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Rant mode on:

Please, for the love of all that is good and righteous in the world of opt-in newsletter email and all things technical and beautiful, please, all of you out there, please, please stop sending these emails to us with no date!  What's the matter with you!  I've got tons and tons of emails in my Inbox from back to 2004 and earlier.  Every time you send me an email with no date, it goes to the top of the list of dateless emails. 

Yes, this means you, Apple, Inc., OWC Larry, Tagged (Tagged, you are spam scumsuckers), Senator Barbara Boxer, Intuit for Tax Return acceptance emails and well, mostly, just Apple:  ADC and iTunes Store emails both have no date. Whyyyyyyy!  Please fix this!  I don't want to have to go to the bottom of my email to find something important and then to have to scroll up to the last item that had no date on it that was sent to me.  Gerf...

Okay, rant mode off...

:P

Today, I decided that I wanted to make the long hike out to the end of the jetty that runs along side Ferry Point where the U.S.S. Hornet is docked in Alameda, CA. 

The first time I discovered the jetty, I made it almost half way before I decided to turn back due to concerns about being able to see after dark with no lights and treacherous, random rock piles that I was navigating on the way out there (see the video below).

For my second trip out, I was determined to get all the way to the end and I even found the secret entrance to the jetty parking lot that I had missed the last time I went.

We've had a brief break in the typical winter storms that have been hitting us in the Bay Area back to back lately and I thought today would be a good day to do this as the forecast calls for rain off and on into next week with a possibility of snow as low as 2000 feet.

So, I got out there and despite it being pretty late in the afternoon, I was able to press on through the Dance Dance Revolution step combinations necessary to avoid wrenching my ankles and feet in some precarious slots between the large, jagged and assorted rock types that are piled up to create this artificial breakwater jetty (again see the video below).

There are several cement markers along the piled rocks that make up the jetty.  All of these marker spots look like some kind of wooden structure used to reside on top of them before they burned down.  There's also a kind of circular metal hole in the middle and possibly some kind of light or lantern of some sort at some point in the past. These holes are now filled with salty seawater and bits and pieces of bird food fodder; chunks and shards of mussels and crab carcasses that have been discarded after the meat was removed and eaten by a seagull or some other seabird.

This crapshoot of obtuse and unusually shaped rocks continues for almost a mile and I started thinking I might fall into a slot and how would anyone find me if I twisted or broke my ankle and get a little worried.  Just then, my neighbor calls me on my cell phone and I return to civilization briefly to tell my her that her sister will have to be added to my list of filtered MAC addresses before I can give her a password to our WPA2 network so that she can get free WiFi.  Knowing that I can receive calls on my cell phone makes me feel better about the trek, although, with my luck, I'd fall, get my ankle stuck and the cell phone would shoot out of my jacket pocket and into the water simultaneously and I'd be stuck there with no phone and nary a pot to piss in.

Eventually, I reach the end of the line and realize that the jetty has an uncrossable gap in it that leads off in a North-Westerly direction and lots of birds are sitting on the rocks out there across this divide laughing at me because I can't come and play where they are hanging out.  There's an official looking red and white striped box just a bit taller than me with a door on it situated right in the middle of the mile long rock-laden path that I've just come down.

I turn to my left and I see another red and white striped box with a door on it just like the one that is where I'm currently standing at almost the very end of the jetty section that juts out into the bay towards San Mateo.  The red and white striped box near me is obviously made of metal and inside the hinged but broken-locked door, there's what appears to be charred coal or the carbon remains of something that was burned inside of it. I presume the other one has similar crap in it and don't bother going out to the farthest point on the jetty for fear of losing my balance and falling into the water.

I'm a little winded now after the long, tedious journey.  I'm feeling a bit uneasy about my solo trek, the late hour of the day and the chance that I could get stuck out here.  A huge bay wave, similar to the one in the movie The Day After Tomorrow that swallows downtown Manhattan, although highly unlikely, could potentially come in behind me as I akwardly dance my way across the rocks back to the safety of the shore.

When I get home, I grab the always informative and now undersea-capable version of Google Earth and use the Ruler window to determine where I was and how far the journey out to the end of the jetty is in miles.  Turns out it's only about 1.03 miles to the end where I went to.  If I had a dingy, I could paddle across that gap and get to where all the bird crap is for a really rare photo opportunity but why would I want to risk life and limb just for a stupid photo that I could take from a ferry or a small boat in the bay some time in the future?

Anyway, my feet were sore and decided that as a reward I have sushi from the newly remodeled and recently re-opened Kai's sushi restaurant in Alameda.

Kai's isn't as hi-falutin' and yummy as Kamakura, also in Alameda, but the price of admission is cheap just like the price of my hike today. Next time I do this hike, I won't forget my camera so that I can take some pictures to add to this post of the red and white striped boxes.

The photos and video here are from the first trip out when I didn't get all the way to the end and it was much sunnier.

I bought a new oven just prior to being laid off for the fourth time in my life.  Previous times were from Opcode Systems, Topica, Tribe.net and now the fourth is Aggregate Knowledge amidst a wonderfully rosy economic outlook. 

Having an oven to stick your head in if it gets really bad out there is at least some solace but just after installing the oven and using it once to make cinnamon rolls out of a can, a personal unhealthy favorite indulgence of mine, the oven stopped working.  When I say, stopped working, as a Quality Assurance Engineer, this is not a succinct enough description.  The oven wouldn't actually heat up when the bake button was pushed and the desired temperature was selected.  That's a much more effective description of the issue.

I haven't had a range with a working oven since probably before I was laid off from Topica in 2001 and I've gotten along prefectly fine with just a toaster oven for things that needed baking.  The stove top worked fine and the tenants I've had over the years seemed fine with the lack of baking facilities but when you fix something like this, you want it to work.

I looked in the manual that came with the new stove and we discovered some interesting things about the oven.  This Kenmore oven has to have it's time setting set or it won't heat up but that wasn't the problem because we tried unplugging and replugging it in and resetting the time and nothing happened.  I looked further into the manual and discovered that Sears, the department store where I purchased the oven from (at the low price of $399 + tax), offers day and night support people on the phone to help me.

What "Day and Night" actually means is, we have people who can answer the phone but can't seem to take down any of the details associated with your problem, can't actually make an appointment to have someone come out and won't let you talk to anyone else, including a supervisor.  I have to say that it was this one particular person that was just difficult to talk to and eventually, he did transfer me to someone else who made an appointment for me and listened to my problem and even sounded like he gave a crap about me as a person and a customer of Sears.

The soonest that someone would be available to come out was Weds. Jan. 21st.  The time range can be between 8 and 5PM or 1 and 5PM which is weird and makes mostly no sense at all.  It should be 8AM to 1PM or 1PM to 5PM but I digress.  The day finally arrived this morning and about 10:25 or so, I get a call from a strange number that probably means it's the repair guy and it is.  We get his A&E (Applicances and Electronics I guess) truck through the gate and into the complex where he can get to it and he gets to work.

After some initial investigation and a faulty multi-meter give the repair guy some trouble (I ended up loaning him my Neumann multi-meter that I won on the Neumann microphone site some time ago that has been a great tool for me and

others on many occasions), Mr. Repair guy determines that the problem is the igniter.  Modern ovens don't have pilot lights anymore which is probably a good thing for repair people everywhere. 

Gone are the days when ignorant consumers can fill a kitchen full of natural gas in preparation for their repair people who come into a situation that is already fueled and ready to ignite and blow the repair person and the kitchen to smithereens.  I'm sure many a range repair person has had a situation where someone did something stupid related to the stove's pilot light and they tell their kids about it as a cautionary tale before bedtime because they were lucky to survive and not have any horrible burns.

Anyhoo, Mr. Repairman shows me the igniter, a new-fangled device that heats up and ignites the gas which in turn causes the oven to heat up.  Sure enough, the igniter is broken into two pieces and is the point of failure for the new Kenmore stove's oven. 

The burners all work correctly on top of the stove but this one piece, a very important piece for the oven portion of the stove, has failed and all it took was one usage for eight minutes at 375 degrees farenheit for cinnamon rolls and poof, it's done.

 The most important take away from today's events is, try your best not to get laid off but no matter what you do, it's unavoidable sometimes, buy an oven that's a little a bit more than the minimum and maybe your oven will work more than once the first time you try it out, and then again, maybe not and lastly, as the repair person so eloquently put it, "Things don't work like they used to".  Time to bake some tollhouse cookies and drown them and my sorrows about being unemployed in some milk.

It was not less than a month ago when my departing roommate Chuck played me a couple of songs and videos off of the toobs from a band called MGMT. 

On my recent trip to San Diego and back, I've been hearing the song Kids all over the radio now.  It's possible that people with some knowledge of new music releases hates this band by now and that Kids will become the new Hey Ya! but I really liked what I heard when my roommate played me a couple of their songs including Time To Pretend, which I initially confused with Kids and my favorite retro-funk wonk Electric Feel which reminds me of the days when I used to wear butterfly collars in Elementary school and listen to Yarborough and Peoples on something called a 12" vinyl record.  MGMT's music is catchy and kitschy and reminds me a bit of the more primarily punk-oriented Crystal Castles album with all of its Commodore 64 chip tune sensitibilities.

As always, your mileage may vary. You may like Terrorcore, noise, speed metal or music that makes your teeth bleed but some may find this group's psychedelic pop freshman song collection Oracular Spectacular kind of alluring, even with lyrics like, "I'll move to Paris shoot some heroin and f**k with the stars" from Time To Pretend which apparently they performed on David Letterman in Jan. of 08;  I wonder what they did with that line when they played on television? Did they cook with the stars?

Next flash in the can artists or real gems?  It's hard to tell this early but I'm a songs person and I liked a couple of this band's songs right from the start and the others are starting to grow on me as I listen to the album through a second time.  I think people will remember this album and artist years later as at least a small bump on the radar of musical evolution.

MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (Buy this if you like it)

I just got back from the solo eight-hour jaunt down the coast of California to see my dad's new place (see photo) and with the exception of the lack of cell service from his new digs, it was a great place to be for Christmas this year, far away from the communal, hippie-share lifestyle of the house I've called home in Oakland for the last twelve years.

I rented a car from Enterprise, as I've done many times in the past, and my friend Tony over at the car shop called them on my behalf to get me into a better car for the trip. 

What I didn't realize abot Monday after 11 or so was how few cars would be left to rent but when I got to the office in Oakland, it was clear from the barren, tundra-esque empty parking slots that slim were going to be the pickins for this year's solo vehicular flight down to the northern part of San Diego County.

When I heard that I was going to get a Dodge Caliber, I said, "a Dodge what?  I've never heard of that car before or seen what one looks like."  At first glance, the car doesn't appear to be too much to look at either.

The vehicle looks like a squashed down version of one of those SUVs that the American car companies were so fond of before gas prices rose to over $4 and dropped back down again and the the economy opened up its trap door in the floor and gobbled up the remaining money and diginity from all of the struggling brick and mortar stores and essentially killed the car business for the foreseeable future.

The Dodge Caliber R/T though proved to be a real sport on the eight hour road trip.  The Boston Acoustics sound system with a sub-woofer and nine speakers as a manufacturer feature made Los Angeles freeway traffic bearable on the trip down and back with the hand full of assorted CDs that I brought with me.  This rental didn't have the EVIC module installed (Electronic Vehicle Information Center) which for a short week's rental, is probably for the best.

The reviews I've read of this car's handling and performance aren't that great but the stereo, the cruise control and the especially peppy 4-cylinder engine made this car a nice choice for the trip down.  I guess I was right when I said "this Dodge Caliber is growing on me" at Enterprise RAC.

My dad and his wife and I all went out to the movies and to breakfast a couple of times in it and I just wanted to crank the stereo up to show them how good it sounded but I knew that no one else would care as much as I did about how great it sounded.

I just had an idea: When I give people copies of the three CDs of music that I've done over the years, I should rent this car and take them on a three hour drive so that they can hear all of the subtle nuances I heard when I was making it.  It's too bad you can't request a specific car when you rent from Enterprise.  If I could, I would choose this car just for the stereo alone.

I am an avid Macintosh fan.  If that's not already clear from reading my blog, I want to say it for the record.  I'm geeked about the new Mac OS aptly titled Leopard coming next Friday the 26th of October and I'm also excited about the new Logic Studio 8 I've been playing around with lately, although I could use a new Mac so that I can play back my songs on it.

Where I work currently, we encourage people to use Macs for many reasons including the fact that you can actually have the Mac OS and Windows running side by side using Parallels software [Coherence mode is awesome!]. Another reason we recommend that new employees get Macs is because they have lots of extremely useful tools under the hood like BSD for starters and a terminal application appropriately called "Terminal" where Mac users can access the Unix kernel and configure their computers via a command line interface.

One of the questions that comes up often is "how can I share files with other Mac users or Mac computers on an internal network at home or at work?"  At some offices, this might be more complicated because of Windows networking issues but with the three Macs I have here in the office or the two I use at home, this is so simple it's kind of hard to believe that I haven't been taking advantage of this feature for years.

To enable file sharing, go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences and click the Sharing Preference pane in the middle of the window under Internet & Network.  If everything is set up correctly on your local network, click the Start button on the Sharing Preference page's Services tab and wait for it to finish the startup process.

Default options here are probably best but you can add additional services if desired in the services area. 

To share files, make sure that the Firewall is Off under the Firewall tab.  If you want to share your internet connection, click the Internet tab and click Start.  I have never personally used the Share Connection option but I'm sure there's a good reason to have this feature and that someone somewhere is using it right now.  Unfortunately, this feature is outside the scope of this blog post for now.

So, back to the important details.  How is the shared Mac accessed from another machine you ask?  First you need to know what the address of the shared computer is.  By clicking the Sharing Preference pane with the Services tab selected, if Sharing is enabled [Personal File Sharing should definitely be checked as well] some text that says the following appears near the bottom of the Preference pane window when Sharing is the currently selected preference pane and when File Sharing is enabled:

"Other Macintosh users can access your computer at afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ or browse for "username" by choosing Network from the Go menu in the Finder."

So, from any other computer that is not explicitly blocked from accessing other machines on the network, the address is what is specified in that sentence.

From another networked Macintosh computer, choose Connect To Server from the Finder's Go menu.  Enter the address that appeared in the shared computer's Sharing Preference panel and click the + button to add the address to the list.  Keep in mind that if you're network is running a DHCP server [dynamically allocated internal IP address server], this address will probably change often so it might be necessary to recheck it the next time you want to connect to the shared computer.  If you try to connect to an address that worked previously, double-check that the address has not been changed since the last connection was made.

Once the address has been added to the list, click the item in the list of Favorite Servers and then click Connect.  You will be prompted to enter a username and password for the remote machine.

This brings up a separate issue.  It will likely be necessary to create accounts on the shared computer so that you can access all of the folders and drives associated with it.  Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts Preference pane and enable Guest access, or create new accounts with specific access rules as necessary.  Guest access will allow you to see the Public folder and the Share folder with restrictions on many folders.

In the Accounts window click the Lock to change settings for a given user account or to add Guest access to your computer.  keep in mind that with default settings, only the Public folder that appears in your user's home directory should be accessible to other users unless you log in as you from the remote machine.  Also noteworthy is the drop box folder where guests and other users that are not you can drop files and folders for you even though they can't see the contents of the folder.

Good luck and happy sharing on the Mac.

I think this tune still needs some more work with regard to the levels of the individual parts but here's a little sample of what I've been working on lately.  This is an MP3 converted from Reason after exporting it directly as a 24-Bit, 96K stereo AIFF file.  I then custom tuned the Ozone 3 Mastering Plug-in with the tape saturation simulation effect to get a warmer sound in Peak before I bounced the file with the plug-ins to disk.  After the bounce, I encoded the file with Peak to a 320K MP3 file at the highest and slowest encoding speed just prior to exporting the file from Peak. 

I think some of the sounds could stand to be a bit louder in the mix but this is yet another sonic experiment.  I think I might need to subdue some of the drum parts in the upper mid range of the frequency spectrum and accentuate some mids in the sound clouds that occur here and there during this under six minute song.

All of the drums sounds are Roland TR-808 samples taken from a collection that a friend of mine and I created at Naut Humon's recording studio in San Francisco many years ago for some synthesizer/sampler project.  I think they sound pretty nice but I wish I could get my mixes a bit louder without introducing a lot of breathing or pumping like I hear on so many rock/pop style records.  Oh well.

Here's the link to the file in case you missed it above:

http://www.belief-systems.com/music/SibilanceDraft4.mp3

Okay, I admit it.  I'm a geek.  A Nyerd.  I actually bought an iPhone.  The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two.  I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.

When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress.  For me, it was painless and without a single glitch.  Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.

I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it.  I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into.  You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor;  Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.

So, the iPhone is awesome.  Seriously.  It is.  Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch.  But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.

Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.

Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia.  There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.

I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM].  At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk.  The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.

I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities.  I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon.  When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice.  Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty.  My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.

Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages.  I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback.  Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.

I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync.  I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone.  When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new].  When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.

Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.

Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.

On April 20th, 2006, I posted a similar version of what follows to my Tribe blog just before switching over to Vox as my primary blog platform.  "Four Twenty" as it's pronounced by those in the marijuana culture is the social equivalent of a holiday and some of these folks even stop whatever day dreaming pot smokers do daily at 4:20PM to take time out to smoke pot, not that regular pot smokers need an excuse to smoke.

At the time I posted it, I was hoping to present to all pot smokers, or former 420 freaks, several reasons why this practice seems kind of silly.  I've come to realize however that this is a fruitless endeavor.  Don't get me wrong though.  The Bay Area loves its marijuana and I'm not personally anti-marijuana per se.  I just don't think it does much good for people in the long run.  Medical marijuana use is great for those with terminal illnesses but I've seen lots of people fool themselves into believing that they're not addicted to smoking pot, or that it's not adversely effecting their lives.  When you can't go out to a party or a club because you've gotta go score from your dealer so you can get high before you can be seen in public or feel comfortable, something's just not right.

I don't smoke pot myself but I do think that most drugs including Cannabis should be legalized so that the drugs can be regulated by the state and federal governments.  People should be appropriately punished for harm or injury that is caused by their negligence when intoxicated by a controlled substance but make the drugs themselves legal and maybe you cut out the allure of that particular substance.  Telling people they can't have something leads to people wanting it, especially when it's narcotics, and there are those individuals who profit from the illegal sale of various illegal substances and these folks typically aren't the nicest sort of people.  Shady business ensues. 

Here's the updated version of my 2006 post about "four-twenty" day:

Cannabis-culture enthusiasts everywhere typically celebrate today's date [April 20th or "Four-twenty"] and especially celebrate by smoking pot at 4:20PM today for some unknown reason. All of this occurs allegedly because of some kids at a San Rafael High School [The Waldos?], according to Snopes.com, High Times magazine, the Marijuana-logues The Straight Dope and Wikipedia.org's Cannabis culture page, that would meet at 4:20PM to smoke Cannabis or "pot" with their friends.

Prior to the internet and all things networking, lots of urban legends about the number and its use in marijuana culture traversed and traveled through the Cannabis culture grapevine [the stemline?] and these false stories have been passed around for generations by Cannabis culture enthusiasts.  The most famous legend about this special, dare I say "magic" number is the story about the police code for "pot smoking in progress" being represented by the number 420 in Oregon or Washginton state is my personal favorite [you know, like 187 is a code for homicide?].  The wikipedia page used to have more urban legends outlined on the page but I noticed most of them have been removed after reviewing the page this year.

- Here's the updated wikipedia.org link that outlines the agreed upon origin of the expression of this particular date as a special day in Cannabis culture.

* It's interesting to note that editing of the Cannabis culture wikipedia page by new members has been disabled.  Too many kids dying to add their $.02 to the wiki page I guess.

- There's also a couple of infamous events that occurred on this date including the Columbine High School massacre, the downing of a Korean Air passenger plane by the Soviets and the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars.

- There are also some famous and infamous births that occurred on this day; most notably in the negative column for an overwhelming majority of folks being the birth of Adolph Hitler in 1889.  Thanks a lot for that one oh Great Architect of the Universe!

The neutrality of the text on the Hitler page, at the time I originally posted a link to it on my Tribe blog last year, was in dispute but the page seems to have settled down since then. It's really too bad that Hitler didn't get into art school. Who knows what would've happened with the world had he gotten in.

- A well-known prophet named Muhammed, the founder of Islam, was born on this day in 570 too

- Here's a short list of noteworthy 4/20 birthdays with their birth and death year, where appropriate:

Adolf Hitler 1889-1945 [huge asshole]
Muhammed 570-632 [prophet]
Napoleon 1808-1873 [guy who liked to stick his hand in his shirt]
Tito Puente 1925-2000 [percussionist]
George Takei 1940 [Star Trek, Heroes actor]
Ryan O'Neal 1941 [actor]
Edie Sedgwick 1943-1971 [cousin of Kyra, Factory Girl, Warhol film actress]
Jessica Lange 1949 [academy award-winning actress]
Crispin Glover 1964 [actor, writer, hipster]
Luther Vandross 1951-2005 [singer]
Don Mattingly 1961 [baseball player]

- The link to the complete April 20th birthday list on Wikipedia

- And finally, the link to the number 420 itself on Wikipedia, mostly mathematic information about the number four-hundred and twenty

Puff.. Puff... Give...  Don't mess up the rotation!

This might come as a shock to some folks but some of us don't know as much about our computers as we would like to and when some obvious question that no one nas ever asked before comes up and you figure it out, it's always nice to share with others what you discovered.  Some people reading this post might be saying "well, duh!" when they've finished reading it but some folks will appreciate what I'm about to enlighten them about.

First of all, if you're not a Mac OS X user, this post won't interest you.  Move on to the next one, unless you have some geeky, maudlin curiosity about how the other [and in my opinion better] 10 percent of computer users lives and breathes.  Or, maybe you just want to ask the same question about the PC to find the answer and decide once again that your choice of computer is still better than the Mac, despite what you've heard from your programming friends.  By all means, go ahead.  Be a PC user.  I don't care.  If you wanna use a craptacular OS, good right ahead and be my guest.  And please don't leave me any comments about Mac vs. PC because I just don't care.   Get a job at Microsoft and suck on Bill's tit all the way up to Redmond if you want.

Now that we've gotten rid of the PC punters, has anyone ever wondered if there is any logic to the order that your computer connects to a given network like say, the Internet?

Someone came by my cube at work the other day and asked me if there was any rhyme or reason to the order that Macs connect to a given network, more specifically in most cases meaning the Internet, or as one of our glorious politicians likes to describe it, "the Series of Toobs" or "The Toobs" for short;  Don't put a big truck on "The Toobs" either; Senator Ted Stevens says the truck might get stuck on the Toobs.

While I was trying to figure out the cryptic art of file sharing last night I stumbled on a feature that I hadn't noticed in the Network System Preference Panel that answers this very question of what order the OS uses to connect to the Internet given multiple available interfaces.

Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences: Click Network and select the Network Port Configurations item from the Show pop-up [PC users: drop down; why is the PC terminology so negative?] that appears below the Location pop-up on the Network preference panel.

On this page, you can check and uncheck Port Configurations that you want or don't want active [Built-In FireWire for Networking?  I guess that's a possibility but not for me and Blue-tooth would be a last resort connection option; dow to the bottom for Bluetooth].  I disabled Built-In FireWire by clicking its checkbox to uncheck it. 

After enabling what you want to use to connect to the Toobs via a "Network" dragging the items in the list up or down determines the order used for each interface to connect to the network.  Logically, if I have an Ethernet cable connected to my computer, I want to use that pipe over my Airport connection because Ethernet is much faster and AirPort or 802.11g/b/a/n is much slower. 

So... Built-In Ethernet to the top.  AirPort second even though that's the one I'll be using most often at the house followed by Bluetooth and finally Internal Modem for when I go back in tech time to beautiful Prescott Arizona to visit mom and have to slide down the 56K toob known as dial-up.   Yuch. 

So, if anyone ever asks if there's any logic used to determine which port or interface to use to connect to the Internet or a *network* I can answer that question for a Mac user.  I have no idea how this all sorts out on Windows Vista or in XP though.  I'm sure someone has already posted this note for PC users somewhere.