Flutterby™! From 2005-05-02 to 2005-05-31

Hike today was up from Audubon Ranch to the Coastal Trail, down through the wildflowers (pretty amazing, the orange of the poppies, the red clover, interspersed with swaths of beautiful purples), across to Laurel Dell for a bathroom break, on Cataract to Rock Springs, thence down to Pantoll to catch the Dipsea down to Stinson Beach.

Leo was just commenting on the quality and quantity of the women along the Dipsea when we were passed by two such on the downhill. Figuring that their pace was as good as any, I tucked in behind. Ya know how they say "if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes"? Yeah, I'm cool with that. Taking my cue from soccer and my various martial arts experiences, I realized that if I watched the waist in front of me I didn't have to watch the trail, and made the car in record time.

All in all a great warm-up for next week's slog down the Coastal Trail from Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to the Golden Gate Bridge.

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

I guess I didn't get a definitive answer on my questions as to whether the SUV backlash has hurt SUV sales or helped the sales of more efficient vehicles, I was wanting to bring whatever answer we came up with there into the context of the rudeness to Scalia question. But I still lack the answer.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

A pregnant 13-year-old girl in Florida has been told she cannot have an abortion because she lacks the maturity to make such a decision.

"Since you guys are supposedly here for the best interest of me, then wouldn't you all look at that fact that it'd be more dangerous for me to have the baby than to have an abortion?" she asked. Alvarez called that "a good point."

It seems that she's under the care of the Florida Department of Children & Families and has run afoul of some activists. Hopefully some less activist judges (funny, you don't hear the usual "activist judges" crowd protesting this one...) will get ahold of this in the context of 743.065:

(1) An unwed pregnant minor may consent to the performance of medical or surgical care or services relating to her pregnancy by a hospital or clinic or by a physician licensed under chapter 458 or chapter 459, and such consent is valid and binding as if she had achieved her majority.

(2) An unwed minor mother may consent to the performance of medical or surgical care or services for her child by a hospital or clinic or by a physician licensed under chapter 458 or chapter 459, and such consent is valid and binding as if she had achieved her majority.

(3) Nothing in this act shall affect the provisions of s. 390.0111.

(Caveat: I've only skimmed 390.0111, and, more importantly, I'm not sure what parts of that are currently under injunction, but it looks pretty cut and dried to me.)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Current Events ]

According to the The Times of London, millions of subscribers to Chinese telco China Mobile received the same text message the other day: "Don't make trouble". It was sent by the police, before the start of more anti-Japanese demonstrations. At least the police paid for the message.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Between helping Jeanne do the food (lots of melted chocolate!) for a fundraiser to keep Public Glass open, going to Valley Visions to help out the San Geronimo valley schools (Good food, which is somewhat amazing for a huge dinner and dance held in a riding arena, and a killer band, although both of us felt like we were dancing in molasses because of the general poison ivy malaise so we ended up going home fairly early), and Sunday's hike, we were both worn out enough this weekend that we watched two movies. Oddly, we had the same reaction to both of them.

The first was Goodbye, Lenin. The premise was that in east Berlin, just before the wall falls, a mother has a heart attack, is in a coma for a number of months, and when she comes to, to avoid shocking her, her family builds a small world around her in which she still lives in the east, as western culture sweeps across that part of the world. Neat characters, some good scenes, but I kept feeling like I was missing a lot because of a lack of cultural context, and I felt this way largely because some of what I did get was derived from many of the slides and stories of the GDR that my parents have from my childhood.

The second was Triplettes of Belleville. We laughed in the beginning of it, but after a while I had the feeling of watching a demo reel that's gone on too long. Great animation, wonderful storytelling ability, but telling an underlying story that just didn't have that much depth to it, and with a surrealism that tended towards the bizarre for its own sake.

So, in both cases there seems to be a cultural context in which these are really good movies, but neither Charlene nor I are part of whatever that culture is.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Animation Movies Chocolate Bicycling ]

I don't know if I find it germaine enough to my life to make it part of my regular reads, but standingonthebox.blogspot.com is "Clublife: An online narrative of the life of a bouncer at two of New York's most popular nightclubs." You ever been out at night in New York and thought "the world would be a better place if someone applied some smackdown to about half the people in here"? Yeah, this guy and his co-workers are justice applied:

"What happened to him?" I asked, gesturing toward the customer.

"Him? Oh, he's just upset that he got pinched."

I took a closer look and noticed that a bouncer named "Louis" was gripping the customer's hand, across his knuckles, with a pair of pliers.

Well written narratives of life policing New York's seedier $1,000-minimum-tab underside.

[ related topics: moron Sociology New York ]

I'm not sure when it was but sometime around five years ago, I emailed Dan asking how he manages to get anything done after taking time to deal with email and reading his various favorite blogs and keeping up with Slashdot. I guess Dan answered my question in his own way by not replying to my email <grin>. I eventually found the answer myself by going cold-turkey from tech for about six months (doing yoga and living in a VW bus). Now there is a site focusing on what I realize was my biggest time-drain: I just needed to Quit Slashdot.

Now I just try to keep up with Flutterby and Slug. Of course, email is always an issue, but staying off ranting LISTSERVs helps.

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Food Birds Public Transportation ]

I am sick and tired of trying to keep a color printer working. The HP was the longest lasting and best supported, but its color heads have decided to choke up. And we've got a bunch of photos we'd like to print.

So, anyone have suggestions on "upload and print" services? Preferably those that are okay with adult content? Or do I just randomly point my finger and hope for the best?

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

K and I have decided it's finally time to buy a good set of kitchen knives. From time to time friends have dropped brand names, but I don't remember any of them, and we know nothing about the industry. So does anybody have recommendations - either specific products or materials/technology - to share?

According to the Telegraph and NPR, Edward Von Kloberg III is dead. Von (or was it Van?) Kloberg was for many years the top Washington PR flack for Saddam Hussein, Ceasescu of Romania, Mobuto Sese Seko and Samuel Doe, the Butcher of Liberia. He reportedly labored long and hard on a defense for Saddam's gassing of the Khurds. Long a fixture of the DC party circuit, Kloberg was known for his Continental manners (although he was born in NYC) and his silk capes. Despondent over the loss of a lover, he went out with a truly magnificent flair: he threw himself off the parapet of Castel San Angelo near Rome, the same place where Tosca killed herself in the Puccini opera. He will be missed by absolutely no one.

[ related topics: Content Management Current Events Consumerism and advertising Fashion Dictators Propaganda ]

Bum Lee's Deanimator Flash Game:

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon.

Fire, reload, fire, die. Repeat. Or, if you prefer your horror remain in your mind and not be graphically animated, look to The Weekly Cthulhu for your regular dose of Lovecraft.

Or you could stay comfortably ensconced in your fantasy world and try desperately not to understand, because understanding brings madness.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

[ related topics: Games Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Animation ]

QOTD, from John over at Genehack:

...when confronted with an unescapable task that is difficult or unpleasant, people generally reveal themselves to be one of two types. There's the "okay, that sucks -- now how are we going to do it?" type, and there's the "oh, that's impossible -- we can't do that!" type. That latter group is just a pain in the ass, really.

[ related topics: Quotes John S Jacobs-Anderson Work, productivity and environment ]

As the end of my 37^th year fast approaches, I'm faced with the realization that, statistically, my life is half over, but my life is nowhere near half complete. Whether, at the end, I choose to rage against the dying of the light, or to go gentle when I take that final bow and exit stage left, I like to know that I've got options.

Being able to reasonably assess my abilities is essential to understanding my available choices. So, every once in a while, I have to go out and pick a fight just to make sure I can still kick ass.

Someone in the hiking group suggested that we join the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council on their annual "Ridge to Bridge" hike, which comes in 30 (with over 3,000 feet of vertical), 19 and 13 mile versions. I tipped my beer into the lap of the baddest mofo in the house.

Woke up at 4, massively over-estimated the time to get out of the house and to the bridge, so I arrived at a bit before 5. Got on the bus to the start point (about 6 miles north of our house) at 5:30, and set off on foot at roughly 6:40. With an extended lunch at Pan Toll (thanks to Bill), got off the trail at just before 5, or just about 3 miles an hour total. And far enough ahead of the group that I went and got a tray full of iced lattes to celebrate their arrival.

The first half I did at the speed of my friends, I think next year I hike alone. Even though in this age of ultra-marathons this sort of distance isn't anything spectacular, somewhere around where the Coastal Trail touches West Ridgecrest Drive I realized that this hike was about proving something to myself.

Even at that, though, it was a spectacular day. It was slightly cloudy, which kept the heat down. The lower air was clear enough that you could see the Farallons in color (usually they're just indistinct blue blobs on the horizon), the wildflowers were still out and spectacular, and everything looks that much more vibrant when you're amped on adrenaline and endorphins.

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

Ages ago, I said of the book A Pattern Language that:

The rules for towns seem to lead to a horribly static and structured culture, the houses all seem cozy, but perhaps confining, and the building methods seem to ignore some issues that I'd sure want resolved before I put tens if not hundreds of thousands into a house.

Over at Sociate there's a link and some background on a quick presentation on patterns in use around Christopher Alexander's house, which confirms my thoughts on the matter.

[ related topics: Humor Books Bay Area Architecture Real Estate ]

I'm preferring the Mac to Windows, but there are still a lot of features X and Linux provide that I miss. One point in favor of the Mac, however, is the existence of the Faith Converter 1.8:

Found an admirable tome but it's in praise of the wrong god?

The premier theological plagiarism solution for OS X, Faith Converter converts text between twenty-seven different religions...

[ related topics: Religion Humor Macintosh ]

You know that May is National Masturbation Month (although there are some detractors), but the Brazilian town of Espertantina has declared today "Orgasm Day". Celebrate as you see fit.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Sexual Culture Current Events ]

As the hype machine kicks into gear for the scene where those who bother to go see the film (I won't) finally see whiny little Anakin get his just desserts, rants like I hates Lucas! I hates it forever! are very cathartic. But all of you Joss Whedon fans have almost got me willing to go see something that looks to me entirely too much like Space: 90210, so today's PVP seemed entirely apropos.

[ related topics: Star Wars Movies ]

Two on sex and biology from SFGate this morning: Straight and Gay men respond differently to scent, and reinforcement of the notion that booze creates strong associations: Men who associate alcohol with sexual desire can become sexually stimulated just by being unconsciously exposed to words related to drinking.

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

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._on_re_us/cohabitation_lawsuit_2

NC blue law banning cohabitation by unmarried people being challenged by the ACLU. It looks like the ACLU will prevail. This could start a real cascade.

radix

[ related topics: Current Events ]

As I mentioned in the comments to my entry about the 30 mile hike, I'm impressed with the Tom Harrison Maps I've seen for areas that I'm familiar with. The ones for Marin had more trails and appeared to be more accurate distance and detail wise than the other maps I've used.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Maps and Mapping ]

Although he managed to successfully name something after Senator Rick Santorum, Dan Savage has declared a moratorium on finding alternate uses for their names:

What's more, there are more American Taliban running around than there are disgusting sex acts or byproducts in need of monikers. We would quickly run out of disgusting sex acts and byproducts and then be forced to name pleasurable sex acts after members of the American Taliban. I don't know about you, BISD, but I don't ever want to hear my boyfriend say, "Stick your dobson in my scalia, big bauer, and musgrave the gates out of me until I ratzinger." Could any man maintain an erection after hearing that?

[ related topics: Language Politics Sexual Culture moron ]

From a San Francisco Bay Guardian article about taggging along on one of his expeditions: Part of Trevor Paglen's website is a section called Secret Places, Secret Wars, in which he talks about exploring the fringes of the super-secret military presence in the U.S., including things like taking pictures of a fully submersible dry-dock, some notes and history on the "Blackbird" family of aircraft, and a few remarks on extreme telephotography. Nothing cosmically revelatory here (in fact I think I'd be disturbed if there were), but I think it'd be fun to see one of his lectures.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation California Culture Cool Technology Military ]

Best use of EL Wire for the back of a car window ever: The Defiant Digit

[ related topics: Humor Automobiles ]

Forest came out to visit us last week, and Sunday evening we sent him off for an airplane and Zack moved in for this one. Charlene and I are both recovering from the Poison Ivy of the last few weeks, and would love to be able to just hang out without company, something that's a few days off at best, but in the mean time we're having fun with kids.

Zack is notoriously bad about telling us what he's doing, and he's needed some rides over to school in the evenings, so we've been hanging around there, hoping to catch a glimpse of him in his various activities.

The activities are centered around a different approach to drama in high school. Drake normally has an incredibly good drama program, but the facilities are being renovated and there are currently no good auditoriums. So they did something amazing: Over the next few weeks there will be over 30 original student written, directed and acted productions, each under an hour, each presented several times. Shows at 6, 7 and 8, in several different rooms, geared for small audiences, patterned after the "fringe festivals". We've seen three so far, and as you'd expect they haven't been blow-us-away quality, but I think overall we've been at least as satisfied with the entertainment value per hour as we would have been, say, renting movies.

As you'd expect with high school authors (and the productions that Zack would be attracted to) they've all tended towards the surreal: Two strangers wake up in a hotel room to discover that time seems to have disappeared; life in a small upstate New York town where the local serial killer is on a first name basis with the police chief, and appears to be more sane; that sort of thing. Sometimes the acting is uneven, this many productions means everyone gets a starring role, and sometimes the improv when a line gets forgotten means we have to dig a little harder for the subtext; sometimes the direction involves way too many set changes, live theater ain't television. However, while we've walked out of each one with ways the show could have been better, I've been entertained in each one. Even (or perhaps especially) the last, which went for total dada surrealism, and from which we wandered out saying "what the hell was that?" after laughing (with a packed room) for 45 minutes straight.

If you've got a kid at Drake and wonder where they've been disappearing to these recent nights, definitely wander down there.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Humor Aviation Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

Crap: Yet another platform that might be interesting (although it might drag me away from Opera). If you haven't heard about Greasemonkey, it's a Firefox add-in that lets you process pages. Specifically, it might let one kill off bad JavaScript (no, that isn't always redundant), like the "pop-to-front when the page has finished loading" behavior of uComics, or those sites which muck with which input has focus so that by the time the page finishes loading you find that you've typed partial data into three different inputs, or the "no, you can't use back and then click on that search button again" behavior that I've whined about.

Now Mark Pilgrim has Dive Into Greasemonkey, which, if it's as good as Dive Into Python, might give me no more excuses for whining about bad JavaScript.

Hell, maybe it'll even fix Flickr...

[ related topics: Web development Open Source Python ]

Yes! I think I've finally figured out a Mac layout that works for me: Auxiliary screen above the laptop screen, with the menu bar on the laptop, which minimizes mouse distance to the menu bar, and Desktop Manager with "active edges" turned on, with delay set on high so that I can still use the doc hidden on the left side. Now if I can just paste into X11 apps, I'll actually stop whining about this platform.

[ related topics: User Interface Macintosh ]

The latest game I've been challenged on by a teenager? Sodaconstructor is an interesting dynamics simulation written in Java, in which you build... things from connected lines. Often these things are vehicles of a sort, powered by various elements of your construction taking input from different phases of a sine wave. Take the non-browser Beta version, build up a model, and race it against others.

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Cool Technology ]

I'm not sure I'm quite hip enough to hang with these birds, so I don't know if they're going to make my regular comics rounds, but indietits got a few laughs out of me.

[ related topics: Humor Music Comics Birds ]

Interesting little look at the life of Tallulah Bankhead.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History ]

Okay all you Mac gurus: I've been using an iSight with iChat for the virtual office. Somebody has to have done some green/blue-screen plug-in that'd let me do something more interesting in terms of backgrounds. Anyone seen such a thing?

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

A must-read, especially if you're mulling the future of software development as a career: Jonathan Shapiro on the future of programming:

It's not that the US has a "tech hostile" environment. It's that the laws of global economics are hostile to expensive providers.

The right question isn't "How do we keep programmers employed?" The right question is: "How do we change the economics of software?"

(Via Hack The Planet)

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering Economics ]

According to my fancy dancy scale, and assuming that the whole bloating from poison ivy thing has subsided, over the last few weeks I've gained 6 pounds (160 lbs) but stayed stable in my body fat percentage (15%). Wouldn't hurt to drop that to 13-11%, but still... wacky.

I rented a Weed Wrench to get out the big French broom that I wasn't able to remove by hand. Unfortunately, much of this is on a slope that's steep enough that I donned the climbing gear (which I haven't had on in a looong time) and had Charlene belay me (and I'd forgotten about teaching people how to belay...). At any rate, I can now say with some assurance that if you have to pull large clumps of French or Scotch broom, the Weed Wrench rocks. Much easier than tying them to the trailer hitch and pulling them out with the car.

Even when you're dangling from a rope.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Sensible Erection had a link to a fantastic collection of suggestive (and often downright blatant) advertising. If you're doing illustration, it's well worth the link to get your (creative) juices flowing.

[ related topics: Erotic Consumerism and advertising ]

[ related topics: Quotes Dan's Life Net Culture ]

It seems like there's always a passing crossover between geeks and aircraft nuts; even those of us who've never gotten closer to pilot-hood than a few touch-n-goes from the right seat and a little kite time in a cow pasture keep an ear out for cool stuff involving aviation. So here's an NPR story, with some recorded radio traffic, about the National Air Traffic Controllers Association recent Archie League Medal of Safety Awards. Audio of the specific incidents is also available in MP3 from the NATCA site.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Columbine once again manages to stir up some cool conversation and yet provoke no answers:

Columbine: I really do think y'all have somehow magically managed to get an academic experience which is totally at odds with virtually everything I've seen.

[ related topics: Education ]

Tara Calishain passed along this press release about Purple Monkey Studios redesigning Chattanooga.gov. First impressions about the site: Buggy menus that could be easily fixed, but have problems in the version of Opera I have on my laptop, and blockade off huge areas of the site when used with Lynx (wonder what those interested in ADA compliance will have to say about that?).

And once again Chattanooga has looked to the outside when those skills exist locally. Sigh.

[ related topics: Chattanooga ]

I am too busy right this moment to follow this up, but I just got an email from the anonymous "Jack" mentioned in this article about a questionable guilty plea for posession of child pornography, the person in question found me through this Flutterby entry, and gave me that Inquisition 21st Century article along with:

• http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,63391,00.html
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/13/browser_hijacking_risks/
• http://ctv.globetechnology.com...Technology/techBN/ctv-technology
• http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5344831.html
• http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/sc...inttech.cgi/dailys/05-30-04.html
• http://www.crime-research.org/news/07.22.2004/506/
• http://www.zwire.com/site/news...426&PAG=461&dept_id=528214&rfi=6

The person in question pled guilty on the advice of a lawyer who probably wasn't doing everything the lawyer could, and is now looking for ways to re-open the case and fund such a legal effort. I've suggested the EFF, but where would you start in investigating the background of this?

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Law ]

Via Entries in Life, a review of Episode III, which will probably be the largest grossing film that nobody will admit to having seen:

Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody's guess, although I'm prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Now that Paul Wolfowitz(a local performer has pointed out that this rhymes with "chickenshits") has been lured away from his valuable job coming up with new justifications for military actions as the old ones were shown to be lies, he's off to the world of high finance, where he can provide new customers to all of those military contractors, rather than just expanding their current customer base. Obviously, the old structures need to be re-invented, thus: The New World Bank (thanks to reader Chris).

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron Current Events ]

Silly Flash of the moment: Fly Guy.

[ related topics: Humor Art & Culture ]

Round up the usual suspects:

New FBI documents to be released today show that anti-terrorism agents who questioned antiwar protesters last summer in Denver were conducting "pretext interviews" that did not lead to any information about criminal activity.

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement ]

I've been wanting to say something about Topspin's comment about why we don't respect Scalia in the thread about Eric Berndt's question of Justice Scalia, but haven't had the time to sit down and formulate the response that this really deserves. David Chess has been exploring the topic, yesterday he looked at what it means for Scalia to call himself an "originalist", today he points out some of the historical revisionism necessary to reconcile such a stance with Scalia's opinions.

[ related topics: Politics moron Law ]

Sliced bread has nothing on the Regex-Coach. Let's you play with regex, see the results and interprets in plain-English.

Go download it now, especially if you have to work on meuon's code!

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

Need to close out my browser tabs, so a link dump:

• The next (June 1^st) dorkbot-sf get-together looks like fun. I've heard a bit about the SimNuke project, but generally with the "can't talk about this yet" caveat. It's public now. And Violet Blue is doing a presentation on teledildonics, something that's come up here before.
• Need to sign up for SIGGRAPH.
• Making Peace With Autism by Susan Senator looks interesting.
• And I need to clear my schedule and sign up and send money for the WWDC Weblogger Dinner.

[ related topics: Books Dan's Life Robotics Bay Area Art & Culture Cool Technology Conferences ]

Had some friends who claimed that they used to use the water leftover from making hashish to mop the barracks floors, so that if the drug dogs were brought in... well... the sniffing was pretty worthless. Someone switched the cocaine sample used to train drug sniffing dogs in Victoria, Australia, with talcum powder, apparently to much the same effect.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Health Current Events Machinery Trains Dogs ]

Some folks over at LiveJournal have come up with a single sign-on system called OpenID. It's a lot like a subset of LID, and I'm not terribly excited about it because it seems to be a big step backwards in many ways, but if they end up adopting it I'll make sure that Flutterby can use it. As soon as the spec settles a bit, I'll probably also hack things so that my LID URL can also double as an OpenID URL.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

This is fantastic, and the pages of your Senators and Representative should be on your daily reads! (If you don't know who they are, use Project Vote Smart) What are your congressweasels up to? Find out on Plogress.com. It looks like they're spidering the .gov sites to bring up bill sponsorships. Thanks to Dori over at Backup Brain.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Real Estate ]

Just me and Mark on the hike this morning, from Tennessee Valley down to the Golden Gate Bridge. Gorgeous hike, the tail end of wildflower season but we still saw a lot of color, along with this turkey who wouldn't turn toward us when he had his fan out, and I'd only taken a shorter lens, so I couldn't get closer on 'im.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Food Bay Area Chattanooga Birds Archival ]

I think that "this is getting tiresome" [*] just made my "anyone who uses ends up in my killfile" list. Much like an automobile horn, the person who uses the phrase is almost always the one in the wrong, is trying to dodge the facts of the discussion, and thinks that bluster can cover for discussion.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Net Culture Community ]

Various forwarded articles on our hiking mailing list talking about Freakonomics made me break down and buy the book. It's a quick read, but oddly hollow, a little too much in praise of Levitt, a little shy on "how can I duplicate this at home" (not all of it, but some of it). So I recommend reading it, but I think $26 is a bit steep. However, the authors of Freakonomics have a 'blog that's worth looking through. The Abortion and crime: who should you believe? entry is worth reading, as is the transcript of Levitt and Dubner on The O'Reilly Factor for some serious spinning.

[ related topics: Books Cool Science Weblogs Economics ]

Larry had a link to a friend of his who lives in Homer, Alaska, who does stained glass under the name Alaskan Leprechaun. None of it's leaping out and saying "ooh", but I think that's mostly a stylistic thing. Those who go for a little more regular geometry than I do might find it interesting.

[ related topics: Weblogs Archival Alaska ]

Hmmm... looks interesting: Paige Wiser reviews Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.

For much of history, in fact, love had nothing to do with marriage. That's why marriage worked. Marriages were about politics or economics. Arranging a child's marriage was the equivalent of today's setting up a college fund.

Love? As recently as the late 17th century, one gentleman noted that a certain woman "was more fond of her husband perhaps than the Politeness of the day allows."

"If we can learn anything from the past," writes Coontz, "it is how few precedents are now relevant in the changed marital landscape in which we operate today."

[ related topics: Politics Books History Sociology Marriage ]

Wasn't very productive this last week, but had fun playing Tourist in both Chattaboogie and Washington DC. - While Chattanooga downtown is being revitalized once again and the new riverfront is looking world class, DC is tired, worn, and just not looking like the center of the free world, home of the brave.. etc.. I'm going to have to sort and organize a LOT of recent pics better, but here is a smattering: A butterfly from the new addition to the Tennessee Aquarium, The Albert Einstein Memorial in DC, and the hinge to the East Gate at the White House which impressed me with it's size and construction. My guess: it'd stop anything less than a tank.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Machinery Fabrication Race Real Estate Model Building ]

In today's Guardian a book critic looks at the 70th anniversary of Penquin's bringing high class paperbacks to the masses, and then at the phenomonen of highly discounted books appearing at mass retailers. Like any good snob he's against anybody reading anything he doesn't like, but maybe it is time to look again at what mass marketing has done to or for literature. Today small, selective booksellers are being crowded out by retailers like Borders or Barnes & Noble. We seem to be loosing small stores and gaining more stores in more locations with larger stocks. Is this good, bad, or just different? A wider variety of books of all types are now available, yet potboilers like The DaVinci Code dominate sales, just like Payton Place and Gone With The Wind dominated their own eras. I suspect every literary period has seen the same sorts of controversies arise.

[ related topics: Books Current Events Consumerism and advertising Marketing Economics ]

A couple of people have sent me this New York Times article about deaths by torture of prisoners in Afghanistan. I've been trying to come up with some coherent commentary about current U.S. policy, and it hasn't happened, so here's some incoherent rambling, and if anyone wants to have a political discussion this is as good a place as any to hang it.

The main conclusion I've come to from articles like these is that there's enough similarity in reports from disparate regions, and reports of "extraordinary rendition" and other applications of torture, that we can safely conclude that Lynndie England and her cohorts at Abu Ghraib were not acting on their own accord, and that the use of torture does go up some chain of command and across some common teaching system.

And that our commander in chief needs to stop sticking his fingers in his ears and hollering "lalala I can't hear you lalala" and take a strong moral stand.

One of the secondary conclusions is that whether or not Newsweek is caving under pressure in retracting their story, flushing a Koran down the toilet is not torture, and if we cave to people who complain about symbolic gestures like that then we start down a slippery slope.

But on that strong moral stand thing, I guess we're not going to get it from someone who's can't keep his own morality straight:

"I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is - I'm against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.''

We now return you to your regular Flutterby.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Ethics moron War ]

For years I've been using C++ as a better C, and ignoring most of the evolution of the language. While I've kept up on the conceptual advances in other languages, I haven't been tracking them in C++. However, the new gig involves a lot of unabashedly C++ code, and there's a lot of it, and it needs to use a lot of the language features, so I'm reading a bunch of books to get back current.

Wow. No wonder people are willing to stand for some of the issues in Java and C#. I mean, it's cool what all you can do, but I'm shocked and amazed that someone hasn't done a high level language that compiles to native code, because sometimes the speed of the interpreter does get in the way, but I can imagine that trying to bring beginning programmers up through the usual C pitfalls in a C++ environment is beyond scary.

Aaand, C++ brings back the old differences between post and pre increment and decrement operators. Something I hadn't thought about in years, especially since I'd discounted it as a performance issue with compiler technology as of two decades ago.

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

The good folks over at the Alternatives To Marriage Project managed to sneak into a Reuters article about wacky laws, which, along side laws forbidding the hunting of animals on Sundays talks about the laws against cohabitation still on the books in six states (and enforced in at least one of 'em), and case law in Washington that kept a pregnant woman from getting divorced:

In Washington state, Gov. Christine Gregoire signed a law last month allowing pregnant women to divorce their husbands. It was prompted by the case of Shawnna Hughes who was denied the right to divorce her physically abusive husband by Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine because she was pregnant.

"There's a lot of case law that says it is important in this state that children not be illegitimized," the judge said at the time.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Web development Books Content Management Sociology Law Current Events Marriage ]

The Register provides a cautionary tale, which reinforces my belief that you should always have a spotter when wearing vibrating panties in public:

Unfortunately, she became "so aroused by the 2"-inch vibrating bullet inside that she fainted" then "fell against shelves and banged her head". This prompted the attendance of the paramedics who "found the black leatherette panties still buzzing".

It is a curious thing to scan a family's slides. If it were my own family, I'd find myself back in my childhood, taken to familiar places, reliving the pivotal experiences of my life. But it's not, it's a family whose history I'm familiar with, but I view it as an observer and bring only recent experiences to the scenes depicted therein.

So I see the young man off at boot camp in 1942. I see the first marriage, the smiling children playing in the yar, the family trips... and then the family trips become more about the scenery and less about the people. I recognize some of the places, but I have only the imprint on the frame, or the building on Alcatraz that was burned during the native american occupation, to help put a temporal context on the image.

The pictures get happy again with the second marriage, until the kids reach adolescence, but in the meantime I'm realizing things about my own pictures:

1. Don't worry too much about scenery shots, get lots of people in 'em.
2. Get someone else to hold the camera once in a while.
3. Yes, you look like a dumb tourist, but take pictures of the signs.
4. Label them now, because in 50 years you might not even remember who some of the people were.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Dan's Life ]

The headline in the Guardian read: "Reds Prepare for Victory Parade". I was grabbing my shotgun and planning to escape to my bunker in the hills to lead the Resistance when I realized that they were talking about a soccer football team. Never mind.

[ related topics: Current Events Sports ]

This one's for Columbine: Brad reviews Bookmark Now: Writing In Unreaderly Times

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Archival Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Can I just do it 'til I need glasses? FDA investigating possible link between Viagra and vision loss. Sorry, nothing really news here, it's like two cases among how many bazillion users, and there's nothing on the FDA web site...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Judge rules divorcing parents can't continue to teach their son wiccan beliefs. There must be more to this, right?

"When they read the order to me, I said, 'You've got to be kidding,' " said Alisa G. Cohen, an Indianapolis attorney representing Jones. "Didn't the judge get the memo that it's not up to him what constitutes a valid religion?"

[ related topics: Religion Law ]

A number of blatantly stolen links:

• Mark had a link to Fortune on the DIY economy, with some stuff on small sacle manufacturing that seemed pertinent in light of the publishing on demand discussion.
• Mark's entry also linked to Julie Leung talking about books on pioneer life and complaining that the Little House were perhaps a bit sanitized. Maybe she's confusing the books with the TV show? I remember at least two situations in which a good number of people were likely to die from lack of food (the long winter and the locust plague) and another involving a woman about to stab her husband with a knife... Might be a good time to re-read 'em.
• In responding to the Flutterby link to odd laws, Dave pointed to the Minnesota bans on fornication (a misdemeanor) and sodomy, the latter punishable by not more than one year in jail or $3,000.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Law Community Economics Marriage ]

Dave's May 26 entry pointed to some particularly egregious pork spending. A few hundred million bucks to build a bridge to serve on the order of 50 residents.

One of the things that Schwarzenegger forcing California into fiscal crisis has involved was canceling the fairly high tax we used to pay on vehicle registrations. Most of the money from this was redistributed from the state back down to the municipal level.

The town we used to live in, Fairfax, faces being disolved unless its residents pass a $165 or so parcel tax to make up for the revenues lost from the vehicle registrations. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I'm fairly sure Fairfax will pass the tax, so the end result is that it'll mean lower administrative overhead and citizens closer to the spending of their dollars. Unfortunately, the only way to do that seems to be to precipitate a fiscal disaster at the higher levels.

This might be a way to help understand what the Bush administration (and Republicans in general, see the above pork spending note) is doing: Cut back on revenues and spend into oblivion until there is no option but to move revenues closer where they're spent.

In the mean times, though, there's going to be some monster pain in rural areas as the economic redistribution from cities into those regions dries up.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area Theater & Plays California Culture Currency Economics ]

Homicide suspect stays atop Atlanta crane. Cop comes this close to saying what he really feels about the situation:

"When he's ready to come down, he'll come down — one way or the other," Quigley said. "The protocol for them is to let him make the decisions."

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Thanks to BBS: The Documentary, I was suddenly transported back to high school, when, after calling all of the less popular BBSs, the phone finally stopped beeping busy and we pushed the handset into the acoustic coupler, heard the answering squeal on the 300 baud modem, and connected to The Ghost Ship East:

YOU'VE BEEN SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR

TERMINAL NOT DOING MUCH OF ANYTHING

WHEN SOMETHING LEADS YOU TO CALL A

NUMBER ON THE 775 EXCHANGE. YOUR MIND,

WHICH IS WEAKENED FROM AN OVERDOSE OF

COCA COLA AND FRITOS, GIVES IN TO THE

OVERWHELMING URGE. YOUR TRUSTY MODEM

CONNECTS, ALL OF A SUDDEN YOUR BEING

IS ENVELOPED BY THE TERMINAL AND YOU

BECOME PART OF ITS ELECTRONIC MORASS.

YOU SCREAM, BUT ITS HOPELESS........



THE FUN'S ONLY STARTING.



WELCOME TO MONGO'S





T H E G H O S T S H I P E A S T

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Net Culture ]

Google Maps apparently has an API that lets you put little flags on it. Here's an app that hasn't been done yet, would take a few hours, and would be very helpful but no paper is clued in enough to do it: Scan the garage sale classifieds, and give me a map with all of 'em on it.

[ related topics: Content Management Cool Technology Maps and Mapping ]

First helicopter landing on the summit of Everest, apparently with video. Freakin' wow.

[ related topics: Aviation Video Aviation - Helicopters ]

[Rant] It's a user interface thing. I know that basic clean design rules work...(we are trying to reach the masses) and the formula is 'big menu categories across the top' and 'product categories' on the left in a vertical menu. If I put the menu on the right. it will not display on many people's screens (amazing how many people are running 640x480), on the bottom - same problem, weblogs show that they click on the items on the left and never change major categories. Although the sites are extremely functional, they are becoming formulatic enough (Novel Idea and Volley Vault are examples) that they are embarrassingly similiar, boring..

Even Wired has become another templated formulatic website design, because re-educating the users to another "paradigm" of web user interface loses those "sticky eyeballs".

So: Web Design Sucks. At least for effective websites for the masses.

Somewhere in the background I hear Huey Lewis and the News:

I want a new template

One that won't make me bored

One that won't make me crash my browser

Or make me feel three feet thick

I want a new design

One that won't hurt my head

One that won't make my mouse jumpy

Or make my eyes too red

[/Rant]

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Weblogs Coyote Grits Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Sports Graphic Design ]

Out here in West Marin the fire roads are better maintained, and we're further from everything. So as I've ground the mountain bike along Sir Francis Drake and over White's Hill, I've looked with envy at the road bikers, with their lower rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag. And I've been thinking it'd be cool to get a road bike.

Garage sale season opened this weekend, and I found a new toy. A 1985 Univega Gran Tourismo bicycle, cantilever brakes, serviceable shifting, so unused that the casting flash is still on the tires, for $20. It's probably a step below the bike I rode when I was in high school, mostly because of the wheels, but I took it for a spin yesterday, up past Roy's Redwoods, out through Nicasio, around the reservoir, past Black Mountain, back along the old railroad grade through Samuel P, and home.

Yeah, the frame is clearly chromoly and absorbs a noticeable bit of power relative to modern high end frames, and it's got shifters on the down tube rather than brifters, and it's a bit heavy, but even after I put a nicer saddle on it I think it's still the best dollars per performance bicycle I've ever owned. And heavy wheels? Well, I remember how much time I spent keeping the light ones true...

But I was also reminded as I tucked in behind a pack on the flat stretch by the water of why cycling is a team sport. Spinning at 20mph is a far cry from finessing over the ruts and rocks, and being able to trade off the lead to have someone else cut the wind is a big deal. Which is probably where the real gains come from on the tandem.

Anyway, I think I just cut my time over the hill and into Fairfax by a third.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Invention and Design Bay Area Pedal Power Bicycling ]

I just got tagged by Dave, so:

Total Number of books I've owned

Hard to estimate. I've been through two large purges, in the last one I shipped John a few hundred tech books. But in Chattanooga, I also had a great uncle who fed me cartons of SF books, and I had a great relationship with a used book store, so if you count those...

Last book I bought

Freakonomics (as mentioned here).

Last book I read

Reading a note or two every day from C++ Coding Standards by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu, ISBN 0-321-11358-6. I'm getting a good "here are the implications" re-education of some of the things I've not worried about since I haven't been doing much that's performance limited recently.

Last book I finished

I just finished re-reading Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, ISBN 0-06-001313-3. Some of the references to modernity are a little less subtle than much of his satire, but it's a fun take on brands and the clash between business and engineering.

Five books that mean a lot to me

Hmmmm... In no particular order...

1. The Magus, by John Fowles. A good romp through the mutability of our perceptions of reality; 14 years after I read it I still end up finding new ways that the line "I'm not asking you to believe, I'm just asking you to pretend to believe" speaks to human experience.
2. Atlas Shrugged, for completely different and yet entirely similar reasons
3. I find myself going back to Terry Pratchett's books reguarly, I don't know how long that'll last, but I enjoy the satire and think that his world that's completely different from our own has helped me build my understanding of politics and people over the last few years.
4. Story, by Robert McKee. Of course it's ruined movies for me, but I think that's a good thing.
5. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Because it was both prophetic and wrong; it spoke to what we wanted to believe, and yet has been most true in its dystopian elements.

Five people I'd like to see to do this as well

Lyn, John, Nancy, Meuon, Mark, Topspin, ... this could go on all day...

[ related topics: Books Software Engineering Writing Chattanooga Terry Pratchett ]

A female friend of my older son just sent me a link to what may be the most sickening TV show I've heard of recently (and that's saying quite a lot): "Beauty and the Geek". We decided between us that the chicks all have boob jobs, nasty noses, and IQs of about 30 ("Life-Size Barbie Model"?? ...wtf??), while the guys are generally just low-social-skill generic geeks with clumsy moves and not enough conversational experience (although I could do without the Dukes of Hazzard fan club... and almost all of them need MORE HAIR, DAMMIT!, although that's my feeling about most people ;-). I actually watched the Sneak Peek. Only do this to yourself if you want to feel even sicker.

Give me geeks any day, man, I love 'em to pieces. The chicks can go take a flying leap and break all their nails at once. Okay, okay, I'm now officially going to not care about a stupid WB show... although I wish we could come up with some way to show geeks in a good light, and bimbos as not worthy of the attention. Never happen, huh. (OTOH, both said son and said female friend are hot geeks, in my opinion. Maybe they'll serve as good examples.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Movies Aviation Television ]