Flutterby™!

Porn industry calls for bailout. (Via SE)

So, uh, maybe while we're getting screwed we can be getting off too?

I wouldn't give this a second glance, except that Brad Graham is a contestant: The St. Louis Sexiest Cybergeek Contest voting is still open, and not only is Brad Graham sexy, he'd appreciate your vote.

Fascinating: Stanwood craftsman puts human touch on factory-made pianos, Darrell Fandrich takes mass produced pianos from China, guts them, and rebuilds them with more attention to detail, selling them for quite a bit less than the completely custom built pianos.

There was recently a thread over at Lumberjocks about how finished projects were worth less than the raw lumber. I think these two notions are tied together.

Stacey's Books in SF is closing. The eBook isn't really here yet, but books are over.

A rare peek at Homeland Security's files on travelers

Three cable cuts again. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Continued in the comments.

On the Redfin blog, Glenn Kelman looks at the assumption of risk and its role in startups and the recent crash:

I explained to my wife, a doctor, that a call option lets you profit from a stock if it goes up, without actually owning the stock if it drops: hedge fund managers share in the fund’s gains but not its losses. I looked at her as if this was quite a trick. “But,” she said, “aren’t all of you paid in options too?”

It took a moment to realize she was right. Venture capitalists take 20% or more of their fund’s gains, but few risk much of their own money in a loss. At startups, entrepreneurs and executives don’t usually own stock, at least not any they can sell, but options to profit from the stock if the company is bought or goes public. Little if any of the money invested in a startup comes from the entrepreneur.

The startups I've participated in with any sort of equity have been funded by the founders and entrepreneurs, which means I've assumed the risk, and spent a lot of money. The article's a good look at the other side of this.

Photos of My Cervix, images of a cervix throughout a menstrual cycle.

Mark apparently has it working on my site, I don't, but if I can get it working this looks to be 100% awesome: Mark has written a MediaWiki mode for Emacs, announced on his blog here. Once you get it configured, from within Emacs you should be able to:

Open a wiki file:	M-x mediawiki-open
Save a wiki buffer:	C-x C-s
Save a wiki buffer with a different name:	C-x C-w

I'm still tweaking my Emacs ignorance, but... hopefully soon!

Great article: Why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

Philip Greenspun has some interesting notes on innovation in higher education. Tossed up here for Eric and my Dad.

Pew Research: States of the Union Before and After Bush. Thanks, Tara.

Way worth reading: Michael Lewis: The End of the Financial World as We Know It.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. ...

Part 2 continues into exploring the fuck-up that is the Paulson management of the TARP payoff bailout, and also details several ways in which the SEC is the problem, not the solution. Both are well worth reading.

Semi-relatedly, there's some concern that the U.S. savings rate will skyrocket, and though raising the savings rate is good, if it skyrockets the economy will slump dramatically. Seems to me that the smarter thing to do with that $750 billion, if you believe in government intervention in the economy, would have been to put it solidly behind Social Security, so that we didn't have the "oh holy crap my retirement's disappeared" reaction, and then work to phase out 401k and IRA plans, or find a way to shift them so that they're not just a way for the Wall Street slimeballs and shysters to get their fingers further into the pockets of the rest of the country. I'm not sure how that happens, beyond abolishing the things entirely (which has a negative impact on the savings rate too), but encouraging local smaller investment would both help to cut out the broker culture, and build more vibrant communities.

Eric Wagoner on some of the legal issues involved in running an online farmer's market, and how he hopes his operation is different from The Manna Storehouse in La Grange Ohio, whose proprietors were recently allegedly held at gunpoint for several hours by police.

This afternoon we went to meet some friends at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco to see the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit (Aside to Google: Do you think that if I searched on "Da Vinci San Francisco" I might get that rather than miscellaneous unrelated and a review panning something that happened at the Metreon a year ago?). While we were there, we saw a private ambulance drive up, park, start to unload, a fire truck come by, drive past and turn behind the building, the ambulance guys pack back up, a ladder truck come and unload lots of gear.

I wish I'd gotten video of the putting up of this ladder, because that looked really heavy and difficult to maneuver, and video of the small woman carrying 350' of rope up the ladder, followed by some bigger beefier guys carrying less, 'cause this is a fairly mundane lowering of a victim, circumstances unknown, in a Stokes litter off a building:

I need to expand this a lot before I put it other places, but here's a start on my evaluation of drawer slides, why I like Accuride a lot, and why, despite that, we've gone with mostly Blum slides in the kitchen.

One year in the new house! Things we've done:

Yard and Garden

• Cleared out the shade structures in the back yard
• Turned manure into the flower beds
• Planted boysenberries, herbs, dwarf Meyer lemon, tomatoes, peppers, kale, chard, parsley, fennel, cabbage, brussels sprouts, carrots, peas
• Installed pop-up automatic sprinkler system, in the front and back
• Built a lattice for climbing plants
• Installed wood for copper surfaces for snail control in the side flower beds
• Removed Rhododendron from the front beds
• Tore up plastic under flower and vegetable beds
• Re-did bike shed so that it would fit in the shed structure
• Built limestone and fir table
• Built workbench

House Exterior

• Installed a new front door
• Built a new front entrance
• Had roof replaced
• Examine rain gutters, cleared downspouts, replaced section at bottom of back left
• Removed fence and gate with rot in the back left
• Painted and caulked the east wall.
• Painted and caulked the south wall.
• Filled hole and painted over old electrical connections on the west wall.
• Replaced the back door
• Had solar attic fan installed

Inside

• Removed carpets, and had floors refinished
• Pulled down faux paneling and painted living room
• Put in a new closet, and installed cedar linings in that and Charlene's closet.
• Put new shelves and tracks in the hall/bathroom closet.
• Built and installed two of the new kitchen cabinets
• Built drawers for those two cabinets
• Shortened main countertop to let dishwasher roll in beside fridge
• Milled and finished baseboards for the living room and hallway.
• Changed out all door handles and locks
• Reworked Dan's old workbench into temporary entertainment center

Wiring

• Ran phone wire to better place.
• Had new electrical panel installed
• Rewired socket in living room for air conditioner

Plumbing

• Installed a hot water recirculator
• Flexible connections, water and gas, to water heater.
• Replaced kitchen faucet
• Put in new shower head

Shop

• Put up shelving in the garage
• Put up new flourescents
• Built the Systainer cart
• Installed new router in the router table
• Put up clamp racks

Underneath

• Installed jack under broken beam in crawlspace
• Cleaned organic material out of crawlspace
• Set up new sump pump pipes to outside.
• Ran GFI connection for sump pump
• Put insulation on hot water pipes.

On the "Ask Obama to get FISA right" mailing list, the following message came across:

Just a reminder that we would probably be (mostly) in the dark about NSA warrantless wiretaps (and the ensuing FISA revamp) if not for the courageous admissions of individuals like Thomas Tamm, Mark Klein, and Adrienne Kinne. It was mentioned in the Dec 22, 2008 Newsweek article ( http://www.newsweek.com/id/174601 ) that to cover legal costs, Tamm recently set up a defense fund. I thought it might be fitting to send a donation to him for his work. To me the amount $20.04 seems symbolic of the spring 2004 phone call that started it off, but feel free to interject your own symbolic number which matches your budget.

Thomas Tamm Legal Defense Fund

Bank of Georgetown

5236 44th Street

Washington, DC 20015

Cory Silverberg talks about yet another article about a study which finds abstinence pledges ineffective.

Yow! If you're into bearings, check out VXB Ball Bearings! I've been assuming we were going to use brass bushing bearings for our appliance lift, but the weekly specials here are making me hope I can find the right form factor for ball bearings, 'cause they're amazingly inexpensive!

Brendan Gregg discovers that shouting at your hard drives gives unusual latencies. Video demonstration here. Via MeFi, which has the usual second-guessing, and there are reasons that this might not be the sound, might be related to something else he's doing simultaneously, but does point to a need to keep things stable in the machine rooms.

This one's for Chris: A floating house on Lake Huron.

Over at The Boston Diaries, Sean talks about his first time making pasta. I remember when I had that process so wired that I could make fresh pasta and cook it faster than I could cook dried pasta. Back in the day, Catherine and I had talked about sending a "pasta with prawns, feta and and pepperoncini" recipe to an "under 20 minutes" recipe contest that'd be a cue-sheet to a few seconds.

I'm building some appliance lifts. We'd love to use a pre-existing commercial appliance lift but nobody makes 'em the form factor we'd like. The Wood Technology SuperStar Appliance Lift comes the closest we've seen, but we really want 'em for appliances that are a foot or so high, max, and that one's 18".

I built a prototype of the mechanism out of 1/2" ply, but the thing ends up being 2" wide on either end by the time we account for screw heads and the like, and the plywood has a little bit of flex.

A few questions:

1. Anyone got experience with cheap bearing systems for metal? We're not talking high speed, we're not talking a lot of use (rotate 90° when we pull out the appliance and put it back), so perhaps even a rivet that allows rotation (which would have the advantage of minimal protrusion)? Last time I did rivets was Pop Rivets in duct metals and similar thin sheet back when I was a kid.
2. We need the arms to have an angle in 'em. I see two ways to this: Either cut it out of sheet stock with a jigsaw, or braze or weld two pieces of bar together. I think my across the street neighbor has an arc welder, last time I tried brazing with straight MAPP (not Oxy-MAPP) I had lots of trouble keeping the bike frame bits hot enough to get a good flow, and I gave away my Oxy-Acetylene torch a few years back. Anyone got experience either brazing with a basic hand-held MAPP torch on 1/8"x1" or so bar stock, cutting 1/8" sheet with a jig saw, or another way to do this?

“Don’t be sorry. We are all dying Jack. It’s just that some of us are dying a little faster. The key is to not live your life as if you are already dead.” (Via)

Reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's observation that our life flashes before our eyes just before we die. For most of us that takes about 80 years.

Apropos of the current (and recurring, to my ignorant senses) situation between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the way to gain my sympathies would be for Hamas to say "we regret that rogue elements have been firing rockets into Israel, and we will assist the Israeli military in apprehending and punishing those elements so that the peace process can move forward."

The way to lose my sympathies would be for Hamas to whine "that was a disproportionate response" (to the rockets we fired at you that happened to miss).

Some pictures from the evening of Christmas Day, when traffic was light enough that I could play with multiple exposures for HDR composition.

If you're in Petaluma, it's worth a drive over to see the Christmas light show at 1623 Cabernet Court.

One of my gifts for Charlene this year was the promise of starting helicopter flight lessons at Makin Air or Sonoma Helicopters. To package this, I decided to head over to the hobby shop and pick up a low-end helicopter, I knew there were 2 channel (yaw and throttle) helicopters for thirty bucks or so.

I ended up letting myself get talked up into an E-Flite mCX RTF Radio Control helicopter, because it's 4 channel, which gives all 4 axes for full control, and because the guy said "here, fly it around for a bit", it took care of the hovering, and replacement parts are available for when we crash it anyway.

We just opened up the package, and I took a look at the thing and I'm blown away: It's got 4 motors, one for each of the contra-rotating rotors and two for servo control of the swashplate, and somewhere in all of this teeny package it also manages to squeeze in enough attitude and acceleration sensors to manage maintaining attitude and orientation. I need to get a toaster oven so I can do my own surface mount soldering.

From "A Christmas Story": "My father worked in profanity the way other artists would work in oils or clay"

Toot, blurb rattle fras camel flurt! You blotter battle feast jerk up brat! Omyvon sak von ratter bottom botter...

You polly wop wapner! Drop dumb fratenhaus sticklefeiffer!

You bladder puss snotgrafter! You wort mon dang noodle. You shotten shifter pastafer! You snort tunger, lay monger sniker shell cocker!

Merry Christmas from The Wet Spots (warning: risque):

(Via)