I almost just titled this entry "Arrgh!". I just finished the alpha version of my extensively revised and expanded Web site and decided that I had best test it on a couple of other browsers. You see, I had developed it with the extensive use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Safari (Apple's implementation of the KHTML KDE Open Source code). It really looks lovely (if I do say so myself) with Safari on my TiBook.
Unfortunately, Explorer 5.5 doesn't seem to do CSS quite right and so I've got to do some mods before I can launch the site. I've accepted that only 2-3% of the marketplace uses Macs/Safari so I have no choice but to do the additional work. Somehow I had naively assumed that Safari and IE 5.5 and Firebird would have reached some sort of common point of development/type display. Not so. So "Aaaaaarghhhhh!" My Web site will be delayed a day or two until I manage to munge the code.
But it will look nice when its done.
Ok, it's silly. But I've got to admit I really enjoy the Bond movies. Not all of them, mind you, but quite a few. Spike TV is showing a marathon over the Christmas holiday of most of the films. The first four (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball) are just fabulous. Especially in the uncut versions. I've never realized how much they were butchered by the networks in the TV releases (being way to young to see them first in the cinema).
With the advent of DVDs we can see everything the networks thought we were too delicate to view. Some scenes that are cut just make little sense in today's world. They seem most often to cut the pre-title scenes (a couple of minutes in most cases) and some of the more brutal violence. There are a couple of scenes in the earlier films where Bond kills someone in a very cold-blooded fashion. These just disappeared from the network broadcasts, making him seem a bit of a milksop compared to the character in Ian Fleming's books.
It feels like Brosnan has brought a bit of spine back to the role of Bond, and I've got to applaud the screenwriters for their contributions to this rennaissance. I do wish that they would cut down a bit on the high-tech gadgetry and concentrate more on the plot and character development, but I think that ever since the films got the "blockbuster" label we've been condemned to ever bigger budgets and ever more outlandish plots.
I've read all the original books and as the series of movies was extended their relationship to the books got weaker and weaker. In the late '60s they seemed to have lost the plot entirely (I think Lazenby's Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the last one close to the books).
No matter.. it's not as if Ian Fleming is around to write any more books. They remain pure escapism and we can do with more of that these days.
Feeling differently the difference between oneself and others, bearing ill will and falling out with people—these things come from a heart that lacks compassion. If one wraps up everything with a heart of compassion, there will be no coming into conflict with people.
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
I just don't believe that the press hasn't cottoned on to how far advanced this Mad Cow problem (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is in the US. The scientific community has believed for years that the problem was far more advanced than the Department of Agriculture or the press has reported.
The issue at hand is that the progress of the disease can take four or five years to actually show up in a cow. So, since the American meat industry routinely slaughters cows at two to three years, we don't see the disease manifested. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. There have been reports that it may be passed on genetically too, so new generations have the disease but again we don't see it.
We have most likely had the disease in this country ever since some bright bulb thought of "enriching" the feed given to their cattle with ground-up cattle brains and spinal tissue. That our meat supply has been declared "safe" is just another big lie that we've been fed (so to speak).
Now, I'm not going to stop eating beef but I think it's the height of idiocy to suggest that most of us red-meat-eating, Atkins-loving citizens haven't been threatened by this for years.
Of course, I type quite well (+100 words/minute) by virtue of tons of practice, on a daily basis. But I was writing Christmas cards (not "non-denominational holiday season cards") the other day and was trying to figure out just why my handwriting had gotten so poor. I finally figured out that I was just very impatient - I could no longer write at a speed that could keep up with my internal narrative. Nor do I really wish to, frankly. I almost equate typing quickly with thinking quickly. So what does this mean for the future? I guess my memoirs will have to be typed - but then I risk losing everything in some sort of catastrophic accident. What I need is some sort of non-volatile storage medium - like paper! Guess I'll just have to be resigned to my handwriting getting worse and worse until my thinking slows to match.
Just like that, I have the GIMP running. It's a pretty darn good substitute for Adobe Photoshop, doing just about everything I need. Courtesy of the OS X GNU Web site which provides nice Apple Installer packages of open source software. I found the reference to where to find it browsing through the very useful 50 Fast Mac OS X Techniques at Barnes & Noble yesterday. While I'm pretty conversant with Linux, I'm much less so with OS X and BSD so this book looks like a really good acquistion. Next up, getting this blog to list my current iTunes selection (which is not complicated, just involved).
So here I am, sitting in the customer area of my local (only one in 60 miles) Infiniti dealership, logging on to their WAP. How cool is that? Never expected that the Total Ownership Experience® would include "free" wireless access at the dealership. Of course, free is in quotes 'cause the labour rates are sky-high as with all dealerships.
But I've been relatively satisfied with the quality of their work here (the service is certainly great). I get a free carwash and vaccuum while the car is being serviced. I'm in for an oil change (Mobil 1) which I try to do religiously at the correct intervals. I've learned an awful lot about oil and maintenance over the
last few years. Part of it was survival - in more than one sense of the word. I used to race motorcycles around asphalt tracks (GP-style, not dirt tracks). Survival depended on lots of thngs - skill, bike prep, bike maintenance, engine survival. Hence the awareness of the different kind of oils and how they are important for your engine's health. I read recently of a Mobil 1/BMW study where they ran a BMW for a million miles using Mobil 1 and then took the motor apart and found it still within factory spec. Pretty damn awesome. Quite a vindication of using synthetic vs. dinosaur oil. I've taken apart enough bike engines to see the difference first-hand. When you spent ten grand building a motor, the last thing you want to do is to cheap out on oil and risk the investment.
When I first bought the car (used) about two years ago, I replaced all the fluids (transmission, rear differential, brake, steering, engine oil) with Mobil 1 synthetics. So far I've got nearly 158,000 miles on my Q45 and it's still idly nearly perfectly smooth.
Right now, I'm crossing my fingers 'cause I really don't want any major car expenses (I'm dealing with taking those mercury fillings out of my mouth and that is damn expensive) so I'm making sure that I do preventative maintenance on the car.
Maybe that's a metaphor for life (obligatory blogging moment)? We shouldn't cheap out on the preventative maintenance of our selves either. Take that vacation, spent time with the kids, read a good book. But keep life in balance and get to know yourself.
I am weak. After four or five days fighting with getting Fink and X11 to work with my Powerbook, I broke down and installed VirtualPC. I hadn't tried to use the product since its very early days (like four or five years ago at least) and wasn't expecting much. I was stunned when I was able to install my Windows98SE OS from CD and it actually ran. Whether or not it will crash as frequently as Windows does I don't yet know. But this has saved me from the stress of getting Fink working RIGHT NOW when I just want to do some design and HTML work. Now I've got a stopgap - though I've promised myself to only run native OS X software in the long run. Part of it is a cost issue - isn't that always the case with a migration? I have tons of tools and legitimate software for use with Windows, and I'm not looking forward to spending a ton of money duplicating that tool set under Mac OS X. I'm pretty confident that I can get Fink working as soon as I have a new copy of the Developer Tools disk (arriving today I think) but in the mean time I'll just hack along using VirtualPC (and feeling guilty all the time).
I've always found the Samurai and their culture to be fascinating. Very uncompromising on one hand (almost unimaginably so to the Western mind), and yet diverse. A complete samurai needed to be not only competent with weapons and conversant with the theory of warfare, but also had to be proficient in the tea ceremony, matters of protocol, calligraphy, flower arranging, and a host of non-martial activities.
I was reminded of some of this yesterday went I went to see The Last Samurai.
Quite an entertaining movie, even if it did take liberties with history. (The samurai certainly weren't anywhere near as benevolent toward the peasants who provided them with rice and money as the movie portrays.) But I suppose the movie-going public would have found it hard to "identify" with them if they were portrayed as exploiters of down-trodden peasants.
There are numerous accounts of them using peasants necks to test the quality of their swords and after the founding of the Shogunate the relationship with the peasantry became pure out and out exploitation rather than the feudal relationship it had been for centuries.
I've got both Miyamoto Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings" and Yamamoto Tsunetome's "The Hagakure" on my Palm and am working my way through Hagakure. Fascinating stuff. Jim Jarmusch quoted Hagakure quite a few times in his movie "Ghost Dog". While BOFR is more about how to develop the necessary attitudes to win a sword fight (and survive in the war-torn Japan of the 16th century), Hagakure is more about the philosophy of what it means to be a samurai. Sort of a textbook of how a proper Samurai should behave and even how he should think.
Would that our lives were so simple that we could pick up an instruction manual. But then they would probably have to be just as uncompromising as that of the Samurai.
I am the proud owner of a new Titanium G4 Powerbook. My folks just bought it for me as a grand birthday present. I had been whinging about my old Sony 505F laptop for months. A very light laptop (about 2.5 lbs) but unfortunately woefully underpowered for the uses I have been putting it to. I've maxed the RAM and replaced the hard disk but it still grinds a bit when I run it under Linux (Knoppix).
I have been a Linux user since about 1994 (when I first used Slackware to run my Webserver). It came easily since I had used Unix since 1979, and I found the transition very easy. I've always used Linux for my servers and only recently gave any thought to using it on a desktop.
I've got several systems at home and had pretty much given up on the Macs 'cause the System 7/8/9 thing had gotten really old. Just way too crufty and really showing its age. My home systems tend to be PCs I've built and they either run Linux (Mandrake, Knoppix, occasionally Red Hat) or Microsoft Win98SE (can't stand Win2k). When I read that OS X was based on a Unix fork, and I could use most of what I knew about Linux, I had to check it out.
Apple has managed a really tight integration of the graphical environment with the underlying BSD-derived OS. Perhaps a little too tight for the hacker in me (as I am still learning where everything is and how to control it). But it does what it was designed for admirably well. They have really taken the concept of Linux/Unix/BSD to the desktop very, very well. If either the Gnome or KDE projects reach this level of sophistication, Microsoft's days will be numbered as a purveyor of operating systems.
Of course, there are teething pains. I need a basic set of apps to be able to do my work. I have the MS suite of Office on the laptop, but I need project management software and a good IDE for D/HTML and a good graphics manipulation program. So I've been struggling with getting Fink and X11 running under OS X so that I can take advantage of all that free software (like the GIMP and Mr. Project). More on this later after I update to Panther and get it all running. I think I'll have to write a HOWTO for others who want to do the same thing.
I can finally be happy buying Apple hardware again. I can only hope their market share rises to match the quality of their efforts.
No, not football American-style.
No.. the football that the rest of the world plays. I first became addicted when I spent a few weeks in the summer of 1990 watching the World Cup (the fabulous one in Italy). I was in the Cayman Islands visiting my uncle and his family and he had this HUGE satellite in the back yard that got every channel available. He is a soccer fanatic and was a big fan of the way Cameroon played (they had a fabulous run that year) and so we must have watched a dozen games. When I came back to the States there wasn't much opportunity to watch (no satellite, no Fox Sports World) so I had to wait until 1994 to watch real soccer again. I went to four games, including the quarter-final match between the US and Brazil on July 4th.
The US didn't play that well, but their future success (as well as their failures) in Japan 2002 was foreshadowed in the way that they pushed the ball up the pitch with great energy. Pace and aggressiveness made up for talent and they gave the Brazilians a run for their money (it wasn't until the 74th minute that the Brazilians scored the winning goal).
So I've watched four World Cups now and every time I watch more of the games. Last year in France, I caught every game of the England team (I follow them as I am a British subject) and got caught up in the French enthusiasm for the Senegalese when their own French team failed to get out of the pool round.
Notable was that the American team was probably the fittest in the tournament. Again, they made up for a dearth of talent (with a couple of notable exceptions like McBride, Reyna, and O'Brien) with incredible fitness and commitment. If they can gain the skill to go with the fitness I could see them doing even better in years to come. Of course, they need to get some new defenders. They were painfully slow when viewed on the international stage.
Unfortunately, we in America don't have a soccer culture. Just a football one.
So do we count the caveman as the first blogger? Were her drawings on a cave wall a way to express herself or an attempt to invoke magic in the hunt or a diary/instruction manual for future generations to read? Perhaps all of these things.
I was trying to think who was the first "blogger" - shouldn't we just say diarist because the medium isn't very important - that we have some knowledge of. I think it's got to pre-date the invention of paper/papyrus (did this happen simultaneously in China and Sumeria?). The first diarists probably wrote on stone in a place protected from the weather.
Famous diarists that come to mind would be James Boswell, and Samuel Pepys. Sometimes I think that my education has been stunted that more names don't come to mind immediately.
I don't suppose that one can count Yamamoto Tsunetomo or Miyamoto Musashi amongst the ranks of diarists though it would be tempting. I think they wrote more for posterity and to enrich future generations rather than chronicling their times and experiences in a daily manner.
My first experiences were on paper (yes, pre-dating the Web). My first writing for the Web was my diary (complete with pictures!) of my first trip back to Europe in 1993. My second trip back to Europe (more of an attempt to live there for a protracted period) is less-well diarized. Incomplete, oddly enough, because when I first arrived I had no television in my apartment and so I spent a good deal of time writing of my adventure. (Does this mean that the television foreshadows a reduction in creativity?) This time, it's a more contemporaneous record as I had access to a laptop, a digital camera, and an Internet connection during my trip to France. Unfortunately, it's a record of really only the first month and I don't think it'll ever progress beyond that (though I have quite a few pictures I can add beyond that first month).
During my first visit, I was working at Apple (Taligent) documenting the development of the kernel of Pink (Apple's abortive attempt to develop the precursor to OS X). So I wrote in a proper diary and took pictures on film (gasp!) and scanned them all on my return to create my first attempt at a blog.
I suppose I could lay claim to being one of the first bloggers as I started writing on the Web in late 1993, early 1994. Of course, there has been a huge gap since :>.
Well, I've got to pity those few of you who have to try and configure this Movable Type software just using the "installation instructions" (and I use that term loosely). What a crock! I've wasted a good six hours getting the damn blog configured properly and it should have taken less than an hour.
It's not terribly complicated if the manual was just clearer. I could write a better installation guide in my sleep. In fact, I think I'm going to tackle the task and offer it up to fellow bloggers (can I use that term since I'm not even convinced I'm going to continue using this forum?). Well, it's worth doing just to reduce the entropy in the universe.
At least I've gotten to watch "Battlestar Galatica" twice while doing the install...