Flutterby™! From 2003-07-03 to 2003-07-31

As in previous years, I posted "Americans Who Risked Everything" text on our main website. Wherever it comes from, it hits me every year when I read it. This year, although I posted it anyway, I seem to be a little less proud of being an American. Our actions abroad, led by Bush Inc. and the Media Moguls seem to be of questionable motives and methods. It is one thing to walk softly and carry a big stick.. it is another to whine and whack at everything, and miss. Still, it is Independance Day (tomorrow), and I am proud to be an American. Dispite our shortcomings, this is an incredible nation to be a part of, to contribute to, and in very small ways, to help mold. The Freedom's we enjoy as Citizens of the USA are unique and without peer in the world, ranging from BurningMan to the simple ability to have sex in our homes, exercise Free Speech and worship (or not).

In this spirit, I implore fellow Flutterbarians to continue the revolution, one small step at a time, in socially responsible ways: vote. get involved, speak out, and do the right thing. Set an example for our fellow citizens. Next year, we could be even more proud of being an American and celebrating our independance and sovereignity.

[ related topics: Burning Man Politics Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Chattanooga ]

Greetings from Seattle, the city with more Imax theaters than any other. Seattle is like a big cute puppy dog which keeps getting up on the couch. It's large, it's smelly, you want to get pissed off, but every time it cocks its head and looks at you with those big eyes and is just so cyooooot that it's impossible to stay mad. We really like this place.

Way back on Saturday we made a stop at Toys in Babeland to pitch Charlene's new business, headed over to the Pacific Science Center for their butterfly exhibit, which is the best $18 I've spent on entertainment recently, up the Space Needle to watch the sunset and see Mount Ranier in the afterglow. Sunday morning we had breakfast at Rosebud while the Pride Parade queued up outside, fine dining with a view, before driving north and meeting up with the family. Today we're back for a few hours to see if we can actually move some product, sitting in a coffee shop on Pike Street with free wireless net access, fly out this evening.

In the intervening times we've been up on San Juan island, and although we learned on the last day there that I could have scrounged some net access, I'm actually glad I didn't know that. Visiting with family, paddling past seals and jellyfish, watching the orcas and bald eagles... Generally an experience which didn't suck. Images coming soon, none are really "nature photographer" quality, but a few are pretty cool.

[ related topics: Butterflies Wireless Dan's Life Nature and environment Food Sociology California Culture ]

Geographically, as far away from Dan as I could get within the conterminous US, I just got back from the Florida Keys. Stayed in Marathon (middle of the Keys) and spent two days in Key West, one day at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas and most of the rest of the time at Bahia Honda State Park.

Key West is like San Francisco packaged to sell to cruise ships with a shot of Tequila and lime. Touristy, but with character. Bars everywhere. Every restaurant has basically the same menu and it's all good. Mallory Square, where everyone gathers to watch the sunset, is a hoot. Locals setup there carny acts and work for tips - no official organization. They lay ropes on the ground to mark off their area. There was alot more stuff to see in Key West that I missed having my daughter and parents in tow. One big draw back - much of the culture is geared to either week-long vacationers at best (same shit different week) or cruise ships docked for the day at worst (same shit, different day). Chickens and cats everywhere. The seafood is incredible - tuna and mahi run the waters and the catch of the day is just that - what the restaurant's charter deep sea fishing boat caught that day. Didn't get to try it, but there are a number of tall ships that do 'sunset cruises' - for $30 a head you get to sail for a few hours to see the sunset and all the wine, beer and champagne your sealegs can handle.

The Dry Tortugas and Fort Jefferson are a must see. I recommend chartering your own boat, however. We took the day ferry and spent more time on the boat than on the island. Fort Jefferson is enough to keep you occupied for a day and the snorkelling and scuba diving around the Tortugas is flat-out amazing (pictures to be developed). Funniest thing I heard all week was the couple seated at our table on the ferry asking if the restaurant we were recommending required formal clothes - in Key West, or so the legend goes, people in formal clothes are refered to as either bridge, groom or defendant.

Bahia Honda State Park is a gem. for $25/night you can camp on the ocean. The temperature in the Keys varies only slightly (low of 80 and high of 90 in June)and on the smaller islands you are guaranteed enough ocean breeze to keep you cool. The park has some interesting nature trails, a butterfly garden, a grove of endangered silver palms, and lots of sea turtle nests. The park offers three daily snorkeling trips to the Florida Reef (for less than $25 for adults). If I go back to the Keys, I'll probably just camp at the park.

I spent alot of time playing with cheap ways of taking underwater pictures. The best result I got was from disposables. Check out my gallery for details.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Nature and environment Food Beer Eric's Life Boats ]

Like meuon, I have some issues with being a U.S. citizen. However, every time I get outside the country I realize that whatever our flaws, we seem to be doing a lot of things better than folks elsewhere are. With that in mind, I think I'm going to celebrate the fourth by putting a little energy into supporting the campaign of Howard Dean (check out Lyn's endorsement of Dean, and know that we must unseat Dubya), re-reading The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, and attending Sam and Kathleen's wedding this afternoon.

(And the bird was soaring over the old lime quarries at Roche Harbor this week.)

[ related topics: Politics Photography moron ]

Last Wednesday we went on an orca watching trip with San Juan Safaris out of Roche Harbor. Debbie was our naturalist, Cal drove the boat, we found the "L" pod (and yes, we have preliminary IDs on most of the whales in the pictures, I just have to type them in), saw two breaches and one spyhop, neither of which I managed to capture, but it was a good trip, and there'll be lots of follow-up images from that trip.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Travel Boats Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Anita Rowland commented that the $12.50 for the elevator trip up the Space Needle was too pricey. Which is probably true, but it was a great view of Mount Ranier, and it was cool to get a quick overview of the various Seattle neighborhoods from the folks doing the descriptions at various points around the balcony.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Travel Seattle Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Just 'cause it is that weekend, some more of our national bird (not Ben Franklin's choice), these two were hanging out in the trees beside the Lopez ferry dock on the way back to Anacortes from San Juan island. A bit too far away to get a good picture, especially with that 75-300/4.5-5.6 IS, but still pretty cool to see hangin' around.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Nature and environment Birds Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

The place we stayed on San Juan island, Roche Harbor, was originally a lime quarry. In its heyday it was run by John S. McMillan, one of those 19^th century industrialists who missed the serfs of Europe, paid his crew in company store credits, and generally, if you read between the lines of the historical brochures in the area, was one of those guys who would've liked to bring back slavery. However, the guy did have a penchant for some pretty cool looking memorials, the mausoleum he built in the woods for his family has all sorts of wacky symbolism dragged from his Methodist beliefs, his Masonic affiliations, his college fraternity, and all sorts of other places. And looks kinda cool "with the right lighting you could see a Maxfield Parrish painting in this setting" way. The back of the chair in that last image, for one of his sons, has a good listing of affiliations.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Dan's Life History Sociology Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

One of the things we did in our meanderings through Seattle was, of course, to pick up all the free weeklies. Among others, Seattle has The Stranger, and this was the weekend of the pride march. The theme was Appropriate This!, an offer to those of us het folks who are taking so much queer culture to take all of queer culture, the bad with the good. Worth reading.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Seattle ]

I usually just delete what makes it past the SPAM filters, but today I got something titled:

Dimensional Warp Generator Needed

And decided it need closer examination. Details in the comments...

[ related topics: Spam History Monty Python Mathematics ]

Anyone want a detailed replica of a fire engine from Skywalker Ranch

[ related topics: Star Wars Pyrotechnics Machinery ]

It's the Loch Ness Monster! Well, actually, just a Dall's Porpoise in Haro Strait off of Lime Kiln State Park on San Juan Island, cropped from this image. It's a shame (and a tribute to the scenery) that this is the best image I got from that visit, as there were quite a few instances of many porpoises surfacing together, and there was one particularly brazen red fox that walked down the trail looking askance at the humans; given that I've never seen one of those in daylight in the wild before there's obviously been some "feeding of the cute little doggy" going on.

Oh, and you can tell it's a Dall's Porpoise by that bend in the back, which sometimes looks like a second fin.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Chronicle article about Jordache, Esprit and Ocean Pacific trying to make a comeback. Hello big hair and primary colors! And bad high school flashbacks.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Fashion ]

Within the past few days, John Robb posted a few snippets of interesting things that he thought weblogs could become, then resigned as CEO(?) of Userland, the company widely known because of Dave Winer's affiliation with it, and his weblog, hosted on company servers, disappeared.

But he had some good ideas and it seems like he went off to commercialize it. With that in mind, I've had a large information management system banging around in my head for a long time, and I want to get the ideas down on electrons first, so that we have "prior art" out there, and so that if anyone wanted to pay me to develop these ideas maybe they'd step forward.

So, some notes on a snippet manager.

[ related topics: Weblogs Dave Winer Software Engineering ]

Lessons learned: unless you buy a real underwater camera, just get the Kodak single-use. The difference between ISO 400 and ISO 800 is startling. The photo on the right (with the anchor) was taken with ISO 400 in clear water. The photo on the left (with the jewfish) was taken with ISO 800 in murky water. I did buy some ISO 800 film for the cheap non-disposable I bought ($11.99 in a gift shop) but it leaked after replacing the film.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Over at Yet Another Web Log (which doesn't have permanent links for current items), Vicki linked to a Yahoo story which says that women may ovulate more than once a month. Here's the Canadian Institutes of Health Research press release and a Globe and Mail article. In short: 63 women with regular menstrual cycles followed daily with ultrasound exams, only 50 of those had "normal" ovarian cycles, others actually had multiple ovulations. So much for the rhythm method.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Current Events Physiology ]

Some days it's about the butterflies. This one hanging out at that previously raved about display at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Seattle Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Adam Curry offers $10k to be split among weblog syndicator writers who eschew the new "Echo" spec. Wow. You've gotta be really committed to a religion to want to suppress alternate views that strongly. I've got a better idea. an entry over at ErosBlog alerted me to Violet Blue's 6/10 entry where she says of the Real Doll, particularly the male version:

I would absolutely love the opportunity to violate this doll ten ways until Sunday, and see just what silicone boy was really made of. Okay, I guess that would be silicone.

But still, if it weren't for the hugenormous price tag, I'd love to roll around with both a male and female Realdoll for a weekend, even with an added real live person, and if anyone wants to sponsor me doing the deed and writing an article about this scenario (and will ship screener dolls), I'm up for the challenge.

I think we've got the perfect match.

Speaking of which, the guy who helped develop that aforementioned male version got a blue woman for his troubles (thanks to a link at the herdesires).

So, on a business oriented note, anyone know where I could see one of these things "in the silicone"? I have an application for a certain level of flexibility in the mannequin, there are a couple of solutions, but it'd be cool to share tech with these guys if they've actually come up with workable ways to get around some of the problems we've seen with silicone and skeletons.

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Dan's Life Weblogs Machinery Fashion ]

San Francisco population drops 2% between 2000 and 2002.

[ related topics: New Economy Bay Area ]

Via Doug's Dynamic Drivel: CanadaHatesMorons.com.

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron ]

Wired reports that hyperlinking is coming to meatspace near you.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

Hopefully I'll get this up in a way that it won't stomp all over Eric's picture entry for the day. A jellyfish off of San Juan Island, apparently, unlike the ones I hung over while learning to sailboard, these guys don't sting. The young boy in our party picked one up, and I didn't hear him hollering in agony. Here's us in a kayak, and our guide Grant with his kayakable guitar.

[ related topics: Music Photography Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Via Jerry Kindall (entry here, although I'm sure it's shown up other places), a brilliant piece of dance from some Japanese TV: Ping Pong meets Matrix.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Art & Culture Television ]

The BBC reports that thousands of rubber bath toys are expected to wash up on New England shores after falling off a ship in 1992. As Katrina and I learned during an Argosy Harbor cruise yesterday (hey, look, it's what to do around Seattle week on Flutterby), vast numbers of containers fall off cargo ships every year.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Seattle ]

The perfect accessory for your Hummer.

Like the H2, the HUMMER Mountain Bike takes its origins from the U.S. Military. Its patented folding system was developed to allow Paratroopers an easy exit from military aircraft with a full size mountain bike.

(Link snagged from Lockergnome.)

[ related topics: Cool Technology Bicycling ]

So we were talking about the behaviors of Serenity, our cat who caused me to sleep poorly last night, including bringing in a mouse at 3 or so, and then batting at the door and making lots of noise when we confined her as punishment, and I used the term "bitch". Which got me to thinking: What's the feline equivalent of "bitch"? Google lead me to Reproduction in the Canine and Feline which labels the female cat a "Queen".

Huh. "Your highness" has a whole new meaning for me.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nature and environment Physiology Cats ]

It's been a busy week. Not much productive work done.. Topspin has become a caver, fighting phobia's.. and loving it. No pics of him all muddy and nasty, yet. He has discovered that tall guys work harder in some places and that it helps in others. Elsewhere, McGyver-ism hits the horse show world... Meuon makes a practice gate using the roof poles from his truck and a caving rope. Laura got 2nd place.. after flubbing this obstacle in previous competitions. Practice makes perfect. Yes, that's a )^( symbol on the windows of Meuon's truck.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

I'm starting to think they do this on purpose. Fu Kim Buffet could be Jimmy Buffet's half Chinese son, and he owns a restuarant.. or if Mr. Kim had taste, he would pick another name. In reality, everyone in Fort Knox Kentucky tells everyone about it.. and they give directions to everything in relation to this place. Food: Pseudo-Chinese Buffet. Advertising: American Style.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

Don't know yet if it's going to be helpful, but I need to give "Sal" over at TTI, "the world's leading distributor of Interconnect, Passive, and Electromechanical components", some warm fuzzies for helping me track down some possible local distributors of a part I'm looking for.

Speaking of which. If anyone out there knows how to get a reliable line on getting a "PC socket" in moderate quantities, preferably with drawings for the part, I'd be interested in help. It's the socket that's on a camera body into which you plug your flash or strobe cable, accepts a plug that's 4mm in diameter with a center pin. And searching anyone's engine for "pc socket" is bloody worthless, because I get every "14 pc socket set" and everything related to "sockets on pc boards".

[ related topics: Photography Machinery ]

And the circus begins: Jerry Springer files for the Ohio US Senate Race . And next week on Meet the Press, an indepth profile of the midget KKK leader who appeared on Jerry's show.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Salon magazine ]

Dang, somehow I glossed over this email: Playing at Red Vic Movie House tonight and tomorrow: The Good Old Naughty Days is:

a collection of 12 silent hardcore pornographic shorts from the early 1900's. Beautifully restored by the National Cinematheque in France, these films were originally created to "entertain" brothel patrons as they awaited their turn.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

Regarding my travails yesterday, I just found the place: Paramount Cords has several different form factors of PC sockets, including circuit board mount and case screw in (scroll to the bottom of the page). If you're needing to build devices to trigger photo strobes and flashes or do other things involving special purpose connectors on cameras and other photographic devices (yes, I am trying to be complete for search terms here), these guys are the ones to call.

Yippee!

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

In Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology, David Weddle looks at the U.C. Santa Barbara film school curriculum from the point of view of a father who's just realized that he's laid out $6,100 for his daughter to take film theory classes:

The prose was denser than a Kevlar flak jacket, full of such words as "diegetic," "heterogeneity," "narratology," "narrativity," "symptomology," "scopophilia," "signifier," "syntagmatic," "synecdoche," "temporality." I picked out two of them — "fabula" and "syuzhet" — and asked Alexis if she knew what they meant. "They're the Russian Formalist terms for 'story' and 'plot,' " she replied.

"Well then, why don't they use 'story' and 'plot?' "

"We're not allowed to. If we do, they take points off our paper. We have to use 'fabula' and 'syuzhet.' "

Good article if you haven't got your "academia and reality don't mix" dander up recently.

[ related topics: Movies Education ]

A /. article linked to New Advances in Filesystem Space [PDF]. Nothing terribly new here, except that I'm playing with concepts similar to these in an information browser, creating an artificial filesystem like view, and while I'm not sure I quite like the "files are files or subdirectories" abstraction these do offer some new ways to help make sense of metadata.

Worth reading if you've been susceptible to the "Longhorn" hype, have looked at perlfs, heard of Plan 9 but don't know what to make of it, or just want to see where user views of data are headed.

[ related topics: Microsoft Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

A look at the role of the "House Mom" in strip clubs.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Are the rules about threatening the members of the Supreme Court as tight as they are about threatening the U.S. president? If so, with Pat Robertson calling for the assasination of members of the U.S. Supreme Court, why he still walking around free? Or is it now generally accepted by the Republican majority in the U.S. government that god is mythical?

[Edit: I got my fundies mixed up, was originally Jerry Falwell.]

[Double edit: Dang it, I can't find that one article, I guess I've gotta withdraw the accusation. He does seem to be simply calling for a retirement.]

[ related topics: Religion Politics moron ]

I got my VIA Eden 5000 motherboard and a Casetronic ITX-2677 case from KnowledgeMicro. Their prices were incredible. I picked up a 512MB DIMM for $55 and a 512MB CF card for $95. I'm still waiting on my IDE-CF adapter. For now, I'm setting up the OS (trying Debian first) on a hard drive. You really can't imagine how quiet this thing is. No fans, no hum, nothing. I even found a clockspeed jumper and have it cranked down to 266Mhz! I wonder if it draws less power at that speed... I don't need fast, just cool and low power... More to come on the lab's server.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Open Source Law Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

Poynter Online has an interview with Mark Morford. Also, in today's SF Gate, Mark looks at the current state of the Bush administration in Nothing Left to Lie About. It occurred to me while reading this that yes, he's a little over the top, and there's probably some quibbling over syntactics, but if someone who self-identified as conservative wanted to understand why the nation is so polarized, reading that article with a "whether or not the details are strictly true, that is the impression that those who revile the current adminstration are getting from it" slant would go a long way towards understanding. Mark sums up his writing style as:

It's an evolution. I suppose I aim for one part DeLillo, one part David Foster Wallace, one part old Tom Robbins, one part stream of consciousness, one part Peets mocha, one part post-coital flush, one part orgasmic syntax abuse, one part nipple pierce for the AP style guide. It lives at the intersection of Divine and Ungodly. Where the long snake moan meets the cool intellectual margarita. Wry informed satirical thought-provoking absolutely essential effluvia to make you squirm and blush and laugh and sigh. I hope. I fail all the time. But that's just part of the process.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area Mark Morford ]

David Chess is searching for epithets:

I mean, shouting "that's because he's a fuckhead!" suggests that there's something wrong with fucking and/or heads, and that's silly. "Bastard" has the same problem (no shame in one's parents not being married), and even "asshole" seems to do an unfair disservice to a useful, and even erogenous, body part. "Shithead" is marginally more acceptable, but is even shit really so bad, compared to your average lying cheating stealing politico? I don't think so.

I know the feeling.

[ related topics: Quotes Politics Humor Sociology ]

Good news! A team led by Professor Graham Giles, head of cancer epidemiology at the Cancer Council Victoria, has found that masturbation may protect against prostate cancer. From the press release:

The researched showed that the protective effect of ejaculation is greatest when men in their twenties ejaculated on average seven or more times a week. This group were one-third less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer when compared with men who ejaculated less than three times a week at this age.

Other rehashes from The Independent, The Australian, Yahoo.

This study looked at ejaculation, which gave different results from previous studies which looked at sexual activity. This was one of the things that bothered me about the "it's bad to ejaculate" thing from the neo-tantra folks (not just delayed ejaculation, which is actually high on my list of "good things"). Clearly this should be up there with brushing your teeth on the "things to do to keep your body healthy" that we tell kids to do.

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

Okay, putting this here so that I remember it next time I go by the bookstore: Grande Horizontales looks at the lives of 4 19^th century courtesans.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

Phil said that The League of Extraordinary Gentleman sucked so bad he walked out of the theater. But on the way home yesterday I had a few extra minutes as I walked by Stacey's so I went in and browsed, and came out with the compendium of the first 6 (which is now "volume #1". Comics are so confusing). I understand why the movie sucked.

Okay, the comic isn't bad, but it's a mood piece, not a real story. There's little setup and payoff, not much to make the characters likeable, the motivations are unclear. Sure, there are the cute references to The Pearl, but neither that nor the other literature references are witty or subtle enough to carry it. And movies definitely don't take well to those sorts of gags. I don't recommend the comic, and given that and what I've heard elsewhere I'll definitely be skipping the movie.

[ related topics: Erotic Movies Comics ]

Okay, Perl geeks, the new State of the Onion is up.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Invention and Design ]

Yes, it's one of those days: I'm reading AP-125 Designing Microcontroller Systems for Electrically Noisy Environments. You, over there on the right. Stop snickering.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Dan's Life Embedded Devices ]

I think Meuon and I didn't start running it 'til a bit later, in '93 Robert, Gonzo, me and a few other folks were still playing with KA9Q at this point, and Meuon and I were doing Usenet via a 9600 baud satellite system and internet email through UUCP, but 10 years ago today version 1.0 of the Slackware distribution of Linux was released.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Open Source Net Culture ]

Via Margaret, who sent me the lastest massive M$-Bug. Kudos Microsoft. - the odd part of this is having a woman in my life that actually understands computers.. and hates M$ and sends me such links. Not complaining, just adjusting nicely...

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Want to go to Burning Man with included schwag and a professional guide? Meals Included? Travelocity.BurningTours.com wants to help you be a tourist for only $1400.00 per head.

[ related topics: Burning Man Douglas Adams ]

It's a scary precedent when DirectTV uses such scary tactics to nail users of smart card programmers.. which can also be used to assist in stealing a DirectTV signal. I own guns, I must be a murdered, I own exposives, I must be a terrorist, I own a digital camera, I must be a pornographer, I can write code, I must be a hacker, I drive a car, I must be guilty of every possible traffic violation....(OK, Some of these ARE true.. but I digress) - What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

[ related topics: Photography Automobiles Guns ]

Big deep breath. Hold it. Breathe a little more. Okay, let it out slooooooowly. Just a few butterfly pictures because some days I need a few butterfly pictures. Pacific Science Center butterfly exhibit in Seattle.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Dan's Life Seattle Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

As I walk to work these mornings, I've been grabbing a San Francisco Examiner, and I've actually been impressed that they've started to cover cool stuff happening in the city. Thought they'd be toast once they went free, but they're actually about the walk's worth of a few cool articles. Bruce Bellingham does a decent dish, and they've been having a few other articles of note. On Wednesday they covered the Banana Republic billboard liberation, (The Billboard Liberation Front has their own minimalist coverage). This morning they covered the "Mob project" thing as it happened in SF; people showing up somewhere, doing something to lend a slightly surreal atmosphere, like applauding for 15 seconds, or, in this case, spinning across a crosswalk during the "walk" cycle, and then disappearing.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

I gotcher syndication right here, pal. None of this wussy "Uhhhm, excuse be, but we're going to entity encode HTML inside of XML" crap, none of wheel-reinvention of a format developed for freakin' headlines, none of the politics of new formats without applications, no standards bodies run amok, nobody's worried about who owns the copyright, that's what ya got tire irons and motorcycle chains for. There's no worrying about revision tracking here, when we want to make sure it's permanent, we'll tatoo it someplace that counts.

Dan has finally done the obvious: Flutterby via NNTP, a protocol actually developed for delivering news. So, fire up a newsreader, point it to port 119 of your favorite server and subscribe to flutterby.weblogentries , use your email address from your Flutterby user info as your username, with your Flutterby password, and read some freakin' news.

Totally rawks in gnus, works nicely in Mozilla, Opera is a little funky, but nothing they won't fix, and it should work in all of the rest of your favorite newsreaders. Nope, not "news syndicators" or whatever that modern wussy crap is, we're talking industrial-strength time-tested terabytes-served chews alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.amateur.female for lunch blows your doors off and in the next county before you realize the light has changed technology.

This is the Bronco II to your Suzuki Samurai, a '67 SuperSport with a bored out block, glasspacks, and nitrous in the trunk to your mother's station wagon, baybee.

Limitations:

• Read only right now. Working on it, but Flutterby doesn't thread, and I don't necessarily want those sorts of conversations coming to the front page.
• Email and password changes might take up to 5 minutes to propagate, and the validity and duplication of email addresses in the user list is an issue. Email me if it doesn't work.
• The "allow my email on the NNTP version" checkbox doesn't work. You can't give out your email yet. Deal.
• I've noticed a lot of folks with spamtraps in the email list. If you ever get mail from one of those spamtraps, tell me immediately, 'cause it indicates something gone way wrong, and we'll have to leave the burning corpses of those responsible as a warning to others.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Flutterby Meta Invention and Design Copyright/Trademark ]

TwirlyGirl.net: "Extraordinary pasties for discriminating nipples".

[ related topics: Erotic ]

San Francisco's Famous Burlesque Review at the Make Out Room on Thursday. We'll be there.

[ related topics: Erotic Dan's Life Bay Area ]

Watched Lucía y el sexo last night. Hmmmm. First movie in a long time I've wanted to see again, and I'm wondering if Y Tu Mamá También got so much positive press, how come I wasn't aware of this one in the theaters?

It starts out as very enjoyable soft-porn, yet somewhere in there switches over to a good strong romantic tear-jerker, one that (contrary to some of the comments on IMDB) came together in a fantastic and yet completely justified way. Photography and direction seemed a little uneven, but again, I want to go back and see it again because I saw some story being told in the use of the camera, and I think there are a couple of threads here wanting to be teased apart.

Something else to note: Despite visible genitals and some pretty hot suggestion, these are actors with mainstream careers in other countries. We need to do everything we can to break the hold the MPAA has on movie taste in this country.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

A few people have linked to Markoff in the New York Times: Whitehouse E-mail System Becomes Less Friendly, about the new forms-based interface to send feedback to The Whitehouse The Whitehouse (With apologies to Doug Marlette: "So you take the feed out to the chickens at 7 or so, and long about 11 you get your feed back..."). Frankly, I see this as an improvement: Now we know what knobs to tweak. Before some hapless intern looked for keywords in the email and funneled that into some sort of higher level statistics system, and they've just taken that subjectivity out of the loop and given us the knobs to tweak. Sounds like opportunity to me.

[ related topics: Politics Spam ]

You know it exists, did you know it has an office? Ok, how about a retail store in Huntsville. - It's a rave/clothing/skateboard shop with a great name.

[ related topics: Photography Clothing ]

Just finished Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography by David Loftus (ISBN 1-56025-360-6). I was disappointed, mostly because it was just a reaffirmation of what I already know, and those who most need to read it, those who've been taken in by the manipulations and misrepresentations of the anti-porn pro-censorship crowd, won't. It's based on his interviews, many done via the internet, with men who use porn, and he breaks down the book into dispelling many of the myths that have grown up around porn use, with a few chapters in the back that directly take on assertions by the usual suspects.

Handy to have on the bookshelf in case someone not quite so enlightened drops by and starts to thumb through it, but to Flutterby readers it's probably mostly a "yeah, and?"

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Free Speech Law Net Culture ]

California state Democrats caught talking candidly about the budget crisis when someone left a microphone on.

"It seems to me if there's going to be a crisis, the crisis should be this year," Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, said during the meeting. "What you do is you show people that you can't get to this without a 55 percent vote."

The unintentional broadcast was interrupted when someone informed the group that a microphone was on. "Oh s--," Goldberg said as the sound was cut.

Hee hee hee.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture ]

Interested in a bunch of source code that you'll have to be a wizard in PostgreSQL, Perl and Apache to understand, that's guaranteed not to install cleanly, and that'll take lots of effort and email with Dan to get running...

...but with the right group of people could evolve from a bunch of loosely coupled scripts into a rather nice content management system? Volunteers needed, in everything from documentation to web design to down and dirty coding, to turn this from a hack into a product. Email me for details and a CVS, then head on over to Flutterby.Net and let's see what we can do about packaging this baby up for use.

[ related topics: Free Software Content Management Flutterby Meta Perl Open Source Software Engineering Graphic Design Databases ]

New Hampshire Supreme Court considering whether two people of the same sex can be said to have comitted adultery.

The justices heard oral arguments in an appeal brought by a gay woman from Brownsville who is accused of adultery in the pending divorce action of a Hanover couple.

"My position is New Hampshire has no same-sex adultery," said Robin Mayer, who represented herself in her appeal to the court. The 1791 adultery statute was meant to apply only to heterosexual intercourse, she said.

Mayer was named as the third party in the divorce proceedings of David and Sian Blanchflower after David Blanchflower accused his wife of having an "adulterous" relationship with Mayer. Both women have objected to the adultery charge on the grounds that New Hampshire law recognizes adultery only as a heterosexual act. Mayer appealed after Lebanon Family Court Justice John Peter Cyr ruled that the legal definition of adultery should encompass same-gender sexual relations.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Law Current Events ]

Aaaaaugh! One hour and thirty five minutes on a conference call. Even in my most mooning-over-someone talk-on-the-phone-all-evening modes I don't think I've been on the phone that long. And I probably only had to say about 50 words.

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

In addition to protests from the Greek Orthodox Church...

North European countries have protested at what they say are plans to increase the number of brothelsin the Greek capital, Athens, during next year's Olympic Games. Gender equality ministers from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania issued a joint statement expressing their "abhorrence" at an alleged request by Athens City Council to boost permits for brothels to meet demand during the Games.

I'm rather surprised to see some of those countries listed. Is prostitution legal in any of them?



(Asides: "Gender equality ministers"? And what is up with those really goofy-looking mascots, Athena and Phevos?! Their feet are too big for most sports, I think. And those oddly-shaped heads? I guess that's supposed to indicate hair.)

[ related topics: Religion Drugs Games Sexual Culture Political Correctness Law Current Events Monty Python Sports ]

In his quickies today, John over at Genehack linked to a Guardian article about proposed British legislation against minors kissing that starts out:

A bill due before parliament next week will make it a criminal offence for two 15-year-olds to kiss in public, the Home Office said last night.

But officials said those below the age of consent were unlikely to be prosecuted if both were enjoying the embrace.

Isn't this how the anti-sodomy laws in the southern U.S. were justified? That these were likely non-consensual activities so criminalizing them would give police the discretion to do the right thing?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Enforcement ]

Anti-news: 9/11 report: No Iraq link to al-Qaida

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned.

Edit: The story has been changed to:

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- On July 23 2003, United Press International published an article about materials believed to be in a report to be released July 24 regarding investigations into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. UPI cannot further stand by this story as originally filed and will have a corrected version soon.

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

Went to see Whale Rider yesterday evening. The tale of a young Maori girl whose grandfather is leader of the Whangara tribe, whose father has rejected the ways of the community and gone off to Germany, and whose twin brother, who would have been the first born of the first born, died at birth along with her mother.

So it's a story about gender roles, about traditions, mysticisms and destiny. It's a modern story, which means there's lots of material to play those traditions off of, and it's PG-13, "for brief language and a momentary drug reference", but probably mostly because it doesn't shy away from showing some downright harsh human relationships. But those strong rejections make the tearjerker parts stronger without being overly maudlin.

Yes, it's about mysticism and destiny, which might leave those of you who need absolute rationality in your films a little unfulfilled, but it was a strong movie that I think has enough substance to keep adults occupied while also finding some resonances with kids old enough to understand and empathize with the family dynamics.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Nature and environment Sociology Mythology Community ]

A New York Press write-up on the recent Romance Writers of America convention, and a quick overview of the state of the genre today.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Writing Current Events New York ]

Went down to The Make Out Room last night to see San Francisco's Famous Burlesque, with The Cantankerous Lollies, Kitten on the Keys, Duck's Breath Mystery Theater, an "everything shaking in ways I didn't know it could" performance by special guest Isis, Gorilla-X, gorilla to the stars, Rocky (who's "stripping on a pogo stick routine" has gone from amusing to impressive) and a few other folks whose names (and stage names) I would only do injustice to. Oh yeah, and Mad Dog as MC, who needs to work on his schtick, it's great to be bad to drag attention away from weaknesses in performances, but he was uneven and a little old last night.

I'd love to see a slightly better venue, The Make Out Room has tables and space near the stage, but out by the entrance narrows out by the bar so that people further back aren't as engaged. It also means that the patrons who arrive early aren't the ones getting drunk, it's the louts who stumble in late. So somewhere towards the end of the first act things get pretty loud back in the audience.

The Cantankerous Lollies were down to two last night, pairing up several times with Kitten on the Keys, who is getting away from the cutesiness of songs like "Grandma Sells My Panties on eBay" (excerpts of her older style) and into some real belting-it-out stage tunes. Different style, very entertaining.

Anyway, a good fun night, although I should remember earplugs because although the sound was clean it did take a while for my head to get back to normal.

[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area Theater & Plays Burlesque ]

So once again I have the web design bug, and I was wondering: Can any of you CSS fans out there give me a reason why replacing text with a background image and a span {display:none;} is better than an "alt" attribute on the "img" tag? In every situation in every browser I use the "alt" solution is better, but maybe there's some bizarre screen reader or something that works better the other way?

[ related topics: Web development Graphic Design ]

Charlene was looking for sex toy stores to distribute her product (yes, link coming as soon as we get the production line unstuck), and ran across a few ideas at The Halfbakery, "...a communal database of original, fictitious inventions...": A Sex Toy Co-op "Sex toy store in the style of grocery cooperatives", and a suggestion for Tofu sex aids:

The strap - on Tofunator with vibrating multispeed tip would be a hit with lesbian vegetarian extremists who despise 'meat' of both kinds.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Food Fashion ]

Digital Photography Preview looks at the Nikon D2H, which has a wireless (802.11, apparently) transmitter option. Take a picture, have it show up on the web server of your choice.

[ related topics: Wireless Photography ]

I've felt like crap this weekend with a sinus infection, so beyond getting the requisite exercise I've sat around and read. Specifically, John Krakauer's latest book, Under the Banner of Heaven. A bit of a departure from his previous works, most notably Into Thin Air, this one isn't about climbing. It weaves the tale of a brutal double murder by two brothers who were part of a Fundamentalist Mormon sect into the history of the Mormon church and its various offshoots and subsidiaries, in the process delving into polygamy, spirituality, prophets, the Powell expedition down the Grand Canyon, and the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping.

A fascinating history of religion gone astray, it wasn't as gripping as his previous works, possibly because it's about a topic that I care less about than climbing. I've lived in an area with lots of religious fundamentalism, I know how closed communities can stray from sanity, it's not news to me that believers can do horrific things in the name of deities.

On the other hand, especially in this time when we're descending from the "it was for the weapons of mass destruction" through "it was because of a regional threat" to "we needed to free the Iraqi people", it's a reminder that strict social codes and oppression don't only happen outside of the United States, and that as we look to cleaning up the Middle East we should probably also do a little soul-searching with the South and West, and probably a bit in the Midwest too.

And it has a fascinating rundown of the path that the Mormons took from New York to Missouri to Illinois to Utah.

Not a gripping must-finish read, but certainly not wasted time.

[ related topics: Religion Books Current Events WTC/Pentagon attacks Community ]

Jeanne had given us an old scrap machine to repurpose for Forest, but every time I tried to update stuff on it I was getting errors on the IDE bus. Forest is getting antsy, so this weekend I repurposed the Via Eden machine that was going to be my living room media center to be the house server, and set up the old house server to be a game and edutainment machine for him. The Eden now has an 80 gig hard drive and half a gig of RAM and is happily serving up Samba shares, PostgreSQL queries and internal HTTP and all that stuff.

But let me tell you, even with a repurposed old CPU fan glued inside the case to a make sure that the hard drive stays cool, this is the way to run a server. Small, much quieter, a lot less electricity consumed. If I'm sure that I can get the whatever-that-silly-protocol that lets instant-messaging type apps work behind IP masquerading going I'll probably stick another ethernet card in this beast and give my router to a worthy cause.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Cool Technology Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

Showing that soldiers are willing to anything to get high speed 'net access.. http://www.army-technology.com...ors/navigation/brugg/brugg5.html

You have to wonder about using fiber cable for field deployment in hostile situations, very easy to break.

Holy Cow! Whump point us to Cathay Pacific's $699 (plus tax) All Asia Pass

which includes roundtrip airfare from San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York to Hong Kong and 21 days of free travel to 17 other cities in Asia. The pass is good for outbound travel between September 1 and December 3, with return travel by December 11.

This seems particularly apropos to Columbine's sinophilia. And Cathay Pacific has wonderful seats with headrests that hold your head in place so you can sleep on the plane, even in coach.

[ related topics: Aviation Travel Hong Kong ]

I thought this was apropos to some of the personalities and conflicts of the weblogging world: A bit on studying truth and memory at Harvard: A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs ]

We've been light on the pictures recently, and I'm about to go do a bunch of hardware clean-up and organization, so I need some inspiration. More from the butterfly exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.

Oh heck, let's go nuts: Lots more in the comments.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography California Culture Seattle ]

Yay! Flip-flops gaining office popularity. I switched back to Birkenstock sandals (with the heel strap) after my recent ankle injuries to keep my feet more stable, and as much as I've liked my Merrell shoes I'm realizing that there's something to be said for that wide sole. And yay for free toes!

[ related topics: Shoes ]

Why do politicians wear ties? To keep the foreskin pulled back. (Sorry, now that I've discovered there are some good lawyers (even when their websites disappear unexpectedly) I'm picking on new demographics). /. points to a BBC article reporting that neck-ties can cause increases in pressure in the eye, a condition whic hhas been linked to glaucoma. Unfortunately, I've searched the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary pages and I don't see any mention of this study there or at the American Journal of Opthalmology.

[ related topics: Health Fashion Physiology ]

I call hoax: I don't remember which of my daily reads gave me a link to the story about the Pentagon funding PolicyAnalysisMarket.org, (one of a gazillion reprints of roughly the same story), but I call hogwash.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

To do Thursday: Catch Sharky's Den of Sunken Pleasure.

[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

Sigh. Everyone else will be linking to it, but I've just gotta do it: Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2003 Results. Do not read while drinking.

[ related topics: Humor Books ]

Borklog linked to the Fantastic Flying Octopus but what really caught my eye was clusterballooning over the Pacific ocean: Remember the tale of Larry Walters and his lawn chair hooked to balloons? Well, These guys do it right.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Wandering around the neighborhood recently, and noting the 1 bedroom shack (that had a bowed roof before the last buyer fixed it) on the market for $439k, we've started seeing that houses aren't selling for their asking prices in Marin. Just last night we walked past a house with a stack of flyers out fron that were penciled down ten thou from the asking price. Carol Lloyd looks at one of the schemes that might have caused the over-pricing, a group in California that manipulated sale prices in Carmel, San Francisco, Marin so that the houses appeared to have sold for 2 to 3 times of their asking price, getting the loan, apparently 86 times, and now skipping off to the south Pacific.

[ related topics: Bay Area moron California Culture ]

Tossing this one up there because I always thought that phreaking was over somewhere around the late '80s, but no: MCI apparently masked long-distance calls as local calls to avoid interconnect charges. This takes me right back to the BBS days.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Current Events Phreaking ]

As of this morning on the ferry I decided it was time to get serious about unsolicited email. I've installed SpamAssassin, but that's just rule based. Igor pointed out CRM114 - the Controllable Regex Mutilator, with a couple of learning algorithms. Looks like it might be a good "in addition to".

[ related topics: Spam ]

I now have the Via Eden hooked up to my 512MB CF card with the IDE-CF adapter. The machine boots extremely faster and is eerily silent. I am 100% sold on these Eden motherboards and as I find the money, I'll be replacing all of my machines, including my server. And it might just be apt-get, but I'm quickly falling in love with Debian. Has anyone played with using a CF card for the boot device and a standard hard drive for data? I'm thinking for an AV system where you might want to store your MP3s on a hard drive but boot off the CF (speed and low-power normal operation). Maybe even copy the MP3s to the CF before playing to allow the hard drive to spin down sooner...

[ related topics: Free Software Music Open Source Shoes Currency Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

Via Daze Reader: I agree with The Smoking Gun, even in the face of Lawrence v. Texas this may be the legal document of the year: Motion to Dismiss: The Constitiutionality of Fuck, "Fucker", and "Fucking Fag". Written by a public defender to get the case of a student who used those epithets against his principal and was charged with disorderly conduct dismissed.

[ related topics: Language Sexual Culture Law ]

Oh yeah: Thanks to some help with Exim configuration and a rather heinous line in my crontab to not try queue flushing unless the link is up, SMTP, my mail checking (at least on my Flutterby based accounts) and my web browsing are now all SSH tunnelled from my laptop. Paranoid is no longer enough. I should still take the time to get TLS and X.509 certificates up and working for SMTP, but that'll probably involve switching the Flutterby server from Sendmail to Exim and that's a mess I'd rather not tackle right now.

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

Some days... Some days the butterflies won't cut it and ya just need a little orca fix.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

CompGeeks just got more of their 4-inch NTSC LCD Displays in stock. I'm going to hook one up to a VIA Eden system for semi-permanent use in Portia. Looking at distros, I found a link to Freepia over at linITX.org. It's a pared-down Linux distro compiled for the Eden C3 processor with just enough goodies to play MP3s and DiVX movies. I may couple it with a FIC Falcon so it can play DVD movies without putting Windows on it. Anybody have luck with the Linux based DVD playback programs?

[ related topics: Free Software Music Movies Open Source Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

Over at Sgt Stryker's Daily Briefing, Stryker says: So You Want to Join the Military.... Damn I wish I'd had that when I was in college looking at my options. Coming from the direction from someone who's career, and therefore serious about it, talking about what recruiters will tell you and all. Worth a read if you're of that age.

Speaking of "of that age", I rode the ferry home with one of the guys who used to come over to Coyote Grits to play Counter-Strike and the like on our LAN the other day. I hesitate to call him one of the Rat Boys because I've yet to figure out what that group encompasses, but I think he's one of 'em. He's got an internship at Discreet. It's interesting talking to the various high-schoolers I know, from the "I have no idea what I'm going to do this summer" to the "I'm using this internship as a stepping stone to this experience, which I think will round out my college application this way, and during college I'm going to do this and this and this to get the attention of these companies..."

I was in the former group. Thought I was going to be a graphic designer until somewhere in my second year of college. Any of y'all in the latter category, and how did it serve you?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Coyote Grits Education ]

Apropos of my comment about encrypting everything to and from my laptop, I was concerned about the speed of the SSH tunnelled proxy server. Here at work where I'm on low-end DSL, it actually appears to be faster than the unencrypted box next to it. At home I had varying results, last night it clipped along, this morning it was slow. But I suspect what's going on is that the network at Highertech.net is better adminned and has faster DNS results than Comcast and whatever DSL provider we use here at work, and if the packets are flowing smoothly from here to my colo box in Chattanooga, then wherever they have to go from there is faster than what the big-name network folks can do.

[ related topics: broadband Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Cryptography ]