Flutterby™! From 2011-11-01 to 2011-11-30

Boing Boing: Jacob Appelbaum — Air Space — a trip through an airport detention center

[ related topics: Aviation Space & Astronomy Travel ]

Carve a pumpkin, but don't push out the pieces, fill with flammable gas, explode (YouTube video). Saved here for next year.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Last night, driving home from Fresno, we hit 101 north through Marin and Sonoma in the middle of the evening commute. We were over in the carpool lane, that ends somewhere around Novato, and this guy shows up in our rear-view mirror. He's got a cell phone in his hand, chattering away. I mean, that's not exactly complying with California state law, but it's all good.

Then up in the narrows there's an obvious compression wave up ahead of us, so I back off on the accelerator in the hopes of leaving a little space and softening up the traffic jam, and dickhead here zips around on the right, pulls in front of me, and slams on his brakes.

So on the off chance that someone out there knows the asshole who was driving the "U.S. Government — For Official Use Only" silver Pontiac with license plate 6857H last night up route 101 through Sonoma, I'd appreciate it if you'd smack him good and hard and tell him that's for being a schmuck about 2 seconds last night, that probably cost the people behind him many minutes.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless Photography Bay Area moron Space & Astronomy Television California Culture Archival ]

Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman.

[ related topics: Free Software Dave Winer ]

Dear Whitehouse.gov: Great that you're responding intelligently to online petitions. Bad that you're sending email with bad links.

Downtown is for People (Fortune Classic, 1958).

Those issues of designers building spaces that nobody wants to use? Yeah, not new.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Crap. My Seagate BlackArmor NAS110 has gone belly-up. Back to last year's thread on NAS devices to see if I can find something that might actually have some lifespan.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Archival ]

Wow, if you do it right, the whole microwaving grapes thing is really cool. Big flash and arcing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

worlds first manned flight with electric multicopter - It's big boys toys. Awesome. Impressive small electric motors.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Aviation Embedded Devices ]

vagina muffins. I need to do some baking.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Weblogs Food ]

Jerome, a friend from the Pixar days, has started Bitnana Software, and just shipped their first product: Nono Monkey!, a game for iPhone and iPad.

[ related topics: Pixar Apple Computer Games Animation Software Engineering Graphics Macintosh iPhone ]

Multi-Target Radar System CORDON (YouTube video), automated license plate reading demonstration. Engadget article. The company is Simicon.

Peak Gain is looking to bring the system to the U.S. shortly.

Via JWZ

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Movies Automobiles Video ]

U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners

But other authorities have come to the opposite conclusion. A report by France’s radiation safety agency specifically warned against screening pregnant women with the X-ray devices. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration’s medical institute has advised pregnant pilots and flight attendants that the machine, coupled with their time in the air, could put them over their occupational limit for radiation exposure and that they might want to adjust their work schedules accordingly.

[ related topics: Aviation moron ]

Best Siri response yet: "What is the difference between a boy and a girl?".

Currently engaged in "Occupy My House". Still concerned about the potential for injury from concussion grenades and tear gas.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Christian Science Monitor: The 'Prius of bicycles' switches gears by reading your mind. Data from EEG probes in the helmet other biometric sensors used to shift automagically.

Thanks, Shadow.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

I'm okay with the FBI treating Juggalos as a "gang threat", as long as they do the same thing with Beliebers.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

RT @Larry_D_Burton:

@danlyke I'm sorry to hear dining options in your area are becoming limited. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011...s/?test=latestnews#ixzz1cf1q6tY1

Quote:

The city's Board of Supervisors has adopted new rules that ban naked people from eating in restaurants, and forces nudists to place a cover on public chairs and benches before they sit down, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food Bay Area Nudity California Culture Furniture ]

A reason to learn a little more about RF electronics, perhaps: Observations of polarised RF radiation catalysis of dissociation of H₂O–NaCl solutions:

The authors have shown that NaCl–H2O solutions of concentrations ranging from 1 to 30%, when exposed to a polarised radiofrequency beam at 13·56 MHz at room temperature, generate an intimate mixture of hydrogen and oxygen which can be ignited and burned with a steady flame.

[ related topics: Robotics Pyrotechnics ]

Reason Magazine: File Not Found: On the Department of Justice's proposed rule to pretend that some documents requested under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests don't exist:

(2) When a component applies an exclusion to exclude records from the requirements of the FOIA pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552(c), the component utilizing the exclusion will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist. This response should not differ in wording from any other response given by the component.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Gambling Archival Government ]

Interesting: Macworld: Mac App Store sandboxing coming in March, developers wary.

When developers submit apps that adhere to Apple’s sandboxing restrictions, they can request specific “entitlements” for their apps, like read/write access to the user’s Music, Downloads, or Pictures folders, interaction with USB devices, printing, access to the built-in microphone, and others. Unlike other platforms (including Windows and Android), which display a list of features that apps will be able to access and ask for a user’s approval, Apple will determine whether an app should be granted the entitlements the developer requests as part of the Mac App Store approval process.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Music Photography Microsoft Macintosh ]

We petition the Obama administration to: We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.

[ related topics: Bay Area Gambling ]

Two questions:

• What's the right way to associate resource files with a Perl module? The code that maintains Flutterby.net is spitting out a bunch of JavaScript, and the right way to do this would be to put it in a .js file with a little parsing to split it into its component pieces and insert the dynamic data, so that I have the JavaScript all in one place, and so that the Emacs mode knows what to do.
• Anyone got experience with KML and OpenLayers? I see the KML layer, but it doesn't appear to be rendering anything and I'm not sure why. I'm also trying to figure out what the magic incantation to get my base layers to render as base layers is, but that's a different problem.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Graphics Clowns hubris ]

Petaluma Police Department advisory message of the moment:

AVOID **(Location)** for the next **(Timeframe)** due to **(Nature of Traffic or Accident)**.

**(Agency)** advises you to AVOID **(Location)** due to current traffic congestion.

The **(Situation)** near **(Specific Location)** will cause traffic backups and detours for the next **(Timeframe)**.

**(Suggested alternate routes (if desired))**.

**(Additional traffic information (if desired))**.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Law Enforcement ]

Elf Sternberg talks about the recent Jerry Coyne / John Haught kerfluffle. If you aren't familiar with it, no worries, but one line from Elf stood out from me:

In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.

I have been reading a bunch of transportation policy stuff. Much of it is political. Much of it is academic. Much of it is predicated on completely bogus premises. Faith, in these papers and proposals, is a virtue, and the style of writing is such that the fact that they're adopting arbitrary premises that are often complete bullshit is neatly glossed over.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Politics tolkien moron Writing ]

Child-sex-trafficking stereotypes demolished by new research. Researchers actually go out and interview underage prostitutes, discover that advocacy organizations and law enforcement are reinforcing popular stereotypes rather than actually looking at the realities of the populations. Go figure.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Don't use MongoDB, a rant on why you should use real databases for "web scale" applications.

[ related topics: Databases ]

ECHIDNE of the snakes: The Stop Internet Misogyny Week. May Trigger.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

How come "layer" is the verb to apply more layers, but "elect" is the verb to apply more liars?

Occupy Oakland destroying local businesses:

Indeed, with only one Fortune 500 company and about a 16 percent unemployment rate, many residents wonder why their city is the target of an Occupy movement directed at the economic elite.

[ related topics: Bay Area Economics ]

Jay is trying to get some visibility for Roger Ebert's plea to find a sponsor for Ebert Presents At The Movies.

I guess I have two problems. The first is simple donor fatigue. There are a whole lot of worthy causes that impact my life more immediately that want attention and resources. If you're a corporate entity wanting to convince me that you're making my community and my life richer, how about bring me more of COTS or help Friends of the Petaluma River turn the Ghirardelli barn into a center that pulls together the community, or, heck, support Mary Anne Mohanraj's push to fund her new book, or give Columbine a regular gig writing short stories, or...

The second is related: Public television? Yeah, two elections ago I spent an election day evening helping wrangle data to keep KRCB coverage accurate, but talking about returns on election night are exactly the sort of horse-race politics that I think cheapens the process. And I've never actually watched KRCB. I understand that various Children's Television Workshop programs may change the culture for the good in low-income households. However, television is largely irrelevant to my life. Heck, even for the few movies we see (watched Ides of March last night) I look to written prose, recommendations from other webloggers and friends online long before I'd watch a half hour show on whatever movies are released right now.

Ebert's done some powerful writing. I'm sure the critics he has lined up on this show are providing insightful commentary to people for whom movies are a central part of their lives, but it's not mine. Movies, television, mass media, these are all things that I partake of when I'm too braindead to participate in my community. I don't aspire to that state. "Let's go see a movie" is an acknowledgement of defeat.

So, sorry, Roger. I'll link to your post, hope you can find your demographic to support you, but it's not my cause. There are a lot of people out there looking for angels, a lot of people with projects that they believe will make the world better, and the impact of movies and talking about them on television to my life is just about nil.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Books Erotic Technology and Culture Movies Invention and Design Sociology Writing Journalism and Media Television California Culture Chocolate Marketing Community ]

Clay is a cartoonist who drew Sexy Losers and now draws The Thin H Line. Those two comics are... uh... not safe for anybody. Unless you can laugh at necrophilia jokes, don't go there. Really.

However, he's also started drawing Depression Comix, a look at depression. I don't know if there are a whole lot of laughs out of them, but they seem kind of important in that "other people are having these experiences" sort of way. And I know a few Flutterby readers have those swings at much greater magnitudes than I've been through.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Comics ]

Trying to watch "Intelligent Transportation Systems: Your Road to the Future" on YouTube. Getting an "Invalid Parameters" error. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Movies ]

I had skipped this the first few times because the headline was misleading. I'm going to write my own headline for it: Apple boots security researcher Charlie Miller from their developer program after he released preliminary information on security holes in iOS and the app store.

"I don't think they've ever done this to another researcher. Then again, no researcher has ever looked into the security of their App Store. And after this, I imagine no other ones ever will," Miller said in an e-mail to CNET. "That is the really bad news from their decision."

[ related topics: Apple Computer Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Spam Software Engineering Current Events Beer Shoes iPhone ]

Watching the debug screen on a carrier phase capable GPS eval kit: Don't know what they mean yet, but look at all the cool blinky lights!

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Added OpenLayers to the Flutterby.net CMS. Now what can I do map-wise that'd actually be useful...?

[ related topics: Content Management Maps and Mapping ]

Shadow pointed to Mother Nature Network's reposting of The Hippie Continuum, originally posted at 1 Block Off The Grid: Infographic: The Hippie Continuum. I got a chuckle or two, but it's also a good reminder that the retired-early capitalist up the street who has the big rainwater catchment system and the huge solar array. has different reasons than the Mercedes driving Gucci wearing neighbors who have the solar water heater array for their pool, has different reasons from the dad next door who says of his solar array "it's not quite practical, but it sends a message to my kids", who has different reasons from...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs broadband Nature and environment Automobiles Fashion Photovoltaics ]

A friend just asked on Facebook:

Anyone know what type of US adapter and converter I need for Switzerland? I got one that works for Europe but apparently not for Switzerland.

I couldn't resist the obvious reply:

Something that takes both hot and ground to neutral?

In response to piracy off the coast of Somalia, the British government is going to allow their merchant ships in the area to be armed. The idea is not to arm the sailors but rather security guards who would actually have the license. I have long thought that the answer to the pirates would be crews of armed men shuttling from Suez onto boats, then shuttling onto northbound ships somewhere in the Indian ocean for the ride back. My question is whether they get to use RPGs like the pirates?

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

Today: Organized the work area, cut 4x4 lumber rack support studs to length and drilled holes. Tomorrow: walls go up!

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Woodworking ]

My Dad's out to help me on the workshop shed, and we're making progress! http://www.flutterby.net/2011-11-12_Workshop_Progress

Looking at heating load calcs to put climate control in the workshop. Interesting how California's Title 24 encourages large buildings...

[ related topics: California Culture Architecture Global Warming ]

We are used to trying to figure out the inscrutable Chinese, but here is a new enigma: according to Gizmodo, Google Maps is showing huge, miles-wide constructions out on the Tibetan Plateau and the nearby deserts. A radar array? The Chinese answer to HAARP? An attempt to teach PinYin to the Martians? Feel free to speculate.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Cryptography Maps and Mapping Conspiracy Government ]

Thanks to help from Alan, we got the walls up on Sunday, today we got the seismic anchors bolted on, installed the headers, and put the top plates on. Aaand, did a trip to the building department, got a company in LA to start Title 24 calcs, and got the bid in from the heating company. http://www.flutterby.net/2011-11-14_Shed_Progress

A new version of "religious liberty". http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11...on-and-gay-marriage.html?_r=1&hp Apparently religious liberty is now the liberty to impose your world view on others.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Invention and Design Sociology Marriage ]

It's almost hard to believe it's not a farce... but Jerry Sandusky penned an autobiography about 10 years ago. The title... Make sure you've swallowed your milk so it doesn't come out your nose: Touched. The comments on Amazon are funny, if not a little tedious.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Pedal Power ]

Today's progress on the workshop: It's starting to look like a building. http://www.flutterby.net/2011-11-15_Shed_Progress

Excerpted from a letter I wrote this morning to someone whom I'm exploring employment options with, and thought I should drop in here. After the preliminaries, it began:

I too have a few suitability/fitting in questions. My Dad's in town helping me build this workshop. I described what I thought this job involved and he said "sounds kinda mundane for what your work history is". I think there are fascinating challenges in supporting business processes, but how I fit in to those challenges is going to be important.

My questions are roughly:

• Markups being what they are, a senior developer/whatever like me should be bringing roughly a quarter to a half a million dollars of value per year to a company, whether through direct revenue (ie: add a markup and sell my services to someone else) or indirect revenue (do this to support ongoing business processes, like assembly line work), or creation of assets (preferred: build processes/systems that continue to create revenue).

And obviously that value is also weighted by risk and so forth.

In some companies with some people that's "we have faith, look at our problems and find a way to do that" (this was what happened when I joined Pixar, which was great in the Interactive Group, less great in the Graphics R&D group), in some places that's "here's a list of tasks, execute them" (Did that at Gracenote), most places are somewhere in between. So the questions I'd ask of anyone up the management chain from me that I'm interviewing with are things like: How do you see that happening? How do you measure success in that task? What paths forward do you see for that role?

• You mentioned 9 or 10 projects for every one you can do. To the limits of business-proprietary, I would *love* to take one of those and drill down on what that means: Who are the customers (in your case, other groups internal to [Elided])? Where does the data come from? What's the plumbing necessary to move things around? What development processes do you have in place? How do you measure the value of that project to the company, both in prioritizing things to do, and in evaluating whether or not they were successful.

I'm happy to have whatever conversations you'd like to on assessing my technical viability for the role you see for me, on my side I'd like to create a better view of what that that role could be and what the future paths from that role are.

I'm not an org chart climber, there are skills I know I have and skills I know I don't have, but I do want to be sure that I am going to be challenged, that I'll be in a position where I can be successful, and where I can gauge that success, and where I have a reasonably good chance of waking up every morning and saying "this excites me and I can't wait to tackle the next problem".

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

Yay! Title 24 calcs came back okay without a floor over the slab! Probably put one there anyway, though.

Back from the Petaluma Recreation, Music and Parks Commission meeting. Public comment was the Occupy folks talking about trying to find a way to build community and change the world. Agenda item 7 was representatives from the Petaluma Wetlands Alliance, and Alan Allen speaking for Movies in the Park, showing how to build community and change the world.

[ related topics: Music Movies Community ]

Trusses are in, blocking installed. Tomorrow, we sheath the roof!

And before 8:30 we've got a third of the roof sheathing on (sorry neighbors). Short break for chores...

Shop roof is sheathed! Break for lunch and rain, now to install hurricane ties.

I am well aware that I have an amazing life. Within that, spending almost two weeks with my Dad building my workshop is a huge highlight.

Bacon Lube — bacon flavored personal lubricant.

[ related topics: Personal Lubricant Food - Bacon ]

A few more pictures of shop construction: http://www.flutterby.net/2011-11-19_Workshop_Progress

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

Drinking gives you the same benefits as yoga

Occupy's A**hole Problem: Flashbacks from an old hippy

Stuffed here because I need to explore it when I have a moment: MeFi post on the coordination of the crackdowns on the Occupy movement.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Enforcement ]

Former Chief of the Seattle Police Department Norm Stamper: Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street:

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Automobiles Shoes Race Seattle Economics ]

Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike:

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

Back when BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant I said the same thing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Movies Food Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Trains Public Transportation Archival ]

And on the other side: Femin: Not all sex workers love Occupy: the creepy dynamic of pretending to speak for "the 99%"

As a sex workers' rights advocate, my life would be so much easier if the sole metric by which I judged an activist "success" was how many members of the general public I could get to hate us. It's easy to turn the public against you, any lazy dipshit can do that. Influencing the public to adopt more progressive and tolerant ideas? That's not as adrenaline-soaked and fun as instigating confrontations with the police, but it leads to actual and long-lasting change, which is precisely the kind of work that needs to be done.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Is the solution to RSS in these modern times *really* to write a preprocessor that puts it in the format Thunderbird or @ClawsMail wants?

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Yes, Thunderbird, I know a leading \n isn't valid XML. Get over yourself and read the damned RSS file!

[ related topics: Web development Content Management ]

Oh dear, I could be lost for days in Public Collectors: Documentation of Complete Publications in PDF form, including "How To Build A Beer Can Mortar, Delta Press Ltd, 1977, 8 pages, El Dorado, Arkansas, 8 1/2 " X 11 sheets folded into half-letter size envelope", "Stephen Gaskin, Hey Beatnik! This is the Farm Book, 1974, 104 pages, The Book Publishing Co.", and more.

Thanks, Larry!

[ related topics: Books Beer ]

Claws-Mail is ticking me off. Undo in the message editor has been b0rk3n for years, and there are enough other quirks and strange lockups that I'm looking for alternatives.

Charlene has gotten to the "hate" level for Evolution.

I thought "Xubuntu defaults to Thunderbird, let's look at that!". Thunderbird lacks piping to external apps in its filtering, which means that I can't do basic things like "add everything this client sends me to a folder and commit it to a git repo".

And Thunderbird also lacks a lot of basic polish. Their RSS client is abominable (though I could probably get along with it now that I've figured out its quirks), but there's a lot of stuff that seems like programmers implemented that way because of underlying architecture brokenness rather than user need: Why is the common operation 5 clicks and the uncommon operation 2?

I'd hate to go back to Fetchmail, Perl scripts and Pine, but is that really the best email situation for GUI linux these days?

[ related topics: Free Software User Interface Content Management Perl Open Source Architecture hubris ]

Ages ago, in a previous lifetime as a young teenager, I was at a Boy Scout jamboree. I actually don't remember a good portion of the jamboree; for reasons nobody has figured out, sometime in the evening I started wandering around repeating basic facts to myself so that I could remember them, the next thing I knew I was waking up at home in my bed because my Dad bailed early with me.

There's speculation that I landed on my head during some rough-housing, in any case, it's probably one in a long series of concussions and my first experience with amnesia isn't germaine to the story.

One of the incidents I do remember is that we were building a lashed together timber tower. I think there were two or three of us Scouts who knew what we were doing, and we were working expeditiously. There was a micro-managing Assistant Scoutmaster, who at some point decided that rather than securing the log we were currently working on, we should leave it precariously perched and go pull some other stuff up and secure it.

Yep, you know what happened. Poor guy then stood under the poorly secured log and got clocked. Hard.

Shadow pointed out a YouTube video that similarly demonstrates why you should make sure your off-cuts and in-progress pieces are firmly secured at all times. This comes by way of Fark, which observes:

Hard to say which is worse: that you scream like a girl when plywood hits you in the head, or that your kid decided to upload Wilhelm Scream 2.0 to the internet

Bonus: In light of my regular updates from my current construction project, Shadow also forwarded along a water system from a horse property near Las Vegas:

... We built an all-new system with partially-buried storage tanks, and an insulated shed to hold the pressure tanks and equipment. I had to commute back and forth from Texas and it took about eight weeks of work over a 5 month period. It's a bit over-designed, but it didn't take much extra work compared to the minimum and is expandable in the future.

http://imgur.com/a/tCYn8#0

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Robotics Invention and Design Law Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Machinery Embedded Devices Fabrication Video Gambling Archival Real Estate Model Building Furniture ]

Watch news, know less:

"Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News," said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. "Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

[ related topics: Politics Movies moron Current Events ]

Tremendous reminder of how far we've come: Golden Age of Video: Fear, Racism, Rehab and History: The 25th Anniversary of Run DMC & Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”

Jon Small: So I’m listening to the song for maybe a half hour when I came up with the idea of the wall. We’re gonna break down the wall because the wall was, in my mind, again, MTV. That was the wall, that was the same wall with Billy Joel when we put the black band in his video. They wouldn’t play ‘black’. That’s when I came up with the idea that the wall was not only separating the music styles but was separating black and white, and I didn’t see any difference in black and white. So, I wrote the idea, they bought it, and then I had to get on this I spoke to Tim Collins, who was Aerosmith’s manager, and he said, “Hey, these guys just got out of rehab.” (Laughter) “There is just no way you, we can do this in New York because these guys— these are heavy junkies. You gotta be out of New York.” So where do we go? The heroin capital of the world — Union City, New Jersey. (Laughter) Bad place. So we set up this thing. I find the location, I came up with the set, the design, the whole thing, and we’re gonna do it, and I convinced them. I got on the phone with Steven Tyler and explained to him. He only said one thing to me that was important. “Please don’t make a fool out of us.” He was really not into — don’t forget, he hasn’t stepped into the video world yet.

Via JWZ.

[ related topics: Music Weblogs Invention and Design moron Pop Culture Graphic Design New York Race Video ]

Latest from the "He tried to do good and did right well" department: a British Green scientist is busy selling quack anti-radiation nostrums to the people of Fukishima. He also claims that the Japanese government is shipping radioactive waste all over the country to raise the overall cancer rate and thus destroy any potential control groups for epidemiological studies.

[ related topics: Nature and environment moron Nuclear Disaster ]

It's that day again. It seems to have become the starting line for a spending spree: Black Friday, Purple Thursday, Small Biz Saturday..

Thankgiving dates back to pagan fall harvest festivals, or lore of Puritanical Pilgrims and Native Americans or [insert modified theology or history reason here].

I've found it's a good day to simply be thankful. We should be thankful and grateful for what we -do- have and are more often. Attribute it to $diety or not, your choice. It's still a perspective correction we need more often in our lives.

Life is mostly good. With gratitude to all of you that are a part of it. --Meuon--

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

New Yorker: Pre-Occupied: Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Race Economics ]

For comfort, Brits turn to Marmite, the Aussies to Vegemite, and Californians? http://www.flutterby.net/2011-11-24_Yosemite

[ related topics: Yosemite ]

Electrical fuses are something I am very familiar with, especially in larger electrical/electronic devices. The genset on our house failed to start -after- it had been jump-started from a car battery and ran for a while. I figured a fuse blew or something else stupid broke. We bought a new battery for it yesterday, and I have spent 3 hours, used 4 different types of "tamper resistent" screw bits (over 30 screws total), 3 different sized sockets... and vice grips, to get the control box out, and find the 3/4 amp fuse in the control box "open". I'm not sure that is all that is wrong, yet. But I am fuming over the poor design choices. I'll be modifying the design when I reassemble it with an externally accessible fuse holder.

Luckily, it's a nice day to be tinkering.

But please, as "you" design things that have protection devices (fuses, etc), please remember to make them accessible.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles Graphic Design Fabrication Real Estate hubris ]

Time Magazine covers, U.S. vs the rest of the world.

While meuon is fuming over revenue creation opportunities in the design of his generator, I thought I'd express a little pleasant surprise the other way: Alan, Charlene's developmentally disabled brother, loves RVs. His second favorite thing in the world (after visiting firehouses) is visiting RV shops. So we rented an RV from Cruise America and took him "camping" (yeah, I'm hardcore, camping to me normally involves tents at the very least).

The pleasant surprise is that unlike experiences renting cars, and even tools, Cruise America didn't try to upsell, hit us with add-ons, or anything else. They gave us a basic vehicle which worked (aside from one glitch), for the agreed upon price, and we generally got the feeling of a company, or at least a franchise, that cared.

And Sierra Meadows RV gave us a place to park, hook ups, with no hassles and everything just worked.

[ related topics: California Culture Graphic Design Handicaps & Disabilities Archival ]

An SFGate.com article about the legal situation which keeps the California PUC from releasing information about utilities that other states make freely available.

[ related topics: Law California Culture ]

SFGate.com: Restaurants want to put brakes on food trucks, on the popularity of food trucks in San Francisco, how restaurant owners and landlords are less than pleased, touching on some interesting issues of ownership and space and externalities, and use of the government for restraint of trade.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area moron Space & Astronomy California Culture Machinery ]

Calamities of Nature — Occupy California Universities. A simple graph of University of California and California State University tuition, and average California household income over time.

Bonus: MeFi entry on how elite financial and law firms select their hires. Basically, they use the college admissions process as their filter...

[ related topics: Nature and environment California Culture Education ]

Why wireless mesh networks won’t save us from censorship, on the practical difficulties of implementing mesh WiFi, mostly saved here so that I can refer to it in my discussions with the Petaluma Technology Advisory Committee.

[ related topics: Wireless Free Speech ]

RC3: Why do good people build bad applications? is a look at Gun.io: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application.

I'm going to go off in a different direction than either Rafe or Rich Jones (respectively) did. Yesterday, a Facebook ad popped up asking me to take a survey on an Institute of Museum and Library Services (.gov) "Proposed Framework for Digitally Inclusive Communities". The survey asked me to read the Building Digitally Inclusive Communities brochure, and, if I were "particularly interested in this subject", the Final Report.

Both documents completely ignore the real issues behind the "digital divide", they're the usual cargo cult "if we make broadband cheap enough that everyone can have it" thinking. The whole thing reeks of thinking that since rich families have more books than poor families, we can eradicate poverty by throwing books through windows in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The real question isn't whether a hundred or two hundred K is a reasonable price for a simple Android app, Rich Jones's "6 hours at the maximum" ignores that there are costs involved in design decisions and numerous other complexities, or whether the code is cribbed from buggy example code. I think it isn't even whether this would be better done as a web page or just a flyer.

I'm not even sure that the question revolves around the horrendous contracting procedures whereby you have layers of shell companies whose sole job it is to make sure that a set of contractor requirements paperwork is filled out, take a substantial cut, and farm the project out to the next layer down. Where by the time you get to the people who actually have the skills to do the work you've gone through 3 layers of "management" who've taken a skim and added "input".

The real question is: What is the reward structure where the mid-level bureaucrat who commissioned this project felt there was career enhancement in making an Android (and iPhone and Blackberry) app for something that's of questionable value to anyone. Because there's a lot of this crap out there, a whole lot of "let's take the facile view of the problem and throw some money at it", and whether that's "Intelligent Transportation", the "Digital Divide", or "we need an App", it's solving the easy problems while ignoring the hard ones.

We need to figure out that systemic dysfunction and fix it.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Weblogs Microsoft broadband moron Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Heinlein Graphic Design Community Guns Currency iPhone ]

LA Times: Idea of civilians using drone aircraft may soon fly with FAA. Interesting because ground transportation will have to solve this problem next.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Things that make me feel old: Getting all this "Cyber Monday" spam and realizing that many people don't read that as "Wanna Cyber?" Eeeewww.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

AM conversation: how Best Buy is way more expensive than online, and how Brick & Mortar may become an economic divider, with online access providing advantages in the same way that high credit scores do now.

[ related topics: Economics ]

More from Shadow: How bicycling set deprived Indian girls on a life-long journey:

The project's results so far have been extremely promising: in those three years in Bihar alone, 871,000 schoolgirls have taken to the saddle as a result of the scheme. The number of girls dropping out of school has fallen and the number of girls enrolling has risen from 160,000 in 2006-2007 to 490,000 now.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Nature and environment Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

JWZ: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.

I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Movies Software Engineering Currency Gambling ]

It looks like the mainstream press has finally gotten a hold of the Bernie Sanders complaints about the Fed audit mentioned here back in October: Bloomberg: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

Via Sensible Erection

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Software Engineering Current Events New York Archival ]

NBC Universal Threatens Partners That They Need To Sign 'Grassroots' Support Of SOPA/PIPA Or It Might Have To Drop Them

Kidney beans, elbow macaroni, what other foods are named after body parts? (first person to mention a steamed suet pudding loses 10 pts...)

I'm at work a little early this morning, because at the end of yesterdays long conference call/working sessions via skype yesterday, they said: Resume at 8am. Which would be 7am locally. It was said with great urgency and importance, so I believed them and did not apply the "Latin American Time Filter". It normally has a lot of variables, but I thought I was getting a handle on them. I was wrong, again.

Doing time math in computers is interesting enough, but adding social aspects for each culture is interesting. In the caribean it is often a logarithmic scale: In 5 minutes means an hour, this afternoon means tomorrow, next week means next month. There are adjustments for 2 to 3 hour lunches, the month of Christmas and New Years, and other people's vacations. Unless you are on a Dutch island, in which case being more than a minute early is rude, and exactly on schedule is perfect, most of the time. Fridays are often the start of the weekend.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology Law Work, productivity and environment Mathematics California Culture Conferences ]

Promoting cycling by building roads, which I got to from misleading video on Dutch cycling policy, which I was pointed to by Erin offering up the aforementioned misleading video and the counter-point.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Sports Embedded Devices Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

An extramarital affair is bad for the heart -- literally. With some interesting caveats. The study is Stable extramarital affairs are breaking the heart in the International Journal of Andrology, June 2^nd 2011.

[ related topics: Health ]

Benoit Felter: Do data caps punish the wrong users? A bandwidth usage reality check (Via).

Basically, the heaviest bandwidth users for the North American ISP studied weren't sucking down their bandwidth during the peak congestion times. Which reinforces the notion that bandwidth caps aren't about network congestion, but are really about monopolistic content control.

[ related topics: broadband ]

When candidates lie, what's a political reporter to do?, in the context of a Mitt Romney ad which quotes Barack Obama speaking about attitudes from John McCain's campaign as though they were Obama's words.

[ related topics: Quotes Politics moron ]

I was in the Petaluma Community Development Department Building Division office yesterday, picking up my permit for my electrical work (and I'm now home waiting for my framing inspection). While I was there, a contractor came in asking questions about a deck rebuild. The questions were two-fold:

• What does the Building Division want to issue the permit (to-scale drawings, paper size doesn't matter). I kind of thought a contractor would know this, but I guess if you've been doing bathroom remodels or something non-structural you might not know.
• What are the criteria the building department is using to approve the structure described in those plans.

I don't remember the exact words, but both the nature of the question and the response to the second portion of that has me pondering things. Petaluma has developed a reputation for being "building unfriendly", and I'm trying to understand that. I've had relatively good relations with the Building Division, once we got over the initial "I don't understand your building", but I'm puzzled on two fronts.

The first is that the contractor doesn't right off the top of his head think "what, beyond 40 lbs/sq.ft. for the deck load, with additional capacities for hot tubs or special fixtures, need to be accounted for when figuring out if the existing piers will have a suitable lbs/sq.in. loading for the soil type at the construction type?". That suggests to me that something in our contractor licensing system is broken, and we've given up even the pretence of contractor-ship being about anything but limiting the practitioners.

The second is that the authorities in question, from the Petaluma folks to the Sonoma folks to the California building code and contractor's licensing authorities, don't clearly lay out the requirements. I mean, sure, you can dig through the code, but the reality is that the building department is looking for "does this look right?", and that simplified high level view of the code is all lore.

So rather than being confident that whatever he comes up with is sufficient, or even being told that he should run it by an engineer, our hapless contractor is going to draw up something that looks kinda like what was there with no idea as to whether the building department will say "okay". If the building department doesn't okay it, it'll get passed back, but even if they tell him to go find an engineer, nobody really has an objective view of what the deciding factors are.

If the city had maps of "this is what we think the soil is like in these parts of town, these are acceptable PSI footing/foundation loadings for these soils, we still reserve the rights to ask for engineering tests", then this contractor could say "40 lbs/sq.ft. plus 10 lbs/sq.ft. for materials, existing footings look like they've got this footprint", there are probably many hours of city staff time that could be averted, and the city would still have the ability to step in and require more when people weren't willing to just go 2x the acceptable limits 'cause it's cheaper to do that than pay for engineering (ie: big projects).

Instead we've got this nebulous world where nobody's sure what the other side wants, and it all becomes "well, I've done the familiar before". And we don't have the chance to advance the state of the art.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Civil Liberties California Culture Machinery Community Fabrication Maps and Mapping Model Building ]