unraveling
31.Oct.2001
Happy Hallowe'en!
Second full moon of the month, just in time for trick or treat.
In this corner of the world, there were happy children in "scary"
costumes coming to our door, looking for a handout. I carved up this huge,
misshapen pumpkin the neighbors grew, put it out at the last minute,
and everyone had a great time.
Cleaning out my inbox at work, I found the
PCWorld
Digital Focus newsletter with this
provocative feature: "Adding Depth of Field Digitally." That would
be a neat trick! Too bad they were really talking about
subtracting depth of field - how to make blurry backgrounds.
FedEx has an answer to the difficulties of air travel, with the
Overnight
PeoplePak.
RAM prices still dropping. $20 or 30 will get you a quarter
gigabyte these days.
PCWorld's "most popular" sorting from various vendors.
Yahoo News has an
Argentina
index, from which we hear from
a former IMF official:
"While refusing to rule out future debt crises in developing countries,
Stanley Fischer, the former deputy managing director of the International
Monetary Fund who was in large part responsible for the IMF's response to
the crises, believes the emerging world has become a far safer
place"...
"We are at the end of an era of crises. National balance sheets are much
tidier than they were at the end of 1997," said David Lubin, emerging
markets economist at HSBC in London.
Accounting is the science that can see the world as tidy when there are
wars going on.
29.Oct.2001
Joel Spolsky, on
why
software so often sucks. (He had a slightly different title for
the piece.) "Today, you need to know how to work with libraries of
thousands of functions, representing buggy code written by other
people."
The Sunday NY Times didn't come again today. Yet another call
to 1-800-698-4637, more profuse apologizing, but this time an agent
who was willing to take personal responsibility. She said she was going
to call when she comes on next Sunday, 3pm CST. I said "the process
seems to be open loop," and wondered if she knew what that meant.
There is no feedback from the physical delivery process to say "yes, we
received the request." The central office sends out all these requests
(and a "memo" yesterday, to the "depot manager"), but they could be
going into a black hole for all they know.
I said that while I found the process interesting, I was getting a
little tired of calling them -- something like 10 times now, with the
first try today eventually routing me to a "we're sorry, but because of
call volume, we can't answer your call right now, please try again in 15
minutes or you can use our automated phone interface" which I'd already
been through.
She said she'd also extend our the half-off promotion period, instead of
just crediting us for the papers we hadn't been sent, and she'd
try to get delivery of last Sunday's paper. On Tuesday morning now.
I have their bill in hand, they want me to pay by November 4th, which
might be the first day we get delivery of one of their
newspapers. I'm inclined to wait and see.
We talked again about when the paper is supposed to arrive, and she
assured me that they guaranteed delivery by 8:30, and that they wouldn't
make that guarantee if they couldn't meet it. She didn't know whether
the papers had to be flown in from somewhere (I'm pretty sure they do,
for Boise), but they'd get it there by 8:30.
After I hung up, I flashed back to the end of my career in newspaper
delivery. After suffering through the early, early morning work of
delivering The Milwaukee Sentinel for longer than seems reasonable for a
young boy, on one New Year's Day, I decided -- forget it, I wasn't going
to get up, I wasn't going to get dressed and go out in the dark and
freezing cold, and I wasn't going to deliver the newspaper. I would've
sung "Take this job and shove it" if that song had been out then.
Needless to say, my depot manager was not a happy camper about that
decision, and sometime later that day, I was persuaded to actually do
the job I'd been hired for, one last time. Now I guess it's payback
time, 35 years later.
Ran car errands with the Prius today, disposing of our trusty old
Sentra, and getting the new registration done, so we could put the
license plates on. A neighbor said he'd be willing to buy the car for
"$200 worth of parts," but we gave it to the Agency for New Americans
instead. We get more than $200 of tax benefit, some needy refugee
family will get reliable transportation, and maybe some learning on car
repair. I included the well-used shop manual in the deal.
Between 40 and 50 city miles on it so far, and the mileage is up to 39.6
mpg, and still climbing. I'm really impressed with the engineering of
this thing, and working to maximize mileage while I negotiate traffic
has made driving interesting again.
Microsoft
backs
down on browser exclusivity on its second-rate MSN website, even
though all those excluded browsers really were second-rate. The
message, of course, was that Microsoft defines standards. The clumsy
approach to expressing the message was, well, vintage M$.
I had to call up
msn again, just to see it.
It looks badly rendered on Opera v5.11, with fonts too small for my
taste. Couple taps of the [+] key on my numpad takes care of the font
size problem, although some of the paragraphs are still badly
wrapped. None of the teasers or links interest me.
Patriotic sentiment for today:
Richard Rodriguez, "Disunited We Stand."
28.Oct.2001
The second Sunday of our "subscription" to the New York Times,
and just like the Yankees will be in a few hours, they're 0 for 2.
They have a lovely automated interface for missing and wet papers (and
getting subscriptions) at 1-800-NYTIMES, but the "physical distribution"
end of the process appears null and void.
When we signed up, they said we could expect our paper by 8:30am.
Calling after no-show at that hour, the recording says a replacement
will be there by 11:30 Eastern time (that's an hour later, in Boise).
Calling after the later no-show, the recording says a replacement will
be out "today." Then later, it won't be possible to get it today,
press [1] to credit your account. The live operators are friendly,
courteous, and profusely apologetic about this most unexpected
eventuality. During today's first call, I asked when we should expect
our paper "in general." By 9:30, she said. We'll see.
Their next opportunity is to try and deliver today's paper a whole day
late, we said we'd take it on Monday. Maybe they just can't find our
house?
Paul
Krugman keeps us up to date on the best government money can buy.
Repealing the corporate alternative minimum tax
retroactively to 1986 is pretty amazing. Here, corporate
America, have $25 billion. Don't spend it all in one place.
27.Oct.2001
On the cusp of standard time, anticipating a 25-hour day and some light
in the morning. Of course, we have to sacrifice our evening light to
get it...
There might be a more effective way to introduce antibiotic-resistant
bacteria into our food supply, but the use of low levels of antibiotics
as growth promoters in livestock seems to have done pretty well.
Science News
reports on several studies sampling commercial meat for resistant
strains of Salmonella and Enterococcus. 20% of a sample
of 200 packages of meat in one study had Samonella, and more than half
of the tainted samples were resistant to three or more antibiotics.
86% of a sample of 407 chickens had Enterococcus faecium, and
more than two-thirds of those were resistant to the potent antibiotic
mix Syncercid, designed to
respond to Vancomycin-resistant E. faecium.
The October 20th issue also had a sidebar about the
AMA's
statement warning against widespread prophylactic use of
antibiotics, as carrying more risk than potential benefit.
Frank
Rich
lambastes the Administration for being more concerned about its special
interests than winning the war. "The White House's home-front failures
are not sudden, unpredictable products of wartime confusion but direct
products of an ethos that has been in place since Jan. 20." Any
remaining notions of the war being quick and decisive are
fading. With 23 years' practice, the Afghanis aren't in a hurry.
Keep this in mind next time someone complains about the godless ACLU:
they're
defending an L.A.
artist against that city's attempt to have his 9-11 memorial mural
with "God Bless America" on it removed. I would much rather look at
that than a "giant-sized painting of Shaquille O'Neill."
26.Oct.2001
Took delivery on our Prius
last night! It's like a combination car and video game: see how high
you can make the mpg go. It hadn't been reset from its inefficient
dealer miles, but I got it from single digits up to 23mpg during my
commute. Not sure if I'm supposed to wait until the "cold" light goes
off before driving off, it's hard to be that patient first thing
in the morning when it's around freezing. Pulling the lever from
D to B and watching the instantaneous mileage go over 100
mpg is fun, but is that better than the regenerative braking?
Now the only problem is I want to drive more than I would otherwise.
:-)
Even further out in the efficiency distribution, this was a big month
for
speed records at the
2001 World Human Powered Speed Challenge. Over 78 mph
sustained for a mile, and 80 mph through 200 meter traps! 80 mph
on pedal power, that is awesome.
The New York Times online in a
big and
annoying facsimile version. Yuk, I don't think I'll be going there.
The most important question I have is: you're not going to screw up the
great site you have now, are you?! Please say you're not.
MSN
blocking non-MS browsers. Complaining that Opera's not
standards-compliant enough, you have to admire their chutzpah.
But what does MSN have that I want? Beats me, I just about never visit.
And if I did, and it wailed at me about using IE, I'd just leave.
The funny thing is, I still have IE (v5.5 - sorta compliant, sorta
broken, like all their stuff), and I use it when it suits me (mostly for
its simpler rendering of data in tables for copy/save as text), but
that's seldom.
The little bit about it specifically rejecting Opera, but accepting
it with one character changed in the string is interesting. Unknown
browsers assumed to be compliant? Of course, you can set Opera to
identify itself as IE if you want. I don't.
Dan Gillmor
interviewed TBL on the topic:
"Amaya, the browser which W3C
develops as a testbed for our technologies, and which arguably has the
best W3C compliance, is blocked from www.msn.com....
Running the msn.com homepage through the validator on Friday showed the
site did not use valid XHTML and did not meet the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines."
Cringely describes one way to
make
money fast on the web:
"The change of paradigm here is that Wheretolive.com is not only owned by
dogs, it is owned by alpha dogs, and that alone assures its
success."
Turns out the vaunted sunset provision in the anti-terror bill is just
a little
side
show
for the rubes. Declan McCullagh writing for Wired says that it only
applies to "a tiny part of the mammoth bill."
Heard on the radio yesterday (?): in opposition to a second office of
Planned Parenthood
in Idaho, the Choose Life organization and its
spokesman, ex-Congressman Helen Chenoweth-Hage calls PP a "terrorist"
organization. Of course "irony" is not in Ms. Chenoweth-Hage's lexicon,
so she probably isn't aware that Planned Parenthood has been the victim
of anthrax scare tactics for some time.
I wonder how HCH and hubby Wayne feel about the USA Act that's just been
signed into law by GWB? I couldn't find an online version of this
story, but the outline is clear in my memory.
The amount of spam on my home email account was getting out of hand,
finally encouraging me to give Earthlink's "trust us on the
configuration"
Spaminator a try.
So far, so good. All 18 of the messages it intercepted and
plunked in a web folder were indeed unwanted. Only 2 unwanted messages
crept through in 3 days. In less time, my wife's account had 27
messages redirected, all of them garbage.
They provide an explicit way to correct false positives (messages you
actually wanted), but if there's a way to tell it about messages it
should have filtered, I haven't stumbled on to it.
I don't know what it is about me, but I'm drawn to the guy (or gal) who
votes "no" when everyone else votes "yes."
Russ
Feingold explains his vote and makes me proud to be a native of the
great state of Wisconsin.
I wonder how many lawmakers took the trouble to examine the particulars
of the bill. Feingold notes, among many other things, that "under this
bill, the government can compel the disclosure of the personal records
of anyone — perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or
went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the
company of, or whose phone number was called by -- the target of the
investigation." He terms it "a truly breathtaking expansion of police
power."
Old news: high power prices. Ken Dey, writing for the
Idaho Statesman (which doesn't believe in durable links, sorry):
"Prices fell to 25 cents a kilowatt hour in May; by June, they were down
to about 7 cents a kilowatt hour, only a few months into Idaho Power's
buyback contracts. Today, rates are around 2 cents per kilowatt
hour." (My emphasis.) California has signed up for
more power than they can use and is looking at getting out of the
contracts.
I wondered how many miscreants would take advantage of the WTC attack to
go "missing." Here's some who did, and took
$105
million of other people's money with them.
Did you like your tax "rebate" this summer? Just imagine how great
it would be to be IBM and have Congress pass you a
$1.4
billion rebate!
24.Oct.2001
Sports for Muslim women. Sounds like a great idea to me - a sound
mind in a sound body and all. What would it be like to have gender
segregated spectation, I wonder? It's so hard to imagine life in that
other world. I work with and around women every day, they're just
another kind of human being. The fact that we're all sexual beings just
doesn't seem to matter that much. Or maybe it's just that I'm getting
old. :-)
Discovered metafilter today,
off the
Scripting News
pointer to the discussion of the weblogs.com rollover. Yet another rich
medium I can't keep up with. A community weblog, with discussions.
Many paths lead outward from there, such as this creative
404 Error page.
The BBC reports that
"fewer than one-third of the 30 missions launched towards (Mars) since
1960 have succeeded." The
Odyssey has successfully reached orbit!
22.10.2001
Fall is closing in. I listened to the weather forecast this morning,
and decided to buck the chance of a big SE headwind on my way home,
and ride my bike anyway. Only a 30% chance of rain. When quittin' time
came, I was pleased to look outside and see the colored trees standing
still.
But it was wet, and I was mortified to have left my more than 20-year
old Brooks leather saddle out in it. Fortunately not too much rain,
though, and I dried it with my blue jeans as I tried (and failed) to
stay below "fender speed," that point at which the water (et al.) flies
off the tires and onto the back. I much prefer a gentle little
misting and going slow on purpose to having the wind make me go
slow.
Tomorrow the forecast is for Big Wind, up to 60 mph east of town. I
hope someone goes sailing
and tells me about it: I've already packed it in for the season, and am
thinking snow.
Along with all the wonderful fall colors, something else to observe and
think about were all the flags on display. In the rain. And on
vehicles driving down the road at 35, 40 mph. It's time for those who
would honor our country and its most recognizeable symbol to learn the
rudiments of flag
etiquette. "The flag should not be used as part of a costume or
athletic uniform" even in the "major" leagues, eh? No marks or
insignias placed on it, no matter how much you love the NY Yankees.
It doesn't go on vehicles unless you're in a parade.
If you love your country and its flag, show it some mindfulness,
please.
20.10.2001
The cleaning man's take on a little
post-modern installation: it's trash. The artist was reportedly
more amused than anyone else. The gallery owners didn't get it though,
they recovered the bags and did their best to recreate the pile of
rubbish. Does this push the value higher or lower into the "six
figures"?
19.Oct.2001
If you're bringing a book along to pass the extra hours involved in air
travel these days, you might want to make sure it's something
politically correct.
Quoted from Philadelphia's
citypaper:
He proceeded through the security checkpoint and sat down to read near his
boarding gate. About 10 minutes had passed when a National Guardsman
approached Godfrey.
"He told me to step aside," Godfrey says. "Then he took my book and asked
me why I was reading it."
18.Oct.2001
Spend, Spend, Spend - Patriotism or Disconnection?
Jackie Alan
Giuliano:
"Just when we started to get access to that inner strength that comes
from staying home, facing and holding loved ones, and examining one's
life to find out what is really important, our leaders came on the TV
and essentially told us to return to being consumers..."
The local PBS station had all four of our congress-critters on its
Dialogue
program tonight, and I saw bits of it in between innings.
(Hey, they put up
streaming video
of these!) One caller tossed up a softball, asking if it wasn't time we
started drilling for oil in Alaska, eh?
Larry Craig stepped right up to that bad boy, and did his best to whack
it over the fence. "The American people are recognizing that energy is
a critical component of defense policy," he said, or words to that
effect. Yeah, that's why we're buying ever larger cars, and driving
them more miles every year. It's critically important that we have
enough gasoline to keep our SUVs rolling.
I suppose along with the sacrifice of our
civil liberties,
we're going to have to punt on the environment, too. (Craig assures
us we can do it in a responsible manner, and that Tom Daschle is just
playing politics. He's so sincere, darn it!) Saw Dick Cheney in white
tie tonight, too, telling an esteemed gathering that they'd have to accept
the changes "for the lifetime of everyone here." Crisis makes
everything simpler, black and white.
And all through the process, we keep hearing that if we change our
lifestyle, than "they win." Consumerism is OK. Civil liberties and a
sound environmental policy? Well, we have to decide on priorities.
If we stop shopping, then they win, yeah? Sounds like reality
TV or something.
Speaking of shopping, it seems our Prius is going to be embargoed until
late next month. Toyota makes the dealers pay a penalty if they sell
the vehicle out of the demo program before the end date. The dealer
told us he'd park the car in the back, and nobody would be driving it,
now that we'd made a down payment. So... Toyota loses, because the
car's not getting "demoed" any more, we lose because we have to wait,
and the dealer loses because they have to wait for the rest of
the money, too. But they don't want to lose the sale, so they won't
approach Toyota with the rational argument I proposed, that having the
vehicle on the road is the best advertising they can get. (Especially
compared to having it parked in the back of a dealership.) The dealer's
like a monkey with its fist around a piece of fruit in a skinny-necked
bottle. It won't let go, so it can't get its hand out. Time for the
end around...
The entertaining example of
using
Powerpoint to botch a great speech from history:
"I was surprised that the Autocontent Wizard had anticipated
my desires so well that I had to make very few changes."
This took a couple years to make it through the email
FOAF distribution to me, for some reason.
But it led on, to
a
discussion forum with Edward Tufte.
Who's he, you ask? If you need to know,
start at the top,
The web makes
opposite
ends
of the political spectrum more accessible than ever. The National
Review doles out previews of upcoming pieces, such as
"The terrorist next door," by Adrian Karatnycky, wherein we'll explore
the slipperly slope from liberal to revolutionary.
Brilliant move for a periodical, by the way -- use the web to create
demand for the print publication, and make it worthwhile by putting
older content online.
The spectrum includes much more than American right and American left,
of course. The list of sources in the left column is fascinating and
broad. I just added the Egyptian weekly, where you can read
Al-Jazeera's
POV, or a
military
assessment of the war:
"The US has set itself on the course of a war without end, and without
victory in the accepted military sense."
An interesting treatise about personal defense against chemical, biological
and nuclear attacks is making the email rounds. "Words of Wisdom from
an Armor Master" was the title on my copy, sounds like some good
preparedness thinking. Someone else has
posted a copy, so I don't have to do that, too. Even if you don't
visit the website, it should get to you by email in a week, or
month.
Tracked down the online copy with
daypop, the Google! of breaking
web news.
Another bit of clear thinking during the present crisis: distinguishing
historical
explanation from moral justification.
As Dave
said, don't be drinking coffee when you try to read
this page.
Caution: contains language you wouldn't read from me.
What that new
national ID
card might look like.
A slightly different identity card:
we're from America, and we're
here to
help.
14.Oct.2001
It's pumpkin time again. Supermarkets across our country have
tons of them jauntily catching our eye, plump, orange and bountiful.
Most people buy them for decoration, to carve up into scary
jack o'lanterns to keep evil spirits away.
We keep ours whole and alive through the month, and sometime in November
cook it into food. On the one hand, they're an extravagant waste, a
sort of bourgeois potlatch. Perhaps the annual crop could be
considered a bit of insurance against lean times. If we found ourselves
short of food for some reason, they could get help us through a hard
winter.
Afghanistan is looking at a very, very hard winter. They could probably
come up with something more useful to make out of all those pumpkins
than holiday decorations. Not that we can drop them out of cargo
planes, of course...
PlayStation -- the catamaran, not the electronic toy --
obliterates the transAtlantic sailing record, besting the old record
by almost 2 days. They did it in less than 5 days, at an average speed
of more than 25 knots. Along the way they set the 24 hour speed record,
covering 687 nautical miles in one day; more than 28.6 knots. They were
powered by a cold front's southwest wind, and reportedly did it on
one reach: no tacks, no jibes.
Nice piece from the LA Times on
weblogs coming of age.
We bought a print NY Times
today, practicing for when our subscription
starts next Sunday. The page of obituaries on the back of section B
was really poignant. It'll take them most of a year
to cover all of the people who were killed in the attack on Sept.
11.
An amazing
first person account of the scene in Kandahar before the bombing
began, and last week:
"When night came and the Taleban were gone, people would hold weddings
and parties with music and women danced because there was no-one there
to stop them," Mr Ahmed said. "For just a few weeks, it was like another
time, long ago."
Design for a Faith-based missile, by Richard Dawkins.
Somehow secular humanism doesn't seem quite so scary anymore, eh?
"Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not
cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds
braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to
understand where that courage came from. It came from religion."
13.Oct.2001
Our stellar Rep, Butch Otter, has apparently labeled The Nature
Conservancy, Idaho Conservation League and Idaho Rivers United as
"extremist environmental groups." That's bad enough, but the scary part
is how many Idahoans probably agree with him.
Boise Weekly's new column of short takes, "Blink," reported on the
Sept. 22 editorial in
The Spokesman Review.
In the
Weekly's
excellent piece on the (past) glory years of Idaho politics, they
inserted "(Senators)" before Perry Swisher's comment about Craig and
Otter, and gave me a start. Butch has only made it to the House, so
far; Mike Crapo is are other senator, thank you. (Still no permanent
archives there, alas, so if you want to see the cover story, you need to
get it while it's hot.)
Also adding flavor to politics in our fine state are upstanding
individuals such as Ed Dunne, who
proposed an ordinance (I suppose) for the city of Post
Falls requiring, among other things, that
"residents, schools and businesses who support or work
for the U.N. would be required to register with the city so that other
residents can track any United Nations activity taking place within our
city." (my emphasis). The Review has
Mr. Dunne's piece available for inspection, too.
"While our rights are inviolable by government, the U.N. says rights can
be limited whenever it deems it worthwhile to do so." Hmmm.
This is the first time I've visited The Spokesman Review's website.
It's quite well done for a small newspaper site. One thing I
particularly like is their implementation of
reader comments: each story has a trailing form inviting feedback,
which is checked for length (I assume), and aggregated on a
separate page, with links back to the original stories.
Most trailing comment indexes have clumsy interfaces and feel like
graffiti on the original article. This approach elegantly recreates
the feel of Letters to the Editor, always one of the most entertaining
features of a newspaper.
In the current crop, for example, we see a response to the story about
Muslim support for Bush's promise to destroy bin Laden:
"The mouse's are quivering, the eagle is souring."
2001.10.12
Another of the many "base 3" calendar days. The recent
"binary" days depend on eliding the "20" from "2001." Without that
cheat, of course, it would be game over for eight thousand years.
But we have a plethora of legitimate base 3 (trinary?) days before
us:
2001.10.20, 2001.10.21, 2001.10.22
2001.11.01, 2001.11.02
2001.11.10, 2001.11.11, 2001.11.12
2001.11.20, 2001.11.21, 2001.11.22
another 8 in December, and 40 next year. If I counted right.
After thrashing around on the weblogs-com Yahoo group awhile, I finally
found the page where the
list of updated weblogs
is. I thought it would be on weblogs.com, but no.
Here's where
SirCam
gets ugly. October 16th, it randomly selects victims for mass
deletion of computer files. According to Wired's report, it only
attacks computers that use "Date/Time" system
settings in the "Day/Month/Year" format, not m/d/y as typical in the
U.S. This is computers that run Microsoft's WinXX operating systems, of
course, but also Mac and Unix systems with a sufficiently bad
implementation of a PC emulator. Your chances are 1 in 20 if you've
been suckered into executing the attachment under the "I send you this
file in order to have your advice" notice, and don't get it cleaned up
in the next couple days.
New word for the day, courtesy of skepdic.com:
pareidolia.
"The illusion or misperception of a vague or
obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct"
according to them, it's not in my American Heritage 3d ed.
The man in the moon, Jesus in a tortilla, Satan in the smoke
from the World Trade Center, and so on.
Also, apophenia,
"the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of
unrelated phenomena." (Is there a word for that feeling you get while
paging through a dictionary and you realize by the fore and aft headings
that the word you seek is somewhere on the current two pages?)
An interesting collection of
maps concerning
Afghanistan.
I wish more software companies took the approach
FogCreek
is using: "Michael added a dialog box to CityDesk for sending feedback.
He also wrote some very spiffy code that catches any unhandled exception
on any copy of CityDesk running anywhere in the world, prevents the app
from crashing, and pushes the exception info up to our
FogBUGZ
bug tracking database here in New York City."
Looks like our next car is going to be a
Toyota Prius.
We have to wait a while to take delivery, though.
So, the House and the Senate have both
passed
anti-terrorism bills.
"Passage of the bill, by a vote of 337 to 79, was the climax of a
remarkable 18-hour period in which both the House and the Senate adopted
complex, far-reaching antiterrorism legislation with little debate in an
atmosphere of edgy alarm, as federal law enforcement officials warned
that another attack could be imminent. Many lawmakers said it had been
impossible to truly debate, or even read, the legislation that passed
today."
The House put a 5-year limit on at least some of the provisions,
apparently the only significant compromise in favor of civil
liberties.
More from the NY Times:
Asked about complaints that lawmakers were being asked to vote on a bill
that they had not read, the chairman of the Rules Committee,
Representative David Dreier, Republican of California, replied, "It's
not unprecedented."
Powerful message from
Thomas
Friedman to ObL. He puts in terms of an answer Bush might have
given the recent videotape, rather than calling on the US media to
censor him. Good idea.
11.10.01
One month from 9-11, so much seems forced into that perspective.
I read the announcement about Bush's
news
conference
while it was happening, so I missed the event, but the NPR commentary
following made it sound like I didn't miss much. The news was that he
had a news conference, and ended it with a closing statement.
Is that really new? Seems much better to have the last word in mind,
rather than end on what seems like a good question.
On other channels,
Paul
Bass, writing on alternet, gives us
A Consumer's Guide to the Bombing, and
the ACLU's
detailed analysis of anti-terrorism legislation under consideration.
From last Sunday's NY Times Magazine:
This is a Religious War.
"If faith is that strong, and it dictates a choice between action or
eternal damnation, then violence can easily be justified. In retrospect,
we should be amazed not that violence has occurred -- but that it hasn't
occurred more often."
Big ideas in the feature piece: Islam's tolerance was premised on its
position of power. The separation of church and state is a radical
change in human history. America's religious nature is a rebuke to
fundamentalism: it says we can be redeemed by choice, rather than by
coercion. It really is a war about freedom.
10.10.01
Something in a binary day, not much else to say.
It's not that I joined the
five
major networks in deciding to report only good news, though. I
would have liked to have seen ObL's full video presentation, actually,
instead of the brief, repeated sound bites. Does our National Security
Advisor really think our homeland security will be improved by filtering
out the unpleasant parts? ObL's audience is not in this country, it's
in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and so on. Wouldn't it be better if we
knew what they were hearing, so we might better understand news
from those countries? Covering our ears as we tell each other to have a
nice day doesn't seem like the recipe for success.
On the other hand, some of his audience probably is
still in this country. That's what the reported "100% certainty" of
another terrorist action is all about... Not a pleasant thought.
Thank goodness the web serves up
news from other countries too. This piece from The Times talks
about Tony Blair's nuanced press releases, and the claim that more than
2/3rds of the hijackers didn't know they were on a suicide mission.
Brian Livingston says he's happy to
stick with W2K, rather than XP. His reasons are persuasive to
me.
Any self-coding bloggers reading? If so, and if you're signed up for
weblogs.com's
update list, here's the sort of thing you can add to your perl code to
perform the ping request, using the LWP::Simple module:
$ping = "http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?" .
"name=Views%20from%20Ft.%20Boise" .
"&url=http://fortboise.org/blog/";
get($ping);
You can also do it with SOAP 1.1 or XML-RPC, but that would be a lot
harder for me to figure out. I'd have to find (and install,
presumably) some other module.
9.Oct.2001
Judith Miller admires the timing of bin Laden's threats. How clever
of him to queue up his latest finger wagging to follow the assault from
the US. "I'm a little disturbed that his press people may be as good as
ours," one official lamented. Oh well, it's not the press people who
will decide this, is it? Will press reports sway the majority of
Muslims to forswear their religious beliefs and replace them with
megolamania?
Similarly, Ben MacIntyre of
The Times casts the Bush vs. bin Laden media blitz
as a central act in the drama, with suitably dramatic writing.
"The battle for the Muslim mind."
The FTC Chair, on internet privacy:
get over it. Our government apparently can't be bothered with
privacy issues anymore.
One of the more gruesome
pictures of Microsoft
monopoly, combined with an onerous bill working its way through
Congress, the
Security Systems Standards and
Certification Act. As
Dan Briclin writes,
copy protection may rob the future of today's works of art.
Another airline passenger breaks into the cockpit, but this time
there's a
happy ending. 10 passengers help subdue him. F16s scrambled to
escort the plane to a safe landing at O'Hare. The skies aren't as
friendly as they used to be, but they might be a lot more cooperative.
7.Oct.2001
Reported by AP, along with Putin's voicing support for the allies'
action in Afghanistan:
Russia also called on the international community to use all its
political strength to help Afghanistan overcome the current crisis to
"assure its democratic future."
We're at the beginning of what
Bush called "sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations,"
and I doubt very much that this country is "filled with fear" as ObL's
latest videogram was translated in one report. ("Filled with horror," in
another, may be accurate.) Some of us are saddened by the need for
military force, some continue to question if it's the best response, but
I expect the majority are strongly in favor of it. The terrorists'
organizations will collapse long before we will.
The combination of strategic attacks on military targets, and the
distribution of humanitarian aid shows again that this is a battle
(Rumsfeld said "this 'so-called' war" in his press conference today)
like no other.
5.Oct.2001
Turns out that the Bush administration took that email
about "bombing them with butter"
seriously. $320 Million aid for Afghanistan!
WriteTheWeb
on yet another brand of (not yet released!) blogging software,
Moveabletype. I tried GreyMatter
briefly, I setup a site
on Userland's weblogs.com (which I'd like to delete, but Userland
won't let me). And I wrote my own simple software for aggregating
daily postings into the monthly blog you see here. It's too humble to
call a "Content Management System," but it meets my needs - I have all
my data local, I can update the site at the touch of a button (which
runs a perl script), I can change the style when it suits me, without
puzzling out someone else's layers on top of CSS, and I can
enhance the "system" when so moved, as when I added the little
"link" graphic with the "permanent" URL for each day's entry recently.
(I'd set up the permanent URLs early on, but didn't publicize them
explicitly.)
Doc Searls on
Post-industrial journalism. A beautiful blog entry.
Take a
Gander
at this: on the hospitality of strangers, or "where did all those
planes go when we closed our airspace?"
Google reports on the
Zeitgeist
(pointed to by the
First Monday
article "The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search
Engine").
4.Oct.2001
I generally don't like getting telephone solicitations of any kind
(and was happy to pay the state of Idaho $10 for 3 years residence on
the big "do not call"
list). I've been curt to some, but I do try not
to be rude, unless they abuse my patience. The other night I got a call
from a fellow Sierra Club member, looking for my help with a literature
drop. I must've been relaxed, had my guard down; I said "yes." Was it
our shared beliefs? His quiet, pleasant voice? Was I in a good mood
for some reason? I don't remember, but he went a step farther: would I
be willing to call other people, asking for volunteers?
Incredibly, I said yes to that, too. So tonight I left my comfortable
home and went to a small office downtown, and joined my caller and two
other volunteers, and punched in more than a hundred phone numbers,
spoke to thirty or forty people.
Hi, my name is Tom von Alten, I'm a Sierra Club volunteer. May I speak to
______, please? I'm calling about our fall campaign to help protect the
Owyhee Canyonlands
and the Boulder White Cloud Mountains. As part of that campaign, we're
going to be doing a literature drop in local neighborhoods, on (date),
and we're looking for people who can help for a couple hours. Are you
interested?
Only two people cut me off before I finished that little spiel, one with
"I'm sorry, I'm not interested," and another with "I can't afford any
more money, I'm sorry." I had one outright yes, and a couple strong
maybes, and a lot of answering machines, a (very) few busy signals, a
lot of people who had other plans, who might have other plans, or just
weren't interested, thanks.
Two households had old friends in them, and it was nice to chat. One of
those has a gravely ill man, another who suggested I give his son a
call. (His son was a maybe, in spite of not being a Club member.)
One fellow was going to be gone, having the stitches in his
transplanted cornea taken out, and I talked to him about my father's
recent corneal transplant. A couple people were caretakers
of older parents, and couldn't get away that long.
My voice was soothing, clear, I was to the point, friendly, a little
persuasive but not pushy, understanding, sympathetic. Most of the
people I talked to felt a little better for having talked to me, I
think, and I felt better having talked to them. Answering machines, no
answers, disconnecteds and the three busies moved me further down my ten
pages of list, but didn't make me feel better.
And even though I didn't need a reminder, I got one that phone
solicitation is dreadfully difficult, work that weighs on one's psyche.
This was better than most: not quite a cold call, not really
"solicitation" (as defined in some legal document), closer to associates
calling one another, asking for help with something that offers mostly
invisible, internal rewards. Maybe it was even building community in a
little way. Not such a bad thing to do.
And for the next few callers that get through the AG's screen, I'll be
a little more gentle, a little more pleasant to the person
on the other end of the line, even if I don't care for the business.
2.Oct.2001
Southwest Airlines CEO James F. Parker: "We are willing to
suffer some damage, even to our stock price, to protect the jobs
of our people." There's a refreshing sound bite!
Talking about firms that are laying off people,
Yahoo's DailyNews:
"Dell -- which was the only firm, out of 10 leading technology and
e-commerce companies that made significant job cuts earlier this year, to
respond to requests for an interview -- said its layoffs were one part of
an overall strategy to control operating expenses...." Their
representative "told the E-Commerce Times that the job cuts have not
hindered the company's ability to stay competitive."
Outside observers are not so sanguine:
"When you cut people you are losing intellectual capital, you're affecting
your reputation, you are penalizing future recruitment efforts, and that is
not going to be felt in the short-term pursuit of financial gain over the
next quarter," Gartner vice president and research director Diane Tunick
Morello said. "That's not rocket science."
Excellent discussion of security measures resulting from 9-11, and
what good they may or may not do, in the latest
crypto-gram.
Signs of snake-oil: "new and unproven security measures, no real threat
analysis, unsubstantiated security claims." And the cost is the
unnecessary sacrifice of personal freedom. The reference implementation
is
El
Al's and we're not paying attention to what they've done which is
demonstrably effective.
Slate's
rundown on the reasonableness of what's happened so far is succinct.)
The section on
regulating
cryptography is especially worth reading: "As more and more of our
nation's critical infrastructure goes digital, we need to recognize
cryptography as part of the solution and not as part of the problem."
Lots of references for additional reading.
How can you help? Speak about the issues. Write to your elected
officials. Contribute to organizations working on these issues.
This week the United States Congress will act on the most sweeping
proposal to extend the surveillance authority of the government since
the end of the Cold War. If you value privacy and live in the U.S.,
there are three steps you should take before you open your next email
message:
1. Urge your representatives in Congress to protect privacy.
- Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
- Ask to be connected to the office of your Congressional
representative.
- When you are put through, say "May I please speak to the staff member
who is working on the anti-terrorism legislation?" If that person is
not available to speak with you, say "May I please leave a
message?"
- Briefly explain that you appreciate the efforts of your representative
to address the challenges brought about by the September 11th tragedy,
but it is your view that it would be a mistake to make any changes in
the federal wiretap statute that do not respond to "the immediate
threat of investigating or preventing terrorist acts."
2. Go to the
In Defense of Freedom web
site and endorse the statement.
3. Forward this message to at least five other people.
We have less than 100 hours before Congress acts on legislation that
will (a) significantly expand the use of Carnivore, (b) make computer
hacking a form of terrorism, (c) expand electronic surveillance in
routine criminal investigations, and (d) reduce government
accountability.
Please act now.
01.10.01
One of those binary days - five more coming this year, then an 8+ year
wait.
More (threats of) terror in NY.
"This is how it is because this is how it has to be," said one
law-enforcement official.
"This is a police
state now."
With the president of Pakistan
speculating about what's next in Afghanistan, I'm wondering how
likely the boasts of being able to beat another superpower are. Last
time, they had us helping them. In the new world order, Russia's
on our side now.
The FTC cleans up some of the
scum on the web. Sounds good to me!
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Thursday, 01-Nov-2001 18:17:26 MST
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