unraveling
30.July 2001
Cringely on
the
resurrection of Code Red and a teaser for his worse-than-the-disease
cure later this week.
The Moose on
programmers as artists. Maybe it's not just programming; I work
better without distraction, and when it's on my own schedule, and if I
feel free to go windsurfing when the wind is
blowing. (His answer to the question "What really happens if you ship
an incomplete project?" slips into familiar
logical fallacy though.)
Lawrence
Lessig: The D.M.C.A. "makes criminal what copyright
law would forgive." "This is bad law and bad policy." How do we
convince Mr. Sklyarov -- a Russian citizen -- that ours is a "free
society"? (Hint: it might be easier if he were let out of jail.)
Maybe the Bush administration isn't going to
let Microsoft off the hook after all.
(The Washington Post) Just think about how many tax dollars we're
spending to have a whole new team of lawyers read through the case.
Registered my copy of
Opera. Gains me a little screen
space, and stops that annoying flashing up there. The only nagging
problem is clicking on links in email and having OE launch IE. I'll
learn.
29.July 2001
Weblogging has given way to windsurfing for the moment, but
not completely; illustrated reports from the Gorge continue,
with the
third of three 3-day
weekends. Woo-hoo!
26.July 2001
Facts I didn't pick up when first reading about Sklyarov's
jailing for violation of the DMCA: he's a Russian citizen.
The codebreaking work he did was while he was in Russia.
He comes over here, and we arrest him.
Just imagine our reaction if a US citizen got arrested over in Russia
for doing something here, that's legal under US law, but that was
against a Russian law.
Speaking of lawbreakers... our dialup connection to the internet went
pear-shaped this morning. Yesterday it worked as usual, this morning,
we get connected, but then nothing. No web, no email, no telnet, no
ftp. A hundred bytes or two come down every 15 or 20 seconds, but
nothing useful happens.
On the 3rd call to Earthlink, I get the suggestion to "repair Internet
Explorer." It doesn't look like you can uninstall IE, but under the
Add/Remove Programs dialog out of the control panel, one of the choices
offered is to repair "Internet Explorer and internet tools." Is it
upset because I've installed Opera v5.11 and made that the default
browser? Who knows, but after the "repair" and a reboot, we're up and
running again.
It didn't fix the repeatable blue screen fatal exception 06 at
0000:00000236 that I can get every time I boot up and start WS_FTP LE
the first time, though. (If I forget and don't do that, my session
typically degrades and blows up in more creative ways; if I remember,
there's just that blue screen, and after it's dismissed, no
problem.)
It's not just anti-competitive, it's really crappy work, too.
24.July 2001
It's a low water year.
Anderson Ranch, Arrowrock and Lake Lowell are all
at or below
25% full, and in a day or two, they'll start draining Lucky Peak.
Did I hear the rate correctly, 2-1/2 feet per day? The flow rate
just below
the dam, 3000 cfs, is about 75% of average. As usual (I suppose),
90% of that is diverted or evaporates before the Boise river runs into
the Snake.
Indian Creek reservoir, out east of town, has been unsailably low for
months. We drove by Mountain Home reservoir on our way to and from
Ketchum this weekend, and found it D R Y, save for a little puddle way
out in the middle.
Adobe does
the
right thing, if a little late, declining to support the prosecution
of Dmitri Sklyarov under the
DMCA. Will the government
back off and drop the case?
It took 8 hours of meeting with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
to get this far, although Adobe says they "still strongly support the
D.M.C.A." That sucks.
23.July 2001
Nuclear waste is getting
ready to roll.
"The administration wants more nuclear plants, so it's eager to show that
it's perfectly safe to ship the used fuel. But nobody wants radioactive
cargo chugging by their town."
There's a lot of things "nobody wants" by their town. Big power plants,
corrosive liquids and toxic gases in tank cars, and so on. Is it legitimate
to just say no to all shipments of radioactive cargo? "Leave everything
where it is" doesn't seem likely to be the optimum waste disposal
method. The starting point for the train, "the Western New York Nuclear
Service Center, is a dilapidated monument to the failure of U.S. nuclear
policy and an environmental mess." Sounds like a good place to get the
waste out of.
Simple answers seem... too simple.
Pop-under site hits #4 in the charts, while we
debate "whether this format is simply too obnoxious to be an
effective way to sell things."
In a word, yes. I've seen that X10 site/camera ad a dozen times or
more, and the only reason I'd go to their site would be to waste some of
their bandwidth. If I needed such a camera, I'd look for someone else
to buy it from.
It seems Lance Armstrong is wearing out his welcome over there.
Jean-Marie Leblanc, the tour director is
bad-mouthing the soon to be 3 time winner. "Armstrong is a rider
who is respected but not liked. He doesn't speak French, he's not warm,
two gorillas accompany him at the start and finish." Sounds like some
serious envy about having a 'merican winning his race every year.
Jean-Marie, tell your boys to train harder!
22.July 2001
Checking my server logs, which I do on no particular schedule, just to
see if I've been "discovered," showed 20 errors last week, produced by
requests for /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN... (ending
with a sequence of non-N characters). That's the Code Red worm, seeing
if my web server code is insufficiently patched Microsoft IIS. It
isn't, sorry.
And here's a "tricky" new email virus,
"Sircam."
Why is it tricky? Ah, it changes subject lines and attachment
names instead of telling the whole world "I love you," for example.
Ooo, that is tricky.
Are people really depending on filters to keep them from actually
launching a virus attached to an email?
What, have you been asleep for 23 months?
Powers-that-be are
saying pithy things
like "It’s difficult for them to understand what’s a good message and
what’s not. In this case, the only way to be protected is by updating
their anti-virus software."
Or, not executing (opening) attachments from email unless you know
what kind of file it is, who sent it to you, and why.
I've been in bad meetings before, although maybe not as bad
as this one.
I've taken sarcastic notes during them (but more often just sketched
doodly things), but what I haven't done (yet) is to post my
sarcastic notes on a public web server.
Someday, maybe. When I'm getting ready to change jobs, say.
(D'you s'pose Flangy is getting ready to split?) In the meantime, I'm
more than happy to read someone else's. :-)
Finally got around to writing an
index page for my top 100 market capitalization
tracking.
21.July 2001
Christmas in July
A little pruning this morning: Ponderosa, Fir, Juniper, and the smell of
pitch to start the day. Nice.
The music industry has pretty much slayed Napster, but like the Hydra,
new
heads are springing up.
HP's
mpulse newsletter, on "boom, interrupted":
First there's the matter of the economy. Growth in the total number of
mobile handsets sold annually worldwide is in decline: 67% in 1999,
47% in 2000, and an estimated 30% this year, according to IDC. Those
are enviable growth rates in most industries, but could be problematic
for Nokia.
"We're seeing some maturing in the cellular market and an economic
downturn in the US," says Seamus McAteer, Sr. Analyst for Jupiter
Media Metrix. "Sales can't continue at the same pace."
Growth is in decline, eh? In 1998, the industry was so big, call it
100. In 1999, it grew to 167. Then 245 in 2000, and estimated to grow
to 319 this year. "Sales can't continue at the same pace"? Unless
growth stops, sales are going to continue at an increased pace.
That's what growth means. Seeing a downturn while growth is continuing
is a sure symptom of growthmania.
The Missoulian on
Bearanoia in Idaho:
Men are made of lesser stuff in today's land of Famous Potatoes....
Keith and Hemingway sprang quickly to mind when the governor bleated
about "flesh-eating carnivores," but those two are mere icons of a
braver, more confident and woods-wise Idaho we once knew. There would
not even be an Idaho, at least one settled and developed as it is today,
if previous generations had been as cowed as Kempthorne by bears.
Code Red sounds
really,
really bad, but I haven't seen any trouble, myself. No "meltdown"
in my ability to use the internet.
20.July 2001
Idaho Public TV covered the aftermath of the Rainbow
Family of Light gathering last night on their
Dialogue
program. They had Walt Rogers, the Forest
Service ranger for the Lowman District, Tom Woodbury, a local
environmental activist and Buddhist, and "Just Tom," a water carrier and
distributor for the RFoL.
Just Tom noted one the "features" of this gathering was the
Incident Command Team, Forest Service law enforcement, from Washington,
issuing tickets "frivolously." The media seem to have forgotten about
the last gathering in Idaho (near Council in 1982), which didn't come
with the same
load of controversy, apparently, or at least no one can remember it.
A couple people acted as "local interface" to the town, and while the
locals were wary, they weren't running quite as scared, and things
turned out alright. "I think if we sent someone like that (this time),
they would have been singled out as leaders and arrested," Just
Tom said.
The sheriff of Idaho County called in, and he said that the problems
were "mostly sanitation and shoplifting." Hardly sounds like it
warranted the "24 hour watch for the safety of our town" that they put
on, but "urinating in public," and "heavy drugs," "very major at times"
were also cited as problems. Was there anything positive that came out
of the gathering? Only that they learned they would have to do more for
their protection in the future, and have communities work together.
Upgrading the permit requirements from a gathering of 1000 to a
gathering of 100 was one action he thinks they need. Curious, when the
RFoL gathering had 15 or 20 times their current legal limit, what
difference would that have made?
The unscheduled callers were the stars of the show. "Elizabeth"
was concerned with protection of the salmon habitat (as was Tom
Woodbury, who worked at mitigation during his 11 days at the gathering),
but was pleased to see less impact that "regular" campgrounds.
She noted that the complaints came from some of the same people who
supported the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade,
and they just seemed to support the laws that they believed in.
Some "scofflaws are sent to jail, and some are sent to Congress."
My favorite line from her, though, was that she "want(ed) to acknowledge
the miracle of this gathering, turning
Larry Craig into an environmentalist."
She was followed by Rob from Idaho Falls, who wanted to know
if the counties considered "possibly buying a bunch of fencing, and when
those folks move into town, and if they're unruly or not following the
law, if they'd just herd them in there and hold them there," "lock them
up en masse."
Maybe Rob is used to managing a bunch of them unruly cattle, I don't
know.
Everyone on camera managed to keep a pretty straight face, and Mr.
Rogers used it to point out that some folks have to play by the rules,
and some don't seem to have to. Meaning the RFoL, of course. Tom
Woodbury pointed out that to be consistent, the Forest Service would
have to play by their own rules, and comply with the Forest
Plan. And it was up to Woodbury to point out the irony of supposedly
Libertarian Idaho, calling in to suggest locking up the Rainbows while
we let the cattle run free.
Grazing was touched on lightly. Anyone visiting Bear Valley could see
the effects of it, but Ranger Rogers noted that they're required to have
an "improving trend" in range and riparian habitat, or else revisit the
allotments and regulations, and by official measures, they're meeting
that.
The photograph of the Forest Service "Level 1" team guy on horseback in
the middle of a stream wasn't exactly a P.R. coup for the home team.
That was "not causing any damage, the damage was insignificant."
One might suppose that the very few Family members who stepped into the
stream and were castigated by others, or by the law enforcement folks
caused similarly insignificant damage, but can you imagine how they felt
to see this yahoo walk his horse through the stream?
They ended with the Ranger's assessment of how the cleanup and
rehabilitation was going. He didn't have anything significantly
negative to say about it, so we can assume things are going pretty darn
well. Trail eradication OK, latrines mostly OK, although not all were
adequately covered. (They're going to monitor water quality. Don't
forget to check for cow piss, Ranger.) Trash was mostly bagged and due
to be moved out yesterday. The re-seeding is agreed to, has to be done
in the fall, and Cache Creek may have a closure for rehabilitation.
19.July 2001
One of my older brothers turned 50 yesterday, and I sent him a birthday
note, with a snippet of a recent dream and my thoughts around it.
He replied with a wonderful story from the
Kathopanishad. It didn't give away the secret that it hinted at,
but he ended with what he thought was "the secret of what happens after
death." I probably shouldn't just put it out so plainly, but the
simplicity and beauty of it are moving:
The explanation I have given to myself, unenlightened by discipline, is
that this life is embedded within eternity, and is itself a part of it,
and is not to be despised in favor of some reward or heaven to follow.
That being so, it behooves us to make the most of life here and now, not
in pursuit of the temptations and charms, but in pursuit of the
knowledge, and the calming of emotions that allow us to share and enjoy
life with one another through all the challenges. That I am working
on.
On a more mundane level, I'm liking this
Opera
browser more every moment. 'g' toggles graphics on and off. Found the
scaling switch, it's '+' and '-' (on the numeric keypad only). Super.
(These dropped out of a few of the "tips" on startup.) "Scaling" isn't
quite all it could be, though - or maybe too much? It's not just
scaling fonts, it's scaling fonts and images, and not doing that
great a job on the images.
It has News and email clients built in, too. That would save me from
having URLs in Outlook Express fork MSIE instead of my new default
browser. The monopolist program cabal doesn't let go easily!
The best part of the Webby Awards is the
acceptance
"speeches": five words (or less).
Now there's a power
surplus
in California - what a difference a year makes! Sure seems like the
good old days when all that electricity trading didn't matter, and the
lights just stayed on.
Microsoft's investments did even worse than mine in the last quarter.
They lost
$2.6
billion. leaving $.01 per share profit. Man, that's a lotta
scratch!
The
Michael
Lewis weighs in on the internet revolution (from part 1 of 6, free
subscription to the NYT required):
The instant message has fast become a staple of European corporate
communication. The technique spread from Finnish children to businessmen
because the kids taught their parents. Nokia employed anthropologists to
tell them this. Finland has become the first nation on earth to
acknowledge formally the childcentric model of economic development: if
you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed to promote rapid technical
change, and if you intended to promote rapid technical change, you
needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority.
But that's just an aside on the way into a fascinating tale of "faking
it." (This piece was in the July 15 NY Times Magazine, and is excerpted
from Lewis' forthcoming book,
Next: The Future Just Happened. Especially recommended for any
lawyers or friends of lawyers in the audience.
One stop shopping to
opt out online. If you
don't know why you should care, you might start with my old
Ad Attack piece.
Speaking of attacks, the
Code Red
worm is attacking Microsoft IIS-driven websites, and threatening a
denial of service attack to at least whitehouse.gov, but probably the
larger internet. Stormy weather.
18.July 2001
More information about the IRS'
501c(3)
regs, and my take
on the battle between the Frontiers of Freedom and RAN.
It's not just any old "advocacy" that puts your non-profit status
at risk, but specifically advocacy aimed at influencing
legislation. (Partisan activities in political campaigns are
right out, also.) Advocacy toward boycotting or lobbying CEOs of
corporations that log old growth timber, for example, is A-OK. FoF may
not get so far against the Action League after all.
Took the plunge, I'm browsing with Opera 5.11 (free, with advertising,
so far). Not at all painful, although it would be nice to have the
different windows accessible via alt-tab like I'm used to. Although I'm
shift-clicking to open new windows, I guess I can click down on its
menubar.
Some nice features that MSIE doesn't have, and lots of things to look
into. Someday. As usual, I'm more focused on content... One that
jumps out at me is that "page down" actually goes down a whole page,
and I don't have to find my place in the top 3 or 4 lines of text at the
top of the (new) page. It seems so amazingly obvious, so why is
Internet Explorer's scroll function broken?
It'll be interesting to see how long I put up with a portion of the
screen being given over to advertising in exchange for not paying $39.
So far, it seems easy enough.
New requirement for teaching: maintaining a website.
"Summer is the time you spend prepping for the next year," said Kathlyn
Van Hoeck, another Cold Spring Harbor participant, who teaches at York
High School in Elmhurst, Ill. "You rewrite the labs and work on your Web
site. During the school year, there is no time."
- from the
New York
Times.
Dan Gillmor following Microsoft: stalling the courts, and yanking
Java from WinXP. The beat goes on.
The
DMCA
plot thickens. Is the Russian in jail what we need to get this
dastardly law thrown out?
Joel on
Software: Good software takes 10 years. (He cranks out good columns
a lot more frequently.)
17.July 2001
Started at the site for his old rant, but liked this page about
bicycle
commuting better. Think I'll ride to work tomorrow.
The ultimate protection against monopoly:
shop elsewhere.
It's been way too long since I had a picture in here, since the
first of the month! (Of course, there are all the pictures of
windsurfing in the Gorge,
but maybe you don't
like that?) How about something... with a little forced perspective in
steel, concrete and granite? Call it "U.P. mainline at Weatherby."
How much is the California power bill going to be?
$100 billion is the working estimate under discussion. Will a
"California power colossus" follow the "colossal failure?"
The Wall Street
Journal looks at shifting power in the Golden State. Here's a
sample of what sounds like government out of control:
The state has since hastily assembled a group of about 20 energy
traders, headed by a 30-year-old manager with one year of experience in
the energy business. The manager, Susan Lee, has held four jobs in the
past four years and is getting paid up to $480,000 over two years for
her services. Ms. Lee declines to comment.
It seems to all be working, at the moment, but the bills will come
due...
16.July 2001
John Robb's blog
offers up "no news, just new ideas." For the 15th, it's another
possibility (or two) for the Singularity. Individual augmentation
(IA) may foil Artificial Intelligence (AI) before the "I" can
actually emerge. (Interesting pun there.) Or perhaps
"a fundamental change in our perception of conscious time" could
be the precipitating event.
Do the first movers go off on a comet ride and leave the rest of
us behind, for real this time?
The second topic of yesterday's entry is an interesting counterpoint.
Dad as reluctant sysadmin. (Weren't the kids supposed to take that
over?)
The New York Times commented on the
Smartertimes.com,
a personal site of a careful reader.
Interesting take on two versions of the effect of
price
controls on the California energy crisis, for example.
15.Jul 2001
Home from 3 more days sailing in the Gorge, not so many pictures
this time, more time on the water. Email waiting, from someone who
apparently read one of the oldest works on the site,
my review
of the book Genesis and the Big Bang, and identifies himself as a
believer in Scriptural inerrancy. Not asking about that, though,
but the fundamental questions: just what is energy?
And what is life? Here's what I wrote in reply:
I've heard (and given) definitions that are
simplistic and provisional, like "energy is the ability to do work."
Except of course its ability to do work depends on its "entropy," or
randomness: heat energy has high entropy, and you can't get much
work out of it, unless it's very high temperature. Exploding gasoline
powers your car, but the warm exhaust goes to waste.
Lightning outside my window just now, and distant thunder - more
energy!
Einstein theorized that matter and energy were equivalent. We
demonstrated the truth of that theory with atomic energy. Yet most
of the time, matter stays matter, and energy flows around it in all
the myriad forms we've come to know - kinetic energy of moving
objects, wind, rain, thermal energy of sunshine, lava, fire,
electricity.
As for what is life... the way most people go about trying to
answer this is looking at the boundaries, trying to sort things out
in to living and non-living, and then describe the differences.
Rocks - non-living. Algae, lichen, fungi - living. Viruses - living,
but on the edge. And so on.
How is human life different from, say, dog life? We think it's
different, certainly, but why, exactly? The most prominent feature
is that we THINK ABOUT life, we have this odd capability of
introspection, and thinking about past, present and (especially)
future, beyond simple cause/effect, action/reaction.
One answer is that there's a Supreme Being who designed all this, and
set us apart. This only pushes the questions beyond us and into
a supernatural realm, and they become no more answerable. We can
appeal to some document of Absolute Truth, and say "that's it, it's
right there." That would finish it.
But science has no way to deal with such a thing. It must go about
stumbling and groping in the dark, putting the puzzle together as
best it can, while only relying on things that can be determined
as fact by observers who would be just as happy to prove it wrong as
right. Can it tell us what happened 100 years ago, or 1,000, or
10,000? Not with certainty. But the power of scientific inference
is remarkable. Just look around you at what we've wrought with
it.
12.July 2001
Great
cover story
in this week's Boise Weekly about the Rainbow gathering and its problems
with law enforcement. The Man wants to be able to finger leaders to
enforce its regulations; anybody who steps up to interact with the
Forest Service thereby becomes a "leader" and gets hassled.
Sharon Sweeney, the "incident team's media spokesperson" gives voice to
the perplexity of the powers-that-be:
They obviously do (have leaders) because this doesn't just fall out of
the sky and happen because of the Webmaster. And the Webmaster pretty
much has to be a leader..."
Bought a memory upgrade for my PeeCee at home last night,
prompted by an ad for
Crucial
in PC World. $30 for 128MB (one DIMM), tax and ("free") shipping
included, after a simple series of forms identifying my system
(and a look inside, just to make sure at least one of my 3 slots was
open).
Last time I bought memory, it was something like $500 for 16MB. 133X
price:performance improvement. (Of course, back then, you could
actually do something with 16MB. :-)
Douglass Rushkoff explains how
the internet is for amateurs; those who love what they do. That's
what fortboise.org is all about, of course. He's putting a new book
online, Exit Strategy, to
make his point.
In the creep-you-out department, there's the
Wall Street Journal's
weblog. They're still fighting the Elian
Gonzales battle, believe it or not, calling Juan his "father."
Windows XP product activation software
reverse
engineered, and found to be benign. How nice. In actual use, of
course, you just have to trust that to be the case. You have no idea
what programs are doing over the 'net, eh?
A better use for such work would be to allow legitimate users
to break the copy-protection scheme so that the company's financial
interests do not waste their time and money. Just like the good
old days, the first time copy-protection fell by the wayside.
Microsoft embraces and extends the
"just reboot
it" reliability model to the world of e-commerce. Hailstorm,
indeed. That's the code name for a Chinese water torture, I think. Oh,
it was "a series of extremely rare hardware failures." Yeah, that's
it.
Robert Bork and Kenneth Starr
weigh
in on the Microsoft appeal decision, and the company's spin on it
being in its favor: "Microsoft appears impervious to law. It seems an
unrepentant recidivist. That is a major reason to consider a breakup
seriously."
Of course, the footnote says they're
"counsel to ProComp, an industry association that includes Microsoft
competitors and supported the government case against Microsoft,"
so not completely unbiased themselves.
The collection of
Ghost sites
just grows and grows. It's getting unwieldy, even.
Driving while phoning gives about the same accident statistics as
driving while drunk. The Tappet brothers
call
bullshit on the AAA for using a lame study to suggest otherwise, and
then not noting the limitations of their study in the press release.
11.July 2001
Morning wind is back, more or less, and I got some of it
today. Last night
I set up a cronjob to fetch the weather observations twice
a day, so the local sailors can see what they missed if they slept
in.
Printing books on demand
seems like a great idea. And this sounds like a
cool machine to do it. Seems like only a matter of time before this
happens, whether or not this particular effort strikes it rich. Or will
we figure out how to make e-books really work first?
Paul Krugman,
Outside
the Box: "(B)ecause of the tax cut Mr. Bush will soon break his
promise to protect the Social Security surplus."
10.July 2001
Resource
wars heating up at the California/Oregon border: who gets the water,
farmers or endangered fish? The Bureau of Reclamation says the fish,
and the farmers have turned into vandals while the local
constabulary become scofflaws.
8.July 2001
It got so damn hot here, I couldn't stand it and headed out of town.
Well, I headed out of town to go
windsurfing
actually, and the heat finally broke with some thunderstorms from the
Gulf of Mexico, but it was damn hot, well over 100°F for two days.
The low was 73 the morning
of the 4th, then 79 the next night. I'm used to natural air
conditioning to cool the house down every night, had to actually run our
unnatural air conditioner for an hour or two. We're back to lows in the
mid-60s now, highs in the 90s. Comfy.
Speaking of "corporate activism," there's the
Frontiers
of Freedom founded 6 years ago by a former Wyoming senator (Malcolm
Wallop) and buddy of our VP, Dick Cheney. It's funded by the Philip
Morris Companies, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings, Inc., and the Exxon
Mobil Corporation, and it's working to get the government to revoke the
tax-exempt status of the Rainforest Action
Network (RAN). With enemies like this, you know RAN is having an
effect! Now the IRS has to decide if things like scaling buildings
to raise banners against Boise Cascade's logging of
old growth forests is "education," or "advocacy."
Something tells me that Philip Morris, RJR and Exxon Mobil get to write
off their contributions to FF one way or the other. Oh sure, here it is
in their press release: "...many non-profits, such as the conservative
Frontiers of Freedom organization and environmental organizations such
as the Sierra Club, set up separate educational and advocacy
organizations to comply with tax laws...."
Read more from
Rachel.
3.July 2001
Watched Groundhog Day
last night. Somehow I'd missed it for 8 years, and had a vague
association with Caddy Shack, that other movie about groundhogs.
(Er, I guess that was gophers in that one.)
But this movie is a charming bit of magic realism from farther north
than usual, a tale of self-realization and falling in love. I looked at
a couple of reviews to link to, but I'm afraid they all give away too
much of the story for my taste. I was amused by the people who had
trouble with some bit of later magic in the story, after they'd accepted
the first; I mean, you can't expect an explanation of how a day could
repeat itself once, so you might as well suspend disbelief.
If you haven't seen the movie, check it out. Good date movie.
What Microsoft
wants. Keep your eye on the ball.
The
EE-Biz Ponzi scheme and its offspring:
"The more they examined Mr. Stroud, the more uncomfortable investigators
became. The primary financial asset he listed was a half interest in a
purported Peruvian debt, which he said was now an obligation of the
American government for more than $1 trillion. The half interest was
granted to him by the woman who said she was in contact with a space
alien."
Hint: If someone shows you a bank balance in your favor but tells you
that you have to send more money to get it out, you're in trouble.
Temperatures in triple digits out here, too, and the
lights
are blinking (a little more than usual) in southern Nevada.
Demand edges up to 4 gigawatts, with a high of 112 on Sunday.
I admire someone who can hack together this much
home
electronics all for want of higher bandwidth. Me, I've got a telco
knocking on my door willing to sell me DSL (sans ISP, of course)
for $20/mo, but the answer is still no.
Global Positioning Systems can of course be used for
Global
Velocity Sensing.
Casey Jones, you'd better watch your speed!
2.July 2001
Almost Independence Day, and that's got Dan Gillmor thinking of
not Red Coats, but
Redmond. The chance that my next computer will be a
Mac is higher than it's ever been. His mention of "free software"
reminded me of
my software list, which has
been pretty stable since I started it last October. Add
Zonealarm from Zonelabs.
Scratch Manila.
And note that "free" and "open source" are far from synonymous.
Internet Explorer and Outlook Express were "free." In either case,
there's no free lunch - they all exact some of my time and attention.
1.July 2001
It's been a couple years (!) since we got around to cleaning the
windows. (That sounds really bad, but then we weren't hear for 12 of
the last 16 months.) Yesterday and today, we got half of 'em done,
including the one we look out when we look "off into space" while
sitting at the computer. Oak bark, leaves, spruce trees, blue sky are
looking way better today.
Paul Krugman's introduction to his
op-ed
piece on the Microsoft judgment is very clever, as he helps us sniff
out a remedy for the problems of O/S Monopoly.
The New York Times
editorializes that Bush should catch a clue and do an about face
from policies that are at odds with the majority of the public, and a
sizeable faction of the Republican party. "Obviously his views reflect
those of the industry lobbyists he has placed in key positions
throughout his administration."
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Saturday, 08-Sep-2001 13:38:25 MDT
http://fortboise.org/blog/200107.html
