Alex RasmussenI make things that do stuff with computers

My apartment didn’t burn down. My advisor’s home also didn’t burn down (at least it wasn’t burned a couple days ago – let’s hope that’s still true). My office didn’t burn down, so I’ll have a place to go on Monday. I’ve escaped to LA, where the smoke isn’t as thick and the house isn’t full of distracting things (like Final Fantasy XII, Guitar Hero II and reporters pointing to fires and saying, “Hey look! The people who hate America are on fire!”), so I may actually be able to get work done.

Business of the day: get renter’s insurance and get back to work.

Google has been kind enough to enlighten me about a local record store in Encinitas called Lou’s. It feels very independent – from the bookshelves full of CDs to the cashiers’ snarky customer banter. One thing that shocked me, though, was the giant dent in their wall:

Customer: “So, uhh, did someone run into your wall or something?”
Snarky Cashier … Frank?: “Nah, I just got angry yesterday and did the whole ‘Frank smash!’ thing.”

Combine that with the music, and it was a pretty good experience.

Ratatat’s first album – holy crap the guitars. I mean seriously, how do they do that?

This was in the bargain bin – 23 Thelonius Monk tracks for $5? Sure!

The New Pornographers have hooks that won’t quit, and they harmonize like few other bands in this day and age. Plus, any rockers that include a piano (not a synthesizer, a piano) in a lot of their tracks get my respect.

Walking back from lunch today I noticed that San Jose’s public library was having a used book sale. For three dollars I received:

	Roman’s An Introduction to Discrete Mathematics, First Edition: Don’t laugh; I didn’t have a discrete math text until now and figured I might need one at some point.
UML in a Nutshell: Kitteh sez: I can has $25 O’Reilly book for $1? Kthxbye. Amazon says it’s pretty crappy, but it cost as much as a Milky Way. Who cares?
	Starship Titanic: It’s written by Terry Jones, and it’s based on an idea of Douglas Adams’. It’s no Hitchhiker’s Guide, but it’s amusing.

My dad has two old Macs (read: 1992 vintage Performas). These computers were purchased during a period in personal computing where storage was hard to come by. Hard disks were still pretty expensive for the average user, and while CDs were readable, the technology to write to them was still prohibitively costly. So a bunch of companies (Iomega and a host of others that nobody hears of nowadays except when they sell the occasional flash drive or music player) invented a host of external storage solutions. Of course floppy disks were still the Old Reliable of storage, but it was getting to the point where 1MB wouldn’t hack it; the average MP3 was (and still is) about 3 times that big.

So my dad has kept these two computers around because they’re the only Macs in the house that can read floppies or connect to any of the external drives he bought during those dark times before CD-Rs. I’ve been helping him get those disks backed up to a more stable storage medium.

There are a ton of these disks. And I just found another box of them. Luckily I can work on two computers at once.

If anyone has a jones for floppy disks, let me know and I’ll be happy to give you a whole ton.

On this date in 1855, the New York Times was first published.

On this date in 1970, Jimi Hendrix died.

On this date in 1984, I was born.

22. 21++. I’m too busy to care.

All I can say is thank goodness the shuttle didn’t blow up on the Fourth of July. I think that would be pretty high on the list of “bad things to have happen on a national holiday”. Good luck to all the guys who are orbiting the planet right now. Let’s hope you come down in as many pieces as you went up in.