Bob Congdon

The Quick and the Dead

2008-11-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

I split one of my fingernails this evening. It started to bleed because the crack extended down into the quick. Which made me wonder: why do we say "into the quick"? A quick search turns up that the word originally meant living or alive. So it's the living part of the nail. Makes sense. And the phrase The Quick and the Dead wasn't originally applied to gunslingers. It was meant to refer to the living and the dead.

Sushi Bullies

2008-10-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

Sushi Bullies — the Japanese equivalent of the Soup Nazi.

The eyeballing game

2008-10-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

The eyeballing game shows you series of geometries that need to be adjusted a little bit to make them right. I got a couple of them "spot on" but it takes concentration to get below 3.0 as an average score.

Smoking Cat

2008-10-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening the kids and I were in my office playing a game. We didn't notice when Murka the cat jumped up on the desk. As she weaved between the computers on the desk, she slid under a halogen desk lamp. My son noticed smoke coming from under the lamp. Murka's tail was right up against the bulb getting singed. A second or two more and we might have had feline flambé. She was blithely unaware and seemed to enjoy the sudden attention. It took over an hour to get rid of the acrid smell of burning cat hair. Yuck.

World of Goo

2008-10-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Remember Tower of Goo from Experimental Gameplay? The same folks have built World of Goo, a full-fledged game. It's currently available for Windows and Wii; eventually for Macintosh and Linux as well. You can download the demo here.

World of Goo is a physics game where you build structures out of balls of goo of varying properties. The goo balls squeak and chatter as they move around. Imagine if Tim Burton and Danny Elfman collaborated on a game. It has that sort of look and sound.

Flickering Lights

2008-09-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

I watched Flickering Lights on DVD last night. It's a Danish film from 2000 about four small-time gangsters from Copenhagen who steal $4 million krones from their gangster boss and try to escape to Barcelona. Along the way they're forced to hide out in the countryside, in an old, wrecked building. If you like Tarantino, Coen Brothers and the like, and don't mind reading subtitles, it's worth checking out. The writing and cast are terrific.

One cast member seemed very familiar (the second from the left on the DVD cover). I couldn't remember where I'd seen him before. It's Mads Mikkelsen who played the evil Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.

I borrowed the DVD from a co-worker (Thanks Henrik!). It's available on Netflix.

My only complaint about the DVD is with some of the translations in the subtitles. It's tricky to translate slang and cultural references but a few of them here took away from the film. For example, in one conversation two characters talk about theme parks and refer to Disneyland and Six Flags complaining that the latter had "too many Canucks". Huh? According to a comment on IMDB, the conversation was about two Danish parks "Tivoli" and "Bakken". And rather than complaining about Canadians (which makes little sense in the film) they were complaining about Swedes.

Doesn't Just Work

2008-09-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I bought an Airport Express to wirelessly share a printer. Setup was easy and everything seemed to work smoothly. But my wife started having problems printing. The job would get accepted and get stuck. The Airport Express was dropping off the network. Looking at the device log, it was dropping off and then trying to reconnect every 20 minutes or so. I found Volker's post from 2005 with the same symptoms as well as a fix. Problem solved. Hard to believe that in three years Apple hasn't fixed the issue or at least released a KB article on it.

Pearls Before Swine

2008-08-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

My son enjoys reading Pearls Before Swine. I recently started reading it as well. The strip revolves around a group of generically-named animals (Rat, Pig, Zebra, etc). I especially liked this one:

It's an reference to the classic Krazy Kat comic strip. Works even if you don't get the reference.

Not So Extreme

2008-08-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

All the laptops in our household now support 802.11n but our current access point only supports 802.11g. This is plenty fast for Internet access but I wanted to see if I could improve the speed of backups to our NAS. So I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme. (Yes, this is the third Apple product I've mentioned in a row).

The AirPort Extreme supports both 2.4GHz or 5GHz so my plan was to use 802.11n over 5Ghz and plug our existing router into the AirPort and run it at 2.4Ghz to support the other WiFi devices in our house. Setup was quick and easy. When I was in the same room as the AirPort, the signal strength was excellent. But when I moved from room to room, the signal would sometimes drop precipitously. In some rooms it was substantially worse than the 802.11g access point. This wasn't looking too good.

So I tried a different approach. Use 802.11n at 2.4Ghz. Although not as speedy as 5Ghz, it's still a decent speed boost over 802.11g. Initially it seemed better but I got the same signal drop offs in some rooms. And it wasn't consistent. Sometimes it would work fine for a bit and then drop off. I made all of these changes late at night so I don't think it was cordless phone or microwave interference. And our existing 802.11g access point doesn't exhibit this type of behavior.

So back to the Apple Store it went for return. I still like the idea of going 802.11n at 5Ghz but looks like I'll have to try another product.

One less USB cable

2008-08-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

I have a Canon printer in my office at home. If I need to print something I plug the printer's USB cable into my laptop. But I'm not always in my office. And it's a hassle when we have multiple laptops sharing the same printer. So I bought an Apple AirPort Express.

Setup was easy and printing for both OS X and Windows works fine. The only issue I had which took a few tries to get right was setting up the printer in Windows. You need to install the latest version of Bonjour for Windows and run the Bonjour Printer Wizard. The installer insisted that Bonjour had already been installed but the Printer Wizard wasn't there. I'm not sure if Bonjour had been installed by Boot Camp or iTunes but the fix was to uninstall and then reinstall it.

New Laptop

2008-08-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

My wife's Thinkpad T43 has reached retirement age — we bought it in early 2005. She's run out of disk space for all or her photos and music. I tried to install a larger drive but Lenovo made it nearly impossible to upgrade.

What to buy as a replacement? We've had good luck with Thinkpads so I considered the new Thinkpad T500. It's pricey but a comparably configured Thinkpad T500 is about $200 cheaper than my other option, a MacBook Pro. My wife relies on several Windows-only applications but the MBP is solid running Windows too. And, if you consider the $200 to be the Apple Tax for being allowed to run OS X, it's not so bad.

We ended up going with the MBP. I installed Windows under Boot Camp and then moved all of her data and applications over. She's been using it for about a week and is happy, especially with the speed — and all of that free disk space! Her only major adjustment so far has been the Backspace/Delete key.

Yearbook Yourself

2008-08-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

Yearbook Yourself lets see what you might look like as a teenager through the last few decades. Here's me in 1952:

Swell! (Via kottke.org)

Death Star over San Francisco

2008-08-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's Imperial Fleet Week in San Francisco.

Watch the whole thing.

Donut Peaches

2008-08-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

We have a membership in Tiny's Organic Farm which gives us a steady supply of locally-grown organic fruits and vegetables each week. This week's bag included a box of Donut Peaches.

Very tasty but the box probably wouldn't fool Homer Simpson.

Calvin and Jobs

2008-08-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

The current issue of MAD magazine contains a parody of Calvin and Hobbes called Calvin and Jobs with Steve Jobs taking Hobbes place.

Lost In Boston

2008-07-31T15:14:00.001-07:00

We got back last night from a week-long vacation in Boston and Cape Cod. Except for a thunderstorm on our first day, we had beautiful weather the entire week. And despite the title of this post, we didn't get lost; just a bit disoriented. Boston was our home for so long that it was sometimes easy to forget that our current home was three thousand miles away.

Being away for nearly three years we did notice some changes. Dairy Fresh Candy in the North End is gone. A couple of the downtown movie theaters and bookstores that we used to go to are gone too. Probably the nicest change we saw was the Rose Kennedy Greenway; park space that occupies the land the formerly held the elevated Central Artery. That ugly elevated road is finally gone.

Many things things haven't changed. The Hancock Observatory, closed after the attacks of 9/11, is still closed. Fortunately, the Skywalk on the Prudential Tower is still open and the 360° view on a clear day is terrific.

And Boston drivers haven't changed. But except for the occasional aggressive tailgater, I didn't mind. Old habits die hard. And one difference between Seattle and Boston drivers is that Boston drivers are much more likely to acknowledge an act of courtesy than a Seattle driver. In Boston, making eye contact and letting someone merge into your lane is a magnanimous gesture, often greeted with a hearty wave. In Seattle, letting someone merge into your lane is expected. No acknowledgment needed. So when we were in Boston, I let people in front of me a lot, just to get that hand wave.

How smart is an octopus?

2008-06-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we visited the Seattle Aquarium. One of the attractions is the Giant Pacific Octopus tank. When the octopus is really active, as he was this day, he moves quickly around the large glass tank and glass tunnel using his arms to explore the walls, even extending them above the water level.

They're also pretty clever. Watch this video of an octopus unscrewing the lid of a glass jar and consuming the crab inside it. After watching that, I think I'll take a pass on trying my hand at octopus wrestling.

BillG has left the building

2008-06-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

This afternoon we had a party at work for our interns. It was in the atrium, an open area that extends up through all five floors of the building. As you probably know, today was also Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft. And his office is in the same building. When people heard that Bill was heading for the elevators for his last trip home from the office, the entire atrium area erupted in loud cheers.

When I worked for IBM, I wondered whether many IBM employees would recognize a photo of the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson, who had stepped down as chairman more than 50 years earlier. More than likely they would recognize his name but probably not his face. If Microsoft has the longevity of IBM will its employees recognize a photo of Bill in 50 years?

JSqueak

2008-06-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

Dan Ingalls has released JSqueak, a Squeak interpreter written in Java. It's roughly 5000 lines of Java. The download includes a Smalltalk image. Running JSqueak with this image on my MBP felt like déjà vu. It reminded me of learning Apple Smalltalk on my ancient Macintosh Plus.

Note: The Apple Smalltalk screenshots in the link are actually running in Mini vMac on a Macintosh. That's a 68k emulator running an interpreted language inside a virtual Mac running on an Intel Mac. Aren't VMs cool?

19 stellar cinematic one-scene wonders

2008-06-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

The A.V. Club has a list of 19 stellar cinematic one-scene wonders. First, and by far the best, is Alec Baldwin's performance in Glengarry Glen Ross. Although not a one-scene wonder, Baldwin's over-the-top "I Am God" speech from Malice is quite a highlight as well.

Another one-scene wonder that I think is missing from this list is Quentin Tarantino's bizarre Top Gun Monologue from Sleep With Me.

Random Rules: Jonathan Coulton

2008-06-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Onion AV Club interviews Jonathan Coulton by putting his ~~iPod~~, er MP3 player in "shuffle" mode. Clever interview format.

Coincidentally, I just added Coulton's Washy Ad Jeffy to my music collection.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script

2008-06-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Hilarious abridged script of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's full of spoilers in case you haven't seen the film yet. And it reads like a Mad magazine movie satire:

CATE BLANCHETT: Pryvet, Harrison. I am evil Soviet. You vill help me find Moose and Squirrel, yes?

HARRISON FORD: Holy Christ, you’re not going to talk like that the whole movie are you?

CATE BLANCHETT: Da. You vill help locate MacKuffin now.

...

JIM BROADBENT: Sorry Harrison, but the government thinks you might be a Soviet. Apparently someone rented “K-19: The Widowmaker” and panicked.

HARRISON FORD: Bullsh*t, nobody saw that movie.

Ha. Well I saw K-19. Pretty good film but Ford's Russian accent was worse than Cate Blanchett's

The Happening

2008-06-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Remember the ending of Poltergeist? Carol Anne is rescued by her parents and then the whole house starts to heave and come apart. Right at that moment the teenage daughter arrives home in a car. She sees the chaos and screams: What's Happening?!?!?

I watched M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening this evening and had to suppress the urge to shout the same thing at the screen. Not because of supernatural events or a convoluted plot. It's just that the film is so shockingly bad.

M. Night Shyamalan has written and directed some terrific films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village). It's hard to believe that he wrote and directed this one. Terrible script, mostly horrible acting. And the twist? What actually is happening? No point spoiling it but it just didn't translate into something menacing. There are a few moments of drama here that work, especially at the beginning but they're few and far between. And there are several scenes where the audience laughed because the action on screen was just so bad.

If you're still planning to see The Happening maybe you'll find it more enjoyable than I did, even if only in a perverse way. If you plan to skip it, check out Christopher Orr's movie review. It's laden with spoilers but is much more entertaining than the film itself. Orr makes an interesting comparison to Spielberg's War of the Worlds (a much, much, much superior film). I was also reminded of 28 Eight Weeks Later but only because the two films end in the same locale.

Update: I forgot to mention that like Alfred Hitchcock's trademark cameos, Shyamalan usually makes an appearance in his films. In The Happening he plays Joey a voice on the telephone. Yup, he literally "phoned in" his performance.

Happy Mac

2008-06-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

The hard drive in our family MacBook died on Saturday. Initially I thought that it was fixable but attempts to repair or reformat the drive failed. Then I noticed an ominous clicking sound when the drive tried to spin up and realized that it was gone. Fortunately we signed up for extended AppleCare so it was covered. A trip to the Apple store on Sunday almost had us walking out with a new hard drive but they didn't have an appropriate one in stock. It was sent off for repair and shipped to our house on Wednesday. No expense for us and the replacement drive is somewhat larger than the original. The MacBook is happy again.

Overall our experience with Apple was terrific. We scheduled an appointment online at the Apple Store. The tech who looked at it was pretty sharp. We got a tracking number for the repair as well as the package when it was returned.

And fortunately we had a backup of the entire drive. SuperDuper was a life saver. Not only does it do incremental backups but it will create a bootable backup drive which can be used if the internal drive dies. Unfortunately the last backup was a few weeks old so we lost some data but not much.

The lesson learned was to set up a schedule and backup more frequently. While it was disappointing to lose a hard drive after only a year or so of usage, losing the photos, videos, music and documents stored there would have been heart breaking.

System Proxy for Firefox and Thunderbird

2008-06-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Firefox on OS X does not read proxy settings from System Preferences. You have to manually configure them. A co-worker showed me a fix. System Proxy is a Firefox extension that adds a "Copy proxy settings from Mac OS X" option to Preferences. Works great. The extension also works with Thunderbird but I haven't had a need for that yet.