Still going after all these years.
WSJ: Beer may actually be good for you (registration and payment required). Quoth the article: “it seems beer not only lifts spirits, but also delivers protection against major ailments such as heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, diabetes and dementia.”
It’s good to have confirmation by the Wall Street Journal, but they’re not exactly breaking a scoop with this story.
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…sort of. To recap, suddenly one day my massive Amazon history of purchases, product votes, wish list, etc. disappeared, leaving only my most recent transaction. Freaked, I dropped customer support an email. They reported that I had two accounts with the same email address! I was a little dumbfounded—after all, email address is basically the user ID for Amazon, as far as the end user is concerned. But I could verify what the support person said—I could search for my old wish list and see its contents. What happened? And how could I fix it?
I finally realized today that I just had to log into my new empty account and change the email address, log out, then log back in with the old email address. Worked like a charm—all my wish list and averything were still there.
I’m guessing two things about Amazon’s back-end system:
Weird, but strangely reassuring. Even through a major system crack-up, I was still able to place an order.
Cory at Boing Boing posted about the Estonian public WiFi system in Talinn. Now, in addition to excellent dark beers and the music of Arvo Pärt, a third reason to vacation in everyone’s favorite former Soviet state.
I’m waiting this morning for the carpenter and the electrician to do some elective work in our dining room. We have an awful little wood-paneled closet in the “solarium” portion of our dining room that we’d like to make usable. The carpenter is coming to rip out the paneling and install drywall if necessary so we can install shelving to hold—well, probably excess glassware, as we probably have enough to stock a small Beacon Hill pub. The electrician is just being asked to install a couple of sconce lights in the dining room.
I thought I was done with contractors in the house, but now that I’m waiting for them again the thought isn’t so bad. Nice to have professionals come in before you screw everything up.
If you read manuals, you probably already know this. But apparently some cable modems—at least the model supplied to us by AT&T Broadband—react badly when placed near a wireless hub, such as my graphite AirPort Base Station. For me the problem manifested itself as dropped packets (meaning generally slow traffic) and ultimately a complete disconnect about twenty minutes after cycling the power on the cable modem. Ever since the broadband tech told me about the potential RF interference effect in the cable modem and I moved the base station further away, I’ve had no further problems—performance is back to really good.
Greg sums up some interesting thoughts floating around about the right way to take campaign finance reform: make the giving of campaign money as secret as the ballot. Interesting reading for a Sunday morning.
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Spent the day yesterday doing a lot of not much at all. Helped my mother-in-law and Lisa in the garden; took them to Ikea with us (most targeted visit ever: 45 minutes in and out), then to Ivar’s Salmon House for dinner. You can get salmon any way you like as long as it’s alder-smoked. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.
Today Lisa’s dad and I assembled the things that were purchased at Ikea yesterday while Lisa bought more stuff at Sears. Then we all basically collapsed.
I’ve been waiting to add this link until I found out more about the case, but I’ve finally linked to the website of Eldred v. Ashcroft over the issue of the challenge to the Sonny Bono Extension of Copyright act, which extended by 20 years both existing and future copyrights. The tradeoff of copyright is between the rights of the creator and the rights of the public, a balance which this suit alleges has been tipped unfairly in favor of the creators at the expense of the public’s rights. I urge you, if you are a creator or consumer of any kind of content, a user of libraries, or a reader of electronic texts, check out the site. The archive of materials about the case is richer than anything I could possibly say here.
Except to point to Aaron Swartz’s summary of the Justice Department’s response to the suit, which was essentially to say, “You don’t have a right to question this law.”
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My in-laws flew into SeaTac last night. Unlike our last flight, there was no lost luggage. We loaded them into my car and swept them to our house so they could ooh and aah before we tucked them into bed.
This is a big visit for a couple of reasons:
They’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so my late night blogging activity will be curtailed. (It probably would be anyway, as AT&T Broadband has been really flaky recently–download speeds of 1.5K/sec last night, no connection at all this morning!)
…like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as “you are not as good a driver as you think you are,” “SUVs are not suits of armor,” and my favorite, “If you’ve been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate.” (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.)
Jill Walker: Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, a very cool paper presented in June 2002 at the ACM Hypertext conference in Baltimore. The paper argues for a “political economy” of value created by links.
Whereas most valuation models for the web start from the advertising assumptions that impressions (views of the ad) are the basis for value, links to sites have value independent of the impression or even the clickthrough value. This is because of Google and other search engines that value the source and target pages of links through the link itself. Links are currency that may give value to giver and recipient: by linking to this article, I share some of my PageRank with it (and vice versa). This makes the article more visible in search engines and therefore more discoverable. How much is that worth???
There are a lot of people talking about this, including Roland Tanglao, and Jim McGee; thanks to Jim for the pointer.
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…Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned as president of the United States when it became clear that he was going to be impeached for the Watergate crimes. Despite continuous attempts to claim executive privilege, in the end it became clear that not even the highest office in the land was above the law that it was chartered to uphold.
My mom, who continues to be one of the most amazing women I know along with my wife and my sister, turns … well, discretion forbids. Anyway, it’s her birthday, and if you know her drop her a line and wish her well. One of the things that makes me unhappiest about being on this coast is that I can’t drop in on her without a lot of advance planning, but I know she and my dad will be throwing a great party tonight before she takes off for my cousin’s wedding in Pennsylvania tomorrow. So happy birthday, Mom!
Greg: Alex Cockburn, Arbiter of Black Authenticity. Greg unleashes some pointed thought on the issue of whether one can be “black in skin tone but not in philosohy” (I’m paraphrasing). Greg sez:
…you get to spell out what my fellow Alabamans — Condolezza Rice and Cynthia Tucker — and I have in common save skin tone, good looks and a firm conviction that Dreamland cooks the best barbecue ever.
And maybe then you can help me figure out why you and Pat Buchanan don’t seem to think much alike. How am I supposed to know which one of you is philosophially white?
