In Really Brief!

Since the last update: fires being beaten back. More homes lost. Fires still going. Smoke is largely cleared in downtown. Freedexter corrected me on the issue of the schools being open. San Diego City Schools were/are off all week. Saw Shaolin Soccer last night. It’s absolutely brilliant. BRILLIANTLY funny. I made these for the potluck at work. Also: saw more mice. Leah and I made a kill last night. The humane mousetraps failed. We both feel bad about it, but frankly, the mouse, I mean, mice (we have taken to calling them “The Stuarts”) are not in the interests of public health. They must die, and we must kill them. All creatures have a right to exist, but not all creatures have a right to play in our kitchen area. That’s really all for now. REALLY have to go to work now. I’m dressing as a Respiratory Therapist, I think. I’m a fan of the lazy costume.

And oh yeah, Happy Halloween. Trick or Treat?

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Fog versus Smoke

Here in downtown San Diego, business appears to be back in business as the courthouses are back on. Leah drove me to the bus and I bussed it in and the activity level is much higher than it was Monday and Tuesday.

Looks like a light, and mercifully grey fog has beaten back the smoke! The air no longer smells of campfire, and fewer people are wearing dust masks and surgical masks. (Yesterday I saw a San Diego Policeman driving with a dust mask on).

My mind is more at ease, though the county is still under hellish conditions. The banner headline on the Union Tribune today is “BATTLE FOR JULIAN” — another 200-300 homes were destroyed overnight near Julian. The town of Julian, famous for its Apple Festival and as a relaxing tourist destination experienced the onslaught overnight. Horrible. While San Diego kids are no longer having ~~snow~~ smoke days, their schools are back on, kids out in the county still have the day off. And they’re still at risk.

We have several fires still raging. Check the map here to see the shape of the “front” of the fire.

But note also, we have four separate areas with named fires: This U-T map shows Pendleton, Paradise, Cedar, and Otay fires actively burning.

On a blog note, I submitted my posts from ArtLung, San Diego Blog and San Diego Bloggers to BoingBoing and they were picked up. Traffic to those sites has risen, hopefully serving some public need for news about San Diego. Bloggers are still blogging, talking about their experiences and taking photos. Some of the linking sites are: Boing Boing, Doc Searls, Amy Langfeld, CriticalMas, Stör-Signale, Andy’s Waxy.org Links, Tony Pierce, Nerd Boy Mikey’s Electric Bugaloo, Emese, Easy Bake Coven, Lost Remote (which looks like an interesting TV News site). Thanks for linking, and thanks for talking about this thing which is huge news here, and a minor item everywhere else. These fires are current news. And the efforts to take care of those who lost homes are ongoing. This is a big blow to San Diego County. “Worst fire anyone can remember” is how people put it. City leaders begin their sentences with “I’ve been on the job 30, 40, 45 years, and this is the worst…” — you get the picture.

That’s all for now.

To my fellow San Diegans: take care.

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San Diego Bloggers Fallout

So the fallout from the fires continues. I went to work today but most of the city had the day off.

Downtown San Diego was eerie. Upside: I could park free anywhere because parking enforcement had the day off. I worked till 1, took lunch, and when I got back there was a memo from building management that they could not guarantee that ventilation would be okay. I left shortly after that.There’s a light snowfall of ash, still and all day. I took photos which I posted. Leah had the day off too. I was glad to come home to her. We took it easy, conserving water and energy as the Mayor has asked us to do to maintain power and water pressure. Thousands remain without power. Many in outlying areas do not have potable water. It’s a catastrophe. The worse news is that they don’t really hope to have the fires under control until November 4th, next Tuesday. Until then we really are still in a state of emergency. My heart and thoughts go out to those who have lost life and property in this fire. And again, it’s not over yet.

And now, the blog news:

Emese has a great list of blogs with photos of the fire and aftermath.

I’ve also gotten a bit of traffic to my San Diego Bloggers site today as a result of people seeking pictures and news. I went through tonight and updated the listing, trimming away dormant or dead blogs as best I could. I also made a list of the blogs mentioning the fire in some form or another. Also, Doc Searls and Electric Bugaloo linked to me. And google searches are a big factor.

I’m not sure there is any better indication that the internet and personal publishing is powerful than the news encapsulated in the blogs below. Personal accounts and thoughts of the folks here in San Diego feeling the effects first hand. It’s amazing how many people were affected by this fire.

Notable to me is that the San Diego Union-Tribune is using a bloggish format for part of their fire coverage. Note “blog” in the url.

And now, blogs mentioning the fires here in San Diego, in utterly random order: (links open in new windows)

(this post will be reposted to san diego blog)

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Fire Fotos

Well, fire fallout photos in Downtown San Diego, by me. Painting the town brown.

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More Fire Coverage

I’ve linked some more links over at San Diego Blog on current events. Here are two pictures snatched from Yahoo News and Weather Underground.

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Oh yeah, the fire

I forgot to mention. My entire neighborhood is bathed in amber light, a glow which is the result of half the sky being blotted out by lots of fires to the east and northeast.

It’s otherworldly, which only adds to my disorientation from the time change and from staying up late.

In better news, my back feels like it’s getting better. I’ve not done any permanent damage.

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Clamshell Down

It is with a heavy heart that I report that my iBook SE “clamshell” — “Revision B” is what they call it here … appears to be irrevocably dead.

Mind you, this happened before I tried to install Panther.

The patient would not boot up as of last Wednesday. Attempts to boot it would result in a long long wait followed by a shell prompt sh-2.05a#.

Yesterday and this morning I was trying to install Panther and run the Disk Utilities. All attempts to format, partition, erase, or install anything are failing at this point. This looks very much to me like a hardware failure. That makes me sad.

This machine has served me well for 1999. It’s been a great machine with which to surf the net for one thing. It’s got an AirPort card in it, 320MB of RAM, and despite its clock speed of 366Mhz is quite nice to work on, particularly writing and blogging. I can’t tell you how many venues I’ve worked on it in — but it’s been very steadfast. Check out some of the pictures from my L.A. trip in February. It’s been cross-country several times. It’s been to client meetings and cafes, on trains and planes, in cars for wardriving.

I think I could have seen this coming. For several months now it’s had no, and I mean NO, battery life. Unplugging it from power put it immediately to sleep, or worse, shut it down entirely. I think that happened enough times that I must have introduced garbage onto the 6GB hard drive.

It’s still a supremely cute machine. People and kids universally look at in and think it’s real cute.

Unfortunately, it’s now a supremely cute paperweight. It needs a new hard drive and battery. And the form factor would not make a good Macquarium

On some searching, looks like replacing the hard drive is painful, It looks like I can get the hard drive upgraded to 30GB for $249 with MCE Technologies. Additionally, an iBook battery would cost me $139. So minus shipping, we’re at $388 to get the iBook back to normal.

It’s at this point that I will point out that the new lowest end iBook may be a better deal.

Clock speed on that new machine is 800Mhz (double ‘Clammy’); comes with a 30GB HD (same as what I would get by upgrading, 5 times as much as Clammy); Has a 12 inch screen (same as Clammy). It also has things that Clammy has no hope of ever having: Firewire and a DVD drive. It starts at $1100. I can’t tell at this point if it I could move my existing RAM upgrade into this machine. I’m also not sure my old (non 802.11g/Extreme) AirPort card would fit into it properly.

So $388 to get my machine back to where it was in 1999. Or $1100 (3 times as much money) to get a super-spiffy replacement.

I’ll mull it over.

I feel like Strong Bad when he exclaims UNDELETED! after his trusty old Tandy blew up. Eventually, “For behold — the 386, a spectacle of graphics and sound!”.

So, from hardware-failure-land. Onward.

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Thanks, Mr. Lung

Fun cartoon via Erin:

Apparently a character from Shutterbug Follies.

Thanks Erin!

comics mr-lung shutterbug-follies

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Panther

Installed Panther this morning. Under an hour to do the install. My job: click okay a few times, wonder if my old video cards in the G4 would work properly — my XClaim 3D Plus and Rage Orion seem to be working fine. I’m not taking advantage of Quartz Extreme with these old video cards though.

Expose is every bit as wonderful as the hype says it is. Even with my two monitors, things get cluttery. I can never quite see the desktop. Now, with Expose via keyboard shortcut or throwing my mouse pointer to a window cornerI can see everything I’m doing, or the desktop — fast. This will provide me, a web developer who tends to have multiple windows open all the time (terminal, text editor, image editor, ftp editor, database interface, web browser, filesystem browser) with a big productivity boost.

I’ve not installed Panther on my clamshell iBook yet, but I hope to, if it will cooperate.

This weekend Leah is seeing her kids up north. This leaves me and the computers. Definitely a caveman weekend.

On a physical note, I hurt my back a bit playing racquetball this morning. I’m taking ibuprofen and trying to take it easy. I think I need to stretch more diligently on Saturday playdays. We stretch before class on Tuesdays and I think to play my best I now need to do that. I certainly don’t want any back problems, and for a guy of my size that would be no fun.

Soon, hot bath.

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I’m in.

Got in the UTC Apple store. Got in line at about 7:35pm. Not shabby. Panther in hand. Dog tags procured. Several hundred people here. Won a bet with the woman in front of me in line that we’d get in the door before 9pm. So I’m ahead a dollar already!

New little iBooks look sweet. G5 very sexy.

Later!

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