...more recent posts
My guilty conscience will not let me rest until I expose the extremely unamerican way I behaved today: I failed to conduct all my affairs under the highest level of security. Also, I made no efforts to observe, not to mention report, any evil doings. And as for smoking people out of their holes, I'm sad to say I'm not even sure what that means. Sorry. I'll try harder tomorrow.
Rageboy on fire.
Mac in red plastic jug conversion photos. No, I don't know why.
Google groups now has a full 20 years of usenet history on line. That's over 700 million messages. Aaron Swartz pointed to some fun old ones, like Tim Berners-Lee's first post and this first "executive summary" of the world wide web project. More links on Aaron's page.
update: Here's a timeline from google with many of these early interesting threads. Wow.
MB has been working on a project lately that involves a childrens television personality I grew up watching on the magic screen. I met her last week here at the apartment. We were introduced, and shook hands, and I pretended there was nothing strange with meeting someone in real life who comes from my TV fueled childhood imagination. "Oh hi, nice to meet you." Last night we all ate at the bar at Fresh Foods and I was trying to see if Dennis, the bartender, recognized her. I mean, she looks exactly the same. But he didn't know what I was talking about. I guess you have to be of a certain age.
007
At ocean eleven
an' now rudeboys 'ave a wail...
Saw Ocean's 11 last night. The Desmond Dekker song is not in it, but I ended up with it stuck in my head anyway. It was my first time at the Zigfeld which is a really old and very large theatre on 54th street just off 6th avenue. The biggest in NYC. It's interesting to watch a movie with so many other people. I grew up on those tiny 20 little narrow cinemas in one strip mall places out in the suburbs. A really big screen does make a difference.
I enjoyed the movie while I was watching, but then afterwards we went to dinner and by the end of the meal I already wasn't too sure. Today it's on the way to having been bad. Strange how that works.
Walking out after the show Tom was asking me about the digital projection. I hadn't even noticed it was digital. So I guess the technology is good enough for my eyes. The only thing weird I saw was some kind of upper lip distortion on Julia Roberts, but maybe that wasn't a projection issue.
Google zeitgeist. If I wasn't already used to the feeling I'd be surprised I hadn't seen that page before. Probably as close to a snapshot of the world computer using group mind as you can get. Dig the top 5 historical personalities:
1. picasso
2. van gogh
3. marilyn monroe
4. bruce lee
5. einstein
I'm pretty sure that says something about us. Not sure what though.
Bruce Sterling. Long. Very worth it.
"Hi" - Nasty Outlook virus going around. I'm getting hammered with this thing. Here's what to do if you are infected. Well, that plus stop using Outlook Express unless you really know that program well (I mean unless you know how to change all the massively insecure defaults - not showing file extensions of downloaded files!!! Automatically executing them!!! - that Microsoft ships this thing with.)
The stars must be lined up or something. I really got a lot done today. I was fortunate enough to have eight straight hours to spend in the code, and I now have the complete system in my head just like back when I wrote it. Except this time I'm rested enough to actually do battle with all the little inconsistencies I just let go the first time around following the "good enough" engineering principle (or is that the "can't see it from my house" building principle?) Anyway, there were some serious inconsistencies which I believe are now worked out. Phew. I love working on this thing.
I'll explain the changes tomorrow over here.