Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/28/google-opposes-gay-marriage-ban/
Go go Google!
We do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues . . . however, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
Sergey Brin,
Official Google Blog
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/26/whamoh/
My bank failed this morning. Apparently I am now a customer of JPMorgan Chase.
I had previously bought some stock at $2.10 a share, you know, as a gamble. First time I ever bought stock in an individual company. Well, I lost on that one. No biggie.
I like how amid the financial turmoil, that my bank can fail, and that immediately, I am a customer at some other bank. That’s really swell. We call that “graceful degradation.” Go go FDIC!
Still, I am a little sad. I liked Washington Mutual. Now my bank matches my credit card. Enh.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/14/dear-liberal-friends/
I have always had every intention in the world to vote for Barack Obama. I really wish liberals found him more fascinating than the Republican ticket because while I admire and respect John McCain and Sarah Palin I would just as soon not hear anything more about them. I mean, shut up already! Yeah, the doddering maverick POW, and the folksy ultra-conservative corrupt hockey Mom from Alaska–I know, I get it, I’ve had my fill! Can we go back to talking about the charismatic Christian-not-Muslim black guy and his tell-it-like-it-is sidekick for a change? Hearing about those guys doesn’t irritate the f*ck out of me.
Thanks!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/10/spore/
Will Wright’s latest software toy is out, and while I would be excited over such an ambitious project, I have also been underwhelmed by SimCity 4 and other games of that type in the past several years. There’s also a protest afoot against the game’s copy protection, so it has just over one star on Amazon.com. On a mailing list at work I explained that instead of rushing out to buy the new game, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach:
My interpretation is that it is an intriguing idea, but rather than building an interesting and educational toy, EA smashed it into an over-hyped high-priced bauble aimed at mass-market appeal. You can download the creature creator for free, but instead of being constrained by say, the amount of metabolism your creature would require or how fast it could reproduce given all it attributes, the only trade-off I could find was that if you spend more “money” you can buy more “features” . . .
My approach for now is to boycott the initial sales to see if they come around on the DRM, and wait to hear what other folks think of it, as well as maybe a price drop.
2c,
-danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/08/24/ubuntu-nvidia-video-violet-hue/
This week I upgraded the guts in my desktop. For the video card I jumped up to an ASUS EN9600GT silent graphics card. It is pretty “bleeding edge” as far as Linux goes, and it is a double-wide card with a massive heatsink where others would have a fan. I like to reduce the white noise.
Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh. (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/08/12/chinas-cute-little-girls/
I’m 32 years old, and so I try to behave like a grownup and not get excited over all the injustices of the world. And I try to have a reasoned, diplomatically nuanced outlook on world affairs. When it comes to Chinese politics I understand the tensions between regional independence and national cohesion, the tension between personal freedoms and the scary business of managing a rapidly industrializing nation of 1.2 billion people and limited natural resources . . . I care about what happens in China but I uhm, try to be a properly diplomatic adult and defer to them doing it their way.
But this latest story from the BBC, about something trifling, just makes me wanna smack somebody with a stick. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/07/04/one-nation-indivisible/
“I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.”
Notice anything missing?
Some time in grammar school I figured there was something wrong with an Atheist pledging allegiance “under God” and after some time I came to pause when we would recite those two words. “one nation . . . indivisible.”
Paul Burd asks “do you remember the words to the Pledge of Allegiance?”
I am overly aware of the words. I responded:
I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance no problem. But as a devout Atheist and an honest patriot I skip the Joseph McCarthy “under God” feature because it is sacrilegious to make false professions, and dangerously reckless to claim holy sanction for the State.
So, here’s to Independence from Tyranny and state-sanctioned religion!!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/06/16/depression/
And one more excerpt from Mister Pip which so aptly describes depression:
The only thing I could think to do was to get into bed. And there I stayed.
For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
I listened to the buses change down gear outside the boardinghouse. I listened to the hiss of tires on the wet road. I lay in bed listening to the woman downstairs get ready for work. I listened to her run the shower and the shrill whistle on her kettle. I waited for her footsteps on the path below my window, and as that brief contact with the world departed I shut my eyes and begged the walls to let me go back to sleep.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usually announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.
Lloyd Jones
Mister Pip
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/06/06/gallery-opening-illuminopart/
Thursday I attended an art opening at a gallery called 20 GOTO 10. I learned of the show as I learn of many parties these days–through a friend on Facebook. Most such parties I learn of through one particular friend and it lends me to wonder if she spends her time searching for events on Facebook. (I tried this recently, but the interface is poor.) My working hypothesis is that she networks with a lot of the hipster Web 2.0 crowd and she thereby gets invited to events posted to Facebook. She probably gets more invites than your average Internet groupie because she is a “total babe” but whatever the deal she has lately been responsible for a fair proportion of my going-out / nightlife in San Francisco.
Anyway, yesterday I hit a gallery opening after work because the art in question was technological in nature and because art openings are a good way to score free snacks and wine. I showed up at the start time of 7PM because I didn’t want to romp around so late and because I figured it would be less crowded and possibly more delicious at the early end of the evening.
They needed more time to finish setting up. (In San Francisco everything happens late–it is a cultural thing.) I waited on the sidewalk with a middle-aged Asian man named Mike. He had a scruffy goatee with several meandering strands of beard, many of them white. He said he had recently moved from Bayview which has bad air that irritated his skin and bad neighbors, to the Mission, which suits him better in many ways. The hallmark of a true San Franciscan, he at one point mentioned his cultivation of avocados in Bayview. He said he is an educational technologist. One thing he did was design a widget for the old 8-bit Nintendo that slotted in between the system and the cartridge, and would show you and let you fiddle with the various registers and whatnot so that a curious kid could explore how fiddling with these things affected playing the game. I thought that sounded like an awesome fun thing that would help open the understanding of technology as something we can control to the people for which such appreciation is most important. He seemed proud, but explained that the project never really got anywhere.
There was plenty more time to wait and I think Mike really needed to talk because he continued through stories of himself–geek friends inviting themselves over to his workshop to use his lathe, for example. He said now that he had divested his life of such things as the workshop that he didn’t get visitors so often. He did not tell this story as an appeal to pity but as a simple matter of fact.
“It should be, ‘Hey Mike, I’ll bring a pizza over tonight and then maybe I can use your lathe.'”
“No, they never brought food.”
“Well,” I offered, “geeks do tend to lack in social graces.”
Another story he told was of his efforts to touch up a mural. He strategized things out in Photoshop then, frustrated that the muralist was busy, he went and fixed things himself. “Because I had to look at it every day.” He said that his efforts had been recognized as an excellent job, and that this had softened the attitudes of his neighbors towards him.
He asked if I knew of ephemeral art. I know of Mandelas made of sand and then cast into the wind. He said a large one had been assembled outside of the De Young Museum and while it lasted he took his own steps to preserve the thing — a series of photographs stitched together into a very large image. He wanted to build a tilt-shift lens, and I was pleased that I could ask a question along the lines of “it somehow shifts the lens to get a consistent focus across the depth of field?”
The show opened, and Mike took an SLR digital camera from his bag. It sported a home-made fish-eye lens and he explained that this took round pictures which he wanted. Lenses on the market distorted such optics back to a rectilinear format, which is not what he wanted. He seemed dubious of his ability, however, to fashion a tilt-shift lens.
A crowd of us entered the tiny gallery — fascinating paintings of various repeated geometrical shapes that were set into motion with changing colored lights. Fascinating and wonderful. I squeezed carefully to the back and grabbed a plastic cup of wine and a handful of what I suspect are actually gourmet dog treats. I squeezed my way back through the gallery, really digging the art work, especially two of the more complex works that did a lot of subtle color mixing within layers of geometric shapes — one was quartets of circles within ever larger quartets of circles, and another was circles within faces of stacked cubes.
I finished my nosh and since space was so tight I stowed the empty plastic wine cup in my bag, made my way out the door, where a line of people had formed, and headed home.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/16/heart-rending-report-from-china/
NPR happened to have a couple of reporters in Sichuan when the earthquake hit. The other day I heard this story on NPR. It is a story of one family bringing in an excavator to try and recover people from the rubble. It is very touching and emotionally difficult to listen to. The reporter’s voice is choked up and failing at the end of the twelve minute piece, which concludes with a great deal of heartfelt wailing and people setting off firecrackers for the dead. The government is estimating 50,000 dead. Horrible horrible news. you can read the contents of the NPR story on the reporters’ blog.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/15/do-you-see-a-sign/
As seen on Judah:
Do you see a sign “Leave your
junk here”? No you don’t see
a sign “Leave your junk here.”
Do you know why? Because this
corner is not a junk yard. Try
putting your crap in a garbage
can.
There is a certain practice in San Francisco of people disposing of unwanted stuff by leaving it on the curb. Alas, for stuff that nobody wants, that means crap piling up on sidewalks. Someone expressed their disapproval in the form of an homage to Quentin Tarantino.
I couldn’t agree more.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/02/bottled-water-vs-tea/
Earlier this week Eva posted a summary of the carbon footprint for bottled water:
Curious about the results?
Well, energy use embedded in 1 L drinking water delivered to Berkeley CA are:
Calistoga Water –> 1.0 kWh
Fiji Water –> 1.7 kWh
Aquafina –> 1.4 kWh
EBMUD tap water –> 0.0003 kWh
[BTW, if you leave your MacBook Pro on for 16 hour, that’s about 1kWh…]
Our boundary includes transportation, packaging, end-of-life, pipes, dams, treatment plants, supply…almost everything.
What about raw water? 1 L of drinking water is equivalent to…
Calistoga Water –> 3.9 L raw water
Fiji Water –> 5.1 L raw water
Aquafina –> 5.8 L raw water
EBMUD tap water –> 1.2 L raw water
All the embedded stuff mostly comes from the PET bottle, which we tracked all the way back to petroleum extraction. Don’t drink that crap. THE END.
For the record, “raw water” is in the aquifer. It costs 20% extra to be treated and delivered via tap.
Anyway, the thing with bottled water is convenient hydration. Plus we have it infused with various flavors and fizziness, never mind the sodas . . . anyway, I just went to the company kitchen and passed up the beverage refrigerator for a mug of tea. And I have to wonder at the carbon footprint there. It is probably way way less than a plastic bottle, and while a tea bag can travel quite far, it also weighs much less than a bottle of water, so it is a lot more energy efficient. (How you heat the water could matter a great deal: we have a hot-water dispenser her at work, but at home I burn a lot of natural gas to boil a kettle.)
All I’m saying is, maybe tea can be promoted as a more conscientious and classy hydration alternative to bottled water. It’s tap water, dressed up a bit.
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/29/choose-an-adventure/
“The art of having adventures is simply that of saying, “Wow, that is dang cool!†and then having the courage to let go of all the doubts and the what-ifs long enough to grab hold of the adventure and go, trusting that you’ll be able to solve problems along the way. This is just as true in the creative arts as it is in adventure travel.”
Tien Chiu
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/07/tibets-torch/
I think this Olympic year is a great occasion both to celebrate China as a great nation and also to protest the Chinese government for any number of serious grievances. But . . . I am hearing that pro-Tibet protesters are trying to extinguish the torch in London and Paris.
That is not cool. To me, it makes the protesters sound like a radical fringe group who would rather spoil the party for the entire world, and it makes the implausible anti-Tibetan propaganda from China’s government sound . . . less implausible.
The Dalai Llama’s non-violent approach toward the struggle gains the Tibetans a lot of international credibility. It must be impossibly frustrating for the Tibetan people to struggle against the Chinese occupation. The passions that are driving these folks are understandably extremely powerful, and I’m not surprised at the reaction. But I am disappointed, and I hope they can coordinate to protest the Chinese in a more compelling manner that kindles rather than douses the sympathies of the world’s people.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/03/30/revenge-forgive-forget/
“So you don’t approve of getting even — of taking revenge for something that was done to you?”
“Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.”
“What can you do?”
“Forget,” said Borges. “That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.”
“Does that work?”
“More or less.” He showed his yellow teeth. “Less rather than more.”
Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.
“When I was in Germany just after the war,” he said, “I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me” — now he spoke in German — “‘Well, what do you think of our ruins?’ The Germans like to be pitied — isn’t that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said” — he uttered the sentence in German — “‘I have seen London.'”
Jorge Luis Borges speaking with Paul Theroux
_The Old Patagonian Express_
Revenge has its appeal, but I don’t think it helps. We use the expression “forgive and forget” but the concern is that certain things should not be forgotten. I figure it is better to forget than to have difficulty stuck in your heart. I think I’d say “forgive, if you can, draw a lesson from the memory, and then move on.”
Try to remember the circumstances and what happened, and that you felt a certain pain and whatnot, perhaps with great intensity. The pain itself, the “pain memory” I would leave behind, if you can. We are fools to forget, but we are foolish too to react in the present to pain from the past.
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