Sites like rightwingstuff.com offer t-shirts bearing such enlightened slogans as “Peace through superior firepower,” “ACLU - Enemy of the state” and “Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions” (sorry, liberal baiters, I’m not biting). A UCSC prof of mine once went on an extended tirade about the seductive idiocy of bumper sticker philosophy, but the crap just keeps getting thicker. Meanwhile, Pomo Sideshow offers sideways magnetic yellow ribbons to counter the current flood of sideways magnetic yellow “Support our troops” ribbons, featuring sensible slogans such as “Demand open source voting” (I’m down with that), “God bless jingoist ribbons” (you know she does!) and “Support the magnetic ribbon industry.” Tell it like it is.

Thanks baald and mneptok

A few customers have asked whether I had Birdhouse Hosting badges they could put on their web sites, and I’ve finally gotten around to creating a few.

Two additional mutations of this specimen in the badge FAQ.

Thanks to customer Joseph Hall for kicking my booty to get this done.

The Billboard Liberation Front yesterday tweaked a San Francisco billboard to celebrate McDonald’s 50th Birthday. The modifications were some of the most extensive ever undertaken, including “the world’s first animatronic billboard alteration: a life-sized figure of Ronald McDonald feeding a corpulent child his daily dose of Big Macs.”

Construction photos here. A good one of the San Francisco Fire Department removing the corpulent child from his perch. Not sure how I get how the alien connects to the overall theme, but it appears that he too is growing a McFlurry waistline.

Recently missed the season finale of a favorite TV show due to a Tivo screw-up. None of my friends had a copy of the show, so decided it was time to figure out what most 17-year-olds already know: Everything is on BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, found that the BitTorrent world is somewhat biased towards Windows users, and that usage instructions don’t come with downloads. With a bit of research and experimentation, I was able to pull all the pieces together to download, decode, and burn the show to disc from the Mac. Decided to post notes here to save other 40-somethings the pain of figuring all of this stuff out.
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Great evening event tonight with Amgine — one of a handful of volunteer administrators at WikiNews. Probably safe to say he blew the minds of a roomful of journalists, discussing grassroots journalism and the growth of open-source information repositories. The discussion, of course, centers around the credibility of the source when you replace the traditionally trained information gatekeeper with a collaborative, volunteer-driven process that can only be described as massive organic peer review. Lots of discussion throughout this conference about citizen journalism, but most of the attempts at enabling it pale, I think, in comparison to the success (both in numbers and in growing credibility) of WikiNews and WikiPedia.

At home, started browsing WikiPedia’s public stats pages. Freaky facts (synthesized from that page and tonight’s talk): WikiPedia currently contains more than half a million articles (6x larger than Encylopedia Brittanica), and is growing at a rate of around 1,000 articles per day — the largest single, unified body of information on the planet. The WikiPedia database now weighs around 67GB, most of it plain text (and only 20% of that text is in English). Dishing up around 1200 hits per second. The changelist, when viewed through the administrator’s IRC-like interface, sometimes scrolls by too quickly to read. Average time needed for the hive mind to correct a vandalized article: 4.5 minutes.

And it all runs as a non-profit entity, on top of donated servers and bandwidth. The only religion of the admins and hardcore participants is total, obsessive commitment to neutrality.

It’s difficult to gauge or imagine what the ultimate effect of open source knowledge bases will be on traditional journalism, but it’s clearly adapt-or-die time. It’s going to be fascinating to watch traditional media struggling to cope with this phenomenon over the next decade.

If you missed tonight’s live webcast, I’ll try and get the archives up by late next week.

Traveled with some of our visiting journalists yesterday to the hideout of Ezra Daly, who makes instruments (mostly basses) out of junkyard parts and found objects. Pictured: Venus de Moto and Frankenbass — the latter crafted from an old Moto Guzzi Ambassador gas tank, resting in an old Yamaha chassis re-deployed as a bass stand. The instruments are gorgeous in person. Long in the making, one-of-a-kind, and completely functional. Total commitment and patience in these. Daly plays mostly psychobilly and cow-punk, but has very eclectic tastes. I was sort of a hanger-on, mostly went along to see the instruments, and to help with tech stuff as needed. Amazing to see these instruments in person, and to hear them played. With fire.

Update: One of the journalists put an image of me from the same visit up on his Flickr account. Not particularly flattering, but love the lighting.

Every now and then someone sends me an invite to hook up with them on LinkedIn. I generally accept the invites, but have never done much with the service, aside from getting back in touch with a few old Ziff colleagues. Yesterday Amy discovered the site. We didn’t find ourselves automatically in one another’s networks, so I sent her invite. This morning I hear her reading her email out loud, in a voice dripping with sarcasm:

“You are a person I trust. I’d like to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn. I’m using it to discover inside connections I didn’t know I had.” And then, “Gosh honey, you’re SO romantic.”

Marriage tip: When sending a LinkedIn invitation to your life partner, edit the default text before sending.

Wired: If wind turbines were installed at 13% of 8,000 sites monitored by Stanford researchers, we could be sucking 72 terawatts of electricity out of the atmosphere — five times the world’s energy needs, which was roughly 14 terawatts in 2002. Lots of caveats and codas to that of course, but the potential is pretty inspiring.

The Festival of Mulch began on September 10, 2004, when I came home to find a mammoth mulch pile in the driveway, and ended May 22, 2005, when the last scrap of shredded bark and other tree waste was applied to the yard and we scrubbed the driveway clean. We can park the car again! It’s been a wonderful, mulch-ful 8 months and 12 days, but all things must pass.

The Birdhouse FAQs/How-Tos have been thoroughly updated to reflect the new cPanel hosting environment. Please let us know if there are questions you’d like to see answered in the How-Tos.

Dang, that was a big job. Documentation is always the least-fun aspect of any development job (which explains why documentation is so poor in so many open source apps). I think we’ve nailed the basics and beyond though…

Miles’ analysis of my ongoing dental escapades: “Daddy, you have a problem with your teeth.” Me, probing: “Oh! What problem do I have?” “You have bugs in your teeth.” “I do? What kind of bugs?” “You have LADYbugs in your teeth!”

The endodontist was kind enough to send me some printouts from their magical instant-gratification x-ray device. I had asked for JPEGs while at the office, but got the old “we don’t have the internet here.”

Pictured: Roots rising up like marsh reeds through the tooth, into the jaw, making problematic contact with sinuses. Love the graceful arc of that plastic spreader device thingy. Had been feeling increasingly low for weeks, now walking tall.

From Media Matters:

Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said he was “thinking about killing [filmmaker] Michael Moore” and pondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” before concluding: “No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”

Political Puzzle wonders how it would have gone down if Michael Moore said something similar about a right-wing commentator…

Another giant week coming up at work, as we prepare for another multimedia training session for mid-career journalists. The same semester-long multimedia program we give to our students, compressed into a five-day crash course. And in the lunch and dinner breaks, we present speakers from organizations doing innovative media stuff. These speaker sessions are open to the public, and most will be webcast live (and archived later):

The J-School is hosting a series of presentations May 23 - 27 on multimedia storytelling, citizen journalism and other new media topics featuring Ken Sands of the Spokane Spokesman-Review; Bob Cauthorn of City Tools; Regina McCombs of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Amy Hill of the Center for Digital Storytelling; Dan Gillmor of Grassroots Media; G. Donald Bain of UC Berkeley’s Geography Computing Facility; Landis Bennett of World Wide Panorama; Mary Lou Fulton of Northwest Voice; Amgine (Wayne Saewyc) of Wikinews and Rob Curley of the Lawrence Journal-World. See event details for more information.

Bracing for exhaustion…

Rear-view mirror: Peachpit’s official website for the BeOS Bible was beosbible.com, and included chapter excerpts, entire chapters that were written for the book but never published, and updates for R4.5. The site was taken offline shortly after the book went out of print. Eventually, Peachpit granted me permission to mirror the contents elsewhere, but they were only able to supply a very broken, partial archive of the original site. I of course had copies of the content I had written for it, but it was going to take a lot of work to fix the fragmented tarball they had supplied. Today, out of nowhere, a user named Oren Bear provided me with a complete, working copy of the original site, which had apparently been hoovered off the web by an unknown reader years ago, and has been floating around on P2P networks ever since. Thanks to Oren, I’m finally able to reproduce beosbible.com in its entirety.

I always thought it was a funny-looking site, with odd navigation, but there you go. One for the archives.

As the nitrous kicks in, I am floating sideways, seven feet underwater, thinking suddenly about SSL certificates and dolphins. What is this lame music, I wonder, remembering that the RIAA is suing dentists across the U.S. and Canada to get them to pay royalties for the privilege of subjecting patients to Kenny G. Isn’t that “Grazing in the Grass?” Yes, but neutered. Don’t they know people prefer to listen to Ornette Coleman on laughing gas? I try to flatten the fifth in my mind.

The antibiotics did such a marvelous job of relieving the pain over the past few days. I ask whether we can just call it a sinus infection and forget the root canal, call it a day. “Your mouth is a time bomb, Mr. Hacker,” the endodontist tells me in broken English. Not the first time I’ve heard that one. Bite plate goes in. Dental dam goes in. I am submerged, I am Dr. Yeh’s supplicant. Do with me as you will.

These are not your typical dentist’s drills. The bits are long and flexible, and turn slowly. No whining, more of a whirr. She applies them quickly, changes bits with lightning speed, examines each one carefully. How many bits do you need here? 20? I remember the line in the disclaimer I had to sign, about the prospect of a bit breaking off inside my jaw. Fumble for my phone, snap some self-portraits at arm’s length. Suddenly the good doctor pips in triumph, temporarily bringing me up from the depths. “You see? You see? Dead meat! Dead meat!” She is dangling a nerve from the tips of a small pair of pliers. The nerve is about the size of a few intertwined hairs, a tiny darkened bulb on one end, in the process of dying. It is the culprit, the source of the infection. I start laughing, can’t stop. Let me repeat the scene, so I never forget:

I am now gazing at a nerve extracted from my own body, pulled out of my head by a slowly rotating flexible bit, now dangling from a thin pairapliers. I have never seen my own nerves before, and I am laughing hysterically. Dead meat! Dead meat! I am happy.

They stop every so often to make images. New digital x-ray, no development required, images on an LCD on swivel mount in front of my face, instant vision. Dr. Yeh exclaims again. “Four roots, not three! Less than 5% of population have four roots! You are very special!” And the work continues. The fourth root goes very deep. They have to remove another filling to get it all. Three hours in the chair, total. I could do this all day. Suddenly they’re increasing the oxygen in my mixture, desaturating nitrous in my blood. I am above water. It all seemed so vivid while happening, now suddenly a barely accessible memory. Today will be a couch day.

In discussions on whether it’s appropriate for government agencies and/or courts to display religious documents such as the Ten Commandments, people often suggest that doing so is legitimate because The Founders were all deeply religious men, their beliefs — and the Constitution — ultimately shaped by Christianity.

At Common Dreams, in Moses Didn’t Write The Constitution, Thom Hartmann makes the case that, Christian or not, Jefferson was adamant about not including the Commandments in the Constitution, and that they are not, in fact, “the very basis of American law.”

The reason was simple, Jefferson said. British common law, on which much American law was based, existed before Christianity had arrived in England … In a February 10, 1814 letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, Jefferson addressed the question directly. “Finally, in answer to Fortescue Aland’s question why the Ten Commandments should not now be a part of the common law of England we may say they are not because they never were.”

More interesting stuff in the piece…

Got a lovely litle flat on the Subaru a few nights ago - fatal stab wound to the sidewall (well, glass most likely - I doubt we got slashed!), not repairable. So the dealer dryly informs us that because it’s an all-wheel drive, it’s critical that all tires have exactly the same radius. If you mix worn tires with new on an AWD, the constant work of matching rotational speeds in the differential can heat up the drive train and cause damage. Hrmmm… Amy does some quick googling and comes up with this — apparently it’s possible to buy just one new tire and have it shaved — lathed down to match the tread depth of the other three, for a sum total of $35 over the cost of the new tire. Wonder why the dealer didn’t suggest shaving… (a facetious question, in case it wasn’t obvious).

Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic gives me hope for the future of filmmaking - I haven’t seen a movie this gorgeously cinematic, this surprising, this full of dry humor and great music and perfect frames one after another for… how long? A masterpiece.

Punctuated throughout by Seu Jorge playing David Bowie songs on acoustic guitar, solo, in Portuguese. “Ziggy Stardust” from the crow’s nest, “Rock and Roll Suicide” from a shack on the beach… poetic and weird and beautiful in a way I never expected. Need to find more Seu…

When Rush Limbaugh decided to lambaste what he perceives as a crisis of multiculturalism in American education, he should oughtn’t of picked on Evanston Township High School. “All ETHS sophomores choose among several “global perspectives” courses covering the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia and Russia.” Imagine the crisis - students learning about the rest of the world! What Limbaugh apparently didn’t know was that ETHS students also do extremely well on standardized tests of U.S. history.

“What multiculturalists is, is balkanizing this country,” Limbaugh said Tuesday.

Students respond:

Until 10th grade, all we did was U.S. and European history. It’s just so false that what he says is funny.

Now some of the students want to debate him in U.S. history. I wonder if they’re accepting wagers. Would be more lucrative than bake sales…

Happy fifth anniversary to Amy and me! I guess the fact that it doesn’t seem anything like five years is testament to how much we enjoy one another’s company. Amy, choosing to spend my life with you was the best decision I’ve ever made. I feel that as strongly today as I did the day we met.

The greatness of the day much dampened by excruciating pain emanating from my upper right molar. Can’t eat anything but soup, can’t even let my uppers and lowers touch. Talking is difficult. Couldn’t sleep last night for the pain. Saw an endodontist this morning, turns out the nerve is dead and complications abound. Good thing that crown I got a couple of weeks ago was temporary, since the dentistas con drillistos are going back into the hole. Can’t get a root canal until Tuesday. It’s going to be a long three days on an antibiotic regimen, plus generous doses of ibuprofen and vicodin.

Oh, and it’s Mom’s birthday. And Friday 13th. Strange days.

Days getting longer, doing more biking, and feeling the close calls with cars again. The orange vest seems to help (a few drivers seem to equate safety orange with “government employee” and become deferential), but it’s amazing to see what drivers will do even when you know they see you - things they would never do if I were another car, since then I’d be a threat to their fender integrity. All of this gets me thinking about Matthew again, and then I learn about the upcoming Ride of Silence:

On May 18, at 7 PM across the country and around the world, cyclists will take to the roads in a silent protest of what they call carnage taking place on the streets. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, much of the motoring public doesn’t seem aware they are there.

Wyn Aldrich tells me Matthew’s name has been added to the list of bicyclists who have been killed by cars, and is to be among those commemorated at this year’s nation-wide event.

Biking home from work, saw a police cruiser parked behind a late-model Corolla, lights flashing. Occupants of the vehicle standing outside the car talking to officers, both wearing karate or judo robes tied with black belts. Karate Dude #1 holding his cell phone up, screen flipped out toward the face of Officer #1, as if showing him an image. Officer #1 shaking his head slowly at the phone, looking puzzled. Officer #2 seemed to be studying Karate Dude #2’s getup.

Tried to write the caption to this scene in my head the rest of the way home.

Being one of those fools with more MP3s than will fit on any iPod ever made, I’ve never used iPod/iTunes in sync mode - I’ve been more than content to drag tracks and playlists in manually, remove them when ready to move on. Listening to podcasts changed that dynamic. Unlike music, podcasts aren’t something you want to keep around — listen once or twice and discard.

But suddenly there was a need to manually update my “Podcast” playlist on a near-daily basis, which meant a several-step process: Delete tracks from the iTunes playlist (and from the Library, via the Delete Selected Tracks AppleScript), ditto on the iPod. Populate the iTunes list manually, drag its contents over… the process was seriously harshing my mellow. The patient’s passages needed to be unobstructed by food particles and other debris; there had to be a free flow from RSS reader to iTunes to iPod, effortless. Discovering that NetNewsWire 2.0 could be made to automatically add enclosures to a specific playlist in iTunes partially mitigated the hassle, but still required deleting old content before downloading so that old and new didn’t get all mixed up.

Then I discovered what most iPod users have probably known all along - when an iPod is plugged in and you access iTunes’ preferences, you can tell it to just synchronize certain lists. Keen. But when I did that for the Podcast list and sync’d, was amazed to see that the rest of the content on the iPod had been wiped. Not only that, but the contents of the iPod were grayed out in iTunes. Allowing sync to take over meant that everything from now on was going to have to be sync’d - no more manual updates. Which meant that if I also wanted music, I’d have to create new playlists for the purpose and tell them to sync as well.

Funny - this is how the iPod was “meant” to be used, but in almost three years I had never seen iPod sync in action. Not sure I like it, but it’s workable. Can’t help but think there’s got to be a better way. I’d prefer to stay in manual mode, but be allowed to designate specific lists as sync-able.

And now the plot is thickening. Some sites are taking such a huge bandwidth hit from podcast downloads that they’re turning to the distributed model of BitTorrent. That makes good sense, but to keep the flow intact, RSS readers that handle attachments will need to gain the ability to handle BitTorrent files, or pass the job over to the BitTorrent client, then move the decompressed archive back over to iTunes. Small pieces loosely joined, sure, but someone’s got to do the joining. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped listening to Slashdot news and a few others.

While we’re talking smooth integration, someone’s got to solve the problem of sites like philosophytalk, which only cast in Real or other proprietary formats.

Bonus horror: Downloading some fresh casts tonight, when the iPod totally locked up (as Dorothy Parker famously uttered, “What fresh hell is this?”). Then I realized that iTunes, NetNewsWire, and the Finder had all locked up as well, a tangle that ultimately turned into a forced reboot. FireWire bus problems are pretty much an uptime kill on any platform, but damn, that was egregious.

Update: I don’t think the problem was the FireWire bus after all. Something deeper happened, probably on the motherboard. This morning there’s a thin blue line running vertically down the left side of the screen, about 2″ from the left bezel. A reboot didn’t make it go away. Looks like it may be time for this one to go to the shop.

Environmentalist / futurist Stewart Brand, who founded the original Whole Earth Catalog as well as the legendary electronic community The Well, and who is now involved with The Long Now Foundation has written an excellent piece for Technology Review on changes of heart — and needed changes of heart — within the environmental movement.

He starts by separating environmentalists into scientists, who “live to admit their mistakes,” and lay-environmentalists, who are often romantics and have trouble changing course. For example, while much of the environmental movement still clings to old ideas about indefinitely expanding populations being the greatest umbrella threat to the environment, world populations are actually in rapid freefall as rural areas empty out and people move to the city (life in the country encourages lots of children, life in the city discourages same). Most environmentalists have not yet gotten the message that population changes are now actually working in their favor.

He also makes some interesting cases about genetically modified foods. For example, the Amish, who are among the world’s best farmers, have enthusiastically embraced genetically modified crops. And he makes the point that environmental concerns like protecting wild spaces (a goal he embraces) are helpless against invasive species of flora and fauna, which do as much or more harm to the natural balance as man. “I can’t wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their reproductive pathway, and then die out.”

And then he gets to the zinger we knew was coming, re: climate change:

So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration� (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

I do disagree with Brand on this: “Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good.” Hybrid vehicles may be less bad than gas-only cars, but “performing public good?” No matter how efficient, cars still take up way too much space in comparison to the number of passengers they typically transport, lead to congestion and the relentless paving over of the planet, and discourage bicycle and public transport. Hybrids are good, but they don’t “fix” the problem of cars in the larger picture.

There are other things to quibble with in Brand’s essay, but it seems clear that the environmental movement is entering a period of deep reflection. To achieve its goals, it will have to honestly question its positions on the very pillars of its philosophy. To save the planet, environmentalists have to be intellectually honest and begin debate on many of their fundamental planks. And that debate has barely started.

Related links at Metafilter.

In 20 years, when Miles joins M.I.T.’s Time Traveler’s Conference and attendees ask him about his first invention, he’ll be able to tell them he taped a vacuum cleaner attachment to the funnel of a steam train as a toddler. OK, he had a bit of help, but it was his idea, and he did most of the taping. Unfortunately, his attempt to make a cow catcher out of Scotch tape didn’t fare nearly as well.