Author Archives: luke

Happy Birthday to Me

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Well, here I am two days into the downhill slide. Actually, it’s a year and two days, but you can kid yourself during that first year. (Forty-five sounds ambiguous: are you in your early forties, or your late, or some kind of middle-ground? Of course, you’re in your late forties. But it doesn’t sound that way. It’s because of zero-origin indexing, like most problems. From the moment of your forty-fifth birthday, you’re an old duffer, and that’s all there is for it. But that first year it’s not so obvious yet. It’s sort of like a bald man combing his hair over as long as he can.)

Anyway, I got the new Harry Potter book. It’s been in my Amazon wish-list forever, and now, finally, it’s mine. The only problem is that I can’t read it. You see, what I got is Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis: the Latin translation of Harry Potter book 1. When I put it in my list, I knew a bit of Latin, and thought this book might help me learn some more. But I’ve forgotten almost all the Latin I knew. (I’ve even forgotten most of my Hebrew, and I use it a lot more than I do Latin. Yikes!)

I also got some aloha-type shirts. My plan is to gracelessly transition from the stuffy Geneva gown to an informal Saddleback outfit someday Real Soon Now. (More on this topic here. Heaven forfend we might identify with the contemporary corporate culture rather than the medieval academic culture.) In the meantime, I can wear them to get used to looking sloppy. I mean, Californian.

Also, Mmhmm, to add to my Relient K collection. And a delicious cake. Low-fat, of course.

Coyote on the way to work

As I drove to work this morning, I was bemoaning how the sun is rising south of east. (No surprise, there; it’s October.) As a result, the hills on either side of Yucca Valley don’t have as much shadow-highlighted relief as they did back in the summer. (They would, if I had been driving perpendicular to the sun’s light, but I was driving with the sun mostly behind me.) Anyway, I was thinking that it wasn’t as pretty as I’d like, and a coyote darted out onto the road. I didn’t even have to slow down for him. He caught a lizard and managed to keep an eye out for oncoming traffic in each direction, all at the same time. He darted back into a lot full of Joshua Trees and was gone. It’s the first time I’ve seen one in the daylight around here.

Pink Floyd’s Pulse Concert

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I’ve mentioned that I’m taking care of some queued-up concert DVDs with Netflix, now that I’ve taken care of my most-pressing movie-wishlist. Tonight’s concert was Pink Floyd’s Pulse concert. It was only about an hour long. (I think there must be another disc or something.) But, whoa!! I liked the stuff from The Division Bell and A Momentary Lapse of Reason well enough, but the best was “One of These Days.” It’s a great song anyway, but to watch David Gilmour playing the slide guitar and to be digging the light show … it’s like if you played Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” at 78. Why would anybody would sit through Dark Side of the Rainbow when this is available?

Tungsten E2 died

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My Palm Tungsten E2 died. Man. That bums me out. I don’t know what I’ll replace it with. Possibly paper and pencil.

I bought it in September 2005 because my CLIÉ died.

When I bought the E2, I needed something to put my Hebrew vocab flash-cards on. The best Biblical language flash card program is Mini-Flash. (A great company with an excellent product, outstanding support, and reduced prices! Beat that! The only downside is that the spreadsheet-to-flash-card deck converter is windows-only. But the library of downloadable flash-card decks is excellent, and just keeps getting better.)

I also needed something to keep my schedule and address book on, and never did find one. (See here.)

A big part of the problem was Apple’s, since they provided sync services that didn’t work for me. But Mark/Space’s Missing Sync partially solved that problem. (It isn’t my favorite application — very modal, you’d think it originated on Windows — but it was a workmanlike effort, and their tech support is pretty good. I never did get it to sync events and contacts correctly — not bidirectionally, at least — but it did a fine job of overwriting the data on the palm. Since I mostly entered contacts and events on the mac, that was good enough.)

But mostly the problem was Palm‘s. They let Mac buyers know what they thought of them right away, by providing the Palm Desktop for Mac, which stunk. The windows version wasn’t half bad, and Windows didn’t offer anything half as good as iCal and AddressBook. The standard for the Mac was higher, because of the better apps and both the desktop support and the sync experience was worse. But the real tip-off is this: Notice that I bought the E2 in 2005, more than 2 years ago. It’s still shipping. Can you think of any other technical gadget where that would be true? Compare to, for example, the iPod. Also the price hasn’t gone down appreciably in that time.

GM blues

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This Montana is the last GM we’re ever going to own, I tell you. The latest problem is the “service engine soon” light.

My theory? It all comes from letting electrical engineers write software. Just because they call it “firmware” doesn’t mean they know beans about it. (Also, of course, you can’t overlook the foreign/domestic thing.)

Amazon’s Digital Music Store…

Amazon has launched a “beta” of their digital music download store. I’m impressed. The selection isn’t bad and the prices are good. But the lack of DRM is the real selling point. Good show.

I’d provide a link to it, but Amazon just defeats me with their URLs. Have for years. I cannot fathom why every URL to those people has to be a zillion-digit opaque code, but it would be naive to assume there was a good reason for it.

rsync and the trailing slash

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There may be no better piece of software in general use today than rsync. It is the heat. Without it, it would be practically impossible to backup data.

Full stop.

But.

I don’t think I will ever figure out what to do about the trailing slash. If you read the man page you will see that

rsync (options) src dest

results in a copy of src being put in dest, but

rsync (options) src/ dest

results in copies of the contents of src being put in dest.

This is actually pretty cool. Except that bash’s tab-completion slaps a trailing slash at the end of any directory, so if you’re backing up foo/ and bar/ you have to be extra-careful that you don’t make a mess of things.

(Or I supposed you could put

set mark-directories off

in your .inputrc file.)

the new iMac

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Normally you can expect a blog update on Thursday or Friday, when I’m procrastinating on my sermon. But I didn’t get to it this last week, because I was busy setting up our new 20″ iMac (specs here). It is a thing of beauty.

But the best part is that I inherit the old family eMac for my main machine. The Linux machine has been retired.

It isn’t that I loved Linux less, but that I loved Mail.app and Accordance and iTunes more. And I’m willing to learn to love iPhoto and the rest of iLife 08, but we’ll have to see about that. Also MarsEdit, which already I can’t hardly blog without. (Not that I blog much with, either.)

The Dance

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We have Netflix, and after almost a year, I’ve kind of run out of movies (and TV shows) I really, really wanted to see. Soon I’ve started to receive stuff from my 2nd tier, but I’m also watching some concert DVDs. Last night I watched Fleetwood Mac‘s The Dance.

Whoa. What a great band. Even Her Nasality was in good form. (At one point she was saying “thank you” to the audience after a song, and she grinned, and you could see just how beautiful she was back in the day.) I’m approximately clueless about all things guitar-ish, but if I weren’t, I bet I’d be pretty impressed with Lindsey Buckingham. As it is, I just like his songs and the way he plays them.

The sound was outstanding, too, much, much better than the “live album” sound that turned me off the genre years ago. As it happens, I have the album, but with 7000-odd songs in iTunes it doesn’t come up that often, and when it did, it’s easy to forget that it’s not a studio album.