Grand View Lodge

Spending the week at Grand View Lodge near Brainerd, Minnesota with extended Kubes family. The classic American resort thing — fishing, golf, tennis, lakeside reading, yoga, meals included… It’s all about the kids — 11 cousins now, Miles the youngest, being showered with kisses and funny faces. By night, Cranium, Mexican train dominoes, political and religious discussions with brother-in-law. Total wind-down time, recharge batteries before students return next week. Absolutely no idea what’s going on in the outside world right now, and don’t much care. Vacation classique.

Biodiversity

In the BeOS days there was a fair bit of argument (no doubt repurposed from Linux turf) analogizing the healthy necessity of biodiversity in nature and platform diversity in the computing world. This line of thought beautifully re-played in Martin Price’s recent piece on Platform Diversity.

Personally, I’m sick of hearing about keeping systems secure from so-called “security experts.” All they ever talk about is patching Windows. You never hear one suggest that it might be a good thing if we weren’t all running the same stupid software. Of course they don’t. The lack of security in Windows is their bread and butter.

Thanks baald.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Arauco

DNS Blues

When I chose ZoneEdit to handle all the DNS stuff for birdhouse, one of the criteria was that they use widely distributed servers for maximum reliability. When you set up a zone with them, the nameservers assigned are in different states, so if one has a power outage or failure, the other is still there to pick up the slack. The nameservers assigned to birdhouse were in New York and New Jersey. This, of course, became a problem when half the Eastern seaboard went down in yesterday’s power outage. So we had a frustrating service blackout yesterday. I moved birdhouse DNS over to dotster last night, but that change of course needed all night to percolate through the DNS tables.

Interestingly, each domain I’ve set up for customers gets assigned a different pair of nameservers, and most of those pairs had at least one machine stay up. So most of my customer sites kept right on running through the outage, even though they’re on the same machine.

Music: Janis Joplin :: One Good Man

Banana Splits

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For some reason, started thinking about The Banana Splits again recently. I watched a lot of them between ’69 and ’71, age 5-7, and they burned themselves into my wee brain. This was in an era when all the tripping hippies went to work for Hollywood and made mainstream TV psychedelic as well. And they did it before there was much in the way of special effects. Sid and Marty Kroffts was running Liddsville, HR Puff-n-Stuff, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters… all these amazing over-the-top sets and absurd costumes. The Banana Splits weren’t produced by the Kroffts, but they did design the costumes and sets.

Anyway. Recently looking through a family album and came across the picture above — me at age 7 in a leisure suit for lads, on a shag carpet with brother John, building the original Aurora model of the Banana Splits Banana Buggy (color pix of that box here). Like most boys, my models sat around for years, then I blew them up with firecrackers at about 13 or so. Would love to have that buggy back. RetroResin is apparently preparing to re-release it.

Joined the Banana Splits mailing list, and the very next day the guy who was inside the Fleegle costume joined the list as well. Amazing.

If your memory of the Splits is vague, listen to the Tra La La Song — it’ll all come back in a rush. Gotta find some videos or DVDs of the old shows, have a festival at home.

Flippin’ like a pancake
Poppin’ like a cork
Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork

Music: The Seeds :: 900 Million People Daily All Making Love

Follow-Up: J-School OS X Lab Migration

It’s been more than a year since I posted How Our OS X Rollout Was Hamstrung, on how the absence of a free version of Pro Tools for OS X was preventing the Berkeley J-School’s multimedia lab program from making the jump from OS 9 to X. The issue was that Pro Tools Free wouldn’t run in Classic mode, and we didn’t want our students dual-booting. We’re finally making the switch. And we had to dump Pro Tools to do it. Follow-up story at my ORA blog.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Drive

Wooden Mirror

This is fairly old (1999) but very cool — Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror uses an array of wood chips mounted on tiny servo motors which position themselves to reflect light in something resembling grayscale (woodscale?) in response to a processed image coming in from a tiny camera in the middle of the array. The result is a panel of wood chips that reflects the appearance and motion of the person standing in front of it.

This QuickTime movie is probably the best way to appreciate (catch the second half for close-ups). Can’t recall having seen digital technology used to create such a totally analog experience before. Runs on an old Mac 8600 AV, software written in a combination of C and Macromedia Director, of all things.

Music: Peter Frampton :: Doobie Wah

Winnemucca

Totally therapeutic weekend at Dad’s place in Pioneer — after renting for five years, he finally bought the cabin he lives in. Hadn’t been there since we were snowbound last winter. In bad need of a weekend away, took a 5.5 mile hike to Winnemucca Lake. All reality is equally real, but something about boulders and pines and clear water and warm winds and eternal wildflowers seems so much more real than asphalt and Burger Kings. Can’t explain it. It just does. Miles rode in his new Kelty Base Camp, loved it. Dad greeted us in his Be t-shirt. Melted the weekend away.

Music: Mose Allison :: Your Molecular Structure

Question for Arnold

As we learned during the run-up to the recall, there are NO requirements to be governor of California, other than being able to plonk $3500 on the barrel. And sure enough, Arnold has NO experience. It does not bother me that Arnold is an actor. I could really care less. But I would like to know why so many people think he’ll be a good governor just because they liked his movies.

More importantly, does Arnold actually believe that the duties of the office are so easy, so trivial, that he can carry them out better than politicians with a lifetime of experience? Arnold: Why should I believe that you can do anything related to running a state, let alone do it better than the incumbent, or other contenders? Most analysts agree that anyone in that office would have had the same budget problems Davis has had. I don’t get it.

Meanwhile, John Kevin Fabiani points out that conservatives may not be so impressed with Arnold once they get a closer look.

Music: The Cars :: Let’s Go

The Sadness of Things

I think this has been the saddest summer of my life. The weight of it all caught up with me today.

First there was Matthew’s death in June, which shook all of us to the core and has consumed a tremendous amount of emotional energy since.

Then something horrific happened to one of our grad students. Her mother had requested a restraining order placed on her father. The judge denied the request. Later, the father showed up, got into an argument with the mother, and ended up shooting and killing the 10-year-old brother and then himself. I can’t even imagine how an experience like this would affect a soul.

A few weeks later, the aunt of a co-worker — a woman who had helped raise her from a pipsqueak — borrowed an unfamiliar car (a pickup) and rolled it with some of the extended family inside. The aunt died, and others inside were horribly wounded. The young boy is still undergoing excruciating procedures to stretch his remaining skin up onto areas of his body that have none.

Then there was my mishap — a tiny event and insignificant repercussions in comparison, but it echoed Matthew’s experience so closely — car-on-bike, uninsured motorist — that it served as a poignant reminder of how blessed and lucky we all are to be alive from moment to moment. It’s all so fleeting. Matthew went under his car, I went over mine. He’s dead and I’m alive. Sounds glib, but that’s about what it comes down to. And physically, even though a fractured arm is small in comparison, it took the wind out of the summer’s sails. This wonderful new house, and I was not able to launch into any projects, not even able to mow the lawn. Robbed of some of the joy of the first months of home ownership. Put every project on the list on hold. Doubled the length of my commute. Made typing two-handed impossible. Made it hard to help with Miles. Just screwed everything up.

The universe wasn’t finished with us. While on a photo trek in Kashmir, the husband of one of our photography teachers was broadsided in a San Francisco intersection (car-on-car). He had to be pulled from the wreckage with the Jaws of Life, and is recovering slowly.

This morning, I woke up actually depressed about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to enter the race for governor. Not depressed about him per se, just depressed that there are so many people out there that think this is a good idea. So star-struck that they can’t see how idiotic it is to want a leader who has never served in politics. That this actually seems not just okay, but desirable to people. About what Schwarzenegger’s image means in the collective unconscious — think of his movie rolls – and that this is what the collective consciousness actually wants. I should be able to laugh about it, write it off as the cartoon that it is — but I can’t, because it’s not. It’s real. And it’s fscking depressing.

Amy has been saying recently how depressing it is to take Miles into the city. To see the aggression of drivers all around, to see Miles fascinated with the shit left behind by homeless people, to see the rudeness and coldness and disconnectedness. She talks about second-guessing our decision to stay in an urban area rather than packing off to somewhere more rural, and I know exactly what she means. In contrast to Miles’ pure, unadulterated joy and innocence, this uglyness we’ve become so jaded to somehow gets … unjaded.

So I’m walking home from BART meditating on all of this, wondering where it’s all going and how we fit into it all and how to reclaim happiness, when I see something very surreal. Ahead of me on the sidewalk there seems to be a short woman packing a large doll into a garbage can. Only it’s not going in very well. I get closer. What I at first thought was the “doll” comes out from behind the can. Her face is bent, distorted. Her arms are tiny, with misshapen hands about where your elbows are. She kind of waddle/hunches, rather than walks. Then the other woman, red-haired, who had had her back to me, turns around. She’s the same height. Her face and body are similarly distorted, but different. Her face is stretched taught, as if made of plastic. I am caught in that uncomfortable space of wanting to stare but knowing I can’t. I smile at one of them. She is expressionless. They go back in the house. Are they sisters? Or just comrades? Thalidomide babies? It doesn’t matter. Their daily lives are painful in a way few of us can imagine.

I was shaken by the encounter, and trembled the rest of the way home. When I saw Amy, I just broke down. Cried. The sadness of the world just imploded on me, had been building all summer.

I am lucky to be alive, healthy. Most of us are. Enjoy your body, your health. Enjoy the hell out of them. Ultimately, they are fleeting. Regard cars with the utmost distrust, whether you’re in them or outside them. And above all, be kind to others. Increase the love.

Music: Moondog :: No. 18 – Sadness

Breastfeeding and the Boycott

The Lone Cheerio post, which started as pure whimsy, is now nursing a discussion on the relative merits of the ongoing boycott against Nestle for their (alleged) practices of pushing formula over breast milk in the third world. The pro-boycott position says that Nestle’s corporate greed hurts — and possibly kills — mothers and babies, and that we should vote with our wallets until it stops. The anti-boycott position says that formula is probably healthier than breast milk if the mother has low immunity, that the World Health Organization is probably warped by uneven political pressures, and that the boycott is an example of political correctness run amok.

Personally, I think that Nestle, like all corporate giants, will get away with whatever it can if unchecked. If the allegations are true, its practices are foul, and definitely boycott-worthy (well-organized boycotts do work). On the other hand, I know that we can’t lift a finger in this world without some of our actions supporting bad karma on one front or another. That organic onion in your stir fry tonight? Maybe picked by an underpaid, exploited immigrant farm worker. Breast feeding is too important to play games with. Even if formula has some advantages (Amy and I use it as an occasional substitute), it’s not worth the risk to the child’s health or later intelligence (breastfeeding.com references seven separate studies showing a correlation between IQ and breastfeeding — in the range of 3-8 IQ points difference between breast- and formula-fed children).

If you have strong feelings about this, do the research — find out whether the allegations are true or whether Nestle’s practices have changed in the 20 years the boycott has been running, and think carefully about the counter-arguments — will not buying Cheerios really make a difference to the parent company? Are there health benefits to formula (in the 3rd world) that in part offset its downsides? Is Nestle’s behavior pure greed, or something else?

Amy and I are still trying to figure out what to do.

Music: The Linkers :: Bongo Man