Flutterby™! From 2004-08-01 to 2004-08-31

The original plan this last week was to go travel the length of California Highway 49, in the foothills of the Sierra, and explore the gold country. There are a ton of state and local parks along this path, along with towns that have been standing (or rebuilt continuously) since the mid 1800s, and a whole bunch of fascinating geology.

But Charlene's been having some leg and lower back issues (which have also been keeping us off of the tandem), and I had some things which needed to get taken care of before the end of the month, and the week was suddenly gone.

So yesterday we drove out to Placerville to see what we could find between there and Auburn on 49. The first stop was at Hangtown's Gold Bug Park, Placerville's historic site. It's on a space where, once the placer (surface) deposits were mined out, they dug in, and there are a bunch of fairly deep mines in the area. One of 'em has been set up with electric lights and an audio tour, so we donned hard hats (ya need 'em) and wandered back in. Cool to see all that slate with the seams of gold bearing quartz from the inside, and the audio was decent.

Afterwards we stepped outside for the obligatory gold panning in a trough, where, as usual, we got distracted by all of the other cool things that came out of the gravel, and then wandered across to see their stamp mill exhibit. They've rebuilt the building in roughly the configuration of the original stamp mill on that site, got the stamping mechanism, and a small working model. It's a piece in progress, but overall this park pulled a bunch of things about mining together in a way I hadn't assimilated from the wreckage I've stumbled across elsewhere, and it whet my appetite for further exploration.

After a very tasty lunch in town and some time hanging out at the smaller of the two museums (where we sussed out the workings of an 1890-something soda water making machine, life was very cool in the days pre-microcontrollers and servos), we toodled up 49 to Coloma, where James W. Marshall had designed and was overseeing the building of a sawmill for John A. Sutter when he found gold in the river bed. We wandered around the buildings and the museum and reconstruction of the original sawmill, out to the South Fork of the American River to the original site, where we saw lots of shiny gold flecks (mostly mica and pyrite) in the water.

After a quick stop in Cool, California, we tried to find a reasonable place for dinner in Auburn, didn't get what we wanted, pointed the car west and discovered the 4^th Street Grill in Sacramento. Good food, really good service, and a nice way to cap off the day.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Food California Culture ]

Okay, I know the next stage in the snippet manager, now that I've got some of the identity structures worked out that I was playing with in that political database I can take care of keeping track of my anonymous correspondents...

Anyway, this regular but anonymous contributor sent me an article about exploring tandem bicycling's benefits for Parkinsons patients:

Last year, Parkinson’s patient Cathy Frazier tackled the ride on a tandem bike, riding with her husband,Atlanta cycling coach Ralph Frazier, and Jay Alberts, a Georgia Tech professor of applied physiology specializing in Parkinson’s research. After 464 miles, she and her Pedaling for Parkinson’s team found they had not only spread the word about the disease, but also may have discovered a relationship between pedaling at a higher cadence and priming/driving the central nervous system of the Parkinson’s patient. At the end of the ride, Frazier could write more clearly for one week.

Alas, no tandeming this afternoon, but I do have to take our new (to us) trailer down to the party store to pick up a tank of helium for tomorrow's helping the folks from The Linux Show set up at Linux World Expo and do groceries, and I'll be trying to keep a good fast cadence all the way.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Open Source Current Events Sports Pedal Power Bicycling - Tandem ]

In my list of all-time great movies, Before Sunrise appears somewhere near the top. On a train into Vienna for his flight home to the United States, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), too broke to pay for a hotel before his plane leaves in the morning, spots French tourist Celine (Julie Delpy), and offers up a brilliant speech telling her that he's doing her a favor, because ages from now when she's settled into the mundane family life she'll be able to look back at a night wandering through the city with the American stranger and say that the serendipitous encounter wasn't that strange after all.

So they spend the night wandering Vienna, the city and its residents providing a backdrop to the discussion of two idealistic twentysomethings with their unrealized dreams and desires.

I've tried to avoid a spoiler but can't in the context of discussing the sequel, so know that the ending in no way makes the journey less enjoyable; the film ends with them agreeing to meet in the train station 6 months hence, unwilling to exchange phone numbers or contact information because that would destroy the essence of their evening.

And we so strongly want to believe that they will make that connection.

Before Sunset, in theaters now, opens 9 years later. The rendezvous failed. He's in Paris at a book signing for his novel recounting that night. She's lurking in the stacks of the bookshelves. In the 90 minutes he's got before his plane leaves, conversation ensues, except this time they're in their thirties, a little less filled with the passion of youth, a little more pragmatic about life and love, with the shields and blocks of those older and spurned once or twice in place.

Somehow Charlene claims to have managed to escape a 5 year relationship with me without having seen Before Sunrise, but as we were walking away from the theater she said "can the original possibly be as good as the sequel?"

Yes, Before Sunset isn't just an excuse to cash in off of the original, it's a continuation of the story that started in Before Sunrise, in a way that doesn't cheapen the original at all.

If you liked Before Sunrise this is a must-see. Even if you haven't seen it yet, this is one heck of a powerful romance that should still be accessible if you don't have the background of the original, and that doesn't cheapen itself by trying for "romantic comedy". Highly recommended!

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Trains ]

I'm struck most by the focus on the enterprise. Everyone here sees targeting enterprise infrastructure as the goal, with very little focus on, say, home users.

The Linux Mobile Alliance has a cell phone platform running Linux on a 300MHz ARM, with a reasonable display and digitizer.

I'm noting Emperor Linux because they sell preconfigured Linux laptops, and next time I'm looking for such a beast I think it'll be worth a small premium to get the kernel and asorted low-level modules fully configured.

Bruce Perens has a booth for his UserLinux, and while I was standing there I noticed that Conrad Oho was standing beside me with a "Fairfax, CA" address on his badge, so we got into a discussion about human powered vehicles. He wants to build a platform to work towards replacing automobile traffic, with the designs open sourced.

If you're here, either call my cell at 415-378-4594, or I'll probably be hanging around The Linux Show booth trying to get famous.

[ related topics: Free Software Wireless Open Source Bay Area Automobiles Pedal Power ]

Nancy and I just got back from a 12 day trip though Costa Rica, the fat bald guy on the surfboard is me. I had to try it, and it was a blast. Our adventure started in Liberia and took us to Playa Nosara (beaches) for a few days, then to the Volcano Arenal, the jungle river of Cano Negro, we even touched the border of Nicaragua, back through the Central Valley Mountains to the beaches of Punteranas and Playa del Coco. Our trip karma flowed, the people of Costa Rica were great and Nancy and I are looking forward to our next trip together... )^(.

Nancy and I will be posting all of the pictures soon, with commentary by both of us about things. Some spectacular photo's are coming (yes, that Volcano is erupting!). We did some touristy things, and some not so US-touristy things and had a blast. The snorkelling alone may be worth another trip.

Coming back to the US found my mailbox full of 2237 requests for GeekLabs Pocket Protectors thanks to it being listed on a couple of 'freebie central' websites for just 3 days.... luckily I claimed (and really did) only have 200 of them to give away.

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography Travel ]

I'm still not sure why I went to the expo the whole week, but I did learn more every day I went, and whenever my feet got tired The Linux Show booth was a reasonable place to take a load off and meet people, so like those evenings when you think "how much can one more beer hurt?", I kept going back.

Highlights:

• The crowd at the Linux Astronomy booth almost always had good conversation. From the home-built seismometer they had on display to talking with Ron (of Alembic Guitars fame) and a few other folks about turning old milling machines into CNC devices with a Commodore 64 and other issues in motion control to the guy who's writing JavaScript games for EduCapers.org, there was always someone with an interesting history and set of experiences. I need to hang out around Santa Rosa some more.
• In my looking for a job, I got more than one "why don't you volunteer for a while and...", which... well... seemed kinda tacky for companies which alleged to be profitable by essentially removing the names of the people who'd actually done the work and putting their own name on it. I'm still not sure in the case of Lycoris, because they seem to exactly get my notion of where Linux on the desktop should be going.
• The folks at Netezza were a close second, but the Coraid folks hands-down won the blinkenlights award. A rack full of those babies would put any 1950s TV show computer to shame.
• It was fun to hang out with Diane, and neat to meet Kim and Doc and run into a bunch of folks I've met casually before.
• The Wyse thin client looked interesting on a couple of fronts, at least until Via finally ships the Nano-ITX boards...
• And of course Russ, Jeff and Arne of The Linux Show provided a great place to go rest my feet and hang out and meet people when I wasn't into walking around. And despite some of the production values issues with the show, I came away from watching them do several of their segments quite impressed. For one thing, unlike all of the mainstream media interviews I've ever been involved in, their pre-briefings are a quick chat before going live; none of this "interviewee hands you the typewritten conversation" stuff that usually seems to happen. Got me somewhat interested in listening, and also convinced me that some real-time audio (and perhaps even video) production software would be a good thing. If I could just figure out a business model...
• Oh yeah: Watching the .ORGs get hit with $150+ charges for alleged deliveries to their booths because of union finagling once again soured me on unions, but it also helped bring together an issue that I've been mulling for a bit: There are two types of ways to go about making money: One is by reducing friction in the economy, making it easier for people to get what they want; the other is by increasing friction in the economy, making it more difficult for people to get what they want. Unions, many commodities trading companies, and companies which use "strategic patenting" are in the latter category.

So today I'm back to catching up on the job and contract seeking I've been postponing. Time to hit the phones...

[ related topics: Free Software Games Weblogs Technology and Culture Open Source Astronomy Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Machinery Economics ]

Studio Foglio has had new XXXenophile material on the back burner for some time, but they've just released an Ashcan Edition called Quick & Dirty to help raise some much needed cash. If you like Girl Genius and/or Buck Godot, and enjoy your erotica humorously irreverent, XXXenophile is a must read. Besides, Phil and Kaja are Good People ;-)

(If you're not familar with the Foglio style, examples are available in various areas of the web site. Girl Genius is generally considered to have the closest visual style to XXXenophile.)

[ related topics: Erotic Comics ]

Alec showed me Doom 3 yesterday. Ctrl+Alt+Del sums it up perfectly. Remember that creepy feeling you got playing the original Doom when it made you twitchy in the real world, but now it's nearly a decade later and you've become inured to the whoole genre... Yeah, it's back. I won't be playing it through, mostly because of a time issue, but if you're into that sort of thing...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Archival ]

I have some respite from Forest's visit, so I'm madly typing away, catching up on stuff, trying to get some of my ideas down in code. Forest is here for the week, going nuts playing games with the surfeit of computing power in this house, but Charlene's entertaining him today, letting me write some code and catch up with job search issues and all of that stuff.

This last weekend and Monday we were out of town doing... stuff. At some point I'll have some notes on all sorts of issues, legal and moral, about personhood and sanity and the like, but not yet. I'm learning a lot about stuff I really don't care about except that it's important to people close to me.

Anyway, because there haven't been any updates to Flutterby for a while, I present: How To Destroy The Universe, Part 2 -- according to Kiki, for those of you who want to be "up" on the San Francisco art scene.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Ethics Bay Area Law Art & Culture ]

That SUV parked in your California neighborhood may be illegal... (Thanks to Dave's Picks)

Here's what few people seem to realize: By weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds, big SUVs are prohibited on thousands of miles of road in California. Cities across the state—including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Santa Monica—use the 3-ton cutoff for many or nearly all of their residential streets.

[ related topics: Humor Law California Culture Automobiles ]

Reminder: Dinner on Friday in Mountain View! I'll be there.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Since the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" story is getting legs, I figured I should direct folks to some fact-checking.

[ related topics: Politics Journalism and Media Boats ]

I've been in sunny Southern California for the past week at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego. This is probably the biggest conference I've ever been too and probably the most productive. GIS breaks down nicely into lots of SIGs and the conference has had multiple paper sessions for every SIG imaginable. I've been catching alot of presentations on mathematical modeling of animal movements - just left separate presentations on grizzly bears, cougars and big horn sheep. I'm particularly interested because the folks doing these studies are mathematicians - in fact - most of them haven't even taken college calculus...

The conference ends tonight and I'm going to be "stuck" here in san Diego until Asha gets back from Canada on Sunday. She's been teaching yoga and anatomy to some high school dancers in Saskatchewan. Then we're off to Colorado to wrap up the last 70 miles of the trail!

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music History Work, productivity and environment Mathematics California Culture Education Conferences ]

Rough week: Rick James, Fay Wray whom most of us probably wouldn't have heard of if not for the pool scene in Rocky Horror Picture Show, and now Julia Child.

While the first two had long disappeared into history, Julia kept turning out new work with that same deadpan approach and a quirky hint of a smile that never quite made it clear if she was making fun of herself or not. In any case, in her later years when she worked mainly as a foil for other chefs she did an admirable job of asking the questions we'd want to ask, but would feel stupid for. She will be missed.

[ related topics: Music Movies Invention and Design Food Current Events Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Mike forwarded I, Cringely: Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't. More on why prisons are really about some sick societal needs for punishment and not about lowering crime rates.

[ related topics: Sociology Law Enforcement ]

Something tells me eBay buying into craigslist is not a very good idea. (And this is coming from someone who uses both regularly: there are reasons that both exist, and mixing them feels creepy to me.)

[ related topics: Current Events ]

This one's for Jessamyn from Borklog: The Image of Librarians in Pornography

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

Jay might know this: After hanging out with the folks from The Linux Show for a week, and then hearing Adam Curry rant about the lack of good software for "audioblogging"[mp3], although I'm not terribly excited about the talk format (If you thought unedited typed braindumps were bad...) there's a need (of somesort) for a tool that:

1. Outputs to a format that can easily be streamed or compressed.
2. Allows easy fade-in/out from pre-recorded songs and clips, both from a playlist (play my intro song, play then fade to my first commercial break, etc.) and from a more random-access sound effects type library.
3. Manages multiple audio sources including mics and internet streams.
4. Has some sort of checkpointing and skip back, maybe with a standard 3-5 second audio delay, as I asked about ages ago for recording spoken prose.

[ related topics: Language Books Music Software Engineering Net Culture ]

Bahahaha! Elf has a description of the day he realized he was not alone, when reading an edition of the "Illuminatus!" trilogy that had some filler material that read:

When I was nine years old, I acquired my first split beaver magazine. You can imagine my disappointement when, upon examination with a microscope, I discovered all I could see was dots.

I'm reminded of a day at Chaco & Eddie's place in the Dr.'s Building in Chattanooga when someone got one of the first color inkjet printers. A couple of us in that group were imaging weenies, and when the proud owner of the new printer brought in some freshly imaged cheesecake, tom pulled out his loupe and we went to work examining dither patterns.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Chattanooga Graphic Design ]

Before I settle into my daily coding, my morning routine is going through the various job listings on Craigslist, HotJobs, Dice and Monster. I run through various searches, middle clicking on what looks interesting, then go through the resulting tabs looking for details.

For the most part I'm not excited. What amazes me most is the number of companies, especially small ones, who claim they're looking for full-time employees, but end up listing "familiarity with [some obscure spec] a must!". If you want full-time employees, if you want to build institutional knowledge and value in the company, then hiring for a specific technology is counter-productive.

Because that stuff can always be outsourced; there is always a specialist out there who can implement some specific technology. So pay 'em with a 1099, or just send the work over to Russia or India, and be done with 'em. What builds value in a company is hiring people who are smart enough to both decide what the right technology is, and then use that technology to implement it (or just outsource it), but paying attention to thinkers with broad-based coding experience is far more likely to make me believe in the eventual success of your venture than hiring full-time people to do jobs that are better treated as commodities.

The other thing that turns me off is the number of typos and mis-spelled acronyms and the like. If you don't care at least as much about your job posting as I do about my response to it, then I shudder at the future prospects of your venture.

I want to work with people who care about building real, long-term value. Where the f*ck are you people?

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

Saturday, November 6^th, I've signed up for BloggerCon. And Diane reminds me that we need to do a South Bay Flutterby (et al) get together soon. Anyone got ideas on a venue where we could do dinner or drinks (but allow under 21 for Greg)or whatever and hang out and chat for a while?

Finally, Meuon is coming out for Burning Man and at the very least I'd drive up to Reno to have dinner with him. Anyone else I've missed?

[ related topics: Burning Man Dan's Life Bay Area ]

This one's for crasch: Philip Greenspun's musings on houses for single people has a lot of good information in the comments. Charlene and I restructured our house so that we have our projects in the living room; I built some furniture that houses my indoor tools ('scope, soldering equipment, small files, knives, saws and vices, etc) and makes a good workbench with doors that can hide the clutter of a project in progress, and modified a bookshelf which has room for my LCD monitor to have a slide-away keyboard. We're less in a place for entertaining larger groups, but longer-term we could save money on housing and just hold larger parties at some communal space.

I used to think there was no way I could live with someone else in less than a 3 bedroom house, but we've managed to work out both the physical and the social issues in such a way that we can share each other's company without disrupting each other's flow, and in the process we've radically redefined what good housing means.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment Real Estate Furniture ]

Prepping for the 'Burn. Unlike those of you in SF, this is a major road trip for those of us in the SouthEast. Even in my big truck, carrying stuff for 3, almost 3000 miles each way, with a few side trips on the way, requires some hauling capacity. Last year I used a bumper hitch bike rack, which not only dragged and broke when 4-wheeling though a canyon, was a pain for getting in and out of the back of the truck. Yesterday, I picked up some scrap aluminum angle (free), and today finished off my mondo roof-rack, with room for 3 bikes and gear boxes. Best part of having a house is having a garage and shop area.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Travel Machinery Bicycling Real Estate ]

Columbine writes, in Irons Always in Fire:

And it left a huge hole. They literally didn't know what to do with themselves without work filling their lives. They weren't at all clear on what they were going to put in its place to fill the hole.

This would never happen to my friend. Nor me. Never. If either of us were ever financially set for life, the reaction would be like, "Wow! Now I will finally have enough time to work on my stuff!"

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Work, productivity and environment ]

Went over to Jeanne's to see Outfoxed last night, and frankly I was disappointed. The problem with all of these docuganda films is that they're preaching to the choir; seeing clip after clip of Bill O'Reilly lying and contradicting himself isn't going to convince his fans, because they've been seeing him do it for years now and still believe; in the minds of many charisma is worth more than observable reality.

And, really, the FOX News strategy is brilliant: The purpose of media is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, and a demographic that doesn't think critically and accepts style over substance (and takes fat white guys in suits as its symbol of trust) is exactly the sort of eyeballs that advertisers want.

Pretending that motivating the masses to march on the FCC to change media ownership laws will change anything is naive at best; I'm subscribed to the American Family Association action alerts mailing list and I see what they're up to, and fighting out speech and truth issues in the legislative forum is the wrong place to do it.

Besides which, flashing up the usual huge long list of URLs at the end of the piece simply reinforces what's happening now: People who might care see that these organizations are doing something, and figure that that's enough.

If we're going to change attitudes and enlighten the populace it has to be a distributed effort, and it has to be reaching out to people who have other opinions. This is why I believe that weblogs are crucial, with the recent amateur coverage of the DNC they're illuminating the reality that mainstream news doesn't bring anything enlightened to the discussion, especially not when it's an event carefully composed of planned presentations, but more importantly they're causing a distributed body of people to start to look deeper at their references and sources, and to think critically.

Anyway, unless you're someone who thinks that FOX News is a legitimate news source (and you're probably not reading this if you do), I think you can give Outfoxed a miss.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Marketing ]

Go now and read Over The Bridge.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

Aaagh. So I've got this photo browser app that's prototyped in Perl, but I'd really like to have a few users eventually and I need to buff up on my C++ skills, so I figured I'd rewrite it in C++. I'm using Glade as the interface builder, and I love that in conjunction with Gtk compared to Windows .NET's Forms class library because there's a lot of stuff, especially concerned with window resizing and position management, that it just does right.

But I tried to use someof the newer widgets and I'm now in this horrendous class library dependency issue with the code generator and... well.. Are people developing Gtk apps in C++ with Glade? It's enough to make a lad say "screw this" and go boot up Visual Studio .NET 2003, it is. And believe me, to voluntarily assume that much pain is... well...

All software sucks.

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering ]

Everyone's been linking in one variant or another to images of hot/naked competitors in the Olympics, but it was Brad who pointed me to Opening Ceremony or Gay Circuit Party?

Both events were elaborately staged productions featuring dramatic light shows, costumed performers and even high-energy dance music... not to mention, the presence of several hundred muscular hunks hoping they don't get busted for drug abuse.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nudity Sports ]

It's not cold enough here to worry about, but if we end up moving to chillier climes at some point then here's another one for the Tandem Toys topic: Hotronics Foot Warmers.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Dan's Life - Tandem Toys ]

So totally jealous department: A journal of a cross-country tandem bike ride, the actual pages appear to start here, I think I'm going to be joining the Adventure Cycling Association and looking at some of their maps as soon as I finish reading through every page of the journal.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Watched Exit To Eden last night, Alec is working at the video store and crashing at our place occasionally and left it lying around. Somewhere in there there's a good story, maybe even a good script (maybe), utterly destroyed by hideous direction.

It was really trying to tell two or three stories, but along the way it got hung up in being a heavy "message" film and couldn't decide if it wanted to be an erotic film (although, my god, leave the '70s kitsch and the bad porn film music at home, please!), a slapstic comedy, or a preachy "live and let live" sermon. Leave this one on the shelf.

[ related topics: Music Sexual Culture Movies Work, productivity and environment Video ]

Oh yeah, just wanted to mention this for my records: On Wednesday, Zack and I grabbed the tandem to meet up with Charlene so we could avoid multiple cars for some of the logistics. Zack is a pretty strong pedaler, but not a very experienced one, so while we were holding 22MPH we were doing so with a fairly low cadence. At some point I shifted my weight back and up a little bit, a really subtle change, and my power changed amazingly. On Friday I biked up Mount Tam, and got there much faster (and more easily on the steep parts) than I've done in quite a while. A good reminder that there are things to relearn and subtle adjustments in pedal technique that can change a lot.

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

I forget what the book was that spawned my current level of bullshit detection, but at some point I was reading something that clearly wasn't targeted to me or my belief system, something praised as "revolutionary", and I realized that most media, especially that praised as "breakthrough", is a re-packaging and re-affirmation of the belief system of the audience, with no real ability to create new modes of thinking or new perspectives. All "self-help" books fall into this, and quite a few of the current non-fiction craze. I've been far enough out of the mainstream for long enough that normally these things aren't hard to spot; I'm instantly aware that this or that piece is succeeding based on reinforcing the prejudices of its audience, because its audience isn't me.

I'm struggling through Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters right now, I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm having this wonderful cognitive dissonance where I recognize that he's writing to his demographic, pushing ineffective patterns because it's what his readership wants to hear...

...and he's writing to me.

So I'm torn. On the one hand I'm enjoying the fact that for once there's a book of views that provides support for many of the things I've believed and that speaks to my experience, on the other hand I'm three chapters in and saying "well, that'd be nice if it were true, but here are a whole bunch of counter-examples", and I'm wondering if it's worth finishing. If there's a payoff in here that ties together the dissonance, then I'm happy to keep going, but if he's just going to stroke my ego then fuck that, I want to go read something that will give me some understanding of the rest of the world.

[ related topics: Books Dan's Life Invention and Design Sociology ]

It might behoove those of you who occasionally rely on the iron steed for transportation to check your chainrings and make sure that all of the bolts are in place. However, since this particular failure cascaded and made me replace all of my front chainrings and I'm now much happier with my shifting, it might also be worth your while to check for general wear. The guy at Mike's Bicycle Center in Sausalito who patched this up so that I could get home (after it failed on my way down to the headlands to meet up for Sunday's hike, which I still managed to make) said "you ride your bike pretty hard, don't you?" Yep, and the moment I figure out how to keep my rear derailleur aligned I'll be really happy.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Bicycling Sausalito ]

I have been avoiding Python for a long time. Perl does much of what I want in a quick-and-dirty language better, the simple syntax bothered me, I thought that C++ was good enough for the non-scripting applications I've been playing with, things like that. But I've been talking with the ZVue folks, and one of 'em is a big Python fan, so I've picked up a copy of Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python. Yesterday I ended up bringing home a ZVue (and having played with that for 15 minutes, I now understand Adam Curry's iPodder and might even get vSpan), so I figured it was time to actually crack that book so that next time we talked I could come off as a little more intelligent.

I like it. True, it's got a lot of the issues of that certain sort of language that's simple at its core and depends a lot on a class library (like Java), but it doesn't require me to go lookup every single freakin' type I want to use (all of which have slightly different semantics, ahh the joys of C++), the language is expressive enough to have some pretty powerful idioms, there's wxWindows with wxGlade for creating GUI apps with native widget sets and py2exe for distributing a single bundle file to Windows, it's slightly more strongly typed than Perl without being straitjacket-ish.

I don't think I'll be hitting it up for web apps soon, but there's a bunch of C++ source from the past two weeks that's about to get revamped.

[ related topics: Language Books Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering Python ]

Over at Clean Sheets: Rants About Pants: Pre-Censoring Your World View talks about censorship in the figleafing of the U.S. televised version of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics:

If you remain locked away in your private fantasies, you've let the censors win. In the end, the censors are commercial-minded. If they can continue to sell you on the concept that only their approved version -- tawdry and cheapened as it is - is the real deal, the sought-for McGrail of pleasure, you'll lose your grasp on romance and love and genuine desire, and have exchanged it for the promise without delivery, the lie instead of the lay, and you'll have been screwed without the satisfaction.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Free Speech Sports Clothing ]

From time to time, I've traipsed on over to Project Gutenberg to see how they're coming along. I love the idea, but the browse/search capability remains its weakest point, in my opinion. I'm almost never looking for a specific author or title, but rather just want to browse a genre or category. Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to be interested in focusing on my preferred (nearly exclusive) category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy. The site does identify individual books as belonging to the Fiction "subject", but it's not an option in the advanced search. (The subject is clickable on the book detail page, but the site complains of too many search results and asks you to refine your search.)

I'm having thoughts about starting a kind of an online community for sharing/posting direct links to books and/or authors who fit the criteria of what I'd be interested in. As kind of a precursur to that, and because we saw the new remake of Around the World in 80 Days last weekend, I give you the available stories of Jules Verne. (Note that audio books are now included at Project Gutenberg.)

[ related topics: Books Open Source Free Speech Community ]

Howl! Mark Pilgrim suggests the Kittenfight method of technology selection: Use Googlefight with the suffix "kills kittens" on your technologies of choice. This technique has the effect of backing up my recent language decision: Python versus Perl

[ related topics: Humor Perl Open Source Python ]

Boing Boing has a post about a quote from a mobile phone CEO they say just doesn't get it. Maybe he doesn't from a market standpoint, but he's certainly speaking to me. I've never understood the appeal of having internet access on a three-inch - or (yuck!) one-inch - screen. Why does this continue to sell so well?

[ related topics: Business Technology and Culture Consumerism and advertising Economics ]

After being so quiet about one job that my first mention of it on Flutterby was when I was leaving it, I figure I'll get this one in up-front: I did a phone interview with Amazon yesterday. I'm still interested in all of the possibilities I'm exploring, that's just one of the several on the list.

It was interesting, a lot of "how would you solve this problem" sort of questions, and as a follow-up they sent a "how would you process this data" email, asking for a response in a few hours. So I documented my assumptions about the data and wrote this massively over-engineered solution which had some issues and some strengths, but...

One of the questions, while I was dictating code over the phone (and how fun is it to try to visualize that?), was "why do you use the post-increment operator (ie: i++) rather than the pre-increment (ie: ++i)?" [Edit: I was the one using the i++ form, he was questioning] It was relatively quick to discover that the interviewer was looking for the "the compiler has to store a temporary in case it's going to use it in an expression" answer, but I went back to some notes I wrote for a presentation on the 1988 Conference on Computers in Physics Instruction, and it turns out he's wrong: Early versions of Turbo C were an instruction more efficient for the "post" operators than the "pre" ones. And it must not have mattered through the various versions of Microsoft C up through the 16 bit versions of Microsoft Visual C, because I kept using that construct, and in those days I was very concerned with saving bytes.

Anyway, it reminded me of being back in high school physics and making up some answer for the "why do AM radio signals travel further than FM radio signals" because I knew of (and was playing with at that point) several applications where AM and FM were used on the same frequency range and didn't think to tie those notions to the "standard audio AM broadcasts are on lower frequencies than standard audio FM broadcasts, and therefore bounce off the ionosphere" [edit: and diffracts more strongly] answer, one of those places where too much knowledge was a bad thing.

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

For the hike today, I chose to forgo the hydrocarbon burning transportation and instead biked up the Rock Springs trail, across East Ridgecrest Road that runs along the spine of Mount Tam, then down Pantoll Road to the Ranger Station, where the hike started. So 2300' of climbing, then we hiked for 6 miles (fairly briskly, everyone else was fresh), then I got back on the bike and raced the car six and a half miles down Panoramic Highway into Mill Valley for breakfast.

As I bled altitude, those big wide tires scrubbing the pavement on every turn, and watched the guys on the skinny tired dropped handlebar technological marvels making their way up the hill opposite me, I realized that the hardcore do it upright on 2.5" knobbies.

They were just about to sit down when I got there, even including the 100' climb along the way in which my muscles were screaming for relief. Breakfast was large with no guilty feelings. After that, the mostly flat 11 miles home seemed kinda anti-climactic.

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

Man, being unemployed is hard work. I was going to drive up to Reno early this morning to hang out with Meuon and the gang on their way to Burning Man, but Charlene's struggling in her English class and we're going to hit the books hard this afternoon so that she's got all of her homework done before class tonight. And we've decided that getting to and from class is a perfect use for the tandem, so I had to get some lighting stuff rigged up yesterday. I've got a phone interview tomorrow at 11:00AM, going to the Sonoma Perl Mongers tomorrow evening (and I'd like to take a small demo), and I'm trying to coordinate get-togethers with folks from two other companies.

So this morning as background noise I've got Will Wright: Lessons on Game Design playing. Worth a listen. I was more intent with the first half because I was washing the dishes, now I'm doing more cerebral thing and just tuning in for the occasional sound-bite, but if you're one of those folks who finds the idea of interactive drama fascinating, it's worth listening to.

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Games Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment Bicycling - Tandem ]

Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth

[ related topics: Politics Humor Boats ]

More cool gadgets of unknown value for the Tandem Toys topic: Rotor Cranks.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Dan's Life - Tandem Toys ]

I've been wondering recently about that rush of coolness we felt back in 1993, that a world of other cool people had opened up and we were suddenly having conversations with folks and about perspectives that we just didn't know existed in our sheltered little worlds. Okay, maybe it wasn't like that for everybody, but it's part of why I got so excited about the internet. It's blowback time: Best of Craigslist: 100 Days of Casual Encounters VS. 1 Night at a Bar on 57th Street.

[ related topics: Humor Net Culture ]

Wait! How have I missed this? Six issues, which implies two years? SF Gate looks at Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz's venture called Other magazine. The website is at http://www.othermag.org/, and I'm subscribing right now.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Current Events ]

So one Leon Mosley, a delegate from Waterloo and co-chair of the Republican Party of Iowa, is being quoted (source, source) as saying:

"This is the party that is GOP -- God's official party."

Now allowing for the vagaries of translation, would you say that that sounds a lot like, say, "party of God"? Which is the common translation of "Hezbollah"?

(props to Elf)

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Politics Current Events ]