Wednesday, January 02, 2008
like the dust that you will find in the cobwebs of my mind
Happy New Year to each and every! May your 2008 be bountiful and peaceful, and to a certain few I hope your depression lifts. I arrived at home right at the stroke of midnight, thereby once I was actually in the house it was ten seconds into the new year. Saw the fireworks, confetti, and singing -- missed the countdown and the ball drop. 
Can we try this again? But that's probably what the guys behind the Space Needle fireworks show are saying too, since partway into the spectacle the software crashed and halted the display. That'll teach you to use Windows for important things!
I did get one interesting New Years gift, as you may have noticed in the comments of the previous entry: an old girlfriend I've mentioned here twice pinged me and now I'm caught up on her life and have been informed about some mutual acquaintances. (But if you've been reading my blog for a year or two and you lived here in Tacoma until a couple months ago, why didn't you speak earlier?!) So that rounded out my 2007 and I can't readily think of anyone else I've been curious about for twenty-some years like that. Now that is a weird feeling, reaching the end of the list, as though I have a void where there had been a pool of curiosity. Not the first time I've stood there thinking, "okay, that's done... now what?"
I received my new Epson scanner on December 27, so I've been doing some scanning of slides and negatives for the [now updated, go see!] Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul site, with plenty more to go. I've also rescanned almost all of the Brownie negatives in the collection (there's one image that hasn't resurfaced because it's not with the rest of the negatives, and I'll have to go digging to find it) but I'm not redoing the pix on the Spackle site;
I have however uploaded them to my Flickr page (or done replacement uploads on the ones that were already there) so you can see them in their glory.
I do have one stupidity to report, which you should find amusing. I order you to find this amusing! Last night I was doing a little research on hands-free headsets for my cell phone, looking for specific things -- how much the plug-in-ear-with-mike-at-throat things that come with the phone are should I want a spare or replacement, what other styles are made which are better for my way of life, and these all have to plug in because I don't trust Bluetooth. (You support a technology for a year, you know whether you believe it worthwhile.) My phone is a hot-purple Motorola W490, which is the narrower relative of the much-ballyhooed Moto RAZR. (The other day at work one of my coworkers, pictured above, called my cell a "Zoolander phone" because of the color, to which I pointed out his dainty little phone is half my phone's size so it's even more "Zoolander" than mine.) Most accessories for the RAZR line will work with the W490... same data cable, same wired headsets, same Bluetooth hands-free kits, and so forth. I could see the cases and other size-specific items being different, but I was seeking stuff that plugs into the mini-USB jack on the side of the phone. So I did a Google search for the RAZR accessories because they're more prevalent, and came up with a flock of stuff including the kind of headset I'm used to as a tech support geek with the hoop over the top of the head. I can't get the plug-into-ear-mike-at-throat earpiece to stay in my ear so it's pretty useless when driving, gimme something I can strap on! Just on a lark, I changed the search criteria to W490. Same list of items, as you can imagine, but five dollars less. Not kidding, exact same items and model numbers but the site was spitting out different prices. I thought this only happened at dry-cleaners (where the significant price difference between a 'shirt' and a 'blouse' is based on which side the buttons are on) and at teriyaki restaurants (where the exact same dish of food is $2 different between 'lunch' and 'dinner'). But no complaints here since my phone isn't the one being bilked based on name alone. Caviat emptor y'all.
Can we try this again? But that's probably what the guys behind the Space Needle fireworks show are saying too, since partway into the spectacle the software crashed and halted the display. That'll teach you to use Windows for important things!I did get one interesting New Years gift, as you may have noticed in the comments of the previous entry: an old girlfriend I've mentioned here twice pinged me and now I'm caught up on her life and have been informed about some mutual acquaintances. (But if you've been reading my blog for a year or two and you lived here in Tacoma until a couple months ago, why didn't you speak earlier?!) So that rounded out my 2007 and I can't readily think of anyone else I've been curious about for twenty-some years like that. Now that is a weird feeling, reaching the end of the list, as though I have a void where there had been a pool of curiosity. Not the first time I've stood there thinking, "okay, that's done... now what?"
I received my new Epson scanner on December 27, so I've been doing some scanning of slides and negatives for the [now updated, go see!] Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul site, with plenty more to go. I've also rescanned almost all of the Brownie negatives in the collection (there's one image that hasn't resurfaced because it's not with the rest of the negatives, and I'll have to go digging to find it) but I'm not redoing the pix on the Spackle site;
I have however uploaded them to my Flickr page (or done replacement uploads on the ones that were already there) so you can see them in their glory.I do have one stupidity to report, which you should find amusing. I order you to find this amusing! Last night I was doing a little research on hands-free headsets for my cell phone, looking for specific things -- how much the plug-in-ear-with-mike-at-throat things that come with the phone are should I want a spare or replacement, what other styles are made which are better for my way of life, and these all have to plug in because I don't trust Bluetooth. (You support a technology for a year, you know whether you believe it worthwhile.) My phone is a hot-purple Motorola W490, which is the narrower relative of the much-ballyhooed Moto RAZR. (The other day at work one of my coworkers, pictured above, called my cell a "Zoolander phone" because of the color, to which I pointed out his dainty little phone is half my phone's size so it's even more "Zoolander" than mine.) Most accessories for the RAZR line will work with the W490... same data cable, same wired headsets, same Bluetooth hands-free kits, and so forth. I could see the cases and other size-specific items being different, but I was seeking stuff that plugs into the mini-USB jack on the side of the phone. So I did a Google search for the RAZR accessories because they're more prevalent, and came up with a flock of stuff including the kind of headset I'm used to as a tech support geek with the hoop over the top of the head. I can't get the plug-into-ear-mike-at-throat earpiece to stay in my ear so it's pretty useless when driving, gimme something I can strap on! Just on a lark, I changed the search criteria to W490. Same list of items, as you can imagine, but five dollars less. Not kidding, exact same items and model numbers but the site was spitting out different prices. I thought this only happened at dry-cleaners (where the significant price difference between a 'shirt' and a 'blouse' is based on which side the buttons are on) and at teriyaki restaurants (where the exact same dish of food is $2 different between 'lunch' and 'dinner'). But no complaints here since my phone isn't the one being bilked based on name alone. Caviat emptor y'all.
