I got a bit peckish before lunch, so I stopped at the newsstand in the building next door for a snack (the Indian restaurant was busy, otherwise I would have gotten a papadam). As the guy in front of me paid for his purchases, I noticed he'd done the old trick of putting a $100 bill on the outside of a wad of smaller bills, to make it look like he was rich.

Such a contrast. When my brother and I were younger, our father advised us to put the small bills on the outside, so as to present a less inviting target to the hordes of robbers that (in his worldview) lurk everywhere, waiting for people to reveal themselves as potential victims.

It's not really his fault; from what I remember of my grandmother, I'm certain she's the one who taught him Fear of Other People (along with Fear of Having One's Eyes Put Out, Fear of Going to the Poorhouse and Fear of Being Electrocuted While Urinating During a Thunderstorm).

It's not like all his advice is bad; for example, it makes good sense to break down the boxes that expensive electronic appliances come in before putting them out for trash pickup. The "birds and the bees" talk was disastrous, though (in part, I suspect, because he waited until I was in college to try and have "the talk" with me).

I had always known my father was "frugal" (to put it kindly), but I'd never realized exactly how much of a tightwad he was until "the talk", wherein he informed me that one could save money by washing prophylactics thoroughly for reuse.

For years I've had a love-hate relationship with the music of John Dowland. I love his lute songs, but I've always found them too hard to play.

I decided that I would, come Hell or high water, learn to play at least I saw my Lady weepe, my favorite of his lute songs. Unfortunately, the first page of it seems to have disappeared from my collection, so today I went to the library to replace it. Though they did have it in a modern edition, I checked the microfilm catalogue and found that they had a copy of the original 1600 edition, so I printed it out from there. Just for grins, I also printed some of my other favorite Dowland songs from the first and second books of Ayres.

To my utter surprise, I was actually able to sight-read through them, albeit slowly, and with only slight trouble due to the fact that the 'e' used in sixteenth-century lute tablature, lacking the middle 'crossbar', looks an awful lot like a 'c', especially when folio-sized pages are reduced to 8½-by-11 sheets. Even Flow my teares went astonishingly well.

I can't account for why I'm suddenly finding Dowland much easier to play, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

For two weeks, I've been playing a game of Alchemy on my PDA. Alas, I finally boxed myself into a corner and had to end the game. Final score: 379448, on level 61.

Interestingly enough, the PDA version has an "Undo" feature, which (as far as I can tell) isn't available on the above-linked Java version of the game.

A week ago, the elevator certificate in my building reached its five-year anniversary of being expired.

Hardly surprising; the building owner has had maintenance people out several times this year trying to fix the doors, which have a tendency to spring back open again as soon as they've closed, making it impossible to actually use the elevator. And there's no emergency phone, which I believe is required by the ADA. (Confounded dentists!)

Karen and I finally saw League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Spoilers hereunder, you have been warned. Maybe I should implement 'cuts' like LiveJournal has. Eh, but not tonight.

Judging from Karen's question after the movie, I was not alone in wondering why Alan Quatermain was selected by 'M' for the League. (Or 'Quartermain', judging from the spelling on the grave marker.) He had no supernatural powers or chemical formulæ to be stolen or copied; there was no reason whatsoever (that I could see) for 'M' to recruit him at all.

From Gamera_Spinning, I now know that the reason given in the movie had nothing to do with the original comic, and — from the Alan Moore interview listed in his weblog entry — that Tom Sawyer was added for the American audience. (Out of all American fiction, they couldn't find any character more appropriate than a kid best known for floating downriver on a raft?!)

It wasn't much of a mystery who "The Phantom" was. We got a nice long closeup of the Masonic ring on The Phantom's finger, and it was hard not to notice that the doors of M's London meeting-room were covered with the square-and-compasses. Could it have been any more blatant? I'm going to have to get me a copy of Alan Moore's comic and confirm my assumption that the original wasn't that amateurish.

Not really too sure about the whole collapsing-Venice thing, either. Let's see, a bomb blowing up causes a domino effect which will destroy the entire city, and blowing up one single building before the radius of destruction reaches it will act like a firebreak and halt the entire process? What about the buildings elsewhere on the radius? And if the whole city's supposed to be destroyed, why are The Phantom's men suicidally lining the rooftops of the doomed buildings? Where in Venice are there streets that long? What metal is the Nautilus made of, if it can survive stone buildings falling on it? And how on earth did Tom Sawyer escape being killed by Nemo's SCUD missile, since two seconds before it the building, he was still trapped under Nemo's "auto-mobile"? There's only so much disbelief I can suspend, and that sequence just went way too far over my limit.

Though they started pushing my limit right at the beginning, with what appeared to be World War II-era German uniforms in 1899. I guess they figured the audiences wouldn't recognize them as Germans otherwise.

According to this article (courtesy of Fark), there are a few more interesting California governor wannabes.

A hundred-year-old woman. A porn actress. A marijuana grower. And Donald A. Novello, better known as "Father Guido Sarducci".

Was knocked out yesterday by a mystery twelve-hour fever. It all started in the wee hours, when I woke up afraid I was going to freeze to death. In Florida. In August. In a house where the air conditioning is not always satisfactory (to be charitable). Fortunately, my joints have stopped aching, the room has stopped spinning, and my temperature is back down to its usual 97.4 degrees¹.

I wonder about the legality of copy-protected CDs. 17 USC 117 explicitly grants users of computer programs the right to make an archival copy without it being considered copyright infringement. 17 USC 1201, though, makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection schemes, which would seem to abrogate the user's right to make a backup of a protected disc. Or, for example, use software to copy them to image files on your hard drive so you don't have to stick the disc into your computer every time you want to run a program.

1. That would be 36.333 degrees anywhere but Burma, Liberia and the United States.

I haven't written much here lately, due to other projects, so to alleviate boredom, here's a Friday Five (only four days late).

1. How much time do you spend online each day?

Hard to quantify. Both at home and at work, my machines are always online, so in a sense I'm technically always online as long as I'm at one place or the other, and awake. In reality, though, Internet-related activities are outweighed by non-Internet-related activities. But possibly not by much.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?

A HTML page on my hard drive which contains my most frequently used links, grouped by category. Why not use bookmarks? Because I use several different browsers (to test Web page compatibility, etc.) and I don't want to have to reproduce every bookmark in every browser, or have to re-enter all of my bookmarks when a browser update wipes them out.

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?

Trillian. It handles all of the major IM networks with a consistent interface.

4. Where was your first webpage located?

http://www.cybergate.com/~shipbrk/ (link no longer valid). My ISP at the time allocated five megabytes to each dialup user. My Web site quickly grew larger than that, so I paid for extra space. I ended up paying the same amount for twenty megabytes as I'm currently paying for four gigabytes (and a whole bunch of other bells and whistles).

5. How long have you had your current website?

It's evolved a bit over the years, content-wise as well as cosmetically, and hosted on a variety of different machines, but it's been around since late 1994 or early 1995, I can't remember which.

I was really hopeful about the apparent improvement in technical support at the company which makes some of the 3D software that I use. Indeed, their homepage boasts of "unparalleled [technical] support".

When I discovered that specular and bump maps were interpreted differently between version 8.5 and version 10.5, I sent in a support request asking if they could tell me what the difference in formulas was, so I could get things back looking the way I wanted them to without having to do a lot of trial and error re-rendering.

Their entire response: there is not a set formula- experimentation would be your best avenue for better understanding-

So I guess the program doesn't use mathematical algorithms like every other 3D renderer, but just pulls values out of its electronic ass. "Unparalleled support" indeed.

The Internet is an interesting thing. Blogging communities like LiveJournal seem to be doing more to bring together people in a personal way than anything I've seen on the 'net previously, such as newsgroups or forums.

They blog about their day-to-day lives, and syndication (like LJ "friends" pages) brings them all together in a single place, so one doesn't even have to go through the tedium of pulling down the Bookmarks menu to read the latest on what they're up to.

In a way, it's great — I've found a whole group of really fascinating people who share my interest in late-period clothing. Today, I "met" a lady who, in addition to costuming, is also a lutenist and a calligrapher (as am I).

However, it's a cruel dichotomy: despite bringing people with similar interests closer together online, it's frustrating because distance makes it impossible to actually hang out with these people in the real world. I'll probably never have the opportunity to play a lute duet with the lady mentioned above, as she lives several thousand kilometers away in England.

It's kind of weird situation to have a sense of familiarity with a person you've never met: to be genuinely happy for someone when she gets a job, and to feel genuine concern for her when she has a panic attack or a bout with depression, even though you don't even know what she looks like. And it's always fun to think that you know what a person's like from reading the words he writes or the pictures she posts, and then one entry totally undermines the assumptions that you've made (like a young, petite-looking woman turning out to be 5'10" and ex-Navy).

As long as I've been on the Internet, I don't think I'll ever cease to be fascinated by the way it continues to shape everyday life.

Yesterday, I went to the art supply store for some new ink, because I'm tired of my pens clogging with the ten-year-old bottle I've been stubbornly using. While I was in the area, I went next door to the Guitar Center (a definite misnomer, as I was surprised to discover; I don't have to be quite so sad that Mars closed).

I'd been in there last week to ask about getting gut strings for my classical guitar. They didn't have any, as I'd expected (it's not like they're highly in demand), but they said they'd see if they could order some and give me a call. When I got up to the counter, the guy actually remembered me by name. He said he'd looked into it, but said he didn't think anybody even makes gut classical strings. Oh well, I'll just have to order a fictional set.

Sev had just purchased a set of Fender flat-wound strings for his acoustic bass. They were nice — great sound, great feel, and no fret noise — so I inquired about a set for my five-string electric bass. Ha. They didn't have any, and Fender doesn't even make any five-string flat-wound sets. The guy recommended a set of Chrome strings which retails for $60 (ouch!), but he said he could get them for about $25. Okay, that's a little more reasonable! I ordered a set.

While I was there, I looked in the microphone case, as I'd recently read that condenser mics give a much better sound when recording acoustic guitars, and I want to do some solo recording. They had the Oktava MK-219, which I'd seen a while ago for about $600 at Mars, going for $69. At that price, I decided it was time for an impulse buy. (They were also running a special on a slightly higher-end mic, but I really didn't want to spend $2499 ($795 off!) on one microphone.)

I brought it home, hooked it up, and... nothing. I changed cables. Nothing. I tried different jacks. Nothing. In desperation, I tried an unbalanced mic cable. Nothing. Ekskrementon! A little 'net research indicated that Oktava — or, more properly, Октава — makes decent microphones, but has historically suffered from quality-control issues.

I went back today to exchange it for a working one, and learned that condenser mics need a preamp, either a separate unit or a mixing console with +48V "phantom power" built in. Since the idea of dropping several hundred dollars on a new mixing console was less than palatable, I picked up a cute little tube preamp unit which they were running a special on. When I get a little free time, I'll be running some experiments to see just how different the mic sounds.

Karen went with me to the store today; she always jokes about being "arm candy" when she accompanies me to a computer or music store. One creepy guy kept standing near her; wherever she moved, he soon followed. I suppose that's one of the hazards of being an attractive woman in a store full of guys.

I'd forgotten how much I hate Insular Minuscule. I'd forgotten how much it hurts, how long it takes to do it, and how if you stare at it too long it starts to look like a cross between Cyrillic and Sanskrit, especially if you're writing it in a non-English language with a lot of Gs and Ns.

I'm finally done with the lettering (except for two all-caps lines up at the top of the page), but then I have to do all that smegging knotwork. Once my hand stops throbbing.

According to news reports, the Sobig worm is programmed to turn itself off on September tenth.

Which, of course, raises the question: what's going to happen on the eleventh?

First, the "Gender Genie" analyzes my writing and deduces that I'm female, and now the Battle Cry meme makes me sound like a hairdresser or a beautician, or whoever it is that gives people facials.

I blame ross_winn for the first link. But since he, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all pegged as female as well, I won't hold it against him. Actually, the comments about the Genie are fairly interesting; it seems it only gets the right answer about half the time, though that's only a sample of the people who bother to let it know if it was right or wrong.

Homestar Runner is extremely difficult to model in 3D, at least if you want his mouth to move like it does in the Flash animations. I've tried about ten different times in the past year, and have met with absolutely no success.

Maybe I should just start with Strong Bad. Or one of the characters with a hidden, invisible or unused mouth.

I brought one of my lutes to Crown because Mistress Elfwyn wanted to see what a real lute felt and sounded like. So after the interminable meetings, I brought the lute into the feast hall, opened up the case... and noticed that there was a string curled about the pegbox. Oh well, I'm used to strings breaking; that's why I keep a full set of replacements in the case. So I looked at the fretboard to see which string it was.

There were no strings on the fretboard.

Due to the heat, or the humidity, or the stupid bumpy dirt road which leads to the event site, or possibly a combination of the three, the glue holding the bridge to the soundboard had decided to give up the ghost.

This isn't the first time my bridge has come off. The first time it happened, I gave it to a luthier (kind of a misnomer these days, since most of them have never even seen a lute, but I digress). It took me six months to get it back from him, but he swore the problem would never recur. Obviously, his faith in his abilities wasn't entirely justified. Time to start researching wood glues, I guess.