Author: shacker

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Heptatrema Madonnahood

Okay, which one of you you nutjobs is masquerading as Heptatrema Madonnahood? I swear, I get some seriously messed up email sometimes.

got a shiny new PowerBook. Spent Friday night feeding it spirulina and granola, geeking out w/Mike.

Saturday worked on the MacWorld piece all day.

Sunday house hunting, again no joy. Now getting too close to the baba arriving, afraid we’ll take it too close to the edge and end up not having room ready here in the rental because we were too busy dancing in an impossible market. Have decided to withdraw from the housing market for now, which is really hard because we’ve been at it for 18 months and have met nothing but frustration and defeat, and it’s going to be even harder once Appleseed is here. But there you go. Color us bruised. We’ll pick up the search again in November or so.

Fascinating piece by Tim O’Reilly : The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors, in which Tim quotes another piece by Dale Dougherty saying:

Nike is running a series of bold, new commercials featuring Tiger Woods, who says his contract with Nike doesn’t require him to use its equipment unless he finds it to be the best in the market. He says with amusement that it puts the pressure on Nike to be the best or else. If Microsoft is the best at what it does, then it shouldn’t have to resort to this kind of lock-in of its contract with users. Let us choose the best.

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Enjoying Pregnancy

Just want to say how completely and totally we are enjoying Amy’s pregnancy. Every day she gets a little bit rounder – an amazing hemisphere precedes her now – and it gets a little bit more exciting. But it’s not like pregnancy is this thing we have to get through to have the baby – we’re really enjoying watching her body change, all the little signs. Our relationship has never been stronger, more joyous. Everything seems filled with life. I love to rest my hand on her belly, love to rub her with oil (it takes a lot of the strain off on days when it gets too much). We’ve been really lucky so far – everything has gone like clockwork. Birthing classes start soon, and I’m sure it’s all going to get much more intense.

Last weekend at a party we met another old childhood friend – Susannah – and she’s got exactly the same due date – Sept. 16. Weird. That makes four childhood friends all having babies within 3 months of each other. Weird.

We call the baby “Appleseed,” which was what we called it when it was the size of an appleseed and we told one of our nieces and she asked “Are you going to name it Appleseed?” The other night Amy had a book resting on her belly and Appleseed kicked right off from inside. That’s real.

Getting ready for the baby is consuming a huge part of our lives right now, emotionally at least. Reading books, preparing to get the baby’s room ready, figuring out the diaper situation, the circumcision situation, endless naming discussions, all that stuff. Like looking towards any big life change, we move in waves of disbelief – one day it seems like we’re getting used to the idea already, and the next our minds are blown again.

I wonder a lot about what kind of father I’m going to make. I doubt my own abilities. Fortunately, everything I read and everyone I talk to confirms that that is the most natural reaction one can have toward parenting the first time around. You just don’t know how you can possibly do it. But at the same time, you know you can. It will just happen. We will keep our wits, stay happy, stay level, and everything will be fine. I know it will.

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Air-Way

I wrote to Air-Way about the Sanitizor lamp I made a while ago, and they actually got back to me. Looks like A and I are now entitled to a half-price vacuum.

Mr. Hacker,

The model you made the lamp from is a model 55 that was produced from 1945 through 1949. Many independent dealers take the top off and use it for an umbrella stand or fill it with sand for an ash tray. Since you own a previous Air-Way you can purchase a new model for 1/2 retail directly from the factory.

Matt/Customer Service

Kind of sad though – their 1940s Sanitizor is about a zillion times more attractive than the contemporary model.

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Plato’s Dad

Our cat Plato is 11 years old and his father just died. That fact that I am aware of this fact and that we were able to carry the news to Plato is amazing to me — amazing that a chain of people connected so remotely can stay intact over time and distance – I heard from my wife who heard from an old and occassional friend of hers on the east coast who heard from her antique boyfriend of a decade ago who owned Plato’s father. Wow.

Plato seems sullen today. I think either he understood or he’s tapped into the universoul, as cats are.

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ORA blog: SliMP3, iRock, etc.

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Shacker Is…

Shacker is:

Shacker is one of six researchers nationwide investigating the use of a cream to treat genital herpes.

Shacker is continuously expanding their product offerings to meet your needs.

The ‘Shacker’ is omnivorous usually eating any Circle K cuisine.

Usually, if the “Shacker” is a female she receives a t-shirt from the resident of the house she stayed at.

Shacker is a derivative of the phrase “shacking up,” used when two unmarried people are sleeping or living together as sexual partners.

At the moment, Mr. Shacker is not sure of the scope of the project but he expects the task to take about a year to complete.

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Warchalking

How do you know when you’re within range of an 802.1x network? You can’t look it up online since you’re not online yet, dummy. The latest is warchalking – chalk-tagging the city with somewhat cryptic but easy to understand glyphs for the benefit of geeky passers by.

Nice metaphor: Perl is Internet Yiddish.

Ultimately, Yiddish and Perl share the potentially detractive qualities of complexity and inconsistency, but turn them in their favour due to the huge amount of character they provide. This is because they have History. This has resulted in Culture and Community, and a great degree of affection.

ORA blog: Internet’s founders offer warnings.

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Found

In 94, just after birdhouse started up, I had this idea that I wanted to start scanning garbage that floated into our yard in Boston – photos, candy wrappers, personal notes, shopping lists, whatever. I never did get around to it. Fortunately someone did — Amy pointed out FOUND magazine today and it’s amazing, if you like things on the dada side – accidental art, strange and sometimes profound and almost always poignant in an eerie kind of way.

Really enjoying the soundtrack to I Am Sam – Beatles covers by modern groups. You hear surprisingly few Beatles covers because… I guess because they’re hard to cover. But most of these tracks are very good.

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OmniWeb Nag

I’ve registered OmniWeb so I don’t see this, but apparently if you use OmniWeb 4.1 in shareware mode, you see this:

“A man in Chicago licensed OmniWeb and the next day he got free fries with his burger. A woman in Des Moines didn’t license it and a week later she stubbed her toe really badly. Coincidence?”

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Splash Guard

Ladies, you may not know this, but in men’s room urinals there are often plastic mesh splash guards at the bottom of the bowl. Their purpose is allegedly to defeat – or at least to minimize – any kind of scattering or splashing activity, and thus keep your trousers crispy clean. At least that’s what I’ve always imagined their purpose to be – personally, I never had a problem with this even at urinals lacking a splash guard.

Anyway. Several years ago, the phrase “Say No To Drugs” suddenly started appearing on some of these splash guards. You’d be merrily peeing along, then would look down to check your aim, and find yourself reading this phrase. Except you wouldn’t just be reading it – you’d also be peeing on it.

We’re all bombarded with messages of all kinds all day long – marketing, propaganda, etc. etc. But we’re not exactly accustomed to peeing on these messages. It seems to me that something about peeing on the message automaticaly subverts its meaning. Like you’re canceling it out by peeing on it. Sure feels that way to me anyway.

So what I want to know is, whose idea was this and also what in hell were they thinking and also how many people had to sign off to get this bizarre idea all the way from whatever corporate boardroom or esteemed think tank came up with it all the way to manufacturing and distribution, and also didn’t it occur to anyone in this entire chain of operations that the message, no matter how well-intentioned (albeit arguably misguided), would essentially be canceled out in the viewer’s mind by the act of peeing all over it?

Life is weird.

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Logic Bug

In a dream, was helping other humans to birth whale calfs in shallow water, and cried because I realized I had never done anything as meaningful as that with my life. For the more difficult births, we had a whale birthing facility made of light blue fiberglass. The facility consisted of cavern within cavern of calf birthing rooms built into a hillside, and fiberglass seats built in rows for an audience. Was waiting with several other people in one of these calf birthing rooms for something to happen, and nothing was happening. As I woke up, conscious mind entered and observed that the room was only big enough for a whale calf — about 30′ feet long — and not long enough for the adult mother whale. So there was a logic bug in the dream that had caused it to hang, which is why we were all standing around doing nothing. Unaware we were in a dream, and unaware there was a bug in the dream. Once fully awake I realized this too was wrong, since impossible things happen in dreams all the time – bad logic does not constitute a bug to a dream.

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Miniature donkeys are more expensive than one might expect!