Rolling blackouts are starting up in California again today, as of about a half-hour ago. Now that I'm no longer hosting this site from home, you shouldn't notice much of anything if Berkeley goes dark. It will be a shame though. My linux server's been running without a reboot for 117 days, since the last time Berkeley lost power back in January. If only OS X is as stable...

I' also rolling through the last couple days of classes. Tomorrow's the big day, the last day of instruction at Berkeley (for me, anyhow). Then of course there's graduation. That's the big day too. And the final final exam the day after that. Another big day.

Well, I have plenty of big days ahead, but I am looking forward to tomorrow. I keep thinking I should pass my yearbook around, only I don't have a yearbook... and I don't have anyone to pass it too...

'Sokay though, I know you're all cheering me on.

Fresh from Memepool and Slashdot comes Color photography from the 1910s. Turns out this guy did what several current photographers (links escape me at the moment) are doing, which is to take three b/w pictures with a red, green, or blue gel in front of the lens. While current practitioners will combine the three images digitally or on color print paper Sergei, not having that luxury, would project each image with a light projector and a color bulb. Some of the photos, reconstructed by the Library of Congress, are absolutely stunning, and are powerful reminders that just because we look at that era through a monochromatic lens, we shouldn't forget that it was just as vibrant (in some cases more so) than our present day. Makes the past seem that much more real...

One of those things about email is that it gets there fast, and if it doesn't, you usually know.

Worst case is that you get a message saying your email bounced because of a bad address, or you get a message saying it couldn't send for 4 hours, but it will keep trying for the next 7 days.

Most email goes through in under a minute, but sometimes you have to wait as much as an hour for a message to get through. So you can imagine I was a little surprised when I got a message today from the infamous 'Mail Delivery Subsystem' letting me know that 'The following address had permanent fatal errors.' Sure. No prob. Which email was it? I'll fix the prob and send again. I scroll down and notice it was an email I sent as a reply to a fury.com reader eight months ago which now appears to have never gotten there at all.

And they say the post office is bad... (Not that I don't have snailmail horror stories as well and damnit, where is that letter I emailed myself from summer camp in 8th grade?)

Happy Monday!

I'm finishing up my last paper at Berkeley, a report on the origins and evolution of elementary education in California from 1850-1900, with an emphasis on state-standardized textbooks and their effect on minority populations.

It's just amazing to me that Berkeley has so much original source material for this kind of thing and that, for the most part, most papers and books on the subject were all written right around 1930.

Even more amazing is that I can walk out of the library with peoples 70 year old theses. It's amazing touching the actual typewritten pages people poured their educational blood, sweat, and tears into.

I have a few old books, some from the 19th century, but there's something different about reading the actualpages they wrote on, had their roommates proof, and that witnessed them sitting timidly before a board of experts as they defended it.

An excerpt from the foreward of Ruth Flemming's 1932 paper on Public Education Materials from 1850 to 1930:

To my family, for discouraging me.To my enemies, for challenging me.To my friends, for upholding me.To all these - my gratitude.        (signed) Ruth Flemming

I don't know, it all just seems so close...

Back at my first ever SCA event (Ducal Prize Tourney, Labor Day, 1992), one of the people I was camping with brought out this baking tray wrapped in cloth. I asked her what it was and she said it was "way bread." She unwrapped it a bit and handed me a chunk. It was pretty heavy and I took a bite, to find that it was basically one huge pan-baked chocolate-chip cookie. "Way bread?" I asked. "Yep. Waaaaaay out of period."

It's with this in mind that I dub "A Knight's Tale" to be the Way Movie of the year, if not the decade. Not that that in and of itself is a bad thing, but don't kid yourself, the movie is baaad.

Karen and I got to see the movie at a campus sneak preview last Tuesday. As two recovered SCA geeks we saw the outing as an appropriate homage to having left it behind. From the very first scenes we see just how fitting it is.

Setting: A shire somewhere in France, not that you'd know it was anywhere other than England if you weren't explicitly told, four scenes in, that one of the characters is saving up money 'to go back to England.' Anyhow, there's a tourney ground with a jousting run and about 300 spectators up along the railings, chewing giant turkey legs, acting rowdy (though, as Ammy noted, surprisingly clean). Traditional Ren-fair-esque music playing into the background as the camera pans and pushes in on the crowd. The music morphs into Queen's We Will Rock You, which is bad enough, but it's actually being sung by every person in the crowd. And not just for a little while. They sing the entire song in a scene so out of place it can only be matched by the time I went to UC Berkeley's English Department graduation in 1994 and the valedictorian closed his speech with Copacabana, all 6 stanzas, on a dare.

Anyhow, the movie just gets worse, not because it's playing a Men in Tights to Excalibur's Prince of Thieves, but because it can't decide whether it's trying to be a parody or not. A parody should be funny-witty, not funny-lame which, I've gotta say, it is when the hero spends the afternoon in a barn learning French pavanne court dances for the evening's revel, then midway through the ball the music shifts into disco and all the nobles get-down. Dancing aside (and by the way there's not a bodice, or jerkin, for that matter, in the flick), the only thing bigger than the holes in the plot are the.. wait, there isn't anything bigger.

Throw in a love interest royal groupie and her maid (we never find out what kind of nobility she is, because that might get in the way of the plotholes) who seem to have no trouble traipsing their way from tournament to tournament in Medieval England, ending up at the 'Jousting World Championship' in London, a naked Geoffrey Chaucer with a gambling problem and a flare for the dramatic (don't worry, while they try to make allusions to a few of the Canterbury Tales, (including, duh, 'The Knight's Tale') you'd get more Chaucer out of eating the front cover of the Cliff's Notes), and a hero who, without explanation, teaches himself to joust with three weeks and a bag of dirt, yet can beat the best in Europe. In a nutshell, take the Karate Kid, steam it until all the substance is gone (doesn't take too long), slice Mr. Miyagi out of the flick, toss it back somewhere between 800 and 1200 years and cover it in velveeta and you'll have "A Knight's Tale."

Anyhow, if you like laughing at movies and are going to see it anyhow, do yourself a favor and see it opening weekend, becuase maybe you'll get some satisfaction from a packed audience laughing as a group, because in an empty theater it would just be funny-sad... On a scale of 10, I give it the rarest of rares, a 3. Not completely pathetic, but bad enough to fall on the lower end of the scale.

Though I was drawn to the site for their beautiful Mini Font Sets, Web Page Design For Designers (WPDFD) has some excellent online design primer pages, especially this page on cognitive interpretation of online text. Great stuff.

I'm just finishing up my paper on American Beauty for my Womens Studies class... I'm just proofreading and revising now, so it's almost done.

I am now an absolute authority on this film...

FYI I've added a little 'look ahead' widget in the left-hand nav. It's probably as much for me as it is for you... Still, it helps give a clearer window into my life, so that's all good!

Compact and fast. 4.9 lbs, 1.35" thick, cute, and cheap ($1299) as long as you don't care about DVD or CD burning. Otherwise the price goes up.

If they can do that for $1299, then a sub-thousand tablet shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks go to Eden and James for pointing out that we merely tied the record for the most people in space last week.

It seems we did the same thing (with a fully-loaded Shuttle, Mir, and Soyuz capsule) in 1995, and again in 1997. I guess this time it's just ho-hum. It's interesting to note (if you're an anal trivia freak) that the Endeavour was involved in each of these events.

Maybe once we get the habitat module up in the ISS we'll be able to up the number, as 7 and 3 are the max for Shuttle and Soyuz transport ships respectively. Then again, since the Soyuz ships are the escape ships for the ISS, I wonder how they'll manage with a crew greater than 3. The X-38 project was supposed to fit that bill, but it's been scrapped...

Oh, unless NASA sends up two Shuttles at the same time... But as anyone in Houston (or anyone who watched Armegeddon) could tell you, if NASA had to try to keep two Shuttles running at the same time, it's collective head would explode.