Blog: Archive for August, 2001

We ventured to the Apple Store in Glendale today . M wanted to get an audio-video cable for her iBook, and, I think, also just wanted to see the place. The drive there wasn't bad at all, but once we got to the parking garage for the Glendale Galleria, it was chaos. More SUVs than you can imagine vying for parking spaces, with people stopping in the middle of the ramps and waiting for cars to leave (holding up between three and five other cars). Also assorted idiots blowing their horns in frustration, which was, of course, utterly pointless.

After driving around and around and up and up, M spotted a space, which was, alas, on a ramp going the wrong way. But we drove down and around, and, after dodging around some waiters, found that the space M had seen was still open! Hurrah!

The Galleria seemed like a nice enough mall. Now, I hate malls, and I wasn't all that impressed by this one, but it was big enough that people weren't crashing into each other all the time. It was also clean, and carpeted, so that the noise wasn't as bad as it is in some malls. In retrospect, the mall may have been less collision-filled than I'd gotten used to in Vancouver because most of the people there were white (or Hispanic), rather than Asian.

After consulting a map (there were actually lots of maps, which was another nice change from Vancouver), we navigated our way to the Apple Store. You've read descriptions elsewhere, I'm sure, perhaps on Apple's site, or maybe even been there yourself, so I won't bother. The people working there were well-trained, however, far better than the people in your average computer store. They also had lots of shiny Macs on display, along with various shiny accessories, including some of the smallest video cameras I've ever seen (smaller, I think, than our digital stil camera!).

We chatted with an employee, who took us to the cables (they're in the back, if you don't want to chat), then he showed us one of the new 867s. The dual-800s still aren't shipping, and they didn't have any to show off either. We talked about NeXT, Mac OS X, and Apple in general. It was one of the more fannish conversations I've ever had. Then he left us to play a bit (we got to see a 17" LCD, which we hadn't seen yet, and to play with iMovie a bit). When we were done, we went to the checkout desk, which reminded me of the Gap. They wanted ID to go with my credit card (is this some new annoying thing in the States, or what?), and I had to sign my name on a digital pad. Luckily they didn't want to compare the signature, because I wasn't about to do my real signature on a digital capture device.

We ended up with a light blue plastic bag with a drawstring at the top, Apple logo emblazoned on the sides. They also threw in two fancy spiral-bound notebooks with the Apple logo on the first page, which probably cost at least $5. The receipt was lovingly ensconced in a fancy cardboard holder with a quote from Abraham Lincoln and a business card in a slot on the front.

After that, we checked out a teddy-bear shop that gave buyers the opportunity to “build their own bear”—choosing a “skin” from one of a number of bins, selecting (or not) from a variety of sound boxes (playing music, talking, or allowing the buyer to record a message), stuffing the creature (including a prestuffed heart), then cleaning it up, choosing clothes, obtaining a computer-generated “birth certificate”, and, finally, paying.

We had to check it out because it looked so much like that pet-cloning store in The Sixth Day.

After that, we headed home, with a side trip to drop off a marked-up manuscript of a paper my only SoCal friend had written. After first going the wrong way, then missing a turn and having to turn around in a lot on the periphery of one of the largest horse-racing tracks I've ever seen, we found my friend's apartment building and left the paper in his door.

That evening we ventured out our for dinner at one of M's colleagues' houses. The food was excellent (Indian-insprired), as was the company (several folks from other departments or schools in the consortium). The toaster-oven fire was a spectacular addition.

I learned all sorts of things about the College and the other schools, was able to marginally impress some people with my work on George Gratzer's books, and had a good time in general. Before we left, we took advantage of Josh's invitation to borrow DVDs of American Beauty (whose beginning we'd missed in the theatre) and the Criterion Collection version of Brazil. That night, we made the mistake of watching American Beauty, followed by the director's and writer's commentary, which kept us up quite late.

Made up for last night by watching Brazil three times. First the director's cut, followed by the version with Terry Gilliam's commentary. Then the “Love Conquers All” version, with commentary on. What an incredible hack job. Everything nasty Terry Gilliam had to say about Sid Sheinberg was true.

Then we stayed up extra late watching a documentary and looking at some of the other material. Ugh.

Paying for last night's foolishness, we were up very late today. It's supposed to be over a hundred, and, even with the air conditioning on, I can believe it. Today is a day of list making, checking, and checking off.

Project Muse provides online access to a swath of interesting academic journals.

“I've enjoyed hating Nixon my entire life,” Groening said. “It's so great that even though he's dead, we can still kick him around.”

We went to the nearest Fry's location—Anaheim. Clearly Fry's has changed, or perhaps it's just a difference caused by being down south. Several employees actually approached us at various points to ask if they could help us find something.

We spent hours wandering around, and left empty-handed. The selection was vast, but the prices were awful. By the time you add in the trip to Orange County (including hellish stints on three different freeways), the advantages of instant gratification versus shipping and handling costs start to pale.

Their selection was interesting, too. They had unopened ISA cards that have been out of date for years. They had a huge display of Ricochet modems, pushing Metricom's wireless Internet service. They neglected to mention, however, that Metricom has filed for bankruptcy and that their network was in the process of being shut down. (According to the Metricom site, the network should be black as of tomorrow, the eighth!)

On the way back, we passed a sign announcing the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library. Grr.

After doing some business at the colleges (signing up for health plans, mainly), we went to the bank to deposit a check, change M's ATM card PIN, and find out why I got a Visa check card when I asked for an ATM-only card.

The WaMu here has the most amazing slow computer system I think I've ever seen. I've been around for a while, and I've actually used systems that used punch cards, and punching cards, feeding them in, and waiting for output didn't take much more time. I don't know exactly what the deal is, whether WaMu's system is under strain because of their fierce acquisition policy, or whether the particular bank we go to has a 2400-baud modem soldered into it, or what, but it's pathetically slow.

After that, we walked over to the Full of Life bakery, which everyone in Claremont has raved about. We've had some of their bread, and found it to be very, very dense. Good, mind you, but awfully heavy. As it turns out, their bread is also outrageously expensive. They charge US$4 for a tiny loaf of bread (something like 8" long by 4" wide and 4" high). I'm sorry, but I don't think I could justify paying that much for bread if it were the best bread in all the world. I mean, it's bread. I can make bread, and it's really not that hard. And after being able to pay CN$1.65 for wonderful airy bagettes within walking distance in Burnaby, US$4 for less bread is just not happening.

If we can't find a reasonable bakery, I suspect we're going to be doing a lot of bread baking in the future.

Sam's Club is evil. You probably knew that, but I can now attest to the fact myself. M got a business membership through the college. We were planning to check it out yesterday, but by the time we spent hours wandering aimlessly around Fry's, it was too late. As it happens, it would've been too late had we left Fry's a couple of hours sooner.

In their infinite wisdom, you see, Sam's Club (aka WalMart) had closed the location near us, but hadn't bothered to update their website. So today we drove down Monte Vista looking for the place. Believing it would be easy to spot, we didn't bother to take the map I'd gotten from the 'Net. (Okay, okay, we forgot it, but you wouldn't think it would be hard to spot a huge warehouse store, would you?) We drove down Monte Vista, past the 10, through a suburban neighborhood, and on out into a bad patch, complete with “adult bookstores”, strip clubs, and divey bars. Then we turned around and drove back. On the way back, we spotted a huge building in a shopping center that appeared to be abandoned. We pulled in and marvelled at the empty stores. I noted that the parking lot would be a good place to come once M gets a learner's permit. The huge building had no hint as to what it had once held. We left and drove home to get the map.

With the map in hand, we drove back down Monte Vista. It turned out that the correct location was the very abandoned shopping center we'd discovered earlier.

We continued down the road, turned near the mall, and looked for a pay 'phone to call them and ask for directions to the next nearest store. We spotted a Verizon store, and stopped to see if they had any telephone books. (They didn't; new ones are due out at the end of the month.) We asked about Sam's Club, and it turned out that the nearest one was out in Ontario.

We drove out to Ontario on the 10. We found the Sam's Club, parked, and went in. M went to customer service to get a proper card, and they grilled her for information—name, address, date of birth, name of firstborn or closest ransomable relative, etc. And her driver's license number. Without it, you see, she would be allowed to pay any way but with cash. Now, M doesn't have a driver's license. Nor does she have a California ID card, which would apparently count, too.

As far as I can tell, this whole driver's license thing is totally out of control. When we bought a cable at the Apple Store, I had to show my license. Sam's Club wants it, too. Meanwhile, I've been buying groceries and gas by swiping my own card in a machine, without even bothering to show it to the clerk. Mobil (and some of the other gas stations, too, I think) has a dongle that you can wave at their gas pumps and cash registers that automatically charges your account without having to show ID, sign a slip, or punch in a PIN. Is the system a bit schizophrenic, or what?

Oh, and Sam's Club sucks, anyway. Not nearly as full of stuff as Costco, and considerably more evil. Although some of their deals on drinks seemed pretty tempting, and they had the best selection of frozen fish we've seen so far. But, they're evil, and inconvenient, too, so we're safe. Probably.

I'm really appalled by the way things seem to be going in the States. People seem to be giving up freedoms left and right for what seem to be very minor gains. I think I'm already at the point where if someone insists on seeing my ID before letting me use my credit card, I'm going to tell them to stuff the things I was planning to buy where the sun doesn't shine and buy stuff off the Web, where they don't check my ID and don't demand personal information they're not entitled to have.

I'm probably overreacting, but it really pisses me off when people jerk me around. I'm handing them a credit card. The credit card people will tell them whether or not they can have the money for the purchase. If there's a problem, the transaction will be declined. If my card is stolen, I'm liable for—at most—US$50. When my card was actually stolen, they didn't charge me anything. Even if they had, I'm willing to eat $50 if necessary in exchange for not being treated like trash. The only people they're protecting by demanding my ID are the credit card company and, maybe, themselves. As the customer, I don't particularly care whether they're protected. And if they lose my business, and others' business, and go out of business because people take their business elsewhere, I'm just not going to be losing any sleep.

Whatever happened to “the customer is always right”?

Appleby's gains a place in the nice food, not too expensive chain list. We had some really yummy food, cost about US$27, which amounts to two meals because the portions were way too big.

I am a genius. Well, I have my moments of inspiration, anyway.

Here's the deal: Our new apartment has a fan in the bathroom that goes on when you turn on the light. Very annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that the fan is very noisy. And even worse than that, when our air conditioner is on, the fan cover vibrates loudly. It vibrates when someone else's air conditioner is on, too.

My idea: pad the cover so it doesn't rattle. After a trip to the Home Depot, we came away with some rubber washers and some foam weatherstripping. I took the cover off, put weatherstripping along the edges, added a rubber washer to the screw holding it on, and viola!, the cover doesn't vibrate, even when the fan is on, and you can now hear yourself think when nearby.

An inside day. We emptied a slew of boxes, tucking their contents away and breaking the boxes down for storage. We also moved the bed over a foot and a half, opening up more space around the desk (and tucking a desktop and several storage containers underneath).

M moved petrain (our LaserJet 4000N) to the living room (where we now have space, as the stuff we used to have on the entertainment center has been replaced by my stereo or moved atop some bookcases), and moved tenby to the floor (in preparation for getting another underdesk mount). As a result, there's now more desk space on my large (240 cm x 80 cm) desk than ever before.

In the evening, I spent a couple of hours looking into X-10 options.

Ordered some X-10 stuff from the evil x10.com and the not at all evil homecontrols.com. x10.com had a good deal on the ActiveHome interface (which connects to a computer and allows you to program macros for home automation events) in the form of a set that also includes one lamp and one transceiver/appliance module along with a couple of different remotes. Homecontrols.com had a great deal on the IBM Home Director Expansion Kit, which includes several lamp modules, an appliance module, a remote, a wall-dimmer switch, and a desktop controller. Should be fun once it all arrives.

I really wanted to be able to add a remote switch for the kitchen lights, as the idiots who built this place felt that the appropriate place for the switch was in the dining room area, next to the bedroom door, and about ten feet away from the kitchen itself. Unfortunately, the only switches that work with fluorescent cost at least US$50, and maybe as much as US$80 for one that would definitely work with our system. While I may change my mind about the annoyance level of having to remember to flip the switch on the way to the kitchen (or go back to flip it when I forget), at the moment, it's closer to the US$20 level.

We did our grocery rounds, as well: Albertson's (English muffins, cream cheese, and frozen juice) and Trader Joe's (most everything else), with a stop at the Home Despot for some felt pads for appliances (for the printer, monitors, and so forth).

We also made an abortive attempt to order a shelf for my desk and an underdesk computer mount from Ikea. The City of Industry location still doesn't have the hardware for the shelf, but Ikea apparently does have the stuff in their warehouse, which just happens to be in Ontario, and is therefore closer to us than the store. Theoretically, once I can actually talk to someone at Ikea (who doesn't claim they're working with another customer and then not call me back), I can order the necessary bits and arrange to pick them up at the warehouse. Coincidentally (?), the various and sundry documents M pulled out and put on the desk will just fit atop the shelf....

See the mighty BSOD (and its friends) in many different public places!
Via RISKS Digest.

Hey, M was just talking about getting a Macintosh Plus, and here's someone selling one!

Looks like Dean is moving to France from Vancouver. Too bad, I was looking forward to being able to read his accounts of events around and about Vancouver. Guess I'll have to read about France, instead.

You can also read about Dean and other Vancouver designers in an article on Adobe's site. I miss Vancouver.

Speaking of Vancouver, Jess is back.

The Ned Blog covers all your Luddite news.

Although I'm completely dependent on technology (this 28.8 connection is driving me nuts!), I'm still strongly attracted to the idea of traditional arts & crafts. I still sometimes wonder about apprenticing myself to someone doing something cool—metalwork, calligraphy, hand printing, or somesuch.
Via Rebecca.

Also: The Luddite Reader.

So, we have a “severe weather alert/excessive heat warning” here now. Temperature is supposed to be about 102 (Fahrenheit degrees; 39 Celsius). Possible high 110! What better time to do laundry?

Actually, it does seem to be a pretty good time—no one else has been around the two times I've been over so far (once to wash, once to transfer to dryers). Of course it could be that everyone else has more sense than I do. Add in the fact that I didn't bother to put on sunblock, reasoning that I should be outside for less than twenty minutes altogether, which may yet turn out to be one of the dumbest decisions I've made in a while....

Whoo-hoo! Another Zeppelin article on Slashdot!

We're wiring our apartment like crazy. We received our X10 stuff, and now have remote control over pretty much all of our incandescent lamps. Network-wise, we'd set up our 10-Base-2 (thin coax) network to connect the computers in the bedroom with the laser printer in the living room. With M's iBook, however, we ran into a problem.

With our older machines, we either had 10-Base-2 connectors built in, or could easily add them (with a Mac AUI adapter for the two Mac clones we had). When we had DSL, we added a second ethernet card to tenby, and got a combo card with all three options.

When M was interviewing, she borrowed a PowerBook 3400 from her advisor, which only had a 10-Base-T jack. So we borrowed an ancient 10-Base-2 hub, and plugged a 10-Base-T transceiver into its AUI port. The hub was huge (the size of a standard stereo component) and noisy (it had a powerful fan to keep it cool). Not an ideal solution, and I was happy to leave it behind. In any case, we didn't need it.

Until M got her iBook. Since we don't have DSL yet, we could use a crossover cable and the second card in tenby. But doing so put the iBook on its own subnet, which required tenby to route packets, as well as requiring assorted tinkering with the DNS stuff in order to allow us to go back and forth.

So we decided to buy a switch. Switches are dirt cheap these days—anyone who buys a hub instead of a switch has to be crazy. M did her usual thorough research (too thorough, perhaps, as she spent most of the day looking for reviews and prices). In part, she was spurred on by the “back to school” rebates available from some manufacturers. In the end, though, she ended up advocating a combination switch/router/firewall, which we bought at a small shop in Pomona for less than US$100, and which, of course, was not covered by any of the rebates. It's only a four-port switch, and we've already used all the ports, so if or when we get another machine for home (current candidate is an 867 MHz G4 PowerMac, but we'll see what Steve announces in September), we'll need to get another switch, by which point they may be giving them away.

(If you care about these things, we ended up with the D-Link DI-804. Among other things, it has a serial port and can be configured to initiate a dialup session when your broadband connection goes down.)

The Top 100 Banned Books of 1990–1999. I'm happy to say that I've read (and own) a lot of these books. I'm also really glad that I read a lot of these books when I was in grade school—unlike some schools, my school taught some of these books.

I might try to read The Catcher in the Rye for Banned Books Week (September 22 -29). Some of these are bizarre, though: Where's Waldo??!
Via Rebecca.

Oh, no! These weird jelly snack things have been pulled from the shelves. I remember seeing them in Vancouver and wondering what they were like. But I never tried them because you could only buy them in large lots, and I seriously doubted I'd ever want to eat more than one. Maybe I missed the boat, but, then again, something nicknamed “deadly mouthful” doesn't sound all that attractive, anyway....
Via Rebecca.

Laurie Anderson is on Weekend Edition Sunday (on NPR). She has a new album (!), which I guess I'll have to find. I'll point to the steaming audio when it's made available.

Speaking of music, while M was fiddling with the switch, trying to get ssh to work, I was idly flipping through television channels and stopped on the Claremont Colleges channel, which was showing a list of upcoming programs. None of the programs sounded all that interesting (which is pretty standard for the whole cable system), but they were playing a cover of Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart” that I'd never heard. Of course they cut it off fairly quickly (in favor of a “music video” featuring a laser show set to Debussy's “Clair de Lune”), but hearing it threw me into a strange mood. I ended up putting on a tape of Joy Division's Closer (to hear “Heart and Soul”), and opening my box of records (glorious vinyl!), pulling out random albums and reminiscing. I have a lot of weird things, some of which I had completely forgotten about.

Some random examples:

• Coil's How to Destroy Angels, a one-sided 12"
• Throbbing Gristle's Grief, an interview disc (I believe), one side “Camera”, one side “Telephone”
• Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, and John Giorno's You're the Guy I Want to Spend My Money With (I have this one on CD, too)
• Love and Rockets, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven (original UK album)
• More Psychic TV than you could shake a stick at

We stayed up 'til about 2 AM, while I played a variety of tracks from Cabaret Voltaire, Tackhead, Siouxsie and the Banshees, This Mortal Coil, Talking Heads, and ending with tracks from the Until the End of the World soundtrack (Can, of course, along with Neneh Cherry, Julee Cruise, and another Talking Heads track—I'd put the CD on to hear “Last Night's Sleep”, and couldn't be bothered to change it because I was busy taking a wrench to the stereo rack. It's finally feeling somewhat solid.).

Looking back, though, I'm amazed that I survived my youth.

M got her machine! Apparently she's one of the very first to receive one of Apple's new dual-processor machines. We went down to the bookstore to pick it up, and found that it hadn't actually been paid for yet, and the person who knew what was going on was out of the office. M somehow persuaded them to let her take it, though, so we loaded it in our car and drove back to her office.

Pretty cool machine, especially with the Cinema Display and SoundStick speakers. Now all we have to do is get her some furniture (leaning toward Ikea Effectiv office furniture) and a chair (probably an Aeron) and all she'll be missing is an actual office.

The excitement wears off pretty fast, though—in the end, it's only a computer, not the key to world peace or even personal happiness.

We went to see my friend Greg Pagel at the Art Center College of Design's Senior Show. “Fun” freeway driving, followed by driving around winding roads in the dark. But we eventually found the place, and as we approached the main building I was struck by the idea that it had to be the Reston Industries building from the Michael Crichton movie Looker.

We found a place to park, and found an entrance, and ended up having to walk across the road (on the level above) to get to where the action was. Zillions of people, all trying to out art-student the next. I don't think I've ever seen so many tatoos, though it may be that piercing is on its way out, as I don't recall noticing those nearly as much.

We eventually found Greg, and saw some of his stuff, including some furniture he'd designed and a model of the building he described in his paper (which I'd done an edit of). Cool stuff—seeing it made me remember how glad I was when I heard he'd left the CMA, where we used to work. He was so wasted there, used by a lot of people who knew they weren't going to be changing their lives, and jealous of those who were young and creative enough to be able to do so.

Anyway, we'd found his stuff, but not him, so we hung around until he appeared. He looked great—happy and in his element. We talked for a bit; he introduced us to some people. Eventually he suggested we check out some of the other rooms so he could schmooze, and we did.

We saw some cool stuff, including some crazy product design and really funny ad mockups. We also saw a sort of backwards tricycle that looked a bit like a unicycle with a pair of wheels extending in front. Although there was a post coming up in front, with a handbrake, you apparently steered by leaning in the direction you wanted to. I think it could be popular at Harvey Mudd (where unicycles are a preferred mode of transportation).

Although we'd initially thought we pop in, find Gregory, and pop out, we ended up staying until the staff started locking doors and throwing people out (around eleven o'clock). The trip back home on the freeway was lots better than the trip out.

Yet another computer problem. It started when we shut down the machines so we could turn off the power to the bedroom and living room so that we could install an X10 dimmer switch in the bedroom. That went fine, but after bringing the power back up, tenby started complaining about problems with disk access. M ended up tearing the machine apart again, and ended by thinking that the problem might be with the Ultra-ATA cable connecting the drives to the Promise controller, which may have been damaged during the move or, maybe, even sooner.

We ended up making a trip to CompUSA, a place I hate, partly to see if they had a cable, but mostly because I thought that they might have a decent selection of laptop cases (M still doesn't have a case for her iBook). They had the cables, but only in one size, and for US$15 more than a small local place we'd stopped at last week. They supposedly did price matching, but they didn't actually bother to have anyone working at the counter where they did that magic. Their selection of cases sucked, too, so we left (dodging past the drone checking the bags of people who were dumb enough to actually buy anything there), and went to the other place, which had the cable for $20.

We then did some grocery shopping (at Pavilions, one of two faces of Safeway in Southern California, which M believes has better bread than some of the other options; and at Trader Joe's), and went home, where we watched Rock 'n' Roll High School. Besides the Ramones, who are the main attraction, I should point out the presence of Barbara Walters as a cafeteria lady. Seriously. That Barbara Walters.

The rest of the day faded into night—M tinkered, I ended up setting up an Amazon wishlist. I know, I know, Amazon is evil, and I don't think I've ever bought anything from them (not from their U.S. operation, anyway—their European side is governed by Europe's more strict privacy laws, and less evil). But I look a lot of things up on Amazon, and it's easier to make Amazon remember some of this stuff than to try to find a pen and some paper to write on.

Amazon has some scary software running their site. After adding a handful of items to my wishlist, their recommendations page was full of books I actually own. On the other hand, their music and film selections were terribly far off.

I spent a lot of today asleep, probably because we were up until something like three o'clock in the morning while I fiddled with Amazon and M fiddled with her machine. Needless to say, we missed the Laurie Anderson segment on Weekend Edition. Luckily, it's available as streaming audio from this page. (Not that it works on my machine, of course.)

M's academic regalia arrived this morning. They look pretty snazzy, and are definitely much nicer than the ones she wore at graduation. Now she can take her place with the rest of the faculty and still stand out. :)

Spent some time this morning building freeamp and verifying that it still segfaults on PowerPC. While I was at it, I noticed a better way of dealing with upstream changelogs than the one I'd hacked together, so I modified my packages to use dh_installchangelogs, and updated their Standards-Version fields while I was at it.

I also spent some time brainstorming questions for a Debian teTeX FAQ.

Some alternative food pyramids to the official USDA pyramid.

When I was a kid, the pyramid seemed vaguely believable. Since then, though, it's been revised in such a way that I can't begin to imagine how can eat what it says to eat and not become hideously obese. According to the current USDA pyramid, you should have 6–11 servings of grain-derived foods, 3–5 servings of vegetables, 2 -4 servings of fruits, 2 -3 servings of milk, cheese, or yogurt, and 2 -3 servings of meat, poultry, dried beans, fish, eggs, or nuts. Anyway you look at it, that's a hell of a lot more food than I could eat.

On the other hand, having been in a number of restaurants since returning to the States, it seems that many restaurants are doing their best to adhere to the guidelines by serving enormous amounts of food. The plus side of that is that we often get two meals out of a visit, which makes them marginally more affordable.

Anyway, Rebecca's spur was this article, which argues that the USDA—which, like most U.S. “regulatory” agencies, is in bed with the industry it's supposed to be regulating—is hopelessly biased in favor of red meat and other not especially healthy foods (at least when consumed in the amounts the USDA food pyramid recommends).
Via Rebecca.

“Why Gnome and KDE Are Misguided”. I tend to agree with this article, which argues that what people need today are computer systems optimized for networking—passing information around quickly, easily, and transparently. The key to that, of course, is good old fashioned ASCII text. The author talks about a Mac-based system using several tools that can accept and generate text; Mac OS X, being based on NEXTSTEP, goes that system one better by allowing any application to take advantage of command-line Unix text-manipulation tools, through Terminal Services.
Via CamWorld.

Wow—I just heard two songs I never would have expected to hear on television within five minutes. One was Television's “Marquee Moon”, playing in the background during Dead Last, a silly show on the WB that's somewhat similar to FreakyLinks. Fox continues to be stupid for cancelling that one.

Song number two was Tones on Tail's “Go”, in a Starburst candy commercial.

I don't know whether I should laugh or cry....

In pain from a canker sore in the back of my mouth. I apparently bit the side of my mouth. That would be bad, but I have this faulty feedback mechanism that causes me to lock my jaw in order to avoid irritating the sore, which results in amazing headaches from the muscle tension, as well as talking through clenched teeth. Oww.

Started looking at building a website for M for HMC. Rapidly ran into problems as apache and Netscape fight to thrash the machine. 80 MB of RAM is clearly not enough, but the last time I looked, RAM for this poor old (but wonderful!) machine was more than a dollar a meg, and the largest size was 64 MB. M suggests I look again. I do. Wow—128 MB DIMMs available for US$35! The company won't sell, though, at least not and guarantee it will work (their info is out of date). Other World Computing, though, has the RAM for $45, and does guarantee it will work in my PowerCenter 132. We order.

Meanwhile, the books I ordered from Subterranean Press still haven't arrived. My stalling around has left me with nothing to read, so last night I decided to tackle The Lord of the Rings again. Now that I've been able to read KSR's Mars trilogy, Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, A Tale of Two Cities, and other giant books, I figure I might be able to handle Tolkien. I hedged, though, leafing through the appendices, before giving in and trying the foreword and dipping into the start of the book. My lack of committal is registered by the gods, and my books do not arrive.

The morning is shattered by the doorbell ringing—my books!

No, turns out to be a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses. Damn.

Having read the first twenty or so pages of the actual book last night, I start to get into it, and read another couple of dozen. I fall asleep (still in pain, remember) committed to reading The Lord of the Rings. That afternoon, the books arrive, delivered by UPS in their patented drop-and-run style. Still, they're beautifully set and bound. I reluctantly put them on the shelf for later.

I meet up with M at the school to go to the grocery store and to a drugstore in hopes of finding something for my mouth. She's not done, and recruits me to install Mac OS software on her machine. Here's a warning about the new Quicksilver Macs, kids: Be very careful about making sure that CDs are placed in the right place in the tray. Jiggle them around to make sure, otherwise the drive will happily grind its hub on the surface of the disc as it tries to spin it. So much for our Adobe Illustrator CD, which no longer allows installs. On a whim, though, I discovered that the entire set of installation diskettes is on the CD, and could be copied. Install successful. Still not cool, Apple.

Kanka is the bomb when it comes to canker sore aids. It has massive amounts of benzocaine, and also leaves a sticky film coating the wound. No one will be surprised that it tastes funny, I'm sure. But suddenly I can move my jaw again! I can eat without worrying about pain. I can talk! Hooray!

Ugh. I had a bizarre dream in which the Shrub had come to a college I was attending, and was supposedly answering any and all questions put to him. I remember showing him up by vacuuming some substance off a pizza, which apparently was the key to understanding that his ABM system couldn't possibly work. I then had a dream involving discussions about (and experiences with) Ecstacy (MDMA). Turned out that Bush was on the radio, answering any and all questions, and that was followed by a call-in show about Ecstasy. Bleah.

Oh, yes! My RAM arrived this morning, and I added it, checked to make sure I could boot to MacOS, and then reassembled the machine, slung it back under the desk, rearranged the myriad cables and cords, and rebooted into Linux.

Everything is amazingly faster. Even with X, emacs21, and bunches of Netscape windows open (forget about the apache and other server processes), I haven't come close to touching swap. Things within programs work fast—I loaded mh-e in seconds. Even GPG (running under exmh) seems to be faster. 320 MB of RAM is the way to go....

Hmm. My ISP seems to be unreachable, which means that you're not reading this entry. (Or, if you are, things have been fixed.) Oh, well, I guess I won't be distracted by mail....

For M: An interview with Professor Yaffle!

At some point we're going to have to get a region-free DVD player so we can buy the Bagpuss DVD....
Via found.

Wow. Salon is so naive they actually think that their “premium service” is worth US$15 a month. I just subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly for a whole year for less than that. And The Atlantic is a consistently better publication, too. I haven't been bothering to check Salon much lately (largely because most of the articles fall into one of two broad categories: predictable political nonsense or sleazy sexual nonsense), and I guess I'll stop feeling bad about that. (Note: Way back when, when Salon first started, M sent them some money and we got some nice things back from them.)

Wow, Dave Winer said a bunch of stupid, sexist things on scripting news. Some people are surprised, although I can't imagine why. After five years or so of reading his stuff, it's clear that Dave is an idiot. His company makes some useful and generally good software. Dave is clearly quite bright. But there are some issues that are just beyond him. One of the big ones is women. (Another one is anthropology. Yeesh.)

The only sane way to read Dave's stuff is to always remember that Dave doesn't understand some things, and that he'll get them wrong every time. Try to laugh, instead of crying. And don't waste too much energy being outraged.

That said, Meg makes some good points. I'm glad she did, so I don't have to.
Via Megnut.

Mm—one more reason women don't bother to attend computer conferences: I happened to pop onto the #debian channel on IRC the other day (because I was really bored). I was ever so amused to see that one of the primary topics of discussion was a new tool based on Debian's apt package tool, designed for downloading pornography. Hey, boys, try growing up.

With all my new RAM, Konqueror is much more usable. Maybe I'll try using it more. At some point I should probably try Mozilla again, too.

Anyone who's trying to call us at home these days has almost certainly gotten a busy signal. That's because we don't have DSL, and because we now have the modem attached to the switch/gateway, and it cleverly keeps the connection up unless we turn the modem off. My suggestion to you is to just send e-mail, which is almost certainly more likely to reach us, anyway.

We're supposed to get DSL sometime around the 10th of September. Although I can't wait for the increase in speed, I'll miss having people be unable to call us. I hate telephones, and I really hate it when people call me out of the blue. Especially when they're selling something (has anyone ever called you to sell you something you wanted?, or when it's a wrong number.

I'd much rather know someone's going to call—then I can look forward to it all day, or even all week. (Hi, mom!)

I'm having annoying problems with ssh. I'm not sure whether it's my fault, the remote site's fault, or the College's crappy dialup.

I'm busy lusting after fountain pens and being annoyed by our fantastically slow connection. On top of that, sendmail is acting up, leading me to seek information.

Sendmail.com is really only useful if you're a giant corporation, but they point the rest of us to sendmail.net (which is, I guess, kind of a news site for sendmail-related information) and sendmail.org (which is the support site for the “freeware” release of sendmail).

I was amused to see a link on the front page of sendmail.net to a “sendmail knife”, which turned out to be broken (because you can't link to it—if you care, go to store.sendmail.com, click on “Sendmail Gear”, and then on the “Sendmail Knife” link). Yes, kids, after wrestling with sendmail for a few hours, you can just finish yourself (or others!) off with the handy sendmail knife! The police and courts, as well as your family, will understand when they pry the knife from your cold, dead fingers and see the sendmail logo (a sort of dragon/Concorde crossbreed) shining through the blood....

(Fixed it. I just love how that m4 crap has made it “easier” to configure sendmail. Easier for their expensive graphical configuration tool to write configuration files, I bet, but certainly not easier for an administrator without that tool.)

(Nope. Still screwed up.)

Speaking of pens, by the way, Deutsche Pen has lots of German pens, fountain and otherwise, including several that are really quite inexpensive (< US$20). (They even have my core, which is quite a nice pen, and would go well with some rave pants or whatever it is skaters wear these days.)

Salon on the (U.S.) Copyright Office's report on the effects of the DMCA.

The report itself (in PDF).

Like most U.S. government agencies, there's a lot of conflict between the twin goals of supporting the industry being regulated (in this case, largely publishers) and supporting the public interest. This report is yet another example of that conflict, and, as usual, comes out the side of corporations over individual rights.

The comments Salon has solicited mirror that impression completely: industry spokespeople are thrilled that their rights to limit access to information have been “upheld”, and everyone else is dismayed by the Library of Congress's gutlessness.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

PR Nation—an account of the Center for Media and Democracy's John Stauber's attempts to expose the evil PR machine that constantly spins the information you receive through the media.

Well, [the Water Environment Foundation] turned out to be the sewage sludge industry, and she was calling because she said, “I heard that you have this book coming out, Toxic Sludge is Good for You, and I'm really quite concerned because, frankly, it's not toxic anymore and we don't call it sludge. It's now bio-solids, and it's a natural organic fertilizer. And we're very concerned that your book title is going to interfere with our education campaign to get farmers across the country to use bio-solids as a fertilizer on their farm fields.”

So, that became a chapter in our book called, “The Sludge Hits the Fan,” and we actually broke nationally this whole story about how this toxic sludge—mountains of it building up at sewage plants all across the country that the Environmental Protection Agency had deemed too toxic to landfill or incinerate or dump in the ocean—has basically been renamed “bio-solids—a natural organic fertilizer.” And now half of it is being spread all across the country on farmlands, despite the fact that it's still as toxic as ever.

Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America. Look at these photographs. Be sure to read the accompanying notes. Be sickened. America has a nasty history, and it doesn't seem to be improving much over time.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

Criticism of David Broder's silence about Jesse Helms's racism prior to Helms announcing his retirement. (The original article.)

Jesse Helms, of course, is one of the most evil people in America, and that's saying a lot. But the media (in general) never bothered to point that out when he had power and they felt that they needed to suck up to him to retain access. We need a media with teeth. Fuck access. Make it clear that the evil bastards in power are refusing to be open about what they're doing when they're covered thoroughly. Maybe if the media stopped sugarcoating everything, the populace would wake up and realize that the people they're electing aren't necessarily working for them. But probably not.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

John Shirley on Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, a new anime film from Mamoru Oshii and Hiroyuri Okiyura.

Also, his review of A.I., a film lots of people didn't get. I have to admit, I was one of them at first: I was annoyed that David never figured out that the humans were incapable of caring about him, and that he continued to believe in them, and then in his delusion about the Blue Fairy.

But that was the point. David was built that way—incredibly capable, but still limited by human shortsightedness. He wasn't a person, he was a toy, a tool, a device, a thing, and the programmers only allowed him to “grow” so far. Even during the horrors of the Flesh-Fair (compare with the lynching photographs bookmarked above), David never really understood what was going on, nor did he understand Gigolo Joe's plight (a robot who was set up to take the blame for a man's murder of his wife—Joe knew he didn't do it, but he also knew that no one would believe him). Ultimately, David only understood his lack of individuality when he went to confront his creator.

All the humans in the film are damaged in some way. We see parents traumatized by their son's illness. A creator driven by memories of his dead son, who ends up endlessly replicating his son as he was, forever frozen in a moment of time. Technicians who question the advisability of the project, but go ahead anyway. Men who murder their wives because of their jealousy of machines. People who destroy robots in spectacular ways to try to compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy.

Damaged people create limited, damaged artificial intelligences.

There are links on the Shirley review to other reviews of A.I. in Locus and elsewhere that are also well worth reading. Gary Westfahl's reaction, in particular, is very similar to my own.

Several of the reviewers note the lack of roles for women in the film—in a world with many specialized robots, women apparently stay home and clean, do laundry, and wash dishes.

For extra points, think about the people and robots in A.I. and the people and corpses portrayed in the lynching photographs.

Something bad happened to our telephone line. No dialtone, only a hum, but people can try to call in, which results in the telephone ringing, but, when answered, all you can hear is a far away sound of a telephone ringing or of “9” being dialled on a rotary telephone.

M came home all accusatory—“Where were you!”—just as I was about to go out to call Verizon from the office and then drive over to campus. I called and reported the problem using their awesomely stupid voice mail tree (“Press 1 if you have no dialtone” *1*; “If you can be reached at the number you're reporting a problem with, please press 1 now”) before reaching a human—why do I fall for those things instead of pretending I don't have a touch tone 'phone?

Anyway, their computer came up with “line problem”, and they're supposed to send someone out tomorrow to fix it. Best guess is that (1) they let Earthlink hook up our DSL on their end, and someone screwed up, or, (2) while hooking up 'phone service for someone moving in before classes start, their installer knocked one of our wires loose. The second option is the best bet—had I known where our 'phone box is, I would have gone over and checked to see if there was someone messing with it. I did look to see if I could see a Verizon truck in the lot, but couldn't.

Built new version of my packages with a tiny change to their debian/copyright file to make the latest lintian happy. Of course I can't actually upload them just now.