Local fire

You'd think, oh, Labor Day weekend, what a lovely time to visit the Wine Country, right? Not quite: Evacuations Ordered as Geysers Fire Burns Out of Control. That's not too far from us.

Yeah, we're worried. While the chance of us having to evacuate is minimal, it's the bit in that article (towards the end) about the Calpine Geysers Geothermal plant that's scary. That's where we (and most of our surrounding area) get all our power. If it gets anywhere near there, we've got big problems.

Update, 2:30 pm: According to this page, things are getting worse: they have no control over the head of the fire, and it's moving towards Alexander Valley (i.e., us). One small bit of good news: they've shut down the power plant (referred to above) and we're now successfully getting power from PG&E. And I guess it's good news that it's not bad enough to be listed on this page of CDF major incidents, but I'll be keeping an eye out.

Update, 3:30 pm: Uh oh. Now there is a CDF Web page. The fire is six miles NE of Geyserville, which is six miles NNW of us, so it's maybe ten miles or so away. Only 10% contained, with no estimate as to when they think it might be fully contained. 14,000 acres burned so far.

Update, 4:30 pm: No new news, which isn't good and isn't bad. It did hit the AP Wire, so it looks like it's getting lots of national coverage. I won't update again unless the situation changes one way or another.

Update, 10:00 pm: Not much new news, sadly. The CDF page was updated about 7 pm, and it says now that only about 7500 acres have burned. Still only 10% contained, and no estimate for full containment, so what that really means (as I understand it) is that it's all up to the wind and weather. Keep your fingers crossed for us. Until tomorrow, here's a panorama I took tonight that shows the view from the hill behind us (click on it for a larger view):

Stupid Mac Tricks

Here's a stupid Mac trick I just learned today: hit Control+Option+Command+8 on your keyboard. Yikes!

For those of you who are Mac-less, it turns your screen to the reverse b&w version of whatever you currently have. That is, white becomes black, black becomes white, and everything else becomes shades of gray. Apple has it as part of Universal Access, but about all I could think of it as actually useful for would be to convince someone (partner, spouse, boss) that you need a new monitor.

My preferred way to make Web pages legible in Safari is this bookmarklet: black on white. Drag that link into your bookmarks bar, and click on it when you're visiting one of those annoying sites (yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Moltz) that think that someone, somewhere, likes reading white text on black.

While I'm at it, I'd like to give a big THANK YOU to Andy Ihnatko, for finally (finally! finally!) understanding that just because a blog is named YellowText doesn't mean that it has to have yellow text. Now available in yummy black on white! Now, if only he'd offer full RSS feeds...

Poor execution by Apple

I ordered a stock Power Mac Dual 2.5 GHz G5 on June 9, the day they were announced. It was scheduled to ship by August 2. On July 30, the ship date got changed to September 3. Yesterday passed without a peep, and today my order status shows a estimated ship date of October 13. Assuming (a big assumption at this point) that they even make that date, any company that takes four plus months to ship their flagship product has huge problems in manufacturing and forecasting. Between problems shipping the G5s, the foolishness of allowing the G4 iMac production line to run out months before the G5 iMac will be available, and Apple's inability to ship the iPod Mini, heads should be rolling at Apple. They've been screwing up all year.

Friday Bad News Dump

True to form (they do it all the time) the Bush administration held off until late Friday afternoon, and on a holiday weekend, to release bad news for seniors: Medicare Premiums To Rise By 17.5%. That's worse, on a percentage basis, than private health insurance's recent increases, and in dollars, the highest ever. What an amazing coincidence that the Medicare and yesterday's lackluster job creation numbers just happened to come out the day after the GOP convention ended.

Finally, a local Apple store!

Rumor said that there was going to be an Apple Store opening up in Santa Rosa, so I checked Apple's jobs site to check, and yep, it's true. I don't know if this is a good thing, or if this is like a crack dealer moving in down the block.

Cheaper .Mac renewal

If you're like us, your .Mac account is coming up for renewal, and Apple just sent you a handy reminder that they're going to auto-renew you for $99.95 + tax (in my case, $107.45). Forget that!

Instead, go over to Amazon, and buy the .Mac retail box for $79.99, with no tax or shipping fees. When that arrives, simply put the serial number from the box into the space for it on Apple's auto-renewal page, and you're set. Personally, I have better places to spend that $27.46.

QOTD

Quote of the day:

What's remarkable about the Republicans is their utter indifference to fairness in their own attacks. Smearing opponents as traitors to their country, as unfit to be commander-in-chief, as agents of foreign powers (France) is now fair game. Appealing to the crudest form of patriotism and the easiest smears is wrong when it is performed by the lying Michael Moore and it is wrong when it is spat out by Zell Miller. Last night was therefore a revealing night for me. I watched a Democrat at a GOP Convention convince me that I could never be a Republican. If they wheel out lying, angry old men like this as their keynote, I'll take Obama. Any day.

That's by Andrew Sullivan. Yeah, that Andrew Sullivan. I guess that Bush can be a uniter and not just a divider!

Comparing apples to lemons

In a comment on yesterday's post about the new iMacs, Steven Vore said I should check out this LinuxInsider article by Paul Murphy: Macs Are More Expensive, Right?.

The conclusion — that Macs are actually less expensive — is nothing terribly new for anyone who's been reading this site for a while, although I should mention that there's two places where I have trouble with his numbers: first, although the article is only 6 days old, it's already semi-obsolete because of the new iMacs, and secondly, most PCs are bought to run Windows, not Linux, and should be outfitted accordingly. On Windows, a firewall, an anti-virus app, and an anti-spyware app are not optional equipment, and that's likely to cost you some additional money. Here's Scoble on the layers of security that Windows XP2 needs.

Professional Magic

While Sean's trying to figure out what to major in in college, it's probably not a good idea for me to point to an article about professional Magic: The Gathering players. But then, I've always been a bad mother.

New iMacs

For those even further behind the curve than us, the new Apple iMac G5's were announced today. So far, so good, in my opinion. They won't actually ship for another month or so, but what I'm seeing on the Web site looks sweet. I love the idea that you can buy the 20" version, hang it on the wall, and use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to work with it.

Yeah, it doesn't have the capabilities of the pro machine, but it also starts at $700 less.

Hello!

I just looked at our logs for August, and one thing really popped out: we had four times as many hits yesterday (Sunday the 29^th) as we did on any other day this month.

I'm not seeing any comparable jump in any particular referrer or search engine visitor, so I'm stumped as to where y'all are coming from. If you're still around today, drop us a line in the comments saying how you got here, please?

And thanks for visiting, and come on back any time.

Surprise Sports

I've taken advantage of our ReplayTV to record a bunch of lesser-known Olympic sports. Sometimes they're events that I don't think are really Olympic-level athletics, like mountain biking. Other times they've been stuff that I didn't get to see in years past, like fencing, judo and taekwondo. I wanted to find out the difference between freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, and now I know. But I was surprised tonight by handball. I saw it listed on the guide, and I thought it was going to be two people in a handball court with a small hard rubber ball. But it's nothing like that; it's a game I'd never seen. It's a cross between basketball and soccer, with a big court, two 6 player teams, and goaltenders. I love being surprised like this.

Update: The handball game was the women's gold medal match, Denmark (defending 3 consecutive gold medalist team) vs. South Korea. It was terrific; I stayed up till 3 AM watching it. The score was tied at the end of regulation, so they did a 10 minute overtime period. Tied again at the end of OT, so they did a second 10 minute OT. Tied again at the end of that (even the NBC commentators were freaking out), so they went to penalty throws (think soccer's penalty kicks). Finally, Denmark won. What a fun surprise for me to see it.