Category: Fun

Char noticed this on the Daily Show:

Note the upper left corner of the window — it’s gnome minesweeper on redhat, not Windows minesweeper! Char suspects it’s for copyright reasons, because it’s free to use a screenie from gnome, whereas with a Microsoft product they’d probably have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Anyway, I thought it was cute.

Char and I went to The Great Pumpkin Show in Salem, New Hampshire. It was really fun, and there were a ton of pumpkins. There were two basic types: traditional eyes-nose-mouth pumpkins of various configurations, many of which could have been carved by anybody; and Artist Pumpkins. The technique here involved getting not carving through the pumpkin, but scratching away at the surface. In this way various amounts of light could be let through, resulting in a sort of grayscale effect. They would also shade in areas with a sharpie to make them blacker. All of the “image-like” pumpkins were carved in this way.

Many pumpkins were scary

Many were not

We visited on November 6th, so by then a lot of the pumpkins were starting to rot. Many were still fresh, but many were collapsing.

The flash makes things look pretty crappy. I tried about 5 different ways of setting my camera up to photograph the pumpkins, but really I needed a tripod I didn’t have.

Today I received my new Alienware Sentia. I got it for the good screen (1280×800) and the availability of a dvd+- burner for less than a thinkpad x40.

Thoughts on the transition:
To move my data from my old Dell Inspiron 4100 to my new system, I actually just moved the hard drive from one machine to the other. I have a 7200RPM 60 gig drive, so it made sense anyway.

When I booted up, I ran kudzu and let it reconfigure everything. That got the sound, USB, firewire, and ethernet working. On the whole I was very impressed with how much was automatic.

Things I had to do manually:

• I needed to add a modeline for the 1280×800 screen. I googled that in about a minute, and added it to the xorg.conf file. A look at the man page told me how to get the monitor to use that specific mode.
• I needed to get custom drivers for the Intel 2200 BG wireless card. That took more like a half hour to figure out the installation process (you need to put firmware files in a specific place)
• XVideo was totally washed out on the default settings, but playing with the brightness and contast in totem fixed that

And that’s it. I have wireless, video, sound, and I have to test cd burning, but that’s it. Under an hour of poking and my whole system is moved to a completely new laptop. I don’t think I could have done it any faster on any other platform.

hehe

Today is a remarkably good day for webcomics. (Ok I cheated, Sept 26 is much funnier for spamusement)

Grab bag time, wooooooo!!!!! Here’s a couple pictures that have been lying around that I hadn’t put up.

Char and I took a weekend trip to New York City last weekend, using the
hip, uber-secret-except-everyone-knows-about-it chinese bus. The idea is, you pay
10 bucks and they take you to New York. Good deal.

I didn’t take many pictures, because I’m lame. I had planned to buy a film camera
at the gigantic B&H Pro photo/video store, but
as two separate people told me later, “they’re all Jews” so it was closed on Saturday.
So I wasn’t able to get a camera.

Our inability to get into B&H was a theme repeated throughout the weekend, as we would try
to find stores and invariably they were closed, in Brooklyn, or otherwise unlocatable.
Eventually we accepted our fate and just went into the stores we could find, but at the
end of the whole thing we felt we were only “moderately successful.”

The part of the trip that went ok was seeing Rent. Like the chinese bus, Rent is
sort of a hip thing to do, although unlike the bus we’re late to the Rent party by about
eight years. The show was pretty good. I don’t see a lot of musicals, so I don’t
have an internal set of standards to go by, but I enjoyed myself. The script is very 90s,
including such memes as: everyone has AIDS! a CYBER-somethingorother! Everyone lives in a loft!
“Living in America at the end of the Millenium!” Somehow we can afford film and processing for
our hip 16mm camera! Something else that probably dampened my enjoyment was that I knew I
would have trouble understanding what was going on, so I was concentrating perhaps a
little too intensely on understanding the lyrics rather than just relaxing. I still
managed to miss a key plot point, but it could have been worse.

Anyway so here is the one good picture I managed to take.

We went camping last weekend, and of course I suck so there are no pictures, but
when we got back we saw Fahrenheit 9/11. We tried to see it at 7:30, but forty-five minutes
before showtime it was sold out and there was a huge line for it. We got tickets for the
10:00pm showing, and got in line at 9:00pm. It was worth it — I hate getting crappy seats at
a good movie.

I’ve been putting in a ton of hours at work trying to get a show out the door to Discovery Channel. Here is what happens while online editors are waiting for complicated effects to render.

So about, uh, a month ago, Char and I took a day-trip to Providence. It was meant to be a “week-end
getaway,” but I’m a slacker so we couldn’t get a hotel for the night. But we had a very enjoyable day.

We took the Amtrak train down to Providence, and it was fast and cheap. We even got Acela tickets, so it
only took 30 minutes to get there. Basically it’s as fast to get to Providence than it is to get to Davis Square.

When we got to Providence, we bought a map and started wandering around to get a feel of the place. I’d never been there, so I didn’t really know where to start. We knew we were going to the zoo later on, and we knew we wanted to eat breakfast in a diner, but finding a diner was more difficult than you’d think.

It seems that Providence has fallen victim to a giant sucking leach of a mall, which is situated right next to the train station. It’s a few football fields long and 4 stories high, and has every single stupid chain store you’ve ever heard of. Just when Char said “boy too bad there’s no Guess store!” We turned a corner and found one. We left the mall, and tried to find our little diner. We walked around the downtown, and found just about every single store and restaurant closed and boarded up. There was abosolutely no business being done outside the mall. Finally we found one last little place called the Metro Cafe (189 Weybosset St) and ate there.

We went to the zoo in Providence, and other than it being overrun by kids it was nice. Zoos are depressing places, because rather than being gleefully ignorant we’re crushingly aware of the general cruelty of keeping wild animals in small places with nowhere to run and nothing to do but follow the shady spot around the pen all day. I don’t think it’s a matter of being too PC either, I think zoos are a concept whose time has passed. When was the last time you heard of a brand new beautiful zoo going up somewhere?

Char demanded a new friend, so I got her a cute little snow leopard. She named it “Mocha chip.”

We also saw the real thing

When we left the zoo we saw one of Char’s favorite animals, a wood duck

I still feel bad for screwing up the hotel thing and only getting one day in Providence, but we’re probably going to go back again, next time to Newport. We’ll get a cute bed and breakfast and everything, really.