man, I’m old

I just realized a few months ago that Usagi Yojimbo has been in print for 20 years. I’ve been reading it for about 15 of those 20 years. For all those years, Stan has managed to come up with compelling stories, believable characters, and a beautifully rendered world.

the most recent story arc has to do with Usagi and his “nephew” Jotaro. It’s been developing for years and finally came to a conclusion. I have to say I almost cried. This is the first story I’ve read in comics that has prompted such an emotional reaction from me. If you want to find out why, head over to your local comics shop (most big retailers don’t carry the monthly book), and pick up as much of the long-eared ronin as you can. You won’t be sorry.

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getting tired of /.

I started reading slashdot back in ’97. In those days, it was *the* source for tech news. Most of the articles posted were of a really techie nature, and the discussion threads almost always had some nice tidbits to pick up. These days, it’s pretty much flamewars and lame comments.

Feeling the need to better fuel my geek obsessions, I’ve been looking for new places to hang out and get my news. The first place that shows promise is Kuro5hin.org. Apparently it’s run by former /. readers and tries to keep the spirit of what /. used to be about. It is more literate, and the posts are fun again.

Then, this morning, my friend sends me a link to engadget.com. It’s exactly the sort of thing that appeals to me, and just what I needed at this point in my geekiness 🙂

Anyway, life with a little less /. should be good, right?

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potty training

okay, this is a rant.
<rant>
I really don’t understand why grown, seemingly intelligent people urinate all over the toilet seat and fail to clean up their own mess. Public areas I might understand, since there’s typically not a set group of people that frequent them. However, in a corporate setting, it is simply without explanation.

I mean, really! One spends a significant amount of time in the workplace. Do people only go to the bathroom once per day? Do they think that it’s going to be magically cleaned up for them before they have to go to the bathroom later in the day? Is there such a fear of contact with the toilet seat that it’s unthinkable to raise the seat? Have people not been taught how to wipe up their piss from the toilet seat? What gives?

If someone came to your house and peed all over your toilet seat and didn’t clean it up, you’d be really upset, right? So then why would otherwise intelligent people find it perfectly acceptable to make a mess of the bathroom that they visit probably as frequently as the one in their homes?

Okay, maybe it’s just one person spoiling it for everyone, but then why is it like this in almost every office I’ve ever been in?

What am I missing here?
</rant>

Okay, got that off my chest. Better now.

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low-level fun…

Man, this is great! I’ve started writing some programs for an embedded microcontroller at work. It has a row of 8 LEDs, so of course, I had to make them light up in the fashion of KITT from Knight Rider. Proving once again that Germans love David Hasselhoff. Man, this is so cool! Haha! A coworker just reminded me: it looks like a Cylon‘s eye, too!
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losing what I lost

dang! After a weekend of having a picnic, and a birthday party, I seem to have gained the girth back. My pants are a bit tight about the waist. 🙁 Oh well. At least I’m eating better now. Hopefully over time, the reduction and normalization of my eating habits will lead to a decline in weight.

Oh yeah, got a haircut this weekend. I let A2C try her “hand” at it. She did a really good job of it, but I think it’s a little too short in the front. Oh well, I’m sure next time will be better 😉

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waiting in vain

D’oh! Due to a minor error on the part of the sender, my Soekris box has not arrived yet. The flach card and PCMCIA – CF adapter arrived today, but they’re useless without the box. Well, actually, I can create my OpenBSD distribution so it’s ready when the box does arrive. Well, it’s home I go, then!

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getting around to things…

Probably about 11 years ago, my french professor told me I should read Vonnegut. She said I’d probably enjoy his dark humor. Well, today, I finally picked up a copy of Slaughter-house Five. I read the first page or two, and it seems really interesting so far.
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insomnia

Well, I stayed up too late, and now, I’m just up. Can’t sleep, but my body is really tired. Grrr…
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maximum suckage

That’s the last time I buy a Canon scanner. Doesn’t even have TWAIN drivers. I mean, HELLO! Canon? yeah, the early nineties called and they want you to start using their technology.

I was working on a slideshow for a wedding, and I needed to scan handwriting for the title screen. So, I plugged in my old Canon N1220U to my WinXP box. didn’t work. Well, served me right. I had turned my old WinXP box into a linux box, and turned my Win98 box into my main WinXP box (follow that?). Anyway, silly me thought that a plug-N-Play USB scanner that worked on my other Windows system should work just fine on the new Windows system: I mean, a driver’s a driver, right? Hmmmm, apparently not.
So then I decided to give the scanner a try on my Powerbook. No go. None of the built-in apps recongnize it. Hmm, okay, so I direct my trusty browser over to the Canon site to get the latest drivers. They claim to support it under OSX, but get this, it ONLY WORKS WITH PHOTOSHOP. Device driver??? Sounds like a PS plugin to me. Anyway, so I even tried a few other things like VueScan. no go. It recognized the scanner, but couldn’t open it, and when it did, the app froze. Grrr…

By this time, it was getting late, and I needed to finish this thing rather quickly. So, I go to Best Buy and grab the Canon LiDE-30, thinking, well, I like the quality of the images from the Canon, maybe the newer ones have better support (a quick check on their site reveals that it’s designed to work with OSX). So, I get this scanner back home and install the software. Um, worst. software. ever. It’s some god-awful ugly app that looks like a bad imitation of OSX 10.0, complete with gaudy pinstripes and everything. And, guess what? It STILL doesn’t work with the built-in capture software in OSX. Yeesh.

Okay, whatever, at least now I can scan the photos. Get the project done, but now I have 2 scanners, neither of which I’m completely happy with. Well, at least I’m getting a $30 rebate on the new one.
So, a few months later, and I’m messing around on my Powerbook, and I happen to look at the system profiler. It has a function that lists log entries. for some reason, the console log is taking FOREVER to load up. Once it’s done, it reveals that the log file is 29.5 MB That’s MEGABYTES. What the hey? So I look at the file, and it’s line after line of

Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718

So, I do a quick google on this log message, and lo and behold, I’m not the only one! Apparently, the scanner starts 2 processes that continuously poll for the scanner. When they don’t find it, they log a message to the console log. Oy Vey.

That’s the last time I buy a Canon scanner.
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