Month: December 2006

omnibus post

Not that I want Gruber to turn his snark deathray on me, but this is dumb: AppleCare or any extended warranty may be gambling but not all gambling is fixed in the house’s favor. For my AppleCare expense ($249, I think it was), I have gotten:

  • a hard drive replaced
  • whatever components made the backlight flicker replaced
  • a new logic board (actually, I think they did this twice, once with the backlight issue)
  • a new case top (including trackpad).

At this point, this iBook has about as many original parts as an airliner after a few major services, ie, not many. And the service is very fast, like 2-3 days, door to door, since they do all their depot repairs at the airport in Memphis, not in California.

I think I won. I would certainly buy the same plan again.

⏎

My TiVo adventures continue. The drive that came with the system is dead, it was spinning up but not reliably. I was able to re-image it (InstantCake, anyone?) but it failed to complete a boot and system upgrade. So I bought a replacement drive, a 160Gb drive ($49), at Fry’s/Outpost.com and we’ll see how that goes. Seems like a fair amount of work for a guy who hates television 😉 but I hope it will allow us to see stuff we do like (baseball season is coming up) at the times we want to see it.

⏎

The cat we are hosting from Kyrgzstan is coming up on the end of her 6 months with us, or so we thought. Turns out the vet we took her to didn’t know the regs, so we now get to start all over from scratch. The USDA makes all this available — we got the straight dope from a friend who is a vet — but it’s no good if you never consult it. So we’re out some duplicated expenses, it seems, as well as have to sorely test the goodwill of the folks we’re doing this for.

perspective on the real vs wired worlds

I have been more or less offline these past few days with my laptop in the shop, but I found a wrapup of the James Kim story at my local blood donation center today, after my appointment. There was some mention of it on a news roundtable on the radio today, with some reporters relating they were hearing both sides, that Kim was a hero or a unprepared fool. Interestingly, one panelist, stationed here from the Netherlands, said she didn’t realize when she came that you could die in the wilderness: they don’t have any wilderness in the Netherlands. But someone within driving distance of real wilderness should know better.

The story isn’t pretty. When you read passages like:

They passed signs warning Bear Camp Road may be blocked by snow but kept going. At times James Kim stuck his head out the window to see through the falling snow,

I can’t help but be infuriated. Maps are important, but common sense is more so. I mourn the loss the family must feel but a cascade of mistakes — missing the turnoff and not turning back to the known route, following seasonal roads in the off-season, turning off the seasonal roads, driving in unsafe conditions, and finally leaving the car (cars are always found, and the car was located before his body was)– all of which were avoidable, make me hope someone else learns from this.

The vandals who enabled the Kims to travel that road — someone cut open a gate — are partly to blame, but there were a lot of choices that could have been made differently. And that made the difference.

More, better-written, and to the point commentary here.

links for 2006-12-04

art and the people who make it

I was fortunate to meet The Poetess at Green Lake today, doing her bit to remind us that

“The terms poet, engineer, doctor and farmer must carry equal weight.”

That’s all I can say for now. I have pictures and will share them when they are processed. She gave me a reading of Amy Lowell’s Venetian Glass. I found it hard to listen to the words, as I was listening to her voice instead. I wanted to hear the performance but missed the content of it in my desire to hear a poem being read aloud.

I actually didn’t get it so well. The Poet herself (I leave off the -ess, as I consider it a diminutive and archaic) expressed some confusion over the idea of waking from “thoughtless idleness.” But I see it as waking from the kind of busywork one often finds oneself engaged in, where the work gets done while your mind is otherwise engaged. It’s echoed later in “through the vacancy of busy life” which to me references modern life and it’s confusion of action with activity, where we are going all the time but not anywhere in particular or all that quickly.

As I read it, the chance meetings and the resulting tears echo the wake-up call of the clock tower to a sailor at sea, reminding him of that which he would sooner forget, perhaps the reason he goes to sea.

She is out there every Sunday, 9-5, just like a regular workman.

tangled up in blue

tangled up in blue

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

Greenlake Flickr photostroll today.

Found a new interesting sights, the kind of thing that happens when you slow down. As Capa is reputed to have said, if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. I would add that if you’re not seeing anything, slow down. A lot of what I seemed to be doing was taking notes for further exploration. There were things that needed a closer or more careful look than I could give them today, but now I have a reminder or a hint of how it could be done.

which wireless phone?

My “new every two” option is due and I would like to upgrade my wireless handset.

I think this is the first time I have actually had a non-obvious choice, as in more than one phone is acceptable. I have the RAZR, the Chocolate, the Nokia 6315i, the Samsung SCH-a930, and a bunch of others, all free.
I’m leaning toward the RAZR as so many people I know have ’em and they seem to be OK. The Chocolate is just a bit too much. I like the slip/slide design, as opposed to a flip-phone (the only one of those I have had was a lemon — the Moto 325. ) And I’ll never use VCast ($1.99/song?).

It looks like it’s down to the RAZR, the Chocolate, and the 6315i.

Any issues you might be aware of? Or some sleeper handset I may not be aware of?

links for 2006-12-03