Flutterby™! From 2001-04-01 to 2001-04-30

Wonder if Maya can do this... /. reports Blender running on an iPaq , just in case you needed a palmtop 3d modeling and animation system.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Animation ]

Charlene took me to The Crucible at the Marin Theatre Company last night, which I'd last read in high school, and with an adult perspective I was struck at how little we've learned since 1953.

Let you not mistake your duty as I mistook my own. I came into this village like a bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crowns of holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. Beware, Goody Proctor - cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

[ related topics: Religion Dan's Life ]

Wow. I knew this was going to happen, but didn't expect it this soon. Broadcast TV is irrelevant. From this morning's hike: the San Francisco NBC affiliate will be losing its NBC affiliation, and probably drop back to Judge Judy and infomercials for its lineup. The San Jose station will be filling the NBC slot on the various Bay Area cable channels, even those that can't get it broadcast. Think about what this is going to mean for HDTV...

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

Columbine points out that the economics of the web lead to quality filtering in reverse.

I have been without bandwidth at the house since friday <shiver> The North Point network has gone Dark. The conundrum of this is that the bandwidth pipe from North Point has been rock solid until they threw the switch...

[ related topics: Todd Gemmell ]

The Billboard Liberation Front strikes again.

[ related topics: Web development ]

25 miles with 802.11b? Yeah, right. Via DSL Reports, Rob Flickenger does the math on those fixed wireless claims.

[ related topics: Wireless Weblogs ]

The Fucked Company porn lead to Little Gray Guy, the cat with the porn website, which lead to the Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW) foundation.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture New Economy ]

Yeesh, when I went to see the Vagina Monologues I didn't get nearly the feeling of helplessness and hate everyone seems to be seeing in it. Sure, it felt a little outmoded, but I thought that was because I lived in the Bay Area. Maybe in other areas Eve Ensler has been a little more strident about linking the whole V-Day thing. Anyway, Betty Dodson piles on the Anti-Vagina Monologues backlash:

...that night at Madison Square Garden there was no complimentary ticket for Granny Dodson to attend the biggest "V-Day" rally to date. I was there only because my girlfriend had VIP tickets. She's convinced that without me, there would be no Vagina Monologues. I correct her, saying, "Cunt Dialogues, please—anything but vagina."

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Thanks to a link from Ziffle I checked my DSL options and they suck. Cable broadband is not available in my area. I am looking into Dish broadband but I am worried about the latencey and the fact that Star band can't keep their website up. Suggestions. PLEEEEEEEEEASE! I need bandwidth!!!

[ related topics: Ziffle Todd Gemmell broadband ]

QOTD, Willie Brown calls Dubya "symbol of ebonics":

"There ain't no brother in Oakland, or anywhere else, that would run the phrase or mix up the words the way this cat does," said Brown, with his trademark Cheshire Cat look. "It raises serious questions about whether he's really white."

[ related topics: Quotes Politics ]

It's an "all entries by someone else" day here at Flutterby! Via Bifurcated Rivets, My Little Phallus.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Via Pursed Lips, the National Research Council will tour regions that voted for Bush to ask about citizens' views on Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography and Their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Internet Content.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture ]

After yesterday's link on the logistics of 25 miles with 802.11b gear, Greg Hanek passed along Rob Frohne's notes on how to Use a Surplus Primestar Dish as an IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networking Antenna. Anyone in Fairfax, especially along the San Anselmo side or up the hill where you can see Willow Ave interested in diddling with a community network? Time to start scrounging those garage sales.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

While at the hair salon today, I picked up an old copy of Car & Driver (being a new Porsche driver, I've developed a more than passing interest in cars) and flipped open to an early test drive of a 2001 Porsche 911. I was startled to learn they were test driving on the Playa - the same Playa that Burning Man puts so much effort into preserving, Car & Driver magazine was encouraging drivers to push their cars to the limits. Could you imagine what the Playa would be like if every muscle car owner from LA got out there over a weekend?

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

Hey Jesus! your Mom is a Babe

[ related topics: Religion Humor Sexual Culture ]

Yay: The Economist is willing to call a spade a shovel: An analysis of the EP-3 downing, what China wants, how that meshes with internal political struggles, why the US isn't going on the diplomatic counter-offensive. Not terribly deep, but better than the simple stenography I've seen in all the other stories so far.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Quick, before they take it down, go check out this ad for PaddyPower, Ireland's Biggest Bookmaker.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Went with Todd and Dylan to the Churchill Club to hear Mark Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Loudcloud. Two quotes of note. Mark Andreesen said:

"...the answer to all life's questions can be found in Cheech & Chong movies."

And either Mark or Ben said, roughly, there's a little paraphrase here, something that sums up my estimation of Loudcloud:

"The reason we went to the public markets is that private investors are very intelligent."

[ related topics: Quotes Sexual Culture Todd Gemmell ]

Kat Sunlove muses about The Will to Censor:

No, the anti-porn zealots may take cover behind such secondary effects arguments, but the real demon they fight is a deep and terrifying dread of the sexual desire and perversity that they sense exists within themselves. Spectator columnist Dr. Carol Queen has labeled such people "absexuals." They condemn to the world that which they secretly or even unconsciously long for themselves.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Just because we're going to have to talk about this widely, Larry Wall on Perl 6: Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good: "I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon."

[ related topics: Perl ]

So I was trying to beat Debra Hyde to the punch with that Kat Sunlove article, but then I actually read through her current entries and found she's linked to it. Now I'm listening to Debra on Love Bytes, a fun interview, but her diaries are more interesting. So I think I've found one that Debra hasn't linked (and might be outside her interests), Carol Queen's current essay in Good Vibrations Magazine talks about meeting the alternative community in Murfreesboro Tennessee.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Sexual Culture ]

Sorry about the ups and downs, I'm playing with the Apache config, and it's breaking the mod_perl stuff.

Next time someone suggests setting emulating a cut-rate ISP's truly brain-dead environment on the Flutterby server for testing, the answer will be a simple "no". Punctuated by small-arms fire, if necessary. The fixing work continues, but a P133 only compiles so fast.

AAAAAaaaaaargh! Okay, I'm going off to Toledo for the weekend to visit fambly. I'll see y'all on Tuesday. Flutterby is back to working, albeit a bit slower than normal. Next week I'll diddle with things again and see about configuring a replacement server that has 8 times the processor power, a better I/O bus, and less cruft.

The real Wall Street view of Jeff Bezos, compliments of the Billboard Liberation Front.

[ related topics: Web development Technology and Culture New Economy ]

SourceXchange shuts down ....long sigh

[ related topics: Free Software Business Open Source ]

Microsith is the site of the day. Even Darth Vader could be turned back to the light side of the force. I hold no such hope for Darth paperclip

[ related topics: Humor Star Wars Microsoft ]

What does Bilbo have in his pocket? Why yes he is happy to see you but....hey cut that out!! it's just the Latest Perl Release from the fine folks at ActiveState

[ related topics: Web development Perl Open Source tolkien ]

Whew. Back from flyover country. Longer notes and pictures later. Had an awesome experience with a potato cannon, blowing holes in plywood and getting nearly 9 second flight times which implies 300+ feet of altitude, with a little engineering we could probably endanger low flying airplanes with errant spuds. Nice to get together with the family and be reminded of old traditions and events. And reminders of why I live in California, despite all the down-sides.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Miffy at School, by Dick Bruna:

Now it's story time.

We all sit on the floor.

I ask a question,

but it's a stupid question

and now I have to do detention afterschool.

The teacher says,

"Nobody likes a wiseass."

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Hale-freakin'-lujah! I think I've got Apache and everything configured right. I'm a little pissed at Sendmail for their configuration-of-the-minor-revision trick, but that appears to be working as well.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Doh! after trading email with a Salon writer for her article you would think she could spell your name right. Oh well, just call me Mr. Gellman

[ related topics: Business Humor Web development Todd Gemmell Coyote Grits ]

Yahoo opens porn video online store. "Do you, uh, ...?"

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Try that with your NT box: University of North Carolina finally finds missing Novell server, sealed behind drywall for 4 years. Still running flawlessly.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Please send hate mail! Clippy Must Die

Ouch! Amazon partners with Borders online division, story on Yahoo and story on the Standard. Cam points out that the Borders online group was about 100 people, which makes their competition on the same field as Amazon pretty impressive, but what got me about this whole thing was that Jeff Bezos has been spending hundreds of millions on branding, and the Borders website will remain separate. I'm guessing Borders will get it back within two years, probably less...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Books ]

It's "random linkage" day here, for you trekkers (what is the current politically correct term for that?) via Julie via Barry comes K'Pinky and Brain

[ related topics: Humor Star Trek ]

Via Borklog, Jesus comes to dinner

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

Microsoft has gotta love this. using Xbox as an Apache server. We all remember the I-opener.

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Web development Games Microsoft Open Source ]

Can't say I didn't see THIS coming but I am sad about it just the same.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Though her voice may not speak to those who aren't lucky enough to be southern, Eudora Welty is 92 today.

LONG before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

From One Writer's Beginnings

[ related topics: Books ]

I guess we can debate forever without settling the question over whether or not drugs should be illegal. Here's a twist on the story. Should it be illegal to sell urine? South Carolina believes so.

I don't know about ya'll but if I had spent the time and effort to fill 20 gallon jugs with my own urine and then had it confiscated like that I'd be, well, . . . pissed.

[ related topics: Drugs Privacy Free Speech ]

Way back in '99 I linked to an article on how sports stadiums don't economically benefit communities. Via RC3, an interview with the authors of yet another study on how government funding of sports arenas is a bad idea:

On average, professional sports reduces inflation-adjusted income per person by a small but statistically significant amount, roughly $40 per person per year. That figure is for every person in the metropolitan area, not just people who attended games. So professional sports do not form the basis of a viable local economic development program.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Had the usual Friday night Counter-Strike session at the office last night, far too many people and it was a mad-house and annoying and not all that much fun; I want to shoot at them, not baby-sit them. So as far as kids are concerned I'm in a pissy mood today. Via a lot of places, Bush wants to end contraceptive coverage for public employees. To the child-free: Hunker down, they're gonna want a lot more of your money to cover the kids they're unwilling to take responsibility for, but just remember that "childruuun are our future!"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics ]

Ad Critic may be the only good use for broadband, but it is a good one. Occasionally aspiring film-makers will risk the wrath of the legal department and make an ad that they think a company should have made. Usually they're outrageously good, but too edgey to actually use, as in the Tampax Red spec commercial.

[ related topics: Humor ]

It's Easter and National Poetry Month. I shuffled thru my bedside stack of books and found this:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

by Theodore Roethke

Happy Reawakening!

[ related topics: Religion Quotes ]

Trellix licenses Blogger and fills Pyra's silos for the coming winter with this Deal

Richard Garriott's NDA has expired and now he tells us what happened and the plans for the future

[ related topics: Nostalgia Games Technology and Culture ]

I've got a personal ramble I keep starting and failing to write, so this'll have to do for a morning update. Salon has an Ode to Frances, the badger written by Russell Hoban and illustrated mostly by Lillian Hoban. That article also pointed to A Russell Hoban Reference Page which has more on Frances. I grew up on the stories, and the collected Frances stories have a place on my bookshelf.

'Yes, she does,' said Mother. 'Even if nobody can see her, Alice has one birthday every year, and so do you. Your birthday is two months from now. Then you will be the birthday girl. But tomorrow is Gloria's birthday, and she will be the birthday girl.'

'That's how it is, Alice,' said Frances. 'Your birthday is always the one that is not now.'

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

In an essay titled Mixed Emotions, Eric Francis provides a practical guide to three way sex. No, you prurient jackals, I won't tell you why this is of interest!

When three people get together to share sexual joy, an extraordinarily deep level of surrender is necessary, and we must totally go outside the safe zone. We must sail out into the high seas. In this unusually open space, we are exposed to a wide variety of psychic weater, to which we're unaccustomed. And it's a truly vulnerable place to be.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Via Daze Reader, some notes on a Texas A&M study on online sex originally published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (alas, $117/year seems a little steep), gives us a little hope that maybe it's not some middle-aged guy in Peoria.

While men are more likely than women to surf the net for titillating material, women are more likely to engage in 'cyber sex,' according to the results of a new survey.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Well, not finding anything to bring the level of discourse up to that of my co-contributors, how about a lot of sex links? Walking around naked for a U.C. Berkeley class.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Argh. I can get to Flutterby from my home machine, but not from the Pac Bell DSL at work, someone's got a routing issue that's causing return packets to get lost into the ether on the far side of AlterNet. So these entries were typed with Lynx while SSHed into my home machine.

[ related topics: broadband Coyote Grits ]

This one's for Larry! Via EatonWeb via Metafilter comes the opportunity build your own slot car racetrack and race on it. Requires Shockwave and is in Swedish, but you'll figure it out.

Today's frustration is that I've got an AMI RAID controller on a BP6 motherboard, and when the 2.2.18 kernel boots it identifies the card, ads it to the SCSI list, and then soft-hangs there. Anyone had experience with this? Update: Sigh, it's gonna be one of those days, I'm having all that great fun relearning how to build custom boot disks that mount root off of weird directories and such. Joy.

Two random pictures. To the left, a great license plate on a VW Rabbit (if ya can't see it, it's "HSNFFR"), to the right proof that we're making progress in San Francisco, from the SF Examiner a few days ago.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Parked outside the office the other day was the official vehicle of the National Bra Tapestry(no link 'cause I can't find the official site), that ball on the trailer is all lacy (and not so lacy) underthings.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture ]

Apparently they're serious, but I laughed: Fuking Machines has images of... well... fucking machines. Both commercial and home-made. If you wanna skip all the nekkid women and just get on to the Tim Taylor style hardware, you can go directly to meet the machines.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Via Pursed Lips, an online petition to Yahoo to reinstate the 'Adult' categories. Go. Now.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Didn't get a picture of it, but saw the license plate "2XYS1XX" yesterday evening. Wondering if they're poly, or if there's another meaning I'm not getting.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Tip of the day: When working with an AMI MegaRAID controller on which you've disconnected a drive because you've stuffed it into another computer to get a 2.4 kernel on it so the driver doesn't hang during boot, be sure to silence the alarm before you start the uninterruptiple reconstruction process. 5% done, which means I've probably only got another 30 minutes of this incessant beeping. Wish I'd found the "silence alarm" menu option before I found the "delete non-responding drive" option...

Today is John Muir's Birthday, a fact I didn't know until I searched for that link. Serendipity lives and life is good! I hiked a 4-5mi piece [from the Powerhouse to Coker Creek] and back out of the 18+mi Hiwassee River portion of Muir's famous 1000mi walk.

Multiple wildflowers, a coupla good sized black rat snakes, numerous lizards, frogs, and views of the Hiwassee River that prompted Muir to write:

All the larger streams of uncultivated countries are mysteriously charming and beautiful, whether flowing in mountains or through swamps and plains. Their channels are interestingly sculptured, far more so than the grandest architectural works of man. The finest of the forests are usually found along their banks, and in the multitude of falls and rapids the wilderness finds a voice. Such a river is the Hiwassee, with its surface broken to a thousand sparkling gems, and its forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden. And how fine the songs it sings!

from A 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf

I wish I had pics, but I'm "non-digital" so those will have to wait.

[ related topics: Quotes Nature and environment ]

So Friday Charlene and I took Zack and his friend Joey to a talk by Mark Tilden, of BEAM robotics fame. His philosophy is building lots of small autonomous self-powered robots that we can build fast enough to evolve by throwing away the ones that don't work well, and making them fairly specialized so that they work together rather than one for all the steps in the process. It occurred to me today that Tilden's philosophy of robotics is much the same as the vision that created the Unix design that took (some of) us away from the huge monolithic application model and on to lightweight apps which communicate. Something to think about: When his jar-lid sized floor and window cleaning robots become ubiquitous, what's the GUI model of robotics going to be?

[ related topics: Robotics ]

So when I mentioned the BEAM robots as Unix philosophy thing to Charlene, something crossed in my brain and rather than Mark Tilden, I said "Mark Pritchard", which lead to musings on swarms of autonomous solar-powered dildos that run underneath the bed when they sense human presence....

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics ]

I know it was on Slashdot a few days ago, but this article comparing PHP, Perl and Java for server-side scripting from IBM looks like a great overview of the differring technologies. I especially like the conclusion:

On the other hand, Perl makes a lot of things weirder. It's a simple language to learn, once you can get past the culture shock. PHP has removed much of the quirkiness from Perl, but in the process it has lost just a little of the power. Java makes the hard things easier, especially since a lot of them have already been done and can be included or inherited efficiently. But it also makes some of the easy things a bit harder than perhaps they should be.

[ related topics: Language Web development Books Perl Open Source ]

Some bits of information need to be conveyed on a subliminal level. Weather reports fall into this category. I shouldn't have to listen consciously to a weather report to know the likelyhood of rain for the day, I should just know that there is a good chance for rain. What better time to pick up this information than breakfast?

[ related topics: User Interface Technology and Culture Invention and Design ]

At various times Todd and I have mused over the possible joys of a massively multiplayer game that let people take different roles. If you had 13 year old reflexes you could play the grunt on the front lines, if your tastes ran towards the political you could be the president who deployed those troops. Coupling that idea with a little Jonathan Swift, on /. Roblimo proposes an Internet Drug Game, with a few slots for Drug Czar, and numerous too-thin avatars for those who want to play a junkie searching for the next fix. Obviously you'd also need spokespeople for trying to justify shooting down civilian aircraft as well.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Todd Gemmell ]

Very interesting profile of the swinging community, extensively footnoted, at the Society for Human Sexuality.

As far as anyone knows, swinging (as this community exists today, in the United States) had its roots amongst an elite group of U.S. Air Force fighter pilots during World War II. These men were wealthy enough to move their wives close to base, and the fact that their fatality rate was the highest of any branch of service led to an unusual social milieu in which non-monogamy between these pilots' wives and other pilots became acceptable.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Doc Searles has an entry with a lot of great links on education. All of 'em are great, The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, for instance, says:

Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world of that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

I'm frustrated. I talked with a friend about a web page he's doing, expressed my distaste for certain traits that have been foisted of on us by graphic designers at the expense of usability, he agreed, but said that he needed to do that because it's what people expect. How have the graphic designers infiltrated our conversations in such a way that we feel we need to insert them in our information flow when most everyone in that process thinks that they detract from the actual information exchanged?

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via Camworld, Philip Greenspun on the ArsDigita suit.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett ]

I linked to Carol Queen's notes on being in Tennessee in Good Vibrations Magazine, she continues talking about unbuckling the bible belt in Spectator. And I think Debra already linked to this one, but there's an interesting essay by Marcy Sheiner celebrating tasteless, demeaning, raunchy porn as well.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Sexual Culture ]

Some facts muddled to protect anonymity: A mother is fairly casual about nudity, as her son grows up, at some point he says something like "Mom, you're too ugly to not be dressed all the time". I recently got a call for submissions for one of the good sex-centered online magazines asking for some essays on body image. I keep thinking there's something extremely revealing and deep in that little exchange, but I'm not quite sure how to expand on it. Anyone wanna riff on body image and see if we can put together such an essay?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

A few days ago I put up some pictures of the National Bra Tapestry ball. Via Daze Reader, the story of the squabble behind the competing bra balls. Apparently Emily Duffy, the person who came up with the idea, has a site at BraBall.com

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Stolen from Backup Brain, first there was the Aibo, now there's the Vibe-inu, a robotic dog with a vibrating nose.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics ]

Emboldened by that whole David Horowitz running anti-slavery-reparations ads fiasco, David Mazel tries to run "God is an Abortionist" ads in various college papers. Snicker.

[ related topics: Free Speech ]

So I'm reconfiguring a bunch of machines, and in the process having to do some net configuration. The DHCP versus static IP thing made me realize that when some people evaluate technologies they see how the technology can make life easier, when I evaluate technologies I see the failure modes first.

Via /., a bunch of guys are building a model airplane to fly across the Atlantic.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Sony to release Linux on Playstation 2. If your browser is japanese enabled, you could try Sony's Playstation Linux page.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

":Open the archives!" cry archivists who are putting their collections on the net. Lots o' good links contained within that article.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Politics ]

I've noticed that my Flutterby entries recently have been fairly non-personal. There's a reason for this. On Friday, Todd and I finished cleaning out the Coyote Grits offices. With the .com downturn we weren't finding work for that mix of people, and decided it was time to try other things. We wanted to kind of keep it hush-hush 'til we were sure that we could make everyone we still owed something to happy, and I think we've done that. So I'm job-hunting, looking around to see what's interesting, finding if there's anything in the tech world right now that really fires me up. I've got a few prospects, but if anyone's got ideas for neat projects that coincide with my interests, give a holler!

[ related topics: Dan's Life Todd Gemmell Coyote Grits ]

I just installed Opera 5.0 Beta 8 for Linux. I was running Beta 7. I've only had the new Beta installed for a few minutes but one thing is for sure: IT'S F*CKING FAST!!!

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Invention and Design ]