the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I needed to find some way of burning a DVD with this “unsupported” DVD drive I have, and just assumed there was a way:
Mac Help – iDVD Hack/Easter Egg – Burn DVDs to an External Burner or an Image:
Seems to work. And all due to a couple of empty files?
Now playing: World Party by World Party from the album “Private Revolution” | Get it
I checked my site (at the urging of someone whose RSS reader is more persnickety than mine) and found that none of my feeds are validating.
I checked a friend and his do (mostly). And I note that he is still using 1.2.2.
Some talk at WordPress HQ that a plugin might be to blame but I haven’t found that to be the case.
No, not the TV show, but my life.
Apparently, I am an apprentice of sorts now. With this ridiculous school board initiative to “destroy the school district in order to save it”, we have some need for video for consciousness raising and general awareness. I am almost done with one project (100 minutes or so of cinéma verité footage from a community meeting) and am now starting another. The first was just done here at home with my aging steam-powered FrankenMac (550 MHz of G4 power is just not enough to run iMovie well). The second will be composed with professionally-shot footage, a script, voice talent, and music composed for the piece.
Needless to say, I’ll be using other gear: the cameraman/producer/director (and benefactor, I suppose) does this stuff for a living and I’ll be able to leverage FinalCut Pro on newer equipment with some experienced folks on hand when — not if — I get in a jam.
Right now, I feel like my eyes are square . . . .
Two boys, 15 and 17, paddle out to sea to do a little shark fishing. They are found 6 days later, alive, though “they had no water, no food, no life jackets, no flares, no radio.”
Finger-Pointing Starts in S.C. Sea Rescue:
“The Coast Guard needs to give a straight answer and say they made a mistake,” Driscoll’s uncle, Matthew Driscoll, told the Charleston Post and Courier.
No one (ie, their families) knew where they started from. No one (ie, their families) could specify what kind of boat they were in, so the computer models and search plans could be properly designed.
And the Coast Guard needs to admit to their mistakes?
a crank’s progress » first dip in the water:
My first weblog posting. Move along, nothing more to see here . . . .
Evidently so, on the 12th of April.
Now playing: Lipstick by The Buzzcocks from the album “Singles Going Steady” | Get it
so we’re embroiled in this battle to convince the school board that they don’t understand our community and how closing the building will do more damage to the local business community, the neighbors, etc. than they understand.
We’re using all the tools at our disposal to make this happen: we’re using mailing lists, we have a Drupal community server, you name it.
Does 16 emails over a mailing list in 2 days seem like a lot? How about 139 in a month (granted 135 of those came in a 10 day span)?
For some reason, that’s considered just a helluvalot of email. People are already checking out and not reading it all. And this doesn’t count people with overly aggressive spam filters (I’m looking in your direction, MSN.com) who don’t see any of it and then wonder why they’re out of the loop.
For my part, I have been posting stuff on the drupal server, so people can go there when they have time or inclination, rather than bombard people with email. I will try to limit emails to once a day (or less), if possible.
Sadly, if I mention filters as a way of managing info glut, I get the blank stare. I wish filter syntax was portable, so that when someone joined a community or mailing list, they could install a filter automagically. I can see wanting to put stuff aside for later, but if it just sits in the inbox, it just sinks lower and lower and eventually falls off the bottom of the list.
<sigh>
You’re probably doing more than you realize.
Mark A. R. Kleiman: A vaccine against tooth decay?:
On Thursday, as I was leaving the UCLA dental clinic after having a crown re-cemented, I paused to read a research poster (whether student or faculty I couldn’t tell) about the prospects for developing a vaccine against dental caries (cavities). The poster claimed that vaccine development was technically feasible, though not likely to happen quickly, and that immunity was likely to be passed down from mother to child in breast milk, so that vaccinating one generation would protect future generations.
Where would I sign up?
[Introspect: what proportion of your lifetime income would you, personally, pay to never again have a filling, a crown, or a root canal, including the cost of the procedures themselves? A tenth of 1%? That is, if you expect your lifetime income-stream to average $50,000 a year, would you be willing to pay $500 a year of that to avoid all caries-related dental work? Surely not less, even if your teeth are much better than mine. I’d pay a couple of percent without thinking twice. Gross World Product is running about $50 trillion a year; a tenth of one percent of that is $50 billion. (Yes, I know the relevant number is personal income rather than gross product, but for back-of-the-envelope purposes we can ignore the difference.) What’s the value of a stream of benefits of $50 billion per year? Assuming a discount rate 10 points higher than the rate of growth of income, and a useful life of 20 years starting 10 years from now gives a present value of about $180 billion. Compared to numbers in that range, whatever we’d actually have to spend is rounding error.]
Next, they need to develop a way of tricking the body to grow teeth to replace lost of broken ones: imagine a broken tooth being simply removed while it’s identical replacement grows back in. This has a special place in my heart right now.
