Month: June 2004

childhood needn’t be this hard

I do some volunteer hours at the school my kids go to. Being “retired” I have the time and it beats working, no matter the lack of remuneration.

I get to know some of the kids. I can tell when they’re happy or sad, when they’re ready for the day and when they need a little help.

There’s one guy I have gotten to know lately; call him Dennis. Dennis is a big kindergartener, looks like a first or second-grader. He moved here from the East Coast during the school year, so there were some adjustments to make. He seemed like a nice kid, and I got to know him a little better as the school year went on.

This is my second year with my own kids in school: I had one enter kindergarten last year, and my youngest this year, so I’m drawing just two years experience. What I have learned is that the first 3-4 months are a struggle, up until January rolls around. Then things start to gel, and by April and May, things are humming. Kids who are up and ready to work, willing to challenge themselves, just a joy to be around.
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time to become less than I am

The Way We Eat Now:

The epidemic of obesity is a vast and growing public health problem. “Weight sits like a spider at the center of an intricate, tangled web of health and disease,” writes Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, arguably the best and most scientifically sound book on nutrition for the general public. He notes that three aspects of weight—BMI, waist size, and weight gained after one’s early twenties—are linked to chances of having or dying from heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and several types of cancer, plus suffering from arthritis, infertility, gallstones, asthma, and even snoring.

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zero tolerance

Daring Fireball: Broken Windows:

Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances.

One of Mr Gruber’s better efforts, tying in nicely with Jane Jacobs[1] as well as the other reference he cites.

I brought up a similar point earlier today, on the invisibility of Windows processes. [Mac-users-discussion] video conversion:

What’s ironic about this for me is recalling the late 80s and early 90s when Windows was even less useful than it is now (DOS was still what people used) and the knock on Mac OS was that there was no terminal to run commands in. There was some implied moral superiority in using a CLI versus a graphic interface. Now, of course, the command line in Windows is an application rather than a complete interface to all the subsystems. I feel superior, but then I did in the old days, too.

fn1. Her 1961 book Death and Life of Great American Cities details how successful communities work to keep people safe and connected. 2004’s Dark Age Ahead follows this up but as a warning rather than a discussion of observed successes.

do people really read anymore?

Dark Age Ahead by JANE JACOBS (kottke.org on books)

Jane Jacobs hates cars. Absolutely can’t stand them. I thought this book was about a possible coming dark age, not her dislike of automobiles.

Alas, perhaps Jason Kottke is too subtle for me, but this is the second review I have read that seems to think Jacobs’ new book is about cars. I finished it last night and even having read a really lame writeup that complained that the whole book was about her dislike of cars, I still didn’t get that.

What she dislikes/hates is the accomodations we as a society (in North America) have made to cars instead of to people and communities. She’s pointing that choices were made to favor auto users over everyone else in many cases and we’re all poorer for it. Her insights into “traffic engineering” are eye-opening, especially here in a state where a vocal minority thinks that more and wider roads are the answer to every question.

But there’s more to the book than that — much more — I recommend it.

wondering what WinFS really does

Jon Udell looks into the promise of Longhorn (any symbolism to this being the name of a type of cheese, and a bland one at that?), with an eye to looking into WinFS. I’ve groused about this[1] before[2]: I looked forward to reading Jon’s piece. I still don’t quite see if the data in the data store can be accessed without being in a Longhorn-based or WinFS-based system. To put it another way, right now I can take a disk out of damn near anything and read it on a linux or FreeBSD system. [3] If I take a disk out of a WinFS system, can I read the data? Or do I need to “install” it into another WinFS system and allow it’s database/filesystem internals to mount the disk or otherwise access that data?

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CNet decides it has too many readers

Bye, CNet
CNet (“News.com”) has recently switched to headline-only feeds. I certainly don’t require (and don’t provide) full-content feeds, but the headlines just don’t tell me enough to make a decision whether or not to visit. So I unsubscribed. It’s a pity, because they are a good news source. Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place? [ongoing]

I haven’t unsubscribed yet — for no other reason than laziness — but I wonder what made them decide to switch feed formats? And I wonder if they have noticed a. traffic going up or down, as a result, and b. any change in the number of subscribers to the RSS feeds?

My technique, to misuse the word, for tallying subscribers is to simply count all requests for *.(xml|rss|atom) files, with some rudimentary tidying after the fact. I wonder what other people use?

all shook up

At 2:45 this morning, I was sure we were having a small earthquake: there was no sound, just a jolt and some gentle but insistent vibration that lasted 15-20 seconds.

Turns out it was a meteor . . . .

The Seattle Times: Local News: Flashes, booms reported over Western Washington:

Bright flashes and sharp booms were reported in the skies over the Puget Sound area early today, and aviation officials said a meteor may have been the source.

Checking the UW’s geophysics website, I found that this is an unexplained event that was not an earthquake.

We never saw any lights from it, though folks as far away as Idaho did. Ah, the joys of living in such a geologically active place.

<update>: check out the video (handily recorded by local security cams: we never sleep[tm]).

isn’t oil what this is all about?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:

Having said all that, beside the possibility that the White House’s favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country’s own spies, I’d say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine.

and on that note:

We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.
—Midge Decter on the Warren Olney show, 89.9, Los Angeles, 5/21/04

treason?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 30, 2004 – June 05, 2004 Archives

A snippet from today’s Nelson Report …

4. If it’s possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA’s conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only “a handful” of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney’s consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

— perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President’s office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to “punish” the agent’s husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.

More soon.

— Josh Marshall

If treason is defined as “betrayal of a trust against the interests of the United States”, I think a case could be made.