Hey girls! Got to “keep it real” … “way cool” … “so cute” … a girl’s got to eat lots and lots (and lots) of beef! Cool To Be Real is a thinly “vealed” beef industry propaganda campaign aimed at teenage girls — too many of whom, apparently, are going vegetarian behind the backs of good wage-earning cattlemen. How can a vegetarian be true to herself and keep it real? Fortunately, I think (I hope) that even Teen-Beat readers are savvy enough to see through this. As Matthew put it, “It’s like life imitating the Simpsons.”

In the process of switching connectivity to Speakeasy (needed faster upstream than my current provider could offer). They get nothing but rave reviews, but we didn’t get off to a great start - they gave the telco the go-ahead to drop my line before they had even shipped me a modem. Going from ADSL to RADSL so my current modem won’t work with their service. So tonight our line went dead and Amy and I get to go dial-up for the next 4-5 days. It feels kind of like driving Fred and Wilma’s stone-mobile with the hole in the floor so you can use your feet to push.

Ah well, it keeps things in perspective. Also a nice chance to test out OS X’s internet connection sharing feature, which is totally effortless and transparent. Turn it on in Sharing, set the client machines to DHCP, and tell the modem to dial when needed. “Just works.”

Excellent piece in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof comparing Eisenhower’s containment of Nasser in Egypt with the situation Bush faces with Saddam in Iraq. Saddam today is not the threat today that Nasser was then, and yet Ike chose containment over invasion. And Nasser just faded away… just as Saddam has been — these have been the 10 best-behaved years of Saddam’s career and his military is at 1/3 strength. He’s fading away with no help from us.

But perhaps it would be best to bomb Iraq into Democracy.

No photo album this month… our photo drawer runneth over. Notes instead. Well, maybe just one little picture ;)

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Miles becomes more of a little person every day, his personality is emerging so quickly. He is the most joyous baby I’ve ever met, and I’m not just saying that as daddy. He never stops smiling and laughing, such a gas to be around him. This month he (read on):
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This afternoon did a quick animation experiment using a small portion of Amy’s expansive gumball collection and iStopMotion. Soundtrack from the Minutemen’s “Toe Jam.” Around 220 individually snapped frames with no particular intent. n.b. Even very old pre-chewed gum gets a bit sticky under hot lights.

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To Elbo Room w/Chris, Nada, Mike to see Banyan — Mike Watt (bass) and Nels Cline (guitar), Stephen Perkins (drums), and a small horn section. Each of these guys has a long and mixed history, but as Watt said to an interviewer, “working in our “song” bands is like sitting alone writing, while Banyan is like conversation.” An outrageously fluid stomping improvisatory conversation. Watt as always solid and rooted and inventive without being quirky and yet abstract but not flighty or airy or particularly difficult. The real deal. Wearing exactly the same plaid shirts, jeans, Converse high tops he wore when I watched him in the Minutemen 20 years ago.

Painter Norton Wisdom improvised paintings behind the band in real time - amazing what he could do with sponges and fingers and some basic red, black, blue ink washes so quickly. Perfect complement. Why are music and painting not more often married? Almost everything tonight mostly improvised, but right in the middle of it all they launch into The Stooges’ “TV Eye.” I can die contented.

Saw a Segway “in the wild” today in Rockridge (Oakland) on the way to breakfast with Amy. Dude balancing at a stoplight waiting for it to change, then leaned forward slightly and went zipping across the street and up College Ave. like floating, a personal hovercraft. Smooth, quiet, and utterly elegant. Just a few months ago it seemed everyone was wondering what the heck this Ginger thing was going to be that was supposed to “revolutionize” cities and the way people got around in them. Now here we are, the Segway not yet common but no more obtrusive than a bicycle and only noticeable for its new-ness. Seeing it like that, not as an oddity but as a plain old fact of life made it seem so sensible. I kind of want one.

While the RIAA kvetches and whines about how the continuing rise of CD-R technology is supposedly hurting record sales, Smithsonian-Folkways — purveyors of all those crusty old albums by Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie (not to mention mid-century field recordings of Mongolian throat singers) — has seen its sales rise 33% in the past year. How? By using on-demand CD-R burning to keep their massive back-catalog alive. Rather than let important but slow-to-sell music go quietly out of print, they burn CDs whenever customers order from the back catalog: one copy for the current order and four more for future orders. No inventory sitting around, no music forgotten to history, no customers turned away. This makes me smile.

Thanks bIPlog.

No theories.

WebMonkey has an interesting piece titled Frying Spam — a quick tour of back-end procedures for spam detection and elimination. Doubles as a nice tutorial for anyone wanting to set up procmail recipes or Bayesian filters such as Bogofilter.

(Reuters) World famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have today announced a new project that is slated to be begin immediately. Responding to U.S. Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge’s call for artists to rally the cause through anti-terrorist art, Christo has received permission to wrap the White House in Washington D.C., using duct tape and plastic sheeting. Much like the artist’s 1995 project “Wrapped Reichstag” in Berlin, “Wrapped White House” will, according to the artists plan, seal the building and those inside. Of the project the artists said, “We are very excited to use our art making methods in the international fight against terrorists. By wrapping the White House we hope to help keep terrorism under wraps, so to speak.” Unlike “Wrapped Reichstag” which was a temporary project, “Wrapped White House” will be the artists’ first permanent work of public art.

100,000 square meters (1,076,000 square feet) of clear high-strength polypropylene plastic, and 15,600 meters (51,181 feet) of silver duct tape, 13.2 cm (4 inch) wide, will be used for the wrapping of the White House. The work will be completed in as little as one week. The artists have contacted other artists across the U.S. who are now in-route to Washington D.C. in order to finish this work in record time. Materials have been provided without charge by the German Government. Recalling the “Wrapped Reichstag,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder stated, “Wrapping the symbol of German Democracy was a defining moment for the new Germany. Wrapping the White House will likewise be a defining moment as democracy is restored in America.”

Thanks Roger.

Dinner at Great China after work with my boss, several workmates, Orville Schell, and a Chinese student involved in monitoring The Great Firewall of China — various mechanisms of internet censorship exercised by the government. An evening’s worth of conversations about Google and blogging, the slippery nature of the internet, encryption, proxies, obfuscation, and the immense scale of China’s censorship efforts.

The plan is to do something similar to what we did with bIPlog, but on the subject of Chinese internet clampdown techniques and mechanisms/stories of circumvention. We’ll be bringing in CS students to help us find ways to monitor whether and how our site is blocked from within China. We’ll also feed and seed the Western press with info gleaned anonymously from within the continent. Should be a fascinating project, though we likely won’t begin until this summer.

It’s all going to be published in Chinese, which means I’ll need to manage a site in a language I can’t read. Looks like Movable Type handles Unicode well ….

Want to get into extreme sports but feel a bit too domesticated to jam? Extreme ironing might be the perfect sport for you. As Starch says, “Press when the iron is hot.”

So London has shown the cojones to do something about the worst traffic congestion problem in Britain: Levy a £5 fee on anyone who wants to drive within the 8-square-mile core of the city during business hours.

Harsh… but the problem isn’t going to clear itself up and medicine can taste pretty nasty. The rest of Great Britain is watching to see how the plan goes, planning to roll out similar plans elsewhere if it makes a difference. Early reports say that downtown London looks “like Christmas day” (i.e. deserted).

It’s such a simple solution, really, but so hard to utter without offending car-centric sensibilities: Car use must be disincentived. Not banned. Not punished. Just made less attractive. Cars have taken over the world and it’s going to be hard work to take it back. But it has to happen, one small step at a time. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American politician risking a plan like this — political suicide. But eventually, I think, similar plans will become a virtual inevitability all over the world.

Update: Ongoing reports on how the first days of the charge are actually going.

Watched The Miles Davis Story with Amy yesterday, after the march, just because. He’s a complex cat. Really a bad man - so mean to so many, especially to women. Reminded me of Mingus in that respect. Tortured genius poet transformer locked in misogynistic mindset. Lots of conversation with wives and children and people close to him (unfortunately no interview with Betty Davis). But some of the musical footage, from the 50s through the 70s, so amazing and beautiful, especially the early 70s sessions — Bitches Brew, Agartha, On the Corner. Conversations with Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Ron Carter… and on and on. Reminded that Carter had recorded on more than 1,000 records by the late 70s already. “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”

Although we protested inevitable war on Iraq a month ago, went again today, this time with a group of other new parents. Had a strange feeling this time that I didn’t have last time — questioning the clarity of mind of some protesters and beginning to realize that my opposition to war is not 100%. More like 90%.

The left is often criticized for knee-jerk politics and irrational, emotional responses. I often resist that description, but today I saw it clearly. So much of the group-think at a protest is expressed in signage, and so much of that signage is really clever / creative / cogent / potent. But there’s also an aspect of it that is so extreme and so clouded. Example: At the last protest I saw one sign that compared the Bush Administration to the Third Reich. Today it seemed that meme was all over the place. I saw dozens of signs accusing the present administration of fascism, attaching swastikas to the foreheads of Bush and henchmen/women.

Listen up: No matter how you feel about the idiocy and dangerousness of the present administration, we are NOT living in a fascist state, and our leaders are NOT engaged in ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Hussein IS a fascist and IS (or has been) engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Somehow it just felt harder to connect with the fervor of the protesters today. In part because so many of them damage their own credibility with poor rhetoric and divisive symbolism, and in part because I no longer think this situation is completely cut-and-dried. Some wars are just. Some fascists are evil and must be removed from power. I question how, by what means, at what cost, and under what hidden agenda. What criteria make a war a just war? Just how much more evil would Hussein have to become for most people to say, “OK, take him out. Do what you can to minimize the damage to innocents … just take him out.”

And then a splinter group put a stain on the march.

Didn’t shoot much today, but here a couple that turned my crank.

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To clarify: I still feel that, as weblogsky puts it, “American power [has been] hijacked by a minority of individuals with potentially disastrous results from which it may take decades to recover.”

When I was in elementary school the teacher would often put a record on the Close-n-Play called “Go You Chicken Fat, Go” and we would get up and dancercise to the lyrics, which instructed us to “Push up / every morning / 10 times / not just / now and then / give that chickenfat back to the chickens / and don’t be chicken again.” After a while this song was completely burned into the faraway nether regions of the brain. Like knowing how to ride a bike, I know this song.

At the time I thought that only our class exercised to this song. But it turns out that the record was actually released by the President’s Council on Fitness and distributed to every classroom in the country! As a result, I’m finding that lots of people roughly my age also have the Chickenfat song indelibly burned in. I played it for Amy the other morning and she knew most of the words too though she grew up in the Midwest.

Wonder why youth obesity is an epidemic today? No Chickenfat song. Thanks Defective Yeti.

Speaking of music permanently etched into the crannies of the brain, I love this animation of The Hustle. The hideous font too. Our time was a good time.

Update 2007: Video version from the archives:

For Valentine’s Day I gave Amy a tiny Zen garden with tiny bag of sand, tiny wooden rake, and tiny rocks.

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The trouble with the mini Zen Garden is that it’s so small that you get frustrated trying to create patterns like the ones David Carradine made in Kung Fu. So you end up either barking at it or losing interest, whichever comes first.

My fist valentine from Funny Bologna, aka Bolognious Monk, aka Bolognious Monkeyfish, aka Miles, and sweet wife Amy. Note: Not Photoshopped - genunine forehead stickers!

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Frank Boosman on contemporary attempts to design a symbolic warning system that will last 12,000 years. What, humans 12 millenia hence won’t intuitively understand that a hill festooned with lovely blue ivy actually means “Get back, we’re radioactive” ???

I’ve s-o-o-o-o had it with Aqua’s pinstripes. The more brushed aluminum apps I see, the happier I am. In theory, Apple employees should be as tired of seeing pinstripes as we are right about now. So you can mark this as my prediction for X 10.3 : A new default appearance plus additional UI customization options. Yes, I know there are 3rd party hacks for this kind of thing…

n.b.: The difference between a simple wishlist item and a public prediction is quantified as:

pi / (foolhardiness x huevos)

Amy made new wallpaper for her Mac featuring Miles on a green rug with large interlocking circles. Buk nekkid. She used one of her desktop Stickies to cover up his wee twig-n-berries, just for the sake of decorum. The particular Stickie note she used happened to contain the account # for our Tiny Tots diaper service. It was all done unselfconsciously, but somehow the combination struck me as perfect visual poetry and we had a long belly laugh about it.

Amused by the fact that Kevin Mitnick’s web site has been hacked into twice already since his release a few weeks ago. Of course, the fact that his host was running unpatched IIS (for chrissake!) is not revealed until the second-to-last paragraph of the story.

Mitnick is pedestalized like he’s the great hacking guru of time, space, and dimension, but the fact is he’s been stuck in a time capsule for years and has much catching up to do to grok the current state of the art. Mitnick running a security company today is like bringing Michelangelo back from the grave and asking him to set up a CPU fab. The world has changed. Hacking has changed. The tools, environment, and culture of hacking have changed tremendously. He’ll catch up, but what a lot of egg on face. Yipes.

Unpatched IIS, for chrissake.

The MusicBrainz service aims to become a community-driven replacement to CDDB, which your favorite MP3 encoder / CD player uses to pull down metadata for the CDs you stick in your computer. CDDB, as you’ve probably discovered, is full of errors, the metadata categories are limited, and results can be ambiguous. The CDDB API is also notoriously difficult to build apps around.

MusicBrainz aims to fix all that in two ways: 1) By using positive, unambiguous techniques to fingerprint specific tracks (imagine sending a friend a playlist file and it working on their computer even though the filenames, paths, and metadata are different), and 2) Letting communities collaboratively build metadata and enhance it over time via constant collaborative peer review, Wiki-style. Sounds a lot more capable than freedb.

This could become a beautiful thing. Or at least interesting to watch. Boing-Boing has more.

Joke floating around today:

The UN asked President Bush what evidence he had that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He said, “We kept the receipts”.