A note on posting styles

If you look at the Monthly: box over in the right margin, you’ll notice that posting frequency has dropped by about 50% for the past 6 months. Some of it has been because I’ve been busy, but another factor has been what I can only describe as dilution. With so many ways of emitting signal – Facebook, Wave and especially Twitter – and some finite number of things to say, my attention has not been focused on posting. I read this entry by Eliza Gauger with interest; I’m not willing to go as far as Bruce Sterling and declare blogging dead, but it has taken a bit of a hit. While I was looking at the bookmarklet Eliza is using, I discovered that there’s similar functionality built into WordPress called Press This. I’ve started using it (‘sproke and the two Lottes were posted via Press This) and am going to mix a lot more Tumblr/Soup-ish quick links into the blog stream. Expect the blog to be – at least until I go off on another tangent – a mix of ‘ooh, shiny’ quickies, stream-of-experience pictures and bog standard pointless ruminations.

(Wo)man Cub

A pretty little granddaughter appeared last night as if by magic. I can call it magic, since I wasn’t in the birthing room with my laboring daughter. Frances Mae M. (Frankie – though Scout may be used as a nickname, too) weighed 7 lbs. 2 oz. and is gorgeous.

Behold: the Majestic T Shirt

A long simmering project finally boils over. Lehmanhaus is the umbrella identity applied to my various activities w/ predatory critters – dog training and breeding mainly. Thanks largely to the efforts of A Certain Design Student and a friend who teaches Latin, I am pleased to unveil the official Lehmanhaus t shirt! [fireworks and gunfire stage right, ululation and baying hounds stage left]

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If any of you out there are crazy enough to actually want one (please – seek help) I have some extras. I’m going to do this the low tech way (except for preferring payment via  PayPal) email me (dr.hypercube-at-gmail.com) what you want and I’ll figure out shipping, tell you what the total damage is, etc. They’re $12.50 a pop – I’m trying to cover expenses – plus shipping.

On the name – Lehman is my mom’s maiden name. A good Swiss/German moniker (Mennonite) that matches well with my German dogs.

Status update

Some of you may have noticed that the blog has been doing a bit of time travelling – first back to the beginning of December and then to January 10. I think we’re resynchronized, time/space-wise – sorry for any confusion.

Transient (I hope) twitter issue

You may see a request pop up from ‘Twitter API’ asking for an ID and password when you first visit DoaMNH. It’s an issue with the twitter badge (halfway down the right margin). The twitter folks are working on it – if it’s not resolved soon, I’ll comment out the badge. In the meantime, just click cancel and press on. Sorry ’bout that…

Postgranioglacial thoughts

  • Living off the grid is a fine thing if you are set up for it. In a house designed for steady electrical input? High stress situation. ~7000W generator, here I come.
  • Generator placement – garage or basement? Neither! With today’s quieter engines, locating the generator in one’s bedroom is now feasible! The other obvious location – the kitchen – is already tight because you’ve brought the gas BBQ in (haven’t you?).
  • Why was this storm so much worse in terms of outages than the ice storm of 1998? Did NH just get hit harder this time? I’ll never forget the pictures of high-tension towers in Quebec and upstate New York crumpled and folded – the next summer, the Design Student and I took a trip to Montreal and the tree damage was apparent everywhere. This time, the ice accumulation was lighter – here on the coast – but the numbers of houses w/o power was up by a factor of four. I’m going to keep an eye on post mortems and not rely too much on anecdote.

Ice storm

I (and many others) am dealing with the aftermath of our recent ice storm. Power is still out – lines are down in at least 3 places along the road I live on. The wood stove has been keeping the house in the mid-50’s, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading by wind-up flashlight. It’s impossible to get any sense of when or in what order service will be restored from Public Service of NH; across the river, Central Maine Power has a goal of all customers back on by midnight tomorrow. I’d love to hear a similar county by county set of goals from PSNH…

Superior Scribblers

Wow. I get back from a multiday bird hunting trip to find that Steve has tagged me as a superior scribbler. To say that I’m emproudened would be an understatement. I’ve been reading Steve since the mid-80’s, when A Rage for Falcons first came out and the other bloggers he tags are damn high quality reads – I feel like the odd guy out. Hasn’t stopped me from doing a little (internal) swaggering around, though – I plan on continuing to enjoy the recognition.

My five picks for Superior Scribblers:

  • Lord Whimsy’s LiveJournal. Sartorial splendor, yes, but also plants, carnivorous and otherwise, wunderkammeren, the Pine Barrens and the Philly scene. He introduced me to Adam Wallacavage’s cephalopod chandeliers and has recently been seen dancing with danger girls. Beware – that well-dressed man on the pennyfarthing is much more than he seems!
  • Xtinpore. I found Xtin via Pluvialis/Fretmarks (they are friends IRL) and what a find it was. She writes like a thrush sings. Xtinpore has been on a bit of a hiatus recently – I’m fervently hoping that regular posting will resume. If you haven’t been there, go and read the older posts; if you have, add Xtin to your RSS feed so that you’ll know immediately when new posts go up.
  • The Glyphblog. One of the nice things about the medium (web stuff/blogging) is that it can be a substrate for various forms of expression – words, drawings, photographs, sequential art, moving images, you name it. You’ll find just about all of the above (and some things that defy categories) over at Lex10’s place. The Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn and trading card mashups? C’mon, what more could an old psychedelician want?
  • Indexed. Visual haiku. Teh awesum. Jessica deserves a chapter in Edward Tufte’s next book.
  • Signor Marcello Poletti’s Flickrstream. Ok, so not much scribbling – mostly pictures – but I don’t care! One of my reading metrics, especially when it’s non-fiction, is how many other books does the tome in question cause me to read? How many tangential paths do I set off on? By this measure Poletti’s stream is superior – keep an eye on it.

AV Gadgetry

Over the past six months I’ve picked up a few pieces of hardware that have changed my media consumption habits a bit. Brief descriptions/reviews:

Sans Digital AccuNAS AN2L – network storage. I bought one at work to use as a quick and dirty data bucket (the fact that it would mirror 2 disks was the big draw) – once I got a first-hand look at the other things it could do, I bought myself one to use at home. Web server? Check. FTP server? Check. BitTorrent client? Check – you can grab a .torrent on your PC, copy it over to the NAS box and the NAS box will handle downloading the file. Nice power saving opportunity – turn off the honker PC and let the low power AN2L run 24/7. UPnP streamer? Check – a nice and reasonably standardized way to access content on the NAS box (think audio and video) without needing a Samba client (see Archos, below). Update – just realized I’d used a potential confusing TLA – NAS = Network Attached Storage.

Popcorn Hour A-100 – media player. This little box lets me play all kinds of stuff on the teevee/stereo. It can access the NAS box using standard Microsoft file sharing (SMB/Samba) or talk to any UPnP streamers it sees (another way or getting at the NAS box). One very cool feature? It will play .iso images of DVDs – I can rip one of my DVDs to iso format, store it on the AN2L, and replay any time – no loading the DVD player necessary, and you get everything – menus, special features, etc. It doesn’t upscale – my DVD player does – I’m not sure if my TV will and I’m pretty sure I don’t care enough to fiddle. If you throw a hard drive into the PCH it will do torrents and UPnP just like the NAS box, but without a drive, it is dead silent (good thing). It doesn’t mirror (out of the box – someone has probably tweaked it), so the AN2L is where content lives.

Archos 705 – personal media player. I wanted a media player that I could use in the house and on the road – I also wanted a screen that I could see. This gadget hit both targets – it will not fit in your pocket, but it will store a bunch of eps of The Prisoner, Deadwood, Venture Bros. , etc. along with hours of tunes (though if music is your primary focus, it is too big) and you don’t have to squint. I also picked up the base unit that allows it to become a mini-DVR. Copying files to/from it is a PITA – Archos have apparently killed it’s file sharing capabilities, so to get files off it you need to connect it via USB to a computer. As a be-all and end-all convergence gadget, it’s lacking – as a satellite screen, it works like a charm.

In action, the sequence of events might look like:

  • I hear about an interesting torrent (I know – ancient example). I find the .torrent file and fire up the AN2L. Time passes.
  • Download complete! Now it’s evening and a little light entertainment sounds like just the thing. I use the PCH A-100 to play the downloaded file (physically on the NAS box in the basement) back on the living room teevee.
  • Phone rings – dang. I pause playback and talk talk talk on the phone. “KTHXBAI”, hang up phone and look at the time – late! “I think I’ll watch the last 10 minutes of the show in the master bedroom suite [massive exaggeration]”.  Grab the 705, queue the show up to where it needs to be and watch and/or go to sleep before the show is over.

I’m not there yet, but my bog-standard teevee watching is so minimal at this point (weather, amurcan football and F1 when I can find it) that my cable feed may have a limited life span.