Where I’m @

20041123

Playing with SUS
We’re playing around with installing Microsoft’s SUS on a not-too-busy server. (In our case, that's a RIS server, mostly idle because it's not the beginning of the semester.) Just for filing, we thought we'd mention that you need to have about 5Gb to hold all the updates as of 23 November 2004. It would be nice if MS informed you of the size, the way normal apps do, before you installed it, or at least before you downloaded all the updates and then found that you had only 700Mb left. Or at least it would have been nice if they had informed me.

20041108

8' Long and Growing
We haven’t posted in quite some time about our slow-burning habit of buying old records, but there are some recent points worth mentioning.

• At a nearby yard sale, we found Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp, and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Unfortunately, the Jackson was quite warped (somehow, we forgot to examine it before handing over our 50 cents), but the other two are great.
• At the nearby Goodwill, we acquired three giants: Chicago’s eponymous debut (as Chicago Transit Authority), Boston’s eponymous debut, and Frampton Comes Alive (a record without which we would not have considered our vinyl collection adequate).

One of the great things about buying old records is the felicitous discoveries one can make for not much money. For example, the version of “Sunday Girl” on Parallel Lines does not include the lines in French as does the version on The Best of Blondie. More fun is discovering the source of hip-hop samples buried in off-tracks. It was quite enjoyable to hear Chicago’s “Southern California Purples” open up with a riff sampled by IAM on “Contrat de conscience”.