Apple has either just now officially recognized or is extending it’s recognition and repair services for the White Spots disaster.

My powerbook serial number is in the range listed and exhibits the behavior detailed, I’ve just not wanted to part with it for the week or so it might take to be repaired. The time has come! I should have done it over vacation =/

UPDATE
I sent it out yesterday and am usind a Dell Inspiron 4100 from the office. I put FreeBSD on it and am getting used to gnome2 again - not terrible, X has a few tricks I’ve always missed in Aqua.

Apple has a support page I can check for status, which I’ve of course been furiously refreshing all day.

DHL picked it up yesterday (1/6) afternoon around 4PM, it was bound for Texas.
01/07/2005 | Unit Received
01/07/2005 | Begin Repair
01/07/2005 | Begin Testing

Hopefully I’ll get it back Monday. 😃

What a lot of us non believers keep to ourselves: SomethingAwful attacks religion and the state - it doesn’t even seem to get to ranty or over the top until nearly 2/3 of the way down when the funny starts.

For those of you thinking this Under God rah-rah is a right wing trick, think again. Furious googling has failed to turn up anything but of a lot of partisan ranting but I’ve heard it convincingly argued on C-Span (haha) using statistics on a four-year basis comparing Bush and Clinton and Bush I and Reagan and so on that mentioning the big G, having a prayer at the end of a speach, or some other similar theist hoo-hah, while slightly on the rise since the 70’s has not statistically differed from president to president, party to party.

fine print: The point at which I care isn’t when God is mentioned, appeal to the masses all you want, just keep your Creationism out of the public schools, keep the ten commandments out of court houses, allow prayer in school but don’t mandate it or the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on.

The owners of Urinal.net have been served a few times for, uhm, well, posting pictures of urinals.

I’ve been in One of the bathroom’s here (yes, that is the DC one) but can’t place the specific urinal.

My suggestion to the urinal.net guys: Try to find a domain name around the new site name Fountain.

Just put down Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and am enjoying mulling over it.

The Amazon reviews were my first thought after google failed to turn up any free information:

Flat, boring, pointless, plain stupid. Guy gets too pretentious with all that bunch of alleged existencial symbolism, whatever it is supposed to mean. His writing style is quite poor, he uses tons of cliches, and presumes to be telling more than he does. Too kitshy to be true.

I would give it a -5 star if I could. Just stay away from this garbage.

And on the other end of the spectrum:

Someone gave me this book alonf with Michael Cunningham’s THE HOURS, telling me that both were part of a group of talented young writers. Let me tell you, Paul Auster couldn’t be Michael Cunningham’s copy editor. There are more cliches in the first 5 pages of this book than you could find in a dime store mystery novel. The characters are flat, the story ludicrous. It tries hard to be some kind of masonic allegory but is so obvious it becomes aggravating. I read the NY Times review that praises the book for it’s series of “ricocheting” coincidences, and I kept waiting for that to happen. IN fact, nothing ricochets. Everything thuds. IF you are a lover of language, don’t bother with Auster.

Lots A wealth of material (never mind kill this sentance) here. Both end’s of the spectrum reviewers quickly attack cliche’s. One then is upset about how much is unsaid, the other hates how obvious everything is. One calls it garbage, the other says it thuds.

I’ll rate it internets style.

+5

Will read again.

RSS is the new “Push”, for those of you that were reading the tech rags in the late 90’s. Er, but it’s done right this time.

While furiously refreshing favorite sites looking for updates has been gone for a while, I’d never have thought to look for it for the few sites that I really want to be notified of updates. I’m tracking 5 packages right now from UPS and this UPS tracking -> RSS trick couldn’t come at a better time.

Dead Like Me, the only reason I have fancy cable channels, has been canceled.

:sigh:

I use and recommend purchasing as I did Acquisistion for the mac. When Acquisition gets a new song, it adds the song to an “Acquisition” playlist in iTunes, making the new stuff super easy to filter, tag, and check out.

Thanks to this week’s randomness, I’m ear-surfing to a mix of Danny Gatton live, Bonobo, Pink Floyd’s “The Committee” soundtrack, Husker Du, Hexstatic, DJ Krush, They Might Be Giants, Velvet Revolver, and Greyboy.

This is a PSA and everyone is supposed to reply with “oh you should check these guys out” type comments. Backup plan: get “The Committee”, it makes for great spoken word stuff between anything. Quoth the random snippet I was able to retrieve from Internets about the film:

THE COMMITTEE (1968)

Directed by Peter Sykes.
Produced by Max Steuer.
Pink Floyd produced the music to the film. It was originally Syd Barrett who was suppossed to make the score, but his work was not finished.The soundtrack has not been released.

The film is short and probably a bit strange. The cast: Jimmy Gardner, Paul Jones, Tom Kempinski, Robert Langdon Lloyd and Pauline Munro.

The clips sound like eery late 60’s SF sound effects backgrounding dialog that is absolutely the bee-knee’s.

Paul-when-listening-to-random-tune-on-his-PC: Ah, this must be from Grant. You can tell it’s a Grant song when there are random bits with people talking and shit over the music.

Oh, and since starting this post I’ve switched to just Simon Green, er, Bonobo. Dig.

I like this guy’s photography. Puts my shit to shame. I did get a “hey don’t forget your camera tomorrow” call from work for the holiday party but wow, good stuff on Croslin’s site.

Discovered by clicking on someone’s username on mf reading the comments on one of the previous posts links.

For those of you not following: John Perry Barlow groggily packed some mary jane in an ibuprofen bottle leaving this years Burning Man festival and was busted at LAX for drug possession by the TSA. Because marijuana is highly explosive or something. Via mefi, an excellent write up of the proceedings.

The surprise witness in question was a former aviation screener who worked for a foreign military during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia….He proceeded to testify that in his extensive military experience with improvised explosive devices and with aviation security screening, he had learned and taught other people how to deal with suspected explosive devices safely.

First follow-up question: If you think a bottle contains an improvised explosive device, is it appropriate to shake it?

No, that’s almost the worst thing you can do.

Second: Is it appropriate to open the bottle?

No, that’s the worst thing you can do.

I know one person that has been called and served at trial for jury duty. Mom.

The case was as follows: Car full of kids pulls out of a the seedy alley in Frederick city and doesn’t have lights on as it does so. It is dark out. The police pulled the car over for driving at night without illumination and for some reason saw the headlights being out as a good reason to search the car. Beer was found in the trunk. The passengers and driver were under 21. Curses!

In court the kids were found not guilty because the jury decided the police didn’t have probable cause to perform the search. It made the city paper, Mom was quoted something-or-other (she was on the “this is bullshit” side of the jury) in the city paper which isn’t archived on the web or I’d linkify, and justice was served.

This whole Barlow thing is the same, only the guy caught used to write lyrics for a band called the Greatful Dead, hang out on The Well, write for a magazine called Wired, and was a cofounder of the EFF, and happens to have a few lawyer friends. Oh, and he was caught by the TSA, not some random police officer.

My apartment used to be operated by two leasing agents and an onsite resident manager. All three were a pleasure the few times we needed their help.

In the past month for various reasons, all three have been replaced. We currently have one leasing manager and she has one assistant. Although the leasing manager lives in the building, she is not a resident manager, which kinda sucks.

Our apartment has two lofts. A spiral staircase leads to one, which we use as a bedroom. The other loft is used for storage - it’s about 100 square feet and accessible with an aluminum ladder.

The previous resident used that space for an office - they had a computer desk and chair set up. We I have too much shit to accommodate that but it makes for a great place to keep bikes, boxes, etc…

The ladder was in our apartment when we moved in. It was in the apartment when we toured when the previous resident was in the unit. We have been in the unit for a few months now and use the ladder frequently, initially stashing and retrieving bikes, lately retrieving tools, computer parts, etc that I need.

Two weeks ago we came home to a note on our counter.

We borrowed your ladder

- Maintenance

OK, we thought.

A day or few went by.

Amanda stopped by the building office (hard to do, they seem to never be open anymore) and talked to the new leasing manager. Apparently the ladder was the buildings’ ladder, not ours, and we could borrow it if we wanted to. Amanda was perplexed.

Yesterday I stopped in to verify this insanity after talking with a few other residents who all said things along the lines of “what, are they going to borrow your dishwasher next?” and met the new leasing manager myself.

Rough Transcript:

introductions, very friendly

“So I just wanted to stop by and ask about our ladder.”

“Your ladder?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in our unit before but but we have a loft that we use for storage, and we’ve had an aluminum ladder going up to it since we moved in. There was a note from maintenance that they’d ‘borrowed it’, I guess from $name-of-the-only-maintenance worker? We never got it back.”

“OK”. She then got on her cell phone, apparently to the maintenance man. “Yes, I have a person here that was under the impression that the ladder that was in their unit was part of their apartment… OK…. right… OK I’ll explain that to him… right… oh he has a package?” She then starts digging through a huge pile of boxes that I’d walked past and not noticed on the way in. “OK… right, thanks.”

“That ladder wasn’t part of the unit, maintenance just had it there while they were checking on the air conditioning, he says”.

“It was there when we moved in. I don’t understand”,

“You can borrow it if you want. He will bring it over this afternoon”.

“Borrow it? We’ve had it for months”