chuggnutt.com

Here's a link to a good image of the Piri Reis map. For all you mystery-history buffs out there.

A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, "a website that watches weblogs for books that they're talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis." Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled "Raising the Humble Chicken," which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn't live inside the city limits, I think I'd try to convince my wife to let me get some.

Over on Jake's site on a roundup of all the known Bend bloggers, the topic has come up in the comments on having a local blogger meetup. Time and place to be decided. I'd vote for one of the breweries.

Any interest?

Notable: Tonight's episode of Law & Order: SVU marks the first time I've heard the term "blog" used on a TV show. Not just used, it was central to the plot.

My drive home from work everyday takes me by an old brick house on Hawthorne Avenue, just out of downtown Bend on the entrance to the parkway. What's notable about this house is that it's obviously old—one of those old, pre-War homes that has ivy growing on it and just oozes atmosphere and looks like it should be on a register of historic places somewhere—and for a long time I've been meaning to look up its address online and see what pops up.

Turns out it is a designated historic resource: the A.C. Lucas House, built in 1910, the first brick house in Bend. Cool.

Here's some of the links I dug up while researching the Lucas House:

• PDF: City of Bend Designated Historic and Cultural Resources
• Deschutes County Landmarks
• Bend Area General Plan, Chapter 3

Okay, so not the most exciting of links. I can live with that.

Inspired by Tim Bray:

From We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner:

The Potsdam communique arrived in Japan on July 27.

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions, and point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Some things I found interesting this morning.

Via Technorati I found a link to my site from eugene.com's blog of the day archive; apparently my site was their blog of the day on November 16 last year. Neat!

And from ORblogs I found a new blog from Portland: the Kenilworth-Abernathy neighborhood blog. Not only does it center on that cool patch of southeast Portland that we like to visit (my brother, when he lived in Portland, always lived southeast, and my bestest friend lives there), but it has "Abernathy" in the name. I never knew one of the neighborhoods in Portland was named "Abernathy." Worth further investigating.

Forgot to mention, I saw the movie Hellboy last Saturday, and had a few words about it.

Really good. For a long time I'd heard about plans for a Hellboy movie and was really skeptical that anyone could make a good one, but when I started seeing the actual previews, I got excited about it. And the movie delivered. It stayed extraordinarily true to the comic and Mike Mignola's vision.

Totally worth it. Go see it!

Maybe it's just me, but I think this season of "24" is really weak, especially after last season. I thought this at the beginning of the season, and after Sunday night's episode (and tonight's follow-up), this weakness was just reiterated for me in spades.

It just really smacks of bad writing, bad plotting. Jack Bauer had to kill his boss? WTF? Sloppy, poorly thought out, poorly executed (no pun intended). If it's simply for shock value, as my wife suggested, then I think it's really bad writing.

But then again, it's hard to follow up last season: they offered up Ass-Kicking Jack, Sacrifice-Himself-to-Save-the-World Jack, and Return-from-the-Dead Jack. This season? Junkie Jack, Desperately-Undercover Jack, and Cold-Blooded-Murder Jack.

It's almost as lame as me writing about how lame it is.

Eric Rescorla speculates about casting for an A-Team movie (should someone in Hollywood ever get the urge to make one). Nice. But my first thought was, why not let the original actors play the roles? (They'd have to find somebody to take over Hannibal, of course.) Sure, it could be done, but that isn't really how Hollywood works, sadly. It would have to fit the pattern of movies based on old TV shows: tweak the concept to bring it up to date, and cast current movie actors in the roles.

So, if an A-Team movie couldn't be made with the original cast (I mean, could anyone other than Mr. T play B.A. Baracus? Really?), here's my take on the Hollywood-ified concept and cast:

Plot: Four Desert Storm vets, framed for a crime they didn't commit, help the innocent while on the run from the military. (Timing fits perfectly; in the mid-80s, they were Vietnam vets.) Of course, the opening voice-over (remaining true to the TV show, up to the point) goes:

In 1992 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the [current hot/popular city] underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

Think along the lines of the aftermath of "Three Kings," maybe.

And the cast, my take:

And of course, all the usual elements have to be there: the van, breaking Murdock out of the mental hospital, B.A. has to be tricked into flying ("Hey B.A., drink this glass of milk"), they have to be locked up in a tool shed or a machine shop or something so they can build some sort of weapon/vehicle/means of escape, and finally, of course, Hannibal has to be "on the jazz."

:)

Here's an interesting bit of trivia I unearthed last week: in trying to prove to somebody at work that aspirin is a coal tar derivative, I found out that Bayer developed and registered the drug as a trademark in 1899.

By itself, that's not so interesting, I know. However, it turns out Bayer also discovered, trademarked and marketed another drug: heroin. "From 1898 through to 1910 it was marketed as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children."

Yikes. Of course, then the thought of "Bayer Heroin" kept me amused for a bit:

So yeah, I took the weekend off from blogging. Ran out of steam, I guess; I didn't even read any other blogs on Saturday, I was engrossed in finishing up Kiln People. Sometimes it's just plain nice to take a break.

This is a total geek-out post. You've been warned.

The kids and I have been watching the Clone Wars mini-series that was on Cartoon Network (we're watching them on the computer, a few episodes at a time... it's much more convenient that way), and enjoying it quite a bit. Hell of a clever idea, too, the way they put it together, with 3 minute segments/episodes.

Anyway, I have to say that by far the best episode is Chapter 13, the "Mace Windu kicks ass" episode. This one little episode alone basically makes all this whole Star Wars prequel stuff worthwhile.

Just looked out my back door a few minutes ago and was mildly surprised to see snow falling. I'd heard there was a chance, but you never really expect it this late in the year. Oh well, welcome to Central Oregon—you gotta wait at least until June before you can guarantee no snow.

I make it a point to not really write about politics here, for several reasons. First, it's a hot topic for too many people. Second, I frankly don't feel qualified one way or another to sound off; I have opinions, sure, but before I voice those opinions, I better be able to back them up intelligently—and there's a fair amount of political knowledge that I'm ignorant or just plain wrong about, I bet. Third, it's been my observation that once you start voicing a political opinion in a public venue like a website, the vast majority of people who respond either are of the same opinion as you (which ultimately degenerates into a mutual admiration society that closes off from the rest of the world) or are fervently opposed to your point of view (which ultimately degenerates into a vicious group of trolls who have nothing better to do than denigrate you because you think differently from them); there's very little real diversity or intelligent conversation. Finally, politics just doesn't interest me enough to write about.

Having said that, I'll write a bit about politics, inspired by having President Bush on television tonight (annoyingly pre-empting regular TV).

I'll just be blunt. I am so sick and tired of the spin and political bullshit that surrounds politics these days. All of it. Whether it's Bush and all the shit going on over 9/11 and Iraq and everything, or Clinton and his "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is" hijinks, I don't care. I do not care.

What I want is a President who can step up to a news conference like Bush did tonight, and instead of spinning out lies and evasiveness and bullshit, just look into the cameras and say, "Yeah, we fucked up. I fucked up. I was wrong, and it cost us, and now it's time to fix things." Is that really too much to ask? Whatever happened to responsibility, accountability, and humility, anyway?

Hell with it. Rant over.

Here's something to think about: do any search engine bots and crawlers recognize and parse JavaScript? I haven't heard of any (and I'm really too lazy right now to do any real research :) ), but I got to thinking about this today, and there's really no reason that they shouldn't be able to handle it.

Sure, there's a lot of cruft and dross in JavaScript code that isn't relevant in a searchable context, but what about something like I've been working on recently: dynamic menus? Each menu item points to a valid page with some contextual link text, but since the menus are generated in JavaScript, the search engine process parsing the content out of the code might easily pass it up and miss the links. Those same links are ultimately being repeated in the actual content of the page, so they'll be picked up for sure, but what about next time?

Of course, then it would be easy to abuse search engine rankings, by stuffing JavaScript full of hidden and obfuscated content. Perfect for the snake oil of Search Engine Optimization. Even so, though, there might be a lot of content or linkage going unnoticed...

Better late than never, I suppose, but here's hoping everyone had a good Easter today.

Growing up, I could never understand why Easter always fell on a different day each year, rather than like "regular" holidays like the Fourth of July, or Thanksgiving. Ironically, it was some computer programming trivia that clued me in to how Easter Sunday's date is determined:

Easter is the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

This is just a little bit of history and trivia that popped into my head tonight, about McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon (just outside of Portland). The Edgefield is a 38-acre estate that features lodging, restaurants, a brewery, a vineyard and winery, a distillery, and more, dominated by a Georgian-revival style manor. It's a fantastic, fun place, as all of the big McMenamins renovations are.

Built in 1911, it was originally the Multnomah County Poor Farm:

Residents operated a self-sufficient environment, raising hogs, poultry, growing a variety of fruits and vegetables, operating a dairy, cannery and meat packing plant as well as working in the laundry, kitchen and hospital.

At that time, not long after the turn of the last century, my great-grandfather was a mortician in Portland, and on occasion he would have to make a trip out to the Poor Farm to pick up the bodies of residents who died.

Yeah, an odd bit of trivia. It's been an odd week.

Pointer to a totally excellent JavaScript library for creating popups: overLIB. I've been using it the last few days to put together a dynamic drop-down menu for a Web project at work. And I've used it before to create popup context menus and tooltips. It's simply one of the best JavaScript tools out there that I've come across—it's clever, simple to use, and it just works, period.

Ugh, it looks like I'm taking a blogging vacation. Time to try to get back on track. Tonight, since I'm reading one of his latest books, I thought I'd provide some links and commentary on David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction authors.

The book I'm reading is Kiln People, and it's really good so far. Brin has a knack for taking some of the most out-there, implausible-sounding ideas and turning them around into fascinating, believable premises. Kiln People is a good example; the premise is that future society will be transformed by the ability to create temporary, clay copies of yourself (called "dittos") that essentially operate as a proxy version of you, and at the end of the day you can "inload" all the memories from the copy—in effect, experiencing and remembering everything the ditto did without risk or effort to yourself. I put off reading this book for a long time because it sounded a bit absurd, but once I got into it, it's entirely engrossing and convincing.

Brin also excels at portraying alien points of view. Brightness Reef is the best example of this I can think of, jumping POVs among half a dozen different alien species fluidly. That sort of writing is hard work, but it pays off when done well. Which Brin does.

Herewith my thoughts on the essential David Brin reading list; if you haven't read any of his books, start with these.

• Startide Rising: This was the first Brin book I read. Utterly fantastic, I was hooked from that point on. It's actually the second book of his Uplift series, but it's the best one to start with, hands down. Space opera, lots of aliens, cool ideas—it has it all.
• Earth: This paints a frightenly real portrayal of Earth in the near future (2038, I believe). Much different tone than his Uplift stories, but very good.
• The Postman: Forget the movie, the book is totally different, except for a few things. And a thousand times better. As a plus, it mostly takes place in Oregon :)
• Otherness: The second collection of his short stories. I like this one better than his first collection, River of Time, because he's a much stronger writer with the later stories.

And, if anyone's counting, my least favorite Brin novel is Glory Season. Why? It was just too long for me, and the ending was far too ambiguous for my tastes—it didn't leave me with any real sense of closure, just left me feeling unsatisfied.

I've already seen several links to this today (the first from UtterlyBoring), and it's too interesting not to point to.

The post in question posits this: Google is a platform. Not a "platform," used in the same sense that Amazon and eBay are platforms (custom Web applications that allow some programmatic user interfaces), but an actual computer/operating system/development platform—something I had suspected for some time, but I've never managed to coalesce my thoughts this succintly.

What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers....

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

It's one of the better tech reads I've seen in awhile. Very eye-opening.

Now, of course, my curiosity is taking hold, and I'd love to take a crack at developing for that platform!

From /dev/beer I just read about the Spring Beer & Wine Fest going on in Portland this next weekend, April 9 and 10. Over a 100 different beers to sample. Sounds like fun, I haven't been to a brew fest in ages. Too bad it's short notice, though. Damn.

I couldn't even get myself to post yesterday, I was just done. This last week was the shit week for computer troubles. After spending the first half of the week struggling over my wife's computer, and Thursday reformatting and reinstalling Windows on a coworker's computer, Friday was the kicker.

The hard drive in the boss's computer at work died. Yeah, the Boss. I get to work Friday morning, find a note on my desk: "Computer says 'Disk boot failure, insert system disk' since last night." Ohhhhhh, how I hoped the problem was simply that there was a disk in the floppy drive.

There wasn't.

Nope. Machine won't boot; hard disk clicks when it has power. That's never a good sign. Can't usefully boot to the floppy; the bootable floppy disk I have is for Windows 98 (yes, almost all of the computers in the office are still running Windows 98), and this is a newer eMachine running Windows XP, so the Win98 boot disk can't recognize the NTFS partition. Contemplate for a moment running the restore CD, but that will wipe out all the data on the drive, and that can't happen.

Of course, like all good, responsible IT persons, I make sure any critical work and files in the office are on the network, right? Right. And the network data is backed up to tape every night, right? Right. So, there really should be no problem, right? Just restore Windows XP (though it's a bad drive, remember, and really should be replaced), and all the data is safe, right? Well, almost.

Friggin' Microsoft Outlook stores all of its data—emails, contacts, events—in a single .PST file on the local machine, not on the network. Uh-oh. And for the Boss, email is the lifeblood of communication in the company; he'll send out 40-plus emails in any given day. Double uh-oh.

But no, wait, hold on: like all good, responsible IT persons, I have batch files running on individual workstations that back up the Outlook data files to the network daily, so that they'll be backed up to the tape each night. This was instituted months ago, after the CFO of the company suffered a major email loss and we identified Outlook as a Major Point of Weakness in the company's data integrity.

Whew! Run to the network, open up the appropriate user folder where the Outlook data file should be, check the timestamp on the file.

Time freezes.

Somewhere nearby, a cat meows in slow motion. A trillion water molecules in the Deschutes River ricochet off one another in a brilliant cacophany of sound not unlike that of billiard balls on the break. Deep in my brain, a synapse fires and a single drop of sweat languidly rolls down my spine.

January 30, 2004.

Not April 1, 2004. January 30. I have never in my life wished more for something to be an April Fool's Day prank.

So what happened to my carefully crafted plan of a batch file running at a scheduled time each night?

The Boss shuts down his computer each night before it can run.

And that, of course, is the punchline. The rest of my day at work—literally, all but about an hour of it—was spent trying in vain to access the hard drive, just to pull the email from it. No love. A computer place in town that does data recovery was able to see the drive, sort of, but were unable to pull anything from it. The only option left is to shell out up to two grand and have a professional data recovery outfit like Ontrack retrieve the email. I don't know if we'll go that route, though.

By the end of the day, I felt I was about to stroke out. Visions of myself convulsing on the floor seemed oddly appealing. The saving grace of it all is that it was Friday, and the kids were being watched so my wife and I were able to go out to dinner and a movie. We saw "Secret Window," which was pretty good.

I'm hoping next week will be better.

Just in case anyone missed it (and unless you're an avid reader of comments to my blog, you probably missed it :) ), Bend.com now has an RSS feed. Gentlemen, start your aggregators!