What kind of beautiful messed up whack did you believe when you were small? I submitted this:

Because my grandfather spoke very quietly and very gravelly, I came to believe that we were born with a limited supply of speech and that if we used it all up we’d become mute at the ends of our lives. I began trying to conserve words as though they were a limited resource.

Met with a guy from IST who wanted to know about ways I’ve been deploying RSS feeds out of various J-School project sites. He’s been writing an RSS parser/aggregator in JSP. We agreed to do a collaborative presentation for webnet (the unfortunately named collective of UC Berkeley webmasters, who meet to compare notes on working with limited resources, compare redesign projects, share technology, etc.) Should happen sometime in the next few months.

Check the QuickTime at this site promoting their flagship product, an adjustable desk. “How shall we communicate the core value proposition of our product?” I know, we’ll do multimedia!”

Desk goes up, desk goes down. Desk goes up, desk goes down.

Heartening to know that some semblance of 1950s marketing sensibility has survived the MTV generation unscathed.

So much to say about the “Connecting with the Wired Generation” conference that I don’t have time to post… suffice to say I’ve got a whole new perspective on the level of technology saturation that is going to be part of Miles’ life - far beyond what even I had imagined (e.g. cell phone penetration among 1st graders in Finland is now 100%!)

During the final panel, when all the young kids (9 1/2 to 17) were on stage, I asked their impressions of 2 Cool To Be Real, wanting to find out whether they could see through the beef industry smokescreen. First reaction from the girls: “Anything pink is evil.” Second reaction: “If it’s called “2 cool” or “Be real” you know it can’t be cool, because it wouldn’t say it if it were. Probably made by some 60 yr old guy or something.” In other words, teenage girls have excellent bullshit detectors. The latter response made me think of Fox News: “Fair and Balanced” and O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” — if it was really fair and balanced would they feel the need to declare it? If O’Reilly didn’t spin, would he be spinning the image of his own show in the tagline?

Glad to have both conferences, and all of the webcasting that came with, finished. A week of 12-14 hour days and Saturday too. A day of rest at last today — dim sum in the morning with friends, errands mid-day, afternoon to Strawberry Canyon for first poolside day of the new Spring, and Miles’ first experience in a swimming pool (pix TK).

Just how disconnected are mid-career adults from kids who grew up with the Internet in their back pocket? The UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism is hosting a full-day conference to explore issues related to the new digital childhood. As a public service, the entire event will be webcast live. Keynote Friday night, panels all day Saturday. Archives will go online sometime next week.

Note: The terrible lighting situation is unfortunately outside of our (webcasters) control.

Later… joker three seats down decided to help himself to our electricity. Pulling and tugging the power cord, accidentally disconnected our FireWire archiving drive, which disrupted the broadcast and cut off 10 viewers. Argh. My fault for situating equipment where that could happen…

Later later… “that joker” turned out to be one Justin Hall (once of “Justin’s Links from the Underground” fame).

Later… router dropped out and pulled connectivity out from under us. Back up now.

Later… conference over! Will mellow for one day, work for a couple days, then take some time off to finish the MacWorld piece. Tempted to blog notes on the conference overall, but exhausted.

xian was there today, but barely got to visit with him. Another day.

Very powerful 1998 letter to the UN by former Attorney General Ramsey Clarke, demanding that the US never again attack Iraq. Quoted:

U.S. contempt for U.N. authority is shown by its defiance of the recent General Assembly vote of 157 nations versus 2 nations protesting the U.S. criminal blockade of Cuba, its refusal to pay dues to the U.N. year after year and its selective defiance, …

and

U.S. arms expenditures are approximately 25 times the gross national product of Iraq. The U.S. has in its stockpiles more nuclear bombs, chemical and biological weapons, more aircraft, rockets and delivery systems in number and sophistication than the rest of the world combined.

My mother seemed always to remember whenever talk of US’ international responsibility came up: “We don’t even pay our UN dues,” she would say. But according to a Sept. 2001 article at Global Policy, we did start ponying up right after 9/11, i.e. as soon as we realized we might need to be on good terms with the UN after all. Which is itself a reminder of how quickly we turned the post 9/11 atmosphere of international sympathy into one of global frustration and contempt.

We had a good thing going there. Trashed it.

Another thought that’s been rolling around lately, and this one kind of leans the other way. As Clarke says in the letter, a million and a half deaths had been caused by sanctions on Iraq as of ‘98. But sanctions are supposedly the diplomatic, non-violent way to exert international pressure. As the administration says, 12 years of diplomacy hasn’t worked, which is why we ostensibly turn to war (by the way, this is also the key difference between Iraq and North Korea - we’ve done 12 years of “diplomatic” work with Iraq, while the blow-up with North Korea has just come on the radar). Anyway, it seems likely to me that war will result in significantly fewer than 1.5 million civilian casualties. If so, this would give the administration the ability to claim that war can result in fewer civilian deaths than diplomacy. Which is, of course, totally inside out and totally messed up.

I feel so conflicted about everything.

Seems half the people I know got a copy of this in their inboxes recently:

Call out Gouranga be happy.
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga.
Say Gouranga my friend.
Gouranga….That which brings the highest happiness.

No one has a clue what it’s about, but it’s so lovely I’m loathe to call it spam.

Meanwhile the Center for Democracy and Technology has a very comprehensive piece out, Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Personally I’d be sunk without Entourage’s incredible spam filtering - lately getting 150+ pieces of mail a day at birdhouse.org, 2/3 spam.

An old friend brought me flowers today, as a way of saying it’s okay for us to disagree, even on the most important matters. An old medicine bottle, wildflowers, long stems, a hand-written card. It meant so much.

The multimedia training conference is in full swing and I’m just fried — 12-14 hour days every day this week (Saturday too) and schlepping, so much schlepping of equipment back and forth from room to room. Some great fringe benefits though. Hearing Rusty Foster from Kuro5hin speak the other night inspired me all over again about the true collaborative potential of the internet — I don’t think anyone has nailed the collaborative model quite as well as he has with that site.

Tonight Cory Doctorow came through, loaded down with WiFi gear and tales of open spectrum. The guy is so full of ideas, and is so fast on his feet, and just so overflowing, you think his head will pop. Who else could make tcpdump part of a demonstration to non-geek journalists without having the eyes of the audience glaze over in boredom? Kept his talking points in a Wiki and invited wireless audience members to modify and annotate them as he spoke.

Shot another pic of Cory and Rusty together tonight, but it came out overblown. Hit a new usage record on our QuickTime Streaming Server. Cory posted the conference page on boingboing just before the event and we had 30 simultaneous users tapped in at one point. Some folks held the stream for more than an hour. I’ll put the QT archives online middle of next week for those who missed it.

Quote of the night:
“Nerd determination: Our superior technology trumps your inferior laws.”

I love how obscure bugs get fixed sometimes. One of our bIPlog writers was having trouble overwriting uploaded files in a Movable Type blog. It just failed with a “permission denied” error no matter how many permissions I gave the temp dir. We run Apache on Win2K, while Ben Trott at MT is a *nix guy. Everyone was coming up stumped. My question got fanned out, and eventually a friend of a friend on the east coast speculated that it was not a perms issue at all, but file handle flushing. Forwarded his response to Ben, who shot back a perl fix minutes later. And we’re in business. The writer is happy and MT is a tiny bit better. Kind of amazing to see this thing blossom from a normal user uncovering an unknown bug to a coast-to-coast correspondence between strangers, people helping out for nothing but the promise of a dozen Krispy Kremes. People are cool.

Thought you already had enough reasons to hate Clear Channel? Here’s one more: Many of the pro-war rallies happening across the nation are apparently sponsored by Clear Channel Central Command. As it turns out, America’s corporate music controller, er, I mean, generous parent of lots of struggling radio stations, has close ties to the Bush administration. It all hangs together so neatly, says my inner conspiracy theorist.

Received this at the J-School’s webmaster email address today, subject line “Take Heed” :

Your name is NOT “Scot Hacker” and take that “gay Christian” remark off of this site or you are going to be in a heap of trouble in more ways than one. Let me tell you about a few of them: You will be reported to the Dean and the Assistant Dean; what you are doing may be reporting to large donor alumni; what you are doing will be reported to media; what you are doing will be reported to organizations as a person of interest and you do not want to become involved with people who can do worse to you than you are trying to do to the name of Christians. Your “gay Christian” remark is placed there only to defame Christians; you are probably a mislead Muslim. If you think this is going to be tolerated, you are dead wrong. Diana

Had no idea what she was talking about but searched for “gay christian” and found a 3-year-old article on our site about black gay Christians in South Africa by an ex-student name of Julia Roller. Diana apparently couldn’t find an email link for Julia so unleashed her spew on me. I returned a nice note wondering what she had against black gay Christians, but it bounced. Too bad - was really looking forward to getting sucked into the bottomless fray of lunatic religious extremism.

I no longer carry the fullest conviction that this is an unjust war. People left a lot of very good comments in a post from a few days ago, Shifting Sands. Especially a pointer from mrgrape to a Salon piece titled See No Evil, about the paradox of the left’s opposition to this war. Salon is a bastion of the left, but is asking some very difficult mirror-gazing questions here.

As one watches protest marches, antiwar advertising and local arts events, one has to wonder whether the left has really weighed the moral issues posed by the horrors of Saddam’s regime — weighed life by life the repression of the 24 million Iraqis who live in a ruthless police state, not to mention the thousands or tens of thousands who have been imprisoned without trial, tortured, exiled or killed. It sometimes seems that the left is so averse to war, especially war waged by America, that it is prepared to turn a blind eye to even the most ghastly realities. Perhaps it is because the left no longer sees these realities that its antiwar arguments tend to justify continuation of the status quo.

Worth the read. Worth subscribing even, though Salon is allegedly on its last financial breath.

We attended the first two SF protests against invasion in the months leading up to war. But once war began, it became difficult to see what protesting could possibly accomplish. And the more it became apparent how Iraqi citizens were generally joyous at the prospect of liberation from Saddam, the harder it was to feel unequivocally opposed to this war. My question now is, do protesters really believe that Iraqis and the world as a whole would be better off if we just pulled out, brought our soldiers home, and left everything as it is? If you can’t answer yes to that question, then why are you still protesting?

Tried to install the ImageMagick perl module for OS X last night, CPAN crapped out. Tried to compile the source manually but no go there either. Discovered that the indefatigable Marc Liyanage has a binary package installer for it - sets up the CLI binary and the perl module all at once, two clicks, 20 seconds.

With Image::Magick detected on the server, Movable Type gives you a few more options in the file upload dialog, offering to create a thumbnail for you, then all the HTML and JavaScript to connect thumb to popup. I’ve always generated thumbnails in iPhoto or Photshop and uploaded them separately. This rocks (yes, I know this particular image doesn’t really need thumbnailing - just testing).

That’s me on the daily bike commute to work.

Experimenting intermittently with mail server software for OS X lately and thought I had settled on Post.Office. At first seemed like it was going to be cake to set up, despite the butt-ugly 1982 design of the config UI. But after my IPs / hostname / domain changed, all hell broke loose. It became impossible to get into the http config and its daemon started chasing its tail in a CPU-chewing loop after following a tech support person’s suggestion to change my hostname. This morning woke up to find the machine grinding at a crawl and a bunch of rogue post.office processes limping along.

Uninstalled with extreme prejudice and set up CommuniGate Pro instead. Configured in minutes with half dozen birdhouse addresses for friends and family, relay blocking and SMTP-Auth set up just the way I wanted it. Slick. Had looked into the built-in sendmail and the qmail alternative, but I just don’t have the time or inclination to wrestle.

So now we’re in full swing with OS X as a multi-purpose home file server, print server, music server, web and email server. Speakeasy provides connectivity, ZoneEdit does the DNS, and the Mac does the rest.

I think you can vacuum up more information and stimulation in 15 minutes walking through warblogs than two hours flipping through the cable and traditional network news. And if you do decide to channel surf, a tip: You’ll feel somewhat less filthy and a bit more informed if you spend more time with Jennings / Brokaw et al than with the younger, more sensationalistic reporters on Fox / CNN.

But don’t try and combine blogging and TV news - the mothership doesn’t like that.

Domestic anti-war sentiment is lessening as the war progresses. According to a radio report I caught today, polls showed around 67% support for military action in Iraq two days ago. But by this afternoon, that figure had risen to 77%. So 10% of people feel better about invasion now that it’s begun. There are a lot of reasons for this I can see — U.S. forces seem to be doing a good job of keeping civilian injuries very low, and we’re hearing more about Iraqis dancing in the streets to celebrate their liberation from Saddam. Here’s the bit (UPI) that really made me sit up:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip “had shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

The liberation angle was not part of the discussion for most of the months leading up to war. Bush talked about WMD and disarmament, terrorism, etc. He only started playing the liberation card late in the game. And when it did come up, the left would respond that Iraqis had not requested U.S. or U.N. assistance in dealing with Saddam. But now that it’s clear that Iraqis welcome U.S. soldiers, the right gets to take credit for liberation, while the left has to deal with the fact that we’ve been actively resisting efforts to take out a brutal dictator, even if for good reasons.

It was during the 2nd SF protest that I first began to ask myself just how brutal a dictator Saddam would have to be for me (and others on the left) to become convinced that this might be a just war after all. Have your sentiments about this war changed since it began?

Big events week at the J-School coming up - I’m going to end up ragged. In addition to a week-long conference on multimedia training for mid-career journalists, we have three excellent events happening, all of which will be webcast live:

Monday, March 24 — Discussion and Q&A on weblogs and journalism with J.D. Lasica, Online Journalism Review and Rusty Foster, founder of kuro5hin.

Wednesday, March 26 - Presentation and Q&A on wireless technology with Cory Doctorow.

Thursday, March 27 - Presentation and Q&A on charging for online content with Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance.

Get your QuickTime plugins greased up!

Me to Amy, watching morning news: “Did you know we have a bomb called the MOAB — the Mother Of All Bombs?”

Amy to me, stepping out of shower: “Did you know my deodorant has “Super Deodorancy?” It says so right on the package.”

Clutter for OS X notes what iTunes is currently playing and finds the corresponding album cover at Amazon. That’s pretty groovy all by itself, just to orient yourself with the current recording. But you can also drag a cover to the desktop and click it later to hear all your songs from that album.

(Click)

Millions of Americans tune in for The Great Spectacle, expecting “Shock and Awe” at unspeakable volumes. Instead they get hours of grainy footage of the back end of a tank in convoy plowing through the Iraqi desert. CNN tries to make the most of it, calling it “remarkable footage” and “historic,” which doesn’t change the fact that they’re broadcasting hours of the butt end of a tank because they have nothing else to show. Is America getting its money’s worth? No doubt some actual spectacle around the corner, but meanwhile how to keep the viewers from tuning out? Ah — treat them to a night with no commercials. Which of course means the competing network doesn’t get to do commercials either. There might not be a commercial for days! Who needs Tivo? Wife starts flipping channels. Protests clog NY, Philly, Washington. In SF more than 1000 are arrested. Fox brushes up against this news, does all it can not to treat it with revulsion. I mean with Shock and Awe. How can anyone protest at a time like this?, the reporter asks. Our boys are halfway across the world at risk of dying to protect our very right to protest, and they’re protesting? The irony is thick like chemical weapons gas, the reporter nearly coughs. Meanwhile, protestors vomit for peace. Fox puts convicted war criminal Oliver North in the field as a reporter — that’s what credibility is all about. And in case Ollie’s spiel is too complicated, Geraldo will be there to sign Iraqi women’s backsides. 16 die in a helicopter crash — 12 brits and a 4 yanks. Or so I hear on CNN. When Fox does the same story a few minutes later, they tell us that four people have died. If you’re not American your life isn’t worth prime-time mention. The info graphic tells me the cruising speed and gas mileage of the Abrams tank and I feel informed.

—

Floating around, author unknown: A Warmonger Explains War with Iraq to a Peacenik.

Students involved with the J-School’s bIPlog have created Revolution Is Not an AOL Keyword (to the tune of Gil-Scot Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) - a roster of interesting intellectual property links embedded in a “fair use” (?) reconstitution of the original poem.

Miles is on the brink of crawling. Up on his hands and knees rocking back and forth, falling forward falling back. And this morning he started spinning around, using his belly button as an axis. He does a full revolution and then looks up to see if we saw him do it, giant grin on his face. I told him he has “mad turntable skills.” Amy’s sister Lisa says he’s “doing the Lazy Susan.”

Rather than CNN or Fox News, we are watching Teletubbies this morning.

Have a nice war.

Went to see Damo Suzuki (once upon a time of Can) last night with Josh and Minette at the Hemlock club - packed into shoebox against mirrored walls, six musicians onstage. Damo was not at his best, I didn’t think - seemed to lack some spark or was not singing at full range or something. He does this improv thing with his voice that sounds so much like human language but is not. Crunching pulsing space rock, band was very good but not as good as bands we’ve seen him with before. One guy with Elton John star glasses played hammered dulcimer and a theremin signed by Robert Moog. It’s a very hard instrument to maintain pitch with, so there was an undertone of things being a bit off throughout — not totally unfitting the music. A great night, if not the best Damo night ever.

Here is a picture of Damo sleeping with a houseplant.

Had a big debate (argument?) on the way home about whether it makes sense to give panhandlers money. A topic for another day.

44% of Americans believe “that most or some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi.” And no wonder, after the snow job our flaccid, compliant, conservative media has done on the American critical faculty. Looks like Salon is setting itself up as a counterweight to the waves of propaganda and quasi-reporting heading our way. They’ve already slipped a reporter into Iraqi Kurdistan on a raft in the dead of night. Salon should be a good resource to watch as the coming weeks unfold.