2020 Hindsight

I give thanks for Julia

Just got back from Thanksgiving with the family. Found the combination of days to drive to and from Las Vegas so as to avoid traffic (from LA to LV Tues; from LV to LA Friday). Saw Cirque du Soleil's Mystere (for which I give many thanks, and awe) Tuesday night.

My Mom brought a bunch of vintage cookbooks (choose whichever one interests you!), including Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the foreword of which talks about how it's a book for the servantless American Cook, so now I understand the tagline for the Julie/Julia site, "No one here but us servantless American cooks". I got my dad started reading the blog. It was good to see him chuckle at her wit and colorful language.

Saw Hal this afternoon, and (among other things) discussed the archaeology of office cleanings and how artifacts are dug out, you know, those old papers that are piled in strata above the legendary car pet. Came home to a house that is slightly cleaner than it was last weekend, for which I give much thanks.

Fortunate

Just had Chinese food. The fortune was worth remembering.

The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

Jonestown, 25 years later

Jeff Jarvis remembers. He worked at the San Francisco Examiner at the time.

Designing the sound in Master and Commander

Art
Heard it on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday. Great interview with the Sound Designer about how the sound effects were created for Master and Commander. This is the *perfect* format for an audio-radio show to do: Interview the sound guy to learn how all those cool movie effects were made.

http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1505241.html

Life Stories 4 year anniversary party Sunday

In Venice, CA. Sunday 7:30 pm. Performances, creative exercises, prizes, and (if this death march I meet tomorrow's milestone) fun cookies and other yummy goodies will be there for the enjoying. Cool, The {fray} storyblog linked to it, too!

so this is how people end up with tatoos

It started out as the oh good, taking a break from the quasi-death march of fixin' to deliver a 94 page product catalog to the printer. A party to wish friends goodbye (goin' to Hawaii, the lucky buzzards!). Couldn't stop yawning on the way there. A little wine, a little cheese, a little 'we're gonna have a hula contest, here's a grass skirt' (my family sailed to Catalina each summer for a luau, so I knew what I was getting into). I challenged the men there to take off their shirts and do a belly roll, like my dad would do. No takers. Transition from wine to cosmopolitans. (I had a designated driver) Old war stories from back in the days of Harvard Systems Corp, before it became HSC Software, before it became MetaTools, before it became MetaCreations. And then, "Oh, M's a dancer. She does swing, too!" "Here we have two followers, and a leader (the designated driver, bless him) who's sidelined with a knee injury!" "Oh!" she pipes up, "I lead, too." So we swing-danced in the kitchen, first to reggae then to to the real stuff once our hostess changed the music. It's hazy here, but I musta mentioned something about seamed stockings. A little hunt among the pens near the telephone, finding a Sharpie, and our hostess gave me depression-era seamed stockings, since I can't buy them right now because of the war effort. Or something like that. That, and breaking my lei-of-fabric-flowers, and letting flowers drift one-by-one to the kitchen floor, carpeting the tile with beautiful gesture. It's all pretty blurry, but this morning I discovered that I've got faux stocking seams on my legs. It's one of those slow-to-get-going mornings, and though I can barely remember, each event that emerges in the fog makes me smile: A good time happened to me last night. I got the hula dance prize and stocking seams to prove it.
Now, back to the catalog death march

all your candy are belong to us

alt.diebold.proprietary.audittrail-less.die.die.die.die

Lots of linkage and blogging about Diebold and doubts about their paper-trail-less voting machines, dubious software, commercial and political conflicts of interest by a Diebold exec, and Diebold's efforts to squash efforts to publicize internal information about their problems. (The Aussies have the right idea: make the voting machines open source.

I'd like to create some banner art to further publicize this. Ideally banners would point to a central site with more info. What would that central place be?

Slogan ideas, so far:

• "Democracy is not proprietary"
• "If ATMs can give you a receipt, so should a voting machine"
• "Get your proprietary hands off our democracy"
• "Diebold, how's your software code? Our election results depend on it. Show it to us"
• Ronald Reagan said "Trust... but verify." Diebold, Verify the machine code. Verify with an audit-trail.

Have any more?

(make your own church sign )

Going from email hell to email... limbo?

Still working on completing that 2002 New Year's Resolution to upgrade my computer to OS X. All it took was a replaced broken processor board, some fried RAM, and then finally up and buying the zippy G4 1.25MHz dual system. Two computers run X. But all that data....

(a post in the 'Getting my iShit together' category. Someone said to me, Be the Last on Your Block to upgrade your computer, so I did and I am)

Upgrade headache #45932.21 Email. Problem: Too much spam. So I decided to try Apple's own Mail It's smart, the A-I agent learns what is and isn't spam. That makes the switch worthwhile. (and you can switch off image display; I prefer plain-text display and don't want to communicate with Spammers that I'm here and I read your mesage)

But what of transferring old Claris Email mail databased to Mail? It says it will import, and things did work at first, haltingly, partially. But now Mail won't recognize Claris Emailer mailboxes (folders) anymore. Even after rebuilding Emailer's mail database. (Discussion thread: Escape from Claris Emailer discusses similar problems) Presumably Bare Bone's MailSmith works with Claris Emailer email databases. But what a kludge that would be. And does Mail import MailSmith mail?

Now, let me tell you who I am: Arar's statement

Read it. [via Jim Roepcke, who has further coverage of Maher Arar]

Now, let me tell you who I am: Arar's statement

I am here today to tell the people of Canada what has happened to me. There have been many allegations made about me in the media, all of them by people who refuse to be named or come forward. So before I tell you who I am and what happened to me, I will tell you who I am not.