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On the drive to work this morning, I noticed that KCRW was playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D in the background of their traffic report. As usual, the orchestration added several layers over the course of the report…

…and then, just as they were finishing, the drum track started.

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Maybe it’s egotistical to keep a list of who you would want to play your characters in a visual media production, but I do it. Some characters started out looking like celebrities; others grew into them. Sometimes I’ll see a star I’ve never seen before and think they look familiar, and a second later it’ll hit me that they’ve lived in my head for lo these many years.

So I’ve got this running tally. Last night, I added one to it and another character–there’s no other way to describe it–got jealous. Continue reading →

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Things that went through my head while watching Troy:

  • That’s a bloody awful lot of ships.
  • OK, so where’s Cassandra in all this?
  • Gee, the way they’re portraying Agamemnon, I’m glad his wife is going to kill him when he gets home.
  • That’s odd, the computer-generated orc army looked more realistic than the computer-generated Greeks.
  • Ah, political context. They’re right, it doesn’t make sense to send that many soldiers just to avenge one man’s honor. There’s usually something else going on.
  • Where the hell is Cassandra?
  • Wait, wasn’t this supposed to take 10 years?
  • Aeneas, eh? Nice throw-away line!
  • Wow, this Agamemnon really is a bastard. I wish I could remember what happens to Brise– uh, waitaminute.
  • Uh, what happened to Cassandra?

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Yahoo has finally released its specification for its DomainKeys email authentication scheme. Included is the following patent license (emphasis added):

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

Yodel?

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I was about to post this over at my LiveJournal, when I discovered my journal was offline due to a massive server outage. Nice timing, as you’ll see:

Well, the phone’s acting up again. Oddly enough, DSL is working most of the time, even though we can’t get a dial tone. An SBC tech is scheduled to come out tomorrow afternoon, but the guy I spoke with had some suggestions for self-troubleshooting (since if it turns out to be a problem with our equipment, we get charged.

So now that we’ve moved the full-height bookshelf out of the way of the phone jack, I’m about to disconnect the last phone line and see what I can find out. Whee.

On the other hand, now that the shelf is out of the way, I can try rearranging cables to see if it gives us the full DSL speed. We’re supposed to get about 600K, but only ever get half of that, and I suspect it’s the ancient 20-foot phone cable. If I move the modem closer to the jack and use a short phone cord and a long network cable, it might speed things up.

Mood: Resigned.

Update 9:32 PM

Well, that was a colossal waste of time and effort. After disconnecting everything, rearranging the DSL/network structure while I waited, then hooking phones back up one at a time, it seemed everything was working. Same old DSL speed, but at least we had a dial tone on each phone. So I canceled the call forwarding, and called SBC to cancel the dispatch. Then it occurred to me I’d better try to make an incoming call. Half a ring, and suddenly there’s static (and nothing else) on both lines.

So it’s disconnect everything again, wait 5+ minutes again, and this time… nothing. Static, and only static. At least the DSL came back up. That would have really ticked me off. And another call into SBC to reinstate the tech dispatch. Fun, fun, fun! (Grumble.)

Anyway, we’re back to square one. I can only hope anyone who needs to call us before tomorrow afternoon tries one of our cell phones instead.