Jack Frost Arrives

The weather quickly turned cold on us in Michigan.  Now we’re lucky to see the mid 30’s.  Mice seeking warmth have invaded our house and we anxiously await the moment they spring one of the traps we have set.  While it is much colder than Virginia, I’ve found that I’m starting to adjust.  It’s especially easy to stay warm by being active.  I set up my 1999 Blueberry iMac in the garage to play tunes while I refinish an old interior door that’s been sitting in the basement since before we moved in.  It has about 4 layers of paint on it and each application of stripper only takes off one layer. 

We’ve been sprucing up our house to get ready for our neighborhood’s progressive dinner party.  We volunteered to host dessert, since Julie has some mad dessert making skillz.  We replaced a ceiling light in the front entry and replaced the ceiling fan in the dining room with a chandelier.  Installing light fixtures is much more difficult in an older home!

I still can’t believe there’s only 4 weeks until Christmas.  We’ll be spending the holiday in Fisher and then New Year’s (and our anniversary) in Chicago.  I used to hate Chicago.  I used to think it was a bunch of warehouses in the suburbs and a few office buildings downtown.  But now that I’ve been around town a little, I have to say it is my favorite American city.  New York is cool and all, but Chicago isn’t so pretentious.  DC has history and some culture, but it’s comparatively bland outside of the downtown/Georgetown/Alexandria area.  Plus, the area is too car-oriented, which makes exploring the city prohibitive, especially if you live and work in the suburbs.  Anyway, I like being only 3.5-4 hours from Chicago (or 4.5 hours by train).  I like that Amtrak takes me directly from Lansing there, but I wish it would run more often than once a day. 

Speaking of trains, I’ve been thinking a lot about why they’re not so popular.  I would think spending 4.5 hours on a train that doesn’t require a security check, allows you to plug in and use your laptop, and costs half as much as flying would be better than flying.  Sure, you may get there a bit faster, but at a higher cost financially and psychologically.  I could see it replacing all of those short-haul hour-long flights, like the ones from Lansing to Detroit or Chicago.  Why not stick a train terminal right next to the airport?  I’d rather take a 4.5 hour train to Chicago than take a plane and spend 2 hours waiting for my connection.  Just think of the reduction of traffic that would result at airports if they could get rid of those short flights.  Think of the money the airlines could save by ditching their regional jets and only having to maintain the larger ones.

In other news, I’ve decided to spin off all my technical posts into a separate blog.

Live From iBook!

Well, instead of posting an update, like I promised, I put together my old iBook and set it up as my new web server. My PC (850MHz Athlon in a tower case) sounds like a screeching banshee, so I moved to the quieter iBook.

I got my iBook in college (beginning of 2002) and spent a year of working off the loan for it. In September 2003 I thought it had died, so I convinced myself to buy a shiney, new 15″ Aluminum Powerbook (1.25GHz). It turned out I had only fried the power adapter, but my iBook would freeze whenever I slightly warped the case and the LCD screen’s backlight wouldn’t always turn on. There were problems with that model, and Apple had extended the warranty for it. Before the warranty was extended, I took it apart and canibalized the hard drive. I tossed around the idea of installing it in my car as a GPS/MP3/Kitchen Sink device, but it never materialized, since cleanly installing a computer would involve mucking around with the ignition and I just didn’t feel like accidently disabling my car.

Specs:
12″ iBook (Late 2001 Model)
500MHz G3
100MHz Bus
256MB RAM (May be upgrading to 640 soon)
20GB HDD @ 4200RPM (Will be putting my Athlon’s HDD in external Firewire enclosures to add on to iBook)

What’s great about the iBook is:
1.) It’s quiet. In fact, when the hard drive is spun down (in power save mode) it makes no noise whatsoever.
2.) It’s slim. It fits neatly on the top shelf on my desk under my network switch and Airport base station.
3.) It’s simple. Setting up the website and MovableType was a snap.

Speaking of configuring Mac OS X, it seems like I’m always finding something new and cool on Mac OS X that you just don’t find on Windows. A while ago, I discovered the Quartz Composer, which lets you generate 2-D and 3-D graphics using a simple, flow-chart-style programming language. It even accepts real-time inputs. Works great for VJ apps.

On Mac OS X Tiger, you can set up MovableType to use the Core Data framework to store its database information. Core Data impelements SQLite, a fully relational database system. Instead of running a massive database server, the SQLite runtime is linked by the application that uses it, thus becoming “part” of the application.

Neat!

Technical Difficulties - Movable Type 3.2 and SELinux

If you’re sick of people blogging about their blogs, then skip this one. I know I am.

Welcome!

Welcome to my new and exciting Blog! I have an existing blog at Livejournal and I will import all of the old LJ entries into this blog. My old LJ blog was mainly a place to keep my midwest firends up to date on what was going on here in the DC area. Hopefully, now that I’ve moved to my very own server, I can expand beyond that role.