The face that launched a thousand cards

July 19th, 2008 – 00:29

Sometime in early January 2006, La Angela took Baby Emma out on her first walk. Emma was about 3 weeks old. Wifey, looking for picture fodder for her newly-deployed husband, took our nice DV cam which had a crappy 1.3-megapixel camera function and took a horridly off-center but cute picture of Emma. In La Angela’s defense, though, she took the pic one-handed while pushing a stroller. Anyway. She sent it off to me; I thought it cute and cropped it with crappy photo editing software at work, mostly for me. I uploaded it to my (poor, currently neglected) Flickr account not much later.

Living the good life

This picture has become the start of Baby Emma’s college fund. This week, after about 3 months of back-and-forth, we finally received payment for the rights to put this picture on a greeting card. I don’t know what the odds are of getting your hands on one, as they’re primarily sold in England (and my contract was actually for an amount in Pounds, not dollars… hooray slumping dollar? :) ). If I get my hands on one, I’ll scan it and post it.

The contract was easy, and written in plain English (The Queen’s English!). Basically, I have given Susan (the card publisher) exclusive use of the photograph in greeting cards for the next 3 years, and she gets notified of any other intended commercial uses of the photograph. The payment we got is renewable for every thousand cards, and was actually a decent price for what I perceive to be a small operation, i. e. not Hallmark. :) Not bad terms, honestly, because no one’s beating down my door to use my other photographs in commercial settings. :)

For the rest, I’ve requested the transfer of the funds out of Paypal, and once they hit my bank I’m setting up Emma’s college savings fund.

I feel so… professional. :)

By ben | Posted in dot family, dot tech | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

International Wordpress Day

July 1st, 2008 – 00:01

Today is the unofficial official International Wordpress Day.

Allow me to say, Thanks!

I’ve been using Wordpress for 4 years and 3 months, and can’t imagine switching to another platform, like, ever.  But what’s so great about it?

  • It’s got a great community of support.  Whenever I have a problem with my blog, I know I can go to the Wordpress forums and learn that someone else has had my issue before, and solved it quickly.
  • It’s got a great community of plugin writers.  I use no less thatn 13 plugins, for everything from killing comment spam to inserting those cute images I have plugged in to my posts, to showing my flickr pictures (neglected as of late) in the sidebar.
  • It’s got a great community of themers.  I’d try out new stuff, but I’m an old grump and set in my ways… I changed themes over a year ago but I’m so set in my ways that the one I switched to looks almost exactly like the one I switched FROM.  :)

Congrats to you, Matt and the rest of the Automattic team, and here’s to your continued success.

By ben | Posted in dot blogging, dot internet | Tagged | Comments (0)

Fellatio

June 29th, 2008 – 00:37

At the rate we’re going, he’s going to top Springsteen for most covers of Rolling Stone within a year or so.

Never underestimate the power of America’s youth… even though they suck.  The fortunate thing is that most will be too disaffected (whether actual or as an act) to actually be bothered to vote.

By ben | Posted in dot entertainment, dot politics | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

The RIAA has declared radio a form of piracy

June 27th, 2008 – 16:54

No, I’m not kidding.

“It’s a form of piracy, if you will, but not in the classic sense as we think of it,” said Martin Machowsky, a musicFirst spokesman. “Today we gifted them a can of herring, about their argument that they provide promotional value. We think that’s a red herring. Nobody listens to the radio for the commercials.”

I am shocked.  Actually, stunned.  The RIAA is asking for royalties for radio broadcasts of music, arguing that radio is making billions off the backs of recording artists.  The National Association of Broadcasters argues back that without radio, most of these artists would be like any other mediocre garage band, unheard and pretty much only playing your college campuses and local bars.  (I tend to agree with the NAB.)

The RIAA have their bought-and-paid-for Senators and Representatives (and from the looks of it, it’s really “bipartisan” legislation) pushing proposals through their respective bodies of Congress.

WTF is wrong with the RIAA?  I used to believe I knew that answer, but with every lawsuit they file, with every bill asking to hack listeners’ PCs, with every bill asking to destroy radio, I am left stunned and shocked.  They keep biting the hands that feed them — first us, then the medium by which we [are supposed to] discover music.

I cannot fathom any artist wanting to be a part of this organization anymore.

By ben | Posted in dot entertainment | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

George Carlin, 1937-2008

June 22nd, 2008 – 22:26

George Carlin

Dead at age 71, of an apparent heart attack about 4 hours ago.

I lack eloquence, and it’s late.  I wasn’t actually introduced to Carlin until the early 90s, when my friend Eric gave me a cassette of some of his 1960s/1970s routines.  It stuck with me, and he stuck with me, even when he moved from stoner hippie comedian to grumpy old man comedian.

The “seven dirty words you can’t say on TV” is still timeless, even though we’re pretty much down to 3 or 4.

George, may you be somewhere watching how you influenced modern comedy.

By ben | Posted in dot entertainment | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Quick and Dirty Multi-Link

June 16th, 2008 – 14:49
  • Via Marie: When McCain drops out. Conjecture that McCain can’t possibly win the election, Republicans know this, and are entertaining making McCain drop out and replacing him with new Folger’s Crystals a candidate who stands a better chance of winning. I doubt it, as Republicans snicker and scoff at the Democrats’ Superdelegates, which do the same thing in essence. [Side note, Marie's same post links to an article where Durbin is being considered for Obama's VP. Repubs couldn't ask for a better running mate for Obama... it's better than Hillary.]
  • Elian Gonzales, now one of the Young Communists. Two reactions: “Thanks, Bill” and “Yawn.”
  • The cheap gas is $4.35 here.
By ben | Posted in dot stuff | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Virii, the follow-up

June 8th, 2008 – 16:57

As noted at the end of the post below, I promised to update if I found a solution. I found a solution:

…nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Last Saturday, I rolled up my sleeves and did just that. It was a bit of a frustration, as I had just done that 3 months ago after a failed go at Wubi. When that had happened, I vowed to find a way to make a “snapshot” of Windows after installing my drivers, so I wouldn’t have to go through the initial hassle of everything again. Just like the road to Hell, I had the best of intentions. They remained intentions, though, so I had to start from scratch.

This time around, though, I did follow through on my intentions. Steps taken, in order:

  • Install Windows XP
  • Install Service Pack 2
  • Install drivers to include: motherboard, monitor, sound card, video card. Any hardware you have that requires a driver. Install them all, as you can, restarting when asked.
  • Optional: Updated Windows Media Player to version 11. This was done simply to share my media library with my XBox 360, which is on the same network.
  • Continued downloading and installing updates from Windows Update until up-to-date. As of this writing, it can be done in about 7 restarts, and I used those opportunities to install drivers at the same time, minimizing restarts. It would probably have been easier to download the Windows XP SP3 update, but I didn’t realize that was even available until nearly done.

Now, we got to the fun part: Imaging the hard drive. This was a bit involved for me, because of my setup; it can be much easier than what I did depending on your available tools.

  • Downloaded and installed CDBurnerXP. The name of the tool is unimportant, just install your CD/DVD burner software. I chose this because (a) my Nero CDs are missing, and (b) CDBurnerXP is free. It’s also quite nice.
  • Downloaded and installed DriveImageXML. I went on and ran this immediately, before installing other programs, to keep the size of my imaged drive manageable. It still came out to about 2.5GB, which is not bad at all. Again, the name of the tool is unimportant, and there are several free options out there. I chose this one in particular because (a) it compresses the data it’s imaging, and not all will do that, (b) it’s free, and (c) it actually has integration with…
  • Downloaded and installed Bart’s PE. This creates a Windows Preinstalled Environment (PE). DriveImageXML has a plugin that is a part of Barts, meaning you can create a windows CD/DVD with that software installed on it.
  • Created a slipstreamed Windows Installation CD with SP2 pre-installed. This was an extra step I had to take because I didn’t have it, and Bart’s PE required it. You can skip it if your copy of Windows has a service pack on it (it will say so on the packaging).
  • From there, it was as simple as following the instructions in the video tutorial to create the Windows PE CD. With the program, you can set a directory where the files are stored, and also go ahead and create an ISO file (a single, large file suitable for burning as a CD image). I did NOT create the ISO, nor did I burn a CD at that moment. What I did next was take the files created by DriveImageXML and move them into the “base” directory where Bart’s files were created. F’rinstance, if you put Bart’s files on C:\BartPEfiles, that is where you would put the DriveImageXML files.
  • NOW, burn a CD with the files in that directory. Again, everything where the BartPE files were created, and NOT the ISO, should be burned. (You can burn the ISO, but it’ll be redundant.)

If you’re confused by all this, it’s cool. Take a little time and read all the websites I linked here. I can’t support all this, and I’m awful at explaining things, so me helping you would be about as smart as my 2-year-old helping you. You don’t want that. Instead, find a good tech forum or use the support forums for each of the individual softwares. If you break your compy on my advice, you’re not going to get sympathy or anything else from me. You’ve been warned. :)

Oh, and the next step after imaging: I got a new anti-virus program. I had been using AVG for about 3 years, then ditched it ~18 months ago in favor of Avast! Free. I found out that free = you get what you pay for. I don’t know if it was a virus or just some nasty-ass spyware that we had caught, but in any case, none of my free solutions caught it. After doing some research in Arstechnica’s forums, I pretty much decided to go with NOD32, and bought a 2-year subscription. The program is fast, small, and unobtrusive. It’s also well worth the money I spent. There are less expensive solutions out there, and I have test-driven a few over the last few years, but NOD32 takes the cake insofar as what it protects against. I did not buy an anti-spyware program, as NOD32 seems to be doing OK with finding spyware. I’m still continuing with Ad-Aware and Spybot: Search and Destroy in conjunction with NOD32 to see if we can keep crap like this from happening again.

By ben | Posted in dot stuff | Comments (0)