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August 2nd, 2007
09:29 pm - anothing nice Corvair video
This is typical of the extremely low regard that most people had for Corvairs in the 1970s. "There ain't no lower class than Tennessee trash..."
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June 17th, 2007
January 16th, 2007
07:35 pm
My favorite Hungarian rap group, Belga, has a new album out; I can't wait to get it next time I'm in Hungary. I found this video on YouTube: Zsolti a Béka. It's the title track for the second CD in their latest double-album, Belga 3.
All of Belga's songs are deliberate and totally hilarious parodies of the hip-hop genre, but are so meticulous in their craft that they fool a lot of people. As Kurt Vonnegut says, "Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be." This one pretends to be in the "gangsta rap" genre specifically. See if you can make sense of the video, with the following hints for context:
- "Béka" is Hungarian for Frog, and "Zsolt" is a common Hungarian first name, with "Zsolti" as a diminutive form.
- "Brek-Brek," "Brek-e-ke", or the diminutive "Breki" are what frogs say in Hungarian nursery rhymes, where in English they would say Ribbit.
- The symbol of the group is an e with two dots on it, which is kind of bizarre as it's not at all a valid Hungarian letter. It's used in the spelling of the group's name; otherwise, "Belga" means "Belgian" in Hungarian. Watch for two appearances of the special "e" in the video.
- The group has four members, three of whom do the vocals, and they all wear sunglasses and wool hats in their other videos, which are usually live-action.
Enjoy!
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November 9th, 2006
12:02 am - FAQ: why eVite is the suck
For about five or six years I have sent out countless party invitations via eVite, but I am officially done with eVite forever. I sent my latest invitation from my Gmail account, and added a p.s.: "eVite is the suck." In response, many people have asked why I think so.
I initially found eVite useful and valuable, but with experience, my disdain for the site has grown steadily and enormously, much like a glacier at the onset of an ice age. Its interface is slow, confusing, and hard to navigate. It has persistent bugs and very obtrusive ads. It greedily encourages all guests to register. It's very unpredictable when dealing with changes to guest lists and copying invitations, often ignoring your actions entirely, which leads to all sorts of social blunders. That's if you're lucky and realize that a guest list change is needed; often, you don't, since it stores all your contacts separately from wherever else you may keep them, making it fairly difficult to systematically keep guests' contact info up to date.
But wait, there's more. Whenever you try to use it to contact an individual guest, it funnels the communication into its own feature-poor messaging system, so that when they reply, you get an email telling you that you have a message waiting for you within the site's own ultra-clunky mailbox, rather than just getting a real email directly from that person. This email wheel-reinvention is a particularly common obsession of third-rate web services -- anything to up that stickyness metric.
That's just the short list, from memory; I'm sure I could find more problems if I sat down with it for a few minutes. The ensuing nausea would outweigh the pedagogical value, though: in other words, you get the picture.
Before Gmail, eVite's main value for me was to keep track of RSVPs and set up groups of people to invite. However, Gmail lets me set up and maintain distribution groups easily, and the conversation-based organization means that all RSVPs are conveniently centralized (unless someone changes the subject line, which is common). eVite has some other benefits, such as polling support and off-the-shelf invitation designs, but nothing that a little creativity can't replace.
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October 2nd, 2006
09:45 pm - artful intersections
What a nice idea! A friend of mine was involved in the Squire Park project mentioned at the bottom of this article. You should drive to these intersections and have a look -- they're really amazing.
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September 28th, 2006
September 21st, 2006
August 30th, 2006
09:07 pm
The city of Tucson, Arizona has a long and rich history. It's the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement in North America. However, 95% of the current city was actually built after World War II; before then, life in the Sonoran Desert was generally impractical, as air conditioning wasn't widely available. Most of this development has consisted of scattered, sprawling, low-density subdivisions. Urban Tucson is only a small speck in a sea of suburbia.
A large proportion of Tucson's residents are Spanish-speaking. Indeed, Tucson was part of Mexico until the United States purchased the area in 1853, an event known as the Gadsden Purchase. It's not surprising, then, that many of the streets have Spanish names. Instead of Road, Way, Street, or Place, you will often see Camino, Via, Calle, or Placita.
What is a bit surprising, though, is that some of the oddest and most elaborate Spanish street names are in some of the most affluent and least Spanish-speaking districts. Many of the gringo newcomers who bought up the brand-new suburban villas in this boom town for retirees could barely pronounce their own addresses, and would never bother to learn their translations. It was effective marketing: another way to sell the exotic glamour of the locale, another building material to complement the adobe, the stucco, the red roofing tiles, and the Spanish fountains. Yes folks, this was paraiso verdadero. Marca registrada, baby.
So, imagine that you're planning a new community for clueless English speakers, and you have the task of picking exotic-sounding Spanish names for the streets. What would you pick?
My hands-down favorite example is the relatively recent subdivision called Rancho Sin Vacas. That means Ranch Without Cows. It was indeed a ranch that was purchased, stripped of cows, and then subdivided. It's a gated community, as the newer, expensive subdivisions usually are, and the distressed-iron, faux-rust-colored gates at the entrance have a pair of cow-head-shaped logos on them. Each of these symbolic cows has a circle around it and a line through it. No cows. Rancho Sin Vacas.
The main drag through Rancho Sin Vacas is, predictably, Camino Sin Vacas. Motorists there can breath easy, knowing that it's a Road Without Cows. Without fail, every last street in the subdivision is called Road/Place/Way/Street Without Something Else. There's Placita Sin Mentiras, Calle Sin Controversia, Calle Sin Problemas, Calle Sin Condena, Calle Sin Celo, Calle Sin Pecado, Placita Sin Codicia, Calle Sin Envida, Calle Sin Desengano, and Calle Sin Ruido. Isn't it grand to live on a street without lies, controversy, problems, condemnation, zeal, sin, greed, envy, disappointment, or noise? I am not making this up.
Another one of my favorites is the Skyline Bel Aire Estates, dating from the mid-sixties. There are lots of nice streets there: Camino Esplendora, Camino de Santa Valera, Camino Arizpe, Camino Almonte, and Camino La Brinca, to name a few. The oddest Camino, though, is Camino Del Hombre Del Oro. I don't know if Mr. Goldman was the owner of the development company, the CEO of the financing company, or what, but apparently he felt like leaving a mark. Camino Del Hombre Del Oro -- Road Of The Man Of Gold!
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July 1st, 2006
October 10th, 2005
12:28 am
Wikipedia articles of the day: biodiesel and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
It's notable that thirty years ago, with retail gasoline prices at (by today's standards) extremely low levels, many 'experts' were predicting that within thirty years, the world would be out of exploitable oil reserves. What they failed to account for, of course, was that as reserves were depleted, the price of oil increased, making more expensive exploration, extraction, and transportation options viable, and creating a natural incentive for research and capital expenditure. As a result, we once again have about thirty years of oil reserves left.
While this may seem encouraging, it does not mean that we will never run out of oil. As we've often seen, new technologies and initiatives for oil exploitation can have high political and environmental (that is, ultimately: human) costs. And, of course, prices will keep rising; just as the practicality of extraction continues to increase, the practicality of consumption will continue to decline.
The large recent rise in oil prices has put Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a chemical process that turns coal into diesel or jet fuel, well above its economic break-even point. Ever wonder how Nazi Germany was able to fuel its forces in World War II without any oil in continental Europe and without any reliable oil imports, or how apartheid South Africa powered its cars during the 1980s, when most of the world refused to trade with them? There are some moves underway to start making fuel this way in Montana, China, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, there are serious concerns about the environmental impact.
Likewise, biodiesel may be starting to catch on. While coal is plentiful, vegetable oil is renewable. Unfortunately, a large increase in the amount of land under cultivation poses very serious environmental problems of its own.
Our society has often shown itself willing to tolerate manageable economic losses in exchange for large environmental gains, especially when the environmental gains are visible and direct. I'm afraid that we may not be so lucky when it comes to passing up economically viable substitutes for foreign oil.
All of this reminded me of the 1979 Jerry Reed song (Who Was The Man Who Put) The Line in Gasoline. Looking around on the web, it seems to be out of print (to put it mildly).
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October 5th, 2005
10:33 pm - the visit
The drive home from dinner this evening took me past the apartment where the nice people lived that bought my first car. It's been two years since I sold her, and I've been on that route before, but this was the first time that I knew that I needed to stop.
My first car was a 1985 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer. I could write volumes and volumes about this car, how she worked, what she felt like, what was awful about her and what I loved. I should know; my mom bought her new, not long after I had turned eight. She taught me to drive, her THM-700R4 clunking violently in my first parallel-park at fast idle. My mom gave the Blazer to me when I turned sixteen. The Blazer was my baby; with my own hands I kept her in tip-top shape, learning all about working on cars, preparing for much thicker plots. She was always loyal, never made me walk home. We went on road trips, rode ferries, hauled canoes. We bounced down rutty, rocky, primitive dirt paths, meandered down lonely desert highways, and got stuck in snow. We hauled greasy parts, journeyed into eerie junk yards, played host to hungry pack rats. We played host to girls, too. Their heartfelt kisses, their bitter tears, and their carefree feet feeling the lowered-window breeze at the end of long, smooth legs.
She was stolen and recovered, broken into and repaired, disassembled and brought back to life, time and again. So she was resurrected again tonight, history made real once again. I stopped by the apartment complex, and there she was, quiet, lucid, magical. The nice, loving young couple must have been home, but it was not them that I was visiting. Same license plate, same Frost White, same in every detail. Not damaged, not aged; just as worn, shiny, and beautiful as I had left her. Neatly parallel parked. Washed. Loved. Cargo visible in the back, remnants of a rope tied to the roof rack. Working, used, useful. My labor, my care, my memories sitting there, a ghost. A dream.
I felt a strange joy, an uncomfortable joy. I did not linger. I turned around and pulled back out onto the road. Rode on home in fuel-injected, power-memory-heated, digitally-networked, cruise-controlled, silver-and-leather German efficiency.
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November 14th, 2004
08:46 pm
I had some scallions left over from the cashew chicken stir fry that I cooked tonight, so I improvised a simple salmon salad.
Ingredients
- The white part of a few scallions (aka "green onions" if you're not a food snob)
- One apple
- 15 oz can of pink salmon
- serve with French bread (aka "Freedom Bread" if you're pro-Bush)
1. Chop the apple into small squares and remove the seeds and stem. Finely dice the pieces, but don't make applesauce. I used a blender.
2. Drain all the liquid from the can of salmon and discard the liquid.
3. Chop the scallions into fine bits.
4. Combine the salmon and the apple bits. Add the scallions sparingly, to taste. I'd say about a fourth of the white part of a big bunch or half the white part of a small bunch. I want to try this with tuna as well; might be a good, healthier alternative to the mayonnaise-laced travesty that is your average tuna salad.
Current Music: All Blues on KPLU radio
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November 10th, 2004
10:54 pm
www.blueeyesmagazine.com
Some very interesting photography. Striking images of how much passion the election stirred up.
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October 18th, 2004
10:32 pm
Photos from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tyrven's birthday party Friday night.
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August 16th, 2004
09:58 pm
The 'digital lifestyle' is easily a full-time job. I don't have time for this shit!
Digital photography. Blogs. The Web. It's all so wonderful, so useful, so fun.
I gave up TV all those years ago in pursuit of freedom and simplicity. I just said no to the crack that keeps the masses entertained, controlled. So too have many of the free-thinkers of my generation. But we have turned instead to a new galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. A galaxy of creativity and learning that keeps us intellectually engaged, with more channels of instantly-gratifying self-actualization than we can possibly consume.
I, and others like me, haven't broken free. We've just hopped up a level of indirection. Filming our own shows.
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May 26th, 2004
09:49 pm - surprise!
My, what tangled webs we weave. It all started last week when my 2002 Volkswagen Jetta Wagon's odometer hit 30,000 miles. Time for an oil change, brake inspection, and tire rotation. I've bled the brakes on this car before, but that's it; the 20,000 mile service was due when I bought it, and I had it done at the dealer because I also needed warranty work done. These are very simple tasks, and I enjoy doing my own maintenance, so why not give it a whirl?
Surprises in the past seven days:
- Surprise: the lifting points on this type of car are so flimsy that you can't believe a floor jack and jackstands won't damage them.
- Surprise: a company in California makes cushions to go on your floor jack and jackstands, just for the purpose of lifting a car by a pinch weld. Just one of several strategies covered in the invaluable vwvortex discussion forums.
- Surprise: UPS ground from California to Seattle can take six calendar days if you time your order just right.
- Surprise: the floor jack cushion you waited six days for is of a size that does not match any floor jack known to exist.
- The wrong-sized floor jack cushion will sort of work with a floor jack whose pad is too big, but not at all with a floor jack whose pad is too small. Surprise: your floor jack's pad is too small.
- You get a real, a.k.a big, floor jack; it's good to have anyway. Surprise: despite the floor jack cushion and jackstand cushions, lifting the car will still mangle the sheet metal at one of the designated lifting points on your car. You'll deal with it later, but you'd be surprised if this can't be repaired with a quick welding job.
- The torque specification for the lug nuts attaching the wheels to the car is the metric equivalent of 89 pounds-feet. Surprise: your biggest torque wrench reads up to 75 pounds-feet. Time for a new torque wrench.
- The rear wheels mount to a thick flange on the spindle. Surprise: the wheel is tight on the flange, so it corrodes to the wheel and requires pounding and rocking back and forth to break free.
- The front wheels mount to a thin flange on the spindle. The wheel is loose on the flange, so it's easy to remove. The wheel appears to be held in place when you're installing it, but surprise: it falls right off and hits something if you let go for a second.
- The service manual shows an exploded view of the engine oil pan, showing the drain plug. Surprise: it does not show where in the oil pan the drain plug screws in.
- There are a half dozen bolts attaching to the oil pan that are not the drain plug but look similar. Surprise: the drain plug is in a recessed cavity, hidden from view.
- The service manual tells you to use an oil filter wrench to remove the oil filter housing, which contains the oil filter element. Oil filter wrenches of the good, band-style type come in exactly two sizes. You own the wrong size.
- You don't realize that you own the wrong size oil filter wrench until you've already drained your oil and it's 8:58 pm. All the stores that sell oil filter wrenches close at 9:00 pm.
- The next day, you buy the right size oil filter wrench. It fits your car's oil filter housing, but there's no space surrounding the housing to turn the wrench.
- Surprise: you don't actually need an oil filter wrench at all, because there's a 36 mm hexagonal ridge cast into the bottom of the housing.
- Your biggest, baddest, oh-my-god-that's-a-huge-tool box-end wrench is 1 mm too small to fit around a 36 mm hexagon. Your biggest hex socket is even smaller.
- Your adjustable wrench fits the 36 mm hexagon, if you can call anything an adjustable wrench does "fitting." Now that you've managed to remove the oil filter housing, you can clearly see that the element inside is of a completely different type than the replacement element that the auto parts store sold you.
- You realize that the auto parts store sold you the wrong element at 9:01 pm. The last place that sells oil filter elements closes at 9:00 pm.
What can I say... life might get a little dull without all these surprises! :)
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February 9th, 2004
06:27 pm - Dave Winer doesn't get it.
Saw a talk today by Dave Winer, a guy with a long and distinguished history in computing who currently works as a blogging visionary -- no joke, Harvard pays him to be one. His vision of blogging revolves around (1) grass-roots competition to major news sources and (2) information sharing within an organization.
LiveJournal doesn't really fit into either of these categories. Blogging, he says, is "publishing," and the idea of posts being optionally restricted to certain groups of people is some other activity, not blogging. I asked him a followup question on this, and he kind of made fun of the question, ending his response with "I hope that doesn't sound flip." :) He did say that you can call it whatever you want -- it doesn't matter if you change the definition of blogging -- but on the other hand he's not really interested in other ways people adapt the RSS technology, besides these two phenomena that he's identified.
I think that's strange, because while there are people doing a lot of good blogging in business and in the "amateur press," I see most of those people as either techno-geeks or professionals in the domain they are blogging about. Livejournal is a much more social medium. It's all about the comments -- giving and receiving -- and I think that's why many non-geeky people post in the first place, to get people's reactions, to have conversations. Winer responds that since comments can't be addressed and aggregated the same way as normal blog posts, he doesn't see them being useful in the same ways. But it's precisely the non-technical, non-domain-expert people who use Livejournal this way, and who are the most enthusiastic users of Livejournal. Isn't that really important to having this type of communication really take off and become mainstream? Isn't that part of his dream?
I asked him why it wasn't compelling to him that the average person seems more interested in socializing via blogs than in using them to democratize the media. He more or less said that he doesn't care what the average person thinks.
Of course, we may have completely misunderstood each other. :) I don't think he really listened to my questions.
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