March 2003 Archives

Has everyone on the planet seen the morans picture by now?

I think I followed Scot's link to Justin Hall's environs and ended up at the Beast Blog ("Because East Bay is Pig Latin for Beast"), reading about this Oaklandish logo:

A deco tree with big branches and big roots both - "Oaklandish." I first saw it on a sticker in the window of Walden Pond books on Grand Avenue. There's a web site, Oaklandish, run by Nonchalance.org. There's good browsing there: Oakland history from Native American "Temescal" sweat lodges to hip-hop. East Bay grafitti coverage. Pictures of memorable Oakland signs. And tales of other misadventures: slide projecting hometown heroes onto freeway underpasses. And things to buy: Oakland smart-art-boostering posters and buttons, a local history reading list.

All sorts of pride rendered in media that's not ironic or too spare, but rather luscious, rich and local. This group seems to be fighting the sad side of Oakland's underclass identification by commending urban beauty. I admire their agitprop style and perseverance. Read SF Chronicle coverage of the Nonchalance Collective. And if all that wasn't enough, there's an affiliated OakTownUnderground online event listings service.

I'd like to see Oakland-based or Oakland-related blogs and websites tied together more easily or cross-referenced more thoroughly. Lazyweb?

off the top of me head:

• Jeff Green


• Dan Brodnitz


• Nicholas Meriwether


• Robert Meriwether


• Jennifer Crumlish


• Arthur Crumlish (pear and fills)


• don't get me started on Crumlishes!


• Jeff Tiedrich


• Justin D'arms


• Doris Lessing


• Louis Menand


• Christopher Hitchens

Over at Hyperbole, Jim Haefele reminisces about what he refers to as his decade. Well, we can't choose the time and date of our own birth and one's own memories always end up entangled with the cultural detritus of the period, plus he's in Tunisia and I know when you are away from home, it doesn't take much to stir up some warm associationsbut I can't think of a way to let the guy down easy. The '80 sucked rocks. I was moved to write a little screed in his comments:

I hate to tell you this, man, but the '80s were the worst decade of the last handful, the utter bottom of the worst aspects of the '70s, the beginning of the worst parts of the '90s, plus shoulder pads and a Flock of Seagulls.

You know Reagan was president the entire time I was in college! What a nightmare.

There's a reason SNL had that mutant goat boy hosting their spoof MTV '80s nostalgia show. I know the '70s is played out and the corpse of the '90s is still smelly, but I don't think I will ever feel nostalgia for cousin Balki or Hands Across America.

As my to-do list grows (book project, consulting projects, conference coming up, taxes to do soon, clients deals to do, and more) I've had one of those two or three day periods of just trying to do the same things over and over. First there was a recalcitrant zip file that was showing up corrupted on my client's FTP site. I tried re-sending it. I uploaded the uncrunched files individually. Still no luck. Finally, I downloaded the file again and e-mailed it last night and got the confirmation this morning that it came through OK.

This shouldn't be a big deal but this one file transfer was holding up a huge project and making me later and later. It was very frustrating. That zip file was also the last significant bit of data from my old Phoenix desktop machine that ran my downtown office from about 1998 to about 2000. At this point I've liferafted everything off that machine and am ready to wipe it and then donate it to the Oakland schools. It's only a Pentium "pro" but it should make somebody a good Linux server. I'd keep it for that purpose myself but it's just too friggin' big. One of them old towers. It's got two ethernet cards in it (one was for the Internet connection - first ISDN and later DSL - and the other was for my old office network, before I had a hub.

The other problems involved some beta software I'm testing. It's running on a new/used/refurbished thinkpad I bought on eBay the other week (my first eBay purchase ever). I was having a setup/configuration problem and literally spent days reinstalling and retrying the same configuration steps and variations. Hour after hour while all my other priorities slipped by unattended to. Finally asked some authors on a mailing list for help last night out of desperation. This morning the advice came flooding in and something simple I somehow hadn't tried worked like a charm.

I feel like I've come unstuck from molasses, ready now to go back to knocking off to-do items (after I go grocery shopping this morning, that is). It got so bad there that for the last few night I've been dreaming about zip files and server hierarchies.

Then this morning another call out of the blue about a small consulting project (white paper) I had discussed with former colleages literally months ago. They're ready to run with it now. When it rains, it pours.

Oliver Willis objectively supports rounding up Bon Jovi fans.

From the left (and from John Perry Barlow, recently) I keep hearing about how the U.S. and NATO use depleted uranium in their weapons, putting Iraqis (and others) at risk of radiation poisoning or genetic abnormalities.

I also seem to recall scoffing at this or "debunking" of the danger from the right, but I don't remember the details.

Just did a Google search for depleted uranium and it looks like I have some reading to do. Most of the top links seem to warn of the danger of depleted uranium, so I may have to dig deeper for the contrary point of view.

I'd appreciate any input or insight on this if anyone has done an analysis and boiled odwn the meme/countermeme struggle around the idea of depleted uranium.

Or, as my friend Non likes to call him, Lung Scott-Egret (or the variant B and I like: Lung Pict-Egret). From the UC Berkeley J-School's intellectual property weblog comes Revolution is not an AOL keyword.

I always figured Victoria's secret was that she was a guy. According to What is Victoria's Secret? the answer is bulimia.

This was in my inbox this morning:

I'm back to Erbil city since half an hour ago to check out on the house, we are now in a small village in the mountains that is one hour and half far from Erbil.. its a big crowd in a house that belongs to my brother-in-law's sister ... few family are stuffed in few rooms, so inconvenient but it is fine.. at least safe! the city is pretty much empty and you can feel how vacant it is! it makes me sad to see that! but yet there are policemen in the city that makes you feel things are under control yet! thanks God!!

We are listening to the news all time, if there are power then through TV otherwise a radio can do! anxiety and worry is the atmosphere all day time !! Seems the war pace is too slow than expected.... people all are disappointed about that.. we wished the war to be faster than that to get back to usual life... to see an end to war fear... to get in touch with rest of family and beloved people and see how are they! as longer this war will take time as worse people's situation will get to! people are making jokes saying that seems Saddam will finish up US and Bush this time!! We all know it must be hard to make this war fast ending.. there must be lot difficulties and so on... but people here got fed up and wish it to get to an end.. a good ending that a day we will wake up and Saddam is no more there and we can start a new life!

Baghdad is not in a good shape! we already knew that in war time no one is allowed to leave home unless very high emergency cases and that will be managed by special units assigned to every neighborhood by the government... streets in Bagdad are empty and people are terrified of teh big blasting sounds.. I wonder how are my little nieces in Baghad!! they must be terrified! :(

Well.. thats it's for now, I'll try to write once again when I visit Erbil to check on houses.. I hope this Internet to be working then as it does now!

Keep safe and say hi to B for me.

Then this came yesterday (late last year I had been encouraging Delshad to start a blog, but he has been on the move most of the time since then):

Dear Xian,

I'm now Erbil and most possibly move to some village or town far from here... I really don't like to do that nor my family or the whole people in Kurdistan but we have fears from chemical weapon use against us or even bombed by Saddam if the American troops are inside cities.. there are lot risks to fear and we can't jeopardize... I'll see if we can stay here, I don't like leaving home and going to somewhere else !!

I was reading the blogs, it's really interesting and I would love to have one, but I don't think I can update it at all in the recent period, I don't think I'll have access to Internet at all till things will settle down here. I think you don't know that I am back to work but in a different city's office and I am back to Erbil now to join family as we are living an emergency case and most staff left home for that case.. I was supposed to be one of the key staff to stay till last moment but thanks Allah they realized I can't be away of my family in such hard days and let me go!!

Maybe when I'm back to work when first light ray shows up after the war I will start up a blog to let the people out there know how is it down here!

I'll keep in contact soon when I can... thanks for
your good wishes.. thanks.

Delshad

Here's the message I got from Delshad on Tuesday, sent to all his online friends:

Dear friends,

This is just a very short note to tell you that I'm now leaving back to Erbil where then I will go with the family to some village - seems the war is already starting and the family needs me to be there with! I think I will not have access to Internet for sometime till this risky situation is over and things get settled somehow!

I'll write back to you all again once I get access to internet. Thanks for your support all the way .. thank you all.

Lot hugs to you all.

Delshad

Long story short, I have a friend in Iraq named Delshad. He is a Kurd and he lives in northern Iraq, in the northern no-fly zone. Last fall he was trying to get out of the country, but only got as far as Syria and then returned.

With the war on, I thought I'd post some excerpts from some of his messages to me, just to add his voice to the cacophony online as well as to give people a glimpse of life on the ground in Iraq.

Here's part of what he sent me in January when he had to give up on his attempt to get out of the country:

Hello Dear Xian,

Here I am writing again from Iraq and sorry it is late! Yes I got back to Iraq after waiting more than 3 months in Damascus-Syria and eventually the leave plan I made with people in Iraq failed to work and I decided to return back to take the money back and think of another way to make a new life and future - it was a real hard time of worry and anxiety that I live in Syria but in another way it was very useful that it opened my eyes and brain to a life that exists out of iraq - something that I never knew how does it look like, just yesterday I sat with the planners of the failed plan to claim my money and gladly I could manage to get most of the money back without fights or troubles that was greatly expected to happen fiercely!! They will give the money but missing 25% which lot money but I have to be thankful that they didn't deny the money issue or took more than that!

I am sorry I kept you worried for sometime but the internet in Damascus was not cheap neither quick so I wasn?t able to send pretty much emails! I was there going to Internet café and it wasn't much convenient - in Damascus I was in a fine flat in a fine neighborhood and that was fine but still we had hard time in its late period there as all things where collapsing around me! It was great that I had one great Syrian friend I met through the Internet few months before moving to Syria and there I made few good friends as well? their existence in my life there was keeping me sane. I was there everyday doing nothing since the early morning till late night than just waiting for the news about leaving as we were always promised to leave next week and such promises extended our residence in Syria for more than 3 months and nothing happened at all.

I have now made a primary decision to go back to Syria by myself in March and start to apply to leave to anywhere - I just hope that no war to happen
till then or even after that cause the expected war will be catastrophic and will ruin the life here for long time!! I'm terrified to think about the future of this country and hear the American administration's arrogant language of speech!

Mailed a birthday card, bought some champagne, returned a video, snapped some pictures. The plum trees have turned a lurid crimson maroon. The recent rain has polished the lens of the sky to its east-bay finest. You wouldn't believe how many pictures of clouds I've taken over the years.

…then what is your mouth?

It’s great to have my new camera, though I’ll need to get a larger flashcard soon (or stop using the silly movie feature). Treated myself to lunch today at Mama’s Royal Café, the site of one of my first dates with B.

I realize I'm falling for a deliberate imitative "fallacy" when Nick Denton contrasts the Iraq/antisemitism storyline with one about drunken Irishmen. It reminds me of an EU chart in a late '80s copy of the Economist I was reading for free on one of my first flights from New York to San Francisco. There were cute little ethnic stereotype cartoons labeling each of the lines on the graph. The one for Ireland was a moon-faced little leprechaun-looking guy hoisting a foamy pint.

If you trace back through my New York Republican roots you quickly hit Philadelphia Irish machine Democrats (and a bishop from Erie regarded as something of a matiné idol in his day) and I'm not unfamiliar with drink or unguarded antisemitism. There's a strange mix of envy and spite as Irish-Catholic Americans privately compare the progress of two national projects: Ireland and Israel. The complaints about the disproportionate influence of the pro-Israel lobby mask (not very well) a sense of competitive disadvantage, an inferiority complex, not unlike the way antisemites here and in the middle east stereotypically seek out Jewish doctors or scientists when push comes to shove.

So I winced when I read about Moran, recognizing the surname as Irish (actually, of course, Anglicized Irish, as all familiar Irish names tend to be). And then I winced again when Denton made his crack about drunken Irishmen, designed I'm sure to get a rise out of people like me exactly, with my vague, somewhat imaginary sense of Irish nationality (mixed in with the German, Scottish, Welsh, English, Italian, Alsatian, and so on).

I guess these headlines will grow stale unless I manually republish the page. Hmmm...

Getting closer on adapting a perl script to aggregate RSS chronically and xlate it into HTML.

My dance card is full now at least through May, and I'd like to spend a week or so in Greece in May or June this year, and with this flood of steady, varied, remunerative work I suddenly find myself more productive in other areas as well.

I'm applying what I've learned and practiced over the years to my own ongoing projects and I find that things are coming together nicely, as ever in fits and bounds. I still have goals, I'm still striving, but I don't feel so impatient. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time.

I just made a kind of console page for myself, for my PEP (personal expresion platform) project. It's brain-dead simple, just a list of direct links into the entry pages of my various blogs and other website publications, with a place fo ropening my current offline writing projects as well. It's one-stop shopping. I'd better password-protect it.

...

Been geeking around on a PC again. Borrowed a Dell for an upcoming documentation project and been bidding on Thinkpad's on ebay for another project. (Found out I'm going to be working with Molly on the project I can't talk about yet, which is cool!)

So after I wondered about using my new camera part-time as a webcam, I remembered that I own a Logitech cam that was gathering dust because of nonexistent OS X support. But since I have this Dell machine just sitting here, I plugged it in, got the driver, downloaded some freeware, and started streaming an image called x-cam.jpg to my xianlandia.com server. Then, since I recently copied the golden boy image over on the x-ism experimental textpattern blog, I figured maybe my personal blog could use that real-time 'ere I am J.H. warts and all circa 1997 cam view, maybe with a clever caption once I think of one.

It's very home page-y and not very bloggy because it's just streaming out there like old time live TV with no backup or archiving.

Don't know how long it will last. Sorry about the backlighting.

Well, it turns out immersion in coffee is not good for digital camera. Our local camera shop (down on Lake Shore, and it's cool we have one – the old typewriter repair shop on College in Elmwood closed recently), sent it back to Canon for a $20 estimate. Turns out they can fix it or replace the ruined parts at least for $327+. This isn't much cheaper than the newer models in their Powershot line, so today we ordered me an S230. It should come by Friday.

It's been tough. I'd gotten used to real-world real-time screen grabs on the spur of the moment. I've realized that the digital camera is an essential, if underutilized, component in my ongoing tightrope walk of self-expression, teetering always between art and ego diddling.

Say, is there some sort of cradle that would enable me to use the camera as a webcam when it's not otherwise engaged?

If there's any blogger out there who deserves a decent-paying column gig, it's Ken Layne. He's got the writing chops, the journalism dues paid, and the blog cred. What more is required?

Noticed a bunch of visitors (to RFB) coming from an unfamiliar referrer. It turns out to be a message board for players of some online game. Apparently one of the participants is a French-speaking 15-year-old from Canada who goes by the online handle 'xian'. The mother of one of the other teen participants in the game Google for xian. The old link to RFB is the top result for xian at Google these days, so she looked at my blogchalk info and decided that there an adult male was posing as a teenage girl, perhaps to gather personal information from the other teens in the game.

In the course of the discussion it became clear that there is more than one xian in the world and that the game player was legitimately who she said she was. I'm not sure where the idea that "xian is a killer" got into the conversation but I hope it's lingo from the game and not a real-life aspersion.

It's strange to see myself refracted in this way, but I guess it comes with the Googleshare territory.

Is the academic world ready for the awesome power of a fully operational mothership? Scot Hacker reports that an article he wrote on Parliament-Funkadelic for a book by Pagan Kennedy has inspired a master's thesis. Now maybe his seminal writings on Liberace will finally get the attention they deserve in the ivory towers of our fine universities.

This message is intended exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. This communication may contain information that is proprietary, privileged, confidential or otherwise legally exempt from disclosure. If you are not the named addressee, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy or disseminate this message or any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.

Happy Mardi Gras. The beadcam shows a pretty tame daytime scene at this moment, but it may get more interesting this evening.

So I'm goofing around thumbing through the always entertaining Craigslist and I notice that they've added (or made more accessible) a system basically allowing people to flag items as inappropriate, misfiled, or especially good. In a way it's like the modding up and down they do at Slashdot. Anyway, I go to check out the "best" nominees and they're in two categories, SF and NY. (Don't any of the other cities do this yet?) Of course I start with the SF list and I can't resist reading that ad entitled searching for bumbling sex dork.

The author points offers more info at her own site, and probably as the teaser intended, I spend the next hour reading her snippets of writing there. Nothing's dated, which is kind of cool, and the design is appealing and simple. Apparently she (I can't find any I.D. at the site) has used Craigslist as a creative medium before.

It's weird. Who is she? I'm a fan of I don't know who.

There was a time when I had my in box(es) totally under control. Stuff got filtered. I either deleted messages, replied to them, or saved them if they really needed saving. Then blogging helped, because it provides a way to directly deal with any information that comes into my box and deserves immediate public comment or should be passed along as is to some specific audience (that's what x-pollination is all about, to me).

But as I blog more it seems that I attend to my e-mail less. Between blogged items, to-do list items, and e-mail messages related to some action I intend to take, e-mail always seems to fall to the bottom of the pile. Then there's the problem of the in-box getting too full and "urgent" messages scrolling off the screen.

Today I sorted all my "highest priority" messages and found 201 that at least at one point I felt needed immediate attention or were important enough that I thought I'd need to find them easily at a later point (usually conveying some key piece of information or instructions for some complicated technical process I wanted to do without fully understanding).

Some of them have clearly expired and I can take off the priority label and even delete them. Others still require my attention. I dealt with the oldest one just now. It was dated January 17, 2002, which is right around the time I started my bodega blog, coincidentally.