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 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.
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.)
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.
A couple of months I posted this picture to my Flickr account:
It’s a fine photo, and I did a great job of masking off the background so you only see the floppy drive unit.
It’s also my most-frequently viewed picture there now.
Why? Do people who only used 3.5″ floppies, and for the last four years only USB drives, really not know how lousy these things were?
I was just in the kitchen a moment ago. I was recharging my AM/PM 44-oz tankard with Wal*Mart “Dr. Thunder” beverage (which, from the taste, is relabeled “Mr. Pibb,” a knockoff of Dr. Pepper foisted upon us by Coke).
When I was there, I noticed that the people preparing for the luncheon tomorrow had left a package of “premium napkins” open on the counter. The brand name was “Vanity Fair.”
I wondered what Bunyan would think, then I wondered how it is that “Vanity Fair” came to be a positive-sounding thing you’d like to associate with your product.
You may recall the troubles I have had in the past with elliptical trainers. And now, for the first time, I can show you that the troubles are by no means over:
There were some additional problems with this unit, but they pale beside the great honking one you see here. Think about this before you drop $170 on a Weslo 620. (Made by Icon, who make Image and Ironman brands as well.)
It isn’t that I’ve died, although I’ve been away from this site for awhile. Rather, I’ve signed up for some of these time-waster Web 2.0 social networking sites. So in addition to Flickr, which I’ve had forever — 18 months at least — now I’ve begun to use del.icio.us pretty seriously, and I’ve gotten a Backpack site and Facebook and Twitter accounts. (Why they invented tabbed browsers.) So if you’re curious what I’m up to, that’s what.
Quick impressions: Twitter is just right.
I don’t like Facebook much. It’s got that gated-community (“franchulate”) vibe, which is irritating. Also, it’s way too ambitious. Comparing it to Twitter is like comparing Yahoo! to Google circa 1998: an overdone “portal” vs. a clean and elegant search engine. Today, Google can get away with doing everything, because they’re bloody geniuses. Facebook? Eh. For them it’s 1998, and they should realize it.
Backpack, I’m not sure about. The potential is there for me to do something useful with it, but I haven’t, so far.
On the other hand, they’re social networking sites, so they have a lot (“almost everything”) in common with pyramid schemes. I don’t want to go invite all my buddies to join your site, thank you very much. I actually like the no-strings commitment free approach of blogs, myself: surf over there, read it, and be on your merry way. Bookmark it if you like it, or move along if you don’t.
I like this video clip that shows the relative size of some things we might, otherwise, think are pretty big: the Sun, Pollux, Arcturus, Rigel, Betelgeuse, My Cephei.