BeigeJournal

The Christmas shopping season really does start earlier every year. I used to think that my parents just liked to complain, but I’m a believer now. The people selling cheap radio-controlled toys from little stands in the mall halls have been at it for at least a month now. Many stores have Christmas stuff up, and at least one I’ve seen was already in full red-and-green holiday trim a week before Halloween. At least they haven’t started playing that music yet.

I’ve been listening to the Dawn and Drew Show (website, RSS 2.0 feed or Atom feed) and for some reason I like it. It’s kind of hard to explain. I have tried listening both during the day after drinking coffee and late at night after drinking wine, and the latter does work better, perhaps because they record it late at night, sometimes while drinking rum. It’s not really the kind of show that will teach you valuable information, but it is more entertaining than just about anything on TV.

I keep getting the feeling that lots of companies trying to sell us commercial entertainment product imagine that we are all extremely bored, desperate for entertainment, and willing to put up with any hassle and pay any price to get it. They come up with complicated, incompatible DRM schemes. They expect us to go out and buy new computers running approved operating systems so we can install new, proprietary software, figure out how to use it, enter all our personal information, and enter credit card numbers. Only then can we download “content” that has so much DRM we probably won’t be able to play it anyway. But we’re supposed to be obedient and desperate consumers and put up with it all.

Me? I have a hundred-odd feeds in my aggregator. I read a few Spanish sites in an effort to improve my minimal ability with that language. I play two musical instruments and get together with friends regularly to share music. I listen to some podcasts. I write for this blog, a Livejournal, and put some of my photos on Flickr. I keep buying books at used book stores and have a long list of books to check out from the library. I buy DRM-free, hassle-free music from Magnatune.com and filk music—a genre that doesn’t exist as far as the RIAA members are concerned—both online and on CD.

If someone wants to sell me “content” and insists on making it difficult for me, or just generally behaves badly and won’t play well with others, it’s very easy for me to ignore them altogether. I already have, readily accessible, more great stuff (bundles of passion, as Dave Slusher says) than I have time for, besides my own writing, music practice, and occasional song writing.

I just listened to the IT Conversations recording of the talk Wil Wheaton gave at Gnomedex 4.0.

Wil, of course, played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even I knew that, though I was never too interesting in Star Trek. I was vaguely aware that he was doing the tech-geek convention circuit these days, but basically hadn’t paid much attention. I’m not a Trek fan, so ‘guy who played Ensign Wesley’ didn’t really attract my attention. I listen to all the IT Conversations stuff, though, and once I heard his Gnomedex talk, which consisted largely of readings from his books, I got a lot more excited. Fantastic performance. I’m going to have to get his books now, of course. (Sigh, more stuff for the reading queue…) You ought to listen (or watch, since video is out there, too).

I first saw Koyaanisqatsi quite a few years ago and I loved it. Unfortunately, it was out of print at the time, so I could not buy my own copy of the tape. Now, in the DVD era, it is again available, and I picked up a copy the other day. I paid $11 at the downtown Milwaukee Borders. There are two more in the series, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, which I’m going to have to see as well.

It is not really a normal movie. There are no characters, no dialog. It consists of images, mostly time-lapse or high-speed, set to music. Time-lapse clouds and traffic. Pedestrians in both time-lapse and high-speed. Factories in time-lapse. It is just beautiful. It is very much a case of what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it. (As Tom Lehrer said, “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”) It is not really explicitly anti-technology (it isn’t explicitly anything), and could be read as something of a celebration of technology, tempered by the realization that so much of what we’ve built is tacky and ugly, and the shear quantity of technological stuff the Earth is blanketed with.

I have to mention my favorite scene, which is the last one of the movie. An Atlas rocket is shown lifting off, accelerating in the sky, and blowing up. A piece of the rocket, I think the sustainer engine still attached to a bit of the structure, is followed by the camera as it spirals down, burning, smoke and flame puffing out as it rotates in the air. Organ music plays. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it, but I really like this.

The DVD includes an interview with director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass which is very interesting.

I highly recommend it.

I’m not sure if I can express with mere written words just how I feel about configuring Windows 2000 to use a Jetdirect networked printer. The instructions at HP’s web site where we got the drivers for the HP4550N color LaserJet simply said to use the add printer wizard. We assumed, therefore, that the wizard must be fairly easy to use. The process starts off with selecting either “local” or “networked.” Since this printer is directly connected to the network, in another room, no less, we chose “networked.” We then futilely spent much time entering IP addresses and wondering why it couldn’t communicate with the printer. I finally decided to type “jetdirect windows 2000” into Google, and the top hit was a web page from HP which started off by explaining that we needed to select “local printer” in order to install this networked printer. Yes, someone at Microsoft thought that, logically, in the install wizard, the clearest category for a printer networked using TCP/IP on the Internet would be “local” and not “networked.” Someone at HP thought that even though they have a lengthy and very clear document already on their web site explaining the completely counter-intuitive method for getting one of their Jetdirect-equipped printers, like, for example, the 4550N, to work with Windows 2000, there was no need to point people to this document on the driver download page. “Just tell them to use the wizard. I’m sure they all know that a Jetdirect printer is considered ‘local’ and not ‘networked’ by Win2k,” they thought.

Via 90% Crud, I found the hilarious The Apple Product Cycle.