Month: September 2005

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Not Curious

For the past couple of months, Miles’ standard rejoinder to questions about why he just did something has been “Because I’m curious.” Example: “Miles, it seems like you spilled that orange juice on purpose. Why did you do that?” “Because I’m curious.” Yesterday I finally managed to get an alternate response out of him.

“Miles, what would you like to have for dinner?”

“Daddy, I want to have breakfast for dinner!”

“OK, what would you like to have for breakfast?”

“Fish!”

“Have you had fish before? Do you like fish?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?”

“Because I’m curious.”

“But if you’re curious then it means you like to try new things.”

[pause]

“I mean because I’m NOT curious, Daddy.”

Music: Sugarcubes :: Birthday
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minimediaguy.org

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome minimediaguy.org, the weblog of SF Chronicle journalist Tom Abate.

I started this blog in January to learn more about the new publishing technologies. I have a strong background in print publishing, and some experience in radio and television. I have owned a business and started a newspaper. I am now a newspaper reporter. In addition to figuring out how all this web stuff works, I am particularly interested in how to make it into a profitable undertaking.

This is the first blog I’ve had the “pleasure” of porting from Blogger to Movable Type. Found a decent recipe for the process (Blogger has no export function!), but wrestled far too long with the fact that its output generated spaces after each “BODY: ” string. Of course I neither saw nor suspected the spaces, nor would have I expected MT’s importer to be so sensitive to them. Hate wasting hours on stupid problems like that. Anyway, using StyleCatcher for minimediaguy’s templating system, and Tom will be experimenting with one-click styles until he finds something he digs. An even more comprehensive Birdhouse project is on deck from Abate — look for that down the road.

Music: Sufjan Stevens :: The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us
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You’ve Been Hacked!

Terminal-Logged-In-1
Students are taking some time getting used to the new “network homes” thing. In previous years, all J-School Macs had a single sign-on. Private files were stored in remote protected folder shares. This year, a student can walk up to any of our 82 new 20″ iMac G5s and log in as themselves. A few seconds later, they’re looking at their desktop, their documents, their email and bookmarks, etc.

The system is working marvelously, except that some people aren’t quite comprehending that if they walk away from a terminal, anyone can sit down and steal/delete/alter any of their content. Loud lectures from the sysadmin aren’t making a difference, so yesterday I made (a larger version of) this wallpaper. Now when we find a machine left logged in, we copy this file into the user’s home and make it their wallpaper. Could have done a nicer job on the lettering, but it’s not meant to be fine art, and it gets the job done. Reaction so far seems to be one of mixed embarassment and satori.

It’s the “Ah-Hah!” part I’m after.

Music: Nina Simone :: The Other Woman
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Resurrection

We’ve all done it — that fatal keystroke that wipes out the wrong partition on the disk, vanishes the critical directory, destroys the mission-critical database. Thank god, this time it wasn’t me :)

Got a call late last night from a contact of a contact (not a Birdhouse customer) who had been running a search/replace operation at a very high-powered Movable Type installation. Apparently watching TV while working (lesson #1), the staffer had left the Find field blank and put the string “sponsor” in the replace field. MT 3.1 puts a weighty warning on the search/replace page, but no further confirmation dialog stops you from sawing off your toes (3.2 throws a confirmation dialog). Result: the string “sponsor” between every letter of every Title field, affecting 11,000 entries. Basically, they were screwed and pulled me in.
Continue reading “Resurrection”

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Cornerstone Gardens

Cornerstone Took some much-needed family time away from the bathroom project last weekend to visit Sonoma’s Cornerstone Gardens, “an ever-changing series of walk-through gardens, showcasing new and innovative designs from the world’s finest landscape architects and designers.” Amazing collection of immersive landscapes and other outdoor installations. Photos by Amy and me.

On the way in, took a call from Birdhouse customer Artefact Design & Salvage. 20 minutes later, entering Cornerstone, discovered that Artefact resides on the very same grounds, so finally got to meet the crew and walk through their jaw-dropping collection as well. World gets smaller.

Afternoon, sipped a root beer and sat in the shade watching a bi-plane pulling loops and barrel rolls, far removed from daily compression. Life is rich.

Music: The Future Sound Of London :: Among Myselves
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Naked Eye

Think you can tell a doctored image from a fake? Popular Science links to three tests you can take to gauge your powers of discernment (the first link is fubar; correct link). First two quizzes on general imagery (mostly images I’ve seen floating around the net), the last tests your ability to tell between photographs and renderings. I scored 75-80% on the first two, 90% on last. You?

Entertaining, but raises real questions where news is concerned, especially when that news comes from less-trusted sources like blogs, but also in the realm of increasingly popular photo illustration.

Thanks Ken Light

Music: Land of the Loops :: Patience
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Ozone Stops Shrinking

Nice to see a shred of environmental good news amidst the morass of disasters both man-made and natural: According to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the Ozone layer has stopped shrinking, thanks to 20 years of international efforts to reduce CFCs, proving that attention and cooperation can make a difference. But don’t get too excited — we’re not out of the woods just yet:

“Chemicals pumped into Earth’s atmosphere decades ago still are affecting ozone levels today,” said Sherwood Roland of the University of California Irvine. “This problem was a long time in the making, and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix.” The ozone layer remains so thin that cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation is still getting through.

Still, it’s progress.

Thanks Jim

Music: Elton Britt :: Give Me a Pinto Pal
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Miles Starts Preschool

Miles Preschool Paint Hard to believe this day has come already. Seems like Miles was just born, and now suddenly he’s in preschool. Bittersweet sending him off to spend three days a week in the company of peers, riding tricycles and gluing beans onto sheets of cardboard, but we’re very proud and so is he. He absolutely loved it. Amy looking forward to kick-starting her adult life again. Miles’ words have become sentences, and sentences have become paragraphs. His speech swerves delightfully in and out of surreality. His deep penchant for pushing the limits of his physicality is now firmly established, and he continues to astonish with his feats of derring-do (almost stopped our hearts today when we found him walking on top of monkey bars 6 ft. off the ground, rather than hanging from them). Like any 2-3 year old, he has his moments of abject refusal / self-determination, but they’re relatively infrequent and pass quickly. He’s starting to spell, loving to count, and is already memorizing dinosaur names that Amy and I can’t even remember, not to mention the names of obscure sea creatures (“Daddy, that’s a clown trigger fish, not a parrot fish!”). He recently picked up on me saying “Rip. Mix. Burn.” and walked around the house for two days saying “Rix. Mip. Born.” Testify!

Music: Mike Watt and the Secondmen :: Reed ‘Round My Waist
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Ballmer’s Latest Conniption

Searchblog has dirt on yet another coronary outburst from that Microsoft humanimal Steve Ballmer, in the form of a court document detailing his reaction to losing a top engineer to Google.

Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….

Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

May Ballmer drown in his own sweat. The guy should be a clown in the WWF, not head of the world’s largest technology company.

Music: Leo Kottke :: Watermelon
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MT 3.2 Upgrades

Just finished upgrading this blog and Battelle Media to Movable Type 3.2. Upgraded the J-School installation on Friday. Lots of cool new tools. My crude little comstop script has been obsoleted by the new Feedback Master Switch — one-click ability to disable comments and trackbacks for all blogs under an installation whilst undergoing massive spam-bombing. Slick. Also liking the new Junk “folders” for suspected comment and trackback spam. Ignore them and the system will auto-delete items after x days. StyleCatcher theme plugin already turning out to be a great timesaver at work for new class blogs. 3.2 turning out to be one of the most impressive upgrades in memory. These are the kinds of things computers are supposed to be good at.

Music: Sun Ra Arkestra :: Prelude To Stargazers