It turns out my favorite band is OMD. I know this because of some interesting behavior I’ve noticed about my iPod usage.
I mainly use my iPod on my drive to and from work five days a week. On average my commute time is an hour each way. I am usually sitting there with my hand on my ipod (in the seat next to me).
I have two playlists, No Classical and No TMBG. The no classical playlist is every song I have except my classical music. The no TMBG playlist is all of my music except the classical and my They Might Be Giants library. I have so much TMBG music that it’ll be easy for me hear three or four songs in a row of TMBG music without any other band in there. This is my usual playlist because most of the time I just don’t want to hear that much TMBG.
I listen to these playlists on shuffle. But during playback I’ll forward thru a song as soon as I remember it and have determined that I don’t want to listen it. This happens all the time. Except for one band. Whenever I hear the start of an Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark song I take my hand off the iPod and sit back (and usually sing along). One of my earliest memories is seeing OMD on American Bandstand on TV. It was a real fluke to see them play as I never watched that show regularly. Below is the last remaining bit of an OMD tee shirt that my sister gave to me.

Yesterday I went to VCF 8.0. I had a lot of fun. I sat thru three presentations. The first one was a presentation called The Future of Pinball. I thought it was a odd title for a presentation at the Vintage Computer festival. But a few minutes into the movie I realized that the documentary was about a product of Williams Pinball called Pinball 2000 which was suppose to take pinball into the 21st century. Overall I give the movie a thumbs up. The producer is looking for a television deal and will produce DVDs soon after.

Next I watched the Homebrew Computer Club 30th anniversary retrospective. It consisted of a panel of former members. The only celebrity was Steve Wozniak. Woz told a funny joke. People spoke of what the club exterience was like. Overall, a lot of fun. I was glad it ran long.

Then I watched Sellam Ismail’s Q&A/Show & Tell session. He was entertaining as usual.

After that I went thru the Computer History Museum’s Computer Chess exhibit. A very nice display of artifacts, plus multimedia explanations of everything. Here is what really caught my eye:

I noticed the Color Computer ROM Pak of Chess produced by Radio Shack. It was nice to see my favorite computer represented in such an exhibit.

Then I wandered upstairs to view the exhibits. The only thing that really caught my eye was the TTL CPU. That really geeked me out. He had a wonderful LED display of the current internal state of the CPU — a real blur of flashing lights.

I bought my car in the year 2002. It is a Kia Rio. A small car with good gas mileage. Most of my coworkers chided me on the fact that I got the car without any accessories. Heck, it doesn’t even have a clock.
Needless to say the car came with no radio. That was fine with me. I got used to not listening to anything while driving. I did that for a full year. But then I got an iPod as a Christmas gift. Now I wanted to listen to my iPod while driving. I discovered that my car did come with speakers.
So I opened up the center console and found the wiring harness that included sound and power for the un-installed radio. To hook my iPod to my car all I needed was an amplifier. But I could not find one that would fit in the space of a standard car radio. It seems most people want big, powerful amplifiers that are usually installed in the truck. Another aspect of modern amplifiers is that they are very pretty, using shiny metal and interesting shapes. All unnecessary for my purposes.
So after searching the internet I found a kit 12-volt amplifier that was tiny. Featuring 22 watts I figured it was more than powerful enough for my application.
In place of a radio my car came with a blank faceplate. I drilled some holes in this face plate for an on/off switch and a pair of phono plugs. I also got the correct corresponding wiring harness to connect the new amplifier to the car’s power and speaker connections. The final bit was a noisy reducer from Radio Shack.
Now I plug my iPod directly into my car and listen to my tunes wherever I go.

Over on MacSlash.org I saw an article saying people were not allowed to use the word mac with google adwords. This is prolly due to the fact that Estée Lauder has a trademark on the word mac. They have a product line called M•A•C.

The silly part is if you google the word mac, the ads you get are for cosmetics, but the search results are entirely for Macintosh stuff. This must piss off Estée Lauder tremendously.

The funny part is a paid ad (above the search results) for the iPod. Paid for by Apple itself. It seems Apple can publish ads under the mac adword because is also has a trademark for the word mac.

Movie review!
I think this is one of the best kid’s movies that an adult can watch. The crude jokes are funny, and the over-the-head-of-the-children jokes are even funnier.

Last week I sent a personal job off to a screen printer. Tee shirts for my wife’s church. The next day my wife called me to tell me there was a problem.
I called up Armond and he promptly told me that I forgot to send the fonts. At first I denied it, But then realized that he was correct.
There is much shame in the lindner house.

Well, It turned out I was half right.

My first big question was what endian the new Mac will be. This was answered by reading Apple’s developer documentation. The new Macs will be little endian. Hmm, has any other platform in the history of computer operating systems supported both endians? How about NeXT and NT. But we know what happened to both of those operating systems. NeXT became Mac OS X and NT dropped support for the PPC.

My second question was how will Apple keep people from installing retail boxes of Mac OS X on non Macintosh computers? The line item in the license that prohibits users from doing this is completely unenforceable. Technically, Apple could use some secret chip in their Intel Macs to keep the OS from running on white boxes. But I’ve learned a lot by writing emulation software recently and I know Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Windows and other x86 virtualization environments will quickly come up with ways to make the OS think it is running on a real Macintosh. Apple can not stop this thru legal means.

This means Apple’s hardware business will die. I give it three more years. In other words, a year after the first Intel Macintoshes are produced virtualization software will negate the need for me to buy a Macintosh from Apple.

Since I like Mac OS X, I hope it won’t die along with Apple’s hardware business.

I just finished reading John Grubers latest article on the Apple/Intel story. I pretty much agree with what he is saying. It boils down to: “Whaa?”. But what if Apple used an Intel coprocessor? Either an entire x86 or some new chip in addition to the main PowerPC.

Managing fonts on Mac OS X is hard. Much harder that it needs to be. By default there are three folders where fonts can reside. I am angry that Adobe decided to add additional font folders. These new font folders (one in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts and on in each application folder for InDesign and Illustrator) are only used by Adobe application. The system will never look into these folders to allow other application access to these fonts.
The only reason Adobe created these folders is greed.

On my way to work today, I saw a billboard that said (in really large letters): Fixing Email. Not just a job, but a passion.
I’ve been running an email server on the internet for five years. I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason spam is such a problem is because email it easy and cheap to send email. So stopping spam (at it’s source) can only be accomplished by making email hard and expensive to send. I believe that is the wrong approach.
I use bayesian classification to filter my email on my machine. I have a 99.93% success rate. The specific product is PopFile and I am here to tell you it works very well.