steveblock.com

I left work early on Friday and drove up to Ames to have dinner with my family. Early on Saturday morning I picked up Liz and we drove up to Minneapolis for a fun if quick weekend with Wongs, Jankes, and Millers.

We first stopped at Ben and Sam’s place. Mapquest lied about where we needed to turn, so we trusted Liz’s hazy memory instead, which got us where we needed to go. Then two Wongs, two Jankes and me went to the St. Clair broiler for burgers if you were cool or breakfast if you were a Janke.

Ben and Brian had to run off to play soccer after that, so the rest of us headed to the Mall for a while. That was pretty lame but they were playing Ratatat in Urban Outfitters. We met up with Sam and Erin at Ikea after that, but the Wong kids had to head off to fabled St. Cloud for a douchecore show. I ended up buying a new TV bench to replace the old stereo cart I had been using for years. You can see that in the pictures below.

The Millers and I stopped and had a few beers at TGI Friday’s while we called Ben and left insulting messages on his voice mail. When he finally called us back we headed his way again and ended up getting dinner at this awesome place called the Sample Room. I had a very German dinner, with sausage and kraut and squash and potatoes and beer. Everything was excellent.

On Sunday morning Sam made breakfast which included eggs cooked in bacon grease (yum). After everyone stopped being lame and tired we went to HKN for some noodle goodness. Then there was the drive back to Ames, stealing back my old TV (feel sort of bad about that), driving to KC, and assembling IKEA furniture. Nothing was broken; everything went great.

steve :: Oct.30.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Firefox 2 is out, and although it still kind of sucks on Mac OS X it is sometimes useful to have around. Some intrepid volunteers have been producing optimized builds of Firefox for some time now. With the release of 2.0, there are now G4, G5, and Intel optimized builds of this program available on the internet. I downloaded the Intel Mac optimized Firefox 2 with Firefoxy form widgets from here and it runs quite well. Looks less ugly than before, too.

Now due to copyright issues unofficial Firefox builds can’t use the official name or branding, so you get a more generic icon and the unassuming name “BonEcho.” It’s not a bad name, but I would rather have it called what it really is.

Luckily you can change things to say Firefox with almost no trouble at all. To do it, I first renamed the application from BonEcho to Firefox in the finder. That was easy. Then I right clicked on the application and chose Show Package Contents. In the Contents folder I opened Info.plist and changed the entries that said BonEcho to say Firefox. I then went into the Resources/en.lproj folder and opened InfoPlist.strings in a text editor. I changed BonEcho to Firefox again.

The last thing I did to make this really work was to download the official build, do Get Info on the official and unofficial files, and copy the icon from the official release over to the unofficial build (click the icon to select, cmd-c to copy, cmd-p on top of the icon on the unofficial build).

If you want to take things even a step farther you can unarchive the file Contents/MacOS/chrome/en-US.jar (it’s a zip file), edit the file locale/branding/brand.properties in a text editor and change those strings as well. Then make a new jar archive and replace the old en-US.jar with it. I’m sure there are more things that can be changed like the About screen but if it is that important to you maybe you should just use the official builds.

Maybe this isn’t kosher but it looks right, and no one who uses your computer will go “what is Bon Echo?”

steve :: Oct.26.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 5 Comments »

Bryan met me at 3:30 and Hope (I think it was 3:30 anyways) the first morning of Burning Man. He pulled out some beer and we though about setting up camp but were relucant to do so before Alex et al. showed up, so we didn’t. Eventually they arrived and convinced us to move due to the proximity of Gigsville. I had a beer Bryan had given me that was half finished, so I put it in my pop-out cupholder (what a feature!) and drank as I drove to the new camp site.

Oh My God.

steve :: Oct.24.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 8 Comments »

Sam: i like contrast
Steve: what brought that on?
Sam: vs. brightess
Sam: i wish i had panablack
Steve: wah
Steve: but you have trinitron
Sam: yeah
Sam: it’s good
Sam: the tube shape is good
Sam: but it’s definitely not as black as panablack

steve :: Oct.21.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 7 Comments »

For quite a while my Grado SR60 headphones had a bad crackle in the left speaker, and it would sometimes cut out. I figured it was a bad connection but didn’t do anything about it since if I put the wires in the right position they worked ok. But of course that only worked for so long, and for months the left channel has been entirely useless. Today I decided to figure out where the break was, so I used the power of the internet to figure out how to get the earpiece open and find the problem.

The problem was readily apparent. As soon as I got the casing apart the driver fell off onto the floor. The wires had broken completely apart from the solder over time. The fix was relatively easy. I went to the Home Depot and got a cheap soldering iron and some electrical solder and reconnected the speaker wires.

Now my headphones work again and sound great. I had been thinking about getting a new pair for home listening but now that these work again I’ll keep them for a while. I may eventually get the desire to have nicer (and way more expensive) phones again, but I think a decent set of monitors might be more useful.

steve :: Oct.15.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 7 Comments »

Downtown KC Photos

But for now I want to link to the pictures I took on Sunday and tell you a little about the weekend. On Friday I met Sam, Ric, and others for First Friday, in the Crossroads district downtown. There are a lot of galleries and some studios that open up for the evening, and for a brief period of time KC proper seems like a city, rather than a collection of buildings. Last Friday there was a big stage set up near 19th and Wyandotte with a choir singing stuff, though they didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic.

One of the places we went to was this cool printing shop that had a big collection of old presses and the like. From the look of things they were still in use. They had atypical Kansas City postcards, and a wall covered in custom band posters detailing all of the bands that came to KC and Lawrence that I failed to see. I’m going to have to try harder in the future.

Our group ended the night at a restaurant called Pangaea, which is on 39th street just a little ways west of Southwest Trafficway. Good food and great presentation there. I was impressed.

I didn’t really do anything on Saturday that I can recall.

On Sunday I went downtown in the early afternoon and walked around a lot with two cameras and a light meter. The few people I did see also walking around seemed a bit shady, but no one bothered me or anything. I saw the current state of construction of the Sprint Center, which is no longer a giant hole in the ground. The Power & Light District is going up right across the street from that, and even though I’m cynical I am holding out some hope that they can help bring downtown up a bit.

I also made it to Union Station and the Liberty Memorial for the first time in what might be more than three years. I’m not entirely sure but that seems right. The nice thing about Union Station is that it seems just about impossible to take a bad picture in there. The trick with photographing the Liberty Memorial is to avoid taking the normal pictures: the entire Memorial from a distance or a shot looking up to the top of the tower. Neither gives a good impression of how massive that pillar really is.

steve :: Oct.11.2006 :: Kansas City, Photography :: 7 Comments »