Author: Tim Jarrett

Silk officially rocks

Dave pointed to Silk today. I got around to trying it out. Holy crap. I installed it while going through my news queue in Radio, and when I switched back to Mozilla from installing it the text changed immediately from regular to antialiased. Unbelievably easy and smooth.
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Happy anniversary, M&D

Happy anniversary to my parents, who (as of yesterday) have been married for 31 years. As I continue in my own path through marriage, I realize just how impressive and difficult a feat this is.

(PS—yes, I’m a day late in blogging this (thanks to Esta for the prod), but I did make dinner for them last night.)

Bit of a nasty Boston day

Oh well. The day started out ok, weather-wise, but quickly started misting, then raining, then blowing. Our first stop was to be the Boston Tea Party ship; had we checked ahead, we would have learned that a fire in the ticket booth closed the ship down some time ago.

We were luckier at the Museum of Fine Arts. I had never seen much of the museum’s exhibits of furniture, musical instruments, or china; now that I’m going to be a homeowner the furniture, especially, is fascinating. And lunch was good at Vox Populi. Now I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the weather clears up for tomorrow.

Gray day

A good day for museums here. I’m taking my parents around Boston—my dad’s never been up to see us since we got here. Should be fun.

And suddenly your readers are no longer anonymous

Radio users used to be hidden behind the informative name “frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator” in my referer logs. No longer! Now I know who’s reading this site! And some of them are darned interesting, like Nicholas Riley, whose blog is subtitled “thoughts from a computer science graduate student, medical student, and Cocoa programmer (this week).”

This alleviates an information asymmetry that’s existed since the beginning of writing…
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Mac OS X 10.1.5 is out

Apple released Mac OS X 10.1.5 yesterday; I left the install running last night while we went for drinks with our friend Niall and his parents, who are over from Ireland. I think the fact that I let the install run unattended says a lot about how much better Apple’s update process has gotten.

The update seems to have fixed a longstanding problem I had with connecting to my iDisk from home; apparently the “added support for connecting to iDisk using default DNS settings of AirPort” did the trick. This is really good. I used to have to dial up directly or go to the network at school to be able to connect to my iDisk. Now I can connect and publish software updates with no problem.
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The people in my neighborhood

Shout out to Mark Pilgrim for building a web service that visualizes relationships between web sites (via Google) quickly and succinctly. Going down my “neighborhood” list, I see a lot of familiar faces and quite a few I don’t recognize.

Question mark: has Google’s API obviated the need for data mining? It used to be that you needed very expensive algorithms and extensive data sets to predict these kinds of relationships (a la Amazon’s recommendation engine). Google has the data set now and has exposed the algorithm via “related sites.” Of course, the catch is your site has to be visible to Google to be able to play.
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Quicktime 6 Beta is out

After a long delay, the first public beta of Quicktime 6 is available for Mac and Windows. This version bakes in MPEG-4 support (the format based on Quicktime’s own standard) as will as JPEG 2000 and some other interesting sounding things like “skip protection.”

All of which I will test as soon as I finish downloading the damn thing; the installer is about 9 MB, and I’m sure that installing will download other components as well. Boy, am I going to be glad when we get broadband again.
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Goin’ house crazy

Busy day in Boston. Had to pick up my cap and gown this morning, and this afternooon all kinds of stuff broke loose on the house front, from scheduling movers here and in the state where our other belongings are living to finding time for the secondary inspectors to come out and look at the property.

You know, when I imagined what I would be doing the week before graduation, I pictured a lot of sleeping on the sofa and general goofing off. Heh. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.

Ah, the festa season starts…

Since I was in Seattle last summer, I missed most of the festas here in the North End. Today, though, the parade for the Madonna di Anzano passed right under our window. Marching bands are good for many reasons; one of them is reminding you that it’s almost 2:30 and you haven’t left the apartment yet, despite the fact that it’s a beautiful day. See you later.
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The joys of 56K

I’m currently blogging from SeaTac over a paid wireless connection—it’s been a week for blogging in new places. For those of you who frequent the North Satellite Terminal, there is an electrical outlet on the right hand side of the sports bar as you face the bartender, by the row of booths in the back. But tonight you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers to use it. I’m charging my cell phone and once I finish my blogging and surfing, I’ll be watching Akira before my plane boards. Life is good.

Life is not quite as good at home. Lisa is trying to watch our new Harry Potter DVD, but her Win 95 laptop (yes, 95. She works for a company that, for a number of reasons, has never upgraded past that nostalgic number) does not have DVD player software. I was able to find the right places for her to go by looking at VersionTracker, but it looks like she will have to download DirectX (11 MB), then the DVD software (9 MB), all over her 56K modem.

God, I’m looking forward to having broadband when we get moved into the new place.

Lazy Friday in Seattle

I spent the morning signing papers and looking in Sears at appliances. I hadn’t realized you could spend $2000 on a fridge!!! Fortunately the one in the house looks like it’ll hang in for a while.

I then went on to visit the Experience Music Project. In a freaky multicolored Frank Gehry building beside the Space Needle, the EMP is responsible for a lot of the funding of KEXP and is a huge museum of rock and roll. Cool points: including Sleater-Kinney and other more recent artists alongside Hendrix. Uncool points: didn’t really want to see Britney’s “Slave” costume.

Killing time in an internet cafe. My flight doesn’t take off until 7 but I’m probably going to head back to the airport anyway. I’m too tired to think of doing anything else.

More power, Mr. Ashcroft?

Washington Post: Government Will Ease Limits on Domestic Spying. Here’s a nice little erosion for your morning coffee: “Mr. Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, plan to announce on Thursday a broad loosening of the guidelines that restrict the surveillance of religious and political organizations, the officials said.”

Thank God for that voice of sanity, the ACLU (and no, that’s not sarcastic):

Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the new guidelines, saying they represent another step by the Bush administration to roll back civil-liberties protections in the name of improving counterterrorism measures.

“These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to be doing something wrong in order to get that F.B.I. knock at your door,” Laura W. Murphy, director of the national office of the A.C.L.U., said. “The government is rewarding failure. It seems when the F.B.I. fails, the response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement failures occurred.”

Seems to me that after the leaks about what the government knew before the September 11 attacks, giving the FBI more data to analyze is the last thing we need to do, regardless of whether it impinges on our personal freedoms or not (and it does, it does!).

How about this: the FBI gets ZERO new powers until it proves it can get useful data from the ones it already has.
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