Garden Of Blog

Stevie Wonder’s 1984 “Don’t Drive Drunk” (from the Woman in Red Soundtrack) in about the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard. And yet, the funk makes me forget myself at moments. The funniest part is the chorus “Mothers Against Drunk Driving Are Mad”. For some reason repeating a chorus like that begs irony. He sings it like a hundred times.

“Don’t Drive Drunk”:

He and his wife have had problems
That he’s played off like nothing’s wrong
‘Til he comes home from work early
Just to find the girl is gone
Oh but he gets into the cupboard
Picks out that bottle of gin
Drinks like there’s no tomorrow
And decides to take a spin

No don’t drive drunk
Don’t drive drunk, no
Don’t drive drunk
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers are mad

etc…

And while my Stevie Wonder obsession is spinning out of control like a drunkass driver, so is the fate of Planet Earth. The Los Alamos National Labratory is in danger of falling under private management. Well… public management, if you consider any commercial company that has “gone public” on Wall Street to be an organization of public character. Ahem. The University of California is getting spanked for recent security gaffs, but we know what’s going on. Los Alamos, out of the hands of Academia, could be *much* more useful… (evil laughter from the White House basement…)

The University of Texas is also in the running against Lockheed Martin, but U Texas? The whole thing just seems odd. Aren’t there a few more rich schools that would like to compete against private interests for control of the laboratory that is the incubator of our future (or lack thereof)?

Los Alamos run by Lockheed Martin. Talk about putting Stevie Wonder behind the wheel of the public interest. (sorry Stevie…)

Check out what Wil Wheaton is doing these days.

Wil is a couple years older than I am. He was married in 1999, like I was. He is a Leo, like me. He blogs.

Unlike yours truly, he has always had a winning and sincere smile.

:-S

Here’s a quote from Wil Wheaton on politics and social issues:

My tendencies on this … range from: “I give to liberal causes. I march for gay rights. I’m a card carrying member of the ACLU. Keep abortion safe and legal.”, to: “Legalize drugs! Abolish the government. Fuck the draft!

I like books as much as the next guy, and have even been known to read them on occassion. I have supported many professional writers over the years by buying their printed work. So I can understand how, when livelihoods are threatened by a copyright-unfriendly internet, intellectual property concerns emerge.

But seriously, people. It’s over. I hope that doesn’t sound cold. But it’s getting painful to watch as you kick and scream long into the 21st century about this new technology. The medium is the message. Watch closely, lest the pixels dissolve before your eyes. It’s over.

I know it’s not fair. You know what your mom told you about fairness in life. And I’ll bet she didn’t charge you for the advice. Words and sounds will continue to have great value, but on a different exchange. Don’t always expect money, henceforth. Your work will pass from peer to peer to peer. Isn’t that an honour, at least?

Hardcopy is dead. The trees applaud.

If I had a crystal ball, I’d tell you more. Instead, all I have is this liquid crystal display. Want to know the future?

Watch the screen.

Behold the amazing career of Stevie Wonder, including a new album released in 2005.

I’ve been grabbing a lot of the 60s and 70s stuff. Check out “Smile Please” off of the 1974 album Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Yes!

By the way, if MySQL Query Browser drives you up a wall by bombing out, try SQLyog for Windows. Sure, I could have painstakingly typed out the proper SQL for the ALTER TABLE I was attempting, but that would have been almost like work.

Before starting my new job at the University of New Hampshire, I was asked what sort of laptop I preferred: a Dell or a Mac. I’d been out of the Mac world for almost 10 years, but now that the OS X operating system (UNIX-based) has had time to mature, I decided to take a chance on Apple again.

So far so good. The new 10.4 version of OS X (”Tiger”) was released just a couple of weeks before I started, and my new Powerbook came with it. I was pleased to find perl ready to go, as well as Apache… thank you Ma’am. Or should I say, thank you, Steve.

Installing MySQL on the Mac was a cinch. MySQL AB even offers a slick package installer for OS X.

I like to have (secure) access to my database server from just about anywhere… today I wanted access from a Windows machine. SSH Port Forwarding using PUTTY got the job done (yes, OS X came with ssh onboard so this required no additional server config). Very easy. Now I can run MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser from the Windows box. Looks like I’m almost ready to develop.

I found a rather sexy news aggregator program called FeedDemon, but apparently it’s only going to work for 20 days. It’s $29.95 sexy. I’ll stick with SharpReader for now.

Still, it seems to me that some variety of news program is the browser of the near future, which is evident in the fact most aggregators have integrated browsers. Here are more news programs for Windows users.

The happy fact of trying out different programs is that there is an easy, standard method of exporting your favorite feeds from one program and importing them to another. Just save your feeds in OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) format and open the *.opml file in the aggregator of your choice. Presto.

I was also delighted to see that craigslist.org is offering RSS feeds. Stop, drop and roll… RSS is on fire.

What a headache.

In an earlier post I mentioned some crucial documentation I had been missing. Since then I found another fundamental RFC addressing similar issues in formatting emails with embedded images or other objects in addition to a plain text or HTML message.

Here they are:

RFC 2392 - Content-ID and Message-ID Uniform Resource Locators
RFC 2557 - MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)

If you want to ship, and refer to, image files or otherwise along with your email messages in your application, keep these resources in mind. I found I was hanging the Mail::Sendmail module when I wasn’t formatting the messages correctly, especially in regards to the “boundaries” betwixt message parts. Details count. Since I wasn’t even receiving the emails at all to debug, I had to dump the message bodies into a text file to see what was the matter. No joy for me today.

Back when I was tearing through his novels, I never realized Kurt Vonnegut had published volumes of nonfiction. There are two, to my knowledge: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) and Palm Sunday (1981, an autobiography… sort of). The only novel I saved for myself is the one Vonnegut apparently claims is his last, Time Quake. I guess Kurt is mostly drawing these days, at the age of 82.

What is apparent in Vonnegut’s nonfiction— even moreso, if possible, than it is in his fiction— is his politics. A relatively recent interview will give you the idea (his pen, or tongue, is still in fine, biting form, when he whips it out). Wampeters… in particular contains some whithering attacks on war itself, and the society that let it happen, in the Vietnam era. To me, Vonnegut is another example of how superior intelligence always arrives at the same general conclusions, when pressed. He is one of the premier geniuses of our time and a voice for the ages.

And so on.

This spring, instead of watching the bulbs push up, I got proactive and screwed them in. I don’t know why it had taken me this long to discover energy saving lightbulbs. But now that I’m paying 75% less to light my home, I’m never going back!

I should never have mentioned my senior thesis without linking to The Diggers.

Thanks for making my history a part of yours, guys. It is an honour.

Marcus

As a theatre major and counterculture buff in college, I fashioned my senior thesis to tie the two. This was definitely a case where I went searching for evidence to back up my fantasy. Luckily, the thesis turned out to be correct, and the paper wrote itself. I am sure that if the thesis had been upsupportable, I would have mysteriously developed writer’s block.

I suspect writer’s block occurs for the same reasons in all genres. The fiction writer may sense, in his unconscious, that he is lying, or at least bending the truth too much, in characterization (like, in Wonder Boys, when James tells too tall a tale about his childhood to Grady at the Warshaws’ house).

Less than being morally averse to the disingenuine, the writer fears the day he is exposed as a quack by an auditorium of indignant colleagues. So he freezes. Cannot write a word. No 1920s typewriter nor present day PC could produce the romance or convenience necessary for this pitiable author to realize yet one more paragraph. He is trying to write a falsehood.

All of which is a roundabout way for me to introduce a book, which is really a thesis, recently reviewed on Slashdot. What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry has a similarly long and proclamatory title as my own senior thesis. I have heard whisperings (from the late Timothy Leary among other dignitaries) of the hippie-computer connection, but this looks like the best attempt yet to show how the most mindblowing technical advances of our time actually sprung from good old California Dreamin’.

The recounting of any history is by nature anecdotal. You can never really prove anything. All you can do is tell a story. But by virtue of not having writer’s block, you at least know that your subconscious mind senses truth. So we have this book, What The Dormouse Said. Feed your head.