Trying to configure the browser on this old Dell 400MHz Pentium II, just so I can write a post bitching about the problems I’m having on my less old Dell 2.66MHz Pentium 4 getting a video card configured…  but both Firefox and IE are being persnickety about allowing me to post from the browser.

My new video card didn’t work, and when I tried to reinstall my old video card it didn’t work either.  Now I wonder if I killed my AGP slot on 2.66MHz box, and if I did can I use a PCI slot to drive a video card, and if this is readable, then it means I won my battle of the browsers.

Frankly, I blame this whole thing on Harvard University.

As a boy I saw myself someday as a Harvard man in a maroon blazer, a rep tie, wearing one of those flat straw hats - a boater - and singing whatever passes for a whiffenpoof song in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These were big dreams for a barefoot kid with a cane pole in a rowboat on the river with a coffee can full of nightcrawlers at his feet. Needless to say they didn’t come true. For one thing, that whole Gatsby thing was long over by the time I got to college. For another, I couldn’t have afforded Harvard on a full scholarship. And just to tidy this up, I probably wouldn’t have been accepted if I’d applied. And anyway, who wears a boater before Memorial Day?

What I have to thank Harvard for today is my new graphics card, a 512 MB ATI Radeon X1300. I skimped on the graphics when I bought the PC, because I am not a gamer. For the last couple years the gamers have been emergent into mainstream community and communications. I’ve ducked into the Second Life site a couple of times but never could pick a name. Today, I figured I’d bite the bullet and load up something generic (also, I picked a great name!). I wanted to see how the gen ex boys and girls with Second Life avatars were synched into the Berkman Beyond Broadcast meetings. It’s a huge download, but when Second Life was finally installed on my desktop machine, the application puked on my underpowered graphics card. I could have dug the laptop out from under the pile of magazines and consumer credit bills, booted it up and gone through that whole installation process again, but by then I’d checked out the wiki and crawled around the conference web site a little. It seemed pretty much like you had to be there. (Although, now that its over, the Wiki looks like a rich source for catch-up notes on most of what they talked about today).

I opted for a game of canine frisbee fetch instead, followed by a face to face planning session for a town hall meeting on some local issues, but I vowed not to be caught short next time there’s a Berkman gathering like that in virtual space. I ran out to Best Buy and overpaid for something I hope will be adequate, and now I have Harvard to thank for today’s retail therapy session and my new graphics card.

Last night Marilyn Wilson unselfconsciously showed me a tattered photocopy of a Gary Larson cartoon: a view from within a room full of chattering, happy people, the devil standing at the door ushering in a bearded fellow in a lab coat. The legend painted on the door says (approximately) “Mystics and Irrational Believers,” the cartoon’s caption is “Scientist’s Hell.” By the time Marilyn was through with me, I felt like the scientist in the picture. But politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

Before I was able to squirm away, she had given me:

• a densely printed page of tabular data associating RF energy with various diseases,
• a Fortune magazine reprint of a story on energy intensive industries and the ways - and reasons - radiant pollution is being mitigated in manufacturing plants (Gene Bylinksy July 5, 1999 Fortune “New Tools for Cleaning Dirty Electricity”),
• an article by Arthur Firstenberg called “Telecommunications versus the Environment,”
• a pamphlet called the Freiburger Appeal,
• and a thick Power Point print-out of a presentation by an electrician on electric energy pollution mitigation for home and business.

We were at the Dane County Board Executive Committee session to consider recommending to the full board that they ask the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office to intervene in a Public Services matter, namely the American Transmission Company’s plans to build monstro transmission facilities back and forth across the county in anticipation of a demand that is poorly understood at best. The incentive to build is purely financial. The energy shortfall projections are merely 29 hours a YEAR of electrical shortages beginning in 2024. The analysis doesn’t address such simple solutions as peak demand rate variation, nor more elegant solutions such as co-generation incentives for new housing construction. Based on ATC’s track record, the construction of the transmission lines will likely cost half a billion dollars (US). The more they cost, the more ATC makes.

The deregulated power industry is run by aliens from outer space intent on looping the Earth with huge high voltage cables, a harness they will use either to drag us all to a fiery doom within our own sun or perhaps to a darker fate in the lair of a huge space spider that feeds on planets roped in by the spider symbiotes sitting on power industry corporate boards. We don’t know which but it would be good to avoid either fate I think.

Many county residents turned out last night. I showed up late and registered in favor of the motion but didn’t intend to speak. Then, when Marilyn spoke of her own illness and a causal link to electrical frequency pollution that she perceives, when she spoke of a double blind study that linked high frequency electro-magnetic radiation to her illness I was moved to speak too. I have a family member with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and while we don’t know the cause, the effects can be devastating. I don’t necessarily believe in the linkage between power transmission and illness, but I’d like to see the work done openly and honestly that might confirm or deny the suspicions.

Over the years there have been many attempts to assess the effects of electrical radiation on health and to the best of my knowledge there is at this time no scientifically proven linkage. The cancer clusters, the CFS, none of the syndromes and symptoms reported by my friends in the tinfoil hat brigade have been objectively linked to power transmission. But there is an emerging body of anecdotal evidence similar to the “unproven” health concerns for asbestos workers, for cigarette smokers. At some point it is possible that the statistical inference associating electric power distribution with ill-health conditions will be nailed down by research that will document a causal relationship and not simply a mathematical correlation. At that point, the toxic tort specialists will open up a new market, and the power transmission and distribution industries will be in a world of hurt.

Call me a misanthropic pessimist, a suspicious and negative skeptic; color me jaded. I believe the fundamental reason for the recent decoupling of electric power transmission and distribution businesses from electric power generation is an attempt to isolate risk, to avoid toxic tort bankruptcy when the industry experiences its ultimate Johns Manville moment and sinks into bankruptcy like the asbestos producers of the mid-twentieth century. Another benefit of decoupling is that where once there was one profit center, now there are three (generation, transmission, and distribution), their interests essentially decoupled, and their investment opportunities broadened to include power market options trading.

Mothers of “cancer cluster” children seeking damages will sue the transmission company or the distribution company. The government will be shielded from liability because deregulation is the law. The generation companies and the distribution companies will be shielded from liability because the transmission companies own the facilities where proximate cause is most likely to be found. So the transmission companies will go under, but their fixed assets will remain in place wanting only an upgrade to continue in service. But before that happens, the residents of Dane County will burn a lot of coal generating electricity that won’t be used locally but will find its way onto the grid for options trading in Chicago.

Meanwhile, there is another environmental issue that gets lip service at best. Global warming is a result of combustion, not just combustion of gasoline, but of coal, natural gas, tobacco, burning bags of dogshit on the high school principal’s front porch. Construction of new transmission facilities today to come online in 2024 - 2024 reinforces the combustion model for electrical power generation. Here in Dane County a coal fired plant was built to the east and demand was projected to the west and a transmission line is planned to move those electrons from there to here. Laying aside the quality of the projections of increased demand, the fact that even the power companies only see shortages of 29 hours in 2024, the fact that the people who present the alternatives are the people who will profit financially from the decision: the question is asked, “Which route shall we choose for the new power line?”  The question should be, “Do we need a new power line?”

My brief recitative at the meeting last night enjoined people to eschew riding the last wave of the twentieth century model of power provision, and to get on the new wave of alternatives that the 21st requires of us. I said that it was a bumper sticker opportunity to think globally and act locally. The committee passed the reolution and moved it out to the full Board.

Our modest victory at the County Board could give us the breathing room to ask the right questions.

Fine and fetching furry creatures, a video to make your heart beat faster, romance and pastoral splendor… Thanks for this elaborate production Brian!

Yes, someone left the dog out in the rain.

And that wasn’t sweet green icing flowing down, but rather some other organic remains, blackened with age and the by-products of decay. And stink? Well why else would she roll in it? She’ll never find the recipe again. I hope. After a day in the spring rain she might be ready for a bath, but one thing troubles me… if I get home and find that she is still befouled, but also soaked, and I approach her in the kennel and she does that doggie thing that causes me to burst into song.

AND I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN TAKE IT
IF SHE TAKES SO LONG TO SHAKE IT
I’M AFRAID SHE FOUND THAT RECIPE AGAIN, OH NO, OH NO!

Trying to get a handel on that JMo’s birthday.

Forever Freud, Forever Freud… may you stay-ay-ay-ay, forever Freud.

Made the American way…

Ireland may soon put its collective foot down and disallow American rendition flights through Shannon.

“Mr. Bush’s overall job approval rating hit another new low, 31 percent, tying the low point of his father in July 1992, four months before the elder Mr. Bush lost his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton. That is the third lowest approval rating of any president in 50 years; only Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter were viewed less favorably.”

Here in Wisconsin the approval figure is a little better, 28% instead of 31%, but that means that more than one in four of us is so greedy or deluded enough to willingly align himself with these criminals.

Shelley has signed off Burningbird.  Julie Leung is going through changes.  Robert Scoble has cut the number of feeds he wishes he could read to about a hundred.  I may have suffered a ministroke today.  Ronni is moving to Portland.  Chris has cut off his pony tail.  I mentioned the cerebrovascular discomfort to Beth but she didn’t hear me.  So we progress deeper into our folie a deux.  Niek is off to the beach.  Halley has gotten so fucking precious I want to grab her shoulders and shake her and say “Get real, girl.”  There’s a personna thing that happens that drives out personality.  Suw was skirting on the edge of that, but she is so fucking brilliant that she’s allowed.  Ninety-nine percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.  I didn’t make that up.  Denise is a one percenter.  I’ve been experiencing so much ageism lately that I’m suspecting a practical joke.

Beneath all this there is bedrock:  Dervala is back with a couple of warm-ups and a beautiful pitch.

Hay que ir adelante.

Something from ze Frank’s comments:

Das Possesivpronomen ist nicht richtig flektiert. Ze. Ee heißt “in meinem Arsch” und nicht “in mein Arsch” (an dieser Stelle muß der Dativ stehen). Für alle, die mehr wissen wollen: {huge URL}
Liebe Grüße aus Berlin, John

Posted by: John at May 9, 2024 01:25 PM

Just to note the fresh batch of poems that went up yesterday at jeneane.net

Six poems… a tall one, a couple of wide ones, a short one, a couple of narrow ones, each one brilliant and complete.

Marx was supposed to have said, “Je ne suis pas Marxiste,” although why he said it in French I have yet to puzzle out. Thierry Ehrmann’s claim (”Je ne suis pas un bobo!”) is easier to understand somehow. Chris Locke recently appeared as the Uniblogger, a Marxy manque sort of appearance, at least as applied to Karl. Yet when you measure his achievement in a more Gouchovian context you would perhaps agree that we are all Bozos on that bus. While the pony tail has always seemed distinctive, the beard quite frankly was more than a little stank. It should not surprise any of us that under that fierce and fearsome facade, there was a gentle face of handsome dimension. It took but a barber to reveal it.

This blogger has a day job. It’s a job with a lot of network administration in it. Today, things were broken and I needed to do some sleuthing to get them fixed. Krugle saved my bacon. I did a quick search for a missing extension, a piece of code that was referenced in a Perl script, and Krugle turned up exactly what I needed simply, easily, intuitively.

Some time ago, a coworker shared with me a cool little Perl program that runs out across the network and checks each drive for free space and reports the results in a spreadsheet or an HTML table. But, in the Information technology world very little is simple, and so this story has a few twists and turns. I’ll save you the torment of trying to follow the whole thing…

Long story short, first there was a program that worked on a laptop that was hooked up to the network. Then the laptop was forced into some kind of Vulcan mind meld with a much faster and better desktop computer. When it was thought (by the people - nobody asked the machines what they thought) that the desktop had sucked up everything that was on the laptop, the laptop was lobotomized and sent to surplus. Think of poor little R2D2 wandering around in a state of permanent memory loss.

Over the next few weeks the desktop performed like a champ, right up until I needed that Perl script. I ran the program. The desktop just burped and looked at me funny. I ran it again. The desktop made that redneck in the beer tent sound and dabbed daintily at its lips. I didn’t run it again, because I was afraid the machine would hurl.

There ensued some analysis, followed by the conclusion that I was missing something called an AdminMisc extension for Win32 Perl. That’s why the machine was burping. Don’t ask how I knew this. I just knew, okay? And that rhymes with GNU and happens to be how the program is licensed by the author, Dave Roth — but I’m getting ahead of my story, which in any event is almost over.

Pretty lengthy set-up for a short and sweet anecdote, don’t you think? The point is, that I knew what I needed to make my computer work, but I didn’t know where to find it. This is where Krugle came in. Some time ago I signed up for the beta test of this programmers’ search engine, but I’m not much of a programmer, so except for a quick look around and a brief search for some WordPress related thing, I hadn’t used it. Today I plugged in the name of the extension I needed, and selected Perl and clicked on “search” and the result that was returned immediately in the tech pages was the result I needed. There were also some snippets of code returned that made me know I was in the ballpark because they looked a lot like the script I was running. Thanks Krugle.

With opening of the Share Your OPML site, I gave another thought to the syndication soup.  Listics has its feeds pointed at Feedburner.  Feedburner says there are several dozen subscribers.   In the old days, when I was just as clueless, but didn’t have my syndication mediated by a service, I could see the names of subscribers who chose to make themselves known.  Now I can not.  A Feedburner benefit seems to lie in the aggregation of the number of subscribers, and data regarding which aggravator they use to read the blog.  But the drawback seems to be that lack of detail.

Is there anybody reading this that can tell me more about my choices?  What would happen to those who subscribed through Feedburner if I turned it off?  Logic tells me to enable multiple feeds, including the Feedburner one, then people would have some choices.

[Cross Posted in Migration Diary.]

Sharon tidied up her links this weekend.  Looks like a links page format worth copying!

From the Wikipedia:  While de Man’s work in the 1960s is normally distinguished from his deconstructive work in the 1970s, there is considerable continuity.

There’s a broken-nose, mouth-breather thing going on here.  It could have sump’n to do with the modifiahs, the advoibs and the adjectives, y’know?

Got a message from Dave Winer to the OPML mailing list to the effect that the “Share your OPML” site will open tomorrow. I’m not sure to what end.

* Cartoon by Berke Breathed (Bloom County)

We need an RSS enclosure for the fragrance of lilacs, crabapple blossoms, honeysuckle…

First time commenters on this site and, I suspect, others who change the parameters of their discourse (for example, changing their email addresses to something like “fantisticasshat@hotmail.com” to underscore a point) have their comments held in a “moderation queue.” I attend to these comments as quickly as I can, sifting and winnowing, weeding and pruning, generally chucking out most of the penis enlargement and obscure tranquilizer advertisements while allowing the direct solicitations from big Swiss pharma firms seeking experimental subjects for designer drugs (”Would you like thorazine with that?”)

Yesterday, writing in a comment to a month old post from a Cox Communications IP address in Atlanta, Georgia, “D man” (not, I think, his real name) asked what may have been a non sequitur but was certainly a thoughtful question. Here it is, just as I received it:

dude when was popcorn invented

This one stumps me, but perhaps you - gentle reader - have an answer for “D man.”