The Urban Refugee

I suspect Apple’s recent transition to Intel processors will be causing support technicians everywhere grief. I got bitten this past week after setting up a new computer for k.d. Lang’s mom (yes, that k.d. Lang — far be it from me to resist an opportunity to name drop). The computer was a new 17″ iMac and it came with an Epson 5800XF all-in-one printer. It turns out that installing printer and scanner software written for a PowerPC processor on an Intel unit seriously destabilizes OS X to the point where it goes down more than a five dollar ho. You wouldn’t know this unless you had actually bothered to read the note in fine print on Epson’s site first, though.

Whoops.

I’ve replaced the funky driver with one written for Intel, and the system is running better. The bad news is that Epson only provides a new driver for the printer — there’s no word on when Mrs. Lang will actually be able to use the scanner built into the unit.

I think there are going to be quite a few seriously pissed Apple owners over the next few months until all the bugs get ironed out.

Addendum:

The iMac ships with a demo version of MS Office. I told the customer to hold off on purchasing it as she would probably be able to get by just fine using the free OpenOffice.org software instead. I’ve just returned from a visit to their download page where I notice that the latest stable OS X build is for PPC only — Intel users are out of luck, for the moment at least. Happily, X11, which is required to run OOo on OS X, is on the customers’s OX X Tiger install CD so I won’t have to sit around and wait for an Intel compatible build of that to appear.

This leaves my customer without a good word processor at the moment. I thought of giving her Abiword instead, but their download page doesn’t differentiate between PPC and Intel builds of the software. No way in hell am I going to slap that on her system until I know for certain the binaries were compiled for Intel CPUs.

Now I’m starting to understand why Mac users are installing Windows on the goddamned things — Steve Jobs has backed them into a corner and this is the only way they can find software that runs on their new Intel CPUs.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

My Garmin eTrex 12 channel personal GPS receiver arrived earlier this week and I’ve been having a blast with it. What I’ve discovered so far…

• Whenever a customer gives me the directions to their place in miles, I can just set the unit for standard measurement and count the miles off rather than having to do that annoying metric conversion from my car’s metric odometer.
• My home sits at an elevation of 2458 feet above sea level.
• The magnetic inclination setting for my digital compass is actually fifteen degrees, not the eighteen degrees that was indicated by a crufty Govt. of Canada map.
• This thing can provide accuracy to within approximately 12  feet, which is pretty damn good.

I think it will compliment my chainsaw rather nicely.

So I was looking at the current state of our finances (or lack thereof), and had noticed that there was just enough money left over to justify a photo outing to the Athabasca Sand Dunes in the next few weeks. And of course that’s when the mail arrives with a lovely Alberta Health Care bill in the amount of $244.00. There goes the photo fund.

Typical.

Does anyone have advice on how to burn off bad karma? Apparently I’m carrying around a shitload of it.

You have one choice, boy: sex or the saw. Sex is, well, nobody knows. But the saw, the saw is family. — Drayton, Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II

My new chainsaw will be arriving on May 3rd. That’s 16 inches and 40 ccs of sharp, two-stroke, whirling, death. Just the thing to have on hand when my daughter introduces me to her first boyfriend, methinks.

Most of what I really need to know about life, the universe, and everything, I learned from watching episodes of CSI. Wisdom was not to be found watching Oprah, Maury, or Montel, but was there in the crime scenes on television.

These are the things I learned. Crime doesn’t pay. There’s always someone smarter than you are. Don’t kill people. Never contaminate a crime scene. You can clean up your own mess, but remember that they’ve got those black light thingies that tell them what kind of mess you made (semen — ew!). Be careful where you leave dead skin cells. Saying sorry when you hurt/kill somebody looks better during the sentencing phase of the trial. Wash your hands after an autopsy. Flushing evidence down the toilet doesn’t work. Cockroach racing is good for you. There’s no such thing as a balanced life. Work crazy hours, put in even more overtime, and worry about catching up on all that missed sleep next week.

If you’re going to take a nap, do it while you’re waiting for results from the DNA lab. When you enter a crime scene, watch for boobytraps, always make sure you’ve got latex gloves, and for gawd’s sake, don’t sneeze on anything. Be aware of emotional involvement. Remember that bizarre episode from season one? The crime went down, everything got screwed up by evidence that didn’t make sense, and then Grissom nailed the killer by tracking larvae growth on the corpse of a rotting pig. Real life’s like that too.

Remember that in every crime scene you’re surrounded by evidence that can help you. Look for it. Everything you need to convict the killer is in there somewhere. Autopsy protocol and determination and evidence preservation, criminology, and motives and sound thinking.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had already been entered into DNA and fingerprint databases — we could clear all our cases and be out for coffee and doughnuts by three in the afternoon. Or if we were allowed to take fingerprints and DNA samples from suspects without having to obtain court orders. And it is still true, no matter how many years you’ve been on the force, it is best to go into an unsecured crime scene with your gun drawn and your partner covering your back.

(With my apologies to Robert Fulghum.)

One of the most amazing things about working a casino as a volunteer is seeing how tightly controlled everything is in that enviroment. All Alberta casinos use a highly efficient software system that can pretty much tell you where every chip is in the entire building and it will catch any problems within hours. It’s rare to come across an Information Technology (IT) implementation that is so efficient and so functional, not to mention, virtually fraud and theft proof. I have to tip my hat to the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Control folks for pulling off this coup.

So… Is there any chance we can hire these folks to do the same thing with Ottawa that they did here in Alberta casinos? Can we? Please?

I’m posting from the Internet Cafe in the lovely Holiday Inn in Red Deer, Alberta. I’m here working a charity casino for the Kirriemuir Community Association. Charity casino work is probably the slackest volunteer work in the world. I worked as the banker last night (doing the same tonight), which means that you have to send out chips to tables every once in a while when they start running short on certain amounts. This was maybe two or three times per hour with 15 minutes of hurried counting at the end of the evening.

This is the cushiest volunteer work I’ve ever done, and it’s much better than standing at the entrace of Hawrelak Park in Edmonton during the Bright Nights festival taking food donations from people in their cars at -30C (and that’s without the wind chill).

I’m definitely signing up for this again.

…besides melting the crystals in a spoon with a cigarette lighter and injecting them into a major artery, that is. Apparently instant coffee crystals work well with washing soda as a film developer. After the developing process is complete simply use a tonne of fresh water as a stop bath and then salt water as the fixative.

I’ve gotta try this.

The pinhole, Kiev 60, and the Holga are getting dusted off next weekend, as is the Epson Perfection 4870 film scanner. I can’t wait!

• Moo
• Storm Mooving In
• Cattle Off In The Distance
• Whirled Trees
• Trees In Abstract
• Trees and Rock
• Weeds, Fake Colour Infrared

“Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind– though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.” — Paul Graham, How To Do What You Love