heh, server side <blink>. (via the Brain).

a heavily-loaded web server may not be able to respond to blink requests efficiently, which will slow down the perceived blink rate. One work-around to this would be to use a high-capacity blink server farm.

things got really wild when a dalmation pulled out the amyl nitrate...

Christian Student Sues For Right To Hate Speech

"If we don't protect freedom of speech, how will we know who the assholes are?" -Louis Neprud, Systems Analyst, The Onion

Interesting commentary by Geoffrey Nunberg on Aliens and the language used to describe them. You can also listen here.

But alien still suggests strangeness and difference -- people who are "not of our sort." That's partly due to the science-fiction writers who picked the word up in the 1930's to refer to extraterrestrial beings. It's revealing that alien is far more likely to be used to describe Mexicans and Central Americans than Europeans. The tens of thousands of Irish and Poles who are in the country illegally are almost always referred to as "immigrants," not "aliens."

...

As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote in 1965 about the European experience with immigration, "We called for a labor force, but it was human beings that came."

San Diego - March 2006

Portraits Summer/Fall 2005

Greenwood Cemetery, March 2006


Greenwood Cemetery, March 2006

I had in interesting conversation this weekend about the new wave of video web sites/services that are popping up everywhere. We talked a bit about the viability of web video, and what people are willing to do on the internet besides read. It seems to me that anything longer than a minute or two of embedded video is too long, as I'm hesitant to sit through anything that's longer than a few moments (except porn, I'll slog through hours of low quality web porn. Don't let them fool you, the Arpanet was initially developed to create a robust network for science geeks to move porn around the globe).

All that said, what I enjoy about services like YouTube is the view into the lives and ideas others. It becomes a strange portal into the human condition. Truth is stranger than fiction, and it becomes evident when watching low grade video clips on the web. Web video tends to lean towards oddity more than anything, and there is something both interesting and disturbing about much of what can been seen out there.

Ok, enough banter, this was all just an excuse to show Shatner "performing" Rocket Man. If you have never seen this, well, you are in for a strange little treat (Mind you, Tam has never been able to watch this all the way through, something about how she becomes too embarrassed for Shatner, and has to look away).

I flew Jet Blue out to San Diego last week. Two simple words, Direct TV. Well, it's really one word, DirectTV, but kinda like two words, anyway. Nothing eases the pain of a six hour flight like reruns of King of the Hill and quasi educational shows like Crash Test Human.

We don't have TV reception at home. We have a TV, and we watch reams of bad movies on DVD, and we have the means, ahem, to watch "programs" via, ahem, other sources, but we don't have the ability to watch broadcast television. This is mainly because if we did I would watch it, all of it, nonstop, hours and hours of bad TV until they'd cut a hole in my head and mellon ball out the part that makes normal people turn off the TV, because that part in my brain will have eroded into a black tar ball of wasted matter. What doctors refer to as brain poo.

So we don't have broadcast TV, and when I am placed in front of, or anywhere near, broadcast TV, I am as a moth to the flame, a crack head to the rock, a drunkard to a half empty (or full, for you optimists) 40oz, a fifty year old financial analyst to barelylegal.com. I am drawn to the glowing, evil wonder that is Nancy Grace like Christians to a vision of the Virgin in a knotted tree. I want to turn away mind you, but I am incapable. I become entranced by the likes of Bill O'Rielly, Blossom or Oprah until I am unable to refuse their blather. I am but a poisoned fly caught in their banal web of engulfing photons.

After about five and a half hours in the air filled with VH1 Classics, reruns of That 70s Show and many, many others, I hit rock bottom. I noticed my neighbor had tuned into Fox News, so I followed suit and turned the station to The Factor. After only a few moments, I knew I had made a mistake. Yet, I continued to watch, mouth gaped, mind numb and a trickle of drool forming on my chin. I blacked out after that. I can faintly remember deplaning and shuffling through the terminal with a sense that I had somehow been violated, that I had lost something precious, and I could never get it back.

I woke in the middle of the night last night, soaked with sweat and trembling. I had dreamt I was in my middle school guidance councilor's office. She held a stuffed bear and was pointing at various parts of its anatomy, "Is this where the cable news man touched you? It's ok, you're in a safe place now." I started to cry uncontrollably. She held me and whispered, "It's ok, you're safe now, you're safe."

It seems I have angered the gods.

April 5, 2006 11:21:27

I headed off to San Diego to visit friends for a few days, and the temperature reached 72.5 degrees in Brooklyn while I was away. Thinking I'd return to spring after being lured into a false sense of season in San Diego, I was dismayed to step off the plane into a rainy 40 degree evening. I trudged through the long term parking lot wondering why I had packed my jacket, and why I didn't deem it necessary to unpack it before heading out into the cold rain. I arrived at the car, which I apparently had parked about 13 miles away from the air tran, wet and cold and cursing my stupid jacket packing ways. I assume the gods will have it will snow tomorrow as penance for my spring lust.