Category: learning from my mistakes

He Saw Her Paint, a home renovation/repair company here in Seattle.

TPM Muckraker April 20, 2006 08:28 AM (Printable Format):

The truth hurts. Missourian Bill Jones opened a letter from his congresswoman, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO), in which the lawmaker wrote, “I think you’re an” followed by “a profane, seven-letter insult,” the AP reports, which our New York Times crossword dictionary tells us is “asshole.”

If you check out the original[pdf], it looks like the offending bit was stripped in after it was signed: it’s not like the text appears in the middle of a paragraph.

Continue reading “constituent communications, how not to conduct”

I ended up with a solution to my audio hum problem.

The iMic is out of the loop which means I can’t use Final Vinyl: it won’t run if it doesn’t detect an iMic in the loop. Using it made too much noise, worse than before. So we’re working with the old dependable: Audacity.

The turntable is running into an old receiver and the output from that to the line-in on the old iMac. Works fine, as best I can tell. The input volume in Audacity has to be way down, but I have it playing through the speakers and it sounds just fine.

Sluice down the vinyl with spritz or two from a spray bottle of clear water, run round it with an old DiscWasher brush, and drop the needle. From what I can tell, leaving a thin film of water eliminates some crackling and popping, either by lubricating the needle’s passage or by eliminating static and dust by negating the natural magnetism of a vinyl record.

Continue reading “banishing the buzz”

A fundraising pitch from Al Gore — remember that guy? — contained this cheering sentence:

Seven days from today, April 26th, will mark exactly 1000 days from George W. Bush’s last day in office.

Start your countdown calendars.

Gallery :: April Experiments:

Not sure the scans are as deep as I would like (127318kb for a 6×9 cm image, when a 35mm slide takes up 44Mb? I guess not.)

But on the positive side, I have beaten the red counter window problem. Now to fix that vignetted corner. The pinhole plate is off-center.

And, the train picture didn’t come out.

As I scan all these old negatives, I am doing it so I never have to do it again (I hope): I am scanning them fullsize (4000 dpi) as TIFF files. Huge. A single 36mm x 24mm image takes up 44 Mb.

But it seemed there must be some way to take those and re-use/re-purpose them: change them to jpeg files, resize them.

Buy that app a drink:

Remember Automator? The app that got the big shrug at the launch of OS X Tiger? Yeah, quite, I ignored it too.

Me three. Seems there sure is.

Then I realized I wasn’t leveraging this Burn Folder idea, where any folder can be magically turned into a shiny CD/DVD. Turns out Automater can do that too. I need to have it monitor the size of a folder to see when it gets to 700Mb. But what to do when it gets there? Hmm. Need to investigate. This looks promising. Might require me to change my workflow slightly, but who cares?

As noted here, you can make any folder a Burn Folder on the fly.

When I get something that

• checks for the size of a directory (seems there could be some math involved to determine when one more file, assuming files of similar size, won’t fit)
• creates a Burn Folder
• populates it
• burns it to disk

I’ll post the results.

Professor Holbo ask the question: is criminality inborn or learned?

Root Causes of Crime:

David Frum: “Over time, they [the Republican class of ’94] succumbed to some of the high-handed and self-serving practices of the old Democratic majority they defeated.”

Redstate: “Where he started by using the enemies’ tools against them, [DeLay] began to take part in the excesses of his Democrat predecessors.”

Could it be this Culture of Corruption thing has all been the fault of the Democrats, because they provided Republicans with a bad environment? It’s sort of an intriguing ‘root causes’ argument. Odd, though. I was led to understand hand-wringing about ‘root causes of crime’ was a liberal sort of thing to do.

Twain of course maintained that America had no native criminal class, except Congress.

The meta-question: does being in Congress corrupt someone or does it attract them?

NaNoWriMo didn’t end on November 30.

I have been working away on this thing since, more so lately.

If you missed the smaller, earlier installments, and re-read them, some names of places and people/characters may have changed. I don’t know if I like the new ones any better . . .

Now playing: – Wieder Zuruckhaltend by Simon Rattle/City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from the album “Symphony No.2 ‘Resurrection'” | Get it

Continue reading “More, about 10,000 words worth”