Steve Seitz July 14, 1953 - September 23, 2006

Obituaries

Steve Seitz

Steve Seitz, 53, died Sept. 23, 2006. He was born July 14, 1953 in Syracuse, N.Y., and moved to Jacksonville Beach 22 years ago.

Seitz was the eldest of 12 children born to Robert and Helen Seitz. He was a sports enthusiast, favoring the New York Yankees, New York Giants and Syracuse Orange.

Seitz was employed by Johnson & Johnson Vistakon for the last 14 years. Before then, he worked for Home Depot.

Seitz is survived by three sons, Steven Seitz, Jr., Patrick Rogers and Ben Seitz; one daughter, Victoria Brown; and his significant other, Susan Rogers. Seitz lived his life for his children and loved them more than anything in the world, the family said.

No formal memorial service will be held as Seitz wished to be remembered by all in his or her own way.

Steve was my cousin. He was the eldest son of my Uncle Robert, my mother's brother. (Correction: Previously, I wrote that my Aunt Helen had predeceased my Uncle Robert. Well, it would appear that my report of Aunt Helen's demise was, as the saying goes, "greatly exaggerated." She's alive and well.

Uncle Robert was a ham radio operator and helped me get my novice class license when I was about 15 years old. My old call letters were WN2FEB. He was also a farmer, and as a kid, I used to enjoy visiting Uncle Robert and Aunt Helen's house. They had 12 kids, and lucky for everyone, they all had a great sense of humor. Stevie and the next oldest, Tommy, used to have me cracking up all the time. I'd go out and help them do various chores around the farm, and they'd be cutting up all the time.

I remember one morning, getting up early and having to walk somewhere pretty far away through the fields. It was kind of cool, and wet, a little cloudy with some fog in the fields. I remember how that looked, and felt, and sounded and smelled. I don't remember where we were going or what we had to do when we got there, but I remember that long walk early in the morning when it seemed like someplace I'd never seen before. I was pretty much a city kid at that time.

Stevie and Tommy were both older than I was. Lou Ann was my age. I had a crush on Lou Ann back then. But there was also Mikey, and Roberta and, God, I can't remember all their names!

I knew Steve lived down here, and somewhere in the back of my mind on that "to-do" list of things you mean to do... sometime, I was going to look him up and say hi.

Now I guess I never will.

But I'll remember Stevie in my own way.

Big Picture: Sunset 9/24/06

It's not up to what I would call "my usual standards" (for a "picture-taker") and I actually missed the best parts while I was chatting with a neighbor, but I had to try out the new camera on a sunset. Sunrise was cloudless this morning. (Unlike a year ago yesterday.) I was also somewhat delayed by the fact that Caitie likes my place about five degrees colder than I do, and the lens fogged badly as soon as I stepped outside.

Again, I'm not a photographer. But being a "picture-taker," I got tired of waiting, pulled out my shirt tail and wiped off the damn lens.

I know... "Blasphemy!" Still, doesn't look any worse for the wear. Won't make a habit of it, and all that.

I like the sunbeams. I have to move off the second-floor landing to get the sun in these shots, it's shifted so far to the south this time of year that it's deep in the trees by sunset. So I stand by the retention pond next to my building. I think I would have had a better reflection in the water if I'd managed to get out there about 10 minutes sooner, but who knows?

A Trip to the Zoo

Put up a few shots from the zoo trip yesterday. I'm a lazy man, and there are no captions. Chances are, I couldn't identify the critter anyway. I'd like to go back later in the fall when it's cooler, maybe during the week when there aren't so many people, and take my time and perhaps actually note what it is I'm looking at.

I will say that I left the zoo feeling somewhat ambivalent about keeping these animals in captivity. For some of them, zoo life might be better than what they would know in their native habitat, where they might be hunted, or driven from it by development. But it's hard to look at the chimpanzees and the gorilla, or even the elephant at the gate, and not think that they don't really belong here.

Anyway, here are some shots from our brief visit to the zoo yesterday. I used both cameras. The P850 was a must because of the long zoom, and the animals weren't always close by. Again, I'm not a photographer, I take pictures.

Big Picture: Wow!

This is simply an amazing shot.

"R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me..."

I thought this was pretty funny, in the sad sort of way too many things are funny these days.

One of the current, well, maybe it's kind of last-minute now, minor kerfuffles on the shiny new Web 2.0™ is the identity of the anonymous blogger behind Dead 2.0, a blog apparently about lame Web 2.0™ companies. I don't read it myself.

Evidently, this guy Nik Cubrilovik, used his élite internet skills to suss out the identity of the author of Dead 2.0. No big deal, not particularly amusing, and I'm mostly following parts of the thread because it's a slow morning and I'm waiting for Caitie to get up before we head off to the zoo.

Anyway, in his post where he declared to the world that he had figured out who Dead 2.0 was in five minutes, I guess laying down the gauntlet for someone to do it in less, Mr. Cubrilovik offered this little insight into his character:

I will give an overview of various techniques, which techniques were used to uncover Dead 2.0 I won’t go into, since I respect his privacy and I don’t have a motivation to destroy him.

The use of the word "respect" is what's kind of funny to me, particularly juxtaposed to the words "his privacy."

Was it out of "respect" for Dead 2.0's privacy that Mr. Cubrilovik undertook to try to learn Dead 2.0's identity? What is the nature of that respect when, having learned it, Mr. Cubrilovik decided to share with the world the fact that he had done so? I mean, I can understand idle curiosity perhaps impelling Mr. Cubrilovik to see if he could learn the identity of the anonymous thorn in Web 2.0™'s side. But once his curiosity was satisfied, was it simply ego that impelled him to declare to the world that he had done so?

Well, there is that whole "motivation to destroy him" thing. The implication clearly being that, should Mr. Cubrilovik have felt the motivation to do so, he could have "destroyed" the author of Dead 2.0. I guess that makes sense somehow. When you're motivated to destroy someone, respect for their privacy is probably non-operative as a concept. Lucky for Dead 2.0, Mr. Cubrilovik is feeling particularly magnanimous these days, and he's "respecting" his "privacy." Otherwise, you know, it'd be "Game on!"

Of course, Mr. Cubrilovik doesn't respect Dead 2.0's privacy. Mostly, it seems to me, it's an effort to intimidate the author of Dead 2.0, and generally, people who try to intimidate other people don't respect them, or their privacy.

Of course, this is the shiny New World 2.0™ of the web, where we all embrace one another in our mutual respect for an egalitarian and socially diverse meritocracy. We don't have any of that Old World 1.x™ bad stuff where people behave like the annoying bastards that they are. Technology has changed all that. Made the world a better place. Yeah, it says so right in the About box.

DVD: Good Will Hunting

Finally got around to seeing this movie for the first time. A very enjoyable movie. About as believable as The Fifth Element, but just as enjoyable.

Big Picture: New Camera

I've been thinking about what it is I like to do with my camera, and going by my iPhoto library, one of the things I like to do a lot is take pictures of clouds. I also started reading about different kinds of cameras and lenses and a little of the arcana photographers seem to care about so much.

One thing I learned is that a lens with a shorter focal length offers a wider field of view, and taking pictures of the sky often seems to involve trying to take in a wide field. Sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes it does.

So I looked into getting a wide angle converter for the Kodak P850 I already own. Kodak offers one for about $115.00 from Amazon, but it's huge and it doesn't look like the kind of thing I want to have hanging around my neck while I'm waiting for the clouds and the sun to line up into a compelling composition.

On the other hand, Kodak seems to be about to discontinue the P850's sister model, the P880. The P880 is an 8 megapixel digital camera, with a 24 mm (equivalent - that is, based on the lenses you'd use on a 35 mm camera) focal length, so it has a significantly wider field of view than the P850 (36 mm equivalent). Wider than I could get with the converter on the P850. It has a manual zoom out to 140 mm (equivalent) or 5.8x. It also generally garnered better reviews for its sensor than the P850, though it is by no means up to the the performance of one found in a digital SLR camera.

So I thought about perhaps saving up for a DSLR, and perhaps a number of lenses. But I decided that I'm not really that much of a photographer. I like to take pictures. I don't like swapping lenses, or lugging around six pounds of crap just to capture some images of things that I see that I think I'd like to share.

So I rationalized myself into buying the P880 from Amazon for $350.00. I received it yesterday, and naturally today it was available from Staples, today only, for $300.00. But when you add sales tax, because Staples is a brick and mortar retailer in Florida, the savings would only be $29.00.

The P880 can share the batteries, external power supply, P20 zoom flash, memory card and USB cable with the P850, so my investment in those accessories is conserved. If I buy the lens adapter for the P880, I can even hang the 1.4x teleconverter off the 880; though I don't think I'd want to do that. It'd be less trouble to just carry along the P850 than that huge lens. The P850 weighs about as much as that lens, and it offers more reach than the lens would anyway!

While I'm at it, I'd like to say that I really don't understand Kodak's naming system for its digital cameras. The "P" series are supposed to be their flagship consumer digicams. Okay, so "P" seems to imply "pro" or something, no big deal. Both of the first models shared the number "8" in their first digits, while most of Kodak's less consumer digicams carry numbers less than 8 in their model names. The second digit is "8" in the P880, and "5" in P850, which suggests 8MP in the 880 and 5MP in the 850, which happens to be the number of pixels in their respective sensors. So when Kodak discontinued the P850 and replaced it with a very similar camera with a 7MP sensor, you'd kind of think that the name would be the P870 or something. But you'd be wrong. Instead, it's the P712!!!??? What the hell does that mean? Isn't 850 > 712? Doesn't ">" = "better?" I guess not.

Marketers...

Big Picture: The Online Photographer

Jonathon Delacour frequently sends me links to posts at The Online Photographer. It's not just about photography, but mostly.

No Nukes: Baked Ziti

Used the Calphalon Everyday Pan to make something resembling baked ziti. Shredded some mozzarella too. Turned out pretty good. Of course, I made enough to feed an army.

I ran out of the mozzarella I shredded myself, so I topped it with some pre-packaged stuff I had in the fridge. One package contained some seasoning and sun-dried tomatoes.

Mac: Tinderbox and "Stretchtext"

Al Hawkins pointed to this site the other day. It's a way of using Tinderbox to create web pages that employ "stretchtext."

You'll do better following the link and exploring the demo than me trying to explain it.

Refreshing Reading

Doc Searls linked to this "Rational Rant" by Mitch Ratcliffe. One wonders how Doc's views are "informed" by Mitch Ratcliffe's thoughts.

When we seek to justify the blogosphere or journalism or any and all crowd- or swarm-produced conclusions we're falling prey to our desire for simple answers to complex questions. Those panaceas don't exist. We're not getting answers at all, only slogans wrapped in the fuzzy words we want to hear, such as "community" or "party" or "tribe." 

Social Hygiene: The Tethered Self

There's an interview with Sherry Turkle, who is "is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology," in New Scientist. (Link via Nick Carr's Rough Sort.) This article is supposed to be available for one week from New Scientist. One week from when you first visit it? Or does it end in the next few days? I don't know, but it's an interesting interview!

A couple of quotations:

Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated.

Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies.

That second passage seems to be describing an aspect of what one researcher has called "neoteny."

Brain Books

One of my favorite magazines is Scientific American Mind. In the August/September issue, the reviews section mentions two books that I'll be adding to my (ever growing) queue of books to read.

Most interesting to me is A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, by Cordelia Fine. It's about the "vain brain," and how we perceive ourselves.

In the review, the author quotes Fine as saying, "Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets." Which is consistent with the thesis of Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson, which is sitting in my queue!

The last paragraph of the review king of tickled me:

Ironically, one category of persons shows that it is possible to view life through a clearer lens. "Their self-perceptions are more balanced, the assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge," Fine asserts. "They are the clinically depressed."

Also in this issue is an interesting article examining the supposed connection between violent behavior and low self-esteem. It seems that such a connection does not exist. Rather, it seems that threatened-egotism is a better predictor of aggressive behavior. The article notes that men have higher self-esteem than women and are more aggressive. "Depressed people have lower self-esteem and are less violent than non-depressed people. Psychopaths are exceptionally prone to aggressive and criminal conduct, and they have very favorable opinions of themselves."

Where Does the Time Go?

I've been a little busy lately. Nothing major, just haven't had much time to sit in front of this machine and indulge my little conceit that the world cares what I think.

I guess I'd better try to catch up.

Cheese Sandwich: 9-20-06

I started to head over to Subway yesterday about lunchtime. It was a beautiful day. I don't think it ever got much over 80, and the sky was heart-breakingly blue.

It occurred to me, in one of my rare moments of lucidity, that it was very likely at or near low tide. I'd been watching the tides because I wanted to head to the beach one morning to watch the sun come up. We're in that part of the cycle when high tide runs around sunrise, so low tide is about six hours later, or just about the time I was headed over to grab a sandwich for lunch.

So instead, I drove to the dunes, parked the Montero and walked out to the beach. It was beautiful. Took off my shoes, rolled up my pants and just took a stroll down the beach from the north end of the base to the south end, and back.

DVD: Gojira

I watched Gojira last night and enjoyed it very much. Shelley Powers offered her own impressions of the movie a couple of weeks ago.

I think it's a vastly better movie than Godzilla, though I do want to watch the Americanized release again before I make any direct comparisons.

What struck me the most about Gojira were its emotional resonances. "Monster movies," to my mind, are most often associated with enfright and suspense that don't extend outside the frame of the film. Halloween* is a scary movie, but you know it's a movie, and so the experience is confined to the two hours or so you're engaged with it. The best science fiction movies, as opposed to "monster movies," seem to draw from existing fears and anxieties and make them part of the film.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, The Thing From Another World, drew upon American anxiety about Communist fifth columnists, the Red Menace. And so their emotional resonance is set in a larger context than just a brief frightening fantasy, although they aren't of the same deeply personal nature of those depicted in Gojira.

Gojira draws upon not only Japan's experience with the atomic bombs, but their larger experience of the war as well. The scene where the mother tells her children they will soon be with daddy, although the children looked too young to have been fathered by a WW II casualty, nevertheless almost certainly recalled the fears and anxiety many Japanese felt who survived the American strategic bombing campaign. There is a scene where, all over Japan, school children offer a prayer for peace in song televised to the nation, which is very affecting and totally believable in the context of the movie and its time.

These genuine, deep and very personal emotional resonances are missing from American films of the period, mostly because we had a vastly different experience of the war.

There is an American science fiction movie that has similar authentic and deeply emotional resonances. It didn't appear until 2003 when Battlestar Galactica drew upon the national trauma of 9/11, and the fear and anxiety we felt, and which our government has systematically exploited ever since.

Gojira is much more than a monster movie, and deserves a spot as one of the best science fiction movies of any time.

• In Halloween, there's a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis is watching a scary movie on TV. The movie? The Thing From Another World, which Jon Carpenter, the creator of Halloween, later went on to remake as The Thing.

No Nukes: Pizza Omelet

I was thinking of having a Spanish omelet this morning, but then got to thinking about the spaghetti sauce I still had in the fridge. So I figured maybe I'd try something else instead.

I went to Publix and picked up an onion and a red pepper, and some sliced pepperoni. I already had some shredded mozzarella in the fridge. I haven't quite progressed to shredding my own mozzarella yet. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

Okay, lessons learned: You have to start cooking the peppers before the onions. The peppers are thicker, stiffer and probably contain more water than the onions. The onions were perfect and the peppers had barely heated up. I tossed the pepperoni in with the peppers and onions and found that the slices tend to clump up together, which didn't seem desirable to me. Didn't take long to heat them either, so they probably go in with the onions.

I reheated the spaghetti sauce on the stove, so that I could put some on top of the omelet.

The omelet part kind of eluded me again. I almost got it right, but it kind of came apart on me during the fold. Anyway, three eggs, a little milk, wait till it's whatever it is when you're supposed to add the filling. I may not have waited long enough, or maybe too long. Not sure. Once it's ready, throw in the peppers, onions and pepperoni, some mozzarella and the sauce. I'd say add some Italian seasoning at this point too. The sauce was pretty lame or tame or something.

Transfer to a plate, pour a little more sauce on top, add some more mozzarella, and top with crushed red pepper to taste (eye-watering).

Consume while listening to Tony Bennett sing East of the Sun (West of the Moon.)

Mac: Keynote and Compact Photo Printers

It occurred to me, looking at this post on Presentation Zen, that Keynote might offer some other alternatives for creating postcards, with perhaps a bit more "class," or something.

So I did a quick test, and it's a little odd. Printing from Keynote, without making any adjustments in Page Setup or the Print dialog, resulted in a print that was correctly oriented on the postcard, but perhaps only 60% of the area of the slide.

Keynote allows you to export a slide to iPhoto (select Images from the Export dialog sheet), and once you're in iPhoto you may want to constrain the slide to 4x6 and crop it. Then print as usual, and you get a very nice postcard.

I was a little concerned that, because the slide was nominally 1024x768 pixels, the printout might contain artifacts or aliasing, but apparently it's rendered at the resolution of the printing device. At least as long as your source material supports it I suppose. The image I used looked identical to a printout directly from iPhoto, and the text was perfect, with no discernible "jaggies" whatsoever.

So if you like printing postcards, Keynote is another application to use with iPhoto to create postcards.

Here's the slide I created, cropped for a 4x6 postcard, and scaled down for the web. There's an unwitting double-entendre in there that kind of surprised me.

Mac: Comic Life and Compact Photo Printers

Fooled around a bit with Comic Life as a postcard editor and learned a couple of things about printing with a compact photo printer. The one I'm using is a Canon Selphy CP510, which is only about $65.00 at Amazon. (If I had my receipt, I'd order one from Amazon and then return the new one to the Exchange to save about $30.00. Alas, I threw it away.)

Comic Life doesn't offer a postcard as standard page size. So, from the File menu, where you would normally encounter "Page Setup," you instead have "Page Format," and it looks like this:

The standard 4x6 postcard size isn't offered in the drop down list of page sizes, so you have to select custom. There are 72 points to an inch, so to set Comic Life up for a 4x6 postcard, enter the values shown in this screencap:

You're not home free yet, because there is some weirdness going on between the printer driver and the Mac OS. I say this because the problem appears both in Comic Life and in Preview, if you try to print from Preview. Basically, the CP510 doesn't seem to recognize the page orientation properly. It prints as if it expects a portrait orientation, so parts of the left and right sides of the image are truncated, and the image appears at right angles to what you would expect in a postcard.

Fortunately, there is an Export to iPhoto option in the File menu. This works fine, because the CP510 does seem to print correctly from iPhoto, and I was able to get a borderless print with Comic Life elements overlayed on a photograph, and it looks great. One other nice thing is that if you wanted to, you could then order that postcard printed from Apple on their heavier card stock.

A couple more tips. Don't add any Comic Life elements at the very edge of the left or right sides of your photo. About 1/8th of an inch will be lost because the image overlaps the perforated edges on either side by about that much. Also, when you load the paper cartridge, I think you want to pay attention to the orientation of the postcards. I haven't read the manual, so there may be some explanation on how to set this all up properly; but in my case, I need to have the end of the card where the postage stamp goes at the end of the tray that inserts into the printer. That postage stamp marker is obviously on the back side of the postcard, and that faces down in the tray, so you shouldn't actually see it when you put the postcards in the tray. The cards go in shiny side up.

Links

Ethan Johnson offered some interesting thoughts on advertising and the extent to which it may impair our imagination.

Al Hawkins noted a thoughtful quotation regarding the nature of information and attention.

Kathy Sierra wrote a provocative post offering tips on how marketers competing for your attention can better seize it. Bear in mind that marketers not only compete for your attention with other marketers, but with your friends, your family, your job, and just about everything that's actually important in your life. And they have an economic incentive to get better at it all the time, which your kids probably do not. Something to think about, because marketers never do.

Roben Keene, who has an intriguing blog, noted a quotation from Kodak, Inc. written in about 1888, and mentions it in the context of idea of simplicity.

An e-mail correspondent pointed me to the announcement of the Leica M8 digital camera, which prompted me to think some more about photography and just what the hell it is. As usual, when I start thinking about something, I wind up knowing less than when I started.

I hate that.

Scott Reynen wrote a sensitive post on the anniversary of 9/11.

Ulises Mejias offered some worthwhile observations on the whole "demand supplying itself" idea.

Those are a few things I meant to make note of earlier, but didn't for one reason or another.

No Nukes: Day 7 - "Will work for food."

I'm sure the title to this post will be a misleading search result. The semantic web doesn't have a sense of humor.

I haven't fired up the microwave in six days, which is perhaps the longest time I've gone without using one, apart from travel or deployments, since I don't know when.

Now, that's not to say I've done a lot of cooking in that time, because I haven't. But I've done some. The Calphalon Everyday Pan is still backordered or something, so I ended up buying a non-stick skillet by the same company that was on sale at Target.

Caitie and I agreed that I would cook on Sunday night. We had some nachos from Sierra Grill on Saturday night, and she nuked some Spaghetti-Os. Shudder.

So Sunday night I made these pork chops, the kind without the bones, I'm sure they have a name, that I'd made before when I was doing the single parent thing. The recipe calls for using Parmesan cheese, and I'd usually use one of the kinds that comes in a canister, already grated, with some Italian seasoning. A neighbor of mine suggested that was the equivalent of sawdust, so I bought some real parmesan cheese and grated it. I see why people like the stuff in the bottle. Anyway, you coat the chops in dijon mustard, then dip them in a mixture of bread crumbs and parmesan cheese. There's a ratio, but I'd pretty much forgotten it and just did it 50-50. Basically, you make enough to cover the bottom of a dinner plate to about an eighth of an inch or a little more, and you have enough for four chops, with some to throw out. Then you broil them about six minutes on one side and five or so on the other.

The skillet was for making rice pilaf. That didn't exactly go as planned. I used brown rice, which may have been a mistake since I think the recipe called for plain white rice. You're supposed to kind of fry it first, the recipe said for about three or four minutes or so, till some of the kernels become a little golden or something. Well, with brown rice it's kind of hard to tell, so I think I went too long, maybe six or seven minutes. Because when I added the amount of liquid in the form of chicken broth called for by the recipe, when it was all gone, the rice was still pretty hard. I added some more water and let it boil some more and it was still pretty hard. So, that kind of didn't work out. Live and learn, or something.

I also made broccoli, which I would normally nuke, but instead I used an insert in a sauce pan and steamed it. I think there's some dissimilar metal thing going on between the steamer insert and the sauce pan, though they're both supposed to be stainless steel, because there are three little round marks at the bottom of the sauce pan where the legs were that suggest pitting. I may get another insert, but I definitely won't let the thing stay in there any longer than necessary next time. Anyway, steaming broccoli is pretty much a no-brainer.

So that was dinner. I made four chops, which turned out pretty well I thought. Caitie said hers was dry, and I'd given her one of the thin ones. The problem with the broiler is that the back seems to cook faster than the front, and thin chops cook faster, naturally, than the thick ones. I figured if anyone was going to come down with trichinosis from my cooking, it ought to be me, so I had the thicker one, which was pretty good. So now I know to put the thicker ones to the back and the thinner ones, well, you get the idea.

Four chops left two for later. So Monday night I ate one of those cold. Hey, I'm a simple man, who's inclined to being lazy, and that was dinner. It was also a taekwondo night, so I normally didn't eat much anyway, unless I got home pretty early and nuked something.

Tuesday, I got a little more motivated. I made an Italian sausage and heated some spaghetti sauce in the sauce pan, then put all that in a hoagie roll with some mozzarella cheese. Not bad. Not as good as I remember from the Fireman's Field Days in Canastota, but what can you do?

Wednesday was another taekwondo class, so I didn't eat anything before and, as usual, had little appetite after. So I didn't eat that night either.

Thursday night I put the remaining chop in the George Foreman and that turned out pretty well, with only a little of the coating sticking to the grill. But no starch or vegetable. Simple, lazy, man.

Last night I had a short TKD class and stopped by Sierra Grill for an order of nachos with chicken to go, and ate that while watching Meet Joe Black. Tonight I've got a little get-together at a friend's place, so I'll probably eat there. I'll figure out what to make tomorrow, tomorrow.

Breakfast is usually cold cereal, but I made eggs for Caitie and I on Sunday, and I made some more again this morning. Eggs are painless, but I used to make them in the microwave all the time.

So, that's it. Pretty much in a Cheese Sandwich™ vein, almost literally. But I figured I owed at least Al an update on how I'm doing in the kitchen. It occurs to me to wonder if I'll consistently be eating less because I'm a lazy man, and not using the microwave makes cooking more work, and if that might lead to long term weight loss? Too soon to tell I guess. Lunch remains my usual sort of fast-food habit, but I try to stick to the less damaging stuff. A lot of subs from Subway, and that sort of thing. So if there's a change overall, it's a modest one. I won't be shedding pounds overnight or anything.

DVD: Meet Joe Black

Watched Meet Joe Black tonight. I'd seen little bits of it on TV before, but had been put off by the theme, Brad Pitt and a three hour run time.

It's a good movie. I'm kind of sorry I waited, but perhaps these things sort of happen when they're time. Or maybe it's all just random bullshit. Anyway...

Plus it has lots of Claire Forlani! Who isn't in nearly enough movies, but is also in another favorite of mine, Mystery Men.

Mac: Random Observations

Apple now offers the original 20" Core Duo iMac as a refurb at the same price that I bought mine: $1199.00, which is a pretty good deal. Mine was a refurb as well, and it was flawless right out of the box. Apart from one significant glitch during a software update, it's been problem-free and utterly reliable.

I read an article somewhere about printing postcards with iPhoto, so I tried to do it on my setup. The card-making feature was something I hadn't tried to use before, so it was interesting to play with. While it's nowhere near as full-featured as something like Print Shop, it's got some nice features. The problem I encountered was that, no matter what I did, I couldn't get a borderless print from the card part of the application. I didn't make notes, but it seemed as though even the print settings were different than in the regular photo-printing portion of the program. Each print I made on 4x6 photo paper had a border.

I can print borderless photographs with no problem, though that still isn't as simple as a Mac application ought to be.

The article made reference to a small dye-sub printer that printed only postcards. Well, I succumbed to an impulse and bought a Canon Selphy 510 at the Exchange for about $95.00. Consumables for 108 postcards cost another $25.00. You can order postcards from Apple through iPhoto and I did that as well. They're very expensive, in my opinion. They're $1.49 a card, and $1.99 for shipping 9 of them. At ten, it steps up to like $3.98 for shipping. They arrived yesterday, and they're very nice and they even include envelopes, which seems kind of odd for postcards, but I still think it's very pricey.

Anyway, the Selphy posed a challenge of its own that I hadn't considered. Canon doesn't offer an intel-Mac driver for it, and so the only drivers you can choose on an intel machine are these GIMP-based ones that I have had no luck with. So I just hooked it up to the iBook and used it on that machine. Again, there was some weirdness in printing. It didn't take long to figure it out, but again, I wasn't making notes so I can't say exactly what the problems were or how I solved them, but it had to do with cropping the pictures with the 4x6 "Constrain" feature enabled, and a Page Setup issue. That problem may have been limited to just printing borderless prints of photographs from iPhoto. As I recall, printing postcards "just worked."

The postcards from Apple are on heavier card-stock, and the back of the postcard includes a little graphical adornment that makes it look like the card was processed in some distant post office. The Canon postcards are on lighter card-stock, and the ends are a little rough at the perforations where you detach about a half-inch of card that is used for paper-handling in the printer.

At some point, I managed to get the orientation reversed in the page setup, because "up" on the photo side was "down" on the postcard side, which is rather unconventional. Something to pay attention to in the future and note which way is the right way.

Print quality was roughly equal from both the Selphy and the Apple Store. The Selphy prints were a little more "glossy," though the finish is more of a satin, I'd say. The ink-jet actually offered the best prints, but I'm not sure how durable they would be in a postcard application, where they might encounter "rain, sleet or snow," in their appointed rounds. The Selphy, like most of these small dye-sub compact printers, lays down a final protective layer of... something, on each print. So you could, say, spill a beer on it and it probably wouldn't smear the print. Some of these newer compact printers are ink-jets, I think Lexmark makes one, so if you're thinking of buying one, bear that in mind. If you don't have to buy large boxes of consumables (dye-subs use a large mechanical cartridge that holds a roll of film that the dye is transferred from), then chances are it's an ink-jet.

The Selphy is a tiny thing, and it pumps the prints out at a pretty rapid clip. I think they said it was something like 58 seconds a print, which sounds about right. One application I thought of would be to take along the Selphy on a trip, taking some pictures and then ginning up some of my own postcards to drop in the mail upon my return or while still on the trip.

This weekend, I hope to find the time to play with Comic Life and see if I can't use that to create some other postcards. That way I'm not limited to Apple's templates.

Anyway, that's another way to use your Mac to waste some time and money.

I installed iTunes 7 back on the 12th, and it's been a problem-free install so far. Album cover art has been hit-or-miss as others have reported. I noticed that it is related to some artifacts in the CDDB database. For instance, the three disk set Bruce Springsteen Live 1975-1985, had Disk 1 named one way, which allowed iTunes to find the cover art, while Disks 2 and 3 had the album titled differently (not just the "Disk 2" or "Disk 3" parts), and so it wouldn't load the cover. Once I edited the titles to read the same as Disk 1, it loaded fine. I still seem to have a large number of albums (well, most of them are one or two songs, actually) for which cover art won't load. It's kind of disappointing in the cover browser, but it's still pretty cool.

Playback has been excellent, no new problems noted. It still works with the Salling Clicker application.

I downloaded an episode of Battlestar Galactica to see if the shows they had already been offering were available in 640x480, or if they would only be offering the higher resolution on new shows. Well, it seems they must be available for everything because The Captain's Hand played in 640x376 (or something close to that) in its "actual size." I keep iTunes open on the Sony LCD, so when you choose "Full Screen" it takes over that one. You have to move iTunes to the iMac's screen to go "Full Screen" on the iMac's monitor. Looked great either way. It's pretty near DVD-quality, if you watch DVDs on a standard 4:3 CRT television.

The 80GB iPod looks pretty sweet, though I have no real need for one at the moment. I liked the changes they made to managing your iPod, and the fact that you can use your iPod to transfer your purchased songs to one of your authorized machines is a nice, and overdue, improvement.

One last improvement I'd like to see would be to incorporate some flexibility in how you want tracks to transition in playlists, kind of like Roxio's Jam offered. I'm not sure, because I haven't burned a CD yet, but when you burn a playlist to CD, the tracks just butt up against each other, you can't make a smooth transition; and even with Sound Check enabled, some tracks are way louder than others. You could fiddle with all that in Jam. I haven't tried Toast lately, but it became rather moot anyway, when Apple made Roxio stop decoding FairPlay tracks through QuickTime so you could edit your mixes that included purchased songs.

Anyway, that's enough about all that.

Climate Change and "Progress"

“Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, ‘civilized’ societies,” said Dr Brooks.

“On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as ‘civilisation’ was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilisation was a last resort - a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions.”

I'm sure this will be a controversial hypothesis, but it seems reasonable to me. Also interesting was this:

He added that for many, if not most people, the development of civilisation meant a harder life, less freedom, and more inequality. The transition to urban living meant that most people had to work harder in order to survive, and suffered increased exposure to communicable diseases. Health and nutrition are likely to have deteriorated rather than improved for many.

Which is perhaps informed or inspired by Jared Diamond's speculation along these lines.

Perspective

Experts who study disasters are slowly coming to realize that rather than try to change human behavior to adapt to building codes and workplace rules, it may be necessary to adapt technology and rules to human behavior.

No shit.

DVD: Veronica Mars

The first season of Veronica Mars was on sale at Target yesterday for about $17.00. I'd never seen the show before, but I knew what it was about, in general terms. I thought it might be something Caitie and I could enjoy watching together.

Turns out I was right. We're halfway through the first season, and we're fans.

And, it's so much easier to take than Disney or Nickelodeon!

Non Sequitur Sunday 9/10

Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be.

Which is just another way of saying that desire is the source of all suffering.

But it is also said that suffering is good for the soul.

I guess that depends. Maybe so, maybe not.

Somehow, the things we desire, things we do not have, seem to assume greater importance in our lives than the things we do have. Perhaps that's because desire commands our attention, and we simply have less attention available to devote to whatever we do have. Maybe this is how "progress" advances? I'm not sure.

And it all looks rather daunting anyway. It seems like the set of all things we do have is finite, while the set of all things we might desire is infinite. That is to say, if you pursue and attain objects of desire, are there not then other objects of desire to pursue and obtain? Is life then nothing more than the pursuit of that which we do not already have?

I guess if your philosophy is "He who dies with the most toys wins," then that's your life.

Like I need a 24" iMac!

Sometimes suffering becomes too much to bear. Sometimes it's a loss, sometimes it's something else. The pain we feel is so great, we'll do almost anything to make it go away, or, to ensure we never have to feel that way again. This is a form of denial, of saying, "No!" to life.

In The Little Prince, the fox allows himself to be tamed by the Little Prince, even though he knows what it will cost. In discussing rites, the fox mentions the anxiety he'll feel should the Little Prince ever not appear according to his custom, when the fox has prepared his heart; and he describes this as a cost, or price to be paid, for having been tamed. The Little Prince even tells the fox that he can't stay, and his departure will be a source of pain for the fox. But the fox tells the Little Prince, he'll always have the wheat.

This is another connection, a connection that anchors attention so that it's not lost in a sea of grief. Before his friendship with the Little Prince, the wheat means nothing to the fox. But because the wheat is the color of the Little Prince's hair, it remains a part of their connection, something that still exists that can help recall and affirm what their connection meant. The fox is not left with nothing when the Little Prince departs. He'll always have the wheat.

It hardly seems like enough, but it is.

Ephemeral. Everything that has a beginning, has an end. But everything is connected too. And when one connection is lost, others created as a result of that connection may still echo and resonate with the vibration, the experience, of the first. Each new connection is enriched by the echoes of the earlier ones, and enables more new connections.

And so it goes, as connections are made and lost, hopefully expanding and not retreating. What remains, perhaps not as a constant, but what remains is the experience. And it can grow wider with each new connection. It can grow richer with new resonances and harmonies.

But it seems like we need to have that anchor for our attention. Something we'll have when we lose something or someone we love. So that our attention isn't exclusively devoted to the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be. Something that allows us to carry that experience forward and add it to other experiences, and let it make those richer too. Something that tells us it's okay to move forward, and not stay in one place; hoping that by standing still, we won't be hurt again.

Easier said than done, I know.

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Cheese Sandwich: Atlantis

Caitie and I were watching The Fifth Element this morning, and it ended just as ATLANTIS was launching, so we made it outside in time but I didn't grab the camera. The sky was pretty cloudy to the southwest, but clearer to the east. Just when I was about to give up, it appeared in the east so I got to see about eight to ten seconds of the ascent. I think right up until the SRB separation, because there was a bright glow, and the large exhaust trail pretty much stopped.

Even as far away as we are up here in Jax, it's still kind of an exciting thing to watch.

Cheese Sandwich: Saturday Morning Confusion

Or, "57 Channels and Nothin' On."

In no particular order, and of no particular importance, we bring you these updates:

Gojira arrived earlier in the week. I haven't watched it yet, but since this is a weekend with my daughter, who doesn't watch anything in black and white, let alone with subtitles, probably won't see it until sometime next week. Very nice case though, with a little glossy book inside.

The stock pot arrived, but the Calphalon Everyday Pan is backordered or something. In any event, we're cooking something this weekend. I did cook eggs yesterday morning in the frying pan. I usually make them in the microwave. Clean-up was about the same, but the eggs were better. Advantage: Frying pan.

The swelling is just about gone from my nose. My dad used to joke, "I've got a Roman nose. Yeah, it's romin' all over my face." Referring to himself, of course. But that's what came to mind Wednesday night. It's still a little tender at the bridge, and I think I'm going to skip jujitsu this morning. Don't want to have to worry about a cross-face.

The 24" iMac looks like a very sweet machine. I got a very nice deal on my 20" iMac, paying only $1200.00 for it as a refurb. A new 24" machine would be a much bigger hit to the wallet, and right now I have other priorities. So I've idled the Rationalization Engine™ for the time being, but I think it's safe to say there is a 24" iMac in my future.

The Amazon movie store looks like a mess, and that's not just sour grapes because nothing you buy there will play on a Mac. It's just that their video store seemed to make me directly compare it to the iTunes Music Store (likely to be called something else after the 12th of this month), and there's no comparison. It's just butt-ugly. And while I love Amazon and probably spend a significant amount of my discretionary income there, it's pretty clear they're not much into aesthetics. Which is probably appropriate, in some sense.

My Apple Dictionary and Thesaurus defines "patronizing" this way:

1 [often as adj. ] ( patronizing) treat with an apparent kindness that betrays a feeling of superiority : “She's a good-hearted girl,” he said in a patronizing voice | she was determined not to be put down or patronized.

Maybe it's a clue. Maybe only men have the power to "reframe" an issue to make it more "gender inclusive." Lucky for all those women, who otherwise would be saddled with unreframed issues. Or something.

ATLANTIS is supposed to launch later this morning. Hopefully the clouds will cooperate and if she goes, maybe we'll get to see it.

Okay, that's probably enough about all that.

BSG: The Story So Far

Yahoo! TV is posting the recap show in five parts. The first two are up now, and it seems that a new part goes up each week.

The recap uses clips from the mini-series and the series, and doesn't necessarily use them in their original sequence, so if you're familiar with the series, the recap seems a little disjointed. I'm not sure what the effect is for anyone who's never seen it.

Mary McDonnell's voice-over is lovely, though there isn't too much of it. In the first two segments, there has been no mention of her character's breast cancer. I can't imagine they'd just ignore it, since the effects of her "alternative medicine" regime figured so prominently in her character's development. It'll probably get recapitulated all at once.

If you've never seen the show, I think the best way to catch up remains to begin at the beginning and watch the whole thing. There's plenty of time between now and the series premiere on October 6. It's available at the iTunes Music Store, and I think I've read that people have rented the individual DVDs from NetFlix, but I wouldn't swear to that. They may be available at your public library, or you could just buy them. It may sound a little daunting to watch that many episodes in a relatively short amount of time, but I think anyone who does so will find it rewarding.

Faith, Steve Irwin and a Bloody Nose

As I sit here, my nose is swollen and every now and then starts bleeding again, and I'd probably do well to just go to bed and not write this particular post. Partly because it'd probably be better for my nose, and partly because there's probably an element of ego-centric presumption in this on my part. For whatever it's worth, I'm not comparing myself to Steve Irwin.

I'd never watched any of his shows on TV, though I did recall surfing through them from time to time. I'd also read about him in the news, so I knew who he was and what he did, and maybe just a bit about what he was like. Like everyone else, I suppose, I was surprised when I read about his death; and while tragic, as so many deaths are, it seemed, somehow, appropriate.

What has somewhat surprised me is the amount of attention his death has received, and its emotional resonance, seemingly on a par with that of figures who were, perhaps, more popular or widely known. I'm thinking of Elvis, Princess Diana, John Lennon, Reagan, and some others I'm sure I've forgotten. With the possible exception of Princess Diana, though I suspect a large portion of the emotional response to her death comes from the same source as that of the others I mentioned, I believe most of the emotion comes from the cult of celebrity, and how these iconic figures and objects of adulation somehow made others' lives more meaningful, or something, and not necessarily in a "good" way.

I think it's something different with Steve Irwin though. I don't think he was around long enough, or widely enough known, to have had the kind of myth form around him that defined, to a large extent, the lives and deaths of the others I mentioned. Irwin was perhaps, in a word, genuine.

Lots of people are genuine. I know a few genuine assholes, and I'm sure you do too. But Irwin seemed to be genuinely a nice guy. And not just that, but genuinely someone who embraced life; who found his passion and embraced it, fearlessly. I think that resonates with most of us, because, perhaps, most of us don't live our lives that way and we know we'd like to.

I got a note from Tish Gier in my e-mail. I don't know how many people she sent it to, since my address must have been in a BCC field, and she didn't mention my name in the salutation. Anyway, she pointed to a piece that she has appearing in an Arianna Huffington blog that seems to promote Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless. But in Tish's post, she writes about her doubts about abandoning her job to pursue a new career as a writer. I wondered if she'd sent me the e-mail because of the audio-clip I posted the other day from The Tao of Steve, which explicitly mentions Kierkegaard and the "leap of faith." Who knows? It doesn't really matter, but I guess I'm kind of curious.

I got blasted in the nose by a round kick tonight. I'd tell you I never saw it coming, but I really don't remember much of anything just before I got hit. I was sparring a yellow-belt, a guy about 36 who's in very good shape, who I know has the capacity to kick high. We were point-sparring, which is described as being like a game of high-speed tag. Point-sparring in the most recent Olympics was revised to demand more contact, in that a point wouldn't be awarded unless there was visible evidence that the person being hit had, in fact, received a blow. As a result, I believe there were more victories by knock-out in the most recent Games than in any prior for taekwondo. Anyway, at my school, point-sparring remains "light contact."

I got kicked pretty hard tonight. My fault. I wasn't paying attention. I suspect I didn't respect my partner enough, since he was a yellow belt. I should have respected him more because, while he has power and the ability to kick high, he doesn't have the same level of control a higher belt rank would have. I ended up taking a knee because I couldn't go on. He apologized profusely and genuinely felt bad. But I wasn't angry at him, and it wasn't his fault. I'm a 2nd Degree Decided, if I get kicked in the face by a yellow belt, that's my fault. Sympathy can be found in the dictionary between "shit" and "syphilis." So I got a bloody nose, and a reminder to pay attention.

Something one of my instructors said to another student, not long after I'd started training, is that the most difficult belt to earn in any martial art is the white belt, the one you must award to yourself by making the decision to begin. This is, in a very real way, a leap of faith. Only it's of faith in yourself.

If you've seen the movie The Matrix, you'll recall when Morpheus takes Neo into the Matrix to make that giant leap between buildings. Cypher says, "Everyone falls the first time." Neo did. And we all do. Sometimes we fall early in our childhood, and we don't like the experience, and so we choose to play it safe and not make any more leaps like that. But when we do, sometimes we are, in effect, saying "No," to life. It's a form of denial, because bad things will happen to us anyway. We will still get hurt, we will still get our noses bloodied. But it will happen to us as passive observers of life. And that's kind of depressing.

I think that Steve Irwin's life resonated with so many people because he wasn't a passive observer of life. I think the specific circumstances of his death only magnified that aspect of his life, and how different it may be from the lives of so many of us.

I'm not Steve Irwin. For many years, I was a passive observer of my life. "Sittin' around waitin' for my life to begin, while it was all just slippin' away," as Springsteen wrote in Better Days. I was waiting for external events to alter the circumstances of my life so that I might get the opportunity to know some measure of happiness. "It'll get better when," I used to tell myself.

Only it never got better. Until I did.

I'm better, but I'm not Steve Irwin by any means. But I know that whatever chance I have for happiness is up to me to seize it. Sometimes that means I'm going to get a bloody nose. For some people, it means they'll die in a tragic accident. But everybody gets to die. Not everybody chooses to live.

Steve Irwin was someone who seemed to choose to live, and I think people admired that. I think we all wanted to be a little more like Steve Irwin, and a little less like ourselves. And it's not so much fearlessness we admire, as it is faith. Faith doesn't conquer fear, doesn't make it go away. You'll still know fear, believe me, this I know. But it does make you understand, if you're paying attention, that you have a choice.

A lot of the time, it's easy to stop paying attention to the things that you ought to be paying attention to. We allow ourselves to be distracted, because we haven't learned how to master our attention. And when that happens, it's too easy to surrender to our fear, to live a life of denial - that if I don't take this risk, then bad things won't happen to me. But bad things will happen anyway, and all that will be different is that you didn't live your life. And you'll never know all the good things that could have happened.

Anyway, my nose hurts and I need to go to bed. As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking. I'm not responsible for anyone's bloody nose but my own.

Well, unless I punched you.

BSG: Webisode 1

Although I'm about as enamored of the neologism "webisode" as I am of "blogosphere," I watched the first of 10 for the upcoming third season of the Peabody Award-winning series to be offered at SciFi.com this evening. It's nice teaser element, but the tiny little box they offer it in probably doesn't do justice to the production values. Hopefully, they'll appear in a larger size as a DVD extra at a later date.

If you haven't seen the second half of Season 2 yet, obviously it will be a major spoiler.

Right now, the "webisode" loads at the home page, SciFi.com. I'm sure they'll be at the BSG site later as a permanent location.

If I go crazy, will you still call me Superman?

The Lost Action Hero.

Happy Birthday to Karl!

Karl Martino is officially one year older today.

Congratulations!

Competing Messages: Quotation

"A market is a place set aside for men to deceive and get the better of one another."

Anacharsis (c. 600 BC), cit. Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Playing With Fire

While I'm a big believer in doing your own thinking, I think it's always wise to talk to people who know more about something than you do. More about that in a moment.

Basically living alone for the last seven years, except for a 16-month gig as a single parent, I've been dining on whatever the latest delicacy was being offered in my grocer's freezer. Occasionally eating out, but mostly it was frozen microwavable dinners.

This was kind of fun for the first five or six years, but it's getting kind of old. On top of that, Caitie has been complaining to me that nobody cooks anymore. So, I figure it's probably time to start making my own dinner.

Well, it's past time, but I'm a procrastinator.

My kitchen isn't terribly well-equipped. I have your basic eating utensils, a mis-matched set of plates and bowls and such, a frying pan and a one-quart sauce pan that I bought to have something to re-heat the soup in should the power fail for a few days, and I have to use my little Coleman propane burner. So I figured I needed a set of pots and pans, or something.

Being a savvy (Hah!) consumer, I consulted Consumer Reports, and became more confused. Then I asked a neighbor who has had some training in the culinary arts. She recommended All-Clad products. So I looked for All-Clad at the Navy Exchange, and after I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I figured I'd better make sure I only get what I really need if I'm going to be spending that kind of money.

My neighbor wasn't available, but I knew Al Hawkins had written a fair bit about how to make your way around the kitchen, and he could probably let me know what the essentials would be. So I shot him an e-mail and then we did some iChattin', and a trip to Amazon or two later, and I've got the stuff he recommended on the way. I didn't buy All-Clad either, opting for Al's recommendation of Calphalon products. In fact, my neighbor also mentioned Calphalon, but the Exchange only carried their least expensive set, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't what she had in mind.

Next, I bought a couple of basic cooking texts at Books-a-Million, and tomorrow I'll try and go through and pick out a couple of recipes and make a shopping list.

Then comes the trial by fire.

Well, it's an electric stove, actually. But you get the idea.

DVD: The Tao of Steve

The Tao of Steve is a cool little movie I wrote about a long time ago, probably back in the original Time's Shadow blog. I watched it again the other night. Here's a little audio clip from it, I have no idea if the things Greer Goodman as Syd are saying are true, in the context she offers them, but they're true enough to me outside of that:

Sunday Morning Beach

Went down to the beach to watch the sun come up. Not much in the way of spectacle, but I took a few pictures.

This is how things were shaping up when I arrived. Rested the camera on a wooden railing. Too much noise.

This next series, I'm not sure how this will lay out but we'll see, was kind of serendipitous. The little girl's dad had just caught one of his own and was putting it in his bucket, so he's out of the frame right now:

If the clouds weren't exactly spectacular, you can usually count on the pelicans for some interesting stuff, but even they seemed to be taking the morning off.

This guy seemed to be enjoying himself:

I was trying for something else, but this turned out kind of nice:

And then the show was over.

DVD: The Sentinel

Watched this last night, although it's hard for me to watch nearly anything with Kiefer Sutherland in it anymore. I keep thinking of Jack Bauer, and I really, really don't like 24. This movie was pretty much in the Jack Bauer character, too.

It was an acceptable distraction for a couple of hours. Kim Bassinger, if anything, is more beautiful today than she was back when Alec Baldwin was still a star.

The plot had a number of weaknesses, though they weren't so glaring as to irritate me too much. Eva Longoria was pretty much just set dressing. The dialog was nothing to write home about. Characterization was weak. Well, that's being generous. Nearly nonexistent is more like it.

C-, maybe D+. Don't buy it. Rent it. Watch once and forget. Unlike In the Line of Fire, which is worth owning and watching more than once.

Technology Changes How We Do Things

Not. What. We. Do.

Wanna better world?

Be better people.

Paying attention yet?

Of course you're not.

That's okay. We've got the rest of eternity.

Hey, that's why it's called Groundhog Day.

23" iMac Coming?

According to AppleInsider, the Mothership is about to refresh the iMac with the new Intel Merom processor. The most interesting thing, to me, is they're reporting that a 23" iMac is supposed to join the line.

Time to warm up the Rationalization Engine™...

Gojira!

The original Japanese version of Godzilla (i.e. not the one with Raymond Burr) will be released on DVD next week. Available at Amazon.com.

Cool.