Moved!

As in: News

So we moved into a house this week. I'm a homeowner. Bask in my glory.

Some quick notes about our first two days here:

1. Movers' lingo for grabbing something by the edge is cuff it.
2. Air conditioning vents on the wall by the toilet make for chilly toes.
3. I need to buy lawn care equipment. And all manner of other effluvia.
4. Few things taste better than new-homeowner-just-moved-in pizza, even if it was ridiculously overpriced. Except beer, I imagine.
5. Who would have thought an 85 year old woman would have cable telephone?

Am still alive.

As in: News

I am still alive and trying to get work done this summer. With baby duty, preparing our condo for the market, and other work, it's slow going. Thanks for checking in. I hope to get back to the blogging rhythm soon.

Catching some zzZZzzs in the early hours of a morning at my in-laws. A rough night for Avery.

Agreed.

As in: News

In Blazing Saddles, the governor makes a statement and his cabinet agrees with him by Harrumphing. He notices that one of the cabinet sat silently:

Gov [pointing]: I didn't get a harrumph out of that guy.

Hedly Lamarr: Give the governor a harrumph.

Cabinet member [fearfully]: harrumph!

Since seeing that film, I've used "Harrumph" to agree with proclamations.

Harrumph.

SSSSsssssssssmokin!

As in: News

1. Chicago recently passed an indoor smoking ban for all public places (even restaraunts and bars). Columbia kept their smoking lounges for a week until they were informed that being a private college doesn't exempt them from the indoor smoking ban--the lounges are gone now, and so are the ashcans outside the doors. Where the ashcans used to be, there are now signs advising smokers that the new ordinance requires they be fifteen feet or more away from the entrance to the building. There are also a lot more cigarette butts.

2. Jenny and I started watching Scrubs on DVD, and episode two deals with a smoker who keeps smoking despite his doctor's advice. Zach Braff is sad about it, and John McGinty tells him "We can't save people from themselves." Of course, being the tall nerdy white guy I am, I identify with Braff's character. When I see people smoking, a part of me wants to remind them that they're killing themselves by inches. Of course, I eat at McDonald's occasionally, so I'm screwed in a different way. I'm not really sure how to respond to the student whose essay describes smoking as a defining characteristic of her persona.

3. My grandfather died from COPD, a smoking-related lung disease that's basically a cocktail of emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The bitch of it is that he stopped smoking a long time before he developed the disease. I generally avoid addictive substances (excepting caffine), both out of my need for self-control and my knowledge that my other grandfather was an alcoholic (and my father said he occasionally heard the siren-song that might herald alcoholism).

4. The new smoking ordinance doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from smoking, it just makes them look a bit more sad. On my way to work today, I saw an Iggy-Pop-lookalike Tower Records employee huddled under the El stairway, sucking on his cigarette and shivering. I still see little clumps of students outside all our campus buildings (being an art school, we have a higher ratio of smokers than any college I've been at before), they just huddle fifteen feet away from the door.

5. Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan features a hard-smoking Hunter Thompson of the future who requires that his 'filthy assistants' take up smoking when in his employ. Of course, he gets them prescriptions for 'anti-cancer drugs' too.

Stopgap

As in: News

I'm hoping to do some big "I'm back" post to assuage the withdrawal you're all feeling, but I can't do that now. Instead, I'll urge any
of you who live in or near Houston Texas to go see a play written by my good friend Andrew:

Waiting for Engines.

Here are the details..
The play runs Jan. 20, 21, 27, 28 at 7:30 & 9:30pm, and Jan. 22, 29 at 7:30pm

Enjoy.

Avery Brynn Riley

As in: News

She arrived at 3:44pm on Tuesday, 13 December. She's beautiful and healthy (7lbs 10oz, 21inches), and her mom's doing fine too. Jenny did a fantastic job--what a strong woman I married. Damn.!

We go home from the hospital tomorrow and are parents all of a sudden. Wild.

TiVo Fracas Roundup

As in: Copyfight , Favorite Things , Media , News

Yesterday, the internet was a-flurry with rumors that TiVo was implementing a copy-protection scheme that would prevent users from keeping shows beyond a certain point:

I recently got a sample of Tivo DRM, accidentally I suspect. Recently a Simpson's rerun recorded with a red-flag next to it (an icon I've never seen before). When I selected the episode, I got a message to the effect that "the copyright holder prohibited saving the episode past date mm/dd". I also noted that this episode could not be copied using Tivo Togo (Link)

TiVo responded quickly:

[The TiVo rep] said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.

"During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals," he said. "We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives." (Link)

But apparently, that doesn't make any sense.

In the room are film executives, consumer electronics manufacturers, software and operating system vendors, semiconductor manufacturers and conditional access system designers. When I asked them if they believed that noise could be "misinterpreted" as a DRM flag, they burst into positive howls of disbelief. One present talked about Macrovision's checksums and said that that must have been "incredible noise if it completed the checksum." A semiconductor expert laughed out loud. (Link)

Alas, I end up feeling link this guy

The basic question is why TiVo is implementing these crap features. But if you want to live with the features, the next question is, who has access to the flag controls? If someone inside TiVo flipped the flag on, for whatever reason, TiVo should say that now. If the broadcaster -- through the analog signal being named as the fall guy by Mr. Denney -- can turn the flag on whenever they want, the power of this feature is in the wrong hands altogether. (Link)

and agreeing that "while I'm a fan of the machine, I'll bolt as soon as this new "feature" kills out a show I'd been saving. There are alternatives that don't do this".

Why, TiVo? Why?

Phuds doomed.

As in: News

Pharyngula, one of my guilty-pleasure blogs, discussed the woeful pay situation for us Phuds. Who does CNN go to when they want to know how bad it is? My father in law, Phil G.

Katrina

As in: News

Lots of horrible and horrifying things coming out of the news. I keep thinking of a book I just read, called Isaac's Storm, about the "worst" hurricane to hit the United States. The hurricane hit Galveston Texas near the turn of the century and killed around 8000 people. The book documents the movements of the town's U.S. Weather Service rep and his failure to save either the town or his wife. The stories of people huddled in their houses as the water rose come back with vivid clarity as I read about helicopter crews chopping their way into attics. The key subtext in Isaac's storm is the blistering arrogance of the rational scientist. Isaac thought he knew weather--he'd written papers about how Galveston was impossible for a hurricane to hit. I wonder how well we warned about the severity of this storm?

Most disturbing to me is the fact that the water is polluted and dangerous. I keep trying to imagine the tsunami--where this sort of thing happened across whole countries. I'm also hit by this paragraph:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number -- 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious [hooey] about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources -- meaning, the political will -- weren't there to get them out. (from boingboing)

The same could be said about the tsunami in Asia--California has offshore sensors to warn of such waves, but there are no such sensors in the countries hit by the tsunami. I can't help but see the everyone for him/herself attitude as part and parcel of the capitalist mentality. Best and worst thing to happen to humankind indeed.

Another cultural mystery gone

As in: News

This story isn't getting as much press as I thought it would. Neither Slashdot nor BoingBoing has anything about it. Anyhow, from the Chicago Tribune:

The world's most famous anonymous news source outed himself Tuesday. W. Mark Felt, a 91-year-old retired FBI official living with his daughter in California, revealed perhaps Washington's best-kept secret--that he was Deep Throat, the secret source for the reporting by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that helped break open the Watergate scandal leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.... Tuesday evening, Woodward, Bernstein and their former editor, Ben Bradlee, confirmed Felt's role.

I don't know why this story is getting so little press, but I'm both glad to see the mystery resolved and sad to have it gone. I sort of thought we'd never know. Anyhow, it seems like the University of Illinois Champaigne-Urbana might want to take down this website.