i understand why i have many hits from google, yahoo, MSN and so forth, but i wonder why catawba county schools, in newton north carolina, has taken an interest in my site? my stats show 353 hits from one server and 278 hits from another server, both of which resolve to catawba county schools.
bizarre…
Multilingual Text-To-Speech Synthesis (1997) – in new condition, $120
An Introduction to Text-To-Speech Synthesis – in new condition, $55
An Introduction to Text-To-Speech Synthesis – in good conditon, with a small worn spot on the spine, $50
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.
i bought a swastika at the FSM yesterday, and despite my feelings about nazis’ stealing the swastika away from what it truly means, i find it kind of amusing that i can now make jokes about how i am an “incense nazi”… but, at the same time, i also appreciate that if i am able to make jokes about being an incense nazi, the important part is that it’s not about other people, and it’s obviously a joke, whereas most commentary surrounding nazis and swastikas definitely is not considered to be very funny.
also i made $99 at the FSM yesterday, which is one sixth of the repairs that i had to make on ganesha the car over the weekend. only five more days like that to go…
Paul Newman
with all the people dying all over the world, and the world going to hell pretty quickly anyway, i give you paul newman – a man who played the underdog in many of his movies, was an unapologetic advocate of our getting out of vietnam, an activist, a philanthropist, a race car driver and a popcorn impressario, who died of cancer today amid no fanfares, and surrounded only by his family…
that is the way i would like to go, although the way things have been going recently, i think that the probability of that happening is getting less and less likely…
i just took a look at my awesome web statistics page for the first time in about a month (due to the battle of the computer). i discovered a bunch of new links, including three that i find rather amusing. there were links to my conversion utility from a brazilian net review called Os Cuecas (which google tells me means “The Underpants”, hee hee), and then from two brazilian blogs who picked up on the fact that The Death Clock apparently asks for weight and height in “gringo” terminology, but it’s not a problem with a measurement conversion utility from Hybrid Elephant.
also, i’m linked in germany’s wikipedia article about Motty and from a guy in switzerland who uses me as a reference in his page on the differences between african and asian elephants.
things are starting to get back to normal after the battle of the computer. although i really hate having to re-create things like my calendar, which has already screwed me up and forced me to contact a person to say that i wouldn’t actually be performing at his event because i had already made arrangements to be a performer at another (paying) event. i also really hate that i have to re-create about 100 hours of database entry, which was just beginning to take shape when the computer died last month.
on the other hand, once i get the chaos sorted out, i will actually have a fair amount more room in my “workshop” that isn’t being taken up by computer/keyboard stuff, and now that my computer and keyboard stuff aren’t in the same room, i can do more stuff that involves my band saw and drill press – the former of which is visible in the lower right hand corner of the photo, having not been moved to its final location due to the aforementioned chaos – because of the dust which i didn’t want to infect my computers and keyboards… which means that, potentially, i may get my pipe-making back on track again, and i’ll certainly have more room for musical instrument repair as well.
of course that doesn’t mean that the idea of putting my workshop in a dome is dead. i have already planned the dome and done some work on pricing out the constituent components, and some figuring out of where i can get some more esoteric building materials such as star plates. i want to build a 16-foot diameter 2V Icosa Alternate dome, because it has more space at the level of a workbench than a standard icosahedron. i believe that star plates would still work, except for where the equilateral triangles come together. i still have to work out how to connect 6 points, which means i still have to figure out whether to use lumber or metal for the edges. if i use metal, i can just flatten the end of the tubes and bolt them together, which is an effect i saw used at burning man, but if i use (cheaper) lumber i may have to figure out where to get – or figure out how to create – star plates that have six slots, rather than five. i talked with the people at stromberg’s chickens, and they said that they were marketing a device that was left to them by the original engineer when he died, and they don’t want to mess with the design out of respect to him, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what they should look like, the hard part is getting them manufactured.
all in all, burning man was a toss up, and i’ve pretty much decided that, given the lack of a good reason to go (like the last performance of Cirque de Flambé EVER), i will probably not go again, for the simple reason that if i’m going to go camping for a week i want to go to a place where i can relax, not to a place where it’s oppressively hot and dry and you have to worry about how much water you’re consuming because there isn’t any, anywhere else for 100 miles in any direction. the following is bits and pieces from a recording that i made every night before going to sleep.
more pictures are there. i would write about burning man, but it’s 2:00 in the morning and i’m tired. possibly tomorrow.
i’m in the process of moving the computer part of my office into the other room, which will (presumably) give me more room in both my office, which will now be a lot more like a workshop, and my office, which will now be where i don’t have to drop what i’m doing and go into the other room and say “what was that?” when moe asks me something. now it’s sort of a mishmash of what it used to be (a big pile of boxes), with the large cat tree and a bunch of computer stuff that has yet to find a permanent place, and the office/workshop is a chaotic mess of displaced shelves and workbenches that are in the process of being moved…
but i did find my GPS unit in a pile of stuff from burning man that i still have yet to deal with, and it had the coordinates for my camp, at 3:00 and esplanade, in it. i figured a while ago that the GPS was approximately 50 yards different from the actual placement on the position of the planet, but that still doesn’t explain why where it recorded i was, was so far removed from the actual placement of burning man, unless, as i have suspected for a while now, burning man moves from one year to the next, presumably to avoid scarring the desert more than it does already.
once again, the battle of the computer has ended. i’m not exactly sure whether i or the computer was victorious, but the important part is that it’s over, and, for the most part, i’m reloading backups from 4 months ago and tweaking things. i have, as yet, been more or less incapable of retrieving any data from the dead hard disk, which is a shame but not entirely unexpected. i plan on trying another hard disk from my Os9 mac that’s about a year on the other side of being removed because it was dead – i don’t expect to get any data from it, either – before i return the exterior hard disk mounting which i borrowed from St. Fred. i realised that the monitor problems that i was having the other day had a solution that was simple enough that, once i calmed down and actually did it, i ended up with a monitor that does resolutions i had never even dreamed of – i’m currently running at 1600×1200! also, in the process of buying a new hard disk for my client, i bought a 200GB drive for myself, so now i have a humongous rockin’ computer – i dumped my entire music collection into it, and it’s still hungry for more! and not only that, but when i showed up at my client’s place, he had the computer unplugged, so i plugged it in and it booted up with no problems whatsoever (i fixed it with magic), so i was able to take the hard disk that i bought for him back for a refund, and because of the fact that i had bought it earlier that day, i was even spared the 10% restocking fee.
and i’ve finally got another thing i’ve always wanted*, which is one computer in every major platform – i have an Os9 mac with a motorolla processor, an OsX mac laptop with a dual-core intel processor, a W2K laptop with a single-core intel processor, and a kubuntu box with an AMD processor! how i ever came to be this much of a computer geek is way beyond my understanding…
now i’ve got to take a shower and continue reloading backups. later on i’ve got a snake suspenderz rehearsal, and tomorrow we’re playing at the queen anne farmers’ market. and i’ve still got two cameras fuill of images from burning man that have yet to be processed… busy busy busy…
okay, i went over to St. Fred‘s house the other day and came home with two anonymous desktop computers that used to be dedicated servers at a video game farm somewhere locally. they’re both intel processors around 800-900 MHz, and they both have about 128MB of RAM, and my computer whose hard disk fried has an AMD K6 1.5 GHz processor and 500MB of RAM, so i swapped the hard disks out (both of the “new” ones have maxtor 6.1GB drives), and combined that with the GEforce 5200 video card (with 256MB of vRAM!) that St. Fred gave me (!), and, once again, i have a rockin’ computer… except…
i just got dapper installed (the rest of them are on the hard disk that died), when there was this “beep” noise and my new/used 21″ monitor that i just bought a couple of months ago(!) turned off and won’t come back on. it just displays this colour bar with a message saying the monitor is working, but that there’s no signal, and recommends that i “activate by computer”. 8P i tried several different cables, and three different options for signal (the new GEforce, my old 64MB AGP/PCI video card and the onboard video that comes with the motherboard), but there’s “no signal” according to the monitor, which, to my way of thinking, means that something’s wrong with the monitor itself.
and in the middle of all that i got a call from one of my clients who, from what he was able to tell me (and he’s not particularly computer-literate), has got a dead hard disk himself, and wants me to come by and fix it for him. 8/
wonderful… another thing to deal with on top of everything else… 8/
well, i am now running on my very own macbook pro, with a 2GHz intel dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a 150GB hard disk. this sounds really cool (and it is, very pretty indeed, and works just like they said it would) but i’m having difficulty getting X11 to run, which means that i can’t get OOo or The GIMP or bluefish to run (although i can get fink to run without any difficulty, it fails when it tries to install gtk+2), i can’t get it to understand .ogg files (which it should do without too much difficulty), and there’s no Os9 emulator so it’s a lost cause getting quark express or photoshop to run. when i tried to install feisty on it, it told me that IO-APIC wasn’t working correctly and it wouldn’t get beyond that… 8/
on the other hand, St. Fred says he has at least four servers buried in his garage that aren’t doing anything, and he offered a couple of them to me to “build what you want outta them”, so i’m thinking that i’ll do that. that way i’ll have a working kubuntu box and a new mac… the best of both worlds…
i still am not up and running with anything like the computer system that i want, however one of my computers, which i thought was completely dead, magickally came back to life, and wouldn’t you know it, it was the windoesn’t computer… which doesn’t have anything on it except 5 gigs or so of data (i used it as a depository, since it was the only computer that talked to both my Os9 mac and my kubuntu box without agonizing details that i never bothered to work out), cooledit and reason, and the browser which i am now using to manage the flow of emails i am getting for three different accounts. i will be really glad when i can use a POP mail client to do that, rather than having to keep everything all in one inbox.
meanwhile i am playing with yet another group of musicians, Snake Suspenderz, which includes my old friend howlin’ hobbit, and my new friends thaddeus and sketch. here is a sample of what we have been doing.
now i have to go mow the lawn dandelions in the front yard, and then i have to go to the clinic to help moe for a while, and then i have a BSSB rehearsal. hopefully i will have a real computer some time within the next few days and then i won’t have to rely on this out-of-date micro$haft monstrosity.
i’m back from burning man, and completely exhausted. burning man was just enough of a disaster that it made the really cool parts pale to the point where it was a complete toss-up. i have decided that, given the lack of any good reason to go there again (such as the last performance ever of cirque de flambé or something like that), there is practically no possibility that i’m ever going to go to burning man ever again. it was insanely hot – 120°F in the shade, where there was shade – when it wasn’t intensely windy with white-out conditions, and, let’s face it, it’s a desert, and an alkali desert (meaning “intensely caustic”) on top of everything, not to mention the fact that i was involved with helping the broke-down and stranded truck (which i was, fortunately, not driving myself) get towed into the site, nor the three other break-downs that our camp experienced, which is just the tip of the iceberg. i, and everything i took with me, are covered in this very fine dust, which i understand will practically never come out, i still don’t have my own computer (although i got two incense orders while i was gone, which is one more than i expected) and even though i am almost completely unloaded (i still have to unload the roof rack), everything in the car is also completely permeated with this extremely fine, ubiquitious, beige dust, which does not go well with the grey interior of the car.
i took a lot of pictures, but they probably won’t actually get posted until i have my own computer again… 8/