Adam Schabtach's Blog
General blog stuff.
It was nearly a year ago that I posted an entry here about the enigmatic animation of someone singing and twirling a leek. Through the odd evolutionary forces of the web, we now have a new version from Japan, sung by voice-synthesis software:
Thanks go to MusicThing for this; the original post with some amount of explanation is here.
My photo gallery is back online. I took it down awhile ago because it got hacked and finally got around to patching it up today. It’s still a little rough around the edges but it should all work. I have disabled the comment mechanism altogether because I don’t trust it. (The authors of Gallery go on at great length about how secure their software is, but the fact remains that my installation of it was hacked.)
You can reach it by clicking here or clicking the handy Photo Gallery link under the heading Adam’s Stuff in the right-hand column of this page.
Lest I give the erroneous impression that Apple is the sole source of my computer woes, I spent all day (fairly literally) yesterday troubleshooting my main PC after what should have been a simple hardware upgrade went awry. I purchased a new graphics card and a new sound card. The graphics card went in without a hitch and dazzled me with both its performance and its nearly inaudible fan. After convincing myself that all was well so far, I put in the sound card.
I still don’t know exactly what I did wrong. It could have been that I connected the cables for the front-panel jacks and the CD drive incorrectly. It could have been that the new card collided in some manner with the motherboard’s native audio hardware or the serial-port card I use for microprocessor firmware development. (I’ve since removed both.) It could have been some weird fluke.
I’m faintly non-plussed by the flap over the price cut of the iPhone. If you consider the price reduction of $200 in the face of the $3000 required to operate the phone for two years, it’s a less than 10% drop. If you were dumb enough to lay down $600 for a cell phone in the first place, well, I don’t have much pity for you, I’m afraid.
But that aside, Steve Jobs making a public apology for the change was an interesting event. Does it mean that we can look forward to more apologies from Steve when Apple screws their customers in various ways?Here are some issues with Apple products which I believe are far more significant for which I never received any apology:
We’re having the furnace replaced today. The old one was 20 years old, and while it hadn’t failed yet, a number of people who know about furnaces have looked at it and told me that it should be replaced Real Soon Now. Last winter I watched the neighbors enduring a furnace replacement during rather cold weather. I’d really rather avoid doing that, so the new furnace is going in today.
This event brought back memories of the furnace in the house that I grew up in. It burned sawdust. There was a room in the corner of the house that served as a huge storage bin. Once or twice a year (to my recollection) a huge truck would arrive and blow a load of sawdust into the room through a covered hole in the wall. After that the house would smell of sawdust for a few days.
I completed another paper model of a character(?) from the Front Mission game series. (The previous one is described in this entry if you haven’t seen it before.) Its name seems to be Blizzaia L.
You can download the PDFs for building it with these links:
http://www.square-enix.co.jp/fm/FM4_BlizzaiaL.pdf
http://www.square-enix.co.jp/fm/FM4_BlizzaiaL_manual.pdf
I actually finished this model some time ago but just got around to putting up a photo here. My current project is the SD Force Impuse Gundam from this site. (It’s in Korean, so navigation involves a certain amount of guesswork unless you happen to read Korean.) It also seems that the link I purchased the plans from the author but haven’t gotten beyond the first step. It turns out to be rather difficult. All of its joints (shoulders, neck, etc.) move, so building it involves making lots of little paper cylinders that fit inside other little paper cylinders. I think I’m going to have to start from scratch; what I’ve done so far really doesn’t fit together very well. It seems to be easier to make cylinders from a couple layers of regular printer paper than from cardstock, so I’ve re-printed all of the cylinder parts on plain paper and will start afresh with those.
Our hibiscus is doing well. We planted it several years ago and it seem to be taking off this season. Here are a couple of photos of it.
My friend and colleage Richard mentioned The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster to us recently. It’s a startlingly insightful short story describing a dystopic future in which all of humanity is tended to, and communicates through, one giant Machine. In its 12,000-word span it touches on a number of topics of contemporary relevance, such as dependence upon electronic communication and technology in general, the significance of direct experience (vs. second- or nth-hand accounts), the malleability of history and “fact”, religion as a psychological self-defense mechanism, and even obesity. The most startling thing is that it was written in 1909, decades before even the television was invented.
First they have to tell me whether they’re serving the ice cream before or after the service…
Internet Explorer emitted this enigmatic error message today:
