Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
For Valentine’s Day I gave Amy a tiny Zen garden with tiny bag of sand, tiny wooden rake, and tiny rocks.
The trouble with the mini Zen Garden is that it’s so small that you get frustrated trying to create patterns like the ones David Carradine made in Kung Fu. So you end up either barking at it or losing interest, whichever comes first.
My fist valentine from Funny Bologna, aka Bolognious Monk, aka Bolognious Monkeyfish, aka Miles, and sweet wife Amy. Note: Not Photoshopped – genunine forehead stickers!
Frank Boosman on contemporary attempts to design a symbolic warning system that will last 12,000 years. What, humans 12 millenia hence won’t intuitively understand that a hill festooned with lovely blue ivy actually means “Get back, we’re radioactive” ???
I’ve s-o-o-o-o had it with Aqua’s pinstripes. The more brushed aluminum apps I see, the happier I am. In theory, Apple employees should be as tired of seeing pinstripes as we are right about now. So you can mark this as my prediction for X 10.3 : A new default appearance plus additional UI customization options. Yes, I know there are 3rd party hacks for this kind of thing…
n.b.: The difference between a simple wishlist item and a public prediction is quantified as:
pi / (foolhardiness x huevos)
Amy made new wallpaper for her Mac featuring Miles on a green rug with large interlocking circles. Buk nekkid. She used one of her desktop Stickies to cover up his wee twig-n-berries, just for the sake of decorum. The particular Stickie note she used happened to contain the account # for our Tiny Tots diaper service. It was all done unselfconsciously, but somehow the combination struck me as perfect visual poetry and we had a long belly laugh about it.
Amused by the fact that Kevin Mitnick’s web site has been hacked into twice already since his release a few weeks ago. Of course, the fact that his host was running unpatched IIS (for chrissake!) is not revealed until the second-to-last paragraph of the story.
Mitnick is pedestalized like he’s the great hacking guru of time, space, and dimension, but the fact is he’s been stuck in a time capsule for years and has much catching up to do to grok the current state of the art. Mitnick running a security company today is like bringing Michelangelo back from the grave and asking him to set up a CPU fab. The world has changed. Hacking has changed. The tools, environment, and culture of hacking have changed tremendously. He’ll catch up, but what a lot of egg on face. Yipes.
Unpatched IIS, for chrissake.
The MusicBrainz service aims to become a community-driven replacement to CDDB, which your favorite MP3 encoder / CD player uses to pull down metadata for the CDs you stick in your computer. CDDB, as you’ve probably discovered, is full of errors, the metadata categories are limited, and results can be ambiguous. The CDDB API is also notoriously difficult to build apps around.
MusicBrainz aims to fix all that in two ways: 1) By using positive, unambiguous techniques to fingerprint specific tracks (imagine sending a friend a playlist file and it working on their computer even though the filenames, paths, and metadata are different), and 2) Letting communities collaboratively build metadata and enhance it over time via constant collaborative peer review, Wiki-style. Sounds a lot more capable than freedb.
This could become a beautiful thing. Or at least interesting to watch. Boing-Boing has more.
Joke floating around today:
The UN asked President Bush what evidence he had that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He said, “We kept the receipts”.
I am taking every opportunity to move domain registrations off of Netsol and onto Dotster. Currently trying to transfer betips.net to its new owner, but to do that, I need to retrieve a password. And to do that, Netsol’s password-retrieval system needs to be up and running. For the past 72 hours, I’ve gotten nothing but a “this service temporarily unavailable” message from them.
After a ~5-month hiatus, we’re officially house hunting again. Back on the Sunday open house circuit, slogging it through the Bay Area in search of the mythical perfect house — nice neighborhood, within bicycle commute distance to UCB, not tacky or flimsy or unloved, big enough to spread out in, extra room to turn into a darkroom, garage with room for a workbench, a few trees on the street….
Now more conflicted than ever. Both of us feeling so oppressed by the idea of going into eternal hawk and living close to the bone for god knows how long to get anywhere close to this dream. Should we pull up roots and head back to Massachusetts? Morro Bay? Portland? Portsmouth NH? Or better yet, Sweden?
But my work situation is so good. But no way can Miles play in the street here, let alone head off for 45 minutes of surfing or hiking before dinner. What’s the answer? Feeling like we’ve been in limbo over the housing thing for far too long. Already missed our big opportunity to cash in on the boom…. now the market hovers at saturation point. Interest rates in our favor, but housing prices “through the stratmosphere” (as an immigrant ex-boss used to say).
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