Flutterby™! From 2009-02-01 to 2009-02-28

Educated Guesswork looks at the curiously non-linear gift schedule for donations to KQED. I have nothing other than the deluge of crap that I've received after giving them money as evidence, but I think that most of KQED's revenues come from selling your name and address to other people, and the more you donate the more you're likely to be a sucker for all the other stuff people would want to sell you.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Random notes from car shopping, a replacement for Charlene's car:

• It's fun when the salesperson can give you the whole song and dance. The Prius sales-guy was great at stepping us through the demo of the car. The Honda guy, not so much.
• A new BMW costs over a dollar a mile. A two-year old BMW costs a lot less. Either way, none of the recent BMWs we looked at excited me, though I'd buy an old 528e in a heartbeat.
• There's a lot of little touches we've written down to check, and a number more that have been suggested to us by friends. It's amazing how many little details most car makers get consistently wrong.
• Surprise leader right now: The Volkswagen Jetta TDI. Not a car we were remotely aware of, but we were at the BMW dealer and the sales guy listened to us and said "just sit in this one". Beyond the fantastic mileage, it gets a lot of the little touches just right. The accelerator foot placement is correct. The sedan version has 12v jacks in useful places, including the trunk. Apparently the wagon version, which nobody wants to sell us because lead times are long, even has 115v jacks. And the mileage R0xx0rZ. Our concern is long-term reliability.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Automobiles ]

So there was this big football game this last weekend. It's also famous for the ads which run during it, ads are also available here.

A few Comcast subscribers in Arizona got something additional: ten seconds from a porn clip. For you obsessive fans Violet Blue identifies which video it came from.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sports Video ]

Two notes on UI. The first is that we went and test drove the Volkswagen Jetta TDI this evening, and I was reminded about German cars and red lit controls. Why does anyone do anything else? Red is the obvious color for things that are lit up that need to be read at night, the greenish white that my Nissan Stanza has is just silly.

The second is that you may have heard about this shooting that happened early New Years morning in a BART station. There's several videos floating around of a BART police officer pulling his pistol and shooting a restrained suspect in the back, killing him. One of the theories is that the officer mistook his pistol for a taser.

I'm actually sympathetic, it seems like the cop is the victim of systemic problems. For one thing, the Taser has always been sold to us civilians as an alternative to deadly force, after all they do kill people. That the police officer thought deadly force was the only other alternative in the videos I've seen shows that he had some really bad training.

However, the latest Sonoma ACLU newsletter has a picture of a Taser. I had always pictured them as something with roughly the same form-factor as a hair trimmer, but I was woefully misinformed. You can see some pictures at the Taser page of products for corrections and law enforcement, and who the hell thought that a holstered pistol was a good form factor for a Taser? 2AM on BART, the guy probably wasn't used to working night shifts, of course that's going to get confused eventually. This isn't just a criminal matter, this is product liability issue that needs to go all the way up the supply chain, from acquisitions to the manufacturer.

[ related topics: User Interface Photography Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Automobiles Boats Trains Race Public Transportation ]

Educated Guesswork looks at the EFF and YouTube, specifically EFF: YouTube's January Fair Use Massacre, in which an aggrieved young teen complains that YouTube yanked a video of her singing "Winter Wonderland".

Now the particulars of which party complained may be wrong, but it sure seem like whoever Dick Smith and Felix Bernard assigned the rights to should still have a say in how their creative work gets used. I'm not gonna claim that every home video that gets shown to the grandparents needs clearance, but it sure seems like when somethings up and public on YouTube, Google shouldn't bne making money off of it unless those who hold the copyrights on the creative work get recompence. ASCAP and BMI manage to get every small restaurant in the country, why aren't they getting licensing fees out of YouTube?

[ related topics: Free Speech Food Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Pop Culture Currency Video ]

We are hoping for rain tomorrow and Friday. It's been a very dry winter and there's much concern over water supplies for the next year, because there's no way that the weather will catch back up.

Bolinas is in worse straits than towns closer to infrastructure. Bolinas is a town out on the coast that's known for being insular. It's hard to find the right turn off of Highway 1 because for years the signs kept being removed. Which led to this comment by SFGate user "zimz" on that article:

The residents took the signs down again. The water can't find them.

Giggle.

[ related topics: Humor Bay Area ]

My friend Phil is selling his 2008 Mazda MX-5 Miata, retractable hard-top, with the Mazdaspeed suspension upgrade installed by Alara. He loves the car, but there are roll bar rules that have kept him from taking it on the track, and he's wanting something that he feels more comfortable driving in track traffic (where he might dent the sheet metal or slide off a corner).

If you live in the Bay Area and would be interested in a sweeeet deal on such a vehicle (and, yes, that new suspension is really nice even for road driving), drop me an email and I'll get you in touch with him. He'd really like to sell it to someone who'd appreciate the upgrades.

[ related topics: Bay Area Automobiles ]

Looking at the new New York Times search API (thanks, Tara), I had an epiphany: We started out with CGI, that had a way to associate variables and values. We put XML on top of that, which then allowed more structured and hierarchical data to be represented. However, the schemes which have won out in actual usage are much simpler, they mostly revolve around a single string with name:value representation, ie: site:www.flutterby.com in Google, or byline:dowd here, with the interpretation of the untagged data left to the far end.

In short, letting a conversation happen in which the user and the service eventually agree on a syntax rather than trying to specify it up front. I think there are a lot of lessons there for software development.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Invention and Design Software Engineering New York ]

Saying "Here's why you sing hymns in church while they pass the offering plate around", Rafe pointed out Paul Kedrosky: Never sing on the trading floor, which quotes Synchrony and Cooperation by Scott S. Wiltermuth and Chip Heath:

ABSTRACT

Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in activities—for example, marching, singing, and dancing—that lead group members to act in synchrony with each other. Anthropologists and sociologists have speculated that rituals involving synchronous activity may produce positive emotions that weaken the psychological boundaries between the self and the group. This article explores whether synchronous activity may serve as a partial solution to the free-rider problem facing groups that need to motivate their members to contribute toward the collective good. Across three experiments, people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive emotions need not be generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation by strengthening social attachment among group members.

[ related topics: Religion Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Community Economics ]

The car shopping has exposed us to a number of credit offers, most of them are fixed for a moderately long (in this volatile market) time, for cars that's generally 3-5 years. So, here's my prediction: In about a year and a half we're going to see the next big crisis of this recession/depression, when the inflation starts to kick in and the banks realize just how much fixed debt they're holding.

[ related topics: Automobiles Economics ]

Daily Kos: Rep Brad Miller (D-NC 13 Dist.): Are We Going to Buy the Bezzle?

Lenders are quick to say that they have every right to full payment, that they don’t have to agree to modify mortgages. The savings and loan had every right not to settle their lawsuit, to let a court decide their claim against the bank. But refusing to do what makes obvious economic sense is suspicious. If lenders agreed to modify a mortgage to reduce the principal, they would have to change how they value the mortgage as an asset. How do lenders value a modified mortgage that does not reduce the principal, but that is destined for default?

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

I feel guilty for laughing at this: Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit. And it makes me want to listen to the audio book version of Dreams from my Father. Apparently Barack Obama read the audiobook version, which includes a character, presumably his father, swearing like a sailor. The video linked above is some of those those bits over appropriate pictures.

[ related topics: Politics Humor Books Video ]

I've been loving my little Sansa Clip MP3 player. I've been catching Coverville and Wait wait... Don't Tell Me! and the like. That last entry got me interested in the audio version of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, so I went out looking for it, and it seems like there are a gazillion people trying to make money from the affiliate codes at Audible.com.

However, I can't figure out what format they give the file to me in. I believe that there's some sort of funky-ass DRM in play. I could buy it on CD and rip it, though I really don't need the physical media, I'd really rather just buy one or more MP3 or Ogg files, but I'm not going to buy anything DRMed unless I know I can easily crack it.

Anyone know? And, Audible.com, here's a potential legitimate customer who's sitting on his hands because you're not forthcoming about such things. I don't know how many sales you'd lose if you dropped the silly file format stuff, but I know you'd gain one. Probably more than that, 'cause I think there are other things there I'd be interested in.

[ related topics: Music ]

I've been at a conference in Mexico for a week now. It's at a nicer hotel than I usually stay in - and that means I had to shell out about $700MXN for a week of internet access. But the access sucks. I always get a clear signal but Google is basically unusable most of the time. Comes up with a 104 error. I've been trying to get on Frontier Airline's site to check my seat assignment for the flight back but it also comes up with a 104. Flutterby works perfectly. MSN also works just fine.

I just checked the IP I'm getting from DHCP and it's a 193.168.x.x address. That's pretty peculiar... Maybe if I stood up a proxy somewhere sane...

[ related topics: Aviation Travel Net Culture Conferences ]

Forbes: the Great College Hoax.

[ related topics: Education ]

I know I've seen this before, but Shadow forwarded along the Mondial Du VTT Descente de Venosc caméra embarquée, or crazy buggers riding mountain bikes down technical single track. Although unlike some of the extreme video I've linked to, this one looks like fun.

[ related topics: Video Bicycling ]

On Friday night we went out to see Coraline. I'm a sucker for anything Neil Gaiman, although I think the movies have been somewhat hit-and-miss. That opinion still stands.

We saw it in 3d, the first of the new crop of 3d I've seen, and it was gorgeous and spectacular. The animation was superb, in a stop-motion style, and the visuals were fantastic. The story, however, felt a little bit cut down, like there were bits that had been edited out. Echoes of Spirited Away.

[ related topics: Animation Movies Neil Gaiman ]

Big fire at 19 Broadway in Fairfax last night:

The name of the band playing at 19 Broadway was Hillside Fire, and the next band up was Mama's Cookin'.

Hope they manage to open back up soon.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area ]

Draft Stormy Daniels for U.S. Senate. That's the official site, which I got to by this CNN article on the effort to run porn star Stormy Daniels against Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter:

Vitter is famous -- or infamous -- for his link to the "D.C. Madam," the woman who ran a prostitution ring. Elected to the Senate in 2004, he admitted to "a very serious sin in my past" in July 2007 after his phone number turned up in records of an escort service run by the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the D.C. Madam.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic ]

I didn't know anything about Leland Stanford beyond the oft-told story of the founding of Stanford University, where Leland and his wife Jane were talking with the president of Harvard, who pulled some extremely high number out of his head as to what it cost to start a university, and it didn't phase them.

So last week when I was in Copperfields and stumbled across The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California, by Richard Rayner, I grabbed it. It's a quick look at the lives of Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins, the founders of the Central Pacific railway, the railroad that went from the west coast over the Sierra, to meet up with the Union Pacific in Ogden, Utah.

It's a fascinating look at graft, greed, theft, murder, and corruption. The various sub-contractors of the Central Pacific railroad were set up explicitly to take federal money spent on the CP and skim large portions directly into the pockets of the four "Associates". Records disappeared. Lots of bribes were paid, and those receipts got saved so that the politicians could then be blackmailed. Ted Judah, the engineer who mapped out the route and worked to raise public awareness, and therefore public financing, of the project died on a trip to the east coast.

Well worth a read. The overall story, and the discussion of the crash of 1873, put a lot of the graft and corruption of the current TARP and "economic stimulus package" into perspective. And the reminder that, in many people's minds, government exists primarily as a mechanism to focus wealth into the pockets of a few, is a a good one in these times when we look to the government for solutions.

[ related topics: Politics Books California Culture Trains Economics ]

The Blurrrville: Bad News comic has been floating around, so I decided to track down the source. Yep, we need to send this guy to Wall Street, and then down to Washington.

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

Growing in a pot decorating the side of the pool in Cancun was this odd fruit. Follow the link for related pictures. The plant had long thorns. The fruit was sweet with an oddly spiced note. What the heck is it?

[ related topics: Photography ]

How to be as smart as Malcolm Gladwell. Which I got to by way of Chris embedding the videos of "Your Religion Is False" from the BIL conference.

[ related topics: Humor Books moron ]

Beginning cheese making, from yogurt to neufchatel to a basic hard cheese to blue cheese.

If all that's too complex for you, you might start with a very simple ricotta, which I still haven't gotten around to even though I linked to similar instructions years ago.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Archival ]

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

This is fascinating: MeFi: Rat Park and Other Children's Stories talks about the work of Bruce Alexander in trying to replicate the "rats will feed their addictions into starvation" experiments, showing that if you give them interesting environments, rather than just little cages, they'll actively avoid the drugs, and wean themselves off of morphine even when they're physically addicted

The assertion being that we're not addicts because of the substances, we're addicts because our environments are untenable.

I haven't explored the links too heavily yet, I actually have work to do today, and Bruce Alexander's The Globalization Of Addiciton is seventy bucks, but there's definitely some learning in this direction I want to do.

[ related topics: Drugs Work, productivity and environment ]

Our headline of the week from the hyperkinetic New York Post: "Octomom Web-Beg". English may be a living language, but sometimes it needs a nap.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media New York ]

Yep, Fantastic Contraption is out for the iPhone, in the App Store. I bought it, but don't have time to play. Yet. It's like an addiction. I know it'll kill some productive time. The World of Goo on the Wii was pretty fun, but not the same,

I predict Dan will have an iPhone soon.. just so he can play Fantastic Contraption when mobile.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment iPhone ]

Starbucks to begin selling instant coffee:

The company has been working on the product for more than 20 years and has a patent pending on the technology that will allow it to "absolutely replicate the taste of Starbucks coffee in an instant form," spokesman Vivek Varma said in an e-mail to employees.

They're going to take Folger's Instant Crystals and put 'em in a toaster oven, giving that dark smokey burned flavor.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Spam Work, productivity and environment ]

MarkV plots the courses and muses about the physics of the Iridium 33 and COSMOS-2251 satellites that collided.

(Just realized that "boom" is the wrong title, "explosions in space don't make sound".)

Don't Do This! - It's a classic example of why resetting a system to the default password should not be easy. This is just too easy for a system with limited access control, and such potential for chaos:

Hold "Control" and "Shift" and while holding, enter "DIPY". This will reset the sign and reset the password to "DOTS"

Dang it. I think my little town is pretty cool but, so far as I know, we don't have a pornography collection. I think the Dutch are head of us:

The city of Leeuwarden has lost its pornography collection. Here's the original Telegraaf article on Leeuwarden losing its porn collection in Dutch.

Addendum: Better article at The State.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Last night we saw Man On Wire, a retrospective documentary about Philippe Petit's walk on a tight wire between the twin towers. See it. It's a great caper movie, told by the participants three decades after their big heist, well told, and I now want to go read his book.

[ related topics: Books Movies ]

Formerly self-described leaders of the "Religious Right" object to the negative connotations of the label:

"There is an ongoing battle for the vocabulary of our debate," said Gary Bauer, president of American Values. "It amazes me how often in public discourse really pejorative phrases are used, like the 'American Taliban,' 'fundamentalists,' 'Christian fascists,' and 'extreme Religious Right.' "

Jerry Falwell, cofounder of the Moral Majority, self-applied the Religious Right label until it started taking a more negative connotation, according to John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Did the Bible say something about "reaping what you sow"? I forget now.

[ related topics: Religion Ethics moron Community ]

On Saturday, we drove down to Corte Madera for the Dedication to Special Education raffle drawing festivities (alas, no one we knew won), but on the way down and back we did a little more car searching.

Continued in the comments...

[ related topics: Wireless Bay Area Automobiles Education ]

How bad is the global economy? In Britain, cocaine is now cheaper than beer.

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Beer Economics ]

Haven't had a chance to read deeper, but this article seems rather Flutterby-worthy:

Sorrells and colleagues didn't really map a new penile homuculus onto somatosensory cortex, but they did create a "penile sensitivity map" by determining, at 19 different locations...

And now I feel cheated:

Five locations on the uncircumcised penis that are routinely removed at circumcision were more sensitive than the most sensitive location on the circumcised penis.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Maps & Mapping ]

Displaying maps with OpenLayers.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Maps and Mapping ]

Twittered by a friend: Commentary on CNN If you oppose the stimulus, don't take the money..

If Republican politicians are so deeply opposed to President Obama's economic recovery plan, they should refuse to take the money. After all, if you think all that federal spending is damaging, there are easy ways to reduce it: Don't take federal money.

His Palmetto State already gets $1.35 back from Washington for every dollar it pays in federal taxes, according to 2005 numbers, the latest calculated by the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax research group... South Carolina is a ward of the federal government. It's been on welfare for years.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Currency Economics ]

It was announced a few months ago that the British Royal Navy submarines now run Microsoft Windows (More, Obligatory /. snark), now we learn that a British Royal Navy nuclear submarine has collided with a French one. The relatively close timing of these two events seems suspicious.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Current Events ]

SANS Diary of a cyberspace attack initiated by flyers placed on car windows at a mall about a parking violation. Scary.

[ related topics: Microsoft Automobiles ]

Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan [Web version], Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama:

In sum, the concern that countries allowing pornography would show increased sex crime rates due to modeling or that adolescents in particular would be negatively vulnerable to and receptive to such models or the society would be otherwise adversely effected has not been vindicated. It is certainly clear from our data and analysis that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims. We have mentioned some possible influential factors.

Via SE. Note that there are some questions about basing their data off of reported rapes.

Meanwhile, Amplify looks at the uproar over the Ohio "Abstinence 'Til Marriage" program website, specifically "it's only a rape if you think she's not a slut" agenda. I meant to link to this a few days ago, but when I went to the source web site I couldn't find the content in question. Looks like Feministe has some stuff mirrored. Also via "tamp" over at SE, be warned that said user is known for... uh... barely coherent ranting.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Software Engineering Sociology California Culture Archival Marriage ]

Linking to Spy Vibe, a weblog of hip mod spy design an fashion, just in case Columbine doesn't read MeFi

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Graphic Design Fashion ]

I've got a report Monday and Tuesday's trip to Safari West muddling around here somewhere, along with a few pictures. It was rainy and wet and cold and we had a blast and will be going back.

Last night we went to see The Reader (warning: Autoplay sound). We went because Charlene had gone with a friend to the matinee, and she came home and said "we have to go see this so we can talk about it", and we are talking about it, although there's at least as much mulling over the details on my own. And we immediately went over to Copperfield's and bought the book and the other book by Bernhard Schlink that they had on the shelves.

You can read the synopsis anywhere. In 1950s Germany, 15 year old Michael Berg has an affair with thirty-something Hanna Schmitz. She suddenly disappears. We catch up with Michael as a law student, where he's part of a class attending a trial of Holocaust perpetrators, and we watch as Hanna is on trial for shades of atrocity deeper than she actually committed because she's keeping a secret. A secret that Michael knows and could corroborate.

There are wonderful echoes throughout of responsibility and secrets and motivations, and the film is fantastically constructed. Some directors club you over the head with the symbols they use to reinforce the story (*cough* Kubrick *cough*), I got the feeling (which Charlene reaffirmed) that this film will reveal layers on subsequent viewings, but even on the first run through there's not a glance wasted. And some of the most revealing scenes are just glances.

In at least one place we're privy to information that Michael doesn't have, but the import of that didn't strike me until after we walked out of the theater so I feel like I got to experience the story as Michael did, and then again understanding another level of Hanna's actions.

And the film is also leading to some good discussions, like Hamas or Hannas, they're not black and white. Recommended.

[ related topics: Religion Books Photography Movies Theater & Plays Travel Race ]

My response to the "Stimulus Package" has mostly been feeling like... well... like our various elected representatives have been "bend over and we'll give you a stimulus package".

Mark's most recent entry, on the boondoggle that's passing for economics these days, made something clear:

If one were serious about "jump starting the economy", one would be looking toward steps that make people willing to spend money and participate in commerce again. Here's what I think a reasonable stimulus package would look like:

1. Reinforce support for Social Security. Yeah, you can whine all you want about how people should be saving for their own retirement, but if you're the sort of person who has a right to be doing such whining it's such a small portion of your income it really doesn't matter, and if you must complain about it you can just treat it as some of the more the conservative bits of your savings.
2. Make a strong commitment towards reducing government spending and government deficits. I think at this point we're all well aware that we're liable for the government debt, and we feel the additional deficit spending as debt. You want us to spend, right? If you're spending money for me, my discretionary income goes down.
3. Reign in the money supply. Convince me that my future is bright, that my assets are worth something. That I don't need to take every free penny I've got and stuff it into commodities that are going to be relatively inflation stable, rather than keeping that money flowing.

Instead, it sure seems to me like the current set of stimulus packages are designed to make me worry about my future, run up debts I don't have any hope of covering, and showing that the only way out of this disaster is monstrous inflation in a few years. I'm taking personal steps to cover myself for this, but it ain't things that are generally as good for the economy as if I weren't hunkering down and expecting the storm.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Currency Economics ]

New Scientist has an editorial on the ridiculousness of drug policy:

IMAGINE you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?

You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Health ]

Fascist Texas Republican (but I repeat myself) U.S. Senator John Cornyn is pushing a bill to make ISPs and WiFi operators keep logs for 2 years:

While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday.

The "for the children" angle is, of course, unmitigated bullshit, this is really about statist wackos getting woodies at the ability to further subvert law and order and due process by giving us more silly crap to do to stay legal, and to track people. Don't you feel safer, citizen?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Nature and environment Law Mathematics Net Culture Conferences Archival ]

Had a great visit with Eric this weekend, lots of reminiscing about the glory days, talks about lives and loves, some neat technology discussions. But I'm reading through the Oscar talk on various blogs this morning, and was reminded that last night Eric and Scott and I were having dinner at Indian Oven in the lower Haight. I got up to go to the bathroom, and while I was waiting for the guy in front of me I noticed the Oscars playing silently on a small TV in the kitchen. I thought there was delicious confluence in Indian music played as background in the restaurant, the Oscars without sound, the prominence of Slumdog Millionaire this year, and the whole Hollywood vs Bollywood dichotomy.

[ related topics: Music Technology and Culture Food Bay Area Television ]

I was gonna start stealing links from the most recent entry over at Dave's Picks, but I realized you should just go read his entry. He touches on gun safety, including some negligence by an off-duty cop at a gun show he was at, experts, how bailouts work, and the recent bad news on 2257.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Guns Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

Courtesy of Sean: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna, or why optimizing for dolphins is leading to a lot more bycatch of other species.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Um. Yeah. Local high school sports. Trojan boys two minutes away from upsetting Analy

Dear everyone who runs a web site that asks for a login: Clicking "remember me" or un-clicking "public terminal" should set a cookie that exists for as long as I'm likely to be using this browser on this user account. It should be measured in years. Not days. Not even weeks. Thank you.

This is kind of a two-part question, and probably both of them are for Eric.

I have an ancient Garmin hand-held GPS. I can download, via the serial port, in almost any format I want (yay for gpsbabel), but waypoints and trackpoints end up at different parts of the file.

Eric and I figured out how to make OpenLayers and Google Earth work to let me draw out hiking and biking paths and, with a little yet-to-be-written Perl drop them into some web pages I'm playing with, but I think I also need a tool that coalesces those waypoints and trackpoints by time into a single stream, and crop to them. I don't want the "driving to the trailhead" portion.

And the second question is: Is there a later GPS device that'd make this simpler? Something that just stores tracking info, maybe has a button that lets me mark trackpoints, that charges via USB and I can plug into my server (or even my Windows box) and set up a script to download the stuff and upload it appropriately?

[ related topics: Microsoft Perl Open Source Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost 1.261-263:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

Achilles, in The Odyssey:

... I'd rather live working as a wage-labourer for hire by some other man, one who had no land and not much in the way of livelihood, than lord it over all the wasted dead.

[ related topics: Quotes Theater & Plays ]

DNA Lounge needs help, the place has been targeted by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

When Rebecca linked to this last year it totally flew under my radar, but I recently ran across it again and know that there are a few Flutterby readers who are fans of the TV series "House": A list of books you might enjoy if you're a House watcher.

[ related topics: Books Television ]

Marvell: Plug Computing, little computers the form factor of a wall wart transformer, including the SheevaPlug development kit, Linux at 1.2GHz, 5 watts, USB2.0 and gigabit Ethernet.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Discussion last night at the Santa Rosa Perl Mongers group included a little bit on someone who'd looked extensively at compact flourescent bulb failure. Apparently in most bulbs there's a capacitor that's spec'd for enough heat if the bulb is run tubes up, but not tubes down. So, depending on the bulb, tubes up plug down can be good for the actual claimed life span, tubes down plug up, as in a ceiling fixture, may fail in a few months.

Just ordered a pack of 5 Embed Inc TTL to RS-232 converters.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery ]

Democrats beware: It is being claimed that sales of Atlas Shrugged have soared since the recent election. Maybe this will the long-rumored movie version off the ground.

[ related topics: Objectivism Movies Current Events ]

Just bought another TomTom, this time a 730.,. because the other one (a 720) has disappeared between cars and traveling gear. It'll pop-up and I'll get it when it does. This one is for Nancy and will stay in her car, it's been a great tool for her in getting around Chattanooga as well as the rest of the world. Darn thing has just worked well.

And now Microsoft is attacking TomTom for patent violations. I've not seen a good list of the exact issues. Heck, I'll even contend there may be some. But the attack is not just against TomTom, it's against Linux and the FOSS community. TomTom was an easy target, very transparent company and technology, but I don't want to let them establish yet another toehold.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Software Humor Microsoft Open Source moron Chattanooga Community ]

Early Office (Technology) Museum is worth a few minutes of browsing. We are still attempting to solve many of the same issues. Scale has changed... Speed has changed.. but the issues are the same. I really like this Bookkeeping Machine.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Wall Street Journal: The 2% Illusion: Barack Obama's Expensive Domestic Agenda Will Cost America's Middle Class:

But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Currency Economics ]

For some odd reason, I've been playing Bach and Beethoven piano Concerto's this morning. In Audacity. On Linux. Very Loud. 'time compressed' or "sped up". Bach speeds up well, Beethoven not so much. And I muse if what we commonly think of as Bach is the "1001 Strings Play the Beatles Greatests Hits" version. I know there are many versions of hyped up Bach, Virgil Fox on Organ being a favorite, but it makes me wonder how Bach himself played it, after a few drinks.

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

Man arrested after pretending to be an air marshal:

Carrying a ''Fisher Island Chief of Police'' badge and claiming he was a U.S. air marshal, Mark Rimkufski convinced Miami airline employees to allow him on a flight after the gate had closed, police said.

Real air marshals on the aircraft observed the fake badge, kicked him off the plane, but did not detain or arrest him. That happened only after he made trouble in an airport bar later.

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

If you're homeless and beg for money on the streets, you're a panhandler. If you form a non-profit and beg for money on the streets, you're a homeless issues education organization. C.W. Nevius reports on some scammers from LA who are running this game in San Francisco.

[ related topics: Bay Area Economics ]