Project Insomnia

• FON


• Gliffy


• Yahoo! UI Library


• Uninstall WGA Beta

I'm also trying to find time to work with Picasa Web Albums getting my cruise pictures online.

From BBspot's "BBloopers": "Cat Nipped"

We can all sleep safer at night, thanks to the cat patrol.

From the "common cultural reference point re-interpreted into a very different culture" department comes this McDonald's spot from Japan, starring the lovely Ebihara Yuri.

Via a Slashdot link from something else (possibly the Opera 9 story), from A List Apart: In Search of the Holy Grail:

Three columns. One fixed-width sidebar for your navigation, another for, say, your Google Ads or your Flickr photos—and, as in a fancy truffle, a liquid center for the real substance. Its wide applicability in this golden age of blogging, along with its considerable difficulty, is what has earned the layout the title of Holy Grail.

I made a half-assed attempt at adding this to the existing template for the Restaurant Reviews pages, but it... didn't turn out well. I would like to, as the ALA article describes, have one column for my stuff (intra-site links) and the other for ads and blogrolls and whatnot (extra-site). We'll see if I actually get around to making it work. Hell, I haven't even gone back and worked on migrating to WordPress.

SFGate's Jon Carroll writes today about his visit to the Oakland Museum's Disneyland exhibit:

There's a show at the Oakland Museum about the creation and refinement of Disneyland. It's a love letter to kindly Walt Disney, king of product placement and cross promotion, never mentioning his union-busting activities or other right-wing projects, and certainly skipping over the odd pervasiveness of shaking rodent butts in his cartoons, but it's still interesting if you can discount the hagiography.

Interesting to me, anyway. I was growing up in Southern California when Disneyland was being built, and I followed its progress avidly. I examined the schematics; I tried to envision the rides. (Particularly Tomorrowland, because I was a reader of science fiction and tomorrow was my destination. Tomorrow is all of our destinations; it just took wise little Asimoviacs like me to realize it.) I went within a month of its opening.

Jennifer and I went to this exhibit with Alex and Lani a few weeks ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I give it a strong recommendation if you're in the area.

From El Reg: Matrox ships four-panel display card:

Matrox has begun shipping its four-screen graphics adaptor. The part is pitched at back-to-basics PCs that act as display and input terminals for apps running on a server. It expects the device to appeal to trading rooms and other financial institutions that favour multi-screen rigs.

I'm trying to think of how this would fit into our remodeling plans. The new eat-in kitchen will include a built-in desk, which is where Jen's PC will live. I wonder how we could put three additional monitors, limited by the effective length of VGA cabling, to use.

Opera releases version 9, plans marketing campaign:

According to the latest stats from TheCounter.com, the market for web browsers has not changed much in the past few months. Internet Explorer still rules the roost with 86 percent share. Firefox seems to have leveled off at 10 percent after a slow climb, and the Macintosh platform makes its appearance with Safari registering a 2 percent share. The browser that everyone forgets about, Opera, winds up in fourth place with a single percentage point.

Opera is determined to do something about that statistic. Starting with version 8.5, the company made the formerly paid-for (or ad-supported) browser a completely free download. Now, they have just released version 9 of its venerable browser, after a two-month public beta period. Version 9 contains many new features integrated into the browser, yet still manages to be a fairly light download (6.2MB) and doesn't seem to use any more memory than other browsers with fewer features.

I've used and enjoyed Opera since somewhere in the 5.x series. I haven't downloaded version 9 yet but I will within the next couple of days. The changelog for Opera 9 shows the new features, improvements, and fixed bugs from previous versions.

It's a small (4.6MB) download, a quick install, and a painless uninstall should you (however unlikely that may be) find you prefer your current Web browser.

Thanks so much to LadyClayton for showing me the way to Music Videos From the 80's at WorkSafeVideos.com. So far I've watched I Could Be Happy by Altered Images and Obsession by Animotion and I'm currently watching Paranoimia by the Art of Noise featuring Max Headroom. It doesn't get any better than this. I'm totally flashing back to "Video One! with Richard Blade" weekday afternoons on channel 22.

Edit: "Video One" was on channel 9. Some other video show was on channel 22.

Funny story today from West Vancouver, BC, courtesy the AP: A woman came home to find a young bear eating oatmeal in her kitchen. Now it's a cute story and all, but the kicker for me is how the West Vancouver PD resolved it:

Three police officers who went to the home Thursday couldn't get the bear to budge, so authorities let the animal finish its meal.

'The bear didn't appear to be aggressive and wasn't destroying the house, so they just let it do what it was doing and eventually the bear decided to make its way out of the residence and down toward a forested gully,' Skelton said. 'It ended the best it could.'

I have absolutely no doubt that here in the Land of the Free, the bear would have been shot.

The National Entertainment State, 2006 -- The Nation:

Where do Americans get their news and who controls what they consume? Ten years ago, when The Nation first charted a map of the National Entertainment State, four colossal conglomerates spread across the media landscape. Today, that map has significantly changed, because of the rise of new media and a vigorous reform movement, but the old corporate giants still hold most of the cards. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are quickly rising, but are not included in this chart because they do not own--not yet, anyway--the major television networks, which remain Americans' #1 source of news.

The article links to a large PDF chart showing the six major media conglomerates (including Disney) and their various properties.

From El Reg... Satanic Sheffield feline hailed as hero:

A Sheffield cat has been hailed as a hero, because it seems to be able to predict its owner's epileptic fits.

Cat owner Michael Edmonds suffers from complex epilepsy and often has no warning of an impending fit, the BBC reports. However, his cat, which was dumped in a river when it was a kitten (this will be significant later), will sit close to Edmonds and stare at his face just before a fit.

Edmonds's step daughter nominated the cat for the Cats Protection 'cat protector of the year' award. Tee Cee is one of four cats short listed for the title 'Hero Cat'.

When one of us is sick, our cats do seem to take more of an interest; sleeping on our legs or heads more than usual, for example.

Nevertheless, the cat grows a thick coat in the fall and thins its coat in the spring, the better to romp in the sun and not sweat. Or at least, so I learned -- since cats sweat through their paws, the thickness of the coat would seem to have no effect on their internal heat-balancing system. So they thin out their coats to keep their paws dry. There, that makes sense.

This is pretty much what's happening at our house, too. It's a never-ending battle to keep sheets, blankets, pillows, couch cushions, towels in the linen closet, rugs, and the carpet at least somewhat free of huge clumps of cat hair. We brush them, and as Jon says, it really doesn't do much. Yes, it smooths out their coat and probably feels good, but there is just as much hair in the brush the fourth or fifth time through as the first. And then they go lie down and shed some more.

This is why we're going to tear up the the carpets and put in wood floors. At least those can be swept.

I'm fiddling with the layout a bit. Is the sidebar blogroll consisting of RSS links actually workable, or should it be links to the actual blogs? Need to add a link to the mail form, resume and a few other things.

Sure, you could do ipconfig /all, look for the DNS Servers line and type it after ping -t. Sure, if you're a loser! You might as well just wait on your ISP's level-1 tech support line for two or three hours, just to find out that your DSL is down either at the DSLAM or the POP.

Instead, try this:
for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %a in ('ipconfig /all ^| find /i "DNS Servers"') do ping -t %a
(That should be all one line.)

Expanded:

1. ipconfig /all prints the current TCP/IP configuration.


2. ^| pipes the output of the previous command to the next command. See the linked article for why the caret is required before the pipe.


3. find /i searches the following quoted text, case-insensitive.


4. "DNS Servers" is from the output of ipconfig /all.


5. for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %a in takes the output from the previous elements (typically something like DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 64.81.79.2), parses it into tokens delimited by a colon, selects the second token and places the result into the named variable %a.


6. do is the "execute" part of for; whatever command follows is run with the parsed parameters.


7. ping -t sends ICMP ECHO requests to the target IP address; the -t parameter causes the pings to continue until interrupted with Ctrl-C.

All clear? Isn't that better? I'm just saying.

By the way, this is not meant to impugn Speakeasy's most excellent tech support people. Yes, my DSL has flakier than Marie Callender's finest crust for the past few days, but it's not Speakeasy's fault and they're managing the diagnostic/repair process through Covad and AT&T.

Oh, and if you want to put this in a batch file, you'll need to double the percent signs in front of the variable. Like this:
for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %%a in ('ipconfig /all ^| find /i "DNS Servers"') do ping -t %%a

This is (obviously) not me. It does however illustrate how this site and my Project Insomnia endevours in general got their name.