Flutterby™! From 2000-11-01 to 2000-11-30

The Lolita controversy addresses the rise of synthetic jailbait, faux child themes in popular porn. I see this as a direct reaction to the restrictions that COPA imposed, say "no" and it's guaranteed to become a fetish, but the article also raised the spectre of some of the bad bits of the Meese era and is making me rethink my vote for Browne rather than against Bush. It's easy to think of the Reagan years in terms of the trumped up falsehoods (like the "he closed all the asylums and created the homeless problem", ignoring the tightening of the standards for involuntary incarceration in the late '70s which was more likely the cause) and forget about the real horrors. For whatever her faults and roles in the Branch Davidian fiascos and numerous other bad Justice Department decisions, Janet Reno ain't nothin' on Ed Meese.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Sigh. Listening to Forum with the alternatives to Diane Feinstein. Feinstein is going to win, and has been blowing off any situation that might give legitimacy to other candidates, but she's still a raving idiot who espouses the worst traits of the Democrats with the fascist tendencies of the Republicans, including such lunacy as voting for a flag-burning amendment. A social conservative and fiscal liberal. Unfortunately, the Libertarian candidate, Gail Lightfoot, is also incoherent. Tom Campbell, the Republican is amazingly close to perfect, but he's the sort of old-school Republican we haven't seen since Lee Atwater decided the Catholic vote was important. While I think the Libertarians are right in principle, too many of them seem to be rednecks who haven't really thought through the implications of their philosophy. Any chance there's a rational political party out there somewhere? I've yet to see it. Of course that'd assume a rational voting populace, and as this election winds down it sure seems that the "gimme gimme gimme and fuck the rest of you" destruction of the commons seems to be the norm among grasping greedy voters.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Politics Libertarian ]

When altering a PostgreSQL trigger function, you have to delete and re-add all triggers which use the function. And you can't delete columns from tables. Oh well, we're back, PostgreSQL gets a reprieve for now, even though I'm only using the triggers to provide functionality that MySQL provides out of the box. Maybe this is a time for me to get involved in PostgreSQL development to try to fix some of the more boneheaded error conditions that it can get into.

As of about 9:30am this morning I became legally single again. Seeing how yesterday was my 8th anniversary I guess I can say I beat the odds and lasted more than seven years...

Dan Savage on Ralph Nader in the last paragraph: While we're on the subject of annoying freaks and dumb whores, would someone please explain the power Ralph Nader seems to have over my usually levelheaded friends? Every other person I know is planning on voting for this . . . this . . . socially maladapted freak. Okay, so he's not subtle about his preferences...

Via ATMP: Apparently unhappy with their trivial lampooning of the institution thus far, Fox presents Surprise Wedding, where unsuspecting bachelors are met on camera by their girlfriends in wedding dresses. I don't know where I could possibly take this that's any more bizarre than it is.

[ related topics: Photography ]

One of my issues with the Clinton-Gore administration has been that they've done some truly heinous things to the abilities of individuals to exchange information, and tried to do even more. Daniel Ellsberg asks Would Clinton ban the release of the Pentagon Papers?

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, assault under color of authority, filing false police reports. Just a few of the charges faced by Oakland police. Had an interesting discussion with a fairly straight-laced friend recently and was amazed that she beleived that you actually needed to violate laws to have police trouble. But I think that this is also a symptom of the problems that happen when we don't elevate members of the police and the armed forces to a different standard, when we treat them as doing a job rather than as civic heroes.

Via Robot Wisdom, ultra light weight radio control helicopters. As light as 48 grams. A while back I was hanging out at 5 corners up on Mount Tam watching the sunset and the guys with the RC gliders flying, and a hawk made a down-wind run over the ridge, shortly thereafter one of the gliders tried the same move. I've been wondering since then what you could do with some more intelligent on-board control to shorten the feedback loop, to deal with turbulence and other local phenomena better. Playing with something that could be tested in one's living room has some appeals.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger ]

Via User Friendly, Eric's Treasure Trove web site shut down by CRC Press. The publisher of the web site got a contract to do a paper version, and when that came out... It seems like any organization which uses the web for more than current events information is going to have to set up some sort of archiving system, which gets in the way of all sorts of other copyright issues.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

Cocaine, statutory rape, abortion, now Bush acknowledges he was arrested and plead guilty to DUI. I don't guess this last is really seen as a downside by the redneck Republicans who'll be voting for him.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Sexual Culture ]

QOTD: Via Metascene, from Born to be Wadd, Bill Margold on John Holmes: There is an orgy scene in Disco Dolls where I'm being blown by Leslie Bovee and John's being worked on by four people next to me -- and all of a sudden his dick popped out over my head, and I looked up at it and it was like the opening shot of Star Wars.

[ related topics: Quotes Web development Star Wars Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Holy Cats! I just discovered how expensive autocommit in PostgreSQL is. Updating data in 1,800 records from an XML file I'm seeing a full factor of 100 from autocommits versus putting all those updates in a single transaction. Youch. This explains a lot. Wonder if there's a good way to say "these updates aren't transaction critical, do them optimally" so that I don't end up choking memory on huge updates?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

A good reason to leave Tennessee (from CNN.com): <quote>39 percent of all Tennessee voters in 1996 were self-identified members of the Religious Right versus 17 percent of all voters nationwide.</quote> I also heard on CNN (still looking for an online source) that Nader has requested that Nader supports in 'battelground states' vote for Gore in exchange for Nader votes from Democrats in strong Republican states. I'm still torn. My district is predominately Republican but the state is borderline. I'd say I should stick to my principles - but there really isn't a single candidate that stands out by that measure - just one that stands out as being the least principled...

[ related topics: Politics ]

Not only does Ethel the Blog have fantastic political commentary, Steve also points to the Apache Toolbox. I'm still downloading stuff to test it, but if it lives up to the description it's a small shell script that takes care of downloading and configuring a bunch of Apache modules. If you've ever tried to make sure that you got all of a couple of different modules compiled in correctly, this is no mean feat. The things it seems to be missing are AxKit and Java support, but only loser weenies use Java for server side web stuff anyway.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Politics Web development Weblogs ]

Dang it, Jay, you're not supposed to tell them that the "due to overwhelming anticipated independent voter turnout this year, the polling days will be split and Democrats and Republicans will vote on Wednesday" thing was a hoax. Candidates with gullible voters shouldn't get elected.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Electroluminescent wire has become an indispensable part of the Burning Man experience. Someone emailed me this year asking about fabrication techniques, and after a back-and-forth he said "No, I wanna make my own." Well, I blew him off as a loony, but on the Burning Man BBS he was pointed to the Dupont Electroluminescent Inks page. Hmmm... Thinking about interesting surfaces and cool ways to switch 80-120V at 400Hz...

[ related topics: Burning Man Web development ]

Apple develops 2 button mouse. We all knew that if they applied themselves, they would figure it out.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Web development ]

Thinking about setting up an 802.11 net at the office and it Looks pretty easy. famous last words...

[ related topics: Web development Wireless ]

Via Yet Another Web Log. I have regular discussions with my friends in Chattanooga, and for a while the subject was often "why don't you come back?" One of my answers was that when I got an enterprise funded and running, I'd have trouble attracting qualified people to work with, despite the tremendous natural beauty and recreational opportunities that the Chattanooga area affords. I remember a long rant complaining about the lack of strip-clubs and regular police harassment of adult book stores, which, when shown to some of the people trying to build business incubators, was completely misunderstood. Anyway, apparently I was closer than I thought, there's a huge correlation between high tech innovation and gay populations. Richard Florida, (apparently formerly) of the Center for Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon, wondered why high tech firms like Lycos started at Carnegie Mellon all left the area. They discovered from 1990 census data that the highest correlation of any factor with high tech vitality was with the population of unmarried same-sex partners. Sorry, Chattanooga, unless a lot of repressed rednecks start coming out you're stuck doing tourism and light manufacturing...

[ related topics: Web development Books Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Via the Civilution Weblog (yay! They're updating again!) comes Overkill: hell in ASCII, a side-scrolling deathmatch game done in text. Doesn't seem to have any autonomous opponents right now, so I'm going to have to take it into the office...

[ related topics: Web development Games Weblogs Carl Coryell-Martin ]

Dave Winer recounts a discussion with Jon Udell asking "why the Unix world doesn't have an integration architecture like Microsoft's COM." It has. Since the late 60s. It's called a "pipe", and it provides interoperability between applications in a way that Windows users only dream of. Example, recently: My parents live next to the manager of an Atlanta Hilton. He had a conference, and had been given a list of attendees by the conference organizers, but not given their arrival and departure dates. When he asked, they gave a list of travel itineraries and said "here, you can reconcile from this", and he had some poor person going through the list. Of course that's one chained command line with sort and diff that'd probably take a few seconds to run. COM helps people write ransom notes in more different styles, pipes help people move data. Of course that means that COM is going to win, in the long-run.

[ related topics: Dave Winer Microsoft ]

The comments and dynamic bits of the server should be massively faster now, but I can't tell over the wireless link. If you see a performance change (either way), tell me, s'il vous plait.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless ]

an interesting idea. Vote swapping

Thanks, Cam, for the D-Dubya-I meme. But beyond the basics, we have to ask the critical questions. Like, since this was the '70s, was he driving a Gremlin? "I've said all along, I made mistakes," the governor said in a hastily arranged press briefing in Kansas City. "I'm not proud of it. That night I drank too much. I got in the car and grabbed the first 8-track I saw. There was no intent, no pre-medication. I haven't listened to ABBA in 14 years, and I have no interest in their reunion tour."

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Politics Web development ]

Via More Like This, a novel solution to traffic problems: Recall Ralph Nader. We must drive a wedge between consumers and their love affair with the automobile. And the best way to do this is to recall Ralph Nader and allow the auto industry free reign to conduct themselves in a free market and produce even more unsafe cars. On a side note, I've cringed every time I hear Al Gore use the term "information superhighway" because I think that that's exactly what he's attempting to build, and I'm frankly not a fan of the interstate highway system...

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

I'm posting this from Opera 4.0b2 for Linux. Smaller footprint, handles frames and CSS, doesn't do Flash (can't decide if that's a good thing or not...), lets me override site colors and honors my X defaults (kinda, there are a few widgets that seem to be hardcoded black). Renders Scripting News and Edit This Page sites in this millenium, unlike Netscape. Still a stupid MDI interface, although SDI is rumoured to be coming soon. Some of the fonts it chooses don't scale all that nicely as I've got it configured. At first I was totally ready to shell out the $39, now I'm going to wait a week and see if it grows on me.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Dave Winer ]

OK my buddy Chris just released his book on Interactive Design

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

Yeah, I know, it sounds very establishment of me, but even if you aren't voting for anyone, go select a couple of candidates you know have no chance of winning and drop a ballot in, just to show the mass media that you do give a damn. And if you live in a borderline state Gore probably sucks a little bit less than Bush. But only a little.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

Yeah, it's a day late, but I didn't want to queer the results by having y'all vote for a non-viable candidate: vote Kiki (No, not that Kiki, the Sluggy one). Although the whole ferret-on-meth theme does ring of Dubya.

[ related topics: Politics Humor ]

Welp, less than 2,000 votes decide who get the electoral votes from Florida and that will decide our President for the next 4 years. Nader was able to get of 95,000 votes in that state(grumble grumble grumble). In California Prop38(school vouchers) goes down in flames showing how gullible voters are. At least prop36(getting non violent drug offenders out of jail) passed. I might have to look at property in Mendocineo county now that it is legal to grow pot on your own land for your own use.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sock Puppet Roadkill: Pets.com put to sleep. Sorry, just hadda get it out of my system.

The new Clean Sheets has a review of Rated X, the Emilio Estevez movie about the Mitchell Brothers.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Bones as art: Sedlec Ossuary. Sounds like a great date location for goths.

[ related topics: Web development ]

My take is that the "crusaders against child porn" aren't necessarily interested in preventing harm to the children, but in imposing a morality. Especially given the various studies that have shown that pornography provides a non-violent release (I think I remember that Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography is a good source for those studies). Anyway, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a law expanding the definition of child pornography to include material made with adults that appears to be of children. I'd sure like to see the proof that "depictions that are represented to be minors are harmful in the same way as any child pornography, except that there is no minor involved in their production." This might be worth tracking down the decision because there are some really boneheaded quotes in the article, I'd like to see how they're backed up.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Erotic Sexual Culture ]

In the list of boneheaded mistakes of the late '90s, along side buying Amazon at 400, will be chronicled the changing of a well-known and respected company name to some gawdawful buzzwordy thing which didn't tell any more about the company or its products and caused it to lose any name recognition it had. So Inprise is changing its name back to Borland.

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

I was reading CNN.com just now and came across a couple mathematical facts: 1. 19120 ballots were thrown out in Palm Beach County, Florida, because more than one Presidential vote was cast (some of the confusing ballots) 2. Palm Beach County is 62% in favor of Gore and 36% Bush. Assuming the other 19120 ballots are split along the same lines, Gore would have received an additional 11854 votes and Bush 6883 votes. That would give Gore a solid 4000-vote lead according to current counting. Does anybody, besides myself, think it's odd that Florida's Governor is also named Bush?

[ related topics: Politics ]

So on NPR show last night Harry Shearer was talking about how he stayed up all night watching the returns, how exciting it all was, yadda yadda yadda. And I had to think: What possible impact on one's life can knowing the outcome of that election a few hours earlier have? I want a news outlet that provides me with information that I can make decisions and take action based on, is anyone out there interested in providing same for me, or am I stuck with people who think politics and football games need to be called the same way?

[ related topics: Politics Games ]

Todd mailed the sample Florida ballot around the office, from Taterbrains.com, I expect the archive will eventually end up as toon 8

Via CNN, here's the real disputed Palm Beach county ballot. Now I'd rather see Gore win, and several news sources have said that it violates the letter of Florida law, but if you have the mental capacity to breathe without outside assistance it's hard to imagine misinterpreting this. On the other hand, Dan Bricklin makes some good arguments about ballot usability.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

One thing's for sure: the problems with this election will spurn alot of spending on vote tallying and ballot design. Anybody know what company makes the tallying systems used in Brevard, Bay or Hernando counties in Florida? Brevard, for instance, has well over 210,000 votes for Bush and Gore combined and got the exact same results on the recount. Bay and Hernando also had reasonably large vote counts with the statisically improbably 0 variation in the recount. Improbable only assuming that the same tally method was used in each county - which I know is not the case. Hamilton County, Tennessee, has moved to the fill-in-the-bubble ballots with a computerized ballot box. I believe this is the kind that was used in Brevard County. Not only was the count more accurate but the ballot itself was much more user-friendly.

[ related topics: Politics User Interface ]

So several of you know I've got two teenage friends with whom I share some of my toys. Their mother has mixed feelings about me, she loves that I'm a strong male influence, but her nerves can't necessarily me bringing over stuff that explodes to play with. Anyway, they whip my butt at video games occasionally. I used to be pretty good at some first-person shooters so I said "sometime we'll go over to the office and get a big multi-player network up and running." So yesterday afternoon Alec brought his friend, another Daniel, over. Daniel was insistent on getting Counterstrike installed, but the latest version had just been released yesterday so the download servers were overrun, we had a couple of copies of Half-Life "Team Fortress Classic" running, and I said "don't worry about it." But he perservered. Oh. My. Now I know why the guys over at Exluna have raved over this so much. Dylan, who's "not a first-person shooter person" was completely hooked. We played 'til 10:30. The concept is simple: The weapons are realistic, a single shot can kill, ammo is limited, and you have to choose weapons appropriate to the sort of tactics you expect to be involved with. You play teams, the scenarios we played were either "keep the terrorists from planting a bomb" or "get this VIP to this point without someone picking him off". It depends on more than 13 year old reflexes and blasting indiscriminately (although those skills can be useful). Highly recommended. And now we've got a couple of ringers to take on the Exluna guys...

[ related topics: Games ]

Okay, what is it with Opera and Netscape and their different and bizarre methods of doing name services lookup? When I'm on a machine and can happily use host and nslookup why do they sometimes all of a sudden take huge times to resolve the same names? And why do they have different issues on different names all of which resolve quickly with all the standard Unix tools? Whatintheheck is the matter with gethostbyname?

I was gonna let the link to Counterstrike be the extent of my political posting for the next few days, but Ziffle passed along the Palm Beach Voter Competency Test.

[ related topics: Ziffle Politics Web development ]

It embarasses me that this post is a day late, but given that until I gave it some serious thought I would've skipped any observation of Veteran's Day altogether, a little time out to consider what those who serve in our armed forces seems like a good idea. Even if you don't like the uses to which the United States Military has been put for the last few decades, consider that the guys with their fingers on the trigger have been amazingly uninvolved in national politics relative to many other countries around the world. If nothing else, most of 'em limit their involvement to the same sorts of involvement any other citizen has. That alone seems worthy of a lot of respect.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

Via Edge Case, which I've been looking for an excuse to poach a link from for a while 'cause it's got good content but is usually just outside the purview of what I like for Flutterby, promiscuity linked to a stronger immune system. Now before y'all go out and put this into practice, it is a species-wide trait and probably works more as a selection system on an individual level...

[ related topics: Web development ]

I had started to see a use for Windows. Counterstrike had me convinced that there was a real purpose for it. And Todd went out today and bought us these nifty headsets with channel controls and everything to lift our spirits while we were at a client meeting; it's got nifty controls to manage channels and drivers to do some voice recognition and stuff. Everyone else's installations went fine, my install, on a generic Windows box that's always worked when other people have installed stuff on it, failed miserably, and in different ways each time. Best theory thus far is that the voice recognition stuff targeted me as a Linux bigot and crashed on me. Windows hates me.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]

Marylaine has a new My Word's Worth titled Beauty is a Choice we Make, exploring communal property a bit.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Just having fun with the election at this point. The guys from My Hairy Brother might be the next Wierd Als of our time with the parody Greasy Election Song. note this site might be busy cuz the song is funny and timely

[ related topics: Music ]

Dave Winer proposes a "bla-bla" button for our televisions, with a cumulative bar at the bottom that shows how many people have the button pressed, as a way to enjoy political speech.

[ related topics: Politics Dave Winer ]

Interesting interview with COYOTE director Gloria Lockett. Police always want easy marks, and prostitutes are a lot less dangerous than a domestic violence call. If you're not on the streets, for the most part, you won't get arrested. Police constantly harass prostitutes; police have arrested me and said things like, "What if we put sand in this Vaseline? That would really be something." They used to take our condoms and punch holes in them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Sexual Culture ]

On the other side of the prostitution issue, Salon has the first in a series on courtesans, which seemed a little fluff heavy and info sparse...

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Unexploited name of the aughts: hanging chads. I'm not sure what I'd do with it, but I was so tempted to register hangingchad.com this morning...

Well, they've got monkey brains directly controlling robotic arms. I guess this was the next logical step after teaching them to read teleprompters.

[ related topics: Web development ]

As a part of the installation process for that Microsoft SideWinder Game Voice device that hosed my machine including the dual-boot NT partition (no idea how this happens, I think it's probably actually some bizarreness with the USB controller and the sound card Plug-n-Pray) I signed up for a Hotmail account. I went back in today to do my "you must log in again within 10 days or this account will get deleted" responsibilities and I've got 5 pieces of spam. On an account that I've never published, anywhere. WTF?

[ related topics: Games Microsoft ]

Via randomonium, a 'blog which caught my attention by the lapels and got in my face in a good way, Surreal Porn Pop Erotica. Well, okay, surreal porn in a heavily image filtered way, not in an X Rated Cartoons sort of way.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

David Steinberg's Comes Naturally #103

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

That Salon courtesan article I linked to yesterday continues with the modern courtesan, taking a look at Clare Boothe Luce, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, and Arianna Huffington. This one's better written, but still pretty shallow, for instance in covering the 20th century it somehow manages to miss Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, perhaps not the same class as Harriman but certainly worth a mention.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

PlanetOut.com and Gay.com to merge. Maybe I'm just playing on old stereotypes, but does anyone really expect this'll last beyond overnight?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Supreme Court refuses to hear adult bookstore owner's appeal, essentially the cops went on a fishing expedition, confiscated his entire adult inventory, by the time he was acquitted he was out of business. This is one of the problems with giving the police too much discretion, since they had access to the titles in his inventory if the judges involved had been on the up-and-up they'd have put the specific titles in question in the warrant.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Latest TiVo hack

Eric Boutillier-Brown has some new photo diary entries and a collection of images called the Claire folio.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sigh. The Democrats last hope for the Florida election seems to be asserting that Democratic voters are less likely to be strong enough to punch through ballot paper than Republicans.

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Via Bifurcated Rivets, Obscene Interiors is a couple of interior designers critiquing the backdrops in amateur porn photos.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Britain gets male lap-dancing: A nightclub has been given what is believed to be Britain's first licence for male lap dancers. Caesars Forum, which already has a licence for Full Monty-style male strip nights, can now let its dancers get even closer to its clients. What I wanna know is where I can get some of those cool stripper's pants with Velcro^tm seams. I think a trip to Felicity's is in order...

[ related topics: Web development ]

I'm shocked, shocked, that government contractors would stoop to such levels: San Francisco airport contractors created dummy minority owned firms. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, well, "duh".

Dan's in a pissed off cynical mood this morning, so Flutterby's taking a turn for the darker: Social workers plead guilty to stealing Christmas fund money. As charity by proxy and buying conscience through front funds set up primarily to pay the employees of the non-profit become more popular of course this is going to happen. If you want to change your community, work to be involved and be a part of it, don't just pay someone else to fix things.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

A virtual suicide in the online game Everquest.

[ related topics: Web development Games ]

Via Mouthorgan, Bubble Body Wear. Seems a little overpriced and like something you'd probably be as well off making yourself, but could be lots o' fun at the right party.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

I ordered a copy of Debra's new novel, Resurrection, An S/M Love Story. Probably not my particular kink (hey, ya never know), but I've enjoyed her writing thus far (speaking of which, Debra, if you want a copy of The Vagina Monologues, drop your address on me and I'll lay mine on ya). Strange Bedfellows remains on order, I was going to reiterate my requiem for the independent bookstore here but the book doesn't show up on the XLibris search... (Yeah, comments about my non-working search engine pre-emptively mentioned).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Books ]

I arrived in Boston last night just before 5pm. It was already dark but not quite as cold as Tennessee. This should prove to be an interesting trip. I haven't been to New England in about 10 years and Boston in 25 years (I don't even think that counts!). Interesting notes: there aren't as many blonde people in Boston as there are in the Southeast. So far people have been quite friendly. A woman who recently moved to Boston from NYC helped me find the subway. Traffic here makes Atlanta and San Francisco seem dull: the construction is beyond anything in those areas (see the Big Dig for proof) and everyone drives like it's a demolition derby. I guess the fact that cars rust through in about five years makes everyone that much less concerned about body-work.

I caught King Crimson at the Berklee Performance Center last night. What a show! They played for almost two hours including about six encores. What was most surprising was the audience: people in the crowd (many Berklee students, I presume) were very much interested in the instruments, sound equipment, and techniques. Between songs there was an 'appropriate' amount of applause, dying down to an absolute silence - not unlike a symphony performance. The venue was amazing. I was directly behind a rather large soundboard so I had to sit on the edge of my seat to see everything, but I was pretty much in the front row of the Mezzanine and no more than 50 feet from the stage. I think it was the first concert I've been to in my life that someone didn't fire up a joint. Of course, I'm sure everyone took care of that before they came to the show...

While Eric's off to Boston and Todd's off to San Diego and Larry's probably doing the sane thing and hanging out at home with the family, I'm headed deep into the Sierra, to June Lake (there's another June Lake page) for some relaxation and hopefully some high altitude hiking and maybe even cross-country skiing. Have fun celebrating that the woefully underprepared failed business people who landed at Plymouth Rock preceded a large smallpox epidemic which destroyed a population that had a custom of leaving large food offerings at grave-sites.

Dan and I end up doing the Good Cop ... Bad Cop routine sometimes. With people I get to be the bad cop but with technology I am the eternal optimist and have been trying of late to convince Dan the XML is a good thing and will unify quite a bit of code through data interchange. Welp, It's pretty apparent XML will happen (is happening) but with these latest bastard subsets I find myself desiring to post wanted ads: "Seeking myopic optimist cheerleader" to console disenfranchised former optimist currently crying in beer do to a small misunderstanding about allowing a horse full of enemy soldiers into the city gates.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management ]

Babylon is my new favorite toy. Dan & I have kicked around the Idea of building a glossary engine that would reference words and provide links based on their contextual meaning. These guys are pretty close. Perhaps I'll build a Flutterby or Blogger glossary with this tool?

Where to start... I went out to the Berkshires Wednesday night for Thanksgiving dinner with distant family. Thursday night I went up to Saratoga Springs (or thereabouts) to visit with Wayne Larmon of Scrounge.Org fame. That part of the country is very beautiful. I forget how small New England is. I was able to traverse New York, skirt Vermont, and cover the entire length of Massachusetts in a few hours of driving. Saturday I hiked around Cambridge. I went to MIT and took pictures of the Great Hall. I especially liked the names of great scientists and philosophers carved in the granite facades. I was drawn by the name Darwin in big letters (pictures forthcoming) and thought that if MIT were in the South, the Xtians would have burned down the building - despite the fact that it's made of solid stone. I then went to the theater in Kendall Square and caught Quills (a must-see if you have the chance). It was great to see a first-run indie film. Cambridge has no fewer than five theaters that specialize in indie films. It was alot a combination of downtown San Francisco combined with Silicon Valley, all within easy access of the subway. Too bad is so damned cold up here! I went to the MIT Museum after the movie. Really cool stuff, especially the Hack Hall of Fame. They actually had the reassembled car that was put up on the dome of the Great Hall in 1994.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

Earlier I was writing my post on a web kiosk at Logan International. I had to pay for the time on the kiosk by the minute ($.20/min) and had to pay up front. My time was about to expire and my mother called on the cell phone... Now I'm at another type of kiosk where I got 10 free minutes for divugling some person information (I was truthful the first time, but I won't be the next). Unfortuantely all of these kiosks have crappy keyboards so my typing speed is way down... Next time, hopefully, I'll be carrying a laptop and a serial adapter for my Sprint cell phone - which seems to have better coverage than the OmniSky or the Ricochet.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

After hitting the MIT museum last night, I walked over to Harvard (yes, it is about two miles but I enjoy the walking). One of my reasons for considering a move to Boston is to finish my degree. Unfortuantely MIT no longer has a night school program but Harvard does as the Harvard Externsion School. They only offer a Bachelor of Liberal Arts (no major) - but that's cool to me. A degree in my field from someplace like UTC won't help my career at all, whereas a piece of paper with Harvard will.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Well, it seems that this kiosk doesn't have it's security as tight as the last. Everytime this one 'timesout' on me I can click the back button and get right back at it. This is one of those Global/Digital Media Com kiosks with a big plasma screen above it streaming commercials at me. The web kiosk is below with no chair and a keyboard mounted just a little bit too low, even if I had a chair. I can get slightly comfy on one knee but I guess to anyone getting wrapped up in the commercials on the plasma screen above me, it looks like I'm saying my last rites online before my flight.. This does pose a new problem for Dan to work out: my cookie is still in this browser, so any schmoe who walks up can post to Flutterby directly unless I logout.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Well, I'm back. I think I need to get the "rants" working again so we can put the longer pieces on separate pages. Missed photo of the trip: The "Optimist Christmas Trees" in Tahoe. Yes, I know what they were, but I'm imagining this conifer saying "I'm gonna make it to Easter!" Lots o' pictures and a longer rant coming soon.

Finally, an explanation for the .com boom: Are You Billable?

• Is the software you work on always broken and never gets better?
• Are people more concerned with filling out timesheets rather than doing their job?
• Does your boss act like he expects you to pull hours out of nowhere?

Well, if you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you are working for a money laundering operation.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Normally I don't do this, but I just got a long well-written email from a technical recruiter working for a company that sounds like it's doing some potentially interesting stuff in the "alternatives to browsers" space. I don't know how much of what he wrote is public, and their web page is information free and sucks, but if you're looking for a 100% Linux sysadmin job in Sunnyvale for a company that sounds like they've got some really neat ideas, drop me an email.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama ]

If you diddle around with digital cameras, especially if you're reading directly from CompactFlash cards mounted as disks, you might want to investigate the Digital Print Order Format. Does anyone out there know how to read the Canon .ctg files?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Dylan called from the other room, wondering about spam that's trying to sell him Viagra so he can "make love like a teen".... 20 seconds, woohoo!

Well, I've always thought of it as the "staff of life": Lynne Allen-Hoffman of the University of Wisconsin is growing immortal foreskin cells. (I expect that the archive version will end up here). The answer, the researchers found, rested in a single strand of one chromosome. Chromosomes are the tiny strands of genetic material that contain the DNA that determines the characteristics of the entire cell, and chromosome 8 had a duplicate string of DNA.

[ related topics: Drugs Web development ]

Yay! Supreme Court strikes down drug roadblocks: "Because the primary purpose of the Indianapolis checkpoint program is ultimately indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control, the checkpoints violate the Fourth Amendment" protection against unreasonable searches, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared for the court majority.

A few notes and images from my recent Sierra trip are up.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Ya know I love TheOnion. When news breaks...they fix it

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Yay! Search works again. Only on entries, not rants, and it's a little slow, but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye. Quoted strings require exact match, prefixed "+" requires, prefixed "-" excludes, ranking is by number of non-prefixed words matched. Anyone know of conventions for partial matches, or should I just give y'all access to the full regular expression search?

I've been ignoring this whole election thing (except for the parodies and satire) because I've felt up to now that the system will work itself out, and since it was really a tie it doesn't matter who "won", nobody's got a mandate. But I'm not so sure, after my vacation last week I heard some ugly rumours, and today Salon's got a recap of the Republican attempt to override law with mob.

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Just got a message via SecureDelivery, which uses HTTPS to let you transfer encrypted data. While retrieving it, my first attempt to set a passphrase failed. This showed up a flaw in the system: If my email is compromised, at best the SecureDelivery system can warn me, but no matter what that supposedly secure data isn't. Guess what my next Fucked Company pick is going to include?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I think I've mentioned Strange Horizons here before, the online SF magazine that Mary Anne Mohanraj is a part of. I've been wondering at the decline of the heroic myth in American culture for a while. Horatio Alger stories are out of fashion, replaced by tales of people trapped by circumstance, too weak to make a stand, ala the wretched but well acclaimed American Beauty. Brains vs. Brawn: The Birthright Trend in Current Science Fiction Television Programming explores this trend: It's all very well if delivered tongue-in-cheek, but the message that some people are born to greatness, while the rest, no matter what their abilities, are meant to support them, smacks of a feudal sensibility. It's possible that this is nothing more than a bit of high fantasy sneaking into science fiction (Star Wars, with its knights and princesses, is the classic example of that), but it could also be a reflection of a societal inclination in America to trust the mystical over the rational. Strange as it may seem, the growing popularity of science fiction on television springs from the declining faith in education in American society. Like a priest's vocation, heroism is a calling, instead of a choice.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Star Wars Erotic Technology and Culture ]

Welp, I was already to buy a tivo and along comes the radeon card outta nowhere. Hmmm I'm going to have to look a little more deeply into it but having a movie collection and tivo like recordings on hard drives sounds very appealing.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Over the years I've had lots o' discussions with people about why "Software Engineering" isn't, one analogy was that "we're asked to build a bridge, except this side of the water's all fogged in and we don't even know if it's a river or an ocean". Via Identity, If Architects had to work like Web Programmers is dead on.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

Dan thinks our office looks like it has been invaded by Darkstar aliens. I remember the one on the ship being more orange...

Salon reviews The Undergrowth of Science by Walter Gratzer. I don't need anything more to read right now, but this looks like an interesting exploration of why people grab on to some really bizarre ideas, and how some of them make waves in the scientific community.

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

So I have a Windows machine that needs more disk space. I have a drive that's way bigger than I need. I think that I'll replace the little drive in the Windows box with the big drive, and use the little drive in a Linux box somewhere. No problem, right? I'll simply partition the drive, format and sys it, then copy the files across, swap drives, and I'm done. Not! From now on any time anyone talks about Unix being hard to configure I'm just going to laugh myself silly and ridicule them for their self-delusion.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]

I love america. This Capitalist knew her market and gave us what we wanted. you GO grrrrl...

[ related topics: Web development ]