You were wrong: stevenf’s Spamusement is back!
Archive for June, 2006
E is back from Daytona, where she graded the AP English Language exam (along with 899 additional graduate students, high school teachers, and other wielders of the mighty red pen). Official verdict: piña coladas are deemed to be missing from our daily routine.
Unrelated: students are funny.
I seem to have a lot of articles about donuts. The latest salacious salvo in the ongoing Houston donut drama is comes in the form of suits brought against Shipley’s alleging horrifying workplace conditions, including beatings, sexual harassment, and fraud. [Seen on Houstonist: Workplace a hole, some Shipley’s employees claim.]
So, I finally updated our sunflower iMac G4 to Tiger (OS X 10.4, for those just tuning in). I did this because Erin’s new MacBook preferred to crash rather than print to the iMac’s shared HP DeskJet 810C; relevant support threads indicate that the PPC print drivers weren’t totally happy inside Rosetta. The best known fix is to install the Universal (i.e., PPC+x86) HP print drivers (version 3.3) from the MacBook’s OS X DVD. Of course, these drivers require Tiger, so an update to 10.4 was in order.
The fix worked; the MacBook can now pull up the Print dialog (in which the DeskJet is the default printer) without crashing, hard.
Except that now there’s a new problem: The print queue will randomly stop, mid-job, causing half-printed pages and other mayhem. An excerpt from /var/log/system.log shows why the queue stops:
Jun 26 19:57:31 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38071.978 AppleUSBOHCI[0×11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 19:59:25 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38185.985 AppleUSBOHCI[0×11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 20:00:43 imac crashdump[6014]: PrintJobMgr crashed
Jun 26 20:00:46 imac crashdump[6014]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/PrintJobMgr.crash.log
So the Mac loses the USB connection to the printer. Turns out that others have experienced similar issues when upgrading to Tiger. Any OS X USB nerds (I’m basically looking at you, Manuel) got any bright ideas here?
Wow, the Diagnostic Hospital implosion was big enough news to make CNN video. (Rice reckoning: the horizontal building at top left with all the windows is new Wiess college; the vertical building revealed behind the dust cloud is Sid Rich.)
Ted captured his own video from the event (frame at right), which seems to have drawn a pretty solid crowd to the soccer fields on the south side of campus. (The explosions seem a lot louder from the Rice side of the building, compared with CNN’s video.)
Other coverage: Some photos by Ian Rees, taken from the vantage of the BCM’s Human Genome Sequencing Center down the street.
Still more coverage (6/27): Cherry Demolition has footage of their own; several lovely photos [r2blue,irees] are appearing on Flickr.
(Previously on dsandler.org: Implosion, in which Google Maps points to the wrong building—good thing the demolition team didn’t use it.)
A new Web startup to watch, as recently reviewed by Mossberg: Tabblo, a photo-sharing site with a twist: they allow you to do nice layouts and collages (instead of locking you into a slide-sorter aesthetic). [Side note for pygeeks: Tabblo is a Django app.]
As you know, my work on the Campanile opened my eyes to the power of photo presentation; you need some gridlines, some breathing room, contrasting colors and sizes, a little text, and pretty soon you can tell a story (or several). Sometimes it’s fun to roll the dice and let entropy decide these things. (e.g.: Chanukah 2001, PalmSource moving out and in, Monterey, a nice pen, doodles, a lovely wedding.)
One little nitpick on Tabblo, though: the photo viewer looks oddly familiar.
Methodist Diagnostic Hospital at bottom-left [exterior], courtesy Google Maps. [Note: The image has been updated to include the actual hospital; GMaps unhelpfully pointed to the wrong building.] The parking lot at center top-right is now the site of the enormous Memorial Hermann Medical Plaza tower, the largest construction project underway in Houston, which dwarfs Sid Richardson College to its west…and all the other medical buildings, too. [Yahoo’s map is slightly more recent and less Escheresque.]
This came across the internal rice.general newsgroup: (emphasis mine, spelling errors theirs)
On Sunday morning June 25, at approximately 7:00 am, the old Diagnostic Hospital at 6448 Fannin, which is immediately across Main Street from Rice between entrances 4 and 5 (detention pond area), will be demolished by implosion. Both Main Street and Fannin Street auto and pedestrian traffic will be stopped between University Drive on the south and McGreggor Drive on the north starting Sunday morning about 6:15 and not reopened until the all clear is given about 8:00. Additionally, no persons will be allowed within 500 feet of the demolition site, including the Rice detention pond and track stadium area, during that time period.
The implosion will be a series of quick explosive bursts from within the building followed by the rumbling sound of the building falling. Depending on the wind that morning, a portion of the expected dust cloud will drift over the Southeast portion of the Rice campus. Immediately after the implosion and the all clear is given, contractor crews will begin sweeping streets and parking lots, and using water trucks to wash off affected vegetation. Rice maintenance crews will be available Sunday morning to address any specific issues that may relate to our campus.
[Update 6/25: this did, in fact, happen.]
