Recently in tidbits Category

Listen: This American Life's 494: Hit the Road

View and Listen: Photos and more audio from Andrew Forsthoefel's walking trip across America on Transom.org.

View: Travel around various places with the Moon, by Leonid Tishkov.

Chew: Paul Miller takes a road trip of a very different type: He eschews the internet in all its forms for a year.

Chew and debate: Vanessa Veselka asks why there are no female road narratives in literature and popular culture. Commenters disagree with her and give examples of their own road trips or good fictional road narratives.

Living Small on Battening Down the Hatches, while Charlotte has a freezer full of pork, I have a freezer full of lamb (from the OC Fair).

Wendell Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front poem:

"Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years." - Wendel Berry, exerpt

Anina goes to the TechCrunch Beijing Disrupt and comes home to write Girls in TechCrunch

From a photographer living in Iraq, 5 Tips for Safely Photographing a Dangerous Event

Brian Fling has decided it is time to write Book #2:

"At the heart of all of these transitions is mobile. I've seen it have a transformative impact on some of the biggest and oldest companies on the planet. I've seen geniuses become dumbfounded. I've seen great intentions fail miserably.

I want to explore and share those stories. I do not talk want to talk about the virtues of native apps or HTML5 apps - or any other irrelevant discussion that revolves around the technology of today. Mobile is no more about the technology, as the printing press was about paper.

Instead this book will be as much a manifesto of 21st century experiences as it is a guide to using century old tools to solve the problems of today, even the ones we may not be able to define yet."

@Jyri tweeted: "If I had an angel credo it'd be to invest in quirky solutions to big problems: e.g. Valkee treats depression with light http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8877185/A-bright-word-in-the-ear-for-those-with-winter-blues.html"

Last but not least, Timo Arnall posts Three films on communication and networks. It is worth it to watch the videos/films.

Three thoughts floating around my head this morning while eating breakfast and reading the weekly Seal Beach Sun:

1) For all of my gushing two days ago, after spending some time with the Nokia N950 the camera is very good but not great like the N8. The resolution, color, and clarity on the N8 is definitely superior but the N950 has a nice look to the photos that I do like.

2) At Mobile 2.0's end of conf cocktails, I had a conversation with Mike Rowehl of Mobile Monday SV and Churn labs about wanting to develop for the mobile web or native apps. Mike said that the stop up on developing for the mobile web for many devs was monetization. I made a joke that I was satisfied as long as I wasn't living in my car or had moved back home at 40-something. We both laughed, but I could see that monetization meant something else to him entirely.

The conversation keeps coming back to me when thinking about the mobile web: why right now devs prefer to create native apps and what in the heck does monetization really mean any way?

Does monetization mean that I can be self-supporting as an app developer and not have to be taking on clients (my definition)? Does it mean the dev can use the money to buy a house and hire a few employees? Does it mean turning the app(s) into a full blown business? A business that then gets sold to a larger business for a large sum and then you get to join the big cats in Los Gatos?

What thinkest thou?

3) Once again the Seal Beach Sun's Crime Log has produced a pick of the litter winner this morning:

"Monday, Sept 5, 2011 - Rossmoor - Suspicious Person or Circumstances - 10:55am - Kensington Road - The caller requested a patrol check for a man wearing a hoodie who was walking on the Gertrude side of the elementary school. The caller said there has been a recent increase in crimes, including a robbery involving men in dark hoodies. The caller that it was suspicious for someone to be wearing a hoodie at all in September."

Now before you get all upset about hooding profiling, please remember that this is September in Southern California, our hottest month of the year with temps in the 90s to 100s and higher. And the caller was right, anyone wearing a hoodie with the hood up in 90+ temps is cruising for a minor Darwin Award in the heat stroke category.

Wed 04.27.11 - Many thoughts have crowded into my head today and then fled just as fast as the miasma of jetlag has descended on my brain.

A few of the fleeting thoughts that I either can recall right now or have repeated on my brain:

1) I really do want to get back to daily photo and/or text blogging. I want to reinstate the multiple year daily blogging that got disrupted in February. One of the things I thought about while in London, is how much I do love blogging and that this is my place. It is time to reclaim it. Please encourage me.

2) The complete disconnect in big big big companies between the executives and the teams that actually do the work astounds me. Last week in London, I heard a true account of one Big Company Making a Big Contract with another Big Tech Company of which it is due to be executed contractually by this June, yet the Big Company to do the work decided to lay off the workers to do the work a few months ago and then when the executives realized that without the workers that the work wouldn't get done and they would be in breach of contract, much LOLs followed. Ha ha ha. F*cking Executive Idiots. Ha ha ha.

3) So Nokia + MicroSquash deal got signed in the workers' blood this last week. Hope the 7,000 employees that are to be laid off aren't the workers who are to actually do the work to make the contract happen, like in tidbit #2 above. Wouldn't that be LOLs?

4) If a certain Mr. Elop is to wield the hatchet, hopefully he will lay off the multiple layers management between him and the teams that do the work. Wouldn't it be big time LOLs if he keeps all the management that have throttled innovation & execution the last five years and lays off the teams that actually do the work?

5) In between bouts of jetlag brain, I did a big spring clean of my house and found the Angry Bird furry slingshot toy that Adrian Parker won for me at CTIA. Adrian, I will mail it you tomorrow.

6) Glad to hear that folks are rescuing Delicious from a certain death by starvation, hope that some passionate social photographers with $$$ will rescue Flickr from Yahoo neglect.

Photo of Ms. Jen reflected in the seat back entertainment screen in hour ten of the plane ride between London and Los Angeles on Tues 04.26.11 with her Nokia N8.

The internets are on FIRE with rumors, rumors, and more rumors about what will happen on Friday Feb 11, 2011 at 10am GMT when Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, gives what may be either the usual dull quarterly report to the investor style humans or a completely non-dull throw down and strategy session. Folks are certainly talking.

The Rumors start...

Engadget on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest 'burning platform' memo?

All Things Digital on Nokia's Stephen Elop Didn't Start the Fire-But His "Burning Platform" Certainly Lights One

And then the real fire gets lit:

WSJ on Nokia, Microsoft Talk Cellphones

All Things Digital on Nokia Appears on Verge of Adopting Windows Phone, as MeeGo, Android Fade From Consideration

Google's Vic Gundotra weighs in: "#feb11 "Two turkeys do not make an Eagle"."

Engadget follows up with Google's Vic Gundotra on Nokia: 'Two turkeys do not make an Eagle' (updated)

Tomi Ahonen enters the fray swinging:

Mr. Ahonen on The Nokia CEO 'Burning Platform' memo at Engadget, doesn't ring true to my ears..

ReadWriteWeb summarizes Tomi in Former Nokia Exec Claims CEO's "Burning Platform" Memo a Hoax

Other prominent Mobile Bloggers come out with thoughts, opinion and a bit more gasoline to throw on the fire:

Ewan on That Nokia memo; How Nokia can still screw it up; and what I want to hear on Friday

Jay Montano on The Burning Platform Memo: Elop supposedly on transforming Nokia:

"Real or Not, I want MeeGo to have a frikkin chance to do what it has been planned to do. I don't want an either/or situation. I can't wait for most of the speculation to be resolved on Feb 11. Then wait and see what happens at MWC."

Ben Smith injects a bit of sanity in to the rumor brush fire with It doesn't matter if Nokia launches a Windows Phone...

The Rumors breed more Rumors, and a Wave of Humor breaks on Twitter:

@MattMiz: "Nokia stock up 14% on rumor that Elop plans new Antarctic HQ run by robot penguins running on LISP OS" ;)

Photo illustration #1: Meanwhile at Nokia HQ...

Photo illustration #2: Nuke from Orbit

@ChanseArrington: "Less than 36 hours until #elopocalypse = less than 36 hours left of binge drinking. #excited #scared #pumped #bringit"

Finally, Eric Zeman sums up my hopes on this matter in a most precise manner:
@phonescooper: "Dear @Nokia and @Microsoft: No. Just, no. Don't do it. DON'T. #dont"

Whatever the outcome of Friday's Capital Markets Strategy Report by Mr. Elop will be, this is the best press run up to an event that Nokia has held in years... almost Almighty Holy Jobs style press/marketing run up. A burning media platform, in word and deed. Good job, Mr. Elop!

Things happened today. Photos gotten taken, but not posted.

What I did do today is spend another 6-8 hours fiddling with VituralBox, Windows, calling Windows Customer Service, installing Linux on VirtualBox, attempting to install and test the various components of Qt on Linux and Mac, etc. Basically, a whole day on my computer setting up a dev environment. More on this later.

Here are some links to some interesting tidbits:

Small Surfaces on Is the phone the next Swiss Army Knife?:

"Fortunately, mobile phones don't get bigger when you install new software on them. But there's been a long-standing debate about the utility of strong-specific digital tools (e.g. the digital camera) and weak-general tools (the camera-phone)."

The LA Times on Engelmann oaks, better than beautiful:

"You don't have to be a descendant of one of the fathers of American botany to share in what De Fato recalls as his pleasure and amazement. The arboretum's grove of Quercus engelmannii, pictured above, is one of the last local stands of a native tree once so common to the foothills that an alternate common name is the Pasadena oak.

The first thing that strikes you upon reaching this group of roughly 200 trees is how much more animated it is by birds, butterflies and scampering lizards than the more cultivated parts of the garden.

The second is that it is drop-dead beautiful.

Better than beautiful. Engelmanns are the oak lover's oak."

Make your own DUCK BACON. Yes, Duck Bacon!
Camont on Duck Prosciutto-Charcutepalooza Challenge#1. My Duck Bacon.

Mobile:

Tech Crunch on Guest post: Symbian OS - one of the most successful failures in tech history

Qt Developer Blogs on Experimental packages for Symbian development on Linux

Qt Mobile Development Online Training

O'Reilly on HTML5 Mobile Web Development

Sarah Parameter on Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries

asymco on What has Android done for Apple?

HTML5:

Think Vitamin on 23 Essential HTML 5 Resources

Chris Heilmann on A call for quality HTML5 demo markup

Delicious:

Tech Crunch on Why Sunsetting Delicious Matters

Jeremy Keith on Home-grown and Delicious

Misc:

Userfocus on 7 myths about paper prototyping

FeldThoughts on Just Make it Faster

Quote of the Day:

"Wow! Assange cornered and detained, his bank account closed, Paypal refuses to accept donations from him and his lawyers are being harassed. All that mess for a broken condom?

In other news, the Bin Laden family is still wealthy."

- Anon, Comment #82, Boing Boing post on Assange arrested in Britain

More on the WikiLeaks' Julian Assange's arrest:

The Guardian's WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates : This is a great, big round up of live blogged links, excerpts, and commentary from The Guardian.

Mefi discusses Julian Assange Turns Himself In

Salon's Glenn Greenwald on The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Making Light on I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of people suddenly facepalmed and then were silent: Commenter #7, Steve C, "And in related news, the TSA will celebrate the Fourth Amendment."

Update on 12.08.10:

Evan Hanson in Wired on Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America: "Instead of encouraging online service providers to blacklist sites and writing new espionage laws that would further criminalize the publication of government secrets, we should regard WikiLeaks as subject to the same first amendment rights that protect The New York Times. And as a society, we should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights, not react like Chinese corporations that are happy to censor information on behalf of their government to curry favor."

I deem today to be UX Friday. For your reading pleasure:

Peter Merholz on The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design with the blockbuster quote being one of the in article headlines, "Ad agencies are the new music industry". Go read it.

Janet M. Six at UX Matters on "Going Mobile, Part II: When to Go Mobile | Reuse Your Web Design or Start from Scratch?"

Marek Pawlowski in UX Magazine on "Mobile User Experience Trends on the Horizon"

Luke W on "Different Approaches to Mobile App Design"

Zadie Smith reviews 'The Social Network' in Generation Why?: "How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg's generation--there are only nine years between us--but somehow it doesn't feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard's campus in the fall of 2003) that "I was there" at Facebook's inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect--like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in '60s Liverpool met John Lennon.

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better."

David Neary on The MeeGo Progress Report: A+ or D-?

Laurie on Why I really, really hate Instagram

Johnathan Stark on On the Popularity of Instagram: My big takeaways from this are:
- Define target market as narrowly as possible. One persona is ideal.
- Ruthlessly trim features until you have the concentrated essence of
the app. It's like reducing a sauce: you end up with less liquid, but
more intensity.
- Gorgeous design (icons, graphics, typography, etc) helps."

Dave Winer on I cheered for Bob Woodward when I read this: "The only way to get what we want is to make the stuff work the way we want it to work. We can't wait for Silicon Valley to do that for us, because they will never do it. It's not in their nature."

Mike Philips in Prospect Magazine on How multiculturalism fails immigrants: "Grouping people according to their "historical" cultural identity is both divisive and dangerous. Migration is about change, not ossification "

Cristiano Betta on My Thoughts on Hack Days: "The great thing though is that this promotes team work. At many Hack Days I see people work mainly in pairs or alone, because we all know it's a pain if you are in a team of 5 and you win ONE prize. Who is taking it home, who will eBay it, who put in the most effort in the hack, etc. I worked in a team of 4 this year at CharityHack and it was the best Hack Day fun I had in a while. I wish more Hack Days would somehow promote team work, either by prizes per team member or any other way."

Thoughts on Teabaggers, Groupthink, The God of the Burgess Shale, and for the Love of Blogging

1) In case you are like me and have spent more than a few hours wondering where all the Teabaggers were during the Bush-Cheney big government spend-a-thon, Mr. Taibbi answers a few of those questions in Tea & Crackers.

I am still in awe how most of those folks spent 2001-2009 asleep, only to wake up after the Obama inauguration. Odd but true.

2) For all the commentators who have been writing on Nokia's corporate culture and supposed Finnish 'groupthink', the Finns may be on to something bigger in the democracy department than we, individualism obsessed Americans, can even dream of, especially if they aren't afraid to combine research & risk with consensus.

3) Making Light on "The Secret Lives of Fossils": TNH's handmade rosary of fossils has landed in the Vatican Observatory's meteorite case. Go read all the links and the comments. Wonderful.

4) Lori Hylan-Cho receives the award for the Best Sentence in a Blog Post in 2010, even though 2010 is not over yet:

"I guess this also proves that this blog really is just a personal memory store for me, and not a mechanism for promoting my professional reputation through blowhardery."

I struggle greatly with the pressure that I should be daily/weekly writing a hard hitting professional posts to promote my reputation in mobile or web worlds when what I really want to do it post beautiful photos and blog about things that interest me today - be they professional, personal, ideas, whatever. I continue to feel strongly that this blog is both a canvas and a gallery.

Bravo to Lori for posting about what she loves rather than caving to the pressure to post professional blowhardery.

Reuters on Special Report: Welcome to Nokia, Mr Elop: "The company is six months past the point where things looked most hopeless, Linardos says. An injection of new blood that has been going on beneath the surface has helped to lift spirits. Just as long as everybody understands Nokia's in it for the long haul."

Yay! Andrew is back from his three week blog holiday and has a trifecta of articles on summer in Ptown, Terrorism "Humility and Humiliation", and Obama "Game On". If you have only a little time, read the Obama post.

Zombies and the political philosophy of Hobbes : Christian Thorne on "The Running of the Dead, Part 1"

Terry Gross' Fresh Air had two great interviews in the last week, go listen to the podcasts:
Ousted Evangelical Reflects On Faith, Future: "If you haven't changed your mind ever, pinch yourself, you may be dead."
Queen's Brian May Rocks Out To Physics, Photography

Restoring the Paradise that Saddam Destroyed: "Saddam Hussein drained the unique wetlands of southern Iraq as a punishment to the region's Marsh Arabs who had backed an uprising. Two decades later, one courageous US Iraqi is leading efforts to restore the marshes. Not even exploding bombs can deter him from his dream."

It is 12:41pm here in Seal Beach, California, socked in with the dreaded 'June Gloom', aka the Marine Inversion Layer, and it is chilly for a mid-summer day at 66F/18C and there is a bit of wind. The Sun has made no effort to come out for a visit. Hopefully, old Sol will burn the clouds soon.

In the meantime, here a few nice links for your Fourth of July reading enjoyement...

How America got its name: The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer's letter, and a pun

When Ringmann read this news, he was thrilled. As a good classicist, he knew that the poet Virgil had prophesied the existence of a vast southern land across the ocean to the west, destined to be ruled by Rome. And he drew what he felt was the obvious conclusion: Vespucci had reached this legendary place. He had discovered the fourth part of the world. At last, Europe's Christians, the heirs of ancient Rome, could begin their long-prophesied imperial expansion to the west.

Nick Patrick on Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

Reading David McCullough's 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?
The answer surprised me.
I'd always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn't yet diverged. That's not too surprising.
What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today's American accents than to today's British accents. While both have changed over time, it's actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.

The Tyburn Angling Society:

Nonetheless, in addition to a regular circuit of dinners, drinks, and fishing outings, the Tyburn Angling Society is committed to resurfacing the ancient stream -- still theirs to fish, they argue, by a never-repealed royal decree. "You could have people fishing by the river in the middle of Mayfair," Jim Bowdidge told the Evening Standard, "We would get the Wild Trout Trust to get the habitat right for small wild brown trout. Properly done, we could have salmon."

John Scalzi on Status Check, Re: USA:

The 234th birthday of the United States of America is a fine time to check in with one's self about how one feels about being a citizen of this country, so today's question: Am I proud to be an American?
I am. The United States, like so many things, is better as an idealized concept than it is as an actual entity, on account that the nation is made up of people, and while most people mean well, in a day-to-day sense they struggle with their ideals, which are often so inconvenient to their desires. And so, like a married family-values politician with a Craigslist personal ad, or a vegan Febreezing the apartment so no one will catch the smell of bacon, America often finds itself failing its own expectations for itself and others.

Last but not least, the quote of the day from Kevin Lawver:

Happy "Crap, We Lost Some Colonies" Day, Brits!

Update! 12:54pm on 07.04.10 - The Sun is doing his job & is burning through the clouds, Seal Beach now has some sun, some clouds, and is still chilly. Wahoo.

Happy Fourth of July!

Justin E.H. Smith in 3quarksdaily writing on nationalism, Of National Character: "And this brings me to my second main concern here, beyond the jockeying by superpowers for hegemonic clout in the world, namely, the differential ways different nations relate to air-conditioning... In some parts of Nigeria, mobile phone technology seems to be largely important as a new means of transmitting hexes. In the Balkans, as in 'Central Europe', something they call air-conditioning certainly exists, but not in the same way it does in the finely chilled banks and supermarkets of my Central Californian youth."

Adam Greenfield on What Apple needs to do now: "The iPhone and iPad, as I argued on the launch of the original in 2007, are history's first full-fledged everyware devices -- post-PC interface devices of enormous power and grace -- and here somebody in Apple's UX shop has saddled them with the most awful and mawkish and flat-out tacky visual cues. You can credibly accuse Cupertino of any number of sins over the course of the last thirty years, but tackiness has not ordinarily numbered among them."

The Knotty Yarn on Commodification, Branding and the Overall Fuckery of Blogging: "I've been uncomfortable with personal branding (as it relates to blogging) from the get go. I was invited to moderate a panel at BlogHer last year; there was a pre-conference meeting for moderators and presenters. Everyone was asked to stand up one by one, introduce themselves, and tell everyone about their blog. Most people stood up and, without hesitation, declared their place in the world of blogging. "I'm a life blogger." "I'm a mommy blogger." "I'm a political blogger." By the time it got around to me I had no idea what I was supposed to say. "Hi, I'm Danielle and, I don't know, I seem to write about my vagina a LOT." "

SOF Observed on Being Comfortable with the Presence of Mystery: "Given that title, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Mario Livio is not himself a religious man. But in his science, he is working on frontiers of discovery where questions far outpace answers -- exploring the nature of neutron stars, white dwarfs, dark energy, the search for intelligent life in other galaxies.

In vivid detail and with passionate articulation, he reinforces a sense that has come through in many of my conversations with scientists these past years. That is, in contrast to the 19th- and 20th-century Western cultural confidence that science was on the verge of explaining most everything, our cutting-edge 21st-century discoveries are yielding ever more fantastic mysteries. The real science of the present, Mario Livio says, is far more interesting than science fiction could ever be."

Killing the Buddha on Louisiana Coast: Return to Sender : "Dear France, You've been good friends. Great friends! ..."

Luis on Helsinki for beginners : "If you're a teetotaller, you'll be happy to discover that Finns drink plenty of berry juices. In case you're not, you'll be happy to discover that Finns drink. A lot"

Mr. G. on Post I/O Thoughts : "Post-Google I/O, there's not much room left to see iPhone-vs.-Android as anything other than an all-out war. What we've got here is a good old-fashioned epic rivalry."

I wonder if the "Big Rivalry" is more than a bit planned out to benefit both companies and mobile platforms...

Andrew Sullivan on Jesus and Christ, Ctd : "Christianity is in crisis - and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe. I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists - of total papal or Biblical authority - because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves."

Paul Davies in the NYTimes on The Aliens Among Us

O'Reilly Radar on Mobile operating systems and browsers are headed in opposite directions : "No single operating system has more than 50 percent marketshare. There are seven operating systems being tracked and even within operating systems there are fragmentation concerns. ...By contrast, the mobile web is converging on HTML5 and WebKit."

Bored Panda on the 50 Most Extraordinary Churches. Number 5 is in Huntington Beach, but from a Google Search I just ran, it appears that a fight between the church and the City in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has landed the church over at a Christian school rather than in the old Shell building.

Mother Jones on Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?

I particularly recommend Julia Whitty's article The Last Taboo : "The plunge in Iran's birth rates has been swift, uniform, and voluntary--engineered via a media blitz, access to free birth control, and education for girls."

John Hawks on NEANDERTALS LIVE! : "I, for one, welcome my Neandertal ancestry.

It may not sound like a lot -- between 1 and 4 percent. But that's the equivalent of one great-great-great grandparent's DNA contribution. In the case of the Neandertal contribution, more than 1500 generations ago, it's an enduring legacy of an ancient group of people, spread across many lines of the genealogies of living people. Beyond their genealogical interest, Neandertal genes might have made a big difference to our evolutionary potential."

Yes, I have a few blog posts about the Ethics of Leaks, the just announced delicious Nokia N8, and my thoughts on Resources for Developing Mobile Apps, but these three blog posts may have to wait for the weekend, as I have been a bit buried in work.

In the meantime, may I direct you to a few good | interesting links:

52 Weeks of UX on Simplicity isn't that Simple:

"John Maeda's First Law of Simplicity states: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. Refinement that is thoughtful, calculated, and whenever possible and appropriate, based on data is one of the fundamental tools of any designer."

Jan Chipchase, the master of many travels and more than a few international relocations gives some of his tried & true tips on 10 Tips for International Relocation, of which I find #8 to be my experience as it was darned difficult to get a bank account set up in Ireland when I lived there in 2005-2006:

"8. Maintain at least one bank account in the country you're leaving, because frankly its a bitch to open accounts when you're 'abroad' and at some point you. will. need. it. The exception to the its-a-bitch-to-open rule are the premium banking services offered by the larger banks geared up to service international clients - allowing you to set up an account prior to departure and pick up your new, local cards on arrival. (I use and am reasonably happy with HSBC Premier)"

And speaking of travel, the NY Times' Travel Section on Joys of the Window Seat, a visual feast of photos in a fun, but hard to scroll interface.

Stephen Prothero in the Boston Globe on Separate truths: "What the world's religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: Something is wrong with the world. "

More Intelligent Life on What's Happened to the Seasons: "When I return home", says Mahapatra, "my mother mourns the death of the seasons. Her memories of Orissa's climate are alien to the generation I belong to. For me, my childhood Orissa is dying. The state now has a new and strange climate that nobody can understand or predict."

Steven B. Johnson on The Glassbox and the Commonplace Book, a lecture given at Columbia University

David Byrne on speaking at TED and Creation in Reverse: "Paintings are created that fit and look incredibly good on the white walls of galleries. They might not look quite as good in your living room, filled with furniture and AV gear. Music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not both). The architecture, the space, the platform, the software, in a sense "makes" the art. After art or music succeeds in a space, more similar venues are built to accommodate more production of similar sounding or looking pieces, but that happens later, after the form has been established."

Little Springs Design blog on apps switch a lot, devices hardly at all: "What this means is that your application should almost always use the OS-default behaviors. For mobiles, that's putting softkeys in the correct locations (don't flip them), making menus look like the device menus, supporting all gestures in the expected manner, and so on. This falls naturally into our avoidance of pixel perfect design. Use rules, and define a lot of the behavior as inherited from the device, instead of being always the same (looking at you now, Opera Mini for touch devices) or only being on one device, because of the "difficulty" of designing for multiple platforms."

tmatt.net on Quest for the common Easter: "We are talking about the central event of our faith, yet we remain so divided about it. ... That has to raise questions for those outside the faith. If the resurrection is so important, why can't we find a way to celebrate this together?" (quote from Antonios Kireopoulos)

[I, Ms. Jen, think we should follow the suggestion of the 1997 Aleppo Conference and "Honor the first ecumenical council of Nicea by celebrating Easter on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, which would maintain the biblical ties between the Jewish Passover, Holy Week and Easter."]

From tumbLAngeles, Time Life of the Burrito

Steven Berlin Johnson on What Does "Generative" Mean Anyway?: "In my mind, a "generative" platform translates to something like this: a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents."

The NY Times on Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge: "America went into a frenzy last weekend with the iPad's release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.
Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing, lending, and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones as flashlights, televisions and radios. "

Tim O'Reilly on The State of the Internet Operating System

Smashing Magazine on Holistic Web Browsing: Trends Of The Future
and Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDF Templates

Frank Rich in the NYTimes OpEd: The Rage Is Not About Health Care

Owls Wings on Happy Teutates' Day! : "St. Patrick is said to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland. According to Waverly FitzGerald, snakes probably represented the old oracle cults tended by snake priestesses. They were also sacred as symbols, not of evil, but of the renewal of life, and miraculous regeneration as they shed their skins. Scholars speculate that this story about the snakes was symbolic of Patrick's orchestrating the ascendance of Christianity over the old Druidic order."

Be you a-theist or a theist, three great links were found on the Inter-Tubes today, one is on Anne Hutchinson and the other two are on the recent archaeological find of an 11,000 year old Turkish temple complex.

It appears that religion started before the villages, agriculture, and cities did, rather than the other way around. More importantly is how advanced the sculptural art is on the T-shaped temple lintels, the photos are truly gorgeous. For as much as we love to think of ourselves as the only era who makes art and creates systems, humanity has been doing both and more for far longer than our systems of history and archaeology have accounted for:

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder--who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites--says: "Many people think that it changes everything...It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city. - Newsweek.

History in the Remaking: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Smithsonian Photo gallery on Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple?

And then let's move the the new world and to America's first public heretic (not really) and feminist (yes, really, 15 kids & was willing to go out on her own and stand up to the authorities in 1630s Boston!), Killing the Buddha parsed out what it heresy means and Anne Hutchinson's wonderful defense for any person's direct connection / petitioning of the Divine without the need of the clergy. She out-Protestanted the Puritans:

Where had Anne Hutchinson learned such an outrageous idea--that a person can be in direct communion with God? From the Bible; from the promptings of her heart. Minister John Cotton--who would later condemn her so severely--had taught her that the inward dwelling Spirit of Christ was more than a mere metaphor or abstraction. "It is not you that speak (and consequently not you that think or do)," he had written, "But the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you."

Just as Antinomianism wasn't something that Hutchinson had cooked up on her own, but an ineluctable (if morally and philosophically problematic) corollary of the doctrine of Justification by Grace Alone, there was ample biblical precedent for Hutchinson's conviction that she could hear God's voice. When the court demanded that she tell them how she knew that it was God who spoke to her and not the Devil, she answered with a question of her own: "How did Abraham know that it was the voice of God, when he commanded him to sacrifice his son?" - Killing the Buddha

The best part is the the two sets of folks that I know who descend from Anne Hutchinson are also bold, outspoken, creative people of (non-conformist) faith.

Luke W on Mobile First: "More often than not, the mobile experience for a Web application or site is designed and built after the PC version is complete. Here's three reasons why Web applications should be designed for mobile first instead."

tnkgrl reviews the Nokia N86 8MP camera phone : This is not just a review of the Nokia N86 and its position in the market, but Myriam also took out the Samsung Memoir, the Sony-Ericsson C905a, and the Nokia N86 for a test photo shoot and the winner really surprised me. Good work, tnkgrl!

Also congrats to tnkgrl for being listed in the Top Mobile Pundits of 2010!

Nokiausers - An Interview with Nokia Enthusiast - Clinton Jeff : A fun interview with Zomg! It's CJ!

PeteSearch on How to Split Up the US from Facebook Data

Rooted

Cell phone subscriptions to hit 5 billion globally

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Tim Bray on HTML5

The Prodigal Guide on An open letter to Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo: The 10 things you need to do today to be a contender in the high-end smartphone market again

BBC's technology show, Click, on Jan. 30, 2010 around min 7:55 does a quick pan of Black Phoebe's masthead during a segment on Blogging. Thanks, Click, y'all rock!

Researcher gave the Chumash a gift: their heritage: "Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention from its rightful place -- on her.

John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught -- even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company. A brilliant linguist and anthropologist, Harrington had been just as relentless with countless Indian families throughout the West, but that didn't impress the young Ernestine.

"It's due to his madness that we are who we are today," said De Soto, a 71-year-old nurse who works at a Santa Barbara rest home. "We have a language. We have an identity.""

Stevenf on I need to talk to you about computers: "For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.

Nothing is simply black or white.

Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that's really happening? I don't know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in "what makes this thing tick?" then we've got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.

The reason I'm starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don't want to."

Blue whales are singing in a lower key: "A retired Navy scientist directed Hildebrand to a trove of tapes stored at Sea World. The delicate old reels were the size of dinner plates. It turned out they contained snippets of blue whale songs from 40 years ago.

The tapes eliminated all doubt: In the Beach Boys' era, blue whales' voices, while nowhere near falsetto, had been distinctly higher pitched.

With more work, the researchers were able show that blue whales worldwide are using deeper voices lately. Some have dropped their calls by only a few tones, but all showed a steady decline. "It was baffling," Hildebrand said.

Blue whales are shrouded in mystery as it is. "

Dear Steve, "Long time no see! I've been busy, sorry. First off all, I want to congratulate you on the great show today. Wow, that iPad is truly one of those things everyone is going to want to have, like your previous successes with the iPod and iPhone. I take my hat off for that! And wow, what a lead up to the show. Probably the first hype of 2010. And do you guys know how to keep a secret and then give a great show unveiling it. ... When you were showing the web capabilities of the iPad, something was missing in it's browser (see screen-shot above). As your keynote and product presentations are normally flawless (ah, well, maybe not always), I think you might have missed this one.
You touted the iPad's (great product name, btw) web capabilities as being amazing, perfect, you know, the regular Apple thing. But during the presentation I couldn't help but notice that little "missing plugin" logo, we all know from the iPhone. Now, I was thinking that this might have been one of those very exotic plugin's of back in the day, like Director or Realplayer. But, as it turned out, the missing plugin was the Flash Player."

The Atlantic Wire on After Failed Attack, What Next on Security and Terror?

The Daily Dish live blogged the Ashura protests that erupted all over Iran today. Highlights: Why The Martyrdom Of Ali Mousavi Matters, Faces of the Day III, Camera is Mightier and Death By A Thousand Snapshots.

I am currently buried under in work and thus don't have any real photos to post from today and the two blog posts that live in my head about the Nokia N900 will have to wait for a day or so.

In the meantime, here is a few delightful links for you:

The Language of Food on Ceviche and Fish & Chips. A wonderful cultural historical linguistical exploration of vinegared meat from the Persia of the Sassanids to vinegared fish dishes of modern day Peru and the UK.

Tom Chi in his OK/Cancel form writing on how developers and designers need to work together and not in separated worlds in Bowman vs Google? Why Data and Design Need Each Other

These last two articles are on the differences between US/Nordic or Apple/Nokia in terms of advertising and approach written by Teemu Arina, who I met last year at Nokia Open Lab 2008, and Karri Ojanen, who I have not met but I love his name & admire his work. I have been formulating my own thoughts on the essential (good) differences between the design & advertising cultures of Apple v. Nokia which in many ways stem from the differences between Norther California and Finland culturally, and Teemu & Mr. Ojanen have beat me to the punch in: Interactive value creation, Apples and Nokias and with Digital (Advertising) in the Nordics.

iconeye on RCA student radically improves the UK plug

Endevver Consulting on Creating event calendars in Movable Type

An excellently pointed Barbara Ehrenreich opinion piece in the LA Times, We need a new women's health movement, "What we really need is a new women's health movement, one that's sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly lifestyle) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments such as chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer's progression from "early" to "late" stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)?

What we don't need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies' auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex."

NY Times on the NY University exhibition, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.," of in the article, A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity : "Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world."

Artist Maria Kalman's delightful photo & handwritten essay on food & eating in America - "Back to the Land - And the Pursuit of Happiness"

The Atlantic's Food section on In Italy, Food Gets Graded: "The day my daughter's kindergarten teacher called me into her Italian classroom to tell me my child was failing lunch, I knew I had run up against the great continental culinary divide. As an American married to an Italian, I've lived off and on in Italy for years, in both Bologna and Venice. I'm an adventurous and enthusiastic cook, an impassioned eater, and one of those parents who throw their kids into the deep end of the culinary pool from birth. Sink or swim: eat your fava beans and grilled calamari or starve."

Jamillah Knowles asks "If you could do anything via your mobile - what would it be? beyond Remote control? radar? colour matching? anything sci-fi (no weapons)?"

Cardus on the linguist orgins of Hello, You Had Me At Hello : "The history of hello is long and mired in many vowels. Though it didn't show up in its current form till the mid-19th century, its forbears are many and obvious: hallo, halloo, hillo, holla (a Shakespearean favourite recently returned to slang prominence), hollo, holloa--all generally being a combination get-attention-and-greet, useful for hailing passing boats and that sort of thing.

Drifting beyond the bounds of English, hello's roots diverge: is it from the Old High German ferry-call halâ, an emphatic imperative of "to fetch," from the antiquated French stop-shout holà, roughly "whoa there!" or maybe, as Wikipedia tenderly suggests, from the Old English hœlan (heal, cure, save; greet, salute; gehœl! Hosanna!)?"

Lane Wallace on Oprah's Chicago School of Economics: "Clearly, Oprah is a missionary entrepreneur. But how do you teach someone to be a successful missionary? Even Polonius' advice to Laertes, "to thine own self be true" is insufficient. If asked, I suspect Oprah would say that first you have to learn who you are, where you came from, how that affects and informs you, and what matters in the world. You also have to care about something bigger than yourself, and imagine a way in which your particular skills could allow you to make a difference in that area. And whether you seek that path out, or stumble upon it along the way, you have to care about making that difference enough that the vision of it keeps you going through the dark, and can act as a compass to steer your decisions along the way."

The New York Times on Cleric Wields Religion to Challenge Iran's Theocracy : 'In recent times, Ayatollah Montazeri has kept up the pressure,
taking the unprecedented step of apologizing for his support for the
1979 takeover of the United States Embassy. "Independence," he
said in a recent speech on ethics, "is being free of foreign
intervention, and freedom is giving people the freedom to express their
opinions. Not being put in prison for every protest one utters."'

Steve Lawson on Rethinking Reviews: "So the art of writing reviews was about giving people an insight into something that hadn't yet experienced, and couldn't experience unless you bought them. It was meant to be impartial, educated and the trust was cumulative... That independence of mind is lost if I start writing reviews of things I don't really love as favours. "

Tiffany B. Brown on On Mobile Context : "When developing mobile applications, we should ask: What do people need to know? What kind of device can they afford? What are the technical limitation of that device (physical size, screen size, input capability, battery life, available memory)? How can we build an application that works well on such a device?"

To Tiffany's list, I add: "What do people need/want to do?"

Two blogs I truly enjoy reading, Wordridden and SoF Observed, wrote posts worth reading about their own memories of Germany in the 1980s and what the 20th Anniversary means to each of them.

Go Read.

Wordridden - Then and now.

SoF Observed - The Fall of the Wall, JFK's Assassination, and Two Birthdays

The confluence of the rambunctious American ritual of Halloween with the somber and sobering feast days of All Saints and All Souls that follow on its heels has always been confusing to me -- never more so than when I was a child. Halloween ranked second to Christmas for the near-hysteria of our anticipation.

The thrill of dressing up to be something scary was delicious, especially so because, as the smallest and youngest member of my large Catholic family, I was much more experienced at being scared than being scary. Halloween allowed me to become the monster. This, no doubt, is at the heart of its hold over us. We're able to put on the clothing of that which frightens us: darkness and death itself.

Tidbit #1: I don't have any photos from today because I only took one and it was of Scruffy. I think y'all get enough Scruffy photos.

Tidbit #2: Why no photos? Gasp! Shock! Horror! What ever have you been up to?
Work.

Yep. I am trying to work real hard real fast so that I can free up two weeks at the end of this month to go to London for the Moo Party, London Design Festival, Over the Air, and FOWA. I am registered for FOWA (Future of Web Apps) but I would really like to be able to be in London the week before.

Tidbit #3: Lauren has been Redeemed.

Tidbit #4: I am perversely considering buying a Nokia N86 in London rather than one here. Why in London?
a. I am sick of the US being the place of last mobile delivery and I don't want to reward companies that wait 2-3 or 4-5 or never months to release good mobile devices in the US.
b. The 3G sucks on AT&T due to the large number of iPhones on the network, so if one is going to be stuck (at least in LA) on Edge-like speeds why not buy a device that is Euro 3G - at least it will be fast when I am on holiday.
c. If I buy an Euro Nokia N86 online in the US, I won't have a warranty. My June of 2007 bricking experience of my online bought N80 taught me that no warranty is BAD. If I buy the N86 in London, then I will have a warranty in the UK. It is still a warranty.
d. I want to within the year get a job in Europe, so it would be better to get a Euro 3G phone.

I know...rationalizations. rationalizations. rationalizations for my anger at NokiaUSA for being S-L-O-W or getting their container ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

Tidbit #5: Hey, have I mentioned lately that I would love to get a job in mobile in London? Know of any positions for a bright creator|ideator|project manager sort? Let me know.

Hopping back on the hamster wheel.

BLDGBLOG on City of Fees and Services: "Indeed, the bizarre irony for me throughout all of this has been that police officers, fire crews, and members of the military are all, to use this language very deliberately, the most socialized subsector of the U.S. economy. That is, they are paid through what many people would call "government hand-outs." On the other hand, it is these very social positions that are often held up - by these same critics - as triumphant examples of national service and personal heroism. Indeed, it is not entirely inaccurate to say that The Greatest Generation was a generation of near-total tax-funded employment.

If the recent health care debates are to be believed, doctors are not subject to this same sense of national appreciation; they are mysteriously yet fundamentally unlike the police, we are meant to believe, offering services that only private money can afford. But where is the line between private health (diabetes) and public safety (tuberculosis) - and when might this solidify into actual government infrastructure?"

Michael Blim on Will Someone Rid Me of Private Health Insurance? : "Once a mistake is made and a bill made up, the paper chase begins in earnest. It is then that one uncovers the fact that unlike in the Wizard of Oz, there is no one behind the curtain. The hospital in a show of dauntless efficiency sends me one bill for everything they do to me. It is a complete sham. There is no unified billing service at the hospital. Every service simply dumps its bills into a big computerized hopper in the Ethernet, and a sum with unintelligible notations is derived and duly sent to the patient. I call to ask each service if it recorded a co-pay non-payment. Recently I made the rounds among the services billing for the podiatrist, the orthoticist, the physical therapist, the surgeon, and the family doctor. Sometimes it's like bingo, and several of the services made claims for the "missing" $15 co-pay. Each service demanded documentation that I paid the co-pay, but even if one of the billing problems is resolved, the clearance never seems to stop the unified billing service from sending out another bill, this time with a dunning notice attached. One of the services refused to believe that I had not cheated them out of the $15 - this on a bill for a rotator cuff repair in which the hospital grossed thousands of dollars."

Adam Greenfield On systems, and what they do: "So from here [Helsinki], it would be easy to dismiss the "debate" on public healthcare unfolding in the United States right now as comedy in the
worst possible taste: the bad-faith flailing of an essentially unserious society, the civilizational equivalent of a Pauly Shore movie.

What serious polity - let alone would-be contender in the cutthroat
global market American policy has been so strongly dedicated to the
creation of over the last sixty years - would want to deny its citizens
and native industries every possible advantage? What kind of patriot
could possibly rest content with the notion that the poorest national
of, say, Trinidad and Tobago has better healthcare options than most Americans?"

"I began to wonder if iPhone ownership wasn't like marriage in the '50s,
everybody pretending they're happy with their spouses but secretly,
behind closed doors, feeling awful and taking pills in the basement."  Amanda Fortini, My evil iPhone, Salon.com

Matt Haughey on The entrepreneurial case for national healthcare: "I don't see how someone could be strongly pro-business and not see an upside to extending the already existing national healthcare for seniors down to age zero. How many more Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters are we missing with the way things are?"

"I guess all Finnish summer sports were invented by drunk people." - Harri Kinnunen in the BBC's article on Finland's passion for crazy contests. Photos.

Mark Cuban on The Most Patriot Thing You Can Do : "Bust your ass and get rich. Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes. Lots of taxes. Hire
people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment,
services. Pay more taxes. When you make a shitload of money. Do something positive with it. If you are smart enough to make it, you will be smart enough to know where
to put it to work."

Losing my religion for equality : Jimmy Carter leaves the Southern Baptists over the Treatment of Women. "The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views."

Of Rum and Raspberries: The Milky Way Galaxy tastes of Raspberries and smells of rum. Milton Basher Cunningham on Smelling the Stars.

The bay of pigs: swine swimming in crystal clear water in the Bahamas. Lovely photo essay of pigs living on a beach in the Bahamas.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Sun 06.21.09 - Sunday night the nice folk from Zeiss took us to a restaurant in the Aalen town center that had good food and drink, and a shiny table.

The LA Times reports on Venus figurine sheds light on origins of art by early humans : A 40,000-year-old figurine of a voluptuous woman carved from mammoth ivory and excavated from a cave in southwestern Germany is the oldest known example of three-dimensional or figurative representation of humans and sheds new light on the origins of art... The intricately carved headless figure is at least 5,000 years older than previous examples and dates from shortly after modern humans arrived in Europe. But it already exhibits many of the characteristics of fertility figurines carved millenniums later.

Candorville on Torture : Just Following Orders, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and best of all, Comparing Our Torture to Japan's Torture?

It is all Lux's Fault... As a way of saying goodbye and fair passing to Mr. Lux Interior, of The Cramps, I would like to confess that I was a good child with a permissive mother who only ever got grounded 2x in my whole life. First grounding in 1978 was all my sister's fault, and the second grounding in 1982 was all Lux Interior's fault.

The Nun's Story - On Sister Corita's design, art, and printmaking work and life.

Postopolis! LA - From Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, 2009, lasting from 5pm to 11pm each day, in a location to be confirmed very soon, we're bringing art, architecture, music, film, design, planning, politics, sci-fi, special effects, geology, history, lost rivers, futurism, and archaeology to Los Angeles, that city of tar pits and movie stars, of beaches, landslides, and mountain lion attacks, of universities and parking lots, of real estate speculation and individualized automotive fractality, city of black magic, mass murder, and abandoned swimming pools, military simulation labs, Die Hard and plate tectonics. City of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, of ecologies, gravel pits, and infrastructure.

Ever since this past weekend's Punk Rock Bowling adventure, I have had a hard time going to sleep before 2am. Given that I am at my Mom's and am supposed to be up nice and early in the morning to go skiing, my idea for a big blog post has been thwarted by the late hour and Rio the large black lab with a cuddle affliction.

In the meantime, while I continue to ruminate on Tuesday's inauguration, here are a few links:

From 3quarksdaily, From Books, New President Found Voice:

Finally, after eight years, you do not have to apologize for being well read. Smart, in fact, is the new cool. Congratulations to all 3qd readers on this special day.

I say Amen, Amen, Amen! I am so glad to have a President who is not just well read, but is an open intellectual. Relief.

From the BBC, Obama 'set to close Guantanamo'. Further Amens.

I have previously written about how it is completely unethical for us to detain folks without due process in a military base that is on the land of a stated enemy. Given that we have made peace and/or diplomatic connections in recent years with other stated enemies (Libya, Vietnam, China, Russia, etc etc etc), maybe it is time to completely close Guantanamo and give the land back to Cuba. And while we are at it, reinstate relations with Cuba. We have brought more change to the communist countries we trade with then the ones we embargo.

From Politics and Culture, David Schmid nominates Slavoj Žižek! a recommendation for a bit of cultural whimsy.

Intertubes Technology - For Men Only : Once again the Web 2.0 conference sparks controversy for the lack of women speakers. You know it is bad when it is men who notice it and blog about it. Hello Web 2.0, innovative thinking and great web creativity is not exclusive to male geeks.

How to Grow Rice in Your Garden

8 Ways to Help Your MacBook Battery Last as Long as It Can

Since I choose to live without a TV, I am "watching" the online election results until 6:30pm when I go out for drinks with Judy and other friends, whereupon, I will start watching the mobile web results.

Here are the most entertaining results, commentary, and stories:

Twitter (I recommend watching Skeskali's feed as she has took the day off from work, is on west coast time, and has started drinking Jack & Coke. Her tweets should get good in about an hour, as drunk tweeting is the best.)

The Daily Dish : Andrew Sullivan has been hitting the ballpark home all day with notes from his readers and links to other stories.

Making Light - Bruce Schneier
is guest posting as the election progresses.

FiveThirtyEight - a blog that is bringing the various polls together in a statistical manner.

There is also the Daily Kos map.

Various News Networks: CNN | BBC | MSNBC | LA Times | NY Times | The Guardian | NPR

And if you need a good laugh, Stewart & Colbert's Indecision 2008.

California's polls are open for another 2.25 hours, so if you haven't voted, get thee to your polling station.

The Great Hack by Heather Gold (a complimentary parody of Sarah Silverman). Heather encourages us geeks to open source marriage.

And for further argument, Anil Dash's excellent blog post, "In Defense of Marriage."

If you are over 18 and a citizen of the U.S., vote tomorrow.

Mark Cuban on "How to Jumpstart the Economy - Tax Free Small Businesses" - This is a reasonable and rational idea. Thank you, Mark.

In the Fervor to be Green and Do Your bit to Stop Climate Change Morality Play that is Contemporary Life (or how to be a good little Green who will go to Arcadia when you Die), the BBC has published an article today on "The Bulb Hoarders". Horrors.

"The government (UK) wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love.

Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year.

And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available.

In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011.

The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US. "

Ok, so the British government has legislated that CFL bulbs are to be sold and that energy hogging incandescent bulbs are to be banned and taken off the shelf. Sounds reasonable right? ((cough cough cough...nanny state... cough cough cough))

But isn't life a give and take? Many of the folks interviewed for the BBC article and who commented think so.

Flagship Sony Ericsson Phone May Have 8.1MP Camera (via FastCompany)

Bill Moyer gave the keynote speech at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis this morning. This is an excellent speech on the importance of a free press in a free society, not a media monopolized by a few corporate giants. Watch it.

Bravo, Bill, Bravo!

***

In other areas of opinion and politics, John Scalzi writes on Hilary Clinton's concession speech today:

"People have hinted that Obama needs to avoid having Clinton as VP to avoid being tied to the Clinton legacy, but it's really the other way around: I'm not sure why Hillary would want to tie herself to Obama's legacy and policies so concretely when she has so many opportunities now to stand on her own. She's was second banana to another man for years; it's not trading up to be the second banana to another. Let Hillary be Hillary now, on her own, in her own spotlight, and let's see where she goes from here."

As other folks have noted, previous to Mr. Scalzi, rather than this being a loss for Hilary, she now has the opportunity to carve her own path.

Now if only Michelle Obama would run for President...

Half of world's population has a mobile

Art as a bridge between cultures & what this means for the Church

The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda mastermind questions terrorism

Cell Phone Art (Installations) : Megan & Murray have linked to Rob Petit's SMFA's 2008 Fifth Year Exhibition installations which are fabulous installations of cell phones that make a commentary on the environmentally disastrous nature of our disposable culture.

SixApart starts a Movable Type Media division with the acquisition of Apperceptive. Does this mean that mobile will get a little more love from Movable Type? Please say yes. Dave Jacobs has hinted in the past that Apperceptive has created a mobile blogging / blog from email plugin for MT for clients. Please make it public... please...

When Muslims become Christians (or Atheists) : Last week, British teacher Daud Hassan Ali, 64, was shot dead in Somalia. His widow, Margaret Ali, said her husband was targeted by Islamists who "believe it is ok to kill any man who was born into Islam and left the faith". Those renouncing their faith for atheism or agnosticism are viewed in a similar way to those who adopt another faith.

Listening to "Up Around the Bend" by Hanoi Rocks. Finland produces more than multimedia mobile devices... ;o)

The same weekend of CES and the porn convention thingy (sorry, I don't pay attention to acronyms at the best of times, let alone the beachballtits acronyms) in Las Vegas is always the weekend of the American Football finals weekend. Thus, my brother, his good buddy Mike and Mike's dad make their yearly pilgrimage to the Sports Book at Caesar's Palace to spend the weekend drinking and betting and getting sick from the smoke & viruses brought to the sports book room by all the folks who are in there. Got to love Las Vegas.

Now listening to "El Matador" by The Spores. Molly rocks harder than you.

Whether you go to CES, the porn thingy, PRB, VLV, or any other reason to go to Lost Wages, you will come home with the Las Vegas Flu. The LV Flu is worse than anything you pick up in an airplane. First off there are a wider variety of folk from more ports of call in any given casino in Lost Wages than in any airplane. Then add onto that the canned, recycled air, and SMOKE. Did I mention the extra, pungent, oxygenated smoke that is recycled in Vegas? Add that to at least 243 viruses and you have SICK. Real quick.

Now listening to "Beat Surrender" by The Jam. If you haven't guessed, I have iTunes on shuffle.

Sin City nothing. More like Sick City. What goes on in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. It comes home with you. If you are a mild mannered (me) or a medium mannered (brother) Hanen, it means coming home sick with a nasty head cold which can develop into more. Now if your manners aren't mild or medium, then wrap it. I don't want to hear what you picked up.

So, my brother spent all last week at home with bronchitis, conjunctivitis, and sinusitis. The CL said he had an extendo hangover, but today (10 days later) was his first half day back at work. Hardly a hangover.

Up now? "Not a Crime" by Gogol Bordello.

I felt mild twinges of tummy flu last week but squelched it. I woke up this Saturday for our first day of the Punk Rock Bowling Tournament #10 with my nose dripping at an alarming rate and I was COLD. I am never feel cold. I like 45F. I like skiing. I like cold weather. I run hot. But I have been cold ever since Saturday. I currently have the heat on in my apartment. Shocker.

"Toast of the Town" by Motley Crue from the remastered "Too Fast for Love" cd. Thanks, Alex!

Don't know if I was getting a bit sick before leaving for Punk Rock Bowling, but within 12 hours I was very sick. Now this makes for a boring weekend. I was in bed by midnight and waking up at 10am. No real drunk, but lots of cold medicine. Bah. How can one flirt with hot 40-something punk men when one's nose is dripping and one has a sore throat. Really.

Speaking of the Crue and Ikki Nikki Three & a Half... if you have a copy of the original Leathur Records "Too Fast for Love" contact me. That is one of the best punk/metal albums of all times - Dead Boy-esque. The 1981 EMI version is just metal. Bah.

Ha.ha.ha.ha... In your mind you are thinking, "Ms. Jen must be sick and a bit loopy, she just wrote 'hot 40-something punk men'!" Yes, it was true. But flirting whilst sniffly never is very effective so I have no news to report. But the men were hot.

"Family Tree" by Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. Love the TSPO. Love 'em.

I hope I don't get as sick as my brother, as I have WAY TOO MUCH TO DO before departing for the Nokia Urbanista mo-pho adventure on Feb. 6th. Like finish two client websites, update the barflies.net's CMS, and put together all of the Punk Rock Bowling photos (334 of 'em) into a mammoth photo essay.

"Leavin' Here" by Lars Fredricksen and the Bastards. Other than Gordy (the Unknown Bastard), none of the other Bastards or alumn Bastards were at Bowling this year. Hmph. Oh, Craig Fairbaugh, where are you? Did you fall off the planet?

Speaking of the Nokia Urbanista Diaries, how did Devin visit Punk Rock Bowling for most of Saturday but he did not post a single photo to the Nseries website? Enquiring minds want to know. I know he got some good photos, as I was with him when he was shooting and talking to the ladies with leopard print Sidekicks.

"Do the Devil" by the Amazing Royal Crowns. No websites for the Crowns, other than MySpace and all my old articles and other bits. Hey look! Someone put up a wikipedia article on the Crowns. Yeah!

Actually, I do know why Devin couldn't post his photos from the Sam's Town Bowling lanes... if one can't get a GPS signal than Nokia's Sports Tracker won't post the photos from the route taken. Why are we using software that is not working while the first of our four mobile bloggers is already out on the road? If Nokia would just add geotracking to Lifeblog and toss the Flash interface into the can, it could have worked out of the box.

iTunes is now playing "I Can't Get It" by Hanoi Rocks. Even though I have 1648 songs in my iTunes Library, it keeps coming back to Hanoi Rocks, The Jam, and Sigur Ros. Odd.

Well, to stop the cold induced brain dump now, I will say this, I can't get it why the world's premier mobile phone manufacturer insists on using Flash for their website. Ironic when one considers that most mobiles can't get Flash and Flash Lite is not so great. Gotta agree with Finland's other export, Hanoi Rocks, right now. I don't get it at all.

10 New Year’s Resolutions for the Freelance Developer

Best bird sighting of the Week: An owl sitting on a big bough of an old oak tree at Irvine Regional Park.

Sun. 12.16.07 - Unique Bird Seen Today: Male common yellowthroat warbler bipbopping about the bird of paradise across from my front door.  Lovely.

Top Ten Astronomy Photos of 2007 : (via Backup Brain)

Static on the Dream Phone : Tim O'Reilly on Verizon and open mobile networks in the NY Times editorial section (via atmaspheric)

Hi all, I have many blog post ideas for your reading pleasure, but I promised myself that I would finish (at least iteration #1) my Ruby on Rails app before I blogged several of the big posts living in my head. In the meantime, I present TidBits:

1) Yes, I am working on my first real live Ruby on Rails app. It is an art / image management system that will blog and manage both images and text. I am doing it specifically for artists Dan Callis and Ryan Callis, but we will see if it will be useful for other artists and photographers. I also finally made the decision about what hosting company to deploy my rails app on, the aptly named: Railsplayground.com.

2) NY Times has an excellent article on Gluten-Free dining: For the Gluten-Averse, a Menu That Works

3) Struggling... Since January, I have been struggling with the return of migraine headaches. I have had them in cyclical bursts in the past, but changes in allergy diet or environmental factors have chased them away. But instead of going away with the elimination of chocolate, caffeine, fluorescent lights, and other triggers, the migraines have stepped up frequency to every week or two. I have brought my art table and chair out of storage, as both are very adjustable, for the best ergonomic set up while working. All efforts to no avail. The headaches keep showing up.

I went to my primary care physician at Kaiser and she just put me on Maxalt but did not have the time nor interest to help me figure out what the new triggers could be. Maxalt works great and will clear the pain away in less than 30 minutes, but I can't drive or really work on my computer for a day or two upon taking it, as it makes me dreamy and unfocused. Being dreamy and unfocused when trying to code does not really work.

In the past my headaches go away and stay away for years, if I eliminate allergen foods out of my diet. To that end, I have an appointment with Dr. Lena Kian N.D. tomorrow.

4) If you are out and about and need to calculate a tip, Aaron Gustafson has created a great little mobile app: Tipr

Somehow I surfed / researched from the BBC's 100 things we didn't know last year item #32* to Behind the Name.

At Behind the Name, I have discovered that the good, solid, stoic, old fashioned name of Alfred, means Elf Counsel in Old English. This makes my day.

Furthermore, Algar means elf spear, Alvar means elf army, and Alvin (or Alwyn) is elf friend. Please name your boy children accordingly.

During my year in Dublin, I got very used to the convenience of the purple Morphy electric hot water kettle in my apartment's kitchen. I found a variety of uses for the less than one minute to boil hot water that the Morphy cooked up beyond just a cup of tea, like unstopping a drain, boiling water in the kettle quickly and then making pasta which reduces prep time, pouring the boiled water over chopped veggies in a strainer for insta-blanched veggies to go over rice, etc.

Since returning to Calif., I have missed insta-hot water and have looked around at various stores for a hot water kettle only to be very surprised that Ranch 99 carried a variety of rice cookers but not a single water kettle. Yesterday, I went to Long's Drug Store near my brother's house for some cleaning supplies and in walking to the cleaning supplies I walked past the electric home appliance section and found two different brands of kettles.

Both types of kettles are of thinner plastic and do not seem to be as sound as the Morphy brand in Ireland, and the one I did end up buying is not quite as fast as the Morphy. But the good news is that the above kettle that I did buy is a lot better than attempting to boil a cup of water in the microwave and then buring myself as I try to get it out of the microwave. Yes, I do have a metal kettle for the stove, but it is in a box in the garage, somewhere...

From Mommy Needs Coffee - Ice Cream, Wine, Midol, and Tampons all while educating the nice youth of America:

“Jerry, take a look in my basket. Go ahead. Look.”

He glances in the basket and then nervously back at me.

“Jerry, what do you see? Go on. This isn’t rhetorical. Tell me what you see.”

Jerry is looking a tad bit freaked out by me and is trying to nonchalantly glance around for a manager, but he answers me anyway.

“Uhhh...Midol, Ice Cream, tampons (serious blush for him), a magazine and a big bottle of wine.”

I look at him hard. “Very good, Jerry. Now tell me, does that look like the basket of a woman you should really be messing with right now.”

*blank stare*

“Tell me, Jerry, do you have a girlfriend?”

Photo of St. Brigit's dog by Ms. Jen, Nov. 2004.

I love a good internet black hole on a Sunday afternoon. Start with an idea or site one wants to find (Today: info on the Ballad of the Lady of Walsingham) and end two hours later up at a great academic resource page (USC's Matrix Home) whilst looking for the historical St. Brigit, opposed to the mythic St. Brigit.

I am currently reading Robert Graves' The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, and his breakdown of the ancient Indo-European-Greco-Celtic-Biblical myths on the Goddess, The Muse, Poetry, and Myth is is engaging and a good read, if not more than a bit confusing for those of us who are not scholars of Greek and Indo-European gods. While Graves does not address, at least so far, his contemporary Jung's theories on myth - the concepts dovetail nicely.

I have been googling names of books and ballads that Graves' references to build his case, and thus found myself in the Martrix. Scruffy is chasing spiders along the top of the couch. Welcome to a June gloomy afternoon in Orange...

Maybe Anne's wouldn't, but mine would.

I have 23 midterms to correct and Anne's idea is tempting...

Meg? Julie Wanda?

Gail linked to the Belief-O-Matic quiz. I took it and guess I should be a Quaker, does it count that the Vineyard came out of the Yorba Linda Friends (Quaker) church?

Your Results: The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

1. Orthodox Quaker (100%)
2. Seventh Day Adventist (88%)
3. Eastern Orthodox (86%)
4. Roman Catholic (86%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (82%)
6. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (81%)
7. Liberal Quakers (64%)
8. Hinduism (58%)
9. Orthodox Judaism (54%)
10. Unitarian Universalism (54%)
11. Bah�'� Faith (50%)
12. Jehovah's Witness (45%)
13. Islam (45%)
14. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (42%)
15. Sikhism (42%)
16. Reform Judaism (40%)
17. Neo-Pagan (36%)
18. Jainism (35%)
19. Secular Humanism (29%)
20. New Age (28%)
21. Mahayana Buddhism (25%)
22. Theravada Buddhism (23%)
23. Taoism (22%)
24. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (19%)
25. Scientology (17%)
26. Nontheist (16%)
27. New Thought (13%)

I have had a few liberal Quaker friends over the years, but no Orthodox Quaker friends. I thought I would tip out on the traditional Anglican before Quaker... hmmm....

Funny thing... many of my friends have departed from evangelical or charasmatic churches for Eastern Orthodoxy and a few for Catholicism over the last ten years. A few of us have hung in there at a Vineyard or similar church have migrated to small bible studies or to small groups of arts oriented folk.

I have been burnt out on all things evangelical ever since Bush's first run for office in 2000. Just hearing much of the rote American evangelical party line gives me a case of the hives. Out of fear that Lance and the Vineyard Anaheim would promote the Reds, I stopped going to church for a good month or so before the election and today was my first sunday back. Chicken, I know, but I was just not up for it. It was enough to be teaching a class at Biola on election night. balk, balk, balk, balk...

[Side note: Does it strike anyone, besides me, funny in a good ironic way that after 40 some-odd years of rabid anti-communism that the Republicans are now proud to be "Red" states? Pinkos.]

Oh when will the chilly 75 degree weather come? As Bill the Cat would say, "Ppphbbttt...."

1) Last night I sat at the door at Alex's making/forcing/kindlyasking folks to pay $5 for a surprise Zeke show. People are cheap and they frequently complain about paying $3 or $5 bucks to see three bands or more. If you can't afford $3 or $5 for a great band, why even leave your house? Why not just stay home with a 40 ouncer of some scary malt liquor that costs less than $5 at your local liquor emporium?

2) Legends and old stories are frequently discounted by the "Everything Must Be Tested In A Rigorous Double-Blind Experiment" set as merely myth until some intrepid person sets out to prove the legend true, the famed example of this is the discovery of Troy. Now DNA testing proves true the tale of the old legend that Irish celts originated from northern Spain.

3) Sorry I have been MIA here not just the last week, but on and off in the last month. My sister broke both of her arms in late July. I have been trading off helping her with my mom. Between working two and a half jobs (Alex's, web design clients, and teaching), I have been too beat to think clearly let alone post.

4) As the last note, have I mentioned how evily hot, humid, and smoggy it has been here lately? Ugh. Erika asked me yesterday if I want to go on a spontaneous lark trip to Ireland, I say yes as long as Ireland promises to rain and have temps under 60 degrees....

Filter Time... Here are a few links to blogs and other essays questioning, answering, and riffing on blogging and the results thereof that I would like to recommend from the last few days worth of blog-reading:

First off, Meg questions why she blogs and what it means in "The Aims and Modes of Blogging".

Second, Apophenia points us to Kate Baggott's essay, "Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs".

Finally, BoingBoing points to Danny O'Brien's post on "how famous do you want to be?" While Danny is writing on bands, his concept of middle class of fame can also apply to bloggers, artist/photographers, and website publishers.

A "Fun Internet Black Hole" is a website that you trip on by following a link to another, then another, and next thing you know... it is hours later. Here are a few that have SUCKED me in recently due to the large number of links or large amount of content that can't be ignored:

Megalithomania - Four Winds Tour of Ireland 2001 - 2004

BBC News: Scotland: "Your Pictures" Photo Gallery

The Online Medieval and Classical Library (via Making Light in a round about way)

The Day After Tomorrow - Be sure to play the animations of the ocean currents at the Woods Hole Site.

Roots Web

Craig's List

The Tate - Will someone(s) please sponsor a trip to London for me?

Last but not least, a four year time suck... Alaska Volcanos - make sure you visit the Atlas section and look at the lovely pictures of volcanos.

Good luck in finding your way out...

1) I have decided that 2003 has been the year that Ms. Jen walk(ed)s down the path through Mirkwood. I am VERY much looking forward to getting out on the other side and seeing the proverbial daylight. I have been sincerely praying that 2004 will be a much better year.

2) If you are the praying sort, please do send a prayer or two or three up for my Grandma Grace. She passed out last Sunday morning while making coffee in her kitchen and has been in the hospital ever since. After a battery of tests, the doctors have ruled out heart problems or stroke, but can't place a finger on the source of her dizziness and inability to walk. They think it may be her previous flu that caused an inner ear infection last summer combined with the new flu. Please pray for her full recovery.

3) Of the two Adolescents shows this weekend at Alex's Bar, Friday night was the best overall band show and Sat. was the best actual Adolescents' show. Photos to come later this week.

4) Today has been a day of big news and lots of blog commentary, Veiled4Allah hits the nail on the head in two sentences.

Ok, here is the question of the day for all of you out there reading this little blog:

What recourse does one have for bad/poor auto repair besides making a complaint to the shop and to the Better Business Bureau?

Here is my situation:

In February of this year, I took my Honda into the Big O Tire Store on Bolsa Chica near the corner of Warner Ave in north Huntington Beach. My brother favors this auto repair shop because the owner/manager, Rich Lindsay, has given my brother and his friends good deals on tires. I have had tire work done at this shop previous to Feb. with no problems.

In Feb., I got new brakes, rotors, cv joints, and front axel. This work was approximately $600. When I got the car back, I noticed that the brakes would pulse when it came time to stop. I called Big O, reported the problem to Mr. Lindsay, and he told me to bring it back so he could have his guys look at it.

My mom took it back for me when I went to SXSW, as I did not need it for 8 days. When I returned, she told me that she had paid another $600 to get a new steering column and assembly. Out of a Tire Store? I was upset at her, as she is famous for getting suckered into non-necessary, expensive auto repairs. The brakes were still pulsing. And the SRS (air bag) malfunction light had now come on.

Back I went to Big O Tires mid-March, I told Mr. Lindsay that I was very frustrated as the pulse was still there and now the SRS air bags had a malfunction. He claimed that he had test driven the car, looked the brakes over again, and that there was nothing wrong with the brakes. Additionally, if I needed the SRS light looked at he could not help me that I had to go to the Honda dealer for that. I replied back that the SRS light was not on before he sold my mom on the new steering assembly and that the SRS is connected to the steering, and it was obviously his responsibility, as they had done the work. He said he would fix it, but that I owed him.

I came back a few hours later to no SRS light but the brakes were still pulsing. Best yet, the speedometer was not working. I was furious. Luckily, my dad was in town a few days later and said he would help. My dad and I discovered the Big O guys had slipped the speedometer dial arm under the metal rest stop at the zero mark when they disconnected the SRS system. Basically, it was a small screw to get me back for my persistence, as the speedometer dial arm could not have gotten into that position on its own.

I talked with my dad and we both concluded that trying to go back to Big O to get the pulsing brakes fixed was a lost cause, as I would probably get more mischief done to the system.

Over the months the pulsing has gotten worse, today I took my car in for a routine oil change and tire rotation at the local 76 station. I asked the head mechanic if he would also take a look at my brakes to figure out the source of the pulse. When I picked up my car a half hour ago, the 76 mechanic informed me that whoever had last replaced the rotors and brakes had put rotors of the wrong size on and they were causing the brakes to pulse and the brake pads to get waves in them. He said I need new rotors to replace the wrong sized ones and pads.

The car needs new rotors only 5 months after they were replaced. I am pissed. The 76 guy told me that this is something brake guys do when they want to make more money, as the rotors put on were the cheaper ones.

Ok, gang, what do you recommend:
1) Calling up Big O and drilling them several new rear ends? Then demanding that they put on the correct rotors and pads? Knowing that they will most likely fuck it up more?

2) Calling up Big O, bawling them out, and then report them to the Better Business Bureau? And go somewhere else to get new rotors?

3) ..... or is there another option that I am not thinking of?

I just looked at my calendar and realized that it is August 3rd. Yikes! Where has the year gone? Yikes.

Then I realized that I have been a BAD blogger as I have not posted anything since July 28th. Bad Jen. Bad Jen. Here are my excuses (I swear they are legitimate):

1) I couldn't focus, as this week I had my first really good heartrending, heartbeating, heartbreaking crush on a good looking, compelling, intelligent man since 1999. Unfortunately, as with my last crush, this was missplaced. Damn. I need your help! People, set me up! I am good at a good number of things, but I am a boo-boo-brained when it comes to men.... I need help!

2) Friendster. It sucked me in, it sucked me down, and I lost hours. Here is the big bitch of Friendster, as first noted by Lucky, lots of hot chicks, lots of hot gay men, but where are the straight single men? Where? Where? Where? .....
Lucky wants to see nude, single, straight men, even if she is off the market. I am on the market and need to know where to find the single, straight men.

3) Working. Had to pay rent. Blah.

Step aside Charles Shaw (Trader Joe's) and 2 Buck Chuck (Beverages & More), here comes Wal-Mart into the Cheap Overblown* CA Central Valley Wine lottery.

Jish has proposed a list of really funny wine names for cheap Wally-Mundo wines.

* Everyone asks, "Jen what do you mean by Overblown wine?" Here is what I mean: wine from a hot region with hot nights (Calif. Central Valley) has tastes of hot roasted tomatoes and bell peppers mixed with the sweetness of some berry. Very bad, even Worse Headache. Just say no to Charles Shaw, folks, retain your dignity.

Spend $2.99 more at TJs and get the Spanish Sangre de Toro ($4.99) which is a very good grenache based red - tasty, balanced, not too sweet, not too dry, great price, and no headache.

The most amusing part of last night's Adolescents show at Alex's Bar in Long Beach was not the crowd, it was not the bands, it was not the drunk broken bottle blood squirts, it was not my drunk friends, it was the security patrol guy.

Liz Ortega and I departed the bar/club and paid our respects to the Steve & Tony "receiving" line, walked down a long alley to the next side street where our cars were parked when a security patrol car pulled up next to us. The security guard rolled down the window to ask where we were coming from.

"A concert at Alex's", I reply.

"Oh," says the security guy, "but why is everyone wearing black?"

Liz and I look at each other. We are both dressed in black. Everyone pouring down the alley is dressed in at least 50% black.

"It was a punk concert." I said.

"Oh," says the security guy. He looks baffled. Decides there is no threat, and drives off.

Now, the Adolescents show was in the LBC. Did I not get the memo, or has Long Beach instituted a color only dress code? Really. As I drove up Redondo towards PCH, all the girls pouring out of the lesbian bars were wearing jeans and black. Someone forgot to give them the color memo, too.

But maybe jeans count as color? Thus, the Alex's Bar patrons in their black, grey and red dickies pants count as black. Hmm... this fashion conumdrum warrants more thinking.

When the powers that be that reside in the fashion design studios of NYC and Milan decide to make clothes that are not scary pale hippy-dippy-trippy-gypsy 70s knock-offs and actually go to real colors like bright & dark colors, then maybe I will add some non-black to my wardrobe.

Just say no to biege, khaki, pale pink, pale whatever. BLECH!

Give me cranberry, give me wine, give me sapphire blue, give me dark green, give me deep royal purple, give me vibrant apricot! Wishful thinking on my part.

Just to let folks know, and request prayers, my step-grandpa Bill West is in the hosptial for a fractured hip. My grandma Grace is very stressed and having dizzy spells. The family is taking two day tours of duty to go down and stay with Grandma in San Diego and help her out. For the next few weeks, I am on the Wed - Friday shift. So, if you call or email, and I don't reply right away, it is because I have very spotty cell and email acess down there. Thanks for understanding.