Russia’s biggest spammer was brutally beaten to death this weekend, and I find that my laments have more to do with the murderers’ failure to film the whole thing pour encourager les autres, and their choice of a spammer relatively unknown in my part of the world, than with the supposed sanctity of human life.
I’d ask, rhetorically, whether this makes me evil, but the truth is that I don’t care. A “yes” wouldn’t change my mind in the slightest, so buggrit.
I started collecting the Invader Zim DVDs pretty much from the moment their release began, glad to get my hands on high-quality copies of the episodes at last. (I make it a point to obtain legitimate copies of things I’ve bootlegged, like the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, whenever I can, if only to do my little bit to undermine what’s left of the MPAA’s credibility.)
Naturally, the inevitable happened: after the individual volumes had finished trickling into the market, a boxed set appeared, complete with Special Features disc, GIR figurine, and eye-catching case modeled on Zim’s house. It figures. Publishers seem never to miss a chance to screw their most loyal customers. (“You pre-ordered so you’d get it the instant it came out? Hah! Now you get to buy it again, just to get your grubby fanboy mitts on the additional goodies! Sucker!”)
Except that AnimeWorks, bless their delicious candy-like hearts, have gone about it just a bit differently. They’ve made a package containing only the extra items — bonus disc, figurine, and case — available for a fraction of the price of the full set. Slot your previously-acquired Volumes 1-3 into the empty space in the case, and it’s like you bought the boxed set to start with.
As GIR would say with a tear in his baby blues, “I love this publisher.”
There are times when you want to fiddle with a bitmap without necessarily wanting or needing to bring the full force of Photoshop to bear.
At times like those, if you’re on a Windows box, Paint.NET fits the bill nicely. While lightweight, it’s neither crippled nor a toy. It’s available free of charge, and you can download the sources if you want to hack on it. This might be my occasion to develop at least a working familiarity with the .NET framework.
Last night, driving home around 9:30, I saw the telltale burst of dim orange sparks on the highway indicating that the occupant of the car 100 or so feet ahead of me had tossed a lit cigarette out the window.
Oh, well. It’s irritating and makes you wish for something unpleasant to happen to the thoughtless oaf who did it, but it’s something you see every day.
What you don’t see every day is the police cruiser that has just lazily passed you — causing you to throw a quick, anxious glance at the speedometer, of course, because you’re only human — put on a burst of speed, cut in its lights, and flag the offender over. It made my evening. I’m sure it didn’t make the butt-head driver’s, but perhaps it’ll prompt him to think twice the next time he’s tempted to dispose of a lit cigarette in the tinder-dry environs of summertime California.
The Netgear WG602 access point is a much happier piece of hardware than its accursed D-Link counterpart. It doesn’t want to reboot whenever you do… well, anything, its DHCP client implementation actually appears to work, and its built-in web-based UI is a model of elegance and simplicity.
It may, in fact, constitute one of the very few legitimate uses of HTML frames I’ve seen. Ever. The left frame chooses the configuration topic, the center frame allows you to set options, and the right frame displays help appropriate to the current context, so you don’t even have to make any additional clicks to find out just what the options you’re facing off against actually mean. I am pleased and impressed.
(Of course, I haven’t actually tried attaching any wireless clients through the thing yet, but trifles like that can wait for the time being. Also, for maximum perversity, I have acquired a Linksys high-gain antenna and antenna mount, just to add vendor mix-and-match to the equation.)
“It’s the end — but the moment has been prepared for.”
Tomorrow will be my last day at Juniper. I’ve had a good run, and it’s definitely time to take up a new challenge, but all the same, it feels odd and just a little sad to be leaving. Not nearly as sad as it would were I not certain that I’ll remain in close contact with the closest of my coworkers, but still.
I have long harbored the suspicion that WiFi is a kind of mass hallucination rooted in collective embarassment. Fundamental security issues — which are grave, and many — aside, no one wants to be the first to admit that this stuff often doesn’t work worth a damn, and doesn’t come close to delivering the advertised throughput even when it does connect with some approximation of reliability. The fear of being mocked for technical incompetence by one’s companions in suffering is simply too great.
Recent experiences have done more to reinforce my opinion than to change it. Thinking that it was time to move at least partway up the technology curve, I decided to acquire an 802.11g-capable access point. Having been reasonably pleased with D-Link’s DGL-4100 router, I picked up the company’s DWL-2100AP access point, along with a matching omnidirectional antenna.
To say that I am not impressed would be a galloping understatement. I didn’t necessarily expect the product to end world hunger, but for the price, I expected it to at least be fundamentally usable. No dice.
For starters, every single configuration change requires that you reboot the device. Change the SSID? Reboot. Alter encryption settings? Reboot. Switch from a static to a dynamically-assigned IP address? Reboot. Every reboot requires that you and your browser twiddle your thumbs for 20 seconds while the AP regains its ability to act as a web server.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you could batch up the changes and effect them all at once, but you can’t. Maybe you’re supposed to use the included SNMP-based access-point management software if you want advanced functionality like that, but then, really, what was the point of even bothering with a web-based configuration interface in the first place? As it is, the thing makes the Windows update and installation proceess look like the very model of simplicity and elegance, and that’s saying something.
In the end, I could live with that, since I expect to configure it once and then forget about it. I could also live with the prevalence of engrish in the UI, for much the same reason. Remember my casual allusion to dynamically-assigned IP addresses above? I should clarify: you can request that the access point act as a DHCP client, provided you don’t mind its subsequently not working at all. Out of the box, the device presumes its IP address to be 192.168.0.50; switch it to DHCP mode, and it will stop listening on that address — or any other.
Watch your DHCP host’s logs, and you will see the access point requesting and receiving a lease. And requesting and receiving a lease. And requesting and receiving a lease… and so on, ad infinitum. Even though it’s assigned the same IP address every time, it’s completely unresponsive when contacted on that address. Installing the latest-available firmware (v. 2.0, at the time of this writing) does nothing to solve the problem.
So I’m taking it back. If it were a matter of just one flaw with an otherwise-impeccable design, I’d try contacting D-Link technical support and working through the issue. But this is clearly a product that is substandard in a number of significant ways, and was shipped anyway. Those responsible should hang their heads in shame. For $100, I expect and demand better. We’ll see if Netgear can do a better job of winning and keeping my loyalty.
I am not a habitual a visitor to rotten.com, as just a handful of the images of human suffering resident there, viewed years ago, were enough to permanently scar my mind.
However, I’ve just discovered that the site also hosts a series of biographical articles. There are few guilty pleasures more guilty or pleasurable than reading a hatchet job done upon a richly deserving target; there are few targets more richly deserving than Karl Rove.
Sometime in the late 1990s, shortly after going on a ten-album buying spree whose haul proved spectacularly unsatisfying, I temporarily gave up on the music industry. I resigned myself to the idea that I would never again buy an album that I actually loved.
Lately, something has changed for the better. Maybe the specter of internet piracy has scared the industry into thinking that it should actually try, rather than just focus on moving product. Maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I’ve just gotten smarter about where I choose to go looking.
Mike Doughty’s Haughty Melodic, released at the beginning of May, was a good start. Recently I’ve gone on a bit of a spree again, and the results have been much more gratifying this time around. The biggest gem in this haul is Kathleen Edwards, a plucky Canadian singer-songwriter who’s apparently categorized as “Alternative Country”. Her sweet-revenge single, “Back to Me”, was punchy enough to sell me on the album of the same title, her sophomore effort, after I’d heard it just once on the radio.
She’s got a simultaneously spare and unsparing way with a pen, and a smoky voice with which to expertly deliver the payload she’s crafted. As for the things she can do with a steel guitar, well, let’s just say that I could listen to the bridges of some of her songs for hours, and have.
Do you think that I’ve changed
I swear I never tried
Memory is a terrible thing
When you use it right
— “Away”
Ordinarily, this would make her my hero, except that:
“As God is my witness, I haven’t the faintest idea what I should do.”