Mr. T is earnestly pitying the fool in Chevy’s marketing department who came up with the ‘make your own Chevy Tahoe ad’ campaign.

See MeFi for the details. Priceless.

Wow, I don’t know what WordPress 2 did, but my happy and functional tagging system got b0rked by it. This isn’t rocket science, either. It isn’t a huge, complicated system. Nonetheless, it was pretty much inexplicably hosed. I did some tooling around with the tagging plugin and made a crappy hack fashioned a practical workaround. So now, for your browsing bemusement, you can once again browse the site by tags. Terribly exciting, I know.

Full disclosure: I am not a programmer, I just play one on the internets.

Last night was fun. Unfortunately I had to pull a Cinderella (heh) and bail out at midnight to catch the last subway train back home. LA public transportation is evil. The subways should run all night, or at least past last call.

Friday: Dan Bell and John Tejada. Life is hard, did I mention that?

I’ve gotten into the cheesy and annoying habit of looking on the bright side of things lately. Take today for example: I called Apple to learn more about the nails-on-chalkboard sound coming from my shiny new MacBook Pro. My concern was that it would be ruled ‘within specs’ for noise level and Apple would refuse to fix it. Since today is the 13th day after I received it, it was my last opportunity to return the laptop if it wasn’t ruled a defect.

So I called them up, and it’s a defect. There’s a problem with the power inverter and when the processors aren’t drawing a significant amount of power, the screech comes on. So I have purchased a defective computer and I have to send it in for repairs. I’m happy about this because it means I have a year to do so, and I don’t have to return it immediately. I really don’t mind the noise that much, and if it gets on my nerves I can turn off a core or power up PhotoBooth.

It’s hard to get upset about this problem since the laptop rocks in so many ways. Friday night (well, Saturday morning if you want to get technical) I powered up the preinstalled Apache web server and enabled the PHP module. Then I set up MySQL. I now have a full-powered web server. It’s great. Had I actually known what I was doing, it would’ve taken two minutes. Not knowing exactly what to do, it took 10. Not a bad deal overall. Meanwhile the computer is blazing fast with 1.5 gigabytes of PC5300 RAM.

I’m still holding out for the x86 WMV3 video codec for Quicktime to roll out.

Update: 1000th post!

I was bemoaning the lack of a SoCal version of Pix Patisserie, but no more. Jin Patisserie in Venice is up to the challenge. I dare say it’s even better. This is bold claim, considering the special place Pix holds in my heart. However, I’ll assert it now and retract later if Jin turns out to be a big disappointment. I’ll of course take pictures when I go.
Update: Aww yeah. It’s all that and more. This was the Afternoon Tea platter, which included some ginger tea. Unfortunately we got there at six o’clock and the light was poor, so I wasn’t able to get the photos I was hoping for. Alas, I shall have to go back again later when the light is better. I suffer so much for the sake of art, but it is a burden I must bear.

Today’s outing was a bit more successful than yesterday’s. I went in for my eye exam and LASIK evaluation. It went very well. While my overall vision isn’t very bad (I’m mildly nearsighted. My mom may have been right about all that reading in low light!) with LASIK I may (keeping my fingers crossed) be able to see significantly better than 20/20. Dr. Berg comes highly recommended by my roomate and another colleague at Disney. They’ve pumped up with a newer LASIK system that they claim will yield fanstastic results, and they threw around “you’re an ideal candidate” a lot at my evaluation. Apparently I have nice thick corneas. That’s me, sexy feet and nice thick corneas.

Fun fact from the VISX site:

70% of the clinical study participants could see 20/16 or better without glasses or contacts

So after two weeks from today, I’ll be able to look out the window on plane trips and read license plates on cars.

The interesting part about the process was getting my pupils dialated. I didn’t notice much at first; I got a bit farsighted, but nothing earth-shattering. I went through the examination process and made an appointment for April 3 to get my corneas sliced open and my eyes blasted with lasers. It’s officially on. After all was said and done I went outside to catch a cab back to work. It was when I got outdoors and into the California sunshine that I realized just how profound the effects of getting my pupils dialated were: it was as if my autofocus had been set about three f-stops too high. The sky was an unearthly white. Most everything was brighter than I had ever seen. Trees were glowing emerald orbs. Even the pavement was unbearably bright. I retreated back indoors to put on the handy shades that they had provided. I spent the rest of the day adjusting. Apparently the dialation can last up to 24 hours. Checking in the mirror, I still look like I’m either incredibly attracted to myself or I’m on drugs of some kind.

Someone once said,

Here’s to hell I spell it, spell it DMV.
Anyone who’s been there knows precisely what I mean.
I’ve stood in line and waited and choked back the urge to scream,
and if I had my druthers, I’d screw a chimpanzee.

Having lived in Oregon for my early driving years, I had no idea what Mr. Claypool was referring to. However, at 8:30 this morning I got a taste when I tried to get my Cally license. Californa DMV offices are hell. HELL. Avoid them at all costs.

As an added bonus, California DMV offices won’t accept my Oregon driver’s license as a valid ID. Because, you know, it’s probably fake. They informed me that they’d accept my tattered, photoless birth certificate. After all, that’s a foolproof form of identification. There’s no way someone could fake that.

Tomorrow night: The Orb, Dntel, Boom Bip, John Tejada: Be there or be not where I’m at.

This article features a pretentious girl named Dance Commander panning the show:

Her doll-like eyes glitter distantly of candy-flip revolution and terpsichorean terrorism before she dismisses the whole idea. “The fans of the Orb are all in their 30s and making money now,” she says with the finality of a Marxian actuary. “There’s this whole genre of ambient house that Lemon Jelly, Shpongle, and Banco de Gaia make that hit my ears a lot like my parents listening to smooth jazz. Uncomfortably mellow. There’s just a way different zeitgeist now,” she concludes. “The Orb is the sound of steady incomes and predictable sex and day-tripping. Maybe this is because psychedelics aren’t my drug of choice.”

Oh, snap! Dance Commander pulls no punches. LA City Beat has another article about this event in the context of the larger minimalism festival that it’s a part of. Isn’t ‘large minimalism festival’ an oxymoron? It should really be a festival featuring only one act, to be consistent.

Update:Well, I believe Dance Commander was both right and wrong about the show. It was indeed filled with thirtysomethings who were making money. That part was impossible to deny. However, the show was in fact enjoyable without psychedelics. Furthermore, this could mean that in ten years the Walt Disney Concert Hall will be hosting the terrorcore festival when all the kids listening to it hit their thirties and start making money and having predictable sex. I think predictable sex on the part of the audience is what makes a genre mainstream enough to get its own festival at the concert hall.

Who am I kidding? This is LA and it’s of course all about the benjamins. Hurry up and get it together, terrorcore fans, and you can hold next year’s Ides of March party at a swanky venue with great acoustics.

Hey look, it’s 2:30 AM and I’m rambling. Time for brain rest.

More photos in the Flickr set.

I’m now posting from the WordPress widget. 1337.

Widgets rock, in case you didn’t already know.

This will be the first Mulling It Over post composed with my new laptop. It is definitely a beautiful piece of engineering, with two exceptions.

1. The nails-on-chalkboard screeching sound it’s making. People have been calling it a ‘whine’. It’s not a whine. It’s the sound of fingernails moving slowly and purposefully across a chalkboard. There are hacks to fix it, but these end up reducing the performance either by enabling the video camera at all times or by disabling one of the cores No, really. Apparently practically every one that’s been sold is making this sound. Don’t believe me? Check out the 500+ post thread on the Apple forums. I’m surprised they’re not issuing a huge recall. People are reporting sending their laptops in for the fix, waiting weeks, and getting them back making the same damn noise.

Update: About five minutes after dropping this post I came upon a workable fix from the Red Sweater Blog. The MBS: SystemLoad will also do in a bind. Both still tax the CPUs and ultimately cost battery life. I suspect this is why Apple has been so skittish about making promises about battery life. With the screech in full effect, the MacBook can be equivalent to the PowerBook. However, with the screech-silencing hacks in place keeping a processor awake, the battery life inevitably suffers and drops to sub-PowerBook levels.

2. It can’t play Windows Media files. Can’t. No, really. There’s a third-party plugin for Quicktime that’s supposed to do it, but it’s not avilable for Intel Macs. No word on when it will, either.

So if you’re looking for some schadenfreude, there you go. Frankly I’m a bit confused why Apple would go to all this trouble to make the switch to Intel chips and b0rk their flagship product in this way.

Other than that it’s alright. I kinda wish I had gotten a Thinkpad. I haven’t heard of the Thinkpads making nails-on-chalkboard sounds or being unable to play WMVs.

Update: Ok, so it’s not as bad as I make it out to be. I can run Windows Media Player 9 under Rosetta, and it seems to play some (but not all) of the WMV files. However, it’s a PowerPC app. Running it with Rosetta makes it a memory hog and causes the fans to wind up to near-hoover volumes. On the bright side, the 1GB stick of RAM is en route which should help.

Last update, I swear: The gigabyte of extra RAM I ordered arrived today. Newegg is on the other side of town, which is nice. I’m now rocking with 1.5 gigabytes of DDR2 5300. It feels good.