The lame duck Bush Administration says it will authorize the purchase of 600,000 unwanted and unsold Chevrolet, GMC, Pontiac, Buick, and Saturn SUVs and donate them to former homeowners who defaulted on mortgages.

“Well, nobody can afford to buy those vehicles or fill them with gas,” said White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, or possibly Nancy Pfotenhauer, “but if you park them in the shade they make a cozy little living space. Kind of like camping.”

More: Melamine Shortage Could Undermine GM Bailout

World Series parade, Philadelphia, PA 2008

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants

We moved out of the RiverLoft and into our new house yesterday. It was more than a little emotional. I’ve lived in 628 since I left the East Village in early 2002.

In this loft: I convinced the most wonderful girl in the world how “fun” it would be to leave New York, live in Philly and commute back to New York. We built an unbelievably successful e-commerce. site. We built an unbelievably successful PR/Marketing firm. We got married. After three false starts we successfully created a human being. We used 628 as a homebase to travel the world. We surrounded ourselves with great friends, had fun parties and made fantastic memories.

Yesterday was our move. It was also McLean’s 4 month birthday. He’ll only know the fabulous new home we’ve built for him. I can’t wait to fill the new house with old friends, great food… and begin building new memories.

We’re slowly beginning the tranisition to the new house this week. Amid quite a bit of unfinished construction, a flaky HVAC and a double hernia we’ve started moving everything over. Telephones should be connected today. All of our stuff should be in by the weekend. Heavy furniture is being moved next Wednesday. The last few weeks have been some of the most stressful I’ve ever experienced… but a long way we’ve come…

Our construction site is starting to look like a home! Finally getting the floor down has been a huge psuchologial boost. I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel… We’re going to be ready for the kitchen install soon!

Our kitchen currently looks a Stalag Luft III escape tunnel:

Hobo Jo. Warden Jordan. Blanket Burglar. JoJo Monkey Bean. You’re the best, and the men in your life love you!

Congratulations to Eric and Tracy on the birth of Blake Christopher Hatton! 9lbs! He’s a pound and a half more than McLean is today, and we’ve got a 3 week head start! No cross-weight class wrestling at the Crawfish Boil.

This is what the internet is for: pen reviews handwritten with the reviewed pens. I love it. I have to get a Pilot G-2 1.0mm Black and a Zebra Sarasa Clip 0.4mm (Black) now.

Some BEFORE and CURRENT photos of the first floor. AFTER photos are a long ways away.

In the CURRENT shots the original external wall to the house is exposed. Around the 1920s the house was expanded backwards into its lot— and apparently they just framed the back wall of the house into the middle of the house! Crazy. We’re going to span that chunk of brick with a steel beam to allow us to open the space wide up.

Photos below after the jump.

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Marty says:

Hey - how about some more pics of the new place? I’m dying to see it. I’d also love to live vicariously through you with a renovation blog story line, now that I’m 50% of the way done with mine…

The only completed project so far is the basement. A little “parging” and it’s gone from “Put the lotion in the basket” to “alien autopsy”. Before and after shots below:

Take the whole thing AND the kitchen sink!

Our new house has a never used builders kitchen that we’re going to tear out and replace. We hate to see the new hardware, granite-tops and cabinets go to waste.

For $500 you can have the new cabinets (w/under cabinet lighting), new sink (w/garbage disposal) and new granite top. Appliances NOT included (they’ve already hit the dumpster).

Everything must go with just a raw empty space left. Cabinets have already been uninstalled and just need carting away.

More photos and cabinet plans below.

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A quick sketch of the house we’re buying. It’s a classic Philadelphia Trinity townhouse that’s been expanded deeper into its lot. Surprisingly, it has a normal, straight staircase unlike most Trinities in the area. Three floors and a basement— 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths with a roof deck and a tiny little yard. It couldn’t be in a better neighborhood— a block from Fitler Square, 100 feet from a PhillyCarShare lot, and a seven minute walk for me to work. We plan to rehab quite a bit with new bathrooms and kitchen… so I don’t expect to actually live in it until mid-summer.

We completed the inspection yesterday and {fingers crossed} we go to settlement on Feb 29th. Settling on a day that only happens once every four years… I’m sure that’s not going to screw up a mortgage payment one day.

Jack has a little brother! Congrats Money and Patty!

After 14 years of renting… I think I just bought a house.

Anya Regan Boghosian born 2/5/08 (National Pancake Day). Congratulations Lloyd & Lorraine!

An apartment on the 5th floor of our building had a fire last night. We live on the 6th floor and missed the sprinkler water damage that flooded all the floors below the fifth. It was just a shock getting forced out of the building at 8:30pm on a sunday night and not getting back in until well after 10.

I had big hopes for the Flight of the Conchords, but I get the feeling their best material was used up in the first three episodes. The rest of the episodes have been moderately funny— but the songs haven’t come close to these:

• Think About It
• Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros
• Most Beautiful Girl in the Room
• Robots (The Humans Are Dead)

I’ve had Think About It stuck in my head for weeks… “There’s people on the street getting diseases from monkeys…”

Much later in the season than usual, I'm headed to Coney Island for the tenth annual (and possibly final) David Lloyd Coney Island Classic. It will be interesting to see how much of old Coney Island is still left after a summer of dismantling.

As over photoshopped as these pics look-- there not. These were taken at the May 2005 DLCIC during the most apocalyptic post storm sun-set ever. It was unbelievable. The same day an airplane crashed on the beach in front of us.

Some previous Coney Island snaps:

• The Plunge
• Live Entertainment for the Hole Family
• Not to scale
• On The Money
• Serpentina

On the train to the Jacob Javitts Center for the big FS Keynote presentation. I’m feeling lucky we won’t have any technical difficulties.

FS is giving a 3 hour seminar at the Fancy Food Show tomorrow. I've just put the wraps on their 278MB Keynote presentation that is chocked full of embedded video and clips. By far the largest slideshow I've ever built. Thanks to Keynote (and plenty of good content), it's going to be a show-stopper.

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

My nephew is number 25 in line at the King of Prussia store. There's about 150 lined up in total.

The sixth borough is shrinking. Philadelphia has moved from the nation's 5th largest city to the 6th and from fourth to fifth on the list of the nation's largest metropolitan areas.

Uncle Jack 1931-2007. The coolest uncle any boy could have. We’ll miss you, very much.

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Thank you.

We flew to Paris with all of Fishbone sitting just a few seats away. Huge CD release party in Switzerland. I guess they're big in the old world.

A couple of months ago Neil and I were chatting about how Nike should have an API to allow you to publish your Nike+ run stats on your own site. I knew it was only a matter of time until someone started parsing the iPod's XML run data and did something with it. Runometer.com is a great start. I'm sure if your one of those GPS route runners, it's perfect for you.

Here's my stats. I only uploaded my last month of runs... Runometer needs a bulk upload feature. I'll try and keep it up to date. (moved below the fold... )

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Comments are enabled again. I’m trying out a new solution I hope will solve my blog comment spam problem. Just to be safe— I’m still moderating all comments.

The upgrade is done (more or less) and everything has gone smoothly. Unfortunately I’m going to have to keep the old server around as EMC (Dantz) hasn’t got their shit together to release a Universal Binary version of Retrospect. I’d prefer not to run my daily tape backups with Rosetta.

Zoom. I’ve just migrated this server from the client version of OS X 10.4 to the server version. I’ve also bumped up the hardware a bit.

Things might be a little rough as I finish off the migration. I had forgotten what a bear it is to get DBI::MySql installed.

This blog has been a little neglected for the last two months or so. I’ve been extremely busy with countless little projects, and a lot has fallen through the cracks as a result. Last week’s required security patch for movabletype finally got me to focus on this site and upgrade to 3.3. The upgrade sort of went smoothly. I’ve finally worked the last kinks out of my dated and tired old templates.

Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll begin to post here again— and maybe I’ll finally find time to start taking photos again.

The lighting Doodle Project

Bethany Beach, DE 2006

The Philly’s flood waters are rising. Our office has been evacuated— the management received a call from the Army Corps of Engineers that they will be releasing damns up river. They expect the Schuylkill to rise another 4 feet. XO, Qwest and Level3 run backbone switches in our building- they’ve begun sand-bagging the doors. The word is that the river will crest at 11pm tonight.

It’s currently low-tide and the Schuylkill River has already begun to break it’s banks from all the rain. The flooding has begun washing away the new Schuylkill Banks Park landscaping. We’re expecting our office’s storage space (along with the XO and Qwest datacenters and switches) in the basement of the Marketplace Design Center to go under water in the next day as upstate New York rivers flood and drain into the Susquehanna and Schuylkill. The debris clusters in the river (and the mud color) is amazing.

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A botched telephone number port with Vonage (from March) has resulted in countless hours either on hold or chatting with someone in Bangladesh. Their tier one support is useless. Escaltion to tier 2 takes almost an hour on hold— and they have no idea why you called.

Vonage customer service is terrible. I can see why the IPO tanked. They’ve never turned a profit— and the support is so bad they’re going to start hemorrhaging users to the bigger VOIP providers like AT&T and Comcast.

Searching for a way to talk to an American (or Canadian) support person directly, I stumbled upon this list: How to get a live customer service person in the US. The Vonage support number (888-250-1799) bypassed India and connected me directly to a management response team member in New Jersey. It’s amazing how fast a customer problem can be solved when both parties have a solid grasp of the English language.

Clothing for Reality TV shows. Genius.

Prison wine. Mmm… good!

Yesterday wasn’t Fat Tuesday, and this week isn’t Mardi Gras/Carnival. And to think what I did for beads yesterday…

Quick post before we leave— not only was the family stone pictured on the front page of a local paper— but my 12 year old nephew Sam provided a sweet sound bite on curling:

“It’s a fun sport,” says the Wayne resident. “More people should play it.”

Indeed. Sam’s complete 15 minutes of fame for the Philadelphia Curling Club is available here (350k PDF). You can also get psyched up for curling at the winter olympics with HammerFall’s music video (.mov). They rock. So hard.

Full Disclosure: I personally haven’t curled since I was 16. The rest of the family are still quite active.

Dear Shareholder,

We are writing to let you know that the IRS1099-DIV Tax Forms reporting dividends you received in 2005 were inadvertently sent to fellow holders of depositary receipts, instead of to you. The 1099-DIV Forms included your name, address, account number, social security number and the amount of your 2005 dividends.(click for full size letter)

My father received this on the 30th. Not only is his name, address, account number, social security number out in the wild— but they also refuse to provide replacements for his missing 1099-DIVs (needed for 2005 taxes).

Citibank
180 days of identity monitoring: Free.
Having your identity and account numbers blindly mailed to strangers: Priceless.

Voice over of Bill Gate’s CES presentation of the “revolutionary new features” in Windows Vista… applied to an OS X demo. Funny stuff.

5 gallons of water-cooler water broken on the office floor. Doh.

Machine guns mounted on an inflatable boat. I hope no-one shoots back.

Directing another photo shoot today. This time at the beach. It’s been a busy two weeks. Hopefully I’ll get back to regular posting soon. Work and blogging don’t mix well.

The bird flu has reached Europe. During Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend we stumbled upon 4 dead ducks on the shore of Lake Ontario. 33 years of going there, I’ve never seen a dead duck. Top news story on Yahoo: Veterinary workers place a dead duck in a plastic bag after suspicion of bird flu disease. I’m wondering if there’s more to the dead ducks on the beach than coincidence.

This blog has been stagnant for the last few weeks. All of September my D100 has been at Nikon for repairs. I’ve been extremely busy with assorted projects, a charity event last Wednesday and three weeks of building Keynote presentations for Food Shelter. On top of all of this, I’ve been sick as a dog. I think I’m finally kicking what felt like the bird flu.

Friday we’re headed to The County for Canadian Thanksgiving. I’ll be back on Tuesday afternoon. When I get everything under control— I’m hoping to help Neil with some projects… and maybe I’ll finally be able to devote some time to revamping this site and my portfolio. There never seems to be enough time these days.

Billions of dollars have been spent since 9/11 to plan for catastrophic events in metropolitan areas. What’s the result? It takes 5 days to evacuate the population of a mid-size city. A mid-sized city with decent roads. Philly— the fifth largest city in the U.S.— has a tiny 2-lane-in-both-direction expressway (76). There’s no way it’s going to be able to handle an evacuation. Do you think the GW Bridge and the tunnels are going to handle the millions trying to escape New York? Hasn’t anyone figured these details out yet?

Terrorist attacks don’t build over the Atlantic and give you a week notice before they hit. What have they been doing? Billions spent on Homeland Security. Billions spent on FEMA first responders. $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans. Sunday we’ll find that another $100 billion is needed to rebuild Houston and Galveston. Where’s all this money coming from? Not from tax breaks.

$200+ billion to plunge Iraq into civil war and ultimately build another Iran (Islamic Fundamentalist regime). I’m thinking that probably wasn’t the best investment.

I’m still trying to work out the obscure bug that has hampered my blog posting. SixApart support has been excellent. I’m very impressed- my support ticket has been elevated to the top!

Also, for anyone that hasn’t heard— here’s an update on New Orleans update from Tracy:

all of my family has evacuated new orleans and are safe. everyone is in different locations throughout the south. it is very difficult to keep in touch with everyone due to the down cell towers and overload of the system that is still in place. it is much easier for my family and friends to get in touch with me than for me to get through to them. therefore, i am the contact for my family - everyone must check in at least once a day & update me on their situation.

returning to new orleans and the metro area at this point is impossible, and illegal. everyone that remained is now being physically forced to leave. the flood waters are rising due to levee breaks and a minimum of 9 feet of water is expected EVERYWHERE on the eastbank (new orleans, metairie, kenner, etc.) the westbank, where my mom & jerry live, has much less water. there home has only minimal wind damage considering the storm that hit. however, no one is being allowed back. the clean-up and rescue efforts will take weeks, if not months, before the homes are inhabitable and power/water services are restored.

i am hoping that my sister and brother will be up soon to stay with us for a while. we are working on that. they are at this point homeless and jobless. my mom and jerry will be staying with a friend in baton rouge. everyone is still trying to figure out what to do!

What Would Jesus Bomb? (via uncrate) I’d also like to know WWJA (Who Would Jesus Assassinate?)

Just unfolding in front of my window. Schuylkill River and Market Street. Very sad. This is the 4th Market Street Bridge jumper I’ve seen in 3 years.

Warning: Graphic images below.

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Another unsuccessful attempt at becoming a property owner. The Chestnut street condo fell through due to a couple of unforeseen circumstances— including the fact that we wouldn’t be able get our furniture into the unit due to some poor design decisions by the developer.

I’m glad we measured everything before we got locked in.

To a de-lux apartment in the sky.

Fish don’t fry in the kitchen;
Beans don’t burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin’
Just to get up that hill.
Now we’re up in the big leagues
Gettin’ our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it’s you and me baby
There ain’t nothin wrong with that.

Movin on up
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

A water main has just broken on Bonsall and Walnut in Center City.

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Doh!

After unsuccessfully trying to get a contingent of NYCers down to Philly for Live 8… we’re skipping town.

We live on the edge of the “no Drive Zone.” From the sheer annoyance factor, JJG isn’t interested in being in our loft 4 blocks from 3 million people… Thursday night we’re headed to the beach for an extra long weekend. I’ll catch Live 8 on the tele.

Major spring cleaning going on. For the next 3 weeks I’ll be unloading Studio2f items on Ebay to free up some storage space. You can track my auction items and be altered to new items with the spring cleaning rss feed.

This week is assorted printers, an old palm and a great Cybershot camera. Next week will be infrastructure items (Switched, Hubs and a VPN).

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On the tail end of a great long weekend hanging out with old friends, Dave pointed out to me that Live 8 (the followup to Live Aid) is going to be happening in Philly on July 2nd. This time not only will it be free, it’s going to be 4 blocks from my apartment. I’m wondering if we should try to entice some of the New Yorkers to come down for the trifecta Dominion Day, Live 8, Forth of July bonanza. The headliners so far are:

• Will Smith
• Dave Matthews Band
• Bon Jovi
• Maroon 5
• Il Divo
• Stevie Wonder
• Puff Daddy
• Jay-Z
• Sarah McLachlan
• Rob Thomas
• Keith Urban
• 50 Cent
• Kaiser Chiefs

A disappointing line-up compared to the diversity of the original Live-Aid I attended at JFK Stadium— but free none the less. I’d miss the Fourth celebrations on the roof of 2f… but top Live 8 off with a July 4th celebration in the home of the Declaration of Independence, and it should be good weekend for a road trip. Any takers?

Some Viagra users report blindness

Tomorrow is the Coney Island Classic. A full day of beer, re-re-fried food stuffs and dangerously unsafe carnival rides. Woo-hoo!

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Tom Ridge Admits Color Coded Alerts Were Manipulated.
Spider, where are you? (8/6)

Happy graduation, Marty. I’m sorry we’re not going to see you this weekend. The next beers are on me. When you put that MBA to good use, I want in on the pre-IPO friends and family shares.

My handmade First Prize keychain ribbon from WEST Saturday night. Good times. Good times. Thanks Paige & Murph.

Today has been the most painful April 15th I’ve experienced in years.

Bisbee is everywhere today. He is there. You are here.

Don’t forget us when you’re a rock superstar. Living large. A big house. Five cars, You’re in charge. Comin’ up in the world. Don’t trust nobody got to look over your shoulder constantly.

When are you going to make a slick video for the employee downsizing ditty? That song rocks.

Thanks to the ThermoChron I know 4:30pm yesterday my apartment hit a high of 102.2°F as the sun came around to the west and roasted everything. After that peak it stays solid at 90.5°F well into the morning. The LCDs on my RAID’s hot-swap sleds show the drives are operating over 150°F. My HVAC is still screwed and the Riverloft is telling me I’ll have to live with it until May.

I don’t understand what their deal is. It’s basic systems administration:

• They made a change to a mission critical system (replaced a valve to the HVAC)
• The change had adverse effects on the system (uncontrollable heat)

Any IT department would know: rollback to the point before the system malfunctioned (ie. replace the removed valve), and try to diagnose the cause and effect. You don’t keep running the broken system.

I’ve notified them that I’m withholding the rent, contacting my lawyer, moving into a hotel (submitting the bills to them). This whole fiasco has made me rethink our apartment/condo hunt in the city for a home of our own in the (gasp!) suburbs. I’m getting sick of “shared living” environments. If something gets fucked up, I’d feel more in control being the problem and the solution.

This is a thermometer suck into the A/C vent in our bedroom.

It’s 90°F at night and well over 100°F during the day as the sun moves west and heats up the 16ft windows in our loft. AMICO’s Philadelphia Riverloft management replaced a valve to the HVAC system on friday that renders the AC part of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning useless. This was a planned “upgrade” to provide better heating in the winter. However, western exposure apartments have used the A/C in the winter for the last 3 years to COOL their sun roasted apartments.

This single valved used to provide warm water to the individual air handlers in the winter, and would allow the temperature to be lowered as well as raised in an apartment. The new “within HoneyWell specification” valve only provides scalding hot water that cannot be used for cooling.

Only get heat! And lots more of it! Brilliant! And it will be providing heat until May when they switch the valve to serve up cold water for cooling. Brillant! Surely there won’t be any warm days before May!

I’m glad they did this the same day they slipped the lease renewal under my door. I’ve attached an iButton ThermoChron to the vent and I’m logging the temp every minute. If this goes on for more than a day, I’m withholding rent for each day that the building is in violation of my lease:

• Apartment conditions have changed since lease was signed
• Landlord agrees to provide tenant controlled air conditioning for each apartment. (Note: air conditioning is defined as: “a system that keeps air cool and dry”)

On top of the seventh floor apartment flood that damaged our apartment, the always broken down elevators, the surprise no-hot water days… Wharton students: I recommend against living here.

UPDATE: the temp keeps going up. More on the current Riverloft conditions here

A new year, and a new chance for peace on Earth.

This server is experiencing the Slashdot effect from Google. Somehow my simple post on the amazing Tsunami Photos from Phuket has made it onto Google’s first page for those keywords on all of the international Googles (Spain, Canada, France, ???, et al). The server is getting hammered, and is dishing up more than 1 Meg/minute. I’ll most likely be off Google’s first page before the end of the day. Until then, services will be a tad slow as my Apache gets battle tested.

• Tsunami Videos
• Tsunami Photos from Phuket
• How to help

The U.S. has pledge $15 million in aid for victims of the devastating tsunami in Asia— where estimates now say over 44,000 have died. From J-Walk:

Let’s assume that the U.S. will spend $200 billion for the war in Iraq (a conservative estimate). Further assume that this money will be spread out over a 2-year period. This works out to about $11.4 million per hour.

So when it’s put in these terms, the U.S. has pledged (so far) the equivalent of about 79 minutes of war cost

Bah humbug. I’m suffering from too much food, too much Toblerone and a terrible head cold.

Happy Monkey Day. More Monkeys in the news.

Dave tipped me off to the 1978 made for TV Star Wars Holiday Special. A Wookie-homecoming-musical that guest stars the Jefferson Starship, Diahann Carroll, Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman— along with the original Star Wars cast.

It’s indescribable. Apparently Lucas has been aggressively trying to get it off the web as it seriously taints the Star Wars brand. Aside from the musical numbers, it also features a short Star Wars cartoon that introduces Boba Fett. If you have the time and bandwidth a 719Mb .avi version’s torrent is here. It’s well worth it.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—John McCrae

When I attended elementary school in Montreal and Toronto, every Veteran’s Day (Armistice Day in Canada) we studied, memorized and recited this poem. I find it appropriate today, as the U.S. offensive rages in Falluja. Flander’s Field is a graveyard and WWI memorial. 550,000 soldiers from four armies died fighting on the Flemish front— in the “War to end all Wars.”

Last night didn’t go quite as planned.

Today has been a tough day. Not enough sleep from watching CNN all night. Disappointment in the results. Code problems. Customer problems. Hardware problems. Last minute wedding to-dos. I’m shot. It’s been a tough day all around.

Tomorrow I’m headed to the beach to pull the boat out of the water for the winter. I’ll be offline most of the day. Hopefully everything will run much smoother than it has today.

I find it interesting how the AP rewrites stories that are already out on the wire. NetNewsWire has this great feature that tracks edits to the RSS feeds that you subscribe to. Here’s an AP story from today:

Red strike through is text that was removed by the AP and green is text that was added. The following AP Wire story went from “Haliburton is out of control in its work providing troop support” to “if we stop Haliburton, U.S. forces face an emergency”. That’s a big flip-flop.

AP: Halliburton Contract Faced Objections (AP)

AP - The Pentagon Army extended a Halliburton Co. troop support contract for 11 months beyond its expiration despite warnings over the objections of a top contracting officer, even contending — and then withdrawing — a claim that U.S. forces faced an emergency if the company was “out of control” in its work providing troop support in didn’t get the Balkans, government memos showed.extra work.

Yahoo! News - Top Stories 10/30/04 11:15 AM

2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes

I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited. I believe the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows it was the fault of a handful of misguided underlings who simply misunderstood a memo signed by the Secretary of Defense which authorized the use of dogs to interrogate prisoners...

I just got home from work. Apparently the guy living in the loft above mine left a plugged toilet running all day. The maintenance guys said he had almost a foot of water on his apartment floor. That water has spent all day soaking into the old concert factory floors and is now slowly exiting directly into my loft. Damn you gravity! I can hardly think over the roar of fans and dehumidifiers. And wouldn’t you know it- the majority of the water exited directly on to my stylus r800.

Only 30 days left of my bachelorhood. Panic? What panic?
I’ve got a lot of beer drinking to do…

Lumière’s color photos from World War I— made with millions of grains of potato starch.

This stood out for me last night. I distinctly remember when Bush said Osama bin Laden wasn’t a concern. I had just mentioned to someone back then that all the administration talk is about Iraqi and the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Iraq was going to use against the free world. At that point it had been literately 6 months since Bush had mentioned 9/11 or bin Laden. Bush, et al. had successfully diverted all the attention from al Qaeda and our 9/11 attackers to Iraq. Then out of the blue he got blind-sided at a press conference and uttered the “I’m not concerned about bin Laden” quote. I was shocked when he said it then, and I’m still shocked today. Thanks to Google- it’s all saved for the history books.

Last night:

Kerry- Six months after he said Osama bin Laden must be caught dead or alive, this president was asked, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” He said, “I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.” Bush - Gosh, I just don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. It’s kind of one of those exaggerations.

Whitehouse Press Conference, March 13th 2002:

As I say, we haven’t heard much from (bin Laden). And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

Flip-flop catalog

Things have been a little hectic around here. It’s down to 50 days until I get married, and 43 days until we depart for St. Johns for a week of fun in the sun with the people that mean the most to me in my life. I’m expecting one awesome week-long party before the big day. There’s a ton of loose ends to tie up before departure. All the current craziness will be worth it once I’m poolside with a Dark & Stormy in hand.

Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates

Apparently Bush’s Air National Guard documents (critical of his service) are fakes. Discovered by Little Green Footballs- the CBS documents were written in Word using Times New Roman. I found it hard to believe- so I opened the PDF in Illustrator and typed directly over the originals. Times New Roman fits perfectly. The consensus seems to be:

• in 1972 standard typewriters used Pica or Elite as their typefaces
• hand typed documents do not word-wrap to match margins or tab as MS Word does
• typewriters from the ’70s do not have kerning tables or proportional typefaces
• typewriters from the ’70s did not superscript ^th or ^st (Word automatically superscripts)

What is the chance that a document from the 70’s is a perfect match for a 2004 word processor? Looks like the Democrats are going to get some heat for this one. Fake-Doc-Gate. Enjoy, Spider.

A freak telephonic incident this weekend has left me without a cellphone. If you need to reach me this week please use email.

Cyclades, Greece 2002

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Terror alert timeline and graph of terror alerts vs. Bush’s ratings. Findings:

• Whenever his ratings dip, there’s a new terror alert.
• Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.
• As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever.

One of my family members may have had their identity stolen. The thieves actually took envelopes with new credit cards and pin numbers out of their mailbox, and apparently physically dup'ed them before returning the cards (and tampered envelops) to the mailbox. They were tipped off when the MBNA fraud dept. contacted the cardholder to check on the thousands of dollars worth of Home Depot goods just purchased. What's interesting is that it appears they were targeted... as new family that has just moved to this state, someone figured they'd be opening new bank accounts and getting new cards. They were also sophisticated enough to make duplicate fakes. Sounds like an inside job by the Welcome Wagon.

My usual paranoia (only use SSL connections for mail, change passwords every month, encrypt important emails and documents with GPG, etc) has been stepped up. Today I've:

• Used Google number range operator to check to see if my credit card numbers are in the wild. (via Waxy)
• Shopped for a personal shredder- that cross cuts or even shreds CDs .

Subject: i feel great!-be you^ng again
selfveroordeling'xfedbashirs_fbprotocols eahml

a_m_erica p_~ha_'rm & 0vern_-ig^ht de`_liver

suikerrietskr marvellst uniontown http://ebu.docket9430pi11.u/f74/ eve is passionate about his 'hobby'and happily tours me round the vast canvases.'Do you like Bacon?'As it's near lunchtime I pause long enough for him to point out the Bacon he means,which stands framed above the mantelpice

• Sunday's terror alert was based on information that was 3-4 years old.
• No one seems to know which CitiBank building was targeted.
• All of NYC has been at Threat level Orange since 9/11. So the financial district is now at Orangey-Red? Red? Crimson?
• Wasn't the original idea behind Tom Ridge and the Dept. of Homeland Security the same idea as the new National Intelligence Director and the National Counter-terrorism Centre? And isn't it really Condi's job to collect intelligence from all the intelligence agencies and filter it to the President?
• IMHO Tom Ridge's Sunday alert reeked of a political stunt when mid alert he began praising the President's war on terror.
• Bush still wants one Terror Photo Op a Month.

Booyakasha-- Response to a Borat interview. (via Waxy)

Today on the freight tracks outside the office, a massive train of military vehicles rolled by. All of them were well beaten up and a few had Iraqi messages written on them. They were headed North from tracks that lead out of Delaware- and probably Dover. The train could have had a hundred run-down vehicles. Humvees in every configuration- ambulance, troop carrier, shelter carrier, TOW missile carrier and armored versions with the turret on top. Water tankers. Bulldozers. HEMTTs. Camouflaged golf carts?!? Some of the $416 Billion is in pretty bad shape.

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BoingBoing's story seems a lot like this from 2003. What's nice-- and they're missing-- if you keep your iChat window open you can respond to all the SMS replies as if you're having an IM session with the phone user.

Now I know what Lars should have done with his FJ40. Clearly he should have sunk a flat screen LCD and DVD into a bamboo floor in the back. So... when you're fording 8 feet of river water with the snorkel kit-- you could watch DVDs underwater?

Matt Voss, under pressure has changed 2 graphics. The shadow and the content background. Not quite enough. Matt's wedding site is still a rip-off lock, stock and barrel. His original, uncredited version is (cached) here, our site here. TAMU defines plagiarism as:

• Plagiarism applies to all information regardless of format; photographs, charts, graphs, drawings, statistics, verbal exchanges such as interviews or lectures, performances on television or live, and texts whether in print or on the web must all be documented appropriately.

So what did Matt and Meg do here? They helped themselves to the code that defines the design of our site. They removed copyright notices and replaced them with their own. They modified only 2 images. Not enough to be considered derivative work. The code and site design were built by a professional designer. The the content and copy were written by a professional PR person. We charge money for our services. Matt and Meg couldn't even write their own welcome statement. I'm really shocked. And how did they get caught? The stolen stylesheet is still calling images on this server. Not so smart.

Updates: Matthew Voss is a programmer at Texas AMU-- knowing how higher education frowns upon plagiarism, I wonder what his employer thinks of him stealing other peoples work? Not to mention removing a designer's copyright and adding his own. Matt- have you looked at your site on a Mac? It calls Zaphino- so the titles look much better. You probably weren't aware of that.

Meg also works for the library at TAMU. Best of luck on your marriage built on lies!

Another update explaining what they've done here.

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

Chicagoist is already running. Gothemist has also registered Phillyist, LAist and Washingtonist. Neil must must have his hands full.

Van Halen's Eruption played on a violin. (via waxy)

NoTell Motel was an awesome bar, with crazy 70s pornos running on TVs all over the place and a legit East Village clientele. Until I found this site, I had completely forgotten about it. It's been gone forever. I think it's a Fresh Tortillas or some sort of taco place now. It was one night 8 or 9 years ago while walking back to 2F from NoTell Motel-- that we discovered the Magic Chili Dog™

You've got to love this. Especially when you remember that he doesn't think he's made ANY mistakes as president.

I'm reading a page a day of James Joyce's Ulysses and The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci via RSS. I can't think of a more killer use for syndicated feeds. I have little time (and patience/attention span when it comes to Ulysses) to sit down and read these texts in meatspace. Daily serialized snippets served up to my RSS reader is ideal. (Of course, Ulysses is going to take until June 14, 2006 to finish this way) I hope to see more RSS nuggets like these. The great thing about RSS or Atom is that in addition to your desktop, you can subscribe to the feeds on just about anything-- cellphones, pdas, email or your yahoo! You've got access to the content from just about anywhere. Surprisingly, RSS seems like the perfect medium to publish stories- I'd love to see some big authors push out some old school serialized stories. If anyone has found any other RSS texts, let me know.

Or, how the the lights will go out when brain-munchers take over. (via Waxy)

Update: All Gone!

This morning when I read this, I couldn't help but thinking of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David has it "on good authority" that there's going to be a terror attack on LA. Duncan reminded me of that episode last night- when we were "tipped off" by a real "play'a" to another big event that we were "guaranteed" would materialize on CNN last night.

• I've been cron-ing jpegoptim to automatically run lossless optimizations to the images that I post. It hadn't occured to me until yesterday that all my monitors are optimzed with custom color profiles. I didn't noticed that the jpegoptim option "stripe-all" wasn't just removing EXIF and previews from the images, but it was also striping the embedded color profiles out of the jpegs-- so EVERYONE hasn't been seeing the same quality images I have been. Doh!

• Double whammy. Using ecto to create the thumbnails (via MT, via imagemagick) creates shitty thumbnails. Clicking the thumbnail and popping up the original is the only way to see a decent image. (I've known this since day one, but my laziness had gotten the better of me. Much eaiser for MT to make thumbnails on the fly than for me to play pixel monkey once a day.)

• Studio2f's Movable Type is slowing down. Static pages serve fast thanks to a well oiled apache and gzip. CGI based actions are another story. It's taking over 30sec for a comment to be posted. I think I've tracked the problem down to the billion crap sites MT-Blacklist has to check every comment for. Not sure how to speed that up, while keeping the crap-flooders at bay. I'm looking into using either speedy:cgi or mod_perl (which should be the default in the first place). Dunc fired up speed:cgi on his server and it work fine with minimal MT modification (replacing all the shebangs). the ultimate solution is probably upgrade the horsepower on this Sawtooth from 500mhz to 1ghz+...or better.

So what to do? The comment posting speed is going to take time to figure out and speed up. The images-- I'm going to start caring less about the size of this site. If you're still using a 56k dialup, tough luck, I'm going to start pushing some large jpegs out the door. Soon (may not be for a bit) I'm going to stop the heavy handed optimization and crappy thumbnails. I need sometime to rethink my new workflow, so these changes won't happen for a bit.

Congratulations to Twinky and Kathleen for joining the engagement club. Now your fun begins-- planning the wedding. <evil maniacal laugh />

I've been invited in Google's Gmail beta. I think I'm going to setup a rule to forward a copy of all my messages to them as a backup. No mail ever lost or deleted, and the Google engine to search it all in seconds. Google Gmail invites are worth net-gold to some people.

Our wedding site is up: wedding.studio2f.com. Of course it's blog-o-fied. If it appears alien and foreign to the studio2f world or to my style- it's a riff off the rather involved wedding invite "package" that we designed. Now the real hard part begins-- picking menus, bands and photographers.

This weekend in Long Island it cost me over $45 to fill my mother's Land Cruiser with gas. That hurts. Duncan is feeling the pain in Cleveland with his Land Cruiser.

Also- enabling trackbacks on a corporate blog is a huge mistake... scroll down on Mena's page and witness the anti-MT 3.0 rage.

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Google launched a corporate blog today. I wonder how that works with the IPO quiet period?

Get is while you can. The iTunes music store DRM stripper is now called Hymn, and is available as a OSX image, windows executable and as source (for compiling on Linux). De-DRM'ed iTunes ACCs are playable anywhere and on any platform that supports MPEG-4. You paid for the music, you should have the right to do what you want with it. Without Hymn, who knows what you'll actually own next time iTunes is updated.

Loyalty Day?

60 million songs / 2.9 million iPods. P2P still in effect?

We're happy we got out of the purchasing process before we made a huge mistake. We've now agreed to suspend the house hunt until the wedding is over. One major life/financial change at a time is all I can handle.

I've gotten my hands on a brand-spanking-new Motorola V600. The phone is an extremely slick little bluetooth flip phone- and the camera is by far better than my t68i, my t616 or a treo600. Taking, composing and sending a Mo-Pho can be done one-handed in seconds. The problem I seem to be having- the V600 is attaching the images to emails in the weirdest way-- mfop can't strip the photo out. It appears that both the text portion of the email and the image are individually encoded base64.

I can't agree more that DRM is a bad idea- however I had the same problem with the iTunes store that BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow experienced- and it was easily solved by contacting Apple through this form. I explained that I had lost access to 2 of the authorized machines-- and wanted them removed from my account. iTunes Store support de-authorized all computers on my account- essentially wiping the slate clean. All that needed to be done was to reauthorize the cpus I wanted.

Trackbacks have busted PageRank? More on blogs Google-Bombing.

An earlier post I brought up the idea of extracting a $479 $345.49 MicroDrive from a $249 iPod Mini. I’m still waiting for my iPod Mini to arrive (backordered). While I’m waiting, I thought I’d do the due diligence and prove the MicroDrive from the Creative Nomad Muvo2 is usable in a camera. Some posts suggested it couldn’t be done. I bought a Muvo2 for $150 on Amazon. The goal: extract the $400 Hitachi Microdrive for my Nikon D100.

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About time! My own site is always the redheaded stepchild when it comes to attention. Finally this page is XHTML valid. Most of the portfolio pages are as well. I have some bugs to work out on old HTML based portfolio pieces and poorly formatted movable type pages from the past. On my path to XHTML compliance I've made some minor refinements to this site. The old look is here. The new one is simpler. I'm sure there's going to be some hickups. As I work the final bugs out and tweak the typography, these pages will fall in and out of compliance. Let me know if anything is horribly wrong. I've test on all the major browsers and my bug list is shrinking.

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This app rocks. Literally. When I began burning to MP3s in 1995ish I screwed up most of the ID3 tags. My 9,000+ library has about 1000+ songs with unusable info. Jay Tuley's I Eat Brainz (interesting icon, eh?) connects to musicbrainz.org and uses acoustical matching to rip through any poorly tagged ACCs and MP3 in itunes. It identifies your songs by their acoustical signatures and rewrites them with the correct -- full -- ID3 tags. It's a tad buggy... and has crashed a few times. However, it's well worth suffering through some bugs to finally fix my poorly organized music library.

Appearently a German has based his Ebay template on the code from this site. Their Powermac G3 listing is using my stylesheet- which is requesting images directly from this server. My non-functioning blogtimes PNG can be seen below the "PowerMac" title. I think I'll swap that out of my site and replace it with ... the goatse.cx image.

I replaced the blogtimes image that they're using with the following image:

Depending how well Babelfish translated it, the graphic above should say "I stole this computer"

Can you locate every State? I naturalized during my college years. It was the first time I had to study U.S. geography. I think I did fairly well: 38/45

Via J-walk

Recently I was at a party talking with some old friends when of one of those friends alluded to my upcoming destination wedding - of which many are very excited for. It was suggested my fiancée and I weren't being thoughtful to others by planning a destination wedding without taking into consideration the time and cost factors attached.

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What's the deal with this? AT&T sent me a direct mail piece saying that in one week they're sending me a free new Sony Ericcson T226 with a return mailer to send my 1+ year old T68i back to them. Seeing the T226 doesn't have Bluetooth, IR, a built-in modem or voice activated dialing...why would I want to do this? What's the catch? Why is AT&T Trying to get T68s off their network? Can i keep my T68i and sell the T226 on ebay? There's no fine print to this deal.

Update: AT&T is changing their network to 850 band and my T68i isn't going to work anymore. Any Sony Ericsson 900/1800/1900MHz phone (P800, P900, T68i, etc), is going to be affected by the network change. The off-shore call center tells me that the unsolicited phone being blindly mailed to me- if it is not returned, I have to pay for it. I didn't ask for it to be sent. Why do I have the onus to deal with shipping it back? CATCH: If you don't like the cheaper phone, you can get a discounted better phone but only by locking yourself into a 2 year contract. Time to switch carriers?

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The more I think about it, the more the economics of the iPod mini don't make sense to me. Besides the fact you can get an extra 11 gigs for only $50 more, the rest of the mini picture seems crazy.

Even if Apple was purchasing the MicroDrives from Hitachi for $50, they're not recouping the cost of the player after the costs of the remaining hardware, advertising and packaging are included. If they ARE getting them for $50 then how is Hitatchi justifying the $480 MicroDrive retail price? Add this to the fact that the iTunes Music Store is a loss leader. What's the strategy here? They can't be converting enough windows users to make up the loss with G5 sales.

It seems so 90s... heavily hype a money losing service to gain marketshare. Lose tons on the hardware you're selling to support the service. They just need to figure out how to get free shipping in the equation and they'll have the dot-com trifecta. Can someone explain to me how this works? Even if they are making money on the mini- the margin has to be paper thin (90s again: "well make it up on volume").

.- - /  ... -.-- -- -... --- .-.. /  .- -.. -.. . -.. /  - --- /  -- --- .-. ... . /  -.-. --- -.. .

Murph showed me that there are some problems with the iTunes/Pepsi giveaway. I have yet to get a smudged code. I've been averaging one song in every 2.

Always entertaining J-Walk points out that Microsoft is running Frontpage ads that feature broken HTML. ( BBEdit is the only way to write HTML).

Via ScriptyGoddess: how to fake Lomo shots in photoshop (lomo effect , lomo actions)

Some interesting thoughts on photoblogs. I consider myself quite a hack. I take 1 good photo in 36. Most of the photos I post here are technically terrible (overexposed, under exposed, etc)- but I enjoy doing it. I'm more "home enthusiast" than "amateur photographer." Despite minoring in Photography at Syracuse I always seemed to have little patience in doing it right. One of the reasons that I migrated so fast to digital. In the back of my head I believed my lack of technical discipline could always be corrected in photoshop (ha!).

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The potd category got out of control so I've broken it up into sub pages with the MT Paginate plugin. There's sub-page navigation now at the top. Since the clean install of Panther, I seem to have lost Blogtimes graph in the top left hand conner. Seems that GD is not generating new graphs. I'll look into that. In what little spare item I have I'm getting closer to the XHTML redo of the site. it's now 85% done.

This guy woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Why your blog must die:

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

The only valid points are that MT has some security issues and trackback is playing havoc with google's page rank system. Other than that who the hell cares what someone wants to post about?

The usual debate is that Windows has all the virus because there's a larger market share, and thus virus writers are Windows users writing Windows viruses. However, the virus du jour is set to DDoS the Santa Crus Operation, the litigate-for-profit DeathStar that is attacking Linux. That being the case, then the My Doom writers are more likely angry Linux users launching a return attack on SCO. Back to the original debate. Why didn't they write a *nix virus to attack SCO? Why'd they write a Windows virus? Is it that Linux/Unix/MacOS are tougher nuts to crack? Windows- by default- ships as a inherently insecure swiss cheese operating system. The many Windows lemmings that haven't patched their backdoor/exploit ridden operating systems are easy pickings. Please people- run WindowsUpdate once and a while.

Now off to set up my OSX mail.app rules to delete the heaps of virus laden emails destined for my inbox.

Our president in action. Yes this a real White House press release. (via J-walk/metafilter).

The party was a success: both with a "That Guy" and an angry neighbor. The live webcast was functional but the iSight didn't handle the low (no) light well. The broadcast image was mostly black. I'll need to find a lower lux camera for the next event- or broadcast the whole thing in infra-red.

We're having a much belated holiday party on Saturday. I'm going to try to webcast the festivities live here on studio2f. If all goes well my trusty iSight will broadcast directly to this page. All you'll need is a java enabled browser. Anticipated highlights:

• Already dead christmas tree falling over
• Jerk neighbors calling the cops at 8:30pm
• That guy

I can vouch for the fact that this year's Flu vaccine didn't work well. I had the new FluMist™ nasal version in November and so far ALL of 2004 I've been sick with the flu. I'm sick of being sick.

Written all over the outside of a crate delivered today:

"Over Basculing Risk"

I'm not sure many truck drivers would know what Bascule meant.

Yesterday I used the iLife suite for the first time. The Joanne Jordan Group needed an emergency compilation of the on-air appearances (today show, good morning america, etc) for one of their clients. In less than 2 hours- with no prior experience- I had captured footage from countless vhs tapes, edited them into a single clip and output the footage to both VHS and a fully interactive DVD. It was simple, seamless and done in no time. Apps I've never used- iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto integrate perfectly- and pulled music from my iTunes. The free iLife- with it's idiot proof interface- was a lot more powerful than I had ever imagined. Now I have to come up with a new excuse to get the big guns.

I'm home from 7 days of sailing crystal blue Caribbean waters and I'm sick as a dog. I fought off a head cold down there, and it's now mutated into some sort of super-flu. Apparently large does of rum kept the strain at bay.

Not only do I have the depression of returning to the cold northeast to do work, now I'm sick too. When I get more energy I'll post some photos from the British Virgin Islands- including our New Years at Foxy's on Jost Van Dyke (voted 3rd best place in the world to celebrate New Years for the millennium).

I've finally made an honest woman out of J. Jordan.

WTF? $4,230.89 for dancing girls? Clearly they haven't been to Scores.

Fuck you and your H2

Some complications from the surgery stopped my mother from being released yesterday. Hopefully everything is cleared up and she'll be out of there today.

Where have I been for the last few days? On Monday my mother was rushed to Bryn Mawr Hospital with a debilitating attack from an infected gall bladder. Not until this afternoon were they able to operate and remove it. I've been at the hospital everyday at her side. Unlike Smooth as Satin's removal, this was much more than a one-day-in-out procedure. The operation was a success. She's still well medicated for the pain- and she has a drainage tube in the side of her spewing some nasty stuff. She should be released from the hospital in the next day or so. We're extremely happy everything worked out ok- but now I'm 4 days behind in my Christmas shopping.

mail down again

Mail is running again. On Friday my provider outsourced EVERYTHING to India. Sunday the locals messed something up and not until this morning did my provider get their U.S. based servers running again.

My email provider seems to have botched a major system upgrade. My mail is down and it's unclear when it's going to be running again.

BlogShares has closed down. My virtual billions are lost.

Not much unlike my CKS USWeb reinvent MarchFirst options.

Bundles for Panther's Mail.app that I can't live without:

• GPGMail: GnuPG for mail.app
• SpamCop: Spam Reporting through SpamCop
• MailEnhancer: Match signatures with accounts. Show dock item counts for all new mail in all accounts. Toggle activity viewer.
• MailTemplate: Generate template based replies.

What the heck happened to the Adobe icons? I just upgraded to the new CS versions- and it's impossible to tell which application is which in the dock. Feathers and flowers? WTF? You can no longer quickly drag a file onto the dock icon- you have to hunt to find which fruity, flowery or birdy application you're looking for. There's nothing that visually tells them apart.

Matrix Revolutions review from Slashdot: "The Wachowski brothers have delivered a dud so disappointing, they may as well have bussed in Ewoks to save Zion"

They're getting ready to bring back the draft?!?

"A day of general thanksgiving for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed." The first North American Thanksgiving was held in Canada 43 years before the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A Little Perspective on $87 billion

It's getting out of hand. And this is without minimized windows. I either need to trim it down or buy a larger monitor.

How is this Coke promo going to work? If it's really GPS and not RFID, the cans are going to need to have a GPS receiver and some sort of transmitter in them. I'm assuming the reporter is misinformed- as RFID is the trendy evil tracking device that requires very little to work. If it is GPS- the GPS satellite system is a one way deal. GPS satellites transmit- they don't receive locations. The cans would need to send their location info another way- cell or paging networks maybe? They'd also have to have their prize patrol vans very close- so someone at Coke would have some idea where the tracker cans where... and as we know from the McDonald's Monopoly scams- when employees know where the "prize piece" is located, someone is going to rip-off the system.

Either way- tracking who buys Cokes is just a little scary, but if it's the beginning of marketers watching what and where you buy- then compiling the info into a database of your purchasing habits- to build more effective marketing campaigns targeted against you... Then that's very scary.

Successful post hurricane party. I had a blast. I hope everyone else did as well- even if we couldn't keep the power on the whole time. A nice surprise when I got home: my 2Ghz G5 is finally here. I can't wait to get it out of the box tonight. Photos of the Virginia Tech G5 supercomputer that "held up" my delivery have surfaced as well.

From here it looks like the storm was a bust. I'm headed down to the beach now. I should be there by 9am

Crazy surf visible on the Bethany Beach cam

NOAA simulations illustrating how the storm surge is going to look at North Carolina's Wrightsville Beach and Manteo.

Party crasher. I've been planning for months a big bash this weekend at my family's beach house in Bethany, DE. Now it appears the uninvited eye of a Category 4 Hurricane will pass within miles of the house. Coastal flooding, houses crushing witches and flying cows, may dampen the festivities.

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I'm finally taking the wool off my eyes. The G5 shipping shenanigans are a red herring. To date 100,000 G5s have been ordered from Apple. At minimum 10,000 2Ghz machines would have been scheduled to ship to on 8/26. None did. I can see the 1100 orders from Virginia Tech bumping the remaining 8900 orders a few days, possibly a week- but bumping them 30 days? There's a bigger problem afoot. To this day the only known 2Ghz that have shipped are 1100 to VT and mysteriously 3 random ones to students that placed orders in July. Where are the G5s? Apple can't provide their own stores with display models. They can't ship them to customers or resellers. The dual 2Ghz G5 is MIA.

Doesn't anyone else think something has happened here? Apple was never "on target to ship all G5s in August." The Virginia Tech order wasn't big enough to halt ALL shipping for 30 days. Apple had another problem and knew it right up until 8/26 that they couldn't ship 2Ghz-ers until the end of September. In a Wimpy voice: "I'll gladly pay you June prices for a dated computer in September." I just pray the holdup isn't a hardware issue or last minute design flaw.

G5 order date: 6/23 at 2:22pm EST. Estimated ship date: On or before 9/22

Why bounce back Sobig.f emails? Clearly the from: header has been forged by the virus, so bouncing back the email to someone that didn't actually send you the worm is a useless waist of bandwidth. The millions of infected emails clogging servers and pipes is doubled by the millions of bounce backs from admins that should just have their mailservers sending Sobig to dev/null. Weeks after Microsoft users should have patched their swiss cheese operating system, I'm getting overwhelmed with a new onslaught of Sobig emails and bouncebacks.

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Maybe the answer to the bugler shortage isn't funding the development of an electronic bugle- but instead to fund school music programs?

I finally have BlogTimes installed. Blogtimes is a wonderfully useless plugin that graphically plots the time of your posts on a graph of 24 hours. You can see the current month's chart it at the top of the left hand navigation. What a bear. It took me forever to get it to use my Fink'ed GD. The last 3 month's of studio2f BlogTime graphs are here.

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Another suicide attempt off the Market Street bridge Not sure of the status of the jumper, the tide is coming in pulling them under the bridge to the other side. A Fire Dept. boat just arrived. This is the 5th suicide I've witnessed out this window. The past ones have been more gruesome, with corpses being fished out of the river in front of me.

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What kind of nuts would come out of the woodwork if the Recall Bush movement was to succeed? Here's the front-runners for California.

There’s nothing all that revolutionary about the Truck Camera. It’s a basic Camera Obscura. Camera Obscuras were housed in small buildings (much larger than a truck). The masters used them to “trace” their subjects. A great read that describes the use of optics and the Camera Obscura in art history is “Secret Knowledge.”

Anyways, I’m not sure the Truck Camera guy should have quit his day job… and how come the site only has 1 photo from Peanut?

Apparently I write like a girl.

Palm rebrands itself as a Calvin Klein fragrance.

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After 4+ years, we’ve discovered that The Truth in Advertising clip is more than a Director’s promotional reel piece- a longer version with additional scenes is available on DVD! If you work in advertising or marketing- you have to see this Quicktime clip. It’s a riot.

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I'm home and can upload my digital camera photos. This happened seconds before I walked up to the corner of 9th and chestnut in Philadelphia. The driver (who has dragged himself onto the sidewalk) took out one of those Philly tourist directional lamp posts. Lucky for him he crashed 1/2 a block from a hospital. Click the thumbnails to view the fullsized images.

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What does any good New Yorker do during a city-wide crisis? Go drinking, of course.

Removed at the request of Dealtime (now shopping.com)

Dealtime has threatened legal action. All we were doing was trying to help out a great service- after calls to the billing dept. (unsuccessful) we posted this page. We felt we were helping Dealtime to create a better- more secure- shopping experience.

It's probably not a good idea anymore for me to carry on: my laptop, ipod, digital camera, lomo, gps, cellphone (w/camera), and sometimes a medium format camera and light meter. Other items to leave behind...

I setup Joanne Hudson Basics to ship everything UPS. As a promo/thanks item for increasing shipments this quarter, UPS sent a set of RC/Racers. "Race the Car, Race the Truck..." but don't race both at the same time! The #88 Ford Taurus and the Brown Truck are set to the same frequency (49MHz)! Doh! Maybe I'm supposed to do individual time trials?

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The mail server move has gone surprisingly well... just waiting for the MX Record modifications to propagate to DNS servers around the world..

I'm moving mail servers today. Studio2f mail will be down for a short while this afternoon. Nothing should bounce, but there will be large delays in delivery to me. Playing with Ettercap has made me extremely aware how easy it to grab passwords (credit card numbers, etc.) out of the ether, so I'm moving to encrypted connections for everything I do. I currently SSH just about everything with tunnels, but my mail provider has always been a weak spot. No SSL, no serious authentication. Repeat after me: "There will be no clear text passwords on my network."

Ellis Point Cache I found the Ellis Point Cache this weekend with help from my nephew Sam. GeoCaching is a blast. Instead of keeping it in a drawer, I'm going to start regularly carrying my GPS with me.

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The crazy traffic from Google has died down a bit, but now some jerk posted a direct link to the "One weekend a month" image in a Fark thread. The funny bit is- the Fark poster sees that image in his thread post. It's getting pulled from his local browser cache because his web browser has already loaded that image off of studio2f. In his eyes his post looks exactly like it's supposed to look. Everyone else viewing the Fark thread, however, is seeing something else.

My google keyword tracking script is going nuts. Seems all of a sudden hundreds of people are showing up here looking for the "One Weekend a Month" photo. If you can't find what you're looking for, it's here.

Update: "One Weekend a Month" was mentioned in the Times Op/Ed section today. That's what's driving all the traffic to that image. Google indexed my keyword tracking page (offline now, redirecting to the image everyone is hunting for), and tons of hits are ending up at the script page.

Update2: I'm not the only one getting swamped. Utterlyboring is having the same problem- and it turns out this is where the image originated from.

Some sort of Dr. Seusian track scrapper just went by my office window. The sound was unbelievable. Going less than 2 mph this thing apparently re-slopes the gravel around train tracks and polishes the track surface. I snagged these two photos with my phone's camera.

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Combining the basic idea behind GeoCaching with MoBlogging, I've been pondering development of a wild realtime scavenger hunt. Contestants - locally/globally would search for objects to complete the scavenger hunt. By submitting cameraphone photos of the hunt items, results could be posted and tracked in realtime (blogstyle) on the web. No need to break the law to steal hunt items, all finds would be photographed and posted to the hunt site.

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I'm headed to Martha's Vineyard for the week. If there's GPRS service up there I'll post some MoPhos from my phone, otherwise not much will be going on around here.

Studio2f's stock tanked yesterday. Last night I took the server offline to rewire a few things and put the SCSI card back in for the tape autoloader. During that time the BlogShares indexer must have come around, and couldn't locate the site! Quelle Horreur! Disaster! $1400/share to $0.02!

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Have a great 4th of July.

This is one of the cooler things I've stumbled upon. Apple's iChat client can do SMS chatting with cellphones. Just open a new iChat window. Add a buddy. Instead of entering a buddy name, enter the cellphone number you want to chat with starting with a +1 (for US numbers) like this:

+12125551212

Ha. This is the same thing we did to our pledges at Beta, but we played They Might be Giants "please pass the milk" (mp3) over and over while they separated buckets of jimmies and sprinkles by size and color. I guess the Guantánamo Bay inmates are in the "club".

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Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

The patent office is out of control awarding patents for the most obvious ideas (1, 2, 3) and as weapons to stifle competition. Today Netflix received a patent on their model of subscribing to receive movie rentals.

One no longer patents a better mouse trap- you patent the concept of catching mice. That way you'll be the only mouse trap company around.

New twist on the Nigerian money transfer scam. This one comes from my dead oil merchant uncle. I'm rich!

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Sega plans to spray paint pigeons and sick them on Wimbledon crowds.

Most people still seem to be concerned about having their credit cards stolen online. The truth is meatspace is just as bad as online. One of my favorite and regular restaurants has just caught a waiter that has been stealing card numbers for over a year. Using a portable handheld magnetic strip reader he called "MoJo" he swiped every card a second time. So if you think it's safer to buy offline- just think, what actually happens to your card number when you: call it into a catalog operator; give it to a waiter, fax it,snail mail it on a form... Whenever you lose sight of your card- anything can happen, not just online.

As a gift, each of the 29 special effects artists from the matrix will receive 1.75 million from Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves says he has enough money to last him "for the next few centuries." Maybe some of it should be used for acting lessons.

Update 6/10: Turned out to be fake. Reeves keeps all the cash.