{"id":10130,"date":"2006-01-28T15:31:23","date_gmt":"2006-01-28T20:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/28\/10130.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:49","slug":"a-few-questions-for-grs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/28\/a-few-questions-for-grs\/","title":{"rendered":"a few questions for GRs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A few random things:\n<ul><li>Your Humble Blogger has a stage sword of substantial sentimental value that has gotten rusty. I know, and I feel really bad about it, but can anybody help? What products are there for this sort of thing? I would like ideally to (a) remove rust and prevent further rust, and (2) make the thing shiny again. Does anybody have any experience with this sort of thing?<\/li>\n<li>While I&#8217;m at it, if anybody wants to advise me on my computer, which has become so slow, so slow. In particular, having Firefox, Thunderbird (email) and iTunes open simultaneously slows me down to thirty-second or longer waits whenever I need to change programs. Even when not all running simultaneously, any of those three is likely to slow down to a crawl (thirty-second or more waits) if they are open for any substantial length of time. I&#8217;m running MS XP 2002 version on an HP, 2.20 GHz, 120MB of RAM. I know, it&#8217;s a two year old machine (purchased Jan 2004), but I don&#8217;t have a new one budgeted for the next few months. I have Symantec Anti-Virus running, and it doesn&#8217;t tell me I&#8217;ve got viruses, and I have recently run malware\/spyware checks, and nothing comes up there, either. Feh.<\/li>\n<li>Somewhat related, Gentle Reader Dan P had an interesting suggestion to do a Tohu Bohu group radio station at last.fm, which would essentially be a way to automatically tell everybody in the group what everybody is listening to. In order to do a group, there would have to be ten people signed up, each of which would have to load audioscrobbler and have a (free) account with this company that keeps a log of what music you listen to. Oh, and you&#8217;d have to listen to music through the computer often enough to have the thing be interesting. I am reluctant to add anything new onto this computer at present, just because I&#8217;m having enough trouble, but are Gentle Readers interested? I could be persuaded, particularly if 9 of y&#8217;all want to join in.<\/li>\n<li>Somewhat related, if any of y&#8217;all have music recommendations based on what I&#8217;ve mentioned I like, send &#8217;em along. In particular, I&#8217;d like to have a band\/artist that is still producing albums, whose new albums I would eagerly anticipate. Given my disappointment with the last couple of Elvis Costello albums, and with the last David Byrne album, I&#8217;m down to a small handful of people who produce new albums I&#8217;d be willing to find a record store to buy. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (and with them, I prefer their old stuff, without the keyboard), Jim&#8217;s Big Ego, Eddie from Ohio, the Klezmatics, Mark Knopfler. Maybe a few more that don&#8217;t come to mind just now.<\/li>\n<li>I asked this before, but does any Gentle Reader have a recommendation for a home-library catalog program? I don&#8217;t mind typing in ISBNs, but I&#8217;d be willing to buy a bar-code scanner, if the program really worked. I would also be as likely to be interested in some community library thing (like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\">Library Thing<\/a>) as the music thing, although the scrobbler appears to have the advantage that I wouldn&#8217;t have to do any actual work.<\/li>\n<li>Do any Gentle Readers do the Mechanical Turk? I was vaguely interested in the idea, both philosophically and, you know, as a way to pick up spare change whilst my Perfect Non-Reader is briefly entertaining herself, but my natural indolence combined with a certain hesitancy to ground-floor this thing, and now that it&#8217;s been up for a couple of months, I&#8217;m curious how it&#8217;s working. The initial page shows only three or four jobs when I load it, but I suspect that there are scads of jobs you only see when you&#8217;ve actually completed a few jobs. Anyway, I&#8217;m just curious if any of y&#8217;all have dipped a toe in that particular water. Quite likely, my computer would be slow enough frequently enough to prevent my actually doing it, anyway.<\/li><\/ul>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s enough random stuff for a while.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few random things: Your Humble Blogger has a stage sword of substantial sentimental value that has gotten rusty. I know, and I feel really bad about it, but can anybody help? What products are there for this sort of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17671,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10130\/revisions\/17671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}