Month: September 2005

Categories
Media

Serenity Countdown

As I was fortuitously reminded, Serenity opens up in a few short weeks: September 30th. I and my roommate have decided we both wanted to see it on the day it comes out, but the where is still open. I also found out that Archon 29 the big St. Louis Fiction and Fantasy convention is going on at the same time, and I considering attending it and the showing there.

For being a big science fiction and fantasy fan, I’ve never been to any kind of convention. Not a Star Trek convention, or one for Dungeons and Dragons and any of the generic fandom type of events. The one at St. Louis promises multiple tracks of presentations, and features some rather fascinating sounding events.

For instance, on Friday night the convention is featuring a showing of Pirates of the Caribbean, inviting all comers to dress like pirates, and then shout out favorite lines from the movie. The convention is hiring pirates and providing all sorts of goodies to make the event one of a kind. I loved Pirates of the Caribbean — did I happen to mention that I adore Depp?–and oddly enough for being a retiring subbie, this party appeals. If the showing is at the Holiday Inn, we can bring our pints o’ rum. Otherwise, we’ll have to settle for the more sedate refreshment at the Convention center.

Outside of the movies, I’d like to attend the event and take photos of people. I think that would be much fun, and add a little variety to all my shots of flowers, birds, bees, etc.

Then there would be Serenity. The people attending Archon are planning on dressing up as their favorite characters in the movie, which I imagine could pass fairly easily for dress on the street. Still, there promises to be a sea of brown.

So, any of you going to see the movie, and if so, are you making a special event out of it?

Categories
Social Media Weblogging

Google’s Blog search

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Oh, yes. That’s what we needed: another one of these. I searched on Missouri and then had to wade through pages of real estate ads. From the review, I gather it searches blogs based on those pinging the ‘popular’ ping servers. The same servers that bring every comment spammer in the biz sniffing around your place. So I can ping weblogs.com or blo.gs, get hundreds of new comment spam; in order to show up in Google Blog Search, and thereby attracting even more hundreds of comment, referrer, and trackback-attempt spam. Oh, yes. Just what we needed.

Boring. Boring, boring, boring. If these hotshot companies would hire more women engineers, we might actually see something different, something new rather than the same old, same old with a new package and a godlike name attached: Google Blog Search. But don’t let this stop you middle aged white boys from jumping up and down, y’hear?

Categories
Critters

Small moments

My roommate came home this afternoon and asked when the bush on the corner had been removed. I had just been downstairs and when I looked out the window, the small, sickly bush on the corner of the dirt in front of our place was still there; still stubbornly hanging on, even if the management had taken no care of it this summer. We’d watered it, but it never looked great. The birds like it, though, as well as the squirrels.

I was surprised and said I’d just seen it when I came upstairs. “No, not the small plant. The big one on the side of the building.”

I was suprised, shocked really, and ran downstairs and outside. Where once was a big bush, three formed into one covering the cable box and overlapping the corner, there was now stubs cut low to the ground. It was awful, but what was worse were the few finch standing on the stumps looking bewildered. When I came out they took off, one female flying in circles in confusion before making a beeline for a car and hiding underneath it.

This was the habitat for our finches, those we had been feeding for over a year now. This was their home and their protection from hawks and other predators; their sanctuary. The only reason we felt we could feed the birds was knowing that they had the safe shelter of the bush in case of danger or dog or people walking by.

It was also a sanctuary for the rabbits as they made their way up the lawn from the street below, and provided a dark green accent to the brick of the building — about the only one this summer since the lawns died from the drought.

I came storming into the house and called the management office and asked why they removed the bush. The young woman who answered didn’t know but checked and came online to tell me that the maintenance was ‘removing some of the older, bigger bushes’, why she didn’t know. Maybe there was a paranoid idiot who was afraid of the shadows, because lord knows Americans jump at shadows, and hack and pick at nature until there is nothing left unknown, uncontrolled, and free.

I am ashamed to say I yelled at that young woman, though this is something I rarely do. I am a quiet person by nature, regardless of what you might think from these pages. But I yelled at her. I told her about the generations of finches who had made their home in the bush, and since they had removed the shrubs in front of our place last year, all that’s left now for shelter is the big trees–home to the hawk and the eagle. I yelled at her and said that all they do is cut down and take away.

Later I called to apologize–yes, I apologized. If I were made of the same cement that seems to pass for ‘ground’ in America nowadays, I may not have gotten so upset when I went out and saw the birds unsure of what happened to their home. Perhaps someone got annoyed because the birds shit on their cars. They rarely did, though; they were content to hang around the corner, safe in their bush. When I apologized and tried to explain why I was upset, I could hear the girl think, “they’re only finches”. Common as dirt, small, brown; you never see them unless you really look; or hear them unless you listen.

But this summer I found out that finches are a wonderful little bird–rich with personality and spirit. I could go out on a sunny morning and stand by the door and listen to the birds in the bush, and no matter how sad, feel uplifted by their sound. We had created a living, viable space in this little corner; filled with simple lives and simple sounds. And now it’s gone, and all that’s left is dead stumps and dirt.

Categories
Social Media Weblogging

Define Noise

This is a test as well as a story. Scoble is very excited about a new service, Memeorandum, that ‘floats’ most linked stories to the top in two specific categories: technology and politics/current affairs. Contrary to some others who have been critical of the UI, I found it clean and relatively simple to comprehend.

I would tend to think of the service as something similar to Daytop 40 or Blogdex, but highlighted by topic and with a few more goodies, such as links to the other search services. Cool enough, except that Robert mentioned a couple of things in his post that got my attention:

… he doesn’t look at all of the blogs in the world (unless you hit preferences and start using the blog search services he’s linked in). Huh? How cool can that be if it doesn’t include your Uncle Joe who wrote code one time back in college?

It’s very cool, because it has very low noise. In fact, I’ve been visiting this 10 to 50 times a day for the last few months and I’ve never seen something that I would call noise or spam.

Define ‘noise’, Robert? Anyone that doesn’t rank? This does lead to an interesting new definition for the semantic web: a web of means, rather than a web of meaning.

According to Gabe, the site developer and architect, the goals are memeorandum are:

1. Recognize the web as editor: There’s this notion that blogs collectively function as news editor. No, not every last blog on Earth. Tapping the thoughts of all of humanity uniformly would predictably lead to trivial, even spammy “news”. But today there are rather large communities of knowledgeable, sophisticated commentators, (and yes) even reporters writing on the web, signaling in real time what’s worthy of wider discussion. I want memeorandum to tap this signal.

2. Rapidly uncover new sources: Sometimes breaking news is posted to a blog created just to relate that news. Sometimes the author of the most insightful analysis piece at 2PM was a relative unknown at 1PM. It happens. I want memeorandum to highlight such work, without delay.

3. Relate the conversation: Communication on the web naturally tends toward conversation. It follows from human nature plus the Internet’s immediacy. Blog posts react to news articles, essays reference editorials. And links abound. Yet most news sites do very little to relate the form of conversations unfolding in real time. Some seem to deny that a conversation is even occurring. I want memeorandum to be a clear exception.

This confirms that only certain weblogs are canvassed for links. In Robert’s post, I asked Gabe to provide a listing of the weblogs he canvasses for both politics and technology.

We’ll see if this shows up in the service. If not, either I don’t rank, or if I do, I don’t rank as a technology blog. Stay tuned…

I did show up, quite quickly. I feel all red carpety and gold starred. I also showed up, as quickly though, in the IceRocket list for Scoble’s link. Another question I had for Gabe was if he originally pulls lead stories from the canvassed weblogs, and then uses the search engines to pull additional links as they come available.

I also wonder if his bot is the one that signs itself “Mmm…. Brains….”

Categories
Events of note People Political Weather

Bye Brown

As expected Michael Brown has resigned as head of FEMA. However, though a move in the right direction, it’s not enough. As the article mentions, the government needs to move FEMA back out into a department of its own, and, contrary to some who may believe otherwise, return it to dealing with natural disasters rather than this obsession with terrorists:

“When you have orders that go down the rung, people interpret them by putting a very tight box around them,” said Bob Freitag, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Hazard Mitigation Planning and Research.

Freitag said the reorganization in Homeland Security had a trickle-down effect in state emergency management as well. For example, emergency management officials from Washington, a state where earthquakes are the likeliest threat, will be devoting their entire annual meeting next week to terrorism instead, he said.

“The locals need more money and we have to get it from grants, and the money that’s available is for terrorism,” said Freitag, who worked at FEMA for about 25 years. “It’s not driven by national hazards. That leadership is not there.”

The Department of Homeland Security has enough resources to deal with terrorists. Life must go on, yellow alert or not.

Replacing Brown is David Paulison currently U.S. Fire Director. I didn’t know we had a U.S. Fire Director. Regardless, this is a man who headed up the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, as well as overseeing the county’s emergency services. He also attended the Kennedy School of Management at Harvard, but we won’t hold that against him. He is qualified, and with his Florida background, particularly so when it comes to hurricane management.

I have to ask: why was this man reporting to Brown? He is so much more qualified, it’s almost painful to see.

One incidental impact of Katrina and the government mismanagement: states potentially impacted by an earthquake in the New Madrid fault are now taking it a lot more seriously.