November 2002 Archives
Luke Francl is answering Lessig's challenge to give more money to the "good guys" than to the MPAA and the RIAA.
Cheers Luke!
It's getting close to the end of the year. The EFF can always use tax-deductible donations.
Back later...
EPA Plans to Ease Utility Emission Rules The Bush administration on Friday proposed relaxing clean air rules to give old coal-fired power plants more leeway to avoid costly maintenance work, a plan criticized by environmental groups who said it would mean dirtier air.
EPA still stands for Environmental Protection Agency, right? I just want to make sure it didn't change when I wasn't looking or something.
Once again, we were the cut-off point for the money with 52 and the money starting at 53. Fun was had by all though.
At the table this week:
- beej
- Champ
- Jerry
- Josh
- Pat
- Py
- Steve
<BapinatorXP> Wooo!!! Lakers are last in the pacific division!
Yes ladies and gentlemen, the Lakers are indeed in last place. Someday some psychology PhD candidate will do a study on the Lakers as prime example of how a team can accomplish almost anything, and how many talented individuals will fail when up against a team with inferior talent.
Unfortunately, the Lakers will not flounder like this for long. Shaq will return and Phil Jackson will work his magic on reining Kobe back in. Eh, who cares. The Kings are going to beat them anyways.
Yay! This means you can get This Modern World weblog updates via RSS. Maybe they'll starting pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs now.
I hacked HTTP 1.1 Conditional Get support into phpicalendar today. Thank Zeus for NetNewsWire Lite's Bandwidth Statistics view. It made it much easier to make sure I was sending the right headers at the right time.
Bruce Campbell was on Fresh Air pimping his new book,
You gotta love Bruce. The guy is just hillarious. Luckily I had Kat and Josh to remind me that he was on the radio so I could listen to it.
This is iPulse. If you have a mac and read any cool sites, you've already heard about it.
So what do I have to add? Nothing. But I did buy it. Sure, $9.95 may be a bit much for a system monitor utility, especially when it doesn't show you anything you can't get from a few command line utils. But it is such a mac app. It was done so well, I felt compelled to pay for it. I've never really considered myself a sucker for aesthetics, but I guess in this case I made an exception.
New Surveillance Powers Scrutinized At the same event, Graglia said without surveillance limits "The World Trade Center towers would still be standing."
Yeah. Sure. I'll buy that for a dollar.
Even in a complete police state there is crime. I don't know where people get these ideas...
"I haven't been the same since my teenage lobotomy." --Ash, Kung Fu
Here, here!
Morning: Drove in to pick up Steven and Josh. Headed out to find food. Headed to Ameoba. You know, just cuz.
Afternoon: Drop Josh back off and head up to the top of Twin Peaks for Steven to get some more SF photos. Drive by the EFF office to show Steven where we do our thing. Park the car at H5 and walk down to Gordon Biersh. Eat, drink, be merry. Head out to get on BART for a trip to the Oakland Collesium.
Evening: Watch Raiders beat the Patriots. Yay! I had my points on the Raiders. Take BART back to SF, drop Steven off at the hotel and head back north. Sleep.
This Modern World Why we're going to war [Salon]
The Stand-In Senator. "'I just went to the Men's Wearhouse. . . so at least I'll have two suits and a toothbrush when I get to Washington." By Interview by David Wallis.
Besides being a pretty cool interview, I found it kind of ammusing that the headline is a free ad for The Men's Wearhouse. Let me also say that it is a great place to buy a suit, and I can't say enough about their customer service. It's quite frankly, in a word, amazing.
Kat and I were headed to a wedding back east. It wasn't going to be a California hippy wedding, so I needed a good suit. Off we went to the mall in Sacramento. We checked all the usual places like Macy's and Structure. All of them were way too much for our budget at the time. So we hit The Men's Wearhouse. The staff knew that I had no idea what to get, so they laid out an entire spread of suits, shirts, and belts. All I had to do was say, "that one, that one, and that one," and we were all done, except that the suit needed to be altered and we were leaving for San Francisco. "No problem," they said. "You can have the suit altered at our store on Market Street."
In the end, I ended up going to four stores. One to buy the suit, one to have it altered, a store in King of Prussia to have it pressed after the flight, and one in San Rafael to have it cleaned when I got back.
Kat was very jealous because, apparently, women's clothing stores don't have anything that approaches this level of customer service.
Anyway, he was making sure I hadn't forgotten about the Raiders game we are going to tomorrow. I assured him it was all taken care of.
But now my concentration on the movie is broken. I start wandering through weblogs, as I have a tendency to do. Anitpixel was first on the list. It's an amazingly good looking site. One of the top stories was about a new MT plugin called Smary Pants.
So, I installed it. It seems to be working quite well.
Whoops, I almost forgot to post the .
- Champ
- Jerry
- Josh
- {kat2}
- Pat
- Py
- Steve
We did much better this week, won $45, although we slid in the music this week. Actually, it wasn't so much a slide as it was a return to normalcy for us. David Gray? Babylon? Who?
FBI Warns 'Spectacular' Al Qaeda Attack Possible Al Qaeda may be planning "spectacular" attacks inside the United States, the FBI has warned, saying national landmarks and other sites where attacks might result in massive casualties, economic damage and psychological trauma were at risk from the extremist network.
After having been on hightened alert
for over a year now, I fear that this kind of announcement isn't going to have to same effect it might have late last year or even early this year.
UPDATE: Bruce Schneier's new book on the whole "more secure" fiasco that's going on. Thanks Cory! ;-)
Price:
Last updated:
There is a certain amount of crap you have to deal with if you are going to have a car in San Francisco. Now, to be fair, I don't live in San Francisco, I just work there. I could take public transportation, but that about take at least twice as long as driving in. At least Kat and I carpool on the way to work and back. But as I was saying, if you have a car in the city you have to expect some dings. This isn't something you should have to deal with though (my car is the green one).
Luckily I left myself enough room from the car in front of me that I could get out. What the hell though? That's just totally messed up. Potentially blocking people in is just not cool.
So, is it illegal to take a picture of a person's license plate and post it online?
Another non-amazing discovery I posted at Forwarding Address.
Coach Knight is suing IU. How classic.
The lawsuit claims Indiana breached its contract by firing Knight without cause, without a proper meeting of university trustees and without a chance to defend himself.
So the previous probations and the "Zero Tolerance" period he agreed to don't count? Whatever coach.
Maybe Google News does at least need a spot-check editor. No harm, no foul though. When you have something this complex that is completely automated, there are bound to be cases like this. At least this one was kind of funny.
As I mentioned over at Forwarding Address, 10.2.2 is out. Some tasty bits for sure. Fire up Software Update and get ready to nuke that uptime.
Big Wizard On Campus: Is Harry Potter Just Another Arrogant, Pampered Jock? Plastic::FilmTV::Kids: "The media loves to chatter about what a wonderful role model Harry Potter is for young children, but Chris Suellentrop, writing in Slate isn't so sure" [Plastic: Most Recent]
I heard this story on the radio this morning while I was driving around doing errands. It is quite funny though. I'll stick with the DJs comment, "two words: de caf."
"Josh" managed to squeeze out another fine blob of art. All that's missing is a glass of lemonade, or whatever beverage the Evil Golabutron drinks...
Can you really restore honor and dignity to the White House by lying?
Yeah, I didn't think so either.
For Eminem the Movie Star, a Profitable Opening Weekend. "8 Mile," the debut film of Eminem, the rap star, made an estimated $54.5 million in a surprising and triumphant opening weekend. By Rick Lyman.
The New York Times should hardly be surprised since it gave such a glowing review and helped add mainstream credibility to the movie.
Exit polling showed that the opening weekend audience was, as expected, predominantly young: 69 percent under the age of 25. But many industry officials expressed surprise that nearly a third of the audience was older.
I went at 11:30am on Saturday and I think about half the audience was over 30. It was rather funny to see an elderly couple going in as I was coming out. Hell, I'm 29 and I went to see it. It wasn't a kiddie movie, as should have been obvious by the R rating.
But I must say, it was pretty good movie.
A scarily familiar story about an interal project for the brain behind 0xDECAFBAD. A few key differences are that we didn't have an LDAP server and never got near RDF. We did have way too many printouts of database schemas though.
So Hixie let loose with a "don't send XHTML as text/html" rant a while ago. It's been popping up here and there again. So I figured I would give it a shot on the main page. Please let me know if something is all fubared on your browser.
Update: Okay, that's over. IE on the mac does it's XML rendering thing on the page if it's sent as text/xml.
Taking Over the Courts. The most important consequence of the new Republican majority in the Senate might well be a remade and more conservative federal judiciary. By Cass R. Sunstein.
Oh joy.
Tech Industry Smells Success in Republican Congress. A Republican-controlled Congress could benefit the high-tech industry, lobbyists said on Friday, as tech-friendly lawmakers ascend to key leadership positions in the Senate. By Reuters.
Now, this could be a boon for the California economy. It's still pretty rough out here. It will probably be bad for consumers though as a bunch of bad tech bills are going to start flowing out of Congress. You just wait...we'll let you know when they come, how bad/good they are, and what you can do.
Steve sent a great link that tells of the return of Sheep on Drugs. Yay!
I'm selling my Newton 2000. You know you want it...
Speaking of plummeting online music sales, here is what I have on the way from CDNow:
"Kim" passed on a very dire story of two relief workers who are being detained in Aceh, Indonesia. The story sounds horrific and terrifying. You can try and help the IHRN by sending a fax to the Indonesian Ambassador.
At the table:
- Jerry
- Kat
- Pat
- Py
We have set a new standard for close, but no cigar
by being out of the money by half a point. We made some bad guesses. What can you do? Go back next week and try again.
Neither party should have such power. And the GOP now has far too much. The counterbalance lost its footing. The greedmongers and the power vipers have been loosed like never before in recent history. The center cannot hold.
Mark is usually either scathingly funny, or incredibly depressing. It's the latter this time. But it again, sums it up pretty well. Certainly better than Bartcop's attempt...
The storm that is slamming into the west coast is snapping tree limbs like toothpicks. Our power was out for quite a while last night. When power is out at my house, patandkat.com is offline. You know, in case you were wondering...
So I was doing some re-org on the site, basically putting things in a nicer directory structure. So now the archives are in a YYYY/MM/DD format. I was getting tired of one directory full of files. Lots of files. I'm archive by month, day, and individual.
Anyway, this caused google to re-index the entire weblog.
$ grep -c googlebot /var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log*
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log:2464
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log.1:706
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log.2:470
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log.3:1017
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log.4:789
/var/log/httpd/patandkat-access_log.5:1020
Stallman: Disk, I/O issues delay GNU OS
"There are two problems that have to be solved," Stallman said. "One of them is the lack of high-speed, serial-line handling, and the other is the limit on the size of a file system which is at somewhere between one to two gigabytes, which means that if you get a moderate size disk you have to divide it into smaller partitions, which is a nuisance."
Nobody ever said make an OS was easy.
Actress Winona Ryder Found Guilty of Shoplifting
Finally, something to distract me...
I need two Republican Senators to switch to the Independent Party ASAP. Has Trent Lott been kicking you around? Has President Bush been ignoring your needs? Are you really in favor of smaller government? Make the switch to Independent and show them you think for yourself! If you are interested please call Tom Daschle's Senate office at (202) 224-2321 or send an email.
I figured I would get more action if I put an ad on Craig's List in D.C.
Why bumble around with my own words when I can simple agree with Joe Conason.
The new powerbooks kick some serious booty. The iBook jump wasn't as impressive, so I don't think Gwen will be too bummed that she bought an iBook literally days before the new ones came out.
I hope you all got a chance to vote today. Voting is very important.
Update:
America clearly wants more of the past two years. Why, I have no idea...
Things to look forward to: defecit spending, war, unemployment, a more conservative Supreme Court (if that's even possible), military spending, environmental damage, and less civil rights. Oh but don't worry everybody, we also will get "tax cuts" and morality shoved down our throats. Enjoy Bush winning in 2004.
Oh, and "Josh", it's only your vote that doesn't count.
Okay, for everybody out there that doesn't already know this, you are being logged. Right now, the very page you are looking at, was dished up to you by a web server that logged your IP address, what time you were here, what page you requested, what browser you are using, and where the links was you followed to get here (if any), and couple of other things that don't really matter. It happens everywhere on the web, with every mail message you send, with every file you download via ftp.
What does this information in my server logs tell me about you? Not much. It's way less information than what you find out about me on this weblog, that's for sure.
Occasionally my friend Dave sends me some music that I need to buy. He works for ADA Music, so it's not completely unbiased, but I figured I would pass it along this time, with handy links to buy it at CDNow. ;-)
shit to check out in november:
- piano magic "writers without homes" 4AD (think this mortal coil)
- david cross "shut up you fucking baby" sub<pop (bill hicks meets andy dick)
- her space holiday "audio astronomy" tiger style (OMD meets red house painters)
out now:
- the streets "original pirate material" (tricky meets irvine welsh meets de la)
- death cab for cutie "you can play these songs with chords" (emo-indie-pop)
- lemon jelly "lost horizons" (avalanches meets orbital)
there's a new saint etienne out as well, but I haven't really listened to it yet
Reuters: A missile fired by an unmanned CIA drone aircraft hit a car believed to be carrying suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen Sunday and killed several occupants, a U.S. official said Monday.
This Modern World Profiles in Democratic courage: A flight of fantasy. [Salon]
We can't. The IRS said so. EFF is a 501(c)(3) organization. That means that your donations to the EFF can be tax-deductible. Yay! It also means that:
For purposes of IRC Section 501(c)(3), legislative activities and political activities are two different things, and are subject to two different sets of rules. The latter is an absolute bar. AIRC Section 501(c)(3) organization may not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office. Whether an organization is engaging in prohibited political campaign activity depends upon all the facts and circumstances in each case. For example, organizations may sponsor debates or forums to educate voters. But if the forum or debate shows a preference for or against a certain candidate, it becomes a prohibited activity. The motivation of an organization is not relevant in determining whether the political campaign prohibition has been violated. Activities that encourage people to vote for or against a particular candidate, even on the basis of non-partisan criteria, violate the political campaign prohibition ofIRC Section 501(c)(3).
So we have to walk a fine line, or loose our 501(c)(3) status, which would be bad for people looking to make donations that are tax-deductible.
There is nothing quite as fun as getting a note from your dentist that states all the work they billed didn't get paid for by your insurance and that you owe them a lot of money. Long story short, they sent the bill to Delta with the name "Pat Berry" when Delta only knew about "Patrick Berry." Of course, the SSN and the DOB was the same, but you know how that first name can be used as a identifier...
"Kuch" pointed me at two interesting article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, one on Eminem and the other on Jimmy Kimmel.
He also asked me where the great minds of our generation were. "Where is our Orson Wells," he pondered. He didn't like any of my answers, and frankly neither did I. I theorized that greatness is not always bestowed upon one immediately. Sometimes greatness takes a while.
Yes, Kat and I trekked to Dublin to see I Spy with Py. I laughed a lot, but there were a lot of painful parts. It gets a rental rating.
So that's going to be your answer to everything from now on? Globalization?
I hope not. But I am curious about what's going on, what's going wrong, and generally why things around the world are happening.
The Last Word with Jim Rome is going off the air. Rome will still be doing the radio show though, so don't get too excited. The TV show always sucked. Lets face it. The radio show will/should be stronger because of this.
OUT!
Lots of people did special CSS themes for Halloween. Google did their usual logo job. But the best thing I've seen so far was the Fox Trot comic. Now that's funny.
The game giveth and the game taketh away. Team Gonzo was four points below the cut-off point for money this week. One thing that killed us was not getting a bonus two points for having people in costume.
At the table:
- Champ
- Jerry
- JoAnn (Jerry's better half)
- Pat
- Py
