Escaped Thoughts

Note to self: test blog after making changes (even minor ones) to blosxom plugin code. Although I guess giving everyone coming here an error does reduce blogspam, so it was effective at some level...

Category: Geek

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Apparently I had my first California earthquake this morning, but slept right through it. I would say I'm disappointed, but I'm not stupid enough to temp the fates that blatantly.

Category: Life

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A year ago today, the world became a much poorer place. A wonderful human being who touched many people, and should have touched many, many more, was taken away from us.

We miss you Skye, and think of you often.

Category: Life

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Laura and I just got back from seeing Hero, and, as the title of this entry implies, I thought it was phenomenal. The artistry was incredible, and although it was so intense it was almost palpable, it didn't get in the way of the story at all. Quite the opposite: the feeling it gave me was that it set an elaborate scene in order to invite me to discover the story on my own. I felt volumes of unspoken dialog in nearly every scene, and the meanings poured themselves out effortlessly. At the same time, although the film made me feel as if I understood things instinctively, I was aware of even more depth and texture and nuance of meaning that I couldn't yet identify or draw out.

I plan to buy it as soon as possible, and watch it many many times. I plan to learn about the symbolism of the five Chinese elements, the symbolism of each color, and anything else that occurs to me, and then look for one theme or repeated element at a time. I plan to discover as much of what the film has to offer as possible.

Watching most movies feels to me like the intellectual equivalent of gorging myself on gummi-worms. Watching Hero felt more like meditating.

Category: A & E

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Microsoft has come up with a fantastic new concept: a place where you can legally download music, for only 99 cents per song! If only someone else had thought of it earlier, and beaten them to the punch.

Seriously though... I know Apple didn't come up with the idea but it's pretty hard to pretend that they didn't make it very successful very quickly, and even harder to pretend you're launching a competitor, but have never heard of the iTunes music store. But apparently not impossible:

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for MSN said, “Our goal with the MSN Music service is to finally bring digital music to the masses by offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal music on the Internet, available on the broadest selection of portable devices.”

First off: which masses are they “bringing it to”? The millions of people in the world who are both trendy enough to want digital music, and yet who have been living under a rock and haven't heard of iTunes and/or the iPod? Do this guy really think there are people sitting on their couches watching iPod commercials and thinking, “I'd love to have digital music, if only I could find somewhere that sells it”?

Second: does he think that because Microsoft's PR group has been living under a rock? If they believe that the library of 500,000 songs mentioned in the article is the largest catalog of legal music online, they might want to, you know, check some recent numbers from their only serious competitor.

It's nice that they want to compete and all, but perhaps they should focus a little more on not sounding like they are either criminally ignorant or lying while they do it.

Category: Geek

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I've been using fink's GIMP 2.0 installation for a while, but my old drag-and-drop script was still set up for 1.2. I could have just fixed it by changing the symlinks that point GIMP commands to a specific version so that they refer to 2.0 instead of 1.2 (which I ultimately also did), but I've been bugged for a while by the old script's requirement of launching GIMP in advance, and having to fix another part of the process finally motivated me to do something about it. Poking around a little I found this hint, which improves on the script I'd been using (the one mention at the beginning of the new hint).

The new script has some issues, mentioned in the comments, but unfortunately the fixed version that is alluded to is MIA. The bright side it that it gave me an excuse to play with AppleScript a bit, and now I have a script that uses X11 and handles multiple files correctly in almost all cases. I still need to fix it so it doesn't launch multiple instances of the GIMP if it tries to open several files and finds that the GIMP isn't already running, but that should be easy enough to fix. And if not, it's still worlds better than the old script. Here's to progress! AppleScript is very cool, but I never quite get around to learning more than a tiny bit of it... but I guess that's what Automator is all about: automation without learning/remembering AppleScript.

If any of the other 20 people running GIMP on OS X using fink instead of Gimp.app need good drag-and-drop support, drop me a line :)

[Update: It now handles all drag-and-drop cases correctly, and also launches the GIMP if you run it without dropping a file, so it's now an app for all purposes that matter to me!]

Category: Geek

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