Solipsism Gradient

Well, it’s taken longer than I expected, but I’m slowly coming to the end of my piled-up e-mail. (Excepting the developer mailing lists, of course.) So if you e-mailed me sometime over the last 40 days and I promised to reply “later”, you may get a response “real soon now” .

I’m also catching up with news and weblogs, NetNewsWire 1.0.3 now has a combined view that shows all news from a source at a glance. And CPU and and memory usage seem to be getting progressively lighter, too. Thanks, Brent!

Regarding the recent Europe trip, I’m still grappling with the 933 photos I brought back. It turned out that importing everything into iPhoto caused it to slow down much more, so it’s become quite useless for organizing stuff; I’m still investigating what I should do to speed it up.

The photos themselves could be better. It turns out that hand-holding such a small, light camera (it’s a 110g Pentax Optio S) isn’t easy; also it’s too easy to mistake the focusing system’s “ready” beep for a sign that the photo was taken, so we missed quite a number of photos. I’ll take a number of practice shots every day until I get used to it – the problem during the trip was that I couldn’t check them out on-screen. Viewing them on TV usually isn’t satisfactory, resolution-wise.

You may recall that I dropped the camera half-way through the trip. Yesterday I took off the dented front cover and, while I didn’t manage to remove the corner dent, I bent the front face back into complete flatness. This seems to have fixed it; the battery now holds its charge overnight and it hasn’t turned itself off anymore.

I had originally planned to open a separate weblog topic and write down a day-by-day trip report, with the appropriate photos. However, it seems that it’ll be more effective to publish short notes about specific aspects of the trip, together with a few selected pictures. So I’ll start later today…

By the way, one of my favorite cartoonists, Bill Holbrook of Kevin & Kell fame, has a very appropriate cartoon out for digital camera enthusiasts. I really need to get used to the idea that I can take several pictures of the same subject and later select the best one.

Posted by Guest:
Hallo Ihr Weltenbummler,

gut zu lesen, daß Ihr wieder gut zuhause angekommen seid. Bin Euch die ganze Zeit im weblog gefolgt und habe Mutter und Angi davon erzählt.

Viele Gruesse aus Ingelheim, Tante Else, Juergen und Angelika

Ouch. NetNewsWire tells me I’ve got 2245 unread posts. I’m reading them in alphabetical order, so I expect to take several days to get it down to two digits. My editor at Macmania magazine tells me he needs an article about the new PowerMac G5 ASAP. I’ve downloaded about a thousand non-spam e-mail messages which have accumulated over the past month, and will read them in my copious spare time.

Meanwhile, interesting things have been happening; MacHack; WWDC with many product introductions; ILAW 5, the Internet Law Conference at Stanford, and many more. Aaron Swartz’s notes about ILAW are well worth reading, and I’ll make sure to read other blogger’s comments as soon as I find them.

Aaron also points at the Illegal Art Exhibit Contract:

NOTICE TO USER: BY METABOLIZING YOU ACCEPT ALL THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, USE OF YOUR HOME AND CAR BY THE AUTHORS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

As they neglected to copyright the contract itself, I’ll check if anything not already contained in my own metadisclaimer should be incorporated…

We’re back! Safe and sound. That is, part of our luggage (the one containing 99% clothing) may arrive tomorrow. Gotta run – zillions of things to do. Film at eleven.

OK. So our luggage made it; it arrived this morning. It seems that over a dozen people had missing luggage on our flight from Amsterdam to São Paulo; between that, and standing in line for over an hour at immigration, we missed our connection. KLM put us up at the Mercure Hotel in Guarulhos, near the airport, paid for dinner and breakfast, and we took one of the mid-morning flights, arriving home at exactly noon.

(Side note#1: I’d actually thought of changing our reservations to stay overnight in São Paulo, in order to get more and earlier rest, so we didn’t really mind… and the hotel was great.)

(Side note#2: there were only 2 customs/immigration agents to process over 200 foreigners from our flight, and neither of them spoke any foreign language. It seems that they’re striking for better salaries, and their normal strike modus operandi is to either have as few people as possible actually working, and/or really work as they’re supposed to, but even more; search every piece of luggage with great care.)

Going back in time a few days, the family meeting was a huge success, and I’m going to be setting up a reserved forum for family members to post pictures and gossip, and to start thinking about the next meeting. So if you’re a Brockerhoff (or related to one), watch this space for the announcement in a few days.

Special thanks go to my cousin Ferdi and his wife Elisabeth, and their son Reiner Brockerhoff, for putting us up for a couple of days and for showing us Frankfurt, complete with the traditional Äbblewoi (Apple wine).

During the flight home I tried to take a photo out of the plane window and promptly bumped the camera lens, not really hard, against the window – I usually do that with my forehead, come to think of it. However, the camera took the opportunity to shut down completely. I managed to revive it at home by removing and recharging the battery, but after a few hours it went dead again. My hunch is that there’s a short somewhere, and as soon as I find the time I’ll take the covers off (which looks straightforward) and see if I find something obvious.

Nevertheless, the pictures weren’t affected, and as I write this I’m importing them into iPhoto. Apparently this will take about 45 minutes. In the evening I’ll try to do some sorting and correcting, and you can expect to see some selected pictures over the weekend.

Posted by B.M.Klein @freenet.de:
Lieber Rainer, liebe Dorinha, vermutlich ist der Name falsch geschrieben, ihr seid gerade noch in der Luft, über dem Atlantik. Mich beschäftigt die Idee euch über Weihnachten diesen Jahres zu Besuchen. Merle, meine Tochter, und ich hätten große Lust dazu, wenn es euch pasasen würde.Ich hoffe, ich überfalle euch nicht damit. Es ist eine schöne Idee.Ich wünsche euch erst mal eine gute Ankunft, libe Grüße Barbara Klein, Tochter von Hilde