BeigeJournal

There is a Hackles cartoon inspired by The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project. I have not gone that far. I just have a circuit board hanging decoratively on my living room wall.

I am back from the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, after much fun and much driving. This was my second OVFF and I’m hoping to make the trip to Ohio many more times.

I really enjoyed the concerts, particularly Lady (Ladies?) Mondegreen, a group of, um, eightish (they move so fast it’s hard to count) women who sing some wickedly funny stuff. The Interfilk guest, Blake Hodgetts, was fantastic. Eloise was right, after I heard him I just had to buy his CD. The songwriting contest was also fun to see, Particularly Renee Alper’s, er, Renee-like take on the Once In A Blue Moon topic. She was a Chambanacon regular way back when and it is nice to see her again.

I liked the chance to meet people who I’ve long heard of, who’s songs I’ve enjoyed, who’s songs, in some cases, I’ve learned to play, or who I just haven’t seen in a long time. Terence Chua, who strongly implied that he wouldn’t be there, nonetheless was. Cat Faber was there, enabling her to say “wow” in person at the Pegasus Awards ceremony. Renee, Ray, and Star. Batya “The Toon” Wittenberg, who is a Lady Mondegreen and was delighted to find her evil influence spreading when I told her I was learning to play her parody Under The Kitten Beast. It turns out she has a Play It Slow parody, so I now have a third song to sing to that tune, along with the original and Benjamin Newman’s.

I also had the chance to sing “The Wreck of the Lady Fitzgerald”, which incorporates bits of Robin Nakkula’s Asteroid Ore, in front of Robin, after she had sung Asteroid Ore. That was fun. Dave Clement described the song as “sick.” That might be a compliment. In my own sick mind, anyway.

I found I did surprisingly well in the circles stage-fright-wise. I felt very comfortable, and hardly felt clumsy at all on the flute. I was a fairly clumsy guitarist compared to how I play at home alone but better than I’ve often been in public and I still felt calm and was able to continue on smoothly after fumbles without getting into that escalating cycle of panic.

This was really only my second experience in chaos circles, since we do bardic at the Milwaukee housefilks. There is a whole set of skills for getting a turn in which I have not practiced and never even thought to observe before I started performing. I may need a little assertiveness training.

This was also my first time at a con banquet and the first time I saw the Pegasus award ceremony. The food was good and the shocked expressions of the award winners was a joy to behold. The Grim Roper said that a few decades he would not have expected to win the Pegasus for best humorous song. Gretchen refused to say anything. Cat Faber could hardly say anything. Dave Clement said that he was going to do as he did in music when the going gets tough, and turn things over to Tom Jeffers, who in turn was too overcome to say much, and the two hugged.

All in all I had a wonderful weekend. Even the rain was nice enough to fall only when I was indoors anyway, leaving nice weather for the two long days of driving. Hope to see you all again next year, plus those of you who couldn’t make it this year.

ExtremePumpkins.com. The kind of people who carve pumpkins with routers and light them with road flares. Not to be confused with Punkin Chunking, who hurl pumpkins frightening distances (1.2 kilometers!?) with frightening machinery.

If you like cartoons featuring talking animals who have jobs involving computers, you’ll like Hackles. Actually, the two system administrator penguins don’t seem to talk, but they do get their point across.

Have a happy Mole Day. And yes, you can buy t-shirts, pins, ornaments, figurines, and so on. And be sure to see (see and avoid?) the big collection of mole jokes.

“I don’t know whether some people rob convenience stores for the money or just to get on TV”— Heard on TLC’s “What Were You Thinking.”

Kayaking the Vermilion Sea: Eight Hundred Miles Down the Baja, by Jonathan Waterman. 1995

Another delightful book by Jonathan Waterman. I enjoyed Arctic Crossing and I’ve now got his mountaineering books on my list to read someday. Jonathan and his wife Deborah spent two months and 1.08 million paddle strokes traveling the Baja California coast by sea kayak. Like most adventure travel writers he makes the journey sound like fun even as he describes the occasional hardships. The journey is a test of their relationship as well, as you might imagine.

Interspersed with the descriptions of the journey, the people, places, and weather encountered, run a history of European influence in the region and descriptions of environmental degradation and overfishing. It makes for a quite interesting book.

The Outdoor Life Network’s show Outdoor Outtakes is yet another example of the very inexpensive type of TV show that consists of video (often home video) of people hurting themselves. The focus is primarily on athletes hurting themselves, or in some cases not hurting themselves but still doing something that seems TV-worthy to the producers.

Outdoor Outtakes takes the humorous approach, complete with a laugh track. We are left to ponder whether it is sleazier to openly laugh at skateboarders smacking their heads on the pavement or to affect a faux-serious tone, as though you had a serious educational or cultural purpose in showing rollerbladers impacting railings crotch-first.

On one the one hand, laughing at people who just landed on a rock seems cruel, on the other hand, if said people deliberately put skis on in the summer and slid down a dirt pile with jagged rocks all around while being videotaped, well, you have to figure they signed up for it. Some of the people getting smacked, however, are spectators, who presumably just wanted to see the nutbars slide down the ski slope in kayaks and were not planning on getting involved in the action. In that respect, I suppose there is an educational purpose to the show: while anyone with more cognitive function than concrete realizes that going down stairs on a skateboard might be hazardous, it may not be obvious to some just how distant a safe distance for observation may be. Maybe you ought to just watch the TV show.

The other popular topic is people doing athletic stuff while nude. They don’t actually show the nudity of course. Apparently we’re supposed to be titillated by the mere knowledge that, out there, somewhere, there are naked people who we can’t see. (Most of the programming on E! is of this nature.) Frankly, that doesn’t do it for me. If you want nude rock climbers, I recommend the Stone Nudes calendar. Beautiful black and white photography, no pixelation, and you can keep track time with the handy calendar. [2004-01-16: I do like the 2004 Stone Nudes calender, in case you wondered.]

Having just trashed the show as tacky, stupid, and occasionally not-very-titillating in that bizarre prudish-sleazy American fashion, I’ll confess that I for some reason never tire of seeing our extreme sports enthusiasts discovering the hard way that, as Dirty Harry said, “A man has got to know his limitations.” It is hard to be happy with this particular show, though.

Update 2003/12-12 23:30 UTC:

Responding to Harold Freely’s comment, I had seen only one or two episodes when I wrote this. I’ve since seen some more, and although I don’t think occasional fictional stories or dialog are new, doing an entire show around made up stories or events is different. I’d say the stories range from hilarious to the lame, but they do on the whole add to the humor. I’m still undecided whether a comedic approach to this subject matter is good or bad. As I’ve said, most of the (human) participants voluntarily did things that anyone could have told them would probably hurt, so I can’t feel too sorry for them. The animal segments do tend to be pretty funny, thanks in part to the goofy stories. The nudity I’m less happy with, not because I’m opposed to nudity but because I’m in favor of it. I do find it just amazing that in this country playing a laugh track while someone falls and hits his head is OK but showing human buttocks is simply unthinkable.

I still have mixed feelings about the show, but it is generally quite funny.

Tramp Lamps, underwear transformed into light fixtures.

Fen living somewhere vaguely near central Illinois may wish to consider attending Chambanacon. Chambanacon was my first con, way back when, and I suppose ought to blamed for my involvement in filk. It is now moved to Springfield, Illinois (The state capitol! In the middle of a large flat region!) in the Hilton Springfield, which for some reason is approximately 30 stories tall even though it’s located in the middle of a large flat region. The view from the top is quite nice, you can get lots of exercise if you choose to use the stairs, plus if you get a good strong Illinois wind (the state capitol is right nearby, so there is always wind from the politicians if from nowhere else) the building sways slightly and creaks like a wooden sailing ship. It’s cheaper than a cruise.

Chambana used to be a fairly large filk event. It has shrunk a bit, but some very interesting people still usually show up. I have no knowledge of anyone’s plans for this year other than my own, but usually Bill and Brenda Sutton are there, Juanita Coulson is a frequent attendee, I believe Margaret Middleton has been heard there, and Phil Parker is always there as the con’s filk person. Jan of the Magic Fingers and Spot of No Fingers At All have been, um, spotted in the audience. I’ll be there.

In Industrialized Nature I read that the Eletronorte power company in Brazil, when building the Tucuruí hydroelectric project, didn’t communicate with the forestry bureaucracy, and so instead of cutting the trees first and then flooding the forest, they flooded the forest first, and then, yes, used underwater chainsaws and scuba-diving loggers to harvest the trees from the bottom of the reservoir. “Eletronorte specialists now talk excitedly about the valuable submerged wood they harvest from the reservoir’s depths, and the proudly proclaim that recovery of the wood provides local employment.”

As I gather is common I didn’t really understand blogging until I tried it. As I write more fairly frequent, fairly short comments, I better understand the desire to do so. The weblog format is natural for that sort of thing. The notion of a frequently updated, chronologically ordered set of short pieces didn’t really mystify me before, though. What I really didn’t understand, but do now, is blogging software. I figured if you want to write, fire up Emacs or vi or Notepad or whatever and write. Why all this software? Having now spent a few weeks installing and configuring and messing with software (Blosxom, specifically), it all becomes clear.

Benefit 'o blogware number one is the ability to easily get all the usual navigational doohickeys, like the calendar, the find function, the categories list, and so on. I can just keep writing stuff and the software will automatically display a finite number of entries at a time and allow the viewer to navigate through the archives.

Benefit number two is that with a pre-written html template the software plugs your writing into and pre-written css, you can get a sharp looking site without knowing what you are doing or putting much work into it, and you can easily tinker with the look of the site just by changing two files (and maybe adding some plugins to get more features).

Benefit three is that if the pre-written theme was any good you should be getting near-perfectly valid HTML/XHTML/CSS/etc. as well as RSS out of the thing, even if you don’t know what you are doing, which is a wonderful thing for interoperability. (And I do recommend that you run your HTML through a validator and fix all those tiny nit-picky pedantic things it complains about. That way when you make a change that causes a problem, you can run it through the validator and see what it says without wading through 500 nit-picky pedantic warnings that you were too lazy to fix before.)

A fourth feature is the easy inclusion of writebacks, trackbacks, automatic weblogs.com pinger, and so on. How many sites would be trackback enabled if they were hand-hacked in vi? Not many. New features diffuse rapidly.

The amazing thing is that with zillions of bloggers all using various different but fundamentally similar blog software packages, we get things like All consuming, which checks the recently updated weblogs listed at weblogs.com for URLs pointing to books at the usual online booksellers, and, on the assumption that if you are pointing to a book at a bookseller, you must be writing about that book, gives us a near-real-time look at what books people are writing about in their blogs. This without the active cooperation of the bloggers, who need not even have heard of All consuming for it to work. It’s the sort of thing we’ve been promised for years, that in the future computers would scan the net for us to gather valuable information and report it back to us automatically. Now we are starting to see that. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in the future.

The Engine’s Moan, by Edward A. Fagen. Astragal Press, 2002.

This is a book about steam whistles. If you are a whistle collector or a whistle aficionado you need this book. I’m not a collector or an enthusiast, and am too young to remember a time when steam whistles were common (though they were common in the cartoons I grew up watching), but I nonetheless found the book quite interesting. The book includes material on the history of steam whistles and their manufacturers, their place in our culture and advertising, advice and building and maintaining a collection, whistle repair and restoration, blowing whistles and organizing a whistle blow event, and a chapter on the physics of whistles. The book is extensively illustrated with black and white drawings and photographs, plus a set of color plates of art and advertising centering on whistles.

There is an International Earth Rotation Service. I for one hope that they never slack off someday and let the Earth stop rotating. (Actually, of course, they keep track of the Earth’s rotation, which is important for astronomy and precision navigation and that sort of thing, and they recently renamed themselves to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, in an effort to have a longer and more cumbersome name slightly less amenable to the joke that I just made.)

Kathy Mar was the guest of honor at Barb’s Basement in Milwaukee, WI on Saturday, 2003-10-11. Her concert was delightful, containing many favorites and sing-alongs. She also played what she refers to as the “Fabric Cycle,” consisting of five songs set to two tunes which have fabrics in their names: her own Velveteen; Velvet, by Talis Kimberly; Crushed Velvet, by Rennie Levine; Without Paws, by Kanefsky; and Dear Departed, also by Kanefsky. I had not heard Crushed Velvet nor Without Paws before. There is much to recommend the practice of playing originals and parodies together, both for those who haven’t heard one or more and those who hardly remember hearing them. I suppose this has to be balanced against the risk of driving people nuts in the case of Banned From Argo parodies or a set of “Drive Songs.”

The after-concert filk went on 'til after three, and with the likes of Nate Bucklin and Howard Kranz present was well worth staying up late for. I also had the chance to spring The Bastard Child of Merlin on Kathy, who had performed Merlin in her concert.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.

This book is an informative and serious look at cadaver research, organ donation, burial, cremation, and other fates of no-longer living humans that somehow manages to be the funniest thing I’ve read in some time. Her take on the subject is perhaps well summed up at the beginning of the book where she writes, “Cadavers are our superheros: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. I take the Superman point of view: What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind.”

I think the book is fantastic. I have read a copy from the local library but I like it so much that I’m going to buy my own copy, which is something I very rarely feel the need to do. The book is sprinkled with delightfully unexpected sentences. Normally you read along automatically, without too many surprises. By the time you’re half-way through a sentence you pretty well know what sort of thing you’ll find at the end of the sentence. In this book I often had to back up and reread a sentence, not because the sentence was ungrammatical, confusing, or a bad fit for the context, but just because it was, somehow, unexpected. A wonderful surprise. Such as describing the beating heart in an organ donor as, “a mixing-machine part, a stoat squirming in its burrow, an alien life form that’s just won a Pontiac on The Price Is Right.” I guess I just wasn’t expecting the part about the Pontiac.

Although research and teaching with cadavers fills a large part of the book, the scope is broad, encompassing embalming, burial, cremation, cannibalism, and even composting of the dead. Mary Roach is unafraid of asking the obvious yet unpleasant questions of the (living) people she meets. She tells it like it is, and does so in an often very funny manner. The book is not meant to shock or offend, and I feel that it doesn’t. I suppose one can say of this book that it is the sort of thing that will appeal to people who like this sort of thing. The topic is a sensitive one as well as an often unpleasant one and surely there are people who would dislike the book, or perhaps any book on the subject. If you think you are one of those people, I’d advise you to skip it. Otherwise, I highly recommend it.

While looking around at metafilter I found a link to Emeril vs. Cthulhu. Don’t tell Terence Chua or we’ll get a Cthulhu cooking filk.

Yes, I’ve fallen prey to the fad that’s sweeping the “blogosphere,” (see this metafilter page, for example) Moleskine notebooks. They actually are quite nice notebooks, and at roughly $11, not particularly expensive. Nice paper nicely bound, page-marker ribbon, handy little pocket in the back (keep a guitar pick in there and you’ll always have one, until you forget to put it back), and that nifty elastic band to hold it shut. I carry one with me, keep one in my car for expense recording and travel notes, and keep one by my bed as a dream journal.

It is handy to have a notebook with me. I now have a place for notes! No more buildup of bits of paper with book titles or URLs or grocery lists on them. It is also a place to record ideas and make note of interesting events in my life.

Naturally, I needed a small pen to carry with me to make use of the notebook. I bought a Lamy Pico. This cost me $33, making it the most expensive pen I’ve ever bought even if it is pretty cheap by luxury German pen standards. It is nicely made, as you’d hope, and has a clever retraction mechanism that extends the pen to about 12cm when writing and a compact 9cm closed. It is all too easy to loose, however. It has already spent the better part of a week lost under my girlfriend’s recliner.

Barnes and Noble sell Moleskines, but that is a shockingly unromantic place to buy them. If you live in the Milwaukee area you must see Broadway Paper, on 191 North Broadway in the 3rd Ward. It is an amazing store. Need some of those little boxes Chinese take-out food comes in? In colors? They’ve got ‘em. Be sure to go to the bathroom while you’re there. I don’t know about the Lady’s, but they have possibly the nicest public men’s room I’ve ever seen.

I bought my Pico at Daly’s Pen Shop, located in the Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee. This store is also a must-see, at least if you are the sort who must see a pen store. It is a very nice store with a great selection and very friendly staff.

Make darn sure the tmp directory for seeerror is writable by the web server, not just you. Just like the plugin state directory must be.

I work in a laboratory. We just purchased a bottle of 1-methyl-2-pyrrolidone. The label says, “Irritant. Irritating to eyes and skin. In case of fire and/or explosion do not breathe fumes.” Indeed, I think we can all agree that in any fire and/or explosion you’d do best to avoid hanging around breathing the fumes.

Blosxom is small and simple, but like any software it won’t work at all if the required files are not in the proper places and the configuration variables are wrong. The existing documentation is a bit vague on just how to get the thing going, and it is very frustrating trying to debug something that won’t work at all. I’m here to help, with this guide to getting blosxom installed and at least minimally running. My installation was on a web hosting service using Unix. I’m an experienced Unix user and this document thus is written from the prospective of someone used to installing Unix software but new to blosxom.

blosxom.cgi goes in your cgi-bin directory, naturally. You’ll also have to create a blosxom data directory and plugin directory. You need to change the title and description in blosxom.cgi, naturally, but the harder part is the $datadir and $plugindir. Your hosting service likely did something clever with the web server’s document root and the FTP server configuration and it may be quite non-obvious what the real path to your new data rectory is. See the blosxom FAQ entry on this subject. You need to get this right or you’ll get nothing but the default header and footer with no postings. Put a test file or two in your data directory. The file format is simple, first line is the title, remaining lines are the body. Use the extension .txt.

Try it out by accessing a URL which will be of the general form http://www.yourhost.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, with your host and cgi directory. You ought to get your test entry(s) with the default blosxom wrapper.

The default output is somewhat ugly. If you get and unpack blosxom_flavor_sampler.zip, you’ll get some flavor files using the pre-theme system. There are separate files for content_type, head, story, and foot. There are several of each, for different flavors, distinguished by the extension. In blosxom.cgi “html” is the default flavor, and so the settings in the .html flavor files will be used. If you use the url http://yoururlhere/blosxom.cgi/index.1993 you’ll get the spare, minimalist 1993 style, if you use http://yoururlhere/blosxom.cgi/index.index you get the index style, and http://yoururlhere/blosxom.cgi/index.html is the same as the default http://yoururlhere/blosxom.cgi/index. You can also access a single entry with something of the form http://yoururlhere/blosxom.cgi/testentry.1993

There are a few flavors and themes available for download. For the themes you’ll need the theme plugin, which consolidates the required files and makes life easier. Install the theme plugin by setting $theme_dir and $theme_dir_url and put it in your plugin directory. Each theme gets its own subdirectory in the themes directory. Some of the themes can then be tried using the yoururl/blosxom.cgi/index.themename format, but Kozo Avo’s graffiti and iztsu have html, index, and rss variants, and the only way I know to get them to work is to set the $theme_dir as /your/path/here/themes/graffitti (or iztsu) rather than /your/path/here/themes, and use .html, .index, or .rss. Whatever you use will need at least a light editing to set your name and e-mail and favorite links in place of the examples.

You’ll need plugins. Writeback is probably high on your list. (Otherwise why bother with all this software?) You’ll need to set the writeback directory in the writeback plugin, and make sure that the web server will be able to write there. You may need to make it world-writable. The .writeback flavors that come with the package are good enough for testing. Koza Avo’s themes work well with writeback.

I highly recommend entries_index_tagged, which allows you to put the date of creation (or the date you want to use) in the file instead of relying on the file modification time stored by the filesystem. If you upload by FTP the filesystem time will be the time of upload, not the time you edited the file. Storing the time in the file is also much less likely to lead to trouble if you need to move to a different server or restore from backups since the filesystem modification time won’t matter. Follow the installation instructions on the entries_index_tagged web page. The Perl modules will need their own directory named Time in the Perl modules directory you created when you installed the modules plugin. Note that running perldoc on most of the plugins will show some documentation, or you can just examine the plugin file itself for documentation and comments. Once entries_index_tagged is running keep in mind that the dates are cached in .entries_index_tagged.index in your plugins state directory, so if you want to change the date you have to either delete that index file or remove/rename the blog entry, reload the directory through blosxom via your browser, then restore the entry, so a new line will be written in the .index.

If you install the find plugin, you need to create the log file (“queries” in the plugin state directory by default) and give it suitable permissions before it will work.

At this point your blog ought to be functioning and you will hopefully be familiar enough with installing plugins and themes to be able to continue tinkering.

Perhaps I’m just reading the wrong paper and not watching enough TV, but I’m amazed that, so far as I’ve seen, Roy (of Siegfriend & Roy) Horn’s incident with the tiger hasn’t turned into one of those wall to wall live updates all the time media events. Somehow I was thinking that celebrity entertainer mauled by tiger during show would be exactly the kind of thing the “news” media would love to cover at endless length and in obsessive detail.

Jason Rollette Railgun Blog. It is good that they have found an outlet for all that spare time. Which reminds me that one year at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign Engineering Open House a group was showing off their rail gun by shooting little plastic cubes into phone books.

Part of the joy of Amazon.com is the recommendations the computer comes up with. They do make sense, in a way, and could potentially be of use, but since I only go to Amazon to buy what the library doesn’t have and which isn’t readily available from a local book store, the Amazon Recommendation Computer’s database of what interests me is strongly skewed both toward the bizarre and toward the technical, which makes for a fascinating set of recommended books. Among those currently on the list are Home Machinist’s Handbook; Recreational Sex; Creepy Crawly Cuisine, which is described as “an introduction to the world of edible insects, complete with recipes and color photographs”; The Root of All Evil, which is a collection of User Friendly cartoons; and, of course, Jet Engines. If you ever buy Tabletop Machining and the computer tells you that people who bought that book also bought the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, you’ll know who to blame.

I bought the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook in 1999 to give to my brother (as part of our continuing tradition of bizarre gifts), and insect cookbooks continue to make a strong showing in my Amazon.com recommendations to this day. Somewhere there is a computer that apparently still thinks of me primarily as the Eat-A-Bug guy. Sure, I’ve bought books about jet engines and machine tools and sex, but it will never forget the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook.

Handy household tip: If you are planning on emptying the paper shredder and vacuuming the carpets on the same day, your best bet would be to empty the paper shredder first.

Science 15 August 2003 Vol 301 page 934, “Extending the Upper Temperature limit for Life,” Kazem Kashefi and Derek R. Lovley. They cultured a microbe from a hydrothermal vent that can grow at 121°C. They call it “Strain 121,” naturally. This is particularly interesting because 121°C is the temperature in a standard autoclave, which kills all previously described microbes and spores. These things can double in 24 hours under autoclave conditions. Below 85°C they shut down because it is just too darn cold.