Another Word for Nerd

Playing around with the built-in iSight on the new Mac…

I need to get Photoshop Elements reinstalled so I can do color correction.

UPDATE: For Tony and Dakota: they always called me a square.

UPDATE: (5/06) SBCL now runs natively on Intel-based Macintosh systems.

I upgraded to a 20″ iMac Core Duo (from a 17″ iMac G5) on Thursday night.

I then found out that neither SBCL, CMUCL, nor OpenMCL will run under the “Rosetta” PowerPC emulation facility. I’ve got a half-assed compile of CLISP working, but it fails one of its tests because I’m unable to install GNU libsigsegv (doesn’t compile on OSX/Intel). Tried to bootstrap SBCL with CLISP, but no go. I can use CLISP to bootstrap ABCL, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for.

Out of the commercial Lisp offerings, Lispworks Personal Edition hangs on startup. I’ve not tried Allegro CL yet, because the eval/free version of ACL v8 isn’t out yet…

Yesterday, I bought a Canon Powershot SD550 digital camera.
Today, it won a PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award.

Guess I made a good choice.

As I was stuck at Firestone this morning waiting on a flat tire to be fixed, I had the opportunity to watch The Price Is Right for the first time in about ten years.

Some thoughts:
- It’s just not the same without Rod Roddy being the announcer.
- Some of these people take this show WAY TOO SERIOUSLY
- They give away more cars than they used to
- Bob Barker is an immortal zombie.

This afternoon, we signed papers and completed the sale of our Austin home to my employer as part of my relocation package. There is now nothing tying us to Austin except memories and friends that still live there.

I hoped to have the house sold months ago, but the contractor we hired flaked out on us and was unreliable and undependable. The work took about six months longer than he originally estimated, and I had to hire a friend to finish the kitchen cabinet work despite having paid the first guy to do it.

I enjoyed living in Austin from 1996 to 2005. It’s a nice town. I won’t miss it or the “technology rat race” though. People in Houston are SO MUCH nicer and friendlier, and I’ve yet to see the massive pollution and horrible traffic that everyone seems to associate with living here.

I love hardware emulators!

This is actually running under OSX on my Mac.

$ show cpu

PRIMARY CPU = 00
Active CPUs: 00
Configured CPUs: 00
$ show system
OpenVMS V7.3 on node MOSCOW 18-JAN-2005 19:11:37.56 Uptime 0 00:10:40
Pid Process Name State Pri I/O CPU Page flts Pages
00000201 SWAPPER HIB 16 0 0 00:00:00.48 0 0
00000205 CONFIGURE HIB 8 5 0 00:00:00.17 112 175
00000206 LANACP HIB 13 33 0 00:00:00.47 361 693
00000208 IPCACP HIB 10 6 0 00:00:00.11 99 177
00000209 ERRFMT HIB 8 40 0 00:00:00.42 153 234
0000020B OPCOM HIB 7 46 0 00:00:00.32 268 113
0000020C AUDIT_SERVER HIB 9 130 0 00:00:00.78 476 941
0000020D JOB_CONTROL HIB 10 19 0 00:00:00.28 191 342
0000020E SECURITY_SERVER HIB 10 31 0 00:00:00.54 737 1384
0000020F TP_SERVER HIB 10 47 0 00:00:00.99 205 317
00000210 SYSTEM CUR 7 2749 0 00:00:31.48 7628 445
$

My first “big iron” experience was on a VAX 4000-700A running VMS 5.5-2.
I created the very first usao.edu web site on that system in 1995, using the OSU web server.

I’ve noted my thoughts on the “Intel vs. G5 Boot Time Video” controversy (with links to the videos) over at MacHELP.

Ever notice that some so-called “religions” charge money for their reference materials?
Is it any coincidence that the primary concern of these organizations is profit?

You can get a free Bible, Quran, Book of Mormon, etc. free for the asking.
I’ve never seen someone involved with Scientology offer to give me a copy of “Dianetics” free of charge.

People who want to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech now need to pay money if they want to hear or use the speech in its entirety, as his estate holds the copyright and considers it a profit center.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Dr. King intended.

I’m looking for suggestions on how to be a better photographer. For the longest time, I’ve just used the “take lots of pictures, pick out the few decent ones” method, which is easy with a digital camera and a big enough memory card. However, I want to start learning how to take better pictures from the start, and not just depend on the “Automatic” settings on my camera (a Canon Powershot A300).

The Basic Book of Photography seems to be good; anyone else have recommendations?