Flutterby™! From 2006-01-01 to 2006-01-31

In answer to all the questions on various voice-mails: Yes, we survived just fine, a leak in the laundry shed and a door blown off another shed was all the damage we took. Neighbors were not so lucky, one got flooded, and I was out cleaning up the gutters on the road (which we'd had a big neighborhood pull-together to get patched this fall), heard a crack, looked downhill to see a big tree limb come down just in time to break the windshield and take the mirror off another neighbor's car. I finally got to meet them, though, we've been playing phone tag for a while.

We were going to go into the city to catch a matinee, but southbound 101 was flooded at Sausalito and we realized that we weren't going to make it, so we got lunch fixings and hung out at Jeanne's in the afternoon, then helped out another friend whose daughter was throwing a large party at the community center, and ushered in the New Year at another friend's.

Apparently San Anselmo took it in the teeth, I hope that this didn't get the folks at San Anselmo Coffee Roasters or Whyte's Booksmith too hard. Michael, owner of the latter, is about to move to Hawaii, and it'd suck if he decided that it wasn't worth keeping the business and San Anselmo ended up losing a bookstore for another day spa or doggie wash.

And MarkV is stuck in Truckee waiting for I-80 to open.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area San Anselmo Whyte's Booksmith ]

Because I'm currently looking at Structured Blogging: RecipeML: The Recipe Markup Language might be a start at trying to publish (and use) recipe information with a little more structure.

[ related topics: Web development Food ]

Because sometimes you just wanna find out what's out there...

perl -le 'for ($i = 1; $i < 255; $i++) { print "checking $i"; open I, "ping -t 1 -c 1 192.168.1.$i |"; while (<I>) { print if (/bytes from/); } close I; }'

(If this doesn't make sense to you, don't worry about it, there's a certain level of nerdliness you have to have to make this useful, and once you're there you'd understand it.)

[ related topics: Perl ]

Took a few pictures with the kite at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. I would highly recommend against flying a 30 sq. foot parafoil kite in 20mph winds. I was more than a little concerned about my 200lb test kite line not being strong enough and struggled significantly to get it reeled in. Of course, I wasn't the biggest kite on beach. Several of these guys were kite surfing once the winds died down below 15mph.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Aviation Archival Aerial Photography ]

Dave linked to Jeremy Zawodny reminiscing about his first web server. Depending on how loosely you define "web", I remember running the gopher:// protocol with KA9Q with the help of Robert Wilson and a few other folks from the BBS crowd way way back. And, of course, there was Hyper!...

But the first HTTP server connected to the real-live Internet would have been NCSA HTTPd sometime in 1994 (I think, we didn't have a full-time feed 'til 94, right Meuon?), with the help of Aaron Spink. I'd guess it would have been on caladan.chattanooga.net, a 386/33, running some .9x or early 1.something Linux kernel. Might have even been on arrakis.chattanooga.net, a 386/25 with either 4 or 8 meg of RAM that served as the nameserver and which, for giggles, we got X running on...

It's amazing to think back to how much of what we predicted back then about information accessibility, personal publishing and the like not only came true, but was scoffed at at the time. But now... well... we had a power outage this last weekend, and I've got less than an hour of battery for the house server and routers, so I shut down the net. Then we started to make plans: "We should pull up a movie schedule", "we should look at a map", "we should check traffic"; all based on technology that most people couldn't even imagine a decade ago.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life Open Source Chattanooga Net Culture ]

Just seeing what I can learn with flours. Not for replication as is, just a reference for further experiment. This morning's experiment:

• 1/2 cup sweet rice flour
• 2 tbs. sugar
• 1/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tbs. butter
• 1/2 lemon zest
• 1/2 lemon juice
• 1/2 cup - lemon juice quantity yoghurt

15 minutes at 425F. Flattened out, more like pancake shaped than biscuit shape. Outside was pleasantly browned, with slight carmelization. Lemon flavor was present, almost a little strong, but no off-flavors from the leavening agents. Fairly large, pleasant crumb. Inside had a gooey texture, kind of like sticky rice, almost pleasant that thin, but would have been annoying in a biscuit or muffin thickness. Tomorrow morning I play with straight brown rice flour.

[ related topics: Food ]

In case you're still running Windows, you should be aware that there's a Windows ".WMF" vulnerability that can be exploited by JPEG, GIF, and several other file formats, and there are exploits in the wild that will infect your computer if you visit a hostile web site. The official fix is due next Tuesday, there's an unofficial patch which you probably want to use now if you use a Windows computer on the web.

Other Microsoft vulnerabilities? Well, if you're Chinese Microsoft could censor your weblog.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus Free Speech moron ]

So speaking of the difficulty of claims and statistics, Women's pages: Next time you read about 'what women want,' check the research -- it's likely to be flimsy is a short article talking about how hacks like Maureen Dowd use incomplete studies and misleading under-researched statistics to sell papers.

[ related topics: Mathematics Archival ]

Bush pushes for permanent powers:

Bush, his voice rising in apparent irritation, said lawmakers must act on a permanent renewal of the law that expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against terrorism suspects, their associates and financiers. Noting the Patriot Act was overwhelmingly approved not long after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he said political considerations now were getting in the way.

"political concerns" like... oh, say, "basic civil liberties" and "reasonable constraints on government powers".

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

Another biometric method has come online. It reads palm vein patterns. It is hygenic in that it does not require contact. First implementation, a library in Japan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/...4/sc_space/newiddevicereadspalms

radix

[ related topics: Language Books Space & Astronomy Current Events ]

Edge: Annual Question — 2006: What is your dangerous idea?

"Everything is pointless"

"Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them."

"A marriage option for all"

"This is all there is "

"The free market"

"We are entirely alone"

"We Have No Souls"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Economics Marriage ]

crasch had a link to The Ghandi Nobody Knows, an article from '83 looking at the reality behind the movie "Ghandi". Reading Savaging the Civilized gave me a little bit of an interest into the history of the religious fundamentalist who brought even more strife and dissention to a troubled land by trying to impose a monoculture on what was a culturally rich and diverse set of regions, more in the "how can I filter out that propaganda so I can discover whhat sort of a heritage was really there" way than a direct interest. This is a good article for helping to filter the propaganda.

[ related topics: Religion Movies History ]

The Sake Koji online order center including several recipes for making sake.

[ related topics: Food Wines and Spirits ]

Posing for Life Drawing, from both sides of the canvas:

The standard life drawing class denies models their humanity—and denies nekkidness its due. Maybe that has to do with artists’ three-centuries-long drive for respectability. But when I see a bare-assed boy on a model stand, I don’t see abstract, platonic solids. And when I was posing, I didn’t want to be reduced to that, either. It seemed more respectful to acknowledge me as a possessor of breasts and personality.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Nudity Art & Culture ]

This one's for MarkV: Public Domain Movie Torrents.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Italian man sues Catholic priest to make it prove that Jesus existed:

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is "Sostituzione di Persona," or impersonation.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Law ]

Augh! When you've become used to Python's ability to pass callbacks as self.method, the whole C++ functor thing really chafes.

[ related topics: Python ]

I'm in a Starbucks yesterday, about 11:30 am Chicago time. Next to the shelf of sugar packets and napkins is a sales rack with copies of the local newspapers. I notice they still have on offer a copy of the Tribune with the headline "Miners Found Alive", referring to the false report of the West Virginia coal mine disaster victims. Obviously this edition went to press about midnight, before the grim reality was discovered. It may have been delivered to the coffee shop before dawn, but here it was hours after the truth was known and still on sale. My copy at home had the correct story. I pointed this out to a supervisor who was puttering around the store, and he hurredly pulled the copies off. A very creepy incident.

These instructions ... outline the procedures of packing a fresh brain for shipment.... (Props to Hgr1219, again, who said " this isnt exactly what I was looking for, wanted to find out how to get one shipped TO me.......... dammit")

[ related topics: Physiology HGR1219 ]

Latest large prime number discovery:

The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Stupid Pothead Stories ... .com

I'm looking for a way to tie this to Web2.0, 'cause if ever there were something deserving of too much VC money...

[ related topics: Drugs New Economy ]

Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Journalism and Media ]

I was going to add this to the comments for petronius' entry about victims of the news cycle, but I think that this failure of the journalism system deserves another entry: Local W.Va. Paper Says Skepticism Helped it Avoid Mining Story Goof:

Skidmore adds that her staff never believed the miners had been found alive because no official word was ever given. She said no update about miners being found alive ever appeared on the paper's Web site, either.

"I was on the phone with her and I was hearing things on CNN and FOX that she was not hearing there," Skidmore said about reporter Becky Wagoner. "She heard that the miners were alive just before it was broadcast, around midnight. She talked about hearing church bells ringing and people yelling in jubilation--but nothing official."

So: Rather than re-print what "everyone knows", one paper decided to wait for confirmation. The Inter-Mountain, with a circulation of 11,000. While Flutterby can't claim to a larger readership than that, I think a few 'blogs can.

In the wake of some of the more damning news stories about the excesses of the Bush administration, a couple of people have noted that the papers that have run these stories have sat on their information for months, in many cases over a year, until the public sentiment swung against Bush. In other words: Editors were quite content to reinforce preconceived notions of their readers, even when they knew that the information on which the readers were basing their opinions were factually wrong, because the truth was at odds with the conventional wisdom.

And here we find a similar pattern: A number of people mistakenly gain a belief, and rather than actually checking sources, in the rush to "be first" and sell more newspapers, traditional journalism goes with simply passing on the conventional wisdom rather than actually discovering the story.

The next person who claims that journalism rises above weblogs or other amateur efforts had better give me a damned good explanation for this phenomenon. And we need to start holding our news sources accountable for this crap: If you subscribe to a paper that called this one wrong, they need at the very least an angry letter to the editor asking why they're reprinting rumour as fact, and asking in what other cases they're content to repeat the conventional wisdom in order to make exciting headlines rather than ask what the truth really is.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Politics Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media Pedal Power Bicycling Archival ]

This weekend, I've promised Charlene that I'll do tamales. I've been winging this every time I've done it so far, but I'm going to start to take notes in the interest of coming up with repeatable processes. I have one Mexican cookbook that starts out every recipe with "a cup of lard", but this one uses a cup of olive oil, although I'm concerned that that much extra virgin olive oil will give a tannic taste, and I'm not sure high oleic safflower is the flavor I want, so I may have to get a more refined olive oil.

A Grilled California tamale involving basil, balsamic vinegar and goat cheese, and another recipe pushing the bounds of what vegetables I'd think were the right flavor for tamales.

[tee hee hee: The topic picker decided on Sexual Culture, presumably because of the "virgin" reference...]

[ related topics: Food California Culture ]

" Giving homeless alcoholics a regular supply of booze may improve their health and their behaviour...":

After an average of 16 months, the number of times participants got in trouble with the law had fallen 51 percent from the three years before they joined the program, and hospital emergency room visits were down 36 percent.

(via)

It's actually not quite that clear cut, the access to alcohol was used to build trust in treatment programs. The article appears to be: Shelter-based managed alcohol administration to chronically homeless people addicted to alcohol.

[ related topics: Health Sociology Current Events ]

In honor of the recent celebration of an alleged virgin birth, Dan Savage did a column on "losing virginity" horror stories, with some additional material.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

Stolen from Medley: Parents report being more miserable than non-parents.

But how can the findings stand? Politics, culture and history -- to say nothing of those annoying Baby Gap ads -- all reinforce the message that having children is the greatest pleasure in life.

Michael Lewis, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry and director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., says that the idea of parenthood as pure joy "was always a bit of a wonderful myth." He said he's surprised the study findings were not even more negative.

Clarifying the Relationship Between Parenthood and Depression [pdf] was published in The Jounral of Health and Social Behavior.

So now's a good time to tell your parents how much you appreciate what they've done for you...

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Child-Freedom Archival ]

Anyone out there still got a line on a free Macworld pass? Seems like I should have done something about this earlier, 'cause I'm getting a whole lot of "will I see you there?" queries.

Fascinating: Sean Conner has been looking at port scans with the La Brea tar pit software:

...And it seems, from these results, that simply blocking the ports used by Microsoft Windows will stop 87% of these scans...

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

According to: The Canton Rep (which requires a long registration, so I am quoting highlights here):

On Wednesday morning, (city proscecutor) Forchione filed a felony criminal charge of disrupting public services against Michael W. Stone, 18, of 13634 Mogadore Ave. NW. Uniontown police arrested the Lake High School senior at the school.

What for you might ask?:

Stone created a blog on a Web site that encouraged others to use a link to another site.(the school website) Once at the second site, Stone told users to "hold down F5 to help crash my school server,"

OK, that is wrong. but not Felony Arrest level wrong. It's "young man, remove the Blog entry" wrong. It's "get the parents down here" wrong. It's "detention" wrong... And if you want to play the "Freedom of Speech" card: It might be a lot less.

The schools website: Might be this, but I'm not sure, it's refusing connections. The google cache shows it was up on Jan 1, so that must be it. Oh, I just linked to it didn't I. Dang.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Privacy Weblogs Law Enforcement Television Civil Liberties ]

An experiment. Before trying, see the notes at the end about starch levels in the soufflé; next time I try this I'll be upping them considerably, and I need to do some testing with egg yolks, assorted starches, and an instant-read thermometer to get a better feel for thickening.

• 2 potatoes
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 t. cream of tartar
• 1 14.5 oz can roasted tomatoes with green chilis
• 1 onion, diced
• 1/2 cup diced ham
• 4 tbs olive oil
• 1 tbs butter
• Small amount grated cheese (sharp cheddar or parmesan, for my tastes)

Pre-heat oven to 375°F. Peel and grate potatoes. In both hands, squeeze the water out of the grated potatoes into a bowl, reserve 1 tablespoon potato and wrap the rest in plastic to retard browning (greying)? Pour off liquid from the potato water, keeping the starch that's settled.

Separate the eggs. Beat the whites and the cream of tartar to soft peaks. Take 2 tbs of the tomatoes, mostly juice, and whip with the yolks and 2 tbs olive oil (kind of makes a mayonnaise like structure).

Heat a frying pan and cook the onion to take the edge off it.

Heat remaining tomatoes to a simmer, whisk in potato starch, 1 tablespoon potatoe and yolk/tomato juice mixture, continue to cook until it thickens. Add onion and diced ham.

Move tomato mixture to a large bowl, fold in yolks, put in a 6-7" soufflé pan and toss in the oven.

Set a timer for 20 minutes. Go do something else.

When timer goes off, heat 1 tb olive oil and 1/2 tb butter on a skillet. When the butter begins to brown, sprinkle grated potatoes in skillet, turn heat to medium, press potatoes down and allow to cook, undisturbed, for 7-8 minutes. Turn potato layer out onto plate, add remaining olive oil and butter, and put the potato layer back in to the skillet, uncooked side down, for another 6 minutes.

Sprinkle cheese on half of potato layer and fold in half over layer.

Remove the soufflé from the oven, cut the potato/cheese hash browns in wedges, scoop out soufflé on to plate, garnish with chopped fresh tomato, fresh basil in a chiffonade, and hash brown wedges.

Next time I do this I'll put more starch (which could just be a tb or two more grated potato) in the tomato mixture, and I need to play with figuring out the exact temperature to bring the tomato mixture to to give me maximum binding from the yolk and the starches, as this was just a little bit too wet.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Via Baylink: SFWeekly does a look at Tom Lehrer and satire:

"The whole idea of freedom of speech means you can say 'fuck' on television is an anathema to me," Lehrer says. "That's not what freedom of speech is about. It's about saying stuff. Now you can say anything, why don't you? But they don't."

[ related topics: Humor Civil Liberties ]

Yet another example of silly gun laws endangering potential crime victims.

[ related topics: Guns ]

Aaarg! If you use a Wacom tablet under Linux with GIMP, maybe this'll ring a bell.

I have my Graphire configured and the XOrg server is reading it mostly fine, except that sometimes, and I can't figure out what the pattern is, it gets confused about the absolute position information.

I think this is related to when I turn on the extended input information in GIMP, I get the tool at a different location than the cursor. I've tried this in "screen" and "window" mode, "window" gives me something that's obviously scaling oddly, "screen" gives me kind of what I want, except for the fact that the tool is at a different location. And it seems like I can move this location by moving quickly off the edge of the window, then back on.

This is bothering me, because now that I've had a taste of touch sensitive drawing, I want more.

All of the usual stuff, Option "Mode" "absolute" in my xorg.conf, verified that this is loading in "absolute" mode in the log files, if anyone has help I'd be most grateful.

[ related topics: Free Software Dan's Life ]

Cool! MarkV had a link to an article about disassembling an optical mouse and hooking the sensor up to a parallel port. Might be handy to have this as a reference for a lot of things, many involing microcontrollers...

[ related topics: Embedded Devices Archival ]

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/mathtrek.asp

A CD is available containing 10 MB files which have passed relavent tests, theoretically speaking...

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

Ziffle

[ related topics: Music ]

A weekend late: Hugh Thompson Jr., the American helicopter pilot who is credited with stopping the massacre at My Lai, dead at 62.

[ related topics: War Aviation - Helicopters ]

C++ trick of the day: The Impossibly Fast C++ Delegates By Sergey Ryazanov. Summary: Use templates to create a static function which does a static_cast on a void * and then dispatches a method on it, and pass around the void * and a pointer to this function. Gives a pointer to a member function that does all the right things, including dispatching virtually, and even from a pure virtual.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Cool Technology ]

Courtesy(?) of Brian (who has an occasionally updated weblog), I got to see... well... the beginning of the "Star Wars Holiday Special". Someone cared enough to create http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/ in which George Lucas is quoted:

MAXIM: Any plans for a Special Edition of the Holiday Special?

George: [hangs head] Right. That's one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it.

Over the years I've heard of this piece of dreck, and heard the various rumours about how George Lucas has tried to buy up all of the legal copies so that he could destroy it. My reaction then was "oh, come on, suck it up, how bad can it be?". Uh... yeah... you go, George, and if you need any help rooting out the bootleg versions too, I'll pitch in.

Oh The Humanity reviews it, and tells you all you need to know in a far more entertaining way. The version reviewed there had the commercials, which, I think would have been at least as interesting.

But, as they say, that which doesn't kill us serves to make us stronger, and today I feel pretty bad-ass.

[ related topics: Star Wars Dan's Life Movies ]

Interesting: LA Times article claiming that Cantonese is losing out to Mandarin in business dealings. Although Mandarin is the official language in China, I've predicted that Cantonese will be on the rise because that's the language used in the regions which are actually building the factories and products.

[ related topics: Language Current Events Hong Kong ]

/. today linked to a documentary about crossing the United States on a Segway. The comments included:

My generation's defining film - two guys do a big cocaine deal, drop out of society, take drugs and have sex with beautiful women while crossing America on outrageous Harley choppers (Easy Rider)....your generation, two dorks on Segways...

which led to:

Yeah, but these guys probably don't get shot at the end of the movie.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be (for the sake of the gene pool), but still...

thence

Two guys cross america on Segways. Trust me, the gene pool is safe. Even if they are straight their odds of reproducing are slim.

Looks pretty skippable, although the trailer does have one of the more amusing Segway crashes I've seen. I think they need a bit more intelligence about when to give up trying to balance...

[ related topics: Movies Segway/Ginger/IT ]

What I made on Sunday afternoon, many ingredients were "because we had them" rather than because they were first choice.

• 1 large daikon (came from Charlene's dad, who grows 'em), cut into thin slices
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 2 cups cider vinegar (what we had on-hand)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 clove garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
• 1 tbs dried dill
• 8 juniper berries, crushed
• 8 cloves
• 1 tsp mustard seed
• 1 bay leaf

Start water boiling with pickling jars and lids in it. Boil vinegar and sugar together, add garlic, let boil for a few minutes (garlic can carry nasty anaerobic microbes which you do not want in mixtures that won't get used very quickly). Toss rest of ingredients in the brine, while you're doing that, pull out the jars (with tongs) and stuff in the daikon slices. Pour the brine in on top, out jars back in the boiling water, lightly fasten the lids, let boil for 15 minutes, then screw down the lids and remove the jars from the boiling water.

Tasty. Not perfect, but a good tribute to a big honkin' chunk o' veggie.

[ related topics: Food ]

Last night I got to the "sugar" section in On Food and Cooking, where Harold McGee talks about the necessity of breaking down some of the sucrose in standard table sugar to glucose and fructose for the purposes of making it workable at lower temperatures. I've been talking for a few years about trying to blow sugar in much the same way that glass is blown, but I've been wondering how the heck you hold sucrose (table sugar) at 320°F (so it's melted) without going over 340°F (when it carmelizes). Then I hit the section which said that glucose, fructose and maltose are interfering agents which can keep the mixture from forming crystals as it cools, and that if you get this mixture right you can get a sugar workable at 120°F. Acids break down sucrose into glucose and fructose, but corn syrup is a ready-made version with maltose and glucose and more predictable when mixed...

So a few minutes in a search engine and I find a page on sugar art which has instructions on working sugar, some predicated on start with $690 in tools. I was thinking "I'll keep my eye open for a free or cheap heat lamp, I've already got some Pyrex™ tubing and a propane torch...", but they've got a basic recipe, 750 grams of sugar, 225 grams water, boil to 230°F, add 320 grams of corn syrup, 1 gram cream of tartar, boil to 300°F to 315°F (start with the lower temperature), cool and pull on a slab (I've got a marble block just for this purpose, from ages ago).

But on the way to finding that I also ran across:

• Pastry Life, a blog of a student wanting to be a pastry chef (actually, it looks like the author went through a complete program and is now fine-tuning)
• Cake Nouveau, a bakery with some beautiful work in Michigan.
• Food Migration looks like another student. I'll investigate further when I have a moment.

[ related topics: Weblogs Food Art & Culture Food - Cake ]

It was a big deal when I was a kid to see a car's odometer rollover at 100,000 miles back to all zero's. I saw it a few times, I even remember my Dad joking he had a new car. Now cars often last several times that. I'v destroyed 3 high end digital cameras caving or other mishaps. #4, a Sony 828 8mpix just freaked me out cause some of the pics I took today were out of order. It rolled over at image number DSC09999 and went back to DSC0001. Hmm.. they must not expect these things to last, or people to take that many pictures. Sadly, the "magic" pictures were just website product shots, nothing kewl and worthy of sharing here.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Photography Invention and Design California Culture Automobiles Clowns ]

In an effort to make this site usable under IE again (I'm not sure what's changed, but...), I've made the right margin bigger. I really need to be serving up a different stylesheet for broken browsers. Hey, Microsoft, while you're rehashing features that other operating systems have had for a loooong time now, how about a working web browser?

And, yes, y'all who are still using IE need to switch. Really. It's time. And if better security, a more stable browsing experience, and standards compliance aren't incentive enough, how about tabbed browsing?

[ related topics: Microsoft moron Macintosh ]

This is a fascinating little magazine: Food Product Design, all about food from a commercial standpoint. Take an overview of onions:

Onion flavors marry well with potatoes. One way to take advantage of this mutual attraction is to add onions to hash browns. Call them by their proper French name -- Lyonnaise potatoes -- and you can double the price.

Onion appetizers take the spotlight from time to time. For example, consider the deep-fried onion "flower." OK, maybe this is a bit overdone, but anything that turns a $0.10 onion into a $6.00 appetizer deserves admiration. ...

Or the kicker from this recipe for roasted peppers stuffed with tuna:

A traditional Italian appetizer or snack, roasted bell peppers stuffed with tuna fish, would work well as a foodservice or deli-counter product during the summer months.

I doubt they'll give me a free subscription, and I'm not ready to pay the $129 or so it costs to get a paid one, but it looks well worth reading on-line.

[ related topics: Food Sociology ]

SFGate: The King of Cookware is a little article on Stanley Cheng, CEO of Meyer Cookware.

[ related topics: Food ]

I know this isn't a political blog, so feel free to critique the photoshop job shown here.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs moron ]

Nikon dropping almost all their film cameras for digital:

As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.

[ related topics: Photography Economics ]

Some days you just end up copying a Sensible Erection entry wholesale. I'll change the wording a bit, but...

Building a vibrating lockpick from a $6 Oral-B battery powered flosser relies on you having just a little bit of lock picking knowledge, and also builds on professionally acquired tools, but there's nothing in the latter set you couldn't make out of a bobby pin and an Allen wrench with a file and a spare evening. And if the video isn't a put-on, I'm going to the ultra lightweight bike lock system that I saw Bob and B.J. using over in San Anselmo(they went to the marine supply store and built little thin aircraft cable loops with a crimper), at least when I'm parking my bike in Marin, 'cause it's not like the bigger locks are any more secure than a luggage lock.

If you don't know where to start, that aforementioned entry suggested http://www.lockpicking101.com/, or you might start at The Document Which Used To Be Called The MIT Lockpicking Guide .

[ related topics: security Cool Technology Bicycling San Anselmo ]

Tulua, Colombia wants to make it mandatory for everyone over 14 to carry a condom, the penalty for breaking the law would be taking a safer sex course, or a $180 fine.

The proposal is perhaps the most radical in a series of pro-condom efforts across a country where 190,000 people live with AIDS, a figure only surpassed in Latin America by Brazil, according to the World Health Organization.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Sexual Culture Health ]

Hey Bay Area folks! The studio that Jeanne and Zack blow glass, at, Public Glass, is having a shindig on February 11^th: "Hot Glass, Cold Beer; Gettin Hot with Your Honey!"

Your $20 admission ($15 tax ded.) includes a glass heart or blown glass cup, and free beer to fill it! There will be great music and great food! All ages welcome.

Last event I was there for, Charlene and I were running a dipped chocolate food station, but we had some good conversations, saw some beautiful work, and got to see a guy skipping a rope made of melted glass.

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

MarkV has a great rant on Robert Scoble, evangelism, and Microsoft vs Apple.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Microsoft ]

Stolen from crasch's del.iciou.us feed: Building the FAL rifle at home.

Building an FAL is a challenging and rewarding undertaking, and one that has few peers in the firearms world. All at once, the builder learns about his rifle with a degree of intimacy that most firearms owners will never know, and has the pride and satisfaction of a job well done when it functions correctly. If that isn't worth a "Glock and a half," we don't know what is.

[ related topics: Guns ]

You may remember that a while back I got a claim of ownership for Flutterby.com. I recently got follow-up email, the first was moderately conciliatory, but they got a little more belligerent, asking that I remove that thread. The legal threats haven't come yet, but I've a feeling they will, and he's basing his claims on two things:

1. That I had no right to publish the threats emails he sent me.
2. That I'm violating his privacy rights by allowing the personal information in that thread to remain on the web.

Ignoring the thorny "right to privacy" legal question [grin], if any of y'all have legal references off the top of your head on those two topics, drop it in here. I know there's good support for both publishing one end of a letter, especially when that letter is a claim, and republishing information available elsewhere... well... the Cryptome folks have pushed the limits of that, but decisions I can use should I have to give an info packet to lawyers would be handy.

So far I've refused. My rationale is that until I trust that he's not a threat to the web in general it's important to have identifying information so that other people who may be threatened see that others are standing up to him.

[ related topics: Privacy Flutterby Meta Law Civil Liberties ]

The Spectator magazine web site says:

Spectator Magazine has ceased publication. Despite recent improvements in the design, content and distribution of the Spectator, long standing debts and changes in the market have forced us to close. We would like to thank our readers and advertisers who have supported us over the past 27 years.

I don't know the full story behind this, but I've felt in the general cutlure, and I think in myself, a shift towards sexuality from the '90s to now, and... I don't have the time to try to come up with an essay describing what that is, but I think the demise of a magazine like this is an important data point in that change.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History Consumerism and advertising Graphic Design Economics ]

Yow! Went to make an entry on Flutterby and noticed the server was running slow. Looked at the process table and the log and... well... the server was dealing with hundreds of referrer spammer requests. I've put together a quick hack which gives a simple text/plain response to the common keywords, apologies if you've been trying to get to the site from a domain that mentions "viagra" or any of a number of other keywords and phrases.

And, wow, we're going to have to Balkanize the net soon.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta Net Culture ]

San Francisco now ranked 11^th meanest city in the US to the homeless by the National Coalition for the Homeless. One of the complaints against the city:

After responding to complaints of homeless people loitering outside the San Francisco Public Library, the police decided to provide homeless individuals, unhappy living in the city, with one-way bus tickets. The plan would “reunite them with loved ones for the holidays.” The Police Department recommended coordination with the bus companies and local businesses to fund tickets, along with boxed lunches.

Meanwhile, others perceive San Francisco as welcoming to the homeless to a fault.

[ related topics: Language Books Bay Area Law Enforcement California Culture Public Transportation Archival ]

Wow. So, I've got a leaky shower valve, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to take it apart. Punch "shower valve take apart" into Google. Click on DoItYourself.com: Repairing Faucets & Valves. Not quite what I'm looking for, so click on Ace Hardware: Repairing Faucets and Valves. Notice that, huh, the text and drawings seem remarkably similar. Go down the list, oh, look, Cole Hardware's page uses the same text and graphics, including the numbering graphics from that first one. And Aubuchon Hardware's page follows the trend.

So are these all licensed? Only the Cole Hardware page offers credit to a third party source? Or are we seeing copyright infringement on a scale not seen since the heyday of Napster?

[ related topics: Copyright/Trademark ]

Elf on BraJengelina:

Come the Singularity, I hope all three of these so-called celebrities and their whole entourages end up running on a Microsoft OS.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

For dinner tonight, Charlene wanted to try a lentil stuffed cabbage with a curry flavor. We didn't have any commercial curry mixes, didn't even have curry leaves, but we made do wit the Sri Lankan curry base from A Taste of Serendib. Actually the first thing I've tried from that book, Mary Anne is one of those authors that I just get everything they release, and even if I don't get to the book for two years I'm never disappointed.

Anyway, we're going to have to play with a bunch of things on it, but the one thing I was amazed at: We had this dark toasted spice mix that was kind of bitter. Tossed it in with a bunch of fresh ginger and onion, cooked it for a while, was kind of disappointed, went poking around for what I could toss in to bring a little more sweetness and a little more higher nose flavors, went back and tasted it again and... I've never had anything's flavor change that dramatically from when I thought it was already cooked. Definitely going to have to play more with that.

Other question of the evening: We were putting up the last of the persimmons from this season, Charlene had eventually broken down and tried the "stuff them in the freezer, pull 'em out and peel 'em in a few months" trick that her parents had been pushing on her. We tried some, and there was an astringency there that annoyed her immensely, but to me was just barely noticeable. Yet another "huh?" that we're going to have to investigate further.

[ related topics: Books Food ]

Nancy and I have ended up at Rembrants Coffee/Chocolates in the Art District many Sunday's and have enjoyed their Tomato Artichoke Soup. We decided it was time to recreate it ourselves and have figured out a reasonable fascimile:

1 can artichoke hearts(in water)

1 can tomato soup

1 or 2 tomatoes

1 pint of half and half

1 half a stick of butter

Chop up the artichokes (into quarters/eighths)

Chop up the tomatoes (small pieces)

Put everything into a small pot and bring to a low boil while stirring. Add a smidgen of salt, paper, and spices to taste. I used just a little oregeno, parsely and thyme.. let simmer for a few minutes. Serve with bread or croutons.

Not as fancy as some of Dan and Charlene's dishes, but very yummy, especially on a cold winters day.

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Food Art & Culture ]

The alter ego of Foo Camp is Bar Camp. There is an Atlanta Bar Camp in the works.. Gonzo Geek Gathering where everyone is a participant.

I'm typing this on the live CD version of Ubuntu Linux, after having just sat next to Charlene while she ran the install version on a laptop she was given (and I talked her through replacing a bad hard drive in it).

I'm a convert. I'll be re-installing my laptop and our desktop machines, moving them over from Debian. The live version just works on my laptop. The install version just worked on her laptop. It uses .deb packages. It installed with Python 2.4 as the default.

The Opera installation has been a little bit complex, but there's an Ubuntu Wiki page on how to install Opera that, if we're successful, should give me a better running Opera than we've ever had on Debian.

And my one problem, that we didn't have all of the repositories turned on, was actually easily solved through the GUI! I could find the right switches! So it has both apt-get and dpkg and a GUI which makes sense to me!

I think we can just get CodeWeavers for their QuickBooks support and be done with the bloody Windows in this household.

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

Hey Atlanta folks! The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum looks like a really cool day trip, and the rest of us can amuse ourselves with the online galleries.

Remember the Corbin Sparrow, one of the devices that, to me, recalls the giddiness of the Internet boom (although apparently it's still available...). Turns out there have been lots of attempts at small three-wheeled vehicles over the ages, along with lots of other fun tiny automobiles.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Chinpokomon had a Hajj death pool in which I guessed horribly low (150). But he linked to the 2006 Hajj-o-Meter^tm which, aside from informing me that shaving your pubic hair before the Hajj is "commendable", also linked to Protect Your Health during Hajj and Ziarat, about vaccinations and such, and all of a sudden I had this "Jared Diamond" moment where I realized...

The Hajj is bringing people from all over the world, the farthest reaches, together in conditions that mean that Muslims are going to have the ass-kickingest immune systems ever in a few generations.

[ related topics: Religion Health ]

Way busy, little time for updates, so here's a bone: Brad had a link to the Bush presidency as the old ADVENTURE text game. As one of the commenters remarked: "If Bush is so in the dark, why hasn't he been eaten by a Grue?"

[ related topics: Politics Humor Games Weblogs moron ]

The feds are going on a fishing expedition by trying to compel Google to turn over its search logs.

The Mountain View-based company told The San Jose Mercury News that it opposes releasing the information because it would violate the privacy rights of its users and would reveal company trade secrets.

This after Attorney General Gonzales knowingly lied for political gain.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Sexual Culture moron Law Current Events Civil Liberties ]

This is fascinating: a graph of "argh" with number of "a"s versus number of "r"s, by occurrence, as derived from Google searches. The blog entry that describes it starts to delve into some of the fun of the mutability of language. (Via Dave's Picks.)

[ related topics: Language Net Culture ]

Quiz - Coder or Cannibal. Todays time waster. I got 8 out of 10.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

The thrice damned referrer spammers took down the server last night. I've put in further safeguards and some extremely lightweight redirects for outside links to heavyweight pages. I don't know what to do generally, it's not like I have any recourse against these people, I stopped doing referrer tracking ages ago (like, around the time where Todd used that trick to make us the #2 result for "French Military Victories"), I can't block all outside links...

Anyway, we'll try this.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta Todd Gemmell Net Culture ]

Does anyone know of an existing Linux app that will monitor CPU load, and if it gets too high shut down some processes for a while? I know that the box isn't dead, because I can ping it, and I think that if I could set a threshold after which I drop Apache for a few minutes, then bring everything back up, I'd have a more general purpose solution to my problem.

[ related topics: Open Source security ]

After long enough with the Mac I started to realize that some of the trade-offs I've been reluctant to engage in over the years have shifted their rewards, and maybe it was time to bite the bullet and switch some of the ways in which I use computers.

So I've installed Ubuntu on all of my Linux machines that have a graphical interface, and I'm now using Opera as my email client as well.

This change has not been without some adjustment, last night I wanted to record an ISO, so I typed in cdrecord dev=0,0,0 image.iso, got an error about cdrecord not liking my kernel version, started to go for the package manager, and then realized "wait, what if I just open a window and double-click..."

Yeah, that worked.

There are some adjustments. I'm having to mouse more, and there are patterns of use that I'm having to re-learn, but most of them are re-learning, there are generally ways that are as efficient to do what I want to do, once I learn them.

And on the flip side, after recovering her laptop from the Windows XP installation with an Ubuntu "live" disk, Charlene's writing up cheat sheets with sudo mount /dev/hda3 ... on them...

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Microsoft Open Source Theater & Plays Writing Macintosh Education ]

What is our children learning? "Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).". A quick scan through the report shows a few interesting tidbits that might be worth pursuing, but I'm a little suspicious about making some of the snarky pronouncements I'd like to make without sitting down and understanding the methodology behind some of the pretty graphs.

So if anyone else cares enough to delve into this, go nuts.

[ related topics: Language Children and growing up Current Events Education ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VFJ0L5OQ_s

http://www.youtube.com/?v=vtII_c3iEfY

I want one!

[ related topics: Movies ]

I'd mentioned that we were playing with curries. Charlene has fallen for Thai "curries", so yesterday and today we tried to recreate some of the flavor that we've experienced recently, notably at Bangkok Thai Express.

We didn't come up with something good. I mean, it was edible, but only after we used yoghurt for the proteins to bind to some of the tannins in the spices, and it wasn't the flavor we were searching for.

Yeah, sure, we could go out and buy a curry paste, but I'm the sort of person who wants to figure out what goes into food from first principles. So here's what I'd like: I want a book on herbs and spices that starts with the table on page 392-393 of the second edition of On Food and Cooking. I want a reference that talks about curries not just as "curry", but as "we can break up the things commonly referred to in the U.S. as 'curries' into these geographic and ethnic sources", and then goes on to talk about the differences in flavor between where the various component herbs and spices are grown, and how different components substitute, and so forth.

And this was going to turn into a rant about online resources and search engines, but we'll save that one for tomorrow.

[ related topics: Books Food ]

MarkV had a link to a Google video of destroying a car with thermite. From the voice-over it sounds like those wacky folks over at Top Gear. And... wow, I think I'm going to have to brew me up some of that stuff...

[ related topics: Humor Automobiles Pyrotechnics ]

After years of satisfaction using my late 1980s Minolta SLR camera, I found most digital camera harder to use, mostly because I was used to a few simple adjustments (fStop, ISO, Focus) and I knew how the camera would respond. However, it may be that this new unit from Canon will change my mind.

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Community ]

Being tested under a federal grant in New Jersey. It's an eye-recognition. It just takes a photo. I certainly wouldn't trust a government project to use a laser on my eyes!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20060124/tc_cmp/177103003

radix

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design moron Current Events ]

I'm hanging out at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference today, and it's surprisingly compelling. I'm sitting in the VC roundtable right now, which is about what you usually hear at such things, but there wasn't the hall traffic I was hoping for. The hall traffic this morning was surprisingly good, had some good conversations, and ran into things which are expanding some of the ways that I'm looking at various technological issues.

But here's a few from HGR1219:

• I know I've seen it before, and though I'd linked to it, but Pixelito is a super tiny remote control helicopter that's worth leafing through.
• Yodel Course... well, I think there's a strong audio component, and I'm sitting in the back of a conference panel...
• And, even though we linked to it three years ago, it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves of the coolness of blowing up big buildings at ImplosionWorld.com.

[ related topics: Music Architecture Conferences Archival Aviation - Helicopters HGR1219 ]

At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, watching a guy from Spark Fun Electronics give a presentation on the Portable Cellular Rotary Phone. They use a Telit GM862 board, for a hundred bucks and change you get a serial controlled GSM or GPRS or PCS module that you can interface to cheap microcontrollers, and it takes a standard SIM card.

They've even got one that looks like it'll let you pass Python across the AT command set...

If you're hacking with cell phone stuff, this looks like a reasonable way for mid-range quantities to build embedded cellular network apps.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless broadband Robotics Monty Python Embedded Devices Conferences Python ]

More Emerging Telephony Conference, Surj Patel on building your own Linux based cell phone using a Gumstix SBC with an LCD driver, interfacing to the aforementioned GM862 which has speaker and microphone drivers, a battery charging circuit. The microphone should be balanced and buffered, they're looking at a Star Micronics mic that's super tiny, they're using a standard piezo ringer and a MM74C922 key encoder for their keyboard.

The particular applications they're looking at are things like putting bar code or RFID sensor in a device that's actually cell phone sized. The big challenge is building small devices. Total cost of parts is about $400, which is a bit high, but gives an open platform (which is probably easier to interface to than a Linux based PDA).

[ related topics: Free Software Wireless Open Source Conferences RFID ]

Just an entry to hang comments for the ETel demo.

It's partially a publicity stunt, I'm pretty sure. But according to an LA Times article: The MPAA got caught making copies of a movie. -I'm hoping they get nailed to the wall. Now if we could just catch some RIAA lawyer with an iPod full of illegal music and an extra unpaid copy of M$-Winders and M$-Office at home.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Movies Law ]

Just in case you didn't catch it: Disney buys Pixar. From the Disney press release:

Ed Catmull Named President of the Combined Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and John Lasseter Named Chief Creative Officer; Steve Jobs to Join Disney's Board of Directors...

[ related topics: Pixar Apple Computer Humor Animation Law Current Events Graphics ]

Seeing links this morning to a New Scientist article that notes an inverse correlation between size of testes and brains in bats, and links these things to promiscuity in females of the species:

Pitnick and his colleagues had predicted that, in species with promiscuous females, males would require bigger brains in order avoid being cuckolded. So they were surprised to find the opposite: “Perhaps monogamy is more neurologically demanding.”

From the Syracuse University press release:

“When females mate with more than one male, sperm compete to fertilize the female’s eggs. Such ‘sperm competition’ is rife in many bat species, perhaps due in part to the unusual ability (among mammals at least) of sperm to survive inside the female’s reproductive tract for a very long time,” says Pitnick. “The male who ejaculates the greatest number of sperm may win at this game, and hence many bats have evolved outrageously big testes—as much as 8.5% of their body mass. Because they live on an energetic knife-edge, bats may not be able to evolutionarily afford both big testes and big brains. We’re excited about these results, as they may stimulate more research into the correlated evolution of brains, behavior and the extravagant and costly ornaments and armaments favored by sexual selection.”

The full study is available at Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences: Mating system and brain size in bats.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nature and environment Biology ]

Skinny dipping always made the most sense for me, but diferrent people want different things: I present the lest in Muslim swimming fashion.

Big plus: High UPF rating!

http://www.ahiida.com.au/produ...5f905471b28512503e9f112525c5e031

[ related topics: Fashion ]

Further rundown from the Emerging Telephony Conference: The hall chatter on this one was particularly good. Had some really interesting conversations about law and internet with Dave Pollak who used to be a lawyer and is now a software developer.

Talked to a few folks from SMS.ac about setting up their user base as some sort of single sign-on system, including the notion that because their users have phones there's already some sort of commitment and value, and because they're used to dealing with folks who actually do micropayments, ie: carriers, that there might be room for a middleman in those transactions.

The folks hanging around Night Owl Consultants had some interesting experiences to share, notes about running big data centers, virtualized servers, that sort of thing.

Talked a bit about Learning Friends, and promised to follow up with someone I know who's looking at ways to use technology and telecom to help kids from different cultures to teach each other their languages and differing perspectives.

Kaliya Hamlin rocks because she just makes sure that things go right, and she's great at making those connections between people who are interested in identity issues.

Saw some cool demos, don't know how many of them I can talk about. A lot of emphasis on intelligent call routing, systems (including smarter cell phones) which know various ways to contact you, various modes you might be working in (including trying to sync up with calendaring), and relationships between you and your contacts. So if Charlene called me while I was in "Important Meeting" mode she might get the option to ring me or leave a message, but someone not in my contacts list might get told to email me first, and others might get told to leave a message or an SMS...

Mostly, it was good to see people hacking: Lots of ideas and "what if we tried..." floating around.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Software Engineering Law Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Education Conferences ]

An SFGate article about underground restaurants:

"It's sort of an anti-restaurant," said Townsend, 29, a poet, promoter and former boilermaker and South Pole tunnel digger who has amassed an e-mail list of 1,200 interested parties. "The restaurant experience is very stale. People are usually disappointed, or at least not awestruck."

That goes for chefs as well, some of whom moonlight at these illegal ventures for either a creative escape from restaurant rules or a way to fulfill their dreams of opening a restaurant -- without actually doing it.

[ related topics: Spam Food ]

Southwestern University study finds caffeine increases sexual motivation in rats:

Guarraci and Benson gave 108 female rats a moderate dose of caffeine before a mating test to determine if the caffeine had any effect on female mating behavior. They found that administration of caffeine shortened the amount of time it took the females to return to the males after receiving an ejaculation, suggesting that the females were more motivated to be with the male rats.

The study is published in the forthcoming issue of Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, but I know many of you have extensive experience in both bars and coffee shops, and I'm wondering if there's any way we can remove the bias from those observations so that we can derive statistically significant information on the effects of caffeine in humans.

For the search engines: That's Fay Guarraci and Staci Benson at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nature and environment Current Events Biology ]

So, I wish I had some hacking time. I'm sitting here working on Maya plug-ins and 3d math (sometimes it's scary when I'm decomposing 4x4 matrices and explaining them to people), but right now I've got a few ideas for things I want to do with web apps:

1. I want to rework Flutterby to put all of its sub-modules on a framework which uses LID or similar for all user authentication.
2. I want to expand that notion to do security groups for all entries and photos.

But, most importantly:

3. I want to hack together a LID implementation that uses a fancy MIME type and a browser launched app to do authentication without the server of the user's LID URL ever knowing the private key of the user.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Work, productivity and environment Graphics LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

When Elf posted his results from this quiz, I read the text as "Elf Skin Flogger" and said "whoah, I gotta get me one of those". Alas, further perusal revealed "Elk Skin". Anyway:

You're a rabbit fur flogger! You're so soft and

fluffy and cute - but if wielded with

sufficient force, you can still make an

impact that will be remembered.



What Type of Flogger Are You?

brought to you by Quizilla

[ related topics: Erotic Games Dan's Life ]

Over a decade ago, I wrote up some notes on the Ocoee river, based on my many hundreds of runs down it. I tossed up a few pictures that I'd captured off of some video I'd shot, and slapped together some quick drawings of salient features and routes through the various rapids. Over the years I've managed to get back to get a few additional pictures, but aside from moving to a new server some time in 1997, they've just been there and pretty much forgotten.

I did a little ego surfing today while waiting for some processes, and I was most surprised to see one of my drawings, annotated, with some of those old video captures (is that Jen A. crankin' through Tablesaw?) in a recounting of a swim. Cool repurposing.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Flutterby Meta Chattanooga Whitewater Video ]

Nancy and I have re-done the dining room into a pseudo-coffee shop aura. She painted the tables, I cut the legs off of one to a comfortable high for lounging and eating/drinking on the love seat, as well as 2 really awesome/aweful cool 70's era retro lounging chairs. Add some drapes, a stylish ceiling fan... But it's got a $18 coffee maker, and I'm jonesing for an upgraded home coffee machine. Something that will do Expresso-Cappacino-Crema-Latte style drinks, and maybe even conventional drip coffee. Nancy sent me a link to: CoffeeGeek.com, where I find an Elitism level I had thought reserved for Unix geeks. - It's worth diving into just for entertainment value.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I just saw SketchUp demonstrated. This looks like a great 3d mockup tool, after the demo I just saw I want it to sketch out the shed we need to replace.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

This one's for Diane: Anita had a link to Brokerat Mountain (credits).

Although I have yet to wheedle the name under which he's participating out of him, Zack said last night that he's spending time playing at enterVOID.com. The concept: You draw up a (comic art/graphic novel) character, with a few poses (win, loss), a two-page introductory story, a design sheet, a bio, and so forth. Others, with similar characters, then challenge your character, you have a few weeks to draw up a minimum number of pages telling the story of a battle between your character and your challenger (your challenger does likewise), and both tales are offered up for vote by the community.

In browsing a few battles, it's clear that while there's room for classic comic book style combat, there's also no reason that you couldn't have, say, a grade schooler who wins by embarassing opponents, and who loses similarly. see, for instance, the second set (you have to click through to 'em, those are just thumbnails) of this battle.

[ related topics: Books Art & Culture Graphic Design Community ]

In light of Ziffle's link to hovercraft video, I'll pass along pedal powered hovercraft plans from Mars.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Pedal Power ]

Ask a Republican (Video, didn't work (although I didn't try too hard) on my Linux laptop).

[ related topics: Politics Humor Video ]