The suspense. Feel it.

As much an excuse to wedge The Girl from Ipanema into a future DCR soundtrack comp* as it is a natural pacing break in the story.

The next strip is The Most Important One Yet, so it's only fair there's some Waiting For An Elevator to even it out. And we'll be Waiting for awhile - I'm in the middle of the first Apocalypse I've been issued in quite awhile. Over the emo hump, on to the Getting Stuff Done bit. So this could be my last New Art for a few weeks.

Inks are a bit chunkier than I'd like, but I was operating under The Clock and on the phone with my Male Parental Unit at the same time. Inking is one of those things I can mostly disengage my brain from (ask a few people who've talked to me on the phone - "I'm inking" is my frequent answer to "So, what're you up to?"). Point of fact, several panels of The Dualist and DCR have gone from gray to black while phonering with the MPU. As such, quality is more a factor of yet another micron going south on me (and not having a spare in better condition) than it is technical laxness.

I should probably try a dip pen again at some point.

This is the first strip to be worked in multiple locations. Cleanup, strip assembly and shading (and posting) were done at the South Side Beehive, soft-proving one of DCR's incept guidelines - that being the ability to do the comic in any location on any hardware. And it is doable, if far from optimal - the strip would have been up last night if I'd remembered to toss my mouse in my cable bag, but I forgot. Again. Not this time, fortunately. In a previous life I was Down With The Trackpad, but after six or seven years of arting with mice, trackballs and tablets, using a trackpad is like trying to masturbate with my nipples instead of my left hand - comical, awkward, ineffectual... with a good deal of grunting.

Fine in private, but it does tend to make one feel a bit self conscious in a coffee shop.

* The Comps are Coming. Probably later this year, for The Dualist and DCR.1.

For future reference:

1gig PC-2700 stick for 12" G4 Powerbook : $89 from Ramjet. $44.95 from OWC.
Would move Knave from 640 to 1184. (128 meg soldered to mainboard)

2x2gig PC5300 DDR2 667MHz matched DIMMs : $85.99 from OWC.
Would move Athena from 1g to 4g. Ramjet sells a 2x1g kit for about the same price and as of this timesink does not list a 4g kit.

Putty Knife : ~$6.
Required for any form of surgery on Athena. Which looks to be a major pain in the ass any way you cut it.

Superdrive for Athena : ~$100 from OWC.
If I'm doing Major Surgery, I may as well go all the way. Though Maniac and Minerva both have 16x superdrives in full-sized ATA bays. And those drives, should one go belly up, can be replaced for $20-40 and a bit of sweat. Oppose the Total Butthurt of working on Athena.

Searching for 2.5" HDDs reveals that a 3.5" in an outboard is going to offer MOAR GIGS for the same price, where "price" includes hassle, butthurt, surgery, backups, data transfer, etc.

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro USB2/FW400 500g drive : $135.99 from OWC.
Empty ("0g") SATA enclosures retail for about $70, so getting the thing with a 500g drive is a good balance of price/convenience. More options here. 320g 7200rpm 2.5" drives start at about $150. No contest.

Looks like an OWC order or two is in my near future - probably one for RAM (soon) and another (later) for the disk.

Which reminds me, I still need to file COA with my bank.

So far the only technological problems I've had with the move have been minor. The big one is a marked lack of internet, though I'm happy to report that I'm adapting well to a life without the traditional staple of Porn Before Bed.

The one probably silly thing I did at the outset was to cable up all of the machines and peripherals before running ethernet. Maniac (the media machine) powered up just fine; Athena (the intel mini) came up, Minerva (the storage locker) wouldn't power up, so I set it aside for a few minutes while I brought Gridlock (which is, among other things, the DHCP server) online. This involved a bit more patience than usual - at present there's no means of plugging a monitor into the machine*, so waiting on fsck - usually a maddening experience - was made trivial by tending to Minerva.

Before Gridlock came up I plugged in the switch and ran cable. Without a DHCP server, hairpulling resulted. Maniac was fine, Gridlock lit up, but Athena's switch port remained dark.

Long story short, "jiggle the handle" works as well for ethernet as it does for toilets.

Some dicking around with the Network preferences on Maniac and Athena was then required to unfuck everything back to normal. My tech fu has always been questionable at best - and after years of not seriously needing it for anything, the skill has grown a pretty thick coat of rust and I'm now making my skill checks at a -3.

Minerva's stubborn refusal to power up was head-traced to the fact that the machine's CMOS (or PRAM for you old mac-heads) battery has been dead as a doornail forever. I'm of the understanding that simply leaving the machine plugged in for an indefinite period of time before powering it on can solve this, though I found my own solution much more viable for an immediate "must make sure it works!" fix - I pried the battery out with a screwdriver and instead of LED light-up, light-out, nothing.... light-up, startup chime, power up. Finally.

Minor remaining nits : Getting plumbing connected to The Intertub, and figuring out how to get the scanner's lightbar to shut off when it's not in active use**. The current solution is to simply unplug the thing, but I'm sure that if it's anything like my old piece of shit Umax, there's probably a software utility that does the equivalent, sans effort.

After the initial financial strain of the move blows over, I may finally be able to afford some much-needed upgrades - namely MOAR RAMS for my powerbook and mini, and a faster (and larger) OS drive for the mini (undecided as to internal replacement or adding outboard storage). RAM can be had for a drinks tab - disk upgrades are another hassle entirely, as the primary hurdle with replacing the onboard drive is the fact that it's on board, which implies a good deal of juggling to get the user data and applications shuffled off to a useful location.

* Gridlock is a beige G3. The expansion slots are filled with two SCSI cards and a 10/100 ethernet card. Or maybe one SCSI card, the ethernet card, and a case cooler or something. I forget. The machine's internal video is the old 25-pin mac standard and fuck if I know where my mac-to-VGA adapters ran off to. All displays in the new place are either VGA or DVI and the old Mac CRT and keyboard I'd use to troubleshoot Gridlock on the rare occasions it needs serious attention are in storage.

** You'd think I'd already know this, right? Well, no. I've been scanning my artwork at work for years. Taking a bus, waiting for the machine to free up, scanning, transferring the data, etc. was vastly faster than letting my piece of shit Umax chew away at an image for a few hours. The scanner in question is an Epson (perfection 600 I think, but it's at the house and right now I'm not), and is the only item Left Behind by a previous roommate that I've been able to make use of. Though it'll be a few days (or weeks) before I'm able to do more with it than see if it works.

Gas should still be Go for Friday. Not in my name, fortunately.

Power at the old place is off. Final bill to be mailed to new address. Phone has been switched over - a $40 privilege. Dialtone expected Friday afternoon, followed by a call to the ISP for them to do their mojo. Won't know how long that will take until the phone's over. I'd have shut off Speakeasy and gone with Verizon DSL but for the fact that Speakeasy's already billed me for the month.

All the calls have been made. The last thing on the current To Do list is to fill out and file the COA form for the post office. Maybe they'll let me do one for my sister, too.

My stuff's been mostly unpacked and largely set up. Wiring with regards to the internet is the last major issue to resolve, and there's no need to think on that until it's time to figure out where the modem lives.

At present the only problems with the new place are a marked lack of garbage cans (merrily biding their time in Steve's car) and the fact that none of the nice big windows have screens. No screens means huge crazyass MOTHRA SIZED INSECTS marching around like they own the place. Moths the size of my cel phone; some weird species of beetle I'd never seen before. Crazy. Fall/winter will solve that soon enough.

My old place was surrounded by hippies. The new place is surrounded by ivy, a weird old dude who wanders around shirtless while chomping a cigar and apparently picking berries or something, and cute girls. Lots of cute girls.

Verily, an improvement in all aspects.

Move Number Fifteen (counting all couches) is Out. Still working on the In. The new place is kind of a hole but is more than workable for our (yes, our - I'm no longer a solo operator) needs for the near-term.

We had no power until this afternoon, which means tonight I have to set up my alarm clock at the very least so I can make a meeting at work tomorrow. Gas is go for Friday, so I have two more days of cold showers ahead of me. My first hot shower in over two months was Monday afternoon. I can (and will) deal.

I've been "slacking" (read : moving*) on getting telephone transferred. It looks like I'll be canceling Speakeasy and "downgrading" to Verizon DSL. This should all either be Done or In Progress by Friday.

Gridlock as a web-facing server is Gone and probably won't be coming back. The web sites have been transferred to Germany. Kudos to _Lasar for hosting!

I still have to contact my previous landlord and get the keys back to him. And I still have to get my Bag O Sammich Materials out of the fridge at the old place. And I still have to maneuver the contents of my new room around into a position that will allow me to start setting things up. I still need to turn the power off at my old place and I still need to inform a few people that my housing needs have been met.

Much thanks to mom, dad and Martin, who helped out bigtime on my end. Also to Dave, JD, Ella, and everyone else who pitched in on the Owens end of things.

Oh, and the bathroom in the new place has a bitching view of downtown. Jpegs to follow.

* Mornings and afternoons on my own materials and logistics; evenings helping my new roommates with their (much larger) volume of stuff. For the past three or four weeks, with most of the heavy lifting being last week. My "me time" (read: ATC time) has consisted of blearily staring at the intertub for a few hours a night in a coffee shop. Very much looking forward to internetting from home again soon.

Points:

00. Some people are ridiculously good at this moving thing. I should be - I've done it something like fourteen times - but I'm not. Probably because I've been at my current place for a good five years or so and have had time to really settle in and build up some inertia. Some of the bad kind of inertia, really. Over the past couple of weeks this bad inertia has been soundly beaten about the head and dragged off to juvie. I'm not out of the woods, but the woods, they are starting to thin. While the situation is sub-optimal it's very far from shitty - it's an Apocalypse - not the Apocalypse - in the original uncover, reveal sense of the term. Limit one per customer per stage of {his|her} life.

01. Need to be out of my place by midnight August 31 (a Sunday), leaving me Labor Day to setup wherever.

02. Wherever is still up in the air, unfortunately. I'm aiming to tenant on with a couple of friends who are looking to buy a house (as opposed to rent one), but there are a lot of options and apparently all of the sexier ones still need some degree of work. Nobody really knows how long this process will take or where it will lead. My guesstimate is six months - three to find, three to renovate to habitable levels. Anyone who's ever done any kind of renovation or construction work (or commissioned said) would probably have a more realistic estimate. With the house an unknown, the amount of work and the time it will take is also unknown.

03. So I need a temporary place for anywhere from three to six months. Maybe longer. Month-to-month would be preferable but that can be really difficult to find.

04. I have some money (by my measure a lot, but y'all know just how fast the stuff burns these days), thanks to a person who's a lot better at managing the stuff than I am - you know who you are and you know how grateful I am ;) - so at the moment, money is a reasonable (read: responsible) non-issue. The where and with who (as well as the how much) are the fuzzier parts of the equation. The parts that need to get glasses, or something.

05. So, need a place. The guys I'm throwing in with may dig up something. The tone of the discussion has been along the lines of "uncomfortable enough to kick us into finding a place, but comfortable enough that we don't kill each other in the process." (paraphrased) They have an Emergency Fallback they can use if they absolutely have to, but they're not reaching for the ripcord just yet.

06. I don't have an emergency fallback. For temporary (read: more temporary than the five years or more I spent in my current location) housing, my coworker has an apartment with a living room slightly larger than the fricking death star. In October. Maybe. Expensive but affordable if I'm a good boy and treat my liver with the respect it deserves.

07. Leaving September as this big gaping "uh." that will need filling this week.

08. I have one Emergency Couch on deck that will cover me for a day or two tops. It's there if I have to, but it's incredibly short term, so I'm loath to make use of it unless absolutely necessary. The owner of the couch is an incredibly nice guy - the sort that makes you wonder if you haven't stumbled onto the set of a sitcom or feel-good movie. I'm a generally murkier sort of character - so much so that thinking on this scenario always breaks off into flashbacks of Edward Scissorhands.

09. I have received offer of a "futon in a basement" for unknown duration, also assumed to be temporarier than the temporary I'll need before I can go longterm again. I'll be engaging in liver abuse while hopefully finding some answers to this possibility on Saturday.

10. I could always get a Shitty Studio or a Shitty One Bedroom. Lease length is an issue there, as well as other factors like total cost, location, and the ability to move into it in a timely fashion. If I have to go 10, then I can hopefully make use of various couches/futons as the details are sorted. I'd obviously prefer 05, or perhaps a time travel device that will allow me to work September while sleeping, say, all those hours I burned in the summer of 2000. All that sleep ought to be useful for something, right?

11. I've made a couple of massive, massive garbage drops over the past few weeks. My old roommate Ben swung by last night and scooped up some shelving and some other odds and ends. Mom came down today (<3) and rescued a bunch of stuff - CDs, the better part of a decade of backups, old role playing manuals (not the bought kind, the "I wrote these in my spare time" kind), my AIP art bag, clothing, etceteras. We even managed to make a run to Goodwill to drop some stuff off. She'll be back this coming weekend for some more stuff - hopefully just the stuff Jen left that she didn't get to, but if worse comes to worse, some computer hardware and the ATC production noteboks and artwork. The landlord has agreed to arrange a sweep and clear for the remainder. I assume he's realized that given the volume of crap and just how much of it isn't mine, he'd probably be stuck with removing it anyway. While this is worst-case true, I'm trying to offload as much as I can through other methods first.

12. Progress on The Five Person Mess is being made. Sometimes it feels glacial, sometimes it feels like huge chunks of The Wall have suddenly Floyded away. It's eroding, and at an acceptable pace - assuming I don't blow up and go catatonic for a few days.

13. I've set my Newtons and associated kit aside for Martin.

14. While my Mission Critical Data is not backed up (390 gigs to DVD-R? Don't have the time, don't have the time!!), it is mirrored. I should have enough time to cook off the less critical stuff this week while performing other tasks. The the full 50-spindle and the empty 50-spindle the media will spool onto stare at me accusingly. Stare, they do, with those ghastly ethereal eyes.

15. Gridlock is going away this coming week. Thanks to an offer from _Lasar, the major hosted sites won't be. The major hosted services, however, will be Gone for the foreseeable future.

16. Which leaves September, lurking in the pale moon light.

I solve that, I can start thinking long term again.

Andy Alm unleashes the awesome might of his accordion on Liberty Avenue. Excerpts filmed while waiting for a Deftones soundalike to open up for a The Cure cover band at Pegasus.

Andy Alm unleashes his accordion on Liberty Avenue:

Most of an Andy Alm cover of the "water world" music from the original Super Mario Brothers (!!):

This man - and his accordion - made my week. Maybe even my year. I gave his accordion case all of the coins in my pockets, took his name, and can't seem to manifest his Facebook profile. But he does seem to have a YouTube channel (linked above) and had no objection to his performance being YouTubed.

I've always had a fondness for street musicians. Street musicians who delve beyond the constraints of the acoustic guitar, that is. Those who embrace other, more alien means of expression. I've heard the violin, the saxaphone (always a favorite), the trombone, the gospel singer (heard but not seen and to great effect)... but never.... an ACCORDION?!

Wow.

Andy Alm exudes the best possible Awesome at the outer orbit of my greatest hour of need. There is no better omen.

00:06 <@solios> xeno: dude, I was waiting outside a GAY BAR to go see a COVER BAND. And this guy cut loose.
00:06 <@solios> it doesn't get awesomer.
00:06 <@solios> ever.
00:06 <@xeno> asdjklfasdjklf
00:06 <@xeno> you mean you saw that LIVE.
00:07 <@solios> I shot that video.
00:07 <@solios> see the account name? :)
00:07 <@xeno> @_@
00:07 * xeno falls right the fuck over
00:07 <@solios> i gave him all of my pocket change, took his name, shook his hand and thanked him for making my week.
00:07 <@xeno> fucking \m/
00:09 <@solios> :D

From io9 via Dark Roasted Blend (also via xeno, #loc's io9 content screener), a bunch of photos of the aftermath of Soyuz TMA-11's ballistic reentry.

A couple of my favorites:

Yes, the pod went THUD! back in April. Go, but carefully - this internet is slow.

Further proof that everything* is going according to A Plan:

- Decouple from Workstation -
Techno Animal - Monoscopic
- Leave Work -
Cabaret Voltaire - Sex, Money, Freaks (Long session 6 8 86)
Front 242 - Animal (Radio)
- Bus In Sight -
Motley Crue - In The Beginning
- Bus Arrives -
Chumbawumba - Mary, Mary (Stigmatic Mix)
Front Line Assembly - Reprobate (Lowlife Remixed By Greg Reely)
The Shizit - I Walk Through Walls
Head of David - 108
Head of David - Adrenecide
Front 242 - Never Lost Faust
Tears For Fears - Mad World
Godflesh - Slavestate
Optimus Rhyme - Reboot
Skinny Puppy - 200 Years
PISSPOWERASSCHRIST - Screwed
PISSPOWERASSCHRIST - Pisspower [V2.5 XopherTM Duncemix]
Godfleh - Monotremata
Crust Requiem - Leafeaters Anonymous
Birmingham 6 - Radicals
Tom Waits - Way Down In The Hole
-Bus Finally Crosses The Bridge -
Birmingham 6 - Summertime is Over

* See here and here.

Thanks to my coworker John V. :

Second Life Computer Remanufacturing apparently does pickup. I hope they do pickup, as I have untold hundreds of pounds of silicon that need to Go Away, and no easy way to make it disappear.

Furnish A Start will, according to John, come take away a bunch of the furniture lying around.

Vietnam Veterans of America (Clothingdonations.org) will apparently take almost everything else.

Any and all of which are better than dumping the entire contents of the house into a dumpster. A good chunk of said contents belongs in one, but the fact there's still stuff lying around that would be useable to somebody other than me has been rankling at me for awhile... and now I can Do Something About It.

Wednesday was the last day of a work, production, and recreation routine that began in 2003. A pattern of inertia I couldn't see any way clear of has been effectively obliterated.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

I've crossed out the Depression stage on the Kübler-Ross Model and should have some idea how effective Bargaining will be on Acceptance shortly.

(time passes)

The answer is "a bit, but not very." Which in the best of all possible worlds gives me a hell of a lot of time for solving the problems I've been effectively not dealing with - but could potentially leave me dangling in a bad way if things go badly on other fronts (read: moving).

As always, it's easier to deal with a change forced upon me than it is to force a change upon myself.

21:51 <@bda> http://www.2009atruestory.com/
21:58 < solios> smells lame
22:01 < solios> bda: that feels like somebody (a) thinks Year Zero is the best thing ever, and (b) thinks Cloverfield is the best movie ever made ever.
22:04 <@ejp> I *know* b is wrong. dunno wtf a is
22:04 < solios> Nine Inch Nails prog album / ARG that oozed barrels of "..."
22:05 <@ejp> ah
22:05 <@bda> solios: Yeah.
22:06 <@bda> (re: Year Zero)
22:06 <@bda> It's sort of ok? I guess?
22:06 < solios> my lamedar pegged with the flash splash.
22:07 < solios> but I'm Dystopian Near-Futured out.
22:07 <@bda> Ha.
22:07 < solios> the dystopian near-future is here. It's been here for years. It's just too massive, lame, and horrific for anyone to actually notice.
22:07 < solios> :|
22:08 <@bda> :|

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : 1918 - 2008.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich being more meaningful to me than The Prisoner, on two points - my high school social activism with regards to said (being politically Retired from the reading list), and the content itself - which brings new meaning to the word cold.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words. (AS via thinkexist)

"The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”
(ibid)

Left to right : Jason Bannister's Vaio, my Powerbook G4 12", and the original "phat" Nintendo DS, all in front of Nick McClay's ginormous Asus.

A big brick of headsorting, cut short by life stepping in to do some of it for me. Benefits of blogging from a coffee shop, etc.

If I can't find a roommate within the next week, I'll be moving in a month. And these monitors are too damned bulky to take with me. I upgraded to LCDs awhile back and always figured I'd find someone else to pass 'em off to. Turns out that 'someone else' will be either a craigslist user or a chunk of pavement on bulk night. If this initial craigslisting pans out, I'll probably be unloading similar items using the same method.

Point of clarity : These are both Apple monitors. That means they have the bulky 25 pin connector. I may have a couple of spare adapters, but they're first come, first serve.

Monitor One : Applevision 1710AV : 20$.

Bought this awhile back at Goodwill computer. It'll pull 1280x1024@60hz and various resolutions below with decent quality, and was my primary monitor before I acquired the Psychic TV. The color quality and brightness are quite good for its age. As for the rest of the Applevision "features," it's a road apple - don't expect the built-in speakers to work very well (or at all). If you have an old System 7 (or up through 9.2.2) mac with 25-pin video and an ADB port, then you'll be able to access all kinds of incredibly slick calibration options. If I still ran 9, I'd include screenshots. Trust me, it's neat. The monitor's a bit touchy (hence the price) and if you're using it with a VGA adapter you'll have to test for your preferred resolution through trial and error.

 

It's big, it's heavy, it's cheap. And it can be yours for one of those spiffy green portraits of Andrew Jackson. I'll even throw in a VGA to Mac adapter if I can dig up a spare.

Monitor Two : 20" Apple Trinitron (aka The Psychic TV) : 40$.

An enormous beast of a CRT. Base snacked on by Cookie Monster - it's missing a good-sized chunk but it doesn't impact stability and as far as I know the ADB passthrough built into the base still works. Can't confirm that, as I haven't used any ADB kit in a good long time. Display is a bit dim and the color is a bit flat, despite brightness and contrast being cranked to the max. But it's an old display, so that comes with the territory. Comes with free Psychic TV and Einstuerzende Neubauten stickers for your aesthetic enjoyment. Given the size and overall quality, would probably work best as a recreational video device attached to a Mac Mini or similar - I played most of Final Fantasy VIII with it, using a Beige G3 as the passthrough. The display is optimal at 1280x1024@60hz. It will do 70hz if you insist on it, but that refresh rate comes with a funky wub-wub-wub-wub effect in the lower righthand corner that you probably won't enjoy much.

 

I'd've included photos of the stickers (port and starboard) but they didn't come out. So it goes. Yours for forty george washingtons and the force you'll exert getting it to wherever you want it to be.

Pickup only - I'll carry to the front door and maybe to your vehicle if my arms don't explode. All sales are final. I can't refund your money and I'm definitely not liable if the equipment explodes or mutates into a giant Toyko-destroying hyperbeast.

12:06 <@ejp> wordy fuck, ain't ya?
12:06 <@ejp> my CL ads tend to be "17" CRT, has all cords. Works."
12:06 <@ejp> you want more? buy something more expensive than $20
12:10 < solios> yeah, well.

I have a ton of other Apple kit lying around that I still need to get rid of and may list later if this goes well. Or I may sell it to you at a reasonable per-pound rate at the time of sale of the above goods, if you're interested.

Carnegie Library Of Pittsburgh, Oakland branch, Lecture Hall entrance. AKA "around back." Defacement most likely occurred between 2200 last night and 0630 this morning. Or Sunday night, according to one of my coworkers.

  

Like most non-comic viz, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The time being one of those magical fun fluffy happy times in which your options have tunneled down to (a) Find Something To Do or (b) lapse into unconsciousness. I need the consciousness thing in a bit. So.

[im]perfect definitely sums things up.

20:58 <@xeno> Io++
20:59 <@solios> fagbot: jupiter?
20:59 <+fagbot> solios: do i look like the Encyclo-fucking-paedia Britannica to you?
20:59 <@solios> fagbot: jupiter is big. Clarke has a hardon for it.
20:59 <+fagbot> OK, solios.
21:01 <@xeno> wasn't rama set around it?
21:03 <@solios> no, 2010 was.
21:03 <@solios> 2001 was originally off to saturn but got retconned. o_o
21:03 <@solios> fagbot: rama?
21:03 <+fagbot> solios: no clue
21:04 <@xeno> ah
21:04 <@xeno> i just wikied it
21:04 <@xeno> i've never read it apparently
21:04 <@xeno> sounds good too
21:04 * xeno puts it on his To Read list
21:04 <@solios> fagbot: rama is god checking up on his creation. (now you don't have to waste your life getting to that HORRIBLE ENDING)
21:04 <+fagbot> OK, solios.
21:04 <@xeno> you're a goddamn assbag.
21:04 <@solios> that's the explanation in the last book.
21:05 <@solios> I didn't spoil the good one at all. :)
21:05 <@solios> the first one is ++
21:05 <@xeno> you need a fucking tattoo, right on your head, that says CAUTION: SPOILERS and then in wee text below it, "also, I'm an assbag"

Since the entry in question seems to suffer from the problems that plagued the previous version of the blog*, here's a bit my dad tried to insert as a comment:

Thought I'd go ahead and insert this one here for the benefit of DCR patrons. This is where Jen is at the moment....

As of 7-19-08.......

http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=38478

I'd already relayed this to various people via IRC - though not everyone who reads DCR is in the channels I'm in, and not everyone in those channels reads the backscroll. So.

* if this persists I'll consider DCR to be Unfixable and will then have to take other measures. Measures that'll probably be some kind of serious pain.

20:37 <@solios> boiled down to the basics, re: the election:
20:37 <@solios> Obama wants to [push back] mars and give religion more money.
20:37 <@solios> McCain claims he'd like to balance the budget.
20:37 <@solios> who would you vote for?
20:38 <@xeno> me.
20:38 <@solios> well, yeah.

I'm liking McCain more and more - he's slinging the same old shit dressed up as the same old shit. There's a certain understated honesty to the fact that his campaign is owned by special interests and up to its neck in the cronies of the Republican Sith Lords. I expected that. Obama promised hope, the (overwhelming) disenfranchised swallowed it, and now that he's got 'em, Obama's back to Business As Usual. His backflip on FISA, which would have lost me all together if I hadn't read about the Constellation and Faith Based Bullshit first, is another prime example.

The man has proven through action that he has no interest in fixing this country. At least he's had the decency to do it before the election.

Unlike some people.

After what Bush has done to the place, the next president needs to be a miracle worker. Not a standard issue Say-Anything-To-Get-Elected type.

Bleah.

Perian is a multi-codec package that enables Quicktime to play back a host of file formats that most people use VLC and MPlayer for.

Unlike current VLC and "current" MPlayer builds, the Perian package correctly downsamples the irritating 5.1 (or 3.1 in the case of the file that done pissed me off so much I had to find a solution for it) AC3 audio codec to something that actually gives me voice on stereo speakers.

Without - I hasten to add for those of you who'd otherwise be all "$App can do that! Just do this, that, edit this, use the CLI for that, etc" - an enormous amount of undue hassle.

As one who strongly believes that things should just work, this makes Perian pretty spiffy in my book.

The comments problem I'd been having? The one that triggered a semi-painful blog rebuild? Turns out it was all due to a <MTCloseComments> lurking in the Category archive template.

I figure in order to keep the whole mess worthwhile, I'll just leave that in the old blog as a nice clean demarkation between where comments Go and where they Don't.

I'm so fucking awesome it hurts.

Having skimmed the plugin documentation a bit more, it looks like it keys off of the number of days displayed in the default index. The thing is, this variable is set in the main blog config, and can be freely ignored by template implementation.

Oops.

13:33 * xeno orders "pizza"
13:33 <@_Lasar> round flat fat discs?
13:34 <@solios> with MEAT
13:34 <@ejp> YAY MEAT
13:34 -!- _Lasar changed the topic of #loc to: What could possibly go wrong? <solios> with MEAT
13:34 <@_Lasar> I must meat.
13:34 <@_Lasar> Meat is the mind-healer.
13:35 <@xeno> it's Domino's pizza :(
13:35 <@_Lasar> Meat is the little-birth that brings total satisfaction
13:35 <@ejp> ...
13:35 <@_Lasar> I will face my meat.
13:35 <@solios> sllhg
13:35 <@_Lasar> I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
13:35 <@_Lasar> And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
13:35 <@_Lasar> Where the meat has gone there will be nothing.
13:35 <@_Lasar> Only I will remain.
13:35 * xeno stares at _Lasar
13:36 <@solios> _Lasar++
13:36 <@_Lasar> The Litany of Meat.
13:36 <@xeno> asdfmasd
13:36 <@_Lasar> MEAT MUST FLOW

From The Chicagoist (found by xeno on io9):

A (now ex-) guard at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has been charged with slashing a painting on loan to the museum from our very own Art Institute. Art Institute restorers are trying to see if the painting is salvageable, but police say it's damaged beyond repair. Neither museum will comment on how much the painting is worth, but reports say Vija Celmins's "Night Sky #2" is worth around $1.2 million. Well, it was.

A few points:

1. There is no "Carnegie Museum." There are four Carnegie Museums, plural. The Science Center, the Warhol, the Museum of Natural History (MNH), and the Museum of Art (MOA). The painting is (was) on display at the 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, not the "Carnegie Museum." MNH and MOA share one street address (4400 Forbes Avenue), so it's an easy mistake to make if you haven't spent any time in Pittsburgh. Most people haven't.

2. The guard, Timur Serebrykov, is, according to a source who's worked for both MOA and MNH, Russian. The artist is Latvian. This probably has far more to do with the defacing than the content itself.

3. This isn't the only thing that's been defaced, broken, or destroyed on the floor of 4400 Forbes over the past few months. It just happens to be the most expensive, and the most high profile.