Month: July 2002

quick, what did it say on that manhole cover you just stepped over?

Drainspotting

Drainspotting is all about paying attention to your surroundings. Manhole covers, drains, grates, trench covers–someone had to design all of these. Functional and ornamental, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening down by your feet. Check it out.

Josh and Cam have been working on this site for the past few weeks: I like the idea a lot. I like to notice stuff like drain grates, fire hydrants, signs, and other manmade artifacts. Seattle seems to be quite rich in these kinds of things, and they often have some interesting facts associated with them. They are after all functional, first and foremost, so if there is any notion of design or style, it often says something about the time it was made or who made it.

I’ll have to see what I can find. Someone needs to take a picture of the brass fish embedded in the terrazzo floor of the airport, especially the one that’s really an airplane, wings and all.

correspondence writers course

Children’s Writing, Writers Course & School Writing Correspondence Course.

So in a moment of lightheartedness, I sent off for the information from this outfit. They dutifully sent me the writing test, which I forgot about. So they sent me another, with an extended deadline. This one, I half-completed, more from chagrin than with any real purpose.

Today a third missive arrived, telling me to forget the writing test and just send a couple of pages of writing samples.

The worst that can happen is they tell me I have some aptitude: with no income, I can’t take their course. But what the heck: if they do say that, I’ll take it as some kind of validation.

reorganizing this page

I took a stab at cleaning up this page: not sure I like it. I need to understand the way the tags and stylesheets all work, but there’s an awful lot of perl in there.

I also added a PayPal link: my Amazon wish list is nowhere near as pressing as the need for the Real Thing.

food choices

TIME Magazine: Veggie Tales

In a survey of 11,000 individuals, 37% of those who responded “Yes, I am a vegetarian” also reported that in the previous 24 hours they had eaten red meat; 60% had eaten meat, poultry or seafood. Perhaps those surveyed thought a vegetarian is someone who, from time to time, eats vegetables as a side dish—say, alongside a prime rib. If more than one-third of people in a large sample don’t know the broadest definition of vegetarian, one wonders how they can be trusted with something much more difficult: the full-time care and picky-picky feeding of their bodies, whatever their dietary preferences.

This says a lot more about food and diet issues than I could: I don’t think people actually know what they eat. Regardless of your opinion of the food pyramid, how much of what you ate today meets or exceeds those recommended amounts?

It’s hard to address this issue in anything but generalities, but I think people just eat what they have always eaten, meaning what their parents served them, and never stopped to think of its effects. Is this too much? Is this the right thing for me to eat now that I’m 30 or 40 or 50? Are my parents and siblings healthy? if not, is it attributed to diet or lifestyle and can I make any changes?

Of course, asking these questions makes me some kind of evangelist or zealot, sad as that is.

spam’s effects

I notice that I get some requests for the comments cgi script, but very few comments. I realized that MovableType requires comment submitters to supply an email address, so I toggled that off. Spambots are everywhere, after all.

But it should be trivial to add some encoding to the email addresses such that a user can parse out the real address, but a robot will just harvest it without realizing it won’t work.

I see that MovableType has some kind of spam_protect feature but I have no idea what it’s supposed to do.

For the meantime, I have enabled anonymous comments.

back to Mac OS 9

I reverted to OS 9 on our kitchen iMac today. Sad but true: it just didn’t work as well I would have liked.


  • It was slow which is hard to take on a 500 MHz machine, especially when you see how zippy OS 9 is.
  • It was less compatible with little things like the world wide web. One of its uses is for some relaxing game play, and that means Java in many cases. Java support is nowhere near as good on OS X as it is on OS 9, and it’s lousy on OS 9. Also, there may be a lot more browsers (OmniWeb, iCab, Chimera/Navigator, as well as IE, Netscape and Mozilla), but they’re all weak in some way or other. IE 5 on OS 9 is hard to beat with anything on OS X.
  • Energy Saver won’t wake the machine up at a specific time each day: a small thing, but upgrades should never mean losing features.

I’ll give it another look when Jaguar/10.2 is released.

Peter Buck on the state of the music industry

The Seattle Times: Arts & Entertainment: R.E.M.’s Peter Buck: talking about the passion

“I think a lot of people are finding unless you sell 10 million labels, a major label isn’t the place to be. I can’t tell you the number of people I know who get dropped from a major label, put out their own label and say ‘Man I made five times as much this year as last year.’ “

See also Janis Ian’s take on this.

is there no middle ground?

What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?

If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

According to this article, the medical community has, for 30 years, denounced the Atkins Diet (eat all the protein and fat you want with no carbs), but has lately begun to realize there may be some validity to it. I was concerned that I was digging my family’s graves with a wooden spoon, with my pasta and potatoes. But then I refreshed my memory about what the Atkins Diet consists of.

To me, it sounds a lot like a “name your poison” argument. Eat cheeseburgers three times a day and have a heart attack, or eat a variety of foods and have one.

The underlying question for me is why has the medical establishment been so shrill in its denunciations of these ideas? And why should we accept their endorsement now, assuming they offer one?

A quick Googling tells me vegetarians like myself are doomed to apostasy in Dr Atkins world: fruits and vegetables are bad, bad, bad. This all runs counter to any nutitional information I have ever come across. A balanced diet and common sense — eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and lay off the Twinkies — would do more for this problem than all the books ever written on the subject.

The few extra pounds of evident prosperity I carry could have been avoided by managing my hankerings for various nutritionless goodies. Good old willpower goes a long way.

Courtesy of Frank.