Flutterby™! From 2004-02-02 to 2004-02-29

This morning we felt like a day-trip of some sort. Had to be back around home in the later afternoon for Charlene to work, but we figured we'd have plenty of time. So we headed over to Alameda. First stop was at the U.S.S. Hornet, quite fun, and be absolutely sure to talk with a docent. Great stories and personal experience, and we'll be going back.

But we got hungry, so we left to go find some food. Wandered around Alameda a while, had lunch (I don't mind an $8 sandwich, but a $8 sandwich is more than meat and standard store bread with a few slices of bland tomato), just weren't finding anything, so we headed back.

Long about Berkeley we decided it'd be cool to run up to Telegraph Avenue. For those of you who don't know, Telegraph used to be the epitome of Berkely culture, on a given day during the '90s you could run into the naked guy, the angry man, any number of punks and hippies, and there were all sorts of bizarre eclectic shops. Not any more. Signs proclaim it a "DRUG FREE ZONE", the stores that haven't gone chain franchise are cleaned up so that they're indistinguishable from them, and after a quick run up and down and a fast stop in Cody's, we headed back west. If the chain stores have overrun Telegraph it's definitely time to find somewhere else.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food Bay Area Sociology California Culture Travel Boats ]

I was going to ignore the Stupor Bowl, complete with the false apology for the alleged breast-baring incident, but it's getting enough coverage on various places that I just have to offer a few notes from people who might know. Amid lots of discussion about the exact definition of "pasty" Bella Beretta points out on the Tease-o-rama mailing list:

what I love is the post scramble the "we screwed up tango" is what i like to call it.

"Her costume was not supposed to do that"..

I'll take BS for 500.00 --

Vinyl doesn't give way without considerable help..and after making considerable amounts of tear away clothing...that's a pretty clean seam for an accidental break away...

and Ms Burleyque notes:

Yeah- I think the song lyric pretty much removes any doubt that it wasn't intentional:

"As the pair wrapped up Timberlake's hit song Rock Your Body with the lyric "Gonna have you naked by the end of this song," the former Mouseketeer delivered on his promise, ripping away the cloth covering Ms. Jackson's right breast."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/04/sb/2382514

So if you were noting that the audience was promised "shocking moments", yep, you got the whole canned package. I, however, was hanging out with friends listening to stories of the famed Hardcastle's coffee shop and San Francisco in the '60s.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Pop Culture Clothing ]

More Like This had a link to Jon Udell: Analyzing blog content, where he investigates putting intelligent markup into class="..." attributes. Astute readers will recognize that that's been an ongoing topic here, most recently with my universal NNTP syndicator, but I should really set up a method for tagging individual links as well. All four of the links in this message should have distinct classes. Unfortunately I don't have a good interface to get all the posters here using such markup.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs ]

Okay, at some point I'll figure out why the forms have a silly border on 'em, but I got sick of the old design and decided to throw something different up, even if it is half-baked. So here's a new look.

[ related topics: Web development Flutterby Meta Graphic Design ]

I can only assume, because no two browsers seem to implement anything remotely similar and none of what any of them do implement seems to match what I understand as the spec or for that matter anything remotely sane, that CSS sucks. But anyway, I think I've answered most of your complaints (via email and in that previous thread), if it's still intolerable please holler. I'm about ready to implement a customization system so that you can tune it so that it's readable in your particular browser, but I'll hold off for now.

Now to take what I've learned here and see if I can transfer it to a few other projects.

And there are now date based archives, and I'm about to go fix the case sensitivity of the search engine.

[ related topics: Web development Flutterby Meta ]

For some strange reason I have not paid much attention to the reported genocide in Rwanda, except to note that something Very, Very Bad happened there. I now see my ignorance cannot be excused. Tacitus, who has some experience in Africa, begins a riveting two-part report on the horrifying events in that unhappy land. I am almost speechless. One million people were murdered in about 100 days, mostly by machete or bludgeon. The bare facts stand as an indictment to the civilized world for not stopping this. Highly recommended.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

Those lucky Canadians. They have History Television which, on February 14^th, is presenting Anatomy of Burlesque (We'll be at a show with Kitten on the Keys and The Lollies and a few other folks, so I guess we're making up for it). But even if we can't see the program there's some reading, there's the History Television history of burlesque backgrounder, and an article in the Ottawa Citizen which quotes director Lindalee Tracey:

"I learned that burlesque was, and is, the dissenting voice against the goose step of decorum and enforced appropriateness," says the producer, director and host.

"It has borne witness to pretence and hypocrisy for centuries."

Something to put in context the uproar over that flash of skin at the Stupor Bowl. Thanks to Vivienne Vavoom of Burlesque As It Was and author of Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind for the heads-up.

[ related topics: Quotes Books Sexual Culture Current Events Television Burlesque ]

As folks have noticed, Flutterby is edging more and more towards the community. Just do drag it back, I'll keep up with the gawdawful techie posts about the mundanities of my life that test the patience of even the semi-geeks.

So, in short, I am the Vivitar 283 photo flash modification god. I have absurd computer control through my C# API over flash duration (and therefore apaprent brightness). I have also reduced a number of opt-isolators to slag, but we won't get into that.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled community relevant posts.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Embedded Devices ]

The office I work in is not for the prudish. Our business is making sculptures of human bodies. Looking at porn on the web can be legitimate research. And we're in San Francisco, so it's not like any topic is off-limits for water cooler discussion.

Thus it was surprising this morning to discuver a shortcut to a porn site on the desktop this morning on one of our test machines; why would anyone be surfing the web out there? Go look at the cookie logs, discover lots of browsing around midnight thirty for the past few nights. Pretty obviously someone on the maintenance staff.

I have generally taken a casual approach to office security; as someone who knows how to circumvent security systems I've always pretty much believed that physical security is security, if someone gets in to the office they can get what they want off my hard drive.

Obviously that's a false assumption. When deleted off the desktop, the shortcut reappears slightly later. AdAware finds nothing. We've held off on the complete forensics on that machine 'til we show it to building management, but it's suddenly obvious that the casual web surfer, one who's not savvy enough to fire up Mozilla rather than IE or willing to run untrusted executables, could cause far more damage than the determined spy. It's time to start locking down the computers. Damn.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Bay Area security Work, productivity and environment ]

If you search Google for "LED calculator", most of the valid links are to people who've used the same JavaScript. The problem is that that calculator checks for minimum values and doesn't do the calculations if you claim your LED has a forward voltage of less than two volts, or uses less than 10 milliamps. I have several such LEDs, so I want to give a little juice to an LED calculator that doesn't pretend to be smarter than me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

We went to the movie - I had not seen the previous Lord of the Rings, but my friend wanted to see just why this movie won all those awards.

The Story: I am not sure - there are multiple stories going on here. Its hard to say why anyone does anything, actually.

The Script: Awful - partially because the audio was so bad; I wondered if the audio was so bad intentionally to mask the lack of a script - I suspect the audio was just bad - AND the script was awful.

The Audio: What did they say? Under their breath - what?

The Photography. (What do you call it when its all digitized?) At any rate the entire movie was out of focus. Could this be just our theater - dunno - I do know the graphics seemed uneven and basically awful. Too many close shots to mask the lack of content (like the script) and the long shots seemed ok until you realized the detail was missing. Long shots that don't look real, close up shots that blur the story... There were moments of focus where a specific scene would appear 'great' but unattached to anything, and created it appeared just for the movie trailers needed to market the thing.

The Continuity: Well, there is none. This poor excuse for a movie had scene after scene basically disconnected to the others - except that long drawn out journeys for god knows what reason, intermingled with heavy action scenes inserted gratuitously. All the time we had new, unknown monsters and characters appear out of nowhere to attack for 'some reason' not known to anyone at all.

What they were saying: Who knows? What was the purpose of the movie? Blank Out - there is no purpose - no values, no reality, no moral, no redeeming story line, nothing. It ended it seemed, over ten times - two hours of a dark malevalent universe stumbling forward to another hour and 20 minutes of a variety of endings all shot it appeared to test movie endings in front of test crowds, but then ALL attached to the end just to lengthen this monstrosity of a joke.

Several times I saw people get up and walk out of the theater - how I envied them! Escape from the tortuous hell we endured.

This movie is in the truest sense 'pornography' - in that it has no redeeming value. I enjoy topical pornography which is misnamed in my opinion. Nudity and sex are values and part of life. But this worthless scrap of digitized joke has to be the the worst movie I have ever seen. (Worse than Planet of the Apes, worse even than The Cosby Show) -- The Blob and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes have this one beat in script, foreshadowing, and plot, and that's the shame of it.

So what can we say about the response to it? How could such a thing garner an award? Only because the culture allows it. It reminds me of the spoof the physicists (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/fac..._franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html) pulled a while back where they fed nonsense into the academic journals and nary a peep was heard from the 'professionals' since nonsense is the order of the day.

So maybe there is a purpose to this movie after all. Its a test of the culture - and the movie's creators are sitting back and smoking their weed and wondering how it could be that such trash could pass for greatness.

Ziffle of Mayberry

[ related topics: Ziffle Religion Drugs Interactive Drama Music Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Ethics tolkien Invention and Design Food Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Sociology Graphics California Culture Economics ]

Fun little bit about the changing language of deviant sexuality and lifestyles:

"If you're not a man or woman, words like 'gay' or 'lesbian' don't fit you anymore," said Sam Davis, founder of United Genders of The Universe, a support group and speakers bureau. "The words from just a few years ago aren't adequate to talk about who we are, where we're coming from and who we like."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture ]

Charlene's got an interesting one: A year ago, she paid a charge with a check. The merchant used Telecheck to clear the check. Recently, she closed out that account. A full year after the merchant did the Telecheck transaction (and we know this because of the Telecheck printing on the back of the check), Telecheck did the funds transfer, resulting in a bounce because the account was closed. Now Telecheck wants a $25 bounce fee.

My impression (and apparently Telecheck's) is that current Federal Reserve rules make checks invalid after 6 months. Telecheck is claiming a loophole because this was an EFT. Anyone have current information?

Yesterday the neighbors had a birthday party for their kid, and we decided that it was a good day to go lie in the sun over by Roy's Redwoods. Amidst the hundreds, possibly thousands, of years old flora I saw a few recent bits that looked worth a picture.\

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

A Financial Times blurb on the upcoming The Good Old Naughty Days, "a collection of naughty shorts from France in the 1920s". Sounds interesting because it appears to lend credence to my story that we don't actually make any social progress, we're simply permissive and restrictive in cycles. Peter Aspden points out some of the conflicts between culture, art and eros:

It is an unsettling paradox that arguably the most powerful human urge, to revel in sexual pleasure, should bear no or little relation to arguably the second most powerful urge, to express ourselves freely. If contemporary folklore is to be believed, what most of us seek more than anything is a regular, passionate sexual relationship with one person whom we love in a number of other ways: Eros and Agape happily unified for convenience and, it would seem, everlasting contentment.

Yet art deals with this unexceptional desire in a diffident, almost contemptuous way....

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Sociology Current Events Art & Culture ]

Geek stuff: The last MS-Patch broke the login:passwd@www.fleeze.com/flutterby URL spec and I got code and systems to rewrite. Accoring to Micro it's my fault for creating systems that have a 'public' access level that I linked access to that way.. as well as some other tricks for links spanning systems or userlevels. I contend that MS is the leading cause of code re-writes, even on non MS platforms, just because they change the spec by the sheer weight of their user base, and when they make changes, it affects everyone.

[ related topics: Business Current Events ]

Went to Florida last weekend with friends, had a great time playing with the Manatees in Crystal River. Snorkelling with my cast on.. but no really good pics of Manatees. If anyone wants to do this, forget prop driven boats, the Manatees hide from them, we did a pontoon boat Saturday. Sunday we used canoe's.. and they come right up to the canoes. Snorkelling in the crystal clear water of the springs was incredible.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Boats Machinery ]

Wow. Just because I'm constantly involved in discussions about new companies, I think this is going to end up chewing quite a bit of reading time. Over at VentureBlog, David Hornik linked (with worthwhile commentary) to the NVCA Model Financing Documents.

Annually, our industry closes several thousand financing rounds, each consuming considerable time and effort on the part of investors, management teams and attorneys. A conservative estimate is that our industry spends some $200 million in direct legal fees annually to close private financing rounds. In an all-too-typical situation, the attorneys start with documents from a recent financing, iterate back and forth to get the documents to conform to their joint perspective on appropriate language (reflecting the specifics of the deal and general industry best practices), and all parties review many black-lined revisions of the documents, hoping to avoid missing important issues as the documents ooze to their final form. In other words, our industry on a daily basis goes through an expensive and inefficient process of "re-inventing" the flat tire."

This is an attempt to give everyone a common baseline.

[ related topics: New Economy Law ]

If I were totally cynical, which I'm not, I'd set up a web site with a betting pool for which day in October of this year Osama bin Laden will be captured.

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

Feature that would help sysadmins and Microsoft: A "self-destruct" that wipes the drive that Windows is currently running from. This would save me from a lot of work verifying that we've cleaned up correctly on old computers that we're looking to scrap.

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

Sure, it's another MS-Bug^tm with security issues. But this is about well earned cocksureness style hubris. eEye takes it to new levels with not only their excellent job at finding and reporting to Microsoft this issue in July 2003, and their being nice enough to not post it until Microsoft spews YAP (Yet Another Patch) in February 2004. With machismo and style they post a pre-amble that starts:

U Can't Trust This

By: MCSE Hammer

Blaster did ya some harm

We just say, hey, another worm

But thank you, for trusting me

To mind your site's security

It's all good, when your server's downed

Our dope PR will pass blame around

Cuz it's known as such

That this is some software, you can't trust

I told ya Homeland

U can't trust this..........[more]

They deserve the Larry Wall Hubris Award. Thank you eEye for sticking your neck out and reminding us to take some pride in our work and to rejoice in that pride.

A truly great computer programmer is lazy, impatient and full of hubris - Larry Wall

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft virus Perl Open Source Coyote Grits Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Work, productivity and environment ]

As the US agonizes over the issue of immigration by working class Mexicans, there is another side to the entire question. From Deutsche Welle via Medienkritic: "Every seventh person with a doctorate in science leaves Germany for the United States."

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment ]

I was going to tag this into the comments at my "Sex Slavery?" entry, but I think it's good enough to go into its own entry. Dan Damon, the public information officer of Plainfield, NJ, sent me a bunch of blog entries responding to Peter Landesman's sex slavery series. What's particularly entertaining about the exchanges with the editor is the total cluelessness on the editor's part that there might be something wrong with the portrayal: "If you see a trend of anti-New Jersey reporting, please send us a message citing bias in a specific article."

Uhhh... Yeah, they were specifically complaining about the treatment of one town, but in general it was more about a reporter spinning tales out of his ass and portarying them as if they were part of some vast international conspiracy.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Conspiracy Sexual Culture - Landesman "sex slavery" article ]

So with Clark out of the race here's a nod to Cam and Mark hoping you guys land on your feet and find satisfying gigs.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett ]

Reality is stranger than fantasy: I took a married friend to an adult store today after work.. she did not want to go alone, and was not going to take her husband for various reasons. She bought a small vibrator.. in the parking lot she realized she needed batteries. Being a geek/caver I have plenty in my truck (aa,aaa,c,d) and gave her some. I say goodbye.. she heads home, I head home, and 10 minutes down the road my cell phone rings. She is giggling and giddy. Yep, she could not wait to get home, she even pulled over on the side of the road to finish.. and called me to say "Thank You" for the batteries. Life is strange, but wonderful.

[ related topics: Wireless Erotic Sexual Culture Coyote Grits Sociology Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

Just because I've gotten to the point where I think it'd be useful, and it's something that with the current lame state of our patent system might be protectable: An application which sends a broadcast packet to the local network to discover an IP address, and then fires up your browser pointed at that IP.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property broadband Embedded Devices ]

Just when you thought the Cold War was over, Vladimir Putin sings the praises of the Soviet Union:

"The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale," from which "only the elites and nationalists of the republics gained," Putin said in a nationally televised speech to about 300 campaign workers gathered at Moscow State University.

And the pucker factor of a couple of million Germans just pegged.

[ related topics: History Current Events Education ]

You've probably seen that a Dallas based group is buying anti-porn ads on billboards for Valentines Day. What struck me, though, is this paragraph:

Almost 18 percent of people who called themselves born-again Christians admitted visiting Internet porn sites, according to a 2000 survey of 1,031 adults by the evangelical group Focus on the Family. In a 2002 Pastors.com survey, more than 50 percent of responding pastors reported viewing pornography in the previous year.

Obviously it's not a scientific sample, but "50 percent of responding pastors"? Can we assume that they felt ashamed of doing so? If so, how healthy can a group of people who feel that much shame over something so close to their being be?

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events ]

Just so nobody is expecting to see me, before ticket sales start I want to announce that once again I won't be making Burning Man this year.

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

Reasons to not collect data: Justice Department goes on "partial birth abortion" fishing expedition, and grand jury subpoenas major league baseball drug testing records. If you work with politically sensitive data, even if it's not yet illegal, it seems like a good idea to up records destruction practices and nuke early, nuke often.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Content Management Health Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Sports Archival ]

Wow. Been a full day, digging through some software I've never seen before to fix an unresponsive server and make sure a new install got all of its records(looks like cool software, steep admin curve); fixed some backlash and settling time issues that have shown up in the motion control system; and did yet a little more clean-up on our old computers (anyone wanna make my life easy and buy a few tens of old P3-733 type machines?).

So I'll take a breather and make a note: My favorite credit card was recently co-opted, I got a call from an online auto parts store asking where I wanted to pick up a new in-car DVD player. No biggie, call my card provider, have 'em cancel it, mark a few things as fradulent. Except that I've got recurring billing on that card. Go to Comcast.net and try to login. All my normal passwords, all the login IDs that they've ever given me or I've given them. No dice. Fire up a browser, try to check support, shut down computer, swap drives, reboot into Windows, try again with IE, get directed (not sure if it was a human or a 'bot that I was chatting with) to help page. Eventually figure out from help page that Comcast.net and Comcast.com use different user databases, and I want the latter. Sigh. If this is "a different kind of cable company" then I want the normal kind.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Mono and dotGNU: what's the point? echoes some of my own thoughts on the matter. Yesterday Phil was trying to make a replaceable word in a message a different format. We suggested a couple of different methods, but each one of them was far easier to implement in GTK than System.Windows.Forms; from using internal formatting to just using three text fields.

As a .NET developer, and as I prepare to move Charlene's computing over to Linux, I'm continually reminded that Windows, and especially .NET, has a long way to go to catch up with modern Linux. What it does have is a popular application suite, but the operating system and the GUI shell are stuck back in the dark ages as a result of bad architectural decisions and inexperienced kludges on top of other kludges. Trying to follow Microsoft's lead is a bad idea, indeed this might be exactly what Microsoft wanted: Drag the smart guys in the Mono development group down a dead end, and keep their energies from going into something innovative.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source moron ]

We didn't just track down that bug, we left evidence of its extermination as a warning to other bugs.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Software Engineering ]

We went in to the city Saturday to have lunch with Jen of Divinest Sense, in the course of which I managed to splatter my shirt. Since I wanted to look like a little less of a slob, and since I'm always on the lookout for good shirts, we took a short time in between saying "bye" to Jen and heading up to Broadway Studios for the evening's show to run over to Union Square and get me a new shirt.

The first place we stopped in had silk shirts which... would have made me look like I'd just walked out of some sort of bizarre disco rodeo. Embroidered glittery collars, the whole bit. The style didn't fit, so we continued to the next place that looked promising.

I've bought silk from a variety of different sources. Street vendors in Hong Kong, hoity-toity department stores like Nordstrom, I think I've even found one or two on the remainders rack in a Ross or a Marshalls. I've worn more than one shirt to the point where the seams just failed, and I'm familiar with several different finishes, and how they hold up after wearings and washings. We walked into Wilkes-Bashford, where I mentioned my aversion to looking like I walked out of a rodeo, and was shown some plain white shirts that not only had the worst of these finishes, they cost $475.

I'm conscious of "cost per wearing" when I buy stuff. Part of the reason I like silk is that I think it wears nicely, lasts a reasonable amount of time. I'm totally cool with $100 for a good shirt, especially if I like the provenance of the manufacturing. These were things I wouldn't buy for HK$28 ($4 US), and I wasn't particularly impressed with the country of origin label either.

Eventually found a reasonable shirt of a closeout rack at Macy*s (of all places) for $22, which I felt was something of a score, and made the show in time to get a great table. But once again I'm amazed at the amazing range of values exhibited in the economy.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Fashion Clothing Hong Kong Economics ]

Okay, cool place that nobody goes of the moment: The Pacific Bell Museum, at 140 New Montgomery in San Francisco is cool, stuff from the early days of telephone, a lobby with an embossed leather ceiling. Very worth a stop in.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Art & Culture ]

I had all of these things about the gay marriage thing in San Francisco that I was going to post, but I'm still trying to organize my thoughts, so I'll post about what I've been doing instead.

I installed Debian for Charlene at home. The only thing missing is QuickBooks, if the environment suits her then we'll find a way to run it, maybe by paying CodeWeavers some dollars. I was shocked at how easy it was to set up printing, actually easier than Windows, which is quite a change from how it used to be. Further updates on Linux as a desktop environment as this evolves.

I do have to figure out why OpenOffice.org refuses to see one of the fonts, though.

Aaand, for a work project today I downloaded Knoppix. I realize I'm late to the party, but... wow. Everyone needs one of these CDs in their bag of tricks.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Microsoft Open Source Coyote Grits Work, productivity and environment ]

If you are having trouble making a TrueType font show up in OpenOffice.org, you might try mkfontdir -weo . to make your font directory, it looks like OpenOffice.org is only showing character sets with an explicit font page, and the '-e' forces an ISO8859-1 entry.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Typography ]

On Tuesday night Charlene and I had a couple of friends over. It was a gathering that had been planned for several weeks, but two of the guests late last week had taken advantage of San Francisco offering marriage licenses to couples of any sex combination, so we showered them with rose petals when they entered, had several "Best Wedding Music" compilations on the CD player, and other theme appropriate decorations. We even had someone sneak out and decorate their car, in the pouring rain. Sneaking him back in and trying to find a dry shirt that wasn't too obviously different from the one he'd been wearing was a trick.

So there we sat, with sappy '80s love songs wailing in the background ("...and I(aaaye) will always love you(ewewewewew)"), a number of het folks who want nothing to do with marriage and two people who a few years ago would have been proclaiming marriage a tool of the patriarchy and now could talk about nothing else.

Over at Population: One there were some questions comparing Gavin Newsom's actions to Roy Moore's Ten Commandments in Alabama, pointing out that Californian's passed a proposition a few years ago that defined marriage as something between one man and one woman. I agree that this is a quandary, although this is probably not the case to test it on. Assorted lawyers in San Francisco have been going over the state constitution and assorted precedent with a fine toothed comb, and the general concensus is that if the resources are behind it the proposition will be ruled unconstitutional. Newsom was simply picking which of the contradicting laws to follow.

And, frankly, I see no reason we should give the citizens of Alabama any more weight than those who run Afghanistan or Iraq when we choose the rules we live by.

This hasn't yet gotten to the state that Massachusets has (Columbine talks about that, and Debra has been participating in rallies), because if you came to San Francisco right now to protest you'd get run out of town on a rail. This town is behind the move all the way, and if someone from the central valley wants to make a stink then we'll happily let them secede to Nevada.

But as the evening's discussion wore on I became more than a little uncomfortable. Is someone who railed about marriage as the tool of the patriarchy and has now adopted it with her love wholeheartedly just doing it as an "in your face" response to the larger culture? How can someone with such a history of attitudes speak of wedded bliss, and then talk about how visible prostitution makes them feel uncomfortable?

It's true that many people stood in line to get married longer than Britney's marriage lasted, but how does hopping off a tour bus to get married because you just discovered the city was doing it, even if you've been with that partner for decades, strengthen a relationship?

So while I think it's great that San Francisco has come together to shake up the status quo, and I'm hoping that things in Massachusets continue to open up the boundaries of what we consider to be marriage, I'm uncomfortable that this portion of the population that's had to reject many of the more restrictive notions of the mainstream society is hopping on this bandwagon so handily.

It's great that we're mucking about with the law for giggles, frankly I think the law needs more of that, I'm uncomfortable that in doing so as an act of rebellion people are losing sight of the larger issues of what it means to adopt that culture.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Ethics Bay Area Sociology Law Civil Liberties California Culture Community Marriage Gavin Newsom ]

A few days ago there was a /. link to Eric Allman on The Economics of Spam, yet another argument that micropayments will save us. Now I'm against micropayments because the friction of accounting and making payments raises the price of doing an action a lot, and this is going to become a way for some large company to suck money out of the system.

However, there's another larger issue here: Micropayments won't stop spam any more than long distance fees stopped telephone solicitors. The only thing micropayments might do is make some of the more egregious offenders change their tactics, but it'll up the legitimacy of large companies sending crap, the same way our physical mailboxes are stuffed with annoyances that cost us time and money to dispose of. Right now I'm divided between technical solutions like Brian Warner's Petmail and social solutions like squads of vigilantes leaving the mangled corpses of spammers on display as an example to others.

[ related topics: Spam Currency Economics ]

Oh yeah, so for that dinner mentioned in the marriage comments, we did soup:

• an onion, chopped fine
• a third of a cup of chopped dried apricots (less is more)
• a couple of cloves of garlic, chopped
• a splash of ground cumin and dried thyme

Sauté and add:

• 5 cups of chicken stock
• a cup and a half of red lentils

Cook until the lentils are soft (20-30 minutes) add a few diced peeled tomatoes, take half of the soup and puree it, add it back in, then just before serving add:

• a third to a half a cup fresh lemon juice

Garnish with some grated lemon zest, maybe a little mint.

I'll try to dig up the recipe Charlene uses for sarmas, rice wrapped in grape leaves that beat any dolmas I've ever tasted all to heck. I'd have loved to get some bastermat (a sirloin type cut of beef preserved with fenugreek and paprika, sliced thin and served on a soft flatbread). A basic salad, grilled veggies with a pomegranite, lemon and mint dressing, sweet vermouth and rosemary marinated leg of lamb. Dessert was an orange and yoghurt cake with pomegranite sauce that I need to refine a bit (and pomegranite sauce can get tannic real fast).

The soup and the sarma were "oh my" delicious, everything else was good.

[edited to change "lentils" to "red lentils"]

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals agrees to hear Norma McCorvey (ie: "Jane Roe")'s arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Civil Liberties ]

Remember the Spanner case in the U.K. where some folks into S&M were charged with assault even though the assault was consensual? More information available at The Spanner Trust. Iowa State University in Ames is going after a student club for a flogging demonstration.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Education ]

Spineless California Democrats scramble to distance themselves from Newsom on gay marriage issue. The view that marriage is between one man and one woman is

... view shared by 50 percent of Californians, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, which showed that 44 percent of Californians favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to be legally married, while half are opposed. The poll of 2,004 Californians was conducted Feb. 8-16, the period in which Newsom announced the city would issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and marriages began to be performed at City Hall.

The Bay Area stood alone as the only region in the state that favors same- sex marriage with 58 percent in favor and 37 percent opposed. The rest of the state's major regions oppose same-sex unions -- 58 percent to 37 percent in the Central Valley, 48 percent to 44 percent in Los Angeles and 59 percent to 35 percent in the rest of Southern California.

So it's a politically expedient stance to be against gay marriage, but this backpedaling erodes the support of those of us who will either be voting for a economic conservatives or a social liberals if we can't find candidates that are both.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area Sociology California Culture Marriage Gavin Newsom ]

Photographer suing over doctored photo showing Kerry next to Jane Fonda. Wow. Just imagine how dirty this race is gonna be when it's no longer Democrat against Democrat.

[ related topics: Politics Photography ]

Oxford University engineering student Matthew Richardson was apparently mistaken for a distinguised NYU economics professor of the same name when he was invited to address a seminar on international business in Beijing. So he went anyway. The Telegraph of London relates his adventures as he tried to "blag his way through it". It makes me wonder about the speakers at some seminars I've attended.

[ related topics: Education Economics ]

Yesterday Bill invited me over to Pixar to see Boundin'. Although Bill was conscious of assorted flaws, I thought it looked pretty darned good, exceptional animation and visuals made up fairly well for the light (good, but light) story. SF Chronicle article on Boundin'.

Although I'm glad to have moved on, as I struggle with some of the shortcomings of my current career situation it was also really cool to be back among that excited energy for a bit. Where "we" is used with pride, and people really light up when they talk about what they're doing.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Graphics ]

Teacher, student naked in car S.F. police arrest 30-year-old woman in park with boy, 14.

He said that parents, teachers and administrator had been notified Friday of the incident. He said resource counselors would be on hand Monday to assist students and faculty.

... deal with all of the scheduling issues as every teenage boy in the school tries to transfer to her classes?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

Damn, just when I'd sworn off buying books, along comes Thomas Roche's test-drive of Charles Gatewood's Photography for Perverts, and part two of the article. I believe I'm going to have to ask my regular bookstore to order me a copy of Photography for Perverts tomorrow.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Books Photography Sexual Culture ]

The one class I kept this quarter (after getting hired at the college) has been an independent study project, where I'm building an application for students to create and run their own study quizzes. For various reasons (including making it a proof-of-concept for creating a commercial-grade product with Open Source / free tools), I selected wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) for my platform and library, and Cygwin for my compiler.

My next milestone includes documented usability testing. I was wondering if any of the Flutterby crowd would be interested in providing me their feedback. I would send you a compressed (zip/tar) archive with everything you need to run it. Right now it's running on Windows, but if things continue smoothly (as opposed to the previous two weeks) I may have a Linux version I can send out as well. (All libraries are statically linked, with the exception of cygwin.dll on Windows.)

I'd need all feedback by Friday, 3/5/04.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Software Engineering Shawn's Life Education ]

Ever wonder about the difference between genres like Nu Italo and Eurobeat? Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is an amazing exercise in subtleties of beats and information display.

[ related topics: Music ]

A nerdly question: I've been looking at the flaws of the .NET system recently. We "solved" the one mentioned a little over a week ago by setting up to run a call in another thread and canceling it if it hadn't completed after a short time, but if you don't trust the called components then threads have issues, and there are all of the performance issues with .NET, and I got to wondering:

Has anyone out there experimented with a component system that communicates with chroot()ed processes running under some other UID through pipes? Is there a standard for this? I believe that pipes are darned close to the speed of memcpy() on modern operating systems, a reasonable interface spec could also be expanded to work between machines, it would be relatively easy to give each component a different set of privileges, you'd have process level separation, and could do things like set up the framework to have timeouts on given calls.

And some basic autogenerated code could create interface modules for different languages which would give you real inter-language integration without trying to cram everything into the same underlying VisualBasic framework.

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering ]

The topic of /. thread on virtual worlds nominally revolved around There, with lots of mention of Second Life as an extremely customizeable world, but there was a reference to http://www.3d-sexgames.com/ which looked interesting because the screen shots look like these folks are actually doing stuff with avatar to NPC interaction that isn't (solely) combat. I'll have to install their demo plug-in to see where they're taking the technology, but since new tech is driven by porn this might be the beginning of the tipping point on virtual worlds.

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture Invention and Design Graphics ]

Governor fears unrest unless same-sex marriages are halted:

"All of a sudden, we see riots, we see protests, we see people clashing. The next thing we know, there is injured or there is dead people. We don't want it to get to that extent,'' the Republican said in his first appearance as governor on a Sunday talk show.

"Those are some nice windows youse gots there, wouldn't wanna see 'em broken or nuthin'. Luckily for a small fee my boys can keep an eye on your shop.", he did not continue.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage Mark Morford ]

Unmaking a Man

A good blade once.
Not a master's work, but firm,
True.
The smith an ugly man,
Prideful and cruel.

Screaming, whimpering steel
Ripped from the forge.
The hammer falls
Again,
and again,
and again.

Again.

Can the damage be undone?

-copyright February 2004, Shawn South

[ related topics: Poetry ]

Daze Reader comes through again with a link to Pornoizing HurryDate:

Him: So what do you do for a living?

Me: PR for porn.

Him: (Pause.) Really?

Me: Yes.

Him: Does the porn industry really need PR?

Me: Can you name me the last movie Jenna Jameson released?

Him: No.

Me: There's your answer.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

I like RFID I think, but - I am concerned abut privacy issues - is there a fix for my dilemma?

Yes..

http://www.ukrocketman.com/digital/emblaster.shtml

"Take one RFID tag and one microwave oven. Place the RF ID tag in the microwave oven, turn the microwave oven on, and in a short space of time, you have demonstrated why Physics can be used very effectively to stop nosy morons in their tracks"

Do we have a right to know? http://www.nocards.org/press/pressrelease06-11-03.shtml Hopefully...

[ related topics: Privacy Space & Astronomy RFID ]

My sister was in town on Sunday, so I dragged her with me with the regular hiking group. Of that group only Bill, Lisa, and Bill's nephew Brett who's going to join the army soon showed. We started at Mountain Home Inn, went up the Gravity Car Grade 'til it hit Railroad Grade, then shortly took a right onto Temelpa. When we got to the gulley part, Brett and I went straight up. This was tougher than normal 'cause usually I'm being followed by Leo, not by a kid who's been training so that he can be sure to ace the assorted physicals and get those early promotions, and he wasn't about to let some aging hippy beat him, so by the time we hit the last switchback we were both surreptitiously trying to avoid coughing up blood. But it was a good burn. Back down Fern Canyon, and a tasty breakfast at Winships in Sausalito.

That afternoon I taught my sister how to use mail merge in Microsoft Office (I take back everything nasty I've ever said about OpenOffice.org).

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

I've been singing the praises of ExpressPCB. This weekend Phil did his first successful toaster oven surface mount soldering, and we've been talking about automating the heating cycle, so hacking electronics is getting easier and easier.

Back when I was trying to deal with machine shops in San Francisco I wondered why there weren't online machine shops. I discovered there kind of are, but communication is still an issue. What if you could provide the part definition CAD software, and the software checked for stupid goofs? Looks exactly like what eMachineShop is doing.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Bay Area Machinery Embedded Devices Fabrication ]

One of the problems with having domain names lying around is that you have to figure out something to do with 'em. I've realized recently that I haven't linked to anything at Clean Sheets or Scarlet Letters in ages. I find Nerve completely uninteresting in that snarky New York City "It's more interesting to talk about the thing than to do the thing" way. And Spectator used to have some pretty good articles and calendars, especially surprising given that I find little that their advertisers pitched interesting, but that site was uneven even when it was updated. Sexuality.org has David Steinberg if you're not on his email list, but it seems like there's something missing. Exalte.com sent me the politest link exchange request I've ever gotten, enough that I'll actually link to it here despite the fact that my policy is to automatically ditch any "link exchange" requests, but I still find something missing in the "sex magazine" space.

So anyway, I've got a domain name, now all I need to do is fill it with cool stuff. I'm in the catch-22 space, I feel reluctant to print up cards and say "hi! let me interview and take pictures of you!" until I have something to show, but, of course, to get the content I'd have to... One of the things I want is a really cool events calendar. I'm on a gazillion mailing lists, I have a folder full of calendar links, but... I'm a software geek, surely there's a way to automate most of this process?

So yesterday on the ferry I wrote a little script that runs through a block of text and does a pretty good job of extracting semantic information from raw text. I'm a good way through extracting show dates and times, performer's names, venue information including addresses (and finishing that is going to be no mean feat given that burlesque performers in particular seem to think that nothing exists beyond their home borough city).

But I'm to the point now where I'm dealing with ambiguity. It's not bad if I'm just looking for patterns in the text, but as soon as I start to actually be able to quantify meaning in phrases (not jus twords or formatting) then the problem becomes one of chasing several paths and this quickly explodes in some awful combinatorial ways, especially since English uses "." for sentence endings and abbreviations, capitalization for sentence starts and proper names (if I'm lucky), and people do things like use "!" in the middle of names. The code complexity, let alone the compute issues, start to explode. I think it's time to go back into the natural language literature and get a refresher on where things are at. Anyone got a suggestion on an overview of the state of the art?

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Dan's Life Invention and Design Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Art & Culture New York Burlesque ]

The quickest way I've found to describe #Develop (SharpDevelop) is "an Open Source clone of Visual Studio.NET". I use it almost exclusively for my .NET application (Windows Forms) development. #Develop turned 0.99 a few days ago and thanks to OS News, I now know that somebody is working on a Mono port.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source ]

Okay, so the Seattle Times article is really about the burgeoning ranks of virtual humans and some of the ethical questions being raised, but they had to make sure they got their digs in on the sex industry too:

"Some people develop an inordinate level of trust with these characters," Plantec said. "No doubt unethical people are going to get involved in this." He has refused funding from pornographic Web sites, for example.

I can think of a long list of people and organizations that I'm much more worried about in this context than pornographers.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Ethics Robotics Artificial Intelligence Propaganda ]

I was over browsing Something Awful and I ran across ads for TGPump. I'm not quite sure what it is, it looks like some sort of software to speed the acquisition of porn, but the ads in the upper right hand corner there are priceless. Stock photos of clean-cut Americans with captions.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising ]

On KFOG this morning there was some discussion of the most hyped movie in recent memory, The Passion of the Christ. Memorable quotes from random interviewees after the show include "Mel might not be exactly sane, but I don't think he's anti-semitic". And mentioned was the possibility of a sequel. I'm not sure how much blood and agony you could get into The Passion II: 3 Days Later, but if this is a commercial success I could see the pitch. Start with a long shot of a hillside, maybe as a slow truck, as the camera moves in we become aware of a large rock, and then of a figure straining to move it. Cut to darkness, and as the music swells we see light start to stream into the cave...

[ related topics: Religion Movies Bay Area Current Events ]

Idea of dubious value of the moment: Most of you out there in Flutterby land have, at one point or another, probably played with something akin to remote controlled vibrating panties. Some of you have probably gone out for the evening wearing other devices strategically placed or inserted.

I got to thinking "what about smarter vibrating panties", thinking about controls with sliders driving mechanisms which could stroke rather than just wiggle, and then realized that what'd be cooler is if the remote interface weren't a simple on-off switch, but were something wired into someone else's sexual response. Moisture and movement sensors reading from someone else's strategically placed devices, with the communication being two-way.

Now this could be a point-to-point technology, something for two people to share surreptitiously at an evening out at the movies or a show or somesuch, where you know that you're wearing something, but all of a sudden you discover what really turns your partner on (warning, to be mixed with today's other mention only with people about whom you really want to know). Or could be something with a limited range to be experienced at a club feeding off the signals of those dancing around you, kind of a surreptitious low-grade safe-sex orgy sort of thing.

I'm seeing something like a shared packet network, maybe wireless CAN bus on 433MHz, talking to a controller with maybe a few circuits that can switch an amp or so at 5v for vibrators (no need for an H-bridge 'cause reverse doesn't matter, PWM for speed control), have a servo controller or three for things with other motion, then have a bunch of analog inputs for strain gauges and moisture sensors. There'd need to be an interface of some sort for mapping responses to actions, but I think this has prospects.

[ related topics: Wireless Erotic Sexual Culture Dan's Life Robotics Cool Technology Embedded Devices Next Gen Sex Toys ]

Remember all that brouhaha over Southwest Airlines charging extremely overweight passengers for two seats? Well, it turns out that overweight passengers may have been a factor in one fatal crash, and the NTSB is asking airlines to start weighing their passengers so that they can compensate for the increasing payloads on airplanes.

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events ]

Straight out a' Redmond. Yo. Microsoft. Word.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft ]