I saw myself from two irreconcilable angles in this quote:

[an individual, I'm paraphrasing here], in order to say anything significant, is “forced to generalize.” The true measure of a theory is not that it accounts for all the relevant facts but that it accounts for those facts “better than any other theory.” Without abstraction and simplification there can be no understanding, Huntington maintained. Those who concentrate on the imperfections of a theory, without coming up with a better alternative, are helping no one.

On the one hand I’m incapable of precision when I try and describe things. I can never remember dates, sizes, places, names, anything specific. On the other hand I feel I’m quite good at synthesizing meaning from a complex mess of data and expressing a well constructed opinion about it. So on the one hand the first half of the quote seems to apply directly to me (and I do agree with Huntington’s supposition). On the other, my former coworkers used to hate the fact that I was a deconstructionist - they would come to me with business plans or new product lines and I would rip them to shreds in short order. Yet when asked to come up with better alternatives, I was usually unable to. So which one is me? The deconstructionist or the able synthesizer of ideas? Here lies the irony because in the end I think it’s both.

To paraphrase Azimov, a ’significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
The germans have just created magic. I spend a significant amount of time tooling around usenet grabbing music, software, books and more off of the binary newsgroups. One of the most frustrating aspects of this is the missing parts. You see, when files are posted they’re broken into chunks. An audiobook for example might consist of 50 pieces. Despite subscribing to what is probably the best commercial usenet provider, I run into the problem of missing pieces on an almost daily basis. You can’t actually use the material you’re downloading until you have all the pieces. Roy and I spend a lot of time trading missing pieces back and forth and hunting them down. Now some awesome programmers in Germany have invented a new file format that allows you to recreate from scratch the missing pieces, without ever having the actual pieces themselves. On the surface it seems like magic. Of course in the end it boils down to sophisticated math I guess, but damn is it cool. No more usenet ‘needle in a haystack’ file hunts for me

This weekend my littlest sister went looking for my xmas list and couldn’t find it on my site. Thinking she was dense, I tried to walk her through it on the phone and it soon became clear that her browser wasn’t rendering the site correctly. She was using netscape 4 on a mac and the .css positioning wasn’t rendering correctly. This sucks. Netscape 4 suckage is not news to me, I do this stuff for a living after all, but I’m not using anything radical in my css and the site validates for .css and html. So wtf am I to do. The answer is soon I will have a redirect script in place to deal. I’m not going to spend time trying to accomodate a 3 year old bug ridden browser, very sorry but that’s the long and short of it.

If like me you have a home office full of computer equipment, including servers that are on 24×7, you might find these devices useful. Think ‘nightlight.’ The glowire stuff is pretty cool too.

Check this thing out. It lets you broadcast mp3’s from say your laptop or your portable mp3 player to your car stereo using the FM radio band. And it’s only $15. Someone is getting one of these for xmas, and no, it’s not you Jesse

I upgraded to the latest release of moveable type, which is the software I use to run this blog. This post is just a test to make sure the upgrade’s gone smoothly.

I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled today. What can I say, it sucked. The surgery itself went fine, much like my hernia operation - they put me under and I don’t remember a thing until after they’d finished. On the car ride home the novicaine started to wear off and by the time I was back in my house I was in a lot of pain, but they gave me excellent pain killers (percocet) which really take the edge off. The only problem is they seem to last for about 3 hours and I can only take one every 4 hours so my day went like this: take painkiller, fall into pleasant dreamy sleep. Wake up 2-3 hours later with a gradually increasing throbbing pain in my jaw, watch clock anxiously until I can take a pill again, rinse, repeat
The only other issue is the amount of bleeding, it’s pretty intense. I don’t want to dwell on it so I’ll move right along.

I saved the teeth and now know why I was getting recurring infections the last six months or so. One of the teeth had a cavity in it you could almost fit a bb into. My hunch is that this cavity was up under my gums (my gums were partially covering my wisdom teeth) and this is the source of the infectious material that was causing me so much grief.

All in all I’m relieved, it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. I’ll post some pictures of the teeth for the curious, and Becky took a before (normal dave) and after (chipmunk cheek dave) photo so maybe I’ll post those as well. Now it’s back to obesessively watching the clock; 27 minutes till I can take another pill.

I love metafilter. It’s come to be one of my favorite sites. Today’s funny line comes from a thread on metafilter about the Bush administration continuing to push for national missile defense despite the changed political climate:

I thought for sure Bush would stop pushing this after 9/11. I’m not sure where his head is on this. We’re opening our mail with salad tongs and he wants a missile shield?

Think ‘Microsoft’ as you read this:

“Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing falls into them, they hold it fast, but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the mesh and escapes.”
Anacharsis (C.600 B.C.)

I haven’t been doing much ‘cool link of the day’ stype stuff in ages, so today, here’s some excellent panoramic maps of various cities around the country from the library of congress.

Man do I wish I knew how to program better. I’ve been playing around with ways to publish a sort of daily ’stream of conciousness’ page where I could instantly publish phrases, thoughts, links and so on in one contiguous stream. So I started block diagraming how I would go about doing it, kicking around various techniques and so on and it occured to me that the coolest thing would be to have it be possible to post via an instant messenger client, which in this case would have to be Jabber. The problem is getting it running would require my getting a number of things installed onto the server, including xerces and Xalan and so on, and put simply, I suck at getting things installed on linux, and even once I had everything installed I would still have to figure out how to parse the incoming xml from Jabber and…..and…and a lot of stuff I don’t know how to do. Still, I’m going to dig into this further, I really like the idea.

I’ve spent the day trying to better understand how the CSS box model* works. While doing so I came across this paragraph:

Vertically adjacent margins of elements in the normal document flow are collapsed. In other words, if two margins are vertically adjacent to each other, then the actual distance between the two element borders is the maximum of the adjacent margins. In the case of negative margins, the absolute maxmimum of the negative adjacent margins is subtracted from the maximum of the postive adjacent margins. The vertically adjacent margins of elements which have been floated or positioned do not collapse.

Riiiiiiiight. Got that? The next paragraph is even worse.
*(cascading style sheets - the lingua franca of web aesthetics….the box model refers to using CSS to position elements on the page)

I can’t possibly say it any better than this. A telling quote:

This war, it will be just like the War on Drugs. It will be potent and effective and our objectives will be clear. The nation had a nasty drug problem and we declared a war on drugs and spent billions over many years and now you can’t buy drugs anymore. It will be just like that.

(that’s sarcasm for the sarcasm impaired

I’ve updated the stylesheets so things look a little better and I’ve spent some time working on the logo with much help and inspiration from Jesse. Also the christmas list is up so those of you who were bugging me about it….stop bugging me
I make no promises but I do hope to be posting more frequently now that this place is starting to look presentable.

I stopped paying attention to baseball the year of the strike. The Mets, a team I had rooted for since I was 7 or 8 years old, were the highest paid team in baseball that year. Despite this, they managed to spend the season at the bottom of their division and were involved in a number of unsavory incidents, including Vince Colman blinding a child on the west coast in a fireworks incident and one of the pitchers dousing the press corps with bleach in revenge for unfavorable coverage of his outings on the mound. Then they went on strike and said ‘give us more money, we deserve to be better paid’ and I said ‘Fuck off.’

I’ve stood by my guns for like 10 years now.

Still, I usually watch the World Series and some of the divisional playoff games. I caught most of the Series games this year and have to say, especially in terms of high drama, that they were better than even my previous favorite, the Mets win over the Red Sox in 86. 3 9th inning 2 out comebacks in one series? Incredible, just incredible. Will I return to being a fan? No. They’re still spoiled overpaid jocks and the games pacing is too slow. But hats off to the Diamondbacks and Yankees for an incredible World Series nonetheless.

I’m in the midst of a long string of bad luck with the devices I’ve been buying. In the last couple of months:

• My mid-range sony receiver stopped listening to its remote control.
• the wireless router I bought broke. Well, more accurately, it never really worked right to begin with. After literally months of haggling with the company that manufactures it I finally am issued a new working unit. Which doesn’t really work right, actually…the wireless networking stops working at random intervals until I cycle the power. And a month or so after they issue me a sort-of working unit, the manufacturer goes out of business.
• I buy a brand new graphics card, a top of the line Radeon 8500. It works for about 48 hours and then simply dies.
• I build a new linux box that among other things hosts the website you’re looking at. 4 times now the thing has suffered some sort of hardware issue that locks the machine and renders it unable to boot. Problem is, I can’t identify what the issue is, despite hours of troubleshooting.

So what’s the scoop? Was I meant to be a luddite? Is the proximity of a power company uplink station to my house causing my electronics to fry? Is the quality of manufactured goods declining? Or do I just have really shitty luck? I have no idea. I do have a router to sell if you’re interested though