Joe White’s Blog

I need to write more.

Jennie and I went to see The Dark Knight last night. (No real spoilers here, just previews.)

First reaction: it was freaking long. It was two movies. At least. One of my co-workers commented that it really needed an intermission. So unless you’ve got a watch (I didn’t), don’t believe it when it starts to feel like they’re building up toward the ending. And don’t drink your entire large Coke during what feels like the first half. (I wasn’t too thirsty, so I made it through okay.)

It was also definitely dark. The magic trick with the pencil could have come straight out of The Crow. I’m a bit amazed that this movie snuck by with a PG-13, and I doubt I would willingly let anyone younger than about 15 see it. There was no blood, at least, but there were some scenes I won’t be forgetting any too soon.

The Joker was… beyond anything you’ve ever known the Joker to be. Every Joker before him pales. (The movie ones, mind you — I’ve never read the comics, so I can’t compare.) He was so far over the top he came back out the bottom. They turned all the knobs up to 11, both in the script and in the acting, and he was freaky. I’m going to be a little bit jumpy for probably another day or two. He was that good.

The Bat-Cycle wasn’t quite as cool as it looked in the still photo I saw in the paper, although that wheelie-180-on-the-building was pretty sweet, and the way he ended the semi chase… adjectives fail me, it was that cool. I’m not usually the biggest bang-bang-shoot-’em-up fan there ever was, but that semi thing took some names and kicked some ass.

And the movie had quite its share of memorable scenes in human terms. The blackmail threat had the whole theater laughing. And then there was Fox’s ultimatum… and the tension on the boats, and the thing you never saw coming… and Rachel’s rescue, about which I shall say no more… and Gordon after the shootout, and wondering how the hell they could have done it.

The story wasn’t as good as Batman Begins — I’m enough of a story geek to really appreciate how well the pieces fit together in BB, how artfully things were tied together, and this just didn’t have the same level of craftsmanship. But it was good just the same.

And the special effects were nothing short of phenomenal. I know, I know, people have said that sort of thing before. But just you go see it, and watch that building collapse, and tell me that isn’t seven kinds of amazing. Not enough dust kicked up, which of course was on purpose so you could actually see what was going on, but apart from that it was… wow. Wow.

And Two-Face. Oh. My. God. I’ve seen CGI that was incredibly hokey, that didn’t even try to fit in with the movie around it (remember the race through the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin?). But this was wrenchingly, blisteringly real. If I didn’t keep wondering how he kept his eye from drying out, I wouldn’t even be able to tell it wasn’t the real thing. Every muscle, every nuance, every twitch was dead-on. I know they had a mind-blowing budget, and 272 special- and visual-effects people on staff (not counting the puppeteer), plus the six other special-effects companies they hired… but even knowing that it took all that to do it, I’m still geeking out about it. It’s a bit scary, knowing that the technology exists to make visions so convincing, to make fantasies live, to lie so utterly.

We really must go to the movies more often.

Absolutely unreal.

I was in Cedar Rapids for the Flood of ‘93. I remember vividly one night when I drove a friend home, and on the way, we drove past a neighborhood park. There was a river coming out of the park, and flowing gently across the road. We couldn’t even see where the curb was supposed to be.

I had been planning to drop my friend off and head back home, but I changed my mind. I called my parents when I got there and said I was going to be spending the night.

The flooding now makes that look like a rain puddle.

None of my family live near the river, thankfully. Mom and Dad just have a trickle of water in their basement, and Jon and Darcy have damp carpet, nothing more.

But the public library where I used to work had water up to its windows yesterday afternoon, and the water was still rising. They never thought the water would get anywhere near that high, and by the time it did, it would have been far too late to start moving books upstairs — you couldn’t even get near the building anymore. It breaks my heart to think of all the damage to those books, historical records, everything. Not to mention the library itself — the city keeps cutting the library budget, to the bone and beyond, and I don’t know how they’re going to get the funding to repair the damage. I pray they have flood insurance, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Flood stage is 13 feet, but the levees are built to handle 19 feet of water. The river hit 20 feet in the Flood of ‘93. This time around, the river is expected to crest at 32 feet. No typo.

I spent over an hour watching news coverage online last night. KCRG TV-9 had been doing “wall-to-wall” news coverage most of the day — no programming, no commercials, no interruptions, just news. It doesn’t look like they’re newscasting this morning, and I wonder if they had to evacuate their news studio — they were inside the mandatory evacuation area, and last night they had gotten special permission to stay, because they’re providing a public service, but they were keeping a close eye on conditions and ready to leave if they had to.

Absolutely unreal. May’s Island isn’t there — just a City Hall sticking up out of the water. The police office and jail had to be evacuated. The downtown Dairy Queen is totally submerged. 8,000 people were evacuated from neighborhoods near the river, and firefighters (in boats) were rescuing the idiots who ignored the mandatory evacuation. Video footage of boats going under the downtown skywalks. The railroad trestle collapsing, despite the 20 railroad cars filled with rocks that were left on the trestle to try to weight it down. Downtown a lake. One of the emergency shelters full — sounds like they’ve got cots filling the hallways. People at the shelters having to leave their pets in the cars outside, because the shelters couldn’t accommodate any animals other than service animals. Over 14,000 people without power, and the word is they’ll probably be without power for a week. Power out as far out as Coe College, over a mile from the river. I think it was Coralville where power was out and they couldn’t even get to the power station to start repairing the damage. Part of I-80 closing, east of Iowa City — that’s a major transportation route, and it’ll hurt. Only one bridge in CR open, and that’s I-380, and traffic moving at a crawl because there’s only one through lane open each direction — other lanes reserved for emergency vehicles. People stopping their cars on I-380 to gawk and take pictures. (The news crew said, “Don’t. We can guarantee, we’ve got better cameras than you do.”) The city’s water supply down to 25% of capacity, because three of the four wells are underwater; people being asked to use drinking water only; people being asked to come out to fill sandbags to protect the remaining well (no longer needed — that effort is complete). The library, the Czech museum, the museum of art, the Science Station — all flooded. One of the two hospitals evacuated. Both hospitals without power, running on generators.

It’s hard to swallow. And it’s really hard, right now, to be so far from home.

I had been ready to give up on having a decent Democratic candidate this election. I had just about decided that, by the time either Obama or Hillary had beat the other into submission, they wouldn’t be someone I’d want to vote for.

But now I don’t know.

What happened? I read the text of Obama’s speech this Tuesday, “A More Perfect Union”. (I tried to watch it, but YouTube kept crapping out, so I had to settle for the written word.)

I won’t give a play-by-play (for that, read the speech, which is well worth the time). But there were several things about the speech that made a deep impression on me.

First was Obama’s reaction to Rev. Wright, his former minister who’s apparently been in the media lately, stirring up controversy with some incendiary racial and political comments. Obama didn’t agree with Rev. Wright’s comments, but neither did he distance himself from him, because “the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man”. He refused to dissociate himself from a man he’d respected for 20 years, a man he’d watched care for the sick and lift up the poor.

A typical politician would have issued a press release condemning the inflammatory remarks and distancing himself from the Reverend, and then stuck his head in the sand and hoped it would all go away. Obama didn’t do that. He faced the issue and took it on. And what’s more, he took it on with compassion and humanity.

I have to respect a politician who, first, shows that he’s able and willing to handle challenges, even controversial ones, even during election year; and second, who won’t abandon his longtime friends for mere political expediency.

Then there was the fact that he saw both sides of the issue. He talked about the things that contributed to Rev. Wright’s bitterness — poverty, oppression, erosion of families. He didn’t excuse the bitterness, but he asked us to see the reality underlying that bitterness — not to whitewash it or rose-tint it or hope it would go away, but to see what’s really there.

And he also talked about the white side of the issue. Whites who have never felt privileged by their race, who have worked their way up from nothing only to see opportunities given to blacks instead, whites who are told that their fear of urban crime is somehow racist.

Then he said we have a choice: we can sweep the issue of race back under the rug, and ignore it once again; or we can say, “Not this time,” and we can come together to fix the problems that are hurting everyone, blacks included, everyone else included.

“Not this time.” I really like that. As much as we might want to be super-crusaders, working tirelessly for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, in reality very few of us have the energy to toil endlessly for what’s right. We have families, jobs, fears, lives. We can’t honestly say “Never again” and know in our hearts that we mean it, that we’re willing to fight tirelessly for, most likely, the rest of our lives. (There’s that humanity thing again.)

But, even imperfect as we are, we can say, “Not this time.”

It was quite a speech. Of course, at the end of the day, speeches only mean so much:

I remember her comment: “He talks purty, don’t he?”

Her comment was only result.

– “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, Robert A. Heinlein

And it’s true: the speech was emotional, but at the end of the day, what does it mean about Obama’s qualifications for President? A President does need to be able to make purty speeches and influence people, but by itself, that’s not enough.

Well, I’d say, there’s one thing it tells us for sure: he’s willing to step up and deal with the tough issues, and he’ll treat the people involved with respect and humanity.

In fact, at this point, I’d say he’s the most human of all the candidates. He’s not just a slick politician, not just a pretty cardboard cutout. He’s not just parroting the party line. He’s a man, with both humility and dreams.

Voting for an actual human for a change, and not a politician? What an idea.

My site is now on a new Web host, and my blog is at a new URL, moving from www.excastle.com/blog to blog.excastle.com. (All the old links should still work — I’ve put in redirects — but you still may want to update your links.)

That means that you can again post comments on my blog, and the contact form (broken for so long) should be working again. It also means there’s an actual blog search feature now.

The move was mainly prompted by comment spam. Instead of an outdated version of .Text with cranky CAPTCHA and a custom spam hamster, I’m now running WordPress, which has built-in comment moderation, as well as a plug-in for spam filtering (that I’m not using yet, but probably will be soon).

It’s been an interesting experience. There is no .Text-to-WordPress importer, so I had to make do with some documentation for the MovableType import format, plus a curious mishmash of Delphi code, Ruby scripts, and false starts. (Three false starts, in fact: three times, I imported all of my posts, found something wrong with my import file, and had to delete all of my posts and import again. My biggest complaint about WordPress so far is their refusal to implement a “mass delete” feature: I’ve clicked “Delete”, followed by “Yes”, well over 1,500 times now.)

But the move itself is done, if still a bit rough around the edges. I’m still looking through all the archives to make sure everything looks okay in the new layout. If you see anything that looks off-kilter, like text falling off the right side of the page or some such, feel free to hasten the process by letting me know.

And now that I’m not fully engaged in blog moving, maybe I can actually start blogging again.

Just happened upon this terrific find: a Web site that has the full text of every Calvin and Hobbes strip. This guy typed them all in by hand!

The front page (JavaScript required) lets you view all the Calvin and Hobbes comics, stepping through them one by one (click on the comic image to advance), and shows the text above each one. You can also search.

But the real treasure is the yearly pages. They require JavaScript if you want to use the Search function, but not just to scroll through.

• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1985
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1986
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1987
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1988
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1989
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1990
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1991
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1992
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1993
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1994
• All Calvin and Hobbes quotes from 1995

Just ran across instructions on using the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000’s “zoom slider” as a scroll wheel instead.

The instructions involve compiling a JScript.NET application and running an XSL transform on the keyboard’s config file. But it looks to me like it’d be a whole lot easier to just open the config file in a text editor and make a couple of manual edits. I’ll have to try it when I get over this danged cold and get back to the office.

All right, I couldn’t come up with a better title than that. Sorry. It’s early.

People have been asking me what my NaNoWriMo novel will be about this year, and my answer has been, “I have no idea.” But I got Chinese food for lunch yesterday, and my fortune cookie said, “Tomorrow your creative side will shine forth with exceptional ideas.”

If that ain’t a good omen, I don’t know what is. So… I’m off to write a novel. Wish me luck!

I finally broke down and got a cell phone. Then I had a challenge: how to customize the ring tone.

See, I’ve always insisted that I won’t get a cell phone until I can set the default ring tone to Carmina Burana. I couldn’t lose face in front of my geek friends by admitting that I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

But apparently Verizon wants to make it hard for anyone to get ring tones without giving more money to Verizon, which I refuse to do on general principle. (And besides that, I kind of doubt that they sell “Carmina Burana” as a ringtone.)

It took me over nine hours, but I got it. (Stubborn little cuss, ain’t I?)

Now I’m sharing. Here’s how to make custom sound clips into ring tones for your Verizon RAZR, without voiding the warranty, in mere moments or less.

On not voiding the warranty

The RAZR supports custom ring tones. It’s Verizon that makes it hard. From what I can tell, they deliberately disable some of the phone’s functionality before they sell it, presumably so they can make more money selling their own ringtones.

There’s plenty of information out there about ways to re-enable the functionality, via SEEM edits and other forms of hacking the phone’s firmware. I didn’t do any of those, because they would have voided the warranty. Even though I’m not happy with Verizon for disabling features, I’m not going to re-enable them if I’m the one that’s going to get screwed. So I stuck to strictly non-hack methods.

What didn’t work

I bought the Media Essentials kit with my phone, so I tried hooking the phone up to my computer with the USB cable. Of course that didn’t work. You can use their software to transfer “songs” to the phone, but they differentiate between “songs” and “sounds”, and “songs” can’t be used as ringtones. And no, they don’t let you mount the phone as another drive on your computer so you can transfer “sounds” to the phone.

The phone can record “sounds” through its built-in microphone, and use them as ring tones. So I tried holding the phone up to the computer speakers. Result: volume nearly inaudible, quality far too crappy and under-watery. I didn’t expect this to work very well, but it was worse than I thought. So I’m not doing that.

I found some message board posts that suggested using the sound-recording capability to make a one- or two-second file, move it to the flash drive, take the flash drive out of the phone, plug it into a PC, and replace the files with identically-named files (including their weird extension) that are actually MP3s. This sounded promising, and it did get me sound files that play beautifully on the phone. But it still was a no-go. Why? Because apparently Verizon has caught on to this trick, and they’ve made it so that, as soon as you move a sound recording onto the flash drive, it’s forever unavailable to be a ring tone. Once you move it, it’s locked out. Even if you move it back to the phone’s internal memory, they won’t let you use it as a ring tone. Drat. (I spent $15 on an SD card reader, too. Isn’t it amazing how we Americans will spend money to avoid spending money?)

What did work

As of October 2007, here’s something that does work. (If you find in the future that it doesn’t work anymore, please leave a comment, so this page stays relevant.)

What you’ll need

• A supported phone (see below)
• Verizon service (these steps are very Verizon-specific)
• Sound-editing software like GoldWave or Audacity
• A sound file on your computer (if you need to rip a song from a CD, do that first)
• One of the following:
• A plan where you can get 250 (or whatever) incoming text/picture messages before paying extra, OR
• A plan where you get unlimited incoming text/picture messages, OR
• The willingness to pay Verizon 35 cents to get your custom ring tone onto your phone
• Mere moments or less

I’m guessing that this should work on any phone that can receive sound attachments to picture messages. Here’s a list of phone models that have been confirmed as either supported or unsupported. If you have updates to this list, feel free to post a comment and let me know.

Supported	Not Supported
RAZR V3m Chocolate LG VX8550 LG 8300 LG EnV2 Samsung SCH-u340 Samsung SCH-u740	LG8500 Z6tv
Note: Aside from the RAZR V3m, these lists are based entirely on user feedback, and are not guaranteed to be correct. When in doubt, try it yourself.

The short short version

If you know what you’re doing, here’s the short short version: save the file as a 30-second-or-less, 22KHz WAV, and use Verizon vzwpix.com to send it to your phone.

The rest of this document takes you through this process, step by detailed step. So let’s get started.

Step 1: Create a Verizon vzwpix account

First, go to vzwpix.com. (You’ll get redirected to another Verizon URL, but in some places they still refer to it as vzwpix.)

Find the Login box on the left side of the page, and click the “Register” link. Then go through the steps to register. (This step can’t exactly be done in mere moments, but that’s Verizon’s fault, not mine.)

You’ll probably need to have JavaScript enabled to go through the registration process. Yes, this is stupid.

Once you’ve created an account, you’re ready to start moving a sound file to your phone. But first, you need to convert your sound file to have the proper length and format.

Step 2: Create the sound file

Your sound file cannot be in MP3 format. (Even if you rename the extension, Verizon will see that it contains MP3 content, and block the file. It’s not clear why they won’t accept MP3 content, since the phone can clearly play it.)

WAV format is what worked for me. It also has to be 30 seconds or less, and have a sample rate of 22.050 KHz or less.

I used the GoldWave trial edition to trim my sound file to less than 30 seconds, add a fade at the end, and save it as WAV. In GoldWave’s Save dialog, I set “Save as type” to “Wave (*.wav)”, and “Attributes” to “Microsoft ADPCM 22.050 KHz, 4 Bit, Mono”.

I’ve also heard a lot of good things about the Audacity audio editor, which is free. I’ve used GoldWave before; it has a lot of features but isn’t always quite intuitive. I’ve never used Audacity, so I don’t know what it’s like.

Mac users: see NL’s comments on Mac software for editing the sound file.

Step 3: Send the clip to your phone

Now that you’ve got a 22KHz WAV of 30 seconds or less, it’s time to get it onto your phone.

You’ll almost certainly need JavaScript enabled for this part.

Start by logging into your vzwpix.com account. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the “Picture & Video Messaging” page.

In the bottom center of the page, you’ll see a red “Upload Media” button. Click it once. You may have to wait a long time for anything to happen, but if you click it more than once, the site gets confused, so don’t do that.

Eventually you’ll see this:

Click the top Browse link. Browse to your WAV file and click OK. Then click the red “Upload” button, and wait a bit more.

After the “Upload Media” box closes, you’ll see your sound file in the “Uploads” box on the left. In this screenshot, I’ve uploaded two sound files. Notice that Verizon assigned them nonsense names, which I haven’t found a way to change (though I haven’t looked too hard).

Now, on the right side, notice the tall red box with stuff in it. A little over halfway down, there’s some white-on-red text that says “Drag audio here”.

Find your sound file on the left side, and drag it onto that “Drag audio here” text.

If you did it right, you’ll now see two tall red boxes. Ignore the second one.

The first tall red box will now have a Play button (which for some reason is red, rather than the traditional green) in place of “Drag audio here”. You can use this to make sure you got the right audio file (since you can’t tell which one you’re dragging because of the nonsense names they assigned). If you got the wrong sound file, click the “X” (delete) button just above the tall red boxes, and try again.

You can just ignore the “1/1, 5 sec” stuff above the red boxes. I left that stuff alone and everything worked.

Okay, so you’ve got two tall red boxes, and the first one has the right sound file in it. You’re almost done. Click the red “Preview & Send” button in the lower right.

When the “Preview and Send” box opens, a 5-second clip of your sound file will play in your browser. Don’t panic! They didn’t lose the rest of the file. They have the whole file, it’s just that this screen only plays a 5-second clip.

In the “Send To” box, type your 10-digit cell phone number, without any punctuation. For example: 4025551212

Tip: If you just got your cell phone and don’t remember your phone number yet, here’s how to check it on a RAZR V3m. You can go to Menu > SETTINGS & TOOLS > System > Device Info > My Number. Or you can click the Voice button to the right of the display, wait for the menu to come up, and say “Check my phone number”.

Now type a subject line and click Send. The sound file will be sent to your phone, attached to a “picture message”.

Step 4: Save the clip as a ringtone

It will take a minute or two for the picture message to be sent to your phone. When your phone bleeps and tells you you’ve received a new picture message, select “View Now”, and your sound file will play on your cell phone, in all its glory.

You’re not done yet. Select “Options” (right soft button) and “Save Sound”. Give it a name and OK. It will pause for a moment, and then display “Sound saved”.

And… you’re done. Now you can select the sound as your master ring tone in the usual way, or assign it to individual contacts. Custom Verizon ringtones in mere moments or less.

Happy ringing!

Also in the Mere Moments series: Mere-Moments Guide to installing a Subversion server on Windows

I was in Ames this weekend at a church meeting. On the way back, I stopped at a gas station that offers free Sunday papers with a tank of gas.

Cover story: U of I, ISU use student data to sell credit cards. Subhead: “Bank of America cards are promoted despite public worries about debt loads”.

I can’t even believe it. Someone had the balls to think it was okay to sell private student data to these predators? Someone thought it was okay to railroad these students into debt? (Yes, the students can choose whether to go into debt — but it’s not an educated choice; nobody’s teaching them what debt is actually going to mean to their lives. Nobody but the credit-card companies… and, apparently, these two universities.)

How many students already declare bankruptcy as their first act after graduation? We want this to get worse?

Apparently most of the money isn’t even going to benefit the schools; it’s going to privately-run alumni associations. Alumni associations. They’re preying on the younger generation. And these people can sleep at night?

If I still lived in Iowa, I’d be working my butt off writing to the legislature right now. As it is, I should probably do what I can to make sure this doesn’t happen in Nebraska (or gets fixed, if it’s already happening), and write to the federal Congress as well. This is unacceptable.

Somebody should be getting fired over this stunt. Somebody should be getting arrested.

No spoilers in this post, but I link to a page that does have spoilers. FYI.

Today’s newspaper had an article that said J. K. Rowling had done “a recent 90-minute web chat” with readers, “her first public comment since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows debuted on July 21″, answering some of the over 120,000 questions that had been submitted. The article did not, however, mention anything about where this chat had taken place, or where transcripts could be had. Odd.

After a bit of searching, I’m doubting the bit about “her first public comment”, because Rowling got interviewed by Dateline, and that interview aired last Sunday. And most of the article’s tidbits from the chat could have been copied right out of the Dateline interview. Hmm.

Anyway, I didn’t know about the Dateline interview in time to catch it on the air, but NBC’s Web site has a transcript that covers a great deal (all?) of the interview. Lots of really good stuff, about what the characters are doing now, what it was like to kill characters off, fandom, and a fair bit else. It’s five fairly long pages, and worth the read (assuming you’ve already read Deathly Hallows, of course). I figured I’d blog the link to the transcript, partly to share, partly so I can find it again.

Transcript of J. K. Rowling’s interview with Dateline’s Meredith Vieira, July 29, 2007