More Gmail invites
Posted on December 27, 2004
Filed Under Internet & Technology | 14 Comments
Gmail’s opening up again. I have a bunch of invites. Ask and as long as I have them left, I’ll send. I’ll close comments when they’re gone.
Apple secrets
Posted on December 24, 2004
Filed Under Macintosh | 3 Comments
Apple has something new in the works. The rumor sites are getting it right, and Apple’s not happy. It’s in their right, I guess, to sue. Competition is so tight nowadays that it’s important that Apple (or any company) protect its trade secrets so their product can get out the door before some other company makes a cheaper, feature-rich but quality-poor knockoff.
From [C'Net](http://news.com.com/Apple+goes+to+court+to+smoke+out+product+leaker/2100-1047_3-5499814.html) among other sources:
>According to the enthusiast sites, Asteroid would have analog inputs for plugging in instruments or other audio sources, a FireWire connection to the Mac and the jacks needed to output sound to speakers or other media gear.
The sites predicted that it could be unveiled at next month’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
Although Apple filed its suit Dec. 13, much of the paperwork for the case has been filed under seal. The order granting the subpoena request was the first publicly available document to identify Asteroid as the product in question.
So Apple’s next great thing is an audio device. Wow. That’s a shocker. Couldn’t have seen that one coming.
Migraines
Posted on December 24, 2004
Filed Under Life | 2 Comments
I’ve been getting migraines since I was 9 years old. The pain of the headache is managable with Excedrin and caffeine. I’m lucky in that respect. I know a lot of people get migraines where the pain is unbearable. The worst for me is the aura. Hard to describe, but I call it my own electric light show. It starts in one eye with a small blank spot which turns into a growing, blinking semi-circle. the circle enlarges slowly until it moves out of my field of vision. It takes about 30-40 minutes from blank spot until the light show fades. During that time, my sense of hearing and smell are acute and it’s not pleasant. A dripping faucet in the bathroom sounds like a drum. The laundry in the closet smells like I’m sitting in the middle of a dumpster. I’m nauseous, disoriented and sensitive to light. After the aura passes, the headache hits on the opposite side of my head from where the aura was. With Excedrin Migraine (which I know is the same as regular Excedrin but a different label), the headache is more annoying than painful. If I move my eyes too fast, sneeze or bend down it hurts but otherwise it’s more of a dull ache. I’ve tried a few of the more well-known migraine medications, including Imitrex but they don’t help enough with the aura which is the worst of it. I’m told that there’s now daily medication that could keep the aura away which I should look into.
So for the past 25+ years it’s been a ticking time bomb. I know that red wine and hot dogs are trigger foods, but other than that I have no way of predicting when one will hit. Sometimes it seems to be related to my monthly cycle, but then I’ll go 3 or 4 months without one. Or then it will be like now, where I’ve had 3 within a 10 day period. No telling. Since my vision is so affected, I am completely useless when it happens. It’s the reason I got my first cell phone. Laini was an infant and I was afraid of what would happen if a migraine hit when I was alone with her. Or worse, driving.
Last night at around 6 pm, I was just starting to make dinner when the aura started. Nothing I could do but tell Eric to finish the meal and I went upstairs to put my head under the pillow. Next thing I knew, it was 2 am. My head felt fine, but after 8 hours of sleep I was wide awake. It’s now 4:15 am and I’m still up and will stay that way. Now it will take days until I can swing my body back to the right schedule. Nice to get a full 8 hours shuteye, even if it was the wrong 8 hours. And I love the silence of the house. No email coming in, no one asking for anything. Just me, my iBook and a M*A*S*H rerun on the tube. Maybe I’ll even catch up on my Gmail and blog reading.
Musicals: stage to screen
Posted on December 23, 2004
Filed Under Entertainment | 3 Comments
Roger Ebert [reviews](http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041221/REVIEWS/41201007/1023) the new movie, [*Phantom of the Opera*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293508/) and talks about the source material (the stage musical):
>But what I am essentially disliking is not the film, but the underlying material. I do not think Lloyd Webber wrote a very good musical. The story is thin beer for the time it takes to tell it, and the music is maddeningly repetitious. When the chandelier comes crashing down, it’s not a shock, it’s a historical reenactment. You do remember the tunes as you leave the theater, but you don’t walk out humming them, you wonder if you’ll be able to get them out of your mind. Every time I see Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom,” the bit about the “darkness of the music of the night” bounces between my ears, as if, like Howard Hughes, I am condemned to repeat the words until I go mad.
Wow. Exactly how I feel about it. I saw Phantom on Broadway with Eric years ago and while the main theme is haunting and hummable, towards the end I remember sitting there thinking, “Enough already! Is this whole thing variations on this one song?!?” It was okay. Just okay, and I was let down by all the hype. Not as numbing as *Cats*, but close.
I’m bummed they never made a movie musical adaptation of my all-time favorite epic musical, *Les Miserables*. I saw the show on Broadway in 1992 and when it was over, I didn’t want to leave my seat. Complex story with a score that has recurring themes but evolves them as the story moves along.
I can’t wait until [*Rent*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294870/) comes out next year. As long as the music isn’t completely butchered I will see it shortly after it opens. I’m shuddering at the memory of [*A Chorus Line*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088915)…practically cried when I saw the movie considering how good the stage musical was. I never saw Rent on Broadway but the road show came to Stamford a few years and I saw it then. Incredible. Now my most played album in iTunes.
Phantom of the Opera? Feh. I’ll catch it on cable.
BSOD (and some good news)
Posted on December 22, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Also known as “Blue Screen of Death”
I bought this PC 11.5 months ago, and until today I knew “BSOD” but I had no idea what it looked like. Now I know. I was working along, minding my own business, when suddenly the screen went black. A second later a blue screen popped up talking about some sort of error and that I should check for new hardware, yadda yadda yadda. I literally jumped with the screen blanked, thinking there was a power issue. I restart the computer, thoroughly checked the drive and all seems fine.
Now before you shout “I told you sos” at me and advise me to throw this Dell out the Window and go back to the safety of my Mac OS world (you know who you are and that you were thinking it), I have to say I know this is similar to the Mac OS X [kernel panic.](http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106227) It’s happened twice on my iBook in the past two years. Both times, I restarted and didn’t worry about it again. I couldn’t draw a link between either instance. Sometimes, these things just happen and as long as it doesn’t happen again with any predictable regularity the best thing to do is create another backup and move on.
This time, on the PC, I know exactly what I was doing at the time. I had just installed [Microsoft FrontPage 2003](http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/). Yeah, you read that right. I bought the software a few months ago, but I had been procrastinating installing it. A while back, [I mentioned](http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/design/a_new_website_to_talk_about.php) that I was in competition to get a contract to work on a website for the State of Connecticut. I didn’t want to say anything here until it was official. Well, I’m happy to report that my shiny new contract is signed and approved and I start on January 1. I will be working on two websites. One is for the [CT Council on Developmental Disabilities.](http://www.state.ct.us/ctcdd/) All State of CT websites are migrating to the ct.gov portal, and I’m joining the team just as the Council’s website is beginning that transition. This isn’t a terribly “sexy” job…it’s a lot of straight, dry information but it needs to be presented clearly. The site was done in FrontPage, and once the transition is complete I’ll be working on it in the State’s CMS (content management system). I only need FrontPage for what amounts to a few weeks worth of transition work. I’ll also be doing a new website from scratch for the Council that I’ll talk more about at another time as it gets off the ground.
So I just installed FP and ran Office update to make sure it was completely up to date. The update went fine. I launched the application and was just browsing the menus when the BSOD hit. Something related to that installation? Maybe. We’ll see what happens next time I try to launch it (which will be after I’ve closed out Outlook or any other application that I don’t want to get zapped by a sudden system failure, just to be safe). I back up all my Quickbooks/Quicken and Outlook files nightly to an external drive and to my G5 across the network (and my G5 is in turn backed up to *two* separate external drives). That alone means that I shouldn’t lose any data, right? It must be a law somewhere that says that the drives that aren’t backed up that go south first.
