Just Looking

Welcome to the Z-List, baby...

Tue, 21 Dec 2004

Happy Solstice
Today is the winter solstice. I'm celebrating by having a miserable cold. Bah humbug!
Posted at 18:37 Permanent Link

Mon, 20 Dec 2004

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 Permanent Link

Tue, 14 Dec 2004

Careless Love
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..."

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.
Posted at 19:51 Permanent Link

Top Overlooked Films of the 1990s
Via Triptych Cryptic, The Online Film Critics Society's "Top 100 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.
Posted at 15:15 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 13 Dec 2004

2004 Retrospective/2005 Look Ahead
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.

Important events in 2004:

  1. The fall of Howard Dean and the rise of John Kerry to become the nominee.
  2. Progress and setbacks in gay rights. Gay marriage had a huge setback in the ballot initatives, but civil unions made headway as the defaults compromise solution. The year begins with Howard Dean as crazy-eyed radical for supporting civil unions, and ends with President Bush endorsing civil unions.
  3. Iraq's unravelling and Abu Ghraib and its aftermath.
  4. The smearing of John Kerry (Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" primarily) and the failure of the media to call "bullshit".
  5. The validation of the small donor, grassroots fundraising model.
  6. The failure to do anything strategic with that model.
  7. Bush's victory.

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

  1. Iraq. Does it calm down after the elections or turn into a full fledged civil war? If the latter, do we "stay the course" or get the hell out?
  2. Does the Democratic Party go for a reform-minded chair like Howard Dean, Simon Rosenberg or Donnie Fowler, or someone from the DC status quo? This decision will have a big impact on the 2006 and 2008 elections.
  3. The progressive movement rethinks itself. Discussions are on among Democrats, labor, and environmentalists how to be more effective. Will they work together?
  4. Whatever Bush is pushing. This makes its own importance.
  5. Will the Democrats be a party of compromise on the 2000-2004 model, or become a true opposition party?

Posted at 22:24 Permanent Link

VoodooPad
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.

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...

Moleskin Notebook
Posted at 08:38 Permanent Link

Fri, 10 Dec 2004

Dear CVS letter
Kevin's breaking up with CVS.

I've made the same move and it's great.
Posted at 08:28 Permanent Link

Sun, 5 Dec 2004

Mexican Entrees
Man Doth Not Live by Burrito Alone.
Posted at 14:48 Permanent Link

Congrats to Norwegianity
Congratulations to Mark Gisleson of Nowegianity, who has now been blogging for five years at various sites.
Posted at 11:39 Permanent Link

Fri, 3 Dec 2004

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 2 Dec 2004

Design Outpost
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).

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.
Posted at 14:49 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 29 Nov 2004

Downtown grocery store(s)
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... ;)

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.
Posted at 17:38 Permanent Link

Internet Commies
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.

And its ID is #42. w00t!
Posted at 17:14 Permanent Link

Sun, 28 Nov 2004

The Joy of Cooking (Hash Brownies)
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.

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:

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 Permanent Link

Sun, 21 Nov 2004

LIMO 0.5 released!
I am pleased to announce that version 0.5 of LIMO, the Lucene Index Monitor, has been 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.
Posted at 21:41 Permanent Link

Thu, 18 Nov 2004

Google 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.

Compare results for "fast multiresolution image query":

Google Scholar

CiteSeer

(CiteSeer is a little slow, I think because of all the people checking it out compared to Scholar ;)
Posted at 08:23 Permanent Link

Wed, 17 Nov 2004

svn diff -w
Thank the lord! I finally figured out how to get Subversion to ignore whitespace.

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"
Posted at 10:29 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Lost for Words
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".

I've never seen politican-speak so ably distilled. For a better English!

Reuters story via Boing Boing.
Posted at 07:59 Permanent Link

Tue, 16 Nov 2004

Hiring Java Programmers
Allen Holub: When Hiring, Smarts Beat Skill Lists.

This is an interesting article. Holub argues that "smarts" beats tool experience (or rather, "skill lists") favored by HR departments:

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.

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.
Posted at 15:42 Permanent Link

Mon, 15 Nov 2004

What a crappy present!
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.

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).
Posted at 15:38 Permanent Link

Wed, 10 Nov 2004

What's wrong with voting receipts?
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".

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.
Posted at 12:31 Permanent Link

Lucene Desktop Notes
Here's some notes about Lucene Desktop, Kevin Burton's latest crazy concoction.

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.
Posted at 09:51 Permanent Link

Fri, 5 Nov 2004

Get Real 2004
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.]

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.

This Ain't No Heartland 1:30

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

Los Angeles Plays Itself 7:30

Tuesday, Nov 9

Checkpoint 7:30

Wednesday, Nov 10

Tarnation 7:30
Posted at 07:59 Permanent Link

Thu, 4 Nov 2004

"Enthused"
Dear world,

"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
Posted at 17:55 Permanent Link

Wed, 3 Nov 2004

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 Permanent Link

First Avenue Closes
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.

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?
Posted at 12:53 Permanent Link

Sun, 31 Oct 2004

I Voted (early)
I voted


Posted at 21:25 Permanent Link

CodeCon 05
It lives!
Posted at 21:15 Permanent Link

Fri, 29 Oct 2004

LIMO
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.

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.
Posted at 14:23 Permanent Link

Insta-doc
I wanna make an insta-doc!

But on what topic...?
Posted at 14:14 Permanent Link

Thu, 28 Oct 2004

GUI Bloopers
This book looks good: GUI Bloopers. Kinda spendy, but it is 500+ pages.

Also interesting is Web Bloopers.

I would like to read these books.
Posted at 13:58 Permanent Link

Thu, 21 Oct 2004

Fuckin' Yankees
I'm not the world's biggest baseball fan, but I do have to say this: HA HA!
Posted at 06:59 Permanent Link

Sat, 16 Oct 2004

Cast your vote.
Florida Election Ballot available early on the internets.
Posted at 18:57 Permanent Link

Fri, 15 Oct 2004

Firefox crashes
Remember how I said I was switching to Firefox?

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!
Posted at 12:31 Permanent Link

Thu, 14 Oct 2004

Ponchos
Slate takes on the stupid-looking ponchos that women have been wearing recently.

Here's a hit ladies: they look ridiculous. If you're going to wear a poncho, at least wear a real one.
Posted at 14:26 Permanent Link

Sat, 9 Oct 2004

Wanna buy some wood?
It's on the Internets
Posted at 11:02 Permanent Link

Thu, 7 Oct 2004

Once more into the breech
The DFL is doing a fundraiser and voluteer drive for Get Out the Vote activities on election day.

DFL Get Out The Vote!

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.
Posted at 20:49 Permanent Link

Wed, 6 Oct 2004

Oops!
I caught this on the Star Tribune website last night:

Cheney, Kerry clash in only veep debate
Posted at 20:33 Permanent Link

Nice Boots
I saw these boots in the window today at Corner Store, a vintage clothing store in my neighborhood.

Furry Wookie boots
Posted at 19:25 Permanent Link

Mon, 4 Oct 2004

X-Prize
SpaceShipOne wins the X-Prize! Congratulations to the pilots and the Scaled Composites engineering team.

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.
Posted at 09:09 Permanent Link

Fri, 1 Oct 2004

You forgot Poland!
One of the best moments of last night's debate:

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.
Posted at 12:33 Permanent Link

Ry4an in the Pioneer Press
I watched the presidential debate last night with Ry4an at O'Gara's in St. Paul.

A reporter from the Pioneer Press interviewed us, and Ry4an ended up in the paper today. They even spelled his name right!
Posted at 10:01 Permanent Link

Wed, 29 Sep 2004

Escaping a dead-end job
David St. Lawrence: Escaping a dead-end job. Sounds like useful advice.
Posted at 11:57 Permanent Link

Tue, 21 Sep 2004

Rowbike
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.

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.
Posted at 07:41 Permanent Link

Fri, 17 Sep 2004

The Daily WTF
The Daily WTF ("Curious Perversions In Information Technology") is my new guilty pleasure.

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.
Posted at 14:23 Permanent Link

Wed, 15 Sep 2004

Kiffmeyer: pwn3d
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.

There's three other anti-Kiffmeyer letters, so check 'em out.
Posted at 20:37 Permanent Link

Looks like it's time to get a new bike lock
Aw, crap. You can defeat a Kyptonite U-Lock with a Bic ballpoint pen.

I guess I'm officially in the market for a new bike lock, then.

Via Boing Boing.
Posted at 10:01 Permanent Link

Firefox
I finally switched by work browser from Galeon to Firefox 1.0RC. Galeon crashed one too many times.

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...
Posted at 09:13 Permanent Link

Fri, 10 Sep 2004

Announcing the New Patriot
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.

Most of my political rants will end up over there, so if that interest you, check it out.
Posted at 09:11 Permanent Link

Wed, 8 Sep 2004

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 Permanent Link

Zip Code Browser
Jason sends along this cool zip code browser (req. Java).

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.
Posted at 12:50 Permanent Link

Sunday Bloody Sunday
You heard U2's song about the massacre in Northern Ireland, "Sunday Blood Sunday" right?

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.

Via Political Wire
Posted at 11:55 Permanent Link

Tue, 7 Sep 2004

Photos from John Edwards's Labor Day rally
I took some photos for DFLers.org.

V for Victory!

Betty McCollum and me.

For more, see this link.
Posted at 11:02 Permanent Link

Fri, 3 Sep 2004

Work like you're 10 points down
At Camp Wellstone, I learned two important things about campaigns.

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.
Posted at 20:35 Permanent Link

Wed, 1 Sep 2004

Are you reading DFM?
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.

It also has a rollicking events list with plenty of ways to get involved.
Posted at 21:16 Permanent Link

RNC bloggers go wild
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."

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!"
Posted at 09:25 Permanent Link

Tue, 31 Aug 2004

Newspaper Advertising
I was looking at newspaper advertising today on a whim.

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?
Posted at 14:06 Permanent Link

Fri, 27 Aug 2004

Bug 17K
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.

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.
Posted at 13:26 Permanent Link

Wed, 25 Aug 2004

John Kerry on the Daily Show
Check out John Kerry on the Daily Show via Blogumentary.
Posted at 21:30 Permanent Link

Fri, 20 Aug 2004

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 12 Aug 2004

Kerry-Edwards Special
I'm not a railfan like my friend Nick, but these shots of the Kerry-Edwards special are pretty awesome.

I really like this one that shows the train heading into Kirkwood, MO as people line the tracks to cheer.
Posted at 15:32 Permanent Link

Tue, 10 Aug 2004

PhotoStamps
Make your own stamps. OK, this is fucking awesome. Make your own stamps!

Via Boing Boing.
Posted at 14:48 Permanent Link

The Onion comes to Minneapolis/St. Paul!
Sweeeet. The Onion is coming to the Cities.

It launches September 2nd.
Posted at 11:13 Permanent Link

Fri, 6 Aug 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Wed, 4 Aug 2004

Doom 3 Hardware Guide
The [H]ard|OCP Doom3 Hardware Guide is very helpful.
Posted at 11:47 Permanent Link

Pacfish

I want one.
Posted at 09:55 Permanent Link

Moore Treason
Traitor!

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!

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!
Posted at 09:28 Permanent Link

Tue, 3 Aug 2004

Window Seat
Window Seat looks like an awesome book for frequent flyers. North American geography -- from 30,000 feet!

This was on Boing Boing a long time ago, and I bookmarked it and forgot about it.


Posted at 11:37 Permanent Link

Web based RSS aggregators (open source)
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:

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.
Posted at 10:25 Permanent Link

Doom 3
Doom 3
Posted at 10:04 Permanent Link

Mon, 2 Aug 2004

Doom 3
Where are you going to be when Doom 3 comes out?
Posted at 19:56 Permanent Link

Proof your company sucks, #287
Mailbox size limits.

"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.
Posted at 12:43 Permanent Link

Wed, 28 Jul 2004

Interesting bug of the day
SYLK: File format is not valid
Posted at 21:26 Permanent Link

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.

Read $75K-$100K/year to McDonald's Not Possible?
Posted at 09:13 Permanent Link

Tue, 27 Jul 2004

Powell on Sudan
"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..."

Ladies and gentlemen, start your irony!
Posted at 14:59 Permanent Link

Super Mario Rampage
Super Mario re-envisioned as a side scrolling shooter (and is that soundtrack by the Minibosses?)

It's a little to easy to be worthwhile, but fun for a laugh.
Posted at 14:57 Permanent Link

Scenes from the DNC
Here's something you don't see every day...

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.
Posted at 09:25 Permanent Link

Mon, 26 Jul 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Fri, 23 Jul 2004

MN GOP: What is Patty Wetterling Telling Liberal Special Interests that She isn't Telling Voters?
The Minnesota GOP wants to know. Here's what I think she's telling them:

Liberal Special Interests: Why should we support you?

Patty: I'm not Mark Kennedy.

Liberal Special Interests: Yea!
Posted at 15:57 Permanent Link

Thu, 22 Jul 2004

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 Permanent Link

Wed, 21 Jul 2004

DFLers.org launches
The Scoop-based DFL blog launched today. http://www.dflers.org

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.
Posted at 21:28 Permanent Link

I'm not...
Harpers has collected a list of statements chronicling things President Bush is not.


Posted at 18:24 Permanent Link

Forged!
Slactivist takes the fall for forging the infamous Iraq/Niger uranium documents. Now we know who did it!
Posted at 10:22 Permanent Link

Fri, 16 Jul 2004

Chipotle Calculator
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.

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.
Posted at 17:25 Permanent Link

PyLucene versus Lupy
I wonder why the OSAF folks created PyLucene instead of improving the existing Python port of Lucene 1.2, Lupy. Performance?

Well, it doesn't matter much, I guess. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to use one of these soon.
Posted at 10:30 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Is the one-page resume dead?
Here's a question I asked over on the Joel on Software forum:

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?
Posted at 09:35 Permanent Link

Tue, 13 Jul 2004

A vote for Nader...
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".

Tell us how you really feel, Steve.
Posted at 11:37 Permanent Link

Mon, 12 Jul 2004

PHP Woes
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?).

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.

PHP Annoyances.

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites is a good article from Linux 2002.
Posted at 19:26 Permanent Link

Not In Our Name 404
Not In Our Name's 404 is pretty funny.

"Page not found...just like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."


Posted at 14:14 Permanent Link

Cheney/Edwards debate sneak preview
For Cheney:

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?

Read the rest.
Posted at 13:43 Permanent Link

Sat, 10 Jul 2004

Turning conventional wisdom on its head
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.

That's why I love this ad for LavaLife.com:

LavaLife Ad

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!"
Posted at 10:09 Permanent Link

Wed, 7 Jul 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 1 Jul 2004

Speech to text
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

Doesn't technology rule?
Posted at 15:19 Permanent Link

Tue, 29 Jun 2004

Libertarian Planning
Wow, this is cool. Jane Jacobs and Ken Greenberg boiled urban planning into two rules:

  1. New buildings must not be set back from the street
  2. New buildings must not exceed the height of existing buildings

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)
Posted at 21:45 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 28 Jun 2004

Word Cleaner
Word Cleaner is a lot like my Word Unmunger with some useless features like an easy to use UI ;)

Why pay $99 when you can get it for free?
Posted at 14:16 Permanent Link

Thu, 24 Jun 2004

Wow
The FuckYou/FuckMe is finally reality.
Posted at 13:51 Permanent Link

Walk home drunk
Co-worker Jason sends along this funny game. I can get about 50 meters.

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.
Posted at 09:44 Permanent Link

IMAP idiots
At work, I have a choice of two IMAP servers. Why two?

On the first one, I can send mail to distribution list aliases.

On the second one, I can send mail outside the company.


Posted at 09:34 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Fri, 18 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

Confluence Wiki
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..."

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.
Posted at 13:42 Permanent Link

Starting a career in "user experience"
How do you start a career in "user experience"?

Step 1: Get a pair of glasses like this guy's...

funky glasses guy
Posted at 11:51 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 17 Jun 2004

Resume
Here's a resume tip folks: Put the dates of your education, damn it!

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.
Posted at 14:49 Permanent Link

Hipikat
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.

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.
Posted at 13:14 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Wed, 16 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

Confused Coworker
Here's a photo of a car from work:

(I've taken the liberty of blurring out his license plate number.)

On this older economy car, there are:

  1. One bike rack
  2. One "Live simply that others may simply live" bumper sticker
  3. One "Defend the Earth" bumper sticker
  4. One "Dismantle the Nukes" bumper sticker, slightly worn
  5. One Bush-Cheney '04 bumper sticker

(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.
Posted at 19:33 Permanent Link

Stellar
IRS files tax lien against state GOP chairman, wife

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.''
Posted at 09:04 Permanent Link

Tue, 15 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 14 Jun 2004

Poker
Jack of Smarts: Why the Internet generation loves to play poker.

Some friends have a monthly game, but I never thought about it as a wider cultural phenomenon. Interesting.
Posted at 10:17 Permanent Link

Sat, 12 Jun 2004

Kerry Rocks
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.

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.
Posted at 15:49 Permanent Link

Fri, 11 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Democratic National Convention
Apparently some wingnuts are google bombing the Democratic National Convention with a pro-Bush look-alike site.

Well, all in good fun I guess, but two can play at that game.
Posted at 12:18 Permanent Link

F911 in Minnesota
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).

Update: Since I posted this, they've added several more venues, including the Lagoon in Minneapolis.
Posted at 08:51 Permanent Link

Thu, 10 Jun 2004

The Uncanny Valley
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.

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.
Posted at 10:05 Permanent Link

Wed, 9 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

Google News OOPS!
Google News: Chicago Sun Times: our democratic senators are finally applying the desperately needed checks and balances regarding the out of control and lawless bu$hit administration!

Heh. That link doesn't actually go to the Chicago Sun Times. It goes to the e-ThePeople discussion site.
Posted at 18:16 Permanent Link

Mozilla freaking out on Blogspot sites
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.

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.
Posted at 16:30 Permanent Link

Mon, 7 Jun 2004

Dance Dance Resurrection
An exciting new development in Christian Entertainment!
Posted at 11:35 Permanent Link

Sun, 6 Jun 2004

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 Permanent Link

Sat, 5 Jun 2004

It's here...
Luke and his Aeron

What kind of idiot spends that much on a chair? Now you know.
Posted at 09:43 Permanent Link

Tue, 1 Jun 2004

Rain, rain, go away
Co-worker Jason says: "When did we move to Seattle?" Good question!
Posted at 14:52 Permanent Link

Thu, 27 May 2004

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 Permanent Link

The Way We Eat Now
is incredibly depressing.
Posted at 14:12 Permanent Link

Wed, 26 May 2004

Second Generation Traffic Calming
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.

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
Posted at 14:21 Permanent Link

H is for Hardcore
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".

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).
Posted at 10:08 Permanent Link

Let me get this straight
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.

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.
Posted at 08:43 Permanent Link

Fri, 21 May 2004

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.

robot protest
Posted at 14:06 Permanent Link

Wed, 19 May 2004

Dean and Kerry
Sounds like they're getting along well:

"I certainly admired you for kicking my [expletive] in Iowa," Dean said to roars of laughter and a quick high-five from the victor.


Posted at 10:58 Permanent Link

Sun, 16 May 2004

What do lofts say about us?
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.

The article also touches on the Jane Jacobs theseis of the life-cycle of a neighborhood.

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."

And it notes that those who started the craze can't really afford them anymore:

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.

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.
Posted at 10:13 Permanent Link

Fri, 14 May 2004

Stalking the Bogeyman
What would you say to the man who raped you when you were seven?
Posted at 21:18 Permanent Link

Fargo Bezerk
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."

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...
Posted at 12:29 Permanent Link

Thu, 13 May 2004

Movable Type 3.0 and group blogs
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.

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.
Posted at 13:23 Permanent Link

Patches
Sweet. Another small patch for Free Software.
Posted at 11:51 Permanent Link

FARK North Dakota
Fark takes a look at the upcoming North Dakota quarter.
Posted at 09:12 Permanent Link

Tue, 11 May 2004

"United States"
HistoryShot prints are shipped to the United States including Alaska and Hawaii, and Canada.
Posted at 06:31 Permanent Link

Mon, 10 May 2004

Whoa.
Infinity (via ArsTechnica).
Posted at 19:54 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Chunnel
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.

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."


Posted at 09:30 Permanent Link

Wed, 5 May 2004

What would it be like if Jerry Springer had a show on philosophy?
Probably like this.

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!
Posted at 10:39 Permanent Link

Tue, 4 May 2004

Micah Ian Wright lied about being a Ranger
Noted propaganda remixer Micah Ian Wright lied about being an Army 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.
Posted at 12:58 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 3 May 2004

Fafblog
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."

I feel better about it now.
Posted at 14:27 Permanent Link

Occam's Swiss Army Knife
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.

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?
Posted at 14:11 Permanent Link

Fri, 30 Apr 2004

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 Permanent Link

Straw Houses
Some friends of mine in Duluth (ahem of the hippie persuasion ahem) are considering building a straw house.

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."
Posted at 17:02 Permanent Link

Thu, 29 Apr 2004

Beyond Parody
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.

Unbelievable.
Posted at 11:52 Permanent Link

No Logo
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.

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.
Posted at 08:29 Permanent Link

Wed, 28 Apr 2004

Best Site EVER
http://www.JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyWay.com/
Posted at 21:29 Permanent Link

Brave new jobs
Claudia O'Keefe, Salon: 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:

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."

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.
Posted at 13:43 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Tue, 27 Apr 2004

Anti-Transit Troubadour
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.

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.
Posted at 16:11 Permanent Link

Wed, 21 Apr 2004

Funny Slashdot ad
I thought this ad was funny:

IRC kiddies chatting ad
Posted at 11:52 Permanent Link

Tue, 20 Apr 2004

Cube
Business card cube (via Mark Gisleson).
Posted at 16:04 Permanent Link

Lost in Translation
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).

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:

[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.

Mizuko Ito: Totally Lost in Translation.

The eXile: Sofia's A Bad Choice:

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 19 Apr 2004

Kill Bill
This Kill Bill game is addicting! I can't quite beat it yet though...
Posted at 19:30 Permanent Link

Graphics for the Gipper
Graphics for the Gipper is a fun exhibit of Regan parody posters from the '80s.

Via BagNews Notes.
Posted at 18:27 Permanent Link

Wed, 14 Apr 2004

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 Permanent Link

"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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 12 Apr 2004

iTunes shuffle observation
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.

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.
Posted at 16:26 Permanent Link

Fri, 9 Apr 2004

Guest blog: Microsoft "Get the Facts" rant
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

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!?
Posted at 15:38 Permanent Link

Thu, 8 Apr 2004

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 Permanent Link

Mon, 5 Apr 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Sun, 4 Apr 2004

iCal for MSPIFF
I'm having fun playing with iCal, so I set up a calendar for the MSPIFF films I'm interested in using PHPiCalendar.

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!
Posted at 23:07 Permanent Link

Thu, 1 Apr 2004

Randi Rhodes on Nader: "We can't afford you."
Yesterday, on the debut of her program on Air America radio (the new liberal talk radio station), Randi Rhodes verbally thrashed Ralph Nader.

I didn't hear it, and there are no archives yet, but a dilligent Daily Kos user typed it all up for us.
Posted at 11:44 Permanent Link

Wed, 31 Mar 2004

The Law of Dick
I think there's a law in Hollywood: No Philip K. Dick Movie May Be Good.

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.
Posted at 15:26 Permanent Link

Places to visit in MN
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!).

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:

  1. Jeffers Petroglyphs Historic Site
  2. The Twine Ball
  3. Otter Tail County
  4. Julian H. Sleeper House Museum, St. Paul
  5. Lac qui Parle State Park
  6. George Crosby Manitou State Park ("first Minnesota state park designed solely for backpackers")
  7. Lake Bronson State Park
  8. Banning State Park
  9. Moorhead (yes!)
  10. The Finnish settled town of Embarrass

Posted at 11:20 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Tue, 30 Mar 2004

John Kerry, trophy candidate
This cartoon cuts a little too close to home...

Meanwhile in America...

Read the rest.
Posted at 15:53 Permanent Link

iPod muggings
In the UK, muggers are targeting iPod wearers by their distinctive white headphones, reports the Register.

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.
Posted at 14:50 Permanent Link

Great moments in grammar
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."

The difference between affect and effect makes for a brain-twisting construction in this frantic email.
Posted at 12:55 Permanent Link

Thu, 25 Mar 2004

Irony
The definition of irony is a huge banner ad for Google AdSense.

huge graphical ad for text only ads
Posted at 14:23 Permanent Link

Wed, 24 Mar 2004

Minnesota firsts '04
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.

It was also the first day I was treated to my neighbor's blaring music coming in my open window.

High temperature: 58 F.
Posted at 18:05 Permanent Link

Create your own Bush conspiracy
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.

* "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."
Posted at 09:40 Permanent Link

Tue, 23 Mar 2004

Great letter to the editor
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

Best of all -- they're publishing it!
Posted at 13:12 Permanent Link

Who asked?
Political Wire: Lieberman Says No To Veep.

Who the hell asked? Bush?
Posted at 11:03 Permanent Link

Mon, 22 Mar 2004

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 18 Mar 2004

iPhoto Exposed
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.

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.
Posted at 22:35 Permanent Link

Blue State Digital
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!

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.
Posted at 22:11 Permanent Link

Tue, 16 Mar 2004

Tycho on the Littermaid Plus
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.

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.


Posted at 15:58 Permanent Link

Mon, 15 Mar 2004

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Sun, 14 Mar 2004

MoveOn at SXSW
Cory Doctrow posted an "impressionistic" transcript of the MoveOn session at SXSW.
Posted at 19:25 Permanent Link

Fri, 12 Mar 2004

Now that I'm a Mac user...
...I guess I get to laugh at the lame-o Windoze users.

Penny Arcade cartoon about going to the Apple store

(It's great, btw.)
Posted at 09:20 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 11 Mar 2004

Cam Barrett hired by Kerry campaign
Pioneering blogger and community software guy Cam Barret of CamWorld, late of the Clark campaign, has been hired by the 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.
Posted at 20:35 Permanent Link

Madrid
Madrid: March 11, 2004

A terrorist attack in Madrid today killed nearly 200 people, the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history.
Posted at 09:29 Permanent Link

Shakespeare Social Networks
Using PieSpy to detect social networks in Shakespeare (via /.).

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.
Posted at 09:25 Permanent Link

Wed, 10 Mar 2004

Sign up with MoveOn to help beat Bush; Earn a chance to win a DVD from me
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. ;).

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.


Posted at 15:27 Permanent Link

Blueprints for the Web/Don't make me think
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).

Dont Make Me Think also sounds cool.
Posted at 15:27 Permanent Link

Tue, 9 Mar 2004

Craigslist MSP
Did you know there's a Minneapolis/St. Paul Craigslist now?
Posted at 21:59 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Thu, 4 Mar 2004

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 Permanent Link

AOL Bob
Sweet, check out these comments from Bob K to my post about Liz Sidoti:

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.
Posted at 17:33 Permanent Link

Posters
Some of these "Welcome GOP" posters are cool.

We have nothing to offer but fear itself.
Posted at 13:42 Permanent Link

Wed, 3 Mar 2004

My first caucus
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.

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.
Posted at 15:47 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Tue, 2 Mar 2004

Overheard at CodeCon
Overheard at CodeCon:

"Napster's slogan: 'Same name, opposite idea.'"
Posted at 14:42 Permanent Link

fortune drinks
Ry4an whipped up a fortune file for drink recipes. Sweet.
Posted at 09:21 Permanent Link

Closet case
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.

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
Posted at 08:20 Permanent Link

Mon, 1 Mar 2004

No on reads your blog
I made a little button.

NO ONE READS YR 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.

NO ONE

READS MY BLOG

Enjoy. Or not, since no one reads my blog. ;)
Posted at 18:36 Permanent Link

Jakob Nielsen
Brad Wilson: "Jakob is the Special Ed student of HTML."
Posted at 16:11 Permanent Link

Rebuilding Movable Type individual archives after Trackback
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).

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.
Posted at 10:27 Permanent Link

Edward Tufte in Minneapolis
Edward Tufte is finally doing one of his classes in Minneapolis. Hmmmm.
Posted at 09:27 Permanent Link

Cairo
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)."

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.
Posted at 08:53 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Fri, 27 Feb 2004

AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzAbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzAbcdefghijk
If you act now, you too can get one of the world's most inconvient email addresses.
Posted at 15:12 Permanent Link

Free trade and protectionism
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.

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.
Posted at 11:31 Permanent Link

525M email addresses?
I just got a spam that shouts: TARGET E-EMAIL BY STATE -525 MILLION 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.
Posted at 09:57 Permanent Link

Thu, 26 Feb 2004

ACT launches website
America Coming Together launched their website just recently.
Posted at 20:06 Permanent Link

Boom
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".

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.
Posted at 15:45 Permanent Link

Imaginary Girlfriend
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.

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.
Posted at 09:34 Permanent Link

Wed, 25 Feb 2004

Apple Store San Francisco
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.

apple store sf

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.
Posted at 19:43 Permanent Link

Bush-Cheney campaign slogan
The Bush-Cheney '04 campaign slogan is "Steady Leadership in Times of Change", which is just a revision of the tried and true:

Don't Switch Horsemen Mid-Apocalypse

Via Atrios
Posted at 09:36 Permanent Link

Role playing your life
[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.]

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...
Posted at 08:31 Permanent Link

Thu, 19 Feb 2004

Open comments in new window icon
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.

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 is light blue. open comments in new window icon

Here is orange. open comments in new window icon

Here is green. open comments in new window icon

Here is aqua. open comments in new window icon

Here's what it looks like in context:

Icon 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.
Posted at 17:30 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Wed, 18 Feb 2004

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".

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".
Posted at 15:19 Permanent Link

Fog of War
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.

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.
Posted at 13:41 Permanent Link

Tue, 17 Feb 2004

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 Permanent Link

Who's Rambo?
Today's Achewood is absolutely hilarious.

I'm in my 20s now and already my childhood is the subject of vague recollection and nostalgia.
Posted at 13:59 Permanent Link

The new BushOut.TV
Last night I unveiled the a new look for BushOut.TV, including a great logo from my friend David Krewinghaus.

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.
Posted at 09:16 Permanent Link

Gay Penguin for America
America needs new leadership. The leadership only a gay penguin can provide.

Gay Penguin 2004!

Vote Gay Penguin for America!
Posted at 08:33 Permanent Link

Mon, 16 Feb 2004

Dear Mary...
Have you seen this woman?

Missing: Marry Cheney
Posted at 07:57 Permanent Link

Sun, 15 Feb 2004

Vegan Attack Rock
I wrote a song for you. It goes like this...

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!
Posted at 13:54 Permanent Link

Fri, 13 Feb 2004

Blackface SpongeBob
Somewhere, something went horribly, horribly wrong...

Sponge Bob in blackface

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!

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.

Heh. I should log onto their copy of AMS and look up the original...
Posted at 19:52 Permanent Link

KERRY SCANDAL BOMBSHELL!
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:

tourist guy john kerry photo

Developing...
Posted at 12:07 Permanent Link

No thank you message?
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.

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.
Posted at 08:42 Permanent Link

Thu, 12 Feb 2004

iTunes iSbogus
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.

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."
Posted at 15:45 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Wed, 11 Feb 2004

US states I've visited
MyWorld66 is an interesting site. You can create a map of the states you'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.


create your own visited states map

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)
Posted at 20:38 Permanent Link

Tue, 10 Feb 2004

Armstrong Zuniga
Markos's consulting company finally has a website.

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).
Posted at 21:35 Permanent Link

Mon, 9 Feb 2004

Christopher Lydon on MPR
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.

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.
Posted at 08:26 Permanent Link

Sat, 7 Feb 2004

Finally
The holiday we've all been waiting for.
Posted at 17:26 Permanent Link

Thu, 5 Feb 2004

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.

Turns out, the intel was worse than we thought...


Posted at 21:27 Permanent Link

Wed, 4 Feb 2004

Ads in RSS (part 2)
Janis Mara of Internet News asks Is Ad-Supported RSS the Next Big Thing?

Last January, I wondered how long it would be until we saw ads in RSS feeds.
Posted at 16:11 Permanent Link

Tue, 3 Feb 2004

North Dakota Caucus Turnout
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!

Let's see any other state get their participation up by this much.
Posted at 20:32 Permanent Link

Link Whoring
BushOut.TV is now linked from DailyKos, the largest liberal weblog.

But I need more. My goal? A more popular site.

Here are my targets, from the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem.


Posted at 13:29 Permanent Link

Features Web Browsers should have
Here's some features I would like it if web browsers had.

  1. Spell checker
  2. Search and replace in text editor fields
  3. Keep track of what I've typed in text fields in case the server eats it
  4. Better text editor in general!
  5. web discussion tracker to keep track of my posts
  6. RSS reader
  7. Ability to archive everything I've looked at, then search it (say, 30 days or up to n GB worth of data)

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?
Posted at 11:04 Permanent Link

Pepys
Hm, this is cool: Pepys Natural Hypertext Notebook.

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! :)
Posted at 10:26 Permanent Link

Gnome is going to give me carpal tunnel
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.

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!
Posted at 10:21 Permanent Link

Mon, 2 Feb 2004

Le Guin's World
Le Guin's World is a cool site about Ursula K. Le Guin and her work.
Posted at 16:49 Permanent Link

Fri, 30 Jan 2004

Slacktivist
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.

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).
Posted at 08:38 Permanent Link

Tue, 27 Jan 2004

Exit Polls
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).

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.
Posted at 18:32 Permanent Link

Migraine...I mean, migrating between Movable Type blogs
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.

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.
Posted at 13:07 Permanent Link

Mon, 26 Jan 2004

Zen koan-like FAQ
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.

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.
Posted at 21:03 Permanent Link

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 Permanent Link

Sun, 25 Jan 2004

Get Your War On
The State of the Union Get Your War On is one of the funniest strips in the series.

"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?'"
Posted at 11:40 Permanent Link

Fri, 23 Jan 2004

Using the Sony SDM X72 with DVI-D on Linux
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.

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.
Posted at 10:22 Permanent Link

Thu, 22 Jan 2004

No way!
Art Garfunkel charged with having pot. No way! What's next, they arrest Cheech and Chong?

Hey...wait a second.
Posted at 08:52 Permanent Link

Wed, 21 Jan 2004

State of the Union Plagiarism
Innnnteresting!

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:

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.

In the State of the Union on January 20, 2004, Bush said:

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.

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".
Posted at 15:20 Permanent Link

Tue, 20 Jan 2004

Schooled
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.

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.
Posted at 21:20 Permanent Link

WHAT?!?
"Operating system not found."

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.
Posted at 06:46 Permanent Link

Thu, 15 Jan 2004

Now THAT'S committed!
Mike Ford told a joke at the Dean grassroots organizing summit I went to that goes something like this:

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:

Deanie Cooper

The Deanie Cooper is one Texas voluteers way of showing her support for Howard Dean.
Posted at 08:19 Permanent Link

Wed, 14 Jan 2004

That's a lot of hard drive space
$1200 will buy you 1 TB of hard drive space, all in one stylish external package.

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.
Posted at 15:38 Permanent Link

Tue, 13 Jan 2004

Pawlenty pushes for Northstar line
Holy shit! Governor Pawlenty did something I agree with!

Star Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/4316577.html

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.''

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!"
Posted at 10:40 Permanent Link

Fri, 9 Jan 2004

Lunacy
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.

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).
Posted at 21:59 Permanent Link

Thu, 8 Jan 2004

Ninja Gate
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.

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?
Posted at 09:33 Permanent Link

Wed, 7 Jan 2004

Dean's Ninja Movie?
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.")

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!
Posted at 21:30 Permanent Link

Tue, 6 Jan 2004

Lying with statistics
I have not formulated an opinion on the new finger print security system, but I do hate it when people lie with statistics.

Paul Hinrichs:

How did Tom Ridge turn a whole hour for tourist253 into [] 15 measly seconds?
Easy! He's a fucking liar!

That link seems to be broken, so try http://blogs.salon.com/0001444/ and look for the Jan. 5th entry.
Posted at 17:26 Permanent Link

Fri, 2 Jan 2004

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 Permanent Link