Yesterday (Oct 26) was the official "release" day of Mac OS X 10.5 or "Leopard". Highly anticipated and awaited by the Apple faithful.

The "bleeding edge" folks were trading comments back and forth on several Mac mailing lists I'm on about when their copies would/did arrive. I found one particular comment amusing. One person reported that their package arrived in the late afternoon, and that the UPS driver said it took so long because the number of deliveries of this "iPod" (sic) nearly doubled her route and the routes of all drivers in San Francisco.

Makes me wonder what Harry Potter did to UPS....

Tags: Humor

Lots of folks have written about this week's fires. Like many others, I paid a lot of attention to them, but for me, a bit more maybe than most since I used to live in both Los Angeles and San Diego, and in particular, in neighborhoods in each city which were evacuated.

I found this picture to be pretty representative of the scale of the fires. Taken shamelessly from The Weather Channel website...



The Witch fire in San Diego resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood there. The Buckweed fire in Los Angeles resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood in Santa Clarita (aka Canyon Country).

I can't imagine what it must have been like in Southern California this last week. If you can see the smoke from space...

Don't faint - two postings from me in one day.

Apple yesterday started taking orders for Leopard - their newest version of MacOS X. They also announced that those who purchased systems on October 1st or later could obtain an upgrade for only $9.95.

Immediately, people who bought their new Macs right before October 1st started to whine.

I had for many years used a story that was taught to me as the "Fallacy of the Beard". Or, more simply, at what point does a beard become a beard? One hair? Two hairs? 100 hairs? The "just one more" argument. At some point, you just have to draw a line and declare the beard a beard.

I learned today that that story (or logic) is called a "sorites". I was pointed to a website http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ which describes the term in more detail.

So to all your whiners out there -- tough. Read the URL. Apple drew the line. Get over it. Just like all of you who whined about the iPhone price cut.

And something new learned. And from now on, instead of explaining the story, I can just give them a URL!

Tags: Technology

I have recently discovered that there are a lot of very stupid email administrators in this world.

In the last two days, two of my domains have been pummeled by large numbers of emails to non-existent people - the apparent result of sites trying to bounce undeliverable messages back to forged email addresses.

What these sites are doing is accepting inbound emails without question, then running them through some sort of filtering device, usually something like a Barracuda Spam Firewall. The filtering device determines the email is either undeliverable or inappropriate. Fine. The problem is the stupid device then tries to *return* the email to a forged sender. Which is some random victim domain.

This is just an entirely stupid way of doing filtering. One should filter before accepting the mail. If you don't like what you're getting, reject the original SMTP transaction with a 500 series or 5.x.x (permanent) failure code. Once you accept it, it then becomes your problem. It shouldn't become mine. All you are doing by trying to bounce it back to forged email addresses is doubling the traffic generated by the spam.

I need to go find a technology-less deserted island and go hide...I can't stand the stupidity of some of the stuff I see on the internet these days. Doesn't anyone understand how this stuff works anymore?!?!?!

Tags: Technology

My friend Fourth Breakfast made a comment recently about never knowing I played the violin. I'm positive she forgot. I think we crossed that path once before when reviewing the odd similarities in our lives....but nonetheless, here's an answer for her and others who might (or might not) have been interested.



So the story about the violin. Recently, Andrew started playing violin at school. It's offered at our local elementary school starting in 3rd grade. First thing you need in order to play the violin is, well, a violin. A friend suggested I just get one off eBay. I disagreed with that. Having played violin myself for well over 15 years, you don't just buy a violin like an iPod. You have to audition it. They don't let you do that on eBay....

I happened upon a local violin store. Gailes Violin Shop in College Park which isn't too far from us. The moment I walked in I knew this was the right store. Violin shops, in my opinion, have a certain atmosphere, including smell. It smelled like a violin shop. Some nice mixture of rosin, wood, along with sounds of instruments being played in a wonderfully silent environment. I spent a fun hour trying out the quarter-sized violins before selecting one for Andrew.

The experience made me decide to dust my old violin off and get it back into playing shape.

I have faithfully carried my violin in its case around, by hand, for 18 years. It has always moved in the back seat or trunk of the car. So it actually was in pretty good shape. I needed a bow rehair, new strings, and a little adjustment to the bridge. Otherwise, the violin was amazingly just as I left it when I closed the case 18 years ago. Opening the case and getting the instrument tuned up was quite like rediscovering an old friend.

Getting the violin to the violin store was how I discovered it fit in the boot of the Mini, by the way. It happened to be the car with gas in it that day.

Andrew and I are now practicing together, with my hopes that not only will Andrew keep up with the violin, but that I'll get enough rust out of the fingers to actually join an ensemble or some other local group. I have discovered, though, that my double-jointed pinky fingers haven't gotten any better with age...

Tags: Andrew

Saw this today on an email list at work (and this does *not* apply to me):

Three things are certain:
death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?

Tags: Technology

Today is the 2nd birthday of my Mini Cooper (okay, it's not really the birthday, but more like the adoption day - I took delivery two years ago).

Since then, I've been amazed at what I found fits well into the tiny little boot (or trunk) of my Mini. See the picture below for a reference point (I took this picture two years ago).



The little boot actually carries quite a bit of stuff. I don't hesitate going to the grocery store with the car, nor have Costco or Home Depot runs been out of the question either (within reason of course - I'm not hauling home a 37" LCD television home in the car for sure...). But in the same way my Roland D-70 keyboard used to fit perfectly in the back seat of my 1988 Mustang LX 5.0 coupe, I have found a couple of surprisingly perfect fits in the boot of the Mini.

- My full size violin in its case snuggles in perfectly between the tire jack case and the opposite wall of the Mini in the left-right direction in the lowered section of the boot.
- Refrigerator 12-packs of CocaCola fit perfectly in that lowered section in the front-back direction. You can get about 5 in (I forget exactly how many) but it's a perfect fit whatever the count.
- Eddie Bauer overnight duffel. This might seem intuitive, but the one I have really is a perfect fit once inside. Sometimes, a little, um, "encouragement" is required to get it into the boot. But once there, it's a happy camper.