May, 2002 full listing

• From the You Don't Hear That Every Day (or at least, I don't) department....
  
  I was walking to the store about noon on Thursday. A car pulled up and a gal in the front seat asked Wanna make a porno with us tomorrow? There was another gal driving, and two guys in the back seat. I asked: what time? I've got to work tomorrow. She replied: all day. Guess you can't make it. So much for my shot at porno fame (or infamy), eh?
• Eve Kayden talks about being "ready" for sex and mentions the rule If you're not embarrassed to buy condoms, you're ready for sex as being less than useful. Hell, I'm still uneasy buying condoms. Maybe it's related to the fact that I end up throwing away most of any multi-pack I buy because they've expired. Because I do things like go to work instead of helping out some gals in need (I suspect they won't have a lot of trouble casting the "late-30s, balding fat guy" role). [instapundit]
• The unwelcome guest got me thinking. I've been at parties with that guy. I'd like to think I haven't been that guy at parties.
• With Senegal vs France the World Cup begins today (5/31). Unfortunately, since the games are in South Korea, there's little chance to watch them here. They start at times between 12:30 AM and 6:30 AM. Or did they begin yesterday? That darned date line. Well, I got the link posted shortly after 12:30 AM on May 31 anyhow. [Jim]
• Going to Japan? Maybe you need Guidebook: Just In Tokyo. Or maybe you're coming through Japan on your way back from the World Cup. [evhead]
• Spammers sued by New York state. 500 million messages at $500 a pop. Hmm. That's a fair chunk of change the state could theoretically get. [strib]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 31, 2002     May 31 in History

• 
• Deal would keep Twins through '03, while Selig contracts six other teams. Why is MLB being so suddenly generous? As Doug Grow writes in Little board gets better of baseball, it's because the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission's suit against MLB will require disclosure of information that MLB would like to keep private. So where's it all stand? The commission hasn't accepted MLB's proposed deal, responsing by saying (more or less) Sure we trust you, but we'd like that offer in writing. That's a good move, since Bud Selig is so twisty he has to screw on his pants in the morning. [strib]
• Congress Threatens To Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built, which is a fine commentary on the current situation within MLB. Note that I'm not trying to compare the Metrodome to the U.S. Capitol.
• D.C. Handgun Ban Challenged in Court. Why? Because the second amendment says the federal government can't completely ban guns. But who runs D.C., where guns are completely banned? The federal government! [instapundit]
• Ice reservoirs found on Mars Huh. Just like those postulated in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. [Jim]
• Speaking astronomically, as it were, an ass-o-tron treatment of Dave's Sausage Sandwich Superimposes human lunar exhibition upon a website. [reed, via boingboing.net]
• Web glitch exposed Fidelity accounts, but Fidelity didn't send any word to US customers (who weren't affected by the glitch, they claim). Crappy security. Who'd a thunk? [google news]
• According to the Seti@Home Current Total Statistics, in just a few days they'll have used a million years of CPU time. [fark!]
• Consumption of alcohol in Ireland rose 41 percent in the 90s. And we were only there for one week. [fark!]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 30, 2002     May 30 in History

• Okay, Harlan Ellison is a dick. No real surprise there. He still used to be a hell of a writer. I do find myself surprised when I hear that he's still alive, though. [boing boing]
• Judi Bari FBI Bombing Trial : SF Indymedia has info on the late Judi Bari's civil rights case vs. the FBI. Apparently the FBI tried to argue that the constitution isn't relevant to the case.
  
  Judi, an organizer for the IWW and Earth First!, had a bomb go off under her car seat in May of 1990. She survived the bombing (along with Darryl Cherney) and they were both promptly arrested for the bombing (pacifists, of course, always carry bombs [and try to blow themselves up. -DaveP]).
  
  More info on the case and on Judi available on her website [Jim]
• Wellstone opens bid for third term. Apparently this is the official opener, even though ads have been running on the TV for weeks. [strib]
• Greens go after Wellstone - there's folks out there saying that the Greens are going to cost Wellstone his Senate seat. I think it's more likely he's already cost himself his seat. First, by running for a third-term after he said he was only going to serve two terms. Second, by trying to pretend he's still an outsider, when after 12 years inside the beltway, he plays the game with everyone else (and which is why he initially promised to only serve two terms). The City Pages' Eating Green has more on the Green convention. Turns out there was a strong feeling that if Wellstone had wanted the Greens not to endorse someone to run against him, maybe he should have showed up: If this is so fucking important to Senator Wellstone, then where is his ass?
• 
• Bush mocks reporter. I'm impressed — que bueno. Now I'm literate in two languages. I'm actually kind of impressed. It sounds like David Gregory of NBC might have talked down to the President, and gotten what he deserved. [instapundit]
• Chumbawumba has reworked the throwaway Beatles track "Her Majesty". Just in time for the jubilee! Download info here. "Her majesty's a pretty nice girl, but I hope she's the end of the line..."

Weather in Minneapolis for May 29, 2002     May 29 in History

• Yesterday brought a ride over to Como Zoo. It's a little depressing, since the animals don't have a ton of room to run around. Also, it was way too ful of humans to be enjoyable. Mental Note: There are a lot of people out on holidays. It's probably better to stay home and work and take a day off when everyone else is working.
• I've collected the reviews I did yesterday and last month at Dave's Movie Reviews.
• rfc-ignorant.org - The home for domains who don't play by the rules [flutterby]
• Oh great, now my site feels bloaty. The 5k. [steph]
• Wave of suits grows over 'poisoning' in the electronics workplace - Making semiconductors is nasty business. People are finally starting to sue. [strib]
• The Enemies of Innovation is a review of Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas [some guy]
• Citibank sucks, too. Plenty of suckiness for everyone.
• A Libel Suit May Establish E-Jurisdiction. If you're libelled by a newspaper published somewhere else, you may be able to sue at home. That's a change that could be established by this case. [daypop]
• New Rules for the New Advertising Economy from Wired. I don't know where to start with all the things that are wrong about this article. But they do get the fact that the x10 ads are annoying right. [fark!]
• How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time. Worms, viruses, and shitty servers, oh my.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 28, 2002     May 28 in History

• St. John's community wonders about its future in light of allegations. Donations are drying up. This quotes Joe Wright, who was a student at SJP one year ahead of me, quite a bit.[strib]
• Handgun Giveaway Angering Chicago Law Enforcement. Though it's not stated in the story, the quote Better judged by twelve than carried by six. came to mind. [endwar]
• Billy Bragg and the Blokes' jubilee protest song Take Down the Union Jack entered the UK Indie charts at #2. It's #22 in the UK Top 75. The penultimate goal is still to be #1 next week, but there's tough competition including the re-release of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen
  
  Want to participate? Buy the three CD single versions of TDTUJ from Roughtrade.com. Sales there count towards the UK charts even if you're having them shipped elsewhere. [Jim]
• I wonder if maybe I'm starting a tradition, but here are the movie reviews for May, 2002. The list is a lot shorter than the one in April, but that's because I've been a lot busier. If you were to try to guess when the next reviews might happen, June 30 would probably be a good guess:
  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension: Ahh, the 80's. Good vs. Bad, with a brain-surgeon / rock-star as the hero. Buckaroo isn't really believeable as either a rock-star or a brain-surgeon, but suspension of disbelief makes this one work. Quirky. 7 of 10.
  • Kiss of the Dragon: Okay, you've got Jet Li, who's supposed to be the hot new action star, and it's directed by Luc Besson, who also did the original Nikita and Léon (aka "The Professional"), both of which I enjoyed immensely. Jet's certainly a very good and fast martial artist, and probably much better than Jackie Chan. But Jackie's funny and that makes him a lot more fun to watch. It was still a very good movie, but I found that I'd rank it behind just about any of Jackie Chan's recent movies. With Besson directing, I should have known it would be moodier and darker, but I don't watch kick-flicks for moody and dark, I watch 'em for things like Roy O'Bannon saying I may not know karate, but I know crazy. 6 of 10.
  • Showgirls: Sleek seductiveness... a world of exoticism and danger! says the big print on the back. I'm not sure I understand the NC-17 rating. It feels more like the same level of sex you see in the not-rated (soft-core) movies on late-night (non pay-per-view) cable. The plot is pretty weak, but there is one. Plenty of tits to be seen, but the movie didn't feel all that seductive or erotic. Just naked. Without all the good-looking nekkid chicks, I'd probably rate it a 3 or 4. Due to the nudity, I'll give it 5 of 10.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 27, 2002     May 27 in History

• It was a beautiful night for a ballgame last night. Just as we were starting to eat, there was a brief shower, and then we got a rainbow over the stadium. Mild temps once the rain had passed, and not much wind. Lots of errors, but it came out right in the end, with the Saints winning in spite of themselves.
• Microsoft wants use of free software curbed, saying it's a threat to security and intellectual property. And the microsoft bottom line. [some guy]
• Nowhere to Hide: Ads Arrive on TiVo (popups coming and going). The ads on the TiVo are just annoying. They're trying to get me to watch an ad for Best Buy with promises of a Sheryl Crow video that I don't want to watch anyhow. At least it's not too hard to ignore. [doc]
• gatt.org reports that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is being disbanded and replaced by an organization with a charter based on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Looks like the work of hackers to me. [Jim]
• 
• Comcast sued over recording customer Web browsing. [google news]
• Six arrested over 'Nigerian e-mail' fraud, but there's a new scam already: Forget the Nigerian spam scam: Now it's the Afghan-war-scam!. [cam]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 26, 2002     May 26 in History

• why justin hall rocks has a funny quote from Justin. [scripting]
• The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism. A long article, but an interesting read if you want to find out how the government thinks terrorists think. [some guy]
• Why "Nice Guys" are often such LOSERS. A friend's feeling this ever so much lately. [some gal]
• Thin! Tan! Hotter Than Hell! - Melanotan makes you tan more quickly than normal (up to 1000 times), is a potent anti-inflammatory, promotes sexual arousal (via direct action in the hypothalamus), and also targets an appetite-suppression receptor popular with the makers of weight-loss drugs. Call it the Barbie drug: a pill or nasal spray that can make you thin, tan, pain-free, and horny all at once, without effort. How much would you pay? [flutterby]
• Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap. I don't think it's a good idea, but it'll probably sell a bunch as collectors items if nothing else. [daypop]
• Factual Error Found On Internet. Horrors!
• The Case for Cocktails. Amen. [daypop]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 25, 2002     May 25 in History

• Here's a picture from last night's Saints' game. Right to left we have Saint Nick (who lived in a trailer at the park last year), Pete (who has since junked the car that Justin Varitek had autographed), the fan services gal whose name I can't remember, and who was working her last game last night, and then J.D. Steve the vendor's butt is featured, too. Saints lost, and the rules for the beer vendors changed with no notice to anyone. It was the first game I've left early (I went to the lot for more beer in the middle of the 8th, rather than being able to buy one in the top of the 8th, when the Saints gave up 4 runs) since 1996, I think.
• Crunchbox, by ShopIP Next Generation Security Solutions (which is fronted by Captain Crunch, aka John Draper) looks like it might be a good security tool. [scripting]
• Jail data, answers still can't be found. 60k photos and records, up in smoke due to buggy software. Oops. [some guy]
• Microsoft issues patch to address IE flaw. Another set of patches. Looks like it's a windows-only problem.
• labs.google.com - Google Demos of stuff that's not quite ready for prime-time, but you can play with it now.
• Where Apple Doesn't Always Play Nice. It's just one of the ways Apple screws developers sometimes. Not saying it's bad, but it's something you have to take into account when developing for the Mac. On the other hand, I've written software like FastFontMenu hoping that Apple would incorporate its functionality into the OS. The idea wasn't to get rich, it was to fix something that was broken in the OS. And even though Classic Mac OS wasn't Open Source, because of the trap mechanism, which allowed patching, anyone could attempt to fix something they thought was broken in the OS. [scripting]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 24, 2002     May 24 in History

• From Alternative Holidays/Days of Significance: May 23rd - The Defenestration of Prague: This is an actual date in history, which warrants note whether you care about the actual event or not. On May 23, 1618, in Prague, a few royal officials were thrown out a window of Hradcany Castle by some noblemen, but survived the fall by landing in a cart full of manure.
  
  More importantly, defenstration is easily one of the most totally underused words in the English language. For those who are unaware, it means the act of throwing something or someone out of a window. The date for this event also falls on an extremely Illuminated day of the year, 5/23, which incorporates both the Discordian number 5 and our old friend 23. Fnord.
• I could spend a lot of time complaining about the pain of having a hard drive fall down, but suffice it to say that sucked.
• The Rise of the Creative Class Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race. Minneapolis just made the top 10.
• Speaking of rock bands, Dead Come Alive for Festival. The Grateful Dead are getting back together (minus Jerry) for a two-day festival in Alpine Valley, WI this August. Look for serious traffic jams in East Troy. [google news]
• Hmm. The progression continues: LSD and the No-Hitter that Dock Ellis threw in 1970.
• Speaking of baseball, tonight's the home opener for the Saints, which means trips to places like Delmonico's and Kramarczuk's.
• Am I stretching the word association thing by pointing to PETSorFOOD.com - The best place for pet and food products on the Web!? [flutterby]
• Aberrant News and Curiosities. Found via the referrer list.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 23, 2002     May 23 in History

• Biernat, plumbers official face added federal charges and Additional charges filed against Minneapolis council member Biernat. It's looking like the 3rd ward might be having an election sooner than expected.
• Proposal for royalties on Internet music rejected but final decision remains uncertain. No word on whether lower rates will be recommended or not.
• Anti-Spam Bill Headed to Senate: Senator Conrad Burns, R-Montana got pissed off by all the spam he gets. So he's actually put together a bill that might pass. It'd leave spam as opt-out, and only state attorney generals could sue spammers, rather than individuals. I'm not sure whether it's better than nothing or not. [fark!]
• Instapundit Terms of Service. Tee-hee! And the Instapundit's a legal professor, so it must be good. [some guy]
• Keith Teare's Weblog has the story behind the murder of RealNames by Microsoft. [scripting]
• Second Reading: The debate over the right to keep and bear arms is only beginning. There's a lot more work to be done. [backupbrain]
• Oh MAN! I'm only 42nd in a search for puerile. Crud!

Weather in Minneapolis for May 22, 2002     May 22 in History

• With the start of the Northern League season on Thursday, there's likely to be a lot more new stuff in Dave's Recipes. I've already started adding things for the season.
• How to go head-to-head with Microsoft -- and win. Beating Bill is the companion piece. It talks about a number of companies that haven't been so successful in competing with Microsoft. [scripting]
• Creative Commons is putting together alternatives to copyright. [boing boing]
• Drug Control Office Ads Entice Kids to Try Drugs. Ad spending to the tune of a billion (9 zeros) clams a year. That's a lot of green to just piss away.
• Canada's medical marijuana supply isn't bad -- it's too good. [boing boing]
• Webcasters say ruling on royalties could silence online music. And charging traditional AM or FM radio stations the same rates that are currently proposed for online stations would bankrupt the traditional stations. [some guy]
• Minnesota bill first for Internet privacy. Huh. [google news]
• Twins stadium bill has Rybak fuming. I've been liking most of what the Mayor has done so far, but I think in this case he should just shut up and let St. Paul spend tons of money to build a stadium for a team that's probably going to be gone within five years anyhow. Me, a fatalist? Perhaps.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 21, 2002     May 21 in History

• Casino brings jobs, development to Hinckley -- at a price. The price is that the old downtown on the west side of the freeway isn't getting any added traffic from the casino, which is to the east of the freeway. Noted because Mom lives up thataway. [strib]
• Castle Coalition: Citizens Fighting Eminent Domain Abuse. This might've been handy when we were trying to convince the City Council that using eminent domain as a bargaining tool for the developer of the Stone Arch Apartments was a bad idea.
• Forbes.com: Best Cities For Singles. MSP is #13. Lucky me. [fark!]
• Selig says 6 to 8 teams are in trouble. But of course he's going to do his best to keep alive recent expansion teams like the Marlins and Devil Rays that are grossly unprofitable (hemorhagging money), while contracting the Twins, who are actually making money, or losing money a lot more slowly, depending on whose numbers you believe. [strib]
• House and Senate pass stadium bill, but if the Twins are probably going to go broke within a couple years as Selig says it doesn't seem like a very good idea. Maybe we should just let baseball get its financial house in order first and then figure out whether we want to pay for a stadium. Screw it. I'll keep watching the Saints. [strib]
• More on the stadium legislation. It sounds like the best offer the Twins are going to get from the state. Now it's just a matter of waiting for them to contract. [strib]
• ROADKILLBILL.COM is the work of Ken Avidor - a Twin Cities cartoonist who lampoons the car culture. A must read for any bicyclist (or pedestrian). [Jim]
• malevole's Bogroll of reciprocal back-scratching links. Dammit, that's funny.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 20, 2002     May 20 in History

• 2 restricted monks work at St. John's Guest House: Fran Hoefgen and Allen Tarlton.
• Lost power for a while yesterday morning. And it pointed out to me what incredibly shitty UI most devices have when the power goes away. As soon as the power dropped, my UPSes started beeping. That's a good idea, since you want to know when they're doing their job so you can get anything non-essential shut off. But there's no good way to tell the difference between the "shut off the beeping" and the "shut off everything connected to the UPS" buttons. Unless of course you've got enough light to read the small-print captions near the buttons.
  
  Then there are the cordless phones. As soon as they lose contact with the base station, they decide to start chirping. The only way to shut off that beeping is to pull the battery from the handset, even if the handset has it's ringer shut off (like the phone in the bedroom does). Shitty again. I know the handset can't call the base. That's why I'm busy trying to find the old-fashioned phone with wires so I can call in the power outage while you keep beeping at me you satanic device!
  
  Then there's the smoke detector. It's hard-wired to the power, and has a battery backup. But as soon as the power drops, it starts chirping. Fine. Let the place burn down. Maybe it'll at least be quiet.
  
  A half-hour power outage turned quickly turned into a morning of frustration as I got woken up, and just wanted all those beeping devices to be quiet so I could get back to sleep until the power came back and it was time to turn everything back on and reset the clocks that were blinking 12:00. I think my plan to put a server in a co-location facility with a backup generator will be a good thing in the long run, since I'll be more able to just ignore power outages, but I'm still going to have to deal with all the other devices that insist on waking me up to tell me they've lost their lifeline.
• Blogger Bias and Google Results. Y'know, I seem to recall pointing part of this out back on September 21, 2001 in my I've Been Googled essay. Google indexes my site on a regular basis because I have a lot of links that make their search engine better. A lot of blogs do. Most of the time, that's a good thing. Can it be used for nefarious purposes? Sure. But I'd bet that the benefit to google is still worth it. And it lets me mention something and have it show up in the search engines in relatively short order. For example, I once mentioned that we'd done a website for Cushing Lake Resort and now they're the number one hit when you google for Cushing Lake. They ought to be. They don't even show up on the list for Lac Des Mille Lacs though, so lets see what happens if I mention 'em in connection with that.
• Jeff Jarvis has proposed The Weblog Foundation. Heck, I wonder why it would take a foundation. It seems as though there are at least a few folks who are making their blogs pay for themselves, and the rest of us are managing somehow. Would it be nice to get a monthly payment for some ads? Maybe. It would depend on the conditions. [instapundit]
• The discussion about Backlinking is still going on over at Flutterby, and Dan doesn't have a solution, either. But he hasn't hit on the second idea I was pondering, which is to use the google APIs to see who's linking to a page on my server. It's not a perfect solution, but I think it would let me avoid some of the heavy-lifting that's got Dan stumped. The only problem is that it means a longer lag-time, and doesn't work if your pages look like they're dynamically generated.
• Open-source evangelist Eric S. Raymond has entered the world of blogs recently with his experimental Armed and Dangerous which contain meaty essays so far reflecting his libertarian bent. It was inevitable [that] terrorism would become bad performance art posted Wednesday morning inquires into the troubled mind of Minnesota's finest art-school reject and the 'back-to-zero' culture which spawned him. [Reed, via Doc]
• Columnist Andrew Sullivan Bites Paper; Paper Bites Back. Another blogger losing his job over what he wrote on his blog. But he's a big boy and was taking on the New York Times. [instapundit]
• OJR article: News by the People, for the People. Another bloggers vs. newsies article. Reasonable reading if you're still interested. [scripting]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 19, 2002     May 19 in History

• Note that I'm also puttting together a collection of all the links at a Sexual Abuse at St. John's page.
• St. John's Abbey faces new lawsuit. Fr. Dunstan Moorse is accused in the new suit, and there's more information about Fr. Cosmos Dahlheimer. [some guy]
• St. Cloud Diocese to revise sex-abuse policy. If I remember right, St. John's Abbey doesn't report to the diocese, since monasteries are handled differently than parishes, but I'm not sure of the heirarchy anymore. [strib]
• Sins of a Father: 'Sauna Kids' Abuse - More on the abuses of Fr. Richard Eckroth.
• St. John's scandal shows need for legal reform, abuse victims say (MPR News)
• St. John's Abbey: Accused priest continued working after 1980s allegation
• Linkup's Links for Abuse Survivors
• Poynter.org - Clergy Abuse Tracker is a weblog exclusively covering clergy abuse.
• St. John's runs the Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute (ISTI).
• Abbot transferred accused priest to school, papers show. Abbot Jerome Theisen, who died in 1995, indicated in a letter that he knew about allegations against Moorse before sending him to Benilde-St. Margaret High School in St. Louis Park in the late 1980s.
• 3rd abuse lawsuit emerges against St. John's Abbey monk. Fr. Dunstan Moorse again.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 18, 2002     May 18 in History

• The Instapundit got into a long discussion about interracial marriages. Some interesting stuff in there. Unions between blacks and whites -- England and the US compared (pdf) is a good study to go with the commentary by the InstaPundit. [instapundit]
• United Press International: Analysis: White prof finds he's not. How white are blacks? How black are whites? In the US, it turns out there's a pretty big division. That's not the case in other countries. [instapundit]
• Risking Limbs for Height, and Success, in China - I don't worry much about height when looking for a girlfriend - but then I'm not chinese, I guess. I am a little intimidated when a gal is taller than I am, but since I'm 6'5", that's a pretty rare occurance.
• Forget The Movies, Couples Go More Exotic. Apparently tittie bars are the hot new date destination in Cleveland. [fark!]
• The Cyborgasmatrix. Another high-tech sex-doll. Only six-thousand clams. [fark!]
• meatmarket.com is a Salon story about online personals. It also talks about advertising and marketing. Apparently SWM geek, 37 seeks... anyone just won't cut it in today's market. [daypop]
• Davezilla's Men's Glossary and Miss Weeza's Women's Glossary. Helpful! [davezilla]
• Nerve's Sex Advice from Our Intern's Mom for the gals. Train him early or dump him fast.
• Ladies, do you know how to Roll your own tampons? Well, now you do. [boing boing]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 17, 2002     May 17 in History

• Welcome to all the folks looking at the Mac Keys page who got here from slashdot.
• Answers to technical interview questions. I don't like this sort of question in an interview, partly because the people who ask this sort of question seldom give you time to think about your answer, and partly because I've encountered too many that were just "do you know the right trick" questions. They're not bad brain-teasers for programmers, though.
• Flickering Borders: A History of Finite Economic Globalization Responding to the onslaught of such legal corporate evasions, governments are abandoning corporate taxation and regulation. It's an interesting article that I found when I started thinking about how I buy books and CDs from all over the world. I'd probably be buying more foreign DVDs were it not for the region protection. And I don't even blink when someone suggests that I do some work for a foreign corporation. It's just easy enough to cross borders that I don't worry about it. The biggest hassle is that some countries make it more difficult to enforce a contract across borders.
• The May MNHPVA meeting included show and tell of Howard Heikes' Amazing Folding Recumbent. That's a cool 'bent.
• The Sol Packing List looks like a pretty good guide to packing for travel.
• Sears pays $2 billion to buy Land's End. Crud! I'm very worried about this, since I've been buying stuff from Land's End for a few years, and I'll probably start getting spam from Sears, and I won't be surprised to see some of the large & tall (I need both) sizes I shop at Land's End for go away. L.L. Bean was also approached and refused to sell out. Guess they'll be getting more of my business over time. [google news]
• Apparently these guys aren't getting Acapulco Gold... Medical Marijuana researchers "bummed" about poor pot quality. [some gal]
• Choking at the Bowl - Why do men have trouble urinating at ballparks? By Bryan Curtis. Turns out there's a class you can take to learn to pee in public. Or you could use the "drink enough beer that you just don't care" method....
• This is war! Should the computer industry protect Hollywood from digital theft? The guns are drawn.. Gateway and others vs. the RIAA. From two weeks in the future, due to the vagaries of print publishing, coincidentally enough.
• Congress divided over plan to arm pilots. Looks like it's breaking pretty cleanly along party lines. [strib]
• Ventura signs telemarketing restrictions into law, but sadly, it doesn't start until the first of the year. [strib]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 16, 2002     May 16 in History

• Last night was the St. Paul Saints pre-season opener. The day's picks are later than usual not because I had a hangover, but because I've been working since 7 since I didn't get things done yesterday evening while I was watching baseball. Oh, and the Saints lost 7-2.
• ESPN presents the 10 biggest cheaters in baseball. Someone had to point it out, I guess. [fark!]
• Former owner's son working on bid for Twins. I don't really know much about Clark Griffith, but I understand he's a baseball person, and I'd like to have a baseball person owning the Twins. [strib]
• College team puts hot dog vendor at third. Now he's batting .320. [fark!]
• More on St. John's: St. John's Abbey let priest keep post after allegation. More details about Fr. Alan Tarlton and Fr. Richard Eckroth. [strib]
• '94 report: Restrict this priest (Eckroth). Once again, it sounds like the Abbey was covering things up in the 80s and early 90s, but is dealing with the issue now. Better late than never, I guess.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 15, 2002     May 15 in History

• 
• Crosshairs and pigeonholes points out that character shows when you've got a gun pointed at you. Compare the reactions of Israel and Iraq when threatened.
• Speaking of guns, this Star Tribune Editorial criticizes John Ashcroft for upholding the second amendment, among other things. They seem to have forgotten entirely about US v. Emerson (or here), which stated that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. More from last October in this piece from National Review, and from my picks for June 19, 2000 [strib]
• The Radical Amendment from the Wall St. Journal. Notice the wording he quotes from the Violence Policy Center. Notice the similarity with the Star Tribune editorial. [instapundit]
• The Op-Ed's Hidden Agenda discusses the tendency of press releases from various groups to appear in newspapers as opinion or editorial pieces with minimal rewriting. Think that applies to the Strib Editorial I pointed at? I do. [instapundit]
• The individual right to bear arms from the Washington Times. [endwar]
• Hidden cameras to monitor aircraft passengers because, apparently, those of us who aren't flying are staying on the ground because we're afraid of the danger. Well, I just don't want to put up with the hassle. And now they're giving me another reason not to fly. It's not as if I do much that's camera-worthy while cooped up in a flying bus, but I just don't like being watched all the time. [daypop]
• PapaScott is feeling less safe in Germany because of recent events. I dunno. I felt a lot less safe in European countries where the only people with obvious guns were the cops. But maybe that was due to the fact that it was 1980, and those countries were all on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
• Wanna steal an identity? There's a simple solution: ID thieves mine for gold on jail sites. Become a criminal (in more ways than one)! [boing boing]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 14, 2002     May 14 in History

• We'll start with a long entry from Jim. I started it by pointing him at coverage of some protests in Ireland which he hadn't heard about. He took it from there. The link that started it and Jim's commentary:
  • I think the term "anti-globalization" is a misnomer, but it's widely used to expaling protests like the ones that recently happened in Dublin's "Reclaim the Streets" demos.
  • Billy Bragg attempted to sum up the aims of this movement in his song "NPWA" - No Power without Accountability.
  • The Irish Independent has lots of info on what happened and the resulting investigation.
  • I actually have some respect for the Irish Gardai - simply because it's a police force that made a conscious decision to be an unarmed force. That in and of itself isn't significant except that they made that decision in the middle of a bloody civil war (both sides agreed that the Gardai would not be targets).
  • Not being armed with guns doesn't justify abusing truncheons, however, and the reports (even in mainstream media) clearly show abuse.
  • It's also worth checking out IndyMedia Ireland for ongoing coverage (and more pictures and video)
• 
• Man claims police abuse. Sounds pretty bad if true. But the Minneapolis police have had this sort of problem before.
• Three alarm fire destroys auto body shop just 7 blocks from me. [strib]
• Restrictions don't confine priests to abbey; several continue to travel, but only for business purposes. There's also updates about other parts of the story. [strib]
• Legislature bypasses bill to extend lawsuit rights for sex abuse victims this time, but the bill will be back. The change? Allowing civil suits for sexual abuse of a minor until the victim reaches age 35, rather than the current standard of age 24.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 13, 2002     May 13 in History

• Microsoft's Cash Woes. $40 billion (4E10) in the bank, and that's a problem? Apparently so. I should have such problems.
• Microsoft convicted of software piracy. Oh, that's a real shame. Perhaps some of that $40 billion can go to pay the fines, easing their troubles. [cam]
• States Call Microsoft Out on Music because Microsoft plays music within IE using Windows Media Player, rather than the application the user chose. Hey, there's a simple solution. Get a Mac. [some guy]
• Telemarketing foe wins $5,000 in lawsuit. Cool. [some guy]
• Ex-Scientologist Collects $8.7 Million In 22-Year-Old Case. Someone's actually beaten the Church of Scientology in court. [fark!]
• Families of 11 dead illegals to sue U.S. because they died in the desert after getting lost. Perhaps the border patrol should mark the paths into America more clearly? Oh wait, they have. They're called roads. [fark!]
• RGB Color Harmonizer Selecting colors for a website, for your bathroom remodel? Make certain they're at least somewhat compatible. See what matches your bright orange (255,128,0) shag carpeting. [Reed]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 12, 2002     May 12 in History

• Just a random thought while eating breakfast yesterday: Some people don't think eggs are vegetarian food because they're baby chickens (even unfertilised eggs, which most commercial ones are, as far as I know). Some of those same people believe abortion is okay, because a fetus isn't a human. Contradiction?
• Don't read The Tabasco Challenge unless you're strong of stomach. It made me laugh, but so did Tim, talking about making puke angels. You have been warned. [TheWVSR]
• Chocolate Butt-Plugs! Don't Eat Batteries! [TheWVSR]
• Rotten.com is the soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see. A blog for sick bastards. Speaking of which, did you know that sickbastard.org is still available? Well, for a while.
• A very Bad Tattoo. [davezilla]
• Sexy tree too much for some Westside neighbors. 20 feet? Yeah, that's a bit much.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 11, 2002     May 11 in History

• Sensational bribery scandal roared through Minneapolis City Hall in the 1920s. A little history to consider when thinking about current political scandals. [strib]
• CityLiving announces 5.99 percent interest rate for first-time homebuyers in Minneapolis. The only catch is that it's only for homes up to $175,591, which is about $50,000 short of what most houses I've looked at cost.
• 'Do Not Call' bill sent to governor. It's a start, I guess.[strib]
• CSS Browser Support: Basic Concepts. Contains all the compatibility information you could want. This one's worth bookmarking if you're building web pages using CSS. [zeldman]
• The other day, I realized that video-games that have high-score boards reward risky behavior. For example, on a computer game of hearts which plays just one round (four hands), if you shoot the moon (take all the scoring cards) twice and don't get clobbered too badly on the other two hands, you'll probably end up on the high-score board. So the best strategy is to try and shoot the moon every time. That's very different from real life, where you only want to attempt to shoot the moon when you've got a reasonable chance because when you fail, you've got a huge score (which is bad) and end up losing the game. On a video game, when you lose, you just drop another quarter, same as if you'd won. The only difference is that your name won't be on the high-score board, which it won't unless you engage in the risky behavior of shooting the moon.
  
  Is there some larger point here? I don't know. I just found it interesting that you want to use a completely different strategy against computer games because the rewards are different.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 10, 2002     May 10 in History

• I've made my Favorites page available on the site. The morning reading part of it, anyhow. The references I use will probably get their own section someday, too.
• Women accuse St. John's Abbey priest of abuse. Another person I know, this time one of the victims. Sigh. [strib]
• Doc is here in Minneapolis and can't get a decent net connection from his hotel. I'm pretty surprised, since I'd bet he's staying somewhere downtown, and my experience downtown is that there were a lot of open wireless networks I could hop onto with my laptop last summer. Maybe they've been closed down since then, or maybe his hotel is a faraday shield.
• Now's the time to act to Save internet radio!, or so I'm told (the original link seems to have been hijacked). The only bit of Internet Radio I listen to was the Rugby World Cup coverage in 1999. And I was listening to that from South Africa, since they had the best "signal". But all of the streaming audio (and video) formats that are out there today suck. I download a new version of RealPlayer about once a year, and within a week it's telling me I need a new version (if it hasn't corrupted itself to the point of not running). Windows Media Player is little better. QuickTime used to be pretty cool, but after paying for QuickTime Pro twice, and still getting bugged to upgrade (I did something that wiped out the registration -- I don't know what it was, nor do I especially care anymore), I'll just sit here in silence.
• The Top Ten New Copyright Crimes per Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting. Is this guy smoking crack, or what?
• The Plain Truth About Piracy from someone hurt by it. The MacNN Forums : Ambrosia license code system update discussion. People feel pretty strongly about the issue. It's not unrelated, but Ambrosia's getting screwed a lot harder than the media companies are, and doing a lot less to screw the consumer.
• U.S. now backs individual right to own firearms and Justice Dept: Gun Rights Protected. Good news for freedom! The justice department is finally saying, that gun ownership is an individual right, rather than a collective right (as in a militia). The only surprising bit is that they're finally admitting this. All rights are individual. [google news]
• Treasury secretary warns about government default on national debt unless Congress extends the government's credit limit. Or maybe just spend less money? Nah, where's the fun in that. Seriously, doesn't it seem a little strange that when the government's credit cards get full, they just extend their own limit? Would your spending habits be responsible if you had that ability? I don't think I'd be able to resist the temptation for that long. I understand that changing the system at this point would probably mean a complete economic meltdown, but is it going to be easier to change in 5 years? Or 25? [fark!]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 9, 2002     May 9 in History

• The St. Paul Saints play the first exhibition game of their tenth season a week from yesterday. I'm feeling ready for another season of baseball.
• Hard-core Twins die-hards are more than fans -- they're fanatics. I can understand the appeal. I just happen to prefer outdoor, minor-league baseball over the Metrodome. [strib]
• Our friend Greg sold a song for use in a commercial. I haven't seen the commercial yet, but adweek.com has nominated it for one of the Best spots in March. The song Me and my Dog is available to stream on line at MP3.com. Greg isn't in the Auto Body Experience (pictured left), but he used to be in the Crops with Scott, who leads the ABE. And I'm ready to watch bands playing outside again as soon as the weather cooperates. [Jim]
• As apartment vacancy rate climbs, landlords offer deals. Apparently the housing shortage here isn't quite so critical after all. [strib]
• Collegeville priest among suspects in sisters' '74 slayings. More bad news for St. John's Abbey. [strib]
• Blogspace Under the Microscope discusses something I noticed a couple days ago. There are a few blogs, disenchanted leading the way, which automatically link back to pages which link to them. It's not unlike a commenting system, except the person commenting needs a blog, too. I'm thinking about whether it might not be a cool thing to implement, but I can think of two completely different ways to do it, and haven't decided which I like better yet. [flutterby]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 8, 2002     May 8 in History

• 
• Kimchi is A Vegetable Semiconductor. How cool is that? Well, I guess it'd be cooler if you could still see the site. Apparently we've exceeded someone's bandwidth limit. Maybe it'll be back soon?
• Is beer better from a bottle or a can? Well, that depends. But the answer, and other things you might not have known about beer containers are in this article. [fark!]
• What the ... What is this Zorb thing? A 3 metre clear plastic hamster ball you put yourself (or others) into and then go rolling down a hill. According to the FAQ, nobody's thrown up in one yet. I think they're just not trying hard enough. [fark!]
• LEDhead is a Classic Electronic Handheld Game Simulator. LED Football on your Palm? Sure! [boing boing]
• Go on over to whatsbetter?com and rate some things. Eventually, they'll all be sorted into a continuum from good to bad. Maybe I should submit the glowing kimchi.[boing boing]
• Someone finally posted pictures from the 4/26 Minneapolis Critical Mass Ride - Count eight pictures down and you'll see Jim on his recumbent biking in the mass in front of the metrodome. Behind him on a yellow bicycle (the one with the basket) is Minneapolis City Council Member Dean Zimmerman (Green Party). [Jim]
• Mpls Bicycle Licensing - Public Hearing on Wednesday May 8, 1:30pm. They're looking to axe the law that makes registering your bike mandatory in Minneapolis. I'd be there, but I have to go see a man about a knee....
• I put together a little analysis of my April 2002 traffic. Almost 8% of the people who looked at the Magical Mac Keys page stuck around to look at something else.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 7, 2002     May 7 in History

• The church next door to me has started on their couple-month long project of tuckpointing all the block on the east side of the building. Not a huge problem, except that: 1 - they fire up their large air-compressor at 7am every weekday morning. If I'm not awake by then, it'll wake me up. 2 - they've got the alley on that side of the church blocked off, which means the buildings around the corner from me, who have parking back there (you can see it in the second picture), use the alley right next to my bedroom window to come home from the bars at 1:30 am. It's making for less sleep than I'm used to, and a week into the project, I'm starting to get cranky about it. But only six or seven more weeks to go!
• Fire Forces Thousands To Evacuate near Denver. Reed lives about four miles from where this is happening. Hope they manage to control it before the fire eats his house.
• Marketing Software When You Are a Small Company [scripting]
• XP Updates Start to P.O. Users. Is your hard drive big enough to handle Trustworthy Computing? [daypop]
• Ink imbroglio: Printer firms vs. recyclers. No real news here, but I worked for LaserMaster, where Mel repeatedly cited the "razor-blade" model. Give away the handles, and make your money selling the blades. [fark!]
• Paranoia, stupidity and greed ganging up on the public. Dan Gillmor takes on the newspaper, movie and music industries. [daypop]
• The common thing about these last two stories is what I've heard called lock-in. Companies want some way to force customers to keep coming back to them for products. Free markets will usually find a way around lock-in, and astute companies don't bet the ranch on their ability to keep every single one of their existing customers. Making a good product that people won't ever want to give up is probably a better idea.
• Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2002 starts about now. I'm not there. I hope someone else will put together a report on what happens.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 6, 2002     May 6 in History

• 
• Yesterday I wrote a short example of programming. It's meant to be a quick introduction to the folks who ask me about programming. I usually can't explain it very well, so I figured I'd explain by example, and since I had a little work to do on the site anyhow, I could write it up as I went.
• There's a lot going on in the Twin Cities today. The biggest events are the May Day Parade and Festival and the Cinco de Mayo Festival
• Experts look at abbey for model in handling sex abusers. Like I've been saying, St. John's Abbey keeps the monks around and isolates them from the larger community, treating them over time. It's a better solution than dumping them out into the world with their problems. The only real problem I have with the handling of abuse at St. John's is that it took them so long to admit the problems publicly. [strib]
• Bottom vs. top posting and quotation style on Usenet. All about how email should be formatted. Bottom posting/top quoting is the right thing, but it's amazing how much people will talk about something like this.
• Boxes and Arrows: Taking the 'you' out of user. Design a website for a persona. A specific person you've made up in your mind.
• Are there Clusters in the web? Sure. Do I fit in any of them? Damfino. Some of the other groups are well-defined, and I read blogs from them. But I suspect, that just as in real-life, I'm that strange guy standing somewhat apart from all the cliques.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 5, 2002     May 5 in History

• 
• The Transformation of Individual Rights, by Tibor R. Machan touches on a subject I've been meaning to write an essay about. It's not exactly how I'd have said it, but it's close enough, and it's written. It's the sort of thinking that leads me to say that taxation is not only theft, but violent theft and to call George W. Bush a socialist. [endwar]
• The Intrusion Explosion. William Safire tears into Bush over privacy issues.
• Threat to Privacy in a Driver's License. Who'd figure Phyllis Schafly and Nadine Strossen would be co-authoring a letter to the editor?
• Bill would push driver's license with chip. Y'know, I've been pondering getting rid of my car for quite a while. I've been using it a lot to drive to work in the suburbs, but I don't like working in the suburbs. The other use it gets is a drive to mom's once in a while and a once-a-year trip to Detroit. In exchange for all this convenience, I pay almost $100 a month in insurance, whether the car moves or not. But it's when I hear of stories like this (and the accompanying mental image of the SS officer saying Papieren, Bitte!), especially when they want to use a driver's license for other purposes, that I think more about just living without a car and the associated license. [daypop]
• Selling the Saudis in a 'Favorable' Light. The Saudi government is trying to spend more money to distract Americans from the real source of the terrorism last September. [fark!]
• God Re-Floods Middle East. You want to keep running each other over with tanks and strapping dynamite to yourselves, killing women and children in pursuit of your extremist political positions, that's just fine. Let's see how well you carry out your murderous agendas under 800 feet of water. [instapundit]
• Everyone Was Wrong About McCain-Feingold! - We all missed a giant loophole in the law. By Mickey Kaus. Huh! [instapundit]
• Tom's Truetype embedding-enabler is a useful thing. So why are Agfa Monotype and ITC harassing him over it? It doesn't break any copy protection, and fixes a problem caused by the default setting in Fontographer, which is probably the most popular font-creation software out there.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 4, 2002     May 4 in History

• The Interactive U of M Map lets you find buildings, service, and transportation at the U of M. I'm not even a student there, but it works really slick. It'd be neat (and a lot of work) for someone to do this on a larger scale. (What Jim doesn't know is that we're working on our own interactive map for Marcy-Holmes. But it's a lot of work.) [Jim]
• No one's home at governor's residence. State Attorney General Mike Hatch has said that Jesse can't close it completely down, but that's basically what's happened. But the mansion is turning into a symbol of dysfunctional government in Minnesota, and I think Jesse's overplayed his hand by trying to completely shut it down. The house doesn't belong to him. He's free to move out, but it should still be open to the public for tours and for ceremonies. [strib]
• Xcel to convert 2 Twin Cities power plants to gas. Neighborhoods downwind of the Riverside plant have been asking for that for years. It'll be 2007 before the conversion, but it's nice to see Xcel moving in the right direction. [strib]
• Ernie's BlindDateBlog is up and running. It's interesting and a little spooky to watch. [evhead]
• A step-by-step tutorial telling you how to make your own porn. [flutterby]
• May 18 & 19 (just two weeks away) are the Fourth Annual Masturbate-A-Thon. Time to stock up? The Masturbate-A-Thon Weekend over at Good Vibrations. [flutterby]
• EmptyBottle.org is a blog by a Canadian living in Korea who's fond of an occasional drink that Jim thought I'd like. (Nice pictures of Sorak San National Park today too) [Jim]
• KMart sells pinball machines?!? For that matter, KMart's still in business?!? [librarian]
• The Autonomous Beer-Opening Robot It would seem a good idea to add a cigarette lighter and a willingness to listen to the sob stories of patrons. [Reed, via Daily Rotten]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 3, 2002     May 3 in History

• The BBC has a decent rundown of May Day in pictures - demonstrations and marches from around the world. [Jim]
• But May Day never really caught on in the US. Perhaps as Stephen Green suggests, it's because we were too busy getting rich to bother.
• Watching the people come in on last Sunday when Dave Winer linked to my movie reviews has been prompting me to think about (and start writing) some more traffic-analysis stuff. I've got pretty good information about where people are coming from to get to my site, but once they're within the site, I wanna know how they're getting around, since I KNOW my navigation within the site needs some work. There's too much stuff that you can only get to via the full sitemap... Ponder ponder ponder....
• I made a collection of all the images I posted during April 2002.
• So I'd read Fixing Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE. I finally got around to changing Dave's Picks to XHTML 1.0. Took about 35 minutes to get the main template done, and I'll be slowly grazing through the rest of the pages. If you spot something that's broken, please drop me a note. [zeldman]
• CSS Bugs in IE5/5.1 Mac. I'd like to see 'em all fixed. Yesterday if possible, of course. [inflatable sheep]
• Clergy accused of sexual abuse remain at St. John's Abbey. Which is a Good Thing. As Abbot Klassen says, When they are here, they are in our community, and the public doesn' t have to worry about what is happening in the larger community. [strib]
• Battleground God checks the consistancy of your beliefs. It's an interesting test. [flutterby]
• Simpsons Could End - D'ohh! [google news], followed by Cowabunga! The Simpsons not ending after all. Millions of geeks breathe a sigh of relief. [fark!]
• You Deserve A Month Off. This article explains at least a part of why I started my own business. As strange as it may seem, in my case, it's meant more time off. Of course there's no money coming in when I'm not working, but that's not always bad, either. I would have been perfectly happy working for a company who'd let me work a 24-30 hour work week (for an appropriate percentage of full-time pay). But none of them wanted to go for it, so now I'm independant. [daypop]

Weather in Minneapolis for May 2, 2002     May 2 in History

• It's May Day. It's a holiday to some. Jim had a bunch of suggestions, so I'm basically turning things over to him for today.
• Workmen, let your watchword be: No compromise! Cowards to the rear! Men to the front! The die is cast. The first of May, whose historic significance will be understood and appreciated only in later years, has come. -Albert Spies, May 1886
• May 1st is May Day - The International Labor Holiday. Indymedia Chicago points out that Chicago is the birthplace of Mayday. (which is celebrated just about everywhere but the US).
• The anarchist information service has a longer piece on May Day's labor/anarchist history.
• In pagan tradition it's known as Beltane - more on that history from witchvox.com
• Workers Online connects has a piece correctly connecting the pagan holidy to the modern labor holiday.
• Here in Minneapolis a lot is happening TC Indymedia has a good listing of events.
• In the Heart of the Beast May Day Parade is the biggest event.
• And some added things I've found this morning, making it more of a hybrid than we'd initially planned.
• In other labor news, 3,000 Conn. Carpenters to Strike beginning today. [google news]
• Police, Activists Clash On May Day around the world. [google news]
• London on May Day Alert. Among other things, there was a Critical Mass ride there earlier today. [google news]
• Speaking of Critical Mass, Critical Mass riders promote bicycle use in city is a story about last Friday's Critical Mass ride in Minneapolis.

Weather in Minneapolis for May 1, 2002     May 1 in History