Blog: Archive for March, 2001

Today I noticed that one of my function keys wasn't working in Emacs. That led me to investigate where and how the keyboard was set for X (remember, I recently updated to XFree4). In the process, I noticed some weird man pages, one of which turned out to be from the xscreensaver package. I checked to see if someone had already filed a bug report (they had), and while I was there I noticed that someone had filed a bug saying there was a new version, so I decided to check and see what had changed.

The changelog was on Jamie Zawinski's site, and there I found a fitting capstone to the “All your base are belong to us” thing: All Your Base Are Belong to Xscreensaver, a collection of “All your base” images from around the Web and around the world, with a script to show them in random order.

While I was thinking of Jamie, I realized I hadn't checked in on his nightclub, the DNA Lounge for a while. Check it out—the craziness he's going through to try to get the place renovated, permitted, and reopened is hard to believe.

Ugh. 4:22 AM. And both of us are feeling pretty ill. I think—hope—that it's just because it's 4:22 AM. If not, well, you read it here first....

Well, I made it home safely. M should be on her 'plane by now, as well (she called to let me know). And I am sick, but luckily I held out 'til I got home. And now, back to bed....

Oh, sure. M's on the east coast interviewing, and the planet decides to serve up “the worst nor'easter in fifty years”.

Rebecca has some interesting thoughts about Frontline's “The Merchants of Cool”, including links to sites about media literacy. Worth checking out.

Sadly, I can't claim to have been half as affected as she was. I've been aware for most of my life that corporations regard all humans as their property, and do their buying and selling via market share.

I suppose being on the outside for much of your life helps you with that perspective—certainly when I was in high school I was able to see that most of the people there belonged to something that I didn't, and, frankly, to something I didn't want to belong to. Alas, it's becoming increasingly difficult to remain outside the grasp of the corporate world, as a couple of recent shopping trips for clothes have made eminently clear. No longer can you find decent clothes for reasonable prices (at least not near a mall or a shopping street like Robson in Vancouver). Instead you are presented with a variety of seventies fashion statements emblazoned with advertisements. If the ads aren't right out in front, in the form of a corporation's name emblazoned across the chest, back, or seat of a clothing item, they're still present in the selection and arrangement of colors, patterns, or other trademarked devices. (Think Tommy Hilfiger.)

The book on architecture and city planning I've just finished reading, Philip Langdon's A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb (Amherst: U-Mass Press, 1994), surprised me with the following (from the start of Chapter 3):

We live in what may go down in history as the Age of Marketing. As the field of business that focuses on developing salable products and motivating people to buy them, marketing has penetrated nearly every corner of American life. Little has been untouched by the one-third-useful, two-thirds-manipulative tactics of marketing specialists—those ingenious businesspeople who pretend to be democratic servants of consumer needs, interested in “giving the people what they want,” while in actuality they use their knowledge of human weakness to achieve what marketing values above all else: sales.

A populace whose fears and vanities have been stirred by adroit marketing will do the strangest things. Who would have believed, until it happened, that the apparel industry could persuade people to be not only willing but eager to wear manufacturers' brand labels on the outside of their clothing? There was a time when, by almost universal agreement, clothing labels were discreetly hidden from view. However, the deep human need for social approval and the equally acute fear of looking out of step have been played upon expertly by the marketers of clothing, and a metamorphosis is now complete; Americans of all levels of taste and education trot around with advertisements stitched to the fronts of their shirts, sewn on the backs of their slacks, affixed to jacket pockets, stamped into the bodies of athletic shoes, and so on. This is just one instance of marketing's successfully striking one of mankind's psychological pressure points and generating almost overnight a new custom.

Y'know, Northern Exposure is still an amazingly cool show, so much smarter than 90% of the stuff they're doing today. In the episode on today, Nikolai Ivanovich, a Russian singer, visits Cicely. He and Maurice, of course, hate each other, and eventually end up in a duel. But this is Northern Exposure: Joel tries to stop the duel by describing the possible outcomes in graphic detail, before giving up in frustration. Then the rest of the cast starts questioning the logic of the script. “What about the fifth draft?”, RuthAnn asks. “What about the version where Nikolai has an abcessed tooth?” Nikolai suggests that Maurice could trip and shoot someone else by accident. They finally decide to drop the duel and go on to the next scene, a celebration. Find me a show that could get away with that these days.

M should be boarding her last 'plane for the day in about half-an-hour. (Just before noon.)

She caught an earlier flight and is here now! (12:30 pm) Good thing, too, 'cause the 'plane she was supposed to be on has been “delayed for scheduled maintenance” (um, yeah, they scheduled maintenance for the same time as a flight?) and isn't even supposed to leave now until the time it was originally meant to arrive.

I just noticed that the Perl upgrade I did a couple of days ago broke my Web system. Swell.

If you're reading this post, I've fixed it.

The Register has a short story by one of my favorite writers, Pat Cadigan.
Via the null device.

Hey, some good stuff in Salon! (Sorry, I haven't been spending much time in front of the computer lately—I guess staring at the empty apartment just seems less angsty when I'm alone for days at a time.)

Anyway, let's start with an interview with Norton Juster, the author of one of my all-time favorite “kids” books, The Phantom Tollbooth (it probably vies for first place with William Steig's Dominic).

Joyce Millman talks about Buffy, particularly about the last new episode, the extremely intense “The Body”, dealing with the immediate aftermath of Buffy's mom's death. I watched that one all alone, after having been alone for a couple of days, and it really messed me up.

Buffy is, by far, the best show on television. That was made extremely clear to me by my trawl through some of the other options available as I taped programs I would usually watch for M. Wow, there's some awful TV.

Let me disrecommend CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which starts off with two strikes because it 1) has clever initials in its title that it has to define and 2) is on CBS. The last strike comes from a combination of its lack of focus (is it a crime show or a character study?), fake computers (I hate fake computers), and bad forensic science. The last is worst. I can (and have) watched plenty of shows such as Exhibit A (on Discovery Canada; repackaged as Secrets of Forensic Science for TLC) and Medical Detectives, so I have a pretty good idea of what can and can't be done, and when it can be done, how it's done—what kinds of equipment they use, what it looks like, what the results look like, and so forth. And CSI: Crime Scene Investigation gets it wrong, over and over. Yuck.

I also want to say some bad things about The Lone Gunmen, which has replaced FreakyLinks. I'm not impressed. In fact, I'm so not impressed that I wonder if it might not be time for Chris Carter to take a long vacation. In an ideal world he'd get David E. Kelley to go with him.

Salon points out some of the inadequacies of The Lone Gunmen, and also suggests some better alternatives: Junkyard Wars and BattleBots.

They also have an interview with Esther Dyson where she talks about the long-term viability of ICANN's control over the domain-name system. My take on it is that she seems a bit too enthusiastic about maintaining ICANN's monopoly control over the namespace, and uses some scare tactics to try to discourage people from looking outside of ICANN for solutions. (“You won't be able to get e-mail! No one outside of your ISP will be able to reach your webserver!”)

My brother's up visiting, which is great as I was getting a bit depressed Saturday night.

Meanwhile, I'm having lots of “fun” trying to find a dentist for M. She lost a piece of tooth, saw a dentist in the States, and found out she needs a root canal. Ouch!

Of course most of the people we could ask about dentists are on vacation or otherwise not responding. Of the two people I did get recommendations for, one's busy (and doesn't work on the days M's going to be back here), and one hasn't gotten back to me yet. I think I might have to try to book her an appointment with one of the (astonishingly many) dentists in the Metrotown Mall who have chosen to advertise in the Yellow Pages, as much as I hate the idea.

*sigh* Well, I ended up going with a mall dentist. On the plus side, they seem to have all the high-tech dentist toys—mouthcams, TV while they work, drill-less drilling.

In our wanderings, Brian mentioned an article about office chairs by Bruce Sterling from Wired. Interesting stuff if you're lusting after a new seat, as I am....

Apparently, the Leap is the next big thing—cooler, according to some, than the old ultimate, the Aeron.

Cooler still, says Sterling, is the Freedom, from HumanScale, which looks to me like a dentist's chair by Cronenberg.

The mall dentist turned out to be pretty good! Melissa survived her root canal just fine, after some initial nervousness. It turns out that Canada and the United States use different systems to identify (number) teeth. In fact, it's more complicated than that. In the U.S., there are two systems in use: the “Universal”, which starts by numbering the backmost molar on the upper right as 1, and moves left ending with 16. The bottom teeth are numbered from the backmost molar on the left (17) through 32. (Kids' “deciduous” teeth are lettered.) Orthodontists tend to use a different system, which numbers teeth within quadrants, starting with the front incisors.

In Canada, teeth are numbered with the backmost right molar as 18 and ending with 28 on the top, and (starting again with the backmost right molar) on the bottom as 38, counting across to 48.

Neither system is the international standard, which is even more bizarre and illogical.

In any event, the difference in numbering systems meant that the estimate they gave me was for the wrong tooth, and was, of course, low. There also turned out to be four, rather than just three, roots.

I got to watch the whole thing. It turns out that what they do is drill through the top of the tooth until they reach the pulp. They then clean out all the pulp, revealing the tops of the roots. They then use these tiny files to scrape out all of the organic material in each root, checking the depth against the X-ray, and, finally, with an electronic device (which I guess works by measuring resistance—one electrode touches the tongue, another clips onto the files).

Once they've reached the bottom, they clean the roots out with thin paper spikes, then insert rubber spikes into the openings, dipping them in gutta percha to fill up any additional gaps and make them stick in place. When the roots are filled, they burn off the ends with a tool heated with a miniature torch, then seal them off with a layer of gutta percha. The rest of the cavity is filled with some composite material that has to be cured with ultraviolet light, and the top of the tooth is molded to appear more or less natural. Because of the amount of the tooth that's been removed, the dentist recommends a crown, which will protect against the tooth cracking or breaking.

Fun!

You may or may not be aware of a controversy going on in scientific and government circles over the firing of Ian Thomas, a contract researcher who posted some maps of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge showing that the areas George Bush plans to open to oil exploration just happen to be the most important breeding grounds for caribou. Thousands of other maps prepared by Thomas showing the distributions of wildlife populations in national wildlife refuges were also removed. (See also the Red Rock Eater message that clied me in about the situation.)

The original site's maps are supposedly “undergoing review” for “scientific credibility”. The particular maps that resulted in Thomas's firing have not reappeared. You can, however, find those maps, along with some others, at Thomas's new website.

There was also a followup message with more information from other folks, including the official response from the United States Geological Survey.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

Roger Ebert really let us down with his review of Fight Club. The marketers didn't bail themselves out, either. Based on Ebert's review and the commercials, Fight Club looked completely unappealing.

Those factors also discouraged us from finding out much more about the film. Little things, such as the fact that the film was directed by David Fincher, who made The Game, which we really liked.

But M happened to catch the end of it in a hotel room, and various folks who seem trustworthy have said good things about it, so we rented it.

It was amazing. Not the greatest film I've ever seen, and I definitely could have done with less of the middle section of the film, but I really liked the first part, and my interest was rekindled when Tyler began to recruit an army (although that was the obvious next step). Based on the reviews on Amazon, the book may be better because it's less focused on the brutal, sensationalistic fights that apparently upset Roger Ebert.

We had breakfast at De Dutch. Yum!

Another thing to miss about Vancouver....

Hit the library for another bunch of books about architecture and design: The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand; A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, et al.; Architecture, Form, Space & Order, Frank Ching; Architectural Graphics, Frank Ching; A Visual Dictionary of Architecture, Frank Ching.

Frank Ching's handwriting is the basis of Adobe's ubiquitous Tekton typeface, designed by David Siegel.

I've just sent M on her way again, this time to Toronto. She's almost done with her interviews, and should, we hope, be able to make a decision in early April.

Wow! My friend John Tynes has a couple of articles in Salon about the Wizards of the Coast: Part I and Part II.

The Nation has Jonah Peretti's account of his attempt to order customized Nike shoes with “SWEATSHOP” on the side.

Bill Moyer's Trade Secrets site. (Chemical companies would conspire to keep information about health risks from their products away from the government and users? Unimaginable!)

Law.com on the Bush Administration's rejection of ABA vetting of judicial candidates.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

Jakob Nielsen talks about non-mobile uses of wireless technology. He has a point—I know I'm looking forward to “semimobile” uses, such as being able to sit anywhere in (or even near) the house with a laptop and still be able to poke around on the Web, get files from our servers, and so forth.

I'm reading about the “New Urbanism” right now, and public wireless net access seems to fit right in—to be practical, you need to have some reasonable level of density to support the necessary infrastructure. A few wireless nodes in a somewhat dense mixed-use neighborhood might be a lot more practical than trying to string enough nodes to cover your average cancerous suburban sprawl.

But who knows? Right now, I have absolutely no idea where I might be living in four months. Not in Vancouver, almost certainly. But maybe nowheresville, Indiana, valley L.A., shady Salem, Oregon, or even Toronto. Or maybe somewhere else altogether, and only visiting M from time to time. Sadly, none of the for-sure options or even the maybes really sound all that attractive for one reason or another.

Health Canada has introduced new graphic warnings on cigarette packets. Now, Health Canada has always had better labelling than the States (“Cigarettes cause cancer”, “Smoking can kill you”), but their new TV commercials annoy me. “It's time to see cigarettes for what they really do,” they say, but if cigarettes are so awful, how can they justify continuing to allow their sale? Seems hypocritical to me. (And, yes, I know exactly why they keep allowing them to be sold. It's still hypocritical.)

Damn. My great aunt died today. She was 88.

In response, I made fudge from this recipe (only using Fry's Cocoa powder instead of Hershey's). After over an hour of heating and stirring, I was able to add the butter and vanilla, wait a bit, and mix it up to form what looked like a giant cowpat. It turned out to taste great, though.

M's back, and with a cold!