The Testing Range is Complacent Chaos

I've been taking a lot of Gigapans and posting them at Gigapan.org.

also see ../code2dist

perl Build.pl ./build dist-creates tar.gz of everything in manifest.o

Setting up a new domain

These are my own notes to self...probably irrelevant to anyone else. To use DNS on tridity.org (mappinghacks.com): mh notes:
/home/named/var/named/asi has named.asi where the individual references go, ie. equiv. to /var/named and it has individual domain files, ala /var/named/data To Add a domain which will live on lewis.geocoder.us:

edit /home/named/var/named/asi

look for zones where the master file points to geocoder.us

co -l named.asi

edit it, add domain as copy of existing one that points to geocoder.us-like presenttous

ci -u named.asi

sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/named reload

This is some old shit, or just non-tridity

copy an existing 'template' file from /var/named/data

on mh copy /home/named/var/named/asi/

Edit the template

do some rcs

on mh see include "/var/named/asi/named.asi"; or something like /home/named/var/named/asi

update the serial number-apparantly not needed on Tridity

edit /var/named.conf to add a pointer to the new /var/named/data file

on my /home/named/etc/named.conf

kill -HUP the named process or /etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart For email on tridity cd /etc/postfix co -l local-host-names vi local-host-names # follow example of presenttous ci -u local-host-names co -l virtual vi virtual # follow example of presenttous ci -u virtual i had to manually remove virtual.db postmap virtual
sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/postfix restart
/etc/rc.d/init.d/postfix restart email on ?

edit /etc/postfix/aliases (if needed for emails) or maybe /etc/postfix/virtual
co -l virtual
edit...see folkartforschools example *on mh: *edit virtual
*edit local-host-names
*postmap virtual
*sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/postfix restart
co -l local-host-names
edit again, see 'rich' section ci -u virtual sudo make -C /etc/postfix Don't need to do these-they are dealt with in make -C /etc/postfix postmap virtual

run newaliases to create aliases.db

edit /etc/postfix/main.cf

add this domain to the mydestination list

/etc/rc.d/init.d/postfix restart On lewis? /etc/httpd/conf domain.conf - see presenttous, other samples. sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd graceful some other server

look in /etc/httpd/conf.d/sites.conf for httpd config

edit the file as appropriate.

put your new site somewhere like:
/home/www/mydomain.com/

restart apache /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

more on cvs

2004-09-10

CVS_RSH=ssh
export CVS_RSH
cd geohacks
cvs -d:ext:rich@nocat.net:/cvsroot import -m "import from Rich's iBook"  geohacks rich start

This was important at one point...
cvs -d:ext:rich@geocoder.us:/home/cvs upd -dPA

and here is my diff line:
 cvs -d:ext:rich@geocoder.us:/home/cvs diff lib/Geo/Track/Log.pm  > f

this works:
cvs -d:ext:rich@geocoder.us:/home/cvs commit lib/Geo/Track/Log.pm 


2007-03-18
this works:
cvs -d:ext:rich@mappinghacks.com:/home/cvs co Audio-DSS

Truth in Editorials

This is where we are: The Washington Post editorial today is

A Defining Moment for America

The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A18

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully
skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek
legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret
prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe
publicly.

Link that will no doubt link-rot as dead-tree newspapers continue their slide into obscurity

(but even with the link-rot, I'm thinking that the headline and jump are enough to convey the story.

We are now at the point where it is considered

legitimate to debate how much we will torture.

No updates like, forever...

Sorry. I was in Europe, I was doing this, doing that. Writing a lot of code. Letting my personal sites languish.

I don't promise to do better, but it could happen.

If you are here because I gave you a card while we were in Europe, or I have pictures or video you want to see please email me: rich@testingrange.com

I have a new Blog

I am moving my blog to Wordpress...the structure and layout are still really quite hideous, but let this be a marker...The Testing Range on WordPress

I have an empty inbox...

See the proof! I have an empty inbox for the first time ever. I have handled, or defered in a proper system, everything from IN.

This is the Getting Things Done nirvana point...I have other open loops to work on, so the pleasure is not yet complete, but, well, damn! An empty inbox.

Swimming Snake Robots...

From Hack a Day we have a swimming snake robot. The little squealing japanese girl voices add just the right future shock frission to the whole mix.

Hack a day got it right with their comment "Snake robots are already freaking creepy; so who had bright idea to make sea serpents?!"

Earlier in the day future shock attempted to grab me when I saw Michael Frumin's, of Eyebeam and Fundrace.org fame, little device to 'sniff' open gl traffic (ie. your computer talking to your graphics card) and allowing you to create 3D models of things that before you had only seen. The whole point of virtual worlds is that they are _virtual_ for christ's sake. They are not supposed to slither out of your nightmares and into your bed.

Check out the OGLE 3D screen Scraper that he worked on.

The physical model of google building data produced in my a sense of frission It is possible that I am due for a raging case of future shock at any moment. It is one thing to read science fiction, and/or singularity fantasists like Kurzweil. It is another thing to have the future jump in front of you with raw unshaven features huffing fortified wine fumes in your face.

Asking to watch your car for small change, while smirking that you have a car.

The future is a wino in the tenderloin

Lapdancing for Jesus?

That phrase just popped into my head, right after the well sourced 'not having that which having makes them short.' I don't think I am hallucinating, but really, how would one know in this day?

I googled 'lapdancing for jesus' and came up with one, and only one, hit-a message (assuming I read the headers right) from a post on a dodgy email list.

'lap dancing for jesus' comes up with zero hits.

Obviously this is all amusing, though whether you find that so is an interesting but unrelated issue.

I tried to email the person where the post appeared to originate only to be denied by "PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: Domain name not found"

Note: I have few blasphemous thoughts about jesus...but he makes a powerful symbol around which to gather.

Fun with Unix - a few commands

I shoot RAW mode, and then want to import the not-raw files into iPhoto to preview, but I end up with the RAW files in iPhoto, which is unable to productively handle them (in my version).

find . | grep NEF | xargs rm

Isn't that special? Or:

find . | grep NEF | tee filelist | xargs rm "Are we going to watch them until they do a couple of back flips? I don't think so. We wern't watching them, we were washing them."

Building in the abscence of design

I tend to build things with a minimum of prior thought...I take things into hand and turn them about and wonder how I can put them together to make what I want. Nomadic Research Labs has a similar approach, at least at times, in their Microship project.

Having a pair of canoes in the lab, perched inscrutably on workstands, failed to reveal an immediate and obvious next step."

A trip to the penninsula

The drive to San Francisco went fast...half of it I listened to my first ever podcast, I'm not sure whether to be ashamed that I popped my podcast cherry, or that I did it so late. I listened to the Paul Di Filippo story Little Worker...which I found by chance in the 2 minutes I allotted to loading something interesting on my ipod. I found the link on boingboing.net

Then I picked up Aaron and we zipped down to Palo Alto. The drive from Palo Alto to drop Aaron off at close to midnight also went quick. Even the drive home went well, in spite of the nasty rain.

Some things were said...ideas expressed

"Sex is sex, peanut butter is what I enjoy" from Little Worker

"Teaching kids " (of refuges and conflict survivors) "is the single most effective thing you can do" - world changing speaker

"We can't keep doing what we are doing-it is toxic. We can't do more and more of what we have been doing." (my invert and subvert thought is that 'what we have been doing' _perhaps_ hasn't been just one thing. What we have been doing this last year differs from a decade ago. (it is a theory)

"Our future is currently unimaginable...once we can imagine it fighting for it is almost the easy part." "What is the kind of world we really want to live in"

What if the Golden Arches are all part of a world wide phased array antenna of some sort (my thought)

"I just think little girls should have RFID's for their ponies" Tamara (funnier with a rising little girl inflection at the end. Funny creepy, not totally funny haha )

More Concordance I say...

No, not More Spaghetti I say, great book though it is, more concordances. I've generalized my concordance code a little bit and added some other books. See the full list and perhaps even offer suggestions for improvements...rich@testingrange.com

Accelerando, by Charlie Stross

I've read some of Charlie Stross' other books-Iron Sunrise comes to mine, and Mike Liebhold keeps raving about Accelerando, and I finally got around to reading it.

Accelerando is available on line (legally) in various forms. I downloaded the plain text version and wrote a small bit of code to create a concordance with links to lookups.

The Basic Concordance is here, and then Schuyler made some random request...

19:10 <@Schuyler> I want to see the concordance ordered by frequency, personally.
19:11 <@Schuyler> we are listening to  http://ordkunskap.se:8000/stream.ogg which seems to be a funny 
                    Internet radio channel of 8-bit video game themes
19:18 <@rich_gibson> http://testingrange.com/accelerando/accelerando_freq.html

So you can also See the concordance ordered by frequency

The whole project is fraught with peril, it is incomplete and horribly broken (the 'word' "s" appears 2366 times, probably because it is part of "'s"), but so what...it does something

This is how I generate it... tr -cs A-Za-z ' ' < accelerando.txt | tr A-Z a-z | sort | ./count.pl | ./makelist.pl Source of count.pl and makelist.pl (which are both rather unfortunate bits of code...sorry).

You get the words, the number of occurances of the word, and links to 'define word' in google, in wikipedia, and wiktionary.

An irreducible empicral content, and I am an idiot

So it turns out that I am an idiot. Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice says so, and that means it must be true.

He spoke to the Federalist Society and said:

"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."

"But you would have to be an idiot to believe that," Scalia said. "The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.""

This is the Scalia who argued that filing a habeas corpus petition where the defendent was first held was wrong-you have to file it in the district where he is now being held. Now, this is idiotic, and is a rather clear violation of the Constitution saying something, in this case:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

This is a useful ruling, since now you can't file a writ of Habeas Corpus unless you know in which secret torture chamber the prisoner is currently being tortured.

Justice Stevens dissented

"The Defense Department first took custody of Padilla in New York, not in South Carolina. All the proceedings concerning Padilla’s detention as a “material witness” took place in New York. Padilla’s attorney wasn’t informed that he had been moved to South Carolina until after she filed the habeas corpus petition in New York. “If jurisdiction was proper when the petition was filed,” wrote Stevens, “it cannot be defeated by a later transfer of the prisoner to another district.”

Do you get that? The prisoner was moved after his attorney filed habeaus corpus. After. What a fun merry go round of liberty has been created.

Idiot? Me? I don't thinks so.

But on more interesting topics... This is a stunning quote.

"When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. The great attraction of libertarian thought lay in its deductive power. The hope was that you could axiomatize the system and sort of render social problems amenable to a set of principles that yielded necessary or deductive truths. That vision certainly fired my early academic life... Essentially, as I have gotten older and maybe a little bit wiser -- which why that 30 years really start to matter -- I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content." Richard A. Epstein, "Skepticism and Freedom"

Mind dump/browser tab dump 2006-02-10

Heather is in Budapest - Molly emailed and said they had a great dinner and went to the baths.

Sky wants ot make a circle around London by flying LAX-SIN-JNB-GRU-LAX. Assuming no link rot, see the pretty picture it makes. Only $11,000.

Mike has 2,500,000 air miles. I _think_ that means he has flown that many, not that he has a magic stash of frequent flyer miles.

I came up with the answer to all our problems today...

The only solution is more candles, chill music, massage oil, hot sex, good wine, and interesting cocktails with cute names.

Google Maps Hacks is...funny?

First, Schuyler and my new book, Google Maps Hacks, is out and available at fine stores somewhere. Second, as an author I seem to get a preview copy of the book, that arrives as soon as they send it, and later a box of 10 author copies. This time I got a box of 12 copies of Google Maps Hacks and and one copy of _Monkey_. Monkey is, according to Marc Powell, the best Asian novel ever...so there!

Heather thinks this is the universe telling me to read the book. My editor, Simon, says it must be serendipity, and to Enjoy.

I think it is hilarious...but the book is good, and Spencer and Maddy love it.

The Internet is for Porn!

Machinima is a genre of film making that uses scenes captured from games. The Internet is for Porn uses the World of Warcraft (WoW) game to create a fun little romp through places not all wish to know about. There is nothing perverse about this short. The worst line might be 'so grab your dick and double click the internet is for porn.'

It has the milk out the nostrils seal of approval.

We've been having flooding in Northern California

www.flickr.com

There have been pictures taken, 'flood exploration' trips, tarp-checking / fixing over the workshop.

Best quote so far From sfgate article.

"Look, Northern California has some kind of flood every two or three years, no matter what," said Maury Roos, the state's chief hydrologist at the Department of Water Resources. "That kind of makes this one of the more flood-prone regions on Earth. So really, what we're seeing right now is just winter.

"If it's anything like other wet years, we'll probably come out of this and go into a good long dry period."

My wishlist...

just incase anyone cares :-) Rich's wishlist tag on delicious

"We looked crazy, but we had the most fun."

Molly went to Venice from Hungary. They spent 7 hours on the train to get to and from Budapest, and then 23 hours round trip on a bus in order to spend 9 hours in Venice.

Molly and Lea had fun. The pigeons were good, and they played in puddles until they were completely soaked, leading to the quintessential Molly line "We looked crazy, but we had the most fun."

Festival of Light from 2005

The Festival was great! Pene deserves 'mad props' for her work. I took a fair number of pictures, Which you can see here

Something I agree with:

"TPMCafe || The Pro-Growth Progressive: I felt frustrated by the view - often from both sides - that there was an inherent conflict between promoting progressive values and being hard-headed about the power of markets incentives, the law of unintended consequences and the inevitability of globalization."

Read more From Gene Sperling talking about his new book "The Pro-Growth Progressive".

Quotes from my dad

"I hate to throw good stuff away just because I can't use it." My dad.

Molly's take on unicorns

Regular readers of Boing Boing have run into regular mentions of 'unicorn porn' (note my respectful lack of a link). I was going through yet another effing box of papers and misc 'stuff' (one of those mixes of things that are really important, like the last letter from a now deceased family member to literally random junk) when I came upon the provocatively titled paper "I Like Unicorns."

She quoted William Blake, Albert Camus, Don Delillo, Plato, Rousseau, and Tom Stoppard and made reference to Six Feet Under, CSI, and Unsolved Mysteries. Molly writes:

"We separate ourselves from our own cultural reality using the media as a drug"

And it ends "The truth is both a mystical unicorn and an injured horse."

Quotes

"Basically nothing that takes more than 20-30 minutes can be done." Anselm Hook

"In my career as a person who had jobs I started working for architects on Martin Luther King day, and it always sort of pissed me off, and WFUV on MLK day." According to John

no guts no story

They can monitor all they want...We're just a bunch of nudist liberal hippy drug using pyromaniac dolphin fuckers as far as they're concerned.

(It's a Burning Man thing I guess)

Do you believe in intelligent falling?

Brad DeLong quotes Intelligent Design moron Michael Behe as admitting that astrology is a theory on par with 'intelligent design.

Brad comments "The Discovery Institute people must be kicking themselves tonight on hearing of Behe's admission, but I'll give the man this much - at least he's honest, even if being under oath in a court of law does constrain one's scope for dishonesty somewhat."

I learned a lesson at the car dealer a month or two back

I took the car in for a regular service, and asked them about a wind noise. When I got the bill they said it would cost $160 to replace glass and a seal, and by the way, that will be $112 to tell you that.

That seemed a tad excessive. But what can I do? It is the car dealer and aside from engaging in a lot of caterwauling that at the best case could save me $112 there really isn't much to do other than pay the man.

Pay the man and learn the lesson. I presented myself at the dealer and asked them to deal with my problem. Please take this problem and make it your own. And they did, for $112.

They didn't internalize the issues with my car. They didn't worry that they were not smart enough to have accomplished the task more quickly. They didn't own confusion, angst, pain, guilt.

They just said 'sure, we will look at it' and then they did, and told me to pay the man $112.

I've too often internalized the needs of my clients in an unhealthy way. Solve problems? Sure. Work hard to figure things out? Also fine. But there is no cause to turn 'your' problem that needs to be solved into a source of pain for me. It doesn't get your task addressed any quicker, or better. It just makes me feel like crap.

Right now I have a bunch of bulk geocoding requests that bother me. They bother me because the data is, well, not optimal. And I don't get good results when I start with dicey data.

And I feel bad about that.

A bit ago I got a bulk request. About 500 records. I was only able to code about 95 of them. I replied to the customer that the results were crap, and there would be no charge. I felt bad about it. He replied that he only sent me the records that had failed to geocode in their expensive commercial geocoding application, so our results were impressive.

Geowankers also get lost

A friend, who shall remain nameless (hi anselm!) has a new house. He doesn't know where it is...

10:43 < anselm> i do not know where i live
10:43 < anselm> i am trying to figure that out
10:43 < nym> heh
10:44 < anselm> in some house somewhere; there is furniture here
10:44 < anselm> i know it is near a bridge
10:44 < danbri> underconstrained query :)

Molly had opinions in 8th grade math

From her notebook:
Dear Lennox I still think that all the problems in the review are really easy and hopelessly annoying like problem 51 I think math is fun and you should brutally punish all who think otherwise

unfortunately as a teacher you are forced to at least pretend to like your students, other wise you risk your job and genaral (sic) well being. To continue with my complants (sic) I think that the questions we are made to answer should have some sort on meaning, I mean, like question 48. I mean who would put 11 bows on 1 box?

Talk to you soon, Molly/mepka/monkeybutt

ps I'm glad we had this little talk. And I will continue to write my comments about the homework on my paper in strange colors.

Once again I say farewell

Molly/mepka/monkeybutt

pss Don't forget to take your test on the next page.

(on top of next page)

Test #1 Just as a test to see if you check my home work please sign here (signed Lenx/can't read it)

by question 48 a drawing 'that's a lot of bows.'

later... about 240 min but I think this quesiton stupid because they could get in a traffic accident and die, then they would never get home & soon.

In back cover "Kendo boys are hot"

So there!

Things I have done...and one lie.

There is a party game, a getting to know you game, in which each person writes down three true things about themselves, and one lie.

You then pass the cards around and someone else reads them.

From before moving to California I had this:

(crossed out) I have never juggled a live animal
I enjoy scuba diving
I tore a woman's clothes off on stage (in front of an audience)
I once found a dead body in a burlap bag by the side of the road in Mexico
I drove the Baja Highway to Cabo San Lucas

How well do you know me? Do you know which one is a lie? Email your answers to rich@testingrange.com...

It is good to go through old files...

In a folder labeled 'Programming Ideas/General Notes' I found a gem. This is a record of an actual conversation (I'm not making this up!) between myself and a less focused member of staff. It is written on a bit of Berger Funds note paper...implying a certain vintage, but out of some sense of tact I didn't record anything else about the other party.

"Rich, it says 'modem not responding.'"

"Check the modem switch"

"It is on...hey, the computer just cam on again"

later...much later

"check the modem again"

"Hey, you know, someone turned off the switch to the modem, is that why it wasn't initializing."

And just to continue the fun...on a different note, from years later: "It might give someone a reason to browbeat you...abuse is free."

You must work hard!

Germans work hard

Japanese work hard or they are shamed by colleaques

Protastants work hard or they are shamed by god

Browser fun...

I found a crumpled postit from under my desk with a url on it...jodi.org, I wonder what that is? Why'd I save it?

The better question is why didn't I throw it away in a more final fashion? jodi.org (feel free to type the url into your browser) runs a wee bit o' javascript that makes normal browsing impossible...and possibly downloads lots of extra stuff.

wget is your friend...

Two views of recent days

"I promised Nancy and Theresa that I'd make cars that don't run on gasoline, so I have to figure out what they'll run on. I might have to make potions to figure it out." Spencer 9/17/05

"Today was the best day of school EVER!"

"Why?"

"xxx was gone!"

Madeline, 9/15 or so Maddy to Spencer "There is no 'why' there's 'yes I'll do it." a few weeks back.

-- scratching an itch can make it itchier. Mikel Maron, 7/31/05 --

Douglas Rushkoff is more or less a here of mine

He wrote advice to new writers in June 2002 "If there is an experience you really want to have then all you have to do is convince the world they should support you in this expedition, and that your report will give them a vicarious experience worth having paid for."

Don't mess with Madeline...

I thought it would be fun to tickle Madeline, so I suggested that to her. She had a different response.

"Daddy, I'm holding a drink. Nice green shirt Drink? I don't think so!"

9/8/05

New Interfaces for Musical Expression

The NIME conference looks cool. Just the idea of new interfaces for musical expression appeals.

But alas, too many ideas, not quite enough time.

Marshmallow gun at Dorkbot

Me and my marshmallow gun. The plan for Wednesday was for me to install the new Free Maps server at the colo in Fremont, then kill some time before going to Dorkbot.

I had a trunk full of marshmallow gun components and had thoughts of pelting the audience.

One thing lead to another, mostly involving things taking way way longer than they should in any reasonable universe, and a dead CPU, and I ended up at Dorkbot around nine pm. I was in time to say hello to Cliff Skolnick as he was leaving.

There were lots of friends there! It was very very cool. And there was one annoying guy. Loud, interrupting, clapping inappropriately. Some people were getting visibly upset at him, fuming. According to Anselm, who was closer to him, people kept turning to him to tell him to shut up and he kept whispering 'don't touch me' 'don't look at me' 'dont even talk to me'

I wasn't fuming so much, but after a bit I actively covered my ears, and winced when he spoke, or clapped. It caused me psychic, nearly physical, pain.

Actual pain. It was actually physically painful to be there listening and to know that at any damn moment some strange shit was going to come from his quadrant.

Which is sort of interesting in an 'odd how the spoon squicks when I use it to dig out my own living flesh' sort of way.

Someone else suggested Aspergers as an explanation, saying that the "don't touch me" business is telling. Personally I'd prefer to think that he was 'ill' or 'put together differently' rather than 'boy what a flaming fuckwad.'

But that's not what this post is about. No, this post is about marshmallow guns. Specifically, it is about my marshmallow gun

I set it up on the sidewalk and shot it across Eddy Street in the 100 block. That was fun. Karen took a movie, and you can check out the September Dorkbot page, with other photo links.

What they are (not) eating in India

"Most people here are avoiding sea food because they think all fishes have eaten bodies of victims of tsunami"

"At least in Mumbia"

"That's a lot of nonesense"

"yes"

"tsunami corpses would have floated towards singapore and bangkok, not mumbai"

It is safer outside...

I love Douglas Rushkoff. He is deeply engaged in the things that he cares about, he writes, makes music, comics, writes textbooks, engages in social analysis and criticism, engages in random fun with the Madagascar Institute, etc.

Oh, and he has a cool caricature of himself on his website...

Last year he wrote an essay called It's safer outside. The basic idea is the in hind sight obvious observation that having a job is not a guarantee of much of anything.

I love the essay. The next component (well, he touches on it as well) is that when you have a job you have your whole professional life tied up in one package. Plus a chunk of your personal life.

I know other people do better (at everything, right?), but I have a wretched record of maintaining social and professional ties with former coworkers.

These themes matter a lot to me. It is vital for me at this point in time to strengthen and extend my professional and social connections. Larger and stronger networks lead to more opportunities to do the things that I value. Sure money and business flow from them, but it is more important to be connected. ... so read the article.

What about risk then?

Ben Goldacre writes the bad science column for the Guardian. He has a supporting website at http://badscience.net".

I just read his column on relative risk and natural frequency. It provided me with a vocabulary to explain my regular discomfort with statistics masquarading as something meaningful.

"xyz makes you 50% more likely to get abc." Assuming 'xyz' is something like 'chocolate' and 'abc' is 'hideous boils' you might be tempted to alter your behavior in favor of excluding chocolate from your diet.

But what if they showed you real numbers, say out of 10,000 people 2 will get hideous boils, and out of 10,000 chocolate eaters that jumps 50% to, uh, three people.

A 50% increase, and yet, it is a tiny number.

read the article to get clear on why we should all use 'natural frequencies' (ie. actual numbers, 2 vs 3 in the above example) instead of percentages.

This quote flat scares me:

I’m not alone in finding percentages unhelpful, incidentally. There are studies of doctors, and commissioning committees for local health authorities, and people from the legal profession, that show that even people who interpret and manage risk for a living are much more likely to make the wrong decision when information about risk is presented as probabilities or percentages, rather than as natural frequencies.

Even those among us who are charged with interpreting numbers don't do a very good job of interpreting percentages (hah! And even that conclusion abuses the 'studies.' What did they _really_ say?).

Pictures on flickr

My method of managing pictures has certain strengths and certain weaknesses...so now Molly and I both have flickr accounts.

You can see Molly's calendar view here

And Rich's

The moral hazard myth...

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of the 'tipping point,' and writes long articles about things like ketchup. In the current issue of the New Yorker he has taken up the question of the moral hazard argument against health insurance.

It turns out that Health Insurance is yet another think that I know nearly nothing about. It appears that the Republican position on health care is that poor people should pull their own teeth out with pliers.

It isn't phrased that way, but that is what it means.

The Moral Hazard position is that if you mitigate a risk, such as by providing insurance, or adding seatbelts to cars, that people will then use more health care services, or they will drive recklessly.

I can't argue against the general position that this Moral Hazard effect exists. I think that it does. The question that must be asked is how much of an effect this is?

We can map this with a series of linear equations, and then do a min-max analysis to find the set of parameters that optimizes for our desired conditions. But that would be actual work.

So perhaps...

More people get unneeded care if they have insurance than if they do not.
More people get needed care if they have insurance than if they do not.
More insurance coverage costs money.

So more people get care if they have insurance. I think that #1 represents a small percentage of costs, and that #2 is a social good. That is, our society is better off if people get needed health care. #3 suggests that costs will go up if everyone has coverage. There is evidence for either side of this point. The civilized world appears to provide universal coverage for less than we spend to leave 45 million people without health insurance. I support universal coverage regardless of the cost.

But don't trust my analysis, get thee to the new yorker and read for yourself

Wow! Some people are clever.

I like flickr. I like it a lot. Molly is posting her pictures from Hungary on flickr.

There is an API to program against, and there is a bunch of data available. From tags to comments to exif headers. Now Ryo Chijiiwa has come up with an application to help plan your bar hopping.

He and a friend, Yitz, searched flickr for the tag 'pub' and then used the exif headers to determine the day of the week that is most popular for pub crawling.

Read about their numbers. I found the link on boing boing.

There is so darned much information out there! And so much of it has so much potential. When I see applications like this it often seems to cement my 'keep everything' mentality. I think keeping date and time stamps is obvious, but there is a lot of data out there that we don't consider, and so we simply chuck it.

The other side of that river is that most data will never be useful. But which is which?

My grandfather was a writer...

And I only met him twice, that I know of. I only remember one of those visits. We went to his house, probably near medford, or, and I played in the back yard while my mom went in and talked to him. I must have seen more of him, but all I remember is this hulking form in the screen door.

But he was an author. One of his stories paid for my Aunt to be born. And he appears in the isfdb.org database of science fiction writers.

I know this, most recently, because I was reading Kathryn Cramer's discussion of hurricane Katrin , and noticed her link to her books, and figured I'd check it out.

And it pulled up this page, and there was a search form. So I popped in a couple of variations of his name, and damned if Winston didn't have a whole page. And it had his birthplace, Spooner, Wisconsin, and his life span, 1915-1979. And then the shocker: there was an email link, to me. And I remember now having sent in a correction to the page when I first found it quite a while back.

Ain't that amusing?

well that was fun...power outage in sebastopol.

Where fun is a word that here means 'a bit of a bother really, with all of that crawling around in dusty places plugging monitors into recalcitrant routers and all'

My home network has been simplified over the years, but is still amusingly complex. There are a random number of 'hanger on' machines that can theoretically be online, but the 'mostly working' part includes two linux based routers, two wifi access points, five hubs, an emac, an ibook, two linux servers (one is my main desktop, one is a semi important server for my network), and a win 2k box.

I periodically get the idea that I could replace it all with a colocated server and n laptops where n=the number of people who want to use a computer at one time.

Why the Right is wrong, part 42

There is a horrible anti-gay movement in our country that believes that the US has been attacked because not everyone in our country is a hateful homophobic jerk. These people are currently protesting at the funerals of US Soldiers under some twisted view that those soldiers are responsible for fighting to defend Gay people, and so they deserved to die.

I know. It is insane. Anti-Gay bigotry is unacceptable. I no longer wish to be around people who are anti-gay. For a long time I've been relatively quiet about a lot of things, allowing spewing morons (I'm specifically thinking of Rod Linafelter who once managed the Berger 100 fund, until it was shown that he was an incompetent under performing boob) to, well, spew without question because of the power they wielded in the corporate hierachy. There have been more recent abusive people in my life, but I hold them in such contempt as to not be willing to mention them by name. Rod is just a moron to be alternately laughed at or pitied, but other people are more malicious. People who claim to be bad at what they do, but instruct you that it is your duty to compensate for them are in that group.

I'm not going to be quiet anymore. If you have even a whiff of belief that some 'god' is punishing America because of our 'morality' then I'd like to put you on notice that if I hear any of that crap come out of you I will not let it go. No more slack to just 'let things go.'

On the other hand, I'm not going to be the first one to bring it up. I'm happy to have polite meals with people with whom I disagree. But I can no longer let this evil pass by without comment.

DRM = Vandalism: Screw the RIAA, screw DRM.

I'm sorry...I've attempted to play nice. My music collection is surprisingly 'legal' by anyone's definition, and I've mostly avoided the bad feelings that that pack of 'Rights holders' has created in my community.

Mostly.

Recently Boing Boing posted a set of slides from an RIAA presentation. They were attempting to spin things...saying stuff like 'bottom line: it is about legal versus illegal.'

hmmm.

okay. Well, guess what RIAA, when I click on a song and the computer says "The track you are attempting to play has expired. Heavy Metal Drummer.LQT Click 'more info' to learn more about track expiration." I just get angry.

I own that CD. This particular instance of the song came from god knows where, but I _own_ that CD, and it is in my 'real' music collection.

I'm working on Heather's computer and I figured I'd listen to some music. Rather than turn to my machine, 8 feet away, I just clicked on some music and got this crap.

There is no 'reasonable' DRM. And now, I'm going further. As far as I am concerned if you create a product that is designed to infect my mind then you have no rights over it. Screw you. Sorry musicians everywhere, but the RIAA claims to have the right to break my computer. Sorry. Screw you.

I don't have my music online (unless you've rooted my box, but my bandwidth is pretty poor even if you did root me), but it used to be because a) I didn't think it was right to share my music and b) it took too much bandwidth and c) assholes would sue me. Answers b and c still apply, but you lost me on a. And given the right trust metrics c is no longer an issue.

And that just leaves the issue of bandwidth. Amusingly, external firewire hard drives carried in messenger bags by bicycle have an amazing data transfer capability.

I don't care if the music industry can figure out a way to continue to exist. It no longer concerns me. Screw 'em. You don't get to interfere with my use of my computer EVEN IF I DID STEAL THE MUSIC. That is an unreasonable and extreme position, but it is now mine. I now consider the RIAA to be worse than the tobacco industry. At least the tobacco industry never entered my home without my permission and vandalized my computer.

holy way too much batman...

I just checked my most recent photo uploads. The last picture was dsc_9999.jpg. Oh, I thought, interesting. And then it turned out that no, the 'last' picture was really dsc_0049.jpg-ie it had wrapped round...

I have taken 10,000+ photos on my D70 in just under 13 months. That isn't the most pictures that anyone takes, but nor is that the least.

At digifoo last October Schuyler and I talked with Stewart Butterfield, of Flickr. He was talking about the home meta data problem. I was the object case. I think his exact words were that I was, well, f'd. Too many images, not enough meta data.

And obviously he is right...

Molly to Hungary?

Molly is going to Hungary...

foo

Search and replace in word

Adam just showed me a Word trick. Turn on wildcards, then search for

( )(*)(\n)

and replace with:

\2\3

And this is clearly superior to doing << in vi :-)

Tagging is the new black

Everything is better with tags. I just printed up business cards for OSCON. I put my name, and Locative Technologis, and then a bunch of tags:

oscon2005 perl geowanker gps geocoder mysql postgis linux osx apache photo d70 make google gmaps maps _mapping hacks_ author ajax community networking wifi nocat fablab dorkbot

I am amazed both at how many there are, and how many things are not on that list. It is mostly focused on the geek side of my life, no mention of the kids for example, but it isn't just professional tags. So what isn't on the list? There are things not on the list because I didn't think of them, or they didn't seem relevant, and many other things that just don't seem to apply to my current areas of focus.

How many things are there that don't apply to me? music, art, philosophy, ethics, economics, finance, physics, medicine, biology, etc etc.

And I think most of what isn't on the list is pretty darn interesting. But you get to pick things, or you just become the sort of people who picks certain things, and there you are.

Hot or Not now has personals. I was surfing it because there is a hot or not google map hack-it probably won't make it in, but it is a hack.

Brain Drain! Google and Yahoo hire all the smart people

Dot coms are left scraping the bottom of the barrel, as Yahoo and Google hire all the A-List talent.

Hell, now Google is even interviewing _my_ friends, and offering them jobs! How low can things go!

link to business week article 'Revenge of the Nerds', which will probably be hidden behind a paywall soon enough, so here is the intro:

"Revenge of the Nerds -- Again Google and Yahoo! are hiring away hundreds of top engineers from high tech's most prestigious firms Some call it the "giant sucking sound" emanating from Silicon Valley. For others, it's a migraine in the making. But whatever they're calling the hiring binge at Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), just about everyone is a bit astonished at the fearsome force swallowing up some of tech's best and brightest."

"They have created a Willy Wonka effect," says James E. Pitkow, CEO of Moreover Technologies, whose former company, Outride Inc., was purchased by Google in 2001. "Engineers want to work on the coolest problems with the smartest people."

Perhaps the money quote for someone who, perhaps, isn't quite A-List cred..."While the Internet leaders snatch up top tech talent, that creates headaches elsewhere. Some startups, for instance, say the talent drain has made their own hiring more difficult."

No, that is 'free as in naked'

"Museum to Let Naked People in Free"

"Vienna's prestigious Leopold Museum is usually a pretty buttoned-down place, but on Friday, some of the nudes in its marble galleries were for real."

,,, The money quote:

""We find a naked body every bit as beautiful as a clothed one," said Elisabeth Leopold, who founded the museum with her husband, Rudolf. "If they came only out of lust, we have to accept that. We stand for the truth."" The AP article

The Mousetrap...

SF Gate has an article on the Mousetrap. Mark Perez's life sized mousetrap is cool.

We have pictures from the first time we went (well, the first time that we went on the right day...), with Maddy and Spencer. Spencer and I went to the County Unfair there while Heather and Maddy were elsewhere. Spencer won cool mutant stuffed animals. That was probably 6/12 or so when Maddy was in a syncro meet.

Really, this is research for the book...

Okay, not totally. I got distracted by a call from my friend Tom Yoder, and discussions of the marshmallow gun. He has a low pressure guage, and determined that at best he was able to generate about 1 1/2 psi from blowing. And that was blowing hard.

That was a far better technique than my thought. I told molly over lunch that I had a thought to measure pressure. You take a bicycle pump with a pressure guage and put it into your mouth, then pump until you get that tingley feeling under your ears.

She interrupted me as soon as I said 'put it into your mouth.' My thought was that since you don't get that tingly feeling puffing a marshmallow gun that you generate less pressure than that...

My thought that we could do the experiment on cadavers was met with the practical objection that the cadavars wouldn't be able to tell us when the tingling started.

Tom Yoder agreed that it was a terrible idea, and he didn't even hear the cadaver enhancement. I just attempted to measure volumne by putting a plastic produce bag on the end of the marshmallow gun and simulating firing. I then twisted the neck of the bag, and stuffed it into the big measuring cup. I got fairly consistant results of about 2 quarts. Google is our friend in cases like this:

Convert 2 quarts to cubic feet . The answer is a mind bogglingly small 2 US quarts = 0.0668402781 cubic feet.

so an air compressor that puts out 5 cfm at 40 psi can fire around 75 shots per minute at 40 psi each. We don't need 40 psi, but I think that compressor output is not linear. If it can generate 5 cfm at 40 psi I do not think it can generate 100 cfm at 2 psi. I could be wrong. If I were wrong, then we'd get almost 1,500 shots per minute.

Since that is an absurdly high number I choose to ignore it, while quietly drooling at the possibility. Why, at 1,500 shots per minute the relativistic strains on the space time continuem could rip the universe back down to its' component strings.

I think whistles should be placed in the circuit...

It isn't funny, unless you turn your head to one side and squint

04:05 < danbri> Progress Report // Day 2 of my new "take gps tracks every day"
life 04:05 < danbri> 1. take GPS on train to meeting @ Amnesty International in London
04:05 < danbri> 2. leave GPS on train
04:05 < danbri> uh, that's it
04:06 < rich_gibson> I'm sorry about that, but it is fairly amusing. Tragedy
is when the batteries on my GPS run out, comedy is when
you are forced to evacuate from lunch because of a bomb,
and then lose your gps on a train.

This Woman owns a cemetary...

Shannon Applegate, "'Living Among Headstones'". More importantly, she owns the cemetary where my father, uncle, grandfather, great grandfather, great grandmother, great-great-grandfather, great-great-grandmother, and great-great-great-grandfather are all buried.

And assorted other great uncles/cousins/and misc Miller family hangers on are buried.

Pictures of the Yoncalla Cemetary, and gravestones for most of those people.

And it turns out that Shannon Applegate owns the cemetary. I mean, someone has to, right? And she is basically, well, trapped in Yoncalla, trapped in her heritage. What else can you do when you have that level of mouldering history to keep track of? I get to descend into maudlin fits of family history at my leisure, she does it full time.

We hang on to things

It is what we do. And My friend David Chrisman has written about his Korean war.

His Korean war was proxyed through his father, but it was real. Trying to make sense of the weight of memory. Go read the essay.

A case of irony

I was reading The Fading Memory of the state, and article that talks about the task of being the National Archive and Records Administration, and being faced with 347+ petabytes of data in the next 15 years or so...

The irony is that while reading it I checked the mail, well, during a break from reading the article, and there was a package from my dad with a letter and a DVD of my Grandmother's funeral. That happened in Aug 2003, and I received the DVD on 6/26/2005, and of course it is just as relevant today as it was then.

So how does one manage it all? The basic answer is that you can't really...The other day I ran across an amusing article on wired: Keep Your Privates private. It talks about a product called Couple Box which claims to be a secure application for your personal home made 'intimate' files/pictures/video.

But clearly, in the decades to come, archives such as NARA will need to be staffed by a new kind of professional, an expert with the historian's eye of an Allen Weinstein but a computer scientist's understanding of storage technologies and a librarian's fluency with metadata. "We will have to create a new profession of 'data curator'--a combination of scientist (or other data specialist), statistician, and information expert," says MacKenzie Smith of the MIT Libraries.

How do you deal with all this data? Some needs to be private, some just needs to be preserved. There is an awesome slashdot post on the subject.

The slashdot comment:

this is actually a BIG question (Score:5, Insightful) by Ralph Spoilsport (673134) Alter Relationship on Sunday June 26, @12:13AM (#12912210) (Last Journal: Monday July 12, @10:38PM) And one that I have railed about for many years.

I have been in the same position the Author discussed, and I have come to ONLY negative conclusions. In a few words, and I hate to say this, but buddy:

WE'RE FUCKED.

Digital is a loser's proposition. backing up to analogue or even digital data on analogic substrates (such as DV tape) fail. Simply nad purely.

The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.

Also, a RAID assumes a continuity of several things that are not likely to be continuous:

With Video:

Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables.

With Audio:

sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.

Basically all of it points to very bad places.

I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper, our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.

Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work. Archiving the 21st century will be impossible. To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age - not only for the holocaust of the die caused by the failure of the petroleum based economy, but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on /.

His problem of saving personal video is just the tip ofthe iceberg. His problem is the problem of our very civilisation, writ small.

That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.

Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.

Caution! Hot stuff ahead!

I hate it when I misjudge the thermal properties of the containers that I put in the microwave, thus resulting in that 'oh f**k why is the counter so far away' feeling while the flesh blisters and you toy with the consequences of dropping hot shit on your feet.

That is all.

Poll: Bush Job Approval Dips to New Low

According to this poll American's are in 'a bad mood.' The amusing thing about this poll is that I was just polled a few nights ago, and I thought this was that poll. But on reading it I realized it wasn't. But still vaguely interesting.

I think Bush is dead wrong on just about everything, but when I can get out of the 'what I think' it is fascinating to look at this time in American history. I suspect that I shouldn't write too much on this, it just messes with my mental hygiene, but it has been a revelation to realize that there are a lot of people out there who flat reject things that I see as inevitable, and welcome.

And perhaps it is welcome that on a lot of issues it is not longer a question of spin and nuance. And, ah, how about that rise in Creationism? What the hell? 6/10/2005

Spencer and I make Marshmellow guns

We went to the Ace Hardware store to get the parts...when we got to the counter the clerk said 'looks like a lot of fun here.'

Spencer sort of acted out putting a marshmellow in a tube and shooting it...she got it.

"Ah, you read Make magazine?"

She not only reads Make, but had got the second issue before me...

See the pictures

Maddy and Spencer and the Bike Rodeo and Life size mousetrap

Bike Rodeo! Life Size Mousetrap! Do it!

We went, we had a great time, and you can read about it with the photos.

Thoughts today...5/19/2005

I think to much. Everyone tells me this. Maybe they are right...I need to think a little less and 'noodle' more. Just poke at projects and try things. Start noodling with the ideas and see where it goes.

I think that theory and thinking and all are important. Joshua thinks that theory and all are important as they relate to actually getting things done. I suspect I'm going a bit far, but in his view an unimplemented good idea is irrelevent, except to the extent that it triggers implementation.

My feet are moving! Rich's feet last moved for 0 seconds at

Something happened out by the dog house... 05/14/05 19:58:27;

Every bed I ever slept in...

A long time ago, maybe when I was 12, I read an author bio on a dust jacket or in a magazine that said 'so and so is currently involved in a long term project to photograph every bed he ever slept in."

It seemed overwhelming to me. I mean, every flea chewed louse infested mattress? What if that bed was rightfully taken to the dump or burned? Does that mean your new life's work is a failure?

I have no sense of humor. I am too earnest. A friend once said "Rich, did you hear about the man who tried to walk around the world? He drowned!"

"Oh, how sad" I replied. The earnest me not getting the whole aqueous earth concept. And the same with this whole every bed idea.

I now believe that it was almost surely a simple joke! But this comes up as I play with Google Maps typing in places I've lived and thinking 'hey, I could make a google maps listing of all the places I've lived."

Kahlua...

"You know, Kahlua and Half and Half tastes a lot better than Kahlua and Skim Milk."

"duh"

I happen to need a microcontroller based midi controller...

And isn't that how it starts? You browse the Make Magazine del.icio.us feed, and find a link to DIY MIDI Controllers using PIC Microcontrollers and Basic Stamps.

I sort of wanted to do the project I have in mind with the Texas Instruments MSP-430, since it is small and inexpensive, but I have a Basic Stamp II just sitting here, muttering 'give me juice, make me process." There is a link from that page to A midi out program for the Basic Stamp II So as near as I can tell, I'm good to go.

Well, except I don't actually have anything with a Midi In port that will make noise...perhaps something MIDI is in my future?

It doesn't take all kinds of people...

...We just have all kinds of people.

Clearly that is advice to live by. I wanted a new server to throw into our 1/4 rack down at Hurricane Electric. I mean, Schuyler has a machine in the rack, and he and I jointly have a machine in the rack, but all those beautiful "U's" were sitting empty, forlorn, waiting for a machine from me!

I got a pretty cool 1U case off of EbAy for $46.97. As near as I can tell it is a brand new case. And it included a power supply, and the PCI 90 degree adapter. Screaming deal.

Of course, for it to be a Testing Range Production there need to be some arbitary number of freaky weird things that have to be done.

First weird thing was that the back cutouts were just a little off from my mother board. But the Dremel tool made reasonably quick work of those. I did shatter three dremel cut off wheels in the process, but that is the price of progress.

Next the motherboard I had from my friend Nate had a full sized heat sink and fan. Hmmm. That is not going to fit in the 1U case. A little time with the metal cutting band saw and it seems that I've taken care of that problem.

Next is the question of drives. Since Schuyler had an emergency that required the use of my new 300 gb drive I installed Fedora Core 3 on an old 6 gb drive. I had a 250 gb SATA drive, and an Adaptec ASH-1205 SATA Connect Serial ATA Card. I figured it wouldn't hurt to try, so I installed the mess and after a quick fdisk and mkfs I amazingly was able to mount the drive.

Fedora Core 3 recognized the Adaptec ASH-1205 and automatically loaded the sata modules. I was happy. I don't know if that would work for the boot partition, but I'm happy right now.

A side benefit is that this system has an older BIOS, and didn't actually appear to recognize the full 300 gb of the other drive. I assume that since the sata modules live in user space that the BIOS loses the power to vex in this case.

The final (knock wood!) indignity was that the case was designed for a single hard drive. It doesn't even have cut outs on the front panel for a floppy or CD-just blank steel.

(if you look closely at that picture you can read this text being edited. If I were clever I would call this 'Computer in the process of being documented' and it would be conceptual art, and sort of clever. If only I were clever and could capitalize on these little syncronicities. Though, since I intentionally planned the photograph to include that text it isn't strictly 'syncronicity' but rather 'staged' which is a word that here means not random.)

Dilemna. I managed to solve the dilemna with a bit of nearly precision metal fabrication. You can tell a geek's operating system from the shape of the hard drive sled used in their server...

Screws and stuff: case and hard drive screws appear to be (mostly?) 6/32. This means size 6, and 32 threads per inch. This is interesting because it turns out that this means if you use a certain size drill bit you can reliably make holes that match your screws, and if you use a slightly smaller bit, and a 6/32 tap, you can make threads that these screws will happily grip.

And if you can tap threads you have far more options as to where you can install things, and even, dare I say, what is possible to treat as a computer case...(more to follow).

Be your own truth squad...

That was a possible hack for Mapping Hacks. "Be your own truth squad, create annotated driving directions."

I just read something on the Geowankers list...'suppose illegal logging is a problem in your country...nuns being killed...other bad things' and so people are given space imagery and GPS units to deal with it all.

In Brazil they are doing massive cool things. Here is Software to georeference their satelite data

A hack of someone other then me

perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"

Too much spam!

Yet again...I'm not actually getting too much spam, my filters seem to be working well enough, and I turned off wild card emails a bit ago, but now I notice that I get it appears tens of thousands of attempted spams per day to journalsonline.com addresses that have never existed.

So I've taken the step of pointing the journalsonline.com mx record to an ip address that I own, but that isn't pointing to anything. First I changed my postfix main.cf file so that it no longer attempts to receive mail for journalsonline, but that just changed the problem slightly: instead of connecting, looking up the user, and rejecting it now simply rejects the connection with a relay denied error.

Actually, I do get some Relay access denied messages in my maillog, but mostly it seems that I get connects and disconnects.

next morning...my log file was still spewing into the log, but then a bit later it quited down...probably as dns propagated. how nice.

More on Locks

Greg Miller's Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners seems like a good site. I'm really only linking it because of this line under 'purchase a practice lock' he says "Stay away from Schlage, it's more difficult to pick due to the shape of the ward." The second lock I picked was a Schlage, and it didn't take that long...

And then it says "Step 4: Remove all but one pin from your lock Attempting to pick a five pin tumbler is way too difficult for someone just starting out. So you'll want to make your job easier by removing all but one pin from your lock. "

But now it sounds like I'm bragging about what is basically beginners luck, coupled with good instruction and good tools. When we moved into our current house there was messing with locks that had to happen. I don't quite remember why I thought I knew how to do what I was attempting, but I ended up with the cylinder out of the lock and the pins all over the place.

Oh sh**! I said, not to myself. I had no idea how it all went back together, so I figured that I'd take another one apart, but I'd be really careful this time to see how it went together. (Don't ask about this tendency of mine to throw good things after bad...I regularly do it). Anyway, the second lock fell to the same chaos of springs and parts.

A while later Heather took all three locks to the hardware store where they charged us $30 or maybe even $45 to rekey the lot.

(yes, after the second failure I took apart the third lock on the same misguided quest).

Last night (4/5/2005) I learned to pick locks

It was great fun. I wrote it up on my O'Reilly Net blog. "Lock picking is the new knitting."

See if I'm moving my feet!

My feet are waiting. Regular readers of this blog know that it is very important to track whether or not my feet are moving. The reasons are varied and many, and there is really no need to enumerate them all.

So now it is possible to literally see when I last moved my feet. This comes with some caveats, like, my feet have to be under my desk. And sometimes the feet that are reported as having moved are, in fact, not my feet, but the feet of another.

Or even a completely non-foot related item, like a cat, or a small annoying dog who manifests her desire for love by chewing the crotches of panties and pissing and pooing on the floor.

Clearly more research and funding is needed in order to engage in appropriate research on remote foot identification. In the meantime, this is brought to you by an old garage door motion sensor, my making things Teleo Modules, and a tiny bit of code.

Hopefully people who care about what my feet are doing will develop a dependence on having this information mediated through a tool that I wrote. That way I can then go off on holiday or down to the pub without annoyance by simply running the "Best of Rich's Feet!"

Take that Panopticon!

Configure a Pebble/Metrix box

Connect eth0 to a network segment with a dhcp server.
Go to the DHCP server, tail the lease log:
sudo tail -f /rw/var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases
Power up the metrix.
Watch the log...by and by a lease should be issued.
ssh root@thataddress, password=root

Things muttered...

A scary start to a sentence "I may be drunk but..."

Totally unrelated, two comments from Spencer: "I want to be a builder, will you teach me" and "It is like me from my head to my toes, plus just my legs" (his way of indicating a height or distance, approximately one and a half spencers). 10/12/2004

The Brady Bunch in the land of the clones

This is funny...what if you had too much time on your hands and a theme song?

Spencer, how did you have any underwear left?

What do you mean?

I just folded about 18 pair!

Oh, that's okay. I have 19.

Another quote: "What has that azalea ever did to you?" (it is possible that those 'Master Gardener' classes have affected my mother...)

Spencer has some opinions: "These are my specialties: I have really sharp eyes and I find a bunch of things, making white vinager, making potions, riding bikes and scooters, and catching ants. They're pretty hard to catch. Making real batteries that can work out of dead batteries and digging tunnels is going to be one of my specialties."

"My jobs are taking care of people and dogs, and I forget the rest..."

The Sledding Hill, by Chris Crutcher

It's a curiosity with humans, how so much productivity can come from searing pain. Of course, much stagnation also comes form searing pain. Heck, searing pain is big fuel.

Isn't that the truth? I go through cycles of massive productivity, mixed with a near inability to move...

Feb 2005

Lot's of links...

I'm exiting an Opera session that has been running basically 'foreever.' Well, no, it has crashed, but then opera is clever and reloads your pre-crash tabs. So here are links:

http://whatthehack.org/ big hacker campout in the Netherlands this summer

http://nakedape.cc/about Naked Ape consulting in Portland, Free and Open Source consultants, Friends (?) of Rael.

http://scienceview.berkeley.edu/view/index.html Web cam from the top of the berkeley hills, of the Bay. Very cool

http://davidchess.com/words/log.20050107.html#20050111 Zen Enlightenment by using analytical discourse to transcend analytical discourse. Very good.

http://flagrantdisregard.com/?p=344Map of sex offenders, near Disneyland, and interesting blog

http://doineedajacket.com/dinaj.asp?dinaj=KSFO The most important of personal services...Do I need a jacket? Yes Why? Because it's not very warm out.

http://teryx.bobdbob.com/~protius/ledbutton/ An LED lapel button project

(a putrid long url) Schuyler's map of terms from the History of the Peloponnesian War.

http://interaccess.org/ia.php Yet another Electronic media arts centre...now, how come we aint got one of those in Sebastopol?

A picture Dav Coleman took of me...that I like at all, at the Dorkbot at The Shipyard in Oakland...Jim Mason's little pied a terre.

http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/reports/91/ECS-LFCS-91-180/ The Polyadic pi-Calculus: A Tutorial

Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog Islands of Belgium in the Netherland, islands of belgium inside of islands of the netherlands inside of whatever...a text.

Baarle-Hertog Islands - map

A place Jerritt lived and the carrot cannon, with a moin moin map

The Regex Coach - Interactive regular expressions-very cool

Too Much SPAM...

I'm getting a huge amount of SPAM. I have a lot of filters, but it looks like my system performance is actually now being impacted by the work my filters are doing.

This came to a head when I was debugging an email problem on another system. I sent email to myself from that system while watching my /var/log/maillog. I kept missing what I was looking for because of all of the darn SPAM hammering my system.

The thing that is annoying me right now is all of the spam send to accounts that don't exist on my system. Running this command shows me attempts to send mail to non-existent accounts:

sudo tail -f /var/log/maillog | grep reject

Using iptables to count bandwidth usage

This command will use iptables to log bandwidth of web traffic:
sudo /sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j LOG
or this adds a label so you can see what is what

sudo /sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j LOG --log-prefix 'www' and then this shows that usage:

sudo /sbin/iptables -L OUTPUT -v

This works if I stop my default firewall rules...so I need to clean my default rules...

sudo /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j LOG --log-prefix 'mail'

This also works, to at catch the responses (ie. source port)

sudo /sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 25 -j LOG --log-prefix 'mail'

I wrote a program to look at reject'ed emails in my maillog

sudo tail -20000 /var/log/maillog | grep reject | ./maillog.pl

maillog.pl just groups by ip address.

So this is quasi interesting to show the current attempts:

watch 'sudo tail -20000 /var/log/maillog | grep reject | ./maillog.pl'
maillog.pl (this is of course ugly, code but you can see what it is doing)

So watching that gives me the most recent abusers, who I can add to my kill file with:

sudo /sbin/iptables -A INPUT --source 192.168.0.8 -j DROP

But I do have the default firewall rules running, so to log things with the firewall running:
sudo /sbin/iptables -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j LOG

The firewall config lives in /etc/sysconfig/iptables and can be edited by /usr/bin/system-config-securitylevel

This is quasi interesting:

watch 'sudo /sbin/iptables -L INPUT -v'

Gas Prices are too high, or are they?

When I was in high school for a year in Minnesota in 78/79 I remember buying gas for 99 cents/gallon. It was a noteworthy amount, because it was near to a buck a gallon.

Today in California Gas is $2.25 plus or minus, it has been higher and lower recently, and is likely to get higher soon.

Basically a 2.25 increase in gas prices in 26 years. So 99 cents a gallon in 1979, but what is that worth today? Economic History Services has a 'What is its Relative Value' service. According to it:

In 2003, $0.99 from 1979 is worth:
$2.51 using the Consumer Price Index
$2.11 using the GDP deflator
$2.46 using the unskilled wage
$3.29 using the GDP per capita
$4.24 using the relative share of GDP

So it sort of looks like unskilled workers who paid a buck a gallon for gas in 1979 could pay $2.46 today.

But I'm sort of picking on 1979. Gas prices jumped a lot in there. They were about 60 cents a gallon from July 1975, up to about 66 cents in Dec 1978, and then at $1.02 in Dec 1979, then they were more stable for quite a while (well, 'stable' is an odd word to apply to gas prices, but bear with me...).

In 2003, $0.66 from 1978 is worth:
$1.86 using the Consumer Price Index
$1.52 using the GDP deflator
$1.78 using the unskilled wage
$2.42 using the GDP per capita
$3.16 using the relative share of GDP

So picking a slightly different base price provides a less optimistic view, but cars get better mileage today then in 1978, so that 1.78 equivelent in the unskilled wage can be bumped up a bit to account for higher mileage.

Here is my thesis: Gas prices are not nearly high enough to serve as a significant disincentive to driving.

Misc Poking at Statistics with little meaning... (you can probably stop reading here because I am thrashing through some numbers)

According to the 'Monthly Energy Review' at Energy Information Administration in the US Department of Energy the 'U.S. City Average Retail Price' varied between 64.4 and 85 cents per gallon. That is an all city average, and I suspect Minnesota prices could easily have been a tad higher then the national average.

Gas prices have varied quite a bit, the US City Average Price was 99.4 cents/gallon by November 1978. And it went up, and then was under a buck a gallon from March 1986-March 1989, and Nov and Dec 1989, and then a decade later from Jan 1999-Mar 1999. It was as low $1.13 in Jan 2002.

But that isn't my story :-) My story is that based on a hazily recollected price from a snowy St. Paul night in winter of 1979 that current gas prices, adjusted for inflation, are not out of line.

We pay more in California, but the nationwide average in Dec 2004 was $1.88

But is this just an example of picking optimal times? Yeah...probably. That 1.13 in Jan of 2002 maps to $1.20 today, so in today's terms gas was much cheaper, but it was $1.60 in June of 1999, so perhaps that 1.20 in Jan 2002 should be considered a discount on gas for a short period, I don't know. On the other hand, in 1976 gas was 60 cents a gallon, which in today's (well, 2003) dollars is 1.91, or about what gas cost at the end of the year in 2004 (yes, there is an extra year in there, but inflation has been low recently).

Which all speaks for a series comparing historic gas prices in today's dollars (however you want to define 'today'). But again, while the prices vary, the upshot is that they just are not enough to have a big impact on consumer behavior.

I've read sources who treat demand for gas as being inelastic in respect to price, but I just don't buy that. I think demand for gas is inelastic in respect to price while gas prices are within a comfort zone for consumers.

I don't know the true limits of that comfort zone, but I do know that I consider the cost of transportation to be a bargain!

Dear Friend,

I am Mr. Olsom Berghart a personal trainer to Mikhail Khodorkovsky the Richest man in Russia and owner of many companiesin the mining industries, especially gold mining. In my work with Mikhail Khordorkovsky I have learned that his metabolism has a special characteristic in how it deals with his extended exposure to dust from the Noble Metals. It is all very complicated, but basically, his sweat contains an extremely high concentration of gold solids. I have created a process to collect Mikhail Khodorkovsky's sweat and process it to extract the gold. But now I need your help to extract these gold bars out of Russia. I have solid gold bars, but not enough foreign currency to allow me to ship them out of the country. If you will aid me in this process of extracting these resources out of Russia without detection I will share the proceeds with you on a 70-30% basis. My initial plan is to reform the gold into athletic shoe innersoles as well as the tips of shoelaces, and then insert those into the Russian Made Khorsky Flyer shoes and export them to the United States. You will be my agent in the United States. Since no one ever buys or wears Khorsky Flyer's unless they are held at gun point the gold will be safe. Please contact me so that we can arrange the details of our shipping and custom manifest paperwork. Regards Olsom Berghart(Mr)

Melvin Goes To Dinner

2/25/2005 - Great

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

Smith turns all his stories into (almost) mawkish postcards of place. Fortunately for me I manage to retain interest, and don't (quite) find them too cutesy. But sometimes it is a near thing. He also wrote the NO. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, about a female detective in Botswana. But here we spend a lot of time wondering how the Kantian Imperative applies to everyday life if you have a bit more money then you strictly need...in this case, Isabel Dalhousie lives life and solves a bit of a mystery of why a man would fly off the balconey at the concert hall in Edinburgh.

Chris Crutcher...

...is great. When one is having particular challenges, say in their work, it is good to read Crutcher and have things made more clear. Catharisis and all. And I had some recent challenges, and obsessive reading kept my sane.

I read or reread _Iron Man_ and _Athletic Shorts_, and Stotan, and Running Loose, and some other things as well...

2/11/2005

Last Chance Texaco, Brent Hartringer

Brent also wrote Geography Club Where do you go if you've caused trouble in foster homes? You end up at the last chance for gas before the empty desert of reform school and worse. At Kindle Home... Date unknown...fall 2004?

The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke

Once before I tried to read this, but became bogged down. And then we went to Italy, including Venice, the scene for the story, and my interest was called forth anew. After our renew I asked Richie Partington of Richiespicks.com for a copy and I read it to Maddy and Spencer. It took us a while, but they loved it. Dec 2004

The Multiplex Man by James P. Hogan.

I loved the Giant's Books, and Inherit the Stars, and Entoverse, etc. The multiplex man's hook is 'He had a stranger's face and a dead man's memories.' The problem is that the book started with a protaganist who ends up cruelly cast aside. Now, that protaganist was not all that sympathetic, but I was hoping for a nice story arc in which the character recognized the error of his ways and all was made right in the world. Instead I was given four protaganists living in one head, none particularly symptathetic, and three of them doomed to the irrelevancy of a passing mist. 2/12/2005 or so.

Homer Kelly Mysteries

Jane Langton writes a series of mysteries based on the character Homer Kelly and his wife Mary. He is a former homicide detective, current professor, and he travels about professing and running into murders.

I started with _The Dante Game_, in which our hero spends a year in Florence. Since I spent four days in Florence I felt a certain attraction. "It was true that Homer Kelly was an exaggerated person, somewhere at one end of the curve of human possibility." I then moved on to _The Shortest Day_, in which a jealous academic murders people he suspects of flirting with his wife. Fortunately everything ends all right. Etc. And again...these 'reviews' are for my benefit, not 'yours' (unless you are me). Feb 2005

Fish are dying all over...1/19/2004

Molly came up annoyed, sad, irritated. Yesterday one of her fish died, today after school two more were dead. She went to Adam's to console herself, and when she got back two more were dead, and two of the last four are looking 'off.'

We bought eleven or twelve fish at a new fish store after christmas, and 10 have died. Including all five of the little's fish in their new Aquarium.

They got new fish that were diseased and didn't quarntine them, or they have bad management practices, or pumps that share supply lines, or shared nets. Who knows.

But Molly is bummed. And it makes me sad.

Maddy was hanging in when the fish started to die, but when the last one died she ripped in two her beautiful picture of the aquarium showing the five little fish, tetras?, in a school.

In Pebble she did an ocean picture that had five fish in a school. I asked her if they were supposed to be a reminder of our fish, and she became pedantic, telling me no, that this picture was of the ocean...but then she added more fish to the school to get away from that magic number 'five.'

Misc Books

Lives of the Popes: The pointiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II. Richard P. McBrien

My ignorance of all things religious is profound. Touring the Vatican, and exploring St. Peter's was fascinating. Now that I've read (parts of) this book my appreciation is improved. Favorite line, from memory... "this was the period of the germanic migration, often referred to as the invasion of the barbarians."

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King

After Brunelesschi's Dome I was psyched for a bit more of Ross King. Good stuff. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici: Lauro Martines.

The ruler of Florence and his brother were attacked, and the brother killed, in the cathedral of Florence in 1478. This is the 'Pazzi rebellion.' The pope Sixtus IV (he of the Sistine Chapel) was involved. Much scandal and blood letting..

The Alias Man, Bill Pronzini

Sort of intended maybe to be a revenge fantasy...the Alias man marries, lives with women for about 4 years, and moves on. Bigamist and fraud. Now three of the women come together and take his ass down.

1/11/2004 "I tried to make a volcano"

Madeline said. I tried to make a volcano with Baking Soda and vinegar but it didn't work.

Oh? Show me what you used.

I used that baking soda, and that dried vinegar.

Dried vinegar?

Yeah, right there (points at bottle of Fuller's Mendocino herbs Basil).

Ah. I think I see the problem. Vinegar is not actually dried...

And we proceeded to make baking soda and vinegar bubble like mad. I remember in 4th grade I had grand plans to make a baking soda and vinegar rocket. I showed my drawings to ?? Ms Milaneseo?? at Grant. I was a big 4th grader, at San Antonio Elementary, just dropping in to show her what I was up to.

Of course...now Grant is a community center, and San Antonio is a Jewish community center, and so is (?) in Los Gatos where I did first and second grades...

wget is really good.

10/22/2004 I knew wget was good, but no, it is _really_ good.

Don't use this server, for various reasons, but this command is good.

wget -r -H -np -Amp3 http://www.oddiooverplay.com/ears/hallowseve/ -r - Recursive retrieving...walks down directories -A accept list -> in this case just mp3's -H span hosts -> follow linked to sites. -np never ascend to the parent or above. ie. this will ignore things like ../../../ that might get you to the root directory. -nH no host directories ... doesn't create a directory named for your domain. 1/9/2005 update: wget -r -np -nH http://www.roberts-etal.com FINISHED --19:12:30-- Downloaded: 437,618 bytes in 48 files -nH no host directories. Without this all the files would have been downloaded into a directory named www.roberts-etal.com.

2005-01-03 A broken toy

The day after Christmas Spencer's radio control car from Radio Shack broke. He cried. I tried to fix it. Finally couldn't, and Heather suggested taking it back.

Radio Shack was incredibly unhelpful. I'm pretty disgusted at them, actually. But this evening I spent three hours hours working on the toy. I have been fabricating a new part to replace the broken one.

This is what happens when you start watching Monster Garage. But I digress :-)

I'm not positive that I can make it work again, but it is looking good.

In addition to the initial problem, it never actually worked right. One of the two controls is exceptionally flaky. I'm not sure what to think about that problem. Looking at the board in the car there are a lot of really ugly solder joints. I think there may be crossed traces. I'm not sure I want to dig into that right now...maybe if I can get the first problem fixed.

Today I bought a set of dremal bits, and I used a number of them. Fabrication takes a long time, but it is pretty satisfying.

The respect that the young owe to their elders is lacking in our house

Maddy came up and asked about King Cobras. "How big do they get?" Well, I answered, did mommy bring in my backpack? No, she hadn't, but she had left the car that included my pack.

Off Maddy went to fetch up my pack with computer and we explored the King Cobra. The biggest one ever was over 18 feet long! And they are often 12 feet! Then we had a problem: my bath was almost overflowing. With HOT water! And the drain is way down at the bottom! So I put in a _little_ bit of cold, then psyched myself like a sumo wrestler and plunged my hand into the depths.

Now we love our deep Japanese 'soaking tub.' You can sit on the bench and have water to your neck. Delightful. And two people can share the tub, assuming that they are close, since they will be close. But it has a flaw. The drain is not easy to open.

Not easy at all! In fact, it can take a bunch of tries to get it to open. It has a silly mechanism. You push it down to close, then you push it past close and it is supposed to spring up to open. Hah.

So there I am, with my chest pressed against the top of the top, stretched down to try please please to release the drain so that I could let some of the scalding hot (not literally, but sort of close) water out so that I could put a bit of cold in so a bath could be obtained, push, clunk, still closed, push, clunk, still closed, push, clunk, still closed.

I do not need any help at this point, when Maddy chimed in "Daddy, you look like a poooping gorrilla."

12/17/2004 "Oooo Gross, I just touched the phone with my tongue."

...that about says it all, doesn't it? I worked on a sculpture yesterday...

A nice bicycle but not for long.

Things progressed...read about it on yesterday's photo page..

Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King, and a need for spatial annotation of books

Michelangelo ran and hid from Pope Julius II. "Please Pope, don't make me paint that icky ceiling!" But Julius was so annoyed at Michelangelo's insolience that not only did he have him tracked down, but he also went to war with Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, and France!

Michelangelo wasn't even that hard to find, he just ran back home to Florence. And after Julius took over Bologna he made Michelangelo work in Bronze to make a huge ass sculpture of Julius to set up on the porch of the church of San Petronio in Bologna to loom over those rebellious sod's and remind them of who was boss!

And so Michelangelo had to spend a bit over a year casting a 10,000 pound and fourteen foot tall statue. One of the largest bronze statues since ye olden dayes.

In an amusing footnote, the statue was melted down less then five years later in order to make a BIG ASS GUN to use to come after Pope Julius, who, meantime, had broken papel law and GROWN A BEARD!

And personal hygiene? Forget about it! Michalengelo would sleep in his boots, and "...he has sometimes gone so long without taking them off that then the skin came away like a snake's with the boots."

And, oh yes, somewhere in all of this excitement, a ceiling was painted.

I desperately need to find, adopt, or create a method for adding geospatial annotations to books. The book is dense with locations. Individual paragraphs will have seven, or more, spatial references. Then there are the issues of temporal references. What came first, and last, and in between, and who the heck is everyone...

But location is the first step. The book starts out 'The Piazza Rusticucci was not one of Rome's most prestigous addresses. Though only a short walk from the Vatican, the square was humble and nondescript, part of a maze of narror streets and densely packed shops and houses that ran west from where the Ponte Sant'Angelo crossed the Tiber River.'

If one is in on the code that sentence is immensly evocative. You know much about this place based only on that description. And if you are out of loop you get the idea that it is a downscale place near a river and near the Vatican.

2004-12-13

Quotes

"...instead I end up with a ball point pen up my nose sculpting animals out of a coffee stirrer saying 'can I go yet?'"

What one can accomplish without the web...or Picture News 12/9/2004

I am getting a heck of a lot done without surfing the web. See my new 'experiments with pictures' page. Specifically, I like the Date/calendar view of pictures. I also wrote code to automatically rotate photos-which is a huge time saver!

I am in the mode of making continuous incremental improvements to my pictures. Progress is made with Regular small improvements. There are few magic bullets...

I am in my third week of almost no web surfing, and nearly no news. I qualify those only so as to seem less like a Savonarola hoisting the web onto my private Bonfire of the URL's. In truth, I have not seen my normal web sites since before we left for Italy on the 19th. No Salon, boingboing, sfgate, wired, dailykos.

And I miss them, and probably do need to figure out a way to reintegrate them into my life in a helpful fashion, but really, why? Last Thursday we met with our new exchange student, and some of her sponsors in the Rotary club. I mentioned my news withdrawel and John talked about being out of contact for three weeks in the Azores. When he came back there was remarkably little that had changed.

I wasn't quite sure if I trusted this current news-abstention, so I checked in with him. "Has anything important happened?" And the answer was, basically, nothing.

Monday afternoon Heather and I met and had coffee. I saw an article on the paper in the news rack, and there was a paper in Johnny Java's, so I read the whole article. Bush is looking to eliminate the deductability of state and local tax payments, which, surprise, most screws the Blue states of California and New York. But in a fun twist, those states have popular 'future of the GOP' Republican Governors.

And guess what...that is all very interesting. But really, so what. The neural pathways that are coded for 'I disagree with Bush's economic policy' are well trod, and hardly need reinforcing. Meanwhile, the neural pathways for 'Renaissance History, Art, Culture, and Architecture' have shown a dramatic leap.

I still have the compulsive need to do something mindless on the computer, but that has diminished. I've been feeding that need by adding meta data to my photos, and extending my image viewing code, and organizing pictures, and catching up with backlogs of email.

Things that are all at least as valuable as mindless web time...and none of which leave me feeling tangled by the web of modern life.

Perhaps it is but an interlude, but a productive interlude!

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, by Ross King

2004-11-28...I bought this in Florence, and read it in Venice. Heather read it on the plane home. Before our trip to Italy I had a deep ignorance. I won't embarrass myself directly by revealing some of the things I did, or rather, didn't know, but I was less endowed with clue then one should be.

Now I am slightly less unendowed with clue.

From the Amazon review:

Filippo Brunelleschi's design for the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence remains one of the most towering achievements of Renaissance architecture. Completed in 1436, the dome remains a remarkable feat of design and engineering. Its span of more than 140 feet exceeds St Paul's in London and St Peter's in Rome, and even outdoes the Capitol in Washington, D.C., making it the largest dome ever constructed using bricks and mortar. The story of its creation and its brilliant but "hot-tempered" creator is told in Ross King's delightful Brunelleschi's Dome.

The point of these 'reviews' is to serve as a reminder to myself of things read...so pardon the lack of original comment... In Italy I worked hard to not buy every darn book that caught my eye in every gift shop. Too often we suffer from 'last exhibit syndrome' where you feel that where you are is the most interesting place you've ever been, and so well worth investing the money, and the time! to buy and read books about that place.

I managed to escape the Colosseum book store without a purchase-though if the catalog for the exhibit had been available in English I would have bought it!, but Finally I cracked in Florence. I didn't buy 'Symbols in Christian Art' at San Marcos, but later I bought Brunelleschi's dome, and glad I was for it.

This is a fun and readable account of one part of Renaissance Florence.

The Skinner, by Neal Asher, 2004-12-7

What if predators 'decided' that harvesting flesh from their prey, while not killing the prey outright, was a superior survival strategy? And so developed the ability to infect the prey with a 'virus' that would protect the prey from death, even as huge chunks of meat were 'harvested' from the prey?

That would be part of the premise of The Skinner. So ho-ho-ho merry christmas to you all.

11/18/2004 Corporal: Discuss

Packing for Italy, for some reason it has been decided that we need to clean the house before we leave. Now this is sort of a good thing, since we can come back to a clean(er) house. But odd in a way. We are pretty much packed, I want to throw the guide books and my novel in my bag, but basically I think we are there. So...let's clean!

I'm listening to the Rocky Picture Show soundtrack. It is making me smile. Heather bought me a 512 mb compact flash card, and bought Molly a TI-33 graphing calculator. Uhh mama. Better than my 33e, I guess.

So I just came upon a sheet of Molly's notes for her 'corporal' speech. I have the speech in a DSS file. So some notes from her speech...note, the lack of context is part of the charm:

Corps-Croe
Now that just led to a long awkward silence. corporeal carcus Marine Corps A body of people Corpse A dead body Ronald Reagan The corpacse (?) of western literature is filled with the corporeal forms

links that should be in delicious...

High res aerial photo of disneyland

Black rock city maps

Vterrain of black rock city

Mapping BRC with GPS

Bricoleurs sans frontieres

Transport Geography

Transport Geography on the Web