This is why I love New York:

Do Pretty Girls Ride The Subway: "

Someone hacked into the MTA's computer system yesterday and changed the LED message at the West Fourth Station to read "PRETTY GIRLS DON'T RIDE THE SUBWAY." Apparently, the new message appeared for several hours until 8PM last night, and the MTA is investigating whether or not it was an "inside job" or someone who has never had a reason to post a subway missed connection on craigslist. Of course, the female straphangers are annoyed. One told the Daily News, "It's a vicious lie." But one found some humor in it: "Pretty women take the subway so we can go spend money on more important things - like alcohol." You go, girl! And, clearly, Gothamist believes the subway is filled with lovely ladies, as well as handsome fellas, adorable babies, that person who didn't wear deodorant, the woman with too much perform, a leering skeeve, the arguing couple, the out-of-towners who think if you're on an orange line you'll go the same place, kids trying to sell you M&Ms, and countless others.

This is yet another investigative coup for the Daily News, who apparently researched the story yesterday (their picture is at right). Last week, it broke the MTA's acceptance of an ad promoting oral sex. Gothamist on the F train's rep as the "love train" and subway love in general. And in MTA budget news, even though they are slashing or raising fares everywhere else, the MTA is not taking deep cuts at headquarters.

"

(Via Gothamist.)

This hell of a week, work and sickness is finally coming to an end.
Perhaps tomorrow I will actuallly move in.

The soba restarurant was a fitting reward to several days of long hours.

Did anybody else catch Mr. Izzard (outed as a wheatard) on Leno this week?

When asked what he thought about the election he answered in that classic, dirty older knowing unclish sort of way, "What [the hell] happened there?"

I wonder if my apartment has acquired silverware yet (as anthropomorphized apartments are oft to do.)

:: issue 58 :: for that technicolor ::

Yo. There's a badmash in your inbox. You'd think with the advent of color televisions, people would demand more color on their televisions. The latest rounds of eliminations on reality television this week says otherwise. Fortunately, some folks perservered in their attempts to help make television look more like America and less like a red state. Now they're headed for the auction block? BADMASH CREW :: featured sponsor :: Send Badmash to friends (or that special someone): :: featured sponsor :: To unsubscribe, click on the unsubscribe link below. You are receiving this because you are 1) a brown person; 2) a friend of a brown person; 3) an individual who has spoken to someone who is brown; 4) fired. On a weekly basis, we send comics, announcements, news, and missed connections to hella people via email. Please see the unsubscribe info at the bottom of this message or contact us directly if this email or brown people are unwanted.

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:: issue 57 :: for them november sweeps ::

Yo. There's a badmash in your inbox. November 2nd has come and gone, so we'll have to wait awhile before the next round of whacky electoral hijinks and other insights about what it all means and stuff. Maybe we'll just go hide in a movie theater for four years. BADMASH CREW :: featured sponsor :: Send Badmash to friends (or that special someone): :: featured sponsor :: To unsubscribe, click on the unsubscribe link below. You are receiving this because you are 1) a brown person; 2) a friend of a brown person; 3) an individual who has spoken to someone who is brown; 4) a sleepy Japanese commuter.On a weekly basis, we send comics, announcements, news, and reminders to do your homework to hella people via email. Please see the unsubscribe info at the bottom of this message or contact us directly if this email or brown people are unwanted.

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The right question about religion...maybe: "

It's only been two days, and I feel like I've already been through way too many discussions among seculars on the "Religious Problem." I'm tired of the cartoon about "Jesusland," of arguments about whether religion just has too much influence, about how we can encourage low-income whites to vote "their interests" rather than what they consider moral values, or whether we should "encourage moderate religious voices," whatever that would entail.

I think the right way to frame the question about the role of religion in current American life is as follows:

We are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian revival in American history, the third or fourth of the "Great Awakenings" in American Protestantism. Each such period has begun with a change in the nature of worship itself, essentially a private phase, and moved onto a public phase where it engaged with the political process. These have been significant moments of progress for this country. The Second Great Awakening led in it public phase to the Abolitionist movement. What some historians consider the Third Great Awakening beginning in the 1890s led to the Social Gospel movement, settlement houses, and the beginnings of the progressive era idea of a public responsibility to ameliorate poverty.

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.

I need some reading suggestions here. If you've read Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism you'll probably recognize that my question comes from there. Here's a chart that summarizes Fogel's basic view of the Great Awakenings, which I believe is idiosyncratic compared to that of most historians of religion (Fogel is an economic historian) Fogel helped me understand the question, but not to answer it. I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice.

"

(Via The Decembrist.)

This hearkens back to one Dr. Collar's great achievements - drumming the idea of cycles in history into my head, one of those wonderful light bulb moments in my education. I saw him a couple years back, referring to OHS as cloistered - of course, he left OHS to teach at a college. I hope they appreciate him as much as we do.

Ok, in a respite from the world's events (Arafat - dead or alive?) (Kerry - does his concession speech matter if the provisional ballot count puts him ahead [actually no]) I'd like to note that gali, antonia & I have a place now in Harlem, right on 125th st. On an express stop, a block from an old navy, magic johnson movie theatre, health club, post office, pharmacy and enough fast food and fried chicken to last a lifetime. And the apartment? Marble floors in the bathrooms, a jacuzzi tub, wooden floors, walk-in closets with shelving we suspect can double as midget bunk beds three bedrooms and a shaftway. (for the bodies.)

The search for the essentials (beds, sofas) continues.

Now if you come visit, you might actually have a place to crash with me.

In regards to events, the republicans say that they won on a "morality" platform.

Bigotry equals morality? Should I be crying? Who are these people? Today's Decembrist essay puts it well. Fuck this national reconciliation bullshit. I am ashamed today to be a part of the country that validated this administration based on... morality.

Does anybody else remember the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?

And btw, if annybody tells you "you voted, now STFU" remember that if you vote, you signed off on the process, so don't complain is a bas an argument as "you didn't vote, so you have no right to complain."

Oh my God! Brian Boitano....

The shock of 9/11, all over again.

Back then, US vs the Fundamentalists.
Now, us vs the Fundamentalists.

There are Two Americas.

And this is not "Et tu"

What can I say?

After 2000, I decided to be far more cautious about the election this year, and despite my optimism, there was a persistent kernel of doubt that kept me worrying about the results of a republican sweep this year.

Will Bush win? At this point it seems all but a done deal. Getting out the vote combined with voter suppression seems to have been a winning ticket in the federal elections.

The major fear was that with the judiciary on the line this year, the democrats would be able to stave off an appointment or two to the Court. This now also appears to be unlikely, especially with Rehnquist's serious problems.

At the same time, despite the irregularities in the swing states, the country appears to have given the GOP time and time again the mandate to govern. Allen points out that this is cause for some to desperately pull out their copies of Democracy in America. It has been far too long since I have pulled out those volumes (if I'm not mistaken not since high school).

Perhaps it has come time again to reevaluate the American Experiment. In most objective circles (dare I consider myself among those) it is generally acknowledged that the winners in this years races while of ideological purity were ... lacking. The Daily Show (unfortunately watched from Television last night my loyal readers) perhaps put this best in the last ten minutes of their election special, rattling off some of the more ridiculous parts of the regional platforms and rhetoric espoused by GOP candidates.

Despite the closeness in the votes in the electoral college, this was not a close election. Any election where these candidates get sixty million votes is a loss. My initial impression is that the problems with this election stem not from a failure to get out the vote, but an inherent failure in the logic behind the get out the vote drives. Voter canvassing attracts marginal voters to the cause.

We have a serious problem with the electorate en-masse. We have to face the fat that there are many Americas, and that most of us are not familiar with them, or their ideas, that we have no strategy to change their core beliefs, which were reflected in this election. To sink to the level of palliative metaphors, "You can't boil water with a blow torch, you just end up making steam."

A majority of Americans are amenable to religious demagoguery, affiliated homophobic paranoia, and a willingness to reject a global context in favor of allegiance to narrow mindedness.

If we who pride ourselves as intellectuals want to regain control of our political process, our international soft power, our pride in our nation, we will have to start from within. "Strength" and false "resolve" are not the only alternative panaceas to ignorance.

Reeducation begins at home.

Today, I live on an island.

See the problem?

From inside, I've been told the Drudge numbers reported so far are correct.

Looks like a landslide...

Thanks to Chibisuke on totalfark. My favorite unexpected poll result.

Just Click Damnit. Totally WorkSafe.

And what's with all this "Just Vote" bull I'm hearing all over?

You don't go to a baseball game and hold up a sign that says "Win!"

I want to see more "Vote Kerry" signs up. If you're a Bush voter, my opinion (and dare I say the opinion of my colleagues) is "Stay Home!"

Money

sex & thought control

A generation without soul

Perfect people

In a perfect world

Behind closed doors

All in control

Life in a world of luxury

Cold cash money mentality

You gotta keep the faith

You gotta keep the faith

You better keep the faith

And run away


Run away

run away

Run away and save your life

And only the last stanza in the luxury car commercial.

I love it.

Firefox tidbit.

If you want to delete an entry from the auto-complete drop-down menu in a field (say in a username or password field on a web page form, where you accidentally entered the wrong information and don't want it saved, you usually hit shift-delete once you have it highlighted to get rid of it.

If you have a mac laptop, hit shift-Fn-delete instead.

Also, we may have a place in harlem.

Stay tuned...

Wandering Brooklyn through the day with Yulia, Jeanne, & Avigail looking at apartments.

A no show landlord at Parkside, followed by a nice apartment in an abysmal location near East New York - followed by seeing an abysmal apartment in an excellent location (Bedford in the heart of Williamsburgh) - mediated by a bus ride through Bed-Stuy (generally not referred to as an up and coming area), the location of a (since canceled) appointment-to-be on Sunday to look at a place purportedly in Clinton Hill (generally considered to be an up and coming area).

For some reason, the bus driver said "last stop" at the outskirts of Williamsburgh well before the actual end of the bus route. Our walk through Williamsburgh, though considerable, was lightened by the walk through the block which contains strong whiffs of the nearby Peter Lugers.

That and posters in authentically Chasidic Brooklyn, full of writing in Hebrew and Yiddish, and a two paneled poster that showed first a concentration camp oven, and secondly various pieces of technology, including cell phones and (IMHO) a 1994 era Mac Centris. The caption (as translated to me) implied that both led to the destruction of Jewry...

Oy.

Dinner (with Bill & Katie, and sans Avigail) was at a Thai place in Bedford called See, which is apparently the restaurant that was used to film the early crappy asian restaurant scene in Garden State. See has great atmosphere, and rather mediocre food.

In lieu of going out, we decided to be lame and stay in. PBS won out this evening, with renditions of The Candidate (not only with Robert Redford, but also a much younger incarnation of Peter Boyle, of Everybody Loves Raymond) and Stardust Memories.

Fantastic Fantastic Earlier Allen.

Tomorrow, the Search continues, in Roosevelt Island, Long Island City (props to Bill for that recommendation) and further along in Queens.

Also, the Onion's AV Club this week has a really nice interview with newbie scifi director ___. There's this great little bit about the role of science fiction in culture today that was really nice:

O: Science-fiction movies are usually big-budget action films set in space. Was Primer intended as a corrective to that? Does science fiction in film need to be redefined?

SC: I wasn't trying to change the industry or anything, that's for sure. It does seem like there's the aesthetic of science fiction, with the aliens and chrome and neon and explosions in space, and then there's science fiction that's used as a literary device. That's the kind I'm interested in. The Greeks had their mythology, and they had a great shorthand. They could assign a human trait to a god and suddenly be able to talk about all sorts of things. I feel like we've got science fiction, which is an even better shorthand, because if you do it right, it's not a matter of "What if this happens?" It's "When this happens..." What will be the reaction, how will we cope with it, and what does it mean for who we are? People complain about I, Robot not being about ideas, and then it makes a ton of money. It's weird. I know I'm not doing anything that's going to change that.

The Onion reports the news first.

From the nyt today:

There were also complaints about possible dirty tricks in some precincts. In Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, the police and the district attorney's office were investigating a letter telling voters that the state had extended voting to Wednesday, Nov. 3.

The letter, written on fake Republican Party letterhead, instructed Republicans to vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday.

Tiny Humans update #3: "
Michael sez "There may be new impetus to visit Kerinci Seblat National Park in Indonesia. The Orang Pendek may be a living fossil - the same species as Homo Floresiensis, but be very much alive. There are still sightings of such "little people" even today, and none other than Fauna & Flora International, the worldâ€'s oldest conservation charity, is searching for the creature.

They have set up camera-traps in likely areas of forest or in areas where local people have reported sightings. So far the picture that will make world news has proved elusive and as reported sightings get rarer, the naturalists fear that if orange pendek does indeed exist it may be very close to extinction. Link

- Mark Frauenfelder
"

(Via Boing Boing.)

As I was saying...

Don't laugh, but perhaps it is time to seriously think about the Prime Directive before the missionaries (damn them) get their hands on them.

And the important questions have yet to be asked about whether they have achieved a human level of intelligence.

Have they created a market economy?

More importantly (a far better indicator, in my humble opinion) have they discovered bacon?

#!/bin/sh

#==============================================================================
# File: OSServicesStartupItem.sh
# Installed As: VirtualPCOSServices
#
# Contains: Bash shell script for OS Services startup item.
#
# Copyright (c) 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
#==============================================================================

I never thought I would see a MS bash shell script.

And here's a hint. If you can't get the Virtual Switch working in VPC 7, it may be because the special kernel extension it uses didn't get started.

Just open up Terminal before you start Virtual PC, and run this command:

sudo kextload /Library/Extensions/VirtualPCNetworking.kext

HOBBITS

Scientists say they have found skeletons of "hobbit sized people."

Which is interesting on at least two levels. First, that a separate species of humans was in existance until 500 years ago, and secondly, that they are referred to as people, as opposed to just hominids. It appears that there's a line beyond which we are willing to see organisms, even of a separate species, as akin enough to use to consider people.

This obviously leads to the question, "are there others?"

Working from 8am to 11pm should imply that I am getting sufficient quantities of food, water, and sleep.

My Bad.

Kudos to jeanne for pointing that out and taking care of the aftermath of the absence of aforesaid necessities.

Monday Joke Edition

From here via boingboing, of course. Also, Chris Dobosz stopped by last night on his way to teh Swiss Consulate this morning.

Notables:

Three women had a very late night drinking. They left in the early morning hours and went home their separate ways.


The next day, they all met and compared notes about who was drunker the night before. The first girl claims that she was the drunkest, saying, "I drove straight home and walked into the house. As soon as I got through the door, I blew chunks."


The second said, "You think that was drunk? Hell, I got into my car and wrapped my car around the first tree I saw. I don't even have insurance!"


The third proclaimed, "Damn, I was the drunkest by far. When I got home, I got into a big fight with my husband, knocked a candle over, and burned the whole house down!"

---

The room was silent for a moment. Then, the first girl spoke out again, "Listen girls, I don't think you understand. Chunks is my dog."

One day, Kermit Jagger goes into a bank because he needs a loan. He asks the teller and is directed to Ms. Patty Wick. He tells Ms. Wick that he needs a loan. She tells him (rather haughtily) that he needs some sort of collateral because they don't go loaning frogs money every day.


So, Kermit reaches into his bag and hands Ms. Wick a small glass elephant. "What is this?" she asks. "We can't give you a loan using *this* as collateral!" Kermit tells Ms. Wick to go talk to the bank manger.


So, Ms. Wick goes to the manager and asks him why she should take the glass elephant as collateral. The manager replies......


"It's a knicknack, Patty Wick. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a Rolling Stone."

---

Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?

---

What does the H. stand for in Jesus H. Christ?
Haploid.

---

How many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

LET'S RIDE BIKES!




A man walks into his kitchen with a duck under his arm and says
'This is the pig I have been fucking'
His wife says' That's not a pig that's a duck'
He replies ' I wasn't talking to you'

---

A guy gets hit by a car and goes to hell. When he
gets there, the devil is standing in front of 3
doors. The devil says, "It's your lucky day. I'm
gonna give you a chance to get out of here. You
have to complete 3 tasks.


"Behind this first door is a 5 gallon jug of Jack
Daniel's. You have to drain it in one drink.


"Behind the second door is a 600 lb. grizzly bear
with a sore tooth. You have to pull the tooth out.


"Behind the third door is a nymphomaniac. When
you've completely satisfied her, you can leave"


The guy figures it's worth a shot, so he goes in
the first door and manages to drink the whole jug
of liquor. He goes in the second door, shuts it,
and the most horrible commotion can be heard from
inside the room. 20 minutes later, the guy finally
comes out. His clothes are torn to shreds, and he
is sliced and scratched head to toe.


Finally he manages to say, "Ok, where's that girl
with the sore tooth...?"

ok I'm done now.

The Bush campaign has a new campaign ad out, Wolves. Decembrist deliciously tears it apart.

Josh Marshall brings www.wolfpacksfortruth.org to my attention, a fantastic rebuttal.

homage to delirium

waking yourself after food coma after a breakfast of freshly cooked ground chicken tacos with shredded cheddar and sliced cherry tomatoes with the first track to the Dancer in the Track soundtrack just barely audible in the background as iTunes runs through the entire playlist but really it was Dave who had woken you up with a text message asking if we were coming over to watch the Michigan v Purdue game at his dorm also so I could use faster internet to look for apartments, schools and then getting on the internet to let him know that we will miss the kickoff but oh wait the game starts at 3:30 not 3 as jeanne thought and then getting reminded (repeatedly) that the laundry needs to be put in the dryer and then reading blog about cat and remembering an article about animal culture and the lion that herded instead of eating animals because it was orphaned and grew up and learned from the sheep dog and oh yeah Jeanne says I can't smell fall which is true and I couldn't smell it even if it came behind me and bit me in the ass and by the way I finally understand why people wear high heels because I bought these hot looking patent leather dress shoes but they feel so gawd awful painful while I break them in and suddenly I feel so gloriously vain to which Sarah rolls her eyes and calls me a metrosexual and now I must go.

Not everyone is sad in Mudville.

No schadenfreude, really.

Good Luck Sox...

Kittens: "This is presented as an instance of internet culture rather than as cogent political argument. (Which should go without saying, but I felt like I should say it.)



It’s one of those passed-around-via-email things.



Doesn’t this confirm just about every stereotype of liberals?

"

(Via inessential.com.)

Yeah Yeah, a nice adaptation of an old farkism. But also true...

An Awesome musicalDebate spoof. W/ Ali, Amitabh, Bush, Cheney...just watch it.

This is how I want recipes to look:



I have a cold. The Allergy pills with gratuitous amounts of pseudoephedrine passing for a sudafed replacement seem to be doing the job.

Looking for apartments with mediocre credit in the city... Sucks.

I've heard enough bitching about my "price range" today. I think $2500 is more than enough for a three bedroom thank you. And no we don't collectively make 40 times that a year.

Anyways, the search continues.

And hamburgers at the UN cafeteria Suck.

Thank god for bacon wrapped pineapple.

And Happy Birthdays to all. I've been a bad person who's been forgetting them. You know who you are.

"Narcissus and Goldmund"

Sponsored Link seen on Google:

Horde For Sale
Low Priced Horde
Huge Selection! (aff)
ebay.com

Umm, I'll take two?

Jeanne took back the Roomba and bought the Roomba Discovery. It works much better than the previous one. Yes it does have an issue with rug edges. But it is cool to turn it on and leave the room, and then come back when the room is clean (or when it pleadingly beeps to ask you to free it from the rug's edge.) Somebody please hack it to talk like R2D2. The Cat is less afraid.

The Cat also likes Romano cheese, but that's another issue.

Neil Gaiman points out blacksocks.com - Socks by subscription! Rock. I want one a pair. Hell. I want a sock subscription.

This series of pictures with Ron Jeremy discovering goatse.cx for the first time is priceless.

So the dinner rotation hit me this Sunday. It is nice to have full budgetary discretion when planning a meal. It is also nice to cook a group meal again after so long. The roast turned out fairly well, though I was an idiot for taking the string off that held the fat on the meat - before putting it in the oven. Check out the recipe if you need one; it works quite well. Jeanne found it and also provided the key advice on leaving a meat thermometer in while it cooked.

We also made tea - DNA style. (And check out the cute 90s flash howto if you get a chance.) So roast, salad, cheese, pate, artichoke pasta and ice cream from coldstone creamery - the mongolian bbq of ice cream places (the perjorative tone is - I assure you - intentional. All in all, yumm.

And this the day after I had the best tofu of my life, at a soba restaurant at Houston & Mercer in SoHo. The soybean concoction was only nominally a solid, and dare I mention the chestnut ice cream that came later? mmmmmm.

I've been thinking up phrases lately. I keep forgetting them before I can commit them sadly. My muse seems to be with me between waking and about an hour and a half later, when I get off of the train in Manhattan.

I have so taken a liking to "constituency rot"...

I've been thinking about the continuum from literature to journalism through blogging recently, and the idea of Journalism < Literature has been haunting me.

As Cyril Connollly once supposedly said, "Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once."

Cute but wrong.

I'm thinking the key is that literature is just a superset of journalism. Good journalism is certainly literature.

Here's the idea: Journalism can be defined as the written word concerning events fixed to a temporal context. Furthermore, journalism has an inherent bias of assuming objectivity, generally unlike literature.

Journalism is about presenting the near here and now as it supposedly is. Stray from that and you lose the journalism label.

Anyways, here's a tidbit that sort of reflects how I feel about blogging.

I'm off to bed. It has been a long tiresome day only punctuated briefly by Cigarettes & Chocolate Milk, some Travis, and croissants.

Oh yeah, and this:

src="http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2003/01/os_quiz/amiga.jpg" width="300" height="90"
border="0" alt="You are Amiga OS. Ahead of your time. You keep a lot of balls in the air. If only your parents had given you more opportunities to suceed.">
Which OS are You?

About one year ago I referred to the Pea Coat Mafia here in the city.

So there's this really nice black knee length pea coat that I saw at Banana Republic this weekend.

I haven't bought it.

yet

In some dream: [the light] it burns me precious, sniff sniff.

Is it weird to dream that you're hung over, and then wake up not?

Dave's birthday partay was fantastic. A ridiculous number of people up and down from as far as DC & New Haven. And poor Allen feeling the brunt of the need to handle emergency stage management. Awww.

There were tentative plans for Dim Sum today, but the Packers/Giants game starts at 1 (Jeanne wants to see that) and the Jets/Miami game is on at 4:15 (Cy wants to see that.)

Dog gone it. I want real food.

Allen's Tony has taken it upon himself to be my externalized conscience. He was playing the parens patriae game with my jacket, gave me family advice, and mentioned last night "You know... Everything I learned in college I learned after I realized I was going to pass all of my classes my last semester."

It is a cool and sunny morning. Allergy med time.

I just realized that I've never spoken the word Bulwark, nor heard it pronounced.

How do you pronounce it?

I was coming off of the B this morning at 42nd street and heard the announcer say that you could transfer to the IRT 7 upstairs. Most people have no idea what the announcer is talking about when they hear IRT, or BMT, or IND from a train conductor, because those are the old names of the lines from before the City took them over. But it is still nice to hear the announcers using the old monikers.

It is reminiscent of the cobblestones that occasionally peek up from fading pavement, reminding us of the past that often does still coexist here with the present. Not the past for the sake of the past, in the historic districts, not new for the sake of the new, in parts of midtown, but somewhere comfortably in between.

I just finished Sandman 6, and I do have to say that it is taking a definite turn back towards addictive.

-=-

The Debate is over, and I am relieved. Kerry came off far better than I thought he would. I think this speaks less to Kerry's strength than to the abilities of the Bush campaign to spread Fear uncertainty and doubt about Kerry. Clearly, the more the better.

Cy is coming in late at night, and likely heading home. Bec is coming in late as well. I've got reservations for 5 at Milk & Honey tomorrow (or is that tonight now?)


Also, Bethany's purse called me out of the blue. My phone returned the call, to everybody's surprise. Her phone relays a "Hi" to yall. B was too busy driving a city Prius.

Prius needs to have the word King in front of it.

This post is through ranchero software's marsedit (from the same guys that have made the indispensable NetNewsWire 2.0 - If you've got a mac try it... My most used program next to Firefox.) It uses the old blogger API, so no headline support until ATOM API support comes in post 1.0. Consider the headline to be:

Hello Fall

And besides, it feels Autumnal this week.

Also, I love Dumbo (the area of downtown Brooklyn next to the Brooklyn & Manhattan Bridges. Washington St, just between the bridges and on down to the East River is amazing. It feels like a spanking new office building area, and yet is in between these massive old bridges, and cobblestones peek through the pavement. A starbucks is opening up (any coffee shop will do) and the area is blocks away from the best Pizza in the City (Grimaldi's - formerly Patsy's) and the A,C and F trains, which all cut underground to Manhattan, far faster than the trains (BDQMNR) that go over the Manhattan bridge. Of course, I can't afford it yet.

Kristof wrote a good piece in the nyt about gender equality becoming the battle of this century. I don't agree with him. I think Genetic Modification of animals and humans will become a far larger issue. I am inclined to wonder if the future ubermensch will also have gender equality issues.

The article talks about Pakistani judicial rape victim Mukhtaran Bibi who's trying to make an impact, despite the death threats of neighbors. You can send money here. The money will actually go to something better than first worlders careening around the third world in NGO SUVs.

The debates start tonight. I'm bracing myself to be very very depressed.

Also, who is coming this weekend? Brendan & Miriam? Caitlin & Cy yes I think. I'm going to make reservations for Milk & Honey tonight for sometime late tomorrow evening.

I'm on Book 5 of Sandman. Is it just me or does the dare I say novelty start wearing off about this point? (Back off... Gaiman is still Amazing...)

So there are strong economic arguments for privatizing social security. But those aren't the republican goals, as described below. I'm going to say this one last time (not likely): Republicans, conservative Democrats, and fellow travelers - Stop Ruining My Country.

Thank you. Bitches.

Are There Reasons to Be in Favor of Social Security Privatization?: "

Duncan Black writes:

Eschaton: The Case for "Privatizing" Part of Social Security: Actually, I don't think there is one. What would be the point? If you think reducing payroll taxes and/or guaranteed benefits in a way which adds up is a good idea then go ahead and advocate that policy. But, what possible good argument is there for a policy roughly like the ones which are floated by the Bushies (without details of course), which would cut payroll taxes by 2 percentage points, cut guaranteed future benefits, and then mandate that you save/invest that 2 percentage points of income. What's with the mandatory savings? If you want to cut benefits, fine. If you want to having all kinds of tax free savings instruments, which we already do, fine. But why force people to save? The only point of doing so is to ensure that people have a reasonable income base when they're of retirement age, but once you take the "insurance" part out of retirement insurance, then a mandatory saving/investment program doesn't achieve that.

I disagree. There are five reasons to be in favor of Social Security privatization. They are:

1. There are large-scale financial market failures which cause the equity premium to be *way* too high: the stock market does a lousy job at mobilizing society's risk-bearing capacity as applied to investment. Privatizing Social Security and mandating that such accounts be invested in stocks rather than holding the public Social Security Trust Fund in Treasury bonds is a powerful way to try to repair this market failure by boosting demand for equities
   
   
2. Too many households are myopic: they do not save enough. Households resist increases in Social Security taxes--they see no link between the taxes and their future benefits. But if Social Security were privatized so that households saw their Social Security contributions as their own, in the future there would be much less objection to upping the contribution rate--and so creating a real and more effective forced saving program to raise the national savings rate.
3. Prefunding Social Security is moral: it is unfair to make tomorrow's young bear the entire burden of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation. But prefunding requires raising Social Security contributions and building up huge assets in the Social Security Trust Fund--enough assets to give the Managing Trustee of the Trust Fund effective voting control over corporate America. The Managing Trustee is the Secretary of the Treasury. Do we want the Secretary of the Treasury casting the deciding votes in every election for corporate boards of directors? No. Hence privatization is a necessary first step to create the possibility of doing the moral thing--making the boomers build up the assets needed so that they can shoulder a greater share of the burden of financing their own retirement.
   
   
4. We need to raise our national savings rate. But if we just raise Social Security taxes, Congress will treat these taxes as general revenue and spend them. Only by funneling Social Security contributions into some vehicle that Congressional representatives cannot interpret as a resource available to fund current spending can we raise the national savings rate. And private accounts are the best vehicle we can find to (a) accumulate contributions without (b) allowing Congressional representatives to seize them as resources available to fund current federal spending.
5. At present, your Social Security benefits are yours only by grace of Congress: Congress could cut them if it wished. But if your privatized Social Security account were *yours*, then it would be yours not by grace of Congress but by right of property: courts would stand ready to defend it against any casual attempt to cut or confiscate it.

The problem is that I cannot see any of these as a reason for George W. Bush to be in favor of Social Security privatization. (It does seem likely to me that (1) and (3) are Marty Feldstein's and Andrew Samwick's reasons for being strong advocates of privatization, and that (4) is Kent Smetters's reason for being a strong advocate of privatization. But their reasons aren't the administration's reasons, and hence whatever plan a second Bush administration might ultimately propose would be unlikely to be crafted to achieve goals (1), (3), or (4).

Why are other groups inside a second Bush administration likely to be in favor of Social Security privatization? What's in it for them? I can see three possibilities:

• Enormous fees for the mutual fund industry...
  
  
• Huge capital gains for current investors as stock prices rise in anticipation of the enormous flow of stock purchases by private accounts...
  
  
• Over time as the contribution rate to private accounts is upped and the resources to pay for the still public system fall, the finances of the public system get worse and worse as the relatively young place less and less reliance on it and more and more on their private accounts. Eventually the balance of political support tips--and the public system's benefits can be slashed and then the public system itself shut down.

I don't think the Bush administration itself knows why it is in favor of Social Security privatization. It only knows that it is.

Nevertheless, I accept Duncan Black's big point: most of the good arguments for privatization are simply not accessible to people on the right: they are inconsistent with their view of the world.

"

(Via Semi-Daily Journal.)

My g-d its full of stars.

Brendan & Miriam may be stopping in next weekend. Miriam's supposed to be giving a talk at a conference in Istanbul the week after, so we'll see what happens. I for one hope that they come in and we have a grand old time.

Friday night we got the kids off to a bang for Yom Kippur through communal gorging at Outback. Dave had this funny notion that if you aren't going to eat for 25 hours, you should eat lots of carbs before you start fasting.

Ummm, no.

Allen, Dave, Yulia Jeanne & I made good use of the meat provided. Afterwards, we introduced Allen to play Dr. Mario, and warmed ourselves by the glow of Heathers.

Saturday, a pleasant albeit fruitless walk many blocks down Flatbush in search of an even moderately reputable looking establishment to find breakfast. After capitulation and return to the apartment, we succumbed to an afternoon of football and some movie with a blonde beardless Chuck Norris playing a zen trucker. We sat for a while wondering of it was actually Norris, and eventually saw a signature fight scene. But folks, Truckers vs Hillbillies? Need I say Rock!

All in all a well spent day, culminating in a search for a bar to hold Dave's birthday party (observed) next weekend. Which is actually pretty tough in the village. You find a bar that's too popular, and there's a line to get in, and expensive drinks (even worse, you may find an establishment so cocksure the bartender doesn't know how to make any drinks). You find a bar too ratty, and you end up with lots of old people and or frat boys.

We think that we found a possible sweet spot in the East Village. Reasonably priced drinks. A pool table. A dart board. Bathrooms cleaner than at Peculier (you ask about our standards...) And as Jeanne points out "a waitress/bartender with a skirt that's ... short."

Cue to the events of today. Plenty of time to catch a game or two on TV.

I'd like to point out for the record that Cy's Jets went yet a third week undefeated.
(Bye week or not)

It was Jeanne's turn on the dinner rotation tonight, and the bar was rose yet again.

A leg of lamb (there are pictures of Allen gnawing at the bone at the end of the night), squash, polenta, strawberry shortcake, and well, really the leg should be listed twice. Yup, that big. Eight people big.

The poor cat, frightened by the prospect of the apartment population rising from 3 to 8, huddled on a chair under a table. Ok, not just because of the dinner party, because you see earlier today Jeanne & Yulia went to

Target (hereafter to be also known as the Robot Pound). She picked up a Roomba [paid for it] and brought it home. And wow. wow.

The little robot spun around the rug and mindlessly cleaned it...and the room... eventually. It was quite strange to see a resurrection of the slave - overseer relationship in the room. Jeanne picking up the roomba, and putting it down in a different place to make sure it cleaned in a region it kept constantly missing. It took about 4 times as long to clean the room as it would have taken a person with a vacuum. Though brownie points to Yulia for calling the vacuum "Sweetie" when it kept running into her in the kitchen.

I do have to say this about the Roomba. It (He? She? And don't you dare say automaton - there was very little ato about it) helped me discover the 4th law of robotics today.

4th law: Thou shalt stare in awe at a machine doing a person's job, even if the machine does the job poorly.

fare well. Next weekend: birthdays & portuguese cooking, but is it kosher?

How to end an Occupation during a war

Join the other side.

Of note, Kolkata's (formerly Calcutta you imperialist ninnies) Airport is named after Subash Chandra Bose.

iCat meets iSat

Kitty has taken a liking to the pretty white cord that extends from the satmac to the wall outlet.

I'm tempted to take her to an apple store and watch her go apeshit.


I'm trying out Verizon's Broadband Access wireless service on my mac. EVDO is supposedly arriving in NYC, and I can get 400k/100k speeds when I'm connected to the EVDO towers. I'm doing a hunt and peck around town to see where I can get service.

The advantages:

If I am in the vicinity of a EVDO equipped tower, I can connect at DSLish speeds to the internet. Which potentially may be a far wider area than that of random hotspots I may be around. (If I'm not around such a hotspot, I can always connect at 1XRTT speeds, which connects at about 40k/30k - not fast, but sufficient to use google, ichat, and a couple of browser windows, arguably faster than at some clients' sites.)

The cons:

It is EXPENSIVE, clocking in at $80/month (the same service in Japan, using the same technology is only $40/month). There's also no clear coverage map. Brooklyn (meaning flatbush between atllantic and ocean) for one appears not to have EVDO coverage yet. The card also seems to be fairly finicky with the computer. I can be connected using EVDO, and then suddenly drop to 1XRTT, go back and forth as time goes on. And the signal strength bar seems to widely fluctuate between several bars and no bars. Some of this can be attributed (using my cargo cult knowledge of mobile phone protocols) to the ability of CDMA (the wireless technology used by everybody these days for high speed mobile phone network internet, and regular mobile phone service from Sprint & Verizon) to "breathe" to deal with network congestion. As more people get on the network, the coverage area shrinks.


But come on man. I was sitting a block from Grand Central, on 42nd st.

I have 15 days to decide if I want to keep the service. So we'll see.

Also, Mr. Handler of Lemony Snickett fame has a new indie movie out, directed by the person who did American Psycho. It opens today, and plays at the Angelika. Anybody game?

Anybody game to find me an affordable 2 bedroom apartment in manhattan in a safe neighborhood?

Anybody?

Beuller? Bueller?

One Month

to me having a place with Avigail in the city, or Brooklyn within 30 minutes of Midtown, if we can find one. Affordable 2 bedroom suggestions are now being seriously considered.

Last night was the beginning of the weekly Sunday Dinner rotation. Dave got us on a nearly unmatchable start, cooking mushrooms, pelmeni, potatoes, making several salads and laying out a dazzling array of herring cheese and caviar.

Tonight Jeanne made Bacon soaked collard greens and peach cobbler with home made whipped cream. (Yes Bacon deserves to be capitalized.)

Did I mention that I'm eating well?

Tom appears to be jettisoning SNRE for Kzoo. Mike is taking over his old job, and there is a vacancy. And Maya's growing bigger.

Yulia & I have begun the process of devouring the Sandman series. It is my first foray into graphic novels, aside from that brief dalliance with Transmetropolitan. Yulia's on Book I, I just started book II, and Jeanne just bought book VI. It is... ridiculously good. And I love the intellectual integration into Gaiman's other works. I'm almost tempted to (likely errantly) belt out the word leitmotif.

Also, Randall from my freshman year pulled me aside on the street this weekend. After seven years, I find that he's looking for a law school and in an Urban Planning program at NYU. He's promised me an evite (isn't that word going the way of xerox) to a party on Yom Kippur.

This blows a big hole in my previously cynical theory that friends tend to drift apart as they grow older. Ha.

In SciFiLand, Ghost in the Shell 2 is finally in theatres, after a wait of 8 years.

And. Star Wars Episodes 4-6 come out on DVD tonight. We were planning on having a marathon on Friday night, after we found a big screen tv somewhere. The only big screen tv we know of resides in somebody's house who likely will be doing religious stuff friday night, and Yulia insists that we respect the one day out of the year she does anything religious. We're likely to acquiesce, especially considering that it is to be she that buys the discs tomorrow. She works across from a Best Buy.

Speaking of religion, this is great, if you get it.

Jeanne & Yulia still don't have a cable modem or dsl.

Internet through my phone sucks. God bless internet through my phone.

I miss Boggle, porches and sleeping in terribly.

Says the person who wakes up when everybody else leaves.

Ayiee. I seem to have landed in a rough patch of ramble.

clap clap.
I'm off.

Senator, have you no decency?

I am not of the party of Zell Miller, Senator from Georgia.

Transcript of his speech.

Andrew Sullivan's analysis.

Westphalian Statehood for All!

Quick bits:

Chomsky & Cooperation

Campus Crusade for Cthulhu

I moved the michminnies blog out to michhouse.blogspot.com, since michminnies.icc.coop seems to no longer be holding a web server. All of the old posts are now there. Sosumi.

The NYT reports today that Hurricane Frances may do enough damage at Cape Canaveral that the existing orbiters may be damaged to the point of killing the shuttle program.

1) Hooray for the end of the shuttle program & the end of the space station! More money for basic science!

2) Hooray for locating spaceports in places far away from Hurricanes, like Arizona! Inland, like Heinlein said they should have been.

I flew to Madison last night. Let me mention for the record that the web of quasi-governmental monstrosities that are the reason that we pay such ridiculous taxes in New York really piss me off. In theory, a free market is supposed to be abhor too much government interference. Sure the rationale for public utlities is that there are public goods that just can't be provided by the private sector very easily, due the the inordinate amount of risk. You weigh this against the possible ineffiency of the utilities, or in New York's case, the obvious inefficiencies of inter-agency turf battles.

Most people agree that New York has a quality of life far superior to many other municipalities, narrowly construed in services provided, and perhaps more broadly as well, in attractiveness to potential immigrants and tourists.

Does the inefficiency of these utilities and the vast quantities of money that they inject into the local economy (arguable) or perhaps the redistribution of funds (unjust?) from the nether regions of the state to the city, contribute in some large part to the success of the city?

Would the Reagan Republican's version of this City on a Hill be dramatically different from the Bush Republican/ Johnson Democrat's current version of the city? I think it may.

There was a man from the Continent on the NJ Transit train who was bitterly complaining of the (signifcant) amount he was being charged to go from Penn Station NY to the Newark airport, noting that he could get a round trip air ticket within Europe for under a Hundred Bucks.

The relatively new Airtrain was having problems, with the door not opening to the passenger lounge at the NJ Transit station, and the big map of regional airports and transportation on the wall conveniently ignored the existance of LaGaurdia Airport, to which no Airtrain goes (unlike JFK or Newark).

Petty petty petty.

So Madison's been fun so far. We got swedish pancakes, during my first ever trip to a pancake house. Yumm.

Jeanne's mother pointed out to me that her husband married her while he was in law school. She then asked Jeanne, "When do I get grandchildren?"

Ummm, yeah.

So the Mets...

tidbit

Click above. That's what happened on the trip.

Pics when I get them.

TeeHee

God's Juicy Brains

Hungary approaches like the shore in death dreams, quickly, peacefully, and with a rush of expectation. Without the death part.

I've decided that there are some books that shouldn't be finished on the subway. I'm thinking that books like this should be bundled away until you find that perfect place to sit annd experience the pleasure of the ending in all of its elegance.

Inevitably, these books are finished on the subway after all. Because you can't wait.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake was one of these books. She and the book rock. Strongly, obviously reminiscent of Wouk's Inside, Outside, albeit taken one satisfying critical step farther from Wouk's pretty whitewash ending. She has a reading at Barnard on Oct. 16th. I'm seriously tempted to go, but of course I will probably never actually get around to it. And it does seema bit silly, considering that she also lives in New York City.

Speaking of which, my lease expires on the 25th, and I leave the country five days previous. But yes, I am thinking of moving to the city proper.

Because, after all, Manhattan:Brooklyn::New York::New Jersey.

No disrespect to NJ intended. I think.

And yes the rumors are true. There has been an intervention, and I'm in the middle of doing research on getting back into school. Dave, the Bro, & Jeannne are to thank for that. Or is it the constant nagging. You guys rock.

I'm thinking that we should all have a meetup somewhere, in the dead center of the country, American Gods style.

In the cold of winter.


Also, I've started a translation of the Turkish bestseller My Name is Red, after finishing a rather mediocre book, Vernon God Little.

I still have to go see Harold & Kumar go to white castle, and I've got an itch to go see Garden State again.

And for the record, who the hell is enough of an idiot to foul Mia Hamm in the penalty box?

I've been corralled into the task of bringing meat to brooklyn, and not the stuff that Jeanne refers to as "pale white meat" from Brighton Beach either, but fresh stuff from the supermarket.

And if any of you happen to be in town mine that is tomorrow evening, we have one empty space in our reservation to Peter Lugers. Cyrus & Caitlin, I'm looking at you guys.

There is a point, walking east on any block in the East Village, where the gentrification ends. That is, in all my wandering these last two weeks, I never discovered a street where the yuppies had made it all the way to Avenue D. On some blocks, they had come close- five or ten buildings were all that remained of the old Alphabet City. Still- I found a certain grim satisfaction in charting the high water mark- "that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Most likely, five years from now, the projects will be filled with Columbia graduates, and all the bodegas will be selling fresh sushi. But not now. [Related: all the pictures from the East Village series in higher resolution.] [Bluejake]

beautiful.

That's politics folks

I've spent far too much of this evening shirking work and indulging my history fetish by watching old convention acceptance speeches on CSPAN2.

If you get a chance, do check it out this week - they're playing them every night.

The end of Reagan's speech is brilliant:

I have thought of something that's not a part of my speech and worried over whether I should do it. Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free? Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain; the boat people of Southeast Asia, Cuba, and of Haiti; the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.

I'll confess that I've been a little afraid to suggest what I'm going to suggest. I'm more afraid not to. Can we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer?

10 seconds of complete silence through the convention hall, with the cameras panning over the entire hall, ending with a closeup of Reagan breaking the silence with:

God bless America.

Transformers Movie?

You heard it on TF first: Tomorrow Paramount & Dreamworks will announce plans to release a TRANSFORMERS movie Summer 2006, with Steven "4 act" Spielberg producing. Link goes nowhere but there'll be plenty of them tomorrow..

Well, I think diepunyhumans posted first, but still, Damn.

Remember when Transformers and GI Joe came on weekly afternoons back to back?

The big question of course is who plays Optimus Prime?

Remember that Vin Diesel has already had a robot role...

Hasselhoff Heaven

The ultimate David Hasselhoff video is just one click away.


from [AndrewSullivan]

sillly hasselhoff.

Apollo 11 +35

Tomorrow is the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon.

Check out this QTVR created from pictures that Amstrong took.

In the year surrounding this anniversary, we will have had both privately funded human spaceflight, the first landing on another moon (Titan), and Ray Bradbury testifying about the future of human spaceflight before a congressional committee.

.-.
The evening so far:
Work,meet Yulia,train,cheap eats @ Gray's papaya,Airport Express (less cheap),train,picking up work stuff left at Yulia & Jeanne's + feeding treats to/playing with cat,train,train,Jerry Maguire (+ work. honest)

Adventures in Harvard Square

Day two of the Great Boston Adventure continued unabated today.

Breakfast at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, searching for half price tix to shows at Bostix, back to Harvard Square to find canoes to travel the Charles River, dinner in Harvard Square, a show in Harvard Square, a (fruitful!) search for ice cream in Harvard Square at 11pm, a halting trip back to the hotel (my fault), to receive an email from Mr. Dobosz, saying hey nice to see you're in town, I am too. Let's do lunch tomorrow, btw, Jill lives down the street, and have you been to Harvard Square?

Mebbe. A bit.

The canoing might more appropriately be called canoodling on my part. I'm pretty pitiful waterborne. I think my only talent was consistently getting Yulia drenched by the misapplication of my paddle, despite constant threats of forcible defenestration through the earliest window of opportunity into the river.

Oh, and Leonia bought Jeanne a mango after she started demanding sliced mango - the consumption of which seemingly consumed a good portion of the morning. Leonia - you dog you.

;)

Not to be outdone by the spectacle of three people watching Jeanne eat a mango, the day threw a modern adaptation of Moliere's Miser at us, liked by some, despised by some. Then there were the others who were just amused that the lead bore a striking resemblance to Gene Wilder in his Willy Wonka days.

Also, there's nothing wrong with ordering Dominos at 1 in the morning, to the hotel room, so that one can eat and enjoy Six Feet Under on a full stomach.

I must off to bed. Brunch tomorrow with Leonia Jeanne & Chris. Maybe.

This is Renal Tap

Hotel provided free Wifi at the DoubleTree in Downtown Boston, a good thing.

The Chinatown bus to Boston:

just $10, good.
crappy seat backs, bad.

What's the point of getting food at the Excellent Dumpling House in NYC's Chinatown, getting it packed because you wanted to get to the bus on time, and then ending up in Boston's Chinatown almost five hours later, with cold dumplings, that you can't store in the hotel mini-fridge anyways since it is packed with food tied to exorbitant incidental fees?

Eric P was in town this week. I unfortunately did not get a chance to see his new early eighties Porsche, but did get a chance to hang out with the boy while he was in town. There was as expected much reminiscing, and I was lucky enough to have recounted the singing of the song "Knock knock knocking on Minnies' door" sung to the tune of, well, you know.

Also, Matlock is still cool.

Edwards, lawyer like Matlock.

Conclusion: Theme music to the DNC, especially when Edwards comes out, should be, not some shitty tune like Macarena, but the Matlock Theme.

Finally, the BBC interviewed me one early morning in Bryant Park this week. They are doing some documentary on Macs and Apple products like the iPod. I was busy, and had the chutzpah to tell them that I only had two minutes. The saving grace of the interview, which was brusque, was, as usual, my dashing good looks.

;)

Osbourne w/o Osbourne

So when did the Sharon Osbourne show pick up a co-host who talks more than Sharon?

Arrgh.

Thank God it is Kerry.

I'm already salivating at the prospect of a Edwards - Cheney Debate.

One's a former trial lawyer, and here's a hint, it isn't Cheney.

The fafbloggers?

Ten minutes of lazy googling investigative reporting might bring you the fafbloggers:

Chris Mastrangelo, Mike Fried and John Leen

Chris is/was a member of "Tech House" at Brown.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Michael Moore abandoned independent movie theaters -- the only ones to give him a chance in the beginning. It's like when Metallica sued bootleggers -- the same people who made them famous. On the other hand, I don't really care and if I were Michael Moore I'd be raking in the cash too (ya know...like a guy who makes money pointing out the failures of others.....) Regardless, check out this 3-minute documentary by a buddy of mine, Finding Fahrenheit 9/11, and make up your own mind.


When: 7/1/2004

Company: Michael Moore

Severity: 5

Points: 105
[Newcum's FuckedCompany Feed]

I'm willing to give Moore a lot of leeway. But nobody is immune from criticism.

Jurisprudent Fusion, or Throwing Laffer a Curve

The presumption of innocence is a hallmark of the American court system.

What would happen if this were reversed in the particular case of American tax law?

Would tax evasion go down?

gmail bindings in browsers

I hadn't realized how hooked to gmail I was until I was reading the NYT site and I hit "u". I think we need to have a firefox extension that allows gmail key bindings. The most useful would be a "g+i" combination to go up to the root url, say if I was reading a NYT story, I could go up to nytimes.com.

The other key that would be useful is "u" - which would just take me up in the hierarchy by going up one in the URL. So if I was in nytimes/news/candybars, "u" would take me up to nytimes/news/.

There already exists an extension for firefox that handles going up in the hierarchy. I want a combined plugin.

And one more thing. It should autodetect that we're at gmail.com and disable itself.

mmmm.

satMac meet kryptonite

The satMac needs a new titanium case. Apparently, it cracks very easily.

:(

set WWDC2004 = Crap;

The Apple WorldWide Developers Conference was the most dissapointing Apple Event in years.

No new systems, a preview of an OS that won't come out until 1st Half 2005 (read as late as June 2005), and a score of "advancements" that have been available independently of Apple.

• Metadata file system like the one BeOS had working, on Apple hardware, six years ago


• System wide searching similar to that already implemented in Quiksilver


• Desktop Widgets a dead ringer for those of Konfabulator


• RSS Feeds in Safari Repeat after me: The browser is not the place for added non browsing functionality. Rather than go the route of a suite in the manner of the netscape suite, have the dignity to buy out NetNewsWire or PulpFiction in the same way you bought out SoundJam to make iTunes.

There were other announcements, but they are barely worth mentioning.

• An updated SMB file system driver. To keep up with "Everybody Else"


• BSD utilities that handle resource forks out of the box. This in a .4 point release?


• New Displays - in Aluminum! yawn.

I'm leaning stronger and stronger towards believing that we need a GPLed Carbon environment.

Give me a linux system running on Apple Hardware, running apps meant for Apple's operating system, but better.

What is it they used to say?

Think Different.

Dale a Flaming Liberal?

The Full Monty was on this afternoon as I hooked up my TV to the cable (with the new splitter I bought today at Lowes.)

Not realizing the movie had ended and Fox had segued to NASCAR, you gllorious reader will understand my surprise as I heard the words "Fahrenheit 9/11" come out of the speakers.

It seems that the NASCAR commentators were referring to Dale Earnheardt talking about going to see Michael Moore's new movie as a potential bonding experience.

Dale!

The Fog of War

brilliant

mcnamara comes off as a tragic figure, despite the millions of lives that he was instrumental in eliminating

i have also discovered

that all with dubious places in history

should come with a philip glass soundtrack

bunnies

my cable modem arrived today

it is pretty

i will call it george

I miss STNG.

Riker: How did you like command?
Worf: Comfortable chair.

Bush or Death?

I think I've caught on to the signature of the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign.

gmail explosion

Three invites last night, and now five more today

Sounds good, I think, aside from the capacity problems gmail seems to be having today.

Ever heard an indie-rock band with a classical violin do Pachelbel's Canon? Me neither. Zox can hook you up. [die puny humans]

That's one cool song.

Great Reagan Memory

Scroll to the bottom.

Impeach Bush

If even a small part of what Seymour Hersh says is true, then we are truly truly fucked.

I think it is about time we started seriously, seriously discussing impeachment.

umm

The Jobs Grunt giving presentations at the Apple Store Soho just waxed poetic about the new 2.5 gigabyte G5s....

oops.

yet another post about gmail first impressions

Now that I've made the plunge and switched entirely to gmail, I am googling daily for external interfaces to gmail.

http://www.email2pop.com now offers a pop3/smtp interface to gmail. This sounds useful, but I would really like to see something that will work on unix. I envision a nice imap interface proxy that could run as a daemon on my system. The biggest irritant so far is the lack of notifications when I get a new email.

Gtray is a windows program that at least notifies you when you've received new mail.

Another reason for imap support is offline archiving. There are many clients that can cache an imap server's mailboxes. Offline storage and searching are a powerful feature that gmail doesn't have yet. There must be a way...

Jon Postel, a remembrance of sorts

On Farber's IP list today:

From:   dave_@_farber.net

Subject: [IP] [spam] letter from Jon Postel

Date: June 10, 2004 8:56:39 AM EDT

To:   ip_@_v2.listbox.com

Reply-To:   dave_@_farber.net







Begin forwarded message:



From: Peter Bachman 

Date: June 10, 2004 3:00:56 AM EDT

To: dave_@_farber.net

Subject: [spam] letter from Jon Postel





Dave,



Got an email addressed from Jon Postel today. Of course it was an infected

W32.Netsky.D Worm that had scanned through someone's hard drive for email

addresses, and not an message from the great beyond being channeled through

a DSL connection.



Still it's a self-generated ironic comment by the network, on the sad state of

email within the network. The great computational expense generated by

sending spam out into the network is obviously wasted on trying to sell

Viagra; that much bandwidth and computing power is evolving into something

else; perhaps a very primitive early form of network intelligence that's

linking up bits of information in odd, but somewhat predictable ways.



Now if the "random spam monkeys" can type up and send me an unpublished mss

from William_Shakespeare@stratford-upon-avon.co.uk I can make money fast.

I'll be waiting near the trash bin of my bayseian filters looking for

submissions.



Cheers,



Peter Bachman



peterb_@_cequs.com



Can a machine think?



"You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me

precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a

machine which will do just that"  J. von Neumann 1948 Princeton, NJ





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Jon Postel, in the parental sense, truly the father of the internet, died in 1998. I'm not quite sure what to make of this event. Suffice it to say that it is strangely moving.

Missed Marketing Opportunities

BUT WHERE ARE THE FREMEN MOTIFS?

Fuckers

I had finally gotten to the point where my disgust at Apple had reached the point that I told myself I wasn't going to buy any more Apple Products.

And then they introduce this. As somebody who just bought a mini wireless router, that has an external power supply for $70, the question is, "Is device worth $129?"

Had I not already spent the money, yes.

Fuckers.

I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on

science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion. [The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci]

Senator, the facts speak for themselves.

Moving on

Saved was excellent. A dash of The Opposite of Sex and Election, and mucho bearable triteness.

The week has been ridiculously long. Find place, help Yulia & Jeanne move, move myself, clean old place... yeesh.

Do check out the moblog on the right. If you have a camera phone, it's a good place to put your pics easily. (Especially if you can take advantage of your phone provider's free data. ;)

Potter tickets were bought months ago. The evening seems to be planned out.

Now if I can just figure out a scheme to have reliable internet here that isn't hare brained.

Medium Lobster is the new homestarrunner.

Where else will you find in rapid succession, an interview with "An Enormous Pumpkin" and Jesus.

OS X is Pissing Me Off

50Gbs dedicated to OS X. 1Gb Ram. 1Ghz Processor.

I am running Safari, Mail, Shiira, iTerm, iChat, Addressbook, NetNewsWire, Word, Activity Monitor, and TextEdit, System Preferences, and of course Finder.

It is true that I only have 2 or 3 gigs free on my OS X boot partition, and I understand that this will inevitably lead to the "Your hard disk has no more space available for application memory" message.

But it shouldn't.

Ok. I'm going to stop complaining now and start deleting MP3s.

Sigh.
-=-=

ok. rebooted. The system is feeling much better.

Using OS X is dealing with a relationship.

The first cat's name was meowsulah

Work, pick up check, look at apartment, look at apartment, pack(?).

The Enterprise finale was outlandish yet fun. Were the Alien Nazis necessary to create a cliffhanger?

I'm torn over whether to pack or see Saved or The Day After Tomorrow.

Also consider: Meow + Adam = Madame

Stevens Post Mortem

Rob put up these pictures he took of the Stevens aftermath.

fasterer

I've started playing around with this Japanese web browser (though the interface works in Ennglish) called Shiira. Umm, Japanese as opposed to American I suppose. It appears to be using the Apple WebKit that underlies Safari, but seems to feel buttloads faster. Dare I say fasterer. Ah. I just found the english web page for the project.

Yippee-ki-yay

satmandu may explode without warning

M EXPLOSIVE

Username:

Also, the man who won, then lost the 2000 us presidential election is speaking @ NYU tomorrow afternoon, and will be calling for seven resignations. Yawn.

Hell, I'm still going. It IS sponsored my moveon.

I looked at an apartment last night. Right next to a White Castle, a Kitchen Fried Chicken, and a McDonalds Express.

Three thoughts.
1) Was that feeling in my stomach love?
2) Is fast food on the road to gentrification?
3) Will I regret having sliders for breakfast?

WW Cheney D

So if you haven't heard, there's talk of reinstating the draft next year, as of March 31st, 2005, and making national service mandatory for young people, ages 18-26.

I just realized that as of the end of March 2004, I'm not going to be "eligible" anyways.

A Diet of One

The Pistons/Pacers series is turning out to be an exciting one. I haven't watched the pistons in years, but they seem to be doing quite well for a change, having made the Eastern Conference Finals.


I have decided to switch to linux for a while - for the first time in months. Despite the prettiness of the OS X user interface, is is extremely slow. The OS X WindowServer process tends to just sit and hog the CPU.

Having booted into debian, I was able to apt-get update to the newest 2.6.6 kernel, which seems to solve most of the problems that I had previously with getting X working properly WITH HIGHMEM enabled (which lets me use more than 768 Mb of ram on my system.) The issues I'm still having are getting sound working properly - I'm still having issues getting different programs to access the sound card at the same time (it suddenly feels like using windows 95 in 1996). We really need a proper multimedia framework in linux. That may be the number one showstopper to linux adoption. The system also seems to be starting by default in a mode where it sits at the lower power setting, 667 Mhz, inste3ad of 1Ghz. Even though my broadcom based 802.11g card, supported from inside OS X, isn't supported in linux, my prism based PCMCIA card works just fine. Otherwise, my system is working excellently. Openoffice finds the cups shared printer on the network seamlessly, and the machine sleeps and wakes up perfectly. I've found a RSS reader that seems to work ok, though not as well as NetNewsWire does.

The other minor irritations are from services I've come to expect from the OS after using OS X. Built in Spell Check in any application and the system keychain come to mind. KDE Apps, as far as I know have this functionality, but sound in KDE is even more broken than it is in gnome, and besides, gnome does look pretty.

Back to the apartment search.

Oh, and this is my favorite quote from the NYT today, in an article on how Kerry should appeal to white males:

"My proposal is that the Kerry campaign run a 30-second ad which is nothing but John Kerry sitting on a couch and eating pretzels without involving paramedics at all," Mr. Katz said. "Guys can't help but be impressed by that, if he can get to the bottom of a bag of pretzels without someone having to call an ambulance."