Disorderly Content

Posted by one of my Scaper friends, and just in time for OzScape:

Q: Does it ever get windy in Australia? I have never seen it rain on TV, how do the plants grow? (UK).
A: We import all plants fully grown and then just sit around watching them die.

Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you've been drinking.


Q: I want to walk from Perth to Sydney - can I follow the railroad tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it's only three thousand miles; take lots of water.

Q: Is it safe to run around in the bushes in Australia? (Sweden)
A: So it's true what they say about Swedes.

Q: Are there any ATMs (cash machines) in Australia? Can you send me a list of them in Brisbane, Cairns, Townsville and Hervey Bay? (UK)
A: What did your last slave die of?

Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Australia? (USA)
A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe. Aus-tra-lia is that big island in the middle of the Pacific which does not... oh forget it. Sure, the hippo racing is every tuesday night in Kings Cross. Come naked.

Q: Which direction is North in Australia? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 180 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we'll send the rest of the directions.

Q: Can I bring cutlery into Australia? (UK)
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.

Q : Can you send me the Vienna Boys' Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is...oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in Kings Cross, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.

Q: Can I wear high heels in Australia? (UK)
A: You are a British politician, right?

Q: Are there supermarkets in Sydney and is milk available all year round? (Germany)
A: No, we are a peaceful civilization of vegan hunter/gatherers. Milk is illegal.

Q: Please send a list of all doctors in Australia who can dispense rattlesnake serum. (USA)
A: Rattlesnakes live in A-meri-ca, which is where YOU come from. All Australian snakes are perfectly harmless, can be safely handled and make good pets.

Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name. It's a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA)
A: It's called a Drop Bear. They are so called because they drop out of Gum trees and eat the brains of anyone walking underneath them. You can scare them off by spraying yourself with human urine before you go out walking.

Q: Do you have perfume in Australia? (France)
A: No, WE don't stink.

Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth. Can you tell me where I can sell it in Australia? (USA)
A: Anywhere significant numbers of Americans gather.

Q: Can you tell me the regions in Tasmania where the female population is smaller than the male population? (Italy)
A: Yes, gay nightclubs.

Q: Do you celebrate Christmas in Australia? (France)
A: Only at Christmas.

Q: I was in Australia in 1969 on R+R, and I want to contact the girl I dated while I was staying in Kings Cross. Can you help? (USA)
A: Yes, and you will still have to pay her by the hour.

Q: Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA)
A: Yes, but you'll have to learn it first

As an Ammurrkun, I resemble that last remark.

I've just finished skimming the most remarkable, unputdownable and yet enormously tedious legal account I've read in many a year. Hank Mishkoff is a web designer in Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, who ran afoul of a local mall developer over a website he created to celebrate the mall they were building in his neighborhood. Some combination of corporate hubris and overzealous legal counsel got him threatened and then sued over his innocuous website and then again as he documented his legal battles. It's a story of arrogant, greedy, duplicitous and ultimately incompetent lawyers, a cautionary tale for any client who doesn't keep a close eye on their legal representation. And it's a cheer for the little guy who refuses to give up, even when his own best interest and good sense tell him to.

I'm an impulse shopper. I'll often consider a purchase decision from all sorts of angles, do research on different offerings. And then a moment arrives when I forget the research and act on the spur of the moment. Yesterday, it happened twice in rapid succession.

The trigger for this burst of consumerism is an upcoming trip to Australia to spend time with my Scaper buds and then do some touristy stuff. I've had the trip in the works for months, wondering if I was going to get grief from my employers about taking so much time off. Then the RIF Fairy took care of that concern. But I digress.

Anyway, I've been debating getting another digital camera. My Nikon D70 takes wonderful pictures, but is awfully big to carry every moment. I still have an Olympus 5050. But it's not exactly unobtrusive, even if it's a fraction the size and weight of the Nikon. So I'd been looking at smaller cameras, something a little smaller than the 5050 that I can have with me for the "just in case" moments.

As a separate issue, I've also been suffering with my new cell phone. When my AT&T-supported Panasonic died, I had to switch to Cingular. But the LG phone they gave me has been highly unreliable at home, losing signal at the most inopportune moments, like when I'm talking to a prospective employer. Besides, I was regretting not choosing a tri-band phone, so I could have service in Oz or anywhere else in the world I might end up.

Anyway, I'd just finished a rather promising interview Friday morning. It was too early for lunch, so I thought I'd kill some time at San Jose Camera. (Big mistake.) I described my plight, at which point the sales rep dropped a Pentax Optio S5i on the counter. The Optio is shockingly tiny; it was love at first sight. But I tried to be strong, so I asked about models that use the same Compact Flash memory as my Nikon. He gave me a similarly featured Canon ELPH, which under any other circumstance would qualify as lilliputian. But not compared to the Optio, which was smaller, thinner and significantly lighter. So much for my research; so much for my self-control.

Next stop was lunch, followed by a visit to the Cingular store. Where I scored myself a Motorola V551 quad-band cameraphone with way more features than any human being needs. And discovered that for just $4 a month I get the right to pay obscenely high rates to use my Cingular service from Australia. Fortunately, I plan to limit my international use to emergencies. Even better, I can cancel the international roaming in between trips. And better still is the fact that the new phone seems less prone to dropping calls.

So I have two new toys for my trip. And a heckuva credit card bill, not that that's anything new. But it sure will be nice if that promising interview turned into a promise of a job...

This morning's email included a note from my car dealer, asking me to fill out a survey about a recent service experience. So after going through all my other morning online rituals, I follow the link to the survey. But what do I see?

A catastrophic error has occured. Please copy this message in its entirety and 
submit as an attachment with a Remedy Trouble Ticket to IT for resolution. 
Error Message is: ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded
Stack Trace is :

java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded

        at oracle.jdbc.dbaccess.DBError.throwSqlException(DBError.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTIoer.processError(TTIoer.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.Oopen.receive(Oopen.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTC7Protocol.open(TTC7Protocol.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.(OracleStatement.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.(OracleStatement.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.(OraclePreparedStatement.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleCallableStatement.(OracleCallableStatement.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleCallableStatement.(OracleCallableStatement.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleConnection.privatePrepareCall(OracleConnection.java)
        at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleConnection.prepareCall(OracleConnection.java)
        at org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.WrappedConnection.prepareCall(WrappedConnection.java:356)
        at com.isky.survey.DaoAcuraSurvey.getEmailAnswer(DaoAcuraSurvey.java:37)
        at com.isky.survey.StartSurvey.execute(StartSurvey.java:75)
        at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:484)
        at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:274)
        at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1482)
        at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doGet(ActionServlet.java:507)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:237)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:157)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:214)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:104)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:520)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invokeInternal(StandardContextValve.java:198)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:152)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:104)
        at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.SecurityAssociationValve.invoke(SecurityAssociationValve.java:72)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:102)
        at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.JBossSecurityMgrRealm.invoke(JBossSecurityMgrRealm.java:275)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:102)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:520)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:137)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:104)
        at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:117)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:102)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:520)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardValveContext.invokeNext(StandardValveContext.java:104)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:520)
        at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:929)
        at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:160)
        at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:799)
        at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol.processConnection(Http11Protocol.java:705)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.TcpWorkerThread.runIt(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:577)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool.run(ThreadPool.java:683)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534)

Guess that survey'll have to wait.

From The Impulsive Buy comes a review of the iPod Shuffle. At least I think it's a review of the Shuffle; the reviewer and his friend seem a little bit distracted...

Many years ago, I was working for a computer company called Symbolics that was based in Cambridge, Mass. Heading to lunch one day, I saw a beat up car with a cardboard sign announcing "No Radio", presumably to keep car radio thieves from doing further damage to the vehicle. "Wouldn't it be fun", I enquired of my colleagues, "to break in and install one?"

I was reminded of this by a report on Gridskipper about a British street artist named Bansky who's been having fun sneaking into art museums and adding his work to the collections. His latest attacks are in my old home town, New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art have discovered his efforts and removed the evidence. At the time of the posting, the Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Natural History, a childhood favorite of mine, haven't noticed. Or maybe they just like it.

In all the noise over the Terry Schiavo case, one aspect has mostly been ignored: polls that show that most Americans agree with the husband's decision and believe that Congress and the President were wrong to try to overrule him and the Florida courts. But even when those polls are reported, they are distorted beyond recognition.

Take the poll at right, which appeared on CNN's website. (Click to see a higher resolution version.) Although factually accurate, a cursory glance would give the impression that Democrats are nine times as likely to agree with the state courts as Republicans and Independents. (Note the difference in bar sizes.) But in reality, the difference is only eight percentage points. And even that is suspect, since poll has a margin of error of +/- 7%.

I've always liked this saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." But in this case I have to wonder. Is this stupidity at work? Or is CNN trying to further the impression that Democrats and Republicans are worlds apart, even when they're not?

"CNN; we're like Fox, only less honest about it."

Update 03/22: Interesting. CNN has updated its graph. Maybe it was stupidity after all.

Thanks once again to Boing Boing for introducing me to the Hand Shredder, proof that the Japanese are way ahead of us in catering to small niche markets. (As if I needed proof of that.) Do they make different sizes for people with variously-sized appendages? Will it work for other protuberances than hands? Are the results covered by major medical plans?

Oh, wait! Is it possible that this is all a misunderstanding? Yet another example of Engrish in action? How disappointing if it is...

I remember some trashy book I read in elementary school where a policeman arrested our hero despite the lack of any justification. The public servant in question defended his actions by invoking Freedom of the Press. Which, he explained, included his right to press charges whenever he felt the need.

Comical nonsense, right? Maybe not. Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Murky News, quotes an article in the Raleigh News & Observer about the government wanting the right to sue those who invoke sunshine laws to find out what their public servants are doing. You'll still have the right to ask. They just want the power to threaten you into not trying.

...that somebody won't try to steal it. A favorite movie of mine is Matinee, Joe Dante's fictionalized tribute to 50s schlockmeister William Castle, here called Lawrence Woolsey. Woolsey's latest opus is the hilariously bad Mant, about a nuclear accident that turns a man into a giant ant. "He's half man/half ant! He's... Mant!"

Now flash forward ten years to the latest from The Sci Fi Channel. It's Mansquito, about a half man/half...

Co I really need to finish this one? I didn't think so.

The world is full of wonderful products that do amazing things, often in violation of the laws of physics (and, one would hope, the laws of the State of California). I get a kick out of the pseudoscientific explanations for how these amazing inventions can do what common sense should tell us is impossible; theirs is some of the most creative writing on the planet.

But I love the spoilsports even more. Like Daniel Rutter of Dan's Data, who devotes way too much time and energy to something called the Batterylife Activator, a magical sticker that somehow restores health and wellbeing to out of shape Lithium Ion batteries. Dan describes in excruciating detail how this miracle product is supposed to work, although with rather more sarcasm than one would expect from a truly objective evaluator, his testing methodology and the results of the test.

I am, I hope, not giving away the last page of the mystery if I suggest that the Activator has all the characteristics of a classic product scam, complete with testimonials by major corporations and universities, although never with enough detail to verify same. Although the fact that I place this one in scams rather than tech may have already given away the surprise ending.

Thanks to Slashdot for pointing out that we're only a few hours from a Unix time of 1111111111. We'll reach this milestone at 5:58 PM and 31 seconds Pacific time. For you non-techies, Unix and workalike systems like Mac OS X record time as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1969 at midnight GMT. You can see for yourself in a terminal window like this:

$ date +%s
1111087273

By the way, we'll never make it to 2222222222; the 32-bit time value will overflow in January of 2038. Ohmygosh! It's Y2K all over again!

Update 03/17: The date overflow situation is a little bit more complicated than I described above. In FreeBSD and Mac OS X and, I assume, other current systems, the time in seconds since 1/1/69 is now stored as a long (64-bit) integer, so it won't overflow in 2038. However, various parts of the system don't yet accomodate 64-bit time values. For example, an attempt to set the date on my Mac beyond 2038 gets rejected out of hand. And the following Perl code, which prints the date equivalent to 2222222222, shows that it's still treating the number as a signed 32-bit value:

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime 2222222222, "\n"'
Tue Apr 26 13:28:46 1904

The good news is that we have three more decades to get the rest of this stuff straightened out before everything breaks.

Not quite as stylish as the ones on Star Trek or Farscape, but pretty cool nonetheless, Gizmodo reports that Siemens has built a wearable communicator that can recognize and respond to thousands of individual words (which, given the German ability to express entire paragraphs in a single word, means it can probably interpret both the Bible and Gone With The Wind). Primary function is home control: turning on lights, opening the pod bay garage door, that sort of thing. But can "arm photon torpedoes!" or "commence Starburst!" be far behind?

I was in Tower Records today, looking through the DVDs for anything new that I just can't resist. Which mostly involves the displays at the ends of the aisles, where the new releases go. At the far right they have their topical display, when there's a topic that's... well... topical. Today it was St. Patrick's Day, so all the discs were Irish in some way or another. The Quiet Man. The Matchmaker. Waking Ned Devine. The Secret of Roan Inish. Ronin. Some PBS special about the music or culture or something...

Wait a second. Ronin? De Niro and Jean Reno doing car chases in the south of France? Everybody after everybody else about a MacGuffinesque briefcase that doesn't really matter in the first place? All kinds of talk about noble Japanese warrior traditions, although none such actually appear in the film?

Oh, wait. Yeah, now that I think of it, Jonathan Pryce and Natascha McElhone were doing Irish accents. They were supposed to be IRA, weren't they? Not much of a connection to St. Pat's Day, thinks I.

And the Japanese warrior thing? Must be some kind of metaphor. Deep.

Just a few days ago, the blogosphere was hip deep in stories about AOL's terms of service for its AIM instant message service, upon which Apple's iChat also relies. It seems AOL claims ownership of, and full rights to use, anything you say or do that passes through AIM. Bloggers were properly up in arms about this corporate land grab. Which AOL denied in due course, claiming that the terms in question applied (or at least were meant to apply) only to public forums, never to private conversations.

Which they thought would be the end of that, showing how little they understand blogworld. The hue and cry just got louder; you may claim those are the terms, but the terms themselves say otherwise. And so AOL did what they should have done all along: rewrote the terms of service to claim ownership only of what's said in public forums.

And there was much rejoicing.

Speaking of photography, which I was doing in my last entry, I've been investigating stock photo sites as a way of turning yet another hobby into a quest for filthy lucre. There are a bunch of sites that let you offer your pictures to businesses willing to pay big bucks for the chance to use your out of focus holiday snaps for their corporate brochures. Okay, I'm lying. At least my own experience suggests I am.

I've signed up with two such sites: iStockphoto.com and Shutterstock. Both have strict requirements as to image quality and ownership rights, including potential trademark and other intellectual property violations. Both review every photograph submitted for acceptability. And both pay small amounts for every download.

I've only submitted a small handful of images so far. And although it's too early to gauge either site, I have a slightly better feeling about Shutterstock. If you might be interested in offering your own photos, use this link to visit them; if you sign up, I'll get a small referral bonus on whatever you manage to sell. Or follow this link If you're looking for stock photos for your website or brochures or whatever. My own gallery is available here; I'll be adding to it a little at a time. And if you download one of my pictures, I'll soon be able to buy that can of Diet Coke I've always wanted...

Update 03/23: It took some doing; iStockphoto certainly doesn't make it easy. But if you're curious, you can find the photos I've uploaded at http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&userID=367272.

Yes, it's true; on rare occasion, sunshine and blue skies do come to San Francisco. Today was such a day. And even better, I found the perfect spot to get pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. Which I'm sure every other resident of and visitor to the City by the Bay(TM) already knows. But never mind about that. Suffice it to say that I found parking at that not so secret spot and took some okay pictures. They're in my flickr gallery if you're interested. Heck, they're there even if you aren't.

With all the noise over Star Trek: Enterprise, its demise and fan hostility to Berman and Braga for wasting all that Trekkie goodwill, you have to love the folks behind Star Trek: New Voyages. New Voyages is an effort to recreate the ambience of the original series, giving us new episodes of Kirk, Spock and the gang with a new cast and modern visuals, but that 60s sensibility we (mostly) remember so fondly. It's an amateur effort; all those trademarks are used without Paramount's permission. And it's amateurish, in both the worst and best senses of the word.

Episode two is now available on newsgroups and through the use of BitTorrent. If you're late to the series, as I was, you can go digging through the alt.binaries.startrek newsgroup for episode one. Or you can get yourself a BitTorrent client (I've found that Tomato Torrent works really well on my Mac) and start downloading a 3.6 GB DVD image using this .torrent file. It'll take a long time to download even with broadband. But trust me; it'll be worth it. Just try to watch without getting a goofy smile on your face!

London's Underground is one of the world's great subway systems. And its route map is a thing of beauty, with each line laid out in clear relation to all the others. There's only one small problem with this map: it doesn't map to reality. Stations that look close on the map often aren't; distant ones are often closer than close ones.

Now those wonderful folks responsible for the Tube have taken the problem in hand. A Flash presentation called The Real Underground Map lets you compare the version Londoners and visitors know and love to both the 1933 original map and a geographically accurate version with optional street map. The warping from one version to another is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Sure wish I'd had the Real version on my London trips. Then again, I learned long ago to rely on street level maps, rather than the Underground map, for the station nearest my destination.

First it was the Mac press, writing in horror as Apple Computer went after the publisher of Think Secret over reports they ran on an unannounced product. Apple wants to force Think Secret to reveal the source of the information; Think Secret is claiming the right as journalists to withhold the names. And what's started as the Mac press has expanded into some mainstream press.

Which makes this article at Daring Fireball a breath of fresh air. Both Think Secret and others have used the straw man argument that Apple is only trying to intimidate a small publisher with limited resources, that they'd never try it against a mainstream publication with its own legal team. They seem to believe that the First Amendment and the right of the people to know are absolute.

But the Daring Fireball article questions both premises. Apple wouldn't go after a major news organization because most such organizations would know better than to run such a story. This isn't the case of a whistle blower reporting corporate malfeasance. It's an employee violating Apple's confidentiality rules just to show off. And having spent a little time at Apple, I can tell you that the company takes its image and its secrets very seriously. I wouldn't want to be that employee. Nor would I want to be any news organization, large or small, that stands in the way.

One can argue that divulging the product in question isn't a big deal, that it was a niche product that wouldn't interest all that many people. But we don't get to make that decision; Apple does. And they may indeed be looking to make an example, to send a message to other loose-lipped employees. That too is their right.

My feeling is that sites like Think Secret want it both ways: to be informal and not subject to the rules of professional journalism, while at the same time expecting that arguments about the public's right to know and the rights of a free press apply. I think that's naive. More to the point, it's a disservice both to journalism and to blogging.

I am using the title of this posting as an analogy, and not just a cheap trick to get more Google traffic to this blog. Although...

A couple of nights ago during my regular scan of my web logs, I was surprised to discover a couple of hits on one of my lesser pages, lesser both in terms of the quality of its content and the number of hits it receives. The page lists the various jobs I've had in a long and not entirely illustrious career, information which is generally of interest only to me. These new visitors were referred by Google, itself not surprising. But the search string was, including as it did the name of a company where I was employed until recently, followed by the word "layoff". Two things about this were interesting: first, that I had written nothing about any layoff that might or might not have happened; and second, that all the hits were from ISPs or sites in one particular state.

Turns out Google had noticed my use of "layoff" in reference to my experience at Apple; the juxtaposition of that paragraph with one about my later employer was a coincidence, one that made my page the first result for their search. The regional connection is less surprising, since that employer had a significant presence there. (I use the word "had" to represent my own lack of knowledge, since I am no longer in a position to know what kind of presence they have in their various locations.)

Anyway, this little incident reminded me of how the accidental use of words or phrases can take on a different meaning when Google gets involved. Like all the poor disappointed people who found my Farscape convention page by looking for the phrase "Claudia Black nude", only to discover mention of a nude scene which actually involved a different actress. And no, the page doesn't have any photographic evidence of that either.

At an alumni event in San Francisco yesterday for my college, I showed my advanced age by mentioning that my Computer Science education predated the personal computer. That's one of the things I like about the field, that so many developments have taken place within my own lifetime.

Including MP3s. According to this article at Business 2.0, which I discovered via Google Blogoscoped, we have Karlheinz Brandenburg and Suzanne Vega to thank for the ubiquitous music file format. Brandenburg for all his work on the lossy compression algorithm that lets an MP3 hold music that takes ten times the space on a CD; and Vega, because her song Tom's Diner was the one Brandenburg used to perfect that algorithm. If MP3 could compress Ms. Vega's natural a cappella performance with audio fidelity, everything else would be easy.

As a Suzanne Vega fan, I'm pleased to know her role in the digital music revolution. That makes her the Lenna Sjoblom of sound. Wonder what she thinks of it.

I don't see a lot of TV commercials. Between DVDs and my ReplayTV, I rarely watch anything broadcast in real-time. But this afternoon was an exception. And I was surprised and impressed with the honesty of this ad. The station: our local UPN affiliate. The product: tomorrow afternoon's broadcast of Mariah Carey's less than stellar performance in Glitter, a film the on-air announcer describes as so bad, it makes Gigli look like Gone With The Wind. He then compounds this fouling of our airwaves by announcing that Glitter will be shown without commercial interruption, as if that's a good thing. And then the piece de resistance: the broadcast is sponsored by something called Options Made Easy, which I assume is one of those seminar series for the terminally gullible.

Then again, who else would waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon watching this crap?

When I was very young¹, television had its first crude brush with interactive entertainment. The show was called Winky-Dink and You, and it involved a plastic cover for the TV screen and a set of special markers. On command, you were supposed to draw in some missing object to help Winky-Dink on his adventures. One can only imagine all the crayon marks and permanent marker scrawls parents had to clean from the family set in households without the official kit.

I mention this because of a posting on Boing Boing about a new experiment in interactive television. The program: Battlestar Galactica. The technology: podcasting. The idea is that you download an MP3 of executive producer Ron Moore doing commentary on the latest episode and then play the file while watching the show. There will be a visual cue to tell you when to start the commentary and audio signals to pause for commercials.

Like Winky-Dink, it's kind of a cool idea with a cumbersome implementation. Somewhere, Rube Goldberg must be smiling.

1. Actually, I was so young I was in negative numbers. According to IMDB, Winky-Dink went on the air a year before I was born.

Yeah, I know; I'm shocked too. But it appears to be true: Boing Boing reports on threats made by Creators Syndicate, which foists O'Reilly's newspaper columns on the world, against News Hounds (subtitle: We watch FOX so you don't have to). Their offense: linking to one of O'Reilly's columns. Which isn't a crime, at least according to Professor Lessig and the court's decision in the Ticketmaster case. So, very much like Tom Petty, News Hounds won't back down.

We'll see what Creators does next. Will they go after everybody who's now liking to an O'Reilly article because of their threats? Will they notice my link above? Should I expect a call from their jackbooted minions?

Ah well, it's always nice to be noticed.

Update 03/06: Professor Lessig provides his own take on the story. Which makes me wonder: is this bullying by copyright a new tactic? Or was it ever thus?

I don't remember when I discovered Meetup, but I know it was a long, long time ago. Might have heard about it in connection with my ongoing Farscape fixation. Not that it did any good; in all the time I was a member, nobody ever managed a Farscape Meetup here in the Heart of Technology. Eventually I got tired of the monthly reminders about the lack of Scaper interest in Meetups, or Meetup-er interest in Farscape. Or whatever.

And then I started blogging. And some mention somewhere got me thinking about Meetup again. Which led to the discovery that there are blogger Meetups. And those actually happen! Twice a month, if you can believe it. And even better, they'll even indulge me and talk about Farscape a little if I ask nicely.

So this is a shoutout to the other blogging Meetup-ers, or Meetup-ing bloggers. (Or whatever.) To Elke, our steamed moderator. (We meet at coffee houses. It's sort of a joke.) And Rich and Courtney. And Fling, who isn't really called Fling. Except in places like this, of course.

Okay, it's not really official. But it's certainly entertaining, in a "power of the masses" sort of way. According to the Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter, which periodically checks AltaVista for the phrase "<your favorite OS> sucks" or "rocks" or "rules", Windows shows an 18:1 "sucks:rocks" ratio. Linux fares rather better, although still in negative territory, with 6:5 against. Mac OS X is 2:1 positive, while Mac OS with no version is 7:1.

The people have spoken! Too bad nobody's listening.

(Oh, and thanks to Google Blogoscoped for pointing this one out.)

Most of the Mac sites have reported the news that Jef Raskin, father and namer of the Macintosh, has died of pancreatic cancer. Although the Mac wasn't and isn't what Jef envisioned (he was more interested in the computer as dedicated appliance, like an easier-to-use Wang word processor), there's no denying his foresight, his dedication and his genius. Strangely enough, the best tribute to Raskin I've seen is at As The Apple Turns, strange because these guys are rarely serious. And even in memorializing the original MacDaddy, they aren't solemn. Which may be why I like it so much. Because as much as a curmudgeon as Raskin could be (and he was), he also had a sense of humor and a humanity that infused his technology. He will be missed.

No, not that dynamic duo. I speak of that other duo, they of the fabulous inventions and the cheese fixation. Aardman Animations has the trailer up for The Wallace & Gromit Movie: Curse of the Wererabbit. You can see it at Screenrant.com. And boy, does this look like fun!

Update 03/02: Even more W&G fun: Screenhead links to the BBC, which has a two minute short called Soccamatic from 2002. Something to whet the appetite while we wait for the rabbit...