Karlo.Org - Weblog

Designer Colors So occasionally I'll keep a found object because I like the design, and I like having it around. (There's a bottle of Bawls on my desk that is kind of there for this reason -- God knows I wouldn't ever drink the stuff again, given past experiences.) I really like the look they chose for the RealOne player. It's not highly original but the execution is nice and subtle. So I'm "collecting" a picture here to look back on when I'm thinking about redesigning this page. Especially because my favorite color is green and I try to make this site white/light grey (so it doesn't compete with the photos I put in as content.)

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink

SV24 Media Cube Accelenation.com did a good article last month on turning the Shuttle SV24 into a mediaCube for your living room. Interesting read.

Posted by at 4:08 PM | Permalink

Teeny-weeny This is my new hardware project, a Shuttle SV24 mini-computer I bought from OutPost.com on sale packaged with a Celeron 850 processor. I still need to replace some fans and maybe change out the CD (which I won't use) for my LCD unit, but it's probably going to be either a new web server (to replace the big honking box this one runs on) or a new system for my dad. He's chuggin along in Win2k with a 4-year-old Aptiva, so a Celeron 850 would be a nice step up.

Here's a close up of that photo. To understand just how small it is, compare it to a standard ATX computer.

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink

Ironman My friend Stef is racing on Saturday in the New Zealand Triathlon. You can watch him live at IronManLive.com. He's also posting his own travel photos at his web site.

BTW, some of you may have found a different site if you visited karlo.org yesterday. Let's just call that a "special guest host." Thanks go out to the DNS system combined with my ISP's dynamic IP scheme.

Posted by at 12:50 AM | Permalink

Stats I've added some web stats to the site, thanks to Webalizer. It lets you see just how few people I inflict this site upon. The stats from last year are very wrong (somehow, there are only results from one day of the month, and we were definitely up and operating all of October to January. I'm not sure where the problem is, it may be with the roll-over of the logs. At least this means that going forward, we'll have better usage reports.

Something is definitely wrong still... the access file for January is 13,000 lines long but the usage stats say there were only 138 hits total (it should be 100 times that many.) I'm looking into it.

Posted by at 6:23 PM | Permalink

Barnes and Nobles Sucks I decided to go over to the local "brick and mortar" B&N store during my lunch hour today. The one in downtown Boston, specifically. What a waste of time -- and no wonder people love Amazon so much. Trying to find a specific book there, even if you know the name and title (and how it looks) is a nightmare. The shelves are out of order, you have to step over people sitting in the aisle reading, the employees don't know where things are any better than you do, and every other book in the non-fiction section is an "Idiot's Guide" release. I'm sticking to Amazon from now on. It's not only cheaper, it's faster, less aggravating, and more complete in its selection.

Another thing: who buys all these "Idiot's Guide..." books? I'm sorry, but I'm not about to buy a book that specifically states that it's targeted towards morons, nor would I want to walk around with it. How about some books targeted at intelligent people? Don't we buy/read things too? Forcing people to consider themselves an idiot just because they're not familiar with a particular topic (which might be something as arcane and useless as Oracle databases, according to the series) is just plain wrong.

Posted by at 4:51 PM | Permalink

Wanted: Reactor Operator The economy may be tough, but you can still get a $15 an hour job as a nuclear reactor operator at MIT. You'll need to bring your own security clearance, I hope. And to think we used to walk to class with the mist from that reactor sprinkling down on us (literally.) Maybe that's why people who live in that area of campus are so weird.

Posted by at 12:06 PM | Permalink

We're Back! I've managed to beat my one month estimate by a few days and get Karlo.Org back up and running. There may be some hiccups until I get the dynamic DNS totally handled and transferred to No-IP.com but for the moment everything seems to work (and if we suddenly disappear, you can find us at karlo.no-ip.org, our backup name.

Posted by at 11:27 AM | Permalink