Month: August 2002

Geeks, Boxes, Books, and Music

My friend Chris came down to visit, and to borrow some bandwidth. He recently purchased an iBook after several years of PCitude. I think he’s happy. Anyway, we went to dinner at an Indian place last night, and had schemed to go bar hopping or something, but ended up going to Powell’s Books and browsing for a while. He was smitten with the place. We went to the Tech book branch today. It was spectacular.

Now I’m working on setting up my own Mail server. If you’ve read before, I was ranting about Apple taking away my e-mail address. Two friends have caved and paid the $50-100/year for an iTools account. As for me, iTools can bite my shiney metal ass.

Anyway, I’m listening to my 05 folder. I used some beta-version Mp3 IDv3 tag editor that crashed and dumped all my mp3s into the trash. This sucks because they were all sorted by genre and album. I was somewhat surprised when there were 30 GB in my trash. I sorted them into folders by track name, then I move them back to the appropriate directory. Its quite a mess. So now I”m listening to all the mp3s that begins with 05 – ….

Fires, Houses, and such for Alan

By living in a municipality, you get certain benefits as paid for by your taxes. These include police dept., fire dept., public schooling, etc. When you choose to live in a forest, you forgo certain protections by virtue of choosing not to participate in said municipalities. Some do this intentionally.

Click on the Comments to read more.
Continue reading Fires, Houses, and such for Alan

Too much to say

Bush was here (Oregon) last week. Said something about kindling, fires, and jobs. Must have made sense to someone, because there was cheering on the radio. I had trouble understanding him. Technically, I don’t think his poor public speaking skills count as doublespeak.

The whole basis of the trip, and the logic behind forest fires annoyed me. I planned on writing a great discertation on why fires should just burn, and people who choose to live outside the confines of a municipality shouldn’t expect to be saved from natural disaster, and on and on, but I figured I’d just be boring people. So I stopped myself. For now.

Regarding DeLorme’s StreeMap decision

Delorme, maker of fine paper and electronic atlases, is discontinuing development for Mac products. Here’s my response:

I’ve read your announcement regarding the discontinuation of support for Mac Products. I’m quite upset, because I’ve been a DeLorme customer for years, and have purchased copies of Street Atlas 3 and 6 for Mac.

I want to thank you for these products, but also share my disappointment in the discontinuation of Mac development. It seems that it would be better long range planning to create software that was in a format that was platform independent, rather than continue with the current model of develop once, then redevelop for different OSes. A platform independent standard would allow for the use of the same material on Macs, PCs, other OSes, and the Web with little or no customization.

As an example, the US Census data used in the 2003 version of Street Atlas, is available in a platform-independent format. I understand that to protect the investment of time and creativity, that you must make some changes to the format. However, I will be somewhat jealous of my PC using counterparts for this reason only. Thank you for your time, and I hope you’ll consider us Mac users in the future.

Sincerely,
Andy Freed

New Keyboard

I love my mac keyboard. It has the best response of any keyboard I’ve owned. Its one of the petite keyboards designed for the iMac, but I’m past that. Despite its shortage of keys, its worked well for 3 years. I’m not writing an obit for the keyboard, but Logitech released a mac driver for the iTouch keyboard we already own.

logitech keyboard

It has so many cool little features like volume, shortcuts, and even a scroll wheel. Plus it has all the easy to use Insert, Delete, Home, End, and arrow keys that my iMac keyboard lacked. I’ve give it a try. It doesn’t have the same response, but maybe it will improve my terminal interaction. We’ll see.

A few changes..

I’m working on modifying the layout of the site, so don’t be surprised if things aren’t where they used to be. For instance, I’m moving /greg to ~greg, so he’s on his own account. Same with Hilly and Michelle.

Either way, you should see these pictures of Oakley, my parents dog. She caught a brook trout and threw it on to the shore. She’s a happy old lady.

Apple Cares

Michelle has finally agreed to upgrade to OS X. I’m excited, because OS X is the best OS ever, and I get to teach her how to use it. And I get to do all sorts of exciting things with it, like having it automatically back up her documents and ftp them to my server.

Anyway, while backing up her files, we noticed that her DVD/CDRW drive wasn’t working. I checked Apple’s Support Site, and several people had problems with the same drive model. I called Apple because we were right about end of our 1 year service, and I didn’t want to get screwed like my sister. Turns out we have 3 days left… So they’ll replace the drive for free, but if we want future coverage, we need to buy AppleCare in the next 3 days.

Everly Fire

Michelle and I adopted a piece of wilderness near Sisters, Oregon. Its part of an ONRC program, where you get a piece of proposed roadless area, get maps, and visit the site to make sure the maps are accurate. Well, its pretty easy to come up with a description for ours. I think this picture states it nicely..

The Everly Fire

…Yup, it was burnt by the Eyerly Fire a month ago. 18 homes were lost. We weren’t allowed to get too close to the area, so we had to take some pictures from a distance. The area is beautiful.