...more recent posts
I'm actually kind of intrigued by this election. I can't help feeling like Bush and Gore are two different versions of the same underlying thing, and so America just tossed a coin to pick it's next President. And it landed right on its edge. That's something you don't see every day. Feels about right too. I don't want either of those jokers as President, so maybe we can just drag this recount out for four years and be done with it. I keep hearing from the news media that this is an historical moment, but isn't it just that neither candidate could generate even one bit of interest or momentum, and therefore it was only a "close race" in the sense that two winless teams fighting to stay out of last place is a "close race" - it's close, sure, but that doesn't make it interesting, nor does it make it a good game.
I'm starting to see how this works. Verizon makes an appointment, but can only give you an 8:00 am to 5:00 pm window (thanks, that really narrows it down.) Then they don't show up, and not only do they not acknowledge this fact, they say they did show up and it is your fault for not being there. This happens a few times, and then when you get mad enough to start writing semi-nasty emails to people, Covad somehow "loses" your order!
"Thank you for contacting Covad Customer Care. Unfortunately, I was unable to retrieve any information pertaining to your order. I attempted to run a search in our database, but to no avail. If you can, please resend the following message indicating the Covad order number. Once we receive this piece of information, we will be able to assist you immediately."I don't think I will ever get my DSL.
What happened?
Happy Birthday MB!
Here's a great looking new site called Untold History. It is documenting "the untold stories of software innovation."
"My ultimate goal with this site is to show people that most innovation in the software industry starts with small teams of extremely creative and persistent people (working for themselves not large corporations)."The first installment is an essay by Jonathan Gay, inventer of Flash. Very interesting. Very well presented. Great idea.
"'I, for one, would like to see the so-called evidence this school has that a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell,' Bell said. A lawyer for the school district declined to comment."
All I wanted was a DSL line, but somehow I've ended up in a Kafka novel.
I've been gearing up for a new (personal) project. Practically this just means I've been thinking about a bunch of stuff, and it seems to be converging on something I could build. It's about bookmarks. I'm trying to follow the "scratch an itch" philosophy which states you should try to make things (tools?) that fill a personal need, as opposed to filling a potential need of some hypothetical market segment. And the bookmarking abilities of the big browsers are not really cutting it for me. Hopefully more info will follow as this develops.
Now that Napster is in a deal with BMG, I'm seeing headlines like this: "Napster goes legit." But who would pay money for the chance to download mp3s using another customers bandwidth, when the song might not even match the title, and even if it does the encoding probably sucks, plus the host machine might disconnect you at any moment? Peer to peer only works because its free. That's the whole point. That's why people make these sacrifices to use Napster. If you pay money then you will expect some quality of service guarantees. And you can't provide that in a peer to peer network.
Slashdot had this great link to a Christian Science Monitor article speculating that today (October 31) will be the last day with no human in space. The 7:53 GMT lift off of the Soyuz rocket carrying 2 cosmonauts and 1 astronaut to the International Space Station is planned to be the beginning of humankinds continual habitation of space.
"I'd say there's a decent chance that Oct. 30 may be the last day we don't have humans in space," says John Curry, the station's flight director at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston."Maybe this is a little overblown, sure, but it's fun to think about. Space colonization seems realistic to me, but of course we don't have too much experience yet, so it's probably too early to tell. My favorite argument against humans ever colonizing space is based on an idea called the "Copernican principle" (I can't remember who argued this, I'll try to find out.) It seems like bull at first, but if you really think about it there is some sense to it: There is very little chance that your particluar point of view is very special, and therefore it would be highly unlikely that you would be living in a time during the span of the human species that is in any way special. Yet if we do go on to colonize space and spread throughout the galaxy then it would be true that right now we are living at the very start of this incredible celestial journey. Your short life span would just happen to fall exactly at the birth of humans as a spacefaring civilivationl. But as we assumed to start, this sort of special perspective is highly unlikely, and therefore it follows that humans won't colonize space and live far far into the future. If we were going to colonize space, it would be overwhelmingly more likely that you woulld have been born in the vast chunk of time that makes up the middle 90% of spacefaring humankinds existence, in other words, you would have been born somewhere during the fantastically long ride we would have to go through to get anywhere in space. But since you (and me) were born right here on the home planet, it's highly likely that we are falling somewhere in the middle of our life span as a species, and therefore won't live that much longer than we have already been around, or again, in other words, not long enough to spread out through the galaxy.
Well, I said it sounded like bull. But the guy I'm paraphrasing argued this as a statistical argument. If you see the math, it's a little more convincing (deceiving?) Anyway, I don't buy it because I like being a bit more of an optimist. Perhaps this date actually will become significant in the far future as the day we first left home.
You can find out more about the ISS here. And here's the slashdot thread.