I finally tracked down a cassette tape I have been looking for. It’s the infamous bootleg “208 in Concert” tape from my fifth grade class. The tape had been lurking in my box of cartridges and tapes for my TRS-80 computer.

I tried to make an MP3 file, but ran into some problems. I’ll keep working on it. If nothing else, I believe my friend Todd can get the groove out for me.

I’ll post the MP3 as soon as I get it.

Last night we were treated to a display of the northern lights aka the aurora borealis. Ever since the unusual recent weather on the sun, I have been waiting to see them around the Twin Cities. Last night they finally showed up. They were an intense green, with unusually sharp edges and creases. I wanted to get some photos but I hadn’t spotted them until 10:45. I tried with the digital camera, but the 4 second exposure just wasn’t enough. Annoyingly my camera has a bulb setting, but it requires one to keep the shutter depressed and there is no way to set it with a timer or use the remote in that situation. So if you want photo’s check out SpaceWeather.

There are some natural phenomena that really capture me. The northern lights are one. I can almost hear music when I see them.

There isn’t nearly enough computer related poetry. Here is a recent example I came across while skimming through slashdot comments.

Algorhyme
I think that I shall never see
a graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
is loop-free connectivity.
A tree that must be sure to span
so packet can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least-cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
then bridges find a spanning tree.
Radia Perlman

This is course is a poem about the “Spanning Tree Algorithm.”

Excuse the dust.

I have tried to rebuild most of my missing entries from an RSS feed I had laying around. I didn’t have the dates, so perhaps some are appear out of order, but it’s no big loss. If you are getting 404′s on the main site it’s still being rebuilt. Hopefully, I’ll get it all and running tonight.

I think I’ll have to be more cognizant of backups in the future.

Rebuilding after hosting problem. Test post.

Looks like I lost some stuff. Hopefully I’ll be able to grab it from a local copy of the rss or something.

John Sundman has his whole novel available now for d/l under a Creative Commons license. I have read the first few chapters a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Better than some other books I have read. He has a harrowing account of writing his first book on-line as well.

Also of note Christopher Moore has a web site. I read “Fluke”, over the weekend and liked it quite a bit. Not as much as “Lamb”, but it was still all right.

I finally got around to the Matrix Revolutions. I had read a number of reviews, all uniformly rotten, before going to the movie. So what did I think?

I like it but it sure didn’t reach the heights of the first movie. First my complaints.

There was very little surpise in this movie. The whole train station scene didn’t seem that meaningful and a little drawn out. The dock scene was filled with characters I had very little attachment to.

What did I like?

Seeing old friends.Let’s face it sometimes we keep the franchises going just because we like to see the characters who become like old friends. Seeing the “rain” fight scene. Seeing Neo and Trinity go the surface. Ambiguity at the last scene. Is Neo dead? Will he come back?

What do I wish was better?

I wish the scene with the Oracle had been better. Some surprise explanation of of why Neo has powers outside of the Matrix would have been good.

While I enjoyed the movie I hope they are done.

A long time ago, Jennie, sent me an url for Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup (bookmarklet).

I finally got around to “installing” it and it’s fabulous. I can get all the goodness of amazon with it’s user reviews and what’s related functionality, and be able to borrow the book instead of buying it.

Note: For ramsey county library, I had to change the ‘ISBN’ in the java script to ‘ISBNE’. Then is worked as slick as can be.

On the surface it’s an IDE, but it’s capable of much, much more. I have looked at it several versions and plugins, but frankly I still don’t get it. If you like IDE’s and/or java maybe it’s a nice environment. I like vim and scripts myself. The problem is that it while it’s purported to be a powerful framework it feels much like walking into a house with all the framing done and no walls up. One really great feature is that it’s free and folks who want to spend their money on something other than nifty but expensive tools can make this a real working solution.

Just picked up Sarah McLachlan’s, Afterglow album. I don’t buy much music lately. I rip all my cd’s to MP3 as the music listening I do is on the computer. The annoying this is that everytime you stick this disc into a PC it tries to install software. I didn’t ask it to do that. Then music match my current preferred mp3 ripper doesn’t even seem to recognize it. Thankfully after a little playing I found that itunes and cdparanoia had no problems.

How did I like the album. It’s nice but no home run. I have a thing for moody music sung by moody sounding women.