Gary Arnold

eMusic's new business plan: raise prices 80%!

garnold — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:16:15 +0000

I've always enjoyed my eMusic subscription -- 90 downloads a month for $19.99, 22 cents per track. Pretty sweet deal! Even when they changed their subscriptions a few years ago (replacing mine with a 75/mo plan), they kept mine as-is. Nice of them.

Now they tell me that because they're adding 200,000 new tracks to their inventory, they have to decrease my quota to 50 downloads, or 40 cents per track, an 80% increase. sigh Read more

Stupid Math Tricks with Python

garnold — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:31:05 +0000

Let's say you know the equation of a circle (r² = x² + y²), but want to calculate the area of a circle. And, uh, you forgot how to do that. Happens to all of us, honest.

Fortunately, we've got a little python program that uses the monte-carlo method to estimate the value of pi! Let's get going!

Read more

Fixin' up some fixer

garnold — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 06:26:19 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I was merrily developing some film. Had big plans for doing a dozen rolls or something, and everything was going great. So great, I hardly even had to concentrate on it!

In goes the film. In goes the developer. Agitate, wait, agitate, wait. Down the drain with the developer (I use one-shot). Rinse the film. In goes the fixer. Agitate, wait, agitate, wait. Down the drain with the fixer...wait, what?

Yup, I dumped out my film fixer that had about 20 more rolls of fixing goodness left in it. To top that off, it was the last of my fixer! Read more

Kenexa - Worst. Software. Ever.

garnold — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:23:29 +0000

My wife has been job hunting lately, and she's had to do quite a few job applications via web sites. Things were going OK until she got to a site "powered" by Kenexa. My. God. I've never seen a site crash so often. I mean, almost every time she clicked the "Next Step" button, boom! On Firefox, it spits out reams of raw HTML. On Internet Explorer, "The page cannot be displayed". On Konqueror, "The requested operation could not be completed". Read more

Drupal random Amazon wishlist item

garnold — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:50:26 +0000

I got this wild hair up my nose about "wouldn't it be cool to show a random item from my Amazon wishlist on my site?" the other day. I looked around, found plenty of wishlist scripts, but none of them did what I wanted. They all showed the first X items on your list sorted by Y, for various Xs and Ys. Nothing random out there. Read more

I live in a junk heap

garnold — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:06:50 +0000

Sometimes I get a little annoyed at having to navigate around a pile of books or a bag of computer bits, or dig through a pile of detritus to find a power cord, or spend an hour trying to find a book in all the bookcases. It can be irritating. Why can't my place be nice and clean?

The girl's friends, though, love to come visit us. They say it's homey. Even when they lived with us and their friends lived in huge houses (like "yeah, they have a theater in their house. No, a real theater"), they preferred to stay with us. Our place felt like a home, they said. Read more

Old film developers

garnold — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:38:30 +0000

I'm getting back into the darkroom after a bit of an absence. Breaking out all the chemicals, I wasn't sure what to expect from year-old developers.

First up was Lauder Chemicals Formula 76, basically D-76 with a not-so-original name. Devved a roll of film, fixed, washed, take the roll out of the tank...completely blank! Even the frame numbers, gone. Stupid developer had completely died, and I'd fixed away everything. Oh well, out with the 76. Read more

Good wheat!

garnold — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:02:07 +0000

About a month ago we were out tooling around, taking photos and whatnot, when Michele tells me, "Let's make some beer tomorrow!" I never turn down requests like this, so we headed over to SF Brewcraft to pick something up.

I don't typically carry around beer recipes (although that might be a good idea), so the plan was to just grab a copy of their bitter recipe and buy the ingredients. "Oglethorp's Best Bitter" is one of Michele's favorites, so of course they don't have a copy of the recipe handy. Read more

I love Neuros

garnold — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:56:03 +0000

I've got a Neuros mp3 player. A Neuros I in particular, a unit they stopped making sometime in the late Cretaceous, and which I just love to death. And I did just that...loved it until it stopped charging one day. It just didn't seem to recognize that it was plugged in.

I figured I was probably out of luck, but I emailed Neuros Technology about it and sent it in to get repaired. To my surprise, they told me that they no longer make the main board for that unit, and that they'd upgrade me to the next hardware version for the price of a regular repair. Read more

Color me surprised

garnold — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:22:15 +0000

So I whipped up a goofy shirt a few months ago after my XBox 360 died The Death of Three Lights and stuck a link to a CafePress shop selling it on this site. See it there, on the right? Anyway, I hadn't gotten any email from the Cafe, and so figured nobody was buying it. A little bummed, but I really hadn't invested much in it. Still...a little bummage happened.

Today I check the mail (real mail, not electronic foolery), and hey...something from CafePress. Wait, what the?!? A check! I sold something? Read more