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Upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6) and so far things are smooth with some exceptions:

• My favorite utility, QuickSilver would no longer launch. Finally figured out that I not only had to trash the preferences file in the ~/Library/Preferences folder, but also the entire application support folder in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Quicksilver.
  
• Dymo Label doesn't work and there's no driver until "the early Fall which is December in developer speak. Not good.
  
• 1Password doesn't work under Safari unless you get their secret beta version 3.
  
• VMWare Fusion also needs to be updated
  

And one of my buds had problems with Mail.app -- turned out that RSS feed prefs didn't transfer over well from 10.5. He trashed them and it started working again.

You know when you're procrastinating when you find out the only good anagram for your name is "Ran a Karma Nuke."

Well, the little iPhone Kindle app has convinced me that a Kindle2 might not be a total waste of money. I'm actually enjoying read both academic and non-academic books on the iPhone. Although the Kindle2 doesn't have a backlight, it looks like it'd be a good way to read before bed or on the airplane.

I wish the Kindle2 had WiFi, I guess that -- along with the backlight -- is my big concern for the unit. Especially as Sprint might be going bankrupt if it continues to bleed customers like it is now. I wonder what will happen to the Kindle's EVDO if that happens....

I'd love to hear from anyone who has one.

I'm setting up a media server in the anthropology department using Mac OSX 10.5 Server. With the demise of the C-Labs service, I wanted a secure way to make streaming video available for in-class use. The Mac OS X Leopard Server was an obvious choice.

Right now, I'm just using flat files and the Mac OSX Server built-in Apache server. In order to restrict the streams to just Yale students, I wanted to limit the contents of certain directories to just Yale IP addresses.

This should be easily done using .htaccess files. However, the default configuration doesn't have .htaccess services turned on (since it is server / file system intensive to do so). However, I couldn't for the life of me to get the Apache server to recognize my modifications in the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file. ARGHH!!! It was almost as if it was ignoring it.

I upgraded our blogs to MovableType 4.23. I was panicked for a second since it looked like I had crashed the blogs badly and couldn't either upgrade or backout to the originals. What had happened was a typical n00b mistake in UNIX, I had copied the files to the mt-static directory but had accidentally copied the folder itself, not the contents, so for a while I had a directory named:


/usr/www/users/gpsy/photoethnography/mt-static/mt-static


with all the files in it and I couldn't figure out why it didn't work. Duh.

p.s. I wish MT did more sanity checking for idiots like me. :-)

Merry Christmas!

(Via BoingBoing)

My partner and I watched in disbelief reports of 3-7 hour waits at early voting polling stations -- with estimates that the lines will be even longer on Tuesday itself.

My partner asked me if Tuesday was a national holiday so that people could go vote. She was doubly astonished that it wasn't a holiday, so that people would have to take off work in order to vote.

Rachel Maddow is right on target when she calls the long lines at Southern polling stations a new form of the racist system of poll-taxes. The only people who can afford to take off an entire day to go vote are those in white collar professional jobs.

Obligatory Japan content: In Japan, I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes to vote. And this was for a country where we don't use electronic voting machines but good old paper and pen.

An article in The Economist (Oct 17, 2008) on the author's grudging transition to digital photography from film mentions Photoethnography.com's take of the venerable Leica IIIf.

I'm sure somewhere in the universe, 10 msecs of fame have been debited from my account.

Fido Gets Motorcycle Side-Car (Aug, 1931): "

Ohmigosh, I have to build this for Momo.

(Via Modern Mechanix.)

I upgraded the blog engine to MT 4.1.1 and added the iNT plugin which allows for easy blog posts from your iPhone, like this one!

I'm very pleased to welcome a new guest blogger on Photoethnography.com, Jason C Romero. Many of you have already seen his comments on this blog, or read material that he sent my way. I'm very happy that he agreed to become a guest author and I personally look forward to seeing his posts!

JR gave me a heads up that my FeedBurner subscription broke when I upgraded to MT4.1. It looks like one of the softlinks went stale and FB wasn't getting new data. I've relinked it so it should work now.....

Akeelah and the Bee is an incredibly touching and powerful film about a young African Ameican girl who is inspired to succeed through the help of her community and friends. I love the quote at the center of the film:

Apparently it's by Marianne Williamson.

Hmmm.... I took this online Aspberger's Test and scored a 38....... which puts me above "extreme."

All of my friends are silently going "duhhhhhhhhhh!" behind my back.

Last weekend, my dog and I helped with our neighborhood cleanup. We made the April 17th, 2008 issue of the New Haven Independent newspaper: