i should really fork a journal, eh?
Days two and three of the MJD experience were just as good or better
than the first, and it looks like
his web site is chock full of tasty
goodness. One of these days I need to make some time to write some
code and put some of the stuff I learned into action — but I’ve got
several other dragons to slay first…
mail overload
Lyn, I, and a few other
people had a
brief
exchange about email management the other day. I wish there had
been more participants, because I really am not completely happy with
the way I’ve ended up managing stuff (but I also can’t think of any
better ways to manage it, either, so…) Maybe all the people
who get as much email as I do (around 300-500 emails a day, mostly
mailing list traffic) are too busy keeping up with it to respond, or
something.
freedom downtime, indeed
Yesterday was not a good day for a couple of important court
cases. First 2600 got bitch-slapped on their appeal of the DeCSS case,
and then Ed Felten et al. got shown the door after only 25 minutes
worth of argument on the chilling effects of the DCMA with regard to
academic research. El Reg has
the
overview.
November 2001 Archives
it’s good to have goals
Let’s just sum up last week by saying that I sat down Monday afternoon
at work to rewrite my TODO list, and I finally finished said rewrite
Sunday evening, at home. Boy, oh boy, whadda week — but I survived my
first period as solo frontline Linux admin at work without destroying
any hardware or any users, so I’m marking it down as a success.
Turkey Day was fun, good friends, good food, good time; hope yours was
the same — not much more to say about that because it already seems
so long ago… The long weekend was nice in that I got a few minor
longstanding pesky things taken care of: the webcam might be showing
up soon (once I get scp working to move the captures to the server),
and I finally switched to ext3 (lemme hear the geeks say ‘w00t w00t!’
Um, anyway…)
While I’m blathering about personal meta stuff, I’ll also pass along
that at work today, I attended a class given by Mark Jason Dominus, a
name that should be familiar to the Perlers in the audience. Good
stuff — I’m looking forward to the next two days, which feature two
more classes and probably some face time with MJD. Meta question for
the bloggers in the house — in such a situation, do you mention your
weblog, or not? Mail me with
your opinions.
flame tree
There’s a tree in the parking lot of my apartment complex, right next
to a globe-style street light. All the leaves are off the tree, except
right around the globe of the light — I guess that extra illumination
is keeping the leaves around just a bit longer. Anyway, the leaves
have turned, and it looks pretty cool at night — like a little flame
ball hanging in the tree. Here’s a couple of cruddy pictures — I
couldn’t really get the flash right, but you can at least sort of see
what I’m talking about:
blog-rolling
Looks like Bruce Sterling’s weblog cum online zine Infinite Matrix is back on
the air.
he will, he will, HOST YOU
Here’s a big shout out to
Cornerhost, the sort-of new hosting
company being run by Michal “Sabren”
Wallace. Cornerhost is home to genehack.com and genehack.net, which will have all sorts
of fabulous content one day real soon now. Michal’s been great with
getting everything set up, and I recommend him highly if you’re
looking for some hosting.
attack of the clones
Medium level flap over human “cloning” yesterday — here’s the
company’s press
release, as well as a news
story that gives a bit more context. Near as I can tell, this is
just the application of techniques that are known to work with other
mammalian oocytes to human eggs — not exactly ground-breaking
visionary stuff. It also sounds like they don’t have all that
much. Finally, I think people might be mis-understanding “embryo” —
that’s an extremely early stage after fertilization. This is still a
long, long way from producing anything that even has a calculable
chance of possibly turning into a human being.
you can’t trust what you can’t see
Here’s an interesting
article about a bioinformatics researcher that has a condition in
his employment contract that allows (not requires, mind,
allows) him to release software he writes as Open
Source. It’s very encouraging to see people standing up and pointing
out that unless you can review the source, you can’t be sure something
is algorithmically correct — and in scientific software, that’s a
pretty damn important thing to be able to tell. I’ve been saying this
for a number of years now, and I usually get “huh?” looks in response. Maybe
that’ll get better now.
If you feel the same way about the importance of making sure publicly
funded scientific software remains open, make sure to sign this
petition over at OpenInformatics.
walking the walk
Linus Torvalds filed a
bug report against the
development version of KDE the other day — he gives pretty good bug
report, I’d say.
in the on deck circle…
If I can continue to manage my schedule such that I actually have the
time to do it, I’ve got several book reviews that really want to be
written — and I’ve still got one or two links in the queue as
well. I’d really like to not feel guilty about describing this site as
“daily”, just for a change… I guess we’ll see what happens. Thanks
for reading.
but then what else is new?
Urgh. Busy, busy, busy. Work has me up against the ropes and is giving
me the business. Occasionally, some non-work project, like getting
ready for our Thanksgiving spectacular, tags in and gives me nuggeys
for a while. Grumble. Should get better soon…
the anchor is here, baby!
Occasionally, however, the non-work nuggey projects work out
okay. Tonight’s post-work task, frex, was to secure beer for the
previously mentioned Thanksgiving spectacular. Now, ‘round ‘bout this
time of year, a special task befalls me. The missus and I have this
beer bottle collection, you see, a very special beer bottle
collection. Every year, the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco
makes a special Christmas beer. Every year, the recipe is different,
and every year the label is slightly different as well. Our collection
has a bottle from every year since we started dating — and obtaining
the current year’s bottle is, like I said, a special task.
It’s pretty hard, going to the beer store every week, checking to see
if the Anchor is in — especially when other beers fall into my basket
and have to be purchased. But I persevere. And this year’s vigil has
paid off: we secured a case of the 2001 Anchor Christmas earlier
tonight. Haven’t sampled it yet, but I’ll try to report once I do.
We also got something new this year: a “Magnum” size bottle of Anchor
Christmas. It’s pictured below, with a normal sized bottle for
comparison. I had a pretty crap day at work, and finding this big
bottle of joy brightened my outlook considerably.
enough with the sherman jokes already, okay?
obI’mMoreOldSchoolThanYou: Genehack from
May
6, 2000. The Archives here go back much
further than that, but I think most of the formatting is FUBARed. I
should really do something about that one of these days…
aisle or window, either way
Cool
picture of Columbia haulin’ another load, but all I can
think of when I see this is “Boy, I wish I could get a seat on there,
because things are starting to get scary down here. Boy, if this goes
on…”
sense of humor or hackery?
All may not be totally lost, however. Either somebody at The
Economist has a sense
of humor, or somebody with a sense of humor has hacked The
Economist’s story engine. Either way, a positive sign — as long
as we can keep laughing at them, we haven’t lost to them.
On the off chance that the second possibility turns out to be correct,
here’s the text of that page as of 11 pm EST or so:
An election correction
Nov 15th 2001
From The Economist print edition
In the issues of December 16th 2000 to November 10th 2001, we may have given the impression that George Bush had been legally and duly elected president of the United States. We now understand that this may have been incorrect, and that the election result is still too close to call. The Economist apologises for any inconvenience.
If I don’t get back before then, have a good Turkey day if that’s your
custom. See you when I see you…
worship the chunk.
Major thumbs up for the new Superchunk long player here’s to
shutting up. Just thought I’d share.
how come we never just talk anymore?
I’m running off at the mouth about webloging, and why it ain’t like it
used to be (least for me) over here on Flutterby.
it’s getting scary out there, part #541
From my cousin in KCMO comes this
story, about a group of part-time small town cops that decided
what their town really needed was a SWAT team — and since you can’t
have a SWAT team without machine guns, well… you do the math.
minor meta
I had to remove some sites from my Daily Dose pages — I’m pretty short on
time these days, and I just wasn’t reading everything. No offense
intended to people who got dropped. (You’re not really
dropped, just commented out for the time being…)
And since I haven’t got my weblogs.com ‘ping’ solution in place yet,
I’ll remind you about the update mailing
list, in case you must know when the site gets updated.
busy busy bees
Sorry ‘bout that little break there. Work has been kicking my ass
really hard, and when I stumble home, hitting the computer to
update this site hasn’t really been the first thing on my
mind. Finally got a bit of a chance to catch my breath this weekend,
and realized that I missed doing this — so here I am again. Got some
plans, but no time to implement them, so expect things to stay
basically the same for the foreseeable future.
(Thanks for the shout
out, Dave. It’s not that I wasn’t pinging ya, it’s that I wasn’t updating. 8^>=)
okay, bed now.
Well, I was going to try to reduce some of my link backlog, but then I
remembered I don’t really have any link backlog. I haven’t been saving
pointers to most of the conflict-related stuff I’ve been reading, and
I haven’t had time to do much surfing, period. Hopefully that’ll
change, or it’s going to get pretty journal-ish ‘round here for a
while.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from this weekend. First, a
shot of a house guest sacked out on the Big Blue Couch of Sloth:
Second, the book pile that I made in our living room while I was re-arranging bookcases in the den:
