Over Thanksgiving, had the chance to watch a few episodes of a Showtime program I didn’t know existed: Penn & Teller’s Bull—-.

No magic, just the two of them doing a sort of commentary/documentary on subjects like drinking water, alternative medicines, alien abductions, parents who go overboard trying to perfect their children, the dangers of second-hand smoke, etc. A quick intro, then they launch full-gale into debunking the hell out of the day’s topic. They’re both hard-core rationalists, and they miss no opportunity to make the most gullible consumers and believers look like absolute fools.
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Dreamed last night that I had put on an old-school beavertail wetsuit with twist grommets rather than velcro, like the one my dad used when I was a kid — before they started laminating the neoprene with nylon, and suits were rubbery-slick inside and out. Then a weight belt and booties, and I descended into shallow water (8 or 10 feet) beneath a pier. No flippers, no tank. Mask, no snorkel. The water was clear, and sunlight shone through as if it were air. Bright under water, not bluish, all the colors were vivid. Holding my breath, walked along the ocean floor until I found a dead fish — a 30 lb. snapper — and dug three fingers into the gills. Hauled it back to shore to have it mounted on a wooden plaque. We (whoever “we” were) intended to hang it on the wall of a seaside bistro we were building. The whole thing had the feeling of being on some kind of important mission, a sense of urgency.

There are two kinds of pop-ups: The evil kind, which spawn unrequested when a page loads, and the relatively benign kind, which appear when requested (by clicking a JavaScript link). Virtually all browser-based pop-up blockers are able to distinguish between the two, so that sites that use pop-ups without devilish intent continue to work properly.

Over the past week, I’ve been getting email from a small handful of students informing me that the J-School’s course schedule was appearing as a blank window. Could not reproduce the behavior on any OS/browser.

Finally a student lent me her laptop, and sure enough, blank page. Viewed source and was horrified to find JavaScript in the page that I had not put there. Turns out she was running Norton Internet Security, which works as a sort of proxy server on the client, and literally rewrites web pages before they get to the browser, stripping page control from the developer. With NIS “Ad Blocking” enabled, the program is unable to distinguish between evil and benign pop-up code, and assumes the user would rather not see the page at all.

Had to order a copy of this POS today just so I can get started on work-arounds. Between this and recent discoveries of incompatibilities between Norton AntiVirus and both Final Cut and Pro Tools, am forced to the conclude that Peter Norton is no longer my hero.

Interesting eight-minute b/w Flash movie (EPIC 2014) on the recent history and future of media consolidation, the broadening alliances of Google, Tivo, news providers, and P2P networks projected out a decade into a future where ubiquitous smart servers (”the Google Grid”) and the consuming public cut up and co-create their own news, ultimately pushing the NY Times out of business. “News is now shallow, trivial… but it is what we wanted…”

Not sure who’s behind this, but noticed an embedded reference to montagist Winston Smith (though this doesn’t really feel like his work).

Buying more music at iTunes Music Store over the past six months; their catalog keeps expanding in ever-widening circles. Increasingly, it seems that when I buy a CD, it only gets touched once. Not because it’s not good, but because it only needs to be ripped once. After that, it’s in iTunes, on the iPod, or pumped to the living room via Airport Express, and the meatspace disc does nothing but take up space. If all I really want is bits, why futz with atoms (especially if I can still support the artist, kinda, by buying it electronically?)

When I told a friend this recently, he remarked (nicely/half-jokingly) that I was “part of the problem.” “What problem is that?,” I wanted to know. “Encouraging the proliferation of lo-fi digital music.” Well, he has a point. On the other end of the spectrum, another friend recently rejected a large-ish collection of music because my 192kbps MP3s were of too-high quality. Even with disc space so cheap today it may as well be free. You can’t win this one. There’s nothing to win.

Can’t help but think that too much discussion about formats, codecs, and bitrates falls prey to the traditional and sometimes true criticism leveled at Hi-Fi freaks: Energy spent thinking about gear is energy stolen from enjoyment or discussion of the music (which is why I love it when an audio tweak puts an old scratchy mono LP on the turntable — I know they have their ears in the right place).

Now excuse me as I return to my regularly scheduled MC5.

Related: Mary Hodder at Napsterization: The Musician’s Era: Do We Still Say ‘Album’?

So will musical development change as more people download by the song and musicians know and work with this new way of interacting with music? Or will both musicians and listeners maintain the convention of the reference to an album, even though we don’t have them for the other reasons mentioned, to describe an associated grouping of music as a complete work?

Took out time with baald to test-drive a couple of scooters today: The Aprilia Mojito and the Kymco People — both 50cc, both a bit over my budget, and both totally anemic. Haven’t been on a bike since I cracked up the R1100R, and even though I knew a scooter would be a pale shadow of that magical creature, wasn’t prepared for just how pathetic a commuter scooter would feel. Head up an SF hill, open it up.

“Baby, is that really all you got?”

Sad, but that was the goal after all. Efficient, not fast. Of the two, was surprised to find the Kymco more peppy, and better handling than the Aprilia. Kinda fun, but felt like a pansy. Felt like I should have a cell phone with little baubles and tassles hanging from the handlebar. One of them even had a little hook for hanging your pink plastic grocery bag from. Kind of hoped no one I knew would see me on it. That’s not where I want to be. So, two lessons learned:

1) Can get a 150 or 200cc scooter on the used market for less than a new 50cc.

2) Want something that’s been through the mod wars. Original styling, not retro plastic, and with battle scars. Fixer OK, if it’s a proven work donkey.

Still, time well spent. Had to ride them to know.

The best thing I ever accidentally stumbled upon at the once-great MP3.com was the music of Bruce Lash - a Chicago musician with a sparkling thing going on: equal parts George Harrison, Joe Strummer, Donovan, Spacemen 3, and some other influences I haven’t yet put a finger on. But I don’t mean to paint him as a mere collection of influences - he’s all Bruce Lash.

At a certain point, Lash “realized the music business was a business” and, sadly for all of us, took his early self-published CDs off the market (check these clips of 1996’s High Water or 1997’s I Went to Tea With the Elephant Man). Totally off the public radar, Lash’s music would still be in my personal Top 100 lists today, if I kept Top 100 lists (I don’t).

On the side, he started doing easy listening / lounge versions of classic 70s and 80s rock, under the name Prozak for Lovers, covering anthemic tracks such as Love Will Tear Us Apart, Rebel Rebel, London Calling… but with vibraphone, bongos, and soul-soothing vocals. Spellbinding.

Lash and I have corresponded a few times over the past four years, but I hadn’t heard from him for a while. Then, out of the blue last week, received email from him saying that Prozak for Lovers II was almost out. Received a copy yesterday, and have been listening non-stop. Three years since the last one, but flowing in perfect sync with the first. Insanely great new lounge songs for your next dinner party: Mexican Radio, Misty Mountain Hop, Heart of Glass, Psycho Killer, Alabama Song, and Blister in the Sun (samples here).

My knees are getting too old to bike to work every day. Driving to work is out of the question — would cost nearly $1000/year to park, and the garage fills up by early morning anyway. If a dude can ride a Segway Human Transporter 4,000 miles coast to coast (pictures), my daily commute should be cake. I’m in an almost ideal situation to ride one to campus, but they’re still not showing up on the used market for less than three grand. Starting to look like an old fixer Vespa might be in the cards (motorcycles park free — a municipal reward for not being part of the problem (or that’s how I look at it anyway)).

Had the privilege last night of viewing an almost-completed documentary by J-School student Jigar Mehta on the problem of endemic slavery in Mauritania, where light-skinned Moors have for centuries been enslaving sub-Saharan blacks. Although the government of Mauritania has decreed slavery illegal three times in the past twenty years, it turn a systemic blind eye, chases out journalists, and has even abolished the word “slave” from the vocabulary.

The problem is made more complex by the fact that Mauritania is so poverty-stricken that many slaves feel they’re economically better off being owned than being on their own — freed slaves have been known to return voluntarily to their masters (some masters are abusive, others relatively “civilized,” apparently). And it’s culturally and religiously embedded: Children born into slavery are taught that their enslavement is part of their duty to God.

Another interesting twist: Although the country was until recently a vocal critic of the United States, the discovery of oil and the recent installation of drilling rigs off the Mauritanian coast (expected to double the country’s GNP) has coincided with them suddenly turning against Saddam Hussein, switching their official state position to pro-Israel, etc.

A Mauritanian slavery watch group, working underground to document details on tens of thousands of slaves (and in some cases freeing them), has produced a report which was recently accepted by the U.N.’s human rights watch group.

Mehta’s documentary, which is exceptionally well-produced, is not yet available for public viewing. Will post again when it is. Here’s a 2001 NPR story on the subject.

SF Chronicle: Paleo-con parents out of control. A Texas school had a yearly day set aside when boys could dress in girl’s clothes and vice versa. Some parents (apparently under the influence of the anti-gay mania sweeping the country ever since Kerry promised to force all gays to marry) decided that the “cross-dressing day” promoted homosexuality. The tradition has been swapped out for “Camo Day,” wherein students get to wear black army boots and camouflage to school. Now that’s emotional health!

After more than a decade of hard-core devotion, mneptok is starting to question his Mac allegiance. Yep, Linux just keeps getting better as a desktop OS, and yes, you can save money on hardware, but I’m not about to give up iTunes, FinalCut, or Entourage. We pay a premium to use Macs, and IMO, we get much more than our money’s worth.

This is a map of how you read a web page. Not you you, but the aggregate “you.” Eyetrack originally started as an attempt to scientifically determine how people read newspapers, and worked by attaching a motion-sensitive device to people’s heads. Updated versions of the study track people’s eye movements as they read web sites by focusing lasers on their eyeballs.

The test equipment is able to draw visual paths showing actual eye movement, and there are some interesting surprises. People don’t scan up and down, or left to right. They start in the upper left corner and hover there for a while, looking for the most important information, then sort of zig-zag up and down, back and forth over the page, finishing in the upper right.

Of interest to both editors and designers: As people zig-zag, they don’t take in complete sentences, or even complete headlines; generally only the first few words of a headline are read before moving on. This heatmap is an aggregate view of how multiple test subjects focused on a blurb, the eye hovering primarily at the left side.

More potential surprises: Smaller type is more likely than large type to draw people into stories. If a headline is much larger than the blurb it accompanies, the blurb won’t get read — the headline is interpreted as self-sufficient. Underlined links and horizontal rules serve as barriers that discourage people from taking in the content directly below them. People do read “below the fold,” but scan content lower on the page very quickly, giving even less time to headlines and blurbs.

The power of images? People actually focus on text before images when both are present (although other studies contradict this). People often try to click on images, even when they’re not clickable. Bold-faced paragraphs leading into article bodies do get read.

No surprise: People ignore ads, and if they do see them, ads get about 0.5-1.5 seconds of attention per. Big ads are “seen” more than small ads.

Google News aggregates vast numbers of news sites, and collects detailed stats on them in the process. Marumushi’s newsmap takes that data and displays it in a Flash-based, database-backed, Mondrian-inspired visual aggregator. The size of blocks on the map represents the number of publications out there covering the topic in some way, relative to other topics. The color of each block represents the broad category to which it belongs (business, technology, nation, etc.), and the shade of that color represents time delta (I don’t really understand this aspect — time since last scan? time the story has been on the map?). Roll over any block for a summary of the number of publications converging on that topic. Kind of a visual, interactive snapshot of the news Zeitgeist at any given moment.

Not sure I’d want to use this as a primary news portal, but it does offer a quick way to tap the mindset of the world’s collective publication editors.

You’re over 30. You were there. You may have worked hard not to remember that you remember, but you do remember. Visiting people’s homes while collecting on your paper route, stepping into the foyer only to be mesmerized by pointless wall hangings –tools from the shed and driftwood embedded in macrame, lamps fashioned from garden tools, dust embedded in the cheap paint, space-age acrylic tables and chairs through which you could more clearly see the hideously clashing colors of the hand-woven shag rug… And you remember sitting in the dentist’s office reading how-to manuals distributed by Sunset magazine…

I’m as much a fan of great 70s design as the next guy, but let us not forget how much craptastic home-spun junk littered people’s homes in the decade, and how it all finally piled up in garages (and ultimately at garage sales) in the 80s.

James Lileks, of The Gallery of Regrettable Food fame, has published a second volume, Interior Desecrations, chronicling the joyous garbage of DIY suburban 70s decor. Scrumptious.

Of course, it’s an old-timey meat-grinder painted avocado green, stuffed with fake vegetables, and mounted on a plaque you bought at Escutcheons ‘N’ Things. But, you may ask . . . how do I make it?

Added a system status log for birdhouse hosting. All public info on status of / changes to the server environment will be posted there (customers will still receive email as well). Currently hosted here, but will move this to another machine before long so that it’s available in the event of an outage.

Now in the 2nd week of a Unix Systems Administration class, working toward my certification. This section is 10 full Saturdays in a row. Installing Solaris on x86 last week was a bust — hardware compatibility problems throughout the lab. But issues were worked out for today’s session, and we’re up and running. Installed gcc and started adding utilities, both from packages and from source, started customizing the environment. Not too different from working in OS X, BeOS, or Linux, but good to get hands-on Solaris experience, and there’s always so much more to learn. Half lecture and half lab. The sessions fly, packed with info, juicy bits and real-world sysadmin anecdotes.

OK geeks, help me out, for I am vexed.

FireFox 1 is out, and it’s great. In FireFox tradition, it’s very strict about web standards. I like that. But it also means that if a server sends a particular MIME type for a file, the browser handles it as such. Most browsers ignore the MIME type for .css files, and just handle them. But if FireFox hears from the server that a .css file has a type of text/plain rather than text/css, it will refuse to render it, and you’ll see the complaint in its console.
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I’m starting a list of “Things to do before I die.” Skydiving was on the list before I learned that a childhood friend had had a terrible skydiving accident, broke his back badly, spent years in therapy, and is now a couple inches shorter.

The main item remaining on the list is to take a canopy tour: Strap into a harness and swing through the treelines of a rainforest, gliding on ziplines, rappelling down cliffs, climbing up through hollow trees, hanging out with monkeys and forest birds…

Canopy tours are offered all over the world — Mexico, South Africa, Jamaica, Costa Rica. Most of the tours advertised on the web are short — a few hours. But my father has a friend leading 7-day canopy tours in Costa Rica, where you pack in food, eat lala from the forest, sleep on platforms in the trees, seldom touch the ground.

For the record, this is my dream vacation.

Miles swapped toys with some friends, came home with a whistling jungle toy and a waddling duck on a stick. Amy decided to have some fun: placed a trail of coffee beans on the bathroom floor and called him in. “Miles, look what the duck made!” Unexpectedly, he looked crestfallen. Later, didn’t want to play with the duck anymore. “Why don’t you want to play with the duck, Miles?”

“Duck poopy.”

Just completed a transition of birdhouse hosting to a new machine (in the same data center) with a greatly increased monthly bandwidth ceiling, and have been able to raise bandwidth caps for all customer account levels.

Also took the opportunity to upgrade SpamAssassin to version 3, which, among other enhancements, supports SURBLs — Spam URI Realtime Blocklists. SURBLs essentially use the same logic as Movable Type’s blacklisting system - rather than trying to analyze content or block sender addresses or IPs (which are moving targets), SURBLs hit spammers where it hurts by blocking messages that include blacklisted URLs.

The downside of using SURBLs alone is that messages containing URLs that are not yet blacklisted slip through the net. But by combining SURBL scanning with content analysis, and by using distributed/collaborative blacklisting systems, you end up way ahead of the game.

Had to modify some of my customer’s SpamAssassin rulesets to work with the new syntax in SA3, but now that we’re dialed in, spam blocking seems to be more effective than ever - we’re catching about 98-99% of unwanted mail prior to delivery. w00t!

Continue to hold bottomless fascination for found objects/found art (see Found Magazine if you haven’t already) - scraps of life that yield accidental glimpses into the inner lives of strangers. Like this poster by Terry, who lost his frog, desperate to find him again.

A band of Photoshoppers started re-working, re-hashing, recontextualizing the kid’s poster at lostfrog.org (click through main image for the series).

via Boing-Boing

Update: The true story behind Hopkin revealed.

Breaking my pseudo-moratorium on political postings after two days because this is just so interesting… a man in Orange County has won a spot on the school board even though virtually no one has ever heard of him or seen him, beating out a challenger who has three children in the district, is president of the PTA at his kids’ school and is active with the Boy Scouts.

Now all that’s left is to find him. “Absolutely nobody, but nobody has seen this guy,” said Paul Pruss, a middle school teacher and the president of the union. “The whole thing is just bizarre.”

On the ballot, the challenger was identified as a “park ranger.” The mystery candidate, who lives with his parents and keeps a Johnny Cash record cover nailed to his front door, was identified as a “writer/educator,” even though no one can figure out what he’s written or who he’s educated.

Two plausible theories: 1) In a contest where voters have not informed themselves adequately about the candidates, people naturally pick “writer/educator” over “park ranger” because it sounds like a better fit for the job. 2) In the absence of enough information, many voters tend not to pick the Latino-sounding name.

Either way, the snafu points up a flaw in the election system — voting with insufficient information can yield unpredictable and potentially dangerous results.

Tieing into our earlier discussion about what kinds of experience qualify one for office, I’d like to frame the point this way: it is knowledge, not intelligence alone, that is crucial. And knowledge comes from two sources: experience and intelligence (where intelligence is defined as some combination of curiosity, analytical skills, and memory).

Who owns your local media? Well Connected’s Media Tracker lets you enter your zip code and see at a glance (with drill-down detail) just how many of your local TV, radio, and print outlets are concentrated into the hands of media conglomerates.

In my zip code, the top 6 mega-media fuzzballs own a total of 25/35 radio outlets. And it’s worse in other parts of the country.

After my recent spleen vent and the ensuing multi-tentacled fracas, I’m feeling politically spent. Just don’t want to think about politics at all for a while. Don’t know how long that while will last, but don’t be surprised if I appear to have lost interest over the next few weeks. It’s a defense mechanism, not a moratorium. Friends and family, sun and rain, music and food — that’s all I want right now.

Warning: Major spleen vent on deck. Indulge the rantings of a depressed American, or skip this post.

Keep thinking I need — or want — to get everything off my chest at once re: Bush’s 2nd term, to somehow convey all the multiple levels and layers of my incomprehension at the result. But every time I start, the thoughts tumble too quickly to be corralled, and I just don’t have an essay in me tonight.

Seriously, America — How much harm would Bush have to do to our nation for you to evict him from office? Would he have to personally come to your house, open up your septic tank with a Bradley and dump half a ton of uranium into your swimming pool? Would he have to steal directly from your bank account, rather than from your children’s? Condemn your kids to be educated in public schools in the projects? Wiretap every room in your house? Become convinced that you were hiding a secret cache of dangerous weapons, destroy your home over it, then not apologize or even admit wrongdoing (and tell you he’d do the same thing all over again)? Let a bunch of frat boys high on hatred attach electrodes to your father’s testicles? Would he have to assemble an inner cabinet of serial killers, rather than mere criminals? Would he have to corrupt every branch of government (and your city council too) with high-finance cronies? Would he have to drive unemployment to 70%? Eliminate Medicare? Undo the New Deal altogether? Just how many debates would he have to lose before you became convinced he wasn’t the right man for the job? Would he have to amend the Constitution to specify that marriage is only allowed between members of the same sex? Only allowed between armadillos and umbrellas? Would he have to ignore every piece of advice given to him by experts, rather than just most? How absurd does it have to get? How many countries would have to hate us over his policies? How much international good will would he have to squander? Would the U.N. have to kick us out altogether? Would Canada and Europe have to embargo the U.S. before you understood how low our standing is in the world today? What would it take, America? You seem to like being punished by your leaders — just how badly do you want more of this humiliation? Apparently, quite a lot.

Yeah, it’s all radical hyperbole, but seriously. I usually try to maintain some sense of patriotism, even though our administration shames us daily. But an election result like this makes it so much harder to be patriotic. I want to be proud to be an American. I find myself having to look deeper and harder to find things to be proud of. We’re in a bad way.

And then we hear that “moral values” was the highest criteria among voters when making their choice. Moral values? In what universe could Bush be considered a “moral” leader? How can you consider our president, who is opposed to gay marriage, who values American lives higher than Iraqi lives, who steals from the future to give to the rich, etc. to have high moral values? And where exactly are the moral blemishes on Kerry’s record?

Look on the bright side. Air America is just getting good, and a 2nd term guarantees they won’t be running out of material anytime soon. Same for Jon Stewart. More importantly, a 2nd term will allow plenty of time for the full effects of this administration’s policies to take hold. We’ll see whether people are still committed to self-destruction in 2008.

Some inspiring/inspired notes in Boing-Boing’s Kerry Concedes post.

P.S. Why does this map of average education levels look so much like the 2004 electoral college distribution? Draw your own conclusions.