bengt-erik norum

upgraded to moveable type 3.14.

mostly not stuff that will i'll care about, but they moved to defaulting to full rss feeds, instead of just excerpts. that'll keep me from having to hack the rss 1.0 feed to include formatting.

nicole and i had a conversation about how my grandmother used to say 'your room looks like a tenement.' i realized in the course of the discussion that i had no idea exactly what she meant. tenement connoted 'poor,' for nicole. if that's a common definition, this could have been a somewhat offensive thing to say.

i had just associated the work 'tenement' with 'messy place' and had expanded it (from context in other circumstances, i'm sure) to also mean 'rundown.' roget's (offline) uses the word poor only in the second definition. wikipedia isn't very helpful, here.

as an aside, tenement.org is the lower east side tenement museum. they define their mission as:

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum's mission is: to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a gateway to America.

something to add to the list for some future visit to nyc.

in the end, we chalked my grandmother's use of the word up to the same era that saw people regularly use 'oriental' and 'asian' interchangeably.

living in the silicon valley for the past 7 years has clearly invaded the only remaining unconnected synapses (the rest were connected storing useless facts or soaked in good beer).

fremont voters decided on measure FF in the november election. the election signs read "vote yes on measure 255" to me. even more sad, the second thought i had wasn't "doh! wrong context!" it was "doh! is that 0-based (255) or 1-based (256)!?"

i had a similar experience this morning. driving my daughter to school, we tailed a silver corvette with the personalized license plate "DRMBLVR." my first thought? "wow, proclaiming belief in digital rights management... here? that's brave." clearly, she meant to proclaim her belief in dreams. i guess i believe that dreams exist, too.

side note, what is it with corvette's and personalized plates? there are three parked on my side of the building at work. that's down from four or five, last year. there's clearly something about the personalities of the population of people that decide to drive vettes that also makes them decide that they want personalized plates. if i could pull make, model and plates for a large enough population of cars, this would be fun to check. maybe i'll interview someone.

omar posted about a very cool app in beta by microsoft (via the GIANT acquisition) for combatting spyware.

as someone who's reasonably savvy when it comes to keeping ie from accepting stuff it shouldn't, i didn't expect it to find anything. previous, even somewhat recent, runs of lavasoft's ad-aware had only turned up doubleclick cookies and a few smaller names in the same type of business; hardly suprising. "microsoft windows antispyware", frighteningly enough, found "myway" on my machine. note that the bho wasn't active nor was i able to find any open handles or fingerprints anywhere indicating that it was actually a problem for me.

a few complaints, though. the ui is completely distinct from any other windows app i use. the main window is modeless but minimizes a 'tree' off to an unobtrusive tab on the left. note that i actually like the ui, just didn't adjust quickly. i'm sure this is a remnant of it being an a completely different dev team.

overall, it looks to be a pretty comprehensive set of checkpoints with a pretty decent user-facing bit.

mt-blacklist installed. i've manually deleted over 40 comment spams in the past week; no more.

it's really sad how primitive the blog spam prevention stuff is. even the concepts adopted from email spam seem to have taken a turn for the unsophisticated.

• mt-blacklist is almost identical to the auto-fetch procmailrc scripts i had what 7-8 years ago?
• moderation (ala majordomo) for comments
• i've seen a couple whacks at integrating the ez-gimpy captcha.
• typekey

it will certainly be interesting to watch where this all ends up in the next 12-18 months (critical mass and all that).

nicole and i bought ourselves a "big-ass photo printer" for christmas. i spent some time looking for one that met our requiremnts.

• printer manufacturer must produce acid-free ink and photo paper for said printer. (nicole scrapbooks and this is important for "lasting memories" or something)
  
• printer must print b&w text on letter sized paper pretty quickly.
  
• printer must accept different ink tanks for each color (no "oh shit, this one's almost out of red, we should use it for swimming pool pics only").
  
• printer must do usb and firewire; usb 2.0 optional.
  
• printer must be produced by major name manufacturer (i once had a tektronix phazer something or other SCSI printer that i couldn't get drivers for without a $14K/year contract. i can only imagine trying to find a longhorn driver for 'billy joe jim bob's pretty good photo printer').
  
• printer paper and ink must be comperable in price to other major manufacturers' paper and ink. ($.29 to $.34/page)

the canon i9900 came close to meeting all of these. canon doesn't sell acid-free ink in all 8 colors required for photo printing, but 3rd parties do.

it's a big ass printer. i was immediately suprised by it's size when i opened the box. the picture above shows it printing an A3+ sized photo. A3+ is 13x19 inches and i must have visually scaled the image to match an 8.5x11 inch letter paper.

i'm impressed with the quality of the photo printing. it produced solid vibrant colors that are true to the image; my laptop screen isn't. the paper is realllly nice. i got some 9.6mil "pro" glossy 4x6 photo paper and it's easily the heaviest paper i've ever had any of my pictures on (including some pretty pricey 35mm kodachrome negative slide-to-print work i had done). i printed on the back of some 8x10 pro matte paper and it looked like shit; same image, same paper, other side? looked great.

i printed a couple calendars for celeste on 12x18 construction paper, mostly for the novelty of printing big. looked amazing.

i hate canon's driver packaging, but that's an infrequent pain. "Easy PhotoPrint" is an app that was bundled. it has rudimentary red eye/crop/resize type editting functions, but largely is useful for it's knowledge of the printer's geometry. the driver does include a really cool visualization of the amount of ink left in each tank.

overall i'm really happy. amazon has it for $409 with free shipping, right now.

nicole and i have been planning a trip to europe for awhile. don't remember exactly how i ran across these pictures, but the millau bridge in france has just been added to the list of places to visit.

it's a pretty suspension bridge with the deck hanging off one side of the towers.

the tallest tower is 280 meters tall (918 feet) and the entire bridge span is 2.46 kilometers long (1.55 miles).

i liked one of the proposed oakland bay bridge east-span replacement designs and this bridge is 7 spans of the part that i liked.

(french and french-inhibited)

i wondered what i could have bought for $40 million. a big party, or...

• buy 60 ferrari enzos (and gas) or 4790 Kia Rios
• hire lawyers to file 2000 patents
• completely finance 209 frozen yogurt franchises (and have enough to buy yogurt for your neighbors)
• get 50,000 botox treatments on your forehead
• spend 3595.5 years at louisburg college, including room and board (or 891.8 at harvard)
• burn 8,620,689 acres of grassland
• go to space
• 4000 prosthetic legs (maybe for victims of our habit of leaving land mines all over the world?)
• 80160 mini macs
• more than 8 sony jumbotrons (or 4000 used ones)
• 4000 kilograms of crack cocaine (if you're willing to bargain shop)

how much cash is that, anyway? it's this much: times 40.

i find it really offensive that this much was spent on the inauguration. note that clinton's cost $29.6M. i'm not making a political statement, just wishing we would use the $ for something useful for someone. ok, so my suggestions aren't useful... fine.

i drove through the walgreen's drive-through, yesterday. there was a vinyl window cling on the glass between me and the pharmacist that read "medicare". i saw it as "mediocre". wonder if that means anything.

a couple years ago, i was riding in the back seat of someone's car. we were returning from lunch in the middle of summer. the back seat had that perfect combination of filtered sun, warmth, ambient noise (muffled voices from the front seat), and squishy seats. i wasn't falling asleep, but zoning out pretty heavily. i'd pick up random phrases from the front seat ("almost 400 horsepower... but that's not 68-pin scsi... i can't eat edamame..."). the words "five pound block of cheese" grabbed my attention. i leaned forward and said, "did you just say five pound block of cheese?" appearantly, they had not.

andrew registered fivepoundblockofcheese.com, a couple years back. it had a wildcard forward for @fivepound.. to @microsoft.com.

my senses lie more (fewer false positives get filtered?) when i'm tired.

explaining that appearance isn't everything, nicole told celeste she was beautiful on the inside. celeste responded "my teachers are beautiful on the outside and they are bloody on the inside. they are heart-y and brainy, too. we're all filled with bloood."

when she says blood, she really seems to enjoy dragging the word out.. "bloooood."

born in mid-january of 2000, celeste has the luxury of being easily able to compute her age based on the last three digits of the current year. "i'm 5 because it's 2005. in 2094, i'll be 94."

her grandfather gave her an offset for his age and helped her figure out how old he'd be in 2007, 2010, etc. he asked her how old he'd be in 2055. she said, "i'll be 55. you'll be died, already."

few weeks ago, i ordered three pairs of shoes from zappos.com. i got a pair of simples, asics running shoes, and a pair of doc marten's. ordered sunday night, received tuesday by ups.

Dr. Martens 1461 Series Black Smooth UK 14(US Mens15) M
Asics Top Seven™ Dolphin/White Men's 15 M
Simple Original Sneaker Sand 15 M

why is this a big deal? see those 15 M indications on the right? they're hard to come by in shoes that don't suck. if i wore hideous basketball shoes or tacky dress shoes, it'd be easy. this site has "search by size" right on the search page. couldn't ask for more. oh, except the `true to size' ratings with customer comments ("these are wide on me and i thought i had wide feet.") tonight, they have 1982 pairs in my size. ok, so i don't want track cleats, but still.

i'm always happy to find a company doing good business with good customer service. free shipping, 365-day free shipping return, and price matching discount for 110% of the difference (online or off).