Happy Solstice
Today is the winter solstice. I'm celebrating by having a miserable cold.
Bah humbug!
Posted at 20:37
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iTunes Party Shuffle shows every song
I really like the iTunes Party Shuffle mode, which shows the next n
upcoming songs and allows you to rearrange them. So it was annoying when
it stopped working recently. Fortunately,
there's
an easy fix: just select all of the songs in the list, and delete them.
iTunes should regenerate the list correctly.
Posted at 19:44
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Careless Love That's Elliot Smith's "Between the Bars", but it sounded like it was being
sung by Billie Holiday.
I did a little research and found out it was a cover by Madeleine Peyroux
on her CD
Careless Love (here's
another review).
I liked it, so I might check out her stuff if I remember. If you like
Elliot Smith, you should try to hear that song.
I was shopping at Barnes and Noble tonight and I heard a song they were
playing that sounded vaugely familiar. I listened to the lyrics a little
more closely: "...I'll kiss you again between the bars where I'm seeing
you there..."
Posted at 21:51
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Top Overlooked Films of the 1990s Some interesting choices on the list. Guess the OFCS is from
Rotten Tomatoes.
List of Bests is interesting too. Everyone
loves lists.
Via
Triptych Cryptic, The Online Film
Critics Society's "Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s".
Posted at 17:15
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Radiohead
I never thought the funniest thing I'd ever read about Radiohead would
come from a
cartoon
bear:
Thom and Radiohead hit the big-time right out of college and apparently their mentality is suspended in the early-20s aspic: a lush death-ambrosia of emotional fear, inability to use Microsoft Excel, and terror at the prospect of waking up the next day lest they be a robot with a large black rubber differential instead of a neck.
Posted at 11:46
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2004 Retrospective/2005 Look Ahead Important events in 2004:
A look ahead at (possibliy) important events in 2005:
Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but here's some ideas about what
might happen in 2005
I'm going to be on a panel discussing the politically important things
that happened in 2004, so here's some notes about 2004 and a look ahead at
2005.
Posted at 00:24
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VoodooPad I'll have to try out VoodooPad. It looks good.
Ultimately, though, I never tried making the Developers Notebook because I
realized I'd just keep using the old fashioned kind...
Somewhere in one of my scratchbooks, I've got notes for an application
very much like VoodooPad. I
called it the HyperInterWebNut, but it was a developers notepad, a
client-side wiki you could edit WYSIWYG, draw sketches, and export to a
server-side wiki. VoodooPad does all of that and more. Very cool. The only
feature I thought of for my software was some sort of integration with a
source code repository for documentation and diagramming purposes
(inspired by
The Pragmatic Programmer.). But that's a hard problem with a limited
audience.
Posted at 10:38
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Dear CVS letter I've made the same move and it's great.
Kevin's
breaking up with CVS.
Posted at 10:28
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Mexican Entrees
Man Doth Not
Live by Burrito Alone.
Posted at 16:48
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Congrats to Norwegianity
Congratulations to Mark Gisleson of
Nowegianity, who has now been blogging
for five years at various sites.
Posted at 13:39
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Skycutter
Skycutter
flying lawn mower. For real. Well, it LOOKS like a lawn mower. It's
actually a lifting body. Via
Ask the
Pilot.
Posted at 11:04
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Design Outpost This is very cool for someone like me who has very low design abilities. I
sometimes need logos for software projects. If I need a professional
looking logo in the future, I know where to go.
I just found out about
Design
Outpost, a site were designers compete to create logos for clients. It's
sort of like Fark, but with money and fewer squirrels with gigantic
testicles. The prices are really reasonable ($100-$200 for a logo) and the
results look quite good (take a look at
the
archives).
Posted at 16:49
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Half Life Story
Half Life Saga Story Guide is
a cool piecing together of the overall half-life story based on in-game
evidence from HL and HL2. Spoilers, of course.
Posted at 14:36
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Downtown grocery store(s) Quick P.S.: the Near Northeast Lunds is going to be in a new development
that will replace the aging and ugly strip mall on Central Avenue, one of
the sites in Minneapolis that bugs me the most. It's a prime example of
non-urban design smack in the middle of the city, and the structure has
exceeded its design life (strip malls are typically built to last only 30
years). The news that it will be replaced by a mixed use development is
welcome indeed.
Downtown finally gets a grocery store, or two.
Two Lunds stores are
coming to the downtown area. Time to put in that reservation on a
downtown condo... ;)
Posted at 19:38
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Internet Commies And its ID is #42. w00t!
I have a soft spot for the graphic designs of communism (why do
dictatorships always have the coolest propaganda?) so I think this
hammer and sickle
http shirt is pretty sweet.
Posted at 19:14
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The Joy of Cooking (Hash Brownies) However, the 1975 edition is apparently a Bible of sorts for many people,
who are distraught at the recipies omitted from the 1997 edition, the
faddish nature of some of the new content, the harder-to-read typeface,
and the elimination of Irma and Marion's personal style. (Fortunately for
these people,
the 1975 edition is still available. I find myself tempted to pick it up,
along with another recommended cookbook,
How to Cook Everything.)
But I found this review most amusing:
Having just prepared my first Thanksgiving turkey from its august pages, I
browsed the Amazon.com listing for the
New Joy of Cooking unaware that I was descending into a malestrom of
criticism. I did not know how significantly the cookbook had been revised
from Marion Rombauer Becker's final 1975 edition. Many recipies and entire
sections were dropped. Some of this was for the better, as the reciepies
were updated for today's (OK, 1997's) more healthy attitudes. Many ethnic
recipies were added as well.
The "Joy of Cooking" (affectionately know by some as "Irma") is a wonderful collection of recipes, terms and techniques. However, I found it to be sadly incomplete.
For example, there is no recipe for baking hash brownies. Now, I've known that this recipe has been widely available since, at least, the late '60's. But is it in this book? No, sirreee. Of course, an accomplished cook could improvise on the basic brownie recipe (p. 645), but I'm a beginner, and not always clear thinking, so a more complete set of recipes would have been very helpful.
Posted at 19:17
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LIMO 0.5 released! LIMO is a web application that allows you to browse your
Lucene indexes remotely. It is an ideal
companion for Lucene applications that run in a servlet container.
The 0.5 release adds some cool new features such as:
LIMO requires Java 1.4 or later and a servlet container.
Download it from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/limo/
LIMO is still ready to go out of the box (er, war file). Just edit the
web.xml to point LIMO to your indexes.
Thanks to Julien Nioche for starting a great and very useful project and
letting me join it; and to Andrzej Bialecki for Luke from which I
appropriated several ideas and his GrowableStringArray class. If you are
interested in getting involved, LIMO is now available in SourceForge CVS.
I am pleased to announce that version 0.5 of
LIMO, the Lucene Index Monitor, has been released.
Posted at 23:41
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Google Scholar Compare results for "fast multiresolution image query":
(CiteSeer is a little slow, I think because of all the people checking it
out compared to Scholar ;)
Cool, Google cloned CiteSeer with
Google Scholar. When I was in school,
CiteSeer (aka
ResearchIndex) was an invaluable tool for finding scientific articles.
I'm sure that with Google's increased indexing power and agreements with
publishers, Google Scholar will become even more vital.
Posted at 10:23
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svn diff -w svn diff has no "-w" option, but you can use a specified diff command:
svn di src/com/foobar/File.java --diff-cmd diff -x "-u -b"
Thank the lord! I finally figured out how to get
Subversion to ignore whitespace.
Posted at 12:29
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Bayesian filtering for idiots?
Screw spam filtering. That's old hat. Who's going to step up to the plate
and write bayesian filtering for idiots? A mailing list that I'm on (which
shall remain nameless) is crawling with morons who don't do the vaguest
search of the archives or FAQs. Argh.
Posted at 11:31
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Lost for Words I've never seen politican-speak so ably distilled. For a better English!
Reuters story via Boing Boing.
Lost for Words: The Use and Abuse of the English Language by John
Humphreys sounds interesting. Humphreys is a UK journalist who takes aim
at politicians like Bush and Blair who use mindless repitition of canned
phrases to drive their point home and avoid using verbs whenever possible
to avoid accountability:
Humphrys notes Blair's apparent fear of verbs and mocks his speeches, which are peppered with verbless phrases like "new challenges, new ideas," or "for our young people, a brighter future" and "the age of achievement, at home and abroad".
Posted at 09:59
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Hiring Java Programmers This is an interesting article. Holub argues that "smarts" beats
tool experience (or rather, "skill lists") favored by HR departments:
From what I've learned in my career, I argue that there is no substitute
for experience gained through real-world use of a language. The skilled
programmer knows the language inside and out. For a team like ours that
depends heavily on another product (in our case, DB2 and IBM Content
Manager) it's also important to have someone who knows these tools like
the back of their hand.
I think my criteria are quite like Holub's, just stated a little
differently. He calls these programmers "smart". I think that's just part
of it. You have to be both smart and knowledgeable.
I don't really buy that fresh graduate mantra that "I can learn anything."
Or rather, I do. It'll just take you five or ten years, like everyone
else.
P.S.: The "widowmaker" strikes again. We've been giving a programming
test to people applying for a senior software engineering position. It's
amazing how poorly some people who have great resumes do on this test. So
I think that a quick programming test, as Joel Spolsky recomments, is a
really good way to select skilled programmers.
Allen Holub: When Hiring,
Smarts Beat Skill Lists.
It doesn't matter if a candidate has written a kazillion EJBs, if they were all garbage. I'd much rather hire a smart programmer who knows both the core language and object-oriented design principles inside and out, but who has never written an EJB, than a marginal programmer who has written 200 of the things badly. More important, I want someone smart enough to recognize that I shouldn't be using EJBs at all if they're not appropriate, someone who can quickly pick up the technology necessary to implement an evolving system.
Posted at 17:42
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What a crappy present! The humorous advice and "Kid's corner" just rule. And I don't know who the
girl in the photos is, but her expressions are spot-on. It's like she
really got a Britney Spears CD she didn't want. (actually, I believe these
may be photographs of my little sister during Christmas '97).
I guess this came out last year, so I'm a little behind the curve, but
Downhill Battle's What a Crappy
Present website is just picture prefect.
Posted at 17:38
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What's wrong with voting receipts? Voting receipts are a really, really bad idea, and here's why:
When you vote, your vote is secret. The secret vote is essential to
protect your freedom from coercion and protect the system from vote
buying.
Someone can threaten you to vote a certain way, or else. But as long as
your vote is secret, you can tell them "Yes, sir" and then vote however
you choose. If they can't look at your ballot, they can't find out how you
voted.
Electronic voting machines change this picture because they're impossible
to validate without a voter verified paper trail. So people suggest, "We
should have it print out a receipt. You can take it with you and know how
you voted." Wired's illustration takes this to the extreme, with online
vote verification, win/loss record, and tracking numbers.
But once you've got receipts, you've opened the system to coercion and
vote buying, because it's possible to check up on people. Bad, bad idea.
Your vote must be kept secret.
How should electronic voting machines work, then? There must be a paper
trail, and the voter must see the paper version of their vote and sign off
on it. But then the vote should be placed in a secure, secret ballot box
in case of a recount. There should be no identifying information on the
paper version of the ballot. Essentially, what we have now is a printed
optical scan ballot.
Some also suggest doing spot recounts of paper ballots to ensure that the
machines are counting accurately.
People often suggest that electronic voting machines should give people
receipts. Wired magazine recently
ran a
"Found" photo about the idea,
which
Boing Boing just linked to, saying "Wow".
Posted at 14:31
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Lucene Desktop Notes PDFbox library for PDF extractions (anything for
doing thumbnails?) BSD license.
TextMining.org for Word documents. Apache
License.
OpenOffice.org also has an API.
Java 1.4 for creating image thumbnails? GIF, PNG, JPEG, BMP supported...
POPsearch, a similar idea, already implemented in
C. Lots of features.
Index should have basic file metadata structures for all files, plus
additional fields for each file type (images would have width and height,
for example).
Field names should be lower case and human type-able for advanced queries.
Easy install should be a goal.
Windows has Google Desktop -- who would switch from that? Mac OS X Tiger
will have Searchlight -- who would switch from that? But there is a niche
on pre-Tiger Macs and Linux.
How do you index email?
Jetty would make a good embedded webserver and servlet engine as Tomcat
blows and is way too big.
Index home directory only? What about privacy? Probably needs to be
configurable.
All config should be possible through the web interface.
File formats: HTML, text, Word, Open Office, PDF, MP3, images (GIF, BMP,
JPEG, PNG -- create thumbnails in the cache directory)...
Meta-file formats (must index inside the file): mbox, Microsoft mailbox
formats, maildir (sorta).
Need some spiffy 16x16 icons to represent file types for above.
Here's some notes about
Lucene Desktop, Kevin Burton's latest crazy concoction.
Posted at 11:51
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Get Real 2004 Here's some of the movies I'm particularly interested in seeing:
Friday, Nov 5
Blogumentary 7:30
Venus of Mars 9:30
Saturday, Nov 6
I am going to a show sometime on Saturday so I will miss some of these.
I'll try to catch them on DVD.
A League of Ordinary
Gentlemen 5:30
Mondovino 7:45
Sunday, Nov 7
The Boy Who Plays on
the Buddhas of Bamiyan 1:30
Born Into Brothels
3:30
Army of One 7:30
Guerrilla: The Taking
of Patty Hearst 9:30
Monday, Nov 8
Tuesday, Nov 9
Checkpoint 7:30
Wednesday, Nov 10
Tarnation 7:30
The Get Real documentary film festival is one of my favorite events of the
year. It kicks off tonight with
Blogumentary by local filmmaker and blogger Chuck Olsen. [Note: OK, it
really started last night with
I, Curmudgeon but
that doesn't count because I didn't go.]
Posted at 09:59
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"Enthused" "Enthused" is not a real word. Everywhere you are using "enthused" you
could use "enthusiastic" instead. Try it! It sounds less stupid by far.
Love,
Luke
Dear world,
Posted at 19:55
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Death to Our Enemies
Death to Our Enemies posted
some photos
I took
of them at
their recent show with Eufio.
Posted at 15:26
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First Avenue Closes The real danger is that the owner of the building will just up and sell
it. That land is worth a lot of money, and there are many in the city
who'd rather see another shitty tower or Block E-esque monstrosity in its
place.
I was going to go to a show this weekend. It sounds like it's been
rescheduled, but will the old tickets still be valid?
Adding insult to injury,
First Ave closed
yesterday. What a major disappointment. I hope that the club can re-open.
I heard someone suggest that the city should subsidize First Ave the way
they do other important artistic institutions. I do agree that First Ave
is important and shouldn't be allowed to close, but getting the government
involved doesn't sound like a good idea because the city could take heat
for controversial acts that play there. I don't want political
considerations affecting what shows I can see. Maybe a foundation with a
strong backbone would be willing to put up some cash for the club.
Posted at 14:53
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I Voted (early)
Posted at 23:25
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CodeCon 05
It lives!
Posted at 23:15
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LIMO I had in mind to write something much like this after I did something
similar (but much simpler) at work. My idea was to implement a simple
servlet that had many of the features of
LUKE, the Lucene Index Toolbox. LUKE allows you to browse your index like
LIMO, but also allows you to execute searches and browse the results. Now
I think it would be fun project to add query functionality to LIMO.
Maybe after the election.
I installed LIMO (the Lucene Index MOnitor)
today to play around with it. It's pretty cool. It allows you to browse
the documents in a Lucene index directly and see some statistics about the
index.
Posted at 16:23
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Insta-doc But on what topic...?
I wanna make an
insta-doc!
Posted at 16:14
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GUI Bloopers Also interesting is
Web Bloopers.
I would like to read these books.
This book looks good:
GUI
Bloopers. Kinda spendy, but it is 500+ pages.
Posted at 15:58
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Fuckin' Yankees
I'm not the world's biggest baseball fan, but I do have to say this: HA HA!
Posted at 08:59
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Cast your vote.
Florida Election Ballot
available early on the internets.
Posted at 20:57
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Firefox crashes Well, it crashes even more than Galeon. In particular, nearly every time I
click on a link that opens a new window, the browser crashes. It's been
filed as bug 260847
but I haven't seen any fixes.
Arg!
Remember how I said I was
switching to
Firefox?
Posted at 14:31
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Ponchos Here's a hit ladies: they look ridiculous. If you're going to wear a
poncho, at least wear a real one.
Slate takes on the stupid-looking
ponchos that women have been wearing recently.
Posted at 16:26
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Wanna buy some wood?
It's on the
Internets
Posted at 13:02
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Once more into the breech I made this.
OK, not really, but I wrote the code that updates the graphic. It was
pretty fun to write. I haven't had a chance to do much graphics
programming so this was a good experience.
I used PHP (not my favorite language, but ubiquitous and I know it better
than Perl) and the GD graphics library.
I did my part, you do yours: Take
the day off on November 2nd and help drive little old ladies to the
polls. You'll be glad you did.
The DFL is doing a fundraiser and voluteer drive for
Get Out the Vote activities on election day.
Posted at 22:49
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Oops!
I caught this on the Star Tribune website
last night:
Posted at 22:33
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Nice Boots
I saw these boots in the window today at Corner Store, a vintage clothing
store in my neighborhood.
Posted at 21:25
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X-Prize I've been interested in glimpses of the chase plane used by Scaled
Composites. It's delta-wing looking craft that can be seen in fuzzy CNN
photos like this one:
But what is it? I did a little Googling to find out.
Turns out it is a Burt Rutan-designed Beech Starship from the 1980s. It
was not successful and less than 100 were built.
Raytheon decommisioned the Starships last year because they were too
expensive to maintain and offered owners a King Air in exchange, but pilot
Robert Scherer didn't want to give his up, so he uses it as the
SpaceShipOne chase plane. He's got a
website with photos of the
plane.
Richard Seaman has
some
good photos of the Starship from the June SpaceShipOne launch.
StarShip chases White Knight and SpaceShipOne as they climb for launch.
SpaceShipOne glides in for a landing, followed by the StarShip.
StarShip does a victory pass.
SpaceShipOne wins the X-Prize! Congratulations to the pilots and the
Scaled Composites engineering team.
Posted at 11:09
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You forgot Poland! Kerry: The United Nations, Kofi Annan, offered help after Baghdad fell,
and we never picked them up on that and did what was necessary to transfer
authority and to transfer reconstruction. It was always American-run.
Secondly, when we went in there were three countries: Great Britain,
Australia and the United States. That's not a grand coalition. We can do
better.
Mr. Bush: Well, actually you forgot
Poland.
One of the best moments of last night's debate:
Posted at 14:33
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Ry4an in the Pioneer Press A reporter from the Pioneer Press interviewed us, and Ry4an ended up in the paper today. They even spelled his name right!
I watched the presidential debate last night with Ry4an
at O'Gara's in St. Paul.
Posted at 12:01
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Escaping a dead-end job
David St. Lawrence:
Escaping
a dead-end job. Sounds like useful advice.
Posted at 13:57
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Rowbike It's called a Rowbike (I believe the one I saw was
the 720 Sport Multi-speed)
There's some movies on the site so
you can see how strange it looks when you're riding it.
I saw the craziest bike this weekend: a mobile rowing machine. I tried to
get a photo of it, but I wasn't able to get far enough ahead of it to get
my camera ready.
Posted at 09:41
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The Daily WTF A lot of it is VB oriented because it's run by a Microsoft guy, but
there's enough Java and DB stuff to keep me interested. They comments are
also amusing in one way or another.
Thanks to Canned Platypus for the link. I'm adding it
to my blogroll.
Now if only I can find some of the horrible code I've dug out of
AMS...It's got to be in CVS somewhere.
The Daily WTF ("Curious Perversions In
Information Technology") is my new guilty pleasure.
Posted at 16:23
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Kiffmeyer: pwn3d There's three other anti-Kiffmeyer letters, so
check 'em out.
My first published letter to the editor of the Star Tribune:
Kiffmeyer and terror
Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer needs to reread her job description. She is supposed to help people vote and ensure the smooth operation of elections.
Instead, she's feuded with local election officials because of her overcomplicated voter registration forms and tried to shut down the City Pages' voter registration effort at the behest of the far-right Taxpayers League.
And now she's scaring people with her talk of "homicide" bombers at your polling station.
Kiffmeyer should let the police and Homeland Security handle the terrorists and focus on her job: helping people vote.
Luke Francl, Minneapolis.
Posted at 22:37
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Looks like it's time to get a new bike lock I guess I'm officially in the market for a new bike lock, then.
Via Boing
Boing.
Aw, crap. You can
defeat a
Kyptonite U-Lock with a Bic ballpoint pen.
Posted at 12:01
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Firefox I loved the Galeon browser but the version I had was just too far behind.
I will miss the crash recovery feature, though. Hopefully it won't be as
necessary...
I finally switched by work browser from Galeon to Firefox 1.0RC. Galeon
crashed one too many times.
Posted at 11:13
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Announcing the New Patriot Most of my political rants will end up over there, so if that interest
you, check it out.
Some local Minnesota progressives and I have founded a new group blog
covering local and national politics: The New
Patriot. Combining the strength of several local bloggers including
Chris Dykstra,
Mark Desrosiers,
Chuck "Blogumentary" Olsen and Space
Waitress Crystal Eitle, the
new blog aims to be the hub of the emerging network of progressive
Minnesota blogs.
Posted at 11:11
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Dive into Accordion
Canada's coolest Accordion player reviews
Dive into Python. My review: A good book by an annoying, pedantic person.
But isn't that who you want writing your programming books?
Posted at 14:51
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Zip Code Browser Be sure to try the zoom function.
Interesting zip codes:
10101: NYC
20202: Washington, D.C.
30303: Atlanta
40404: Berea, KT
50505: N/A
60606: Chicago
70707: Gonzales, LA
80808: Calhan, CO
90909: N/A
90101: Los Angeles
So you can see that having a "cool", memorable zip code corresponds
somewhat to living in one of the US's biggest cities: New York, Atlanta,
Chicago, or (breaking the pattern a little) LA. This is similar to the way
the easy to dial area
codes were given to big cities in the 1950s. If you want to find out how
important your town was then, add up the numbers of your area code. New
York's, 212, is the fastest possible to dial on the rotary telephone,
followed by LA's 213.
But not necessarily, as some large cities didn't get their region's
repeating zip code.
Jason sends along this cool
zip code browser (req.
Java).
Posted at 14:50
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Sunday Bloody Sunday Someone took clips of Bush audio and spliced it together to create a cover
of the U2 song...word for word!
This is AMAZING.
George Bush sings "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
This sort of extra-pertinent for me because I was just listening to this
powerful song over the weekend.
You heard U2's song about the massacre in Northern Ireland, "Sunday Blood
Sunday" right?
Posted at 13:55
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Photos from John Edwards's Labor Day rally V for Victory!
Betty McCollum and me.
For more, see this
link.
I took some photos for DFLers.org.
Posted at 13:02
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Work like you're 10 points down First, you need 50% + 1 to win. Everything else is ego.
Second, no matter what the polls say,
work like you're ten
points down.
At Camp Wellstone, I learned two important things about campaigns.
Posted at 22:35
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Are you reading DFM? It also has a rollicking
events list with plenty of ways to get involved.
Are you reading the Democcracy for
Minnesota blog? You should be. It's turning into a real powerhouse of a
Minnesota liberal group blog. Tony Dorsano is kicking ass daily with his
posts, and I try to add a dollop or two myself.
Posted at 23:16
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RNC bloggers go wild Salon checks in on the RNC bloggers
to
see how they're holding up. In short, their coverage comes down to, "Hey
look! Hot chicks!"
There was a lot of criticism of DNC bloggers' navel-gazing. RNC bloggers
noted this and promised bigger and better things. Kevin Aylward of
Wizbang! said, "Readers rightly criticized the number of 'hey, look at me'
posts from DNC bloggers. I'm aware much of the audience isn't interested
in what I had for dinner and what my hotel room is like."
Posted at 11:25
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Newspaper Advertising It is incredibly expensive!
Here's the Star
Tribune's rates and here's the
Pioneer Press's rates.
To run a full page Sunday ad in the Strib will run you $30,000. In the
Pioneer Press, it's a mere $23,000 (if I'm reading the rates correctly --
it's a bit confusing).
Yikes! $50 grand to hit both Sunday papers?
I was looking at newspaper advertising today on a whim.
Posted at 16:06
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Bug 17K I thought it was appropriate that I filed this numerically significant bug
because I'm using it to track the development (and test) a Subversion hook
I'm writing to submit change messages to Bugzilla.
I just filed bug 17000 in the Bugzilla system at work. This is the 2000th
bug since I wrote the conversion script that migrated us from the
God-awful ProblemTracker to Bugzilla.
Posted at 15:26
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John Kerry on the Daily Show
Check out John Kerry on the
Daily Show via Blogumentary.
Posted at 23:30
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Why Johnny Can't Read (Revised Edition) by Steve Greenberg.
Jenny's tried to go to the library multiple times this week to no avail:
they are always closed.
Fuck library budget cuts!
Posted at 14:03
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Kerry-Edwards Special I really like this one that shows the train heading into
Kirkwood, MO as people line the tracks to cheer.
I'm not a railfan like my friend Nick, but these
shots of the Kerry-Edwards special are pretty awesome.
Posted at 17:32
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PhotoStamps Via Boing
Boing.
Make your own stamps. OK, this is fucking awesome. Make your own stamps!
Posted at 16:48
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The Onion comes to Minneapolis/St. Paul! It launches September 2nd.
Sweeeet. The Onion is
coming to the
Cities.
Posted at 13:13
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Doom 3 flashlight
Jason says:
One of the biggest complaints about Doom 3 is that there must exist a roll of duct tape somewhere on mars so the grunt can tape his flashlight to his weapon. Well, here it is ;) http://ducttape.glenmurphy.com/
Posted at 16:27
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Oops!
Funny insult from mondo dentro to a conservative poster in Atrios's
comments: "Oops! You must think you're posting at a Neocon Website.
Tacitus must be in the other window. Use alt-tab to go back."
Posted at 10:31
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Doom 3 Hardware Guide
The [H]ard|OCP Doom3
Hardware Guide is very helpful.
Posted at 13:47
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Pacfish I want one.
Posted at 11:55
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Moore Treason From the Urge
Ashcroft to brand Michael Moore what he really is -- traitor to America!
petition.
After signing, you recieve a free brownshirt with cool armband!
Don't let Moore get away with treason! Sign this petition urging U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to brand Moore a treacherous traitor guilty of seeking to undermine our nation's resolve to fight while giving aid and encouragement to our avowed enemies during a time of war!
Posted at 11:28
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Window Seat This was on Boing Boing a long time ago, and I bookmarked it and forgot
about it.
Window Seat looks like an awesome book for
frequent flyers. North American geography -- from 30,000 feet!
Posted at 13:37
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Web based RSS aggregators (open source) Mark
Irons unnamed Perl aggregator. Lightweight, CSS scriptable. Uses
XML::Simple.
Meerkat. Insane. Uses XML::Simple.
Feed on Feeds. PHP. RSS and
Atom. Barfs on broken feeds (see todo: "Find a way to handle broken feeds
better."). But then, probably all of these do. Uses Magpie.
Blagg. Perl, integrates
with Bloxom, with plugins for MT. Uses regexps.
Drupal's web based aggregator. Requires
Drupal. ;)
Feed on Feeds looks the most promising. Rasterweb has done some
customization to Feed on Feeds and likes its hackability (and he's a Perl
programmer, so that's saying something about a PHP app). See:
Super-Happy-Terrific Aggregator,
Super-Happy-Terrific
FEED ON FEEDS? (dicusses using Universal Feed Parser),
FEED ON FEEDS ala
Bloglines,
Feed on Feeds Unread List,
More
Aggregator Madness,
Yet More Aggregator Madness.
I think it would be possible to use the Universal Feed Parser to poke data
into Feed on Feeds database.
Update: Ohhh, someone already modified Feed on Feeds to use UFP.
Simple Aggregator.
Update 2: I shouldn't have started writing all that crap about hacking
Feed on Feeds before reading the links off of Rasterweb.
Temboz is a
Python RSS aggregator that uses SQLLite, Cheetah tempates, and the UFP.
That sounds very much like what I want (though having a built-in webserver
is not). But it's not released yet, and it's unclear it ever will be.
I'm thinking about setting up a web-based RSS aggregator for a project (it
would function sort of like Dave Winer's
Convention Bloggers site). Ideally,
it would use the Universal Feed Parser to parse
(and not barf) on as many formats as possible. But I haven't found any web
based aggregators with that parser, and I'm not that interested in
writting my own. So here's a list of web-based RSS aggregators I've found:
Posted at 12:25
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Doom 3
Posted at 12:04
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Doom 3
Where are you going to be
when Doom 3
comes out?
Posted at 21:56
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Proof your company sucks, #287 "Effective 8/6/04, all email size limitations will be enforced at 150
megabytes. Any exceptions to this policy have already been notified."
Cost of 200GB hard drive: $150.
Cost per MB: $.00075
Your worth to company: $.11
Manipulate numbers as appropriate for RAID level and backup medium.
Mailbox size limits.
Posted at 14:43
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Interesting bug of the day
SYLK: File format is not valid
Posted at 23:26
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How do you get a McJob when you have too much experience?
Interesting thread on the JoS forums from a guy who lost his upper 5-6
figure tech job and can't get work anywhere. He's overqualified and has
trouble lying about his experience to land a McJob. Lots of good advice on
this thread about how to deal with being down and out, how to get a job,
any job.
Posted at 11:13
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Powell on Sudan Ladies and gentlemen, start your irony!
"We should not underestimate what a difficult choice that would be in a
sovereign country where there is no U.N. resolution for any such
action..."
Posted at 16:59
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Super Mario Rampage It's a little to easy to be worthwhile, but fun for a laugh.
Super Mario re-envisioned as a side
scrolling shooter (and is that soundtrack by the Minibosses?)
Posted at 16:57
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Scenes from the DNC Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly argue on the street corner. They are
discussing terms for Moore to appear on O'Reilly's show.
Via
Tom Tomorrow.
Here's something you don't see every day...
Posted at 11:25
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Bush approval rating tracks the price of gasoline
Weird. President Bush's approval rating
tracks the inverted price of gasoline very closely. Via
Professor Pollkatz.
Posted at 16:33
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What's it like gathering signatures for Nader on the eve of the DNC?
Salon's War Room has an
amusing post about the trials and tribulations of being a Nader petition
signature gatherer in Boston on the eve of the Democratic National
Convention.
A few feet away Elizabeth approaches an unassuming 30-something man dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a sun hat.
"Would you like to sign a petition to put Ralph Nader on the ballot in Massachusetts?"
The man's face instantly darkens. "Yeah, right," he sneers, and turns to stride off. "Sign me up to kick that fuckhead in the ass."
Posted at 11:39
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MN GOP: What is Patty Wetterling Telling Liberal Special Interests that She isn't Telling Voters? Liberal Special Interests: Why should we support you?
Patty: I'm not Mark Kennedy.
Liberal Special Interests: Yea!
The Minnesota GOP
wants to know. Here's what I think she's telling them:
Posted at 17:57
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Dead girl, live boy
"I will root for the Yankees next season, attend Sunday Mass every week
and live in Peoria for a full year if Kerry wins Wyoming. This would only
happen if Bush winds up with a dead girl AND a live boy, and it all
happens to be an undead, trans-sexual Dick Cheney." -- DavidNYC,
Swing
State Project
Posted at 16:44
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DFLers.org launches I've been working on this for the last couple of months. It took a while
to get going, but once we got the hosting account it came together pretty
fast. I am proud of how the site has turned out, but there's still a lot
of work to do.
P.S. Bonus props to
DU's Dickie Flatt for spotting this hours after I started working on it
last night.
The Scoop-based DFL
blog launched today. http://www.dflers.org
Posted at 23:28
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I'm not...
Harpers has collected a list of statements chronicling
things President Bush is not.
Posted at 20:24
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Forged!
Slactivist takes the fall for forging the infamous Iraq/Niger uranium
documents. Now we know who did it!
Posted at 12:22
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Chipotle Calculator The story goes that someone's at work's husband put this together using
the nutrition facts at Chipotle's website. Anyway, it's good for a laugh.
I got this
eye-opening Chipotle calculator spreadsheet (Excel) from a co-worker. It
shows how many calories (and fat, and sodium, and carbs...) are in those
huge Chipotle burritos, depending what you put on them.
Posted at 19:25
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PyLucene versus Lupy Well, it doesn't matter much, I guess. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to use
one of these soon.
I wonder why the OSAF folks created
PyLucene instead of improving the existing Python port of Lucene 1.2,
Lupy. Performance?
Posted at 12:30
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Fahrenheit 411
Here's an interesting idea: a wingnut wants to use Michael Moore's footage
from F9/11 to make his own movie telling the other side of the story,
called Fahrenheit 411. I think that would be pretty
cool. Rip, mix, burn, and all that.
Posted at 11:47
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Is the one-page resume dead? In response to a recently job posting, we got a number of resumes, and
none of them were in the "classic" one page format (almost all of them
were terrible, but that's another story). This was for a senior software
engineer position, so people with over 5 years of experience.
I've got three years of experience at my current job, plus a student
developer job I had in college and an open source project on my resume. I
always try to keep my resume one page, which limits the amount of stuff
that I can put on there.
After seeing these resumes -- though most people had a few more years of
experience than I do -- I'm wondering if the one page resume is dead. What
do JoS readers think? Is your resume multiple pages?
Here's a question I asked over on the Joel on Software forum:
Posted at 11:35
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A vote for Nader... Tell us how you really feel, Steve.
The typical formulation goes, "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." Steve
Gilliard goes right for the jugular with,
"Every vote for Nader condemns an American soldier to death".
Posted at 13:37
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PHP Woes PHP in contrast to Perl (but has a good overview of
the weaknesses of PHP).
PHP: A
love and hate relationship ... the quality problems of most PHP code.
Experiences of
Using PHP in Large Websites is a good article from Linux 2002.
These articles mirror my experiences with PHP. No namespacing is my
biggest complaint. It's the root of both PHP's hideously overburdened list
of built-in global functions and the inability to make modularized PHP
code (ever noticed how many stand alone PHP apps there are compared to
good libraries?).
Posted at 21:26
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Not In Our Name 404 "Page not found...just like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
Not In Our Name's 404 is pretty
funny.
Posted at 16:14
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Cheney/Edwards debate sneak preview If Halliburton and the Carlyle Group both invited you to the movies on the
same night, who would you go with?
For Edwards:
If, as you say, there are two Americas, which one is your vacation home
in?
For Cheney:
Posted at 15:43
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Turning conventional wisdom on its head That's why I love this ad for LavaLife.com:
Now, this is an ad that turns conventional wisdom on its head. It says,
"Look women! You have tons of men to choose from on our site!"
Everyone knows that online dating services are overwhelmed with horny,
desperate guys trying to hookup with the hot chicks they saw in the ads.
Ads for these services acknowledge this and cater to the horny, desperate
guy demographic with ads showing nubile young women who really want to
meet you. Yeah right.
Posted at 12:09
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Daily Show on F9/11
John Stewart takes a look at F9/11: "Did he just ambush her on her own
interview?"
Posted at 18:44
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America?
This Land Is Whose
Land? City Pages interviews What America
Needs director about Disney's new documentary America's Heart & Soul.
Posted at 12:39
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Ehrenreich in the New York Times
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickled and Dimed, is writing a guest column
in the New York Times for the next month as a welcome replacement for Tom
"Tortured Metaphor" Friedman. Her
first column on the "liberal elite" is worth reading.
Posted at 10:09
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Speech to text Doesn't technology rule?
Sample output from speech to text software (from test data at work):
the urban there's a lot of traffic a monkey on anatomy if the typhoon around Andrea living then out definitely a pair stores everywhere actors at Apple supermarket in there
Posted at 17:19
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Libertarian Planning Aside from these two rules, anything else is allowed. It's libertarian
urban planning.
This is awesome. It requires buildings to address the street (one of the
must crucial features of a walkable neighborhood) and not overpower their
surroundings. The essence of livable places in just two simple rules.
(Via
City Comforts)
Wow, this is cool. Jane Jacobs and Ken Greenberg
boiled urban planning into two rules:
Posted at 23:45
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The Electoral Calculus of Iraq
Josh
Marshall: The economy does continue to be an advantage for the president.
But Iraq -- and the myriad of assumptions, policies and repercussions it
represents -- is what this election is all about. I take it as a given
that virtually no Gore voters from 2000 will pull the lever for Bush. But
how many lightly-committed Bush voters from 2000 will hold him to account
if they believe he gambled big and gambled unwisely with America's honor
and safety, and came up short? I think more than a few. And since there
were more Gore voters than Bush voters last time anyway, well ...
Posted at 20:03
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Those Wacky Greens
And they say Democrats hate America? I like the part about voting for a
guy who's been dead for 75 years (Actually, in my small dealings with
Green party leaders, they seem to have some sort of obsession with Eugene
V. Debs.).
For Greens, roll call of states is more like a litany of sins
Chuck Haga, Star Tribune
June 29, 2004 GREEN0629
MILWAUKEE -- At the Green Party national convention here on Saturday, state delegations paraded to floor microphones to announce their votes for a presidential nominee, and it was just like listening to the Republicans and Democrats.
Well, almost.
Major-party convention halls usually ring with unabashed pride and self-promotion as vote announcers remind everyone that "the great state of [fill-in-the-blank]" is home to this sainted man or that unparalleled mountain range.
At the Greens' convention, though, the spin was a little different. Delegates were told, for example, that "the great state of Indiana" extends "from the shores of polluted Lake Michigan in the north to the clear-cut banks of the Ohio River in the south, with many other sins in between."
Before casting its votes, New York trumpeted itself as "home of Wall Street and unbridled corporate greed."
And the great state of Minnesota? It is, delegate Kellie Burriss of Minneapolis intoned, "the land of 10,000 lakes and the Boundary Waters -- as well as the home of the Prairie Island nuclear power plant."
The reference to nuclear power drew a chorus of boos from the Greens, but that changed to loud, sustained cheers when Burriss read out the state's votes, which included "one vote for Eugene Debs," cast by delegate Wade Hannon of Moorhead, a teacher and counselor.
Debs, who died in 1926, was a fierce critic of the established order and five-time Socialist Party candidate for president. In 1908, he stumped the nation on a train dubbed the Red Special. In 1920, he campaigned from a federal prison cell after being convicted under espionage laws for speaking against World War I.
When the convention chairman repeated Minnesota's vote totals, ending with "one vote for Eugene Debs," the hall erupted with cheers again.
Posted at 10:46
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Word Cleaner Why pay $99 when you can
get it for free?
Word Cleaner is a lot like my
Word Unmunger with some
useless features like an easy to use UI ;)
Posted at 16:16
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Wow
The FuckYou/FuckMe is
finally
reality.
Posted at 15:51
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Walk home drunk It's not in English, but just click on the guy's sign to start, and move
your mouse from side to side to steady him as he walks.
Co-worker Jason sends along this funny game.
I can get about 50 meters.
Posted at 11:44
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IMAP idiots On the first one, I can send mail to distribution list aliases.
On the second one, I can send mail outside the company.
At work, I have a choice of two IMAP servers. Why two?
Posted at 11:34
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2004 candidates
Sure, you've heard about the boring ol' choices for president...Kerry,
Nader, Bush, Badnarik. Why be a slave to the four party quartopoly? Daily
Kos diarist apostropher
gives a rundown of
the more, uh, unique candidates this year, including the Prohibition Party
and the Judean People's Front, er, the various socialist splinter parties
("[Socialist Worker's Party] gets extra credit by nominating two people
ineligible to hold the office, since Roger Calero isn't an American
citizen and his VP choice is only in her 20's."
Posted at 10:11
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You are not special
You are not special. I don't care how awesome you think your "framework"
is, it ought to follow the standard Java package naming convention. You
are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
Posted at 17:32
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Confluence Wiki It looks highly sweet. They only thing they're really lacking from my
vision is automated documentation insertion/extraction (which I never
figured out how to get working ...it was based on ideas from the book The
Pragmatic Programmer) and diagramming tools. But it has an API and
they've written a thick client so theoretically that would be possible,
too.
It's proprietary software: $1200/25 users or $4000 for a site license.
Well, it's cheaper than BitKeeper, anyway.
The other day, I described a bit of what my ideal writing tool would be
like (I have pages and pages of further description in my notebooks, which
I won't bore you with). Atlassian has come pretty close with their
Confluence wiki. It has all the standard
wiki features,
then: "On top of that, we added professional features, such as the
partitioning of content into separately managed spaces, user- and
group-based access control, automated refactoring, PDF exporting,
searchable attachments, a comprehensive remote API, easy installation and
a professional and easy-to-use presentation..."
Posted at 15:42
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Starting a career in "user experience" Step 1: Get a pair of glasses like this guy's...
How do you
start
a career in "user experience"?
Posted at 13:51
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TCJUG
Anyone know what happened to the Twin Cities Java Users Group? They seem
to have fallen
off the face of the Earth.
Posted at 12:33
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Resume P.S.: We really are hiring someone, and it's a tough spot to fill. If you
know a really good Java person, I'd like to hear from them.
Here's a resume tip folks: Put the dates of your education, damn it!
Posted at 16:49
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Hipikat This reminds me of an idea I had for a searchable and editable
"Developer's Notebook" which would be sort of a rich client interface to a
wiki, with diagramming and documentation generation capabilities. Perhaps
something like that would be a good Eclipse plugin as well.
Hipikat looks like an
interesting Eclipse plugin. It's a research project that provides
pervasive search of your "software artifcats"...documentation, bug notes,
news group posts. Check out the
senarios
for examples of its use. It's a research project and obviously a little
flaky, but the ideas are cool.
Posted at 15:14
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Congradulations to the Canned Platypus
Congradulations to Jeff Darcy and his wife Cindy on the
birth of their first
child, Amelia Rose.
Posted at 13:40
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A good deal I recently read three novels by A. E. van Vogt, one of the early masters
of pulp science fiction. I picked up this three book set at Book Smart on
a whim, and it turned out to be a good deal. For four bucks, I got
The World of Null-A,
The Voyage of the Space Beagle, and
Slan. I was mostly curious about The World of Null-A, and I'd never even
heard of Voyage of the Space Beagle, but all three books ended up being
enjoyable reading. This is old skool sci-fi, where the heros are men, the
science isn't, and the pages turn quickly and the writing best not dwelled
on. But very entertaining.
Posted at 22:21
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Confused Coworker (I've taken the liberty of blurring out his license plate number.)
On this older economy car, there are:
(Cue
Seasame Street music: "One of these things is not like the others/One of
these things just doesn't belong")
What is the story with this car? Did the owner buy it used, with the
environmental stickers already attached? Is the owner being ironic?
Perhaps he's one of those
"crunchy"
conservatives, who cares about the environment (but in that case, what's
he doing voting for Bush?). Or maybe the owner is a triffle confused. Or
an idiot.
These are the only explanations I can come up with, and yet each is
dissatisfying.
Here's a photo of a car from work:
Posted at 21:33
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Stellar Associated Press
June 16, 2004 IRS0617
State Republican Party Chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife have had a
$390,113 federal tax lien filed against them by the Internal Revenue
Service.
The dispute, Eibensteiner said, relates to the calculation of capital
gains for stock options he exercised in the Eden Prairie-based software
company Stellent Inc., on which he once served on the board.
``I thought it would get resolved, and I think the position they're taking
is unreasonable,'' said Eibensteiner of the IRS. ``My accountant and my
attorney have a different view of it than the IRS.''
Although the lien was filed on May 6, Eibensteiner said he was unaware of
the filing. The lien indicates that the dispute can be traced to the 2001
tax year.
Stellent, which was previously called IntraNet Solutions until being
renamed in 2001, is publicly traded. Stellent identifies itself as ``a
global provider of content management solutions.''
IRS files tax lien against state GOP chairman, wife
Posted at 11:04
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SmartDraw
I came across SmartDraw today. I don't know if
it's any good, but it looks like a nice way to do
web page mockups.
Posted at 17:34
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Poker Some friends have a monthly game, but I never thought about it as a wider cultural phenomenon. Interesting.
Jack of Smarts: Why the Internet generation
loves to play poker.
Posted at 12:17
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Kerry Rocks Due to increasing intrest, RCA has
re-released the Electra's
album and you can buy it for $14 (previously, it was nearly impossible to
find). It's crazy that RCA kept the masters in their catalog for all this
time. But you never know when the bass player from some shitty garage band
might get nominated for President.
Update: Sweet, got this
posted on
Boing Boing.
It's a little known fact that John Kerry was in a high school band called
The Electras (he played bass). The site
KerryRocks.com has lots of photos, the liner
notes, and an MP3 melange of some of their songs.
Posted at 17:49
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HORNSWAGGLED!!!
HORNSWAGGLED!!!
How the Me of Now was Tricked by the Me of Yesterday into Going to War by
George W. Bush.
Posted at 17:13
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Job
Looking for a job working on a
probably-doomed product in the world's most characterless suburb? Yes,
that's right, my group is hiring.
Apply online!
Posted at 16:22
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Democratic National Convention Well, all in good fun I guess, but two can play at that game.
Apparently some wingnuts are google bombing the
Democratic National Convention with a pro-Bush look-alike site.
Posted at 14:18
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F911 in Minnesota Update: Since I posted this, they've added several more venues,
including the Lagoon in Minneapolis.
Michael Moore's controversial new movie Fahrenheit 9/11 is currently
scheduled to play in only two
theaters in Minnesota, both in Oakdale (fer God's sake).
Posted at 10:51
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The Uncanny Valley I agree that a more stylized representation is the best way out of this.
Humans in games just look stupid. I think the anime/manga style is a good
example of high-detail but representational characters.
Slate's Clive Thompson writes about the
"uncanny valley" that game designers face when they try to create
realistic looking human characters. It's virtually impossible, because no
matter how "real" the characters look, our brains are hardwired to find
the deficiencies...the eyes don't look right, the skin doesn't move, the
lips and mouth movements are off.
Posted at 12:05
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Radiorocket
Wes put it as "Rocket
+ video camera + Radiohead", but the truth is that the equation is
Rocket + video camera + Radiohead =
Awesome.
Posted at 21:55
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Google News OOPS! Heh. That link doesn't actually go to the Chicago Sun Times. It goes to
the e-ThePeople discussion
site.
Posted at 20:16
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Mozilla freaking out on Blogspot sites They're trying to get it fixed for 1.7. But fortunately, they'res a work
around -- hit reload. Since part of the page is on your cache, Mozilla
loads it correctly.
Every once in a while (yet, very reproducible on certain sites, for
example Digestible News) I will hit
a blogspot site that just makes Mozilla freak out halfway down the page.
I'm not the only one having problems: check out
Mozilla bug #241085.
It turns out that Mozilla gets confused when the server sends one version
of the page compressed, then responds to a range-request with uncompressed
data.
Posted at 18:30
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Dance Dance Resurrection
An exciting new development in
Christian Entertainment!
Posted at 13:35
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bSOS
Check out two men's quest to get
Beer Sales on
Sunday (bSOS). Winner of the Grain Belt Film Festival...uh, whatever that
is.
Posted at 22:46
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It's here... What kind of idiot spends that much on a chair? Now you know.
Posted at 11:43
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Rain, rain, go away
Co-worker Jason says: "When did we move to Seattle?" Good question!
Posted at 16:52
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Celeb mix tapes
Turns out musicical celebrities have the same lousy taste in music as
everyone else. Now, thanks to the iTunes music store, you can
share in their banality.
Posted at 17:20
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The Way We Eat Now
is incredibly
depressing.
Posted at 16:12
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Second Generation Traffic Calming The article is marred by a semi-off topic comparison to the lawless
streets of China, which sparked a number of
"Are you crazy?" letters (which the author
had to
correct in a response)
Ignore the part about China, but
read
the article and
the interesting responses
Salon has an interesting article on
"second generation" traffic calming, which is a new movement in Europe --
where streets have traditionally been multi-modal -- to open streets to
all sorts of uses. The interesting part is how they do this: by removing
all traffic signs, markings, and sidewalks. Cars, motorcycles, bikes,
pedestrians and roadside merchants share the street equally. Because
everything is chaotic, cars have to stay around 20 miles per hour, which
also just happens to be the maximum speed humans can maintain eye contact.
Drivers and pedestrians have to look at each other to communicate shared
usage of the street.
Posted at 16:21
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H is for Hardcore Via
BoingBoing, I see that this is not a unique observation. Check out
Cookie Mongoloid, the
Sesame Street speed metal cover band (check out
their songs).
I have had trouble taking heavy music seriously ever since Jenny pointed
out that all hardcore sounds as if it's sung by Cookie Monster. She even
talked about doing a hardcore cover of "C is for Cookie" called "H is for
Hardcore".
Posted at 12:08
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Let me get this straight All this happened even though it was painfully obvious that Chalabi was a
huckster (The Prince counsels against ever trusting exiles) and the
evidence coming from Hans Blix's inspections show that Iraq didn't have
any WMDs.
Now, it turns out that Chalibi's intelligence guy was an Iranian agent.
Iran, one third of the "Axis of Evil", manipulated George W. Bush into a
war to destroy their greatest enemy, Saddam Hussien's Iraq.
Because of the Bush administration's lack of judgment, we went to war on a
lie -- an Iranian lie -- and over 900 coalition troops have died, along
with thousands of Iraqi civilians. Growing frustrated with their inability
to find the WMDs, the Pentagon approved the use of harsh interrogation
techniques supposedly reserved for terrorists. This order is implemented
by untrained and unsupervised National Guard MPs. At least a few of them
turn out to be sadists who torture the prisoners at Abu Gharib (and else
where?) above and beyond their already cruel orders. Photos from the
prison ricochet around the world, destroying the myth of American
Exceptionalism. The country that once considered itself the shining City
on the Hill is now ashamed.
To top it all off, a new intelligence report indicates that Al Qaeda
recruitment is up and the terrorist group now has over 18,000 fighters.
Is that about right? Unbelievable. Never in my wildest dreams did I
imagine the war would go this bad.
OK. Let me get this straight. The Bush administration used faulty
intelligence from Ahmad Chalabi to justify the war on Iraq. Chalabi also
pawned off his nonsense on other intelligence agencies, so when the US
went looking to confirm the reports of Iraq's WMD program, other nations
backed them up (any guesses on who came up with the forged uranium
letter?). In the run up to the war, Chalabi also was a major source for
the New York Times, helping to solidify backing for the war among the
press, and hence the public.
Posted at 10:43
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Madison Rules
Kids in Madison have all the fun. First, the hilarious Daily Show bit
about their anti-trust lawsuit against bars eliminating drink specials;
now, a sweet Robot Protest.
Posted at 16:06
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Dean and Kerry "I certainly admired you for kicking my [expletive] in Iowa," Dean said to
roars of laughter and a quick high-five from the victor.
Sounds like they're
getting along well:
Posted at 12:58
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What do lofts say about us? The article also touches on the Jane Jacobs theseis of the life-cycle of a neighborhood.
And it notes that those who started the craze can't really afford them anymore:
And so, ironically, the search for "authenticity" pushes out those who made a neighborhood authentic in the first place. This is also part of the cycle Jane Jacobs wrote about. They move on to
a new, cheaper place.
I think developers could help maintain the autenticity of their loft developments by reserving a certain number of units for artists and other interesting characters at a subsidized rate.
Also, if they incorporate small shops into the ground level of the development, they could make live/work units cheaper and therefore encourage more creative people to live in the unit. I
think others in the loft would appreciate this and pay for the extra value of living in a continuously interesting neighborhood.
Lofty Ideals is an interesting article in the Strib (login: cypherpunks/cypherpunks) about what the development and popularization of
loft-style living means for our society.
Loft living is "part of a larger, modern quest for authenticity" in ways new construction is not, says Zukin, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and City University Graduate Center, and author of the lifestyle bible, "Loft Living; Culture and Capital in Urban Change." Lofts are "organic," not pre-fab, and because they are both yesterday and tomorrow, they provide "landmarks for the mind," Zukin writes.
Loft living did not always mean luxury. In New York in the 1950s, lofts became popular places for artists. They were ragtag spaces that cost little but had plenty of light and air.
But as artists became celebrities and held parties in their homes, the upper and upper-middle classes were exposed to high ceilings, big windows and industrial artifacts. As modern art became more accepted by the masses, so did the desire to copy the artist's romantic lifestyle. So what does the loft craze say about current times and the people who populate them?
A dissolution of formal relationships, gender inequities and walls between work and life, for a start, according to Ritsuko Ozaki, research fellow at the Innovation Studies Centre of the Tanaka Business School in London....
"My respondents stressed that they shared household chores and that it was important for the female partner not to be excluded from social occasions they had in their home," she said in an e-mail. "Therefore, the open-plan layout can be seen as a reflection of new socio-cultural values [e.g. less unequal conjugal roles, less formal relationships among household members and more interaction between household members] of a certain group of people."
Despite the iconoclastic tone to the loft sales pitch, it's no secret that those who started the trend, artists, are often no longer able to afford those very spaces.
And while many loft livers say they want to live near unconventional people, most of their neighbors will eventually be as fairly conventional as they are.
While small, warren-like loft spaces can be found in places such as the Franklin Lofts for as little as $130,000, most are priced for a vastly different clientele: those who can afford $250,000 to more than a million dollars.
Posted at 12:13
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Stalking the Bogeyman
What would you say to the man who
raped
you when you were seven?
Posted at 23:18
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Fargo Bezerk This is totally hila
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."