That rug really tied the room together.
 
April 29th, 2007

Stop Making Sense

Miles quite taken recently with calling things (and sometimes people) “dumb” or “stupid.” Trying to wean him off this verbiage, Amy told him a better way to express himself would be to say “xxx doesn’t make any sense.” Which, by evening, turned into “I don’t want to eat this soup. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He’s been running around the house lately, inexplicably pleading “The taxes are going to get me! Save me from the taxes!” This morphed from last week’s variant on the same theme: “Save me from the ticklers!,” which he started saying after holding a live starfish and being tickled by its thousand sucker feet. You know how it goes – starfish, 1040EZ, all on the same continuum.

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April 29th, 2007

Sanoodi

Miles and I tracked down our first geocache today – less than a mile from our house. Most caches are tucked deep in the wilderness, but a surprising number are stashed right under your nose; you could walk by them a thousand times and never have a clue. Hardcore geocachers look down on caching in residential areas, but wanted to start easy. M scored a pair of super-bouncy balls and left a Matchbox tow truck. Think he was a bit disappointed – “surprise” may have meant “new Lego set” in his mind. Opportunity to talk about the pleasures of discovery. Have heard of some caches containing opera tickets, c-notes, world peace, etc. Reality is probably that most will contain key fobs and hair clips.

Nabbed an account on Sanoodi, a regretfully named Web 2.0-ish site that lets users upload XML (.gpx) track output from GPS devices, which it maps directly onto Google maps to share with other hikers/bikers/runners. I’ll be using the site to store tracks for posterity. Started with my bike route along the Ohlone Greenway from home to UC Berkeley.

Thanks Patrick Cates

Music: União Black :: “Yeah Yeah Yeah”

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Posted in Geek, Geo | 1 Comment »

April 29th, 2007

nonfictionmedia

Birdhouse Hosting user Scott Squire has a gorgeous new portfolio site capturing some of his representative photography and “moving pictures” (not quite video, but not just photography either). Loved his photo slideshow Jump School, on U.S. Army paratroopers in training. Squire also remains one of the most interesting wedding photographers I’ve seen. The site for his coming book Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley is also hosted by Birdhouse.

Posted in Culture, Hosting | No Comments »

April 27th, 2007

Elevation Map

Miles and I hike every weekend, sometimes twice. He loves it, and scrambles like a nine-year-old (it’s almost scary how confident he is in the wilderness). Recently got a wild hair to marry the geek thing with the granola thing and get a GPS unit, so I could 1) Start mapping our hikes digitally, and 2) Experiment with geocaching. Found an eTrex Legend Cx on eBay, and have been trying to climb out of the rabbit hole since it arrived.

Bike-Elevation-1
Elevation delta of my daily bike commute from home to UC Berkeley.

The device may look like a bit like a phone, but the similarity ends there. These things are capable of so much, I was totally unprepared for the learning curve it would bring. Tracks, routes, navigation, waypoints, points of interest, and the interfaces for managing all of them. Not to mention the huge variety of available software and the multitude of data formats that tags along.

The GPS universe is notoriously Windows-centric, but went with a Garmin in part because of their announcement that they intended to roll out full Mac support in 2007. But my unit came with a Windows-only CD, which meant hauling an old laptop out of the closet. Garmin.com has a few scattered Mac apps on their site, but nothing capable of loading maps and exchanging data formats. For that, you have to turn to workhorse open source apps like Babel, which get some of the job done, in a crude fashion. Found a few others, all with different strengths, but the killer one appears to be Google Earth, which (I didn’t realize until last night) is capable of connecting directly to popular GPS units and mapping their tracks and routes onto the the 3D surface — if you spring for the $20/year premium version. Still, an embarrassment of riches of mapping options is out there, some of them web-based.

Super impressed by the contact I had with Garmin tech support after I sent them email detailing some Mac issues and questions – expected a boilerplate response but got 6 paragraphs of info from a Mac-head employee and realized they actually care — unheard of!

Having fun so far*, but much learning to do, and haven’t set out on a geocache finding expedition yet.

* Today realized for the first time in five years of doing the same old trek that my daily ride covers 5 miles and a 200-foot elevation delta, and that my top bike speed is 31 mph, with an average speed of 15.7 mph. How could I have ever lived without this data?

Music: Minutemen :: Hittin’ The Bong

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Posted in Geek, Geo | 2 Comments »

April 26th, 2007

Nothing Racial

And people call Berkeley a political bubble, detached from the rest of the country? CNN: Students attend school’s first integrated prom.

The comments in the story are astounding. On the surface because of the underlying racism of Georgian culture, but also because of this weird sense that the endemic separatism isn’t necessarily coming from conscious decisions to maintain segregation, but rather a desire to maintain tradition, as if tradition ipso facto diminishes racism. Imagine a California teenager saying:

“The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

People sometimes see tradition as inherently valuable, no matter how twisted its roots. Satisfying to see that even if children there aren’t being brought up to question racist traditions, they’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

Thanks baald

Music: Dean Martin/Paul Weston & His Dixieland Eight :: I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine

Posted in Culture | 3 Comments »

April 25th, 2007

Collider VR

&tQuicktime VR at its finest: The Atlas target at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, near Geneva.

When I see stuff like this, I always wonder why Quicktime VR never really took off. Examples of it aren’t unheard of, but given that it’s relatively easy to create QTVR files, I’d expect to see these things everywhere. Instead, Apple’s QTVR creation software became the only OS 9 software the company never ported to OS X. I’ve heard this is mainly because stitching software now comes bundled with most digital cameras, so there was little market left for it. But if every digital camera comes with stitching software, why isn’t QTVR ubiquitous?

via David Rowland

Music: Liz Phair;/a> :: Chopsticks

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April 25th, 2007

Famous Hackers

IT Security has posted its list of the Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time.

Hackers are a very diverse bunch, a group simultaneously blamed with causing billions of dollars in damages as well as credited with the development of the World Wide Web and the founding of major tech companies. In this article, we test the theory that truth is better than fiction by introducing you to ten of the most famous hackers, both nefarious and heroic, to let you decide for yourself.

Looked promising, but shockingly, I didn’t make the list.

Music: Caetano Veloso :: Rai Das Cores (Array of Colors)

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April 24th, 2007

Religion in Second Life

A sincere religious community is developing within the synthetic atmosphere of Second Life.

Leaders of Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites estimate about 1,000 avatars teleport into churches, synagogues or mosques on a regular basis. Hundreds more list themselves with Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and other groups.

The extracted video, both beautiful and eerie, gives me the willies, and I’m not exactly sure why. On one hand, it’s no more or less odd than any other simulation of the real world that takes place within the game. On the other, religion is all about community, and the religious community in 2L is virtualized – people never meet, and yet they do. Not sure what that means for things like religious involvement in local charities (are there soup kitchens in 2L too?), but I suppose it’s not so different than a drive-in church.

Thinking now of Europe’s great cathedrals and the centuries of hard labor it took to build them. Since Second Life is so heavily construction oriented (everyone’s both an architect and a contractor), will avatars set themselves to toil and construct some of the grandest and most ornate places of worship ever conceived?

Parallel question: Is Second Life a game, or is it something else? I know what Wittgenstein would say, but I’m not sure even the Second Life community itself have an answer to that one. If it is a game, what would that say about engaging religion within it? Perhaps “It’s only a game if you treat it like one.”

Music: Jim White :: Wayfaring Stranger

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Posted in Culture, Geek | 6 Comments »

April 23rd, 2007

Iguana at 60

New on Stuck Between Stations:

Covered Saturday’s Stooges w/Watt show at The Warfield in SF: The Iguana at 60.

xian on how the mind manufactures musical connections: Goodbye Ruby Grapefruit.

Mixed feelings about Patti Smith’s new covers record, even though her 1976 version of Van Morrison’s Gloria makes one critic’s “top cover songs of all time.”

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April 22nd, 2007

Sweat Solder

Sweat Joint A minor first for me today – rather than call a plumber, read up on sweat joints, went out and bought a torch and a flux/solder kit, and installed my own fittings on 1/2″ copper. Not beautiful, but amazingly, all three joints (two sink + one toilet) came out watertight on the first try. Once brief elation had passed, discovered that the sink we picked out for this already very small area was 1″ too wide, so we have to take it back and get a tiny one – a wee hand-washing basin. S’okay – we’ll do something less frowsy looking this time, so it’ll work out for the best.

Music: Pinpeat Orchestra :: Sathouka

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Posted in Home | 2 Comments »

April 22nd, 2007

I Bought Votes on Digg

Interesting example of how what looks like a nice, friendly democratic socialism on the surface can be easily corrupted with an elixir of money and a non-critical voting populace.

For Wired, Annalee Newitz describes her social experiment in gaming social news ranking site digg.com by purchasing votes through an external service.

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!

Digg claims that its algorithms are able to detect patterns reflective of vote purchasing, and that it shouldn’t be possible for popularity to be bought and sold on the open market. But there was more at work here — only some of the diggs received were bought – many more came from non-bought diggers “jumping on the bandwagon” — digging the story just because others were doing so. Newitz was able to goose the site with purchased votes just enough for it to rise through the ratings until it hit the tipping point, at which point critical mass took over and the site became a minor hit.

So, the magic mixture seems to be a just-right blend of pimps and lemmings.

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April 19th, 2007

savenetradio

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

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April 18th, 2007

OpenID: The Missing Link

The OpenID light went on today, after a little setup and testing. I can now go to a blog or CMS or discussion board or other service that supports OpenID and type in “birdhouse.org” – no username, no password. Hit Return, and I’m in. If I’ve never been there before, I get standard user-level permissions. If I’ve been there before and an admin has escalated my privs, I’m in as admin. Securely. How is this possible?

Created an ID for myself at MyOpenID (though you could use any OpenID provider). Doing so gave me an identity URL through that provider. But here’s the dirty little OpenID secret that shouldn’t be a secret: The protocol supports “delegation” — by adding a couple of meta lines to the header of any URL you control (the birdhouse.org homepage, in my case), that URL can stand in as your identity URL. So when I typed “birdhouse.org” into a blog that supported OpenID earlier today, it fetched that URI and read its delegation headers. It then knew my “real” identity URL at the provider. The provider was able to determine that I was already logged into their service and pass “true” back to the blog I was trying to access. If I hadn’t been logged into MyOpenID at the time, I would have been prompted to log in there first, as a middle step in a seamless process.

Once authenticated to the blog, which had the WordPress OpenID plugin installed, a user-level account in that blog was created automatically for me. The admin could then escalate my privileges to admin or whatever, and I’d still only need to type “birdhouse.org” to log in there as admin. And you can’t. So there.

Distributed single sign-on works. Totally elegant.

A while back, Six Apart launched TypeKey, a single sign-on mechanism first made available for Movable Type blogs. TK never really took off, for a couple of reasons. First, most blog owners had already discovered that requiring any kind of sign-on had a chilling effect on blog conversation — any barrier to commenting was too high, and tended to stop casual “stopper-by” conversation dead. Second, a lot of people didn’t want to put all their identity eggs in the Six Apart basket, didn’t feel comfortable having a corporation behind the critical task of identity maintenance. That assumption was bogus – TypeKey was always an open API – but a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable with it. TypeKey isn’t dead, but there aren’t many sites using it.

Lots of identity conversation at SXSW this year, with OpenID emerging as the “final” solution to the distributed identity problem. Ended up not attending that panel, but did get to eat sushi with Kaliya “identity is a commons that no one can own” Hamlin, who (by some accounts) is single-handedly responsible for wrangling the monolithic corporate gargoyles (who all wanted to sell the world on their own proprietary silo identity systems and end up falling into the same hole that swallowed TypeKey), tying them up in a room and making them take mushrooms and hug until they agreed to adopt OpenID. Now even AOL is an OpenID provider.

Free love works!

Thanks Milan

Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Brain Smashing Dub

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Posted in Blogging, Geek | 4 Comments »

April 18th, 2007

Buzzword Enabled

BeOS used to market itself as the “Buzzword Enabled Operating System.”

Got a call from someone recently who was going to be speaking at a public event, wanting to make sure I could set them up with a “Web 2.0-capable laptop.” And so I did. Wasn’t hard, neither.

Music: Nick Drake :: Saturday Sun

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Posted in Geek, Work | 1 Comment »

April 18th, 2007

Peanut Butter: Atheist’s Nightmare

The fact that life has never spontaneously emerged from a jar of supermarket peanut butter is apparently all the proof we need that evolutionists are off their rocker.

What, Chuck Missler never heard of preservatives (added specifically to prevent life from spontaneously erupting from food?) Or that billions of years of planetary soup-making isn’t quite comparable to a cup of goo sitting on a supermarket shelf for two years?

And then there’s the other atheist’s nightmare: The banana, so clearly designed to fit in the human hand and mouth that it’s clear evidence of God’s handiwork. Never mind that bananas weren’t quite so well-engineered to fit human hands and mouths before we evolved them to do so.

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Posted in Out there | 6 Comments »

April 15th, 2007

Everything’s a Dollar

Wrote about last night’s performance “Everything’s a Dollar in This Box: The Songs of Tom Waits on Cheap Instruments” for Stuck Between Stations.

Also, Malcolm Humes follows up on the fall-out from the cease-and-desist take-down of dylanhearsawho.com – complete with Jesse Jackson reading from Green Eggs and Ham.

Music: Madeleine Peyroux :: No More

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April 15th, 2007

If The Earth Were a Sandwich

Last year’s meme, but I missed it — Ze Frank’s If the Earth Were a Sandwich:

Never before have two pieces of bread been placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an earth sandwich. The fact that the earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so f***’d up.

Use the find opposite tool so you can discover what point on earth is diametrically opposite your own back yard. Like Ze Frank, diametrically opposite my house is the middle of the Indian Ocean. In fact, it looks like the entire U.S. is SOL on this one, exceptin’ Hawaii and a tiny sliver of northern Alaska. But I strongly encourage all of you reading from Mongolia to hook up with your antimatter cousins in Argentina.

Music: Tom Waits :: Grapefruit moon

Posted in Environment, Geo, Out there | No Comments »

April 15th, 2007

The Great Turtle Race

For the past 100 million years, 6-foot long leatherback turtles have been crawling onto a beach in Costa Rica to lay their eggs, then sprinting back to their feeding grounds in The Galapagos to re-fill their bellies. But 90 percent of the leatherbacks have disappeared in recent decades, victims of human pressures. The turtles’ epic history may only have 10 years left – they’re on their way out.

This year, researchers attached satellite transponders to the turtles’ shells as they laid their eggs, and were able to track routes back to The Galapagos. The resulting wealth of GPS data means their race home can be plotted, full of educational opportunities. The trip will be re-played as a 14-day journey starting tomorrow. Amy, Miles, and I have all picked a turtle to cheer on, and will be watching the trip for the next two weeks.

At first I bristled to see the names of corporate sponsors attached to the animals, but that was a knee-jerk reaction. Corporations are exactly the entities that should be chipping in to raise awareness and change the world. Away we go.

The site is being produced by J-School multimedia journalism instructor Jane Stevens.

Music: Tom Waits :: Earth Died Screaming

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April 13th, 2007

New York To London

London-Directions 1. Go to www.google.com
2. Click on “maps”
3. Click on “get directions”
4. Type “New York” in the “from” box
5. Type “London” in the “to” box
6. Click on “get directions”
7. Scroll down to step #23

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Spaniolated

Posted in Out there | 1 Comment »

April 12th, 2007

Fly On, Little Wing

M Trapeze 1     M Trapeze 2    M Trapeze 3

Miles and I trekked up to the Physics of the Circus exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science recently — he was just big enough to be allowed on the trapeze. Talk about one of those days when I wished I had a proper camera on me. This cell phone business doesn’t cut it. He wasn’t heavy enough to bounce it himself, so they had to “fly” him manually by tugging rhythmically on the elastic stays. Then I got a turn to get harnessed up and try some flip-dee-doos (which was exhausting). In mid-twist, I heard a small voice calling to me from the ground: “You’re doing great, Daddy!” Wanted to jump down and hug him.

Yesterday, zookeepers from the East Bay Vivarium came to Miles’ preschool. When they asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to let a tarantula walk on their head, M’s hand shot up. No shots of that, but he apparently wasn’t scared a bit.

Fly on, little wing.

Music: Toots & The Maytals, Bootsy Collins & The Roots :: Funky Kingston

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Posted in Family | 2 Comments »

April 11th, 2007

backpackjournalist.org

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes backpackjournalist.org, run by a pair of J-School graduates now traveling the world as a team, reporting on-the-fly:

Backpackjournalist.org is a collaborative international professional reporting project by journalists, Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones, intended to generate stories of global interest from countries in the African Great Lakes region and the Great Rift Valley, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia.

Birdhouse is also hosting annasussman.com, a portfolio site for one half of the backpackjournalist team.

Anna Sussman writes, reports and produces print and radio news features. She has reported on a wide variety of issues from the US, Africa and Asia, with a focus on human rights.
Music: Pink Fairies :: Going Down

Posted in Hosting | 2 Comments »

April 11th, 2007

Married on Twitter

Count me among those who don’t “get” the Twitter phenomenon, which seems like it’s bursting at the seams lately. The need/desire to have your cell phone buzzing all day with transient random noise-bursts from everyone you know: “Eating a pretzel.” “Fiddling with printer.” “Feeding the cat.” Suddenly we’re all Japanese school girls? Being on Twitter (sending or receiving, not to mention both) seems like one of the worst things I can imagine doing to my day. I don’t even turn on IM most of the time, can’t deal with the distraction. But I guess meaningful things do happen on the network. From today’s Twitter newsletter:

There was a 9 minute delay between Alex twittering, “Being engaged. Timoni said yes!” and Timoni updating with, “Wearing my ‘I’m engaged!’ pin.”

And that, folks, was Twitter’s jump the shark moment. Whaddya bet.

Thanks Milan

Music: Stereolab :: Our Trinitone Blast

Posted in Culture, Geek | 4 Comments »

April 9th, 2007

I Zimbra

A couple of new entries at Stuck Between Stations:

I Zimbra, on the absurd connections between David Byrne/Brian Eno, Dada poet Hugo Ball, and the peerless Marie Osmond.

Dilute! Dilute!, on Germs drummer Don Bolles being arrested recently in Orange County (apparently) for possession of a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap.

Music: Mission Of Burma :: Head Over Head

Posted in Music | 1 Comment »

April 8th, 2007

Experiments in Galvinism

Embed a web server in a frog. Dunk httpd frog in formaldehyde. Let public control frog’s movements from any browser.

Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst’s bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera.

It’s not pretty.

Music: New Creation :: Sodom And Gommorah

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Posted in Out there | 2 Comments »

April 7th, 2007

santokiproductions.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Santoki Productions:

Santoki Productions is a national Emmy award winning boutique digital TV production and media strategies firm which offers a full range of services – including tv and documentary production, PR & Web campaigns and digital strategies.

Posted in Hosting | No Comments »

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