the 2002 demotivators® collection Ahhh... wonderful wonderful posters...

Always good to review: FBI's Guide to Handling Suspicious Mail and Packages

Slashdot | Wil Wheaton Responds to your Questions. I never thought I'd care, but I'm enjoying this interview and finding I rather like the guy...

Religion's Role in the Terroristic Attack of September 11, 2001

Debunking the Myth of a "Christian" United States

Aaron Sorkin Works His Way Through the Crisis Another great article. The New York Times is having a good week :)

How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science This is a perfectly timed and fascinating article. It also ties in very nicely with the earlier link and comments today...

kuro5hin.org || Is Islam truly peaceful? This is a truly fascinating article and the discussion that follows is even more fascinating still. My opinion? I just don't know enough yet but my inclination is to side with those that point out that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have rather bloody source books which either advocate violence, accept it, or at least provide open hooks to justify it by some of the crazier types. Chris Kagy is fond of point out that he views the Islamic world as being very similar to the Christian world just before the Rennaisance. If that is so, then the violence being seen makes a lot of sense in that it is directly analogous to the same behavior in the Christian world at that same point in its history. I rather like this view and it does make a great deal of sense.

Human Bones Discovered In Sandwich Now this is one of the most misleading headlines ever...

In online logs, Web authors personalize attacks, retaliation Webloggers aren't constrained by objectivity or fact-checking. While I have made this point in the past, I also think that the mainstream media is not itself perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Take all of the hysteria in the press about anthrax. Every night I see commercials for network news which are intended to do nothing but scare viewers and gain ratings. I asked a friend of mine who works at the New York Post (who is still awaiting his anthrax test results) why this is so? His reply is that the media are the ones being attacked and they are scared to death. Maybe so, but the media is supposed to be objective and report the facts. I see far less of that these days. At least with weblogs, you get to know the authors and you begin to see where they are coming from. You know when they are reporting something interesting, when they are pulling things out of the air, and when they are editorializing. With network news and newspapers, you have to pay more attention to the money trail and try to find that line between when they are reporting facts and when they are trying to sell advertising.

Red Thomas on chemical and biological weapons.

Farewell to the airport gate experience My friend Renn wrote this wonderful editorial. I'm happy to report that tearful hellos and goodbyes still exist, just outside the security gate. So, it's still there, if a bit different...

Quick picture of yesterday's amazing sunrise... (Picture by Clarissa Bertha)

Quick update from North Carolina. There are military planes going by overhead. One is (we believe) a KC130 tanker. It went back and forth most of yesterday (I don't think it's been over today yet) and late in the day we watched it refuel a helicopter of some kind. I took some great video of it but forgot my firewire cable so I won't get the pictures off the camera and up here until after this weekend. It's a bit chilly here but the house we're staying in is right on the beach and the sound of the ocean is heavenly. This morning, not long after sunrise, I went for a nice long walk down the beach and enjoyed being alone just listening to the sounds of the waves and the wind and watching foam blow around. This is a very busy work week but it's also very relaxing at the same time. One final comment before I go, Pierce's BBQ near Williamsburg, VA is excellent. Yummy.

Today I drove from Boston to Providence, flew from Providence to Baltimore, drove from Baltimore to Annandale, VA. I'm tired. As part of the fun, I was randomly selected to be searched at the Providence airport. So they unpacked my suitcase and went through everything. Then repacked it. At the gate, my carryon bag was searched and I was "wand" searched (where they wave a wand at you and it beeps when it finds metal.) I was also frisked. Good thing she was cute. :) My van from Baltimore to Arlington, VA had to go to Fort Meyer to drop one passenger off. The MPs at the gate made us all get out so they could search the van. Thankfully, they didn't search me personally. I was tired of it at that point. On the flight down, I had a morbid desire to see Manhattan. But we flew well to the north of it and it was on the other side of the plane from me. Driving around Arlington, I had a morbid desire to see the Pentagon. But we drove around the wrong side of the building. Today was not my day to see destruction. Just as well. Tomorrow we head south to Pine Island, North Carolina for the company retreat. I hope to blog daily and to get pictures taken with the company digital camera. If I don't blog for a few days, you can assume I didn't make it back online. I bought a copy of Don Quixote and the Man of La Mancha CD today. It's a theme, I guess. Nah, I'm just tilting at windmills. Sleep would be good...

Falwell-Robertson-Bin Laden Quiz This is truly frightening

Blog Archives back to 1994!! I have now gotten all of my past blogging back to 1994 (seven years ago... wow). I'm only missing the blogging from 1998 through 2000 which I may have lost permanently through some stupidity on my part. I'll have to check my poor attempts at backups to see for sure. What's interesting to me is how my blogging has evolved. I started out just posting very periodic blurbs on single pages, sometimes with pictures but usually without, and then moved totwards the more automated, many blurbs a day approach. I also started adding links to make it true weblogging rather than an online journal of sorts. Now it's both. Sometimes it's links and sometimes it's journal. Over the years I used straight HTML (hand coded in BBEdit), Userland's Frontier's News Suite which built a site out of its internal database and ftp'd it up to my server, blogger.com, Manila (another Userland tool geared towards blogging), and now I'm back to blogger.com again. I'm still watching Userland to see how things progress but their free hosting is unacceptibly slow and purchasing their software to roll my own at home (and ftp to raggedcastle.com) is prohibitively expensive. When Radio Userland 7.1 is released (I hear there will be an OS X version) I may reconsider. I know I could host my manila site on weblogger.com but I'm already paying for a domain name and its hosting so I don't really want to pay for yet another service just to have my site hosted at a different domain name. I'd rather host it on my own site. And I am not willing to pay for the tools to do this. This is just for fun, it's not something I'd pay to do. Maybe that will change over time but at this moment, it needs to be easy, quick, and free. So, that's blogger. Of course, blogger isn't without its problems. I've had trouble reaching the servers and I've had archives vanish (and later come back) and I've been unable to publish entries for the better part of a day, etc. Which is why I am keeping a keen eye on Radio Userland which, last I checked, was free and powerful. I just need an OS X version since I am also not interesting in running a tool in Classic mode. Well, I'm sure that's far more than you wanted to know about my blogging history or my attitude towards blogging tools. We now return you to your regularly scheduled life, already in progress.

MyAppleMenu News Feed Useful...

Personal Web Logs Put a Face on a Faraway Disaster

The New York Review of Books: College: The End of the Golden Age Fascinating. I need to read this through a second time.

The Whitman Project Main Index Another from the archives that I'm glad is still around.

This is a conversation I just had on Yahoo IM (I generally sit online in Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber. I generally only give out my IDs to friends and family to cut down on the random spam one tends to get on these services.) The names have been changed to hide the screen names. jess (03:23 PM): afternoon andy (03:24 PM): Who are you? jess (03:24 PM): jessica andy (03:25 PM): A Jessica I know or a Jessica I don't know? jess (03:25 PM): the latter i guess andy (03:25 PM): Ok. Just checking. jess (03:26 PM): nice photo essays andy (03:26 PM): Thanks... I'm actually updating my weblog right now. Found some old stuff that I'm incorporating. jess (03:27 PM): that's all i wanted to say...sorry to bother andy (03:27 PM): No problem. I appreciate the kind words. Have a good day So, my question is this: have we become so ruined by spam and by online perverts that we are automatically rude to people? Jessica wrote to say hello and to compliment me on some of the stuff I have written online. In the real world that's akin to someone saying hello to you on the street and I'm a huge fan of that. I like walking down the street and saying hello to people, making small talk about the weather or whatnot. But notice that I was immediately guarded and standoffish. Granted, her intro was just "afternoon" and I had no idea if this was someone I knew (it could have been my friend Jesse) but my immediate "Who are you?" was pretty rude, all things considered. At least it made her want to apologize for bothering me at the end. Whenever I get a call in the evening and the voice asks if this is Andy Williams (or Affleck) I immediately assume it is a telemarketer and answer with a suspicious sounding "Y-e-e-e-s-s-s...?" which immediately puts them off. Granted, I'm usually right and often give the standard "I'm not interested, please take me off your list" and then hang up. But still, it's much the same thing. Anyway, is there a lesson to be learned here? Should I be moderating my own behavior to those few random IM's I get from strangers or has the vast amount of junk mail, porn advertisements, and weird online lurkers pretty much ruined the online space for simple smalltalk among strangers? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

The Near-Myth of Our Failing Schools by Peter Schrag Another oldie but goodie I need to reread. If a weblog is when you record where you have been and what you have read to share it, what is it when I link something here that I want to read later on? Preblog?

The Computer Delusion by Todd Oppenheimer Another old link. I need to re-read this. I remember being very against this at the time but it's been some years and it would be interesting to compare the state of things today against Oppenheimer's claims.

The WWW VL: Educational Technology - Educational VR (MUD) sub-page: One of the many links in my new blog archives (new archives? I mean old archives that are newly online again :) which still work. And worth another look. I did a lot of research on the MOO/MUD in education back in grad school.

Webcrumbs Archives to 1997! I finally added in a large chunk of the past: April 1997 through April 1998 are now up. What's still missing is April 1998 through August 2000 and stuff from around 1994/5 through April 1997. There's a ton of link rot in this archives, but they are interesting nonetheless. A lot of interesting stuff from when I was in grad school. I'll have to go through and see what still exists and where things moved.

Ok, I'm going to bed now. Night night.

Andrew Pulrang on Baseball ... and they're singing "God Bless America" now at the Seventh Inning Stretch, instead of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame". If you ask me, (well obviously you didn't), a goofy, good-time song like "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" is a much better answer to fundamentalist terrorism than some somber, patriotic hymn. Quasi-religious nationalism is something Bin Laden can probably relate to. Enjoyment just for the hell of it is a far greater challenge. Hear! Hear! I so agree. At least it's a good song. I never liked the "Proud to be an American" song and am not enjoying its recent resurgence in popularity. I know a good rah-rah tune helps with the crisis but there are plenty of better songs for that. Hell, the Star Spangled Banner is about as close as you can get. The "Proud" song doesn't represent who we are. Instead, it embodies the very arrogance that makes so much of the world pissed at us. And I'm not being an apologist like others who say we brought terrorism upon ourselves. That's a horrible thing to say. Nobody deserved what happened on 9/11 and no foreign policy justifies that kind of response. We're often heavy handed (or club-footed, take your pick) but terrorism is never justified, ever. So, that's not where I'm going. I'm just saying that the song bothers me. It's not represntative of our pluralism, of our compassion, of our melting-pot nature. It reeks of "We rock, you suck" and that is just not how I think of America.

Stumped by Rubik's Cube? Let the Lego Robot Solve It Well, shit, what I have I been doing with my free time? Building duplo towers that Jack then knocks down and watching Winnie the Pooh videos over and over and over and over and over again. While I'm on the subject, does anyone else think that Disney is pulling some kind of weird crap on us to say there is a FOUR video set of original Pooh cartoons? Come on. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Blustery Day, Pooh and Tigger Too are all wonderful, all voiced by the same people and are all a joy to watch, even for the 100th time. But that fourth video in the set, "A Day for Eeyore" is a travesty. It was made in 1983 and has only Paul Winchell as Tigger back from the original cast (most of whom had died by then). The replacement voices are simply awful (The narrator says "Peeoooh" instead of "Pooh" in his affected British accent, Rabbit doesn't speak but sneers through the whole tape, Piglet is pathetic, and Kanga and Roo are just not right). And I don't like the little argument between Eeyore and Tigger doesn't fit at all. And there are no cute songs Pooh makes up. Finally, the intro music has changed and sounds terrible. It's not part of the THREE tape set and should not be advertised as such. I want my money back. Who's with me?

The End of Snail Mail? I don't agree with what he is saying. I think paper/postal mail has a long and necessary life ahead of it despite email.

scriptbuilders @ macscripter.net Lots and lots of AppleScripts.

mac.scripting.com A blog about scripting on the Mac.

Outside New York, Charities Feel the Pinch While the relief funds created for victims of the terror attacks have been deluged with money, small charities throughout the nation are suffering. Fund-raising events and direct mail campaigns are bringing in less than expected, and some major givers are reneging on their pledges, sending contributions instead to relief funds for New York's victims.

css/edge This site has a fascinating look at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the author, Eric Meyer, does some interesting things with it. I'd love to adopt these techniques for this site to jazz it up (uh oh, did I say that? Am I already talking about another redesign?) but the fact that IE/Windows doesn't work with strict CSS1 is a major problem. Lately, I've run into a lot of problems with IE for Windows that has (a) made me happy with IE/Mac all the more and (2) pissed me off. A number of designs that are dirt simple in HTML are coming out all wrong because IE/Win is simply stupid. I'd give examples but that would take effort and it's Saturday. Come on, what did you expect? Well, enough ranting about IE/Windows. It is a shame that I can't do some funky tricks here because it's too widely used but I'll live.

London Times: Every night for the past month, as Taleban soldiers and police fled the city in fear of airstrikes, the residents of Kandahar came out to enjoy long-forbidden freedoms without fear of punishment by the religious police.

Researchers Bring Voice Recognition to Palmtops I want one...

Learning to Be Wired Throwing technology at educational problems may do more harm than good. It takes careful planning -- and a healthy dose of skepticism -- to make computers work in the classroom

Funny! I blogged the home page of Phi Tau Coeducational Fraternity and THEN realized that I'd taken the picture used on the home page. Neat!

The Dawn - Opinion; 09 October, 2001 Very interesting reading.

'If you hate the west, emigrate to a Muslim country' An interesting article about Hamza Yusuf, a Muslim convert and advisor on Islamic issues to the President.

My friend (and, now, co-worker) Chris Kagy has an interesting response to what Andrew Pulrang wrote about bin Laden's videotaped message the other day (blogged below, I'm too lazy to look up the link right now :). Among other comments is this gem: "A wonderful high culture of arts and sciences existed in the Middle East. I've heard it argued that it was not the Irish that saved civilization but the Arabs, by proactively acquiring as much knowledge and literature as possible and not just transcribing it, but studying it and furthering it. This corpus of learning was rediscovered (relearned?) by Europe starting after the Reconquest of Spain. Was the decline of the influence of the Middle Eastern cultures analogous to the European Dark Ages?" I think this is an excellent point. I've read Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization and thought it fascinating but I can also see that it is a rather euro-centric viewpoint. (Incidently, Cahill is doing a series of books on what he calls the "Hinges of History." He's covered Judaism's origins and the life of Jesus. I certainly hope he covers Islam as well.) Between Andrew and Chris (all three of us were in the same co-ed fraternity in college) I feel like the uneducated poser. I always feel I have so much to learn. I'll start by reading their stuff and the other weblogs I follow and try to keep up...

Osama Has a New Friend Now, in a move that defies all rules of logic, a doctored photo showing Bert with the world's most-wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, seems to have made its way into an anti-American Islamic protest in Bangladesh.

At U.S. Request, Networks Agree to Edit Future bin Laden Tapes The CBS anchor, Dan Rather said: "By nature and experience, I'm always wary when the government seeks in any way to have a hand in editorial decisions. But this is an extraordinary time. In the context of this time, the conversation as I understand it seems reasonable on both sides." Very interesting. Good move or slippery slope?

Jedi makes the census list It's official: "Jedi Knight" is ON the list of religions for the 2001 UK census.

In the end, blogger.com went down not long after my attempts below. It's back up this morning and we'll see if I can post these updates to my blog.

Well, at least I'm not the only one with this problem [Link may require a blogger login, I'm not sure]. So, it's likely a system problem. Hmmm. That does raise the question about reliability. I switched from a manila hosted site to this because I wanted my site to be local rather than remote and I felt that the Manila hosted sites were awfully slow and cumbersome. Also they provided features (discussion groups, et al) that I wasn't really using. But this is somewhat annoying. My site comes up but nothing new appears on it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a blog? This is the second time this has happened in the two months I've been using this. The last time it was resolved within the same day. Let's hope this is resolved as quickly.

Still nothing. And it's starting to get my goat. And I didn't even know I had a goat. I have a goatee, but that's because I had a beard-trimming accident the other day. Everyone tells me they like it so I may keep it. But that's not important right now. What is is that I can't seem to update my blog and that brings me back to me and my goat, or lack thereof (because it was taken -- you are following this, right?). Um, anyone have a goat I can borrow?

More weirdness. I just tried to republish the page and the ftp log on blogger hasn't changed even though blogger claims the file was uploaded just fine. Methinks something is wrong on the blogger side of the fence. I'll wander their site for any kind of technical information, online help, FAQ, etc.

Another weird problem with blogger.com. According to the interface, my blog has been updated with my big ramble for the evening. According to the ftp log, it has been successfully uploaded. According to raggedcastle.com, it has not. The file there is the older one and no sign of new data exists. So, what's going on here?

And so it begins... we started packing tonight. Actually, we didn't pack anything but we did sit down and map out exactly what we have to do between now and when the movers come. It's intense. It's going to be a very crazy few weeks. In addition to packing and moving, I also have to go to a company retreat in North Carolina and a birthday party for my mother in New York. All inside the next two and a half weeks. Are we insane or what? It's been a fun few days, all things considered. We went to a wedding of some college friends over the weekend which was a lot of fun (though the DJ played that "Proud to be an American" song that's being driven into our skulls with alarming regularity -- whether or not you like that song (I don't) I honestly can't figure out why anyone thought it was an appropriate final song for a wedding) and then we went to Rhode Island to hang with Ann's folks and Jack. Oh, and we started bombing things. I remember when the Gulf War started. I was watching Babette's Feast at Dartmouth College and someone walked up on stage and announced that ground troops had just crossed the border. We stayed until the end of the movie (why, I do not know) but afterward went back to my office in the computer center and listend to NPR for the next few hours. I was against the war and I was very bothered by the yellow ribbons that sprang up everywhere. That was then. This time, I sat and listened to the news on the radio and felt really good about what I was hearing. I support what we are doing and I feel very good about the American flags I see everywhere. Normally, I'm a pacifist and support diplomatic solutions over military ones but I recognize that our enemy this time is not one we can reason with or who shows any form of rationality. Andrew Pulrang points out some places where bin Laden has a legitimate beef with the US (scroll down his page to find it, he doesn't have archiving activated for individual entries so that link is the closest I can get -- Andrew, email me, you need to turn on that feature :) and I see where he is coming from. But I also agree with his final analysis. Well, that's my update for today. No real links because, aside from Andrew's site, I didn't find anything I felt like linking to. Sorry. Come back tomorrow. Of course, I'm going to be so bloody busy the next few weeks it will be a miracle if I blog much. Great. Our new neighbors are being loud and it's late and Jack is getting restless. I have to get dressed and go next to door to bitch them out. How happy am I?

The New York Review of Books: Saving Us from Darwin, Part II Part 2 of the article I blogged a week+ back.

Salon.com People | Police make doughnut run via chopper If you had a helicopter, wouldn't you?

Read Darwin -The Elements of E-Mail Style Hear! Hear! I'm SICK of getting badly formatted email. I spend huge parts of my day reading email. Please, make it readable! Some additions to the list in this article:

• Trim the quoted text to just the relevant bits
• If you are forwarding a forward of a forward (etc) first, ask yourself if you should even be doing that (I have too many people who forward me the same thing over and over and I have rarely ever appreciated it). If you really should (and you probably shouldn't. Really) trim out the excess forwards.
• Really, you shouldn't. If it's a joke, I've probably heard it. If it's a petition, it's not going to help. Internet petitions are useless. I'm politically active in my own way on my own time. If it's worthwhile, I'll find out about it through more legitmate means. If it's a virus warning, I don't care, I use a Mac. If it's a warning about something else, I don't care. I'll find out about it through legitimate sources. 99% of these things are hoaxes. The other 1% I already know about.
• Really.
• Rather than just using complete URLs, I would also enclose them in <>'s so the beginning and end are clear.

Sorry if I sound cranky, but I get so much email and I delete so much of it. If everyone sent everything that they were told to ("Forward this to everyone you know") we'd all drown in the flood. If we all stopped, email could be a truly useful tool again and not a time sink. Wow, I am cranky about this.

WTC Tourist + More. These are sick and just too funny. And some people will be offended, I'm sure. But hey, it's time to laugh a little too.

Jack visits the Farmstand (QuickTime 5.x, 5.7 MB) The first iMovie project I have worked on in over a year (lame, I know). But I love this one. Warning, it's a huge download so don't do this over a modem unless you have time. A lot of time.

Well, if things go well, and you are reading this, then something cool has worked. I am writing this blog entry not in a web browser but in a simple notepad application on my Mac. I'm trying out an AppleScript that can take a block of text and insert it into my blog through the magic of XML-RPC. Let's see if this works...

Chicago Show Explores the van Gogh-Gauguin Connection Unlike the familiar brainless extravaganzas, this effort involves real ideas and even a little hard work on your part, with the result that you leave it not quite the same. It's a serious and very beautiful show with a phonebook full of information for a catalog and a painstaking, nearly day-by-day account of the claustrophobic weeks in 1888 when van Gogh and Gauguin drove each other nutty at the Yellow House in Arles. -- I wonder if this show will tour or if we have to go to Chicago to see it...

Scientists Report Finding a Gene for Speech I need to go back to Matt Ridley's book Genome and see what he writes about this. The book predates this discovery but he talked about it extensively. Damn my poor memory for a book I just finished a month ago.

I'm now an Amazon.com associate. If you buy from Amazon.com by going through my site, I get a little bit back from them. Think of it as helping sponsor this site. If you like what you see here and are going to shop at Amazon anyway, go through here and help me out. Think of Jack's college education :) (See the link on the left side of the page).

AccessEdu I just started another weblog focusing specifically on distance learning and accessibility (either individually or together). I started it because I am doing a lot of online research on this now and didn't want to flood this blog with the links I am finding. There's enough that I wanted to keep it separated from this. Who knows, it may grow into something useful. For now, I'm just using it to keep myself sane. The new blog, btw, can easily become a community project. People are welcome to ask me to help blog on it (you can do that with blogger, fwiw).

NewsForge | Ignore SSSCA, risk becoming a 'federal felon, overnight'

Bush Watch. This site is running some interesting articles looking at the connections between the Bush family monies and bin Laden's money. I'm only part way through, but what I've seen is interesting so far.

Yeah, I know, lots of links and no commentary. I've been blogging in bed this morning and I can't type very well. You don't want to know where I'm sitting right now to write this. Maybe having wireless is giving me too much freedom... Anyway, I'm waiting for Jack to wake up so I can feed him breakfast and get his day going. Ann's off to Rhode Island to pick up her folks and bring them up here to watch Jack so she can start packing. We're moving in about 3 weeks. She and Jack to her parents' house in Rhode Island and me to stay with my friend Chris in Virginia. I'll be flying/driving back to RI on most weekends to see Ann and Jack. We're doing this insanity for the next four or five months while we save some money and look for a place to move to in the DC area. I'm expected to be on the ground in the office in early November. I've been working remotely since I started in September. It's going to be insane and we're working on strategies to make it less painful. That reminds me: anyone out there know of good video conferencing software for Mac OS X?

Edu-Blogs

Greg Mcnulty: The Day

We're more nuts than you...

Too cute...

Jack was being very cute yesterday...

NaNoWriMo ! I just signed up for this. It's wonderful. Go there now and sign up. Maybe we can egg each other on. Whoever you are.