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Goodbye Bike

Almost a year after the accident, I finally sold the motorcycle. To an Apple employee, no less (WebObjects team). Cool guy. At least I know it’s going to a good home. Not sure why it took me so long. It’s been out of the shop for ages. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it, even though I had already agreed that I wouldn’t be riding it anymore. The guy came to check it out last night, test drove. Offered me a fair price, money for the housing fund. Tonight after work I drove it into SF for him (he was a bit nervous).

But when I got on the bike I realized it was just 35 miles shy of turning 10k miles. No way could that opportunity slip through the fingers. Warm summer evening. The final hurrah. Headed the opposite direction from the highway, up into the Oakland/Berkeley hills, straight for the Grizzly Peak ride. Taking it easy at first, hadn’t done any serious riding in a year, slowly building back up toward the old speeds. But not pushing it. Once bitten and all that. Just felt so good, that time of the day when the light is all golden, everyone is inside eating dinner and watching jeapordy and the hills are on fire with sunset light, smell of pines and eucalyptus, distant ocean smell, the twisties all to myself.

Got really contemplative about it. Of course a big part of me wants to keep the bike and enjoy summer on two wheels. And this other part of me, this new part, that knows so viscerally what happens when you blow it once for a split second, and this other part that’s like genetic programming, self preservation for the sake of the kid (the kid is, after all, the rhetoric I used to sell the bike – “gotta do the dad thing.”) Anyway, I made my peace then and there, leaning into a left hander. Enjoy it this once more, and say goodbye. I feel okay with this. It’s fine.

Gassed up for the buyer and timed it just right – 10,000 miles rolled over on the Bay Bridge heading west into the dusk, the sea all purple on either side, summer night sky coming down, getting cooler. Patted the tank and thanked the bike for the life lessons we took in together, and for all the fun. Got kind of choked up. It was good.

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Gummi Louise

Amy started having her first “weird pregnant cravings” the other day – for gummi sharks, of all things. So I bought a pound of gummi and made a gummi mandala for her to come home to.

gummi amy

Louise got into it too (note little licking of little lips).

gummi louise

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Plugging the Analog Hole

This was floating around the other day – Plugging the Analog Hole – a fairly chilling piece on attempts of the entertainment industry to convince lawmakers to clamp down on ALL analog-digital converters. Sound innocuous?

If ADCs are constrained from performing analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that refuses to store your child’s first steps because he is taking them within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera that won’t snap your holiday moments if they take place against the copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.

Stay tuned.

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Puzzler

OK, a puzzler for you webmaster types (spoiler below).

So I get a call from my a client that two of their people were having trouble logging into the alumni database. I tested these people’s logins in every browser I had handy and they worked fine. No one else was having problems logging in. I went to the job site and sure enough, I couldn’t log in as anyone from two machines, both running IE6. Javascript was enabled. Cookies were enabled. What the heck was going on?

The site uses HTML hosted on a virtual domain at earthlink and database data coming from phpwebhosting.com, all married together in a frameset. Login authentication is handled via PHP sessions.

So why weren’t any logins working from IE6? Give up? This one took quite a while to figure out.

[ … spoiler … ]

First of all, PHP sessions are really just a simplified wrapper for a specialized form of cookie. So start with the realization that cookies aren’t getting planted even though cookies are enabled in the browser.

IE6 has a cookie tolerance slider that defaults to Medium. On the Medium setting,

“Internet Explorer prevents Web sites from storing third-party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy or that use personally identifiable information without your explicit consent. The browser also prevents Web sites from storing first-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without your implicit consent.”

Compact Privacy Policy:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/privacy/config.asp

Ah. So now I have to find out how to implement a compact privacy policy. Jeezis christ. See also:

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

and

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-268478.html?legacy=cnet

And finally, I find the deployment answer in a PHP forum. This affects me because the site is pulling HTML and PHP/data from two different sources:

“MSIE 6 has an inaccurate definition of third party cookies. If your domain is hosted on one server and your PHP stuff is on another, the IE6 P3P implementation considers any cookies sent from the second machine “third party”. Third party cookies will be blocked automatically in most privacy settings if not accompanied by what MS considers “an appropriate Compact Policy”. In order to make this new piece of tweakable garbage happy I’d suggest you’d par exemple send

header(‘P3P: CP=”NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM”‘);

before sending your cookie from your second machine. This header enables your cookie to survive any privacy setting.

So in the end I went to privacycouncil.com, filled in the wizard, which generated a CPC similar to the one above, and started sending it in the header of auth.php.

What a huge hassle. And I shudder to think how many sites this going to affect. There’s a good intention behind it, but it’s virtually useless, since you can virtually make up the privacy policy (it doesn’t have any necessary bearing on ACTUAL privacy) and meanwhile, it’s going to make a hell of a lot of sites inaccessible.

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A.V. Club

Re: credibility of the Tom Waits interview below – theonionavclub doesn’t appear to be satirical at all – rather an offshoot of theonion. My theory is that they’re just expanding on the brand – reaching for the same audience with more than just humor. Seems like a pretty good site. Smaht kiddies.

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Chicken Head

Give a man a chicken head and he eats for a lifetime.

chickenhead
as he appeared with the rubber chicken head I made him wear for his starring role in Visit To A Sad Planet.

chickenhelmet
With principal shooting complete, the chicken head had nowhere to go and nothing to do. So our hero cut it in half and gummed the business end to his motorcycle helmet.

Ladies, admit it – you want to date this man. Serious inquiries to .

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Gracenote Database

There’s so much conflicting data out there on whether or not MP3s and digital music distribution affect CD sales, but this is a first : Eminem’s as-yet-unreleased CD is currently the 2nd most popular CD being stuck into CD players, according to Gracenote. Also interesting that Gracenote can track popularity of CDs being played regionally (presumably by mapping IP addresses to geography). Not that I feel sorry for Eminem, mind you, but anyone who insists that digital music means more record sales has to take this picture into account.

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Momovelo

Came across the most unusual bicycle shop today – a little hole in the wall in a hallway mall that connects Bancroft and Channing. Outside was a bright orange road bike with that really “straightforward” style like the bikes in Holland. Turns out it was Swedish – Europeans right now are apparently going nuts over mid-century bicycles, or resurrections of them. Next to that bike was a grayish purple Japanese road bike – again super “normal” looking, but also really clean in a form follows function sort of way.

Turns out the proprietor had this vision of filling Berkeley with thousands of used Japanese and European road bicycles. The bikes have really long lifespans, but most Europeans and Japanese want to replace their bike every couple of years just for the hell of it, like computer upgrades. So zillions of these things sit around in landfills, available so cheap they’re almost free.

The guy had a good job at IBM and had saved up a bunch of money. He didn’t need any more money. He needed to see Berkeley have access to good bikes for cheap. So he started up this business importing used road bikes and selling them for less than it cost to import them. What a cool guy – his name is Kai, the place is called Momovelo. Wish there were more Kais in the world.

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Thunderbirds Are Go!

Stayed home sick Thursday – clogged head, cloudy thoughts, generally achy. Found “Thunderbirds Are Go!” videos at the video store, rented a few. Wow wow wow! These are so good. Sci-fi stop-motion puppet supercharged rescue action, filmed in “Supermarionation.” Tremendous attention to detail, super-stiff dialogue:

Stewardess: “It’s the maiden flight of the new atomic-powered Fireflash.”
Passenger: “Isn’t that the new aircraft that flies six times the speed of sound?”
Stewardess: “That’s right, but don’t worry: it’s perfectly safe.”
[Cut to: interior, Fireflash landing gear, a device clearly labeled “Auto-Bomb Detonator Unit”]
Sinister bad guy (talking to himself for no readily apparent reason): “Perfect. Enough explosives to smash the Atomic Reactor.”

This stuff was made in ’64, I should have seen it as a boy but didn’t – we didn’t have TV through most of my childhood. Don’t want to deprive our kid of this though – want to buy all 36 episodes, but the DVDs are expensive. Amy loved watching these as much as I did – they’re visually gorgeous.