May 31, 2003
From news to action
I was browsing VolunteerMatch when I was struck with the idea that news aggregators could do keyword matching between news stories and volunteer opportunities:
News briefs from California's Central Coast
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 29, 2003
(05-29) 07:23 PDT SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (AP) --Four people accused of nearly beating a homeless man to death Halloween night have pleaded no contest to felony charges.
James Gardner, 19, and Roy Thomas Bohannon, 24, were sentenced Tuesday to eight years in state prison. Chanda Miller, 18, and Devon Alexander Smith, 20, were sentenced to five years.
The four defendants allegedly used a piece of wood, a metal pipe and a spiked bracelet to beat Vance Lybrand, 49, as he slept in a plywood shelter along the street.
The attackers left the area at one point, and then returned later. During a second beating, Gardner allegedly jumped on Lybrand's face repeatedly, climbing a chain-link fence to gain leverage.
Lybrand suffered a partially severed finger, a broken collarbone, facial cuts, broken ribs and a punctured lung.
Lybrand testified during a preliminary hearing that he had been assaulted by the defendants multiple times in the past.
Gardner claimed Lybrand tried to attack Miller with a hammer that night, prompting a physical response.
To help the homeless: click here
Fascinating...
My internal dialog while reading Girls Are Pretty:
Visual Cortex: words words words words words words
Brain Stem: breath in, breath out, heart beat, breath in, heart beat, breath out
Cerebrum: My reality is shattering around me while this stranger describes strangely realistic alternatives to the actuality of the moment.
Hypothalamus: I'm hungry.... and sexy. Oh, so sexy.
May 28, 2003
If, Then
If you read this email about the corporate boning that Robert Half International is giving a disabled vet and his wife and you want to avoid supporting such a firm, then don't do business with their companies: Accountemps, Robert Half Finance & Accounting, OfficeTeam, The Affiliates, Robert Half Management Resources, The Creative Group, and Protiviti. There are plenty of other staffing and consulting agencies out there, so it shouldn't be hard to find help without supporting that kind of behavior.
Harold Messmer, Jr. (CEO) and Steven Karel (Gen. Counsel) should know better.
May 26, 2003
A Chekhov 5
Here's a Friday Five style list:
1. How will history remember you?
2. What is your contribution?
3. Are all circumstances the same?
4. Can we ever really know another?
5. What does it matter, anyway?
Chekhov and Kayak
My in-laws are staying with us and they're very energetic, so Shelley arranged for us to do all sort of things, including going to the San Francisco American Conservatory Theater's production of Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" and sea kayaking in the bay, led by SeaTrek. It's all exciting but I'm exhausted. I hope that I'm that energetic when I'm in my 50s.
May 21, 2003
Winged Migration
Shelley (my partner) and I went to see the new Jacques Perrin film, Winged Migration, at the excellent Clay theater in San Francisco. When I saw the trailer for this movie a few months ago, I was convinced that they were using incredible computer graphics. How could they possibly fly a camera in formation with a flight of migrating canadian ducks, thousands of feet above the Earth, and maintain such clarity? How could they pan from facing to the rear to looking forward, from the middle of a flock of geese? How could they hover next to cliffs, riding the sea winds with cliff dwellers?
According to the site, the production used gliders, remote controller gliders, helicopters, remote controlled helicopters, a delta wing (which is what they used for the migration scenes, ultra light aircraft, and balloons. However it was shot, I felt elated and enthralled with the variety and beauty of the rulers of the winds and the ancestors of the dinosaurs.
May 17, 2003
Toolmakers unite
The Orwell compliance specification just hit version 1, and if you're a media toolmaker, you'll want to check out this clear description of how media consolidation affects our history and our freedoms. More importantly, it details what you, as a creator of media and its architecture, should do to save them from further degredation.
May 15, 2003
May 13, 2003
Roadside Assistance and Travel Club
Not being a fan of the way automobiles affect our social and biological environment, I was pleased when Shelley found The Better World Club for roadside assistance. They offer assistance to both car riders and bicyclists and (unlike AAA) they don't lobby to relax laws limiting car emissions and (unlike AAA) they don't spend membership money on campaigns to increase tax spending to subsidize the automobile industry. Instead, they spend 1% of their profits on environmental groups that support better forms of transportation. I don't think that the 1% will change the world, but at least it isn't going towards causes that I don't support.
May 12, 2003
There are 10 sorts of people in the world...
So, really. Who doesn't like visual representations of sorting algorithms?
Join voices.
In the interest of wider coverage, here are a few links about the FCC's move to allow further consolidation of news sources (you know, the lifeblood of intelligence) in the United States of America:
Copyfight
Cory Doctorow
Lisa Rein
You can send a note to your representative and the FCC.
Sarcasm here, if that helps you.
May 11, 2003
May 10, 2003
Café Commons
I'm really enjoying my work from home days, because I'm actually working from the Café Commons at 3161 Mission Street. The couple who own and run the place are so friendly that I hear them asking how people's days went with such attention to detail that I wonder how they keep it all straight in their heads. People are greeted with "How was the movie?" and "You need to bring Sarah in because we'll play that CD she asked about." The comfortable seating area is always clean, the open kitchen is spotless, and there is a variety of food for when I'm feeling like a sweet or a meal.
Security...
I've saved a funny script on this page to demonstrate the now popular trick of opening MS Windows users' CD drives using a web page, windows media player, and Internet Explorer.
What I enjoy most about this trick is that it bridges so many languages (Visual Basic, HTML, COM), protocols (HTTP), and clients (Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player). If any one portion of our system is open to unexpected interoperability, then the whole is open to unexpected security risk.
We live in an increasingly interconnected world in which no group of people (no matter how smart or rich) can build totally secure yet interoperable tools, which is why a monolithic identity system like Microsoft Passport is such a risk. Placing all of our eggs in one basket is not going to last beyond the first few large cracks. As the (often cracked) Hotmail system demonstrates, a centralized target will eventually fall.
May 09, 2003
Out of the PARC
Dr. Ian Smith of PARC (google and ye shall find) has started out of the parc, "A Blog About Software Life At PARC". This may be interesting, given time, as Ian's a top notch wing-nut (I say that lovingly) with a deep understanding of the history and future of software.
May 07, 2003
Thin Cities 2
From Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:
"Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies places on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes.
No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia's founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.
This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."
May 01, 2003
Just what the net needed: More dog photos.
If you think you've seen the end of the era of the Internet dog photos, you're so very wrong.
Highlights:
Fuzzy puppy
Bark a lounger
Antlers!
Crissy Fields
Alien dog
Laptop
That is all.