Disorderly Content

Former Apple Fellow Alan Kay used a line I like in his talk at MacWorld a bunch of years ago: "The right point of view is worth twenty I.Q. points." An article referenced by Kottke.org brought that quote to mind. I like to think that I'm smart. But when I heard the amazing story about the remains of tiny humans discovered on an Indonesian island, and the fact that Homo floresiensis likely coexisted with Homo sapiens for thousands of years, I never once thought about Creationists.

I once had to listen to my Chassidic brother-in-law try to explain away the fossil evidence of dinosaurs as the result of evil breeding experiments between horses and giraffes or somesuch nonsense. For the truly religious, dinosaurs can't have existed. After all, God wrote the bible. And God knows everything, since he created it all. So how could he have left out something as big as dinosaurs?

And now we have little humanoids coexisting with primitive Man. How can a literal interpretation of the bible explain that one? Another species of man overlapping in time with us? How could God have neglected to mention that little development?

There's an old saying: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. And with all the reports of dirty tricks being perpetrated on Democratic candidates and voters this campaign, it is perhaps understandable to look for patterns of nefarious behavior in what would otherwise be innocuous events.

Like today, when my mail included a letter from the County Registrar of Voters. My first thought was that somebody had decided that I was ineligible to vote. Paranoid, right? I've been a registered voter here for more than fifteen years. So I opened the letter to discover that my polling place had been moved. No big deal; one nearby location is just as good as another.

Except that I can't help wondering if a change like this would confuse some voters and perhaps cause a few to miss their chance to cast their ballots. Especially coming just three days before the election. But I reassure myself that it's no big deal. Besides, all the polls agree that California isn't a battleground in this election. And not every incident is caused by the malevolent hand of Karl Rove.

Am I being too paranoid? Or am I not being paranoid enough?

Update 11/02: And sometimes paranoia is just paranoia. Turns out that the county has been saving money these past few elections by combining two precincts into one polling location. And they guessed that it might be a problem this time around, what with George W.'s efforts to bring us all together. So they decided at the last minute to give us our own polling place. And everything seems to have gone smoothly, aside from the few folks who went from their right place to the wrong one, only to be sent back to the right one.

From Wonkette comes a link to proof, assuming we needed it, that Ralph Nader is playing with less than a full deck, that he's a few fries short of a Happy Meal, that his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor, that his marbles are glassies, <insert your favorite "he's nutso" cliche here>. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, For only $20 you can buy a DVD of Ralph debating the two major party presidential candidates. Well, not the candidates themselves. But the next best thing, at least if you're Ralph: Kerry and Bush action figures.

Yes, it's true. Ralph Nader debates with plastic dolls. Are you frightened yet?

The camera store that sold me my Nikon D70 digital SLR sponsored a presentation last night by a couple of Nikon reps. Most of it wasn't news, although they had some nice images to illustrate the points they made about different camera modes and settings. But I sat up and took notice when they started talking about flash units and all the amazing things you can do with remotely controlled flashes (or speedlights, as Nikon's manuals like to call them).

Turns out the SB-600 flash I'd bought for the D70 has capabilities I didn't pick up from the manual or either of the ebooks I'd bought. I can use the built-in flash as a controller for one or more flash units, which will coordinate back with the camera to get the exposure just right. Combine multiple flashes with gel filters and you can get awfully creative. Can't wait to try this stuff out!

I was also intrigued to hear about some all day seminars that Nikon offers around the country through their Nikon School. Including one in Fremont next weekend. Fortunately, they still had room for one more.

Wired covers a story I first saw on Slashdot two months ago (before I started this blog) regarding brain differences between Republicans and Democrats. If these results are to be believed, there's a measurable difference in empathy and the reaction to specific kinds of events. It would certainly explain a lot.

And this time it's not a scam to get me to forward the message to everyone I know, 'cause Bill Gates is dying to part with some of his billions. No, this comes right from the shaved gorilla himself. A 2000+ word missive from Steve Ballmer called "Customer focus: comparing Windows with Linux and UNIX", it's Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to convince the world that Linux isn't really cheaper or more reliable or less prone to attack or just generally better than Brand M. I don't know which I find more offensive, that Steve is using questionable studies and anecdotal evidence to protect his monopoly, or the fact that he's spamming the world to deliver the message. Because I sure as hell didn't give him my email address for crap like this. Reports of patch releases for Office for the Mac, the only Microsoft product I use, sure. But I draw the line at anti-Linux propaganda. Besides, even Microsoft themselves are capable of a more nuanced OS comparison.

Take a look at this.

Update 11/01: Suddenly it's not so funny any more. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, there are all kinds of plans in place to support a draft. Guess those stories about the administration lowballing the troop requirements in the run up to the war were accurate after all.

...then why can't our president have his own custom-design iPod?

I run this other blog. It's a nice little blog. Nothing fancy, just some music I found on the iTunes Music Store that I feel like writing about. Mostly it's good music, stuff I enjoy and you might like if you gave it a listen. Occasionally it's not so good; it just reminded me of something funny or tragic or otherwise worthy of note. But whichever it is, I like to think of it as a sort of public service.

Which makes me wonder what possessed somebody to create this. What we have here is what the iTMS calls an iMix. It's a playlist somebody made that they just had to share. There are thousands of 'em on the iTMS. Some are good, others are obvious. But this one, this one is inspired. Its creator went looking for every truly awful recording he (it just has to be a he) could find, all so he could share them with the world.

Some tracks are just plain bad, like anything done by William Hung. Then there are uninspired covers of songs that deserve better by artists who should have known better. (Picture Mel Tormé singing Happy Together. Or Fiona Apple on Frosty the Snowman. Better yet, don't.) Others are just plain weird, like California's Governator leading you through a workout routine to It's Raining Men. Amazing.

There's an embarrassment of riches here: 161 tracks at the latest count. And every one guaranteed to bring a tear to various bodily orifices.

God, I am so jealous.

Update: Great minds think (sort of) alike. Mere moments after posting the above, my RSS newsreader came across this.

Amazing, simply amazing. California's Secretary of State had to win in federal court to get us all the right to paper ballots this election year. There are plenty of reasons to fear electronic ballots: the lack of a paper trail, Diebold's incompetence, their heavy support for the Bush team. So having the ability to avoid electronic voting machines is a big deal. And we have that right.

Except... It turns out that several counties (including my own Santa Clara) have told poll workers not to tell voters their rights. They have to make paper ballots available. They just can't tell us about the option unless we ask first.

If you're in California, know your rights. Point your friends at paperorplastic2004.org. If Bush's people are going to steal yet another election, let's make 'em work for it.

Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest "because it's there." Other people see great challenges where the rest of us see really stupid ideas. But aren't we glad there are those people to do the really stupid things so we can read about them?

A while back I read about somebody who used Mac OS X's built-in RAID support to create a RAID filesystem across a stack of floppy disk drives. RAID is designed to spread a directory across a bunch of disk drives, for performance or failure resistance or both. Let's just say that doing it with floppies is as silly as it is brave.

But as impressive as that stunt was, it ain't nuthin' compared to getting Mac OS X running on a Centris 650. I had one of these, a 25MHz Motorola 68040 with less main memory than my PowerBook's video card. And wholly incapable of running the PowerPC-only OS X. Then how did an Australian adventurer pull off the miracle of getting it to work? Emulation! First, get a copy of Debian Linux, which can be made to run on a 68040. Then install a copy of PearPC, a PowerPC emulator, on top. Ignore the fact that Linux runs like a pig on such a slow processor with such a tiny memory space. And further ignore the fact that PearPC runs more than ten times slower than the native operating system on any computer. And you get a running Mac OS X on a Centris. But slow? Boy howdy!

Here's just how slow: The system was booted today at 9PM local time. An hour and a half later, the Apple logo appeared. Expectations are that the Dock will be up and running by the same time next week. I can't wait to hear about the performance running Word!

(A vote of thanks to As The Apple Turns for this story. This is just the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to their site.)

While various of my colleagues agonize over the fate of the Red Sox, one particularly cliche-prone individual muttering darkly about the Curse of the Bambino, I think this guy has the right attitude about the whole deal. Thanks to Joho the Blog for the pointer.

A few weeks ago I was going over my web logs, looking for interesting behavior. I do this most every night, curious about how people find out about my site and which parts interest them. A link from a web forum got my attention, so I followed it to see where it led. It was a pretty nasty comment on my Farscape music videos (available here). Not about the videos per se, but about the weirdness of anybody wasting their time making such things.

I'm not going to defend the idea of fan videos; either you enjoy them or you don't. And anyway, hobbies are things you do for yourself, not for others. But I kind of wonder what that poster would think of my other current hobby: the creation of cloisonne pins for other Farscape fans. I recently got pin #4, a gold plated version of a Farscape communicator badge. And suddenly a peculiar fan activity has turned into something different. Hoky smokes, Bullwinkle! I'm a jewelry designer!

Well, sorta kinda. But the point is that for me, the best hobbies teach you something. My videos and these pins suggest talents I never would have imagined, much less found. And aside from one forum post, people seem to agree.

Suddenly I don't feel quite so old.

From Talking Points Memo we get a story the Bush Administration has been keeping secret for more than a year, that 350 tons of high explosives that were under seal before we invaded Iraq has gone missing. This is most likely what has been used to kill American troops and Iraqis since that ill fated Mission Accomplished banner went up. It doesn't take an expert on the military to suggest that this stuff should have been a top priority for our military. Or that Rumsfeld's insistence on minimal troop strength for the invasion and the occupation was a factor in this disaster.

Karl Rove has been planning an October Surprise for this campaign. But somehow I don't think this was it.

Update 10/28: This story gets more and more interesting, as the administration tries denial after denial, only to be shot down. Their claim that the explosives were stolen before the American arrival was shaky before. But these pictures taken by an ABC news crew would seem to pound a final nail in that particular attempt to avoid responsibility. Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer.

I just came from the first political event of my not very young life. It was a rally in support of John Kerry, which won't come as a surprise if you've read anything else on this blog. But it was still a most unusual event, a grass roots activity in the finest sense. The event was a Silicon Valley instance of parties going on all over the country, sponsored by fans of Buffy creator Joss Whedon. Joss himself was at the Los Angeles party, which is where I'd have been if I'd had any brains or forethought. And Joss was joined by cast members from Buffy, Angel and Firefly, all of whom believe that this election isn't about more of the same. It's about good vs. evil, about taking America back from those determined in their greed, their arrogance and their stupidity to ruin what we each hold most dear. Hearing Joss answer questions from far-flung attendees (gotta love the Internet) and relate them to both his shows and the election, it's hard to see our November 2nd choice as anything but a battle for the soul of a nation. Joss didn't put it quite that way. Well, actually he did. He was just a whole lot wittier and more articulate about it.

If there was any doubt that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is an intelligent program with an intelligent audience, this afternoon's rally would have dispelled it in an instant. My thanks to the organizers for giving me an afternoon that was both fun and meaningful. And come Election Day, we'll fight the good fight.

A while back, I read that Microsoft had won a major battle for the hearts and minds, not to say wallets, of future video consumers. The people behind blue lasers and other standards for high definition video devices chose WMV9 over MPEG-4 as the codec for HD DVDs and other devices in support of HTDV. That's a major loss for Apple and the other members of the consortium behind MPEG-4. And for anybody who believes that Microsoft has way too much power already.

But wait! What's this? According to Slashdot, Microsoft misrepresented the state of its technology, its code, its test suite and the availability of a reference implementation. There's a lot less there than they claimed. And the people behind the standard are reevaluating. Looks like reports of its victory may have been a wee bit premature.

Last night my DSL service up and died. I'd been having regular disconnects for a few weeks, so I assumed that whatever was flaky had finally decided to flake off. And perhaps I should have pursued the problem before it went pear shaped (a British expression I much prefer to crapped out, although both apply). But never mind that; it was time to enter the circle of hell known as Customer Support.

I started with Earthlink's online chat, which was probably a mistake. They assume it's my fault, despite my telling them that:

1. I've tried connecting with two different computers, both with and without a router.
2. It was all working until last night.
3. I haven't changed any hardware or software.
4. Yes, I've tried power cycling the modem. Several times.
5. I've swapped cables, disconnected the phone on the DSL line and tried out all the other stalling tactics they could come up with.

Then they told me to talk to my DSL provider. "You're my DSL provider," I explained. "Then talk to your phone company about the line." "Covad did that. I've never dealt with the phone company about the DSL connection and wouldn't know where to start".

That got them to point me at their phone line, who could give me a contact at Covad. So I spent a pleasant half hour on the phone with another customer service rep, presumably in a cheaper part of the world (nice accent, I thought) who took me through all the usual steps before accepting that the problem likely wasn't at my end. She sent a trouble ticket to Covad and forwarded my call there. Where, after a few minutes of light classics hold music, I talked to somebody who put in a request to check the lines and figure out what's really going on.

As I write this I've only been DSL-less for 24 hours. And if I'm very lucky they'll track down the problem before I get up tomorrow morning. If not, I expect I'll spend some quality time in the office this weekend. Because whatever else I think of the place, their networking sure beats the hell out of dialup.

Update: It's the following morning. A chat with Covad later, they ran a test and discovered that their DLSAN card (whatever that might be) was misbehaving. They issued a reset and suddenly I'm back from the mid-20th century, technology-wise. Most excellent!

Courtesy of Backup Brain, Rolling Stone has a classic piece of political commentary from the original gonzo journalist, the one and only Hunter S. Thompson. Read it for yourself; it's savagely funny and funnily savage.

Not safe for work, this may be the cleverest political satire yet. Check out the video commercials for the services at LiveGirls.com. They know how to say and do just what you want. They'll satisfy every one of your sick and twisted fantasies. Just don't ask about the cost.

Salon reports on the latest utterance by George "Shecky" Bush:

Earlier today, Michelle Goldberg told us how a good lot of the president's supporters seem to be a little truth-challenged. It turns out they're not so hot with humor, either. At a Victory 2004 rally in Mason City, Iowa, Wednesday, the President of the United States apparently got a good laugh out of the party faithful with this sharp one liner:

"I'm also proud to be working with your United States Senator, Charles Grassley," Bush said. "I saw him the other day in Cedar Rapids. I took him aside and I said, 'Listen, the South Lawn at the White House has got a lot of grass.'"

Gee, George, that's a real knee-slapper. But maybe you shouldn't give up your day job quite yet.

According to a study of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which I discovered in an article on Salon, the majority of Republicans hold mistaken notions about more than Iraq's WMDs and their connection to al Qaida. By and large, they also have inaccurate beliefs about world opinion of American actions, as well as the positions of their own president. The study found that 72% believe Bush supports the banning of land mines (he doesn't), 69% believe he supports the Test Ban Treaty (he doesn't) and 74% think he wants labor and environmental standards to be considered as part of trade agreements (ditto).

Which ought to make you wonder how many people support the president because they don't know anything about him.

Thanks to Boing Boing for noting that Godzilla is finally getting the recognition he so richly deserves: his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And who deserves it more? Rampaging through Tokyo all those years is hard work!

Okay, it's hardly front page news. And it's not even about this blog, where my posts outnumber my total readers by two to one. And that's without my having posted all that much. But it's a nice milestone to note that my iTunes blog has actually attracted a link from somewhere other than search engines and the blog directories I importuned to carry it. So thank you, Nat Pike. I appreciate the vote of confidence. Or the need to fill out the list of links on your homepage. Whichever.

The one good feature of a bad (rude, dishonest or just incompetent) customer service experience is the ability to say, even if only to yourself, that you will never, ever deal with these people again. But what do you do when the incompetence is repeated, and the purveyers of this bad service are unavoidable?

Case in point: the United States Postal Service. My local post office has run out of room. Their partial solution: divide their activity between the branch and an annex building somewhere else. And one use they make of the annex is the storage of vacation mail. So if you're away, your mail is collected at the annex. And when you return, you have to call them in advance, so they can move the mail to the branch for pickup.

That's the theory, at any rate. In practice, calling in advance actually triggers the mail transfer about two times out of three. And that third time means coming back the next day. But only after waiting patiently while they figure out that they haven't done what they promised to do. And try to suggest that you didn't actually call. And then back down when your cell phone tells them that you did in fact call the right number at the time you said.

Too bad we don't get to pick our mail delivery service. Or at least the particular branch. Hey, maybe we need a voucher system! The conservatives are always pushing this for schools. Why not for other government-provided services?

The Farscape mini is now history, at least for me. And it was everything I'd have hoped for, although if they'd stretched the story over another dozen hours I wouldn't have minded. For those of us hooked on this show, especially those of us who've been to cons and spent a little time with the cast and crew, it's a bittersweet moment. We got the conclusion we wanted to this chapter. And even if we get more Farscape, it will be different. Because Rockne O'Bannon and David Kemper, those magnificent bastards who scripted the mini, have changed everything.

I won't reveal any details, in case you haven't seen the mini; you should be as stunned as I by what happens. But for anybody who thinks we're all a little nuts for being so emotionally involved with anything as ephemeral as television, well, what is more central to humanity than storytelling? And a story told well, as this one has been, tells us about ourselves and what we hold dear. This latest (I won't call it the last) chapter closes some doors. But it leaves much unanswered and points toward all sorts of possible continuations and spinoffs. And if we can get them, I'll be there to enjoy them.

In the meantime, I'm still trying to come to terms with what we have. And I now have a new entry on my calendar, to go with the Burbank con in November and the Sydney event next April. Yes, one day after seeing the second half of the mini, we have a date for the DVD release: January 18, 2005. I can't wait. But then you knew that, didn't you?

Combining two of my favorite things: sushi and USB keychains. Tres amusant. And wouldn't they go perfectly with my Godzilla-knockoff Firewire hub!

As I write this, I'm seven hours away from part two of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, the miniseries we Scapers fought for for a year after the cancellation and then waited for over another year after the almost announcement last November. Part one rocked mightily, especially for the crowd at Seattle's Science Fiction Museum who saw a special commercial-free (as in no commercials, not as in commercials we didn't have to pay for) presentation. Hope you all were watching, as were all of your Nielsen family friends.

I'm in Seattle this weekend, attending a fan convention. And after day one, I'm reminded of why I don't do conventions. Aside from Farscape cons, which I believe are different in a fundamental way.

Cons are put on by fans. And the word fan derives from fanatic, which you would certainly have to be to put in the effort required to get a convention going. If a con has been going on for a long time (this one is the 17th iteration), it can develop an insularity from inbreeding. Not literally, as in the "Isn't it a shame when cousins marry?" sense, but a social version of the same thing. Where everything is about in jokes, and the ostensible theme of the con is taken less and less seriously, presumably because the regulars are bored with the same old thing year after year.

Which is their right, certainly. But as a newbie to this particular con, it makes me feel unwelcome, an outsider. The con is for insiders, those in the community. And any outsiders who show up will either adapt or withdraw.

What brings this all home to me is that my experience with Farscape fans has been almost entirely the opposite. My one experience with a fan-run Farscape con was great fun, despite the fact that I didn't know a soul when I arrived and despite the fact that most of the attendees knew each other either from previous incarnations of that con or from Farscape-oriented message boards. Not only did people treat me like one of them, despite my appalling lack of a proper "handle" (a nickname used on web forums, which is neither required nor used to provide anonymity), but as soon as they discovered that I was new, I was put into the care of the official Welcome Wagon, who made sure I knew what was going on and had every chance to participate in whatever interested me.

It's the same on the web forums, which I joined immediately after that con. Someone new shows up and they're immediately welcomed. Inside jokes are explained. And although you have to have some knowledge of Farscape to understand the discussion, there isn't condescension toward the less knowledgeable. And contrary opinions, aside from outright hostility to the show, are generally welcome and at least tolerated with good humor.

Which makes Scapers unique among both physical and virtual communities. This weekend's con is, I feel, a microcosm of society, a community that defines itself by an implicit insider/outsider dichotomy. Farscape fans are infinitely inclusive. And that may explain how the post-cancellation fan activity has not just continued, but has grown in both size and intensity. Scapers like to share.

Wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that...

I have more than ten reasons myself, but this article at teevee.org makes a pretty good case for why you really, really ought to give Farscape a try. Too late to convince you to turn in to the miniseries, maybe it'll get somebody to go looking for the DVDs or catch a rerun on Sci Fi. You'll want to thank me. And then you'll want to curse me for your brand new addiction.

Just got back from Seattle's Science Fiction Museum, former Microsoft founder Paul Allen's effort to show off his collection and his obsession. A seriously cool place, albeit one you can knock off in an hour or so. Sadly, they don't permit photography inside, or I'd be able to share some of what I saw. But there are tributes to SF in written, small screen and big screen form, with props and recreations from dozens of memorable characters. Well worth a visit if you're in the area.

I was admiring a colleague's Nikon D70 the other day. Not because of the camera, since I already have one of my own. No, it was the lens that got my attention, a 24-120mm zoom lens with vibration reduction that's not much bigger than the 17-70mm that came with my camera. So I went on the web to check prices.

My first stop, as usual, was CNET's price comparison site. My search for "Nikon lens 24-120" didn't find any matches. But what it did find was a series of sponsored ads for exactly the lens I was looking for. The first was for Express Cameras, an outfit I'd not heard of before. But there's no harm in looking, right? And their price was amazing, a hundred dollars cheaper than I'd seen anywhere else.

Which should have warned me that something was off, right? In fact, it did warn me. But what totally shocked me was what appeared below the blurb on the lens, among the recommended accessories: prices that are simply outrageous! A UV filter for $100! (Ritz has one for $30.) A polarizer for $160. (Ditto.) And the list goes on.

Is this bait and switch? If I tried to order the lens without the expensive extras, would they suddenly be out of stock? (That one's been tried on me before.) Is there a reason why I go back to vendors with lots of positive user comments? (That question is rhetorical.)

Warning: not for the easily offended:

A blogger provides photograph evidence that somebody at Kellogg's has more on their minds than good nutrition. To wit: an electric toothbrush for kids found in Canadian boxes of Rice Krispies. Take away the brush head, look at it from the right angle and think about the vibratory power of the toothbrushy motor...

(Hey, if Everwood can build an episode around one of these things, why can't I?)

The Macintosh news sites have been full of reports about a Mac emulator for PCs CherryOS. Reports is too strong a word, since there's little to report beyond the claims of the company (their website is here). And those claims are producing large and, in my humble opinion, entirely justified amounts of skepticism. A Mac emulator that runs at 80% the performance of the real thing? That supports a wide range of PC peripherals? Does it come with a Holy Grail too?

The most skeptical writeup I've seen so far is at Jack Whispers, where the author suggests that emulators are the next get rich quick scheme. He has an interesting take on the business models of Windows emulator firms Connectix (Virtual PC) and Insignia Solutions (SoftWindows).

As for CherryOS, it sure has the odor of scam about it. Is it really just an attempt to bilk anybody foolish enough to pay $50 for a test drive? Or is there something there?

A review of Going Upriver, the documentary about John Kerry's time in Vietnam, by somebody who was there. Read it and try not to be moved.

Interesting ongoing thread at Talking Points Memo about Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to run an anti-Kerry film on its television stations right before the election. Sinclair's website lists regular advertisers for its stations. And web citizens (webizens?) have been contacting some of these local advertisers to express their concern about Sinclair's wholly partisan and inappropriate actions. What I find interesting is that for many of the advertisers, this is the first they'd heard about it. And most of them are not happy. They're after customers, not controversy. And the advertisers are just as likely as not to be Kerry supporters.

Kick Sinclair where they live: in the wallet!

A few years back, eBay had a major IT disaster when one of their Sun servers failed and took the whole auction system with it. Lots of noise in the papers and on the web about it, about the causes of the problem (as I recall, an unpatched Oracle bug) and eBay's lack of a fault tolerant architecture (which was planned for installation, albeit just a little too late for this particular failure).

And yet... yesterday saw a similar class of failure at eBay's Paypal subsidiary. For most of yesterday Paypal was inaccessible, returning errors if it responded at all. And not a word in any of the instant media at my disposal. I was worried that it was my personal account that was failing, rather than a more general problem with their service. At least until things came back. And then later I saw a piece on Slashdot reporting the failure.

Which is quite a surprise. Given Paypal's preeminent role in web commerce, how did the problems go unnoticed or at least unreported for so long? Granted, big sites don't use Paypal for their transactions. But lots of little sites do. And what of all those eBayers who suddenly had no way to pay for their purchases? Why was it all so quiet?

Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here.

Courtesy of Lawrence Lessig's blog, some more presidential debate fun.

From PBS by way of Slashdot: Robert X. Cringely's latest column talks about recently released documents from Burst's lawsuit against Microsoft. And the story they tell of Microsoft's deceptions go beyond the usual "I answered the question you asked, not the one you meant to ask" legal games. Fascinating stuff if true.

Like every other genre, science fiction has its standard plots. And one that's been used to death is the time travel/fouling up the timeline story. The original Star Trek used it in Harlan Ellison's famous The City On The Edge Of Forever, where Captain Kirk has to let depression angel Joan Collins get run over by a car to keep the Nazis from winning the war. Farscape used it in an episode called Different Destinations and made it new by not letting our heros off the hook -- turns out their actions do have consequences and their efforts to undo the damage they've caused only leads to even greater damage.

I mention this because the latest and, God willing, last incarnation of Star Trek has gone back to that hoary plot yet again. Not that I saw it; I gave up on Enterprise a year and a half ago. No, I only keep up through the offices of Television Without Pity, a website whose recaps of series episodes are far more entertaining than the shows themselves. (How much better to read about the atrocities Brenda Hampton foists on diehard 7th Heaven viewers than to have to experience them firsthand.) And the latest Enterprise recaplet makes it clear the show's writers have learned nothing. Yet another timeline undone by the Intergalactic Reset Button.

I'd forgotten just how much fun surfing the web can be. Like today; I wandered over to Brad Sucks to listen to some of his music. And a blog entry caught my eye; called Fans Rule, it's a pointer to a piece by Scott Andrew, another musician and blogger. Scott writes about why having people appreciate him and his music is more important than worrying about getting every last penny from file swappers/swipers. Skimming through Scott's blog after reading that piece took me to Joe Gratz's site, which quotes an absolutely brilliant End User License Agreement from Virgin Digital. And a comment on that piece led me to the equally brilliant (if not quite so over the top) policy statement for Modern Humorist. Both of which make my own site's privacy statement look pitiful by comparison.

I got an email yesterday from Magnatune, whose slogan is "We're a record label. But we're not evil." The email was a thank you for my purchases last year and an offer of a free download of any of their albums.

If you haven't tried Magnatune, you really should. They're an online music store that lets you decide how much their music is worth. Seriously, you can pay as little as $5, or more if you so choose. (50% of the price you pay goes to the artist.) They have streaming versions of all the tracks, so you can sample all you want before making a purchase. And you can get your music in as many formats as you want, including MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV and, for an extra $5, a physical CD. (They still make those?)

I hadn't been back to their site in a while; much as I like their concept, their selection is kind of obscure for my tastes. But a free download was a good inducement. And of course, I knew as soon as I started exploring that I'd just have to find something to buy. It just doesn't feel right to take the freebie and run, does it?

Yeah, like I said: I am such a patsy.

PhotographyBLOG quotes a press release from Minox on a new 4.0 megapixel digital camera. It's retro chic in a big way, at least for those of us who lusted after Minox spycams in our younger (if equally avaricious) days. The only thing I couldn't find was a price. And it's not like I need another camera; my D70 and 5050 are more than sufficient. But this looks like so much fun! I'm definitely keeping my eye out for it.

Unlike fashion, our leaders' beliefs don't change with the seasons.

An article in Salon discusses a photograph from the first presidential debate and wonders what that mysterious bulge is between the president's shoulder blades. Was George W. wired for sound, with an offscreen Edgar Bergen/Karl Rove feeding him instructions? Is the most powerful man in the world almost literally a mouthpiece?

You'll need to watch a commercial before Salon will let you read the article. But trust me; it's worth it.

Looks like we dodged a bullet this time. Boing Boing reports that Orrin Hatch cancelled plans to present the INDUCE Act to the Judiciary Committee. This is the bill that would make manufacturers liable for illegal activity on the part of those who purchase their products. Like Apple for any music on your iPod for which you can't produce a receipt. Just think: if this thing had been the Law Of The Land back in the days of the Betamax decision, we wouldn't have VCRs and the movie industry wouldn't be making half its revenue on home video.

Only a year after it was posted, I found this most excellent blog entry which explains the whos whats and whys of Farscape, my most favoritist television program ever. After you've read that posting, you can go here and read about some of my fannish activities and see all the pretty pictures.

*	Which is a much better title for this posting than Farscape For Dummies would be, since a dummy would have little chance of making sense of this show.

Footage from the Republican National Convention, edited for your viewing convenience. All the content is there, without any of that disgusting filler.

I was thinking about our current administration and their interesting way of dealing with inconvenient truths. And looking up from my desk, I saw a magnet I'd bought at the Reagan Presidential Library. They were running an exhibit of both real and fictional spy paraphernalia:

When Confronted:
1. Admit Nothing
2. Deny Everything
3. Demand Proof
4. Make Counterallegations
5. Accuse Someone Else

Makes you think.

I've been a minor participant in the Farscape fan movement and the efforts to bring the show back after its premature cancellation by Sci Fi Channel. That effort has taken some interesting turns. An amusing one involves an attempt to get Google to create a doodle in honor of the broadcast of the miniseries on October 17th and 18th. They were rewarded with a sort of form letter response:

Thank you for the Farscape logo suggestion. We really appreciate your thoughtful feedback, and we'll keep it in mind as we work to improve Google. As you may imagine, it is difficult for us to choose which events to celebrate on our site. We have a long list of events that we would like to celebrate in the coming cycles. We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage from arn to arn.

Please remember you can visit any of our doodles at http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html

Regards,
The Google Team

Any true Scaper will recognize a kindred spirit or two in those well chosen words.

I guess it's official: I'm old. Today I got my offer of membership in AARP. Not that I'm close to retirement, unless my employer stops spending Other People's Money and starts making some of its own. The worst part is that I might actually have to join; the price is low and the benefits not insubstantial.

Damn! How did this happen? I'm too young to be this old...

Gotta love the reactions to Microsoft's head weasel announcing that all the music on iPods is stolen and that nothing like that ever happens in Microsoft's world 'cause they got DRM. The Register's is my favorite, pointing out that all the p2p file sharing networks got their start, and have most of their traffic, on Windows. And that Apple has Digital Rights Management too, at least in the iTunes Music Store.

I know that lying by telling the (partial) truth is just the latest waypoint on the slippery slope of spin (sorry for the mixed metaphor). But at some point it stops being spin and turns into outright dishonesty. Besides, blaming Apple for music theft is like blaming the people who maintain sidewalks for the homeless who live on them.

I was in Fry's this weekend, looking for various techie odds and ends. And while I was there I decided to pick up a PCMCIA Compact Flash adapter to use with my new digital camera. (Digression: PCMCIA stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. It does not stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. Now back to our story.) The only one Fry's had was for Type I Compact Flash cards. I wanted one that could also handle the thicker Type II cards, since I have a couple of Microdrives and I'd like a faster way to transfer pictures than the slow but not as awful as serial USB 1.1 interface on the camera.

So off I go to eBay, to see what I can find. And once I sift out the Type I only adapters, I find just what I'm looking for. And at a great price too: $5. And it's Buy Me Now, so I don't even have to worry about getting beaten out at the last moment of an auction by a sniper. (Yeah, I've sniped too. But only out of self defense.)

Great deal, right? Especially since Fry's wanted $13 for the one they had. And I'm all ready to buy it when I notice the fine print. Shipping & handling: $10. Plus another two dollars for mandatory insurance. Plus sales tax if you're in California. (Which I am.) On the whole amount, bringing the total to $18.50 for a five dollar item.

We know what's going on, don't we? Set the price low, first to catch the unwary buyer and second to reduce eBay's cut on both the listing and the final sale. And of course, there's no way to search eBay based on what it's really going to cost. Heck, even CNet's price comparison site lets you figure out what the best deal really is.

I don't know who to be more annoyed with, the eBay'er who's trying to charge more but make it look like they're charging less, or eBay, which doesn't do more to get us a fair deal. As for me, I found somebody out of state who only wanted $5 for shipping and didn't make me buy insurance I didn't want. That's the way it ought to be.

(Gee, three postings before my first rant! That's some sort of record, isn't it?)

The website that surrounds this blog passed its ninth birthday a few weeks back. I had cause to think about that fact while I was working on my iTunes blog and trying to figure out how to get people to discover it. My site gets a fair number of hits, especially given its relatively static content. But that took both time and timing. The latter is because I discovered the Web at such an early stage, when Yahoo! was new and Google hadn't yet arrived on the scene. Getting listed in directories got some visitors. And having content about Java was enough to get lots of links, a surprising number of which persist to this day. And of course, the more people link to you, the more people want to link to you. And Google uses link popularity as one of their criteria for positioning a page in their search results.

Which leads to my initial efforts to get my other blog noticed. I put a couple of links to it in other places on my site. And then I found some blog directories and submitted my information. And waited for the hits to start rolling in. Interestingly, nearly all the hits it's had to date (as few as they are) have come from Google. Which shows how much things have changed. Back in the good old days, it could take weeks for Google to notice new content on a site and add it to their index. Now they absorb things in days if not hours. It also shows that web directories aren't the way to introduce a new blog, or at least that you need a more provocative topic than iTunes to stand out among all the other thousands of competitors for attention.

And that makes me wonder how long it'll be before anybody reads these words and how many other entries I'll write before I get an audience. Assuming one arrives in the fullness of time. Which reminds me of my father's favorite joke:

"If a man stands in a forest and his wife isn't there to hear him, is he still wrong?"

Well, it's funny the way he tells it.

As I sit here, recovering from too much champagne at a slightly late 50th birthday celebration that went on until well into this morning, I'm trying to make sense of this new blog and my total fascination with the range of information and opinion at hand. This morning's reading includes two articles that are so good that I'm giving into the "me too" tendency of bloggers to bask in reflected glory, an overly long way to hope I'm providing value by linking to my betters.

First, John Perry Barlow writes about why he's unenthusiastic about supporting John Kerry and realizes that the problem is that we elect people for all sorts of stupid reasons. But this race is too important to let personal warmth decide for us.

The second concerns the documents CBS used in its report about the president's National Guard service and the work of a Utah professor to determine what their typeface tells us about their genuineness. But it's not really about that; it's actually about how one blog went after that professor, accusing him of malfeasance. Now it appears that the University is considering libel action on the professor's behalf. Bloggers have gotten a free ride for the most part. It'll be interesting to see what happens when one has to face the fact that the First Amendment isn't absolute.

Some things seem like a good idea at the time. Like creating a blog around a specific topic like favorite music. (That wasn't a hypothetical notion. It's over here.) But it doesn't take long before you think of other things to talk about that don't fit the structure of that first blog. So here comes blog number two, where I'll write about whatever seems interesting, whenever it occurs to me. Can't wait to see how often that happens...