Category: General

Recently I read a blog essay that collected bloggers’ excuses for not having blogged lately. I have no excuse, I just haven’t written anything lately. I haven’t written anything for over two months, so all the content dropped off my front page.

I suppose it could be worse. The first blogging system I ever used had a stupid bug, if you didn’t write anything for a month, all your links got corrupted and your blog crashed.

I am writing this entry primarily so there will be something on my blog other than a blank page. I have plenty of new stories, I just haven’t written them down yet. If you’re really desperate for something interesting to read, you can consult my archives.

Last week, I found a stack of old business cards. As I scanned through the stack to see which ones I could discard, I saw the name of an old friend. I’d lost touch with David, so I decided to look him up on the internet. I was shocked to discover that David was a passenger on the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Here in the midwest, world events can seem so remote, involving nobody we know, perhaps we deliberately cultivate that feeling of remoteness, to isolate us from that horror. But the shock that I felt when I discovered this connection, thinking how my friend must have felt during the hijacking and that awful final moment, reminded me that no event is so distant from my life.

Oh what a lovely holiday. I live right across from the City Park, I had no idea it was the center of activity for the 4th of July festivities. I was living here last year on the 4th, but I don’t recall anything going on.

But this year was quite different. Last night, I was treated to a 2 hour redneck suthern rawk concert by the Charlie Daniels Band. My home is the closest residential location to the concert. Even though my apartment is in the basement, facing away from the stage, my walls were shaking.

Oh but that was just the beginning. Tonight was the City’s fireworks display. I’ve never been this close to a fireworks launch site before. It was kind of fun, although I was distracted just as the grand finale started, when a small riot started. About fifty local gangster-wannabees got into a fight, they chased their victims down the street and straight into my apartment building lobby. I tried to shut the front door to lock them all out, but my stupid neighbor, oblivious to what was happening right in front of her, pulled the door back open and let them all inside.

This is the final straw. If I ever needed a kick in the ass to remind me I need to get the hell out of this town, this was it.

This website has relocated to a new address. If you read this site with an RSS or Atom-enabled reader, you may not have noticed that you were forwarded to the new site, so you should manually update the bookmark now. For your convenience, here are links to the Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds:


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Disinfotainment is moving to a new webhost! Things are going to get a little messy around here, while I import the site and clean up the details. Some features will be broken for a while, but everything will be put back in place as soon as possible. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.

Update May 16, 2006: I think I have all the links fixed and all videos are up and running. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can try the videos, and let me know how well they are working on the new webhost. Please leave a comment in reply to this message. Really, please please try some of the videos and let me know how well it works for you. I am working hard to upgrade the BlogTV system, to make it easier to view the videos, and to make it easier for me to prepare videos for the server. But if I get no reports on the quality of the streaming video services, I have no way to judge if the service is better or not. So leave a comment. Please.

Today I toured around Iowa City to see the tornado damage. Most of the city was completely unaffected, the weather was beautiful, the sun shining, and the trees just beginning to turn green. But the areas in the center of town were a bleak contrast, blasted by winds and torn to shreds.


I decided to visit my childhood home in the historic Woodlawn district. Iowa City was a planned community, the original State Capitol, and was designed around a broad boulevard, Iowa Avenue, that would stretch between the Capitol Building and the Governor’s Mansion. This plan was copied after Washington DC, where the US Capitol and the White House are at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Iowa Capitol was moved to Des Moines before the Governor’s Mansion was built, so Woodlawn was sold and many of the city’s oldest homes were built there, many of them are nearly 150 years old.

This photograph shows the view down Iowa Avenue, you can just see the golden dome of the Old Capitol building in the center, and just to its left are the gothic spires of the old State Hospital. This is the view the entire city was built around.






This photograph was taken from the very spot where I would set off each morning to deliver newspapers on my paper route down Iowa Avenue. Each morning I would look down the tree-lined boulevard and look for the rising sun glinting off the dome, it would only be visible during the winter, and for a few weeks in the spring, before the tall trees spread their leaves and obscured the view. But the view never ever looked like this.

Nearly all the trees have been stripped from the boulevard. In their place, electric poles have been hastily erected to restore power to the damaged buildings. Almost all the old homes have blue tarps covering the massive holes in their roofs. Cranes were lifting piles of debris into huge dump trucks, I had to wait a while for them to pass before I could take an unobstructed photograph. Students were moving out of their damaged homes, their cars stuffed full of clothing and books. Just off camera to the left, a Red Cross truck was dispensing food and water to the local residents and emergency workers.


I walked up Woodlawn to see my old home, it was undamaged, but it was heartbreaking to see the 200 year old oak trees smashed to bits. I could not take any pictures, almost every direction was blocked by piles of debris stacked 6 feet tall. The 40 foot tall pine tree that stood outside my bedroom window was snapped off and only the bottom 10 feet remained. Almost every tree was smashed to bits, leaving only jagged stumps barely higher than the piles of debris.

I drove around the city but I could not approach the most damaged areas, the streets were blocked off. Highway Patrolmen were directing traffic down Burlington, the traffic lights were torn down. The most astonishing sight was Green Square Park, I saw an uprooted oak tree that was 6 feet in diameter, it pulled up a huge ball of soil 10 feet across.

The entire landscape of the center of Iowa City has been changed by the loss of the trees in the oldest section of town. I feel more acutely the loss of the natural landscape, than the loss of the houses. A house, even a historic 150 year old house, can be rebuilt quickly, but a 200 year old oak tree takes exactly 200 years to replace, if it even manages to survive that long. Many of these trees were here before any houses were built, the city grew around the trees. That circumstance will never happen again.

The dead hardware saga continues, my PowerBook died. This is getting ridiculous, I’ve never had such a streak of bad luck. Even worse, it’s embarrassing. It’s like the old proverb of the cobbler whose children go barefoot. I’m the guy people call for help when their computers go bad, to have my own computer go bad is pitiful. It is especially pitiful considering the machine died due to an upgrade. This upgrade was supposed to improve performance, but now I have no performance, it won’t even boot.

My PowerBook has been acting cranky ever since I installed a new 1Gb memory stick a few days ago. It ran much faster with the extra memory, but then suddenly, I saw the dreaded “kernel panic,” and now my PowerBook won’t boot.





Diagnostics said the hard drive is corrupted, most of the data is irretrievable. I used every technique I knew to repair the disk directory (and I know a lot of them, it used to be my job to recover damaged disks) but nothing worked. My disk is hosed, the data lost. Fortunately I don’t use my PowerBook for anything really critical, it’s my backup machine for light web surfing and email, so it’s not a major disaster. But it is a major waste of time, having to reinstall and reconfigure it from scratch.

After wasting a whole day trying to resurrect my hard drive, I finally realized it might be a memory problem, so I ran the Apple Hardware Test disk, it proved the new memory stick is defective. I thought it might be the infamous Upper Memory Slot problem but my PowerBook isn’t in the affected range of serial numbers. I tried installing the RAM in the lower slot, but it tests as defective in that slot as well. The memory module is definitely dead.

Curses to Other World Computing for shipping me a bad memory module that hosed my hard disk! They promised a lifetime advance replacement warranty, but that hardly compensates for hosing my hard disk. My machine will probably be OK now that I’ve removed the bad RAM, the hard drive is probably not permanently damaged, but I’ll have to reformat my hard disk and reinstall the OS. And in a couple days I’ll get a replacement module from OWC. But you can be damn sure I’m going to run hardware diagnostics to test the new RAM as soon as it’s installed.


Update: I got the replacement RAM, it works properly this time. I reformatted the hard drive, installed everything from scratch, and my PowerBook is working well again. But it was a lot of wasted time and work that I didn’t really need to go through at all.

I was surprised to receive an announcement of the 10 year reunion for my university’s 1996 graduating class. It’s not like a real reunion, it’s just the annual Homecoming Week and football game, if I attended, it would be extremely unlikely that I’d encounter anyone I knew. But I was shocked by how fast 10 years passed and I am still stuck here in this town. Tempus fugit.