What's the point in always looking back

Farhad Manjoo has an interesting peek back at the internet circa 1996 in Slate. One of the things I find so interesting is that by that point in my life I considered internet access to be a core necessity and spent as much time online in a day as the average American did in a month (30 minutes, according to the article). Of course, I'd been using the internet with some regularity since the early 90's (gopher, archie, usenet) and had used BBS's on occasion prior to that. By 1996 I'd already come to consider a non-networked computer to be largely useless.

Back in the day my lovely girlfriend at the time (now my wife) and I were early adopters of GeoCities and like others mentioned were already 'blogging' though it wasn't called that at the time. We went to an early focus group at GeoCities offices in Santa Monica (I think it was Santa Monica at least) and stayed in contact with them until we left L.A. later that year. We documented our cross-country move on one of our GeoCities websites all bloggy style. It's too bad we didn't save those sites, or several of the incarnations of each of our sites since then.

Through a dozen or so domain names, as many hosting services, and half a dozen platforms* we've been managing our web presence for almost 15 years now. It doesn't seem that long.

* GeoCities had some custom web builder toolset, so I'm not sure what platform that was, but since then we've gone through straight html, perl, asp, Zope, and now django(me) or wordpress(her).

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Complicated Potatoes

I am not what you would call a clothes horse. I have enough clothes to get me through a week or so and will wear them until some point past where most people would consider it time to replace them. A fact which innervates my wife greatly. But I do on occasion run across an item of clothing and feel the immediate need to purchase it. This is one such shirt.

Ben Goldacre has asked that people send in photos of themselves wearing the shirt in the proximity of other people wearing other statement shirts that might suitably or amusingly be responded to with the 'complicated' shirt.

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We put our styles in the blender and the tape on our spectacles

Not much to say, just a few pics to display. Clickie clickie for full size.



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It took so long to remember just what happened

In what is an entirely predictable result of the privatization of prisons, two judges pled guilty to taking kickbacks to send kids to prison. I very seriously doubt this is an isolated case and I would not be the slightest bit surprised to find that this was happening with adult defendants as well. The other entirely predictable result of such privatization: prison companies lobby for harsher laws and penalties to ensure their profits, often writing the sample legislation themselves. The justice system should be driven by justice, not profits. Once the profit motive enters the picture corruption is guaranteed and justice is the least priority.

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By the evidence that I see

It's Happy Darwin Day! In honour of the progenitor of modern biology, take a few moments to peruse some of the commentary in the science blogosphere.

• John Whitfield finishes Blogging the Origin in his usual fine style.
• John Wilkins posts another in his series of Debunking Darwin Myths
• Alex Palazzo provides two key points on the evolution question, the most important of which is belief in evolution is irrelevant.
• D. Graham Burnett and Chris Mooney have a great history of the conflict between science and religion as it relates to Darwin.
• Mooney also interviews Darwin's Dangerous Descendant. Which is a hilarious nickname.
• Discovery has a Darwin Portal for learning more about the man and the theory.

I think it's important to note, as many in the media often seem to miss and many in the ID movement intentionally misrepresent, that the Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with the question of the origin of life. Even the title of the book, Origin of the *Species*, makes that clear.

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Ballet for a blue whale

Yet Another Transitional Fossil. There's not really any surprise when one of these critical keys to the history of evolution is found. They generally have all the traits we'd expected and are in about the time period we'd expected. This one is a less common one in that it clearly demonstrates the path whales took from land to sea due to the fact that this specimen was pregnant. PZ has a nice drawing, whilst Brian Switek has a really nice writeup on the background of the whale evolution debate. Greg Laden describes the placement of the specimen in the fossil record. Ed Yong goes into some detail on the fetus placement and developemnt as well as the overall physiology of the Maiacetus.

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Learn to lose, it's easier that way

The standard kalyway combo update to 10.5.3 consistently bricks the machine. The SuperDuper! backup is not bootable (don't know if it's a limitation of the P7230 or the external enclosure I'm using, some experimentation might help with that). So I'm going to try booting from Ubuntu liveCD and dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda2. Not pretty, but it might work.

Sure, I'd love to have two os partitions, a test one and a stable one, but I've only got a 60G drive and my user folder gets big when I'm working on editing video. Hell, my iPhoto library alone is 10G.

So I'm casting around for better upgrading techniques. I may bite the bullet and move over to OpenSUSE, which I really would rather not have to do. No offense to OpenSUSE, I just prefer OS X.

(later)That sucked.

Can't boot from the SuperDuped external, can't mount usb drives from OS X install dvd boot, dd failed me in that the now duped main drive is not happy. I'm going to bite the bullet and do a new new install with two boot partitions and one home partitions. Space is gonna be tight on this. And 1.8" drives are very spendy.

OK, back at stable 10.5.2 with TWO system partitions, so I'm basically where I was when I turned the computer on this morning. That's progress?

Once again with the Kalyway 10.5.3 Combo Update. Once again with the blue screen. Found this snippet on insanelymac: "restore AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext" and voila. Amazing what happens when you read the instructions. I'll let this percolate for a week before I take the next step and try for 10.5.4.

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