Flutterby™! From 2006-12-01 to 2006-12-28

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but the great thing about web pages is that they're experiments! I'm trying to develop Flutterby.net as a more personal site. MediaWiki doesn't have the sort of fine-grained access control that I'd like for such a personal site, so we'll see how comfortable I feel with some revelations there, but we'll see how that evolves.

At any rate, that's where I'm going to put things that are either entirely personal journal entries, or are parts of my personal data(base|space) that I expect to evolve.

So it's with that in mind that I open up my evolving reading notes on Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, which I bought based on this entry over at Ideas in Food, and which I'm not as enthused about as I could be.

[ related topics: Books Dan's Life Food ]

Last night Charlene and I built a mini table saw for some stuff she's playing with.

[ related topics: Photography Boats ]

Where the hell's that global warming I've been promised? It's been cold out here. Normally we get ice on the windshields once or twice, yesterday there were large chunks in the puddles where cars had driven through them:

[ related topics: Photography Archival ]

In light of my reading notes on Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection: Slate taste tests various beefs, via this morning's Mark Morford rant on red meat.

[ related topics: Food Mark Morford ]

Abortion pill thwarts breast cancer gene, at least in specially bred mice:

No one is suggesting women use the abortion pill that way. But the provocative experiment helped illustrate how the notorious breast cancer gene BRCA1 does its dirty work, by spurring a hormone called progesterone that RU-486 happens to block.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bioinformatics ]

Oh yeah: I haven't done a full write-up on this one 'cause I'm not sure what I'd say, but: Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys: If you liked American Gods (I did, Larry did), this one's a must-read. If you haven't read either, it's in paper, and well worth the few hours it'll take to get through it.

And as an aside: Another "I don't have time for this", but I want a search engine that gives me a list of all of the mentions of "American Gods" on weblogs I read. Sigh: Something else to add to the "someday I'll write code to..." list.

[ related topics: Books Weblogs Neil Gaiman ]

Giggle: Microsoft bought Firefox (thanks, Jay).

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

If these are really the tools I've heard of, then the Kress Electric web site doesn't do them justice.

[Edit: The Kress Electric tools look really really nice, but the tools that I was hearing about are actually Festool]

The router and the circular saw (which, interestingly, also is apparently available as a chain saw for deeper cuts) both have pickups for a vacuum system, and the circular saw has a guide in it which snaps into a rail for straight longer cuts.

And while searching for information on that, the Otocoup is a home built CNC router/wood milling machine with a freakin' huge bed using Nema 23 mount stepper motors (which I have a box full of) and (depending on what he's cutting) one of those aforementioned routers.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Festool ]

In case you haven't already gotten your Christmas music fix this year, Flip Baber does Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite on bicycle parts.

And Specialized's site with the same music, 'cause ya gotta give the sponsors their due.

[ related topics: Music Bicycling ]

The Times of London has what is becoming a more common story: A British ambulance crew transferring a patient to a hospital 8 miles away set their GPS unit and proceeded to follow its instructions to Manchester, some 200 miles away. Fortunatly the patient was not in extremis and arrived in good order, 5 hours late. The GPS database is being reviewed, as are the brains of the drivers.

The story mentions some similar cases in the UK, and I heard of one recently where an elderly German on the Autobahn followed the voice mode on his GPS right into a sandpile, more than a mile down a very clearly marked "Closed for Construction" offramp. I realize that we expect the mighty computer to give us accuracy, but at what poiont does common sense kick in? And would these folks have been so trusting in written instructions? I notice that in my area Mapquest has a habit of putting you on the local expressways if they are within a mile even on short trips. I ignore such idiocies, but only because I know the territory.

[ related topics: Machinery Maps and Mapping Databases Interface issues ]

I was wrong on those tools, the tool set I was hearing about is Festool. Now I need to go find a shop where I can play with 'em.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Festool ]

I think my next hard drive is going to be a Seagate: Seagate's CEO Bill Watkins understands his business mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

[ related topics: Business Sexual Culture ]

I a vein similar to Dan & Todd's bet about the death of TV, I'm beginning to believe that it won't be too long before we see computer applications pushed away from the desktop and onto the 'Net. For instance, Flickr is almost good enough that I'd prefer to just stick all my photos there. I don't have to worry about backups. I can easily share with friends. I can easiy order prints. Of course, I use web-based email almost exclusively (Gmail). Google's Docs and Spreadsheets provides rudimentary desktop apps. But what will really drive this is the coloboration possible with the Web that's really impossible on stand-alone PCs. I can gather comments on my Flickr images and share with other people easily. With GIS, in ESRI ArcGIS as well as NASA WorldWind and Google Earth, I can connect to remote data sources that are really too unwieldy for local storage.

At what point could this become the "norm"? I'm betting that if we can get ubiquitous pipes providing the equivalent of a full 30fps refresh on three 24" displays, the desktop will really be irrelevant. I say that because around that kind of throughput, doing crazy things like linear editting of video while playing DOOM XX will be possible. That throughput works out to (assuming each 24" display gives 3200x1600x36bit resolution) roughly 1300MBps or 1.3Tbps. Granted, right now in tightly controlled LANs we are only seeing about 10Giga-bps, we are just about three orders of magnitude away.

Of course, the real problem is latency. Video editting used to be relegated exclusively to SGIs, Macs and Amigas (with the VideoToaster) because linear video editting can't tolerate any latency...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Technology and Culture Todd Gemmell Space & Astronomy Astronomy Television Video ]

Once again, I am so going to hell for laughing at this (do not be drinking anything). Courtesy of Tom & Dori, who are also going to hell.

"Damn it, ma, ah told yer if ya leave the quaint out we'd end up with filmmakers". Biked down to see what all the fuss was about in Forest Knolls. They're shooting Winston, starring Ed Harris, over at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon. Which sucks 'cause they won't be open for pool this evening.

But they're doing a night exterior shot, so we may wander down and play looky-loo when the lights are up and the water trucks are spraying.

We'd driven by wanting to stop at the antique shop that's got "estate sale" signs up all around it, 'cause we hadn't heard of problems in the family that owned it. We didn't know that they owned the estate sale business, and were just looking to cut down on stock, either. But we couldn't find parking, so we headed back up to the house and grabbed a tandem.

The guy in the poncho is the cinematographer's uncle, we had a good little chat with him.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Movies Winston ]

Jeff forwarded along pictures of tow-truck functionality integrated into a motorcycle. Yes, really.

So, Chattanoogans, does the International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum have one of these yet?

[ related topics: Machinery Cool Technology ]

Post Rapture Post. Two avowed atheists promise to be around after the rapture so that they can deliver your messages to any loved ones who weren't taken by the rapture.

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

Two this morning have me thinking a bit about advertising, weblogs, and online content. Making Light: I am not content; I am a human being raises outrage at the recent spate of new companies aimed at paying for comment spam. Anti-news, I know of several such companies that have been around for years, the fact that some are getting a little play right now changes nothing.

Rafe talks about turning down $1.5k/year from advertisers looking for PageRank: "To make a long story short, I'm not taking the money. I love the Web too much to take money to improve the search engine rankings of spammers."

I've seen these arguments before, and I was almost swayed by them, but... Google is not the web. Let us not confuse our love for "the web" with the people who have brought us this mess (and are profiting handsomely from it). There are plenty of ways to fix this problem, and Google has decided that pushing this back on us is the right solution.

Maybe now if people see how broken this all has become we can get some competence back in search.

[ related topics: Weblogs Spam Invention and Design Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

The Great American Book Giveaway claims that they'll be sending me a book. I figure that's worth a link.

[ related topics: Books ]

My dad sent along a bunch of Creative photos by Chema Madoz, the C-clamp on the piano made me laugh out loud.

[ related topics: Humor Photography ]

This one's for Warkitty, 'cause she's mentioned gluten intolerance: Charlene wanted pancakes this weekend, and I've been playing with commercial wheat-free biscuit mix that's been giving me bad textures when I use their suggested recipes, so I decided to go off-map and see what I could do combining a biscuit with a soufflé in my quest for better pancakes: Wheatless Pancakes had a nice texture, and the texture nicely masked the "this tastes like falafel" experience.

[ related topics: Food ]

Drove Zack home this evening, and on the way through Fairfax noticed that the crew for Winston was there this evening, so we stopped and played looky-loo as they shot a scene where folks walked from the theater down to 19 Broadway.

Talked again to Jeromy Zajonc, the line producer for the movie. Their web site isn't hot yet (it's still in the "password only" phase that many smaller productions go through), but if you folks involved in Winston find this and want a link and a little publicity, give a holler.

And Charlene and I have asked around a bit, but it looks like there's no overlap between all the kids (and recently kids) we know in the valley and Noah and Logan Miller, the writers and directors of the film.

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Winston ]

This is what ya'll are getting for Christmas. These links, not the actual objects:

• Rubberroom Pornaments
• The Mall Version

It looks like the RubberRoom ones are sold out, you may have to make your own inspired by their Kinkmas spirit.

It's 2:20am, waiting for servers to come back online during a scheduled maintenance outage.

Some interesting notes on scalable system architecture in Johannes Ernst's notes on a talk by Dan Pritchett and Randy Shoup about the eBay Architecture, and Dan Pritchett's slides on the talk in PDF. Among other things, it talks about moving CPU intensive work, joins, sorting and referential integrity, out of the database layer and into the application layer, because application layer stuff is more easily distributed across processors.

As I consider going to a hosted solution for my web sites, and my development process in general, makes me re-think my preference for PostgreSQL (a real database) versus MySQL (still largely a bunch of flat files with an SQL layer on top).

And Dan Pritchett's weblog looks like a must read if you're building large scalable database driven systems.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Databases ]

Strange byways of history department: The Mitford family was an aristocratic British brood whose 6 daughters became social notables in the first half of the 20th century. Two became famous writers, two married nephews of Prime Ministers, one became a Communist, and two were genuine, card-carrying Nazis. The oddity is that a large part of the family fortune was based on a gold mine in the unfortunately-named town of Swastika, Ontario. Indeed, one of the girls, the resoundingly named Unity Valkyrie Mitford, was conceived there. There were attempts to rename the town Winston during WW2, but it never happened. There is still a Swastika Public School in the town, but I fear to learn what they call the football team.

[ related topics: History Sociology Writing ]

Reminder: It's Repeal Day!

Women masturbating! Okay, now that I have your attention... Say you mention reading materials to someone. Say that someone says "I've got a female friend who's uptight about masturbation, I've gotten her a vibrator and lube, but she's not really able to let go". Say the subjects are early college sorts of age.

Any suggestion for up-to-date reading materials? I'm sure there'll be future discussions, and obviously I'm at least once removed from the specifics (no, my life doesn't have nearly as much discussion of masturbation with 19 year old women as you might surmise), but I'd be a little afraid Betty Dodson's Sex For One is a bit dated, and I'm not sure what other directions to recommend.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Community Education Personal Lubricant ]

http://my.break.com/media/view.aspx?ContentID=185806

I have to say they don't come to my door that often, but this is poetic justice and hilarious!

Ziffle, not in Utah

[ related topics: Ziffle Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]

Reason magazine interviews Dave Barry.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Current Events ]

John Derbyshire: The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists:

Oh, like Head Start? That landmark Great Society educational program, launched in 1965, is still going strong. The Thernstroms reported that 20 million children had passed through it when they wrote their book, at a cost to the federal taxpayer of $60 billion. They go on to report that while there is some slight, disputable evidence of marginal benefits for white children from Head Start, “It does not seem to have improved the educational achievement of African-American children in any substantial way.” Whether it has done anything for Hispanic children is not known.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Libertarian Education Race ]

Booyah! The war in Iraq is taking the fight to the terrorists, man! By fighting over there we keep them off our soil! Hooah!

Uhhh... How come we didn't hear more about this: White Christian native-born U.S. citizen sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to blow up Congress, another version of the story.

[ related topics: Religion Politics History Current Events Race ]

Building a tablet computer out of a Mac PowerBook and a Wacom Graphire.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Macintosh ]

Two stolen from Genehack:

• Blog Or Get Off The Pot is a thought inducing rant that, if I had more time to play with the Flutterby CMS would instantly result in a whole bunch of new features.
• SQL::Shell is a solution to all those times when your Perl libraries point somewhere other than your system SQLite libraries (I'm lookin' at you, Apple!).

Okay, three, because I'm seriously considering switching hosting before other circumstances make a hosting switch happen to me. Nothing certain, but...:

• Dreamhost and Google Jabber chat interop info.

And yes, that means that I've alas been dragged down the evil path that is chat. Unfortunately all chat clients appear to only interop the wrong way. What I really want is a chat module for Perl that'll let me automagically archive everything from specific users, that'll alert me to new messages only in specific group chats (ie: I follow the rat boys game coordination chat mostly to stay hip with what kids these days are up to, but I don't need it beeping at 1AM if I forget to close the lid on my laptop), and that won't, after some period of use, forget to alert me altogether (I'm lookin' at you, Apple).

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Content Management Weblogs Perl Macintosh Net Culture ]

We just tried a sample run of Coverity on our code base, and I'm moderately impressed. My first reaction is "and GCC isn't finding these? do we have our warnings turned up high enough?".

But overall my feeling is a lot like when I finally got over my ego and embraced lint, working with this tool for a few months would do good things for my C++ style, applying this tool to an existing code base is a very good thing, and I'm guessing that subjecting a programming team to a few months of it will make us all better programmers.

It ain't cheap, especially for a startup on a budget, but if you're managing a C++ code base it's worth looking at.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

So speaking of hosting options, what's the catch to Dreamhost? Do they screw you with or have unreasonably low limits on CPU use? Is the cost for overages super high?

I'm just not getting the other pricing plans as I look around (I'd like to find somewhere running PostgreSQL), and the performance I see on sites hosted on Dreamhost looks just fine.

I don't know why I follow virtual worlds stuff any more, but I guess I see what happens in and with them as a more extreme version of what happens culturally in net communities in general. And I know that Lyn has been looking at them recently (I suspect for work). So if anyone cares, I thought that it was interesting that Mark Paschal leaves Second Life with a long note on why just as David Chess discovers it (2, 3 (differentiating real life from Second Life), 4).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community ]

Heather Corinna, whom you may know from her work at Scarlet Letters and Scarleteen, and whom you may not know from her testimony to the Supreme Court in support of your First Amendment rights (upon which she remarks: "I have never had a pet name for my body parts, but I’m seriously considering calling my tits Exhibit 42 from now on."), wrote a long piece on why Scarlet Letters hasn't had any updates in a while: Why I Stopped Trying To Save The World Through Pornography:

Women can’t possibly reclaim pornography — which is an expression of sexuality — before we’ve reclaimed sexuality, period.

The whole thing is worth reading. And I think this ties in to why I was intrigued by Ariel Levy's comments, despite what I see as some obvious and immediate flaws in Levy's arguments: Raunch culture is still a defining culture for sexuality.

Anyway, too much coding to do right now to explore this too far, maybe y'all can take it soimewhere.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Civil Liberties ]

Holy crap. My spam load was fairly heavy, circa 500 messages a day, but between last night and this morning that skyrocketed. Has Vista hit the streets, or is this just some new exploit for XP?

And once again I find it amusing that penis enlargement, tranny porn, and Rolex knock-offs all seem to have the same target demographic. I'll never be able to look at a high end wristwatch again without snickering.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Spam Marketing ]

This one's for Mark and his interest in old radio shows: Old Time Radio Network, lots of links to old radio serials

[ related topics: History Radio ]

The Changing Workplace: Smashing the Clock (alternate link) is a little article about BestBuy going to a performance rather than time-in-the-office based system:

That's where Achen's performance metrics came in handy. He could measure how many orders per hour his team was processing no matter where they were. He told Thompson he'd reel everyone back to campus the minute he noticed a dip. Within a month, Achen could see that not only was his team's productivity up, but engagement scores, or measuring job satisfaction and retention, were the highest in the dot-com division's history.

This grabs me particularly hard because one of the things we're trying to do with our distributed team is build a "virtual office", as a first pass by just making sure that our chat programs are all on during a specific time, and right now it isn't working right. I don't know how to fix it yet, but maybe that's the wrong thing altogether? I wonder how they facilitate inter-group communication (cue the old story about "giving every department their own coffee pot").

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

In honor of Stupid Pothead Stories: Those inventive university students have come up with the next great advancement in bong technology: The Blissett Bucket, water cooling, but without requiring you to have the lung capacity to actually suck the air through the burning material.

Please be warned: With traditional (unfiltered) g-bongs, the natural human coughing reflex will stop lightweights taking in too much smoke. With the Blissett Bucket however, the smoke will be so cool that even Billy First-Smoke will be able to take it down

In short, this thing will get anyone really really wasted. Just dont say you werent warned

[ related topics: Drugs Education ]

Last night at the Marin Cyclists holiday party we sat next to Allan Reeves of Lostende Tours, and among other things we talked about biking over the Pyrenees. But not all of their rides are that hardcore, there's a package with day trips out from a central chateau that sounds really cool.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

The Guardian: The House of Death. When the drug war has innocent human casualties, and the information is deemed more important than the lives.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics ]

Giggle: Rafe, in rc3/ofinterest, said:

Jon Udell is joining Microsoft — He's going to be doing the same stuff he does now, only he'll be on the Microsoft payroll.

Snicker.

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron ]

Yesterday, December 7^th, was "a date which will live in infamy". But it isn't, not really. The local papers all had interior stories somewhere about how the few remaining veterans of the attack are worried that the history will be forgotten, and aside from Jay, I didn't see it mentioned on any of my regular blogs.

But today Elf had some harsh words for John McCain's refusal to accept talks with Syria and Iran, and I wondered what we're losing of the cultural wisdom that those attacks may have brought us.

One thought I've seen is that every generation rollover or so there's a big war. It takes those who went through the last one dying off to let the society forget enough to try for another one. Yet since WWII we had Korea, and Vietnam, and I'd hate to cast off either of those as "small".

However it sure seems like we're destined for another big one. Like the collective idiocies of humanity are lining up for a big slugfest with lots of bodies on the order of the War Between the States, or the First World War, or the Second, and for all of the flaws of that generation and its culture, I've got to wonder what else we're losing as they die.

[ related topics: History Sociology War ]

Teen, both a perpetrator and victim of sex offense, presents legal puzzle:

Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old Ogden girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.

As the SE entry which brought this to my attention said:

Anyone taking bets on how long before some kid gets put on the sex offender registry when he's caught touching himself?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture moron Law Current Events ]

Charlene brought to my attention the Craigslist post of the day:

This is a brand new earthquake survival kit meant for homes and small offices. Bought new 6 months ago and never used. Retails for $349.

[ related topics: Humor Earthquake ]

Dear Apple. I can't say that I'm a Mac fanatic, but after a year and a half with a PowerBook my earlier (pre OS/X) doubts about the Macintosh as a general computing platform have faded. I'm now loathe to ever boot Windows, and while I dislike some user interface choices and issues with X interoperability, I usually understand that those decisions were made to enable less technical users to use your machine. In short, I far prefer a real Un*x machine, and I really wish you'd hire someone who could design a good switching power supply, because having mine shut off every time I turn on a flourescent light is kind of a bummer, but this ain't too bad.

However, can we talk about your printing subsystem? I have a printer. It's accessible via a Windows share, and via IPP. Every other computer in the house can talk to it just fine. I have yet to configure the Macintosh to find it. It all seems like it should work, I select "IPP" as the protocol type, I enter the IP address of that machine, I print, I go to the print queue, see my stopped job, click on it, click "start jobs", see the "Gimp-Print" status loop through its "% printed" message, and then... nothing comes out.

I don't get anything in the logs of the remote machine on why this job may have failed (or any indication that this computer ever tried to connect), but, worse, I don't find any record on this machine of why the job failed, just a little red exclamation mark.

I realize that most users don't want to know the details, but how the hell am I supposed to figure this out? Is this just the latest in the push for the "Paperless Office", ie: We're going to tell you that you can print, but not actually make it possible? Is printing a piece of fucntionality that hasn't made it into 10.4 yet? What gives?

[ related topics: Apple Computer User Interface Macintosh ]

Who will protect us from the "sex offender panic" laws?:

Apparently unable to find a vocal advocate for a child who had actually been abducted by a convicted sex offender, Hatch used Smart and Walsh to promote an agenda that had nothing to do with the circumstances of their abductions. The two high-profile abductions (neither by sex offenders) were somehow claimed to demonstrate the urgent need for tighter restrictions on sex offenders. Hatch’s bill, signed by President Bush on July 27, will likely have little effect in protecting America’s children.

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

Aaaah, free enterprise: Unable to compete with small dairy producer, big dairy farmers used the government to crush his business.

"I still think this is a great country," Hettinga said. "In Mexico, they would have just shot me."

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]

Who would have thought that watching videos of people messing with tables would be so compelling? DB Fletcher Furniture Design has some amazingly cool stuff, the most awesome are the capstan tables, round tables which double their seating capacity with a simple twist. (stolen from crasch)

[ related topics: Cool Technology Furniture ]

The Atlantic: In Praise of Chain Stores asserts that:

Stores don’t give places their character. Terrain and weather and culture do.

And to some extent it's hard to argue with the statement, in lamenting the fact that cities looking for downtown revivals may be working against that goal when they keep chain stores out, that:

You can show people pictures of a Pottery Barn with nothing but the name changed, he says, and they’ll love the store. So downtown stores stay empty, or sell low-value tourist items like candles and kites, while the chains open on the edge of town.

but I think the article as a whole ducks the real issue. Yes, if everything is mass-produced in China and shipped here in containers, if there's no skill required in the service industry jobs, then, yes, large chain stores are indeed the most efficient way to funnel all that cheap plastic crap from the ports to the consumer.

Is that what we aspire to?

Do we want our local economies to consist primarily of untrained unskilled workers executing policy as dictated in overly specific manuals to bring products we had no part of the creation of into our living rooms? If so, why bother with the physical presence at all? Why not move the retailing to the internet?

When I drive into a town and see a TGI Fridays across from a Cheesecake Factory across from a Red Robin, it tells me that the local populace not only expects no more from a dinner than mass-produced food shipped frozen from a thousand or two miles away, it also tells me that they don't expect that their children will want passions, to learn how to cook and be able to build a regular customer base that they can cook to the particular desires of.

I talked this morning with a guy fixing the lock at the local store. The thing was so cheap that the central shaft had been twisted. We exchanged Home Depot stories for a little bit, but then I suddenly realized that I'd had the same problem with my local hardware store, in fact, even with the slightly better hardware store that sells the high end professional tools and the metal gas cans (imagine! gas cans that don't deteriorate in the sunlight!).

The chain store pulls down quality all over, because those of us who want higher quality are no longer subsidized by those who don't give a shit, who are willing to buy and rebuy cheap crap over and over again.

As a free market libertarian, I'm all for that. As someone who sees humanity aspiring that their economy become one with a little room for those who can improve processes, and a whole lot of space where people mindlessly fulfill tasks that will eventually be automated, I weep.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Libertarian Food Sociology Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment California Culture Net Culture Economics ]

Keeping Quicken running under Codeweavers on Linux as Microsoft does more and more to try to make that impossible has me looking for other alternatives. Moneydance is written in Java and will run on Linux and Mac as well as Windows.

[ related topics: Microsoft Open Source Macintosh ]

Hey, anyone have ideas on how to find non-profits with lots of volunteers who'd like to raise some funds and their visibility among well heeled Bay Area dwellers? We're looking for groups that will staff a rest stop for the 2007 Marin Century/Mount Tam Double bicycle ride in exchange for a donation to their organization. We'll take care of the logistics, they have a fun day in the fresh air interacting with and feeding lots of neat people, their organization gets some cash.

I'm putting together lists to hit with letters from various searches, the MARIN DIRectory non-profit and clubs list, the San Francisco Bay Area Volunteer Information Center, I'm trying to track down all of the local Lion's Clubs, I'll try to hit the Marin Boy Scouts and Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Marin and Napa Counties, but if anyone else has suggestions for finding organizations that would be willing to put together ten or so people that we can count on to show up, and that could use some money, I'm trying to find 'em.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Over at Strip Mining for Whimsy, Joshua Norton is on a roll: first he pointed to a man sentenced to "almost two years" for killing a bicyclist, then he pointed to a woman sentenced to three and a half years for killing a motorcyclist. As flamingbanjo commented of the first story:

Jeez, all he did was intentionally run down a bicyclist with his car. It's not like he sold drugs or something. Drugs kill!

As I've ranted before (8 years ago(!)), we give very special protections to irresponsible users of the deadliest weapons out there, and if people wielded firearms they way they wave cars around we'd move to Kabul or Baghdad, 'cause they use AK-47s more responsibly there.

[ related topics: Automobiles Guns Bicycling ]

Here's an interesting little tidbit: Remember how Air America Radio went bankrupt a little while ago? There's a a leaked ABC Radio Networks memo that shows a boycot of 90 major national advertisers who not only didn't want to advertise on Air America Radio shows, "...they do not wish to air on any Air America affiliates", even those shows which were just ABC Radio Networks syndicated shows.

Now I'm not much of an Air America Radio fan, I hit my limit when I heard one host take a quote out of context and without the words's precise meaning in a way that would have made Rush Limbaugh proud, but this is kinda weird, especially since other shows on the ABC Radio Networks include "Sean Hannity" and "Focus on the Family Commentary".

Wetmachine goes into detail.

And remember that when it comes to media, you are the product, the advertisers are the customers.

[ related topics: Sociology Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Television ]

Smell has long been an enigma. One of the reasons I scoffed at that .com "digiscents" attempt was that... well... I've done a little reading and research on that topic, and it's nowhere near as easy as, say, color.

Nature has an article about a theory that posits the smell sesor mechanism may rely on quantum tunnelling:

This would explain why isotopes can smell different: their vibration frequencies are changed if the atoms are heavier. Turin's mechanism, says Marshall Stoneham of the UCL team, is more like swipe-card identification than a key fitting a lock.

via /..

[ related topics: Food Physiology ]

Interesting article about photographer Frank Cordelle and his collection of pictures: The Century Project: Women from birth through 100 years of age. Pictures of nude women in all shapes, sizes and ages, and some of their stories.

For men - who are often uncomfortable looking at pictures of nude women, and who often have a difficult time distinguishing between nudity and sexuality - the impact of seeing this collection of photographs has been largely educational: they see women who are real human beings, as opposed to a series of impersonal toys in a sexual (and frequently violent) environment.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Nudity Sociology ]

I'm still not sure if this is an attempt at viral marketing (my how cynical I've become), but I've long known that the eyeglass industry is one hellacious protectionist scam that's working against the consumer. And as someone who's used the $8 sunglasses from convenience stores, the fact that I can get a frame and an admittedly cheap but not that much worse than some of the prescription glasses I've seen and worn for at least an order of magnitude less than just the frames from other sources has made me wish they'd use just a little more lube when they screwed me. With that in mind, Glassy Eyes is a weblog about ordering glasses on-line or from other cheaper sources.

[ related topics: moron Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Those evil soybeans: "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"

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

Elf Sternberg: On the irrelevance of an old friend: Someone asked me recently, "Should I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy?" Here's my reply:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy saved my life.

It won't save yours.

[ related topics: Robert Anton Wilson ]

Wanna know what a troll looks like? Washington Post eulogizes Augusto Pinochet:

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved.

Yeah, and since Ceausescu was deposed in Romania I'm sure that amazing things have happened to that economy, too! I watched Michael Bauer's weblog over at SFGate.com until I became convinced that he was deliberately shit-stirring and trolling for comments, but I wonder if major papers sometimes publish stupid crap like this simply because doofuses like me will link to it, thereby driving traffic their direction?

If so, I have been trolled.

[ related topics: History moron Dictators Economics ]

Remember that "liquid bomb" plot that I dismissed as "security theater"? Terror charges against the "ringleader" have been dropped:

But an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi found no evidence that he had been involved in terrorist activities or that he belonged to a terrorist organisation.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]

Why I had whale steak for dinner today. (No, not me, the author of the article)

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food ]

Phil mentioned this article, Those annoying little IMs? They cost $588B, as a follow-up to a discussion we'd had earlier about instant messaging and its effects on productivity.

[ related topics: Business Current Events Work, productivity and environment Community Currency Economics ]

The weblog community is abuzz with the news that John McCain has introduced legislation that would hold weblogs responsible for their comment sections and user profiles. News.com has some more on the legislation.

This is the same John McCain who said: "I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government." In plain English that's "I want it run my way and the rest of you can shut the fuck up", but you don't have to take my interpretation of it, you can go watch that video. (props to this MeFi entry)

The reporting would also happen through the the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, so I went over there to see a little background on who they are and what their mission is. They have a Flash based timeline, the intro to which claims that:

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that in a one-year period of time 797,500 children were reported missing. That is an average of 2,100 children reported missing each day. 1,682,900 children ran away or were thrown away. 203,900 children were abducted by family members. 198,300 children were involuntarily missing, lost or injured. 58,200 children were abducted by nonfamily members.

Now I've seen something similar to that fifty-some-odd-thousand non-family abductions number in the past, that's the number that Mark Klaas pulled out of his ass when lying testifying before Congress, but that last bit had a superscript on it, so I went and checked out their citations page, which says:

According to David Finkelhor in What the Numbers Tell Us in The Front Line (Alexandria, Virginia: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Winter 2002/2003, page 10), many fewer children, approximately 115, suffer one of the extremely serious kinds of nonfamily abduction called stereotypical kidnappings.

So what were the other 58,085? Or is this yet another set of lying scumbags who use "for the chillldruuun" as their rallying cry while they push more governmental control over everything and trample any notion of individual rights?

Yeah, thought so. Arizonans, please vote this fucker out of office. The rest of you, holler at your senators to stop this bullshit.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Weblogs moron Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Huh. What does this say about the possibility that U.S. currency is massively overvalued and we could be in for a bit of monstrous inflation or other devaluation in the near future? NY Times: Rising Metal Prices Prompt Ban on Melting and Export of Coins:

According to calculations by the Mint, the metal value of pennies, which are made of copper-coated zinc, is now more than one cent. The metal value of 5-cent coins, made from a copper-nickel blend, is up to 7 cents. Adding in the costs of manufacturing means the Mint now spends 1.73 cents for every penny and 8.74 cents for every nickel it makes.

[ related topics: Currency Economics ]

Are you jonesing for your Joss Whedon fix? Notes on a fridge, or things you might find under a magnet on a Firefly class space-ship. Start at the bottom. Thanks, Lyn.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Machinery Community Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

Lyn linked to Sexism Among Comic Book Geeks: "The Rape Pages Are In", which is basically a link to Valerie D'Orazio (aka "Occasional Superheroine")'s series Goodbye To Comics (start at the bottom) (or you can use Elayne Riggs's chapter by chapter links).

There's a lot about this I want to say that I don't have time for right now. On the one hand it's the brain dump of a woman who needs a good shot of self-esteem, on the other hand it raises (in me, at least) a lot of issues about acceptance of kinks and quirks versus a culture which encourages the harmful bits of that.

Worth reading if, like me, you have one of those strange relationships with comics and wonder why there seems to be so much potential there but in practice they're so often not compelling.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Comics ]

Next person to use the phrase "best practices" gets a boot to the head.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Border fence construction company pleads guilty to hiring illegal workers (alt story). This, of course, comes in the wake of Swift & Co. meatpacking using the DHS for union-busting.

[ related topics: Politics moron Law Enforcement ]

I thought Larry's musings on the problems in urban planning worth a read.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Ultra-Orthodox Jews more likely to jaywalk:

Rosenbloom thinks that ultra-Orthodox faith might contribute to this cavalier behaviour by making people respect religious law more than state-imposed rules. It is also possible that religious people take more risks because they are more fatalistic and have less fear of death.

I remember a bus driver when I was raft guiding who made us all nervous, 'cause his main concern was that if he careened off a cliff with a bunch of people on board some of 'em might not yet be saved.

[ related topics: Religion Public Transportation ]

Bush administration puts publishing restrictions on U.S. Geological Survey:

The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office must be "alerted about information products containing high-visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature."

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment Invention and Design Earthquake ]

There were, indeed, three Kings (lacking gold, frankincense and myrrh) just downstream of the bridge at Devil's Gulch, but the bigger fish don't make it much further up the watershed than that. These are two Coho salmon in the creek just down the road from us, the female (with the white tail) digging a redd, the male waiting for his chance.

On Thursday afternoon we saw some genuine classic salmon jumping up waterfalls action at the Inkwells, but by Saturday the water had gone down enough that they weren't moving upstream. Next big rain, though, we'll be camped out on that bridge.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Race Archival ]

More toys for the kitchen: Chef Rubber has unflavored things like "Pop Rocks" (which I assume is a trade mark, and these aren't actually them, so here's the official Pop Rocks) to industrial sized chocolate warmers.

[ related topics: Food Chocolate ]

I put a 500 gig drive in my home server, and in the process re-installed the OS. This lead to all of the usual crap in trying to set up Samba, and I realized that we should really just ditch that last abomination of Windows and go for real protocols, and if I got that working then maybe I could connect the Mac, too. Little did I know.

Anyone succesfully configured CUPS to work with IPP? I'm close, but I'm getting "/usr/lib/cups/backend/http failed" (with nothing in the logs) when I try to start the printer. I have every vestige of authentication turned off (if my neighbors really want to use my printer, more power to 'em), test pages print fine from the server, I've tried URLs that point to both the printer and a printer class, maybe I've got the URL format wrong (just the same one that I'd use to access the info with a web browser) but damned if I can find that information anywhere online.

[ related topics: Microsoft Open Source Macintosh ]

While the title statement is integral to some personal beliefs of mine, when I read things like: Slashdot talking about the Physics of Buckaroo Banzai (one of my favorite really bad movies) I wonder if that is not "more true": Does Science Fiction create our reality, or is it just an insightful fantasy that gets lucky every once in a while?

Sure, I know the reality, and that good (and sometimes bad) sci-fi authors have a good solid scientific foundation and are often active in real science/scientific work and that this becomes the seed for Sci-Fi. But I want to believe that we can create the future by believing in it, and in believing that.. --laughing. - and now, back to reality, time to go to work.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Movies Work, productivity and environment Archival ]

I've seen a lot of people link to this annoying snarky New York media site that fancies itself a blog or network of blogs (nope, no linky love from me) that's titled "Bad Media: Blog Lingo Clichés". If you haven't seen this, remain blissfully ignorant and carry on. If you have, then:

If you're primarily interested in the genitalia of assorted celebrities and which one of the vapid but well-photographed snogged which other one, then you have no place calling out anyone on stylistic issues. We don't ask you to drop the sense of ironic detachment that's really masking an underlying fear that nobody really likes you anyway, you don't ask us to stop making fun of that, okay?

I mean, really, yo. Just STFU already. Um, we know that your life sucks, that you'd never admit it, but to get there you've made the Worst. Decisions. Ever. but when we see crap like this it makes us feel nauseous; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. So we should abide by some unloved New Yorker's desire to say "hey, everybody, look at me, no, really, I define cool now"? Seriously? Seriously? Oy. What's next? "Urdu is the new 1337speek"? We'll just happily stay here with our cliché-y goodness while you... wait for it... sink further into your egogasm so badly it makes our toes bleed.

Oy.

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media New York ]

Per Dan's suggestion several months back I decided to try "Synergy", an app that enables sharing mouse and keyboard, including clipboard, among a number of computers. I've got an XP laptop and an Ubuntu box, and was forever typing on the wrong keyboard so that, for example, Dan received a Skype chat message from me that said "cd .." (He, of course, came back with /earth/usa/ca/lagunas/house) So, with considerable help from Dan and a few false starts, I've installed Synergy, and now have a three monitor, two OS, one keyboard, one mouse (oh, and a partridge in a pear tree) desktop. On windows, it's easy, and if you know enough about linux to add a host, it's virtually self installing on ubuntu linux using the ubuntu package via Synaptic. Two thumbs up. If Dan's dad can do it, so can you.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Music Microsoft Open Source Real Estate ]

A few weeks back the Berlin Opera decided to drop a performance of an opera by Mozart that includes a beheaded Mohammed in the final scenes. Much controversy ensued over the malicious inflouence of islamic extremists, or at least the fear therof, over Western cultural affairs. Well, they finally staged the opera, and as seen in Annie Applebaum's review, no murderous protests occured. Unfortunately, neither did any comprehension by the audience. I sometimes wonder over which is the greater danger to Western culture: Jihadis or progressive theatrical directors.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Sociology ]

Tennessee school systems receive software vouchers from Microsoft as settlement for monopolistic practices lawsuit:

The class action suit alleged Microsoft used unlawful trade practices to maintain a monopoly and overcharge Tennessee consumers.

Irony really is dead.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Law Consumerism and advertising Chattanooga ]

Anti-news: Most Americans Have Had Premarital Sex:

Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

I'd guess that the pill and Griswold v. Connecticut changed a lot, but I've heard anecdotes of swinging back in the late 1930s (and, albeit as "reports of reports", "petting parties" in the '20s), so it would have been cool if they could have taken this data back further than they did. (via Rebecca Blood)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Argh. Nothing makes you appreciate Microsoft like getting a MacBook Pro.

Okay, maybe that's overstating the case a bit, because the suckage I'm running into is the sort of stuff that you'd mainly run into as a developer, but... expect a long rant sometime soon about the many ways in which Apple is playing catch-up to Microsoft, but seems determined to beat them to the bottom.

I yearn for the day when a manufacturer will ship a laptop with Ubuntu installed so I can just tell people to buy that, rather than saying "well, buy a Mac because it sucks less than Windows and I hate to have you buy a pre-configured computer just to blow away what's installed on it".

[ related topics: Apple Computer Microsoft Software Engineering moron Macintosh ]

I've written A Mac Rant, on the suckage I've encountered.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

For some reason when I saw this safety sign on CalTrain, I immediately thought of Brad. And I hope he'll forgive me for quoting an entry in its entirety from Must See HTTP://:

MyFox Chicago | Media Player Had Porn On It

I don't care if it does come with two hours of gay porn pre-loaded. I'm still not buying a Zune.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

From Autistic Advocacy: Understanding Neurotypicality. (thanks, Lyn)

Damn, I need a road trip: What happens when you let 2 mk1 kids drive your S4 from NY to Seattle? (56k, not a chance) (thanks, Jay)

[ related topics: Travel ]

Particularly apropos since I have little baggies of assorted chocolates that I need to blind-taste and make some notes for a batch of truffles I want to make next week (my neighbor Diana is a chocolatier, I helped her make a huge bunch of truffles for an event earlier this year when she was sick, and I'm tasting the various varieties of bulk chocolate she stocks), and I just finished a batch of truffles last night for Charlene's co-workers: Dallas Food: What's Noka Worth looks at a super high-end chocolatier to figure out what makes them (not-)so special.

[ related topics: Food Chocolate Economics ]

You may have noticed that the right side-bar over there is becoming a little worn. Last time I tried to remove it I got some complaints, but when my other laptop died I dropped the script that automatically updated it from my browser bookmarks, partially because I wasn't using my browser in the same way any more.

But I've realized lately that my comics selection is getting a little tired. Too many reads, not enough caring, so I need to go through and cull. So the question is: What remains?

Miracle of Science will be over soon. Concerned is. Applegeeks is descending into Mega Tokyo-like surrealism for its own sake.

If I tie it back to the ones I eagerly check on a regular schedule, it's Devil's Panties, Girl Genius and Girl Genius 101, Least I Could Do, Mousewax, Questionable Content, and Something Positive.

You may notice that neither Doonesbury or For Better or For Worse made that cut. I don't really know why the former has dropped down my list, but Why I Hate Anthony accurately describes the failure of the latter, and although the animations don't bother me on a conscious level, Columbine's complaint about them (which was also the source of that other link) reminds me that there's probably something in the decisions which led to those that's broken.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Comics ]

While I'm ranting on stuff. Yesterday I went to Yahoo Maps to check directions. I use three Yahoo services, Maps, People Search, and whatever their email list service is, but I only ever use the email interface, so I don't know.

I use Yahoo Maps when I'm in a hurry, because I don't have to jiggle the zoom bar when portions of the map fail to load like I do on Google Maps. That is, I did, but I tried pulling it up on a browser where my cookie to use the old style maps wasn't in place, and by the time their new-fangled Flash-based player had finished loading, I'd checked with other sources, gotten everything together to get out the door to my destination, and was shutting down the computer.

So this morning there's a little pop-up (and people using DHTML to break my browser interface, like those stupid psuedo-windowing image zoom pop-ups that are trendy right now, is another rant, but I'll let that slide for a moment) asking if I want to take a survey to improve my Yahoo experience. Sure! It's my chance to maybe tell them why they're fucking up their mapping service, could improve their people search, and could make me give a damn about their web search.

No dice. It's all about what sort of products I'm looking to buy when I'm using their web site.

This is why I snicker at the Cluetrain guys, not because I don't want the world to be that way, but because if smart companies are still treating me like a stupid commodity, then most consumers must be stupid commodities, to be passed from shill to shill while cheap crap is foisted upon them.

Or maybe the Cluetrain really doesn't stop at Yahoo, and their business would be improved by caring how they can improve my experience at their site, not just the experiences of their advertisers. I guess time will tell.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Maps and Mapping ]

Awesomeness: Home-build your own 3d laser scanner (Via Brainwagon)!

[ related topics: Graphics Gambling Archival ]

So the story is fairly basic: The Tyler Telegraph had a story about an ex-cop who's marketing a "how not to get busted" video because he's fed up with the idiocy and inefficacy of the drug war:

Cooper, once "the best" drug officer in West Texas, according to his former superiors, told the newspaper during an interview Wednesday night that he believes marijuana should be legalized, and that the imprisonment of those caught with the drug destroys their families and fills up jails and prisons across the country with non-violent offenders.

ie: bad cop sees the light and goes good. But what's interesting is that while many outlets ran a simple reprint of the AP rip-off of the story, ie: SFGate's republication of same, while the Guardian story that turned up when I did a Google News search is complete with links. The latter clearly gets the web.

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]

Target pulls Che Guevara image house brand CD cases. The idea of Che Guevara on products at Target is amusing to begin with, but I think this nails it:

"What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose? Target gives this monster a pass, while using common sense on almost everything else it sells," Investors Business Daily editorialized on Dec. 13.

I wonder if the occasional cropping up of Nazi themed stuff in Hong Kong and similar places is in the same vein as U.S. merchandizers use images of Che?

[ related topics: Current Events Consumerism and advertising Dictators ]

Occasionally we see movies where we think "how the hell did that get made?". Actually, that's probably most movies we see, but usually it's in the "who thought that was a good idea?" vein. In this case, it's the "witty dialog, impressive stunts, entertaining, how did that get through the studio system?" meaning.

The film is Stick It, "it's not called gym-nice-stics". For some reason it had caught my eye when it was on posters at The Lark, but of course we didn't see it there during its week or so run, but we've stumbled across it once or twice at the video store, and last night, looking for something completely brain-dead, we rented it.

We ended up watching it again this morning with the director's commentary.

Part of this may be expectations, it's a movie about obsessive teenagers, but from the really impressive stunts of the inciting incident through the banter and the fact that it's dealing with the flaws and beauty of gymnastics, not teen interpersonal issues, it kept us entertained both times. Recommended.

[ related topics: Movies Sports Pop Culture Video ]

Although many weeks there's nothing there that I'd bother with, I've entered my name in the Great American Book Giveaway a couple of times, and one of those times was told I'd won a copy of Elizabeth Hickey's historical novel, The Painted Kiss. Set in late 1800 and early 1900s Vienna, it's an imagining of the relationship between the painter Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge. Klimt was a successful painter in the Symbolist style who died of a stroke, his last words were apparently her name.

I can't evaluate it from a historical perspective, I did recognize Alma Maria Schinder Mahler Gropius Werfel, mostly from the Tom Lehrer song, but even Klimt was someone I had to go look up on the net. However, in the the end-notes Elizabeth Hickey mentions where she kept to history, where she changed things for story pacing, and where she had no information and imagined what it could have been.

It was a decent read, nicely captured the feel of an era and a society and the introspection of two people who wanted a relationship that couldn't happen because of who each of them was.

[ related topics: Books ]

the movie file as a direct download.

[ related topics: Movies ]

the movie file as a direct download.

This may lead to other ideas for New Years, specifically for places where fireworks are prohibited...

[ related topics: Movies ]

The Good Shepherd: See it. We'll be seeing it again.

This morning I stumbled across a blog entry about how the FBI considered It's A Wonderful Life communist propaganda. And I read the Wikipedia article on James Jesus Angleton, the man on whom Matt Damon's character Edward Wilson in The Good Shepherd is allegedly based on.

As I read through both of them, I was reminded that that there's a difference between believing in something, and believing in the ideals that underlie something, and in these times and with these politics it's good to have a reminder that many of those who believe in the United States of American have little to no regard for the ideals that underlie it, just in the notion of it.

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement ]

Must read: Bill Walker: Why There's No Cure for the Common Cold. (via crasch)

OK, seriously: If the computer industry were running under the same conditions as biotech, this is how it would work:

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Health ]

Two completely disconnected quotes of the day. The first comes from a recipe for Buttermilk-Sausage pancakes, cooked up for shrove Tuesday, with this note:

Nevertheless each year at this time I do my best to make up for at least one devout Catholic by taking up a new vice for 40 days. I'd tell you what my new vice is this year, but since the episode back in '84 with the penguin and choir director I've found it best to keep that to myself -- you don't want to spend a weekend in jail with an angry penguin.

The second is a response by "Cliff" to Rebecca Blood's posting of Paul Kedrosky's One-Sentence Challenge:

"Sadly, each of us is only as moral as we feel we can afford to be."

Except that I'd drop the "sadly" and acknowledge that that's both human nature and what we consider moral.

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Ethics Food ]

Rough storm in this neck of the woods last night. Manka's Inverness Lodge burned, presumably due to a downed tree, here in Lagunitas one woman was killed when a tree hit her house, and there are reports of at least two other houses hit by trees, I saw crews working to pull the tree off of one down near Shafter Bridge, but didn't see a good angle to take a picture.

And power is out here at home, this message brought to you by batteries. Lots of batteries.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area ]

Violet Blue says that Google is broken. The sooner we recognize this, the faster there'll be room for a competitor in the market. The problem I see is that none of the competitors "get it". Clusty is too busy and slow, the big companies are laughably wrong...

[ related topics: Economics ]

How come we don't see more trailers like this: A trailer for a restored re-release of Fritz Lang's Spione (Spies) from the silent era. Very stylish, indeed.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Why does every OS or shell that isn't Un*x think that it's a good idea to have separate sorts of handles or descriptors for sockets versus streams versus files? Even those that are based on an underlying Un*x architecture? What part of the object oriented notion of "reading and writing are common operations so we should be able to do them on base objects" that the designers of Un*x and BSD sockets understood is wrong in the eyes of the developers of Mac OS/X and Windows?

[ related topics: Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering Macintosh ]

If someone grazes you with a bullet while indiscriminately discharging a firearm and you shoot and kill them, you're a hero. If someone grazes you with an automobile and you shoot and kill them, then all of a sudden you're the bad guy. Why?

[ related topics: Ethics Law Automobiles Bicycling ]