As Linoge says, you can’t stop the signal.
Edited to add: Quote of the day:
The right to download CAD files is the right to be free. 😉
—Tam
(Reference explained here for the non SF fans in my audience.)
Invisible airwaves crackle with life, bright antenna bristle with the energy…
May 10th, 2013Random notes: May 10, 2013.
May 10th, 2013So they raised the withdrawal limits, but shouldn’t it have set off alarms if they tried to withdraw more than the amount on the prepaid card? Or did the people involved change that as well?
…
…
The Times notes this is bigger than Lufthansa. And no guns were involved (at least in the initial heist: one of the people alleged to be behind it was shot dead later on). As a connoisseur of hacks and heists, my hat is off to these guys.
Remember our old friends the Zeta cartel, and their plan to launder money by purchasing quarter horses? Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, not guilty.
Week of Gatsby: Day 4.
May 9th, 2013Following up on a previous entry: it is legal to download Gatsby in every country except for seven. The United States is one of those seven.
If you happen to live in a country other than those seven – say, for example, Australia – it is perfectly legal for you to download Gatsby from the local version of Project Gutenberg.
Also, I wanted to link to this week’s episode of “The Ihnatko Almanac”: (Edited to add: Fixed. Thanks, Lawrence.) Andy Ihnatko touches on Baz Luhrmann and Gatsby, though his primary topic is one we brought up the other day: Sebastian Faulks continuing the Wodehouse Jeeves novels.
(I also wanted to link this because if you listen to the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear a name you might recognize.)
(Important safety tip: be careful who you page, and who you send feedback to. They just might read your name on the air. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
Robert Anton Wilson, call your office, please.
May 9th, 2013Guccifer’s latest target: noted Illuminati member Candace “Sex and the City” Bushnell.
Good time.
May 9th, 2013Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg is out of jail.
(I think that’s pretty much SOP, but I Am Not A Lawyer. Just want to make it clear that I don’t think she got any special treatment.)
Art, damn it, art! watch (#36 in a series)
May 9th, 2013More:
Can’t afford it (take 2).
May 8th, 2013Don’t really feel like I have a need for it, since I’ve been happy with my D40x, and the step up from 10 to 14 megapixels doesn’t seem like that big a jump to me. Also, I’ve already got the lenses.
But if I were looking for a new DSLR, $500 for the D3100 with 18-55 and 55-200 zoom lenses strikes me as being a heck of a deal.
I assume Nikon is blowing the D3100 out in favor of the D3200. And the 55-200 lens isn’t the VR one. But still, this strikes me as being a good bit of starter kit.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of all three cameras I’ve mentioned from Digital Photography Review. Note that I’m not getting any kickback from Nikon for this; I just like my camera.
(Precision Camera doesn’t list it on their website, but I have seen the same deal in their store.)
Random notes: May 8, 2013.
May 8th, 2013(Fresno is paying their poet laureate $2,000 for a two-year term.)
Paging Andy Ihnatko. Andy Ihnatko to the white courtesy phone, please.
(Seriously, this does not strike me as a good idea.)
“She” is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Edited to add: Ken over at Popehat has a post up flaming the LAT and other newspapers (and, sort of by implication, your obedient servant) for seizing on the karaoke angle and taking out of the context it was in.
The Statesman has been all over the collapse of RunTex (a local running shoe store, which was also active in various community events) like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition. I haven’t paid much attention to the story because I’m not a runner and didn’t care about RunTex. I remember my sister (who competes in triathlons) telling me about going there a while back and being totally unable to find any shoes that fit her. (And my sister does not have giant mutant feet.)
In that vein, I found this Statesman column rather interesting. It looks like my sister wasn’t the only person who had that problem…
Edited to add: A friend of WCD told us a similar story in email; he went in looking for the Nike shoes that would work with their iPhone application and transmitter. They didn’t have any shoes in his size, let alone the Nike ones. When he inquired, they told him “We’re not a shoe store. We support the running lifestyle.”
“We support the running lifestyle.” WHAT THE FRACK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?
“We’re not a shoe store.” Yeah. Now, you’re nothing.
This is just further evidence towards my theory: the problems with the American economy have much to do with the fact that nobody wants to take money for goods and services any longer. I’m not kidding: I can’t count the number of experiences I’ve had, or been told about recently, involving wanting to make a purchase and not being able to get help, get questions answered, or get people to take money.
Obit watch: May 8, 2013.
May 8th, 2013Ray Harryhausen. NYT. LAT. A/V Club appreciation. Lawrence. Popehat.
Week of Gatsby: Day 3
May 8th, 2013Why isn’t “The Great Gatsby” in the public domain? F. Scott Fizgerald has been dead for nearly 73 years, after all.
This is 19 Zillicoa Street in Asheville, North Carolina:
This building is Homewood. Homewood was part of Highland Hospital, and was the home of Dr. Robert S. Carroll and his wife, Grace Potter Carroll. Dr. Carroll ran the hospital, and his wife taught music lessons. (Nina Simone was one of her students.)
In 1939, Dr. Carroll turned management of the hospital over to Duke University’s Neuropsychiatric Department. It was while Duke was managing the hospital that the final act of a great American tragedy took place.
On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out at Highland. Various reports say the fire started in the kitchen and moved upwards through the dumbwaiter shaft. The fire escapes were made out of wood and also caught fire. By the time it was extinguished, nine women were dead.
One of the women who died was Zelda Fitzgerald, the widow of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Zelda had a troubled life. I’m not an expert, but the consensus opinion I’ve seen is that she probably suffered from some form of bi-polar disorder, and medicated herself in an attempt to deal with it. She was in and out of Highland between 1936 and her death.
This is the closest thing I could find to an obituary for Zelda Fitzgerald. (Local cache if that doesn’t come up.) I hope wherever she is, she found the peace that evaded her in life.
(Information about Highland Hospital drawn from the NPS page.)
Week of Gatsby: Day 2
May 7th, 2013Real estate people like Gatsby.
That company, by the way, is “East Egg”.
In other news, have you driven a Gatsby lately?
(Nice looking cars, but not $34.5K worth of nice looking in my opinion. Assuming these people are still building cars, which I admit is a questionable assumption.)
Municipal corruption watch.
May 6th, 2013Hey, remember the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania? Sold bonds to build a new trash incinerator? Then sold more bonds to pay off the earlier bonds? Remember some jackass saying
Good times, good times. Guess what?
Yeah. That wasn’t an individual charged with securities fraud, that was the city itself. Noted:
This comes to our attention by way of Shall Not Be Questioned, which also points out that Mayor Linda Thompson (who is running for re-election) is a member of Criminal Mayors Who Don’t Want You To Have Guns.
Awards season.
May 6th, 2013Pop quiz:
Fäviken: Understanding the Genius Behind the World’s 34th Best Restaurant
Is that a headline from the Onion, or a real article from a food blog?
Answer: That’s a real article in the current “issue” of Dark Rye, which won the James Beard Award for “Best Group Food Blog” this year.
Sorry. Where were we?
I’d write more on the subject of “Dark Rye” (Why does the design make me stabby? Why are they endorsing the crank theory of Ayurveda?) but Ryan Sutton over at “The Bad Deal” has already made about as pithy a comment as I’ve seen.
(I know there are some people in my audience who feel that New York in general, and New York dining specifically, is overblown in the food news/food blog scene. I kind of agree with this in general: when it comes to Sandy, though, that was one of the most important food stories of the year, and there were lots of real food blogs that covered it well.)
In better news, the Edgar Award winners have been announced. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, so I’m pretty happy Live by Night
True crime: I didn’t read any of this year’s nominees. Midnight in Peking
Critical/biographical: I hope The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics
I finally got my hands on a copy of In Pursuit of Spenser
Can’t afford it.
May 6th, 2013Have no practical use for it.
Camera is not included.
(I wonder if you could build a business around this device.)
Chester, Chester…
May 6th, 2013Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)
Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.
Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…
More:
He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.
One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?
I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)
I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.
(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)