Category: What the…?

The Spock Pistols @ Whisky-a-Go-Go.

The next time someone tells me that Portland’s OK but it’s not very cosmopolitan, or raves that their former home had a wider variety of “ethnic” food and restaurants, I think I’m going to force them into the Food4Less at SE 82nd & Powell where I took this shot of some durian fruit in the produce section.

“Pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock” is how travel writer Richard Sterling described the smell. Even the uncut fruits smell so bad they’re banned from public transport in notoriously rigid Singapore (where the sign gives them equal standing with smoking, eating and drinking, and flammamable goods), although I have to admit I didn’t smell them from a few feet away in the Food4Less.

The part I liked best about it was that the sign in the store notes that they’re eleven cents cheaper there than “SUPERMARKET PRICE”. And I have to ask exactly which supermarket they’re thinking of. They’re sure not at Fred Meyer’s or Safeway.

From the AP:

Some see racist theme in alien adventure ‘Avatar’

…

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the sci-fi Web site io9.com , likened “Avatar” to the recent film “District 9,” in which a white man accidentally becomes an alien and then helps save them, and 1984’s “Dune,” in which a white man becomes an alien Messiah.

First off, Paul Atriedes in “Dune” starts out as a human, and the Fremen of Arrakis are humans. Paul does sort of become an alien worm thingie in the story after “Dune” (although not in the movie) but at no point in the book or any of the various film adaptations is he ever anything other than a spiced-up human.

And in “District 9,” Wikus Van De Merwe turns into an alien, but he doesn’t become the leader of the aliens. He does help the leader and his son escape, but Wikus himself gets stuck picking through garbage in the new alien relocation camp, waiting for the sequel.

Once, somewhere, sometime ago
His eyes were clear to see,
He put his thoughts into my mind,
And gave my self to be
He stopped me from living so unsane,
I could be just what I want to be,
Things appear as they really are,
I can see just what I wanted to see

Come on, and let it happen to you
I say, I say come on, and let it happen to you

You gotta open up your mind
And let everything come through…
Come on yeah!

Well it starts like a roller coaster ride,
So real it takes your breath away
It slides you through your point of view,
You look back to where you thought you’d stayed

Your ride changes outside view,
While it glides you like a neon ray,
And you find you don’t have to search for words,

For there’s nothing to be said

Come on, you gotta let it happen to you
Hey, come on, and let it happen to you
You gotta open up your mind
And let everything come through…

After you trip life opens up,
You start doing what you want to do
And you find out that the world that you once feared,

Gets what it has from you
No one can ever hurt you
But you know more than you thought you knew
And you’re looking at the world
With brand new eyes,
And no one can ever spoil the view

Come on, and let it happen to you
Hey, hey, hey come on, and let it happen to you

You gotta open up your mind
And let everything come through…

Open up your mind,
Let everything come through…

— Roky Erickson & The 13th Floor Elevators, “Roller Coaster”, Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators

Over the past several decades of computer work, I’ve dealt with a variety of archive and backup methods. I still have a couple of 8.5″ floppy disks from the Terak system that was in the basement of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall on the University of Oregon campus when I got there in 1980.

Over the years, I’ve tried to hold onto most of my personal digital output. There are still 5.25″ floppies for a TRS-80 upstairs that hold the code and most of the data for the play-by-mail gang warfare game I wrote more than twenty years before the current social network mafia games. I used to have buckets of “hard” floppies, then 44MB Syquest removable hard disks, then 250MB Syquests, but for the past sixteen or seventeen years I’ve relied on a program called Retrospect for both backup and archiving.

I came across Retrospect (originally from a company called Dantz) back in the days when I was working in the pre-press business and we were looking for a way to, duh, handle the firehose of data from four-color scans, juggle jobs on and off the limited space of the servers of the early ’90s, hold onto old scans for pickups in future jobs, and cover our butts when a machine or a server went out. With the advent of DAT tapes holding a then-inconceivable gigabyte or two of data, Retrospect — with its ability to back up multiple machines across a network, run unattended, and search for files by name or folder or date — was a literal godsend.

As the years have gone on, I’ve used it on a semi-daily basis. When I had an office outside the house and was running my own servers plus multiple workstations on both Windows and Mac, everything got backed up twice a day: mid-day and after business hours. I burned through a couple of DAT drives, then as terabyte hard drives became available I moved to those.

Archives started off on DATs as well, but I moved most everything to CD-ROM (then DVD-ROM) because of the flakiness of the tape systems. A few things got missed in the translation, but that’s my own stupid fault.

So for the past several years things have been pretty stable. My main workstation, an old dual 1GHz G4 has an external terabyte drive for incremental backups of everything it can access (the PC hasn’t been turned on for a while, but it has a Retrospect client). As jobs age out, they go onto DVD-ROM (and because I’m a little crazy about these things, I make a non-Retrospect version of the archive, as well, look for me soon on Hoarders).

The problem, of course, is that I got a new laptop to work on iPhone projects over a year ago and the version of Retrospect I’ve been using — 6.1 — won’t back up the newer OS X operating system. Since the only times I’ve broken my rules on twice-a-day backups have generally coincided with a big disk error that’s screwed me over, it’s been on my nerves. So last month I downloaded the trial version of Retrospect 8 (now from EMC) and installed it. I can back up both the desktop and the laptop now, although the engine works as a server (it runs on either a PowerPC or Intel chip) and a management tool (on the laptop, because it can’t run on a non-Intel processor). It takes a little getting used to, but the backups seem to be coming off on time. The desktop’s usually on and it runs the backup, and if the laptop’s on at the right times, it gets backed up, too.

The holidays and a cold cut into my time to play with the system for the past couple of weeks, but I spent part of this morning trying to figure out how to deal with the archives. I couldn’t seem to add them and I started to get frustrated at the lack of information in the online knowledge base. Apparently, I’d missed this important bit of info from the Read Me when I set up the trial:

Upgrading from Retrospect 6.1

Because Retrospect 8.1 does not read Backup Sets created with previous Mac versions, the installation process does not overwrite or remove existing Retrospect 6.1 (or earlier) installations. It is recommended that you continue to maintain your existing Retrospect installation to perform restores from legacy Backup Sets.

We’ve had a lot of discussion on various Director forums about whether a new, glorious version of Director would need to maintain backwards-compatibility in file format and functionality, and I tended to say “Why bother?”, but Director wasn’t a tool where one of its main purposes was to maintain archives of data.

Wake up in the morning, pull myself out of bed

Think about the night before and everything I said

I made lots of promises I know that I can’t keep

So I’ll do ’em tomorrow

That seems like a pretty good idea to me

Life is moving faster, I can feel it every day

I’ve got trouble keeping up with what other people say

Big problems in the world

My life’s just a social swirl

But I’ll do it tomorrow

That seems like a pretty good idea to me

What’s wrong with tomorrow?

I’m watching him but who’s watching me?

Out my window there’s nothing where a city used to be

Phone line dead, the power gone, there’s nothing on TV

Can’t understand what happened to all the plans I made

I turn on the radio and hear the signal fade

(It’s pretty loud)

But I’ll do it tomorrow

Wall of Voodoo, “Tomorrow,” Call of the West

Since I haven’t been reading Willamette Week for a while, I only found out through my alumni magazine that Marty Smith, who I sort-of-knew long ago at Reed and for a couple years beyond, is now appearing weekly as “Dr. Know” in a Q&A column in the paper. A week ago, the question was about the costs of mountain rescue efforts, and his answer was witty and informative but it was upstaged for me by this comment’s opening line:

I don’t think you are a real doctor of anything other than dumbass-ness.

Dieter, the guy Dad shared an office with back in his days as a TA at the University of Oregon’s history department sent this along, knowing that I have a smart car. This one’s a convertible, too!

Saturday morning was supposed to be a snow and/or ice apocalypse for the Portland area — the mayor told people Friday to stay off the streets while retailers gnashed their teeth and counted down the number of shopping days before Christmas — but it bypassed the city giving us only a bit of slightly-above-freezing misting, which I’ve taken to calling Drizzaster ’09. You may not be able to get into the area from any direction, but once you’re here it’s a winter wonderland.

Looking east across the top of Mt. Tabor at 8:23am today.

Looking west from Mt. Tabor at 8:24am toward downtown Portland.

Looking east across the top of Mt. Tabor at 8:25am today.

Normally, walking down from Mt. Tabor doesn’t take quite as long as getting up there, but the black ice that finally showed up made getting down (safely) harder than the climb.

Seven years ago today I just about died from a bunch of blood clots in my lungs, stemming from a broken leg and ankle two months earlier. Four years ago, after Barbara and I saw that you could still buy a spot in the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery and we got ourselves a little dual-cremation plot so we could mix it up with the likes of the Banfields in the hereafter, I did a little jig on our plot to show I was still around.

The day after that photo was taken, I was back in the ER. Despite the horrible pain in my foot, I was relieved, because it turned out to be gout, not a blood clot about to send chunks into my lungs.

https://twitter.com/higgyb/status/6316049217?s=20

Still, this year, a more sober image. And a shout-out to Unity Evangelist (and former Director Product Manager) Tom Higgins for entering the world of old man diseases.

P.S. When we went over to Lone Fir to take the picture this evening, the place was lit up. Not for Christmas, but it looked like they’re shooting either a scene for a movie or an episode of “Leverage” tonight. I doubt it’s Madonna come back to haunt the place.