Joe Maller: Site Notes Archive - November 2001

November 27, 2001

Aside from the tedious paperwork and excessive, archaic verbiage, the strategic practice of law must be quite invigorating.

November 25, 2001

Apologies in advance for the following stream of vitriol.

Not realizing that Saturday Night Live was a repeat (and still not funny), I sat through the first song by musical guest Sum 41. They surprised me with they're practiced and contrived suckfulness.

Ways in which Sum 41 appears to suck:

1. I thought the first 30 seconds of the song were a Beasty Boys cover.
2. The coordinated whole-band hopping, reminded me of N'Sync
3. Sum 41 -> Blink 182
4. Lead singer/guitarist had Billy Idol hair and sneer.
5. www.sum41.com

That's what I could remember. Overall, these guys seemed every bit as engineered as O-Town, just targeted at the opposite market. Why are today's kids such hapless suckers? Don't they see how they are being manipulated? Do they care? The idea of punk doesn't look anything like it used to. All the groups and divisions seem so contrived now, if somene was to stand out as an individual, would anyone even notice?

November 24, 2001

Blue & White G3s can not boot from a Firewire drive. I wish I'd found that article sooner. Or this one or this one before spending several hours installing and partitioning my drives. This is the reason my drives were grayed out in the Startup Disk control panel (my original Google search).

November 22, 2001

Government shouldn't tell us to pray, government should act so we don't feel compelled to pray.

Something I wrote in a legal pad in January or February, 2001. Found while going through a stack of old papers.

November 20, 2001

Hello to everyone clicking through from the WWUG message board, Re: FCP Plugins?. Thank you for the kind words Tim B, and yes I am working on several new filters which I hope to have in beta test by the end of the month.

Congratulations to Bruce for taking the top spot on FilePile. (image mirrored here)

November 15, 2001

heh. Search Google for sound capture and there I am. Number 1! Cool.

From an interview with Tom Stoppard on his creative process, excerpted from Salon's ongoing Brilliant Careers section:

"He sought to ensure that his insights 'weren't simply the average conclusions of a first-year philosophy student,' he told the Times of London in 1972, 'which indeed they invariably turned out to be.'"

We saw The Invention of Love on Broadway earlier this year. While I regretfully admit to nearly dozing off during the first act, the play was in fact a workout and massage for the mind. Big ideas were flying around in a dozen directions (bicycles!) but afterwards my head felt expanded and invigorated. I attribute my near-loss of consciousness more to exhaustion, a comfy chair and a dark room than to anything in the play itself.

This article also reminded me that I still haven't read Arcadia. Maybe I'll go grab a copy today.

November 14, 2001

This is the best OS X resource I've found so far. The page turned up on Google when I was searching for a way to access different disks from the Unix command line.

Bruce, please don't read the whole thing before I get a chance.

November 13, 2001

The webcam machine crashed this afternoon. 31 days, 17 hours and 31 minutes up. When this machine is finally retired, it will be replaced by one running OS X. I doubt 31 days uptime will be anything special after that, OS X just doesn't seem to crash.

Endurance milestones have a depressing quality coupled to their achievement. Keeping track of time makes life seem shorter, acknowledging the hours and days passing forever into the past. I'm happy the machine ran for a month, taking pictures, running it's little scripts. It's weird to think that this marks only the second time it's been restarted since before September 11th. Is the period between restarts the conscious time of the machine? In the same way dogs have years, was that a "computer day"?

What is left in memory when the power goes out? What are the electrical currents of the day before last? Memory leaks and power surges. The more it is copied, the farther it goes. – posted 11/13/2001 08:26:07 PM

November 10, 2001

More behind the scenes updates, mostly to fix the stuff I didn't really fix the first time. The site notes archive links now work correctly. This time the Perl script works with the archives instead of breaking all the past links. Also the JavaScript timelapse webcam now goes forward instead of backward.

Bumbling through my referrer logs (with which I am somewhat obsessed and occasionally disappointed), I noticed a link from Jeeyoon's new wintertale blog. She seems to simultaneously publish her site in Korean (I think) as well. I'm kind of jealous and respect for multi-lingual people, especially when their languages are so totally unrelated (one Euro/Latinate with one Asian or Semitic*). It took me almost an hour to compose a short two paragraph letter in German, and that was with two travel dictionaries and Babelfish.

*I didn't forget about Swahili, Aboriginal Australian dialects, Nordic, Ket, Russian/Slavic/Asian dialects, Maori, Bemba, Nyanja or any of the thousands of other languages I glossed over.

I've been able to get by in foreign places with roman alphabets, but I felt absolutely illiterate in Thailand and Morocco where my inexperienced eye couldn't make any sense of the words around me.

While gathering the list for the above footnote, I came across a few sobering reports on the extinction of indigenous languages:

• Endangered Native American Languages: What Is to Be Done, and Why?" by James Crawford
• Languages, Disappearing and Dead in Scientific American
• World's languages disappearing, study finds

November 1, 2001

By the time any of the Anthrax letters were delivered and revealed to contain a biological weapon, the mailing containers they were processed and delivered with were already back in circulation, on their way to unknown locations. There is no way to track where a container goes after it's contents have been delivered. Routing directions are attached to mail containers when they are full, these are removed and the containers are refilled and sent elsewhere.

My parents own and operate a mailing service. As part of their jobs, they deliver mailings to the post office using postal service trays and bags. The trays are made of cardboard and corrugated plastic, the bags are canvas. All of these containers are filthy. They never seem to get washed, and stay in service until they wear out.

Mail bags and cardboard trays are porous. These are filthy because paper dust, ink particles and all manor of grease, grime and muck get into the cracks and crevasses and stay there. Cloth and paper are filters and filters clog over time.

Considering how much time has passed and the massive volume of mail processed every day, it's almost a certainty there will be more Anthrax cases based on redistribution of the existing spores. Our government agencies aren't doing a whole lot to counter this continuing threat.

The CDC, the same supposedly informed authority who presumed that a common paper envelope was somehow a bio-hazard containment device, has posted these InterimRecommendations for Protecting Workers from Exposure to Bacillus anthracis in Work Sites Where Mail Is Handled or Processed. One passage reinforced my concerns:

Gloves and other personal protective clothing and equipment can be discarded in regular trash once they are removed or if they are visibly torn, unless a suspicious piece of mail is recognized and handled. If a suspicious piece of mail is recognized and handled, the worker’s protective gear should be handled as potentially contaminated material

The glaring inconsistency here is that a postal worker's jeans would be considered potentially contaminated, but the unknown canvas mail bag through which the deadly letters were delivered has not been quarantined. In this case especially, any contaminated item has the potential to distribute the contagion just as readily as the original letter. Did no one think of this, or is it just too big a headache? It seems like none of the people commenting on how to make the mail safer have ever visited a working postal facility and have no idea how many potential hazards are built into the system. Yes, high-speed sorting machines create dust, but so does a 30 pount canvas sack of letters when thrown into the back of a truck.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Inquiries line: (800) 311-3435

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