Category: Weblog

Chain

Sean Bonner posted some sort of chain email/post thingie, what the hell:
1. What is your full name? Michael August Pusateri
2. What color pants are you wearing? Tan
3. What are you listening to right now? People talking outside my office
4. What was the last thing you ate? Melted cheese on chips
5. Do you wish on stars? No.
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Forest Green
7. How is the weather right now? Cool & clear, not cold.
8. Last person you spoke to on the phone? My wife
9. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yes
10. How old are you today? 37
11. Favorite drink? Orange Bang
12. Favorite sports? Baseball
13. Hair color? Black
14. Do you wear contacts? Yes
15. Siblings? Matthew
16. Favorite month? July
17. Favorite food? Italian
18. What was the last movie you watched? Hellboy
19. Favorite day of the year? My birthday
20. What do you do to vent anger? Curse
21. What was your favorite toy as a child? The chemistry set
22. Summer or winter? When the leaves turn in autumn and green appears in spring
23. Hugs or kisses? Hugs
24. Chocolate or Vanilla? Dark chocolate
25. Do you want your friends to email you back? Yes
26. Who is most likely to respond? My brother
27. Who is least likely to respond? My wife
28. Living arrangements? Home with wife, daughters, toad & fish
29. When was the last time you cried? When Columbia was destroyed
30. What is under your bed? Dust bunnies
31. Who is the friend you have had the longest? My fraternity brothers
32. What did you do last night? Blogged and played World of Warcraft
33. Favorite smell? Tie between clove cigarettes and baking bread
34. What inspires you? People liking what I do
35. What are you afraid of? Heights
36. Plain, buttered or salted popcorn? Light butter
37. Favorite car? Not a big car guy, but a 60s Mustang Convertible would be nice
38. Favorite Flower? Orchid
39. Number of keys on your key ring? Two, one for home, one for work
40. How many years at your current job? Coming up on 10 years
41. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
42. What did you do on your last birthday? Quiet dinner with my family
43. How many states have you lived in? 2
44. Have many cities have you lived in? 3

Omni Magazine

Back in the 1970s, Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse Magazine launched a new magazine called Omni. Omni was devoted to science, the paranormal, sci-fi/fantasy stories, and technology in general. My parents would pick up copies regularly and so they became fundamental objects in my childhood.
Omni Magazine was the Wired Magazine of the 70s & 80s. Everyone from Nobel Prize winners to UFO crackpots were interviewed. News of new and fascinating inventions and ideas were a regular part of the magazine.
Recently I thought about a story I read in Omni at this time and wondered what ever happened to the magazine. I did a quick search on ebay and was happy to find plenty of copies.
I bought the 12 issues from 1982, my last year of junior high school, when I was intrigued with computers, BBSs, girls, and the science in general.


As I flipped through the pages, the old neurons flickered to life as I recalled many of the images and stories as if it was only yesterday when I last saw them.
The fiction is from well known authors such as Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Greg Bear, Isaac Asimov, Fredrick Pohl, Dan Simmons, Frank Herbert, and Ben Bova. Hell, the July 1982 issue has Burning Chrome by William Gibson in it. Omni Magazine was THE place for the launch of the internet age. The same people that were cobbling together usenet, the internet and building BBSs were reading Omni Magazine every month.

Here’s and ad for the revolutionary service, Compuserve. Twenty-three years ago, they were trying to reel in customers with promises of online finance, travel info, games, and images. Not much different from what AOL offers today. In some ways the world hasn’t changed much.

The funniest part of the magazines is looking at the ads. Ads for booze, cars, and cigarettes are bascially the same as today. But the technology ads are blast. Seeing the IBM ads for their computers starring their the Charlie Chaplin lookalike are incredibly dated.
Check out the ad above about the Panasonic knockoff of the Sony Walkman. It should be a reminder to the iPods fantatics as to what lives ahead for Apple’s current hit product. Back in the early 80s, the Sony Walkman was the defacto standard for personal audio, bouyed by Sony reputation and great product, but as the market matured, Sony any semblance of an edge and personal audio player were completely commoditized, made by the cheapest vendor.
It won’t take long for the iPod’s currently huge marketshare to drop once the the inevitable market forces (and the Walmart factor) take hold. Seeing the ads for Betamaxes, cassette players, and cordless home phones remind me that whatever today’s hot tech items are, they’ll be on sale for $20 in a few years at the local discount mart.
Back to Omni, I’m glad I took the time to look into the past. Once I’ve read the fiction, I’ll probably put the magazines back up on ebay for someone else to read.

Daytripping

In about a hour I’ll get in a car, head to the airport, fly to New York, arrive at 6:30 AM, wait for a meeting that runs 9-6, get back on a plane and fly back to LA, arrving at Midnight.
There is a meeting I ‘must’ attend, or so I am told. I fear it will be powerpoint hell.
Modern business travel is amazing, silly, and tiring all at the same time.

Speed up Firefox

A fraternity brother sent me this tip. It may be old news, but for me, it worked great to speed up the already fast Firefox browser if you have broadband.
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
Sites that loaded slowly in the past pop up quickly now.

Off-air

Here you can see HDTV being recieved the way it was meant to be, with rabbit ears antenna.


Yes, the picture that good.
Yes, regular TV sucks in compairison.
Yes, I’ll have more to say once I get the DirecTV HD setup running.

Oops



In a sling, originally uploaded by Argyle.

Zoe slipped a fell on the sidewalk. Looks like a minor fracture in her forearm. We’ll know more tomorrow when she goes to the ortho doctor.

Always look on the bright side

My brother Matt, who quit his weblog last year, made a nice little “Post-Inaugural e-greeting…”

Hi all…
Ok, so this started out as my holiday e-greeting, but December was
kind of rough for me, so it got bumped to being a “New Years”
e-greeting, but that didn’t happen either… So I ultimately turned
this into my post-Inaugural-blues e-greeting…
https://mattmedia.net/bright.html
Hope you get a smile out of it… Feel free to pass it along to any
bitter, jaded, or depressed progressives out there…
Best wishes…
– Matt

Take a look and I’m sure you’ll get a laugh out of it.

Inaugural

I would have preferred that the President took a cue from his predcessors.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Woke up to a war

I turned on the computer today and an instant message popped up to tell me I was the center of a war.
Now, my mother likes to see my name in print, but this is a little silly. We make decisions to switch vendors all the time with no fanfare. Those deals are hundreds of thousands of dollars and nary a peep.
We make a change where the cost is less than I spend on soda pop for the office and it’s a war. I don’t think so.
The point isn’t what software we are using, but can we get people to use wikis at work? I tell ya folks, it ain’t easy to wean people off of email…