chronic_d » Blather

Legal Tender

underwaterguy — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:50:02 +0000

Most Unflattering Photo Ever

underwaterguy — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:20:07 +0000

This my first post from the new Wordpress iPhone app. Yip.

If it doesn’t say “Dvorak”, it’s not the real thing!

underwaterguy — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:17:21 +0000

I’m thinking of learning to type in Dvorak. My goal is to be able to transcribe John Moschitta, Jr. in real time.

Stella Physics

underwaterguy — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:25:50 +0000

I’ve been doing some web two-point-ohs at work using blip.tv, a site for publishing videos. In order to test it, I had to create an account and upload a few videos. So, the other night I put together a couple of very short clips in the form of a video podcast featuring me and my cat, Stella Physics. I decided that they were just stupid enough to share:

Caucus? They Barely Know Us!

underwaterguy — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:36:53 +0000

I noticed last night as I was watching the results of the primaries come in that Obama tended to win all the caucuses. I checked the tally this morning, and he has won every caucus, with the exception of Nevada (where he still won the majority of delegates.)

I don’t know if this says something about Obama, or about states that use the caucus system, but it’s an interesting correlation. Is it that Obama supporters convince their fellow caucus-goers to come to their side? Or is it that caucus states are smaller, and more likely to support Obama going in? Is it simply that going to a caucus is harder than just going into a booth, so the voters tend to be more informed about the choices? Is it because the young’uns who support Obama like going to caucuses, because they’re kind of like keg parties?

My instinct is that it’s a combination of the more-informed-participants theory and the convince-the-doubters theory. If that’s the case though, it makes me a little sad to think that Clinton might be winning on name recognition. In case you haven’t noticed, America ain’t perfect, folks.

Avocado Tuna Salad

underwaterguy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:03:24 +0000

Sonya impulse-bought some avocados yesterday, which would normally mean that exciting avocado-times are ahead. But we’re planning on leaving town tomorrow morning, so those innocent-looking avocados spelled stress, worry and angst for the Wadsgreens.

I decided to try to make avocado tuna salad on the theory that if avocados are nature’s cheese, then they may very well also be nature’s mayonaise. I’ve judged the result to be tasty enough to warrant remembering, and therefore blogging, so here’s the recipe I created:

1/2 of a ripe avocado

1 can of albacore tuna

1 green onion, chopped fine

1 liberal squirt of sriracha

Mix everything together and put it on some bread. The avocado should be sufficiently ripe that you can easily squish it up with the tuna.

It’s entirely possible that regular tuna salad with slices of avocado on it is even better, but I can’t help squishing things together when given the opportunity. Your mileage may vary.

Niggy Tardust

underwaterguy — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:59:57 +0000

On the heels of Radiohead, the latest Saul Williams album is available free-or-not-free (fonf) on the web. Unlike the In Rainbows site, there are only two options for payment: $5 or nothing, but the web site is much better. (What kind of cut-rate web developers did Radiohead hire, anyway?)

Anyway, I’m about two-thirds of the way through the album so far and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. It’s certainly worth at least 5 bucks to me. I don’t know what other Saul Williams albums are like, but it’s a pretty well-twirled mix of styles. I’m enjoying the tell-tale traces of Trent Reznor in the production.

Link: Niggy Tardust

Mike Gravel Sunk It!

underwaterguy — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 14:05:26 +0000

I think it’s clear that Mike Gravel is a Discordian. It’s about time we had a presidential candidate who can see the fnords.

iTunes and Uno and Memory and God and the Bible

underwaterguy — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:10:05 +0000

This morning when I tried to fire up iTunes, I got an error telling me that I didn’t have enough memory to run the application. That didn’t seem very likely since I had nearly a gig of free memory. They say that iTunes is a memory hog, but that’s just silly.

After a bit of research, I saw that some people who had this problem had just installed or un-installed Uno, the user interface unifier for OS X. I just happen to have un-installed Uno last night so that must have been the problem. I don’t even recall why I decided to uninstall it. Now that I don’t have it, I remember why I wanted it in the first place.

An out of memory error is a pretty peculiar symptom for swapping out a few UI files, but who knows what mojo lurks in the depths of iTunes. In any case, the world-wide-consensus was that you have to reinstall iTunes in order to get it to work again. And, just to make things more difficult, you have to delete /Library/Receipts/iTunes.pkg in order for the re-install to work.

I normally don’t bother blogging about things like this, but I discovered that, at least in my case, deleting the receipts file wasn’t necessary. I just ran the installer and iTunes is back to normal, complete with all my settings. I thought it would be worth adding to the world-wide-cacophony (WWC) to save someone the trouble of rooting around in scary places like /Library.

References:

I’m a Mac, I’m a PC (Reprise)

underwaterguy — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 23:21:51 +0000

True to form, I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon once again. So much for NoBloPwnMo. But, I got a comment on my I’m a Mac, I’m a PC post that deserves attention, so here’s another hit.

I’ve been accused of not using OmniGraffle to its full potential by jetfuel, who appears to be both an employee of The Omni Group and a King Crimson fan. Even without any evidence against me, I’d plead guilty to that charge. I only spent a few minutes on that image, and made no attempt to actually replicate the original. But, jetfuel took the time to do it right and created this:

You’ve got to have respect for someone with enough pride in the product he develops (I’m guessing) to search out references to said product and ensure it gets the love it deserves by creating images of supermarket-packaged goat urine. And you’ve got to love the world wide web for making that kind of connection possible.