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December 31, 2002
"Beowulf is a wonderful story,
"Beowulf is a wonderful story, and if you put Tolkien's name to it, it would probably be a great commercial success."
And now that Michael Drout, assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, has uncovered 4 volumes of original, unpublished Tolkien notes and translations of the epic tome, that just might happen. I'm all for popularizing the classics. Beowulf is one of my all time favorite stories and more people should read it.
They have seen my strength for themselves,
Have watched me rise from the darkness of war,
Dripping with my enemies' blood. I drove
Five great giants into chains, chased
All of that race from the earth. I swam
In the blackness of night, hunting monsters
Out of the ocean, and killing them one
By one; death was my errand and the fate
They had earned. Now Grendel and I are called
Together, and I've come
BTW, if you haven't seen The Two Towers, go see it. Now. It is amazing, even better than The Fellowship of the Ring.
Posted by John at 03:24 AM | Comments (0)
Dave Berry's 2002 Year In
Dave Berry's 2002 Year In Review, or "Getting To The Bottom of 2002".
Posted by John at 03:02 AM | Comments (0)
The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck.
The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck. This is very funny and very cool, particularly if you're at all familiar with the images of the Tarot. Why, you ask, would someone bother to do this? Well...
"... the Peanuts characters, and the world they inhabited, deserved their own Tarot deck. Their world was rich and complex enough to portray all the different lives, powers and experiences shown in previous Tarot decks..."
The author goes on (and on and on and on) describing the parallelism between the emotions captured in the traditional Tarot deck and the Peanuts characters, each of whom embodies, at various times, the adult emotions as seen through the eyes of a child. But enough of that headshrinking nonsense, check out the funny cards!
Posted by John at 02:59 AM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2002
Stop and think for a
Stop and think for a moment about how considerate US special forces teams deployed to the middle east are going to be of civilians who deliberately get in their way, particularly with their marching orders coming directly from George Bush. Far be it from me to criticize people who are acting on their strongly held beliefs, but the human shields heading for Iraq are Darwin award candidates in my opinion. Self-selecting themselves right out of the gene pool.
Posted by John at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
Flyguy. [via MeFi] Explaining it
Flyguy. [via MeFi] Explaining it is pointless. Go try it. It's fun.
Posted by John at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
Since I've been thinking about
Since I've been thinking about archiving my CDs on to a big hard drive (partly in response to having 4 kids, and the resulting tendency for CDs to wander off seemingly of their own accord), I'm provisionally pretty excited about the upcoming release of Windows Media Player 9, which has WMA lossless copying for perfect digital copies of CDs in 1/2 the file size. This ensures that no matter what the evolution of compression formats (e.g. MP3 -> MP4 -> MP5, etc.), I'll always have an archival copy of the original CD from which to make the compressed file. And with hard drive prices so low (100GB for under $200), the math goes something like: an 80-minute CD is about 740MB, so if I can reduce that by 50%, it should fit in about 370MB. A 100GB hard drive will hold 270 CDs, so at $200 for that hard drive, my archival copy costs $0.74. Or $1.48 with backup.
The reason I'm only "provisionally" excited is that it's from Microsoft. While that does ensure a high degree of quality and support for the product, I've also heard rumblings that it won't copy many CDs because of embedded digital rights management software. Jury is still out on that one. Plus if they follow their usual pattern, they won't support MP3 except on the import side, and many devices (including my car stereo) will play MP3s but not WMAs. I could always use a separate MP3 encoder but it sure would be easier if it were all in one program.
Nevertheless, I've decided making reference archival copies is the way to go, and if WMP won't do it for me, there's always Flac, or Monkey, or Shorten or any of a dozen others...
Posted by John at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2002
Also, if you're rushing out
Also, if you're rushing out to buy TurboTax to get your 2002 refund early, be aware that it contains a spybot called C Dilla.
"C Dilla is a copy protection program that installs without disclosure with certain programs such as game demos. It disables your CD burner when copy protected software is on your computer, monitors what copy protected software you are using and how, disables "certain" internet downloads, and possibly sends user data off to a remote server without permission."
Spybot catches it.
Posted by John at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
There was an interesting discussion
There was an interesting discussion thread today on Metafilter concerning one of my favorite programs, Ad-Aware. The lack of updates since September prompted me to try out the free Spybot - Search and Destroy program, and I heartily recommend it. Easy to install and run, and it gives you much more information than Ad-Aware about what it finds on your PC. On one of my PCs (the only one I've used it on so far), it found 139 programs. Some of them were OK - history files held by the applications (so when you go to Word, it "knows" which documents you worked on most recently) and some were harmless (advertising cookies), but it found a fair number of ne'er-do-wells that Ad-Aware had overlooked. I'll be using Spybot at least until February when Lavasoft estimates Ad-Aware 6.0 will be released, and possibly even beyond in conjunction with (or, possibly, instead of) Ad-Aware. I am somewhat concerned about the originally cited poster's comments that he recommends Spybot for removing "advertising spyware" and two other commercial programs for "surveillance spyware, keyloggers, and password stealing trojans". Does that mean Ad-Aware and Spybot don't catch those? I need to run a trial version of one or both of those programs after a run-through with Ad-Aware and Spybot to see what they catch, if anything. I'll report on what I find here.
Posted by John at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2002
I can win Ben Stein's
I can win Ben Stein's money about 25% of the time, but I'm convinced that's because the questions are skewed towards American political history, which is one of his fortes given his experience as a lawyer and speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford. If we could introduce more science-oriented questions, I'll bet I could take his money every time... Nevertheless, he's a smart guy, and an astute commentator on the American social condition, particularly at the intersection of culture and business. So when he writes a column about the 12 characterisitics of American society that are undermining our nation, I'll make time to read it.
My dad would have loved this column. It summarizes many of the things he loved to complain about, at great length and to anyone who would listen.
Posted by John at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
New reading for the new year
If your New Year's resolutions include becoming a little bit more well-read, you might start with a daily dose of Samuel Pepys' diary.
Posted by John at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2002
Merry Christmas!
Posted by John at 04:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2002
Gawker has been live for
Gawker has been live for one week, and I think it's going to be part of my regular reading. I especially recommend it if you live in, frequent, or have friends in the Big Apple. It focuses on NYC news, "and by news we mean, among other things, urban dating rituals, no-ropes social climbing, Condé Nastiness, downwardly-mobile i-bankers, real estate porn -- the serious stuff. Fun reading, with just the right air of nervous, abrasive, self-conscious bitchiness that so characterizes Manhattanites. This is doubly impressive given that none of the site's authors are from NY; they're just tourists and short-timers.
Posted by John at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)
But on a happier note,
But on a happier note, NORAD has already acquired Santa on radar, currently over Stonehenge, England at the time this is posted, and headed for the USA.
Posted by John at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
I heard the news on
I heard the news on the radio on our drive to Long Beach airport this morning, returning back home from a visit with the in-laws. Malawi, where we spent several days last year on our trip to Africa, is plagued by rumors of vampires on the prowl. Famine conditions are worsening as villagers are afraid to leave their homes to tend their crops. The government is officially denying that it employs any vampires.
Posted by John at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
The climax of "Reloaded" is
The climax of "Reloaded" is a lengthy freeway chase that, like the original "Matrix" in 1999, will redefine action filmmaking and visual effects for years, and "... may be the most audaciously conceived, thrillingly executed car chase ever filmed. Sounds like hype, yeah. But you’ve gotta see this thing... " Says cinematographer Bill Pope: "It's going to make 'The Fast and the Furious' look like 'The Slow and the Dimwitted'."
The quote is from The Matrix Makers, Newsweek's cover story detailing the next two sequels to The Matrix. Pretty bold endorsement, given that it's based on 20 minutes of preliminary footage. For fans of The Matrix, a dilemma: the article is too good not to read, but it is definitely a spoiler for the upcoming movie. What to do? What to do?
Posted by John at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2002
The Parkerfamily.net Guest Book is
The Parkerfamily.net Guest Book is now back on line. Unfortunately, all previous entries were lost when BeSeen.com shut down. Sorry... I still haven't made the time to set up a dedicated web server and of course my web hosting service doesn't offer guest book functionality, so once again I am resorting to a third party service. After an exhaustive technical analysis (15 minutes of checking out the results of a search on Google for "free guest book", but it was late, and I was exhausted), I settled on the very fine guest book service provided by Alxnet. Set up and deployment took all of 15 minutes, so I guess I should have done this months ago. Anyway, for those of you familiar with the distinctive navigational scheme of Parkerfamily.net, the guest book is located within the cerebrum, roughly in the area of the parietal lobe which is responsible for processing somatosensory information (kinesthesis and body awareness). The area specifically occupied by the guest book, on the dominant side of the brain, is responsible for sensations of taste, enabling you to savor a fine wine or enjoy a sweet dessert. On the non-dominant side of the brain, this part of the parietal lobe is responsible for spacial orientation, enabling you to conceptualize your environment, read maps and follow directions. (For more fun with the brain, go to Harvard.) Think about that while you sign the guest book.
Posted by John at 01:22 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2002
Wow. There's a new trailer
Wow. There's a new trailer up for The Matrix Reloaded, due out in about 5 months, and there's a high-resolution version (1024 X 464) that is an 62.3 MB download. A high-speed Internet connection is "recommended but not required". (It took 18 minutes over my AT&T cable modem.)
Posted by John at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2002
Go ahead, laugh, fool. You
Go ahead, laugh, fool. You don't know your ass from your elbow.
Posted by John at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
You know the old story,
You know the old story, Santa couldn't possibly visit 3 billion children in 24 hours, his reindeer would burst into flame traveling 1000 times the speed of sound, and so on. This analysis, however, ignores some alternate explanations that could explain how the jolly old elf does it. Merry Christmas!
Posted by John at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
Now here's an interesting inter-face.
Now here's an interesting inter-face. Hah.
Very lifelike javascript picture montage of a woman's face, with good transitions between her expressions. Kind of eerie, frankly. [via MeFi]
Posted by John at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
Keelhauling - Now With Slogans!
Keelhauling - Now With Slogans! Just keep hitting the Refresh key until you find one you like.
Posted by John at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2002
Creative Commons, managing freely available
Creative Commons, managing freely available content on the Internet. "...it can be that easy when you skip the intermediaries" or How to Get Rid of the ©.
Posted by John at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)
Google has announced its 2002
Google has announced its 2002 Zeitgeist, their annual review of the year in Internet searches. The response seems to be a collective yawn. Maybe that's because, with all the data from billions of web searches all over the planet, they can't seem to answer the most important question: "What was the most common search on Google in 2002?" Instead, we get the "fastest rising" image searches for movie stars in Japan, and other not-so-interesting trivia.
Far more interesting is Froogle, the new product-pricing search engine out of the Google labs. I will definitely use this one. It's like MySimon on steroids. This is Google's Catalog search, only without all the hokey scanned catalog pages and with more and better competitive pricing information.
And far more fun is Google Viewer, which sets up your web searches as a slide show. Not particularly useful, but certainly more fun if you have the time to approach your searches this way, or if you have a search that lends itself to this type of display (example: try searching "Aztec ruins"). Broadband users click the rabbit to speed up the display (the default delay is 5 seconds). Dialup users, don't use this.
While we're extolling Google's many virtues, for all you news junkies out there who haven't seen it yet, Google News is simply the best compendium of news articles on the web, polling over 4,000 sources for stories and ranking them by relevence to always bring you the most important stories of the day. Resistance is futile. You will be assimiliated.
Posted by John at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)
The Mind Has No Firewall.
The Mind Has No Firewall. [via MeFi] An exposition on psychotronic weaponry. Just because.
Posted by John at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)
This is interesting. A neurologist
This is interesting. A neurologist from University College London picked 8 winners from the World Memory Championships, plus two others already known and tested for their prodigious memories. These are people who can memorize 4,000 digits, instantly learn and remember 99 new people's names, memorize and recall an entire deck of shuffled cards. She then subjected them to a wide variety of tests, including various types of brain scans performed while they are engaged in memorization. These results were compared with those of 10 normal people. [Sidebar: Why hasn't this been done already? This seems to me to pretty basic research, and I would think scientists engaged, for example, in Alzheimer's research would have been way beyond this. Still, it is an interesting study.] She found higher brain activity levels in the medial parietal cortex, retrosplenial cortex and the right posterior hippocampus, but all stimulated by learned memorization techniques. In other words, it's all a mnemonic trick. Interestingly, though, despite the existance of literally hundreds of mnemonic methods, they all used the same one. Known as the "method of loci", maybe it's worth putting in a little brain exercise time on flexing those unused brain cells.
Posted by John at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2002
If you're a fan of
If you're a fan of tee-shirts that leave them laughing... 30 seconds after you're gone... when they finally get the joke, then you definitely need to know about Perspicui-Tees. Some are obvious but still funny, some are rather obscure.
Posted by John at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
On the other hand, we
On the other hand, we sat around the dining room table playing cards by candlelight last night, and that was nice. Mother Nature's way of telling us to take a break from the electronic onslaught, maybe. Plus it was quiet. I mean, eerily quiet.
Posted by John at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2002
Another extended absence from my
Another extended absence from my little corner of cyberspace, as I traveled from SF to London, Brussels, Madrid, Frankfurt and Seoul last week. The Frankfurt to Seoul 14-hour flight was a bit much, otherwise OK. Although it was strange giving a presentation to 22 consultants from the largest systems integrator in Korea from 10-12 on Saturday, leaving Seoul at 4:40pm and arriving home at 10:00am -- on Saturday. I had the weird feeling that I already knew what was going to happen to me that day, and it had gone well, so no worries.
Plus watching the sun rise in the west was a unique experience.
We found ourselves one of the 200,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers that are without power today. The power went off at about 11:00pm last night, came back on about 1/2 way (brown out) and then went out completely sometime during the night, when the winds were beating the windows so hard I thought it would blow them in. We've had 15.5 inches of rain in the past 4 days. We went from 37% of the average YTD rainfall to 122%. The weathergirl said on the raido this morning, "no significant relief from the rainstorms is expected until the new year." I don't mind the rain, but not having electricity sucks.
Posted by John at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2002
Brian Thomas is a PhD
Brian Thomas is a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University. He used MATLAB (running on a Sun Solaris 2.7 workstation and commanded remotely through Telnet) to manipulate equations and run the model that determines how many vampires the population of Sunnyvale, CA could support. Since I work in Sunnyvale this was of considerable interest, especially as I have noticed a precipitous increase in nosferatu roaming the corporate hallways in recent weeks, particularly.. you know.. as it gets dark outside.
Posted by John at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2002
The patented Parker Business Attitudes
The patented Parker Business Attitudes Barometer™ is based on the number of emailed jokes I receive each business day. For the past year, it has been on a steadily declining path, indicating the economic recovery everyone is hoping for is still many months away. Over the past two weeks, however, there has been a noticeable uptick, leading me to conclude (pending trendline confirmation signals) that we have reached the bottom. Samples from yesterday and today:
HUSBAND 1.0
Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a slowdown in the performance of the flower and jewelry applications that had operated flawlessly under the Boyfriend 5.0 system. In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.9, but installed undesirable programs such as NFL 7.4, NBA 3.2 and NHL 4.1. Conversation 8.0 also no longer runs and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do?
Signed,
Desperate
______________
Dear Desperate:
First, keep in mind that Boyfriend 5.0 was an entertainment package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Try to enter the command C:/I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME and install Tears 6.2. Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Guilt 3.3 and Flowers 7.5. But remember, overuse can cause Husband 1.0 to default to such background applications as Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0, or Beer 6.1. Be aware that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will create Snoring Loudly.WAV files. DO NOT install Mother-In-Law 1.0 or reinstall another Boyfriend program. These are not supported by applications and will crash Husband 1.0. It could also potentially cause Husband 1.0 to default to the program Girlfriend 9.2, which runs in the background and has been known to introduce potentially serious viruses into the Operating System. In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have a limited memory and can’t learn new applications very quickly. You might consider buying additional software to enhance his system performance. I personally recommend Hot Food 3.0, and Single Malt Scotch 4.5 combined with such applications as that old stand-by Lingerie 6.9 (which has been credited with improved performance of his hardware).
Good luck,
Tech Support
____________________________________
NEW WORDS FOR THE 2003 WORKPLACE
Essential additions for the workplace vocabulary:
BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMS: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiney.
SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.
IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J.trials were a prime example.
ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message..."404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located.
GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.
OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.
WOOFYS: Well Off Older Folks.
And last but not least...
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again (we all need this).
I've seen them both before, but it's still a good amusing read, and the fact that my friends are feeling well enough to start sending along jokes again does bode well for the economy at large.
Posted by John at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)
December 03, 2002
Well, Julie's got her business
Well, Julie's got her business off the ground, or at least motoring down the runway, and is now officially a licensed and bonded freight broker. Which means I get to try my hand as the web site designer. Woo hoo! I'm used to mocking up web pages and user interfaces (usually in PaintShop or even Excel), and then chucking them over the wall to the graphic design crew to implement. Unfortunately, in this case there's no one to chuck it to.
Posted by John at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
