Flutterby™! From 2005-02-01 to 2005-02-28

My parents have always had friends from Eastern Europe, so as I was growing up I had a reasonable diet of tales from the other side of the Iron Curtain. But in the intervening years, especially since the wall came down, it's been easy to forget what government gone horribly wrong can be. I finished Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million last night. It's a look by Martin Amis at the reign of Iosef Vissarionavich Stalin. But Amis was the son of another famous novelist, Kingsley Amis, and came of age knowing Christopher Hitchens and other famous lefties, so it's also a memoir an reaction to the apologists for the Soviet Union that came out of the 1960s. The last two chapters are a letter to Hitchens and Amis the elder, and in the letter to Hitchens he recounts an episode where Hitchens was giving a speech an referred to someone as "an old comrade". Amis picks up the story:

Afterward I asked Conquest, "Did you laugh?"

"Yes," he said.

And I said, "And so did I."

Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many "an old blackshirt," the audience would have... Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher—or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little mustache and the big mustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old iea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

I was originally going to take this critique off into pointing out that while graphically illustrates, drawing on all sorts of sources, the horrors of the Soviet Union, he doesn't do anything to illuminate why a nation would allow that sort of evil to occur. One man didn't put 5% of the population in slave labor camps, didn't kill and punish by quota. It took the coordinated efforts of many people to deliberately screw up harvests, to starve many countries under that huge nation, and then when the United States stepped in to help, to make sure that those supplies didn't get distributed either.

But as I was retyping that quote above, I realized that maybe he did.

I was going to tie this whole thing together in one long distrusting bit, pointing out that not all of the alleged brutalities of, say, Uday Hussein occurred as they were originally reported but that we have pretty strong record of such things happening elsewhere. I was going to balance that by mentioning that buyying into false realities created by politicians who deliberately pervert and change language is also a recipe for disaster.

But I don't have a conclusion. I can, however, recommend the book as a great shit-stirrer.

[ related topics: Politics Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality History moron Sociology Dictators ]

Yowza! Flutterby is now the first LID enabled weblog, and as soon as I check these changes in will be the first LID enabled weblog system! I'm holding off on making your Flutterby login an automatic LID identity (that sounds redundant, like "ATM machine") for a number of reasons, if it seems like a good idea I do have a bunch of the code in place.

And for those of you who haven't been watching closely, LID^tm is the single sign-on and identity solution that you get to control! And I'm psyched and now want to get together with Johannes Ernst to see where we can take this!

[ related topics: Weblogs LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

Tom Negrino is thinking about a Mac Mini for a home server, partially justifying the cost of a new machine based on electricity savings. I've got a better suggestion: How about a Via Eden based Linux or FreeBSD machine? Sure, the stock case for a built-up machine from, say, iDot is a little larger, but you'll save both capital costs (for $500 you could have a gig of RAM and a 120 gig hard drive!) and operating expenses (probably sub 15 watts, depending on your hard drive), and have a PCI slot to play with as well!

Okay, I'll stop trolling now.

[ related topics: Macintosh Cool Technology Embedded Devices - Via Eden Economics ]

Quick: will "insurgents" behead an actual prisoner or a 12" action figure? Only Cody from Dragon Models knows for sure!

The recent death of architectural gadly Phillip Johnson and our discussion the other week of Frank Lloyd Wright made me notice anew a curious design motif here in the Chicago area: Prairie-Style Lite. One example is the picture shown here, the village hall in the suburb of Lincolnwood Illinois. I passed at least three such buildings in a few miles the other day. The design scheme is a low, prominent red roof, darker brick set off with some lighter stone just under the roof line, and some strongly vertical windows. The insides of such buildings are perfectly ordinary, they certainly don't subscribe to Wright's theories about decor or room flow. Some are pretty nice, like this one (its much nicer in spring), while others are rather tacky, looking like they bolted the roof on.

What's intriquing is that these formerly radical designs are now just another option in an architect's portfolio. You can order up a Wrightesque building, just like a faux Victorian with modern insulation or a bogus Spanish hacienda on the icy shores of Lake Michigan. I also note that nobody is copying the Guggenhiem or the Marin Civic center; Wright's ideas might have evolved but the popular taste prefers things he was doing nearly a century ago. Sic Transit Modernism.

[ related topics: Fabrication Architecture Architecture - Frank Lloyd Wright ]

I've been tasked with getting MacClade running on a lab full of PCs running Windows 2000 (can't change OSes). Being at a University, I'm trying to do this as cheaply as possible (i.e., free). I've been playing with SoftMac and Basilisk without much luck so far. Fortunately, I do have piles and piles of old 680x0 Macs that I can use the ROM licenses from and the license for MacClade is actually MacClade Version 3, so all I need to do is emulate a 680x0 Mac running MacOS 7.5 (have licenses).

Does anyone know of: A. a better way to emulate a Mac or B. a better genetics program for the PC. This is for the head of the Biology department, so there's not much momentum to change programs.

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering Sports Macintosh Education ]

Best Headline Ever! SFGate.com tagged an article about "Pink Pistols", a group for gay gun owners and enthusiasts, with "The Right to Arm Bears". Giggle.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Guns ]

The latest for all you incipient narcoleptics out there: An alarm clock whose ringer can only be deactivated by assembling a jigsaw puzzle atop the clock. The catalog page for this diabolical contraption warns that it might be a choking hazard for little children. And to the guy who gave it to you when you stuff it (still ringing) down his throat!

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

This morning Charlene said "I need a vacation, where can we go?" So we looked in a couple of books, and picked Castle Rock State Park. Had a great hike down to the waterfall and back up through the boulder field to Castle Rock itself. Lots of folks out climbing, and the view from the waterfall out towards Goat Rock reminded me a lot of Chattanooga, with all of the fantastic sandstone crags out in that area.

I didn't bring along a tripod, so there were some "could be great art" shots that were handheld way too long, but we were there to be in the day.

On the way back down from the Santa Cruz mountains, we saw the sign to Hakone Gardens, and on a whim pulled in there. Cringed a little bit at the $7 parking fee, but... it was well worth it. The best Japanese garden we've ever wandered through. A great bamboo grove, with all sorts of different bamboo, the fish pond was truly spectacular, and even in this season, before the flowers, there was some good foliage. Highly recommended.

We stopped for dinner in Saratoga. an extremely yuppie tourist town. Walked past a coffee shop that served $7 green salads, several art galleries, two restaurants that wanted $20 for a plate of pasta, antique shops, and there, nestled amongst the day spas was the "Saratoga Rose International Gourmet Market #2". A Persian deli that had a few tables in the middle for "eat here". Very yummy, and highly recommended if you ever find yourself there.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Bay Area California Culture Chattanooga Flowers ]

The weather is sunny and clear with blue skies, and today's hike was Big Rock Ridge, which we've done a gazillion times before, so no pictures from there today. Therefore, two images from last week on Mount Burdell, when it was also sunny and clear, but the scenery was fresher:

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

Sometimes headlines will confuse you. Case in Point: This recent headline from the Guardian; "England need faith and change but offer defiance". I was amazed!. The Guardian calling for a return to religious values? A revival of Churchillian calls for sacrifice against overwealming odds? Nope. It was a story about the Rugby football tournament. Oh well.

[ related topics: Religion Movies Sports ]

Two more from Hakone Gardens:

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

Something else to add to the "electronics I want to build": 1.5V amplifier schematic with automatic volume. For the tandem, so that we can wear headsets and talk back and forth over the wind, but still be able to yell without doing bad things to each other's hearing.

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

I've been ignoring the calls to get Skype, but the rat boys got me Warcraft III, a very non-subtle "spend more time with us", and told me I needed to get Skype. So I did, and this morning Meuon and I had our first Skype call.

I'm impressed. It works, the software is what it needs to be and nothing more, the audio is fine. I need to find a really good headset, one with a high gain mic that I don't have to be breathing on to have reasonable audio (maybe I need to start looking for a good lav mic and combine that with, say, Etymotic ear buds), but so far I'm a fan.

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

A plea those of you who use or have used services on my colo server: Can you send me email describing what you think you're using? I'm at the "I need to upgrade some stuff" stage of frustration with a few things, and I want to make the resulting configuration as clean as possible.

In the process of linking to a cheat sheet on the difference between sex and gender, A Capital Idea also quotes from The American Heritage Book of English Usage with some good distinctions.

[ related topics: Language Sexual Culture ]

Under pressure from the board of directors, Carly Fiorina resigns from the lead spot at HP, leaving the gutted carcasses of both HP and Compaq in her wake.

Okay, one more distraction, then I'll stop jumping from work to other stuff and back and be able to focus today. For quite a while, the Sunday morning hikers have agreed that Marvin's in Novato, California is the best breakfast place we've been to. And we've known that a lot of it had to be kitchen technique; even scrambled eggs there were better. This Sunday we sat at the counter and got to watch the cooks at work, and I'm blown away by the level of communication that happens in that small kitchen, but I also discovered their secret for why their scrambled eggs are so good: a milkshake blender.

Yesterday I was looking for a little more for breakfast, and realized that our Oster blender came with the metal pitcher and warped disk blade, so I used that to prep the eggs (and don't be shy about beating them 'til they froth a lot), tossed them into a hot well greased pan, let them sit 20 seconds or so, beat vigorously and scraped the bottom with a wooden paddle for 10 or 15, gave it another few of sitting, beat once more, then turned down the heat and let set.

That's definitely the way to do eggs. It's a bit tough to do omelettes that way, because you end up with a thicker egg mass, but I also discovered the trick Marvin's uses there: Rather than trying to fold the omelette in the pan, fold it as you slide it out, ending up with the layer mostly upside down. I'd never noticed before that it wasn't a conventional folded omelette, and my guess is that people are too busy noticing the texture to notice the lack of full wrap.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area California Culture ]

I did some ramblings on LID and Trust, if anybody cares.

[ related topics: Net Culture LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

And just for completeness, with all of my focus on LID recently I should look back to Drizzle: A response to Hail Storm, which met with a resounding "yeah, whatever".

[ related topics: LID (Lightweight IDentity) Microsoft Hailstorm ]

The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex.

5. "Emotions are the mind's near-instantaneous evaluation of a perceived fact or idea as either good or bad for the individual. Hence, my wet panties."

[ related topics: Objectivism Humor Sexual Culture ]

A thread over on the Chugalug mailing list got me to write something that's been bobbling about in my head for a while: Open Source: Not about TCO.

[ related topics: Free Software Economics ]

There's now a LID Wiki (which, ironically, doesn't yet use a LID for sign-in...), and I've talked with Johannes Ernst, and I think we'll be able to get something that's acceptable all the way around in terms of licensing issues.

[ related topics: LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

This one's for Jay, because it echoes something he's been saying for a while: Michael S. Malone writes Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?.

[ related topics: Business Microsoft ]

Okay, it's time to upgrade software on Flutterby. If bits of Flutterby or other services hosted on the server don't seem to be working, I'll get it worked out this weekend.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta Work, productivity and environment ]

Okay, we should be back. Not sure about the NNTP, if any of you folks are having trouble, holler and I'll fix it tomorrow.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

New strain of HIV detected in New York, more resistant than normal to the usual AIDS drugs, and develops into AIDS faster. That latter bit means it's probably less likely to spread or be as dangerous, because people will know that they're infected sooner.

[ related topics: Drugs Health New York ]

Spent the weekend with Nancy and Maureen and Zell and some other "couples", talking about the the State of Grace Document, The Work, and "Open Space" (link 1 - link 2). Although the real purpose was Nancy and I beginning working on a joint State of Grace Document together, I was intrigues by some of the things I learned, including the concept of a "Story" as how we understood how something (anything) is good or bad.. or even how we reference things that are neither. These were things that I "know" and "grok", but had not actually thought about in these ways. I can't take these thoughts to the absolute that the evangelists of these thoughts do, but they do make sense and help me understand why I think some of the things I know better. Question everything. Question reality. Create a new one based one what you find is 'True'. Done a lot of that over the years, but not encapsulated it the way they did and that was good for me. I wanted to specifically share the links to the State of Grace document, both for personal relationships, but for business and co-worker ones. It helped me think through many of the issues I am having where I am working, as well as the original personal goal of living "in a state of grace" with Nancy (who wrote the nicest things about me.. {blush}. There. That was my big touchy feely sharing moment.. Next: the group hug. [ H U G ].. and now back to working on techno-thingamabobs.

[ related topics: Drugs Coyote Grits Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]

As Ziffle pointed out in the Objectivist sex thread, Ayn Rand was born a hundred years ago (February 2, 1905). Long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn was chronicling the evils of the Soviet Union, in fact, back when many in the west referred to it as "the great experiment", Rand showed the evils, in We The Living, but then went on to show why such a system would be inherently evil.

I believe that there are places that Rand was wrong, that she twisted her philosophy to support a system she admired rathern than acknowledging that sometimes there are no pure solutions to some of the problems life poses (notably her argument in support of patents in The Objectivist Newsletter was amazingly week), but in general I prefer her utopia to the others oft proposed.

Besides which, I like long sweeping verbose utopian novels.

• Who's Afraid of Ayn Rand, the article Ziffle linked to.
• Reason Magazine's Ayn Rand at 100, which has lots more in the side bars.

[ related topics: Ziffle Politics Objectivism ]

I have discovered the ultimate french toast:

1. Make your bread as normal, two and a half cups of warm water, a tablespoon of honey, yeast, let that proof, with about a quarter whole wheat flour to three quarters a good high protein bread flour.
2. About the second kneading, add a tablespoon or two of fennel.

Bake that, let the loaf sit out about two days so it'll dry out a bit, slice thick, then make up your custard with just a touch of ground cloves and cinnamon/cassia bark. That fennel adds just the right nose.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Nancy's comments in the Touchy Feely Mumbo Jumbo thread made me think that, in honor of the Hallmark marketing moment, we should get some musings on geeks in love going here. Might help the partners of geeks understand the geeks better, and might help the geeks understand themselves better.

One of the reasons I linked to that The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex is that all of those things, to me, read as true. And the incongruence of those truths coming up against the cultural meanings we have for sex was funny. If you have to say "..., hence my wet panties", you're either about to get turned down as weird, or you're talking to someone who gets it, in which case the foregoing explanation is superfluous.

But it's also incongruous because it pits rationality against something that many people would rather stay unknowable. The local free weeklies out here have competing covers in light of today: The North Bay Bohemian has a Sex: 2005 issue, in which it looks at Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, and pits Best American Erotica 2005 against the Mammoth Book of Best new Erotica Vol.4, while the Pacific Sun tackles "The Mystery of Love".

But the teaser for the latter is "A-Lea Silas thinks we should embrace the mystery of love rather than see it as a riddle that needs to be solved". This being Flutterby, I'm fairly sure that a good number of you think that there's nothing that isn't a riddle that needs to be solved, and most of us probably have the string of disassembled household appliances, automobiles and relationships to prove it.

So of those two papers facing off for readership, we're far more likely to choose the option that doesn't discount the possibility of understanding. Because we have a long experience of people telling us "I just don't understand [computers | how to set the clock on my VCR | ...]", and we know we understand the world at a deeper level than that.

And we're not willing to accept other cultural myths on the same level. We find it hard to accept that it's a good idea to pay two or three times the going rate for a good dinner because our mates want it to happen on one particular day of the year. We see no reason that we should profess our love via the Beanie Babies of the gemstone world, so we'll eschew diamonds: Someone we love wouldn't ask us to support colonialism, civil strife and genocide for a chunk of rock which has artificially high sales costs and no resale value because of tacky marketing.

(And, frankly, if you want clarity and aesthetics, cubic zirconium looks better with or without a loupe. And I've mentioned befoere the irony in diamond advertising, and many of us "sensitive new age guys" like to keep our coercive sex in the realm of "carefully negotiated with safewords".)

Further, at least in my relationship, it drives Charlene nuts when she expresses an emotional need, especially in terms of how she's relating to someone else, and I say "I realize you want emotional closure, but what action would provoke the reaction you're looking for?". Because, once again she knows that my intellectual approach is the right long term tack, but it doesn't feel right.

So, here's our chance for some Q&A (we'll leave the T&A for another thread): Nancy et al, lay those "I don't understand you guys" questions on us and we'll try to explain.

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism Books Sexual Culture Sociology Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

I bought a combo VCR/DVD player from Sears yesterday, and was rummaging through the instruction book last night. One intriguing feature is the ability to change the DVD menus into many, many lanquages by entering a 4-digit code. Besides the usual Spanish, French or English, I also had the option of choosing Abkazi, Azerbijani, Croatian, Scots Gaelic, Singhalese, Xhosa (with the click), Faeroese, Greenlandic, Icelandic (but not Vinlandic), Greek, Afrikaans, Zulu and Yiddish and many more. Even more interesting were the options for Esperanto, Interlinqua and Volapuk, three concocted, synthetic lanquages. Are there enough Volapuk readers to need this feature? Then I saw the capper. I can program my VCR in Latin! My Jesuit teachers would be so happy. Of course, setting a recording for the Ides of Januarius might be a bit tricky.....

[ related topics: Language Hardware Hackery Television ]

Mendocino County considers standards for organic marijuana.

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events California Culture ]

Went out last night and saw the perfect Valentine's Day date movie: The Aviator. Think The Wall, but with airplanes.

Overall, I liked it. The movie captured a struggle with obsessive compulsive behavior beautifully, and, for all that the first half screamed "Oh look, there's Jack Dawson flying airplanes", I thought that once he was allowed to act, rather than just look pretty, Leonardo DiCaprio was amazing at getting inside the behavior of someone who knows he's going crazy, but has to transcend that to fulfil his passion.

Martin Scorcese on the other hand, needs to get some new camera moves. That shit worked well in The Age of Innocence(and didn't work in The Color of Money), but about the umpteenth time we see the "spiral staircase" move around the airplanes, it becomes monstrously distracting. In fact, one of the previews was for Kingdom of Heaven, which looks awful, but my reaction was "Oh, look, Ridley Scott did a Gladiator remake". Scorcese is a better director than Scott, but this movie very clearly showed that Scorcese never really loved aviation and airplanes, and that visually he's essentially a one-trick pony.

And it was cool, in this administration of drafting legislation to help specific companies and lobbyists, to have the defeat of such evil be a pivotal moment. Alan Alda played the corruption well, although we were still aware that it was Alda playing a role (luckily, not Hawkeye Pierce).

Enjoyed it, didn't notice its length.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Science Movies Coyote Grits Invention and Design Aviation Work, productivity and environment Currency Archival ]

Our Godless Constitution (thanks to More Like This).

[ related topics: Religion Law Civil Liberties ]

Hot damn! How to make a Mac Mini useful? Install Debian Linux on it.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source Macintosh ]

Jay turns us on to the recently passed H.R 418. Section 102 reads:

SEC. 102. WAIVER OF LAWS NECESSARY FOR IMPROVEMENT OF BARRIERS AT BORDERS.

Section 102(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1103 note) is amended to read as follows:

`(c) Waiver-

`(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.

`(2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court, administrative agency, or other entity shall have jurisdiction--

`(A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or

`(B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.'.

How did your representative vote?

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]

In light of that last entry, The Brad Blog points out that CNN has been running the same image for alleged nuke plants in Iran and North Korea, and that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is also reusing the same image.

[ related topics: Politics Journalism and Media ]

Harmon Leon goes on a porn set.

"You guys are doing great!" says the cameraman. "Look over your shoulder, Cameron."

The tempo builds. It builds! It builds! It builds!

"I got a muscle cramp!" Cameron suddenly cries.

Once again, everything is brought to a dead halt.

"Kind of walk around and put some weight on it," yells the director.

Apologetic, Cameron hops around naked. The boom guy takes time to read the paper. One of the grips naps on the couch.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture California Culture ]

Hey, you know all of those recommendations that the elderly should get flu shots? And all of that hoopla this past season about running low? Well...:

Logically, doctors would expect flu deaths to drop as more older people are vaccinated annually. But researchers found the influenza death rate fairly stable between 1968 and 2001, even though the percentage of seniors getting shots increased from 15 percent in the 1970s to 65 percent in 2001.

(via)

So as we see studies which show that half of all bankruptcies are attributed to medical costs (via) maybe we should be thinking about ways that we can divorce policy from drug company sales better, so that we're dispensing less useless medication as a matter of government recommendation.

[ related topics: Health moron Current Events ]

I know Dan's been playing around with georeferencing his photos and I'm not surprised that other folks are doing it (especially with the convergence of digital cameras, GPS and WAP enabled cell-phones). GEOsnapper does an amazing job of putting the pieces together in a really fun, and rather snappy, way.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping Archival ]

Hey, Bill: Baja Fresh is Wendy's and Chipotle is McDonalds. Just from the basic economics of food quality, notably that while a large company can impose standards on their suppliers, they can't pick and choose quality from individual lots, and that they can't optimize their menu to what's best on the current market, it stands to reason that your local taqueria has better food.

[ related topics: Food Economics McDonald's ]

There are some days when the only thing left to do is laugh: Whitehouse names former Iraq ambassador John Negroponte to be the top U.S. intelligence official.

[ related topics: Politics moron Civil Liberties ]

I didn't bother to precisely date my first entry, so I only know that it happened sometime in February of 1998. Wow: Seven years.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Flutterby Meta ]

Nudist restaurant in New York. Short on details, sounds like they rented out a place for an evening, but... I wonder how this story made its way into the press. Something doesn't feel quite right about the story.

[ related topics: Business Food Nudity Current Events New York ]

In the teaser for an article about "Jeff Gannon" by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, SFGate.com says:

Scandal erupts around nude images of a White House journalist that appeared on web sites.

And it's true, the article is shallow and focuses on that. In fact, so much so that it misses the whole point of the "Jeff Gannon" affair: It's not about the nude pictures and the escort work, it's that the Whitehouse bypassed their own stated policies to put a reporter hired by a "news organization" that's owned by GOPUSA in press converences who provided a foil for passing false information and who squeezed out legitimate questions with queries that appear to have been planned as dialog.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Coyote Grits History Nudity Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Race Real Estate ]

New York Times pays $820,000 each for 500 weblogs with annoying frame-based nav-bar-stealing user interfaces as it buys About.com.

So that brings me to a few musings on search engines. I played a little bit with the MSN Search, and I think it's worse for my purposes than Google, but it did show me why people like Mark Cuban keep investing in search companies: There are lots of ways to improve the search experience.

So, a suggestion: How about the ability to exclude URLs from searches. Not just "-site:...", but a wholesale list. Two, actually. One is sites I never want to see, the aforementioned About.com falls into that class. The second is "spare me the obvious", just for this search let me keep Amazon and IMDB and the like off the list so I don't have to make my way to page 3 to find the good stuff.

[ related topics: Weblogs New Economy ]

Watched Heaven last night, the one made in 2002, directed by Tom Tykwer(of Run Lola Run fame), and written as part of a planned trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Charlene had seen it with Jeanne in the theater, it kept coming up in conversation, and with L'Enfer(aka "Hell"), the second in the trilogy coming out soon, I wanted to see it so we could all go see it in the theater.

I have trouble recommending it. The directing was tight. In the inciting incident we have a setup in which we know something's going to happen in 5 minutes, and as the seconds count down the turns and twists are great. The attention to detail, and the visual details which heighten the suspense are wonderful.

But, without giving away spoilers, the ending was a cop-out that can only be justified in that Eastern European metaphorical sense, and until I've seen the rest of the trilogy and know if they tie some of the details of the story that weren't resolved in this movie together I feel like it's a beautiful piece of craft, but falls well short on the art scale.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies tolkien Nature and environment Theater & Plays Art & Culture ]

I recently acquired a nice Sniper-ish Colt AR-15 5.56mm 24" floating barrel, scope on rails, match trigger.. after a long hiatus from shooting, I am craving a day at a range or better. While getting boned up on things I have forgotten (and a lot: never knew ), I found the Ammo Oracle. It's extremely well done, rings very true and accurate, but also has some incredibly tongue in cheek humor pointing at the odder part of the gun-geek-nerd paranoid crowd. Some favorite quotes:

"What works in deer may or may not work in humans. The same goes for hogs, varmints, pigs, dogs, zombies (headshots only please), and aliens (particularly grey skins- go for the big eyes, not center mass)."

And another:

""SHTF" is an acronym for the "Shit Hits The Fan," meaning a natural disaster, a catastrophic breakdown in civil service, a military takeover, a New World Order, or an invasion by brain eating zombies that makes life an exercise in "every man for himself." (Also known as "The End Of The World As We Know It" or TEOTWAWKI--easily characterized as akin to a third NSYNC and Britney Spears tour.) "

Still, an excellent large single web page with an amazing depth and clarity to it.. if you are into such things.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Humor Coyote Grits Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture Boats Guns Databases Dogs ]

One of the personality problems I struggle with is my inability to see value in many of the things that have worth to the general population. I remember once hearing on some radio report about 419 scams someone assert that many of the people who fall for these things are actually fairly wealthy because they have the sort of mind that's constantly looking for such opportunities and this is similar to many of the opportunities that actually work. Whereas the first time I ran across one of these, and it was actually a letter with a legit stamp and postcard from Nigeria, my reaction was immediate and negative.

So in checking for that reference to Mark Cuban I saw Mark on the NHL dispute with the NHLPA and the resulting lockout say:

I’m re-upping my Dallas Stars season tickets and if it comes to it, I will enjoy watching replacement players as much at the American Airlines Center as I did watching the Cowboys with replacement players in Texas Stadium.

Which to my mind is saying "the brand is more important than the play". Now I don't much care about professional sports of any ilk, so obviously it's part of my flaw that I see value in the abilities of the player. Mark, who's bank account has quite a few more zeroes than me, acknowledges that he'd watch high school players tumble over each other if it were associated with the right brand.

No conclusion, just another data point in my search for understanding why I'm not an effective salesperson.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Consumerism and advertising Sports ]

Once again, the GAO proves itself the best value for tax dollars out there: Warning about faux TV newscasts: Federal agencies told they must clearly state source of reports:

The two best-known cases of such video news releases -- one concerning the new Medicare law, the other an anti-drug campaign by the Bush administration -- drew sharp rebukes from the GAO after separate investigations last year found that the agencies involved had violated the law.

Those cases were followed by disclosures that the government had paid at least one conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote the administration's No Child Left Behind education measure and had put two other conservative writers on the federal payroll to help develop programs.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Television Education ]

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that it's on tape that G.W. Bush admits to smoking marijuana:

In the tape, Bush mocks former Vice President Al Gore -- who fought him for the presidency in 2000 -- for admitting he smoked marijuana.

On the other hand, it's nothing we didn't already know.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics moron ]

It's about a company that used to be named "PH", but now calls itself "Kumquat". With the recent departure of CEO Karla Fidora (has accepted a job at Amtrak: "I have a lot of concern about the asset portfolio which for some reason seems to be overloaded with track, locomotives and passenger cars.") the company seems poised for growth:

http://www.everythingispossible.com/

[ related topics: Humor New Economy Net Culture ]

Dang, I think I've seen more movies in the past week than I saw in the previous year. On Saturday evening we watched Blue, trying to see if it was the director or the writers that made Heaven so compelling. Based on that we're pretty convinced that it was Tom Tykwer's direction, and the flaws in Heaven were in the story.

I've been wanting to see The Five Obstructions for a while, and Bill was in the mood for a thriller, so yesterday evening Bill, Dave, Charlene and I gathered at Bill's house to see Diabolique and The Five Obstructions. It was a loooong night to watch those two relatively slow films back to back.

Diabolique was the original black and white 1955 film, not the universally reviled 1996 remake. The tagline is "The Great Suspense Film That Shocked the World... And Became A Classic.", but wht was shocking then is slow now. Only two real turns, largely unsympathetic characters, lots of shots that were held way too long. Nice to have seen for the history, and when people reference it in conversation I now know what they're talking about, but not one I'd say "go out and see".

Similarly, if you hang out with film geeks, The Five Obstructions is a must-see, but is a little too slow and loosely edited for general appeal. The well-known director Lars von Trier takes on one of his inspirations, director Jorgen Leth. Leth made a short film back in 1967 called The Perfect Human, a modernist look at two humans, exploring what he could do with the medium and how he could work with his actors. One of those films that makes you say "huh?".

von Trier asks Leth to remake the film five times, with five different obstructions to the way he shot the film the first time. The primary obstruction on the first film is "no shot over 12 frames" (half a second).

We watched The Perfect Human off of the DVD extras first, but that might not be necessary to understanding the film, and we never see any of the remakes in their entirety. What we do see is Leth as he muses about how he's going to work around the obstructions, and enough of the resulting films to see what that process brought.

But as much as it's about that portion of the creative process, it's also a human tale of von Trier trying to goad Leth back into creativity. I don't know a lot about the history of Leth, but it sounds like he'd sunk into an alcoholic depression living on Haiti, and the film is about von Trier trying, in various different ways, to get Leth back into making films.

I don't think this is one I can recommend to a general audience, but if you're a film geek I think it's one to see for a re-imagining of scenes and messages that'll kick your creative juices, and we can only wish that as we go through our humps and slumps there'll be someone as provocative as von Trier in our lives, ready to kick our asses when we slump.

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

Snicker: Leo leads us to Udargo, a sporadic comic with the tagline "You think you're being funny, but there are a lot of people Jesus would bomb." See, for instance, Fox news reporting on the tsunami...

[ related topics: Humor Current Events ]

Hunter S. Thompson dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound, at 67.

[ related topics: Gambling ]

Argh. So I tweaked the style sheet a bit because I hated the way that sometimes Firefox stretched the page right, and broke IE's rendering. And then thought I had that fixed, but IE would, at some screen widths, not draw the top entry. So, anyway, I think we're once again back to a bad compromise. Sigh.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Amazon.com just hit me, on their front page, with Amazon Prime. - A Membership deal at $79 that gets you free 2 day shipping and overnightfor $3.99. - Are they hurting or is their shipper and they are going to front load some cash for capital improvements or something? And yes, in doing my math..based on my usage.. it's a pretty decent deal for me.

[ related topics: Books Mathematics ]

My dad's been struggling with getting a Linux install up and working. I think I'm just going to give him a machine, but I've been looking around at my options and wondered if to send him over to Linux Virgin. Only saw the first episode, but it involved helping a young lady in a Catholic School uniform unpack a Shuttle...:

This amusing series chronicles Karla Grundick, an eager linux groupie schoolgirl, as she is taught how to build a computer by Mistress Koyo, the cyberpunk linux expert.

Also starring Roy, the voyeur, and Dog Big, the masturbating Rottweiller

Okay, maybe not.

[ related topics: Free Software Erotic Open Source ]

Constantine is a movie that normally would get no mention from me. The premise could be cool, but in the end any radio ad for a movie which contains the line "...featuring the new hit single by..." is instant disqualification. So it's surprising then that it doesn't suck that badly. In fact, even people who make hilarious fun of it like it overall:

Isn't Constantine supposed to look like he's been brutally beaten around by life?

Yeah, I guess.

But Keanu Reeves looks like he's been lightly slapped by life's colic-ridden toddler!

Or, you know, sexually assaulted by life's horny, drunken sister. Which, you know ... understandable.

I'll bet Balthazar's really spooky.

Oh, yeah, Gavin Rossdale's just a big pile of scary. You know, if you consider a look that says, "They're coming to get you, Gwen Stefani," as an actual threat.

[ related topics: Humor Movies ]

Augh. I'm in cross-platform hell. It's not just how badly Windows sucks, or how badly Visual Studio notYET 2003 sucks, it's that on real platforms we type "apt-get ..." or "rpm -i ...". On Windows we go find the source code, discover that the last makefile distributed is for VC6 or something, but that's okay, so we type nmake and discover that for some reason on this environment nmake decides that the include path is for sissies, and... well... It could be worse, I could be trying to do web design for IE.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Microsoft Open Source ]

Newsweek looks at "extraordinary rendition", ie: The CIA abducting people and flying them to places where they can be tortured. They touch on the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian that the U.S. sent to Syria for a year of torture, but also talk about people like Khaled el-Masri, who was abducted off of a bus in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan on a CIA owned 737. (thanks to RC3).

[ related topics: Politics Aviation Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]

The funny thing about globalization is that globes are, in fact, circular. Case in Point: according to a short item in the Economist referenced by Reason Magazine's Hit and Run weblog (a pretty globular chain all by itself), certain Indian call centers are finding new ways to hire people with good English skills. They're hiring American and English students bumming around Asia who are willing to work for Indian-level wages while soaking up local culture. I wonder if they take lessons in Punjabi pronunciation, just to keep it more real.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment California Culture Bizarre Diamonds Economics ]

If you, like me, are largely divorced from television and those aspects of popular culture, take a moment out and watch the compilation video on the Jeff Gannon... uhhh... "affair".

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Journalism and Media Television Net Culture ]

It's art-film overload! In the continuing effort to figure out if the beginning of Heaven was the director or the writer, we rented Tom Tykwer's Run, Lola, Run last night. I'd count this one as a serious "skip it". Sort of a Eurotrash techno music video, it's got a great premise, but by playing the "let's play this three ways" game it loses any credibility, and we lose any empathy for the characters. Especially the third time we see that interminable "running under the elevated train station" shot. Skip it.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Because it's good to keep in mind that such things are still happening, and that cultures based on the premise that individuals should serve the country and not vice-versa are evil: Cubans told to limit time with foreigners.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology ]

M$ Licenses for Dummies with explainations like:

Each resource hungry upgrade will burden you with features you never knew you needed while slowing your existing hardware to a crawl. As a result you will need to buy more hardware with - you guessed it - new operating systems. Try our analysis tool today and find out why training costs are reduced by upgrading software as often as possible for no apparent reason.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering moron ]

Sensible Erection had a link to The Definitive Stormtrooper Costume How To, notable especially for its very detailed discussions of vacuum forming. If you're the sort of person who's figuring out interesting and exciting ways to form styrene, this is a must read.

[ related topics: Movies Cool Technology Model Building ]

I'm removing /. from my sidebar. By the time something hits there I've seen it a gazillion times, and the commentary has gone from insipid to irrelevant.

But there is a bright spot: /8===> aka http://www.slashdong.org/ has arrived on the scene, with: How to hook a vibrator (or really pretty much anything) up to an XBox Controller

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Sexual Culture Cool Technology Model Building ]

Requisite Microsoft bashing for the day: Rafe reports the joys of putting a 200 gig drive in a Windows XP machine:

Update: It's always a relief to know that I can blame Microsoft for my problems. I booted up the computer using a Knoppix CD, and fdisk -l indicated that the computer knows it has a 200 gig hard drive installed. Windows is the problem.

And on that front, look for some big announcements here on the job front. One of the reasons I'm posting on Flutterby at 3:54 A.M local is that I'm awake and my mind is churning. But one of the side effects of all of this is that I may end up on the Mac side soon.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Macintosh ]

While the headline says Teen sex increased after abstinence program the findings are really that in Texas, at least, abstinence based sex education had no effect on the subsequent sexual activity of teens. But, as always, what it does have a negative effect on is their use of condoms and birth control. This is anti-news, and really just an excuse for me to link to Mark Morford's comments on the study:

Look. We all know that telling teens to abstain from sex is like telling tequila to abstain from the lime. Telling teens to repress their burgeoning beautiful natural chemical lustful cosmic urges that have been only recently delivered to them on the wings of salacious and well-lubed angels is like telling a fervent piano devotee that Mozart is a hack.

People who advocate such nastiness should be ashamed. Ashamed and humiliated and then flogged with the dead fish of their own tepid and miserable sex lives. Just an opinion.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Software Engineering Sociology Current Events Pop Culture Education Mark Morford ]

Last night Charlene and I went over to The Rafael to see Born Into Brothels. Zana Briski is a photographer who went to Calcutta's red light district to photograph what was there, and in the process of ingratiating herself into the area so that she was accepted, ended up teaching a buch of slum kids photography. The film chronicles her efforts to get several of them into boarding schools, take them out of the slums and educate them so that they can break the cycle.

During the film I wasn't all that impressed with the film. The beginning was slow, even for a documentary, but the conversation we had afterwards made the film worthwhile, and I think I can recommend it based on that.

It's probably beyond the scope of the film, and might even be counter to the spirit in which the documentary was made, but I would have liked to see a lot more editorializing in the film about the policies and circumstances that lead to slums like that. For instance: One of the struggles was finding boarding schools that would accept children whose parents had been convicted of crimes. Cited were prostitution and selling liquor without a license. If ever there were an argument for decriminalizing those two particular activities...

I also wonder why every boarding school we're shown is run by westerners. These kids attend schools in their own neighborhoods, and part of the draw of the boarding school is to get them out of the neighborhoods, but I wonder why the Indian educational system is failing them. I believe there are a lot of reasons to re-examine Ghandi's legacy, perhaps this is another one?

I'm also now far less sympathetic to those who decry child labor and sweatshops. Every one of those kids would have been better off working a 12 hour shift in a factory and sleeping in a company dorm.

Anyway, despite my somewhat negative first impression I've got to recommend this one.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment ]

Went out searching for some of the waterfalls listed in The Secret Waterfalls of Marin. I'd been to Rubicon Falls in Lucas Valley before, but only in summer when it was dry. Then over to Blackstone Canyon, breakfast at Marvin's, and home to build a new cabinet and shelves for the stereo.

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

Longmire does Romance Novels, or re-imagined romance novel covers.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

I guess it's Oscar^tm night or somesuch, but the extent of my homage to that is sitting here listening to the soundtrack from The Incredibles(which is, indeed, incredible). Got a bunch of disconnected thoughts from today's hike, these ramblings are for entertainment purposes only.

One of the things I've been pondering recently has been "podcasting". I've been back and forth between Windows and Linux recently, and therefore haven't had the machine I'm at booted long enough to listen to shows. The only one I've missed has been Brainwagon. Surprisingly, I haven't even really missed Coverville.

As I watched the tendrils of mist crawl up the mountains and thought about the songbirds from yesterday, I thought about the "sound seeing" segments some people have been doing, and thought "well, I should just carry the video camera", and I realized that the audio format removes much of what we gained with hypertext. I read a bunch of weblogs, and skim a bunch of email, but if I had to deal with, say, mailing lists where I had to read everyone's input sequentially, or book length tomes from many of the people whose output I enjoy in small snippets, I wouldn't bother.

The hike itself was along Bolinas Ridge, a mile and a half of steep climbing, and seven and a half of a long meander through redwoods and across meadows, with the first hints of the flowers of spring peeking out. The overcast was heavy, only saw shadows once, but the rain held off until we hit Olema, where we piled into my car and headed up to Point Reyes Station for lunch at the Station House (with the divine desserts). A late day, but a rather nice break.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Dan's Life Weblogs Movies Nature and environment Bay Area Video ]

It's hard for me to be critical after spending two hours giggling and leaving smiling, but that's my reaction to F[unknown char]tes de la Nuit, which we saw at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre last night. Charles Mee strings together a bunch of sketches, some of which are supposed to be distinctly about Paris, some of which just seem to be there for the gag, into a two hour show that had us laughing, but sometimes because we had that surreal non-sequiter feeling that occurs with something like, say, Bulbous Bouffant.

Had we paid list for our tickets, I think we would have felt quite disappointed. When compared to some of the other funny plays we've seen in the past few years, like Fool Moon or Titillation Theater, it falls far short. But it was a fun two hours.

[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

Howl! Halle Berry just gained my admiration for showing up at the Razzies and giving an acceptance speech that mirrored her Oscar^tm speech:

"They can't take this away from me, it's got my name on it!" she quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.

She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

"I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit," she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him "next time read the script first."

[ related topics: Humor Movies ]