TV on DVD

I got a semi-sizable check from a client today so I did what any red-blooded American would do with a Republican president in the White House: I went to Best Buy and started spending. (No, this isn't a political post; I just couldn't help myself.)

I got the essentials first: a new surge protector and an 804.11g wireless card for MLB's old Windoze laptop, which I've inherited now that she's got that slick new ThinkPad. Then I wandered over to the DVD section, and to the TV show aisle specifically. I had been feeling a bit guilty since July, when I bought my wife the "From Dusk 'til Dawn" trilogy for her birthday, not realizing how truly awful they are (well, in my defense, I'd never seen II and III, but I should have known. Although, you have to admit that a plot involving Ambrose Bierce's efforts to volunteer to fight with Pancho Villa lends a bit of intellectual credibility to an otherwise insipid film). I was trying to make it up to her by finding one or two collections of TV shows that I know she'd enjoy...and by gum, I was successful.

I picked up the DVD collections of the best show currently on television and the best show that should be on television but isn't. I'm referring, of course, to Monk in the former case and the first season of Boomtown in the latter.

Tony Shaloub is a hoot as the OCD detective in Monk, and the show is actually getting better as it goes. On the flip side, Boomtown started strong and then the pointy-haired bosses at NBC decided that since they didn't get it, then surely the rest of America didn't either, and they dumbed it down in a suicidal rush to cancellation. Still, it's the kind of series that's suited for a DVD set; it works best when watched back-to-back-to-back, preferably over a cold and rainy holiday weekend with plenty of New Mexico Piñon Coffee and homemade scones to keep you fortified.

I think those two collections will get me off the hook, but I'm still waiting for "The Bob Newhart Show" to make it to DVD to seal the deal.

Terrorists & Drunk Drivers

Due to an inexcusable breakdown in our internal control process, the Today Show was on the TV in our bedroom after breakfast yesterday. I walked into the room just in time to hear Matt Laurer ask President Bush if he thought the war on terrorism was winnable. As soon the President's reply left his lips, I knew we were in for a long and ugly next few days.

In case you missed it, his reply was pretty simple: no, we can't win the war against terrorism.

JohnSquared didn't waste any time jumping on this apparent lapse in judgment by quickly proclaiming that, by gum, the Democrats will win the war on terrorism, if given the chance.

This, my friends, is why I'm voting again for W. Because he's right, plain and simple, and he won't lie to the American people just to be politically correct.

We'll never "win" the war on terrorism, any more than we'll "win" the war against drunk driving. See, the Democratic candidates still don't get it. This is not a conventional war where, as Bush's campaign spokesman put it, there will be a conventional and formal cessation of hostilities, sealed with a signed declaration that clearly identifies who won and who lost. Terrorism doesn't need armies, well-stocked arsenals or even governments. Terrorism needs only one person intent on doing evil, and how are you going to stop that?

Sure, we need to try to kill or disable as many terrorists as possible before they have a chance to put their plans into action, but to declare victory is to bury your head in the sand...next to a claymore.

Perhaps JohnSquared will garner a few extra votes from the naive and complacent who sleep better at night with the knowledge that if politicians say a thing, then that thing must be. Personally, I'd rather have a leader who tells me up front that the world is now different, and we'll never return to how it used to be, and here's what we need to do in order to cope with it. Give me the straight scoop, recruit me to help, and let's get to work doing what we can.

My only regret about the President's remark is how his own campaign seems defensive about it. Bush is simply doing what he does best: underpromising and overdelivering, and in my book, that's strength, not weakness.

Update: CNN Headline News just aired a sound bite from the President's speech this morning in front of an American Legion convention in which he says that we will win the war on terrorism. That's the problem with sound bites...a lack of context. Bryan over at Arguing With Signposts puts the context issue into, um, context. Still, I wish the spin cycles weren't so strong.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

An emailed newsletter caught my eye a few minutes ago, with an article about the just-released American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for the second quarter of 2004. Although the article was trumpeting Apple's score as the highest of any computer manufacturer (and, indeed, as the ACSI commentary states, "...the highest score any PC manufacturer has achieved in the 11 years of ACSI measurement"), that's not the most interesting tidbit to come out of the study, at least not to me.

One of the study's categories is "News and Information Sources" and here's the summary of the 2nd quarter survey results (emphasis mine):

This has significant implications for the mainstream print media. As the ACSI website puts it, "The ACSI model is a set of causal equations that link customer expectations, perceived quality, and perceived value to customer satisfaction (ACSI). In turn, satisfaction is linked to consequences as defined by customer complaints and customer loyalty – measured by price tolerance and customer retention." If you cut through the consultant-speak, this means that people will eventually stop doing business with a company that has a lower score, in favor of a company with a higher score.

I just mailed a check to the MRT for $132, for another 12 months of daily newspapers. My 12 month subscription to the online version of the Wall Street Journal is just $79. The online version of the MRT is free. At some point, the satisfaction of holding a handful of newsprint while drinking a cup of coffee in the morning will no longer outweigh the inconvenient immediacy of the online alternative.

T minus 365 and counting.

Trackback Spam - Blogger Etiquette Breach

I discovered the first instance of trackback spam on the Gazette earlier today. If you haven't run into this phenomenon yet, that's my term (perhaps someone else has a better one) for a blogger who sends a trackback ping to one of your posts, without actually linking to the post on his or her blog.

It may seem like a pretty harmless practice, and in the cosmic scope of things, I suppose it is. I'm not sure how many people actually follow trackback links; I always follow them on the Gazette, but rarely do on other blogs that I read. But the practice is also a breach of blogger etiquette, because it is designed to send traffic in one direction only: away from your blog and to the pinger's blog, without any reciprocity.

In the example I found today, the other blogger's post was at least related to the topic of my post. But there may have also been some commercial intent, in that the offending blogger seemed to be marketing the product that was the subject of my post. (I'm being intentionally vague here, because I deleted the trackback and the notice before checking it out very thoroughly.)

If you're a blogger, my gentle advice is just to use a little common sense and apply the Golden Rule: if you want traffic from another blog, offer something in return. A one-way trackback will not make you many new friends.

Hydrocarbon Nomenclature: A Short and Nasty Primer

There's simply no excuse for folks living in the Permian Basin to be so casual with their terminology as to use "gas" interchangeably with "gasoline."

I saw it in a headline in today's oil and gas (not gasoline) section of the paper, and I just heard a local anchorman use the word "gas" to refer to "gasoline."

It's OK if Yankees don't know any better; we make allowances in such cases. But the rest of you yahoos need to shape up. So here's a simple rule to help you remember: if it's a liquid that you're referring to, then use the word with the "L" (gasoLine...get it?).

Next lesson: Why it's perfectly acceptable to refer to someone as a "toolpusher" in mixed company.

RNC Verse of the Day

As the Republican National Convention kicks off, I thought it fitting to find the following verse in my daily Bible reading:

That seems pretty clear, doesn't it?

Hero

It took two years to get it to America, but it's worth the wait to now see Hero (or "Ying xiong" in Chinese).

This is an achingly beautiful movie with a convoluted and dramatic plot that keeps you guessing to the very end. It's a worthy follow-on to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and in fact features some of the same actors, most notably Ziyi Zhang, who played Jen in CTHD.

The English-dubbed dialog occasionally suffered from woeful translation (I suspect; I don't speak Mandarin), but the beauty of the cinematography and the scope of the director's vision more than offset this minor distraction.

The martial arts choreography brought nothing new to the screen, impressive though it was, and Jet Li, the hero (or is he?) is not an emotive icon. But I keep coming back to the atmosphere of the movie and find that this is one of the most remarkable movies of the year. I'd watch it again in a heartbeat.

Open Water

MLB and I caught a matinee showing of Open Water this afternoon, and came away with the feeling that it's not a movie that will appeal to a wide audience.

This movie deals with the predicament of a pair of scuba divers who were inadvertently left behind by the dive boat miles from shore. As if that weren't enough to ruin a good day of diving, they found themselves in shark-infested waters. The story is presumably based on an actual event.

Being certified divers, we identified closely with the characters and their surroundings. The "cattle car" operation where 20 or more divers are crammed onto one boat is a familiar and realistic scene for resort divers, although more experienced divers seek out operators who limit their passenger count. The gear snafu that leads to the miscounting of returning divers is also realistic; there seems to be one guy on every dive trip who makes everyone around him adjust to his priorities.

And, in our experience, there's also one couple who usually pushes the limits in terms of "doing their own thing" on a dive...making the boat wait for them, going deeper or farther than recommended by the guide, or simply not staying in sight of the main group. The unfortunate couple in this movie suffered some extreme consequences as a result of such behavior.

I can't say anything more about the plot without spoiling it. It's not an uplifting movie, and it could inspire some uncomfortable feelings depending on one's perspective.

My wife and I were once temporarily separated on a dive. It's been six or seven years, and I can still feel the clutch in my chest when I realized that I didn't know where she was. I surfaced, as protocol in such situations requires, but she didn't. In fact, she was unaware that we weren't together and continued to blithely inspect the reef and its inhabitants, completely unaware of my dismay. When she finally noticed my absence, she surfaced as well, not more than fifty feet from me. I alternated between tear-inducing anger and relief; I didn't want to experience that feeling ever again.

This short film (only 79 minutes) asks you to consider how you'd react in a situation where your life and that of a loved one are threatened. There wasn't much that was heroic about the couple in the movie, and I left without the feeling of inspiration that I had expected. It also won't do much to swell the ranks of new scuba divers, even though the shark interaction is completely atypical of the diving in the Caribbean that we've done over the years. (The real-life event that inspired the film took place off the coast of Australia, which is a whole different ballgame.)

Overall, the movie was disappointing and I can't recommend it, despite its pretensions to cult status. The production values were low, but we expected that, given the movie's teensie budget. There was some surprisingly graphic nudity and a good deal of strong language, which grew stronger as the situation grew bleaker.

Worst of all, the incessant water-bobbing finally made MLB ill (a not unfrequent occurrence for her, by the way; she's extremely susceptible to motion sickness). Talk about adding injury to insult.

Blogging Through Real Life

The fact that I'm beginning this post at 6:45 a.m. should tell you something about the state of affairs around here lately. I've been consumed with a new design project and I'll still doing triage on my schedule after working Rock the Desert last weekend. So, all I can offer is this pitiful attempt...

• I know I promised a report on RTD, and I did actually start one. But, after a thousand words into the post I realized that nobody would be interested and I abandoned the effort. It's instructive to consider how, immediately after a major event, every detail seems significant, but after the passage of a bit of time, the important impressions begin to emerge (or the truly insignificant recede). In my pursuit of immediacy, I often lose perspective. Time will tell whether I've truly learned a lesson.


• Speaking of detailed perspectives, today's Wall Street Journal has interviews with fifteen "credentialed bloggers" who will be covering next week's RNC. Many of them, or their blogs, will be familiar to regulars blogosphere lurkers: Kevin Aylward of Wizbang!, Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics, syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt and novelist Roger L. Simon.
  
  Two things stand out. Of the fifteen, only one is a woman, Karol Sheinin, a political consultant who blogs at Spot On and contributes to Dean's World. Since most statistics show the blogger population to be roughly split between the genders, it's hard to figure why there's no more female representation in this group. For a political party that's struggling to attract female voters, this is not a great signal to send.
  
  The other interesting tidbit is that the WSJ emailed its questionnaire to more than fifteen bloggers. I know of no self-respecting blogger who wouldn't jump through hoops for a chance to get some free publicity from a national publication, so I'm wondering who doesn't need (or want) the props. OK, I can think of a couple.


• Speaking of women and wrong messages, I notice that a local organization is promoting an upcoming seminar targeting women-owned businesses. They've selected the ill-advised title of "Making Cents," an obvious play on words with a bad subliminal message. Right off the bat, they're lowering expectations.


• Speaking of subliminal messages, is the Brazilian Olympics women's beach volleyball team so mentally challenged that they needed to have "BRA" printed on their swimsuit tops to ensure proper donning of their "uniforms"? [It's a joke, folks; lighten up.]


• And, finally (mercifully), speaking of athletic supporters, Abbye and I have been enjoying serenades by the Midland Lee High School band as we go on early morning walkies. (Yes, we really do refer to them as "walkies." Got a problem with that, bub?) Their practice field is a mile away, but the prevailing southerly winds bring in the signal loud and clear, and the sounds transport me back to those halcyon days of youth, playing and marching to the sounds of "The Conquerors," "Cyrus the Great," and "March Grandioso." Hmmm. These are the exact same sounds we're hearing today, which leads to the question of the day: has no one composed new marches in the past 30 (or 40 or 50) years?

You earned it, Paul...keep it!

Any notion that American gymnast Paul Hamm should give up his Olympic gold medal is pure hogwash.

The fact that a scoring error was made and it cost the South Korean gymnast the gold medal is unfortunate, but it's also the nature of any human-judged and -scored event. As Paul pointed out this morning during an interview on NBC, a video review of the Korean's parallel bar routine revealed an error that went unnoted by the judges, and which, if scored properly, would have dropped the athlete from the medal stand completely, all other things being equal.

If you're going to revisit the scoring after the fact, then revisit all the events for all the competitors. Oh, and we'll wait the necessary 2-3 weeks for the results. You can just Fed Ex the medals.

By the way, did you notice Ms. Couric's question to Paul about when he thought all the furor over this incident would die down? (I've temporarily if grudgingly set aside my boycott of the Today Show while the Olympics are in session.)

I thought Hamm did an excellent job of biting his tongue and not giving the reply I would have offered: "It'll die down when people like you give it a rest!"

Still, I'm sure I'm not the only person who is thinking that the Olympic figure skating judges are thanking their lucky stars for bringing along another contender for the gold in the Bumbling Idiot event.

"Rock the Desert" Debriefing Coming...

I'm part way through my Rock the Desert report. My plans to write as I went quickly fell by the wayside due to weariness and other priorities, and even now I'm having trouble finding time to complete the post. However, I promise to have it up within the next day or so.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this question to ponder, by way of a teaser: if you had already paid your headline act its guaranteed $250K, how hard would it be for you to make the decision to cancel the show for a reason that might or might not materialize?

Heading for The Desert

I'm off to Rock the Desert...don't wait up!

I visited with Midland city councilman Berry Simpson at Kuo's at lunch; he's been assigned as a chauffeur for rockers Kutless (no, you won't hear their tracks on KLOVE). He said they make him feel old and uncool...he's thinking about getting a henna tattoo for the weekend. I started to advise him to be sure to tell them that he plays the trombone and his favorite group is Chicago; I think they'll really respect him after that!

This evening's lineup:

• Karen Fisher (local gal)
• Building 429
• Casting Crowns
• David Nasser
• Chris Tomlin

Checklist:

• Ear plugs (check)
• Sun screen (check)
• Rain gear (check)
• Digicam (check)

Can you tell that the weather is a bit, um, unsettled?

Bible Book Haiku: Ecclesiastes

It's only fitting that the haiku for the book of Ecclesiastes would be submitted by a preacher: Paul Carter, the parson of The Parson's Pantry, an excellent blog from way up north (north Texas, that is).

[By the way, Paul is celebrating a very special anniversary today, one that he'd probably like to forget, except for the wonderful example of God's grace that was worked through it.]

Next up: Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs, depending on your Bible translation). Think you can make me blush? Take your best shot in the comments or send me an email!

The whole collection to-date is here, along with some simple meme guidelines.

The Real "Dream Team"

The juggernaut disguised as the American women's Olympic softball team rolls on, leaving behind opponents who are still asking onlookers for the license number of the truck that hit them.

Today's victim, er, opponent was the Greek team, playing on their home turf and getting spanked 7-0. The game was proof that not all Californians are created (or, at least, trained) equal, as the Greek team had 11 players from that state, only one fewer than the American team. (This gives rise to a different discussion about the dilution of national pride in Olympic sports, but we'll save that for another day.)

None of the American women are likely to ever become millionaires playing their sport, unlike the American men on the very mediocre basketball team, and that makes their accomplishments all the more chill-inducing. They play for the love of the game. And for the whacking they get to hand to their opponents.

AirPort Express

My latest toy arrived via FedEx yesterday morning, completing the unholy upgrade ritual that began just more than a week ago.

The plaything is an AirPort Express, which looks at first glance exactly like the a/c adapter for a new PowerBook, and very similar to the power adapter for an iPod (gee, do you think Apple realized what they were doing?). The AirPort Express, which we'll call "AEX" just for fun, is a palm-sized wireless base station that plugs into any standard electrical outlet.

There are three main reasons for getting an AEX. One, you can use it as a standalone wireless base station for any internet connection. Two, you can use it to extend the range of an existing wireless network. Three, you can use it to stream music wirelessly from a computer running iTunes to any home stereo system with the right audio-in connections. The AEX has several more interesting capabilities but these are the main uses.

I'm using it for the second reason, so that I can roam the vast expanses of my 0.1 acre, disproportionately-taxed lot, notebook in hand, surfing the net au naturel, as it were. And it works admirably for that purpose. Now that I have it working.

I won't lay out the gory details of what I went through to get this "plug-and-play" device plugged and playing. I'll just leave you with this little tip, in case you're contemplating the purchase of an AEX to extend your network: don't mount the remote unit too close to the base station.

I'm not sure you'll find that instruction in any other documentation, and it's a glaring omission, in my opinion. But if the remote unit is placed near the outer edge of the existing network's coverage, your laptop will be much happier. And we like for our laptops to be happy, don't we?

Master and Commander: Better late than never

I finally watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on DVD, and I must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

When it was released in 2003, it was accompanied by the world's least compelling trailers and neither I nor MLB had any desire to see it. And while I'll never deny Russell Crowe's acting abilities, his off-screen personality is such that a movie has to be really attractive to convince me to give his another shot. (Sorry, Jen...I know he's one of your faves.)

The trailers for this movie simply didn't do it justice. It was almost perfect as a period piece (the lone slip-up was a reference to distance in miles, which I seriously doubt would have been the measurement of choice of a 18th century British sea captain; if I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll be corrected below). I have read some comments about the dialog being unintelligible, filled as it is with obscure naval terms thrown about in thick and salty accents. Fortunately, I anticipated this and watched with subtitles turned on, and, frankly, found them to be indispensible.

If you were dubious about this movie the first time around, I think you'll find it well worth the price of a rental. (Just remember the subtitles tip.)

Rocking the Desert

Rock the Desert is taking place this weekend, and I'll have a bird's eye view of the action this year.

I've agreed to operate a video camera through the weekend and will thus be stationed on scaffolding directly in front of the stage. This will be quite a change from my usual experience of filming relatively staid and quiet worship services in church on Sunday mornings. Earplugs are mandatory.

The camera operators are teamed in pairs, and I and my teammate (another volunteer from my church) will film alternating acts with the other team. Since we're the new kids on the block, so to speak, we didn't draw any of the headline acts (Chris Tomlin, Jars of Clay, POD and Rebecca St. James), but we still have some interesting performers and speakers to work with, including Building 429, David Nasser, Nate Sallie, Pax 217, Plumb, Stephen Baldwin, Logos and Luis Palau.

Stephen Baldwin is the guy I'm most interested in hearing from. Baldwin is the youngest of those Baldwin actor guys, the most (in)famous of which is big brother Alex. Stephen became a Christian just two years ago, and is now using his influence and media savvy to create new evangelism tools targeting the X-Games Generation. I ran across this fascinating interview with Baldwin, and you can literally feel his passion for this work.

I'll also be interested to see the progress on the Rock the Desert Ministries Encampment. And, of course, it will be an opportunity to see if the crowd turnout seems to approach the scores of thousands that has been claimed in the past. The official headcount numbers should be more accurate this year since admission is no longer free (except for Sunday evening), but that aspect will also put a bit of a damper on attendance.

Stay tuned for reports...when and if I recover!

Browsing Through Monday

No theme...just trickles of consciousness...

• Today is the first day of the new school year in Midland, and for the first time in memory, the weather actually feels like a fall day, at least relative to what August is usually like around here. Indeed, ever since my whiny post about the dog days of August, the weather has provided us with cool temps, cloudy skies and brief showers here and there. Our good fortune won't last but a day or so longer, but it's been quite wonderful to contemplate. Not that the returning schoolkids will appreciate it, other than the football players during afternoon practices.


• Speaking of the first day of school, there's an editorial in today's MRT that is quite baffling in its intent. The editorial is entitled "Early start of school means loss of dollars" and it tries to make the argument that starting school so early is an economic impediment to our city and state. The writer argues that we're losing almost three weeks of tourist dollars, for example, by not waiting until after Labor Day to start the new school year.
  
  I'm quite skeptical of this claim. I don't dispute that the statistics show a drop in sales tax and other indicators of tourism spending once school begins, but I will argue that there's only a finite number of dollars that will be spent by vacationers in any given year, and that extending the summer vacation would serve only to let them spread those dollars over a longer period of time.
  
  In any event, taking this argument to its (il)logical conclusion, why not just call off school completely and turn the whole year over to vacationers and tourists? I'm sure the merchants of the state would be ecstatic over that prospect. That is, until they found out just how much disposable income is generated by a whole generation of -- forgive the cliché -- burger-flippers and "greeters."


• Speaking of the MRT, you can imagine my shock and disgust to find that the regular Monday morning edition of Dave Barry's column had the last line of each of its four columns missing, due to an apparent paper alignment problem on the press. (Do they still use a "press" to print papers?) This is a boo-boo of epic proportions, especially considering the usual brevity of reportage in the Monday edition. Why, it's like if I was telling you a joke, a wonderful and witty anecdote that had you on the edge of your seat, and

Running the W3C HTML Validator on Your Mac

Even if the only reason you can muster for doing it is so you can tell people that you're doing it, the idea of installing and running the W3C's HTML Validator on your Mac (under OS X, of course) is simply cool. Here's how to do it.

Tip of the hat to Design By Fire.

So, should we paper train them?

From the Wall Street Journal's Taste section, a longtime Friday treat, comes this wonderful account of more stupidity from PETA, who long ago raised the stupidity bar so high that few organizations (save, perhaps, Planned Parenthood) can hope to compete:

Emphasis mine; stupidity all his (or hers, as the case may be).

"10 Commandments" Canceled Due to Lack of Interest

Gotcha! What I really mean is that my presentation of "The Ten Commandments of Church Websites" which was scheduled for tomorrow has been canceled, because no one signed up for it. I don't know when I'll recover from this disappointment...wait...OK, I'm recovered.

I was never convinced that this session would work well as a part of a general Sunday School training agenda. (The session was added to the agenda, and then I was asked to preside over it.) Most of the attendees of the conference are either church staff specializing in Sunday School-related work or church members volunteering in that work, and very few would likely have "websites" anywhere on their job descriptions. Plus, the session was scheduled as a lunchtime talk coming at the end of everything else, and most folks would probably rather get back to their regularly-scheduled Saturday programming than listen to me (or anyone else) blather on about website usability.

I also wonder if this is a sign that church websites have finally been mainstreamed. It's no longer a question of whether a church should be on the Web, but, rather, how to use the Web to extend the reach of that church's ministries. Perhaps introductory courses are now too rudimentary. If that's the case, it's a positive thing.

Regardless, I've now got a freshly updated version of the presentation, should anyone else want to hear it, plus an extra hour or so on Saturday that I didn't anticipate. Onward and upward.

Phun with Photoshop

We Interrupt This Campaign to Bring You This Message: Lighten Up

Cowtown Patty has three strikes against against her. One, she's from up north (Foat Wuth). And, (b), she likes Mollyescu Ivinski. Despite these overwhelming character flaws, you gotta love her, especially when she points us to links like this'n, in a video parody featuring Will Ferrell as W.

CTP and I agree on one thing: you gotta laugh to keep from crying, sometimes.

AdobeLand: Where All the Print is Fine

This is a story of incompetence. There are two characters. The names have been changed to protect the stupid. One is, um, my friend. The other is a software company named, appropriately enough, after a mud brick. Each has taken incompetence to a new level, and the combination is lethal.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm the moron who has just allowed Adobe Systems Inc. to get to me for $167 and two hours of wasted time, all because I made some erroneous assumptions about the capabilities of that company's pricey software, which, in this case, is Acrobat 6.0. The tragic details follow.

Now that I've made the complete jump to OS X, I needed to "upgrade" to Acrobat 6. I had read complaints about Adobe's move to a split personality issue of Acrobat, with "Standard" being the "home/small business" version and "Professional" being the "corporate" edition. What differentiated them seemed mainly to be some enhanced group workflow capabilities in the latter package, which I certainly didn't need, since all the members of my group reside within one basic corpus, that being me, and no software was going to address whatever issues that situation birthed. So I blithely submitted my online order for the Standard version, being quite content in this case to not be considered a Professional, along with the $50 premium such consideration required.

The software arrived yesterday, and as soon as I got back in town this afternoon, I popped in the CD and proceeded with installation. That was simple enough, but I was confronted with one nagging issue: the installed software didn't work. It wouldn't open PDF files, a rather significant drawback in a program designed to open PDF files.

I immediately jumped on Adobe's website, where I found the answer. Acrobat 6.0 doesn't work with Mac OS 10.3. Duh. Doh. Drat.

Fortunately, 6.0.2 does, and it was available as a downloadable update. Only, you first have to download and run update 6.0.1, because 6.0.2 will work its magic only on 6.0.1. So, 15 meg of downloads and two installations later, Acrobat 6[.0][.2] Standard is finally ready to fulfill its destiny. Sure enough, it opens PDFs slicker'n you know what on you know where.

So, I start acquainting myself with the layout of the new program, and I quickly realize that something is just. Not. Right.

One of the primary reasons for a builder of websites to invest in the full version of Acrobat is the capability of creating interactive forms in PDF format. You know, the kind you can fill out online? This is accomplished in fairly efficient manner through the use of Acrobat's Form tool, a tool which came with the good old 5.0 version but which is strikingly absent from Acrobat 6.0.2 (the Standard Loser Edition); at least, I don't see it in any of the logical menu items.

Back to Adobe's website, where I finally take the time to click the "Compare Versions" button and find that the Forms capability has been striken from the Simpleton Edition (after all, what can you expect for only $99 in upgrade fees?) and shifted to the Mega-Corporate Version, where it costs an additional $149 to upgrade, even if you're just baby-stepping from the Standard Fool's 6.0.2.

Well, I'm without excuse and without recourse. I've ordered the upgrade, paid the price and learned a lesson. And, to add insult to injury (to my wallet), I get to do the "0.1 and 0.2" two-step once Professional arrives, because it, too, is not compatible with Panther.

That great philosopher Leo Getz, as revealed in Lethal Weapons 2, 3 & 4, had some choice words about the practices of fast-food drive-throughs and cellphone companies. I think he'd similarly love doing business with Adobe.

Hospital Update

The patient is doing much better this morning and both doctors have already dropped by to pronounce him fit to leave. I appreciate very much the expressions of concern, prayers and best wishes on behalf of my dad.

More Bible Haiku

I'm dreadfully remiss in bringing to your attention a new Bible haiku for the next book in the series, Proverbs. Larry Stephey, proprietor of Inspired Haiku, left this one at the Gazette a couple of weeks ago and I just lost track of it until today:

Our complete collection, which now spans Genesis through Proverbs, can be viewed here. Ecclesiastes is next on the list; feel free to take a shot at it, as there's a time for writing poetry and a time for not doing so. I {ahem} promise to do a more timely job of adding new submittals to the list.

Wi-Fi to Heal By

I'm blogging today live and direct from room 34 of the Pecos County Memorial Hospital, on the outskirts of beautiful metropolitan Fort Stockton, Texas (pop. 7,846 [more than I thought, Dawn]), and I've rarely felt more grateful for the magic we call technology.

I'm in FS today because my dad underwent "minor" surgery, which, as we all know, is surgery that's performed on someone else. The surgery went fine, he's resting well and the prognosis is for a speedy and complete recovery. The skill of the surgeons and the technology at their disposal made that possible (along with a heapin' helpin' of Divine attention).

I hauled my PowerBook down here thinking that I'd at least get some offline work done while I waited with my mom. We moved from the surgical waiting room to his private room, I booted up the laptop and started playing with MySQL monitor.

I only half-noticed the new window that popped up a couple of minutes later. Having been up since a quarter to five, it took me awhile to comprehend the meaning of the appearance of the Apple Software Update window. I may gripe about some of the shortcomings of OS X, but one of its major strengths is the way it automatically seeks out and connects to a wireless network, and that's exactly what happened here. So we have another miracle of technology: a highspeed Wi-Fi network in this little country hospital!

And here we sit, blogging to the sounds of Glenn Miller via iTunes, taking care of the occasional emailed website update from clients who don't even know that I'm out of town. I won't tell 'em if you won't. Life is wonderfully strange, isn't it?

Krispy Kreme Koming

I noticed that Krispy Kreme was running a "help wanted" ad in Sunday's local newspaper. It appears that the long-rumored appearance of the doughnut chain is finally coming to pass.

I still haven't heard anything about a location. I hope it's not in the shopping area where Starbucks is located; that's enough of a mess as it is. My vote would be to tear down the abandoned Exxon station at Wadley and Midkiff and put in a new store. It's a really congested intersection already, but it would still be superior to the Starbucks/HEB location from a traffic flow perspective.

Now...if the company can only stay solvent.

Alice In Staples

I just saw a great new back-to-school commercial for Staples featuring Alice Cooper. Cooper is in full stage makeup and is loading a shopping cart with school supplies while his pre-teen daughter leans against a counter, arms crossed and pouting.

"I thought you said school's out forever," she says to him in an accusing tone.

"No. What I said was that school's out for summer. Nice try, though."

I find odd comfort in the unchanging fact that commercials on broadcast TV are more entertaining than the programming that surrounds them.

Felonious Pruning

A disturbing trend is taking place in our previously quiet little neighborhood. Audacious assaults are being perpetrated upon the most helpless of our citizenry: our plants.

Abbye and I were presented with a most disturbing scene as we entered our park early this morning. A 15' ash tree was laying helplessly on its side, its trunk neatly severed at the four foot mark by some drunken yahoo with a bow saw who evidently found an opponent with an IQ to match his. (I suspect the bow saw, because there wasn't enough sawdust at the crime scene for a chainsaw diagnosis.)

Felling trees in public places in west Texas should be a capital offense, like horse thieving was in the good old days. Those in their right minds don't take trees for granted out here on the plains; none occur naturally, unless you count the occasional overachieving mesquite. To mortally vandalize a large healthy specimen is just downright nasty.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only example of recent crimes against foliage. A couple of weeks ago, sometime during the night, another apparently drunken yahoo drove his vehicle across our front drive and halfway through our hedge, taking out two 15-year-old elaeagnus pungens. What's worse, they were in the middle of the hedge, leaving me no choice but to remove three more plants in order to salvage the bed. I've checked every vehicle in the neighborhood for tell-tale fronds stuck to a bumper, but finding the culprit is a lost cause.

I won't say that these events have caused me to lose my faith in humanity, because I never had much to begin with. They're simply reminders to never underestimate the stupidity of yahoos. I just wish Audrey II was around to inflict a little floral justice upon the offenders.

Comment Spam: Fighting Back

Scott called me on my comment spam whining, so I've followed his advice and installed MTBlackList and MTCloseComments in order to put the automatic hurt on would-be CSers. I'm relying on Scott's recommendation to make this blog a lean, mean spam-free machine, and he's never yet steered me wrong (well, there was that one time about the Rangers and the World Series, but...no hard feelings). So, henceforth, "comments on" will be the default and we'll see what the bad guys have to say about it.

On the other hand...

This was the last spam I received before I closed the remaining post holes:

I can't help but blame Scott. Dang, the style is even his. Wonder if Drudge knows about this?

Stealth Wallpaper

NewScientist.com has an article about new "wallpaper" that can be used to block outgoing Wi-Fi signals without interfering with cellphone usage. This technology was developed by a British company to address the concerns of business and government over the potential exposure of their networks to Wi-Fi hackers.

This is cool stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with one point the article makes, about the "relatively low cost" of the material. It apparently can be produced for about £500/sq metre, which according to my back-of-the-envelope calcutations works out to around ten bucks per square foot, American. When you consider the size of the average office building, that's a pretty hefty add-on (and that number is the production cost, not retail). Still, I suppose the data being protected is more valuable, although I tend to think that there are much cheaper software solutions to the problem.

Then there's this aspect to be considered: the material doesn't work on windows, although the manufacturer is working on a transparent version.

Gee...a security feature that doesn't work on (w)(W)indows. You didn't see that one coming, did you?

X Things I Hate About X

I "upgraded" to Panther (Mac OS 10.3) last week (another reason for the light blogging). This experience has reinforced the chill of terror that runs up my spine whenever I learn that my [fill in the blank] is to be "upgraded." "Upgrade" is the new euphemism for getting less for more, in far too many instances.

I had previously taken an oath not to upgrade my desktop computer to OS X until I bought a new one with it already installed. I was afraid the new OS would slow down my first generation G4 and, more importantly, disrupt my well-established workflow. But a peculiar confluence of events conspired against me, necessitating that I "upgrade" our wireless network to AirPort Extreme in order to take advantage of 128-bit encryption, and that, of course, required the jump to X.

Interestingly, the new OS doesn't bog down my computer. In fact, it's quicker in starting up and shutting down, and many of my apps are faster. I'm sure that's because they've been optimized for OS X and I wasn't getting that benefit by running them under OS 9.

But the workflow worry? Oh yeah...I got that, and in spades.

It's sort of like waking up one morning to find that the rooms of the house you've lived in for two decades have suddenly been rearranged, and the furniture either replaced or put in new locations. It's not that the old layout was necessarily better in all cases, but it was at least predictable and you could navigate it with your eyes closed.

Under OS 9, every item had its place and every task its flow. Sure, the system had its peculiarities, but I knew what they were and how to work around them. OS X has thrown most of that trivial-but-useful knowledge out the window and presented me with a whole new set of workarounds, most of which I've yet to discover.

With that in mind, here are ten things I really don't like about the new OS, in no particular order. Some of these things are bugs in the system, some are "features," some are due to shortcomings in the applications themselves, and some are due to my lack of experience and knowledge. But they all came with the package.

1. I hate how my computer's fan continues to run even when the system is in sleep mode. It's a documented bug, affecting just a few G4 models. Lucky me.


2. I hate how my wife's Windows 2000 laptop can't print to our USB laser printer connected to the wireless base station, even though the documentation says it can.


3. I hate how the keyboard commands for copy and paste periodically stop working, for no discernible reason, requiring a relaunch of the Finder to (sometimes) correct the situation. Another documented bug, this one.


4. I hate how I can no longer automatically preview a web page in the browser of my choice via Adobe GoLive.


5. I hate how my scanner has no OS X driver, and, further, won't function in Classic mode (don't worry if you don't understand these terms; they're not really important), instead requiring that I reboot into OS 9 (which, at least, I can still do...some models won't do that anymore).


6. I hate how clicking the desktop doesn't bring the desktop to the front. Well, it didn't in 9 either, but I figured Apple should have corrected this by now.


7. I hate how the new version of iTunes requires a three-step process to rip a WAV to MP3 rather than the one simple step previously required.


8. I hate the fact that I can't get the Firefox installer to complete its designated mission. Sure, Firefox isn't even compatible with OS 9, but what good is compatibility if you can't get it installed?


9. I hate the way clicking on one of several files opened within an application doesn't automatically give you access to all of the similar files that are open.


10. I hate how stoopid the Terminal window makes me feel.

OK. I feel better now, especially since I had to struggle to complete this list. It makes me realize just how good Panther really is. I could easily come up with 50 things I love about it that weren't present in 9. Simply put, Panther is a gem of an OS and when it works (which is almost always, despite my whining), it works beautifully.

That doesn't make the process of rebuilding and relearning my workflows any easier, but I have no doubt that I'll get there with a little time and patience.

Dog Days and Comment Spam

We're in the sweaty throes of the dog days of August, and, yes, it's sweaty even on the fringe of the Llano Estacado. This muggy weather demoralizes and demotivates me, and it's a chore to simply press the keys to create this post, let alone put any useful thought into it.

I went six days last week without blogging, which is the longest non-vacation-related dry spell since the Gazette started up way back in ought two. But it's not entirely true that I was ignoring the blog, as I spent several hours during the week dealing with a fresh onslaught of comment spam (pitching V*I*A*G*R*A and, of all things, cigarettes...the latter, I suppose, to accompany the post-game show after partaking of the former).

I've had it up to here with comment spammers. They're scum o'the earth types, and if Dante was updating his most famous work, he'd have a new and special circle of hell reserved for them. You know the really bad thing about comment spammers? They don't care. They don't read blogs, and even if they did, they wouldn't give a tinker's dam about my ire toward them.

Thanks to them, I've shut off comments on all previous Gazette posts. I'll try to remember to open new posts for comments, but I'll be shutting them off after about two weeks. I feel like a Spaniard, giving in to the terrorists. The only difference is that what I do will, at least, stop the spam.

Dog days. Comments spammers. I'll be glad to get past both of 'em.

"Collateral": The Best Movie of 2004?

"Collateral" was as much a pleasant surprise as "The Village" was a dismal disappointment. We saw the Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx movie this afternoon, and I came away thinking that this was one of the most intelligent and well-made films I've seen in a long time.

Tom Cruise's bad guy isn't much different from his usual good guy. He's quick-witted, supremely capable and scarily efficient at his job as a hitman. Cruise has taken a lot of heat over the years about his acting ability, but his screen presence in "Collateral" is mesmerizing at times.

Jamie Foxx (from Terrell, Texas, ya'll) is likely the next Denzel Washington (with perhaps even more talent; his upcoming role as Ray Charles will tell us for sure), and is excellent as a cab driver who's scared to be more.

But the real star of this movie is the screenplay...conversations are surprising, smart, funny; the plot takes some unexpected turns, but not so many as to strain credulity. The characters are believable and you care about them, even Cruise's amoral killer. The only aspect of the movie that sounded a wrong note was that so many streets and buildings in LA could be so deserted.

"Collateral" is rated R for bad language and violence, but neither is gratuitously excessive.