February 2009 Archives

An article at autos.yahoo.com suggests that a persons astrological sign has an effect on the likelihood that they'll have car accidents.  Apparently, I'm in the worst group (Sagittarius).  A quote from the article:

David Neave, director of general insurance for The Co-Operative Insurance, said: 'The results show that certain star signs are unluckier than others.'

I was born in '61, which is interesting for more than being the birth year of Barack Obama.  It's also a year that is either one of the last years of the Baby Boomer generation or the beginning of Generation X.

An article about Baby Boomers and social networks includes the quote: "Younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for Older Boomers (ages 53 to 63)" which puts me well into the boomer group, whereas Wikipedia suggests "the Canadian boom took place from 1946 to 1962", putting me right at the tail end.  Wikipedia also suggests that Generation X envelops "the birth years as 1961 to 1982" so I get a GenX membership card too.

I'm content enough to be following the boomers: I figure by the time I need all the geriatric facilities they'll be ultra modern and have all the kinks worked out of paying for them on a lower tax roll.  Not to mention they'll be begging for clients after the big bulge of them start dying off... 

'61 rocks.

I'm anxiously awaiting new stock of the Panasonic Lumix LX3 arriving in a camera store near me.  Yes, it's expensive but it shoots RAW files and it's tiny ... just slightly bigger than the Canon SD870 that I cart around now.   I had been previously lusting after the original LX but had heard that it didn't do that well in low light. The new one does better, plus it has a wider angle lens: 24mm vs 28mm!

I upgraded an older computer (a first generation Asus Pundit) to Windows 7 from Vista.  The update went quite well ... it was surprising how cleanly it managed to migrate the settings and preferences to the new OS.  It took some time but when it was over I had Windows 7 installed and working. 

Well, almost working.  Apparently the video card (a PCI ATI 9250), which worked fine under Vista, was not supported by the new OS.  I was able to get an image but it was stuck at such a slow refresh rate as to be painful to view.  I searched for updated drivers but it was so old that neither ATI or Microsoft had any intention of writing updated drivers for it.   I went on a quick search for alternative video cards but most stores I called either no longer stocked PCI video cards at all or didn't have one that supported Vista / Windows 7.

So, I was left with a machine that ran Windows 7 just fine but I couldn't look at. 

This bothers me.  The computer works fine for what I want to use it for (essentially anything other than Photoshop or games).  In fact, I've reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows XP and am typing this entry on it.  But, because Microsoft has decided that they want to push Windows 7 and discontinue updates for Windows XP at some point I'm going to have to abandon it.  If the people over there in Redmond are so smart why can't they create a driver system that doesn't have to be completely replaced every time they do an update?

We have one cat who eats tape, one who eats envelopes, one who eats hair and one who eats too much.

If Windows 7 is really Vista underneath why does my Radeon 9250 which worked fine under Vista show up as 'unsupported' in Windows 7?? Grrrrr.

How does a cat know which part of herself needs cleaning? I mean do they just keep a mental list of the parts they've cleaned that day so they know where to pick up next time? Or maybe uncleaned areas are itchy so they just lick until it doesn't itch? Dunno.

The We Don't Do Mainstream movie group went to see The Reader this past weekend.  Coincidently, the T Dot Bookclub will be discussing the book at our next meeting and I had just finished reading the book.  This gave me an opportunity to compare how the book and movie jive.  On reading the book I thought it was a simple enough story that it would easily be adapted to the screen without many changes.  Superficially this was true: the action pretty much followed that of the paper version but the relationships and motivations were tweaked just ever so slightly as to throw me off.  Kate Winslet's character particularly was made more sympathetic than my interpretation of Hanna from the book. 

The interesting part of the story for me was reading (or seeing) how regular Germans dealt with Nazism and the Jewish genocide and how their decisions during the war  impacted their lives after the war was over.  I've often wondered how I would react if a similar situation arose in Canada.  I'm sure that most people feel that they would rise up and rail against the situation.  In reality I think most of us would knuckle under and just do what we had to do to keep life as normal as possible for our children and families.  Just like in the old saw about slowly boiling a frog, a small change here and a small change there wouldn't be enough for most people to do more than grumble about but over time it could result in situations that we would regret forever.

I have been using Outlook as my mail and calendar app on my Asus Eee PC and have been very frustrated lately about how slooooow it is. I have moved a lot of the older mail into separate databases and am compacting all of them on a regular basis but it just never seemed to make any difference. Earlier in the week I deleted everything in the Deleted Items folder and compacted again. Now Outlook is quite snappy! Things you learn...

Just learned about this handy tip for Apache:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/book/([^/]*)/([^/]*) /cgi-bin/book.cgi?author=$1&subject=$2 [PT]

It rewrites a URL so it can be arguments to a cgi program so something like

http://server/path/blah

can be parsed as

http://server/someDirectory/someCGI.cgi?path=blah

Handy!

I like this shot ... had to wait quite a while to get a break in traffic so there would be no cars in the foreground.  (Testing a flickr photo importer for Windows Live Writer.)

Sometimes you can discover good things by accident.  Here are examples of images that were accidently squished down. 

Sometimes squishing works:

I quite prefer the squished Eiffel Tower to the original. 

Here, not so much:

I'm still here!

Actually, trying to decide whether to update the blog server software or not. (Yeah, I'm overtaxing my current set up, for sure!) I'm considering either upgrading to the new version of Movable Type, switching to Word Press or something more exotic using Drupal or what not. I want to learn PHP and the latter two options employ it so those are really the choices.

The current version of Movable Type doesn't allow emailing entries to it and it's awkward to upload photos or to format the output easily.

More exciting details to follow.