July 2000 Archives

My father is though his surgery and appears to be recovering nicely.

I'm in South Mississippi right now; I needed to come down for a family emergency. My father, Maurice O'Keefe, is scheduled for triple bypass surgery in the morning, and I wanted to be there for him and for my mother. If you are inclined towards prayer, please hold him in your thoughts tomorrow.

Oh, no, not again. There Should Have Been Only One.

OK, there is a slight possibility that a new Highlander movie (with both Connor and Duncan MacLeod) could Fail To Suck. The other sequels leave me with a strong sense of dread, though.

Are there even any mirrors in all that smoke? Joel Spolsky has come to believe that Microsoft's .NET initiative is just a bunch of hooey, and a mole within the company backs him up. [via TBTF]

I love the fortune cookie I got with lunch: "When the mouse looks down upon the cat, there must be an escape route nearby."

A Swedish attempt to recreate Leifur Eiriksson's voyage to the new world has failed. Are these the same guys who had their ravens confiscated a week or two ago? The problem seems to be that their engine broke down... Waitaminute. Engine? They were recreating an ancient longboat voyage in a boat with an engine? Compared to Tim Severin's various recreations of historical voyages using sail power, this publicity stunt deserved to lose.

With any luck, this will be the last 30 seconds of Mahir's fifteen minutes of fame. But then, the folks at MeFi may very well have found the next internet "celebrity".

According to this Salon review, the book Assassination looks like a good read. The author's assertion is that very few historical assassinations had the desired effect on the events of the day.

The vultures are circling today...

First, Intel seems to be downplaying the Itanium because Microsoft isn't ready for it. The Big I's first 64-bit processor has been downgraded to a toy for developers, in order to allow them to prepare for Intel's next 64-bit effort, codenamed McKinley. This could have more to do with Microsoft's delays in developing a 64-bit version of Windows than with Intel's ability to produce the chips. With a mass Itanium release before Win64 is ready, 64-bit Linux could be first out the gate with a working operating system for a newer, more powerful processor, which MS will Not Allow. Of course, this move could allow someone to steal a march on the rush to 64-bit.

The vultures aren't buying into the hype over Internet Explorer's "improved" cookie-management features, either. I sipped at the kool-aid myself last week when I linked to a glowing article about privacy advocates' reaction to Microsoft's announcement. I deleted my post a few hours later, after I'd thought about things a bit more; I now regret the deletion more than the orignal post, for reasons I may go into later.

Finally, in the latest round of his "monkey see, monkey do" games, Larry Ellison attempts to buy his way to the America's Cup. Earlier this year, Bill Gates was part of a cartel attempting to lure the Cup-winning New Zealand team to America; naturally, that means Larry has to give it a shot too.

I'm disappointed than no 80's Hair Metal made this list of the ten most irritating songs of all time.

The more I hear about James Cameron's upcoming Dark Angel TV series, the better it sounds. I hadn't heard before that it was planned as a fixed-length serial rather than an open-ended series.

My favorite moment in last night's premiere of The War Next Door was when the Good Guy refers to the Bad Guy as an "evil genius" and the Bad Guy corrects him: "Evil supergenius. I just got my certification." I'm not 100% decided on this show, but I plan to give it a chance.

There was a good article floating around a few weeks ago about how media violence has some benefits for children. (It might be here if I could get the link to work.) Here's a new one:

And if we allow them to enjoy the fantasy, they'll feel less need to make it real. It's when kids are made to think that their own desires are wrong, dangerous or scary to their parents that they're most likely to identify with their "bad" impulses and want to test the limits by acting out.

[picked from Rebecca's pocket] Update: Now that I can see both articles, they're by the same author; two different spins on the same idea.

Salon interviews the Taco Bell chihuahua about the mascot's recent firing. I thought "he" was actually a female named Gidget, but I guess that's not worth bitching about.

More Cringely on Carnivore, including some reader mail from the tinfoil-hat club; one over-the-top theory envisions a bomb in the FBI's "Black Box". Still, this week's piece has some good material on the technical issues involved in traffic monitoring, as well as some comparisons with other countries' draconian internet-control policies. In case you missed last week's link to the first Cringely column on this subject, Carnivore is a new FBI system for monitoring the internet communications of suspected criminals, but it has other implications for privacy and network security as well. By the way, some scientists have different ideas about carnivorous computers.

I'm not usually much for sports stories, but a couple of local football heroes are showing some class by not letting contract issues get in the way of working with the team. The St. Louis Rams have reported to training camp, including top players who are still trying to negotiate multi-million-dollar deals. Kurt Warner has signed a minimal one-year contract, and Carter has chosen to honor the final year of his existing contract, in order to begin training with the rest of the team.

Bartelstein called Warner's decision to sign the $358,000 tender offer "unprecedented" in his 16 years as a sports agent. "I think Kurt's made an amazing decision. He's very disappointed that we haven't gotten a deal done, but he didn't want to put his personal agenda ahead of the team."

Both star players hope that the Rams management will continue to renegotiate in good faith. I don't really have an opinion about whether their salary demands are reasonable or not, but I'm glad they aren't letting them get in the way of sportsmanship.

Looking for a better link about these folks, but in the meantime: Tractordance! I've also found a personal account, but no pictures.

Speculation on additional mutants for the next X-Men movie has begun. Beast, the creative team's first choice, appears to be the fans' second favorite after Gambit. Personally, I'd like to see some of Nightcrawler's acrobatics. They could also play up some of the traditional characters who had brief appearances in the movie, like Iceman and Shadowcat. I'm disappointed that this article didn't have much to say about the villains of choice.

If you think that web site creation, or any other internet activity, should be reserved for some "elite", I wouldn't recommend mouthing off about it in Arivaca.

If the various complaints about Harry Potter haven't proven that some people will try to make a controversy out of anything, check this out: An upcoming Dreamcast game with a grafitti-spraying element has aroused the ire of the Keep America Beautiful campaign.

If the Mississippi Gulf Coast wasn't the Redneck Riviera (for better or for worse) before, it certainly has been ever since the coming of the casinos. Though limited to "dockside" gambling (likely to become land-based after the next hurricane leaves a casino or two across U.S. 90), Harrison County boasts eight to twelve casinos (plus one or two more in neighboring Hancock County) and probably under 200,000 residents. Now my former home is trying to get a Hard Rock Casino and Resort. Greaaat. Wake me when they get their own Blue Man Group show, OK?

Ninja Burger sounds like a great idea, but I'm sure the Deliverator could wipe the floor with these bozos.

Serohito says, 'You cannot order food to the third floor of a locked building.'

Aenomi-san says, 'Ninja Burger. We deliver ANYWHERE.'

[via /usr/bin/zannah]

The success of the X-Men movie has caused studio execs to green-light a pair of sequels. Good; while this one was far from perfect, it treated the story and the characters with far more respect than the modern Batman flicks, and stayed true to the style and themes I remember.

I don't buy many CD's; usually only collections of my favorite oldies, or new releases by a handful of proven bands. However, even though few of these artists sound familiar, I'm going to have to buy Heroes and Villains: Music Inspired by the Powerpuff Girls. Should be a nice companion to my Saturday Morning Cartoons alt-rock tribute disc.

My uncle, a nuclear-safety consultant from Los Alamos, passed along the following "help wanted ad" from the Los Alamos paper:

Wanted: Gifted, energetic scientists trained at top universities. International reputation desirable. Knowledge of physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science required. Willing to work long hours. Must be extremely flexible to adjust to rapid changes of policy and detailed direction by government agencies. Psychologically capable of withstanding ridicule by congressmen and media. Should have independent means and housing is very costly in isolated area and pension uncertain. Salary increases possible in years of budget surplus. Association with top university possible but not guaranteed. Able to obtain high-level security clearance. Willing to abide by stringent security regulations, with solitary confinement possible for mishandling of classified data. Occasional lie-detector tests and FBI interrogation. Active volunteer ski club maintains slopes but no snow in recent years. Should not enjoy tennis, as courts not maintained. Help with biking trails through novel Black Forest. Fight forest fires and support flood control projects in free hours. Should be willing to disarm nuclear weapons in emergencies including weekends. Free Red Cross lunches available. Apply to Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM 87545.

Apparently, someone at the paper decided that this "ad" was a better editorial on current conditions at the lab than they could have written themselves.

Since I'll soon be working on an e-commerce project for my employer (anybody want truss plates?), this piece on the best practices for designing shopping cart and checkout interfaces looks to be worth a read. I doubt I'll be able to use this knowledge, though; the site already has a (not very good, IMHO) ordering interface to send in orders via e-mail, and I'll probably only be working on a back-end enterface to send the same orders directly to the database.

It's good to see someone taking a stand against the plague of personal sites on the net. There are far too many benighted souls who would throw open the gates of the internet to the pathetic barbarians who think they should have the same rights to self-expression as the elite.

After five years of driving in St. Louis traffic, I don't want most drivers piloting flying cars.

Since when does Toad have a prehensile tongue? I haven't been reading the comic in a few years, but that seemed as silly as giving Oswald Cobblepot flippers. Other than that, I was pleased that the movie seemed to capture the characters and themes of the comics, as I remember them, quite faithfully. Yes, The X-Men could have been a better flick, but I found it quite enjoyable.

I want to punch whoever came up with the obnoxious, distracting "punch the monkey" banner ad.

With his stylish new tinfoil hat, Cringely speculates that the FBI's new Carnivore net-surveillance system may be even more of a threat than it seems. After the initial knee-jerk outrage I felt when I heard about this system, I thought it sounded like little more than a glorified packet-sniffer, part of the master net admin's standard kit.

What bothers me is the damned box. Why would the FBI need a box? Here's all the FBI will say about Carnivore. It sits on the network at the ISP, is PC-based, is "a kind of a sniffer," identifies and saves packets associated with suspected criminals, is installed under a court order, and doesn't itself act as a decryption device. There are supposed to be around 20 Carnivore boxes, and they have been in use since early this year. You don't need a sealed box to do any of these tasks, most of which are already being done for completely legal reasons right inside the router at every ISP. Routers look at every packet, determine what type of packet it is, where it is coming from and where it is going to, then the router delivers the packet to its intended destination. This is what routers do. Adding the Carnivore task is a simple matter of blind copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a third address at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. It's at most a few lines of code and requires no additional hardware.

So if this black box is unnecessary for it's stated purpose, does it have another? Bob thinks so, and it's a scary one: a shutdown system for the net. It's pure speculation, mind you, but a disturbing concept none the less.

In an era when most media coverage of children seems to invoke the specter of the Columbine shootings, I'm glad some newspapers are making an effort to provide more balanced news about and for children. [via Media News]

I'm surprised I haven't logged this already, but this History of Chili site has inspired me to make some experimental chili as of late. I'm trying to develop a good "fajita steak chili" using small strips of marinated steak instead of ground beef. I think the theory is sound, but the exact formula needs a bit of experimentation. It does seem to go well with smoky chipotle cornbread, though.

I'm kinda torn about going to the Gateway SciFi Con this weekend. Yeah, I'd love to go to see and hear Pterry, but the more I hear about this con, the less it sounds like there will be anything else I care that much about. By my standards, Gateway is pretty pricey; also, even when I don't get into the gaming, I tend to enjoy gaming cons much more than media cons. Archon is much more my speed. I guess the sad thing is that I've lived in St. Louis for five years, and have never really gotten into the fandom / gaming scene here.

Some commercials are fun to watch whether or not you have any interest in the product. I think this is the one I saw tonight: a helicopter, some soccer players, a Nike-branded ball, and a zillion robot soccer ninjas. It may even be cooler than Tim Burton's Timex commercial.

In today's episode of "I shoulda logged it when I saw it", Zannah points to a company selling neon lightsabers. I think there's another site I saw a couple of weeks ago that has similar products, plus a Darth Maul double-bladed lightsaber. It might have been this same company, but I don't think so, and if I'd logged it at the time, I'd know for sure.

My first attempt at an animated GIF is a mini banner ad for this site:

It's supposed to loop three times, then stop on the "tagline" image; if that's not the way it's displaying on your system, or you have any other comments, let me know.

Gee. How reassuring. Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, says that the company's ".NET" initiative is not a bid to control the internet. Perhaps not; maybe it's just a smokescreen project that Microsoft has never had any real intent of pursuing, but that it could publically "scuttle" to placate regulators. (I tend to believe that a similar motivation was behind the publicity over the infeasable "Star Wars" defense system during the Reagan era; it was a nice "concession" for us to make in the arms treaties of the day. Perhaps the current ABM testing flap is meant to serve the same purpose.) No, I don't trust MS; I hope that even if no real action comes out of the DoJ anti-trust agreement, more people will start looking at Microsoft's actions a bit more skeptically. Update:

Microsoft's .NET not a bcrosoft Corp.'s ambitious initiative of coupli violations, to control the medium, said chief eeeks ago, which is software it hopes will driventernet does not disguise an ambition to rule that view of history.

Thanks for clearing that up, Steve.

simulblogulation n. the new (and pointless) act of identical content being posted to several weblogs simultaneous. I'm sure the authors believed themselves to be funny, but simulblogulation is simply stupid.

For the record, Ray Larabie creates awesome fonts, many for free.

Just when you thought it was safe to advertise on the beach...

I just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I don't want to give away any spoilers, but...

Wow.

I hate the smell of the first few minutes of rain in the city, especially in summer. When it hasn't rained in a week or more, so much oil and grease and smoke and filth get baked into the asphalt, that when the rain finally comes, it releases this awful acrid odor. It's not so much that the smell itself is so horrible, it's the reminder of how much of this stuff we spew into the air and earth. After those few minutes worth of nastiness are dispersed, it smells so much better. Perhaps, if it didn't clear up so quickly, we'd take it more seriously.

How do you say "Cthulhu"? Very Carefully. [via Browse-O-Tron via Calebos]

Harry Potter and the Massive Merchandising Moguls: Warner Brothers, who hold licensing and merchandising rights to J. K. Rowling's books, have granted a license to LEGO. I'm not sure whether this bothers me more as a Potter fan or as a LEGO fan. I hope Rowling won't let the licensing money go to her head and affect her writings; so far, it hasn't seemed to, and I'd attribute more of her literary missteps to enthusiasm for her story than to greed. Just the same, I grew up on LEGO toys, so they've been a much more important institution in my life than these new books ever will. I didn't mind as much as some people did when LEGO started producing licensed sets for Star Wars, which had proven its popularity for over twenty years; however, a license as new as Harry Potter gives me pause. As much as I like Potter, I can't predict the future popularity of the series. Is it going to have the lasting power of, say, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, or even the Redwall books? Not that I wouldn't buy a LEGO model of Hogwarts, mind you (as I currently lust after the Ultimate Collector TIE Interceptor); I just hope that the company isn't going to start licensing every fad that comes along. [via Leaky Cauldron] Update: Just noticed yesterday that LEGO does have another license: there seem to be some "Winnie the Pooh" Duplo (or whatever their line for really small children is called) sets. Again, I don't mind licensed sets for proven children's favorites; it's the official Pokemon LEGO sets that I dread.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

My image editor of choice, Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, is now beta-testing Version 7. I love PSP; for the fraction of the price of a professional-grade graphics program like Photoshop, it has more than enough functionality for a hobbyist or amateur web designer like myself. There are plenty of neat tips & tricks for creating fantastic-looking special effects using a handful of simple tools. I just figured out a trick for curving text along the inside of a circle; I'll have to write it up sometime soon, but it involves telling PSP to reverse the drawing of the circle. (Update: It seems that such a tutorial already exists, so never mind.) I'm just starting to read about the new features of version 7, and I'll have to download the beta when I get home. What looks good so far:

• Photo enhancement tools: scratch removal, red-eye correction, etc.
• New textures and special effects, such as brush strokes, sepia, and the dreaded page curl
• Different fill styles (patterns, gradients, etc.) and line styles (dashed, dotted) for vector-based objects
• Snap-to grids and guides for those of us who are finnicky about alignment
• Better UI customization (toolbars, warning dialogs)
• Auto-save

Again, I have to try this for myself.

From Acme Labs' Russian division comes the latest breakthrough in roadrunner pursuit technology.

I'm reading the new Harry Potter book. I'm enjoying it. Deal.

Really, this is a good, fun book, even though I'm thirty and it was written for children. I'm not going to comment extensively on Potter (I'm willing to leave that to others), but I'm especially happy that some people are trying to direct young Potter fans to other excellent children's fantasy. I'm just disappointed that The Phantom Tollbooth (I just picked up a copy. For my cousin's daughter. Really. And she can have it as soon as I'm finished.) didn't make it into the top ten. I have a few of my own juvenile fantasy and (if I may make the leap) sci-fi favorites that I'd add to the list:

• The House with a Clock in its Walls and sequels, by John Bellairs (with illustrations by the late, lamented Edward Gorey)
• The seemingly out-of-print Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones
• The "Tripods" trilogy, beginning with The White Mountains, by John Christopher (not to mention the prequel, When the Tripods Came)
• Lest I forget, a broad selection of Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels (often better than his more adult works), such as The Rolling Stones and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
• Terry "Discworld" Pratchett's "Johnny" series, which starts with Only You Can Save Mankind

OK, that's quite enough for now.

A new report on how cities affect weather seems to support a theory I've heard about St. Louis weather. Several of the natives I've talked to say that all the brick buildings int St. Louis absorb enough heat to create a sort of permanent warm air mass, which seems to deflect many storm systems around the metro area. Fortunately, St. Louis may also have more trees to moderate this effect than most urban areas.

The Iron Chef Compendium fan site is back at its old URL, with a brief summary of the Cease & Desist mess.

I've published my Backflip Weblogs folder for all the world to see. I need to clean up some descriptions, etc. but feel free to check it out.

I have this theory that, for all the other prejudices (real or perceived) of the southern United States, Southerners are a lot more tolerant of many types of individual eccentricity than other regions, especially the Midwest. Eric Wagoner's latest entry seems to support my theory; it seems that the town of Athens, Georgia is crawling with Spy Cars in search of the 8-Track Gorilla.

You think the Diablo II fashion victims are strange? Just wait until Evergrace comes out for the Playstation 2; then coordinating your virtual outfit will be an important part of gameplay.

Good grief, I almost forgot that the Gateway SciFi Con was little over a week away. I figure this one will be worth attending just to see and hear Pterry!

Looks like someone has beat Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to the punch in creating a real-life Running Man. While the movie of that title plopped Aahnold into a gimmicky arena with ridiculous costumed "stalkers", the Stephen King book upon wich the movie was (loosely) based featured more of an open bounty hunt. "The Runner" is an attempt to bring this concept (hopefully without the fatality) to the small screen to capitalize on the current craze for "reality" shows; RealityRun appears to be a web-based version. [via wannabe]

Mike links the Banzai Institute, which still has no new information on the proposed Buckaroo Banzai TV series for Fox. *sigh* I want this to make the small screen. Rumors about "Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets & New Mysteries" have been floating around for a couple of years; the series was supposed to chronicle Dr. Banzai's fights against the World Crime League mentioned at the end of Across the Eighth Dimension. The way I've heard it, everyone involved in the original flick wanted for years to create a sequel, except for the alleged crook who owned the rights to BB, and who apparently passed away a couple of years ago.

I want one. It's completely unreasonably expensive, but I want one. Canon is now producing a tiny digital camera the same size as the APS film camera I currently use. A couple of reviewers seem suitably impressed. Still, at $600, it's going to be a long time before I can seriously consider getting one; the only kind of digital camera I might get in the forseeable future would be one of the cheap, non-removable-memory models. [via GirlHacker]

One of the few good things that has come from feeling included in a blanket dismissal is that I have been giving some thought to what I'm doing with this page and why. It seems to be somewhat of a cliche among webloggers, but I'm keeping this weblog (primarily) for myself. I want to get into the habit of writing. I want to experiment with HTML coding, and design, and web applications. I want to catalog sites of interest so that I can find them later. I want to vent, to muse, to speculate, to annotate. The audience (if it exists, of which I am not convinced) is only a means to an end, to keep me honest. I'm more likely to keep writing if I believe someone out there expects me to do so. I'm likely to give my words a bit more consideration if I think someone will judge me on their merits.

Right now, this weblog is my only personal presence on the web, although I'm seriously considering doing some different things on websites. A few months ago, there's no way I could have done anything more than a simple weblog, but I feel like I've learned a lot both here and at Pitas that I could now apply to other sites.

I'm doing this because I enjoy it, and because I think it is helping me in a number of ways; if you don't like it, just go away.

I love cooking in a cast iron skillet, even though they require a bit more maintenance than more modern cookware. The one I've been using is a pretty huge model that my mom bought me; I picked up a new, smaller skillet today that might be a little easier to handle for my bachelor needs. The proper care and feeding of a cast iron skillet is generally considered to involve "seasoning" the skillet, which is to say, maintaining a protective layer of oil on the surface. Of course, everybody has thir own variation on how to get a proper coating. I generally try to spread a thin layer of vegetable shortening on the surface after each use, and occasionally put the skillet in the oven to cook this coating on when the skillet is new, or when it looks like the coating needs a little extra care. Anyway, that's the technique I used to prep the new skillet; If I don't use it before then, I'm hoping to try out a chipotle cornbread recipe I found, to go along with my usual July 4th chili.