Month: April 2007

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Stop Making Sense

Miles quite taken recently with calling things (and sometimes people) “dumb” or “stupid.” Trying to wean him off this verbiage, Amy told him a better way to express himself would be to say “xxx doesn’t make any sense.” Which, by evening, turned into “I don’t want to eat this soup. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He’s been running around the house lately, inexplicably pleading “The taxes are going to get me! Save me from the taxes!” This morphed from last week’s variant on the same theme: “Save me from the ticklers!,” which he started saying after holding a live starfish and being tickled by its thousand sucker feet. You know how it goes – starfish, 1040EZ, all on the same continuum.

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Sanoodi

Miles and I tracked down our first geocache today – less than a mile from our house. Most caches are tucked deep in the wilderness, but a surprising number are stashed right under your nose; you could walk by them a thousand times and never have a clue. Hardcore geocachers look down on caching in residential areas, but wanted to start easy. M scored a pair of super-bouncy balls and left a Matchbox tow truck. Think he was a bit disappointed – “surprise” may have meant “new Lego set” in his mind. Opportunity to talk about the pleasures of discovery. Have heard of some caches containing opera tickets, c-notes, world peace, etc. Reality is probably that most will contain key fobs and hair clips.

Nabbed an account on Sanoodi, a regretfully named Web 2.0-ish site that lets users upload XML (.gpx) track output from GPS devices, which it maps directly onto Google maps to share with other hikers/bikers/runners. I’ll be using the site to store tracks for posterity. Started with my bike route along the Ohlone Greenway from home to UC Berkeley.

Thanks Patrick Cates

Music: União Black :: “Yeah Yeah Yeah”
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nonfictionmedia

Birdhouse Hosting user Scott Squire has a gorgeous new portfolio site capturing some of his representative photography and “moving pictures” (not quite video, but not just photography either). Loved his photo slideshow Jump School, on U.S. Army paratroopers in training. Squire also remains one of the most interesting wedding photographers I’ve seen. The site for his coming book Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley is also hosted by Birdhouse.

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Elevation Map

Miles and I hike every weekend, sometimes twice. He loves it, and scrambles like a nine-year-old (it’s almost scary how confident he is in the wilderness). Recently got a wild hair to marry the geek thing with the granola thing and get a GPS unit, so I could 1) Start mapping our hikes digitally, and 2) Experiment with geocaching. Found an eTrex Legend Cx on eBay, and have been trying to climb out of the rabbit hole since it arrived.

Bike-Elevation-1
Elevation delta of my daily bike commute from home to UC Berkeley.

The device may look like a bit like a phone, but the similarity ends there. These things are capable of so much, I was totally unprepared for the learning curve it would bring. Tracks, routes, navigation, waypoints, points of interest, and the interfaces for managing all of them. Not to mention the huge variety of available software and the multitude of data formats that tags along.

The GPS universe is notoriously Windows-centric, but went with a Garmin in part because of their announcement that they intended to roll out full Mac support in 2007. But my unit came with a Windows-only CD, which meant hauling an old laptop out of the closet. Garmin.com has a few scattered Mac apps on their site, but nothing capable of loading maps and exchanging data formats. For that, you have to turn to workhorse open source apps like Babel, which get some of the job done, in a crude fashion. Found a few others, all with different strengths, but the killer one appears to be Google Earth, which (I didn’t realize until last night) is capable of connecting directly to popular GPS units and mapping their tracks and routes onto the the 3D surface — if you spring for the $20/year premium version. Still, an embarrassment of riches of mapping options is out there, some of them web-based.

Super impressed by the contact I had with Garmin tech support after I sent them email detailing some Mac issues and questions – expected a boilerplate response but got 6 paragraphs of info from a Mac-head employee and realized they actually care — unheard of!

Having fun so far*, but much learning to do, and haven’t set out on a geocache finding expedition yet.

* Today realized for the first time in five years of doing the same old trek that my daily ride covers 5 miles and a 200-foot elevation delta, and that my top bike speed is 31 mph, with an average speed of 15.7 mph. How could I have ever lived without this data?

Music: Minutemen :: Hittin’ The Bong
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Nothing Racial

And people call Berkeley a political bubble, detached from the rest of the country? CNN: Students attend school’s first integrated prom.

The comments in the story are astounding. On the surface because of the underlying racism of Georgian culture, but also because of this weird sense that the endemic separatism isn’t necessarily coming from conscious decisions to maintain segregation, but rather a desire to maintain tradition, as if tradition ipso facto diminishes racism. Imagine a California teenager saying:

“The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

People sometimes see tradition as inherently valuable, no matter how twisted its roots. Satisfying to see that even if children there aren’t being brought up to question racist traditions, they’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

Thanks baald

Music: Dean Martin/Paul Weston & His Dixieland Eight :: I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine
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Collider VR

&tQuicktime VR at its finest: The Atlas target at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, near Geneva.

When I see stuff like this, I always wonder why Quicktime VR never really took off. Examples of it aren’t unheard of, but given that it’s relatively easy to create QTVR files, I’d expect to see these things everywhere. Instead, Apple’s QTVR creation software became the only OS 9 software the company never ported to OS X. I’ve heard this is mainly because stitching software now comes bundled with most digital cameras, so there was little market left for it. But if every digital camera comes with stitching software, why isn’t QTVR ubiquitous?

via David Rowland

Music: Liz Phair;/a> :: Chopsticks
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Famous Hackers

IT Security has posted its list of the Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time.

Hackers are a very diverse bunch, a group simultaneously blamed with causing billions of dollars in damages as well as credited with the development of the World Wide Web and the founding of major tech companies. In this article, we test the theory that truth is better than fiction by introducing you to ten of the most famous hackers, both nefarious and heroic, to let you decide for yourself.

Looked promising, but shockingly, I didn’t make the list.

Music: Caetano Veloso :: Rai Das Cores (Array of Colors)
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Religion in Second Life

A sincere religious community is developing within the synthetic atmosphere of Second Life.

Leaders of Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites estimate about 1,000 avatars teleport into churches, synagogues or mosques on a regular basis. Hundreds more list themselves with Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and other groups.

The extracted video, both beautiful and eerie, gives me the willies, and I’m not exactly sure why. On one hand, it’s no more or less odd than any other simulation of the real world that takes place within the game. On the other, religion is all about community, and the religious community in 2L is virtualized – people never meet, and yet they do. Not sure what that means for things like religious involvement in local charities (are there soup kitchens in 2L too?), but I suppose it’s not so different than a drive-in church.

Thinking now of Europe’s great cathedrals and the centuries of hard labor it took to build them. Since Second Life is so heavily construction oriented (everyone’s both an architect and a contractor), will avatars set themselves to toil and construct some of the grandest and most ornate places of worship ever conceived?

Parallel question: Is Second Life a game, or is it something else? I know what Wittgenstein would say, but I’m not sure even the Second Life community itself have an answer to that one. If it is a game, what would that say about engaging religion within it? Perhaps “It’s only a game if you treat it like one.”

Music: Jim White :: Wayfaring Stranger
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Sweat Solder

Sweat Joint A minor first for me today – rather than call a plumber, read up on sweat joints, went out and bought a torch and a flux/solder kit, and installed my own fittings on 1/2″ copper. Not beautiful, but amazingly, all three joints (two sink + one toilet) came out watertight on the first try. Once brief elation had passed, discovered that the sink we picked out for this already very small area was 1″ too wide, so we have to take it back and get a tiny one – a wee hand-washing basin. S’okay – we’ll do something less frowsy looking this time, so it’ll work out for the best.

Music: Pinpeat Orchestra :: Sathouka