I danced this past weekend at Arthur Murray Fall Freestyles and took a few photos with my partner’s excellent Canon Rebel XTi. Pictures are up at my MobileMe Gallery. I have not had time to edit them much or write about the weekend, but it was fun.
Wow, a co-worker forwarded this link about the Blind Spot each of our eyes has and it got me to thinking a little.
If Chris Davis (the author of that link) is correct, and this means that our brains are not seeing what is reality, but only our own perception of reality, partially fabricated to fill in missing data; then we are seeing the world we want to see, or perhaps think we ought to see. It brings into question some very interesting debate about what exactly is real.
Makes the quote from Myth-busters even more interesting:
“I substitute your reality with my own.”
Almost two months ago I wrote and started investigating why web browsing on my MacBook Air was sluggish. Well, I tried a few things, and then had to focus on other issues and put that problem aside for a bit.
I am happy to say my friend Anthony asked about the same issue and I was able to dig a little deeper. I discovered that DNS lookups over WiFi are much slower than over wired ethernet. I am not sure why this is yet, but I found a work-around. Stand up a caching DNS server on your wireless laptop.
In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is trivially easy:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist sudo launchctl start org.isc.named
In Tiger or Panther you’ll need some more UNIX skills, but it is not very difficult to set up a caching name server on any flavor of Mac OS X. Vastly faster web browsing now!
This link may help those of you using Tiger.
I am sure the same problem can be helped on Linux and/or Windows with the same trick though the commands are likely a bit different.
La Belle Compagnie is participating in two public shows this October. La Belle is a living history group focused on English history during the Hundred Year’s War, and right now we are focused on 1388.
| The first is from 9am to 5pm on October 4th and 5th in Charlottesville, Virginia; it is called the American History Weekend and will be at the Albemarle County Office Building, 401 McIntire Road. The site is charging $5 per family or individual, and there will be re-enactors and living history interpreters there from several different eras. This being Virginia, there should be lots of Civil War and Colonial Virginia re-enactors; and this year they have expanded the scope to include groups (like ours) who interpret earlier periods history as well. |  |
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The second is on October 18th and 19th in Media, Pennsylvania; it is called Medieval Days and it will be at the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation in Ridley Creek State Park (note: their website is broken, and does NOT show the 2008 events schedule in Firefox nor Safari, though it does work in OmniWeb).
October 19th; 10am to 3:30pm (last entry at 2:30pm) Admission: Adults $8, Ages 4-12 $6, under 4 get in free The Plantation is located in Ridley Creek State Park, Edgmont Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. |
| It’s lots of fun for the whole family in either case. Anyone interested in history will like these events, and children studying these periods in school may learn more about history by touching armor or watching embroidery than they do in classrooms. |  |
All images in this post are from La Belle Compagnie.
Woke up this morning with a skull-splitting pain in me noggin… unable to fully embrace the holiday fun.
Felt like I were bein’ keel-hauled by the time me vessel was finished getting some repairs; damned scalliwags took o’er three hours rather than the usual one; may the lubbers rot fer havin’ the incompetence of a fresh press-gang.
Well, managed to offend the good pirate Winter Badger with a poorly considered letter, for which I be truly sorry… and then discovered by messenger that repairs to me favorite swimming hole will be delayed indefinitely. Not a very smart day.
Things be looking up considerably once I had a nice long walk to grab some grub, lavish a lingering gaze on a wench or two, and make way back to ship… Me new spectacle lenses are in, and the apothecary is installin’ them now. Soon, I be sailing the calming seas fer home port and a gathering of fellow bilge rats to share some grog and prepare for a boarding party the first full weekend in October.
In case ye be wonderin’ what all dis chatter amongst us privateers is about, please feel free to examine me letter of marque…
My favorite holiday is only a little over one week away, so this link is to help you prepare for it in case you forgot:
talklikeapirate.com September 19th!
I see from the 2008 local observances list that my former co-workers over at AOL are observing the day with big plans; prepare to be boarded!
I have a rather large AddressBook on my various Mac computers, it weighs in at 1679 entries, though many of those are goofy duplications of email addresses that showed up when I botched an upgrade from 10.3.9 to 10.5.1.
Both MobileMe and .Mac have done an excellent job of keeping the AddressBook application data on all my 10.4 and 10.5 Macs up to date (though the 10.3 Macs were left out in the cold). Over the weekend, I added an iPhone to the mix, and started manually copying over changes from my old Nextel and deleting some of the crap from the botched 10.3 upgrade… something like 20 new contacts (mostly numbers only), 45 updates to existing contacts, and about 90 deletions of duplicate email address only junk. All those changes were done on my laptop in AddressBook.
Then a problem cropped up… I could not sync the changes that I’d made over the weekend to MobileMe. I logged into MobileMe on the web and verified… the changes were not there - though they were on my laptop. I contacted MobileMe support with the assumption it was a problem on the server end.
A very nice chat agent named Geoff S walked me through the issues and we figured out the problem was not with MobileMe at all, but with my AddressBook data, which had somehow become corrupt. We archived that data from AddressBook itself using “File/Export/Address Book Archive” from the menu. Then I manually did a sync where we reset sync data and used MobileMe contacts to wipe out my AddressBook data entirely, which flushed the corruption along with all my recent changes. I confess I was very nervous at this point in the process… but then I double clicked on the Archive of my AddressBook and again overwrite everything. That fixed the problem and now my AddressBook is able to sync normally again, and all my recent work is there.
I am manually resetting the sync data to all other Macs and the iPhone and it is working beautifully. An additional benefit, while exploring MobileMe via web browser (not something I normally do), I discovered that it is much easier to delete all the contacts with no name in the database, which effectively de-duplicates the 10.3 to 10.5 bug I ran into last year. I am definitely doing the happy dance, and can be counted as a happy MobileMe customer for the moment.
The following document might help you if you are having issues with MobileMe: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1679.
I have dumped Sprint/Nextel service, which leaves me with a very good phone I no longer need. So, would anyone like a Nextel branded Motorola i580?
This thing is rugged. Toughest multimedia flip phone on the planet. You can literally throw it out a 6th story window and expect it to be fine. It can even survive being dropped in up to about 4′ of water! It does MP3s (2GB SDmicro card comes with this phone), photos (1.3MP crap phone camera on it), full-duplex speakerphone (awesome sound quality speakerphone I might add), uses standard 2.5mm headphone jack, but also has bluetooth for car/hands free operation and headphones.
I have two wall plug chargers for this phone (one for work and one for home) that come with it. I also have MobileAction i580 USB Handset Manager (v9.2 software and USB dongle/cable for Windows). MobileAction cable lets you tether your phone to a PC if you have a data plan with Nextel, and even if you do not you can back up the contact list, music, photos, and videos to your Windows PC (so far as I know it only works with Windows). The external LCD on my i580 has stopped working, but the internal one with the color screen is fine. The biggest gotcha is that this phone only works with Nextel and iDen…. so make sure you get good Nextel signal in your area.
All this for the exciting price of one meal, one beer, or one back-rub… any takers?
Update: the i580 has found a new home already.
We’ve been getting heavy rain for several hours now, generated from a storm that is still over 300 miles away. That’s pretty impressive when you stop to think about it. Look at the map below, and rain is already hitting people all along Long Island Sound; I am just impressed.
http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200808_sat.html
Update: Bailey, our Maine coon/tabby cat, is sitting on the back step watching and listening to the rain. He whined and begged to be let out, and did not want to hear me explain that it was raining, so I opened the door and he is just sitting on the step under the roof that covers the door. Very cute.
I used to love Sprint. When they were an underdog long-distance provider competing with AT&T and MCI for your long distance plan on a land line they were fascinating, cutting edge, and competitive. Prices were attractive, and for a while I had Sprint as my long distance provider on my phone…. I carried an AT&T long distance calling card because it was more world-wide available (and being in the Air Force that was important), but Sprint has excellent rates for domestic long distance and good call quality. That was several eras ago. Everyone has effectively free domestic long distance now, so the only competitive edge is call quality and friendly billing.
I used to love Nextel. When the rest of the mobile phone services in the United States went to nickel and dime charges on everything their customers wanted, and silly gadget distraction; Nextel stayed true to it’s customers needs. They simply provided a phone for voice calls that happened to have exceptionally good call quality, signal strength, and full-duplex speaker phone functionality. No cameras. No music players. Limited ring tones. No text, but the damned phones just worked. All the time. Flawlessly. Awesome.
Sprint and Nextel merged. Nextel began to suck. Not all at once, but more and more each day. Their website became utterly and completely useless (you can’t even pay your bill online with fewer than about 150 clicks now). Why does any business make it hard to give them money?!? The signal strength in the same area I have been using my i580 phone in for nearly two years is getting weaker as components in the iDen network fail and Sprint does not bother to replace them. Their customer service stopped being Nextel excellent a year ago.
I don’t like being bugged by monthly bills, and I used to have Nextel set up to pay my bill quarterly. Simpler, fewer transaction fees, quick and easy. Been a Nextel customer long enough that they knew I was good for it. Sprint can’t figure out how to allow that, and insists on spamming me with calls beginning as soon as you are a day late on a monthly bill. I am done with them. Switching services soon.
PS: that means that a Nextel/Motorola i580 phone with 2GB SDmicro card, two chargers, and MobileAction i580 USB Handset Manager (v9.2 software and USB dongle/cable for Windows) will be available shortly to the first person to offer a back-rub, beer, or lunch.
