I Don't Want to Grow Up!

Celebrated by market researchers and fretted over by social scientists, rejuveniles come in all ages but are mostly a product of the urban upper classes (free time and disposable income being essential in their lifestyle). Evidence of their presence is widespread. According to Nielsen Media research, more adults 18 to 49 watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN. More than 35 million people have caught up with long-lost school pals on the Web site Classmates.com.

Good freaking jebus h. pogostick. What's next? Does the Times own stock in some firm that makes this kind of stuff up?

Let's make up some catchy marketing terms ourselves.

Hm, how about pudgy suburban technophiles - up and comers if there ever was! I think we shall refer to them as bigendians or perhaps rotuneers.

Ah! Multiply divorced marketing professionals sporting leathery artificial tans, stinking desparately of aromatic Calvin Klein unisex personal hygeine products: brass coiners or perhaps counterfitters. Nice Bruno Maglis!

Angry, economically displaced persons domestically and internationally: grumpies. Cheer up! You're sure to die eventually, and then, none of this will matter!

Apartment dwelling dog-owners: commandogs. Sit, Fido. STOP BARKING! I - I don't know what's come over her, usually she just loves children!

Apartment dwelling cat-owners: pussyfeet. Dear, will you tell the upstairs neighbors to make the dog be quiet? It's - it's giving me a headache. I - I think I might cry.

Rural admirers of hard-core urban rap music: crystal mesh-backs. Because nothin' sez lovin' like four on the floor, a DeKalb cap, and NWA blastin out into the humid midwestern night. Oh, that, a case of Bud, a shotgun, and about a half-pound of crank.

The Illuminated Donkey announced that when the counter over there rolled over to 100,000, a prize involving obscure 80's films on VHS might be in the offing.

Well, I must be getting old, cuz I had nothing better to do between 11:50 and 12:15 tonight except to kick that puppy over!

No cheating or chicanery was involved - just good old Murrican know how and more computers than one man could ever possibly actually need. I even tried Lynx, for god's sake, but it didn't render the java, of course.

So, for reasons unclear to me, I have fallen into the habit of listening to the radio on my computer during the day as I work, playing streams via iTunes. I can play feeds from many stations all over the world, but mostly I stick close to home and listen to KUOW, the local NPR gabfest. I actually would prefer if it were a music station but I find myself more irritated than pleased when I listen to the local stations that occasionally play music to my tastes – either they are commercial, and the ads drive me nuts, or they are not, and the taste of the deejays doesn't often reflect my own.

Lately my local station began airing an NPR-Slate coproduction at midday, Day to Day. I gave the show a try, but it just grates on me. It seems to be a considered attempt from NPR to broaden their base by incorporating contemporary journalistic perspectives that reflect a more conservative bent than often heard on NPR. It's a project that fits well with the editorial objectives of Slate.

I'm reasonably sure the show's doomed; I kinda doubt that droves of conservative radio listeners are tuning in to escape the mind-numbing palaver of Dr. Laura and Rush. Day to Day maintains the even-tempered, thoughtful, voice-of-quiet-reason presentation that's the NPR house style, and as I understand it, that's the specific element that puts non-NPR listeners to sleep.

So, as you may have noticed, I rarely write about negative news and entertainment consumption experiences. It's not that I don't have them, but it is that I don’t think my negative reaction to a given work, show, book, or what not is really, on balance, a positive contribution to discourse in the world.

However, in this case, I was sufficiently motivated to do something about it. Being me, I wrote an Applescript radio-station switcher for iTunes which allows me to set up a schedule with cron, so that during the day, iTunes will switch from station to station according to a schedule – so now, when Day to Day comes on, I find my self listening to WFHB, the non-NPR public radio station that morphed into broadcast existence from several strands of community radio organizations in my hometown shortly after I left.

I use Cronnix to set up the schedule. Cronnix is a GUI front end to cron. I believe that cron is included with the stock OSX install.

You'll need to make sure you have ScriptEditor – get it from Apple's Applescript site. I think you must register with the Apple Developer Connection to get the free download, but don't recall.

Here is a link to a text-only version of the switcher script. Download it, open it in ScriptEditor, change the default values at the top of the script, and Save As > Application to a folder in your Home Library folder, specifically to ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts. The folder will also appear in the menubar for iTunes so you can run the script from within iTunes. When I save the scripts, I name it with the callsign of the station – so the sample script would be renamed as KUOW.

Here's the part of the script you need to edit:

You need to change "a radio selection" to the name of a playlist which contains the streaming tracks you want to access – you could try it with the default "Radio" playlist, but I have not. Instead, I have a separate, much shorter list.

A note: the script looks for the callsign you enter in the name of the track – but not all radio stations keep that callsign, and when you access the stream, the name of the track may change. Finally, streaming tracks that have certain special characters or a long name may not be called accurately. It wasn't a problem for me, but might be for you.

If you want to poke around to make this script better, Doug's Applescripts for iTunes and the associated discussion board will be very helpful. Doug's Applescripts for iTunes also offers a method to use iCal to accomplish some very similar stuff. I avoid the .Mac apps, though, after the email address bait-and-switch.

So what does the script do?

When it's run, a voice will say "Switching to KUOW" or to whatever the callsign is you enter. Then it looks to see if there are mounted ejectable discs – that could be CD's, DVD's, Jaz, Zip, mounted disk images, whatever.

Then it looks for disc-related apps – Toast and iDVD, but you can add more if you want. Carbon Copy Cloner leaps to mind, actually.

If it sees you do have a disk mounted or one of these apps is active, it asks you if you want to continue. That’s to allow the user a chance to stop the script if you're doing something that might make the radio streaming unwanted – installing something, backing up, ripping, watching a movie… stuff like that. It's not the best way to ascertain, but it's simple and you can always allow the script to continue.

Once that's out of the way, the script will look in the specified playlist for the first track that contains the callsign you specified. I don’t think I have an explicit error handler in case of no match, but if there's a problem – maybe iTunes is busy with a modal dialog or in a crucial burning phase – the script will speak, saying, "iTunes is busy at the moment."

That's it! I open the script, edit the call signs, and save each time as an Application, naming each applet with the callsign. Then you set up you schedule in Cronnix, and you're in business.

Tablet's posted my first comics column, Ink and Pixels. Sadly, a major section of the piece was cut, probably for space reasons. I spoke with an organizer of the InkSpot zines-and-comics forums at Bumbershoot, and really regret that the section didn't get included in the article.

I interviewed Tatiana Gill for the article and reviewd Dave Cooper's Ripple.

I think I like the format - but I'm still wavering about running straight Q&A versus rewriting the interview into 400-word features to lead the column.

Finally, I also secured the domain name "inknpixels.com" with the intention of doing some archiving and incorporating more material - such as regular capsule reviews and introductions to web comics site - but need to discuss this with the Tablet folks, I think.

The next installment of the column should include more substantal review material as well. One of the challenges in attempting to feature younger, self-published artists will be familiarizing mysef with their work. Fortunately, most of the people I'm coming across have websites.

Testing!

Code:

There we go.

If you care:

Brief Power Failure in London Halts Trains

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) -- Power went out in parts of the capital and southeast England on Thursday, bringing much of the London Underground and many regional trains to a halt and trapping rush hour commuters in the tunnels.

Ooh, luverly. First Seattle, then the Eact Coast, now the Brits. Next thing you know, some middle eastern country will have massive failure of the electrical... um... uh...

Go on about your business.

What was that about bears? The Globe and Mail notes some unfortunate news regarding bears and humans.

I briefly noted some palm ebook resources. Motivated by curiosity I purchased the Mark Twain set - it weighs in at about 8mb, and, yes, it appears to be the actual complete works of Mark Twain.

I know, of course, that the material for the Twain books - and most of the rest of the free classics available digitally - had come from Project Gutenberg, the repository for textual materials in the public domain. Which led me to some pondering.

Last year, my wife read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud - I had refused to provide her with plot details and this way we were able to share the experience before the second film arrived. The experience was very successful within our relationship, and we immediately began casting about for other books to read in this way.

We tried some postwar fantasy and SF, with no luck. So we tried the Fagles Illiad and Odyssey, to no avail. We haven't tackled the Odyssey yet, but the Illiad is as boring as reading transcripts of the play-by-play at a football game. I suppose it might be of historical interest if you like the game - war, in this case.

Stanza after stanza of the heritage of this or that violent princeling followed by said princeling's brutal death. Who cares? Not me, lemme tell ya.

Still, I have hopes for the Odyssey. Less endless killing, more clever tomfoolery, one is led to believe.

But alas! What to read?

Hm, sez I. Movie led to book, earlier. Hm. Isn't there another recent film that takes some inspiration from classic adventure literature?

Seems to me that Treasure Island ought to be available for the Palm?

Happily, there are a fair number of other books in the genre, as well.

All that's needed is a conversion utility. I saw a Perl one somewhere but didn't bookmark, darn it.

HumanDescent.

Human Descent. Human descent, descent. Human human descent. Human; descent - human descent human descent.

Hu man des cent hum and esce nthu. Man de scent hum. An de sce nth. U.

Man de scent.

(via April Winchell, fount of worry and fear)

Correspondent John Dee forwarded a spam he received earlier this week, concerning the need of a time traveler for certain necessary pieces of equipment to whisk him away to his temporal point of origin.

I'd seen a similar spam some time ago, and I must admit I rather relished it, although I took it to be the work of a genuinely schizophrenic individual. Many years ago, I lived with a man who had very extreme schizophrenia, and he had a very well-developed suite of theories concerning the disconnects between his perceptions of reality and the perceptions of reality that most of those around him had.

For example, he was a physically healthy male who was attracted to females; yet, for obvious reasons, he was never able to enter into either a loving long-term partnership or even into a casual, physical expression of sexuality. His obvious insanity creeped the ladies right out, lemme tell ya. His interpretation of this undeniable, consistent, frustrating fact?

God (or Yahweh) and Jesus, working together, had given him a disease which made it impossible for him to have sex with a female. How can you argue with an interpretation like that? He was clearly correct.

At any rate, recognizing the Time Traveler's spam as the output of a similarly distressed mind, I had filed it away and more or less forgotten it, when Mr. Dee reminded me of it. I googled a bit to see what I could see.

The always-alert N!kke has a roundup of posts on the topic, including a long correspondence with the apparently-Massachusetts-based temponaut.

Here's Sean's creepy account of actually waiting at a Time Traveler specified teleportation coordinate and time. Hard looks from a man in a minivan! Cell-phone toting, laptop-using men in a car that leaves when observed! A man in the woods! Pretty good for a ten-minute lunch break.

One futher point I found intriguing. Several of the websites that post experiences or research about the poor Time Traveler identify him by name. At Sean's post, someone signing "todios" claims that the Time Traveler has been sent home. "Todios" bears a high degree of phonemic similarity to the last name of the person identified as the Time Traveler here. Of course, it also can be understod to mean "to God". Multiply-layered meanings and coinages such as this are extremely characteristic of the writings of schizophrenics that I have read.

In the same comments section, "Octavian" posts:

Please do not assist this person. I am from about 200 years further into the future than he is (That's about how long his DWG has been obsolete)and have been hunting him acoss most of human history. Now that he's trapped in your era, he must be subdued by whatever means necessary. He knows I am after him, so it's very important that he be stopped before he can kill my great-great-great-great-great Grandf

Ha ha ha, right?

Check this out. The post is dated July, 2002. Scroll through the comments (including a Chat log with TT). Look! There's the same comment, also from "Octavian," dated August, 2003. And look, todios is back too.

It seems odd, also, that the Time Traveler has not set up a website, as he seems conversant with domain acquisition and management.

In fact, googling for "time travel spam" yeilds quite a few results. One wonders - could the Time Traveler and the Time Cube Guy be brought together?

Marc Liyanage: Mac hero.

Mac users of a certain level of technical curiosity may well recognize the name. About a year ago, perhaps a bit more, all the major US-market Mac publications both online and in print included tutorials on installing MySQL; all the articles turned to Mr. Liyanage's pre-compiled binaries in the tutorials rather than explaining the intricacies of compilation from source, a wise call for a Mac audience.

(Non-Mac people - stick with me here: I think that Liyanage's site is a model for presenting information about and access to personal development and technical projects, especially his minimal, exemplary and crystal clear installation instructions, such as these, for his MySQL package.)

He offers continually updated and evolving installation packaes and instructions for both MySQL (his package becoming the basis of the Mac OS X official release) and PHP, as well as certain other less widespread tools. This much is widely known. But look again!

• A comprehensive support bulletin board. (For those keeping score at home, Marc's responded personally with in 24 hours each time I've had a question).
• Miscellaneous other software.
• A useful Applescript, "Open Terminal Here;" one adds an alias of the script to one's windowbar. When run, it opens a new Terminal session in the current working directory represented by the open window. Being Marc, he's configured the session such that the titlebar presents the full path to the directory. Useful! Elegant!
• And finally, a roundup of other people's software that Mr. Liyanage appreciates:
  • AutoPair, a text-entry widget that automatically inserts opening and closing quotes, parens, and so foth, positioning your cursor between them - something that makes coding noticeably smoother.
  • MacSFTP, which provides a GUI for FTP-like file transfers over SSH.
  • and hometown heroes The Omni Group. I remain an idiot, based on the evidence of my failure to develop some sort of journalistic pitch about this outfit.

If only all software sites were as comprehensive, clean, and reliable.

I'm sorry, did i say "Defeat?"

What I meant, of course, was "Victory!"

I got that 9500 to boot. I had to remove the large additional internal SCSI drive and mount it in a discarded and suspect external SCSI case. Then I used CCC to dupe the volume I was hoping to grab, and I was in business.

Mind you, removing the physical boot volume and mounting it in the drive chassis is by no means an acceptable long-term solution - in the end, I still need two bootable OSX volumes. But, enough time wasted for now.

.:: chuggnutt ::. | Free Palm Reader eBooks - I'd say this is, like, self-explanatory.

Of course, I should note the $4.95 Complete Mark Twain.

On friday night Viv and I and our friend David went to see Pirates of the Caribbean again, just before it ends its' run at the Cinerama.

I spotted a few little continuity errors and plot holes this time - minor stuff, really - but in the whole, the film held up very well. I went googling for obsessive fan sites that chronicled both these issues and the points of congruence with the ride that inspired the film, and unsurprisingly, that'll await the DVD release, by and large.

I suppose that this is the appropriate time for me to discuss my own avid appreciation of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland and Disney World. The last ride in the parks which Walt Disney personally oversaw the development of, I think that the ride itself - with the film Pinocchio - represents the highest artistic accomplishment of Walt Disney as an artist, as auteur. I noted that I was concerned that the film's unalloyed success might bring changes to the ride itself, something that I regard as undesirable.

Pinocchio is routinely cited as the greatest of the classic Disney animated films, both technically and as a mature work of art that embraces the dark undertones of the children's folktales that inspired the series of films that Disney produced between the Depression and the 1950's. The wooden puppet endures fearful situations rendered with genuine dread and has long been hailed as the darkest work of Disney's imagination.

I hold the opinion, however, that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at the parks goes farther than Pinocchio in both depth of artistic resonance and the extent to which it presents a grim and foreboding world of disrupted urban life, ruthless obsession, and stark mortality.

The ride is often paired in the public mind with the Haunted Mansion, an attraction developed nearly at the same time and featuring the imagery of death and morality as well. The most recent evidence of that pairing, of course, is the forthcoming film, coming on the heels of the triumph of the Pirates film.

There are two remarkable fan sites that are devoted to these attractions - DoomBuggies.com and the same-creators TellNoTales.com. Both sites feature detailed walkthroughs of the attractions and extensive fan-supplied lore about each.

But to the point.

The ride opened at Disneyland in California on March 18, 1967 (Florida's Disney World version opened in 1973). It was developed between 1964 and 1967, and Walt himself passed away in December, 1966. What was happening in the world at that time? Well, the pot of the nineteen sixties was just coming to a boil. Assassinations, riots, blackouts, political corruption, the Vietnam war, pollution - America's self-image was being seriously challenged.

As this was coming to a head, Disney himself was facing his mortality. His success depended on his ability to hold up a mirror to the American public. He provided myths. His stories allowed the exploration of troubling aspects of the world and the comforting, preferably humorous and practical resolution of the problematic issues in the narrative.

It takes no great leap of the imagination to see Detroit and Watts burning beyond the ramparts of Port Royal in the context of the ride. Look there! The comical pirates chasing women, wine and food in the streets of the sacked and burning colonial outpost! Why, it's the media image of the Summer of Love! The pirates are hippies and civil rights agitators, and are presented as self-indulgent, silly-looking threats to the social order.

Ah, but do note the troubling point: Port Royal is sacked; the pirates are carrying away the loot. The last thing the visitor sees is the pirates fighting among themselves as the building they are in tumbles down about them, all aflame. No happy ending here, mateys. America burns.

I accept that the majority of visitors will not see things this way. It seems clear to me that this interpretation never occurred to Walt as it was being developed, for example. Yet, I think the failure of the ride to present a traditional happy ending actually has much to do with the success of the ride. It's unique in Disney's portfolio. Ah, I would love to have an interview with Walt himself concerning the development of the attraction, its intended meanings and so forth. Of course, it's far too late for that.

Dead men tell no tales.

Well, darn. After black struggle, I have to admit defeat and time wasted on the mirrored 9500 project. Just after I posted last, even the limited success I was experiencing with the Jaz drive halted; and sadly, I must judge that a sufficient investment of time has been expended in my efforts to develop a sub-1gb bootable OS X image.

I'll revisit matters at some indeterminate future point.

I should note that the developer of BootCD has generously corresponded in response to my questions. I have found that his CDs, when burned exactly as he recommends (using Disck Copy from an unmounted disk image) produces a bootable CD. What appears to be required, then, is a bit-based copy utility for OS X.

The alternate path is to carefully delete files from the "System" folder of a duplicated and verified bootable OS X volume. After trial and error, I was able to boot some very considerably slimmed volumes. Alas, in no case was I able to successfully get the boot process to move past the stage of startup which leads to the appearance of Aqua.

I found that the removal of any single item from /System/Library, such as the "Printers" folder, horked the process; so I assume that there's some sort of manifest that the boot process is checking against and hangs on failure.

But five solid days is far too long to waste on such trivialities.

My, my, has this been a week of techno-struggle.

Just before Bellerophon was to be overworked by the results of the post-blackout linkfest (palpably demonstrating the value of getting there fustest with the mostest) I embarked on my occasional quixotic quest to retrofit an aging Mac (Athena, a 9500 with a G3 upgrade card, for the propeller-heads out there) into a dual-boot backup server, so that I can swap between Bel and the 9500 in the event of untimely misfortune.

Athena has long been outfitted with a suite of OS9 backup services - SIMS for email and the venerable QuidProQuo providing the web server - but as I've become further ensconced in the land of OS X, the setup has gotten less similar to what I run currently.

Step one was to finally acquire an absurdly large outboard firewire drive to - gasp - actually store backups. I ordered it this weekend, just as the blackout was ending.

As I watched the stats climb earlier this week, I figured booting Athena in case of a Bellerophon crash made sense. I began thinking about how to mirror Bellerophon to Athena, dug out an old jaz drive, and started tinkering. So it was a good thing that I'd been poking around thinking about how to do backups and so forth when the crash occurred.

A day later, and I have updated backups for Bellerophon and the traffic has subsided. But what's this? Sobig.F floods the internet and I'm puzzling over my mailserver logs on both platforms to make sure I'm not actually contributing accidentally. Thankfully, both servers were secure but I sure did get a whole bunch of "message bounced" notes indicating that some hassled large-scale IT staff will pretty much not believe this.

So anyway, it's been a heck of a week, the giant backup drive has arrived, and - yes - I have been able to boot the 9500 into OS X from the jaz, although not entirely to my satisfaction. The key tools have been charlessoft's BootCD, which enables a bootable OS X volume of under 2 gb; the indispensable Carbon Copy Cloner, from Mike Bombich (although not for working with BootCD, which requires special handling of its' disc images; I had to dupe to the Jaz using "ditto -rsrcFork"); and the woefully supported but boy-am-I-glad-it's-there XPostFacto from Ryan Stempel and available at OWC.

There are still significant sloggeries to be inflicted but I do see the light at then end of the tunnel, probably without automated failover but very possibly with autmated backups.

We visited the zoo on Sunday, and I took a bazillion pix.

Highlights:

• Hearing a tiger roar, which made all my hair stand on end. Then we watched him play with a rubber fishing-net float. I got a shot of him bursting through some foliage with his toy right after the roar.
• Watching the gorilla troop - there was a year-or-so old infant hanging around Mom right by the window and all the human toddlers were totally fascinated by him. He was not so interested in the kids, though.
• Standing behind a small porthole viewpoint as a huge grizzly bear strode right up to the window and alternately siffed at the glass, looked me in the eye from a distance of four inches, and scrabbled at the glass with his huge, huge paws. It took pretty much all my will not to obey the adrenaline that poured into my veins and run away shrieking and gibbering. It was neat. Sadly, my slo-poke camera's shot buffer was full and the images I attempted to take were not written to memory card.

Here he is, headed right for me.

My referrer logs are going crazy - apparently Paul's guest-posting is one of the must-link blackout stories for bloggers; I'll be keeping a sharp eye on Bellerophon to see if she can take it. The biggest day we've had in the past was in the wake of the passing of Bill Mauldin in January, as I recall...

So far today's traffic won't quite get that big, if the pattern holds true, but it's plenty big to make me concerned about heat-related freezes on the poor dear. So: if you can't read this, you know why!

UPDATE: Wonder what the blackout was like in NC for a survivor of the WTC disaster on 9-11? Look no further: Jahna D'Lish has the scoop, and acknowledges some post-traumatic stress while at the same time expressing herself in her usual, assertive way! You go, girl!

Ken had encouraged me to give the girl a jingle for on-the-spot reporting but afer his thrilling updates I felt like I'd done my job.

(In the MeFi thread I cited earlier, there's a passing reference to people being trapped in elevators in the city during the blackout... Stop and think about such an experience for a moment, and be thankful that you were not one of that unfortunate number.)

UPDATE II: Well, just as this was posted: KERRANG! Bellerophon went down like a poorly-masoned brick wall. All's well and here's hopin' there won't be more crashes. At least I have a recent backup now.

Spencer held his annual cinema party - including his latest addition to the liberry, a 3-D short. Here's the teeming mob prepped for viewing:

Other treats included the amazing expressionist film The Fall of the House of Usher (in a short version) which after viewing I realized I'd often heard of but never seen; the usual selection of Méliès films.

New York power outage | Metafilter.

Great coverage all the way through mixed with the usual MeFi mirth.

Note this link to sat photos.

Ah some funny stuff in here, lots from beyond NYC...

The still-dark website of Paul Frankenstein is not matched by his winking cable modem, and so we were able to get a blog entry from him in the heart of Manhattan via the wonders of iChat. I recieved this from him less than one minute ago, and he may have more:

Well, as I write this, some twenty-five-and-a-half-hours after the lights first went out, things still aren't entirely back to normal in the big bad city. Part of the city are still without power, and, more importantly, I still don't have email or a website.

I left my office at about five, after some 50 minutes or so of trying to figure out what was going on. Terrorism was the elephant in the living room -- no-one was talking about it, but at the same time, everyone was thinking about it. My co-worker lives up in Connecticut, and he was short of cash. I loaned him some money, either to get a hotel room or to try to get a taxi up to Greenwich.

I just assumed (correctly) that the subways were going to be out of service. Walking up Park Avenue, I saw men in very expensive suits holding up manila folders with the words "Westchester -- Will Pay Big Bucks" written across them in bold marker. Traffic northbound on Park was at a standstill -- a police SUV eventually gave up and headed up the wrong side of the street, siren bleating.

Central Park was strangely quiet; people were lolling about in Sheep Meadow, throwing footballs and frisbees around. After leaving the park, I stopped by a car that had it's radio on. They were talking about a power failure up in the Niagara-Mohawk area that cascaded across the region. I got home and stomped up eight flights, flashlight borrowed from the super. Then I took a shower. I tried calling my family, but the phones were not really working.

I went back downstairs. A tiny little blonde girl who lives in the building was standing out by the front door. It was her twenty-fifth birthday. There had been plans for a big party. I told her that at least her twenty-fifth birthday was a memorable one. The bakery next door was giving out free cupcakes.

... and here's part two:

I walked down Columbus. The doorman at my parents' building told me that they were out. Down at 57th and Ninth Ave., a lone soul was bravely trying to direct traffic. I jumped out into the middle of the intersection to give him a hand. A guy from the deli came out and gave the two of us bottles of water. You guys are New Yorkers of the month, he said as he gave me the water.

Drivers would come through the intersection, and give us the thumbs up. A lost trucker came through and asked me for directions to the George Washington Bridge. The hardest part of the job, aside from trying to avoid getting killed, was directing pedestrians. They don't listen to anyone.

A woman came up to me in the middle of the intersection. She said she was a reporter from Ohio. She tried to interview me while I was directing traffic. I suggested that she talk to the other guy, as he'd been there longer. It was a bit distracting trying to talk to her and not get hit by cars barreling down Ninth Avenue.

Later, a fella on rollerblades came up and asked me if I wanted an orange vest. I said sure. He pointed out that I looked a bit like a pedestrian.

There's a lot of non-verbal communication that goes on when two guys try to direct traffic. The other guy's name was Nick.

Occasionally cops would come roaring through, sirens on high. They would slow and make a point of tipping their hats to us. I figured that they were off doing more important things.

The guy with the rollerblades came back later. By then, my arms were getting tired. You try holding up your left arm for 45 minutes. He had bright orange life vests. Turned out that he had participated in the dragon boat races out in Flushing last weekend, and just happened to have them around his apartment. I put one on, and he gave me a note with his name and address, so we could return them later. Then he shot off, looking for more people

My brother showed up not long thereafter, bearing more water. That was a good thing, as I'd gone through that first bottle rather quickly. People walking by stopped and took pictures of us.

After about an hour of standing out there dodging and directing traffic, some auxiliary police officers -- in uniforms and everything -- showed up to supplant the civilian traffic control. A guy with a red mustache and a mike came up and interviewed me. I noticed that Nick had a small gaggle of folks with small digital video camcorders surrounding him. I sauntered over there. As the cameras turned to me, Nick slipped away, glad to be away from the limelight. I guess I now know why athletes always repeat the same cliches over and over in locker-room interviews after games. I just said that I was just trying to help out as best I could.

After mumbling some more platitudes, I said that I had to go; time to return the life vest, time to go home.

Way to go Paul! "New Yorker of the Month!"

And now, the thriling conclusion to Frankenstein: New Yorker of the Month:

After stopping off at my parents' apartment (14 floors, and I don't need to tell you that down is much easier than up), I went home. I hung out downstairs, talking with the other folks from the building as dusk settled over Manhattan, waiting for someone with a flashlight to go upstairs with me. I'm not afraid of the dark; I'm afraid of falling down a stairwell in the dark and breaking something important for locomotion, like an ankle or a leg. Once inside my nearly pitch black apartment, I found some matches by the light of a cell phone, and lit a couple of candles.

I heard an echoing guitar somewhere, so I grabbed a still-cold six-pack of beer and a candle and headed off in search of it. A kid was playing in the stairwell, taking advantage of the echo chamber. We drank our beer cold and just hung out, not saying much.

The lights came back on at 5:32 in the morning. I know this because I left the lights in my room on -- I wanted to reset my alarm clock so I could get up in the morning and go to work if there was power. I had heard the mayor suggesting that power could be restored by 2 or 3, which is what gave me my ill-fated idea. Of course, the heat and the helicopter hovering right outside my window didn't provide much in the way of a restful rest.

By 7 a.m., the radio was reporting that parts of Manhattan had power (which was obvious to me, since I was listening to an AC-powered radio), including parts of midtown, but that the authorities were urging people not to come to work if they had to. The subway system was down (and would be down until "six-to-nine hours after power had been fully restored to the entire city"); commuter rail was out completely; buses were running, but on limited schedules.

I got to work by 7:45 a.m. on my bike, only to find out that the entire east side was still without power. There was no work to be done though; the entire building my office was in was closed. I waited outside the building, sitting on the ground. A couple of other people from the office showed up. Small talk was made. We saw some buses go by on Third Avenue; they were all stuffed to the gills. I finally went home at about nine, concerned about the increasing rush-hour traffic and the increasing temperature.

A restaurant up the street had a blackout special: $10 all-you-can-eat eggs, bacon, and french fries. It was pretty tasty. Naps were taken, and once my cable modem returned, websites were surfed (Amy Langfield's tale of being trapped in the subway is a must-read). And now, thanks to future California governor Mike Whybark, tales are told.

There you have it, electricity fans!

Look for Paul to pick this up when and if he ever returns to the air, er, packet-switched network data transmission network.

the Evansville Courier & Press website carries an article by fellow Vulgar Boatmen listee Mark Wilson on the band and the musical career of Dale Lawrence:

Dale Lawrence doesn't seem to do or think about anything the usual way. It's an attitude that permeates everything about the semi-legendary Indianapolis band Lawrence has fronted for well over a decade now.

Nothing about the Vulgar Boatmen is what it seems, at least to the uninitiated. Despite a name that on first hearing sounds more fitting for an industrial heavy-metal band, the Vulgar Boatmen play heartbreakingly gorgeous pop-rock.

The Illuminated Donkey: back on the air.

Ken called me from his work this morning to note that while HIS power was back on, sections of Manhattan remained dark.

This means that as of that time, Paul Frankenstein remained offline. I'm not sure if Paul self-hosts or if hs hosting provider is out as well, but it's well within his technical capacity to be hosting his own website. The situation appears to be the same now, a few hours later.

More trivial updates concerning the personal activities of pals in the Great Northeastern Blackout of Ought-Three as they come in.

Ken's reportage has been highlighted in several locations, such as The Fat Guy, who coined this site's new official designation for the event, the Great Northeastern Blackout of Ought-Three; at Amy Langfield, highlighting Ken's pithy commentary on his experiences at home; and at Kofuzi, where I am referred to as "this guy," as is Ken.

As we finished expunging typos from the previous entry, the preternaturally cheery Mr. Goldstein telephoned with an update, barely understandable due to spotty cell-phone reception.

Listening hard through the static, we made out the following phrases:

"I'm in my room it's dark."

"I had to use my cell phone as a light to walk down the hall."

"One or two buildings across the street seem to have power."

"It's dark."

Then, the phone went dead.

Roving reporter and East Coast Whybark California Gubernatorial Campaign Chairman Ken Goldstein was reached via newfangled wireless telecommunications device and filed this eyewitness report on the largest electrical blackout in history:

"The area I am in – It was sort of amusing to me at least – I actually left work early for a dentist appointment." Goldstein recounts. He’d left work early. "I was at the dentist until 4, the blackout came at 4:10. I got in to my car and put in a tape, and didn’t realize anything was wrong until 5:10. There were traffic lights out, but I didn’t think ‘oh, the whole eastern seaboard is out.’"

"I turned on the radio and heard static," he says, "But I just thought it was just a problem with the transmitter."

Goldstein left the city without incident and made his way to Central New Jersey, where he stayed for a period of time. "Central NJ has power, so I was hanging around there with some people I know," he notes, speaking from his car. "Right now I’m gonna head back to my place, which could be a problem, because I live right near the Holland Tunnel, and they had announced they were going to close the Tunnel."

As he spoke, he noticed a sports stadium that was illuminated. "I’m passing by the minor league stadium for the Somerset Patriots – and the stadium lights are on! The crowd is pretty sparse." Pausing, Goldstein continued, "Life appears in this area to be – ah - going on as per normal."

The deceptively youthful-appearing copywriter had heard that "NJ Transit has sent every available bus into the city. I dunno how they are going to get back into the city. NJ Transit just stopped the trains, at the next station, so there’s a lot of people probably just standin’ around." Again pausing for a moment, he continued, "I was gonna say, I should probably just swing by and see if someone needs a ride in towards New York."

Asked about circumstances in the city itself, Goldstein reports, "Manhattan is – is – well, you can imagine. It’s just massive amounts of people with the vehicles tryin’ to get somewhere else. I mean, I saw some pictures of the crowd."

Continuing, he then provided a layman’s explanation of the breakdown: "When that power plant went, all the energy went on down the line, like a circuit breaker."

"People are golfing on the golf range," he observed, passing the establishment. "In my area, I appear to be very fortunate. I haven’t heard any wild stories or rumors or anything interesting. You also have to remember the area I was in, it really hasn’t hit. Hopefully Jersey City is not affected."

"I’m not gonna make a great on the scene reporter," Goldstein concluded, "because I’m not really on the scene. It’s kind of like being in the middle of a massive power failure, except the lights are on and everyone is going about their business.

But my dental work went well."

Mr. Goldstein may call in further updates as the situation progresses.

Power Outages Reported Along East Coast

Power Outages Reported Along East Coast

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Power outages were reported today throughout the Northeast. Blackouts were reported north to Toronto, south to Maryland and west to Cleveland, Detroit and Toledo.

Guess it's New York's turn! I tried calling Ken but the lines are all busy. Also: DETROIT?! Geez.

I'd like to take this opportunity to note that as Governor of California, no further giant blackouts of the Eastern Seaboard would be permitted, as I would incorporate legislation against them in my state vehicular procurement requirements.

Today, in order to properly demonstrate my commitment to the candidcacy for the Governorship of California, I awakened hurriedly, twisted in the sheets, in danger of missing my bus to the University District for a press screening of the Claude Lelouch film, "And Now Ladies and Gentlemen" starring Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas.

Fortunately, I made it to the theater a cool twenty minutes ahead of the noon showing. Since it's for a review to be published later and elsewhere, modesty forbids me to reveal my opinion in any meaning ful way - a discipline I find useful in my campaign appearances.

The film is bilingual, roughly equally in French and English, and the characters and actors slip in between the languages with the ease and grace of parters sliping in between the sheets in old-fashioned French sex farces.

This is the second film in a few weeks that Tablet's sent me to that features a heavy use of French, and it's proving to be plumb good for my French language muscle - I leave the theater thinking in French, itching to speak it again.

On my second campaign appearance, I attended the Tablet staff meeting in Belltown ad met many of my fellow contributors, finding, unsurprisingly, that many shared acquaintances already link us. Notable among these shared acquaintances was Olympia, Washington's beloved Chuck Swaim. All in all it was a pleasant get together and it was nice to put faces to names.

Dear readers:

I read the papers. I listen to the radio. Sometimes I even watch television. I even, God help me, read the blogs.

While it is true that my long-time residence in Seattle’s harmonious and bustling Capitol Hill neighborhood has kept me from spending as much time at my primary residence, in Laguna Beach, California, of late, I have never considered my dwelling in Seattle, as deeply connected to the place as I am, as my primary residence.

No, from the first day I stepped into my beautiful wife’s parent’s charming basement guest room, just blocks from the glory of the Pacific Ocean, I knew I had come home. Truly home. It is in the small, low-ceilinged room, modestly furnished but carefully tended with all the hard-working virtue that immigrant Americans bring to our great country, to our great state, that my true home lies.

Therefore, just as I can tell you my true home, I tell you that my true heart sings with the timeless truths of the obligation to seek public service.

Therefore, given the successfully mounted effort to recall Governor Gray Davis of California and the subsequently well-documented rush to run what will certainly be remembered as the California Marathon, it is my patriotic and sacred duty to declare my candidacy for the Governorship of California.

However, in an effort to demonstrate my fiscal probity, I have declined either to raise funds or to file as a registered candidate. I can declare that my current campaign warchest contains twenty-three cents, a Canadian penny, two green rubber bands, and the tattered remnants of my recently-washed telephone list, a circumstance that helped clarify my position on fundraising.

It should further be noted my current status as a permanent resident of California – that is to say, the California state of mind – has been called in doubt by virtue of my long-term physical residency in Seattle. I come before you on this day – this great and glorious day – to dispute, refute, and rebut these scurrilous charges. My argument presented a moment ago is sufficient to prove my legal eligibility for the position, of that I have no doubt.

However, I feel strongly that a case should be made to my beloved constituents – my fellow Californians – that I am sufficiently acculturated to the California lifestyle and way of thinking to provide the quality of leadership that the Golden Bear state has always sought. I lay before you two arguments. The first is the simplest.

California has always been synonymous with change, with creativity, and with doing things your own way. Is not declaring my unfunded candidacy from the keyboard of my computer in Seattle consonant with these values? To paraphrase the campaign for the presidency of Barry Goldwater, in your hearts, you know I’m right.

My second argument, is, I think, the most elegant. I will conclude my remarks to you this evening with the pithy words that express it as succinctly as it can be said.

Dudes, hang loose.

Quimby the Mouse is my review of the fancy hardback republication of some of my favorite early Chis Ware material. It's at Tablet, where I'm pleased to announce I'll be turning in a regular 800-word column on regional indie and alternative comics culture for a while.

I'm filing my first one this evening, and by jingo by cracky, I'm happy to be doing this.

I spent the past few weeks plowing through a double-feature, prompted initially by the release to DVD of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. About the time that the disc hit shelves a few weeks ago, I found myself, like others, reflecting on the film. In the theater, it was a frustrating viewing experience; it was clear that there was in fact a great film inside the exhibited picture that just didn't make it to the screen. However, six months later, I found that significant sections and images from the film had stayed with me. My curiosity about Mr. Scorsese's source material – and the historical veracity of those sources – led me to keep a sharper eye out for New Your history books than usual.

I scored not only the book that inspired the filmmaker, Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, but also a work of recent vintage, the scholarly Five Points by Tyler Anbinder, a professor of history at George Washington University. I had previously read The Murder of Helen Jewett, by Patricia Cline Cohen, a recent work of historical research that looks at a scandalous 1836 murder in New York. As I read both Gangs and Five Points I was driven to consult Jewett more than once, and so I think I should touch on it here.

Mr. Asbury's book is the most familiar of the three, both from the drumbeat of hype for the film and as a genuine work of literary and historical merit, having drawn favorable commentary since publication in the 1920s. It belongs to a currently undernourished genre that flourished in the era of its' publication, the anecdotal metropolitan history. Each American urban center seems to have these colorful tomes somewhere in their spittle-and-chewing tobacco stained past, perpetually reminding the city that the towers grew on foundations of hard work, graft, greed, violence and ambition.

Generally these books were written by journalists with strong connections to the rough-and-tumble culture of American cities before World War II, frequently police reporters who saw that elderly survivors of this political battle of the 1880s or that riot of the 1860's were not long for the world. Mr. Asbury's book is the current standard bearer. The incredibly entertaining and surreal Bosses of Old Chicago, also published before WWII, and Murray Morgan's Seattle contribution, Skid Road, published in the sixties, also come to mind. Readers in other areas of the country will doubtless know their local version of these wonderful books.

Asbury's book largely upheld its' reputation, and I am sorry to say that Mr. Scorsese's film suffers a bit in its shadow, for all that it's a valiant effort to transform the setting and themes of the book. The book covers a considerably larger field and time than the film and where the film rang false the book reverberates with what appears to be truth, sparing nothing in its description of the racial focus of the draft rioters, for example.

However, the joy of Asbury's book is that it's essentially a collection of entertaining and colorful anecdotes and character studies, the sort of interesting thing you really expect a police reporter to hear whilst bending elbow in a saloon somewhere near HQ. Stories told in bars contain one kind of truth; but that truth is the truth of tragedy and myth, not that of the historian, and so when I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Asbury's mooks, goons, and politicos, I felt it meet to drop in on the professor for some clarification and demystification.

Five Points is a history of the neighborhood that is the focal pont of Scorsese's film, an intersection just around the corner from the remaining Italian restaurants of Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan today. The neighborhood, my high-school pal who now patrols the streets as an officer of the NYPD tells me, is now mostly Chinatown. I found it fascinating to realize that the street I’d walked down with Ken and his then sweetie was one of the primary stages of the stories in both books. The corner I watched an indecisive teenager hesitate on before entering a limo with his posse was the location that a Five Points gang leader had been gunned down one hundred fifty years before.

The book is unusually structured – each chapter opens with a prologue, focused on the life of a specific individual that lived in the milieu covered in the body of the chapter. The device permits the scholar to develop his research and present his conclusions cleanly, pointing to the prologue's narrative as example and freeing the writer from the responsibility to present a story-arc or narrative in the chapter proper. Despite this structural decision, I did not find the reading dry – the characters that populate the neighborhood through time are too colorful.

Mr. Anbinder rarely expounds upon characters that Mr. Asbury explored or made much of, preferring, rightly, to examine either less apparently colorful and therefore more representative individuals or conversely individuals whose remarkable accomplishments, being not of the criminal variety, were outside the scope of Asbury's book.

He also takes some joy in researching anecdotes to reveal that the historical outcome of well-known events is quite discrete from what might be expected. In a notable instance, he concludes both that intermarriage and cohabitation between persons of European and non-European ancestry was relatively common, in this instance supporting Mr. Scorsese's filmic vision of a more-integrated society than might be expected. In another, he shows that of the five-hundred or so Five Pointers who were actually called in the draft that triggered the famous riot a grand total of two actually served, calling into question the commonly understood reasons for the riots.

Ms. Cohen's book, The Murder of Helen Jewett, was first published in 1998. I believe I read it in early 2001. It's more like Five Points than Gangs, in that it's a contemporary book by a professional academic historian, and in that it relies on research and current techniques of history writing to accomplish its' goals. However, by focusing on the story of two young New Yorkers – the unfortunate Miss Jewett and her killer – she ties her detailed survey of manners and economics, of place and time, to a story that interpenetrates the book as a whole.

It's unfair to critique Jewett and Five Points as narrative entertainments, as this is not their sole or perhaps primary aim. I very much enjoyed all three books; I still wished a bit more of the garrulous and smoky barroom air had made it into the two historian's books. I anxiously press these books upon you, fellow admirer of urban histories. I found them endlessly fascinating.

Simply Red, by Mark Rotella: a long, tasty feature on the joys and fate of what I think of as red checkered tablecloth joints, hands down my favorite endangered restaurant species.

From the article:

And for someone like me, an Italian-American in his 30's who grew up with Italian food as the ultimate comfort food, the old-style Italian restaurants offer service and food that, while not innovative, always satisfies. In the old-fashioned Italian restaurants, what many call red sauce restaurants, I know I'll get Old World treatment - if not old Italy, then definitely old New York.

At these family-run establishments, the waiters - almost always male - are typically dressed in black bow ties and crisp white shirts. Stepping into them is like stepping into the early 20th century, the height of Italian immigration to the United States.

Mmm, I miss 'em. There was one here in Seattle - over in Queen Anne, God I loved that place. I think it was called "Louie's."

I learned about the death of Princess Di there, one September. Got drunk with the layoff victims of my first tech bubble burst. Oh, it was a little bit of heaven, murky lighting, brick interior and cheap wine.

I miss 'em. East Coasters - you don't know what you got ovah deyah. Mangia!*

(*my apologies for any language mangling involved in this post)

KUOW's devoting the Swing Years and Beyond to the late Cynthia Doyon this evening; they also added a page with a selection of what are apparently considerable numbers of notes of condolence and shock.

bluejack has a little note expressing surprise; and the Little City Journal noted her passing, pointing to the P-I obit. Anita linked to me about this as well.

I'm actually surprised that there aren't more blogland expressions of loss out there - I suppose blogger demographics don't overlap with Saturday night public radio listeners very much.

Over the past few days, I haven't really been able to shake brooding about this - I feel like I've lost a friend, as illusory as that is. In the comments on my original entry, at least one person expressed similar sentiments.

UPDATE: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon's last moments. There's a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine's cover for the issue.

In the heat of battle today, I was listening to my old pal Bob Dylan - who really is more of a Johnny Come Lately than an old pal in my musical tastes, having dropped his battered guitar case in my living room after I had made the acquaintance of Harry Smith and Shane MacGowan for several years. Before that, I had sort of abstractly admired the man's work but bever really got it, for all the usual reasons: whiny voice, obscure lyrics, too boring, you know the drill.

Anyway, Bob's been couch-surfing in my mind for a while now, earning his keep mostly though his later stuff - Time Out of Mind is how he usually pays his rent, and I urge you to take him in for a night.

But this is old, old news, Mike. What brings you to wave the well-lofted banner of an artist who needs your praise like Norma Desmond needs Joe Gillis?

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You Belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Well, I happened to focus my ear on the last song of Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row. So, I'm sure this is old news, but, like, the song is great.

On repeated closer listening, I found fault - it's too long, and abandons the interplay of the fluent lead picking and fluent lyrics for one of Dylan's squawling harp solos - but these are complaints of style, of manner.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"

Listening to this as a break from the war news - so sad, so surreal - I was totally distracted from my project as a never-made film by Alex Cox, set in Missoula, Montana, one-hundred-and-fifty-years ago, unreeled on my inner eye.

It's pretty rare that I hear a song closely like this anymore unless I plan on it - when it just washes in, grabs me, and reminds me why music interests me, I have to say: "thanks." So, like: thanks, Bob.

And a footnote: as one might expect, Herr Doktor-Professor Marcus has a thing or two to say about the song that's worth reading.

ah, the absurdly oversized tumbler of Maker's Mark that follows the end of productive work for the evening.

ah, the wrist pain and sore forearms of the last-minute technical contract.

Gakk! heap big XML import/export project due Monday!

Jeeves! To the Web Cave!

Cynthia Doyon dead at 48: She hosted KUOW's 'Swing Years', notes the P-I.

I'm really bummed out. Ms. Doyon is an apparent suicide.

She was the Saturday evening host of a retro radio show, "The Swing Years and Beyond," and I have spent many Saturday nights happily learning about that era of American popular music in this gracious and knowledgeable woman's virtual company.

Each Saturday, she opened the show with a slightly cheesy, deliberately old-fashioned audio montage of the sound of waves lapping shore over the show's theme.

"The Swing Years and Beyond" was the only radio show devoted to music in the region that I responded strongly to. Ms. Doyon's encyclopedic knowledge of her subjects and the self-effacing sense of humor that she brought to her broadcasts filled my home with joy on many Saturday nights.

I also noticed over the years that when I was up overnight, so was she: her voice was by far the most likely to host overnight shifts at KUOW, and without realizing it, I guess I had begun to consider her a part of my life - just a voice on the radio, but a friend, someone else who knew how to greet the dawn after a night of work, reading, or the black black.

I should note that I more-or-less never watch any television but nearly always have a radio on. Radio fills the same place in my life that the tube does for the great majority of my fellow inhabitants of the United States.

I am posting this before I go to sleep. In my certain sleeplessness I will envy her current peace. There's a hole in my life. I'm sure it will close quickly for me. May it heal with speed for those closer to Ms. Doyon.

UPDATE: a few days later, I posted this entry, and both draw comments, so I've decided to link them.

UPDATE II: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon's last moments. There's a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine's cover for the issue.

Soo...

I was closing in on a server-side software debug (updating Marc Liyanage's PHP 4.3.0 to 4.3.2r7, if you care) when

BANG

All the lights in the house went out - this was around 9pm on Monday night, the fourth of August. Viv and I stumbled around in the dark for a few mintues, trying to remember where the flashlights were, lighting candles, and eventually made it outside.

The whole neighborhood was dark, and the very last reflections of post-sunset dusk still illuminated the sky. A half-moon shone on broken clouds. After a few more minutes of puttering around the house, I noticed that the streetlights and traffic lights went out as well. Our apartment building sits at the intersection of two very busy streets, and drivers immediately began speeding through in both directions without stopping, those traveling along Twelfth often passing the darkened intersection at speeds that appeared to surpass forty miles an hour.

People started emerging from their darkened apartments, and everyone was talking with each other. Eventually I heard from someone who had walked down from above fifteenth that a bus has somehow snapped a power cable.

The lights came back on at five am.

in the interim, lying in my dark, dark, dark bedroom, the night silence outside was as deep as I can recall it ever being in this bustling neighborhood full of young people. No hum of a neighbor's fridge or throb of a dryer; no high-pitched electrical whine. Somewhere in the distance, someone tentatively explored a melody on a steel drum.

Bells and Whistles: In Between Stations

When we got to the doorway, people were jumping across a short distance to a narrow ledge running along the side of the tunnel. Some people fell between the wall and the train and had to be pulled back up. Although I didn't worry about getting across the gap, I did wonder which way I should go from there. I hadn't seen any flames, but there was a lot of smoke. It occurred to me--still quiet, still calm, not screaming--that I might not get out of the subway. I hadn't told E. I was going downtown, and how long would it take him to figure out what had happened? And then I was out of the car and onto the ledge.

But going where? There was enough room to stand and a small handrail to hold on to, but there wasn't enough room to walk forward; you had to face the wall and shuffle sideways. Some people were shuffling to my left, but since the smoke was coming from that direction, I opted to shuffle to the right.

Anne shows us why she makes the big bucks with this harrowing recollection of what it's like to be caught in a burning subway tunnel.

Whoo.

Apparently I am sufficently serious and annoyed by both spam and the hasslement of accomplishing my objective that I'm sticking to it, in abeyance of my previous sour declaration.

My objective is to get a server-side spam filter, or "milter" as the kids would have it, installed on my mail server so that all incoming mail gets vetted. Cursory research revealed that Spam Assassin is the Bayesian weapon of choice. Forthwith, the links I've been haunting in search of the wise words of early voyageurs into OS X serveration.

One person, as noted earlier, has actually accomplished my goal.

Unfortunately for me, the world has turned, and the versions of sendmail and SpamAssassin there employed are both superannuated. Currently, I've been able to get everything to work as desired up through the compile of the milter proper, which barfs on something I haven't noted yet but which appears to be different than Numbski's compile problem.

Or maybe it is, as he had problems with a function called "new_poll()" while mine also have to do with polling:

spamass-milter.cpp:86:24: subst_poll.h: No such file or directory
spamass-milter.cpp: In member function

`void SpamAssassin::output(const void*, long int)':

spamass-milter.cpp:1157: storage size of `fds' isn't known
spamass-milter.cpp:1160: `POLLOUT' undeclared (first use this function)
spamass-milter.cpp:1160: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in.)
spamass-milter.cpp:1162: `POLLIN' undeclared (first use this function)
spamass-milter.cpp:1165: `poll' undeclared (first use this function)
make[1]: *** [spamass-milter.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Savannah: Project Info - SpamAssassin Milter Plugin and mailing list archives are my next stop.

Previously was having trouble getting sendmail to unzip - it was because I stubbornly persisted in attempting to use a non-commandline product, Stuffit Extractor, to do the job. Once I broke down and typed "tar xvf filename" all was well. Silly me - expecting a GUI tool to do a man's work!

Monkeying around wth my sendmail has led me to seek to disentangle the gordian wiki that is the documentation - or lack thereof - of the beloved SquirrelMail, a PHP-based webmail system that relies on IMAP to manage email on the server. Unfortunately for me, in previous incarnations, SM had no clearly documented capacity to handle secure communications with sendmail or the uw-imap family of mail demons. Sufficiently curious about what's failing, I've joined the support list, which did not apparently show a record of my specific problem. The PHP part of the program looks like it's working just fine, but it does not successfully establish communications with the IMAP demon, desite currently supporting the needed protocols.

Secure connections are no longer an option, but rather the default in most of these projects. This has had the salutory effect of requiring the casual user, such as yours truly, to seek the wisdom of such masters of clarity and open, clear communication as the PGP corporation, which, in their defense, did explain to me how to resolve a bug in their free version, once I was aware that they did not, in fact, provide support for the free version.

(I should explain I actually was a good boy ages ago and setup a bunch of security stuff server side, albeit grumpily. Mmmm, brussels sprouts and lima beans!)

So.

I think that hits most of the links I've been pawing through lately - it feels rather like digging around trunks of other people's old clothes. One of the special qualities of the open source support mailing lists is the testiness of many of the knowledgeable users in response to support questions from, well, those less knowledgeable.

It's understandable, sure.

But I'd venture to guess each nastygram on the support list of a given opensource project translates directly into increased shareholder value at a certain large, friendly software provider across the lake from where I live. Hm, I wonder - could there be any legislative pressure aimed at UW-developed projects such as pine and uw-imap?

On Friday, Greg's Previews, a usually pretty relibale source of production tracking information on films in preproduction, posted a tracking page for the forthcoming Elric movie.

He mentions (and links to) this part of my Michael Moorcock interview. Of course, he didn't get this site's name right - I wrote him asking for a correction but it's the weekend and I'm sure he's off having a life somewhere. At any rate, I thought the citation was kind of neat, although it probably means in a few years I can expect a busy day or two on the line.

And oh yeah! Dirk at Journalista linked to my grumpy take on that NYRB thing on Sacco and Clowes, which was kinda neat.

Ping pong: words fail me. This is brilliant. I believe it is enhanced by the flash-video presentation. Hurry before the bandwidth issue arises.

Via April Winchell.

I am at least getting sendmail to compile OK. There's still scads of disentanglement to work through but with luck the spamassassin stuff will come up after a few more head-smacks into the monitor.

What else is new?

I have a painful infected pore on my elbow, for which we went to the emergency room today. My parents are home safe and sound.