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Interior Desecrations

grater

You’re over 30. You were there. You may have worked hard not to remember that you remember, but you do remember. Visiting people’s homes while collecting on your paper route, stepping into the foyer only to be mesmerized by pointless wall hangings –tools from the shed and driftwood embedded in macrame, lamps fashioned from garden tools, dust embedded in the cheap paint, space-age acrylic tables and chairs through which you could more clearly see the hideously clashing colors of the hand-woven shag rug… And you remember sitting in the dentist’s office reading how-to manuals distributed by Sunset magazine…

I’m as much a fan of great 70s design as the next guy, but let us not forget how much craptastic home-spun junk littered people’s homes in the decade, and how it all finally piled up in garages (and ultimately at garage sales) in the 80s.

James Lileks, of The Gallery of Regrettable Food fame, has published a second volume, Interior Desecrations, chronicling the joyous garbage of DIY suburban 70s decor. Scrumptious.

Of course, it’s an old-timey meat-grinder painted avocado green, stuffed with fake vegetables, and mounted on a plaque you bought at Escutcheons ‘N’ Things. But, you may ask . . . how do I make it?

Music: Sly & the Revolutionaries :: Lambsbread
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System Status

Added a system status log for birdhouse hosting. All public info on status of / changes to the server environment will be posted there (customers will still receive email as well). Currently hosted here, but will move this to another machine before long so that it’s available in the event of an outage.

Music: The Aggrovators :: A Crabbit Version
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Solaris 9

Now in the 2nd week of a Unix Systems Administration class, working toward my certification. This section is 10 full Saturdays in a row. Installing Solaris on x86 last week was a bust — hardware compatibility problems throughout the lab. But issues were worked out for today’s session, and we’re up and running. Installed gcc and started adding utilities, both from packages and from source, started customizing the environment. Not too different from working in OS X, BeOS, or Linux, but good to get hands-on Solaris experience, and there’s always so much more to learn. Half lecture and half lab. The sessions fly, packed with info, juicy bits and real-world sysadmin anecdotes.

Music: Vincent Gallo :: Cracks
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MIME Vexation

OK geeks, help me out, for I am vexed.

FireFox 1 is out, and it’s great. In FireFox tradition, it’s very strict about web standards. I like that. But it also means that if a server sends a particular MIME type for a file, the browser handles it as such. Most browsers ignore the MIME type for .css files, and just handle them. But if FireFox hears from the server that a .css file has a type of text/plain rather than text/css, it will refuse to render it, and you’ll see the complaint in its console.
Continue reading “MIME Vexation”

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Canopy Tours

I’m starting a list of “Things to do before I die.” Skydiving was on the list before I learned that a childhood friend had had a terrible skydiving accident, broke his back badly, spent years in therapy, and is now a couple inches shorter.

The main item remaining on the list is to take a canopy tour: Strap into a harness and swing through the treelines of a rainforest, gliding on ziplines, rappelling down cliffs, climbing up through hollow trees, hanging out with monkeys and forest birds…

Canopy tours are offered all over the world — Mexico, South Africa, Jamaica, Costa Rica. Most of the tours advertised on the web are short — a few hours. But my father has a friend leading 7-day canopy tours in Costa Rica, where you pack in food, eat lala from the forest, sleep on platforms in the trees, seldom touch the ground.

For the record, this is my dream vacation.

Music: Flanger :: Quicksilver Loom
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Duck Poopy

Miles swapped toys with some friends, came home with a whistling jungle toy and a waddling duck on a stick. Amy decided to have some fun: placed a trail of coffee beans on the bathroom floor and called him in. “Miles, look what the duck made!” Unexpectedly, he looked crestfallen. Later, didn’t want to play with the duck anymore. “Why don’t you want to play with the duck, Miles?”

“Duck poopy.”

Music: Frank Zappa :: I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted
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SURBLs

Just completed a transition of birdhouse hosting to a new machine (in the same data center) with a greatly increased monthly bandwidth ceiling, and have been able to raise bandwidth caps for all customer account levels.

Also took the opportunity to upgrade SpamAssassin to version 3, which, among other enhancements, supports SURBLs — Spam URI Realtime Blocklists. SURBLs essentially use the same logic as Movable Type’s blacklisting system – rather than trying to analyze content or block sender addresses or IPs (which are moving targets), SURBLs hit spammers where it hurts by blocking messages that include blacklisted URLs.

The downside of using SURBLs alone is that messages containing URLs that are not yet blacklisted slip through the net. But by combining SURBL scanning with content analysis, and by using distributed/collaborative blacklisting systems, you end up way ahead of the game.

Had to modify some of my customer’s SpamAssassin rulesets to work with the new syntax in SA3, but now that we’re dialed in, spam blocking seems to be more effective than ever – we’re catching about 98-99% of unwanted mail prior to delivery. w00t!

Music: Air :: Radian
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Hopkin Green Frog

ilostmyfrog

Continue to hold bottomless fascination for found objects/found art (see Found Magazine if you haven’t already) – scraps of life that yield accidental glimpses into the inner lives of strangers. Like this poster by Terry, who lost his frog, desperate to find him again.

A band of Photoshoppers started re-working, re-hashing, recontextualizing the kid’s poster at lostfrog.org (click through main image for the series).

via Boing-Boing

Update: The true story behind Hopkin revealed.

Music: Cheikha Rimitti :: Nouar
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The Wrong Trousers

Breaking my pseudo-moratorium on political postings after two days because this is just so interesting… a man in Orange County has won a spot on the school board even though virtually no one has ever heard of him or seen him, beating out a challenger who has three children in the district, is president of the PTA at his kids’ school and is active with the Boy Scouts.

Now all that’s left is to find him. “Absolutely nobody, but nobody has seen this guy,” said Paul Pruss, a middle school teacher and the president of the union. “The whole thing is just bizarre.”

On the ballot, the challenger was identified as a “park ranger.” The mystery candidate, who lives with his parents and keeps a Johnny Cash record cover nailed to his front door, was identified as a “writer/educator,” even though no one can figure out what he’s written or who he’s educated.

Two plausible theories: 1) In a contest where voters have not informed themselves adequately about the candidates, people naturally pick “writer/educator” over “park ranger” because it sounds like a better fit for the job. 2) In the absence of enough information, many voters tend not to pick the Latino-sounding name.

Either way, the snafu points up a flaw in the election system — voting with insufficient information can yield unpredictable and potentially dangerous results.

Tieing into our earlier discussion about what kinds of experience qualify one for office, I’d like to frame the point this way: it is knowledge, not intelligence alone, that is crucial. And knowledge comes from two sources: experience and intelligence (where intelligence is defined as some combination of curiosity, analytical skills, and memory).

Music: Herbie Mann :: Memphis Underground
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Media Tracker

Who owns your local media? Well Connected’s Media Tracker lets you enter your zip code and see at a glance (with drill-down detail) just how many of your local TV, radio, and print outlets are concentrated into the hands of media conglomerates.

In my zip code, the top 6 mega-media fuzzballs own a total of 25/35 radio outlets. And it’s worse in other parts of the country.

Music: Tim Buckley :: Sweet Surrender