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Here’s kind of a weird one: SF writer Wil McCarthy has a web
page with the audio of his new
book The Wellstone
, sequel to The
Collapsium
. The catch: it was generated by computer. It
sounds OK, I found it listenable. It’s an interesting experiment. He
says on the page he made it for a friend who is visually impaired and
just decided to make it publically available.

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In my interactions with the citizens of my neighborhood in Atlanta, I
am continuously surprised. Today someone on the neighborhood mailing
list (which I set up when I was secretary) reported getting unwanted
commercial e-mail from someone on the list and then porn when she
complained to that person. One suggestion was to go to the cops. I
sure hope our city police are not running down e-mail offenders. I
wish that was the most important thing they had to do, but
unfortunately we have a criminal or three in the city.

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Turns out my entry from yesterday wasn’t showing up because I violated
the rules: I typoed the filename and called it “020226.txt”, which
made BlogMax think it wasn’t current and thus not show up anywhere or
get reposted. This is a fragile web I weave.

I’ve been doing more work with Cayenne both at the day
job and at home. I’m liking it more and more as I get used to it. It
definitely has a good role in a Servlet environment as it can do smart
(ie lazy) fetching. You get an object out of the database and you have
a reference to an object related to it. Until you use the other
object, it doesn’t actually pull it down and then it smartly keeps it
around after that. If the data underneath changes, it gets it again
otherwise it doesn’t. You never touch the database, just the
objects. I keep hearing about various other Java based O/R layers
(Object Relational) but really, they’re all mostly the same. Whatever
works is fine with me. If another is just as good but no better, I’ll
stick with this. If the other thing gives me something of value, I’m happy with that too.

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I’m a telecommuter again, at least in the way I register my dissent
with the current government policies. I made my virtual march phone
calls about 10 minutes late, and never did get through to the White
House, which makes sense. It would be getting 50 times the volume as
any individual senator. Both of the ladies answering the phones
sounded very harried. Sorry ma’am, but we each have to do what we have
to do.

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I’m going to participate in the MoveOn.org Virtual March on
Washington
tomorrow. My times are from 3:31 PM with Zell Miller’s
office to the White House at 3:40 PM. I’m not a peacenik. I understand
there are times to go to war. This is not the time, nor the
reason. Not only on a moral level but on an economic one, this is a
Bad Idea. The world is more interconnected than it was 12 years ago. I
would so much rather see our focus right now away from invading other
countries and forcing other countries to accede to our wishes and
instead see it turn to Selling American Shit to the World. To do that,
you need a reasonably stable world that wants uniquely American goods
and services. Becoming the aggressors in preemptive invasions of
countries that are on our shite list does not further that goal. Below
is approximately what I will say in my phone calls.

“I love this country so very much that I do not want us become the
aggressors in an avoidable war. Let us be an example of peace and
stability, of strength without aggression, of vision, of
character. Let us do that by choosing peace and diplomacy above war.”

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Monday is Monday and Friday is Friday, Wednesday is “hump day” and
Thursday is “Must See TV”. I think of Tuesday pretty much exclusively
as “trash day” – at least since I’ve been in this neighborhood.

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I watched the Grammies with one eye and one ear last night. I kept
having the same reaction over and over as musicians performed – “This
is the best there is?” The Norah Jones song that was such a big winner
struck me as somewhere between pleasantly inconsequential and
inconsequentially pleasant. The only moment I enjoyed was when Bruce
Springsteen, Dave Grohl and Elvis Costello played “London Calling” in
honor of Joe Strummer. I thought the speech by the president of the
academy was freakishly self-congratulatory and not of the world I
know. In my world, the big machine music of 2003 of is low-common
denominator, more of the same stuff that gets played to death, not as
he said “The best the world has to offer.” The only winner of the
whole night that I cared about was when The Flaming Lips won for best
rock instrumental (which we didn’t see, just the fast rundown of
awards that had already been awarded.) I’ve been listening to a lot of
great music lately, and none of it is anything you hear on commercial
radio.

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Cafe Press, the purveyors of
much merchandise via many websites, are making the logical jump into
POD publishing. Read about it in
this posting
. Interestingly enough, they are also doing POD style
“retail ready” CDs, complete with booklets and jewel cases. I think
this kind of stuff is positive. As I’ve written over and over, the
vast majority of music I’ve listened to in the last year or three is
not major label stuff. Much of it has been self-produced by the
musicians or a small musician run label.

There is consensus received wisdom that says that such material
published this way is, of course, crap. Yes, it’s true that
self-publishing produces howlers such as The Pleistocene
Redemption
and such. OK, let’s accept that as fact. Now, does
standard big publishing produce 100% high quality books? Of course
not. I see a lot of unreadable shite coming from the big companies
(some of it sells very well despite being unreadable by me). A lot of
people seem to be very upset by even the notion. There seems to a big
buy-in for the “big machine” style of media, at least for books and
music. In movies, people understand that the economics mean that the
major studios put out a lot of least-common-denominator stuff and the
independent films take a lot of the chances and not coincidentally
have some of the best work. Somehow, though, that seems to be unheard
of in other media.

One of the best books I’ve read in the last few years was Lois
Tilton’s Written in Venom. It came out from Wildside,
a small press. I don’t know the publishing history story behind it,
but it definitely is not from the safe, Robert Jordan/Terry Brooks
style generic medieval fantasy. It is the story of Norse mythology
told from the viewpoint of Loki and it is a fabulous read. It didn’t
sell well, partly because it is out of the mainstream and not safely
the “same old thing (TM)”. I recommend highly that anyone who is at
all a fan of Norse mythology read this book. You can get it at Fictionwise
if you are willing to read it electronically (that’s how I did.) This
is not a “big machine” book, but it is wonderful. If Wildside hadn’t
published it and Lois had published it herself, it would have been
equally wonderful but it would have had the stink of “self-published”
and thus been suspect. Some writers have the sig line something like
“Thanks to the internet everyone can be a slush reader.” I think that
implication is horseshit, that everything that runs through the big
machine is automatically better than everything that doesn’t. I can
tell you that the big machine hasn’t done much for me lately to get me
music I want to listen to, to fill the FM airwaves with things I want
to hear, or give me good books. I’m finding ever more stuff of
relevance to me outside the machine. The vast majority of the
bookshelves I see are filled with stuff I can’t read more than a
paragraph of. I don’t think the machine should go away, but neither
does that mean that being outside the machine is a mark of Cain. Good
is good, and it can come from anywhere. I’m glad their are
alternatives to the machine and I’m taking advantage of the wherever I
can.

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While out walking the dog just now, I saw one of my neighbors had a
“War is not the answer” yard sign. On it was a reference to http://www.fcnl.org, which I see is a
web page for the Friends Committe on National Legislation, ie, the
Quaker lobby. I never thought of myself as Quakerlike, but when I see
their positions I agree
with all of them.

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Here’s an article from HardwareExtreme.com about
the next
group of PalmOS devices
. I’m not an early adopter and am fine with my
current Handspring Prism until it gives out. While I kind of like the
form factor and all the goodies of the Sony Clie, there ain’t no way
I’m paying $700 for a handheld. I think it is smart and good to do the
flipcover with the screen inside the cover, which lets you have the
same small package but with double the working area. I’m more leaning
towards one of the handhelds that run Linux for my next one, which if
I’m lucky will be many years from now.

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I just had a sneezing fit that lasted 5 minutes, I swear. A few days ago
I was marvelling that I had remained so healthy all winter and
wondered if the flu shot had anything to do with that. Today, I feel
snotty and sneezy. Guess that answers my question.

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The news about this club fire in Rhode Island is really
depressing. That 90+ people died, a number of them from trampling, is
bad enough. That they died because they really wanted to see Great
White is just so surreal as to not seem as if it really
happened. That’s like people dying at a Vanilla Ice show. This kind of
makes a point (in the most horrible possible way) what I’ve been
saying about our current obsession with terrorism – you can’t be safe
all the time. All the efforts in the world cannot save you from
stupidity or bad luck or freaky weather or bad genetics or any of the
other things that can end your life prematurely. Even if I could be 100% sure I was
safe from terrorists, that doesn’t protect me from club fires or
asshole Atlantan drivers running me down in the crosswalk. Yes,
terrorism is a real risk and needs to be treated as such, but do we
really need to fundamentally alter our lives? Isn’t that, like, the
aim of terrorists – to make others alter their lives and think of them
all the time?

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Nothing like getting up 5 AM during a thunderstorm to unplug all the
computers. It really leaves a mark on the rest of the day.

Here’s a funny link, another from my friend Jonny X. I don’t even know what the
hell it is, but it is weird and funny and involves
soy sauce
. I can’t tell if this is from the company or just a
devoted amateur fan of soy sauce. Wow!

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It’s Friday and I feel like I have barely limped through this week. I
have no energy, little to show for it and a general feeling of
imminent doom.

I had uninstalled Eudora from my Handspring a while back because it
was so time prohibitive for me to try to write e-mail via
Grafitti. Now that I have the keyboard, it is actually feasible to try
it, so I’ll give it another shot. I shouldn’t do it for time sensitive
things unless I’m willing to remember to do a sync as soon as I get
home. A guy at work made an odd statement about the folding keyboard,
saying “What’s the point? Why not just type it on your desktop and
sync up?” That kind of misses the point, since the folding keyboard
isn’t something you are using when you are, like, at your computer. I
was planning on having a quiet lunch by myself in the cafeteria and I
was going to answer some personal e-mails while I did. That’s the use
case for me. When I travel and I write those weblog entries from the
road, I always have to fire up the laptop to do it. I like the idea of
being able to do that from the Handspring, and just cut-and-paste them
in later. We’ll see how all this goes.

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The Flaming Lips will be on Letterman tonight, which I think I’ll
tape. I’ve been listening to their album obsessively for nearly two
months. “Do You Realize” makes me cry it’s so freaking good.

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They have released SpamAssassin 2.50 in the last few days, you can download it
here
. This is the first blessed release that includes the Bayesian
training algorithms to set the scores. I
installed it today and trained it on the nearly 4000 spams that I’ve
been saving for just this reason. The combination of CRM114 (which
also uses Bayesian learning) and this version of SpamAssassin really
seems to work well. The spams are scoring higher and the nonspam is
scoring even lower. It is doing what it is supposed

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Here’s an interesting article on Salon by John Snyder, president of
Artist House Records, a board member of the National Association of
Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), and a 32-time Grammy nominee (bio
cut and pasted off of Salon). He argues that file
sharing does not hurt record companies
and points out the odd
disconnect that they will pay millions to get songs heard on the radio
and spend millions to fight the equivalent via P2P trading.

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I stand by my belief that West Wing has jumped the
shark and I think its fall is accelerating. The formula is wearing
thin, the writing is wearing thin and I hate both the Will Bailey
character and the way they write his dialogue. The whole “The staff
doesn’t like me” stuff is neither funny nor interesting. The only
thing I get out of it nowadays is that I get to see John Spencer
onscreen for a few minutes a week. He’s one of my favorite actors.

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A little experimentation with the keyboard and my verdict so far is
“That was worth $30.” It’s not a fullsize keyboard and it doesn’t have
all the keys. The worst aspect is that some punctuation is in new and
different places which will be hard to get used to, like the question
mark on the “G”. The wireless link program allows you to rotate the
screen, which is good since the IR port on my Prism is on the left
side. I need to play with it more, but so far so good.

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My friend Rob pointed out to me that there is a megasale on this
wireless PDA folding keyboard at
CompUSA
– normally $99.99 it is now $29.99 with sales and
rebates. I looked up the review
he sent me, and it looks pretty good. For $29.99 (really $59.99 out of
pocket but with $30 mail-in rebate) it’s worth a risk to me. I think
I’ll be buying it today.