Happy Solstice
Today is the winter solstice. I'm celebrating by having a miserable cold.
Bah humbug!
Posted at 18:37
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iTunes Party Shuffle shows every song
I really like the iTunes Party Shuffle mode, which shows the next n
upcoming songs and allows you to rearrange them. So it was annoying when
it stopped working recently. Fortunately,
there's
an easy fix: just select all of the songs in the list, and delete them.
iTunes should regenerate the list correctly.
Posted at 17:44
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Careless Love That's Elliot Smith's "Between the Bars", but it sounded like it was being
sung by Billie Holiday.
I did a little research and found out it was a cover by Madeleine Peyroux
on her CD
Careless Love (here's
another review).
I liked it, so I might check out her stuff if I remember. If you like
Elliot Smith, you should try to hear that song.
I was shopping at Barnes and Noble tonight and I heard a song they were
playing that sounded vaugely familiar. I listened to the lyrics a little
more closely: "...I'll kiss you again between the bars where I'm seeing
you there..."
Posted at 19:51
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Top Overlooked Films of the 1990s Some interesting choices on the list. Guess the OFCS is from
Rotten Tomatoes.
List of Bests is interesting too. Everyone
loves lists.
Via
Triptych Cryptic, The Online Film
Critics Society's "Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s".
Posted at 15:15
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Radiohead
I never thought the funniest thing I'd ever read about Radiohead would
come from a
cartoon
bear:
Thom and Radiohead hit the big-time right out of college and apparently their mentality is suspended in the early-20s aspic: a lush death-ambrosia of emotional fear, inability to use Microsoft Excel, and terror at the prospect of waking up the next day lest they be a robot with a large black rubber differential instead of a neck.
Posted at 09:46
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2004 Retrospective/2005 Look Ahead Important events in 2004:
A look ahead at (possibliy) important events in 2005:
Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but here's some ideas about what
might happen in 2005
I'm going to be on a panel discussing the politically important things
that happened in 2004, so here's some notes about 2004 and a look ahead at
2005.
Posted at 22:24
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VoodooPad I'll have to try out VoodooPad. It looks good.
Ultimately, though, I never tried making the Developers Notebook because I
realized I'd just keep using the old fashioned kind...
Somewhere in one of my scratchbooks, I've got notes for an application
very much like VoodooPad. I
called it the HyperInterWebNut, but it was a developers notepad, a
client-side wiki you could edit WYSIWYG, draw sketches, and export to a
server-side wiki. VoodooPad does all of that and more. Very cool. The only
feature I thought of for my software was some sort of integration with a
source code repository for documentation and diagramming purposes
(inspired by
The Pragmatic Programmer.). But that's a hard problem with a limited
audience.
Posted at 08:38
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Dear CVS letter I've made the same move and it's great.
Kevin's
breaking up with CVS.
Posted at 08:28
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Mexican Entrees
Man Doth Not
Live by Burrito Alone.
Posted at 14:48
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Congrats to Norwegianity
Congratulations to Mark Gisleson of
Nowegianity, who has now been blogging
for five years at various sites.
Posted at 11:39
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Skycutter
Skycutter
flying lawn mower. For real. Well, it LOOKS like a lawn mower. It's
actually a lifting body. Via
Ask the
Pilot.
Posted at 09:04
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Design Outpost This is very cool for someone like me who has very low design abilities. I
sometimes need logos for software projects. If I need a professional
looking logo in the future, I know where to go.
I just found out about
Design
Outpost, a site were designers compete to create logos for clients. It's
sort of like Fark, but with money and fewer squirrels with gigantic
testicles. The prices are really reasonable ($100-$200 for a logo) and the
results look quite good (take a look at
the
archives).
Posted at 14:49
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Half Life Story
Half Life Saga Story Guide is
a cool piecing together of the overall half-life story based on in-game
evidence from HL and HL2. Spoilers, of course.
Posted at 12:36
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Downtown grocery store(s) Quick P.S.: the Near Northeast Lunds is going to be in a new development
that will replace the aging and ugly strip mall on Central Avenue, one of
the sites in Minneapolis that bugs me the most. It's a prime example of
non-urban design smack in the middle of the city, and the structure has
exceeded its design life (strip malls are typically built to last only 30
years). The news that it will be replaced by a mixed use development is
welcome indeed.
Downtown finally gets a grocery store, or two.
Two Lunds stores are
coming to the downtown area. Time to put in that reservation on a
downtown condo... ;)
Posted at 17:38
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Internet Commies And its ID is #42. w00t!
I have a soft spot for the graphic designs of communism (why do
dictatorships always have the coolest propaganda?) so I think this
hammer and sickle
http shirt is pretty sweet.
Posted at 17:14
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The Joy of Cooking (Hash Brownies) However, the 1975 edition is apparently a Bible of sorts for many people,
who are distraught at the recipies omitted from the 1997 edition, the
faddish nature of some of the new content, the harder-to-read typeface,
and the elimination of Irma and Marion's personal style. (Fortunately for
these people,
the 1975 edition is still available. I find myself tempted to pick it up,
along with another recommended cookbook,
How to Cook Everything.)
But I found this review most amusing:
Having just prepared my first Thanksgiving turkey from its august pages, I
browsed the Amazon.com listing for the
New Joy of Cooking unaware that I was descending into a malestrom of
criticism. I did not know how significantly the cookbook had been revised
from Marion Rombauer Becker's final 1975 edition. Many recipies and entire
sections were dropped. Some of this was for the better, as the reciepies
were updated for today's (OK, 1997's) more healthy attitudes. Many ethnic
recipies were added as well.
The "Joy of Cooking" (affectionately know by some as "Irma") is a wonderful collection of recipes, terms and techniques. However, I found it to be sadly incomplete.
For example, there is no recipe for baking hash brownies. Now, I've known that this recipe has been widely available since, at least, the late '60's. But is it in this book? No, sirreee. Of course, an accomplished cook could improvise on the basic brownie recipe (p. 645), but I'm a beginner, and not always clear thinking, so a more complete set of recipes would have been very helpful.
Posted at 17:17
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LIMO 0.5 released! LIMO is a web application that allows you to browse your
Lucene indexes remotely. It is an ideal
companion for Lucene applications that run in a servlet container.
The 0.5 release adds some cool new features such as:
LIMO requires Java 1.4 or later and a servlet container.
Download it from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/limo/
LIMO is still ready to go out of the box (er, war file). Just edit the
web.xml to point LIMO to your indexes.
Thanks to Julien Nioche for starting a great and very useful project and
letting me join it; and to Andrzej Bialecki for Luke from which I
appropriated several ideas and his GrowableStringArray class. If you are
interested in getting involved, LIMO is now available in SourceForge CVS.
I am pleased to announce that version 0.5 of
LIMO, the Lucene Index Monitor, has been released.
Posted at 21:41
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Google Scholar Compare results for "fast multiresolution image query":
(CiteSeer is a little slow, I think because of all the people checking it
out compared to Scholar ;)
Cool, Google cloned CiteSeer with
Google Scholar. When I was in school,
CiteSeer (aka
ResearchIndex) was an invaluable tool for finding scientific articles.
I'm sure that with Google's increased indexing power and agreements with
publishers, Google Scholar will become even more vital.
Posted at 08:23
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svn diff -w svn diff has no "-w" option, but you can use a specified diff command:
svn di src/com/foobar/File.java --diff-cmd diff -x "-u -b"
Thank the lord! I finally figured out how to get
Subversion to ignore whitespace.
Posted at 10:29
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Bayesian filtering for idiots?
Screw spam filtering. That's old hat. Who's going to step up to the plate
and write bayesian filtering for idiots? A mailing list that I'm on (which
shall remain nameless) is crawling with morons who don't do the vaguest
search of the archives or FAQs. Argh.
Posted at 09:31
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Lost for Words I've never seen politican-speak so ably distilled. For a better English!
Reuters story via Boing Boing.
Lost for Words: The Use and Abuse of the English Language by John
Humphreys sounds interesting. Humphreys is a UK journalist who takes aim
at politicians like Bush and Blair who use mindless repitition of canned
phrases to drive their point home and avoid using verbs whenever possible
to avoid accountability:
Humphrys notes Blair's apparent fear of verbs and mocks his speeches, which are peppered with verbless phrases like "new challenges, new ideas," or "for our young people, a brighter future" and "the age of achievement, at home and abroad".
Posted at 07:59
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Hiring Java Programmers This is an interesting article. Holub argues that "smarts" beats
tool experience (or rather, "skill lists") favored by HR departments:
From what I've learned in my career, I argue that there is no substitute
for experience gained through real-world use of a language. The skilled
programmer knows the language inside and out. For a team like ours that
depends heavily on another product (in our case, DB2 and IBM Content
Manager) it's also important to have someone who knows these tools like
the back of their hand.
I think my criteria are quite like Holub's, just stated a little
differently. He calls these programmers "smart". I think that's just part
of it. You have to be both smart and knowledgeable.
I don't really buy that fresh graduate mantra that "I can learn anything."
Or rather, I do. It'll just take you five or ten years, like everyone
else.
P.S.: The "widowmaker" strikes again. We've been giving a programming
test to people applying for a senior software engineering position. It's
amazing how poorly some people who have great resumes do on this test. So
I think that a quick programming test, as Joel Spolsky recomments, is a
really good way to select skilled programmers.
Allen Holub: When Hiring,
Smarts Beat Skill Lists.
It doesn't matter if a candidate has written a kazillion EJBs, if they were all garbage. I'd much rather hire a smart programmer who knows both the core language and object-oriented design principles inside and out, but who has never written an EJB, than a marginal programmer who has written 200 of the things badly. More important, I want someone smart enough to recognize that I shouldn't be using EJBs at all if they're not appropriate, someone who can quickly pick up the technology necessary to implement an evolving system.
Posted at 15:42
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What a crappy present! The humorous advice and "Kid's corner" just rule. And I don't know who the
girl in the photos is, but her expressions are spot-on. It's like she
really got a Britney Spears CD she didn't want. (actually, I believe these
may be photographs of my little sister during Christmas '97).
I guess this came out last year, so I'm a little behind the curve, but
Downhill Battle's What a Crappy
Present website is just picture prefect.
Posted at 15:38
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What's wrong with voting receipts? Voting receipts are a really, really bad idea, and here's why:
When you vote, your vote is secret. The secret vote is essential to
protect your freedom from coercion and protect the system from vote
buying.
Someone can threaten you to vote a certain way, or else. But as long as
your vote is secret, you can tell them "Yes, sir" and then vote however
you choose. If they can't look at your ballot, they can't find out how you
voted.
Electronic voting machines change this picture because they're impossible
to validate without a voter verified paper trail. So people suggest, "We
should have it print out a receipt. You can take it with you and know how
you voted." Wired's illustration takes this to the extreme, with online
vote verification, win/loss record, and tracking numbers.
But once you've got receipts, you've opened the system to coercion and
vote buying, because it's possible to check up on people. Bad, bad idea.
Your vote must be kept secret.
How should electronic voting machines work, then? There must be a paper
trail, and the voter must see the paper version of their vote and sign off
on it. But then the vote should be placed in a secure, secret ballot box
in case of a recount. There should be no identifying information on the
paper version of the ballot. Essentially, what we have now is a printed
optical scan ballot.
Some also suggest doing spot recounts of paper ballots to ensure that the
machines are counting accurately.
People often suggest that electronic voting machines should give people
receipts. Wired magazine recently
ran a
"Found" photo about the idea,
which
Boing Boing just linked to, saying "Wow".
Posted at 12:31
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Lucene Desktop Notes PDFbox library for PDF extractions (anything for
doing thumbnails?) BSD license.
TextMining.org for Word documents. Apache
License.
OpenOffice.org also has an API.
Java 1.4 for creating image thumbnails? GIF, PNG, JPEG, BMP supported...
POPsearch, a similar idea, already implemented in
C. Lots of features.
Index should have basic file metadata structures for all files, plus
additional fields for each file type (images would have width and height,
for example).
Field names should be lower case and human type-able for advanced queries.
Easy install should be a goal.
Windows has Google Desktop -- who would switch from that? Mac OS X Tiger
will have Searchlight -- who would switch from that? But there is a niche
on pre-Tiger Macs and Linux.
How do you index email?
Jetty would make a good embedded webserver and servlet engine as Tomcat
blows and is way too big.
Index home directory only? What about privacy? Probably needs to be
configurable.
All config should be possible through the web interface.
File formats: HTML, text, Word, Open Office, PDF, MP3, images (GIF, BMP,
JPEG, PNG -- create thumbnails in the cache directory)...
Meta-file formats (must index inside the file): mbox, Microsoft mailbox
formats, maildir (sorta).
Need some spiffy 16x16 icons to represent file types for above.
Here's some notes about
Lucene Desktop, Kevin Burton's latest crazy concoction.
Posted at 09:51
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Get Real 2004 Here's some of the movies I'm particularly interested in seeing:
Friday, Nov 5
Blogumentary 7:30
Venus of Mars 9:30
Saturday, Nov 6
I am going to a show sometime on Saturday so I will miss some of these.
I'll try to catch them on DVD.
A League of Ordinary
Gentlemen 5:30
Mondovino 7:45
Sunday, Nov 7
The Boy Who Plays on
the Buddhas of Bamiyan 1:30
Born Into Brothels
3:30
Army of One 7:30
Guerrilla: The Taking
of Patty Hearst 9:30
Monday, Nov 8
Tuesday, Nov 9
Checkpoint 7:30
Wednesday, Nov 10
Tarnation 7:30
The Get Real documentary film festival is one of my favorite events of the
year. It kicks off tonight with
Blogumentary by local filmmaker and blogger Chuck Olsen. [Note: OK, it
really started last night with
I, Curmudgeon but
that doesn't count because I didn't go.]
Posted at 07:59
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"Enthused" "Enthused" is not a real word. Everywhere you are using "enthused" you
could use "enthusiastic" instead. Try it! It sounds less stupid by far.
Love,
Luke
Dear world,
Posted at 17:55
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Death to Our Enemies
Death to Our Enemies posted
some photos
I took
of them at
their recent show with Eufio.
Posted at 13:26
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First Avenue Closes The real danger is that the owner of the building will just up and sell
it. That land is worth a lot of money, and there are many in the city
who'd rather see another shitty tower or Block E-esque monstrosity in its
place.
I was going to go to a show this weekend. It sounds like it's been
rescheduled, but will the old tickets still be valid?
Adding insult to injury,
First Ave closed
yesterday. What a major disappointment. I hope that the club can re-open.
I heard someone suggest that the city should subsidize First Ave the way
they do other important artistic institutions. I do agree that First Ave
is important and shouldn't be allowed to close, but getting the government
involved doesn't sound like a good idea because the city could take heat
for controversial acts that play there. I don't want political
considerations affecting what shows I can see. Maybe a foundation with a
strong backbone would be willing to put up some cash for the club.
Posted at 12:53
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I Voted (early)
Posted at 21:25
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CodeCon 05
It lives!
Posted at 21:15
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LIMO I had in mind to write something much like this after I did something
similar (but much simpler) at work. My idea was to implement a simple
servlet that had many of the features of
LUKE, the Lucene Index Toolbox. LUKE allows you to browse your index like
LIMO, but also allows you to execute searches and browse the results. Now
I think it would be fun project to add query functionality to LIMO.
Maybe after the election.
I installed LIMO (the Lucene Index MOnitor)
today to play around with it. It's pretty cool. It allows you to browse
the documents in a Lucene index directly and see some statistics about the
index.
Posted at 14:23
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Insta-doc But on what topic...?
I wanna make an
insta-doc!
Posted at 14:14
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GUI Bloopers Also interesting is
Web Bloopers.
I would like to read these books.
This book looks good:
GUI
Bloopers. Kinda spendy, but it is 500+ pages.
Posted at 13:58
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Fuckin' Yankees
I'm not the world's biggest baseball fan, but I do have to say this: HA HA!
Posted at 06:59
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Cast your vote.
Florida Election Ballot
available early on the internets.
Posted at 18:57
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Firefox crashes Well, it crashes even more than Galeon. In particular, nearly every time I
click on a link that opens a new window, the browser crashes. It's been
filed as bug 260847
but I haven't seen any fixes.
Arg!
Remember how I said I was
switching to
Firefox?
Posted at 12:31
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Ponchos Here's a hit ladies: they look ridiculous. If you're going to wear a
poncho, at least wear a real one.
Slate takes on the stupid-looking
ponchos that women have been wearing recently.
Posted at 14:26
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Wanna buy some wood?
It's on the
Internets
Posted at 11:02
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Once more into the breech I made this.
OK, not really, but I wrote the code that updates the graphic. It was
pretty fun to write. I haven't had a chance to do much graphics
programming so this was a good experience.
I used PHP (not my favorite language, but ubiquitous and I know it better
than Perl) and the GD graphics library.
I did my part, you do yours: Take
the day off on November 2nd and help drive little old ladies to the
polls. You'll be glad you did.
The DFL is doing a fundraiser and voluteer drive for
Get Out the Vote activities on election day.
Posted at 20:49
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Oops!
I caught this on the Star Tribune website
last night:
Posted at 20:33
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Nice Boots
I saw these boots in the window today at Corner Store, a vintage clothing
store in my neighborhood.
Posted at 19:25
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X-Prize I've been interested in glimpses of the chase plane used by Scaled
Composites. It's delta-wing looking craft that can be seen in fuzzy CNN
photos like this one:
But what is it? I did a little Googling to find out.
Turns out it is a Burt Rutan-designed Beech Starship from the 1980s. It
was not successful and less than 100 were built.
Raytheon decommisioned the Starships last year because they were too
expensive to maintain and offered owners a King Air in exchange, but pilot
Robert Scherer didn't want to give his up, so he uses it as the
SpaceShipOne chase plane. He's got a
website with photos of the
plane.
Richard Seaman has
some
good photos of the Starship from the June SpaceShipOne launch.
StarShip chases White Knight and SpaceShipOne as they climb for launch.
SpaceShipOne glides in for a landing, followed by the StarShip.
StarShip does a victory pass.
SpaceShipOne wins the X-Prize! Congratulations to the pilots and the
Scaled Composites engineering team.
Posted at 09:09
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You forgot Poland! Kerry: The United Nations, Kofi Annan, offered help after Baghdad fell,
and we never picked them up on that and did what was necessary to transfer
authority and to transfer reconstruction. It was always American-run.
Secondly, when we went in there were three countries: Great Britain,
Australia and the United States. That's not a grand coalition. We can do
better.
Mr. Bush: Well, actually you forgot
Poland.
One of the best moments of last night's debate:
Posted at 12:33
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Ry4an in the Pioneer Press A reporter from the Pioneer Press interviewed us, and Ry4an ended up in the paper today. They even spelled his name right!
I watched the presidential debate last night with Ry4an
at O'Gara's in St. Paul.
Posted at 10:01
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Escaping a dead-end job
David St. Lawrence:
Escaping
a dead-end job. Sounds like useful advice.
Posted at 11:57
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Rowbike It's called a Rowbike (I believe the one I saw was
the 720 Sport Multi-speed)
There's some movies on the site so
you can see how strange it looks when you're riding it.
I saw the craziest bike this weekend: a mobile rowing machine. I tried to
get a photo of it, but I wasn't able to get far enough ahead of it to get
my camera ready.
Posted at 07:41
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The Daily WTF A lot of it is VB oriented because it's run by a Microsoft guy, but
there's enough Java and DB stuff to keep me interested. They comments are
also amusing in one way or another.
Thanks to Canned Platypus for the link. I'm adding it
to my blogroll.
Now if only I can find some of the horrible code I've dug out of
AMS...It's got to be in CVS somewhere.
The Daily WTF ("Curious Perversions In
Information Technology") is my new guilty pleasure.
Posted at 14:23
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Kiffmeyer: pwn3d There's three other anti-Kiffmeyer letters, so
check 'em out.
My first published letter to the editor of the Star Tribune:
Kiffmeyer and terror
Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer needs to reread her job description. She is supposed to help people vote and ensure the smooth operation of elections.
Instead, she's feuded with local election officials because of her overcomplicated voter registration forms and tried to shut down the City Pages' voter registration effort at the behest of the far-right Taxpayers League.
And now she's scaring people with her talk of "homicide" bombers at your polling station.
Kiffmeyer should let the police and Homeland Security handle the terrorists and focus on her job: helping people vote.
Luke Francl, Minneapolis.
Posted at 20:37
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Looks like it's time to get a new bike lock I guess I'm officially in the market for a new bike lock, then.
Via Boing
Boing.
Aw, crap. You can
defeat a
Kyptonite U-Lock with a Bic ballpoint pen.
Posted at 10:01
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Firefox I loved the Galeon browser but the version I had was just too far behind.
I will miss the crash recovery feature, though. Hopefully it won't be as
necessary...
I finally switched by work browser from Galeon to Firefox 1.0RC. Galeon
crashed one too many times.
Posted at 09:13
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Announcing the New Patriot Most of my political rants will end up over there, so if that interest
you, check it out.
Some local Minnesota progressives and I have founded a new group blog
covering local and national politics: The New
Patriot. Combining the strength of several local bloggers including
Chris Dykstra,
Mark Desrosiers,
Chuck "Blogumentary" Olsen and Space
Waitress Crystal Eitle, the
new blog aims to be the hub of the emerging network of progressive
Minnesota blogs.
Posted at 09:11
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Dive into Accordion
Canada's coolest Accordion player reviews
Dive into Python. My review: A good book by an annoying, pedantic person.
But isn't that who you want writing your programming books?
Posted at 12:51
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Zip Code Browser Be sure to try the zoom function.
Interesting zip codes:
10101: NYC
20202: Washington, D.C.
30303: Atlanta
40404: Berea, KT
50505: N/A
60606: Chicago
70707: Gonzales, LA
80808: Calhan, CO
90909: N/A
90101: Los Angeles
So you can see that having a "cool", memorable zip code corresponds
somewhat to living in one of the US's biggest cities: New York, Atlanta,
Chicago, or (breaking the pattern a little) LA. This is similar to the way
the easy to dial area
codes were given to big cities in the 1950s. If you want to find out how
important your town was then, add up the numbers of your area code. New
York's, 212, is the fastest possible to dial on the rotary telephone,
followed by LA's 213.
But not necessarily, as some large cities didn't get their region's
repeating zip code.
Jason sends along this cool
zip code browser (req.
Java).
Posted at 12:50
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Sunday Bloody Sunday Someone took clips of Bush audio and spliced it together to create a cover
of the U2 song...word for word!
This is AMAZING.
George Bush sings "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
This sort of extra-pertinent for me because I was just listening to this
powerful song over the weekend.
You heard U2's song about the massacre in Northern Ireland, "Sunday Blood
Sunday" right?
Posted at 11:55
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Photos from John Edwards's Labor Day rally V for Victory!
Betty McCollum and me.
For more, see this
link.
I took some photos for DFLers.org.
Posted at 11:02
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Work like you're 10 points down First, you need 50% + 1 to win. Everything else is ego.
Second, no matter what the polls say,
work like you're ten
points down.
At Camp Wellstone, I learned two important things about campaigns.
Posted at 20:35
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Are you reading DFM? It also has a rollicking
events list with plenty of ways to get involved.
Are you reading the Democcracy for
Minnesota blog? You should be. It's turning into a real powerhouse of a
Minnesota liberal group blog. Tony Dorsano is kicking ass daily with his
posts, and I try to add a dollop or two myself.
Posted at 21:16
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RNC bloggers go wild Salon checks in on the RNC bloggers
to
see how they're holding up. In short, their coverage comes down to, "Hey
look! Hot chicks!"
There was a lot of criticism of DNC bloggers' navel-gazing. RNC bloggers
noted this and promised bigger and better things. Kevin Aylward of
Wizbang! said, "Readers rightly criticized the number of 'hey, look at me'
posts from DNC bloggers. I'm aware much of the audience isn't interested
in what I had for dinner and what my hotel room is like."
Posted at 09:25
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Newspaper Advertising It is incredibly expensive!
Here's the Star
Tribune's rates and here's the
Pioneer Press's rates.
To run a full page Sunday ad in the Strib will run you $30,000. In the
Pioneer Press, it's a mere $23,000 (if I'm reading the rates correctly --
it's a bit confusing).
Yikes! $50 grand to hit both Sunday papers?
I was looking at newspaper advertising today on a whim.
Posted at 14:06
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Bug 17K I thought it was appropriate that I filed this numerically significant bug
because I'm using it to track the development (and test) a Subversion hook
I'm writing to submit change messages to Bugzilla.
I just filed bug 17000 in the Bugzilla system at work. This is the 2000th
bug since I wrote the conversion script that migrated us from the
God-awful ProblemTracker to Bugzilla.
Posted at 13:26
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John Kerry on the Daily Show
Check out John Kerry on the
Daily Show via Blogumentary.
Posted at 21:30
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Why Johnny Can't Read (Revised Edition) by Steve Greenberg.
Jenny's tried to go to the library multiple times this week to no avail:
they are always closed.
Fuck library budget cuts!
Posted at 12:03
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Kerry-Edwards Special I really like this one that shows the train heading into
Kirkwood, MO as people line the tracks to cheer.
I'm not a railfan like my friend Nick, but these
shots of the Kerry-Edwards special are pretty awesome.
Posted at 15:32
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PhotoStamps Via Boing
Boing.
Make your own stamps. OK, this is fucking awesome. Make your own stamps!
Posted at 14:48
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The Onion comes to Minneapolis/St. Paul! It launches September 2nd.
Sweeeet. The Onion is
coming to the
Cities.
Posted at 11:13
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Doom 3 flashlight
Jason says:
One of the biggest complaints about Doom 3 is that there must exist a roll of duct tape somewhere on mars so the grunt can tape his flashlight to his weapon. Well, here it is ;) http://ducttape.glenmurphy.com/
Posted at 14:27
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Oops!
Funny insult from mondo dentro to a conservative poster in Atrios's
comments: "Oops! You must think you're posting at a Neocon Website.
Tacitus must be in the other window. Use alt-tab to go back."
Posted at 08:31
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Doom 3 Hardware Guide
The [H]ard|OCP Doom3
Hardware Guide is very helpful.
Posted at 11:47
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Pacfish I want one.
Posted at 09:55
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Moore Treason From the Urge
Ashcroft to brand Michael Moore what he really is -- traitor to America!
petition.
After signing, you recieve a free brownshirt with cool armband!
Don't let Moore get away with treason! Sign this petition urging U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to brand Moore a treacherous traitor guilty of seeking to undermine our nation's resolve to fight while giving aid and encouragement to our avowed enemies during a time of war!
Posted at 09:28
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Window Seat This was on Boing Boing a long time ago, and I bookmarked it and forgot
about it.
Window Seat looks like an awesome book for
frequent flyers. North American geography -- from 30,000 feet!
Posted at 11:37
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Web based RSS aggregators (open source) Mark
Irons unnamed Perl aggregator. Lightweight, CSS scriptable. Uses
XML::Simple.
Meerkat. Insane. Uses XML::Simple.
Feed on Feeds. PHP. RSS and
Atom. Barfs on broken feeds (see todo: "Find a way to handle broken feeds
better."). But then, probably all of these do. Uses Magpie.
Blagg. Perl, integrates
with Bloxom, with plugins for MT. Uses regexps.
Drupal's web based aggregator. Requires
Drupal. ;)
Feed on Feeds looks the most promising. Rasterweb has done some
customization to Feed on Feeds and likes its hackability (and he's a Perl
programmer, so that's saying something about a PHP app). See:
Super-Happy-Terrific Aggregator,
Super-Happy-Terrific
FEED ON FEEDS? (dicusses using Universal Feed Parser),
FEED ON FEEDS ala
Bloglines,
Feed on Feeds Unread List,
More
Aggregator Madness,
Yet More Aggregator Madness.
I think it would be possible to use the Universal Feed Parser to poke data
into Feed on Feeds database.
Update: Ohhh, someone already modified Feed on Feeds to use UFP.
Simple Aggregator.
Update 2: I shouldn't have started writing all that crap about hacking
Feed on Feeds before reading the links off of Rasterweb.
Temboz is a
Python RSS aggregator that uses SQLLite, Cheetah tempates, and the UFP.
That sounds very much like what I want (though having a built-in webserver
is not). But it's not released yet, and it's unclear it ever will be.
I'm thinking about setting up a web-based RSS aggregator for a project (it
would function sort of like Dave Winer's
Convention Bloggers site). Ideally,
it would use the Universal Feed Parser to parse
(and not barf) on as many formats as possible. But I haven't found any web
based aggregators with that parser, and I'm not that interested in
writting my own. So here's a list of web-based RSS aggregators I've found:
Posted at 10:25
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Doom 3
Posted at 10:04
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Doom 3
Where are you going to be
when Doom 3
comes out?
Posted at 19:56
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Proof your company sucks, #287 "Effective 8/6/04, all email size limitations will be enforced at 150
megabytes. Any exceptions to this policy have already been notified."
Cost of 200GB hard drive: $150.
Cost per MB: $.00075
Your worth to company: $.11
Manipulate numbers as appropriate for RAID level and backup medium.
Mailbox size limits.
Posted at 12:43
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Interesting bug of the day
SYLK: File format is not valid
Posted at 21:26
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How do you get a McJob when you have too much experience?
Interesting thread on the JoS forums from a guy who lost his upper 5-6
figure tech job and can't get work anywhere. He's overqualified and has
trouble lying about his experience to land a McJob. Lots of good advice on
this thread about how to deal with being down and out, how to get a job,
any job.
Posted at 09:13
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Powell on Sudan Ladies and gentlemen, start your irony!
"We should not underestimate what a difficult choice that would be in a
sovereign country where there is no U.N. resolution for any such
action..."
Posted at 14:59
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Super Mario Rampage It's a little to easy to be worthwhile, but fun for a laugh.
Super Mario re-envisioned as a side
scrolling shooter (and is that soundtrack by the Minibosses?)
Posted at 14:57
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Scenes from the DNC Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly argue on the street corner. They are
discussing terms for Moore to appear on O'Reilly's show.
Via
Tom Tomorrow.
Here's something you don't see every day...
Posted at 09:25
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Bush approval rating tracks the price of gasoline
Weird. President Bush's approval rating
tracks the inverted price of gasoline very closely. Via
Professor Pollkatz.
Posted at 14:33
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What's it like gathering signatures for Nader on the eve of the DNC?
Salon's War Room has an
amusing post about the trials and tribulations of being a Nader petition
signature gatherer in Boston on the eve of the Democratic National
Convention.
A few feet away Elizabeth approaches an unassuming 30-something man dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a sun hat.
"Would you like to sign a petition to put Ralph Nader on the ballot in Massachusetts?"
The man's face instantly darkens. "Yeah, right," he sneers, and turns to stride off. "Sign me up to kick that fuckhead in the ass."
Posted at 09:39
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MN GOP: What is Patty Wetterling Telling Liberal Special Interests that She isn't Telling Voters? Liberal Special Interests: Why should we support you?
Patty: I'm not Mark Kennedy.
Liberal Special Interests: Yea!
The Minnesota GOP
wants to know. Here's what I think she's telling them:
Posted at 15:57
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Dead girl, live boy
"I will root for the Yankees next season, attend Sunday Mass every week
and live in Peoria for a full year if Kerry wins Wyoming. This would only
happen if Bush winds up with a dead girl AND a live boy, and it all
happens to be an undead, trans-sexual Dick Cheney." -- DavidNYC,
Swing
State Project
Posted at 14:44
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DFLers.org launches I've been working on this for the last couple of months. It took a while
to get going, but once we got the hosting account it came together pretty
fast. I am proud of how the site has turned out, but there's still a lot
of work to do.
P.S. Bonus props to
DU's Dickie Flatt for spotting this hours after I started working on it
last night.
The Scoop-based DFL
blog launched today. http://www.dflers.org
Posted at 21:28
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I'm not...
Harpers has collected a list of statements chronicling
things President Bush is not.
Posted at 18:24
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Forged!
Slactivist takes the fall for forging the infamous Iraq/Niger uranium
documents. Now we know who did it!
Posted at 10:22
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Chipotle Calculator The story goes that someone's at work's husband put this together using
the nutrition facts at Chipotle's website. Anyway, it's good for a laugh.
I got this
eye-opening Chipotle calculator spreadsheet (Excel) from a co-worker. It
shows how many calories (and fat, and sodium, and carbs...) are in those
huge Chipotle burritos, depending what you put on them.
Posted at 17:25
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PyLucene versus Lupy Well, it doesn't matter much, I guess. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to use
one of these soon.
I wonder why the OSAF folks created
PyLucene instead of improving the existing Python port of Lucene 1.2,
Lupy. Performance?
Posted at 10:30
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Fahrenheit 411
Here's an interesting idea: a wingnut wants to use Michael Moore's footage
from F9/11 to make his own movie telling the other side of the story,
called Fahrenheit 411. I think that would be pretty
cool. Rip, mix, burn, and all that.
Posted at 09:47
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Is the one-page resume dead? In response to a recently job posting, we got a number of resumes, and
none of them were in the "classic" one page format (almost all of them
were terrible, but that's another story). This was for a senior software
engineer position, so people with over 5 years of experience.
I've got three years of experience at my current job, plus a student
developer job I had in college and an open source project on my resume. I
always try to keep my resume one page, which limits the amount of stuff
that I can put on there.
After seeing these resumes -- though most people had a few more years of
experience than I do -- I'm wondering if the one page resume is dead. What
do JoS readers think? Is your resume multiple pages?
Here's a question I asked over on the Joel on Software forum:
Posted at 09:35
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A vote for Nader... Tell us how you really feel, Steve.
The typical formulation goes, "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." Steve
Gilliard goes right for the jugular with,
"Every vote for Nader condemns an American soldier to death".
Posted at 11:37
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PHP Woes PHP in contrast to Perl (but has a good overview of
the weaknesses of PHP).
PHP: A
love and hate relationship ... the quality problems of most PHP code.
Experiences of
Using PHP in Large Websites is a good article from Linux 2002.
These articles mirror my experiences with PHP. No namespacing is my
biggest complaint. It's the root of both PHP's hideously overburdened list
of built-in global functions and the inability to make modularized PHP
code (ever noticed how many stand alone PHP apps there are compared to
good libraries?).
Posted at 19:26
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Not In Our Name 404 "Page not found...just like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
Not In Our Name's 404 is pretty
funny.
Posted at 14:14
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Cheney/Edwards debate sneak preview If Halliburton and the Carlyle Group both invited you to the movies on the
same night, who would you go with?
For Edwards:
If, as you say, there are two Americas, which one is your vacation home
in?
For Cheney:
Posted at 13:43
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Turning conventional wisdom on its head That's why I love this ad for LavaLife.com:
Now, this is an ad that turns conventional wisdom on its head. It says,
"Look women! You have tons of men to choose from on our site!"
Everyone knows that online dating services are overwhelmed with horny,
desperate guys trying to hookup with the hot chicks they saw in the ads.
Ads for these services acknowledge this and cater to the horny, desperate
guy demographic with ads showing nubile young women who really want to
meet you. Yeah right.
Posted at 10:09
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Daily Show on F9/11
John Stewart takes a look at F9/11: "Did he just ambush her on her own
interview?"
Posted at 16:44
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America?
This Land Is Whose
Land? City Pages interviews What America
Needs director about Disney's new documentary America's Heart & Soul.
Posted at 10:39
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Ehrenreich in the New York Times
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickled and Dimed, is writing a guest column
in the New York Times for the next month as a welcome replacement for Tom
"Tortured Metaphor" Friedman. Her
first column on the "liberal elite" is worth reading.
Posted at 08:09
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Speech to text Doesn't technology rule?
Sample output from speech to text software (from test data at work):
the urban there's a lot of traffic a monkey on anatomy if the typhoon around Andrea living then out definitely a pair stores everywhere actors at Apple supermarket in there
Posted at 15:19
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Libertarian Planning Aside from these two rules, anything else is allowed. It's libertarian
urban planning.
This is awesome. It requires buildings to address the street (one of the
must crucial features of a walkable neighborhood) and not overpower their
surroundings. The essence of livable places in just two simple rules.
(Via
City Comforts)
Wow, this is cool. Jane Jacobs and Ken Greenberg
boiled urban planning into two rules:
Posted at 21:45
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The Electoral Calculus of Iraq
Josh
Marshall: The economy does continue to be an advantage for the president.
But Iraq -- and the myriad of assumptions, policies and repercussions it
represents -- is what this election is all about. I take it as a given
that virtually no Gore voters from 2000 will pull the lever for Bush. But
how many lightly-committed Bush voters from 2000 will hold him to account
if they believe he gambled big and gambled unwisely with America's honor
and safety, and came up short? I think more than a few. And since there
were more Gore voters than Bush voters last time anyway, well ...
Posted at 18:03
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Those Wacky Greens
And they say Democrats hate America? I like the part about voting for a
guy who's been dead for 75 years (Actually, in my small dealings with
Green party leaders, they seem to have some sort of obsession with Eugene
V. Debs.).
For Greens, roll call of states is more like a litany of sins
Chuck Haga, Star Tribune
June 29, 2004 GREEN0629
MILWAUKEE -- At the Green Party national convention here on Saturday, state delegations paraded to floor microphones to announce their votes for a presidential nominee, and it was just like listening to the Republicans and Democrats.
Well, almost.
Major-party convention halls usually ring with unabashed pride and self-promotion as vote announcers remind everyone that "the great state of [fill-in-the-blank]" is home to this sainted man or that unparalleled mountain range.
At the Greens' convention, though, the spin was a little different. Delegates were told, for example, that "the great state of Indiana" extends "from the shores of polluted Lake Michigan in the north to the clear-cut banks of the Ohio River in the south, with many other sins in between."
Before casting its votes, New York trumpeted itself as "home of Wall Street and unbridled corporate greed."
And the great state of Minnesota? It is, delegate Kellie Burriss of Minneapolis intoned, "the land of 10,000 lakes and the Boundary Waters -- as well as the home of the Prairie Island nuclear power plant."
The reference to nuclear power drew a chorus of boos from the Greens, but that changed to loud, sustained cheers when Burriss read out the state's votes, which included "one vote for Eugene Debs," cast by delegate Wade Hannon of Moorhead, a teacher and counselor.
Debs, who died in 1926, was a fierce critic of the established order and five-time Socialist Party candidate for president. In 1908, he stumped the nation on a train dubbed the Red Special. In 1920, he campaigned from a federal prison cell after being convicted under espionage laws for speaking against World War I.
When the convention chairman repeated Minnesota's vote totals, ending with "one vote for Eugene Debs," the hall erupted with cheers again.
Posted at 08:46
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Word Cleaner Why pay $99 when you can
get it for free?
Word Cleaner is a lot like my
Word Unmunger with some
useless features like an easy to use UI ;)
Posted at 14:16
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Wow
The FuckYou/FuckMe is
finally
reality.
Posted at 13:51
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Walk home drunk It's not in English, but just click on the guy's sign to start, and move
your mouse from side to side to steady him as he walks.
Co-worker Jason sends along this funny game.
I can get about 50 meters.
Posted at 09:44
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IMAP idiots On the first one, I can send mail to distribution list aliases.
On the second one, I can send mail outside the company.
At work, I have a choice of two IMAP servers. Why two?
Posted at 09:34
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2004 candidates
Sure, you've heard about the boring ol' choices for president...Kerry,
Nader, Bush, Badnarik. Why be a slave to the four party quartopoly? Daily
Kos diarist apostropher
gives a rundown of
the more, uh, unique candidates this year, including the Prohibition Party
and the Judean People's Front, er, the various socialist splinter parties
("[Socialist Worker's Party] gets extra credit by nominating two people
ineligible to hold the office, since Roger Calero isn't an American
citizen and his VP choice is only in her 20's."
Posted at 08:11
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You are not special
You are not special. I don't care how awesome you think your "framework"
is, it ought to follow the standard Java package naming convention. You
are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
Posted at 15:32
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Confluence Wiki It looks highly sweet. They only thing they're really lacking from my
vision is automated documentation insertion/extraction (which I never
figured out how to get working ...it was based on ideas from the book The
Pragmatic Programmer) and diagramming tools. But it has an API and
they've written a thick client so theoretically that would be possible,
too.
It's proprietary software: $1200/25 users or $4000 for a site license.
Well, it's cheaper than BitKeeper, anyway.
The other day, I described a bit of what my ideal writing tool would be
like (I have pages and pages of further description in my notebooks, which
I won't bore you with). Atlassian has come pretty close with their
Confluence wiki. It has all the standard
wiki features,
then: "On top of that, we added professional features, such as the
partitioning of content into separately managed spaces, user- and
group-based access control, automated refactoring, PDF exporting,
searchable attachments, a comprehensive remote API, easy installation and
a professional and easy-to-use presentation..."
Posted at 13:42
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Starting a career in "user experience" Step 1: Get a pair of glasses like this guy's...
How do you
start
a career in "user experience"?
Posted at 11:51
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TCJUG
Anyone know what happened to the Twin Cities Java Users Group? They seem
to have fallen
off the face of the Earth.
Posted at 10:33
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Resume P.S.: We really are hiring someone, and it's a tough spot to fill. If you
know a really good Java person, I'd like to hear from them.
Here's a resume tip folks: Put the dates of your education, damn it!
Posted at 14:49
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Hipikat This reminds me of an idea I had for a searchable and editable
"Developer's Notebook" which would be sort of a rich client interface to a
wiki, with diagramming and documentation generation capabilities. Perhaps
something like that would be a good Eclipse plugin as well.
Hipikat looks like an
interesting Eclipse plugin. It's a research project that provides
pervasive search of your "software artifcats"...documentation, bug notes,
news group posts. Check out the
senarios
for examples of its use. It's a research project and obviously a little
flaky, but the ideas are cool.
Posted at 13:14
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Congradulations to the Canned Platypus
Congradulations to Jeff Darcy and his wife Cindy on the
birth of their first
child, Amelia Rose.
Posted at 11:40
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A good deal I recently read three novels by A. E. van Vogt, one of the early masters
of pulp science fiction. I picked up this three book set at Book Smart on
a whim, and it turned out to be a good deal. For four bucks, I got
The World of Null-A,
The Voyage of the Space Beagle, and
Slan. I was mostly curious about The World of Null-A, and I'd never even
heard of Voyage of the Space Beagle, but all three books ended up being
enjoyable reading. This is old skool sci-fi, where the heros are men, the
science isn't, and the pages turn quickly and the writing best not dwelled
on. But very entertaining.
Posted at 20:21
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Confused Coworker (I've taken the liberty of blurring out his license plate number.)
On this older economy car, there are:
(Cue
Seasame Street music: "One of these things is not like the others/One of
these things just doesn't belong")
What is the story with this car? Did the owner buy it used, with the
environmental stickers already attached? Is the owner being ironic?
Perhaps he's one of those
"crunchy"
conservatives, who cares about the environment (but in that case, what's
he doing voting for Bush?). Or maybe the owner is a triffle confused. Or
an idiot.
These are the only explanations I can come up with, and yet each is
dissatisfying.
Here's a photo of a car from work:
Posted at 19:33
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Stellar Associated Press
June 16, 2004 IRS0617
State Republican Party Chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife have had a
$390,113 federal tax lien filed against them by the Internal Revenue
Service.
The dispute, Eibensteiner said, relates to the calculation of capital
gains for stock options he exercised in the Eden Prairie-based software
company Stellent Inc., on which he once served on the board.
``I thought it would get resolved, and I think the position they're taking
is unreasonable,'' said Eibensteiner of the IRS. ``My accountant and my
attorney have a different view of it than the IRS.''
Although the lien was filed on May 6, Eibensteiner said he was unaware of
the filing. The lien indicates that the dispute can be traced to the 2001
tax year.
Stellent, which was previously called IntraNet Solutions until being
renamed in 2001, is publicly traded. Stellent identifies itself as ``a
global provider of content management solutions.''
IRS files tax lien against state GOP chairman, wife
Posted at 09:04
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SmartDraw
I came across SmartDraw today. I don't know if
it's any good, but it looks like a nice way to do
web page mockups.
Posted at 15:34
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Poker Some friends have a monthly game, but I never thought about it as a wider cultural phenomenon. Interesting.
Jack of Smarts: Why the Internet generation
loves to play poker.
Posted at 10:17
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Kerry Rocks Due to increasing intrest, RCA has
re-released the Electra's
album and you can buy it for $14 (previously, it was nearly impossible to
find). It's crazy that RCA kept the masters in their catalog for all this
time. But you never know when the bass player from some shitty garage band
might get nominated for President.
Update: Sweet, got this
posted on
Boing Boing.
It's a little known fact that John Kerry was in a high school band called
The Electras (he played bass). The site
KerryRocks.com has lots of photos, the liner
notes, and an MP3 melange of some of their songs.
Posted at 15:49
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HORNSWAGGLED!!!
HORNSWAGGLED!!!
How the Me of Now was Tricked by the Me of Yesterday into Going to War by
George W. Bush.
Posted at 15:13
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Job
Looking for a job working on a
probably-doomed product in the world's most characterless suburb? Yes,
that's right, my group is hiring.
Apply online!
Posted at 14:22
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Democratic National Convention Well, all in good fun I guess, but two can play at that game.
Apparently some wingnuts are google bombing the
Democratic National Convention with a pro-Bush look-alike site.
Posted at 12:18
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F911 in Minnesota Update: Since I posted this, they've added several more venues,
including the Lagoon in Minneapolis.
Michael Moore's controversial new movie Fahrenheit 9/11 is currently
scheduled to play in only two
theaters in Minnesota, both in Oakdale (fer God's sake).
Posted at 08:51
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The Uncanny Valley I agree that a more stylized representation is the best way out of this.
Humans in games just look stupid. I think the anime/manga style is a good
example of high-detail but representational characters.
Slate's Clive Thompson writes about the
"uncanny valley" that game designers face when they try to create
realistic looking human characters. It's virtually impossible, because no
matter how "real" the characters look, our brains are hardwired to find
the deficiencies...the eyes don't look right, the skin doesn't move, the
lips and mouth movements are off.
Posted at 10:05
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Radiorocket
Wes put it as "Rocket
+ video camera + Radiohead", but the truth is that the equation is
Rocket + video camera + Radiohead =
Awesome.
Posted at 19:55
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Google News OOPS! Heh. That link doesn't actually go to the Chicago Sun Times. It goes to
the e-ThePeople discussion
site.
Posted at 18:16
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Mozilla freaking out on Blogspot sites They're trying to get it fixed for 1.7. But fortunately, they'res a work
around -- hit reload. Since part of the page is on your cache, Mozilla
loads it correctly.
Every once in a while (yet, very reproducible on certain sites, for
example Digestible News) I will hit
a blogspot site that just makes Mozilla freak out halfway down the page.
I'm not the only one having problems: check out
Mozilla bug #241085.
It turns out that Mozilla gets confused when the server sends one version
of the page compressed, then responds to a range-request with uncompressed
data.
Posted at 16:30
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Dance Dance Resurrection
An exciting new development in
Christian Entertainment!
Posted at 11:35
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bSOS
Check out two men's quest to get
Beer Sales on
Sunday (bSOS). Winner of the Grain Belt Film Festival...uh, whatever that
is.
Posted at 20:46
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It's here... What kind of idiot spends that much on a chair? Now you know.
Posted at 09:43
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Rain, rain, go away
Co-worker Jason says: "When did we move to Seattle?" Good question!
Posted at 14:52
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Celeb mix tapes
Turns out musicical celebrities have the same lousy taste in music as
everyone else. Now, thanks to the iTunes music store, you can
share in their banality.
Posted at 15:20
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The Way We Eat Now
is incredibly
depressing.
Posted at 14:12
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Second Generation Traffic Calming The article is marred by a semi-off topic comparison to the lawless
streets of China, which sparked a number of
"Are you crazy?" letters (which the author
had to
correct in a response)
Ignore the part about China, but
read
the article and
the interesting responses
Salon has an interesting article on
"second generation" traffic calming, which is a new movement in Europe --
where streets have traditionally been multi-modal -- to open streets to
all sorts of uses. The interesting part is how they do this: by removing
all traffic signs, markings, and sidewalks. Cars, motorcycles, bikes,
pedestrians and roadside merchants share the street equally. Because
everything is chaotic, cars have to stay around 20 miles per hour, which
also just happens to be the maximum speed humans can maintain eye contact.
Drivers and pedestrians have to look at each other to communicate shared
usage of the street.
Posted at 14:21
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H is for Hardcore Via
BoingBoing, I see that this is not a unique observation. Check out
Cookie Mongoloid, the
Sesame Street speed metal cover band (check out
their songs).
I have had trouble taking heavy music seriously ever since Jenny pointed
out that all hardcore sounds as if it's sung by Cookie Monster. She even
talked about doing a hardcore cover of "C is for Cookie" called "H is for
Hardcore".
Posted at 10:08
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Let me get this straight All this happened even though it was painfully obvious that Chalabi was a
huckster (The Prince counsels against ever trusting exiles) and the
evidence coming from Hans Blix's inspections show that Iraq didn't have
any WMDs.
Now, it turns out that Chalibi's intelligence guy was an Iranian agent.
Iran, one third of the "Axis of Evil", manipulated George W. Bush into a
war to destroy their greatest enemy, Saddam Hussien's Iraq.
Because of the Bush administration's lack of judgment, we went to war on a
lie -- an Iranian lie -- and over 900 coalition troops have died, along
with thousands of Iraqi civilians. Growing frustrated with their inability
to find the WMDs, the Pentagon approved the use of harsh interrogation
techniques supposedly reserved for terrorists. This order is implemented
by untrained and unsupervised National Guard MPs. At least a few of them
turn out to be sadists who torture the prisoners at Abu Gharib (and else
where?) above and beyond their already cruel orders. Photos from the
prison ricochet around the world, destroying the myth of American
Exceptionalism. The country that once considered itself the shining City
on the Hill is now ashamed.
To top it all off, a new intelligence report indicates that Al Qaeda
recruitment is up and the terrorist group now has over 18,000 fighters.
Is that about right? Unbelievable. Never in my wildest dreams did I
imagine the war would go this bad.
OK. Let me get this straight. The Bush administration used faulty
intelligence from Ahmad Chalabi to justify the war on Iraq. Chalabi also
pawned off his nonsense on other intelligence agencies, so when the US
went looking to confirm the reports of Iraq's WMD program, other nations
backed them up (any guesses on who came up with the forged uranium
letter?). In the run up to the war, Chalabi also was a major source for
the New York Times, helping to solidify backing for the war among the
press, and hence the public.
Posted at 08:43
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Madison Rules
Kids in Madison have all the fun. First, the hilarious Daily Show bit
about their anti-trust lawsuit against bars eliminating drink specials;
now, a sweet Robot Protest.
Posted at 14:06
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Dean and Kerry "I certainly admired you for kicking my [expletive] in Iowa," Dean said to
roars of laughter and a quick high-five from the victor.
Sounds like they're
getting along well:
Posted at 10:58
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What do lofts say about us? The article also touches on the Jane Jacobs theseis of the life-cycle of a neighborhood.
And it notes that those who started the craze can't really afford them anymore:
And so, ironically, the search for "authenticity" pushes out those who made a neighborhood authentic in the first place. This is also part of the cycle Jane Jacobs wrote about. They move on to
a new, cheaper place.
I think developers could help maintain the autenticity of their loft developments by reserving a certain number of units for artists and other interesting characters at a subsidized rate.
Also, if they incorporate small shops into the ground level of the development, they could make live/work units cheaper and therefore encourage more creative people to live in the unit. I
think others in the loft would appreciate this and pay for the extra value of living in a continuously interesting neighborhood.
Lofty Ideals is an interesting article in the Strib (login: cypherpunks/cypherpunks) about what the development and popularization of
loft-style living means for our society.
Loft living is "part of a larger, modern quest for authenticity" in ways new construction is not, says Zukin, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and City University Graduate Center, and author of the lifestyle bible, "Loft Living; Culture and Capital in Urban Change." Lofts are "organic," not pre-fab, and because they are both yesterday and tomorrow, they provide "landmarks for the mind," Zukin writes.
Loft living did not always mean luxury. In New York in the 1950s, lofts became popular places for artists. They were ragtag spaces that cost little but had plenty of light and air.
But as artists became celebrities and held parties in their homes, the upper and upper-middle classes were exposed to high ceilings, big windows and industrial artifacts. As modern art became more accepted by the masses, so did the desire to copy the artist's romantic lifestyle. So what does the loft craze say about current times and the people who populate them?
A dissolution of formal relationships, gender inequities and walls between work and life, for a start, according to Ritsuko Ozaki, research fellow at the Innovation Studies Centre of the Tanaka Business School in London....
"My respondents stressed that they shared household chores and that it was important for the female partner not to be excluded from social occasions they had in their home," she said in an e-mail. "Therefore, the open-plan layout can be seen as a reflection of new socio-cultural values [e.g. less unequal conjugal roles, less formal relationships among household members and more interaction between household members] of a certain group of people."
Despite the iconoclastic tone to the loft sales pitch, it's no secret that those who started the trend, artists, are often no longer able to afford those very spaces.
And while many loft livers say they want to live near unconventional people, most of their neighbors will eventually be as fairly conventional as they are.
While small, warren-like loft spaces can be found in places such as the Franklin Lofts for as little as $130,000, most are priced for a vastly different clientele: those who can afford $250,000 to more than a million dollars.
Posted at 10:13
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Stalking the Bogeyman
What would you say to the man who
raped
you when you were seven?
Posted at 21:18
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Fargo Bezerk This is totally hilarious. I grew up in Fargo, near the West Acres Mall
(basically, the mall in Fargo). And Officer Volrath, I'm pretty sure,
was the D.A.R.E. officer for my 6th grade class.
I guess the guy who did it is planning on pleading guilty, since he
doesn't really try to excuse his actions...
Can you
hear me now? Fargo man charged in trashing cell phone store
By Jeff Zent, The Forum
Published Friday, May 14, 2004
Can you hear me now? Jason Perala's message got through loud and clear to employees at a Fargo Verizon Wireless store Wednesday.
The Fargo construction worker said he planned only to scream at the employees at the store in West Acres mall.
"Then I just lost it," he said in a phone interview a few hours later, from inside the Cass County Jail.
"I just started grabbing computers and phones and throwing them," he said. "I just destroyed the place."
Unreliable phones and poor service were eating away at Perala for months, he said.
"I'm always sending money across that counter," he said. "I'm tired of doing things their way."
Perala's rampage began just after the cellular phone store in West Acres shopping mall opened at 10 a.m., police said.
A phone hurled across the store struck an employee in the shoulder before he and other workers dashed into an office, locked the door and called police, Fargo Police Sgt. Kevin Volrath said.
Perala tried to open the office door, then turned his attention back to the store's merchandise, Volrath said.
The rampage drew a crowd while some area businesses lowered their steel security gates, said Samantha Guthmiller, who works at a kiosk just outside Verizon Wireless.
Perala took off his shirt and continued to throw merchandise and displays throughout the store, she said.
A phone thrown from the store landed near her feet, she said.
"I couldn't really make out what he was ranting and raving about," she said. "The whole thing made me a little nervous."
Guthmiller said the ruckus lasted about 10 minutes before police arrived.
Officers drew their taser guns and ordered Perala to the floor. He complied and was arrested without incident, Volrath said.
Store employees closed the store for the day and spent the afternoon cleaning up. They declined to comment.
Store manager Paul Terveen referred questions to the company's Chicago office.
Perala didn't walk into the store to settle a problem, said company spokesman David Clevenger from Chicago. The store came under attack as soon as he walked in, Clevenger said.
The employee hit by a phone was not seriously injured, he said.
Perala said he put on a pair of safety glasses before entering the store because he thought employees could have pepper spray.
"I was just going to scream at them, but that doesn't get anywhere," he said. "I didn't know what was going to happen but I knew something was going to happen."
Perala said he didn't intend to hit an employee and regretted that he had.
Volrath said the store received more than $2,000 in damages.
Four patrol officers responded to an employee's call for help. They arrested Perala on charges of criminal mischief, a Class C felony and misdemeanor simple assault.
"I started and I just couldn't stop," Perala said. "I kind of regret that I did it, but I hope my message got across."
Posted at 12:29
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Movable Type 3.0 and group blogs Yes, I do not think we will be upgrading any time soon. I have no use for commerical MT support and there are not that many new features.
And if I did want to upgrade, I would have to pay at least $150 to get what I currently have.
I don't want to demean the authors of MT. It's a great program, and their new pricing structure helps clarify what it can be used for
commerically. But it's left a class of non-commerical, tech-savvy heavy users out in the rain.
sigh That's what you get for using proprietary software.
Apparently, there is a great deal of discussion about the Movable Type 3.0 pricing structure. The "free"
edition is now limited to three weblogs and just one author. To get 9 authors, you've got to pay $190 ($150 intro price). This effectively
means the end of free and reasonably priced MT group blogs. For example, Crooked Timber has 15 co-bloggers
plus multiple guest bloggers (now requires a "commerical" license for $700/$600 intro). BushOut.TV has 6 authors,
not to mention being hosted as part of a MT installation with 10 users and more than 5 blogs.
Posted at 13:23
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Patches
Sweet. Another small patch for Free Software.
Posted at 11:51
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FARK North Dakota
Fark takes a look at the upcoming North Dakota quarter.
Posted at 09:12
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"United States"
HistoryShot prints are shipped
to the United States including Alaska and
Hawaii, and Canada.
Posted at 06:31
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Whoa.
Infinity (via
ArsTechnica).
Posted at 19:54
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Like fish in a barrel
Vermont. Home of flinty New Englanders, quirky politicans, Ben and Jerry's
ice cream, and...
fish shooting.
Posted at 19:50
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Chunnel Nice quote: "The last land link between Britain and France was worn away
by storms after the last Ice Age. It seems we will have to wait until the
next one for Britain to become truly part of Europe again."
I found this editorial about the
problems with the Chunnel interesting. The author says the root cause is
the continued aloofness of the British and (rational) French desire to
vaction in the Mediterranean instead of the UK.
Posted at 09:30
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What would it be like if Jerry Springer had a show on philosophy? Audience member: Okay, this is for Tina. Tina, I just wanna know how you
can call yourself an existentialist, and still agree with Nietzsche's
doctrine of the Ubermensch. Doesn't that imply a belief in intrinsic
essences that is in direct contradiction with with the fundamental
principles of existentialism?
Tina: No! No! It doesn't. We can be equal in potential, without being
equal in eventual personal quality. It's a question of Becoming, not
Being.
Audience member: That's just disguised essentialism! You're no
existentialist!
Tina: I am so!
Audience member: You're no existentialist!
Tina: I am so an existentialist, bitch!
Probably like this.
Posted at 10:39
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Micah Ian Wright lied about being a Ranger Bummer. The veteran thing gave his posters more "cred" (they are still
fantastic, of course). It is kind of weird how America exults military
service in a time when so few serve. That this is supposed to give
veterans a special kind of credibility on anything (except the experience
of war) reminds me of Starship Troopers.
Noted propaganda
remixer Micah Ian Wright lied about being an
Army Ranger.
Posted at 12:58
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Josh Marshall on Neocons
"In the popular political imagination we're familiar with the neocons as
conniving militarists, masters of intrigue and cabals, graspers for the
oil supplies of the world, and all the rest. But here we have them in what
I suspect is the truest light: as college kid rubes who head out for a
weekend in Vegas, get scammed out of their money by a two-bit hustler on
the first night and then get played for fools by a couple hookers who
leave them naked and handcuffed to their hotel beds." -- Josh Marshall, on
how
Ahmed Chalabi scammed the neocons.
Posted at 07:58
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Fafblog I feel better about it now.
Fafblog's Medium Lobster puts the Abu Ghuraib torture story
into perspective: "The activities that occurred at Abu Ghuraib prison are
not to be compared to those of Saddam Hussein's rape rooms and torture
chambers. After all, those were rape rooms and torture chambers.
These were merely rooms in which rape occurred, and chambers in which
individuals were tortured."
Posted at 14:27
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Occam's Swiss Army Knife My favorite is the "Marcus" investigation, where a woman describes a
cat-like humanoid being named "Marcus" who engadges in a "complete
spiritual union" with her. Analysis: "I can not think of any objective
natural or human made phenomena that would explain this encounter."
Uh, how about a bored housewife who hasn't had an orgasm in 20 years?
Check out these alien
abduction "investigations" from MNMUFON for a great example of what Jenny
calls "Occam's Swiss Army Knife" -- where the most complicated explanation
is mostly likely.
Posted at 14:11
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300 Images
300 Images from 1800 Sites. This is
a cool look at web icons culled from hundreds of well-known sites. Via
Widgetopia.
Posted at 17:16
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Straw Houses I'd never heard of such a thing. A house built of straw? It turns out
that hay bales can be used as a construction material. It was common in
the Great Plains when wood was expensive and hard to come by. They have
several advantages. Not only is hay cheap, but the thickness of the walls
provides great insulation. And the thick walls help provide some nice
patterns: #197, thick walls (for latter modification); and #202,
built-in seats at the windows.
It also turns out that straw houses can be quite beautiful.
Here's some links on them, including some books with nice photographs.
The Straw Bale House by by Athena Swentzell Steen, Bill Steen, and David
Bainbridge.
The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes by Athena Swentzell Steen, and Bill Steen.
The New Strawbale Home by Catherine Wanek.
House of
Straw - Straw Bale Construction Comes of Age by U.S. Department of
Energy.
"Those who live in straw houses shouldn't blow down."
Some friends of mine in Duluth (ahem of the hippie persuasion ahem)
are considering building a straw house.
Posted at 17:02
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Beyond Parody Unbelievable.
Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act. It reads like an
Onion headline, but it's not. It's from the Washington Post.
The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.
The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.
Posted at 11:52
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No Logo But why encourage Lasn's pseudo-brand? You can buy union made, sweatshop
free "Converse" sneakers TODAY from
Sweat Apparel. And it literally has
"No Logo", unlike Lasn's Black Spot shoe.
Cory's
linking to Kalle Lasn's new project, Black
Spot sneakers. It's will be a union made Converse-style sneaker designed
to "kick Nike's ass", complete with its own branding strategy.
Posted at 08:29
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Best Site EVER
http://www.JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyWay.com/
Posted at 21:29
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Brave new jobs A woman who has to take a waitress at a hotel serving the political and
financial elite finds many of the guests obnoxious:
This is not what I would've said. It's not nearly spiteful enough. Perhaps
something like:
"Yes, sir. And you? A Beta? Beta-plus, perhaps?"
That would enrage the presumed Alpha plus.
Claudia O'Keefe, Salon:
Brave new jobs.
Like people who speak extra loudly around the blind, the privileged communicated with me as if I had the I.Q. of a canapé. Once when I used the word "synonym" in conversation with a guest, he and everyone else in the party broke out laughing. "My God, she just used a word with three syllables," his wife said.
On another night I approached a table in the dining room.
"Are you the Epsilon who's going to serve us tonight?" asked one of the men at the table.
He was making a reference to the classic novel "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley, in which a future society is divided into strict castes according to intelligence and capabilities. The names of the castes, from the top down, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and at the absolute bottom, Epsilon, the semi-morons. He didn't think I would understand his reference, and exchanged amused glances with a friend, enjoying his joke.
"No, actually I'm an Alpha in disguise," I told him. "I'll be happy to take your order, however."
Posted at 13:43
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The Man Responsible
This letter from
yesterday's Star Tribune turns conventional wisdom on its head in a
delightful way:
The man responsible
I am extremely offended by the publication of photographs of the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers, and I wholeheartedly agree with the Pentagon that the individual responsible for this should be fired.
On Election Day, I intend to do my part to see to it that he is.
Wayne Swickley, New Hope.
Posted at 11:18
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Anti-Transit Troubadour That gave me the opportunity to search out one of my favorite pieces of
pro-transit literature:
Twelve
Anti-Transit Myths: A Conservative Critique (PDF) from the
Free Congress Foundation, no less. This
article is a great refutation of the "anti-transit troubadours" like
O'Toole.
My coworker Nick was telling me about this anti-transit book he saw at the
bookstore on the corner of University of Snelling (the one with the big
"SAY NO TO UNIVERSITY LIGHT RAIL LINE" sign in the window). I guessed,
"Hmm...Was it by Randall O'Toole?" Indeed,
it was.
Posted at 16:11
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Funny Slashdot ad
I thought this ad was funny:
Posted at 11:52
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Cube
Business card cube (via
Mark Gisleson).
Posted at 16:04
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Lost in Translation Apparently, many Japanese are unhappy with the movie because they find it
racist. Here's some articles about that:
Lost in Racism: No Votes for "Lost In
Translation" (a failed attempt to deny Lost in Translation's Oscar).
Christian Science Monitor:
'Lost in Translation'
doesn't translate well in Japan:
Mizuko Ito:
Totally Lost in Translation.
The eXile: Sofia's A Bad Choice:
A few weeks ago, I went to see [Lost in Translation] with some friends.
Jenny and Kim didn't like it because they thought it was too simplistic. I
thought it was sweet (or maybe I thought looking at Scarlett Johansson was
sweet).
[W]hile "Lost in Translation" opened all over the world last fall, it opened in image-conscious Tokyo only last weekend. Some sources say this is deliberate. Japanese decorum on culturally sensitive matters precludes angry protest or high-volume misgivings about images that might be considered unfair or "unpleasant," to use a local reviewer's term. But it is telling that the Academy-award-winning "valentine" can be seen here only in a small 300-seat theater in Shibuya, and critics warn that the film may hurt the feelings of ordinary Japanese.
Why am I on my high horse about the awful cornered-by-an-art-bimbo scenario? Because this is exactly what spending two hours watching Lost in Translation felt like. It is truly the dumbest and most pretentious movie I have seen in at least a year – in fact, I can't remember a movie as truly stupid and pretentious as this, because it's a really special combination of stupidity and pretentiousness that I didn't know existed outside of second-rate university cafes or dorm rooms. The experience of watching Lost in Translation was one of those rare moments in my seven years with the eXile where I genuinely felt like I was working at a job, a shitty job. I even called myself up to warn myself that I'll never allow myself to make me watch a movie like this again, then hung up on myself to prove a point. That'll show me!
Posted at 09:25
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Kill Bill
This Kill Bill game is addicting! I
can't quite beat it yet though...
Posted at 19:30
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Graphics for the Gipper Via
BagNews Notes.
Graphics for the Gipper is a fun exhibit of Regan parody posters from the
'80s.
Posted at 18:27
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iTunes song ratings
I'm finding iTunes' song rating feature too expressive. I don't really
need any rating beyond "Good" or "Bad"!
Posted at 21:00
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"I hate America"
Baghdad Burning: "Are tanks, troops and violence the only face of
America? If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi are 'America',
then yes- I hate America."
Posted at 19:46
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Great response to Nader supporters
Arianna Huffington was on Air America today talking about Nader. She
acknowledged that the system is broken and needs fixing, but
then she said, "When
your house is on fire it is not the time to be speaking of remodeling."
Posted at 08:36
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iTunes shuffle observation But, interestingly, I feel like I can get a sense for a old song after
just a few seconds. Before I skip it to go on to the next one, I enjoy a
five second burst of nostalgia.
Since I got my Mac, one of the first things I did was put all of my
(entirely legally obtained) music into iTunes. It's interesting to see how
my musical tastes have changed over the years. I haven't listened to much
of my own music since I decommissioned my old desktop about two years ago.
Naturally, my tastes have drifted towards the sort of music I've been
exposed to, which is Jenny's: short and loud. Consequently, I have trouble
listening to some of my old music, which tends to be longer and more
involved (Pink Floyd, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins for example). So I find
myself skipping through the list quite a bit.
Posted at 16:26
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Guest blog: Microsoft "Get the Facts" rant So, I was reading my trade rag today (yes, yes, eWeek, but it makes good
for bathroom breaks), and I ran across one of Microsoft's wonderful "Get
the facts" ads.
The chart compares Price/Performance for file serving. On the left is
"One Linux image running on two z900 mainframe CPUs". On the right is
"One Windows Server 2003 image running on two 900 MHz Intel Xeon CPUs".
The units were "Cost per megabit per second", and the z900 was $415 and
the Xeon was $40.
The conclusion is, please hold your laughter...
"Linux was found to be over 10 time more expensive than Windows Server
2003 in a recent study".
Ummm... yeah. If you're using a mainframe to serve files, you DESERVE
to pay that much for your stupidity.
Sure, it would be 10x more expensive to drive a
Kenworth to work than a
Yugo, but who in their right mind would do it!?
The following is a rant from my co-worker Jason
Cwik about Microsoft's Get the
Facts campaign. We're working on getting an image of the offending ad. --
Luke
Posted at 15:38
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Quote of the day
Jesus' General: "I wasn't--I repeat, wasn't--surfing the
Little Green Footballs blog
while touching myself inappropriately. That would be wrong."
Posted at 14:35
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Soldier's mom pays him a visit -- in Iraq
This is funny: US
mother's surprise Iraq visit. Susan Galleymore is a member of the
anti-war group Code Pink and visited Iraq witht hem. She decided to drop
by for a visit with her son who is an Army Ranger serving in Iraq.
Posted at 17:14
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Who knew?
Apparently, the Europeans put a
great deal of thought into
their paper system. All sizes use the same ratio, so pages can be
enlarged or shrunk seamlessly. Read on for the gritty details (via
Ry4an).
Posted at 15:27
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Quote of the Day
Andy, on exurbanites regulating gays: "The ironic thing is the people who
are trying to regulate the behavior of those different from them are
apparently the very people who will most likely ever come into contact
with those who are different from them."
Posted at 12:28
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iCal for MSPIFF Now I need to figure out how to use rsynch to keep it up to date!
I made a
small change to PHPiCalendar so the URL doesn't redirect you to the
default view. A minor detail, but I like pretty URLs, damn it!
I'm having fun playing with iCal, so I set up a calendar for the
MSPIFF
films I'm interested in using
PHPiCalendar.
Posted at 23:07
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Randi Rhodes on Nader: "We can't afford you." I didn't hear it, and there are no archives yet, but a dilligent Daily Kos
user typed it all up
for us.
Yesterday, on the debut of
her program on
Air America radio (the new liberal talk
radio station), Randi Rhodes verbally thrashed Ralph Nader.
Posted at 11:44
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The Law of Dick Since Bladerunner, there hasn't been a really exceptional Dick movie,
despite the torrents of them.
Now, Richard Linklater, who directed the mind-bending Waking Life, is
reportedly going to direct a
movie
version of "A Scanner Darkly" using the same rotoscoped animation
technique. Sounds pretty cool so far.
Except Keanu Reeves is going to star. Whoa.
Too bad. But the Law must not be broken.
I think there's a law in Hollywood: No Philip K. Dick Movie May Be Good.
Posted at 15:26
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Places to visit in MN Recently, he had an
article in the Star Tribune on 10 places in Minnesota "you've probably
never visited, but should."
Since the Strib nukes its archives, here's an abbreviated list:
Tim Bewer is one of the many great people I met while volunteering on the
Dean campaign. Besides his politics, he's also a travel writer, and the
author of a
Minnesota travel book (buy it!).
Posted at 11:20
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City Comforts
City Comforts looks like an
interesting book. It seems to be a pattern language for livable city
neighborhoods. The author, who describes himself as "mildly libertarian"
(and then, "My 'mildly libertarian stance' is, I regret most sincerely,
getting milder by the day." -- sounds like me) has a
blog for the book.
Posted at 09:12
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John Kerry, trophy candidate
This cartoon cuts a little too close to home...
Posted at 15:53
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iPod muggings I did notice this when I was in San Francisco, but I didn't think to prey
upon their upscale conformity. I guess that's why I'm not a petty
criminal.
In the UK, muggers are targeting iPod wearers by their distinctive white
headphones, reports the
Register.
Posted at 14:50
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Great moments in grammar The difference between affect and effect makes for a brain-twisting
construction in this frantic email.
From an IT email today: "Whoever is running VMWARE and has the mac address
of 00-50-56-E2-71-7E, you are effecting the network."
Posted at 12:55
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Irony
The definition of irony is a huge banner ad for Google AdSense.
Posted at 14:23
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Minnesota firsts '04 It was also the first day I was treated to my neighbor's blaring music
coming in my open window.
High temperature: 58 F.
Today was the first time this year I've gotten into a parked car and feel
that the inside of the car was uncomfortably hot.
Posted at 18:05
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Create your own Bush conspiracy * "This tool may not be used to create Democratic presidential candidate
speeches or generate content for MoveOn.org without the express permission
of Buttafly.com."
The George W. Bush Conspiracy
Theory Generator* is fun for everyone, no matter what party they're in.
Choose your event, co-conspirators, victim, and goal for an awesome Bush
conspiracy theory.
Posted at 09:40
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Great letter to the editor Best of all -- they're publishing it!
Jeff Boatright wrote a
great letter to the editor of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
Re: "White House blasts critic of terror war"
To the editors:
Let me help you with your job.
Man bites dog: NEWS.
Dog bites man: NOT news.
Top anti-terrorism official criticizes President: NEWS.
Administration flaks deny charges from critic: NOT news.
This simple list of examples may help you in designing your next set of headlines.
Best regards,
Jeff Boatright
Posted at 13:12
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Who asked? Who the hell asked? Bush?
Political Wire: Lieberman Says No To Veep.
Posted at 11:03
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Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival
The schedule for the 2004
Minneapolis/St. Paul
International Film Festival is up. I'm really looking forward to
The Corporation.
Posted at 13:38
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iPhoto Exposed She tried to name an ablum "Eufio 2/18/04" or something like that.
Perfectly reasonable.
Except.
iPhoto stores its albums as directories on the file system. And "/" is not
allowed. So iPhoto beeped at her and switched the "/" to a ":", which is a
legal character (Amusingly ":" is the path separator in Mac OS 9 and
before).
She didn't get it, and she should've had to. What's the best fix? I'm not
sure. If there isn't a good one, it just goes to showcase a major weakness
of our computer systems today.
The other day, Jenny stumbled on a good example of the principle of not
exposing the underlying nature of system to the user while she was using
iPhoto.
Posted at 22:35
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Blue State Digital Honestly, I was not that impressed with most of the tech stuff the Dean
campaign did. They had a first mover advantage, but the Clark campaign's
tools were much more elegant. Fortunately, the architect for that is
now working for
Kerry.
Some of the Dean campaign's tech people have put together a consulting
company called Blue State Digital.
Biggest surprise: the bat was automatically updated. It was so cheesy, I
was sure it was manually created. Questions remain -- why was Nicco always
said to be working late, updating the bat? And why was it only updated
ever hour if it was automatic? I'd do it every five minutes, at least!
Posted at 22:11
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Tycho on the Littermaid Plus I have a lot of people who swear by this thing, but when we tried it, it
just didn't work. Tycho's exprience mirrors mine exactly.
Tycho of Penny Arcade
gives the
smackdown to the Littermaid Plus automatic cat box.
Cat pee and litter is like wet cement, it's like a new state of matter. In an ordinary, non-robot litter box it has time to "set" so that you can remove it and then go do something that is important to you. If, on the other hand, a mechanical arm reaches out and spreads it the length and breadth of the device, now you have a completely disgusting new task you could never have imagined in trade for the one you thought you were giving up forever.
Posted at 15:58
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Justin's blog
No one told me Justin Chapweske had a blog!
Sweet, now I don't have to talk to him any more, I can just read his blog.
It's totally the same.
Posted at 12:36
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IT Conversations
IT Conversations features interviews
with big bloggers, tech pundits, coders, and other geeks. I haven't
listened in yet, but it looks pretty cool.
Posted at 11:21
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Fuckly?
Scott Rosenberg: "An
adverb modifies a verb, so it's awfully hard to turn a verb into an
adverb. 'Fuckly'? 'Fuckingly'? It just doesn't fly."
Posted at 09:07
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Javier and John's Dean Songs
Fellow Minnesota for Dean activists Javier and John
wrote some songs for
us: "What I did for Dean" (to the tune of "What I did for Love") and "His
Name was Howard (At the Caucus)" (to the tune of "Copacabana").
Posted at 08:28
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MoveOn at SXSW
Cory Doctrow posted an "impressionistic" transcript of the
MoveOn session
at SXSW.
Posted at 19:25
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Now that I'm a Mac user... (It's great, btw.)
...I guess I get to laugh at the lame-o Windoze users.
Posted at 09:20
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Bush and the recession, and the debt
Krugman: "No sensible person blames Mr. Bush for the onset of the
recession in 2001. But he does deserve blame for the fact that all he has
to show for three years of supposed job-creation policies is a mountain of
debt."
Posted at 08:20
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Cam Barrett hired by Kerry campaign Good. Cam's a pro, and I think he'll bring the Kerry online community up
to speed very quickly. We've now learned lessons from the Dean and Clark
campaigns about what works and what doesn't, and the strengths and
limitations of online activism.
I look forward to seeing what Cam and his team come up with.
Pioneering blogger and community software guy Cam Barret of
CamWorld, late of the Clark campaign, has been
hired by the Kerry
campaign.
Posted at 20:35
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Madrid A terrorist attack in Madrid today killed nearly 200 people, the worst
terrorist attack in Spanish history.
Posted at 09:29
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Shakespeare Social Networks Now this is cool. Social networks like Friendster are amusing for a
while, but like
Clay Shirky said the other day, I already know who my friends are.
Inputing metadata into social networks has the same problem of metadata
input everywhere: it's really
hard.
That's why I'm a believer in the value of derived metadata: textual
similarity and grouping, binary similarity,
full text search, PageRank. Social networking software can use observation
to graph the network, like the
Shakespeare example and
OrgNet's email analysis and
Red versus Blue
book buying analyses.
What I would love to be doing right now is writing a custom CMS and
network analysis program for political opposition research. I think this
would be incredibly cool. You could use publically available data, Google
and Lexis-Nexis searches, and intern blood, sweat, and tears to keep the
data on your targets up-to-date, then use derived networks to map
relationships between donors, supporters, and candidates. Would be cool.
Using PieSpy to detect
social networks in Shakespeare (via
/.).
Posted at 09:25
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Sign up with MoveOn to help beat Bush; Earn a chance to win a DVD from me MoveOn is efficient. At last count, they had less than 10 paid staffers
and no physical office. MoveOn is effective. They've raised millions of
dollars for their candidates. MoveOn is big. They've got over 2 million
members in the US now. That's as many as the Christian Coallition at its
peak...you know, when it took over the Republican Party. And MoveOn Gets
It. They used the internet to harness the distributed creativity of
thousands of people to create anti-Bush
campaign ads (more on that in a moment).
As a consequence of America's, ah, interesting election system, some
states matter more than others in presidential elections. These are the
"swing states" that could go to either the Republican or Democratic
candidate. This year, there are about 17
swing states (including Minnesota). Most real campaign activity -- except
fundraising -- will happen in these states. MoveOn's election plan focuses
on these states, and they want more members in them.
So, if you're a resident of Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Maine,
Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington State, West Virgina, or Wisconsin, sign
up for MoveOn here: http://www.moveonpac.org/tellafriend/?id=2443-1469410-cxAFvGr5dRkYiunE9euU_g
I get credit for each of my swing state friends who sign up, and if I get
10 people to sign up I win a copy of the
Bush in 30 Seconds Live
DVD, which contains the 56 best home-made anti-Bush commericals under a
Creative Commons license. But I already
bought a copy to review
for my site. Which means I'll have two, if I can
get 10 people to sign up for MoveOn.
So...
sign up for MoveOn and I will enter your name in a drawing to recieve my
extra Bush in 30 Seconds DVD. You must be a new member of MoveOn to
participate. Some restrictions apply, void in Canada.
If you want to help defeat Bush in November, MoveOn.org is one of the best
organizations out there (If you don't want to defeat Bush, you can skip
this post. ;).
Posted at 15:27
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Blueprints for the Web/Don't make me think
Dont Make Me Think also sounds cool.
Blueprints for the Web looks like
an interesting book. It's by the author of the
Wigetopia site (the author would
probably like that phrased the other way around).
Posted at 15:27
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Craigslist MSP
Did you know there's a Minneapolis/St.
Paul Craigslist now?
Posted at 21:59
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VideoLAN
VideoLAN has to be the coolest project I've
never heard of. It's a cross-platform, multi-format streaming video
player.
Posted at 17:08
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Job Graphs
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman
borrows Brad DeLong's
payroll employment graph. And a fine chart it is. We have always been at
war with Oceania!
Posted at 08:08
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MT-Revision Plugin
Oh, this looks really great:
MT-Revision plugin. Mark
Pilgrim
wrote something like it, but Mark's version requires MySQL.
Posted at 19:24
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AOL Bob By bob k Mar 4, 2004 6:35 PM
LIZ YOU SUCK .. YOU MANAGED TO MAKE GW LOOK LIKE DA FOOL YOU W WANT HIM TO
BEE .. YOUR AN ASS HOLE LIBERAL WITH AN AGENDA,.... WHAT ELSE IS NEW I
PLAN ON CANCELLING MY ACCOUNT W/ AOL... BOB K
THANKS FOR THE SO CALLED NEWS
By BOB K Mar 4, 2004 6:42 PM
YOUR WEB SITE WONT LET ME CLICK TO A PRO BUSH SITE YOU SUCK AS USUALL
LIBERALS FROM HELL... HOW DID YOU GET ON AOL..
I think he found the site from a search. This page is #1 right now if you
Google for Liz Sidoti. Sidoti is an AP reporter who I get a lot of my news
posts from. Anyway, he probably read an article by Liz, searched for her
name, and found my site.
His conceptual model of the internet is hilarious. He's cancelling his AOL
account because he found my site. He thinks he's talking to Liz Sidoti. He
types in ALL CAPS.
Wow, I thought Bob's kind were extinct.
Update: He emails! "f you you f..n liberal bateards........."
This rules.
Sweet, check out these comments from Bob K to
my post about Liz Sidoti:
Posted at 17:33
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Posters
Some of these "Welcome GOP"
posters are cool.
Posted at 13:42
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My first caucus Heh. I'd have to agree.
Our resolutions weren't so exciting. We did pass one to require a
voter-verified paper trail for all electronic voting machines and one
supporing instant runoff voting (
sorry Aaron, it wasn't my idea; otherwise I might've proposed approval
voting), and one opposing the Unequal Rights Amendment.
I'm going to the Senate District 60 convention where hopefully I'll be on
the resolution committee. We'll see what fun stuff comes up.
I went to my first caucus last night. The most fun was the resolutions. My
friend just sent me this quote from the
Star Tribune about
one resolution:
One caucus attendee took aim at his own party in a resolution that called for the designer of the state DFL Web site to be drawn and quartered. The caucus attendee argued that the Web site was not at all helpful. The resolution failed.
Posted at 15:47
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WordPress
I talked to a guy at CodeCon who runs several blogs with
WordPress. It looks pretty cool. It's a
full-featured GPL competitor to Movable Type written in MySQL and PHP. It
has most of the features of Movable Type, plus some improvements, like
hierarchical categories, which I desperately wish MT had.
Posted at 14:40
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Overheard at CodeCon "Napster's slogan: 'Same name, opposite idea.'"
Overheard at CodeCon:
Posted at 14:42
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fortune drinks
Ry4an whipped up a fortune file for
drink recipes. Sweet.
Posted at 09:21
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Closet case Wow. Now, I'm sure Dr. Cameron is delivering these lines with scientific
dispassion...but it sure seems like he has some, uh, "first hand"
experience.
Quote from The Holy War
on Gays, Rolling Stone, March 18, 1999.
Via Atrios
I've read in psychology books that often the fervently anti-gay are
themselves homosexuals. But I've never seen such an excellent example of
what seems to be a self-hating closet case as
Dr.
Paul Cameron:
Like many of his allies, Cameron believes that, if left unchecked, homosexuality will destroy America like God did Sodom. "Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system," says Cameron. "If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get -- and that is what homosexuality seems to be -- then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm." So powerful the allure of gays, Cameron believes, that if society approves [of] gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. "I'm convinced that lesbians are particularly good seducers," says Cameron. "People in homosexuality are incredibly evangelical," he adds, sounding evangelical himself. "It's pure sexuality. It's almost like pure heroin. It's such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they'll take enormous risks, do anything." He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. "Martial sex tends toward the boring end," he points out. "Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does." So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would be come the dominant form of sexual behavior.
Posted at 08:20
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No on reads your blog Given the Zipf distribution of blog readers, it's probably true.
UPDATE: For those that would prefer a more standard size (and
self-deprecating humor) I created a two-button version.
Enjoy. Or not, since no one reads my blog. ;)
I made a little button.
Posted at 18:36
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Jakob Nielsen
Brad Wilson:
"Jakob is the Special Ed student of HTML."
Posted at 16:11
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Rebuilding Movable Type individual archives after Trackback This sucks for me because I'm using
Simple Comments to integrate
TrackBacks and comments into one list. After all, a TrackBack is just a
comment left on someone else's site.
There are a couple solutions to this. Most involve PHP or SSI to include
the dynamic list of TrackBacks on the individual entry page. I can't use
that because my site is all static. Phil Ringalda
hacked the MT source code to rebuild individual entries which makes
upgrading a bitch.
The solution I am thinking of is using procmail and the
MT-Rebuild script to
rebuild the comments after a TrackBack. But that's a problem too, because
I am not the only author on my site. However, I do write most of the
entries, and I could do a cron'd rebuild to catch the rest.
The other thing -- and this would catch all the trackbacks with a slight
delay -- would be to set up an RSS feed for TrackBacks and parse that XML
to find the entries which need rebuilding.
I was surprised to learn that Movable Type does not rebuild individual
archives after receiving a TrackBack ping. The reason for this is that
Movable Type processes the ping before sending a response. MT rebuilds as
few pages as possible so that the listener does not time out (this often
happens anyway; there is a config setting you can change to increase the
timeout).
Posted at 10:27
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Edward Tufte in Minneapolis
Edward Tufte is finally doing
one of his classes in Minneapolis. Hmmmm.
Posted at 09:27
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Cairo Considering that Longhorn is essentially the realization of the vision of
Microsoft's next-generation "Cairo" operating system (tagline:
"information at your fingertips") that was supposed to be released in the
mid-90s, it is now clear that Longhorn is the world's biggest piece of
vaporware (baring Xanadu!).
Salon's Scott Rosenburg talks more about this in an
article from
December that I found while looking for "Cairo" trivia.
ArsTechnica:
Microsoft to update
Windows XP before Longhorn release: "...with this comes new concerns that
Longhorn's own release date is slipping far, far away, perhaps as late as
2007 or maybe even 2008 (a guy in a bar last night said 2010)."
Posted at 08:53
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Bush'd
"President Bush, even if you personally shot Osama bin Laden tomorrow, I still would not vote for you in November."
Posted at 08:20
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AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzAbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzAbcdefghijk
If you act now, you too can get one of the world's
most inconvient email addresses.
Posted at 15:12
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Free trade and protectionism Economists often present trade as better for the whole economy, so get
with the program (See radek's comments in this
Brad DeLong thread on outsourcing). Clinton-esque politicians turned
that into "trade is better for everyone". But as Krugman says today, trade
is clearly not better for everyone. Some people are winners and some are
losers. The fact that there are more winners than losers doesn't mean
there aren't losers. The boom of the 1990s covered up these losers,
because for the most part, they could easily find a new job. But now, we
have a weak job market, and protectionism is rising, both with the
Republicans and Democrats.
Free trade advocates sometimes accuse those who oppose free trade (like,
say, programmers fearful of losing their jobs to outsourcing) as seeking
their own "personal socialism": low prices for me, but not for thee.
This is funny, because economics assumes that humans are rational actors
who try to maximize their own benefit. Isn't trying to keep your wages
high a function of that? These free trade advocates say trade works
because of self-interested entities maximizing their own benefit, but
demand that workers become utilitarian aultrists, sacrificing their wages
for the good of All.
Krugman has it right: to get widespread support for free trade, someone
must prove to the losers that they will not be harmed. Part of that comes
from the lower prices they'll enjoy, but that doesn't make up for lost
wages. Universal health insurance, not tied to employers, better
unemployment insurance, job retraining (programmers can't get this
currently, because programming is a "service"), and a higher minimum wage
would do wonders here. So would extracting concessions from trading
partners about improving working conditions and environmental protections.
All this said, I agree with
something Krugman said in another setting: "Let's get some return to
fiscal and environmental and general governmental sanity in this country,
and then we can talk about we manage globalization." The trade debate is
irrelevant until the grownups are back in charge.
Paul Krugman makes an excellent point in his
column on trade today. He says something I've been trying to articulate
for a while in conversations with friends.
Posted at 11:31
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525M email addresses? But there's only 260M people in the whole country. At minimum, half those
email addresses must be crap. But we make it up on volume.
I just got a spam that shouts: TARGET E-EMAIL BY STATE -525 MILLION EMAIL
ADDRESSES.
Posted at 09:57
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ACT launches website
America Coming Together launched
their website just recently.
Posted at 20:06
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Boom Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of job-hungry progressive nerds pounced
on the site, utterly distroying it. I think the Geek Organizer Job Fair
will be a success.
As I write this, MoveOn.org's webserver is melting
down. The likely culprit? The mass email they sent to their 2 million
members looking for "Geek Organizers".
Posted at 15:45
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Imaginary Girlfriend Shades of
Canadian Girlfriend Unsubstantiated.
Fortunately, in this service, the imaginary girlfriend will send you
letters and photos, so its easier to make other people believe she's real.
Imaginary Girlfriend. Finally, the
service that connects real girls to closet cases and losers for imaginary
relationships. Cheap, too! Now you, too, can pretend to date a
hottie.
Posted at 09:34
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Apple Store San Francisco This photo is a little bit of wishful thinking. The shell wasn't done yet.
Still, kind of serendipitous to see this being built, then on Apple's
homepage. There's a nice place for breakfast next store.
I was just in San Francisco for CodeCon. I stayed around the corner from
the new Apple Store, only a
few days before it opened.
Posted at 19:43
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Bush-Cheney campaign slogan Don't Switch Horsemen Mid-Apocalypse
The Bush-Cheney '04 campaign slogan is "Steady Leadership in Times of
Change", which is just a revision of the tried and true:
Posted at 09:36
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Role playing your life This morning when I was attempting to haul my jet-lagged self out of bed,
I had an interesting thought [Note: thought, not dream! thought!]. I
imagined that hitting snooze was like rolling the dice to build your
character in a roll playing game. But instead of your roll determining
your character's attributes, the dreams inbetween snoozes determine
aspects of your life for that day.
In these feverish, 7 minute dreams, I often dream of strange things,
entire worlds squeezed into the time between groggy slaps at the snooze
button. What if, from each dream, you selected one thing from your dream
to be a part of your life? What if you did this every morning?
Roll the dice...
[Note: This may fall to near to "I had a really weird dream last night..."
but I wanted to write about it anyway because it was interesting.]
Posted at 08:31
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Open comments in new window icon It's a 14x12 4K PNG with a transparent background that looks OK on most
colors (it was designed for a white background).
Here's what it looks like in context:
The icon was inspired by the
"New Window" QBullet, but
is a lot simpler.
You can use this on your site if you like. I place this icon in the public
domain.
Update: Uh, I guess IE 6 doesn't support transparent PNGs. So if you
want to use this on a colored background, convert it to a GIF.
I had a request to open
comments in a new window on my site. But I hate
that, so I wanted to make it optional. I settled on creating an icon that
opens the comments in a new window if you click on it.
Posted at 17:30
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Gay Marriage Photos
Here's some nice
photos of the gay marriages on February 15th in San Francisco by Derek
Powazek.
Posted at 16:12
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Life Hacks
Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks
talk sounds like it was pretty cool. I need to do more of this stuff...my
scripting abilities totally blow and it hurts my productivity. I also
don't know Emacs as well as I should.
Posted at 16:11
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Gay Divorce But by all accounts, a number of people are probably getting married for
the wrong reasons. Many are young, stupid, and in love. This shouldn't be
surprising -- after all, that's the same reason a lot of straight couples
get married.
What I'm really looking forward to is the first "gay divorce".
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the city to marry same-sex
couples. Thousands of people have jumped at the chance to confirm their
commitment to each other with a real marriage. Many of the pictures are
stirring; they put a human face on "gay marriage".
Posted at 15:19
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Fog of War The Evasions of Robert McNamara.
It makes the movie more interesting to know these things. The marquee at
the Uptown theater was: "WE NEED TO TALK MORE ABOUT KILLING" You should
definately check it out.
This is a really interesting article about the excellent documentary
The Fog of War (which I saw at the City
Page's "Get Real" film festival last fall). A historian notes that
McNamara isn't being totally honest in some of the parts of the film. He
talks about what he wishes or thinks he did, not what actually happened.
Posted at 13:41
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Great comment
Sometimes I get some great comments on my website.
This one cracked me up:
ALthough i am an australian and my opinion doesn't count, i am inclined to agree with the Democrat point of view. Having George W. Bush as the American President has fucked the Australian government. our PM, John Howard has effectively scarred and severed our ties with South East Asia and Asia itself in favour of pursuing strengthening a relationship with a country that doesn't even know what a fucking Kangaroo is. Australian troops are being put on the line in a war that doesn't even concern us just because George W. Bush asked Howard to. Where is Australia's strength of character? Having a Democratic President for you Americans would benefit the world so weak-charactered arseholes like John Howard won't HAVE to do what America says. Please, elect someone OTHER than that arrogant prick currently occupying the White House.
Posted at 23:34
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Who's Rambo? I'm in my 20s now and already my childhood is the subject of vague
recollection and nostalgia.
Today's Achewood is
absolutely hilarious.
Posted at 13:59
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The new BushOut.TV I'm also making progress on my quest for mindshare. I was linked in
LiberalOasis's best of the blogs rundown
this week and -- believe it or not --
Mickey Kaus (no links; scroll to Tuesday, February 10, 2004 entry). Does
getting a link from Kaus mean you're officially over?
I also installed a site meter tracker for the pretty statistics. We've got
full httpd logs going but no software installed to look at it.
Anyway, check it out if you like to look at pretty moving pictures and
stuff.
Last night I unveiled the a new look for
BushOut.TV, including a great logo from my friend David Krewinghaus.
Posted at 09:16
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Gay Penguin for America Vote Gay Penguin for America!
America needs new leadership. The leadership only a
gay penguin can provide.
Posted at 08:33
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Dear Mary...
Have you seen this woman?
Posted at 07:57
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Vegan Attack Rock Get those fucking eggs away from me
Get that fucking cheese away from me
Get that fucking meat away from me
VEGAN ATTACK ROCK
VEGAN ATTACK ROCK
VEGAN ATTACK ROCK
All I want is veggies
All I want is veggies
All I want is veggies
VEGAN ATTACK ROCK!
I wrote a song for you. It goes like this...
Posted at 13:54
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Blackface SpongeBob My good friends at American Greetings screwed up and ended up with a
Valentine's Day card that looks like it has SpongeBob SquarePants in
blackface. Oops!
Heh. I should log onto their copy of AMS and look up the original...
Somewhere, something went horribly, horribly wrong...
He's black. And with his trademark big teeth and wide eyes, this SpongeBob seems similar to offensive images of African Americans portrayed in minstrel shows decades ago.
American Greetings officials said Thursday they were surprised and puzzled when the Free Press made them aware of a complaint about the product.
"We absolutely fell out of our chairs when we saw it," said Carol Miller, director of business development for the Cleveland-based company. "We're obviously going to be talking to Wal-Mart as well as Nickelodeon . . . to offer our sincere apologies for this product making it to market."
Miller said the cards, which were printed and packaged in China, are mistakes, but she and other officials said they were trying to determine how that happened.
Posted at 19:52
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KERRY SCANDAL BOMBSHELL! Developing...
Rumors that John Kerry appeared at an anti-war rally with
Jane Fonda have been blown
out of the water by a new photo that shows the young Kerry with tourist
guy:
Posted at 12:07
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No thank you message? Why no thank you message -- from Clark, from the tech team?
Clark's endorsing Kerry today. Maybe they'll use their tech tools advocate
for Kerry. But it seems not.
Wes Clark dropped out of the race for president. His message to supporters
is posted on the front page of his site. But on
the campaign blog, it's as if time has stood
still since Monday, February 9th.
Posted at 08:42
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iTunes iSbogus Nice site. Good arguments, good proposed solution (display the artist's
cut with the price).
Via The Register's
interview with Jim Griffin: "It costs $20,000 to fill an iPod from iTunes
Music Store. Quite simply, no one looks at a 40 GB iPod and thinks, 'it
will cost me $20,000 to fill it'. It's a polite fiction."
iTunes iSbogus is a
critique of the Apple iTunes Music Store and a parody of an Apple website
all rolled into one. Apple used to claim the store is "fair to artists",
but removed that claim
from their website; possibly because of this site.
Posted at 15:45
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Bram finally gets some money
Looks like long-suffering BitTorrent developer and CodeCon co-founder Bram
Cohen is
finally getting some money. Valve hired him to work on their Stream file
distribution network and he's getting more donations now on
his site.
Posted at 13:41
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US states I've visited Here's my list of states I'm sure I've visited. I haven't counted states
I've driven through or stopped at an airport in.
Here's why I've been to each state:
AZ: relatives
CA: tourism
CO: tourism
DC: tourism
DE: tourism
IL: college visit, tourism, friends
IN: relatives of a friend, Latin convention
IA: relatives, tourism, political activism
KS: relatives, Latin convention
MD: lived there
MA: tourism, Latin convention
MN: live here
MO: lived there
MT: tourism (hiking)
NJ: tourism (if you can believe it)
NY: tourism
NC: tourism
ND: lived there
OH: lived there
PA: tourism, family
SD: tourism
TN: Latin convention
TX: tourism (QuakeCon)
VA: tourism
WI: tourism, friends
WY: tourism (hiking)
MyWorld66 is an interesting site. You can create
a map of the states you've visited.
create your own visited states map
Posted at 20:38
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Armstrong Zuniga Interestingly enough, Rusty Foster (of
Kuro5hin fame) joined the company as CTO this month.
I wonder if there's still room for another NetRoots company. I would be
interested in starting one -- if only to develop political software.
P.S.: Joe Trippi has a new blog, too.
Hmmm...
Update: I forgot to mention, that I think this explains the explosion of
political Scoop sites lately. The Senate Democrats launched
From the Roots and Jerry Springer(!)
launched Jerry Springer for Ohio (even
though he's not running this year).
Markos's consulting company finally has a
website.
Posted at 21:35
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Christopher Lydon on MPR I listened in on the way to work today, and wow, is he doing a great job
(One caller dissed Lanpher and all the other guest hosts, saying that the
show hadn't been this good for about a year). Today's first topic is
pretty political (the Iraq intelligence failure) and the guest, a former CIA
spared no contempt for Bush and the neocons. While listening, I said to
my co-worker Dan, "There's a lot of pissed off Republicans listening right
now."
Like clockwork, a conservative called up and repeated the "liberal media"
talking points. Instead of letting him ramble on, Lydon turned it around
and asked the caller what he would do had he been in Bush's shoes. "The
same thing," he sputtered. Lydon followed up with simple questions about
the standard of proof and just utterly destroyed the guy. It was
beautiful.
Since the topic is so widely debated, he also had some great callers
asking questions like, why did George Bush go to war given the
intelligence he had? and what about the Office of Special Plans? The
former CIA analyst was as harsh on the CIA as the conservatives lately
are, but for a different reason. He argues that the CIA is not meant to be
political, and if the intelligence was politicized, it is the CIA's and
the CIA director's fault for not standing up to the administration.
Another interesting facet of Lydon as host is that he's very popular on
the internet from his Christopher
Lydon Interviews... and Blogging of the
President. On his sites, he's encouraged people to listen to the internet
stream and call in. While I was listening, he got a caller from New York.
MPR might enjoy having the profile of their show raised nationally -- at
no additional cost to them.
After listening for only about 30 minutes, I'm ready to see Lydon stay on
as Midmorning host for a long as he likes. He's a fantastic interviewer.
However, I'm afraid that Lydon will become the target of Republican ire.
So listen in and if you like
what you hear, email MPR and tell them so.
Since Katherine Lanpher quit
Midmorning for the new liberal radio network, the MPR has been trying out
guest hosts. This month, the guest host is
Christopher Lydon.
Posted at 08:26
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Finally
The holiday we've all been waiting for.
Posted at 17:26
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The intel was worse than we thought... Turns out, the intel
was worse than we thought...
On Feb. 3, 2003, Colin Powell
made his case to the
UN, complete with mind-numing PowerPoint presentation.
Posted at 21:27
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Ads in RSS (part 2) Last January, I wondered how long it would be until we saw
ads in RSS
feeds.
Janis Mara of Internet News asks
Is Ad-Supported RSS
the Next Big Thing?
Posted at 16:11
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North Dakota Caucus Turnout Let's see any other state get their participation up by this much.
According to CNN, turnout for the North Dakota Democratic-NPL caucus was
10,508
voters. In 2000, only 2,188 voters
participated. There's a lot of factors at play, but a near-500%
improvement is nothing to snear at!
Posted at 20:32
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Link Whoring But I need more. My goal? A more popular site.
Here are my targets, from the
Truth Laid Bear ecosystem.
BushOut.TV is now linked from
DailyKos, the largest liberal weblog.
Posted at 13:29
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Features Web Browsers should have I know you can get some of these using add-ons for various browsers (and I
think Safari has a spell checker). But wouldn't it be nice if most of
these things were available out-of-the box?
Here's some features I would like it if web browsers had.
Posted at 11:04
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Pepys It sounds a lot like an idea I've had, which I call the programmer's note
book or HyperInterWebNut. The HyperInterWebNut would be a thick client
wiki with auto-linking features (beyond wiki words, using analysis),
visual diff, infinite versions (and maybe branching) and server side
publishing and editing. The programmer features would include
documentation editing and diagramming.
But basically, it would be a thick client wiki. Which is what Pepys is. I
wish I had more time to work on these stupid ideas I have...other people
keep inventing them first! :)
Hm, this is cool: Pepys Natural
Hypertext Notebook.
Posted at 10:26
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Gnome is going to give me carpal tunnel Is it the keyboard? That's what I thought. I traded in the shitty
KeyTronic IT gave me for a shiny new Microsoft Natural (my prefered keying
device) but it didn't help. Maybe it's because I'm using USB keyboards.
I hope I can figure out a solution to this problem, or else I'm going to
have to go in for early retirement.
Update: Looks like it was related to USB after all. I plugged in the
KeyTronic again (it still sucks, but I needed to use a keyboard). That
forced the OS to re-register the keyboard, and all of a sudden my new key
repeat settings took effect.
Boo on that. Why didn't it work while I was fiddling with it?
Screw it, I've gone back to serial for my keyboard!
Ugh. Gnome is going to give me carpal tunnel. I upgraded to the latest and
greatest, and my the key repeats are all f'ed up. I can park my finger on
the arrow keys or the backspace key and it doesn't move for crap. I've
jiggereed with the settings but it doesn't improve.
Posted at 10:21
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Le Guin's World
Le Guin's World is a cool
site about Ursula K. Le Guin and her work.
Posted at 16:49
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Slacktivist Here's a few of my favorite recent posts.
A
patriot, therefore angry: "[Brad DeLong] is angry because he is a
patriot, and it is the duty of patriots to be angry when the greatness of
a great nation is greatly reduced by careless men."
Bad
habits: "[The reporter] seems uncomfortable simply stating fiscal
statistics relating to the incumbent administration when those facts may
seem unflattering. So, to avoid any appearance of bias, the reporter
attributes any unflattering facts to the 'charges' of the president's
political opponents."
Cheethos of Mass Destruction (just read the whole post).
Slacktivist is one of the best weblogs I read regularly. Timely,
insightful, progressive. He's a newspaper editor/copywriter (or something
like that) for a small PA paper, and that gives the Slacktivist an
uncommon insight on the news. He's also an evangelical Christian disgusted
with the hypocrisy of the religious right.
Posted at 08:38
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Exit Polls So some people want to forbid calling of elections before the polls close.
Today, I had another idea. What if voting results were posted from all
states in real time (or near-real time)? That would take the crystal ball
out of the media's hands, democratize the data. Campaigns could make
last-minute pushes in their strongholds to drive up turn out. With a known
universe of registered voters (not possible in all states), victors could
be predicted with confidence.
A lot of people, myself included, hate the media's exit polls. This is
especially annoying in the presidential races, where winners are often
called before the polls close on the West coast (and in states that cross
time zones, the state is often called before the polls close in part of
the state, as happened in Florida in 2000).
Posted at 18:32
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Migraine...I mean, migrating between Movable Type blogs You export your entries from the one MT blog to a file, then import them
into the new system by placing it in a special directory. Surprisingly, MT
does not support web-based importing, and it does not clean up the imports
file after it has finished with it, nor does it support restricting
imports to a single blog (the import directory is MT-install wide).
But all seems well after you do the import. Except for one tiny detail:
your custom templates are not included in the export file! D'oh! There
goes your cool custom look...there goes any MT hackery you've done. That
really sucks. I wish exporting the templates was an option in the
software.
My suggestion is to always link your custom templates to files, then copy
all those files to the new install when you move (you have to do this for
your image files anyway). After you import your entries, edit the
templates in the new install to link them to the files.
I just learned this the hard way.
Migrating between two Movable Type blogs is
deceptively easy. I say it's deceptively easy because it seems easy, but
doesn't work the way you'd expect.
Posted at 13:07
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Zen koan-like FAQ I love this zen koan-like question and answer in the FAQ:
Q. What's the meaning of "socket error"?
A. Ignore. This is the case that return code of socket functions is -1.
Knowing socket API, you will understand.
So true, so true.
I've started using a program called
Net Transport to download RTSP streams (see
more on that at BushOut.TV). The
program is a little quirky, but very well done (as far as I can tell). To
figure out some of those quirks, I turned to the documentation.
Posted at 21:03
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New virus going around
There must be a new virus going around. All day I've been getting a ton of
bounces and virus advisories sent to my email. And now, actual viruses
from people who send me mail.
Posted at 18:11
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Get Your War On "What if 'program activity' just means 'wishing for?' Like, 'last night my
wife and I were engaged in an affordable health care-related program
activity?'"
The State of the Union Get Your
War On is one of the funniest strips in the series.
Posted at 11:40
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Using the Sony SDM X72 with DVI-D on Linux I asked for a flat panel, and they gave me a Sony SDM X72. Since it
supports DVI, I wanted to use that.
I installed RedHat 9 and it did not detect my monitor. That's bad news,
but I pressed on. I searched Google to little avail...apparently this
monitor is highly popular in places that don't speak English. I looked up
the specs (PDF) and set the
horizontal scan, vertical scan, and resolution correctly. Still, nothing.
XFree86 bombed out with a message saying the scan was out of range.
At this point, my co-worker Jason advised me to look up XFree86 and DVI-D
because I was trying to use the monitor using digital DVI. Bingo. I found
a message on the
Xpert list (much more useful than xf-newbies, where every question goes
unanswered!):
DVI-D-savvy drivers?. Turns out you must use
nVidia's
binary-only drivers (the "nvidia" driver) instead of the open-source
drivers (the "nv" driver). Apparently, nVidia won't share their drivers
because it would allow
Macrovision-free DVD output.
Short Version: Just use nVidia's drivers if you want to use DVI-D.
I am (finally) upgrading to a new computer at work. There is some law
that no Linux installation may ever be routine, and this install followed
that law. Here's my story, hopefully it will help others.
Posted at 10:22
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No way! Hey...wait a second.
Art Garfunkel
charged with having pot. No way! What's next, they arrest Cheech and
Chong?
Posted at 08:52
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State of the Union Plagiarism An Atrios reader
discovered some plagiarism in the State of the Union. The following is
shamefully ripped off from Atrios.
On October 20th, 2003, Rep. Peter Hoekstra wrote an
op-ed in the
Detroit News where he said:
In the State of the Union on January 20, 2004, Bush said:
Since the same person probably wrote both, it's not really plagiarism.
It's just shameful. And shamefully easy to find in the age of Google.
The construction of this phrase is so tortured. I would've thought the PR
flacks would have time to clean it up after a few months.
Update: Looks like they both lifted the tongue-mangling phrase verbatium
from the Kay report.
From a speech Kay gave: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related
program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq
concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in
late 2002."
I hope Kay will continue to be vigilant in his search for "program
activities".
Innnnteresting!
The group's report uncovers dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.
Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.
Posted at 15:20
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Schooled Dean has calmed down. Post on the blog like
this one ("A Doctor
Who's Delivered") make me feel better. Today, he drowned out LaRouche
protesters not by shouting, but by leading the crowd in
singing the national
anthem.
I am worried, but I'm not ready to give up yet. I still believe Dean has
the best chance to beat Bush -- if he learns from his mistakes. He has
good, centrist policies; a great grassroots base of supporters; and he's
rejected the public financing, which is key to beating Bush.
Well, anyway, my guy got schooled in Iowa last night. Ouch. The campaign
seems to have learned its lesson...too late, unfortunately, for Iowa. But
maybe not for New Hampshire.
I am worried.
Posted at 21:20
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WHAT?!? That was the message when I turned on my laptop this morning. WHAT?
I turned it off and restarted the boot process. I loaded as normal. Whew.
I need to get an Apple.
"Operating system not found."
Posted at 06:46
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Now THAT'S committed! Q: What is the difference between being involved and being
committed?
A: Think of a bacon and eggs breakfast. The chicken was involved, but the
pig...he's committed!
This is what I call committed:
The Deanie Cooper is
one Texas voluteers way of showing her support for Howard Dean.
Mike Ford told a joke at the Dean grassroots organizing summit I went to
that goes something like this:
Posted at 08:19
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That's a lot of hard drive space Not a bad price for never having to ever run low on hard drive space.
Though I'm sure we'll all be bumping up against that limit sometime in the
near future.
What it really does is enable some amazing new applications for home
users. The site says, "With this unsurpassed storage capacity, the LaCie
Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and
up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video."
Imagine archiving every TV show you've ever watched, editing together
hours upon hours of home video to make your own movies, recording days
worth of DIY uncompressed music...or just downloading tons of pr0n.
$1200 will buy you 1
TB of hard drive space, all in one stylish external package.
Posted at 15:38
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Pawlenty pushes for Northstar line Star Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/4316577.html
The line has been cut back to about 40 miles from about 80, but it's a
start...
As the Northstar folks say, "It just
makes sense!"
Holy shit! Governor Pawlenty did something I agree with!
Gov. Tim Pawlenty has abandoned his opposition to a commuter rail line and plans to ask the Legislature to borrow $37.5 million for the Northstar project that would link Big Lake to Minneapolis.
``We're choking on congestion,'' the governor said Tuesday. ``This past year, we made the largest infusion of road-building funds in history. Now, we need to also look at expanded transit opportunities.''
Posted at 10:40
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Lunacy If the goal is to get to Mars, why would we stop at the moon? Unless
significant parts of the craft or its fuel are going to manufactured on the
moon, there's absolutely no reason to go there! And if we want
manufacturing plants on the moon, why not invest the $billions on
nano-facturing research instead? And if no payload is being built on the
moon, why not invest the $billions on an orbital or L5 docking facility?
If the goal is to send people to Mars, our current propulsion technology
it totally inadequate. So why not spend the $billions on nuclear
propulsion research?
Greg Easterbrook says it a
lot better than I could, because he uses math. He absolutely destroys the
Bush Moon/Mars space concept: "In the days to come, any administration
official who says that a Moon base could support a Mars mission is
revealing himself or herself to be a total science illiterate. When you
hear, 'A Moon base could support a Mars mission, substitute the words, 'I
have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.'"
Basically, this whole thing sounds like a crock of shit to me. Just like
when another Bush proposed we'd go to Mars as part of his re-election
campaign. Bush Sr. lost.
Update: Island of Balta lays out the case for a
L1 station rather than a moonbase, by way of discussing the USA and
NASA's failures in space (both of engineering and political will).
I'm a die-hard science fiction fan and a big supporter of space
exploration. So you might think that I'm interested in Bush's plan to go
to Mars via a base on the Moon. Nope. I think it's retarded. And not just
because I think Bush sucks. I think it's retarded because it is
retarded.
Posted at 21:59
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Ninja Gate To the editor:
I have been a long-time reader and subscriber to Salon. It's times like
these when I realize how worth it my investment in Salon has been. John
Gorenfeld's in-depth reporting on one of the biggest stories of this
campaign cycle -- Ninja-gate -- has fundamentally changed the dynamics of
the 2004 campaign. The actor clearly sounds like Howard Dean. One can
easily imagine him bellowing "All units! All units! You have the power!"
Dean flatly denies he is in the movie. But Dean's "ninja problem" is not
going to go away simply by denial. I urge Gorenfeld to dig deeper. Find
the director and get him on record. Because what I wanna know is, does
Howard Dean have the real ultimate power?
I wrote this letter to Salon about their recent article on
Dean's
possible role in a cheezy 1980s ninja movie. I also CC'ed the author and
he wrote me back saying he enjoyed the letter. Turns out he did try to
contact the director, but couldn't get a hold of the guy.
Posted at 09:33
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Dean's Ninja Movie? I watched the clip, and it totally sounds like Dean. It's hard to see
the actor's face though. So, while Dean denies being in the movie, doubts
remain.
As for me? Well, all I know is that Dean is the
real ultimate power!
Salon did some
real
digging into the rumors that Howard Dean was in a
crappy 80's ninja movie. The
procured a copy of the movie
( watch
the clip here) and asked the Dean campaign if it is Dean:
Dean, unfortunately, says it's not him. Jay Carson, a Dean spokesman, told Salon he asked Dean "point-blank" -- and the Democratic front-runner said he was in no way associated with "The Domination," the story (from producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan) of a beautiful '80s aerobics practitioner possessed by the spirit of a ninja slain on a golf course. (It's the kind of movie where the heroine, having gone to a psychologist for help, is told that there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with her, "aside from your exceptional extrasensory perception and your preoccupation with Japanese culture. No harm in that.")
Posted at 21:30
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Lying with statistics That link seems to be broken, so try http://blogs.salon.com/0001444/ and
look for the Jan. 5th entry.
I have not formulated an opinion on the new finger print security
system, but I do hate it when people lie with statistics.
How did Tom Ridge turn a whole hour for tourist253 into [] 15 measly seconds?
Easy! He's a fucking liar!
Posted at 17:26
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Website Downtime
All of the websites I host on this server (recursion.org, luke.francl.org,
eufio.com) are going to have some short downtime because the server is
being decommissioned. Hopefully the downtime will be short. Thanks for
reading.
Posted at 07:07
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