alright kids! it's time for another exciting game of "You Might Be Old When..."

you might be old when it's well into new year's eve and you still painting trim while purposefully listening to jazz you're pretty sure your grandfather listened to in-between ball games. you know the kind. wood blocks and xylophones.

my grandmother, who lives deep in downeast maine, recently got a computer and e.mail. it's really quite a treat to get e.mail from her, since i'm notoriously, horrendously terrible at remembering to take the time to call. it's also very interesting to see how her e.mail "voice" is different than here letter "voice".

no word yet on whether or not she's a fan of the site :-)

The Wireless Commons Manifesto:

"We have formed the Wireless Commons because a global wireless network is within our grasp. We will work to define and achieve a wireless commons built using shared spectrum, and able to connect people everywhere. We believe there is value to an independent and global network which is open to the public. We will break down commercial, technical, social and political barriers to the commons. The wireless commons bridges one of the few remaining gaps in universal communication without interference from middlemen and meddlers."

of course, one person's meddling middleman is another persons value-added service provider.

reading mark pilgrim's follow-up on his use of the "cite" tag makes me wish there was a bit of markup to signify a "blogbite":

"if you have million-dollar markup, you don't need million-dollar code, and vice versa."

every now and again i get an e.mail asking why i don't have comments on the vast wasteland. i've been waffling for years on whether or not to implement a comments, so i guess it's time to take a poll.

if you'd like to see comments on the site, send me an e.mail. i guess some people are away for the holidays, so maybe i'll ask again in january.

i forgot to mention that despite a lack of perceived demand for rss 2.0 in xml::rss , i sent rafe a quick email and he rewarded my laziness by committing a patch to produce valid 2.0 feeds.

i still haven't decided why i'd want to produce a 2.0 feed, but at least the option is there. thanks to rafe for submitting the code.

if you're looking to gain a whole new perspective on life, there's nothing like standing in a small, poorly ventilated room filled with oil-based primer fumes.

i feel similar to the way i felt after a long day of doing ether extractions in advanced o-chem. i remember my professor's sage advice - if you look in your lab book and you don't recognize your name on the page, it's time to take a break. happily i guess, i didn't quiet reach that state today, although i did find it harder and harder to grasp the brush as the hours wore on.

only the strong brain cells survive.

one of life's mysteries is why the prep work associated with painting rooms takes ten times longer than you estimated.

well, hoohah! i finally got all the parts and pieces from apple to get the ibook back in proper working order. i'm cautiously optimistic since everything seems to be functioning. it's recharging right now, so i haven't been able to put it through the paces.

the whole experience has sullied my impression of apple's hardware reliability and customer support. i don't know - in the whole scheme of things two weeks for two rounds of repairs is not completely insane. i'll reserve final judgement until the next system failure.

on a whim today, i reactivated the snowdeal.org voice portal, which is powered by the free service from tellme. it was the result of goofing around awhile back with converting rss feeds to voiceml. it's pretty basic and i never really explored the potential dorky applications that could be developed. hopefully by reactivating it i'll get inspired to tinker. i could imagine some cool stuff you could do with jeremy zawodny's opml2html script that could rip your blogroll into voice-accessible news aggregator.

if you want to check it out dial 1.800.555.TELL and say "extensions", then dial 32523 which will take you to the snowdeal menu. you can say "perl" to get the latest uploads to cpan or "quotes" to get a few quotes-of-the-day. it looks like the cnn rss feed might have moved and is now broken. but the best part doesn't have anything to do with rss. say "homer" to hear a quote from homer simpson that is still making me laugh two years later and i'm not quiet sure why.

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool:

"The in-room chat created a two-channel experience -- a live conversation in the room, and an overlapping real-time text conversation. The experiment was a strong net positive for the group. Most social software is designed as a replacement for face-to-face meetings, but the spread of permanet (connectivity like air) provides opportunities for social software to be used by groups who are already gathered in the same location. For us, the chat served as a kind of social whiteboard. In this note, I want to detail what worked and why, what the limitations and downsides of in-room chat were, and point out possible future avenues for exploration."

and in other house cleaning, i updated the ex machina outbound links to better reflect what i'm reading these days. a few links have fallen by the wayside and a few new links have appeared. if time permits, i plan on updating the other sections of snowdeal.org and parallax may soon get yet another lease on life.

i'm embroiled in The Great Basement Cleanup, so things might be a little slow. my mildly asmatic lungs are enjoying the dust kicked-up from sweeping a basement that hasn't been swept since 1947.

i forgot to mention that friends that give art are the best friends to have. getting art is fun. not that the other gifts weren't appreciated, of course. happy holidays!

in case you were wondering, the old addage 'past performace does not necessarily predict future results' applies to chopping firewood.

i don't care how many successful times you've chopped firewood - it's still not a good idea to go outside, in the dark, standing on a ice-slicked surface, attempting to balance wood and swing an axe. it's more than likely that you'll wack an appendage. but it'll be so cold you won't really notice until you feel the warm sensation of blood dripping through all your fingers. in a rare glimpse at the enormity of your stupidity - then and only then will it occur to you that you might have made around five poor decisions in a row. you'll contemplate this standing in the dark on the icy ground with a sharp, heavy axe, while not being able to see, but now feeling more clearly the dripping blood.

so, it's back to the house, wondering if perhaps this will be the eve of christmas eve when you'll be remembered for cleanly slicing your thumb off. in the house, you will quickly determine that the thumb is intact and you've merely suffered the proverbial flesh wound. you'll note this as positive, while observing that there's a sizeable gash across the thumb knuckle, continuing at an angle down the inside of the thumb. if motivated, you could possibly fold back a small, postage-sized triangle of flesh but you'll quickly decide you're not. oddly, despite the blood there will still not be much pain. since there's no pain, you'll make another brilliant decision, which is to wrap the thumb in giant wads of paper towel, apply five minutes of pressure and decide to give the axe swinging another go.

a half-a-dozen swings into a knottiest of knotty knots, which is in a log so dense you'll be sure you see the faint light from the kitchen window bending towards the grain, you'll realize that now you can feel your thumb. it will started to throb at the same rate as your heartbeat and the blood will have soaked completely through the many layers of paper towel.

back in the house, while contemplating the merits of opposable thumbs and pondering the origins of your maniacal desire to produce the perfect eve of christmas eve cozy fire, you'll resort to wrapping your thumb in paper towel and electrical tape, producing an appendage worthy of sissy hankshaw .

i'm not a lawyer and i don't even play one on tv, which is why it's nice that the jabber.org folks have posted a clear, preliminary technical analysis which inidcates that jabber technologies do not infringe on the aol patent :

"A technology must meet each and every limitation of the independent claims defined in a patent in order to be construed as infringing on the patent. Therefore even this brief analysis shows that U.S. Patent 6,499,344 does not in any way threaten existing or future Jabber technologies. (In fact, the patent seems to describe the original ICQ system, which is fundamentally different from Jabber as well as most other modern IM and presence systems.)"

relatedly, it was recently the 29th anniversary of instant messaging , with the introduction of an application known as TERM-talk .

o.k. enough already! i know i've been slacking on the pictures of cadence, our new bernese pup, that i promised a few weeks ago. here she is in all her fluffy, 7-week-old puppy cuteness. she's already mostly potty trained [ except when you miss her subtle cues ] and loves to give mauja our malamute a hard time in the best possible way. more pictures soon. honest. because who couldn't use a few more dog pictures around the holidays?

ha! my little ipod theory appears to be true. it does make christmas shopping tolerable.

i guess i'm out of the loop. i had no idea that zip zaps are this year's "must have" toy . they're only sold at radio shack and the employee laughed when i asked if they had any. they didn't, but he offered to put me on their 150 person waiting list and told me that he was pretty sure their weren't any left in the state. undeterred i came home and found a store with the last two in the entire grand rapids area less than 5 miles away. the employee said i should hurry over, because he didn't think there were any left in the state.

but now i'm left with a quandry. do i give them as presents or do i unload them on ebay where i could make a tidy profit ?

i just caught the end of a piece on "on the media" on the blogger/trent lott story:

"This week, amidst a wave of controversy, Senate majority leader Trent Lott announced his resignation from the leadership role. Lott's inflammatory remarks were intitially ignored and it was only days later that the story came under mainstream scrutiny. But according to New York post Columnist John Podhoretz, the comments were not ignored by bloggers-amateurs and professional pundits with their own websites. Brooke speaks with John Podhoretz."

i'm off to do a little last minute christmas shopping.

typically, i despise shopping. no, i don't think you understand how much i despise shopping. i used to tolerate certain record [sic] shops and bookstores, but it's hard to muster the energy for even that these days. i tried to go to the bookstore the other day and had a parking spot snatched in the rudest manner by what otherwise appeared to be a kindly grandmother. and today, it's even worse because i have to shop for kids. it's not that i'm some sort of grinch and against kids and toys. i'm just against being in toy stores. or even the toy aisle. it brings out the worst in humanity. and soccer moms.

but today, i have a theory. today, my ipod is going to make it all right. with a little help from brian eno, i will survive.

jabfoaf looks like a handy little tool for producing "friend of a friend" or foaf documents:

"JabFoaf currently consists of two pieces: Roster2Foaf and JID2Foaf. Both tools are based on the same idea -- retrieving vCard information about Jabber users and returning FOAF entries."

of course, you may be wondering why you'd want to produce foaf entries. because, my friend, many a glorious splendor awaits the arrival of the foaf-filled world - for example the foaf- enabled alarm clock :

" Imagine you wanted to create an computer-based alarm clock based on FOAF, where instead of an alarm, your computer played sound samples of your friends (and friends' friends) shouting "Wake Up, slacker...". FOAF tools provide most of what you need, ie. tools that harvest information from your friends' Web sites and aggregate it in a local database. Except you need to know one more property associated with people described in FOAF documents. You want to know the URL of an audio clip (eg. MP3 or WAV) of their "wake up" message. All you need to do to deploy your FOAF-based alarm clock is to document the syntax for adding this new piece of information into FOAF documents. Then install a FOAF harvesting tool, write up some motivating documents, and produce some demos or applications that make interesting use of your FOAF extension."

as proof that the road is not the map and the blog is not the man, i offer up exhibit 'a'. a shiny 1965 galaxie 500 that i purchased back in august.

i think there may be only a handful of friends and family that know that i bought the classic muscle car, and i'm not quiet sure how it failed to make it into my online life.

perhaps it's because i originally intended to "flip" the car for some easy money and didn't think i was going to invest that much mental energy in it. i figuratively "stole" the car from a co-worker whose family had owned the car since it was purchased in '65. when he said he wanted to get rid of the car, which was sitting risking neglect on their napa valley property, i was smart enough to say i'd pay to ship it back to michigan. i was pretty sure i could sell it for more than what i was paying, so i jumped on the opportunity.

now, despite the fact that i spent 13 years in maine the grandson of a grandfather who owned a car dealership and helped-out behind the parts counter when i was barely out of diapers and despite the fact that i went to high-school "just outside" of flint, michigan and despite the fact that the pops is an engineering manager for gm - i've never considered myself a "car person". much to the chagrin of my dad, i'm all about automobile pragmatism which usually means buying foreign - mazdas, toyotas and vws have all been parked in my driveway. and after years of owning a toyota camry, i was completely unprepared for experience of driving the galaxie.

well, the very first experience was trying to get used to the "three on the tree" set-up where the the manual transmission is shifted on the steering column. but five minutes later, as i pulled into my driveway, i had what would end up being a commonplace experience - someone freaking-out over the car. in this case it was a couple of construction workers that tripped over themselves to get a closer look.

little did i know that there's a whole different world out there. a world of people who will yell out their minivan window, while you're driving down the highway that their first car was a galaxie. people with large, black muttonchops and blue coveralls that will bolt across the parking lot with their girlfiend in tow, just to get you to open the hood. people that will ask you if they can buy your car while you're idling at a light. people that stop the flow of traffic to jump out of their idling car to ask you when you're exiting a conveniece store where you get parts because it just so happens that they bought a '66 but it doesn't have a seat and "no shit" that's the original seat, i've never seen a '65 galaxie seat in such great condition.

of course, i can't just get rid of the car now. there's a whole winter's worth of work to done on her. maybe a new gearbox. maybe i'll put in "doolies" [ duel exhaust for the unitiated ].

who knows, but i hear this is how it starts. it's a disease that strikes the unsuspecting and if i don't keep it in check in ten years i'll have cars in various states of reconditioning up on blocks in the front yard.

are you worried yet? when you see plans to build an uber system to monitor the internet :

""Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said.

The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet.""

and you see that we're rounding up hundreds of immigrants :

"Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000."

does it worry you? will you look back in 2 years and say, "how come i didn't see it coming?"

my ibook woes continue. apple's dispatch database has been down and they've been unable to send out new parts. what did i do to so anger the mac gods?

after receiving a friendly reminder today that the maintainers of xml::rss would happily accept a patch to produce rss 2.0 output, my laziness homunculus reminded me that rafe was working on just such a patch. hopefully rafe still has it sitting around somewhere.

it's been nearly two months since we had to put harper down and in some ways kris and i have started to move on. at the risk of being gratuitously morbid, i thought i'd share a picture from a few shots i took a couple of hours before taking him to the vet, which i just developed after staring at the roll for months.

i think it only slightly captures how both of us were feeling that afternoon.

pets are amazing and scary. it's stupifying that i still occasionally think i can hear him roaming around the house.

i've been ruminating on putting together an rss 2.0 feed and was interested to see mark pilgrim's recommendation as to which feed format is appropriate in "what is rss?"

i went looking to see what the current state of affairs is with xml::rss , the perl module i use to produce this site's feeds, and was disappointed to see that the development version doesn't look like it's going to support the format. i suppose i could handcraft a 2.0 feed. or contribute code to xml:rss. or i could just stay with the status quo. hmmmm.

the folks at jabber.org are rightly concerned about the aol/im patent and have put together a dedicated website to serve as a repository for information and discussion.

i can't really tell from the claims on the aol/im patent what date would be suffient to establish prior art, but if it's based on their icq acquisition, then anything prior to 1990/1989 would be fair game - at least according to an informative thread on the jabber developer's list. the overworked, underfunded uspto strikes again.

you know you're a superdork when you consider "The case of the 500-mile email" an intriguing mystery worthy of development into a made-for-t.v. miniseries:

""We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice."

Remote Application Development with Mozilla:

"This article will explore the uses for remote XUL (loaded from a Web server), contrast its capabilities with those of local XUL (installed on a user's computer), explain how to deploy remote XUL, and give examples of existing applications. This will give you a firm grasp on the potential uses for remote XUL, its current limitations, and how to start using it to enhance your Web sites and applications."

i often wonder if the masses of people googling for "strained calf muscle" are amused or aggravated at stumbling across my marathon debacle in the top ten results.

the ibook saga continues. i get it back today with the word that is ready to go with a brand new logic board. only it took me 30 seconds to figure out that it wasn't ready to go, since the power supply doesn't work and the wireless range had dropped down to 10 feet. all problems that i didn't have before it was "fixed".

more calls to apple and they have to send me a new power adapter before they can determine they can troubleshoot any further. maybe it'll get here in three days. this is really trying my patience. i'm sure there's a tech sheet that says after you replace the logic board you should perform a basic set of quality assurance checks before sending it back to the customer. i'm being advised that i should probably drive all the way back to the apple store in chicago and yell and scream until they give me a new one. normally, i'm not really moved to perform those kinds of acts in public, but i'm getting close.

and so, it's back to the trusty linux and wintel boxen.

throwing caution to the wind the folks at mozilla released 1.3a on friday the 13th, with loads of new stuff - including built-in spam filtering.

Beyond "Couch Potatoes": From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors:

"The fundamental challenge for computational media is to contribute to the invention and design of cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change (1) the structure and contents of our interests; (2) the nature of our cognitive and collaborative tools; and, (3) the social environment in which thoughts originate and evolve, and mindsets develop."

why would i want to go to hotbot's updated site just so i can use google?

speaking of tunes, "Homemade Dot Mac: Home Web Radio" would a lot more fun if i had my ibook. sniff.

Why you can't get that tune out of your head:

The many thousands of tunes most of us know, from arias to singles and jingles, are locked in a shifting pattern of neural circuits in a region just behind our foreheads, scientists say.

This part of the brain - the rostromedial prefrontal cortex - has complex functions relating to the link between data and the emotions, and, say the scientists, it may be the reason why melodies evoke memories."

given the current state of affairs at aol, it's unsurprising and yet still unfortunate to hear that the recent round of layoffs will affect netscape - and quite possibly mozilla:

"Daniel Glazman has confirmed this FuckedCompany report and notes that "Netscape is badly impacted". Netscape developer Andrew Wooldridge also notes that "today has been a really bad day" but doesn't elaborate.

Even though Mozilla is a seperate company, the majority of its developers work at Netscape."

from headlines-that-predict-the-future-department: "New 'Communicator' Threatens Netscape's Future".

john robb wonders, "what is social-software.com?"

whois says it's owned by a Corbin de Rubertis who google says says is/was a vp at novell.

interesting. obviously could be a different Corbin de Rubertis, but what are the odds of that?

well, the good news is that all the dns funniness should be resolved. the bad news is that the ibook is hosed beyond belief. according to the local mac tech - "well, i don't know. i've never seen this many things go this badly all at once. it looks like you just got a bunch of shoddy components."

great. if i'm lucky i'll get it back before christmas. meanwhile i'm back to a using a bevy of linux and windows boxen which have reliable served me for a median of 4 years. it's nice to see apple ensuring quality products from its outsourced manufacturing partners.

no word back on the the prognosis for the ibook. i beginning to have brand new emotion associated with apple and i don't think it's the one that tim o'reilly was writing about in reference to apple's emotional brand.

maybe it's a fluke, but a friend had to return his ibook after a week due to a similar "sleep of death" problem. and i'm not sure i'm feeling any better after the local mac tech dryly and knowingly recommended that he thought it would be in my best interest to get the three year support service rather than take my chances after the standard one year warranty runs out.

i really hope it's all 1 and 1 adding up to 3. the irony is that i'm sure i could dust off lisa, my nearly decade-old mac color classic and be rest assured that she'd come to life. sigh.

ev says "I think Mozilla will become the preferred browser for Blogger once we release this new version.". and for all the right reasons.

if nobody can hear you does that mean...whistle, whistle while patiently waiting for the dns system to do it's thing.

i can access the site usually, but i hear it's sporadically unavailable. and i'm still not getting any e.mail which makes me wonder if i've set up the mx record correctly. hi. hi. you'd think i'd learn my lesson about setting up secondary dns. after 3 years of faultless - and free - service, it looks like mydomain was brought down by a DoS attack . curiously another vendor i deal with, servepath was also brought down the night before by an "unprecedented" denial of service attack. hmmm.

so, the verisign story. in the fiasco yesterday i was nearly caught in a very ugly catch-22. i needed to change the name servers. but i'd long ago forgotten and lost the username and password associated with my account. and my contact and e.mail info had long since gone defunct. yes, friends. i had just dramatically reduced the number of ways that i could prove that i am i.

i've known this for quiet some time and was pleasantly surprised when i discovered that i could renew the domain without having the usename and password handy. i also dreaded the day that i'd need to somehow prove to verisign that i am indeed, eric snowdeal. and not my dad who is also eric snowdeal. or even more improbably my grandfather who, although deceased, was also eric snowdeal. you get the picture. well, the day of reckoning had arrived. i was going to call verisign ! i made sure i got good and irritated by scouring the house one more time for any evidence that i was the owner of the domain. and i found one. back in august, we received one of the last pieces of e.mail that was forwarded from our old address that has a new password to my account. for security reasons, they were sending the username separately. i never received the usename. nonetheless, password in hand i dialed the support number. astonishingly, in ten minutes i was talking to a real person and explained the situation. she asked for the password and then gave me the username. just like that.

so a crisis was averted, but i shudder to think of what could have happened if the person who received the username in the mail decided to call verisign and get the password. yikes.

just to keep the universe perfectly in balance, while verisign was being so helpful my six-month old ibook decided to suddenly and unexpectedly fail. it just started going into a sleep of death. initial attempts at recussitation by resetting the power management unit , seemed promising but ultimately ended in failure.

so that sucks.

and i'm fighting off a nasty flu. while my wifes violently expells fluids every hour, i sit in a constant, low-grade state of nausea in perpetua.

praise murphy.

wow. thanks to a meltdown at mydomain i was suddenly and quiet unexpectedly sans dns service for almost all of today. i ended up switching to ultradns, and things seem to be blinking on and off. i expect more bumps in over the nightime hours. and would you believe that i had a relatively straighforward if ultimately scary interaction with verisign today?

more tommorrow. right now, i'm drained coming close to seeing just how tenuous this connection to the aether really is.

nervemail - delivering rich web-based applications with mozilla.

Hep Message Server:

"Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it's done, you'll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging."

[ via afroginthevalley ]

can't you just hear the overwrought movie trailer voiceover - jane fonda is wifi. coming to a neighborhood near you, it's the the tragedy of the fondas :

"I figured out a humorous way to explain the importance of my "not all unlicensed is Wi-Fi" crusade:

Imagine, as if in a nightmare...

First, the innovative new movie business, an offshoot of the entertainment business, gives us the talented actor Henry Fonda. Known as a craftsman in a young field, his work was respected and followed by a core group. A generation later we get Jane and Peter. There's Jane. Not especially talented, but with looks and that mouth, she gets lots of flashy attention. We start to see Jane in places maybe an actor does not belong, like political rallies and war zones. Jane is everywhere. "

be sure to read the whole post. it really is quite clever.

call me cynical, but i'm going to have to side with this astute analysis of the intel, at&t and ibm backed company, called cometnetworks :

"It seems the owners are trying hard from the beginning to make the operation of this company as expensive as possible. IBM will benefit if every installation takes two hours instead of one. AT&T will benefit if there is a per-megabyte charge on traffic, and unstable equipment with a huge need for network management. It's not like a small operator that hangs a zero-maintenance commodity access point off of an affordable residential DSL line, but more like a replay of MobileStar/Starbucks. The burn rate is there, as if this was 1999, but how much have they got to burn?

Is this perhaps a sign that AT&T and IBM really don't have anything better to do? It seems like a stupid project, but perhaps it was the least bad they could come up with? During the time Cometa burns its venture capital, both AT&T and IBM Global Services can show an increased demand for their services, perhaps at a very high prices, which isn't too bad these days. Only the VC firms lose."

because you never know. Create Pop-Up Notes with DHTML [ via dangerousmeta ]

while is suspect the telco powered products site is a humourous hoax, i wondered if there was some grain of truth behind it. an authoritative-sounding post on the boi