unraveling
30.Dec.2001
Time for a random walk in weblog-space, starting with
weblog.com's list
of recent updates. It's time for "microcontent" to shine,
as there has to be something about the name that catches one's
eye. Cowlix
was the first catch, and pleased with a broad range of links
into current events. I chose the
conflict between the EU's navigation system (Galileo) and our GPS,
flamefest on an
anti-LotR commentator,
Fox News-pulled
transcript of the show about Israeli spies in the US, and
Scientific American's
top
science stories of the year for further exploration.
Whew. My first wander was to someone who's a wander specialist!
Synergy
came through with its motto (at least today): "Something
beautiful every day." His (? her?) quote from John Muir was it for me:
"Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in
where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul
alike."
J.P. Zmirak, writing in
Frontpage magazine, has a more interesting discussion of the
background and foreground of Tolkien's literature.
His title, "Tolkien, Hitler, and Nordic Heroism" seems overly dramatic,
but his brief essay is concise, fascinating, and well-referenced.
"(W)hile the players tend to come and go--always with a few
exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder,
brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in
countless homes, in every other head."
Mark
Crispin, writing about the media cartel in
The Nation, "What's Wrong with this Picture?"
That's the nice thing about blogging - it resists cartelization. Just
mentioning that, though, I can imagine the development of astroturf
weblogging for corporations that need to point to "grass roots" support
for whatever mischief or marketing they need next. If the
cluetrain
is right, we'll be able to detect authentic voices. The jury is still
out on that one.
The powers-that-be, led by FCC chief Michael Powell can neither discern
nor protect the "public interest," according to Crispin, even as they
diligently work to enhance the corporate interests that speak to them
most regularly. If there's a counter-argument to his thesis, I can't
think of it at the moment.
Back to that Fox News piece on Israeli spies (and
cryptome's
documentation of it, after Fox News' website pulled the
transcripts): among many provocative bits, it exposes one of the
weaknesses of outsourcing. According to the (alleged) transcript,
"most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and
billing in the U.S. are done for the phone companies by
Amdocs Ltd., an
Israeli-based private telecommunications company.... (I)t is virtually
impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs
record of it."
(Amdocs' web site proclaims them to be "the world's leading provider
of CRM, Billing and Order Management solutions.")
Amdocs can mine this data for whatever intelligence they like. They'd
assure us they'll only use it for good things like preventing fraud, of
course. But outsourcing "grunt work," and then moving up the knowledge
chain to accounting, software, and more complex systems may be
removing more than just direct labor costs from U.S. corporations.
Another company that figured in the Fox News report was
Comverse Infosys, "adding intelligence to lawful interception."
The Washington Time's Insight magazine's website runs
a related article under a January 14, 2002 (sic) dateline, but spins
it as "Espionage at Clinton White House." Right, the spooks all hung up
their gear when George W. moved in. Cryptome's page linked to this
article as from "May 2000," so I guess bogus javascript and/or
formatting on Insight's site. The
Washington Report's special report on Insight's reporting and the
press response to it was July, 2000, so this isn't exactly a late-breaking
story.
29.Dec.2001
Seven feet of snow in five days.
Buffalo. They all take it in stride, apparently.
Here in SW Idaho, with another day of gloom and inversion developing,
I drove back over Mores Creek Summit and skied up to Banner Ridge
again. No new snow, but it's been nice and cold up there and the
stuff that fell two weeks ago is still in fine shape, with lots of
slopes still untracked. I got an early start, and tracked as many as I
could until lunch, when I was half-way around the Cougar trail. It
was mostly following tracks from there out, and noting the many, many
open slopes available for "next time." Then I went down into the
abominable part of the Cougar trail, woven between dense trees in
a seemingly perverse way for a couple of creek crossings. The
description mentioned two bridges, which I suppose I went across, but
it's hard to tell under 2 feet of snow.
The last Science News of the year had a feature on
Polyhedron Man,
George Hart. Happily, it's one of the "full text" (and pictures)
articles on the web, with references into
Hart's site.
And just for a twist, Hart points to
Scott Kim, Puzzle master
who makes "ambigrams," among other things. Writing that's symmetric top
to bottom. What'll they think of next?
27.Dec.2001
I went cross-country skiing today, returning to Banner Ridge where we
had the "on the edge" but totally fun trip to the yurt a week and a half
ago. The groomer has been around the trails by now, and it was a world
of difference: solidly packed skating lane and even more solidly packed
pair of tracks for us fuddy-duddy diagonal types. A little blue wax was
all I needed to blast up to the top in about 45 minutes, with a couple
of off-trail herringbones to straighten out the hairpins. The unbroken
snow has settled a bit, but there was an inch or so of fluff on top, and
still a nice powdery feel to it. Breaking trail's not too
hard, and turning on the way down is a delight. Throw in a little
sunshine dodging some high, thin clouds and it made for a just about
perfect day.
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And I brought the camera this time, so I can show you what it looked
like! I can't show you what it felt
like, though, you'll just have to imagine that. Other than the yurt
trip, it's been quite a while since I've been out in the woods on
cross-country skis. Without the distraction of a heavy pack, needing
to get somewhere before dark, and a party of 8, the sensual pleasure of
being in all that deep, untracked snow just washed over me. The bit
of groomed trail was nice to get up the hill, but I really like being
out away from machines, and the noise and crowds that surround them.
Stopping at the top of a knob above the top of the Banner Ridge trail,
I realized I could hear my heart beating. It was that quiet.
Continuing around the Elkhorn loop, the Alpine trail seemed inviting,
traversing around the sunny side of the ridge and entirely untracked.
After a couple of miles of breaking trail, it didn't seem like
quite as good a choice, but I was probably just regretting
that I didn't have the skill to try a downhill shortcut to the Elkhorn
trail below me.
Nevertheless, even in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon, there
was plenty to enjoy on the way down. I collected
a bunch of the pictures I took
for your viewing pleasure. (Just under 300kB in 9 images.)
Went to see
Lord of the Rings
last night. It's at two venues in town, downtown at the Egyptian, and
in no-there-there land at Edwards 21. Our decision was made based on
timing, with the 4:00 show a half hour away. The drive downtown was
retarded, though, with some new snow on the ground and Boise drivers
going spastic. Radio said the local police responded to 77
accidents in one day. I thought everybody only went nuts on the
first snowfall, but I apparently thought wrong.
Anyway, we figured to go a little cheaper parking at a meter, and
suffered sticker shock: $1/hour to park on the street. Lordamercy.
We slid our way down to the line at the Egyptian with minutes to spare,
and then watched those and many others tick away as the lone ticket
seller processed about two people a minute. With the advertised running
time 178 minutes, and the showings 3:00 apart... you do the math. At
4:10+, I pulled the ripcord, not wanting to see just part of
the movie.
The next Edwards show was 5:30, not 5, as I'd imagined, but that gave us
time to have some dinner at one of the nearby eateries.
Eight bucks for the show out there, though, instead of only five
at the Egyptian. Could've afforded some more of that downtown parking!
Seems like the Egyptian should charge enough more that they can put
another ticket seller on for the crunch times.
Edwards has enough venues that they can program in some slack time, show
annoying banner ads mixed with trivia questions ("Are you thirsty yet?")
until the appointed hour, and then a wave of coming attractions. How
much more do you have to pay to turn those off? They really suck.
They all flash and bang way too much and way too often for this old
fogie. Most of the movies are trash anyway, I wouldn't pay $1 for them
at the sticky-floor houses, even if they'd have them, which they won't.
Just show me the movie, eh?
They did, finally, and it was a good one. Remarkably faithful to the
book (as well as I can remember it from, oh, 25 years ago :-), and
artfully created from the scenery of New Zealand, a lot of seamless
digital effects and plenty of drippy makeup for the bad guys.
Jeanette hasn't read the books, so we had a combination of a "bound to
like it" viewer, and a "show me" one. For the latter, the story line
comes out melodramatic, and rather too brutal. "What exactly did you
see in the books?" she wanted to know. Well, it reads differently than
it comes to life on the screen. The darling miniature perfection of The
Shire, the remarkable instantiation of multiple humanoid races, the
magic and mystery and triumph over adversity? I dunno, but falling into
the fantasy as an adolescent, I didn't have to question anything.
So I liked the movie just fine, but it does expose a certain lack of
character depth and complexity in good v. evil partitioning in the
original literature.
Cory Doctorow describes how we
live with uncertainty on the "fault-tolerant realpolitik of a public
network composed of uncoordinated actors with conflicting agendas."
His vision of "the next generation of Internet entrepreneurs... working
to provide unreliable services that work in concert with other
unreliable services to provide a service that works on average, but not
predictably at any given moment" is almost as interesting as his
description of the world-as-it-is. I like his use of link titles to
throw in asides, too.
Christmas
Paul Krugman makes a suggestion for
Christmas giving: a dime a day, to save millions of lives.
The U.S. currently ranks last in the share of GNP given as
foreign aid. Paul O'Neill (the Treasurey Secretary) isn't sure
"what works," but I don't suppose he's done the cost/benefit
analysis between war and foreign aid.
Foreign aid would be cheaper, to say nothing of more humane.
Now you can download the internet, compliments of
W3Schools.
rebecca's
pocket has a public service announcement about the latest email
virus hoax: "If you get an email that apologizes for sending you
a virus, then explains how to remove the file from your computer, do
not follow the directions." The file it directs you to remove is
needed, she says. (I actually followed the directions, but our Win95
system didn't have the file mentioned. I might well have deleted it had
it been there.
Here's a story you probably overlooked:
Congress' latest pay raise slipping through earlier this month.
Don't feel bad, it seems like the mainstream media missed it too, as a
few are just
picking it up off of AP on December 24th. Rising star Russ Feingold
tried to get the Congress to consider the issue directly, rather than
just accept the automatic raise approved by legislation that's more than
10 years old. A procedural vote dispatched that hurdle, with plausible
deniability, no doubt.
A list of rarely asked
questions.
Understanding the
ghosts of our past with Karen Armstrong's help, in Modern Maturity.
"In the West, we have completed the modernizing process and have
forgotten what we had to go through, so we do not always understand the
difficulty of this transition."
Spinsanity
looks to be skewering hyperbole from left and right with equal
vengeance. Tending to the dry side, but looks like a good antidote to
excessive punditry.
The first giant step toward a
world-wide web: "We were both shocked at how well it worked," Kunz
recalls. Ten years ago this month.
24.Dec.2001
The chilly temperatures and gloom settled in a little stronger today,
after giving way to a little sunshine over the weekend days. Jeanette
and I went for a walk at the Boise Towne (sic) Center (sic; it's off to
the side; although it does seem to be the center of traffic congestion)
Mall around 8:30. It wasn't particularly crowded, but most of
the stores were already open, big signs for 20%, 30% and even 50% off
sales, before Christmas. Tough act to follow! The folks manning
the various kiosks looked beyond cheer, and were trying to stave off
boredom. A suited clerk in a jewelry store failed to supress a yawn
as we came out from behind a column.
While hiking our loops, I had time to think about
the concept of the shopping mall. It seems to be trying to be the
imaginary home we'd all love: spotlessly clean (at least at 9am!),
interesting architectural details every which way, overflowing with
abundant material goods to wear, play with, eat and drink. And all our
friends will be there. Unfortunately, I dropped a glove (yes, the same
one I thought I lost on the highway) and
didn't notice it till we were at the exit. More walking, but to no
avail. The floors are kept spotless by eternal vigilance, and I don't
think the glove was down more than a minute. Customer service had a
black leather glove some hours later, but not mine.
Another possible tragedy
averted
by cooperation among air travelers, this time on an overseas flight from
Paris to Miami. The account sounds somewhat cartoonish, and it's just as
well: a more intelligent suicidal terrorist could have carried off the
mischief. The hot foot is not just for Wile E. Coyote anymore.
What's next in airport security, strip searches?!
Safire
describes the nightmare scenario of the national ID card:
What do you have to hide?
2001.12.22
Another "ternary day." I realize now I overlooked this year's
palindrome day: 2001.10.02. It was a signal event: the first since
the dark ages. Our next one is not so long a wait: the day after
the new year, 8 years from Tuesday.
My mirror project
submission was accepted. (They're easy.) How do you see yourself?
Some have a camera stuck to their face, but eventually they'll learn to
trust the lens to be on its own. Some like to slip into the background.
I like the site's clean interface, and sufficiently endless offerings,
with links off into the whatever site the contributors wanted to point
to. It makes me feel like I've seen it before, but I'm pretty sure
yesterday was the first time.
Give up my car? Them's
fightin'
words, buster! Even a voluntary day, once a month, is too
much for some to contemplate.
It's amazing how many people are so in to The Simpsons that they
analyze, dissect and
cross-reference every episode. This "milestone" episode put the
show past the Flintstones (in quantity - they passed them in quality
some years earlier), but is deemed too deep for most viewers:
"Your average slack-jawed yokel watching the show was more than likely
left mystified and wondering what the hell (s)he'd just seen."
(Matthew Kurth, disenchanted ex-FAQ maintainer) I suppose this
meta-episode looking at fans looking at the show must be more examined
than most...
Provide your own
caption to the OBL
video.
AdAge.com:
selling American
values to the Muslim world. The best selling requires "becoming
fluent in their culture," which would seem a tall order for 'mericans.
We sure know a lot more about their culture today than we did 4 months
ago, though. Check out their special coverage,
American
Advertising goes to war.
When I started reading this story about the claim that
Al-Qaeda hacked
Microsoft, and WinXP, I was wondering if it was a send-up.
My next thought was, how would we tell the difference if the "trojans,
trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP" were hacked in, or simply
conventional software? "According to (Microsoft spokesman Jim) Desler,
Microsoft has rigorous processes in place during the development of
Windows to ensure the security and integrity of source code."
Which rigorous processes of course do not prevent us from reading
regularly about
Windows' vulnerabilities and the latest patches we need to fetch and
apply.
"A Microsoft official acknowledged that the risk to consumers was
unprecedented because the glitches allow hackers to seize control
of all Windows XP operating system software without requiring a
computer user to do anything except connect to the Internet."
Scott Culp, manager of Microsoft's security response center says "Every
Windows XP user needs to immediately take action," for this "very serious
vulnerability."
Slashdot
has a field day with it, digging up Allchin's "dramatically more secure"
quote from a few months back, and other fun things.
A new cloak for teaching anti-science:
intelligent
design. "A recent Gallup Poll found that 45 percent of Americans
believe that God created humans in their present form within the last
10,000 years, and 39 percent believe that Darwin's theory of evolution
is not supported by the evidence." Well, hey, 10,000 years is a long
time, who knows what happened back then?
The Environmental Working Group offers a
database of farm subsidies. Fun
facts to know and tell, like $900 million paid to Idaho farmers
in the last 5 years. Idaho's leader, Thompson Farms, is making it a
growth industry, from barely over $100,000 in 1996, to $822,000 in 2000.
Payments via two counties of more than $2.3M from 1996-2000. That's all
small potatoes compared to states bigger in agriculture: $5.6
billion to Illinois. $15 million to Missouri Delta Farms.
$49 million to Riceland Foods in Arkansas.
2001.12.21
The solstice. Sunrise 8:15, sunset 17:11.
General gloom enhanced locally with a foggy inversion,
hopefully short-lived. Much colder tonight, than maybe snow tomorrow.
Snow would be good, since it would bring higher temperatures and cleaner
air with it. Having all our smells (especially the sugar beet factory
and animal feedlots') stay around us is not a happy thing.
Mid-afternoon, I was wondering what the time of the solstice was, and
naturally searched the web. "Solstice." Too noisy. "Solstice
calendar." Closer, but still too much extraneous material. "Solstice
calendar navy" got me to an interesting article about
Milankovitch cycles and then to what I was looking for:
Earth's
Seasons Equinoxes, Solstices, Perihelion, and Aphelion
1992-2005.
12:21 MST, by the way. Soon after, the fog lifted and the sun came out
in a wonderfully clear blue sky.
Jeffrey Harrow's latest
technology report got me looking at the
Web.archive, starting with a
vanity
search. They have a lot of not-very-different versions of my
pages, all dated 2001 (in spite of timestamps they captured that show
they go back to 1999 and earlier). Something weird with their
stylesheets have them loading images, but then covering them over
in gray. One of the photoessays was OK, though, so whatever they're
doing, it's inconsistent.
So, bad dates, poor comparisons to weed out unnecessary duplications,
javascript that breaks Opera v5.11, at least, lots of capturing of
copyright material and the nerve to insert their
own copyright on the javascript. (They did note "ALL OTHER
CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT.") I was amazed to see that
all the relative links I tried worked. That is, they've captured enough
of my site -- and enough versions of my site -- that they're
serving it all up, with an apparently intact graph. Over 100 TB so far,
and 10 billion web pages; an amazing technical feat.
Maybe they'll fix all the broken stuff, and we can focus on the
copyright issue. Do they have the right to reproduce the whole look and
feel and content of my site, including pages that had errors I've since
corrected? Why on earth should they?
I figured the
terms of
use would be interesting... "If you provide any content to the
Archive, you grant the Archive a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to use
that content." So, anything put up on a webserver anywhere in the world
seems to be "provided" to them, this takes care of their copyright
obligation?! Users agree not to infringe anyone's rights...
If specifically asked to remove content by an author, they
"may remove that portion of the Collections without notice."
(My emphasis.)
Down at the bottom, they have an explicit Copyright Policy.
"If you believe that your copyright has been violated by material
available through the Internet Archive, please provide the Internet
Archive Copyright Agent with the following information..."
I'm debating whether I want to do that or not.
Also from the Harrow Technology Report,
taking minimalist pixel art to new heights:
Blinkenlights.
Using 144 lightbulbs and a modest Berlin building to make a low-res but
very fun animated display. The animated GIFs didn't work in my
MSIEv5.5sp2+, but they do in Opera.
Now Tetris, and Pong (live action from your cell phone) and so much more
can seem new again. :-)
The spirit of the times, as seen by Google:
die Zeitgeist.
As they say, a unique window into what is happening in the world.
I liked
the timeline
better than the top ten lists.
Lawrence
Lessig on Slashdot: the most interesting stuff I've ever read there,
I think. "We have never until now understood the rights of copyright to
be the right of the author (or publisher) to exercise perfect control
over copyrighted material." Until now.
Looks like anyone can have a turn in
the mirror. I sent in my
favorite tourist shot from in front of the Miyako hotel in Kyoto.
I could submit the one from
behind the
curtain, too, but maybe I should seek out new work.
Here's a good reason not to be superstitious:
It can kill you,
apparently.
Living in a police state: yes,
the FBI is making house calls.
16.Dec.2001
A weekend in the snow: we joined half a dozen other Sierra Clubbers for
a ski trip to the 5-year old
Banner Ridge
yurt, maintained by the
Idaho Department of
Parks and Recreation. Various last minute surprises pushed us past
our 10:00 start time from Boise, and Highway 21 over Mores Creek Summit
was closed due to avalanche danger after heavy snow on Thursday and
Friday. We circled around from the other side, through Horseshoe Bend,
Banks, Garden Valley, Lowman, and made it to the trailhead about 2:00pm,
only 4 hours past when they recommend getting started.
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Breaking trail through a foot and a half of powder, climbing uphill
at 6000' elevation, while carrying overnight packs occupied the rest of
the afternoon and some of the evening. Our vanguard and prime trail
breaker, Alice, made it to the yurt with just enough light left to
start the fire, and the rearguard made it with headlights, in time
for a wonderful and bounteous dinner. We drank beer and played cards
and laughed and got toasty around the fire, retelling the story of the
group of 8 who'd started even later than us and who thought they were
going to get to the Elkhorn yurt, another mile ahead. In the dark.
Breaking trail. They ended up turning back and making the traverse and
descent in the dark, driving to their cabin in Lowman. The next
morning, we saw the 50 yards they'd made past where we'd broken the
trail for them, before turning around.
On Sunday, a few of us looked for some telemark patches, warmed up on
the hill out the front door, and then finished on the big slopes
draining to the canyon below the yurt. Lots and lots of work for a few
turns, and more challenging conditions than I was ready for, anyway: I
guess I need a little wider skis for that kind of stuff. More practice
and conditioning would help, too.
We wrapped up affairs at the yurt about noon, and headed out in overcast
and light snow, enjoying the luxury of a by-now firmly established
trail, and the wind coming from behind us for the exposed ridge
crossing. Lots more people out today, most just for the day, but a
father/son team headed for the Elkhorn yurt, almost up to the ridge at
1:30. They're warming their feet by the fire about now, I imagine.
Driving back this afternoon, we admired the incredible job of snow
removal it takes to keep that highway open, cruised on the inch or so of
new snow since the last plow had been by. The picture's from a parking
lot just down from the summit. Dropping down to Lucky Peak and below
the snow line, the colors of dried grass, shrubs, rocks and bare trees
seemed incredibly vivid after 24 hours in a black and white world.
The political fight over
missile defense
from a year and a half ago seems like the distant past. After the Sept.
11 attack on Washington and New York, the thought that this had shown
the futility of spending money on a
technological boondogle was quickly
replaced by renewed resolve to protect ourselves at all costs.
Now another failure: a Navy program for a defense against short-range
ballistic missiles has itself
been
shot down. It was more than 50% over budget and two years behind
schedule. James Dao writes: "the Navy program was viewed as one of the
less technically difficult anti-missile programs in the Pentagon's
missile defense arsenal." $2.3 billion sunk.
14.Dec.2001
Nothing like radio when you
want it, rather than when you get lucky on the air.
Terry
Gross's interview with Jeff Nurnberg (Realaudio)
bubbling off everything bloggish. I was expecting ridicule, and there
was a certain tweedy derision about it, but I think he was actually
rather positive about the whole phenomenon. Drawing a parallel between
blogging and the birth of the novel, for example. The (intended?)
irony is that his audio essay is rather bloggy, except without the URLs
to let us follow-up on what he mentions that's interesting.
It's somewhat like writing a journal in public, but
"it's not written for everyone, but for God knows who."
I found out about the interview on a
blog I read regularly,
and here I am blogging it.
Jeff's a linguist at Xerox PARC. Wonder how he'll fare in the
standalone unit. "Will parse for food."
Senate panel
pushback on the DOJ rollover on Microsoft. They mention in passing
that James Barksdale had "his invitation to appear withdrawn because
of objections raised by Microsoft." Wow. M$ is really in the driver's
seat. Oh yeah, and Charles Rule, counsel for M$, used to be the head of
the antitrust department at the DOJ.
Google's
20
year archive of Usenet is a milestone. Take a tour down memory
lane, when the information highway was just a country road. The Apple
Superbowl commercial, the
birth
of the web, the Great Renaming, worms, spam and cold fusion. It's
all there. Oh yeah, and the
first mention of google, in 1998. The earliest post of mine that I
could find was 1990.
13.Dec.2001
After I read
Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer, I posted a
simple list of the 25 fallacies
he enumerated. Here's someone who's made a handy
elaborated
list of logical fallacies. Good place to check when something's
wrong with that argument, but you're not sure exactly what.
My buddy JQT suggested another one,
hosted
on Nizkor, a site to counter Holocaust deniers.
Xerox
has decided what it to do with its Palo Alto Research Center: spin it
off as a standalone entity. It'll be interesting to see how that works.
What
Compaq + Digital Means to Our Industry: Jesse Berst Editorial on
ZDNet, from early 1998. "This merger positions Compaq to challenge IBM
as the world's undisputed computing leader," and other fun
predictions.
Webb McKinney says: "There is no Plan B." And
Walter
Hewlett to directors: Give up on HP-Compaq. What a mess.
2001.12.11
News and commentary from
Ann
McFeatters: "The drug war blunders on: The DEA is cracking down on
hempseed oil in tortilla chips." They've announced a ban on certain
brands of "beer, cheese, coffee, corn chips, energy drink, flour, ice
cream, snack bars, salad oil, soda and veggie burgers" if they contain
trace amounts of THC.
Never mind that you'd die of overconsumption on this stuff before you
ever got high from it, we just can't be sending the wrong signal on
our war on drugs! (The signal is: "we have lost our minds.")
The good news is that "anyone who has purchased a food or beverage
product that contains THC has 120 days (until Feb. 6, 2002) to dispose
of the product without penalty under federal law." Hemp clothing is OK,
though, they figured out that you can't get high from that.
Winer gets to
ride
on a Segway (and go to a toney cocktail party to do it, no less).
Sigh, it must be nice to be rich and famous. Me, I rode my bike home in
the dark, in the gently falling snow. That was fun, too, but not in the
"skiing the mountain" way.
9.Dec.2001
Dave writes
why he likes the West Wing: "it's nice to see another alpha male
gain total acceptance in his alpha-ness." If he said "guess why I like
The West Wing," I woudn't have even been able to imagine that. We
watched the same episode last week (which was a rerun, and which we'd
seen before, but we both like seeing episodes again), and what moved me
was the intensity of emotion that came out in the family interplay:
the middle daughter who was never dad's favorite, the dramatic
expression of the unresolved tension between the two of them, and the
tentative resolution and release in the last scene in the theater.
It was so not about being an alpha male.
Also seen on TV, an uproarious bit of scatalogical humor on
The Simpsons
between Homer and his friends as young kids: a pre-internet
internet joke, in "The Blunder Years." I'd explain it to you, but you
really had to be there.
Nice explanation of
how
Ginger's gyros work.
Things seem light and airy here because the reality of
what's going on in Washington is too far beyond belief. (When even
the National
Review can't find a way to be positive about Ashcroft's testimony,
you know it didn't go well.)
8.Dec.2001
D-day for the HP-Compaq merger?
"The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which holds 10
percent of HP's stock, said it had made a preliminary decision
to vote against the merger." The Hewletts and the Packards
all appear opposed, but the "preliminary" signals a possible opening for
negotiation, although the
New York Times' piece said "there was scant prospect the foundation
would reverse itself."
In the graph to the right, you can see when HP's and Compaq's fortunes
began to diverge, in early November, when Walter Hewlett first spoke out
against the merger. Presumably there'll be more divergence on
Monday: after the 23.52/11.32 "close," the two stocks traded at
25.25/9.97 after hours.
Frank Rich's
Confessions
of a Traitor examines the boundaries of political correctness
in this time of war powers.
An interesting application of Flash: the New York Times'
photographers' journals, combining images and audio commentary from
the men who took them. Outstanding glimpses into the situation in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
6.Dec.2001
Looks like
India's
answer to William Safire,
with questions about a reported airlift of combatants out of Kunduz,
along with a big dose of Pakistan and China-bashing.
Peter Hessler's
"Straight to
Video" in The New Yorker is a more thoughtful (and original)
look at the Chinese reaction to 9/11. With news of
the Taliban surrendering Kandahar we're not sure we care for
the moment:
Tonight the Taliban's last ambassador to the outside world, Mullah
Zaeef, spoke with finality at the news conference in Islamabad. The
Taliban was finished as a political movement, he said, adding: "I think
we should go home."
Paul
Krugman compares the management of Enron and the US economy:
"First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at the top. Then, if
things don't work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the
price." Fuzzy has become simply phony. Could be another
one-term Bush.
5.Dec.2001
Windows XP
Flight Feature Flawed:
"...Another problem is XP's susceptibility to viruses. Janice O'Connor, of
Anderson, North Carolina was ejected from her 14th floor apartment after
opening an e-mail that contained a virus targeted at Windows XP...."
A must-have
accessory for handling your mail these days. (Low cost!)
Those links thanks to Steve Bass' "Home Office" newsletter from
PCWorld. He has
fifty of 'em on line for your reading pleasure.
2001.12.02
Bit of a controversy over a "religious" message from
the Crossroads Assembly of God Church in Wilder: their reader board
is sporting the message, "The spirit of Islam is the spirit of
Antichrist."
Just to show that some people can find Idaho on a map (or at
least on the web), daypop shows
this story being picked up by
Pravda!
Sergei Borisov's snippet is titled "Mirages of Incomprehension." I'd be
tempted to include "ignorance" in my title.... I got the AP story in an
email, but couldn't find it on the lame website of our local paper.
One excerpt:
"There are very few people in the church who agree with it," said Sharon
Wilks, a caretaker of the church with her husband, Mike.
Well, good for the members of the church, maybe they can relieve
Pastor Geoff of his duties and find someone else who's more in touch
with their beliefs.
Of course, Idaho does not have a monopoly on narrow-minded bigotry.
Bush is reportedly
prepared to nominate
J. Robert Brame, a "Biblical
Law" activist, to the National Labor Relations Board. Reading the
AU's characterization of the
positions of the organization he's listed as secretary for,
American Vision,
I'm struck by how neatly one could substitute 'Islamic' for
'Christian' and have a bin Laden manifesto. For example:
"...an Islamic education and communications organization that provides
materials to help Muslims develop a Quranic worldview for the
construction of an Islamic civilization. The beliefs and actions of
individuals will affect the future of a nation. As lives are changed,
our society will change...."
Unfortunately, his religious views aren't the worst of the concerns for
the NLRB. This would appear to be another 1984-revivial Reaganesque
appointment. The
SE
Michigan Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health
reports on his past tenure as a member of that board, and his
anti-union history.
HP was the lead story on the
front of the Business section in today's NY Times. The story is
about upcoming David and Lucile Packard Foundation's board decision
about which way to vote their 10% stake in the question of the Compaq
merger. Yet another big consultant, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, will
present their opinion to that board. Walter Hewlett's consultant, Friedman
Fleischer, presented to the Foundation board. Now all we need is for
the HP board to answer the FF report... maybe they're waiting to do a
combined response if they have to counter B-A&H as well. (Links to
the SEC filings and more opinion in my piece
Are You Synergized?)
So, this is "it" -
a gyro side-by-side 2-wheel scooter.
"I don't want to sound like a Ginger-slammer," said Paul Saffo, director
of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., "but it's about
$2,000 too expensive and 40 pounds too heavy." Let's see, $1000 and 25
pounds... isn't that a bicycle? No batteries to charge, and fitness
benefits besides.
But Ginger does sound like a fun toy. I'd certainly take one for a
ride, unlike a jetski or snowmobile. Now if I were delivering the mail
every day... maybe I'd see it as a God-send!
(Since Kamen got
US patent
#5,971,091 2 years ago, how come it took so long for all these super
sleuths to figure it out?)
2001.12.01
The third month of 5 in-a-row with "ternary dates": all 0s, 1s and 2s.
It's not too late (I assume) to get your $2 into the
Nenana Ice Classic and do your part in maintaining the 85 year climate
record at the Tanana river. Last year the winners split $308,000!
"Alaska's coolest lottery." It's a big page with some nice photos,
and a weblog of the 2001 breakup. Watching the ice melt - sounds like a
favorite Alaskan pastime.
In honor of George's passing, we spun some vinyl today: all three of the
All Things Must Pass records. I remember being lukewarm about the set
when I first got it, and some of it still drags a bit, but "I Dig Love"
still excites me the way it did almost 30 years ago. Is that Ginger
Baker bangin' on the drums? I love the syncopation with the chord riff
that gets you anticipating their return.
"The Art of Dying" takes on a new color at this point. At a funeral for
an 80-year-old man of our acquaintance today, I got to thinking about
what I want for my funeral. Something pithy I wrote, I hope, some nice
music from friends, a capella singing, good food, good beer,
no gloom and doom. No B.S. about the hereafter. It's a reminder to
make life count.
If you're after links to George Harrison stuff,
BookNotes
looks like as good a place as any to start.
The battle between civil liberties and anti-terrorism heats up in the
Senate judiciary committee:
Mr. Leahy added, "Maybe part of this is the hubris of, you're riding
high in the polls and you feel you can operate by fiat."
(NYTimes)
Deborah Branscum imagines
life in the downturn for Fortune:
"The weekend. Commiserate with wounded souls at a dinner party. Discover
that nine of the 12 dinner guests have been laid off. Be afraid. Learn
that two guests plan a networking trip to Comdex. Be very
afraid...."
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Tuesday, 01-Jan-2002 13:06:12 MST
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