Flutterby™! From 2007-04-01 to 2007-04-30

Tom Waits has a great tune about the "Immaculate Confection". The stink in New York about a 6-foot Chocolate Jesus has me wondering if Jesus is hollow? Perhaps the ultimate answer is the White Chocolate Jesus with Liquid Cherry Center. Personally, I'd probably make a dark chocolate Jesus with a Cherry liqueur filling.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Food Current Events Chocolate New York Race ]

An article on the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, a 29 bike mile ride that looks like it'd be grand for a day toodling on the tandem with Charlene.

[ related topics: California Culture Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

This one's for Zack: Edible Origami: Crane croutons for your salad. (Via Dave's Picks)

[ related topics: Food ]

Interesting... I put comment markers around the "Sites Dan Reads" section over there on the right because I wanted to disable it for the moment. I had forgotten whether or not the templating system removed comment blocks, but the section disappeared on my Opera view of the page, so I thought everything was hunky-dory and carried on with my life. Then yesterday afternoon I had the Windows machine fired up to do taxes, and brought up Firefox to surf around while I was waiting for printing, and, lo and behold, there was the sidebar I thought I'd excised.

Apparently Firefox ignores HTML comment markers and renders the comment as though it were regular HTML. Interesting.

[ related topics: Politics Microsoft Open Source California Culture ]

With all the entrys on food around here, here's another: Chicago has issued its first punishment for the recently enacted Foie Gras ban. A restarunt called Hot Doug's has been advertising a goose liver-laced hot dog for some time, but now they've been assessed $250. First they came for the foie gras..... PS click on the link for Hot Doug's Rock theme song, with the deathless lyric "I want the feel, I want the taste, I want the meat that's been encased..."

[ related topics: Food Current Events Consumerism and advertising Dogs ]

Well, I just had my first Windows Vista experience: Jeanne got a new laptop today, was all excited about showing me a language application, pulled it out of her bag, flipped open the top, and although it had been working just fine earlier it was complaining that the license key was invalid.

We tried several times to type in the key from the bottom of the computer, but eventually it gave up and just said "you have to call Microsoft to continue".

So, lest you too get suckered into buying Vista, know that you're buying software that may, at inconvenient moments, suddenly tell you that the system you just, perhaps even a few hours ago, paid good money for, is invalid and your only recourse is to call Microsoft and put yourself at their mercies, with your credit card out and ready.

Or you could buy a system without an OS pre-installed and run Ubuntu.

[ related topics: Microsoft moron ]

Yowza! French train sets record at 357.2 MPH. I wonder if, at that speed at ground level, it's any more efficient than an airplane?

[ related topics: Aviation Trains ]

I guess one of the things I've become conscious of lately is how much of a bubble the Bay Area is. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who wanted to add some space to their living room. A fairly simple change, pour a bit of a foundation, extend out some walls, probably change the roofline. They've got plans drawn up and, I believe, approved. No plumbing, maybe a little wiring. The bids came in around $240/square foot.

And, as others have asked me about in the past, I see the world as overpopulated because my world is overpopulated, on the edge. This year we had light rainfall, so local cities are beginning to deal with water rationing issues. Food is either high priced specialty stuff, or something that comes from "somewhere else".

At any rate, Letters at 3 A.M.: Red State Blues is well worth a read:

I forget the name of the Kansas town where we stopped for lunch. It was like a scene in an old Western: We walk in; everybody looks; everybody stares as we take our seats. Dave, he could be a businessman from down the road (as, in fact, he is) – distinguished looking, tall, gray hair, casual clothes. He walks into this diner alone, and he's fine. Me – maybe it's the hat, the gray ponytail, how I walk, I don't know. But the people in that Kansas diner, in particular – they looked at me with naked, livid hatred. (So did old women in Nebraska the next day. As I passed, one said to another, "Well, he's different." She spat "different" as though the word meant something vile.) In the diner, one farmhand couldn't take his eyes off me. Sitting with his friends at lunch, he stopped eating and stared at me. His face was trembling – trembling! – with rage and hate. I expected something nasty to go down, but all he did was stare. I was baffled. Why me?

And he actually comes up with some answers (I was lead there by this Orcinus entry that Lyn linked to).

[ related topics: Food History Space & Astronomy Nudity California Culture Clothing ]

The Chronicle of Higher Education sifts through the best college pranks on YouTube (so that you don't have to).

[ related topics: Humor Education ]

Thanks to Bill Humphries for the reminder that Dave Winer's Scripting News turned 10 this weekend. Dave has largely dropped off my weblogging radar, but whatever's happened in the meantime, Flutterby's start in February of 1998 was heavily inspired by the format, more than link list, less than journal, that he pioneered and the realization that it was relatively easy to write software to do all the heavy lifting.

[ related topics: Weblogs Dave Winer ]

Hey! Debra Hyde reports that she placed third in the 2006 Queer Lit competition, and she's been offered a contract for another novel.

And she's updating again!

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

One of the problems I have with some games is that once I figure out the algorithm to optimize the game and reduce it to its random choices, I lose interest. Sodoku was instantly that way, Minesweeper can quickly be reduced to random chance (albeit with known odds), and so forth.

But what happens when the control systems are not as immediately obvious as "click on a square"? Here's a Lego NXT Wii Playing Robot that can bowl a perfect game (Via Brainwagon).

[ related topics: Games Robotics Lego Mindstorms ]

There are always calls for secession from various states flying around. Many of them are based on economic stats, the fact that the "blue" states are largely the ones who fund the Federal government and the "red" states are heavily subsidized, that sort of thing.

But I thought Frank Bryan: The Case for Vermont's Secession went interestingly deeper:

The problem we face is much deeper than George Bush and the war in Iraq; if our passion and commitment is fired only by that furnace, we are doomed. America’s problem is as much a fault of the liberals as it is the conservatives. It is as much a fault of the Democrats as it is the Republicans. The problem is that we have systematically undermined the natural homelands where citizens are born, raised, and trained in the art of governance, and with them has gone our democracy. The current buzzword for this lost capacity is social capital, but whatever you call it the result is the same: a continental monolith uncontrolled by its own citizens.

I went searching for this because of an entry about the Vermont secessionist movement over at John Robb's weblog.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics History Art & Culture Economics ]

Usually these sorts of things just dribble around the edges of the mainstream media, but the articles mocking John McCain's visit to a Baghdad market are flowing through all the news outlets. SFGate: Baghdad merchants astounded at McCain's claims of security They say the market he saw, surrounded by GIs and humvees, wasn't real life, NY Times: McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say. Rafe Colburn pointed out Josh Marshall calling this McCain's "Dukakis in a tank" moment.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Imploding a 55 gallon drum (also), via Diane and starring her son Greg.

[ related topics: Cool Science Movies ]

Building a 1/5^th scale Sherman Tank, complete with drive motors. I'm not sure that this'll be appropriate to the nephew, but the techniques might be useful for, say, a riding bulldozer at some point...

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Berke Breathed on the future of Opus and the Opus movie:

That project is gloriously dead and decaying on the Weinstein Co. beach, Breathed said. "They were set and determined to make the cheapest animated film in Hollywood history, and they finally gave up trying to figure it out, thank God. Opus shall remain the way he is without Hollywood's interpretation sullying his dubious legacy."

As to why I may have been interested in the future of the Opus movie... well... can't comment on that one. But this answers a few questions.

[ related topics: Animation Movies Comics ]

I have seen a number of uproars over this report of fifth graders "having sex" in school (alternate version). What I find particularly amusing are threads like this one over at Least I Could Do decrying modern media taking away childhood.

Either there are a whole lot of adults out there who are criminally negligent in terms of understanding the growing up process, or there are a whole lot of people in pretty severe denial. Or kids in general are better at hiding this stuff from adults than I think they are, but since adults were kids once, let's go back to those two explanations.

I generally try to not kiss and tell, but... I went to school in a community that was pretty darned removed from the popular culture. There were parents who asked that, if a kid were visiting a house that wasn't as far removed from technology, that radios and televisions be covered, but even in the houses with some exposure to the modern culture such things were fairly well limited. In the 1970s I knew Mendelssohn, Bach and Beethoven, and I don't know that I'd heard of Crosby, Stills and Nash. And, yes, there was various genital touching. At ages younger than this.

I'm not sure what the harm here is, other than that there are very definitely power dynamics which can be unhealthy extensions of the cruelty that goes on on playgrounds and the usual hazards associated with sex, but if we keep playing the "oh my god, kids these days!" hysterical bullshit games, we won't be able to address either of these concerns effectively.

And remember that there are cultures where 13 is adulthood.

So: Adults in general, parents, teachers and school administrators in particular: Kids, probably first and second graders, hell, probably any time preschoolers can sneak away from adult eyes, not just fifth graders, are exploring their own and each other's bodies. Get over that. Deal with that. Stop expressing surprise, shock and outrage, and open your darned eyes to see what's actually happening with the children around you.

I'm not asking you to condone it, I'm just asking you to stop the denial and the willful ignorance and outright stupidity.

Maybe once you've done that then you can get to talking about what to do. But until then, you're a hazard to children, and, yes, I'm talking to you, Bob Buckley, you are a hazard to children:

"After 44 years of doing this work, nothing shocks me anymore," said Union Parish Sheriff Bob Buckley. "But this comes pretty close."

and should be kept the hell away from them.

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

Holy crap. Would you people who are still running Windows please stop it! I'm getting virus mail out the wazoo this morning, probably due to the fact that the "Windows Genuine Advantage" (ie: You'll never again know if Microsoft is going to ask for extortion money to keep your computers running in the middle of an important project) "upgrade" doesn't install automatically, so everyone running automatic update is now weeks out of date.

But, yeesh, I'm just watchin' the .pif files flow in this morning.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus moron ]

US Home Prices 1890-2007 plotted as a ride on a roller coaster, from the good folks at Speculative Bubble.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Yesterday the Chronicle had a report of a family in a minivan attacked by Critical Mass riders:

It was supposed to be a birthday night out for the kids in San Francisco, but instead turned into a Critical Mass horror show -- complete with a pummeled car, a smashed rear window and little children screaming in terror.

I'm no fan of "Critical Mass", but the reality is apparently a little more complex than that. According to a witness in a KTVU news report), she was trying to force her way through a traffic jam and knocked a cyclist off his bicycle and ran over his bike:

"His bicycle went under the wheels of her car, on the front side, it was ejected through the right side, and his body landed in the center of the lane."

I don't know which witnesses are credible, but I hope that if she did destroy another vehicle as she pushed through traffic that the DA brings her up on charges, or she at least gets whatever tickets and citations she'd get if she deliberately rammed, say, a motorcyclist, in a traffic jam composed of motor vehicles.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Journalism and Media Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Teardrops & Tiny Travel Trailers forum, with lots of people building their own teardrop trailers.

[ related topics: Fabrication ]

Douglas Rushkoff buys a Vista laptop, ends up running Ubuntu:

But the fact that I'm now using it as my principle(sic) operating system means something else: that soon a whole lot of people will be, too. Linux has finally arrived. Maybe not this year, but 2008 will almost certainly be the year of Ubuntu in the same way 2005 or 6 was the year of Bittorrent. It will reach critical mass, penetrate the general market, or do whatever it is that means coming of age.

Via PlasticBoy. The whole "fear every time I tell Windows it can update" thing is bad enough with "Windows Genuine Advantage" playing some hidden heuristic as to whether or not it'll let you continue to run, but now that I've seen Vista in the wild I'm more sure than ever that next year's tax prep software might be on the Mac, might even be a web app, will hopefully be running on Linux, but I'm not locking myself into any more Microsoft.

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Microsoft Open Source Macintosh ]

The Rocking Horse, ready to get loaded in the car for delivery to my nephew this weekend.

[ related topics: Photography Automobiles ]

Yeah, I'm having trouble coaxing good small pictures out of my little HP Photosmart point & shoot camera, but some days ya just need a good flower break:

Spent some time last Sunday hanging out in the flowers on the edge of Nicasio Reservoir, using the cell phone (which, as the coastal fog advanced and retreated over Mount Barnaby jumped from four bars to one and back) to catch up with family. It was good therapy.

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

crasch has a great Q&A with a woman who worked as an escort:

I haven't read much whore lit, mostly because you don't get book contracts unless you hated it or are repenting.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

In the comments about Rushkoff runing Ubuntu, Columbine muses about the lack of games on the Mac or Linux. I'd propose a bicycle or woodworking as reasonable alternatives to computer games, but I do understand the desire for shared virtual spaces. So how about setting up a Croquet server? There are others interested in this, over at Slashdong the series on The Naughtyizing of Croquet starts here.

[ related topics: Free Software Games Open Source ]

I haven't gotten to the part where Ayn Rand is discussed, but this piece over at NY Mag is a must read. My favorite quote so for:

"Jail is terrible, really boring," says Jason. "But it does give you plenty of time to plan your next move."

[ related topics: Objectivism Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Hmmmm... Let's see if anyone posts between the time I set up this post in the future, and how that'll look on the front page. Easter brunch bunny bao (steamed buns). Via Rebecca's Pocket.

[ related topics: Food ]

Courtesy of the SeeingEye.org newsletter, via a co-worker, I give you the FDA's Recalls RSS feed. The context here was the recent pet food recalls, but I thought it was a great use of RSS.

[ related topics: Food Dogs Cats ]

Bog Venus Versus Nazi Cock Ring: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography By Alan Moore:

This is not to say, of course, that all society is a direct result of chronic Onanism, although I can see how one might come to that conclusion. Rather, it is to suggest that our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable, and that back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists.

(Emphasis in the original)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Art & Culture ]

Gonna trek up to Portland over the next few days, and then leisurely dawdle back. On the list for the later part of the week is moving Flutterby to a new server. Nothing else to report.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Back from elsewhere. Delivered the rocking horse to my nephew. Saw cool stuff in Oregon, more reports forthcoming. On the way back dropped in on Jerry Work and chatted with him for a bit, saw his shop and a bunch of his work, some of which was built with and for his upcoming manual on the Festool Domino, which he raved about a bit and showed us how some of the super cool work he had in his shop was made easier with that tool. The book-matched butterfly leaf table has me distracted from Shupe tables for the moment.

Not that the gorgeous japanese joinery chest of drawers that was held together with waxed sliding dovetails and had new details to discover from every angle it was viewed at had anything to learn from the Domino...

Some of Jerry Work's work (and not only is that gong stand beautiful, the sound from that gong is also amazingly rich and complex), and some more of his work.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Furniture Woodworking Festool ]

Comments will be disabled while I switch servers... Eventually, when I get closer to switching servers, comments will be disabled.

Remember when herpes was the big threat and everything else could be cured with penicillin? Lucky dog, I missed those years. Now the CDC Says Gonorrhea Is Drug-Resistant

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

I disconnected our POTS line today.. All we got were calls from telemarketers at that number anymore. POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service. It's an incredibly apropos name. Partially because I recently upgraded to a Q, which, even though it's running WinMobile, has been a great phone for the past week+. the voice quality/clarity is incredible. It also becomes a mobile 'net connection for my laptop (Under WinXP) which I've actually used a few times. As a handheld occasional web browser, it's pretty decent as well. for mobile e-mail, it's been great. So the money I was paying BellSouth for a POTS line few humans we cared about used, became a mobile 'net connection and much better phone. Need to call me: 423-605-6943

[ related topics: Spam History Sports Currency Phreaking ]

24 Hours of LeMons. Not Le Mans - LeMons - as in lemons. A 24-hour race of cars purchased and equipped for less than $500. Hard part - the car had to be manufactured for use on California highways. My first car was a 1972 Mercury Montego that I bought from my high school Biology teacher for $250. Me and my family put about 40K miles on it before selling it for $500. I used to have a Dodge Spirit that I bought for $300 (again, from a Biology teacher) that probably had an good 50K miles left in it...

Meuon, up for a challenge?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Astronomy Sociology California Culture Automobiles ]

Okay, web stuff is on the new server, email still needs to be transferred across, but if you can read this it should be on the new machine. Thanks, Meuon!

Oh yeah: Note problems you run into. One that may crop up is that I haven't fully tested character encoding and internationalization issues in the new system, and I know there are some bugs there.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

The Smithy Supershop is like a ShopSmith, but it looks like it'll work metal as well as wood, and might be a bit sturdier.

[ related topics: Fabrication Woodworking ]

As a follow up to this entry about the havoc at a recent Critical Mass: Critical Manners takes a stand for sharing, harmony, red lights. A "critical mass" like ride where the focus is on being traffic, not a mob.

[ related topics: Politics Bicycling ]

A friend just registered a new domain for his kite photography: ungroundedphoto.com... While playing around on the web he realized that people might mistake the domain for undergroundphoto.com. Too bad he already paid for the domain...

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Invention and Design ]

My heart goes out to all of those affected by the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday, and I'd also like to holler a big "STFU" to all the people second-guessing the authorities without any actual facts to go on. But I'd also like to point to Now Do You Understand?, which says more eloquently than I could write it up my reaction on a political front to the incident.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Balloon Pirate Radio, a tale of broadcasting in Poland during the early 1980s. Well worth a read, especially in these days of "campaign finance reform" and attempts to restrict publication on the net.

[ related topics: Free Speech Radio ]

crasch had a link and copy of the graphic that he'd found via Newmark's Door to this weblog entry which republishes a map from National Geographic's February 2007 issue showing imbalances in single men and women across the United States. The west side has more single males, the east side more single females. But check ou those two close-together circles in Utah. And you Chattanoogans who are single might want to take note of a circle there.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Maps and Mapping ]

Study warns of health risk from ethanol:

He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far the hardest hit because of the city's reliance on the automobile and environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there.

[ related topics: Health Automobiles ]

Supreme Court backs ban on "partial birth abortion". Women will die because of this.

"Today's decision is alarming," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling "refuses to take ... seriously" previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision "tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

Bennett Haselton, of Peacefire fame, has an interesting article over at /. about fighting spam in the face of judges who demonstrably aren't reading motions.

[ related topics: Spam Law ]

You know those various videos you've seen from Iraq, where the mercenaries hired by the U.S. government are ramming other vehicles off the road, randomly machine-gunning out windshields and tires, and generally doing their absolute worst at being ambassadors of goodwill?

Yeah, well, that accident involving New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine apparently involved a state trooper doing pretty much that, driving over 90MPH in a 65 zone, running a new driver off the road, and ramming another vehicle, resulting in an accident that put Corazine, who wasn't wearing a seatbelt, in the hospital.

Politicians shouldn't assume privilege like that. Security is one thing, but this sure seems like it's beyond the pale, and I hope that the driver is charged with at least attempted manslaughter, and if the law doesn't deal harshly with Corzine for being in direct charge when this happened, then the voters do.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

There are techniques in this walkthrough on building a mantel with recessed flat screen TV that I could learn from, but what I find more interesting is the social statement made by the combination of television and fireplace. I'm sure that there's nothing interesting here to people for whom a television is a part of their living room experience, but I'm kinda bemused by the juxtaposition.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television Woodworking ]

The Establishment Rethinks Globalization:

The Gomory-Baumol book describes this as "a divergence of interests" between multinational firms and their home country. "This overseas investment decision may then prove to be very good for that multinational firm," they write. "But there remains the question: Is the decision good for its own country?" In many cases, yes. If the firm is locating low-skilled industrial production in a very poor country, Americans get cheaper goods, trade expands for both sides and the result is "mutual gain." But the trading partners enter a "zone of conflict" if the poor nation develops greater capabilities and assumes the production of more advanced goods. Then, the authors explain, "the newly developing partner becomes harmful to the more industrialized country." The firm's self-interested success "can constitute an actual loss of national income for the company's home country."

This has been one of the things I've been saying about something as simple as treating IT as a commodity means that a company has given up on innovating (and out-innovating their competitors) in that front.

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Columbine says of Making Carefully Nuanced Distinctions Regarding the Totally Unacceptable that you should "read the whole thing", and if the Don Imus thing has showed up on your radar at all over the past few, I agree.

[ related topics: Politics History Political Correctness Race ]

Among other trips on our list, Charlene wants to go visit her nephew in Germany. Lodging Hints for Germany and Austria is about B&Bs and Pensions in the context of bike touring, but isn't specific to bike touring.

[ related topics: Travel Bicycling ]

100 tons of explosives YouTube video.

[ related topics: Video ]

We volunteer for a couple of causes, and sometimes that has us doing tasks that we'd otherwise never stumble into. Like, for instance, what am I doing on Saturday evening? Yep, workin' security at a hip hop show.

Dat's right, my posse gonna bust a cap [if] you step outta line.

MANties - Panties made just for men.

Go to google maps get directions for new york to paris france go to step 24 notice the time to arrive...

Also go to moon.google.com keep zooming in :)

[ related topics: Invention and Design Maps and Mapping New York ]

Cannot find the damn server.

Linking to S.F. publisher bets on Christian fiction for the cheap shot: I was down at the general store this morning and one of our local residents pointed to the headline and asked "isn't that redundant?"

But, from a less snide side, it's an interesting social evolution that a publishing imprint that, for years, has been the home of "new age" is now focusing on evangelical Christianity.

[ related topics: Religion Bay Area ]

Okay, I've got a silly question: My systolic blood pressure often runs a little high, in the 130 range (my diastolic is usually 70-80), and although I haven't got enough data to correlate it yet (ie: is it really lower all the rest of the time?), every once in a while (year or two) I'll get a spontaneous nose bleed, check my blood pressure, and be up around 140.

Of course I go out and get some exercise and I'm at 111/69 or so (at least according to our little battery powered sphygmomanometer), but I'm wondering what else I should be doing. And by that I'm meaning "yeah, yeah, I've seen the usual list of the usual suspects, but those sources were generally wrong about cholesterol (ie: 'saturated fats' was the wrong classification, and fructose is at least as nasty as anything else) and I already don't eat any trans fats and am fairly low on the refined flours and sugars", so where's the research pointing towards the most likely culprits?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food Physiology ]

A premise I've long subscribed to: DollarVotes.org: "Every dollar is a ballot. What are you voting for?" Looks like a weblog devoted to raising consumer consciousness.

[ related topics: Weblogs Consumerism and advertising ]

From Elf Sternberg, whose characters in Sterlings: The Old Country Returns don't claim to be coming up with it so he's probably just rephrasing succinctly a witticism from elsewhere:

"I heard it that a programmer was a device for turning coffee into source code. And a compiler is a device for turning source code into bugs. So a programmer with a compiler is..." She let the obvious consequences of that chain of logic trail off. "So, which is it?"

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Every time I mention overpopulation, crasch delights in pointing out that food prices have declined over the past 40 years. And, as a percentage of a household's spending, I can't disagree. Michael Pollan looks at the new farm bill:

A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

For reference, ours is a two person family that can go through 1 lb of spring mix in a dinner.

[ related topics: Politics Food Bay Area Sociology Michael Pollan ]

With a couple of big projects in full swing, and the next few years looking pretty scary in terms of amount of work to accomplish, Charlene and I have been doing a little long-term planning, starting to think about what we'd like to do after that. And we've been thinking about houses and homes. I have a longer ramble about how customization removes value, about how we have to choose between comfortable, useful and valuable, but I'm reading through the first book in The Not So Big House series and think it's worth a gander. With so much real estate being pushed as "investment" and "resale value", it's willing to acknowledge that a home is an expense, and that 'though builders and real estate agents have been talking people into "upgrades" that make their homes uncomfortable in the name of future returns, sometimes we have to come back to livability.

[ related topics: Books Economics Real Estate ]

"Catapult Boy is Eaten After Taunting Crocodile". It makes a bit more sense when you remember that in England a catapult is what Americans would call a slingshot.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Eric has several times recently been the "I just want software to work for me" curmudgeon, so it's been fun watching as he's discovering Ubuntu Linux and trying to figure out how to move his essential apps over.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

I'm not sure how I feel about this quote from Peter Merholz:

The global market we’re entering into is one that increasingly values soft skills, and the kinds of understanding borne of education in the social sciences and humanities. This isn’t to devalue science and math — they’re critical — but there’s a lot to suggest that they won’t be the defining disciplines of the 21st century (the way they were of the 20th century).

That's certainly the way the future looks to me right now, but I'm afraid of that world, I'm afraid that as an economy the U.S. will get stomped by people who have their feet firmly on the ground, and that as a culture we'll become easily led by anyone who can come up with a good narrative.

[ related topics: Sociology Education Economics ]

Okay, this one's just too bizarre to pass up, especially if, like me, you thought that Captain America is dead. Captain America (or at least a doctor dressed like him) accused of sexual assault. Best quote from the article:

Authorities said Adamcik was in possession of a large burrito and drugs.

"a large burrito"? Apparently Florida has imported police from San Francisco.

[ related topics: Drugs Sexual Culture Health Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Comics ]

Last Thursday a self-proclaimed "Christian" group disrupted a Mike Daisey monologue. You may remember Mike Daisey from 21 Dog Years, about slacking in the early days of Amazon.com. Anyway, I read the initial comments on the incident, skimmed it, caught things like:

After the show I told the audience something, and it's been rolling around in my mind. It's common to think things will never happen where you are--never in Cambridge, never in New York, never in Seattle--that sort of thing, whatever it is, never happens here, not in our community. Then it happens, right in front of you, and you realize you were blind to it, that you forgot that intolerance and zealotry and viciousness are human currency everywhere, and it takes your breath away. You want to curl up and pretend it never happened, because they were fools, idiots--you make excuses and move on. Do the next show. Breathe. Forget.

A paragraph that I think is particularly apt because the monologue he was presenting was about living in New York for the year before the September 11^th 2001 attacks. But I didn't think it was worth pointing people to.

However, the follow up, in which Mike Daisey talks about the aftermath, and talking with the attacker who destroyed his notes is well worth a read.

[ related topics: Religion Sociology New York ]

Last time I went to the doctor, they were having trouble with the new computer system. This was kind of shocking to me, because my impression of Kaiser Permanente has been that, whatever other flaws, their system for making my life easier in terms of dealing with records and billing is really good. But that day things were breaking down.

So I took notice when I ran across this: Justen Deal wrote an interesting memo about how the CEO of Kaiser Permanente was funnelling a lot of money to a cohort in the guise of building a new information system for them.

Of course Justen was fired. Wall Street Journal follows up.

[ related topics: Health ]

(From here via Bifurcated Rivets)

[ related topics: Humor Net Culture ]

So I recently fired up the Windows box, and on a lark turned on Steam and tried the latest version of Counter-Strike. Wow. That game used to really fly and be fun, but as the "upgrades" and "enhancements" have continued the frame rate has dropped and... well...

So I downloaded the PrBoom Doom engine and the Freedoom maps and spent five minutes reliving 1994.

[ related topics: Games ]

Tonight's break from 3d programming on the Mac was firing up Linux on an Atmel AVR32. Serial port to the console gave me a BusyBox shell, but since the development board had ethernet interfaces I used "wget" to download to it from a web server running on my development machine, and wrote pretty pixels to a little 320x240 display by memory mapping /dev/fb0.

I want to see what a chip with a reasonable amount of SDRAM and enough local PROM to use the SD card for external storage would cost in decent quantity, 'cause this is a neat little embedded platform...

And their development platform either runs under Cygwin on Windows, or Linux, and they've got Ubuntu packages. Getting back on a Linux box is so nice, the windows snap, all of the tools you'd expect are in the right place, I spend time coding rather than looking for how stuff works and trying to get all the libraries installed.

[ related topics: Free Software Hardware Hackery Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering Graphics Macintosh Embedded Devices Embedded Devices - Linux ]

A quick puff piece in SFGate about ultra-small (96 square feet) houses.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Thanks to Meuon's help, I'm throwing the big switch on the mail server. If you can't reach me via email, 415-488-4053.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

Diane's got some cool pictures of her flight in a B-17. Tell me that looking down over suburbia from that bombardier's seat doesn't make ya think...

[ related topics: Photography Aviation ]

http://nynerd.com/dont-forget-your-wallet/

Glad I don't commute: Tanker truck overturns and ignites on I-80 to I-880 overpass, destroying it and I-80E to I-580E connector. I believe that when they completed that interchange a few years ago it was on record as some of the most expensive road anywhere, measured in millions and inches. But it's a major connector between Pleasanton, Livermore and Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco ('though you may be able to get on to the Bay Bridge without it...).

At any rate, I hope that BART manages to leverage this one well, they've already announced free rides today in the wake of the collapse, it'll be interesting to see how the commuting situation out there evolves.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Public Transportation ]

Charlene and I went to see Hot Fuzz last night with Chris and Doug and Carly, then out to the Golden Era Vegetarian restaurant for dinner. Both were good.

However, Hot Fuzz was no Shaun of the Dead. There were a couple of things detracting from the movie, one was that the sound system at the AMC Van Ness was turned up loud enough that during the previews I got clipping and distortion once or twice, but overall it felt like great acting, a script that needed a little tuning, and editing that kept making me as "what'd they do that for?". And a little of the gratuitous gore was over the top.

Taken as a decent spoof of the cop movie genre it got a good bunch of laughs out of us, played with some of the stereotypes in good ways, and dealt with a fairly universal evil, at least one that exists in all small towns.

[ related topics: Movies Food Bay Area Law Enforcement ]

I heard about this situation from Rafe, who pointed out the irony of MIT admissions dean Marilee Jones, who's successfully served in that post for 28 years, losing her job for lying on her résumé way back then. I was going to write something about the necessity of a woman who has since proved in a big way that she's fully capable of the job needing to pad her résumé to get a job at MIT, however Columbine has said most of what I wanted to say about Marilee Jones, but phrased it better than I could.

[ related topics: Education ]

Interesting: Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity, or "why is there a gender gap on the issue of compact flourescents?":

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week showed that while women are more likely than men to say they are "very willing" to change behavior to help the environment, they are less likely to have CFL bulbs at home. Wal-Mart company research shows a similar "disconnect" between the pro-environmental attitudes of women shoppers and their in-store purchases of CFL bulbs.

I know that in this household I'm the instigator to keep trying CFLs, and Charlene keeps pointing out that they suck and switching us back.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Sociology Current Events ]

Okay, mailing lists appear to be back and working. Redirects from "flutterby.com/xyz" to "www.flutterby.com/xyz" are up. I think I'll adjust to Courier eventually. The news feeds should be live. Still got one or two email accounts to transfer, but overall I think the new server is up and running. If you notice problems, tell me.

And super duper incredible thanks to Meuon.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]