Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Returning from the UC-CSC conference last week, hitched a ride with a very cool UC Irvine operating systems prof. Had some interesting conversations about databases, filesystems, etc., then the conversation drifted to the topic of people’s insanely busy lives. I made some off-handed comment about time and money, and he responded without hesitation:
NO! Time is not money. You can always get money back. You can never get time back.
This Modern World has scanned evidence that “Bush was an asshole even in college.” Here seen violating major groundrules of rugby – both feet off the ground during a tackle, tackling above the shoulders, and oh, um, slugging a player hard in the face. “I’m sure by next week Karl Rove will have a collection of rugby players claiming that John Kerry was even worse…”
Just watched The Corporation with baald, feeling overwhelmed. Feel like fighting the machine. The movie is complex, huge in scope, tragic, and very entertaining. Hits like a ton of bricks. Dozens of interviews with CEOs, thinkers, economists, corporate spies. Case studies and analysis of the role of the corporation as entity that now fills a role larger than that of any church or government, and that is bound by law to hold the bottom line above all other considerations, and that is treated with the full rights of a person (but without accountability), thanks to a twist of the 14th Amendment.
So many vectors here. Amazed at the story of a city in Bolivia that was rescued from starvation by a corporation, in exchange for the right to privatize all public services, including water. Citizens ended up paying 1/4 of their wages for water, and were barred even from collecting rainwater. Amazed at the turns of events and court decisions that resulted in genes becoming patentable. Amazed at the lies of Monsanto and their pushing of Posilac to farmers (whose cows already produced more than enough milk) at great detriment to the cow and probable detriment to human health, and the legal war they started with the Fox Network, who planned to air an expose’ (two journalists ended up getting fired over it).
Revelatory, shocking, and brilliantly produced. But also depressing.
Got to check another line item from my “things to do before I die” list. Amy and I bought a few packs of ear candles several months ago and finally got around to using them. Punch a hole in a pie tin, insert ear candle with tip sticking 3″ below. Lie down, encircle ear with moist towel, snugly insert business end of hollow candle into ear, have your partner light it on fire, and lie there listening to it crackle softly. Kind of soothing, like having a miniature, non-threatening roaring fire inside your head.
About five minutes in, I heard a gurgling, then a kind of soft “whump” sound. Afterwards, found several globules of ear wax sticking to the inside of the candle, a few inches up the remnants of the tip. Not a huge amount, as I’ve heard some people experience, but enough to impress my date, er, wife.
What’s amazing is that it works at all. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but to see wax dislodge, enter the tip of the candle, wander straight uphill three inches, and re-harden again on the inner wall of the candle, is quite amazing. As if the stuff had legs and a desire to get the hell out.
Beyond the magic of the uphill wax walk and the soothing aspect, we weren’t overly impressed, probably won’t do it again. Can’t honestly say I could hear better afterwards. What I want to know is, who ever thought of doing this to begin with? Clearly this wasn’t one of those “accidental discoveries” – someone had to have really sat down and wondered how to extract deeply lodged ear wax, then thought, “I know – gentle heat and a soft vacuum, plus a jigger of capillary action… a hollow candle lighted in the ear would be just the ticket!” Truth is stranger.
Took the final exam in my shell programming class last night – very weird to do a test like that with pencil and paper rather than into a shell, but the instructor wanted the test to be black screen, closed book. The offline approach was actually very effective, since you can’t experiment until you get it right – you have to know the material cold to be able to write scripts on paper that actually work when plugged in. Still need to write a final project script – will expand some customer provisioning I’ve done for birdhouse hosting, automate a few more housekeeping tasks.
To blow off steam, needed to do something non-shell, non-class related. Piles of misc images floating around that never get used, so decided to write an image rotator in PHP and plop some of them into the sidelines. Fun, but now that it’s there, I’m not sure I like it. We’ll see. Image is rotated once per hour, so save your reload-clicking finger. Also finally canned the calendar module – does anybody ever use those? If you think the image rotator is stupid, let me know.
The hilarious parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at JibJab is a victim of its own success. The copyright holders of Woody Guthrie’s original are suing JibJab for infringement (like, how many parodies of this song did you have memorized in elementary school?) The EFF has leapt to JibJab’s defense by responding with a counter-suit. Woody’s son Arlo “Alice’s Restaurant” Guthrie was interviewed on NPR, and says that his father would have loved the parody. And just how many lost record sales of the original does the copyright holder think it stands to lose, anyway? Ernest Miller has details.
Several good panels today. Berkeley took the Gold in the Sauter Awards for their Minimum Security Standards for Networked Devices (now I have policy to back up my goal of shutting down vanilla FTP for good). Saw a great demo of using video polycom devices in combination with IP-based desktop control software to deal with overcrowded classrooms, letting one instructor teach in two or more classrooms at once. Got to see up-close just how complex the campus WiFi networks really are (holy crap!). But the highlight of the day was the after-lunch tour of UC Riverside’s underground steam tunnels (phonecam image). Berkeley has these too, but I never thought I’d get to voyage through them. A trip to see the antique and the new side by side — steam for heating, briney chilled condensation on the return trip for cooling, and sparkling new harnesses of fiber optic cable snaking alongside.
In balmy Orange County for the next few days, attending the UC-wide Computing Services Conference. Shocked on arrival, expecting to pick up a quick shuttle from the airport to UC Riverside, only to discover the cheapest ride I could find was a $70 shuttle! No trains in the land where automobiles rule, and a series of buses would not have gotten me there in time. Hoping to find people to ride-share on the way back.
Drove miles through a desert pocked with strip malls and auto-body specialists, then suddenly we’re in the middle of an oasis. Downtown Riverside is really sweet, centered around the old mission. The Mission Inn is stunningly beautiful. Opening night at the California Museum of Photography, original pieces by Harold Edgerton, William Wegman, William Eggleston, many more. Largest archive of turn-of-century stereoscopic images in the world, and an immense collection of period cameras and related gear. Watched the sun set upside down from the dark innards of a camera obscura.
Tomorrow, the geekery begins.
I finally got my wish.
Despite being used for nearly two hours per day for the past couple of years, being thrown from my bike in the accident, dropped to concrete on several other occasions, used by Miles as a very small stool to reach the bathroom sink and other ignominious fates, my first-generation iPod simply would not die. The jog-wheel has been popping off lately, revealing dirt in the works, the battery has been charging down quickly, and the face-plate is badly scuffed. Lately I’ve been wishing it would just die, so I could justify a new one, but the damn thing apparently thought it was better to burn out than to fade away.
It finally stopped booting last week. Riding to work in silence was more jarring than expected. At the Apple store this morning, the girl who assisted me announced that her name was “Boots.” That’s a good name. She went into the back room to get a 20GB 4th-gen iPod and returned empty-handed. She stood before me and pronounced, “Umm… peace and love, but we’re out of stock.”
Peace and love? I’m all for it! But, what was behind the Lenon/Ono sentiment? Was she anticipating a violent, non-love reaction when I learned the truth? Did she think I was going to smack her just for being out of stock? Seeking to pre-emptively diffuse my inevitable rage with a prayer for world peace and a global bed-in? Boots! It’s OK! I understand! I dig the sentiment, but I wasn’t going to holler, really.
It all turned out for the best. After another trip to the stock-room, she found one in an opened box, with a 10% discount. I’m in heaven. Coincidentally, the Airport Express arrived yesterday, so the living room is wirelessly wired now as well. AE works perfectly, but sits on the edge of good reception — the status light blinks perennially yellow, but the audio signal is solid — no drop-outs until we run the microwave, at which point the music pauses (I don’t mean the signal drops out; iTunes actually stops moving until the signal is clear again; amazing).
Speaking of peace and love, where was it at the Democratic National Convention? Lots of rousing speeches, but the DNC was militaristic from top to bottom. Must be the price of admission back into the white house, but still found myself wishing we were watching Kucinich instead. Here’s some more peace and love from your friends at Halliburton.
In the middle of a rousing round of “Old MacDonald” tonight, Miles surprised us with a joke, substituting the “O” in “e-i-e-i-o” with… whatever other words from his wee vocabulary he could think of. Legend: “Ucky” = pacifier, derived from “Nucky,” which means Nuk. “Hop hop” is multi-purpose noun standing in for all hopping creatures (frog, cricket, kangaroo, and, most frequently, bunny). By extension, it also means carrot. “Poo poo” means poo-poo, which derives from “poo-poo.”