yes, that's right. i've actually updated the photo gallery. thanks to "scanners and mac os x", i discovered that there is now a plugin for my canoscan n650u. this means i can use the perfectly capable graphic converter application to get my photos out of the shoebox and onto the web.

in a move that will surprise exactly nobody, i have more than a few dog pictures in the queue. here's a few from winter 2002.

ever wondered what it might be like to regain your sight after being totally blind for 43 years? apparently, it takes a little getting used to :

"I found it very distracting to look at people's faces when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving, eyelashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. At first, I tried looking down, but if it was a woman in a low-cut top that would be even more distracting. It was easier to close my eyes or tune out the visual input."

for the annotated bookmark bin - moblogger:

"This application runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email to your blog and uses FTP to post the files to your server. Send the email from a phone and you immediately start "moblogging"."

i don't normally do this kind of thing, but i'm going to wax enthusiastic about my hosting provider, cornerhost , which touts itself as hosting with a human touch . this is no mere marketing euphemism - devoid of any spirit - for it doesn't take long for a new cornerhost customer to see the immovable force behind the company, michal wallace , performing his characteristic brand of understated, yet unparalled, customer support.

a case in point. recently, a peculiar and difficult to track down behavior began to appear in ids , the image management script that i use to power my photo gallery . i spent a little bit of time trying to track down the cause of the problem but didn't have time to really dig into the root cause, so i decided to lob a barely coherent email to the private email discussion group for cornerhost customers.

24 hours later, michal had not only tracked down the bug, but had proposed several alternative solutions and actually modified my script to get it running correctly again! i want you to pause for a moment and think of what would happen in you asked your hosting provider for help with a script that they didn't officially support.

michal obviously has a deep understanding of how to run what would typically be viewed as a commodity business. now, i can hear all you freshly minted mbas screaming that "high touch" customer support isn't scaleable and you're right, to a certain extent, it's not. but it has been my experience that cornerhost cultivates a relationship with its customers that discourages abusing the system and the support takes place in a semi-public forum where any number of smart people can jump in if michal is to busy to respond within 24 hours. and, of course, he's probably not unaware that after one of these superhuman feats of support, a percentage of his customers with a little google juice are probably going to be more than happy to step up to the plate and give him a good-old-fashioned unqualified endorsement.

so, if you're in the market for affordable hosting with a human touch, look no further than cornerhost .

now, i don't know pat metheny that well. o.k. i don't know him at all. and it's not like i'm a big fan of kenny g, but i'm still surprised to see pat crack open such a mean can of whoopass on kenny:

"But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril."

[ via anil ]

well, i guess i'll have to add Lingua::EN::Gender to my rather long list of things to check out:

"I discovered The Gender Genie from LaughingMeme, which led me to Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon's algorithm, described in Nature and the New York Times Magazine. The Koppel-Argamon algorithm analyzes the text and guesses the author's gender. The algorithm was very simple, so I implemented it as a Perl module -- Lingua::EN::Gender."

i could imagine a few amusing and pointless applications that could benefit from guessing an author's gender. [ via laughingmeme ]

from the discovering-the-obvious department. scientist confirm what is obvious to anyone who's been out to eat in the last decade - americans are fatter that their french counterparts because their portions are obnoxious:

"The answer, after methodical study of brasseries, eateries, pizza parlours, Chinese restaurants and Hard Rock cafes in both countries, is simple: the French eat less of everything. And they eat less because they are served smaller portions."

i'm shocked, shocked. did you know that 20 years ago the average bagel was 3 inches in diameter and now it's around 6. the average french fry serving has gone from 2 ounces to 5. of course, soft drink manufacturers are the big winners, with the "typical" soda [ giving away my east coast heritage ] serving ballooning from 6 ounces to 20 ounces.

olivier hits things squarely on the head - it's all about elastic demand and "share of stomach".

i've written previously on mauja, our emotive malamute and his sometimes amusing, occasionally infuriating, tendency to walk around "talking" to you; of course since he talks, he's more than capable of talking back, or - more correctly - getting sassy:

"One of the most endearing (and sometimes exasperating) characteristics of the Alaskan Malamute is the fact that they talk. Their "Mala-talk" is usually sounds such as "oowoo", "roowuf", etc. Be warned, if they talk... they will also "talk back" to you just as a arguing child would. Owners have often found themselves in full conversation with their mals and both parties understanding what is being said."

under normal circumstances mauja's full of mostly good-natured, if not slightly grumpy sass, but give him a good case of impacted anal glands [ i'm not going to go into the ugly details of impacted anal glands, follow the link or use your imagination. ] and the sass turns into the rough equivalent of what you get when a toddler decides that she doesn't want to be in the car anymore 20 minutes into a 5 hour trip.

to "unimpact" anal sacs, one need to "express" them, which pretty much means you need to pinch and squeeze them to get out the infected material. it's kind of like when you were 13 and had pimples, only different in vitally important and repugnant ways. technically, a dog owner can perform this function, but i've never had the necessary fortitude, so off to the vet mauja goes, with bulging anal sacs and a mouth full of sass.

i arrive at the vet and realize that i'm getting a "newbie". maybe she's heard of mauja, but she hasn't really experienced his sass in the first person. i don't even bother to warn her. she takes mauja's leash and i take a seat, casually flipping through "dog fancy", while counting down in my head.

"5...4....3...2....1..."

"RAAAAAAARRRRRGH....ARRRR.......RAAAARRRRRGH!"

and so it goes on for two or three minutes. the newbie has gusto, i think to myself. people in the lobby cast worried glances, obviously wondering what sort of torture is being performed on mauja. of course, i know that not one person has laid a single finger on him. he's merely telling them in no uncertain terms that he's not really happy about the whole situation.

the newbie comes into the lobby, red-faced, likely embarrased by the calamity and probably wondering if i'm thinking that she's injuring mauja.

"ummm. i think it might be infected. but i'm not really sure, because mauja won't let me look. you know, he's really not very happy."

"i think i'll have to get his regular vet so there's somebody in the room he knows. it might be a few minutes since she's seeing another animal right now"

"that's fine. i understand."

about 5 minutes pass and mauja starts into making his case again. only this time, it's slightly different. i am not making this up. you can tell when he's talking to somebody he knows. although he's still loud enough so that you can hear him through the entire building, he's a little less over-the-top in his vocalizations. it's as if he's switched from north korean style brinksmanship to a more diplomatic tone. it gets quieter over time and can tell the vet is slowly sweet talking him into letting her do what needs to be done. it's only when i don't hear a sound that i know he's been pursuaded.

a few minutes later the vet comes into the waiting room. "ok. all set."

"mauja's such a big talker." she says. "and a big baby. you know the whole time he was making all that noise we were standing around trying to talk to him. he always settles down eventually. "

"yeah. i know."

i knew things weren't looking so good when weeks started to pass and you still couldn't get the x11 version of openoffice for os x [ update: oh, c'mon, of course i meant you can't get the new 1.1 version. i'm perfectly aware that if you follow the link you can download the older 1.0 version ]. but apparently it gets worse, for the openoffice team has delayed a aqua-native version until early 2006:

"According to the update, the OS X translation has proven more complex and developer resources more limited than expected. As a result, project leaders have halted work on the OS X edition until version 2.0 of the main Windows/Linux version of OpenOffice is ready. "

i guess i can live with this as long as it doesn't mean that there won't be any more updates of the x11 version for the mac. i'm not a power user of office suites of any sort and openoffice is the perfect solution; it allows me to avoid the microsoft tax while giving me the ability to open the occasional powerpoint or word file the someone sends me.

oh those clever worm writers. i'm assuming this email is sobig or a variant which claims to come from security@microsoft.com and comes complete with patch.exe. if the grammer were a little better, i'm sure they'd get a few takers. it's a perfect example of the new breed of social viruses that exploit your sense of authority:

"These are big, powerful email addresses like support@ebay.com, sales@amazon.com or (oof) blogdex[at]media.mit.edu. Even though people know not to open attachments, the authority of that email address throws an exception in their brains and thus the virus is propagated. It's a new breed of virus, and it's spreading like crazy.

Of course after another few months of IT castigation, the email world will return to normal. But this is an arms race between email virus authors and the pattern recognition in all of our brains. For every patch that a network administrator makes by slapping our wrists, someone is engineering more and more sophisticated techniques for bypassing our preconceptions."

it's hard to believe that is has been around 13 years since i was sitting on curb rolling gently back and forth on a skateboard talking with friends about how odd it was that mark "gator" rogowski had confessed to killing his girlfriend. even stranger is the fact that that the event is now the basis for a documentary which has nearly scored a media hat-trick by being featured on the terri gross show and two, count 'em two, articles in the new york times [ see, "A Skateboard King Who Fell to Earth" and "The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of a Skateboard Star" ]. the terri gross interview was fairly compelling, but i've been suckered once into paying hard earned money to take a walk down memory lane with the barely mediocre "dog town and the z boys" and newsday pretty much confirms my worst fears with its skewering of "stoked" :

"On a strictly mechanical level, even skateboard fanatics likely will find it embarrassingly self-congratulatory, particularly about the alleged glory days of '80s skating; the skateboard illiterate will wonder why so much time and effort are being spent on such an insignificant, uncharming subject. And anyone even the least bit cynical will smell the promotional stink behind the social criticism, as "Stoked" promotes the very outlaw life.style it pretends to stand against."

i'm quiet sure i'll regret taunting the networking gods, but i'm going to do it anyway. for some reason, i haven't received that many sobig related spams over the last few days, despite it being declared the biggest virus so far:

"E-mail filtering company MessageLabs, for instance, said it intercepted more than a million messages that carry the virus on Tuesday, while rival Postini trapped 2.6 million in 24 hours."

don't get me wrong, i'm still getting my fair share of spam and whatnot, which is the inevitable casualty of having a public personality on the internet but, for me at least, sobig was notso. i wonder why.

i'll admit it. i've countergoogled in the past:

"Pay attention, marketers: remember Roger & Peppers, evangelizing 1:1 customer relationships back in 1997? Well, just when you finally have your company's customer databases and filtering tools all worked out, and you actually identified that Lego-loving dentist in Taipei and emailed him a personalized offer for a family holiday in Denmark, Google changes the name of the game with a vengeance."

although i agree with matt that it, "...could actually be something that gets built into new business processes..." , i usually find that i need to go to unusual lengths to prevent the recipient from feeling like i'm a wierd blogstalking corporate tool. up to this point, i've reserved my countergoogling powers for rather benign purposes; i specifically restrict the activity to people who have mentioned facefive in a blog. i, of course, see this as simply starting a friendly conversation and happily it has all worked out for the better so far, but i think it definately needs to be used with caution. [ via ev ]

i just noticed that garret p. vreeland's blog is sporting a snazzy redesign. clean and crisp, although i think the logo should be a little bigger.

Instant logging: Harness the power of log4j with Jabber:

"Not only is logging an important element in development and testing cycles -- providing crucial debugging information -- it is also useful for detecting bugs once a system has been deployed in a production environment, providing precise context information to fix them. In this article, Ruth Zamorano and Rafael Luque, cofounders of Orange Soft, a Spain-based software company specializing in object-oriented technologies, server-side Java platform, and Web content accessibility, explain how to use the extension ability of log4j to enable your distributed Java applications to be monitored by instant messaging (IM)."

just the thing for a lazy afternoon in the dog days of summer. Perl 5.6.1 for Mac OS X.

i think the schwarzenegger campaign has broken through some kind of fourth wall by getting rob lowe on board. i'm sure they will figure out something for him to do soon, but right now it appears he's functioning perfectly as a way to get even free press despite the fact that it seems he doesn't have ...any official title with the campaign and his future role seems to be still evolving.".

i suspect that jesus jones is doing much better financially by playing corporate gigs than, say, rerun is doing by personally greeting fans on the phone. maybe not though. i almost bought a little of reruns time to call kris today on her birthday.

holy crap. big, big, big power outtages all over the place. nyc and detroit are reportedly without power. apparently not terrorism. i'm in west michigan and the power is still on here, but the outtages are as close as lansing.

pssst. hey! yeah, you news.google. entire cities are without power. you might want to update your home page, people are reporting it. update: o.k. at 5:20 eastern it's up on the front page. so it only took at least 45 minutes for it to make it the front page.

update:michigan public radio reported that apparently the niagara mohawk power grid is overloaded; i can't verify who reported this because the radio station went off the air again.

despite the fact that we're sinister, today is left handers day!

warning: the following is an incoherent, rambling, liberal-leaning, rough draft of a political "essay" which is mostly meant for me. being the narcissist that i am, i thought i'd make it public and see if anyone else was having similar thoughts. if you're a conservative, i hope we can still be friends. whatever your political leaning, send an email and let me know what you think.

i tend to think of myself as a political centrist who is not strongly tied to any particular political party, despite the fact that i almost always vote democratic. i vote. even in midterm and local elections and i do my best to stay on top of candidate positions, although my better half, kristine, is usually much better at this than myself.

but as this election cycle gets rolling, moreso than any other, i'm finding that i'm not vaguely centrist. i'm a liberal. i'm a liberal's liberal. i'm as progressive as they come. o.k. i know i did go to that bastion of northwest liberalism, the evergreen state college , but i'm still as surprised as anyone that i'm apparently becoming more liberal over time. i thought you were supposed to chill out and get all moderate as you age gracefully.

no, instead, i'm feeling marginalized and disenfranchised and i'm tired of it.

so what's a liberal's liberal to do? well, normally you'd support dennis kucinich [ who is, b.t.w., guest blogging for lawrence lessig at the moment ]. i admit to having some initial adverse reactions which were mostly the result of media soundbites on his positions and opinions on his electibility. but when i look at his "progressive vision" , i'd have to say it articulates things in a way that i strongly identify with. so i guess that makes me a progressive, liberal kook. so sue me.

my problem is that i have this heart and head thing going on. my heart says i should voluteer for the dennis kucinich campaign and help him get out the vote. but my head says that i should just go with dean . my heart says that i know they are not the same and i'm sick-and-tired of compromising, but my head says politics is compromise and that voting with the heart isn't necessarily the most effective way to achieve desired polical ends . my heart says, "viva la revolution!", while my head says that things aren't looking so good in kucinich-land when molly ivans, of all people, reduces kucinich to, "... a no-hoper. Can't elect a guy that short and skinny, not to mention vegetarian. Accuse me of cynicism in my old age, but I am interested in winning this one. Decent, kind, excellent: no Elvis, no hope." . a cheap shot, unfair, and despicable in its own way, but we are living in a country where an important electoral state apparently is in favor of voting arnold schwarzenegger into the governor's office , without hearing one word about where he stands on anything substantive. if people are worried about dean being too short to be electable , then i guess kucinich is not viable as candidate based on his haircut alone.

so will my heart or head win out in the end? i don't know. i still have a lot of work to do as a citizen to kick the tires on kucinich's "progressive vision" and decide for myself whether it's tenable or just "feels good".

who knew that kevin costner has started a company which has developed a centrifugal process to separate oil from water?

" Describing it, he is a CEO dream-maker:

"It's going to solve a very big problem. If something happens in your beautiful San Diego Bay, you shouldn't stand there in rubber boots soaking up oil with straw. I couldn't stand that approach. I've been working on it nine years; it's going to be really big though we are still under the radar as a global company. The oil companies want it not just to clean spills, but because they can recover the oil. As a company, we are about to hit the light of day in a very cool way." "

own a mac and longing for new ways to lower your productivity? well, my friends, glider is now "free as in beer" due to the unfortunate demise of the original distributer, Casady & Greene. a word to the wise, if you download it, you will find yourself spending far, far too much time attempting to navigate a paper airplane through a house.

[ via laughingmeme ]

Rivals Say Halliburton Dominates Iraq Oil Work :

"The Bechtel Group, one of the world's biggest engineering and construction companies, has dropped out of the running for a contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as other competitors have begun to conclude that the bidding process favors the one company already working in Iraq, Halliburton."

i'm going to the kucinich meetup in grand rapids tonight. kris is big into kucinich. i'm neutral at this point. the pragmatist in me doesn't think he's electable, despite the fact that some of his positions resonate with me. oh well. it should be interesting to at least get a glimpse of how the political meetup thing works in west michigan.

update:i'm back. although there were only a handful of people there, it was quiet informational since a member of the michigan kucinich grassroots campaign was there from kalamazoo. of course, the issue of his electability came up and i learned a lot. the evidence seems to indicate that it's at least semi-plausable, if one ignores superficial issues such as the fact that he's divorced and is living with his long-time girlfriend. i'm teetering on getting involved in a more direct way, so we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

i have a niece, ruby, who is the most well-adjusted, normal 1.5 year-old that anyone could ever ask for. she's smart as a whip, cute as a button, likes to give her uncle kisses when he asks [ which makes him so very, very happy ], likes to dance, likes to give her food to dogs and loves to take pictures. ruby is all these things and much, much more; as uncle walt would say, she is big - she contains multitudes . it just so happens that ruby's parents are lesbians. of course, ruby doesn't care, despite the fact that many other people might.

i'm very proud that ruby's parent's are featured in a chicago tribune article on gay marriage [ free registration might be required ]. it's astounding to me in 2003 that sane people can't differentiate between the religious and civil implications of marriage:

""Some people are upset because they see marriage as a religious institution, and it is for many people, but it is also a civil institution. The Pope decides what unions the Catholic Church will recognize, and that's fine. A same-sex marriage wouldn't change that. It wouldn't force any religion to do that if it didn't want to.""

ruby has parents and a circle of support that would make any child from heterosexual parents envious. gina and diane should be allowed the same rights as any other couple and to deny them those rights is unconscionable. if you think otherwise you're ignorant and support politicians who are practicing ostrich politics of the worst sort and you should be ashamed:

"Ostrich Politics is about sticking your head in the sand and refusing to view immoveable facts as a practical, reasonable basis for policy. Will pushing abstinence by instilling fear actually stop people from having sex? No, say the studies: people are simply going to have sex. Except they might have unsafe sex because the information about safe sex is not being made available. Will refusing to recognize gay couples (10% of the population) somehow make them go away? No, say the scientists. Homosexuality is not a disease. It can't be "cured," and doctors have known that since the 1970s. Homosexuality just is. It's a fact. Yet life-long homosexual partners are forced to live their dedicated, loving relationship in a social no-man's land, without proper healthcare support, government benefits, or inheritance rights.

Faced with facts they don't like, Ostrich Politicians choose to ignore them and enact policy that would make sense if these facts never existed. Not only will this fail to achieve intended goals, but the actual results are disastrous: more people having unprotected sex, and more citizens ostracized by the government. "

Outboard Brains for Mac OS X:

"Before you rush off to find your way to Hogwarts School, take some time to consider some of the brain assistants that already exist. This article is going to take a brief look at some applications designed to be digital brain-dumps; electronic Pensieves into which you can throw any information you want, knowing that it will still be there when you need it later."

proving that he can deftly manipulate the press to his advantage, arnold announces he's in the running for governor of california:

""I decided that California is in a disastrous situation right now," said Schwarzenegger. "The atmosphere is disastrous. There is a total disconnect between people of California and politicians.... The people are working hard ... but the politicians are not doing their jobs. The politicians are fiddiling , fumbling and failing, and the man failing more than anyone is Gray Davis, and this is why I am going to run.""

i have no idea why, but i found cameron's post on the "bacerial media" to be a fascinating study on the wierd world of the std psas:

"In the case of positive promotion of syphilis awareness, Phil the Syphilis Sore has been in the spotlight. He's disgusting, hairy and angry-looking, and he conjures a queasy stomach by way of association with the real thing. But despite that he's been featured in Newsweek, on various talk shows and other media apperances while the Health Penis has been restrained to mostly gay publications and websites."

i'm almost embarrased to admit that i bought the new janes addiction album [sic] today. o.k. i admit it. i've of the age when "nothing's shocking" was on permanent rotation in my sony walkman when it was originally released 15 years ago. so buying a reunion album is pretty much a blatant attempt to walk down memory lane and relive the salad days of yore.

what's worse, is i bought it on the recommendation of rolling stone, which if you're in the demographic of people who had "nothing's shocking" on permanent rotation in 1988 is sort of like buying an album on the good word of the devil. flipside fanzine good. rolling stone bad. that's the way it is.

so what brought me to this sorry state of purchasing affairs? a rolling stone review i read via their new rss feeds.

and the funny part? the album is great. it's big fun to crank up to '11' while tooling around in my jetta tdi station wagon. such is life.

so-called "flash mobs" get prominent play today and the headlines say it all. via the new york times we have, " What: Mob Scene. Who: Strangers. Point: None. ", while the christian science monitor weighs in with the slightly less judgemental, " Synchronized, collective, and so far pointless ".

fwiw, i can't help leaning towards feeling that the current incarnation of "flash mobs" merely prove that there's a lemming born every minute. but that probably only proves that i'm a stick-in-the-mud.

buried in an enjoyable new york times profile piece on economist steven levitt , i find a reference to a new paper he's working on that discusses the causual factors related to crime reduction in the 90s.

how timely, i think to myself, since kris and i were debating crime statistics on sunday prompted by a snarky george will commentary on how the new york times keeps printing the same article year after year in which they repeatedly ask why prison populations are on the rise despite a slight drop in crime. in george's humble opinion, it's obvious that this is liberal mush-mindedness at its best, for any idiot can plainly see that there is a drop in crime because more criminals are in prison.

of course, george was really presenting the theory that people who want to build prisons usually put forth and presenting it as an undisputed fact that soft minds are incapabale of grasping. george's snarkiness aside, me wondered, what was the truth?

well, inasmuch as it may or may not be the truth, via the power of google , you can get your own prepublication copy of "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not" and discover why george might be right:

"Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. This paper examines the competing explanations as to why crime fell. I conclude that four factors can collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. A wide range of other possible explanations do not appear to have played an important role: the strong economy, changing demographics, innovative policing strategies, gun control laws, concealed weapons laws, increased use of capital punishment, and crime prevention programs. While some future crime reduction remains a strong possibility, it is unlikely that the impressive rates of decline of the last decade will continue."

while i'm a big fan firebird, there's one default behavior i find annoying. if i open a new an url from a bookmark it will automatically spawn a new window; however the preferred behavior for me is to open it in an existing tab. i don't see any obvious preference to change, but i'm sure there's some sort of user.js fiddling i can do. any hints? i don't see anything obvious if i type about:config in the location bar.

fear not fellow os x and python aficionados - macpython 2.3 is available for your downloading pleasure:

"MacPython-OSX is a distribution of Python that contains a complete unix-Python plus a number of Mac-specific extras. It is available in both source and binary form for Mac OS X 10.2 or later."

while i disagree with some of the details i his latest example, if i ever had chance, i think i'd find any ol' cheap excuse to get joel to write a book forward for me. why? go read "rick chapman is in search of stupidity":

"When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn’t know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products. Put Jim Manzi (the suit who let the MBAs take over Lotus) in that meeting and he would be staring blankly. “What’s a rich text edit control?” It never would have occurred to him to take technological leadership because he didn’t grok the technology; in fact, the very use of the word grok in that sentence would probably throw him off."

wherein we learn that "...80% of British men didn't even know what foreplay was, mistaking it for a sport, a computer game or an item of clothing".

Five Lessons You Should Learn from Extreme Programming