Turkeys for Thanksgiving

Okay, promised to put up some pix. See some of the play pix here and the full flickr roll on the left.

O. Henry, O. Kay

The Ransom of Red Chief was well rehearsed, well executed, and well received. Of course, I'm biased. Pix when I get back to the house.

*My wife was the director and impresario and my son was one of the leads.

Give One, Get One.... while their hot....

Okay, a week or so ago, I posted about the One Laptop Per Child XO and my initial impressions. Well now you can buy one at www.laptopgiving.org. Well, really you can buy two (and you get to keep one.) Or you can just make a donation. I've donated and my company has matched that donation so that more kids can get their hands on this computer.

For another take on this, see what a co-worker has written: Alex Chiang (truly a world traveler.)

Cold War Hero Receives Posthumous Award

Okay, that title was ripped straight from the newspaper, possibly the Pravda (though now defunct.) I'm referring to this man: George Koval. Many of you who know me, know that I'm also a spy junky. I've never heard of this guy before today. I did a research paper 26 years ago on the Manhattan Project and have followed the Cold War, spying, etc since then. This came as a complete surprise. Read the link above or check him out on wikipedia.

O. Henry

Mrs. Dowdberry is directing another play based on one of O. Henry's best known works The Ransom of Red Chief. One of the junior dowdberrys, Spencer, will be one of the leads. The shows are Friday, 2007-11-15, and Saturday, 2007-11-16, at 7pm at Calvary United Reformed Church. (This is not as per se a "church"-y play though.)

OLPC XO

I got my hands on an OLPC XO last night. It's a curious, interesting, portable, fun tool. And if no one else borrows it tonight, I'll flash it and see if I can get the mesh working.

You can get your hands on an OLPC XO too and do a good deed at the same time. See: http://www.xogiving.org/


As Ron Popeil says, in general, "It makes a great gift!"

------------

The One Laptop Per Child program tried to create a $100 laptop. It has created a very cutting edge $200 laptop and intends to put them in the hands of children all over the world. You can help by buying a couple (and keeping one of them.)

typologorrhea

I find myself at times just typing fanciful, farcical, non-sensical, valueless comments (in chats and email.... ) I've come to call this behavior typologorrhea. However, there is a blogger already using typorhea as his nickname and that's probably a more accurate term. I was surprised to find no Google hits for typologorrhea so I've just recorded it in my blog for posterity.

Alternate spelling would be tyoplogorhea (with one r.)

Muggledom

This muggle has been re-reading all six of the Harry Potter books over the last few weeks in preparation for tonight's release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. These books really stand the test of time.

Jim Dale's rendition of the books is absolutely magical. We've got the hardback and the CD set arriving tomorrow.

I'll let you know how it plays out on Monday the 23rd (though a couple of folks who received shipping mistakes have already given it high marks.) JK has a lot to live up to, but I think she's up to the task.

If I weren't a Muggle, I'd just accio Deathly Hallows and be done with it--but I won't download the pirated copy from the Internet.

Camp Geek

Spencer is at Rose Hulman's Operation Catapult for the next few weeks. He told us he is doing the POLYMER SYNTHESIS project. You can email him. He'll be back home in July.

This Dad thinks it sounds like a cool project.

SCIENCE RULES!!!!

Stuart made the local news today after visting the world famous Little Shop of Physics put on by Colorado State University this year.

Spencer visited CSU earlier this month for their Engineering Exploration Day held by the School of Engineering. This was his first college visit but most assuredly won't be his last. He's dragging in about 20 pieces of mail per week as a result of his PSAT test.

Geek Update

Geeks Who Drink is a recurring bar event at the Trail Head Tavern in Fort Collins. A co-worker of mine recently invited me to sit in on his team....

and we won, so he invited me back last night. Alas, the victorious "I Broke My FEMA" team could not compete successfully in as many categories this week and took a modest but acceptable fourth.

My kind teammates pointed out that I was not officially old, as at least one of their parents was born before I was..... I'm only mostly old.

*note, though called "Geeks Who Drink", I stick to diet soda for health reasons... and it's also free, so that's abonus.

Arctic Update

More snow and more cold....

Brrr....

Expected highs tomorrow (Groundhog Day!) are... 4F.

Mo' Snow

Yesterday was the third consecutive Thursday that snow fell in Northern Colorado. This 4" was of course nothing like the first snow, but the overall cumulative impact is starting to overwhelm much of Loveland, CO. Wednesday was to be the first day of school in town, but it was cancelled as the school district couldn't clear the parking lots and sidewalks in time. Late Wednesday, they had the high school parking lots opened and school resumed at Loveland high schools yesterday. However, they had no hope of opening the elementary and middle schools as there were no public sidewalks cleared (due to the mounds of street snow piled onto them) thus no safe place for children to walk.

Last night's new snowfall merely compounds the problem. OTOH, the moisture is much needed and terrific. Also, we haven't experienced the outages that Eastern Colorado and the plains states have.

I'll throw up some pictures later....

Ripping Vinyl

I've spent the days since Christmas "ripping vinyl" for my wife.

She wanted very little material for Christmas, but there were a few "honey-dos" on the list:

• Help clean the house
• Move her LPs to CD/digital media

Ripping vinyl is the name commonly given to converting an LP into a digital format. Consequently, I've been listening to classics, classic rock, and a few soundtracks. Oh yeah, several comedy albums as well....

If you are interested in ripping vinyl, I can recommend:

• ARTcessories USB Phono/Line capture
• Audacity
• K3B
• FLAC -- Free Lossless Audio Codec
• Ogg Vorbis -- a compressed format similar to MP3
  

ARTcessories Phone/LINE Preamp with USB is an audio capture device. When you plug it into your USB port, it registers as an audio capture device (similar to your existing audio card or microphone.) Sound recording programs (even the simple default ones) should now be able to see and use this card. The device can record LINE level devices (typical stereo components) or Phono level inputs (as it includes a preamp to bring them up to line level.) This has been a completely transparent, rock-solid, no-brainer solution. The ION Turntable USB was sold out over the holiday season. This is a very, very good alternative. (Props to K.A. for suggesting it.) This tool likely works with whatever hardware/software you have and certainly works with Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP.

Audacity is a free, open source sound wave manipulator. It allows you to capture the LP and then break it up into individual tracks. I used (at least so far) no automation to break the tracks up. (You can try and detect "silence" and use that to auto detect the track breaks.) Rather, I used Google Music, Wikipedia, and the album jacket and album itself to learn the track lengths. That information is sufficient to do a straight-forward job of disassembling the LP side into individual tracks. NOTE: This tool is available for Windows, Mac or Linux. I use the Linux version, but my wife uses the Windows version. Caution: The native Audacity file format (.aup) isn't really useful and is a space hog. This is done in order to make audacity very responsive to edits. You will always want to "Save as..." and export to a more usable format once the editing/post-processing is completed. I didn't try and do any pop and hiss cleanup on these files. A lot of folks use Audacity specifically for this purpose. Only one or two of the files would have benefited from this but I didn't have the luxury of time to use this tool/technique.

K3B is a CD/DVD authoring tool capable of creating audio or data CDs and DVDs. I'm familiar and comfortable with the interface (though it really has no especially unique features.) It's a Linux tool.

It takes "play" time to rip the vinyl properly, so each LP is taking "LP time", about 45 minutes to capture and then about 30-45 minutes to post process into tracks, convert to wave files, flac files, and ogg vorbis.

FLAC -- the free lossless audio codec -- is a format akin to WAV but has the advantage of using less space. By saving the FLAC files along with the original LPs, I'll be able to recreate either the CD or the Ogg files at a later date in a fraction of the time.

Ogg Vorbis is a free, unencumbered format that competes (and beats) MP3 format for space and quality. I use it to store all my CDs and LPs for computer playback (and even use a Samsung "mp3" player as it directly supports ogg. Samsung apparently no longer supports ogg vorbis--having sold out to the DRM Nazis. See Defective by Design for a DRM discussion.)

Toad Sucking Non-Sycophants

In the same vein as the previous post, I also ran across this on a year-end weird list:

The Dog Who Loved to Suck on Toads

He's apparently in re-lab now. (Okay, Lady is not a lab but I couldn't resist the lowest possible form of humor.)

100 things you didn't know...

I stumbled across this on slashdot yesterday and was so engrossed I thought I'd share it:

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year


and here's a few of these goodies:

7. The Cowardly Lion Suit is made of real lion.

40. The medical name for the part of the brain associated with teenage sulking is "superior temporal sulcus".

68. The egg came first (I've always used this argument....)

86. Six million people use TV subtitles, despite having no hearing impairment. (And, since I've some lossage, I'm not really in this group, though I suspect a lot of these folks are in hearing impaired denial.)

and ...

100. In the 1960s, the CIA used to watch Mission Impossible to get ideas about spying..... (along with everyone else....)

and along these lines, I got a short little trivia book for Christmas: That's A Fact Jack! It's not the best trivia book ever but does have a few memorable items:

1. Edison invented the tattoo gun.
2. "The Whole Nine Yards", refers to unloading 27 feet of machine gun bullets on a target...
3. Mr. Potato was the first TV commercial.\
4. Little holes in leather shoes are not for ventilation, rather they are drains.... invented for wingtips used in boggy, soggy parts of the world.
   

Windows Vista -- DOA, rather, killing on arrival

This post by security expert Peter Gutmann is frightening in its assessment of the impact and underlying philosophy of Microsoft Vista.

Consider a medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there's any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection,
potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical
industry has worked so hard to avoid.

The type and degree of lock-in described in the article is utterly frightening, harkening back to the Ma Bell days.

The Grinch

Another quick post:

Yes, we're the grinch family--we have once again procrastinated to the extent that we've stolen a bit of Christmas from our friends and families and ourselves. We all did our local family shopping yesterday, since along with the blizzard, the boys have been sick in bed all week. They actually were fairly well recovered yesterday so we joined the masses and the clueless for our first day of shopping this holiday season....

Those of you out there in Webland will realize that we haven't sent you anything... yet.... but hope to do so prior to the start of school on January 8th.

(So, this is less of a blog now and more of an open family letter of lame excuses.) :(

Ho Ho Ho and lots of Snow

Well, unless you're a troll in a dungeon somewhere, you know it snowed here in Loveland this week--mostly sideways snow. This recent storm really reminded me of Wyoming. Fortunately though, we had nowhere we had to be....

There are thousands of pix on the web of the Blizzard of 2006, but here's my small contribution anyway....

vmplayer

I struggled and struggled to get a "blank" vmplayer appliance built.

All of the on-line tools say how simple it is, just:
qemu-img create -f raw -O vmdk outfile.vmdk 2G
and create a default/typical vmx (or use vmbuilder).

Unfortunately, doing all that with an install ISO just flat out wasn't working. The blank vmware screen would appear after a while (the Black Screen of Boredom) and it never got beyond that.

After rebuilding vmdks, vmxs, moving symlinks to physical files, nothing would work.....

Finally, I thought about hitting the delete key and changing the boot option order... yep, that did the trick. I had to move CDROM to be the first boot option. (Odd because I thought it would be by default based on all of the other entry information I had come across.....)