Wedding Work and Geek Speak
Maria and Crystal were busy with wedding stuff yesterday. Trip to florist, then to Costco to survey food for bridal shower (being given by Maria's co-workers for Crystal), then off to the church to review pew configuration for flowers, then back to the florist for further consultation.

Bryan was here tonight for dinner. Nice to "speak geek" with him. Discussed web logs and First Class software in education as well as PGP Wireless security for PalmPilot. Talked about thoughts on additonal degrees, possible mentoring  by my co-workers, company retirees, and grandparents. Reviewed security honeypots, firewalls, network backup, latest big news from my workplace and Maria's, neither of which can be detailed here.

Maria's new boss took her out for belated birthday lunch today. 

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Refinance Update
Rates decreased overnight at Bank Of Internet. Submitted refinance rate lock on-line. No vendor response yet. 

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Recent Cake Photos
Forgot to post some recent cake photos.

Maria's birthday:
"Hey... How you doin'?"

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Crystal's Birthday
Picture of her as a baby with underwear on her head.
"Happy Birthday to the underwear Queen"

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Father's Day
"To Our Superman"
 

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New Refinancing Application, Possible Rental for Crystal
Completed on-line refinancing application with Bank Of Internet since HomeSide Lending site always has problems. Entered all information, but missed the rate lock deadline for the evening.

Maria's friend, who lives in the "first choice" rental, will give their landlord written 30-day notice on 8/1, along with information about Crystal and Nate wanting to take the unit. Hopefully they’ll have the landlord’s response on Friday. Crystal and Nate looked at two other possible rentals this evening. 

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Cartoon Fun
Political cartoons, and lots of them. Updated daily. [Ye Olde Phart] 

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More Fun WIth Cartoons
Cartoons. A fabulous resource. [Ye Olde Phart] 

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Blogging In Education
Blogging and engagement.

Blogging for engagement in the classroom. Gregor in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 parts. From gRadio on http. This is the start of a handbook, a tutorial, a movement. Assuming prior "Blogging 101" KSAs, this is a great "Blogging Applications for Classroom Instruction" upper division course. Or maybe an instructional technology course chapter. Nicely done. [a klog apart]

Very well thought out series of posts on blogging in education that also apply in other settings. I'll be referring to these frequently.

[McGee's Musings] 

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WorldCom And Blogging?
WorldCom Magazine has a great article on blogging. [Scripting News] 

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The Hose, The Mac, and The Gophers
Got distracted yesterday removing burrs from the dog's fur and forgot to put the hose away. Which got run over by the car. Which happened just at the point where two hose sections join together. Which crushed the thread connectors. Which then leaked like a sieve. Which could not be squeezed back into a round shape with pliers. Which required a trip to the hardware store for a hose mender. Sometimes things just happen.

While in town, stopped to help Maria at the college with a Mac problem related to Adobe Acrobat. Which switches printer drivers without telling you. Which does not switch back when it is finished. Which it doesn't tell you. Which makes you go to the Chooser and select your default printer again. Sometimes things just happen.

While at the hardware store, I also purchased gopher poison. The damn gophers have been digging everywhere and eating the roots of almost anything. Which is killing all the plants and small trees. Which led us to buy replacement plants. Which the gophers promptly ate. Which caused us to buy several sonic gopher-repelling devices. Which discouraged the gophers for about 2 weeks. Which the little bastards then grew accustomed to. Which sent them back to digging and eating. Which led to the poison purchase. Which I put in their runs today. Sometimes things just happen. 

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Now You See Me, Now You Don't?

"How To Disappear, Protect Your Privacy, and Eliminate Spam.  A handful of suggestions on how to live with less spam, with less fear of identity theft, and a little more anonymously.  [MarkTAW.com] [jenett.radio]"

 

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Copyright, The Outline
Copyright Basics - you've read the book and seen the movie, now peruse "the outline."  This is a project I had been tinkering with to add to my site as a link.  I was hoping to make it an outline, and when activeRenderer went live, I decided to pop in what I had been working on.  Exploring legal information is much easier in an outline format.  Ne c'est pas? [Ernie the Attorney] 

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Blogs and Journalism
Steve Outing wrote a very deep article about weblogs and professional journalism. [Scripting News] 

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Home Refinancing Sites Overwhelmed
The HomeSide Lending refinancing section has been down most of the day. The home page works, but following any of the three graphic highlights or text links to the refinancing section returns a 404 error. Can't get in to finish our application. The last few days have seen many internal server errors while working on the application. Similar problems on the Costco/Lending Tree site. 

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New Bed and Dog Covered With Burrs
The bed which Crystal and Nate purchased was delivered today. Not sure where to put the old one yet. This is only a problem for a short time since they should know about their apartment next week. They'll probably move out in early September, a few weeks before the wedding.

Interesting coincidence: One of the delivery men attends their church and has a dog which is a Chihuahua Pomeranian mix.

Misty (Crystal's Chihuahua) was outside on the hillside with me while I was watering. She became tangled in a mass of burrs, which took a long time to cut out of her fur. 

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Microsoft Loves You. Bend Over.
I hope you didn't want the messages (formerly) stored in your Sent folder at Hotmail. Microsoft deleted them. Details available at news.com. 

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Kevin Marks' Guide to Magnitude
For the numerically-challenged, this item from the current JOHO newsletter clarifies the speed of different network connections.

"Kevin Marks' Guide to Magnitude

Kevin writes: "I know you have trouble with numbers, so here's a handy guide to relative speeds in orders of magnitude."

Bluetooth is 10 times faster than a 56k modem
USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth
802.11b is as fast as USB
10baseT is as fast as USB
100baseT is 10 times faster than 10baseT
FireWire is 4 times faster than 100baseT and 40 times faster than USB
Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times faster than 100baseT

Thank you, Kevin."

 

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Radio Configuration Changes
Republished entire eSpective site several times to make template changes migrate properly. 

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Site Statistics
Added WebTrendsLive tracking code. 

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Radio Category Tests
More testing of eSpective category posted to separate FTP site. 

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Ernie the Attorney uses ActiveRenderer for copyright outline
Go. Take a look. Nice example. 

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Hey, FBI -- Don't You Know There's A War On?
"Apparently not. This from a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Editor -- Al Qaeda has the upper hand in the war against terror because the security agencies responsible for protecting us act like a bunch of sissies.
Case in point: I was recently hired for an FBI counter-terrorism position based on my ability to speak several foreign languages, my thorough knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and my extensive travel abroad. Each FBI employee who interviewed me told me, "We're desperately in need of language skills."
I'm a blue-blooded American, 44 years old, who has taught college several years for the Department of Defense, and I was excited my skills would be helpful in the war against terror. Then came the FBI's lie detector test.
I admitted I'd smoked marijuana about 20 times when I was 18. I've never used drugs since. But within five minutes I was put out on the street.
I told the FBI agent who kicked me out that "I doubt very seriously that Bin Laden screened any of the hijackers for drug experimentation when they were kids." The FBI agent confided, "You wouldn't believe the number of super- qualified individuals we've turned away. Just last week we let go a highly qualified psychologist for the same reason. It's very frustrating."
Moral of the story: Don't hold your breath for the FBI to save you.
JOSEPH ROSS
Sonoma

Message to the homeland security crowd: If the war is important enough to justify a new cabinet-level department, sweeping powers for law enforcement, and (you know it's coming) higher taxes, then it's important enough to get rid of these pantywaist just-say-no rules. If it's not important enough to get rid of those rules, then it's not a war, and you guys need to turn in your badges.
Homeland security remains a joke, and the people in charge remain unserious.
(Via email from Stefan Sharkansky, who also has the letter on his blog, I notice). [InstaPundit.Com]" 

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The Little Spacecraft that Could … and Did
Decades after their original objectives were completed, Pioneer, Voyager and IMP-8 keep on trucking. 

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Bryan, Refinance
Katie's family and Bryan return from Hawaii. More loan refinance work. 

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Active Render Extras
I was just messing around with Radio UserLand and found another cool way to present pictures in a slideshow with the ActiveRenderer tool. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 

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Time To Refinance
Started applying for home refinancing through several web sites. 

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Got Evidence?
Evidence for sale on EBay. Attention lawyers: The Los Angeles Times is reporting that evidence is for sale on EBay. [How Appealing] 

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Maria's Birthday
Gardening and watering in early afternoon. Dinner at Gabriella's in Santa Cruz. Pork loin with plums, garlic mashed potatoes, squash. Great bread. The rest was decent, but not memorable. Champagne at home. Crystal made the cake at work; chocolate with one raspberry layer and one custard layer, cream cheese icing, and whipped cream trim. Maria bought a ring and bracelet. 

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Gateway To America's Past
American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers over 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections. [Ye Olde Phart] 

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Evening With Friends
Dinner at Ken and Sharon Anderson's with Mike and Jennifer Madigan. Fantastic hors d’ouvres and meal. Ken caught the 18-pound salmon and also grilled some tritip. Sharon made olive-filled ? and some small fried goodies. (You can tell how clueless I am about the details.) Asparagus, mushrooms, rice, and bread accompanied the two entrees. A wonderful feast, which Maria and I discussed all the way home. Five hours of conversation covering many topics. Since all three women are affiliated with the college, a good portion of the evening centered on that, as well as Sharon's election to Associate Dean and Jennifer's doctorate. Interesting tales of fishing rules and regulations from Ken. Learned a bit about abalone harvesting. 

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SharedOutline Radio Tool
Paolo: "SharedOutline is a Radio UserLand tool that lets you share outlines with other users." [Scripting News] 

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Digital Backfile Of New York Times
Relive America's Past.

"ProQuest Releases Complete Digital Backfile of The New York Times
This file begins in 1871 and runs to 1999. It includes over 25 million articles. From the news release, "Every backfile issue of The New York Times has been digitized from cover to cover, including news stories, editorials, photos, graphics, and advertisements. Searchers can use basic keyword, advanced, guided, and relevancy search techniques to locate information. Or, they can browse through issues page by page, as one would browse a printed edition. Search results lists provide bibliographic information, including date, issue, article headline, page number, and byline (where given). Users may choose to display the full page image of any page in any issue."
See Also: In June, Gale released a digitized archive of The Times (London). This archive runs from 1785-1985.
See Also: Learn More About ProQuest's Historical Newspaper Program" [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk]

Thank your local library for this, because there would never be enough individual paying customers to make it worthwhile for ProQuest to finish and maintain this project. Very nice!

[The Shifted Librarian] 

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Generator in July?
Arrived home after work to find the power had been out for over an hour. Not very common for July in the San Francisco Bay area. However, being further south in the Santa Cruz Mountains, things can be a bit different. I wheeled the generator out of the garage and fired that sucker up. Trees down on the power line between town and us had done the deed. We were lucky this time; only needed to run the generator for about an hour. We've used the generator quite a bit in the last 11 years. Most of the neighbors are also generator-enhanced.

Crystal and Nate brought over the Shallow Hal DVD with Gwenyth Paltrow. 

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Minny Me Meets Mini-MEMS

"Whoever said big things come in small packages was dead on. While most of mankind focuses on building bigger homes, bigger weapons and bigger boobs the researchers at Sandia National Laboratories think small. They are working on MEMS, or MicroElectroMechanical Systems. It's amazing stuff - they're microscopic machines, with gears the size of human blood cells. For size comparisons they used pictures and videos of a mite towering over the gears." [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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The Computer Doctor Is In
Received an emergency request for computer help from my retired friend Manfred in Texas. MJ was my boss at least 5 years ago. Sounds like a lightning strike right next to their house fried the printer port on his desktop computer. Bad timing, as he wants to move data to his laptop before a trip to Germany.

I plan to see another retired friend for lunch tomorrow. Charles was head of our IT organization when I joined the company over 11 years ago.

Spoke to my parents about their continuing battle with the O/S from hell and about Crystal's wedding plans. There is also a problem accessing my picture files at Ofoto.

<soapbox>I'm amazed by their tolerance of constant Windoze problems. I've used the O/S since the first commercial release. I hope Microsoft delivers a version that isn't a POS before I die. </soapbox>  

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Fun With Randomizer
Brian St. Pierre has written something up that may be useful to members of the randomizer network:  Putting the Randomizer Referers page in your Cloud Links - thanks Brian! [jenett.radio] 

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Bryan Beats Us To Hawaii
Son Bryan called from Hawaii when he and Katie arrived there OK after 6-hour flight. Good digital cell phone coverage with Verizon. Katie's parents have already been there at least several days. He'll be back in a week. Maria and I are jealous; he beat us to the islands. Daughter Crystal is on housesitting and dogsitting patrol. 

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So Much For PGP
Outlook plug-in could let the hackers in. The Pretty Good Privacy encryption plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook has a flaw that could hand hackers the key to coded e-mails. [CNET News.com] 

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Active Render - Nice Tool
Marc Barrot:  "activeRenderer Upgraded To 1.0rc2. The reports from early users of activeRenderer (68 have registered so far) gave me enough information to move to version 1.0 Release Candidate 2." [jenett.radio] 

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Kit Suite: Something I Need To Test
Kit 1.1.6.

Kit 1.1.6 is out. It adds a Radio to the Past form bit to the weblog post page, and incorporates a couple minor minor fixes I'm going to let the Kit page claim I released as 1.1.5.

I've not been spending a lot of time in Radio-land lately, and will have to carefully consider it, since I may be ditching Windows in the not too distant future. I've invested enough in Radio that I should probably keep using it, but sunk time is a bad decision-making factor.

[Mark Paschal: Kit] 

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Radio Outliner To Presentation Tool
Announcing: "The RadioPoint Tool turns the outliner into a presentation authoring program." [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand] 

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Yahoo altering your email?

"Yahoo's "Anti-Scripting" Filters Examined. It's being reported that Yahoo's free email service is now changing certain words in email messages, supposedly to stop "cross-site scripting attacks". A good source of information is this article at Need To Know, linked to by (among others) Slashdot, where, predictably, discussion has sprung up about the ethical implications of unseen filtering of personal correspondence (a quick search through Yahoo's help pages turned up no information about this filtering that I could see). What's lacking in the articles I've seen, though, is an examination of just how this filtering is working, so I've spent a little bit of time fiddling with it to find out exactly what's going on." [kuro5hin.org]

 

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Radio Tinkering, Friends' Sites, YACCS Problems
While experimenting with both the Radio and YACCS comment systems, spent time reviewing both Craig's and Nancy's individual real estate sites and their new Bonny Doon community site. Craig was the programming wizard who kept our business running on the VAX for years.

The YACCS system was down for several hours, just at the time I was trying to swtich back from Radio comments to YACCS. I'd prefer to use Radio comments, but there is no alert mechanism. YACCS lets me subscribe to an RSS feed to monitor any comments left on the system.  

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Still more tinkering with Radio UserLand 8
More template work on the second template for the FTP test site. Define directives in #prefs.txt and change template macros so that category name and description will render properly on pages other than the home page. 

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Wedding preparations continue

A hilarious gay man measured father and brother of the bride, groom, and best man for tuxedos. Calm down... he wasn't hilarious because he was gay; he was hilarious about being gay. He raced around, very busy with customers. When he finally got to us, he had us in stitches joking about his lifestyle and his other clients. Very cheerful fellow. Stopped at potential florist trying, again, to get quotation. Bride and mother received practice hairstyling sessions. Took several pictures of hairstyles and alternate dresses for mother of the bride. Sent email to neighborhood mailing list looking for studio or apartment rentals. Everything still 'go' for a September wedding.

 

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Radio tinkering again
Up until 1:45AM tinkering with Radio templates. Reactivated categories and posted tests to separate server via FTP with second template. Set up a third template in system directory, allowing simple template for local editing and full version for the primary site. 

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When You Care Enough To Use The Very Best
 

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Blogging as part of a personal knowledge management strategy
McGee's Musings, in the Materials for TEC924 - Knowledge Management Class, says "If knowledge is your craft, you have a responsibility to maintain and develop your tools and your craft." Along with other cogent remarks, he references My Blog, My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow, a good read. Those close to me know how much I rely on my PocketBrain/PalmPilot/Handspring since I first tested this tool several years ago. I also 'blogged behind a firewall' for about a year, testing the value for personal knowledge management. As Jim McGee also mentions: "Now, there is a question of how much of this you choose to share publicly. Most of what I've said so far works whether you publish your weblog or not. Although there is an advantage of visualizing an audience to help you distill your thinking. Warren McFarlan at the Harvard Business School was one of the professors who dragged me through my doctoral program.  He used to joke that one of the worst aspects of being an academic, especially in a fast-moving field like information technology, was that there was a public record of every dumb idea you'd ever had. On the other hand, if you have the guts to put the ideas out there, you also get the opportunity to test and refine them. " 

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Happy Anniversary
Today marks the completion of 11 years in this house, this community, and this part of California. Eleven years ago we relocated from the greater Los Angeles basin of Southern California to the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California. Voluntarily changed jobs and industries again, from aerospace back to electronics. Relocated a son who was 11 at the time, a daughter who was 8, and a wife who was... oops. ;-) 

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Doing What Comes Naturally
 

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Trying to keep up with the Internet Law Program?

"Slashdot | Eavesblogging the Internet Law Program.

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn't spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she's learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there - it's worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all." [Privacy Digest]

I haven't been able to keep up with this topic, but here's an easy way to catch up!

[The Shifted Librarian]

 

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Deep Linking: The Latest

Our friend and co-author, Chris Sherman, has provided access to two excellent articles for SearchDay about this important topic. Yesterday, Chris wrote "Deep Linking Lunacy" where he shares several thoughts about the topic, specifically, about a recent court decision in Denmark. Chris writes that if deep linking is found illegal, search engines, phone directories, and tv listings better watch out. He also adds this warning for the academic world and librarians, "But why stop with the web? How about those sneaky academics, citing the work of fellow scholars with footnotes to specific articles using exact page numbers in the journals that published them? And just think of the worst offenders of all -- librarians, who not only help patrons find books, magazines and other materials but often even show them where to find specific information within the works?" Today, guest author Eric Ward has authored, "Linking Legalities: What You Need to Know". Ward writes, "In my opinion, there are only two specific instances where linking to someone else's content could be seen as illegal. First, if a link on your site when clicked loads someone else's content into a frame on your site, so that the user has no idea where that content came from, then you're on thin ice legally. Don't do it. Second, if the site you are linking to has stated on their site that linking is strictly prohibited, or requires permission first then don't link to them unless you have it." Make sure to share these articles with others. Must read stuff!
Link Directly To This VAS&ND Post posted by g price on Wednesday, July 10, 2002

 

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Yearly Ritual, New Player
S.F. Bay Area temperatures soared the last two days, setting all-time high records in at least 3 cities today; more record-breaking expected tomorrow.

Yearly Ritual: Installed window air conditioner this evening.
New Player: Crystal's fiancee, Nate, helped install it instead of Bryan. 

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Radio v. Sleep
Tinkering with Radio UserLand 8 can be very distracting. I really need to go to bed at a decent hour, which this is not. 

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The web is a wonder-filled place
My thanks to InstaPundit for the following:

JANIS IAN ON THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, courtesy of Reid Stott . [InstaPundit.Com]

as it led me first to Reid's blog entry and then to the rest of his PhotoDude site. Although I had already seen Janis Ian's comments, I followed the InstaPundit link for reasons unknown. Fate? As a "person who uses a camera", but will never be anything but a frustrated photographer, I was both thrilled and depressed to see PhotoDude. As someone who "can't draw a straight line even with a ruler", I am always thrilled to see the artistic talents of others, but depressed to have none of my own. Visit PhotoDude, you won't be disappointed.

Speaking of photography... I don't recall who blogged this in the last few days: Noah Grey is back. 

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Just Another Day In Paradise
Garden work in the morning. In the afternoon, Maria worked on her quilt and I updated addresses and printed mailing labels for Crystal's wedding. Bryan and Katie returned from their July 4th trip after staying with her grandmother in Reno. They also saw Katie's two aunts. More visiting: Michaela and Keith moved to Reno in May (June?) so Bryan and Katie spent time with them too. They had a 6 hour drive back to the S.F. Bay area due to holiday traffic. 

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jenett.radio.randomizer
Added the jenett randomizer this morning. 

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A troubled mind with an interesting outlook on artificial intelligence - Richard Wallace and his Alicebot

Approximating Life [New York Times: Technology]

After reading the article, try a chat with an online bot:
• Richard Wallace's Alicebot (from alice.sunlitsurf.com)
• "Anna" bot (from artificial-solutions.com)
• Netbot (from bot-in.net)
• The Internet Firstborn bot (from the1stborn.net)

 

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Illusion of freedom?

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre." - Frank Zappa

 

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Radio UserLand v. Wallet
Purchased my copy of Radio UserLand 8 after 15 day evaluation. Don't need to wait the full 30 days, I'm convinced. 

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Seems I'm not the only one wondering why Outlook never had a newsreader...

I had great hopes for Outlook, but it has been a constant disappointment. The Notes module is a joke, the Contact module is worthless, there is no cross-repository email search capability, etc. There must be a good reason why the largest software vendor on the planet can't produce a useful PIM. Outlook's Contact module is so lame that I sync my PalmPilot and Handspring contacts to Day-Timer Organizer but sync the other Palm apps to Outlook. I sync using Chapura PocketMirror.

Microsoft, NNTP, and the mismanagement of knowledge management. Robert Scoble has a theory about why Outlook doesn't include a newsreader: ... [Jon's Radio]

 

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Janis Ian Weighs In
Another musician speaks out ...

Bravo to Janis Ian for speaking out on the Internet as a medium for music distribution. [Scripting News]