drury dot com

Rest In Peace, Richard Drury (1936 - 2012)

2012-01-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

I lost one of my very best friends New Years Day and, as it happens, the one I've known the longest. He and I didn't always get along when I was in my teens and early twenties but, thankfully, our mutual interests pulled us together over the many years since, and our love and respect for one another only grew with each game of chess, round of golf, layover in Menlo Park, and visit with other friends and family.

Rest in peace, Richard Drury. You died as bravely and serenely as you lived. Few people leave this world with so many wishing you hadn't. I may never be half the man or friend you were to so many but I hope to be every bit as good a father and husband.

Richard Drury with granddaughter Katrina, Ukiah, CA, 2004

Move Over, Leica

2012-01-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

I have long lusted after the German-made Leica M rangefinder cameras, both the "older" film versions (M3, M6 and M7) and the newer digital incarnation, the M9. But even were I able to divest myself of $7,000 for the M9 camera body, I would still need to spend $4,000 to $10,000 each for the beautiful little lenses I'd want to accompany this camera (28mm Summicron, 35mm Summicron, 50mm Noctilux, 75mm Summicron, and 90mm Summicron, just in case anyone's in a gifting mood).

Now, suppose for a moment that you actually owned this outfit with all the aforementioned lenses. It would have a street value in excess of $35,000, not the sort of thing you'd want to carry -- much less flaunt -- in public without an armed escort, sadly, and I don't think I'd really be comfortable unless it were locked in a safe most or all of the time.

Enter Fujifilm and the company's new mirrorless X-Pro1, pictured below. It's not a true rangefinder with a full-frame sensor, as is the M9, but it's clearly aimed at Leica and those who admire/acquire the German brand. The camera offers some seemingly amazing technology to complement what will surely be outstanding optics in the initial three prime lenses and, perhaps best of all, the body will "only" cost about $1,700, with the lenses running round $650 each, a mere fraction of the cost of the Leica gear.

The only possible drawbacks to receive mention prior to release are that auto-focus may be on the slow side and that the lenses are not manually coupled to the camera and, thus, manual focus is achieved suboptimally via "fly by wire." But if those are the chief complaints leveled against this camera and its lenses I will be an owner shortly after it's release in February 2012.

McDonald's: Powering Olympians

2010-02-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

When McDonald's assures me in their Olympics television commercials that I "needn't be an Olympic athlete to eat like one," I'm reminded of the Quarter Pounder® with Cheese I ate not too long ago, and how, after taking the last bite, I knew without question that my colon would medal in the peristalsis freestyle 8-10 hours later, which brings me full circle to McDonald's marketing.

And the same thing could be said for Coke.

Have social networks killed my blog?

2010-02-19T16:09:00.000-08:00

I don't spend a great deal of time on Facebook, but it seems that most of the random musings, videos, photos, and links of interest I would normally share here, end up there. Add to that an occasional tweet and the fact that I'm the network creator for a number of Ning networks (I work at Ning), including http://comfortfood.com and http://nwprr.net, and that pretty much claims the little time I have for online interaction.

But I miss adding content to this blog, and generally dislike being limited in the number of words I may add to a Facebook update and, especially, to a tweet, so I hereby resolve to add something of interest here at least once per week, even if that means merely rehashing and expanding upon what I've already posted to Facebook or Twitter. In the meantime please let me know if you, too, face this dilemma and, if so, how you plan to overcome it.

The genesis of human swine flu infection

2009-04-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

Cute (if gross), but a hungry pig can bite your lip off:

Riding a bike as art form

2009-04-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, on some level this is pointless, but you really must admire the athleticism and balance Danny MacAskill displays on a bike. Especially at about 3:10 into the video, when he uses a tree to do something I'm sure few if any other people in the world can do. Check it out:

Ain't it the truth

2009-04-13T15:08:00.001-07:00

And they're still laughing, every single one of them:

"The pile of dung that is Bernie Madoff"

2009-02-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

The following video makes my list of required viewing for all Americans, even school-age children. It is enlightening, humorous, and distressing all at the same time, and Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, really brings home how broken the Securities and Exchange Commission truly is, with its "investigations" of large Wall Street players like Bernard Madoff. More politicians need to take this hard line with our inept bureaucracies, immediately, especially when they fail so spectacularly:

And here's video of the Markopolos testimony mentioned in the video above. Harry Markopolos tried repeatedly to bring Madoff's scheme to the attention of the S.E.C. for almost a decade, to no avail:

Skier suffers serious exposure

2009-01-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

This happened New Years Day and, though not truly newsworthy given current world events, most skiers will attest it's likely the first incident of its kind. As an avid skier myself, I would rate what befell this gentleman just a notch or two less serious than, say, breaking one's leg. For the unabashed, more images and an incomplete summary of events that led to this man's predicament may be found here, though the meat of that report follows:

JANUARY 6--In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado's ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Thursday morning. The January 1 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier, 48, and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail's Blue Sky Basin. It appears that the chairlift's fold-down seat was somehow not in the lowered position, which caused the man to partially fall through the resulting gap. His right ski got jammed in the ascending chairlift, and that kept him upended since his boot never dislodged from its binding.

The Skyline Express lift was stopped shortly after the pair's botched boarding resulted in the man dangling from the lift. The exposed skier was stuck for about 15 minutes before Vail personnel backed the lift up and successfully dislodged the unidentified man from the four-seat chair.

Clearly one of those situations where all modesty, pride, and decorum disappear, but I'm wondering if Skier X tried to calm his child while hanging upside down sans pants, declaring with all the authority he could muster, "Don't worry, sweetie, everything's under control. The ski patrol will have us down in a few minutes. I'm fine, fine. Just keep looking at the trees...."

World of World of World of Warcraft

2009-01-07T13:51:00.000-08:00

I bought Blizzard Entertainment's "World of Warcraft" about six months ago, just to better understand the state of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), something in which I've had a casual interest ever since the protogenic "Dungeons and Dragons" burst into nerdly bedrooms back in the 1970s. Problem is, one must devote a *great* deal of free time to the game to become proficient and advance in player level, and free time is one thing I have little of these days. Hence, my seventh-level Paladin was all but abandoned in the ether several months ago, and I finally canceled my account a couple weeks ago.

I'll no doubt return to WoW or something like it in the near future, perhaps when my kids have cajoled my wife and I into letting them play online games, but in the meantime I have The Onion to make be feel good about my abstinence:

Please vote "No" on California's Proposition 8

2008-11-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

For the past few days now my Google Ad space in the lower right corner of your browser window (perhaps below the fold) has carried a single "Yes on Prop 8" message (Prop 8 is California's initiative to ban same-sex marriage). The text varies but the message is always "Yes on Prop 8." I can only conclude that whoever is paying for these ads is spending a great deal of money if their efforts end up on my blog, as none of the content I've written shares any affinity with this position. If gay people wish to take part in the absolutely *bankrupt* institution that is marriage in the United States, where the divorce rate hovers near fifty percent, I welcome them with open arms -- they can't screw things up any worse than heterosexuals already have.

California's Proposition 1A, "Rails of Dreams"

2008-11-04T14:10:00.000-08:00

I really like trains. Always have. I belong to the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Historical Society, am a closeted model railroader, and am also a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club, so you might think I'd support California's High Speed Rail Initiative, Proposition 1A on this year's ballot. But you would be wrong. Much as I want to support a project like this, the current incarnation before voters is an absolute disaster. Every projection bandied about by Prop 1A supporters is mired in fantasy. Something akin to a Hollywood mania or mana has enveloped the project, one with the mantra, "if we build it, the hundreds of millions of riders will come, at no cost to anyone."

But please don't take my word for it -- watch the following three short YouTube videos, wherein HSR expert Joseph Vranich testifies at a State Senate Committee hearing and thoroughly tears down the "business plan" of the HSR Authority. I just wish these videos had been seen by more California voters before today's election:

Beware the fairy princess and the puppy dog

2008-10-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

Halloween has always been one of my favorite times of year, and that's even more true now that I have children. The near-infinite, oft-mysterious possibilities Halloween night offers to imaginative young minds draws me back, strongly, to the days when my two brothers and I would set off with friends down our dark street in search of sugar, however packaged (about the only thing I shunned as a kid was coconut which, thankfully, wasn't found in too many candies). Back in the early 70s, neighbors still gave popcorn balls and caramel-covered apples, and these were eaten with little or no concern for safety.

The only real danger associated with Halloween night in Ukiah, California, where I grew up, was the older kids with their penchant for throwing rotten eggs. I got hit by a few, at least, and needed to run quickly to avoid being hit on several occasions, but this generally added to the excitement of the evening, rather than detracting in any way (never mind the smell of a rotten egg, of course). I hope that my children and yours make it through their trick-or-treating careers as safely as I and my brothers did, and that Halloween still holds some magic and mystery for them when they have children of their own.

Stupid effing people

2008-10-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

Name your daughter "Sarah McCain Palin" and display your dumb mug for all the world to see:

Highest federal budget deficit EVER!

2008-10-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm continually amazed by the number of people (many of them good friends and acquaintances) who vote Republican for one overarching reason: They can't abide "Big Government." Remarkably, Big Government for these people isn't synonymous with a Big Deficit. For a good many Republican voters the deficit represents considerable pork that makes its way directly or indirectly to their tables, but what about rank and file Republicans? Remember so many years ago now, during the Clinton Presidency, when we had a budget surplus? Why isn't everyone outraged by news such as the following?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal budget deficit soared to $454.8 billion in 2008 as a housing collapse and efforts to combat the economic slowdown pushed the tide of government red ink to the highest level in history.

The Bush administration said Tuesday the deficit for the budget year that ended Sept. 30 was more than double the $161.5 billion recorded in 2007.

It surpassed the previous record of $413 billion set in 2004. Economists predicted a far worse number next year as the costs of the government's rescue of the financial system and the economic hard times hit the government's balance sheet.

Some analysts believe that next year's deficit could easily top $700 billion, giving the next president a formidable challenge.

Christopher Buckley's parting shot

2008-10-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Christopher Buckley, the conservative commentator who disclosed he would vote for Barack Obama in November, has resigned from the National Review, the magazine his father William F. Buckley founded. He had the following to say about his resignation and the conservative movement in this country, a movement that grows ever more bowel-like as the election season draws to a Democratic-friendly close:

"While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case."

Et tu, Cadbury?

2008-09-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the rant but I've had it. As both a parent and a consumer I've had it with Chinese food production safety issues. It isn't enough that Mars' brand M&Ms and Snickers -- Snickers! -- are made in China, where recent product shipped to Indonesia contained melamine. No, I now come to learn that Cadbury, the venerable English chocolatier with a near-200-year history as a company, is pimping out production to a Chinese firm which cannot kick a melamine habit. And I'm reasonably certain these reports are just the tip of a food safety iceberg that's on a collision course with a U.S. food industry rushing headlong to China's shores to save a buck or billion.

But the worst part is that I have no easy way of knowing where much of my packaged and "fresh" food comes from. Where it's grown and processed. Sure, I'd like to buy nothing but locally-grown foods but that isn't realistic for the vast majority of Americans, no matter the current popularity of farmers' markets in California and elsewhere. In digging a little I was amazed to learn how lax our country is in terms of "Country Of Origin Labeling" (COOL) for foods, how little is required and how many exemptions are in place. Dammit, we label our toys with country of manufacture; I see no reason why we can't require the same for our food, inarguably the more important of the two imports for which to have this information.

So, rather than just rant passionately if ineffectually in this blog I decided to do something about the issue. I created an online petition which I plan to send to Congress if I get more than a few signatures, and I'm asking you, dear reader, to read and sign that petition:

Require Country of Origin Labels on all U.S. Foods

Heard at the breakfast table this morning

2008-09-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

My kids and I were at the breakfast table early this morning, eating cereal and chatting about those things that most interest a 6-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy, when my daughter began prattling on about her new secret diary, and after a few moments it became clear she was lording it over her younger brother, who has no such secret.

My son Tyler, who is becoming very much his own person these days, suffered this indignity with grace as long as he could before interjecting, "Katrina, I don't have a secret diarrhea, and I don't think I want one." To which Katrina replied in a confidential whisper, "Tyler, I have a secret diary, not diarrhea. Diarrhea is hard to keep secret because it's so noisy."

"Making America Stupid"

2008-09-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times Op-Ed section comes this sensible piece written by Thomas Friedman:

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”

I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that — with “drill, baby, drill” — why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent?” That is what a party committed to “change” would really be doing. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

I dwell on this issue because it is symbolic of the campaign that John McCain has decided to run. It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. Now the same guy, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.

In order to disguise the fact that the core of his campaign is to continue the same Bush policies that have led 80 percent of the country to conclude we’re on the wrong track, McCain has decided to play the culture-war card. Obama may be a bit professorial, but at least he is trying to unite the country to face the real issues rather than divide us over cultural differences.

A Washington Post editorial on Thursday put it well: “On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government’s rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Senator John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Senator Barack Obama for using the phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.”

Some McCain supporters criticize Obama for not having the steel in his belly to use force in the dangerous world we live in today. Well I know this: In order to use force, you have to have force. In order to exercise leverage, you have to have leverage.

I don’t know how much steel is in Obama’s belly, but I do know that the issues he is focusing on in this campaign — improving education and health care, dealing with the deficit and forging a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure — are the only way we can put steel back into America’s spine. McCain, alas, has abandoned those issues for the culture-war strategy.

Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?

Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are the issues this election needs to be about, because that is what the next four years need to be about.

There is no strong leader without a strong country. And posing as one, to use the current vernacular, is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.

Sex, Drugs, and Rocks and Oil

2008-09-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

It comes as absolutely no surprise during the Bush presidency -- unquestionably the worst in the history of the United States -- when we uncover the kind of corruption in our government employees like that described below. The entire federal government is in bed with the oil and gas industries, and prostitutes itself with impunity, no less! From CNN:

WASHINGTON -- Key government officials overseeing the energy industry had sex with, used illegal drugs with, and accepted gifts from representatives of oil and gas companies they were supposed to be regulating, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Department of the Interior's inspector general.

The $5.3 million investigation "uncovered recreational marijuana and cocaine use" by "a handful" of Interior Department staff, and found two federal employees "engaged in brief sexual relationships with representatives from companies doing business" with the department.

Two Interior Department employees "received combined gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business -- a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources," Inspector General Earl Devaney says in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne accompanying the report.

Randall Luthi, head of the Minerals Management Service at the Interior Department, said the public had not suffered financial losses as a result of the employees' behavior.

Some of the government employees tried to hide their close association with the industry they were supposed to be regulating, the report says.

The investigation turned up e-mails in which MMS employees "preparing to attend industry events used such language as 'this trip is to be kept quiet,' or were asked to RSVP 'in private' by their supervisor," the report says.

"When we asked we these one of these employees why they needed to avoid discussing their social activities with industry, he responded with a slight chuckle, 'They might have, you know, contacted the [inspector general],' " the report says.

The investigation appears to have been prompted by an internal whistle-blower's report in 2006, and concerns activity from 2002 to 2006.

The report alleges inappropriate behavior by 19 members of the Royalty in Kind program -- about one-third of the department. Some have since left the department, making it unclear what kind of disciplinary action they could be subject to.

Bride of Cheneystein

2008-08-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, John McCain and his GOP handlers finally surrendered in this election year of "change" to the realization that they can't simply load their ticket with the familiar comforts of another grumpy older wealthy white male (nothing against older wealthy white males, as I hope to be one some day), so they've settled on the butt-cheese of all compromises: A vindictive smarmy wealthy white female who could be Dick Cheney Jr. were she less competent with a firearm.

Crass and unfair to Sarah Palin, you're thinking? Probably true, but listen to what two of the staunchest Republican supporters (Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy) have to say off-mic about Palin as a choice for Vice President:

Your daily dose of Kong

2008-08-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

In the Spring of 1982 I was living in a college dorm (yes, I'm that old) and, at the time, didn't have a real passion for video games, though I'd certainly spent my share of idle nights plying the games at the local video arcade while in high school. But sometime early in the Spring semester a new video game was installed just outside the dining room, one named "Donkey Kong". At first the game held little interest for me, as it was competing with some older, known favorites, as well as the stunningly new and advanced "Dragon's Lair" (a game that cost two quarters to play, which limited its adoption amongst the relatively poor denizens of the dorm).

But at some point my good friend Craig Swarthout convinced me to play Donkey Kong more and more frequently, perhaps because he often gifted me the quarter just to have someone to play against, and it didn't take long for a fierce rivalry to develop. It matters little that I, in my mind, at least, became Donkey Kong Champion of Craig Hall, but it was a great deal of fun, and the game still comes up in conversation whenever I speak or exchange email with Craig.

So, a company called Widgetbox has turned some of the classic video games of the 80s into web-installable widgets. Below is the Donkey Kong Widget. To play, merely use your arrow keys to move right, left, up, and down (for the ladders), and the space bar allows you to jump over the barrels and other offending nastiness. Once you reach the girl-in-distress at the top of the ladders you have successfully completed the level. Give it a try, and relive a little of the early 80s:

Donkey Konggreat free widgetsWidgetbox

From Putin, with love

2008-05-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what Gary Kasparov (former world chess champion and aspiring Russian politico) is telling this small gathering of reporters, but I'm sure his cause is little advanced by the sudden appearance of the oddest of remote control ... aircraft. A deft if underhanded statement by Gary's opponents, and one the Russian press will not soon forget (click here for a still image if the video doesn't make clear that which assaults Gary):

From deep in the heart of NASCAR country

2008-04-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

I have an old college friend who is supremely talented at (or monomaniacally focused on) finding images like the following. I chuckled when I first saw it, but mainly because of the simpering edifice staring out from the painted cardboard box. I'm guessing this guy was tailgating at a NASCAR race (the superfluous "Place Boobs Here" sign is the giveaway). Caption, anyone?

Someone, somewhere in the Congo, stole my manhood!

2008-04-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

There's simply no way to introduce the following story without coming across as a culturally-insensitive bigot. Anthropological apologists tell us that only an immersive endemic study of the culture at hand will shed light on the social relevance and intellectual validity of genital theft by sorcery in the Congo but, honestly, people, can't we label ignorance, ignorance? Ignorance is not scarce in America, of course -- the approval rating of our current president as polled by CNN demonstrates that 32% of 1,012 adult respondents in this country "approve of Bush's performance," while 8% are unsure, so fully 40% have been robbed of their intellect through spinnery cum sorcery!

Here's a link to the Reuters page; the text of the article follows:

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

New toy, courtesy of Jango

2008-04-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

Ever the sucker for an interesting widget, I stumbled upon Jango's offering and created the 15-artist jukebox, below. Doesn't necessarily include my all-time favorite bands, mind you -- just those that came to mind in the two minutes it took to create the following. If you mouse over the artist images the scrolling slows and a "play" button is rendered (requires Flash, of course). Very simple creation interface and definitely worth a try (I edited the markup so that the ugly trailing buttons do not render, but you can get your own widget here:

How not to express your faith, exhibit one

2008-02-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

Ignorance? Malice? Naivete? Or simple piety gone horribly awry? Is it a sin to turn on this light switch? Assuredly, if you flick it more than once, you're playing with it:

Must-see "wing suit" videos

2008-02-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

If you're an aviation or extreme sports enthusiast, you may already have seen the following Youtube "wing suit" clips. If you enjoy watching people do amazingly scary things, stunts which should seemingly result in horrible deaths, watch the following clips:

Warren Miller narrating, well, what must be seen to be believed:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NHIxSCO5kNk

Another incredible clip:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=asTo8eAoFUI

And another:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SAzvYK1C6Bg

And the natural extension to the wing suit: small jet engines strapped to one's boots:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eS2rjcVcaqQ

And when jet boots don't provide enough thrust, a rigid folding wing with four tiny jet engines is just the ticket (with some cool background music):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=j-66AcTo9TU

And, yes, some poor guy testing, at speed, the rigidity of his wing suit and skeletal structure against that of a steel bridge:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FcXowfeztYo

I'll stick to the occasional 40-50 MPH run on snow skis, thank you very much.

I must be un-American

2008-01-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

I must be un-American because:

I honestly don't give a damn about the foibles of Britney Spears, Kevin Federline, Lindsay Lohan, Brad Pitt, Jessica Simpson, O.J. Simpson, or any other celebrity for that matter. I don't care about their marriages, breakups, divorces, reconciliations, pregnancies, births, adoptions, custody battles, DUI's, court appearances, trips to rehab, escapes from rehab, favorite recipes, little secrets, and insecurities. And the media and paparazzi who chase after this crap should be butt-waxed in public.

I want all televangelists, their families, friends, followers, accountants, lawyers, handlers, swindlers, and other partners in crime to pick my fruits and vegetables. Forever. Especially that money-grubbing Creflo Dollar creep (what a perfect name for a televangelist).

I want George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and the entire executive staff at Halliburton to spend one month driving Humvees through the crowded streets of Baghdad.

I want every single executive at Exxon Mobil Corporation to ride a billion dollars worth of unicycles through the crowded streets of Baghdad, wearing nothing but an "I love Dick Cheney!" tee shirt.

I want Billy Mays to drink a gallon of OxiClean, blanch his testicles in boiling Orange Glo, and sing the national anthem at this year's Superbowl.

There will be more ...

What's the good word?

2008-01-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

What a fucked-up world we've made for ourselves, people. I just visited CNN's web page and here are the exact items found under the "Latest News" banner at the top of the page:

* 2 big races down, nothing settled
* Dobbs: Pundits take one in the teeth
* Ticker: Obama: Bill Clinton twisted my words
* Police: Spiteful dad threw 4 tots off bridge
* Marshals serving eviction notice find 4 bodies
* 50 cars and trucks smash in fog, smoke
* Tornado touchdown captured on I-Report video
* Mom stuck on roof as kids drown in car
* KSAT: Medic never checked victim's pulse
* WITN: Pregnant Marine missing from post
* 'Brutal execution' caught on tape, U.S. says
* Nude teacher pix on student cell, cops say
* Girl, 2, left behind at Chuck E. Cheese
* Tiger's agent: 'Lynch' remark a non-issue
* Man sees 'mark of beast,' cuts off hand

Don't even bother to read the story about the man throwing four kids off the bridge (three of the children his own, all presumed dead), as it will surely depress you. The truly sad thing is that, day in, day out, the type of content found under "Latest News" doesn't change much: people killing other people, natural disasters, corrupt politicians and priests, teachers corrupting students. Henry David Thoreau had it right in Walden:

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

Hawaii Surfer Donates Boards for Gazans

2007-08-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

We can only hope to be half so cool when we are half so young:

An 86-year-old Jewish surfing guru from Hawaii is bringing good vibrations to the impoverished Gaza Strip.

Dorian Paskowitz, a retired doctor who has been surfing for 75 years, donated 12 surfboards to Gaza's small surfing community on Tuesday in a novel gesture to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians. "God will surf with the devil if the waves are good," Paskowitz said. "When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can't help but say something that brings them together."

Tanned and shirtless, Paskowitz emerged grinning at the Israel-Gaza border crossing after handing over the dozen boards to Palestinian surfers waiting on the other side.
He said he was inspired after reading a story about two Gaza surfers who could not enjoy the wild waves off the coastal strip because they had only one board to share between them. "So I said to my son 'come, we'll go to Israel and get them some boards,'" Paskowitz told AP Television News.

He described his mission as a "mitzvah," Hebrew for a "good deed." During his visit, Paskowitz said he wanted to "do something spectacular, like getting all the surfers and paddling around into the waters of Gaza." But those plans were scuttled because of security concerns.

Arthur Rashkovan, a 28-year-old surfer from Tel Aviv, said Paskowitz's project was part of a larger effort called "Surfing for Peace," aimed at bringing Middle Eastern surfers closer together. He said eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater, who is of Syrian descent, is expected to arrive in Israel in October to take part in the drive. "We want Palestinians to enjoy the surfing experience. We believe it brings people together," Rashkovan said. "The idea is for people to forget about the violence and follow the journey to peace on the waves."

Paskowitz is venerated by Israeli surfers as the man who brought the sport to the Jewish state five decades ago. Rashkovan called him a "guru" to Israeli surfers.
Paskowitz said he first arrived in Israel in 1956 during a war between Israel and Egypt. He tried to join the Israeli military but was turned down. So he surfed off the coast of Tel Aviv instead, he recounted, and was mobbed by Israelis charmed by the strange sight of a man riding the waves standing upright on a board.

The father of nine served in the Navy during World War II, practiced family medicine for more than half a century and has published books on surfing and health. He said he has surfed for 75 years all over the world, and he ranks the waves off the Israeli and Gaza coasts as among the world's best. "I'm 86 years old. I can't stand up very well, I have a piece of titanium in my hip. But I still love it," he said.

One for the Shake Your Head files

2007-08-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

I post the following story only because it typifies the idiotic state of things in this country, especially in Washington (never mind that it happened in Georgia). I'd laugh, too, but I have young children, so laughing doesn't tend to help:

ROCHELLE, Ga. -- A woman was arrested after she called local police to help "get her money back" after she was unhappy with the crack cocaine she purchased.

Juanita Marie Jones, 53, called Rochelle Police late Thursday night after she purchased what she thought was a $20 piece of crack cocaine, according to police reports.

She told officers she broke the rock into three pieces and smoked one, only to discover the drugs were "fake."

She took Officer Joel Quinn and Deputy John Shedd of the Wilcox County Sheriff's Office into her kitchen and showed them the drugs, police said.

She was promptly arrested on charges of possession of cocaine.

Why the GOP truly is in trouble

2007-06-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

Forget presidential approval ratings, popularity indexes, or the outgassings of pundits, I'll tell you why the GOP is in trouble. I saw definitive proof this past week when visiting my 93-year-old grandmother in Clinton, Iowa. When asked what she thought of President George Bush, she turned red as she exclaimed, "I've been a lifelong Republican and I voted for George Bush in the last two elections, but he is the worst president in the history of this country! He should be impeached or worse! The war in Iraq is a God-awful mess -- absolute foolishness -- and there's no forgiving him for it." Her opinion of Vice President Dick Cheney is even less cheritable, "The most mean-spirited crook ever to hold the office."

Now, when I heard my grandmother say these things last week I was shocked. She has been a lifelong Republican -- can't stand the Democrats -- and places Ronald Reagan on pedestal in the stratosphere. So for her to offer more than a mild rebuke of our President came as a complete surprise. What's more, she stated she may vote non-Republican in 2008. She probably won't vote Democrat, but perhaps the Greens, Independents, or Libertarians will pick up her support. So much for the GOP base...

Confounded immigration issue

2007-06-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know where to stand or whom to listen to on the issue of illegal immigration in this country. 95% of the effluent that reaches me from Washington or that flows my way on television news programs makes be believe we are a nation led and fed by sycophants and idiots. Past personal experience working summers in agriculture in Northern California tells me that illegal aliens, if forgiven the offense by which they earn their label, can be as hard-working and honest as any citizen. But my gut tells me the United States simply can't absorb tens of millions of people, most of whom are already marginalized economically, if for no other reason than for the impacts these people may have on the looming disasters that are social security and health care.

I've read widely over the web on this issue, and the only person whose opinions I tend to agree with more often that not is Lou Dobbs, a syndicated columnist whose work appears on cnn.com. Here's a snippet from his June 13th Commentary, titled "Give it a rest, Mr. President." Pointed -- perhaps even a touch of hyperbole -- but let me know if you agree or disagree:

In what other country would citizens be treated to the spectacle of the president and the Senate focusing on the desires of 12 million to 20 million people who had crossed the nation's borders illegally, committed document fraud, and in many cases identity theft, overstayed their visas and demanded, not asked, full forgiveness for their trespasses?

Illegal aliens and their advocates, both liberal and conservative, possess such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they demand not only legal status, but also that the government leave the borders wide open so that other illegals could follow as well, while offering not so much as an "I'm sorry" or a "Thank you."

What the heck is Electronic Mail?

2007-06-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Computerworld is carrying an interesting story about advertisements from the computing Pleistocene. Choice copy includes "80 Megabytes for under $12,000," "The Personal Mainframe," which has a visual guide to help you determine if you need it, and the "Versatile, Dependable, Compatible, Sexy, 1,200 bits/sec PENRIL MODEM," which looks to have the mass of several bricks and is modeled by a woman wearing hot pants. Below is Honeywell's attempt to educate Computerworld readers about the merits of Email (click here to see the ad with accompanying text):

Problem-solving flowchart

2007-06-11T16:56:00.000-07:00

The following flowchart was sent to me by a coworker (without implication, I might add). If you work in software (or just about any other industry) I'm sure you can relate. I'm no stranger to the "You Poor Bastard" loop:

The Electric Sham

2007-06-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

I still have a problem with people doing my choreography incorrectly, but we're working through that and I now have a great lawyer who's helping me control this.

--Richard Silver, Electric Slide creator

This is one of those stories that will benefit from the least possible attention, as we don't wish to encourage people like Mr. Silver, but I still feel compelled to share it with the uninitiated.

Way back in the mid-70s, at the dawn of the Disco era, a time perhaps best forgotten in terms of what it gave us in the way of dance, Richard Silver invented and copyrighted a 22-step jig he came to call the "Electric Slide," and it has been his life's passion ever since to preserve all 22 steps of the dance for posterity and ego.

But Richard's has been a tough row to hoe of late, given the number of heathens who are bastardizing his dance by doing it incorrectly, using 18 steps in place of the requisite 22, not kicking with enough flourish, not sliding with sufficient emotion, and what have you. Richard laments in an interview with CNET news.com:

Yeah, my choreography was 22 steps because my birthday is January 22. I wanted something that was uniquely mine, and so I created a dance with 22 steps. And the dances that are being portrayed on YouTube and MySpace and wherever are doing an 18-step dance instead of a 22-step dance. I fought for the last 28 years trying to get it not done as an 18-step dance, and now with all this being presented on the Internet, I had a problem with it....

The only harm is that choreography is being presented incorrectly. By people watching it and learning it from them incorrectly. And prolonging what I've been fighting for for the last 30 years since I created the dance. Every night that I taught the dance I had a dream that someone was going to leave my class and teach it incorrectly and it was going to go around the world incorrectly and I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to correct it. And that is exactly what has happened.

Which is it, Richard? A 28- or a 30-year struggle for the sanctity of your Electric Slide? Perhaps it's just me but I think it's a sign of the End Times that one can copyright a 22-step dance (or a dance of any length for that matter), and enforce that copyright even when the dance has been changed. Is the 18-step dance the same as the original 22-step version? What about an 11-step copy? Where does the madness end?

The first million-dollar laptop

2007-03-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

Suppose you had one million dollars to spend and you dropped that sum on a single notebook computer. Suppose, too, you were an idiot. But I repeat myself.

Gizmag is carrying a story about the first million-dollar notebook computer. The company that makes such an expensive appliance, Luvaglio of London, justifies its purchase with the following: "Many claim to produce luxury goods but we believe that the true element of luxury is having something that says 'YOU', that money can't buy." Never mind the glaring contradiction in that statement -- how exactly does a notebook computer say "YOU"?

Maybe it says, "YOU will feel like an idiot when asked by the curious nerd about the brand, specs, and cost of your notebook (assuming you ever take the thing out of its gilded case in public)!" You'd better do your best Dr. Evil when you admit, "I paid ONE MILLION DOLLARS for this notebook and it was worth every penny of FORTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS the moment I took delivery of it, diamond power button included. Best of all, I'm going to attach frickin' laser beams to its head!"

My kids all a'buzzle in Bear Valley Lodge

2007-03-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

This is a test (disguised as a post) of embedded YouTube content, which, if you see video below, has succeeded (I've been trying to use the YouTube "Post Video" feature, but am consistently getting http 400 errors with each attempt -- what gives, Google?).

My family and I went skiing this past weekend at Bear Valley in California's Sierra Nevada, and we shot some video on the slopes with our compact Olympus digital camera. The video quality as delivered by YouTube is far less than that offered by the camera (no surprise there) and the audio is woefully out of sync through much of the clip, but it's still cute.

My kids are seen eating lunch in Bear Valley Lodge. This was my son's first ski trip and both he and his sister had a great time, and both are asking when we'll go again, so I can envision how we'll be spending our winter breaks in the coming decades.

The Apple QuickTime Pro Enema

2007-03-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

This is straight out of Orwell's "1984" -- a propitious year for Apple Computer -- only not quite so dark and forbidding as events in the book. Actually, this is nothing like "1984" or, if it is, it's "1984" as written by Ayn Rand, which publication would have been a dark day for literature.

My wife and I shot some video on our compact Olympus digital camera this past weekend, while skiing with our kids at Bear Valley in California's Sierra Nevada. Without thinking, most of the video I shot was in portrait mode, which, as you can imagine, plays "on its side" in Apple's QuickTime application (and most/all other applications, I'm sure).

I assumed naively that the free version of QuickTime 7 for Windows would allow me to rotate the video and, sure enough, the option to do so is right there in the Window menu, labeled "Show Movie Properties." Alas, it is disabled and is only available if you purchase the Pro version for $29.99. Never in my life did I think I would buy a copy of QuickTime but at 10 pm last night, due to a desire to make the video files available to other family members ASAP, I was offering up my Visa number to Apple in exchange for the privilege of rotating a few video clips 90 degrees (yes, there's probably a free solution that would allow me to do this, but I was in a freewheeling frame of mind).

So I paid $32.46 (which included estimated tax) and was taken to a receipt web page, which mentioned the "registration code" I would need to upgrade to QuickTime Pro, but there was no code anywhere on the page. I then received the confirmation email that also mentioned this code, but it, too, contained no code. I then visited the My Account page at Apple, and on the transaction page for the purchase there was, again, no code. Mind you, Apple's support pages indicate the registration code should be available on all three of these sources.

Flummoxed, I sent a nasty-gram via Apple's support form and a reply was waiting in my Inbox early this morning:

Dear Mark,

Thank you for your recent order. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Although your purchase attempt was successful, a QuickTime Registration Code was not generated.

A credit in the amount of $29.99 is being credited to your account and should appear on your statement within five business days....

A credit of $29.99? What about the $2.47 charged for tax? I fired off another form submission asking that very question of Apple Support and received the following a couple hours later:

Dear Mark,

Thank you for contacting Apple.

We apologize for any confusion. Your original purchase was for $29.99, therefore Apple issued a $29.99 credit for web order number W27652158 and sent it to your credit-card company....

At a loss as to the $2.47 misunderstanding, I savaged another form submission, this one ending with, "I don't give a damn about the two dollars and change owed me for the tax -- it's the principal! I feel a nasty blog entry worming its way out of my sphincter, so please let me know I'll be getting a $32.46 refund before I pass this thing!" Apple Support replied an hour later:

Dear Mark,

We apologize for any confusion.

In order to verify the information provided at the time of purchase, Apple requests a preauthorization from your credit card company. Each time a change is made to your billing information, a preauthorization is requested. The preauthorization may sometimes appear as a line item of $1.00. In addition, you may see a preauthorization for the approximate amount of the order to reserve funds for your purchase.

Preauthorizations will not appear on your credit card statements and will be dropped from your account based on your credit card company's policy.

The actual charge to your account (and subsequent credit) was $29.99....

Preauthorization. Ah, yes, I knew that....

For you March Madness fans

2007-03-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

If you follow college basketball you should consider signing up for 4INFO's NCAA Tournament Pass, which, in a nutshell, sends a text message (complete with score and seed information) to your cell phone whenever a tournament game ends and when an upset is likely to occur. And you can't beat the price: it's free, as in beer. If you don't want the results for all the tournament games you can sign up for individual team alerts, as well.

Signing up is quick and easy -- you can use the widget below or text message "tourney" to 44636 (4INFO) for the complete tournament pass, or text a team name with "alert" to the same short code (e.g. text "stanford alert" to 44636 and you'll receive Stanford end-of-half alerts and upset alerts for all tournament games in which Stanford plays, if any). Stopping the alerts is just as easy -- simply replying "stop" to any 4INFO alert will permanently remove it.

I've been using 4INFO for almost a year now, getting sports, news, weather, and stock information sent to my phone on a daily basis, and find the service reliable and indispensable, but the fact that I'm a 4INFO fan is probably obvious given the two 4INFO widgets in the right column of this page. In any case, give the service a try and let me know what you think.

I'll wait (a long time) for the $200 iPhone

2007-01-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

Suppose you decided to pay $600 for a cellular phone with a mandatory two-year contract. Suppose, too, you were an idiot. But I repeat myself.

I'm allowed to paraphrase Mark Twain only because, while working at Netscape back in 1996, I was silly enough to purchase the high-end Motorola StarTac cell phone for just under $1000 (I don't now remember the model number), and I'm sure the sale included a mandatory contract, as well. There's no rational explanation for the purchase. $1000 was then and is now a large sum of money to me. Only two or three people at Netscape had the phone, Jim Barksdale among them, so there was a certain cachet to be had sporting the handset on your hip or at your head, which, as we all well know, is the silliest damned reason to spend money on anything, but especially on a plastic phone that will be outdated before you change out of yesterday's underwear.

Anyway, ten years on and I'm older and wiser. I discarded my Danger Sidekick II middle of last year in favor of a sleek little $50 Motorola RAZR, and I'm done with phones that double as door jams. And yet, oddly, I find myself wanting the Apple iPhone. I probably wouldn't use the WAP browser and MP3/Video player much, if personal history is any indication. Ditto with the camera, the email client, and half of the widgets that are available. I probably would use the Google Maps client, but not nearly enough to warrant the $600 outlay.

Mind you, on a purely subjective level I "like" that all the above features can be had in one relatively small device, but I wouldn't use them sufficiently, in aggregate, to justify the cost and size of the handset. Perhaps when my two-year Cingular RAZR contract expires middle of 2008 I'll look into version 2.0 of the iPhone. Should be improved in all areas, have some new features, and cost perhaps one third the current price.

Needless things I might need (had I the coin)

2007-01-05T20:47:00.000-08:00

Of all the needless things I've needed in my time -- a blimp, a submarine, a steam locomotive and a railroad to run it on, a semi-tractor trailer, a thirteenth century castle in Great Britain, a suit of armor, an antiquarian bookshop, a golf course or two -- I think I've found the pinnacle of nerdly conspicuous consumption for the 21st century. It's not a Segway Human Transporter, not the $100K Tesla electric roadster, not the iPhone or the latest gaming console -- nothing so banal as all that.

No, for a mere $1.5M you can own a one-of-a-kind InfraStruXure Express On-demand Mobile Data Center. Built by APC, it's a computing facility built into a white 18-wheeler truck, and it's been around since 2005, though I've never heard of it before today. According to APC, "The trailer is a complete data center system. It has an onboard generator, uninterruptible power supply, cooling, network operation center, and its own satellite feed. You could park it in a cornfield in Kansas and operate a data center autonomously, as long as you had fuel in the fuel tank."

Imagine hosting your blog and email server from this rig as you travel the country, talking to people, writing, taking photographs. Think William Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways" on a ridiculously grander scale. Needless, to be sure.

Are you a Scrobbler?

2007-01-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

I imagine myself something of an early adopter when it comes to new technology, with the possible exception of music, where I'm sometimes late to the party. For example, I was a very early user of Apple's iTunes software, but my wife was given an iPod years ago, back when they were truly new and cool, and combined we've used it a total of an hour or two. Nor do I have an interest in ringtones, but that may have more to do with my age than my musical proclivities.

Last.fm is different. It's not a service I was immediately drawn to after one or two uses, the way I was with, say, Youtube. After installing the Last.fm software six months ago or more I fired it up perhaps once per week, listened to a few tunes, skipped a few, and closed the application. And that's pretty much how I still use it. Once or twice per week, usually while at work, I'm in a scrobbling frame of mind, and I've found scrobbling to be an excellent way to stumble upon new music and new artists, much of which one would never otherwise encounter. (Last.fm's Help page states, "Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.... Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.")

The UI is straightforward: Choose a genre or search for an artist and Last.fm builds play lists based on your listening history and that of other users. You do not control the play list other than having the ability to skip a song you don't like, as I'm now doing with Alice in Chains "Grind" (I like some of this group's work but not this particular song). Presumably, if you listen to most or all of the song it is added to your profile and may affect your future play lists. It's that easy, and I happened upon the group Snow Patrol, a decent find, while scrobbling long before I heard them on FM or Satellite radio. You do encounter a number of dogs, as well -- I'm listenting to Bloodhound Gang's "Yummy Down on This" as I type and am hovering over the Skip button. Give it a try, discover some new music, achieve self-actualization, or simply tune out for a while.

The princess and the tank engine

2006-10-31T14:25:00.000-08:00

Halloween was my favorite "holiday" as a kid. Period. Sure, Christmas meant new toys, skiing in Tahoe, snowball fights, family, homemade candy, and weeks away from school ... okay, Christmas was my favorite holiday, but Halloween was a close second. There was just something about haunted houses, ghosts, skeletons, dungeons, graveyards, trick-or-treating, and all things scary, dark and mysterious that appealed to me.

I was a little eccentric in that my favorite costume was the $1.99 skeleton outfit that could be purchased at your Thrifty Drug and Discount store. You know the one -- the cheap plastic skull mask and black smock with the skeleton imprint that tied loosely in the back. Many of my friends' mothers spent days or weeks making their costumes, but I could never understand why anyone would wish to be Money Man, Cinderella, The Great Pumpkin, Superman, or the like, no matter how nicely executed the costume, when for a mere two bucks one could be a skeleton. What the hell did Cinderella have over a skeleton?! Suffice to say I never won a costume contest at school or elsewhere, but I stuck by the skeleton costume for years, long after my brothers were proudly wearing my mother's creations (and winning contests).

In any case, the macabre and the gothic still appeal to me, but at some point in my early teens Halloween fell out of favor. It likely happened a year or two after I'd stopped trick-or-treating, about the time I realized that throwing eggs at cars and other teens wasn't all that smart. I rarely celebrated Halloween in my twenties and thirties, but now that I have two small children, ages 4.5 and 2.5, and get caught up in their excitement when we talk about ghosts, skeletons, and candy, the memories come flooding back. My daughter will be a Snow Princess and my son will be Thomas the Tank Engine this year, and part of me wishes I could don the ol' skeleton one more time, just to feel the way my two children do now. Have a safe Halloween!

4INFO Cool

2006-10-23T18:34:00.000-07:00

Do you have a blog or RSS feed you wish to promote via SMS? I found a cool new tool from 4INFO that, in about two minutes time, allows one to create an SMS service for just about any RSS feed. In my case I used my Feedburner URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/drury, and reserved the "drury" and "markdrury" keywords with 4INFO. So if you text either of the those terms to short code 44636 (4info) you'll get an SMS message with my latest blog entries. Why you would wish to do that for my blog is another question, but it's a pretty handy way to promote information services, especially those that change frequently. Here are just a few of the services I created while testing 4INFO's offering:

cnnpt (CNN's political ticker)
drury, markdrury
earthquakes, quakes
mebay [search term(s)]
pgagolf
rydercup
u2b, utube, youtube [search term(s)]
yahoonews [search term(s)]

4INFO offers four different service types, ranging from a Simple Menu Service, with static content, to XML Web Applications, that allow one to provide an XSL to parse and display the feed as desired (the mebay and youtube services are XML web applications).

4INFO's Open Platform site also has a number of example services to get you up and running quickly, and there's a developer forum if you have questions or comments that aren't addressed by 4INFO's content. Visit the site, create an account, and you, too, can have people following your blog or feed on their cell phones within minutes.

Florida's wacky triumvirate

2006-09-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

What the hell is wrong with Florida? Between Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, and now Republican Representative Mark Foley, the state has the perfect See No Evil, Hear No Evil, IM No Evil triumvirate of political neer-do-wells. Worse, Foley looks to be guilty of something far more serious than mere pandering or incompetence. What follows is but a small part (and by no means the most graphic bit) of his instant messaging exchange with an underage congressional page that took place in 2003 ("Maf54" is Foley):

Maf54 (7:33:39 PM): i am in pensecola…had to catch a plane

Xxxxxxxxx (7:33:47 PM): oh well thats fun

Maf54 (7:34:04 PM): indeed

Xxxxxxxxx (7:34:14 PM): what are you doing in pensecola

Maf54 (7:34:21 PM): now in my hotel room

Xxxxxxxxx (7:34:39 PM): well ..like why did you go there

Maf54 (7:35:02 PM): for the campaign

Xxxxxxxxx (7:35:29 PM): have you officialy announced yt

Maf54 (7:35:45 PM): not yet

Xxxxxxxxx (7:36:06 PM): cool cool…

Maf54 (7:37:27 PM): how my favorite young stud doing

Xxxxxxxxx (7:37:46 PM): tired and sore

Xxxxxxxxx (7:37:52 PM): i didnt no waltzing could make you sore

Maf54 (7:38:04 PM): from what

Xxxxxxxxx (7:38:34 PM): what do you mean from what

Xxxxxxxxx (7:38:42 PM): from waltzing…im sore from waltzing

Maf54 (7:39:32 PM): tahts good

Maf54 (7:39:32 PM): you need a massage

Maf54 signed off at 7:39:37 PM.

Maf54 signed on at 7:40:35 PM.

Xxxxxxxxx (7:40:44 PM): got kicked off?

Maf54 (7:41:24 PM): must have

Xxxxxxxxx (7:41:57 PM): ugh tomorrow i have the first day of lacrosse practice

Maf54 (7:42:27 PM): love to watch that

Maf54 (7:42:33 PM): those great legs running

Xxxxxxxxx (7:42:38 PM): haha…they arent great

Xxxxxxxxx (7:42:45 PM): thats why we have conditioning

Xxxxxxxxx (7:42:56 PM): 2 days running….3 days lifting

Xxxxxxxxx (7:43:11 PM): every week

Xxxxxxxxx (7:43:14 PM): until the end of march

Maf54 (7:43:27 PM): well dont ruin my mental picture

Xxxxxxxxx (7:43:32 PM): oh lol…sorry

Maf54 (7:43:54 PM): nice

Maf54 (7:43:54 PM): youll be way hot then

Xxxxxxxxx (7:44:01 PM): haha…hopefully

Maf54 (7:44:22 PM): better be

So, clearly, Dateline NBC's Chris Hansen needs to take his "To Catch a Predator" crew to Washington for their next installment. Just disturbing to think that Foley was chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children. No one is safe, people. No one.

"No, really, Mr. Hansen, I meant horny as in 'toad' -- I have a scientific interest in amphibians, you know!"

And the Abramoff noose tightens

2006-09-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

Jack Abramoff. The very name is greeted in some Washington circles with the same horror that "E. coli" brings to California's Salinas Valley. And it appears the Abramoff political spinach was served at the White House many more times than we originally suspected.

CNN is running a story about White House visits made by Abramoff cronies Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Reportedly, the White House released the Secret Service visit records to settle a lawsuit by the Democratic Party and an ethics watchdog group seeking visitor logs for the two GOP strategists and others who emerged as figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Norquist and Reed shared 115 visits between them, with the lion's share going to Norquist.

The article goes on to list seven other suspect individuals in the Abramoff circle that made repeated visits to the White House. Nothing surprising here, and no one of import will hang for the influence peddling that is rife in the current administration. Just the status quo in Washington, so please shake your heads and move along, people.

Ralph Reed confronting a skeleton: "My point is simply this: Even if I had posed for photos and video dressed in stiletto heels, bare-buttocked black leather chaps, a studded dog collar with leash, and a leopard print cowboy hat covering a flowing mullet, while riding a mechanical bull in an indian casino, that, that naive lobbyist is not the man you see before you now!"

So much for brand loyalty

2006-09-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

I've had a transient problem with brand loyalty -- clothing, golf equipment, book publishers, trivial stuff, mostly -- but one that hasn't bitten me until my latest car purchase. I owned an Audi A4 2.8 Quattro for nine years and liked everything about the car. (I say "liked" because no one should love a car. If someone claims to love their automobile ask them if they would freely give a kidney or some bone marrow to save it. There are some who will answer yes to such a question, without hesitation, but to paraphrase Mark Twain: Suppose you were an idiot. Suppose, too, you would freely give a kidney to save your automobile. But I repeat myself.)

Back to my much beliked A4. An accident required the removal of the car's dashboard and other structural work, and left lingering questions about safety (did the guy who removed and reinstalled the dashboard and airbags really know what he was doing?), so in March of this year I traded it in on a brand new Audi S4. The car had everything I wanted save for good mileage, but as my commute is very short and I don't drive too aggressively I am fairly easy on the gas, week to week.... Now, how a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club rationlizes the purchase of an autombile that gets, optimistically, 15 MPG in city driving is the topic of another post.

So I get the S4 home and am basking in all the irrational joys of new car ownership until the morning after my purchase when, upon starting the engine, putting the 6-speed manual transmission in neutral, and letting out the clutch, I hear a high-pitched whine coming from somewhere under the beautiful black leather and aluminum stick shift. Thus began my transmission travails.

Suffice to say that a reverse gear bearing had completely failed in my transmission, probably before or immediately after I took delivery of the car. I called the dealer that second day, before driving anywhere, to report the problem and was told, "They all do that." I drove the car another two weeks and noticed that the whine was loudest when starting the car cold, but would disappear after a few minutes driving. Into the third week of ownership I took the car to the dealer for a complimentary detail, and once again mentioned the problem to the service rep, but was again told it was likely nothing and that I shouldn't worry about it. So I blithely drove on for four months and the whine never appeared to get worse, that I could tell.

Things did get worse on the evening of August 9th, however, when my wife took the car to the grocery store. She got one block from our home when she heard a loud clunk followed by a very noticable whine/rattle coming from the transmission, which had now become very difficult to engage. She limped home and parked the car in our driveway, where we stared at it in disbelief. We found out a couple days later, after the car was towed to the dealer and inspected, that the failed bearing had finally destroyed three gears and a gear shaft in the tranny, and that the car would be out of service at the dealer for at least two weeks. I demanded a new transmission. Audi's mysterious "field rep" decided against me, that the existing unit should be rebuilt. After innumerable calls to six different talking heads at Audi of America, including one supervisor, the transmission was still rebuilt, but I'll save that rant for another post. The car had just under 2,500 miles on the odometer when it failed.

The dealer had my car for just over one month, but was gracious enough to give me a loaner car while mine was in the shop (apparently something that Audi of America no longer offers, so the onus is on the dealer). But on the day the mechanic was moving my rebuilt tranny under the car for installation he noticed that the clutch slave cylinder was leaking like a sieve. Parts were ordered from Los Angeles and I was informed of further delays.

By this time I had, of course, investigated the California Lemon Law and had discovered that I qualify because my car has been out of service for more than 30 days during the warranty period. Handily, even. I called Audi of America and heard a new term when I mentioned the Lemon Law -- I was asked if I wished to "sever" my relationship with the vehicle. I answered in the affirmative, grudgingly, and was told I'd get another call in a few days. That call came the next day, actually, and the nice gentleman with whom I spoke offered me the following to stay with the car: a 1-year and 12,000-mile extension to the warranty plus $650, roughly one month's payment on the loan. When asked about a new replacement vehicle I was told the above was Plan A, and that if I decide against it we move to Plan B, the new vehicle.

And that's where things stand. I have my car with the repaired tranny and clutch and have been driving it for a few days, and to be honest I still really like it. But everyone I've spoken to about this thinks I should demand an identical new car and be done. What do you think? Keep the existing car with the extended warranty and cash, or get a brand new replacement vehicle? The decision isn't an easy one for me, for reasons I don't completely understand. Perhaps ... perhaps I love my car?!

Time to molder for five weeks in the dealer's service lot.

Separating mind from sanity

2006-08-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

No matter what you think of Katherine Harris, the former Florida Secretary of State who oversaw the 2000 presidential recount debacle, you, too, must be surprised at how quickly she has fallen from GOP graces in her bid for a U.S. Senate seat. And it's all but certain that if she still wins the Republican primary she'll lose handily to incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. Her recent remarks about the separation of church and state being "a lie we have been told," and that the nation's founding fathers did not intend that the country be "a nation of secular laws," might, in fact, shock our founding fathers, many of whom were deists.

But ours is not to wonder why Ms. Harris chose this year's Senate race to implode, politically. She no doubt daydreamed about a future bid for the White House, running against arch-nemesis Hillary Clinton and carrying the weight of the evangelical world on her padded shoulders. But that contest will never be, and ours is simply to sample some tasty YouTube fodder while we (and Ms. Harris) ponder what might have been:

Jettisoned by the GOP
Separating mind from sanity
Sharing the spotlight with Osama
Hooking up in Congress (watch the background)
Sharing some profile with the boys at Fox "News"

"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin ... did I just say that?"

Ted "Tube" Stevens in the news again

2006-08-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

It's old news now but I couldn't let Senator Ted Steven's latest foible go unmentioned. It appears the old oil man's world is naught but a series of tubes, not unlike the oil and gas pipelines in which he would so love to enmesh his home state of Alaska. Here is how the Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation describes the internet:

Ten movies streaming across that, that internet, and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got...an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? ... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

I can't help but close with some Daily Show send-ups of Stevens and company in the Senate, courtesy of YouTube:

With Senator Byrd
John McCain on Ted Stevens
Jon Stewart explaining Ted Stevens
John Hodgman deciphering Ted Stevens

"If that ... that internet had as many tubes as I have intestine we wouldn't need the truck. WAR, I say!"

The Great Imivator passes ... AdCenter!

2006-05-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's just me, but the only things more staid and boring than Microsoft press releases are the product names that leak from the corporate rectum in Redmond. Take recent bowel movements such as "Windows Vista" and "AdCenter" as but two examples. The latter, the moniker for Microsoft's foray into the online search advertising market, was reportedly the product of two long years peristalsis within the company, and the only reason the late entrant has any chance of competing with the likes of Google and Yahoo is the ol' Internet Explorer trump card. To quote one source:

Microsoft has a long way to go to create the kind of user loyalty Google's search system has been able to create. A new version of Internet Explorer, by far the most popular browser, will feature an MSN search tool in the upper right corner. Already Google has begun to make noise with the Justice Department about the feature, clearly fearing what could be a killer app for Microsoft's search ambitions.

Microsoft also unveiled "Windows Live" in response to Google's collection of online applications. Here is what passes for innovation at Microsoft:

Many of the Windows Live features were revealed. For example, its mail product, which launched in beta mode last week, offers Outlook-like functions such as the ability to view new e-mails without refreshing the screen and the ability to move mail from folder to folder by dragging and dropping.

It will be interesting to see how far Microsoft is pulled from its comfort zone of disk-based client software toward true web applications, and how much internal strife any such movement causes.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Strategic Account Summit, analogizing for customers that the effort required to launch AdCenter in a scant two years was "akin to passing a stool about yea big while wearing a wetsuit over a diaper!"

Death by speeding locomotive

2006-03-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

I'm not the suicidal kind, but if I were I imagine I would take my life in the least violent manner possible -- a sleeping pill and alcohol nightcap, say, or a long drive in a sealed-up garage. But to step in front of a diesel locomotive traveling at more than 50 miles per hour? No thanks.

Turns out that stepping in front of a speeding locomotive is a fairly popular way to off oneself here in the Bay Area, and when I arrived at the CalTrain station this morning for the short hop from Menlo Park to Mountain View I found a slow-moving "bullet" train pulling into the station, and these trains don't normally stop at Menlo Park. I boarded the train, took a window seat, and asked a man sitting across the aisle if the train was stopping at all stations on its way down the peninsula. He answered that it was supposed to have been a bullet train but that it had been seriously delayed for unknown reasons, and that it was, in fact, stopping at all stations.

So I sat on the train for ten minutes before it pulled away from the station, but we never accelerated beyond 10-15 miles per hour. In less than a mile we switched tracks to that normally used for northbound travel, and I assumed there was probably a disabled southbound train somewhere between Palo Alto and San Jose.

Everyone else on the train appeared unconcerned so I opened the web browser on my Sidekick 2 and searched for CalTrain news, found nothing, and set about reading the Palo Alto Daily I'd brought with me. All was quiet until we crossed Meadow Drive in Palo Alto, still moving at 10 miles per hour or so on the northbound track. Without warning, a man seated directly in front of me groaned as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. I looked up and saw him staring out the window, mouth agape. I followed his gaze and saw what was left of a human torso several yards east of the southbound track, and a few investigators were preparing to cover the remains with a yellow tarp (see the image below). Most everyone seated on the other side of our car stood to look out the window, unabashed in their desire to see what they surely knew to be carnage.

Before I got over the initial shock of seeing the mangled torso I saw, right between the southbound tracks next to our train, what appeared to be the victim's intestinal tract, but I'll never know for sure what the large hank of flesh truly was, and I don't really wish to. Shamefully, I wasn't able to take my eyes from the window, and the unpleasantness continued for 50 - 100 yards down the track until we got to the train that hit the victim. At this point we'd slowed to perhaps 5 miles per hour, and as we passed the front of the offending locomotive I saw an inordinate amount of human flesh affixed to the large front coupler, which rests perhaps 4 to 5 feet above the ground.

Shortly after passing the stopped locomotive our train switched to the usual southbound track and resumed normal operating speed the rest of the way to Mountain View. Everyone was sharing somber nods and shakes of the head, though little or no conversation, and a suffocating calm enveloped our train car. As I stood to exit the train at the Mountain View station a young woman in a Stanford sweatshirt looked at me, wrinkled her face, shrugged her shoulders and said earnestly, "Try to have a nice day." I asked her to do the same and ten minutes later I was at work, preparing for a meeting.

Image from the Palo Alto Weekly looking south along the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto, California.

Would you like a side of Freedom Fries with your Rose of the Prophet Mohammad?

2006-02-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

Those courageous Americans who traded their French fries for freedom fries after the French snubbed the U.S. warmongering effort in Iraq now have a gastronomic and xenophobic equal: Some number of Iranians are following up their morning prayers with "Roses of the Prophet Mohammad," rather than the Danish pastries that were so popular before a certain cartoon appeared in a Danish newspaper.

Now, while freedom fry-loving Americans are clearly idiots, some may think the Iranians are displaying cool-headed moderation with their "Roses of the Prophet Mohammad" -- after all, we're talking about reacting to blasphemy in a Muslim theocracy. But at least one question comes begging: Why is it blasphemous to produce a caricature of Mohammad or Allah but not so to rename an infidel pastry after the Prophet?

AIM is lame

2006-02-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

Way back in 1994, when I was still a frustrated AOL dial-up customer and was dreaming of the day when I'd have something like a DSL connection to my home, I registered two AIM IDs: markdrury and AIMisLAME. The latter was chosen in response to some aggravating email and instant messaging behavior in the AOL client software, behavior I can't now remember, thankfully. I've been using AIMisLAME ever since, and I've discovered in the intervening years that thousands of people answer the question, "What is your AIM ID?" with the offhand "AIM is lame," an answer that far too many people take literally.

Nearly every day that I login to AIM for an hour or more I get a message from someone I do not know, one that begins something like: "Yo, [expletive], waddup?" Depending upon my mood and how busy I am, I'll either play along or will tell the errant IMer that I am not the person s/he thinks I am. It can often take five or ten messages to make clear that I am not, in fact, "... Crissy from the Superbowl party, the blond who was there with Derek but who looked unhappy and was leaving with two girlfriends, and who said her AIM ID was 'AIM is lame' with a smirk as she breezed out the front door." Here is but one such exchange:

(12:52:10) D81385: hey!! i stalked u and took yr sn from facebook! lol
(12:52:25) AIMisLAME: Cool. Who is this?
(12:52:31) D81385: yr rapid vis lover!
(12:52:41) AIMisLAME: Hardly.
(12:52:47) D81385: its danielle
(12:53:03) AIMisLAME: Hey Danielle. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?
(12:53:12) D81385: ??
(12:54:07) AIMisLAME: Good news is I'm a relatively nice guy who gets misguided aims such as yours all the time. Bad news is I'm not who you think I am: http://drury.com/oldindex.html.
(12:54:29) D81385: oh damn sorry
(12:54:33) AIMisLAME: NP
(12:54:41) D81385: :) bye
(12:54:45) AIMisLAME: Later
(12:54:49) D81385 logged out.

You get the idea. Why the hell I still use the ID is unclear, but that makes me lame, too.

(An older yet pithy animated gif from daw_)

News that gives pause

2006-02-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

This news makes me happy. I can't say why, exactly, other than to explain that I'm a wilderness-loving, card-carrying member of the Sierra Club. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that nowhere in this story is there mention of a suicide bombing, of tsunamis, earthquakes or fires, of violence and death due to the flushing of a book down a toilet or the simple caricature of someone whom no living person has ever seen.

In any case, BBC News ran a story today with the following headline: "New species found in Papua 'Eden'". Here are some excerpts:

An international team of scientists says it has found a "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle that is home to dozens of new animal and plant species.

"It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the group....

"It's beautiful, untouched, unpopulated forest; there's no evidence of human impact or presence up in these mountains," Dr Beehler told the BBC News website.

"We were dropped in by helicopter. There's not a trail anywhere; it was really hard to get around."

He said that even two local indigenous groups, the Kwerba and Papasena people, customary landowners of the forest who accompanied the scientists, were astonished at the area's isolation.

"The men from the local villages came with us and they made it clear that no one they knew had been anywhere near this area - not even their ancestors," Mr Beehler said.

The article goes on to describe the many new species discovered as well as the solving of a major ornithological mystery: the location of the homeland of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise.

Amazing to think that the 7-odd billion of us didn't know of this "Eden's" existence until now, but surely this is the last such place on our ever-shrinking planet....

John Bolton: Jingoist in search of a jihad

2006-02-02T21:26:00.000-08:00

John Bolton, George Bush's hand-picked U.N. ambassador and self-imagined "irresistible force" wrangling with the "immovable object" that is the United Nations, opened his first meeting as head of the Security Council at 10 a.m. sharp on Thursday -- and was enraged to find no other diplomats in attendance.

"I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room," Bolton said. The United States has just assumed the rotating presidency of the 15-nation council for the month of February.

"I believe in discipline. I think daily briefings constitute a form of intellectual discipline. Starting on time is a form of discipline," Bolton told reporters. "I failed today."

"I took a list of when they (council members) came in," Bolton said. "We started just before 10:15." Ever the optimist, he concluded, "On the plus side, the first fifteen minutes of the meeting were immensely productive: with only me in attendance I covered 13 agenda items with limited discussion and minor quibbling, mostly of a technical or procedural nature."

"Corporal punishment is what these council members need -- a good hard butt-racking would see them in chambers on time!"

"Brokebutt Mountain" (Or, "I'm no movie critic")

2006-01-19T23:23:00.000-08:00

Please don't be put off by the title of this post -- I like everything about the film "Brokeback Mountain" and I heartily recommend it, even to the most homophobic among us (well, if you live in the Southern United States and own a Confederate Flag you can safely await the edited-for-television broadcast). "Brokebutt" was merely the term that came to mind when the first rough-and-tumble love scene between the two male protagonists elicited a loud gasp from the woman seated behind me, as though she'd been kicked in the buttocks or something (and, well, yes, I couldn't resist the stupid play on words). She must have been the only person in the theater with no foreknowledge of the film's plot, and if that's true she can be pardoned for her outburst, as the scene is powerful and intense in its way.

In any case, my wife and I spent all of dinner after the movie and several moments during the following two or three evenings talking about the film, and even more time thinking about it, which is our unscientific barometer that tells us a) that we both liked the film a great deal and b) that the movie has some artistic merit coupled with probable broad public appeal.

For me, a somewhat normal hetero married guy with a left-leaning political bent, it took all of 0.3 seconds to accept as natural the unfamiliar image of two Marlboro Men wrangling furtively with one another's belt buckles, and to move on to enjoy the film's many rewards, both subtle and otherwise. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are prefect in their roles, using more than the spare dialog to evoke seemingly genuine feelings of love and pathos with one another.

The tale's backdrop is almost as compelling as its plot, and the vast, empty, yet beautiful vistas of Alberta backcountry are the perfect symbol of the cultural vacuum the two men inhabit in pre-"gay" 1963 Wyoming (the film is set in Wyoming and Texas but much of the backcountry footage was shot in Alberta, Canada, I believe). But the backcountry also serves as a refuge for the two men throughout the film, one made safe by the absense of other people.

Chock-full of nuance, infused with emotion and foreboding and beautifully rendered in every way, if you haven't seen "Brokeback Mountain" I'd recommend catching it in a theater to better appreciate the film's visual depth and scale.

Interesting to note that none of the images on the official website hint at the film's central theme, but maybe that would give away too much to those who have not yet seen it.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

2006-01-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

Feedback on my previous post ("Intelligent Design deemed anything but") would seem to indicate there are more than a few people who do not understand the difference between a well-established scientific theory and mere untestable, unobservable ideology. In digging around I found the following link -- worth a read if you, too, are curious:

http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/qanda.shtml

"Intelligent Design" deemed anything but

2005-12-21T16:21:00.000-08:00

So, yes, the former members of the Dover Area School Board and their backers, which included Seattle-based think tank Discovery Institute and Citizens for an Inbred Pennsylvania, were bitch-slapped yesterday by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, a Republican appointed by none other than our Intelligent Design-loving President, George Bush. News sources are reporting that Jones decried the "breathtaking inanity" of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion.

Judge Jones wrote in his ruling that, "The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

Reaction from the policy's supporters was as expected. Former school board member William Buckingham, who advanced the policy, said from his new home in Mount Airy, N.C., that he still feels the board did the right thing. "I'm still waiting for a judge or anyone to show me anywhere in the Constitution where there's a separation of church and state," he said. "We didn't lose; we were robbed."

John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, having apparently forgotten who appointed Judge Jones, chimed in with, "Judge Jones got on his soapbox to offer his own views of science, religion and evolution. He makes it clear that he wants his place in history as the judge who issued a definitive decision about intelligent design. This is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur."

Meanwhile, those of us living in the 21st Century can nod our heads with some satisfaction, if ever wary of the next threat to liberty and rationality from neo-conservative quarters.

Thank you, Judge Jones

Ted Stevens denied his monument in Alaska

2005-12-21T15:22:00.000-08:00

Poor Ted Stevens. You'd think that at 82 years of age and after 25 years of beating his head against the same board he'd have learned, but apparently the support of Big Oil is worth so many years of self-flagellation. The hapless Senator wants desperately to leave the "Ted Stevens Oil Field" in place of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as his lasting legacy (to say nothing of the years of oil subsidies the citizens of Alaska will receive if any drilling occurs). But today the Republican-controlled Senate fell three votes shy of the sixty needed to block a threatened filibuster of the must-pass defense spending bill, and that bill will now be reworked without the ANWR drilling language.

So Ted and friends will need to find another bill to which they can hitch their fetid wagon, and the threat to ANWR will not diminish until Ted retires or, more likely, until he checks into the Great Oil Seep in the Sky that surely awaits him. 'Til that time he'll have to content himself with visions of the earthly disaster that is Prudhoe Bay.

"The 'Ted Stevens Oil Field' would be my gift to Alaska ... to all America!"

Sign of the thymum

2005-12-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

Damn, I'm a crufty old bastard. That, or the world is going to hell faster than I can say "Nerf". I have two small children who enjoyed throwing and kicking an old Nerf football in our backyard, just as I did thirty-odd years ago. But some evil raccoons laid waste to the football along with a large swath of our backyard recently, so I thought a new Nerf ball would make a nice holiday gift.

I jumped on Amazon expecting to find some colorful replacements for the football, but in my search for "nerf" the first nine hits were all Weapons of Mass Destruction, which make nine more such weapons than have been found in Iraq to date. Here are four of the more fearsome:

Now, I grew up in a rural area and had access to small-caliber firearms as a kid, and I understand the visceral appeal of guns, both real and play, but I'm still left wondering why people buy this crap for their kids. When I was a kid "Nerf" meant a football with which one could actually play the game of football. Today's "Vortex Challenge Nerf Football" looks more like a rocket-propelled grenade:

The Nerf basketball and hoop were also popular when I was young, and I note Hasbro is now selling the "Official 35th Anniversary NERFOOP", but this product will no doubt be superceded by the battery-sucking "Nite Jam Nerfoop" replacement very soon, even though this item seems largely unpopular in Amazon customer reviews. In any case, I'll lighten up and if anyone knows where one can get the old-style Nerf football these days, the one with the simulated laces, etc., please send me word.

Images that give pause

2005-11-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

Sometime in 1996, while working at Netscape on the browser software, I received an email message from Michael Lopp, also a Netscape employee who managed the test automation team, if memory serves. The message was titled innocuously enough: "Welcome Drury to knobs!" I noted that the message had an attachment but opened it without hesitation, and was horrified to see a large, screen-filling image of a completely nude male, likely a full-frontal scan from PlayGirl or the like. It was just the sort of visual surprise that causes one to lunge forward, reflexively, to block the view of one's monitor (never mind that I was alone in my cubical) while simultaneously trying to decide if iconifying the email application would be a quicker way to remove the offending image than, say, by bringing a browser window forward, all in a split second.

Over the coming weeks and months I would learn that the "knobs" email alias at Netscape comprised something of a select group. Its members included all the founders except Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen, as well as many of the earliest employees. I think I earned my invitation to the alias based on some posts I'd sent to the internal mcom.bad-attitude newsgroup at Netscape, but no one ever passed on the reason, so I may never know. In any case, knobs appeared to have two unwritten rules:

1) Once on the alias one could never be removed
2) Messages sent to the alias should shock or offend, or do both

Much of the knobs traffic included graphic, often disturbing images, possibly with a caption from the contributor, one that frequently associated the image with an alias member and sought to ridicule that member in the offhand manner of nerds at play. Most of my contributions to the alias were prose rambles that are not fit to reprint, but suffice to say the general tone of knobs was as unprofessional and un-PC as can be imagined, which is probably why everyone enjoyed it as much as they did.

Knobs is still alive today, and is being hosted by one of Netscape's founding engineers. It gets far less traffic now than it did in 1996, but occasionally an image arrives in my Inbox that takes me back to the reckless days of '96 and '97. Such was the case a few weeks ago when I recieved the image linked below, one that arrived with the simple but adequate message title, "WTF? W T F !" Please don't open this image if you are offended by nudity. I have no explanation for what this man is doing in the image, much less why he is doing it. Perhaps the high cost of gasoline of late combined with the low miles per gallon the featured vehicle surely gets drove this poor sod in ladies finery to get more from his SUV than basic transportation. You've been warned -- now you be the judge.

Grumpiest Old Men

2005-11-20T18:39:00.000-08:00

Vice President Dick Cheney, the wily veteran of numerous long but successful legislative and lobbying campaigns on behalf of the oil and energy industries and five-time recipient of the Lavender Spleen for deferments sustained during the War in Vietnam, had U.S. troops in mind when he boldly addressed the American Enterprise Institute today:

"American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions ... conditions not unlike those found in the House of Representatives these days," Cheney said, to muted laughter. "Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood.... What the hell is my point here? Oh:

"This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety."

When asked after his speech by a doting member of the conservative think tank if published rumors in People Magazine and elsewhere were true, that he and John Bolton may be reprising the roles of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau for a third installment of the "Grumpy Old Men" movie series, Cheney gave a wry smile, winked and said simply, "Fuck yourself, groupie!"

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for Halliburton!"

Kepler's Books is dead; long live Kepler's!

2005-11-16T21:36:00.000-08:00

In my previous post about the death of Kepler's Books, one of the Bay Area's premier independent booksellers and long my favorite bookstore, I closed dejectedly with, "These truly are the end days of the independent bookseller." And even though Kepler's has since risen from the proverbial ashes the sentiment still holds, for Kepler's is no longer the family business that Roy Kepler started fifty years ago.

No, in order to survive in the grave new world of Amazon.com, Borders and Barnes & Noble (or, more specifically, in the world of one-click shopping, near-zero margins on massive volume and markdowns, zero sales tax and free shipping), Clark Kepler and his advisors decided the store must rebuild upon its devoted local customer base (albeit a base that had clearly been tempted by the likes of Amazon) and must become something of a hybrid -- part charity, part co-op and part Silicon Valley startup.

That decision appears to have been sound, for in the days and weeks following the store's closure there was tremendous public outcry, nationwide press attention (New York Times article), fervent requests for the Menlo Park city council to step in and save the store, calls for volunteers to spread word of the store's need, and demands of the store's Scrooge-like landlord, the infamous and elusive Tan Group, to lower the dot-com-era rent that was leeching the store of more than $30K/month for its 10K square feet (all of which came to pass, actually).

If you visit Kepler's website you'll note that you can purchase memberships, not unlike a membership one might buy at REI, though the benefits are a little less tangible. Several people have opted in at the Patron level for an undisclosed but presumably large sum of money. And most conspicuously, Kepler's now has a board of directors that is chaired by Clark Kepler (who is also the President and CEO), and includes several of Silicon Valley's lesser technology/investment luminaries. At least one valley marketing guru stepped forward during the height of the crisis to offer what aid she could and, while the extent of her aid seems unclear, she did succeed in getting her name in several newsclips and press releases.

Which is to say that the effort to save Kepler's took on a circus-like air, Silicon Valley-style, something that may have been the best outcome for the struggling business -- it certainly generated attention and news coverage. If I come across as unhappy let me be clear: I would much rather have Kepler's Dot Com in Menlo Park than no Kepler's Bookstore, and I applaud -- loudly -- the efforts of everyone who helped save the store. But it is sad that the bookstore Roy Kepler began as a family business fifty years ago, one he successfully passed to his children, is now in the hands of a board of directors, patrons, members and volunteers.

Kepler's Books, 1955 - 2005

2005-08-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

Inconceivably, two of my three favorite bookstores in Menlo Park, California, have closed down within a few months of one another (see my earlier post about Wessex Books). Today at 9 am, Clark Kepler announced to his employees that Kepler's Books, after fifty years in the business of selling books and ever a stalwart in the local business community, was no more.

My wife sent me the Palo Alto Online link to this story a moment ago and it was like a blow to the head. When I first moved to the Bay Area after college, in 1987, I lived in Union City, and when asking friends and coworkers about a good bookstore in the area the Kepler's name was all I heard (well, that and Cody's Books in Berkeley). I began making weekly pilgrimages to Kepler's, usually on weekends, and have been a loyal customer ever since, even when I lived in San Bruno for a short time.

Without wishing to appear melodramatic, I'm stunned and dismayed that Kepler's is gone, and I can't imagine downtown Menlo Park without this business. It is, or was, the hub of downtown Menlo Park, and its demise will almost surely be followed by that of Cafe Borrone, Feldman's Books and many other businesses. The loss is doubly painful for me because I was a big fan of Wessex Books on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park (across the street from Kepler's), and we lost that bookstore earlier this year when its owner wished to retire and couldn't find a buyer.

Ironically, I was just in Kepler's a few days ago with my three-year-old daughter, giving her the grand tour and thinking to myself how solid the business seemed, how there was always a good crowd with people queued up making purchases. The fanfare surrounding the 50th anniversary this year certainly gave no clue to any financial woes. I wonder why Kepler didn't give his loyal customer base some warning, marshall the troops, that sort of thing. Clearly the situation must have been dire, beyond repair, to close the store with no final sale or customer notice.

Perhaps a Borders or a Barnes & Noble will take Kepler's place, if they can get Cafe Borrone and the other first-floor businesses evicted to make room for their huge stock of narrowly-focused crap. These truly are the end days of the independent bookseller....

Daily dose of bumper sticker

2005-08-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

I don't normally pay attention to bumper stickers, personalized license plates, stuffed animals in back windows or the myriad other pleas for attention that adorn automobiles, but on the drive to work today, while waiting for the light at Middlefield and University in Palo Alto, I saw an unassuming vehicle with one inconspicuous sticker on the rear bumper, one that read:

Don't pray in my school
And I won't think in your church

When I got to work I googled the above and found at least one outfit that sells tee shirts emblazoned with those words, so I take it the remark is by no means new. But it was new to me (the nifty turn on the word "think", at least), and it made me wonder how many churches would begin their Sunday service with five minutes to respectfully acknowlege -- to participate in, even -- the worship of local Satanists, to use an extreme example. If you find that notion abhorrent you should know that I and many other reasonable, well-meaning people are equally put off by the idea of prayer in public schools.

Now, I'm not hostile to religion -- several of the most important people in my life are deeply religious -- but I do believe the practice of religion through prayer, however thinly veiled as "quiet time" or "time for reflection," has no place in public schools. Personal feelings aside, I've never understood the objectives of those who push for prayer in public schools -- there's no evidence I know of to suggest that prayer makes for better, more focused, more respectful students, or for a less violent student body. In fact, the only anecdotal evidence I have would seem to suggest the opposite: The children who attended the Catholic K-8 school in my hometown were, generally speaking, some the most troublesome students in high school.

Perhaps those who would have children pray in our public schools are simply in need of validation; need to see their understanding of control and conformance extend beyond their church into the classroom, no matter how awkward and unproductive the routine of five minutes silence at the beginning of each school day, where some number of students will bow their heads in earnest prayer, and the remainder will stare blankly out the window or at the ceiling, fully aware that this morning ritual is not theirs, no matter how civil or secular its outward structure.

But so much for generalizations, which are often neither fair nor accurate. I'll only add that in the continuing struggle over faith as a public concern, people of reason will stand resolute in defense of that line that fronts our public schools.

Now, if I could just find my underpants ...

Bush, Big Oil looking to bugger us yet again

2005-08-09T22:09:00.000-07:00

It would appear that administering a $25 billion dollar butt plug to the American taxpayers care of his energy bill, the chief aim of which is the enrichment of oil and energy companies (many of which are already enjoying record profits), isn't enough for President Bush and his cronies. No, the only proper encore for a billion-dollar energy tax boondoggle is a million-acre drilling debacle in Alaska. And the sneaky bastards have learned from past failures in the Senate, where attempts to push through drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have generally languished. This time around they plan to include a provision authorizing ANWR drilling as part of a budget procedure, which is immune to filibuster.

Reublican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green -- no matter your party preference you owe it to posterity to help end this nonsense. Two dozen House Republicans would seem to agree. Please contact your representation in the House and Senate and voice your disapproval.

-- Mark

President Bush to Big Oil: "Drilling platforms in paradise!"

Bolton ready to "kick ass, take names" at United Nations

2005-08-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

Still giddy from the 51% "mandate" he received during the 2004 presidential election, George Bush sidestepped the Senate and installed John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador earlier this week. Commenting on his installation to the U.N., Bolton stated, "We seek a stronger, more effective organization, true to the ideals of its founders and agile enough to act in the 21st century. It will be a distinct privilege to be an advocate for Americans' values and interests at the U.N. -- and in the words of the U.N. Charter, to help maintain international peace and security.... Who am I kidding -- I just want to kick the whole world's ass!" Well done, President Bush.

-- Mark

John Bolton facing the Senate, demonstrating how to handle "hostile foreigners" at the U.N.

Windows Beesta?

2005-07-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

What does the world's largest software monopoly do when it has marketing billions to spend and nothing of technical interest to announce? Hold a press conference and throw some parties to reveal the woefully mundane new name of its flagship operating system, of course. Never mind that the product in question won't ship for another 18 months or more, and don't bother trying to understand how a project code-named "Longhorn" became "Windows Vista."

It's clear that those within Microsoft don't understand the name either. Greg Sullivan, group product manager at Microsoft, offered the following clarification: "We each have our own unique view or vista of this digital world. Windows Vista is going to bring more clarity to that." What? Windows Vista is going to bring more clarity to my unique digital vista? Whatever.

God help us -- Steve Ballmer wants to pole dance!

Wessex Books & Records, 1975-2005

2005-07-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Suppose you wished to open an independent bookstore. Suppose, too, that you were an idiot. But I repeat myself." Idiot or no, I've wanted to own and manage a used bookstore for many years, but probably missed my opportunity when Menlo Park's Wessex Books & Records came up for sale earlier this year.

Wessex was one corner of what I termed the "Golden Triangle of Books" in Menlo Park, the other two stores being Kepler's and Feldman's Books. All three stores were located within one hundred yards of one another and their selections were complementary, too.

Wessex admirably filled the role of small, narrow-aisled, somewhat-dimly-lit-but-by-no-means-dark, eclectic-music-playing bookshop with used volumes (and LPs) stacked floor to ceiling and helpful eccentrics behind the register, just the sort of place where one could lose oneself for an hour or two between History, Literature and Poetry, with only the unobtrusive specks of dust vying for space between the aisles. In contrast, Kepler's is larger, lighter, cleaner, far more populous and sells only new books, while Feldman's strikes something like the middle ground. Great bookstores each, and each befitting a particular mood.

Sadly, Menlo Park's Golden Triangle is no more. Wessex, which had been in business for thirty years, didn't find a buyer, and an antique store now occupies the modest building at 558 Santa Cruz Avenue where the little bookshop once stood. Tom Haydon, the long-time proprietor of Wessex Books, was quoted as saying he couldn't find a buyer who was interested in the long hours and low pay that are the lot of the small, independent bookseller.

It's a shame Tom didn't hang on another two or three years before trying to sell, as I have this indistinct notion that come summer 2007 or 2008 I will leave the software/technology field and sign myself up for those long hours and low pay. It isn't that I'm dying to try my hand at retail or that I'm driven to own a business. Rather, I simply enjoy reading and talking to people about books. And while that motivation does not make the most compelling business case -- and no doubt has led to many short-lived bookstores -- I would sooner fail compellingly than continue my path of quiet resignation.

Wessex held a liquidation sale leading up to the store's close on June 1st of this year. I had $85 in store credit earned from trade-ins that I considered recouping during the sale but, in the end, felt I owed Tom that much or more -- for the use of his shelving, which I had leaned against so many hours; for the many books I browsed but did not buy, and for all the other intangible goods that a great bookshop and bookseller impart on loyal customers. Thanks, Tom -- Wessex Books will be missed.

-- Mark

In Praise of Skype

2005-05-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

If you haven't tried Skype yet you should. Truly. Download the free client and if you don't know someone who is already using the service have a friend register, then share a couple calls with one another. You'll be hooked. If, like so many others on the net, you happen to be friendless, or nearly so, Skype has you covered -- just search for a user who shares, say, your name, first and last, and give that person a call (assuming they speak the same language you do). Or you can break the ice by using Skype's chat utility (instant messaging). Even easier, simply enable the "Skypme" feature, which lets other Skype users know you're open for chat or conversation, and you'll probably receive a chat invitation within a few minutes.

I liked the free client and service so much I took the plunge earlier this week (if spending €20.00 can be considered a plunge) and registered for SkypeIn and SkypeOut, two relatively new services offered by the company. SkypeIn gives you a "regular phone number" in your choice of area code, where supported, and includes voicemail service, so people who do not use Skype can call you at your computer, while SkypeOut allows you to call any telephone number in the world, just as you would from a regular landline. In the span of about five minutes, start to finish after paying with paypal, I had both accounts active and ready for use, including my newly-leased SkypeIn phone number, 6502760463, which I was able to choose from a list of available numbers (a speedy javascript app let me pattern match to my vanity's content, but 276 was the only prefix offered in the 650 area code).

(As an aside, I recently moved from neighboring Bay Area community to another and had the pleasure of talking to three SBC customer service representatives about the pros and cons of starting new service vs. transferring existing service to the new home, listening to the monotonic recitation of different rate plans, none of which seemed to fit my needs, suffering the mandatory fee and tax advisements, paying the extra $10 for the custom number, etc., all of which left me wanting to scream, "For the love of humanity, I just want to take a call from an older relative now and then!")

But Telco gloom aside, I've using Skype both at home and at work for several days and I am very impressed with the quality and features of all the services. The only two drawbacks I've noticed thus far are a) my SkypIn phone number is not associated with my SkypeOut calls, so my ANI shows up in outbound calls as "0000123456" and b) the DTMF behavior of the Dial keypad seems inconsistent with voice applications -- I'm still unsure if I'm clicking the digits too quickly or too slowly but recognition by many voice apps is sometimes uneven.

Microsoft, Yahoo and others are jumping on the P2P VoIP phone bandwagon but Skype was first to market with a solid offering, so give them a try -- your Telco will thank you.

Why Blog?

2005-05-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

Damned good question: Why join the sycophantic ranks in a medium rife with idiots and windbags when I can just as easily enjoy the pleasure of my own stupidity in the privacy of, say, a hardbound journal? The larger, rhetorical question may be: Why does the ego require that one expose one's intellectual shortcomings to the world? The answer, we all know, has to do with cheese.

Turns out an ever-thickening, variegated wheel of cheese is the nexus upon which Civilization revolves, and though we are treated to the occasional morsel of Havarti or Asiago courtesy of a Michelangelo, da Vinci, Swift, Milton, Austen, Keats, Peake, et al., the mass is mere effluent, the Limburger that you and I spew forth in the bleating hope that someone will be moved by what we write, speak, paint, sculpt or imagine.

The late great Pope John Paul II recognized this when he revealed to visiting cardinals weeks before his passing that, "Had God Himself not called me to the Church, and to Papacy, I would very much have liked to try my hand as a cheesemonger or, failing that, as a producer of adult films, but that is not why I called you here...."

And so it is that great and small alike go about the daily business of thickening the cheese, and herein you will find my little slice of Limburger....