<blockquote> <p>&#34;A good woman is like a fine cheese,&#34; says me. &#34;Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants.&#34;</p> </blockquote> <p> <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_13_fafblog_archive.html#110841400293602113">What more do you need to know?</a></p>

<p> So, decided to cave in and get that grocery store discount card that makes Ben &amp; Jerry&#39;s a buck cheaper, but hate the fact that you&#39;ve just given them a window into your buying habits?</p> <p> Benjamin Mako Hill <a href="http://mako.yukidoke.org/copyrighteous/projects/20050208-00.html">has the answer</a>. He and some compatriots put together <a href="http://cardexchange.org/">cardexchange.org</a> so you can meet up with people and swap cards. Yeah, they&#39;ll still collect information, but it&#39;ll be kinda strange.</p>

<p> John&#39;s a Debian developer, and I keep up with his blog through the <a href="http://planet.debian.org/">Planet Debian</a> aggregator.</p> <p> I was very interested to read his <a href="http://changelog.complete.org/node/230">post on Amtrak funding</a>.</p> <p> I think having public transportation is a significant public good–one of the things I have liked most about the times I have lived in large cities (Boston, Miami, DC) is the ability to get to places without a car. That public transportation occasionally provides Chet with an opportunity to note, &#34;That woman had pierced nipples.&#34; (a fact I had not noticed in my still-somewhat-hung-over state) is just icing on the proverbial cake.</p>

<p> Yes, Virginia, there is a band named <a href="http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?userid=eAF3LEDLCL&amp;amp;EAN=676517101822&amp;amp;ITM=3">Frickin&#39; A</a>.</p> <p> Words fail me.</p>

<p> The multimedia system in Airbus airplanes <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Misc/airbuslinux">apparently runs Linux</a>.</p>

<p> I found it preposterous that anyone could believe there was any urgent need to go to war with a tinpot dictator who wasn&#39;t even in control of the northern third of his country.</p> <p> And I&#39;m pissed that we&#39;ve dragged our own good name through the mud, with lies, torture, allies who are no better than who we were fighting against, and a stack of civilian bodies that&#39;s got to be quite high, no matter which of many numbers you cotton to.</p>

<p> It&#39;s easy. Walk up to me and say, &#34;Do I know you from somewhere?&#34;</p> <p> You see, the problem is that&#39;s either the most cliched pick-up line in existence–and, being realistic, I don&#39;t generally assume women are trying to pick me up–or you at least <em>think</em> you know me somehow, and now I have to figure out how.</p> <p> So the wheels begin spinning furiously, and if they can&#39;t find any traction, well, it&#39;s like beginning to slowly drift backwards in your manual transmission car in San Francisco–not a good feeling.</p>

<p> I wasn&#39;t actually a reader of <a href="http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/">TMFTML</a>, but when I noticed a reference to it, I went to see if it had re-opened because Chet had been a fan.</p> <p> Mostly, I just want to echo <a href="http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/archives/001851.html#001851">the assessment</a> of Modest Mouse&#39;s latest album, Good News for People Who Like Bad News, which was an album I listened to quite a lot during my stint in DC.</p> <p> I can&#39;t express my feelings towards Modest Mouse. They are an untelegenic band, the lead singer is rather older and not nearly as scrawny as I had imagined. His voice isn&#39;t that great–it&#39;s better than mine, but that says fuck-all–and he mutters indistinctly, and the guitars twang in odd ways, but Lord, the lyrics make me feel 19 again when the lyrics to songs meant everything in the world.</p>

<p> <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_23_fafblog_archive.html#110669057794140997">Heh</a>.</p> <p> I&#39;m not sure that there is any response to the state of the world that is more sane than <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/">Fafblog!</a></p>

<p> I&#39;ve been through a blizzard or maybe two in Boston. I have to say, though, it never occured to me to <a href="">jump out my window into a handy snowbank</a>.</p> <p> So, Laura, how you holding up?</p>

<p> So, <a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05%2F01%2F14%2F0028208">Slashdot has an article about paint that will help you protect your wireless network</a>. By lacing the paint with copper and aluminum fibers, they&#39;re hoping to create a simple <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage">Faraday Cage</a> (hey, that&#39;s my first-ever link to wikipedia!), thereby reducing or eliminating the amount of RF passing through your walls.</p> <p> Hope you don&#39;t watch broadcast television.</p> <p> But, much more worryingly, am I the only one who remembers the decades of issues we&#39;ve had in this country with lead paint–lead having been a great pigment for getting a nice bright white color–and small children eating the paint when it chipped off, and the neurological problems that that engendered, and at the same time remembering that copper can be poisonous, and aluminum may be connected with Alzheimer&#39;s (though Wikipedia&#39;s article on Aluminum suggests that that&#39;s been refuted)?</p>

<p> So I idly look on Amazon to see if there&#39;s a release date for the new Nine Inch Nails album With Teeth. No, but there <em>is</em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00001MXV6/qid%3D1105376386/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-8228765-4982512">an album by the same name by another band</a>, so I wonder if I got the name wrong, so I go to nin.com, and look at the <a href="http://nin.com/current/index.html">pseudo-blog section</a>, which contains a comment about <a href="http://www.damageplan.com/">Dimebag Darrell</a> and someone named &#34;Jhonn&#34;. So hit google, and end up being pointed to (among other places) <a href="http://blogofdeath.com/">blogofdeath.com</a>, which turns out to be much more serious than its name might imply.</p>

<p> The morning started off early–no appreciable acclamatization to the time change had taken place.</p> <p> After a nice breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel, <a href="http://www.restaurantanzu.com/">Anzu</a>, I went across the street to National Car Rental, got a car, and headed north.</p> <p> I must say, the drive is fast when you&#39;re going opposite prevailing traffic–I was in Sonoma in roughly an hour, and took the time to stop in <a href="http://adobenetcafe.com/">a little net cafe there</a> to download some email and post yesterday&#39;s entry.</p>

<p> OK, I reported before, with some trepidation, about <a href="/2004/11/i-cant-decide-if-this-is-good-or-bad.html">plans to make a move of V for Vendetta</a>.</p> <p> It has become more interesting in that <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?category=0&amp;amp;id=30098">Natalie Portman may feature in it</a>.</p> <p> She&#39;s an interesting actress–her willingness to get involved in the massive charlie-foxtrot of schlock that is the Star Wars prequel trilogy aside.</p> <p> I dunno.</p>

<p> So, we headed out to Cali yesterday morning. Our flight to Newark was uneventful, as was our flight to SFO, although we sat next to a painter and her cat–her husband and her other cat (in a bizarre coincidence, a male named Tucker) were across the aisle.</p> <p> Her website <a href="http://madelonjones.com/">has some interesting material</a>. She was very interesting to talk to.</p> <p> We also saw The Bourne Supremacy and Vanity Fair. The Bourne Supremacy seemed a perfectly reasonable film of its type–a reasonable way to pass an hour and a half. Vanity Fair actually left me interesting in reading the book for I wonder how the book itself treats Becky Sharp.</p>

<p> Seen on <a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005">Sci-Fi Wire</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?category=0&amp;amp;id=30025">Is Bosworth Superman&#39;s Lois?</a></p> </blockquote>

<p> …but this one was different. I was taking a course in writing Humorous Essays, but most class discussion consisted, perhaps unsuprisingly, of one-liners. I was concerned that my work was too bitterly ironic; I wanted it to be a little more generously funny. And Tina Fey was in the class. And she had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to me.</p> <p> There was more, but I couldn&#39;t remember it by the time I actually got up.</p>

<p> <a href=""><img src="http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg" alt="http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg" title="http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg" /></a></p> <p> A shot from <a href="http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/java/?permalink=ThinkingMachine4.txt">a computer chess applet that shows a graphical representation of it&#39;s analysis</a>.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/">Via Nick Lothian</a></p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> Although there is definitely a soft white underbelly of overblown sentiment in this movie, there&#39;s also a good chunk of Michael Caine and Robert Duvall appearing to be having–and if you credit Caine&#39;s appearance on The Daily Show, having–a lot of fun, along with pretty decent work by Haley Joe Osment, who gives every sign of growing into a credible actor.</p> <p> I was surprised to find, browsing on <a href="http://imdb.com/">IMDb</a> that one of his first film rolls was as Forrest Gump Jr. Oh, well, there&#39;s no accounting for coincidence.</p>

<p> I hope everyone reading is well–all two or three of you.</p> <p> We had a day of beautiful weather–it was more like January in Miami than January in Durham. Of course, I spent too much of it inside playing World of Warcraft, but Anne and I still got a walk of a bit over an hour and a quarter in midafternoon.</p> <p> On an amusing meta-note, I can only guess that the person who found this site by searching for &#34;milla jovovich naked&#34; did not get what he (presumably) was looking for, since it probably wasn&#39;t snarky comments about Resident Evil.</p>

<p> …but I&#39;m not sure I&#39;d go to them for web development.</p> <p> It is a tiresome fact of web development that you can&#39;t trust anything the user enters, and you really <em>must</em> validate input you get from your users. Unfortunately, the <a href="http://www.hawkingtech.com/prodSpec.php?ProdID=">message you get from following this link</a> (which I didn&#39;t construct–it was on their site) seems to show that they&#39;re not doing a very good job of that.</p> <p> (Not that I&#39;ve ever been perfect, either, but I try hard.)</p>

<p> The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek but the fact is I&#39;m starting to think that for me the answer is &#34;mild depression&#34;.</p> <p> Now I&#39;m really not trying to cause anyone concern–this is not &#34;I&#39;m going to go jump off a bridge now&#34; material. I don&#39;t feel unhappy or anything–which even now makes me wonder if I&#39;m wrong–instead, I&#39;m just totally and utterly apathetic. I have no energy, no desire to do anything active at all–I&#39;d happily sleep, eat and watch television, maybe read and play World of Warcraft.</p>

<p> &#34;I hope your children turn out to be as perfect as you are, sir.&#34;</p> <p> – Bill Clinton, quoted by the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/262079p-224420c.html">New York Daily News</a>, allegedly to a man &#34;pushing a stroller&#34; in Central Park who called him &#34;an embarrassment.&#34;</p>

<p> …but I will note that during the three months I was in Washington, the two local, non-political things that dominated the news were the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Dupont Circle and the jubilation of some that they would no longer have to drive to Baltimore to see pro baseball.</p> <p> Nevertheless, I don&#39;t see how paying for a new stadium for a team would be anything other than a boondoggle.</p>

<p> …that postings have dried up, insofar as he hectored me into buying Worlds of Warcraft, which is interfering with me getting any, you know, <em>work</em> done.</p> <p> I haven&#39;t spent this much time with a video game since &#39;95 or &#39;96, when Quake came out.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_12_05.php#004169">Read it here.</a></p> <p> Discussing the Bush Administration&#39;s plan to privatize Social Security:</p> <blockquote> <p>In other words, we have to start phasing out Social Security now because if we don&#39;t we&#39;re going to face some big borrowing in a few decades. But we can avoid that horror of horrors by doing some big time borrowing now to finance abolishing Social Security we won&#39;t have to face that terrible fate a few decades from now.</p>

<p> I&#39;ve become resigned to the 5 year cycles that are all Trent seems to be able to achieve–yeah, yeah, I know that there&#39;s always a ton of sub-releases in the intervening time (I&#39;ve got a shelf full of them), but let&#39;s face it: Pretty Hate Machine was 1989, The Downward Spiral was 1994, The Fragile was 1999–crap, this one&#39;s going to be 6 years. He&#39;s getting deep into Paul Simon territory here.</p>

<p> Now, I wouldn&#39;t encourage anyone to invest in DVDs of Tom Clancy movies, but pudge <a href="http://use.perl.org/~pudge/journal/22052">notes Ben Affleck&#39;s negaive value in terms of such things</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.diepunyhumans.com/">Find it at <a href="http://www.diepunyhumans.com">http://www.diepunyhumans.com</a></a></p> <p> This should be important to anyone who&#39;s read Transmetropolitan (bet that one came out OK, Nova), and, well, <em>everyone</em> should read Transmetropolitan.</p> <p> Oh, and that link where he says don&#39;t look–seriously, don&#39;t look. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. I need to go spend about three hours in the shower now.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp">via William Gibson</a></p>

<p> <a href="http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000586.html">You can read the whole thing here</a></p> <p> In response to <a href="http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002532.html">another article</a>, wherein someone notes–mostly without suprise–that Linux is becoming a real contender for desktop use, Brad puts forth the following:</p> <blockquote> <p>There are two theories about open-source. The first is that while it has always been possible for a charismatic leader to call forth immense team effort and accomplish great things by force of inspiration and example alone, such enterprises are never stable. In the long run you need either the stick of potential punishment–call it the authority of the state–or the carrot of material reward–the market–in order to maintain a large social division of labor and preserve a project across any substantial length of time. Call this process the routinization of charisma.</p>

<p> After reading that there was some sort of connection between the Allman Brothers&#39; In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Miles Davis, I did a quick google search, and stumbled across <a href="http://songfacts.com/">songfacts</a>, which has the potential to be an interesting site.</p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> reprint series. In fact, looking over <a href="http://www.distrimagen.es/mignola/mignola.htm">a list of his published work</a>, that&#39;s about all I think I was likely to have seen. I&#39;m actually amazed that I&#39;ve read so little of his stuff, because he certainly made an impression on me.</p> <p> Well, I&#39;ve also enjoyed reading Hellboy, with its wisecracking take on neo-Lovecraftian horror, but I just picked that up in the last year.</p> <p> So, as I said <a href="/2004/02/ive-been-getting-back-into-comic-books-of-late.html">some time ago</a> (before the movie came out in theaters), I wasn&#39;t sure how I&#39;d like the movie adaptation.</p>

<figure> <img src="/weddingband.jpg" alt="/weddingband.jpg" title="/weddingband.jpg" /><figcaption> My el-cheapo wedding ring. </figcaption> </figure> <p> <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/2004/11/24#051124engaged">As I had occasion to be reminded today</a>, I needed a new wedding ring.</p> <p> Now, I went the first 6 3/4 years of my marriage without one. For the first couple, well, it would have given it away–although, in retrospect, there could have been a lot of fun in watching people figure it out–and for a good while after that we just had more important things upon which to spend money.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001750.html">Just go read it for yourself</a>.</p> <p> <a href="http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/11/bestblog_postev.html">via Matthew</a>.</p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> is one of the definitive Computer Science textbooks. It was also, for years, the book that defined the scheme language. It&#39;s big, and dense and fairly expensive.</p> <p> Imagine my suprise, then, that MIT Press has apparently <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html">made the entire thing available for free on the web</a>.</p>

<p> I broke down and did what I&#39;d recently recommended to someone else–I bought a Linksys WRT54GS, and then I ponied up the $20/year for the subscription to sveasoft.com&#39;s super-firmware.</p> <p> (Yes, I know there&#39;s some conflict about GPL compliance WRT sveasoft.com, although from my understanding of the issues (that they want to restrict circulation of betas), I don&#39;t have a problem with it, really.)</p> <p> Boy, I am awfully pleased.</p> <p> For &lt; $100 all told, I got 802.11g (though I am having one bastard of a time finding a cardbus card with an in-kernel driver), a four-port switch (though I&#39;m really only using one), a router, a VPN server (albeit PPTP), a dhcp server that&#39;ll do static address assignments, a local DNS server that cooperates with it, and no doubt a bunch of other stuff I haven&#39;t discovered yet.</p>

<p> This is a little tardy, but I feel I must mention that as of roughly 10 PM CST November 22, 2004, I have a new nephew, Nigel Sanford Berry.</p> <p> On the subject of the name, I can only speculate that my brother in law (Hi, Cory!) didn&#39;t think that naming his first son Calvin Rufus Berry was sufficient revenge on his parents for naming him Corlis–I wish, though, he had opted for therapy instead of a path that willguarantee his sons get beat up every day after school. It&#39;s just a little too &#34;sins of the grandparents&#34; meets Darwin.</p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> So, in an amusing coincidence–given that I had just spent three months among ex-Amazonians–Anne&#39;s friend Chapman got me a copy of this book as a birthday gift.</p> <p> It is not the book I was thinking it was–there is apparently some other Amazon insider that mentions my friend Alex by name. It&#39;s a quick, light read. A fair amount of dot-bomb silliness can be recognized.</p> <p> Yet, at the same time, I guess it&#39;s the final proof that I&#39;m not a slacker that I find the main character unlikeable. Self-centered, uninterested in doing work, a dilettante who doesn&#39;t even do a good job of that, he pretty much offended me.</p>

<p> <img src="" alt="" title="" /> For various <a href="http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/hystericalreasons.html">hysterical raisins</a> two of my primary guitars have old-school Stratocaster tremolo bridges.</p> <p> However, I hate them. I don&#39;t use them, I don&#39;t have the bars screwed into them, I&#39;d basically rather not have them. But there&#39;s always been the problem of what to replace them with.</p> <p> <a href="http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2004/Convertible-Hot-Rod.html">Now there is an option, and it&#39;s fucking cool to boot!</a></p>

<p> Hardware manufacturers seem to be obsessed with rejiggering the internals of their products without putting <em>any markings</em> on the packaging (or hell, on the card, or even in its top-level PCI information) to indicate that something has changed. This screws Linux users on a regular basis.</p> <p> The particular case in point–which I suggest you avoid–is the Netgear WG511. The original (v1) iteration of this Cardbus 802.11g card used the Intersil PrismGT/Duette chipset which is well-supported under Linux–it has a driver (prism54) that&#39;s been in the kernel for several months now and it&#39;s apparently fast and reliable.</p>

<p> U2 always seems to just take over SNL when they show up. Their 2000 performance (the day after the 20th anniversary of John Lennon&#39;s murder) had Bono walking through the crowd, incorporating bits of Instant Karma during Elevation! (IIRC).</p> <p> This time around, they did three songs (and the broadcast cut a fourth) and if you watch at the end of I Will Follow, well, let&#39;s just say that some fan will one day be able to tell kids about her lap dance from Bono.</p>

<p> I have to say, <a href="http://www.delicious-monster.com/">Delicious Library</a> is almost enough to make me want a mac.</p>

<p> A local organization was told that it would have to remove the word &#34;rights&#34; from its on-air sponsorship spot.</p> <blockquote> <p>The conflict between Ipas and WUNC has drawn national attention. Last month WUNC informed Ipas that it would have to remove &#34;rights&#34; from its on-air acknowledgement, which had read, in part, &#34;Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit that protects women&#39;s reproductive health and rights at home and abroad.&#34;</p> </blockquote> <p> Joan Siefert Rose, WUNC&#39;s general manager, said the phrase could be interpreted as advocating a political position, potentially running afoul of Federal Communications Commission regulations.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.theanticmuse.com/">Antic Muse</a> was Ana Marie Cox&#39; site before she became <a href="http://wonkette.com/">Wonkette</a>.</p> <p> I hit the link on Unfogged, and then came across <a href="http://www.theanticmuse.com/~anamarie/archives/000172.html">a review of Liz Phair&#39;s latest album</a> she reproduced from the Chicago Reader. I guess I&#39;m not sorry I haven&#39;t bought it.</p>

<blockquote> <p>Jeff&#39;s young new neighbour &amp; his pal, on learning of Jeff&#39;s professional area, asked him if he knew any rock stars.<br> JF: Have you heard of King Crimson?<br> A: Air-guitaring to the opening riff of 21st. Century Schizoid Man.<br> JF: How do you know that? (the riff was first played some 23 years before the neighbour was born).\\</p> <ol> <li>Our friend used it for the music to his skateboard video.</li> </ol> </blockquote> <p> Jeff didn&#39;t mention Ozzy Osbourne is covering Schizoid Man on his next album.</p>

<p> On the same day <a href="/2004/11/jon-carroll-on-kinsey-2004-11-19.html">I quote Jon Carroll talking about the movie Kinsey</a>, Steve Clemmons finds that New York&#39;s premier PBS station <a href="http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000196.html">will not be showing ads for the movie</a>.</p> <p> No, there&#39;s no chilling effect.</p>

<p> <a href="http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2004-11%2F18%2F11.30.film">The Wachowski Brothers will be producing a movie of Alan Moore&#39;s V for Vendetta</a>.</p> <p> Now, V isn&#39;t bad–although it&#39;s hardly Alan Moore&#39;s best work, as it is lacking in subtlety in many spots–but I don&#39;t see how they won&#39;t do a Constantine on it–and let&#39;s face it, that&#39;s one movie I&#39;m <em>not</em> intending to see in theaters, if at all.</p> <p> I mean, to understand one of the first scenes in the story, you have to know what Guy Fawkes Day is about, and in a country where they had to re-title The Madness of King George III because people thought they&#39;d missed the first two installments, well, that&#39;s just going to be too much.</p>

<p> Basically, <a href="http://www.newdonkey.com/2004/11/christian-right-and-sanctity-of.html">the suggestion over at New Donkey</a> is that, in fact, the nature of marriage has always been changing, and points out the fact that both Luther and Calvin felt that marriage was a secular thing that should not involve the church.</p> <p> I&#39;ve also heard it suggested, many months ago, that marriage as a formal ceremony originated as a way to be assured of the &#34;proper&#34; passing-down of property (poor people would just be &#34;common law&#34; man and wife), and that the clergy got involved because they were the only ones who were literate.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%2Farchive%2F2004%2F11%2F19%2FDDGAB9AB991.DTL">You can see the whole thing here</a></p> <blockquote> <p>It is interesting that a film about Alfred Kinsey is coming out today. Half a century ago, he released a book that seemed to prove that human beings act like human beings. &#34;Who, us?&#34; said the human beings, and got all huffy. All of a sudden, we&#39;re back in a pre-Kinsey world.</p> </blockquote>

<p> Yeah, yeah, Tom Oliphant likes Kerry, and he&#39;s a Massachusetts liberal and all, but that doesn&#39;t change the fact that, of the 11 state ballot initiatives portrayed as &#34;protecting marriage&#34;, only three were just about that–<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/07/the_gay_marriage_deception/">the other 8 were about restricting people&#39;s abilities to make certain sorts of contracts</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>In pivotal Ohio, for example, the voters may not have realized it but they voted to strip people of the right to contractually arrange distribution of assets, child custody, pensions, and other employment benefits.</p>