super-structure

Friday, November 30, 2007

Ch-ch-changes!

Filed under: Life, Marriage — Jason Coleman @ 12:49 am

First of all, let me announce what is probably the worst kept secret since we announced we were pregnant: Angela and I have made the decision to move to Franklin, TN (that’s near Nashville for you non-Tennesseans). We had been discussing the idea of doing so since July. When I say discussing, I mean Angela kept trying to convince me we should move and I kept trying to convince her we should stay in Richmond.

I caved.

Then, just a couple of days before she moved back to work, her company posted openings for her position in Franklin. She saw this when she returned from maternity leave and they said a transfer was possible. Instead of waiting until next year, as I had finally agreed to do, we would be moving at the end of this year. I felt like there was no way we would be able to move sooner and that this was the least I could do for my employer (I work for a fairly small branch office of a relatively small company, so it just seemed the right thing to give them as much notice as possible).

We’ve put our beloved Colonial up for sale here and found some nice temporary housing in Franklin, very close to Angela’s work. Angela of course has her job lined up to change over, although the application process for her to get a license in a different state is very long and complicated. It’s all in place now, though.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about what I’d be doing for work. I’ll expand on that more next week, though. I haven’t posted in quite a while and I wouldn’t want to sprain a thumb or something writing too much. For now, though, I’ll just say that it has been an exciting turn and it’s got me looking forward to all this change after all…

Ainsley? Oh, she seems to be growing by the hour. Of course, that was the one bit of change we were expecting.

Comments (5)

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

I’ve never given it much thought as I’ve tried to be consistent, but Flickr allows users to switch back and forth between Creative Commons licenses and traditional copyright, despite this being in violation of the CC license itself. Most of my work has been published under a Attribution- Noncommerical, Share-alike CC license since I first learned about copyleft several years ago. And though I’ve never really considered degrading the license back to full copyright, apparently other people have done so. I don’t know of any legal fights over this (yet), but it seems like it would be a nearly impossible position to defend. [1 # ]

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

I really enjoy most movies-based-on-books in which the author is involved in the film itself (”Hellboy” and “Sin City,” for examples). Of course, what happens when a director or screen-writer decides to significantly change portions of the story (like in virtually ever one of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films)? Well, I am not going to argue when the writer gives their blessing, as appears to be the case with Frank Darabont’s change to the ending of Stephen King’s “The Mist.” Darabont quoting King:
And I still have the e-mail. He said, “Wow, I love the ending. If I’d thought of it, I’d have used it in the story.”
[0 # ]

Monday, November 12, 2007

When Angela and I first moved to Virginia, we made the casual observation that the Commonwealth has a lot of vanity license plates. We even told friends and family back home that we figured Virginia had many more than Tennessee due to the lower cost of getting them here. Turns out, Virginia does have more. A lot more:
Out of the 9.3 million personalized plates on the roads of America, about one in 10 are in Virginia, according to rankings provided to The Associated Press by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
This probably settles some previous bets, though I don’t recall who they were made with… [1 # ]

Friday, November 9, 2007

The OS Triathalon

Filed under: Geek — Jason Coleman @ 2:50 pm

Wednesday evening, I finally got around to upgrading my iMac to OS X 10.5 (”Leapord,” a word which only appears to occur in the installation screens). As I’ve had a number of wonky things happening after upgrading my hard drive last month, I simply decided to do a backup and then the “Erase and Install” option. The beauty of this is, I was simply able to use the Migration Manager tool to bring back in all my apps, documents, and settings from my bootable backup (I use SuperDuper! for creating backups, which is the only third party app involved in this whole epic event).

The upgrade went well, though it did take quite a while. I didn’t suffer from any of the “blue screen” issues that a few folks have been reporting. I did, on the other hand, get a kernel panic screen (link for example, not the actual incident in question) within about two minutes of rebooting after the upgrade and migration. It seems Firefox 2.0.0.8 didn’t play well with OS X 10.5 despite it being billed as compatible. A quick upgrade and all was well.

I also used the opportunity to get rid of my incapacitated Windows Boot Camp partition (one a few things that didn’t survive the hard drive upgrade last month). I create a new partition and got Windows XP re-installed without too much trouble. I do however, hate the fact that my bluetooth mouse and keyboard don’t work during half of the installation process. It’s a pain to have to hunt down a USB mouse or try and tab through windows to get to the right dialog box. Anyway, Windows boots fine and I can also use the XP partition with Parallels again, which is extremely handy (and going to be necessary for work in the future, I suspect – structural engineering is a Windows-only game).

I spent about an hour last night getting my SP 2 copy of Windows XP up with the latest security updates and such. I plan to use WinClone to make a solid backup that I can always go back to in the event of emergency and to speed up when a re-install is again necessary (which is inevitable, so I might as well make it fast and painless to do).

Now, I still have to get my virtual machine copy of Ubuntu linux updated to 7.10! Of course, who would have thought that updating Linux would be the easiest and fastest of them all? (I say this because I’ve already updated my workbench/ testing machine in the basement, and it was a breeze.)

Oh, and I also need to upgrade Angela’s iBook as soon as we can figure out why her bus-powered FireWire drive isn’t connecting to her laptop. It’s a good think I actually enjoy doing this stuff or it would seem like a real chore…

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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

I really enjoyed this bit from the coverage of yesterday’s NY City Marathon, where Brit Paula Radcliffe won the women’s race:
…there was something seminal about the way Gary Lough emerged from the crowd at the finish line at the New York Marathon yesterday in order to hand his 10-month-old daughter, Isla, to her mother, Paula Radcliffe, moments after she won the New York City Marathon. And that is because Isla is among the first generation of daughters who will grow up watching their mothers compete as professional athletes.
Things like this make me very glad our daughter gets to grow up in this time. [0 # ]

Monday, November 5, 2007

Google, along with a number of mobile hardware manufacturers, announced the Android mobile OS today. What became painfully obvious, though, from reading Engadget’s live-blogging of the conference call is that the press members that were allowed to ask questions have no idea what any of this means. Repeated questions of ’so when is Google going to release their own mobile hardware?’ I figured that there might be some confusion over open-source licensing but it appeared the press didn’t know hardware from software. It just seemed that the big media tech reporters weren’t asking questions about moving towards standardized platforms on mobile devices. [1 # ]