Category: observations

Had my consultation with a periodontist this morning.

It looks like my damaged teeth (from my little bike accident) are going to cost about $6000 to repair.

So click on an ad, won’t you? At my current rate of return on AdSense, I should be able to cover that sum in a mere 60 years. I’ll be 103. A winning smile will be pretty far down my lists of things to be concerned with. Details below the fold (no pictures or anything unpleasant, honest.)

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Continue reading “adventures in dental surgery”

komo news | Judge Upholds Election; Rossi Ends Challenge:

WENATCHEE – A judge Monday upheld Democrat Christine Gregoire’s victory in last fall’s governor’s election, and defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi said he would not appeal – ending the legal fight over the closest gubernatorial election in U.S. history.

“With today’s decision, and because of the political makeup of the Washington State Supreme Court, which makes it almost impossible to overturn this ruling, I am ending the election contest,” Rossi said at his campaign headquarters in Bellevue.

The election – decided by an amazingly narrow margin of 129 votes out of 2.9 million cast – included 1,678 illegally cast ballots, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges found.

You’d think he could just say “enough’s enough, we’ve had our chance, let’s move on” but no, that wasn’t good enough.

Makes me even more glad he lost, if that’s how he handles reality.

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Daring Fireball: Classic Not Supported on Intel Macs:

I don’t think this is surprising, but it’s certainly the end of the Classic Mac era.

Sounds like it might be worth buying one as late as possible before the Intel ones become the standard if you have any need for backward compatibility.

Any bets on the future collector’s market for PPC Macs?

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I have created a posting for each of the broadcasts of the Beethoven symphony cycle, to be published when the downloads are available.

I plan to collect the whole set.

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Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips | CNET News.com:

Apple has used IBM’s PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

The announcement is expected Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech. The conference would be an appropriate venue: Changing the chips would require programmers to rewrite their software to take full advantage of the new processor.

Interesting.

Of course, changing chips actually wouldn’t require developers to rewrite anything: the compiler (gcc 4 comes standard with OS X) needs to know what it’s generating object code for, as with the rest of the toolchain, but in this day and age, programmers don’t need to sweat those details.

Gee, I hope they got some of the more important facts right. Not that this story hasn’t come up before . . . .

Now playing: Sweet Soul Dream by World Party from the album “Goodbye Jumbo” | Get it

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Automounting under Tiger doesn’t work like it did in earlier releases. So I had to figure out how to do it all over again. Now it seems to work. It required doing it all in NetInfo Manager for now: I couldn’t make the older directions I had used work. I think that may have something to do with my system rebuild: I dimly remember using the flatfiles option (very old school) for these types of things.

This is what I got from nidump -r / / (It’s the moral equivalent of mounting red:/opt/music on /Network/Servers/Music but not as direct.)

    { 
      "name" = ( "mounts" );
      CHILDREN = ( 
        { 
          "name" = ( "red:/opt/music" );
          "dir" = ( "/Network/Servers/Music" );
          "vfstype" = ( "nfs" );
          "opts" = ( "net" );
        }
      ) 
    },    

And it looks like this in NetInfo Manager:

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Books Over 200 Pages Considered Harmful To Students:

Leave it to lawmakers to replace one problem with a totally inane and dangerously misguided one. The California Assembly just passed a bill that bans textbooks longer than 200 pages, requiring publishers to shorten their tomes and include — get this — an appendix of related websites. The bill, California AB 756, ostensibly addresses the problem of outdated textbooks while encouraging use of the internet for learning. There are so many things wrong with this bill, it’s hard to know where to begin. Well-meaning as it is, catering to the short attention spans of kids is the most counterproductive thing the state could do. Teachers are complaining all the time they can’t get students to read more books and spend less time online. If the books are long and boring, find better books. Don’t commission shorter boring books. Failing that, maybe they should just go with the best books they can find and understand that education requires a modicum of an attention span. And kids don’t need a soon-to-be-outdated list of websites to encourage web research. On the contrary, they need more guidance on how to use it more judiciously and appropriately. Also, the law defines the books in question as “instructional materials.” Does that include novels? Dictionaries? Reference guides? If this bill does become law, looks like the makers of Cliffs Notes and Reader’s Digest will be pleasantly surprised.

Both my 6 and 8 year old read 300+ page books routinely, and I know of others who can do it as well.

My question: where are the parents in this? Opposed? In favor? Unaware the state assembly is meddling in something like this?

Now playing: Welcome To The Occupation by R.E.M. from the album “Document” | Get it

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Brad Delong pointed this out:

Louis Uchitelle Looks at the Long-Term Unemployed:

Not since World War II has long-term joblessness – the percentage of the unemployed out of work for six months or more – been so high for so long after a recession has ended…. Several factors seem to be contributing to the rise in long-term unemployment. The swelling cost of company-paid health insurance is “inducing business to be less aggressive in its hiring,” said Mark Zand…. The baby boomer bulge working its way through the labor force also plays a role; as this large group of workers ages it becomes harder for some who lose their jobs to find new work suited to their skills….

“It looks like employers are very hesitant about the future of the economy,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “It may be that we will fall into another weak economic period before we get a good recovery and really robust hiring.” After World War II, when traditional industries dominated the economy, the usual pattern was for long-term unemployment to surge during recessions and die away quickly as recoveries took hold. That changed during the early 1990’s and is even more evident in the current recovery, which began in November 2001. Rather than subside as growth resumed, long-term unemployment as a share of total joblessness continued to rise, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It peaked 17 months ago at 23.3 percent and has only gradually tapered off since then, to 21.2 percent in April….

Toyota Motors of North America, whose sales are rising more rapidly than other automakers in the United States, is holding back on hiring although its plants are operating flat-out. Its payroll, said Dennis Cuneo, a senior vice president, has grown by only 600 jobs this year – all of them at newly opened plants – to a total of just over 32,000 employees. Existing factories continue on two shifts a day. Overtime and reconfigured work schedules help to squeeze out more production, without adding third shifts and the hiring that the additional shifts would require. “We are reluctant to bring people on immediately,” Mr. Cuneo said. “We are going to wait and see what we can still get from improvements in productivity. If the demand is sustained, there will come a point where you have to add a shift.”…

Sixty-six percent of the working age population was in the labor force in April, down from 66.7 percent at the start of the recovery. That is 1.6 million missing people, enough to raise the unemployment rate to 6.2 percent from its present 5.2 percent – if they all showed up….

That’s a real problem with unemployment stats: they don’t count everyone.

And it’s hard to look at that penultimate paragraph and think there’s a lot of job growth: there may be productivity gains and increased sales revenue, but that ain’t the same thing.

Some time earlier today, a friend passed this my way:

Mike Davidson: We’re Hiring In a Pretty Big Way:

[T]he Walt Disney Internet Group is looking to fill over 80 positions in our North Hollywood and Seattle offices right now. These are mostly technical positions ranging from the creative side of things to the engineering side of things, and I can tell you from the over four years I’ve worked here that it’s a great place to get your groove on.

To list every position available in this blog entry would take quite some time, but just in the Seattle office, I know we’re looking for engineers, technical producers, designers, managers, Java people, SQL people, project managers, and a handful of other positions.

So perhaps there are some opportunities out there. But it’s hard for me to keep up the pretense I am employable in technology any more: 4 years away is a long time. I think I still understand the business aspects of it all well enough, but the tools and coding landscape has changed more than I care to think about.

And of course, I couldn’t consider anything til September anyway, unless I could bring the kids to work or work from poolside. Ah, well.
Now playing: Prove It by Television from the album “Marquee Moon” | Get it

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Some features seem to have been inadvertently removed in the Tiger development and release cycle.

• I can’t get X to work properly: I can run X-based apps locally, but can’t display any from other systems. Nothing to do with the built-in firewall, since I turned it off. I don’t even see any log entrails to work with.
• Also, disk space seems to be in short supply: I attribute this to my music collection to some degree (it takes up half my 30 Gb disk) but also Spotlight’s metadata stores and the swapfiles used by the vm system.

-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 May 25 21:47 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 May 26 07:09 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 134217728 May 26 07:49 swapfile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 26 13:28 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 26 21:00 swapfile4
-rw------T 1 root wheel 268435456 May 28 19:57 swapfile5

That’s a gigabyte right there . . . .

• rsync doesn’t seem to work over ssh as it used to: I use it to back up my music collection and I now have to mount the remote volume with nfs and use rsync to synchronize two local directories, rather than doing it over the network.
• And snmp is broken.

The obvious lesson for me is that I should have bought a fully-loaded PowerBook, but I couldn’t swing it then, still less likely now. More real memory would have meant less vm use and a larger disk would have come standard.

Also, getting used to cron’s deprecated state, in favor of launchd: in 10.4.1, it seems that you can use crontab files, same as always, and they get managed by launchd anyway.

I needed to find that out to get an automount set up. It looks like I am going to have to have my music collection automounted and then run from that, syncing up to the iPod and such. But it feels risky to me to run from what is essentially my backup system. That has to be improved upon. I have my 80 Gb FireWire drive that I may have to employ for this: just plug it in and rsync to it nightly.