It's funny because it's true. And couldn't have happened to a better corporation...

Hitting stores from Florida to Arkansas, Texas to Iowa, four Portland, Tenn., residents lived for more than a decade off the proceeds from a theft operation of a ''staggering magnitude,'' police say ... The four suspects and their immediate associates are accused of scamming Wal-Mart out of $1.5 million over 10 years. That doesn't include what they allegedly stole from two other unidentified retail chains.

 

Think Secret has 2 stories on possible expectations for MacWorld next week. The first story has some highlights some new applications:

• iDVD 5 - Burn DV tapes directly to DVD and support for dual layer DVDs.
• iMovie HD - support for HDV, panoramic 16:9 aspect ratios, and MPEG-4
• GarageBand - Version 2 and support for the Asteroid hardware.
• Keynote 2 - Support for two unknown products codenamed Slingshot and Crossbow

The second story has a very exciting expectation.

With iPod-savvy Windows users clearly in its sights, Apple is expected to announce a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Mac Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499...The new Mac, code-named Q88, will be part of the iMac family and is expected to sport a PowerPC G4 processor at a speed around 1.25GHz. The new Mac is said to be incredibly small and will be housed in a flat enclosure with a height similar to the 1.73 inches of Apple's Xserve.

If it's true, I will buy it. Oh, this is exciting!

Update: More details from AppleInsider. This thing would make a awsome home automation server/Home command center with media server.

Update 2: Think Secret has more on iWork, to be released at MWSF next month:

Apple will launch its new iWork '05 productivity suite at Macworld Expo, Think Secret has learned. The software, code-named Sugar (as alluded to in our previous Expo report), will include Keynote 2 as well as a new application, Pages... What is almost certain, however, is that iWork will come bundled with most, if not all, of Apple's new systems, including the new $500 headless iMac. Such a move will enable Apple to market the affordable system as being ready-to-go out of the box with all the software most users need.

Update 3: More details on the iWork trademark.

According to filings at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the "iWork" name is currently registered by Apple, with the previous registrant being IGG Software--hinting that Apple acquired (paid for) the rights to the mark. The change was made in August 2004

Update 4: Being sued by Apple isn't stopping Think Secret, who has more details on the iPod Flash:

Apple's long-rumored flash-based iPod will be introduced at Macworld Expo in 1GB and likely 2GB versions, Think Secret has confirmed...Rapidly falling flash prices have enabled Apple to buy 1GB modules from Samsung at a relatively low cost, sources report, which in turn will allow Apple to sell the device for $149. Sources have also suggested that a 2GB version, packing two tiny 1GB flash modules, may sell for $199...Not certain at this point is what sort of touch-based interface the device will use. Some sources have suggested that device will forgo Apple's ClickWheel, featured on the iPod mini and 4G iPod, and will instead have more buttons, like the first generation iPod.

Update 5: Unsurprisingly AppleInsider has a little more to add on the iPod Flash. They also note that there will be new G4 PowerBooks with bumps in speed and better graphics. It's best that they not release G5 PowerBooks because I couldn't possibly afford the headless iMac and PowerBook at the same time.

Update 6: The big day is just one day away, but the intel keeps coming. These guys have seen some more evidence for the iPod Flash.

We found a new iPod, probably based on a 1 GB flash memory. Here in San Francisco we have seen people mounting the billboards inside Moscone Center. There were images of the new iPod and a slogan: "Life is random!". Plus the number of the song: 240. Will it be the next "iPod micro"?

They have some photos of those posters going up, and it's probably going to piss someone off in Cupertino.

Update 7: Think Secret has some more details on the expected PowerBook updates. Although no G5 processor is expected they are giving them an hefty update to 1.5 - 1.6 GHz. They also expect that they will have offical support for DVD+R media and included Bluetooth 2.0. The graphics are not spectacular but they are bumping up the vid memory to 128. Overall not too bad but I am still waiting for the G5 in 6 months (hopefully).

This site, in German, has seen the future 

 

Update 8: Even more details on the iPod micro or whatever the hell it will be called.

The micro iPod is white, and will hold 240 songs ? but has no screen so will play the unlisted tracks in a set order or in random fashion. Four buttons are arranged in a square formation ? two large buttons and two smaller ones. Apple's slogan for the iPod is "240 songs a million ways".

Also MacRumors has more info on Shuffle, which they think is the name of the next iPod (iPod shuffle, weird). It also notes that "Pages" was trademarked and could be the word processor for iWorks.

Update 9: MacOSRumors gets back into the rumors game with this juicy tidbit:

etween 15-minute email checking intervals, almost 100 of you wrote in to tell us about a television interview this evening in which the famous actress and pop musician Lindsay Lohan talked about having recently cut an advertisement for Apple's new "iPod Radio."

Think Secret suggests that there will be 10 announcements with 2 unaccounted for. Wouldn't it be cool if all the 4th gen iPods had radios built in but just need software updates to take advantage of them. They also don't talk about the cell phone thingy, if that really turns out to be true. 

The Chambers Trading Post, located along what use to be Route 66, about 50 miles from Holbrook is for sale. But it looks like they are having a hard time giving the property away.

For months, the couple have been buying ads in newspapers and promoting an unusual property transaction via the Internet: Send $100 and an essay of less than 100 words about why you want a trading post, and the best essay claims the prize. The Konheisers have received extensive publicity in newspapers in the Four Corners area.

They were hoping for 20,000 entries. They have received 12. The current owner has cancer and wants to retire, at this point he's more interested in the retirement part than the "trying to make a buck" part.

I've probably passed the place a hundred times but don't recall anything interesting about it. A little Googling will show it has some interesting history. But I wonder how much money is to be made out there? 

Photos By Greg is a 2005 calendar, published by me, with photos taken by me. The photos were taken in the corresponding months in 2004 and shown for that month in 2005. The photos were all taken around New Mexico. Admittedly there are some good pictures in there and some not as good pictures in there. Had I planned properly for this they all would have been good.

The calendar is created via Lulu, an online publishing service which allows anyone to publish things and make a profit (if so desired). I found this site when looking for alternatives to the built in book creation service thats in iPhoto. What's really cool about Lulu is there's no charge for publisihing, they only take a commsiion from your profits. If you choose no profits then they don't charge anything extra, of course there is the charge for actually creating the item and I really don't have any idea how cheap that is.

My calendar costs $12.70 and I added $1.00 of profit for each one. That's no too bad compared to a popular calendar that charges $19.99. 

This photo is part of a larger collection of family photos that I'm in the process of archiving on the computer. It appears to be Christmas around 1979 or 1980 1981. I know this because shown in the photo is the Lego Galaxy Explorer which was released in 1979. (This was one of my favorite Lego sets and it is of many others too)

Shown is the picture is my sister in the back and me in the front. Boy did I bring in the loot, look at all that stuff. I see Stompers in the picture, A slot car racing set, a storage box for Hot Wheels ( I still have some of those and I have the box) among other stuff I can't make out.

By the way, I intend to fix this picture. I know it's possible in Photoshop using masks and gradients. I just can't seem to search for the right thing in google. I guess I'm going to have to buy a photoshop book. 

Apple has filed two lawsuits recently. First one was for the leak of the Firewire break out box for use with audio equipment. I first saw this on PowerPage.org (no longer available but you can find a Google cache here) and showed up on AppleInsider and Think Secret. Apple is suing someone, they don't know yet, and they subpenoed those three sites for info on who revealed the device so thay can add them to the suit.

They are also suing 3 guys who released Tiger via Bittorrent. As far as I know this is the first time Apple has sued for the prerelease of a OS. I know you could easily get copies of Jaguar via Bittorent before it was released but Apple never did anything about it. I always assumed they didn't mind because they wanted to allow more people to check it out. I find it interesting that they were able to identify who released these, I wonder if there is a serial number or something embedded in the software.

In either case it will make less info leaked to rumor sites, that is disappointing becasue Mac Zealots like me like to hear what's coming. But practically speaking I can say that I support Apple and their hunt of the leaks. Letting it slip that Super Cool Product is going to come out just gives the Apple Hating competition a chance to bring their in development product out faster, maybe before Apple does. Mac Zealots such as my self don't like that. But the question remains, how much of this stuff does Apple leak themselves? 

I have no idea who this came from originally. But If you Google it you will find plenty of people who quote it as well.

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in theworld. However, since Santa does not visit children ofMuslim, Hindu, Jewishor Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload forChristmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to thePopulation Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 childrenper household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is atleast one good child in each.Santa has about 31 hours of Christmasto work with, thanks to the differenttime zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west(which seems logical). This works out to967.7 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santahas around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down thechimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under thetree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney,jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed aroundthe earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for thepurposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles perhousehold; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stopsor breaks.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times thespeed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle,the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and aconventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. The payload ofthe sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set(twopounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santahimself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normalamount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them... Santa wouldneed 360,000 of them.
This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (theship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per secondcreates enormous air resistance. This would heat up the reindeer in the samefashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair ofreindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. Inshort they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing thereindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26  thousandths of asecond, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating froma dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected toacceleration forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seemsludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him toa quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

 

The New York Time's Travel section has spent 36 hours in Albuquerque. Along with a few interesting pictures they profile several areas of the city.

All the years I've lived here I haven't rode on the Tram up to the Sandia's. However I have eaten at "High Finance" at the top. Not sure where the name came from but I recall it was appropriate for the price of the food. I've also been to Sadies several times, however I think El Pinto is better. The Frontier Restaurant on Central (Route 66, across from the University) is a required place to visit. But the restaurant illustrates how it's possible to have too many choices. The Flying Star Cafe is an equally excellent choice, especially since there provide free WiFi (same goes for their coffee shops, The Satellite).

There's several other places mentioned in the article but I haven't been to to them. 

MacSlash, a slashcode based Mac site, posted the following humorous but stupid item on their site today.

...Microsoft lawyers contacted digital.forest, our hosting provider, with a cute little email demanding an "immediate take-down" of MacSlash for infringing activity... It seems that several (and by several, we mean 8) months ago an anonymous commenter posted a comment which contained a purported serial number for Longhorn. The comment was rated -1 and until yesterday those of us who administer MacSlash were completely unaware of it lurking there in our archives.

Their provider declined Microsoft's request to take-down MacSlash, which I'm sure will earn points in the hearts of geeks everywhere. 

Hey, Engaget has a post about this Viosport helmet-mounted camera, which is really cool. Imagine the very awesome skiing movies I could make with that.

Basically these things are self contained cameras that you can hook up to a recording device. So I would put my DV came somewhere on my person and hook the camera to the external inputs. However this Canon Optura 200MC is kind of bulky so I'm not sure where I would put it exactly

One person commented that there are some cheaper alternatives. At $295 the Viosport isn't too badly priced but it's always good to have alternatives. 

Thanks to QuirkyBurky for pointing out the the City Of Albuquerque's website is 10 years old today.

On this day, the City of Albuquerque was one of the first governments in the state of New Mexico to "give birth" to a website. In fact, based upon our research, Albuquerque's website appears to be the 3rd oldest municipal website in the country, just behind the City of Palo Alto, CA (Feb 1994) and the City of San Carlos, CA (May 1994).

The city has a very useful website. I've used it on multiple occasions to look up city services and almost always found what I was looking for. 

You know, it's just bizarre to me that they accepted me for the iTunes affiliate program but not the .mac program. Yet I am a .mac user. Who better to promote their program that the users?

From: dotmacaffiliate@mac.com

Subject: .Mac (Apple Computer, Inc.) Your LinkShare Affiliate Application Status

Date: December 16, 2004 2:33:24 PM MST

To: Greg Smith

Dear Greg Smith:

We regret to inform you that .Mac (Apple Computer, Inc.) has chosen not to accept
you into their affiliate program at this time. The reason for this
decision may be as follows:

* inability to access Web site
* Web site not yet live
* traffic levels too low
* inappropriate material on site

Please feel free to re-apply with .Mac (Apple Computer, Inc.) whenever you feel you
have been able to address the concern(s) listed above.

The LinkShare Network also consists of hundreds of other Affiliate
Programs. We encourage you to look for other programs that may be of
interest to you. Simply log in to your account by clicking here
(http://www.linkshare.com) and then clicking on a program category for
additional merchant listings.

If you encounter any problems, or have any questions or concerns, please
contact LinkShare at contact@linkshare.com. Thank you for your participation in The LinkShare Network, and we look forward to a rewarding partnership with you!

Best regards,

The LinkShare Team
http://www.linkshare.com

 

Were you aware that they are making a Movie of the Dukes of Hazzard? Now you are. The movie will star Jessica Simpson (Daisy Duke's butt), Johnny Knoxville (Bo or Luke), Seann William Scott (Bo or Luke), Burt Reynolds (Boss Hogg), Willie Nelson (Uncle Jesse).

Ah, I recall watching all the reruns during my summers off of school. I must have seen them all. And if your nostalgic like me you can buy the 1st and 2nd seasons from Amazon. Don't all run out at once and buy them.

Also MTV has some pictures from the movie (thanks Autoblog). 

This is darned cool. Lexar has created a USB flash drive that is no bigger than the usb connector itself.

Lexar wants the UFC to replace/supplant CompactFlash and SD and they?re talking to digital camera, PDA, and MP3 player manufacturer about putting UFC slots in their gadgets (they?re pretty realistic about the slim prospects of UFC appearing in smartphones); if you had to choose between a camera that used CompactFlash or a camera that used UFC, it?d be mighty tempting to go with UFC since you would never have to make sure you have a card reader handy to transfer photos to your computer.

I don't think they will replace CF or SD anytime soon, it would be really cool if they did. 

On Friday I left for Taos. Mapopolis said it should only take about 3 hours to get to Taos from Albuquerque. Friends tell me I could get there in 2. It actually took me a little over 4 hours. I should have got up at 5am, which would allowed me to leave at 6. Instead I got up at 6 (darn snooze button) and left a little after 7. This meant I was stuck in Albuquerque traffic and there didn't see t be a single road that lead to the freeway that didn't have a accident on it.
Between Santa Fe and Espanola there's construction building a nice new road. Unfortunately it's not done and there was only 1 lane. I finally arrived in Taos sometime after 11. The good news is lift tickets were only 20 bucks, and rentals were only 11. Cheap! I skied for about 3 1/2 hours. To be honest I was getting sore so it's probably a good thing I didn't get there when they opened. Plus my right boot wasn't fitting right, it was pretty uncomfortable and was cutting off circulation to my right foot at times. The track file (read at the bottom on how it was made) shows I reached about 38mph at points. Not bad. You can also see they have some very long runs. Once they get some more snow the skiing should be awesome, it wasn't bad but wasn't the best.
I left after 3:30 and began the trip home, which didn't take quite as long as it did to get there. Next time I go I will probably plan on staying there overnight. It doesn't seem worth it for the length of the trip.

On Saturday I went up to Santa Fe with some friends from work. Santa Fe will the primary location of skiing this winter since I purchased the Millennium pass. This pass is one step down from the Season Pass, yet is more than $500 cheaper. It gets you $10 off lift tickets, except in January where lift tickets are free. Guess where I will be in January? By the way, I picked up my pass which is a ID card with my picture, It's the worse possible picture they could have taken.
RIght now lift tickets are $34, so it cost me $24. They also got new rental equipment, which cost $18 to rent for the day. I was very happy with the boots, they fit perfectly and are probably the most comfortable boots I have ever worn. I think I will be doing enough skiing this year that I really need to invest in my own gear.
One of the best part about skiing at Santa Fe is stopping at the little restaurant/bar located just up slope. A nice (and expensive) lunch just hits the spot about 11. Then come back every hour or two for a break and have a delicious Hot Buttered Rum. It's not enough to get you drunk, but enough to get a buzz and warm you up.
I have to admit that I was still kind of sore from the previous day when we started and the pain continued though out the day. It wasn't enough to keep me from skiing but was enough to keep me from really hitting the bumpy parts. Thats when you really put your leg muscles to work. The pain in my thighs did start to go away as the day went on. But even today I'm still feeling it. A few more times on the slopes and it won't bother me anymore.
The right back was less comfortable since my legs were sore and I sat in the back of my friends Honda Pilot. It's a nice enough SUV, just pretty cramped in the back seats for a long trip like that.
Santa Fe had 80% of the mountain open and I could tell they needed some more snow in parts. Hopefully the weather will cooperate because, well, you know where I will be every weekend.

If you're interested in how I generated the speed tracking maps, click here. 

The latest beta of iSilo, the PalmOS website conversion program, is out. Notable in the beta release is the support for RSS. This is the killer feature I've been waiting for.

I previously wrote about AvantGo. Initially I thought I might keep a few sites on AvantGo that I couldn't find the "low res" version of the site for (converting whole sites is painful). But since most of them have RSS feeds there's not much reason too. So far it's worked flawlessly and you can bet if your a blog and on my link list I will be adding your feed to my iSilo list. 

The LA Times has an interesting article about a man named Gene Savoy, who has been exploring the Peruvian jungle looking for El Diablo. He hasn't found El Diablo (which is a mythical city full or riches) but found a lost civilization in the process.

He has probably seen more Chachapoya architecture than any man alive, discovering, by his own account, more than 40 ancient cities. The Peruvian government gave him a medal, the Order of the Gran Pajaten, for bringing attention to a region once thought archeologically barren. People magazine has called him the "real Indiana Jones." Real archeologists agree ? and some wouldn't mind if he were chased through a cave by a rolling boulder.

Speaking of Indiana Jones. Gene Savoy (79) is a little older than Harrison Ford (63) but Harrison Ford will be making another Indiana Jones movie. However I don't know if I like the idea of them changing the actor who is Indy for future movies. 

Well the Apple Buy Out Rumor comes again. This time the talk is about IBM buying them.

udacious speculation is that once publicly free of the PC division IBM will either buy, or form a close joint venture with Apple to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip.

It's interesting, yes. I did find it strange that IBM let loose of their PC business. But buying out Apple? My tin foil hat will remain off for now. 

It's good to see the Canadians taking matters into their own hands. Of course this will probably mean the U.S.'s next target will not be Iran, but Canada.

OTTAWA, CANADA (AP) -- On the first of his two-day planned visit to Canada, George W. Bush was taken into custody by Canadian authorities citing war crime charges. Under Canadian law, even a non-citizen can be charged for crimes committed outside of Canada once that individual enters the country.

 

I'm experimenting with rounded corners. Not the easiest thing to do right now, CSS3 will make it much better.

I used this example. I'm not going to test it in every browser so let me know what you think.

[Update:] I should note that I'm only testing it in Safari so if your using anything other than that let me know.

[Update 2:] OK made some more changes. Corners look good in FireFox 1.0 on my machine (not testing IE on Mac). I used PowerPoint to create the corners but had issues with the colors matching when I created the final results using both .jpg and .png files. So far .gif seems to give the best results. 

I was a fan of ZDTV then TechTV but not G4TechTV. It looks like ZDTV could be coming back in the form of MSTECHTV?

Its all about G4TV not about Techtv, G4techtv will become G4TV very soon Q1 2005. Look out for ZDTV to make a come back Q3 2005. ZDTV will make a come back as MSTECHTV due to microsoft being the support behind the whole thing... it will be a brand new channel called MSTECHTV, it will be on cable right next to MSNBC and CNBC. All this should start Q3 of 2005. 3th quarter of 2005

It's a "rumor", I know. Having Microsoft run the network or even influencing it doesn't seem much better than it dying off as G4TV. But I guess competition in this area is a good thing. Now if they brought back the Mac Show... 

This is just a weird email to get. Me thinks they are just fishing for someone to get money from. This is all the email said. 

 

 

From: gbdj@sovsem.net 

Subject: Hello 

Date: December 3, 2004 10:48:16 AM MST 

Reply-To: gbdj@sovsem.net 

Hello! I like to write letters. If you like too, write me back! We
shall tell about each other and we shall get acquainted... I search
for prince...
 

I love In-N-Out Burger as much as anyone. Ok, more than most. But I have to say that this is just over doing it. In fact it looks a little gross too. The comments are kind of funny to read though.

Dam, I wish In-N-Out would come to New Mexico. I'm getting hungry. 

This image is projecting itself on our celling from one of the lamps that sits next to the TV. No, it's not a image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. It is the image of Mr. Incredible. 

 

I've once again caught up to the rest of the internet users and established a Flickr account. What is Flickr?

Flickr is the best way to store, sort, search and share your photos online. There is a huge mass of photos in the world, and Flickr provides a way to organize yours, and for you and your friends and family to tell your stories about them.

OK so it's just a photo sharing site. But it has some cool features beyond what other sites have.

• The feature that initially attracted me to Flickr is the banner at the top of the site. That banner is generated by Flickr and updates whenever I add a new photo.
• There's a iPhoto plug-in that makes it very easy to transfer photos to Flicker
• It's free to store photos online, although they do offer a paid account with more bandwidth and capabilities. Free accounts can only upload 10 MB per month, which is about 50 800x600 sized photos. But there is no limit on storage space.
• Flicker has the ability to let one comment on individual photos. This is a very handy feature!
• I'm sure the list goes on and on.

For now I will just add my favorite pictures to Flickr and create my main albums within my blog. Apple should look at this and add some of these features to .Mac. 

A form of modern police enforcement has arrived in Albuquerque. Since 18 October 2004 there have been red light cameras placed at two intersections. The police have been surprised that more than 2200 people have been caught running red lights, more than twice what they initially expected.

Apparently the Police never actually drive on the roads, because I'm not at all surprised. I would even say that running red lights is the biggest traffic issue in Albuquerque. Probably the worst variation are those that run the left turn arrow.

I for one welcome our red light camera overloads to Albuquerque. I would hope that the next one goes at Coors & Montano Rd, which is the second most dangerous intersection in the state. 

My friends, this is what I have been waiting for. I'm looking of my office building now and can see out about 500 feet. The roads are covered and I'm hearing were going to get a good 3-5 inches. Not the many feet of snow that some parts of the country get but enough to reek havoc on this town. 4 WD will likely be engaged today.

The forcast for tomorrow is cold and sunny which means melting snow turning to ice.

[Updated:] Well it's turned out to be kind of anti-climatic. About 10am it was snowing hard. The roads were covered in it. Then came news that several roads were closed and the hill up to Rio Rancho had 7 accidents on it, it was closed as well.

About 12:30 I decided to leave work, everyone else had. The snow had pretty much stopped. The roads were clear and a good bit of the snow had melted. It's still pretty cold under 30 degrees.

Still more snow is expected. 

These are the most dangerous and safest cities in America. Nothing in New Mexico showed up in either list. But I was surprised to see Phoenix show up in the top 10 for most dangerous of cities with a population of 500,000 or more. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale showed up under the most dangerous 25 list of metropolitan areas. (I grew up around those areas,) 

Many years of computer usage produces many piles of computer manuals. Well, maybe not so much today since most manuals come in the form of online help and what-not. But in the 1980 & 1990's software came with giant manuals. Note the yellow manuals on the right, they are the Symantec C++ 4.0 for Macintosh manuals. I bought those around 1994 for about $300 and I still have the floppies. Manuals to Now Utilities, the Link Link 14.4k modem (boy that thing was cheap and fast in it's day), Microsoft QuickBasic. You name it I probably have it. I did find a cool poster for Broderbund's ShufflePuck cafe.

Now the question remains; what do I do with them now? It seems unlikely that they have any value. I guess the Mac related manuals might have some value as well as the PowerComputer manual, so I will hold on to them for a while. Getting the rest of them recycled would be the best bet. Where in Albuquerque can one get stuff like this recycled? 

Here's some great pictures taken by another .mac'er of White Sands, New Mexico. White sands is located at the northern end of the "Chihuahuan Desert", fifteen miles west of Alamogordo. It's 275 square miles of gypsum sand that forms the white dunes. 

One of the biggest uses I get from my PDA is reading web content offline. That is, I have a program that converts a website to a more small screen friendly version. The first program I know of to do this is AvantGo, I used them for several years. But as Palms advanced with higher resolutions Avantgo did not. I eventually switched to iSilo which was very similar but had different capabilities. Avantgo has come out with a newer version that addresses it's shortcoming.

The latest beta of AvantGo address the two biggest short coming of the program. First it support hi res 320x480 screens. Second it supports having the content on external media cards, like SD cards. One thing I noticed, and I'm not sure if the old version had this, is a full screen mode. If you press the little widget in the lower right had of the screen the menu bar will go away. 

 

I sync my Palm with both a PC at work and my Mac at home. So I pretty much don't use any apps that don't work on both platforms. Avantgo does, sort of, work on both platforms. Avantgo provides the conduit software for PCs but not for the Mac. To sync with a mac you need to download the open source MAL conduit. It doesn't provide a lot of configuration but it works without a hitch so far.

I was happy to see that the username I set up many years ago was still there. So set up was very easy and straight forward, just as it had been in the past. It still had several of the websites I had set up. 

 

Websites have so far displayed liked I would expected. I noticed ads placed here and there throughout the program, and I wonder if those are placed by the sites themselves or placed by AvantGo. I wonder that because in many cases I grab the very same sites through iSilo and haven't see the ads. 

 

AvantGo has the advantage of downloading the website whenever you sync, whereas iSilo downloads them on a schedule or manually in the background. iSilo also takes longer to convert a website and doesn't always do a good job at it.

The free account with Avantgo is limited to 2MB of space. I've already filled mine with 1.8MB that consist of 21 sites. You can upgrade your Avantgo space limitations to 8MB for $15 a year. iSilo has no space limitations and costs $20 with an upgrade cost with each major version. 

If you haven't been following the Ukrainian elections, here's the best summary I've read so far:

The Orange Revolution -- A coup is taking place right now in the streets of several Ukrainian cities. Following the "election" of Viktor Yanukovych, an election that everyone from the Ukrainian man-on-the-street to EU observers and the US and Canada say was marred by serious and obvious fraud, Ukrainians are turning out by the hundreds of thousands to show their support for the opposition candidate, the pro-West reformer Viktor Yushchenko. Individual cities and municipalities, not to mention heads of Ukrainian religious groups, have even announced that they will refuse to recognize Yanukovych as the Prime Minster.

The problem is, Yanukovych is supported by the Kremlin. Russia's state-run TV stations had been broadcasting propaganda on his behalf, they called the election on his behalf before the polls were closed, and their increasingly despotic President Putin even congratulated him on his "win", before backtracking slightly. And now reports are trickling out--from former American congressmen communicating via Blackberry, no less--about Russian soldiers being flown across the border into Ukraine, dressed in Ukrainian militia garb, and set among the protestors. Phones have been cut across much of the country, including at the embassies. A semi-covert Russian-backed military push against the pro-democracy protestors is feared. Will this be another peaceful Rose Revolution, as happened in Georgia one year ago today, or more like Hungary, 1956? Stay tuned to the Ukrainian bloggers and webcams; this could get messy.

 

I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to these things, but this is very strange. These black triangle lighting things have been seen before over Phoenix in 1997.

The nidsci report is interesting to read (and doesn't read like a crack-pot wrote it) and has interesting map of sightings. Even if you rule out 2/3's of those sightings as false your still left with quite a few sightings over populated areas. Of course sightings are going to be greater in heavily populated areas because that's where people live. It's just really strange that such apparently secret things are being flown with such frequency over populated areas.

The years 1990-2004 have seen an intense wave of Flying Triangle aircraft, as measured by three separate databases. The major finding in this report is that the behavior of the Flying Triangles, as related by hundreds of eyewitnesses, does not appear consistent with the covert deployment of an advanced DoD aircraft. Rather, it is consistent with (a) the routine and open deployment of an (unacknowledged) advanced DoD aircraft or (b) the routine and open deployment of an aircraft owned and operated by non-DoD personnel. The implications of the latter possibility are disturbing, especially during the post 9/11 era when the United States airspace is extremely heavily guarded and monitored. In support of option (a), there is much greater need for surveillance in the United States in the post 9/11 era and it is certainly conceivable that deployment of low altitude surveillance platforms is routine and open.

They are definatly UFOs, as in Unidentified Flying Objects but that doesn't mean they are alien. I propose they are government issue but who knows. I will be carring my video camera with me from now on just to be ready. 

I noticed a massive peak in traffic in the iBloggers Webring on 11/07/04. It somehow came from my site. 5000+ page hits from my site to the ring? There must be a mistake! 

 

"No, no, no. The song goes School's Out for summer." Whatever, in either case it's not summer or really out forever. It's out for the next month and I managed to survive.

I finished my English class today and I may have earned a A. I got a 89 on the final and I think our final presentation went well. The professor said we were the best performing out of all of her classes, which makes me wonder about the other classes.

As for my other classes I know I managed a A in Humanities (just barely), I'm not sure about the System Admin class but it's got to be close to a A.

I'm only taking 2 classes next semester so I can concentrate on Skiing.  

Do you have a Kohls in your city or state? We don't have one anywhere in New Mexico. So what's the deal with them advertising here? I'm not talking just during the national primetime broadcast but during local programming! 

Want to see some amazing home video of the fighting in Falluja? Click here .

It's a Windows Media Player .asf but works with the Mac version of WMP. 

Snow is possible today through Wednesday. But it's been cloudy and cold for 2 days now with just one instance where tiny flakes fell for about 10 minutes. That's OK the important thing is the Santa Fe ski area has 10" of snow with more falling. They are also making snow and plan to open Thanksgiving day. 

 

There is nothing more offensive to me than the Executive Branch of government referring to judges as "Activist Judges" on the basis that they don't agree with them. The president has referred to them before:

The sacred institution of marriage should not be redefined by a few activist judges.

On his way out the now former (thankfully) Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has to jump on the judge bashing bandwagon with some choice remarks (I also think I read elsewhere that he referred to them as "activist judges" as well).

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in his first speech since his resignation became public Tuesday.

Oversight? Intrusive? I would like to remind the Executive Branch the purpose of the Judicial Branch: (emphasis mine).

Article III of the United States Constitution establishes the judicial branch as one of the three separate and distinct branches of the federal government. The other two are the legislative and executive branches.

The federal courts often are called the guardians of the Constitution because their rulings protect rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Through fair and impartial judgments, the federal courts interpret and apply the law to resolve disputes. The courts do not make the laws. That is the responsibility of Congress. Nor do the courts have the power to enforce the laws. That is the role of the President and the many executive branch departments and agencies.

The Founding Fathers of the nation considered an independent federal judiciary essential to ensure fairness and equal justice for all citizens of the United States. The Constitution they drafted promotes judicial independence in two major ways. First, federal judges are appointed for life, and they can be removed from office only through impeachment and conviction by Congress of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Second, the Constitution provides that the compensation of federal judges "shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office," which means that neither the President nor Congress can reduce the salary of a federal judge. These two protections help an independent judiciary to decide cases free from popular passions and political influence.

 

One single reason alone for voting against Bush in the election was John Ashcroft. This guy is worse than Bush for his fanatical religious beliefs and applying them to the Justice Department is like giving the local dope dealer his own farm. You would hope he would grow corn but you shouldn't be surprised by the results.

How can I make this more clear to you?

Attorney General John Ashcroft was a disaster waiting to happen. An evangelical fanatic with an agenda, Ashcroft was a man with a dream, or perhaps we should call it a vision, or perhaps it would be more accurately described as an undeniable mandate from God... if there's anything worse than an attorney general with an apocalyptic messiah complex, it's an attorney general with an apocalyptic messiah complex at a time when infidels have declared a holy war on America.

Which I'm surprised and happy that he has resigned. I'm surprised because I really expected that he would be there for another 4 years. 4 years of him deciding if any US citizen is a "enemy combatant" and stripping away their rights. 4 years of hair brained Carnivore like schemes. Of course his department is chartered with protecting the rights of every American as long as your are not a minority and are straight. OK now I'm happy he's gone.

Who is going to replace him? Larry Thompson, has already left and doesn't seem likely to come back. Marc Racicot a former Montana Governor or Alberto R. Gonzales who "spent three years on Gov. Bush's staff as general counsel".

[Update:] Albert Gonzales come on down ! 

Ah yes, we don't have enough wackos with the drunk driving and all. We get these characters as well

Roy Michael Moore, a 56-year-old who grew up in Amarillo, said he came to Los Alamos about four years ago for a "very distinct reason": to get the attention of scientists working on the most complex cosmological problems of the universe and introduce them to his unifying theory.
Mike, as he calls himself, has come to be known as either the "caveman" or the "hermit," depending on to whom you talk, since he was discovered on Oct. 13 living in a well-appointed cave in a deep, wooded canyon on Los Alamos National Laboratory property.

It's not enough that he was living in the cave but he also had put in a door and sealed it in with foam insulaltion and had solar cells. It appears that he had been living there for years. If it wasn't for the massive smoke put out by his stove this time around they would have never found him.
He also had some Marijuana plants growing around his little cave, apparently to help with his research.

[Updated:] What the? This guy has his own website (of course he does). Thanks Boing Boing. 

sigh... The dam election is finally over. I had to put a sign on the door last night, because of the consistent barrage of door-to-door vote-getter-outers coming by, that said "I Already Voted". Now that it is finally over I have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Obviously the idea of Bush being in office another 4 years has some bad consequences. I always felt that the mixing of politics and religion has some bad effects, it seemed to help Bush with his win this time but I feel many of those that voted, voted for only for the god fearing reason and are missing the real issues. Is there a draft in the future? What other countries are we going to attack in the middle east? How roughly half, or a little more than half, of the voters think he is better is beyond me. This isn't the first time it's happened, we were sorry then too.

Kerrys concession is pretty classy in my opinion. He saved the country weeks maybe months of more grueling post election burn by ending it today. It doesn't seem likely that it would have helped him anyway.

Nationwide I'm pretty stunned by the 11 states that passed discriminatory anti gay marriage constitutional amendments. This disgusts me more than the Bush winning reelection.

Here in New Mexico the difference between Bush and Kerry was about 1% and there is still over 10,000 ballots to be counted. However our measly 5 electoral votes aren't going to do much for Kerry. Heather Wilson was reelected by about 10% margin, I do not support her. The charter that would merge the City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County was defeated, I voted against it. The street bond was approved with 61% in favor of. This street bond will not only fix the streets in Albuquerque but gives a lot of money to building the Paseo Del Norte extension into the Petroglyphs. Apparently the lure of fixing roads was enough to overlook the Paseo issue, which has failed to receive enough posts in years past.  

Looking at the ballot for the US Representative I find there are not many choices. During the last election Heather Wilson unseated Richard Romero. At the time I thought this to be a good thing, some new blood after 12 years would do us good. Unfortunately Heather Wilson's record is lack luster. Her performance during BreastGate was, well, unrepresentative.

With lack of a better choice I am going to write myself into the box. Yes I am having a last minute run for office. If you think the current candidates suck, feel free to vote for me: Gregory J. Smith. 

Dam you Apple, dam you all to hell!!!! Why must you separate me from my money? At this rate my credit card will never get paid off.

1-2 weeks to ship is just to long. Why must you torture me in so many ways?

[Update:] It shipped on Oct 27th from Shanghai. It now shows that it arrived in Albuquerque tonight (Oct 29th). Guess I have to wait till Monday.

Buy the Apple 40 GB iPod Photo or Apple 60 GB iPod Photo from Amazon. 

I previously mentioned the next version of Library, what I think will be the next killer app. The authors have made a formal announcement and the software will be available November 8th.

Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library's digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover.

The use of a iSight to scan barcodes makes it a handy feature. 

When I was a kid I spent the majority of my time building things with legos. I had a lot of legos, two small garbage cans full. I spent hours and hours trying to find just the right peice to complete my latest materpices. Nowadays I can merge my love of Legos with my love of computers.

What is it:

Mac Brick CAD is a CAD (Computer Aided Design) program that allows you to virtually build Lego projects. The interface is pretty basic. It reads and writes LDRAW files which is basically a open standard Lego CAD file format. That's good since you can exchange the files Windows and Linux users. I took a look at this a few years ago and found it to be pretty unstable however the latest release works pretty good.

The Program:

The latest beta (2.4b1) is developed using XCode and released on August 17th, so the author is keeping it up to date. There's a main window that shows your current project and another window that shows the list of available parts. The main window has a standard MacOS X toolbar with a few basic tools. I wish more work was done on the toolbar. There were a lot of things that took me a while to figure out. For example it took me a while to figure out that I could move the object around in the main window by un-selecting everything. Moving the individual items around can be a little difficult as well since you have to use the arrow keys to move things around. Well that's not exactly true, there is a "mouse mode" that lets you use the mouse to move items with a modifier key. However I found that I just horribly screwed things up that