Flutterby™! From 2004-06-01 to 2004-06-30

Leo, freshly back from Japan, missed the hike yesterday, but expressed a willingness to exercise today. So we biked up Eldridge Grade and back down Rocky Ridge. It was amazing how much the tandem has improved my aerobic capacity, I bent my chain mid-way up to the lakes (probably within the first thousand feet of elevation gain), and had to limp to the top on the middle chain ring in the front and with an extremely limited range in the rear, and managed to keep a good cadence all the way to the top.

The other project for the day was building a front rack for the tandem, and thinking about that experience and some discussion about building car carrier racks on the Tandem@Hobbes mailing list has sparked some thoughts that might be applicable to the college thread that I'll try to compose later.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Bay Area Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

A Reason article points us to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act which outlaws clove cigarettes. The article also then points out that there's a link between coffee and smoking:

The report reveals that caffeine is a little known risk factor. Girls and young women who drink coffee are significantly likelier than girls and young women who do not to be smokers (23.2 percent vs. 5.1 percent) and drink alcohol (69.8 percent vs. 29.5 percent). Young women who drink coffee began smoking and drinking at earlier ages.

... so why not start with the bean? Pointing out more idiocy in the attempt to legislate cool.

[ related topics: Drugs Sociology Law ]

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton declares the "Partial Birth" abortion ban unconstitutional. A bright spot in politics and women's rights today.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]

Finally, a reason to buy a PlayStation 2. Actually, it turns it from a "yeah, whatever" into a "hey, that sounds like a really good idea". Apparently the PlayStation 2 Rez "Special Package" comes with something called a "trance vibrator":

After many of my langorous gasps and moans, we stopped playing, and tried to analyze the gameplay experience. "I don't know exactly what the game designers intended with that trance vibrator thing - but it had to be this, right?"

"It's a total stoner game," said Justin.

"But don't you think this trance vibrator extension is so your girlfriend can get off while you're playing the game? Or so a girl gamer can get off while she's playing the game?"

"It was a bit odd," said Justin, "my fingers were working the controls, but they were also kind of working you."

It is definitely time to see what sort of pickups I can build for that collaborative vibrator idea...

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture Next Gen Sex Toys ]

After hearing a number of men describe themselves as "Peter Pan", Bunni explores the darkness of J.M. Barrie's original. Well worth a read.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books ]

Over at Backup Brain, Dori had a link to Iraq on the Record, a listing of public statements by Whitehouse administration officials on Iraq, for those moments when you're talking with rabid Bush-ophiles who need to see how the message has changed.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

If you want to see how a political story happens, I strongly recommend reading The Education of Alexandra Polier, the subject of the "John Kerry was sleeping with an intern" lie that went around during the primaries, and Cam's discussion of his involvement in the story.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Politics Current Events ]

I have thought a couple of times about my involvement with the whole "weblog" thing, how there are a few funded companies now running software that's not a whole lot more complex than what runs this site, how my lack of a reasonable install script sunk adoption by other people, how basically I have a small cool site while a few other people, some of whom started playing with this stuff later than me, have careers based on it. Rafe did some similar musings yesterday.

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

It's been a quiet couple of weeks while I worked on my house (and Nancy helped a lot) after playing with some 'network marketing' site databases.. (it paid, what can I say?). We are heading to meet Nancy's brother Howard and kin and spend a few days on the beach in North Carolina. And then it's time to generate some paying work and get back into the groove. I'll start marketing a bit in next few weeks, just to see what kind of response (if any) I can generate before I pound the streets, shake hands and do my sales-weasel gig. Which leads me to mailing out shwag.. in order to collect names and addresses. - But ya'll are friends and fellow geeks, so I'm not trying to market to you, but I do figure you'd like a GeekLabs Pocket Protector. If so.. Fill out the form.. and pick "just send me the freebie" and I'll just send you some geeky schwag.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Coyote Grits Nature and environment Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Marketing Databases Economics Real Estate ]

Plexus looks like it'll keep MS-Sysadmins employed for a while longer.

[ related topics: virus ]

Just brainstorming on some ideas for Next Generation Sex Toys. Feedback either as comments to this entry or as updates to the Wiki appreciated (and this might prompt me to fix some of the known bugs in the Wiki system).

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Dan's Life Next Gen Sex Toys ]

Another for yesterday's tech topic, a Vital-signs monitor consumes less than 50µA from a 3v source.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Embedded Devices Physiology Next Gen Sex Toys ]

Thigh-smacker of the moment: Bush praises the Pope:

...we appreciate the strong symbol of freedom that you have stood for...

Ummm... Yeah. Because there's no symbol of freedom and openness like the Catholic Church.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Current Events ]

An article on Church bikers versus nude cyclists in the Netherlands cued me in to the existence of a World Naked Bike Ride, on June 12^th this year.

[ related topics: Religion Nudity Bicycling ]

Enough other people have linked to this that I feel kind of guilty copying it here, but Larry had a link to the Yahoo! News publication, Anita Rowland had a link to South Florida Sun-Sentinal version, the original seems to be L.A. Times: Bluesman's Son Gets His Due (included all of those for archive's sake), about the son of Blues legend Robert Johnson getting royalties. It was Larry who interested me by quoting the testimony of 80 year old Eula Mae Williams being questioned by attorney Victor McTeer:

Q: Well, let me, let me share something with you, because I'm really curious about this. Maybe I have a more limited experience. But you're saying to me that you were watching them make love?

A: M-hm.

Q: While you were making love?

A: M-hm.

Q: You don't think that's at all odd?

A: Say what?

Q: Have you ever done that before or since?

A: Yes.

Q: Watch other people make love?

A: Yes, I have done it before. Yes, I've done it after I married. Yes.

Q: You watched other people make love?

A: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Q: Other than ... other than Mr. Johnson and Virgie Cain [her married name].

A: Right.

Q: Really?

A: You haven't?

Q: No. Really haven't.

A: I'm sorry for you.

I would pay money to hear the original voices in that exchange.

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Law Current Events Currency Marriage ]

See if they want you --

http://www.alta.org/utility/patriotactsearch.htm

Ziffle

I suppose he was not the most popular guy in some parts, but in Mayberry, Ronald Reagan was tops.

I don't vote - generally. It's a waste of time. The choices are awful, and freedom is crushed by the results of our educational system, who vote by the millions.

We endured Kennedy's Fascist 'New Frontier'; Johnson's idiocy of micro-managing a war to stalemate; Nixon's managed economy disaster, and of course Carters 'the best years are in our past' speech and attitude. With Carter we had ships that could not go to sea for lack of sailors, crashed helicopters in the desert, and hostages that had been held by a third rate religious dictatorship.

So when Reagan came along and said 'the best is yet to come', and 'government is not the solution but the problem', and expressed that radiant optimism that is the American character, I made the effort and voted for him, as did every one else. He carried 49 states that night, blowing Carter out of office - it was so sweet.

And he delivered - two hours before he was sworn in -- the hostages were released. When the air traffic controllers pushed, he pushed back, and fired them all. Ahhhh - justice. And that set the stage for dealing with the Cold War. It was not a forgone conclusion how that might come out, but he raised the ante and the USSR had to fold.

And he did all this in a nice way. He stuck to his principles and it worked.

He had his flaws. For example, he believed in god, and was religious, and that caused him to go astray - I could not vote for him the second time. But he won big again of course anyway.

So I have mixed feelings about part of him, but in a longer sense I miss him. He was a part of real America, and we are better off for him.

So, it may sound corny, but I'll miss the `gipper' and his belief in the American ideal and its optimism.

Ziffle of Mayberry

[ related topics: Ziffle Religion Privacy Invention and Design History moron Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Machinery Economics ]

Had a very cool weekend. On Friday evening, we drove up to the town of Napa, where we camped at Skyline Park, a private park with a very nice garden of native California plants (which we need to go back and explore next spring), and a lot of horse, hiking and biking trails (which we didn't explore).

Saturday morning we drove up to Middletown and to a tour of one of the CalPine geothermal generating plants. We were kinda hoping to see steaming fumaroles, but they don't take people back to where the superheated steam leaks out of the ground because the ground is unstable, so we had to settle for seeing the well heads and plant from where they extract the steam and generate power with it. This is a picture from the sulfur extraction part of the plant, since the steam is coming up from a mile and a half or two underground it contains a lot of gnarly stuff, so as a part of cooling down the water and putting it back into the ground (and yes, they are seeing the possible effects of extracting too much water from near the magma, so they recycle as much water as they can, and contract with local water districts to take wastewater and pump it back down) they filter out lots of sulfur, some mercury, and assorted other nasties. Need to hook up with a geology class sometime and get the tour of the less stable terrain.

We decided to camp at the Napa County Fairgrounds in Calistoga, so we headed back down from Lake County to Calistoga, on the northern end of the Napa valley. Calistoga was so named by Sam Brannan 'cause he was trying to create a Saratoga like spa region in California. He died broke, but the name stuck, and there are also references to "Sarafornia" around town. On the way back into town we stopped at California's Old Faithful Geyser, watched an eruption, then went and got the camp set up so we could get on the bike.

Back on the bike we pedaled south along the ample shoulder of Highway 128/29 to Bale Grist Mill, a restored mill first built back in the 1840s or thereabouts, and watched the ancient machinery at work.

Tooled back into Sonoma for an iced drink, then kicked it out down Silverado Trail for a few miles, across through the vineyards of Napa valley, then back up the other side. Probably got in a good 25-30 miles of biking, through the vineyards, along roads with nice wide shoulders. Got back to camp in time to make a nice dinner, watch the folks next to us play horseshoes while we critiqued their style, and get a good night's sleep.

The next morning we pedaled back down to the Bale Grist Mill again because we'd been short on cash the day before and both needed to pay for our entrance fees and buy some of the flour we saw ground. Ended up with a bag of polenta and two of a pastry flour ground from einkorn wheat. There'll be scones in our future.

On the way back stopped to pose in front of the very cool delivery truck sculpture in front of the Calistoga Mineral Water Company. Back in Calistoga we wandered over to the Sharpsteen Museum, founded by Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen it's a neat look back at the history of Calistoga, and while a lot of small-town museums end up being a collection of junk, this one kept us reading the plaques all the way through, long enough that while we were originally going to pedal up to the The Petrified Forest we decided to load the bike back on the car and drive up.

The Petrified Forest is a bunch of relatively young petrified logs, redwoods and one pine. Because of their low relative age and that there wasn't much interesting geologically going on over them after the initial eruption which covered them in ash they aren't very colorful, but what they lack in color they make up for in texture. Unlike our experiences in Utah, you could count the rings and clearly see texture in the bark on these logs, but there was nothing there that'd take to polishing very well.

Most of the logs in this preserve are fenced off to prevent picking, and most of them have had to be artificially excavated, at least one down a long tunnel (which you can look down, but not go into). On Sundays at 2:00 there's a walk up into the fields above the trees, lead by one of the family involved in the upkeep of the forest who's very enthusiastic, which ends up at an ash mud flow in which you can see basalt, pumice, and petrified wood chips.

Inspired by this, on our way home we stopped along the Russian River to look for assorted rocks and realized we need some good references on geology and earth science to refresh all that stuff that went in one ear and out the other around ninth grade, so we're going to have to seek out that and start mapping out finds in various places. Yet another large map on the wall at home, I must get some of this stuff onto computer.

And home at a reasonable hour to head on over to the Cafe Amsterdam for a light dinner, listen to Jazz Philosophy do a set, then crash and marvel that as good as you think a sleeping mat and bag are, a good matress and sheets are so much nicer...

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Nature and environment Bay Area Art & Culture California Culture Machinery Cool Technology Maps and Mapping Architecture Bicycling ]

If you're a fan of discovering how searches work, here's an experiment underway: Nigritude Ultramarine

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

An easily embarassed anonymous correspondent who said "If you use this I DO NOT WANT credit. :->" (and no, I won't hint) forwarded me a Press Release for "the World's First and Only Organic Personal Lubricant". Certified by CCOF, the product is Nude^tm. We're pretty happy with Slippery Stuff, and lubes are a personal enough experience that I kinda doubt we'll be switching now that we've found one that really works, but I'm always into innovation in the marketplace.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising California Culture Personal Lubricant ]

Scoble has a fascinating bit on the IT infrastructure of a major church.

[ related topics: Religion ]

Sensible Erection had a link to In the Provincial Court of Alberta: Citation: R. v. A.B., 2003 ABPC 180

[4] The accused advances the following issues in law arising from his admitted act of ejaculation onto the face of the complainant on December 15th, 2002:

a) whether the complainant consented to the actions of the accused with respect to the ejaculation onto the body (face) of the complainant and as a corollary to that issue, whether the act of ejaculation is a sufficient application of physical force to give rise to a complaint of assault;

(b) whether, in the absence of the complainant's consent, the accused nevertheless held an honest but mistaken belief as to the complainant's consent, thus negating the requisite mens rea.

In which the court settles the question of "whether the act of ejaculation is a sufficient application of physical force to give rise to a complaint of assault".

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

The BIO Conference is happening this week, and the usual contingent of protesters are out in force. I'm going to a schmooze over in Berkeley this evening and had considered driving into San Francisco today, then just in time remembered that streets everywhere are blocked and rerouted. This morning a large contingent marched chanting and drumming down New Montgomery outside of our office window, so at lunch today I wandered over towards Moscone Center to see what was going down.

I took a few pictures, but I'm not actually going to bother to upload any of 'em. A lot of cops, with some good organization for mobility. I ended up walking through a large block of protesters, and there were smaller clusters talking on many of the street corners. What gets me most is the level of ignorance displayed; these are the same "capitalism is evil" people who crawl out of the woodwork when there's any chance that humanity will drag itself forward. Not to say there aren't some issues in bio-tech that need to be resolved, but the conversations and chants I heard sure didn't exhibit any understanding of what they are.

But having wandered through the thick of it, if I were Monsanto I'd set up a free food line with big bowls of that beta-carotene enriched rice and see how long that "smash the state" resolve held out.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food Bay Area Law Enforcement Conferences ]

Went to an event last night to schmooze a bit and see Kris Pister, CTO of Dust Networks speak. Interesting conversation, moderately interesting presentation, I think they've got a reasonable business plan, with some intermediate steps to their final goal that make sense, even if I'm skeptical about their final goal.

It also seems like anyone with a real sized market for what they're building would just engineer the device themselves, for less, so I guess they're hoping that their market stays small enough that they can compete by not having any single customer become large enough to want to redo the engineering. But the rise of ZigBee may throw some kinks in that path.

But the talk about making the leap from a moderate sized surface mount device to a single chip made me perk up when I saw this post from Wes Felter suggesting that if you wanted to get a chip made you should contact MOSIS or ChipX. And MOSIS even provides a sample price list.

I had no idea that such things were so cheap. I think it might be time to learn how to use an FPGA and develop my own CPU core so that I have the technology lying around should the need for a tiny computing device arise.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Economics ]

Filched from Anita Rowland, it's Factory Tours USA. Looks like there are a bunch in my area that I haven't done yet.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

I've avoided this largely because I think it's too esoteric for Flutterby readers (and yes, I say that with the knowledge that I was just talking about making your own CPU core...), or that those readers who care find this on other sources, like /., but in the current environment of Microsoft astroturfing and SCO attempts to fleece investors there's a lot of FUD flying around about Linux.

One particularly egregious example of late has been the works of one "Kenneth Brown" of an organization calling itself the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (because "Microsoft supported astroturfing PR agency" was a little too "in your face"), who's been going around interviewing various computing luminaries for an alleged forthcoming book on open source, and then completely misrepresenting what they've said. In particular, there's been an open spat between Andy Tannenbaum and Ken Brown that's gone back and forth a few ways. Mark's rundown of the situation, Ken Brown is a Big Fat Idiot, sums up the current state of the exchange.

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Books Microsoft Open Source Nature and environment Aviation moron Archival ]

Wow, this has gotta be a first: San Francisco School District tells anti-drug program that it must teach facts. Of course this is just Narconon, an outreach program of Scientology, no news yet as to whether they've decided to stand down D.A.R.E..

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Scientology Bay Area Current Events ]

Wow, we've got some real Newspeak going 'round: The headline reads "Officials say Cologne bomb that injured 22 likely not the work of terrorists":

Twisted 4-inch nails littered the street for hundreds of feet around the blast site, leading police to conclude they were part of a bomb.

So we have a shrapnel laden anti-personell device detonated in an inner city, and we have German Interior Minister Otto Schily saying "Indications are that it was not terrorists, but the criminal underworld". When did organized crime get the PR agency?

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

David Chess remembers the halcyon days of Usenet and alt.sex.stories. At some point I got suckered into reading a tale by one Nick Scipio called "Summer Camp", and I casually subscribed to the Yahoo Groups Scipio Forum where people discuss the use of oranges as erotic literary device. The spammers and unrestrained growth have, indeed, destroyed some communities, but the human desire to communicate and congregate keeps pushing through.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Net Culture Community ]

Via ratbox, a cool look at the aerial photography of Vincent Laforet.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation New York ]

Can a $744 "Cardas Golden Reference Power Cord with Built-in Filtration" power cord provide "...an immediate upgrade in sound quality with audio gear and picture quality with TVs, monitors, DVD players, and VCRs"? The good folks over at Sensible Erection seem dubious, but somebody's paying $4500 for 8 foot speaker cables...

[ related topics: Music moron Consumerism and advertising ]

My family used to raise guide dogs for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, and the first dog we raised for them, Nemo, was incredible. All of the dogs were pretty smart, but Nemo, either because he was our first and we took extra care with him or because he was just one special dog, picked up all of the commands we were supposed to train him on, and then started on other things, he had the words for several different toys down, we could say "get your ball/sock/whatever" then "take it to ...", and he clearly knew the different objects and people. And he knew "go for a ride in the car". Nemo loved riding in the car.

One day we were outside, about to leave, and trying to get Nemo in the house because he wasn't going with us. "Get in the house, Nemo", "Nemo: House", lots of gesturing towards the open door, nothing was working. Then someone said "Nemo, go for a ride in the house?"

Bam. Dog inside in a flash.

He wasn't too smart, 'cause it worked several times after that before he finally caught on, but that incident showed that not only did he have a reasonable ability to distinguish between multiple objects and locations and link phrases with actions, he had enough language ability to understand a verb-object structure.

Apparently, Dogs understand adjectives relating to size, too.

(And obligatory jab: this further backs up my disbelief in some of the theories promoted by Steven Pinker (& cronies))

[ related topics: Language Dan's Life Dogs ]

When a geek starts working on a house, it's really just an excuse to acquire and play with cool toys. I splurged on a Wagner Paint Crew high pressure painter. Wow. This thing rocks! Sprays paint smoothly and fast. Wow. I've always hated painting, this may make it fun. Takes longer to prep and mask than to paint.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]

Remember when Hans Solo was encased in Carbonite?, turns out he was ahead of his time and they could have justed used a VacBed for the special effect. But then, that would introduced an all new level of sexuality to Star Wars..

[ related topics: Star Wars Photography Invention and Design Space & Astronomy ]

"What have I gotten myself into" realization of yesterday evening: Even when it's folded into the whipped whites from 12 extra large eggs, 3 lbs of butter is a lot of damned butter. Pictures and story coming tomorrow.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

English soccer fans permitted to light up so that they'll be less rowdy:

ENGLAND fans will be allowed to smoke dope before Sunday's crunch clash with France — to keep them calm.

Cops in Lisbon plan to crack down on drunk supporters while turning a blind eye to those spotted puffing on a spliff.

(sourced from Sensible Erection)

[ related topics: Drugs Law Enforcement Sports ]

Linux Devices interview with Glenn Henry, founder of VIA processor subsidiary Centaur is interesting, and I'm not sure why. But one of the things that caught my eye was:

Our engineers are extremely experienced, and very, very productive. One engineer here does the work of many, many others in a big company. I won't go through all the details, because they're not technical, but basically, we started with the theory, "We're going to do this with 20 or 30 designers." Remember the 82 people I mentioned? Of those, only 35 are actual designers. The rest are testers, and things like that.

because I've run into so many companies recently that have way too many people involved in the process, and rather than structuring the company to figure out how to support the most productive developers (or whatever) they end up hiring two or three times the number of less productive people, leaving the people who could be carrying the bulk of the work doing too much casting about and trying to figure out what the product direction is. From what I've seen of their products so far these folks have figured some things out about management that are the right way to go.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Coyote Grits Work, productivity and environment ]

"You two are so going to hell for that", said Alec when we unveiled the cake for his graduation party. We were inspired by the awesome Thorax Cake, but Charlene wanted something a little more... personal, so she asked Alec's mom to find out what his favorite D&D character was, "Succubus" was the answer (possibly because of who was asking the question, but since tweaking folks is something we enjoy doing, that was cool).

So we decided on the "disembowled succubus" theme. This took quite a bit of discussion, Dan had fears about Jeanne's feminist reaction to the gory lifeless corpse of an attractive woman as an art piece, Charlene thought it had just the right amount of edginess without going overboard. It turns out Charlene was dead on in her estimation of the various reactions.

We started with a roll of vellum, the largest board we had to carry the cake on, and a bunch of drawings. I'd sketch an idea, lay another sheet over it, and Charlene would help refine it with suggestions about sizes and scale. We went through probably six or seven revisions before we got something that we thought would fit on the board, waste a minimal amount of cake, and be possible to build layer-wise.

We did the cake for the wings on Wednesday evening. Thursday afternoon, Charlene baked 5 yellow cakes. When I got home about 6 I started on the butter cream icing, 12 extra large eggs, 3 lbs of butter, and of course I hadn't thought this fully through, so we didn't have a mixer with a suitable capacity. I started by hand, but after about 30 minutes of whisking Charlene realized that we needed some help and left to get a hand mixer, which made finishing the whole thing possible.

Then we started assembly, cutting out pieces from cake, carefully lifting and placing them onto the masked wing pieces which lay below:

Finally we were ready to layer in the chest bones, here Dan is test-fitting a sternum piece, we eventually decided on a shattered sternum left as whatever ripped out the creature's heart dragged the entrails across her lifeless body.

Long about 11:30 we were tweaking her face one more time and it still wasn't coming together, so we covered everything, put it in the back room, and I woke up at 5:45 or so to continue the march. My experiments with dusting cocoa and cinnamon through stencils weren't working, but Charlene came through with the right combination of those techniques and a few colored sprinkles and details made from cut licorice sticks, and the whole thing gelled rather nicely.

The final picture, alas, doesn't do the cake justice, but it still looked pretty darned good, and got more than the appropriate response from our audience. Overall, we're quite pleased with the effect, but won't be doing cakes again any time soon.

Or at least not until Jeanne's birthday...

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Photography Dan's Life Food Art & Culture Food - Cake ]

Today was "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday...", so Zack and I went down into the city to see some "Action, Action, Action..." at the Power Tool Drag Races.

There are some pictures from yesterday's action, alas Zack was dog tired from an all-weekend LAN party so we didn't hang around and see the dildo in one of the small classes which allegedly hit 70MPH, but we saw Nitro Powered Funny Saws, at least one vehicle which lit the track on fire (no, literally...).

John Hell, Chicken John, and Dr. Hal performed the announcement tasks, Chicken, as usual, talked too loud and too much, but, as someone in the crowd said "about one thing in six they say is funny", and that every sixth thing was pretty good.

Crews often had uniforms appropriate to their vehicles.

And I was going to try to get a better shot of some of the cheerleaders, so I held the camera up over the crowd, aimed it roughly so I thought I'd get her face and breasts, and... well... I don't think I could've gotten a more appropriate camera angle on purpose.

This competitor was 9 years old, the wheels on the vehicle were made from serving trays, the beast wobbled, and yet when they pushed the "start" buttons and the vehicles started down the track the other one started quickly, then derailed and crashed, leaving the slow and steady to win the race.

Of course there were flame throwing vehicles.

Cute decorations.

Cute decorations.

Some teams in the rider classes had different ideas about safety, despite the precarious posture of the rider, this guy had an amazing amount of safety gear on. Probably because of the precarious posture of the rider...

Kiki and Sparky were there, we didn't stay there until Sparky's run, but Kiki said she was kinda sad that she had to run again today, 'cause she didn't expect her vehicle to win. It didn't, but we all had fun.

And although sawblades were generally not a good wheel system, as they cut into the track, this guy ran fairly well.

All in all, it was a grand day out. Too bad Zack had to call it early, 'cause I now totally understand the appeal of standing around in the hot sun drinking bad beer and eating animal byproducts, I just need something more interesting than football or baseball while I do it. Recommended.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Dan's Life Bay Area Art & Culture Beer Sports ]

Hanging out at Cafe Amsterdam listening to Namely Us, with a group that included the person who made the "light switch" comment this evening, so conversation was varied and touched on topics of double-entendres, a follow-up including references to "there's a switch in the closet", and as the evening was winding down, Charlene and I were talking about getting on home, and she started a sentence that I believe was going to end with "the garbage" with "you gotta put out...", and the first thing I thought was "wait a minute, I bought dinner..."

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

Linux in 80mm by 20mm by 8mm for $109: gumstix.

[ related topics: Open Source Cool Technology Embedded Devices ]

As promised, pictures of World Naked Bike Ride Seattle, 2004.

I toyed briefly with trying to make the ride myself, but it didn't work out. K. had to be at work at the Seattle Center (picture of the International Fountain only works in IE ) that day, however, so I was able to be on hand when they rolled in.

All in all, it was a pleasantly surprising and impressive demonstration. I was just deciding that they hadn't made it after all when the trill of a bell drew me away from my book. The vanguard had arrived. I waited a bit, but didn't see anybody else. The three men were posing for pictures, so I wandered over to get some of my own. Not much of a turnout, I thought, but better than nobody at all. After a couple of shots one of them said, "here they come," and so I found myself almost perfectly positioned to take in the arrival of the main body.

I'm a horrible judge of numbers, but I guesstimated about 50 riders. Approximately half a dozen were women, and there was one boy who looked to be about 14. Not everyone was [completely] naked. There were boxers, briefs, bikinis and thongs - including what looked like a home-made furry number that was quite cute.

The crowd was very respectful, clapping and cheering during the arrival and at various points throughout. Two women from the crowd even stripped down and joined the bikers for a time. The leaders gave interviews to the press and addressed the crowd with a bullhorn they had brought along. (I was on the other side of the bowl at the time and couldn't hear what was said.)

After a bit of frolicking in the fountain, they collected their bikes and prepared for the next stage - whereupon the leader discovered that he had a flat tire. After the standard 15-minute wrestle with tube, tire and rim, they were once again underway - to a fresh round of cheers.

[ related topics: Nudity Pedal Power Bicycling Seattle ]

I was reading the latest BOFH story, and I start laughing, because he was doing what an old boss of mine did to people.. pre-high-tech. He never did it to me, but Dave (my boss) would pick up and store applicationss for places, stores, truck driving school, headhunter/temp agencies, etc. We'd be eating lunch on the road somewhere and Dave would pull out a form and start filling it out as some schmuck in the company, Dave would attach a copy of their resume, and in at least once case, he wrote a letter of reccomendation as himself (their boss) citing some 'downsizing' reason and that he was trying to take care of his best people. Dave's reason: Sure beat firing them and having them end up on un-employement, which cost the company money.

And then, with things like Dice.com and Monster.com, I realize how much easier it has all become and wonder how much of it is going on. Laughing..

[ related topics: Law Work, productivity and environment Machinery Currency Economics ]

Because democracy is too important to leave to chance.

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron ]

I've been waiting with some trepidation to see Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" since I heard of its existence months ago. After it became a surprise winner of the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year, and after the distribution controversy and the pathetic attempts to label Moore a "domestic enemy", my resolve to see it only strengthened.



The film opens on Friday, 6/25, in a small number of theatres nationwide. People who have previewed it seem to feel it is a much more powerful film than Bowling for Columbine, and a better movie overall. I strongly encourage like-minded patriots to see it early in its run, to help make a statement about its importance. To see the trailer (which I found quite powerful in its own right) or find theatres which will show it on opening weekend, visit http://www.f911tix.com/.



My fear is that I will walk out of the theatre filled with rage and pain. I plan to enter the theatre expecting to walk out with resolve to see things changed. I am convinced we have an opportunity now, perhaps unlike any since "the '60s", to change our country's direction for the better. Energize, motivate, activate, expand.

[ related topics: Politics Movies Theater & Plays Heinlein Archival ]

I can't believe that I don't seem to have any reviews of Sarah Waters' books on Flutterby, I remember thinking that Fingersmith was pretty good, although the pacing and changes were almost too contrived.

Anyway, Clean Sheets has a review of the BBC miniseries for Tipping The Velvet that makes me wanna rent it.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Movies Monty Python ]

I promised Mars that I'd put this up here, and then it slipped my mind (and this week has been madness, anyway).

Mars has an idea for a Burning Man project, and he'd like input and assistance from folks who know something about electricity. There's a large component of this which involves human powered generators, and all of the usual power supply questions come up. Can anyone help him?

[ related topics: Burning Man Cool Technology ]

Two sex-related from SFGate today:

• Gene which controls promiscuity in voles apparently found
• Profile of a strip club regular

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Biology ]

Nerd alert: Skip this unless you think a pocket protector is the height of style on those rare days when you actually wear a shirt with a pocket...

Argh. Spent a bit of the afternoon with a coworker digging through SOAP calls as displayed by Ethereal and contrasting that to what came out of logging at other levels in the monstrosity that is IIS and notYET and who knows what else.

Unfortunately, the symptoms we're seeing are way too freakin' weird to even bother trying to describe here. It's like a web services call from a specific machine is attempting to log in a user on the server, which is creating printers from one domain on the server of another domain. Needless to say, we are all massively confused.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Microsoft ]

Scotch Night was small last night, I knew it was going to be, but even so I decided to hang out with Leo at the Orbit Room Cafe rather than head down to the Churchill Club event titled Blogging and Social Networking: Who Cares?

I have to admit that I care. While there are still some very interesting questions about the meanings of online relationships versus those that happen face-to-face, and whether the nature of online communication encourages an appearance of deeper trust and compatibility that can never occur in the real world, I think my life is richer for being able to find more people who share some of my non-mainstream perspectives of life.

But generally all of the "social networking" software or attempts to commercialize the blog space in a grander sense than "here's a tool" will fail; the more they label themselves "social software", the more they want to control the social flow, rather than enabling it.

Thus Yahoo Groups will beat Tribe's forums, and I even believe that there will be other distributed technologies which will supplant the "friend of a friend" capabilities of Friendster and Orkut. The one place they may have room is in what Manhattanites so quaintly refer to as "hooking up", but my impression is that Match.com, especially with their distributed personals, has that space pretty well sewn up.

So it was no surprise to me to run into the Venture Blog commentary on last night's event: All Social Networking Panels Are The Same:

"Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah Spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah is this a product or a feature blah blah blah a feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah ...

[ related topics: Weblogs Sociology Consumerism and advertising Community Social Software ]

So among the conversations I've had recently, one was about the posibilities of exploring the capabilities of console hardware in a game startup. Am I nuts?

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

Argh. Going down this weekend to catch up with Charlene who's visiting family in Fresno. Taking Amtrak. So not only do I have the usual issues with the Amtrak site (I would consider a large revamp by the Adaptive Path folks taxpayer money well spent), but it seemed like every time I asked for a schedule I was getting a different set of available trains, or the train I was trying to book on was suddenly sold out and it was suggesting one that was one that it'd previously told me was unavailable...

So I finally called 1-800-USA-RAIL and waited on hold for an agent. Apparently it's pretty hard to be goin' to California when the levee breaks.

[ related topics: Music Dan's Life California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

The theme for "Junkyard Wars" kept going through my head, Eric and I created steel plates to fit the rusted out chunk of frame on his pathfinder and we welded them to the frame. We learned: Buy the good saw blades for the reciprocating saw.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Science Fabrication ]

Kids sure seem to be different. When I was a kid, doing the things I helped kids do last week at a ropes course would have caused major drama. Over two days, I helped over 100 kids climb a 20' telephone pole, stand on it on both feet, and jump into mid-air to try to catch a trapeze bar 10 feet away. We only had one kid freak from the heights, everyone else was eager to try, and although most expressed a little 'oh my gosh it's high' fear at the top, they jumped and many actually grabbed the bar. They also did ziplines, wire-walking and other high activities. Shows like 'Fear Factor' and 'XTC' seem to have changed their perspective, or maybe it is other factors in their environment, but whatever it is, it was suprising to me. This were not the 'adventure crowd' either, it was almost everyone entering Ooltewah High School, a wide cross section. So my question is, am I the oddball (and I only started doing such things a few years ago), or were you and your friends in 9th/10th grade capable of such feats without unreasonable fear?

[ related topics: Nostalgia Children and growing up Photography Nature and environment Television ]

One of the big problems with installing Windows is getting online long enough to download the security patches and virus updates without getting infected. Beyond the obvious (ie: Use a Linux box as a router to protect the Windows machine), there appear to actually be some Windows config options you can use to harden the machine before connecting it. This would be particularly useful for computers with dial-up connections where it's harder to put a firewall between the computer and the net.

There's a /. thread on how to install the security patches for XP and 2000 without getting infected by viruses that looks worth filing away for the next time I end up installing that vileness.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus ]

First private manned spaceflight successful. The folks at Scaled Composites have sent pilot Mike Melvill to 60+ miles and brought him back safely in their first test. Now they have to do it twice within two weeks to win the X Prize.

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation Space & Astronomy Current Events Cool Technology ]

We were down in Fresno this weekend visiting folks, and once again found bits that were attractive and reasons we want to stay in the Bay Area. Luckily, we didn't run into this level of people: Dave Chappelle had his own run-in with the central valley:

Performing in Sacramento, the comic said, might turn out "to be a bad idea - like chocolate-covered fish."

Chappelle told the crowd he knew why they liked his sketch-comedy show: "Because it's good. You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong.

"You people are stupid."

(sourced from Cobb)

[ related topics: Humor moron Sociology California Culture ]

They're nowhere near the dollars per performance that the Via boards are, but if you're looking for small x86 boards that boot off of flash, Soekris has some options that could be interesting.

[ related topics: Embedded Devices Embedded Devices - Via Eden Embedded Devices - Linux ]

Must-read: Poker with Dick Cheney

DC: Very good. And here are my cards. A straight flush.

Judith Miller: Dick Cheney has revealed a straight flush, confirming his pre-collection claims about beating two pair.

TE: Those cards are of different suits. It's not a flush.

Mark Steyn: When will it end? Now liberal critics complain that Dick Cheney's cards are not all the same suit. Naturally, these are the same liberals who are always whining about a lack of diversity in higher education. It seems like segregation is OK with these liberals, as long as it damages Republicans.

(Sourced from Value Judgement)

[ related topics: Politics Humor Current Events Gambling ]

Some obligatory sexual culture links for the day:

Eros Blog had a link to Mistress Matisse in conversation with one Master Ryker Blackstar.

Her Desires had a little expansion and reiteration of Defining the Bdsm Lifestyle on separating fantasy from reality and credibility.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Weblogs moron Sociology ]

Went over to the The San Francisco Perl Users Group last night for the Database Dependence as a Design Strategy, with Josh Berkus of the SF PostgreSQL Users' Group presentation. Interesting group, I think I'll be going back. It was cool to be outside of my usual social group, and as I was reminded by hanging out with that crowd last night, I really enjoy hanging out with some of the über geek sorts.

But it was also a reminder of how much my attitudes about software design and architecture have evolved. There were discussions about encapsulation of functionality in the database versus in the application that went on a lot longer than I thought, and at least one discussion of debugging that assumed that you could view things at a much higher level than has been my recent experience with trying to debug Microsoft .NET distributed applications (maybe the Microsoft experiences are just making me assume the worst).

But it was good to get out of my cocoon of application development and realize that there are also still people out there doing cool stuff, and I need to connect with more of 'em.

[ related topics: Microsoft Perl Open Source Bay Area Software Engineering Community Databases ]

It is, of course, going much slower than I'd wanted what with everything else going on in my life, but I actually dropped back and started with a command line interface to some of my snippet manager ideas, and I think I'm slowly making progress. In fact I may soon get to the point where it's actually useful to me.

But along the way I've been struggling with my choice of development environments. I've been using gtk2-perl, which is pretty good, but will be a major pain to deploy on Windows, and I'm sick of having applications which are tied to my particular sysadminnery.

The recent Joel on Software: How Microsoft Lost the API War, the buzz about Gmail (which I haven't bothered to check out yet (yes, I know where to get accounts, you may touch me, now piss off) but which is alleged to use a bit of ActiveX, sigh), a few things I've seen recently with CSS and JavaScript, along with what people are doing with local web servers and RSS and Atom aggregators, have made me think that something more along the lines of that architecture might scale to being a remote application better, might port more easily, and the development environment may have actually arrived.

And struggling through the hell that is .NET distributed applications has convinced me that every other client-server architecture will suck less than SOAP through IIS.

So, I have Dori & Tom's book on my shelf at home but my memory of that is that it's more useful for dressing up your website than as a core for application development. I'm interested in where else to look next. Is Creating Applications with Mozilla a reasonable resource? Is it reasonable to support IE, Opera, the various Mozilla children and and those that use the Konqueror core, or do ya pick one?

What's the state of the art?

[Edit: Wandered over to Stacey's at lunch and browsed through Dori & Tom's book, and while it isn't focused on my topic it does have a lot of what I want to know about things like direct manipulation of objects and such]

[ related topics: Dan's Life Content Management Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering History Art & Culture ]

AOL employee fired and arrested for theft of screen names of 92 million AOL subscribers, that list was then used as a mailing list for unsolicited commercial email.

[ related topics: Spam moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Net Culture ]

Dang it, I mention this site to someone and realize that I've got two (1, 2) totally nerdly and excessively long entries yesterday. Oh well...

I was hoping to break that with some juicy sexual culture links or something, but I'm coming up dry this morning, so we'll settle for...

Over at Backup Brain, Dori linked to the Electoral Vote Predictor. Rather than the national "this percent support..." polls, which really mean nothing, this one breaks it down to support by state and tallies what that means in terms of actual election results. It also shows how fickle and constantly changing the election really is, even though nationally the numbers don't change that much.

Speaking of which, remember back in April when we reported that the Rev. Dr. Sun Myung allegedly addressed Congress and was crowned the Messiah? The New York Times has finally picked up on the story, congrats to John Gorenfeld's efforts to get the world out.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Weblogs Sociology ]

Howl! Okay, some kids are a little too visual.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor ]

My current gig has not been an amazing career move. I've gotten the chance to play with some fun technologies, done a lot of personal growth (note the change from my attitude in October), but especially as we're going through the funding evaluation process and talking about market and prospects and strategies, I realize that I put too much trust in the opinions of others and didn't do my own critical thinking about market strategies when I took this job.

VentureBlog: Thinking About Success Factors isn't transformative, but it's got a few things that should make it on to my checklist whether we figure out how to take this product to its market or I decide to go on to other opportunities.

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

Quote of the Day:

"No matter how much money they spend, casinos have a history of mucking up concepts that may have worked great...in L.A...10 years ago."

--- Michelle M. Baldwin "Vivienne VaVoom" www.BurlesqueAsItWas.com.

[ related topics: Quotes Las Vegas Burlesque ]

Google Blackmail? - I know of this being done to make an advertiser's rank higher... have a few machines searching for your keywords, and clicking on your ad, while ignoring others for those words causes your ranking and frequency of showing for those words increase. Of course, you have to pay Google for your cost/per-click but if you are willing to spend a few bucks for some short term fame and ranking, it works. I'm also not sure why this technique would be interested to spammers, but web advertisers would/could/do use it to advertise their website.. and pay Google in the process. I wonder what the real story is. Of course, attempting to extorting Google or anyone is bad enough in iself, even if it is a stupid attempt. It's also not hard to do: [ Example Code ]

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Conspiracy ]

Thursday is a scheduled "out carousing" night for me. Yesterday Charlene said "I'm coming into the city tomorrow, and I'd like to meet up with you if you run late". I only had Phil and Ruby for company, and neither of them wanted to make it a later evening, so I grabbed the F line up to the Fisherman's Warf area around 7, called Charlene, got no answer, and wandered into the Musee Mecanique for a while. Highly recommended if you're into mechanical coolness.

It turns out that the reason she didn't want to say what she was doing was that she was getting the "free cruise of the bay" (and assorted other goodies) from a TrendWest timeshare condo presentation. And she was, as the receptionist euphemistically put it when I got in touch with her a bit later and wandered up to their offices, a "tortoise".

[Edit: Want to make it plain that she was hanging around because she wanted to check it out with me, and had as much fun looking at the sales techniques as I did.]

I present to you: Dan and Charlene go Timeshare Shopping.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Consumerism and advertising Real Estate ]

I'm about to send out a bunch of individual invites, but mark your calendars now. We paid the deposit on the space yesterday. We've got room for 150, but will be quite happy if only 25 show up, as we expect it'll be the right 25.

(Alas, the venue is 21+, which means at least one person I wanted to attend won't be able to, but we had to get off our butts and do something to shake up this town.)

Way back before the .com boom, when the net was mostly for email and "multimedia" was the next big thing, there were parties. Excellent parties where people with interesting ideas talked about working on exciting projects that had the potential to change the world.

Then the boom hit, and the parties were inundated with hipster marketing guys and soon-to-be community college grads looking for web design jobs, and we confused funding rounds with marketplace success and selling advertising with changing the world.

We want to bring back the ideas...

So take a break from doing your cool stuff to talk with others about their cool stuff. Invite your friends, spread the word, and bring your good ideas.

(Varnish Fine Art is just south of Market in the San Francisco Financial District with easy access to Cal Train for the South Bay, BART, the ferries, and, yes, even Muni. Late enough that you can get there, early enough that you can still catch that last convenient train or boat home.)

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Community Public Transportation ]

The latest in dual use technology: the first combination vibrator and periscope. It gives new meaning to the phrase, "Take her down!"

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Next Gen Sex Toys ]

Web browser flaw prompts warning, Microsoft has issued advice about the loophole.

Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it.

Apparently an IE hole is being used in conjunction with compromised IIS servers that are in trusted domains. If you still use IE(and why, why, why would you still use IE? ) this is a really good time to download an alternative like one of the Mozilla variants or Opera.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Open Source moron Current Events Monty Python Net Culture ]

Over at Back To The Kitchen, Jen had a link to an article about the SizeUSA study that the good folks over at (TC)² just finished up (press releases which all of these articles will be written from...). I'm not sure I made my argument as well as I could have, and I certainly don't mean to detract from the efforts and value of the study, but I mentioned that I wasn't as optimistic as some that this would really help find clothes that fit.

In fact I'm wondering now if it might make it harder to find clothes, if the smaller boutique manufacturers can spend the same $20k that it's taken a lot more to discover before this and get an idea for where their largest market is, then in the worst case the niches will get lost.

Hopefully this won't happen, but: There is no single "size 8", just as in men's trousers there's no single 32w/32i. In fact, it's pretty damned hard to find two designers who use the same position to measure, say, the shoulder width on the same body. Clothing is going to continue to be hit-and-miss, and what we really need are better ways of finding clothing that already exists that fits us rather than thinking that the garments aren't already out there.

[ related topics: Current Events Clothing Economics ]

It's "pride weekend" here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we've got a lot of visitors from out of town and as a public service I figured I should re-run this image from the '98 pride parade:

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Bay Area California Culture ]

How I spent my birthday yesterday:

No, silly, it's from an eye exam, my first in eight and a half years, actually. Left eye a little worse at -1.25, right eye a little better at -.75, slight astigmatism in both.

(Which left me wondering how "stigmata" and "astigmatism" were linked...)

But since I'm taking stock, our fancy-dancy new scale tells me that as I turn 36 I weigh 159 lbs, body fat is 16%, so far as I know I'm still somewhere just shy of 5'10", and doin' pretty damned good.

[ related topics: Photography Coyote Grits Invention and Design Economics Archival ]

This morning, as I was feeding the cat, I realized that we need a way to dispense wet cat food so that the unused portion stays sterile (ie: equivalent to canned), and the dispensing system needs to do it in small portions (a quarter to half an ounce or so) at a time.

If you could then set the system up to respond to cat input but limit output over some period, wet cat food could be a "fire and forget" operation, we wouldn't waste as much when the cat isn't hungry (because I always end up giving a third of a can when the cat pesters us), and we wouldn't worry about underfeeding the cat.

The dispenser is the easy part, cheaply packing unused catfood in those smaller portions is the hard bit.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food Cool Technology ]

While we were down in Fresno weekend before last we went and hung out with Charlene's brother. He's a fairly serious cyclist, so he did 60 miles, came and picked us up at Charlene's parents' house, and we cruised back to his house to chat with him about life, get suggestions and tips on the bike (I've since been practicing with clipless pedals on the mountain bike, because dropping the tandem would be bad), and hang out by their pool.

Out by the pool in their back yard, they've got a tortoise. It's nearly 40 lbs (should top out at 100 lbs). It loves plums. They've got a plum tree that's dropping a lot of fruit. So there's this giant reptile with red ooze dripping from its mouth wandering around the back yard. Quite the lawn ornament.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

In the visit to Charlene's brother's place we talked about their training for The Agony Ride, see how many miles you can do in 24 hours. I have the usual atheist skepticism about organizations like Christian Encounter Ministries, but I was intrigued because it's been a long time since I've had a real physical challenge, I need to keep my eyes open for something like that that's more inline with my beliefs. It's also interesting that a HAM club up in the Sierra uses that ride as an exercise of their emergency systems and procedures (Google HTML version), I guess cyclists at 3:30 A.M. is about as close to disaster as you can simulate.

[ related topics: Religion California Culture Bicycling ]

I saw it on Slashdot. As a minor robot and computer animation fan, as well as looking for something different to watch, I ordered Killer Robot. Crude 3d graphics by modern standards, and synthesized voices that are fairly crude but listenable. The movie is interesting because of the sense of humour in the dialogue (some great one liners), the story and the that it is a 'one man' movie. There are some holes in the movie and you would have to really like this kind of thing to be worth the $22, but it's worth it.

[ related topics: Humor Animation Movies Robotics Graphics ]

11. is working crowd control at the 4th of Jul-Ivar's celebration this year - Myrtle Edwards park, on the Seattle waterfront.

If I can get some friends to come hang with me, I'm planning to head up with her (at 6am - yikes) to stake out a good spot and spend the day. Flutterbarians in the Seattle area (including those who may find themselves there) are hereby invited to come join me - at a time and for a duration of your choosing. Just let me know if/when you're planning to be there, 'cause I'm probably not gonna spend an entire day guarding a blanket and various gear by myself.

[ related topics: Shawn's Life Seattle ]

Just in case you're not aware of it, there's this Republican politician named Jack Ryan who was married to Jeri Ryan (IMDB page), known for her roles on "Boston Public" and as "Seven of Nine".

He's finally bowed out of the Illinois race for the Senate because it turns out he likes public sex. There have been a bunch of different takes, Debra provides an overview, but two things have stood out. The first was Tom over at Backup Brain who pointed out:

Dude, you're married to Seven of Nine, the gal with the catsuit that launched a million sweaty fantasies. Everyone already knows you're having sex with her. Many envy the hell out of you for it. Do you really have to flaunt it? Man, that's just tacky.

Which is a pretty good snarky answer, but it was Lyn's entry over at Back to the Kitchen that pointed out this line from The Chigago Tribune article quoting the divorce proceedings:

I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me and said it was not a `turn-on' for me to cry.

Obviously I've no problem with people liking public sex. I do have an issue with lying to your spouse, and I especially have an issue with responding to a concern with "that's not a turn-on for me". Whatever the collected voters and party bosses thought that got him out of the race, believing that it's your partner's duty to be a "turn-on" is beyond reprehensible.

So, congrats, Jeri, on ditching the bastard.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Movies moron Current Events Marriage ]

Supreme Court blocks enforcement of COPA. That's the second right thing they've done recently.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Civil Liberties ]

Went to the Sonoma County Perl Mongers meeting last night. I got into the meeting a little bit because Mica(sp?) was giving me a tour around the facilities at Alembic, a guitar maker.

Alembic is very cool, they build electric guitars, from the metal working for bridges and frets to the internal electronics to gorgeous wood bodies and laminated necks. They've been in business for long enough that much of their CNC capability is cobbled together using things like the Commodore 64 for control systems, and it was totally cool to see that understanding of their product from beginning to end, including the ability to customize all the way through the process.

The first demo was a bunch of cool modules that sat on top of the Jack audio connection kit to let you lay out filters in Perl, and running the Perl script generated and compiled C code. The eventual target for this was to be able to use PC hardware for easy prototyping of code that would eventually be put on DSPs in custom hardware. For debugging there were also hooks to put X based oscilliscopes and fader controls inline.

They were demonstrating on a 24 bit 10 channel card in a PC machine, latency was in the 12ms range, which the musicians seemed to think was acceptable for prototyping. Other "duh" cool hack is that I hadn't thought about using an OpenGL display list for sample display like that, stuff the 'scope data into a display list and the pan and zoom controls just munge the camera.

Second demo was a rambling one that covered analyzing branch prediction algorithms (and looking at machine trace data to try to suss out code structure), and wandered off into parsing Perl for code refactoring, with display of parse trees to try to debug them.

What impressed me most about this group is that most of the folks here were old-school hackers, everyone was comfortable talking about subjects from branch prediction to circuit board layout to Perl code to... well... bass riffs.

And I'm not qualified to judge sound, although I'd guess they're fairly good, but if you're looking for an electric guitar or bass in the three to twenty grand range, Alembic does beautiful work.

[ related topics: Music Perl Open Source Coyote Grits Graphics Cool Technology ]

Cool article on Eric Johnston helping young cancer patient Ben Duskin create a computer game. Ben asked for help from the Make A Wish Foundation, and Eric worked with Ben to create Ben's Game, a third person shooter with some interesting dynamics that uses Ben's experience of cancer as its driving metaphor.

But, for those of you with young kids who want to start customizing games in your lives, it also has a fairly easy way to build new player characters...

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

Columbine claims to have finished that huge project called Mei Wah. If you've ever wanted to know enough Chinese to read off of a restaurant menu, this is a good place to start. I know this because it got me through a couple of meals during my most recent trip to Hong Kong, and was especially helpful for reading labels off of dim sum carts.

[ related topics: Food Travel Hong Kong ]

Jerry called it one of the signs of the apocalypse, but it looks to me like almost reason to get a Dachsund: http://dogbuns.com/

[ related topics: Humor Clothing Dogs ]

While it's easy for me to pile on to all the Bush hatin', as I listen to the various Kerry positions I keep having these twinges where I remember some of the badness that came out of the Clinton years. The Supreme Court strike to COPA (one of many bad Clinton era laws) reminded me that all was not sweetness and light.

But it was reading today's Mark Morford column on the (non?)renewal of the "assault weapons" ban after hearing Teri Gross interview Simon Sebag Montefiore about his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar on Tuesday's drive up to Santa Rosa that I had a sudden reminder that put politics into perspective: Both sides still trust the notion of a powerful government. Whether it's the right wing wacko claiming "there's classified information that justifies this whole Iraq mess, you just don't know" or the left wing "if we just restrict the means of violence to the government we'll be fine", both sides place far too much trust in those processes executed by people just like us that we call authority.

[ related topics: Politics Books moron Civil Liberties Guns Mark Morford ]