Tikkabik

...just for knowing how to pronounce the word "nuclear."

Tonight I gave up on the ill-timed commercial breaks and totally banal commentary of the "big three" broadcasters and did what I should have done earlier this week: Turned the channel to C-SPAN.

As far as I'm concerned, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show news crew on Comedy Central are the only ones whose analysis has been worth a damn all week. Tonight I heard one jag-off on a major network talking about what Kerry had for dinner, for God's sake. Can't wait to see what The Daily Show does with the RNC next month.

Posted by flargh at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Living on Cape Cod, I've gotten accustomed to unreliable electricity. In all my life, this region is far and away the most prone to losses of power, and I've never gotten a satisfactory explanation for why it happens.

The worst was this past January, when we lost power for the better part of a day thanks to an accident about a half mile away that apparently took out an electrical pole. Without any juice to power the furnace, it got pretty damn cold before the electricity finally went back on in the middle of the night. Sometimes it's gone off for a couple of hours in the middle of the day.

But more normally, we'll suffer these momentary lapses of electricity that only last for a few seconds. It's enough to turn off all the lights, shut down the TV, and, most importantly for me, kill power to the computers.

Most of the computers have UPS's -- uninterruptible power supplies -- attached to them, and I do most of my work on a PowerBook, so a momentary lapse of power shouldn't be a big deal. Even the cable modem and AirPort hub are, at this point, jacked into a UPS. But when these outages happen, apparently it affects something "upstream" from my cable modem as well, because the device often needs to be reset before my connection will come back online.

The power outages are frequent and common enough that at least two of my neighbors have invested in gas-powered generators. It's peculiar to hear them in the dead of winter, because they sound like much like lawn mowers.

What's uncanny during these outages is to realize how wholly dependent we are on electricity. We've gotten rid of every hard-wired phone in the house -- they're all cordless -- so when we've had to call the electric company for status reports we've resorted to cell phones. Presuming we remembered to charge them up, that is.

Posted by flargh at 09:41 AM | Permalink

Bob turned nine today; it was pretty low-key. His grandmother and great-grandmother both called to wish him well, and he got several cards and gifts. I made his favorite dinner tonight, and we had a cake. But Bob took it all in stride. On the way to the store I asked him, "How does it feel to turn nine?"

"Exactly the same as it did yesterday."

I wish you could have heard the delivery, tho. If his words had been a dialog bubble in a comic book, there would have been a big black scratchy mark below it.

Posted by flargh at 09:42 PM | Permalink

This thing just oozes sex appeal. If it can run iTunes, even better.

Posted by flargh at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I get a sizeable number of messages every day from e-mail servers that intercept virus-ridden e-mail with my address in the header. Now, I know I'm not infected, because I'm using Mac OS X -- the offending messages have spoofed return addresses from PC users' address books.

It's a pain in the ass. If I was a system administrator at a company using one of these products and it were up to me, I'd likely turn them off, because I can't see how the bouncebacks really help matters much: They're not directing the messages to the actual infected user, and chances are good that the infected user probably wouldn't know what to do even if they were advised they were infected.

I'm starting to wonder at how much volume these automated messages add to daily traffic across the Internet -- the total volume has to be mind-boggling. Any way you slice it, the amount of work we have to do each day just to rid ourselves of irrelevant crap is truly depressing.

Posted by flargh at 10:15 AM | Permalink

All right, so there's a lot of duplicity on both sides of the political fence today, but this made me laugh. Not funny ha ha laugh, more like wry, I sob inside for the state of humanity laugh. Anyway, my father e-mailed me this, so I figured I'd pass it along.

Things you have to believe to be a Republican today:

Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N.

Posted by flargh at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over the course of the past couple of years, my PowerBook has become a fixture in the living room. When I'm not working in my office, I usually have it perched on my lap sitting in the living room while I'm watching TV or paying attention to the kids.

Up until now, I've really resisted accepting the PowerBook as a part of the living room decor, but there it is. And what I've begun to realize is that I have to integrate it into the living room more effectively than I've been doing.

So I'm looking for some kind of furniture that's ideal for this sort of thing. Nothing as gauche as a computer desk; that's the last thing I want. But I'm wondering if you have any ideas for other furniture I can use that can be my PowerBook's home away from home, as it were -- a perch, or a stand, or some other dedicated-function furnishing that would be a good place to lay the PowerBook when I'm not carrying it about. If you have any creative ideas, please let me know.

Posted by flargh at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So Verizon Wireless is finally adding a Bluetooth-equipped phone that works with their CDMA-based cell phone service -- the Motorola V710. Verizon's got good coverage area for the places I work and visit and their service plans seem all right; I've oft considered getting a plan through them but put it off because of the lack of Bluetooth connectivity to my Mac.

I've looked through Motorola's pages on the V710, but based on past sketchy reports of Motorola phones and iSync support, I'm wondering if anyone has any hands-on experience with this model or similar models.

Posted by flargh at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Every morning Max comes downstairs at about 8:30. He is bleary-eyed, puffy faced, and generally staggers and stumbles stumbles his way into the kitchen for a morning nosh. He's usually licking his mouth like he's trying to get the morning-breath paste out too.

I have never, ever in my life seen a cat so begging for a cup of coffee and a cigarette than Max, first thing in the morning.

Posted by flargh at 08:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So as you've noticed, I've laid low this week for blogging, and it's because I've spent the week at Macworld Expo in Boston. Let me speak frankly: Going into this, I had very limited expectations because of all the factors that were working against it. Apple's absence, the absence of some big-name vendors, less than stellar news coverage leading into the show, and other issues seemed to weigh against Macworld Expo Boston's return.

Now that it's over, however, I'm feeling more more positive. Measuring a show's influence or success by the size of its exhibit hall is no more meaningful than measuring the quality of a car just by the raw horsepower of its engine. Sure, it gives you an overall idea of how powerful the vehicle is, but if it's a rickety bucket of bolts otherwise, you're not going to have a quality ride.

To that end, Macworld Expo was good. Almost every conference I saw was packed with people -- especially the "Power Tools" sessions and other events that drew out power users and professionals who were here to learn and gain new knowledgea bout how their computers work and how best to leverage the power of Mac OS X and the applications they depend on to do their work.

"Quality" is a word that was used a lot when I talked with vendors who did buy exhibit hall space. While some felt that more people should have attended and remarked that Apple's absence undoubtedly hurt that, many many people I spoke to appreciated the quality of the customer who they were talking with and the quality of the experience itself. The smaller show floor and crowds enabled what one vendor described as the ability to "dig deeper" to find out what his users -- and potential users -- were looking for in their products.

To that end, I think the face-to-face time a show like this affords is invaluable to the industry, and I don't think that the immediacy of Internet-based news and press is bound to erase that any time soon. Sure, 50,000 people don't come to these events anymore, but many of them don't need to come. The ones that do, however, seemed to have gotten a lot out of it.

Posted by flargh at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So tonight Bonnie and I stopped at Wal-Mart to do some shopping after dinner. I spent about a buck on a black baton with a yellow nylon string affixed to the end of it. At the end of the string is a rubber bauble with plastic feathers. It's a cat toy.

As far as the cat is concerned, I just bought him an Xbox with a 51-inch projection TV and a 5.1 surround sound system.

Right now he's passed out cold underneath the living room table -- we've exhausted him by having him chase the kitty fishing pole around the living room. What's really funny is that toward the end, he was attacking it even if no one was wiggling it.

Posted by flargh at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Macworld Expo is, as we've established, in Boston this year. Even though it's a "local" show for me, I'm honestly surprised at just how much crap I have to do before I can focus on it. My boss and I will meet in Boston sometime on Sunday afternoon, so we'll be good to go on Monday. The show opens on Monday, but the exhibit hall -- normally our bread and butter in terms of news -- doesn't open til Tuesday. Still, Monday's a work day, so to have us both traveling (as was the original plan) is not a great idea.

Given that, I've basically got two days to prepare for my departure, which means, among other things, making sure all the bills are paid, stocking up the pantry with plenty of food to keep Bonnie's trips to the grocery store to a bare minimum, backing up my computer, transferring all my data onto a new laptop I'll be using this trip, getting the van serviced, mowing the lawn and other various and sundry tasks.

In the middle of all this I've had a couple of vendors get in touch with me about pre-briefings for announcements that they plan to make next week (not Expo-related, but still important to cover) that absolutely must have my attention, so my time tomorrow is going to be divided between work and domestic responsibilities, to say the least. And that further compresses my schedule into basically a day and a half.

This pre-show frenzy is one of the reasons that I've grown, over the years, to really dislike trade shows. They're too disruptive to both my personal and professional life to ever truly enjoy. But, in the midst of it, I always find time to have a good time with the people that I'm with, so that I'm looking forward to.

Posted by flargh at 10:57 PM | Permalink

So Emmeline was wandering around the house the other day telling Bonnie all about these adorable kittens on this calendar in her room. She's smitten with them. So Bonnie asks her what breed of cat they are.

"Salami, I think," says Emme. "Yeah, Salami cats."

"Salami cats?"

"Yeah, Salami cats."

Only after careful investigation does Bonnie discover the breed that Emme's looking at: Somali.

I kinda like the concept of a Salami cat instead.

Posted by flargh at 08:14 AM | Permalink

The latest free association game at Lunanina.com is up.

1. Resignation:: letter
2. Coupling:: funny show (the British version, anyway)
3. Grounded:: for Life (another funny show)
4. Habit:: Nun's garb
5. Chainsaw:: Texas
6. Rental:: car
7. Deleted:: document
8. Online personals:: [this space intentionally left blank]
9. Penguin:: Linux
10. Offend:: upset

Posted by flargh at 10:29 AM | Permalink

Free Comic Book Day (last Saturday) was a wash-out for us because the place we went to has gone out of business in the last month or so, since the last time we drove by there -- quite sad, papered-over windows with no "We've moved to" sign on the door, so I guess they've gone kaput.

So instead we took the kids to see Spider-Man 2 -- I figured a comic book movie would be the next best thing. And indeed it was. We went to the local theater in Mashpee, which we haven't been to in a while -- we prefer to go to Hyannis, where they have a theater with really big screens and stadium seating, and if we're sticking nearby we usually drive to a cinema in Sandwich that's just a hop, skip and a jump away from us that's small but very well-appointed. The Mashpee theater -- a Regal franchise -- worked out just fine, and the kids loved the movie.

For what it's worth, I though Spider-Man 2 was *excellent:* Every bit as good as its predecessor, and in many respects, better. In fact, outside of Batman and Batman Returns, I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of a movie based on a comic book that I like better.

So there it is. Thumbs up.

Posted by flargh at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My old multibutton mouse has fallen apart and I'm putting off buying a new one until my Bluetooth adapter arrives, so I can go wireless with the mouse at least. So briefly, I've returned to the Apple Pro Mouse, which is, near as I can tell, the crappiest mouse that's ever been designed for gaming.

No second button, so I have to resort to command-clicks or control-clicks in any game I play in order to do secondary weapons or other activities normally mapped to the second mouse button. No scrollwheel, so zooming or switching weapons in any game I play becomes a nightmare of remembering what key command on the keyboard will activate that feature.

God, this sucks. And on a long weekend, too.

Apple's one-button mouse philosophy I *understand,* but it's something I totally DON'T agree with. Even when I'm on the road with my PowerBook, I bring a multibutton mouse with me (and I'd use it here, except it's a portable unit that's a bit too small to game with comfortably).

Posted by flargh at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Macworld Conference & Expo is bearing down on us only two weeks after WWDC wrapped up, and while there's a lot of general pessimism aimed at the show thanks to Apple's absence, it looks like there's still going to be enough to interest folks who make the effort to show up. For one thing, the conference schedule is quite strong and chock-full of interesting topics aimed at everyone from new users to seasoned professionals.

The exhibit hall is what a lot of people use as a gauge to measure the success of a trade show, however, and by that measure, Macworld Expo Boston is bound to disappoint. From what I can see of the show floor plan on the official Web site, it's smaller than last year's CreativePro show in New York, which was markedly smaller still than the Macworld Expo New York that preceded it in 2002. But as someone who spends much of these shows struggling to stay apace of the torrent of announcements and product releases and introductions, it's a welcome respite, because it means I actually might be able to enjoy some of the show instead of struggling to keep my head above water.

I got a taste of that in New York last year; in fact, as downcast as I was going into it with Apple giving that show fairly short shrift, I ended the week upbeat and happy that I'd actually been able to spend more of the show talking with individual people and getting to know them better than I had in years past. I've often lamented at particularly hectic trade shows that there isn't a way to split myself into two or three clones that can then reintegrate at the end of the week, so I can cover the news, enjoy the social atmosphere, and get to know some of the products more in depth.

So to that end, I'm keeping my chin up and hoping for the best at this year's Macworld Expo in Boston. And at the very least, this'll be the easiest show I've covered in a while when it comes to travel: I just have to take a bus to South Station, rather than struggling with train or airplane itineraries.

Posted by flargh at 11:30 AM | Permalink

as the favorite hamburger topping of respondents to a new poll. I find this absolutely heartbreaking.

Posted by flargh at 01:30 PM | Permalink

So Marlon Brando has passed on at 80, according to news reports. Does this culminate our last rule of three starting with Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan, or does this start another?

Posted by flargh at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)