:Archive Of August 2000:
Wednesday, August 30, 2000
- 3:12 PM -
Weird just warms my heart. Meiwa Denki. Clicking on the photos takes you on a quick loop tour of items.
Never heard of them? Try this for a better introduction. Make sure to check out the vid.
Tuesday, August 29, 2000
- 6:54 PM -
Oh my good god. Yes!
- 12:10 AM -
Fun for me. Moloko.
Yes, I know everyone on the planet has probably seen this vid but I haven't had a tv for a long time and I finally thought to go look. This album has that little extra for me.
I wonder if they know they're an 80's band?
Monday, August 28, 2000
- 9:28 PM -
Damn Joyce for the sad man he was. He had no sense of Ulysses.
- 7:13 PM -
Yow. iScoot.
Friday, August 25, 2000
- 3:58 PM -
Hullo, how have I missed out on this? Ani Moller is smart, sexy, and lives an impossible distance away. Wow. That's even better than being ficticious. And did I mention she's smart?
Thursday, August 24, 2000
- 8:37 PM -
Oh lovely: the story was just passed on that Darwin did his science in the morning, and in the afternoon he would have someone of his family read him a novel. When asked what kind of novel he'd like read, he would say, "It doesn't matter, as long as it has a character I can fall in love with."
- 12:14 PM -
Imagine the wind never stopped. Now imagine it's always coming from the same direction. Would we have learned to fly earlier? Would we have made kite structures, or clothing so we could take advantage of 'hopping' into the wind and having short glides when direction and terrain permitted? Would we have developed elegant structures like hang-glider galleons to let many people navigate the globe together, or would we have developed individual clothes-kites so that all and any travel independently?
Either way I can turn this into commentary on virtual communities, or into a heck of fun level in Real Myst.
Hm.... I think it's time we got back into bodysuits and VR; the world's technology has had about 15 years to catch up to the ideas in this. Let's see what we can produce now for the price of a Mattel Powerglove, or say a mid-range sport bike.
Yeah.. wind ships or leaf people. Which will it be? You choose.
So I guess the 'next level' to take Myst to is to add a sim-evolution engine so we do more than just build a world and explore it in a fixed time.
Or jack similar tech to the code of your Quake skin so that it evolves its characteristics based on your survival skills. Mine would quickly evolve into a camouflaged section of wall and would neither let me move nor fire for fear of attracting attention, but your mileage may vary.
- 11:44 AM -
Telephones, contrary to popular belief, are not a tool of the devil. You cannot see the person's facial expression and posture. There are fewer unlocked doors to messing with their soul.
Tuesday, August 22, 2000
- 1:42 PM -
Hot whistling Mickey on a stick, can't Netscape render any css right?
- 11:09 AM -
I was sitting at a cafe with a lady who was explaining that her dad is a hydraulic engineer and by way of this tragedy there is no flat surface in her entire family homestead that is not covered with blueprints of dams going back to the 1960's.
Not being one to mask social ineptitude I said, "Wow. Cool!" The blank stare I got told me this was the wrong answer, so I proceeded to furnish the hole I was digging by explaining that the drawings were as rich with ideas as a private library of novels. This earned me a long pause and, "Yeah, that's what he says."
So have a look at this. The Nieuport Page. Lovingly collected technical drawings of early aircraft. Page after page of elegant solutions to flying at low airspeed in lightly stressed structures of wood and metal. Glorious. Being geek doesn't just mean a CRT tan.
Monday, August 21, 2000
- 4:18 PM -
A few hundred clicks later ... My lovely old black telephone is a Dutch HEEMAF designed by Gerard Kiljan in 1955. I've seen a lot of telephones in the last 24 hours and I have to say the Japanese No.4 is still the prettiest.
Other things I found included a nice site on the Ericofon, and blueprints for the TARDIS.
Sunday, August 20, 2000
- 11:55 PM -
...I've just spent far too long surfing for refs to an old phone I have. But I did find perhaps the most beautiful phone in all the world. The No.4 Automatic Desktop Telephone. A general image here, and a small handful if you scroll to the bottom here. Such exquisite lines.
- 10:01 PM -
Neato. I got to borrow a digital camera and I immediately made a herd of incompetent shots. I'm definitely not going back to film. Meanwhilst I have images of things I've been meaning to show to certain people. The index is here for those of you who'd like to root through my laundry.
- 10:23 AM -
Over yonder at Bob Cringely's Pulpit, he's discussing the issue of security at the Utah games. In particular the FBI requirement that the public email terminals have both the ability to let them record everything, including your passwords, and also to intercept your message until they get around to delivering it, or not.
Here's Bob,
"And the truly amazing part of this story is that there is nothing illegal about the data gathering, itself. Since the kiosk doesn't belong to you or me, we are bound by terms of usage that allow the kiosk provider to do pretty much whatever they want with the bits we run through their system. By simply using their machine, we give up our privacy without even knowing it."
Why is this suddenly okay because I used a keyboard and not a telephone?
Nations put great stock in privacy -- much of their business is "secret". Businesses have trade secrets and trade marks and copyrights and patents and non-disclosure agreements. Why this sudden belief that it is unhealthy and dangerous to society for the individual to have privacy?
In the democratic tradition of oversimplification [think of it as mob rule with cheerleaders] I find I'm on a side of a polarized issue. Because I believe in anonymous cash and private speech I am considered alike with militia nutbars and goth kids who might finally have had enough.
Why on earth don't we have an institutionalized Human Right to Privacy? Seems it's not even in the public conciousness. Freedom of speech is worthless if you haven't the freedom to think your own thoughts through first.
Friday, August 18, 2000
- 11:49 PM -
rrrrrrrrretro! It never occured to me there'd be a used car lot for race cars. Of course there is.
Thursday, August 17, 2000
- 6:01 PM -
I've been needing this: The Bluffer's Guide to Anime & Manga.
- 2:41 PM -
Augh! I hit a MSN link by mistake and suddenly my security software had to block them from creating a .vbs file on my machine.
I don't get why computer privacy is such a hard concept for the general public to grasp. We've got some pretty clear models to go by: Just because you have a phone installed in your house does not make it suddenly legal to eavesdrop on your house. Just because you have a television installed does not make it okay to monitor what you watch with it.
- 12:07 PM -
Just 'cause I like putting things in pairs. Lance and Henry.
Wednesday, August 16, 2000
- 11:44 AM -
It begins. Fasten your seatbelts folks. I've been waiting for the real computer revolution to start since 94. Doesn't sound like that long ago? Pick up a copy of Wired from then and see how dated it already is. Web years are long. 94 was when I decided The Change was way overdue and the catch-up swing would make the acceleration seem even faster. Think how a space probe travels by doing high speed slingshots around the gravity of planets. This is an indicator of one of those swings.
Tuesday, August 15, 2000
- 11:05 PM -
Since we're talking about dream interpretation (it's a sure bet someone is somewhere), back in '88 there was a flick I missed called Walking After Midnight and I've been meaning to hunt down since. It didn't sound like a movie per se, and the theaters dropped it after only a week. MrShowbiz gives it a whopping 43 out of 100 and this description:
KD Lang, Willie Nelson, James Coburn, Helen Shaver, and other celebrities discuss near-death and past life experiences. Presented with solemnity, it too often lapses into silliness; narration by the irony-laden voice of Ringo Starr doesn't help.
Still, I'm intrigued. Is it completely horrible? Any sort of cult status out there?
Monday, August 14, 2000
- 10:52 AM -
This the stuff of dreams. They won't sell you a rail ticket to where you want to go because there are no more trains? Build you own train. What a delightful outing.
Friday, August 04, 2000
- 10:30 AM -
I've been looking for a good site about international symbols for airport signage, but with no luck. Anybody know one?
I did find the History of Art by Airport Signs.
Wednesday, August 02, 2000
- 10:03 PM -
A few days ago I had to wrestle with Win98 to install a printer. Although it correctly identified the printer and the printer did it's normal little reset dance when the computer was powered up, I couldn't print. It said it couldn't find the port. Under System, no ports were listed. Kinda odd, that, since the mouse works fine. So I selected Add Hardware and installed LPT1. Win insisted on looking for all plug 'n' play items and so System now showed duplicates of each item. If I removed the duplicates, the next boot would reinstall them. Oh well, at least I had the printer going.
But on each boot, it'd whine that the registry was corrupt and insist on rebooting to install a backup registry.
Frustrating, but everything seems to be working, so I decided to live with it for now. Then this problem vanished. That worried me, so I went looking, and yes indeedy, my ports were gone again and I could not print. So I went through the whole install dance again. Everything seemed good. Hot reboot okay. Cold reboot okay. The only thing I did not test was reboot with the printer turned off.
I didn't have to wait long to test that. Windows just crashed [surprise!] and on restart it insisted that the registry is corrupt and it will have to reboot with a backup....
Augh!
Yep, the printer port is gone again and so is every other setting change I've done in the last few days.
Can they hear you scream in Redmond?
- 1:28 PM -
CSS is the football in the Charlie Brown and Lucy sketch.
Owen Briggs ©2000, 2006
