schrödinger's dog

Concertina Weekend

A few weekends ago I went to the annual Northeast Concertina Workshop, sponsored by The Button Box in western Massachusetts.

It was a full day of workshops run by top-notch Anglo/English/Duet concertina teachers from the US, Canada, and Ireland, followed by an excellent evening concert in Amherst.

Here's a group photo. Lots of grey hair and facial hair. Bonus points if you can spot yours truly.

Jim on 04.30.09 @ 04:45 PM ET [link]

Lyttle Lytton

Huzzah! My entry was chosen as one of the honorable-mentions in the Lyttle Lytton Contest. You can find my entry among the 2009 Winners, just search for the word "French" on that page.

The Lyttle Lytton Contest is a lower-profile, subtler (and some would say better) version of the famous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Jim on 04.29.09 @ 03:01 PM ET [link]

Civic Duty

I finished up a week-long stint as a juror in the Middlesex County Superior Court. I had so many prurient people wanting the know the details that I wrote up Jim's Jury Journey.

Jim on 04.22.09 @ 04:56 PM ET [link]

Heap

Here's Imogen Heap doing a live version of "Just for Now". The amazing thing is that the entire song is composed of sound loops that she makes up on the spot and replays at just the right time.

Another favorite: "Hide and Seek".

Jim on 04.08.09 @ 10:40 PM ET [link]

Flashmob in Antwerp

Something to make you smile. An ordinary day in a train station in Antwerp Belgium. YouTube Video.

Jim on 04.05.09 @ 01:03 PM ET [link]

Yikes!

¡ɹǝʇndɯoɔ ʎɯ ɥʇıʍ ƃuoɹʍ sı ƃuıɥʇǝɯos ¡ou ɥo

Jim on 04.05.09 @ 11:47 AM ET [link]

Not FAT

My off-site backup system consists of a USB hard drive that I keep in my desk drawer at work. Every month or two I bring it home, backup the important contents of all the computers in the house, then bring it back to work and stick it back in my drawer. On a more frequent basis the upstairs computers are backed up to the basement server. Simple and fairly effective protection against fire, flood, theft, or zombie attack.

But my preferred backup mechanism rsync -av doesn't play nicely with FAT32 formatted USB drives. FAT32 doesn't support permissions, or symlinks, or files over 4GB, all of which are present on some of my machines. You can work around these limitations, but it's ugly.

It recently occurred to me that the USB drive didn't have to be formatted as FAT. FAT is simply the Lingua Franca for USB storage - all major operating systems can read and write to it without much trouble. So instead, I reformatted the entire drive as EXT2. Why didn't I think of this before?

Now rsync makes flawless backups of my Linux and Mac hard drives, and I can save my multi-gigabyte VM images without restoring to 'split' and 'cat'. Whew!

Jim on 04.04.09 @ 11:07 AM ET [link]

Blue light indicates joke

"Blue light indicates joke". This is a phrase I heard on some British TV series with Tom Conti maybe 25 years ago, and is still rattling around my brain. I even toss it into conversation now and again when someone doesn't realize that something I've said was in jest. (And for bonus points, saying this phrase while pointing to one's head is a nice little additional piece of stagecraft).

But since Googling this phrase turned up nil, I thought there should be at least one mention of it on the Interwebs. And here we are.

Jim on 04.03.09 @ 09:12 PM ET [link]

iSkype

As anybody with an iPhone knows by now, a free Skype client is available for the iPhone via the Apple app store.

I played with it briefly and sent and received voice and text calls. Seems to work fine, despite reports of it being buggy. The one thing that makes it inconvenient is that you can't receive incoming Skype calls unless your Skype application is in the foreground. If you switch to another application or even to the main icon screen you are considered offline.

A lot of this has to do with the way Apple designed the OS for the iPhone, and rumor has it that this will be improved in the upcoming 3.0 release of the iPhone OS.

We use Skype a lot for both IM and voice calls at work (we have several remote developers, including one in Perth, Australia) and many of our meetings include participants on Skype. I could imagine being in a situation where this iPhone Skype app would come in useful, but it's not very likely. As with 90% of the applications on my phone I've downloaded them and never really used them.
Jim on 04.01.09 @ 10:41 PM ET [link]