Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Friday, July 22, 2005
SECURITY: Gah. You know, I realize terrorism is scary but for pete's sake, let's not all lose our minds. NY cops are now going to start searching random people's bags on the subway. All in the name of "stopping terrorists." This post by Bruce Schneier is, as usual, a good and sober commentary on the issue. He and the commentors below the post make some excellent points.
Beyond all the other problems with this scheme, none of which are small, people are missing one important fact about terror bombings. The point of a bombing on a subway is not to blow up the subway, it's to kill people. If I have a bag with a bomb in it and a cop stops me right at the entrance to the subway, why wouldn't I just blow the bomb right there? There will be lots of people around because a cop randomly searching people will cause a backup and a crowd just by being there. Plus I get the benefit of closing down the entrance to the subway for an unknown period while they repair any damage. And if I get through, which is the far more likely senario, I still get to blow up the bomb wherever I want.
Once again this is a pointless measure that puts us one more step down the road toward a police state.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
HISTORY: Wow, I've known about The Wayback Machine for a long time but never thought it would have my old website in it. Well, it does. Here's a view of my old personal site (not a blog, an actual old-school personal website) from New Mexico Tech, circa 1998. This isn't the first site I had up or even the first version of that particular site but it's the first one they have. Not all of the images are there so some of the (at the time) fancy stuff doesn't work but it's mostly intact. Awesome.
TERROR: More bombings in London today. These ones didn't seem to be very successful, though, thankfully. After 9/11 I always said that if the terrorists were really smart about terror, they wouldn't have crashed all the planes in one day. They would have one (maybe two to hit both World Trade Center towers) and then waited, then struck again, and again. The best way to cause real terror and affect a society is extended, small campaigns. Look at Israel. They have bombings there almost weekly it seems. Hitting somebody once doesn't cause terror. It might cause anger or fear, but terror is a different beast.
A more benign example is movies. The Exorcist is a movie of terror. It's slow, crawling, shadowing horror. Something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a terror movie. It's a scare movie. The 9/11 attacks were horrible, but they didn't cause long-lasting terror in people, except maybe in NY. Bombings in random places killing dozens week after week would cause terror because it's unknown. You wouldn't know where to go to be safe. The damage to the economy if people started staying home en masse would be terrible, for sure. Of course the next step would be bombing random homes so that even that ultimate sanctuary isn't safe. But who knows if these people are thinking long-term. Who knows if these aren't just copycats?
MORALS: This is a great article by Hal Crowther about the irony-free and morals-free Bush administration. One of the best, most hard-hitting, articles I've seen recently. It touches on the administration, John Bolton, the press, and the relentless attack on the poor and middle class. Great, great, stuff and not one of the typical shrill attack pieces that pretend to be authoritative but just end up sounding whiny. Crother has his act together.
Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
BOOKS: Good article on the value of books in school and life. One quote that mentions something I see talked about quite a bit but always gives me the willies:
Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim.
I just cannot fathom never having read a book and not having them around. I remember watching the first time Oprah Winfrey did her book club. There were women on the show who hadn't read a book in decades. The very idea freaks me out. My 3 year old daughter has more books on her shelf than some adult homes I've been in. Don't people think it's weird when somebody mentions a new book or they see somebody reading and they have to think "Hmm, I should do that sometime"?
Even if you only read one book a year, at least do that. Read in the bathroom, on your lunch break, before bed, whenever you have the chance. Even if it's 10 minutes 3 times a week and you think you'll never finish because you read slowly, who cares. Nobody is grading you. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody in a bookstore. Tell them you like X and Y movies. They'll have a suggestion. Ask a librarian. Heck, ask somebody else in the library. Choose something random off the 'New Books' shelf at the library. I used to do that every time I went and I found some of my favorite books that way (Red Earth and Pouring Rain being my all-time favorite random find and one of my all-time favorite books period).
Just read.
MOVIES: Tim O'Reilly points to an article on The Big Picture blog about something I talked about a week or so ago, the declining state of movie theaters. He focusses on the increasing number of advertisements at the beginning of movies nowadays. I don't know if they're talking about regular TV ads or movie trailers, I've never seen a regular TV style ad (besides the ones for Fandango at the Century theaters) in the movies. I like the trailers, personally, but I sure would be pissed if I had to sit through ads for Ford or whatever after paying for my ticket. I fast forward commercials on TV for a reason, they suck. The first time I have to watch a regular commercial before a movie will be the last time.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
MEDIA: If you want to see the future of media, check this out. I don't know who this is (yet) but I'm sure it wasn't made by a corporation or an old-school news media entity. This is the power of cheap, powerful tools. With a digital camcorder, a web server, and in this case some Flash these people put out a very powerful, very real video commentary. Welcome to the 21st century.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
STUPID: Dell is stupid.
That link is Doc Searls's note (although the link text above is my wording, not his) about how Dell shut down its Customer Support Forum because people were using it to bitch about Dell's apparently horrible customer service of late. The point of his post is that while they have shut down their forum, the move is sort of a fingers-in-the-ears-yelling-blah-blah-blah move because people have many other forums in which to complain about Dell. Instead of dealing with the issues or at least trying to contain the blast radius of people's complaints, they've drawn attention to it and spread the fire all over the internet.Eventually people will learn but until then, it's very frustrating to deal with these clueless companies. I always build my own computers because I know the only idiot that's going to piss me off in that case is me.
My only dealing with Dell support was when a server went up in smoke here at work (literally) and they told us our Gold service contract only got us a 2-week turnaround on a new server. After speaking to multiple people about it, being told nothing could be done, and us getting us good and pissed off, a new server arrived in 3 days.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
POLITICS: The press finally gets some balls and presses the President's press secretary on something.
"You're in a bad spot here, Scott" - Salon.com
Finally. It's nice to see these idiots doing their jobs and not taking any crap from the White House for once. Of course the issue is being pushed by them as "You told us all lies and now our feelings are hurt so you're going to pay" rather than, "You lied to the American people and should be out on your asses." Oh well, I'll take what I can get. I've said for awhile that the way these people were going to be taken down was toppled by their own arrogance and hubris. And with Bush's approval numbers hovering just slightly above mine, I'd say the time has come.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
MOVIES:
As Ian Mohr writes, last year studios waited about four and a half months before bringing out a movie on DVD. That number has been decreasing since, and "one studio chief predicts it could dwindle to just two months, or even fewer for box-office flops."
All I can say is: Please do this. Of course, it will mean the death of stupid movie theaters but that's fine. Theaters need to realize that they need to sell a premium product, rather than thinking that their product (watching a movie in the theater) is the best thing around by default. Theaters are too expensive (it cost almost $20 for me, Kim, and Allison to go to a matinee last weekend!), and the big thing is that they don't care if you have a good movie experience. I've never seen somebody kicked out of the theater for anything, even after complaints were made. If they put out movies on DVD a month after theatrical release, people will stop going to the theaters unless they can get good service, a better experience, better food, something that sets it apart. The theater is dead, long live the theater.
Friday, July 08, 2005
CIVILIZATION: I was listening to a talk Stewart Brand did for the Long Now Foundation and I had an idea about cities and civilization. I don't know if it's new or not but it's interesting. Basically, civilization is about information storage and cities are storage devices. The reason nomadic tribes don't have much civilization is that they have nowhere to store information except their own heads. All the old oral stories and traditions are information storage. When you settle down and have a house, you can store more information. You can keep books, scrolls, whatever, but you can also just have information like what kind of a house do you have, what art do you put up, things like that. Do all the members have individual houses or does everybody live in a giant house? That's important information. The more information you can store, the more civilization you can have. Once you have enough people and a town, you can have libraries and schools, massive information storage. A city is the center of civilization because of the amount of information stored per area. A skyscraper can store many times as much information as a single house in the same land area. How this will change when we can store all human knowledge in a chip the size of a fingernail (it's coming, don't doubt it), I have no idea. I think as long as we have enough bandwidth, I think it'll make all areas possible centers of civilization because anyone, anywhere will be able to share in the effects that right now only cities bring. So if you're sad about the death of the rural area, just wait, people will move back as soon as the bandwidth moves out there and bring access to the information.
Jarod Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel (soon to be a must-watch PBS miniseries) tells about why some cultures dominated others and it almost all comes down to geography. Here's how I think that fits in with my theory. Diamond says that certain cultures got agriculture because of their geography. This allowed them to settle down, make houses, and start storing information in mass quantities. More people, more agriculture, more information, more civilization. It's a cycle. With more information, you can make more information. People start putting ideas together, making discoveries, inventing things. Agriculture leads to settling, which starts the information storage cycle.
One of the things Stewart Brand talked about is manufactured housing in England. His idea was you just put up the houses and as long as you don't have covenants or rules about what people can do with their houses (like we have so much of here), you'll get real culture and not just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses. People bring their information, their culture, and transform the area. If people aren't allowed to bring their culture because the convenants and neighborhood associations want everything the same, you get less information storage and the area just stays an ugly real estate development, not a place for people to live in.
Like I say, I don't know if it's obvious or not but I've been thinking about it.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
LIFE: I just turned 27 and for various reasons I've been thinking about how to go about making a life. I never used to think about the future, other than in an abstract way. I never thought about my own future. I was with some people recently who are older than me, around 35 I think. I started wondering what they had actually done with their lives. I think they'd say they've done a lot but I don't see it. All I see are people whose lives are (maybe) half over and who have done nothing other than work and have some hobbies, some relationships, buy some stuff. Then I saw a lady I used to work with working the checkout at Walgreens and I'm sure she's in her late 50s, if not older. What I've realized in thinking about life is that I don't want to go out like that. I never used to consider going out and doing something, I always pretty much went with the flow, did whatever came along that fit my preferences, not my goals because I didn't have any. I've already done something I'm proud of, that is build SpinnNet up from a small modem-only ISP to a good sized DSL, wireless, etc. company wit many times more customers. Plus we've got Allison, who will undoubtedly be way smarter than me and go on to do a lot with the world she'll grow up in. I've recently started working on a website I think could be very cool and a comic book publisher I want to work with is having a Talent Search so I've been working on getting some scripts to them. I don't want to go with the flow on my life any more. I don't want to wonder what I've done at 35. I want to make something of my family's life so Allison and the new baby have more than just parents who work all day. My parents are working on building their own house on their own land, that's something important. The next century is going to have more change in it than the past millenium, I can feel it. My kids are going to grow up in a world as radically different from the one my parents grew up in as my parent's world was different from George Washington's. Kim is always talking about not just running in the rat race and living paycheck to paycheck and I always agreed but in an 'Ok, now what' kind of way. I'm on board now though, we're going to start pushing toward that, whatever I can do.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
MOVIES: I noticed something funny about the ads for the new Fantastic Four movie and an ad I saw today is a perfect example. Here's a picture of Jessica Alba's character from the actual movie:
Invisible Woman (from the movie)
And here's the ad I saw today:
Invisible Woman (the advertisement)
Notice anything about her costume? I thought it was bad when the studio that made King Arthur Photoshopped Keira Knightley's chest up 2 cup sizes for the posters but this is just dumb.
CYCLING: I finally got my new road bike out of lay-away over the weekend. In short, it rocks. It's a Giant OCR3, sort of their upper-low-end bike. I got it on sale for $500, a good price for a road bike that isn't just junk but still enough to make me feel a little bad about spending that much money. The cost helps motivate me to actually use it to lose weight and get healthier though. It's has some nice components, although being totally new to having a nice bike I don't know much about them. My other bike is a mountain bike I got from my friend James who upgraded to a $1200 model. He probably had $1000 in it before he gave it to me, making it one hell of a gift. I owe him Chilacas burritos for life. I took it out for a 28 mile ride along the beautiful Bosque trail and it was great. I got going up to almost 20mph immediately, even into the wind. James and my other friend Walter are big mountain bikers but I like to put my headphones on and just zip along. I do like the trails but I'm enough out of shape that I worry too much about falling, which in New Mexico means falling into cactus if you're not lucky. I'll get there though. Our new house is 5 minutes from the foothills of the Sandia mountains so I can get out there and ride some nice, somewhat easy trails to build my stamina.
COMICS:
“I remember thinking that I wanted to draw the most awesome comic ever,” [Becky] Cloonan told Newsarama.I <heart> Becky Cloonan.
Click here for an interview with Becky about her new comic. And if you're smart, you'll read the book she did with Brian Wood, DEMO.
Friday, July 01, 2005
BUSINESS: I'm working on a new website I'm going to try to turn into a real money-making business for myself. I tried to get a business site going before but it didn't work out for various reasons. This thing I think has real legs. Plus it doesn't involve me selling it face-to-face to a small audience like the other site. This blog entry by one of the founders of Excite is something I've been thinking about. He's talking about how cheap it is to start a company these days. Of course, he's saying cheap is $100,000. My definition of cheap is like $400 for a server. That's what I'm hoping to do. I can get a heck of a server for $400 these days. Running Linux, Apache, mod_perl, and rolling my own code I can make a server work for a pretty heavy load for almost no money. Once I get enough load to need another server, I want to have the site earning it's keep. I'll have more details about the site coming soon but I have to say, if you're building a site and you're a perl programmer - use Mason.