Got an intel mac? Get thee over to vmware’s site and grab a copy of the public beta of their ‘fusion’ product, which is basically the PC vmware engine ported over to macosx. I’ve been running Parallels and am completely happy with it, but I’m also really happy to see competition in this space on the mac, and given my last several years use of vmware on the pc, I’m also happy to see it running on the mac, which allows me to seamlessly move my environments from platform to platform as needed. If you’re not familiar with it, vmware, parallels and other virtual machines software allow you to run alternative operating systems inside your host operating system with very high levels of compatibility and at almost native speed. If you’ve had experience with products like virtual PC in the past which left a sour taste in your mouth, rest assured: this is not that. vmware and parallels are both great products and tremendously useful.
All that remains is for Apple to loosen up so you can run OSX as a guest OS in these virtual machines, something which is really needed and would again be tremendously useful. If Apple wants to compete in server rooms, they basically have to do this because vmware has taken over the world’s server rooms over the last couple of years.
Anyway, kudos to vmware on this, and here’s to healthy competition.
Published on December 21, 2006
in General.
Check out the monstropedia, an encyclopedia of monsters, for a little fun. Personally I think my sister should get on there and add Spongo the merciless, her deadly little cat.
This is getting a fair amount of mention, but in case you missed it, Google released a fantastic extension to firefox this week - google browser synch, which lets you synch your bookmarks, open windows, and even cookies, across multiple copies of firefox. Working in your browser at the office and want to resume working where you left off when you get home? You’re all set with this, which alone makes it super useful. The bookmark synching, history browsing and password synching are all just a fringe benefits. Definitely worth running if you’re like me and work at innumerable computers.
I’m just full of pet stories of late, it seems. This one is actually from my sister, who recently had a bleeding pet experience:
OMG. So I am sitting on the couch catching up on work when Spongo flies across the room and attacks Poot, unprovoked, as she sometimes does. Gidget runs over and attacks Spongo until she leaves Poot alone (Gidget is a good and loyal, if half-blind, friend). I rush over. There is blood everywhere, and I quickly realize that it is pulsing, warmly, out of Poot. Now what?
Brian and I try not to panic. We try to find the source of the blood on a white dog covered in blood. Poot’s getting splashed, we’re getting splashed, the floor is getting splashed. It’s a bloody mess. Brian starts looking for an emergency clinic. I am trying to figure out how we manage getting Poot to a clinic with a baby. I find the source of the blood - a gash on her ear, and thankfully not a vein in her neck, which is of course what I had been picturing. I stabilize her, and we start to talk about whether or not we need to bring her to the vet. We feel like things are ok. She shakes her head and the blood gushing starts again.
I call the vet and tell them we are on our way. We stabilize her again, head downstairs, she shakes her head and the gushing starts again. I wrap her in gauze like crazy, she gets excited, shakes her head… you guessed it: gushing. I managed to get her and Brian out the door by wrapping her head and ear in paper towels and gauze and taping the whole number to her neck.
Now I am sitting here wondering what blood to clean up first.
That cat is so out of here!
There’s also an update, 24 hours later:
…after an emergency visit to the vet last night, during which we were told that the two worst places to have an injury are the tail (uh yeah - had to have a piece of Poot’s tail surgically removed two years ago after she slit the tip and it wouldn’t heal) and the ear (of course!), Poot returned home with her entire head (less one loose ear) in a pink bandage (with a green heart - nice touch) and wearing an Elizabethan collar sized for a Saint Bernard.
As early as 8 AM, she had wiggled out of said bandage and splattered said collar with blood. After one more visit to the local vet this morning, Brian is now on his way to Poot’s regular vet in New Jersey (she sees a specialist for her heart) to prep for emergency surgery.
Anyone care to adopt Spongo the somewhat amazing?
Published on December 20, 2006
in General.
Well….maybe there are. A brief scary story. I have about 30 acres of farmland behind my house. At various times I have seen fox and coyote traversing the property. Last night it was pitch black out, so when I took Soolin out for her 10PM constitutional I put my LED camping head lamp on so I could see. We got about 100 yards or so out into the farmland and she began doing her business. While she was, I was sort of aimlessly looking about when what do I see but two bright peepers, about 15 yards away and creeping up on us. As soon as I had them in the light, they stopped moving and just stared at me. They were roughly canine height.
I panicked, not out of fear, but out of concern that Soolin would rush over to attack. I discovered that nothing puts fear in a man like tackling a pooping dog though, and imagining the possible outcomes.
Anyway nothing much came of it beyond that - I got ahold of Soolin and dragged her back towards the house. The eyes never moved, they just followed us as we walked away. After I stashed Soolin in the house I went back to see if I could spot whatever it was, but I couldn’t see it.
Published on December 16, 2006
in Gaming.
This week’s friday fun link: Imagine the original quake, played from a top-down perspective. If that appeals to you, go check out Bloodmasters, a freeware multiplayer action game. You’ll pick up the controls in 2 seconds, the graphics are decent, and there are a variety of gameplay modes to choose from. About the only downside is the limited number of servers. Check it out for your friday fun fix.
Published on December 12, 2006
in General.
My friend Nick turned me onto Velomobiles a while ago and now I’m mildly obsessed with them. If you’re unfamiliar with them, check out the velomobile wikipedia entry. They’re basically enclosed recumbent bicycles, and they’re often equipped with a small electric engine to help you climb hilly terrain. I could easily commute to work with one of these and would love to be able to - though I might need the assist on one hill, it would combine a great workout, the ability to get grocery shopping done, and an environmentally sound way to commute all in one package. There’s just one downside - the cost. You basically can’t touch one for under $10k. They’re also very hard to get in the US.
The concept seems brilliant though, especially if you buy into the peak oil/ever increasing fuel costs theory of where we are right now. I’m mulling over buying a recumbent, which can be had starting at around $2k, as a way to work my way up to a full velomobile. There’s a dealer in Greenfield, MA that carries stock on a lot of the main recumbent brands. As soon as it gets warm I’m going to take a few for a test drive, and possibly sell my kayak off and use the funds to buy a commuter bike.
I have a fairly extensive collection of boardgames, many of them from the 1970’s and some, especially the ones published by Avalon Hill, are somewhat valuable (Titan, for example, regularly sells for over $100 on ebay and I’ve seen it go for over $200). It’s an impractical hobby in that boardgames take up quite a lot of space, and in fact until last weekend it had been over two years since I had seen most of them, because ever since I moved to Saratoga they had been sitting in boxes, first in the attic of a barn in Greenfield and then more recently in a spare room in my current house.
When I visited family over Thanksgiving holiday we went to Ikea and I bought dressers, which allowed me to disassemble the ramshackle milk crate and board shelving system I had been using for my clothes. I transferred this to the spare room, unpacked all the games, fawning over some of them as one might fawn over long absent treasures, then closed up the spare room. I’m not heating it this winter to save on the heating bill.
Yesterday I went into the spare room to retrieve one of the games and discovered the whole assemblage had collapsed for reasons unknown. Things could have been much much worse than they ended up being but still, games and parts of games were scattered everywhere. Most of the 1970’s era games, with their hundreds of cardboard chits, survived intact and boxes closed, but some of them vomited forth a stream of cardboard bits it will take me a month to sort. At first I thought to take a picture of the carnage but the whole thing was so depressing I couldn’t bring myself to do it - in fact, after gathering together the still closed games and stacking them together I fled the room and left the mess intact, to be dealt with another day.
The best thing I can say about it all is that most of the really valuable games seem to have survived, boxes uncrushed. The whole episode has tempted me to sell off the majority of the collection. It’s a bit of a burden to keep around and though I do get to drag out some of the games several times a year for play, the vast majority are neither valuable nor ones I would play. They are individually notable for their rule system, or the designer, or their heritage, or their theme, but in aggregate they’re a great bulk of relatively delicate historical gamestuff that would be better stored in a collector more inclined to make use of them than I am.
Published on December 11, 2006
in General.
The one downside to my recent move and career change was that I put myself in a hole financially. Part of this was due to switching jobs and having no income for almost 2 months, part was the expense of moving, establishing myself in a new area, and furnishing a 3 bedroom house, part of this was due to my having rewarded myself for my new position with a relatively expensive HDTV, and part was due to my less careful control over my spending. I’m making more, after all, and a little ….excess seemed in order.
Still, I plugged away at the debt. When I first moved in March, I gave myself 6 months to clear it off my credit card. It took me 8 months instead, which all things considered is not too bad. Now the question enters: after Christmas (which for the first time in my adult life will not put me in a serious financial hole: my family agreed to move to a secret santa model), how should I best spend my monthly budget surplus? I could continue with ridiculous excess: buying an xbox 360, a PS3, a Nintendo Wii, a Velomobile or at least a recumbent bicycle, additional home theater equipment upgrades, and more broadly expensive consumer electronics and gadgets, of which I’m inordinately fond. I could start saving aggressively, with an eye towards buying a house or at least recharging a savings account that’s sadly depleted after several years of career changes. I could try to quickly pay off my car loan, which right now sits at about $8.5k and is just a little higher than the overall debt I incurred in the move to MA, meaning with a little discipline and a nice tax return I could have it paid off by next fall. Or, the most likely scenario, I could find a balance of the above.
We’ll see how this plays. I’ll be making the first decisions in January. I’m tempted to flat out focus on paying off the car, but some reading of financial advice columns has left me with this sense that conventional wisdom says ‘debt is not bad, especially when it’s low interest,’ which my car loan is, and that I might be better off simply dumping money into savings where it will draw a higher interest rate. I have to balance that against the fact that there is some sentiment that the dollar is about to collapse (after the housing market does) which could leave me with a pile of savings worth nothing, in turn leading me to wonder if I should focus on tangible assets like, for example, my toys 
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