Flutterby™! From 2003-08-01 to 2003-08-31

Oh fudge. Just when I was sure I was going to vote against the recall because I think recalls are stupid and as bad as Davis may be, the only possible alternative I could imagine supporting is Frank Riordan and it'd be a bad thing for his career to win this election because it wouldn't give him a mandate and you'd have to be a miracle worker to come out of the next few years in California without a majority electing you looking at all good, when I learn that Hustler's Larry Flynt wants to replace Davis.

Now this is an election where anyone can win. Those who vote to remove Davis from office will be able to vote for one of the possible replacements, and the replacement candidate who gets the most votes is in. The campaign season is short enough, and the big names are staying far enough away (except perhaps for Ahhhnuld) that there'll be a bunch of small candidates all beating it out, and someone could win with 10 or 20% of the voter turnout.

Flynt couldn't get elected in a regular election, but might in this one. And that could be a really good thing for California. Hmmmmmm...

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Free Speech Current Events California Culture ]

Latest odd story out of Iraq: According to the Guardian, Coalition forces have found a number of Iraqi warplanes hidden at airbases. No Iraqi warcraft are thought to have flown during the late war, although it is unknown if this was due to some strategy or to refusal by pilots to confront the Coalition. Perhaps most strange is that fact that some of the planes were lowered into the sand and just covered up, with little effort to sandproof them. As Instapundit points out, this ruined the planes as effectively as if they were shot down.

[ related topics: Aviation History War ]

I wonder what unassembled passengers look like?

Ferry from Anacortes to San Juan Island.

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

John over at Genehack has a ramble about Sun's FUD. And yes, if Sun truly believes that "operating systems are the single most valuable asset on the Internet", they're toast. Especially given Solaris.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Open Source Net Culture ]

Big White Guy looks at pressure on kids in the Hong Kong education system. Of late I'm frustrated with some Hong Kong cultural differences, and in pointing out the emphasis on competition rather than success I think he puts his finger on some of what's going on.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Education Hong Kong ]

Foxtrot on the inspirations for kids going into computer animation, looking at the specific instance of Pixar and Finding Nemo.

[ related topics: Pixar Children and growing up Animation Movies Graphics ]

I'm just going to send everyone elsewhere today. Too many good entries other places on the web. Mark outlines How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less.

Each successive revision of Windows has a slightly longer half-life. Windows 95 lasted about 3 months. This copy of Windows XP has lasted me almost 9. I?m not bitter; when you realize that you?re measuring on a logarithmic scale, a factor of 3 improvement is really quite impressive.)

The sad part is that he's right: Windows has less time between installs than Linux does between reboots.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source ]

Virtual economists.

[ related topics: Humor moron Economics ]

http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm

is an analysis of:

http://www.infowars.com/patriotact2.htm

the whole thing.. No sure who or what to believe yet..but fun to read.

Noooo... Fire engulfs 7 story Jim Beam warehouse in Kentucky.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics ]

Occasionally I fantasize about what the world would be like if we all had the ethics of spammers:

This bomb is not murder because you agreed to be part of an assisted suicide project through one of our affiliates or agreed to receive lethal attacks from us as part of our terms of service.

[ related topics: Ethics moron ]

BMW appears to be taking on online MINI enthusiasts. I love the "Let's let our legal team be an 800 lbs gorilla. Let's undo our enthusiast branding...." ad campaign.

[ related topics: Law Automobiles ]

So, uhhh, hypothetically, if a tool were to turn up that magically turned weblogs into NNTP feeds (much like Flutterby), what should those NNTP feeds look like?

• All feeds in separate groups, or the same group? (Or separate groups crossposted into one big group, but that has implications on "Subject:" headers)
• What do the headers look like? Does the "Subject:" include a notion of the source weblog? How about the "From:"?
• Where should I put meta information. Right now I'm just using a separate class name in the HTML in the message, but should I put it in an "X-" header instead? Or as well?
• If you run a weblog, would you like having your content delivered this way?
• Is there a standard for retreiving and feeding back in comments?
• Anyone else out there got an NNTP server and want to experiment with feeds? I've got one other person I'm working with, and his server gets posts from mine fine, but we haven't figured out how to get his feeding back at me.

[ related topics: Weblogs Flutterby Meta Net Culture ]

Justice Department indicts Extreme Associates on obscenity charges.

On the company's Web site, which Thursday featured an American flag waving in the breeze, Zicari posted a statement that said no one had been arrested and that the company remained in business. He vowed to fight the government and wrote, "I definitely will not sit here and cry a bunch of tears."

He went on to name the five allegedly obscene films and, in an act of defiance, announced that the company was selling "The Federal Five" tapes at a discount on its Web site.

For those of you following along at home, Extreme Associates makes tapes which include rape and murder in their story line.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Last night a bunch of us went down to the Blue Room Gallery affiliated artists. A few cool things, we talked for a while with Bathsheba Grossman, her intricate intertwined steel and brass sculptures created with stereo-lithography are very cool, and some of her steel pieces had some really neat use of shape.

[ related topics: Cool Science Bay Area Art & Culture ]

So I didn't find the file I'd hoped to run across, one with messages from at least as far ago as 1992, but in preparation to throwing a whole bunch of crap out I did fire up a few 10 year old hard drives (which worked! mostly...) and copy some stuff off. Now I'm stuck with the ethical issues of "I wonder how those people would feel about having their writing show up on the web a decade later?"

But for giggles, see naive Chattanoogans talk about a Chattanooga public network. More, and more. As Mike and I were running a TBBS based system and getting frustrated with committees, frustration which eventually lead to Mike's infamous "...and we'll have 60 days to pay the invoice..." comment leading to our real-time connection.

See Dan riffing on the joys of "PIMP", a TBBS add-in that let us run UUCP email back up into the net, while we were downloading a complete Usenet feed, 2 times a day, over a 9600 baud satellite link. Or Dan prostletyzing Linux over TBBS in 1995.

I've left out my note announcing my intent to move out to the Bay Area and work for Pixar because it's inextricably entwined with the lives of people, some of whom I haven't talked to for years, who bared their souls to each other and me on some of those Fido echos.

And I'm not sure how much to save, there's lots that just seems irrelevant now, and I'll never have time to go back and catalog it. Wish I'd found that one file, but... oh well.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Just finished Mauve: How one man invented a color that changed the world, by Simon Garfield (ISBN 0-393-02005-3). It's the tale of how William Perkins, at the tender age of 18, discovered how to turn coal tar into dye, and how that discovery in 1856 spawned, or predicted, a lot of advances in the chemistry of both dyes and pharmeceuticals.

Hiking last week we talked about the "...that changed the world" fad in books, and in trying to be both that and a biography of William Perkins, Mauve fails. Short on the descriptions of the chemistry that would make it compelling, and short on the dish about the private life of Perkins, it instead becomes a loosely assembled recounting of facts without enough context to make anything really compelling. The narrative has a tendency to jump around temporally, he'll insert an anecdote of something that happened ten years later, and so the story never really conveyed to me the effects of the movement, of industrialization, and of the culture back on the companies.

One thing I did note was the mention of how Germany's supremacy in the dye industry gave them a leg up on the manufacture of explosives in the first world war. I've been concerned recently about the effects of the United States losing manufacturing capabilities. Given that much of the cost of starting up a product is getting the bugs worked out of the production line, more of what's actually involved in product development is moving to Asia, and I see the United States being stratified into people shuffling around the money and the service economy making those folks lattés. How long is it going to be before the places that have all of the factories, and that are quickly gaining the expertise and the cultures necessary to innovate, realize that posession counts for more than law?

But I digress. While Mauveworks from some fascinating source material, alas it never quite puts it together in a way that makes it as compelling or informative as it has the potential to be. So, skip it.

[ related topics: Books Nature and environment History Sociology Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

In linking to Xeney looking at some of the law behind the recall, Medley says:

I'm so depressed at how the Republican party is corrupting our democracy every chance they get and aghast at what a circus the politics of the state of California (whose economy is larger than that of many nations) is becoming.

Nope, it's been this way for a long time. California is a schizophrenic state, with at least three distinct regions that have three completely different sets of politics, and those politics don't map cleanly onto a two party system. The primary process is such that the electable candidates from either party don't actually make it to the final election, and our dependence on ballot initiatives means that our legislature gets overruled and second guessed to the point where they just don't try any more.

And yes, parts of our political system are completely beholden to Hollywood, but it's the bits that are aligned with the wacko wing of the Republican Party.

So a rundown of my favorites:

• Gary Coleman has a following
• as Jay points out, Georgy Russell is a total hottie
• my favorite remains Larry Flynt, especially because I think he'll run the right sort of ad campaigns
• I can't find the web site of the guy who promises to resign immediately so that the lieutenant governor can step in

Yes, I'm taking this lightly. It's government, and it's government without much of an armed force to back it up, so it's hard to take it seriously. I'd love to see Larry Flynt in there because of the candidates I think he's the one with the most good ideas and the most experience, but I also understand that he won't have a mandate to actually do anything, so it'll be a novelty governorship. But even if Davis avoids the recall it'll be a novelty anyway, better that we should descend into postmodern self-parody and start citizens thinking about politics than that we should continue this farce we've got going.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture moron California Culture ]

Went to the Heart of the Forest Renaissance Faire up at Stafford Lake yesterday, despite the big honkin' drumstick and constumes, Charlene was ready to go before I was (and I wasn't terribly keen on the whole thing to start). It did make me a little sad to be missing Burning Man this year, however.

So, to satisfy our jones for costumes and revelry and music and such, we went down to see The Nice & Nasty Show hosted by Snatch at Harvey's, "in the heart of the Castro". That was fun, both 'cause... well... divas are always fun, but also from a people-watching standpoint. The show was a little uneven, with all types, from the "could be any one of the National Federation of Republican Women" to clearly diva to a few who had me guessing to one or two that I think were clearly biological women. Some knew how to take a stage, some were still working on their presence, and the crowd was... well... it was the Castro: mostly male, mostly buff, all out to have a good time. Much hootin' and hollerin' was had.

We were in the furthest seat from the stage, which was cool 'cause it was back where the performers were gathering, but next time I think we hang at the bar 'til something closer comes open rather than just staking out a table 'cause we can get one.

[ related topics: Burning Man Music Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

Danny's Raw Blog had some links to Greg's Digital Portfolio (Given the last name and the TS 2 image, I've sent mail asking if he's any relation to Tony Apodaca). In light of last night's outing it was interesting to come across some of his retouching jobs, seeing just how far from reality some of our standards for humans have come. Anyway, check out the rollovers on this bikini model and this woman's portrait shot for some images that gave me a little pause over the differences between the manufactured ideals of popular culture and the reality of humanity.

[ related topics: Pixar Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Australia gets a little closer to prosecuting thought crimes: man faces pornography charges for writings in his diary:

Julie Sutherland, who represented Daryl Quick, 59, in a committal hearing at the Melbourne Magistrates Court yesterday, argued her client's "private jottings" were kept away from the rest of society "at all costs".

I wish I could get the full story, it sure sounds like this is ancillary to some other charges, but Deputy Chief Magistrate Daniel Muling has ruled that publication was unnecessary.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Writing Law Current Events ]

Jay doesn't have real permalinks set up, this is in reference to the entry marked "End of an Era, Part CCCLXVIII", which links to the end of life announcement for Speak Freely:

The Internet of the near future will be something never contemplated when Speak Freely was designed, inherently hostile to such peer-to-peer applications.

I am not using the phrase "peer to peer" as a euphemism for "file sharing" or other related activities, but in its original architectural sense, where all hosts on the Internet were fundamentally equal. Certainly, Internet connections differed in bandwidth, latency, and reliability, but apart from those physical properties any machine connected to the Internet could act as a client, server, or (in the case of datagram traffic such as Speak Freely audio) neither--simply a peer of those with which it communicated. Any Internet host could provide any service to any other and access services provided by them. New kinds of services could be invented as required, subject only to compatibility with the higher level transport protocols (such as TCP and UDP). Unfortunately, this era is coming to an end.

Go read it. This speaks to so much wheel reinvention; so much wasted effort. And not to pick on Microsoft too badly, but I've used Windows on an unprotected connection recently, and that requires a firewall, which means you've got to build workarounds, and pretty soon people are no longer sure if it's parody.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft broadband Invention and Design moron Net Culture ]

If not for Bob Guccione and a drunken evening following Ultimate practice I don't think I'd care, but archeologists are excavating Caligula's old castle, and confirming some of the rumors:

"Everyone knows this guy was a little crazy. But now we have proof that he was completely off his rocker, that he thought he was one of the gods," Darius Arya, one of the directors of the excavation, said on Monday.

I could've told you that ever since that unfortunate scene of Peter O'Toole and... uhmmmm.. No wait, any further speculation is way too much information. If you don't know what I'm talking about and want to, the IMDB page on "Caligola" is oddly spare with the inforation, a Google search on "Caligula Guccione" brings up a few reviews.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies History ]

Over at Pursed Lips, Debra looks back at 4 years of weblogging and acknowledges her part in the culture war.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

All is not right for pedestrians in San Francisco, for one thing we have to worry about the various vehicles of the San Francisco Municipal Railway. SF Weekly looks at Muni's accident record:

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 10 pedestrians died in Muni bus crashes in 1998, 1999, and 2000. During this time frame, Seattle transit bus drivers were involved in accidents that killed one person. In Atlanta, two pedestrians were killed. The same number died in Boston and Washington, D.C. One pedestrian died in Sacramento, none in San Diego. Muni's kill rate is remarkable in a holistic sense: 33 percent of all pedestrians killed by vehicles in San Francisco during this time were killed by Muni buses, according to the federal data. The ratio in Seattle and Boston was 16 percent; 13 percent in Los Angeles; 10 percent in Atlanta.

Woohoo! Mexico City here we come!

[ related topics: Bay Area Trains Seattle Public Transportation ]

Just when I thought that New York was completely abandoned to the poseurs and the pseudo-hipsters, Anita points to reports from the New York condiment war. "Eat flying mustard, losers!"

[ related topics: Humor Food New York War ]

This is just a check to see if posts to the main page come from the NNTP version for authorized users.

So, lemme get this straight: The Russian cops ship a dummy missile to the American cops, get a single Brit to sign for it, and they get lots of press about about "breaking up a plot"? No, that's a "sting". And given that apparently this hapless "arms dealer" wouldn't have been able to get the missile without the Americans and the Russians cooperating on taking him down, it's also "propaganda".

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement ]

The Seattle Times (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/) has a great article (http://seattletimes.nwsource.c...ocalnews/2001461074_bare10m.html) on the increase of nudist activities and organizations.

Also, a nude rugby team beat a clothed team, 7-0, in South Africa (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/11/1060588329097.html)

And Jan Glidewell of the St. Petersburg Times points out Rep. Foley's inconsistencies in attacking nudist organizations (http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08...umns/All_nudists_aren_t_eq.shtml)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nudity ]

COPA may yet become a reality. The Bush administration is appealing to the Supreme Court to reinstate the law, as the anti-porn war machine builds momentum. (http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030812_2115.html)

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture ]

I'd hate to be a teenager again. For one thing, the potential pool of adolescent wanking material just got smaller. Penthouse files Chapter 11.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Journalism and Media ]

I've got a Samsung SyncMaster 171v 17" LCD display on my desktop at home (where I'm working on hardware today, which is why this came up). Inspired by Scoble's rant, and being an old fan of the Apple ][ graphics system, I went over to the Microsoft Web Service page to tune ClearType. When that didn't work, I fired up IE and went back, and tuned ClearType, ahhh the joys of trying to confuse applications with operating systems. After having ClearType enabled for a few days, I've gone back to without it. Yes, the page looked prettier, but it wasn't any more readable, in fact I kept thinking "that's distracting" every time I sat down in front of this computer. Anyone else got experience with ClearType?

I remember reading a study at some point that claimed that anti-aliased fonts were harder to read than jaggy fonts on a computer screen, and I wonder if either I've become so used to reading jaggies that the other is now more difficult, or if I just tend to use fonts at so close to the resolution of my display device (even when that's 1280x1024 across a 17" diagonal that too much information is lost.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Microsoft Graphics Typography Graphic Design ]

Last night we were at the Fairfax Farmer's Market, and the guitarist playing for tips was awesome. Classical music that sounded like hammered dulcimer, but more. Dropped a buck in the box, then went back and bought his CD. This morning after my dentist appointment I dropped into San Anselmo Coffee Roasters, and the same guy, Michael Klapholz, was playing. So I sat and listened for a bit, and dropped a few more bucks in the tip jar, but just now I was sitting here waiting for some operation to complete and I looked over at my guitar in its case and I realized...

There are some artists who inspire; who make me want to practice at what they do, because what they do is so cool. There are other artists who don't inspire, they just awe; when I'm exposed to their art I realize that it occurs on another plane, and the only way to be that good is to dedicate a life to it. I have a pretty high opinion of myself, there aren't too many artists whose work falls into the latter category.

Klapholz is there. There is no question when listening to this man work that he's spent a lifetime getting to where he is, and there's no illusion that even if I were to start now and practice hours a day for a decade I could ever come close to being judged on the same scale as his mastery. Apparently he played with a band called "Chumbi", which seems to have been a metal band (I find a few references with web searches), but his style nowadays is all acoustic guitar. Last night he was doing some classical pieces, this morning he was doing Queen's Bohemian Rapsody on guitar, and both were just amazing. I don't see a place you can buy his work on the web, perhaps we should see if we can carry his Coffehouse Classical CD as Charlene's new business comes online.

Anyway, highly recommended, and I think I've signed up for his mailing list so that I can pass along gigs he's playing. Especially since you're most likely to run into him in intimate performances where it's you and a few other people and a tip jar.

[ related topics: Music Coyote Grits Bay Area Art & Culture San Anselmo Michael Klapholz ]

While looking for "Chumbi" for that last post I went to the Gracenote page. Q, man, I love ya like a brother, but what the f*ck is up with that page design? It wasn't 'til I went and looked multiple times that I realized that the music search wasn't an extra click away, but it's clear that they've abandoned the consumer and are just interested in providing technology to developers of other products.

Of course they didn't have what I was looking for anyway, which makes sense 'cause I often found that my favorite new CDs weren't in their database, people ripping and distributing generally aren't listening to CDs of small indie artists bought in coffee shops, but it reassures me that as frustrated as I get right now with my current employ I made the right decision in leaving.

[ related topics: Music Dan's Life Consumerism and advertising Art & Culture Pop Culture Databases ]

George (tell me if you want a link, I can't find a good one for you) forwards this along with "Just priceless!": Gollum has declared for Governor of California. Damn, now my vote is split three ways, between Gollum, Georgy and Larry.

[ related topics: Politics tolkien California Culture ]

So I'm actually having some fun today, I got back my boards from ExpressPCB, and aside from a few "did I really draw that?" instances, I've got some reasonable success as I add components and test. One of the things that strikes me is that for $62+tax I got three 3.8"x2.5" boards, which isn't a whole lot more than if I'd bought some kinda generic half-printed perfboard thingies of similar size. And that's just large enough to fit a motor controller on. It'd be fine for more than that if I got to spec out where the the connectors lie, but I'm plugging in to an edge connector that was put together elsewhere.

However, on other fronts I'm on the phone with the office tracking down an issue which stopped a demo earlier this week, and it appears that, yep, .NET did nothing to solve "DLL hell". In fact, it seems like we have a versionitis issue where an install of some other software, in this case one of the offenders seems to be the latest version of Visual Studio .NET, causes some JPEG routines to stop functioning. My money is on .NET Framework 1.1 versus 1.0 right now.

Double sigh.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Microsoft Software Engineering ]

Andrew Orlowski nails BloggerCon. For those of you following along at home, BloggerCon is a weblogging conference, most of the official presenters are newcomers (>= 2000) to the weblogging scene, and rumour has it it costs $500 for the weekend. Before lodging. That's great, but as Dori points out, that's not going to get many webloggers there. The justification for the cost is that it's "almost exclusively so that we can pay for the coach-fare travel of speakers and their accommodation". Uhhh... Isn't this what weblogging isn't about? Exalting a bunch of journalists and PR types over the average publisher?

Wake me when someone wants to run one along the lines of an SF con.

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media Conferences ]

I got another Friendster friend request today, if you're a user feel free to add me, although I'm having trouble figuring out how to leverage it into anything useful, but it reminded me of Enemyster and STD-ster (which The Register has dubbed "crabster").

[ related topics: Net Culture Social Software ]

New entry for the Crucial Items you May have Missed department: Feral Chihuahuas Have their day in Court.

[ related topics: Law Bizarre Dogs ]

Last night we both needed a break, so we skimmed down Squidlist looking for cool stuff, saw "burlesque", noted that it was Big Burlesque, a show titled "Fat Fest 2003", so were a little unsure about what to expect, but we headed down to the Theatre Rhinocerous to see. After dinner in The Mission we got there about 45 minutes early, being used to bars rather than theaters as venues, and ran into a huge line of trim fit men. We got in the box office line and the vibe got even weirder, one or two women, but we wondered just what we were in for. I was just about to turn to Charlene and say "wanna go see what's happening at The Odeon?" when we discovered that these folks were all waiting for Making Porn. So after that crowd dispersed we went into the smaller downstairs theater.

"Nothing says performance artist like a naked fat dyke in a Spandex^tm sack."

--- Beth Smulyan (quoted from memory, I think I got it close)

Elizabeth Gumbel MC'd, and she was great (and has a killer voice). A few other performers had it together, the additional flesh gave at least one tassel twirl an amazing amount of action, and André the Urban Hermitt(sic)'s readings were good enough that we bought the book on the way out, the Phat Fly Girls had some pretty cool moves, but we both left a little perplexed.

Today Charlene and I talked about it a little. I still haven't come to any conclusions, but I guess that I came away from the performance feeling a little like an enabler. I also feel uncomfortable because rather than accepting all these women for their size some of the performances were about celebrating their size, and in that we get away from the performance and into objectifying the person. And the objectification bothered me.

It was also interesting to have a slightly older largely dyke audience rather than the usual well dressed women and their dates and drunk guys in jeans in the back; the music was quieter, which I thought I'd appreciate for being easy on my ears, but it made the audience have to work harder. Some of the hootin' and hollerin' had to be forced a bit. As I mentioned, the MC managed to bring out the crowd well, really work us right, but in the end it turned into a much more cerebral evening than we were looking for.

No conclusions yet, except that that feeling of objectification and enabling left us both looking for answers. But in between that there were some fun performances, a few that need a bunch of polish, and at least we'll be talking about it for a while.

[ related topics: Quotes Books Erotic Sexual Culture Health Bay Area Theater & Plays Art & Culture Burlesque ]

Hey, would someone out there with a blog tool that implements Trackback hit this entry, and if you've got an entry that I can hit for testing tell me that? Thanks!

Edits:

• A link to this entry
• a test entry at Population One
• An entry I feel comfortable hitting at Larry's Log.

[ related topics: Weblogs Flutterby Meta ]

As a few of you know, I'm trying to complete my BS in Math. And as even fewer of you know, I have many competencies and can hold my own with an integral but I'm no genius. So I'm watching Good Will Hunting and after the excruiciating A Beautiful Mind and really beginning to wonder: I've seen other students in my math classes (especially the dread third-year, proof-oriented classes) who just get it. For me, it's a constant struggle to catch on just a little (got a C in Abstract Algebra and I'm damned proud of it). But is it possible to actually train your mind to 'get it', Or is it a matter of genetics and hard-wiring at the synaptic level? This is a practical question as I stare at the four textbooks next to my computer: Intro to Analysis (proving Calculus), Complex Analysis (imaginary numbers!), Mathematical Statistics, and Numerical Analysis... I'm taking Mysticism of the East and West, a senior level religion class, for break from the purely numerical...

[ related topics: Religion Movies moron Mathematics Machinery Trains ]

After my last post, I decided to see if GettingIt.com was taken. Sure enough, it is and it's now becoming a part of my daily reads:

Finding a good lover is like finding a good pair of shoes: It takes a long time, and you have to try out a bunch. When you finally get one, you use it up fast; then you try to keep using it until you (or someone close to you) realize it's just no good any more.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Shoes ]

I'm reading Shelley (of Burningbird fame) Powers' book Practical RDF. Digging through the end of chapter 2 and "merging lemma"s, and I'm thinking "so how is this used?" I skimmed through to the end, and while I saw a few tools for querying RDF, I don't think I saw any real-world applications except for RSS. Are there any? And are there any indications that the people who might actually build tools to help encode semantic information in web pages will care about RDF? I don't want to rehash the old flame wars here, but it sure seems like a lot of verbosity to justify a "semantic web" label without actually giving anything any real meaning.

[ related topics: Books Content Management Weblogs ]

Damn, where was this stuff when I was in high school? BBSs and FidoNet were never like the Internet, where an adolescent can get lured into meeting up for sex with a 27 year old woman. If only we'd had Instant Messaging back then...

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

I'm at home working on Atmel assembly language stuff today. Fun. So, a few random pictures because life hasn't been very exciting recently. There, on your left, was my sandwich as it arrived last week. Roast what? And now that I've got that question lodged firmly in your brain, a cute cat picture, because... well... We've gotta do something to piss off John Dvorak.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Okay, I'm finally in the process of organizing and ripping CDs so that I might actually start to listen to some of these gazillion discs that I've paid for. And some I haven't paid for, I'm currently enjoying the "Listen" album from the harmonica pocket which one of the band (I assume) handed to me at Burning Man; but if I actually start listening to music again, I think it's worth buying in that smooth-jazz cocktail music kinda cool bouncy feeling vein.

For various reasons, I'm doing some ripping on my Windows box, and I'll also want playback on Windows. Under Linux this stuff is easy, I use Grip and XMMS for playback. XP doesn't have Ogg Vorbis support natively, so I'm currently using FreeRIP which is ad supported (okay, although I wish ad supported software had ads for products I'd actually want), lacks decent tab navigation when entering track information (yes, the first few disks I've ripped are missing from both FreeDB and Gracenote, so I foresee a lot of data entry), and QCD Player with the "Simple in silver (remixed)" skin, which is okay for me, but will be confusing as hell if I drop it on Charlene's machine.

Surely Windows is up to contemporary professional standards on this matter: Just a simple set of tools with standard widgets that allow fast data entry and expose the critical playback tools without hiding it all behind graphics that appeal to adolescent males? Anyone?

[ related topics: Free Software Burning Man Music Microsoft Open Source Graphics Pop Culture ]

The trees are having their revenge! Giant Sequoia crushes Jeep Cherokee. But what made made this an article of note was:

Picavet said the road was closed for about 15 minutes while park crews and firefighters cleaned gas and oil from the road and cleared tree fragments.

"...cleaned gas and oil from the road". Now that, friends, is how ya do automobile destruction right.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events Automobiles ]

Snipped from Lockergnome: Hollywood is feeling the pressure of the instant review, fueled by modern technology. [Mostly] youngsters are text-messaging their friends and word of mouth is spreading at a rate that the studios call "alarming". The real answer actually shows up in the last line: make good movies.

I think this is just another example of something that I've been saying over the last few years: Technology has been increasing at high-speed but socially we haven't kept pace with it. I think what we're finally starting to see the social side catch up.

The article also reminds me of an observation - well, more a complaint, really - my aunt made recently. Going off on teenagers in general, she was lamenting how her 17 year-old daughter (and her friends) doesn't plan anything - or, more specifically, doesn't stick to the plan. She pointed out how, since she and all her friends have cell phones, "the plan" is more a fluid, evolving thing than something that can be relied on [by those outside the loop].

In the comments, Jette mentioned Austin JournalCon, which looks like a reasonable alternative to BloggerCon. Round-trip from the Bay Area looks to be in the $250-300 range (possibly less if you get Southwest at the right moment), rooms are $120/night, $65 for the con. I'm thinking about it. Don't know if Charlene would be bored silly for the weekend, anyone out there interested in perhaps splitting a room? Kick the total price of attendance down to the range of just the registration for BloggerCon and have a much more interesting crowd to boot.

[ related topics: Weblogs Travel ]

The Furrygoat Experience (http://www.furrygoat.com/) passed along John Hargrave's attempts to get somebody to *not* accept his credit card purchases (http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/index.html).

Anti-news: Report finds kids more apt to use drugs, alcohol if they have extra money and are bored. Duh.

Relatedly, I was talking to Christopher Keiser at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters on Sunday, we talked about skating a bit, and he mentioned that in Lausanne, Switzerland they've just gone ahead and done the right thing: Put rails on the edges of benches and public works that are grindable, and let the kids go to it. There's a thought: Let the kids do something rather than trying to make them bored and give them early negative experiences with law enforcement...

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Bay Area Law Enforcement Skating San Anselmo ]

Hi Flutterbarians, Bone Girl (Jen) and I have visited Canyon de Chelly (Great), Grand Canyon.. and are now leaving Zion Canyon on the way to the Burn.. Of those of you that will be there, we will be with the Lumerians will be at Dubious (5:00) and Esplanade right behind Nate Smith's Fire 'thingy' (big).

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics ]

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a cute little fluff piece: Heidi Fleiss: In Defense Of Prostitution. I'm a little dubious about some of the numbers Fleiss tosses around, it sometimes seems like maybe she's let the fantasy and the need to present a successful face override reality, but maybe there really are guys out there who'll pay a grand a minute for a blowjob.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Sam & Fuzzy introduced me to Dayfree Press, which features such gems as Ctrl-Alt-Del, Coffee Brain, Butternut Squash, and Oneryboy. So far, the quality seems much better than the average found over at Keenspace/Keenspot.

Also, Bloom County reruns are now available from uComics. (Thanks to Aeire for the tip.)

[ related topics: Comics ]

Whoah! Digital Photography Review reprints Canon EOS-300D press release (Via Jerry Kindall). 3072 x 2048. EOS mount lenses. $900.

The 6.3 Megapixel CMOS sensor is almost identical to that found in the EISA award-winning EOS 10D which remains the benchmark for image quality.

Which means that it'll be pretty much totally noise free at ISO200.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Cool Technology ]

Not all drug side effects are to be avoided, as seen in this report of a drug that causes an orgasm when you yawn. This may be a boon to dull professors in many disciplines.

[ related topics: Drugs Sexual Culture Health ]

Eric (not our Eric) points to the efforts to bring wireless access to Washington State Ferries. Ted also makes a good point in his hope that the coverage includes the terminals.

Via RC3: An interview with Sterling Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball, a guitar string manufacturer ("the world's leading") that was nailed for piracy:

Q: Can you start by giving us a brief rundown of how you became an open-source advocate?

A: I became an open-source guy because we're a privately owned company, a family business that's been around for 30 years, making products and being a good member of society. We've never been sued, never had any problems paying our bills. And one day I got a call that there were armed marshals at my door talking about software license compliance... I thought I was OK; I buy computers with licensed software. But my lawyer told me it could be pretty bad.

[ related topics: Business Music Microsoft Open Source Law Current Events ]

The Daily Breeze, out of Torrance, CA has a local story about a naked man who trips a burglar alarm while sneaking into a school at night with a camera and tripod. The story says he was found with the camera, which the officers said he "was using to take naked pictures of himself", and that other photos in the camera indicated he had done this at other locations.

Now, maybe I'm biased (not to mention "corrupted") because I have a membership at a website where hobbyists routinely take naked pictures of themselves at various public and semi-public locations, but I find the closing remarks in the story to be the height of cluelessness:

"His actions are highly unusual," Crespin said. "Usually when you catch someone committing a burglary, they're there to take items."

Crespin said it was not known why the man was taking the pictures.

Are they really so naive as to think he must have been there to steal stuff? Or are they just trying to give him a break and charge him with something that won't get him branded as a sex offender for the rest of his life?

I have the utmost respect for those fellow Flutterbians of faith who have shared their personal take on religion with me (I found you all very reasonable ;-) but I feel a great many go too far. I find the suspension of this judge, who refuses to remove his monument to the 10 comandments from the courthouse, and the subsequent investigation, entirely appropriate.

During a discussion a few weeks back I was asked (by way of establishing a baseline) if I believed that this country's laws were based on biblical teachings. Having done some thinking about the question, I'd have to say that yes, there is evidence to that effect. But a good idea is a good idea, regardless of where it comes from. Just because the founding fathers (and mothers) said, "yeah, those are good rules," doesn't automatically mean the entire doctrine should be applied wholesale.

That sounds too much like when my freshman social studies instructor told us we had to accept the *entire* bible as fact because a few places and events depicted therein had been proven to have been real.

Aaargh. So I have an idea, I code it up in HTML and CSS, it looks great in current versions of Opera and Mozilla, I think "great, I'll migrate Flutterby", then I think to go over to Windows and check it in IE(pronounced "aiieee"). Sigh. There goes my momentum. Of course it just now occurred to me that I might be able to solve the problem by yet another nesting of "div"s. It's almost enough to make someone wanna join the Web Standards Project.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft moron Web Standards Project - WaSP ]

Mr. Steinbacher over at The Stranger has some interesting ideas and makes some excellent points about installing a Red Light district in Seattle. I just wish he didn't feel the need to wallow in the "sin", "squalor" and "dive bar" descriptive phrasing. I think he does his point a disservice by painting the neighborhood he proposes as such pit of ugliness. (Props to Daze Reader for the link.)

[ related topics: Drugs Sexual Culture Gambling Seattle ]

A Chronicle article on WiFi starts out with this tidbit:

Anthony Azzollini, the owner of Caffe Roma in North Beach, believes in free Wi-Fi.

Ever since he's allowed his customers to piggy-back wirelessly on his DSL Internet connection, he's seen a 30 percent jump in foot traffic on weekday afternoons.

Linked here because I need to take that article down to Brian at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters.

[ related topics: Wireless broadband Bay Area Net Culture San Anselmo ]

Uh oh. I'm running Windows Update on my home XP box, and reading through a gazillion license agreements, when I come across:

• You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the .NET Framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.

This seems to mean that my discussing relative speeds of managed versus unmanaged code is in violation of the license agreement. So, sorry, no more ragging on the speed (or lack thereof) of C#.

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

I just got through dumping all of my rice and flours in the compost pile due to an infestation of rice weevils. The buggers managed to get into everything (haven't checked my pasta yet) that wasn't stored in glass containers. And my garbanzos also fell victim to another weevil that must have come from the store with the beans! But seeing how this one only attacked my two-liters or so of dried garbanzos as opposed to my 10kg of various rices, I deem it the lesser of the two weevils... The rice weevil did decimate the few small bags I had of short-grain brown rice while barely noticing the 7kg I had left of Jasmine and 1kg of sushi rice - but they did find it!

A word from the wiser: store all of your grains in glass or metal containers!

Well, after struggling with some serial stuff yesterday I broke down and got me a sillyscope. Probably a little more than I should have paid for it, but it's only a 20MHz one, and I have it this morning as I tackle the issues of serial communications and the ATmega8515. Summary of yesterday's activities:

• Half-stepping stepper motors generates way more torque.
• So does dropping 40mA into the bases of the power transistors rather than 8-10mA.
• Hook up the probes after power is applied, it's less likely that they'll get bumped in a way that lets the smoke out.

But I only did that last bit once.

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

Aaargh! I'm at my wit's freakin' end. I'm using an Atmel ATmega8515. I'm trying to get the UART to talk at 9600 N-8-1. I have standard PC hardware right next to me sending out capital "A"s at 9600 N-8-1 so that I can compare on the 'scope. The ATmega8515 is clocked at 8MHz, my initialization code is

clr temp

out UBRRH, temp

ldi temp, 51

out UBRRL, temp

clr temp

out UCSRA, temp

ldi temp, (1<<RXEN)|(1<<TXEN)

out UCSRB,temp

ldi temp, (1<<URSEL)|(1<<UCSZ0)|(1<<UCSZ1)

out UCSRC,temp

And the output seems to be about 1/10^th the speed it ought to be. I realize only about two of you understand whatintheheck that was about, but if anyone's got a clue, please help me out.

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

If anyone plays BlogShares, there's an easy $50k at the Flutterby's listing right now... I'll leave it for a few days, and if no one bites maybe we'll up it to half a million or a million.

[ related topics: Games Weblogs ]

QOTD from the Examiner "The State" section, which talks about residents of Riverside California wanting to sue Fox over comments made in the new show The O.C. calling the denizens of Riverside "white trash":

"The show does not make any false statements of fact," Volokh said of the "white trash" comment.

You go Eugene! (Who appears to be part of The Volokh Conspiracy). Anyone wanna weigh in on Manhattan?

[ related topics: Quotes Humor California Culture ]

Charlene's venture has had her delving into law and talking to IP lawyers recently. And it's been slightly confusing, she's been getting different answers from different people, making it clear that, yes, "the law" is some sort of group hallucination, and frankly some of those interpreting it are on some wacky shit. While Charlene is struggling over the fine points of trademarks versus service marks versus registered trademarks, Abercrombie & Fitch is claiming trademark status on "22", despite the fact that they've never registered it. Based on what little I know, I can't imagine that that'll hold up, but.... yeah...

So while we're talking about lawyers on crack, Eric Raymond examines the details of the SCO complaint against IBM.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Open Source Copyright/Trademark ]

A bunch of you have, with that "oh, him again" sigh, linked to Andrew Orlowski's "Google heals the sick", in which he takes on Sergey Brin talking about some family's use of Google to check on emergency health care information. Scoble has the right response:

The thing Andrew gets wrong is that sometimes people get aches and pains and they don't wanna call 911 everytime. Maybe they have a co-pay on their health insurance. Maybe they don't wanna put costs onto society (calling an ambulance costs thousands of dollars and if your health insurance pays, that gets passed onto all of us in increased costs. If government pays, well, we all pay cause now that $1000 isn't available to increase the quality of our educational system).

(Of course someone in his comments immediately takes him to task for the "money=better education" fallacy, but we'll let that stand for the moment.) The last time I saw my grandfather he mentioned that his town was in danger of losing its volunteer fire department because of the increase in trivial ambulance calls. It sucks that we have to draw on billions of dollars of infrastructure because we're too damned lazy to go take basic first aid classes, but it's good that some of that technology might actually be saving us money.

[ related topics: Health moron Sociology Net Culture Education ]

As I alluded to when I linked to that Chronicle article about WiFi, I was chatting with Brian over at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters a few days back about putting 802.11b in the shop, and he complained that it would be many hundreds of dollars a month. Paul Victor Novarese has been watching TV and seems to have found a disconnect between SBC's TOS and their ads. I've been through the SBC site and I think, if I'm interpreting it right, that he could use any of the small business plans (starting at circa $80/month) as long as he didn't charge for the service. Unfortunately I initially thought he could keep access to customers by just turning off the router when the business is closed, but when I think about it more I can't see a good way to do this without a fairly smart router that can do things like make sure people aren't spamming from that IP. Anyone got suggestions?

[ related topics: Wireless Technology and Culture Television San Anselmo ]

Okay, California gubernatorial race fans, here's your chance to sneek in some early votes: http://www.amigovernorornot.com/ Note especially the Top 40 and the Bottom 20.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture ]

Also interesting of note to those of us who are snickering over the California gubernatorial (damn, I love that word) race: No, Recall Sanity isn't about recalling sanity; we've never elected it. It's about instant runoff voting. Worth poking around.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture ]

Hey, maybe Ahnuld wouldn't be so bad a guv after all. He's got plenty of experience with California culture:

Schwarzenegger, then 29, told of an orgy at a gym in the state he is now hoping to run.

He said: "Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's - the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train -there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together."

Asked if he was talking about a "gang-bang," Arnie answered, "Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can f*** in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough c***, so they can't get a hard-on.

Flutterby readers can decide for themselves whether Ahnuld thinks he has "a big-enough c***".

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

Cam talks about a standard dilemma of development. In this case he's talking about HTML and CSS, but I've seen the same struggle go down over coding styles in Perl, and C and C++: Where's the balance between readability, brevity, efficiency and maintainability?

Yesterday I talked to a graphic artist who's in advertising, who's finding that he lays out visuals for web pages in Photoshop, and then finds himself spending a day or three struggling with all sorts of different tools to build this into some sort of page, and he wants to do something about that extra day or three. I know the tool he wants, and I wish someone would write it (or pay me to write it, but that's not terribly likely), and it's really not that far off from hand-coding, but I'm not sure that he's got the... whatever it is... to take up hand-coding.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development Perl Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

Must read: After being blind for 43 years Mike May has an operation that restores his sight. He keeps a journal. There's a nice edited set of excerpts at Guardian Unlimited:

It is quite unsettling looking into someone's eyes, especially when you aren't used to it. When Ms DC to Denver casually leaned close enough, I couldn't even stammer out the answer that her eyes were blue. I might have been less shocked if she had taken her shirt off and asked what I could see. I had never seen someone's eyes other than those of my family and it was very disconcerting. Although I was tongue-tied, she was very sweet about it and probably didn't notice I was flustered.

This was a very intimate experience and I can't fathom how sighted people go around seeing each other's eyes without being flustered too.

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Via More Like This, can you tell a programming language inventor from a serial killer? Take The Quiz.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Accidents and injuries, and now death, rather than art and nudity are filling the media about Burning Man.

[ related topics: Burning Man Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Art & Culture ]