Best place to buy tires

Kevin Kelley, of Wired fame, says the best place to buy tires is online at Tire Rack.

It has thorough reviews and buying guides for tires, and when I asked it about snow tires for a Ford Windstar SE, it gave me this info and a bunch of places near Mercer Island that will install them.

Quicktake camera photo conversion

I have a whole bunch of old photos taken with an original Apple QuickTake 100 camera in the early 1990s, but I can't view them anymore because the image format is no longer supported.

Finally, today I found some information about how to solve the problem.

Macintouch offers the following advice:

Mike Silverman

The bad news is that the QuickTake 100 and 150 cameras used a
special, proprietary version of the PICT format to store images.
These can't be opened by anything, including GraphicConverter,
unless you are running on an OS 9 or earlier system with Apple's
special QuickTake image extension installed. Apple has a tech note
about this
Mac
OS X: Unable to Open QuickTake 100, 150 Pictures, but of course
the tech note is quite unhelpful about actually pointing you to the
necessary software.

For that, you have to search Apple's database of obsolete
software, where the QuickTake 1.0 software for PowerMacintosh can be
found:

QuickTake_for_Power_Mac_1.0.sea.bin

You'll need to find a bona-fide MacOS 9 or earlier PowerMac to
install this on (you can't run it in Classic mode on an OS X box)
but once you do that you can then open the QuickTake pictures, and
save them in another format.

If you don't have an old Mac running Classic system software
handy, you can always try your local library, schools, or even
actually buy a first generation PowerMac for $10 or less on eBay.

Christopher Morrison

Go to

AppleCare Support - Older Software Downloads and look for
"QuickTake_for_Power_Mac_1.0.sea.bin". I actually converted some old
photos to JPEG format a few days ago, and it works fine in Classic
mode in OS X.

Craig Colthorp

I believe that iView Multimedia includes a QuickTake image plug-in
that will read old QuickTake camera images. From there, one can
convert the images to whatever format they wish.

[QuickTake isn't explicitly listed in the iView site as a
supported format, though that may not be the final answer -
MacInTouch]

Fred Shippey

His only option is to find someone with OS 9 AND the necessary
software who will do the conversion for him. Note that there were
two different QuickTake cameras (100 and 150) and they use different
software.

By the way, I'm moderating a panel on digital imaging archiving
issues at the I3A leadership conference next week and will use Ken's
comments as one of my "problem" examples.

Robert Patterson

I searched my OS 9 machine and found that Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2 has
some Apple QuickTake Plugins so it would seem that Adobe might be
able to open them, then save as something else.

I also found that Toast Titanium 5.02 had Roxio Photo and in
there, in PlugIns, is an extension called "QuickTake™ Image"

[Roger Kramer - The Roxio Photo folder (from Toast Titanium 5)
contains iView Media 1.0 that includes a QuickTake image import
plug-in. Have never had QuickTake images so I cannot vouch for its
usability.]

Mercer Island School District Board Meeting

We attended the beginning of last night's MISD board meeting, which featured an important presentation by Stowe Sprague, who was there with a few other moms and members of the Mercer Island Preschool Association. They are trying to get more attention for preschool and daycare issues for children under 6, particularly in light of a new building project being considered by the school district.

Quantitatively measuring popularity of books

The New York Times > Technology > Amazon's Ratings Count After All: Mikhail Gronas, an assistant professor at Dartmouth, used a computer to analyze those user-submitted book reviews on Amazon.com and found that the best-selling books are those that are high on a "controversality index", i.e. have as many one-star as five-star reviews.

Silicon Valley Jobs

Looks like we left Silicon Valley in bad shape. This chart is the WSJ's summary of the job situation there for the past 10 years:



the source data is from Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

Mel Levine, Pediatrician and "Demystification"

NPR's Margot Adler did an interesting story about Mel Levine, M.D., director of the University of North Carolina's Clinical Center for the Study of Development and learning, and a co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, an organization that analyzes learning differences. He talks like my kind of pediatrician.

He doesn't look for root causes for learning or developmental problems, saying that's a waste of time because you'll never know for sure what the cause was and you probably can't do anything about it anyway. Instead, he uses a process he calls "demystification" to work with a child on all their strengths and weaknesses. Once you put a label on a person's weaknesses, he says, it becomes much easier to find solutions.

For example, he might take an unruly student and find that they suffer from "sequencing problems", so he'll work with him/her to show how the problem affects them and some things they can do about it.

60 MInutes did a profile of him as well.

Aerial view of our house

http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/listings-search?searchView=MySavedSearches&saved_search_id=209