Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.

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Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:

April 10th, 2008
12:05 pm [Link]	Product shill Just registered SizzlingKeys to the tune of $7 for a "family pack" (five-computer license). Highly recommended for all Mac OS X users. And virtually all of its functionality is available in the freeware version. SizzlingKeys addressed one of the most painful parts of my transition from Winamp to iTunes: it adds configurable global hotkeys for music control (as well as a few bonus hotkeys for locking or sleeping the system). It's got a clean, simple interface and has been an indispensable sanity saver at work - letting me keep music on and mute/pause it at a touch when calls come in. -- EDITED TO ADD: Since I'm on a buying spree today, fish owners should check out the Screwcumber. (Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter. thwaps your nose with a rolled-up newspaper) Nice solution to the problem of how to sink fresh vegetables to the bottom of the tank. Current Location: ~spiral Current Music: Stiiv, "Naked Time" Tags: pets, reviews, technology (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
April 5th, 2008
11:19 pm [Link]	Oddly appropriate icon Last weekend, we had a little incident with our clothes washer. By "incident," I mean "flood." And by "little," I mean "half the kitchen and living room, and also through the walls so that both our next-door and downstairs neighbors had to mop up too." Anyway, I am given to understand that it was unpleasant. I was on my Work Schedule From Heck at the time, so I first found out about it by calling kadyg during the middle of the mopping up. At which point I promptly freaked out and almost didn't make deadline with the night's layout. "Half the living room," it should be belatedly mentioned, included my computer desk. Most of our books, papers and gear were safely up on desktops or bookshelves. However, the battery backup-qua-surge protector that powered basically everything on that side of the room was happily sitting in a quarter-inch of water by the time Kady and Rob ran out to the living room to take in the disaster. It was promptly unplugged (and confirmed waterlogged). But I had no immediate way of knowing whether it had shorted out and taken out the half-dozen devices plugged into it. Kady managed to plug in my monitor and watch it blink to life. An optimistic sign. My lovely, 12.5-month-old Mac Mini, on the other hand, wasn't booting. Literally. About a week out of warranty coverage. Got home to find out that this is because its power brick was also sitting on the floor next to the UPS. Picked it up and it dripped. The good news, as I discovered about 36 hours later, is that when I took my computer in to work and plugged it into a known-good power brick there (my tech support job uses Mac Minis for our work computers as well; that's what convinced me to get one), it worked fine. Bad news is that, having spent the better part of a week drying out my power brick, it still isn't transmitting power to my Mini. Chances are high that I'll have to throw the brick away and buy a new one. Is there a word that is an exact antonym of "silver lining"? I know I'm feeling tremendously lucky right now that I don't have to replace a $600 computer (and data that hadn't been backed up in months), but somehow I'm still annoyed over the much smaller expense of the bits that did blow out.* Edited to add: Apple Discussions thread. -- * Total damages: $50 brick, $35 UPS (it's making some death click when plugged in now -- after the same full week of drying out), $50 DSL modem (but we swiped an old spare from work), one $3 DSL filter, several man-hours of mopping, and a modest amount of landlord goodwill. Apparently the UPS had the good grace to ground as it shorted. (Come to think of it, I think the printer power brick was down there as well -- I should check it. But it cost us less than $100, if it comes to that.) Current Location: ~journal Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: Jars of Clay, "Flood" Tags: misc life updates, technology (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 6th, 2007
03:46 pm [Link]	New web toy Now you, too, can make up charts like this one* on the fly and embed them in your posts -- even if you don't have a website to host them on: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ has the details. Fun contest in comments! Make up the most awesome fake chart! Winner gets official Baxil Points, redeemable for fine Baxil merchandise at fine Baxils everywhere! -- * Venn diagram idea shamelessly reused from a floating Internet meme. I just needed something to test the API out with. Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: amused Tags: contests, geekery, technology, wordplay (15 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 2nd, 2007
01:27 pm [Link]	throwaway mini-rant What is it about modern consumer operating systems that has cast the perfectly useful idea of "version number" into disfavor? I mean, it's bad enough that Windows gave it up after Y2K ... ME, XP, and now Vista (née Longhorn, aka Aero). ... But Apple? Okay, seriously, guys: Enough is enough. Yes, the cat thing was cute. But it's overstayed its welcome. There's no logic to it, just cute, and cute isn't a good enough concept for things that are supposed to be released in a specific forward progression. When even the people providing support for your products have to look it up -- and when virtually every customer with the OS refers to it with the more useful "OS 10.X" designation -- you need to give up the pretense. I mean. Really: Cheetah < Puma < Jaguar < Panther < Tiger < Leopard Is that supposed to make any sort of sense? (... Is that a value judgment on the worth of particular cat species? Are you oppressing my cheetah brethren?) Not to mention, you're running out of cat names. What will you do then? Are we going to see the following releases in the next few years -- 10.6 Lion 10.7 Ocelot* 10.8 The OS We Were Going To Name Lynx Except The Name's Been Taken 10.9 Colocolo 10.10 Margay, And We Promise We're Not Reaching 10.11 Asian Palm Civet, Which Is A Cat, We Swear! 10.13 Lion-O 10.12 Catwoman 10.14 Tigatron 10.15 Garfield® Please, stop. For the sake of the children, don't let it go that far. -- EDITED TO ADD:** Now with bonus tech support griping in the comments! -- * Insert Metal Gear pun here. (Or just go read this excellent webcomic.) If you clicked through from there to the image of the comic book page, here is a better scan of the first frame. Yes, that really is Batman saying "Quiet or Papa spank!"* * Anyone willing to make a good LJ icon of this (probably involving Photoshopping it to cram the text closer in; and/or cutting it up into an animated GIF) will earn 20 Baxil Points, redeemable for fine Baxil merchandise at Baxils everywhere. Current Location: ~spiral Current Music: Dandy Warhols, "Bohemian Like You" Tags:** technology, wordplay (45 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 26th, 2007
12:53 am [Link]	Please stand by We are experiencing ( technical difficulties ). Dealing with today's DSL switchover here at the International House of Ninja is turning out to be a much bigger hassle than expected. Your Baxil will return shortly. At least I've now got some detailed notes on ... Steps for switching a Speedstream 5100 to our company's Internet service Log in to http://192.168.0.1. Click to edit configuration. Enter the "Modem Access Code" printed on the bottom of the device. ... Which is set in the firmware and shouldn't be changeable. Enter the "Modem Access Code" again because it's not accepting it. Assume firmware corruption. Find "Factory Reset" link. Reset the modem. Repeatedly. ... With a large hammer. Finish cursing. Locate hardware reset switch on underside of device. ( The fun continues ) Current Location: ~/Brainstorm Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: "Green," Afro Celt Sound System Tags: geekery, misc life updates, my brain now hurts, tech support horror stories, technology, work (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 3rd, 2007
10:18 am [Link]	The death of privacy As a follow-up to my post on the death of personal privacy earlier this year ... I finally found it again. The link I mentioned in a footnote. The really brilliant essay that summed it all up. Quoting myself from three years ago, when I had the foresight to link it, albeit from a friends-locked post: Danny O'Brien wrote a brilliant blog entry about this effect, which I stumbled across [in June 2004]. In brief, he points out that we have three different "registers" (types) of conversation: public, private, and secret, and we communicate in different ways in all of them. In particular, we guard ourselves strongly when "on the record" (in public) in ways that we don't when we're addressing friends or associates. "Private" conversation is not intended to be hidden, but we assume a context that random listeners might not have, and it's aimed only at the audience being specifically addressed. "Ah," you might say, "so the private register is like an LJ friends list." But the insidious thing is you would be wrong. A friends-list post is secret. It is restricted to only the desired audience, as opposed to "private" conversation, which is at worst hidden by obscurity. The public register is a loudspeaker and a soapbox; secret is a closed-door meeting; private is dinner chat at a restaurant. The loss of privacy doesn't mean the loss of the secret register (though that register is certainly shrinking, and that's frustrating too). The loss of privacy means the loss of the private register. The notion of being consistently either on the record or totally hidden. Before the age of the Internet, the vast majority of our lives was on the private register. This is still the case to a large extent. As technology continues to improve, it won't be. Humanity can live without a private register, but I (still) think our lives will be the poorer for it. The piece's author, by the way, replied to my e-mail last night; he says "If you liked it, I did a more wandering talk about the same topic you can download here." (I also mentioned to him that, given four years of hindsight, I'm really not convinced that the shine has worn off of distant mockery for the masses. "No, me neither," he responded. "And my day job [at the EFF] continues to teach me that the interactions between privacy and free speech aren't done with yet." True dat.) -- Given that the entire purpose of this post is to lament the ever-widening reach of the public sphere, I really had to think about whether to post excerpts from a (secret-register) e-mail conversation. Yes, massive irony. But on balance I believe no harm is being done here; there's nothing actually secret in the two lines I quoted. The link can be found via a Google search already and Danny's bio is listed on the EFF staff page. Current Location: ~/brainstorm Current Music: Hazel Blue, "Bottle In Hand" Tags: privacy, technology (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 30th, 2007
06:26 pm [Link]	meanwhile One of the most observant things I ever said was something I first pointed out four years ago: "There is no international crisis so major that it can't be interrupted by a small, stupid crisis close to home." I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of my friends list is devoting mindspace to Strikethrough 2007 right now (short summary: yes, LJ is actually deleting accounts based solely on their user interests; but before panicking, please click through the link and get all the facts). Dealing with that is not a bad thing. It does hit close to home. It's something worth taking action on. I spent an hour or two reading up on it, and have taken a few protest actions myself. But don't forget what's going on in the rest of the world. And please take a moment of silence with me to mourn the age of personal privacy. It was a good age. We'll miss it. This development by itself -- Google is apparently driving vans down the street, running cameras and getting still photos of individual buildings for Google Maps -- isn't going to singlehandedly destroy anything. But it is another line being crossed, another step down the slippery slope. By itself it might mean little. But we're also in an age of YouTube'd cameraphone videos, overnight internet celebrities, personal blogs with global reach, archive.org, dirt-digging via search engine, ubiquitous surveillance, and terrorist watch lists. I don't know who, for example, this guy is. But his face is already being passed around the internet (as for why, see the background of the photo. Worksafe but suggestive). Someone probably will ID him. And when he does, the odds are good that there will be bad consequences. What stops that from happening to the rest of us? As of now, only sheer weight of humanity's numbers. There is nothing stopping random and equally embarrassing photos of me, or you, from being spread around the planet at the speed of light; all we can rely on is the fact that with so many targets out there, the odds of instant notoriety are about the same as that of winning the lottery. Numbers will be a good defense for a while, but as the sheer amount of data and the computing power available to sift through it increases (never mind the development of increasingly sophisticated AI), even that cover will get stripped back. Fifteen to twenty years from now (assuming of course no energy crash, world war, imperial collapse, complete financial meltdown or technological singularity), I suspect we'll be at the point where basically everything we ever say, except in the most secret and encrypted spaces, will be available for endless scrutiny.* -- * As opposed to now, where we can choose to put the things we say on the public record (such as here, in a public blog), but that's not the default choice for all of our communication. I read a great essay some years back -- and my google-fu is failing me at the moment -- about how the Internet was drawing a bright dividing line between hidden communication and exposed communication. It argued we're losing the ability to speak in "semi-public" space -- where we can speak up to those who want to hear without the rest of the world beating down the door to listen in. I need to find that essay again. Current Location: ~calorg Current Mood: somber Current Music: "Itsoweezee (Radiohead 'I Will' Remix)," DJ Panzah Zandahz Tags: privacy, technology (17 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 17th, 2006
02:55 pm [Link]	Hint for Windows users For those of you using Windows XP, here's a little tip that can save you plenty of aggravation: Map network drives to drive letters starting from the end of the alphabet. Yes, I know, it seems a lot more natural dropping your coworker's share folder at E: or F:. But Windows' removable device mapping and network drive mapping don't play well with each other. I spent several hours this morning troubleshooting why a fresh install of Windows XP SP 2 wasn't reading files from a plug-and-play USB camera that works on every other computer in our office. It turns out that Windows Jekyll was saying "What ho, chap, let us visit our network brethren upon every jaunt to E Drive" and Windows Hyde was saying "DURR I PUT USB FILESES AT E: NOW!!! HOORAY THEY IS MOUNTED, LOOK A KITTEN." If it hadn't been for the Internet, the good doctor's sordid little secret might never have come out. Because, you know, he looks so polished ... who would have expected he could be capable of such scandalous behavior? Oy ... frickin' Windows. I'm starting to get a feeling I'm in the wrong line of work (MP3 link) for when Vista comes out. -- Edited to add: If you like the song link, more goodness here. The one I linked is Jeffrey Hitchen's "Tech Support." Current Location: ~calorg Current Music: Toad the Wet Sprocket, "Windmills" Tags: geekery, technology (5 comments \| Leave a comment)

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