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Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Back and froth 
| | All the computers are up again. Kudos go to Lincoln Durey at Emperor Linux for help with the Thinkpad, and to Seth at Mac Mechanic for help with the Powerbook. |
| | I was looking at the Thinkpad this morning when I noticed that the Emperor Linux sticker (we — Linux Journal — got it from them three years ago) had tiny phone numbers on it. I dialed the toll-free one and Lincoln, the company founder and chief honcho, answered the call. He told me to remove the battery and let it sit for fifteen minutes, then to re-attach the power cord and see it it started up. It did. From completely dead to completely alive in one brute physical move. Nice to know that one. |
| | The Powerbook was harder. Seth said the file system was highly messed up. Took him awhile, but he fixed it. |
| | Now the backlog of emails and other input is kind of an avalanche. So I'll go dig out of that. |
| | Meanwhile, thanks for all the kind birthday greetings and offers of tech help. Much appreciated. |
Bogged down with an idea
| | So anyway, I got to thinking that authorities on featured museum subjects should provide their own commentary for vistors, in .mp3 form. That way, visitors could just bring their own iPods or other players along, and get the kind of useful commentary that museums, for whatever reasons, can't or won't provide. Podcasts with a purpose. |
| | In fact, I think links to these would be a cool extra service that Wikipedia, or Wikipediasts, could provide. For example, in its own entry on bog people, Wikipedia could include a list of links to narrative explanations for museum tours like this one. |
| | I got that idea after seeing a museum exhibit on The Bog People that I describe like this... |
| | Here one found that, if one's ancestors are from Northern Europe (as are most of mine), their depressing cultures involved murder, ritual sacrifice, and internment in peat bogs. The term "bog people" is something of a misnomer. Seems the bogs were employed mostly as burial sites for unfortunate victims of stabbings, stranglings, eviscerations and fatal whacks on the head. |
| | While the remains of these victims are described as "remarkably well-preserved", in fact most of them looked like bog jerky: gray deflated sacks of skin with shrunken mummified heads at one end. Some had no heads at all. Others looked like monkey fists with hair and a hole surrounded by tiny, protruberant teeth. The lighting was so dim that reading explanatory text was nearly as torturous as the corpses were nauseating. Worse, the stories they told were severely depressing. The mood music was even darker, giving visitors the sense that they were trapped in an unpleasant movie with no happy ending. Kind of a neolithic Seven. Pure Hollywood, of course. Makes sense, given the location. It worked too. Our nine-year old boy made jokes about the corpses during the visit, but had trouble falling asleep because he couldn't get images of dead bog people out of his mind. "I keep seeing teeth sticking out of things", he said. |
| | Next to that, tours of dinosaur skeletons and stuffed animals in painted habitats were positively delightful. |
| | Look for more blogging over there, and in Linux Journal while my main machines for blogging here are still in the garage. |
| | (Later...) From the comments: |
| | Meanwhile, here's a new idea for the museums: Instead of handing out silo'd audio gear to visitors, rent out podcast recording gear. That gear might include a USB adapter for recording onto compact flash, SD, Memory Stick or thumb drive. (I'd bet that most visitors would have a camera with on e of those media.) However it's executed, the idea would be to provide visitors with the means to become more involved with the museum. Even if the visitors just joke around with their podcast tours, what's wrong with a little fun? It would do a lot more for the "experience" of visiting a museum than the usual stuffy official tour. |
Pardon our smithereens
| | My two main laptops — a ThinkPad and a PowerBook — are both down. The ThinkPad croaked while it was in the midst of a standard Linux (Novel Linux Desktop, SUSE 9.1) startup procedure. Now it's dead as a stone. No indicator lights come on, and it won't even warm up the power supply. (Which is not to blame... I have two of those, and both fail with this box.) So that gets mailed out for repairs tomorrow. The PowerBook had been flaky around power management for awhile, and then started losing its ability to show graphics or navigate directories. Now it's in the shop, where a bad logic board is suspected. I hope it gets fixed before I fly to Boston early Thursday. If not, I'll stick with plan C, which is an old no-name notebook running Linspire's Linux distro. Slow and short on storage but at least it gets me on the Web. |
| | If you need to reach me, my backup email address is anitadrink AT gmail.com. I'll check it as often as I can. Thanks. |
| | Meanwhile, the best I can blog here is in EditThisPage mode, which is why it looks different. |
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