Monthly Archives: May 2005

Today, on The Clown Show

Idiots, Politics

President Bush simultaneously derides an Amnesty International report condemning conditions at Guantanamo Bay — where people are held without, you know, so much as the pretense of due process — as “absurd”, and then proceeds almost in the same breath to decry the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, piously declaring that “Here, you’re innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial.”

Hee hee ha ha ho ho… sob. We’ve done it. We’ve crossed some kind of event horizon from which not even irony can escape.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to beat my head bloody on the desk.

Broodmaster

Friends

Somehow, I find myself responsible for the care and feeding of no less than five cats this weekend: my own Ben and Tig, Jody’s stalwart Brie and dainty May, and my neighbor Nat’s regal snowshoe, Chloe.

One of my coworkers back at Adobe, Shawna, had a sticker in her office window that read, “Destined to become an old woman with lots of cats.” Somehow that wasn’t where I expected to end up, but maybe fate has other plans. All I know is that if I see an army of knitted tea cozies advancing upon my cubicle under the command of a floppy straw hat wearing dried flowers, I’m making a break for it.

Ouch

Hardware

Kids, the flanges on ATX power-connector sockets are surprisingly sharp. If you’re going to pull them while replacing the connector, either keep your fingers clear, or wear gloves, mmmmmKay?

Hate Sink

Hardware, Idiots

A few moons ago, I acquired a Thermaltake PIPE101 heat sink, a sexy little skived-copper-fin-and-heat-pipe affair. Well, okay, sexy, but not exactly “little”. It has mounting holes for a 92-mm fan, which makes it a mite larger than the typical heatsink.

This was originally a selling point, as I am a student of the big-slow-fan school of quiet cooling, but it turns out that the motherboard of the Athlon XP machine I was planning to put it into places the processor socket near the very upper edge of the motherboard, where it practically abuts the power supply. The PIPE101 won’t fit there. Oops.

So I put it aside, thinking that since it could also be used as a Socket 939 heatsink, I’d have occasion to use it whenever I got around to building an Athlon 64 machine, something I knew I’d do eventually.

Or maybe not. Because, in order to do triple duty as a Socket A/Socket 478/Socket 939 heat sink, the PIPE101 eschews most of the benefits of the AMD-designed retention bracket in favor of its own screw-in metallic clip. This clip has two possible orientations, and it’s hard to tell from the indistinct pictures in Thermaltake’s documentation which one you’re supposed to use, but in a sense it doesn’t matter: they both would have required exerting an amount of pressure upon the whole assembly that, frankly, terrified me.

Screw that, I decided. I am not jepoardizing my $350 processor-plus-motherboard investment just to save my pride and a $30 heat sink. I wound up using the AMD heat sink instead; said sink seems reasonable, is designed to clip into the AMD-designed retention bracket, and uses an elegant lever-arm mechanism to ensure adequate tension without dangerously heroic effort.

Memo to self:

  • Think long and hard before buying anything from Thermaltake ever again. Thermalright and Arctic Cooling both make nice gear whose installation requirements seem considerably saner.
  • Try to buy a heat sink that is designed for your particular processor, rather than a jack-of-all-trades design, unless you’re sure that the latter is sufficiently well-engineered to work cleanly with your hardware.
  • Check the fit on any prospective heat sink before you spend the better part of an hour lapping it. Idiot.

Memo to would-be vendors of aftermarket coolers:

  • With Socket 478 and Socket 939, Intel and AMD both went to the trouble of designing retention brackets that could realistically support the kind of large, heavy heat sinks needed to dispose of the thermal waste their processors produced. These brackets, while differing from one another, were both created with thought and care, and, when properly used, allow the installation of heat sinks without requring excessive force or pressure.

    Use them, you wankers. The next time I open a heat-sink package and find some bullshit little stamped-sheet-metal “adapter” that I have to screw into some part of my motherboard before I can get down to business, I’m going to hurt someone. That goes double if I have to remove part of the existing mounting hardware first.

Uh, anybody want to buy a barely-used heat sink? It’s been lapped and everything, and should work very nicely on any Socket A motherboard with enough room. Act now, and I’ll even throw in a 92-mm fan for free.

Toy… “Prurient Interest”

Toys

It’s not lust, not exactly, at least not yet, but it certainly is enough to raise an eyebrow. palmOne announced the “LifeDrive Mobile Manager” today. While the built-in 4-GB microdrive is neat, the real eye-opener is built-in 802.11b support. This makes it the first Palm device, aside from the unattractive keyboard-based Tungsten C, to offer built-in WiFi.

Open questions:

  • Is the mail client as useless a piece of hideous garbage as the one on older Palm devices? (If it can connect directly to the mail server using its own network stack, rather than having to piggyback onto the host’s stack at sync time, there’s hope that the answer is “No.” However, a direct connection to the server is not per se going to save you from acute developer retardedness, such as assuming that the only IMAP folder of interest on said server is INBOX, and making it excruciatingly painful to specify others.)
  • What’s the battery life like, especially when you’re actively using WiFi?
  • Did palmOne gratuitously redesign the connector at the base of the thing yet again? On the one hand, it sure looks different in the photographs; on the other hand, palmOne’s literature suggests that it is in fact compatible with accessories designed for its forebears. Further investigation is warranted.
  • Is palmOne about to come out with an equivalent Treo counterpart? (And would I, in fact, care? In the past few days I’ve been pointedly indicating the generally miserable quality of all cellular networks in the Bay Area as the reason I haven’t acquired a new cell phone since my last one was stolen. The Treo 650 is a sweet little unit, but there’s still the matter of having a decent network to use it with.)

The Shape of Things That Might Have Been

Movies

In the course of discussing Warren Ellis’s superb Planetary, specifically the subplot involving Project Artemis, Dirk mentioned Man Conquers Space, a work-in-progress pseudodocumentary that dares to imagine how events might have unfolded had some of the early 1950s’ starrier-eyed visions of near-future space travel come to pass.

Watching the trailer literally gave me chills, and filled me with a nostalgia for things that never were. I would beat down more than a few doors to gain access to the final film, whenever it comes into existence.

The Circle is Complete

Movies

One of my very earliest memories of childhood: I am barely five years old, and standing in my sandbox. (Actually, “mudbox” would be a more accurate description, but that was exactly the way I liked it.)

My father is kneeling down beside me with the vaguely conspiratorial air of one about to bestow a present upon a recipient who may not fully appreciate its import for some time to come. “Mañana,” he says, “te voy a llevar al cine, y veras los Jinetes Jedi, y las espadas de luz.” I nod, not realizing what a seminal moment in my young life is bearing down upon me. And it is seminal, even though I wind up hiding my face behind the seat in front of me when Obi-Wan and Darth Vader fight their final duel, and again as the Imperials whittle mercilessly away at the Rebel squadrons during the trench run.

Now, twenty-eight years later, I’m hoping that I won’t again feel the urge to conceal the sight of the screen from my own eyes — but for very different reasons.

Please, God, let this movie not be a complete disappointment.

The Cargo Cult Erects Monuments

Idiots, Travel

Should I have entertained any lingering suspicion that the permissive treatment I recieved at the Freer Gallery, at odds with the written policy hanging before my eyes, was some kind of anomaly, it was dispelled at the Museum of Natural History.

Like the Freer Gallery, the museum greeted visitors with a placard expressly forbidding weapons. (I don’t carry the knife for use as a weapon, but it’s pretty hard to argue that three inches of honed steel couldn’t be put to offensive use by one with the right inclination.) It also forbade food. Finally, it required that visitors pass through a metal detector before entering the museum. Figuring that we were well beyond the gray area, I put the knife in the bag containing our dim sum and handed the bag to the attending guard.

He poked disinterestedly at the food containers and handed the whole thing back to me. Shrugging, I returned the knife to my back pocket and walked through the detector. Some understanding of the game’s rules was beginning to dawn, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised when it let me through without a hiccough. I did have to wonder just how much metal I would need to carry before raising a red flag, but never mind.

The gemstone and mineral exhibit was impressive, although the entomological section was disappointing. (All the exhibits were dead. Dead, dead, dead. I’ve seen more impressive living specimens at the Memphis zoo, and more impressive dead ones on the walls of Celina’s co-worker‘s office.)

Dim Sum Madness

Food

Celina and I got off to a very late start, boarding the metro well after noon. While we tried to decided what we’d have for breakfast, we happened to notice the Chinatown stop on the Metro map, and Celina suggested looking for Dim Sum.

A friendly local cop — at least, I think she was a local cop, though she might have been a transit worker — pointed us in the direction of a place called Tony Cheng’s Seafood Restaurant. Once we were actually in the right spot — the ground floor is Tony Cheng’s Mongolian Barbecue — we grabbed a menu and proceeded to check off items.

Memo to self: beware ordering dim sum when you are famished. After taking our slip, the waiter came back a few minutes later and said, essentially, “This is fourteen items. Are you sure about this?” We assured him that we were.

We didn’t quite finish everything, but we did considerable damage, and we took the rest with us, so nothing went to waste. The food was excellent — should I ever find myself in D.C. with a hankering for Dim Sum again, I will know exactly where to go.