When I logged into my.yahoo.com on my birthday, I spotted this subtle, friendly greeting at the top. It’s good to have friends in the Yahoo I.T. department.
Now playing: Remember The Tinman by Tracy Chapman
My Yahoo Robot Friend
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More Find Him Frog
The Hopkin story grows. About 20 more entries since I last posted.
If you visited earlier, here’s a shortcut to the middle:
Or you can start from the beginning by clicking here.
Gas Piping
Two plumbers came by on separate visits today to give us a quote on installing a gas valve in our kitchen so that we can get a new gas stove/range. (Currently have electric.) One quoted $475 and the other quoted $525. There is a gas pipe running under the floor where the stove is today carrying gas to the dryer. It is probably 12″ away from where we need the valve to be. That’s a lot of money for a little bit of pipe.
Grant thinks I should try to do it myself. So does this guy….
And here is an article on flexible piping.
Firewire and FlowerPower
Nicole’s FlowerPower Mac had a CD drive running OS X Jaguar (10.2). Our iMac 17″ Flat Panel came with OS X Panther (10.3). I was troubleshooting a problem she was having with her keyboard, and decided to upgrade her system. The problem was, the Panther install was on a DVD, and the Flower Power only had a CD Drive.
I searched far and wide using Google trying to figure out how to boot up the contents of the DVD on her Mac. You can’t just copy the files over. Can’t boot off a network-shared drive (without a Mac OX Server.) The DVD contents are way too large for a CD. I don’t have an external drive.
Then I ran into the concept of using Firewire to connect two Macs. One Mac can be set to boot up in “Target” mode by just holding down the letter “T” when booting up. I was able to start up Nicole’s Mac in target mode, then connnect the new iMac via a Firewire cable. The FlowerPower Mac’s hard disk acted just like a second hard drive on the newer iMac, so I was able to set Nicole’s hard drive to be the boot drive for the iMac. In the photo below, the 17″ flat panel iMac is using the FlowerPower’s hard drive to start up, so it looks like the FlowerPower Mac is inside the iMac. (The FlowerPower’s screen is showing the Firewire icon meaning it is in target mode.) The glowing blue Firewire LED makes it all look cooler.
I was able to use the new iMac’s DVD to upgrade Mac OS X on the FlowerPower Mac. Apple is always building unexpected but useful things like “Firewire target mode.” (It is really like built-in SCSI in older Macs…. which was advanced for its day.)
The other cool thing about this photo is that I recently learned how to use the manual mode on my digital Cannon. This allows for an otherwise impossible shot like this where the screens would be overexposed because of the dark surroundings.
Find Him Frog
A kid loses his frog. He makes a poster with notebook paper. Someone photographs it and turns it into a website.
After reading the poster, click anywhere… then click again…
HEY KID!! Her find your frog!
via birdhouse.org
URI vs URL
I’m running into “URI” more and more in tech talk space.
URI = Universal Resource Identifier (in)
URL = Universal Resource Locator (out)
The hip initials are “URI” explained here.
I predict “the people” will keep “URL” alive. People like to talk a little geek, but not this much. A conversation I heard the other day: “No, that’s an e-mail address, what you need is the URL. URLs don’t have ats in them.”
Testing Archive Template
This is a test to see if the archive template field with this value:
/.html
Will create the improved permalink format /yyyy/mm/dd/blog_title.html
Ignore.
Naked Mole Rats
NMR Facts:
1. Naked Mole Rats are neither moles nor rats.
2. The queen will use her nose to violently poke the noses of family members.
3. Their teeth are on the outside of their mouths.
4. They have a good reason for rolling around in poop.
5. They have a good reason for eating their food twice.
Want to know why? Here is an entertaining and well written article:
The Naked Truth about Mole-Rats – National Zoo
Now playing: Aja from “Aja” by Steely Dan
Drugs from the Sea
The story I heard on NPR this morning sounds like Grims Brothers fairy tale. Drugs float in from the sea and change the social and economic fabric of a tiny fishing community. This new “natural resource” has created monsters, moguls, and even new fund raisers for schools. All of this a tiny byproduct of the gigantic, evil drug trade.
Nose Fairy
Claire, then Kathy, then Kelly, now I have all picked up bad colds. This Dilbert asks and answers a question I had never considered.
(I do know about the pee fairy.)