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Jackass, The Awful Truth

Last night went to see Jackass with Mike – first time out of the house in the evening without Amy since Miles arrived. Utterly tasteless, retarded, relentless, extreme beyond words. The kind of human horror show from which you can’t avert your eyes. I have a weird admiration for these guys – they don’t seem to think of themselves as artists, even though they warp boundaries by challenging assumptions. Meanwhile, I dislike them for lowering the bar of decency another few notches.

Then tonight rented season #1 of Michael Moore’s old TV show, “The Awful Truth” with Amy – if you never saw it, Moore took the formula from “Roger and Me” — giving big business a hard time — and ran with it. In one episode he gathered a bunch of ex-smokers who had lost their larynxes to cancer or smoking and took them to headquarters of tobacco companies to sing Christmas carols through their voiceboxes. Eery and powerful … just brilliant stuff.
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Study: Mac OS Least Attack-Prone

Computerworld: Mi2g Ltd. said 1,162 new software vulnerabilities in operating systems, server software and third-party applications have been discovered so far this year. Of that number, fewer than 25 were attributable to the Mac OS.

Gotta say, it feels great to not worry about a thing as one wave of vulnerabilities after another washes over the Windows shores. And even better to know that my wife, father, landlord, clients in the city etc. all fly under the radar as well. Security by stealth + security by design is a lot of security (though not total, of course).

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Music: Billie Holiday :: I Cried For You

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Synthetic Utopia

What do you do when you get so frustrated with the middling, leveling side-effects of democracy – the averaging out that makes it impossible for more dramatic philosophical/political ideas ever to take hold? You get together with throngs of like-minded people and take over a state, swing the vote, and create your own legal utopia, that’s what you do.

A group of largely techno-libertarians are gathering forces right now to do just that, and it looks like they’re honing in on Delaware, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Alaska.

The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S. to secure there a free society. We will accomplish this by first reforming state law, opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for appropriate political autonomy. We will be a community of freedom-loving individuals and families, and create a shining example of liberty for the rest of the nation and the world.

The FAQ is a good read, and is revealing of some of the types of readers a project like this attracts, e.g. “Q. Why don’t we make common cause with white separatists?” and “Q. Why don’t we start shooting government agents?”

Trying to imagine spin-off organizations…. I wonder which state will get to host the bleeding heart liberal utopia? The Jerry Falwell utopia? The Camejo-Green utopia? The skate punk utopia… ?

But I should be careful throwing the utopia word around:

Q. Is the Free State Project some utopian power trip?

A. By no means. The Free State Project is ameliorative, not utopian. We’re not trying to create heaven on earth, just a sphere of liberty, a framework for individuals and families to make of their lives what they will.

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Music: Ozric Tentacles :: Cat DNA

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Danger Blogging

Mike Popovic has set up a communal blog for Danger hiptop users. The hiptop is this little Star Trek Communicator-type gadget with wireless networking, instant messaging, built-in camera, dinky keyboard, phone, entertainment apps, etc. They’re starting to market the hiptop as a way to blog from the road, photos and all.

“This communal weblog also converts into a personal weblog system for anyone participating – just click the {*} symbol in the title area of a post to get all posts by that author. AND, just to make things interesting, Ficus and I are organizing a Photo-Scavenger hunt for Halloween. Over 50 folks will be running around, taking pics and posting them to their team blogs (not yet public). right now, they are using the private team blogs to organize themselves into an actual team. i am pretty sure this is a first.”

Very cool. Almost enough to get me to consider a new gadget. Must… resist… temptation…
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Music: Edith Piaf :: Mon Dieu

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Miles Pushing Off

When Miles was born, he seemed to have lots of extra skin, like a puppy. Now he’s starting to grow into it, his legs and arms are pudging up. In fact his calves actually feel strong, with real muscle. And you can feel it when he sits with his legs on your belly — give him a little support under the armpits and he’ll push off with his legs, making his first instinctual moves toward standing. It’s amazing to see – he can barely hold his head up straight (although his neck is quickly getting stronger too) but he can damn near stand (but not balance) on his own.

Some images of Miles taken by Amy recently. I love the view through his Stim-mobile — he’s really taken a shine to it, quiets immediately when we lay him down to be changed. Fascinated with the high-contrast shapes and movement. He can watch this mobile turn for 10 or 15 minutes without getting bored.


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Music: Stereolab :: Anamorphose

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PalmOS 6 To Be Based on BeOS

Just when it seemed like Palm intended only to forever mothball BeOS and all the Be engineering talent they bought, The Register reports that PalmOS 6 will be a genuine multitasking OS containing genuine chunks of BeOS code (rather than simply “inheriting DNA,” as Jean-Louis Gassee once said it would). ” Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft. ”

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Music: Charles Mingus :: Haitian Fight Song

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Where’s Osama?

At the risk of stating the obvious, how long has it been since you saw the name Osama bin Laden in the news? When did we cancel the manhunt? Is it still going on? Funny how you don’t hear about it anymore. Oh, that’s right – finding Osama is much less important than assassinating the dictator of an irrelevant country that poses no threat to us.

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Music: Barry White :: Love’s Theme

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Yahoo! Chooses PHP

Am gratified at Yahoo!’s decision to move their systems gradually to PHP. I’m sick of hearing perl die-hards trying to fabricate reasons why Perl is for true hairy chests while PHP is only for slightly hairy chests. For purposes of server-side web scripting and database integration, both are equally capable, but PHP is far easier to learn, write, and maintain. I think the cabal of wizards want to keep their hats pointy by convincing the world that Perl is arcane because it’s more powerful.

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Music: Sun Ra :: Sun Thoughts

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Switch on Bhutan

Open house at the J-School today, prospective students swirling. Days like this, with all the enthusiasm, I am reminded why I wanted to come here.

Day was wrapped up with screening of some of the documentaries made in the TV/News departments over the past couple of years, one of which was “Switch on Bhutan” – Bhutan is a tiny country tucked into the Himalayas. A few years ago, its government decided to allow TV and Internet into the country, making it the last country on earth to get TV. A J-School student went there to document the schizophrenic process of TV’s introduction to the last virgin culture on earth. Whole families would greet cable installers with parties and tea. The one and only cable company received endless calls wanting them to account for the strange shows. Why are these grown men beating each other up without mercy? — explaining WWF to them was a challenge. But within 6 months, children were making play wrestling belts out of cardboard, honoring their new heroes. Old ladies complained that TV was so fun to watch they would forget their religious duty, forget to count prayer beads. Beautifully shot.

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Music: Dreamt Of By Armadillos :: Noize1

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RSS at the Christian Science Monitor

I am becoming so dependent on my RSS reader (Net Newswire Lite) that I’m starting to not read sites that don’t provide a feed. It’s just too inconvenient to visit serial bookmarks every day… once you’ve seen the RSS light, it’s hard to go back. Now the Christian Science Monitor has unleashed what may be the largest RSS commitment of any mainstream news organization to date. You can pretty much access the entire publication via RSS now — powerful.

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Music: Angelic Upstarts :: The murder of Liddle Towers