Voder-Vocoder

A discussion of my impending visit to the mother city.

(12:41:47) Hal Canary: I don’t even know the cool places in memphis.
(12:42:03) Andrew Webb: you do. you just don’t know that you do.
(12:42:09) Andrew Webb: because
(12:42:13) Andrew Webb: they just don’t exist

POSTSCRIPT 2004-08-03: I still think there must be cool places in Memphis, but even if there are, Andrew and Geoff don’t know them. They took me gambling in Missisippi.

http://www.fuh2.com/

I was burgled sometime in the last week or so.

The perp entered the basement (1) with a key or (2) thorugh a door that did not fully close. He then opened the storage locker next to mine, which is not locked, and cut through the chickenwire seperating my space form the next space.

They took:

1. A 19″ monitor that doesn’t work.
2. Two old external-frame backpacks. My new backpack was safely in my bedroom.
3. My spare sleeping bag.
4. Two old tents, both of which have broken zippers and smell like mildew.
5. A rain fly that is missing its poles.
6. Maybe some other things.

With the exception of the spare sleeping bag, I was planning on giving most of these things to goodwill. They are, as far as I know, worthless.

They left most of the things I had a personal attachment to, such as boxes of old mementos (though they went through them all.) and the old rug (which may be worth money).

Now I need to get more worthless but valuable-looking stuff to act as a decoy.

UPDATE 2004-08-11: They also took my window air conditioner. I haven’t used it since I moved in here.

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I took some photos with Mark’s camera. I cropped and massaged them, just for you:

img width=”120″ height=”103″ alt=”[Thumb]” src=”/photos/thumb/2004-05-27-guitar5-bw.jpg” />

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The usual crowd, wandering around state street predawn sunday.

My boots are shiny.

Sunset at the terrace.

Sunrise on the Solstice.

The other morning I got mad at my clock radio and hit it.

Hard.

It doesn’t work anymore.

I feel bad. I got that clock sometime in the late 80s. I was fond of it.

Why was I angry? One of those fascists praising GWB for his taxcuts — “giving the people their money back” — while supporting an expensive war and refusing to adequately fund schools. Chapman had the perfect graphic for this: Two pie graphs, the first is government spending as a part of GDP. The second is taxes as part of GDP. In the long run, those slices HAVE to be balanced.

UPDATE 2004-07-16: It turns out that new clock radios sell for $5 at Wallmart. Same features, streamlined production –> cheap conusmer goods.

UPDATE 2004-08-11: Inlining the image:

I’m going back to school to get teaching certification.

My
Linux Firewall Notes

A couple of weeks ago I got sick of the whole propritary/binary Nvidia graphics drivers. So I searched around for the best ATI chip that 3D graphics drivers in Xorg X11. I bought a ATI Radeon 9200. The 3-D driver is a bit buggy, but no worse than any binary drivers I’ve used. And I can hope that support for this card does nothing but improve.

Of course the only games I have that take advantage of 3-d on linux are Quake 3 and RtCW.

I wandered around state street for a couple of hours last night. It was pleasant. I don’t do that often enough.

I recieved a free subscription to Granta Magazine with my Salon subscription. I read a few more stories from that when I was hanging around downtown. They were good.

Here you go…