Cafe Bucky

Microsoft is going to pay AOL $750 Million to settle a long-running spat, and AOL is going to use MSIE for the next 7 years.

Damn.

(more…)

Three years ago this weekend, I watched Thursday practice for the Formula 1 GP of Monaco from the Rascasse. I watched qualifying from an apartment across the street from the pits, and the race from a grandstand overlooking the harbor.

Monaco, in racing terms, is a total anachronism. Heinz-Harald Frentzen has compared it to “trying to ride a bicycle in your living room”. Guardrails are over your head. It’s like driving through a canyon. The pits are very cramped. There’s hardly any place for overtaking.
The streets are narrow and bumpy.

But most would have it no other way. The atmosphere is electric! You can check the SpeedTV listings to see when to set up TiVO or a VCR to record qualifying/race (hint: 5:00 am PST…)

If you ever get the chance, go! I can heartily recommend Grand Prix Tours. We stayed in Nice, FR, and took the crowded trains with many true Tifosi. It’s fun, hot, happy, and so much to see that is unlike any other event - a swirl of glitterati, personal helicopters, lots of great food and swag on the street, and tons of fans coming off trains from France and Italy.

I’m the proud owner of a Dremel 7800, which can put small objects into orbit if you’re not careful.

I’d mentioned recently that I was building monitor stands (because I want to USE the space under the monitor) Well, one of my beasts is a 21″ Apple Studio Monitor - the one that has a huge tripod base. No, not the gorgeous 23″ Cinema Display, but the big hulking CRT ancestor.

Don’t panic! The Dremel shows up soon!

So anyway, I build a stand, and it’s sturdy and I’m proud of it and so on…
I managed to wrangle the tripod base off of the bottom of the ASM. The monitor stand adds 6″+ to the top of the desk. The tripod removal gives me back about 4″, but there’s still a plastic dome on the bottom of the monitor.

Enter basic ergonomics. I don’t want to spend the next year or so fusing my top two vertebrae together looking UP. I knew going into the project that some sort of surgery on the Cathode Ray Beast would be absolutely necessary. It was some sort of Mission Imperative - make useable space under the monitor, without noticeably raising overall height.

Enter the Dremel. A Dremel is what a cordless screwdriver wants to be when it grows up. You can attach almost any small object (such as a marshmallow, or jello), and spin it at 25,000 RPM. This mandates the use of Safety Goggles.

I wrestled the 80 pound monitor into an overturned position for the operation. With a good bit, and the use of the optional cutting guide, I reasoned that removing the polycarbonate dome from the bottom would be, like, cutting through cold butter - not too hard.

Hah! Apple monitors (CRT’s, circa 1999) are made of pretty tough stuff. There’s a myriad of reinforcing ribs running every which way, so the cut keeps alternating between 3/16″ and 5/8″, and the bit is not happy AT ALL about it. I stopped about 20 times. I kept thinking the bit was going to overheat and explode on me. I actually touched the bit once and got a minor burn (Doh!). Plastic dust everywhere! I should have recorded the screeching sounds of metal and plastic. I’m sure some industrial band would have loved it. My cats covered their furry ears.

So I lived, didn’t go to the hospital, etc. This was one of those “be patient, don’t rush the tool, this will all work” deals. [disclaimer: This article is written for entertainment value. I am not suggesting that you take a potentially dangerous tool to the bottom of your Apple Monitor. It is not an entry-level modification, and you could possibly damage a) yourself, b) the monitor, c) the table, d) the hearing of nearby parakeets. If you do this though, I would be keen to hear the tale.]

Dome removed. Vacuumed all of the shredded polycarbonate out of the monitor. It rests beautifully on the stand; the bottom controls have a finger-thickness clearance. Powered up. Everything’s perfect. Sigh of relief.

Thank you, Dremel!

I’ve managed to scatter pieces of my personal tech puzzle all over the proverbial floor. There are pieces labeled “Hardware”, “My Upstairs Study”, “Excessive Dust and a Spaghetti of Cables”, “ThereThen”, “FlexiPhoto”, and “Resume”. There’s another one labeled “Blog”. I’ve addressed most of the hardware stuff, which is always a cyclical thing.

My goal for the week is to get all of the pieces back in their places.

Oh man, it’s a short week. Better get crackin’!

The theme this week has been: avert hardware disaster, and stretch out the life of my Mac G3 and my Toshiba 3110 for another 6 months or so… (I am waiting for the Mac 970’s to come out)

The original SCSI drive in the Mac (from January 1999) was starting to make the noise you would hear from a roulette table - the ball going around, oscillating. Not good. New drive, disaster averted.

The laptop now dual boots to WindowsWhatever and Red Hat 9.0, with 192M of ram. Travel + LAMP = Now I Can Demo.

Weekend Project: I have a couple of 21″ monitors that are about the size of Rhode Island, and there’s a lot of wasted space around/under them where firewire drives and a couple of other peripherals should be hanging out. I want a couple of monitor stands: 6″ high, 18″ deep, 36″ wide. Of course, nobody makes that size. Time to fire up the chainsaw!

A new, rough document is up:

Creating ThereThen Addresses

The thought is hitting me that I should put all of the documentation into a Wiki. I am afraid of going off on a detour though, as I just want to get this written up, get demo code out there, and see how it goes. On the other hand, topics such as creating and resolving addresses can go from very straighforward overview to the more involved details (and I lean towards wanting to put more detail in)

According to this article on CNN.Com, Disney
is going to start renting DVDs that become unplayable after 48 hours.
You don’t have to take them back. A chemical reaction makes the DVD unreadable.

This strikes me as wasteful. Those who are inclined to copy the DVD can still do so in the first 48 hours, so it’s not as if they are addressing any sort of DRM. It’s too much in the “disposable mentality, everything ends up in landfills” direction for my taste.

A quick skim of the slashdot thread gave me this idea: Every DVD you rent has a $15 deposit. If you don’t bring it back, you own it. Simple.

Apple gets it (iTunes, Apple Music Store). Disney doesn’t. In a few years we’ll be downloading movies from Apple.

I’ve been writing and researching a bit lately, in my efforts to get ThereThen addresses well-defined. Two new docs:

• A Quick Look - A One Minute Glimpse
• Design Decisions - or, “Why did you do it that way?”

It should be noted that these, and other docs on my site, are in-progress. I will say that I feel I have the specification nailed down, and that my writing is focused on how best to describe the various aspects and implications.