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Saturday, January 25, 2003

Happy ending, so far I've been having weird hardware problems for the past two weeks. A couple of weeks ago, my La Cie 48x CDRW stopped working right. When I inserted a disc, either one with data on it or an unformatted one, the green light on the thing would blink and blink for about 30 seconds, then stop, and the disc would never be recognized by my iMac. Earlier this week, I shipped the unit back to La Cie, and now they've FedEx'd one back to me. Oddly enough, FedEx's web page shows that the package took a day to get to Oakland from Portland, but two days later still hasn't made it up to Albany. So I guess I'll get it on Monday. So that case isn't quite closed. A week or so ago I started working with my friend Blair's Formac StudioTV video digitizer. It worked fine for a few days, then stopped working. iMovie, when I tried to look at video would go into a mood where it was toggling between "camera connected" and "camera disconnected." (iMovie, when connected to the Formac unit, calls it a camera.) So I was going around with Formac tech support, and they couldn't come up wth anything either, and I also scrounged Apple's discussion boards and Google. Finally, I realized that Formac was near my home, and suggested I bring the unit over. Instead, a support person there went above an beyond the call of duty, and stopped over yesterday evening. He brought a power source for the Formac -- I was running it without a direct power connection, and it takes its power from the Firewire port. When we connected power to the unit, it worked fine! So now I know how to fix it. My guess is that somehow when I was using the LaCie drive, it was giving power to the Firewire bus (it's separately powered), and when I disconnected the LaCie unit, there wasn't enough for the Formac unit. So, if you're having some troubles with a Firewrire device connected to a slot-loading DVD iMac, suspect power and see if that helps. Thanks to great support at Formac, I'm back in business. 4:37:27 PM  Permalink  comment []

Mars. I’m not a fan of George Bush. But if he proposes a mission to Mars in his state of the Union speech—as the Guardian reports he may do—then I still won’t be a fan of George Bush, but I’ll be hugely excited about the mission to Mars. Nicely put. Didn't W's daddy, though, also propose a mission to Mars? Even if he proposes it, it won't happen: 1) He wont' include a way to pay for it. 2) He won't marry his rah-rahism to a concrete plan, 3) No one else will get behind it. 4:06:56 PM  Permalink  comment []

The Lost Cosmonauts: "One day in early 1961, weeks before Yuri Gagarin's epic space flight, instead of the usual beeping tones which they had become accustomed to hear, they were startled by a sound which signaled a new chapter in the history of mankind: there, in the listening center of "Torre Bert", these two young students heard, clearly and unequivocally, the beat of a failing heart and the last gasping breaths of a dying cosmonaut." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 12:13:37 AM  Permalink  comment []

Skeptic Pitied [The Onion] "I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life," Eddy said. "But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that's a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a stubborn doubt over the actual existence and nature of that soul." 12:01:26 AM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.