WTF

From the Bruhaha mailing list, here's a parody of the Switch commercials & also a comment on OS X.

Use caution: It includes the big f curse word.

 Green Monster North

Edward Cossette's Bambino's Curse weblog points to the Portland SeaDogs' website and the announcement that the Red Sox's new Double-A affiliate is building a reproduction of Fenway's Wall in their left field.

Very cool! Yet another reason to get up there alot next summer.

 Trick? Treat?

It's been a quiet couple of days.

Today is Halloween Part One. Some communities around here have set tonight as the night to take the kids around the neighborhood. Other will do it tomorrow night. Two of my nieces are out tonight trick-or-treating.

B is a devil. She's dressing up like a devil, I mean. She's starting to be a little old for the house-to-house, candy thing, so she's off to a friend's house for some sort of soon-to-be-a-teenage-girl carousing.

C is younger and will be made up as a cat. Trick-or-treating time is from 6 to 9 in her neighborhood. She arrived home from school at 3, and announced it was time to go out for candy. She's a little excited.

Trick or treating is now held on a government mandated evening, during a specific block of time. What is the world coming to?

 Flash Animations

This guy has created some nice Flash stuff. My favorite is the Tom Lehrer one on the elements.

 Rick and Jo Ann's wedding

Back on Labor Day, two of my dearest friends got married. I travelled out to San Diego to attend the wedding and be a "groomsman".

All my life I've believed that I don't like weddings. But sometime during the weekend of Rick and Jo Ann's wedding I discovered that, in fact, I actually like them!

Many of these feelings were similar to ones I had when I was Best Man for Rob and Sarah's wedding two years ago. At the time I didn't realize what they meant. But the return of these personal reactions, at Rick and Jo Ann's, helped me to learn this thing about myself.

I enjoyed the days in San Diego before the ceremony. Most of the family and friends arrived just before the ceremony, and only attended it and the reception. But as a member of the wedding party I arrived two days earlier. I was a part of all the rehearsal activities. And I was also part of all the socializing with the families, and the helping with last minute preparations.

I discovered that I enjoyed watching these family and traditional, activities. Meeting people, talking with them, hearing their stories, was a fascinating and fulfilling experience for me. And I had a sense that we were doing something very important: helping Rick and Jo Ann to start their life together.

Sitting in the reception, I realized that in many ways it wasn't just a celebration of Rick and Jo Ann's marriage. It was also a celebration of all the marriages and families present. Watching the couples. Watching them dance, interact with their kids, and just look at each other. It was as if this new marriage was a reaffirmation of theirs. Regardless of where they were in their own lives, this was a reminder of how each couple started together.

At the reception they did something that I'd never heard of before. They asked all the married couples to dance. During the dance they had couples leave the floor based on how long they had been married. Rick and Jo Ann left first since they had been married the shortest amount of time. Gradually couples left the dance floor. Until finally there was only one couple left, the couple that had been married the longest. Over 60 years. They gave this couple the bride's bouquet. That was nice.

Anyway, I now like weddings.

 Dear Saddam...

A reporter for Wired has hacked into Saddam Hussein's public email account. He's been getting some strange and scary mail.

"The e-mails sent to press@uruklink.net were obtained earlier this month by first clicking on a link, labeled "Check your e-mail in Uruk," on the homepage of Iraq's state-controlled ISP, Uruklink.net, then guessing the login name and password -- both of which were the same, five-letter word."

 Doonesbury on Technology

Ed Cone has put together a nice collection of Gary Trudeau's observations on computers and technology over the years.

 Blogging baseball games???

The Giants lost Game #7. Very disappointing.

Kinda unrelated to this series... alot of weblogs are "blogging the games". [Baseball Musings] [Scripting News] [Dan Shafer] And I'm a little uncomfortable about that, because I think it is a copyright violation.

It's nearly a cliche that every game contains a blurb, "the accounts, descriptions of this game... may not be published or rebroadcast"... etc. Posting a weblog account of the game, based on watching the televised game, is a violation.

And also, it's weak blogging. The weblogs become a long stream of small items. The account of the game pushes the previous blog items off the front page. Weak stuff replaces good stuff. It's too bad.

 Paper Darts

I'm not sure if I'm grown up enough to do this without adult supervision. But it looks like fun.

 It was a Red Sox moment.

Perhaps that is why I was so disturbed by the SF Giants' collapse in last night's Game 6.

Up 5-0, they remove their blazing starting pitcher Ortiz, which at the time seemed like a good conservative move. But then the bullpen self-destructs, giving up 6 runs and letting the Angels tie up the series.

Now we go to Game Seven, and I don't believe that baseball abilty can be decided on the basis of ONE game. Too many things are subject to chance. Maybe the World Series shouldn't be best of seven, maybe it should be the first team to win at least 4 games AND have won two more than the opponent... yeah, I know, that wouldn't work either. We'd still be playing the Series in January.

Too much stress... Go Giants!

 Busy Day

Not much time for blogging today. This morning I went to a meeting about putting together a New Years celebration for Portsmouth, NH. Then I drove down to Boston to help my mom set up her cable modem connection.

It really is a different world down in the big city. I spent more time in traffic slowdowns today than the entire past month combined. Too crowded, too much traffic. Not where I want to live.

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to eat at Kelly's while I was down there. Kelly's is a great roast beef/fish and chips place on the beach in Revere. I've been eating there since I was in high school. It's open like 364 days a year, and stays open until an insane hour every nite.

Back in my youth we would head to Kelly's at 2am and discover a line of people waiting to order. I've been there when there was a blizzard blowing in off the ocean, and they were still serving from the outdoor, walk-up order windows. If you're ever on Revere Beach Massachusetts don't miss Kelly's.

 Snow.

Well we reached another seasonal milestone in New England today. It snowed for the first time this season.

The forecast had said it could snow during the night, and into the morning, and darn them, they were right.

I awoke at 7 am to a dusting of snow in patches around the yard. At that time, a mix of rain and snow was falling. By 7:30 it had changed to full snow. And it fell pretty steady for awhile, before changing back to a mix.

Around 8:30 I measured one patch of accumulation at 1/2 inch deep. It must have snowed more than that, since the rain surely melted alot of what fell. News reports are that other locations in the area got 2 - 5 inches.

So it's official, summer is over.

 As you might imagine, today's Doonesbury is getting alot of referrals from the weblog world. It is pretty funny. But alot seem to think this is Trudeau's first mention of weblogs. But I'm pretty sure we saw Mike's hacker daughter writing in her blog weeks ago.

 Megnut: "Observation #82 in an infrequent series: People will take anything that you give away for free. Except free paint. No one seems to want free paint."

 My half-baked ideas...

The annoucement of the Chandler open-source PIM has heated up the ongoing debate, pro & con, on "open source software". I haven't gotten to Dave yet today, but here's Lessig weighing in.

I won't pretend that I have this stuff figured out. But one thing that I've always thought is that the whole discussion is confused by the fact that there's really TWO issues here: "open source" and "free software". These are two very different subjects. And they don't neccesarily go together. Software can be 1) free, but closed source... it can be 2) open source, but sold for $$... or 3) open source AND free.

I can see how either/both of these can produce passion and controversy. But as I see it, the ongoing debate always lumps them together. And that generates alot of the confusion in this discussion.

 Only in America

Jeanne Shaheen is the Governor of New Hampshire. She is also running for U.S. Senate.

Yesterday I had lunch at the McDonalds next to the Lee Traffic Circle. As I arrived I noticed that there were about 15-20 "Shaheen for Senate" signs stuck in the grass around the inside of the circle. These were the only signs posted inside the circle, and, strictly speaking (as I understand the law), they shouldn't be there since campaign signs are not supposed to be put on public property.

While I was eating, a State Highways Department truck pulled up. Two guys got out, pulled out all the signs, and threw them in the back of the truck.

I sat with my quarter-pounder pondering whether it was ethical for state workers to be inteferring with a campaign... when it dawned on me that these guys, tearing out "Shaheen for Senate" signs, work for Governor Shaheen.

So the irony of this is that Jeanne Shaheen has one group of people working for her who put these signs up, and another group of people working for her who rip them out.

God Bless America.

[BTW, make no mistake. I plan to vote for Shaheen. She's the right person for the job.]

 "Oh... My... God!"

Mitch Kapor, Andy Hertsfeld and some others have started a project to create a major, open-source, personal information manager. It's code-named "Chandler". It's starting to generate some big buzz.

Kapor has been comparing it to a product he introduced years ago called Agenda. I always loved Agenda, a PIM that would let you record lots of snippets of info then help you to organize, sift, sort, and use them. Unfortunately, by the time Agenda made it to the Mac it had been watered down and was soon to be abandoned.

Alot of weblogs have been writing about this project. Here's Dan Gillmor's column.

 What IS that stuff?

I just posted a story I wrote about a bloom of nasty-looking blue-green algae in Pawtuckaway Lake earlier this summer.

 Lawrence Lessig: "[If you] give the past a veto over the future, and the future will be vetoed."

[Previously...] Here's a link to the audio and slides of a talk given recently by Larry Lessig. I found it to be entertaining and very informative.

It's 31 mins long, so find a time when you have a few minutes, but check it out.

 You say potato...

As part of preparing our Lake House for winter, my brother put plastic over the porch screens. The plastic is totally opaque, and we want to be able to see out, so he cut a series of oddly shaped holes which he replaced with clear plastic.

When our Mom saw this she said, "I like your windows."

"I thought you might think they were too far-out," my brother said.

"Far-out?" my mother asked. "I think they're jazzy," she said.

"Far-out" "Jazzy" It must be a generational thing.

 The Register: "Scottish Power has barred Linux AND Opera users from signing up to its online energy accounts."

Hopefully this is an isolated bug, and not the start of something.

 How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...

I saw a woodchuck in a yard near the Pawtuckaway Lake house yesterday. Since returning to New England I've been repeatedly amazed at the wildlife that is common now, but wasn't when I was a kid spending summers there.

Loons, blue heron, deer, woodchucks, lots more ducks. A bear was seen in the elementary school yard this fall. I talked to one guy who insisted there are moose in the State Park now. Oddly there are fewer seagulls around the lake than when I was a kid. That's not a bad thing. But it is distinctive.

Muskrat photo from enature.com, a site which I found in a link at boing boing.

 What a wonderful treasure!

This family has taken pictures of itself every year for nearly 30 years.

 Anyone out there speak Japanese?

I think this is a Switch ad for the Japanese market. This woman is being called the Japanese Ellen Feiss, but she doesn't seemed stoned to me.

 The Ranger Foundation is a local Portsmouth group that wants to build a reproduction of John Paul Jones' ship Ranger. Their plan is to raise all the money that they need before starting to build the ship. In other words, they see the finished ship as being the product. I've said all along that the building of the ship is an equally, or more appealing thing. They should raise enough money to get started and then make the shipbuilding project as an exhibit and a fundraising focal-point.

The Foundation is having problems and is about to reorganize.

 Dan Gillmor reports on Microsoft's latest financial results. He points out that they have accumulated $40 BILLION, in cash and short term securities, that they are just sitting on:

Once Microsoft is out from under what's left of the antitrust case, it'll go on a strategic investment and acquisition spree the likes of which you cannot even imagine.

"The monopoly continues, unabated, and could even grow stronger. Innovation is almost dead in desktop software, where Microsoft has sucked the financial oxygen out of the system."

 DING!

Right on schedule, we had the first frost of the season last night. The overnite low was 29 degrees. As of right now it's back above freezing at 32.5 degrees.

I say 'on schedule' because historically, statistically, on average, the first frost in New England happens on October 15.

 Giants Win!

Last night the SF Giants won the NL Pennant to advance to the World Series. So even though my #1 team didn't make it, my #2 did. Go Giants! They face the Anaheim Angels who beat the Red Sox for the AL Wildcard. This is the first time ever that both Wildcard teams made it to the Series.

 Columbus Day

This is one of the seasonal milestones here in NE. In some ways it is the real beginning of Fall.

This is the weekend that we would always "close up" our lake summer house. Turn off the water and take all the bedding home. After today we would only come to the lake for day trips.

Very soon now they will open the dam and start lowering the lake level for the winter. They take the level down about seven feet for a variety of reasons. To keep the lake from freezing around the legs of boat docks and destroying them. To allow people to do maintenance to their shorelines. And to prevent the spring thaw run-off from causing floods.

We are having some glorious Fall weather today. It rained pretty hard for the past two days, but today is clear with a light breeze. Temp in the low 50s. Good day for a hike and/or a boat ride.

[Later: I was a bit optimistic about the temp. It was really in the hi 40s, still is at 1pm.]

 Monetary Units

I just heard someone refer to $10 as, "three starbucks".

 And the Nobel goes to...

I think it's pretty cool that President Carter has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was probably one of the smartest and most decent US Presidents in recent history.

He was elected in a backlash from the Watergate era, but when push-came-to-shove, the American people demonstrated, once again, that they don't want quality leaders. They want media stars.

Of course, Carter was also a victim of Ayatollah Kohmeini, who used the American Embassy hostages to win the election for Reagan.

Carter has been a model of what a not-yet-old retired President can accomplish. His work with housing, medicine, and peace through communication, are his legacy.

Congratulations Jimmy.

 Seasonal Milestones

We are approaching a seasonal milestone here in New England. The first frost.

It was forcast for last night, but we seemed to have dodged that icicle for now. It's been in the mid 30s the last two nights. But it is inevitable. Any night now.

Here's my little record of the daily hi and lo temps.

Last Spring I watched for the equivilent milestone: the last Frost. But it's part of the frustration of awaiting Spring's arrival that the last Frost is a bit harder to identify.

How does one know that the last one was the last? Will there be another tomorrow? Next week?

Statistically the final frost happens in mid April. This year it seemed that that would be the case, but then we had a freak frost -- and SNOW! -- in May!

Ah well. I guess that a hard-to-pin-down milestone is the price we pay for the end of winter. I can hardly wait.

 Spare Time Project

Want a valuable project to fill those spare moments?

How about building a G4 Mac.

BTW, I was under the impression that all Macs were dependent on a proprietary ROM, which was only available from Apple, and that they won't sell you one except as part of a whole computer. A quick skimming of this site makes no mention of this. Anyone know what the deal is?

 How 'bout them Giants!

Giants win!

 I'm still here.

Sorry, I've been a little distracted by life. I'll try to do some substantial posts tomorrow, but consider this...

The American teams are doing pretty well in the Louis Vuitton (Americas Cup) prelims.

The SF Giants are leading in the 5th (and deciding game) of the only baseball playoff series still not decided.

 Kurzweil Talk at Sensors Expo

KurzweilAI.net website... Ramona "AI" character on website... website host... he uses the term "big thinkers"... by 2020 $1000 computer will be 1000x human brain power... his alter-ego Ramona is a 25 year old rock singer from New Orleans... RK has a 14 year old daughter who was the backup dancer for his TED conference vitual person demo... he kept referring to "mems based sensors" I need to look that up... "experience beamers" are people who will share their recorded observations and emotions with others... the human brain can do 10^26 computations... 120 days added to human life expectancy each year now. And that is accelerating, soon it will be extending by more than a year each year.

 Friday Five

1. What size shoe do you wear?

Left foot 8 1/2, right foot 9

2. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Three. If you count sandals, five.

3. What type of shoe do you prefer (boots, sneakers, pumps, etc.)?

Sneakers. Although all summer I thought about getting a pair of those kayaker water shoes. Next summer I probably will.

4. Describe your favorite pair of shoes. Why are they your favorite?

I buy fairly expensive running shoes to protect my ankles when running. After about 200 miles I buy a new pair of running shoes and retire the older runners to be my everyday sneakers. Those are usually my faves. By the time I retire them they are usually still in pretty good shape, but nicely broke in.

5. What's the most you've spent on one pair of shoes?

$120.

Friday Five website.

 Geek Poetry

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting essay on the history of the tilde. It includes a reference to this funky bit of geek poetry. It's fun to say them outloud.

The poetry is in the middle of a long internet newsletter from 1990. I've reprinted the poetry portion here. The entire newsletter can be seen here.

 "...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
  perhaps---we're really not sure what the poem actually is
  about. Here it goes:"
    <>!*''#
    ^@`$$-
    !*'$_
    %*<>#4
    &)../
    |{~~SYSTEM HALTED
Transliterated:
    Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
    Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
    Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
    Percent splat waka waka number four,
    Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
    Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

 America doing OK in the Americas Cup.

It's still VERY early in the competition. But it's satisfying to note that the three US challengers are all undefeated after two days of racing.

The three teams have very distinctive personalities.

OneWorld is from Seattle and led by Craig McCaw (did I get his name right?). There was an article in Wired Magazine about how they are using all kinds of hi-tech to make their boat the fastest. They were penalized, before the races even started, for getting in a public spat with one of their team members who apparently gave some secrets to a competitor. So they started the first race with a score of -1. They won their first two, so they now have one point.

Stars & Stripes is from New York, and is led by the legendary Dennis Connors. Dennis was a Cup legend way back in the days when the US had never lost the Cup, and the races were in Newport RI every time. Dennis was the guy who first lost the Cup to Australia, and then won it back for the San Diego Yacht club.

The city a challenger is from is relevant because the winning team gets to pick the location of the next races. If Connors wins it might well return the Newport. OneWorld would probably bring it to Seattle. Which brings us to the third US challenger, Oracle.

The Oracle team is from San Francisco, and even though I'm living on the east coast now, I think that having the Cup in the SF Bay would be pretty cool.

The Oracle team is led by Oracle head honcho, Larry Ellison. I've never been a big fan of Larry. He's always seemed to me to be a big jerk. But he sure is colorful. He's kind of a throwback to the days of rich-guy Ted Turner's involvement in the Cup -- and I guess that isn't all bad. Ted did OK for himself.

Larry has made headlines by insisting that he will not only be skippering the boat, but will be at the helm for much of each race. And him being the third richest guy in the world has added to the color to this thing. You have to remember that it is incredibly expensive to mount these challenges. Tens of millions of dollars. Larry, who is worth like $15 billion, and is financing most of the Oracle team out of his own pocket, was quoted early on as saying, "This so inexpensive, I'm surprised more people don't do it."

Anyway, those are the US teams. They are doing well early on. We'll see.

 Static is better?

Over the past year I've been experimenting with various home-grown content management systems. During that time I've never really settled on whether it's better for these systems to generate the HTML pages "on the fly" at the moment that they are viewed, or should they be "compiled" into static html files. Ray Ozzie writes this, which makes sense:

"PC-based Trellix Web product - a visionary "word processor for the Web" that, like Radio, publishes static HTML.  Very important, in my view, because the content will far outlive tools, servers, services and their administrators."

 Cognitive Dissonance

Zoe Lofgren is the US Congressional Rep for San Jose, Calif. A few years back, when she was a Santa Clara County Supervisor, she had some very bad attitudes about the smaller airports in the Valley, particularly about Ried-Hillview airport.

The common belief among the aviation community was that her motives for wanting the airport demolished were, at best, a self-serving political thing, and at worst, because her husband and other cronies wanted the land for development.

We were pretty happy so see her head off to Washington.

Now she seems to be on the right side about copyright and intellectual property. And I'm having a hard time thinking of her as a good guy. But we can use all the allies we can get.

More about this from Ed Cone and Dave Winer.

 OK, now what?

They've been searching for the world's funniest joke: "For over a year, huge numbers of people from all over the world have sent in their favourite jokes and rated how funny they found the jokes submitted by others.

LaughLab certainly captured the public's imagination – we received over 40,000 jokes and almost 2 million ratings!"

Here's Reuter's story featuring some of the other popular jokes.

Stuff I'm involved with:
EAA Vintage Chapter 15
Prescott Park Arts Festival

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