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When I was in Bennington VT I bought an old copy of "Amiga World" that had an interview with Andy Warhol in it. (Though famously he doesn't really do interviews, so it's more like him answering some questions while being a little distracted.) He most frequently compares the Amiga to the Xerox, in terms of a new technology for artists to explore - especially interesting given his exploration of what endless reproducibility means for art.

I was considering transcribing it but The Internet Archive has it. (For now... I hope they get past these stupid lawsuits.) Call with Cora. She got one of those LCD doodle boards, like a more colorful version of the old "magic slate" toy. (Had to look up how it works... I think it uses just a bit of electricity for the erase button). probably the best result was using a "monster high" centaur as a model, but we got into but we got into "bad versions of loveable figures", so stalker santa, bad tooth-fairy, skeletal-cupid...

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Beyond that, a lot of other centaurs, and a few doodles with the left hand...

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Finding jeans that fit me well became easier when I realized "slim" doesn't mean "slim" per se (which I don't think I am really) but is also a euphemism for "no ass" (ding ding ding ding)

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"What's the primary difference [between the music/bop at school and your main work]?"
"In New Orleans, you'll hear more Louis Armstrong, it's more dancing, it's more for the people. And then when you go to play the other stuff, you're really playing for the next musician next to you..."
"And they're barely listening..."
"Oh they're listening, but the crowd might not be listening."

That sentiment is so near and dear to my heart. I know part of it's a little laziness on my part, but while the main reason I play tuba as much as I do is to enable other musicians, but my real goal is to get them to connect to audiences, not to try and wow each other with finesse.

I also liked "That's a New Orleans thing - we put a tuba on ANYTHING. You see a washboard player, he got a tuba player..."

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Always loved this Coltrane diagram. Wrote about it (and also state machines) at my devblog.

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New Trek Opening... Thinking about the Trek original crawl, and how ST:TNG changing it from "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to "Where No One Has Gone Before" makes it less sexist but more colonial? Like, there are usually beings already living below wherever the Enterprise parks itself in orbit... (Sigh. I guess "No human" is too wonky and too specific for a multi-species crew) I've adopted not being judgmental and always giving the benefit as kind of a life style (which is a bit problematic at work where we're supposed to do thorough reviews of other developer's code...)

This goes way back... when I was helping judge auditions for my singing group in college, my nickname was "C'mon guys, she wasn't THAT bad was she?"

Sometimes I feel like Walter Monheit^TM, the Movie Publicist's Friend, in the much lamented Spy magazine:

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So a while back I think I mentioned Spy magazine's run is online. And also, how fresh it looks even today... in some ways it's like Spy was the last hurrah of magazines, and all that snark got transferred onto the web.

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(oh and I guess Walter Monheit was a real guy, the "oldest club kid" - you can catch a few obituaries of his as well.

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Interesting tweet thread on how market economies slide into aristocracies. You can't have a society that is maximally just to individuals and maximally free, because given their druthers most humans will favor kin. I am co-facilitator of The First Church in Belmont Unitarian Universalist "Science and Spirituality" reading and discussion group. For many years it was capably lead by physicist Edwin F. Taylor. Edwin's life has shifted gears and he no longer attends the group, and while his death is not imminent, it is on his mind. He has prepared a text to be read at his memorial service, and my own recorded thoughts on mortality is what put me in a select group requested to review and tender suggestions... but it was a beautiful and touching piece from the first draft I saw.

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If We Did Not Die

Edwin F. Taylor

[Two readers, one to read the text, the other to read the quotes formatted in blockquotes. Please speak slowly, one hundred words or fewer per minute.]

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, the Crimson newspaper ran a column by David Riesman, a Harvard sociologist. One sentence jumped out at me.

If we did not die, I would have no hope for man.

This sentence has rattled around in my skull for more than sixty years and forms the basis of this meditation.

Turn Riesman's saying into a positive statement. Change "man" to "humanity" to make it inclusive. Add the word "all" to make it universal:

The fact that we all die gives me hope for humanity.

The death of a child is tragic. So was the death of my father at age 55 in a mountain climbing accident. Here we will limit ourselves to death in old age, which is my good fortune.

My thesis: Death in old age contributes to life, both the life of the individual and the well-being of humanity.

The playwright Samuel Beckett denies my thesis and uses death to tell us that life is meaningless. In "Waiting for Godot" Pozzo declares:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Humans rebel against mortality. Those with rank, power, or genius often use these tools to attempt immortality. The report of Jesus' resurrection made him, for his followers, an immortal. Saint Paul offered every Christian spiritual immortality as a believer in the resurrected Christ.

The poet William Cullen Bryant suggests that death provides motivation to live a good life.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

My wife Carla often said that we grieve about everything we will miss after death but rarely grieve about what we missed before birth. Leave it to Shakespeare to turn this symmetry into poetry.

                   our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The poet Shelley too pondered the fleeting nature of both life and fame. In his sonnet Ozymandias he describes the monument of an ancient ruler on which the inscription embodies the uselessness of worldly ambition. The sonnet ends with the words:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Great Pyramid of Egypt is another "colossal wreck" from which "level sands stretch far away." A paid army of citizens worked with dedication for twenty years to erect this only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World. Scholars now understand that the Great Pyramid was designed to be a resurrection machine for Pharaoh Khufu. A pair of tunnels, one from each side of his burial chamber, connected it to the outside world. Every night Khufu's spirit traveled out through these tunnels and ascended to become a star in the heavens, a star that showered blessings upon every Egyptian.

By good luck, when I was inside the Great Pyramid in 1978, I discovered a path to one of these tunnels, a path cut through the rock by thieves. My dollar pocket flashlight revealed the tunnel's cross section to be square, about six inches on a side. Straight lengths of this tunnel, each eight to ten feet long, connect Khufu's burial chamber in a sweeping arc to the outside world. The pair of escape tunnels for his spirit were a working feature of Khufu's "resurrection machine."

The cathedrals of Europe contain burial crypts for the famous. Most of those buried there expected eternal life. Prominent families funded elaborate side-chapels where their members were buried. English poet and dramatist Ben Jonson insisted that he be buried in the vertical position, standing up. Jonson said to the Dean of Westminster Abbey, "Six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me."

[PAUSE]

"The fact that we all die gives me hope for humanity."

David Riesman felt that without death humanity could not move forward. Even a genius has but a few truly revolutionary ideas. Albert Einstein created special and general relativity between the ages of 26 and 37. During the remainder of his long life, Einstein's fame and some of his work was a drag on physics. He hated the idea that quantum mechanics predicts probabilities, not certainties. He claimed that "God does not play dice with the universe." Well, it turns out She does!

Steve Jobs did not share Einstein's blindness about quantum mechanics. Here is a central point of Jobs' 2005 speech to the graduating class at Stanford University:

[D]eath is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. . . . Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I rest my case that death contributes fundamentally to our individual lives and to the well-being of humanity.

But why must we ALL die? Why not limit death to those who would hold us back in some way? You know the answer to that: No person limited by the accepted truths of his or her era can know which proposed innovations are blind alleys and which few will carry us to surprising goals. No, we must all die, preferably in old age.

The pillars of my life are not built of stone like the Great Pyramid. These pillars are, first, my children and, second, my textbooks, particularly those on special and general relativity.

God willing, my children – and Carla's child – sit among you. They turned out well and bless this world with professional lives and children of their own, as Pharaoh Khufu's spirit among the stars blessed his people.

Writing textbooks thrilled me. I found breathtaking the power of a well-edited phrase and the way a small handful of fundamentally simple equations embody the mighty physical structure of the universe -- and predict its action. I truly felt that to express a beautiful theory with accurate and comprehensive clarity is to "bring it into being," at least for the reader.

More: To summarize this structure in a textbook gave me extended tutorials from co-authors John Archibald Wheeler, who resurrected general relativity from obscurity, and Edmund Bertschinger, who is its master. We tried out scores of sequential chapter drafts with students worldwide. Their comments helped us to present these subjects powerfully and effectively.

In addition to my children and textbook writing, I was inspired by humans that have gone before. Among those from our nation: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. Rank upon rank of others worldwide illuminate for us what it means to be human at the highest level. The columnist Roger Cohen memorializes such "great souls."

Great souls resemble the elements in their immensity. They absorb everything -- pain, injustice, insult, folly -- and give back decency and kindness. . . . They come into being through unflinching confrontation with life's spears. They reach quiet. Discipline is the backbone of graciousness. Stoicism is the other face of wounds. In the most beautiful smile, painful knowledge hovers. . . .

Life hangs by a thread. Pay attention to its ephemeral gifts.

[PAUSE]

My son Lloyd suggests that we might greet death with more gusto by following the advice of Hunter S. Thompson:

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

Selah, amen, and farewell, Edwin

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Incomplete References:

Great Pyramid: National Geographic DVD "Engineering Egypt"

William Cullen Bryant: The end of his poem Thanatopsis

Thanks to Kirk Israel, who has thought about death for a long time, and to Downing Cless, a professional dramaturge, who had many suggestions and showed me how to turn this into a performance piece.

Free download of relativity books at spacetimephysics.org and exploringblackholes.org
Today some BABAMers supported Cosecha Massachusetts at the end of their 4-day march to the State House demanding a public hearing in the transportation committee to push the bill for drivers licenses for all - here's the state house and Cosecha folks as reflected in the bell of a french horn

#DriversLicensesForAll #ManejandoSinMiedo

the idea that the 'ideal beach body' just means being thin or buff is so unimaginative, surely the ideal beach body would have a powerful lobster claw, arm flaps to act as a windbreak and a sand repellent anus

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We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something.

Pain in the butt, but a certain pleasure in re-establishing order with your belongings, especially reordering a book collection with your own idiosyncratic "feels like" subject/type system.

Probably should be doing more Kondo-ish filtering of stuff not providing joy, but most of the stuff I've been doing has already been filtered.

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But now we have wifi again so I'm a little worried about my unpacking productivity :-D

Crying isn't sadness; it happens because an emotion is too big for your body.

Bai had gone into the kitchen with a six-pack and now he came back into the living room holding one beer. It was like the opposite of a miracle.

'There are no refunds. That's the point of the game.' I should have bought two.

(The game in question has half-dead aliens wanting refunds from the gatekeeper to the afterlife... "Should have bought two" is an alien expression that kind of combines "buyer beware" and "have your cake and eat it too")

Don't be a guy who feels bad. Nobody ever knows what to do. Our life-task is to decide what to do.

A static document is a fossil of thought.

I dropped a leaf into a hole
And you dropped me in turn. I found
That gravity reversed its pull
And through the sky was solid ground.
We drop, are dropped, and each to each
It's what we do, it's not profound.
And if a hole is out of reach
We take a longer way around.
We fall in all directions. Some
Find lucky landings, higher ground.
I wait, instead, for help to come
And some of us are never found.

I left a message in the ice:
The time, the distance and the price.

(The game in question is about a stranded astronaut trying to return home.)

It wouldn't be the first time the power of love was responsible for a whole lot of bullshit.

Those were some passages I really liked on rereading Leonard Richardson's "Constellation Games". Man, I wish I knew how to get this book the attention "Ready Player One" gets... it's orders of magnitude superior.

Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

via this tumblr entry that points out he's significantly less creepy than the guy from "50 Shades of Grey". Anyway I like the quote.

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Doodle transcribing a dream artifact...

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It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

"God changed Jacob's name to 'Israel,' which means 'one who wrestles with God.' As far as I know, Israel is still the only nation named after a wrestler."

"Kings may have money and power on their side, priests have tradition. But, in the end, writers always win. Kings die and traditions change, but nobody outlives a book."

"Just because life is pointless, that doesn't mean you get to sit around all day moaning about it. There's still work to be done. You should help the oppressed, take care of the abandoned, and make each other happy if and when you can. Just because there's no point to any of it doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do."

Mark Russell's "God is Disappointed in You" is a straightforward (if sometimes bawdy, and a bit irreverent) book-by-book summary of the entire Bible, Old and New Testament. (That last quote is the ending of the summary of Ecclesiastes, "very possibly the first work of Existentialist philosophy.) I feel most people, even a lot of Christian Believers, have a relatively sketchy knowledge of the meat of the thing, and I'd recommend this book extremely highly.

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I posted it 2 years ago, but this still grabs me, resonates, reminds me of romances that didn't worked, and then didn't.

Lyrics here I am astonished at how bad the PS3 is; a labyrinth of menus, endless mandatory slow download updates, last night a big game-before-the-game of hide the downloaded titles. Rage-inducing.

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Just found out OSX has all these great accented voices. Sangeeta's "English (India)" is really fun to listen to, and I like the strong accents you get with some of the voices that are meant to read other accents.
Some article referenced this clip. I like its wistful nature. found this online but I resliced it to be vertical

Karl Rove said

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing

Yeah, too much, thanks Karl. To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
aprilamber - source - built with processing

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Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty

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The MBTA distribution of plastic tap and go Charlie Cards, vs disposable tickets, is so weirdly half-assed. They just leave them lying around, or you gotta find someone to ask.... click to run

dreamclock - source - built with processing
A timepiece that came to me in a dream last Tuesday morning. I was toying with making an hour and minute ring, but it I had an attack of lazy, plus I kind of like keeping closer to my subconsciousness' rambling.

I'm not sure if it "means" anything, except I did have Java on my mind last week. Also I'm happy that I could punch out a first draft of this in literally 5 or 10 minutes, in terms of programming mojo and convenient tools.

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MA legislature... 6 3/4% sales tax? Really? I hate dumbass numbers like that. At least make it the nearest damn penny. (5% was pretty cool)

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heh, years later this tiny pixel alphabet is still coming in useful...

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Kate points out http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ a nice and extensive set of Creative Commons icons

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(to dylan on facebook)
Holy cats, a goatee?

Hey remember when we were in like 6th grade and I was jealous 'cause you were starting to get acne and I wasn't yet? I'm over that now.

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One thing I appreciate about my new company: during my whole contracting gig, I never saw them misspell my last name. Woo, the release of Grand Theft Auto IV kind of snuck up on me! But I asked for it as a delayed birthday present from EB and he claims my copy is already secured and waiting for me...

Word is this version lives up to the hype, continuing the tradition of a rich story (actually, richer in this version, with its story of a Russian immigrant trying to make it in the big city) on a world big and complex enough to just enjoy running around in and causing havoc with weapons and cars.

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Insanity of the Moment

Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded.

A very odd tale of a loon who claims to be heavily armed and working to protect a mall near you.

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Captcha of the Moment
Now un-slashdotted, a new style of Captcha, those little interaction bits (like type in the squiggly word you see here) that try and help people prove that they aren't dumb spambots. The visual cognitive approach is kind of neat, though I'm surprised the "geometric center" would be such a challenge for an AI.

I'm up in Rockport helping EB again, so this is just a placeholder, an assurance that my "daily" humanistic/spiritual ritual will get done.

Maybe doing articles in advance is cheating in that regard, and really I'm just weirdly obsessed about not missing a day.

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FX Suit of the Moment

I was happy to see that this "goomba" from the Super Mario Brothers movie just snuck into the Carboard Monocle's Top 20 FX Suit list. As they say

Okay, so we may catch some flak for having this on the list. Though the head sculpt and the animatronics in the face are impressive, the overall design of the creature left the average viewer wanting more. Not to mention the disappointed Mario traditionalists that wanted it to actually look like a Goomba from the game. All that aside, there was something about these that stuck with me. They were big dumb oafs, and watching a pack of these bump into each other and sway to music is just plain funny.

The goombas were the 3rd best thing in that movie, right after the little windup Bob-Oms (scroll to the bottom) and Samanth Mathis' purple-to-white dress I kisrael'd about before.

Also, the soundtrack was decent, despite of or because using US3's "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)", like every other movie made in 1993-1994.

Pessimism of the Moment

I did not come away from watching United 93 feeling optimistic about the triumph of the human spirit and the superior resilience of enlightenment values. Quite the opposite. I came away with a feeling that history has been hijacked by a cult of the undead, or the wannabe dead, suicidal mass murderers driven by theocratic savagery.

I think he's a bit too pessimistic, I think the eternal vigilence the endless "War Against Terror" requires is going to be a pain in the ass, and there may well be tremendous acts of destruction in the future, but I don't see it as the "end of enlightenment civilization".

The article draws a parallel between "Day of the Dead", with its images of people in TV control rooms watching helplessly as the world they knew gets torn apart by undead zombies and our present situation with its risk from death-worshipping "We Love Death while You Love Life" assholes.

Damn, actually, that makes me scared and angry about religion in general. When you get in the habit of faith over "show me" skepticism, there might not BE a particularly strong reason for a culture to prefer life-affirming, positive belief over martyrdom-seeking "this world is nothing compared to the next" fantasylands. Maybe Dawkins was right, "To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns."

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After writing the above the other day, I read this Atlantic piece about how badly the administration has played Iran. It's a difficult situation that needed a much defter touch than our president and crew has ever displayed. Iran pretty much has us by the economic balls.

Another note.... how many more hardline hardcore Islamic fundamentalist governments have to get elected before we realize that widespread democracy might not be our friend in the Middle East? By coincidence, I added an old political pin to my courier bag from a collection my dad had made... "President Nixon / Now More Than Ever". I like it because it can both be used as a sly-ish commentary on the people currently in office, but it also kind of reflects my belief that we would have been better served by a Kissinger-esque sense of "realpolitik" post-9-11 than what we ended up with.

I recently heard an interpretation that states Islam has been in kind of a dark ages for centuries now. It seems to me that there's an inverse relationship between fundamentalism and human advancement. I suspect a balance between faith and science is useful to a society, but looking at how the secularist enlightenment brought Europe out of its Dark Ages.... of course the trouble is that there's not much stopping the fundamentalists from co-opting the technology and other forms of progress a more balanced approach applies... this has been going on for a long time in the Middle East and I think can be applied to some of the political situation here and now.

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Link of the Moment
Next time I'm out trying to decide what car to buy, I should stop and ask myself...What Would Batman Drive? A very cool history of how his car has been revamped over the years, including the movie and animated versions. Man, he must've spent a lot of time in the garage. I think my favorite is the behemoth Frank Miller Batmobile.

Or maybe you'd like a lifesize model of an X-wing? Now on Ebay for a Buy-It-Now of $85K.

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Anecdote of the Moment

Mostly Harmless had just been published in paperback and I invited Douglas [Adams] in as a guest, as well as Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who had just manhauled a sled across Antarctica, losing useful items like fingers and toes to frostbite. As the great explorer told an epic tale of suffering and endurance, Douglas's face fell.

Afterwards, in the pub, I asked if something had upset him.

"Oh, not really," said Douglas. "It's just that talking about being locked in a hotel room to write an overdue novel seems pretty tame stuff compared to trekking across a thousand miles of icy crevasses."

"Well you need to put things in perspective," I replied. "First of all, your struggle was on a more human scale, and the result is a unique achievement no-one can match. Secondly, just before we went on air, Ran Fiennes got lost in the basement of Broadcasting House looking for the toilet."

Douglas smiled and picked up his glass. "That makes me feel much better."

With the opening of the new Hitchiker's Guide movie, slashdot linked to this series of Douglas Adams anecdotes from some cool people. Link of the Moment
It looks like this speculation on what a spaceship war in the Solar System might look like is about as finished as it's ever going to get. (Three parts.) Some interesting ideas, but it is so impossible to do "realistic" predictions such as this and have it look anything like what it actually ends up as. There's always some little feature or technology, a "minor" change that changes everything.
UPDATE: that's what I get for just publishing a link from the backlog without rereading it...as AuSkeptic points out, one of the coolest things about the link is the highlevel historical overview of Naval warfare here on Earth, and I forgot to mention that.

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Observation of the Moment
"Scali" is a very intriguing name for a very mundane bread. It's such an evocative name that when it turns out to be white bread with seeds, its gotta be a disappointment.

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Historical Culture of the Moment

John Bull and Uncle Sam...I hadn't heard much about the former gentleman, who is parallel in concept to Sam, though not as prevalent these days. From a Library of Congress exhibit on British-American relations. Do any other countries have semi-official personifications like these?

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Meme of the Moment
This is probably making the rounds, but Babwa Wawa et al. want to make a reality show episode of 20/20: compete to adopt this baby. But, it being the strange world that it is, they may be stymied by Uri Geller's patent on the concept. Excellent. And people wonder why I'm so into pop culture. Paranoia of the Moment
This morning I started thinking about how little intuitive understanding I have of, say, what it costs to run a business. More specifically, even understanding that I'm blessed with an above average salary, if a company has a decent number of people, that's a lot of money. (Conversely, I think there are some costs of living higher on a per-day or per-week basis than I realize, like mortgages, car payments, and even food.) Compared to other things I buy on a day to day basis, it seems like a lot of a lot.

I guess that explains why so many companies fail; you really have to know what you're doing to get a cash flow up to paying the people that you need to do it. Maybe that's why the executives get paid so much; I could see where a really good head honcho could be worth the salaries of, 20 or 30 mere mortals. (Of course, pay is not always commiserate commenserate ("thanks" Gowen and John) with performance, but heck, that's true at all levels of employment.) It still might be a little obscene, but much in life is. (Heh, of course, if all those young bright more-business-oriented-than-me dot-commers didn't really grasp these simple ideas, no wonder we had a dot bomb implosion.)

Ugh! Now I'm paranoid. Obviously the system is somewhat stable; despite the ongoing economic turbulance, I'd say a majority of people I'm friends with are hanging in there, and I could probably make this same argument 10,20, maybe 30 years ago (though 30 brings us into some of the problems the 70s had) but still, it feels a little precarious.

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Link of the Moment
Extremely cool site, Starship Dimensons shows the relative sizes of hundreds of scifi vessels, from X-Wings to various flavors of the Enterprise to the ID4 Mothership. Each page is a different scale, from 10 pixels to a meter to 1 pixel to 2000 meters. Plus, on IE, you can drag the ships to do specific side by side comparisons. (They sometimes bring up the ships from a smaller scale to the higher scale for reference...that's where these tiny Star Wars craft are from.) For me, this is tons cooler than that skyscraper page it drew some of its inspiration (and a few borrowed images) from.

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Contest of the Moment
Wired.com had some decent coverage of the very cool looking Kinetic Sculpture Race, where artist work to make the bestest art works that can travel over land, water, and mud. "Art Collides With Engineering". The judging criteria (the most coveted award is the "Mediocre Award", for the vehicle that ends up right in the middle) and the other rules are worth a quick read through. So I went to the video game conference, and it was pretty good. Christian, the guy I drove down with, turned out to be very good company. (He's much more of a collector than I am, with an astounding gameroom, and he's also a chef, which is a bit unusual for this hobby.)

The convention was...well, mostly it was a great big room, with many tables of video game goodness for sale, trade, and display, and very few "Don't Touch" signs. Many console game setups, but the highlight was the far corner with a few dozen fullsize Arcade machines rigged for free play...a great little stroll down memory lane.

It's interesting to be so close to people who are really into this hobby...I felt like a piker. Like this guy, Alan Hewston. He's dressed up as Pitfall Harry (the cartoon version). And as a Pitfall cartridge. It's a bit of a mixed metaphor really, but wow: that's dedication. I didn't buy much there: a Dreamcast game that was a bit cheaper than usual, and two videogame books, both purchased directly from the author there.

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Quote of the Moment

Q: What would you say to people today who may not know who you are?
A: I would just say that they're really lucky to be able to play some of the neat stuff they have now, instead of the cheap stuff we had then.

Bushnell was the founder of Atari, the maker of the first Pong arcade machine. Or as he says in the same interview, "I think I was the guy who started it two years earlier than it would have been started without me".

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Link of the Moment
Guess this is as good a time as any (and better than most) to post this older link, The Church of the Burgertime. It's difficult to judge how seriously it's taking itself, actually. Link of the Moment
A very interesting information toy: interconnected.org, aka Dirk, the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. (The name is a reference to a character and stated belief system in some Douglas Adams book.) Dirk asks people to state the connection between two objects or concepts. For example, "socks" is related to "feet" because "that's where you wear them", "white" because "a baseball team", "bill clinton" because "the first cat of the united states of america is named socks", etc. The cool part is you can then enter any two concepts, no matter how disparate, and it will try to find a connection between them-- and often succeed. The server is a bit slow these days, but it's still a great site. For example, "socks" is related to "atari" with the following path:

		socks
	she has a cat named socks, what more proof do you need that she is a witch?	hillary clinton
	by golly, it looks like the alt.bible.prophecy mob are out to get her. Grow up, people!	bible
	Genesis is the first book of the Bible	genesis
	the SEGA Genesis is a system that will allow you to play video games	video games
	atari was one of the first big video game companies	atari

Cool, huh? And you can try almost anything and get the path, and then add in any connections you feel are missing.

Joke of the Moment

A Peruvian military jet on anti-drug patrol recently shot down a Cessna seaplane carrying American missionaries.

Asked to justify the shootdown, a senior military officer responded that the Cessna had been carrying "the opiate of the masses."