The Indigestible

…well, if you’re a graphics person. Who likes to get his work done on a stable OS. That doesn’t harass you all the time with dialog boxes like a needy, attention-hungry child (I printed the file! I sent your memo! I installed the program! Do you like me? Can I please be even better? Huh huh huh?). And especially if you dislike viruses, Macs are better.

Anyway, each year the hospital does a gathering for its employees called the Snowflake Ball. Last year it was at the fairgrounds, and I put together a (sigh) PowerPoint slide show recap of the year. For this year, the gathering was at a casino outside of Laughlin, and instead of a PPT we were asked to do a DVD. The request came from the casino’s side of the event; they were set up for video playback but a PPT presentation would have been problematic.

Fortunately Macs have iMovie built in, as well as DVD authoring software. (I know, a lot of PCs have that too, but the Apple tools are pretty quick to pick up and have a tolerably useful set of features.)

The loop part was pretty straightforward, but the title sequence gave me pause. It was something that really needed to be seen with attention, ideally just once for maximum impact. It was decided to use that for the program opener rather than as a bit of eye candy running in the background form time to time. The piece I did follows the fold; it’s a 3.1 MB QuickTime video.

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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time — update the work Mac to OSX 10.5 to take advantage of the new features, particularly Spaces (the virtual desktop manager) and Time Machine, the automatic backup engine.

Aha, ha ha, silly me.

I use Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 to do most of my work. This includes the big three tools: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. PS is great for bitmap hacking; AI is a nonpareil vector editor, and ID is a pretty damn good page layout program. CS2 is one version down from CS3, the current release, but CS3 didn’t do much for adding features so much as it changed the way a lot of the tools functioned, making them more accessible to relative novices.

Oh, I also use Acrobat 7 to print to PDF, because when your work is sent to press, that’s generally the format desired.

Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the 10.5 upgrade, InDesign began behaving like it was running on Windows, complete with random crashing and unpredictable printing behavior — by which I mean that sometimes a document would print, and other times the exact same document would not print. OSX Leopard: Bad, bad kitty!

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Good golly. So many new things to share. The Mac Mini is performing magnificently, which is great, but sheesh, I’ve been heavily at it since it arrived (in time for my Big Four-Oh, FWIW).

Graphics and — yes — video will follow soon. But not now. It’s all Top Secret™.

I am pretty stoked right now. I just learned that my freshy-ordered Mac Mini is about to ship.

So TF what, right?

Well, I’ve been staggering along here with an iBook, a 600 MHz machine with 640 MB RAM,* for longer than I care to admit. Well, actually, I bought it new, and you can do the math and figure it out for yourself. (If you groaned at half a fucking decade, congratulations on your prizewinning entry.)

My Mini-Mac-Me? 2 GHz, dual core, 2 GB RAM, and the damn thing is about the size of a DVD case for width and depth, three times that or so in height, and here’s the shit.

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But it’s genuinely not possible. After you’ve read some of the mock ad copy and checked out the PDF of the “advertisement” flyer,¹ I think you’ll agree that it’s tragic no such device will ever exist.

Spam Got you Down?

In 2006, 17 exabytes of junk emails and commercial spambot blog comments were transferred in the United States alone. If an equivalent amount of data were put to paper, the resulting pile would be as large as Saturn.

Just reading the headers and junking the mails cost an estimated 250 million person-hours, sucking the nation’s productivity into an ever-increasing spiral of wasted time.

If you have email, chat or a blog you already know how much time you waste per day dealing with the annoyances of spam and viral scripts. You’ve installed filters and firewalls, but the flood of useless data has continued to rise like an unholy cesspool connected to Lucifer’s own privy. And it seems like there’s no way to stem the rising tide.

Now there is. Now there’s SPucker™.

SPucker™ is an innovative, simple-to-use tool that will eliminate spam at its source — the spammer himself. Simply connect SPucker™ to your Linux, Macintosh or Windows PC, then copy and paste (or drag and drop) any spam email, blog post or IRC transcript you encounter into the SPucker™ system icon.

Select the way the message was sent to you, the way you want SPucker™ to respond, and the level of dissuasion you want to transmit. SPucker™ will do the rest, delivering a 50 Kv, 0.01 mA charge or — at your choosing — a 100 Kv, 10-amp charge to the sender of the spam.

Painful or permanent, you can be sure your message will be heard loud and clear.

Doesn’t this sound like a lovely little gadget? Image mockup after the flip, as well as the link to the PDF, which goes into more detail and has a “FAQ” on page two.

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An excerpt from a recent Dinosaur Comics:

Go and check out the whole thing. Doesn’t this seem like a hell of a fun idea?

Once when I was getting cable installed at a rental, the technician asked if I had a ladder he could use. I was suddenly overcome with an insane urge, one I intend eventually to follow through on when the opportunity presents itself once more: To say, Yeah, I’ve got a ladder in the dead body, then leave the room casually as though nothing unusual had happened, returning in a few minutes with the ladder.

He would spend the rest of his life wondering if he’d heard me right or not.

A CAVE, AFGHANISTAN — Osama Bin Laden released another tape Monday reacting to the news from author JK Rowling that Albus Dumbledore, the wizard-headmaster of Hogwarts in her runaway Harry Potter book series, is gay.

“I am not surprised,” the translated message says in part, “to learn that yet another supposedly-harmless beloved icon of decadent Western culture has proved to be an amoral proponent of the worst kind of unnaturalism.

“From the beginning, we have seen Western culture to be on a decline from the pure will of Allah. The signs and portents are all there for anyone who cares to look. What of the relationship between the perverse miser Scrooge McDuck and his ‘nephews’, Huey, Dewey and Louie, forced to run around without pants in front of the decrepit old drake’s allegedly myopic gaze?”

Responses from the United States were no less accusatory. Sean Hannity, of Fox News, warned that “such perversions of American youth by the too-liberal leftists of England were inevitable. And then we had that stage play with Dan Radcliffe screwing horses, or whatever it was about. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before we learn that something truly inappropriate was transpiring between Ron, Harry and Hermione.”

Ann Coulter’s comment was only that she thought Dumbledore looked a little too Jewish.

As for his resemblance to the fictional headmaster, Bin Laden had this to say: “While a gangly, tall, bearded man may seem, in the eyes of the sinful, to resemble any other tall, bearded man, Allah knows that I have never allowed any to have illicit control of my sacred wand.

“Besides, mine is far longer than that English poofdah’s. Suck on that, Rowling.”

• The Penis Monologues
• Lose Weight and Get Stronger: The 2,517-day Diet Plan for Better Health that Involves Getting Off Your Fat Lazy Ass, Exercising and Eating Properly, Already
• Car Repair for Dummies, or, Take it to the Mechanic, you Goddamned Cheapskate
• The Anarchist’s Form 401(c3) Filing Cookbook
• Hello, Larry: A Loving and Meticulous Revisit of Every Episode of the Classic Television Series
• The Wonderful World of Sherwin-Williams Paint Chips
• My Pet President: The Autobiography of Dick Cheney
• The Joy of Sexually-Transmitted Diseases (Or, The Autobiography of Dick Cheney)
• My Friend “Toe-Jam”
• Seventy Years of Gold Mining: A Fully-Illustrated History of My Nostrils and Their Products
• Michael Bay’s Guide to Subtlety and Plot in Screenwriting
• Mother Teresa: Fucking Bitch

–

Got any of your own to add? Fire away!

Right, so General Petraeus is telling us that the surge in Iraq is working, which is interesting, since Rummy (who I thought was irrelevant even before he left office) has said Iraq is being “hampered” by failures in its government, but Afghanistan is a success.¹

Meanwhile, according to a poll of Iraqis — you know, the people who actually live there — the surge is a failure.

These are mixed messages, and it’s understandable that one would wonder how to interpret them; conservatively, given the Bush administration’s track record on facts for the last seven years, I think the last thing we want to do is accept as valid anything they — or their mouthpieces — claim to be true.

Thus we have no reason to believe that Petraeus’s assessment of Iraq is in any way valid. He’s not offering any sort of documentary evidence to back up his claims; he’s only making claims and expecting them to be accepted because he says so. That’s not good enough with Bush; why would it be good enough with anyone else?

As for Rumsfeld: He thinks Afghanistan is a success. Whatever else he has to say on any subject after an assertion of that kind cannot be taken as valid. If Rummy tries to tell you the sky is blue, you’d better get out a colorimeter and double check it, on the wild chance it turned orange when no one was looking.

That leaves us with the people we’re supposed to be giving “God’s gift” of freedom to: The Iraqis themselves. And 70% of them believe the surge is a flop; and 60% believe that violence against US troops — which, remember, are viewed as invaders — is valid, acceptable and even desirable. Nearly 1 in 2 believe that the US should withdraw immediately.

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MSNBC passes along the “news” that Laura Bush will go under the knife Saturday. Tragically it’s not an assholectomy, so we’re still gonna be stuck with George; no, she’s going to have work done on some pinched nerves in her neck.

That might go a long way toward explaining the bizarre lack of ability her face seems to have; specifically, she always seems to smile all the time, but she never smiles with her eyes, and it’s really damn creepy.¹ Used to be people made fun of Hillary Clinton for her pantsuit, and after a while she changed into other things. But apparently Laura Bush is tragically unable to change,² afflicted with whatever malady drove poor old Jack Napier over the edge.

Check under the fold for photographic evidence of the truth of my assertions. Note how, from image to image, there’s a sort of emptiness around the eyes best described by Robert Shaw:

Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white.

Oh wait, that’s from Jaws, isn’t it?

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There are words that we use every day to express ideas in a somewhat condensed form. An example is the cliché thinking outside the box, which is shorthand for approaching a problem from an unexpected angle or providing a fresh insight into dealing with it, which might or might not lead to an innovative and creative solution.

In a lot of cases, I expect this sort of verbal shorthand is good, since it facilitates adequate communication without too much essential data being lost. Putting it in graphical terms, these phrases are verbal JPEGs. They’re lossy compression but, in most situations, they get the point across.

Of course, there are plenty of venues wherein JPEGs are not acceptable. While you’d be crazy to use a full-resolution uncompressed TIFF or PSD online, you’d be just as nuts to use a 72 DPI JPEG as a graphic source for a 30-foot-wide billboard. (Even a 300 or 600 DPI JPEG would not be suitable to a purist.)

That’s because JPEGs really are lossy; for example the Nikon D50 I use lets me store about 540 photos on its card as “high-resolution” JPEGs, but only about 270 as camera-raw NEF files. If you think about that for a moment you realize this means the camera, even with high-res JPEG settings, is still throwing out about 50% of the image data its sensor can pick up.

Umm, no thanks; I think I’ll decide what pixels can and can’t be be blown off, thank you very much.

Similarly, our lossy verbal JPEGs can contain surprising lacunae in information and awareness.

I’ve got a list of my all-time big three phrases that seem consistently associated with shortcut thinking, the kind of thinking that can get you into trouble far sooner — and far deeper — than you may ever suspect possible. Thinking by shortcut usually involves overlooking several crucial steps, steps which are necessary in order to complete a given task and, when they’re not explicitly delineated, can leave you quite lost.

In reverse order, then, my personal set of Danger Words, or words that raise my hackles every time because I know where they’re going to lead.

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…and not end up looking like a freshly-carved pumpkin when you’re done.

A while back I reverted to straight razors for shaving. I’d used them before, but only with limited success; there wasn’t a lot of information out there on the topic at the time. That was unfortunate since I wasn’t off by much in terms of how I used or maintained my blade. Given a little more guidance, I’d've kept going.

Since the propagation of the net, a lot more data has become available, and some of it is quite valuable; however, more than a few articles on the use and maintenance of straight razors seem to have been written by people unfamiliar with their use; and a few, at least, were obviously written by men with absolutely no firsthand experience using them at all.

I’ll go into all of that below, including pointing out a few howlers penned from the inky oubliette of ignorance.

First, though, I should handle the question I always get from anyone when they first see one of these razors in my bathroom: Yes, I really do shave with them.

The second question is a little more obvious and a bit harder to answer.

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