Flutterby™! From 2001-12-01 to 2001-12-31

a Great Idea for a woman owned business. This short film shows the basic idea.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Bioinformatics ]

So Dan's doing ok but has wisely choosen to see a western medical practitioner. So he should be right as rain in a few days. His bandwidth is not doing so well. I suspect we won't see a post from him till monday. Good thoughts and attentions from favored deities are always a good thing (hey it worked for Dori). It would be nice if the other contributers would throw a post or three up so the communty does not become disenchanted by cranky old chief pot stirrer Todd

[ related topics: Dan's Life Todd Gemmell broadband ]

Ok I put this as a seperate entry with hopes of feedback from the Community (that would be you reading this) about directions to take or what sounds cool. Assuming Dan's good health, we are going to meet weds for lunch to talk about writting an online game for the flutterby community. We have talked about some of the great games of the past like Zork, venture etc etc but are leaning to more social game styles like lemonade stand, taipan, trade wars, galacticwars etc etc. What are your favorites? What do you think would be cool?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Health Open Source History Current Events ]

The Penis Thief rips off 21 ceramic peneises from the public library so our boys overseas don't feel bad??

[ related topics: Humor moron ]

Man uses GPS to chart dog poop locations

[ related topics: Humor moron Current Events ]

Vipul's Razor is a distrubuted collabrative network that might be a new leg up for the white hats...

[ related topics: Spam broadband Invention and Design Monty Python ]

It appears that the Queen of England has gone over to the Dark Side.

[ related topics: Free Software Web development Microsoft ]

My wife and I thought about booking a room but we got cold feet.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Alright, one more this morning and I'll leave ya'll alone. Some imaginative film students have combined Legos and Monty Python for good effect. Now I realize that with Dan's bandwidth, being brought to him by AT&T, is going to be pinched for a few days but I thought, what the heck, if you can't tease a friend while he's down it isn't much of a friendship. :-)

[ related topics: Movies broadband Monty Python ]

I'm writing this from work. My home net access is still gone, AT&T is saying "10 days", which I'm taking to mean "next Monday". But I thought about this a little bit more. AT&T apparently has roughly 1 million subscribers. After ramping up for the .com boom, they've probably got gigaparsecs of dark fiber. @Home was getting $20/month/user. AT&T was offering $307M @Home, 15 months of fees. Now AT&T gets to switch all of those customers over to its own network, which is currently under-utilized, and it gets to use @Home as a scapegoat for the outages during the switchover, and the cost is "2 days of service for every day of outage", so roughly "no revenue realized for December", about $35M.

Boy I'd like to hear the bondholder's side of the story, it's gotta be... well... something.

[ related topics: New Economy broadband ]

Dean Kamen's Ginger/IT/"Segway Human Transporter" has been unveiled. I don't get it. Why not 3 wheels? Aside from the "cool, it balances in one direction", what makes it any more interesting than a ZAP! Scooter, especially since the two wheels side by side makes it as much of a hazard on turns as a trike? $90 million, huh?

[ related topics: Cool Science New Economy ]

More evidence in my "everything that happens has a Marin tie-in" experience: Marin man caught fighting for the Taliban.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Tendons of the ribs are inflamed. 1.8 grams of Ibuprofen daily for up to two weeks. Suck it up. Tough it out. For those of you who were waiting for the latest on my health travails.

[ related topics: Health ]

David Chess fans will notice that his site has been abducted by aliens. His weblog has temporary new home at http://ceoln.pitas.com/

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design ]

There's gotta be a smart-ass comment wanting to come out of this story, but I can't for the life of me narrow it down to just one: Teen Girls more likely to be Cyber Schizoid:

Teenage girls are more likely to maintain multiple online personas than other groups, according to an unexpected finding from an academic survey of how Americans use the Internet released on Wednesday.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Cable modem is back. Re-hit the DHCP server, and after some nameserver funkiness (I'm using my colo box right now) I have IP again.

[ related topics: broadband ]

Okay, it's nothing that people who've been developing software for long enough haven't started to puzzle out for themselves, but sometimes we need someone who can articulate some of the lessons of tens of millions of keystrokes and years of struggling through product ships to tell us that maybe the way we've ended up developing software isn't a bad thing. Linus Torvalds talks about why he believes good software evolves. Well worth a skim, especially if you, say, are working on a project where the lead has been adamant about getting the design right, and somehow the tasks that have lead to actual implementation have all been skunk-works side projects which are what actually get put into production because of budget and time constraints. [cough]

[ related topics: Open Source Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

So Brad changed "A Day Without Weblogs" to Link and Think. My past observations of December 1^st have been about links to the work of artists living with or who've died of AIDS, but specifically not in the "Day Without" theme, and though I'm still wondering about the relative attention HIV gets compared to various other diseases, I thought the change needed to be supported. Then I lost connectivity over the weekend. Oh well.

But in that spirit, go read Brad's account of a eulogy for a friend. 'Cause Brad's verbal rambling is always good reading.

[ related topics: Weblogs Art & Culture ]

Via both Daze Reader and Pursed Lips, proof that I've obviously been sleeping in my quest to bring you the latest and greatest. A press report on a study of differences between how men and women react to porn.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Charles forwarded along an article cataloging the recent stupidities of Georgians. Fun reading, but this seems like it's just a random cluster in an otherwise wide-spread phenomenon.

I had seen this on another 'blog that's on my daily reads, but forgotten about it 'til Columbine reminded me: The MIT Media Lab Erotic Computation Group is well worth a scan, especially if you're at all familiar with the general output of the Media Lab. From the New York Times article on the site:

"There's a fair amount of fluffy stuff at the lab without much hard technology behind it," explained Dan Maynes-Aminzade, the first-year Media Lab graduate student behind the hoax. "Sometimes we hear masturbatory rhetoric about how we're changing the world. This seemed to fit."

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design ]

Okay, over there on the right, below the useful bits on that nav box, are the contents of a few folders from my Opera bookmarks. I try to be more wide-ranging than this, the "Daily" are the things I try to read every day, the "Sporadic" I try to check once a week, some of those haven't been updated in longer, but I hold out hope.

Don't feel slighted if you're not on there, I may not know about you yet, or I may know and for some reason you've fallen off my list of sites I check often, or there may be a silly bug in my script that's keeping it from showing up, or I may just check it every month or so by typing in the URL (Jessamyn, for instance), or I may have given it a name that doesn't get your attention. Anyway, there it is, hopefully it'll provide more use than acrimony.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

Here's a good argument for upping the tar in cigarettes:

Forty-six percent of Britain's smokers believe their habit must be safe or the government would not let cigarettes be advertised, a survey by anti-smoking organization ASH showed.

[ related topics: Health moron Current Events ]

Enron asks California for surplus electricity:

"We don't want to dance on anyone's grave," said Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources. "But this is sort of ironic."

[ related topics: Cool Science California Culture ]

Ev ranting about Exodus got me in the mood. I've been deliberately vague about where I work for various reasons (and my opinions are definitely not theirs anyway!), but I'll tell you that if I were having the issues work's systems group seems to be having with the machines located at a big-name Silicon Valley colo facility (not Exodus) I'd be really concerned about some of their claims regarding redundant connections and power conditioning. It always amazes me when I see organizations rush to use services provided by companies that clearly to spend more on their salesweasels' suits than on technical infrastucture. This is why I think the Cluetrain folks are full of hoohey: consumers, especially at the corporate level, are far more interested in the appearance of progress than results.

Maybe it's the case that hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment allegedly built for redundance has a higher failure rate than an old consumer level P133 which boots off a floppy, maybe it's reasonable that I've had less net connectivity issues between me and the Flutterby servers than me and Yahoo (which I think is at Exodus) over the past three years, despite the fact that I check Yahoo very infrequently, and Flutterby several times a day. But Highertech.net seems to be way outperforming the big name colo services.

[ related topics: New Economy Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment ]

Via PeterMe, there's a furor over David Hockney's claim that the old masters used optics to get perspective and such right; in comparing them to photographers he's raised all sorts of stink in the "photography isn't art" crowd.Via Utopia with Cheese, the New York Times version of the article.

What I love about this is that they put the "art is not photography" crowd down on the side of saying that "great art" is synonymous with great craft, not necessarily with vision or statement.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Art & Culture ]

A man who smokes marijuana provided by the Federal government for medical purposes is suing Delta Airlines for kicking him off a flight. This isn't just some California "I've got a Doctor's note" thing, this is actually part of a federal program.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Aviation California Culture ]

While we're talking about drugs, it appears that heavy Ecstasy use causes more brain damage in women than men. Don't be making long-term plans with the cute raver chicks.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Pat Robertson leaves the Christian Coalition:

"I would rather be active in spiritual ministry than engaged in political activity anymore," Robertson said.

I was a bit ignorant. I thought there were restrictions on what non-profits can do politically, and the Christian Coalition claims to be non-profit, but apparently 501(c)(4) can do just about anything (legal) , but electioneering cannot be the majority of its work.

[Update: Wow. Read Dylan's elucidation on 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) corporations and how campaign finance works in relation to them in the comments to this entry.]

[ related topics: Religion Politics Coyote Grits moron Law Work, productivity and environment ]

Jello Wrasslin , crisco twister and other assorted depravity.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Art & Culture California Culture ]

The TurtleBeach AudioTron could make me care about MP3s. Fits in your stereo, plugs in to your home network (10baseT/HPNA2.0). Reads MP3, unsecure WMA, WAV PCM audio files, and PLS and M3U playlists from standard Windows shares (ie: Samba), outputs standard analog line or headphone or S/PDIF digital. Limited to memory to store ID3 and path information for files, they claim 30K in their spec sheet. $300.

[ related topics: Music ]

We're in the process of being attacked by terrorists. They appear to be lead by John Ashcroft, who's adamant that critics of giving the Bush administration unfettored power hurt the cause. The only thing he hasn't said at this point is "If you're not guilty, you have nothing to worry about", and "It's okay, it's only terrorists that we'll be trying and executing in secret. You're not a terrorist, are you?"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

I've come a long way in accepting Bush as our president and found value in having an angry texan in the whitehouse but this guy really scares me. If he could just declare martial law, this country would be a hell of a lot more easy to protect

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists."

[ related topics: Politics moron Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]

Someone's screwing with somebody's mind: Via Edgecase, I was going to link to the Americans United for Seperation of Church And State press release against J. Robert Brame III, which is up in arms that Bush is about to appoint Brame to the Labor Relations Board, and that Brame has been a supporter of some pretty fascist Christian organizations. But a couple of net searches and it appears that Brame was a Clinton appointee from November 17, 1997 to August 27, 2000.

[ related topics: Religion Politics ]

It occurred to me the other day that in cultures where age was equated with wisdom, I'm roughly at the average life expectancy.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Quote of the day, Edith Sitwell quoted in Loose Cannons: Devastating Dish from the World's Wildest Women:

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty

But I am too busy thinking about myself.

[ related topics: Quotes ]

The Art Test says I'm Edvard Munch's The Scream.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

I recently finished Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. An interesting look into a world of completely obsessive socially maladjusted people who have reduced the game to specialized pattern memorization. In that way, while I got some insights into thinking, and how specialization affects thinking, but after a bit I got dragged down by the fact that the heroes seemed so pointless, they fought for social acceptance within a circle of 10 or 20 people (okay, maybe as large as 50) with a set of skills that end up being almost completely non-transferrable. A good book, but ultimately not a compelling enough subject to make me want to go back and read it again; and the realization that to become a really good Scrabble player I'd have to give up all of the things that make it fun as a living room game somehow dulls the casual fun I can get from the game.

[ related topics: Books Games Scrabble ]

Afghanistan fashion is on the move but can't we just ship them Britney Spears and get it over with.

it's an onion link so I left the <sarcasum> tags off but the Bitney link is the one that makes you howl

[ related topics: Humor ]

I wish I could easily link to her archive information, but Debra is currently covering a situation where the New York City DA is prosecuting consensual SM. The defendant is getting some support from the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, but it's worth a read though to think about how this might affect your own life. The prosecutor appears to think this crossed the line because it drew blood, which should make tattoo and piercing shops very nervous.

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture Civil Liberties ]

Sir Peter Blake killed by pirates at the mouth of the Amazon. I met Pete back in 94 and he was the "enemy" then and the kind of enemy we all wish we had. He was the kind of guy that would thrash you in the competition and buy you a pint afterwards and rub your nose in it that you could loose to a guy like him.

[ related topics: Books Current Events ]

Damn it, once again packages screw me up. Something in a package upgrade while attempting to fix some sendmail glitchies has hosed mod_perl's use of DBI. So the database stuff will be a bit slower 'til I can get this figured out.

I keep threatening to just compile everything from source, but think that'd take too much time. Sigh.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta Perl ]

Can anyone recommend a good web hosting company that provides the following?

1. CHEAP
2. Large storage allowance
3. Decent, but not necessarily stellar, bandwidth.

The reason I ask is that my mother's sort of actually making a go of making a living as an artist, and she feels she wants to have an internet presence to expand her market outside her local (college town in Iowa) area. I'm going to do the site for her, but need someplace to put it.

Essentially it'll be a lot of images in some kind of thumbnail script, along with a small database of some kind for processing orders. (I really haven't decided on this yet...in any case, it'll be a challenge...I'm totally new to database development). I'm going to set her up with PayPal for the payment section of the fun unless someone here decries PayPal for some reason.

Oh, also...I've never really tried to "market" a site before, if anyone has any tips for getting the site into the search engines, without resorting to putting "horny asian fisting monkey cheerleader barely legal horse sex fuck" into the meta tags, I'd appreciate it.

Anyway, if anybody knows of some good hosts that would be able to provide the kind of service a *small* business needs, let me know.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture broadband Invention and Design Law Art & Culture ]

This Little box removes repetative frames and is currently used for TV stations to squeaze in more comercial time. I think they are missing their true market. Think of the bandwidth a box like that could save.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture broadband Television California Culture ]

Spectator looks at FukingMachines.com, some interesting musings.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Just when I was whining that Salon seemed to have lost all interesting content when they went "premium", Salon interviews Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder. McGruder hit his stride in Boondocks post September 11^th, and while the interview doesn't pull anything new, it's clear that McGruder's asking the same hard questions I want to ask:

This is gang warfare on an international level. That's all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it's wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it's not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it's murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now?

[ related topics: Politics Humor WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

A couple of people have linked to this note on filesystem metadata in OS X. As much as they love metadata, one of the most frustrating things for me about the MacOS is that files are not self-contained, and there's always some funky packaging that has to be done to pass files around. It's one of the reasons that over the years I've looked at using the metadata available on file systems like XFS, and not used them. I also find it harder to reassociate files, exposing file associations through the extension allows the user to easily change associations. I absolutely agree that hiding the extension is bad.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Macintosh ]

Via More Like This, Who Said It: Ashcroft or McCarthy. Not quite as revealing as I'd hoped, I got 100% right.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

I think this judge was testing his volvo's air bag too often. Sperm Donor ordered to pay child support after the lesbian couple who wanted the child broke up.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

Hey! anyone want to go Las Vegas this january? The Internext Expo is January 6th - 8th and should be pretty educational for someone trying to create games for older kids. At $275 bucks it's gotta be one of the cheapest expos out there and Southwest has tons of cheap flights from the bay area. Look at the photos from last year, Comdex never looked that good!

[ related topics: Games Sexual Culture Las Vegas ]

So I got a panicked call from Alec yesterday evening, his teacher had announced a test for today and he didn't understand some specifics of the material (ahh, the joys of factoring polynomials). Besides reinforcing that I should not answer the phone when I have previous commitments for the evening, even when those commitments happen to be at home, it's got me thinking about Dori's assertion that high school is about teaching politics. Alec tells me that when he's asked for more advance warning on tests (so that I can help with material he doesn't understand) he gets a "I've got hundreds of students, I can't make an exception for you" answer. As an adult, I can't imagine that his teacher is being this unhelpful. As an ex-high school student, this perfectly mirrors my experience. As a third party to this whole transaction, and one who didn't figure it out in high school, I've no idea what course of action to recommend.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics ]

In the latest thread on education, Ziffle asked: "Dan: how are we supposed to get wordy if you keep the edit box so small?"

I guess I could make the size of the edit box settable via cookie, but the real long-term solution seems to be building some tools so that people can use their own favorite editors or other tools divorced from the browser to interact with Flutterby.

The Manila-RPC interface seems to be one that other people are supporting, but doesn't map to Flutterby's internal structures nicely. I've been playing with some client ideas in Perl::Tk. Is anyone else out there interested in this problem either from a client side or a server side? I got a resounding nothing to my Storm Cellar proposal.

[ related topics: Ziffle Web development Weblogs Flutterby Meta Perl Open Source ]

Once again, I found the flexible rubber "hinge" for my Palm Vx tearing. So I dropped by Office Despot to pick up a new one, and found a Palm hard case, with a "designed by Ideo" plastered on the back.

So I bought it, tried to fit it in my fanny pack where I usually carry it, promptly pulled out my Gerber multi-tool and carved the back cover off of it; now it's actually the roughtly the right size, not a monstrosity that makes my sleek Vx as thick as a III. This case had been returned previously, probably for exactly the reason that I saw fit to modify it.

What is it with the cult of design that manufacturers are willing to shut their brains off when design companies like Ideo make suggestions? Is this part of why FrogDesign is in trouble? Maybe now that the .com craze is over we'll get back to engineers designing products, and see a new wave of usability.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

When I was a kid my grandparents used to take us down to Saratoga to see The Nutcracker. It was cute spectacle, but since then I've always seen performances of it as a bit too gimmicky, too much "let's break out everyone in the troupe", to be real art. But this might make me interested in seeing it again: a Dance-Along Nutcracker:

As Louie writes in the program, "For two hours at least, we create a world where gender, age, ethnicity, politics, sexual identity, physical appearance --

and even talent -- fail to divide us."

[ related topics: Nostalgia Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Software Engineering Art & Culture ]

Unlike ballet dancers, erotic dancers must register with the city and get work cards. The dual standard story

[ related topics: Erotic Law Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties ]

Get in the hobbit of seeing more Tolkien Hype as we are about to be overun by little furry feet.

[ related topics: Movies tolkien Consumerism and advertising ]

Well, I may not like the methods and have trouble trusting the messenger, but the newly released transcript of the bin Laden tape, with independent translation and verification, seems to be the smoking gun.

[ related topics: Current Events WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

charges against Dmitry Sklyarov have been provisionally dropped, but ElComSoft will bear responsibility for the charges.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Speech Current Events ]

Charlene and I need to put up some shelves, so while we were at the hardware store, we dropped by the tools section and found a Zircon Studsensor^tm 3. I figured $16.95 was worth an experiment. At first I thought it didn't work, but then I put it up against a wall... Ya know, I do not now how we got along before these things. This beats the old "knock 'til it sounds different" all to hell. If you're hanging almost anything there's way more than $20 worth of frustration saved by one of these things. Recommended.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment ]

Remember those days when west coast pedestrians could just step off the curb and know that traffic would yield? Long gone. Just days after Berkeley introduced bins with bright orange flags for pedestrians to carry at dangerous intersections, a pedestrian carrying a bright orange flag is hit in a crosswalk. The Chronicle was uncustomarily subdued in not labeling the vehicle involved an SUV. Even though it was.

The categorizer offered Humor for this. I'm not sure how I'd differentiate that from "Irony" in general, so I think I'll let it stay.

[ related topics: Humor Bay Area California Culture ]

I was standing in-line at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters the other day, and noticed that they had a CD on a shelf with a face I recognized from behind the counter. So I bought it. The CD is Pale Shade of Blue by Don Gallardo, and a bunch of other folks that you actually might have heard of. It runs from very Country to Jazz, with stops in between, and I think it's pretty darned good. There are a couple of tracks that might have been made more commercial with a producer and the budget to do a couple of takes and some mixing, but this guy can lay down some tunes, and the few places the album does show its teething pains make it more endearing as a work of instrumentalists, rather than a technical and post tour-de-force as so many modern sounds are. If any of that sounds appealing, I recommend it.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area San Anselmo ]

An interview with Jeffrey Zeldman on the Web Standards Project hiatus. This was the first time I'd heard that the Web Standards Project is taking a hiatus, and the reasons are interesting. Any of the other WSP members willing to comment on this?

[ related topics: Web development Current Events Web Standards Project - WaSP ]

Dave Winer has announced voting in the Scripting News Awards for 2001. Unsurprisingly, I only found one category in which I thought a leading contender was nominated, but it got me thinking that a little "me-too"ism might be in-line. I don't have the time to write the voting scripts for a few days, but maybe we could hash out categories? This might also be a good opportunity to find some other good web publications that I'd otherwise miss. So here's my suggestions for a starting list:

• Best reader commentary or discussion.
• Sites we really don't want to admit we read but end up checking regularly anyway. This would probably be well expanded out into the reasons we don't want to admit we read it: Personality, political bias, etc.
• Best melding of personal voice with interesting external subject coverage.
• Most compelling personal voice with little or no external linkage.
• Sources for "scoops"; where the dishy stuff shows up first (I'm thinking mainstream news, not just The Daily Brad, although there's always dishy stuff there...).

Despite the "admit we read" category up there, I've deleted a lot of potentially negative categories ("Most overcomes its design") because no matter what I want to encourage personal publishing, but how about weighing in with your own descriptions of categories you'd like to see other people recommend sites in.

[ related topics: Weblogs Dave Winer Journalism and Media ]

Bodyguard/stuntman/actor Chuck Zito was arrested and removed from a Conneticut casino for refusing to either remove his Hells Angels jacket or leave the establishement.

The media never tells the whole story, but it sounds like he wasn't being a nuisance and the state police said he was cooperative. Zito says he was just standing up for his right to free speech. The casino claims that they have a policy prohibiting the wearing of "gang colors".

[ related topics: Free Speech Political Correctness Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Want a long healthy life? Studies show sex, drinking and rich foods could be your key to longevity.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

Tom rips the Sonic Blue Rio Advanced Digital Audio Center. I agree. The Turtle Beach Audiotron and picking up that Don Gallardo CD got me thinking about listening to music again. I don't understand why you'd pay $1,500 for a 40gig drive with ridiculous hookups, when the $300 Audiotron will share the data off your house server anyway, and if you don't have a server yet, you can buy that for less than the remaining $1,200. But "I am not a market sample".

[Edited to "Tom", not "Dori". Sorry, I'll learn to read attributions, now I understand why people think every entry on this site is mine...]

[ related topics: Music ]

Brian Cappelletto won the world Scrabble^tm championships, but the interesting bit is that the official transcripts of one of the games was altered. Daze Reader covers the removal of "offensive" words. It's bizarre, because anyone actually reading the transcript can see right through the alteration. Sigh.

[ related topics: Games Sexual Culture Current Events Scrabble ]

Occasionally, people will ask me why I'm so vehemently anti-marriage. More than a quarter of married couples in Britain responding to a new survey say that they wish they were single again.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

The times, they are a-changin'.

On Saturday - during Saturday Night Live - NBC will broadcast the first hard alcohol commercial since the '40s. Smirnoff is the lucky liquor.

I had always thought that this was an FCC (or some other Federal) regulation, but apparently it's only an informal rule the national networks agreed to abide by.

[ related topics: Business Current Events Consumerism and advertising Television ]

There goes the only reason bandwidth really mattered: AdCritic.com shuts down.

[ related topics: broadband ]

PlayStation 2 outselling XBox and Game Cube. This article chalks it up to supply, but I'm not so sure. I've tried to play some of the demo games on the XBox, and gameplay sucked. Meanwhile, Phil and Leo are raving about Grand Turismo (although Alec didn't like it 'cause it had no damage model) and Grand Theft Auto III seems to have cross-gender appeal (left anonymous 'cause I'm not sure she wanted this comment "on the record"). Meanwhile, the XBox developer I know (also anonymous for the same reason) says that the testers are giving them a 9.2 on appearance and a 1.7 on game play which he claims was guided towards the areas that the playtesters hate by Microsoft, the publisher. Sega learned the hard way: It's all about game play.

Too much going on to play computer games, though, I'd rather be coding.

[ related topics: Games Microsoft ]

Yet another reminder of not enough time: Kiki passed along what looks like a great book on brazing.

[ related topics: Burning Man Books ]

Oh yeah, this totally rocks! The Social Network Explorer. Now I can find out whose feelings got hurt 'cause I didn't link to them on that right side-bar and they link to me.

[ related topics: Weblogs Flutterby Meta ]

Isadora Alman, the sex columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, has been laid off. No word on whether the Guardian will continue to run a sex advice column.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Journalism and Media Art & Culture California Culture ]

AT&T and Comcast to merge, I expect further problems with my cable modem. There was an interesting article about wireless sharing of broadband connections yesterday that showed that the cable modem guys really don't get it, that they're much more interested in an adversarial customer relationship, as opposed to the DSL folks who seem to understand the real value of a net connection. I just wish they'd be faster on DSL deployment so I could get a guaranteed static IP.

[ related topics: Wireless broadband Current Events ]

Shelley Powers voices many of my concerns about the effects of the Web Standards Project.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

blah blah blah massive Windows XP insecurity discovered 5 weeks ago, fix announced today, blah blah "the glitches allow hackers to seize control of all Windows XP operating system software without requiring a computer user to do anything except connect to the Internet" blah blah blah blah. Yawn.

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering Current Events ]

Boy, this just screams "Mark Klaas style statistics made up on the spot to suit the argument": U.N. Children's Fund conference claims 250 million children trapped in prostitution. Let's back-of-the-envelope this: 6 billion people, world-wide average life expectancy is about 62, we'll be generous and call "child" up to 18. At just over 14%, my guess is that they've got a fairly broad definition of "prostitution".

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

Vehix Site is a good site for car reasearch and Dan needs your help (because Todd's pestering is not enough) to help him decide how to travel in the 21st century. Some of the givens are 4WD and the ability to tow things. Now I don't think Dan wants/needs a big beasty car like mine but I think something like a Rav 4 is too puny.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Todd Gemmell Bay Area Travel ]

I've been reading Balance of Power by Chris Crawford and it's little ominous watching Argentina go down the drain. I know we are busy pounding the mountains in Tora Bora but it just seems very wierd to let a 2nd world country drop into chaos

[ related topics: Politics Games ]

We can leave the non-spoiler comments in the other Lord of the Rings thread, I'm going to put some spoilers in the comments to this entry later. If you need to link to this wihtout revealing, remember that the littke "*" below links to the entry without the comments.

Saw Lord of the Rings yesterday afternoon. Art direction was awesome, script was great, direction had some stylistic things that I had issues with (I'm not much of a fan of Gladiator fight scene editing style). Even when the visions of the characters weren't exactly what I had, they were still very plausible visions, nothing was jarring relative to the book, and it's been several years since I've read the books and, loosing geek cred, I've only read them twice, so I wasn't playing language lawyer with the story.

I won't be averse to seeing it a second time this weekend when another group goes to see it. And y'all are nerds and have to see it anyway.

WARNING: Spoilers in comments

[ related topics: Books Movies tolkien Art & Culture ]

I tried to avoid getting caught up in the whole 'blogging politics thing for a few years now, but the 'blog scene is getting stale, and we don't have a Sally Tenpenny to do any shit stirring for us, so I'm going to delve into the meta: Dave Winer has been taking a lot of crap for his Scripting News Weblog Awards. Cam did a Jonathan Franzen (for those of you who aren't book geeks, Franzen turned down an Oprah "book club" pick), in a Metafilter thread, Brig said:

all "sites i read" lists cheapen what people are doing and create a feeling of "why am i not good enough to be included?"

Which I pondered before putting up my list, and it's one of the reasons I automated my list from my bookmarks (the other option was an automated scan through the archives for "stolen from" or "via"...). Lyn has been musing on Medley about some of the heat she's taken for The Medley Medals.

So, without further ado, I open nominations in The Flutterby Personally Published Cool Sites You Might Wanna Check Out awards. And I do this with this goal: I want to find other sites that I might find interesting, and I want y'all to find other sites that you might find interesting. I could write separate scripts, but there are a bunch of technical issues with that, so just put 'em in the comments and I'll collate 'em from there. If you feel a need to remain anonymous, email me and I'll add 'em. This is also a way to absolve myself of responsibility for some of my own nominations [grin]. I offer the following categories, if you see a missing one, suggest it. Nominations will close January 1^st, at which point we'll figure out some completely arbitrary and capricious way to select the best ones. Or not, maybe the journey is the reward and we'll just list 'em all for poster(ior)ity.

The goal is to find cool sites. Feel free to nominate your own site. Any way you can figure to subvert the voting process is okay, knowing that I'm making up the rules as I go along and will feel completely free to disqualify people based on disruptions of community.

The categories are:

1. Site which should make Dan most jealous. People or sites who/which cover Flutterby topics better than Flutterby. Subcategories:
   1. Sex
   2. Drugs
   3. Technology
2. Sites we read but wish we could stay away from. Subcategories:
   1. The politics are personally abhorrent
   2. the personality sometimes makes me cringe
   3. the reader comments are so juvenile
3. Sites where the links are so compelling that the lack of personal voice doesn't matter.
4. Sites where the personal voice is so compelling that uninteresting sites or lack of links doesn't matter.
5. Sites where the content is compelling enough to override horrid design (I was going to leave this out, but Phil Wolff nominated Flutterby!).
6. Sites where the design is so compelling that the flaccid prose is unimportant.
7. Sites that started strong, petered off, and should update more often!
8. Best "I feel like an insider" source for scoops.
9. Random other cool site not covered here. Subcategories:
   1. Sex
   2. Visual Design
   3. Information Architecture
   4. Programming/Software construction
   5. Journal/Life
   6. Politics
   7. Drugs
   8. Other
10. Sites which best engender cross-weblog community.
11. Sites with the best user comments/participation.

A few categories stolen from Phil Wolff:

12. Best executive weblog: ceo's that blog. Don't be the last ceo to be nominated. I'd open this up to anyone who represents a company in their weblog.
13. Best shared weblog: more than one author posting frequently
14. Best photo rich blog: cultivate this visual segment of the community.
15. Best life passage: follow someone through childbirth, a wedding, a divorce, death, war.
16. The Can't Vote Award: best blog by someone too young to vote legally.

Reader submitted ones which will be edited in later:

And if you don't like the process or think this will unfairly single out some set of weblogs... piss off.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Weblogs Dave Winer Flutterby Meta ]

"Come not in that form!" Lovecraft fans, rejoice! There's a newly discovered giant squid-like creature prowling the deep.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.5!

Name: John Carmack

Email: johnc@idsoftware.com

Description: Programmer

Project:

Last Updated: 12/21/2001 19:07:50 (Central Standard Time)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 21, 2001

-----------------

The Quake 2 source code is now available for download, licensed under the GPL.

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/quake2.zip

[ related topics: Games Open Source Software Engineering Graphics ]

Stolen from Justin's Journal, (this entry, where he's asked for comments), in Australia, a 15 year old gets his dying wish granted: He lost his virginity. Obviously this raises all sorts of ethical and legal questions.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Ethics Law ]

In my notes about my recent trip to Disneyland, I noted that one of the things that broke the experience of the place was that the toilets didn't seem in-theme enough. It's hard to feel like you're at a small-town merchant, or immersed in Toon Town, when the facilities look like generic facilities from any large mall. Via Larkfarm, someone has taken to documenting the Happiest Potties on Earth.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Travel ]

It's becoming more popular in Austrailia to give a Sex Romp as a christmas bonus instead of cash. It even has tax advantages.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Monty Python California Culture ]

We Must Attack France by Ann Coulter has me rolling on the floor. Love her or hate her you'll find this article funny.

So Dan's playing around with a voting system for Flutterby. I ran across Randal Schwartz of perl fame's parody of "am I hot". It's called Am I a hooter?. Note the nice handeling of graphics or is that nice graphics he's handeling.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Coyote Grits Graphics ]

Good Afternoon!

Finally saw Memento last night. Damn, but that's a mean-spirited film. Compellingly shot, the gimmick of telling half the story backwards worked very well, and I love the way that the certainty and meaning of the written notes changes over the course of the film, but the real conflict among the more interesting characters remains deliberately vague in a way that makes the payoff not as compelling as I'd hoped. Anyway, now that I've seen it I can go back and read the Salon dissection of Memento. While it was an amazing break in the standard forms of film-making, I don't think that the payoff, about the meanings of memory and delusion, makes the film worthwhile as more than an interesting study in the structure of story.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Via More Like This, Shane McChesney praises the thin tech book. It's interesting that he specifically mentions the Wrox books, I got dropped from their reviewer list when I kept complaining that the chapters they sent me weren't written for me, and I'd much rather have several slim volumes that targeted what I was interested in written by someone extremely competent in the field than some huge bit of shovel-ware, written by a professional author who had no clue about actual development practices and was just regurgitating documentation in an only slightly better organized form than the originals.

I don't mean to slight the professional authors who read Flutterby, Mike Gunderloy's book on the Windows Installer clarified a few things for me (Sorry it didn't do well, Mike, but I think the clue is that Windows Installer is a steaming pile, and everyone does the minimum they can get away with and forks all the real work off to other executables), and my glance through Dori and Tom's JavaScript book says that it's something I'll be glad to have on my shelf if I ever decide that JavaScript isn't the work of the devil and better done with Flash, but we need to rein in publishers and remind them that, especially with the ubiquity of the 'net, we pay them for filtering, not for volume.

[ related topics: Books Microsoft Work, productivity and environment ]

Rafe Colburn points out some obvious fuzzy thinking in the changes in airport security following the "explosives in shoes" incident:

If you could choose to focus your investigation on finding people who met any of those criteria, where would you start? With people who have strange passports, people who check no luggage on long flights, people who travel on one-way tickets, or people wearing shoes?

Something else I find puzzling that I haven't seen addressed is that the rumours are that it was a C4 like substance. It'd have to be a high explosive to make shoe-sized quantities able to do any real damage. So what sort of blasting caps was he firing off that'd go better from a match than from the battery pack from a portable CD player?

[ related topics: Aviation WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

This one's for Jay: Cambodia threatens use of tanks in the war on Karaoke.

[ related topics: History Current Events ]

I'd linked to that compendium of studies on longevity, which referenced Sex and death: are they related? Findings from the Caerphilly cohort study. Rayner pointed out the letter which showed a response to this from rural America:

I was informed in no uncertain terms that if their husbands were ever made aware of this article or given a copy, I would have a very unhappy patient on my hands.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

So I've heard the various radio ads for Hotwire, supposedly a cheaper Priceline thingie, except that you get to see the fare first (you still don't know flight times). This is the third time I've looked up prices on it. At least this time it didn't lose to Expedia (unlike the first two times), but did lose to Southwest Airlines. I won't bother next time.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Aviation ]

Diane has some gift-giving disillusionment over her experience with The Family Giving Tree. Not sure what I can add to that, other than that it's a reminder that institutionalized giving is by its nature depersonalizing, and I wonder what would happen if our taxation system didn't bias away from personal involvement towards charity by proxy.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Kiki was working on me last night to join up with Firetown for Burning Man. She's also been trying to get me to rent a studio over at the Shipyard in Emeryville (where the recent SRL show happened). I've been making various "in my own time" noises, but I realized last night that we have some differing experiences of community, and I'm examining how I can change my attitudes.

[ related topics: Burning Man Work, productivity and environment ]

Okay, it's turning into "Dan meta" day. It's funny when job interviews stop happening. Maybe this happened to everyone else much earlier, but career contacts for me right now are all "you should talk to X", and lunch or what-have-you isn't about working for the company, it's just getting together to talk, and at the end of lunch someone has either said "ya know, you should talk to Y", or "can you introduce me to Z?", or there's this weird date-like vibe of "do you want to come in for a drink sign an NDA?" Anyway, I've got that vibe from a project that looks moderately interesting, but would be on a Windows platform, and I'm not sure that going back there would be any less frustrating than my complaints with my current project. The current project is also not at a stopping point, the pace of completion is part of my frustration, but I hate to leave anything in the middle.

And of course what I need to do is figure out a way that I can get beyond being a coder, because I'm sick of struggling through other people's baroque designs, supporting their house of cards in odd and strange ways because they refuse to use glue. Shipping code and satisfied customers are beautiful; baroque filligree C code is interesting in the same way that museum art is interesting: I'll go to look at it, but I rarely want it in my home.

The nice thing about the latest good-vibe lunch is that it'd be working for someone who's software architecture skills in general I admire, but I'm afraid of the trade-offs of trying to integrate multiple applications on a Windows platform, and, of course, there's the old loyalty question (see my cryptic query on community earlier today).

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture ]

Sigh. And furthermore, when did my design start stretching beyond the boundaries of the browser window? Obviously I'm clueless.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

This morning I wandered out to get my oil changed, and to find a place to sit and sip a cup of tea and code for a bit. Coffee Roasters was way overpacked, especially since I wanted to sit and type, so I wandered across the street to Javarama, where I overheard a conversation that involved some trust fund baby whining that he was 59 years old and it was so hard to get along on $3500 a month, even owning his house. This got me thinking about various people I've met at both places, and what it is about Coffee Roasters that makes it so much more attractive, even though it's smaller and often feels cramped.

Ages ago Peter Merholz looked at coffee shop design, and I was surprised to find that from the drawings his preferences were exactly reversed from mine. I wonder how much correlation there is between the place and the people it attracts. Any Adaptive Path folks wanna talk about ways to explore this?

[ related topics: User Interface Sociology ]

Finished David M. Friedman's A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. Initially I was disappointed that it lacked footnoting and references, but once I got to the end I realized that rather than cluttering up the text with superscripts the bibliography referred back into the text. So I feel a lot better about the scholarship of it. The chapter on '70s feminism was worth the price of admission, the rest of the book was quite interesting, although it didn't grab me terribly hard. I'll try to remember to go back and write a real review in the next few days.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Sociology ]

L. Ron Hubbard has got to be rolling in his grave that he didn't think of it first. Colorgenics will awe and amaze you into the insight of the mystical colors. If you like getting a Tarot reading you find this a hoot.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Scientology ]

The Parot FAQ will give you an idea of the future of Perl 6 and just how twisted some of these guys are. Damian is working a Latin to Perl interpreter.

[ related topics: Todd Gemmell Perl Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

Watch for Lord of the Brooms out in fall 2002. And one Broom to sweep them all and in the dust bin bind them...

[ related topics: Humor Movies Art & Culture ]

I've stolen a few stories from Slashdot and now Rob pinched a Flutterby story because I'm sure he doesn't watch Google closely and must have gotten it from here. Yes I am just crowing cuz I scooped Cmdr Taco

[ related topics: Butterflies Humor Flutterby Meta Current Events ]

Progressive set of photographs showing the mummification of a hollywood prostitute. I think this reflects the choices of an unhealthy life style over 10 years. Would this happen if prostitution was legal? If she had access to healthcare? Drug rehab? Maybe but maybe other choices could be made.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Photography Sexual Culture Health ]

Boy, I'm sure glad book burning freaks are still around. Otherwise I might start to think we were civilized or something.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Books Free Speech ]