The local university has a room with a drawers and drawers full of microfilms containing English books from 1475 through 1800. Every so often, I'll go and print out a book or two, with the result that I've now got a filing cabinet full of old books on various subjects I'm interested in.

Unfortunately, that's space that could easily be used for other things, so I thought, Why not scan them in and put them on CD-ROM?

And then I thought, Why not turn them into PDFs and put them on the Internet for anyone else who might find them useful?

Tangent: this is why I shall never be a successful businessman. A successful businessman would have thought, Why not print them and sell them for a whole lot of money? Then again, a successful businessman would be dealing with something of greater interest to the general public. About the only people who might be interested in these are SCAdians and other reënactors, who are notorious for spending great amounts of money on alcohol, armor and occasionally clothing, but rarely on books. Generally speaking, of course; there are some who buy entire libraries, but they seem to be vastly outnumbered by those who don't.

I've scanned three and a half books in since Friday night (along with doing other things, such as band rehearsal, seeing X2, and so forth), and have come to a few conclusions:

1. I'm definitely going to have to quit cleaning up the images, or I'll never get through the filing cabinet.
2. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors saw nothing wrong with taking several paragraphs to explain something that could have been said in one sentence.
3. If The GIMP didn't have scripting capabilities, I'd have given up halfway through the first book. It's very nice to be able to select one menu function which changes the image's mode to black-and-white, crops out all the whitespace on the borders, rotates it to the proper orientation and then sends it to the clipboard so it can be pasted into another application. Now if only I could get the script to actually perform the scanning, and close the window after the image has been sent to the clipboard...
4. I need to learn OpenOffice scripting, so I can perform the same sorts of time-saving measures on the other end.

Because I now maintain the Trimarian Arts & Sciences Web site, I keep an eye on the referrer logs, especially the error messages. When I find someone linking to an invalid page, I'll usually send a message informing them of where the information can be found.

Earlier today, I got an error message, showing the link had come from a Yahoo! group. I went to check out the message, to see if I needed to post a correction.

The group was marked "Archives for members only". Because apparently, they're discussing some top secret costuming information they don't want anyone else to see. Anyway, it was "open membership" — not requiring moderator approval to sign up — so I joined the group and checked out the message, which didn't look like a correction was urgently needed.

I noticed from my referrer logs that an owner and/or moderator of the group checked out my Yahoo! profile a short time later. The IP address was quite familiar (being one of the people who despises Karen, Lisa and me but can't seem to stay away from reading our blogs).

I went back a couple hours later, out of boredom, to see what was being discussed on the list (since costuming is among my interests). Lo and behold, access had been changed to "Archives for moderators only".

Surely the moderator isn't so afraid that I might read something on there that all members of the group have been denied access to the message archives! No, a rational person would have just revoked my list membership instead of inconveniencing every other list member — so it must simply be a wacky coincidence that a couple of hours after I signed on, archive access was changed to moderator-only.

But that raises the question of why, apart from sheer incompetence, a list moderator would choose to do such a thing. Hey! I know you're reading; what's up with that? And why were you so desperate to find this post of mine?

Highly amused inquiring minds want to know!

Update: after the moderator read this entry (and obviously lacked the courage to answer the above questions!), archive access is back to "members only" — but now membership is restricted, so the moderator has to approve new additions to the list, and the member list is still hidden. Well, I guess some people just love their secrets! Heaven forbid anyone should know who else in the kingdom is interested in costuming; the earth would shake and cities be laid waste, or something.

No, I'm not one of those PETA wankers. I eat meat, I wear leather shoes and belts, I see nothing wrong with the use of fur.

I just hate trying to make something with fur. I try not to use pins to hold it in place, because I've had tiny holes in the hide turn into large rips before. But if it's not pinned, it shifts horribly. Worse than velvet.

But somehow, I always seem to forget past attempts at wrangling fur into a useful item, and end up cursing maliciously recalcitrant pieces of fur in the wee hours of the morning...

Funniest cartoon I've seen in a long time: Comic Fight Club by Liberty Meadows' Frank Cho.

This actually confirms many of my suspicions about those costumed vigilante "superheroes"...

While the Lunchbox plans his computer enhancements meticulously, over at the Lee residence our upgrades tend to be spurred by circumstances. Such as the power supply fan in Ginevra's machine dying over the weekend, thus frying her CPU and/or motherboard.

I'd known it was coming; the fan had been making noises of late, and I'd planned to replace it once ArtSci was over. But as Robbie Burns warned, such plans gang aft agley, and the fan punked out on us while we weren't home to hear the overheat alarm. Fortunately, we live right near TCWO, so we can get mail-order prices without having to wait for delivery.

They were out of stock on the motherboard I wanted (the same one I've got in my machine), but they did have another one with roughly equivalent features plus built-in GeForce4 MX video for only $10 more — and they had a bundle deal which included that motherboard, CPU and fan for less than it would have cost me to buy them separately with the other motherboard. I spent the extra $8 to bring her CPU up to 2000MHz — so now her system is equal to mine speed-wise, plus it's got better video than it had.

As a side benefit, it'll be a fairly kick-ass machine for the next Nerdvana. Sometimes, problems can make things work out for the best.

I smegging hate Microsoft.

That is all.

Brought Theseus, my computer, to work with me today so I could reinstall XP and a lot of my software without having to stay up half the night to do it.

Lesson #1: An office ISDN line is not the thing to be downloading software on. Fortunately, I snagged all of yesterday's list through the cablemodem before I left for work, but there were still a few things I needed — Creative and kX drivers for my sound cards being the most essential. kX drivers and utilities for SBLive #2: 3.4MB. Creative drivers and utilities for SBLive #1: 23.4MB. If I didn't need to have a genuine Creative driver installed so I can use the Vienna SoundFont editor, I'd go with kX all the way.

Lesson #2: Boss gets unhappy when he can't check his stock quotes every five minutes because someone's hogging the ISDN line.

While obtaining the Creative drivers, I stumbled upon their Prodikeys computer-and-music keyboard. It's an intriguing product, but their Web site sucks. They claim it has "touch-sensitive" keys, but don't say whether that's velocity sensitivity or pressure sensitivity. They don't say if the keys are weighted, whether they're full-sized... Hopefully they'll send me some more complete technical specifications.

The blue overhead has been set upon by an army of grey. From the looks of it, we'll soon be treated to the flash and boom of celestial cannons — but as always, the grey will eventually be beaten back by the blue, waiting to rise again some other day.

So. The Lunchbox scored some tickets to the Verizon 2003 Music Festival performance of Koko Taylor, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Bo Diddley.

The evening started off with a plan: eat at a sports bar on my block, then hit the Performing Arts Center. Unfortunately, sports bar's kitchen had closed at 4PM, and even the offer of free tickets couldn't convince them to cook us dinner. So we walked around until we came to one of the few restaurants open in downtown Tampa (the city that never gets out of bed).

Showtime. No, not yet. First, some soulless Verizon mid-level executive had to sing the praises of his company, making sure he got the name out about sixty times. It was like sitting through the timeshare presentation before claiming our free prize. Yes, we know Verizon is sponsoring it; you've got that huge banner up as a backdrop.

Koko Taylor's band came on first. The lead guitarist, who resembled Chris Rock, led a good number in which his guitar "sang" the part of his girlfriend. For some reason, his fifty-cent bottle of wine wasn't enough to warm her heart, so he demonstrated his lingual dexterity by playing the guitar with his tongue. Apparently, it was a convincing argument.

Koko was great, but (a) the sound guy had all the knobs turned up to eleven, so it was difficult to make out the words she was singing, and (b) the guy running the spotlight didn't feel it was necessary to illuminate a soloist unless he'd been playing for at least five or six seconds.

I guess there's some truth to the stereotype that white people are rhythm deficient. I was going to use as my example one particular gentleman a couple of rows in front of us, who was lurching back and forth as though he was davening out of time with the music, but he kept on doing it after the music had ended. Plenty of other examples abounded, though, like the bald guy in front of me who rocked his head from side to side, about 80% slower than the actual tempo — so about one time out of five, his head reached apogee on the beat.

Throughout the entire concert, people were just yelling things at the performers. Monosyllabic things like "Woooh!" and "Yeah!" mostly, but occasionally longer bursts, like "You tell it!" I was sorely tempted to shout "Random interjection!" but forebore so as not to embarrass my friends.

When the intermission came, Soulless Verizon Mid-Level Executive announced that we were at the Verizon 2003 Music Festival, as though we had all gone blind and contracted amnesia. I think he did some more pimping of his company, but I decided to take advantage of the intermission. I was held up from leaving the restroom by a knot of five guys clustered around the paper towel dispenser, trying to figure out how to get towels out of it. The instructions clearly, though ungrammatically, stated: If no paper, turn wheel, but these were guys who preferred to blaze their own experimental trail.

Clarence Brown started. Like The Lunchbox and Lisa, I preferred his first two songs and his fiddle medley to some of his other pieces, but the other pieces didn't exactly suck.

I guess not all white guys are rhythm-deficient, as the band was all white. The saxophonist was an immense guy — both Lisa and I thought he looked like a giant midget — who absolutely dwarfed his alto sax. This was kind of the opposite of my high school jazz band experience, when I (the smallest guy in the band) was the one playing the baritone sax. The drummer seemed to be holding a running conversation with himself as he played.

Once again, the sound board seemed to be run by a poorly trained monkey rather than a musically literate engineer. When the sound levels are so high that you can hear the hum of the lines, it's time to rethink your mixing strategy.

After Gatemouth's set, we were treated to Alan Ciamporcero, President of Verizon in the Southeast, pimping his company. "We're the ones bringing this to you," he boasted. "None of those other phone companies are doing this! We're even letting you bring drinks in here! Would AT&T do that? MCI?" Well, since it's the Performing Arts Center that sets the policy on drinks in the auditorium, what the smeg are you bragging about, moron? He tried to engage the enthusiasm of the audience, who ignored him for the most part as he reiterated the Verizon name ad nauseam. We got the point, pinhead. Verizon Verizon Verizon Malkovich Verizon. When he was done blathering, Sarasota Slim came over and discussed the bass player's sound with The Lunchbox (who works with Slim's wife).

Bo Diddley. Surprisingly, not only was his band all white, it was half female (keyboardist and bassist). He came out and sat down, strapped on a guitar that looked like an enormous mousetrap with a fretboard attached. During the performance, it revealed itself to be a MIDI guitar, something I hadn't expected from the 75-year-old blues musician. He explained to the crowd that he couldn't stand up because his sciatic nerve was giving him trouble. (Inside joke: see, that's what it does to you; it doesn't prevent you from wearing a certain style of clothing.)

One of the first songs he sang was a hilarious number called Shut up, woman. I know it sounds misogynistic from the title, but the woman had the upper hand. And a razor blade, eventually.

One song he did was completely out of character with the rest of the set. I don't recall its name, but it took a little while to get going. I'm all about MIDI, but an orchestral string sound coming out of a guitar is just wrong.

He had to cut one song ("Leave") out of his act, because it was closing in on 11PM, which is when the union stagehands' overtime kicks in. Still, it wasn't enough; during his final song, they first turned on the house lights while he was singing, then Verizon sent Bo Diddley's manager to take his guitar away from him. It didn't deter him; he just kept on singing. The Lunchbox and Lisa have already described the rest of the abysmally rude treatment he received at the direction of Soulless Verizon Mid-Level Executive, and our experience meeting The Originator backstage.

I have never seen a performer treated so abysmally by a sponsor. Even if you have no respect for the audience, how could you do that to Bo Diddley? Well, at least we knew who to blame for it, since they only told us 16,384 times that it was Verizon who was putting on the show. Everyone within earshot of me was indignant about Verizon's treatment of the music legend, so their little stunt generated a lot of well-deserved badwill.

Fucking Verizon.

Yesterday, Karen and I finally went to see The Matrix:Rebounded. Like everyone else on the Web, I had my opinions about it.

First, long-term thought doesn't seem to be Morpheus' forte. Let's say they do manage to shut down the Matrix without killing all the humans connected to it.

Then what?

There's a quarter of a million people in Zion. If the number of human "coppertops" is roughly equivalent to present-day real-world population, there's about six billion humans who'd suddenly be needing food, clothing, and shelter — 24,000 new mouths to feed for each man, woman and child in Zion.

The surface of the Earth is, if I remember correctly, uninhabitable; nothing growing. Do they have enough mush synthesizers to feed all six billion people? Do they have a distribution network for that food (and clothing) in place? Do they have the medical facilities to rehabilitate all those people's atrophied muscles, like they had to do for Neo when he was first ejected from the Matrix?

And all that assumes they can actually get those people out of their capsules before they starve or suffocate (or, if the machines dump them into the slurry like they did to Neo in the first movie, rescue them all before they drown).

Second, what on earth makes them think they can hold secret meetings in the Matrix? Every word they "utter" is converted from neural impulses into data which is transmitted to all the other people (or programs) located in the same virtual vicinity. There shouldn't be a need for an Agent to be present to hear it; the Matrix need only pay attention to the data as it's being transmitted, like the FBI's Carnivore system.

For that matter, how can there be such a thing as a "rogue program"? It's all being executed on the Matrix's systems; seems like a simple thing for the Matrix to simply terminate a program that isn't behaving. (And, of course, all the "rogues" we saw ultimately turned out to be furthering the Architect's plan.)

Thirdly, why didn't Neo just send the bullets back at his attackers rather than simply letting them fall to the ground? Failing that, since he was able to telekinetically grab some weapons for himself, why not just send all the weapons lining the walls at his opponents? Silly Neo.

Some computer tasks are more of a black art than a science. CD burning is one of these tasks: sometimes everything works fine, but other times — even though you follow the exact same procedure — the gods of silicon evacuate their bowels all over your blank disc, rendering it fit only for decorative purposes.

I needed to burn the master disc for the HMS Falcon's forthcoming collection of sea shanties. I won't bore you with the details of trying to get an Enhanced CD made (we wanted to include a video shot during the recording session), but after a great deal of profanity last night and this morning, I was finally able to hack together something which at least resembles an Enhanced CD.

I popped it in the car stereo to listen on the way to work, to make sure everything sounded all right (and that a regular CD player would play it). About a minute into the first track, a short high-pitched tone came out of the right speakers.

Crap. I have to deliver the CD tonight! I jumped the player back a few seconds, but the beep didn't recur. Weird. Maybe a bit got written sideways or something, and a bump in the road made things wonky? I took the CD out, put it back in again and played it from the beginning. No beep. It was probably something outside the car, a truck backing up or something. But it didn't sound like an outside noise.

Fifteen seconds into the second song, the beep came again. Damn it! I backed up, but once again it played normally. In disgust, I shut off the CD player.

A few minutes later, I heard the beep again. When I hit a stoplight, I looked around, and there on the floor behind the front passenger seat was Karen's cellphone, beeping to complain about a missed call.

Arrrgh.

Over the weekend, during dinner at the Columbia in St. Augustine, we passed our time at the "bachelors' table" playing the Star Wars Pants game.

If you're not familiar with it, you take a line from Star Wars and replace a noun with the word "pants". Great fun.

If you're as bored as I am, check out the comments to this entry, where I've placed all the good ones I could come up with.

For the past couple of weeks, at random intervals, the top of my right foot and the lower part of the shin will inexplicably feel hot; this sensation will last for several seconds before it returns to normal.

It's like a ghost is pissing on my ankle.

Here's your chance to get the Stephan [sic] Hawking Action Figure! His wheelchair comes with helicopter blades, boxing glove and... some kind of weird rubber casters on extending tubes, it looks like.

And is it just me, or is it the height of tackiness to boast that the action figure "is articulated and [can] stand", when the real Stephen Hawking isn't so fortunate?