Purple Vengeance Version

From an interview in Filament Magazine:

“At what age is it best to crush a child’s dreams so that they have an easier time stepping in to the status quo?”

You fool. You do not do such things to children. A child is like a poison missile you aim at the Future. You encourage, fund and resource their dreams to the fullest extent of your capability, knowing that your reward will be the pain and misery of generations yet unborn.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for cute baby pictures, there are many:

(click here)

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

…and to forestall and trump the obvious joke/question:

We apparently cannot blame the milkman.

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

For reasons which are too annoying to mention at such a moment, all of the pictures I uploaded today were ended up in a locked album, which was less than useful.  That’s fixed now.  Say hello:

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

Born at 4:50am this morning, after roughly 22 hours of total labor, weighing 6lb 7oz, measuring 19.5 inches from stem to stern: welcome Theda Marie Hambro.

Miranda and Theda and I are all resting up at CalPac Medical Center, probably to go home on Wednesday. Pictures are here and on facebook.

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

Beloved girlfriend would appear to be in early- to mid-stage labor.  (7-minute-interval contractions for the last few hours.)  All signs point to baby sometime on the 30th.

You have somewhere between 12 and 24 hours to reach minimum safe distance.

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

Dear friends who are better versed in such things than I:

Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture?

For context: I have been shooting with a DSLR in jpg mode for about 1.5 years now.  Mostly I’m looking for something that will let me (a) process a ton of photos quickly and painlessly and then upload them to flickr, and (b) let me quickly correct basic stuff like white balance problems.  The primary machine for this will be a 2006 Mac Pro.

Yes, I am inviting a modern-day emacs-vs-vi flamewar.  Fire away.

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

And while I’m snarking about Fortune 500 companies unable to pull their style out of 1997, allow me to quickly demonstrate that Amazon hasn’t paid anyone to look at IMDB in many, many years:

“Daddy, what’s a newsgroup?”  “Well son, it’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t done.  And if you see your mom…”

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

I was going to cook up a nice long stemwinder about my misadventures on American Airlines this weekend, and about how I really should have learned by now that any money “saved” by not flying JetBlue, Virgin or Southwest is a false economy, but nevermind all that; the intertubes are clogged with angry airplane consumer stories, and will only get moreso as the dread holiday season comes upon us.

Instead, I’m going to reprint a single sentence from AA’s online check-in confirmation email.  Pay close attention:

“There are Adobe Reader versions for MS Windows, MS Windows NT, OS/2, Macintosh, and Unix platforms.”

American Airlines: boldly supporting 1997’s state of the art… in 2009.

(For the curious or confused: The products known as “Windows 2000”, “Windows XP”, “Windows Vista” and “Windows 7” are all lineal descendants of Windows NT, which was Microsoft’s next-generation OS product from 1993.  There hasn’t been a version of Windows that was not based on NT since the death of “Windows ME” in 2001.  “OS/2” was a competitor to Windows NT that was marketed by IBM in the mid-90s: you haven’t heard of it because it was bought by, statistically speaking, nobody.)

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

It's that time of year: I'm going through my addressbook, pruning people I haven't seen in decades, and trying to figure out if the information I have for everyone else is up to date. (I'm also attempting to make 3-way sync between my iPhone, OSX's addressbook app and Google Contacts work, because apparently I enjoy shaving yaks.)

So: if you think I should have your contact information (whatever subset thereof seems relevant), please post it here. Comments are, of course, screened. If you find this method disconcerting, feel free to just email it to me -- vCard format preferred if you happen to have it, but I'll happily transcribe if not.

Side 1: Manifesto

Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains.  You never can go back, only forward.” 
(—Michael Marshall Smith, “Only Forward”)

Side 2: Reminder

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
(—E.M. Forster, “Howard’s End”)

Actually, there is only one side.

(Tattoos by Tex, font by Paul Renner.)

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

Long story short here:

If you own an iPhone, Apple’s warranty will often be very liberally applied by Genius Bar employees if you’re nice to them…

…unless the submersion sensor has been tripped.

“What submersion sensor, Nathan?”

Well, funny you should ask.  There are actually two submersion sensors inside an iPhone: one just inside the iphone jack port (the wide narrow thing on the bottom that you plug the USB cable into), and one inside the headphone jack.  To see them, you need a magnifying glass and a flashlight, much like your doctor uses to look into your ear canal.  The sensors are just little strips of moisture-sensitive paper: if they get wet they turn bright red.  (Pictures here.)

Here’s the catch: you don’t need to drop your iphone into a toilet bowl (or fishtank, or river) in order to trip the sensor.  In fact, you don’t need to submerse it at all.  Just a few drops of water that creep in at an unlucky angle are enough to do it.  If that happens, your warranty is null and void, and no amount of sweet-talking will change it: Apple will refuse the return of the phone, and they will charge you two hundred dollars for a refurbished replacement.

You can buy a little silicone insert for the iphone jack for $6 from various websites.  You may wish to consider doing so.

Why yes, I do speak from highly annoyed experience here, why do you ask?

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

Better late than never: the full Amanda Palmer concert and Q&A at Google.  Special appearance by me, attempting mightily to not drop a 7-pound disco ball on Amanda’s head in front of a live audience.

So remember hearing about that Wordpress worm that swallowed half the blogosphere last month?  Yeah, well, funny story: it worked just as well on ancient, hacked-nigh-to-death versions of b2/cafelog such as the one that blahg.blank.org used to be.

After several days of frenzied cleanup on my server, I surveyed the damage, considered my repair options, and said: fuck this noise.  So the blahg, and blank.org in general, have been given a thorough php-ectomy.  We’re now running on byteflow, a blog engine written in python/django.  

You don’t actually care about this, unless you’ve linked to an old post of mine, or if you keep track of me via an RSS feed.  To the former, I’m slowly importing all of the old content, but it remains to be seen if I can actually make the old-style links ever work again.  To the latter, you’re just boned, and you’re going to need to re-subscribe at the new feed URL, which is: here.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled diet of funny cat pictures.

Crossposted from: blahg.blank.org

At long last:

 
#1 -- costar in a music video with Amanda Palmer:



Had I known, I might have shaved this morning.

Better pictures forthcoming, I hope. Also forthcoming: a whole frickin' music video, on youtube.

 
Way, way, way too many people to thank individually for all the well-wishes. So thank you one and all.

 
( cue the exploding heads... )

 
File under, "What they didn't teach you in high school civics class:"

 
It's been a major irritant to me for years now that my former home of New York has lagged behind places like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, (temporarily) California and (for fuck's sake) Iowa in extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. I mean really... if anyone holds the American patent on sin and depravity it's New York Fuckin' City, and getting lapped by Massachusetts first on gay marriage and then on marijuana law reform was... well, I think I now know how my friends who are Yankee fans feel these days.

But at long last, that seems to be about to change: marriage equality is, weirdly, the only popular initiative being pushed by the deeply unpopular Governor Patterson, it just cleared the state house handily, and looks poised to win a close but clear victory in the state senate.

And just to add some sweet, sweet schadenfreudian icing on top of the already tasty cake of victory, it looks like it's going to pass, as much as any other reason, because the Archdiocese of New York was too busy with other things to rally the troops over the marriage thing. What other things? Ladies and gentlemen, the New York Times:

The state's Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

Yes, you read that right: the Catholic Church of New York has been too busy fighting an attempt to tighten anti-pedophilia laws to lobby against gay marriage. Oh my lord, the awesome.

(More here. Disgustingly, the Archdiocese is being joined in their fight by a group of Haredi Rabbis. I have no words. Well, actually I do, they're just unrelentingly foul.)

Of course, it will only be truly awesome if the bill in question passes. If you're in NY, now would be a great time to call your State Senator...