I'm a bit late with my wishes, but I hope all of y'all had a good holiday :) I've been kinda busy with work, but things here are fine, as usual :) asterickpup came over for Thanksgiving with me and my mom, and I went to his folk's place for Christmas, which was really nice. I had baked a cheesecake to take over there, but due to me precariously perching it on other stuff in the fridge, it went splat when my mom opened the fridge. Oops :) So asterickpup made a yummy key lime pie instead. Didn't do anything for New Year's; just stayed at home and relaxed, which was also nice :)
I finally got some doujinshi I had ordered back in October, and the artist sent along a ton of bonus stuff, which was a nice surprise. In addition to what I had ordered, I got another book that's listed as out of print, and a new book that was published after I had placed my order. I also got a plastic fan from Comic Market 72 (apparently, Comic Market is crowded and hot, especially the ones held in the summer), a cat cellphone charm, a "thank you" card, and a card with a fish on it whose purpose is unclear to me. I think you're supposed to hang it somewhere as a good luck charm, but I'm not sure.
Mo- mon Dieu, qu'est-ce que les Français ont fait ?
La pieuvre Le poulpe (ah, c'est un calembour) me fait peur :) Version de qualité supérieure (mais juste 60 secondes) est disponible sur le site de Orangina (lien direct).
Last week, the power went out at work for about two hours, which prompted a co-worker and I to wonder about whether we needed beefier UPSes for the servers (especially since we added another one semi-recently). The units we have were getting low on battery after about 10 minutes, which is fine, but we were thinking 15 minutes would be nicer. I had no idea how much power we're actually using, so I was pondering about those power meters that plug in between the wall outlet and the device you want to measure. It turns out that some inexpensive ones are available, so I decided to pick up this one for myself—it's $20 from Amazon, and I was interested to know how much power my computers are using. I'll take it to work and check the servers too :)
the PowerMac uses a lot of power even when it's "off"
the AlphaPC is a huge power hog for its performance (the Alpha CPUs were never known for being low-power :)
the K6 uses a lot less power than I thought it would (when idle, which is most of the time)
the MacBook's AC adapter manages to have a power factor of 0 when it's not plugged in to the MacBook. Edit: no it doesn't
FWIW, the PowerMac is almost always asleep, the Centris is off, and the MacBook is usually asleep. The Alpha, K6, and Opteron are always on. The CRTs are almost always asleep/off, and the LCD is on maybe 10 hours a day or so. So, looks like I'm keeping my two most power-hungry machines on all the time... no wonder my room's hot. :)
A few months ago, I got a new Motorola V195 cellphone from T-Mobile, only to find out that T-Mobile had locked it so that Java applications couldn't access the internet. Which pretty much kills the utility of being able to run Java on the phone... all you can do is play single-user games.
I'm off to San Diego for a conference tomorrow, so I figured I should look into fixing the phone so I can use it to do Internet stuff while I'm away.
MotoModders has plenty of info on Motorola cellphones, and I found a post on their forum with instructions on how to re-enable Java network access. All you have to do is download a utility that lets you access the internal files on the phone (I used P2KTools) and delete the /a/mobile/certs/root/x509/kjava/j2me_domain_registry.sm file. I've heard that removing that file may cause some Java apps that come with the phone to stop working, but the phone didn't come with anything worthwhile (some games and a help file), and in any case, they still seem to work fine. I saved a backup in case I need it for some reason...
I also edited a "SEEM" file to un-hide the Web Session configuration menu, so I could switch the proxy server from WAP-only to HTTP. Now I can run Google Maps and Opera Mini on my phone :). However, for some reason, MGTalk with HTTP Binding won't even install.
I heard from splash that LiveJournal has permanently suspended a bunch of users/communities simply for discussing things that they have deemed unacceptable—e.g., things like incest, pedophilia, and rape. Many communities that got the axe were ones where people posted fiction related to those subjects. Even worse, others were support groups for victims of those crimes. It reminds me of the FurAffinity "cub art" debate, except FA actually thought about what it would mean to prohibit speech that some find unacceptable, whereas LJ has just caved in to the demands of what appears to be a single noisy person (or a small group, at the most).
In any case, it's really disappointing that a site whose entire purpose is for people to express their thoughts is banning people who express thoughts that some people don't like. While LJ is certainly in their rights to do what they've done, they need to learn the lesson that the point of free speech isn't "free speech for those I agree with," it's "free speech for those I disagree with."
Some details on what happened from CNET News, and there's discussion in this LJ post.
Edit: LJ apologizes and says they'll reinstate the journals that don't promote real-life criminal activities. I guess we'll see how that goes...
No, not Kimba or Astro Boy... 動絵狐狸達引 (Ugokie: Ko Ri no Tatehiki), a Japanese animation made back in 1933. Pretty neat; reminds me of the American cartoons from that time.
I'm a CLI junkie—I have a shortcut to Command Prompt in my Windows Startup folder, and use it for just about all my file and text processing needs. So, I decided to try out Windows PowerShell (né Monad), MS's redesigned CLI. The idea sounds pretty neat—instead of having commands that output text (or a stream of bytes) that you pipe into other commands, you have commands that output complete objects, which you can pipe into other commands, or call properties/methods on. However, the commands that come installed by default seem pretty limited... I don't know if that's by design or if they just haven't gotten around to writing all of them yet. For example, there's no command to specifically list the contents of a directory—instead, there's a get-childitem command, which gets the contents of a container object (and if you don't pipe its output to something else, it displays a directory-style listing to the screen). Various things can be containers: the hard drive, the registry, the encryption certificate store, the list of environment variables, etc... Seems pretty elegant. Good old DIR is even an alias for get-childitem, as is ls, so you can dir and cd to your registry. But the price of being generic seems to be that there's no way to do sorting/filtering specific to that properties of that object without piping the output to another command to do the filtering, which leads to rather verbose commandlines to do simple things.
dir /o-d in DOS or ls -lt in Unix gives the contents of the current directory sorted by descending modification date. The simplest PowerShell equivalent I've found is get-childitem | sort-object LastWriteTime -descending (or using the default set of command aliases, ls|sort lastwritetime -des)
dir /ad in DOS gives you a list of all the directories. The easiest way I've found so far to do that in PowerShell is get-childitem | where-object {$_.psiscontainer} (or ls|? {$_.psiscontainer}). Admittedly, there's no way to do that with ls without a pipe either: ls -l|grep ^d.
On the other paw, it does seem fairly easy to do more complicated stuff. For example, to search for all files with extension ".txt" in the current directory and subdirectories that contain the string "meow" and print the line number and pathname of any matches: ls -r -i *.txt | select-string meow | select-object LineNumber,Path.
Unix equivalent: find . -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -n meow | awk -F: '{print $2, $1}' Or find . -iname '*.txt' -exec grep -n meow /dev/null {} \; | awk -F: '{print $2, $1}', neither of which are terribly intuitive.
DOS equivalent: there isn't one.
Anyways, I'll mess with it some more and see if I like it :)
So last year, I had bought some ammonium dichromate to do the volcano demonstration, but I still have quite a bit of the stuff left over. So, I was looking for some other things I could use it for, and came across a historical process for making prints of negatives called the gum bichromate process. Basically, you mix in a tiny bit of dichromate with a solution of gum arabic and a pigment and paint it on a substrate and let it dry in the dark. Then put your negative on it and expose to ultraviolet light (e.g., the sun). The exposed areas will oxidize more and turn insoluble in water, while the unexposed areas stay soluble. Soak in water for a couple minutes to remove the unexposed areas, and the exposed parts will be colored with the pigment of your choice. Then, I read about making color prints by using the cyanotype process for the cyan layer, and bichromate for the magenta and yellow layers. This all sounded pretty cool, hence my previous post about my attempt to buy chemicals. Well, I did end up filing a dispute with PayPal, and I did get my stuff, although I never received any response to the emails/messages I sent the seller.
I need to experiment more with exposure times, but the results are promising. Cyanotype is pretty easy, since you can actually see it change color. Gum bichromate is a bit trickier, since there's no visible change until you soak it in water to develop the print. And using the sun as a UV source adds some unpredictability, due to clouds, time of day, and things like that. I don't have a UV lamp though, and using the sun just seems nicer :)
Currently, my only print with all 3 colors. A bit underexposed.
Fully-exposed cyanotype is too dark to mix well with the other colors. This is cyan + magenta. I didn't bother doing the yellow since it wouldn't show up. I think it looks pretty nice though.
Another cyan + magenta, this time with a really short exposure for the cyan—too short, I think. I was planning on doing the yellow over the weekend, but it was cloudy. Tuesday's supposed to be sunny though.
Another issue I've run into is that I probably need to find some different paper. These are on Arches Aquarelle hot-pressed watercolor paper, 300g/m² weight, and it shrinks and warps after soaking and drying, so the color separations don't quite register right. It was the only heavy watercolor paper the local art supply store had though; I guess I need to head into the city to find alternatives.
The negatives are inkjet-printed transparencies, magenta pigment is quinacridone PV19 (Winsor & Newton Permanent Magenta watercolor), yellow is benzimidazolone yellow PY154 (Winsor & Newton Winsor Yellow watercolor). This site has lots of good info on watercolor pigments. And for reference this is the original picture. While I know I'm not going to get my prints looking as good as that, I hope to bring out some of the variations in color. They're all pretty monochromatic so far...
So, I'm attempting to buy some potassium ferricyanide and other chems from this guy's eBay store... I paid over 2 weeks ago and haven't had any reply to either of the two messages I sent :(. His feedback is full of that stupid eBay-speak "A+++++++++++++++++++!!!! FAST SHIPPING!!! WOULD BUY AGAIN!12332!!OMG!", so I'm wondering why I'm not getting that legendary fast shipping service :( Oh well, I'll give him another week before telling Paypal to do a chargeback.
P.S. It's illegal in Texas to buy or own an Erlenmeyer flask, various other glassware, or even a transformer (what?) without getting a permit and agreeing to let the cops search your place whenever they feel like it. That's idiotic. Do they even know what a transformer is? You also have to show ID to buy pseudoephedrine too... although I asked a pharmacist friend about that, and he said they don't actively send the info to the feds, which on one hand I guess isn't quite as bad, but on the other hand, makes it pretty pointless exercise, since one can just go to every drugstore in town and pick up a box without anyone knowing that you now have 100g of pseudoephedrine.
Well that's annoying... I bought a new Canon flatbed scanner back in February, and it seems to have died :( It was working just a few days ago, but now it doesn't show up on the USB bus on either my Mac or my PC. It's powered by the USB bus and doesn't have any sort of LEDs on it, so I can't even tell if it's powered up or not. (I did try a known-good USB cable, and that didn't change anything.) The 90-day warranty has expired, so I guess I'll fiddle with it myself and/or buy another scanner. Oh well, at least it was cheap.
In other news, I talked to my mom in Thailand last night, and she said she didn't even know there was a coup until a friend from the States called her and excitedly asked if she was OK. She's out in the country and I guess news travels slowly to the boondocks :) Thankfully, everyone's OK this time around... I guess the Thai army's had enough practice with overthrowing the government that they know how to do it without shooting anybody now :) I asked her if there was anything on TV about it, and she confirmed what the international media was saying... all foreign TV stations were blocked (BBC, CNN, etc.), and the Thai stations were running a loop of some army spokesman saying that the constitution has been revoked, martial law declared, etc. Apparently the foreign TV stations are back on air now, but are being censored to remove any pro-Thaksin sentiments. This blog has some good info and commentary on the situation...
So, I was looking through the the list of #1 songs in the US, and found that I haven't even heard any of this year's chart toppers. In fact, I have to go back to 2003/2004 to find a song I've heard—"Hey Ya!", which I only know from the Charlie Brown video (it is a pretty catchy tune though :). I don't know any of the other 2003/2004 #1 songs though. Looks like the years where I've heard a significant number of the #1 songs are 1982 through 1993. And while I don't think I've heard anything from the 1940 list, I do know "Chattanooga Choo Choo" from 1941.
Current Mood: nostalgic Current Music: Pet Shop Boys - Opportunities
After comic conventions (or sometimes furry cons), I often see people posting pictures of their loot. Well, the big Japanese comic con is going on right now, which reminded me that I have some new and semi-new acquisitions to show off:
It's neat how the artists will often send bonus gifts along with the comics I order. For example, I ordered the set of 3 books in the second row of the pic, and got 7 postcards as a present (left side). And along with the book on the top right, I got a couple of stickers (the small things along the bottom row), along with a pack of Japan's famous advertising tissue (the "NOT FOR SALE" thing at the bottom). And I always get a nice letter or card along with my order. :)
I'm also impressed with the production quality of Japanese self-published comics... Most fanzines here are photocopied and stapled, or maybe laserprinted at a Kinkos and stapled, but while I do have a few photocopied doujinshi, the majority of them are digital offset printed and perfect bound. And since my discovery of economy airmail, ordering Japanese comics can actually be cheaper than ordering American ones. For example, I just got 3 books from Japan for less than it'd cost me to get 3 issues of Circles from Rabbit Valley: $14 international money order + $3.45 money order fee + $1 blank greeting card w/Texas scenery + $.80 stamp = $19.25 for the doujinshi, vs. $15 for 3 issues of Circles + $4.50 for the cheapest shipping = $19.50. Of course, Rabbit Valley is in business to make money, whereas doujinshi authors are probably selling at-cost, but from the consumer POV, doujinshi can be a pretty good deal. At least if you're interested in that sort of stuff. :)
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dahankitty's journal
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