Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Does anyone know of photo enlargement software that can faithfully enlarge 640x480 photos to 1280x960? Or software that can fix damaged digital photos?

I have a set of photos that I took with my camcorder. The maximum resolution on the camcorder for still pictures is 640x480. I'd like to enlarge these to 1280x960 for printing. I can print them now, but unless they're wallet-sized, they'd look horrible.

I have another set of photos that got damaged due to a disk hiccup. It looks like the photographs are missing a pixel or two, and the color information changed after that missing pixel. That's about the best way I can describe it.

So I downloaded and reinstalled Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 in the same location it had been. And it appears on first glimpse that all my email, settings, and filters are gone. I did a little bit of searching, and was able to find all my messages from fuse.net from the time I started the account last year up to last week, when I last downloaded my email. (Whew!) My Gmail account was set up as an IMAP account, so my email should still be there on the server; all I had on my PC was a copy of the headers.

So now I wait for the downloads once more.

I heard the news last night after I got home from dinner.

My first exposure to Michael Jackson was a Saturday morning cartoon show featuring the Jackson 5. Does anyone else remember this show? Michael and his brothers -- no, don't ask me to name them -- would have these adventures, and they'd perform their songs during the episode.

Years later, I remember going out of my way in college to see his videos on MTV. We'd go to bars just to watch the premiere of his latest videos -- Thriller (still one of my all-time favorites), Bad, Remember the Time, Black or White. (I'm sure they'll be a DVD released soon.)

My interest in him and his music waned when he was brought up on child molestation charges the first time. I think that's when his career started to wane.

At the very least, the media can stop hounding him now.

40 years ago this evening, pollutants in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire and burned. Since then, a lot has been done to clean up this and other waterways. But in the humble opinion of this correspondent, there's still a lot to be done.

Last week, one of my interviewers asked me the question, "How has your university training prepared you for the job?" I answered, "It hasn't." I went on to explain that many of the languages and technologies in use today weren't developed 20 years ago, and the ones that were are rarely used today. Most of what I use today I either learned on the job or on my own. Also, my alma mater's CS department's primary focus was to prepare students for graduate school, not industry.

( What CS courses did I take in college? )

I went through my extensive CD, casette, LP, and MP3 collection to find 20 songs from 20 different artists. Some of them may be easy, some of them may be hard. I know they'd be hard for me; I know the first few seconds of many tunes, but I don't often know the first lines of songs. There's only one rule: no internet searching, regardless of search engine. Have at it!

If an item has been guessed correctly, the name of the guesser(s) will be posted beside the line.

( Cut-tagged and hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar. )

Every so often,on my LJ-friends list, I'll read announcements on upcoming science fiction conventions, or reports on past ones. More often than not, these are posted by single people, or married people with no children, or empty-nesters.

Part of me would like to go to some of these conventions -- meet some new friends, touch base with old friends, see some interesting panels, meet some interesting guests. But conventions can get expensive -- hotel rooms, convention fees, meals, goodies from the dealer's room. And because I'm divorced and paying child support (and spousal support until next year), conventions (or "cons" for short) have become a luxury that I can no longer afford.

Sometimes I often ask myself, "Are con friends real friends?" I'll see them in passing at a convention, and because we're so busy with our own schedules, not a lot of time is spent on those friendships during a convention. I'm thankful for things like filkhaven and LJ, through which I can deepen my relationships with my con friends.

I also ask myself, "Is my life being served well by living out some escapist fantasy?"

I used to collect lots of things like CDs, DVDs, videotapes, books, and comic books, until I consolidated the collections and realized I no longer have the space to keep them, and the money to maintain the collections.

Or maybe I'm just growing older, and outgrowing SF fandom.

*FIAWOL = Fandom Is A Way Of Life. Polar opposite of FIJAGH = Fandom Is Just A Goddamed Hobby.

My final project for CIS 285 (Java Servlets and JSPs) is now complete enough to be demonstrated. I still have a few minor tweaks to do here and there, but that can get done anytime between now and Thursday evening.

Each of us in the class had to come up with a project that used servlets, JSPs, and two database tables. I wrote a family tree database application.

The folks at the Dayton Business Journal have confirmed the rumors that NCR (formerly National Cash Register) is leaving its home of 125 years and moving its global headquarters from Dayton, Ohio to Duluth, Georgia.

This is devastating news to the area, and to the local economy.

The Cash, as it was once nicknamed, had many facilities and buildings in the Dayton area before I moved here in 1989, and at one time, employed over 20,000 people. Many of its buildings have since been vacated and torn down. There are a few buildings left from that heyday, although now they are occupied by the Dayton Daily News and the University of Dayton.

I don't even know that they make cash registers and computers anymore. Their main product now is ATMs.

This is further proof that Dayton is a dying city, which Forbes magazine reported last year.

I really don't expect my next job to be in this town.

Still saddened and angered at the news of the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

General Motors finally Chapter 11'ed.

And an Air France jet went missing flying from Rio De Janiero, Brazil to Paris, France.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday hofdave and catalana!