Flutterby™! From 2004-07-01 to 2004-07-30

From the Santa Rosa Cycling Club, 10 great Sonoma County rides. From some beginner-ish 20 milers to a 4,500 foot vertical 55 miler.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Had a great series of drinks and discussions with Dave Polaschek last night, the discussion ranged from homebrewing to recumbents to Minneapolis to software. Met up with his friend Ingrid who had a few others in tow, one of whom ended up buying the largest round.

It was yet another reminder that my social group has become a little too closed and I'm doing well to be branching out. And yes, you assorted South Bay contingents, I need to make some treks down there to visit.

And I don't feel comfortable talking about the situations at work on the wide open web, but there are going to be changes coming soon, so this isn't just a matter of personal development.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment California Culture Community ]

It has been a long time since I've cared about buying a book on "software engineering", most of 'em recently seem to be of the "regurgitate what people want to hear" mode, but Borklog pointed to Facts of Software Engineering Management excerpted from Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass that makes it look like the book might be worth a read.

[ related topics: Books Software Engineering ]

Microsofts new search engine - is being slashdotted it seems, I tried to search for 'meuon' - a good vanity search to test a new engine, and got a typical MS-Error: EID: f:1658889542 - 1041:1041:10004:1059 HC: 71d61b14 I'm waiting so I can see what it shows up for Linux, will it be an impartial search engine?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Machinery ]

(Sorry, I know we're heavy on the tech posts today, but...)

So, thanks to a tip dropped in an editorial (excellent piece, by the way) over at Joel on Software, I was installing Microsoft's free Visual C++ 2003 compiler the other night. For no real reason, I decided to actually peruse the EULA for this one.

Now, I'm no lawyer, but it looks to me like they're pretty clearly saying: 1) you can't distribute anything you build with this compiler under an Open Source license, and 2) the apps you build are only allowed run on Windows platforms.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering ]

Now THIS is something I want to see! Lucky for me, I'll be dropping a teenager at camp in LA in mid-July, I think I'll get tickets immediately. (Anyone in the LA area who'd like to join in? I'm feeling social these days...)

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Because it bears re-reading: The Declaration of the Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

Finished the racks for the front yesterday, the tandem handles quite differently with a full load of camping gear, but nonetheless we're loading up and pedaling up to Petaluma for a get-together, camping overnight there, and coming back in the morning. See y'all then, with some miles of road stories to tell.

[ related topics: Politics Dan's Life Bicycling - Tandem ]

Yesterday Charlene and I loaded down the tandem and pedaled up to Petaluma for a party at a friend's house. The plan was to camp overnight and pedal back today. It wasn't a a long trek by my solo standards, 29 miles on the odometer, but on the tandem with a lot of gear, and with stopping regularly to massage out some of Charlene's muscles, it was a long pedal. Especially that 8 mile stretch on the shoulder of highway 101 between Novato and Petaluma. Yuck (although we did keep a respectable pace on the flat, and it was another chance to clear 35mph on the downhills... Much more stable now!). And the house was well up a hill, so while toodling through Petaluma proper was fairly flat, by the time we got to the last mile or so I totally bonked. We got off and walked for a bit, then I got back on the bike and was able to pedal it up the hill, so it was clear that Charlene had bonked earlier than me.

This morning Charlene hurt in places she doesn't normally, so she decided it'd be easier to catch a ride south (with the gear), and I pedaled the tandem home (and I'm about to go out skating, 'cause I haven't had this good a workout in a long time and I wanna feel the burn).

But we got to thinking... It'd be cool if we could measure the force applied by each rider, both for historical information, but also so that I could know when I'm bearing the load and when I'm not, so that I know earlier than "oh damn that hurts" that we're not going to make a hill, for instance.

The two easiest places to measure that seem to be by seeing if there's any measurable crank deflection or deformation, or by measuring tension along the top chains. Crank deflection would require some sort of wireless transmission, and I doubt there's much of it going on so it'd be difficult to distinguish from noise (same with, say, measuring seat weight). But we started brainstorming about a chain link that had something measurable that changed under tension, and suddenly it hit me: Measure the temperature differential between the chain on the top (under tension) and the chain on the bottom, and see what could be derived from that. Anyone know if this sounds reasonable to pursue? Yes, there's a lot of noise, but the two places would provide a reasonable baseline, and I know the chain's gotta get hotter under tension but I'm not sure I ever got to that place in physics.

Anyone got suggestions?

[ related topics: Wireless Dan's Life Cool Technology Pedal Power Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

I'm working on a generic small business shopping cart system for my own reasons, mostly that I have some time to do it right, and a couple customers that want a good system, but are not picky about it, save that it works well. I'm looking for intelligent feedback:

For example: I dispise having to remember a login/password to a site that I'll maybe use once in 6 months. I don't, and then I have to retrieve a password to order again. I like it when the shopping cart is displayed on the main site pages as I shop, so I know what I ordered (and sometimes what I didn't).

What is your favorite feature or what do you not like about shopping carts/ordering systems?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

When I read David Steinberg's look at Donna Ferrato's Love & Lust I thought my bookshelf didn't have room for yet another book of fine art black and white sex photography. But it was a Nerve excerpt and look at the book that convinced me that it was at least worth browsing Love & Lust next time I was in Good Vibrations.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Books Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Art & Culture Race ]

Dang it: Violet Blue needs permalinks. I'll try to update this later, but for now if you've any interest at all in where robotics meets sex, go read her entry for July 4^th: Making Pris.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics Next Gen Sex Toys ]

Two things puzzle me this afternoon, the first in a good way:

1. The "yes I'm definitely coming" responses to the July 20^th gathering in San Francisco have been overwhelmingly from women. I'm expecting a lot of people will just show up, but it's strange (in a good way) that in a field so dominated by men the women are the ones who seem to respond positively to a call for sharing ideas.

That's the cool one, and I don't know if it's just that there's a cultural difference in responding to invites (versus just coming) or whether there's some other dynamic at work. In either case, I'm confident we'll have some cool people there, next worry is just to think about dynamics for making sure that the conversations start and spin off. The second is:

2. Microsoft Visual Studio .NET installer projects. I mean: What the fuck? Close a solution, open it, the properties and dependencies are all different. Randomly loses post-install steps because it randomly loses track of target files, or so it claims, because those files are actually ones which made it past the closing and opening step. What sadistic bastard thought this software was ready to ship?

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

Okay, new category: Dan's Life - Tandem Toys, bike parts and components that I can't justify yet but want to keep track of. For starters:

• The Rohloff Speedhub (in German, the Rohloff USA page is frame based and doesn't allow deep linking) is a 14 speed hub with all internal gearing. It doesn't have the overlap of a standard derailleur system, so they claim similar gear ratio coverage with less maintenance and adjustment. Chris Timm raves about it for off-road tandem riding, Kinetics in the U.K. has a bunch of drawings. In the $1000+-10% range.
• Probably sooner would be a good tandem intercom system like the Tandem-Com, unless I get a little bit better with op-amps and end up building one one weekend. But the real challenge is finding a quality wind-resistant mic, and the hassles of that make a small premium worthwhile.
• SPD compatible sandals. Shimano or "Lake" seem to be the brands of note.

[ related topics: Shoes Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Dan's Life - Tandem Toys ]

Just... uhhh... adding some more weight to some different notions of a War on Pornography.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Among the apps it looks like I'm never going to have time to write is an email client that does it right. I think I've finally outgrown vm, I love that it's fast (mostly...), that (because it's a set of Emacs macros) it integrates into the keystrokes my fingers already know, and that it lets me use lots of different tools to do what I want with my mail.

I've thought about Gnus, but me and Gnus never really got along. And as much as I like Emacs, there are features that I want that just aren't implemented quickly under it (mostly related to MIME handling).

So I've been looking around. I love the idea and some of the concepts behind Opera's M2, so I've tried to configure that. But it's got a couple of show-stopper bugs (filter existing messages, then try to get your preview pane back...), depends on mousing far too much, and I'm having trouble making the filters and shared views work for me; I love the concept but the execution just seems klunky.

So does anyone have a favorite email system that has:

• Fast consistent keyboard navigation
• A graphical view of folder hierarchies (views rather than copies in this would be a plus)
• Either has filters with all of the capabilities of procmail, or lets me use procmail for my filtering.
• Has a reasonable way to add plug-ins and functionality, this could be as easy as a "pipe this selection to..." option.
• Plusses for an integrated "to do" list and calendar.

Paying money is okay as long as the architecture is open. I guess I need to look a little bit more at Aethera, but what else is out there?

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

If you run Mozilla or Firefox on Windows, go to http://www.mozilla.org/ right now and download the security patch. News Forge article on the subject, apparently the software was passing an unchecked URL directly through to a Windows function that Microsoft supposedly fixed a while ago. It wasn't fixed. Vulnerabilities ensued. That is all.

[ related topics: Cool Science Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering moron Current Events ]

Okay, so I've finally made the decision to add a blog, or something very like a blog, to my personal site as part of an upcoming redesign. Thing is, I'm having a little trouble finding something that will meet my needs:

1. I don't have shell access to the server my site is on, so this precludes anything that requires extra stuff being installed (like Perl modules). I've got PHP, Perl and MySQL available to me.
2. I don't want to replace my entire site, or even an entire page, with a full-featured blog site. I just simply want to post entries and let people comment on them - and I want to embed that functionality into a page of my design. Categories for my posts would be nice, but I can probably live without that initially (but would also make access to the source fairly important.)

From what I'm seeing available out there, it looks like I'm gonna have to build something myself, but I figured I'd check to see if anybody else has seen what I'm looking for first.

[ related topics: Content Management Weblogs Perl Open Source Shawn's Life Community Social Software ]

So after our thread of speculation about the movie, Charlene and I finally got out to see Fahrenheit 9/11 yestderday evening. My first reaction on walking out of the theater was that it was a more powerful movie than I thought it was going to be, but after a bit of discussion and the distance of a good night's sleep, I've gotta say I'm somewhat disappointed.

I didn't expect any new information. In fact on that front the movie seemed rather light. The most powerful part for me during the movie was seeing the rehab hospital, yet with a little distance I realized that there was no indication of how many soldiers were ending up there, and so (while I'm fairly sure there are a lot) I fee like I've been manipulated.

The images of our leaders partying with the bin Lad(e|i)ns were interesting to see, but it would have been cooler if there'd been a little more of the tie-together that Dubya is closer to the leaders of al Qaeda than Saddam Hussein ever was. Alas, it seems like Moore once again gets bogged down in some of the easy shots without digging deeper.

So you should see it, because it's a cultural landmark and a good reference point going into the election no matter what your politics, but it's not going to change the world.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Movies Invention and Design moron Theater & Plays Sociology Community Dictators Archival ]

It's taken months of prep work, removing the old deck, digging new footings, filling a block retaining wall full of concrete, fixing structural issues, and then I've been waiting and waiting for a crane. My first contractor was a no-show, until the very time and day when my newly hired company were taking measurements (3 weeks later). And then rain delays, and rain delays, and.. and then finally, yesterday, Larry and the 'A-Team' from Chattanooga Crane and Rigging showed up with my two, 40' long 18" tall I-Beams and put it all together in under 4 hours. They had to cut the back bumper off of their truck to make it up my driveway, but they quickly put it all together. Clem, Pam, and Cara came to watch, as well as my Dad, and of course Nancy. It was a great show. The decking should be here in a few weeks, it is some amazing stuff from Lock Dry. and is an aluminum decking material. Why? It seals and is waterproof, rot proof, spans 30+ inches,

Soon, there will a heck of a deck initiation party..

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Machinery Real Estate ]

There is really no way to effectively stop such things as: Simeda's iPod turned wireless jukebox - As consumers, we demand that our devices interact.. and they do. Very well. The RIAA and Lawyers will try to stop it though.

[ related topics: Wireless Consumerism and advertising ]

Well, as of two minutes ago I was told that by our CEO that our management has decided to close the San Francisco office and cease development of the Garment Visualization System. It's not completely unexpected, and I've been working on my résumé and will probably post a version of it today or tomorrow, but it does mean that I'll be looking for work.

Along with the résumé I'm also working on a list of things I want out of my next job. And I've got a few product ideas that I've no clue how to develop a revenue stream for, if anyone out there has business development skills and wants to talk about some kick-ass products with potential markets that I'm having trouble making all of the connections for, please drop me a line.

And despite the change in my circumstances, the party on July 20^th will remain a sharing of ideas, and distinctly not be a job seeking forum.

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

Nancy e-mail this to me.. I felt compelled to share:

(Would these only apply to toddlers?)

The Toddler Laws of Ownership

01. If I like it, it's mine.

02. If it's in my hand, it's mine.

03. If I can take it from you, it's mine.

04. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.

05. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

06. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.

07. If it looks just like mine, it's mine.

08. If I think it's mine, it's mine.

09. If it's yours and I steal it, it's mine.

10. Oops, WAIT! I've been reading Microsoft's Business Plan.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Spam moron Fashion ]

Had a chat last night with Jared from regardé, and it was especially interesting from a "how has this plan evolved" standpoint. I don't want to give away business secrets, but from when I turned down doing development work with them a few months ago to now they've made some dramatic shifts in very interesting directions, and it's got me further thinking about projects and businesses and what I want to be doing.

So I sent my résumé off to two people this morning, and some personal issues have thrown off my planned work schedule for these two days here, but I'm thinking more and more that the world needs a personal knowledge management system along the lines of what I've been exploring with my snippet manager coupled with some of my photo album ideas, and it's becoming important to me to spend some good hours fleshing out the browsing in what I've got working, but more importantly documenting my ideas about how security and peer-to-peer sharing should work.

Sorry the posting's been so thin, but being unemployed is hard work, hopefully in a few days I'll have a chance to slack a bit and catch up with life.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Content Management Work, productivity and environment Net Culture ]

Interesting: S.F. D.A. refuses to prosecute after prostitution raids on strip clubs.

"It just leaves me in amazement,'' says vice Capt. Tim Hettrich, who likened the D.A.'s inaction to "almost legalizing prostitution.''

The D.A.'s office sees it a bit differently -- calling the arrests "business as usual'' and saying that while the cops were all too eager to arrest the women, they all but ignored the club's owners and the alleged johns.

Today's Matier & Ross fleshes out the issues a little bit:

According to Denig, one friend who returned to the clubs two years ago was told by a day manager: "The stage fee is $250. I don't care how you make it. Do whatever you have to do, just get that stage fee.''

Seems like the arrangement at the Lusty Lady, where the women are behind glass, precludes that sort of exploitation.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Enforcement ]

One of the discussions which came up last night and again today was the notion of breaking genres; how sometimes we see obvious flaws in genre media say "we'd like that so much more if...", but in fixing it forget that the reason that "flaw" was there in the first place is that it's essential to the primary market.

Romance novels, computer games, action movies... the list goes on and on, and includes porn. Over on the SHS mailing list, Shawn and Ron inform us that Millerswork is shutting down the website tomorrow and ceasing business at the end of this month.

When I read Pornblography or Fleshbot I'm often struck with that "I like the commentary, but who likes this sort of porn?" feeling. Obviously it's people willing to pay for their porn. While I'd surmise that the Millerswork videos were probably pretty hot, frankly I think I'd probably end up re-watching Before Sunrise before I'd slap on a porn video.

Yet another reminder that genres evolve because there's a market for 'em.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Economics ]

The USPS is printing Buckminster Fuller Stamps. There is a nice article at The Register about Bucky. - I gotta go buy some stamps! What else should GeekLabs use for postage? Laughing...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Charlene wants a dropdown menu for the revamp of the Delightfully Cherished site. I was using the technique from A List Apart: CSS Design: Taming Lists, so before I just took code from the awesome JavaScript for the World Wide Web I went searching for something that was already using nested unordererd lists, and found it in Dave Lindquist's Using Lists for DHTML Menus.

By the time I got the dropdowns plus the tabbed appearance Charlene wants mostly working under Mozilla and Opera (sigh: IE introduces yet another set of visual glitches; CSS sucks!), I'd made a few tweaks to his JavaScript, and I wanted to communicate them back to him. He appears to have removed any email links to his site, and email is bouncing with a

(reason: 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1))

I hate the overhead that a "sender pays" scheme would introduce, it'd make a couple of monopolies very rich, but I'm not seeing another way around it. The spammers have killed off communication and we're back to the small balkanized systems that we used to have in the days of FidoNet.

[ related topics: Open Source Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design ]

Doing my part to spread the word about Ian Spiers.

Ian is a photography student who relates (text only version), via his blog, two incidents of post-9/11 hysteria profiling while he was taking pictures at the Ballard Locks. The Locks are a popular tourist destination and Ian photographically documents all the other people who were taking pictures on the same grounds where he was questioned by a gaggle of Seattle police officers and agents from the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Seattle Times article. Seattle PI column.

There is a protest and show of support for Ian being organized (show up at the Locks with your camera) for August 1st (Sunday).

[Props to Boing Boing for the initial word.]

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Civil Liberties Seattle ]

Just in case my browser crashes before tomorrow: One of the spoils of the layoff was a Via Eden board, which will let me take the fanless case that currently houses my server and finally turn it into that living room media center. So I sat down to whip up a little HTTP daemon that'd look on NFS mounts for media files and let you manipulate play lists and start and stop an mpg123 or ogg123 process, really looking forward to it 'cause that would also give me some current C++ code to pass around with my résumé, but figured I'd give a quick search, first.

Looks like Music Player Daemon got there first. Runs as a daemon on the server, clients for all the operating systems we run here in the house, I'll give step-by-step instructions as soon as I get this thing built (probably tomorrow) but I think at this point it'll be easy.

Damn, now I need something else in to write in C++. The snippet manager is currently reading my mail spool and my images directory, and is in Perl, and I'm thinking that this'd be a good chance to really get a good solid grasp of templates and STL by converting it over to C++, and yet...

The other thing the Via Eden board would be good for is control of assorted animation on the model railroad modules. These .9 degree step NEMA 23 mount stepper motors I got are honkin' massive overkill, but... "Don't touch the turn table when you grab that locomotive, it'll take your fingers off!" Maybe I'll write a web interface to control that.

[ related topics: Music Dan's Life Animation Perl Open Source Machinery Trains Toys Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

Massive rework over at Delightfully Cherished; I'm now feeling like I'm actually learning CSS. If anyone's running a wacky browser and wants to see if I'm totally off my nut, I welcome bug reports.

[ related topics: Web development Dan's Life ]

I've become less and less likely to link to Eric Raymond's stuff, but The Final Virus: A Science Fiction Story is worth reading for his exploration of the implications of shoddy Windows security and the current push for "digital rights management" by organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus Civil Liberties ]

After much frustration with what extraneous services need to be available to mount network file systems, my Via Eden and MPD music player is working. The speakers I have available for it appear to suck, so that's the first thing we need to fix, and that should show whether I've got the rest of the audio drivers configured correctly (part of the audio issue may be aliasing and sampling rate, but I won't know until we try better speakers).

I may have to write a better Windows client, MPD Commander doesn't appear to allow playlist manipulation and the default skin sucks (why do all music players think that it's cooler to not use the system widgets?), but the Gnome Music Player Client appears to do everything I want on the Linux machines, so now it's just a matter of digitizing another 200 or so CDs...

[ related topics: Free Software Music Microsoft broadband Open Source Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]

We've been camping a bit recently, and have been amazed (flabbergasted even!) at the price of camp sites. It's worse if you have an RV, the whole notion of retire and tool around the country while paying upwards of $900/month in campsite fees seems... well... for the most part it'd be easier just to rent an apartment each place you wanted to live. But apparently, Wal*Mart has an unwritten policy of letting RVs park overnight in their lots for free, thereby engendering lots of goodwill among the vacationing and retired with other unused space.

Of course out here in the bizarre real-estate market of the Bay Area, people have been using RVs and Wal*Mart lots as alternatives to three hour commutes, and The Chronicle reports that various cities in the area aren't comfortable with this.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy California Culture Economics Real Estate ]

I guess I've been wrong all of these years, when I've said I was biking up Rocky Ridge, I was actually biking up the Rock Spring-Lagunitas trail. I don't feel too bad about it, because as bad as Rocky Ridge is, the Rock Spring trail is a steeper ascent to that first 1,400 feet. Today I was feeling like a bit of adventure, so when I saw that right turn that I'd pedaled passed numerous times (and hiked on before), I took it, and went back down Rocky Ridge to the earth dam that separates Bon Tempe Lake from Alpine Lake. As I pedaled across the dam, I looked down and saw a flash of white head. My first thought was "bald eagle", but as I looked further from above I realized that that was the scrawniest ugliest bald eagle I'd ever seen. So I pedaled across and snuck up on the creature from below. You'll have to zoom the image, and there's another one of the bird at rest. Time to go hit the Sibley book and figure out what it was I saw, 'cause much of what I saw as scrawny from above was just coloration interpreted in the context of an eagle, there was definitely a lot of bird there.

But in the process of chasing him down, there were a few other treats:

It's been a really wildlife rich summer; the other day pedaling back over the Terra Linda-Sleepy Hollow divide from Phil's house I saw a coyote up close, and the deer are out in daylight to the point of infestation.

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

Dave's Picks had a link to the Ethical Philosophy Selector. Even as I've aged and acquired a healthy dose of pragmatism... well... my results weren't exactly a surprise.

[ related topics: Objectivism Dan's Life Ethics ]

Good party last night! Started a bit slow, I kind of expected people to trickle in early, but we probably had 20-30 people at the peak, everyone seemed to be engaged, and I left having had great discussions all night but still wanting more conversation with people I hadn't talked to. A partial list, and apologies to those I've left out, Mary, Anil, Matt, Bill, Dori, Ruby (whose site might not be up yet), Daniel, Leo, Phil, another Matt, at least another Bill, Kelly, Preston (who's been building electric cars and other alternative vehicles in his retirement), Dana, John (who was showing around the ZVue handheld video and audio player that he did the hardware for that unofficially may be a nice little Linux platform), Brian, Adam, and quite a few others that I'm going to slight by leaving out.

We'll definitely have to do this again in a few months. How about in the South Bay with an under 21 friendly venue?

[ related topics: Music Dan's Life Open Source Bay Area Video ]

Woah crap. Just over 4 weeks ago I reported that I was at 159 lbs. Today I'm at 154 lbs (and yes, that's accounting for the 3-4 lbs of daily variation I have). Now it's time to ramp up the calories so that I slow this about here, maybe even put on some weight if I can keep the body fat percentage down where it is now.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Health ]

So what ya do is ya take:

• a cup and a half of flour. Allegedly a low-protein flour such as a self-rising flour (with appropriate adjustments to the baking soda) works best, but I've just been using a half-and-half mix of whole wheat and all-purpose unbleached white.
• a teaspoon and a half of baking soda (half-a-t if you're using self-rising, prorate accordingly).
• a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of salt
• one or two tablespoons of sugar (honey would probably rock!)

Sift into a bowl. Mix thoroughly in:

• a tablespoon of vegetable oil
• a tablespoon of butter

The original (cited below) used vegetable shortening, I've tried all butter 'cause I'm trying to keep the hydrogenated fats non-existent, but I'm trying to keep the saturated fats low. Then add:

• A cup and a quarter of cultured buttermilk.

Mix gently, then spoon a tablespoon or two into another bowl of flour, lift the mass in your hands, form gently into a ball, and place in an oiled pan (I use a 9" pie pan, which is a little small, a 9" square would probably be perfect). Continue 'til you're out of batter, then brush the tops with more vegetable oil.

Bake at 475F for 15 minutes. 15 minutes is approximately what it takes me to take a shower, get dressed, and get a start on the dishes.

Poof. Hot tasty biscuits for breakfast. Way yummy with a little jelly, or just butter. That's what ya do.

Pragmatically adapted to what I have in my fridge and cupboard from Shirley Corriher's "Touch of Grace" biscuits, published in CookWise, and on the web in a Good Eats Fan Page on Shirley Corriher.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Went to see The Corporation last night. Wow, was that 2¹/₂ hours of butt-numbing bad editing or what? There was some great footage there, even some thoughts which need to get heard, but it was all so muddled in amongst mixed messages and overly propagandized material that I've got to say give this one a pass.

Now if someone will release the unedited "protesters hang banner on the house of the head of Shell Oil who invites them in for a tea party" video from which they took clips, I'll sit through that. And I'm interested a bit in looking at how Interface, Inc. has changed their business practices. But MTV style cutting back and forth between distinctly non-insightful talking heads and annoying graphics and animations muddled the message and alienated me, one of the people the film could have been talking to.

Despite the buzz, I'd say skip it.

[ related topics: Politics Movies Nature and environment Civil Liberties ]

I'm sorry, maybe I'm just paranoid, but my parents had a lot of eastern European friends when I was growing up, and I heard lots of tales. Does anyone else find it unnerving that in the wake of the Hiibel decision that police are stopping Amtrak trains and checking the identity of everyone on board?

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

Under the subtitle "Distinctive handcrafted clothing is more accessible than you think", the San Francisco Bay Guardian has an article titled Sewing for the soul about some "sew your own" workshops in the city which provide sewing machine rental and some advice and guidance. But here's what I'd like: If all the left-wing protesters are right and all of these outsourced fashion companies are getting their goods for a few pennies and marking them up a few thousand to tens of thousand percent, then I'd like to find someone in the U.S. who's willing to make clothing to my specs for that few thousand percent. I'll pay full retail, probably even a little more, to someone with a sewing machine willing to make me clothing.

I've tried this in the past and it hasn't worked out, one person still has some really nice silk and has been saying for a year and a half that she'll finish up that shirt real soon, but, damn it, I really want some mandarin collar shirts made from a good silk (not that cheap shit that Alfani uses) or linen that fit me, and maybe we can come to some agreement on pants in a reasonable fabric too.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Fashion Clothing ]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/t...ews/2004-07-23-sco-baystar_x.htm

It looks like SCO is surounded and about to torn in to little bits with the larger bits going to IBM and it's 14 counter suits. I know some people are never going to accept this but LINUX is being saved by BIG companies like Red Hat & IBM.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Looks like the military is augmenting the troops

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/21/military.perks.reut/index.html (note: edited link from linux tech to boob tech)

Do you think the implants are mil spec?

Went to the post blogon conference dinner last night to chat with people, figure out what the state of the art of "blogging" is. Learned a couple of interesting things:

• I finally "got" the lure of RSS. I forget the exact phrasing, but discussion was made of "I meet someone at a conference, I add their RSS feed to my syndicator, but I really don't have time to read 5,000 feeds, what I want is when 3 years down the road they post something that...". So it really is being used as a replacement for email, and much of the popularity is that coupled with the promise of some sort of learning algorithms down the road as people are already feeling overwhelmed.
• A lot of people are looking to Technorati for these sorts of algorithms. I've never "gotten" Technorati, searches never return anything I think of as useful there, so I'm not sure why.
• Someone mentioned Gizmodo as an example of a blog making $10k/month from advertising. This is why I'm not rich, I fail to see the value in something that's essentially the ad pages from Wired.
• All of these come together to show me that what I thought most people see in weblogs, that someone is doing the filtering from their communities in a way which matches my taste, isn't what those who want turn it into a "movement" see; they'd like to automate the whole editing process.
• Which brings us to a desire to get closer to a real "press release" feed, which was oft expressed.
• There are those who can introduce themselves via their URLs, and those who want to make money off of weblogs, and the intersection is smaller than you'd think. Way smaller.
• My snippet manager is needed on a lot of fronts, and as soon as I get the photo/image management bits to demonstratable (and I'm actually making progress on this front!) I'm going to put the email parts of the back-burner and slap in some RSS management.

Made some good connections, had some good discussions, will try to write something more coherent and in-depth when I've done a little processing of it.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Content Management Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Community Conferences ]

On Tuesday's get-together a few people complained about my RSS feeds. This is your chance to comment on those and the changes I've made, as well as a general "meta" for "things you've noticed about Flutterby and have been looking for a time to mention".

[ related topics: Dan's Life Content Management Flutterby Meta ]

Congrats to MarkV finishing his bits on The Incredibles. Hope the rest of you Pixarians are doing similarly well!

[ related topics: Pixar Animation ]

Over on SFGate.com there's a fluffy little piece on "alterna-porn", focusing a lot on Suicide Girls and a few similar sites and how they're catering to a different audience. And another article asking whether the acceptance of pornography is lessening its cultural impact.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Yay! Bill Humphries is doing a weblog-ish dinner on Friday the 13^th in Mountain View. Sounds like a plan.

[ related topics: Weblogs Bay Area ]

In these heady days after the fall of the Soviet Union, it's easy to forget the evils that lurked in the statist regimes of eastern Europe and beyond. As I've mentioned several times before, my parents have lots of friends who escaped from assorted eastern European countries, I was born in Germany because my dad was serving in the military there, so I grew up on stories and slides and images from the border regions. If It Had Not Been For 15 Minutes is the tale of Thomas Wagner, formerly known as Michael Michnowski, and his mother escaping from east Germany.

If you're familiar with such tales it's probably similar to stories you've heard before, but it's worth a refresher to remember what living under a government and a culture out of control can be like.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology Civil Liberties ]

Over at RC3 Rafe called "Where the money went" a "must read". It's a quick look (I'd actually like something deeper) down the gradually declining wages of the past few decades.

[ related topics: History Work, productivity and environment ]

Yes, you hated the last Star Wars film, and thought that it was a bad comic book brought to the screen. Now, NASA proves that George Lucas was creating a work of non-fiction!!!

[ related topics: Star Wars Space & Astronomy Astronomy Conspiracy ]

How To Date an Exotic Dancer, a book for those of you who'd aspire to such.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

As if the recent "yeah, we single-sourced from the Whitehouse" non-apologies from the New York Times weren't enough to slam the final nail in that tired "liberal media" coffin, over at Medley, Lyn points to the AP giving up any pretense and running Bush campaign ads as articles. It's yet another of the "Bush goes mountain biking" (big buff manly sport) stories, but this one goes over the top:

Bush keeps a cramp-inducing pace on the uphills, panting hard by the time he reaches each peak, backing off a little to recover, attacking the next hill just as hard.

His heart rate reached 168 beats per minute, about four times his resting rate and in the same range as Lance Armstrong's when the six-time Tour de France winner is pedaling hard.

Oooh. Bush as Lance. And if 168 is "four times his resting rate", that gives a resting heart rate of 42 beats per minute. Uh huh. Yeah. Riiiiiight.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Journalism and Media Bicycling ]

Obviously I'm ever so freakin' excited about the media circus that is the Democratic National Convention. Given that nothing actually happens at such things any more, there's no way you'd debate a platform in modern politics at such a venue, my "whoopdee-fucking-do" meter pegged so hard the needle bent. But there's this buzz around about how assorted folks with weblogs got media passes, so occasionally I get sucked in.

Mostly, my cynicism about mainstream "journalism" is just getting hammered home harder, but I thought one in particular, the heartwarming tale of one such media whore stooping to pander to the webloggers, deserved a call-out:

erratum: upon further review, we find we were incorrect in the assesment of being 100% misquoted. it turns out we did use the word "as" in the original email.

we apologize for the error.

The original email mentioned, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo mentions first being aware of the spot.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Journalism and Media ]

I'm networking like a madman (running up to people on the street with disheveled clothes hollering "who do you know?"), and I'd hoped to have one of the off-shoots of the snippet manager thinking available for people to play with today, but I've got this meeting mid-day that's going to break everything up, but...

Back to social networking software: I'm getting some requests to participate in Linked In, but have the usual issues about giving out other people's email addresses. If you're cool with being part of that network, drop me a line.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Social Software ]

Oooh, this looks cool: SFGate reports on an automata exhibit at the Exploratorium, with pieces from the workshops of the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre.

Here's the Exploratorium press release.

[ related topics: Bay Area Cool Technology Toys ]

John Robb compares Kerry's proposed foreign policy to Bush's. He's not optimistic.

[ related topics: Politics ]

I just made a proposal to a company this morning. I've no idea if they'll bite, mainly because what I bring to the table is a long-term proposition, and the company is in a fairly short-term mode. But I offered to ameliorate that by working for equity for up to three months, and part of the reason I did that is that several of their people understand technology at the right level. With that in mind, go read Paul Graham's Great Hackers:

A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.

via Rafe.

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

Coming down Eldridge Grade, through some of the rocky sections, all of a sudden the bike does something completely unexpected. Reflexes click me out of the SPDs, I go over the handlebars, land on my hands, tuck, kinda roll, the Camelbak keeps me from going completely over, and then there's a loud smack as my helmet impacts.

Stand up gingerly, still got full range of motion in the legs, cycling shorts are sticking on the right side, don't wanna know, right shoulder's a little stiff, feels like I pulled something in my hand, neck is strangely loose (brushes with death always seem to do wonders for my neck and back...), glasses still have their lenses, still have all of my peripheral vision, but... yep: the helmet has a big chunk missing.

Pick up the bike, and it won't roll. Hmmm... The front V-brake had pulled weirdly and was stuck under the rim, whence the "completely unexpected". Work that out, and I need to go to the bike shop and decide if I want to replace the pads and recalibrate the brake or just spend the bucks and go for disk brakes, so this can't happen again. I've been lusting after some of the features on Charlene's new ride anyway, but...

And I do need to get another helmet. And the shower I'm about to take is gonna huuuuurrrrt.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Health Sports Physiology Bicycling ]

Study: Fear shapes voters' views:

Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.

"In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."

When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.

"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said.

Also, do some searches on these guy's names with the string "terror management theory", something they came up with back in 1986. Fascinating.

[ related topics: Politics Technology and Culture Education ]

Actually, QOyesterday, Kiki wrote:

PS BTW, I'm about to try to make your penis go away. :)

Context in the comments...

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Hey, I'm messing about with a little something:

http://danlyke.gamahuche.com/polidb/browse.cgi?id=156

You can enter your own assertions at

http://danlyke.gamahuche.com/polidb/assert.cgi

And I forget whether or not this is automatically approving everything yet, but you can see any assertions you've made with by appending an "&unpublished=1" at the end of :

http://danlyke.gamahuche.com/p.../browse.cgi?id=156&unpublished=1

There's the start of the content flow behind it with some notions of trust and verification and all of that, the general idea is that we need an IMDB for politics.

[ related topics: Politics Movies ]

Okay, totally off-the-wall request: Anyone have a source for General Tso's Chicken near the Moscone Center, preferably that'll deliver? Henry's Hunan doesn't do it, and all of the other asian places of note I can think of in that area are Cantonese, Thai or Vietnamese. And I've no clue where to start looking if I go as far astray as Chinatown, as it's a dish I wouldn't normally seek out.

I'm helping some folks set up for Linux World Expo and they've made a request for Monday lunch, and I'm having trouble tracking it down.

[ related topics: Open Source Food ]