no, that samhain, this samhain.

dear readers, i present for your enjoyment, the artful juxtaposition of quotes taken out of context.

Studies: 90 percent of kids use computers

"About 90 percent of people ages 5 to 17 use computers and 59 percent of them use the Internet -- rates that are, in both cases, higher than those of adults. Even kindergartners are becoming more plugged in: One out of four 5-year-olds uses the Internet."

VC Guru on Coming of the 'Next Big Thing'

" Q: So, Guy, tell me... what will be the next big thing?

Almost by definition that is in the hearts and minds of young people in educational institutions. The job of the early stage investors is to find those people, and not necessarily to know what that thing is. People have hazard at guesses -- a real explosion in biotech or wireless, but the wireless journey has already begun. That may already be here so I don't know if you can call it the next big thing. Those are the ones mentioned most often -- wireless and biotech."

jon katz hits the nail on the head in his bit in "When Should You Put Your Dog Down? How to make a decision you never want to make." :

"As the owner of three dogs, I spend more than I can truly afford to keep them healthy and vigorous. But as my conversations with Jack reminded me, they are not people. Their lives and deaths ought not be conflated or confused with human losses.

To love dogs is to know death and to accept that there's never a time we are more morally obliged to speak for them than when they face the end of their lives."

not so long ago, we had to make a decision you never want to make . luckily, our vet was empathetic yet pragmatic in laying out the options.

regular readers will know that i've got a thing for george lakoff, which started around the time that i was exposed to "metaphors we live by" at evergreen [ the only school with a molluscan mascot! ].

apparently george has started a progressive think tank and, quiet naturally, he's focusing on language :

"The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, "You!" Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing."

[ via the always informative rafe colburn ]

neat. awhile back i was lamenting the lack of support for ssl encrypted, password protected rss aggregation. it looks like now i've got options .

ugh. a couple of hours ago, the dogs went crazy in the backyard and we went outside to discover that they had cornered a big, fat and unfortunate raccoon and were giving it a working over. the raccoon was doing an ferocious job of defending itself, but it was clear that it was going to end badly. i couldn't do much beyond hollering and waiving my hands wildly in a mostly useless attempt at convincing the normally docile dogs that tearing a raccoon to bits was not really a great idea.

after a round of shaking the raccoon like a rag doll [ keep in mind this is a rag doll that's the size of a not-too-small dog ], mauja decided to drop it and play a little. the raccoon was in no mood for play and went after mauja with a vengeance. this suffiently freaked out cadence enough that she decided that maybe it was a good time to step away from the action. mauja then decides that maybe he should get a little breathing room and stepped back, giving the racoon just enough space to somehow climb up the fence and into the neighbor's tree.

we called animal control and the police and both said that they will not under any circumstances go anywhere near a wild, injured raccoon.

now, hours later, if you go in the backyard, you can hear a slowly dying raccoon, rasping and gurlging in the tree. i have no idea what to do. the humane thing would be to just put it out of its misery, but i haven't got a gun and i'm not about to climb the tree and do it in with a shovel.

wasn't i just writing about an impending backlash against the "offshoring is the answer to every question" mindset? business week joins the club by looking at the the hidden costs of it outsourcing :

"On paper, it looks extremely attractive. A Russian programmer charges 80% less than an American. But when you parse it all out, the total cost of offshoring a given IT job is generally comparable to getting the work done domestically, says Tom Weakland, a partner at management consultancy DiamondCluster. It's just that few companies are aware of these real costs. "Most companies can't accurately measure their productivity and costs prior to and after outsourcing," says Weakland. "Most look just at wages.""

i've found that people who think offshoring is a panacea for cost reduction also subscribe to the "masses of asses" school of thought:

""Masses of asses" refers to the old-school IBM way of programming, just throwing a whole lot of average programmers on a project, because surely more programmers means it will get done more quickly. If you want a road built quickly, you add more construction workers. Unfortunately, its a bad analogy to software -- adding more programmers to make software quicker is like adding more mothers to have a baby quicker. Again, this is nothing new.

The key is small focused teams of good people. If a project is big, subdivide into well-defined components with small teams developing them. "

if you read "OS X Conference: Pixar talks OS X migration" you'll discover that pixar has reduced their "total cost of ownership" by moving from os 9 and they've been nice enough to put their geeky admin tools online :

"Rollout - A python script that will scour an OS 9 drive for user data and copy it onto a FireWire drive in an OS X like home directory. It will also copy the data back from the FireWire drive onto an actual user's home directory!"

because you can. mozilla-ad-blocker:

"Block image, java, and flash ads based upon common sizes and url parts.
* This uses Mozilla's support for CSS3 selectors and user style sheets, but
* this should work with any browser that supports both."

[ via decafbad ]

can be that wilco's jeff tweedy has stealthily been building p diddy's sweatshop-based clothing empire?

"Jeff Tweedy, executive vice president of Sean John, the New York-based apparel company run by Mr. Combs, who performs as P. Diddy, said: "We have absolutely no knowledge of this situation. However, we take these matters very seriously, and we will have our director of compliance look into the matter immediately.""

it's funnier if you try to imagine jeff "wilco" tweedy uttering that bit of corporate speak.

olivier travers eloquently illustrates a music business model that is closely aligned with my own music listening habits:

"Here's the product I want: 200GB hard drives full of fully meta-tagged mp3 files that I can transfer to whatever device or media I want. Let me create my selection online and ship me the hard drive. I'd buy such a product for $1,500 (the price of the included hardware is just 10% and falling), and I'd buy one every 18 months. Basically an "All You Can Listen To" package geared to collectors and people who like me hate to know songs by heart and are in discovery mode day in, day out.

Why should anyone pay $50K+ to have a decent collection to enjoy with their friends and family when we're talking about a product that is mostly already amortized (we're talking about huge sleeping catalogs here) and that for the most part isn't generating any revenue anymore (because the backlist is unavailable online or even in most record stores). Put music in the fabric of people's lives, make it really pervasive, and you'll increase both the number of buyers and the absolute dollar value you'll extract from them. "

the $1,500 price point would hurt, but i think there are several ways you could slice and dice the payments . the basic point is a good one; some of the music industry's best customers are waiting to be served. we are cut from the "the more we listen to the more we want to listen to" camp. we are in constant discovery mode and are drooling at the prospect of working out ways where we can discover hidden jems.

i've played with xul on and off over the years and while it's easy to see the potential of a markup language for describing user interfaces, my general impression has been that it has been languishing on the vine. i think there are a lot of reasons for this not least of them is the fact that there are some fairly big disincentives for learning and developing a mozilla -specific technology [ no offense intended ].

so i was a bit surprised to see that apple has put a little xul support in safari 1.1 which comes with panther . and if that's not enough, if looks like microsoft is putting together its own competing effort called xaml , which is sure to create a brave new world of competing implementations and cross-browser compatibility issues. dave shea does a good job of summarizing the stakes.

so i'm reading danny o'brien's very amusing bit on being tasked with compiling a list of the secrets of the well-organized geek and i'm thinking when i'm reading the discussion topic that it's appropriate that morbus is on danny's list of suspects. i have no idea if morbus has any secret geeky tools underlying his prolificness , but there have been times over the years that i could be convinced that he's in about eight different places at once while being inordinately productive and helpful.

i'm thinking this while i hop over to his disobey nonsense network and i see that he's taken the polical compass test and appears to be solidly leftist/libertarian . curious to see how my own political and economic views might be categorized, i take the test and discover that i'm also leftist/libertarian . that's when kris reminds me that i'm apparently a leftist/libertarian with a bad memory since since she claims that i already took the test "a long time ago". a quick search proves that i have indeed just taken a test that i took nearly two years ago . i guess the old results prove that some things will never change. and amusingly, it also highlights my secret "geek" efficiency tool - a wife with a better memory than myself.

at this point, i'm chuckling at the small pieces loosely joined quality of unintentially illustrating an efficiency tool while pondering efficient people while hopping from website to website. and then i realize as i'm browsing around to see what else i was doing around two years ago that i might have forgotten about that i rolled about my syndication feeds at around the same time.

now things are just getting unecessarily wierd for a saturday morning since i had just written about the script i wrote to create the feeds last night. and who has a hand in helping me to make sense of rss via email? mr. morbus iff [ go back and read the beginning of the article to see how this mess started ].

frightened by where this multi-layered recursive wierdness might end, i decide that it's probably a good idea to shut the laptop and go play the part of the milk maid .

i have no idea what that title means, but it was the first thing that came to mind, so i'll roll with it.

bill humphries notices that simon willison is getting into using spath to mine xhtml .

my own personal "aha" moment came when i discovered that i could hack together an obnoxiously simple script to convert xhtml to rss [ which produces this site's rss feeds ] over a cup of coffee or two. i found the xpath expressions oddly intuitive and have always had big notions of "enriching" the metadata of the vast wasteland to slice and dice things in interesting ways.

andy points to an interesting article on the "mainstreaming" of the word "fuck" :

"The decline is a matter of shifting taboos, says Jean Aitchison, the Oxford professor of language and communication who is married to Ayto. "In the last century, it was religious swearing that upset people," she says. "Then, in the mid-20th century, sexual swearing. But these days people get far more upset about politically incorrect language: nigger, and even mad, are quite taboo."

i guess one need look no further than the fcc overlooking bono's use of the word to find proof of the theory that the word that could unleash a thousand bars of soap in the mouth is, well - you know, fscked:

"ON MONDAY, THE government agency's Enforcement Bureau rejected complaints by the Parents Television Council and others that Bono's use of the phrase "this is really, really f---ing brilliant" failed to meet the test for indecency. The bureau ruled that Bono's indiscretion was so "fleeting and isolated" that it did not run afoul of the rules."

Sliding Doors of CSS:

"A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects. CSS2’s current state requires a separate HTML element for each background image. In many cases, typical markup for common interface components has already provided several elements for our use.

One of those cases is tabbed navigation. "

i haven't bothered to listen to the interview beteen terry gross and bill o'reilly, but the response from npr's ombudsman is interesting:

"I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. It may have illustrated the "cultural wars" that seem to be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR's liberal media bias.

It left the impression that there was something not quite right about the reasons behind this program: Bill O'Reilly often loves to use NPR as his own personal political pinata; and NPR keeps helping him by inviting him to appear." .

what was most disturbing to me is that it was done right before the traditional npr "fall fund drive" and could be interpreted as a cheap attempt at a "sweeps week" style stunt. they don't seem to be shy about pimping the gene simmons fiasco during the fund drives. maybe i'm just being cynical.

define:google.

"How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us" gives a glimpse into some some of the issues with "offshoring" :

"What are my options if my highly productive, 15-person software team generates only one-third the output our customers demand? I was certain that augmenting our team with offshore development was the right answer. It wasn't, at least for a small project we recently outsourced to an Indian firm. "

although anecdotal and difficult to generalize to all cases, it's a good reminder that going overseas isn't always the right answer and when it is the right answer, it's more difficult to execute properly than you might imagine. i suspect after a year or so of the pendulum swinging in favor of offshoring, we'll see more failures reported and the system will moderate itself a bit more than it has of late. [ via dangerousmeta ]

we just discovered that when we went to chicago to run the marathon our dog sitter left the dogs alone for two of the three nights that we were gone. i suppose some dogs can deal with being left alone, but our dogs have never, ever been alone for that long. it's particularly traumatizing for a quintessentially pack-oriented animal like a malamute. malamutes desperately need to be with their pack and they can get very, very vocal when they aren't, which can be hell on your neighbors. luckily, we have understanding neighbors.

one of them told us that mauja cried and howled like a very, very, very sad and lonely wolf all night long. and now he gets stressed whenever we leave since he's probably not sure when we'll be coming back. what's even more aggravating is that we specifically told the dog sitter that he needed to stay the night. i guess he didn't count on mauja letting the whole neighborhood know that he hadn't.

google goes a long ways towards assuaging terms of service fears by changing them for the better:

"Updated - In response to recent feedback regarding the Google AdSense Online Standard Terms and Conditions, we have made clarifications to this agreement in the following sections: Prohibited Uses (section 6), Confidentiality (section 8), Payment (section 12), Publicity (section 13), and Miscellaneous (section 17)."

i'm not a lawyer and i don't even play one on tv, but it looks like i might move forward with giving the program a shot on the {bio,medical}informatics section.

well alrighty then. i'll show my age by citing the cramps' "mad daddy" from 'songs the lord taught us' in the title of this post. it seems that, "Want to get rich? Get taller":

"Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay, according to a study released on Thursday."

at this point, i guess i could show my age even more by calling forth the ghost of minor threat and humming "small man, big mouth".

so, i guess it really does pay to be 6 foot 4, lower back problems notwithstanding.

sam ruby is embedding foaf in atom:

"Having this information within a feed would enable aggregators to display additional data about the author of the entry being viewed, for example: their personal info, online accounts / IM, projects and groups."

[ via decafbad ]

RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes:

"After watching the RIAA's public Dance of Death closely for only about a year, everything they do is so predictable that I'm beginning to wonder if they even have any control over their own destiny. For some inexplicable reason, they seem compelled to follow through until the final scene, perhaps unaware that there's been a rewrite in the ending over the last 90 years."

[ via scott andrew ]

you really, really, really have to feel for the guy. he's super sorry :

"A police guard was posted outside the suburban Northbrook home where he lives with his parents. His brother-in-law — who read the statement to the media — said Bartman was “hiding somewhere."

o.k. i stole the "new everything" title from blogzilla, which has a complete list of all the new mozilla-related goodness, including new releases of firebird and thunderbird. if you didn't see the new firebird website, you're out of luck because it's been rolled-back to the previous version, due to howling protests from the masses. be sure to check out dave's rationale for contributing to the mozilla.org redesign. it's a good read on Doing The Right Thing.

sweet mary mother of perl. what have i done to deserve this? my ibook has gone down for the count again. if you're keeping track, this is not the first nor the second nor is it the third time it has gone into the shop. nay, i say, it's the 4th fucking time in 1 year?!@

what a piece of shit. this time, just to keep things interesting, instead of the usual new logic board, it seems that the hard drive has just crapped out. not that any of the available disk tools would tell me that it was on the verge of crapping out. no, i'd just get the occasional clicking sound and things would go on as usual. this morning it got worse quickly and in the process of troubleshooting with tech support, it just died. now all i get is a the dreaded blinking question mark folder. no utility will even recognize that the drive exists.

of course, i'm such a dumbass i didn't back everything up between the last outtage and now. that's 5 months ago. i was going to do it tommorrow. i'm sure you know how it goes. something tells me i won't be seeing any of that data anytime soon.

i've really grown to enjoy os x, but my opinion of mac hardware reliability could not be lower. my experience is that it's total and complete shite. here's a clue. buy better components.

if you were trying to imagine something that you'd probably not ever read in forbes, it might go a little something like this:

"I told her, 'Look, you'd better buy a vibrator or you're going to lose function there.'"

[ via eatonweb ]

both matt haughey and elwyn jenkins noticed my entry on being bought and their responses lead me to believe that i probably hit the publish button a little too soon. in my defense, i was getting ready to get head out of town for marathon, slapped together a brief post and hit publish.

to clarify, in my original post , when i wrote, "...it's not hard to draw conclusion that the difference that could make the difference is rooted in the fact that one author is making enough money to buy a loaded aeron chair every month and one is making "$85..." - the specific "difference" i was contemplating was related to each author's emphasis on the importance [ or lack thereof ] of the unsavory adsense terms and conditions . my chain of reasoning went something like this - matt doesn't appear to think the terms of service issues are a big deal, but elwyn does. matt makes more adsense money on pvrblog than elwyn does on microdoc news . therefore - and i'll rephrase and slightly moderate my original comments; from my perspective, it's disconcerting to think that the difference in attitudes towards the terms of service issues could be partially explained by the fact that one author is making enough money to buy a loaded aeron chair every month and one is making "$85".

if elwyn was making 10 times more money and matt 10 times less, would their respective stances on the adsense terms of service be exactly the same? what about 20 times more money? 50 times? 100?

i find matt's response even more confusing. he thinks i've missed the point entirely:

"...I think both authors are missing a vital point in what I wrote last week.

The bottom line for all this discussion is simple: google ads aren't designed for typical blogs .

Maybe I made the mistake of calling my article "blogging for dollars" since it's not exactly blogging in the classic sense. I don't post about the cheese sandwich I ate earlier, I don't post about politics, and the site isn't a mirror reflection of me. I'm not the least bit worried about Google's terms of service because I'm not blogging my thoughts on advertising systems at the site. It's totally focused on gadget freakdom and not at all a personal site.

People worried about carrying Google ads on their personal site and wondering if they would be silenced over it should worry more about how pointless of an endeavor the ads will be."

the appropriateness and effectiveness of adsense ads is a completely separate issue from that raised by the terms and conditions under which you are willing to dispay the ads. whether or not the ads are displayed on a "personal" or a "topical" blog is irrelevant and matt's rationale that he's, "...not the least bit worried about Google's terms of service because I'm not blogging my thoughts on advertising systems at the site..." is the most perplexing to me. oddly, it's almost as if he's saying that it's o.k. to accept the terms of service since he can always blog his thoughts somewhere else without suffering the [monetary] repurcussions.

to be clear, i don't think the problem is that advertising per se will "kill blogging". indeed, i applied for and was accepted to the adsense program . i recognized that the adsense ads didn't make sense on ex machina which is a "personal blog", but it could work well on the {bio,medical} informatics section. you can't get more "topical" than a blog that's devoted to the bioinformatics. interestingly, since i have a "topical" blog and a "personal" blog under one roof, what would happen if i only put the ads on the informatics site and criticize to my heart's content on the personal site? again, the issue is not with advertising or making a buck, but rather the terms and conditions under which we accept to that buck, regardless of the "topic specificness" of the blog that is generating the buck.

when i wrote the original post, i was wondering on a very personal level whether my decisions would be influenced by money. i've already stated my intentions to not run adsense ads until the terms are changed. but this is easy because i haven't made a dime on {bio,medical} informatics . would my answer be different if i could pay my hosting fees? definately not. would it be different if i could buy a new aeron chair every month? probably not. would it be different if i could pay my mortgage every month with adsense benjamins? i'd like to think not. would it be different if i could pay for an office and employees and a private jet? i'd like to think not, but it's gets a little more difficult to say it without pausing for long, reflective thoughts.

i can hear many of you groaning and telling me to get off my damn soapbox. it's only a few bucks and they're only saying that i can't talk about terms and conditions, right? but what if google decided to impose a few more conditions on particularly popular sites? what if they decided that pvrblog or {bio,medical} informatics could only stay in the adsense program if we refrained from posting negative posts of products from their most lucrative advertisers? what if they tried to prevent you or i from stating that they had put us under the new conditions? ridiculous? a few weeks ago, i would have said it was preposterous to say that google would impose any restrictions on what you can and can't publish on your blog, topical or not.

as i said before the issue is not with making a buck, but rather the terms and conditions under which we accept the buck. as elwyn points out in his response

"Newspapers have long had this problem to solve . . . and the newspapers who have solved it best are the prestigious papers that people really listen to and take notice. Those that are frequently bought by their advertisers are not taken seriously for very long."

whew. i'm back from running the chicago marathon. as usual, around mile 24 i was wondering what kind of wacko runs marathons. despite that i had a great time running with kris and a friend from seattle. we christened it the "fun run 2003" and made a concerted effort to take our time, enjoy the experience and snap some pictures. i'll post a longer update over here in the near future.

it's interesting to see the difference between the "Blogging for Dollars" perspective put forth by matt haughey and the position put forth by elwyn jenkins in "Blogs, Blogging and Advertising on Blogsites". it's disconcerting to think that it's not hard to draw conclusion that the difference that could make the difference is rooted in the fact that one author is making enough money to buy a loaded aeron chair every month and one is making "$85".

if elwyn was making 10 times more money and matt 10 times less, would the essays be exactly the same? what about 20 times more money? 50 times? 100?

kris and i and a few friends and family have stopped drinking soy milk and entered into the wild and wacky world of raw milk. raw milk is straight from the cow. it's not pasteurized. it's not homogenized. it's not anything-ized. it goes out of the cow and into your fridge. and if you're lucky to have a wonderful amish farmers in your area, you can get fresh, raw milk from range-fed cows that don't get any funny chemicals in their feed.

why do this? we're not granola-crunching freaks, but after doing some thinking and research, we decided that it'd be fun and healthy thing to do. no, i don't think you're going to die a horrible, painful death by drinking milk that you get from your local supermarket, but all things being equal, we decided that raw milk was at least as healthy as the regular stuff, and quiet possibly moreso.


technically speaking, most states consider what we're doing "illegal". or at least consider it illegal to purchase raw milk. mostly this is due to claims that it's unsafe. we looked at the evidence and decided that it wasn't, if we worked with a reputable farmer. but that doesn't make it any less illegal to purchase. how did we get around this? we don't buy the milk. we purchased "shares" in our cow, musical, and pay her room and board, which is roughly $6 a week. basically we own part of a cow and are paying her keep and are simply picking up the milk that's rightfully ours. so how much does it cost to buy part of a cow? we bought two shares at $150 a piece and split the two shares between a group of 6 friends and family [ 3 couples ], so it's about $100 a family to start and $6 a week. and for that you get 2 gallons of milk, which is a good deal. it gets even better when you realize that you get enough cream from the two gallons of milk to make enough butter, cream cheese, ice cream to feed a normal family. all things considered, it's a fantastic deal. since 3 couples are involved, we get milk in rotations. you can amuse yourself by pretending that it's 1950 all over again, and you're the milk-person delivering the goods.

so what's involved? it's easy! follow along in a day in the life of the Raw Milk Maid.

admire the gleaming, clean stainless steel vat.




take a peek!




open the valve slowly. you'll be surprised how fast it comes out and if you're not paying attention, you'll be standing in a pool of milk. not that i've done that.




watch it gush!



get enough for friends and family.



don't forget to clean the nozzle. being sanitary is A Good Thing.



you did remember to neatly hang the hose back on the hook, didn't you? of course you did.


it's o.k. you can go into the barn and say "hi!" to the skittish newborn foal and ponder why she has the power to turn invisible.


and don't forget to go visit the cow that made it all possible. she works hard, so you'll forgive her for laying down on the job. pasture fed animals have it rough.


when you leave, you'll wonder if it's against their religion to photograph an amish buggy. you decide it's not and hope you're right.


by the time you get home, you'll discover that cream really does rise to the top. you can make butter from the cream. more on that in the next installment of The Raw Milk Maid.

it's great to see jason get out and go for a run. and yes, running can seem dorky and purposeless, unless you set an outrageous and improbable goal such as training for a marathon.

in the end you might still look dorky and purposeless, but you'll be a dorky and purposeless marathonist.

you can do the impossible. you just need to put one foot in front of the other. for 26.2 miles.

i meant to wish best of luck to cam in his new role as "blog strategy guy" for general clark. it looks like one week into the job, he's going to have his hands full with hullabaloo surrounding the general these days. it looks like he's getting a trial by fire on the "official donnie fowler thread". i haven't read all the comments, but he seems to be doing a good job, all things considered.

susan mernit has taken an adequate stab at blogger author classification. of course, blog tools merely facilitate the act of publishing the range of human expression, so it would seem a bit simplistic to stop at 8 categories, but i guess you've got to start somewhere. there's also enough overlap between categories that the power of categorical analysis is diminished.

there must be a more rigorous precedent for this sort of thing in the librarian crowd. i'll bet jenny has some thoughts.

admittedly, it's a minor thing what with everything else going on in the world. but somehow that doesn't make it any easier that a year ago i took harper to the vet and he didn't come back. if you're a dog person you'll understand.

perfect news for the information junkie in your life. yahoo is rolling out news search via rss.

watch your head as i lob this Comparison of Features and Rates of Current U.S.-based VoIP providers into the ol' annotated bookmark bin. [ via hack the planet ]

hey you can start your own "available domain name of the week" service by perusing the "Free Expired Domain Name List" . what luck! aboutcrotch.com, excitingnewsex.com and planetsteak.com are just a few of the newly available domains. [ via decafbad ]