Category: Misc

Clearing out the office closet so Amy can share it with me so we can make her office into the baby’s room. On a cleaning binge, throwing out tons of old software boxes. Just found:

– Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1
– ColdFusion Application Server 3.1
– Kai’s Power Tools 3
– No less than five separate Win95 installers, some of them legal

and so on and so on…

Another tough one : revisiting the floppy disk boxes : around 300 floppies – BeOS R3 boot disks, antique Linux and FreeBSD boot disks, WinCIM and CompuServe and Prodigy and ZD Interchange installers, DirectoryFreedom (my old favorite DOS directory navigator), XyWrite installer (my favorite DOS text editor), tons of games, Photoshop on floppy, zillions of drivers for sound, video, and network cards I no longer have, setup disks for long-defunct ISPs, all those new hard drive setup disks you never use, ancient terminal communication apps, paint and morph programs sent to me at Ziff, which no one ever heard of and never got off the ground, games like Heretic and Descent, BIOS updaters, old embarassing writings, about 14 MS Intellipoint driver disks (none ever installed, as far as I can remember), CD-ROM ATAPI drivers, SCSI scanner drivers, and on down the road. I kept about 20 — the rest, into the crapper. Too much trouble to get rid of them. I haven’t touched a floppy in a couple of years now, except to booting or rescue drivers on the odd x86 box. But I’ve eliminated almost all the x86 from my life, and convinced everyone I support (family members, landord, and now the law firm) to go Mac. This stuff is groovy history, but it’s gathering dust. Sentimentality and attachments bog me down. Things that once seemed important no longer do.

Perhaps old news to some, but I just came across the thelongnow site.

It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the beginnings of civilization. Progress lately is often measured on a “faster/cheaper” scale. The Long Now Foundation seeks to promote “slower/better” thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

They are considering designs for a clock to last 10,000 years, as well as a library. Brian Eno is heavily involved with this project and has created some of his generated musics to accompany. According to my friend Mal, the organization is a sort of think tank and Eno sits on the board, “along with Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson and others.”

My parents owned a diesel Volvo in the late 70s / early 80s. The neighbors had a diesel VW Rabbit. Those are the last two consumer cars I remember seeing run on diesel, which has all but disappeared from the American scene. Meanwhile, those whacky (read: sensible) Europeans have evolved diesel technology by leaps and bounds in the past two decades – they’re now creating massive amounts of torque in tiny packages, and doing it clean. Diesel now accounts for 33% of European car sales. But U.S. policies have effectively blocked any potential embrace of new diesel technologies in this country. See this AutoWorld piece for more. Pretty messed up.

Battle droids are becoming real. NY Times:
A War of Robots, All Chattering on the Western Front

As abstract and original concepts, Enron’s and WorldCom’s balance sheets can be classified as works of art.

Gaddafi: Goats, Guns, and Grenades. And just who is that frightening Fred Gwynn character in the picture at the bottom?

Pop quiz: which of the stories referenced above is satire?

Just received an email from someone wanting to know how to get a copy of the MP3 book, since it’s out of print. Out of print? WTF… checked Amazon and O’Reilly, and it’s true, but no one ever told me. Why is the author always the last to know?

That book sold terribly. I sold 10x more copies of the BeOS Bible. Amazing how something with an immense built-in audience can do so poorly while a book on an obscure topic like BeOS can do so well. My reckoning is that A) Very, very, very few MP3 users perceive the need for a book on the subject, in contrast to BeOS, and B) I had no competion in the BeOS space, while there were 10 other MP3 books on the market.

A few completely wrong-headed and bizarre comments on the book’s Amazon listing sure didn’t help. Ah well. It was a fun book to do.

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.

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.

—

ORA blog: SliMP3, iRock, etc.

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.

Spent the weekend in North Fork, CA, below Yosemite, at the home of an old surfing buddy and friend from junior high and high school. A simpler life there, near a buddhist monastery. Matt and his wife Stephanie, 4-year-old Lucas and most of their friends all attend the monastery. So a very peaceful time – veggie food, honest people, hot tubbing under the stars (so bright!). Entertained ourselves with improv humor games after dinner.

Highlight: Up the river over a secret path, to a place where eons of bubbling dug amazing huge holes in the granite – bathed in the icy water and dove from rock cliffs, swam through underwater tunnels, ate bagels and carrots in the sun.

Back at the ranch, I goofed around with the mighty Husqvarna on Lucas’s swing:

Rushed home Sunday for more housing madness. More of the same.

Righteous Mac case hacks – I dig the low-fi.

I want to go on a zip ride.

And you wonder why web developers come home with migraines.

Some among you may wish to install a PC Tachometer

This could be the world’s smallest web site.

I really want to live in an Eichler home.

Teleportation is now real.

Not everyone is enjoying Apple’s new “switch” campaign.

Found an antique upright cannister vacuum on trash day, decided to make a lamp for the kid’s room out of it. Of course the job ended up taking half the day rather than the couple hours I had expected. Still, it was worth it – I love doing projects like this, and don’t do enough of them anymore. Well, I do, sort of, just not in meatspace. It’s summer – you’re supposed to be out there getting your thumb crimped in the jaws of the pliers when they slip off a spacer hex. New blood blister!

Amy and I both joined the UC Berkeley rec facilities and can now use any of the pools, weight rooms, etc. This morning went up to Strawberry Canyon. Worked out for half an hour, swam, read magazines under the trees. Totally relaxing. Didn’t come home until 3.

Last night out to dinner at La Note with Josh and Minnette. Great time, stuffed silly. The accordionist started playing “Stairway to Heaven” and “Paint it Black”, French cafe’ style. Between this and the Junior Brown show the previous night, it’s getting a little too pomo for comfort around here. Started remembering lyrics to the songs we played in the quote-unquote “band” we had in junior high… which was more like one brilliant musician, plus us embarrassing ourselves.