My new favourite song title: "In the Battle of Sun vs. Curtains, Sun Loses and We Sleep Until Noon"

Happy iCal Day.

"I am stranded in your city for a variety of hard-luck reasons, and need gas/busfare to get home" is a common scam, and for good reason. If you tell a good story and ask for a small, plausible amount of money, people are likely to believe you.

However, for this scam to work it is important to pay attention to the details.

Yes, it is indeed frustrating when the person you stop to ask for money tries to direct you to a place where you can receive aid and services instead of giving you cash. However, in rejecting these referrals, remember that you are claiming to be from out of town. You should probably not display an encyclopedic knowledge of Baltimore social service agencies.

Also, if you're going to use HIV as the centerpiece of your hard-luck story? Try not to stop someone who works in an HIV clinic. She will have unfortunate questions for you.

(NB: I do give money to people on the street from time to time. But not if I feel like they're trying to scam me.)

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/ele/1272617367.html



130-Watt Bi - M-Audio Amplified Studio Reference Monitors for real - pick up in BROOLYN only.

Never used, still in original box. Retailed for $600. My engineer uses them and They are the best monitors money can buy. If you're interested, drop me a line, and hopefully we can set something up.

One sub is opened but never used, the other is still factory sealed. The surround speakers (Kilpsch RS-3) were never opened either. The satellites (Quintent 1) were used gently less than 10 times. PICK UP ONLY in BENSONHURST.

These speakers sound phenominal, but I upgraded to professional studio monitors recently, and have no used to these anyone.

And if you're interested, I also have a Pioneer D509S 5.1 Dolby Digitial/DTS receiver, as well as a Kenwood DD/DTS receiver (sans remote) That I"m looking to get rid of. Everything is in perfect order, and you can find manuals to each and every item you're interested in purchasing by going to the manufacturers website in case of any trouble-shooting.

And if by some chance you're having a hard time finding specs or pictures of said items, try using Google's image searcher.

Comments for Thursday, July 16, 2009
Guest: Edmund Andrews
Author, Busted

Comments for Thursday, July 16, 2009
Guest: Robert Glennon
Author, Unquenchable

I swear I will write a real post sometime soon. In the meantime here's this:


Astronomers Declare February No Longer a Month
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emboldened by their success in declaring Pluto not a planet, the International Astronomical Union determined this week by a close vote that February is too short to be considered a true month. It has, however, been granted the newly created status of "dwarf month." It shares this dubious distinction with several other calendar time spans, including Labor Day Weekend, Christmas Vacation, and the Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You Actually Did.

"It only seems fair," said IAU President Ron Ekers. "February reaches a peak size of 29 days, averaging only 28 days for 75 percent of the time. Recent research has shown that other periods, such as the Time Between When You Were Supposed to Get Your Oil Changed and When You Actually Did, often exceed this meager time frame. In fact, this erratic behavior only strengthens our case that February does not belong in the same classification as the eleven 'true' months."

Ekers also warned that the crop of 30-day "so-called" months should be careful to maintain their number of days. "They're already cutting it pretty close in my book."

Written by Michael Haber.

Five resources to keep kids learning over summer vacation

I thought this might be of interest to people watching this community- all ideas are specific to Washtenaw County. Some of these are "duh!" obvious like Art Fair and the Hands-On Museum, but I think it's a decent guide for people who are new to the area and might contain some ideas that even people who have lived here a while might not have considered.

Last night I was forced into rebooting for an update of Safari and iTunes. Supposedly, a web browser update required the entire OS to restart (yeah, right). Since the reboot failed (I didn't have the time to waste sticking around to supervise a Mac rebooting, I was on my way out), it basically resulted in a denial-of-service attack on the entire wireless shared internet portal here - the mac is the nameserver.

So I'm reading the news this morning and as it turns out, Apple fucked the entire Mac family RIGHT UP THE ASS for no purpose other than to rape anyone who happened to buy a Palm Pilot instead of one of those crappy phones they offer - phones that would remain pieces of shit no matter how well Apple made them simply because they only work with the extremely crappy AT&T network.

So the reboot was really necessary as a way to disable hardware, and it was labeled as coming from the Safari part of the update instead of the iTunes part of the update to conceal the fact that this was going on. Assholes.

I miss the Apple of the late 1980s and very early 1990s that gave us awesome tools to use our Macs any way we wanted, tools like ResEdit.

Subjecting every customer to a corporate sponsored denial of service attack just for the sake of engaging in anticompetitive business practices is a fucking outrage.

Didn't Mac users used to whine and bitch that Microsoft's OS was only popular because they did this sort of crap? Next time I hear a Mac user say something like that as a means of suggesting a Mac is somehow better, I'm going to throw a fucking pie in their face, same as was done to Bill Gates back in the day.

From http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090716/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_apple_palm_pre
SAN FRANCISCO -

Apple Inc. has shut down one of the most compelling features on Palm Inc.'s rival Pre smart phone, crippling the Pre's ability to act like an iPod.

Users of the recently released Pre had been able to put music on it by using Apple's free iTunes software — a unique twist for a device not made by Apple. But Apple updated iTunes on Wednesday to block this feature.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the update "disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre."

Palm spokeswoman Leslie Letts said Apple's move is a "direct blow to their users, who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience." For a workaround, she noted, Pre owners can stick to the older version of iTunes, move music from computers to a Pre with a USB cable or consider third-party music applications.

The iTunes software smackdown is the latest example of tensions brewing between Apple and Palm, which since June has been led by the former executive behind the iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Rubinstein became Palm's executive chairman in October 2007.

The $200 Pre includes a "multi-touch" screen like Apple's iPhone, letting users do things like pinch photos to zoom in and out. Apple was granted a patent in January related to certain multi-touch functions, though the effects on Palm are unclear.

Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton said Apple's move to squash the Pre's iTunes function could turn off some people looking to buy the Pre, since they might have considered the device as a way to consolidate their music player and cell phone.

Still, "it's not like 10 out of every 10 people who buy a Pre are going to use the device for their MP3 player," he said.

Right. I hope someone DDoS's Apple's entire fucking domain for the next month or so. It'll keep those of us with Mac's from being attacked like this again, second, maybe it'll teach 'em a lesson. After all, It's not like 10 out of every 10 business transactions Apple conducts flow thru their website, right?

But the tomato plants are quite tall at this point. I think we're going to see some coming out soon, as there are little blossoms hiding under leaves all over them.


The square planters to the left of them hold my newly replanted basil and parsley seedlings, which La Mom sent down a few weeks ago. And a pepper plant in front that I bought two weeks ago.


And my whole corner deck garden. In the shadows, my crazy sage and slightly sad chives.


My rosemary is doing quite well this year. That's red basil to the left of it.


And my basil that I bought the first day of the farmers' market, along with the four tomato plants. This basil is just growing like crazy, I've already cut it back three times.

I have a web service that generates raw XML files.

I need this data in Excel.

If I curl http://fooservice -o foo.xml and try to open "foo.xml" in Excel, Excel pukes on it and refuses to open it since it's not an Excel XML file.

The only way I've found thus far to get the data into Excel is to do it manually. Load the URL into Firefox. Let Firefox do the graphical translation of the page from XML into HTML tables for viewing, then copy/paste the Firefox table into Excel. That works.

Problem is... i need a way to automate this. I can cron the curl call and have it grab raw .xml files, but I need a way to get them into HTML tables for Excel to be able to read it.

Any ideas? Help?

Update:

Got the solution:
curl http://foo.com//admin/tabular.xsl -o tabular.xsl;
curl 'http://foo.com/select/?q=SELECT+*+from+hardware&rows=5&format=xml' | xsltproc ./tabular.xsl -

Comments for Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Guest: Douglas Rushkoff
Author, "Life, Inc."

Comments for Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Guest: Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services

I got e-mail from someone about one of my old, old pictures on Flickr.

I'm working on a baby accessory line and would like to use
your photo "airplane baby" ... on my hang tag and possibly
on my website. May I have permission to do this? If you
agree, I'd like to get a release form from you. Please let
me know.

I've gotten a request like this one before, but that was from someone putting together a nonprofit educational website. If someone wants to use one of my pictures in a commercial venture, I feel that I should ask for some money. But how much is reasonable? It's just a snapshot. (Albeit a cute one!)

Hello,

My hubby and I have a hankering for two things:

GOOD Vietnamese food. Not like the stuff we are used to in Ann Arbor (well, there's one place we do like, but that's it).

ANY Burmese food at all. We had this in San Francisco, and it was the best food I had ever eaten. I hear that sometimes the best place to get Burmese food is out of peoples' kitchens. Anyone know any Burmese people who take orders out of their kitchen? Any restaurants? Anything?

Thanks,
Pooket

The kids are at my in-laws for the week. We seem to be spending our extra time getting errands done. We have planned a hot date Thursday night, though.

It will have been two weeks that I'm away from my kids, what with my conference last week and their trip this week. The kids were given a choice: leave Sunday and catch up with mom before they left, or leave Saturday and spend an extra day with grandma and grandpa. I didn't stand a chance. I got back from my conference late last Saturday to an empty house.

I've been sleeping in late every morning this week so far. I should be getting up at the usual time (7:30am) and use the time to go jogging, but I can't escape the gravitational pull of the bed until about 8:30. Such a sloth I am.

We're going to pick up the kids this weekend and spend the next week vacationing in Vermont and Boston. Stay tuned for further updates.

I have great towering brandywine tomato plants on my back porch.





I also have only four of these adorable little saffron buns left.



All images taken with My New Pony, which someone gave me for my birthday. I have a new pony! And it's excellent!

I'm sorry to totally spam you guys with Alex today, but she's really in full flower. I can't resist reporting this conversation with my daughter:

Alex: (singing) Jordan River is big and wide, Alleluia. Milk and honey on the other side, Alleluia. (speaking) Who put the milk and honey on the other side?
Me: (sifts through a bunch of potential allegorical answers and then picks the chickening-out one) I don't know.
Alex: Well, who do you *think* it was?
Me: I think in the song, it's supposed to be God.
Alex: I think it was pirates.
Me: Pirates?
Alex: Yeah, pirates. I think they stole the milk and honey from someone.

Study shows hormone therapy increases risk of ovarian cancer.

I was really lucky. Even with (actually, because of) all the agony of my ovary twisting and pulling on my fallopian tube, I was lucky.


It's been eight and a half years, and I'm still here.

Menopause is going to be interesting. I still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer about how to tell it's starting when you're on the pill. But it looks like I shouldn't take hormone therapy, so I will get to revel in my symptoms. I bet it'll be like the worst period I ever had, only for years instead of weeks. Or, possibly, like the period day passing out thing I've had that is the reason I won't go off the pill, since it doesn't happen when I'm on it.

It's interesting getting older. I wonder how soon I'll hit menopause. And whether having only one ovary makes a difference. I don't think so, from what I've been told, but I don't actually know.

Life is strange and wonderful.