason or another, of course. But people who seek help from DriveSavers do frequently call again to say thanks.
“That’s really nice,” Chessin said.

Now that I think of it, a lot of regular computer help desks could use with someone like that, too.

This-or-That

It’s this week’s This-or-That Tuesday:…

It’s this week’s This-or-That Tuesday:

Continue reading “This-or-That”

UK03 – The rest of the picture

Got the rest of the digital photos up, covering (mostly) Wales: – Stonehenge, Avebury, Tintern Abbey, Chepstow Castle – Cardiff Bay and Caerphilly Castle – Raglan Castle, London, and Home…

Got the rest of the digital photos up, covering (mostly) Wales:

– Stonehenge, Avebury, Tintern Abbey, Chepstow Castle

– Cardiff Bay and Caerphilly Castle

– Raglan Castle, London, and Home

Tomorrow night I can start dealing with the print film.

Gee, thanks, Bill

Not enough that half the people and their dead fathers/uncles/spouses/bosses in Africa are trying to make me rich, now people are directing the other half to me. Oh, well –…

Not enough that half the people and their dead fathers/uncles/spouses/bosses in Africa are trying to make me rich, now people are directing the other half to me.

Oh, well — there no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Face of America

Doyce writes an interesting bit about the view of Americans abroad, and the perils of taking Government Positions as being the actual positions of the populace therein. Worthwhile reading. I…

Doyce writes an interesting bit about the view of Americans abroad, and the perils of taking Government Positions as being the actual positions of the populace therein. Worthwhile reading.

I have heard that there’s something of a backlash against French wine these days. Which will no doubt be used by some folks back there as more grist for the mill. “Those simplisme Americains … zey not only are wild cowboys, zey a are out to ‘arm ze French farmehrs and ruin zeir own palates! Incroyable!“

These things, over time, pass.

Still, Doyce’s comments on the infiltration of American Stuff into the British cityscape are worth thinking about. One of the things I noted the last time I was in Britain is that chain restaurants were virtually unheard of, except for the relatively rare American fast food place in London, or the innumerable Burger Kings, KFCs and (home grown) Little Chef joints along the Motorways.

Doyce is right. There’s a lot more McDs and BKs and Starbucks visible than their used to be.

But let’s also remember that it’s not American tourists making that happen. (Tourism, especially from the US to the UK, is still very down; most tourists in Britain are either from the Continent or from within Britain herself.) It’s the Brits themselves, deciding that they want a quick Big Mac instead of fish and chips, or that they’d rather read a Newsweek than the Sun.

Ditto for those McDonalds in Paris, which French radicals so love to burn down. Even if they managed to wangle their way into the City of Lights through some underhanded payoff of politicians by American Big Business Conglomerates, they’re being supported by the ordinary French (or British) man-on-the-street. The bland predictability of franchise fat and salt and gristle is apparently something people want — and if there’s no French or British business ready to step into that evolutionary niche, then McDonalds wins.

I can see why people resent it. Heck, I resent the ubiquitous-throughout-Shadow Starbucks — except when I actually want a caffeine-and-sugar pick-me-up, and I know what it is that I want.

Which ties back into this post, earlier today.

I don’t know. I’d hate to see a Starbucks in the British Museum, rather than the cafe they have there. On the other hand, I’d hate to tell the Brits they can’t drink a Fudge Brownie Frappacino if they really want one.

Missed news

Whilst we were gone, Google bought Pyra, the Blogger and BlogSpot people. I have no idea what this means (and none of the commentators on it seem to, either), but…

Whilst we were gone, Google bought Pyra, the Blogger and BlogSpot people.

I have no idea what this means (and none of the commentators on it seem to, either), but it’s certainly a Big Event in the blogosphere. If nothing else, it may be Google trying to stay a step ahead of Lycos and AOL, both of which are introducing blogging tools.

Interesting.

(via Blather)

Shields Up

Imagine that — the Iraqi government, which is taking the lead in “assigning” voluntary Human Shields who have traveled to Iraq, is more interested in protecting communication centers and oil…

Imagine that — the Iraqi government, which is taking the lead in “assigning” voluntary Human Shields who have traveled to Iraq, is more interested in protecting communication centers and oil refineries than, say, orphanages.

Oh, yeah, and they seem to be particularly interested in protecting targets that are next to military bases.

Imagine that.

(via Blaster’s Blog)

On the street where you live

Here’s a disturbing blog article about how the USA PATRIOT (gack) Act requires database checking every time someone closes on a house sale deal. If either the buyer or seller…

Here’s a disturbing blog article about how the USA PATRIOT (gack) Act requires database checking every time someone closes on a house sale deal. If either the buyer or seller are on The List of Suspected Bad Guys, the settlement agents are supposed to delay the closing and not let anyone (but the Feds) know they are doing so.

Yeah, that makes me feel a lot safer.

Lessons from the past

Some words to think about. Many people said in the 1970s that Latin Americans were unsuited for democracy, in the early 1980s that East Asians were unsuited for democracy, in…

Some words to think about.

Many people said in the 1970s that Latin Americans were unsuited for democracy, in the early 1980s that East Asians were unsuited for democracy, in the late 1980s that Eastern Europeans and Russians were unsuited for democracy. Many people worried in 1945 that the Germans and Japanese were unsuited for democracy. There were reasons for their doubts and fears. But the United States took chances on democracy, transforming Germany and Japan into decent independent nations we can live with and helping to move Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia in the same direction. We have no choice now but to do the same, first in Iraq and then in other parts of the Middle East.

(via InstaPundit)