Category: Technology

Randomly Monday night

It doesn’t matter how many times I look out the back door. There’s not going to be a cute orange cat there. And that sucks.

Happier thoughts and subjects:

  • I just booked my room for New York in January, although I may extend my stay by one more day since I got such a good deal. If anyone wants to hang out, please let me know.
  • Pondering my post-Christmas travel plans as well and whether I should continue my Virginia Beach tradition into its second year or opt for a different beach…or no beach at all. I really do like winter beach trips and Virginia Beach is a good choice because there’s a city there too, just in case I get bored. I opt for the cheap oceanfront room where I read all the books I didn’t have time to read the rest of the year.
  • In case you were wondering, I’ve had a really successful soup season this year. Okra seems to be the running theme.
  • For your amusement, the top twenty Toronto music videos of all time, at least by somebody’s count.
  • I’m finally getting back to the home video project. I finished digitizing all the analog stuff earlier this year and now I’m making MP4 derivatives from those masters for easy access on the Roku, etc. It’s much easier and “batchable” than the initial project was and I hope to be done by New Year’s. This will also make it easier for me to post old video on the site and/or YouTube if anyone cares (which I kind of doubt).
  • Despite my rotten state of mind Saturday night, my friend Jeff dragged me out to College Hill and other assorted destinations and I actually had a really great time. The secret to doing that in Greensboro is to remember never ever to go to the queer bar.

Randomly Monday afternoon

It’s President’s Day in the US, Family Day in Canada, and just a plain old non-holiday Monday in campus. We take President’s Day and Veteran’s Day the week between Christmas and New Year’s, as George Wahington intended.

Random stuff:

I’m cold and am now going home.

Close to the end

After more than two years and many starts and stops, I’m finally almost done with Phase One of my massive home video archiving project. This is seventeen years of video–nearly three terrabytes–that’s now completely digitized and organized into folders by date. It was no small task. I’ve shot lots of video over the years in multiple analog and digital formats. And I still have all of it, save for a defective tape from 1995 (shot in North Carolina) and one from 1996 (shot in Minneapolis and San Francisco) that I lent to an ex many years ago and never saw again.

I started working on this project right after Mark moved back to San Francisco and kept working on it off an on through the pretty thoroughly miserable two years of personal and family drama that followed. It may not have been the best timing since a virtual walk down memory lane was probably not exactly what I needed at the time. There were a few times when I stopped because things were getting too intense–I was in no mood to listen to romantic banter or my parents in healthier times–or because I didn’t have time, or I was experiencing equipment failure (e.g. the G5), or whatever other reason. All in all, it was sort of like watching my middle age unfold as sort of a documentary. And it wasn’t an altogether bad one, I suppose.

Phase Two will involve making MP4 versions so that I’ll have accessible copies in one consistent format. At that point, I’ll probably complete an index of sorts as well. Yes, I’m a geek and an archivist. If you didn’t already know that by now, you’ve obviously not been paying attention.

A few important realizations:

  • I’ve never been terribly social, but I’m even less so than I used to be.
  • I used to smoke a whole lot.
  • Radio used to suck less than it does now, but not by much. Particularly in places like Winnemucca.
  • I say incredibly stupid and repetitive things while driving.
  • When I look at video from the past few years, I can really see those forty pounds I’ve lost since September. I like that.
  • I hope that my love affairs with Pittsburgh and Los Angeles never go sour.
  • I used to be able to have my way (date, cavort, etc.) with lots of really cute boys. Not quite sure what happened there. OK, I have an idea what happened…

Good read…

…and a reminder of why I still have my own website, in case I’d forgotten (via Ed Cone):

We get excuses about why we can’t search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users.

Basement Sunday

On this, my first actual weekend in quite a few weeks, I’m moving data from the dead G5 to one of the many external drives that populate the basement, particularly after the ex sent me a few extra ones several weeks back. Most of this is not really irreplaceable stuff, but it is stuff that would require a lot of work to replace, so I’m glad I’ve got a couple of cheap HDD enclosures handy so I can grab it all without too much trouble.

I’ll probably be investing in one of the new 27-inch iMacs when they ship in a couple of weeks. Having used an early 2005 G5 for six years followed by another year and a half on a late 2005 iMac, I think it’s really time for an upgrade. It’s also amazing how well Apple hardware lasts (I was still editing video on the G5 till the bitter end) but that’s a subject for a different day.

Getting all this stuff off the G5 will also allow me to proceed with the home video project, which has been sort of stuck in neutral for a few months.

Saturday stuff

I once had an attention span. Now I just publish bullet lists:

  • So the News & Record, which used to be the daily newspaper in my hometown, has finally manged to degrade their web experience so significantly that, after fifteen years or so, I no longer even bother. Looking past the fact that much of their content was no longer was accessible online to most folks anyway, they now seem to have stripped the site of RSS feeds, eliminating a primary access point to what content still was available. Thus I no longer click through and see any of their work nor any of their ads–an astonishingly high proportion of which seem to line to their own religion portal (which doesn’t even seem to be a working link for me as of this morning). They’re not getting any click-throughs from aggregrators, either. I understand the debate about how much content newspapers should make freely available but it seems to me that what content they do make available shouldn’t be such a hassle to access.
  • I’m really trying to feel sympathetic about this, but it sounds like the developer really has gone above and beyond the call of duty here, even though some of the altruism may have been legislative in nature. I’d like to see a low-cost enclave like this preserved in Santa Monica as well, but come on…
  • The cartoon-like antics of Toronto mayor buffoon Rob Ford and his idiot brother continue to amuse me but also make me feel a bit embarrassed for my adopted hometown, which deserves better.

As for me, I finally finished the first draft of my reappointment portfolio last week. After one last proofing tomorrow, I’ll submit it on Monday and then will have a free week or two before I have to do anything else to it. Now that I’m done with what has pretty much been two solid months of composing very dry prose (between that and another pair of projects), I’ll be able to contribute something here again. Or at least have some weekend time to take care of some pressing projects at home. We’ll see.

Umm, no…

From:     iProspect <british.gas@iprospect.com>
Subject:     Otherstream: Link Removal Request(Urgent)
Date:     August 8, 2012 7:28:54 AM EDT

Hello,

I work for the digital marketing agency iProspect on behalf of British Gas.
As part of our ongoing SEO campaign – we looking to edit or remove some of the backlinks pointing to the http://www.britishgas.co.uk domain name.

We have identified the following link to British Gas on your site (otherstream.com):

http://www.otherstream.com/sections/school/page/4/
http://www.otherstream.com/2009/02/05/boliers-and-books/

We would like to work with you and request that one of the below actions are taken regarding this link.
This is to ensure that our client avoids violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines in any form due to a historic decision they or a previous agency has made.

•    Please remove the link(s) from your website

Please note that we are not trying to imply that your website is of fault for violating any guidelines, but that we have advised British Gas should remove any historic links that they acquired which could be interpreted as paid or intended to manipulate PageRank.
Please let me know if you are able to action this request or if you require any further information.
Apologies if you have received multiple emails, this is due to their being multiple links on your website (please review each one).

Kind regards

I believe I’ll decline. And by the way, please take this opportunity to go fuck yourself.

Saturday night in the basement

It was a wonderfully gloomy, stormy day today. Nice background for a wedding, although the principals might not agree. Regardless of weather, it’s a happy thing to watch two people who so clearly should be married actually doing so. Congrats to Carroll and Lex.

Saturday was much better than Friday, which pretty thoroughly sucked in many most ways for me. Many thanks to Duncan for helping to temper the suckage for a while on Friday afternoon; you maybe don’t know quite how much I needed that. And my apologies to anyone else who came in contact with me in any way whatsoever, especially my parents and the poor folks at the Harris Teeter on Cloverdale. Enough said. I’m not joking when I say it was a pretty shitty day.

But now I’m contentedly in the basement, listening to Capitale Rock and working on Groceteria databases and (hooray!) on the last of the analog home video. I should be done with that by tomorrow. The digital stuff requires much less babysitting and I’ll finally have my home video archived to…um…archival standards very soon. That will make me very happy. Then I can start making MP4 access copies so I can easily watch it all on the Apple TV. Or not…

Seven years is not enough

After seven years and four months, I fear I may be losing the G5 tower. It hasn’t been my primary machine in about a year and a half, but I’ve been using it to digitize video while I do my regular stuff on a slightly newer iMac I got in the divorce settlement (and which isn’t feeling 100% healthy itself). The G5 has performed pretty well although it’s been a bit flaky the past week or so. I feared the problem might be an external drive I was using, but that’s apparently not it. Right now, I can’t even boot in safe mode or using a CD. Based on everything I’ve read it looks like I may have a fried CPU and/or motherboard.

I was thinking about buying a new desktop machine next week during the tax-free weekend anyway. I think it’s time.