There's a limit to my tolerance for computer stuff and I'm seeing it, looming up in front of me. Audio-wise, I've made a CD for my cousin (that's not her above) and her husband, who are celebrating a 50th wedding anniversary next week. I pulled down a batch of songs from 1956 from iTunes to add to the songs I've ripped off, excuse me, "ripped," from audio CD's at the public library. That was a fun project although it took substantially longer than it should have. I didn't include the dreary stuff they played on the radio before Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the great blues singers, and the rock 'n roll pioneers came on the scene, which narrowed the choices considerably. Video-wise, I have a new scanner. It makes excellent copies of color slides and negatives. Now I'm learning what I never knew before about resolution, dots per inch, scanning photos versus scanning film, and printing. The printer has always been the magic box attached to my computer and I've never pretended to understand it. Tonight we attended the wedding of a lawyer in our office. That's her in the photo above. Now I have to learn how to take "red eye" out of photos. The photo above doesn' t have much "red eye" but you should see the others. I've seen instructions for doing this but the job seems to require 20 minutes per photo, times about 30 photos. I tried downloading a plug-in for Photoshop but it didn't plug in. Tomorrow is a vacation day and I'm celebrating by doing carpentry work on my roof. I don't have time for all this computer nonsense.
We had to see the movie, having read the book. The details were still fresh in our minds. Good thing, because anybody seeing the movie first is bound to get lost by the end of the first reel.I liked it but wasn't overly impressed by it. She's lukewarm. She didn't think there was much suspense. This may have been a function of knowing how it was going to turn out, but I don't think so. My theory is that the movie and the story line didn't procure the "willing suspension of disbelief" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817) which is necessary to enjoy fiction, especially science fiction. Coleridge called it "poetic faith." In "Mission Impossible" and the James Bond series, you enter the theater thinking, OK, this really is impossible. You accept that, and then you can relax and enjoy the show.In "The Da Vinci Code," I didn't have as much trouble with the theological underpinnings as I did with the basic story. We are to believe that in 2,000 years, a genealogical line that began with one couple and one child came down through 80 or more generations (four to a century, or more) to the point where we now have - at the risk of tipping you off - only one child. Yeah, right. We are asked to accept that the Catholic Church was able to locate and murder the line, or most of it, despite being scattered all over France, England, and Scotland. This was before the Internet, which I can use to find your birthday, phone number, and last three addresses. They could not have been that omniscient or that efficient.The movie, and the book, were puzzle stories, starting with the puzzle of why a mortally wounded man would spend maybe an hour setting the stage (the floor of the Louvre) with puzzles rather than go for help. The movie left the viewer with no time to solve the puzzles. The solutions popped right up from one actor or the other as fast as the puzzles were explained to you. In effect, the audience is deemed too slow or stupid to "get it." The audience has no time to buy into the story. Our audience of two didn't buy into it.On the theological side, could Jesus have sired an infant? Joseph was a carpenter and we can assume the boy Jesus learned the trade. When he hit his thumb or cut his hand, he got bruised and bloody as we all do. During his short ministry he expressed no antagonism towards women. Of course it is possible that he could have become a father himself. The only "shocking" part of this work of fiction are the crimes attributed to the Catholic Church. As a student of history, I am not shocked. I am, however, not suspending my disbelief in this story. It is just too far-fetched for me.
In college basketball, this is the Year of the Gator. Florida's team was the first from the state to win the national championship. The FSU team made a grab for the gold ring in 1972 but fell a few points short.In the carnivorous world of Mother Nature, this is also the Year of the Gator. Three alligators have mistaken three women for lunch, which is a flippant and irresponsible way of saying three women suffered horrible deaths at the hands, or rather jaws, of reptiles left over from the days of dinosaurs. Two of the gators measured about nine feet long. A gator's modus operandi is to lie still, imitating a log under water until something goes by that looks like prey. Its method of killing is to drag the prey under water and hold it until it stops bubbling and kicking. One of the victims, a tourist from Tennessee, was snorkeling in shallow water. Another, a college student, was jogging along a canal and apparently was dragged under water. The circumstances of the third death are uncertain because "drug taking equipment" was found at the scene. To put this into historical context, Florida experienced only 16 fatalities due to gator attacks between 1948 and 2005, plus one in Georgia, not to mention nine "suspected alligator killings." Those fatalities represent about 4.3 percent of gator attacks. We've now had three fatalities in a week. There are several factors at work, here. Warm weather has arrived, and mating season has begun. The drought has dried up gator holes, causing gators to search for food and water in residential areas. The boom in residential housing has caused natural gator habitat to be filled up with houses, people, and small dogs, which gators seem to fancy. These factors added together do not explain why three women have been killed by gators in a week. Florida counts about 1.5 million gators in the state, almost one gator per ten people. A thousand new residents stream into Florida every day, which is both bad news and good news from a gator's perspective. Bad news: Your habitat is diminishing. Good news: Your food source is increasing. There is a moral to this story for Yankees who want to sell their homes and put a thousand miles between their friends and their new Florida home. The moral is: Stay home. Between hurricanes and gators, you don't want to live here.
I awoke this morning to the sound of thunder,How far off I sat and wondered,Started humming a song from 1962,Ain't it funny how the night moves. . .(with apologies to Bob Seger)We did wake up yesterday morning to the sound of rain and thunder, really good boomers from somewhere east of Tampa. Rain, rain, come on down. We just had the driest March and April in 100 years. I'm not normally going to comment on the weather here, but we have wildfires all over the state right now (let's all join in singing "The Fire Down Below," another Seger song). To see a "live" map of Florida showing how much of the state is up in flames, go here: http://flame.fl-dof.com/wildfire/tools_fmis.html#FMISand then scroll down to "FMIS Mapping System" and click on that. (It takes a minute or three to download the map. Be patient.) The icons will give you an exaggerated impression of how extensive the fires are, but not by much. With a lot of dry brush and fools setting fires by accident or on purpose, we are going to have a long hot summer in several senses of the term. (Cue to "Have you Ever Seen the Rain?" by John Fogerty.)
I got my machine back up and running thanks to my good friends at the shop who spent entirely too much time on it (but they gave me a huge break on their labor charge). They installed a new card for the monitor that allows a digital cable connection, added more than double the memory, and made a "clean install" of Windows XP. They thought it would be an easy fix but three of them worked on it for two days. They aren' t sure what happened. Their best guess is that my Windows 2000 installation was faulty, although it worked OK for nearly a year, and a recent Windows upgrade didn't fully install, leaving the system on shaky ground until the electonic version of a belch scambled some drivers and other key files. The "clean install" of Windows XP meant they backed up the data files, reformatted the hard drive, installed Windows XP, and copied the data back to the hard drive. That means I have to reinstall every program I was using. This is not as bad as it sounds. After all these years, going back to Windows 95 with some old DOS and Windows 3.1 data files and other stuff still tucked away in nooks and crannies, my computer is so full of crap that a "clean install" is the best way to go. Now I'm going back to reorganize and delete the old crap, with a faster computer and a great looking monitor to enjoy. My love-hate relationship with computers is swinging back in the direction of love, or at least admiration, for this stupid machine which, in reality, is no smarter than a light bulb.
The first computer I ever saw was one of the first PC's made by IBM, sitting in the living room of an IBM employee in Boca Raton, Florida, where they developed their "Peanut." It had a tiny screen and used an audio tape for memory. Peripherals? A mouse was still a rodent, "floppy" was an adjective, and a hard drive meant Interstate 75 through Georgia. I remember thinking it was cute but what possible use would I have for one? Lawyers crunch words and ideas, not numbers. OK, so a guy spends four hours typing checkbook data into his new computer. When he's done he says to his wife, "Looky here, Thelma Lou, I told the computer we have $310.82 in our checking account, and the computer just told me we have $310.82 in our checking account." (Yawn.)I was thinking of that last night when our computer crashed. With a snap and a crackle, it all went dark. The machine tried to reboot itself. Crash. It tried again. Crash. It finally gave me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death with a long, mysterious message about the K_Mode not being able to do something followed by pure gibberish, in English but still gibberish. I fancy myself as semi-adept at dealing with computers but this one mystified me. I took it to a shop first thing this morning where a genuine guru has resuscitated my computers in the past. He opened it up and started testing this and that. It's now after 5:00 and he's still working on it. If he charges me full price for labor, I may as well have bought a new one, although migrating to a new computer is a pain in the heinie. Aaaargh. If you don't think of computers as a hobby they are a monumental waste of time and money. I'm still at the office, using my office computer and waiting for the River of Steel to thin out so I can drive to a computerless home. I can feel the withdrawal symptoms already. I have three books to read and the Rays-Yankees game is on at 7:00, so the urge to check e-mail one more time and maybe play a game on Shockwave will just have to be sublimated. When I saw the IBM "Peanut," I had no idea what the future would bring. I shoulda bought stock in the company.
thoughts of baseball. Here in the Tampa Bay area we have a team that promises, each year, to be a better team than last year and we have long-suffering fans who have forgiven the broken promises. This year, however, the Rays show genuine promise, if: (a) the pitching rotation finds itself, (b) the better players come back from the disabled list, and (c) the young players mature. Speaking of maturity, here's a prime example. (Get the video started, on the right. I tried to put up a better link but it was too long t work.) http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2423307
After weeks of indecision, I bought myself a new monitor . . . a Dell 1907fp. The motivation was a new one at work, a Dell 1905fp, that made my old one at home look dark and fuzzy. So I spent the evening installing it and playing with it, and trying to decide if I like it. My JPEG photos look really sharp, after increasing the resolution to the maximum 1280 x 1024, and that was the primary reason to buy it. But if I am doing something with a white background (using a word processor, or typing up a new blog entry), this thing has an irritating tendency to change colors with only a slight movement of the head. The white background turns a pale brown on the right side if I move to the left, and vice versa. If the entire screen is white, the left and right sides look off color without even moving my head. I'm going to have to decide if this is a problem or not. It is not an obvious issue when looking at photos, oddly enough. I got a heckuva good price on it. Why is everything in life one trade-off after another?
