Lee.org

Turning PC off now. Withdrawl symptoms imminent.

I meant Thursday. Yeah. Thursday morning, bright and early.

Jeez, this has been the longest goodbye in the world.

I’m paying close attention to Bob Parson’s come TJIC’s come Lee’s 16 rules to live by. Especially #3.

Continue reading ‘Did I say Tuesday?’ »

I’ll likely be in my car, on my way west on Tuesday morning. My computer will be in a box for the next couple weeks (yipe! What ever will I do without it?!). I’ll be able to check mail only sporadically. Much better to reach me by mobile phone or email short messages to my cell at [my cell #]@tmomail.net.

I’m offering a bunch of my stuff on Freecycle before I move, mostly to save on disposal charges and the hassle of hauling it to wherever. Turns out that giving stuff away is a hassle too.

I posted the stuff. In 15 minutes everything was spoken for. Hurray!

After 12 hours, I had 20+ responses. Everybody loves “free”. Yeah, whatever.

I was a bit bothered that some people emailed, asking for all kinds of details… details that I had already given in the photo or description. Apparently beggars can be choosers and even stupid choosers.

After a day, 5 of the 6 takers either didn’t return my call or backed out. Fuckers.

Now I’ve got to go down the list and try to find more takers… and more takers.

Next time, my OFFER letter will look like this:

I have a beautiful widget that can be yours if you can pick it up in [town] between the hours of [n] and [n] on [today or today +1]. Here is a photo of it: http:http://lee.org/[photo]

Email me with your name, phone number and a time to call in the next 12 hours and I’ll call you. If you aren’t available when I call, I’ll offer it to another.

I decided to donate to the WordPress project since the program has helped me so much. While donating, I noticed that the receiver, Matthew Mullenweg has received 269 Paypal payments. Only 269?! There are more than 100,000 users!

Well, I put my buck in the hat.

Donating to WordPress will make you feel good. (and you’ll find out Matt’s phone number during the Paypal transaction!)

Sure, you might not care about this… but I’m going to SF Tivoless. I might buy one when I get comfy, or maybe not (oh, who am I kidding, I am completely addicted to vitamin T)

In no particular order (I thought about ordering them but which do I put first, “guilty pleasures” or “feelgood”, “easy to watch” or “engrossing”?

• Northern Exposure – for when I need some existential cheering up
• Nip/Tuck – a hugely intelligent and disturbing show
• CBS News Sunday Morning – My aunt just recently suggested this to me. Thanks Dorty! It’s a bit like 60 Minutes.
• Blue Collar TV – Pretty funny. Comedy Central is becoming like a real network or something!
• Con – Because knowing is half the battle. And it’s still pretty fun to dream of what I’d be like if I were bad
• 24 – The most exciting hour of television all week. (next season starts in 6 months.. hurumph)
• Good Eats – That Alton Brown, he makes cooking into geekery!
• Scrubs – I really connect with this show (though I admit that after so many seasons of the exact same formula, I’m getting tired of the routine)
• The Daily Show – The best (fake) news program on television
• Mythbusters – It bugs me that they don’t always practice “good science” but hey, it’s good TV and they blow stuff up but good.
• Attack of the Show – It lost several points in my book as soon as G4 moved the studio from San Francisco to LA but it’s still a good geek show (as long as you have your finger on the fast-forward)
• Taxicab Confessions – the best and most real reality show I’ve ever seen. Episode #6 almost qualifies as my Budda.
• 60 Minutes
• 60 Minutes Wednesday
• Star Trek Voyager – It’s the smartest of the Trek series. It’s the only one I ever watch and not snicker at.
• Max & Ruby – the most zen program for 2-4 year olds that I’ve ever seen.
• Rough Science – They had another season, hurray!

I got an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo scanner LE with a feeder tray, after asking a few folks online what they thought of it and not hearing any horror stories.

The plan is to scan all 2,000 or so of my family photos and taking them out west. That might sound like a terribly daunting task but in the time it’s taken for me to get this far in this blog entry, it’s already scanned 6 images and dropped them into place.

I’m not using sharpening or other features built into the Epson software. Some of the images scanned like this will need to be tweaked for brightness and contrast and such to bring out their best, but it’s best to get the images in the purest state posible and then muck with them. The software that came with it is pretty well designed; beginners can get pretty darn good images with simple, integrated tweaks like a descreening filter and unsharp mask at the flip of a single switch. And then nerds like me can turn all that stuff off so they can make it hard on themselves.

The scan quality I’m using for prints only looks a hair worse than 2,400 dpi uncompressed .tiff when the image is magnified roughly 10 times on my screen… IE a 4 inch print blown up to 40 inches. My images take up 4 MB instead of 65 though. I’m not adverse to 65MB images except that my image programs choke trying to display and edit them.

I’m not totally happy with using the built in auto-exposure because I think it messes with the histogram, lossing some data. Then again, it might be changing CCD sensitivity, which means I’m getting better data. But it seems to do a very good job and I’d otherwise have to spend a lot of time with each image getting it right (and frankly, I’m not so good at that kind of futzing)

I’m very happy with this scanner. :-)

Prints: Home Mode. The feeder can accept 10-15 images. Images take 1 minute apiece. I’m using 24 bit color, 1200 dpi, auto exposure with no other adjustments, save with compression 15 .jpg. Images are approx 4 MB. Some photos can’t go through the feeder because of its size or gunk on the picture.

Large Prints: If a print takes more than 1/3 of a page, I consider lowering the resolution to 720 dpi or 600 dpi because .jpg images more than 10 MB are quite cumbersome for photo programs.

Negatives: Home Mode, 24 bit color, 4800 dpi, auto exposure and no other adjustments. Save with compression 15 .jpg. Images are approx 3 MB. Mounting slides would go faster if I get my hands on several film holders.

Slides:(my folks have lots!) same settings as negatives.

6-13-05 575 photos done. Negatives go slower than prints… 3 minutes per image and it must be loaded every 3 images. But the final images are usually a bit smaller even though I’m capturing more data. If you’ve got the negative, use it!

6-14-05 660 photos done. I didn’t have much time today… and slides are an even bigger pain. You load 2 images at a time. A Swiffer duster does a very good job on dust specks.

6-15-05 900 photos done in 3 gigabytes. I’ll stich together the mosaics of large images later. Large images are an even bigger pain than slides. I’ve scanned every important picture in a frame in the house. I can’t take those with me!

6-16-05 Uh oh. After all this, I’m almost done with box #1 of 3. I’m going to ship them out to SF and finish this project later. But I’m very happy with the scanner

Sample images:
Continue reading ‘Scan every photo in sight’ »

There is no way to search the entries of a particular Blogspot blogger for particular text. Same for Livejournal. What the hey?

Technorati offers pretty good blog searching… better than Google.

Oh and my mother’s 33 day old EMachines computer just died. Like dead. The power supply probably got fried by an electrical storm a few nights ago. Funny though, nothing else in the house was effected. The warrantee people are sending me a new power supply fer free.

I just want a cordless phone that works. That’s all I want. Well ok, that’s not entirely true. I want a cordless phone that has:

• 2 cordless handsets
• good sound quality
• a call-answering/voicemail waiting indicator
• a reasonably simple interface
• caller ID

What I’ve found is a quagmire.

First off, our house is filled with crummy cordless phones. There is the one behind the bar that rings well enough but makes your callers sound like they are in a deep pit (it rubs the lotion on it’s skin). Upstairs, there is the analog 900 MHz phone. It sounds like shit too and it has crappy range. Then there is the Olympia OL-2410 we’ve been using; it sounds… not like “total crap” but just “poor” and the display recently went south.

What phone do I use? It’s the kind of phone that you can pummel an assailant with. It’s a corded Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone. It’s unapologeticly heavy, sounds great and feels good in your hand.

So, last week, the Olympia 2 handset phone system broke after 1 1/2 years of service. I called Staples and used the extended service plan I got to get an $80 credit. While I was waiting for the credit to arrive, I plugged in my old Uniden 900 MHz digital spread spectrum phone. This is a great phone. Great range, sounds like a corded phone, long battery life, enough heft in the handset to leave a welt on an assailant (especially since you can throw it across the room at him), a well designed answering machine… da da da…

The credit arrives so I go to Staples and pick up a Vtech 2.4 GHz phone. It was great except for it’s horrid range: less than 50 feet. Admittedly, compounding factors include that the range problem was between the 1st and second floors and we have 2 Wifi networks in the house. But shouldn’t these devices SHOULD be able to coexist in the same band?

I returned the phone.

I went back to Staples looking for a phone. After looking at all 30+ different phone models they had (think I’m exaggerating? Take a peek at Staples.com) I concluded that, unless I wanted to spend $220 on a phone, I wouldn’t get what I wanted. $220?!?!? $220?!?!?!? Two Trimline phones would cost $40 and work flawlessly for at least the next 20 years. And think how cordless phones have been around for 20 years now. Are you starting to smell a rat? I am.

So I forged my way over to Radio Shack. I was bedazzled by their selection as well. So many flavors of….. vanilla. With the help of a self-avowed over-achieving salesman, I picked out a $70 5.8 GHz phone. To be specific, it is a Maxus 5.8 Gigahertz Dual Handset, Radio Shack # 43-3585. I got it home and plugged one of the phones in. I didn’t dare take everything out of the box until I knew it worked because, I swear Radio Shack must employ master jigsaw puzzlers to pack their products. The corners of my mouth started to curl up as the dual-frequency hum of the dial-tone remained steady in my ear while I walked from room to room. Satisfied, I ripped the rest of the packaging open.

After everything was all set up, I opened the manual to figure out the intricacies of the Memories and such. It was there on page 13 that my heart died.

Conveniently, your cordless phone allows you to transfer outside calls from handset to handset simply by pressing DELETE/TRANS. Conversations will not be interrupted; only one handset at a time can talk with an outside caller. The second handset cannot go off hook to listen to conversations or make an outgoing call while the other handset is in use.

What?

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Only one handset can be used at a time?! So why the frig did I buy a two handset phone? Is it a freaking backup for when the first explodes unexpectedly?

I threw everything in the box. The ecstatic guy at Radio Shack can repack it himself.

Tomorow I will go shopping for telephone system number 3.

Read my new entry on the subject