Anyone else catch the show?

I'm amazed at how easily 8 contestants will put themselves into an antagonistic mode, trying to think up witty mean things to say in order to show up (or play along with) the host. It reminds me of the time I saw a stage hypnotist and I volunteered to go on stage. I wasn't hypnotized at all, but I went along as if I were because I didn't want to be embarrassed or embarrass the hypnotist. I remember thinking maybe that's all it was. People would quack or run around like a dog because nobody wanted to be that guy who wrecked it for everyone else.

Anyhow, I enjoyed the show, though I'm glad I can TiVo it, so I can cut out the whiny 'they kicked me off because they were threatened by my intellectual prowess' speeches.

I'm really looking forward to Ernie (of SurvivorBlog and SurvivorBlog 2 fame) taking a break from his job search to put on The Weakest Blog.

First, Penny wrote me a few minutes ago to let me know that "Christa McAuliffe" was the answer for a question on Weakest Link (darn time zones). Kind of interesting, since just a few hours earlier I write a post about her, immediately followed by (and preceded by) a post about the show...

Another coincidence (in the more literal meaning, of two things coinciding in time), I'd like to wish a happy birthday to Fury Sainato. Why? Because they wrote to me and asked me to! Happy Birthday Fury!

The extra coincidence here is that Fury.com's birthday is in exactly one week.

Causality is such a weird thing. I'm starting to think that the whole concept of causality serves to confuse predictions and understandings of events, whether they are physical, neurological, or social. I'm sure I'll write a long speil about it at some point, but one thing hit me again today...

With this whole blowup (pardon the term) about letting Dennis Tito visit the International Space Station as a tourist, a CNN article made a loose reference to the Challenger disaster and Christa McAuliffe, the last 'space tourist' to attempt a space mission (if you don't count Senator John Glenn). The article quotes NASA officials who think sending Tito up would be dangerous because he's not sufficiently trained and could endanger himself and others.

Well, obviously it wasn't Christa McAuliffe's lack of training that precipitated the Challenger disaster, but it's also fair to say that the disaster wouldn't have happened if she wasn't on the mission.

Back on that fateful day in January 1987, a shuttle was launched in far more adverse conditions than ever attempted before. Morton Thiokol, makers of the solid rocket booster that failed, spent the 12 hours before the launch trying to convince NASA officials that the launch in such cold weather wasn't a good idea. It was the first time the manufacturer had ever given a 'no-launch' recommendation in 12 years of rocket development for NASA.

So why did NASA launch anyway? Well, Edward Tufte would say that it was because Thiokol did an abyssmal job of data visualization and presentation, and true as that may be (this is what I mean about causality. A billion things need to align for something to happen, and you can point to any one and say 'that's why it happened. What a flawed concept), as bad as the data visualization may have been, NASA decided to override the recommendation because this was a media-driven mission.

Like the Moon shots, which NASA used to gain funding for planetary research (mainly the Pioneer and Voyager missions), the Challenger mission was supposed to renew waning excitement over the Shuttle and other initiatives NASA had planned including, ironically, a space station to compete with Mir.

Okay, back to the point, if Christa hadn't been on the Shuttle the nation wouldn't have been watching, and if the nation wasn't watching, NASA wouldn't have had so much pressure to launch on schedule, better conditions would have been waited for, and the launch would have gone off without a problem.

Sort of Murphey's Law and a Catch-22 rolled into one..

Wow. Okay, I'll admit that two entries in tonight's Tuesday TV Trinity I'm only interested in because they're brand new 'car-accident-esque' shows.

At 8pm tonight we have: Chains of Love on UPN, Weakest Link on NBC, and Buffy: TVS on the WB.

Luckily, I'm catsitting Kisa for Emily tonight, so I can record Chains of Love on my TiVo, leave her TiVo as it is to record Buffy, and watch Weakest Link live. Then of course there's Angel and Dark Angel, which the twin tivos can handle as usual...

I don't even have to touch a VCR. I'm riding a techno-high.

First, of course, came the CLUI (well, first came the punch card and switches, but you have to start somewhere, because before that there were slide rules), then people build a GUI front-end. Then, a while later, apps started drifting back to the CLUI (most notably the web browser which, graphical as it may be, usually starts out with someone typing in a URL).

Now, with desktop UNIX OSes proliferating, CLUI and GUI are getting mixed together (much as they were in the early days of the Jeckell/Hyde DOS/Windows), with users switching back and forth between a terminal window and a graphical app.

With KDE and Gnome (and more to the point, X-windows) on Unix boxes, graphical applications often were created simply to act as friendly front-ends to command-line programs. One of my hopes for Mac OS X was that it would do the same, maintaining all the Mac programs out there, but allowing for a whole lot of new front-ends to powerful UNIX command-line tools.

Leapfrogging the hand-coding of these kinds of tools is ShellShell for OS X. It lets a user/programmer (the line's really getting blurred. Umm. 'scripter'?) create a config script for a command line tool (in the example given at the site, 'cal') to create a graphical front-end for it.

The author envisions a whole suite of these mini-front-ends for popular UNIX commands. I think it's really cool, though I'll be far more impressed if they come up with an intuitive way to handle piping results from one tool to another.

I don't care much for the little horoscopes my cellphone gets every morning...

"Cancer: You may have a good day if you can get through it without talking to anyone else."

Great...

And the winnder for all flash, no substance goes to: 3na.com.

To think, 18 months ago a flash intro like that would be enough to secure first-round venture capital funding...

It's kind of scary (to me, at least) that 31 years ago was 1970, but 1939 was just 31 years before that...

I have no idea what it's like for other people, especially people older or younger than I am (27), but to me decades go something like this:

• '00s: Livin' it right now, though it still doesn't feel like a new decade, well, it's just starting to, but not a new century or millenium. I've no idea how those should feel, though I bet hovercars would soften the blow.
• '90s: Went by so fast. I keep thinking things that actually happened in the early '90s happened in the late '80s, especially movies and political movements. A good litmus test is where I was living. I moved to Berkeley and started college in '91, so I don't think of it so much as the '90s as the 'Berkeley decade'.
• '80s: The heyday. This is my archetypical decade. It felt like it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn't seem that long ago, though it frightens me when I realize some friends of mine and people in my classes didn't even exist at the beginning of this decade, and even worse, they can already buy cigarettes and alcohol...
• '70s: Something to laugh at. It seems real, I lived through most of it, though I wasn't really aware of it as a place in time, not realizing how much things would change, or how much they'd changed in teh 10 years previous. Nixon? Never knew the guy but he probably was a crook, victory-fingers and wobbly jowels or no.
• '60s: They seem a little real to me, mostly because I've seen pictures of a slightly younger version my mom with long black hair, and I can match that to all the things I hear and read about the 60s. Of course, living in Berkeley I'm barraged with the anti-war, free-speech, hippy tie-dye picture of the 60s all the time, perpetuated not only by the t-shirt street vendors and Peoples Park, but by the annual batallion of new students who chose Berkeley because they were activists in high school, and see the school as the mother ship calling them home. The irony is that Berkeley in the 60s was a much more conservative campus than it is now, and it was a media lens on a relative few, and those who joined them from outside the campus, which built the picture of Berkeley as a hotbed for activism, a picture that has consequently come true after the fact.
• '50s: This is where things start moving into fantasy for me. Most of my impressions of the 50s are from Norman Rockwell paintings, episodes of Leave it to Beaver, Back to the Future, and themed restaurants like Johnny Rocket's and Mel's Diner. Flat greyscale tones and important-looking bald people in double-breasted suits.
• '40s: Another media explosion, the '40s means World War II. A history lesson about who did what where, and how the nation came together to fight a common enemy in a just war. we were good, very good. They were evil, very evil. Though you were terrified, you were righteous because you knew your cause was just. My parents were born in the '40s about the same time I was born inthe '70s. I should probably ask them...
• '30s: The Great Depression. No concept of what it was like. I mean, literally yes, but I don't know how it would feel to be thrust into a world where suddenly nearly everyone is poor, living through hardship so soon after such good times. Even with our own recent Nasdaq crash, I'm having trouble visualizing exactly how the transformation takes place. Probably because of the media I watch and read, it's far easier for me to imagine a post-cataclysmic US (ala Dark Angel) than it is to see one where everyone is poor, but things are intact, like some giant economic neutron bomb went off.
• '20s: A cultural period, taking a breath from the changes in the preceeding decades, people are starting to be at ease with cars, airplanes, and the like, and just want to have fun. World War I is over, and swing dancing is in its heyday. I'm pretty sure someone from that time would read this and laugh, yet this is the image I come away with.
• '00-'10s: Airplanes, cars, and World War I. It just seems so early for these people to have airplanes. I can't believe they've been around for nearly a century. When I think of what the world was like when Edison invented the light bulb, or Morse created the telegraph, airplanes, cars, computers, what have you, I'm usually amazed at the world they were invented in, and that that world could give rise to such an invention. It amazes me that people could go to the Moon in the '60s, after only 7 years of intense planning. If we had to go back to the Moon today, it would take at least 15 years and 10 times as much money. You don't have to look much further than the Internatioal Space Station to see that. We've built space stations before, yet now everything seems harder to do and far more expensive. Anyhow, the point of this misplaced soliloquy is that the inventions of today will almost no doubt be seen by future people as ahead of their time, and how could a society as primitive as ours possibly have given rise to (insert next big thing here). I feel like the Net was really a product of our time. Will our grandkids wonder how we could have done it when computers were so primitive? Will it be because the Net will have evolved into something so much more fantastic by that time (like biplanes to jet fighters), or because they'll see us as being more primitive than we actually are?
• 1800s: Pure history. the Civil War, slavery, manifest destiny and the gold rush are just historical accounts, and as much as I can visualize the places, people, and circumstance, I can't connect it to what I see around me now (unless I visit a cemetary, or other historical site). It's not even that far back, yet things change so much.

Well, as usual, much longer winded than I expected or intended. It's just weird to finally have a nicely wrapped package I can call a century. A century I participated in (well, for the last fourth, anyhow), yet one so completely different than the one before it. not to get all trite, but I really do wonder what the next century will hold... This entry is exactly the kind of thing that someone in 2101 will look up, read, and smile at.

So I flipped Fury 3.1 on this morning. There are still tweaks to be made, and I'll be fixing little things left and right for the next few days, but for the most part it's done.

New features include:

• Permalinks! - Use the icon for permalinking to a particular entry. Right now permalinks go to individual article pages with one article to a page. In the next few days I may change that so permalinks will go to the appropriate month-view, jumping to the entry with an anchor tag. I'd love feedback on what you find more useful.
• Updated masthead - The new masthead has little icons along the top right for different areas of the site. These will grow more numerous when I make more icons, and migrate more content to the new look. The bigger 'microbanner' will randomly rotate between these areas, so you can get a little more detail on one before you click through.
• Topics - Probably the biggest architectural change in Fury 3.1 is the ability to surf by topic. Each entry can be correlated to one or more topics, and you can click in the topic name (in parentheses after the entry's title and date) to jump to that topic's page, with all the entries that match that topic. It's a fun way to surf, and designed for those who haven't been here from the start, and might want to see what else has been said about topics I post about. The topic array is wide rather than deep, so there are lots of topics, but not so many posts in each topic. I think that this makes it more useful than lists of 50-100 posts each.
• Totally new underlying framework - Not that you can see it, but the way the system builds the pages is completely new, consisting of an object-oriented framework I built in PHP and mySQL. It should add for a lot of flexibility for future changes, and makes site consistancy a lot easier to maintain.

Well, that's it for now. Like I said, I'd love to hear your feedback. Visually the changes aren't very significant, but I wanted to start with the architecture, then build on it.

Manga!

My friend David recently got in an accident and lost his car, arguably one of the most minor things you can lose in a car accident (license, arm, life, loved one, etc. suddenly a car seems pretty minor).

Hearing him talk about Pergamina (for that was the car's name), I was reminded of a class assignment from 10th grade (wow, 12 years ago...) where we were asked to write a eulogy for anyone or anything, and I chose my sister's car:
 

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The Tank (1979-1989)

May, 1979. My mom was very late from work and I was home alone for hours. I began to panic and was near tears when she drove upin a brand new '79 Volvo 244. I hastily dismissed my fear and went out to look at the car. My mom showed it off like her newbaby, no diapers needed. I loved it, it was big, it was new, but it was green. "What would possess you to buy a car in a huethat hadn't been seen since T.V. sit-coms of the '60s," I didn't say; not old enough to chide the one person in the world Ithought couldn't make any mistakes. The car became an extension of our lives, mine, my mother's, and my sister's. I always feltsafe there, knowing that no matter what kind of accident we got into I would hate to see what happened the other car becauseours was invincible.

As I grew older the car grew with me, and in 1987 it grew past the point of most cars and used that sixth digit in the odometer.It had graduated from the university of the sub-decimillion mile and now it was equipped for the ultimate test. The car washanded down to my sister on her 16'th birthday.

The Car, (as we always called it), protected my sister from the hell of the Los Angeles automotive perils for a year before itwas tested. My sister was returning from the beach with friends when The Car met the only possible foe a car of his staturecould have, a Ford Galaxy. After this run in The Car used his powers to make sure that we didn't get the bad end of the deal; infact, when the mail came, we were surprised to find not one, but two insurance checks in the load, each for the amount of theclaim. I'd imagine that The Car wasn't surprised though.

Later in its life, The Car outgrew his name and was dubbed The Tank. The Tank's next test occurred in the Valley College parkinglot, where some kids unwittingly attempted to steal The Tank's radio. They tried to break the window with scant success,then they tried to open the door using a crowbar. The Tank laughed. Then when The Tank thought he had them beat, they struck thewindow again full force. They managed to strike a lucky blow and made off with the radio.

After a small family dispute it was settled that I would inherit The Tank upon my sixteenth birthday, but, as fate would have it,exactly one month away from that holy day The Tank breathed his last.

The Tank died as he lived, full of life, happiness, and helpfulness. It was while attempting the treacherous Grapevine, carrying5 happy friends to Lake Tahoe that he lost grip of a cylinder and died. The only comfort I can find in this is the knowledgethat he died without pain, that he was happy until the end, that he never knew sorrow. Yet it is with a heavy heart that mysister and I set forth in our tasks to find two cars to replace him, one for me, and one for my sister. I have heard that thebest thing in a time of loss is to find other amusements; I suppose that I will find out whether or not this theory holds.