How to glue adhere

Posted by rae in the Net
at 7:39 pm on Saturday, 29 October 2005

Had to share this one. I ran into this by way of Fabulous Adventures in Coding, a blog by one of ths guys working on the VBScript/VB/whatever team at Microsoft.

This to That tells you what glue to use to bind two materials together. Here’s the list of materials:

Ceramic Fabric Glass Leather
Metal Paper Plastic Rubber
Styrofoam Vinyl Wood

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I’m here…

Posted by rae in Reid
at 12:28 am on Tuesday, 25 October 2005

So I wiled away the time at Pittsburgh airport by buying Greg Bear’s “Dead Lines”. I managed to leave my ticket on the plane and it turned out I needed it for the connecting flight. Fortunately, the US Air people took pity on me and printed out a new one. Apparently doing this would have been tons easier had I had an e-ticket, but mine was a plain old paper one.

I’m at the hotel now, the Courtyard Merriot, and they have free internet terminals here, from which I am typing this very entry. :-)

Instead of paying for a taxi I actually took BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to Montgomery Station and walked down Second Street to the hotel. All in all, it worked out quite well and cost 1/3 of a taxi fare. I took some pictures, too, which I’ll post when I get back. One psychedelic tunnel in particular.

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I’m off to San Fransisco

Posted by rae in General
at 10:45 am on Monday, 24 October 2005

As most of you know, I’m off to San Fransisco for a couple of days. This time (unlike my WWDC trip in June) the weather looks to be a lot warmer there than here.

I’m bringing magazines and books to fill in that 2.5 hour stopver gap in Pittsburgh.

*sigh

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Off to San Fransisco .. by way of Pittsburgh

Posted by rae in Reid, work
at 11:47 am on Friday, 21 October 2005

I’m flying to San Fransisco next week for a job interview. This is good.

On the way there I have a 2½ hour stopover in Pittsburgh. Not so good.

I don’t have a laptop, so what do I do for 2½ hours in Pittsburgh International Airport? I did a quick Google for comic stores nearby.

Guess not. I got similar results searching for “computer” and “electronics”. So, I guess I should bring along reading material. :-)

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TV Shows

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 1:43 pm on Friday, 14 October 2005

Here’s a rundown of TV shows. Ratings are from 1 to 5 (1 being bad, 5 being good).

SHOW - RATING
Description
Afterlife - 3
Kind of a British version of “Medium”. On my wait-and-see list.
Arrested Development - 1.5
Rich family goes broke, only sensible one is a son. Watched first ep, not sure; but Mark seems to like it somebody (who is not Mark) recommended it.
Battlestar Galactica - 4.99
Currently the best show on TV. A new, “realistic” take on an old show from the 1970s
Bones - 3.5
Archeological Anthropologist helps solve crime.
Close to Home - 3
Lady lawyer brings down bad guys. Oh, and she’s a very recent first-time Mom.
Commander in Chief - 4
Geena Davis becomes President of the US. Also has Donald Sutherland. I’m really liking this.
Cuts - 2
Barber shop show.
Extras - 3
Extras in movies try to be more; has the definite angst factor common to “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, which I personally do not like.
Firefly - 4
It’s the series the movie “Serenity” is based on. I’m up to episode 5 and it’s pretty good so far.
Greys Anatomy - 4.5
I can’t get enough. And that Sandrah, oh!
House - 4.5
Diagnostic wizard finds out what’s ailing people; Hugh Laurie makes this whole show
How I Met Your Mother - 3
Sitcom about a guy meeting a girl.
Inconceivable - 2.5
I enjoyed the first episode, but can tell I won’t like the second one.
Invasion - 2.5
.. of the Body Snatchers. No, really, that’s about all it is.
Killer Instinct - 3.5
Cop newly rejoins the force and solved bizarre murders with his sexy female partner.
Line of Fire - 4
BBC police show. Not sure why, but I really like it!
Medium - 4
Psychic mom helps DA solve crimes
My Name Is Earl - 3.5
Bad boy tries to make good every wrong he’s done after winning a lottery
Numb3rs - 3, down from season 1’s 4.5 rating
Mathematician helps the FBI solve crime. But this season it’s not real math, it’s hand-waving crap.
Out of Practice - 3.5
Sitcom. Marriage counsellor needs help from his wacky family when his own marriage fails. Has henry Winkler and guy from Odyssey 5 and Jake 2.0
Point Pleasant - 3
Mystery girl shows up in beach town. First one seemed interesting. On wait and see list.
Robot Chicken - 4
Anthology of humourous skits done in stop-motion animation using old toys and just about anything else. A Seth Green production.
Rome - 4.5
Julius Caesar storms Rome!
Smallville - 4.5
Clark Kent grows up. This season looks to be the best, and they claim that it is also the last, so we can hope for fun stuff.
Stargate Atlantis - 4
With SG-1’s downturn, this has become my preferred Stargate show.
Stargate SG-1 - 3
I’m sorry, but whats-his-name from Farscape just doesn’t cut it. And the whole “Ori” (Ore-eye?) plot is tiresome.
The 4400 - 4.5
What happened to the 4,400 people who came out of the UFOs in Close Encounters? Or something like that.
Threshold - 3
Alien invasion from a higher dimension. Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek) is in it.
Twins - 2.5
Sitcom. Smart and slick Darlene from Roseanne runs a company with her bimbo blonde twin sister. Fraternal twin, obviously.
Veronica Mars - 4.5
Investigative high-school daughter of the town’s ex-Sheriff gets to the bottom of everything. Excellent show.

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Ronnie’s PC upgraded

Posted by rae in family, hardware, software
at 5:19 pm on Thursday, 13 October 2005

Ronnie has a much more powerful PC now, with an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ for a CPU. I basically switched machines between Ronnie and the Media Box, which hasn’t managed to be one. New games we’ve bought recently (Empire Earth 2, Lord of the Rings, Black and White 2) were unable to play on Ronnie’s old PC because the CPU was only 700 MHz, and they demanded 1.5 GHz. Egad.

The good news is that even with the slower CPU, the Media Box could theoretically still function. Indeed, it may be easier to set up because the hardware is older. Linux installs mellow with hardware age, you see.

I am going to put it back together this weekend and try installing Ubuntu and then see if Myth TV will install nicely on that OS. I may have to use the CVS version of Myth, but I’ve actually been wanting to do that so I can contribute.

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Signed up with DreamHost

Posted by rae in Reid, friends, software, web site
at 9:41 am on Friday, 7 October 2005

So last night Jeff and I both signed up for DreamHost.com hosting. In the short term, I’m going to move Luisa’s uclbs.org site over to it. In the long term, it’s a good place to experiment with Rails (they support it), and possibly hosting tnir.org and its many subdomained blogs (they support WordPress). Overall after examining the site, they seem to be a good company. For now, anyway.

Oh, they give you URLs to use such that, if anyone signs up through them you get a kickback. I’ve used mine in this posting, so heh heh heh, I am waiting for the millions to roll in..

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Autodesk Acquires Alias

Posted by rae in software, work
at 2:56 am on Wednesday, 5 October 2005

Yikes! Slashdot is reporting that Autodesk is acquiring Alias. There’s lots of doom and gloom about Autodesk killing off Maya etc.

Egad, I’m totally taken aback. One member of the Sketch/Maya team left Alias to work at AutoDesk back in the mid-90’s. I wonder if James is still there?

Comments on the story point out links on Wikipedia to Alias’ history and Autodesk’s.

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Kal-El Cage

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 2:16 pm on Tuesday, 4 October 2005

LOS ANGELES Oct 3, 2005 — Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage is a new father.

His wife, Alice Kim Cage, gave birth Monday to a boy, Kal-el Coppola Cage, in New York City

Bwah-ha-hahhhahahahahahahh…

In further news, Nicolas announced he was changing his name to “Jor-El Cage”.

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Domain renewals.. again

Posted by rae in the Net, web site
at 1:01 pm on Tuesday, 4 October 2005

It’s time to renew some domains. Specifically, tnir.org and gmone.org. Last time I switched them over from register.com to dotster.com because dotster was way cheaper.

Now that I go to renew, their price looks pretty good. $15 for one year, or $14/yr for two years, or $13.60/yr for 5 years. But then I notice that DNS management is separate.

DNS management is the web page where you type in that “tnir.org” should porint to the IP address “66.11.182.45″. Ideally your ISP (who supplies your IP address) has a page somewhere that lets you say that “66.11.182.45″ points to “tnir.org” too, but that’s another story (although it shouldn’t be!).

So dotster charges $10/yr for DNS management. So their price is basically $25/yr now. *sigh.

Can anyone recommend another place? I’ll go see what it costs to use lowcostdomains.ca. They say it’s $22/yr (Canadian!), which is pretty good. Not sure if that includes DNS management though. I *think* it does.

[...]

Looks like it’s lowcostdomains. And ya, I checked, and the $22/yr includes DNS management. They call it “parking” the domain. I briefly looked at DreamHost, because they are all up on Rails and stuff, and I could actually move all my files there since they allow 4.8 Gigs of space. But they are $8/month, which is $96/yr US.

Yikes.

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