"How can you be serious?" Not by wearing this T-shirt! The classic Mark Pawson T-shirt, updated for 2012.
By Glenn Fleishman at 7:29 am Monday, Dec 6
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According to witnesses, the man looked like he was in his 30's, white, with slicked-back dark-blond hair and was said to resemble Eric Idle.Lemon curry?
By Glenn Fleishman at 7:55 pm Sunday, Dec 5
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I suspect this photo will not appear odd to any of us celebrating mixed families, traditions, religions, cults, vanilla extracts, syncretic faiths, unionism, or pure unadultered atheism with presents this year. My wife erected the Christmas tree last night with my full approval (I'm recovering from hernia surgery, and thus was unavailable to help, ahem ahem), and I lit the Hanukah candles this evening. A happy juxtaposition in our home.
A friend in college, on discovering I was Jewish, asked, "So you don't celebrate Christmas?" No, I said. "Not even commercially?"
Photo by yours truly.
By Glenn Fleishman at 12:10 pm Thursday, Dec 2
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Steve Martin isn't the same wild and crazy guy he used to be, according to Manhattan's 92nd Street Y. The New York Times reports that the Y offered to refund all 900 attendees their $50 entrance fee to an interview of Martin by Times writer Deborah Solomon. Why? Because they talked about his new book, Object of Beauty, and about art. Martin has been collecting art in a studious and intelligent manner for decades.
According to the story, the Y sent up a note asking for less art talk, apparently responding to emails from those watching a remote broadcast. This is odd, because the 92nd St Y is known for bringing damned intellectuals together to talk about damned intellectual stuff. Go figure.
Martin noted in Twitter,
So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience's emails. Artists beware.Extra points for identifying the headline's paraphrase. Update: A number of people who say they attended the event, including some commenters on this post, explain that the problem wasn't Solomon and Martin talking about art and the new book, but Solomon making a hash of her role as interviewer. Martin Schneider wrote in with a link to his lengthy analysis of the evening, which concludes with a fascinating paragraph that encapsulates the broad issue of spectatorship and reporting:
A counter-narrative has arisen that is in complete conflict with this picture of events, a narrative that serves Solomon and Martin's agenda. It would be a disgrace to let that counter-narrative become the final word on this fiasco. Do not believe it.
By Glenn Fleishman at 10:29 am Thursday, Dec 2
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By Glenn Fleishman at 9:18 am Thursday, Dec 2
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By Glenn Fleishman at 8:50 am Thursday, Dec 2
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By Glenn Fleishman at 10:16 pm Wednesday, Dec 1
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By Glenn Fleishman at 8:29 pm Wednesday, Dec 1
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I went in for surgery yesterday morning to repair a small umbilical hernia. Mildly graphic material follows. My belly button done did me wrong. Having only had a few minor surgeries before, the most recent about nine years ago, I was surprised by a number of changes in procedure, the kind of clinically tested improvements we all hope are going on behind the scenes, and we often doubt are.
The operation itself was quite simple, and took under an hour. I received a mild general anesthetic, and a local was applied liberally to my belly. I don't even recall being asked to count backwards from five. The surgeon cut a small slit in my belly button and cleaned up protruding material. Then he took a small circle of polypropylene and stitched this with permanent stitches inside the muscle, a neat trick. This is relatively new: a few years ago, small umbilical hernias were merely stitched, but the recurrence rate was unacceptably high.
I joked to my kids that I was being repaired like a bicycle tire tube: the doc would put a plastic patch on me and glue it on. And that was true: the incision was glued shut, and scarring, if any, will be invisible. In the future, we are all bicycle tubes.
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By Glenn Fleishman at 10:11 pm Tuesday, Nov 30
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The streets of Seattle are no longer safe--for cute little dogs and fiber-optic cables.
First, The Seattle Times reported today on the strange case of a dog being electrocuted as it walked down the street. A privately and legally installed street light lacked proper grounding, and the dog was zapped walking over a metal plate on the sidewalk. My condolences to Lisa Kibben, who lost her 68-pound German shorthair pointer, Sammy, in this bizarre event. The utility dispatched a crew immediately, fixed the problem, and apologized, trying to reassure the public that we (and perhaps our sub-70-pound children) are not in danger.
This reminded me of the peculiar death of Jodie S. Lane in Manhattan (East Village) in 2004, walking down the street with her two dogs when one apparently received a severe shock, and Lane, unaware of what was happening, attempted to help the dogs. The dogs survived. Jodie's father, Roger M. Lane, received a massive amount of information about electrified Con Ed objects and shocks caused to people as part of a settlement. He created a Web site which showed the 31,900 objects found to cause electrical shocks between 2004 and 2009.
Seattle has no such history, but you can imagine that Emerald City denizens will be skipping metal panels for a while.
Second, local Seattle business site TechFlash reported that a bullet was fired into a fiber-optic cable owned by Comcast, severing access to 2,500 customers. The motivation is unknown, and the company isn't asking for a police investigation. Oddly enough, this is not the first time. A Comcast spokesperson told TechFlash, "About 13 years ago, someone shot a bullet into a main fiber line in Tacoma on New Year's Eve, knocking out service to about half the city."
Man, I guess people are really angry about Comcast's attempting legal contractual modification of a peering agreement with Level 3.
First they came for the fiber-optic cables, and I tweeted nothing.
Photo by Photocopy, used via Creative Commons.
By Glenn Fleishman at 9:56 pm Monday, Nov 29
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By Glenn Fleishman at 3:39 pm Monday, Nov 29
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Level 3 has accused Comcast of demanding fees to transfer data from Level 3's backbone to Comcast customers. Level 3 describes this as "Internet online movies and other content," which would mean everything, even though it's calling out movies. Level 3 signed a deal on November 11th to act as one of Netflix's primary network providers. In October, Internet monitoring service Sandvine said Netflix streaming represents 20 percent of all U.S. Internet non-mobile bandwidth use during prime-time hours.
Far be it from me to defend Comcast's policies, even while I am generally happy with its service. I subscribe to Comcast cable broadband service at home and at work, and it performs quite well in my parts of Seattle. I don't have much choice--Qwest has limited availability of an "up to 20 Mbps" service--so I'm lucky cable performs. And Comcast caps my 15 to 25 Mbps downstream service to 250 GB per month, with no-appeal threats of cutoff after two broken caps in a year.
Nonetheless, this may not be quite what it seems. The Internet is a syndicate of different networks that agree to interconnect on various terms. There are quasi-public meet-me network rooms in which providers all pay to connect in and traffic passes among all those present. Networks can also choose to create peering points between each other when traffic demands it.
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By Glenn Fleishman at 10:34 am Monday, Nov 29
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The Google-backed Android phone platform has a huge problem with fragmentation, or the number of different releases and adaptations of Android for different phone platforms over its history. Or this is no problem at all. It depends on who you ask. Ken Segall, a former branding chief at Apple--branding as in marketing, not burning flesh, although with Apple, it may be necessary to clarify the difference--wanted to help his 13-year-old son buy an Android phone. The results are illuminating.
Segall took his son to an AT&T Wireless store, looked at two phones of interest that ran Android 2.1, and tried his darnedest to get a straight answer about whether either model was upgradable to 2.2. The 2.2 release includes tethering (phone as modem) and mobile hotspot (phone as Wi-Fi/cell router) options, among a number of other well-received improvements.
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By Glenn Fleishman at 9:57 am Friday, Nov 26
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By Glenn Fleishman at 10:13 pm Tuesday, Nov 23
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I'm not ashamed to admit that I harbor unnatural feelings towards my servers. If programming and writing are both expressions of one's personality, then the content and systems on a server are a piece of you. Where it gets complicated is when you can transplant the ticking heart of a server--its logical brain--into another piece of hardware. You've transmigrated the soul without any of the messy ethical considerations. This is a common theme in modern sci-fi, because the notion of where the essence of who we are lives (in wetware or hardware) fascinates us.
I wrote today at the Economist's Babbage blog about my move from owning several rack-mounted servers to a couple of virtual private servers (VPSes), virtualized computers running on computers I'll never see or touch. The move was moving, and I'm hard pressed to understand why.
I couldn't understand why I was near tears. It was only a computer server I was shutting down, not pulling the plug on a life or saying goodbye to faithful pet. Nonetheless, my eyes were moist. ... Virtualisation is the classic brain-in-a-jar scenario. If you, dear reader, were a brain in a jar with all your sensory inputs mapped into a simulation program a la "The Matrix," how would you know? As long as the illusion were perfect--and no Agent Smiths intruded--you could live your life in blissful delusion. So, too, do virtual servers perform: unaware.Photo by...what the hell! Cory Doctorow? I swear, I just did a search for brains. Via Creative Commons.
By Glenn Fleishman at 9:32 am Monday, Nov 22
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