What do you do when you get so frustrated with the middling, leveling side-effects of democracy - the averaging out that makes it impossible for more dramatic philosophical/political ideas ever to take hold? You get together with throngs of like-minded people and take over a state, swing the vote, and create your own legal utopia, that’s what you do.

A group of largely techno-libertarians are gathering forces right now to do just that, and it looks like they’re honing in on Delaware, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Alaska.

The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S. to secure there a free society. We will accomplish this by first reforming state law, opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for appropriate political autonomy. We will be a community of freedom-loving individuals and families, and create a shining example of liberty for the rest of the nation and the world.

The FAQ is a good read, and is revealing of some of the types of readers a project like this attracts, e.g. “Q. Why don’t we make common cause with white separatists?” and “Q. Why don’t we start shooting government agents?”

Trying to imagine spin-off organizations…. I wonder which state will get to host the bleeding heart liberal utopia? The Jerry Falwell utopia? The Camejo-Green utopia? The skate punk utopia… ?

But I should be careful throwing the utopia word around:

Q. Is the Free State Project some utopian power trip?

A. By no means. The Free State Project is ameliorative, not utopian. We’re not trying to create heaven on earth, just a sphere of liberty, a framework for individuals and families to make of their lives what they will.

–
Music: Ozric Tentacles :: Cat DNA

Mike Popovic has set up a communal blog for Danger hiptop users. The hiptop is this little Star Trek Communicator-type gadget with wireless networking, instant messaging, built-in camera, dinky keyboard, phone, entertainment apps, etc. They’re starting to market the hiptop as a way to blog from the road, photos and all.

“This communal weblog also converts into a personal weblog system for anyone participating - just click the {*} symbol in the title area of a post to get all posts by that author. AND, just to make things interesting, Ficus and I are organizing a Photo-Scavenger hunt for Halloween. Over 50 folks will be running around, taking pics and posting them to their team blogs (not yet public). right now, they are using the private team blogs to organize themselves into an actual team. i am pretty sure this is a first.”

Very cool. Almost enough to get me to consider a new gadget. Must… resist… temptation…
–
Music: Edith Piaf :: Mon Dieu

When Miles was born, he seemed to have lots of extra skin, like a puppy. Now he’s starting to grow into it, his legs and arms are pudging up. In fact his calves actually feel strong, with real muscle. And you can feel it when he sits with his legs on your belly — give him a little support under the armpits and he’ll push off with his legs, making his first instinctual moves toward standing. It’s amazing to see - he can barely hold his head up straight (although his neck is quickly getting stronger too) but he can damn near stand (but not balance) on his own.

Some images of Miles taken by Amy recently. I love the view through his Stim-mobile — he’s really taken a shine to it, quiets immediately when we lay him down to be changed. Fascinated with the high-contrast shapes and movement. He can watch this mobile turn for 10 or 15 minutes without getting bored.

Music: Stereolab :: Anamorphose

Just when it seemed like Palm intended only to forever mothball BeOS and all the Be engineering talent they bought, The Register reports that PalmOS 6 will be a genuine multitasking OS containing genuine chunks of BeOS code (rather than simply “inheriting DNA,” as Jean-Louis Gassee once said it would). ” Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft. ”

–
Music: Charles Mingus :: Haitian Fight Song

At the risk of stating the obvious, how long has it been since you saw the name Osama bin Laden in the news? When did we cancel the manhunt? Is it still going on? Funny how you don’t hear about it anymore. Oh, that’s right - finding Osama is much less important than assassinating the dictator of an irrelevant country that poses no threat to us.

–
Music: Barry White :: Love’s Theme

Am gratified at Yahoo!’s decision to move their systems gradually to PHP. I’m sick of hearing perl die-hards trying to fabricate reasons why Perl is for true hairy chests while PHP is only for slightly hairy chests. For purposes of server-side web scripting and database integration, both are equally capable, but PHP is far easier to learn, write, and maintain. I think the cabal of wizards want to keep their hats pointy by convincing the world that Perl is arcane because it’s more powerful.

–
Music: Sun Ra :: Sun Thoughts

Open house at the J-School today, prospective students swirling. Days like this, with all the enthusiasm, I am reminded why I wanted to come here.

Day was wrapped up with screening of some of the documentaries made in the TV/News departments over the past couple of years, one of which was “Switch on Bhutan” - Bhutan is a tiny country tucked into the Himalayas. A few years ago, its government decided to allow TV and Internet into the country, making it the last country on earth to get TV. A J-School student went there to document the schizophrenic process of TV’s introduction to the last virgin culture on earth. Whole families would greet cable installers with parties and tea. The one and only cable company received endless calls wanting them to account for the strange shows. Why are these grown men beating each other up without mercy? — explaining WWF to them was a challenge. But within 6 months, children were making play wrestling belts out of cardboard, honoring their new heroes. Old ladies complained that TV was so fun to watch they would forget their religious duty, forget to count prayer beads. Beautifully shot.

–
Music: Dreamt Of By Armadillos :: Noize1

I am becoming so dependent on my RSS reader (Net Newswire Lite) that I’m starting to not read sites that don’t provide a feed. It’s just too inconvenient to visit serial bookmarks every day… once you’ve seen the RSS light, it’s hard to go back. Now the Christian Science Monitor has unleashed what may be the largest RSS commitment of any mainstream news organization to date. You can pretty much access the entire publication via RSS now — powerful.

–
Music: Angelic Upstarts :: The murder of Liddle Towers

Ack packet via Radio Free Blogistan: Race relations skewered on a whole ‘nuther shishkabob at Black People Love Us!. Dot com. Totally hilarious. What really scared me was reading the letters page and discovering how many people couldn’t see the irony in the site, or didn’t know what to do with it once they found it.

–
Music: Severed Heads :: Goodbye Tonsils

Moshe Bar at Byte.com has performed a careful and thorough side-by-side benchmarking of OS X as a pure server (not desktop) environment by installing both OS X and the SuSE PowerPC Linux distribution on an XServe. Short story: OS X lost to Linux on every measurable count, but Moshe is still impressed, since OS X is so new while Linux has had a decade to tune its subsystems. To my knowledge, this is the first such test done with this degree of care.

–
Music: Fugazi :: Waiting Room

Anonymous reader “George” sent me a point-by-point rebuttal to “Why HTML in EMail is a Bad Idea.” While I disagree with most of George’s assertions, his response is nevertheless the most cogent defense of HTML in email that I’ve seen. In the interest of fairness, I have posted George’s notes without editing or commentary from me.

As if to prove I’m not a lone crazy man howling in the woods, Low-End Mac has published The Dying Art of Plain Text Email.

–
Music: Bill Laswell :: A Screaming Comes Across The Sky

Great quote on the commoditization of words, courtesy the J-School’s not-yet-unveiled weblog on intellectual property (stay tuned):

Clay Shirky on the mass amateurization of publishing and why weblogs are as good as gold:

“Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing. ”

–
Music: Sonic Youth :: My Friend Goo

Photographer Eric Meyer invites you to reassemble his photographs on the fly (not to be confused with on-the-fly eyeball distortion).

Coincidentally, I’m in the middle of reading O’Reilly’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, by a different Eric Meyer. The book is very thorough, but I can’t help but think it would actually be more useful in a more terse format. I want to hear everything he has to say, but I want him to do it with fewer words. But I know well how much harder it is to write something short than long.

“I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
- Blaise Pascal

–
Music: Aimee Mann :: Momentum

You’ve probably seen Janis Ian’s testimonial in USA Today, Music industry spins falsehood. What we need are about 1,000 big-name stars to do similar experiments themselves, and make similar testimonials that they actually made more money by giving away their music, rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer now testifies for Apple.

–
Music: Godley & Creme :: Cry

News floating around this morning that the entire Blogger system has been badly hacked. Because it relies on FTP for site publishing and because most people have the same password for FTP as for the rest of their account, tens of thousands of people now have compromised internet accounts. As always, this is the achilles heel of big, centralized systems. This can’t happen to MovableType because there is no centralized server on which the system is based.

Ask and ye shall … I asked the author of Kung-Log about the possibility of integrating Kung-Tunes‘ ability to detect iTunes’ current track (have been missing that little twist of LiveJournal hijinx), and he added it in v 1.5.4. Complete with full output format templating (I like simple). Hats off to Adriaan Tijsseling!

–
Music: King Floyd :: Groove Me

Amy took Miles outside today - the shades aren’t just to make him look like a bad-ass — gen-u-ine UV protection!

(Click)

If you’re outputting RSS feeds, you can now have them validated - one small step toward a more XML-interoperable web. Even if you’ve upgraded to MovableType 2.5, you’ll need to update your RSS templates manually to get them to validate properly.

Just spent half an hour with Transmit 2 for OS X — possibly the best FTP client I’ve ever used. Slick, bug free, full featured, and integrated support for SFTP, which more and more sites are requiring. Fetch’s days are over. Snooze you lose…

Dreamed I caught a ride on a giant pachyderrm. It was white rather than grey, with fine (for a pachyderm) hair just long enough to grab onto. The amazing thing about it was how smooth and fast it could run. We cruised through the Serengheti at what must have been 70mph, and there was hardly a bump in the ride, like that old commercial where they moyle performs a circumcision in the back seat of an El Dorado or whatever. The beast was gigantic - I was 20 feet off the ground sitting on the back of its neck, so the view was spectacular at that speed. It was hot and the air blew through my hair as fast as we ran. There was a winding dirt and sand road that snaked through the desert for miles on end and this was our course. The only hard part was going over walls - the pachy would sort of go sideways-backwards and would shift all over the place - hard to hold on.

The folks at Ahleman have created The ElectriClerk, a 1988 Mac SE driven by a 1927 Underwood typewriter, with a Fresnel lens hovering over the screen for added period effect. I’m thinking Naked Lunch here, or something from Brothers Quay, or Jan Svankmajer (if Svankmajer characters used modded Macs, that is). They even created a prop brochure to go with it. If you’re looking for a DIY project just slightly more feasible, try making your own lava lamp.

After all these years, I’m still naming all my hard drives after cheeses. Ran out of space on the 80GB MP3 storage drive (Asiago) and went to see what the biggest ones on the market today are - didn’t end up going that high - got a Maxtor 120GB, named it Manchego (Amy comes up with the best cheese names), copied the collection over. Swapping out drives in OS X is as easy as it was in BeOS - plug in, initialize, use - no formatting. Remembering it wasn’t that long ago when it seemed remarkable that storage was approaching $1/MB. Now we’re nearly at $1/GB.

Bummed to find that iTunes doesn’t store those ratings in ID3v2 tags, as I thought it did - those were in the library file. So lost many moons of track ratings. Sent Apple some rasty feedback on that one.

Preparing a database-backed site for J-School students to produce election-night coverage, and it occurred to me that I might not be giving MovableType enough credit as a generic publishing solution rather than pure blogging tool. With some deeper modifications to templates, removal of comments and calendaring, rearranged permalinks etc., there’s no reason MovableType can’t function as a full CMS. The Categories feature plays perfectly for creating “Departments” for the site. So far so good, but there are two problems with the scenario.
(more…)

I used to be among the haters of one-button mice. Then the Mac came. I decided to live with one button for a while and see how it worked out, see what all the religion was about. Surprised myself how easy it was to make the transition - I never miss the right button anymore (took a couple months to stop missing it). Then the baby came. Babies change the mouse game, not because the kid wants to use the box, but because he gets thrust into my hands almost as soon as I get home — Amy needs a break. That, in turn, means I get a whole lot less machine time in the evening than I used to, and the time I do have is mostly surf time, not typing time. Surfing one-handed with a one-button mouse, holding the baby in the other arm, am disabled - not able to open links in a new window, not able to reveal the desktop with a quick keystroke, etc. May have to go two-button again after all. Apple — consider the children!

Woody Harrelson: I’m an American tired of American lies . Nice parallax with this piece on being a “Bad American” by Ted Nugent, although it turns out that Nugent did not actually write the piece ascribed to him. I part company where “he” (and others) resist the notion that the Constitution is a living document. The same “rigid” Consitution once called a black man 3/5 of a man. We got rid of that bit when our culture and our minds changed, didn’t we? The Constitution is not immutable. Somehow I don’t think The Framers had the likes of the Beltway Sniper in mind when they guaranteed us our right to own Personal Laser Cannons.