Flutterby™! From 2001-06-01 to 2001-06-30

It's baaaaack: Young gays contracting HIV at 'explosive' rate, CDC says. Among gay and bi African-American men the infection rate is almost 15%/year. Use latex, kids! To be fair:

CDC officials cautioned that the new data are preliminary and represent a relatively small sampling of gay men who may be more sexually active than their peers.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

A few years ago I mentioned a Harper's article about David Hahn, the kid who got a good way towards building a breeder reactor in his back yard. Via Camworld, a web transcription of that article, The Radioactive Boy Scout.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Children and growing up ]

It's National Trails Day and I hope we all try to get out there and enjoy the trails.

"There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog." -- Edward Abbey

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Joel Selvin delivers A Napster Eulogy. It seems fairly clear that the legal remedies will destroy any of the legitimate uses for Napster which, of course, is exactly what the RIAA wanted. Wish I ran this site anonymously so I could ramble further on this topic...

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Music ]

I finally got around to seeing Eyes Wide Shut last week, and yesterday evening rewatched Sirens. I mention them together because they both seem to be saying the same thing in remarkably different ways, and despite the canonization of Stanley Kubrick, I think Sirens does a better job. The difference is that watching Eyes Wide Shut is a tedious task, it's only in the memory and the analysis that it gets better, and there it sometimes feels like that's because I'm reading more into much of the visual language that Kubrick uses than was actually there.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

Aaaugh! Sorry about the outage, someting in 'nooga caused the server to reboot and somehow I'd gotten the boot script out of sync with the machine state. D'oh!

Yes, Ballmer sounds like a lunatic with his "Linux is the anti-christ" spiel, but there's no reason for Microsoft to be making all of this anti-Open Source noise except as a smokescreen. Pay attention to the web services issues. Pay attention to the subscription models that they're implementing. These are the real issues that they're attempting to divert attention from!

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

Two recent discoveries: Some conflicts in the testing Debian packages have meant that I use Emacs rather than XEmacs to read my email. Since Emacs doesn't have the W3 module installed I don't read HTML email. This is good. At the same time I've also turned off site-based stylesheets in Opera. This is even better. I need to tweak a few things about the Flutterby design so that it looks a little better this way, but the number of sites that become amazingly more readable without their designer's vision intact is incredible.

[ related topics: Web development ]

What happens in the absence of government? Well, in Mogadishu, capitalism is replacing the feudalist gangs.

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism ]

Well, ImageK/Silicon Film/whatever is finally shipping their film-canister like CMOS sensor that I wanted when they announced it a few years ago. Unfortunately, 1280x1024, 24 shots (the box to save off shots independent of a computer isn't ready yet) doesn't seem worth carrying my big cameras around for. I think they missed their window. And check out their goofy stupid product names. Obviously a company that's spent too much on management and not put the resources into engineering it should have.

[ related topics: Photography ]

So I'm looking through a couple of hundred megabytes of data that I'm trying to extract some reasonable information from, and I come across:

Baha Men - Who Let The Dogs Out (Good Version).mp3

[ related topics: Music ]

Via Dodger, in Sweden, vibrators have been recalled because of cadmium in the plastics. Hmmm... need to go ask the good folks at Good Vibrations which of my toys are affected.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

From Plastic I found a link to this NY Times (subcription required but free)article about Pearl Harbor, the historical event and Pearl Harbor the movie and the effects of revisionism that this is having all around. It seems the LA Times is of the opinion that the attack was a surprise attack and shouldn't be referred to by its journalist as a sneak attack.

"But there were other Americans who suffered, and they were Japanese Americans," she said, referring to the wartime relocation and internment of citizens of Japanese descent. " `Sneak' conjures up images" of the racial hatred and racial epithets of the 1940's, she added. "Particularly in the western U.S., it resonates." The preferred alternative for describing the events at Pearl Harbor in The Los Angeles Times is now "surprise attack."

Now, I'm all for forgiveness over what happened in 1941, afterall, this isn't the Middle East, and I think it is a terrible thing that we did to US citizens of Japanese descent during that time and reparations to them was in order. I don't want to offend anyone, but it just seems to me that the term sneak is very appropriate for what happened.

[ related topics: Movies History Political Correctness ]

I seem to be finding an awful lot of things completely absurd this week, but the winner thus far is: C.I.A. Director Is Going to Israel in Effort to Maintain Calm.

[ related topics: Politics ]

European Home Office officials are supporting demands from law enforcement authorities for logs of all Internet traffic to be stored for up to seven years.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy ]

Perspective of the day, Michael Pollan quoted in a New York Times look at Pollan's The Botany of Desire: "It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees".

[ related topics: Books Bioinformatics Michael Pollan ]

I'm baaaaack. I'll horify you with my Pacbell/bandwidth story later. Today's rant is about Sendmail You see I decided to upgrade my home server to RedHat 7.1 and with that came sendmail 8.11 which seemed all well and fine but if you upgrade, it automatically installs a new sendmail.cf file that clamps down your system so tight only localhost 127.0.0.1 can use it. Yeeeech.. so 3 hours later, as I made the mistake of attempting to use RedHat documentation instead of going to sendmail first, I can now send email again.

[ related topics: broadband Open Source Invention and Design ]

Via Medley: Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we've all been waiting with bated breath for American Gods, now the first chapter is available online.

[ related topics: Books ]

Sea of Silverlight has been publish which is the 4th and final book in the Otherland "trilogy" from Tad Williams Which also reminds me he is starting an online story Shadowmarch

[ related topics: Books ]

Steven Leeb has built a ballast that encodes data in flourescent light fixtures. He mainly sees the applications as augmenting the environment for people with various disabilities, by carrying around receivers they could have additional information about the environment.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

BMW films is a great place to visit if you have bandwidth to spare. I'm a big fan of short films so here's the quick review....

1. Ambush directed by John Frankenheimer ok car chase scenes but basically "sucks rocks"
   
   
2. Chosen directed by Ang Lee the best of the bunch if you see just one, this is it
   
   
3. The Follow directed by Wong Kar-Wai kinda a nice twist
   
   
4. Star directed by Guy Ritchie easily the funniest in this crowd
   
   
5. Powder keg directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (not out yet)
   
   

[ related topics: Movies broadband ]

There's a big outcry over Microsoft's "Smart Tags" features in the XP browser (aside: has anyone figured out what XP means besides "extra pricey"?), Dave Winer collected people's fears yesterday. I don't know for certain, but from the descriptions I've seen there's a solution: Richly link the hell out of your pages. Larry's convinced me that I need to go CSS, and that'd let me have different classes of links, which means that I could link nearly every phrase in a document (with some tool rewriting). That's what the promise of hypertext means to me, if Microsoft pushes us to making our content richer with better generation tools that doesn't sound all bad to me.

[ related topics: Web development Dave Winer Microsoft ]

QOTD, from the /. interview with Alex Chiu, proving that he's obviously the master of the .com:

Our company cannot afford to do this kind of expensive research at this stage. This kind of research would cost hundreds of thousands. I rather use that money on advertising. Testimonials are enough to convince people for now. I think even if I did the research mentioned above, it would be a total waste of money because if those people don't believe in the testimonials, they won't believe in the research at all. They would say that I made it all up. So why waste money?

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Heard this guy on As It Happens yesterday evening and he sounded really cool, if a little eccentric: Brian Milton plans to make a 33-hour, non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in an open cockpit weightshift microlight.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Sigh. Okay, so if, at 17:30 on a Friday afternoon when everyone is trying to get home, you're completely anencephalic and miss the "FasTrak lane ahead" signs, and then the big "FasTrak only!" lines painted on the roadway for several hundred feet before the toll booth, and the blinking yellow light that's only above that lane, right below the big FasTrak sign (which also only exists on that lane), and realize your mistake when you notice that there's nobody in that tool booth, you should:

1. Continue through the toll booth, put on your blinker, go to the designated parking lot and talk with the nice understanding people in the big building. And everyone I know whose had reason to go talk with them has told me that they are truly very nice and very understanding.
2. Park your car in the middle of the only FasTrak lane on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, ignore all the people shouting "go park next to the building", get out of your car, and walk across lanes of flowing traffic to go talk to the people who are shouting these helpful instructions to you about what you should do.

Apparently this is not a rhetorical question.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Lest I give y'all the (correct) impression that I'm just an annoying self-centered boor, while I'm whining about by commute being held up a little, Debra Hyde is wondering about a boy who's run away. One of my ongoing ethical quests is about children (despite my calls for legal abortion through the 55^th trimester), how they're not really adults and we can't treat them as such, and yet they're not property, and we can't just allow parents to treat them as they will. So what are our collective responsibilities to their parents when we disagree with how they're being raised?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Ethics ]

Cal-ISO gets hacked and I can't help but giggle at the thought of a couple of 14 year old kids playing black out BINGO with the california power grid.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Technology and Culture Bay Area ]

So Anarchy Online launches it's beta (they claim they have over 100k people). These guys are going up against Sony and EA for the MMORPG crowd and I wish them luck.

[ related topics: Business Web development Games ]

Went to the Mountain Play production of Oliver yesterday. I don't think I'd actually been to that theatre before, although of course I've seen it in various movies and such. It's outdoors, with stone seats, up on the side of Mount Tamalpais. Pretty good show, too, a very good job of dealing with outdoor sound issues.

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

Finished leafing through the first O'Reilly offering to hit the bioinformatics wave, Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills. I am not its target audience. It's a quick and overview of a lot of different tools for bioinformatics (although none in the area that I'm currently exploring), with a bit of the chemistry bundled in, but I get the feeling that it would really rather be two fairly high level books, one covering the chemistry and genomic biology, the other covering the tools. Or at least I'd rather it were that, 'cause then I wouldn't have had to skim over the tools bits to find the parts that were up my alley. Anyway, can't recommend it unreservedly unless you're a working biologist who knows all this stuff, and then my guess is that you're probably steeped in the culture of your profession enough that you already know most of it.

[ related topics: Books Bioinformatics ]

As you've undoubtedly heard the United States has created a martyr, and I'd surmise has caused more wounds than it helped heal. Not that I can in any way condone his actions, although I believe more Americans than anyone thinks can understand some of his motivations, and I think the terms of his conviction were fair, but I think playing up the children killed in the day-care center as the reason for his death, when he was sentenced to death for the murder of federal agents, only adds moral ambiguity to the situation. My own philosophies on this matter have mellowed over the years since the bombing, I now think that his death sentence is wrong for largely pragmatic reasons, but no matter what his death heals little. And perhaps it's just been people smarter than him managing his public image, but I daresay he put quite a bit of thought into his actions and acted from convictions. Even if you, like me, disagree with his actions, that should cause fear over and above the fear of disorder. That CNN story links to a scanned GIF of his final statement, a quote of some or all of William Ernest Henley's Invictus, which I'm reproducing here because I don't like the way everyone's quoting two lines out of context. Capitalization as best I can puzzle it out from his handwriting:

Final Written Statement of Timothy McVeigh

Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

  my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

  I am the captain of my soul.

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism Ethics ]

Charles Taylor has a great article about the morality police who are hiding behind children in which, among other things, he takes on the "click on and jack off" Salon article that I found distasteful.

"...we are still awaiting the great piece of social criticism about modern society's fetishistic construction of childhood as a time of asexual innocence."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture ]

Snopes is a great site to point your more gullible friends when they try to explain to you how Bill Gates will send them a check . Yeah I know thats and old one but they keep coming back. This site seems to providing a useful service.

[ related topics: Humor moron ]

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies I have seen in recent memory. I recently watched it again on DVD and I had to put this warning out. If you are watching it for the first time PLEASE do not watch the english dub. The movie looses a LOT in the translation and interestingly sometime because they did not translate proper nouns.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Movies ]

Yay! The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement officers need a warrant to use heat detectors on houses.

"Where, as here, the government uses a device that is not in general public use to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant," Scalia wrote.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy ]

Via /., Roke Manor Research proposes detecting "stealth" aircraft with cellphone networks.

"The system would work as a bi-static radar. Using the basestation and sensing equipment together, we would be able to accurately plot the position of all aircraft in the area, even if it has been designed to be stealthy."

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation ]

Via /., some awesome pictures of the International Space Station taken with consumer equipment.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

Big day at /. check out the rocket guy...

[ related topics: Humor moron Space & Astronomy ]

So the USDA estimates the cost of raising a child born in 2000 at $165,630. But this is just cost to the parent, so (extremely) optimistically, at $6k/year for school funding taxpayers are covering at least a third of the cost of raising that child to 18. Huh. Nope, no subsidization of population growth going on here... It's also interesting to compare that press release with Salon's AP wire feed version.

[ related topics: Politics Child-Freedom ]

Acronym Translator is very cool and most of our favorites are there i.e. RTFM

Speedle is good example of this and why wierd is a good thing. I espically liked the diagram of a 13 years boys brain and the open letter to Dr. Laura. oh BTW they have a pretty slick linking technology (what caught my attention in the first place)

[ related topics: Humor Political Correctness ]

Two from Dodger, Amateur strippers fight back against New York anti-sex laws, and Brazil is using "pornographic" images to fight AIDS.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Since ads were once the great hope of online media, I'm pondering why they're treated so differently online than everywhere else. Why do we have random ads? There have actually been a couple of times when, on reflection, I wanted to go back and find a banner ad, but when I went back to the page I got a different one. Why don't we embed ads in online media the same way we do in print media?

Teen pregnancy dropped to a record low in 1997, according to the CDC.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture ]

A look at Albert Arthur Allen, a nude photographer of the '20s.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Many years ago, when I lived in Chattanooga, there was a group of people who got together once a month or so who called themselves the Chattanooga C User's Group. We'd talk about algorithms, share code, that sort of thing. One of the folks involved in that crowd was a high schooler named Mark. Well, years later, Mark has a company called AIWorks, and that company has, among other things, a document imaging product. His partner in crime, business, and life, Kelley, is out in the Bay Area for a few days, and last night she and I got together to chat. They've got a deployment of this product in a huge insurance company, a couple of terabytes of imaged forms tied-in to the rest of their business systems, but they're looking around for other uses. Any of y'all out there familiar with systems that are swamped in paper that need solutions? I don't want to guide the brainstorming, but systems which need tracking of checks or paper invoices or the like?

A German web site is offering Madonna tickets to a reader who'll have sex with one of their reporters. Thema1's site appears to be giving me database errors right now or I'd link directly to their own version of the story.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Sometimes movies come along that let critics riff off them in wonderful ways. Today's Chronicle review of Tomb Raider (headlined Raiders of the Lost Brassiere) is one such.

Think of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" as a culmination. It is the ultimate in a trend in action movies to replace story with art direction and substitute style for a coherent narrative.

[ related topics: Games Movies ]

Dan Dorough found a great listing of Berkeley Restaurants.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area ]

Via Need To Know, Extreme Ironing has the potential to become the next "all your base" or Wall Drug type meme...

[ related topics: Humor ]

Bruce Schneier is a pretty nice guy although a bit suspicious, anyhow he has given permission to post snipets of his cryptogram news letter provided he is credited and linked So this little bit of info made the hair on the back of my neck stand up...

"The results are fascinating. A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network."

[ related topics: Free Software Web development Microsoft broadband Open Source security ]

Holy Grail is back in theaters...and OMG 23 seconds of never before seen footage

[ related topics: Humor Technology and Culture Movies ]

Welp, it's legit now. Doh is officially part of the english language. I wish I didn't find this word so useful...

[ related topics: Humor Web development Technology and Culture moron ]

Happy Fathers Day

to all those dads out there that have chossen the endeavor of having and raising children "Thank You". They are our future.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Charlene and I went to The Discord Aggregate Intersection yesterday evening to hear Tony Ryan talk. He does some interesting black and white nudes, drawing heavily from late 19th century paintings. Some good insights into the processes he uses to come up with his images. The venue was also neat, the Discord Aggregate is a collection of folks in a house over in Berkeley, so this was around 10 people in a living room, which made it possible to have the presentation as much dialogue as lecture. I'm not sure which all he'll be speaking at, but his work will be up at ATA in San Francisco, and over at Passion Flower, Ardency Gallery and !Hey! Gallery in Oakland.

[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area ]

My dad passed along Marge Piercy, a poet and writer who I haven't explored heavily yet, but who looks like she's got some interesting thoughts worth pursuing.

[ related topics: Books ]

Apple to Church of Satan: Don't "think different", and take that horrible "made with Macintosh" off the Church of Satan website too.

[ related topics: Religion Apple Computer Web development ]

A Wall Street Journal article on Microsoft's use of Open Source software. "Open source is evil! Don't use it or we might lose our competitive advantage!" The Register also comments on how this article changed when it appeard on MSNBC.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft moron ]

The SF Bay Guardian 2001 Nude Beach guide is up. Fun trip out to Red Rocks beach on Saturday evening, someone had built a fantastic sand-castle on a rock there that was slowly being eroded by the tide. It's also interesting to see the militant non-cruising attitude that's sprung up by the regulars in response to the unpleasantness down at Muir beach.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nudity ]

Okay, the next time anyone's giving me crap about how my profession doesn't understand user needs and how hard software is to use, I have a three word answer: Child car seats.

[ related topics: User Interface Software Engineering ]

The secret of sexual attraction lies in the movement of a woman's eyebrow and the natural smell of a man, or at least that's what the study finds. It goes on to point out that ambition in a man is also a point of attraction for women.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Anti-news: Microsoft IIS web server has yet another root-equivalent exploit.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft moron ]

Doh!(hey it's a real word now) I just noticed that Salon is a about to be delisted

[ related topics: Technology and Culture New Economy Bay Area ]

The real story of the homeless ex-.COMer.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Scary fungus that eats Cds & DVDs. Flesh eating bactera is one thing but this is pretty serious stuff.

[ related topics: Music virus Nature and environment Bioinformatics ]

via /. send your name to Mars in 2003.

[ related topics: History Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

In Spectator, Veronica Monet writes The Truth About Men: The Education of a Courtesan, a neat essay about male stereotypes from a prostitute's perspective. David Steinberg's pictures accompany.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Vitamin C pills tied to DNA risk. The opinion from the Linus Pauling Institute points out that the results of a test tube study might not scale to humans, but excessive concentrations of vitamin C seem to be precursors to DNA damaging substances. Given the common wisdom of megadosing on C as a preventative against viral infection (whence the Linus Pauling reference), it'll be interesting to see the follow-ups to this.

[ related topics: Health ]

Hey there, tall nordic blondes, we've got something in common: Survey finds Finnish women fantasize about sex outdoors. But that whole sauna thing doesn't really work for me.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

I haven't read Paying For It: what children fully cost enough to do basic fact-checking on, but I wanted to continue the cost of a child discussion in a separate place so that we didn't make that page way too long to load. So this is just an entry to hang another discussion off of.

[ related topics: Child-Freedom ]

Hot Damn! Dave Winer is proud to have been listed as a Net Authority offender for violating the Net Authority guidelines. I'm going to have to work on this to try to get all 7 in one entry, but including all 5 types of porn would just be gratuitous.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dave Winer ]

Via Edgecase, the New Scientist reports less than six degrees of sexual separation from a Swedish study in Nature (vol 411, p 907). Shades of the Netizen snogweb (which doesn't seem to be responding right now). There's discussion on the topic at Edgecase.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

You like me! You really like me! Thanks to those who've reported me to the Net Authority, I've gotten two Notification of Internet Violations messages, the tag on the second one (not reproduced here) was "The bit about the baby Jesus and Mohammad went just a little too far, Dan", referring to the attempts to make sure we conformed to all the guidelines yesterday.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Web development ]

Happy Solstice and longest sunlight of the year (at least for y'all north of the equator).

[ related topics: Astronomy ]

I finished Terry Pratchett's latest, Thief of Time, recently, and I think he's finally jumped the shark. I enjoyed The Truth, but in the escalation of his cosmology Pratchett starts to tell tales of gods (well, beyond gods, in his stories) which, because we don't have a strong enough reference for the limitations in which they exist, makes payoffs less satisfying. Still a fun read, but it read more like a Tom Holt novel, funny prose without the strong narrative drive or the usual level of social satire.

[ related topics: Books Terry Pratchett ]

This new source control system rocks. stolen from camworld

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Invention and Design ]

Dave Winer has an exchange with Microsoft employee John Wilcox on Smart Tags which makes me even more sympathetic to the concept. Of course I've been a big proponent of the idea that HTML is a content language, and users should be able to view it in any form they wish, and back in July of 1999 I was publicly thinking about looking up phrases in large public databases. If you're creating "art", use Flash or PDF, if you're writing, use HTML, and offer your users real value.

[ related topics: Web development Dave Winer Microsoft ]

Enron CEO gets a pie in the puss

New York Times: Relying on Hard and Soft Sells, India Pushes Sterilization. Cultural changes are leading the way.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Child-Freedom ]

Interesting note on how Harry Reichenbach manipulated Comstock into promoting September Morn:

The painting, by Paul Chabas, went from being "rejected as a brewer's calendar," to being, for a time, a celebrated icon on par with the Mona Lisa.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Okay, so it's a British holiday, but we should celebrate anyway: Citing a recent study that said 80 percent of women faked their climax during intercourse, the Ann Summers chain of sex shops declared July 31 National Orgasm Day.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Ok, I've actually been a long time defender of Flash technology because I think it has great potential for many uses, buuuuuut it also has the potential for great abuse.

[ related topics: Business Technology and Culture ]

Just got back from 4 hours helping an acquaintance. I'd figured on maybe 2. She's someone I've met at various North Bay Multimedia Association shindigs, has various physical disabilities, and is trying hard to find a career path that'll let her make a living and no longer be supported by the state.

I went over to help her set up an Avid non-linear editor. Various dedicated hardware boxes, a shiny Betacam SP deck, googobs of thick cables with those beefy industrial connectors. No wussy USB folded metal USB connectors here, even for the composite video and the audio stuff there's not an RCA jack on that rack.

And yet, all the folks I know who are doing video editing professionally are working on laptops with Firewire jacks.

I just went to help her get the system running, provide a little focus, give her some direction for her next steps, but although I try to be up-beat and as "cheerleader" as possible, I'm more than a little concerned for her future. I mean, it's great that she's got $20k worth of cool hardware in her apartment so that she can undertake learning a new profession, but because nobody who really knew was guiding the purchasing she needs a bunch more stuff to make it useful, a year from now that stuff will be worth $5k, and I'm not sure she'll have learned what she really needs to survive.

Instead, if we had the social structures where she could have some contact with professionals, where the career counseling was more than "and you should add some web design skills to that mix", where it was more than my lone voice screaming "editing is not about the technology", and maybe she got set up with an $800 computer with a $100 capture card and an old video camera to learn what directions she needed to go after this, I think she'd come out of the next year with quite a bit better chance of actually making a go of it in the real world.

Does anyone have insight into how the social services of this matter work? Anyone know how we can get professionals involved in mentoring more? I mean, I'm looking at the time I'm going to spend this week helping adults with career advice and thinking "no wonder I'm such a conservative asshole, I feel like I'm already giving 20% of my life to things that the state claims to be doing before we even get into the contributions of taxes."

So how do we undertake to do this better?

[ related topics: Politics ]

Phil passed along this great introductory page of elementary concepts in statistics, part of the Statsoft Electronics Statistics Textbook.

[ related topics: Bioinformatics ]

The Chronicle covers FasTrak losers. Yeah, I know, you non-Bay Area folks are undoubtedly sick of hearing about this, but at the very least this shows that there are some interesting user interface issues still to be solved. There's also a clue here about why the Golden Gate bridge district has sent me violation notices for three quarters of the times I've been through that bridge with FasTrak: They just aren't paying any attention to the tourists backing up in FasTrak lanes:

Golden Gate Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie said full-stopping there is rare on a span where 40 percent of the commuters use FasTrak and the service is accepted at all 11 toll gates.

[ related topics: User Interface Bay Area moron ]

Somewhat related to my rants on career choices on Saturday, I was biking to Berkeley this morning, and, just south of Richmond's Marina Bay in the middle of that bike path through the slough, got a flat. Checked my saddle pack, no spare tube. Too early to find a bike store. Pick up the bike, start walking. Long about CostCo on the El Cerrito/Albany border, a scruffy looking guy asked if he could help, but he had the wrong size tubes, so I carried on. Half a mile later, another scruffy looking guy comes up behind and says "You're obviously in a hurry, I'm not, take the tube from my front tire." So I did, got on the bike, hit an ATM, rode back to their camp, camouflaged well, but obvious once it's pointed out, and repaid the guy. And he said "great, and if there's any sort of grunt labor I can do for you, here's my qualifications."

The problem was I got the feeling of a Cargo Cult approach to success. An "If I can only acquire the trappings" approach to a job. Don't know how to verbalize it better than that, but I think something in understanding that feeling is the reason we don't have good dole-to-work programs.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Bay Area ]

What we have here is a failure to communicate: Man seeking gratification in red-light district finds wife working as prostitute.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Game development fans: 7:00 Thursday evening, Will Wright, of Maxis, will be speaking at Autodesk in San Rafael. I, alas, will miss it, but Todd and others might want to be there.

[ related topics: Games Todd Gemmell ]

Who'd o' thunk? Trent Lott appears to be a closet Democrat. Lott against Bush plan to cut corporate welfare and for fetal stem cell research.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Cool graphics in XML? Far be it from me to criticize the method of delivery that a developer might choose but, isn't there a more efficient method for delivering these types of graphics to a webpage? I'm just asking.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Animation ]

Just to stave off any pre-emptive attacks: Happy Birthday (33^rd) to me.

Holly reports a new issue of her Ms Muffin comic.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Either you love them or you hate them. I happen to love them. Tarzan's Tripes Forever, and Other Feghoots - The Web's First Shaggy Dog Story Archive is a "must view" for anyone who has a love of long stories with a bad PUNch line at the end.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Just heard Susan Estrich on City Arts & Lectures, speaking on a lot of things, including grand generalizations about "women's issues", and I couldn't help but think that if Howard Stern presumed to speak "for men" I'd go postal.

[ related topics: Politics Political Correctness ]

I've been reading William Goldman's Which Lie Did I Tell?, his second book of notes on screenwriting and anecdotes from the trade, and I'm realizing why I'm completely burned out on movies. Bill Polson, Phil and I had a discussion once about art direction, and how art direction is several generations into drawing on movies for inspiration, rather than drawing on life, that it's diverged completely from reality. Well, the same thing has happened with screenplay. And Goldman's completely cognizant of this (Which isn't a strike against him, just shows that he's intelligent and knows his market).

[ related topics: Books Movies ]

In California Bullfights, the Final Deed Is Done With Velcro. The bulls wear little velcro dartboards between their horns, making this a sport where only the humans are endangered. Now that's cool. Of course they usually end up shipped off to the slaughterhouse after the "fight" anyway:

Bulls can be fought only once. "The second time, they won't go for the cape," Dennis Borba said. "It's, `uh-oh.' They're very intelligent animals."

[ related topics: Humor Nature and environment ]

I tried to find this back when I heard a radio or TV report on it, and had no luck. Via Rebecca's Pocket, what happens when someone really believes in the death penalty. "My name is Donald R. Bell.... I am going to serve justice on myself"

[ related topics: Politics Ethics ]

I just caught Moulin Rouge. It was quite good although sometimes difficult to watch - almost stomach turning. I've never associated bloomers with roller coaster rides before...

[ related topics: Movies ]

The Smart Tag Jihad can claim a small victory as Smart Tags will not be appearing in the soon to be released OfficeXP

Mixed metaphor of the moment: A mind so dirty it could stand up on its own.

Ziffle passed along this heartwarming story from Mexico city, police have 20 minute gun battle... with each other.

[ related topics: Ziffle Politics ]

News to me: Lucked Company covers .COMs that have recently had changes in their funding or revenue that point towards potential success.

[ related topics: New Economy ]

Via /.: Just say NO: Nitric Oxide is the switch for a firefly's light. So the chemistry is escaping me right now, but is this something like nature's own "poppers"?

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]