Category: Misc

Family portraits, taken in a similar orientation once per year since 1976, presented as photo essay. A family floating through time, children evolving to become echoes of the parents and yet not. A beautiful record.

On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.

Try keeping your eye on a single column, then scrolling the page vertically – like a filmstrip animation of a person’s biological life.

Thanks Susanna

Ticket scalping is legal in California, I learned from an East Bay Express piece. When you think about it, why shouldn’t anyone be able to buy any item from a store and sell it on the open market at a higher price? And why should tickets be regarded differently from any other meatspace item in this regard?

But traditional scalpers are being trumped by digital scalpers, as computer software evolves with the ability to defeat human detection software. If software can crack a captcha image and buy tickets online on behalf of its master, a stadium can be sold out in minutes. That’s exactly what happened when U2 tickets went on sale recently and Ticketmaster servers were hammered with two million hits per second.

Trying to figure out why anyone would go to see U2 on purpose, let alone pay money to do so, is beside the point. The question is, is asking computers to go get a bunch of tickets for you qualitatively different from asking a bunch of friends to go stand in line hours before Ticketmaster’s doors open? It’s kind of like comparing MP3 trading to the old days of taping. The principle is the same, but the difference in quantity is so immense that you effectively have a qualitative difference.

Laws will change.

Decided to try my hand at chai-from-scratch. Gathered ginger to grate, whole cardamom, star anise pods (like little alien doilies!), cinnamon sticks, pepper corns, fresh peppermint, black tea leaves, sugar. Ground the cardamom and anise in a clay mortar & pestle, set all to simmer for two hours, steep and settle overnight. The house smells like divine spice. Tomorrow morning I’ll dilute with warm milk, Amy will make scones, and we’ll feast.

Thanks Mary Anne!

Not two weeks after a giant eucalyptus crashed outside my office door, today I suddenly hear a great gushing sound. Step outside and I’m in the shower. Workers removing the stump with a crane had pulled up a watermain, and a geyser shot up 40 feet in the air or so. A river flowed down into next building (my office was spared), and workers scrambled for 10 minutes to control the gush. Snapped a handful of pics and made a quickie slideshow.

Update: Got a kick out of the post on this at CalStuff, where they refer to me as “Professor Scot Hacker.” Professor? No idea where they got that information. Then the author goes on to say “go start a blog! They are fun and easy …” By that I guess he means “fun and easy to be wildly inaccurate.” 36 hours after writing the author to let him know I was not a professor, he hasn’t changed it. Then he calls me “Hackler” in a P.S. at the end of the entry. Sheesh.

Woke up the other day wondering about my career, and trying to figure out how it is that I didn’t end up as a dolphin trainer, which was clearly my destiny. Life is strange. Dad sagely reminded me that as a dolphin trainer (probably living out of a van behind SeaWorld) I would have days where I’d wake up wishing I had become a webmaster. I’m sure he’s right, but dang, just imagine what it would be like to work with dolphins rather than professors!

Massive construction project going on outside my office door – scheduled to last three years (lucky me!). Just heard a huge crashing sound, walked outside, and found a 130-foot eucalyptus tree laying on its side, branches snapped, debris everywhere. And under a large bough, the dean’s car. He was not in it at the time and no one was hurt; he was even able to drive it away. But wow.

Theory is that some of its roots were cut by a Godzilla-sized backhoe during adjacent construction, and today’s high winds gave it enough nudge to seal the deal. Eucalyptus don’t have very deep roots to begin with… I’m sure the contractors are going to have some explaining to do. It really was a beautiful tree.

Photos here.

This has been up for years, but it’s new to me. Turns out that Mr. Ed the Talking Horse (“I didn’t go to college, but I’m not stupid!”) was in fact played by a zebra. Due to peculiarities in the way black-and-white film works under studio lights, his stripes were nearly invisible. And because zebras are smaller than horses, the producers had to construct special sets to elevate him to horse-height.

Seems almost unbelievable, but no less an authority than Snopes.com has the dirt. Snopes’ does such a great service to the Internet dispelling the endless rumors and half-truths that float around, they should get some kind of award. They always do good homework. Some good ancillary information at the bottom of that page too.

And once again, I’m amazed by the accidental thematic connection between the titles of songs I’m currently listening to and whatever I’m writing about at the moment.

Thanks Mal and Mark

Walk into my office, an acrid smell fills the air. Like burning hair, if that hair was puddled with lots of “product.” With even more chemical goodness.

“Is that smell coming from outside?” I ask.

“Not sure. Kind of weird. My Mac just blinked out while I was working, but I’m not sure if the smell is related.”

The Mac is still alive. Responds to keypresses, hard-switches down OK. I open the case. No smell inside, but it’s definitely getting more rank in the room. Heading toward toxic levels. I step back, and as I do, a beam of sunlight glances across the top of her monitor, over the vent holes. A stream of blue smoke is rising up from the monitor case.

“We have to get this thing out of here,” I say. I lean over to unplug it and the smell is choking. Like roasting weenies, if those weenies were made of polyethylene and industrial solvents. Hold my breath, squint my eyes, unplug, haul it outside. The smoking continues. I feel slightly nauseated.

Two hours later, a residual acridity still hangs in the air. Office mate says she wasn’t able to eat lunch. Funny how things reveal what they’re made of when they die.