Some pigfuckers are banging away with about ten comments a minute on the subject of online poker websites, and I’m too busy to screw around with it right now. I’ll turn comments back on later.
Back At Tino Manor
Nov 30, ’04
3:08 PM
We are back for a while now from our travels, and regular ranting should resume here soon. At the moment, though, I am trying to recover from all my aches and pains and am not up to much besides that.
My ribs are all bruised up thanks to Amtrak bouncing me around all last night like a fourth-class parcel. Our sleeping compartment was on the end of the car, right over the truck. There are two things you need to know to fully understand why this is a problem:
- The American loading gauge is quite large, and
- American railroads’ tracks are maintained for hauling coal, not passengers i.e. they do not give a particularly smooth ride.
1 means that American train cars are, relative to those in other countries, enormous, which in turn means that the cars act as levers to exert a whole lot of force on the trucks at each end. #2 means that most of the track in this country is horribly bumpy. Well, okay, three things you need to know: perhaps because there’s more track in the United States than in most other countries, the American approach has generally been to build fancy suspensions into the railcars rather than to fix the tracks. This contributes to the general wallowing motion of Amtrak trains as their giant springs rebound from absorbing the bumps in the track.
Anyway, all of this means that the compartment over the trailing truck on a Superliner car gets bounced around quite a bit, and it gets whipped back and forth a lot, too. The only respite comes in Florence, SC, where the train stops for fuel and a crew change. Unfortunately, it does this in a middle of a relatively busy freight yard, where CSX spends a lot of time humping cars.
In railroad terms, humping refers to connecting railroad cars together by opening the couplers and sending them down a little hill, at the bottom of which is a partly-assembled train.
You can probably imagine what the collision of empty railroad cars sounds like, but in case you can’t, here’s a representation:
Boom! Boom! Boom! Booooooommmmmm! BoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom!
That last bit is the train being pushed back to its starting position from where it’s rolled from the impacts. Repeat this for about forever, and in much bigger type, and you get the idea.
So it’s somewhat less restful than it might be, despite the Superliner being the world’s finest sleeping car. A room somewhere in the middle of the car is essential; this way you might be able to sleep through the BOOOOOMMMMing. I didn’t, and so I’m still a bit wrung-out, and I just offer these pictures:
Amtrak lounge car 33101, still showing evidence of its off-track excursion in April 2002. Four people died in the derailment of the Auto Train due to a track misalignment. Ironically enough, all the fatalities occurred when the walls of the cars twisted and allowed the grommet-retained emergency-exit windows to fall out; the unlucky passengers were thrown from the train, which then fell over on them. Lounge #33101 wound up on its side in the ditch. The fact that Amtrak has not even repaired the scrapes and gouges on this car tells you something about their finances.
The world’s smallest and bounciest room. Actually that’s probably not true, but it is a pretty small room in any case. Also Tino’s knees. Those seats are horribly uncomfortable for sitting in, but they do fold out into a bed.
Two views of the coffee-and-ice area at the top of the stairs in the middle of a Superliner sleeping car. My elbow and/or forearm appears in many of these pictures, for which I offer no apologies. Taking pictures in a moving train is hard enough without having to worry about whether your elbow is in the frame. This lens has a field of view of 180°, so some part of you will almost always be in the frame.
Going down the stairs. What handsome feet I have. In case you haven’t already figured this out, clicking on any of these pictures will cause a larger version to appear in a pop-up window.
At the bottom of the stairs. The bags are full of dirty linen. Down that hallway you can see doors to the shower, a bathroom, and the Family Bedroom.
The Amtrak shower. The towels used to say ‘NPRC’ (for National Passenger Railroad Corporation, the True Name of Amtrak), but they don’t any more. I suspect that they were stolen too often. Note the large speaker on the wall, so you can’t escape the smooth jazz even in here.
Software Upgrade & Flickr
Nov 4, ’04
9:38 PM
Tinotopia has been upgraded to Movable Type 3 point something, which should be of absolutely no interest to you, the public. If you notice anything wiggy happening, particularly with comment posting, you might mention it.
In news that may actually be of use to you, I have stuck a few pictures on Flickr, and replaced the old phonecam picture on the main log page with a selection of recently-added Tino Flickr pics. The main impetus for having anything to do with Flickr — I generally don’t like having my data where it’s not 100% under my control — was that my mobile-phone carrier has started sticking their logo onto any pictures mailed from my phone. Dealing with this would have meant re-writing my auto-phonecam-posting script, which I am too lazy to do.
I’m still uneasy about not having those pictures on my own machine, but I have to say that Flickr’s software is pretty slick. Expect a lot more blurry, horribly low-res phonecam pictures in the future. I’ll bet you can hardly wait.
There’s also a Tino Flickr RSS feed, available here. Those of you using the Tinotopia Phonecam Feed should replace it with this.
Panera Proxy
Oct 21, ’04
5:25 PM
As I have mentioned before, Panera Bread’s free wireless network blocks Tinotopia on the grounds that it is an ‘adult’ website. If you enter the URL here, you can see that in addition to being ‘adult/mature content’ and ‘society and lifestyle’ — I assume this group exists in the list for people who like to micro-manage, and who are afraid tha their employees might be doing something non-work-related during working hours — Tinotopia is also listed as ‘Usenet News Groups’. I have no idea what the hell this is supposed to mean in this context. It does help to confirm that these lists are put together more or less at random, though.
Tinotopia isn’t meant for children, and I try to keep the fart jokes to a minimum. In that, I suppose that the content here is relatively ‘adult’ and ‘mature’. I believe that the block-list people are using those terms as euphemisms for pornography, though. (Or maybe not; they also have a ‘pornography’ category!)
So you might say that, in some senses of the terms, Tinotopia is an ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ site, even though there are no skin pics here. It’s certainly a ‘society and lifestyle’ website, as the whole point of it is to allow you, the reader, to experience a bit of the Tino lifestyle, and to imagine what it might be for you to live in such high society yourself.
But Usenet newsgroups is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.
Anyway, earlier this week I set up a proxy server on tinotopia.com that I figured would allow me to do whatever I wanted, independent of the block list — the Sonicwall blocker only acts on http traffic, so you can still get to other things on Tinotopia. I figured out all of Panera’s networks (they have a whole raft of /29s) and told that proxy to accept connections from them, and tested the lot from home.
Today when I got here — I’m at Panera as I write this — I tried things out, and was astonished to see that, despite the fact that my requests were indeed going through the proxy (I was watching the proxy activity log), I was still being blocked! The Panera firewall was actually looking at what was being transferred and not just at the host it was being transferred from!
I quickly established an SSH tunnel back to Tinotopia and started encrypting the traffic — something I suppose I should be doing on a public wireless network anyway — and it all started working.
Tino Has A Cold
Sep 14, ’04
7:48 PM
I’ve got a cold as a result of having my head blown on all night by a Holiday Inn air conditioner somewhere in Pennsylvania. Cheap hotels have long used these nasty through-the-wall air conditioners, but a new and special feature of the ones in this particular Holiday Inn is that you can’t aim the air flow; it just goes wherever it goes. Since the room was stuffy and muggy without the air conditioner running all the time, just turning the thing off wasn’t an option. And the window was jammed so that it would only open a few inches.
As I recover and start getting caught up with all the things that have been neglected for the past week or so, I’ll have a few hotel reviews that al wind up asking the question: what the hell is the matter with the ‘hospitality’ industry?
New Tinotopia Feeds
Aug 10, ’04
6:36 PM
Okay, I’m probably going to regret this, basing my self-esteem as I do entirely on the level of traffic that this website sees. But that’s not important. What’s important is that I do right by you, my Public.
To that end, I have established a number of new RSS feeds here, to make it that much more convenient for you to enjoy Tinotopia. The feeds are:
All of this stuff should work out of the box, but as I do not really read my own feeds, please let me know if something seems wrong.
So I'm Lazy
Jul 16, ’04
6:35 PM
Well, okay, so I’m a lazy bum, and I haven’t written anything in so long that everything here has scrolled off the main page.
The problem is that, here in the Humidity Belt, you tend to get cabin fever in the summer because it’s too awful to go outside most of the time. So you stay in the house and eventually you get annoyed by all the junk laying around and you get involved in all sorts of little projects to make the place less horrifying. Or at least I do, anyway. I am beginning to suspect that Nicole and I might be the annoying kind of people who apologize to guests for the colossal mess just as the guests are marveling to themselves at how damned clean and tidy everything is.
Anyway, it’s better to just stay in the air conditioning, and being refrigerated all the time tends to cause the creative juices to thicken and to stop flowing. So I’m using this time instead to attempt to get the kitchen island rebuilt to my specifications. I usually sit at the thing all day long, and my back is starting to hurt, because it wasn’t really well thought-out to begin with. Actually, saying ‘my back is starting to hurt’ is understating things somewhat; my back is so strained by this practice that once when I sneezed a couple of months ago, something went wrong with the muscles of my upper back and I collapsed. I had to spend the rest of the day laying flat on the living-room floor, whimpering and admiring the dust on the ceiling fan. Say, that reminds me, that thing needs cleaning.
(40 minutes later)
So, inspired somewhat by Lileks, we’re rebuilding the the kitchen island.
The idea is to have two levels on the thing, one at normal countertop height for chopping, mincing, and occasionally dicing, and the other at normal desk height for propping computers on. There’ll be all kinds of electrical outlets, network jacks (for the gigabit Ethernet connections that make it easier to back up data to the computers in the basement), phone jacks, TV and audio wires (for feeding signals back to the AV stuff in the basement), the whole magilla. Several thousand dollars at a minimum.
The problem is that we’re having a hard time finding anyone willing to take our money. The first people we went to said that their granite supplier was too busy to even give a quote, and they actually recommended that we try Lowe’s, who, it seems, have their own granite pipeline. The guy at Lowe’s didn’t seem very interested in what we were trying to do, and in fact they still haven’t called us back.
The place we tried today, the third place, was the first that did anything other than leave me with the strong impression that they were totally uninterested in the work. We’ll see. I already refuse to go into the Burger King, the Taco Bell, the Martin’s, and one of the 7-Elevens in Front Royal, so disgusted have I become with their total inability to even begin to do business; if many more places let me down, I’ll have to move or become a hermit.
So anyway, that’s what’s going on at Tino Manor. There are a few other things in the hopper, but they’re really just rants about how idiotic everyone is. That’s pretty much par for the course here, but it’s too hot for me to work up the proper head of steam for a really good rant; for the next month or so, I might just try something other than ranting. If I can figure out what that is.
I see Nicole coming to rook me into the horrible task of emptying the vacuum cleaner, so I’m off.
In The Suburbs
May 23, ’04
11:55 AM
It’s what comes to my mind when I hear the word ‘sprawl’, and it’s awful. It is not entirely without charm; in particular there’s a strip mall where the developers made a real effort. Unfortunately, the result serves mainly to emphasize just how bad the whole place is.
It's All About the Benjamins
May 18, ’04
12:36 PM
I have not been writing here because I have been too busy embracing and extending Tinotopia’s capabillities. Specifically, I have improved the photo gallery here, and it’s about ready for testing now.
To shake the thing down — I’m having trouble viewing thumbnails in some browsers myself — I have added a gallery of photos that illustrate some urban planning principles and that some of you may find interesting.
Comments on the photos can be made, but you’ll have to register with a valid e-mail address first. I generally prefer to let anyone say whatever they like, but that does tend to bring the idiots out of the woodwork; I have things configured so that, should you register and leave comments, only your username, not your real name or e-mail address, is shown.
New phonecam feature
Apr 30, ’04
3:26 PM
The Tinotopia Multimedia department has been hard at work, and as a result I at last have a use for the terrible camera that’s built in to my mobile phone.
The archive interface isn’t yet complete, but for the time being the latest picture taken with the Tino phone-cam will appear in the column on the left side of the main Tinotopia Log page. I take the photo with the phone, and then send it from there, so it can be updated at any time, from any place.
