February 2005
Wednesday, Feb 16
"...for women working in the sex industry, whether prostitution or pornography, technology just might be replacing men -- the middlemen, that is. Because while the media continues to portray high tech as a man's world, that same tech has been quietly liberating women who work in what has historically been an exploitative field: 'professional' sex."
- read the article -
Tuesday, Feb 15
Boy, did I have a cool birthday this year (Saturday, February 12). I've occupied this realm for forty-six years now. My high school senior son had an audition date, for the UT-Knoxville music department. We left Nashville around 5:30 AM, me with a Thermos full of Sumatran Reserve, he fully prepared with his percussion audition pieces and a nice change of clothes. We drove a rented, fully-loaded Jeep Liberty, a fabulously cool car, with spectacular weather for distance driving.
We arrived at UT-K with over an hour to spare, as planned, and casually walked around part of the campus. We looked at the dorm he'll live in during his freshman year as a student of the College of Engineering, and made our way to Neyland Stadium, where he will eventually be marching with the Pride of the Southland Band, as the Tennessee Vols make their grand entrance by "running through the T" as nearly a hundred thousand fans roar their appreciation.
If there is such a thing as living vicariously through one's children, I definitely did that morning. But really, I'm just tremendously excited for him.
He eventually emerged from the formal audition with confidence in his step, saying he felt quite good about it. No foulups, and did everything according to recommendations. He changed his clothes, we stocked up on food and more coffee, and he took the wheel to leave Knoxville.
Next stop, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, some hundred miles south of Nashville, where he would resume weekend rehearsal with Music City Mystique, an indoor drumline, or Winter Guard. Of driving interest: it was I-40 West back toward Nashville, then onto the relatively new I-840 loop through Williamson county, widely skirting Franklin/Nashville, onto I-65 South, some twenty miles south of Franklin. I have to admit that, for all its negative points, I-840 sure as hell beat having to drive all the way back into Nashville, only to head directly south.
We finally arrived around 3:30 PM. He headed straight into the Lawrenceburg high school gym where Mystique bivouacs and practices themselves to exhaustion. (Why Lawrenceburg? They have to meet two criteria for a practice location: one, find a school that will agree to house them over the weekend, and two, that it be a fair driving distance for all its statewide members to drive.)
I then gassed up the Liberty, filled up the coffee, and headed back up the highway to Nashville.
My boy heading into a bright future, my girl in Winter drumline practice all day, and my wife running her new business...Happy Birthday to me, baby.
Tuesday, Feb 8
"In a culture that glorifies violence, why are human penises, bums and breasts so threatening? Why did the foundations of American civilization quake when, for 1.5 seconds, Janet Jackson's partially nude breast popped out at last year's Super Bowl?"
- read the article -
Thursday, Feb 3
Things I love about OSX Panther (the operating system on my fabulously kickass new computer:
The sidebar.
That's when you open a window of a drive or a folder, you have three content viewing options: icons, list or sidebar (Command>1, 2, or 3). It's a horizontally multi-paned window that shows nested contents side by side, and you simply use the arrow keys and the press of a letter to rapidly traverse through multiple layers. The beauty is, you can see all the contents without double-clicking a folder or using the flippy triangles in list mode. Kind of like viewing several pages of an open book simultaneously.
Exposé.
So you've got two or three programs open, and each program has several windows open. You wish to view a particular window that's buried somewhere beneath the one you're working in. Press F-9 and all open windows shrink (zoom!) to a size small enough to spread them all out separately, for easy viewing. Roll your cursor over the one you want and either click or press F-9 again, and it now is the front window.
Or: press F-10, and only the open windows in the program you're working in shrink to a viewable size - all others, and the desktop, are dimmed out.
Or: press F-11, and all open windows zip to the edges of the screen and out of sight, except for small slivers along the edges of your desktop. Excellent for pinpointing some stray file on the desktop, which is now completely open to view.
There are variations of all this, naturally: press F-9, then "return" the windows with F-10, and vice versa...the results are an inverse of the second keypress' function. You can have lots of fun with Exposé, as well as impressing onlookers. Once you use it, there is no going back. Outstanding.
Drag frequently used folders or files into the right side of the Dock.
Okay, that's probably an old trick. But I've never had OSX in my home, and it tickles the hell out of me.
There are a couple more features that I've only read about, but super-flexible navigation is a life-changing factor...and having a twenty-inch monitor makes it all the better.
I love this thing. Fast as hell, nearly silent operation, ultra-cool to look at.
Life's good.
Wednesday, Feb 2
Welcome to February, 2005.
What do you think?
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