In LA

I had some trouble installing Palm Desktop on my ibook, and chances are you will too. But thankfully there is a solution. Here’s the tale from the top.

I installed a new version of OS X on my ibook, and afterward needed to reinstall palm desktop to get syncing to work. I jumped through all the hoops required to download Palm Desktop (is it really absolutely necessary for me to have to find and enter my Treo 600’s serial number in a form just to download the software? Annoying, bothersome, unnecessary.). I then began my futile attempt to install Palm Desktop.

The installer crapped out with an error message very quickly in the install process (wish I could remember the error message). After much searching, I found out that the culprit is a permissions problem of which PalmOne is aware and has a fix available. It boggles my mind that PalmOne doesn’t mention the availability of this fix right away in huge print on the download page for the Mac version of the latest Palm Desktop, because I think just about every Mac Palm user who ever needs to install a new version of Palm Desktop will need to run this fix (apparently, anyone who has ever installed isync will need to run the script to change the permissions on a couple of folders).

After running the script, available here (get PalmOnePermissionsFixer.sit), I was finally able to install Palm Desktop. Yay.

A document that explains the difference in quality between the recordable DVD media from different manufacturers and includes quality ratings. DVD MEDIA GUIDES -> Blank Media & Quality FAQ

An application (for Windows) that will tell you information about your blank DVDR disc — who made it, what speed it can be written to at, etc. DVD Identifier.

A similar application for the Mac, in Japanese or with babelfish translation to English.

I’ll have to check all this out. I’ve had very good luck (i.e. 100% success so far) with my stack of 200 DVDR discs I mentioned earlier.

Many times I’ve found myself wondering how “conservative” and “liberal” positions on issues are actually decided, because neither have ever seemed like coherent collections of ideas to me. This excerpt from Berkeley linguist George Lakoff’s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” describes a framework for understanding liberalism and conservativism, a “family model” that rings very true to me. I found it a fascinating read. Here are a couple of links to it:

PDF excerpt (with nice formatting - recommended)

same excerpt, in html (with very little formatting)

Well….the day was made a little bit more exciting by a spotting of Andy Dick having lunch.

ed note: This post was made a while back by my friend Enrique who had an uncanny knack for running into celebrities. I figured it’d be fun for him to be able to post ‘Celebrity Sightings’ here, so I gave him an account and a category. But then he became busy at work and didn’t have time to make any more posts, the category languished, and I eventually deleted it. This post is all that remains of that happy era. I guess for real celebrity photos you should look elsewhere.

This video is simply one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve never been accused of hyperbole by anyone to whom I paid attention.

The technology used in modern-day farms is moving along by leaps and bounds. I thought this machine was gross when I watched the first few seconds of the clip before I realized that there was no blood involved — it’s not a chicken-killing machine, or at least not an efficient one — it simply loads chickens onto a truck in a highly efficient manner.

Those of you prone to worrying about animal cruelty and whatnot will be pleased to note that according to the manufacturer:

Eight (8) degree tilt of cage prevents packing of chickens to back of cage, reducing stress on chickens.

Well I sure am relieved. Just be sure that the “hydraulically adjustible rotating drums” are set for the right size chicken and everything will be fine.

edit: mirrored video and changed link

This place, shop4tech.com, has 200 DVD-R discs for $34.

The discs are rated for 1X-2X speed, which is very slow by today’s standards — 8X and 16X media are de rigueur with fashionable geeks these days. But apparently people have had great success burning to these discs at 4X, and there’ve even been reports of them burning well at 8X. There’s also a 10%-off coupon code that may or may not work available at the previous link.

Not bad… I’ll be backing up all my non-critical data to these as soon as my order arrives.