Flutterby™! From 2010-06-01 to 2010-06-30

For Eric, though there's probably nothing here he's unaware of: The Secret Lives of Professors.

Not only are sunscreens and our paranoia about exposure to our closest star apparently contributing to vitamin D deficiencies, sunscreens may be accelerating skin cancers, notably the vitamin A additives.

[ related topics: Health Space & Astronomy ]

Boccalone advertises themselves with the tag line "tasty salted pig parts". Let me just be the first person to say "oh, hell yes!"

[ related topics: Food - Bacon ]

Advertising Age: Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? Fewer younger drivers, and younger drivers are driving less, but the comments are also interesting: Now that cars are relatively trouble-free and you can do more to to tune them by replacing the engine control chips than by any home-brew mechanical additions, there's no joy in tinkering.

[ related topics: Sociology Consumerism and advertising California Culture Automobiles Machinery ]

Danny Sullivan: How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Elena Kagan filed an amicus brief that said that prosecutors must be immune from lawsuits even when they deliberately fake evidence and frame defendants.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns

quote1:

When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.

quote2:

As journalist Radley Balko declares, "State legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials."

A better than average story for Gizmodo.. and quotes: the Agitator whose has some more on this meme.

[ related topics: Quotes Photography Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Marketing Guns Government ]

Dear maps.google.com:

Parts of http://www.flutterby.net/Us... could not be displayed because it contains errors.

Is not acceptable. The XML validates. Several feed validators believe the file to be correct. I know that previous versions of this file, generated by the same process, used to display on Google Maps just fine. I suspect that you've deprecated GeoRSS::Simple without telling anyone, because I can't find a note for it, but I really hate that you're making me play this game.

Dear Google: I've put all those search terms in my search for a freakin' reason. I've even included punctuation to indicate that I'm searching for a Perl module, which at the very least you can treat as a quoted series of words. Giving me the first page of results which does not contain all of those words, when there are search results out there that do, is un*freaking*acceptable.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Perl Maps and Mapping ]

Joy defined: When you coded some things sometime in 2005, in a way that were a pain but you thought it would pay off later. June 2010 (5 years later): Pay off, the code and thoughts worked well and saved me a LOT of time. PHP may not still be the darling of the web world, but it sure works well.

Geeks.com wooden (bamboo) keyboard and mouse. Yes, that's now the standard in my office.

Giggle: Brennen looks a little deeper at some of the things Orson Scott Card is pushing.

[ related topics: Humor ]

What are the signs of a bubble? Out of control spending on a product? Check. Redefinition of the product and changing standards on the purchasers in order to sell more of it? Check. From that latter, this quote:

Daniel Soto of Hardeeville, S.C., works full time at Wal-Mart as a zone manager supervisor, lending a hand in several departments. He had to give up college to work, but said he could see some of his duties translating to academia, such as the algebraic equations he uses to figure out how much merchandise will fit on a shelf or how much of a product to order.

"I do math all day at Wal-Mart," he said.

I suspect he's one of those people who cannot distinguish arithmetic from mathematics.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment Mathematics Education ]

You Are Not So Smart: A celebration of Self-Delusion, including notes on how memories are affected by current framing of situations, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Lots of good stuff there!

Rundown of the best tablets of Computex 2010.

Pencil art by Paul Lung. Animal portraits done in pencil, with painstaking care.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Pictures from the tornado in Ohio that passed within a few miles of my parents and half a mile of my sister's horse farm.

Whenever anybody asks if I'm worried about earthquakes...

[ related topics: Photography ]

A guy went onto the local police website to complain about his speeding ticket. Then he discovered that the domain registration was expiring. He is now the proud master of the local PDs web URL, and is a center of complaints about red-light cameras.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Net Culture ]

Piaw Na is thinking about writing a book on bicycle touring. His pitch video is here. If you bike tour, or aspire to bike touring, you've probably already run into Piaw's advice, and should pre-order this book.

[ related topics: Books Writing Video Bicycling ]

FDA considers a "Plan C". Ulipristal acetate, brand name "ellaOn", is consistently effective at preventing egg implantation up to 120 hours after unprotected sex, as opposed to 72 hours for levonorgestrel, aka "Plan B".

Of course the anti-choice "sex is eeeevil" crowd is up in arms.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Salon magazine ]

If San Francisco crime was elevation. Via Ünnecessary Ümlaut.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

Fascinating video on labiaplasties and how Australia's Classification Board is forcing "normal".

"What's happening here is far more than just Photoshopping out blemishes, it's actually removing part of the human body."

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Video ]

Giggle. Freedom From Porn is an advertising improvement organization. WWDC is an Apple developer's conference currently happening in San Francisco. Two great tastes...

Violet Blue has mirrors of the pictures of the improvements.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Sexual Culture Bay Area Consumerism and advertising California Culture Conferences ]

Recycle Match puts together waste streams with people that can use the material. Right now there are 5k lbs of used denim every week, a whole bunch of rubber around (but not bonded to) a steel wire as waste from a weatherstripping process, lots of crushed concrete or rock scrap. Via Mefi.

For you Vibram Five Fingers wearers, cheap toe socks. They don't have a molded heel, but a friend of a friend on Facebook suggested that they worked fairly well.

Speaking of which, I've taken up running, not huge distances, a 4.5 mile loop and a longer one, two days a week right now. Started with my basic cross-trainers, once I got comfortable with the distance I switched to the Five Fingers. There's too much going on in the first few weeks/months of taking up a new activity to call anything data, but the days when I wear the Five Fingers my calves and the sides of my thighs feel a lot better afterwards.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sports Clothing ]

Last night I went up to KRCB public television to help out with their election night coverage, at the request of Jake Bayless. So in a busy studio filled with hot lights and incessant chatter, I mashed reload on various web pages 'til numbers changed, then copied those numbers into a database, pressed "submit", and a process was started whereby Targa file slides eventually ended up in a place where the director could choose to use them.

The problems with this?

1. I can't believe that there isn't a standardized way for counties and the state to publish this stuff. If ever there were a specific "useful" need for the "semantic web", this is it. I'll be asking a few questions around Marin and Sonoma to see if we can get something in place there for November.
2. This is exactly the sort of "news" I loathe. There was 2 hours of "male answer syndrome", newscasters and commentators making stuff up and prognosticating on a very small amount of actual data. I did get a different view of some of the candidates, and boy I don't like either contender for DA...
3. Looking at SFGate.com this morning shows how bad "news" is: I have to actively read headlines and decide what to click through on to figure out how the various propositions faired.
4. The workflow for generating those slides involved us mashing reload on web pages, typing that data into a Filemaker Pro web interface, which triggered something which output that data into some sort of pseudo-XML which got fed into Motion, which got dumped to .TGA files, which... So at the end of the night I thought "we should have been Twittering the results", and I asked where we could stick that in the process, and... yeah... It may be more pain to build your system on top of open source to start with, but it'll pay off when you're a non-profit publishing in a dying medium trying to figure out how to stay relevant to the current generation.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Technology and Culture Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Television Macintosh Databases ]

A few weeks ago my parents reported some cool clouds over their place in Ohio. I think these are some pictures of what they were describing.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Phoneballs - an iPhone case with balls. Via Unplggd. As Eric observed:

Cool! An iPhone case for the Tea Baggers!

[ related topics: iPhone ]

Philip Greenspun has a round-up of California state salary and pension links. Yeah, part of the problem California has budget issues is political gridlock because of that 2/3rds for the budget issue, but...

[ related topics: Politics moron Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

Steve Jobs survives Gizmodo but not MiFi suggests that the reason Steve had trouble at the iPhone 4 unveiling was all the bloggers using the WiFi to 3G devices like the previously mentioned on Flutterby Verizon MiFi, causing WiFi interference:

When Jobs ran into error messages and slow-loading pages from his demo phone, he called out “Scott,” to Scott Forstall, the company’s senior VP of iOS Software, “you got any suggestions?” Multiple audience members shouted back in response “Verizon!” — referring to the network that often has more reliable coverage, especially here in San Francisco. Jobs took the bait, breaking the fourth wall to reply, “We’re actually on Wi-Fi here.”

Down in the comments, Packetguy suggests:

...The issue isn’t Jobs asking people to turn off their abusive MiFis,or AT&T’s problematic network. It’s that devices like the MiFi are an incredibly stupid replacement for a one-foot USB cable, which is all these audience members were using it for. 802.11 does not support AP densities of more than three per 100′ radius under the best conditions. The WWDC had more like 50 per 100′.

Seems like there should be a Bluetooth solution for this... Via Omega Delta.

But I guess the other question is: Were the people hollering "Verizon" getting connectivity? If so, then WiFi isn't the problem, because their MiFi devices were presumably getting through.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Wireless broadband iPhone ]

BP Spills Coffee (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

In order to promote HTML5 as a platform that developers should embrace, Apple created a bunch of demonstration pages... that can only be viewed in Safari. Further entrenching the idea that Apple really wants to just get everyone developing proprietary apps for Cocoa and flip a big "fuck you" to other platforms. Via Dori at Backup Brain.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Web development ]

When I was in my 20s, I was guiding or paddling whitewater every weekend. For a while that meant Saturday and Sunday, hitting the gravel at 7 or 8 and coming off the water as the sun went down, and though I was spending a lot of time at the office, in the evenings I'd watch TV and do light weight reps, or go rock climbing. Which basically meant I was working out twelve to fourteen hours each on Saturday or Sunday, add a couple of hours during the week and we're at 30 to 35 hours of exercise.

When Catherine and I started living together, I adjusted my eating habits to hers. She'd had weight problems, and had found her solution in long walks every evening and an extremely low fat diet. We moved to California, I spent long hours on my ass at Pixar, without much exercise, and gained a bunch of weight.

When we broke up, I increased the amount of fat in my diet. Somewhere in there I also started at an office in San Francisco that was 2 miles from the ferry. If something kept me there a minute or two after schedule, it was a mad dash to make the boat. And I made a conscious decision to replace many of my calories with water. I lost somewhere around 50 lbs. That's a lot of variables, but I always suspected that increasing the amount of fat in my diet helped.

I also recently ended up abandoning a Kaiser Permanente "how can you tune up your health" survey mid-way through when it asked how many saturated fats, lumping butter and margarine together, I consumed. Don't need more pseudo-science based suggestions. Anyway, with that, I present:

Gary Taubes talking about big fat lies. Via Brainwagon

[ related topics: Health Physiology ]

John Waters on marriage:

"I understand wanting gay marriage. I would never vote for somebody who was against gay marriage. [But] I purposefully have no desire to imitate a rather corny tradition of heterosexuals to me. I would owe three alimonies. I basically think that it's more fun to go against the rules ... to make up your own rules. Sexual confusion is fun. 'Heteroflexibility' is something that really makes me laugh, that term. And kids today are like that; you don't have to be gay or straight. They don't care, really. And I like that. I think it's funny and more liberating in a way. It's sexual anarchy, which is exciting."

Via the ATMP mailing list.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]

Well, it's a start: Judge limits border laptop searches, meaning only that DHS can't confiscate and hold your computer for 6 months to "look for evidence", and re-search it as necessary until they *cough* find what they're looking for (plant what they need to bust you).

Don't piss off a border guard.

[ related topics: Law Current Events ]

Rivertown Revival. Steampunk on the river in Petaluma, July 24th.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Worth reading rant by Linus Torvalds on culture and context and project management (and C++). Via Mark Hershberger.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Sociology California Culture Community ]

Those of us of a certain age fondly remember The Karate Kid, and can't imagine experiencing the desecration of the sacred experience that the remake will undoubtedly be. For us, the film event of the summer will be Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio. (Via SE)

Last night I saw the new restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis on the big screen. It is a marvel, with newly restored scenes so that we have all but 10 minutes of the original. What is interesting, however, is that I got far more out of the film than I expected. This is at least the 5th restoration I have seen since the early 70s, including the clever but grotesque Grigorio Moroder version from 1984 with a musical track by Freddy Mercury and Adam Ant, among others. This time the original story is much more coherent, and while somewhat corney still enthalling. I found myself not seeing it for the great models of the future city with biplanes and zeppelins floating between the towers, but for the actual flow and ebb of the story. Instead of being a cultural artifact it became a work of art able to stand on its own terms.

Now some of the melodramatic moments still cause some giggles in the audience, but I was able to see past that. We tend to see silent films as quaint, no matter how serious. But we wouldn't call Lang's crime masterpiece M of just a few years later quaint. So, what happened? Sound added a layer of reality to the process that the stylization of the silent era did not have, even for lurid melodramas like Lang's works. Shakespeare is stylized, as is Sophocles, yet we still enjoy them. Maybe the answer is not to dismiss silent films as quaint melodramas, but instead compare them to theater, not to modern films (ie, anything after 1929) The distancing of the stage lets us accept that in one scene we are in Rome and the next 500 miles away at the Battle of Actium in Antony and Cleopatra, and maybe we can accept that for a time people carried out their dramatic lives in silence.

[ related topics: Movies History Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture ]

Giggle: Philip Greenspun: If we took what we invested in educating our children and invested it in fast food franchises in developing nations, they'd earn more.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Education Economics ]

I have, several times, mentioned that I view JFK as a scary and frightening figure in United States history, and that "ask not what you can do for your country" is emblematic of that string of '50s era people who hated the Constitution and personal freedoms and pretty much everything we've been told this nation should stand for.

Yes (and, of course, check the hover text), I also said during the last Presidential election that I hoped Obama could be the JFK or Reagan for this generation. Alas, it looks like he's becoming that, and not in the "inspire and motivate the nation" way...

[ related topics: Politics Civil Liberties Comics ]

Lightning destroys "Touchdown Jesus" statue.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Current Events ]

Philip Greenspun: "The best way to discourage women in science may be writing about what it is like to be a scientist.".

The Real Science Gap:

“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.

(Via MeFi)

At least more people want to go to law school now. (Via MeFi, which also points out that we have an oversupply of lawyers, as if you didn't know that already)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Writing Work, productivity and environment Beer Education Economics ]

Lego sniper rifle (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Lego Mindstorms Video ]

Viv was jerking her neighbor's chain, in the comments she linked to this video of a woman with a wonderful solution to a parking availability problem

[ related topics: Automobiles Video ]

Sociological Images: Luxury or Necessity (update) looks at the Pew Research Center "Luxury or Necessity?" survey changes from 1996 to 2006. Go to either of those links and look at the graphic, note especially the things that didn't even show up on the list in 1996: Cell phone and High-speed Internet.

[ related topics: Wireless Net Culture ]

True story about how CHP, Android and Google Latitude saved the day. The thing that makes me intensely interested is that they had a phone with a GPS tracking app just running on it.

The apps I've tried to do that with on the iPhone 3G give me a battery life measured in minutes, so now I'm really interested in the Android based phones.

[ related topics: Sports Community Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

Supreme Court decides that Maher Arar, a Canadian who was sent to Syria for torture when his flight had a layover in the U.S., can't sue the U.S. government.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties ]

Issendai's Superhero Training Journal: How to keep someone with you forever:

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they've ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they've ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn't want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?

You create a sick system.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Furniture ]

Denver Post: Raft guide arrested after helping stranded rafter on Clear Creek. Via Larry. Meshes with my impressions from back in the day: When law enforcement shows up on the scene of a rescue, you then have two problems.

[ related topics: Weblogs Nature and environment Law Enforcement Television Douglas Adams ]

Schneier on Security: Fifth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner:

A is for anthrax, deadly and white.

B is for burglars who break in at night.

C is for cars that have minds of their own

and accelerate rapidly in a school zone.

...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Movies Cryptography Race Archival ]

So, I don't follow too much pop or videos these days (must be getting old) but came across this video did a Hun? double take and finally left with a urge to buy the Candyland game.

[ related topics: Games California Culture Archival Burlesque TC ]

Alkali metals show their personalities (Direct YouTube link)

"You can see that things gradually become more terrifying as we go down the group."

[ related topics: Cool Science Video ]

I'm going to take a bit of issue with Glenn Kelman: What the Government Could Really Do to Support Entrepreneurs. It's not that I don't like seeing Thomas Friedman get smacked around a bit and watching Glenn fact-check his ass hard, it's statements like:

Finally, Friedman talks about policies that “encourage private investment.” He seems oblivious to the fact that too much money is what’s breaking venture capital right now. We don’t have a shortage of capital, or even a shortage of ideas. We have a shortage of engineers.

Perhaps it's a bit of a conflation of "scientist" and "engineer", but as was discussed yesterday that doesn't seem to be the case.

[ related topics: moron Economics ]

Howl! Anti-porn Bingo. Via Violet Blue's rundown of the Stop Porn Culture “Future of Pornography 2010″ conference.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Sociology Conferences ]

I don't use/read a lot of the "blogosphere", yet I can tell you how to not get read: by using some third rate ad service for your blog (or anything else like insane background image sizes, javascript laden navigation and calendar pages..) that has me looking at a blank, incomplete, or frozen page for 10 seconds or more.

I'm an old modem/BBS user.. I'm patient.. I'll wait a while, I used to read BBS posts at 1200 baud. But just because it works quickly for you, with your browser full of caches pages, cached images, cached DNS and cached JavaScript because you look at it 100 times per hour.. does not mean it looks that way to the rest of us.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Ever wonder what happens when your 15 minutes are up? and just past that? Observe.

[ related topics: History Art & Culture Pop Culture ]

Mike Rowe Replies To A Slightly Offended, Not Very Enthusiastic Scout, in which he talks to a Boy Scout about his previous recommendation to go for an Eagle Scout or live a life of predictability and mediocrity.

Anyway, the letter that offended you was written because I don’t want to see that sort of mentality creep into Scouting. I don’t want the Eagle standards lowered just to encourage less enthusiastic kids to “go for it,” or satisfy a parents desire to see their precious little snowflakes bring home another “trophy.” And frankly, I don’t think the best way to inspire and motivate kids like you is to blow a bunch of sunshine up your butt.

I'm afraid that Mike's too late, by at least two and a half decades. I was reminded of this because I went camping this last weekend with a boy who's well on his way to Eagle, and, though I love the kid dearly, it brought up a lot of my issues with Boy Scouts, and why I quit and joined an Explorer troop, abandoning my Eagle.

It would be petty for me to harp on specifics, especially since after so many years my memory is fuzzy as to who was responsible for which lowering of standards and there was crap at the troop leader level that I was probably completely unaware of. Maybe, in fact, it was preparation for life and I'm still unwilling to accept that the bullshitters and the responsibility shirkers are indeed the ones who shine.

But, back to Mike's point: yes. Strive. Build great things. Pick a project and see it to completion. But please pick an organization with higher standards and less dysfunction if you're going to look for external validation.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology ]

Knew Concepts makes jewelry and fine metalsmithing equipment. Next time I get frustrated with my cheap-ass coping saw, I need to see if the frustration is enough to get me to spring for the Knew Concepts 8" precision hand saw. (Via TalkFestool)

[ related topics: Fabrication Woodworking ]

Okay, Connecticut, you can stop re-electing this putz any time now. Joseph Lieberman, I-CT, introduces Senate bill with "Internet Kill Switch". All the links I'm finding for this are Australian, I guess that makes sense because they're more aware of whackjobs well into their senility attempting to destroy the Internet, but here's another story (warning, autoplay sound ad), and here's the bill itself on Senate.gov (which I haven't read yet).

Sensible Erection thread, Craschworks entry.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Net Culture ]

I don't see a way to comment on his blog, so I'll comment here: In his link to Aaron Swartz's "That Sounds Smart", Brennen Bearnes observes:

There are a few possibilities here: One is that I'm not very smart. Another is that Aaron Swartz is spouting some fairly high-test bullshit.

Aaron's essay is here, I'm gonna go with the latter. A few examples. Aaron mentions the Freakonomics guys. It doesn't take a whole lot of digging before many of their examples start to fall apart because the world is a lot more complex than they let on. Another fun pastime of smart people is poking holes in Malcolm Gladwell's popularizations; boy the world sure seems simple when Malcolm explains it, doesn't it? Similarly, read some of Philip Greenspun's blog posts and you'd think he had it all figured out similarly, but if you follow the discussion down Philip himself will admit that though his thoughts are great discussion starters, they often don't go deep enough to get to the root of things.

So, yeah, Brennen, I'm with you.

[ related topics: Sociology Writing ]

Katy Butler: What Broke My Father’s Heart, aka "A Pacemaker Wrecks A Family's Life". On medical decisions, hard choices, and a reminder to make sure that the living will contains all of the contingencies.

[ related topics: Health Ethics Sociology ]

Gonna drop a bunch of emails from a Chugalug thread in the comments... A tweet from Twitter user "invalidname" got me free-associating on "iPhone is Disney, Android is Six Flags".

Mark Hershberger pointed out LA Times: China's Real Estate boom spells trouble for boyfriends. Short version: Owning a house will get you laid. This is probably also a consequence of an undersupply of women from the "one child" policies. A currency kept artificially low, a housing boom, what could possibly go wrong?

Mark also pointed out that Homeownership in Russia Gets an American-Style Boost, and Housing Russia becomes a state priority.

Also: Philip Greenspun wins a bet that housing prices Cambridge would keep going up.

[ related topics: Currency Real Estate ]

Bunnie gives a rundown on the Best Buy Insignia Infocast, basically an 8″ screen Chumby, with some cool hackability features.

Charlene and I just ended up giving away a whole bunch of picture frames (with pictures in 'em) because we lack the wall space, and talked about how many digital photos we've taken that we've never done anything with. I got to thinking about digital picture frames, and things I'm using various processors for, and I may have to think pretty hard about this one...

[ related topics: Photography ]

If you had told me, post my )^( experience in 2002, that there would ever be a 'Burn style event in Chattanooga.. even a nano-burn event. I would have laughed. Andrew of Winter Sun Studio (warning: woodworker porn) built this for a party, which several 'burners and 'formers attended. In Chattanooga. Tennessee. Andrew is also very involved in TransFormUs, a regional 'Burn event, and is building the main temple and burn structures for it. yeah.. This was on E. Main in Chattanooga. Blows my mind.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Chattanooga Java Woodworking ]

There are portions of HTML I know pretty cold, I thought I'd been through the DTDs for HTML4 pretty darned thoroughly when I built the allowable tags tables for Flutterby, but the 10 HTML Tags Beginners Aren't Using taught me a few things (specifically <fieldset> and <legend>).

So apparently there's this big soccer tournament happening. It's causing me a bit of anxiety, because I'm deathly afraid that one of these "World Cup" messages is going to involve "two girls, one (World) cup".

[ related topics: Sports ]

We often talk about various building projects here, but I think we've all been beat: a homebuilt fusion reactor in Brooklyn!

[ related topics: Cool Science Current Events New York ]

You may have seen reports of problems with reception when touching the metal on the iPhone 4. porn producer Pink Visual cuts right to the chase: Does it have an anti-porn viewing feature?

VAN NUYS, Calif. – Late last night, the mobile porn-watching community was in an uproar over Apple’s new iPhone 4 handset losing signal while being held in only the left hand, creating an obvious problem for right handed masturbators.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Community iPhone ]

Random YouTube:

• The quick brown (red?) fox jumps over the lazy (indifferent?) dog (at 1:22)
• Clint Webb for Senate
• Dan Telfer wants to know which dinosaur is best.
• What the videogame DOOM is like with a Vuvuzela.

[ related topics: Politics Video Dogs ]

Somewhere between RSSyl and Claws-mail, I had a crash which nuked my RSS feed list (think it has to do with a resource leak in the spam processing, how obscure is that?). I still have the folders, but I lost the OPML file which listed which name went to what. And, of course, my backup is a few months old.

So, I want to recreate it. My first thought was to write a little Perl script that ran through the folder names, plugged 'em into Google, got back the home pages, analyzed for RSS, and subscribed to those. Unfortunately, Google seems to have gone all JavaScripty in their interface, so that's no longer as easy as /q=$search.

I'd also like something with an interface as quick and friendly as RSSyl in Claws-mail. In fact, I'd probably be super overjoyed if the poll process ran as a separate thing and dumped into my ~/Mail folders, to be read by Claws-mail, 'cause that'd allow me to do some cleanup of malformed feeds that RSSyl has some problems with, and maybe even find something that's smarter about same update posted in different places, and a little bit of intelligence about a lot of people posting the same link.

Haven't gotten that far yet.

Anyway, no real content here but a little whining.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management Spam Perl Open Source Monty Python ]

keyboards as art from DataMancer: Prestidigital Datamancery and Paraphrenalic Technofetishism. - yes, there is a lot of very interesting things on that site.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Huh, thought I'd linked to some earlier article about Bloom Energy, but I don't find it. If I had linked to some earlier article, it would have been skeptical. There have been promises of efficient fuel cells made forever, and... well...

Apparently, I would have been wrong. Meuon informs me that Chattanooga's Electric Power Board has purchased one for its headquarters. If this is a reasonable thing in the land of TVA priced power, then maybe the price of natural gas will shortly soar to unbelievable heights these things work, and we'll need to figure out how to do methane recovery from landfills in order to feed 'em.

[ related topics: Chattanooga Cool Technology Real Estate ]

A strange new literary discovery from Slate: Every week for many years, poetess Emily Dickinson's brother Austin dropped by her house, where he screwed Mary Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst College astronomer, on Emily's couch. The odd thing is that Emily apparently never even met Mrs. Todd; she just stayed upstairs during the assignations, although she must have known what was happening in the parlor. Now this would just be a slightly creepy instance of literary scandal, except that after Emily's death Mary Todd got control of all the poems, edited, and published them, insuring Ms. Dickinson's immortality. Todd is generally considered an excellent and scrupulous editor of the works, but there is good evidence that one of her tasks was to erase any mention of Austin's wife, Sue, from all of the works. Hell might have no fury like a woman scorned, only which is the scorned woman here?

[ related topics: Language History Marriage Poetry ]

A little YouTube/Star Wars mashup cuteness: At-At Day Afternoon.

[ related topics: Humor Star Wars Animation ]

Drowning doesn't look like drowning. When I was learning whitewater, one of the hardest reflexes to overcome was the "oh shit, I'm going underwater, breathe!" reflex, because it got me into a cycle where I was trying to breathe against the waves, rather than with them.

The reflexive action that this article describes sounds exactly like that: Someone looking like they're breathing, because they're gasping when they surface, but that's air going out, not in.

This is your PSA for the day.

[ related topics: Whitewater Physiology ]

The Altek Leo is a 14 megapixel point-n-shoot camera with an Android phone built in.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Texas GOP platform wants to criminalize gay marriage, ban oral and anal sex, and seeks to outlaw strip clubs and pornography. It's easy to say "oh, that's Texas, ha ha", but if other Republican organizations want to take themselves seriously they either need to be screaming really loudly about how this isn't really the sort of freedom and lack of government intervention that modern "conservatism" is supposed to be, or we have to assume that this is what the GOP wants.

Of course many of us have seen that this is apparently what the GOP on a national level wants generally, which is why those of us who might otherwise be tempted by a platform that claims fiscal conservatism and freedom have been running off to the Democrats in droves.

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture moron Current Events Civil Liberties Marriage Government ]

Bwahahahaha! And I say this as a TAL podcast listener who was successfully guilted into contributing directly to the show: The Onion: 'This American Life' Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence

In what cultural anthropologists are calling a "colossal achievement" in the study of white-collar professionals, the popular radio show has successfully isolated all 7,442 known characteristics of college graduates who earn between $62,500 and $125,000 per year and feel strongly that something should be done about global warming.

(Hat tip to Kottke)

[ related topics: Humor Sociology Education Race ]

UCLA, York College, Elon University.

Note to practitioners of "agile" software development: this is what a scrum is all about.

[ related topics: Sports ]

So, those of you who've been to my house have seen the situation: Generally pretty nice neighborhood, mixed houses, built from the 1940s on, although most people in our neighborhood have been here for decades; due to Prop 13 our little 768 square foot cottage could very well have the highest property taxes on the street. Our house and the one directly next to it are obviously the same design built at the same time, and we have pictures from when our road was dirt and these two houses were the only man made structures looking east.

The story is that the parents of the resident of the house next door bought it for him to get him out of the house. He probably suffers from some mental illness, in the two and a half years we've lived here we've seen him only a few times, he tries to avoid people. He had a truck when he moved in, but that's disappeared.

The house is a shambles. The shingles are curling, the paint is peeling, berry vines grow over the yard. Once a year contractors for the fire department come out and mow the place so it's not a fire hazard. Several of the windows are partly opened, and we've never seen them change position.

When we see strange people in the neighborhood we go engage them in conversation. One of those people was a process server looking for the him. Late last year the Petaluma Police knocked on our door saying they had a warrant for him and asking if we'd seen him.

A few months ago, PG&E put in "Smart Meters". This is relevant only because the meters got reset at zero, and we can read his from over the fence. It's been zero for a few months. The vines have grown over the front door. There's a possible path in and out along the far fence, but it looks like the only thing that'd provide access to is a window.

So, the question is: What legal mechanism do we start to solve this problem, and what department of the city is that? I've exchanged email with the fire department, and they just have it put on the property taxes. So presumably someone's still paying property taxes. We don't know if some civil judgment (the process server who came looking for him) escalated into a criminal complaint (the police who came looking for him) and he's now incarcerated, or if he's died in there, or if the house is abandoned, or if he's still living in there, coming and going through some means we can't see.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

[ related topics: Privacy Dan's Life Law Law Enforcement Real Estate ]

My solution to my RSS woes was to write a little script to take the folder names, run a search on them, grab the first result, check that page for a <link rel="alternate"...> RSS or Atom feed, and then write the results back into the OPML my RSS feed reader uses for its database.

Google's TOS, and implementation, keeps me from doing that simply. My simple Perl script which uses "GET" gives me a "no no no" message.

No problem, sez I, I'll point to Bing. Results come back just fine. Alas, the first pages of those results are all SEO spammer sites.

Back to "by hand". Crap.

[ related topics: Content Management Perl Open Source Databases Archival ]