tn3270

Was doing some cleaning and organizing today, and came across an old paper brochure from an Arthur Ganson exhibit I saw at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum back in 1992. It was great, and very crowded. Now we have You Tube videos of his work. I like this one:

Mike Oldfield's Tubular bells for Ukulele Orchestra



Brillant.

Drove my Mom to a Demoulas Market Basket today (on the North Shore), and was very impressed. Less than one week after the settlement, the store was very well stocked. The bread and fruit sections were not completely restocked yet, but other than that, it was pretty much normal.

When I was a kid (1960s); I had many of the Mattel "Thing-Maker" mold toys that let you "cook and make" bugs (creepy crawlers), dragons, army men, flowers and many others. To this day, I still have some of my creations.

I was delighted to find a great net presence of people collecting and still using them:
This site brought back memories of my childhood. The cookers were VERY hot, and such a toy could never be made today with safety laws, and fear of lawsuits.

I have been watching Dark Shadows, the gothic soap on DVD. In my younger days I watched reruns of it on my local UHF station and loved it. Its very fun to watch again. It holds up pretty well, and IMHO it was a trailblazer for later horror in TV and movies. Like many shows of that era, it clearly did not have a lot of budget for sets.

It is fun in that it was done sort of as live theatre in that video tape edits were expensive and hard to do. They just kept going over all sorts of blown, forgotten lines etc. The cast were excellent at keeping going no matter what.

One of the original actresses, Kathryn Leigh Scott, is now a publisher and writer: http://www.kathrynleighscott.com her accounts of making Dark Shadows are fun and amusing.

Actually more of an API horror. Am using a product's internal API and there are two routines that would be commonly be used together. One of them returns 0 if it worked, and non-zero if it failed. The other one returns 0 if it failed, and non zero if it worked. Was this really necessary?

On the Mass Pike today, I saw the following bumper sticker:

"There's no place like 127.0.0.1"

About once a week, I work in the office of my client, for better communication and to access some computer stuff that's a pain to do remotely. Today, I went in and they had a maintenance and cleaning man in for the day doing an assortment of non-urgent loud things in the office. This including him talking loudly on his cell phone about a problem with another job he was doing. He had been told it was OK to do this work all day today. I got about half of what I had intended to do done due to the noise level. At first I was irritated, but then I thought "what the heck, I am not going to bill any less my for my time". This contrasts with many salaried jobs where you end up making up lost productivity due to a poor work environment with unpaid overtime.

Am slowly but surely moving more and more stuff from PC to Mac. This was accelerated by my old Dell PC buying the farm as mentioned in my last post. Things that do not go easy from PC to Mac include MS Access mdb files. While I still have a way to run Access, its a pain and I want to move to better portability. I found the cool freeware MDB Tools which read and extract data from mdb files. It is simple command line tool that runs pretty much on any Unix type system (for Mac, you can get it from Mac Ports). Its doc is not the greatest, but it is worth the effort.