mailbucket is an interesting attempt at "crossing communication-mode boundaries" as jon udell so aptly put it . jon also did a nice job of pointing out the primary flaws in the current incarnation - namely the lack of any way to limit the ability to spam a "topic". i suppose one could quickly put together a system that limits posts to subscribers of a particular topic. and i guess it wouldn't be too long before you found yourself reinventing a mailling list manager.

looking through the mailbucket technorati linkage i discovered that chris is ruminating connecting mailbucket with era , which monitors rss feeds and then emails you any changes. how long before some wiseacre sets era to monitor and email a mailbucket topic on changes to that topic, thusly initiating an endless loop of emailing madness.

not that i would do anything like that.

despite my best attempts to avoid any "action shots" during my quest to live through my first marathon, i discovered recently that i forgot that i allowed a family friend to shoot an amusing photo of me around mile 18.

your guess is as good as mine as to what i'm trying to accomplish with that pose. perhaps i was influenced by the strange power that a terry cloth headband can have over your better sense of judgement. hi. ho. i look a lot more happy than i did around mile 24.

the firebird 0.7 release candidate is available for your downloading pleasure. if i'm not mistaken, the about:mozilla page has been updated:

"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 "

update: jeez. thunderbird 0.3 release candidate 2 is also available.

while glenn reynolds is suspicious of the "revenge" motive for the plame/wilson story passing the smell test :

"First, if you want to "intimidate" someone, committing a felony at which you can be caught -- and which doesn't hurt the target -- doesn't seem to be the way to do it. What possible benefit was there to the Bush Administration in saying that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?"

rafe colburn reminds us that revenge was not what was being served :

"The purpose was not to discredit Wilson nor was it revenge against him, rather it was a way of substantiating White House claims that they hadn't seen Wilson's report."

i can't tell if this is some sort of elaborate spam, but i just received and email from the seller of a purported method of human cloning for sale on ebay that's already bidding for over $87,000:

"This method is novel and original, and I will turn over all claims on it, including my share of the Nobel Prize, to the highest bidder. The main improvement over current methods is that in this case, genes turned off (or on) in the somatic cell which should be turned on (or off) in the zygote will be corrected by specialized extranuclear RNA in the gametes, reducing the incidence and severity of defects in the clone."

as enticing as it sounds, i think i'll have to sit out this round of bidding.

got a fast connection, plenty of time to waste and a sad desire to relive bad 80s commercials? well, you're in luck thanks to X-Entertainment's Commercial Downloads Center . of particular note is the "annoying encylopedia fool" . it's amusing to see him sitting in front of a computer and walk over to the of encyclopedia volumes and exclaim that, "this is like having your own research library in your own home!"

yes kids, there was a time before google . [ via eatonweb ]

joe clark has written a thoughful piece on the compatibility of Weblogs and ISSN registration:

"People who publish and maintain Weblogs have applied for ISSNs. Some registrars have immediately registered the Weblogs; others have categorically refused to register Weblogs at all; and still others have reluctantly or selectively registered them.

The evidence, however, indicates there are no justifiable reasons not to register Weblogs for ISSN providing they meet the regular criteria."

joe has some solid arugments, i'd like to see what the naysayers have to say. [ via zeldman ]

User Mode Linux - the third way for hosting? has a nice little overview of "virtual dedicated servers" made possible by user mode linux. going vds can be an affordable way to enjoy the benefits of root access without having to pay the fees for a traditional dedicated server. of course, you're operating in a shared environment, so you're at some risk of abuse of pooled resources. as with anything else, this can be minimized by going with a vendor that has a sollid track record.

i've been with johncompanies for about 8 months and have nothing but good things to say about john and the service. jvds has much more attractive prices, but i'm waiting to hear from les about uptime and resource usage before i'll consider moving anything over. [ User Mode Linux - the third way for hosting? via decafbad ]

congratulations to everyone at the jabber.org for announcing that there are, "...nearly 10 million end users of software based on the open Jabber/XMPP protocol.". there are, of course, some guestimates in the numbers, but all things considered it's a remarkable accomplishment.

i'm also happy to have discovered that the os x "nitro" jabber client is a lot more stable than the last time i tried it, or at least the development build i'm running is solid. although i like proteus because it's an "integrated" client for those times that i have to use other IM systems, its jabber client implementation is buggy and loses connections to the server.

upcoming sure is attracting enough positive attention to virtually guarantee widespread and rapid percolation in the blogosphere. whether or not this is a good thing, i suppose depends on how good the rumoured moderation system will be at keeping the impending flood of craptastic events at bay . it'll be interesting to see how well things scale as the number of venues and events fills out .

scraping, priming and painting the outside of your house is not a fun way to spend the last weekends before the coldness of fall sets in. no sirreee.

buried in the snarky "Eulogy for the Trucker Hat" is the following gem:

"I guess I'm saying that your piece was about the wrong thing. Why the need? Why the need to have to go around knocking the wind out of everyone? That's the Willamsburg/Austin/No Ho thing to do. Not the wearing of the Trucker Hat, but the being faux angry at the proliferation of the Trukcer Hat. To be above the Trucker Hat. I agree with Stephen King, why is everyone so insecure in New York about their intelligence? Why does everyone in Brooklyn have to remind you of how they've seen it all before, to recognize a trend, discover it's fiber, and then bray loudly that it's over."

in my screed on ipods and marathons, i hope i didn't unintentionally leave anyone thinking i thought they thought i was dumb :-)

"Beyond The Template Engine" is a nice little bit on templates that focuses mainly on smarty and contains the following bit of wisdom that most template zealots seem to forget:

"And remember: the point of template engines should be to separate your business logic from your presentation logic, not to separate your PHP code from your HTML code."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

it's hard to believe that five years ago kris and i were standing on a breezy lakeshore in wisconsin saying our wedding vows. even harder to imagine is the fact that you need to add roughly seven years on to the five to get the total number of years we've been in a relationship. how that time it does fly by. i've loved every minute of it.

amusingly, we bought a bottle of wine for our five year anniversary and a bottle for our ten and neither of us can remember which is which. we both suspect it might be the 1995 stags' leap cabernet, but we're not positive. hi. ho.

here's to many, many more anniversaries.

well, that's it. my ipod is most definately dead . and yes, i never did think that is was the greatest idea to train for marathons with a device that had a hard drive , but after a year of training - including running in the winter - with no problems, i guess i decided to see just how much it could take.

it's a pretty amazing piece of hardware when you think about it. it took a year-and-a-half of pounding, in temperature extremes from sub-zero to over a hundred degrees fahrenheit , for runs as long as 18-20 miles; and to make the environment even more stressful, to prevent skipping, i found i needed to tighly secure the ipod to my upper arm with an elastic bandage . of course, this meant that the ipod was coated with a layers of salty sweat after a long, hot run. obviously not the best idea for things electronic that aren't technically waterproof. so, yes, it was "dumb" in a certain sense of the word, but it did make those long winter runs a whole lot more enjoyable.

since it looks like post-warranty ipod work costs only slightly less than a new one, i'm probably going to be forced to take it apart and see i bring it back to life myself. there seem to be a few good resources on how to disassemble the ipod, including "complete ipod disassembly" and the "ipod battery installation guide" . it's even relatively easy to track down the toshiba 10 gig embedded hdd that i'd need to replace. but after all that efficient gumshoe work, i can't seem to find a place to purchase the drive. hmmmmmmmmm

having trouble coming up with a cohesive color strategy for your next Big Project? how about going natural with the prairie palette?

"From complex web applications to informative “brochure-ware” sites, naturally occurring color combinations have the potential to distinguish (by helping create a more memorable website), guide (by allowing users to focus on interactions), engage (by making page layouts comfortable and more inviting), and inspire (by offering new ideas for color selection)."

oh, the humanity. after surviving my training for several marathons i think my ipod died today on a 20 miler. it just quit after 15 miles and now it won't do anything. my ibook is not even recognizing it when i plut it into the firewire port so i can't "restore" the software. it gets hot as if it's charging when in plug it into the ac, but it doesn't do anything if i try to "reset" it or put it into diagnostics mode. crap.

i'll ignore it until tommorrow, but i don't see things getting any better.

so let me get this straight. there's a very non-zero probability that yellowstone could erupt , obliterate everything within 650 miles and make things extremely unsavory over the entire planet? nice.

"On August 10, the Denver Post reported that Liz Morgan, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist had discovered a huge bulge underneath Yellowstone Lake that had risen 100 feet from the lake floor. The bulge is two thousand feet long and has the potential to explode at any time. Morgan was quoted as saying that "The inflated plain is a potential and serious hazard and possible precursor to a large hydrothermal explosion event.""

""The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend." says Professor McGuire. "Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years.""

update: o.k. i'll admit it. i didn't really fully investigate the author of the article. via a metafilter thread i discover that the the author is a apocalyptic crack-pot. the usgs answers a few questions about what's going on at yellowstone:

"Do any of the features beneath the lake relate to possible volcanic eruptions?

It is very unlikely. All active features are related to faults and hot water (hydrothermal) vents. Identified craters were formed by collapse or as a result of old hydrothermal explosions. Many of the rocks beneath the lake are lava flows more than 100,000 years old. "

oreillynet does a nice job of highlighting the nokia 3650's finer points and yet somehow manages to leave out it's ability to deter mosquitoes . [ anti-mosquito via rael ]

taking a page from the prescient "conquest of cool", adbusters is getting into the the shoe business by starting the blackspot sneaker brand. according to their marketing plan, they are accepting "preporders" [ no payment required ] and once they get 5000, they can start a production run at a unionized south korean factory.

of course they are open to cheap shots at using a south korean shop, but i'll take them at their word that it's a clean, well-lighted, unionized place at this point. i'll admit that i haven't preordered anything yet, because i'm a bit suspicious of a product that is only displayed in fuzzy artistic renderings. adbusters can position the shoes as being a nike killer all they want want, but i'm not going to get suckered into shelling out my money for what could potentially be a pair of crappy, chuck taylor ripoffs [ note that i'm saying they are, i just want more evidence and don't make the logical error of assuming that i'm endorsing nike; it's just that if i'm going to spend $60 to make a point then there are better ways to do it thanforking out cake for an adbusters stunt ].

theoretically, i'm all for what adbusters is trying to do. personally, i like how americanapparel going about it, which is similar in spirit on many levels; however, compared to the blunt instrument of blackspot rhetoric, there's a savviness to americanapparel that i think is more broadly appealing.

Pixies To Reunite For Tour In April 2004; New Album Possible.

in an amusing post the site formerly known as up2speed [ and even more formerly known as marketingfix ], explains why they're changing their name to marketingwonk mere months after the last change. they forgot to do a trademark search. anyway, best of luck to them. the site, whatever the name, is always informative.

that said, i'm not sure why they just didn't stick with marktingfix, which i think is less clunky than marketingwonk.

i live for the days that i can juxtapose the announcement of a shiny, new aviation software system which will rate your risk level based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase, with the news that a man shipped himself from new york to texas in crate.

yes, that's right. today i had the easiest, least painful experience with sendmail of all things. for reasons too obscure to go into, i needed a local mail server. normally, i avoid sendmail like the plague after discovering the pleasures of postfix . but local in this case means os x , which comes preloaded with sendmail .

great. i've either got to fiddle with installing postfix which will inevitably have a few speed bumps, but i get the advantage of being able to configure it quickly; or i go with sendmail which is already installed, but which will likely come with it's own configuration speed bumps.

but a quick search for "os x sendmail" turns up the "one click sendmain enabler" , which happens to be heartily recommended by jon udell , which is good enough for me.

1 minute later i had a functioning mail server running.

i hear that panther will go with postfix anyway, so maybe i'll only need to sully my system with sendmail for a short time.

recently, i downloaded a few of the christopher lydon interviews and put them on my ipod for when i'm running or driving around and sick of npr.

yesterday i rather enjoyed wandering around the home despot, while listening to an interview with the real live preacher. good stuff. now a good thing is even easier, considering that all the interviews are available in one tidy collection. just in time for a trip to chicago

listmatic is exactly the type of thing i'd throw into a "sidebar" links blog, because when it comes down to it, there isn't really that much you need to say about it. and yes, i did find it on jason's remaindered links.

interesting. of a whim i applied for google adsense and now i'm not sure what to do. i think it might be a little jarring for ex machina, but it might make sense for conflux and {bio,medical} informatics.

it's densely packed with all sorts goodies and perhaps even a bit off-putting in the same way those the high-falutin' "lit crit" classes in college, but don't let that stop you from getting lost in "landscapes of capital". much, much good stuff on the medium and the message:

""Our project is an ongoing attempt to write a multimedia Web-based book dedicated to studying how corporate television commercials portray a world shaped and defined by global capitalism during the late years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. Drawing on a set of over 800 TV commercials sponsored by corporate firms from 1996 to present, we try to map conceptually the landscapes and narratives of Cpital, Technology and Globalization as seen in corporate television ads."

[ via peterme ]

i discovered today that you can inhale a lot more paint dust that you might think you can. we're repainting our house and i spent the day scraping our cedar shake siding. normally i might consider Doing The Right Thing and wearing some sort of mask to keep out particles, but today it was way to hot to be concerned such practicalities.

so i've got scads of paint dust packed into every nook and cranny of my upper respiratory system and i'm thinking that maybe a face mask wouldn't have been so bad afterall.

i'm sure there's no long term health effects to inhaling paint dust for eight hours. uh, huh.

what weighs as much a 200,000 elephants and is the size of missouri? it turns out, your average hurricane :

"Let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud -- a cumulus cloud. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers."

matt haughey asks "Is it possible to produce a wiki that offers all the power of a wiki while at the same time looking like a regular website?"

from the looks of it, i'd say the answer is yes [ and incidently, i'd say he handily defeats the wikis are inherently ugly criticism ].

now, for the low, low price of nothing, you can get your hands on haughey's omninously sized 666kb phpwiki code changes .

so, let's just say you're allegedly imitating that canary in the coalmine of cultural decline, jackass and you fall down while trying to shove a firecracker in your buttocks what happens next? nothing good:

""By virtue of the fact that the explosion was confined in an upward direction, it went up into his pelvis, blasted a great hole in the pelvis, ruptured the urethra, injured muscles in the floor of the pelvis which rendered him incontinent.""

it must be a slow day since wired news has seen fit to write a lengthy article on the tdi club.

i'm loving my jetta tdi wagon. with gas prices what they are you just can't beat getting 45-50 miles to the gallon [ and diesel is cheaper the regular gas anyhow ]. and it would seem that biodiesel must be catching on, since you can even get it in the perpetually-behind-the-curve area of west michigan where i live.

oddly, i haven't joined the tdi club yet, although i did just join the galaxie500 club.

interesting. google has pulled removed from its index eight sites that distribute kazaa lite at the request of kazaa. welcome to the wierd world of the dmca. i suppose at least google is transparent about the situation [ see the footer of the search page].

somehow i almost missed that the thunderbird 0.2 candidate builds are available for your downloading pleasure. see the release notes of sorts for the lowdown on new stuff.

well, now you can find out exactly where you fit in the global pay distribution. it's an effective way to drive home a simple point. [ via blackbeltjones ]

so maybe norman vincent peale was onto something with all that power of positive thinking talk. scientist apparently finding more clues that positive thinking may have a health benefit:

"Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are reporting today that the activation of brain regions associated with negative emotions appears to weaken people's immune response to a flu vaccine."