Cafe Bucky

Sunday was a full day for me, ranging from the late night still air of Petaluma, to the humidity and activity of the protesters who made their way up to Central Park’s Great Lawn.

5 pm. Just back in the City from JFK. Let’s drop the luggage at the apt and take a walk…

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I’m going to get geeky.

There’s other stuff I could write about, like my terrible camphone pictures of the protesters on the Great Lawn in Central Park. That’s a whole story in itself, how I went from tranquil Petaluma to a hubbub of NYC protest aftermath in a matter of hours. Loved the Billionaires For Bush spoof!

Or I could write about the Great 2004 mishap with a jar of Fairway Spaghetti Sauce, which rendered my kitchen into the Tomato Pavilion, permeated with a wonderful garlic smell. Cut my thumb nicely with that one.

But fellow geeks, I ponder the following:
ComboDock, FireWire800 / USB2 Docking Device

It’s a FW800 / USB 2.0 dock for IDE drives. Since I have about a half dozen IDE drives sitting around, this would be a handy way to grab their data, as well as earmark them for an “extra backup” for big photo projects.

Cheaper to buy future bare drives and run them through this, than to keep buying enclosures and FW bridges…

The other thing that occurs to me is that you could put a PC & Mac (as in, an Intel Debian and PowerPC Debian) Linux environment on one of these, and, with the right partition scheme, be able to run off of any newish machine in sight. The tricky part would be deciding how to deal with the boot sector…

So that’s my thinking out loud bit. I’m basically burnt out on dealing
with drives in PC cases, and the thought of easily getting to them from my PowerBook has a lot of appeal.

BrowseHappy.com is a campaign to get people to ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and use something safer instead.

More power to them, says I! I’m a happy Safari user on the Mac, and I try to avoid MSIE on my Windows box at work whenever I can.

They need a testimonial video, and not from Yet Another White Male (one thing lacking on the BrowseHappy site is a diverse cross section of browser users) What’s Ms. Feiss using for a browser these days? :-)

At the moment, I’m sitting in quiet, misty morning Petaluma, light-years away from the Beltway. Next Sunday I fly to my other place in NYC (where I work), which will be a maelstrom of political activity leading into the RNC. Include me out. I’m a democrat, interested in hearing energetic speeches from the Left, but it doesn’t look like there’s much of a plan. It’s tempting to stay in California for another week, and avoid the whole Manhattan schlamozzle. I live two blocks from Central Park, and am guessing that 100,000 people are going to drop by, permit be damned.

I sure hope the convention week stays peaceful. Why couldn’t the Republicans pick a more suitable city, such as, oh… I don’t know… Houston! Putting Bush & Co. in the middle of Madison Square Garden is akin to tossing rocks at the New York City hornets nest. Some of the insects are bound to get upset and do stupid things. Seems like Bad Planning 101.

So I’m just hoping for restraint on all sides. I’d hate to see a replay of the WTO in Seattle, or 4 Dead in Ohio, or Chicago ‘68, or any number of scenarios involving idiots hiding behind a political banner versus nervous riot police and national guard.

Hurl only words. Break only the seals of your beers. Burn only calories. Shout your lungs out, but keep the teargas away from mine. Yeah, the Right has gotta be voted out, but don’t fuck up New York in the process.

Spotted an item off of MacCentral this morning, via a feed to NetNewsWire … (ok, I’ve given everyone credit, may I move on? :-)

There’s a new USB mouse with 64 meg of memory.

I won’t be getting this one, but it did make me think of a new product category … multiple memory card wireless mice.

My favorite mouse is a small, metal optical Logitech Mouseman Mobile. It’s gotten to the point where a rollerball mouse feels very clunky to me.

Even though my mouse is small, there’s ample room for, say, a compact flash card. Hmm, even two of ‘em (such as 2 Lexar 8gb cards, when they come way down in price … enough for quite a project)

So that would be cool - Give me a mouse that I’m going to be carrying around anyway, give it bluetooth, or better yet, wireless Firewire. That means one less thing to carry around, and a quick way to make local backups of important files on my laptop. My wrist is not going to really notice the weight of a flash card either way.

I started writing this blog in March 2003. If Usenet posts count for anything, I’ve been writing something online since the early 80’s. No stranger to online expression …

But sticking to JavaJoint for a sec, this is the 200th post. I think I’ll do 200 more.

Some personal favorites, somewhat grouped:

Blogging / Context:

Context, Blogs, and Chameleons - where I compare the process of writing a blog to other online forms that have more focus. Something else along the same lines is Nostalgic for Usenet, looking for UseWeb - and sometimes I’ll revisit the theme, such as when I went to NY Bloggers talk: NYC Bloggers make me think of future.

ThereThen Addressing & FlexiPhoto:

There are a number of posts where I mention my ThereThen addressing idea (urls that express time and space). One entry point is: ThereThen: How Important Is Altitude? FlexiPhoto is my web-based photo db, and in my grand plans, I will tie it together with ThereThen addressing. I did implement the notion of how photo collections span time

Looking Back:

I sometimes get nostalgic, such as An Echo or I’ll think of old music such as Camper Van Beethoven.
But also love random memories, such as Snow Kidding.

New York:

Thoughts of my New York experiment started taking form around August, 2003, when I wrote: Big Apple Plans. My “do I think I want to live in New York” experiment started, and this was one of my first impressions. I do talk about the weather sometimes: Brr York City and Winter Splinter.

Geeky:

I pine for super geeky gizmos - but then I’ll balance it out with a someday tech vacation - sometimes I want a different sort of tech, such as my Stratocaster.

There’s much else I could touch on, such as a constant desire to travel, or fave books or movies. I’ll do my best to keep branching out with these entries.

If you value your time, don’t play Civilization III

Because it’s a very good strategy game. The best I’ve ever played. Really.

Sophia and I were in a CompUSA a couple of days back, and she zeroed in on an expansion pack for The Sims (Hot Date). In my quest to expose her to simulation/strategy/logic stuff in general, I recalled reading great reviews about CivIII. Hmm, Hot Date, or history itself to experiment with? For an 11 year old girl? Look, no hurry for the Hot Date stuff, as far as I am concerned!

Civ III. Bag. Out the door. Install. Runs fine on her G3 PowerBook.

She absolutely loves it. She and a friend were immersed, screaming at the game, cheering when they attained the ability to sail a boat, groaning at the military finesse of enemies - there’s so many things to think about with every turn. Rival leaders would snicker at them, or lavish praise, or threaten war.

So I tried it last night. Took the Red Pill. It’s 9 pm, and I want to think about something other than XSLT.

Oh my, it’s 3 am. My Russia is in a state of unrest. The citizens are revolting in Moscow, starving in Odessa. Germany keeps sending Galleys at me, and I keep pinging them with catapults.

That’s it. Gotta return to reality. Go to sleep. Stay away from that game :-)

Back in June, I wrote PANs In The Clouds, which was an initial take on spontaneous social networks on lengthy flights.

I flew from NYC to California on Saturday, and was going over the idea. The bit about fusing a Craigslist-style board and a event-oriented Wiki seems like a likely direction for making it easy for fellow travelers to seek each other out. Any given flight is pretty easy to express (JetBlue.7August2004.101)

I have too many projects going right now to do anything with this, coding-wise. I could storyboard it pretty quickly in VoodooPad. If someone out there needs a “social software” project, get ahold of me and I’ll give a brain dump.