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| Sunday, July 2, 2006 |
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Patriotic question 
On the continuing approach of 2.whatever
| | As a veteran of many tecgh wars in which developers treated users as quarry, Dave is right to bust "versus" thinking by businesses (or open source projects) recruiting users in their competitive fights. |
| | Reading his post sent me looking for something I had written on the same subject. Without time to look farther, Time to Grow Up isn't far off, and speaks indirectly to the generational issue Dave brought up as well. It was written more than fourteen years ago, in January 1992. |
Better than none
Fly wide
| | FlightView tells you which airports have delays. Also how delayed a particular flight may be. Watch to see how much SFO turns yellow or red. |
The High Art of Trolling
| | In political terms the blogosphere is like white noise, insistent and meaningless, like the wash of Pacific surf I can hear most days. But MoveOn.Org and Daily Kos have been hailed as the emergent form of modern politics, the target of excited articles in the New York Review of Books. |
| | Beyond raising money swiftly handed over to the gratified veterans of the election industry both MoveOn and Daily Kos have had zero political effect, except as a demobilizing force. |
| | The effect on writers is horrifying. Talented people feel they have produce 400 words of commentary every day and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which turn rapidly to slush. They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off , drifting zeppelins of inanity. |
I feel safer already
| | ARLINGTON, Va., June 29, 2006 The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism. |
| | Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project entitled "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information. |
| | "It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what¹s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns," Ulicny said. |
Clear the room. He's teaching gun safety.
| | Best part about this video is the audience reaction when he brings out the second gun. |
Raising Neutraility to Greater Heights of Confusion
Keeping up with everything
Late Pet du Jour, #4: Sparky
| | Looks like Kent Newsome and I will both be running down our pet rolls. |
| | Yesterday Kent wrote, Hey Doc- how about some photos to go along with the stories? Well, Kent, here ya go. Above is the first and probably the best in the series. If I could find pictures of Fizzy and Fuzzy (pets #s 1 and 2, featured Friday) or Kim (featured yesterday), I would have run them. Alas, if they exist, they're packed in the garage of our new house, along with the other 99.7% of our belongings. |
| | And hey, I just found one more here, featuring my sister and myself in the same wheelbarrow with a now full-grown Sparky. This is in front of a sign spelling Wanigan "Wanegan." Also featured in that picture are Mom and cousins Ron and Sue Apgar. |
| | Sparky was a gift to me from my father on my 8th birthday: July 29, 1955. This was a year after our last dog, Kim, was killed by a car. |
| | Sparky was six weeks old, born on June 17. I think I remember that because Pop's birthday was July 17 and Mom and Pop's aniversary was August 17. I think Pop chose Sparky because he had the same coloring as Kim: white with a black head and highlights of brown around he eyes. He also had a black spot on his back. |
| | Neutering male dogs was hardly ever done in those days, so naturally I spent a lot of time chasing after Sparky, just like I did chasing after Kim. Unlike Kim, however, Sparky would come eventually, but only when Mom called him. Although I loved Sparky like a brother, he was more of a mama's dog. That's probably also because Mom was better at feeding him. |
| | With me and Sparky, fetch was a game played without props. No balls or sticks. Just boy and dog, where the former fetched the latter. He'd take off, and play hard-to get. I'd try to fetch him. Sometimes he'd let me get him, and other times he'd keep running away. |
| | The whole time we had Sparky, I had a fear about him getting hit by a car. Partly that was because Kim was killed by a car. But mostly it was because Sparky, like most dogs, he had no sense about cars at all. |
| | Sure enough, my worst fears were fulfilled on Labor Day 1957, just two summers after we got Sparky. Somebody opened the front door in the evening and Sparky ran out and into the woods. It was dark, and past bedtime. My cousin Ron (featured in the last picture linked above) and my father went out into the woods with flashlights, looking for Sparky. |
| | Not much later, we heard the screech of tires out on highway 549 (now named Brick Boulevard). Pop and Ron didn't return and my sister Jan and I went to bed. I remember hearing Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy" on the radio and laying there, fearing the worst, waiting to hear Pop and Ron return home. |
| | When we woke up in the morning, Pop and Ron broke the bad news to us. They had found Sparky dead by the side of 549, and that they had already buried him, next to Kim in the clearing behind Grandma and Aunt Ethel's woodshed. When I asked why they didn't let us see him, as they had with Kim, Pop just said it was best to bury Sparky right after they found him. It mustn't have been easy, since it was the middle of the night. |
| | As we had with Kim, we surrounded Sparky's grave with shells and covered it with moss. |
| | When we drove home the next day from the Wanigan, to return for another school year in Maywood, I kept looking into the back of our Ford station wagon, to where Sparky used to lay while we drove, imagining he was still there. Or that his ghost was there. |
| | Losing Kim was bad, but losing Sparky was by far the worst thing that happened to me as a kid. I remember having an ache in my heart for many months after that, and often dreaming that Sparky was alive again, and we were chasing each other around the back yard. |
| | I also remember developing a belief — one that I still hold — that having pets is a mixed blessing for kids, since so many pets die. And so many of their deaths are awful. Sparky and Kim were not the only car victims I knew. Grandma and Aunt Ethel's dog Duffy was killed by a car in front of Aunt Grace's place, as I recall. So was their own dog, Duffy's brother Mickey. Before that they had a German shepherd named Sargeant, who also died. Not sure how. All were buried just to the right of this picture here. |
| | My North Carolina cousins had a series of small collie-like dogs, mostly named Mugs, who tended to live longer than the New Jersey dogs I knew. But I'm not sure, since I think there are four or five Mugs buried in the pet graveyard on their family spread. And that's not counting their dogs with other names. (Such as their rotweiler, Echo, who was friends with a pet duck until one day Echo ate it. Or so the story went. Maybe one of them will weigh in with the details.) |
| | In those days (1950s and '60s) neutering animals was a relatively rare thing. I'm sure Kim and Sparky both would have lived longer if they hadn't been horny all the time. (That they loved to hunt bitches, literally, did not become apparent to me until I revisited their behavior from the perspective of my teen years.) |
| | Anyway, there are happier stories of a few subsequent pets. But hearing "Tammy" still makes me sad. |
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