One of my favorite cereals is Shredded Oats from Barbara’s Bakery. A big 25-oz. box is $3.49 at Trader Joe’s. Take a look at this master race mother and her flawless children on the back of the box.
Are they the products of healthy eating, or some secret engineering project in Aryan genetics?
The Beatles with Neil Aspinall, Murray “The K” Kaufman, and Miami Police Sgt. Buddy Dresner, February 1964
In November, 1964, Capitol Records released a 2-disc LP called The Beatles’ Story. It’s missing from the otherwise excellent series The Beatles: The Capitol Albums. The record was produced by Gary Usher and Roger Christian, both of whom had worked with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
I’ll post each side of The Beatles’ Story separately, taken from a 70’s pressing. The album would have fit on a single disc, and thanks to it being so short, there was plenty of real estate to get an exceptionally good cut on the master. As a result, the sound quality is noticeably dynamic and full.
My home computer is five years old, and mastering videos is painfully slow. So it’s time to give it to The Kiddo and buy something new. Here’s the link to what I ordered. A DELL Inspiron 530, Intel quad-core, for $500.
The only upgrade I took was for 3 GB of 800 MHz memory, instead of 667 MHz. This seems to be a rock-bottom price on a pre-made quad-core system. Take note that I ordered it with Windows XP. I first bought XP literally the day it came out, but I have yet to want Vista; which has been out for over a year, and still has driver problems, as well as placing a significant drag on system speed compared to XP.
If this machine has everything I think it’s supposed to have — DVI (rare for integrated video) and two open PCI slots — I’ll be very pleased. If it has only a VGA connector I can live with that, but I won’t be as pleased. Estimated arrival is in about two weeks. I’ll let you know how it looks and works.
Oh. One more thing. XP works with multi-core processors. For licensing, Microsoft counts the number of processor sockets, not the cores. XP Home supports one processor, and XP Pro supports two processors, regardless of the number of processor cores.
A little ways back I posted a clip from the first Superman movie, with Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor. In that scene his henchman, Otis, played by Ned Beatty, has a black eye. Lex gave it to him earlier in the movie after Otis screwed up a slightly challenging technical assignment.
[flv:/Video/2008/APR/LexLuthor.flv 448 252]
Those numbers may as well be an IP address! I love this scene, and I’m fond of quoting it at work, because it perfectly dramatizes the reality of life in high tech, where support people who are earnestly working hard, and trying to do their job right, nevertheless totally screw it up.
I’m a so-so Dilbert fan, partly because there’s no real drawing involved. Occasionally Scott Adams has a sight gag that’s funny, but overall the effect of the strip’s gags and themes leave me feeling chilly, not warm.
A while back, Scott Adams recovered from an affliction that prevented him from speaking. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is his facial resemblance to Charles Schulz.
Anyway, there’s a Dilbert plug-in that is yet another impressive application of Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash animation. I thought I’d embed it and see how it works.
It’s been a busy day, but it’s done. In a stunning surprise to business people and techies alike, the brash upstart Web logger Dog Rat has acquired Yahoo! They laughed when I started blogging — OK, some cried — but I showed ’em!
