Still getting the random blogspam comments, even though I throw away anything with a web address. At least (example in the title of this entry) they're occasionally amusing engrish.
Reminds me of one of my favorite expressions: “Your presence here fills a much-needed void.”
“Your site has very much liked me.”
No, my site has very much not liked you.
This year at Burning Man, I'll be camping with “The Secret Xchange” (which I insist on calling “Camp Secret” because I think it sounds better!) Our contribution/participatory art project will be to provide people with multiple ways of unburdening themselves of secrets – as well as enabling them to unburden others. You'll be able to commit your secret to a plantable, beseeded postcard that you can plant in your garden; write it on your chest in grease pencil; whisper it into a sympathetic ear in the confessional; yell it through a bullhorn; as well as other ways to be announced (and/or invented).
My personal project is the “Undisclosed Location” – a playa art installation. Located somewhere far out on the desert, this oasis will echo the theme of Camp Secret, with a few twisted ideas of my own.
What do I need from you? I need your secrets. You can enter them as comments here, if you'd like to be anonymous; or you can email them to me here. If you really want to help me, you can record them to some digital audio format – mp3 or wav or aiff – and email that to me.
These don't necessarily have to be your own secrets. They can even be made-up. They can be personal, mundane, childish, pornographic, humorous or serious. If they're government top secrets I'll keep them tucked confidentially under my tinfoil hat. If you choose to record them (did I mention I'd really like this?) use an appropriate tone. If you want to embellish them in the style of Post Secret, that would be lovely.
Oh, and if you happen to have a blog (especially one that's popular, or whatever…) feel free to pimp this idea there!
Thanks!
By the way, wouldn't it be interesting if Apple had allowed AT&T an exclusive contract on the current iPhone, but not on new iPhones (or other iPhone-like-products)? Unlikely, but one can only hope.
As part of the moving-in process, I'm opening lots of boxes marked “Office Stuff” and “Random Junk” and trying to figure out if I can throw things away or if I have to find places to put it. One of the classes of object I seem to have a lot of, and not know what do to with, are keepsakes.
I have a box of keys, which is not that surprising, most people probably have this. But in this box are the keys to my first car, as well as keys to two other cars. I can identify that these rings only have these keys. Why am I keeping these? If I see my old car on the street, will I try to steal it? Or just give the keys to the owner and ask them about how the vehicle has been doing lately?
I also have a triangular hay blade that I drove over in around 1980. Slashed my tire, I thought it was pretty cool. It's in the same drawer with the ninja stars I bought in Tijuana (or probably Mexicali) about the same time. We set up a dartboard in the dorm on the back of a door and played darts with throwing stars; it was pretty fun but I don't know why I'm keeping them. I have a nice set of darts; I don't think I've played darts in ten years. Multi-sided dice. Record cleaner spray – that I'm sure I can get rid of. Old checks and check registers from the early 80s. I know I'm allowed to get rid of tax records after several years; I've kept them forever.
In the drawers of a card table we're selling, are a bunch of old decks of cards, and monopoly money. Should we throw them away? And of course a lot of this is made far more complicated by the fact that my wife is a costumer and we're both burner artists – so we keep a lot of things that seem like they might be good for a project, someday. Things like old CD cases (“these could be made into a dress”) or old blenders (“this could be used to make paper”) and old speakers and potentiometers and switches (“I might do a project with these.”).
Then there are the various levels of recycling. Some stuff just gets pitched – old pens that don't work, broken connectors for devices that no longer exist; keys that I know I don't need anymore. Old checks and financial stuff has to be shredded, of course. Paper and glass can go in recycling. There's a pile for me or Becke to put things that we don't want but we think the other might want. The pile of stuff for garage sale/goodwill sort of overlaps with the pile of stuff that should really be sold on Craigslist. There are a few things that are specialized and should go on Ebay, I guess, if I ever got around to it. The aforementioned project items take up a lot of space. Finally there are the boxes of stuff we don't need right now but can't bear to get rid of. And the stuff that we have a place for but we have too many of already has to be split up into one of the other piles.
What I'd really like is just a big industrial shredder/disintegrator/vaporizer. Throw stuff in, and it gets broken down into its base elements and/or burned to generate power. Needs to be about the size of a microwave and be able to eat things like old hard drives as well as expired cleaning solutions.
Hi, I'm Fred, and I'm a handheld computer addict. (Hi, Fred!)
In high school, my friend Joe taught me how to program a pocket calculator. I think it was Texas Instruments, like the TI-55, or the Radio Shack clone; I remember it used assembly-style programming – sto 1 rcl 2 gto 5 gsb 7 rnd. I believe the memory was lost whenever the power was turned off, and about the best you could do was a random number guessing program. Which we did over and over again when we were bored in math class. 55 enter? Lower!
In college, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Actually made by Sharp, it had a single-line display, programmed in Basic, even had an external portable printer/plotter which I used to solve and print results for matrix multiplication problems for a game theory class. A few years ago I found it in a box and donated it to a guy that was starting a museum. I still have another one that seems to eat up batteries instantly, but that may be because I only fire it up every few years.
The HP100LX/HP200LX was a favorite of mine. DOS (even though I hated DOS!), database, word processor, Lotus 123 (interface hell, but still, a spreadsheet in my palm around 1990 was pretty cool). I mainly used it as a serial port diagnosis tool, with a serial cable and Reflections. I even used the modem to do dial up maintenance on customer sites from hotel rooms. What killed the 100LX was not switching to Unix; they could still be selling the thing as a UNIX terminal, even without a GUI. I still have one of these, too, that I'm this close to selling; let me know if you want it before it goes to ebay.
Loved the Newton, of course, several of them (100, 120, 2000, even an eMate). What an awesome device, which I argue was killed by one missing element – a USB port. (The original Newtons had a serial port; the 2000 had a screwy proprietary interconnect port that only was able to connect to the required interconnect port->serial adapter!) USB would have given the Newton easy connectivity for sync'ing, third party external keyboards, memory sticks, and any number of external devices (By the way, I just bought a USB key WIFI adapter, for $12. Lets you create your own 'ad hoc' wifi network. Open, of course.) It did have PCMCIA cards, and I guess you could get a USB one of those; I know I had a network card that worked swell. In the garage there's a whole box of Newton – 2000, development kit, CDs, leather case, keyboard, etc. etc. I really really need to get rid of it, but I just can't!
There was at least one developer release of a Unix-based palmtop, but without a keyboard and with only a serial port, it was pretty useless.
My phone is a Treo 650 because despite how juvenile I find the PalmOS, I can connect and sync it with my Mac (using Missing Sync); run Pocket Quicken to enter my cash transactions; play music (I don't even own an iPod. Okay, that's not true, I have an original 5GB that sits in a drawer); keep notes, surf the web – mainly used for googling the closest (whatever) or finding the answers to questions that pop up. I've had a lot of phones, too, and this admittedly isn't the best phone (the range isn't that great, and it's a little uncomfortable to talk on for long periods. I have programming books for Palm but I've never gotten that far into them.
I've become attached to the hp12c calculator, partly because I adore the perversity of RPN, partly because I used it to calculate mortgage payments while shopping unsuccessfully for houses. I even got an HP12c emulator for my Palm.
Which brings us to the latest. Ever look at Woot? It's a site where every day (sometimes several times a day) they sell discount electronic closeout stuff. The site's shtick is to have a clever or amusing story about each item. Today they're advertising a media player with a list of disclaimers: “40GB hard drive holds so many songs, mentally unstable users may become frustrated and bellicose when trying to decide what to listen to.” Stuff sells quickly so unless you jump on it, it'll be gone – sort of like the Home Shopping Network of electronica. Of course it's in my daily Firefox bookmarks (Damn you, “Open All in Tabs”!) Anyhow, the other day up popped the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, for $129. Nearly the same size as the HP12c, it's a full Debian Linux PC, with an awesome color screen, built-in Wifi, Bluetooth, Opera web browser, email, RSS reader, and easy-to-install Linux software (yes, that's a contradiction in terms, but it works!) No keyboard, but the bluetooth keyboard I never use with my Palm works fine with it. Runs VNC so I can connect to my home PC from anywhere I have a Wifi connection. Still won't replace my Treo as a carry-around web device (tho there's apparently a hack to defeat Verizon's cripplage and let the 770 use the internet connection from the Treo).
Then there's the iPhone. I really really wanted one of these, and the store near me had them in stock and no lines on “iDay”. What kills it for me is having to use AT&T. Not that I love Verizon – they're all spinoffs of the death star, after all. But everyone I know is on Verizon, so calls to them aren't included in my minutes. Plus they don't have the damned “rollover minutes” which I of course think of as “roll over and …. minutes” – could they make it more obvious that they're screwing you? That, and the fact that it isn't programmable. I'm sure I could create some cool webapps for it, this is after all what I know how to do. But somehow, without being able to actually program it…it's just a phone with a web browser. Maybe that's just rationalizing; what's true is it doesn't currently do as much as my Treo (tho what it does, it does a lot more elegantly!)
Finally, a new blog entry!
See, I used to host my website from the Mac under my desk, which was great for practice and really easy to change, but gave me an excessive DSL bill and a tweaked custom site. Moved to hostmonster and got a really cheap hosting bill, occasional downtime because gallery is hammering mysql is hammering the CPU, and lost all my custom tweaks. Including one that allowed me to edit this blog! I dropped in a few entries directly using phpmyadmin to add to the database, but that offended my sensibilities too much to keep on with it.
Now I'm working doing php web development, so I figured I might as well fix it; it took about ten minutes to find the problem. Yay.
As punishment for you and me, at least one new blog entry every day for as long as I can stand it.
Public Announcement
My parents keep telling me that somewhere on here I referred to my Dad as a “Budweiser kind of guy”. I don't think I did, and I can't seem to find it (SELECT * FROM `blog` WHERE blog_content LIKE '%Budweiser%'), but I know I did say that “When I was growing up, my Dad liked Budweiser (the American version), so I thought that was what beer tasted like, hence I thought I didn't like beer.”
For the record, Dad is by no means a Budweiser kind of guy, nor do I think he really is all that fond of it. It was just all they had to drink back in the '70s – that or perhaps something even less appetizing. And if you were hosting a hadball tournament, that's what you'd get a keg of, because as I recall, after a couple of games of handball, a watery beer would be pretty swell. In any case, I owe Dad quite a few beers for that offense. I should mention that the first day I drove the first car I ever drove, I carried an open container of Bud – a tapped keg as a matter of fact – to a handball tournament, the “First Annual Helen Keller Invitational” where the power went out.
Tonight with dinner I had a Belgian Trappistes Rochefort #10 that I paid way too much for at the local Bevmo. I think El Centro even has a Bevmo these days. Bevmo still doesn't have Dogfish Head Raison d'etre – not to mention 120 minute IPA (yes, I even read the brewmaster's book, Brewing Up A Business), but they do have a decent selection of microbrews, including the one I just had as well as Ommegang and Three Philospophers, plenty of Stone selections, Rogue River, several of the ubiquitous but tasty Chimay flavors… I don't know if Dad has heard of any of these, but I'll make it a point to introduce him. Funny thing is, I only end up drinking a single beer every few days, 'cause I'm trying to watch the carbs and they make me snore. Sometimes I go wild and have a big bottle.
Oh, (“2 RESULTS FOUND”) I also said, re St. Patrick's Day, “Friends don't let friends drink green Budweiser.” That one I'm sticking to.
Meet my newest web diversion: Wikitravel. WT is the Wikipedia of travel guides. It's got, or will have, articles about every city on Earth (worth visiting and/or worth writing about and/or someone's from or been to). Go ahead, go there and check your local city. I'll wait.
Pretty cool, eh? What, you found something wrong? Or better, something you'd like to add? Go ahead! All pages are editable. If you vandalize or make a mistake, someone else will helpfully revert the page to before. Articles are well-linked to others, and are fairly hierarchial where possible.
Besides cities, it has articles about other popular places – Death Valley, for example; I'm trying to write one about the Mojave Desert.
I've been concentrating on what I know best – San Diego area, a few in Los Angeles, some in Baja and of course Imperial Valley – which is actually a rather popular tourist destination.
I even wrote Driving in Mexico – mostly, unless someone's edited it. Is it perfect? Of course not – but someone will get around to fixing it. Feel free to hack at it yourself. If you do, it works better if you register a username, tho you're not required to.
One of the cool things about WT is that, although it's been running for a couple of years, it's still sort of getting started – so maybe you're not getting in on the ground floor, but maybe you're on the Mezzanine. Or the pool deck on top of the lobby, or something.
Waste of time? Sure. But it's entertaining. And I enjoy contributing to this sort of open information exchange. And I found information about all the places on my upcoming trip to China (more about that at some point).
Recently I've been getting “comments” on some of my blog entries, from automated spammers. The messages are pretty consistent: “Hi! Great web site!” blah blah blah. Then a bunch of links to websites.
It was pretty easy to kill these, I just rejected any comments that contain http:// and that takes care of it. Prevents legit guests from posting website links as well; c'est l'merde. I could have made it “log on to register” but then I have to deal with the whole login system. Was a lot simpler just to regex comments.
I notice they also have hit several other blogs that I read – often there are more spam messages than there are legit comments. Which is unfortunate, because like email spam, popups, and mailing list spam, it quickly devolves into more noise than signal.
The odd thing to me, is that these spam sites aren't even up when I go to check them. I still get the rejects in my mailbox, so I sometimes look them up. What I've found is that either they've been taken down already, or they never existed. They usually have links like somejunksite.cheaphost.org – and even cheaphost.org isn't even available. Pretty ineffective marketing, even if they worked.
Best thing for you to do? Never, ever click or order anything that came from a spam, no matter how you got it. I imagine it's too late, and there are too many people online that are stupid enough to order viagra or golf clubs or spamming software or antispam software, from spam. So we get more and more of these until the medium becomes unusable. That's not crapping in your own nest – it's crapping in everyone's nest.
“I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and then wrap himself in the flag.”
–Texas Representative Craig Washington, quoted in Molly Ivins’ syndicated newspaper column, June 30, 1997
