Author: shacker

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Cabin Stuffing

Lincoln Logs Miles and I built a Lincoln Log cabin, and he decided it would be a good place for some of his people to live. Tough to make them stand up, so he started piling them all in. When the top of the window frame was reached, M peeled the roof off and filled the house the rest of the way up, then replaced the roof. Choc-a-block. Naturally, any sympathy he felt for the overcrowded living conditions was overshadowed by the irresistible temptation to kick the whole thing over in a shower of wood and plastic the next morning.

Music: Bettye Lavette :: Little Sparrow
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Pop Quiz

Imagine you’re taking the SAT and complete the following semaphoric equation:

Rickie Lee Jones is to Tom Waits as Laurie Anderson is to __________.

First correct answer wins an official Birdhouse mouse pad.

mneptok is automatically disqualified

Music: Rickie Lee Jones :: Ghostyhead
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Edges of Bounty

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Edges of Bounty, a site representing an upcoming book collaboration between photographer Scott Squire and writer William Emery, covering California’s Central Valley.

Our project consists of a series of extended roadtrips around the valley, our notebooks and cameras in tow, talking to people, listening to their stories, and photographing their way of life and the products of their labor.

Squire also runs the excellent nonfictionphoto and nonfictionweddings sites, also on Birdhouse.

Music: Pram :: My Father The Clown
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Noboating

Lindsey Breaking new ground on Birdhouse: For the first time in five years I’m going to render… a sports opinion.

Watched dumbfounded with everyone else last night as Lindsey Jacobellis gave up the gold due to a stupid mistake, and then basically lied on camera about it (she first said she had grabbed her board to “stabilize” the jump). Almost immediately, Costas and the pundits pegged her backside method as “showboating” and blamed it all on overconfidence. This morning’s papers, more of the same — Jacobellis was showing off, blah blah blah. There’s another side to this.

First of all, it’s not like a backside method is any big deal of a trick. It’s a simple tail kick in the air – the kind of thing average riders do on the slopes of any mountain every day, and probably something Jacobellis has done 10,000 times in similar conditions. But for freak reasons, she landed it slightly wrong.

Second, remember that Jacobellis is the only woman rider who does both halfpipe and snowboardcross. ‘Cross offers no points for style, so the smart rider won’t attempt any. But halfpipe is all about style, and it’s likely that doing that kind of thing on a jump is just part of her groove thang.

Third, as she said to Costas, she wasn’t really thinking about it – she was just barreling down the run, having a ball. And a little method is just the kind of thing you do when you’re having fun.

Fourth, if she really wasn’t aware of how much of a lead she had, as she claimed to Costas, then she wasn’t in a position to be doing arrogant things, and the showboating argument falls apart. The tail kick could also be used to throw off neighboring riders in mid-air; it might have partially been an instinctive strategic move.

Yeah, it was a stupid thing to do. But the pundits skewering her for “showboating” aren’t seeing the whole picture, and are raking her across, I think, a few too many coals. The impression left is that it was typical American arrogance. I think it was more innocent than that: A freak bad landing of a very simple, albeit unnecessary, trick.

Photo: NBC

Music: Cassandra Wilson :: A Little Warm Death
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AskForCents

Send a question – any question – to q@askforcents.com. Leave the subject blank and type your question in the email body. Minutes later, get an answer. In fact, to hedge your bets against incorrect answers, you’ll get two answers. I’ve only tested it with one question, but both answers were correct.

2:13 am, Scot  Hacker:

Who was the fourth Banana Split, beyond Drooper, Fleegle, and Snorky?

2:16 am, AskForCents: 

Answer 1: 
bingo
Source: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0062543/

Answer 2: 
Bingo
Source: http://12121.hostinguk.com/splits.htm

Service is currently free; paid version on the way. Looks like they plan to run the service on micropayments — a few cents per question. If it’s good enough, possibly useful for those times when a simple Google search doesn’t turn up what you’re looking for and you just don’t have time to look deeper. The key will be making it totally fluid – no one is going to enter a credit card number for a 3-cent charge.

Music: NEU! :: Hallogallo
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Everyone Needs a Thneed

Lorax Watched a video of Dr. Seuss’ environmental parable The Lorax with Miles this evening. Pretty heavy stuff, and a bit complex for a three-year-old. Had forgotten about the awshum 70’s fuzztone wah-wah TV-funk-style soundtrack. Asked him halfway through whether the movie was making sense to him, and he said it was, though I suspected he was just enjoying the visuals more than anything.

Afterwards, as the credits rolled over a landscape of clear-cut Truffula Tree forests and a sky blackened with smog from Thneed manufacturing plants, I asked him what the movie was about. “It’s about cleaning up,” he said. “Cleaning up what?” “Cleaning up the trees.” “And what happened at the end?” (The ending was only hinted at). “The boy got a seed for a tuffuffa twee and he planted it and it gwowed up.”

I’ll be damned, he did get it. And the concreteness of the fact that I will grow old and die while he and his friends deal with a choking planet — hit me so hard. Now here’s where it gets corny and painfully sincere: I almost cried. Looked at him, and gave him one of those big bear hugs, and he gave me one of those big bear hugs back, and I told him we have a big job to do, watching out for those Truffula Trees. But if anyone can do it, Miles can do it. If he wants to.

Music: Evan Lurie :: Those Monkeys Weren’t Typing
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20-Ton Packet

Analyst Nick Gall, in a podcast at IT Conversations, on precepts that make systems modular and extensible. His basic point is an old one, but well made: In order to have freedom for extensibility, you need a solid, but basic underlying architecture. Too much architecture in the framework, and you’re locked in, without sufficient freedom. Too little, and you have neither interoperability nor room to improvise.

Gall compares the simplicity of the lowly IP packet — source and destination addresses, protocol identifier, a TTL, and a payload — to the similarly internationalized system of modular shipping containers, which move so easily from train to truck to ship, can slide quickly between countries, arriving easily at their destination without ever having been opened. TCP/IP and the meatspace shipping container system form near-perfect mirror images of one another. The shipping container, in essence, is a 20-ton packet.

The balance between simple, formalized, underlying structure with a high degree of overlying freedom, applies to so many things. Thinking now of a thread we had here a while back on the fact that HTML standards are not enforced, while TCP/IP standards are.

And of a Drupal users group meeting I attended today, where developers referred to the balance they try to strike between creating enough structure to let you get things done easily in the CMS, but not so much that the system isn’t infinitely extensible.

And of jazz: Too little structure = inaccessible, chaotic (not necessarily a bad thing, but generally not successful). Too much structure = rigid, soulless, boring.

Music: MC5 :: Skunk (Sonically Speaking)
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On Anonymity

In a comment the other day, I said:

I’m opposed to the concept of anonymity on the internet in general (the same reason I hate that people on IRC use handles rather than real names, or handles that don’t even resemble their real names). I make exception for political dissidents etc. of course.

Based on a couple of emailed comments, wanted to clarify my position on that: There seems to be an aspect of internet subculture which conflates anonymity with privacy. What I’m talking about here is standing by your name – accountability. I feel that what you write, and the domains (i.e. publications) you own should in most cases be attached to your real name. I feel that it is possible to be non-anonymous while still keeping private information private. I feel that attaching your name to your expressions is connected somehow to integrity.

When I enter an IRC channel or chat and everyone is using a handle rather than a real name, I feel suspicious. Do these same people configure their email clients to use false names as well? The predominance of nicknames in IRC doesn’t automatically mean everyone is “hiding” something, but it does mean people may be inclined to say things they wouldn’t if they were using their real names. It invites the saying of things that might not be said otherwise. Some call that a level of freedom we don’t have in meatspace. I’m not sure that exercising that freedom without good cause is necessarily beneficial.

I don’t begrudge anyone the right to be anonymous if they choose to be – I just don’t think it’s necessary most of the time. I also think that a lot more conversation on the internet would be civil if pseudonyms were removed from the picture. Again, I make exception for some political speech.

A friend pointed out that artists sometimes work under pseudonyms for artistic reasons that have nothing to do either with politics or actual anonymity — just pure art. Fair enough. But we also know — or can easily find — the real names of most artists working under pseudonyms. If an artist (or writer, or domain owner) is taking positive steps to thoroughly hide their real name, we assume they have political or other very good reasons to do so. If not, then we are suspicious of their reasons for seeking anonymity, and credibility is in question.

Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Music: Coot Grant & Kid Wesley Wilson :: Take Your Hand Off My Mojo
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Domain Registry Support

Got the strangest call today. The number that appeared on my phone’s display was bizarre: 001-416. The voice on the other end launched directly into a polite, quasi-legalistic rant about how “my intellectual property was in danger” regarding one of the domains I manage (for a customer). I kept pressing him for details, but all I got was piles of scripted fluff. But pretty good fluff. Things like “We need to verify your address for the domain notification processor.” But all attempts to get them to explain what a “notification processor” were met with another line of nonsense.

It was pretty clear to me that this was the phone equivalent of those increasingly popular quasi-legalistic letters sent to domain owners attempting to buffalo users into either changing registrars or into registering every possible associated TLD on the base name. The latter is the key to understanding the jive about how your intellectual property may be in danger — the pitch is that if someone else registers yourname.us, you may never have complete control over yourname!

The guy (who was calling from India, BTW) didn’t succeed in getting any information or confirmation out of me, but I was impressed by the fact that he seemed to have a plausible-sounding nonsense answer to every question I threw at him. And though my questions about what company he worked for were answered with things like “We represent all domain registrars,” he was happy to send me to Domain Registry Support — a site which boldly attempts to lend itself phony cred by linking to the IETF and the W3C. Sycophants.

Quick search on their name pulled up dozens of pages like this one, filled with comments from people who had just gotten off the phone with DRS.

Shields up; predators everywhere.

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Experimental Hebrew Typography

Odedezer

Pingmag interviews Oded Ezer, an Israeli typographer and designer who does absolutely breathtaking things with the Hebrew alephbet. Using nails, Fimo, cut paper, insect wings, and, yes — ink — Ezer does things with type I never dreamed possible.

When I saw an ant on the floor of my studio, I started to imagine what would happen if this was a creature half ant and half letter. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nature had invented letters? And then maybe different letter-ants could gather, create words and communicate with us!?

Ezer on fontography inspired by the music of the Israeli composer Arye Shapira:

So the music sounds really hard, almost broken… What I then did, was to take the names of the music titles and cut up the individual letters. My intention was: how would the letters behave, if they were this music?

Music: The Dandy Warhols :: Orange