Archive for October 2006

24 Oct 2006 1330H

My next PC will be a Mac

New Apple Duo Core Intels have a slight bump in processor speed.
Here’s the deal. Because of certain software choices, I have to haul around two frickin’ laptops through airport security twice or more times a week. Besides the damage to my back I’m probably doing, it’s a big pain in the culito to haul around [...]

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21 Oct 2006 0840H

Galactica’s a hit, but why?

Wow, this season of Galactica’s heading deeper into the darkness. In the lead-up to this season, Edward James Olmos, who plays Adama, the military leader of the eponymous space battleship, said:
“The writing, the story, the character development is devastating,” Olmos says. “I cannot tell you. I worked last week and I’ve never had a week [...]

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14 Oct 2006 0835H

JavaServer Faces and Creative Development

Creative Development was the umbrella term for tasks people like me performed for the last ten years on the web. The basic description was (and is): take, or design a website in Photoshop, generate optimized, web-ready assets in the form of minimalist code pages in HTML, usually with some light interactivity written in Javascript, and [...]

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13 Oct 2006 0043H

Surprise, surprise

That’s what Jim Nabors would have said, back in the day. Been looking for this track forever. I first saw this on Austin City Limits like, three years ago, I guess, and it caught me so so SO by surprise. You don’t even recognize it at first — at least I didn’t, just the way [...]

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10 Oct 2006 2354H

Chuck Schaden hosts ‘When Radio Was’

First time in a few months that I’ve listened to “When Radio Was” on my hometown affiliate, WBBM-AM News Radio 780, and I was surprised and delighted to hear Chuck Schaden’s trademark, “Uh-uh-uh-uh. . .don’t touch that dial!” According to the Sun Times, he’s been doing this for a few weeks now, ever since [...]

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08 Oct 2006 2339H

Using Xgrid to improve DVD rips and encodes

There’s a distinct possibility that I could speed up the process of converting the raw DVD file into an AVI by using Xgrid. For those not in the know, Xgrid is a mechanism built into OS X Tiger which allows a Mac to harness the power of other Macs in the same network to [...]

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03 Oct 2006 2013H

How to rip DVDs to your Mac, then squash them

What you’ll need: a fast Mac with lots of RAM, a big fast hard drive in an enclosure, Mac the Ripper, Handbrake, maybe an hour per gigabyte of video. When making choices about encoding, think about where you’re going to wind up using this file.
First, buy a bigass hard drive and an enclosure for it. [...]

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02 Oct 2006 1211H

Reduce, reuse, recycle: books in Chicagoland, and other things

Summary: Little City Foundation for books; checking St Vincent De Paul and Salvation Army for furnishings; might recycle the appliances when we get rid of the old fridge.
So, re: my ten boxes of books up north, I was looking towards Bridge to Asia to donate a load of them, but, that would incur a drive [...]

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01 Oct 2006 1735H

Jinki:Extend

Summary: Not recommended. Frustrating transitions, derivative plot, lack of character development, and mysterious story direction results in half-assed giant robot drama that can’t be saved by its cute little girl cast.
Generally recommended by the anime-watching public, who’s apparently so starved for entertainment that they’d applaud a dog crapping on the sidewalk, I was surprised [...]

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