July 30, 2004
Credential swapping. Those inbred "security" jerks shut down my entire city in the name of security and then did this!?
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July 29, 2004
After making the mistake of watching the second half of Kerry's speech—I broke my rule of not watching political types deliver anything on TV—I can only emphasize how thankful I am for The Daily Show.
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Paul G. on why your narrator is not improving as a programmer:
One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them.
That quote from a section called
Nasty Little Problems. Have fun.
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July 27, 2004
David Rees updated everything (although it's super slow at the moment) just in time for what Bonnie at work begs everyone to stop calling "the DNC."
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Adam (not the one from yesterday; the other Adam) sends the following important hoax warning, from which I've stripped several dozen email addresses:
Okay, I hate hoax warnings, but this one is important:
Please send this to everyone on your e-mail list.
If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a survey and
asks you to show him your ass, DO NOT show him your ass. This is a
SCAM!!!!!!! He only wants to see your ass. I wish I'd gotten this yesterday.
I feel so stupid and cheap.
Now you know.
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Best line from Wag the Dog: "We need a song."
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July 26, 2004
Happy birthday, Adam.
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July 23, 2004
After seeing several of these things while commuting lately I decided to check out the actual mileage specs on the Toyota Prius. We rented one of these things when we were in California last month and found it to feel bigger inside than the big station wagon we own that burns 2.5x more fuel. The Prius would have been $2,000 cheaper, not counting another couple thousand dollars in tax breaks for having a snazzy Car of the Future, and had at least as much power as our Subaru. So check this out. We got exactly what mileage the EPA said we would get out of the thing, which is 51 highway and 60 city (yes, it is supposed to, and does, get better mileage when it creeps along in traffic than flying down the highway). It has an 11.9 gallon gas tank. That means that the damn thing goes between 600 and 700 miles on one tank of gas. My slow, trafficky, 11.5-mile commute means that I would be able to drive to work and back about 30 times per tank. Try to wrap your head around that. Assuming weekend travel equivalent to driving to work and back each day—not an unreasonable assumption—that means filling the gas tank once a month.
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In what's probably the best use of Flash I've ever seen, the Times has a super cool electoral map to explore, the highlight of which is the ability to switch back and forth between an electoral map, in which the states are sized proportionally to the number of electors they send to the electoral college, and a normal geographic map. The animation back and forth is really pretty neat.
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I categorically deny telling Lib that she needed to trim her hair. (I don't deny that she needed to—I just don't remember saying so. Alas.)
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July 22, 2004
Man, I had totally forgotten about suck.com. Apparently now it's called Plastic.
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So the television is playing a Hootie and The Blowfish song in attempt to sell me a luxury SUV. This is not America at its best. Perhaps driving fewer SUV's should have been one of these long-awaited recommendations, available in many formats and from several sources.
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In Omaha, local reporters just say "No" to Wolfowitz background request: "A reporter never knows what resistance to authority will get him unless he resists."
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Former Howard Dean campaign manager and generally interesting guy Joe Trippi talking about where-to-go-from-here type stuff.
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July 21, 2004
It's really too bad I can't stay up until 11:30 most nights anymore, because Futurama is on just about every night. Man, what an excellent show:
Professor: Good news everyone!
Bender: I don't like the sound of this...
Professor: You're all off to Trisol, a planet with three suns...
Bender: Here it comes...
Professor: ...Deep in the heart of the Forbidden Zone!
Bender: Thank you and goodnight. (Drinks.)
Leela: Uh, Professor, are we even allowed in the Forbidden Zone?
Professor: Why, of course! It's just a name, like the Death Zone or the Zone of No Return. All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror.
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Let the games begin. Real live stories of Olympic athletes partying and screwing around like, uh, kids... "I went to a party thrown by Sports Illustrated magazine with my roommate, Jud Logan [an American hammer thrower]. We got pretty shit-faced and ended up wrestling in the street. Jud picks me up and just body-slams me - damn near knocks me out. Anyway, the next thing I know we’re in some girl’s hotel room. She worked for Speedo." Better yet, "Being at the village is like taking your place in a wild anatomical parade seen nowhere else on the planet."
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This guy has constructed an unbelievably neat animated map of his bike ride from Marina Bay (here in Quincy) to Provincetown, out at the end of Cape Cod. If the animation, constructed from GPS data, apparently, is to be believed, then he braved some astonishingly busy roads, including highways that I don't even like to drive a big, heavy car on. Have fun and try to imagine the scenery.
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July 20, 2004
July 19, 2004
Reading the whole article probably doesn't really repay the time you'd spend, but it's at least nice to see a mainstream news outlet noticing the dilemma about special education (as it's called) that I always used to wonder about back when I was in school:
...The realm of work is a universe away from the realm of education for those with A.D.D. In the public-school system, a child's diagnosis is like an admission ticket; districts are obligated to help students whose learning is impaired by their A.D.D. In the world of work, the burden is on the A.D.D. employee to help himself.
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Phil G.: "You would think that, at a minimum, the U.S. and W. would get credit from 'the Arab Street' for the continued existence of 'the Arab Street.'"
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July 15, 2004
Good lord, even Dark Overlord Henry Kissinger isn't sure that the Iraq war has made America safer. Wasn't this the kind of crazy liberal attitude that got Howard Dean, the best potential President we've seen in years, in so much trouble?
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The Onion: "The University of Michigan has become the 17th institution of higher learning to be implicated in the checks-for-degrees scandal rocking American campuses, representatives from the Department of Justice reported Tuesday." This is what happens when satire hits its target too squarely—one doesn't really laugh all that hard.
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I want an iPod for a lot of reasons, but here's another: to be a radio pirate just like Christian Slater. Nice. Super ultra bonus: ASCII rock videos accompanied by wicked cheezy Casio keyboard renditions of these classic rock tunes. Van Halen, The Who, and ZZ Top are extremely well covered, while the others kind of suck. Do not say that this space never did anything to totally fix whatever's wrong with your day.
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Everyone should watch The Daily Show's coverage of the Democrat's convention that's coming up in just about a week and a half. They're already leading up to it with Ed Helms reporting from the Free Speech Zone a decent fraction of a mile from the site of the convention itself. In the previews he celebrates his free speech by playing the penis game with a cop.
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Huck at work pointed this space to the coolest clock I've seen all week. Just try not to sit there and watch minutes tick by.
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Getting ideas on how to spruce up this space at the unbelievably neat CSS Zen Garden, where same HTML with different stylesheets produces wildly different results, including some of the prettiest (content-free) web pages I've seen.
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July 14, 2004
My previous laptop has finally died. It had been dropped at one point, thereby making the screen useless, but it lived on for another couple of years as a server sitting on the floor of the closet in the den. Now the hard drive has died, which is really kind of sad. Now I really need a new machine. Update: I've kind of recovered the machine by running the wonderfully-named fsck command manually. It stands for filesystem check, so get your mind out of the gutter.
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The big color conspiracy: "Nobody’s obliged to follow CMG’s lead; but a manufacturer who ignores them is likely to find that all his competitors’ products are in fashionably compatible colors, while his own clash."
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July 13, 2004
I like boingboing (in the sidebar) for a lot of reasons, but here's a new one: a gallery of pictures of people flipping off Hummer H2's. There are two or three houses in walking distance of mine whose occupants have one of these things, and I once had the pleasure of being nearly broadsided by one with my wife and baby in the car when the H2's driver failed to stop (after slowing down enough to give the opposite impression) at an intersection about a hundred yards from my house, dammit, at which he had a stop sign and I did not. The H2's bumpers are at approximately head level, and I hope that Hummer drivers are lightly injured in single-vehicle rollover accidents that total their crappy vehicles. Or at least that they suddenly feel ashamed to be driving them. It absolutely kills me that they use a Who song to sell them. Bonus: What is that truck trying to compensate for, anyway?
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July 12, 2004
Two new batches of baby pictures here and here. Wow, two batches of pictures and five posts to this silly website in one day: do I even have a job?
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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine: "One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company."
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Happy birthday, Barb.
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Another rabble-rousing movie to go see, this one about Fox News. Included apparently is a Fox memo instructing: "Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives." The movie uses a crapload of copyrighted footage from Fox, and so is receiving legal (and light promotional) assistance from Lawrence Lessig, one of this space's minor heroes.
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July 10, 2004
So they're closing down the highways but not bothering to make the city any more secure. Shouldn't they actually do one or the other? Pretty amazing, if this is to be believed, and I can verify that traffic still flows unabated all around the place.
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July 09, 2004
As we work on cranking out a new release of the software at work I've found ample opportunity to trot out the poetry of D. H. Rumsfeld. An edifying sample:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Seem literate while enjoying your friends' and colleagues' reactions to Rumsfeld's name!
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NASA: The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn site is really a nice site, with the latest cool pictures from Galileo's planet with handles, and descriptions of the images that aren't dumbed down too badly. Note in particular this excellent description of where the probe itself is. This is what happens when you let scientists do their own science reporting to a lay audience. And when you have scientists fidgeting nervously for five years while the spacecraft makes its way to Saturn to begin with. How better to pass the time than to exhaustively prepare for what you hope will be a successful insertion into orbit? Years of fun.
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July 08, 2004
Oops, I haven't posted any new baby pictures in a while, and am starting to receive heat. I'll work on it. Update: It's going to be Monday before this happens.
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July 06, 2004
Iraq's oil terminal in the Gulf looks like a scene from Waterworld, and is being guarded by a big piece of the US military: Obviously it's going to be a very prolonged operation."
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July 04, 2004
WiFi on the beach. Life, aside from the screaming baby who refuses to take a nap, is exceptionally good.
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July 02, 2004
Lib: "What I am looking forward to is being surprised by how fun it is!"
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Not sure why this is quite so "unexpected", but here's The Economist on how adaptive cruise control can massively reduce traffic jams.
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July 01, 2004
In a fit of missing its younger brothers and not caring about the fact that it's linking to naughty words this space presents you with an introduction to Wesley Willis complete with magic Wesley Willis lyrics generator. Find some MP3's and go listen. They're sublime. Rock and Roll McDonald's was in Super Size Me, which the three of us saw with the wife (in my case) and girlfriends (in theirs) a couple of weeks ago in lovely Marin County. It was nice. (Note that Wesley Willis died last year.) The Willis songs that have been stuck in my head since a couple of years ago tend not to have titles I'm willing to print.
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