Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

Talk about fascism from your heros. I love OSC’s Sf writings – well, most of them. But his political and social views are just so far out of my league it’s boggling.
Here, Card pretty much states that fascism is the only way to reign in the horror of free speech.

Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It’s not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It’s just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.

Read the entire rant at The Ornery American.
Update – I’d also recommend reading other interesting commentary regarding Card in the Kuro5hin article. Interesting stuff.

Sorry for the total lack of updates lately. I can tell you about at least one of the things that’s burbling around.
This morning we accepted an offer on our house, with a closing set for July 31st.
We’re pretty excited, but also quite worn. Yay!

There ought to be a law against this:

I get that there’s the whole “though April showers may come your way, they bring the flowers that bloom in May” thing, but, hey, we’re almost done with May, can we have a little sunshine? Please?
(This is actually the forecast for about 100 miles north of here where we have our Maine house. I was looking forward to going up there Friday for the Memorial Day weekend, but gosh, this isn’t looking all that wonderful.)

I asked on one of the Radio Paradise forums whether XM Radio would ever carry RP. I’m getting closer to picking up an XM subscription, partially for the long drives to Maine and back that’ll happen all summer, but also for my trips down to NJ and back for my client.
In the the posting, Bill Goldsmith (the man behind RP, is quoted:

Neither XP or Sirius are interested in any outside music programming. They’re both committed to doing that themselves.
No huge loss for us, really. The day of widespread wireless broadband is near at hand. Verizon already has a very nice wireless broadband service in 30 US metro areas (400+ kbps, $80/mo – click here for more info). I know of at least a couple of RP listeners who use that service to listen to RP in their cars – & one who listens regularly on Amtrak between NYC & DC, rarely losing the signal.
Over the next few years, more wireless carriers will be adding or upgrading their 3g (broadband cellular) offerings, with speeds going up & prices coming down. Many ISPs & telcos will also be jumping on the WiMax bandwagon, offering true broadband wireless services which – though primarily designed for fixed-position use – have mobile possibilities as well.
So before too much longer, there will be very few places that you won’t be able to get an Internet connection on your PDA, phone, laptop, media player, or whatever. Then – who needs some multi-billion-dollar satellite corporation? So, like I said, no huge loss really.

The problem is that I don’t think I agree with Bill’s comments.
First, there’s the problem of cost. $75 a month is too high for most people to pay.
Second is the performance. I’ve used the 1xRTT service from Verizon, and it’s not all that hot. I don’t think it would keep up with the 128k feed I normally listen to (I’m seeing functional 1xRTT speeds of between 70kbps and 90kbps), therefore I’m looking at a serious reduction in my music quality.
Third is coverage. Yes, wireless broadband may be available in most metropolitan areas, but it is hardly ubiquitous. If I wanted to listen in metro areas, there are a lot of good progressive stations around Boston. The problem is they disappear in the middle of Connecticut or the New Hampshire mountains. That’s where I want to listen.
Fourth is more of a socio-political-economic issue. I had a problem for a bit where I thought XM Radio was owned by ClearChannel, a company who, IMHO, embodies all that is evil in large corporate holdings. In fact, ClearChannel is a minority investor in XM, and does not in fact own them. While I’m still giving ClearChannel some money, I will happily give XM radio money to support stations such as RadioParadise.
However, the money I give Verizon Wireless (quite a lot MORE money in fact) will never ever see its way into Radio Paradise’ pocket. I will get poorer service, poorer signal quality, and higher overhead trying to get a WiFi hookup running in my car just to listen to a dumbed-down music feed than I would get with a $10/month $90 receiver for XM radio.
Bill, I think you need to reconsider your reasoning for not at least talking to XM Radio again.

Just to follow on to my recent posting, while reviewing James Randi’s excellent weekly column, I read a great quote from the master himself, Mark Twain

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive … but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

A lot of thought regarding my own personal belief structures has been rattling around in my head for the last year or two. Perhaps a lot of it has to do with what I see as the ascendancy of the radical religious view, and how somehow the concept of ‘spirituality’ has been perverted into a political cause. To me spirituality is a deeply personal, internal, and individualistic thing. When attempts are made to codify, organize, and publish those thoughts as dogma, I believe it damages, if not destroys those paths that an individual is following.
Organized religion, or even just the term ‘religion’, in it’s many forms, I feel is anathema to this process of self-examination and growing. Why is it that organizations feel that they must structure a persons individual growth, and if you do it ‘wrong’, somehow you are ‘bad’.
Now before I get everyone in an uproar, the immediate reaction by those who practice religion in whatever form tends to be “Wait, _I_ dont’ practice religion that way!” or “My faith doesn’t believe that!” I say to them then “Then why are you practicing a religion?”
Seriously though, take a look at that. A religion is an attempt to explain things that may not be understandable or clear to a person existing in the world. In the Good Old Days, religion was all powerful because the world was not well understood. Modern day, however, the average layman can tell you what an Atom is, and that the earth goes around the sun. So why do we need to make up stories about old men up in the sky to explain the world around us?
What set me off on this was not only the ongoing idiocy by the Creationists in the US government, in particular the absurd drive by the radical right to tear down the concept of evolution as it’s being taught in the schools. There’s a wonderful commentary from the American Association of Physics Teachers:

Evolution and cosmology represent two of the unifying concepts of modern science. There are few scientific theories more firmly supported by observations than these: Biological evolution has occurred and new species have arisen over time, life on Earth originated more than a billion years ago, and most stars are at least several billion years old. Overwhelming evidence comes from diverse sources – the structure and function of DNA, geological analysis of rocks, paleontological studies of fossils, telescopic observations of distant stars and galaxies – and no serious scientist questions these claims. We do our children a grave disservice if we remove from their education an exposure to firm scientific evidence supporting principles that significantly shape our understanding of the world in which we live.

I do not say that folks should not have the right to organize to observe their beliefs. Observation is one thing, but brainwashing and political activism to expand the power of those religious organizations is obscene.
In doing some of my research, I came upon some commentary by one of the more powerful religious organizations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons. This is a huge, wealthy, and powerful organization. The Mormons are noted for their high secrecy, but there are several very good sources for insight into the practices this organization condones. In particular, I refer to the Ex-Mormons Archiva. The articles that drove me to post here refer to the ‘Apache Tears’ episode (see down further on that page). This is an organization entrusted with small children, and they inflict this level of trauma on them. On top of that is the doctrine of “Death before Rape”, which seems to be norm. “You got raped? You must not have fought hard enough, you’re still alive.”
This is just one example of my total disdain for virtually all forms of organized religion. I feel that we as human beings are in no position to decide what is right or what is wrong (if there is such a thing), and even beyond that, we are in no position to define that viewpoint to others. Who are we to know? The old maxim “There is no truth” still holds. (For more entertaining reading, apparently even that statement is false. Another example of self delusional double-think.)
Agnosticism. “We just don’t know.”

What can you say about Kitten War? I mean, it’s a site where you vote for the cutest kitten. And with pictures like this one in the top 10, it’s just chock full of squee-ing goodness.
My personal caption for this one is “Rar. I am fierce.”.

My voiceover hero, Don LaFontaine was the guest on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. The show is available on the NPR website. The show is from 05-14-2005, so the ‘current’ link might not work. You can try this link. Don’s part in the show starts around the 18 minute mark.
Don LaFontaine is also known as the ‘Voice of God’ – or ‘The King of the Movie Trailer’. His is the voice most folks associate with modern trailers in the theater. Some refer to him as the “In a world…” guy – a phrase he actually ad-libbed at several years ago, and is now a mainstay.

Goodness, what a day. With Cat out of town this week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Zach, and today we got to go out and bikeride for the first time in probably 2 weeks.

Not only was that cool, but today I received my new Olympus D770UZ camera. Astute readers will remember that about a year and a bit ago, my old camera was stolen at an event. I’ve been without a decent digital camera since then, and with work picking up now, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new one. It arrived today, and so while Zach and I were out biking, I naturally gave it a go.

The camera generates stupid-high resolution pictures (2277×1712) which would make very little sense sharing on the web, so I’ve thumbnailed and rescaled these to avoid 800k downloads beating the bejeezus out of our server.

Down the road from us is Berlin Orchards, an apple orchard we sometimes go to to pick apples. They have some fantastic trees around the fields, and I loved how this one stood out. By the way, this is less than 2 miles from our site for Mosaic, so it gives you an idea what the area is like.

The camera is small enough that I’m comfortable letting Zach handle it. I handed it to him and rode away from him and back, asking him to just keep taking pictures. This is the one that came out the best. By the way, that’s the Assabet River Rail Trail we’re on. It’s a beautiful trail as you can see, and Zach and I ride it a lot. Check out the AART inc site for pictures of the ongoing construction on it.

Quiz time. Can you figure out what this image is? I didn’t do much more than hold the camera and take the picture, but it’s a nifty keano pattern. My pattern/artist/nutso mom couldn’t figure out what it is. I’m pleased 🙂

This is an example of why I like the Olympus larger-scale lenses over the small-aperture standard digital camera lens. Because the 770UZ has a 10x zoom on it, it has a larger lens, and therefore handles long distance pictures in an elegant way, but shortening up the depth of field. This picture was actually taken from about 30′ away, with the zoom at about 80%.

These are selected from about 2 dozen pictures I took, including an MPG of Z bikeriding. The camera is fast, handy to work with, and I’m screamingly pleased with the results. The image quality is what I’ve come to expect from Olympus digcams.

Oh, and the bikeride was nice too. We rode about 6 miles in (according to happy bike computer) about 34 minutes. We stopped and fiddled with the camera a bunch, hence the slow pace, but even still, with me on a trail bike and Zach on a kids 5 speed, we move along okay.

Yay, it looks like Derek has started blogging again, another person to add to my Sage feed. I have to thank Derek for finding this quote, which I had seen many years ago, but couldn’t actually find:

The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. –(unknown)

Last, but not least, everyone must check out Darth Vaders Blog.

This past week I drove my nifty Golf TDI down to NJ for a quick visit to a client. It was a great drive, but it gave me time to think about the moral arguments in my head about my car.
On the one hand, it can’t be denied that getting 42-43mpg nowadays is a good thing. Diesel prices in Boston run about $2.49 a gallon (though down in NJ it was down to $2.15. What’s up with that?). I can run almost 600 miles on a single tank of gas, and the car is _FUN_ to drive. This was one of rare long distance drives where I could really wind it out and have fun with it (go go gadget Merritt Parkway, a road that is high on my list of East Coast Speedways.
On the other hand, there are questions about the cleanliness of the Turbo Diesel Injected, or ‘TDI’ engine.
It goes without saying that the TDI engine in the current model Golf is vastly superior to the old Diesel engines that went into the VW Rabbits in the 70’s. They’re far cleaner and more efficient. You don’t see current generation TDI’s with black soot all over the back of the car. But California, New York, and Massachusetts have forced VW to withdraw the TDI because of questions about the emissions.
I did a little digging trying to find out the reason behind this. If I’m driving a car that is dirtier than a standard gasoline engine, I’m really not gaining much…
The folks over a TDI Club have one of the most detailed and complete FAQ’s about these engines (heck, about ANY topic) that I’ve ever seen.
The relevant section is in the part about emissions…

TDI vs. gasoline – The TDi emissions levels are among the lowest ever for Diesel powered engines. All TDi powered Volkswagens sold in the US meet so-called “Tier 1” emission limits. The TDi is often “cleaner” overall than gasoline powered cars. CO2 emissions are 25% less than a conventional gasoline powered engine. CO, HC and NOx emissions are less than previous Volkswagen Diesels. Diesel fuel has lower evaporative emissions than gasoline. Diesel fuel also requires less energy intensive refining than gasoline.

Diesel engines generally emit higher amounts of NOx and particles than equivalent gasoline powered cars, even though CO and HC emissions may be lower, and total emissions are lower due to much better fuel consumption. The current TDI Volkswagens typically emit slightly somewhat lower than the Tier 1 limits for NOx and particles (around 0.052 g/mi of particulate matter [PM] and 0.82 g/mi of NOx per EPA data), but the CO and HC emissions are far below the Tier 1 limits and well below the emissions of the equivalent gasoline engine.

Further down, there’s the section specifically about why California and NY (and now Massachusetts) have withdrawn these engines:

California and New York issues – The state of California places limits on the “fleet average” emissions of auto manufacturers. Currently, a manufacturer can only sell a certain proportion of “Tier 1” vehicles in relation to the number of “LEV” or low-emission vehicles. Certain other states have copied the California legislation. Volkswagen has stated that the withdrawal from sale of 2000-model TDI vehicles from certain states is due to these reasons. Furthermore, California has declared diesel exhaust to be a toxic air contaminant, although other studies dispute this conclusion. The situation in New York is the same.

My interpretation of this document (and it’s long, and quite detailed), is that the TDI engine is in fact more efficient on all fronts than a gasoline engine. MPG for MPG, it is dirtier in particulates, but because of it’s uncommonly high mileage, it is still cleaner than a standard-mileage car.
Compared to ultra-efficient gas-hybrid engines (such as those in the Toyota Prius) it appears that the TDI still puts out less of the more gruesome chemicals (Formaldehyde and Benzine – in Benzine’s case, by an order of magnitude), but can be considered ‘dirtier’ due to particulate emissions.
I’m also intrigued by this comment:

The emission levels from diesel engines tend to remain more-or-less constant throughout the useful life of the engine, whereas gasoline engines have many more emission-related components which deteriorate and lead to higher and higher emissions as the engine gets older.

So for me, I think I can keep driving my TDI with a clear conscience. It is a high performing, very clean engine that gets great mileage. It is not the ultra-clean engine that a pure electric or Hydrogen based vehicle may be, but it is available now, the price is good on it, it has 4 doors and is very zippy to drive. I think I’ll keep it.

A post in Tom’s livejournal made me think a bit about how people use computers in the modern day.
Back in the Dark Ages (the 80’s and early 90’s), most PC’s ran single tasking operating systems that let you run (with only slight variation) one program at a time. You ran one program, when you were done with it, you closed it, and ran something else. This mindset set the stage for many people’s home-computer use.
By way of digression, I use the term ‘PC’ in the generic defintion, not in the context of an “IBM Compatible Computer”, after IBM co-opted the name in 1983.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Because of this “One screen, one application” approach, folks who continued working on Microsoft-based systems tended to stick with that model, while those who ‘branched out’ into alternate systems, such as the Amiga or the MacIntosh, or spent time with the early Unix X windows environments, tend to work on their machines in ‘multitasking’ modes. Running many applications at once, and flipping between them rapidly.
More recently, Windows systems have progressed to the point where it is feasible to actually run more than one application at once efficiently. But even with that improvement, compare how a Unix desktop user operates with the way a Windows user operates.
Unix (and by extension Linux, and even Mac folks) tend to run their desktops as a series of floating or tiled windows – each application running in its own window, but with the windows overlapping or tiling. On Unix, I personally set up multiple desktops – one having my ‘communications’ stuff (email, irc, etc), and another having my ‘work’ desktop (editor, compiler, reference materials). My experience watching Windows users tends to show them running the 2 or 3 applications they have available all in full screen mode – and generally it is in fact only 1-2 apps.
At the moment, in a ‘quick off the cuff’ setup on my laptop, I have 3 windows on a single desktop (shell, browser, and irc), with 1-2 small things in the dock (Jabber, etc). But even within my browser, I have 5-6 tabs open. To me, this is a minimalist setup. To a windows user, this would be ‘busy’.
I’m not making any value judgements here, just an observance. Much of this came to light watching people use Internet Explorer – a browser I find supremely inferior to Firefox, if only for Firefox’ ability to use Tabs. This (IMHO) quantum leap in browser useability is not as strong a draw to Windows users because, I believe, this mindset of ‘one app at a time’ softens the attraction to a tabbed interface. There’s just nothing for a Windows user to latch onto and say “Oh, I could see how that could help!” Whereas Unix and Mac users are all over it. (I’ll note that Safari, under OSX, has a tabbed interface).
I’m not going in for bashing Windows users here – to each user his or her own. But to me this does go to explain why Windows users haven’t flocked en masse to Firefox (though the adoption rate by Windows user is quite high all things considered – this mostly driven by the incredible insecurity of IE).

… visiting your old high school 23 years after you graduated. Seeing things you yourself built (“Wow, that’s still there. I wired that.”), seeing things you don’t remember (“Was that building there before?”), talking to teachers who still remember you (“DAVID SHEVETT!!! My goodness, you used to be so skinny!”), and talking to students (“Dude, I wasn’t even born then.”).
And even with all that, it’s still a beautiful place.

There’s a long note pending here somewhere, but just wanted to let folks know I’m back and survived the weekend. This was by far the largest event I’ve done (over 7000 attendees), and all in all, things went very well.
Special thanks to fraterrisus and dancingwolfgrrl for all the work they put in.

This is sort of buzzing about in blogland, sort of the equivelent of a Livejournal Meme.
I’ve been chattering about setting up my KVM and how things finally turned out. Thought it might be nice for folks to check out my digs.
This is where I spend untold hours a day either coding, browsing, chatting, gaming, but for the most part doing what I do.
The laptop is my IBM T40, which is basically my entire online life 🙂 I do everything on it, from development, to email, to browsing, to chatting, to some gaming.
The Shuttle box has no name, and is a Windows XP box whose primary purpose is running high end games and doing the occasional Windows thing that I can’t do under Linux. At the moment, I’m doing some work for a company that is all Windows based, so I have to test / transfer my things under Windows on occasion.
There’s a hidden KVM that lets me switch the flatscreen monitor between the two (but nicely, while gaming, I can still keep the laptop screen open and see chat on IRC while I game 🙂
BTW, the laptop is open because I run mostly wireless, and the antenna on T40’s is in the lid. If I close it, the signal strength goes down to where I start getting performance issues, not to mention randomly hopping over to the neighbors un-secured WAP.
And yes, that is in fact a Rokenbok stand that is holding up my laptop and power supply. Normally my printer is under there, but it’s getting ready to go to Animeboston.