Posts From January 2003

{04:34 PM} There was once no rewind button
William Gibson: We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
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{02:21 PM} Schwarzkopf Not So Keen on Another War
Washington Post: Desert Caution.

[Norman Schwarzkopf] says he hasn't seen enough evidence to convince him that his old comrades Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz are correct in moving toward a new war now. He thinks U.N. inspections are still the proper course to follow. He's worried about the cockiness of the U.S. war plan, and even more by the potential human and financial costs of occupying Iraq.

...

He contrasts Cheney's low profile as defense secretary during the Gulf War with Rumsfeld's frequent television appearances since Sept. 11, 2001. "He almost sometimes seems to be enjoying it." That, Schwarzkopf admonishes, is a sensation to be avoided when engaged in war.

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{10:47 AM} Information Overload
CNET: Do cell phones blind drivers?

"We found that when people are on the phone, the amount of information they are taking in is significantly reduced," he said of the study, the results of which will be published in the March edition of the American Psychology Association's Journal of Experimental Society: Applied. "People were missing things, like cars swerving in front or sudden lane changes. We had at least three rear-end collisions."

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{12:16 AM} Networked Information Applications
Over at Boxes and Arrows, David Heller writes HTML's Time is Over. Let's Move On.

Ultimately, I don't see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution. It is a misapplied tool that was never meant to be used for anything other than distributed publishing.

I've been developing web applications for a few years now. Always spending time deciding what to leave in. What to leave out. Trying to get the most useful things working for the most users. The end stages are always frustrating and time consuming. "Browsers are getting better" becomes a mantra of sorts. More and more, it's working less.

The internet has already changed the amount of data we receive and it's still growing. New tools are needed to manage and share and make sense of it all. The quick answer has been to build them into our primary means of receiving all that new data - The browser.

The problem is that these tools need to make complexity appear simple. Otherwise they're just adding to the overload. Even if you stick to a single browser on a single OS, the current state of DHTML falls short. Making it work for most everyone is a technical rarity. The lack of proper standard adherence is only partially to blame. There's a fundamental flaw in building these applications browser side. The load and refresh manor of moving through pages makes transparently manipulating and managing data nearly impossible.

So why not use desktop applications? The list is long. Notably, they aren't ubiquitous. They need to be downloaded and installed. You can't be sure that the coffee shop around the corner is going to have all your favorite net apps installed. Even if they did, they rarely work well in a one off situation for multiple users. There's too much configuration needed.

Maybe the best solution is two tiered? Leave the web for quick, feature limited accessibility... While a desktop application handles the heavy lifting.

I'm already using a similar setup with .Mac. Most of the time, I read my mail in a desktop application. It filters, spellchecks, and highlights. It even tells me when the sender of a message is on AIM. When I'm away from my computer, I use the web interface. It doesn't do any of those things. But thanks to iSync and IMAP mailboxes all my messages/folders and contacts are available online. All the basic functionality is right there... in a simple, quick interface. It works great. I've never needed more. Or been slowed down/denied access by having too much.

It's easy to see the same model applied to other forms of digital data. Or even that model used to start blurring the distinction between varieties of that data... There's more than a fair amount of possibility.

Somebody start building.
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{07:09 PM} And I Want My Unicorn Back
A couple of nights ago, I went to see Movern Callar with Gomen. It's a movie about a fairly ordinary Scottish girl's process of finding herself. Told through the story of a boyfriend who commits suicide, a novel with a changed author, a holiday to Spain, and a few little crawly bugs now and again. I loved it. The pacing is slow... going long stretches with no dialog what so ever. Only a single sound of a scene, amplified (such as the click of heels on asphalt, during an early morning walk home from a party). The shots are close and lingering... filled with soft lights and strange shapes. It's all very surreal. And sticks in your head like only something that abstract can. I look forward to seeing it a second time.

Now the state of the union is on. So I've been reminded by online pals. Even if i had television to watch, I'd skip it. We've long since passed the point of any legitimate public discourse. Question after question has been posed. None will be answered. Only alluded to in that vague sort of way that satisfies anyone who doesn't really want to think about it (read: news media). Every sentence he says is meant to manipulate. Including the carefully practiced pauses for applause.

I'd rather spend my time with something of value.
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{12:41 AM} Kind of like the Dirty South if OutKast was comprised of Edgar Allan Poe and Dorothy Allison
Anticon finally receives a quality write up: anticon WIRE (Nov 2002) feature by Peter Shapiro. [via: goldtoe]
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{02:42 PM} Approval Timeline
Nice chart of Bush's approval rating (in all the major polls) from the start of his term through January.
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{03:10 PM} Full Coverage
Easily view 169 newspaper front pages, daily. [via k10k]
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{02:32 PM} It's War! Boo!
Note to Rep. Charles Rangel: Anti-War scare tactics are still scare tactics.
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{01:37 PM} Fate: Judged
A Table of the World's Major Religions.
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{12:18 AM} Lane Photos
Finally, pictures from Lanes visit are online.

Many more will be posted... following her eventual return.

I can't wait.
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{01:13 AM} Clear Explanations and Vivid Illustrations
Last week, everything broke at once. Computers. DSL. Even a toilet. If it wasn't mine, it was other peoples fix it please. If it wasn't that, it was something else... Like loosing Gigabytes of un-replaceable data.

This week can kick in any time now.
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{12:54 PM} Hip Hip Horray
DSL is back on!
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{04:43 PM} DSL Update
Someone from Covad came by this morning. Seem's it's Pac Bell's fault. They didn't do the cross connect. A trouble ticket was opened with them. I've now got trouble tickets at 3 different place. Averaging considerably more than 24 hours between each. A few days wait for someone to tell me it's somebody else's fault. Call and repeat. All for $60 a month. It's no wonder broadband still hasn't taken off... and folks are going out of business.
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{01:54 AM} "We Will Call by the End of Today, Promise."
My DSL is still broken. Speakeasy is big on wasting my time, small on fixing things. I'm using the modem on my Cube for the first time ever. Works like a charm. If a charm was something that inched ever so slowly along the ground, stopping at every crack to build up enough courage to cross it. ...And wouldn't allow you to take phone calls.

My less than a year old 15" apple studio display is acting flakey too. I get funny glitchy lines all over the place. Sometimes it goes away. Sometimes the whole screen stops drawing. Computers are not my friend. At least not this week.

In non computer news, I miss snow.
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{07:06 PM} opend COvad tt
My DSL is broken. I don't know why. Neither does anyone else. Maybe it'll be fixed by Noon tomorrow.... maybe not. In the meantime, dial-up is miserable. I need to read a book.
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{10:13 AM} Daily Zen Comes Through Again
There’s no time for confused thoughts.
Practice the meaning of single-mindedness.
Buddha isn’t found by searching.
Look at the characteristic of your mind.
Generally, faith is like spring mist at first.
Be brave at the vanishing point

- Godrakpa (1170-1249)
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{09:00 PM} What to do about nothing?
According to iTunes, I have 2100 songs (with a playing time of 6 days, 1 hour, and 45 minutes)... plus piles of cds that haven't made it onto a hard drive. I can't find anything to match my current mood.

It's been a long week. Not in the bad sense. Just in the never ending one. I've been stretched and pressed in all manors of directions. Some good. Some bad. Full of things to think about. Pieces of persons placed inside of me. Worn a bit down.

If it was sunny, I could spend the afternoon with trees. Regrouping. Instead it rains, or makes raining faces. I sit inside.... Looking forward to the comfort that comes when she calls.
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{11:05 PM} Rob Was Here
Sometimes you wake up in the morning to find you're spending the next two days with a surprise houseguest, his own brother, a few bars, old friends, and your sink gets pulled off the bathroom wall. Despite the home repairs, it sure does beat waking up and going to the laundromat.


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{10:33 PM} The runner up is... money.
CNet News: Spiritual Web draws U.S. holiday crowds

The Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that surfers were more likely to turn to the Web for matters of the spirit and society than they were for commercial activities during the holiday season.

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{01:08 PM} Core Simplicity
Jason Kottke asks Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?

Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data? Using Watson to find movie times is great, but it means having a separate application running...and for ticket purchases, it dumps me back into a web browser anyway. Apple's Sherlock app offers functionality similar to Watson. Why not merge Sherlock and Safari into one application?

He has some intresting mock-ups of the combined application... but it would violate Apple's number one goal. Speed. A browser with Sherlock integrated wouldn't start up and run nearly as fast as Safari does. Speed is extremely important. A web browser gets used multiple times per day. As such, the more transparent it's operation, the happier the user will be. Sherlock is great... but (for most people) it's not something that gets used everyday. Adding it's overhead to the browser isn't worth the minor gain in convenience.

I do agree that spawning a web browser from apps like Sherlock and NetNewsWire is clunky and annoying. What I'd really like to see, are hooks to easily embed the Safari rendering engine into other applications. You've been able to do this in windows for some time (ex: Newzcrawler shows full stories in an embedded IE pain). It works really well. Developers have the freedom to create unique interfaces, that cater to the specific ways their users view specific sets of information... Rather than making the web browser (and therefore all users) conform to a wide variety of information needs.
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{04:59 PM} Meddling with Safari
Michael Tsai has instructions for removing Safari's brushed metal interface.
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{03:31 PM} The tragedy of SUVs
Alternet: Bumper Mentality, by Stephanie Mencimer.

The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars – 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of rollover; 62 percent of SUV deaths in 2000 occurred in rollover accidents. SUVs don't handle well, so drivers can't respond quickly when the car hits a stretch of uneven pavement or "trips" by scraping a guardrail. Even a small bump in the road is enough to flip an SUV traveling at high speed. On top of that, SUV roofs are not reinforced to protect the occupants against rollover; nor does the government require them to be.

...

Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his 2-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.

...

While failing to protect their occupants, SUVs have also made the roads more dangerous for others. The "kill rate," as Bradsher calls it, for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken. Government researchers have found that a behemoth like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe.

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{12:12 PM} No Dairy Needed
A visual guide to making fresh coconut milk.
Present by: Mr. Jason Goldman, Mr. Aaron Fagerstrom, and Mr. Jason Sutter.
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{12:05 AM} How The West Was Paved

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{03:12 PM} Apple X11
What apple didn't announce during the keynote today, was Apple's own X11 implementation. Quartz enabled, with an Aqua like window manager. The beta is available now. This means anyone with X11 apps, should be able to run them much faster. Bye-bye MS Office... Hello OpenOffice.
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{12:08 PM} First Impressions
Some quick impressions of Apples new web browser, Safari:

Pluses:
• It's fast!
• The UI is very simple and clean and useable
• There are shortcut keys for blocking pop-ups and clearing cache
• You can block pop-ups
• You can block cookies from third party sites
• Bookmark management is really nice
• It's fast!!
• Text size can be changed for pixel defined text

Minuses:
• No tabs!
• No divider lines/spaces/anything for bookmarks
• Doesn't like simple sizing/positioning javascript
• Lots of little javascript mathy stuff doesn't work
• No bookmark import from Mozilla/Chimera
• No smart form fields
• Popup window bookmarklets don't work (blogThis)... regardless of blocking setting

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{11:19 PM} There is already some human space here
First Steven Johnson got one. Now William Gibson finally has a blog (and it's using Blogger). If only Kobe Abe could somehow set up an RSS feed from beyond the grave, I'd be complete.
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{09:38 PM} With cute little jelly beans and a mad scientist to boot.
Sega is offering classic Genisis titles over RealPlayer. It's about time. Emulators have been nearly perfect for years, but you have to spend hours/days/weeks/forever hunting down ROM files online. I'd gladly pay a small fee to avoid the hassle.

At least, I would if it worked on MacOS.
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{08:53 PM} Photographia
Lane has a photo blog: pink elephants!
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{01:53 PM} You Show Me Your Documents and I'll Show You Mine
Ev's been drinking and thinking about blogs...

Sometimes I'm fascinated by this idea of "posting" things to a "web site." Mostly, when I've been drinking. But it's still weird. Don't you think?

Which reminds me of an old post on Corndog... it's a document collecting document. Blogs, such as the internal Pyra blog, are dynamic documentation of a company. A collected history, presented from a variety of view points. This is what we've done. This is what we're doing. This is what we like. This is what we don't. This is who we are. All coming from posts to a website. Edits to a document... Links to other documents created in the same fashion. This very website is documentation of me. All the documents here and the links to documents there, relate to me.

Remember when documents where just pieces of paper whose only relationship was maybe a paper clip, and maybe a folder, and maybe a drawer in a filing cabinet? And very few people knew what was in them? It wasn't that long ago.

This posting to a website stuff is something different. And something good. And something just getting started... Why don't different types of documents play better together? Why can't they figure out simple relationships on their own? Why are they so hard to search? Why does it take so much effort, to document a company or yourself or your interests? Why are we interested in any of these things, in the first place?

Fascinating is a very good word.
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{11:46 AM} Freedom From Unconscious Impulse
Not going, not coming,
Rooted, deep and still
Not reaching out, not reaching in
Just resting, at the center
A single jewel, the flawless crystal drop
In the blaze of its brilliance
The way beyond.


- Shih-te (c. 730)
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{01:02 AM} I am a minor character in my own story.
I just saw 24 Hour Party People, for a second time. I love a movie about good music.... even more so when that music is put in a proper frame... even if the movie is really mostly about Tony Wilson. 24 Hour fits that bill. And then some.

On the way there, and back, I sat near the same girl on the bus. She wasn't at the movie. San Francisco has a habit of being a small town like that. Yet, it's still a big city. Evident by the fact that I recognized her, she recognized me, and neither of us said hello. The risk of clingy crazy is too much of a chance to take at midnight when you just want to get home... quietly.

So home I am. It's late and friends I haven't seen in much too long are coming tomorrow. I should be in bed. Instead I trade typed pitter patters across the length of an entire country. With a wonderful lady nice enough to wait up wonder wishing for something more. If only there was a technology to cure time zones...
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{02:33 PM} Hello, My Name's Driftwood
Our new roommate, Heather, started moving in today. Out with the old rugs, in with the new. It's a bit weird to give a stranger a key to your house. Not that she's strange. I like her. What little I know... and thats the weird part. Becoming friends with someone, in your house. Their house, even.

It's something different...
And should be very interesting.
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{11:54 PM} She wants neo soul cause hip hop is old
I push my seed somewhere deep in her chest
I push it naked cause I've takin my test
Deliverin' Mary it don't matter the sex
I'm gonna name it rock'n roll.

If I were you, I'd find a copy of the new Roots album, Phrenology. If you were me, you'd check out their newish site and tell your friends how pretty it is.

That guy you saw me talking to was your boss... I tried to put a spell on him, but his soul was illiterate.
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{10:13 PM} Kids Taste Less
Harrisonburg City Schools - Lunch Choices I don't think the lunches were this bad where I went to high school. Then again, I mostly ate Pepsi and Fritos. I may have missed all the 'grey meatball drowning in it's own filth' days.
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{08:16 PM} Rain.Stop:Sun.Shine

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{07:04 PM} Are You Experienced?
Matt Jones details the design process behind the new (and very good) BBC homepage. [via Ordinary-Life]

We believe that the resulting page will feel familiar to our existing users, but through digital patina, balanced design and excellent functionality, we also believe we have given it soul.

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{11:47 AM} Freedom of the Press
Geov Parrish's annual overhyped and underreported stories of the year. It's been a long one...

Now, that same trivia is mixed in with active disinformation being cynically fed out by politicians from the White House down, self-interested corporations, and media that could know better if it only dared rock a boat now and then. As a result, two-thirds of Americans in a recent poll were reported to believe that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. That's a combination of a cynical and extraordinarily effective propaganda campaign, and corporate reporters not doing their job -- or at least, not the job they're supposed to be doing.

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{10:52 AM} A New Years Coming - It Looks Just Like Me
Following Grant Hutchinson's lead, I'm forgoing resolutions in favor of reflections. These are some things I noticed last year:

• Everyone is a bit crazy.
• The difference is in how hard they try to hide it.
• A challenging job with responsibility can be tiring.
• An easy job with nearly no responsibility can be numbing.
• I don't want to be numb.
• The Internet is finally getting a little older.
• Blogs are very young.
• Friendship comes from the strangest of places.
• Life is what you let it do with you.
• It always comes back to love.

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