Great. Not that anything unseemly has happened to my credit reports yet (and yes, I keep a close watch), I'm not happy to read about the second time this year that my SSN was lost/stolen by someone I was compelled to trust with it. I mean yes, thanks Citibank for underwriting my student loans, but I hope you're not planning on trusting the credit reports of people whose social security numbers you've misplaced.

Okay, sure, UPS lost the tapes, not Citibank. But please, you're hiring a third-party shipper to move 3 million people's sensitive financial data representing billions of dollars in assets and you don't even encrypt it?

Comments? (5)

What's worse than a flat tire when you're about to leave for work?

Two flat tires. Gah. Now how'd that happen, and did I drive home on them last night? I'd think I'd notice something like that.

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One of the most interesting blogging-related queries you can do on Google, Why I blog gives a great deal of insight into both our online culture and the nature of our individual needs for self-expression.

I've been questioning my own blogging needs a great deal lately, as a result of having not blogged very much in the last few months. It's not the other way around, deliberately weaning myself off the blog or anything; rather it's that many of the outlets satisfied by blogging over the last five years are being satisfied in other ways.

As Fury's audience has both broadened and become more focused (more people, but falling into sharper distinct buckets (eg work people, friends, google searchers, family, and randoms) I have more trouble self-justifying posts I think about writing. I don't necessarily want to talk to people at work about random dermatological issues (not that there are any, really. Just a hypothetical example). I don't want to talk about upcoming vacations because now that I own my own house, I somehow feel that a cyberstalker breaking in and stealing from me is a greater violation than if they broke into a place I rented, and as the holidays approach, I'm reluctant to have the more personal aspects of my life become kitchen-gossip when my family comes together for Christmas next week.

All in all, I'm coming to terms with the fact that most people who I read online have either migrated toward the livejournal model intended to disseminate relevant life stuff to friends for whom it is actually relevant, or those more highbrow bloggers who have, whether they've noticed it or not, excised their literal personal life from their online presence, showing themselves only through inductance, choosing to pass on this interesting thing on the web, or providing social commentary on this other thing that happened to someone else.

I'm not sure where I fit. Fury has always been about a lack of focus, and whenever I try to narrow the blog, even if it's by splitting it, readers have said the wandering nature is one of the more appealing things about the blog.

So, in the spirit of wantering, I leave you without a conclusion. I hope you'll comment with whatever thoughts this meander sparks in you. I'm still working on the next iteration of Fury, which will be as drastic an information-architecture redesign as it is a visual shift. I'm hoping to make a good balance between the 'inverse-chronological log of compositions' and the more static structured heirarchical site. Think of it as the stage that follows the path from archive-by-month to categories to multiple-categories (or tags). Anyhow, hopefully I'll be able to stop rambling soon and once again produce meaningful work.

Till then, it's your turn...

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I love it when news sites publish scientific articles. They try to get people excited about the ephemeral or intangible, and they usually do a pretty good job. Then there's the exception to the rule. Today's CNN story about tomorrow's blue moon is one of the worst-written articles I've ever seen on CNN, barring when they accidentally insert the same paragraph twice in a row.

First, there's an image of a reddish moon with a caption explaining how soot from recent volcanos or fires can make the moon appear blue. Then the first paragraph talks about how tomorrow will be a 'blue moon' because it's the second full moon in a month. Next they explain how a 'blue moon' has nothing to do with a color change, but is purely a coincidental conjunction of the moon's orbit with the Gregorian calendar, and it happens every 32 months or so, except last year, when it happened twice in three months, thanks to a February without any full moon.

Then we go in to a long first-person (?!) discussion of where the term 'blue moon' came from, culminating by a reminiscence of that time that the author put forth a theory that it was a derivation of 'belewe' from Old English, which means 'to betray.' Allusions to Billy Crystal's rendition of Miracle Max in the Princess Bride ("He clearly said 'to blathe' which, as we all know means 'to bluff'!"), the author proposes that the 'belewe moon' is so named because it 'betrays the usual perception of one full moon per month.'

Then follow another few paragraphs explaining how the author's offhand hypothesis later proved to be false, and that the original term came from the Farmers Almanac in the 1920s, to refer to the one extra full moon in a season, and then was bastardized in the 1940s by a writer at rival publication Sky & Telescope (the author writes for space.com).

In closing, the author brings the subject back to this blue moon, or more exactly, to the first full moon of the month, four weeks past, and how it occurs when the moon coincidentally is at perogee with the Earth, making tides higher than usual, and warning, all in the present tense, that if there are any cosatal storms on the 4th of July weekend, it could mean big flooding in those areas. This is because the story originally appeared on Space.com on July 2nd, and someone decided to push it up to the CNN home page today, after changing a few words in the first paragraph while ignoring the context of the latter part of the article.

Don't mind me. I'm just having a bitter day and am taking it out on one less-than-perfect story...

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Did anyone out there see the series premiere episode of Stargate: Atlantis? Cause I didn't. Tivo messed up changing the channels so I got 120 minutes of MSNBC instead.

Anyone have a tape? A DVD? A bittorrent or a local PVR where Rachel and I could watch the ep? We were looking forward to it all week.

Ugh. Thanks! If you do, please drop me a line at hi at fury.com.

Take care!

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For those of you following online politics, it's been an interesting couple of days between Moveon.org, the Re-elect George Bush site, and Democrats.org. Amidst the harsh language and finger-pointing about Hitler imagery, here's the lowdown:

Last October, Moveon.org sponsored a competition "Bush in 30 Seconds" for ordinary people to create their own commercials critical of the Bush presidency. 1,300 people and groups of people made such films, and the ads were put online for judging. Two of those spots had allusions to Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The Bush campaign and the RNC took great offense to any comparison of Hitler's regime to the current administration, and vocally denounced these two spots. In response, Moveon.org removed the two movies from their site.

Now, eight months later, the front page of the Bush campaign's site features an ad denouncing the 'attack ads' from the Kerry campaign, by showing clips not from the campaign, but from various entries in the Moveon.org competition (including both of the removed Nazi-related ads), a clip of Michael Moore accepting his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, and other clips completely unaffiliated with the Kerry campaign.

Even more interestingly, the 'Bush in 30 Seconds' competition took place before the primaries, at a time when Moveon.org's own poll, held to determine who they should endorse for the Democratic nomination, overwhelmingly supported Howard Dean. John Kerry took a distant third place behind Dennis Kucinich.

The DNC, seeing the Hitler imagery on the Bush home page, vociferously denounces the Bush campaign for using Nazi imagery, and calls for democrats to sign a petition to get the placement removed while studiously ignoring the fact that the imagery is ostensibly being used as a case example of how Kerry's campaign is one built on negativity and attack ads.

In response, the Bush site modifies the ad on their home page to make it very clear that the clips being shown weren't produced by the Bush campaign, by labeling them as coming 'from moveon.org,' but omitting the fact that the ads weren't created by moveon.org, and that moveon.org took the clips off their site at the Bush campaign's request months ago.

The real shame here is that both sides, filled with very intelligent people, act like they're preaching to idiots who will believe the more sensational voice, and won't look beyond their words. The Republican leaders are happy to point to the ads and say "Look! They're comparing us to Hitler! They're evil!" when they know that the ads weren't created by Moveon, and were quickly pulled. The Democrats on the other hand are saying "Look! They're using imagery of Hitler on their home page! They're evil!" while ignoring the fact that the imagery is being displayed as an example of work created by (presumably) a democrat, and that it was pulled as requested last year, after being on the site alongisde hundreds of other ads for only a few days.

I just watched the episode of The West Wing entitled '20 hours in America' where one of the themes was that the campaign leaders were spending so much effort trying prove they're superior to the other guy, that they don't focus on the actual needs and concerns of real people. Sadly, that's exactly what I feel here, and that neither side is noble nor just, because each is only willing to tell as much of the truth as needed so that they look like the righteous ones.

We deserve better than this from our campaigns, regardless of who you favor.

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I bet a lot of you have heard about Gmail Swap by now, but if you haven't, Wired has a nice article about the service.

It's not right for me to barter away Gmail invitations, so sadly I can only watch the offers go by. It's all for the best, though, because as I tell Rachel how much I want to diet, an offer for four pounds of fudge scrolls by.

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I want Kerry to win more than anything, which is why the following is so frustrating: A few weeks ago I got my first ever piece of real, physical political correspondence from the Kerry campaign. The first sentence reads, "All our hard work and determination -- all the energy and enthusiasm that you and so many other dedicated people have brought to our campaign -- are finally paying off."

Are?! Admittedly, this is a difficult sentence, since 'all our pennies are shiny' but in that case, 'our pennies' is plural. In the above case, "our hard work and determination" is singular, and the modifier 'all' doesn't group together many disparate items, but rather refers to the grand sum of a single item, as in 'all our work was for naught,' as opposed to 'all our work were for naught.'

Ugh. I hope part of my campaign contribution goes to a proofreader. In a battle like the one running for the next six months, it's stupid to miss points for something like this.

Update: Thanks to Andrew, for convincing me that the letter was correct after all. Hard work and determination are two individual things, so 'all' groups them together, making the total plural.

<Gilda>Nevermind!</Gilda>

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It's so frustrating when webloggers ask questions but don't facilitate a way for users to provide the answer. Today's example compliments of Dave:

Dave Winer: "Google knows I'm in the Netherlands. This is irritating. I may be in the Netherlands, but I don't speak Dutch. How do I tell it to stop being so smart and just give me Google-As-Usual for a guy from the US who likes the Mets."

Dave's blog doesn't support reader comments and doesn't appear to contain his email address. A feedback-email page (three clicks away, it appears) to contact the Blog author yields a 'relaying denied' failure after I tried to submit.

Dave, I hope you get this. In answer to your question, you click on the link that says "Google.com in English".

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Putting aside the saga of Diane Feinstein's strong support for a new flag-burning amendment, and her lack of consideration of the views of her constituancy, I figured out what really bugs me about such an amendment.

What happens if the amendment is passed, and someone breaks the law? How do we feel about federal prisoners incarcarated for burning a flag in defiance of the government? A State that imprisions its citizens for burning a flag is a State one step closer to Orwell.

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A lot of tech blogs are linking to news of Toshiba's new 400GB hard disk drive.

So what?

Maybe living in internet time has jaded me, but back in 1995 I got a 1 gig drive for $700 and frankly I thought it was the shiznit. A few years later drives bloomed so large that I could take the 'the' and 'zni' out of my former opinion, because 1 gig was suddenly very old hat.

Since then, and well before, hard drive sizes have followed Moore's Curve (not Moore's Law, since that has to do with transistors on a microchip, but the curve is the same). Hard drive capacities at a given price point double every 12 months.

It's been true since I got my 5meg (yeah, meg) serial drive for my Mac 128K in 1985, and it was true until over two years ago, when 200 gig drives were mainstream.

Some time in the last two years, however, Moore seems to be slacking off, and what's more, nobody seems to be talking about it. So why the buzz over a 400 gig, 7200rpm drive? There are already plenty of 7200rpm drives out there (heck, there are 10,000rpm drives at Fry's), and 400 megs is just incremental over the 300gig drives on sale all over the place.

<whine>Where's my terabyte drive?</whine>

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Well, it looks like I'll be moving offices for the third time in as many months, but this one's only temporary, and I'll keep my old office.

I've been a lot busier of late, and I've got to find a way to bring meaningful blogging (as opposed to meme-linking) back into my daily process. I've got to find a time and a place to blog, and then put it into my schedule.

Tonight's Poker night at Google (which, considering Poker night at TiVo, either means I'm becoming an addict or a shark (or both)). After Poker is Rachel's and my last waltz class with Richard Powers.

Tomorrow is Friday Night Waltz, then a blessed break where Rachel and I can play catchup on our lives after too many full weekends.

Rachel's been doing such a bang-up job on her own personal site that I'm really inspired to enact more of my own web visions, but then there's this whole job thing that cuts into my play time.

Wanh, wanh. Pity me. I'm too successful for my own good.

Comments? (9)

My sister's house got broken into today.

They also broke into her tenant's house in back.

My mom and sister went to Home Depot to get doors to replace those obliterated by the thieves.

While they went to load one into the car, someone stole the other two.

Crap crap crap crap. Damnit. Did you know doors can cost over $200 apiece?

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The damned spammers have a new trick up their sleeve that's been foiling my mail client's smart spam filtering. They insert comment tags <!-- like this --> throughout their email, between words every few letters, so neither my email client's Bayesian logic nor my own explicit filter for 'viagra' will flag it as spam. I've literally been getting about 40 of these emails sidestepping my email program every day for the last couple weeks. Here's an example.

The two simplest solutions seem to be Apple's updating of mail to filter out comment tags in the html portions of email before running its spam filtering, or switching to an email client like Mailsmith that will let me write my own complex rules using regular expressions and perl, so I could make filters like "If the email has more than 4 comment tags" or "If, when all comment tags are removed, one of these keywords exists."

Option three is just filter out every piece of email that has a comment tag in the first place, only a lot of legitimate email has these tags (for no reason but to help the lazy programmer who didn't bother taking it out, even though no reader should ever see it).

Apple? Are you working on this problem?

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I'm so very, very tired, with no room to sleep. Ugh. I need a vacation.

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I so don't want Fury to become a warblog, but I wold like to point to an editorial critical of the Bush Doctrine that was published in the SFGate today. A highlight:

"Here are the words you will never hear from Dubya: We have won the war on terror. Never will you hear this, because the battle is, by definition, unwinnable; you can't win a war on terror any more than you can win the war against racism, or ignorance, or drugs, or cutesy boy bands or sunlight. Terrorism is as much a concept as a force, an idea as a scattered, well-organized, global network we can't possibly pinpoint."

Yes, the article is designed to enflame people, polarize them one way or the other. At the same time, it underscores my primary anger about our country. Beyond any one action, vote, or invasion, we've become a nation of pre-emptive aggressors who fight because we're scared of what happens if we don't beat people up before they beat us up.

Okay, so if the last warblog post I made was any indication, this will probably get a lot of comments. Go ahead and comment away. I won't be putting as much effort into point-by-point rebuttals to people's vim this time around. I've expressed my opinion well enough.

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The political world is going to shit. I strongly believe that our top leaders are lying to us, that they have their own agendas that don't mesh with the well being of the nation and the world, and that they realize that since the media won't call them on it, they can make more daring and more glaring lies every day.

My question for the weekend is: If the United States is taking on the role of the World's Policeman, ensuring that the world enjoys the American standards for human rights and freedom, then why do we not listen to what that world is saying?

I say 'we' though every day I feel less and less that 'we' are represented by our government. I'm travelling overseas later this month, and I'm just hoping that people in other countries don't treat me like I agree with what my country is doing ostensibly in my name.

I don't understand why Democratic leaders (or any domestic leaders for that matter) aren't coming out against the way this charade-driven prelude to war is being played out. With less than 50% of Americans saying that they would vote to re-elect Bush if the election were held today without even having an alternative candidate in mind, why don't we hear more from those politicians who better represent our views? Why don't we hear it more vocally from the US media? What little true investigative reporting that's done by US news services is usually printed as 'opinion' or 'editorial.' Bush understands that the first step to controlling the media is to make sure the other guy never gets heard.

We're being bullied. We're being spied upon. We're being lied to, and we're being robbed.

Give the populace a lollipop tax refund and make them pay for it later when 'the other guy' is running the country. Make the government earn less and spend more, call it the price for our liberties and tell us that the best thing we can do for our economy is to buy ourselves a new VCR and look the other way.

How do I raise my own flag, for all the world to see? How can I identify with a nation that feels as I do, led by a government that does not? What is the best way to say that I stand up for the ideals that this country was founded upon, but that I think that those ideals are not represented by the people currently at the nation's helm?

What happens to the United States' credibility if we go it alone and invade Iraq, and not find weapons of mass destruction (other than our own) in the ruins we create? Would our leaders plant them, like crooked cops at a drug bust, or would we blanket our slaughter of the Iraqi people under the guise of their emancipation from tyranny? How will other nations ever again justify allying with us when we collaboratively set the rules for a country's disarmament, then unilaterally say 'fuck it. I don't believe you, but since I can't prove it I'll decimate your infrastructure to be on the safe side'? What does it say when our foreign policy is based on Napoleonic Law, and even France won't stand with us?

We're inches away from strip searches for traffic violations. Our bank account and previous travel activity are already looked at by threat-assessment computers to decide which planes we can fly on, and how often we get searched along the way. And more invasive systems are in the works. American citizens are being held without bail, without charges, and without paperwork or public scrutiny, under the oxymoronic guise of protecting our freedoms. If an American was treated this way by any other nation, it wouldn't be tolerated. But this is America, where our government knows what's best.

Our 'terror alert' scale is designed to tell us when to feel scared (but not why), and when to feel safe (but not for how long). We're told to prepare for ambiguous terrorist threats, then told not to feel fear or overreact as we're instructed in how to walk leisurely away from a nuclear attack.

We're being played as puppets. We're brainwashed into thinking that Iraq and Al Qaeda are the same thing, and that having a missile that can travel 113 miles instead of the proscribed 93 miles is tantamount to possessing smallpox.

Our government has told the world that they're either with us or against us, and if they don't like the way we run the world, well, then they just might be next on our list. This is the same ultimatum that's also being given to the people of our country.

How wrong is it that I fear a repeat election in 2004 more than anything that Iraq, Al Qaeda, or even North Korea could do?

How can we stop this ride? I want to get off.

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Looking back five years from now, this will probably be the single event that will have changed the face of personal communications more than any other event in 2003.

Google has purchased Pyra Labs, providers of Blogger.

Oh, and I'm not sure what my intellectual property dealio is with Yahoo, so please don't ask me why Yahoo didn't buy Pyra a year ago when I was UI designer for GeoCities and Pyra was inches from insolvency. It's a painful memory anyhow...

Okay, to elaborate more, I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.

I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.

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With a wind-chill temp of -7.

Oh yeah, and that's Farenheit. That's -16/-22C.

Brr. Arg!

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Well, despite paying for overnight shipping, my sidekick's slowboating it here from Texas, and I'm without cell service at all until Thursday, at the earliest. I had to cancel my AT&T service before ordering the new phone because I wasn't sure that I could cancel it without paying the early termination fee, despite the terrible reception I get at home with that phone.

Anyhow, my only phone for the moment is my home phone, and that doesn't even have voicemail. Looks like email's the way to get a hold of me for a while.

Come Thursday though, I'll be a cornucopia of connectivity, with email, real web access, SMS messaging, instant messaging (on AIM :-/ ) and of course cellphone service, all in my pocket.

Technology's so cool, but I just don't have the patience...

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So I was up until 6:30 this morning, in the cold multimedia lab, before walking over to my office to take a nap on the couch, prepping for my 8:30 class.

My cellphone went off at 8 as I asked it to, and I opted for a 5 minute snooze before facing the next half of my 48-hour day.

Apparently reality and I have a difference of opinion as to what constitutes 5 minutes, or so I realized when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:55.

Pissed at being (so very) late, and having a flashback to the recurring nightmares of waking up 2.5 hours late for a 3 hour final, I got up moved my car which, after two hours of delinquancy, didn't have a ticket (small favors, I thank thee), and was grateful (for once) that Interactive Programming is a 3 hour class, and I'd be coming in just after our mid-class break.

Walking in on a presentation, I was still asked by Pamela to see her after class. I thought I was older than that. Wanh. (stomping foot)

Nevertheless, the presentation went off without a hitch, and all went well. She told me I should be working on more challenging programming projects, and I certainly could; I just have to clear my work buffer to the point where the assignment doesn't get shoehorned into the sandman's time, because sometimes he takes time when you've really got better things to do.

So some of the fonts won't work quite right, unless you have the full Lucida family on your computer, but if you're interested, here's the thing I made last night, a takeoff on the traditional hangman game.

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Damnit damnit damnit... this stupid software we're supposed to use for my computer music class is so buggy on the mac. not only do I frequently come across functions that just don't work on the mac side, but a couple hours ago it actually brought down my machine to the point where I had to install system software on another partition to get up and running again.

I hate this... I'd go talk to the instructor (class is right now and I have to go so I can at least catch some of it), but I think this is another one of the weeks he's away at a seminar. Fuck.

I'm just stressing.Part of me wants to ditch this class, but then I'd have to take seven classes next semester to graduate on time.

Okay, I'm stressing and venting, venting and stressing. Parental and familial types who may be reading this, don't worry, I'll take care of it in typical Kev fashion, but that doesn't stop me from having the stress, and using it as a fuel, a belly of burning coal to fire up a solution to this problem.

It's nobody's fault, and I'm not mad at anyone (except myself) but arghhh, it's so frustrating.

More later, I'm sure.

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Two kvetches this morning. First, and most minor: Why does Mac OS X's Software Update suggest that I download a 20 meg update for iDVD, considering that my mac knows it doesn't have a Superdrive and, thanks to Apple's policies, there's no way to upgrade my mac to have a superdrive, nor is iDVD compatible with any third-party DVD-R drive? In short, they want me to upgrade software they know my machine will never be able to use.

Second: Fuck Vanguard Air. I bought Ammy's return ticket a few weeks ago, to fly her from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, and this morning Vanguard announces that they've gone bankrupt, are suspending all flights as of 1am today, and will not be refunding fares to current ticketholders.

Oh but they've made arrangements for discounted travel via Frontier Air and National Air ('discount' meaning they're waiving short-notice penalties, letting you buy their 21-day fares for immediate travel). This despite the fact that I already paid once for the ticket, and that neither airline even has operations in Pittsburgh..

Now the cheapest fare is $290 and involves two plane changes, all on different carriers. Blar.

Blar blar blar blar. Luckily, I have a plan.

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So hey, looks like Buffy didn't get any Emmy nominations. Bummer...

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There's being snubbed, and then there's being slamed against a wall head-first.

Buffy, always a bastion of exceptional writing and in a genre of its own, usually has one exceptional episode per season, pushing its own bar even higher. In 1999 that episode was "Hush" which was quite justifiably nominated for the 'Best Writing in a Drama' Emmy award, remarkable because over 75% of the episode took place with no dialog at all. It didn't win, but it's an honor just to be nominated.

In 2000, the breakout episode was "The Body," detailing the aftermath of the death of Buffy's mom. Sadly it didn't get the nomination which, in my opinion, it richly deserved.

That's fine though. Votes are votes; democracy in action.

Last year, "Once More, With Feeling!" was absolutely outstanding. In my mind, and in the minds of many others I've talked to, the best Buffy episode ever, and very possibly the best hour on TV in 2001.

People were talking about Buffy's first 'real' (read: not in makeup or music) Emmy with confidence. UPN was so proud of its new acquisition (having taken over the series from WB just that season) that they spared no expense in including, along with the customary 'for your consideration' ad in industry-mag Variety, a complimentary DVD of the episode. The DVDs sold on eBay for prices ranging from $120 to upwards of $600 just for that episode.

Emmy nomination forms went out to voters earlier this month, with a list of the episodes being put forward for nomination in each category, and inexplicably "Once More, With Feeling" wasn't on the list.

This isn't sour grapes or whining: Each show on television gets to put forward what they feel is their strongest episode and that gets presented to voters for conideration. OMWF was supposed to be on the list, and the Emmy coordinators made a typographical error.

Now, after being made aware of their error, the Television Academy has sent out postcards letting constituents know the procedure for retroactively changing their vote, but the process is considerably more difficult than the original voting, and industry experts forsee that a reasonable percentage of those who would otherwise have voted for OMWF won't bother to change it after the fact, if they even take notice of the junkmail-like postcard.

Losing in a fair vote is one thing. Losing because your show just doesn't have enough visibility is another, but both are par for the awards course. Being left off a ballot by a clerical error, though: that's simply fucked up. It's 2002, and voting still sucks. What will it take to have a peer review be a standard step in the ballot creation and certification process?

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Pet peeve of the day: When my (or any) computer says something along the lines of, "The user 'kfox' does not exist."

This bugs me because the computer grants existence to the object by by making it the subject of the sentence, then denying that there is any such thing. More accurate would be to say, "The user 'kfox' cannot be found" or "'kfox' is not a valid user on this system."

Of course, these don't address the larger problem, which is that I am the user 'kfox' and whether I have an account is the issue, not whether or not I exist. I don't think my computer is qualified to tell me that, even if I did name it Descartes.

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(notes: Most of this was written before 'Evil Will goes on a Rampage' aired. It's also rather randomly put together, but I've too much of a backlog to go editing and rewriting this into a term paper. :-)

I love Buffy. Along with The West Wing, it's my favorite show on TV.

But lately Buffy's been pissing me off.

Sure, there have been compelling storylines, and as far as the master-arc goes, I couldn't be more impressed with all the changes. Nevertheless, I don't feel like I'm watching anymore, but instead being manipulated.

The Buffy writers know the success they have on their hands. They know their rapt audience, lusting for their weekly fix, pushing the story along. They know that there are basically only two ways to lose this momentum.

The first way is to pull a Moonlighting or X-Files. For one reason or another the master-arc progressions stalls completely. You don't have to lose a main character to stop the arc-train. Sometimes it happens because the producers give too many opportunities to too many writers, making it nearly impossible to maintain a cohesive arc, resulting in a string of interchangeable capsulated episodes (again, X-Files pre-Duchovny's departure is a good example).

A lot of producers fear significant cast and focus changes. Some of that fear is nested with the worry about becoming a soap opera, where implausibility rules, and storyline shock is used for shock's sake. This kind of turn is rapidly followed by a 'who cares'-manship of the audience. When anything can happen at any time, what does it matter what the characters do? This is the second way to lose the golden eye of the viewer.

Granted, some shows thrive by exploiting both of these: Creating a world where outlandish things happen all the time, yet nothing ever sticks. This is usually the domain of animated shows. The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park live and thrive in this world. This is not a suggested area for live-action shows, unless you're The Tick.

But back my Buffy Beef...

Buffy neatly avoids both these problems, but at the risk of finding a third problem. While the first few seasons had season or half-season arcs (The Master, Good Angel, Bad Angel, Dead Angel, Good Angel, etc.) for the most part the Scooby Gang remained constant, not rocking the boat until Joss proved to the network and the sponsors that she was seaworthy.

Soon characters were being added, relationships formed, were broken, twisted. Dawn was added, forever imprinted on the Summers household like a big 'CHA' half-etched on the surface of the moon. Plotline floatsam.

The true strokes of genius on the show is when the unexpected but believable happens. In 'The Body' where Buffy's mom is dead (not 'dies' but is just found dead, in the most honest post-mortem portrayal I'd ever care to see) we felt for the characters. It's not like she was murdered by her own lovechild who was kidnapped as a baby and returns from an evil dimension to hunt her down for her wrongs (ahem). No, it was a good example of life. Nobody expects an aneurism, and Joss didn't try to prepare us for one.

Granted, too much of that sort of thing and it becomes unbelievable, but in the right dose, it's honest life. When was the last time someone got in a car accident in a show, right in the middle of a totally unrelated storyline, and the accident becomes the new line? It happens all the time in real life, but on TV? Only on the soaps. Or ER, which is a perfect example of life-events pushing a storyline.

So I've written over 600 words. What am I getting at?

Buffy's in danger of turning to crap.

There are legitimate ways to foreshadow: Buffy the Musical was great because it revealed people's secrets. It didn't spell out what was going to happen, because often times actual events are the result of more than just innermost character desires. Contrived? Perhaps. But it was honest. It didn't declare what would happen, it was just a domesday book of where everyone was at at the given time.

Now, though, in recent episodes, the foreshadowing isn't at the character level, but at the omniscient level. When Willow and Tara get back together so fast and so passionately, Joss is tying on little heartstrings to pull a week later, when he kills her with a random bullet through the heart. When Spike has to leave for the sake of the story, we have to feel good about it, so he has to try to rape Buffy so he's the bad guy again.

Back to 'The Body', It was powerful because it was plausible, indefensible, and random. Shooting Tara through the heart just after her reconciliation is soap-operatic at best, predictable at worst.

Joss is telling me how to feel, so he can pull me like a puppet. "See? Spike is good deep down. Trust us; he doesn't have a soul, but you want to like him like he has one anyhow. Okay, do you feel for him yet? No? Then let's make him a little more sincere and a little more abused. Yet? Okay. Now let's show you how you were wrong when he slams Buffy's head to the porcelain.

"Remember how strongly people felt when Glory scrambled Tara's mind? Let's do that again! Oh, but we have to get Tara and Willow back together. The happier they are, the better it'll be. It'll be like Romeo and Juliet with kittens!"

Bah. My problem with all this is that Buffy's producers and writers decide where they want the series to go, then they figure out how to get it there. After a large, cycling ensemble cast (Buffy, Giles, Willow, Xander, Angel, Spike, (buffy's mom), Cordelia, Oz, Faith, Wesley, Anya, Riley, Dawn and Tara) (not counting the transient arc(h)-foes: Glory, Ben, the Master, the evil-supervillian-troika, Spike (err, again), Drusilla, Anya (heh), The Mayor, Principal Snyder, the Initiative and Professor Walsh, the Watcher's Council, etc.) they've decided to bring it back to the original foursome, the core Scoobies. Only in Giles's place we get Dawn, the master replaced by the apprentice (and if you think Dawn's not going to be 'let in' and will continue to warm the little-sister bench, then that's exactly what Joss wants you to think. Dawn has a trick up her sleeve that nobody knows yet.

Right, so: Foursome. Gotta get rid of Anya, while not making the viewers hate Xander for it. Have her sleep with Spike and get her vengeance back on. Gotta get rid of Tara without people hating Willow. Kill her off randomly in front of Willow. This also neatly solves the problem of Willow's ride on the wicca wagon, because a wegan Willow is as useful to the scoobies as a stupid Selma. (speaking of which, is it any coincidence that Buffy is reverting to core scoobies at the same time as Sarah Michelle Geller is staring in the Scooby movie?)

We got rid of Spike (but don't worry, "I'll be back, Slayer, and when I do..."), Giles is in England with a new show life, Mom's dead, Riley's married, Angel's on another network, and Oz is still on his wolfsome walkabout. Actually, there are some serious possibilities in the land of Oz. I watched Oz's last visit to Sunnydale last night, and his and Willow's 'wrong time, wrong place, but someday' speech sets the stage for an Oz housekeeping, if Joss can handle it tactfully enough to not raise the potential 'boy saving Willow from her lesbian self' ire.

Funny how there's an order to the randomness. In the words of the Fear Demon, "They're all going to abandon you, you know."

And of course, tonight we'll get to find out "what it really means to be a Slayer." Finally, again.

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So I saw it again (already) and I was able to focus on some of the details.

This film is so interesting because it's so deep and shallow at the same time. I'm still not ready to write my full review, I want a little more distance, but I do want to express astoundment at exactly how rich the environments are in Clones, and how stunning it is that the foreground action is so stilted.

For someone who styles himself as a storyteller above all, George Lucas simply doesn't create a compelling story. As I said before, talking about Phantom Menace, there's no anchor. There's no character you cling to and identify with, and hope good things for. This is a movie about other people, and it's really hard to care about them.

That said, the movie's a real tour-de-force visually. That and there are a couple commercials for C3PO and R2-D2, and one for Jar-jar thrown in.

Slight spoiler kvetch

I've got a long list of kvetches, but I'll sit on them for a while...

On second thought, do you even care? I'm starting to realize that everyone and their dog writing reviews about Star Wars movies is a little like telling everyone exactly what you were doing when an earthquake hit. If we've all been there, how interested are we in everyone else's gripes? Well, I'm interested in yours, so have at you.

(It's probably best to assume that the comments thread for this post will have spoilers, so you've been warned...)

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Well it's Tuesday, and the eyes are about 85% of normal. Still no contacts for me, and probably not for another several days, but at least I can apparently sit in front of a computer and read without too much discomfort.

For those of you looking for an 'after' photo, here's how my eye looks now (compared to earlier). Still itchy (don't rub it!) but a lot better than before.

Now it's catch-up time at work, but I've got some posts I'll be writing on the train tomorrow, so hang in there. :-)

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And I thought last week's allergies were bad...

This weekend I went with my dad to try flying model airplanes. Out to Antioch we went, and we were there for no more than 30 minutes before I had the worst allergic response of my life.

Hours later, in the Alameda County Hospital emergency room, he snapped this picture of my swollen eye, and the other one's just as bad. (Only click if the words 'this picture of my swollen eye' don't deter you.)

Needless to say, contact lenses or any kind of reading for more than a few minutes is pretty much not going to happen for a little while (1-3 days, according to the doc), though the nice doctor gave Kevin some drugs to try (Zyrtec) so hopefully this won't happen again.

I really hate pollen.

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Microsoft and Unisys are planning a massive ad campaign designed to 'save people from the evils of UNIX.' Among the reasons Unix is a bad idea, and will box you in, according to the ads:

• Unix systems are inflexible
• Unix requires you to pay for expensive experts
• Unix makes you struggle with a server environment that's more complex than ever

Okay, now anyone who's ever used a Windows server environment and a Unix environment is probably thinking 'but no, those are the things wrong with Windows, not Unix!'

In short retort:

• Unix flavors run my TiVo, my Powerbook, Google.com, and this web site. That's pretty flexible to me. NT Webservers in places I've worked have to be completely rebuilt on a regular schedule to address 'creep' problems that will otherwise bring the machine to a crawl, if not a blue screen of death.
• Unix requires you to know what you're doing, or to use tools created by other people. You can always hire an expert, but you're more likely to find a good one for less money than someone who's still trying to pay off their credit cards from the 6 months or more they took off work to get their Microsoft Certification credential. An MCSD credential means you can make bank consulting, and naturally Microsoft pushes employers to use only Microsoft Certified Engineers, so Microsoft's accusing Unix of requiring expensive professionals is a bit of hypocrisy.
• Finally, the Windows server environment is quite complex, nowhere near as modular as Unix systems, and gets more complex with each version. Also, since it's a single-vendor solution, if you don't like the way a product's development is headed, it's tough luck, or you can change systems entirely. Unix has flavors, and as they evolve, you can easily port from one to another that better suits your needs (from Solaris to Linux, for example).

It's all about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Microsoft's firm belief that the decision makers in a company are the ones in air so rarified as to know little enough about technology to be brought in to Microsoft's folds by this bunch of crap.

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Feels strangely like Monday again, except that I'm extraordinarily busy today. Even my train-time isn't free from work's reach today, so I don't have much time to write.

So Dreamhost, my hosting provider, dropped a velvet brick on my head yesterday. They sent out the cheeriest email ever, talking about how they're changing all their plans to have more storage, more transfer, more domains, and such, and as an existing customer, I'm grandfathered in, getting all the new capacities for my original monthly price. Great! Whoopee! They have a link so you can see what all the new levels are. I follow it.

The one thing they didn't mention was that they now meter mySQL access using a unit they invented called a 'conuery' (I pronounce it 'con-weary' and with good reason). Where before they had unlimited mySQL access, now each database connection costs 25 'conueries' and each query costs a single 'conuery,' the logic being that establishing a database connection requires 25 times as much CPU effort as executing a query (hence conuery, 'connection-query').

On my $40/month plan I get 15 million conueries per month, which sounds like a lot but isn't really. It's enough for about 500,000 page views per month the way Fury is set up currently, and closer to 3-4 million views per month once I switch to persistent connections instead of one-off connections. That's fine, Fury typically gets about 70,000 hits a month, so that's no biggie.

The problem is Metacookie, which I host in the same account.

Though right now Metacookie's in alpha testing until I can wall off some time to bring it to beta and final release. The gist is though that for Metacookie to work, each metacookie-enabled site has a little badge graphic that is served from Metacookie's. That badge is a 'beacon,' so that when the reader requests it, my database marks them as being up-to-date on that weblog. Naturally, this requires a database query to update the user. The graphic served is only 241 bytes, but the query is now a lot more 'expensive.'

How expensive? Well, assuming that I completely solved the connection problem and only had to pay one 'point' per user-blog-view instead of the current 26 points (25 for the connection and 1 for the query), then Metacookie would only be able to handle 15 million 'beacon' hits per month (less the conueries that Fury, qwer, aoliza, randompixel and underblog will be using). Considering that there's a beacon hit every time anyone looks at the home page of any metacookie-enabled site, 15 million hits is an incredibly low number. Metafilter alone gets about 1 million hits a month, and that's just one site that might be Metacookie-enabled. After release, Metacookie will be serving to hundreds if not thousands of sites. The first impact this will have on the design is that people will have to be signed in to use Metacookie. That will reduce database activity by around 90%.

But what happens if I go over the limit? My $40/month gives me 15 million conueries, along with all the rest, 900 megs storage, 20 gigs transfer, etc. If I go over my 15 mil, it automatically charges me $5 for every million I go over. In essence, if I exceed my quota by 50%, I'm paying double my regular monthly charge. This for a database service that goes down for several hours at a time at least once a month, though this is likely the reason they're instituting limits like this.

Not to get overly technical, but the way persistent connections work is, when one of my scripts requests a database connection, the server checks if a connection with the same username, password, and host already exists, and if it does, it uses that connection instead of (ch-ching) starting a new connection (for 25 points). That's cool and great. In theory I can start one p-connection and use it for all my database stuff. This is what Dreamhost is pushing everyone to do.

Warning, database geekspeak ahead:

Here's the rub: Each mySQL server can only handle N many simultaneous connections, persistent or otherwise. The default is 16, though I don't know what Dreamhost's servers have been configured to support. Basically this means only 16 (err, n) sites or less can have a persistent query open at any given time. Try to open another and the oldest one closes to make room. Considering that each database server supports hundreds of sites, there are a lot more sites hitting the database than connection slots. The upshot is that if I'm the only one, or one of only a handful of sites using persistent connections, I'm in good shape, since the others using one-shot connections don't hold on to their slot. They take it and let it go, freeing it up for the next request. The problem is that if everyone does as Dreamhost recommends (indeed, is pushing on their wallets to do), suddenly hundreds of sites will be requesting one of 16 (err, N) connection slots, and each persistent connection will last for only a few seconds (if that), not minutes, before being automatically closed to make room for another persistent query, thus completely nullifying the theoretical benefit of using a p-connection.

Is this kind of connection-flooding likely to happen? Insufficient data. So far, though I'm waiting to hear back from them, it doesn't seem that Dreamhost provides any tools for measuring your current conuery usage, or usage-to-date this month. I suppose you just get a bill and that's how you know.

Anyhow, time to get to work. Let the barrage of 'you should host with provider X or Y' begin! :-)

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In Star Wars IV through VI, I was Luke Skywalker, fighting for his past and his future at the same time, up against evil and incredible odds and emerging victorious at great expense.

In the Matrix I was Neo, someone who believed there was more to the world than we were aware of, given the chance to see behind the curtain, and discovering that I was the only person who might be able to rip that curtain down.

In Fellowship of the Rings I was Frodo, on an unasked for quest to save the world and all that is good.

In Star Wars: Phantom Menace I was.. who? Princess Amadala? No. Obi Wan, or Qui Jan? Unh unh. Anakin? Certainly not. Jar-jar? Ugh.

Ep One wasn't about a personal struggle or a quest. It was an ensemble action flick with pretty CGI. Who am I supposed to bond with, to put myself behind and see their own troubles as my own? Who am I really supposed to get close to?

Maybe Attack of the Clones will be better. Maybe Anakin is old enough now that I can relate to him. Maybe we see through his eyes enough that we feel it's his story. Maybe there's gonads and strife. Maybe there's valor born of both necessity and despair.

As any Smallville watcher will tell you, we have to love Anakin before we can hate Vader.

Maybe Anakin will do what he does because it's what has to be done.

Somehow I doubt it though. The previews don't paint Anakin as particularly humble, a quality that Frodo, Luke, and Neo all shared. What will Episode II contain to make me proud of Anakin? What will make him worthy of my suspension of not just disbelief, but sense of self, to let me put my being into his?

Dear Attack, Please don't suck.

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So most of the really cool games and gaming platforms (Xbox, PS2, Gamecube) rely far more on realtime rendering for their wow factor. Personally, my favorite games are racing games (why this is true is probably a subject for a whole other post).

The latest crop of racing games try to make the experience as real as possible, raytracing the surrounding terrain in the reflection of a car's windows or polished surface, using sophisticated physics models. Gran Turismo 3 even uses actual recorded engine sound for each of their cars, and will alter the tire's gripping power over the course of a race to reflect how tires behave differently when they get hot.

So what I don't understand is actually pretty simple: Most (all?) of these games have lens flare, that diagonal line of circles that appear across the screenn when the sun is in direct view. Lens flare is an artifact of the multiple lenses used in sophisticated still and video cameras. Each lens (your pocket 35mm has a few, a telephoto lens can have between 4 and 10, etc.) creates a ghost image of the sun, usually on the opposite side of the frame from the sun, connected by an imaginary line cutting through the center of the frame.

Okay, great, cool. By simulating lens flare, these games are replicating even the imperfections of the experience, to make for a more realistic experience. Fantastic.

But what experience are they trying to replicate? When I'm driving a racing simulation (or flight simulator, Sonic 3D, or whoever else is being lens-flare-clever) I'm trying to suspend my disbelief and pretend I'm in the car and driving it, but the simulator, giving me lens flare, is trying to pretend I'm looking through a camera lens in a car.

Lens flare got put into these games because it was a cheap and easy way to make them look prettyer, and give them a little 'wow'. ("Hey, look at that, they even programmed in the lens flare. Those programmers got every detail! This is so cool!")

Now that everyone has it, and the lens flare isn't a hundredth as impressive as seeing the car in front of you reflected in the puddle on the ground, or driving through 3D fog, can we just lose the lens flare, so I can believe I'm a transparent eyeball, and not an 8-element Nikkor 28-210 telephoto lens?

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So you're a spammer. You have control over the big red button that sends a given email message to 20 million people who don't want it.

Before you press that button, wouldn't it be nice if you actually proofread your message? Or at least the first three words?

I got spam telling me to move to Austin in the mail yesterday, and again this morning. I see at least two big mistakes with it... Maybe I should just tell people that I moved to Austin, for practice...

(don't worry, I locally cached all the images. Following the link won't tell evil spammers anything about you)

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So hey, the 2002 Bloggies finalists should be announced today, followed by one week of frantic voting.

Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get a mention for 'best programmed site' but even if, it's unlikely I'll get enough votes to win, my traffic not touching that of the kind of sites that were finalists last year.

Still, may the best blog win! You should check it out, and see what gems other people love.

A couple of asides: First, doesn't it seem silly that there's an award for 'best-kept-secret weblog' that's judged in a popular vote? By definition the most deserving sites would lose. Second, be wary of the competition's definition of a weblog. One of my favorites was inadmissable, because it doesn't have enough outbound links. Note to self: linkpimp:blog as stream-of-consciousness:journal. 'Weblog' looks to be a contested concept, to be sure.

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Moment of self-pity for my Saturday:

• My Saturday movie plans were thrown to the wind when the friend I'd hoped to see suddenly skipped town to go skiing.
• My Sunday movie plans were tweaked when another two friends 'thelma-and-louised' to places unknown to get away from the world, leaving only a note saying they'd be back when they were back.
• Another couple friends who said they'd visit and play never showed up, probably figuring they'd see me at the 30th birthday party for another friend at Stanford that evening, the drive for which, sadly, I didn't really feel up for after all of the aforementioned.
• Two other friends let me know they'd rather not spend time with me for a few weeks because, within our 'urban tribe' of four, I had dated two within four months. This is the one that really vexes me, but all involved are bloggers, and so this probably isn't the best place to air frustrations... It suffices to say that, as bloggers, I thought they would be better at communicating feelings. Disillusionment has a bitter taste.
• But then, I wasn't attending my grandfather's funeral, as Dinah was, so things could have been a lot worse.

The upside is that, at least for me, despondency is the mother of industry, and I got a lot of good programming done on Fury, enough, you might note, to warrant a bump in the version number. Yes, Fury is now at version 3.2.

My Sunday turned out a lot better than Saturday. I got pulled out of bed at 9 by Ali (not literally; she called me when she was done with rowing (Rowing at 7am? It's Sunday!) and we got Chai, walked on campus and caught up on each others lives. Going on 22 years, my friendship with Ali is my oldest, and talking life stuff through with her always gives me a good perspective.

Emily, Chris and I went to see Beauty and the Beast in IMAX at the Metreon. God Disney musicals can rock. (Note: Lion King is coming to IMAX on January 1, 2003. What's with the annularized movie releases? Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars (okay, biannual), and now Disney IMAX re-releases... Are movies franchises the new holidays? November 17 is 'Harry Potter Day'? Well, for the next six years, anyhow.)

Karen and Crystal (thelma and louise) came back in the afternoon, after a theraputic run down to Gold Country and wine tasting.

Another evening at home, coding, catching up on TiVo, talking to Dinah.

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Well they did it again. Something happened to Dreamhost's file system that made it revert to a previous day's backup. the comments people made have been lost for one day, and who knows what else.

I still have the comments archived in email, so I'll probably recreate them, but it's still annoying. What with email, sql and now even web files going down, being deleted, or otherwise blocked or bouncing, there isn't a part of my Dreamhost service that hasn't keeled over at some point in the last month.

A great user interface will only go so far when the tradeoff is a site that's not accessible or reliable.

Oh, on an ironic note, I had the stomach flu yesterday, fever, chills, all kinds of stay home and hallucinate in bed, and my computer arrived. At work. Ah well. I'm feeling mostly better now, though weak. Since I wasn't going to let myself set up my computer 'till I had my office clean anyhow, maybe that's the next thing I should tackle.

Sorry for the downers this week. Actually, a lot of things are looking up. Expect much more joy (and less misguided fury) in the new year. Thing are good. To quote the Tick: Life am good.

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God it never ends... The Amazon Package in the Void, the missing $0.25 cents, and now my new computer in limbo.

There's a long story behind this, but the short version is that FedEx thinks someone's here between 5pm and 8pm or 7am-8am to receive packages, like they can't figure out Yahoo is a business.

They promise it'll be here today before 5. They've got 92 minutes.

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It's so disturbing. The federal government says there's a credible threat of terrorism in the next week, but they claim they don't have any information on what the threat is.

Then Davis, California Governor, claims there's a credible threat against one of six bridges in California, including the Bay and Golden Gate bridges.

The Federal government then pops up and says that the California threat isn't as credible as the general threat.

What? If there's a general threat, and then there's some additional information indicating a possible target, how is that less credible? Argh. I just feel (as I'm sure a lot of us do) that we're not being given all the facts. I expect to be left in the dark, but I don't like being misdirected, bending the 'truespeak' to fit anti-terrorist tactics.

More later, I'm sure.

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As a Berkeley native of 10 years, I feel like I'm part of the community, and that my City Government should reflect the aggregate views of its constituents, especially when purporting to send a message to the nation and the world on our behalf.

This is why shit like this pisses me off so much. The people of Berkeley as a whole don't support the City Council's condemnation of US attacks on the Taliban, but the vocal minority, along with the Berkeley City Council's self-declared mission to 'be as Berkeley as we can be,' gets in the way of what a democracy should be.

It's ironic that one of the leftmost cities in the country has become a true republic, and not a democracy. In a democracy, official acts mirror the majority will of the people as closely as possible. In a republic, people just elect officials, and from there, the officials do whatever they want, because at least we got to choose who's up on the pedestal. In the US, the elected officials usually try to keep their votes in line with their constituencies, but apparently not in Berkeley.

Sadly, Berkeley is interested in profit more than democracy. The City Council's actions are attempts to differentiate Berkeley from the mainstream, cashing in on the 60s hippyism legacy to maintain a fading individuality because it's good for tourism.

The trouble is twofold. As if I wasn't offended enough that my elected representatives have decided to sell themselves out under the guise of an altruistic purpose, their ill-conceived and politically dishonest tactic backfired, with companies and individuals boycotting Berkeley businesses, and unthinking journalists projecting the will of city council members onto the citizens of Berkeley.

Not to be a linkwhore, but I hope that some of you with weblogs might point out that the People of Berkeley and the City Council of Berkeley are two separate realms that, sadly, only seem to touch one day every few years, when elections roll around.

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Something wasn't right.

I've been having some strange dreams lately. It's probably been a lot of things: I rearranged my bedroom and now my bed's in a strange place. I'm regularly living on 6 hours of sleep a night. I go to sleep thinking of unfinished projects and wake up in a rush.

I've been having strange dreams. Dreams of flying I'm completely familiar with; not flying like a bird, soaring, gliding, and circling through thermals of inspiration, but more like the flight of a butterfly, alternating floating downward and twitching upward. This is a familiar dream.

Strange dreams. Dreams like vignettes. A few seconds here, lay the background, and scene. And on to the next. Most of them I don't remember beyond the wheel-of-fortune structure of flipping from one environment to the next.

Strange. Two nights ago one flash was my car, the front fender damaged on the driver's right, sort of shredded, sort of planed off, so the bumper was higher on that side for want of a bottom. I was unsettled on Saturday, vaguely unsettled on Saturday, until I remembered this night-picture and segmented it off from reality. All better.

Today's morning ritual involved getting up later than I ought to have, to catch my train, rushing to get it all together, walking up Haste to my car.

Berkeley parking is somewhat of a mystery. When I get home, bet it 6pm or midnight, Berkeley is perpetually packed, residential and meter parking alike. Luckily, a silver-lining of my working world is being able to park at a meter, as my start time is substantially earlier than when the meters tick on at 9. The mystery is that, though the meters are packed when I get in in the evening, come 7am mine is the only car remaining on a block of 25 spaces.

Are the other 24 who were here last night all earlier risers than I am, or are they partying until 2am, then driving home?

No matter. My car is at the top of the block, and walking towards it from 300 feet out, I can't decide if it's mine. It doesn't look quite right. I don't think about it again and come half-a-block I can see that it's Baby. I walk up, unlock the door, hand on the handle, and I stop.

I go back to the front of the car, the dream-vision coming back, to check out the front bumper.

Fine, normal. Okay. I turn back to the door.

Something wasn't right.

Back to the front I go, and realization dawns. No license plate. Gone. Just an empty bracket. No trauma of a violent parallel parker, just the void of absence.

I check the back, just so see if my assailant was going for a hat trick. At least they left me that one, with the registration tab I spent far to long acquiring.

When did this attack occur? Were there cars around bearing mute witness? Did it happen days ago and I only just noticed? Was my dream prescient, coincident, or simply a subliminal realization trying to share itself with my conscious awareness?

So now I assume that my license plate, too clever by half, is adorning someone's dorm room or apartment. What my assailant isn't counting on is the interconnectedness that seems to run through my life. Three friends of mine who don't know each other all attended the same wedding on Friday, for two people I've never met. I can meet someone and within 15 minutes find a common acquaintance. I just know that I can find someone who knows upon what wall, in which hall or frat house, the license plate "GRR ARG" stands imprisoned and shackled. Have you seen it? Vanity theft is the most dangerous kind indeed. For the victim robbed of a non-fungible item, the desire for recovery is strong, and the thief feels the need to display the acquisition, for what good is art in a drawer?

It will take a few weeks for this spell to run its course, but I know that I will get it back. It may take some help from friends, or some more dreaming, but it will come back.

Grr, arg! Indeed.

Addendum: I just got off the phone with Ali, who tells me I was very lucky that they didn't take the back plate, as I can get a replacement front plate without a problem, but if someone steals the back plate, they'll keep the plate out of circulation for seven years. Umm, thank you I guess?

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Okay, so the site's been up and down again and again because Dreamhost still has problems. If you read my earlier message, you might be interested in the reply they sent me 10 hours later, and my immediate response.

Anyhow, sorry for the disruption. Tonight I'll be working on ways to make the site stay up, even when the Dreamhost database decides to eat it.

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I should be sleeping. This marks my final defeat for the day.

In the wake of a job that gives me precious little time of my own, I set out this morning to see, with everything arranged most favorably, if I could create a work schedule that would still give me some degree of personal time.

Despite all my efforts, I abjectly failed.

Okay, so I thought I would get to work at 7:30 this morning, and to do so (and to visit Em and Kisa) I stayed over at Em's house last night. Further changing my schedule, I took my shower before going to sleep, so I could be up and out and off to work early in the morning.

Morning came: so far so good. Left the house around 6:30, got in to work at about 7:15 (25 mile commute instead of 45). One of the first in the office, I actually got to relax. For the better part of the morning I was working on mocks and debugging my Powermac which inexplicably slows to crawl whenever I launch iTunes (v 1.1, running MacOS 9.1 on a dual 400Mhz G4 box) regardless of whether music is playing, or even if I quit the app. Every time this happens I have to restart, or suffer with a text editing experience much like typing over a 300 baud modem and a tendency to drop characters.

Ever resourceful in finding ways to increase personal time, I also brought laundry to work, to give our new laundry service a try. At $25 a bag it sounds like a good way to free up hours of my own day and a (relatively) reasonable price. The catch is we're supposed to pack laundry in their bags, but the first time you naturally don't have their bags, so you use your own. Mind you, my bag is huge, holding about 40 lbs of laundry.

Nevertheless, I was still set upon leaving at 4 to come home, only I forgot to let my manager know so come 3:15 I get a plateful of work that keeps me in until 6:45. At about 5:00 the laundry guy comes to my cube to pick up my laundry (nifty!) and he shows me what their 'regular bags' looks like. The site says their bags hold about 2-3 loads of laundry, but it looks more like 2-3 sinkfuls to me. The thing would barely hold a couple towels. Anyhow, I sent my bag off with him anyhow, though I really don't know why since I'll probably just get a call tomorrow asking for authorization for $150 to do my laundry (no thankyouverymuch) and I'll get my old dirty laundry back tomorrow or Wednesday and be right where I am now, only feeling like more of a humanitarian for participating in 'take your laundry to work TWICE day.'

Frustrated at that, and at being at work for nearly 12 hours on the day I was trying to prove that I can shape my destiny and make my life tenable, I finally finish up work at about 7:15 and decide, since my day is shot anyhow, to put a positive spin on it by bringing up from my trunk the parts to the POÄNG chair I bought on Friday and assembling it for my cube. I lug the four pieces (chair frame, ottoman frame, and two cushions) from the car to the cube, and take the boxes apart, only to discover that I got the wrong stain for the chair which, while it would look fine in my office, wouldn't match the one I have at home and, more to the point, wouldn't match the matching ottoman (truly a Will & Grace moment, yes).

Argh. Repack the chair, take it back to the trunk, drive home, stopping by IKEA 30 minutes before they close, making it out of there (god only knows why I happened to have the receipt in my wallet. I'm usually really bad about that) about 10 minutes after their 9pm closing.

Driving home I decide for one last stab at satisfaction and dropped by the Starry Plough for Monday Irish dancing and got to dance a four-hand reel for the first time in about 6 months, so that was good.

Parking, I just knew I'd get another ticket for expired registration tabs and, after grabbing a frozen dinner from the market and getting my mail, I notice my DMV registration has finally arrived, so I go back out to my car and put the sticker on, then come up to my apartment, about 28.5 hours after I last left it (or, to be more fair, 16 hours after I left for work).

Don't even get me started about missing Rosh Hashana tomorrow. Maybe it'll be something to atone for during next week's Yom Kippur.

Anyhow, I'm going to try again tomorrow, even if it means I only get five hours sleep tonight. Outta here by 6:00, at work before 7:30, leave work at 3:30 or 4 and get home around 5:30.

Well, at least that's the plan.

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So the avid reader will recall a couple weeks ago when I almost got on the radio. Well, last Friday I did!

Sarah and Vinnie were talking about cloning, and the morality of making clones for organ harvesting. ("They're still people, clones or not!") I remembered a research experiment creating