Friday (foo) Blogging

A pic of Saturn's weird moon Hyperion, taken by Cassini on Wednesday.



A NASA radar image of the asteroid 2005 CR37, taken when the asteroid passed near the Earth in February.

---

A few more blogs I came across with the aid of random "Next Blog" users or similar means:

• Defibrilator - Views from a Student Paramedic. This is a really fascinating read, if you've ever wondered what being an EMT is really like, or even if you haven't.
  
• Lost Remodernist. Has something to say about modern art & architecture, but I'm not clear on what, exactly.
  
• dancing king
  

---

A few (primarily) local items of note:

• Two posts at Welcome to Blog debunking Portland's so-called "Shanghai Tunnels ". I can't blame people in town for wishing we had a cool underground netherworld beneath our fair city. I can't blame people for wishing our city's early history was more interesting. Everybody knows that real cities have vast networks of centuries-old catacombs beneath their streets. Also, caves rock.
  
• But lest you think that it's all fun and games underground, you might want to read this cautionary tale over at K5 about getting food poisoning at Carlsbad Caverns. Yikes!!!
  
• A whole category of funny posts over at Jalpuna! about the fun of owning cats.
  
• A post at Loaded Orygun bashing Bojack. Aww, c'mon, Jack's a local institution. Rumor has it Matt Groening actually based the character of Grandpa Simpson on our very own Mr. Bogdanski. (Well, I'm trying to start this rumor, anyway.)
  
• It's official, our neighbors across the Columbia are a bunch of dorks, and I mean that in a good way. Really. The governor of Washington has issued a proclamation declaring today and tomorrow "RSS Days". No, seriously. For the sake of comparison, it doesn't look like Oregon government uses news feeds much at all. So far I see exactly one: The state Department of Revenue, of all people. All other departments apparently release their news in PDF form only. If there are any other feeds, they're cleverly concealed. Multnomah County is just as bad that way. You'd think governments would care more than private sector firms about using open, non-proprietary formats, but at least in this state the opposite is usually true. A few entities have mailing lists, which is fine from a practical standpoint, but it's not exactly geeky these days, and I demand geeky. At least Portland city government's holding up its end of the deal, feedwise. I love the city's news feed. I'm serious.
  
• Local reaction to the latest Tour de France doping scandal. I was going to root for Basso too, and now I can't. Society needs to accept that bike racers are a bunch of freakish mutants, drugs or no drugs, and just let them have at it. The same goes for jockeys.
  
  We have a household tradition that when Le Tour rolls around, we hole up in front of the TV with a couple of baguettes, a wedge of Pierre Robert, and a jug of cheap rose (which we avoid the other 11 months of the year). We were already lamenting not having Armstrong to root against this year (yes, you read that right). Now most of the riders I've heard of won't be in the race either.
  
• Forget everything unkind I ever said about the Portland Aerial Tram. It's official now: the tram is my friend. Yay!
  

---

A few articles examining MySpace and its "walled garden" model. I was going to write a post about this myself, but these and other articles are pretty good, so I think I'll just pass some links along instead.

• "If You Don't Get MySpace, You're a Lametard"
  
• "The return of the walled garden"
  
• "MySpace: Walled Garden 2.0?"
  
• "Its MySpace ... but its not MyData!"
  
• "Latest MySpace killers are - almost - on to something"
  
• And an entire blog named Beyond the Walled Garden.
  

My new Crackberry addiction

Believe it or not, until a month or so ago I'd never owned or desired a mobile phone. Then I got a Blackberry, and I quickly learned where the "crackberry" nickname comes from. Hell, I'm using it to blog right now, as I have on several past occasions. What makes this time so special is that right now I'm at the gym, on a stationary bike. I've also got the iPod on, too, and I'm sure I look like a total clown. But I find that I simply don't care. You'll get this thing away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, understand?

Now if only Crackberries were waterproof, so I could do this from the pool and be an even bigger gadget dork. Yeah, that would be just fabulous, I'm totally sure of it.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Reason #641 why modern art is dangerous

So I was walking over to the Thursday market in the Pearl District, and I saw what appeared to be a green purse hanging in a tree, with a paper tag attached. Hmm, interesting, I thought, that must be someone's conceptual art installation. Next week is First Thursday, maybe someone's getting a head start or whatever. So I stopped and reached up and grabbed hold of the thing, to get a better look at the tag and see what it was all about. Most of the time they don't bother to explain the concept behind the art, but you never know. Maybe the real art's inside the bag, waiting for an inquisitive person to find and discover it. I've heard of people doing that, so it wouldn't be all that surprising. Or maybe it's an invitation to a really super-elite art party that only the cool people know about, and looking at the tag is the test to see if you're cool enough.

So I got a look at the tag. It read BAITED INSECT TRAP! Gaaah!!! So I hurriedly let go of the thing, brushed my hands off, and went to look for somewhere to wash off all the nasty chemicals. Drat! I hate not being able to tell when something isn't art.

The worst part is that now that I think about it, I still can't be sure the thing isn't someone's conceptual art. Maybe "Baited Insect Trap" is actually the name of the piece. Maybe there's even a secret camera trained on it. Maybe the whole episode was caught on film, so absinthe-guzzling art snobs in black turtlenecks all across the globe can snicker condescendingly at my distress, and call me a rube for not immediately intuiting what was really going on. Maybe it's even on YouTube now. Artists can be incredibly vicious that way, and I woudn't put it past 'em. The effete little bastards.

moonshot

I was going to call this something along the lines of "TEH MOON", but I've already done two tech posts in a row.

ESA's SMART-1 probe (which, um, isn't visible in this photo) is now scheduled to crash into the moon in just over 2 months. Here's a recent photo of the moon taken by the probe. I realize the moon isn't exactly the most exciting corner of the solar system, and I agree it's a real shame. But the pic's sort of newish, so here it is. At least the moon's got lava tubes, which might end up being useful someday. So anyway, enjoy!

Linux Genuine Advantage

Everyone's been wringing their hands lately over the new "Windows Genuine Advantage" program, which Microsoft uses to determine whether your copy of WinXP is legit or not. But did you know Linux has had something very similar for years and years now? It's true! Chances are it's already on your box, perhaps without you even knowing it was there.

So here, for the first time ever, is the super-secret way to tell if your machine has a legitimate, authorized, legal copy of Linux or not:

1.) At a shell prompt, type /bin/true. You won't see any immediate output here, but don't worry. Linux Genuine Advantage (LGA for short) does its thing quietly, and you don't need to enter any serial numbers off any cds, or go register on some random website, or enter any personal information, or provide a credit card number. The state-of-the-art LGA system is able to figure out all the info it needs without ever interacting with you. It's clever that way.

2.) When step 1 completes (which should take almost no time at all on any modern PC), type this at the shell prompt: echo $?. This command will let you see your super-secret LGA authorization ID code. If your copy of Linux is legal, this ID should be 0. Otherwise, you will need to contact SCO headquarters and purchase a new Linux license. (Please note that a nonzero ID may also indicate a causality violation, so prior to contacting SCO you may want to try rebooting the universe you currently inhabit, and then retry step 1. Be sure to exit universe before rebooting.)

And remember: If you don't participate in LGA, your box *will* stop working on January 19, 2038.

Be careful who you share this information with. If people find out about this trick and learn the secret ID code (and quite possibly even if they don't), they'll be able to get their own "legal" copies of Linux, absolutely free.

[Originally posted elsewhere.]

tagz: linux windows genuine advantage

SCO loses again, bwhahaha!!!!

If you've been following the SCO saga like I have, you've been waiting for this day for a very, very long time. Today's ruling (which Al P. has here [PDF]) throws out nearly all of their allegations about those evil commie Linux hippies stealing their precious secret code. There are a few assorted charges left, so we haven't seen the last of Darl McBride and his merry pirate crew just yet. I doubt that what little they've got is enough to make all those big federal court cases worthwhile, but they'll pursue it anyway, of course. No sense in suddenly growing a brain this late in the game, after all.

A lively and well-deserved round of gloating has started over at Y! SCOX, but the story's only just now showed up on GrokLaw, and just as a comment thread, not a story yet (see here). It'll probably make Slashdot sooner or later, too, although as usual the comments will be all about Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman, and Beowulf clusters, instead of the topic at hand, whatever it is.

This may be bad news for SCO, but it's probably going to be great news for SCO investors, since the stock mysteriously jumps up every time there's bad news, defying all known laws of economics, gravity, logic, and common sense. So somebody's going to make kazillions tomorrow.

tags: sco

---

Updated: Here's a fascinating item I ran across today, one man's memories of Darl McBride from back in the old days at Franklin-Covey (you know, those "synergize proactively outside the box" guys).

Referroutine

First off, I'd like to give a mad shout out, or mad props, or proppy shouts, or or shroppy pouts, or whatever the current term is, to the nice folks over at alt.portland, for linking to my rant about the Essential Forces fountain over at the Rose Quarter (among other things).

Second off, a brief program note: I've acquired another colony in the ever-growing Cyclotram multimedia empire. Please bid a hearty "hi" to cyclotram3, my infinitely humble blog over at MySpace. Yes, that MySpace. I figured I ought to check it out, even though I think it's teh st00pid. Don't expect a great deal of thrilling excitement over there; the idea is that people can find me over there, and then find their way here. In the end I think MySpace will be the AOL of the 21st century. It'll be acceptable for a lot of people for a limited span of time, but ultimately the "walled garden" model always loses out. Every tech CEO would love to be in charge of an MSFT-style predatory monopolist, but MySpace-style social networking is only going to be cutting edge for a few short years, and then something else shiny and new will come along, and MySpace will go the way of Lycos, Excite, and friends. It'll be one of those things "Generation Y" people will reminisce fondly about once they hit about age 27 or so, sort of the way people my age did about archaic things like playing outdoors without constant and extremely strict adult supervision. Oh, and about Madonna, if we're being brutally frank here. But only the early stuff. Like all right-thinking citizens, I stopped being a diehard fan around the time of "Papa Don't Preach". Now that was a dreadful, dreadful song.

So without further ado, here are a few selected referrer pages I got lately, since it's hot outside and I'm unable to think of anything to write about. Or more precisely, I have a few ideas to write about, but it's hot outside and I'm inclined towards sleeping instead of writing.

• Tabitha's Blog, about live in rural Alaska. Pretty fascinating, at least for me. In the Pacific NW we tend to have a sort of inferiority complex about Alaska. We have nature, sure, but they really have nature. We have salmon, but they've got the good salmon, and lots of 'em. We're rugged and independent and all, and we defy the elements, yeah, yeah, whatever, but we're a bunch of wimpy East Coasters compared to Alaska. Read this blog, and look at the photos, and weep, puny lower-48-ers. And those of you in my (somewhat) sizeable UK contingent, I just don't know what to say to you guys. You can talk about remote northern Scotland all you want, but in Alaska everything is bigger than Scotland. I'm not exaggerating here. Everything. Especially the mosquitoes.
  
• Productos Brain-Team. I haven't run this through Babelfish to see exactly what it's about, but it's a tech blog of some sort, and the name's fantastic.
  
• ohime nana
  
• Esculturas de lury Pinto. It's sort of like Claymation, except in Portuguese, and in blog form. Other than that, it's kinda like Claymation.
  
• VIM in Belize. A blog from freakin' Belize, already. I don't care if it's mostly about church stuff, it's from freakin' Belize. (Note to oldsters: "Belize" is the place formerly known as "British Honduras") I also got a search engine hit from Belize a couple of days ago, FWIW. This visitor must've been bored to tears by the way I write, because s/he clicked on the link to translate this page in to Pirate. Yarrr!!!! Stereotypes are a terrible thing, but maybe sometimes they exist for a reason. I mean, with Belize being on the Caribbean coast and all.
  
• Four Corners of NY Photoblog from NYC, with lots of baseball photos.
  
• 4th Avenue Blues Interesting, somewhat New Agey blog.
  

And a few referrer pages from earlier that I never got around to posting:

• Mantantirulirulá :: un camembert con ataxia locomotriz
  
• Cosas para decir en silencio
  
• BartCopSports
  
• Resist! Be Bodacious!
  
• Loving the Freedom, blog of a recent transplant to Edmonton. Go Oilers! (Ok, maybe next year... sigh...)
  

Tramhenge

So I was looking at those photos of the tram tower I posted the other day, and suddenly it reminded me of something (a bit), and suddenly I was inspired (sort of) and wrote this song (more or less):

[To the tune of Stonehenge, by Spinal Tap]

Tramhenge, where they all read Dwell
Where the boomers live and they do live well
Tramhenge
Where a $cam is a $cam and spoiled pugs dance to
the pipes of pan
Tramhenge
Tis a magic place where the condos rise
With a smug yuppie face
Tramhenge
Where the bureaucrats lie
And the prayer of developers fill the midnight sky
And you my love, won't you take my hand
We'll go forward in time to that mystic land
Where the tapas fry and the cats meow
I will take you there
I will $$$how you how

It's not a very good song, is it?

Don't hold your breath for an mp3 of it or anything. If you thought the lyrics were bad, oh, you haven't heard me try to sing it. And you won't. Oh, the humanity...

---

It's not a very good blog post, is it?

Ok, fine, here's some cute prosimians to look at, so you don't go away feeling cheated or anything.

Thx. Mgmt.

Those tram tower pics I promised

As I mentioned earlier, today I walked down and had a gander at the new tram tower. I haven't yet found the perfect adjective to describe the thing. The closest I've managed so far is improbable, which is true, but doesn't really convey a lot of information. Maybe I'll be inspired once they bolt on the top segment.



Ok, phallic is a fairly apt (if overused) description as well. I think it's awfully amusing that the city added the big middle segment on Midsummer's Eve, as if they were raising the, ahem, maypole or something. I guess I really don't mind the occasional state-sponsored pagan fertility ritual, just so long as there's no mead, and no Morris dancing. You have to draw the line somewhere, after all.

Hot Sunday Moblogism

Ok, I managed to drag myself outside after all. It's really hot out today. Did I mention that already? I wandered down to the tram tower to take a few photos (which I'll post when I get to a box that speaks Camera). I decided that was enough pointless, geeky exertion for the moment, so I'm on the streetcar now. The heavily air-conditioned, non-walking-about-in-the-sun streetcar. Mmmm.... Transit...

So a few days ago I was out getting rained on, taking pictures of roses for you people, and now I went out and risked a slim but nonzero chance of heatstroke on your behalf, and has anyone thanked me yet? Anyone at all? Umm, no. Maybe I ought to start just making stuff up and saying I did it, without leaving the comfort of my own home. It would probably work out just as well in the end.

The streetcar is full of tourists, plus the sort of locals who aggressively seek out tourists to yammer at. The sort of people who work really hard at cultivating their quirky local vibe, and want everyone on earth to hear all about it. If that wasn't bad enough, today's Oregonian ran another of those "You Know You're From Oregon If..." articles this morning, celebrating the fascinating folkways of our little tribe. I guess maybe some of us were slacking off in the smugness department and needed reminding about our truly special uniqueness, which isn't like anyone else's uniqueness, nosirree.

In reality, all these articles accomplish is to help rich Californians learn how to pass as natives. Well, they try, anyway. The cologne and gold chains are dead giveaways, and in all history no real Oregonian has ever used the word "babe" as a synonym for "buddy".
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Hot Lazy Sundayism

So it's hot outside, and I'm too lazy to do much of anything except blog randomly. (Please recall that I only promised not to ever use the word "random" in titles of blog posts.) Here are a few things I came across while feedgrazing today, which I'm doing instead of enjoying the sunshine like a good Oregonian.

• A cool photo of a dragonfly.
  
• An article about the proposed "Oregon Wine Train" running between Portland and Grand Ronde, which would double as a commuter rail line, and triple as a train to the Spirit Mountain Casino. I'm all in favor of passenger rail, and I think this would be pretty cool, even though in practice it would end up being packed full of pretentious Californian (or wannabe-Californian) wine twits and geezers heading for the nickel slots. The initiative seems to be unrelated to the upcoming Beaverton-Wilsonville commuter line. Seems as though Portland-area commuter rail is being done in a piecemeal fashion, with no real central leadership taking place. I've gotten the impression that the bureaucracy at Tri-Met sees commuter rail as a threat to the expansion of light rail, which may explain why there aren't commuter rail routes between downtown and the other existing train stations in the metro area at Vancouver and Oregon City. But I'm not a bureaucrat, so what do I know?
  
• It's a bad year to be a pelican here on the West Coast. Either you're starving, or you're getting poisoned by algae. And when the latter happens, humans just say you're "drunk" and laugh about it.
  
• This very blog right here, translated into Pirate. Yarrrr!!! Shiver me timbers!!!! Blow the man down!!!
  
  More translators and such here.
  
• The latest creepiness from our local bike subculture.
  
• The Friday (Foo) Blogging thing has finallygone too far.
  

Friday Multimedia Semi-Extravaganza

• An update on the Washington Park reservoir grand opening, which is now scheduled for July 10th.
  
• A way cool optical illusion.
  
• The Two Coreys are reuniting. Yes, those two Coreys. I have to admit I was never a fan back in the 80's, being, you know, a guy and all. Sometimes I think the Powers That Be are trying to arrange things so we'll all welcome the Apocalypse when it finally happens.
  
• Harriet, the world's oldest tortoise, has passed away at the ripe old age of 176.
  
• New episodes of Futurama are on the way, for real this time, allegedly.
  
• Lyrics for a song about Cthulhu.
  
• Yet another LOTR DVD set is due out in August. This time each film comes with a new feature-length "Making Of" documentary. Just how many of these things am I going to have to buy? And will I have to do it all over again once the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray versions come out? Sheesh...
  
• If you haven't seen it already: The New Orleans Times-Picayune's animation about the Katrina flooding. Yikes! It just keeps coming -- bam, another levee goes out, and another section of the city turns blue, again, and again.
  
• Awww, kittens!!!!
  
• More feline cuteness, although I can't provide any more details about the site without invoking Godwin's Law.
  
• Ooh, yet another local beer blog to pass along. Mmmmm.... beeer....
  
• I wasn't planning to do an extended rant about Ann Coulter's latest circus freakage, and I'm still not going to go there. But I would like to pass along this nice lil' video rant on the subject from Henry Rollins. Now that he's had a go at it, there's really no point in anyone else trying.
  

Meet Nix & Hydra

The two little moons of Pluto discovered last year now have official names: Nix and Hydra. Sounds like a twisted Nickelodeon cartoon, or maybe an almost-famous indierock emo duo. "Nix" should not, not, not be confused with "Nyx", which is an asteroid, not a moon. Get it right, silly.

Hydra, meanwhile, should not be confused with the alcopop of the same name. Also I can't very well say "Hydra" without mentioning my Hercules vs. Hydra post, part of my recent foray into total math geekage, in which I sought to bore readers out of their minds -- and I often succeeded. Yay for me!

If I wasn't sick to death of the word "blogosphere", I'd say that's where these four N&H links came from:

• Laura Elizabeth looks at the mythology behind the names.
  
• More mythological musing at ryusen
  
• The comments at shsilver feature the first lame joke I've seen about the new names.
  
• And The Empty Space In My Head uses the moons in a nice post, which occasions me to wonder when my posts became so prosaic. Oh, wait, they've always been this way. My bad.
  

The tram tower grows taller!

The middle segment of our shiny new tram tower was bolted on sometime late last night, and here it is. Compare this to the photo I posted when the first segment went up.

My previous post just got a link from a guy who's working on building the thing, to illustrate what it is that he's working on. How cool is that?

So do I like the thing? Do I hate it? I haven't made up my mind yet, despite what all my carping and complaining might lead you to believe. Maybe it'll be totally fantastic once it's up and running, for all I know.

The most common complaint you hear about it is over the ever-growing cost. The public originally got a bargain-budget $15M figure, and now we're at $50M and counting. I don't really see why anyone's surprised the city & friends lowballed the initial estimate. You do that to get all the key players on board, and get construction started. Then it's easy sailing the rest of the way, because nobody wants a partially-built tram just sitting around gathering dust. It's the oldest trick in the book. I'd be shocked if it didn't happen when the great pyramids were built. And when people say nobody will care what it cost 75 years down the road, I'm sure they're right. Look at the St. Johns Bridge. The city spent way more than it needed to, and built what's still more or less a bridge to nowhere. The taxpayers were stuck with a huge bond debt right in the middle of the depression, and we could't afford to build any more bridges again until the mid-60's. But it sure is pretty. There's no denying that.

While I'm at it, I'd like to dispel a couple of common misconceptions about the tram. One, it is absolutely untrue that the tower grows -- poof, just like that -- every time the city lies about what it's going to cost. Two, there were no magic beans involved, here or anywhere else in the South Waterfront district. Those are just fairy tales, and they aren't even the right fairy tales. The thing would be much cheaper if magic beans or lying politicians were involved. No, the correct fairy tale is that we in this city are going to build an enlightened new economy where everyone is rich, upscale, thin, liberal, and ultra-educated, and nobody makes anything more complicated than a half-caf soy mocha. For everything else, we'll rely on the hard labor of cute little six-year-olds in China (but we'll try our hardest not to think about that part, because that would mess around with our precious inner calm).

three relaxing(?) video clips about water

The beach at Pacific City, Oregon, right outside of the Pelican Pub & Brewery. The audio is more wind than waves, which is unfortunate, but that's the coast for ya.



A fountain known simply as "Untitled", downtown Portland. It's often called the "Car Wash", but don't be fooled. If you try to wash your car in it, a nice policeman will drop by and shoot you full of holes. I mean, not to detract from the relaxing(?) tone of this post or anything, but the fuzz really will do it. Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me. [Legal Disclaimer: Don't!]



Balch Creek, Macleay Park, Portland. You can't actually see the creek very well in the clip, but at least the audio's better than the other 2 clips. It's probably obvious by now that I won't win any Oscars anytime soon. And the clips aren't exactly box office gold either, not unless I CG in a few big explosions or something unrelaxing like that.

The creek contains a native, isolated, and threatened population of cutthroat trout (image), so the trail's plastered with signs hassling visitors to please fer chrissakes stay the hell out of the water already, this means you, and your little dog too, dammit. The signs work really well, too, except for children, and dogs, and people who don't read signs, and people who don't feel the rules apply to them, and people who don't think anyone's looking, and people with fishing poles, and so forth. I'd say this was a damn shame, except that the creek's fish are a bunch of little bastards who have it coming. They're everywhere and are easily seen, except if anyone else comes to the park with me, in which case they all go hide somewhere, so that people think I'm just dreaming or hallucinating or something. Which, for the record, I'm not.

Three Wet Roses

Three roses, captured during a bit of drizzle a week or so ago, in the South Park Blocks, downtown Portland.



A group of schoolchildren was touring the park around the same time, and they were somewhat less enthusiastic than I was. I got absolutely soaked on your behalf. Yes, you. Now you owe me, big time.

Misc. Items 6-20-06

• Just started playing with Opera 9. Seems nice so far, except that my collapsing menu sidebar comes out horribly mangled. Instead of one little arrow graphic next to each menu item, the browser delivers 30-some arrows per item. I have to say I find that a little excessive. So I guess it's back to the Javascript salt mines again.
  
• Here's someone's homebrew recipe for "Echidna's Barleywine". I couldn't resist linking to this because it involves both beer and echidnas. Which is unusual.
  
• The latest idiocy from SCO. (Y! has the press release here.) "Biztones" are a clueless PHB-ism for the ages, and SCO's entire wireless initiative is teh st00pid. Yeah, I'm really going to pay for the right to receive spam on my phone, and I'm going to rush out and buy the one model of phone that can run the Me, Inc. software, catastrophic system bugs and all. And I'm going to love it so much that I'll run out and sign up to resell all those super-advanced Me, Inc. services under SCO's MLM scheme, which is most definitely Not A Scam. And I'm also going to rush right out and join their developer program, in hopes of scoring that ultra-desirable Bimmer with the V10 under the hood. Because nothing motivates programmers like a pretentious new set of wheels. I need that there Bimmer so bad I'm going to give SCO all the rights to my work, even if I don't win the grand prize, because it's an honor just to be part of the Revolution. Yeahhhh... Not.
  
• A new survey claims that New York is the world's politest major city. Clearly they've never observed the curious ritual practiced by Oregon drivers at four-way stops: "After you", "Oh, no, you go ahead, I'm in no hurry", "No, no, you were here first, please, be my guest", and on, and on. Well, it's either that, or they simply don't consider us a major city, the bastards. I'll key their cars for that, dammit. It should be noted that the survey was conducted by Readers' Digest, which is based in -- you guessed it -- the New York metro area. So really what they're saying is that New Yorkers do a rather good job of resembling themselves, and people in other cities don't pull it off quite so well. Seems that Mumbai does an especially poor job of it, causing a bit of hand-wringing in the local media.
  
• If you've been in downtown Portland in the last few days, you might have noticed that the parking lot next to the Fox Tower is being torn up. Seems we're getting a brand new Park Block. This is the last vestige of a once-grandiose plan to tear out a bunch of buildings and connect the north & south park blocks. The plan went nowhere, even though it was being promoted by a now-disgraced Ex-Governor Who Shall Not Be Named. Certain power elite types thought it was a fantastic, visionary plan, but everyone else saw it for what it was: A horrible throwback to 60's-style urban renewal. But this one block was just a surface parking lot, so there's no harm in putting that parking underground and sticking a park on top.
  
• I seem to have missed this year's Oregon Eel Festival, which celebrates the local lamprey population. (And yes, I know lampreys technically aren't eels. Tell it to the people who run the festival.) I'm not joking here, I really would've gone if I'd known about it. I keep hearing about how Northwest Indian tribes consider them a delicacy, and I'll try just about anything once or twice. An article in the Portland Tribune claimed lamprey tastes something like a cross between liver and duck, which sounds kind of promising. There's always next year, I guess.
  
• Speaking of liver, the local food fascists (and we have a rather large contingent of them) are hassling a local French bistro for serving foie gras. And if they win, no doubt they'll keep expanding their jihad until we're all making do with vegan raw food, the blander the better. Um, but I have to drop in a little qualifier -- one of the comments mentions a substance known as casu marzu, which is basically cheese full of wriggling insect larvae. I know I just now said I'd try just about anything, but I draw the line here. No thanks, guys. This is why I always say "just about", in case something like this pops up. Ugh!
  

Slug on a Fungus

A slug oozing over some sort of random tree fungus in Macleay Park, NW Portland.

More Miracles of Modern Technology

An ancient bus converted to a (sort of) double decker using part of an old van. This is on NW 29th near Nicolai, in a weird old industrial corner of NW Portland. It's on the hike to/from Portland, er, Pyramid Brewing up at NW 31st & Industrial, in case you're wondering what I was doing up there. There's probably a fascinating and eccentric story behind this beast, but I have no idea what it is, or why it was made.

In other thrilling technology news:

• MEJ mentions the latest tech conspiracy theory rippling across the blog 'verse. If you open Notepad on WinXP, type "Bush hid the facts", save it, and reopen the file, you see gibberish. Frightening, no? A little government censorbot right there in your own PC. And Windows probably reported you to the NSA, as well.
  
  Ok, well, no, that's not really what's going on. As the comments to that article note, it's really an artifact of the flaky international language support in Notepad, and a lot of short text snippets trigger the same behavior. Also, the text itself isn't actually mangled. If you open a command prompt window and do a "type bush.txt" (or whatever you named the file), your computer will tell you that Bush hid the facts, exactly like it was supposed to.
  
  I spend an inordinate amount of time in my RL job dealing with ugly internationalization (i18n for short) issues, primarily with Japanese language support on Windows and a few Unixes. And this is one of the rare situations where I'm forced to say that Windows is not worse at it than the Unix world. Convincing iconv to do what I want, reliably, across umpteen different platforms is a freakin' nightmare.
  
• Both Slashdot and Groklaw both took the recent "Caldera OpenLinux X" hoax seriously at first. I'm sorry, but when something defies all evidence and all common sense, a little skepticism should be in order. It wasn't even a very good hoax. Is this why people keep falling for phishing spam? They just believe anything that looks vaguely legit after a brief couple of seconds' inspection? C'mon, people.
  
• Another blog spammer managed to get past Blogger's word verification, and posted an ad for aquariums to an old story of mine about Saturn's moon Rhea:
  

  
  Hi I was searching for some information on Aquariums - some tips and Tricks and sites which have great resources and came across yours.
  Great site - I will bookmark it !
  
  Thanks
  h t t p :// hckpublishing . com / aquarium /
  

  
  I imagine the spammers think bloggers are so needy and insecure that they'll be thrilled to receive insincere compliments from spambots. And maybe that's actually true for some people. I just get curious about who's behind it. Unfortunately these spammers have taken a few steps to cover their tracks. The domain's registered through Domains by Proxy, so there's no useful domain contact info. And the hckpublishing.com site is hosted through a "reseller hosting" firm called HostGator, so there's several layers of obfuscation here. I can't figure out who to complain to, which I'm sure was the whole idea. The site itself is puzzling: a few low-value filler articles, and a few ads. Do people actually make money doing this? That's what I really don't understand about the spam business. Other than stealing credit card numbers, the spam business model is a complete mystery to me. Are there people out there, in this day and age, who still try to buy stuff from spammers?
  
• It's time to jump on the viral video bandwagon again. Here's that ultra-cute Kitten vs. Powerbook video, if you haven't seen it already. Awwwwwww....
  
• A post about our fair city's shiny new tram tower, arguing that the tram is cool and artistic and architecturally adventurous. Also, did you know that we're now officially the Best European City in America? It's true, at least so far as anyone knows. We don't get across the pond that often to see things in person, but we have cobblestones here, and sidewalk cafes, and Vespas, and the Europe you see in the movies looks a lot like that, so we must be on the right track.
  
  What's more certain is that we're the most Caucasian city in the country, and getting even more so every day. Surely that can't be what our leaders are really thinking when they say "European", can it? I mean, not consciously thinking it, anyway. (Actually, these days genuine European cities are probably more ethnically diverse than we are, come to think of it.)
  
• An article about the current architectural fad of figuring out how to use surplus shipping containers as housing. Seems that in the Glorious Future, we really will live in bitty little boxes, er "modules", and we'll love it. Also, we'll subsist on nothing but vitamin pellets, and ride flying cars to the office. Resistance is futile.
  
• Anything that's large and shiny counts as technology, even if it's art. This is doubly true if said object is on the cutting edge of "intellectual property" legal insanity.
  
• This is even more of a stretch for a technology-related post, but here's a photo titled hops plant transplanted from a local park. Hops growing wild in our city parks. How cool is that? (I figure this item fits here because hops go in beer, and making beer involves technology, so there you have it.) Mmmm.... beer....
  

Some news and stuff, 6-17-06

A couple pics of the asteroid 2002 JF56, taken by New Horizons a couple of days ago. Color pics with higher resolution are due next week some time.

In other news:

• This comment takes the place of an extended rant that used to be here. I'm not pleased about yesterday's "don't bother knocking" ruling from the Supremes. But the rant didn't really fit here, so I'll save it for later, probably.
  
• All of this (i.e. the aforementioned supreme court ruling) makes me want a beer. And here's yet another local beer blog I just ran across. Lookit all them hops in that there carboy. Mmmm, tasty.
  
• I don't know if Portland's ex-mayor Vera Katz is a beer drinker or not, and I kind of suspect not, but her new statue seems to like the occasional brewski.
  
• A fun little piece about Crazy Crab, the most hated sports mascot of all time, hands down.
  
• The "OMG PONIES" thing may have run its course, but Portland's tiny plastic pony thing is still going strong. More photos here. I was thinking about taking some photos myself and posting them, but now everybody's doing it. And as I've said before, I'm not much of a joiner.
  
• In Ireland, even mad scientists have literary leanings. "Bloomsday device". I love it.
  
• The OLCC's jackbooted thugs are at it again. Like I said before, I'm not a libertarian when it comes to the economic side of things, but I'm all in favor of abolishing the OLCC. Never give puritanical power-mad busybodies their own funding source and their own law enforcement arm. Everything they do would be handled better by local governments (licensing), regular state & local police (enforcement), and the private sector (liquor retailing). There's no need for them to exist. If we ever did abolish the agency there'd be no need to shed a tear for all the unemployed OLCC bureaucrats -- with their experience, they'll have no trouble finding similar jobs in Saudi Arabia.
  
• A couple of lists of the world's worst beers. If the OLCC really wanted to perform a public service, they'd establish minimum quality standards for beer and wine, as a consumer protection measure. But noooooo....