2006 January - she's the one

archive for January of 2006

Washington Post Sunday crossword, December 4 (contains answers)

Posted January 9, 2006 • Comments Off

Title: In His Own Write
Theme entries: John Lennon lyrics.

22A, Lennon, on life’s requirements: love is all you need
42A, Lennon, on his alter ego: I am the walrus
65A, Lennon, on unity: the world will live as one
87A, Lennon, on teamwork: come together
107A, Lennon, on resolving conflicts: give peace a chance
15D, Lennon, on a bright future: we all shine on
61D, Lennon, on son Sean: beautiful boy

Things I learned, with web links so you can learn them too:

26A, Michael of “Caddyshack”: O’KEEFE
30A, Scrooge player: SIM
40A, Like Satchel Paige: AGELESS
52A, Mississippi source: ITASCA
62A, Iowa college: COE
71A, Designer Gucci: ALDO
92A, Sondheim musical: FOLLIES
12D, Cakes go-with: ALE
13D, Swamp slitherers: MUD EELS
29D, Scottish actress Mary: URE [she comes up all the time too]
39D, Mother of Eos: THEA
75D, Actress Anouk: AIMEE [ha, Anouk is her first name!]
77D, Bern flower: AARE [oh, flow-er, not flower. so there is a pun in here.]

Overall:
I messed up no squares in this one, a fine return to form, though I just realized just now that the intersection of 77D and 81A is blank. I know asher so I only really missed aare. Oops. This was another kinda-boring theme, coming as it did right after the Woody Allen one. I want my puns back! In the interest of getting it out of the way, I’ll note here that December 11 was ALSO not a pun theme, but December 18 was an excellent one. Anyway. 7 theme entries. A whopping 13 things I had to look up. Blah. Just: blah.

Moving on

Posted January 8, 2006 • Comments Off

Well, I did it. I found the right place and found the right tools and I did it.

My Lego is for sale. All of it.

http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=kostia

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I feel I should point out that most of the large boxes in the above photo are not each one big set—they are full of Ziploc bags containing smaller sets. So are the storage boxes (including the two you can’t really see because they’re behind others).

Bricklink.com has what appears to be an active market (hundreds of people on the site all evening) and easily checked market prices. If I were to sell all 141 Lego sets I listed tonight, I’d make $2,079.19. I know I didn’t pay quite that much.

(Yes, a hundred and forty-one. The listing and checking and uploading took six hours—with a great piece of software from Bricklink to help.)

A lot of the little sets are worth more than I thought, and a lot of the big sets are worth a little less. Most of the ones I really like are worth much more than I paid for them. Most of the ones I bought at MacFrugal’s years and years ago because I thought they’d be worth much more than what they were going for finally are. Skull Island, for instance, is worth about $42 unopened. A Belville set I paid $3.50 for is listed at $47. And so on.

I felt a slight twinge at some of the sets, like the wonderfully intricate Victory Cup Racers, which I might still take off the store list, but mostly I don’t feel bad at all to be selling my collection. I expected it to be a lot harder to part with. We’ll see how it goes when I start actually shipping things out.

I’m keeping a lot of Duplo. I always liked Duplo, and it’s nice for Max to have something to play with besides my kitchen tools.

New photo pages

Posted January 7, 2006 • Comments Off

My photo pages (always linked at the top of this page and available at http://www.kostia.net/photo) have been undergoing repeated facelifts of late. You may have noticed a bunch of missing files, and you may have noticed an ad for a casino. Those were speed bumps.

The software I use to organize my photos (including things like rotating, fixing red-eye, and so on) is iPhoto. But iPhoto has never had the publishing features I need. There’s a plugin to upload to Flickr, but I can’t use Flickr, as I have thousands of photos and would be way over the free bandwidth limit, and I don’t want to pay beyond the hosting space kostia.net already has. Besides, the plugin (FlickrExport) puts my comments and keywords into the Flickr photo titles, and that made me uncomfortable because I use people’s full names as search terms.

iPhoto has built-in web exporting, especially if you have a .Mac account, which I do, and there are plugins for iPhoto like BetterHTMLExport that purport to put your albums up on the web more easily, but both those solutions seem geared toward people who want to put up one album at a time (Jenny’s Fifth Birthday and such). Neither creates nested file structures where people can drill down from one library collection into the multiple albums inside.

So for years (since before I even got a Mac, actually) I’ve been using JAlbum, which does what I want (and actually defined what I want). But somewhere in the last year or so I hit some wall where JAlbum’s very handy built-in FTP client would no longer reliably upload all my stuff without crapping out halfway through.

I’d use my excellent FTP client, Transmit, but the same thing would happen. I’d have to quit and restart a few times to get the connection back after uploading a couple hundred photos. And since what I really love about JAlbum is the virtually unlimited number of choices for what my photo albums can look like, I found myself running resizing and reuploading operations a lot. Transmit couldn’t keep up. If my computer didn’t travel with me, I would host the site from home. Uploading has been that much of a pain.

Until today, when I finally read the help file and learned about the new features it has, like synchronization and linked folders and DockSend. Now it works like a charm, and now I see why Transmit wins all these awards.

I run JAlbum to create my photo and thumbnail pages. I can then either simply drag the whole “/photo” directory onto Transmit’s icon and let it go, or I can run Transmit and click “Synchronize” and it will churn away without breaking the connection until everything is uploaded (like it’s doing now). It’s wonderful.

Long story long, my photos are at http://www.kostia.net/photo and are in a whole new format. It’s called “Chameleon” and the color scheme is “Coffee” and it has built-in keyboard commands and slideshows (no more paging/clicking through photos! just hit space and sit back and watch!). It’s really very cool, and I like it.

Portrait of the Artist as an Insufferable Weaselface

Posted January 7, 2006 • Comments Off

Obviously I am not a teacher but when I saw this on Postsecret I said YES.

Blogger 994 593 1600 Portait

I’m not a fan, is all.

Meme from Arwen

Posted January 6, 2006 • Comments Off

Yes, that’s what I said.

A – Accent: Parts of Ohio (crayon has one syllable) and parts of New Jersey (I no longer say “roof” like “book” but rather like “boot”).
B – Breakfast Item: I rarely eat breakfast but am trying to get into the habit and will probably be having cereal sometimes. Sometimes I have frozen taquitos or other non-breakfast food I can eat in the car in the six minutes it takes to get to the bus.
C – Chore you hate: Taking out the garbage. God, I wish I had some sort of incinerator chute or something. I hate having a trashcan fill up so I have to replace the bag. I hate carrying the bags outside to the dumpster. I hate the garbage.
D – Dad’s Name: Ronald.
E – Essential everyday item: Treo 650.
F – Flavour ice cream: Butter pecan.
G – Gold or Silver?: Silver.
H – Hometown: Berkeley Heights, NJ.
I – Insomnia: Often.
J – Job Title: Unemployed, for all intents and purposes.
K – Kids: Someday.
L – Living arrangements: Alone, in a big townhouse designed for at least two people, which I can’t really afford.
M – Mom’s birthplace: Ohio.
N – Number of significant others you’ve ever had: Eleven or twelve. Significance is in the eye of the beholder.
O – Overnight hospital stays: Besides when I was born, four days last October when I had pyleonephritis.
P – Phobia: Heights. More specifically, precipices. I do NOT like precipices.
Q – Queer?: Nope.
R – Religious Affiliation: Anti.
S – Siblings: Jeff.
T – Time you wake up: Last possible moment. Today, 2pm.
U – Unnatural hair colours you’ve worn: Several shades of red. My highlights at present are grown out to the tune of two inches.
V – Vegetable you refuse to eat: Is coconut a vegetable? I hate that shit.
W – Worst habit: Biting my nails and cuticles until my hands look like I tried to claw myself out of someplace.
X – X-rays you’ve had: In the last three or four years, both knees, chest. Before that, right foot a few times (broke foot in college, broke toe in junior high), right hand (bent finger when I was a kid). Probably others.
Y – Yummy: Cheese.
Z – Zodiac sign: Libra, on the cusp of Virgo.

An addition to the previous post about Retrievr

Posted January 5, 2006 • Comments Off

I just think this is a cool example, though the cat is still my favorite.

I drew this. It is the HRC symbol, or as close as I could get it. I see this all the time at Omni, and it was one of the simplest logos I could think of.

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One of the photos I got was this one. It’s not a great visual match, but isn’t it an interesting coincidence?

An amazing thing: search by drawing

Posted January 5, 2006 • Comments Off

Retrievr is a tool to search Flickr photos based on what they look like, in a very general way. You have to draw “slabs” or “areas” of color; details like facial features or shadows aren’t going to work. What seems obvious to the human eye will not be obvious to this search, because we identify things we see based on what they are instead of what they look like and in three dimensions instead of two. But once you get it, it’s amazing.

I am blown away by how cool this is and how well it actually does work.

I drew this just now. I was imagining a centered subject on grass in front of a blue sky.

200601050506

Among the images Retrievr found for me were these. Damn close. That first one is uncanny.

Then I drew this, thinking of my well-known Needle Tower picture.
200601050512

And I got these. I love this thing.

I am also gratified to find that my photo of Needle Tower is the first Google result for “Needle Tower” that isn’t a page about the sculptor himself. Fourth overall. I’m fourth in Google for something that isn’t my name. That’s really cool.

Washington Post Sunday crossword, November 27 (contains answers AND CONTENT)

Posted January 5, 2006 • Comments Off

I’ve fallen behind, but my December 25 paper never came, so we’ll be skipping that one, so if I power through I think I can catch up.

Title: A Worrier’s Words
Theme entries: Woody Allen quotations.

27A, “My one regret in life is that … I am not someone else”
43A, “What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely … overpaid for my carpet”
52A, With 76 Across, source of this puzzle’s quotes: WOODY
64A, “Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering—and … it’s all over much too soon”
76A, See 52 Across: ALLEN
84A, “Money is better than poverty, if only … for financial reasons”
103A, “I do not believe in the after life, although I am bringing a … change of underwear”

Things I learned, with web links so you can learn them too:

79A, ___-majeste: LESE
97A, “Turn to Stone” band: ELO [yes, I’m not completely sheltered, I know what ELO stands for; I just didn’t recognize the title] [ohhhh, it’s this song]
13D, Shrinking sea: ARAL
28D, Trireme feature: TIER
76D, ___ breve: ALLA
84D, Spassky toppler: FISCHER [not really sure why I marked this one, as it seems pretty obvious]
106D, “Hud” Oscar winner: NEAL

Overall:
I messed up 7 squares in this one, though I don’t think three of them should count (Gabrielle Reece, not Reese, and Rosey, not Rosie, Grier; gimme a break). This was not my favorite type of theme; I like puns. Only 7 theme entries, counting the two with his name, but also only 7 things I had to look up, counting Spassky/Fischer, which I wouldn’t mark if I happened upon it today. Both low numbers.

I’m annoyed (again) at things like lese-majeste and alla breve. I just can’t seem to internalize these phrases and I end up having to look them up every single time. I don’t think that’s fair!

It has always helped me, as documented by the A-plus I received on my tenth-grade history final after “studying” by retyping my entire semester’s worth of notes (and I’m pretty sure it was on our electric typewriter, not a computer, by the way), to internalize information by typing it over in my own words. Got it? Good.

TO WIT:

Lese majeste is a term from the Latin for “injury” and “majesty.” It means a crime committed against a sitting sovereign. If you punch the Queen, that’s lese majeste. If you poach deer belonging to the Crown, that’s lese majeste. Since “sovereign” can also mean “state,” technically, if you cheat on your taxes or otherwise steal money from your government, that, too, is lese majeste. In some countries (like Belgium) it has been interpreted to apply to crimes against heads of state as well.

I will remember this because “lese” sounds like “less” and “less” is how much common sense I suspect the judge has who let John Hinckley out of nutcase prison to visit his parents in Williamsburg. To my way of thinking, Hinckley committed lese majeste when he shot the sitting President. Yes, he’s been in a custodial punitive situation since, but I seriously don’t get why he’s allowed to go on field trips now, after years of sensible denials of this oft-repeated request. Next year, just you watch, the Manson Family is going to Knott’s Berry Farm.

No, not really. My actual mnemonic for this will be: If you shoot the Queen there is less of her. Less majesty. Your crime is lese majeste.

Alla breve is a musical term. It’s the Italian way of saying “time signature.” I played the clarinet for roughly six years and am embarrassed not to know this. The words alla and breve mean cut time. I will remember this because a time signature is written as a fraction, like 3/4 time or 4/4 time, and slashes make cuts, and cutting something changes it from being all of something to being more brief.

Next time alla breve comes up in a puzzle, I’m quite sure I’ll have to look it up again. But lese majeste is learned. It’s MINE FOREVER.

New Jersey

Posted January 2, 2006 • Comments Off

We had some Dom Perignon at the party.

Arwen bought it at Costco.

The drive home was nightmarish, but there was one saving grace to all that time on the New Jersey Turnpike. Harold and Kumar, eat your hearts out.