Category Archives: Life

Cyberduck vs. Another WordPress Update

Leave a reply

There’s a new (2.3.1) version of WordPress out. It is my first WordPress update since I moved to the eMac about a month ago. I was wondering what FTP client to use: ftp, lftp, or ncftp. These are all command line apps. The first (ftp) ships with the Mac. The others, available as Macports, overcome some of its limitations.

But I decided, purely as a lark, to try out Cyberduck. And there, hidden in its File menu, is the magic word Synchronize. So instead of having to copy about 2.5 MB up to my web host, I only have to copy a few 10’s of KB. I’m not sure which few, because Cyberduck figured that out and I didn’t have to worry about it.

Excellent. It’s the next best thing to having rsync. And that’s a very good thing indeed.

Dead Sea Scrolls @ SDNHM

Leave a reply

Yesterday, a couple of days after we’d planned to, we saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

I thought it was an excellent exhibit, and I’m glad I went. There was a lot to see there. Beside the scrolls themselves (or, I should say, odd chunks of miscellaneous scrolls) I was surprised to see how much information they had on the Qumran site. It was helpful to me to understand the geography of the site better and to see what archaeologists have learned from its ruins. I also liked the displays that helped to explain paleography and its role in dating the scrolls.

Sadly, I found that my Hebrew, which is on the retreat even in the best circumstances, is not improved by putting all the words in an archaic script, in the handwritten equivalent of 8 point type, under thick glass, in the dark.

After we’d studied the DSS for awhile, we looked at some of the museum’s other exhibits:

Allosaur

post capital-L libertarian non-blues

Leave a reply

Just this summer I got into an argument with my nephew about his radical libertarian ways. I explained to him that he spent too much time reading Reason, and I could say that because I was a subscriber for 15 years. (Also Liberty. Also Cato … I subscribed to something that is probably posted to their website these days.)

I was an honest-to-goodness card-carrying capital-L Libertarian. I went to the train station to pester commuters to sign petitions so we could run our own candidate against the two Jims. (One of whom, Jim Florio, ended up winning.) I manned a booth at the county fair (Middlesex? Somerset?) giving people the World’s Smallest Political Quiz and trying to explain the “diamond chart” to them.

Now I see that Stephen Green has been down the same path (plus or minus a few caveats, provisos, codicils, and asterisks; your mileage may vary) as myself. (Nor is he alone.)

Continue reading →

So-Cal Fires

Leave a reply

So we had scheduled a brief vacation this week. Go down to San Diego, see the Dead Sea Scrolls, go to Seaworld, things like that…and now this. I mean really. Yes, certainly, 500,000+ people have been evacuated, but they live there! We were only going to be there a few days.

(Humor-impaired readers: I’m contrasting my minor problems with their big ones.)

Well. It’s pretty yucky here. Orange skies, with red glowing orb where the sun’s supposed to be…parking lots peppered with ash. Yecch. I’ll tack on a photo real soon now.

Update: the photo, as promised:

Bad Skies Over the Beach

Pink Floyd again

Leave a reply

I enjoyed listening to Pink Floyd’s Pulse Concert the other day — so much, that I wanted to play “One of These Days” so the next generation could hear what I’m talkin’ bout. Imagine my shock to learn that I never ripped all my Pink Floyd discs on the home PC. Just the one at work. How embarrassing.

I remedied that error at my first opportunity, then I made the next generation listen to “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Money” and “One of My Turns.” I’m saving “Comfortably Numb” until they’ve done something especially good.

By the way, I think “One of these Days” sounded a lot better in concert than it does on Meddle. But I’m a philistine when it comes to such things. I like the improved Star Wars episodes more than the originals. (Mostly.) Although I do like the original Blade Runner compared to the incessant stream of director’s cuts Ridley keeps churning out.

Amazon’s MP3 downloads, etc.

Leave a reply

So I got my first credit card bill since Amazon started their MP3 download business. It lists each transaction, so I have one album (prices vary, this one was $6.99) and a number of singles ($0.89 and up). If this isn’t micropayments, it’s close enough for me.

I’ve decided I like this service. I wish the other labels would jump on board. As it is, I’ve downloaded one new album, hoping it would be as good as the others by the same artist. (Jury is out on this.) But I’ve also downloaded almost a dozen singles: “White Wedding” by Billy Idol, for example, or “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, or “Undercover of the Night” by the Rolling Stones. (All hail the early ’80s.) That’s pure gravy for the labels, since I was never, ever going to buy those albums. (I bought them once in vinyl, back in the day. But they were destroyed in the deluge.)

Happy Birthday to Me

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.