Laptops Lost? Or is it Like Cars Stolen from the Queens Plaza Mall?

Back in the day (yes, I am old enough to use that phrase now), if you wanted to get rid of your junker car and claim a little sumthin' sumthin' from the Good Hands People, you dropped your car off at the Queens Plaza Shopping Mall in the morning and called the cops a few hours later. It seems that the QP parking lot had the highest rate of auto theft in the nation, and the cops wouldn't even bother to go out and check to see if your car was actually gone. You just went to the local precinct and spend a few minutes with the harried guy in the blue uniform, walked out with a report clutched in your hot little hand and that was that. Within a few hours, your car was actually gone - without a trace - probably into one of the illegal chop body shops that operated in the shadow of Shea Stadium.

Or so I've been told.

What brings this bit of urban legend to mind is a newly issued report from the oddly named Ponemon Institute (gotta catch 'em all?), which states that over 637,000(!) laptops are lost and/or stolen from U.S. airports each year. That's over 12,000 laptops a week. I don't know about you, but when I travel for business, the one thing that never leaves my sight (except for going through a scanner) is my laptop. I'm thinking that a lot of people really want a new laptop, and business travel seems to be the equivalent of leaving your car at the Queens Plaza Mall.

This statistic bears some truth to my train of thought:

"Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn’t do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information."

Via MacWorld

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The Dog Files: 5/5 Milkbones!

A few weeks back, a fellow member of the TWiT Forums posted a new thread, asking for opinions about his new podcast, The Dog Files. Although I've been in a sans canine home for too many years, I love dogs and anything about them piques my interest. The Dog Files is probably one of the best video podcasts I've ever seen; from both a production and a content standpoint.

The video is extremely well produced, it hits all of the right technical notes - lighting, audio, storyline, use of CG. More importantly, it scores big on content - the first episode, about a doggie ice cream social was delightfully whimsical, particularly the completely unscripted comments by an elderly lady and her companion who came to play with the dogs because they're "very old now."

The most recent edition, about the rescue efforts of Rawhide Rescue, a shelterless dog rescue operation in New Jersey, is heartwarming without being sappy or sentimental. The video tells the story of a group of volunteers who works with P.E.T.S., another rescue group that brings unwanted puppies and full grown dogs up from the South (where, apparently, spaying and neutering are not accepted practices). Rawhide Rescue takes some of these dogs, and working with a local kennel, gets them ready for adoption.

Rawhide Rescue is a self-funded operation and it can use all the help it can get. Same with The Dog Files - the content is free, but content creation is not. Skip a few lattes this week and donate $5 to each group, please.

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Gross Out - Kosher Style

This has got to be the most unintentionally disgusting thing I've ever seen in a food market. One giant matzoh ball floating in congealed chicken soup.

Something I don't think anyone's bubbie would ever eat.

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Family Photos

Yeah, yeah, I should be working on my presentation instead of blogging, so stop nagging me. I've got a month to go.

I finally found the family photo albums, and something needs to be done about them. They are all on those awful self-stick and cellophane pages which are rapidly decaying. But this is not a one-person project. I'm going to need some help here. Any recommendations on how to proceed? I am not dedicated enough to start a fancy-smancy scrapbook, complete with cutesy stickers and journaling...after all, I was either the subject of these pictures, some forty years ago, or wasn't even born yet.

And the sad thing is, there is no one after me and my sisters who would even want these pictures.

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Diablo III

I guess all of the rumor sites were right - there will be a Diablo III. Blizzard announced it in Paris yesterday. Good news, it will be released for Mac and Windows PC simultaneously. Bad news, there is no release date. From the looks of the Blizzard job board for Diablo III, I don't think we'll see this anytime soon. They are looking to hire level and 3D designers, which seems (to my eyes, at least), some of the hires one would make in the early to middle stages of game production.

The teaser graphics are pretty hot, though. I loved Diablo I, did not like Diablo II so much - more because the graphics never ran quite up to par on my (wait for it) G4 PowerMac. It's been that long. Hard to believe that Diablo II was the game for which my sister abandoned the Mac platform. I'm taking bets that the earliest we'll see the Gold Master of DIII will be January 2010.

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NYT: The Tyranny of the Heirloom

Among the news of North Korea's demolition of a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant and the SCOTUS decision on hand gun ownership was this delightful article about what to do with the family "heirlooms" and an even more delightful plethora of comments - particularly those about families torn apart by who gets Aunt Martha's faux-vintage spatterware collander.

I like stuff - and the late, great George Carlin would have had a field day with me. I like my family's stuff too - the dining room furniture, the recently reupholstered living room couch, the weird marble table with the French bronze d'or statue my grandmother had made. But at the end of the day, and when the time comes (hopefully not for a long, long time), if my sisters want it, it's not worth fighting over. We've had our tiffs (and GIFs and JPEGs) and our relationship is not without the occassional friction (even if it's internalized), but nothing's more important than knowing help and love is just a phone call away.

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Magical Thinking

I thought I'd see the Twitter Fail Whale today, and guess what? I did!

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Enough already!

This morning, I learned that yet another friend is dealing with cancer. Her husband has colon cancer. This makes it the sixth person I know that has been hit hard in the last five months. What the hell is going on? Enough already!

I need to keep this one brief - I have to go an make an appointment for a long past-due checkup with my own oncologist.

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Fun with Photoshop

Once again, I've signed up to do a presentation at the Convention...lots of pretty pictures. Two problems:

1 - No More PowerPoint. I've paid for just about every version of Keynote, but have never really used it. I loathe PowerPoint more than just about any other piece of software. So, I've set up my presentation in Keynote - there was a bit of a learning curve, but nothing insurmountable. As long as I remember to keep it simple, everything should work just fine. Or so I hope.

2 - Using Scanned Pictures. For reasons not really worth going into, I am using either old digital pictures of pieces I no longer own (and when I mean old, I mean OLD - stuff taken with my first digicam, a Kodak Digital Science 65, circa 1997) and edited with ColorIt! Given that the projector is fairly low res, I am not worried about the quality of the images (but I'll be certain to test them out). However, the majority of my pictures have been scanned from books, with unlovely screening effects and nasty shadowed backgrounds. I've been spending much, if not all of my free time extracting the piece from the background.

What I've achieved from this extremely tedious process is a new mastery of Photoshop's selection tools. Combining the wand with Quickmask with the Convert to Path with Edit Path with Convert to Selection, touching up with Quickmask again, and then back to Path for more tweeking, then back to selection, then inverting and finally - hitting the delete key and then...

Undoing, undoing, undoing, then Refining Edges, then re-inverting selection and deleting, and finally...

Saving and closing. And then trying to figure out what slide this piece needs to go onto. At the rate I'm going, with the number of pieces I want to show, I'll be at this until next year's Convention.

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Farewell, George C.

It was with great sadness that I read of George Carlin's death.

His 1973 album, Occupation: Foole was a touchstone of my childhood.

My eldest sister would play it for me in her bedroom (well out of the hearing range of my parents) all the time...on the condition that I never repeated any of the routines. Our favorite bit was not "Filthy Words" but "Cute Little Farts." Even today - 35 years later...we still make reference to a "one-cheek sneak."

As I grew older, and became more aware of the world and the effects of censorship, I grew to appreciate George Carlin for more than his trenchant, biting humor. I greatly admired his bravery in the face of conformist corporate America. If you've ever seen pictures of George Carlin from the early '60's, he looked like a bigger square than Tricky Dicky. I remember him saying that what happened to Lenny Bruce was transformatory for him. And so he transformed us - to watch our language and the impact of what we say, and not to be afraid of it.

George, you will be missed.

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I'm Back

I can't believe it's been over two years since I've posted here. It's not like I haven't had anything to say.

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