Flutterby™! From 2004-09-01 to 2004-09-29

My faith in small stores may be wavering even further. First I interview with Amazon, next I buy a lighting system from a chain bicycle shop. Specifically the Performance ViewPoint Gen3. I had an old huge lead-acid Nite-Hawk, but I couldn't get the charger and the battery to cooperate any more, I suspect the battery is bad, so I started to look around for other options. I like the idea of using white LEDs, but had heard bad things, so I was a little trepidatious when I looked at the box and saw "as bright as a 10 watt halogen". However, the form factor was perfect, it takes 4 AA cells, and the package I bought comes with NiMh cells and a charger, and we're using it for mostly suburban riding, so lighting up the trees isn't a factor.

It rocks. The light is bright, brighter than I remember the Nite-Hawk being. We were cruising reasonably, probably in the 15mph range, and I always felt confident that I could see potholes in time to miss 'em, even on the big heavy tandem. I never felt that confident on my single. The beam is a little narrow, but that's okay, we seemed to have enough peripheral light that I was never concerned.

It uses standard batteries, so we don't have to get rid of a huge lead acid thing when the batteries go. It uses AAs, so in a pinch we can buy some alkalines on the road, and it'll even run on 2 (it's a 3V system). It's small, you can clip it off the bike and toss it in a pocket when you park. Overall I'm damned impressed. Oh, and you can buy the light separately from the batteries and the charger, so you can get two if one isn't bright enough for you. Furthermore, the charger comes with a 12v car adapter.

Okay, one more bike thing and then I promise we'll get back to the usual perversions and technology (wait, are those distinct sets?): Barb and Randall Angell are currently pedaling from Alaska to Florida, with trip reports.

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

It's getting to easy to make fun of Bush: Headline says Bush Insists His Administration Seeking 'new Ways to Harm Our Country'

"[Our enemies] never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Yes, we have to laugh at him. Otherwise we'd just cry - for ourselves.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Wow. Yesterday was fun, but I don't know how much of it I want to recount here. Discussions are ongoing. I will say that while both of my job (and Flutterby) related get-togethers were very interesting, the first one has me re-evaluating a bunch of things.

I've got a fairly high opinion of myself, so I come away from a number of conversations thinking "I'm really smart". I also know some super smart people, so there are other conversations where I think "they're really smart". Occasionally, magic will happen, and a conversation will occur where I come away thinking both things simultaneously. Even better is when that conversation happens between someone who has a completely different area of expertise than mine.

So, yeah, the conversation opened with "I've looked at your resume, why would you possibly want to work for us?" (which was my question too) and ended with me thinking "maybe moving down to the peninsula wouldn't be such a bad thing".

Which softened me up for the second conversation of the day.

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Clowns ]

In the discussion about Iraq recently I've been hearing from a bunch of people who got their conservative views back in the days of the Soviet Union. They were rightly horrified by what was going on over there, and thought that appeasement was a bad idea. We can talk forever about what role Reagan had in the collapse of the USSR, or whether Gorbachev was an instigator or a reactionary, however...

In all of these discussions I haven't heard any one of them who seems to understand why the Soviet Union occurred, and continued for so long, and it's the reason we're having so much trouble in Iraq. Most of those of us who remember the evils of the Soviet Union remember it as bad because we know people who were oppressed under the regime. We've met the people who filled the trunk with stuff they hoped would stop bullets and drove full-speed through the border crossing ducked down while the windows exploded around them, or who crawled under the searchlights and barbed wire. We've talked with those who spent time in prison for expressing their thoughts.

But there were others who found their place in that political system, who supported it and rose through the ranks, or who were supported by it. And while the tipping point eventually drove those who were once supported by it to rebel, if they can't make it under the new system it could easily tip back.

When I hear these people rant in favor of the Dubya foreign policy, or of the intervention in Iraq, I miss that perspective and that understanding. And I fear that unless the knowledge that government exists in the mind of the governed percolates up into our foreign policy, that our intervention will be for naught and Iraq will tip back.

No answers, just a big gaping hole that I'd like to see filled.

[ related topics: Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology ]

Ouch. Now that I'm spending so much time talking to people, I'm not even doing interesting development that I can allude to on the blog. But I did replace our cracked toilet this morning with a pressurized tank Eljer. If you see me nervously pressing a flush handle from a distance... well... the first few flushes on this beasty are kinda scary. The instructions do warn you, but...

Next up: cat pictures.

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

I've been listening to a bunch of audio blogs as I do the morning dishes, and while I've heard a few good ideas, I'm fairly sure that this isn't a habit that's going to survive my re-employment. Mark had a link to Maciej Ceglowski's Audioblogging Manifesto[mp3]. There's a text version:

But before you jump on the audioblogging bandwagon, remember this - the power of the Web is the power to choose. You make your own trails, and your own links. You read what you like and skip the boring bits. And audioblogging takes that power of choice away. Your listeners become a passive audience - they have no power to skim, they can't skip the boring parts, they can't link or excerpt your post effectively....

[ related topics: Music Weblogs Pop Culture ]

What I Want From The Next Generation of the Web:

So what do I hope for from Web 2.0? What do I want to invest in? Technology that actually reduces the technology footprint in my life.

Yet another argument in favor of invisible interfaces. We waste far too much information already, we need better systems for capturing and using all of the hints and cues we throw out into the world. And another random unconnected thought: That environment needs to adjust to individuals, not to people; culturally we need to come to grips with the idea that devices that work for some people don't work for others, and that preference plays a huge role in interface.

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment ]

At last: The answer to the nagging problem of declining voter participation in the American experiment. Solution? a working incentive program.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Community ]

David Chess had a link to: WaSP: Browse Happy. This is the closest I've seen the The Web Standards Project come to admitting that some of their earlier misguided campaigns created the current virus-laden monoculture from which we struggle to escape.

Now if we can just get Apple and KDE to fix all of the grossness in the KHTML rendering engine. Getting the units wrong is one thing, semi-randomly forgetting that <div elements are block elements is not.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Web development Web Standards Project - WaSP ]

Snitched from La Di Da: John Lott on media bias against guns

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Guns Archival ]

Think you have problems keeping your websites up to date? According to the relevant sections (scroll down to Section C, Paragraph 1) of the McCain-Feingold act, Congressfolk are restricted as to the types of updates permissible on their own websites, due to the 60-day silent period on unrestricted political advertising before the election. They can make "technical corrections", add press releases, or reprint material already in the Congressional records. Unless, of course, if they are runing unopposed, when the sky's the limit.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Privacy ]

I've mentioned Michael Klapholz before. Today Charlene needed some space to do homework, and I always enjoy hanging at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters, so I wandered down, and Michael Klapholz was playing. We got to chatting, and I asked if I could post a few excerpts. In fact, I should have asked if I could just put up the whole CD. Anyway, here are two clips, both off of Coffeehouse Classical an excerpt from Opus 35 (track 11), note particularly how he plays with tone in the sustained notes, and an excerpt from The Clap (track 9) to show off some of his faster licks.

Highly recommended. He says he's working on getting gigs in NYC, so y'all on that coast should check him out.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Work, productivity and environment New York San Anselmo Michael Klapholz ]

Apologies for the prolonged silence, it was a tough Monday and Tuesday, and today I'm getting my ducks in a row 'cause I'm flying to Seattle tomorrow to talk with Amazon on Friday.

There are a few of you out there, one in particular in transit from Burning Man, that I'm going to use for references. I'm trying to notify everyone, but don't act too surprised if...

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Books Aviation Heinlein Seattle Public Transportation ]

This isn't the normal purview of Flutterby, but Tara Calishain has, over the years, kept us well supplied with content both directly and indirectly, and I forgot my camera today so I couldn't even use pictures of the huge cloud of brown over the bay from this afternoon's hike with Phil for content this week (presumably from the fire up by The Geysers, Backup Brain has a wrapup).

So let's judiciously crop and cut and paste from the Research Buzz 300th Issue Press Release, including excerpts from Tara's new book, Web Search Garage, that promises "Four Things Yahoo Can Do that Google Can't". This I've gotta see.

[ related topics: Books Photography Nature and environment Invention and Design California Culture Pyrotechnics ]

Greetings from sunny Seattle (hah!). I'm staying at the W, which is appropriately pretentious. Got there via the bus for the whopping sum of $1.25 in roughly 20 minutes; I don't think you can get from the airport to downtown in a reasonable time in any other major city for that price. I'm connected via the good folks at Auricle internet and coffee bar on Pine somewhere up on Capitol Hill.

On the bus to the airport and while waiting at the gate I read Touching the Void. I missed the movie when it came through, and from the reviews I heard in the hiking group I think the book captures the situation much more strongly than the movie did. I now want to see the movie, but I don't think there's any way to convey the confusion, sense of desperation, or notions of survival in the visual form as strongly as the book did. For those of you who don't know the story, it's a recounting of two guys climbing a peak in South America, having an issue, and getting into a place where one of them decided he had to cut the rope to survive. The book is written by the guy who got cut loose, fell into a crevasse, was left for dead, and managed to crawl back down the glacier and over a boulder field to base camp with a mangled leg, partly as a way to assuage the conscience of the one who cut the rope.

Highly recommended, especially since recent life events have me re-examining some of my ethical structures. Nothing like "lifeboat ethics" in the real world to put things out there in black and white.

For the flight I zipped through The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World. Nothing terribly cosmic in it, but I've recently become enamored of the occasional reading of a book which restates the obvious just to make sure I'm thinking about such things. Since the book is about making sure that programmers don't forget that they exist in an ecosystem, especially when they're part of a larger development effort, it was a good book to read before the interview tomorrow.

I'm going to hang out in this area, see what other conversations I can get into, then wander down to the Convention Center bus station and catch transportation south to go hang out with Shawn for the evening.

Be good, and if ya ain't, name it after me.

[ related topics: Books Movies Ethics Software Engineering Seattle Public Transportation ]

5200 Miles and several planets later, we made it back from Burning Man. In many ways it was a great trip, Nancy, Jen and I had a blast, even though this was a quick trip compared to years past. Nancy has a real job and had to get back to work ASAP. The burn itself was different for me than the past two years. Partially because we camped in the burbs (8:00 and Pluto) instead of a theme camp, partially because Nancy and I were having fun together being tourists (although we were both very burn-ish, making lots of people glow and in other ways). But I also noticed that the community was much more touristy and rave/party focused then before. The geeks, the artists, the truly strange and wonderful people of Burning Man were there, but in much smaller numbers and with less to show/share/give...

The first days (Mon-Wed) were windy and dusty enough we did not get out much, other days and nights were great, the weather cool (and cold at night), I took some obligitory pictures, more like snapshots, but I usually did not see anything that really inspired me for some real photography. It's also easier to take pics when you are alone, it can be time consuming.

)^( will continue to be important in my life, it's lessons have become part of who I am, and I'll be back someday (next year ?? ), but I also realized that I have other adventures in my life, great friends to share them with and especially with Nancy.

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography Coyote Grits History Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Heinlein Travel Community ]

Sitting outside the Union Station Specialty's taking advantage of wifi from someone with the ESSID "MSHOME". Thanks, anonymous helper!

Anyway, thought I'd point y'all to Political Victory: From Here to Maternity, or why evolution apparently favors the Bush voters.

Of course the flip-side of this is that the reason population is growing on the coasts is all the kids from the red states fleeing.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Seattle ]

I just completed the first real job interview process I've ever been through, and I feel like layers of... something have been flayed away. I've learned a lot about myself in the past five and a half hours, hopefully what they've learned inclines them to have me join them, because Amazon sounds like one heck of a place to work, with some really fascinating and exciting problems, and a structure that's oriented towards some really effective development strategy.

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

Some notes on the flight: Amazon booked me on United. Even without the knowledge of their current financial difficulties, it only takes a single flight to tell that United has some serious management issues. In fact, just checking in, with a long line, and seeing that they were getting probably 60% utilization of their self-service terminals for the lack of a way to tell the people in the line that there were terminals free, shows me that someone's not paying attention to process. Contrast this to JetBlue which has a little "next available check-in slot" LED sign and runs a much higher utilization of resources.

[ related topics: Books Aviation Television ]

I mentioned in the comments to my "Wow" post that I got anonymous email which contradicted the thus far rosy view I've gotten about working at Amazon. I've already had one reader write to me about two weeks ago and tell me how cool the company is, but if you work there, especially (but not exclusively) if you haven't been part of my hiring process, please give me some constructive feedback on your experiences. All replies will be held confidential, and if you're paranoid you can go find a coffee shop with anonymous 802.11 up on Capitol Hill or wherever and post here under a dummy account, or find other ways to send me email with an obscured identity.

I'm taking this seriously: it's a shift in my life's focus, an attempt to put down some long-term roots, probably some hefty lifestyle changes. Just as I'm fairly sure that not all of the references I gave them will necessarily come back with "Dan walks on water and his feet don't leak", I appreciate any efforts towards giving me a balanced view of what I'm in for.

And perhaps if you feel like your talents are getting wasted there's the opportunity to find ways to resurrect and recast that work, and maybe there are ways of making that happen.

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

Loca Luna is a classy adult fetish clothing and accessories store that recently opened on the North Shore of Chattanooga.. prime downtownish shopping real-estate, which by itself is pretty impressive. And last night (Sunday) they threw a 'fashion show' party at downtowns hottest new venue: Club Voodoo. Nothing much by California standards, but here in the bible belt.. the belt loosened a little. Nothing like this has been this public around here before. - The Loca Luna website is not even close to being done, but I thought Flutterbarians might enjoy the pics anyway. Note in the pic posed outside of the cops sitting across the street..

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Invention and Design Law Enforcement California Culture Chattanooga Embedded Devices Fashion Clothing ]

Two bicycle notes today. The first is that I've had Peter Jon White: How To Fit A Bicycle up in a browser tab for ages, and just need to link to it here so that I can find it again when I need it.

The second is that Conrad Oho took me on a tour of tuning up our tandem yesterday. I'll be doing similar things with Linux on his computers in trade. Every time I watch someone tune a drive train I learn things, and Conrad's the first person who's managed to get that cheap front derailleur working while it's straight (I'd gotten it working with a weird cant to it). The other is that I've managed to true a wheel before, but I've never watched someone else do it. While I've used spoke sound a bit, he used it a lot, and it was cool to see some of that technique.

[ related topics: Free Software Machinery Pedal Power Race Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

I've now run across this on another site, but Frankie alerts me to life imitating satire: Remember the alleged Kenworth Pilgrimage? Now there's the International©7300 CXT pickup truck.

[ related topics: Humor moron Machinery ]

Now the true agendas are starting to leak out: Right wing wacko pharmacists and doctors trying to squelch "the pill":

Julee Lacey, a mother of two, had used the Pill for nine years when a pharmacist at her local chemist in Texas refused her prescription.

"She [the pharmacist] began to tell me she personally does not believe in birth control," says Ms Lacey.

"I was a little caught off-guard and shocked... I asked her again. She said: 'No, ma'am, I don't believe in birth control. I can't help you'...

Now we can go back to the '70s and try to ascribe the great strides that women have made towards equality in the culture in the past decades, but that's a hard sell to me. Go back a little further and start casting forward from the idea that women finally started to have control over their reproductive systems and you start to see what I see as the real roots of that change.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health History Political Correctness Sociology Current Events ]

Adam Curry had a link to an article about police discovering underground cinema in Paris. As in a theater in the old catacombs. Not terribly surprising, sounds like a good use of otherwise underutilized space.

[ related topics: Movies Law Enforcement Art & Culture ]

Boing Boing links to a BikeForums post that demonstrates how a Kryptonite lock can be opened in a few seconds with an ordinary Bic pen.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Now I know on Flutterby when we talk about tops and bottom it's usually something else but yesterday I had lunch and BEER with Dan(thanks Dan). Somewhere in our ramblings we talked about what industries were flourishing while others are begining to wither. Here they are with a few surprises, notably Water utilities and Home health Care.

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/market/top10Industries.asp

[ related topics: Health Coyote Grits Beer Economics ]

Along with the catching up with probably a solid year of "what's been happening?" and serious discussions about low friction versus high friction economics, at yesterday's lunch Todd and I also reminisced about some of our game ideas and notions. I forget where I first heard of it, but it's time to point out Kingdom of Loathing. In what other online game can you wield a homoerotic frat paddle? Or combine two 334 scrolls and a 30669 scroll to get a 31337 scroll, which summons the UB3r 31337 HaX0R? Or lay some smackdown on furries, hippies and yetis, and the protagonist:

...a 12-year-old boy who has somehow become one of the most powerful warriors in the world. He's on a quest to both save the world and somehow redeem himself from a past he doesn't remember....

To be fair, while the notion was cute I lost interest because the interface is way too slow and takes up way too much time to keep up with.

[ related topics: Humor Games Todd Gemmell Economics ]

Two from SF Weekly: First, remember that incident where the San Francisco District Attorney's office refused to prosecute strippers for prostitution? David Steinberg looks at the history and politics of the situation.

And Merchants of Passion looks at the business behind Passion Parties

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area Law California Culture ]

Damn it, Columbine, I didn't have that time to spare... Over at Shrunken Cinema, Columbine completes a long film viewing experience with Heavy Bondage, a huge look at all of the James Bond films. We disagree on quite a few essentials, for instance Columbine likes Goldeneye, which I find to be the film that destroyed all interest I used to have in the franchise, but along the way has lots to say about Bond.

[ related topics: Movies ]

The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11:

I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible.

[ related topics: Politics WTC/Pentagon attacks War ]

It's true: pretty women make men stupid:

Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an "irrational" way - they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.

Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.

Thanks to Rebecca Blood. Charlene and I were having the discussion about advertising and women's self-esteem recently, she's got an assignment for class which drags out the tired old clichés, and I wonder what the result of women being shown images of women would be.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Eric Idle can still make me laugh. Perhaps its the nostalgia of Monty Python or just the calmness of such harsh delivery but it made me laugh...

http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3

[ related topics: Music Monty Python Python ]

So if you haven't been following the news recently, it's worth poking your head up to see what looks like classic Karl Rove in action: Recently, CBS "uncovered" some memos alleged to be from Bush's National Guard commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, saying some unpleasant things about Dubya's record. Now Marian Carr Knox, Killian's secretary, says that the memos were fake, but that they accurately represented Killian's feelings about Bush:

"I know that I didn't type them," says Knox. "However, the information in those is correct.

This has all the hallmarks of a classic Karl Rove operation. Now the campaign kicks into high gear.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]

Two california porn companies fined for allowing unprotected sex on a movie set:

Susan Gard, agency spokeswoman, said the companies violated California law when actors performed sex scenes without using condoms. She said state law requires employers to protect workers who are exposed to blood or bodily fluids on the job.

"Any bodily fluid is considered infectious," she said. "That means barrier equipment must be used."

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

At the last minute, went to see Paul Nathan's latest show, "An Hour of Magic", at the Climate Theater last night. It felt a little rough around the edges, especially compared to the awesome "Dark Kabaret" that we saw last year, but we were still solidly entertained. And for more than an hour.

Then we came back to Fairfax and wandered downtown. Ran into The Shots playing at Cafe Amsterdam: "Irish cajun", and well worth both the cover charge and the CD we bought. A friend has been working on some music recommendation software that mines a database that's got 20 or 30k entries, and was showing it off to me yesterday. We had a heck of a time finding artists and tracks I liked enough that they had any entries... Link to that coming as soon as I hear that they want more traffic.

[ related topics: Music Movies Bay Area Software Engineering Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Clowns Databases Archival Burlesque Paul Nathan ]

I'm torn in this next election. I really believe that we're being asked to choose between two evils. Kerry has a civil liberties record so bad that John Ashcroft has opposed some of his more onerous attacks on freedoms. On the other hand, as a (formerly) die-hard Republican friend said recently, "Kerry has the potential to be the second worst president ever, that's why I'm voting for him". Never before has my "Cthulhu for President, don't settle for the lesser evil" bumper sticker seemed so apropos.

And I'm also one of those people who, every time I see a Che Guevera t-shirt, wants to liberally apply the clue-bat, because obviously the history class failed.

However, every once in a while these things come together in a way that I think is kinda cool. The Flutterby reader who participates as skrubly (and who was behind the late lamented "Hornswoggled.net"), is doing a fundraiser for MoveOn.org over at Designed By Monkeys, with assorted "Michael Moore as Che Guevera" images. Which seems to work so well, whether you like or hate Moore or Che.

[ related topics: Politics moron Clothing ]

Aaugh! Just when I thought I was getting close to my ideal development environment... So, there are reasons I both like and dislike Python, but I like its object syntax better than Perl, and it's easier to deploy apps on Windows, so I'm willing to overlook all of the places it's deficient (starting with documentation). wxWidgets is a "lowest common denominator" widget set, but it uses native widgets across platforms, and is well supported with wxPython. I'll forgive the lack of an MVC architecture for various core widgets, because that's functionality lacking in the Windows widget set. I can even accept that wxGlade has a long way to go before it catches up with Glade, and that the other GUIs for this purpose are even further behind.

However... What the hell is up with the lack of a good text editor control? I don't want much, The native wx.TextCtrl would almost do it, except that there's apparently no way to read back styles once they've been set. Scintilla goes even further afield, saying:

The biggest problem with Richedit and other similar controls is that they treat styling changes as important persistent changes to the document so they are saved into the undo stack and set the document's dirty flag. For source code, styling should not be persisted as it can be mechanically recreated.

but that behavior is exactly what I want: The ability to set up some simple styles, attach attribute information to those styles, maintain them in the edit stack, and have word wrap. Short of, yet again, switching back to GTK or something, anyone have a suggestion?

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

“If you all don’t lower your voices and cease calling me Satan, I will have to sing show tunes.”

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

A while ago (like, a few years), Ziffle gave me a "John Galt is coming" bumper sticker. This yesterday I walked out of Bogie's, the place we had breakfast (the hike got cancelled 'cause we had the first rain of fall and I hike with a bunch of wusses), towards my car, and heard "Who is John Galt?" from some people who I thought should know. Thanks, Ziffle!

[ related topics: Objectivism Dan's Life ]

Jim Standard just walked into San Anselmo Coffee Roasters with one of his "Spectral Generators", a bunch of prisms mounted on a board with room for a candle. Very cool. There's a North Bay Bohemian article from a year ago with a better picture than I could give you from here and a bit of background. I think it'd be even cooler if the prisms were more spectrally active rather than being salvaged from periscopes, but it's also hard to get the full effect here in the brightness.

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture California Culture San Anselmo ]

Okay, my mention of Designed By Monkeys got kinda buried, so I'll reiterate it (and the "Che Moore" theme) here, and offer up a pointer to Operation: Hammertime, home of the "Music In A Minor" T-shirt (Hint: The "A" in that phrase is an indefinite article, not a note).

[ related topics: Politics Humor Music Clothing ]

Must read: /. interview with Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]

Must read: From 2600 comes Notes From the RNC - The 8/31 Experience:

I was there to document the history that was being made. I had a mini-DV video camera, a Marantz tape deck that was strapped around my neck, and a digital camera that could also make thirty second movies. I was getting some good stuff too, not counting all the arguing. There was a tension growing in the crowd as police started implementing strange policies, like lining one of the exits with dozens of cops and forcing everyone coming and going to walk between them and not around them. One man got into an argument with a captain who told him to get moving. When the man asked for the captain's shield number, he was arrested. Just like that. The uneasy truce was definitely beginning to crumble. And, as any decent reporter will tell you, that's a situation you don't walk away from.

[ related topics: Politics Photography Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Video ]

San Francisco DA office doesn't think it can prosecute the "Naked Yoga Guy" who practices down near Fisherman's Warf.

[ related topics: Bay Area Nudity California Culture ]

I've switched to Python and GTK, and I'm finally feeling like I've found my preferred development environment for GUI apps. I also feel like, after a stretch of some serious doldrums, I've got my software development mojo back. As much as I hate some of Python's quirks (you want to know why significant whitespace sucks? reindenting blocks), the GTK bindings do a lot of things right.

Anyway, I currently have all of the images on my laptop indexed, with descriptions imported from various sources, and I'm going through and marking up the descriptions with "people", "place", "event" and "thing" attributes, where "event" might be "Alec's graduation" and "thing" is something like "turkey vulture" or "Airsoft". Now I can open up a list of all people, double-click on Charlene, and see all images in which Charlene appears. And if I mark a "place" attribute and location information hasn't yet been filled in for the image, it goes and looks up lattitude and longitude.

I need to do a little more interface work here to manage things like cleaning up different names for people, and then I can post some screen shots. And maybe by tomorrow I'll have the map editing functionality ported back over from wxWindows and enough data in the system that I can show you a topo of the area with thumbnails in the locations in which they were taken...

In other news, I owe several of you mail on the job search front. Stay tuned.

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

OK, so why HAVEN'T we seen video footage of the 9/11 Pentagon impact? Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but could there be anything to this? (The comment I got from my kid was, "Holy crap.")

[ related topics: Video ]

John Robb asked "...for some classic papers on on market psychology (more of a general focus than just stock and commodities markets).". Plucked from the replies to that query, all of which have good suggestions, are Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds and Daniel Kahneman's 2002 Nobel prize lecture, preserved here because I want to read both of 'em.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Economics ]

North Bay folks, mark your calendars and get yer butts out for some tunes three Fridays hence. Michael Klapholz is playing in San Rafael:

Em K

Rock 'n Classical

Friday October 8 9:30-midnite

The Kung Fu Lounge at Yet Wah restaurant

1238 Fourth St. (between B and C)

San Rafael

$5.00 cover

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Michael Klapholz ]

Yesterday evening Charlene and I were working on homework in the massage room, which is off-limits to cats for the sake of those with sensitivities. The cats felt left out, so they went out and got something to get our attention. In this case it happened to be one of the largest praying mantises I've ever seen. Unfortunately, the light was bad, so this was the best shot I got of a cat menacing the mantis.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

Going to Millbrae tomorrow for a party, and Charlene has convinced me that we need to do it on the tandem. Bike to the Golden Gate Ferry, then the San Francisco Bicycle Map tells us to head south on Embarcadero, past the ballpark, and take a right on third street until we pick up on the San Mateo County downtown bicycle route, down to Millbrae. About 20 miles (5 to the ferry, 15 after) there, and we can (hopefully) load ourselves and the bike on to BART back to the ferry. Trip report forthcoming.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Travel Bicycling Public Transportation Bicycling - Tandem ]

The article states that a chimp can bypass the Diebold e-voting system. Scary to me is that they are apparently using a generic MS-os and Access MDB files to store the records. Apparently, you can break out to Windows and run things fairly easily. If there was ever a reason for a simple single purpose computer, that simply logged voter choices to a log file with running CRC/hash/checksum on the file, this would be it. I'll bet getting "unfettered access to the machine" is not that hard. A real system would be very hard (nothing is impossible) to tamper with even with "unfettered access to the machine". I really like: ""We probably have the most secure system in the nation," - Laughing... Sounds like a call to hackers and phreaks. I predict that there will be some blatent and obvious errors introduced into actual elections like 500k voters in a 100k population town.. all voting for "None of the above".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Sports Databases Phreaking ]

Full day yesterday. Biked to Millbrae to Ken and Roger's house, where we hung out with the ex-Alvanon folks, came home, went to see Shaun of the Dead with Bill, and then 'cause Charlene said "I can't sleep immediately after seeing that", went down to Cafe Amsterdam for Ruckus.

So, excellent day, Ken's cheesecake was incredible, two and a half hours of Ruckus rocked, but let's talk for a moment about Shaun of the Dead.

So you have a couple of slackers stumbling their way through life. Something (we see snippets of the news behind them and as they flip through channels) happens, and zombies occur. It's part horror film, part romance, part comedy, part social satire, and it works on all of those levels. Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a slacker about to hit 30, stumbling his way through a dead-end electronics salesman job while defending his couch-surfing friend Ed (Nick Frost) and trying to spend as much time drinking beer at the pub as he can. Liz (Kate Ashfield), his girlfriend, wants more out of life. And it takes all hell breaking loose to move Shaun to be the sort of take-charge person she can respect.

One of the things that makes the lead-in to the actual gore creepy is the social commentary, as Shaun goes through life oblivious to what's happening around him we're never sure when the zombification of the neighborhood has really started. And the film plays up the similes between horror movie and real life wonderfully, to my mind peaking in one scene involving flickering lights and a horde of approaching zombies that looks remarkably like a crowd shot at your average concert. Sometimes the satire is more subtle, sometimes more heavy-handed, but luckily the film never stoops to self-parody. It plays the plight of Shaun, Ed, Liz, and a cast of supporting folks as they struggle to find safety at the pub straight, and while the humor is sometimes about realizing that these situations are indeed the rational responses to the horror movie clichés, and sometimes we laugh at the characters, I still found the people sympathetic and believable.

Bill, I and others in the audience spontaneously applauded when the credits rolled, and I walked out smiling, saying "that movie was wrong on so many levels", but those levels are the same ways in which In-a-gadda-da-Oswald is "so wrong", it reveals things we'd rather stay hidden.

And it works. Really well. Recommended, unless you're really turned off by graphic gore, and then maybe you should see it for the other three aspects of it and expect to go hang out and listen to Ruckus for a few hours so you don't sleep on images of intestines being eaten.

[ related topics: Humor Movies Sociology ]

I would say that the one on the right down there is the very definition of "optimism":

The hike this morning was up Hill 88, with a side trip to look down on Hawk Hill, where they trap and tag raptors for study. The Marin headlands are where hawks congregate until the flying conditions are right to get altitude to head south across the Golden Gate, so it's a great place to observe 'em. We saw a boatload of red tails (more than turkey vultures today, which was shocking), a couple of harriers, a kestrel or two... The only problem was that I realized that aside from this particularly vocal raven, good bird pictures start with $10k in glass.

Any day which starts hiking up out of the fog (did I ever tell y'all about the day in that area that the fog was so thick we got lost and ended up in the next valley over?) and includes that many incredible bird sightings and even a few late-blooming wildflowers in the otherwise "golden" (brown) hills, like this prevalent wild pea variant, is pretty darned good.

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

This weekend was the first one we've had where we weren't struggling to finish something, so when I got home from the hike Charlene was raring to go out. We settled on a trek down to the San Francisco Asian Art Museum to catch the last day of Geisha: Behind the Painted Smile. We were both disappointed.

I realize that large art museums aren't in the business of entertainment, nor really education, they're in the business of hyping up the art of their large donors so that said donors' collections will have greater value, but the context and content of this exhibit were the most disappointed I've been since the Ansel Adams exhibit at SFMOMA. And unlike the Adams exhibit, I wasn't really familiar with the subject matter.

Beyond the basic problem, that with better flow control and exhibit layout they could have increased their viewer throughput dramatically, it came down to my usual complaint: All curators should be required to read the basic texts of information design. Start with consistent language and if you're using terms that differ because of cultural context from their normal meanings, then define them; this applies specifically to "courtesan" and "prostitute". If you're expecting huge crowds, where people will be standing in front of works reading each legend, how about making larger panels up above with detail information so you don't keep repeating "Edo (now Tokyo)". How about some maps so that when you talk about regions of Edo, we have some sense of geography? If it were just one section, like Yoshiwara, then fine, give me a label and move on, but especially if you're going to reference geography, then I want more information.

How can you have an entire exhibit about how geisha weren't sexual despite constant pairings with "courtesan" and "prostitute" and not mention shunga, even once for context?

And while it's great to see a kimono hung flat, one or two on mannequins for a little more context, even if they were modern day reproductions, would have been really nice to see.

Overall we came away with more questions than we went in with, feeling like the descriptions and prose had glossed over large chunks of history and context with some sort of agenda.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Bay Area Sociology Art & Culture Graphic Design Education Maps and Mapping ]

I've been waiting for this: Over at brainwagon, MarkV has started recording audio "shows", and while I find Adam Curry's shows interesting for the novelty value, Mark's notes are actually interesting. What I also find interesting is that the topics he rambles on aren't things he'd write about, because the formality of that would require more rigor than the topic demands. So we're richer for having heard the partial thoughts.

Anyway, I now need to make sure that I can mount the ZVUE under Linux(update: on my desktop box modprobe usbcore; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbstick "just worked") and write an iPodder type thingie that'll also work with video so I'll be ready when the video blogs start.

[ related topics: Weblogs Coyote Grits Work, productivity and environment Video ]

I know this is probably entirely predictable, but I am just SO EXCITED! KQKE (no website yet) began broadcasting in the SF Bay Area today at 960 AM: AirAmerica Radio has finally come to the Bay Area and I couldn't be happier! I had to be in the car for about 3 hours today, and listened the whole time. My 15-year-old and I were in stitches at the PSAs and the musical interludes, and shouted "YES! YES!" at regular intervals during the talking, with big grins on our faces. It was like a stream of fresh air from which I took a deep and cleansing breath.



I couldn't possibly listen all day long, but in intervals it is exactly what I need to hear. It is "All Bush Bashing, All The Time", and there is very little that resonates with me any better. The announcers and hosts are literate, informed, occasionally funny and sarcastic, and some are quite vitriolic. Are some of them disrespectful? Yep. Is some of their talk "diatribe"? Yep. That's the nature of the Talk Radio beast, and they easily measure up. I can completely understand how many people tuning in would get all riled up and cuss at the radio and turn it off -- rather like I did whenever I came across "standard" Talk Radio of the Limbaugh variety. But y'know what? I don't give a hoot about them. It is refreshing to feel there is finally a brave, political station FOR ME, talking to me about things I understand and agree with. NPR is wimpy next to these guys: I needed to hear that PASSION in their voices, and it thrills me. I don't feel so alone anymore.



So yeah, I don't expect many, if any, of you will agree with me, but I am thrilled they're on the air, and thrilled they've finally come to the Bay Area.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Politics Nature and environment Bay Area moron California Culture Automobiles ]

I finally got around to uploading pics from the Costa Rica trip from months ago, sure miss having ethernet to my servers, took all night to upload images. More pics coming tonight.. Gotta clean off my laptop hard drive so I can use it for other things. Friday I start a 3 month project (set of projects?) in an almost a real job style.

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein Travel ]

I'm now getting to the point where I have to drop back and do some graphic design work, but my photo manager is progressing. You can see the map view, with images laid out over a topo of San Francisco, and a detail view which shows off in garish primary colors the hypertext description editing, all subjects then become cross referenceable in subject views. For sticklers, some of the lat/lon positions are wrong because my first pass at placing things was simple keyword searching.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Bay Area Software Engineering Graphic Design Maps and Mapping ]