Ron's Log

You Thought Mad Cow Was Bad

Lying on the trailer-truck was the dead whale - underbelly exposed with a large elongated tear where the biological gaseous blowout took place. Besides the shocking red bloody mess, large piles of whale intestines and guts were strewn along the road, leaving an unpleasant and ghastly scene for startled residents.

Photos here.

Wirelessly

Okay, boys and girls, we are flying wireless with broadband. We had two issues. First, the cable hardware guys who don't support Airport (although they seemed to try to avoid saying that very clearly) plugged the network cable into the wrong hole on the base station. There's one hole labeled with a sort of a horizontal icon and one with a circular icon. I'm sure some of you know what they are. Fortunately, my iBook could tell that was wrong and told me what to do. Fixed that, then performed the Byzantine ritual to reboot. Voila, I am now able to vomit forth a hundred times as much stuff while sitting out on my warm, dry piazza.

All my Mac friends who I left phone messages with yesterday can now stand down from Orange Alert. One called me to point me to supprt.apple.com which was very helpful. Really guys, when I ask for help that is the sort of basic simple stuff I need. Sometimes when I think I'm drowning, somebody just needs to point out that the brown stuff under my feet is the mud at the bottom.

Broadband

I had been putting off getting cable and broadband because I dreaded dealing with their customer service. Bit the bullet earlier this week and after barking at the rep only a little I got her to drop the BS and talk plain. Today the hardware guys showed up to do the installation. They were fast and as a closing act I had to sign a couple of papers, both of which basically said the same thing: that I had received and agreed to the Time Warner "Cable Modem Subscription Agreement separately provided to me." I hadn't been provided this thing, and the two hardware guys didn't have it, so I called customer service and the first person had never heard of it, bounced me upstairs. They had never heard of it, bounced me over to somebody else. He said he had never heard of it, and insisted there is no such agreement. I didn't make the hardware guys sit through all this, but finally signed and sent them on their way while I continued to annoy customer service.

Besides the imaginary subscription agreement, I think T-W ought to provide their customers with a leetle card with just a leetle bit of info on it. The card might cost 'em about a nickel, but would have saved me several calls just to get basic info from an expensive human being. The card would include the required ritual for turning off the modem and the computer and turning them back on so that a connection can be established. I spent an hour trying to get a connection before calling them and being let in on this secret. It should also point out that the customer's email handle and password are buried on the work order, and that even though it's all printed uppercase, it really should be lowercase. It would be nice if they also told you the addresses of the pop and smtp servers, but they'd probably say you could get that from their web page. Oh! Their web page! Yeah, they should put that on the leetle nickel card too.

I still haven't gotten the airport base station working, but I haven't re-tried it since learning the proper reboot ritual. Right now I'm just connected by wire and experimenting with Safari and the Mail program. Speaking of which, the address book (I think maybe "Address Book" is more proper), is a totally separate program from mail, it seems, and is so complex I smell Microsoft in it. You can get an address in Mail into the Address Book, but it isn't simply and certainly not intuitive. I'm used to my e-mail program (Agent) where I can just right-click an address and one of the options is simply "Add to Address Book." I want that.

And scripts. Am I missing something in scripts? I have only ever a script twice on the iBook. Once I tried importing addresses, the other time I tried to use a script to create a new mail account (the roadrunner one). Both scripts ended with an inscrutable Microsoft-worthy error message and error number along with an offer to edit the script. I decline to edit and it all ends there. Anybody got any insights on why these Apple scripts are not working on my new, not yet very altered iBook?

Palm Desert, really

My recent post entitled Palm Desert would have been more accurately called Rancho Mirage. Sometimes I'm a bit fuzzy on when I've crossed the line. In that earlier post I am in Rancho Mirage, but you can see all of Palm Desert. Today's panorama, though, is definitely all Palm Desert. It's taken not far from the Desert Crossing shopping mall.

I was surprised to discover the Coachella Valley Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in an obscure spot on one corner of the intersection you see in the left part of the photo (Route 111 and Painter's Path). I got the poor quality photo below, but will return with a better camera in better light so you get a better idea.

Car Salesmen

A long, but mostly interesting article at Edmunds.com about an reporter who went to work undercover at two different car dealerships; one high-volume and high-pressure, the other a no-haggle dealer.

IKEA, Starbucks, etc.

Not a defense, but a call to get real guys at v-2 Organisation. I think he just needs to take it one step further and include Wal-Mart...but one difference between Wal-Mart and IKEA and Starbucks is that Wal-Mart has no pretense at being cool. Of course, the other difference is that Wal-Mart is big enough to shake the whole economy, while IKEA and Starbucks are just amusing scamps.

On Our Knees

God bless MJ for pointing out the very genuine website of the Cumming First United Methodist Church at cummingfirst.com. Spirituality that has me growing up on my pants.

Fotolog

Fotolog is just chock-a-block with Brazilian photographers, so much so that it's become a bi-lingual site. Interesting things happen, like the comment on this photo (safe-for-work) which says "So lovelly this pics that I'm growing up on my pants!." I think he means exactly what you think he means. "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just growing up on your pants?"

Getty

Yes, I am still working on those photos from my trip to the Getty Museum. Here's one:

Photobucket

Photobucket is a website that currently allows users to display their photos without charge and without advertising! There is a 100 Mb limit, but that's pretty generous. No telling how long this will last. The creator is either a naive young man who will quickly discover he has opened his doors to a tsunami of images, or a genius who has finally discovered the secret to free, unlimited bandwidth. We hope for the latter.

If you try it out, let me know how it goes.