fine whine

I’ve already migrated /ketchup from MT to WP, and now the time has come for this site to kick it up to eleven. Expect a newer, better fine whine by, oh, the year 2011 at the rate I do these things.

Well, I’d like to think that I’m getting pretty decent with the propane grill (thanks again, Scott, Carina and the mysterious benefactor!) as I was able to cook chicken breasts for my parents, grandparents and sister.

That said, though, next time I’ll make an extra one for each of us. And I still think that asparagus can be grilled.

Poison ivy is evil. Jessica’s little blister things are starting to get to be more of a concern. My arms (as I’m sure you want to know) are pretty much back to normal, albeit looking like they were sunburnt and are now peeling.

And in other news, I finally watched Matrix revolutions and have to admit that it wasn’t nearly as horrible as the second one. My expectations were much lower, of course, but overall I thought it was pretty decent.

I broke some Tupperware. I didn’t think that was possible.

I might just have to post some photos of that, for the novelty value, and whatnot, you know.

That, and I don’t have much use otherwise for the camera.

So, faced with poison ivy as Jessica and I have been, we were forced to do what everybody else does. I took digital pictures of our three-leaved friends and watched Jessica rip them out of the ground. She’s not as susceptible to it, after all.

So I watched the Alec Guinness “classic” The man in the white suit (1951, directed by Alexander Mackendrick). It was a truly unique movie. I can’t say that I mean that in a good or bad way, really. It’s just so different as to be only possibly called “unique”. I know not of any other movie about a man seeking to create the perfect fabric, one that repels dirt and cannot be torn or cut without an acetylene torch. That’s just the beginning, though, as our protagonist succeeds halfway through and spends the rest of the movie trying in vain to share his creation with the world. He’s up against merely the capitalists and the workers… hijinks ensue, naturally.

I can only imagine the way they’re going to pitch the eventual remake. If they manage to get the Encyclopedia Britannica people to make a product placement deal again. As such it could be intelligent, as the original made a fair stab. The comedy’s probably as funny as the science is correct: I’m not sure and I don’t want to find out.

Watch it if you want to see something unique, though, pick it up at a nearby library (Blockbuster’s not going to carry it, I’d wager).

Oh, and if you’re reading this, Jessica, that one guy is Michael Gough who did, in fact, play Alfred in the Batman movies. So there.

Don’t get me wrong. Movable Type is a great piece of software, and I’ve enjoyed using it. There are a lot of sites moving away from MT as of late, but their reasons and mine are largely different. Most of them will point out their unwillingness to pay the high license fees Six Apart’s charging (i.e. anything more than free) and the continued close source status of the popular blogging software, but those don’t really bother me. Its lack of custom fields and relative lack of control over comments faze me not.

No, what bothers me about MT and what’s prompting my eventual complete switch to WordPress is MT’s interface. It uses so many buttons, and every one of them an image. With those images come loading times, and extra requests littering my logs. Therein lies my beef with Six Apart; all I want is a clean logfile.

So anyway, I’ve been using Movable type for things other than these entries. I also ran /ketchup, a links blog of sorts meant to consolidate the ten years and hundreds of kilobytes I’ve devoted to bookmarking, “adding to favorites” and hotlisting sites of interest. It was my hope that I’d add a paragraph or two about one of them every day (then, having lapsed badly, every weekday). I made it, fitfully at times, through some seventy or so before stopping altogether. From last fall or so it sat largely dormant, save for the occasional added draft entry and the more-than-occasional spam comment (and a real one or two!) here and there. Until this week.

Today I transitioned it over to WordPress. I’ll sporadically add more interesting links, but at least now I have a clean interface through which to do so.

Oh, and it was a dry run for this. By 2005 I’ll have converted it over, too.

So I have this expensive receiver at the center of my home audio system, right? It’s got lots of inputs, right? Well, it doesn’t have nearly enough optical digital audio inputs, as it seems I now need at least one more. Whatever shall I do? Lower myself to listening to analog audio again?

Pshaw.

Instead, I scoured the web for a toslink splitter. Such things must exist, I insisted, and was proved by the very existence of such a thing. Except… everybody described it as a 1-in, 2-out splitter for sharing one input (e.g. a minidisc player) between two outputs (e.g. a minidisc recorder and a stereo receiver). Shouldn’t it work the other way around, I wondered, and then the question of if anyone had asked that very question before me.

I found scads of four and five source switches, but nothing that merely took two inputs and made them into one. Was I asking too much?

I returned to my scouring. It seemed that across everything Google indexed, be it newsgroup, forum or web page, nothing came up for my search. I was the first to ask such a question. So I asked around, emailing an expensive audio products retailer (no reply), asking jeeves (nothing useful), and even checking in on the ol’ Usenet alt.audio.minidiscs and there, at last, was my answer.

“Yes, as long as only one source is ‘on’ at a time.”

At last! As long as I wasn’t planning to play a PS2 game at the same time as CD, I was fine. I found the most easily obtained specimen, ordered it from Amazon, and have now the pleasure of saying to all the world:

Yes, you can hook two inputs to a toslink splitter and have only one output! Now I will sleep better, having put that earth-shattering issue to rest.

Before embarking on our wondrous bargain hunting expedition yesterday, I dropped by a doctor’s office for probably the first time since starting college. We were looking for an expert opinion on the odd rashes here and there on my arms, and it came in the diagnosis of “probably poison ivy”. With said diagnosis came a prescription for some antibiotics and something else and by the day’s end I was already well on my way to pill popping junkiedom.

Anyway, I have noticed that I have a somewhat odd way of taking pills. I toss them back and snap back my head in a near-theatric gesture reminiscent of tossing back a shot of whiskey, yet always end up with the pills on my tongue. Then I need a chaser of water. It just struck me as odd, really.

Today we went yard and garage saling. Wheee.

Jessica really gets a kick out of that sort of thing, and I have to admit liking finding a bargain, such as I did with a forty dollar benchtop router. I bought it in part to be able to say that I had a router now, which would necessitate the explanation of the difference between woodworking routers and networking routers. We also bought some glass pans for cooking and other sundry items which I no longer remember.

Something I do remember, however, is one householder’s ingenious solution to the cicada problem otherwise plaguing the no-longer-quiet neighborhood. At about two feet off the ground this person had run a piece of tinfoil around the circumference of the trunk, and the cicadas could be seen only under it. Evidently they cannot climb over smooth metal nor can they land on a tree.

We saw them covering just about anything else: concrete geese, car tires, slow moving children and more. And this one house, with the tinfoil, had none on its trees. Why, then, wouldn’t everybody else do the same?

Probably because it looked really funny. Half of me wanted to congratulate the guy for his ingenuity and the other half wondered if clear saran wrap would have the same effect.