Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Bah, between the military keeping their stuff secret, the inteligence community snatching up mathematicians and programmers, and corporations patenting everything else, I'm amazed we've had any technological progress at all since WWII." --doug (December 2003)

The latest spacecraft to join LJ: eo1_sat.

I had to get out and do something early, so I left the house without pausing for breakfast. So I picked up a snack at an ethnic convenience store I'd spotted in Charles Village before but never been into, named "Ziad Market". The sign in front lists a handful of different food ethnicities. I thanked the proprietor in Greek, and he responded in that "you said something in an unfamiliar language but I know what you meant from context" tone of voice, then a few seconds later he looked up and said, "Greek"? My guess is that it sounded just familiar enough for him to think he should recognize it, and he had to remember where he had been when he'd heard it before. Then he pointed to photos on the wall from a trip to Athens. I'm not sure where he's from; for some reason I want to guess Egypt. Maybe I'll remember to ask the next time I go there.

I'm hoping to make it to misia's talk at Johns Hopkins this afternoon, but that depends on whether the next couple of hours is enough to feel rested from having gotten up too early and done several errands this morning. I can remember a time when I just didn't have to think about things like that unless I tried to live three lives at a time for more than a few days in a row.

The cranky Win98 box I'm supposed to fix remains cranky. Currently the problem I have is that it can't see any packets on the LAN. It sends ARP packets but never seems to notice the replies (or respond to ARP requests from other machines). If I insert ARP table entries manually, it sends ping packets that the other machines see and respond to, but it never sees their replies, nor does it ever respond to pings from the other machines. This means any video drivers I want to copy to it will have to go via floppy, and I can't just point it at Microsoft's web site and say "see what's new".

Speaking of copying via floppy ... I've gotten so used to doing anything with a command-line via telnet to a Linux machine, and all files (Windows, Mac, or otherwise) being on the file server, that last night (admittedly pretty tired already) when I went to copy a file to the floppy I'd just stuck into the front of the NT machine (I had to move a stack of stuff out of the way to reach the drive), I spent a little while staring at a Linux prompt trying to figure out the syntax for "format the diskette in the A: drive on that other machine" and "copy this file to the A: drive on that other machine" before I remembered that I wanted the MS-DOS Command prompt under NT, not the telnet window. Whoops. Though I guess I could configure Samba to at least let me copy files to/from the NT machine's diskette drive from a Linux shell, if I thought I'd need to do it often enough.

(I know I can do these tasks from the Windows desktop, but it takes less time to type a command I've known since 1980 than to figure out how to format a diskette via the GUI; and once I've got the DOS window open, I may as well type the copy command as well.)

The other Win98 box has revealed the source of its intermittent VERY LOUD NOISE on power-up: it's the CPU fan. It still doesn't seem to want to clock down its scan rate to something the monitor I've got available will handle, but for the time being I've got it plugged into the monitor that's supposed to go with the cranky box I'm trying to fix. For some reason one of its CD drives refuses to stick out its tongue and say "aaah". Odd.

Must remember to scrounge another hub someplace.

(I did not make it to misia's talk, unfortunately, but I had to go back to Charles Village this evening anyhow.)

There is boring architecture in Baltimore, but most of what counts as boring is only dull in comparison to more fanciful examples in other parts of the city. A lot of this town is an entertaining assortment of styles and variations, even for the basic -- and overwhelmingly dominant here -- row house. While SoWeBo tends to have flat-front rowhouses with small details, it seems the farther north one travels the more the front walls of the houses bulge forth and shrink back, with curves and angles breaking up the line of the sidewalk's edge even where there are no porches. Along North Avenue, there are steep conical peaks on the round protrusions on the fronts of the rowhouses.

Tonight was one of those orange sunsets with lots of that "peeking through a slit in dark clouds" effect going on, and a healthy dose of "reflect off the nearby clouds and make them look shiny, not just pink". And I was driving west along North Avenue, towards that fairytale movie sunset, which silhouetted those steep conical peaks. And in the shadow cast by the further ones, distances became kind of random and the rest of the roofline became somewhat arbitrary, and really one might as well have been looking at the top of a storybook castle except for the lack of pennants streaming in the breeze. Several blocks of North Avenue and its cross streets became almost Disney battlements and turrets as I drove into the pink and orange sunset.

How fitting, then, that as I caught sight of this I was listening to a cassette of Playford tunes by The Broadside Band. Something medieval would have been even better, but this worked. It was the right mix of tootly and tinkly and dramatically oomphy to go with the visions of princesses and white horses that the almost-sight of a castle with tall pointy bits and an orangepink sunset suggested.

When my life ends, I have to find a way to stick around to watch the credits. I like how the special effects are synchronized with the sound track.

There ought to be some mathematical function that takes the shape of the front of a rowhouse and assigns a number prepresenting how ornate its construction is, or at least how curvy. Then it would be cool to generate a map of Baltimore showing the fancifactor and construction date of each house. I could have fun looking for patterns in that.

Of course, it would probably be easier to find a book in a library that just illustrated historical trends with pictures of a few typical houses from each decade, and a general overview of the ages of different parts of the city.