So I’m in the midst of a move to Holyoke MA. The server that runs this website will need to move to its new home, and that home is getting its network updated to support all the additional equipment moving into it. Metamusing will see some downtime as a result, probably starting Thursday night. It’s possible the downtime will last for several days or even longer, depending on how things go at Susan’s house. It shouldn’t be as bad as when I moved to Saratoga several years ago, when I was down for about 3 weeks (thanks, Time Warner) but it could be over a week. In the meantime head on over to the wonderful metafilter, one of the sites that got me going with my own site, to feed your news of whatever jones.

So Susan bought a new laptop, and it came with an ipod touch for ‘free,’ and we’ve been playing around with it. The thing is absolutely the coolest little device ever and now I desperately want one. Meanwhile though one of the things we discovered was that my old templates looked completely broken in the ipod browser, which got me started looking for something else. I’m going to stick with what you’re looking at now for the time being. Meanwhile, donations towards my own touch are welcome

Susan doesn’t think much of the green in the right column, and I have to say I agree with her, but I like some of the functionality of this theme, particularly the stuff happening in the right column, so I’m torn. I can also work on the color theme, but also I’m curious as to what folks think. Let me know in the comments and I’ll choose whether to switch back, find something else, or tinker with the photoshop templates to get a better color scheme going.

Susan was invited to be one of the subjects of a public art project on campus last fall that involved having her portrait sketched by an artist, then allowing any member of the campus community to doodle on the portrait. The finished works were then publicly displayed on the outsides of campus buildings and around campus for several months. For most of that time Susan’s portrait was hung inside the Mead art museum, but for a little while it was hung outside the building she works in. They’re beginning to take the portraits down, so we quickly snapped a shot the other day. Witness Susan of the giant and not so giant head:

[edit]

Kirsten pointed out in the comments that Susan looks like Queen Elizabeth in that picture, so here’s a higher resolution shot of the actual artwork:

My day job is website management for a small liberal arts college. We use drupal, which we arrived at after a process of review a couple of years ago which was overseen by me, and the ongoing maintenance and development of our publishing platform is also overseen by me. We’re growing our staff this year by 2 programmers. If you know drupal or have an extensive background in web application development, consider applying. The boss is cool, the wages are competitive, the benefits are excellent, you get to work in a college environment for one of the more prestigious schools in the US, and you get to help grow a CMS framework, focusing on open source tools while you’re at it.

[update] Per a suggestion from Andrew in the comments, I’m linking over to a case study on how we’re using drupal at amherst college which I wrote a month or two ago that covers what we’re doing in depth and has a lot of interesting commentary including a few kudos for us.

Oh, there’s so many contexts where that would be useful. Unfortunately this post is only about one context, but it’s useful and you’ll love it nonetheless. The scenario: windows prompts you to update it and you dutifully do so, after which it tells you it needs to restart, but helpfully allows you to defer this until later. Great! Except it reminds you…every…goddamn…minute…with an annoying as fuck popup window. Ever shout at that thing? Turns out a little googling reveals how to shut that thing off for good. The cheatsheet, if you don’t want to clickthrough:

Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

Windows sucks, sucks so profoundly that words cannot express my loathing for it, yet it’s the standard OS for gaming and I love my gaming action, so I’m stuck with it. I took Friday off last week because windows registry cruft had finally gotten to the point where the machine was taking ~5 minutes to finish booting and no amount of registry scouring could cleanse it of the problem, plus the boot volume was writing a disturbing amount of error messages to the logs, making me fear for its life. It was time for the ‘once every couple of years’ clean install of windows.

Since I was having to go through this, I took the opportunity to buy a new motherboard and videocard. The motherboard only supported 1066 bus speed, leaving me unable to upgrade to newer faster cpu’s including the new wolfsdale 45nm cpus. The videocard has had overheating problems since the day I bought it - it’s an ATI 1900xt and I basically dislike the thing. Performance wise it was ok, but it’s been loud and flaky due to the heating problems the whole time I’ve owned it.

I went cheap but effective on the motherboard side of things, with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. It’s lean on the features but the right price and with a solid review and reliability record. The one thing it lacks is firewire, which my last board also lacked and I survived without (though not without the occasional annoyance). It doesn’t support DDR3 RAM either, but I figure I am at least one machine away from moving to DDR3 anyway.

On the videocard end of things, I switched to Nvidia after at least 4-5 ATI cards in a row. ATI still produces decent cards but the 8800GT I bought is basically the value performance leader these days and ATI cards continue to run hot and loud. I didn’t want a repeat of my last ATI card is what it boiled down to. It also helped that I found a deal on an ASUS for around $150 after a rebate.

The build went pretty uneventfully. The only problems I had were initially getting it to boot, which turned out to be because the cooler on my CPU has a broken peg which was causing it to not stay seated against the cpu. Boot, overheat, shutdown immediately. I figured it out pretty quickly and brute-forced a solution. Next time I upgrade the CPU I’ll toss the cooler. The other problem was me being a dummy coupled with bad labeling on my RAM. For some reason I had it in my head that I had 4GB of Patriot RAM, the the labels on the RAM are misleading, so I spent a ton of time fiddling with ram slots and BIOS memory timing settings before I had a V8 moment and realized all was already working well - I had 2GB and the machine was seeing it correctly.

On the OS side of things, I did a couple of things differently. For the first time I used a slipstreamed installer disc, in this case one with service pak 3. I had an initial blue screen with it but the second install went smoothly, and it was a beautiful thing to go to windows update and see only a small handful of patches instead of the usual hours worth of patches to apply. I also installed Ubuntu 8.04. I’m going to try and force myself to only use windows when I’m gaming and linux the rest of the time. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway I just figured I’d write up how the build went, as I’ve done a number of times in the past. The whole thing took me a full day and then some, though portions of it were spent watching progress bars creep by, fiddling with my DS or PS3 while I waited. The current build’s name is ’suckeggridesaga,’ which is short for ‘Suck Egg Rides Again.’ Every one of my machines has been named some version of suck egg, cause, well, you know - Windows really does suck eggs.

Oh - one other thing to mention. Steam, as in the software service from Valve, is just awesome. I have at least a dozen games installed in Steam, and to get everything up and running again all I had to do was install a new copy of the steam client, log in once, then log out, copy 70 some gigs of data into the steampowered folder, and re-login to the client, and all my games just worked. Compare that to installing a dozen games using the physical media, then installing all the patches and adding in all the mods and addon content. There’s no contest - digital distribution is totally the way to go. The same was basically true of my gametap stuff as well - I copied over the client and binaries and all my games were good to go. Physical media for PC games can bite me. Given the choice, I will go digital distribution every time.

Digital Rights Management is such a crock. In today’s example of why you should never, ever ‘license’ DRM’d content, check out what’s happened to the customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music business. Microsoft is turning off the lights on the service and ceasing support for the infrastructure which provides the ‘keys’ which allow you to move your content from machine to machine. You can burn CD’s to rescue the content off the hardware (while reducing the quality), so you won’t permanently lose access to it so long as you take that step and accept the quality trade off, but you should never have had to do that in the first place. As I’ve warned before, stay away from services licensing DRM’d content. Emusic, Amazon, and others now offer unencumbered mp3 files at higher bit rates than Apple and the other DRM-encumbered music merchants. iTunes may be convenient but it’s supporting an untenable business model. To those who would say say Apple would never pull a similar move, companies don’t get much larger than Microsoft, and they just did it. Vote with your wallet folks.

Imagine being an 11 year old boy with a remote controlled car with an integrated webcam that you could look through using a wireless headmounted display while you drive it, effectively driving in first person mode. How cool is it that such a thing actually exists? Now imagine being a 41 year old man-boy trying to come up with a rationale for purchasing such a toy….

I was in a fraternity back when I was in college, and there’s been a sudden burst of activity related to a facebook group that was created for the frat. I got an email today that an old friend had uploaded a photo of me which cracked me up, so at the risk of much mocking, I post it here for everyone’s enjoyment. This was taken in roughly 1991 during a fraternity rush, during which we ‘murffled’ our hair to make it stand up on end dramatically. Check out the mane I was wearing that night:

I’ve played most of the Call of Duty games at this point, including the various console ports. I’ve played through 2 on the PS2, and 2 on the PC (three if you count one of the expansion paks for the original game) and I played through 4 on the xbox 360 right after Christmas. I enjoyed that so much I went out and got COD3 for the Xbox 360, and played it through over the last couple of weeks. It’s nowhere near as good as 4 was, but it’s decent at what it is - a formulaic WWII console FPS. What novelty it has you can tell was tacked on because of the WII and PS3 motion sensing bits in the controllers, because there are these interactive sequences like ‘plant this bomb on the anti-aircraft gun’ which require sequences of button presses and twists, which on the wii or PS3 would have been actual motions with the controllers. They’re weak on the 360 because they feel contrived and because you can exploit them for a limited invulnerability by sprinting for the objective and initiating the sequence, which mostly keeps the AI from shooting at you so you can charge into insane situations and survive. The other new addition to the formula is scripted moments where you get jumped from around corners by enemy soldiers, which starts a ‘quicktime event’ style melee combat where you have to press the right buttons at the right time and speed. It’s basically as weak as it sounds, made worse by the fact that each of them requires whacking on the shoulder buttons, which it’s not easy to do quickly. There are also driving sequences and sequences where you control tanks or other heavy weaponry. These are just ok, and not as good as the ones in COD2, but they’re not bad either.

I didn’t try the multiplayer, because I already have the superb COD4 for that, not to mention Team Fortress 2 on the pc, so I figured why bother.

You can score the game for under $20 for the PS3 and the 360 if you shop carefully. At that price it’s worth it if you’re a fan of the genre, and who isn’t - after all, shooting nazis never gets old

We had perfect weather this weekend, with temperatures in the low high 60’s and clear blue skies. Susan and I took advantage of this and went hiking in the green mountains in vermont about 40 minutes north of Bennington:

It was pretty much perfect - the hike made its way up a steep grade but at an angle such that it was never too strenuous of a climb. We saw a beautiful ice covered lake, followed a roaring brook for over a mile that the dogs had a blast frolicking in, struggled to follow a poorly marked appalachian/long trail section that was covered in sometimes deep and slightly treacherous snow, climbed an excellent quartz rock seam, and looked out over a Vermont valley with stunning views. There are more pictures if you’re interested, including a couple of movies and (after tonight) a panoramic shot of the view from the summit.

Ever seen Ghost in the Shell? It’s taken many forms over its existence (Manga, Anime, TV series, anime sequel, multiple videogames), but it’s best known in the US as a superb anime that came out in the 90’s. It was one of the first anime to (almost) achieve mainstream success in the US, and it deserved the cult status it achieved on video. It’s a meditation on the nature of existence wrapped up in a sci fi action movie that takes place in a blade runner-esque near future. I thought it pretty cool that Spielberg’s Dreamworks Pictures optioned it for a 3d feature. Here’s hoping they bring this project to fruition, I’d love to see a competent live action Ghost in the Shell.

Evernote is an excellent little personal knowledge base. It runs on macs and pcs, will soon run on iphones and blackberries, and runs on the web. You can always get at your stuff no matter what platform you dump info into, and you can control what gets synced to their servers and what stays local on your machine. You can also control the availability of materials, making some publicly available and other stuff private.  It’s also got incredible image recognition/OCR software integrated in it, so you can do things like hold a business card up to your laptop’s camera, import it into evernote, and then later search for the person by name and it will find the card. It’s even ok at recognizing my horrible handwriting.

I have 10 invites to their beta. It’s free - their business plan is to eventually start charging on the volume of materials you store on their server, so in one sense it’s going to be free forever if you’re frugal. If you want in on the beta, leave me a comment and tell me what email address to send the invite to and I’ll get you set up. If I don’t hear from anyone after a week or so I’ll hand them out over on inviteshare.

I should mention that it’s worth running through the short screencast on the homepage of the evernote site to get a sense of how it works. It’s really cool tech.

Hurrah! The weather’s warmed up to the point where I can ride my bike to work again, yesterday being the first day I was able to manage it. I used some muscles I hadn’t been using so I was a bit sore, but really it’s minor. It’s also better for Soolin this year because when she can manage it Susan has graciously agreed to pick her up on her way into work and drop Soolin off in my office. Three cheers for the return of the warm weather!

How much do I love Rockband? So much that I’m considering dropping ~$75 on a professional drumkit pedal to replace the flimsy thing that comes with the original drumkit. Check out the Omega Pedal. And if you haven’t been playing Rock Band, you’re missing out. It is hands down the best party game ever made, and it’s fun in its own right just playing by yourself.

I’ve noted other studies highlighting similar conclusions about the benefits of drinking red wine and black tea if you’re a type 2 diabetic. A recent article over on sciencedaily.com is more evidence that type 2’s should consider adding both tea and red wine to their diet. Check it out, and tip a glass or two back this weekend.

I bought a Thermaltake USB hard drive cartridge system for work last week after almost losing all my data on my laptop. Techreport has a lengthy writeup which I basically agree with, but a bottom line statement would be, for ~$50 this thing is excellent. I got it and a 500GB drive, partitioned half as OSX journaled file system and half as fat32, then backed up my mac and pc at work, using time machine on the mac and Cobian backup on the pc. Cheap, infinitely extensible, and cleverly designed. Well worth a look if you’re in the market for a backup device.

(stupid product name though)

Leopard is the latest version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Last Wednesday I decided to install it. Little did I know what I was in for.

Like most folks, I have limited backups of stuff, and my mac laptop is the home of some pretty critical data - project timelines for my staff, project sheets for each of the major projects we have, a huge knowledge base full of all kinds of info related to my day job, and more. So I go to install the upgrade, choose the ‘archive and install’ option, and let it start. An hour later it pops up a very helpful ‘the upgrade has failed for unknown reasons, press to restart’ message. Aigh! I press to restart and the machine won’t boot from its drive. I boot from the OS dvd and it can’t find its drive. Needless to say I freaked out. Many machinations later and I could get it to recognize that it did, in fact, have an internal drive in the laptop, but the volume was hosed and it wanted to reformat. I couldn’t let that happen. With some trepidation I handed it over the our support folks for a look see, more because I lacked the time to continue looking into it than because I had exhausted all my options.

To their credit they did manage to restore my drive. Interestingly, they could never get Leopard to even recognize its existence, but they tried booting from a Tiger OS dvd and it recognized the drive straight away. They didn’t even have to run disk tools - once Tiger had ‘touched’ the drive, it was back to its normal state, and the machine was working fine again.

I have no explanation for how the above happened. I do now have a laptop running Leopard, and I now have several backups of it since the whole experience put the fear of ‘OMFG I lost all my stuff!!!’ into me. Leopard is pretty great once it’s running, but of all the OS X releases this one was by far the worst in terms of the upgrade process. Back everything up is my advice to anyone thinking of upgrading. It came out during this process that I was the 8th machine that was being upgraded to Leopard on our campus, and it was the second one to have a serious issue. The other one actually had data loss too.

The scenario: you downloaded some cool anime/samurai flick/bollywood musical, and you want to play it on your game console, but it has subtitles in separate .sub or .idx files. The solution if you run windows is to go visit the sub2divx homepage. It’s a little app that lets you bake those subtitles into the avi file so it will play on the consoles with the subtitles. There are some dependencies to get this running but the sub2divx page helpfully lists and links to everything you need. Just dump it all into one folder, point the app at the avi file and sub file, and off it goes. It’s fast too, a 2 hour movie broken across 2 avi files took me less than 10 minutes. It’s also flexible - you can tune the color, shadow, and highlight colors of the subtitles, adjust their position on the screen, and choose the font. It’s a great little tool.