Blog: 2003-08

Geov Parrish, "Thou shalt not establish a theocracy," WorkingForChange, 27-Aug-2003

Every hour on the hour after nightfall, the Eiffel Tower is forced to light up, for exactly ten minutes, in a crazy-quilt pattern of scintillating lights. [...] Charming when it first appeared, the show now has something dutiful and undignified about it, like a society lady in her eighties wearing spandex and shimmying her hips; it's nice to know she can do it on New Year's Eve, but you don't really want to see her doing it every night.

—Adam Gopnik, "The Anti-Anti-Americans," New Yorker, issue 1-Sep-2003, posted 25-Aug-2003

Tim and Karen from Hammerhead Technology, who sold me the X20, are being very helpful in replacing a couple components, so I'm definitely keeping it. Positively thrilled to finally have a modern laptop. Time to get a proper laptop bag for it, to replace the seven-year-old (itch?) battle-damaged courier bag. (That's a charcoal Martha Stewart Living terrycloth towel, with which I used to wrap the old laptop for extra padding and rain protection, not some retro faux fur fashion lining. It saved the laptop and digicam several times, including when the strap broke abruptly and the bag fell to the sidewalk.)

Greg Palast, "Black-out at the Times," WorkingForChange, dated 26-Aug-2003

One amusing way to get rid of cruft:

From: "Neil W. Van Dyke" <nwv@media.mit.edu>
To: reuse@mit.edu
Subject: reuse: handcuffs
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 20:30:49 -0400 (EDT)

One pair of metal handcuffs.
Fairly strong, but can be opened with a paperclip if needed.
Latchable to prevent collapsing on wrists.
Never used, except as a novelty conversation-starter.
Photo at http://nwv.www.media.mit.edu/people/nwv/tmp/cuffs.gif

Mail me an interesting statement of why you would like to have these (be
as vague as your sense of propriety compels you), and I'll notify the
lucky winner sometime Monday.

Winning response:

Subject: Re: reuse: handcuffs
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 20:41:12 -0400

there once was a naughty little boy
who was tricky and stubborn and coy
so his girlfriend, with a ruse
and some handcuffs off reuse
turned him into a well-behaved toy ;)

-web

(do you have the keys to them?)

Speaking of cruft, three years ago, I had to liquidate my personal library, and I ended up donating the bulk of the books to Cambridge's Central Square branch. Last week, when I finally got my own library card, I was gratified to see that they actually circulated the SF books I donated, rather than selling them. As I was borrowing my old copy of Card's Worthing Saga, the librarian asked for recommendations on SF authors and titles to buy. I pointed her at the MIT Science Fiction Society for experts. When I was a kid, my local libraries had little in the way of SF, and eventually Sister Edwin forbid me from borrowing one of the two SF books in the school library, since I kept re-reading it by default. SF was underappreciated. The best SF takes the world, introduces a change, and then explores some implications. Great for fostering open-minded dreamers and thinkers. If you have an SF collection and want to see more use gotten out of it, perhaps your local library would be interested.

Progress on the used ThinkPad X20 front. Bought a $10 notebook IDE&power adapter from the local Microcenter, yanked the new X20's drive, and used parts from two desktops recently saved from the trash to load a minimal bootable Debian GNU/Linux onto the laptop hard drive. Failed were prior attempts to do PXE boot (claimed onboard Ethernet was missing) and Loadlin (first WinME would not provide a real-mode DOS prompt, then the precariously patched WinME's real-mode DOS prompt still would not work with Loadlin). Sadly, the original Windows 2000 was not installed, and the standard rescue partition was absent. We'll see if the hibernation-related hard lockups that were occuring with the WinME install still occur. Also, the disk is a little noisy, and I'm not looking forward to PCMCIA Ethernet pigtail hanging out the side rather than being able to plug CAT-5 into the purely cosmetic RJ45 in the back of the X20. Debian is still installing as I type this, so it'll be a couple more days before I know whether I can keep this unit or have to send it back.

The particular notebook HD adaptor I bought worked, but is not recommended. The quality of manufacture is minimal, and the design was missing keying for direction, which is bad, considering that some of the pins are for power. More info on this later, perhaps on the forthcoming "GNU/Linux on the IBM ThinkPad X20" page.

James Traub, "Harvard Radical," New York Times, 24-Aug-2003

The ThinkPad X20 arrived yesterday, but there are a couple unresolved issues. After two person-days of headache, I really want to dash it to pieces on the pavement, but that would preclude a refund.

Will Hutton, "The American Prosperity Myth," The Nation, 1-Sep-2003 issue, posted 14-Aug-2003

To use Debian's packaging of Mozilla Firebird with Emacs 21.3:

(setq browse-url-mozilla-program  "mozilla-firebird")
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-mozilla)
(setq browse-url-new-window-flag  t)

One of my boxes, almudena, has insufficient memory and pixels to run Firebird and Emacs simultaneously, so:

(setq browse-url-browser-function (if (eq my-hostcode 'almudena)
                                      'w3m-browse-url
                                    'browse-url-mozilla))

Someone reminded me of my dotcom-era embrace of PhD and rejection of startup opportunities, when every Harvard and Sloan MBA student desperately wanted you to CTO their B2B play. After the PhD thing hit a political roadblock, I did experimentally register for the MIT 50K Competition, with an entry designed to generate only qualified leads of MBAs. It worked well: not a single response.

I like to think the following quote is missing context. The controversy and suspicion arose because Jayson Blair messed up severely and repeatedly, and Gerald Boyd and others apparently failed to take adequate action after signs something was amiss.

[Former New York Times Managing Editor Gerald] Boyd, who also is black, said he was dismayed that race became part of the story. "I would be lying if I didn't say that I can't help wonder why after all these years of struggling to establish our work and credibility in the newsroom — to be seen as top-notch journalists — as soon as controversy arises, an African-American reporter and an African-American senior editor are automatically viewed as suspect," he said.

—Renee C. Lee, "Boyd Shares Blame for Jayson Blair Fiasco," AP via Editor & Publisher, 8-Aug-2003

Updated Privoxy actions file. I'll probably update this more frequently, and not bother weblogging it.

As a sign of our enlightenment, up to a third of Americans don't think gay sex is "wrong":

Americans have even become less censorious about gay sex itself. In 1991, 71 percent said gay sex was always wrong, according to the General Social Survey, a leading cultural barometer. By 2002, that number had fallen to 53 percent, and another 32 percent said that gay sex was not wrong at all.

—Elisabeth Bumiller. "Why America Has Gay Marriage Jitters," New York Times, 10-Aug-2003

The file hineil.jpg (warning: adult themes) has been brought to my attention. I'm certain it wasn't for me; I would've remembered.

Today I got this Yahoo signup horror flick scene.

IMDB: Home of the Write-Only Comment. Much like weblogs. Ahem.

Bought a used 600 MHz ThinkPad X20. I suspect PLT tired of me pestering about DrScheme not running on my ThinkPad 560E. Quack will still be maintained.

Whether the subject is stem cells or global warming, budget deficits or weapons of mass destruction, government agencies are under intense pressure to say what the White House wants to hear. And the long-term consequences are likely to be dire.

—Paul Krugman, "Everything Is Political," New York Times, 5-Jul-2003

Law Of The Day:

This is a law I learned when I was an actor. If you repeat something, you don't come back and repeat it again. If you do it a third time, there has to be a payoff Two seems a lot, already. Let's say, for example, that someone leaves the room and says, "Okay, see you tomorrow," and then he suddenly comes back and says, "And don't be late." If he returns a third time, something more must happen. He probably has to stay and not leave at all.

—Roman Polanski, quoted in "Chinatown Interview 1974," http://minadream.com/romanpolanski/Interview.htm