Category: Stuff

Berkeley Breathed, author of the classic Bloom County and Outland comics is returning to the funny pages at the end of November, 2003. The strip will be called “Opus” and will run in the Washington Post on Sundays only.

It will also run at a the size half a newspaper page, which is really cool. Breathed and other cartoonists have talked about the sad state of newspaper comics in terms of both size and content. Some of comments on Slashdot suggested that Breathed do a Web comic strip. I hope not. Computer screens have gotten less painful to look at in the last decade or so but they still can’t match the resolution, portability and affordability of newsprint.

I often thumb through a Bloom County collection late at night. I find it much more enjoyable than trying to absorb pages of prose before bedtime. Still – As much as I love the characters, worlds, and ideas that Breathed has brought to life in his work, I wonder if the new strip will be as fresh as Bloom County. I really enjoyed Outland but some of the jokes and the themes were recycled from older strips. But anyway that’s a small quibble. I’d take Berkeley Breathed’s recycled ideas over most cartoonist’s fresh ones.

Some of my favorite comics:

Too Much Coffee Man
Red Meat
P.S. Mueller
Zippy the Pinhead
The K Cronicles and (th)ink

If you’re in the Boston area and you’re in the mood for some great ribs, head over to Tennessee’s BBQ. Try the Memphis ribs. Trust me, it’s a spiritual experience 🙂

Wednesday I’m heading out to OSCOM 3. It’s a conference on open source content management systems in Cambridge, MA. One of the workshops I’m looking forward to is called “Building a CMS Client With Mozilla”.

I really admire the music of David Grisman, Bill Monroe, The Jazz Mandolin Project, etc. and I’m fan of the subtle sound of the mandloin. So I bought myself a cheapo instrument and I’m learning to play. It’s uphill work with me having no musical experience except as a listener. My fingers don’t want to move that way. But slowly I’m getting something that sounds like it might grow up to be music one day.

If anyone can point me to resources (web sites, books, tapes) that are helpful for a beginner, I’d be grateful.

Mambo Sinuendo by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galbán: This is the kind of album that I often look for when selecting music to fit the mood I’m in. The groovin’, swingin’ and sometimes muted tunes don’t demand your full attention – they can float by themselves in the background. Click the link above and listen to some samples.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no life. Thankfully I have access to a large selection of products designed to solve this complex problem. Most of these solutions are “digital” in nature.

Apple Computer’s iLife suite of products helps me effortlessly manage my “digital lifestyle”. AT&T’s mLife let’s me be mobile on my own terms. Their advertisement tells me that “we are meant to lead a truly wireless life“. They promise me “more minutes than ever before”. I’m not quite sure what that means but it sure sounds exciting! Sign me up!

Of course these products would be meaningless without a support system to guide my transition to digital Nirvana. Luckily my good friends at T-Mobile prompt me to “get more out of life”. And thanks to interventions by the kind folks at Verizon Wireless, I’m making progress every day.

I’ve been building a new computer over the past few days. I had read Asa Dotzler’s experiences with Red Hat Linux 8.0 and I was looking forward to trying it out myself.

After a little over a year using Mac OS X, my life has been relatively free of compiling drivers and kernels and dependency hell. And wow! The Red Hat install went very quickly and seemed to detect all of my hardware.

The Redhat desktop came up and I tried to play a wav file. Silence. I tried bringing up the Volume app and I saw an error message that complained about a problem with the sound driver. I opened the Sound preferences and it listed my sound card with the correct kernel module loaded, but I heard nothing when I tried to play the sample sound.

So a Google search lead me to a few discussions that suggested the drivers from the ALSA Project. Ah! This is the Linux I remember. Configure. Make. Make install. After about 15 minutes I had the ALSA drivers installed, but still no sound. But there were no error messages in /var/log/messages and the volume app worked.

After 20 minutes of combing message boards, checking my modules.conf file, and more dithering, I looked at the back of the machine and noticed that I hadn’t plugged the speakers into the sound card. Oops!