Today I picked up a package at the post office from my parents: a birthday gift that they had sent out last week! Here are the contents:

qqq|
1 box Ziploc 1-Quart storage bags
1 box Ziploc 1-Gallon storage bags
1 box large drawstring trash bags
1 box kitchen-sized trash bags
4 rolls toilet paper
1 box Earl Grey tea
1 box of Buckeyes from the Squirrel’s Den (recipe/explanation for non-Ohioans)
2 packs of Trail Mix from the Squirrel’s Den
1 box Kudos
1 large bag of peanuts (to be eaten while watching the ALCS)
1 box Bisquick
2 boxes Rice Pilaf mix
1 box Chili Cheese Cheez-its
1 box Double-Stuf Oreos
|qqq

Now, this may seem like a strange birthday gift, but it is exactly the sort of thing that Becky and I have recently been requesting. Frankly, in terms of material possessions, we have more than we need, and literally more than can fit into our apartment. So we’re asking for consumables as gifts, for birthdays, Christmas, whatever.

Of course, you are still more than welcome to check out the Stuff Peter Wants page, should you want to buy me something a little less practical. My Amazon wishlist is linked from that page, as well.

(not really!) But I have been knitting the past several evenings, which is what has kept me from blogging. It keeps my hands too busy to type! 🙂

I do want to post a little review of the Lord of the Rings Exhibit at the Museum of science. Peter mentioned that we were going to see it a few days ago and I thought I’d let y’all know what I thought. But really, there are two Rebeccas that need to review it… The regular ole me and the “museum professional” me.

First off, as a fan of the movies, I loved the exhibit. From the first, startling first image to seeing the actual costumes and sets to trying out some of the special effects it was an exciting experience. I loved seeing Galadriel and Arwyn’s costumes and jewelry and the weapons and costumes of the warriors were incredible.

The exhibit was full of families and couples, many of which seemed to be LoTR fanatics 🙂 The little boys were so cute using the green screen technology to fight like elves or orcs (peter, too for that matter!) And we had fun using the ‘double shot-perspective cameras’ that made one of us hobbit sized and on Gandalf sized, while sitting on the same wagon seat. Fun, fun.

As a museum person I have a bit of a different perspective. (a good example of a little knowledge being a bad thing,,,) Despite the positive review above, I found the exhibit lacking in a few aspects. First off, with the exception of a few computer-tech features (which were more fun than scientific) there wasn’t anything sciency about it. I also thought that there was a lack of explanations about how things work. There were several opportunities that went unused. I wonder if the Science Museum was really the best place to host this exhibit.

Secondly, I thought the exhibit had a poor floor plan. There was no real flow to the room. I kept feeling like if I went in one direction I would keep moving and miss something on the other side of the room. The map provided with the exhibit guide was little help as it only identified the different sections of the room, but not the divisions made by free standing walls.

Just a small note: I really don’t think that this was worth the $19 bucks a person that we paid in admission…but it was a fun splurge.

Also, and not really museumy, but, I thought that the exhibit maybe has gone on tour a bit too close to the showing of the movies. As I walked through the room I found myself thinking, ” that’s cool, but I feel like I just saw it in the movie” and “It’s not an ancient relic or anything, it’s just a movie prop”. Perhaps if they had waited a few years there would be some ‘nostalgia’ involved.

Anyhoo, to recap, I liked the exhibit alot, I had a couple of minor criticisms and I think that if you liked LoTR you would probably like the exhibit. the end.

I’ve been perusing this here website and I was noticing that lately the posts have been very techy and percentage filled. Never fear ye non-techies! I am here to save this blog from becoming over geek-ti-fied.

(and besides, I have this neat story that I wanted to post about anyway. And it is decidedly non-technological)

This week, during their “end of the fiscal year” pledge drive, ***WGBH (PBS 2 Boston)|http://www.wgbh.org*** has been playing a documentary about this amazing guy, Richard Proenneke. In 1968 Mr. Proenneke built himself a cabin in Alaska and continued to live there for the next 30 years…Alone. ***Here|http://www.minifarmhomestead.com/outdoors/richardproenneke.htm*** is a good little site to read more about him.

Despite my dependance on technology, I long, deep down in my heart, to be a self-sufficient country girl. I can’t help but be a little jealous of this guy’s skills in surviving in the wilderness. He build his own cabin and outhouse and even had a little refridgerator built into the ground. WOW! I truely admire his patience and persistance for living off the land. And I just can’t imagine living all alone in the middle of nowhere. His insights on nature and living, however are incredibly inspiring.

Amazon has a book based on his journals. I just may have to check it out. Here’s the link: ***One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0882405136/worldwidewood-20***

I’ve got a long list of things to dump from my brain. If you have time, go on and read them… using the handy Extended Entry feature that I finally got around to implementing (it wasn’t hard).
Continue reading →

Some news items and issues to catch up on:

* The photos from our ***Niagara Falls trip|http://gallery.prwdot.org/niagara_falls_trip*** are online. Go look at ’em.

* I’ve upgraded our photo gallery to ***Gallery|http://gallery.menalto.com/*** 1.4.4-RC2, which has some interesting new features such as an ***RSS Feed for new photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/rss.php***. If you plug that URL into your favorite RSS reader, it will keep you up to date with any new additions to our gallery. Pretty cool! There are a few little bugs here and there. For example, when viewing a single photo within an album, the photos is left-aligned rather than centered. Other than that, it’s looking good! Also, the Gallery has released an alpha version of Gallery 2, their next generation project. I have been following this major redesign for a while, as it is pretty revolutionary. Hopefully it will make users and permissions much easier to manage.

* The latest nightly releases of ***Firefox|http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/*** have a couple nifty features. One is a redesigned find feature. Hit ctrl-F, and a slim toolbar appears in the bottom of the window with a search box and some other controls. Searching occurs as you type, which is really great. There is also now support for RSS feeds, by way of a “Livemark” feature. When Firefox detects that a given page has an RSS feed or feeds, a small lightning bolt icon appears in the bottom status bar. The user can then click on this icon to display a list of available feeds, and upon selecting one, it can be added to a “feeds” item in the bookmarks menu. This item will then be accessible as a sort of folder, and within the folder is a list of the entries contained in the feed. Sweet!

* From what I hear, the Macworld Expo in Boston last week was a success! My co-worker Christine took off of work for a few days to go down there. She enjoyed taking some classes on GarageBand and digital photography. She was also nice enough to pick me up a t-shirt from the Expo – it has the expo name on the front, with a spiffy patriotic Minuteman logo in the middle. The expo has already been booked back in Boston for around the same time next year, so maybe I’ll see if we can plan to attend.

* Yesterday ***Apple|http://www.apple.com/*** released a new lineup of ***iPods|http://www.apple.com/ipod/***. There are now just two models besides the Mini: a 20gb and a 40gb. They sport a scroll wheel of the same design as the Mini, as well as a new shuffle songs feature. The 20gb model is $299 and the 40gb model is $399.

* Mac fans may be interested to hear that when we returned from our trip, I found a special package waiting in the mail for me. I can’t officially disclose the specifics of what was in that package, but I can say that it was sent out to seed-holding members of the Apple Developer Connection who did not attend ***WWDC|http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/***. Hee hee.

Anne of Green Gables once entertained the idea of becoming a nun. She hit a snag because she wasn’t a Catholic. I have two obstacles: I’m not Catholic and I’m already married.

Still, I was thinking today that it might be nice to be a nun. “What brought this on?” you may be tempted to ask. Okay, I’ll tell. As I was leaving North Station today I found myself walking behind a nun. She was wearing a brown robe, white head covering and Birkenstocks. As we made our way through the city I noticed that evey one we passed looked at her and smiled, or waved, or said hello. The smiles disappeared as soon as they were passed her.

I found myself wishing that I was a nun so that I wouldn’t have to be the recipient of everyone’s stone cold stares. It must be nice to be a bride of God.

You’ve probably heard of, and may have already seen the new movie starring Tom Hanks: ***The Terminal|http://www.theterminal-themovie.com/***. (I haven’t seen it yet, but Becky and I hope to do so soon.) What you may not know is that the movie is loosely based around a real person: Merhan Kerimi Nasser.

Nasseri has been trapped at Paris’ ***Charles de Gaulle|http://gallery.prwdot.org/cdg*** airport since 1988. Expelled from Iran in 1977 because of his political beliefs, he sought political assylum through the United Nations. When he finally received it in 1981, he searched for a country in which he could apply for citizenship. He decided on the United Kingdom, and finally set out for the UK in 1988. But his refugee documents were stolen in Paris. He flew to the UK anyway, but was sent back to Paris, and has been living at the airport ever since.

Nasseri’s bizarre situation has already been chronicled in the 1993 French film, ***Tombés du ciel|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108359/***.

You can read the rest of his fascinating story ***here|http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm***.

First, the general-interest stuff:

Item: Becky and I were in New Jersey this past weekend to visit ***Jenn|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/***. We came to watch her in the ***Ridgewood G&S|http://www.ridgewoodgands.com/*** production of ***Patience|http://www.dancaster.com/RidgewoodGandS/currentshow_home.htm***. She did a lovely job as one of the “Rapturous Maidens”. 🙂 We also made a side trip to ***IKEA|http://www.ikea.com/***. This was my first visit to one, and I must say that I was quite impressed! The store was absolutely enormous! Becky and I ended up getting a brand new coffee table, regularly priced at $99, for only $9.99. What a bargain! You can see the photos from IKEA and the musical ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/visiting_jenn***.

Item: Becky started work at the ***Otis House Museum|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm*** on Friday! The organization was previously known as “The Society for the Preservation of New England Activities” (SPNEA), but between the time she was hired and her start date, they changed their name to “Historic New England”. Perhaps she will provide more details to our readers at a later time… today is just her second day of work so far. 🙂

Now for more geeky matters…

Item: As ***Will|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** ***mentioned|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/001822.html***, ***Apple|http://www.apple.com/*** has just released a nifty toy called the ***AirPort Express|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/***. This is basically a scaled down version of their AirPort Extreme Base Station, which connects to your cable or dsl line, local network, or modem, and provides wireless internet access to anyone in the vicinity. The AirPort Express is much smaller (fits in the palm of your hand), and has an extra added feature called ***AirTunes|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html***. This lets you send music over your network to the AirPort Express from another computer running iTunes. The APE can then plug directly into a stereo system or speakers via an audio jack. Pretty nifty. At $129, it’s almost half the price of its larger bretheren, so it is quite a good deal.

Item: Apple has also just released some new ***PowerMacs|http://www.apple.com/powermac/***. The high end is now a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with a new ***liquid cooling|http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html*** system. Steve Jobs had previously promised 3.0 GHz machines by the end of this summer, so it still remains to be seen if he will deliver on that promise. The liquid cooling may be the first step in making that happen.

Item: I don’t know when this happened, but the iTunes Music Store now has Radio Charts. Just bring up the iTMS, click on Radio Charts on the left side of the homepage, and then browse by city and then station. You can hear the latest music, as charted by your local stations. I know that Columbus, OH and Boston, MA are on there.

Item: My current fascination is parsing weather data with ***Perl|http://www.perl.org/***. With a little help from Dirk-Jan Koopman’s ***Geo::TAF|http://search.cpan.org/~djk/Geo-TAF-1.04/TAF.pm*** Perl module, I can now grab ***METAR|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml*** and ***TAF|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/taf.shtml*** reports from the ***NOAA|http://www.noaa.gov/***. METAR and TAF are short, coded strings used by weather reporting stations around the world to communicate weather reports in a concise format. For example, a string like this:

ccc|KCMH 091551Z 16008KT 8SM FEW032 SCT250 29/21 A3015
RMK AO2 SLP201 MDT CU W AND VC NW T02940211|ccc

…translates, roughly, to:

qqq|Observed at Columbus, on the 9th at 15:51 Zulu time. Wind is coming from 160 degrees at 8 knots. Visibility is 8 miles. There are few clouds at 3200 feet, and scattered clouds at 25000 feet. The current temperature is 29C, and the current dewpoint is 21C. Altimeter pressure is currently 30.15 inches. Remarks: This is an automated station with a precipitation descriminator. Sea-level pressure is 1020.1 hPa, and there are moderate cumulus clouds to the west and the vicinity of the northwest. The temperature is 29.4C and the dewpoint is 21.1C|qqq

Yowser!

These reports are automatically generated once per hour, or more often if there are notable condition changes.

Eventually I hope to make this into a useful service on the prwdot.org site, but for now, you can check out a couple of links below to see how this works. Keep in mind that I’m still in the experimental stages, so the information may not make a lot of sense. Scroll down to the bottom of the reports to see the information in its most “readable” form:

***METAR for KBVY|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KBVY*** (Current weather conditions for Beverly, MA)
***METAR for KCMH|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KCMH*** (Current weather conditions for Columbus, OH)

I have also done a bit of my own work on the TAF.pm module itself, to allow it to translate measurements into something an American like myself is more comfortable with. TAF.pm’s capacity for processing “remarks” is also somewhat limited, so I am fleshing that out a bit, with some help from ***Jim Metzger|http://hub.kivlin.net/***’s METAR documentation.