Flutterby™! From 2004-01-01 to 2004-01-30

For posterity, since this serves as something of a journal for me, I should mention that last night we officially declared "done" a monstrous cleanup. Only once before in my life have I been so moved by a feeling that everything needs a place, and, alas, that feeling only lasted a week and a half or so. Maybe we can make this one more permanent. Those of you who've seen my work room would be totally shocked and amazed by the state of it, the floor open and sullied only by a few large items that have yet to find homes. I'm still finding magazines to cull, but shelf feet have been reduced to a few files of the articles I can actually see using.

On Monday, loading up for a dump run, the big storm hit. As the rain with occasional hail crashed down, flooding the sidewalks, the San Anselmo emergency sirens blared because the creek was inches away from flooding, and the occasional large crack and crash of trees falling in the high winds (and, yes, we're in a small canyon and I'm comparing this to some of the high winds I've experienced up on the black rock desert), we packed stuff into the car. Cleaning up is good. That much motivation is pathological. Later I was in downtown San Anselmo and offered my cell phone number to Karen and Michael at Booksmith as they nervously watched the level of the water. Luckily, it seems like they dodged it, although tomorrow morning we're scheduled for another big one.

In scaling back, I'm also getting rid of a few large project-ish things, it's probably time to give up the torch (already got a few folks speaking for that), the one that I'm fumbling over is my Honda EU2000i generator. If you've a need for a quiet efficent generator of that size, run a few times for Burning Man and one or two times as an extension cord at home, make me an offer. Note that this is not an "I need a cheap generator" option, this is a generator for someone who's going to run it a lot (so that the fuel efficiency matters) or values the quiet (you can talk in normal tones next to it while it's running).

Anyway, it feels damned good. There's probably even yet one more dump run coming (#3 was pooled with Tom from next door, he's got a fairly large truck now), but I think we've finally got a handle on everything.

[ related topics: Burning Man Dan's Life Bay Area San Anselmo Whyte's Booksmith ]

It´s me, in a town I pulled into in 4wd low.. that has a 3 computer internet cafe.. Mexico, waaaayyyy in country is amazing. Rapelling into the Rio Choi river was insane, beautiful and fun. Pictures will blow you away, will upload when I get back. Happy New Year or as they as screaming here: Feliz Navidad!

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Net Culture ]

This little critter is cute! The person in the photo is 6yo Alexandra. Alex' Mom, Ann, was behind the camera and the young manatee was curious about her new Sony DSC-U60 which I got her primarily for caving, but it worked well in the river too.

Ann, Alex, and I just got back from a few days at Crystal River and quick, one-day trip to Busch Gardens. Using Ann's sea kayak and experience, we had a blast paddling the river, snorkelling, scratching the manatee's bellys, and some limited salt water paddling.

[Edited after I examined the pic more closely. It's only Alex, not Alex and I.]

Life is good!

[ related topics: Photography Travel ]

Yesterday we had some friends staying with us from out of town, so we took 'em down to Justin Herman Plaza at the Embarcadero in San Francisco to try out the Kristi Yamaguchi Holiday Ice Rink(something I've been wanting to do for years). It's been a long time since I've been on steel blades, and it was tough when I was starting out to tell if my problems were the rental skates, public skate ice (it was a little bumpy at the start, and really got chewed up over the time of the skate), or just that I haven't been on skates of any sort at all in a while. I was reminded of the difference between inlines and blades when it comes to spinning, although by the time I was ready to exploit that my legs were already off their prime, I got one good spin in, then two falls, and figured maybe it was time to bag the session (since everyone else was getting tired too). But I did see that there are occasional clinics over at the Yerba Buena rink, maybe it's time to take some actual lessons and coaching on spins and jumps.

They were playing James Bond theme music, which was kinda cool, but aside from A View To A Kill, all of it is this long flourishy stuff with lots of tempo changes, good for fast sweeping moves that cover the whole ice. New Year's Day public skate, with lots of kids and newbies, is not the time for that sort of move. For once I wanted a little dance music, short and choppy with lots of room for footwork.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Bay Area Skating ]

Okay, what sort of imbecile referrer spams a weblog for a web shop that's not live yet? Morons.

[ related topics: Weblogs Flutterby Meta moron Net Culture ]

Sigh. That second comment in this entry has me thinking that maybe I need to start a different tack on commenting systems. Any suggestions? Should I just ditch the Flutterby code and switch to slashcode for lots of collaborative filtering goodness, or should I just take a more draconian hand and let any of the Flutterby elite delete comments?

[ related topics: Weblogs Flutterby Meta ]

Charlene and I went up to Healdsburg today to have lunch with Dori, Shaan Hurley, Bill, Robert (and Patrick) Scoble, and Roger, who's URLs I missed out on. Good time, Charlene and I got to hang around Healdsburg a little bit, the museum was cool, the town was a little too tourist-gallery-ish for our tastes.

The chat at lunch was interesting for what it covered and didn't; many of the "oh, isn't that cool" technologies discussed held zero interest for me. One of the discussions was about a research project up at Microsoft involving software which was smart about mobile connections, issues with which I was familiar from diddling with Linux on the old Metricom network, but which largely were a matter of "if this is a problem for you, you need to smack a few people, not try to fix b0rk3n user issues with second-guessing software". Which is probably why I don't understand the success of certain systems in the market.

One gallery was kinda cool, Spirits in Stone carries stone sculptures from Zimbabwe, some of which had some form and style that I really enjoyed. None enough that I could imagine space for them in the house, though.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Weblogs Microsoft broadband Open Source Art & Culture Economics ]

Scoble has been fanning the syndicator flames of late, and offers some reasons he thinks RSS is better than HTML (actually why he thinks syndicators are better than browsers, but we'll leave his syntax intact). Many of his reasons are based on using a horrid previous generation browser like IE that don't have tabbed browsing or "open every link in this bookmark folder", or that he reads sites with crappy web design ("don't do that, then"), but the one that struck a nerve is that syndicators only show you updated pages. I probably spend a few seconds per site seeing that it didn't update, and that's a few seconds we could probably save, and then there's a whole bunch of sites that are unfairly relegated to "Sporadic" or elevated to "Daily" that could just find their own place.

Well, a quick opera --help showed me that one can do opera -backgroundpage url to open a page in a new tab in the background. A few lines of Perl parsed my Opera bookmarks file, checked to see if the URL had a changed last-modified date or content length, and slapped up a new tab if it couldn't tell that things hadn't changed.

(Oh yeah, I should probably tie this into my last updated dates down there on the right somehow, 'cause the whole Weblogs.com really isn't working very well.)

This is totally not ready for prime-time, but if you're an Opera and Perl user (or other tabbed browser user willing to do a little coding) who'd like to help turn this into a real app, gimme a yelp.

[ related topics: Web development Dan's Life Content Management Weblogs Perl Open Source Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I hope I will never be a 'yellow-ist' and if I go to 1992 (in the future) I'll remember not to compliment your shirt.

How do those who see things differently get to say what they see? Not easily, and its gotten worse. Paul writes a clear identification of the problem, and is yet another chip out of the wall of political correctness.

Ziffle of Mayberry

[ related topics: Ziffle Interactive Drama Politics moron Clothing ]

The Rattler had a link to this short quiz on who made which historical political statements:

Hopefully, you're happy with the personalities that The Political Compass has placed you closest to; but how well do you really know the famous figures that you love or love to hate?

That being The Political Compass. I'm not sure about the latter quiz, as I either haven't taken it yet or the memory of doing so is lost in the haze of too many political quizzes, but the former test is well worth a look. I scored poorly.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Wow! Okay, suddenly iTunes becomes interesting: The Register now reports that it's possible to play iTunes songs on GNU/Linux using VideoLAN. This is just a way to circumvent the cripple-ware nature of it, you've still got to have a Windows machine to download the songs and as a reference for the user key, but now that Charlene and I have a shared space in the living room that computer based music player is becoming more useful, and being able to legitimately extend our library in virtual form is attractive.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Microsoft ]

I'm getting a little sick of "straw man" arguments in advertising masquerading as mainstream journalism. Normally it's assorted right-wing propaganda, but today's example is tech journalism, which is probably an oxymoron. The title at /. reads "Better Search Results Than Google?". The AP article is obviously thinly stapled together from bad press releases. Notably, it offers this example of searches gone awry:

Let's say, for example, you're curious about accommodations in France and enter a search for "Paris Hilton."

Google recognizes this as a search in the category of "Regional-Europe-Travel and Tourism-Lodging-Hotels" but still produces page after page with links about celebrity socialite Paris Hilton and her exploits. That's because Google's engine ranks pages largely based on how many other sites link to them, sending the most popular pages to the top.

Cute anecdote. But if you search for "Hilton Paris France" the results seem perfectly reasonable to me. The technologies quoted are cool, but a little poking around Vivismo shows that as a search engine they're... not yet ready for prime time. So the question I have is: Who did Vivisimo have to blow to get placement in a CNN article?

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Television Net Culture Machinery ]

A note to users of Microsoft Outlook: I've gotten two calls today from people trying to undo wackiness, including lost data and endless email loop sort of problems. I'm sorry, but if you persist in buying snake oil from traveling salesmen you're going to continue to have health problems. Ditch the crap software. I can't perform miracles if you're going to persist in self-destructive behavior.

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

Since John Robb's comments are down, I wanted to quote this entry:

We are slowly seeing the death of weblogs as a means of creating a vibrant new global thinking process. Politics, personal animostity, and indifference dominate. What a change from the early years (not long ago), when new ideas and thinking were rewarded with links and push back.

That's one way of looking at it, but the other is that weblogs are like any of the other new media I've seen come and go in the past two decades: They're interesting at first because those spaces are inhabited by the pioneers. After a while the masses come, and the noise gets too high to have intelligent conversations. See "the September that never ended".

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design History Journalism and Media ]

Nasa on Earth's Inconstant Magnetic Field. Most shocking is that diagram on the right side showing the migration of the field over the past century. That's a lot o' damned territory.

[ related topics: History Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Did you have a bad time traveling over the holidays? You may rethink your complaints when you read this Telegraph obituary of a British man who had the worst trip home ever. Count thy blessings.

[ related topics: Travel War ]

We rearranged pictures in the house, one of which was a version of that one down there on the left, and I was reminded of the high desert. I'm sure others don't find the same sort of beauty I see in that bleak terrain, but those lands are a place I don't want to have a relationship with because I know it'll just end badly, yet the tug is still there.

[ related topics: Photography Archival ]

So amidst the depth of yet another 411 scams and cheap mortgages and the like, I've gotten a few that say "Bi-Curios couple wants you". Assuming that they're not folks into paired bric-a-brac, I've just gotta point out that none of those so inclined that I know would mis-spell their subject lines.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Spam ]

Okay, I'm way disturbed. Unlike most of my fellow geeks I'm not a big fan of pouring more money into the gaping maw that is publicly funded manned space flight. So maybe it's just me, but when I read that Bush is running trial balloons about funding a manned Mars mission, I think "wow, could his machine be any more crass?". First there's the $400 billion payout to the AARP constituency, next the "please please please give me the Latino vote" ploy (which will hopefully backfire, unless he can find a way to get the illegal immigrants as registered voters... anyone else expect that the Republicans will suddenly resurrect the "motor voter" initiative they worked so hard to scratch?). It's almost like he expects that Diebold might not be up to the task this November.

[ related topics: Politics Space & Astronomy Current Events ]

Reportedly seen in the signature of someone who works at a games company of note:

A woman walks into a bar, asks the bartender for a double-entendre. He gives it to her.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

So I've been watching the Democratic horse-race unfold, and I'm starting to get concerned. The front-runners seem to be Dean and Clark. Dean seems to be doing his best to make sure that Bush voters stay Bush voters ("Dubya is an idiot"), and that Nader voters end up convincing either Nader or Kucinich to run ("confederate flags"); maybe there's enough votes in young internet users to make up for that demographic, but I'm not so sure. Clark bothers me because in that whole "support and defend the Constitution of the United States" thing, as we step through the Bill of Rights we stop at #1 (with his comments on flag burning), and he admits to voting for Reagan (yes, I know, Reagan didn't actually know about all the shenanigans of Iran Contra, right?) and Bush the elder (he was equally clueless, especially since he was an ex-head of the CIA, right?).

(Comparisons between Reagan and Bush the elder's alleged lack of knowledge about the actions of their lieutenants and information flow in Saddam Hussein's administration elided because that'd just be nasty...)

For a moment there Dean (and more importantly, Dean's supporters) could have made me think I was a Democrat, but now I'm becoming convinced that the Democrats as an organization (or maybe that's too strong a word, perhaps "movement"?) are trying to be more effective than Karl Rove at getting Bush the younger re-elected.

(Teeheehee. The topic picker suggested "dictators"...)

[ related topics: Politics moron Law Civil Liberties Marketing ]

Mark over at Brainwagon had a pointer to Microwave melting:

Research is nearing completion on a system that will allow the melting and casting of bronze, silver, gold, and even cast iron, using an unmodified domestic microwave oven as the energy source.

I'd still love the leisure time and energy necessary to build a complete metalworking shop from scratch, but on a small scale being able to melt iron to do casting for a small positioning table would still rock.

[ related topics: Machinery Cool Technology ]

Huh. Who'd a thought that Paul O'Neill would end up as the Daniel Ellsberg of our time? Or, as Talking Points Memo said:

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.

Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless.

-- Josh Marshall

For those of you who haven't been playing along at home, Dubya's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said some less than charitable things about Bush:

Asked about his comment that during Cabinet meetings Bush was like "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," O'Neill said he regretted some of the language he used to describe his former boss.

He also pointed out that Bush had been planning the invasion of Iraq far before September 11^th, which should come as a surprise to nobody, but:

"People are trying to say that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be a regime change in Iraq."

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events WTC/Pentagon attacks War Economics ]

Is there anything that I, as a user with a cable modem with a NAT box and a colocated machine, can do to help or hasten the coming of IPv6?

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture ]

As a surprise to nobody, Kodak will stop making Advanced Photo System cameras. Let's see: "Let's replace 110 with a format that uses about the same film area, sell the users that it's cool because you can crop that at picture taking time, and introduce it at just about the time that we can see that digital will be overtaking film in half a decade." APS was a bad idea at a bad time. It's brilliant management decisions like this that have put Kodak where it is today.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]

So say you're someone who, since sometime in 2000, has believed that the stock market is massively overvalued. So you've got some cash in money markets. Say you saw the writing on the wall, but still weren't smart enough to move that from U.S. dollars to Euros three months ago.

Now say you've suddenly realized that the way the Federal Reserve is going to deal with the overvalued stock market is by encouraging inflation (as they've been hinting with all of this "deflation scare" talk). Say you've also realized that the way the Bush administration is going to deal with the over-priced real estate market is by encouraging overpopulation immigration to bring the value of the real estate up to the costs of it.

Is it still to move that money into an overseas currency? A lot of U.S. companies are making investments in China and India, is it a reasonable strategy for an individual investor to make similar decisions? How do we not piss in our own beds, and yet still have a reasonable shot at retirement?

[ related topics: Politics Currency Economics ]

It was just yesterday that I was browsing through the Flutterby user info for canis and ran across my plea that everyone publishing XML parse it before it's published. Today, Mark has a wonderful wrap-up of the issues of producing valid XML from a weblog tools standpoint.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Weblogs ]

crasch had a link and commentary on Alex Tabarrok's challenge to blogdom. I've tried several times to paraphrase it, but can't seem to pare it down, so in its entirety:

President Bush reputedly asked his big-think guys to come up with a new vision to unify and motivate the nation and they came up with ... a moon base? It's so been there, done that. Going to the moon was one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind but I am not inspired by imitation. Are you?

Hence, I issue this challenge to the blogosphere. What's your big-think idea to unify, motivate and inspire the nation? A moon-base will cost on the order of 200 billion so let's economize and say that the idea should cost 100 billion or less - a better idea and 100 billion to spare! Ideally, the idea should be mostly free of politics and have a strong possibility of success given that the money is spent. Email me and I will post the best ideas with full credit.

I mentioned that the Democratic primary is doing its best to return me to my Libertarian roots and that I'm not a fan of government supported manned space missions, so my first reaction is "Use it all to pay down the deficit and get the U.S. back towards a stable financial footing!", but let's brainstorm...

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Invention and Design Space & Astronomy ]

Via David Chess: 18 year old black man has apparently consensual sex with 15 year old white woman, gets decade and a half in prison. Georgia hasn't come nearly as far as we'd sometimes like to think.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Race ]

For some reason, we wanted a movie tonight. Any movie, out. We looked at Big Fish, but assorted reviews made it out to be quite treacly in a Wet What Dreams May Come sort of way. Charlene couldn't get excited about John Walker Lindh goes to Japan Dances with Samurai, there were a bunch of what looked to be really lame romantic comedies, and I couldn't quite convince her that the highly reviewed but surreal and nearly dialog-free Triplets of Belleville was worth a look. So down the line we said "no, no, no" until we came to this review of the latest adaptation of Peter Pan:

If you like your filmic adaptations of legendary children's lit red-hot steamy than jump on-board this imaginative treat. The closest we'll ever get to a faithfully XXX Peter Pan, this very-storybook retelling is certainly uh, adventuresome.

Like Tom Lehrer, we were able to adopt the mindset that "when correctly viewed / everything is lewd" and quite enjoyed it. Not a great film, but entertaining, and the state of animation and visual effects has certainly advanced a hell of a lot over the past few years, the seamless shifts between live action and animation worked fairly well.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Animation Movies ]

Cascades de Tamul

Finally got a copy of our pics.. This was a beautiful waterfall, we spent some time chilling above, climbing down (trails and 'ladders') and back up. And yes, we did some caving/rapelling.. like down into the Rio Choy where we started in darkness, and ended up dropping into glowing warm water lit by the lower cave entrance. It was surreal, it was beautiful. and then we floating out.. over a small waterfall.. The climb back up was tough for me, I suck at free climbing, but Shane loaned me an ascender and I made it back to the top. El Geiser was a trip.. we were looking for a campground, and found one at an industrial accident converted to a water park. We never got the straight story, but apparently they capped a natural geiser, and it blew up. Enterprising and resourceful, they turned it into a recreational hot spring and sauna, collecting the hot water from the geyser and routing it into large pools. Remnants of the factory (whatever it was) are still there.. It was the hot place to be over the holidays. as whole families (I mean the WHOLE family) camped there for several days.

Next stop: Guanajato...The mexican equivelent of Gatlinberg, yet it was still a neat place to visit. Where I do something I love to do, wake up early and watch a city come to life. It's a great way to get to know a town.. And, as I was feeling pretty good, get some exercise. It's an old city, that was the center of a gold and silver mining boom. They dug the mines right under the town, which are not converted into streets. Guilt built some beautiful churches. It's alao a university town, which gives it a neat flavor. It's also the home of Diego Rivera, famous mexican artist, whose works covered the gamut of style, and was infamous for his political views. Still, it was art gallery display of paintings like the one on the left, that struck my fancy.. We can't find him on the net, and aren't really sure what his name is (Garrido?) but I would like to find prints of his work. - More later..

[ related topics: Photography ]

17 firefighters in have resigned because they're too prudish to work with a porn star.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

aka 'The BirdHouse' - Surreal architecture buily by a British eccentric in the mountains of Mexico. It's worth clicking on one of these images and looking at the rest of the pictures in that folder. - It was built to be a rich man's garden, he died, and it has become a tourist attraction even as the jungle reclaims the land.

[ related topics: Photography Architecture ]

OK, I admit, I've been a Perl wannabe for a long time, and Perl is incredible. For multiple projects, I started trying to use PHP a few weeks ago, and was hating it. The breakthrough was groking that it was a real language, and that all of the 'example' code I was seeing was for people whom have never written any code and were doing VERY simple things (normal 'web design' stuff). After studying the excellent online manuals with a different viewpoint, I flushed my aching brain of the multiple web pages with embedded PHP mentality and started writing a single PHP program with modes and functions that outputted HTML as needed. Wow. Many things that were hard in Perl are basic functions in PHP. The ease of doing HTTP Auth (without .htaccess files) alone, directly against the database, makes it worth learning. Although I'm using MySQL right now, I was also able to get Sybase working, and I'm stoked. It's been a while since I felt good about coding..maybe busting an ankle in Mexico and being forced to chill and concentrate in front of my systems was what I needed, and it was good karma after all. Enough geekspeak for today.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Robotics Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Embedded Devices Education Databases ]

Ages ago, my parents got me a rice cooker. Although it seems somewhat frou-frou, if rice is a substantial part of your diet it becomes one of the most used tools in the kitchen. Rice and water goes in, cooked rice comes out, no stirring, no checking on timing, it just works. In my kitchen over the past decade and change it's been handy, but since most of my carbs have been handmade pasta it's not been a necessity.

Charlene doesn't do wheat, so the pasta has declined, and the rice cooker is nice because it's a "fire and forget" tool for the kitchen. Tonight, on the other hand, we did polenta. Damn that's a hell of a lot of work and attention.

I see that there's a polenta cooker available on the net, but it seems set up for 220v and has a copper bowl. I'm cool with copper for the occasional meringue, but don't want it as part of my staples, and I'd rather not have to run 220 to the kitchen. Any suggestions?

Or is this yet another reason I need a TCP/IP controllable stove, so I could tie it to a TCP/IP controllable mixer, put a controller on 'em, and let that cook my polenta?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Okay, this is fascinating. You know how modern photocopiers won't make copies of some currency? /. has had some recent stories about currency detection in various products, here and here.

What's most fascinating is how they do it. In this comment on the second thread there's a link to a PDF which shows the pattern that the assorted devices and software are looking for (in the blue channel, apparently). Incorporate that into your graphic design, and "poof", you put your users through issues while trying to scan or reproduce your artwork.

I need to figure out the exact ratios involved so that I can make a T-shirt...

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Graphic Design Currency Clothing ]

John Robb linked to the John Edwards interactive electoral map, a quick Flash app that lets you choose combinations of states and see what the electoral college results are. You can use this in conjunction with Columbine's link to The Globe article about the MassINC article Beyond Red and Blue to help with your "electability" calculations.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Maps and Mapping ]

Shit. Those fuckers are fucking us over (H.R. 3687) (David Chess points out that they forgot "tits"). So, silly question. Dictionary.com's first two definitions of "profane" are:

1. Marked by contempt or irreverence for what is sacred.
2. Nonreligious in subject matter, form, or use; secular: sacred and profane music.

Wouldn't that tend to make Title 18 Section 1464 of the U.S. code a "...law respecting an establishment of religion..."?

[ related topics: Religion moron Law Civil Liberties ]

Via Sensible Erection (link), Penguin Baseball.

[ related topics: Humor Games Sports ]

In the comments to my question about cooking polenta, Meuon said: "And now we know what Flutterbarians are REALLY into: cooking." I've recently been reading The New American Chef. Subtitled "Cooking with the best of flavors and techniques from around the world", I was hoping for a "here are the basics of each of these cuisines". Alas, it's a collected from conversations with bunch of the most pompous chefs who take every available opportunity to drop into self parody, from the guy who runs the sushi restaurant in LA that flies in all of its fish from Japan and charges enough that you may as well just fly to Japan if you want to be that authentic; to the disagreements about "only ingredient X would be in that dish, you would never ever have ingredient Y", of course countermanded in the next paragraph by another chef; to the usual repetition of lore that anyone who's actually tried to verify in the kitchen has discovered is false. In that vein, imagine wavy lines, as the camera dollies across the studio audience, the stage lights come up, and...

Welcome to cooking avec Dan at Domaine du Flutterby. Ah, pardon, "Fletterbié", we must keep se fak accent of indeterminate origin sso you think se years I clam to haff spent preparing food in McDonald's exclusive sixteen star restaurants across Europe have happened. You haff not heard of e sixteen star restaurants? Zat is how exclusive zey are.

Tonight we ahr prepahring acorn squash ravioli with sahj and garlic. We start with whole wheat flour and semolina. Se whole wheat flour brings a nuttiness to se pasta that I like, especially since I'll be matching this up with collards, a rhobust earthy green. Since we are cooking for one, we use half an egg, and a quarter cup of each of se flours for se dough. Since we have se luxury of editing, we will skeep over se part where we show how out of practice Dan is at making pasta, and pretend that he didn't make it just a touch too dry, and we we were almost instantly able to end up with se rolled out dough.

Handmade pasta cooks much faster than dried pasta, so we need to prepare se rest of se meal. Garhlic in zis establishment is measured in heads, not cloves, since we're only cooking for one we'll chop up a single head.

Next we prepare se filling. Acorn squash, zome parmesan (reggiano, because it was cheap at Trader Giotto's), some herbs (dried, because se garden isn't producing this time of year). Mix it thoroughly, and spoon it out onto se dough. Zen we spread se remaining beaten egg around se edges of se ravioli to be.

If we were cooking for company, we'd carefully crimp se edges, or use se press. Because we are just cooking for one, we beat se edges togeser with a knife handle. So primitive. Rrarrr.

Se accoutrements will be some collards, garlic, dried tomatoes, a little bit of diced ham, and sage in olive oil. Simple, yet hearty. First we brown se garlic for that nutty carmelized flavor, sen we add se ham and crisp that.

Add se greens, toss in a little bit of water to help things braise, cover, and cook. Meanwhile, slide se ravioli into boiling water, set a timer for 3 minutes or so, and when it goes off combine and serve.

I find that bills and unopened bottles of wine of unknown provenance on se table add to se ambi-aaah-nce, but grated parmesan and a sprinkling of olive oil brought back from Italy by friends who like to go to Vernaza make se flavor.

Not bad, the accoutrements could have used a little more acidic bite, maybe more dried tomatoes or some capers, and I should have done a separate small pan with just sage and oil while the rest was cooking to better distribute the flavor, but it works.

What'd you make for dinner?

[ related topics: Books Dan's Life Food McDonald's ]

Silly question of the moment: What sort of a premium would you pay for "hackable" consumer electronics? Think of the places you have LED or LCD displays in your life, how much extra would you pay to have access and interface specs to things like your alarm clock or kitchen timer?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Consumerism and advertising Cool Technology ]

In the comments to the very first entry of Andrea Nemerson's column fodder:

I really just want to be a food writer. Sex is so 90's, really.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Food Writing ]

Remember the tale of black syphillis patients left untreated "for science"? It's a tale oft-quoted when people talk about experimental ethics and review boards and the like. Via Arts & Letters Daily, I strongly recommend the essay Tuskegee re-examined

[ related topics: Health Ethics Political Correctness Race ]

So by now you have undoubtedly discovered the new Friendster, dubbed Orkut. If you haven't gotten an invite from one of the select 20,000 seedings (I haven't) you might have seen the /. mention of the News.com.com article.

Named after its developer, Orkut Buyukkokten, apparently "orkut" is also a common Finnish slang term for "orgasms" (yes, plural, from other sources). Finally, a site that's up-front about its purposes.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Social Software ]

Just a random plug for two people doing Passion Parties: We've already mentioned The Goody Lady over in the Washington D.C. area, now my sister Sara is doing parties in the Toledo Ohio area at Fun Parties for Ladies.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Went and saw The Same River Twice. Quite a few moments where I was thinking "someone tell the film-maker not to be in love with his footage", and yet I found myself very affected by the film. It's a documentary based on a film that Rob Moss shot in 1978, on a whitewater trip down the Grand Canyon, followed up a few years ago when he went and tracked down the guides on that previous trip.

There was, perhaps, a bit more nudity in 1978, and these folks were running less scheduled multi-day trips, but there was a lot that I found familiar with my own experiences on the Ocoee a decade later; that feeling of comraderie, the fast friendships that come from sharing danger, the adrenaline rush that knocked us out of our afternoon naps when the bus came into view and someone hollered "showtime!".

Contrast that with the mundaneness of life 20 years later and it was something of a wake-up call. The nature of friendships changed, from a broad web to one person, bodies had gotten a bit softer, smiles more tense... Sometimes looking in the mirror isn't a pretty thing.

If you never had the river guide sort of experience, I think this film will mean nothing to you. I did, and while a few times during the film I wondered why I was watching yet another long cut from modern life, in walking out of the theater I was reminded of a lot that's changed, and some things that I've lost.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Nature and environment Sociology Whitewater ]

I hate that I write my best code under pressure. I hate that it takes a harsh deadline for me to tear apart code, and not only get it right, but add new features that I thought were tough to do in the process. I like the new features and functionality and all, I just that my best code gets written on the weekend before it's absolutely positively needed, rather than in a slack month before.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

I just gotta repeat this one whole hog from John over at Genehack, who says: "Something tells me that the Flutterbarians are going to really be into this one: Pornzilla"

The goal of the Pornzilla project is to make Mozilla into a great porn browser. We mostly contribute to Mozilla directly, but in cases where the requirements for a porn browser conflict with the requirements for a general-release browser, we will release modifications that aren't included in the main Mozilla distribution.

I need to check their thumbnailing feature, it sounds like there are a couple of features that could be handy even if you're not surfing porn.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Sexual Culture Flutterby Meta Open Source ]

Woohoo! Spent the day feverishly implementing new features which I was previously told we'd never ever want, but the result was grabbing the motion control system, winging it around, and watching the representation of what was supposed to be happening change on the screen. Not just the computer controlling the rig, but vice-versa. The "Wow, that's cool" factor was very palpable.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Also on Slashot, but The Register covers it with a better twist. The patent covers initial redirects to a login page. It's a patent that I have repeatedly broken using various Linux tools for network security (iptables mostly) and many xDSL and Cable router boxes also do this for initial configs, logins.. Heck, Belkin did it randomly just for advertising purposes. Patenting such techniques is lawyers abusing inherent technological abilities of an advanced society.

We the geeks, in order to form a more advanced society, share knowledge and provide for the common good and promote the general welfare of good technology should [explictives and violence deleted per counsel] the patent lawyers who enact and enforce patents of common techniques and processes used by all for the common operations of the world.

Next, they'll be patenting breathing in though the nose.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Software broadband Open Source Consumerism and advertising Typography Graphic Design ]

Charlene's step-mom is Armenian, so when we go to visit them I not only get some culinary explorations, I also hear stories of families. A recurring theme is "parents were killed, grew up in a Turkish orphanage". If you're looking for historical precedence about why negotiations in northern Iraq right now are so tense, a good place to start might be this review of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response.

[ related topics: Politics History War ]

Must read: Daze Reader had a link to The Mike Jones Story. Summary: Photographer sets up porn website to display his wares. Busybody in town takes offense and starts calling in false accusations of child porn to local police. Prosecutor decides to take him down, so when they couldn't get an obscenity charge to stick they used a thumbnail page in his browser cache that might have had underage models on it as the basis for a child porn posession prosecution. So, how many times have you stumbled across something and hit the "back" button? Yep, that might be used in court.

The case eventually got dropped because they got that evidence thrown out on the basis of an overly broad search warrant, but it's a reminder that the law is so ridiculous now that if a prosecutor decides they want to put you in jail, they can almost always find a way.

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture Law Law Enforcement ]

While I'm stealing from Daze Reader, last night on my few minutes in the car on the way home I heard a bit of the Fresh Air bit interviewing Peter Landesman, author of the current New York Times series on sex slavery. As he talked I kept thinking "this isn't reporting, this is story telling". This morning Daze linked to Jack Shafer in Slate discussing the series:

I can't disprove the claim made in the article's subhed that sex slavers hold "perhaps tens of thousands" of women, girls, and boys against their will in the United States, but I seriously doubt its veracity. Landesman's breathless performance, in which he asserts that "hundreds" of "stash houses" inhabited by foreign sex slaves dot America's metropolitan landscape, offers almost nothing in the way of verifiable facts about the incidence and prevalence of this heinous practice.

Now to temper this, on Friday the SF Examiner reported on a bust in San Francisco, noting that:

Officials have not yet determined whether the women knew they would be working as prostitutes, but said none of them tried to escape and none had been injured.

"They are being very cooperative and seem very comfortable, not afraid but quite happy," said one bureau source.

(a short follow-up today) The archives haven't been updated for today yet, but this morning there was an article about sex worker's groups making the case that if we just legalized prostitution, most of this slavery issue would disappear.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Sexual Culture - Landesman "sex slavery" article ]

What's the difference between whining and complaining? The only pants I have that fit me right now are 8 years old, and even they may be too big for me shortly. That's whining.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Clothing ]

Heeheehee... I've become a fan of The Big Picture on my daily walk from the ferry reading The Examiner, but haven't bothered to find it online until today's strip. If you've ever called your cable modem company for support...

[ related topics: Humor Dan's Life broadband ]

Wow. Will one of you Dean supporters confirm or deny that these are the words of Howard Dean speaking at Carnegie Mellon?

On the Internet, this card will confirm all the information required to gain access to a state network -- while also barring anyone who isn't legal age from entering adult chat room(sic), making the internet safer for our children, or prevent(sic) adults from entering a children's chat room and preying on our kids.

So: No more anonymous discussions about public policy. No more anonymous whistleblowers on corporate misdeeds. As I read that speech, he's advocating that if you log on to the 'net the government knows.

If so, then... well... Getting rid of Dubya is important, but since Clark has already spoken out against the First Amendment, with Dean apparently hollering for an end to anonymity, and the rest of the Democrats being roughly generic business-as-usual politicians, I'm no longer so sure that the alternatives presented are better.

Thanks to Jay who turned me on to News.com.com on the topic.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Law Current Events Civil Liberties Net Culture ]

I was browsing /. and ran across this question about "A Modern Day '101 Basic Computer Games'?", which had a link to an online version 101 BASIC Computer Games and a comment pointing to an online version of More BASIC Computer Games. The younger rat boy has been asking about programming recently, maybe it's time to do an updated version in Perl?

[ related topics: Games Perl Open Source Software Engineering ]

I've no idea how these notes from April of last year from Tom Igoe's talk at ETech 2003 on Physical Computing made it into this morning's feeds within 50 miles of my house, but if you're diddling about with microcontrollers there are a few things there that might spark some neurons.

Speaking of sparking some neurons, Mark V had a link to Dan Piponi's Equibot, yet another two-wheeled balancing robot, except that this one does away with the whole gyro thing and just uses an arm with an IR distance sensor.

[ related topics: Robotics Cool Technology Embedded Devices ]

Aaargh. I'm getting roughly 15 an hour of the MiMail virus to my home account, and I thought we were home-free at the office until this morning when my work account started getting flooded. A request: If you're a sales manager who was silly enough to click on the damned attachment without knowing what it is, and I unplug your laptop from the net, and I then ask you to log on again, do not complain that your laptop is not connected to the net until I have determined that your computer is no longer spewing random mail that insults your clients. That is all. Thank you.

[ related topics: Dan's Life virus moron ]

Come back with us now to those days of yesteryear, when the only way to see the web was with a semi-homemade browser. Deja Vu offers an old-timey browser emulator, so you can see your own website as it would look to someone using NCSA Mosaic.

[ related topics: Web development Invention and Design History ]

This one's for Eric: Via MemeMachineGo!, a visual teaching aid: Bush Yoga.

[ related topics: Politics Humor ]

A correspondent and Flutterby reader who wishes to remain anonymous has sent me email asking if I know anything about a series of pictures like this one. Each picture is a series of 7 images of the same woman, one fully clothed from the front, then four shots unclothed, front, left side, back, right side, and two closer of the back and front. In some the hair drape has changed slightly. between the clothed and nude shots. The closer shots appear to be different than the front and back of the full body shots. Each woman is wearing a different outfit, clothing looks to be all '90s or contemporary, these are relatively recent figure studies.

I'm fascinated because these look like a derivative of some sort of body shape or fit study, and I'd love to get my hands on the raw data. But I'd also just love to know context. I believe said correspondent got them from a Usenet binaries group, but I don't know anything about header information or any way to track data backwards from that.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Dan's Life Clothing ]

According to the Telegraph of London, the first woman to command a Royal Navy warship has taken over HMS Brecon, and is busy tracking gunrunners off the coast of Northern Ireland. I wonder what Hornblower would say?

[ related topics: Current Events Boats War ]

I originally saw this on Borklog, I think it showed up on /. a few days later but I can't find it now, but if you're an old software developer, this is a must read: Folklore is site full of tales of the development of the Macintosh. Sometimes I lose perspective, and forget what it was like when memory cost money, when critical functions were in RAM, when we worried about video pages and direct memory access. Heck, some of those days weren't even that long ago. Still, as I occasionally find myself thinking "No problem, we can do that hash table in less than a megabyte" it's fun to have a reminder of the days when bytes mattered.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering History Macintosh ]

Wow: Pixar ends talks with Disney to seek deal with other studio.

"After 10 months of trying to strike a deal with Disney, we're moving on," Jobs said in a statement. "We've had a great run together -- one of the most successful in Hollywood history -- and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes."

Now that Pixar can range a little further in the audience for its films, can we maybe hope for a partnership with Vivid? Or would that just be tacky? (Warning: I'm sure that latter link has pop-ups galore...).

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Movies Current Events ]

Microsoft advocates TYPING IN url's.. http://support.microsoft.com/d...ult.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;833786

"Do not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them in the Address bar yourself."

And: Microsoft resorts to Java:

"Use a JScript command in Internet Explorer. In the Address bar, type the following command, and then press ENTER: javascript:alert("Actual URL address: " + location.protocol + "//" + location.hostname + "/");

To verify website addresses..

The best reccomendation: Use another Brower! (and operating system if you can)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Net Culture ]

Yesterday Larry mentioned that Nothing Will Evolve in Georgia, this morning the The Chronicle has the AP article on the political correctness situation that's... evolving there. Apparently:

The state's school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia's science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase "biological changes over time."

It's worth reading the articles for the various people quoted.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Politics moron Current Events Biology ]

I've been playing around with Orkut a bit (Thanks, Dori!). I think it's more interesting than Friendster, mostly because they've got ways to group and search by interest, but three things come to mind:

First, for any automation of a social networking system I need a way to quickly determine which friends will and won't be okay with participating in that system. I'm fine with my email address being out there, I depend on technology to filter the crap, and so far that's doing okay. I know others aren't, so when it's time to invite new people I have to think about if I believe they'd be interested, email them to see if they are, then go back and enter that into the web site.

The second bit ties back to that "if I believe they'd be interested" thing. These web sites allegedly trade social capital. The problem with social capital is that while it grows when it's invested, as we've repeatedly seen it's very hard to automate investing. The best networkers pick and choose who among their acquaintances meets whom. Every introduction is spending a little "social capital" in the hopes that it will be repaid by that connecting having extra value to those introduced.

Last, as I run through it, I start to wonder why I'm giving away all of this stuff to a third party when I could just use blogs. It'd be a much better idea for me to fix my trackback code and work on automated common link discovery systems than to type lots of stuff into a place where I no longer have any control over it.

[ related topics: Sociology Net Culture Social Software ]