Flutterby™! From 2003-01-01 to 2003-01-31

Diane offers three things she did for herself in the past year. I like that, it beats the silly "New Year's Resolutions" thingie by celebrating stuff that actually happened. So, three things I did for myself this year:

1. Got a new job. I kept my trials and travails at my old company secret, so secret that some readers thought I was unemployed, because I was somewhat embarassed to be working there, and over the year I stayed there I grew increasingly uncomfortable with their corporate ethics. Eric gave me a little reminder that it was time to move on, so I joined Alvanon and feel much more productive, and much more comfortable with the company.
2. Lost weight. I'm now back to a sub 34 waist, closing in on 32, and I've got myself a set of weights that I carry from the ferry to the office every day to work on my upper body, since my legs are doing okay from the mad "oh crap I've got 18 minutes to cover 2 miles to catch the ferry" dashes.
3. Learned to spend money on myself. Now I need to work on moderation a bit, but I've gotten comfortable with treating myself occasionally.

What did you do for yourself last year?

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Happy New Year! And if there's one place I didn't expect to be on New Year's Eve, dancing to bad disco at a Sober Living event at the Harvy Milk school deep in the Castro is probably it.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area ]

Last night we took the ferry street to the California cable car to do the Vampire Tour of San Francisco, but ended up wandering off about an hour into the tour. She's got a great idea, but the stories need to be polished a lot, and the aspects which tie into San Francisco history need to be cleaned up quite a bit. Her presentation voice, a bit perky for my blood-sucking tastes, would probably be fine if the story were polished up a bit, but with extraneous digressions and lots of "so..." it just fell flat. After an hour of that we bailed and headed for the Castro, which didn't have much going on either, but we had a good time.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area ]

PGP is not only encryption, it is also the Public Genitals Project - Which uses LCD screens to display images.. mounted interestingly on performance artists. A unique mixture of technology and performance art. I would like to have seen more info on the site about the public's reaction.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Art & Culture Cryptography ]

It's that time of year again(the new part),where we reflect on the past year and make goals for the next. In this time of reflection here is a good read about choices and goals (poached from slashdot)

[ related topics: Business History Work, productivity and environment Community ]

As an aside, I've got to find a good way to refer to the various "Tom"s I reference on Flutterby. But without that better way, we'll leave it at this: tdl praises the Phoenix web browser for its simplicity and full-screenability. It seems that lots of folks are deciding that windowed interfaces aren't the future, I know I get along fairly well with the Palm interface, and tabbed browsing in Mozilla and Opera seems like a great way to manage lots of asynchronous tasks, but with lots of virtual desktops under I've become pretty enamoured of interfaces which put up lots of windows and let my desktop manager figure out how to arrange them.

[ related topics: User Interface Microsoft Open Source ]

Wow. Here in the Bay Area the holiday killers are things like dehydration at raves and driving under the influence. Over in Japan, they've got different worries: Rice cakes kill six in Japan

[ related topics: Bay Area moron Current Events Salon magazine ]

Salon reviews various sex toys, including the Hello Kitty vibrator mentioned earlier (but have not tried out yet). The conclusions are the obvious ones that you'd expect. I've got some ideas for a few toys, but I haven't yet found the right materials to build it with, so implementation hasn't happened yet.

[ related topics: Erotic Salon magazine ]

Worth a read for some of the ventures that we're working on, The Guardian spends a day with the guy who started Divine Interventions as he tries to peddle his wares in San Francisco.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

Starship Exeter is a fan made Star Trek episode thats pretty close to the mark. They made it seriously like the original with just a hint of homage to the originals cheese. You'll laugh, you'll cry you'll say it was better than Insurrection

[ related topics: Movies Star Trek Space & Astronomy Macintosh ]

Happy Birthday Mr. Tolkien!!! Thank you for the treasures you wrote err found and many of us are richer for these discoveries.

[ related topics: Books Movies tolkien ]

University of Virginia apologizes for half-time show at University of West Virginia game:

The show, in which West Virginians were depicted wearing overalls and pigtails, "crossed the line between humor and the ridicule that the ACC, the NCAA and simple decency proscribe," Casteen said.

Now I'm not sure how everyone else read this, but in my interpretation he then went on to confirm every single stereotype about that region: "As the Bluefield (W.Va.) Daily Telegraph pointed out on Sunday, we are all pretty much the same. We are related."

[ related topics: Humor moron Current Events ]

I've been trying to find a context to link Jim Goad's tenure editing a free sex weekly in Portland. It's a loathesome piece, a guy gets out of jail after two and a half years for domestic violence, but excuses it with: "was more violent than me" and "She was a stripper when I met her". A friend gives him a job editing a free weekly whose support comes from advertising dollars for strip joints. He changes the tone of the paper to mock the strip joints, denigrate the patrons, readership soars, but eventually he gets canned because, go figure, the soaring readership is not the sort of customers the advertisers want.

It's hard to argue against some of his premises, that most porn is stupid, that there's a faked sense of intimacy in strip joints, but his loathing of women oozes through in a way that made me think of that attitude when I read this:

Saudi Arabia is reviewing their ban on cameras in mobile phones.

It bans mobile phones with built-in cameras as they may be used to take pictures of uncovered women and send them to other phones or post them on the Internet.

And, of course, who's taking these pictures?

A teacher caught one of the girls taking shots of others during a class in an all-girl college in Dammam in the Eastern province, the paper reported Thursday.

The official daily, quoting witnesses, said the girl admitted photographing girls with the help of five others and buying the phone in Bahrain.

Sorry, Mr. Goad, I can't condone your attitudes.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Current Events ]

While searching for information on using an ultrasonic transducer to vaporize droplets of liquid fuel.. I keep running into conspiracies regarding the evil fossil fuel industry. Maybe the best way to get rich (or commit suicide) is to publically announce a home made hydrogen powered car..

[ related topics: Sports Automobiles ]

Not credited because, well, it sounds like maybe he didn't want credit for this one, but a reader suggested that I note that Marin women will march naked for peace tomorrow. Ya know, I'd go into the city for it, but... well... going into the city to see naked women isn't that much of an appeal any more. It's true, California does make you jaded.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area California Culture ]

Finally saw Y Tu Mamá También last night. Charlene and I both thought it didn't live up to the hype. Good cinematography, use of handheld camera angles and the camera as a character in ways that worked very well, the acting was good, but there were too many stories going on, and it was told in a way that the primary story didn't seem to be the most interesting one. Also, watching the out-takes, I'm not sure the editing was as good as it should have been, one line that got dropped should have been in there, and a bunch of others could have been dropped. I think Threesome did much of the primary story better, I wish Y Tu Mamá También had a story that strong because the storytelling skills were certainly there.

If, however, you're one of those gazillion folks interested in ways of telling sexy stories differently, this is a must-see, because he has some very erotic long shots. I don't think there were more visible genitals than, say, Henry & June, but in Henry & June I was conscious of the director constantly saying "no, really, this is art", here the sex was part of the story and expository about the characters.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Art & Culture ]

I've been batting a few things back and forth with Robert Scoble about "Tablet PCs". He suggests a few applications and makes comparisons to PDAs and laptops. I wanted to find the online portion of our discussion, but his comment counts seems broken right now. I think I've got an application for a keyboardless PC, but to make that a viable form factor it's got to have a camera and a good microphone built in. If you're going to remove one I/O device, it needs to be replaced with better ones, otherwise it's just a more fragile book.

With that in mind, Henry Norr talks about Bill Gates' enthusiasm for the "smart display" in Bright Guy, Dumb Idea.

[ related topics: Microsoft Cool Technology ]

Andrew Orlowski profiles Microsoft's takedown of Sendo. Short version: Sendo bases product on Microsoft promised ship date, and makes partnership announcement with $12M cash infusion from Microsoft. Microsoft gets Sendo technical details from this deal, slips ship date, without promised ship Sendo has no product:

"Under the SDMA, in the event of a Sendo bankruptcy, Microsoft would obtain an irrevocable, royalty free license to use Sendo's Z100 intellectual property, including rights to make, use, or copy the Sendo Smartphone to create other to create other Smartphones and to, most importantly for Microsoft, sublicense those rights to third parties."

Microsoft gets Sendo technology at firesale prices.

[ related topics: Microsoft Law ]

Just got back from a lunchtime trek over to Art Rock to see the work of Cynthia P. Caster that Diane mentioned here earlier. Very worthwhile trek, there's a huge difference between, say, walking through Good Vibrations and seeing a sample of erect phalluses selected because of the musical abilities and aspirations of the affiliated human. And some of her drawings ain't bad either. I was also reminded of how much cool stuff is done in few color screenprinting, lots of really cool artwork on the posters that's the bread and butter of Art Rock.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Music Erotic Sexual Culture Art & Culture ]

Just because I was techie this morning, we'll toss in a link to Mary Anne Mohanraj's story How It Started, which, as she notes in her online diary, appears in Wet and the latest Best Lesbian Erotica.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

California Supreme Court rules rescinded consent is rape. It's hard to tell the details from the article, but it sounds like they got it right.

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

Over on PeterMe, Peter looked at Gawker, and then asked if the weblog model could be applied elsewhere to make a better alternative to the "alternative weeklies". I think I've mentioned before that I'm interested in building such a thing for Marin dwellers. Anyway, in the comments to that entry I mentioned something about hiking and GPS data. Adina Levin followed up, and I went out searching.

• The USGS Eros Data Center has all sorts of elevation data in DEM format.
• MarinMap has data from various public agencies, although it looks like it's only accessible through their apps.

But I've snagged enough data that 'til I can figure out what to do with it I'm still overwhelmed.

[ related topics: Weblogs Nature and environment Bay Area Maps and Mapping ]

Well, ya can tell it's MacWorld time again, all the Apple faithful are waiting for... well... Announcements were made today. Paul Boutin writes about Apple's New iSUV, comparing the new PowerBook to the Cadillac Escalade (thanks to Dave for those links). Made of "aircraft-grade aluminum" (um... Isn't nearly everything? How come the only people who can't get aircraft grade aluminum are the folks supplying the out of service ferry?), this 17" display behemoth is only an inch thick, so while you'll knock people over if you try to turn around while carrying this thing on the sidewalk, it'll look like you're just an art student who doesn't yet have a portfolio.

Seems like a perfect time to recall that beautiful Car & Driver review of the Cadillac Escalade we linked to back in March. Let's update it for ༿: "There are a lot of things you can buy for $3299. The Apple 17" PowerBook is one of them."

[ related topics: Apple Computer moron Macintosh ]

The Economist writes in praise of the dirty desk, in the context of Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper's book The Myth of the Paperless Office.

People spread paper over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because it is a physical representation of what is going on in their heads

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment ]

Our offices are right next to Mr. S Leather, so it isn't unusual for me to see lots of sexual culture references on folks on the street, but when I walked down to the Moscone center to grab some stuff at the hardware store yesterday at lunch I was bewildered by the number of folks declaring their ambivalence with "Switch" T-shirts. It took me all the way to 4^th street to remember that it's MacWorld week. I need a Linux shirt that says "Top" on the front and gives the appropriate output on the back.

[ related topics: Free Software Sexual Culture Sociology Macintosh Clothing ]

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had the idea that I was completely at odds with Arianna Huffington. I am now finding that this may not be true. I'm with her 100% on this latest one: fuel efficiency is important to national security. SUVs (and other gas-guzzling vehicles) are helping to fund terrorism. Her Detroit Project has produced a couple of 30-second TV spots parodying the Bushies' "drugs-fund-terrorism" spots, and I find them spot-on. (They're on the site, if you're willing to watch them in RealPlayer; their scripts are there also.) (And yes, I drive a hybrid. It's not just talk.)

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Health Movies Current Events Television Salon magazine ]

A big "three cheers" for StepperControl.com and their S100SMC controller. I fired it up with the NEMA23NSM motor, cobbled together fittings for our equipment out of bits bent from a computer case, and a cut up soda can for shims, and it drives our rig. Yes, it doesn't allow curves for acceleration, just straight lines, but that ramping lets us move our load smoothly enough that we're not throwing clothing around, and relative to all the other vendors we talked to this board has saved us hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Now that we've played with it, I think I'm going to buy one to automate some stuff on my model railroad, and Phil wants to build a multi-axis telescope mount. The only thing missing from their documentation is that the motor block connectors are not insulation piercing, you've got to strip the insulation yourself, and the center post of the power connector is positive. What a great cheap way to get started with motion control. Recommended.

Too bad that, unlike the great guys at StepperControl.com, the manufacturers of the various cameras I'm looking at using in our system insist on NDAs that'd keep me from recommending one once I've had experience with it.

[ related topics: Photography Law Work, productivity and environment Machinery Cool Technology Trains ]

Via Genehack.org, for which I need to change the link down there on the right, AlterNet: Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002. Worth a read because this isn't a "little green men" thing, this has lots of links to mainstream news.

[ related topics: Current Events WTC/Pentagon attacks Conspiracy ]

Be afraid: Federal appeals court rules U.S. citizens can be designated "enemy combatants" and held without having charges filed or even being allowed to talk to a lawyer. It's tempered a little with the statement:

"We shall, in fact, go no further in this case than the specific context before us -- that of the undisputed detention of a citizen during a combat operation undertaken in a foreign country and a determination by the executive that the citizen was allied with enemy forces."

So if you find yourself in a foreign combat zone and aren't a GOP contributor, get out.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]

May force companies to acknowledge security breaches..Of course, it also means they may hide them a little better as well, in order NOT to disclose them publically, which may backfire.

(Dan edited to add the link here)

New TV Show(s) will not have advertising breaks.. it will just be an advertisement, thinly disguised as a show.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Invention and Design Journalism and Media Television ]

Check out these match sculptures

Some of you have contended that the church is full of hot air. Well some of you were right

[ related topics: Religion ]

I'm not sure if this design would make you stand closer of back up a step. I do think I would use a different tag line than "get infected" but that's just me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor moron Graphic Design ]

I don't know if I can explain this site but if thats what fishing was like I guess finally understand the interest.

[ related topics: red neck culture ]

Did I mention TIVO rocks. The chairman of the FCC agrees. Maybe people in the goverment only suck 98% of the time.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

The world's most powerful strap-on could be yours for the right bid on Ebay.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

I'm only 66% geek.. (ok, so I had to answer NO to being a virgin), - But I am 63% Evil Genius (taken tongue firmly in cheek), 47% raver.. 33% Grunge.. 44% Art ("I know art, I just don't live it) only 48% internet addict.. 34% Goth.. Go take a test and kill a few minutes of your day.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Theater & Plays Art & Culture Net Culture ]

In The Big Apple, staying in The Pennsylvania across from Madison Square Garden, Charlene said "I hate to say this, but I've stayed in Motel 6s that have been better appointed". After an experience in a bar last night, I can sum up much of New York City as "black tie drinking white zin". Yesterday hit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, today spent most of it at the Museum of Sex, we'll probably go back to finish out the exhibit. It was fascinating.

I'm sitting in the Morebucks at the south-west corner of Central Park. Tonight it's off to the Vavavoom Room at Fez under Time Cafe, probably stopping in Greenwich Village or Little Italy for dinner. Tomorrow hopefully off to Long Island to visit my grandfather. Everything's going by way too fast, but it's good to catch up on a lot of the things I never got to when I lived in this area. Next time I need to do a better job of catching up with folks I know in this area, but having the freedom right now is nice, it lets us wander the city without schedules or pressures.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Dan's Life Art & Culture Travel New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

Back in the day..('94) Dan, tom, and I joked about starting Chattanooga Online as a religion rather than a legit service company. Right here in River City, headquarters for the Adventists, Church of God, Assembly of God and a few offshoots of each is the Internet Temple Cafe. Alt.Binaries.Pictures.Erotica just became a sacrement, and e-mails from God must show up every day.

Their main web page is unfortunately worthy of being one of Todd's punishment links.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Erotic Spam Todd Gemmell Coyote Grits moron Current Events Chattanooga Net Culture ]

New MS-Product: MS-Settlement - Actually a MS-Disguised large pile of cash, $1.1 BILLION dollars worth for anti-trust and unfair competition. Thats calculated as 28 percent of what " California consumers and businesses paid for Microsoft products from February 1995 to December 2001".

[ related topics: Current Events Net Culture ]

Maybe better than a 17" Laptop for $3500.. a high tech Massage Chair.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/...i?f=/c/a/2003/01/12/MN125083.DTL

Baghdad -- Apparently in response to a blanket e-mail campaign by the U.S. military urging dissent and defections, the Iraqi government shut down -- at least temporarily -- all Internet access and the country's two e-mail servers.

Although no official explanation was given, e-mail service stopped midafternoon on Friday. Some service was resumed Saturday morning.

LOL!! We SPAMMED the Iraqi's. LOL!!! Warfare takes on a new low.

[ related topics: Spam Invention and Design moron Heinlein Net Culture ]

Another time sink on the net but it will make you giggle

This is surreality? Hmmm surreality sucks.

[ related topics: Television ]

ROAR! just go read the site

Georgia Supreme Court has abolished a 170 year old law prohibiting sex outside of marriage.

The girl's boyfriend, Jesse McClure, said he was astonished at being accused of a crime for having sex.

"I laughed for hours," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

"It was so hilarious that they were going to charge somebody for having sex," he said.

McClure was ordered to pay a fine and write an essay about why he should not have had sex.

He wrote that it was none of the court's business.

Only 10 more states to go.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Law Civil Liberties Marriage ]

Mark Pilgrim: "Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant." Yep. And the only people trying for semantic markup these days are the people playing with RSS, with its schismed 1.0/2.0ness and its cop-out of entity encoding HTML, which means that you've still got to have a danged HTML parser. Part of this is the lack of tools, both producing and consuming, but more of this is just that after a while standards groups become dominated either by corporate agendas that have more to gain by bloating and stifling the process than by building lean consensus, and by kids with no real-world experience.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management ]

Not much to update from New York. Charlene went home last night, I think without regrets on leaving, now I'm down to business. We had a good visit with my grandfather on Monday, he's still giggling over having a "Fireman 1^st Class Certificate" sent to him at 84, and has some good stories about a long life richly lived, so that was fun. Other than that, I think we're massively disappointed in this place. Went to the Guggenheim to see their "Moving Pictures" exhibit, and realized that this is a town that still takes postmodernism seriously, acclaiming the role of the critic more than the artist. We skipped seeing the various Broadway shows, when you're choosing between ancient (42^nd Street) and Disney (The Lion King) smaller theater down in "the village" seems much more attractive. But even there, VaVaVoom Room would be a "monday evening" class performance in good old Ess Eff. I came excited, but frankly Atlanta has more going for it; chalk it up as another in the list of places I don't need to live.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Art & Culture New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

The great philosopher Monty Python once postulated that it's always Christmas in Heaven(from meaning of life).Well, we have christmas elves running about and it's january and I still think I have a pulse. To quote Meuon "life is good"

[ related topics: Monty Python Sports ]

Placing a giant lava lamp in the middle of town might be a way to boost tourisum.

Jim Hill Media: $485 Million doesn't count?! asserts that everyone wants to make Toy Story III, except there's this little thing about money and a five movie contract between Disney and Pixar, and sequels don't count...

[ related topics: Pixar Business Animation Movies ]

So despite Todd's glamorous views of the fashion industry, my life isn't nearly that way. Today's comments from a model viewing us working with a mannequin made from a scan of her include complaining about how to keep her job she's had to stop working out and gain 15 lbs over the past few years to keep up with the American size 8, and "when you're done with me, would you put some clothes on me?"

But I'm getting a fascinating peek into how much models know about their own bodies ("This needs another quarter inch on the back shoulder, and...") and the interaction with the designers and technical folks.

On the contrary side, I discovered how much the hotel wants for laundry service, so I went into Macy's last night in hopes of finding a new shirt and some undies. All of a sudden the extra bucks for the service at Nordstrom seem totally worthwhile, and Macy's is now lower than Target in my personal ranking of stores.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Fashion Clothing ]

Went down to Tower Records on Lafayette Street last night. Last time I was in New York it was 1992 or so, and they had a huge set of racks for just zines, small magazines with circulations in the hundreds. This time they had the same larger magazine publication, but the zines were down to two small shelves, probably 20 or so total. I don't know if this is an indication of the ascendance of the Internet or the fall of the New York art scene, but it was roughly what I expected. Which is a shame.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Net Culture New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

Douglas Adams predicted that towels would be the essential travel accessory and perhaps he was right. nude tourisum looks profitable.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Graphic Design ]

A ship pursuing the Jules Verne cup is attacked by a giant squid. Go figure.

[ related topics: Humor Food Art & Culture Machinery ]

Pete Townshend aressted on kiddie porn suspicions. I just learned that in jolly ol England they can arrest you before charging you with a crime. Not sure what Pete's guilty of(if anything) but it seems very wierd to be grouping him with other monsters of that ilk.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Since I work with virtual humans, and other friends do animation and such, I know a couple of people who've talked about the differences between various races recently. All Look Same, a quiz on whether a person looks Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, was enlightening for me.

[ related topics: Animation Race ]

Most of the online guides I can find seem to give the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan, New York City, a 3 star rating, but after a short time there Charlene and I decided that if stars were the standard we needed to be classifying the place with smaller celestial objects. Like asteroids.

The counter staff barely spoke English and went through their steps perfunctorily. There weren't enough of them. The bathrooms had two bars of soap and two small containers of shampoo/conditioner-in-one, none of the usual array of emery boards and hand lotion and the like that one might expect to find. The halls were grungy, although many rooms actually had signs, our room number was written on the door in marker. It took us a while to find the "Do Not Disturb" sign after being awakened at 9:00.00 (6:00.00 our time, and this after having been out late because, well, that's what you do in New York), and once we did it didn't hang on the doorknob well. We were woken up one morning by the sound of rushing water and falling hardware to see water flooding into the bathroom, which is okay, everyone has the occasional accident, but when I opened the door to see if others were having this problem I ran into our neighbors shaking a cockroach out of their bedspread.

And whatever you do, do not make a long distance call from your hotel room. More than $2 per minute.

If you're looking for a place to crash, there are cheaper options in Manhattan. If you're looking for a nice hotel, there are better options. Skip this one.

[ related topics: Travel New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

In New York on Wednesday night and Thursday night I ended up doing dinner in Korea town, 32^nd over around 6^th Ave. On Wednesday I was walking west from the east side, hadn't seen it yet, and tried to flag down a well dressed man to ask if I was going the right direction. He took off running. What does it do to your soul to live in a place with that kind of fear, that any human interaction is a threat?

Anyway, Wednesday I hit a barbecue, which means you get a gazillion little plates with all sorts of awesome pickles on it, from kimchee to pickled melon, a cup of rice, and some grilled meat. And they brought me this little bowl of a yummy soufflé thing. Thursday night I went to another place and ordered "beef with vegetables". The waitress, in broken english, said "You sure? Can be very very hot. You order, no complain." I'm up for adventure, so I assured her that, yes, I wanted it. Well, the vegetables were onion and jalapeño, and as you can see from the picture there wasn't much onion. Of course pride overruled common sense, but let me add that while beer is really good at absorbing capsaicin, with enough of those molecules floating around sometimes that means they just end up getting deposited further back in the throat.

[ related topics: Food Beer New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

[ related topics: Photography Chattanooga ]

I've scoffed at Jacques Derrida before, and after our visit to The Guggenheim on this recent New York trip my opinions of post-modernism are lower than they've ever been (and that's saying something), so when Arts & Letters Daily pointed to a National Review look at the new documentary Derrida I had to check it out. I was not disappointed:

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida — the man who is the subject of the movie — is that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States — a species whose gullibility ranks them somewhere between nine-year-old boys listening to spooky campfire stories and blissful puppies chasing after nonexistent sticks — into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale. History will remember Derrida, and it surely will, not for what he himself has said but for what his revered status says about us.

[ related topics: Movies Art & Culture Travel Pop Culture New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

I didn't march yesterday. I think the U.S. abandonment of the Kurds is disgraceful. I'd love to see various bullies in power in the middle east deposed, and I think U.S. military forces might be the most reasonable ways to go about this. But when Rumsfeld says that the failure to find evidence against Iraq could be evidence of Iraq's non-cooperation, I start considering that our leadership doesn't understand the real reasons we should be working for change in that region and is instead just pushing their own petty agendas.

"The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation," Rumsfeld said.

Um. Yeah. "We've got a lot of weapons here that we really want to use, damn it!", he did not continue.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]

With nothing new and witty to say this morning ("why qualify?", they ask), I'll just drop a few more New York bits here. As I ate breakfast yesterday morning with the hiking crowd I was reminded that not all eggs have to be cooked to shoe-leather. Which reminded me that there's more to salads than iceberg and romaine, too. I was amazed at the level of food, maybe there's some shift in the curve at the high end, but at the middle and low end I'll take other parts of the country, hands down.

The National Debt Clock is counting up again, nothing much to add to that.

[ related topics: Politics Photography Invention and Design Food New York Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

In sharp contrasts to my whining observations about New York, Brink Lindsey says some of what I feel about Hong Kong:

OK, Hong Kong's in a rough patch right now. But it's still a jewel to be treasured: It's rich, it's free, it's dynamic, it's vibrant. The economy will bounce back when the global economy recovers. There are fears that, over the longer term, Hong Kong will fade as China -- and specifically Shanghai -- continues to rise, but I think these are overblown. A Chinese city with Western institutions promises to be a special place for many years to come.

[ related topics: Hong Kong New York ]

Be sure and stop by the MAP CD settlement site and claim $20 of the money they stole wrongfully appropriated from you. If you bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 you are in this class.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Currency Maps and Mapping ]

I watched Startup.com this weekend (along with a few other videos). Great overview of the financial ups-and-downs experienced by most .coms. They managed to completely sidestep all the geeky stuff - but what can you expect when they focus on the Ivy League 20-something CEO. I was proud to hear one of the clients of the failed .com I worked for touted as one of their competitors (Link2Gov). This might have been more interesting if my own experiences with a failed .com was actually alot more interesting!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies ]

Roe v. Wade turns 30 today.

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture ]

Eventhough they share the same DNA. Cloned cats are not identical. So would you wackos stop trying clone Hitler so you can put him on trial! It doesn't work that way! Cloned Hitler might be a nice guy but still certainly ugly.

[ related topics: Cool Science Bioinformatics Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

Since I'm doing the taxes(yeeech) I've been researching various deductions and came across the proposed SUV deduction and thought I'd pass it along since this group seems to be <sarcasum> so cozy with dubya</sarcasum> I thought it would help you understand the <sarcasum>genius</sarcasum> of his domestic policy.

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron ]

Via Must See HTTP, an explanation of the German in the movie Top Secret!: Do you know a little German?

[ related topics: Humor Movies ]

A News.com interview with Peter Houston gives me the impression that someone at Microsoft is "getting it". They've dropped the angry scared rhetoric and are realizing that this is a force with which they're really going to have to compete:

I still believe Linux is an extension of the Unix paradigm. It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly. The Windows approach is very different. I will say that the adoption of Linux is likely to be bounded by how many companies are happy with Unix. Will it have an ability to be persuasive to people that it's a more cost-effective version of Unix?

While I've no doubt that they're still going to make incompatible implementations and play the embrace and extend game, this guy looks like he's also doing some straight-shooting. Now if they can just enhance .MSI files to provide the features and ease of use of the .DEB or .RPM packaging, make the OS not crap itself on simple USB issues, and finally ship a production quality version of Visual Studio .NET I might actually warm up to the company.

[ related topics: Free Software Business Microsoft Open Source ]

Frank's Depression: The boom-bust of a dotcommer's identity looks at someone who went from construction work and waiting tables, to a high flying life as a web designer, and back down. Worth reading because we're seeing a lot of this story, the real estate market hasn't yet caught up, and we're going to have some high maintenance costs on the build-out. And we're going to need something other than tax breaks for the top end and a war to change the attitudes of our compatriots back to an entrepreneuring mode.

[ related topics: Politics New Economy History Work, productivity and environment ]

Phil has taken up SCCA autocross. We mounted a camera between the seats of his car, and I'm playing a bit with video again. Linux Video Editing is a good place to start, his Cinelerra Tutorial has made a couple of things about my Cinelerra experience much more reasonable, and while his compile of the DVUtils package didn't work for me, the dv2dv utility worked perfectly to convert my dvgrab acquired AVI to a Cinelerra compatible MOV.

[ related topics: Free Software Photography Automobiles Video ]

The rescinded consent is rape entry got enough attention that this FindLaw analysis of People v. John Z. might be of interest.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

To make sure you heard it from me first - I finally moved out of the 'Virtual Building'.. I'm not far, just moved to Cameron Hill, Overlooking downtown Chattaboogie, 1.77 miles line of sight from the Virtual Building, complete with a wireless link (Canopy, not 802.11x) to work. The best part has been setting up a kitchen, I really miss cooking. The first trip to a REAL grocery store will be expensive. :) The view is also pretty great, I'll link pics tomorrow.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Wireless Coyote Grits Food Work, productivity and environment Travel ]

I need a motion controller for our rig. We're going fairly well with the S-100SMC stepper driver from StepperControl.com, but we still need some computing power to track position. After looking at budget trade-offs, development costs versus number of units we plan to ship, we've decided that it might actually be cheaper to go with a small PC than an embedded microcontroller. iDot sells a number of VIA Eden based products, including the VIA EPIA 5000, Eden 533MHz Fanless M/B for $100 and the VIA EPIA EM 6000, 600MHz Fanless M/B for $149. Add just a little bit of RAM, use the mouse port for position feedback, and set up Ethernet for control (because it only has one serial port... sigh), and this'll be way too much power to do what we want.

But it would also make a really sweet Ogg Vorbis player, and with a cheap NTSC LCD monitor and some TIP120 transistors hanging off the parallel port to augment the stepper control for the turntable on the serial port might make a heck of a model railroad throttle.

[ related topics: Robotics Embedded Devices Trains Toys Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

I think fair is fair. We've given Cookeville Tennessee police a really hard time for blowing the head off of a family dog in front of its owners during a highway stop, so now it's time to point out that the Danish police shot a teddy bear. (In fairness: It was a bomb hoax.)

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Chattanooga Toys ]

Scoble pointed to a Leoville report that CNet Radio is calling it quits. I'm not surprised, they were a clear product of the .COM boom, the "Wayne's World" of venture capital. Although CNet Radio still has a button on my car radio, I find it hard to listen for extended periods because they can't figure out if they're a financial station or technology pimps, and they get enough wrong that it often feels like fingernails on chalkboards.

[ related topics: New Economy ]

So it looks like a standard PC switching power supply is the cheapest way to power this project I'm working on, replacing the power strip worth of wall warts I've been using for prototyping. The 12v side will run the regulators for the various controller cards, and we can use the 5v side to run the stepper motors. But we don't want to apply holding torque to the steppers when we aren't actively using them because the user should be able to rotate the system by hand. So we need a minimum current draw to keep the switching power supply from eating itself. Anyone got any imaginative ideas for wasting 2 amps at 5 volts?

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

Got together with Lyn of Medley fame last night for dinner. Good discussion, although I was too burned out from a week of meetings and dealing with a vendor to be too coherent. One of the results of that discussion is that I think I want to make Flutterby a little more autonomous, and set up a more personal journal-ish site. I need to install the new version of the code sometime soon, but I'm thinking about ways to make this less my place and more a gathering place. First step is that the "Sites Dan Reads" is going to get dropped from the side-bar to be replaced by something derived from the user records of those who participate in the discussions.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Community ]

The internet went down last night, and it looks like Microsoft did it again </hyperbole>. Exploit in SQL Server got, well, exploited with a worm like the Code Red that got IIS in July of 2001. SF Gate report. /. entry.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus moron Net Culture ]

Some may recall my previous trip last March to Suter Falls. Today, snow was on the trail and the icicles were bigger and more menacing than last time, but I somehow managed to get under the ledge and reasonably close to the frozen waterfall. Tomorrow? Hopefully Bald River Falls

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Chattanooga ]

Weird Ass Shit had a link to Richard Goldstein: Persecuting Pee-wee: A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All. Once again we run into the situation that mere posession of child pornography causes all sorts of potential problems to archivists, and leads to questions about intent:

One California dealer of vintage magazines, who has sold to Reubens, says "there's no way" he could have known the content of each page in the publications he bought. As for the incriminating films, "Most people don't watch videos before they buy them—especially the compilations," says this dealer. He recalls Reubens asking for "physique magazines, vintage '60s material, but not things featuring kids."

Essentially, a few years ago Paul Rubens got raided, his house searched with a fine-toothed comb, and after a year the D.A. decided there was no case. Then a new D.A. gets elected, decides to be high profile, and rather than looking at intent thinks he's got an easy target based on a few grainy images from old magazines, and Rubens is front page news again.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

Since Topspin is raising the quality with images, I figured I'd chime in. This morning's hike was a quick one up Cataract Creek, the light was flat and overcast, and the fog desaturated all the colors, but we got a bit of a workout and saw some cool falls. All the good pictures there have been done again and again, though, I need to start doing something that interests me more visually.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Nature and environment ]

Dave Winer has been musing about age versus youth. Yesterday he talked about how age views the arrogance of youth, and today he says:

Old people are cursed by memories. So much bullshit begins with "I remember when."

I've been looking for a segué to talk about my grandfather, and age in general. On my recent trip to New York I stopped in to visit with him, and hear stories. Stories which have lead me to tons of observations about community and service and the like; among other things, he was a volunteer fireman for something like 58 years, getting out of bed tens if not a hundred times a year to help people, and one of his recent giggles was taking a first aid class, having his files reactivated, and getting a "Fireman, First Class" certificate at 84.

And he was wearing a T-shirt I airbrushed for him back when I was in my teens: "Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill, every time."

One of the things I notice in his tales, and in the tales of various other of my friends who are "older", is how the arrogance of middle age gets dropped. The idealism of youth comes through again in old age as people reflect back and realize that the façla;ade of middle age, when we believe our own lies in order to accept the choices we've made, is unnecessarily limiting. While the aspirations and beliefs of youth aren't realistic, neither should they be quashed or forgotten.

While it might be important that we be aware that there are limitations, celebrating the cynicism of middle age rather than realizing that in another decade we'll look back on that age and feel ignorant once again, sometimes coming back to our original beliefs, is no victory.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Dave Winer Community Dan & Charlene's January 2003 New York Trip ]

Not only do public subsidies of professional sports have net costs to the local economy, if your team is ever successful enough to lose something like the Stupor Bowel your city then has to pay to clean up after the rioting, looting and violence.

Of course it could be worse, you could live in a city with a university that has a strong fraternity system...

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Sports Education ]

Charlene has been complaining that her Windows ME box is crashing and doing weird things. Meanwhile, at work I got this 533 MHz VIA Eden based machine in from iDot that I'd mentioned earlier. Now that I've been playing with te VIA Eden box I'm torn between setting her up with a tried-and-true full-sized Celeron machine, and one of these booting off of CompactFlash into a network mounted drive. What would I get for my $250? Total silence. We could unplug the fans from the case and have a machine that merely sips power running full-out.

There are performance issues, the instruction set is optimized differently than Intel and AMD, and since I've never run a machine off NFS mounted drives I'm a little reluctant to propose that as a solution to stability, but this thing is sweeeeeet and has invoked some of the strongest techno-lust I've had in a while. With a small screen (either VGA, S-Video or NTSC inputs) or Hitachi HD44780 LCD hooked up off the parallel port and remote control in the serial port this'd make a kick-ass Ogg Vorbis or MP3 player, and spending a little money on software (nobody's unlocked the hardware DVD decoder with free software yet, so they tend to skip frames a bit) probably a cool customizeable DVD player too.

Or just get a 15" LCD display and one of these on your desk and easily out-compensate the executive team.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment Cool Technology Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

A couple notes on women's roles and places in society this morning. First, Tastes Like Chicken had a link to an ABC News story on the "Magdalene laundries", operations run by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order of Catholic Nuns in Ireland that took girls thought to be unfit to live in Irish society, took away their names and gave them numbers, and put to work.

Sadie Williams, 64, spent a total of four years in two different convent laundries. She was 14 when she was virtually kidnapped by two women who had determined that she was "in moral danger." Williams liked to take a walk in the evenings, after working all day at a bed and breakfast in Dublin. She said the women considered her much too attractive to stay out of trouble.

She was only 14 when she ended up in a convent laundry outside town as "Number 100," and locked into a cell each night. She says she almost never saw daylight.

Meanwhile, over at Burning Bird, Shell has some thoughts on Phyllis Schlafly's newest book, Feminist Fantasies.

Finally, on the other note, at Utopia with Cheese, Todd has a short euology for Virginia Heinlein. I'd quote from it, but that'd get the whole thing, so just go read it.

[ related topics: Religion Books Sexual Culture Ethics Sociology ]

I am under the distinct impression that the rise of CSS has reduced the amount of semantic information in web pages. We see <span> with special styles used when <cite> would be better. We see the anti-table atmosphere blow away tabular data in favor of wacky

schemes. The latest is Dave Winer's request to redesign Weblogs.com, with an explanation of why and some solutions. Now I do some mucking about on the Flutterby pages to accomodate slow downloads, I understand why Dave wanted to do away with a table that takes a long time to render, but it bothers me that we're seeing semantic information stripped. Especially when the RSS variants, with their entity encoded HTML, is what's being pushed as "the semantic web" these days.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Weblogs Dave Winer ]

SF Gate has a quick article on the current exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum, "Hate Mail: Comic Strip Controversies". Looks like a must-see. Also on the list is "She Draws Comics: Great Women Cartoonists". A visit is in order.

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture Comics ]

Devoid of advertisements, subscriptions and very useful: HyperDictionary is extremely useful for people like me that can't spell and often mis-appropriate words. It also has a thesaurus. Reading his about page, all I can say is Kudos!.

Is there a specific body language for different political ideologies? As suggested by Slate (Edit: link was http://slate.msn.com/id/2077384/ ),the notorius goosestep is one such. It makes no tactical sense to train soldiers in it, it does not exercise any needed muscle groups, yet it is cultivated to a remarkable degree in various dictatorships, such as North Korea. Of course, there is the theory that most dictators are actually failed artists, like Hitler. I guess I never realized that the art in question was the dance.

[ related topics: Politics Art & Culture ]

Just in case you haven't yet seen it elsewhere: Jeff Stryker. Porn Star. Country Singer. From that wonderfully subtle love song, "Pop You In The Pooper" (no, really):

Hey buddy you say you're straight that's great

but you oughta try something new

'cause you got a spot in a place that's hot

and it likes to be tickled too

[ related topics: Humor Music Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Ever have one of those days where someone says something, and it keys all the right words, and a whole bunch gets accomplished really quickly. It happened to me at work with "notched belt pulley systems"; I went back to a place I'd asked for help 3 times already and all of a sudden we found the right catalog and ordered the right parts.

That experience helped me realize that when I was looking for materials for making sex toys I'd never entered "food grade" and "silicone" into a search engine. The alt.sculpture "Flexible Mold Materials Compared" FAQ enlightened me about why some of the folks with the coolest silicones emphatically say "not safe for mucous membrane contact", and I found this catalog page with two materials which might be suitable, with hardnesses in the mid-30s, one much harder one, I think 60A is like a soft skate wheel, and Chef's Silicone Plastique from Culinart, which is hand-moldable, like modeling clay, with what looks like about an hour cure time. Maybe now I can build that two-vibrator cock-ring that fits behind the scrotum. </overshare>

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Food Work, productivity and environment Machinery Skating ]

Do Penises have higher bandwidth than cablemodems?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture broadband ]

The Jer Zone had a link to Zip Code Mysql Database, notable for its discussion of sources and explanation of distance from lattitude and longitude.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Mathematics Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

I read Skipping Towards Gomorrah last night. I'd planned on just starting it and then doing something productive, but I just kept reading. That part's good. But having finished it, it now falls into the "other people should read this book" category, and those people definitely never will. Dan Savage, whom I assume you're all familiar with from his sex advice column, sets out to experience all of the "7 deadly sins" as a reaction to right-wing moralists. There are a few revelations and clarities, but mostly what he finds is what I'd expect to find if I went looking. Even so, it was an interesting time spent with a fun writer.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

You've already seen that AOL lost $99 billion last year. That's a little less than twice it's current market cap. I'm trying to make sense of this, and I can't. I guess I need to sit down with my financial analysis books and figure out just what those shrouded numbers are trying to tell me.

[ related topics: Business New Economy moron Currency ]

FOAF is an XML namespace for expressing "friend of a friend" relationships. Over on 0xDECAFBAD there were some musings about the meaning of the relationships expressed, which lead to a suggestion for a little more specificity. I think it doesn't go far enough, and they need to look to SnogWeb for definitions that lay it out.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

David Coursey on the lawsuits against ClearPlay. If you haven't been following, ClearPlay hopes to sell a DVD player that can take an external edit list, so that you can use the legal DVD in a way that plays their "bleeped" version, with objectionable material removed. Of course I've wanted such a thing ever since hearing about The Phantom Edit(Sam has suggested that similar technology would help Attack Of The Clowns if you could make sections black and white, speed them up by 15%, and put the dialog on cue cards), but it seems that this simple extension of what you could do with a remote or the mute button if you watched the time code quickly offends Hollywood.

I'm wondering how long it'll be before watching a movie involves strapping down the audience so they can't walk out; after all that'd be an edit.

[ related topics: Star Wars Movies Law Consumerism and advertising ]

In light of the article on the history of goose-stepping that Petronius put up here two days ago, I thought it was worth nothing that Tessa Jowell, Culture Secretary of Britain, says that Britons lack German love of culture.

[ related topics: moron Sociology Art & Culture ]

OK if you haven't signed up for Netflix then please come out from under the rock and log on. I wanted to post this suggestion about 6 months ago as a late comer, but have had my life fulminate on the political & industrial fronts and forgot. Two years ago I tried to think of a delivery system where people could watch movies about the same time in different locations and then talk about them. This involved a lot of bandwidth and some grey areas of the law. Netflix is a much better delivery system till broadband becomes as ubiquitous and cheap as power.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Movies broadband ]

Oh MY GAWD! Victorian Science at it's best and worst. Lateral Science seems to be a compendium of scientific logs and corespondense. I am currently reading the letters from Earnest Glich to Michael Faraday. This stuff reads BETTER than Jules Verne.



and a month later when Hodges' arm had recovered sufficiently for turning the machine, I again demonstrated the qualities of vitreous strength inherent with mica. As an interesting sidenote, Hodges has sustained peculiar fern like scarring and ramifications on his skin where he touched the prime discharge brass. I have endeavored to draw these for you Faraday, please forgive the penmanship. Hodges` hand was still smoking when I started the sketch, I hurried somewhat, as he was pleading to go to the horse doctor.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Cool Science Health Todd Gemmell ]

Scoble linked to Sascha Corti's takedown of Sun's ".Net is Not" bit. In it, Corti says:

"Drop the .NET brand?' Did he mean 'Rename the next version of Windows?' He may want to have a look at the .NET Framework...".

From a Mercury News piece on Microsoft dropping .Net:

``We haven't done the best job being clear on branding,'' a Microsoft spokesman said. ``We started slapping .Net on too many products.''

Which is true. I don't know what "dot net" is any more. However, if it's the glorified forms editor known as the ".NET Framework", I'd just like to point out that when I need an example of some of the undignified cruft that I've dealt with in my career that I can talk about publicly, that's it. To some of us, .NET had the promise of being new ways of transferring data and communicating between applications. To find out instead that it means more buggy layers of abstraction and loss of functionality is kinda disappointing.

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering ]