lornamatic

You can get updated news on the southern CA fires by listening in on the fire and police scanners from anywhere in the world. There are emergency streams for everywhere, from Santa Clarita to Malibu to San Diego. From what I can hear, the rescue teams are busting ass. These guys rock.

Here’s how to listen to the feeds:

1. Install the Teamspeak client. It works for Mac, Windows and Linux.

2. Follow the step by step instructions at Scannerbuff.

(here’s the short version: run Teamspeak, then choose Connection>Quick Connect. Enter a nickname. Use this server address: radio.scannerbuff.net:8767, and leave the rest blank.

Scannerbuff.net has a listing of other live streams. )

3. Brush up on your police codes: at radiolabs.com. Bonus points if you know morse code.

4. Log out when you’re done and don’t hog bandwidth. People post these streams from their own scanners as a really great public service, so please don’t abuse it!

Note, you can also try publicsafetyfeeds.com though I find Teamspeak has better coverage for LA County.

You have to use IE, and there’s an Autodesk plugin. Sorry.

But you can search for individual trees!

Just in time for Halloween, a series of Very Yucky Desktop Backgrounds. I guarantee you (or your co-workers) will be completely creeped out by at least one, and they’re even mostly color balanced, and therefore suitable for doing design work over.

Considering my extensive collection of bizarre biology photographs and medical clip art, it just seemed unfair to NOT share. There are seven desktop backgrounds, at 1024×768 and 1600×1200.

Freshly posted, get them while they’re still warm!

Yeah. Totally Windows’ fault. For having most of the marketshare. Stupid Windows. If only you weren’t popular enough, no one would bother to write viruses for you, either.

But really. I feel bad for the QA tester involved. Even though, way totally avoidable mistake, it was an accident, and that just sucks. And it should be mentioned, this qualifies as a big IT boo-boo.

This is why you NEVER install anything on the build box. Not even if it’s Jeremy Allaire, giving you a totally awesome sneak peek of terrific new technology (well, it was new at the time). But that’s probably a story for another day.

Oh why not. It’s late, I just inexplicably spilled half a glass of very cold water down the back of my own pants. Perfect time for a story.

So there was nothing like a virus involved. But this was back in the days after Picasa outgrew Mike’s spare bedroom (and then living and dining room), and since there were now more live-in employees than couches, we’d rented the apartment next door. Somehow we wound up hosting Jeremy Allaire for an afternoon. He came by to talk about what we were working on, and to show off some new unreleased flash technology. As it turned out, our little company had been growing fast and the only monitor in the office/apartment that could accomodate everyone in the room, was attached to The Build Box.

So after a bit of discussion, the neat new technology was installed on The Build Box. Great demos followed, and sometime after that, the crew went out for dinner. It was one of those really fun nights of 12 hour straight hacking and development, the highly productive post-workday workday. And about an hour or so after everyone finally retreated to their sleeping bags and couches, one of the offsite guys discovered they couldn’t build. Big demo, due in a few hours, and no one could connect to the box - there was a small matter of a little memory leak that had gradually eaten up all resources on the build machine.

All in the grand scheme of things, so not a big deal, except for the groggy wakeup call requiring Mike to dig out the extra ‘office’ key and trudge 25 feet to go reboot the thing.

It’s not like the real old war stories, back in the days when a GM was a physical disc that a product manager risked life, limb, and points on their license to get on that last FedEx truck, only to discover a virus on the build box an hour later.

Lessons? Never install stuff you don’t need on your build box. Always keep your virus definitions updated. And whatever you do, don’t put your glass of icy cold water down on the sofa late at night.

“[It is] one of the largest merger and acquisition scandals in U.S. history,” Greenspan said in his statement. “Deliberate steps were taken to withhold and manipulate information; money was improperly gained and laws were broken. It is my hope that regulatory bodies will begin their investigations quickly before evidence is destroyed.”

Yup. That first acquisition is always the toughest.