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Offending By Dazzling Light

The 2003 Worst Manual contest winners have been announced. Who among us haven’t encountered amazingly bad instructions? But this bad?

1. Be tights part E with part I together by fitting M. Also can be installation handle part J in this side.

2. Be tights part D with part H together by fitting M. Like a step No. 1. And may be installation handle in this side too.

Honorable mention went to a manual for assembly of a baby bed:

To protect baby’s eyes offending by dazzling light; To prevent baby from dust.

And so on. No wonder people don’t read Joyce anymore.

Music: Neil Young :: Rockin’ In The Free World
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John’s Wedding

     

Weekend in Central Coast : Brother John married Jamie Sheridan after several years of Tru Luv® at Sycamore Mineral Springs in Avila Beach. Classic, non-denominational, lovely law-enforcement wedding (John is a sheriff of 10 years, Jamie is daughter of a cop and is herself a prison guard). Both of them are adventure-hungry – he proposed to her after scuba diving with sharks in a great undersea basin in Belize. He’s also way into no-holds-barred mixed martial arts. Dangerous couple.

I was the best man, stood by my bro on the altar to bear witness etc. Gave the big toast – three minute allotment I parlayed into seven, but it was fun. Oh, did you say toast? I thought you said “roast.” :)

Miles wore a dashing blue satin Chinese outfit, cut a rug, slept on Amy’s back, danced on my shoulders, kept his cool. He’s turned out to be mostly a breeze in public, we’re blessed.

Much love and respect to John and Jamie. Congratulations!

Music: Angelo Badalamenti :: Sycamore Trees
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Plain Old Fraud

The news was somewhat buried — reading page 8 or 9 of USA Today — Rumsfeld sees no link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and Bush: No proof of Saddam role in 9/11. Well, it’s really big of them to come clean on this, two years after the fact, and long since it was shown that 70% of Americans thought that Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Exactly why would the people have thought that? Because the Pentagon dropped Afghanistan like a hot potato when the going got non-productive, and pursued Saddam instead? Because the insinuation was made over and over again that there absolutely was a connection?

I’m frustrated that this is page 8 news because the war could not have been fought without support of the American people. Therefore it didn’t behoove the pimps in power to come clean on the non-connection, though Rummy says he knew all along that there was no connection. So remind me again what the supposed goal of the war was? (“Removing a terrible dictator from power” is the wrong answer, sorry).

p.s.: U.S. weapons hunters find no evidence Iraq had smallpox and Senator Edward Kennedy says the case for war against Iraq “was a fraud.”

None of this related to the recent disocvery of ancient Venezuelan Buffalo-sized rodents, of course.

Music: 3 Mustaphas 3 :: Starehe Mustapha I II & III
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RSS Skews Logs

A seldom-mentioned side-effect of “the RSS revolution” is the weird way it skews web traffic. If a person subscribes to my RSS feed, index.rdf is going to be pulled off my site every time the person’s (or site’s) aggregator checks to see whether I’ve published updates. I leave NetNewsWire up and running 24×7, and set to refresh its feeds every hour. That means I generate 24 hits a day on Radio Free Blogistan and around 100 other sites I like, even though I actually look at the site only once or twice a week.

In August, I had 24,000 requests for index.rdf — fully 6x more requests than for my homepage. More than ever before, traffic fails to equate with readership. In fact, the numbers are way off. And the more popular RSS gets, the more skewed the numbers are going to get.

If you’re dishing up RSS, make sure all feed paths are removed from your traffic summaries (this is easier and more effective than trying to trap the UA strings of the various readers). You’ll still want to count those requests, but don’t be misled: You’re not nearly as popular as you think.

Music: The Clash :: Rudie Can’t Fail
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Miles Points

A few days before his first birthday, and Miles can point to objects in a book by name. In “Clifford the Big Red Dog” he can show you cars, airplanes, trucks, houses when you ask him where they are. In “Baby Animals” he can point out the duck. Then he goes to the bathtub and gets his rubber ducky, brings it back to compare and contrast.

This morning he demonstrated that he knows that keys go in keyholes. Keyholes that he’s never seen us use. i.e. he’s seen us use the door, but we’ve never locked or unlocked the filing cabinet, which is what he’s trying to do right now.

His passion for FireWire (pictured) and other cables continues unabated. However, his favorite grown-up toy is probably the iMic — endless swinging, chewing, dragging joy. I’m resigned to it.

Music: Les Baxter :: Temple Of Gold
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Revenge of the Copyright Cops

One of the J-School profs I share an office with brought in an hilarious (and scary true) cartoon on copyright madness from the New York Times today [free reg required]. The fine print at the end:

WARNING: Do not forward this column through email, make photocopies to send to a child in college, tape it to your dorm-room-door or put it on a bulletin board in your office… or you may be receiving an unexpected knock on your door.

I made ten photocopies and passed them out to iPod-wearing (or similar) students.

Music: King Crimson :: Exiles
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orvilleschell.com

birdhouse hosting is pleased to host orvilleschell.com.

Orville Schell is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of 14 books — nine about China, including “Virtual Tibet,” “Mandate of Heaven,” and “Discos and Democracy” – Dean Schell has also written widely about Asia and other topics for Wired, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Newsweek and other national magazines. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship, a Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award and numerous writing prizes. Dean Schell has also served as correspondent and consultant for several PBS “Frontline” documentaries as well as an Emmy award-winning program on China for CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

Music: Suba :: Felicidade
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Domino Theory, Pt. II

EBMUD set us straight with the main valve, so back to the task at hand.

To replace the toilet shutoff valve, remove the feeder tube that supplies the tank. This one was installed before the dawn of flex hose, so it’s a straight, stiff shot. Oops, that means there’s no way to get it out of the fittings without removing the tank!

Keep in mind that the goal here is merely to replace the rubber stopper in the tank to stop a minor leak, and that we’re way sidetracked by now.

Grunt, skin knuckles, try every wrench on the pegboard, finally succeed. Behind tank, the wall is black. Scrub and clean wall, tank.

Ace Hardware for replacement everything. Ace Lady says at a certain point you may as well replace the whole durn turlet. But I like this one. 1942 original. Much respect to this turlet.

Return and replace shutoff valve. Restore water pressure. It holds!

Replace main gasket. Lower tank into position. Begin cranking down retaining nuts to compress the fat main gasket. A little here, a little there. A little more here, a little more there. CRACK the day is shot as toilet bowl shatters from pressure (I wasn’t giving it much, must have been ready to go). Well, not shot — I did fix the shutoff valve — but now we have to replace the toilet.

Anyone who thinks I’m complaining about home ownership is off their rocker. I’m in heaven. I feel whole. Computers suck the life out of you.

Music: Modest Mouse :: Willful Suspension Of Disbelief
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The Eolas Boondoggle

I generally applaud judgments against Microsoft — they too rarely reap what they sow, and a little smattering of justice every now and then feels karmically right. But this Eolas thing is out of hand. The suit is targeted at MS, but ultimately affects every browser vendor and every Web developer.

In a nutshell, Eolas has a 1994 patent on the ability to seamlessly pull plugin data into a web browser. Read that sentence again. In the web atmosphere, that’s the equivalent of saying someone has a patent on breathing without assistance.

If the suit is not successfully appealed, web developers will have to retool every instance of embedded Flash, QuickTime, Shockwave, Real, Acrobat, etc. to make the experience not seamless. We may have to launch everything in external players, for example, or throw up a dialog before rich media content is able to play. Right back to 1994, yippee.

Intellectual property is important, but determining how original an idea has to be to warrant a patent is a difficult thing. Once a patent is issued, it’s very hard to recall. No matter how you slice it, allowing one company to retroactively reshape a huge slice of an industry — with a negative effect on innocent users no less — is just wrong.

I can only imagine how much more difficult this would make the teaching of our multimedia skills class.

Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu
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Superchicken

In the 1940s, a chicken lived two years without its head. For reals. The incredible tale of Mike the Headless Chicken. Some kind of tie-in with baald’s chicken head helmet, the chickenfat song, the chicken transformation set, and Tim’s chickenfoot pads. Somehow connected to the original Superchicken: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”

Henry Cabot Henhaus III, the richest chicken in the world, and an amateur scientist, would drink the Super Sauce that his trusty side-kick and butler, Fred, would mix up. The Super Sauce would transform Henry into Super Chicken although it gave him no discernable powers. Thanks baald.

Urban Dictionary is the best place to look up words like “hodad” and “doofus” … Bill Maher: DVDs are for losers! … Standing on the bleepin’ moon … Gorgeous wagons (and other ephemera) … Etch-a-Sketch – hit spacebar to erase … Not fake news: Giant lizard terrorises Beirut … For someone who needs, nay requires unfettered, unbuttered, poeticized truth upside the head, dole out slackards — with parallels to Eno’s Oblique Strategies … Can a music snob learn to love the ‘Dead? … Disney and Dali collaborated on a movie “I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney” … Time for a rousing round of hipster bingo … New movie about Robert Anton Wilson, “Maybe Logic.” Now it turns out the good man is running for governor … Jesus has his own homepage … CSS Zen Garden … Howdy! … If you’re gay and you love NASCAR … Nicotinis being offered to smoking customers in Fort Lauderdale bars – soak tobacco leaves in vodka before shaking martini … So am I governor or not? … Telemarketing at midnight … 75 years of Band-Aid … George W. Bush – U.S. President and Naval Aviator – 12″ Action Figure … How to stick it to the man.

Music: James Chance & The Contortions :: Twice Removed