Gratuitous picture OTD: More tacky eco-porn: El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Some disagreement over whether I should have included the dead limbs in the foreground, I think the image would be too sterile without.So at the below-mentioned party, someone asked for a pair of pliers, and I pulled out my Gerber multi-tool, and this lead to a comparison of multi-function pocket knives among all the gadget crazed guys, 'til a woman pulled out the largest blade I've ever seen on a Swiss Army knife. It doesn't seem fair, how come the women always win the dick-size wars?
Cool party last night. As a college dropout I sometimes end up in more groups of alumni than if I had an alma mater, and sometimes this way's more fun (hey, if you offer to bring a smoked turkey you get invited to all sorts of neat happenings!). Anyway, I was at a gathering of Cal Poly friends last night, a bunch of really interesting people. I haven't had a chance to check out Asian Art Post , but if you're into asian art, especially if you're a dealer, Jim and (and I know I'm doing a horrible American transliteration of her real name) Nova were quite fun to talk to.
Also, if you like Japanese culture and reading poetry aloud, Michael read from his book of poetry Japan: From Shape to Mind, which I enjoyed.
I was having dinner with Catherine tonight, and we got to talking about how we never have a chance to see TV any more, and I commented that I'd like to have seen the first blind contestant on Jeopardy and she said "Yeah, as a five time champion he won a car..."
I'm told that Need To Know is up, time to go see if I was lied to.
QOTminute, nicely explains why if I were a Christian I'd be a satan worshipper:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
--- C.S. Lewis
Scary Devil Monastery QOTD:
"Was it Bill Hicks who said that some people should just be legal to hunt?"
--- Mike Sphar
"Yes, but who wants to eat diseased meat ???"
--- Keith Glass
Atlas Shrugged coming to TNT as a miniseries . I don't know whether to be elated or scared, Ted Turner isn't the guy I'd have picked to put this one on.
It's been a long time since I've had a Scary Devil Monastery QOTD:
I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou.
--- Paul Tomblin
Since TS2: Toy Harder will be my second movie credit (just kidding about that title, BTW), this seems apropos: Landover Baptist weighs in with their review of Toy Story 2 :
"A stomach-turning tale so sexually offensive, even that ungodly crippled pervert Larry Flynt would hurl his fat little body from his wheelchair to avoid seeing it!"
Personally I think it's a stronger story than either Toy Story or A Bug's Life , with much more visual complexity than the latter. It won't be a deep film, but it will be an entertaining one.
Via Camworld who got it from Obscure Store , a Boston public access show that's raising eyebrows . What catapulted the show Crapfest to notoriety was an episode on which they used a chicken to demonstrate cunnilingus techniques.
"They howl at suggestions that they are giving good people bad ideas. To demonstrate how absurd they think this allegation is, one recent Crapfest segment showed Taylor's 73-year-old father watching the show, retreating to his kitchen, removing a chicken from the refrigerator, and massaging it with a vibrator."
Dang it, I had a mid-sized update for y'all this morning and didn't get to send it 'cause in the midst of finally getting my new server up and running I ended up with some ethernet card config issues.
A new Mouthorgan on gender issues.
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~olc/dejapower.html
Via FactoVision , the Roton prototype made its third test flight yesterday . Phil and I saw the hangar in Mojave on our trip to Joshua Tree this summer, a bunch of us would love to lease a plane and have Sam fly us down there for one of the flights if we could get advance notice.
Keith Knight tackles the rising host of health care .
Per user request I've made a PDA friendlier version of Flutterby , just the last two days worth. I've also shortened the main page, figuring y'all drop by at least once a week anyway.
The new Clean Sheets starts out with the Fat Broad on revenge sex.
Did some single malt tasting last night, a bunch from Glenmorangie. Had probably the most expensive scotch I'll ever drink, and reaffirmed that I like 'em smokey and peaty, smooth (at least in this drink) is wasted on me.
Went to see The Limey afterwards to help sober up. Interesting editing style, one turn story line, the editing managed to drag what would have been a neat short out to something that became tedious.
Oh, to follow up my comments about XML-RPC , I suppose I ought to put up or shut up and post some code. Here's a Perl fragment to get book info from Barnes & Noble , Amazon and Borders . Run it in a directory with a file called "isbn", one number per line. It's not massively smart, there are a few problems, and some interesting issues show up in the database differences between those three samples, but it's a quick hack to play with some data reaping ideas and learn a bit more about good ways to extract data.
David Steinberg's Comes Naturally #89 has made it to the archive, about sexual photography coming of age.
Studies suggest modern primates, Neanderthals mated screams the CNN headline. Heck, I didn't have to do carbon dating and DNA analysis to figure that out, just a quick look at Congress will tell you that and a whole lot more.
Interesting Salon article about Whisper Numbers , and how this relates to Whispernumber.com which takes amateur investor's data and insight. The whisper number is the real number bandied about Wall Street, and is usally off from the "analysts projections". When analyzing this sort of thing, of course the first thing you should do is look at the economic reasons for there to be two sets of numbers. Not that I'm suggesting anything about people with stakes in the markets who are giving information to others with much larger stakes in the markets, and why their answers might differ and be largely less correct than the numbers given by people who aren't looking at the bigger picture and are just tracking the data given out by the company...
Via /. : Todd was asking about digital cameras, and I pointed him towards the Nikon 950 based on recommendations from people I know, but he'd be missing out, he could play old arcade games on the Kodak DC265 Digita Camera .
A high school writing assignment I could have gotten into: If you had to assassinate one famous person who is alive right now , who would it be and how would you do it? Needless to say, assorted clueless parents are outraged.
And Hoyt Axton is dead at 61 .
Jeremiah was a bullfrog,
was a good friend of mine.
Never understood a single thing he said,
but I helped him to drink his wine.
My friend Charlene got me one of these black tomatoes that has been making the rounds. If you get a chance, mortgage your house to buy one. They're amazing, and apparently at farmer's markets in the Marin area, probably elsewhere too. Very dark color, slightly greenish around the stem area is okay, and amazingly sweet and rich. Highly recommended.
Saw Orgazmo last night while waiting for some disks to fsck (oddly appropriate). Was actually kind of enjoyable. Relative to some movies I've seen I've no idea why the reviews were so bad. Not a great movie by any means, but in the "Mormon boy goes to LA, turns to acting in porn films, and becomes a superhero" genre I thought it comported itself fairly well:
Chota Boy: Stop, he's never gonna want to have an orgasm again!
Orgasmo: One more for Jesus.
Okay, per that complaint by Dave Winer, all new entries into the archives will have an time stamp anchor. If you want to link to a specific entry, you can now link into the archives .
Last week I made a comment about an incident I saw as a symptom of the lack of rigorous thinking behind XML-RPC . Dave Winer responded to that on his discussion forum , and I responded to Dave . Worth reading only if you want a bitter rant on how those who do not learn history are condemned...
Homicide trends in the US . Weapon wise, handguns peaked in the early '90s, knives have been on the decline since '80 or so, there was a sharp drop in "other guns": in the early '80s, and "other methods" and "blunt objects" remained fairly constant. And most of the variation in gun usage comes from ages 18-24. Interestingly, while the number of men being killed by intimates has dropped substantially, the number of women killed by intimates isn't declining nearly as quickly.
One of my on-again off-again predictions is that e-commerce will peak fairly quickly because it's pulling from two markets: The faddists and the catalog shoppers. Via FactoVision , similarities between e-commerce and supermarket branding suggest that there are other factors at work leading to the same end:
Two years down the road, he says, repeat buying rates at websites will typically be no higher than 30% of the initial triers. This rate is similar to purchase rates among packaged goods at the supermarket.
Well, my ISP connection from home has decided to institute some pretty moronic anti-mail-relaying measures on a Friday, and in their wisdom they've blown out the override facility because everyone's calling Saturday tech support to try to find a work around.
Meanwhile, I'm without outgoing mail. If you haven't heard from me, that's why. I expected to get back to a whole bunch of you today.
I may switch back to a dial-up after this boneheaded maneuver. Anybody in the Marin area got a favorite local ISP, or have they all been bought by Best ?
So you've gotta wonder, was the question on the order of "The internet is down... no, just that one website... but I need it fixed now!"? Or perhaps "It's telling me there's an error... Exactly? Well, it says there's an error..."? I hope it wasn't like that, I hope it wasn't just stupidity, I'd hate to think the cops had no reason to shoot the techie who stabbed the woman who called the support line . In an episode that was probably straight out of the daily life of alt.tech-support.recovery :
Witnesses say the woman, who worked on the fifth floor, had called for tech support, which is on the second floor, because she was having computer problems.
Morec said that 41-year-old Patrick Michael McGowan responded, which was strange in itself because he specialized in telephones, not computers. Witnesses say he stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor, went straight to the victim's cubicle and stabbed her twice without saying a word.
A new Need To Know .
More nerd ?humor?: http://www.jerkcity.com/
Deuce: "Who wants to watch me jerk off to Final Fantasy VII ??!??!?!??!?"
Spigot: "Or me to just regular VI"
/. interviews Cult of the Dead Cow .
Perjury. Theft. Coverups. No, it's not the latest presidential scandal, just business as usual for the Los Angeles District Attorney . For instance the LAPD overheard a cell-phone conversation about the sale of the home of a recently deceased relative, and then seized the inheritance as drug money .
It occurs to me: If you want to institute a web content rating system, how about one that's rewarding rather than punitive? The default is that all web pages contain hardcore porn involving small mammals, and the filtering system only allows through pages which claim otherwise.
A couple of people have forwarded me this New York Post article on foiling Echelon .
Hacktivists around the world have scheduled today as "Jam Echelon Day." They're encouraging computer users to flood the Internet with e-mails containing suspected keywords, hoping the deluge will short-circuit Echelon's computers and satellites.
I could write many of my dissatisfactions about epinions , but it seams that Eatonweb has done better if you can read between the other comments.
Via Strange Brew , conjecture that Europe's economy will lag behind that of the United States .
That's because US Net users have little else to do with their spare time other than stay glued to their PCs in search of entertainment or in the hope of finding some fleeting, yet distant, human interaction.
Europeans, on the other hand, "have a life" and enjoy a far wider range of activities, according to Fabiola Arredondo, MD of Yahoo! Europe.
The new Mouthorgan talks about... well... lots o' stuff about looks, self-esteem, long-term relationships and such, by examining gay male culture.
CRACK has made headlines before, but that was in southern California. Now they've come to the Bay Area, and their offer of $200 for sterilization is infuriating Oakland activists . We've really lost track of a lot of things in this society, that public education is a preemptive protective move against parents who won't take responsibility for raising their own kids, and now taking that preemption a step further is raising hackles by people who are confusing rights with privileges.
Laurie Anderson talks about Moby Dick .
I'm looking for web sites celebrating artists who've died of AIDS or other complications arising from HIV. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Send them to webmaster@flutterby.com . Thanks!
Okay, I laughed at the benefits of using Doom as a tool for system administration page, but as I reread through it there are some really interesting ideas here, especially as popular fiction pushes us closer to metaphor based interfaces. He did actually hack a version of Doom to display PIDs over characters and "nice" them according to damage and kill them when they got killed off, and I think there lessons we can take into managing work groups:
"Sysadmins could cooperate or compete. Doom is a natural environment for player-to-player interactions. A team of players can cooperate to take care of a heavily-loaded system, or they can even take out rogue sysadmins who are killing the wrong processes."
Benefits of using Doom as a tool for system administration .
"Really crowded systems would regulate their own load because monsters occasionally kill each other. Once the population in a room goes down, the monsters will stop attacking each other."
I think I forwarded a wire service report of this, but here's the original. This year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are in .
"Just look, ya bloomin' idiot," Eleanor Rugglesby-Bobsyeruncle, the world-famous cockney art collector, screamed at her assistant, Ivan Ivanovich, illegitimate son of the Secret Czar, Ivanovichi, "ya packed me priceless Don Quixote paintin' in with a sack of bloody Spam, it was the darn cans tore me knight!"
---Allan D. Burrows, Mississauga, Ontario, CANADA
Back, apparently even before I started the Flutterby web log, I saw a subtitled version of Mononoke Hime , and loved it. Well, my office-mate Phil saw the English version which will be coming out in the U.S. in a week or two last night and said that the English dialog (apparently by Neil Gaiman) of the dubbed version had none of the subtleties and moral ambiguity that I'd reported from the subtitled version. Disney ruins another one. Still a gorgeous movie, however.
The latest Keith Knight empathizes with the red socks fans.
Pursed Lips pointed to this note about how teens lack information about sex . Particularly worth noting is that the ignorance is higher among the sexually active!
A new Clean Sheets .
Via Bifurcated Rivets comes the brain in a tank . For your living room or wherever mad-scientist poseur types gather.
Just because I feel like a lemming, I've joined epinions and I'm utterly shocked at how sparse their database is. I'm looking around trying to find movies like Before Sunrise or books by Robertson Davies and while I can find lots of pop media, I'm not having any luck finding anything that I've found to have real lasting value.
A new NETFUTURE , tying the hazards of baby walkers to those of educational software, among other things.
O'Reilly books we'd like to see: Practical Unix Terrorism by Theodore Kaczynski.
That great Penguin Computing ad you've seen around? Now you can get posters and T-shirts of it .
Via Pursed Lips come some startling revelations about why men get married . Hint: It's not for sex.
My Word's Worth toys with rational decisions versus intuitive ones.
I'll write a trip report about hiking in the Sierra this weekend later, might come after the pictures get developed and scanned.
Saw The Sixth Sense on Friday, won't bother to review because although it's a fun experience with a neat twist, it doesn't feel like there's any meat that'll stay with me. Depending on the date, could be a good date movie.
Susie Bright wonders why she can't get media coverage .
Roger Green credits ZDNet with finding this inadvertantly funny URL: http://www.lumbermansexchange.com/
Pat Califia has a new Topping the News .
A mistype in a search engine made me think: Is a "pronographer" one who eschews pictures?
Family games more profitable on the 'net . So if they're eliminating "hardcore gaming", does that mean they're left with "softcore gaming"?
John S Jacobs Anderson has his notes on why he's participating in a Day Without Weblogs as a counterpoint to my thoughts on why I'm not .
In Salon , Tracy Quan writes about coming out as a prostitute to parents .
Testing might be a potential Y2K problem? Entity sets clock ahead to test Y2K compliance with software that uses FlexLM license manager. Software works fine, no problems. Entity sets clock back to normal time. FlexLM detects that user is monkeying with clock and reports license violation. Which is exactly what it's supposed to do, so in this case the testing is the risk.
I had skipped this Salon piece on how AOL dominates gay male chat, titled You've got male , but I was talking with two people yesterday about community building on web sites and how chat contributes and detracts from that and this seemed a necessary link.
Mouthorgan this week is a wide ranging hodge-podge.
Keith Knight experiments with cross dressing .
Dave Winer has discovered why reinventing protocols is a bad idea , he's running into problems with his content distribution system built on top of XML-RPC because his protocols don't take into account a lot of the issues that SMTP and NNTP deal with effectively. This wouldn't be noteworty except that this sort of arrogance pops up fairly frequently, developers slap together something without thinking through the ramifications and it ends up biting them. I'd have thought that Dave's been in the business long enough to know this, but he seems to be remarkably short-sighted.
Jorn has asked me to offer a bit more of what my rants are about. Today's "For a cause" talks about why I won't be commemorating a Day Without Weblogs .
Well, what with Genehack having Scary Devil Monastery quotes before me, this is a challenge now:
Joe Zeff: We can prove that the statement is false by finding another inteligent race.
Alistair J. R. Young: Another?
Abigail: Cats being the known intelligent race.
Carl Jacobs: There's some debate about Dolphins, too. $DEITY help us if the dolphins and the cats ever team up.
Not very likely, I suppose, as the cats have been eating tuna for all these years and by now have probably acquired a taste for Dolphin.
http://thelamb.dhs.org/~rael/bgrab/
When /. had an entry about wiring up a cat's brain to get video out. I couldn't get to the original site, but now there's a BBC article with pictures as the cat sees things .
Well, someone implemented Jorn Barger 's idea about mapping web logs idea . If people start using this it'll be interesting to see where the clusters end up. I expect lots of Michigan and lots of bay area.
Dang, I need to keep up on the pages hosted on my own server: In the San Francisco Area Romance Writers of America pages Shelley Bates talks about courtship in Regency dance .
An update to Crypting News continues to point out the incompetence and fear mongering which characterizes the U.S. military and government in general.
Haven't had a chance to look at them yet, but photographer Eric Boutilier-Brown informs me that he's updated and changed the Evolving Beauty section of his web site, overhauled the Aquis folio , added a three graces folio , and added the images from his first portfolio offering, the Alberta portfolio .
(and looking back at that previous paragraph, properly interpreting the glossary information from that entry is the big challenge to be faced as I work on the next generation of my content management stuff.)
Gratuitous picture OTD: More tacky eco-porn: El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Some disagreement over whether I should have included the dead limbs in the foreground, I think the image would be too sterile without.
Via Pursed Lips : There was an incident a few years ago in Chattanooga where someone got maced by a cop for posession of a Frisbee. Well, it wasn't quite that simple on the surface, but when you dug a little deeper that's what it was. Anyway, the difference between Chattanooga and forward thinking towns is that Cedar Rapids encourages Frisbee playing to cut down on anonymous sex .
Vicki of YAWL has an article in Salon that says teaching creationism in Kansas doesn't go far enough .
My Word's Worth tackles how stories get edited.
Well, I got my new Dual Celeron 533 machine booting yesterday. Need to do some twiddling with network adapters and such and copy my old drives across, but this should leave my P133 to become the new Flutterby server. With root access to my web serving box there's all sorts o' cool stuff I can play with. But e-mail will be delayed for a day or two.
More goodies from the New York Times . A bunch of people have nutrition studies which discount willpower. In these studies of weight loss they determine that humans are completely at the whims of nature, and cocaine isn't the only thing that humans will consume 'til death. Well, they doesn't put it that way, but they're obviously smoking something.
Federal health officials hope they can eradicate syphilis . Due to the consciousness of safe sex brought on by AIDS, syphilis rates are down to 2.6 cases per 100,000, and most of them are "concentrated in 28 of the nation's 3,100 counties".
"...for reasons scientists cannot quite explain, the disease runs in cycles of seven to 10 years; the cycle is now at its low ebb. The goal is to keep it from ever rising again."
Via Camworld , an article in praise of plain web sites .
Just a note: If you're a poet you might want to check out http://www.poetry.com/ and see if they've ripped off anything of yours.
Damn it, those images still aren't coming up! I'll fix it this evening.
QOTD:
I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.
--- Peter da Silva in the Scary Devil Monastery
The pictures continue: In another vain attempt to look cool by hanging out with cool people, here are some pictures of me and Loren Carpenter
playing with Loren's liquid nitrogen bottle rocket launcher at Pixar
last fall. The launcher will theoretically launch 5 gallon water cooler bottles (its predecessor did), but we were launching 1 and 2 liter soda bottles and 1 gallon milk jugs.
Of course immediately after this we got to talking about more convenient gasses than liquid nitrogen, which is expensive and needs to be transported in an open container. We settled on liquid propane, which opened up the possibility of using liquids other than water for the reaction mass [nudge, nudge, wink, wink]. Loren built the EjacuLauncher, with a heater to compensate for the low vapor pressure of propane and an electric valve system. He was firing off bottles at Burning Man , but because he was unsure of the spark ignition system hasn't yet used gasoline or similar as the reaction mass.
So this Microsoft anti-Linux propaganda page has been floating around. Ignoring the outright lies, let's go to the total cost of ownership study they cite . In a Scary Devil Monastery post, Timothy J. Miller pointed out:
Did you read the TCO survey they cited? Some interesting facts buried inside:
- They compare sites running Compaq servers to sites running SPARCs.
- They admit that the SPARC installations had:
- 57% bigger databases on average,
- More sites running enterprise applications,
- More sites running web applications,
- Nearly *double* the simultaneous sessions count (NT:98 v. Solaris:168),
- and over double the page hits per
(NT:~1400 v. Solaris:~3400).
So for a 37% reduction in cost, you get a 50% reduction in capability.
Someone explain how this is a "win" for M$, please.
Mouthorgan is having trouble figuring out what it's about today.
Oh. My. If you're not a total nerd, you won't understand. I'll just sit here in stunned shock. http://www.linas.org/linux/i370.html
Unclear on the concept: Animal sacrifices celebrate animal hospital opening in Izmir Turkey.
via Medley comes the Statement of Julie Hiatt Steele to the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law September 23, 1999 that's frightening and well worth reading.
It's the staff issue of Clean Sheets
Bill Clearlake's Burning Man diary asks questions about bringing kids to Burning Man that are worth thinking about.
A Burning Man virgin who gets it. Her pictures aren't of spectacle, they're of the people she made contact with.
Not posted here because it's not really germaine to here and I want to do something a little more introspective for that, but my initial rant on the Burning Man cleanup is on the Burning Man BBS .
QOTD:
"Sure, only 2 percent of the Internet population uses lynx, but they're the top 2 percent"
--- petro in the Scary Devil Monastery
Some notes at the Stuffed Dog which echo my thoughts about why Scripting News isn't on my Nibelung ring , titled Dave Winer: Whiner .
Marylaine isn't afraid of Godwin's law, in My Word's Worth this morngin she muses on two sides of the issues not being balanced.
Well, my parents always said that if I didn't go to college I'd end up digging ditches. I guess dropping out just left me shoveling piles of burn residue. I'm back from a weekend of hard labor in Black Rock desert helping out the Burning Man clean-up. There'll be some notes from that coming soon, but I got in at 1:30 this morning, and am rushing to get crap out of my car before I start the day. This might be a slow day, update wise.
I'm off to help with what should be the final weekend of the Burning Man cleanup. Hope to be buff and tan when I return. See y'all Monday.
I don't know if I've pointed to these folks before, but I'm one of those rebellious souls that believes that state recognition of marriage is a bad thing. The Alternatives to Marriage Project seeks to provide support to those of us who choose not to succumb to the social pressure to engage in an outdated institution with dubious goals.
If you live in the Bay Area, on Thursday November 4th come on by the Borders in San Rafael to heckle Terrence Masson, director of Bunkie & BooBoo, author of CGI 101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference , and who has one of the Canadian comics in the South Park movie named after him (seriously!). He promises "maybe you'll get a free balloon or something", but that may just be for the people he sent the e-mail directly to.
Damn The Tin Drum, the Ig Nobel Prize list for this year has been announced. Top winner: A guy who patented a centrifuge to aid baby delivery (Mercury News article on the baby delivery centrifuge ). Alas, I can't find any details on one of the physics awards to Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck , a mathematician who has apparently calculated how to make a teapot spout that doesn't drip, which was my goal back when I threw clay regularly.
Okay, now Need To Know is up, and their former entrance tunnel (which is a parody of http://www.greyday.org/ and http://www.grayday.org/ ) is well worth a read http://www.ntk.net/grey.html
So has anyone else noticed that since Gore announced moving his campaign headquarters to Tennessee his southern accent has been cranked up a notch or three? As much as I dislike GW "there ought to be limits to freedom" Bush , can American voters really be stupid enough to fall for this crap? Alas, I think the answer is "Yep!".
QOTD:
"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice--all the odious qualities--which drive a man (sic) to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in so doing he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement."
--- Evelyn Waugh quoted by Bonnie Montgomery
Todd's not letting himself update anything here 'til he finishes his Burning Man rant, but he offers http://www.linuxchix.org/
Need To Know hasn't updated yet. But they've added an entrance tunnel. That's the bad news. The good news is that they ask: "What if all the web designers just gave up and went home?", and give some wonderful answers.
In Oregon, Matt Rolloff is building a small world . I've a feeling the pictures of the Roloff place don't do it justice.
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com