I am Kim's complete lack of surprise

buttermilk ≠ butter + milk

2008-04-01T00:24:51Z

I learned something today. It is not acceptable to substitute buttermilk for butter and milk. Seriously. Don't.

cooler than thou

2008-03-24T19:39:33Z

poeticdream is no longer using livejournal. She started using it before I did, back in 2001. She has almost 3000 posts (I have slightly less than half that number, despite having had mine almost as long). She's writing in a paper journal now, as she often has. Why? SUP, since they have bought Livejournal have reversed previous SixApart and LJ practices and business decisions. Notably in the case of basic users (which were ad-free), SUP recently switched these accounts to sponsored overnight with no notice. Now, from the company which once promised to remain ad-free forever, you have the option of either liking ads with your journal, or paying for the privilege of your creative content remaining ad-free.

Sorry guys, but you're going to have to throw in a lot more added benefit than just "no ads" for me to want to pay to have a journal. I'm seriously giving thought to hosting my journal on private webspace. I don't know if i'm retro chic enough to revert to paper like Robin.

wanna get high?

2008-03-24T19:20:05Z

poeticdream and me talking about painting the hallway:

me: "I'm going to paint the wall and drink beer, and then... [pauses for dramatic effect, then sways back and forth a bit] i'll be high!"
abigail_m whines: "i wish i could paint the walls and get high..."
me: "someday I'm sure you will, Abby."

it reminds me of a conversation Lindsay Leclair had with her mom when she was in high school: Lindsay: "I don't think I'll ever do drugs mom, I just don't get the point." her mom: "oh, you'll do them..."

penis!

2008-03-21T14:05:57Z

last night abigail_m was drawing in her sketchbook. she said she was drawing a few different things. first she said she drew a ballerina, which looked like a mass of random scribbles and chicken scratches. then she said "penis!", which was a bit of a nonsequitur, but i came over to look and indeed, she had drawn a penis.

why is it that my 3 year old can draw penises?

"it's like they think it's a parking lot!"

2008-03-08T00:27:48Z

The scene: Just now as abigail_m and I were walking up our driveway to the street level we saw two police cars that had pulled over someone for who-knows-what. The cops had the perp out of the car and were talking to him and rummaging around in his car.

me: "hey! they blocked the driveway!"
abigail_m: "what?"
me: "look, those two police cars parked right in front of our driveway!"
Abby: "yeah! it's like they think it's a parking lot!"

Abby will be three on Monday.

"take a deep breath..."

2008-02-08T01:12:45Z

setting: earlier, at WRFR.

cast: abigail_m, poeticdream, and yours truly, riffraff.

[Abby produces a chocolate, by sleight of hand or magic, we're not sure which]

Robin, incredulously: "Abby, where'd you get chocolate from?"

Abby, triumphantly: "From my pocket!"

Robin: ...

Kim: *sputters and hyperventilates, laughing out of control*

Abby: "Take a deep breath..."

Robin: ...
Kim: ... *takes a deep breath*

tiny pasta

2008-02-08T01:07:16Z

abigail_m has declared that while egg noodles shall still be called egg noodles, tortellini shall henceforth be called "tiny pasta"

superbowl #answer-to-the-ultimate-question

2008-02-05T00:49:32Z

Best part of the superbowl, imho? The Giants' coach saying, in slo-mo: "godddd daaaamn iiit, sonnnnn oooof a biiiiiitch..."

Seeing it in HD at the Strand theatre for free was pretty cool too. The commercials this year? Lame. (the ones I saw at least)

lolkids

2008-01-30T00:34:08Z

earlier:

me: "ready for dinner?"
abigail_m: "noooo....."
me: "why not? aren't you hungry?"
abby: "i am, but... I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER dot com" *grin*
me: ...

at least abby doesn't know the word "duh" yet

2008-01-13T14:37:03Z

poeticdream: "I'm going to have some coffee. Do you want some coffee?"
abigail_m: "No, I don't like coffee!"
Robin: "Why not?"
Abby: "Because it's too caffeinated."

lastday? can it be?

2007-12-31T02:24:18Z

lastday?

tomorrow will i be a runner?

crazy... eights?

2007-12-28T03:50:06Z

Abby and I played a game of Crazy Eights and she tied me. so, I guess she's gonna be a card shark. Anyone want to play her?

whither the weather modification?

2007-12-24T19:25:05Z

if they saw this post, Scott Stevens of weatherwars and The Shift fame, and as my new friend Dave might chuckle.

Today for the first day in a long time, I see no weather modified skies here in Rockport. Perhaps this is an anomalous area and simply nobody has their fingers in this part of the pie. Perhaps even the WM folks are taking a well-deserved break from their climate control agenda (a well-deserved break from tire-track trails and cottage-cheese clouds on the part of uninformed citizens of the planet, that is).

Whatever the reason, I salute the clear skies! Note that not only are the puffy cumulus clouds natural-looking, but also that the sky visible between the clouds looks pristine, clear, and deep azure blue. None of that smoggy, gray, DOR (Deadly Orgone Radiation) look that we've become accustomed to (if that last reference throws you for a loop, go do yourself a favor and read some Reich). Mayhap I'll go out for a stroll and see if Nature reacts differently to not being smothered, as it too has grown accustomed.

Please, unknown, shadow corp-gov Weather Modification gnomes, take more holday breaks, I implore you! and a Happy Christmas Eve to you!

For poeticdream, who always asks me what real clouds look like:

the LJ drama-llama rears its ugly head again

2007-12-23T17:41:59Z

note to self: someone else's filtered friends-only posts only work right when you don't leave yourself logged in.

oops. sorry, folks.

Abby is the Decider

2007-11-26T01:28:13Z

abigail_m, smacking me on the chest lightly with a diaper (for emphasis) as we walk to change her diaper: "after *smack* this *smack* set of diapers *smack* I'm *smack* potty-trained. OK?"
me: "o rly?"
abby: "yes."

this is how it goes with her, she wears the old paradigm into the ground, then, one day out of the blue she chooses a new one and, more often than not, sticks with it.

my little shopper

2007-11-25T16:17:10Z

abigail_m: "can i borrow your credit card because i don't have a credit card"

GLTerminal updated for Leopard

2007-11-17T17:17:41Z

Almost two years ago I discovered James McCombe's GLTerminal. Some people hacked it to work with Tiger, but I (and others) discovered after upgrading to Leopard that the Classic Terminal view was oddly scrambled, so to fix it I rearranged the character bitmap, as you can see under the cut:

scrambled character map

restored character map

new and worksafe

As others noted, the original icon was a little over-the-top (jwz quote: "most inappropriate fanboyriffic application icon evar."), so I made it something more work-safe, a VT220 screen with "GL TERM" in green text.

old and "animeriffic"

To make Classic Terminal mode work (the pictured green-phosphor look) you still need to open the Preferences and re-select the "Classic Terminal" plugin, then click Save. I re-ordered the tabs with "Renderer" being the default, so at least you don't have to click on the Renderer tab like you used to; click-count - 1. If someone could reverse-engineer it so this step wasn't necessary, that would be nice. If James McCombe would update it (or even release the original source), that would be even better. Petition him via email, if you like.

Oh, and lastly it works pretty well with Spaces in full screen mode, though the window doesn't display right when looking at all your spaces (not bad for an app made in 2002, five years before Spaces was even developed).

Download GLTerminal updated for 10.5, sil vous plait.

In Which I Discuss a Hard Drive Recovery Scenario And Elect Not To Put the Disk In The Freezer

2007-11-09T19:19:06Z

Got a bad or dying hard drive? Read on. This is part tutorial, part introduction to data recovery ideas, and part case study. Also, I've linked to some PPC Mac binaries that are useful if you don't have the Developer Tools installed on your Mac and you need to recover some data, hence this whole post is somewhat Mac-skewed, though the theory is applicable no matter what kind of computer you have. Hopefully this is of some help to someone.

Not to be confused with the similar and similarly named dd_rescue and dd_rhelp (which were precursors to this program), the GNU ddrescue program is a useful command-line utility that helps restore failing hard drives. Here is a zipfile containing a Mac PPC binary and a readme, should you be having trouble getting ddrescue working on your Mac. Note that it's available for compilation on just about any unix-like OS; google ddrescue if you need more information or if you need to compile it for different architectures.

The basic idea is that because block-wise data recovery can stall for long periods of time at errors, it's prudent to read all the good data off the drive quickly first, then go back to revisit problem areas and work at them until (hopefully) all the data can be recovered; at worst in the output file there are blank areas where there were unrecoverable sections of the original disk. Because this process can take a significant amount of time it is possible to run the program, abort it (with a control-C), and resume it again later to finish recovery, if necessary (though make sure you specify the same logfile so it is able to pick up where it left off).

Save the above .zip archive to the desktop and extract it. It should produce a ddrescue folder, inside which will be the unix (Mac PPC executable, runs under Rosetta emulation on Intel macs) and a text file explaining usage. Launch Terminal and cd to the ddrescue folder (type "cd " then drag the folder icon onto the Terminal window). Copy the executable to your /usr/bin directory with the following (it should prompt you for your password):
sudo cp ddrescue /usr/bin/ddrescue

Figure out which drive you need to run ddrescue on by running Disk Utility, then getting info on the partition you wish to rescue. The Disk Identifier is the string you need (hooking up a failing laptop hd in a firewire enclosure, knowing I want the second partition of the disk yields the identifier "disk1s2"; yours may well be different).

Run ddrescue with the correct disk specified (all the disks live under the /dev/ hierarchy), your desired output file, and a logfile name for later resuming in case you need to stop and start over (the process can take a LONG time). In my case, the command line was:
ddrescue /dev/disk1s2 ACER.dmg logfile
which runs ddrescue on the correct block device, outputs the reconstructed disk image to ACER.dmg and logs progress in logfile (both files go in the current directory).

In my case, the partition to be rescued was about 54GB in size with (at max) about 140 errors—represented by 9000KB (just shy of 10MB) of bad blocks. The better areas of the drive read after some time (about 18 hours), and then the remainder of the time was focused on the bad areas (only about 3MB, with ddrescue scrubbing repeatedly over them to extract data thus reducing the number of errors and the size of the error regions—it shows the stats in real time on the command line, which is moderately more interesting than paint drying, though heartening if you have a vested interest in the data you are recovering). I stopped it a few times with control-C after rescuing most of the drive and reran it with --max-retries=2 (less obsessive but faster). In the end I was left with a little under 3MB unrecovered, which was gudenuff (I could have stuck it in a ziplog bag and chucked it in the freezer for a few, and then tried again if I was really crazy about that last 3MB).

Also, the zipfile ddrs2r.zip contains some perl scripts that summarize the log file and also let you use other utilities to figure out what files are hosed on your recovered disk image. See here for more info on these scripts. A GUI would be nice, but so far it seems no one has stepped up to the plate and made one.

A final note: when using the recovered disk image, it would be prudent to lock it (make it read-only) first before looking around it and playing, lest you change it (which, if you wish to keep running ddrescue to get the last few blocks, might really F things up). In my case it looks like all the data that my client cares about is recovered! Yay for happy clients!

cell is found

2007-11-08T13:23:56Z

Thank you, poeticdream! now if only we could find your cell... methinks we should get your Treo functioning again.

cell is MIA

2007-11-06T13:28:24Z

FYI, my cell phone is currently missing as well as poeticdream's. I don't know how we both managed to lose our phones in the same week, but there you have it. email is the best way to get in touch with me right now, that and IM.

iCal doesn't let you make events repeat _on all but the_ nth weekday of a month

2007-11-04T20:48:10Z

the following is an iCal bug report/feature request I just sent to Apple:

I am managing a radio station automation setup using iCal, iTunes, GarageBand, and Automator/AppleScript (the station is WRFR-LP FM in Rockland, ME). The workflow is going well with one exception: we have a show that plays on the last friday of every month, and the other fridays a different show plays. The problem here is we can't set up show #2 (which plays every other friday) as a recurring event in iCal. I can't set it up as separate monthly recurring events on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fridays either because some months have 4 fridays and some have 5.

What would be useful is the option to "Repeat monthly (every n months), on every friday EXCEPT the [first, second, third, fourth, last]". The "Except" could be added as a radio button next to "On the" (the two would naturally be exclusive of each other). Perhaps "On all but the" is better wording than "Except".

If this were included in iCal, my situation above could be remedied by adding two events: one for the first show, repeating "monthly every 1 month, on the last friday"; and another for show #2, repeating "monthly every 1 month, ON ALL BUT THE last friday".

i have:

i want:

is this a logical annoyance to anyone but me?

living with my family is like living with Theodore Geisel

2007-11-02T00:48:14Z

me: "I have pizza, yes I do. I like pizza, how about you?"
abigail_m: "I do!"
me: "that rhymes!"
poeticdream: "woohoo!"
me: "that does too!"

An Open Letter to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church

2007-11-01T18:00:13Z

Mr. Phelps,

Following your specious logic and reasoning, when the Lord takes your life the followers of your congregation will picket at your funeral. They will do this because He must have wiped you from the face of this planet because, logically of course, America is in love with gay people. Necessarily then, your death will be a consequence of His hatred for all things gay. If your followers do not protest at your interment, they will be the basest of hypocrites.

Oh, wait, that doesn't make a bit of sense, does it? I am overjoyed that you have been sued by a grieving party whom you so heinously wronged (as has been your modus operandi for years now, you and your minions having picketed some three hundred military funerals). Good riddance, Mr. Phelps, good riddance.

Signed, with Universal Love and Allowance, despite your hatred and prejudice,
Kim Slawson

take that, mac!

2007-10-12T18:49:51Z

control-option-command-eject shuts down a mac (at least one with an eject key on its keyboard).

this is very useful and heretofore unknown to me! it's not listed in the official apple mac os x keyboard shortcuts page. it's especially useful when shutting down 25 macs in short order.

An Open Letter to Celebration Life Church

2007-10-01T17:18:35Z

Moved by recent local events I have drafted an open letter to Celebration Life Church and to Pastors Bryan and Leah Carle.

MSAD #28 Curriculum Committee
September 28, 2007 – 3:00 p.m. -- Bus Barn

Present: Cara Moody (Chair), Jim Patterson, John Lewis, Tracy Dorr, Matt Brown, Clairlynn Rountree, Maria Libby, Jan Staples, Mike Weatherwax

Also attending: Bryan and Leah Carle, Mara Crans, Lilly Goodale, Gail Ribeck, Bonnie Rutgen-Miller

Yoga Proposal

Matt Brown presented a proposal on behalf of the CRMS Physical Education Department and the Wellness Team to provide Yoga instruction in grade six PE classes. Matt summarized the proposal noting that the Yoga instruction could be tied to existing curriculum in regard to stress relief and lessening anxiety by way of relaxation. He indicated that outside instructors from YoKids would provide the instruction under his supervision.

In response to a question from the committee, Matt indicated that if there were any parents who did not want their son or daughter to participate in the Yoga instruction, then alternative PE activities would be provided.

Bryan and Leah Carle expressed concerns about the "spirituality" component of Yoga, which they felt impacted upon their religious beliefs. They also expressed concerns about the alternate activity as singling out kids who would not be participating.

There was significant discussion regarding whether Yoga could be taught in a secular nature with focus on stretching and relaxation.

Reading the above compelled me to write this:

Bryan, Leah,

You have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and, most importantly but not explicitly mentioned, freedom to think as you wish. Your move to limit MSAD 28 students' access to yoga instruction is not in the spirit of these freedoms, rather, it is a chilling reminder of the repression and dogmatic thinking that flourishes when the above freedoms are not respected. It is curious that not only would you attempt to compel others to share your viewpoint, but that you would do so by attempting to limit their access to information and to the teachings of a well-respected discipline. Is this acting in the spirit of good will and in the pursuit of truth? I think not.

Yoga is a highly valued tradition and practice for many people, and in your haste to condemn it and in your wish to limit local children's access to it you may well be overlooking its potential and its benefits. Yoga is not counter to God's teachings, on the contrary, it serves a very useful purpose, namely: "On the physical level, yoga postures, called asanas, are designed to tone, strengthen, and align the body. These postures are performed to make the spine supple and healthy and to promote blood flow to all the organs, glands, and tissues, keeping all the bodily systems healthy. On the mental level, yoga uses breathing techniques (pranayama) and meditation (dyana) to quiet, clarify, and discipline the mind. However, experts are quick to point out that yoga is not a religion, but a way of living with health and peace of mind as its aims." (Yoga definition, from Answers.com - http://www.answers.com/yoga&r=67 )

Should such practice hasten enlightenment, I am sure that you would not object, rather I would expect you to embrace the process fully! In this day of spiritual decline and soul-searching by many, I would hope that you would accept that which brings people closer to the Divine. As for meditation, is not sitting in peaceful contemplation, opening your consciousness to a higher power, and allowing yourself to channel the will of said power akin to prayer? I urge you to put aside whatever notions you may have regarding the practice of yoga and to re-examine it with your hearts and minds open to the truth. If you do not wish to accept yoga's value, at the very least do not limit others to the same set of conclusions without allowing them access to information and practices with which they could come to their own conclusions. Your argument that students that do not wish to participate are "singled out" is without merit, as, if that were the case, any time one expressed a difference of opinion, religion, political stance, and so on they would be "singled out". People do, however, express their opinions, practice their religions, and think as they wish every day without consequence and without being trodden upon, save, perhaps by those who see any viewpoint other than their own as troublesome, dangerous, and pernicious. I implore you, please demonstrate that you do not belong to that group of people.

Yours,
Kim Slawson