Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

To hrj!! Have a great one!

The future isn't like it used to be

Salon.com Books | Back to the future

Staring out of my window in Manhattan's East Village the other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelators. And even in hipster-friendly New York, most people's clothes and hair don't look especially outlandish. From the trusty traffic meters and sturdy blue mailboxes to the iconic yellow taxis and occasional cop on horseback, 21st century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.

(From this post by folkmew.)

I wrote this song [mp3] in late 1998 while my father, who introduced me to science fiction, was dying of cancer, and the new millennium was looking more like a nightmare than a fantasy. Grump -- I think I need to go out for a walk.

Not what I was planning to do today

Spent some time this morning looking at what remains to be done for ABT and realizing that, no, there's no fscking way I can have it done by Monday. And besides, I want the versatility of being able to have a mix of CDROM, CD-Extra, and pure-audio disks on hand. So I fired off an RFQ to proactionmedia.com (they're not open on weekends). Wish there was someplace local that did inkjet printing on CDRs.

After the usual weekend 4-mile walk I stopped by Staples, because I'd seen them on a web search for CD duplicators. What the heck; if they had the DupliQ I might just buy one. No duplicators, but they did have a shiny new HP D5160 that (wonder of wonders) prints on CDs! Apparently somebody's patent has expired, because it used to be an Epson exclusive. Filed the information away for future reference, and headed across the street to Fry's to see whether they had it for less.

It was the same price, $89, but there was somebody there from HP who, in response to my query, said that it worked fine in Linux. HP has been pretty good about Linux printer drivers, while the latest Epson (the R260, successor to the R200 that's been giving me grief lately) is listed as a "paperweight" in the linuxprinting.org database. That clinched it, and I brought it home just in time to spend the next hour trying to find some way of printing a character sheet for the Y.D. Turned out that not only was the Epson suffering from clogged jets, but the cheap print server it's attached to appeared to be hosed (or at least unresponsive, even after a power cycle), and the SMB server on Nova appears to be inaccessible to the Windows machines. Again. GAAAH! And in spite of having what I thought was a reasonably complete set of fresh ink cartridges, I was suddenly reminded that I couldn't find a magenta cartridge the last time I went ink shopping. Guess which one I need. Finally put the page on my keychain drive, hauled it over to the Linux workstation, and printed it on the laser printer.

There are lots of reasons why I do most of my reading on the screen these days, but a well-founded loathing for printers and printing in general, and Windows printing in particular, is right up there.

Still haven't installed the HP -- no useable print server at the moment -- but I'm hopeful. I've never had particularly good luck with HP equipment, but I really like the fact that their ink cartridges include the nozzle assembly, so that even if you haven't used it for months, all you have to do is change the cartridges to get a totally new, clean, print head. Unlike the Epson.

Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing ABT's Makefile to correctly (I hope) write cd-extra (pressed-multi-session) disks, because although it's perfectly feasible to add audio tracks to a CD-ROM, I don't think most of my customers will be amused by 20 minutes of silence on track 1.

OK, I suppose I can reconfigure my old gateway now

gw:~# uptime
 22:26:04 up 366 days,  3:05,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

In the future, I probably ought to reboot the thing once every couple of weeks whether it needs it or not, just to prevent the kind of clock-watching that kept it up past its expiration date this past year. It's still my mail gateway, so I need to keep something in that position for a while. But at least I can now feel free to take it down long enough to repackage it in a smaller box, swap disks with the interim gateway, and so on.