Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
The majority of Americans now see Bush as dishonest. But 2/3 of respondents also describe him as “strong and likable.” So according to the Venn Diagram, somewhere out there is a sizable group of people who find our president a likable liar. How patriotic.
Playing “Switched-Off Bach” a while ago (interesting history on the releases of Switched-On and -Off in 1968) when a melancholy passage comes in. Miles looks at me and says, “Daddy, this music makes me sad.” Walked into his room and pulled the blankets over his head. Later pegged a less-than-upbeat Toots and the Maytals track as also being “sad.” Can now identify four or five genres. When asked, usually says his favorite kind of music is “weggae.” This evening, driving home listening to Breakfast in America, M pipes up from the back seat. “Daddy, this music isn’t sad like that weggae song, this music is happy!” Typically unable to help myself from supplying info he isn’t ready to process, I pounce on the opportunity to tell him all about Supertramp. “Now I know a lot of kinds of music. Cwassico, Chazz, Blues Clues, Weggae, and Supatamp!” Decided not to go into the messy terrain of subgenres like Ork. Maybe when he turns three.
Nice photos of public art on the West Bank: Banksy vs. The West Bank. In fact, lots of great visuals at Wooster Collective.
Kyocera installed an array of 25 “solar trees” in their parking lot, letting employees park in their shade. Cars stay cool, and the mini-plant generates enough power yearly to save an estimated 338,905 pounds of carbon dioxide (which would otherwise be spewed into the air by conventional power generation).
Cheap plastic solar is not nearly as efficient as traditional solar, but it destroys the price barrier for small private projects like this.
Watched a great Penn & Teller “Bullshit!” episode a few months ago on the bottled water industry, which confirmed what many of us already suspected: Bottled water is not more pure than tap water, nor more healthy, and the bottled water industry is environmentally nasty. Not to mention the fact that most people can’t tell bottled water from tap water in a blind taste test (in the episode, they crafted some fancy “high end” water labels and affixed them to empty plastic bottles, which they then proceeded to fill with water from a rubber garden hose in the back alley; the footage of diners at a fancy restaurant being invited to comment on the taste of the “gourmet” waters was priceless). Loved the close-up of the Dasani bottle label, which proclaims proudly “Source: Milwaukee municipal water supply.”
Because Penn and Teller cuss so much (well, Penn does), and because their shows often seem skewed or riddled with personal agenda checkpoints, I sometimes find their credibility dubious. So it’s nice to find an op-ed in the New York Times coming to exactly the same conclusions.
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that “use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided.”
Oh, and there’s the small matter of highway robbery:
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today’s high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water.
Bottled water is the ultimate consumer suckerpunch, yet remains phenomenally popular. Do people simply not know it’s a consummate waste, or do they know and buy it anyway? The whole phenomenon is beyond me.
Experimenting with RBLs in the mail server to catch messages originating from known spammy SMTP servers before they hit the SpamAssassin engine. Highly effective, but some of the RBLs cast too wide a net. For example, hapless users on major networks like Comcast may be assigned an IP recently used by a spammer (or by a virus-infected Windows computer), and end up on an RBL. Result: Legit mail inbound to Birdhouse customers gets bounced to confused but legitimate senders.
Had three such incidents with bl.spamcop.net in the past month, so have just dropped it permanently from the RBL list. In its place, added an RBL in China and another in Korea. These seemed to work well, but today I heard from a customer who was running a legit PHP mail script, which suddenly started timing out. Removed the new RBLs and the problem went away. Lesson: the RBLs being consulted must not only be accurate, they must be fast.
Aside from a few false positives, the RBL experiment has been very successful — server load down, straggler spam down. But getting it right is like tuning a fork.
In celebration of antiweb’s 10th anniversary, used Comic Life to create a non-contiguous digital comic book cut-up based on images by Amy and myself with text excerpts from the antiweb mailing list.
The comic (if you can call it that — don’t go looking for continuity here) was on display at the anniversary happening, running full-screen on a 20″ iMac (perched on crushed velvet no less, though that part was not planned). Looked much better full-screen than it does online; the goldanged interweb has its limits.
Prepared the image portion first, added text later. This was a tough call – I actually think it works much better visually without the text. But the text did add dimension, and it wouldn’t have had much relevance to antiweb without it (thanks to everyone whose words I lifted).
The title of the piece comes from that peculiar recurring spam that doesn’t sell anything at all, proclaiming simply “Call Out Gouranga Be Happy!” Looks like more explanation for the chant is available online now than existed when I first posted to antiweb a few years ago looking for Gouranga insight.
Found Comic Life totally addictive, though it did take more time than it probably appears to get the look I wanted — choosing templates, experimenting with image filters, selecting word/thought balloons and captions, setting gradients, panel ordering, sizing, etc. But would love to use the app to tell an actual story sometime.