News Chum Stew: Media, History, Vegas, and Patches

It’s Saturday, and that means it is time to clean out the links. This week is comparatively sparse compared to last week, the result of a busy week at work combined with the news cycle being dominated by celebrity deaths (the shock of Robin Williams, which overshadowed Lauren Bacall’s death the next day, just like Michael Jackson overshadowed Farrah Fawcett Majors) and police actions (with people acting surprised that racism exists in America… alas, it goes hand-in-hand with similar attitudes towards religion and sexual orientation — America isn’t perfect folks — it is our job to make it better). In any case, here are a few, perhaps less controversial, subjects that managed to catch my eye:

• Is There A Movie on This Flight? On a recent 737 cross-country to Baltimore, I noticed that there were no longer shared movie screens. Instead, there were individual seat back TVs, and although there were more entertainment options, none were free if you were in coach. Gee, just like the old days of the 1970s (when you had to pay for movies). But I was lucky — we had seat-back TVs. Here’s why, more and more, your airplane just might not have seat-back entertainment.
• Just Like a Fingerprint. Digital is dull and boring. The studios hate the fact that every digital copy of a song is unchanged from the original. That’s every different than the old days. Here’s an interesting article that notes how every audit recording of a vinyl record is different. This makes sense — turntables have variations in speed, there are different needles with different audio pickups, scratches and noise accumulate at different points. We don’t love analog media for the quality; we love it for the imperfections. Just like we love people.
• That Is Something I Will Never Do. Mental floss explores what it is like to be the person who repairs the antennas at the top of skyscrapers. Excuse me while I cower on the floor for a bit.
• Quilters in Powerful Places. My wife is a quilter. This is a dangerous thing, because it just adds to her fabric stash. This weeks’ news brought word of another quilter: Gloria Molina of the LA County Board of Supervisors. She’s part of the East Los Angeles Stitchers, TELAS for short, a group that Molina and a few friends founded three years ago to share their love of quilting with a larger, particularly Latina audience.
• How They Work. Here’s an article I’m linking simply because I want to read it: How modern browsers work.
• A History in Signs. At the Caltrans building downtown, there is evidently a display of Los Angeles street signs over time. Cool.
• Vegas Items. Two interesting items about Las Vegas. First, another piece of old Vegas is shutting down: the KOA campground at Circus-Circus. This goes back to the 1960s and the first post-Sarno owner of C-C. As for opening up, next week the new SLS opens up on the site of the Sahara (1952). One thing it will feature is very see-through bathrooms. At least that is better than what you will find in Berlin.
• Problematic Patch Tuesday. It appears as if a few updates in the last patch Tuesday were problematic. So far, I haven’t seen the problem on my Toshiba laptops (but I was worried); then again, I seem not to have the font registry entries that could be problematic. Still, you might want to read about the problems; you might even want to read the Knowledge Base article and uninstall those patches.

 

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