"Make a Picture"

ever changing world forms a perfect scene
it's fleeting - lasts but for an instant
camera shutter snaps
the scene is gone forever, but the image remains
mechanically captured by the camera - imperfect
only the idea of the scene really
maybe better - idealized, altered for aesthetics
the scene the image conveys maybe never existed

or maybe there is no camera
only the mind captures the scene
the mind of an artist can recreate
or selfishly horde
the mind is a better camera
its perception is fluid
molded by artist into the ideal
it takes shape in words or music, paint or clay

the artist abandons it
not knowing its value
leaves it as an orphan to the world
and moves on to the next creation
the artist lives for the act,
not for the result

the artist defies labels
the truly original gets bad reviews
the critic can not label the unique
in frustration, he decides he hates it
later, once labeled, it is appreciated
the artist does not seek favor
and cares not for reviews
"critics can bite me"

Phone Book

Put all your phone books in the recycling bin and tell the phone company to stop sending them - you have the internet (you're on it now). You can find any numbers/addresses you need on the internet. So you don't need any more paper phone books wasting paper.

^{Waste of Paper}

Plus, the internet's faster - you probably have the computer on most of the time anyway and anybody who still doesn't have some sort of "high speed" internet needs to get out of the stone age. Once you are familiar with the routine of online white/yellow pages, you may find that it is actually faster than thumbing through the yellow pages.

Blogger Beta is great...

I like the new blogger (is it still beta, I don't even know). It uses google accounts for login. So I'm already logged in if I'm logged into Gmail. But out of habit, I still hit the Sign out button on the blogger page when I'm done blogging. Then it logs me out of everything google. They should at least have a confirmation dialog - "This will log you out of your Google Account - are you sure?" or something.

Some New Links in the Sidebar

I've updated the sidebar links. I won't duplicate the links here, you can check them out in the sidebar. over there. right there ---->

I've kept one lucid dreaming link and the wetware hacking link. The first new one is Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The rest are all about ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain)

Pissin' me off

About the only time I get really irritable is when I've been up driving all night and am still on the road the next morning.

7:30 am - I'm trying to put some gas in my car. My check card is not working because the stripe is too worn out for the pump's temperamental reader. So I hit the "Pay Inside" button. And the pump says "Please Wait". There's a sign on there that says "Prepay after dark" - well, Ok, it's still dark, but I would not consider 7:30 am to be "after dark" by this time, most normal people would consider it to be a new day and in fact would have already begun their day. So I waited because it said "Please wait". But it never did anything and I'm wondering if the clerks consider it to be "after dark". So I start all over - hang up the hose, hit "pay inside" and stare at the "Please wait" screen which shows a little clock with the minute hand seeming to move up and down on the left side of the clock while the hour hand remains fixed on the 6. And I consider beating the hell out of the gas pump - I have been thinking that I should carry a sledge hammer in my car at all times. After I go through the "pay inside" routine a third time, a clerk comes on the intercom and tells me that I do in fact have to prepay. Well, they should say "prepay between dusk and dawn" or maybe replace the "Please wait" screen with a "prepay in effect" screen. The very term "wait" tends to convey the idea that something is going to happen eventually.


Other than that, the trip went pretty well and I made good time.

printer spiders linux

Uncle Dave was here before Thanksgiving. He wanted to print a Sudoku puzzle that he'd been working on in Excel. I said I had a printer and we could dig it out and hook it up to his computer. We did so, but it refused to print - it had the right drivers and all, but the light wouldn't stop flashing and the head went wild when the thing started up - I mean it would slam home so hard that the printer would jump sideways a few inches.

He finished the puzzle in Excel and we both forgot about the printer - until today. I plugged it into my computer with its fancy new Debian GNU/Linux OS. The computer recognized the printer and configured it in a flash - no 45 Mb printer driver downloads (yeah, that's the actual size of the hefty windows driver for the same printer - I'm sure that about 2 megs of that are driver and the rest HP software crap). But it exhibited the exact same behavior as earlier.

Then I took a look inside the thing. There was crud everywhere in there - it looked like someone used the insides for a place mat for a two year old eating spaghetti. And there was crud all over the encoder strip (the plastic strip with a million little black lines that is used by the print head to keep track of its position). That explains the slamming home issue and probably most of the rest of the funny business too.


So I took the top of the shell off - 4 screws - and proceeded to clean all the crud out of the thing. The the source of the crud became apparent. There were mouse droppings and some mouse collected junk in there. Fortunately the mice did not chew on any of the printer internals. However, while cleaning the plastic strip, some of the encoder lines came off with the crud - that's not good. But it was much better than it was to begin with - not sure what a few missing lines will do, but I decided to fire it up and find out.

Well, it does print now. But those missing lines cause it to loose a bit of ground on every pass - so it creeps closer and closer to one side on each pass. The result is a skewed print - still serviceable in a pinch, but pretty funny looking - I'd post a picture, but I'm too lazy to take one - maybe later.

I have spiders crawling all around my room. Every few minutes I see one dart across the floor from one pile of clothes to another. I like spiders. I think of them as my pets. They keep the mosquitoes and flies down in here.

I really like Linux and open source software in general. When I get bored I like to install some new flavor of Linux on one of my computers. I liked the latest Debian testing release (codenamed "Etch") so much when I installed it on my desktop that I've also installed it on my laptop.

One feature that I really like is smart command line completion. Command line completion has been around for a long time. But in all my experience with it up to now, it used some simple logic to determine if the word it is completing is supposed to be a command or a not-a-command, which is assumed to be a file name. I have not explored the new smart functionality fully as of yet, but it knows about file types, and commands that take other commands as arguments.

the which command takes another command as an argument and tells you the location of the file that would be executed if you were going to execute the second command. The old completion would try to match files in the current directory, the new completion tries to match commands - smart.

some commands only make sense with certain file types. mplayer plays video and audio files - it wouldn't make sense to pass it any other type of file. previously, completion was only semi-usefull. I have ripped some of my dvds to my desktop harddrive which is accessible to my laptop (better screen for movies) through nfs. I have ripped the subtitles with the movies and the subtitle files have the same name as the movie files, but with different extensions (there are 2 files for the subtitles for each movie). Previously, the completion would go up to the extension and stop because it does not know which file is which. If I wanted to watch Return Of The Jedi, a dvd which I own and am therefore entitled to copy/rip for personal reasons¹, I would type mplayer je and then hit the tab key for completion and the completion would fill in the filename up to jedi. leaving the extension off because there are 3 files with that name and it would have no idea which one I want. The new smart completion however, would fill in the full filename jedi.avi because it knows that it would make no sense to pass either of the other two as arguments to mplayer. sweet. I'd been trying to figure out how to get the subtitles to work with with filenames different from the movie for this very reason - now I don't have to. sweet.


^{1. Actually, I don't have this particular movie on my harddrive right now - I did, but had a harddrive crash and lost all the movies on it. And I can't rip it again because the dvd is scratched and won't play or rip correctly. I think I can get it resurfaced, but it reminds me why it should be legal and not unnecessarily difficult to copy/rip movies. The main reason that I rip movies is so that I don't have to load a dvd every time I want to watch a movie - and the dvds themselves can remain protected in their cases. The only reason that Jedi is scratched is that I lent the movie to someone a while ago. Never lend your movies out - they will get scratched. Stupid crash-happy harddrives. Stupid DRM.}

the x86_64/firefox/adobe flash fiasco

lots of freakin web pages use flash. I'd prefer if they didn't, but they do. Some extremely poorly designed pages use nothing but flash for no practical reason. homestarrunner.com uses mostly flash, but it makes sense for a page centered around a flash cartoon.

adobe acquired macromedia or something, so now it's the adobe flash player. And adobe seems to be doing a much better job with the development - they have a flash player 9 beta for linux - it works pretty well. But not on 64 bit web browsers. They say they're working on a 64 bit version and that it's pretty hard because they have to rewrite a bunch of stuff to get it to work.

So in order to view flash on my athlon 64, I have to have a 32 bit version of the browser installed in a 64 bit operating system. No big deal, but now I got two versions of the browser (firefox) installed as I installed the 64 bit version before attempting the 32 bit install. They're both the same "version", just that one is compiled to 64 bit binary and the other to 32 bit binary. This is a bit more complicated than it sounds though because all the libraries and stuff that they use has to be compiled in the same format as the browser - so I have 64 and 32 bit versions of a bunch of libraries as well.

Now I just have to decide if I'll use the 32 bit version all the time or just when I want to watch some flash stuff - not very often since most of the flash I am routinely subjected to are advertisements. I'm not sure yet if there is a noticeable benefit to running the 64 bit version - speed wise.

The 32 bit version loads pretty fast and works pretty well, so I may just end up using it all the time for simplicity.

"burning" a dvd

I made a bad dvd - actually it wasn't my fault, I think it was a defective disc.
anyhow, since I've never seen a dvd in the microwave, I decided to try it with this coaster.
it was pretty cool.


dvd's sandwitch the foil layer between two layers of plastic - unlike cd's which just have one layer of plastic and the foil on top. This makes dvd's more resistant to scratches in the foil which can not be repaired. it also traps most of the bad smell. if you've ever put a cd in the microwave, you know what I mean by "the bad smell". if you haven't ever done so - go do it now. you must have some junk cd or dvd "coasters" lying about. get to it.

after taking these pictures, I was able to pry the plastic layers apart. most of the foil remained on the top layer and the purple pigment is all in the bottom layer. layers here refer to the top and bottom layers of plastic, this is just a "single layer" disc - but all dvd's (except for very, very cheap ones) have 2 layers of plastic which has nothing to do with "dual-layer" discs.

so it's a bit cooler than a microwaved cd. of course I didn't photograph the lightning - I'll see about doing that with my next one. - if I can get the stupid autofocus to focus on the dvd and not the perforated microwave screen.