Jaw-dropping mini-collection of bilious quotations from the Christian right.

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
– Jerry Falwell

Or try this one on:

“God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” 
– Ann Coulter

I try to remind myself that these people are well-intentioned, but have trouble believing it sometimes.

Update: For the first 15 seconds you’ll be convinced forceministries.com is some kind of cruel joke. Then you’ll realize it’s not. The real cruel joke is the painful misunderstanding of Jesus’ message.

How hard can it be to slide a few servers into a cabinet? Took pretty much the entire day to rack up a UPS, X-Raid, and three X-Serves into an XRackPro2. From top to bottom, the J-School’s existing web server, fairly new streaming media server, brand new directory server/RAID controller, and 1.4 TB RAID-4 student/faculty storage system. Haven’t yet configured the RAID or directory server — will be working on that in the coming weeks. Huge leap forward - this half-height cabinet replaces a wall full of mostly x86/Windows servers.

Added 50 new “Images from Nowhere” (right column, rotated hourly). Had been saving them up for months to try out Automator, but the only Photoshop resize action I found turned out to be commercial rather than free, and the PS batch action I already had set up does a fine job anyway.

Did have good results using Automator to add hint tracks to a bunch of webcasts earlier this month. But even then, the shell script I had already created to automate the same task was faster and simpler to launch. Automator seems like a wonderful idea, but I’m having trouble coming up with real-world jobs for it… I think the big break will come when I need to process the same set of files in multiple applications. For example, a code cleanup I’m currently involved in could benefit by being able to pass the same set of files through both BBEdit and Dreamweaver. But Automator depends on having access to applications with the right hooks built in, and it may take a while for those to appear (BBEdit is ready, Dreamweaver is not).

Listening to Brian Eno talk about the creation of Another Day on Earth over the past few days. He spends some time meditating on the temptations that technology presents, and the balance he has to strike between using the technology compositionally vs. the danger of becoming seduced by it. Talks about how artists used recording studios in the 50s, before there was so much huge money in the industry and each hour of recording time was money out of musicians’ pockets (still true for independents today, though the equipment has changed). “First take best take” (Trungpa –> Kerouac) was much more common. Now we produce the hell out of everything. Overproduction a side effect of too much technology presenting too many choices.

The central problem of a musical piece may be the lyrics. But that problem is hard, and no one can solve it on the spot. So instead we start tweaking knobs, applying 177 effects to 19 guitar parts across 128 tracks, sidestepping the core weakness of the piece and distracting the listener’s attention from the song.

Comparison made to getting stuck on a piece of writing and starting to tweak the fonts, page layout, etc. rather than the piece. He calls this process “screwdriver mode.” The seductive garden paths of technological possibility.

I watched this happen with myself and the old birdhouse — originally using web technologies to create web art, then slowly finding myself spending more and more time exploring technologies without actually applying them.

We see the same tendency with digital photos and music collections - becoming obsessed with cataloguing, databasing, finding new ways to sift and sort, all taking attention from taking excellent photographs or really listening.

Distractions. Screwdriver mode. All of us susceptible to it, some more than others.

As if Apple had read my mind (or read this post), iTunes 4.9 and the accompanying iPod updater released today addresses every single one of my sync frustrations. No more using an external RSS aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, transmit them into iTunes, and then into the iPod. No more manually removing casts I’ve already heard*. Suddenly it’s all tightly integrated, totally elegant, just works. How Apple of them. The new podcast directory built into the iTunes Music Store is pretty cool too, but has some growing to do.

* Actually this remains to be tested - there’s a preference that lets you tell iTunes to keep copies of all casts you haven’t yet heard. How “haven’t yet heard” is defined remains to be seen. I’m assuming that the 29MB iPod updater I just installed includes a mechanism for determining whether I’ve listened to a cast all the way through; on the next sync it should remove that cast from my hard disk as well.

Finally, archaeological evidence for the correct pronunciation of the acronym “GIF.” Not sure about the claim that Mac users tend to say GIF and Windows users JIF — never noticed a correlation there, but it does lead to a great user comment on the site:

First of all let me say that Mac zealots should be rounded up into cattle cars, gassed to death and incinerated to make certain there is no remaining genetic material that might infect the rest of the gene pool. I group Mac-heads with NAMBLA, the flat earth society and regional militia. I say this merely to point out that how violently I would oppose aligning myself with this much confused group. However, there can be only one correct pronunciation of the acronym GIF. And that pronunciation begins with a hard G as you would find in the word “graphic”. Still have trouble forming the correct sound? Try this. Begin to say GIF as if you were saying the word “graphic”, abandon the final six letters as you slip into the acronym. GIF, there you’ve said it correctly.

I agree with this guy (about the pronunciation part), but will defer to the authors of the format and return to using “JIF” in pronunciation. Even if it’s wrong. Dammit.

Thanks baald

Cleaning out the office today, moving an old and buggy Cambridge SoundWorks sat-sub computer speaker system to the garage, heard a mysterious rattle from within. Shining a light down through it’s vent and tilting it side-to-side, spied a little race car and a few other unidentified objects. Uh-oh. Tried to shake them out, but the vent was shaped like a lobster trap — no way were these things coming out easily. Removed nine screws from backing plate, lifted out the crossover, uncovered following items:

- 2 Gerber pacifiers, extra small
- One blue/yellow Cheerios-branded race car
- One Canon lithium-ion digital camera battery

There was a period of about six months when Miles was half his current age when he loved to crawl around under my desk among the wires and cables — hasn’t done that for a long time. The size of the pacifier suck-plugs pegged the time of insertion at around 1.5 years ago (his mouth was smaller then). We had forgotten all about the Cheerios car. The missing camera battery had driven us crazy for months. “I know we couldn’t have lost it… it’s got to be around here somewhere…” Finally bought a new one. Now we have two, which is fine.

Somehow we found the discovery heartwarming. Love/hate his growing up, that he doesn’t do this kind of stuff anymore. It’s all about Tinkertoys and Bob the Builder now.

It’s interesting to see how differently people using Birdhouse Hosting services. Some set up a domain and do nothing with it for months (or ever). Others are heavy-hitters, consuming massive amounts of bandwidth and CPU. Some set up great sites with no interest in using email services, while others register domains for the sole purpose of email, with no interest in running a site.

Another interesting distinction: While most users handle email through a desktop mail client (some, like me, almost obsessive, always in search of the perfect mail app) and view webmail as an inconvenience one is forced to use when on the road or at an alien machine, I’ve come to accept that increasing numbers of people aren’t even aware that desktop mail clients exist. A lot of people — especially students, who float from machine to machine — live in webmail. Just explaining to some users that there is life beyond webmail can be tricky.

robertaklugman.com has been an email-only user for more than two years. Klugman was actually Birdhouse’s very first customer, and has been a heavy email user with no site to represent her food and wine marketing/promotion business. Today we set up something simple; more to come.

Sincere, deluded, so terrible it borders on musical magic. This is why I don’t do karaoke.

votesolar.org: Each day, more energy falls to the earth from the sun’s rays than the total amount of energy the planet’s 5.9 billion inhabitants would consume in 27 years.

On June 1, the California Senate voted to pass the Million Solar Roofs bill by 28-3.

Salon: The bill would add a staggering 3,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the state — equivalent to the capacity of 10 average-size coal-fired power plants or two nuke plants, and more than 30 times the current installed solar capacity. That could make California the No. 1 solar market in the world, surpassing today’s top two biggest consumers of photovoltaic technology, Germany and Japan.

If this goes through, it could be the one great accomplishment of the beleaguered Schwarzenegger administration. But The Governator has created such a caustic climate that political infighting could lead to the bill’s demise before it ever goes into effect. Meanwhile, union pressure to stipulate wages for the technicians installing the panels could raise the cost of installation 30-40%, virtually killing the initiative. Get it together people.

Playing around with the new iTunes Artwork screensaver in Tiger — generates an array of all albums in your collection for which you have cover art, randomizes, throws them up in a grid, flips/replaces covers at random. Sounds a bit silly, but in reality feels like a sort of reclamation — the vanishing romance of thumbing through piles of LPs, cover art scattered over the rug. Feels good.

Of course you quickly realize how little of your MP3 collection even has cover art. Clutter solves that, but grows your database by about 1MB per album (art is added to metadata of each track) and it would take weeks to add cover art to an entire collection.

You need to use the CLI screencapture utility in OS X to shoot screensavers. Be sure to silence it with the -x flag — without that it hoarks forth an ungodly loud noise when it snaps.

sleep 25; screencapture -x cap6.png

Interesting that Apple has switched from PDF to PNG as the screen capture file format with Tiger. Would be nice if they offered a preference for that.

Met a woman yesterday in an office building, complimented the cute picture of her daughter on the wall. “What’s her name?” “Special.” “Her name is Special?” “Yes, she has two sisters — Unique and Lovely.”

My interest was, um, piqued, but didn’t quite know what to say next. She filled the silence. “Sometimes when someone asks Special her name, she tells them, ‘Oh, what a unique name!’ and she answers, ‘No, Unique is my sister.’” So her kids are trapped in an endless game of “Who’s On First?” with strangers.

Don’t get me wrong - I think unusual names are great. Shows balls, shows art. But this trio of monikers brings so much built-in difficulty for the kids.

Reminded of a story I heard about a woman who gave birth to twin girls and named them Orangelo and Lemonjelo (orange jello / lemon jello)… after the post-labor food she had just enjoyed. No idea whether the story is apocryphal, but I actually don’t entirely doubt it.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes josephhall.org, the all-purpose site of Berkeley SIMS PhD student Joseph Hall. Joseph’s got an interesting B2 Evolution weblog running at Not Quite a Blog, at which I found a reference to a neat trick: When using a Mac in bright sunlight, hit Cmd-Ctrl-Opt-8 for instant super-high contrast inverted display - a shortcut to one of the accessibility features, sans rummaging around in the prefs.

It’s been 15 years since Brian Eno released a vocal album. All of the ambient stuff in the years between has been interesting and even gorgeous at times, but not sustaining in the way records like Another Green World have been (Green World still has the power to take me far, far away). Out of the blue (or into it), the just-released Another Day on Earth revives some of that spirit — ethereal synth washes, complexly layered vocals, Fripp-like guitar, melodies that simply float without sounding anemic… It’s not Green World, but it’s great to have the old Eno back again.

emusic has it, iTunes doesn’t. Amazon review. There’s also an Eno interview available for download (billed as a podcast, though I think content should have to be serialized to be billed as a “podcast”).

30+ years ago, used to spend summer afternoons at Atascadero Lake and its adjoining zoo. It was a crappy little lake, but it was what we had (spent a lot more time in the ocean than in the lake; this is where we’d go for company picnics, playdates with cousins, etc). Hadn’t given a thought since then to the fiberglass lion head / drinking fountain at the zoo entrance, and was amazed last weekend to find it still intact, despite total reconstruction of the zoo (much for the better). Miles ran right up to it, worked the handle himself, got totally doused. A rush of memories came flooding back. Comforting to see that a few good things occasionally withstand the ravages of modernization.

At the zoo last weekend, an info kiosk presented by Dawn dishwashing liquid on the effects of motor, crude, and other oils in the oceanic environment on wild birds (Dawn has always been the detergent of choice in bird rescue efforts). Interesting factoid: Of the roughly 24 million gallons of oil humans introduce into the world’s oceans yearly, only 8% can be attributed to tanker spills. The rest comes from jet skis, boats, airplanes, and runoff from cities.

Tip: “Place cooking oils and fats in a sealed container in the garbage rather than pouring them down the kitchen drain.” Have to confess, I had never made the connection on that one.

Generally skeptical of corporate attempts to appear as enviro do-gooders, but can’t fault Proctor & Gamble for donating thousands of gallons of detergent over the years to clean up birds.

Video archives from our last New Media Training Conference are now up, and the streamer is getting hit hard with requests for a presentation by Bob Cauthorn — an industry analyst who virtually handed newspaper executives’ heads to them on a platter for 90 minutes re: the madness of perpetuating business models that have resulted in a steady 30-year slide in product popularity. Cauthorn took ‘em to school, no holds barred. Quite an amazing performance to watch live, but plays well on video too (though his slides are tough to read). E-Media Tidbits says of Cauthorn’s presentation, He May Never Get a Newspaper Job Again!. Quickly shaping up to be the most-trafficked video stream we’ve ever served.

The webcast of Amgine from WikiNews is also very worth watching, though a bit dark - didn’t have time to brighten it in post.

Built RSS feed generators for the J-School’s student and faculty stories databases today. Nice to be able to test RSS feeds directly in Safari. These will probably be lightly updated now that we’re into summer. Now that these exist, I’d like to build a custom Dashboard Widget for J-School RSS feeds in time for next semester, and load it onto all of the new incoming Macs.

Finally got approval and backing to undertake a massive re-creation of the J-School web site this summer, glory be. We’ll be hiring a designer; the hard work is going to be cleaning up and prepping 1500 pages of static content, taking it out of 1997 mode. Design tables, font tags, non-existent standardization on how pages are constructed. By the time I’m done, every page should be XHTML compliant, lightweight, and with total separation of design and content. We’ve got a heck of a lot of custom PHP/MySQL stuff interleaved, which could make choosing and integrating a CMS tricky.

Now that back-to-back conferences and jury duty are over, nose to the grindstone.

In the eternal quest to clear the inbox (aka The Impossible Dream), I responded to a message today dated June 2003, with something like “Let’s face reality - I’m never going to give this the thoughtful response it deserves, but thanks for the energy you put into this thread.” It’s a cop-out I know, but also necessary/pragmatic. This got me thinking - is there, like, a statute of limitations on the age of email messages? After what point is it just pointless to bother responding? Can you delete unanswered messages after a year without having to apologize for it? I know I’m not alone in this dilemma. How old is your oldest unanswered message? The one you keep around because you just know one night you’ll get around to responding (I actually have some older than June 2003 and would love an excuse to just can them).

Jury duty. Foolishly expected that, as usual, I would get in, not get selected, and get back to work. What unfolded instead could be called a comedy of errors, but that would be too charitable a description for the expanse of waste and idiocy (and yes, comedy) that I encountered today.

Update: I’ve added the end-game to this post.
(more…)

Salon.com:

According to an Annenberg poll conducted this spring, about 40 percent of Americans consider Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly a “journalist” — while only 30 percent of the people surveyed said they considered famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to be one. … Meanwhile, more than a quarter surveyed said that another champion of judicious reportage, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, was a journalist.

So when you see reports about the sinking credibility ratings of journalists, keep in mind who the “journalists” being rated really are.

The hallucinogenic dream sequence from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day has recently become one of Miles’ favorite bits. Amazing to see how the images and icons foremost in his mind become interleaved so fluidly with real life. Heard recently that children can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality until age seven. At two, it’s all one big plastic fantastic reality sandwich.

“Miles, what are you and Mommy going to do today?”

“Daddy, we’re going to go down in a gopher hole with Winnie the Pooh and some Heffalumps and Woozles and we’re going to take a train table and trains in there too and grandma will come with us down in the gopher hole and look for honey that’s what we’re going to do, Daddy.”

On the second night of the recent Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival, cellist Theresa Wong played an amplified bicycle, in a performance that brought many in the house to tears. Wong, who studies performance at Mills College, had been playing the amplified bicycle prior to having known of Matthew or his death. I had been storing the bicycle from which Matthew was struck in our garage for quite some time.

After the performance, I offered Matthew’s bicycle to Theresa to use as her instrument; she accepted. I spent Saturday afternoon getting the wheels rolling again, chain disentangled, brake pads unstuck, and cleaning up the road grit. Rested my hands on the grips - the last things Matthew ever touched - and took the bike for a spin, meditating on his life. Sunday I delivered the bike to Theresa’s Oakland loft.

Theresa found the bike resonant, full of surprising sounds. After a few minutes of orientation, she improvised a piece for Matthew. A wild dove had been hanging out in the loft for a few days, and we imagined it to be Matthew’s visiting spirit. There are two versions of the performance here:

- An audio-only version of the complete performance (5:20, mono, 3MBs), captured directly from Wong’s amp.

- An edited set of video excerpts (including the dove, 2:48, 6MBs).

As KrazyDad, Jim Bumgardner produces dozens of web toys every year. His most recent is Colr Pickr — select a color value from a wheel and find Flickr images whose average value match the selected color.

To those that question the utility of this little application, let me point out that it is a toy — like all the stuff on my website. It’s purpose is simply to provide wonder and delight. Nothing more, nothing less. Isn’t that enough? — jbum

Nevermind Burning Man, the French know how to do performance spectacle x 10. From the Nantes festival, celebrating the works of Jules Verne:

“This Thursday, May 19, a rocket landed on the square of the Cathedral. It is a rocket controlled by a small giantess. Our sources of information indicate to us that it is probable that she will leave tomorrow morning… This Friday, the elephant of Royal of Luxury arrived on Saint-Pierre road and the small giantess left her rocket to join it and visit the downtown area.”

P.S. God bless Baby Elephant Walk.