What did I say?

Have you ever noticed that when you say something like, "I need to make new friends," that most of your old friends choose to interpret that as "get rid of us?"

Why is that?

My current friends are nice people-- all I'm saying is it's difficult to converse about certain interests of mine because few (if any) in my current social circle share them. It's like being a hockey fan in a football town.

Ubuntu 7.04, G4 iBook, and WPA2

I *think* I've finally managed to get WPA2 working with Ubuntu 7.04 on my old G4 iBook. I'm putting that huge qualifier in there because it seemed almost TOO easy, and I'm waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop.

I believed, like many others, that the issue was the Broadcom chipset in the Airport Extreme wireless built in to the iBook.

It turns out that the (as I understand it) process of converting WPA passwords into hex keys gets screwed up by Network Manager on the PPC architecture. It's a "big endian" versus "little endian" thing . . . basically, some machines store bit values from right to left (i.e. the least significant digit is on the right), while the Macintosh does it from left to right (i.e. the least significant digit is on the left).

In other words, if you let Network Manager do the password to hex key conversion for you, it's "backwards." If you bypass the conversion process entirely, and go straight to the hex key itself-- you should be in!

At least, that seems to be what worked for me.

In terminal, type this:

wpa_passphrase your_ssid your_password

You should get a sixty-four character hex key in the result. Highlight and copy that key in your terminal session, then try to reconnect to your WPA2-protected network with the Network Manager. When prompted for your password, paste the 64-character hex key in place instead. If you have the option of telling Ubuntu to remember your password, I'd recommend taking advantage of it-- because manually generating, copying and pasting that long key is going to get really old pretty quick.

Hope that works for you as nicely as it did for me!

And remember, I'm pro-Linux, NOT a Linux-pro-- so don't expect me to be able to field any and all questions that people might be inclined to leave here in the comments!

Internet Explorer 8, Version Targeting, and "The Dead"

In a recent article over at "A List Apart," my web design role-model divided people who build web sites into two groups-- the quick (those who understand web design standards and try to abide by them) and the dead (folks who still build web sites like they were done back in the 90's.)

Why is this important? Because Microsoft is working on the next version of Internet Explorer, and they are aspiring to improve the support for web standards in version 8 beyond the improvements we saw in IE 7. This is great news for "the quick"-- but not such good news for "The Dead."

You see, people who design/build web sites with a complete disregard for web standards can pretty much expect their web pages to fail when rendered in future versions of a web browser. They can be minor failures (i.e. things don't look right, but the sites still functions) all the way to spectacular failures. Microsoft, being sensitive to the needs of "The Dead", has adopted a mechanism called "version targeting" to try to address these concerns.

I should care . . . and I do care, it's just-- the official designers that I work with are (for the most part) still stuck in a "nested tables/IE6/presentation tags are okay" paradigm. I can't even get them to think about IE7 as a design consideration, and now I need to worry about the next version of Internet Explorer having "version targeting?"

Wisdom in under 130 chars

Advertising = what the software can do,

Manual = how to use the software,

License = how much trouble you'll get in for doing it.

The OTHER other times

Some times, I sit down in front of an empty Blogger post form and it seems like I have absolutely nothing to say. Other times, I log in and any idea I may have had suddenly seems cliche and banal-- like it's not even worth expending the time and energy trying to capture.

Then, there are the other other times, when it feels like my skull is hemmoraging ideas-- and writing seems as difficult and pointless as a head trauma patient trying to save their own lives with a box of band-aids.

Tonight is one of those other other times-- and I have no idea which "band-aid" I should even try to put on first. ;)

The peculiar thing about all this is that many of these ideas seem inter-related somehow. Not directly related, like simple cause and effect, but more like insight into one idea will somehow reveal hidden wisdom about a different idea. There is a danger in trying to explain these connections to people, though-- because if they aren't able to comprehend the connections themselves, some of them will automatically assume you are schizophrenic and building your own mental construct.

So, forget trying to explain the connections to "folks who won't get it." Just consider this another random series of involuntary twitches.

I've been thinking more about the "singularity" (not so much in the academic definition of the term, but more like the concepts presented in popular science fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's short stories or the Cylons in the Sci-Fi Channel's remake of "Battlestar Galactica.") One premise of this singularity is that people have found a way to copy their intelligence/essence in a way that transcends the physical limitations of the body. Again, this is science fiction, not reality-- but the concept of being able to "upload" the essence of me to a backup drive/network storage/mainframe/what have you, which can in turn be "downloaded" into a new body-- or even more than one body-- and then those bodies go out and accumulate experience and wisdom, until they in turn are "uploaded" back into the central repository. The "essence" that started off as me begins to accumulate new experiences and histories . . . .

I blame the scientists who are researching teleportation. I was fine until I read a recent article about "misconceptions of teleportation." See, like many modern people, I assumed teleportation was all about taking a person or object on one end, breaking them down into energy particles, transmitting those particles on some kind of carrier wave to a remote location, and then reassembling them on the remote side. Not so. It turns out that teleportation aspiring researches don't want to transmit actual matter; they only want to send the information (the blueprint, if you will) necessary to create a remote duplicate.

In other words, you don't teleport to Detroit-- it's more like cloning meets telecommuting. (There is a movie called "The Prestige" which apparently does a pretty good job of getting this idea correct.)

I'd be lying if I didn't admit it freaks me out a little bit. You create a remote, identical copy of me that effectively lives out its life independently of me, but at the same time as me. And, you can do this as many times as necessary. In a way, it makes one immortal-- or does it? From a subjective standpoint, I still grow old and die-- but the identical copy of me survives. Then, you take Cory Doctorow's premise of being able to upload a sentience as a way of closing that loop.

It gives me cold shivers. Or it did, until recently.

See, I got to thinking-- we have all learned from experiences that we didn't actually live through. Someone tells us a story about something they did (e.g. mixing wine and liquor), and we learn that such an action has nasty consequences without having to experience them firsthand. We avoid the pitfall, even though we never actually experienced or witnessed it. Or, even more recent/current-- we watch the travel channel and learn about the climate and culture of a remote tropical island. If it's a place that interests us, we might pay very close attention and memorize the landscape features to such an extent that we'd experience deja vu if and when we finally arrived there ourselves in person.

If and when the day comes that we can "copy" memories and essence outside of the body, we will have the psychologically disorienting experience of recalling vivid memories that we never actually lived through-- but, in the end, it's nothing more than a faster, more intense version of the memories we already create by listening to the stories other people share with us, or watching the travel channel. Each generation gets better at the information overload.

Wait-- there's more. If you think about it, every cell in our body dies eventually and is replaced by a different cell. Fortunately, not all of the cells die at the same time-- otherwise it would be very messy and painful. The cells take turns in rotation, much like the overall population of a society. At the end of seven years, though, every cell in your body has at some point died and been replaced. There isn't a single cell in your body right now that was present in your body eight years ago. You are not, literally speaking, the same person you were eight years ago.

When you think of it in those terms, the idea of jumping into a new body doesn't seem quite so . . . freakish. We're already doing it-- just very slowly and inefficiently.

(sigh) Which brings us to the Cyclons. Yes, I know-- it's only SF. Why on earth am I expending so much mental energy on something that isn't even real? (Answer: Just because it isn't real right now, that doesn't mean it can't ever be real. Gene Roddenberry featured computers with voice recognition in Star Trek in the 60's and we began to see it in the work place less than three decades later.)

So, where were we again? Oh, right-- Cylons. How do you defeat an enemy hellbent on exterminating your entire species-- that "uploads" their intellect back into the central network whenever you kill them, so they can just download into a brand new body and come back to fight you again another day? Oh, sure, you are laughing now-- but try replacing Cylons with something like "Fourth Reich", "Islamic Fundamentalists" or "corrupt politicians" and then tell me if you are still smiling.

Bet that wiped the smirk off your face, didn't it?

One possible solution: trap one instance of the enemy, subject them to some biological/chemical agent known to cause mental illness or impairment (syphilis? lead paint? I Love Lucy marathons?), and let them "upload" back to the mother ship-- potentially contaminating any other "essences" that assimilate the damaged essence with the same illness. On second thought, turning a homicidal enemy into an insane homicidal enemy might not be such a good idea. Although the goal is to incapacitate them, it could actually make them more dangerous.

Insanity with a biological origin isn't the same thing as a computer virus-- there are just some superficial similarities at first. Which brings me round to OOP (Object Oriented Programming). I taught myself C (a procedural programming language) way back in 1994. I dabbled with C++ (an Object Oriented Language) a little bit, and although I'm conversant with the concepts (e.g. inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, etc.), I'd be lying if I said I'd successfully internalized the paradigm to the point that I natively think in OOP. If anything, I think procedurally first, and then find myself laboring to translate my thoughts into OOP.

Hardly surprising-- if you took Spanish in high school, and then stopped using it after you graduated, chances are you will not think "natively" in Spanish, but think in your mother tongue and then translate to Spanish inside your head, before you speak. The only way to internalize that paradigm is to keep studying and practicing until it becomes sufficiently ingrained in you.

Fortunately, I now have that opportunity. I ran into a former colleague of mine-- and he's looking to upgrade his programming chops to a more "popular" language. He was trying to teach himself C++, but I think both of us would be better off to pick something newer and more widely used, such as Java. I shouldn't get my hopes up, of course, because every time I've made the mistake of helping someone with a project like this, I'm the one who gets short changed and screwed-- but at the same time, it's sort of like having a workout partner. Knowing that another person is going to be there, learning the same material you are, tends to motivate me a little more than just doing it all by myself.

Maybe the problem ISN'T the technology?

Try this scenario:

You have a technical need.

You contact your IT department, and they tell you to submit your request through their website-- which doesn't work.

You contact them again to notify them that the website they sent you to isn't working properly and it's impossible for you to submit your request.

They tell you to type up all the information related to the request in an email and send it to them. You do so, and a few hours later, you get a message back that your request has been fulfilled.

You find out that although the request has been fulfilled, it was done incorrectly. On top of that, a high ranking member of the IT department has contacted a high ranking member of your office to complain about how you bypassed proper protocol-- even though all you did was what the IT people told you to do in the first place.

Scary. Very scary.

Depression, the Artistic Impulse, and the nature of insanity

Don't expect a fully formed, thought out essay at this stage-- I'm just trying to get my thoughts down "on paper" before they vanish entirely.

A few days ago, I heard snippets of an discussion on NPR dealing concerning a poet who also had serious, long-term bouts with depression. The question the interviewer asked (paraphrasing her, obviously) was "is depression a necessary component of the creative process, or are artists/poets being creative in spite of their depression?" It's an interesting question, I suppose, but it seems to me that it overlooks a third, even more thought provoking, possibility:

What if being creative/imaginative leads to depression?

It seems like an outlandish question at first, but less so when you give it serious consideration.

You have an idea (e.g. subject for a painting, to keep it simple) that grabs your imagination. It may or may not be unique, but it's different enough that you can't easily find it or something "close enough" to it in the real world today. Turning this idea into a reality becomes an obsession-- it *should* be possible. After all, people create paintings all the time.

But when you try to "make it real", you discover barriers and hurdles that complicate the act of bringing it into the real world. Maybe you bought the canvas, paints and brushes, and you've started to paint your masterpiece, but the realities and restrictions of the media you are working in prevent you from achieving what you originally envisioned in your head. You have to make compromise after compromise to capture it on canvas-- the colors aren't as bright as the vision in your head, or the paint is too thick on the canvas and looks muddy, it takes far longer and requires more effort than you ever imagined, etc.

That's just painting, which tends to be a fairly solitary creative activity. Imagine how many more compromises and frustrations would be involved in a collaborative situation, like designing a web site or co-authoring a story?

Maybe the constant act of compromise and the laborious efforts involved in the creative process cause frustration and disappointment that predispose artistic types to depression?

Suddenly, it doesn't seem so far fetched, does it?

Cheese?! HA! Behold the power of ESPRESSO!

After a few days of research and contemplation, I decided it was finally time to crack open the case on my broken iBook and replace the broken hard drive. I picked up a new Western Digital notebook hard drive, $75 for 120GB, got a shot of espresso at my favorite coffee shop and said, "What the hell-- it's already broken, right? Can't hurt to try!"

It took me slightly more than three hours to take it all apart, remove the old hard drive, put in the new hard drive, and put the case back together again. I even took the time to clean out all the "gunk" that accumulated inside the case-- finishing off my can of compressed air. There are a few nicks on the laptop case from being pried open by a screwdriver, but it went surprisingly well-- no broken tabs, cracks in the case, or forgotten connectors.

It's taken about an hour and fifteen minutes to partition the hard drive (1 30GB partition for Mac OS X, the other 90 GB are TBD) and reinstall the OS X 10.3 Panther sofware, and I'm still letting it grab all the various security updates and application patches from Apple's Update Service. I could have just restored my previous hard drive from backup and been done with this part of it much sooner, but-- there's something pleasant about a new clean laptop and how fast and responsive it is when you don't have dozens of background processes hogging the processor cycles.

It's not exactly like having a brand new laptop, of course-- but it feels pretty darn close.

the mystery of the iBook deepens . . .

When my iBook's hard drive "crashed" a few days ago, I was able to boot up off of an external Firewire drive and run DiskTools on it. I wasn't able to repair the drive, but figured I'd come back later and try some other tools to see if I had more luck.

So, this morning, when I tried to boot up off of the external Firewire drive, I found my iBook refused to let me boot up. Strange, no?

It almost sounds like I have some sort of worm or virus, doesn't it? The weird part is I run Clam A/V and Little Snitch, which should let me know if I have such a beastie. They aren't perfect, of course, and it is theoretically possible I got hold of something new that didn't get picked up . . . but those are some pretty unusual odds.

And yet, when I try to come up with other explanations, they seem even more farfetched. The firmware doesn't "go bad" usually, and that would prevent it from booting on any drives-- not selectively fail.

I did manage to boot up from my CD-Rom/DVD drive with an old Live CD of Ubuntu. From there, I was able to look at my hard drive with "G-Parted" (a hard drive partitioning tool that is used in Ubuntu). It can "see" the hard drive, even though it isn't mounted, and it can tell me that there are three partitions in it. The first partition is marked as "unknown" and is sized at 128 MB, the second partition is undefined, and doesn't appear to have any real "size" to it, and the third partition is HFS+ and comes in just over 28 GB. That third partition is, theoretically, where all the data is-- except I can't get the drive to mount properly. It's not a big deal, because I've got most of the data backed up on my external hard drive-- minus some bookmarks I made for my home improvement project.

So why is the iBook suddenly refusing to boot from the external Firewire drive? Is this a clue to the original problem, or just the sign of a deteriorating computer?

the "Bionic" iBook

It's official -- the hard drive in my iBook is kaput.

A friend of mine (who is always eager to learn more about "under the hood" of computers) asked me to try to explain what happened. I'd like to oblige-- except I'm more of a software geek than a hardware nut, so how do you try to explain something you don't completely understand yourself?

Basically, there are two things that can go wrong with a hard drive-- either the information on the hard drive can get erased/scrambled up, or the actual physical matter of the hard drive can be damaged. Neither situation is "good", but the first one can usually be resolved more easily than the second. You basically wipe the hard drive clean, restore your data from your most recent backup, and move on from there.

When the physical apparatus of the drive is actually damaged, however, you have to either repair or replace the hard drive before you can do anything else. (The hard drive is, as I understand it, basically a stack of magnetic-sensitive platters, and there are "heads" that move in and around these platters "reading" and "writing" information.)

So, I get to crack open my old iBook case and see if I can remove the old drive and replace it with a new one.

The good news is that a comparable hard drive (ATA 100 4200 RPM at 30GB) is pretty cheap-- under $50 easily, if you shop around. I could pay for someone with a lot more experience to replace the drive, but that quickly adds up to an amount that approaches the cost of a new computer. Besides, you don't learn as much if you get someone else to do the dirty work for you. ;)

This all begs the question, though-- if I'm going to go to the trouble of cracking open my laptop case, why should I stop at replacing the hard drive with the exact same hard drive that was already in there? Why not track down a bluetooth module and install that, too? Why not put a 60 GB drive in instead, or even a 120 GB drive, and chop them into several partitions (Mac OS X/Ubuntu/etc.)? Or, even go really nutzo with it and see if there's some way to hack an interface to a "steady state" drive, like the Air Book currently has as an option?

Yeah, I know-- that last option is the kind of thinking that gets me in hot water in the first place. But still, if you're going to spend time and effort fixing something, why not make it better than it originally was instead of just getting back to the status quo?

iBook hard drive

The hard drive on my little iBook suddenly crashed on me last night.

Thanks to this article at Lifehacker I am at least able to boot up from an external firewire drive and run Disk Utilities on the internal hard drive. I'm hoping erasing and restoring will do the trick, but I'm afraid things are not looking good.

More later.

Goodbye G and L :(

Pero, ¿por qué?

textually.org: Bush pushes House to OK immunity for telecoms in eavesdropping legislation

textually.org: Bush pushes House to OK immunity for telecoms in eavesdropping legislation: "In order to be able to discover ... the enemy's plans, we need the cooperation of telecommunication companies"

So basically, you're saying: Trust me, there's a known future threat-- which I won't tell you any details about-- except that it's so scary that it justifies the immediate and retroactive absolution of any illegal activities that may or may not have taken place over the past six years.

Wow. I need to write that one down so I can try it out later.

Comments and Compromises

My blog can be "sticky" or it can be "valid." It cannot, at this time, be both.

I've enabled comments on this blog, which means the front page will still validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but the "child" pages within the blog will no longer do so.

So, take advantage of this new opportunity to comment and tell me: is it better to be "sticky" or "valid?"

The "Hacker" Stereotype

It happened again tonight. This guy I know "jokingly" asked me if I knew of an exploit that "we" could use to take advantage of the gold-farming situation in Second Life. Seems he'd read a magazine article about how some "creative" folks were turning Linden dollars into real dollars, and he wanted a piece of the action somehow. I tried to discourage him by explaining the reality of the situation-- that his idea was completely unethical (read fraud), probably illegal and bound to attract the attention of the FBI and/or Secret Service.

Does he take the hint? No.

He keeps going on about how we'd give a third of it to charity (like this makes the unethical behaviour "okay" somehow?), split the other two thirds between us-- and it'd be so cool and edgy that we'd become urban legends, blah blah blah. The guy goes on for 10 minutes like this, trying to convince me I should see this his way. I finally turned my back on him and walked away.

He probably never realized he was being stupid and offensive.

Here's a lesson for the uninitiated:

1) There's a surprising number of asians who do NOT know martial arts.

2) There are black people who can't dance, rap or play basketball.

3) There are "hackers" who don't vandalize or break into web servers/computer systems.

Oh, yeah-- almost forgot:

4) If you want to make "mad cash," figure out how to hack the prevailing paradigm of the current business model instead of the technology (cf. Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" and Seth Godin's "Free Prize Inside.")

Blogging alone is no longer enough

(Warning: I'm writing this post while recovering from a splitting headache-- which is probably the result of caffeine withdrawal and a "Battlestar Galactica" marathon-- so don't be surprised if it rambles and sounds incoherent.)

Back in 1999, a young student by the name of Peter showed me the power and simplicity of blogging. I wish I could say I was smart enough to see how amazing this was and would turn out to be-- but the truth of the matter was it seemed like an awful lot of jiggery-pokery with Perl scripting just to update a simple web page. A year later, when I finally "got it", I had a blog through Blogger with my own domain name (thanks to the "Brand 50" book from Tom "CAPS LOCK" Peters). After Blogger got popular/overloaded, I made the jump to Greymatter-- it was a good platform (also written in Perl, I should note), but failed to keep up with trends in the field. Extinction is what happens when you ignore critical functionality, like RSS feeds, in favor of superficial qualities, such as "what song am I currently listening to?"

From there, I moved on to Blosxom. Blosxom is an amazing tool, in my opinion. So lean, so capable-- but it's horrible for someone who LOVES to tinker when they really need to focus on writing. Plus, Rael Dornfest's moved on to bigger and better things, so I suspect the golden days of Blosxom are over. That left me with either WordPress or Blogger as my blogging platform, so I wound up "closing the circle" as it were by returning to Blogger.

The thing is-- I'm slowly coming to the realization that the act of blogging alone is now no longer enough. Expressing myself in a vacuum, although better than suffocating, is not the same as finding people who are like-minded-- it's not the same as finding people who can help me "become actualized" (or whom I can help become "actualized"), or even transforming the world.

I need to make the jump to the next logical avenue-- social networking. Christ knows there's about 15 million of them to choose from. Google has Orkut, of course, but considering I don't actually live in Brazil, that's not doing me much good. MySpace appears to be very young women and much older men, which feels borderline creepy and uncomfortable-- so what's left for me? Facebook? Something else I haven't even heard about? I don't know-- but I'm looking.

Profession, Aptitude and Personality

Although I find some aspects of medicine fascinating, I suspect I'd hate being a doctor.

I'm not great at dealing with blood and viscera, but I could learn to get beyond that aversion. The real problem is that people would seek my assistance with a potentially life-threatening illness (diabetes, for example), and then after I shared my expert advice with them on what was necessary to save their lives, they would leave my office and refuse to take enough responsibility to do what they need to do.

Hell, I already have people coming to me for advice on matters that AREN'T life threatening (how to secure their home Wifi access points, for example)-- and then completely disregard what I tell them. It wastes my time and seriously annoys me, and people's lives aren't even at stake, so can you imagine how righteously pissed I'd be if I were a doctor?

Airport Express has amazing range

I first started using WiFi in my house about 2003. I've used an old Belkin 802.1b access point (which was okay for its time, but you couldn't upgrade the security on it), an SMC Barracuda (the extra RJ-45 ports were nice for my home "servers") and, most recently, an Apple Airport Express. It's funny, but I've sort of taken the Airport Express for granted.

You know how it is-- if it works, you tend not to think about it very often.

For some reason, I was outside with my Asus eee PC the other day and figured I'd check the status of the various WiFi access points around me. Much to my surprise, my SSID was showing up loud and clear as far as six houses down! I could literally put a wireless camera on the community mailbox (not that I would, but just to demonstrate the distance) and get an image transmitted back.

Considering the Belkin unit couldn't even get a reliable signal into my own backyard, I'd say things have improved quite a bit.

I mention all this because, believe it or not, I'm actually thinking about replacing my Airport Express with a Linksys router. It's all DD-WRT's fault. ;) Airport Express is very well designed, but it doesn't support the higher-end security features that a Linksys router with DD-WRT does-- such as Virtual Private Networking. (I was wondering how some of the folks I knew were using personal VPN connections at public WiFi spots.) Of course, the downside is that if I get rid of the Airport Express, I lose the USB printer and streaming of iTunes songs to my stereo system (er, which I never use anyway?)

The Cell Phone Recycling Problem

According to The Secret Life of Cell Phones, the reason most North Americans throw their cell phones away is because they are unaware of cell phone recycling programs. I don't see how this is possible-- for years I've seen publicity about old/reused cell phones for battered women's shelters.

I don't believe ignorance of recycling programs keeps people from recycling-- I think there are a number of factors not being considered here:

1. if the phone still works, people will hang on to it as a backup, or give it to a friend/family member.
2. people are worried about removing all their personal data from the phone.
3. people aren't completely certain the cell phones are really being recycled, as opposed to just throw away after we turn around and leave.
4. people don't want to be ridiculed by cell phone store staff. Yes, we KNOW it's an old phone-- that's why we are bringing it back to get it recycled. If it were a new/trendy phone, we'd still be using it now, wouldn't we?
   

[an error occurred . . . ]: Cheryl Crow nails it in one lyric

[an error occurred . . . ]: Cheryl Crow nails it in one lyric

I just got schooled by a fan of Ms. Crow's-- it's Sheryl, NOT Cheryl. Apologies to anyone who might have been offended.

(For what it's worth-- no one gets my name right either. I always get "Johan" for some reason.)

Stainless Steel Refrigerators and Magnets

You learn the darndest things while researching home improvement projects. I recently learned my ancient refrigerator was causing an issue with my electricity-- the motor creates an enormous draw whenever it starts the defrost cycle. Rather than spend the money to replace the motor, it makes more sense to purchase a new fridge.

I even know what I want in a new model-- ice maker/water dispenser in the door, freezer and refrigerator side by side, and a stainless steel finish. Then, of course, I started doing research on models, reliability, etc. and learned that everything I want is wrong bad problematic.
For example, I use magnets to put all sorts of odds and ends on my fridge-- business cards, calendars, pictures, and so on. No problem, though, because stainless steel is magnetic. Right?

Actually, it depends. ;)

See, "stainless steel" is actually a generic term for any steel alloy. So, depending upon what other metal is added to the steel, it can change some of the properties of the end product. It turns out that some refrigerators with stainless steel finishes use nickel in their alloy-- and that type of stainless steel isn't magnetic.

Good thing I learned that before I spent all that money on the fridge and those fancy Global knives then.

Life isn't a competition???

Have you ever noticed that people who utter platitudes like "Life isn't a competition" tend to be, shall we say, better off? They've got the basics covered and don't have to worry about things like freezing to death, or where their next meal is coming from. Chances are they are working like lunatics on the extras (nice house, family, car, etc.) behind the scenes, but publicly professing a different message.

The truth is-- life IS a competition, but it's not as simple and straightforward as which neighbor owns the most expensive car. It's about the way society chooses to use and distribute resources that are finite and/or limited.

The difference between derivative works, homages and rip-offs

I'm listening to my car radio the other day, and this local DJ is talking about an upcoming interview with some sports figures. This is unusual for him, because he's a morning DJ and not the "sports guy"-- so he wants to do something entertaining for the regular listeners above and beyond the plain old interview. He starts explaining this "game"-- a show within a show, as it were, where he and his cohorts will use "code words" during the interview, but only regular listeners to the program will be in on the "joke." He even solicits people to call and suggest the code words that they would need to work casually into the conversation. As an example, he says "aluminum siding" and then gives a demonstration of how to work that into the conversation.

Sounds pretty inventive, doesn't it? Until you find out that whole bit, including that "aluminum siding" example, is practically taken verbatim from an old Steve Martin flick, Leap of Faith (1992).

When you take something from someone or someplace else and try to pass it off as your own, without acknowledging the original sources (homage) or adding some new twists or improvements to it (derivative work), then you are committing a rip off.

Are coupons passe?

Little math problem for you:

I have a 20% off the list price of any one item at Borders. The coupon cannot be used online and must be redeemed by no later than 2/3/2008. The Doctor Who Season 3 DVD has a price tag of $99.00, which means I would pay about $83 (don't forget the sales tax) for it if I use the coupon.

Not bad, right? Until you you go to http://www.borders.com and see the exact same DVD for $69. No coupon, no sales tax (thanks to their partnership with Amazon), and free shipping = $69.

$69 < $83. You could take the money you saved, go to Borders, buy a magazine (~$10) AND a fancy coffee drink (~$4), and . . . ponder what are you gonna do with that coupon?

textually.org: SMS opens doors to toilets in some rest areas along Highway 1 in Western Finland

textually.org: SMS opens doors to toilets in some rest areas along Highway 1 in Western Finland

Now that's an intriguing idea-- in order to access the toilet, you send a text message. Since they (presumably) keep your mobile number on file, they know who went in on any given date/time-- which makes end users less willing to vandalize the toilet.

Oh, sure-- the naysayers can find 20 million things wrong with this approach: what if I steal someone else's cell phone and use it, or what if I use a cloned SIM chip, or what if I wait until someone else uses their mobile to open it and then sneak in behind with them, etc.

Maybe this will replace some of those ridiculously proprietary RFID keycard systems (separate database instead of integrating with Active Directory?!?) that people currently love to use to regulate after hours building access.

ThinkGeek :: Keychain GPS Receiver with Bluetooth

ThinkGeek :: Keychain GPS Receiver with Bluetooth

Okay, none of my computers have Bluetooth. My old Nokia phone doesn't have Bluetooth. And yet, I'm still contemplating picking up one of these GPS keychains for the day I eventually get a phone or PDA that actually has Bluetooth.

You say "compulsive shopping," I say "economic stimulus package." ;)

Actually, I do have this sort of half-baked idea in my head of using one of the various Net/mini/MacStumbler programs with a GPS and getting the data together in some sort of Google Map Mashup-- but it's not like it's a really fantastic idea or I don't have better ways to spend my time and energy.