unraveling
29.Apr.2001
Just a touch of eye candy to finish off the year, and a blogroll list to
share some of what I read regularly. After playing around
and getting close, testing with MSIE, I fired up the old NS v4.7 to see
how that looked. Terrible. But functional, more or less. I've spent
enough of my life trying to accomodate Netscape bugs, it's time to
forget about that and move on. If there were any sort of rhyme or
reason to the mistakes it made, I might keep trying, but there
isn't.
As a side effect of taking the CSS margins out of the body
and putting them in the paragraph specs (to make room for the table
floating in the left column), the images I wrap around (below) get to
float out to the edges. I like that.
I'd come across the
observation
that human's can't really multitask before (perhaps from Weinberger, on
JOHO?), and it seemed correct;
I've experienced the loss of effectiveness from context switching.
Peterme
brought it back to my attention.
As the example supplied by Evan's email correspondent shows, we are
certainly capable of simultaneous monitoring of multiple inputs with
multiple senses. And "of course," our bodies take care of things like
blood circulation, thermoregulation, breathing and digestion even as we
go about what ever else we do. We can drive and chew gum and listen to
the radio and have a conversation and think about whether we'll get
there on time all at once, too.
I think this is one of those tricks that consciousness is playing on us.
The "I" in "I can only pay attention to one thing at a time" is the
conscious part of me, which likes to think it's in charge of everything,
merely served by those "lower" autonomous functions.
Then
two
pieces
by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, whose book
(
The Tipping Point)
I just read. More good writing about
interesting stuff.
The
summary
of Jef Raskin's book,
The Humane Interface
is also a bit on to a different subject, but a refreshing clean-sheet
look at all things computery.
27.Apr.2001
Summer must be getting close; it was colder in Millbrae at 6pm yesterday
than it was in Boise when I got in at 10:30. The marine layer was
rolling up the coast range and into the sky, and filling up over the bay
to the east side, too. Today, at home, that long awaited moment
when it's time to open the windows and doors to the screens, give the
furnace the day off and let the smell of Spring drive off the last
remnants of Winter.
Rode my bike to work the direct, flat way, but came home about
lunchtime, diverting to the river path. Stopped at a clearing, and
just watched
the river
flow by for a while. After the constant motion sets an expectation in
the eyes, returning to "solid" land creates a familiar hallucination: the
unmoving seems to flow, the way the water did (except in the other
direction).
That made me think of what it's like to live in an urban culture, swept
along by technology to the point where that seems natural, and glimpses
of the "outside" world are distorted, disturbing. We look away in
discomfort, go back to what we were doing.
Dan Gillmor's eJournal has moved to
SiliconValley.com,
apparently under the care of those who think the
length of URLs is an arbitrary consideration. To some extent it is,
but I still look at them as an indicator of art, as well as craft. Is
your site run by humans or machines? Or by humans acting as if they
were machines?
The column linked above is an important one, using Coke's
"Online agreement from hell" as an illustration of the reprehensible and
one-sided click-through agreements we're all "signing." Read the
rules, and see if you
have a story you'd like to "irrevocably and in perpetuity assign to
Coca-Cola all worldwide right, title and interest in and to."
Bill
Moyers on 30 years in journalism, and other things:
Theodore Roosevelt... got it right about power in America. Roosevelt
thought the central fact of his era was that economic power had become
so centralized and dominant it could chew up democracy and spit it out.
Now that I've taken enough pictures (650 or so) with my Coolpix950, I
can appreciate Philip Greenspun's
review of the
Nikon D-1. I'm glad I didn't have that much money when I was
shopping! Having currently misplaced my manual and CD, I can relate to
those problems, although the 950's menus are not quite as cryptic.
The observation about the camera not knowing which way is up is
something that hadn't occurred to me to fix, but yes, it is obvious:
I don't want the "life (and quality) wasting" task of rotating
JPEGs with my computer.
I didn't know what was happening when "contrasty scenes quickly
overwhelm(ed) the standard 8 bits of the JPEGs," but I could tell
something was wrong. Now I know what's wrong, and that I can't
do much to get it fixed. :-/ "If you originate 8-bit JPEGs in a digital
camera, though, the detail is lost forever."
I'll definitely do more investigation of user interface before I buy
another digital camera. Getting the old Canon AE-1 (35mm SLR) fixed,
or buying a new film camera seems more attractive than it used to.
A nearby couple of shopping centers seem to have fallen on hard times.
We used to have two grocery stores just down the block, but one moved
to a better location and bigger store, and the other went belly-up.
Without a steady reason go shopping in Cole Village, the other stores
have foundered. A stylish remodel attempted to bring shoppers back, but
without groceries... there is a Post Office and a State Liquor Store,
though, and those two probably account for saving the place from total
devastation.
Coast-to-Coast has become Coast-to-Ghost, and the remodelling is
starting to look dated before it's paid for itself. Personally, I
thought it looked bad from the get-go, but I do think I've figured out
the architectural sense of this inverted bulbousness that seems to be
the local fashion.
It's Cargo Cult
architecture, funnels upturned to the sky hoping for the return of
prosperity. The bulge signals current prosperity, "this must be a good
place to shop." Since it didn't work on its own, something new is
probably planned for the even more defunct (no P.O., no liquor store)
group of stores on the south side of Ustick Rd. I sure hope they've
tied the remodelling to the landing of a grocery store, though; somehow
I don't think a fresh crop of false fronts, stucco and mood lighting are
going to work on their own.
Cringely
picks up the Cargo Cult theme with regard to the dot.com bubble. In
addition to a wonderfully concise description of the phenomenon
(first brought to my attention by required reading for Anthro 101
some 25 years ago, in Marvin Harris'
Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches), he observes the similarities
between WW II armies and Venture Capitalists, showering ignorant natives
with unbelievable wealth. After they've gone, we wrack our brains
trying to find the cause in the mess of correlated events. What can we
do to get prosperity to rain down on us again? Seems like there should
be some interesting things in this regard in Japan, after a decade of
stagnation.
The Cargo Cult idea has many wonderful applications, including "cargo
cult programming," where chunks of code with no apparent function are
included by ignorant natives who hope that plagiarizing successful
programs will aid their own. And Richard Feynman's
Cargo
Cult Science
lecture, interesting in its own right, but also being copied by so many
sites that it's a bit of cult behavior on another level.
Coincidentally, Feynman's lecture impinges on the question of
integrity that's been under discussion this
month.
24.Apr.2001
What if...
your instant messages turned out to be
permanent
rather than ephemeral? How would that be?
The folks at eFront found out.
Extending the
"what if cars were like software" analogy:
"Suppose, I could only have performance and reliability data that was
supplied by the automakers' marketing departments, couldn't test-drive
the car without buying it, and first had to divest myself of my existing
car."
23.Apr.2001
We're over the English hump on the internet:
(I)t was the dramatic growth last year in the number of Japanese people
with wireless email access (that) tipped that US/Rest of the World
balance in favor of the Rest of the World. There were 31.8 million
email-enabled wireless devices in Japan at the end of 2000, up from 3.7
million a year before.
From
Nua Ltd.'s take on the "Year end 2000 Mailbox Report" from
Messaging Online.
Overheard just before boarding, from two adventuresome guys with fishing
pole packages:
"...I never shot a turkey."
"It's exhilarating just to watch 'em die."
22.Apr.2001
Not everything about our system of justice is "just right" yet.
For example, the fact that exculpatory evidence alone
isn't enough to prevent the state from putting you to death.
If you can prove that
the
prosecution concealed exculpatory evidence, then maybe.
But you need a good lawyer.
One of the ones involved in this case, Bill Mauk, said:
"I was stunned by the insurmountable difficulties of overcoming the
conviction, even though there was evidence of innocence," he said.
"Without Ed Matthews and his firm, Don Paradis would have been killed a
long time ago."
Elsewhere on the fringe of the Bill of Rights, with the Idaho
Legislature ruling the State Board of Education should approve anything
that Idaho Public TV wants to put on the air. The News Hour
ran a feature about it this week, featuring Dennis Mansfield as
regular family guy, rather than as a co-founder of Focus on the Family
and former director of
the Idaho Family Forum or as a failed candidate for the state
legislature.
The Legislature found out that there was a lot of support for state
funding, thankyouverymuch. 867 of the 900 people who took the trouble
to testify said they did want PBS state-supported.
Our esteemed Senator Hawkins, at the forefront of those who would censor
PBS' choices, made believe he'd deliver a video for
"an alternative view to the evolution theory," perhaps for
competition against Saturday morning cartoons?
21.Apr.2001
It's tulip
time around here, and even on a cloudy day, they make
wonderful subjects. I figured out how to use the "spot metering" to get
the autofocus to take the subject instead of the background, and made
several trips to the computer to refine my takes. I see there's a
manual focus mode, too, but I think it requires too much simultaneous
control manipulation... at a minimum, I need a clue to figure it out.
(Now, where did I put that booklet and the CD??)
Our Earth day activity was to do some trail action and some political
action in and around the foothills. I bossed a small crew of pruners,
walked around Hull's Gulch a couple times, and dug in a couple logs for
water breaks. Cloudy and 50s is perfect for working outside, but it's
still an act of dedication for almost a hundred people to show up on a
gloomy Saturday morning to do volunteer work, especially heartening to
work alongside a new generation eager to make a difference.
The political action was to distribute postcards with information about
the vote on the
Foothills Levy on May 22d (and protecting other wonderful places).
Are we willing to pay $10 million more
in property taxes over the next two years to preserve
some precious open space in our back yard? Some of us hope so.
The event was sponsored by the
local
Sierra Club group, 94.9 FM The River and the
Ridge to Rivers Project, and I'd call it a big success.
20.Apr.2001
Dave Winer's latest
tempest
in a teapot came out of
his pronouncement about integrity.
"(W)riters who work for others have less integrity to offer than those
who do it for love."
There's no reason I can imagine why we should consider writing as unique
in this regard. Bricklayers who work for others... software writers,
engineers, choose your profession. If you're doing it for wages or a
salary, you're working under an integrity cap. Given that the economy
pushes business enterprises to hierarchical organizations, and the most
successful of these become large, that leaves the vast majority of us
working under the cap. We just don't have as much integrity to offer as
someone who does it for themselves, for a hobby, for the hell of it, as
long as they love what they do.
Sorry, I'm not buying it. First of all, absolute pronouncements are
always false. (Think about it.)
Secondly, working for (and with) others, working for
love, and having integrity are not mutually exclusive conditions.
One can work for others and be true to one's self. It's possible to
love your work and collect a salary.
Am I willing to be fired if I feel strongly enough about something to
insist on "my way," and not the way I'm being told to do something?
Yes. Am I willing to accept that I might not be the smartest or wisest
person in a group, or the one with the greatest integrity, and accept
correction, criticism, or revision? Not always, but I'm working on it.
:-)
The whole kick started because Dave didn't like the way he was
portrayed by NY Times reporter John Markoff; it didn't
reflect that week's change (or at least state) of heart and mind. He
thought Markoff should've reslanted things at the last minute, and his
failure to do so reflected a lack of integrity. In fact, the whole
editorial page of the Times got dissed in the snit.
I don't imagine too many of the parties involved ever make it out to
fortboise, but if they do, they can read how my
bottom line is that
integrity
is possible within the corporate world.
In yet another piece, Dave
elaborates on what he means by integrity, and it comes out sounding
like a combination of full disclosure and consistency. You don't have
to be honest to have integrity, as long as you lie all the time,
according to his used car salesman example. Used car salesman are liars
(for the purpose of his illustration), so as long as you identify
yourself as one, lying has integrity.
It should be "interesting" and instructive that his pieced
"pushed a lot of buttons." That's because integrity doesn't mean the
same thing to everyone as it does to him. The American Heritage
collects integrity with other synonyms of honesty; it isn't
simply being consistent and disclosing biases.
I think Doc Searls'
brief
description is closer to what the word means to me, "the place where
your integrity lives" could be shortened to your integrity.
In fact, had I taken the trouble to read all of
Doc's weblog for the
19th, I probably would have saved myself the trouble here. :-)
He also points to an example of an industry that must be the antithesis of
integrity, Salon's
Pay for Play piece answers the question "Why does radio suck?"
18.Apr.2001
I've been riding to work via the Matadero Creek greenbelt, taking a
little extra turn for some morning exercise. There's a slice of pasture
with two handsome donkeys in it, and a hand-lettered sign on the gate:
"Don't feed the donkeys! They may bite or kick!
This morning as I rode by, the two of them were in the gate corner,
and one had his neck through the barbed-wire fence to
sample some of the grass-is-greener on the other side. Photo
opportunity! I stopped, dismounted, pulled the cover off my
pannier/briefcase and dug out my camera. When I turned back to my
subjects, they'd taken notice of me, and the extended one had pulled his
neck out of the compromising position and was eyeing me from a safer
stance.
As I pulled the camera up to look through the viewfinder, he decided I
looked harmless enough, and casually turned his head to the side and
took a bite out of the sign. Too perfect.
16.Apr.2001
Left work at 5, cruised down to the Creekside, checked in, put on shorts
and a t-shirt and headed for the hills. Took the full turn through the
Arastradero preserve, going nice and slow on the downhills, looking for
wildflower photos in general, and a Scarlet Pimpernel in particular.
We'd seen their tiny explosions of color a year ago, when I didn't have
a camera handy, and I'd been wanting to come back and take a picture
ever since.
This bit of rutted "single" track dives down into the dark woods, with
poison oak growing lushly on either side of the trail; I was feeling
itchy a couple feet away from it as I concentrated on dodging the ruts
and staying up. No Pimpernels, though, just lots of Astragalus
sprinkled through the grass, and an occasional clump of Balsamroot.
I see my autofocus focused on the leafy surround rather than the
flowers... I do miss seeing through the lens, and having a
focus ring.
15.Apr.2001
It's that first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal
equinox (sort of, see the link below for lots of interesting
details), otherwise known as Easter. A holiday that follows the moon is
a sure sign of something earth-centered, rather than other-worldly. So
it is that Christianity builds on earlier religions. The word itself
derives from a
Germanic dawn
goddess whose holiday was on the equinox.
Hope you had a happy one!
Letters to the editor are one of the most interesting parts of
newspapers to me. But they don't have as good a web interface as the
news – no succinct blurbs pointing to them, no streaming format to
help you cruise through multiple topics.
Two I liked this weekend:
Gerald
Lillpop's in the Sunday NY Times, "If you think that the United
States economy can recover without California, think again. But don't
take my word for it; call your stockbroker, or the company that holds
your retirement fund."
And in Saturday's Mistakesman,
Dan Foutz writes to encourage us to let Jesus Christ direct our
actions. "The (National Democratic Party) believe(s) in pro-death, that
homosexuality is normal, radical environmental issues, evolution, that
government should run our lives, that Hollywood is great. All are the
tools of Satan.
Paul Krugman notes that forecasts for this summer's power bill in
California are has high as
$70
billion:
(I)f I were a power producer, I would be more worried about my long-run
prospects in a California enraged over the huge profits earned by
Texas-based companies than I would be in a state where the generators
and their friends in Washington, instead of squeezing out every last
dollar, had helped craft a reasonable transition plan to get the state
through a difficult time.
14.Apr.2001
I'm not much for hospital drama, but every once in a while I get
back to q.queso.com and am
immersed in that world. His
incredible day
is wonderful, gripping and real. Matters of life and death,
not just put on to sell something.
Zero to 7200 mph in less than 3 minutes; take a trip out of the gravity
well on the
Mars Odyssey
(Houston Chronicle 7 min. video). Watch for the arcing shadow on the
ground as you leave the launch pad. Who needs fast cuts with a show
like this? The first chage of camera angle is 5 minutes in.
That's when it gets to outer space, and things (appear to) stop
changing.
I really have to spruce up the site, even I'm getting tired of the "easy
on the eyes" look here. It all started when I decided I didn't want to
tableize everything... But there's only so much you can do with CSS if
you want to accomodate today's browsers. And so little time...
The flight out of SFO was delayed last night, in spite of on-time
boarding, which was in spite of warnings about reduced landing due to
fog... which was either invisible fog, or high fog, but I imagine it's
part of the ramp-up to the
campaign to fill SF
Bay for the convenience of the mother airport in the area.
Traffic
at SJC and OAK is up smartly (13.3 and 7.5%), while SFO is "only" up
2.7%.
This seems like exactly the right thing to have happen to me; SFO has
reached saturation, it should stop (or at least slow) growth. The
alternative – undertaken ever more Herculean development to
maintain growth of something that's big enough already – seems
like insanity.
But back to the flight. We packed in, buckled up and got through the
safety talk, the jets were running... but we didn't push back. "Some
paperwork that maintenance needs to print out for us," what, they can't
get their printer working? In intermittent revelations the details came
out: "a ding in the sheetmetal," "close to another ding," and they had
to check the regulations to see if we were OK to fly again.
We sat there with the jets spinning for almost an hour before the issue
ran up and down the bureaucracy and technical manuals and they decided
we were good to go. So, an hour later into Boise. Not a big deal.
A coworker on the plane let me use his cell phone to call home and amend
my previous call from a pay phone saying "looks good, we're on time."
Handy little things, I'll have to get one some day.
Don't remember how I got there, but spiraling into
the
media navel is occasionally fun. Go for
part
72 if you can't make up your mind.
Gotta keep up on
SpaceWeather;
there was another aurora last night, maybe while we were flying.
(I'm so inured to the commute that I'd rather have an aisle seat these
days.) Tonight's forecast is for north of 50°, Boise's below
44.
What would we do without Google? I'm even starting to use it for
spell-checking.
("Do you mean injured" it asks, inexplicably without a question
mark.)
What's up with et cetera, et cetera? I've seen two journalists
use it twice in the last two days. Just once, guys: et cetera is
recursive. Ironically,
Paul Andrews
introduced me to the word
pleonasm
a few sentences further along.
Zero to 1.8 million in
eight
days. I never really got the "hot or not" bug, but the article
piqued a little interest in me, and I went through some voting. I can
see how you might get sucked into it, but the novelty wore off about the
time an ad window popped up.
Whatever I think about it, it's clearly a contagious sort of thing.
Read half of
The Tipping Point on the plane last night, about epidemics in behavior
and ideas. This is one.
Multitasking as a way of life. I've been immersed in that for 15
years or so, although it's been getting more intense – more
fragmented – since my involvement with the web started in late
'94. I was in the TV generation... what will the multitasking
generation be like? "Sometimes it's all too much of a distraction."
Dan Gillmor
shines a
light on the business of brokering data. This is where cookies and
webbugs and clickstreams was headed, of course.
Note the fine distinction in ChoicePoint's
privacy
policy: your non-public credit header information (with your SSN and
birthdate) can be bandied about, even though the credit
history is a tiny bit better protected. They promise to be
careful with your data.
It's rather funny, when so many people are pouring out intimate details
in weblogs like this one, when it's never been easier to find out lots
of things about someone just by listening to what s/he's willing to tell
you directly. But of course, it's not about personal relationships,
it's about aggregation, mass marketing and data mining.
As Dan mentions, opting out is not one of the "choices" ChoicePoint
offers.
Gillmor's
Wednesday column gives a heads-up on the privacy policies coming
your way in mailings from financial institutions. It's not because they
like you, it's because they have to. Take the time to look 'em
over, and take the action that will limit the traffic in information
about you. As Dan says, "your inaction is their go-ahead to
treat your information as a commodity."
13.Apr.2001
Zeldman and I corresponded about
ALA's
stylesheet business. They've taken the trouble to make
alternate stylesheets, for which the referenced standard tells me
my "user agent should allow users to select from alternate style
sheets." Apparently only Mozilla/NN6 does that so far. (Does it pay
attention to "media" specifications, too?)
He's not at fault, and his obstinancy does have
a point: the makers of
user agents need to pay attention to the standards! A focused effort by
a few companies would obviate the distributed efforts required by the
millions of us who write web pages.
The immediate problem is a bit of an inexplicable lapse on Microsoft's
part. They have this simple interface to change font sizes in IEv5,
and in the Mac version, the text zoom works regardless of whether the
font is specified in pixel (or point?) or em units.
Yet Z says:
i haven't seen any sign of (it in IE6). and it's just weird. it's such
a smart accessibility enhancement. it's his own company's invention. i
don't get it. there may be competitiveness between different microsoft
groups involved.
12.Apr.2001
I set up amail
on fortboise.org, to give me a decent web interface to
my personal email on Earthlink when I'm away from my home computer.
It works great, and is a new addition to
my software list.
My comparison was
webmail,
Earthlink's "free" version of the same function. Webmail is slow to
authenticate, framed in an unhelpful way, has ads, and tedious wait
states between every action. (Oh, but it's "free" with the $20+/month
we pay to Earthlink.)
Amail is fast and effective, no ads, no long waits for it to act, and
it really is free (as long as you have a server to run it on!).
Best of all, I have the (GPL'd) perl source, so I can change anything I
don't like.
Jon Udell, writing on Byte.com:
Supporting the Netscape browser has become a thankless chore.
One slice of browser share data he shows has IE 5 going from 51% to 77%
in the last year. NS 4 (9%) and Mozilla (in the 1% "others") are
disappearing.
Zeldmen continues his
ranting
about the difficulty of designing for bad browsers.
He also continues his insistence on sizing everything in pixels,
thinking that he knows what's right.
News flash, Jeffrey, you don't. Your "just right" fontsmanship makes
everything itty bitty and annoyingly unreadable on my display. I
wouldn't have noticed had I not turned off the "Ignore font sizes
specified on web sites" setting in MSIE v5.5, however. That lets me see
things at the size that's right for me, and more importantly, lets me
adjust the size to suit me. Microsoft made the mistake of
figuring that if fonts were specified in pixels, it shouldn't allow them
to be changed with the "view / text size" choices.
I'm not that big on the Family Circus, but the
reader reviews on Amazon.com for this collection are sure funny.
9.Apr.2001
Home again, after a road trip up and down Idaho. We traveled north on a
beautiful Thursday, did yard work and had a big trash fire in the stiff
Palouse wind on Friday, planted and pruned in blowing snow on Saturday,
and woke to snow covered hills on Sunday.
After a long weekend surrounded by Palouse agricultural land,
reading about
server
farming is a bit surreal. Of course you've heard by now that
PG&E has filed for bankruptcy.... Or at least one little part
of PG&E - the profitable parts are off somewhere else, in a shell
game. A bit of irony too: the Bank of New York is PG&E's biggest
creditor, at $2.2B. California's two big utilities' stocks are down 75%
from last year. Who says utility stocks are boring?!
2.Apr.2001
A day late for April Fool's, and two days late for March to go out like
a lion, we're having rain and snow showers, the temperature just barely
into the 40s in the middle of the day.
Oops, check that, we're having a blizzard
at the moment. This is too wild.
Bogus Basin had closing day yesterday, fresh snow overnight. But we'll
need a lot more to catch up to "normal," from
about half
and below.
Some piece of dung portal managed to insinuate itself into my browser's
home page, without my request, and certainly without my approval.
It's called "gopreference," and I will be sure to remember and tell all
my friends what a flaming crock it is.
1.Apr.2001
I slayed the multi-headed monster: the taxes are done.
By the time I saw the New York Times
Sky
Watch mention of a chance to see the
Aurora Borealis, the storm had passed. Maybe if I'd been keeping
track of spaceweather
I would've caught the show. Spotted as far south as Mexico!
Damn, it was a fantastic show; check out their
gallery
including some pictures from Boise. And we missed it! :-(
Maureen
is not the only one "going hungry for a shred of modernity."
Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally,
globally, culturally, it's redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the
shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white Kansas.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Sunday, 01-Jul-2001 16:19:37 MDT
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