Flutterby™! From 2006-10-01 to 2006-10-31

It will be one of the continuing ongoing challenges of my life that I don't move through cultural and social structures in the prescribed manner.

Yesterday I participated in Marvin Zauderer's Group Riding Clinic, one of the Marin Cyclists perks. It was a good day with a relatively mild ride, 40 miles from Fairfax to Point Reyes Station and back, with a bunch of breaks for various practices and pointers.

There were parts of it which were really good. Practicing 30 second rotations through a paceline was good for me. Riding in amongst other inexperienced riders gave me a chance to re-evaluate some of my own foibles. Hearing some of the concerns others expressed gave me some good perspectives.

The problem is that I've been doing this stuff at 20-30 MPH with C level riders for several months now, and most of the riders seemed to be A level riders graduating up to B. So one of the challenges was trying to practice drafting techniques at speeds where I'm normally sitting up and riding no hands. One of my usual things is to hold a fairly slow cadence in the draft because it gives me more fine speed control, and when I rotate through the front of the pack downshift and spin while I'm leading, because then I don't want control over my speed, I want consistency.

However, in this group, if I came off the front and started spinning I'd just completely lose the pack. So while much of my practice in my other riding has been about not letting the pace of those behind me dictate my lead speed, not trying to back adjust for them, in this case I was completely about keeping an eye on what was going on behind me and not holding 17MPH up that roller, because the rest of the pack was going to drop to 12.

Which was kind of disappointing given that one of the questions when I signed up was "Can you sustain 18 mph on the flats and 6-8 mph on climbs?", because there were essentially two climbs on the ride (well, two each way), but the rest is gentle rollers, and if I can sustain 18 on those stretches solo then I'd expect that in a paceline we'd be holding 20-22. Instead, a lead at 17MPH was pushing the pack.

The really good bit was that on Thursday's ride I'd admired Gary's mirror and mentioned that I must be getting old, 'cause I was looking around for a good one. Gary said "yeah, this is road find, I've got one almost like it, but with a shorter extension, in my truck that you can have". It's a great little mirror, looks like it's bent together from an old spoke and some brass tubing, with a real glass mirror (not that half-foiled surface that most bike mirrors have), and it was very nice to have that much more information about what was going on around me amongst those less experienced riders.

So I'm glad to have been through the formal instruction, but it was really just stuff I've picked up over the past few months, practiced at a much lower level than I've been doing it.

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

Crap. Ya know, I wanted to write something about the end of habeus corpus and the press spinning that as the Whitehouse losing. About Republican pedophiles and the institutions that support them, and how, unlike the Clinton administration that actually tried to do something, the Bush administration ignored repeated warnings about bin Laden and Al Qaueda. About... well... fuck, I just don't have it in me.

Tom and Dori rant on what it means to be a Republican now, Wonkette gets all snarky on the pedophilia, and... well...

I believe that all governments are Democracies. That people accept governments or overthrow them. The fact that so many Americans aren't even using the non-violent structures we have in place to smackdown this crap no longer shocks me. It makes me sad, but I've long known that most voters are morons.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture moron Current Events ]

I've been playing a bit with OpenID, 'cause I've got an application that needs single sign-on, and I wanted to add Yahoo's Browser Based Authentication and Google Account Authentication to my toolbox.

Last night we got a call saying "hey, we've got two $2 tickets for the movies that expire tonight, you want to use 'em?". The only thing remotely interesting in that particular theater was Little Miss Sunshine.

It was okay, nothing memorable, but really it was a reminder of why we don't go to movies anymore. First we have to get there for a specific time. No "okay honey, I'm ready, start the movie". Too early and we're subjected to the most horrendous pop bands while they play bad advertising for local real estate offices. Then the movie starts and... well... I've got a 15 year old S-Video monitor, and even with DVDs (which I've maligned for their digital artifacts) we didn't have the visual glitches of a worn out screen and other things which I couldn't identify (but didn't seem to be related to print age).

And, yeah, the movie... laugh at people with ridiculous foibles, only minimal character development, couldn't figure out what it wanted to be, it was nice to spend two hours hanging out next to Charlene, but the movie wasn't anything that'll stick with me.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Consumerism and advertising Video Real Estate ]

Funk Logic, "rack filler panels with a bunch of stuff all over 'em!" Fill those empty slots with devices like the DD-301 Digilog Dynamicator or the 3P-III Palindrometer.

If you're a software only studio, they also produce The Masterizer, "A Software Mastering Plug-In that Actually Makes Your Mix Sound WORSE!"

[ related topics: Music ]

San Francisco's Lusty Lady strip club has apparently had a dustup over the weight and size of some of the strippers working the stage there. The Lusty Lady is famous partly because it was one of(?) the first strip clubs to unionize, and was then bought by the workers and is now run as a cooperative.

What's really interesting is the difference between the SFGate.com coverage of the story and the San Francisco Bay Guardian's version. In the former, the person who sent the email of complaint to the board had collected the comments from customers, in the latter it's implied that they were his own opinions. Very interesting example of how news can get spun.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Over at More Like This, Bill Humphries talks about the jarring discontinuity of product placement in Sweet Charity, which is now playing down in San Jose. In the process he also links to Theresa Neilsen Hayden's coverage of The Science of Sleep astroturfing over on LiveJournal.

[ related topics: Bay Area Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media ]

In honor of my link to the Skywalker Jetpack, I feel it necessary to poach this from Jay: Beamjockey has a report from the Rocketbelt(sic) convention.

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

Another movie post: Asha and I just started our "journey" watching the Academy Award "Best Picture" Winners. First up was 1928/29 winner The Broadway Melody. Overall, it was a nice movie that combined the "Broadway revue" genre with acting and some character development. There was an interesting bonus on the disc: The Dogway Melody which, as you could imagine, involved dogs acting out a 15 minute version of the movie.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Dogs Burlesque ]

From our Burning Man exploits, I've got a whole bunch of those solar powered walk lights in a bag downstairs. They each have two white LEDs in them.

Charlene and I have been riding the tandem in the early morning, and I'd like to go do a few double centuries, and I'm finding in both cases that as cool as the single LED off of 4 AA NiMH batteries headlight we've got is, it's much better suited to lower speeds in more lit urban areas.

So I'm thinking that there has to be a way to combine 20 decent white LEDs and a water bottle of NiMH AA batteries into something that'll give me more peripheral light, and let me focus my current spotlight a little further up the road.

In looking at the circuits in the walk lights I'm sure that the LEDs aren't being driven to anywhere near their full capabilities. I've also, over the years, run into articles which suggest that you can get more light out of an LED by running it with pulses at much higher currents than you'd normally draw, but every time I go searching for those articles, I can't find 'em now.

Anyone got resources on efficiently driving white LEDs (of unknown provenance) for as much light as I can get out of 'em?

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

Met up with Mark in Fairfax to do the Alpine Dam to Ridgecrest loop. My venerable Canon S100 gave up the ghost a few months ago, and I tried to last without an point-n-shoot for a while but I broke down and bought the cheapest camera I could find, which turned out to be an HP M525. This ain't the greatest picture in the world, it's the second picture I've taken with the camera, but fall is here. Out here in Lagunitas the coastal cover has made the days overcast and gloomy, and we're predicted to get the first rain of fall tomorrow if not this evening. Blue sky has been precious.

This morning, climbing up Ridgecrest, the high clouds were making great patterns, and there were low clouds out on the ocean that trailed, although you can't see it very well even in the largest version of this picture, out into the sharp crisp view of the Farallons.

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

Charlie Kelly's Mountain Bike Hubsite, reminiscences from the days when Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher were hacking together bikes for fast downhill descents on dirt, and the Fairfax cabal was organizing races.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Very good read on evolving economies, the value of work, of thinking, and living: Shop Class as Soulcraft:

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Education Economics ]

I had, at some point, picked up that Terry Pratchett's book Monstrous Regiment was riffing on John Knox's 1558 screed against women in the military, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. And I'd had in the back of my mind this vague notion that Pratchett's excellent Night Watch was riffing on some historical event, but I didn't know what...

...until I ran across a Metafilter post on the history of the Battle of Cable Street. Blindly stealing links from that post for redundance, the battle of Cable Street happened on Sunday October 4^th 1936 when the residents of the East End of London put up barricades to keep out the police and a march of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Here's a history of the Battle of Cable Street that talks about some of the different political factions involved in organizing the resistance, and Oswald Mosley was a right bastard and Nazi sympathizer, and reading these various histories has given me a better appreciation of the Spanish Civil War and the run up to World War II.

[ related topics: Politics Books History Law Enforcement Terry Pratchett ]

The rain has come, preceded by a week or two of gloomy weather. Fall is definitively here. There's an annoying roughly 60Hz hum resonating... at first I thought through parts of the house, but as I went through trying to identify sources I eventually figured out it was coming from elsewhere, so I took a walk around the block. The source is a large hopper truck down at a construction site just west of the store across Sir Francis Drake, I assume there's some sort of internal cement mixing going on, but it sure is annoying.

Spring in California is wonderful, with the wildflowers across the hills. Summer is growing on me, and the notion that we can predict the weather months in advance has its pluses. But the gloomy grey of fall is making me yearn for other climes. Jerry Halstead has a picture of fall in the northeast that reminded me of childhood, of large piles of bright colors, of hillsides of glorious reds and oranges.

Looking out across the little canyon we inhabit to the houses across the other side, we have green. Not a bad thing, but even green gets monotonous after a time.

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

Lou, Nancy's daughter, has been going to UTC for CompSci, is just becoming a Junior, and has been talking about transfering to Georga Tech. As a lark, we headed to GaTech yesterday afternoon, just to drive around and see what was going on. It was 5pm-6:30pm.

Gatech

College of Computing has an open work area, tables, booths, with power plugs and ethernet. 2/3rd full of students with Laptops. Whiteboards with code snippets, diagrams, a matrix or two, We walk a couple of floors (Lou's saying "we should not be here", I'm saying, why not?. There are people working hard in nicely equipped labs, pairs, trios, and a few larger groups. We get back to CompSci central: It's 6:15pm, and there are counselers, teachers and undergrad's still helping students. I introduce Lou to an undergrad counselor (at 6:15! - no appt, she's just there and the door is open.), she's friendly, informative and says thinks like: 1st we teach you Python, Problem solving, Troubleshooting. and then you learn C, Java and "other languages"... She's in good hands, I leave so they can talk. I pull up a booth and fiddle with my Laptop to blend in, but really to listen. Everyone's talking code. problem solving, tokenizing data.. I see people working on code, writing papers, talking geek. real geek. There is a buzz in the air.

Lou will thrive in this environment... she's looking for a challenge, a place to work hard and learn things. a place where a geek-girl can be a very geeky girl.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Weblogs Coyote Grits Nature and environment Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Education Python ]

Interesting New Yorker article on the changes in food television since Julia Childs, and the decline of cultural knowledge about food. Nothing cosmic there, but this comes on the heels of the release of the Michelin guide to SF Bay Area restaurants and in reading the ensuing buzz and controversy I'm not sure how the two are connected, but I feel like the ignorance about cooking for ourselves is sloshing over into the ignorance about others cooking for us.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area Sociology Television ]

Need a quick laugh? Iggy Pop's concert rider.

1 X 13inch and 1 x 14inch TOM-TOM, WITH MOUNTING. And if you can't bring the mounting to us, we'll have to send a bloke called Mohammed to the mounting. A stand mount would be fine, or a bass drum mount. Herre endeth the sermon on the mount.

[ related topics: Humor Music ]

British Find No Evidence Of Arms Traffic From Iran to Iraq.

Those of you who follow Bay Area news have known for a while that the current mayor of San Francisco has a well publicized substance abuse problem: Gavin Newsom uses hair gel. To excess. That is, until recently. Apparently he's kicked the habit. Reports from the SFGate Culture Blog, SFist (which has a picture of him with gel), and pictures at the San Francisco Sentinel.

What does all this mean? I'm not sure yet, but I think mostly it means that it's going to be more difficult to build the computer version of him...

[ related topics: Humor Bay Area Current Events Gavin Newsom ]

Speaking of colleges, Zack would like to go to California College of the Arts, or if he can't get in there (or figure out how to afford it, although my attitude has always been that if you can show a school why they'd want you there, they'll figure that part out), another good arts school. I like his comic work, I think the boy's got talent, but I'm biased in that way.

Anyway, if you're an alumnus or instructor at that school, or have similar ties or suggestions for other art schools (and maybe career planning suggestions for someone who enjoys sculpting and drawing comics, and who'll be including blown glass work in his portfolio), I'd like to get a dialog started between you and him.

[ related topics: Art & Culture California Culture Comics Education ]

Regarding the whole political maneuvering over the Republicans covering for Mark Foley scandal, you should go now and read Get Your War On for October 2, 2006:

Too bad the writ of habeas corpus wasn't written in 1990! Because then it would be sixteen years old, and people would be scandalized when politicians started fucking with it.

[ related topics: Politics Movies History moron ]

Positive review of Shortbus in the SF Bay Guardian.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

Here's a upright rear steering tandem from Brown Cycles in current production. The Hase Pino is a recumbent upright mix with rear steering, and I thought Bilenky or Bike Friday made a 'bent/upright mix with rear steering too, 'though I can't find it now, but this is the first modern rear steering both riders upright bike I've seen.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

I've started taking ads on Flutterby. You may or may not run into them, they're specific to a page right now. I got an email that proposed a reasonable amount, specific pages, and I figured that this was easy.

So, Michael Kelley, I believe that you had an in with the Blog Ads folks, and they only do new sites by recommendation. Would you put me in touch with them?

I have no idea of what I'll charge for front page ads or "meta" pages, but I have a price for text ads on a single archive page, and if you make me an offer you can probably get a good deal.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Invention and Design ]

Marijuana's Key Ingredient Might Fight Alzheimer's:

The active ingredient of marijuana could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer's than any currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of the disease.

Scientists report the finding in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Okay, it's a bike morning: David Lynskey, founder of Litespeed Bicycles which used to be either up in Ooltewah or Cleveland Tennessee, if I remember right from the one time I wandered through their factory, has waited out his non-compete and is starting another bike company: Lynskey Performance, custom bikes built in Chattanooga.

[ related topics: Chattanooga Bicycling ]

George Bush proposes Yucca Mountain facility to store radioactive Republicans:

The current situation shows the difference between the present ad hoc storage program, and the previous ways of handling radioactive politicians. Democrats have tended to either use jail, or academia, though in recent years they too have favored dumping radioactive politicians into K street storage.

(via Doc Searls)

[ related topics: Politics Humor ]

What's causing the current real estate boom? SFGate looks at a young investor who lied and leveraged himself into overextension. He has a weblog in which he's allegedly pulling a "mea culpa": IAmFacingForeclosure.com, about being 100% financed in California's dropping real estate market.

And, of course, he talks about all of the standard practices: Lying on his mortgage application forms about owner-occupation, cash back at close (where the buyer and seller represent the sale as more than actual and the buyer gets cash back; I don't know what's in it for the seller 'cause the only conversation with a seller I've had on this matter was "I didn't want to get involved in those sorts of shenanigans", but apparently this is something that mortgage brokers push). Now that he's been caught up in all of this fraud he's starting to do some self-examination.

But he does have a point: The housing market has been feeding on itself and on frauds like this, and will continue to do so until banks start to get seriously bitten. It's a mass hallucination that, like any other Ponzi scheme, continues as long as there are more true believers to be found.

[ related topics: California Culture Economics Real Estate ]

More than half of MySpace users are over 35. Of course they're all pretending to be 13 year old girls, so this isn't really news.

[ related topics: New Economy moron Current Events ]

Nancy and I just got back from "TAG". 1000+ cavers camped together for the weekend, I did a 150+' drop, cave and climb Friday, Nancy and I did a simple, mostly walking stream bed cave Saturday. We used a new pair of Apex lights, which were awesome. TAG's known for it's huge Saturday night bonfire, a 30' by 30' by 30' pile of logs. Nancy said it well, "it's a nice bonfire, it's nothing compared to Burning Man". we had a nice weekend, and I got to do some real vertical caving, which I have not done in a while. felt good. Got interested in Casita trailers, we saw two at TAG and they seem to fit what we would use one for, including a )^( trip and some weekend event and non-event usage.

And when we get home, an e-mail directs me to, and I drool over: A Human/Electric Hybrid Twike.

A great extended weekend..

[ related topics: Burning Man Spam Invention and Design Heinlein Travel ]

Yesterday Zack and I got together to play with sugar. We made up a half a batch of working sugar from the Pastry Wiz sugar instructions page, 375g sugar, 112g water, cook to 230°F, add 160g corn syrup and half a gram of cream of tartar, continue heating to 305, turn out onto a buttered marble slab.

We set up a heat lamp over the marble slab to keep things in the workable range, then we took some glass Pyrex™ tubes, heated the ends of them wrapped a blob of sugar around 'em, and started to blow.

It wasn't easy. The sugar tended to develop thin spots and blow out, so you could keep the ball inflated, but not know where the hole was. It was possible to pull out a small flat section and patch the hole, with judicious close use of the heat lamp, but it was quite the struggle.

The technique which produced the best container of the afternoon was hand forming out a sheet of sugar and dropping it over the back of a teacup, which gave this nice slumped dish.

For next time: Now that we've got a bit of a feel for the medium, that even with the softening of the fructose it's still got a fairly narrow working temperature range compared to glass, that blowing requires a hell of a lot of care and attention, and that slumping and forming on some sorts of molds works really nicely (sticks like crazy to metal and ceramic) we need to start with a goal of some sort, and use blown parts as accoutrements to more structural pieces. Maybe, instead of doing the bowls and containers out of sugar, do ornate holders for chocolate bowls, kind of like you might see out of wrought iron...

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food Chocolate ]

Interesting weblog entry on the fears of evangelical "mega churches" that riffs on this New York Times article:

Once, church was a committment like the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts. Now, it's a movie. You go, you do some other things and you go to watch football. Without a community committment to a church, how can you feel you belong to anything. And then the fear based teaching breaks down when you live on your own and your beliefs change.

I got to that via Pablo over at Danger West talking about it:

Christianity has always at least had a strong tendency towards insularity. Neverthless, Christians need to concentrate less on programming teenagers to reject secular ideas (evolution for instance, or even loose sex… afterall, divorce is just as much a problem among Christians as anyone else) and more on buidling meaningful communities that help people deal with real life outside of the group.

I used to be a fairly constant reader of NetFuture. And then I saw that Steve Talbott, the editor, had adopted the community in which I grew up, and my perceptions about the central message of that publication changed. Despite the desires instilled by my upbringing for a somewhat insular life outside of the mainstream culture, I realized that that sort of separatism leads primarily to myths that feed on themselves in unhealthy ways.

It's as if memes can become inbred.

When the myths can change to offer a cultural continuity to the larger reality, they can survive. When they have to be walled off from that truth, they can only become perversions of their former selves, and die.

[ related topics: Religion Technology and Culture Theater & Plays Sociology Community ]

Time: Secret Letter from Iraq:

Biggest Hassle — High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no effect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

[ related topics: War ]

I don't get it: Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion.

I feel like I should weigh in on the Mark Foley situation. Honestly, I'm having trouble getting worked up. A lot of people are raising the "pedophile" cry, but I'm sure that there are sixteen year olds claiming to be eighteen hustling in every city in this country (and most towns), and sixteen is plenty old enough to understand that members of Congress are going to try to fuck you, although most attempts will be metaphorically.

I'm sure that asking around will reveal that the pages talked about this stuff to each other, but I'll also be surprised if it lifts any other rocks; teens live in a world that's incredibly well insulated from "adults", and none of them have anything to gain by talking.

The one thing that does bug me is that assorted other Congressweasels covered for this guy while Foley was doing his "for the childruuuun" spiels, but I expect that sort of hypocrisy from politicians. And the whole "Republicans are victims" line that Hastert et al are throwing up and trying to make stick sickens me, but at this point I'm so beyond outrage that it just doesn't matter.

Mostly I see this as a smokescreen from the real issues facing the country these days, although I stand with Jay in my support of Dennis Hastert for Speaker of the House.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Current Events ]

So, I get excited over little things, from Mike Ward's Slug Page:

Something I just noticed with Vista (it's not new, I just noticed it) is that user directories are under c:\Users instead of c:\Documents and Settings as with XP.

For years, I've been remapping the "My Documents" directory to C:\documents. In the DOS days, it was just c:\docs. But Windows has handled directory names greater than 8 characters reasonably well for a while now. But this switch at the OS level from "Documents and Settings" to "Users" reinforces the belief that spaces should never be used in directory or file names!

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design ]

This week Asha and I watched the 1930 Academy Award "Best Picture", All quiet on the Western Front. The difference in cinematography between this and the 1929 winner was absolutely amazing. This film would stand up well even against today's films and I'm sure if Milestone had modern editting capabilities, the acting would have been comparable to a modern film (i.e., it's not the quality of the actors but rather the ability to clean up takes until you get something close to perfect).

Granted, the theme of youth lost to war is quite a contrast to "The Broadway Melody". It's definitely a must-see!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies History Theater & Plays Archival ]

It's fascinating when organizations come up with a clever promotion that turns into a disaster. One such case was PETA's ad showing Rudy Giuliani with a milk moustach and the slogan "Got Prostate Cancer?". The latest entry in this list is the London-based Committee Against Living Miserablyan anti-suicide group. They compare the 4 7/7 Underground suicide jihadis with the 900-odd other suicides in Britain that year. Not even the Guardian is amused. UPDATE: Yes, the original CALM link disappeared. The BBC link above will show the poster.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Archival ]

I'm lookin' at markd for this, but maybe someone else will know. And I'm hoping the answer is not "use Cocoa", but I'm prepared to believe that it might be.

I've got a Carbon data browser control with a list of layers. The user can reorder the layers with drag and drop.

Everything seems to be working, except that the highlight is, as a user describes it, "as though I'm going to drop the layer on the other layer". What I really want is some sort of visual indication that the user is going to be dropping the layer in between (or after) the layer below the cursor.

I'm guessing that this is something that I'll either change for the control, or return in my .acceptDragCallback. Any suggestions?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Macintosh ]

I think it was Meuon who first introduced me, in the days pre internet, to the construction techniques championed by the Monolithic Dome Institute: Inflate a balloon, then spray concrete all over the inside of it, to create a dome enclosure. And here's a journal of the construction of a dome home in South Dakota.

Interesting construction material because they seem to be much more durable, fire resistant, and insulated buildings than traditional stick-built construction, and the shapes don't have to look as "1970s image of the future" as you'd expect (although some people have gone that direction).

[ related topics: Fabrication Architecture ]

I just came across a slew of online Geography quizzes. I'd sure like to map out data of results of his quizzes based on demographics!

[ related topics: Marketing Maps and Mapping ]

I found the Segway killer: The A-bike. 5.6 kg (< 13 lbs), folds into 67cm x 30cm x 16cm (26.5" x 12" x 6.5"). £200, or about $375.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Segway/Ginger/IT Bicycling ]

Via Borklog: A little article about landing a C-130 on an aircraft carrier.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

As the Republican spin machine kicks into high gear, I think it's worth noting a few things:

Under Clinton's policies, North Korea was not refining plutonium, even though they had the capability to do so and had threatened to do so. And there were inspectors there to verify this. There may have been some back and forth on various agreements, but there was no plutonium refining.

Under Dubya's policies, North Korea began refining plutonium and built and detonated a bomb.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

I have sliced tomatoes (from the random "heirloom" bin) for a tomato/bean/pesto torte, and bay leaves from a downed tree along the road, in the dehydrator.

Checking on the status of those is a joy.

[ related topics: Food ]

Man robs store to cover room and board until retirement:

"At my age, the jobs available to me are minimum-wage jobs. There is age discrimination out there," Bowers, who turns 63 in a few weeks, told Judge Angela White.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

Since we have a Cake topic here, this seems appropriate: Chef Valentyn Shtefano makes wedding dress for his bride out of 1500 cream puffs.

[ related topics: Marriage Food - Cake ]

You know those stories of Muslim outrage? Some of them appear to have been rather inartfully manufactured out of whole cloth.

[ related topics: Religion moron Current Events ]

Can any of you graphics design type people help me out? I'm trying to identify the font used for the "ROAD CLUB" and "SINCE 1963" text in the Marin Cyclists logo. Yes, I realize that what's on that page isn't much to go on, but as sometimes happens in such organization I'm not sure I can find the original.

I've found a good match for the other text with a "Kaufmann" font from an old Corel Draw collection I bought ages ago, it looks like it's close to the Linotype Kaufmann font, but I can't come up with a sans serif font that has that shape "O" and the (from what I can tell from that monstrously aliased tiny little sample) more playfull curves of the leg of the "R" and the "3".

[ related topics: Typography ]

Okay, I'll accept the Cingular bullshit explanation of why they need my physical address:

A street address is required by Federal law to provide a geographic location for each wireless device that can be associated with the state, county, or city for tax purposes. In order to comply with the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act (MTSA) of 2002, Cingular Wireless is required to capture and maintain a Place of Primary Use (PPU) address for all of its customers. PPU is defined as a valid street (physical) address within the defined licensed service area for the customer's home market.

But don't make it the only place you'll send me my bills, and if you don't like it on your checkout page, don't show it to me but not let me change it and whine to me about it.

And furthermore, if someone forcibly ripped all of the JavaScript out of those web pages, the world would be a far better place. Yet another place where trying to move my cursor around is a bad thing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Wireless Economics ]

Some fuckwit stole Dori's "WEB GEEK" license plate. If you have information on the location of this plate, Dori would like it back.

Wally Wallington's hobby is using simple machines to move large heavy things around (via this YouTube pirate video of a documentary on some of his work).

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

Interesting: How Many of Me claims that there's only one "Dan Lyke" in the U.S., but I'm fairly sure there are at least two others, although I've never gotten them to respond to email. (via Medley)

(Addendum: Aha! Ten "Daniel Lyke"s.)

Does television cause autism?

Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of teleivision watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television.

Stolen from /., where the commentary is beyond skeptical.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television California Culture Education ]

Estimated U.S. population passes 300 million people.

David Chess had a link to an interesting patent on methods of processing rebates with computer:

The present invention satisfies a need for a more consumer friendly method for processing rebates that maintains a breakage rate, prevents fraudulent claims, provides on-line status reporting, and provides a centralized rebate processing center for matching rebate promotions with qualified consumers.

In other words: gives the consumer warm fuzzies but still makes sure that a large number of the applications for the rebate don't get processed.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Consumerism and advertising ]

• SlashGeo, regular updates on GIS and mapping issues.
• GeoRSS :: Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

[ related topics: Content Management Cryptography Maps and Mapping ]

Brett Emerson, the author of In Praise of Sardines will be opening a restaurant in San Francisco called "Olallie" soon. Until then, we'll have to make do with ogling techniques: The whipped chocolate discussion looks like a way to play with chocolate that I haven't yet, and I'm definitely going to have to play with the tortilla soup recipe.

He also mentions a restaurant called Incanto which I find interesting for their "why?" page. It's not often you'll find a restaurant willing to call "bullshit" on a cash cow:

Meals at Incanto begin with complimentary sparkling or still water because our local Hetch Hetchy water tastes great (we filter, chill and carbonate it before serving) and because serving our local water in reusable bottles makes more sense for the environment than shipping heavy glass bottles filled with water all over the world.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food Bay Area California Culture Chocolate ]

Massachusetts Elementary School Bans Tag:

Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

But maybe it's not just the lawyers:

Another Willett parent, Celeste D'Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. "I've witnessed enough near collisions," she said.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Games Current Events Sports ]

Two links in the same entry, related only for personal reasons that I can't disclose right now:

• eBook Technologies makes two document readers that may be interesting, one of which you can purchase from third party companies.
• Orion Energy does wind farms and has a nice photo gallery.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Technology ]

Two darknets that may want a little perusal:

• anoNet
• I2P

Both look like wide-scale VPNs that have as their goal an IP network that runs below the radar of some of the stuff that's happening legislatively in terms of content on the internet.

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture ]

Some rambling on spyware & games stems from this Chugalug note about EA including spyware and spyware targeted ads in Battlefield 2142, which referenced this ShackNews thread and this SomethingAwful thread.

[ related topics: Privacy Games ]

We're having a lot of issues up for debate in the local election right now, and I have to admit that, given the current political issues, when I see some local politician's name on a sign followed by "for water board", I mostly think: "Oh hell yeah! Head down with a wet towe... uhh.. oh, never mind".

So when I saw this entry over on Sensible Erection, I laughed: US Torture Corps (YouTube video):

I've been into surfing for years. When I found out the U.S. was into waterboarding, I was like "wow, man, a skill set".

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron Video ]

One of our cats, Spirit, is dying. He's been losing a lot of weight, the vet diagnosed it as an untreatable cancer, and so we're making his last days as comfortable as we can. He's become an extremely picky eater, so we offer him a variety, including fresh chicken livers, pet grade canned tuna, similar stuff and surprisingly I think this smorgasboard is actually cheaper than regular commercial cat foods.

At any rate, he's been sitting on my lap a lot recently. Sometimes, when he feels like he's not getting something from me, he'll progress up on to the keyboard (which is great if I'm doing sysadmin work and trying to come up with a password), and then settle down on the clear spot where I (normally) mouse.

Right now he's taken over my usual chair, so I've rolled it away from the keyboard and am sitting on another one. (Our) Cats are so spoiled.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

A menu's pastoral descriptions may not be what they seem:

... Unfamiliar with White Marble Farms, I had the house-made spaghetti -- and took home a menu to research the company.

What I discovered surprised me. White Marble Farms is a brand of Sysco, North America's largest food services distributor. The pork comes from Cargill Meat Solutions, America's second-largest meat processor.

I think this is related to the realization we had that the spring mix for six or seven dollars a pound at Good Earth was coming off a Sysco truck, and was probably the exact same product we saw at three to five dollars a pound over at United Markets, and they probably both came from Earthbound Farms or an affiliated conglomerate.

And related to my fear that the "local farmer's market" involves products trucked in from far further away than the Salinas valley where the aforementioned spring mix originates.

[ related topics: Food Consumerism and advertising ]

Senator Conrad Burns (R-Montana) says Bush has a secret plan to win in Iraq:

Burns, at a debate Tuesday night with Democratic challenger Jon Tester, said he believes Bush has a plan to win - but added: "We're not going to tell you what our plan is."

Ya know, these plans only work if you tell 'em to the people who can execute 'em... Snort.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events War ]

Confident students do worse in math; bad news for U.S.. The article itself is the usual mishmash of bad AP reporting, with the take-away something like:

"The implication is not 'Let's go make kids unhappy,"' he said. "It's 'Let's give kids better signals as to how they're performing, relative to the rest of the world."'

I went digging for better source material, and found the report on dead trees and the press conference at which it was released, but no better info.

[ related topics: Current Events Mathematics Education ]

Went down to Drake High School last night where the students of ComAcad presented pro and con commercials on the governor's race, Prop 83 (further complicating laws regarding sex offenders, and duplicating a lot of things that have already been done through standard legislation), Prop 85 (requires parental notifications 48 hours before minors have abortions), Prop 86 (special protections from anti-monopoly laws for some health care providers, and $2.70 per pack tax on cigarettes), and Marin and Sonoma County's "Measure R", a quarter cent sales tax to repair the north-south corridor tracks and restore passenger/commuter service along those tracks.

The format was to show both the pro and con ads, and then have those who made both answer questions from the audience either on substantive issues on the particulars of the vote, or on the mechanics of the ad creation. Most questioners went with the former.

I was impressed, both that the ads didn't necessarily reflect the personal opinions of those who made them, and in how informed most of these high school students were. Yeah, there were some glaring holes, but I'm far less disturbed about those kids reaching voting age than I am about the ignorance in many already voting citizens.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area California Culture ]

It looks like the last of summer's berries aren't going to ripen, or if they are will be shriveled little things, not worth picking. The massess of sweet juicy goodness amongst the prickers and poison oak along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard have been plucked, and the replacements aren't ripening with any speed.

One of the less attractive bits of living out here is that many of the denizens of the valley have a higher impact on the environment than they realize. Around this time of year the wood smoke starts to fill the canyon where we live and leave a hazy blue layer that at first smells quaint and rustic, but after a while is annoying and unhealthy.

And for some reason the yellow fade to green against the blue sky of this tree struck me.

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

Because I know I'll want to play with interesting food stuff at some point: Terra Spice Company has assorted industrial ingredients and sugars, including calcium chloride, methyl cellulose, sodium alginate, and tapioca maltodextrin.

[ related topics: Food ]

Yet another competitor in the PCB prototype market: PCB Singles gives you a 4"x6" single sided single hole size circuit board for $35. Next projects I've got in mind will probably want to be double-sided, but might be worth checking out.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery ]

As we approach 9 years of Flutterby, one of the problems I see is that link rot in the archives is going to be influencing search engines in bad ways. I'm running across publications and weblogs I used to link to that have become spam sites.

I don't necessarily want to just blow away all the old content here (although I do think we need some better ways to re-use the old stuff, I know there have been some great comment threads that I'd love to re-read if I could find 'em).

Anyone have suggestions? I guess an enhancement to the CMS which lets me de-link any sites I find which have expired would be a good thing, maybe I need to re-map them to a page which lists what the URL used to be (because sometimes there's useful information in that URL), but if you know anyone who's dealing with this stuff successfully, or have any ideas (they don't even have to be good ones), let me know.

[ related topics: Content Management Weblogs Spam Archival ]

Forest passed along a compilation video of various jugglers of note played over Fatboy Slim's "That Old Pair of Jeans".

[ related topics: Video ]

You have, undoubtedly, seen Cute Overload. Ugly Overload is exactly what you'd expect, but with a little education, for instance this entry on white tigers points to Big Cat Rescue on the fraud of white tigers.

The only conceivable legitimate reason for exhibiting a white tiger would be for educational purposes to clearly and unequivocally illustrate to the public the process of natural selection and how, when a deleterious recessive genetic mutation randomly occurs that is disadvantageous for the survival of the animal, such as white color in a tropical jungle environment, the animal does not survive to pass on that genetic mutation or disadvantageous characteristic to its offspring.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

I hate to muddy the flutterby waters with a downer, but I need to share this with the community. Putting aside opinions about our being in Iraq in the first place, I have a strong affinity with the men and women in uniform and with veterans of service (I served '67 to '70). I have met a man with an extraordinary story, who faces an absolutely outrageous (my judgment) problem. This man served for ten years, saw combat in various theaters, acknowledged and covert, was separated and honorably discharged. He has now received “orders” from services to which he has no current ties or obligations to report for 2 years' service (“Involuntary Active Duty”), most probably to support the invasion of Iran, given his mos and experience (this latter is my assessment). His orders cite an Executive Order for their authority. Speaking as a veteran, I am outraged that this man, who has completely discharged any reasonably expected “duty” to his country, would be called up when Jenna, Barbara, and all the other scions of wealth face no obligation whatever. Just one more instance of the back door draft. So – I've let off steam. I'd like to ask you, dear reader, if you know of any other such situations, to share them with me so I can take some action other than supporting, and possibly hiding, this man. andylyke@mindspring.com

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community ]

We've questioned whether MDMA has gender specific negative effects, seen that Ecstasy studies that claimed injury were dramatically flawed and that attempts to link it to Parkinsons were so sloppy that they actually used the wrong drug in animal experiments, and that the DEA has approved trials in 12 trauma patients. In fact, some of those deserve a little going back and seeing if we can follow 'em up.

MDMA can increase the survival of dopamine cells during fetal development:

Because these cells are critical in the regulation of voluntary movement, the findings, the researchers say, may lead to better therapies for neurological diseases like Parkinson's.

[ related topics: Drugs Physiology ]

Over at Medley, Lyn had an entry titled Always Been At War with Eastasia in which she contrasted Dubya's "We've never been stay the course, George!" response to George Stephanopolous's query about James Baker's plan to find a middle ground in Iraq with all the times he's said, of U.S. policy in Iraq, that "we will stay the course",

Think Progress has cites, and there's a YouTube video collection of Georgie saying "stay the course".

While we're talking about lying politicians and bad policy, Yesterday my dad mentioned an instance of abusing our veterans. Coincidentally, RC3/ofinterest linked to Kevin Tillman: After Pat's Birthday (alt link). Kevin is the brother of Pat Tillman, the football star who gave up a pro career to enlist, and who, we've mentioned, was killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan:

It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice ... until we got out.

That was the hook, one that especially got me in light of the "you're not signing up for 4 years, you're signing up for at least 8, but they don't tell you that" that I learned while looking deeper into my the circumstances behind my Dad's note. But the whole damned thing is a must read, because it's just too powerful to excerpt. Go read it.

On a related but separate note, I also remember, back in the early days of the invasion of Iraq, saying to a friend that it'll be months or years before the U.S. took Baghdad. I didn't say anything when U.S. troops rolled in a few days or weeks later, but as this report from Baghdad shows, even though we've got troops on the ground there, we're still a long way from taking the city (also via RC3/oi).

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Video ]

Brethren forgive me, for I have sinned - I use Windows XP. And now, when I boot up that computer, I get to the "To begin, click your user name" screen, but see no users. I try logging in as guest or administrator or names that had been good on that machine, and get a message that "the sytem could not log you on". It seems that the account info has disappeared. Other computers that try to open files on that machine, usually done seemlessly from inside the local network, are prompted for logon, but the subject machine won't respond to any of the user ids.

Any web info I can find demands that I log on as administrator, yet I can't. Does anybody out there have experience with this, or am I simply screwed?

[ related topics: Microsoft broadband Shoes ]

Commercialism run amok: At least they didn't call 'em "Extra Virgin Salmon Oil". Just in case anyone's not clear on this, salmon eggs are fertilized externally, so that meaning of "virgin" doesn't count, and I'm fairly sure you only get one pressing of a salmon...

But the accompanying recipe for lavender lemon cream, mostly revolving around mixing the lavender buds into melted sugar, letting that harden, then grinding the resulting sugar/lavendar mixture, sounded amazingly tasty, I was thinking we'd do that in little balls dipped in chocolate.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Charlene and I built a Bike Rack.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling Archival ]

One of the things I'd never thought about before I did some playing with mapping, projections and geographic datums, was how hard it is to pinpoint a geographic position. I mean, you have "down", and that points to the center of the earth, right? Lattitude is a simple matter of measuring that angle to something else that's relatively consistent, and longitude requires a clock, but how hard can it be?

Well, to begin with, you don't really have "down", as this illustration of the lumps in earth's gravity shows. Worse, as glaciers and ice sheets melt, "down" is changing. (via JWZ)

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy Television Maps and Mapping ]

On the phone with my Dad, I hear the two words I really don't want to hear in the same sentence: "sudo" and "oops".

Yesterday at mid-day I had to get out. My back has been bothering me, causing me to wake up at 2 in the morning. I've been grinding on my work stuff, I mean, really grinding, and not accomplishing what I want to. The sun's rising late enough that the morning rides have fallen apart, at least until after Daylight Savings changes over. Last weekend we dealt with various issues that meant being in a car for a long time, and getting no exercise.

So I got on the bike and pedaled to Point Reyes Station and back. The backlit trees and the horses as I climbed south along Nicasio Valley Road from Lucas Valley Road were kinda cool.

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

We're going to go into the city this evening (the last Scotch Night before Leo heads off to work in Japan), but I still don't think we're going to get to Shortbus before it's out of the theaters. Debra likes it a lot, Violet Blue was general positive, with some reservations about sex worker clichés.

I wasn't a total fan of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but this one does intrigue me, but I'm not yet motivated enough to try to organize a trek into the city or up to Santa Rosa.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies ]

I don't know if this is an experiment in robotics or a performance piece on the mutability of life and death, but this clip from Gizmodo shows a self destroying/rebuilding kitchen chair.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Philosophy ]

Six word short stories.

Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.

- Margaret Atwood

Although some of them do appear to be just inciting incidents. MetaFilter thread has more.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture History ]

Season Shot - Ammo with Flavor:

Load your gun with Season Shot and let the hunt begin. Watch as your bird is seasoned on impact leaving no harmful waste behind in the environment.

As the Sensible Erection entry says:

If there comes a day when I must go down in a hail of gunfire, I really hope it's teriyaki flavored gunfire.

I'll leave the Dick Cheney jokes up to you.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Guns Birds ]

Before clicking on this link you have to promise me that you're not immediately going to run out and go garage sale-ing to pick up old microwave ovens. Okay? Okay? High-power microwave system employing a phase-locked array of inexpensive commercial magnetrons:

The resulting cross-injection of microwave energies brings the respective magnetron tube pair into a phase-lock sufficiently stable to permit coherent combination of their outputs for many high-power microwave applications, such as directed energy weapon systems.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

I may yet lose that bet with Todd: More reason that TV is obsolete: Live on Tape Delay is a group playing with short films. Some of 'em fall flat, but XXXMas was the classic "Santa gone bad meets Jerry Bruckheimer" film trailer, and Car Chase is kinda fun. From splogs.

[ related topics: Humor Technology and Culture Todd Gemmell Video ]

For Dan and, I guess, Diane also: I'd give my right...er.... left arm to be able to make desserts like that.

[ related topics: Food - Cake ]

This last weekend we were out in the Central Valley dealing with some stuff for Alan, Charlene's developmentally disabled brother, and knowing that we were near to an Armenian community, I got a hankering for some thinly sliced basterma (beef cured with fenugreek and paprika) and string cheese with caraway seeds.

So we found a place called simply "Hye Deli" (At Bullard & Marks in Fresno), and got into a conversation with the woman (whose first language wasn't English) behind the counter. We got our basterma and string cheese, and then started looking around.

We picked up a couple of sticks of soujoukh (a sausage), assorted ingredients for middle eastern cooking that we haven't been able to find locally (but, alas, no pomegranite molasses), some roejik (sausage like rolls of walnuts in a grape mixture, I think thickened with a starch and possibly dipped), and, after agreeing that we couldn't bring home the frozen Armenian ravioli like things, talked to the proprietress a bit more.

She told us that it was very simple, you mix the seven spice mix with some beef, put it in the dough, bake them to brown them, and then simmer them in a watery chicken and tomato broth. We asked "what spices are in the 7 spice mix?".

She said "all of them."

So we got ourselves a tub of the seven spice mix. It appears to be black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, anise, nutmeg, chili pepper, and cumin, and at two tablespoons and a cut up onion for 3/4 lb of turkey meat and two eggs, cooked as meatballs, is a little strong, but damned tasty.

There's another ramble in here about loss of the old ways and homogenization of cultures, but that'll keep for another day.

[ related topics: Food California Culture Community ]

Stefan Fatsis on Michael Cresta's 830 point Scrabble game.

His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points.

Which means that neither of them was playing a defensive game, in fact they were almost certainly playing enabling games, and looking at the board confirms that, but still...

[ related topics: Games Scrabble ]

Banks try to stem foreclosures by reassuring homeowners:

"I don't care what people think -- we don't want your house," said Bob Caruso, national servicing executive at Bank of America.

Obviously he's got a point, it probably costs them more to unload it than many homeowners have equity in it, but I thought it was an interesting turn of the phrase as the market softens.

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

Just in time for Halloween, a genuinely creepy gallery of Victorian Post-Mortem portrait photos. The strangest are those that pose the living with the dead.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Books Photography ]

Last week, Asha and I watched the 1931 Academy Award "Best Picture": Cimarron. Reading the description, I expected a real Cowboy and Indian movie but that sure wasn't the case! The story's about a family dealing with the husband's wanderlust and support for Native American causes as he starts a newspaper in the Oklahoma frontier. A very deep story with a surprisingly positive stance on the Native American (while, interestingly, including the common parody of African Americans). Probably my second favorite, so far, after All Quiet on the Western Front.

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Law Journalism and Media Race Marriage ]

Last night was 1932: Grand Hotel. A fun movie - all the pomp and circumstance of a big Hollywood production and a little existentialism to boot. Granted, much is lost when the actors and actresses aren't common names anymore. Intrestingly, no one on IMDB picked up that Queen Latifah's 2006 Last Holiday was essentially a remake of this 1932 hit.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Travel Shoes ]

http://www.citypaper.net/lovehate/

Truth in a newspaper?

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

This morning we went over to Oakland to see Phil Angelides, candidate for California Governor. The venue was interesting, it was a "power breakfast" in which local unions fired up people to go canvassing union members, which Charlene got into by dint of her association with the CSEA. I'm obviously not normally a union fan, although I have come to appreciate their value in dealing with monopolies, like offices of education.

The campaign slogan of Phil Angelides is apparently "I'm not Arnold", which I don't think will be enough to get him elected, but maybe he can generate a little more interest. We just finished the long arduous process of voting (or at least I did, Charlene gives a little more consideration to some of the propositions than I do; I'm of the opinion that if you say "yes" to a proposition you're going to get fucked), but I voted for him, mainly because while I've gotten used to being lied to by politicians, I'd like to get lied to by a different politician for a while.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area California Culture Education ]

Discovery of the day: Mandarin Orange Marmalade from The Wild Pear Company. Expensive, but Oh. My. delicious.

We don't eat a whole lot of beef. When we do, we've been known to go somewhat overboard. And while I'm quite happy with a New York strip, Charlene tends towards the filet mignon side of things.

Now that we've both read Omnivore's Dilemma, we're starting to look around at ways that we can alter our life in subtle ways to change our larger scale impacts on the world. And to be totally honest, we've also heard a lot of stuff about how different the flavor of grass fed beef is.

So yesterday we got a pair of New York strip steaks from grass fed local livestock that didn't spend time in a feedlot. Wow, what a difference. Different texture and flavor from the corn-fattened cows, and we're completely okay with both the additional cost and the fact that we can 't just pick these up out of the meat case at our supermarket. Yet.

But if you're a meat eater, I can heartily recommend the difference.

[ related topics: Food Michael Pollan ]

Today's hike north from the Bolinas Bird Observatory. Terrence was in town, he's one of those naturally warm people, and we thought it'd be cool to team up a coastal lake and morning cloud cover against his thinking that cold means two t-shirts. So we headed out to the rope swing.

Here's a view across the lake, you can see the tree in the middle of the shot.

And here's a closer shot showing the rope.

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

On the way back north up Highway 1, I saw this interesting scene on my left.

Not sure what variety they were, I don't think the thule elk wandered in from Point Reyes, but they looked cool.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Overshadowed by the awesome beef, last night's dinner also included a rather nice pumpkin soup that involved the pumpkin, an onion, celery, a tablespoon of the aforementioned Armenian spice mix, a knob of ginger and a bay leaf.

Not haute cuisine, but a nice hearty mix that worked well.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Ages ago I had a mailing list conversation with Dave Winer where I recanted my previous position that the discussion in weblogs was largely driven by the content and tone of them. This was sometime after TC made a Flutterby entry the second Google result for "french military victories", and I'd seen that when you get the masses piling in, the tone of the conversation deteriorates.

With that in mind, I'd love to see readership numbers for the SFGate blogs. Michael Bauer's dining & restaurant review weblog attracts the trolls. Fred Larson's weblog of Bay Area photography doesn't. And the multi-contributor Culture Blog manages to look at the art scene and Bay Area tech personalities without bringing in the flamers.

I wonder what their relative readership is. The latter two attract fewer comments, and there are other variables, but I think there's something really strong about the style and tone of the primary writing that makes a big difference.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Dave Winer Bay Area Sociology Writing Art & Culture California Culture Community ]

For several weeks now, in the middle of the night I've woken up with an excruciating backache. Last week I went to the doctor, and got told "suck it up and walk more". It seems to have been better, but this morning it hurt enough that I got up, read my email, and then decided to go catch up with Bill and Jim (with dogs Whisky, Queenie and Vector) on their morning hike. This super grainy hand-held shot that's probably in the quarter to half-second range was the view back down into Lucas Valley from mid-way up Big Rock Ridge in the morning twilight.

And because it came off the other camera and I didn't download it 'til this morning, here's looking south along the coast towards the Bolinas peninsula from the Palomarin Trail.

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

I've been having an interesting discussion with my PhD advisor about Firefox vs. IE. She recently made a web page for her students that included a series of PDF files. She made some of the URLs with slashes (/) delimiting directories and some with backslashes (\). The PDFs would all load fine in Internet Explorer but not Firefox.

I did some research and found out that Microsoft deviated from the W3C standard for a URL (see RFC 1738) and translated the backslashes as directory delimiters. I also looked into the history of the backslash in DOS. Evidently, DOS (and Windows) could always use the slash as a directory delimiter. So, even DOS 2.0 could parse a slash used for a directory independet of a slash used for other purposes - allowing both slash and backslash as the delimiter. It stands to reason that a URL parser should be able to do the same.

It was my opinion that Microsoft was purturbing the standard to force more people to use their software. My advisor queried "why doesn't the W3C standard allow \ or /?" There is absolutely no reason the W3C standard for URLs couldn't allow either delimiter. It would then make it easier for people who only ever used Microsoft (and the \ delimeter) to successfully publish on the web. So, is Microsoft perturbing the standard to restrict use by their users or is the W3C maintaining a standard that alienates people from publishing on the internet?

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Net Culture Community ]

Went over to Pixar today to catch a SIGGRAPH 2006 Electronic Theater showing in glorious 1080p with a 4k projector. And apparently there are some licensing issues that prevent the DVD from having all of the content, but the purpose of this screening was so that Terrence could show the whole thing.

An interesting show, I'm not sure I've got anything to say about the state of computer graphics, at least not from what I saw today. A few "that's really cool" (and the Germans are taking the CG lead from the Canadians, in a big way), a couple of "that's really funny", and since I know a few folks who were on the jury panel and know that one particular short was unanimously voted the worst submission of the year, I was kind of disappointed that I didn't see that one.

What I realized, though, was that I should have contacted Mark or Tom or Tom or Arun or someone over there. It used to be that I knew a lot of people, now there are a lot of unfamiliar faces, or a few familiar but not quite clicking ones. Still talked with a few folks, had a fun time, but didn't get a thing done on my real work today.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

YouTube Vid of Harold Ford / Coker Ad. I'll let you decide if it's satire, or not. It is, but it's not.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Automobiles ]

Studies have long shown that access to pornography reduces sex crimes. Here's more: How the Web Prevents Rape: All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

I had recently had some discussions on security, and had come to the conclusion that social engineering a Certificate Authority was easier than corrupting DNS. I'm not sure I'm wrong, but Johannes Ernst points out that something's wacky about MySpace DNS right now. Interestingly, doing a "whois" and going straight to their domain servers only has the loopback missing, so the exploit (if this involves an exploit) is about something listening on a compromised machine.

[ related topics: security Net Culture ]

US federal government extends abstinence-only education message to kids up to 29 years old (alt link):

The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

"We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents," Horn said. "It's a reminder."

"All this money we're throwing at you? Find new ways to waste it!" he did not continue.

I'm not sure what I could possibly add to this stupidity, except perhaps to note that this is the "smaller government" party pushing this sort of crap.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics moron Current Events ]