My Father, the Ghost Hunter

If there is thing you could say about my father it is that he left a memorable impression. He was the sort of man that seventeen years after his death family friends and acquaintances still speak of him with respect and wonder. I have memories of him that will astonish you, but if you knew the man you would just nod your head and accept it. It's only now that I am an adult and can look back at my childhood memories with a new perspective and realize that he was more than just my dad. It is only now that I can come to terms with the idea that my father could see ghosts.

I suppose it will help to give you a brief history of my dad's life, or at least the parts of it that I know -- much of it told to me by my mother over the years since his death when I was twelve years old. Not much is known about my dad prior to his marriage to my mother, except that he was in the Air Force and worked as a "budget analyst" during the Vietnam War, or at least that what his paperwork said. I learned from my mother that he had some kind of top secret clearance and was always flying to places like Turkey and Greece. It's also known that he was a sort of "human guinea pig" for the Air Force in the early 1960s but my mother tells me he was "very very quiet" about it and never told her straight out what it was they did to him. She suspects that he was given experimental drugs, and given the nature of his paranormal abilities, it's quite possible that he was part of an secret Air Force experiment dealing with telepathy and extra-sensory perception.

There is not sufficient evidence to prove this suspicion, and unless my father contacts me from beyond the grave to validate it, no one will know for sure. But what I do have is the stories he left behind, some of which I experienced first-hand and some of which were told to me by my mother and older siblings.

When my father was in his twenties he was one of the leading advocates in the world for the Boy Scouts of America. He traveled frequently and set up Boy Scout camps all over the United States. Years before he met my mother, he traveled through a dreary small town in northern Michigan called Kalkaska. As he passed through, he sensed that he was going to fall in love with someone named "Donald" from this town. At the time it scared him quite badly, not knowing or understanding whether he was going to become homosexual. It was only years later, after he had met my mother at Michigan State University in southern Michigan that he was able to laugh at the incident. You see, my mother's first name is Donalda, and she is a native of Kalkaska.

It wasn't until I was ten years old that I realized there was something different about my dad. We were living in England at the time, in a tiny little town called Darley, near Harrogate in North Yorkshire, where my parents both taught school on the nearby military base. The principal of the school, Mr. LaLonde, had invited our family over to their house for a night of activities. This meant the adults would sit around the kitchen table drinking and telling stories while the kids were kept occupied in the living room watching a movie or playing a game. The LaLonde's house was very old, and three stories high. Made mostly of stone it was in one of the oldest parts of Harrogate, set back from the road. It was large enough of a house to have been owned at one time by a rich baron a few centuries before.

While the children played Monopoly, my father led the adults in a séance, something he did occasionally with close friends. It's difficult to determine if my father only did this as a party trick or whether it was completely authentic, but whatever it was it scared the crap out of the LaLondes. My father was able to tell them things about their house that only a home-owner would know. Like how the door leading to the attic would sometimes be found wide open, despite it having a tendency to stick so hard it took both arms to tug it open. During the séance that evening, my father slipped into a trance and reported what he was seeing. He said there was the sound of a young girl crying, hiding in a kitchen cupboard. The girl was crying because there had been a murder in the house, most likely a servant whose quarters were in a sub-basement below the house. This was the first time my father had ever been to the LaLonde's house and there was no way he could have known about the servant's quarters. After he came out of the trance, the LaLonde's showed my parents the hidden passage that led to the sub-basement. When my father saw the servant's kitchen, his face turned ash white.

In another incident my parents and older sister were visiting the Hellfire caves in West Wycombe in southern England. The caves are most famous for being the location where Sir Francis Dashwood and his inner circle of friends (the Knights of St Francis or Monks of Medmenham), including Benjamin Franklin, held secret meetings and performed black magic rites. My father snuck away from the tour group to explore parts of the caves that were off-limits. When he came back he was able to recount facts about the caves that very few people knew. It's unlikely that my father, an American with little access to obscure British history, could know such things unless he learned them in his own way. No one knows what he did during the time he was away from the tour group, but it's pretty easy to guess. My father was hunting ghosts.

I still have the deck of Tarot cards my father used to tell fortunes. It was a common party trick he performed regularly, usually among family friends. When I was eight years old my family was living in American Samoa, a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific. Our next-door neighbors were the happily-married Mehelis family, originally from Seattle, Washington. One evening after the popcorn had been consumed and the board games were put away my father got out his Tarot deck and began telling fortunes. After the cards were laid out, he looked at Carolyn Mehelis and said "There's been a problem with your marriage, hasn't there?" Carolyn turned to look at her husband and asked "How could he possibly know that?" It turns out that several years before Carolyn had left her husband for a short while and after they had reconciled they had sworn to never tell anyone.

My father also once told my mother's fortune, something that is expressly forbidden by those who do readings. Notably, telling the fortune of a spouse will result in very bad luck. But my father persisted and proceeded anyway. He dealt the cards said to her, "You will be a young widow" and my mother replied, "You must be talking about my mother," who was only 40 years old when her husband died. My father died young, at the age of 42. My mother was only 39.

Early in 1973, a few months before I was born my father came home with two new baby strollers. My mother asked him why he had bought two. He grinned, kissed her and replied "Two-for-one sale. We're having twins." My mother just stared at him. The doctor had said he was certain she was carrying only one baby. A month later and six weeks early, my twin brother and I were born. Somehow, my father knew.

On a Friday, four days before he died he came home from the hospital where he had been for four months, recovering from a massive heart attack. He locked himself in the den for the entire weekend and arranged bills and paperwork for my mother. All of the neighbors were pleased to see him home, knowing that our family had been going through a very difficult time. My mother tried to make him comfortable, and hoped he would spend some time with us kids but the drugs he was on made him very tired. When he wasn't in the den, he was sleeping. When my mother asked him how he was feeling, he replied, "If I go back there, I'm coming out on a slab." On Monday, he returned to the hospital. On Tuesday morning, he died. Somehow, he knew.

It's difficult to know whether my father's abilities were authentic or whether he was just unusually perceptive and picked up on things that other people ignored. To this day I still do not know. The stories lead me to believe that my father knew something, that he had some sort of extra sense that allowed him to know the things he did.

A few years ago I was alone, working late at night in my office in Manhattan. The office was on the eleventh floor of a building and my desk was near a window. I was sitting at my desk working on some HTML for a web application when I happened to look up and out the window where I saw a woman's face staring back at me. Impossible! The hairs on my neck stood up and I felt a cold shiver travel through my body. My heart pounding from a rush of adrenaline, I froze and forced myself to look away. When I opened my eyes she was gone. Behind me I heard something fall to the floor. When I turned around I saw nothing but I felt an old but familiar presence and I knew right then, at that very moment, that I would be safe.

Camworld Stories: My ...

Camworld Stories: My Father, the Ghost Hunter. I originally wrote this true story for Fray but it was not accepted because of a lack of submissions for their Halloween special. Have a good Halloween everyone. My brother Damien responds.

CSS Layout: As practice for converting Camworld to CSS layout I have gone ahead and converted Aaron Draplin's site (which I host) to MoveableType, using a highly modified version of one of the CSS layouts included in MT. There is a lot of work yet to do on Draplin's site, but it's pretty slick and I was shocked at how easy the conversion was. The Blogger-to-MT import tool is amazing. Note: Camworld does not use Blogger; it uses an antiquated home-grown system/process I developed back in 1998.

ICANN Needs to Be Replaced: How in the world does eliminating public participation in the voting process equal being "plugged-in to the community"? Such bullshit. The ICANN board needs to be removed. ICANN itself needs to be replaced or disbanded. Am I the only person who thinks that they're holding this meeting in China simply so they can avoid people showing up and protesting?

NY Times: From Anxiety, Fear and Hope, the Deadly Rescue in Moscow. Finally, a good article that explains exactly what happened in the Moscow theatre last week that killed so many innocent people.

Pinnacor. Today's big ...

Pinnacor. Today's big news is the company I have been consulting for for the past 13 months has been acquired by Screaming Media which has renamed itself today to the slightly obscure name Pinnacor.

Weird Coincidence: The first result in a Google search for "Pinnacor" turns up an old page from my twin brother's web site. Apparently, there is an old Apple distributor named Pinnacor, which Damien has worked with in the past. Weird.

NY Times: Want Bills by Snail Mail? It Might Cost You Money. While I agree with this trend and think it's the right direction, I think that no company should charge extra for such a service if their web site has any kind of accessibility problems. For instance, if a company wants me to pay a bill online to save them money then their web site must work with my browser of choice. Of the dozen or so bills I pay each month, thre are only two that I must mail in. The rest I pay using PayPal's BillPay service, which pulls money directly from my checking account.

Using PHP at Yahoo: Excellent presentation that clearly outlines why Yahoo has decided to use PHP over many of the other scripting languages available. This is great stuff. [Via rc3.org via Anil]

Résumé Spam: What the hell? I just got yet another piece of résumé spam from someone named Randy Feldman. This guy clearly is just spamming his résumé since it was sent to the email address I use only for PayPal, which is the only email address on Camworld that is accessible to spambots. As is my duty I will report it as spam and then reply to him with a link to the Bernard Shifman story.

In Mourning: After Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash last week, many people observed that this would lead to unethical campaigning by the Repulican party. The family of Wellstone apparently has asked Vice President Dick Cheney to not attend the funeral, after they became upset about recent GOP campaign activities. Ouch, that's got to hurt.

Economist: The Weakest Link. "Human failings, in other words, can undermine even the cleverest security measures. In one survey, carried out by PentaSafe Security, two-thirds of commuters at London's Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen." Oh my.

ABC News: American Unease With Islam. I don't think it's just the U.S. Many people in the world have unfavorable opinions of the Muslim faith, and as long as religious fundamentalists continue to kill people in the name of their god, that opinion will not change. It's not just Islam though. Christianity (among other religions) has a long history of people being killed because of their religious beliefs. More religious intolerance: Eagle Scout kicked out of organization for being an atheist.

Airline Seat Pitch: Excellent chart of the various dimensions of seat pitch on airplanes. Seat pitch "is the distance between a row of seats - the measurement from the same position on two seats, one behind the other." Bookmark this.

Green Feces: Funny ...

Green Feces: Funny stuff over at the Moonlight Health message board, where people talk about their abnormally-colored poo. Some of my favorites:

"I had a yellow and blue snowcone last night and I got green shit today so since two others have had blue slushies I can pretty much sense what it came from."

"I WAS STONED AND ATE AN ENTIRE PACKAGE OF TWIZZLERS. NEXT DAY POOP WAS GREEN. IT LOOKED PRETTY COOL BUT THEY WERE CHERRY TWIZZLERS SO GREEN POO-POO WAS A BIT UNEXPECTED IF I DIE FROM THIS I'M SUING TWIZZLERS OR HAUNTING THEM OR SOMETHING."

"I had about 5 glasses of grape Kool-Aid last night, and this moring my doodie was BRIGHT green. The highly artifically colored drink/food mystery continues..."

"i believe that kool-aid is a huge culprit! i drank a whole jug of blue kool-aid yesterday and pow! fluorecent green dookie...come to think of it, i wish i'd turned the light off to see if it glowed!"

Anchor Attributes: Fascinating overview of what attributes people are using for the A (anchor) element on their web sites.

Apple: Building Music for the Movies. Apple profiles Danny Elfman, one of my favorite composers. Excellent.

LiquidMetal: Hasta La Vista, Titanium. I hope Apple's next Powerbook casing is made out of this stuff. A slick metallic glass case!

But when heated in its raw form to 750 degrees Fahrenheit...the mysterious alloy does something that amazes even the most unflappable metallurgist. It softens into a viscous tar that can be molded like plastic. Then, when cooled rapidly, it congeals into a solid that's twice as hard as titanium or stainless steel, and so smooth that paint won't stick to it. The alloy, which scientists liken to "metallic glass" is called LiquidMetal.

AlterNet: Was Paul Wellstone Murdered? This article seems to smack more of sensationalistic journalism than it does offer any proof or theories that Wellstone's death was anything but an accident. Some conspiracy theory discussion here.

Skeptical Inquirer: Why Was The X-Files So Appealing?

Daily Times of Pakistan: Ignorance of a hegemonic imagination.

That most non-Muslim Americans are abysmally uninformed and misinformed about the basic teachings of Islam is certain; what is less clear, however, is why.

Village Voice: Blame It on Al Qaeda. I've noticed this too. The mainstream press seems to jump to conclusions too quickly and too often. Something tragic happens; try to link it to terrorism to make it a more sensational story. A serial killer happens to be a Muslim; oh, he must be linked to Islamic fundamentalism somehow. A Senator's plane crashes; oh it must be a secret GOP plot. Blogger hacked; it must have been Userland!

Nice Design: Spiffy new design over at Cederholm. Great work! As some people have guessed I am in the tedious process of coverting my site layout to CSS, driven by MoveableType. Slow-going...

Blogger Hacked! If ...

Blogger Hacked! If you use Blogger, you need to change your server password RIGHT NOW! Whoever has hacked into Blogger has changed most of Blogger account passwords, so you are unable to get into their database to change your data. If FTP passwords and server info are available to the hacker, then your site and web server are vulnerable. Change your FTP/server password now!

That shit don't add up. British folk singer Billy Bragg is distributing a new MP3 that takes issue with the recent Bush administration efforts to invade Iraq. It's called "Price of Oil." Download it here.

Voices on the radio
Tell us that we're going to war
Those brave men and women in uniform
They want to know what they're fighting for
The generals want to hear the end game
The allies want to approve the plan
But the oil men in the White House
They just don't give a damn

It's all about the price of oil
It's all about the price of oil
Don't give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil
It's all about the price of oil

[Full lyrics]

Sad news. Paul Wellstone, a Democratic Senator from Minnesota has died in a plane crash, along with his wife, daughter and three staff members. Senator Wellstone was a leading voice against Bush's Iraq war plans. [Thanks, Ted]

Truly Impressive. I've been playing around with Moveable Type again, after putting it aside for several months. Ben and Mena have done an amazing job with this weblog product. I thought it would be pretty difficult to convert Camworld over to MT, but after understanding how it works I see that it won't be that difficult at all. I have thousands of posts in the archives that need to be entered (or scraped) and MT is flexible enough to allow me to keep my specific directory structure which means I don't have to put any redirects into place. All of the incoming links to Camworld will stay they same and there will be very little, if any, linkrot.

O'ReillyNet: Building Online ...

O'ReillyNet: Building Online Communities

Your tax dollars at work. It's rather unsettling to learn that Bush has been using government resources (paid for by your tax dollars) to promote the Republican party for the upcoming elections. Aren't there laws against this kind of thing?

BBC News: US media gripped by sniper obsession. This is all too true. Yes, the sniper thing is important news, but so is politics and the Iraq situation. The media focuses too much on the sensationalism. Never forget that mass media is advertising-driven; the more viewers they can get the more money they can charge for their ad spots. For them it is a business decision to focus on sensationalistic news and less on the "boring" stuff like politics and elections.

New IA Book: ...

New IA Book: Congratulation to Christina Wodtke on the publication of her first book, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web.

O'Reilly: Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason. I had no idea this book was in the works. Good stuff. Also, masonbook.com.

Terror in Moscow: This is getting very tiring. All this senseless violence. A few minutes ago 20 armed gunmen stormed a theatre in Moscow taking as many as 700 people hostage. According to reports, only children and Muslims have been released. Update: only the CNN report notes that Muslims were allowed to leave. There's no proof yet that this terrorism is religion-based.

News from Russia: The TV news there says the gunmen are Chechen and there are 1216 hostages. Though the Chechen officials are saying to not believe the terrorists' claims of being Chechen. Further reports from released hostages indicate the men are Chechen, and their likely demand is to stop the ongoing war in Chechnya.

Regime Change Begins At Home. U.S readers, don't forget to vote on November 5. If enough people vote against the Republican party, it will be possible to stall Bush's grand plans until 2004 when hopefully someone better can be elected into office.

New PHP list? ...

New PHP list? A few days ago I asked about good mailing lists that cover PHP and MySQL. I received a few responses but no one was able to give a glowing recommendation for a list that was well-managed and carried a high signal-to-noise ratio. I'm tempted to start a new list, which I will own and co-moderate with another experienced list manager. I'm not sure yet if starting another list is the right approach, but there appears to be a need. I have been managing the cms-list for over two years and it continues to receive lots of praise from within the industry. I never like re-inventing the wheel, which is why I asked about good PHP lists, but if there is a true need for a good, well-managed, low traffic, no-marketing, PHP list then I will be more than happy to manage it. I will, of course, be looking for a co-owner/manager for the list, preferably someone with experience running mailing lists and also strong interest in PHP. Is this a good idea? Are you interested? Email me.

• NY-PHP
• Southeastern Michigan PHP user group
• phpclasses.org (having trouble loading...)
• Official PHP mailing lists (and their archives)
• Sitepoint's PHP forum (not a list, but an excellent reseource)
• PHP-XML list (very low traffic)

Webmasterbase: Build your own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL - Part 1: Installation

Photo: The statue in front of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Downtown Manhattan.

Macs in New York City: Derrick Story: Apple's Switchers Campaign Getting Through. I am continually amazed the large number of Macs I see in New York. I know that it's because New York is the media capital of the world, and Macs are traditionally a media industry tool, but the number of empty G4 cardboard boxes I see sitting among piles of trash bags on the side of the street is sometimes astonishing. It's rare that I see iBooks or Tibooks on the subway because people don't like advertising the fact they are carrying one (beware of theft), but I regularly see numerous iBooks and Powerbooks in the coffee shops and WiFi parks. My brother Damien is looking for a couple of good Mac techs for some open poisitons he knows of.

Evil ≠ Oil?: NY Times: Are the Saudis the Enemy? I'd be interested in learning what percentage of the Saudi GDP was supplied by American money in the past 60 years, and how much of it was oil-based (45%). If America suddenly stops buying oil from Saudi Arabia, what will happen to their GDP? In other words, would Saudi Arabia be the country it is today had it not had been able to use its American-centric oil money to educate its past 3 generations of people? Or would it just be another Iraq? It is interesting to note that Iraq's literacy rate is 58% and Saudi Arabia's is 78%. Lots more info at the CIA World Factbook site.

What is an Information Consultant? Entrepreneur.com: Information Consultant

Nick Denton: Search for the moderate Muslim. Nick brings up an important point. I think it's clear that most educated people realize that not all Muslims fall under the fundamentalist stereotypes created by terrorism, but it also must be noted that not all Americans are cowboy boot-wearing, rich, ignorant, funny-talkin' Christians who think Muslims are evil.

Diversity Visa: Here's something else to think about. If so many people overseas hate the United States so much then why do approximately 9 million foreigners every year enter the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery program? If they win a visa, they are given a Green Card and are allowed to emigrate legally to the U.S. In 2002, the U.S. gave 71 DV-2003 visas to people from Iraq and 38 to people from Saudi Arabia.

Let's take a look at the number of diversity visas issued to each country over the past four years. I've also added the Iran and North Korea numbers since Bush has labeled them as 'Axis of Evil' countries:

Apple Advertising Copycats: At what point should Apple say "Enough." Now the Republicans are copying the Switch ad campaign in the hopes of getting Democratic voters to switch. [via Metafilter]

Weblog Schwag: I got a postcard in the mail yesterday from UPS saying they could not deliver a second-day airborne package from Perseus Publishing. I've been scratching my head as to who would be sending me a book from Perseus. I thought at first it was Mark Frauenfelder, who asked me for my address so he could send me a copy of his new book called Mad Professor! But checking Amazon shows that his book is being published by Chronicle, not Perseus. And then I spotted Rebecca's note about receiving a copy of signed copy of Howard Rheingold's new book called Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. And yes, checking Amazon shows that this book is published by Perseus. Mystery solved. I'll pick up my copy from the UPS warehouse after work. On further thought, is this an example of problem solving using social networks? Hmmm....

Hot vs. Cold: It's that time of the year where the building's air conditioning is fighting the heating system. About once every hour the A/C kicks on, runs for a while and then kicks off. About a half hour later the heat kicks on. This wouldn't be so annoying except the main A/C duct is directly above my cube.

Cambridge Docs: Transforming Unstructured Content into Meaningful XML (White Paper)

Funny: The Sex Calculator. (Needs sound + Shockwave)

Photo: ...

Photo: Looking down Stone Street at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court building, Manhattan.

Livejournal: New York Primer. Brilliant! [via BoingBoing]

It comes as no surprise that Microsoft's latest earnings are massive. Yet, the company is taking great pains to downplay this fact. The only reason I can determine is it proves their new licensing scheme is financially abusive to companies who are locked into their operating system platform and software.

Dan Gillmor's latest piece talks about Microsoft's $40 billion in cash reserve and wonders what Microsoft will do with this money. It's disturbing to think that Microsoft is going to just get larger and larger by buying into new markets.

Come to think of it, a good part of that $40 billion would help us pay for Bush's ego-war in Iraq. How about it Gates? Better his money than mine. True, it's a silly idea, but not completely crazy.

Anil Dash Magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client. Where's the dead-tree version?

Working For Change: The Empire's soft underbelly.

Doonesbury: On bloggers. Heh.

For the developers out there and those who love to control every tiny aspect of their web browser, check out this amazing list of Hidden Mozilla Prefs. Excellent stuff.

John Perry Barlow: Pox Americana. Read this if you want to be more scared than you probably already are about the Empire-building of the Bush administration.

Congratulations are in order to Jesse James Garrett for shipping his first book, The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web. It's now on my wishlist.

Computerworld: Wall St. Leans Toward Linux.

MeanKitty.com: Who's Got a Meankitty? I Do, I Do! You just gotta love the Internet sometimes.

O'ReillyNet: Digital Identity Redux. "This is, of course, bullshit. The average consumer, the realists tell us, will trade privacy (a business card) for a 25-cent rubber squeeze toy with a company brand name on it."

The Official Naked Skydiving page.

Bet On The ...

Bet On The Future. "First thing we see is that everyone has a high-speed connection to the casinos. That's because the servers are now all in space --thereby avoiding any jurisdictional squabbles-- and wireless internet is everywhere."

Here's an excellent article at Business 2.0 that outlines the business model used by the super-successful Swedish furniture retailer, IKEA.

New York: The Ghostbusters Tour. Great concept. I'd been meaning to track down where in Manhattan the Ghostbusters firehouse is.

Sartopia, the Femdom Art of Sardax. Mildly pornographic, but definitely in a category of its own. Nice.

Excellent New York Times Magazine article that talks about the societal problems (and political ramifications of such) between the super-rich and middle America:

The concentration of income at the top is a key reason that the United States, for all its economic achievements, has more poverty and lower life expectancy than any other major advanced nation. Above all, the growing concentration of wealth has reshaped our political system: it is at the root both of a general shift to the right and of an extreme polarization of our politics.

Slashdot: Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer

ZDNet has a ...

ZDNet has a good series of articles on Microsoft:

• Part 1: Open source closes in on Microsoft
• Part 2: Microsoft means business
• Part 3: Microsoft's risky Web services bet
• Part 4: Microsoft: Its own worst nightmare?

Slashdot reviews Creating Applications With Mozilla.

Craigslist. Mystery RAM for sale. Ha ha!

Brian Carnell: The Best Religious Joke Ever (by Emo Philips)

The Best Damn Page In the Universe. And he means it too.

Hee hee. Oh, the irony...

I remember way back in the early 1990s I was watching a new sketch-comedy show on FOX called The Edge. One of the actors was a then-unknown Jennifer Aniston, and I recall thinking "She's going to be a big star some day." A few years later she resurfaced on the hit show Friends. For the past couple of weeks I've been watching the new show Good Morning Miami, and I feel exactly the same way about the actor who plays Dylan the hairstylist, Ashley Williams. Even if the show fails (it likely will not) Williams has a bright future. This guy agrees. She has a glow about her that sets her apart from the rest of the fresh, new actors on TV today.

Are you as ...

Are you as confused as I am about the different cell phone technologies between Europe, Asia and the America? I found Steven Den Beste's in-depth explanation to be very informative. It cleared up a lot of confusion for me. So the question I ask now is, if Europe is abandoning the GSM network that was established in the 1990's, isn't it possible to start thinking about alternative uses for such an established network? Perhaps it can be converted to be used as an emergency communication network. I don't know if GSM and 802.11b are compatible at all, but a continent-wide WiFi network would be pretty damn cool.

Funniest thing I've seen in a long time. This comes from the very funny Christian Republican Evangelical Teaching International Network (CRETIN) web site. Update: I am told by a Russian friend that the word kretin in Russian means "idiot." From the French.

Stories like this one make me think that laws in this country are out of control. A teacher who makes and collects hunting knives sells a knife to a student who is also a collector. The teacher gets permisison from the principal of the school and the student gets written permission from his mother. No harmful intent or ulterior motive is present. Yet, because the sale of the knife happens on school property, the student is expelled and the teacher is forced to resign after 11 years of teaching. I understand why such laws regarding weapons on school property exist, but this is clearly an example of two people making a mistake and being punished for it because the laws are zero-tolerance.

CMU HCI Research: Automatic Sign Translation. Wow, this technology could be very profitable. Imagine being able to carry around a PDA-like device that is able to automatically translate any sign in any language for you. Amazing.

Kevin Werbach responded to my note about the differing costs of technology conferences. He makes some good points about corporate sponsorship and how a more-focused event costs more.

It's a matter of different business models. One option is to try to get a lot of people at a low price, the other is to have a more focused event, but requires a higher price to recoup expenses. Unfortunately, the first option often doesn't make up the difference on volume, given the fixed cost of an event, unless you have several thousand people. SXSW has the advantage of combining the interactive event with the film and music festivals.

Also, the lower-priced events almost always have corporate sponsors (which opens up its own set of issues), or are done on basically a non-profit basis. I tried to make Supernova as affordable as possible (it's less than half what we charged for PC Forum last year), but I understand the price is a barrier for many people.

David Chess is brilliantly funny:

FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR OF THE ROYAL FAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN). I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER, THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION. I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION ("DEATH STAR") WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD VADER.

Wired: Spam Masquerades as Admin Alerts. Yet another security flaw in Microsoft technology that allows unethical marketers and advertisers to take advantage of your home computer and invade your privacy.

The most recent K Chronicles comic strikes a chord of truth for me. I know I am not the only non-religious person in the world who is sick and tired of this kind of be religious behavior. The world would be a better place if religion were kept behind closed doors.

DevShed has a great 5-part article called The Art of Software Development. Worth bookmarking.

Flipping around the TV tonight I started watching Monster Machines on TLC, and was fascinated to learn that the director of Caterpillar's Training Center called his machines by the masculine pronoun he. Like the D11R Carrydozer, which is a damn big machine but only half the size as the Komatsu D575-3 Super Dozer, whose blade is as big as a one-story house. It's interesting how people use the feminine pronouns she and her for automobiles but the masculine pronouns for heavy equipment.

...

A few weeks ago a coworker from our London office was in town and we were working on something at my Mac. He looked at my AOL Instant Messenger application and started laughing out loud. I was puzzled at his sudden outburst and he grinned wide and pointed to the names of my Buddy lists. "Hey mate, I love the fact you have a 'Girls' Buddy list." I laughed and explained it was a holdover from when I was doing more dating than I am now.

Request: I'm looking for two mailing lists that cover the usage of PHP. The first list should be tailored to newbies and cover the basics and the second should be for more advanced users and should cover things like doing secure commerce and complex database queries with PHP and MySQL. As always, the lists should have a high signal to low noise ratio. Email me your recommendations.

Between the Washington D.C. area sniper, the Bali terrorist bombings, and this morning's attempted hijacking of a Saudi Arabian airliner I'm starting to wonder how the world has become the way it is. All this senseless violence. Sad.

New Yorker: The trouble with being the world's only superpower.

It's true, duct tape can do anything: even remove warts. I don't recall where I learned this trick but you can also get rid of warts by keeping a couple of band-aids over them for about a week, starving them of oxygen. It will eventually fall off as new skin grows underneath it. Duct tape uses the same technique.

Slate: Bush League Economics. Excellent article about the incompetence of Bush's economic team. Granted, they cannot be blamed for the economic downturn but it's clear that they don't have a clue to what they are doing. I guess this is what happens when you fill the presidential cabinet full of ex-CEO's. [via rc3.org]

ZDNet: Sun-Microsoft: Missed opportunities. "In truth, all Sun has accomplished is to create a void for a VM-style technology on Windows, creating a market opportunity for the ultimate "polluted" Java (.NET)." The saddest part of this is it indicates an Internet technology, no matter how good, cannot be wildly successful unless it receives the Microsoft blessing. This does not bode well for the markets that Microsoft is now entering, including the broadband cable market, the PC-TV market, the video game console market, and the cell phone market. The only good news is that these are all markets that Microsoft does not (yet) have the power of a monopoly in.

Happy 29, Draplin. Have a slice of cake for me.

Yesterday I was ...

Yesterday I was at the Content Management Summit here in New York City. For the most part a great group of attendees and a decent conference, complete with a panel on weblogs. I was a little startled to learn that immediately before the panel began, the moderator didn't know what a "blog" was and was asking me about how weblogs can be used to better tailor content to specific groups of people. I realized at that point he was confusing server weblogs with with informational weblogs. I steered him down the right path and the panel turned out to be a great success.

Jessamyn: How I Tried to Resign from Google Answers but Found I Was Already Fired

Kevin Werbach, who used to run the PCForum conference is now doing a new conference called Supernova. I'm sure it will be a great conference but asking me to fork over $1500 for two days is just not going to happen. Why are some conferences so expensive and others are not? Every year, SXSW manages to be an excellent experience and it costs only a couple hundred bucks. Actually, I couldn't go even if I could afford it, since I'm planning on being in Malta and/or Egypt in early December.

It has happened again. Today I found a $20 bill on the ground. It seems that I have a long history of finding money. Here is a list:

• $20 - October 2002 - Broad Street, New York City
• $10 - December 2001 - Union/Pacific subway station, Brooklyn
• $5 - October 2001 - Water Street, New York City
• $5 - December 2000 - West 86th, New York City
• $20 - August 2000 - Union Square, New York City
• $5 - July 2000 - 7th Ave & 22nd, New York City
• $20 - July 2000 - Market Street, San Francisco
• $300 - February, 1997 - counter of a gas station (I turned this money in), Traverse City, Michigan

Note: Taking a ...

Note: Taking a few days off. I'll be back soon.

No updates today. It has not been a good day, except for one phone call I received that was good news.

Lennart Regebro: Internet World Fall 2002 Report

An astute reader ...

An astute reader noted that CamWorld is inaccessible in China, as it is blocked by the Chinese government. Indeed, it is being blocked since camworld.org and camworld.net, which are aliases to this site, are accessible. Hmmm... Update: Various readers have reported that they get different results when checking the accessibility of CamWorld in China. How odd.

Please kids, don't pray and drive (no offense intended). Update: A couple readers have written in saying that this story may be a hoax.

Satire or actual analysis? I can't tell. Critical analysis of "Bling Bling": A breakdown of the personalities of Baby, Lil' Turk, Lil' Wayne, Manny Fresh, Juvenile, and The B.G. derived from their "flow".

What the...? A turtle with a laptop? I have no idea what the FTC is thinking.

How odd, I saw a talking monkey (some would say a puppet) on TV tonight. And people were applauding. And it was on prime time. I can only imagine what they'll think of next.

Darwin Magazine: When ...

Darwin Magazine: When Bad Things Happen to Good Ideas

NY Times: Anyone Seen Any Democrats Lately?

The Japanese have ...

The Japanese have some weird fetishes. It's cool though, especially the cigarette-smoking iBook-carrying kittens.

This is not good news. RIM is suing Handspring over patent infringement. Apprently, they are claiming that the QWERTY keyboard layout of the Handspring Treo devices is too similar to the keyboard layout of RIM's Blackberry device. I don't know the exact details of the patent infringement but this does not look good for other companies who are producing PDA devices with a QWERTY keyboard layout, like Danger's Hiptop. Here is RIM's patent.

EvilDeadClowns.com. And you can get your own evildeadclowns.com email address, if you really must have one.

The Economist: Phone ...

The Economist: Phone Scams. This great article talks about the unethical cell phone telemarketing going on in Japan. This disturbing practice has yet to catch on in the U.S. but I expect that it will soon. I managed to reduce the amount of telemarketing calls I received to zero by cancelling my land line and using only my cell phone for calls. I use my cell number for everything, whenever a phone number is required -- so I know it has to be in numerous marketing databases. However, I also know that most telemarketing companies will run their databases through a filter that strips out cell phone numbers (which they get from the cell phone companies) and this is why I never receive telemarketing calls to my cell phone. The reason they do this is because when a telemarketer calls your cell phone they are wasting more than your time, they are also wasting your money and don't want to do deal with the hassle of angry cell phone users taking them to small claims court.

MSNBC: America's Worst/Best Phone Service. Excellent! Exactly what I was looking for.

Clay Shirky: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing. Hmmm, odd. I don't consider myself as an amateur publisher. I just write my weblog the way I want to write it, regardless of who reads it and what they might think about it. For me to actively think of myself as a "publisher" I have to think about my audience when writing. Most of the time when writing CamWorld, it's a stream-of-conscious activity and my readers are just along for the ride.

Two students started ...

Two students started a school club called the Satanist Thought Society and declared thats purpose was "to separate church and state completely." Parents and classmates became outraged, and there are quotes from students who belong to the school's Christian Club saying "I'm offended" and "It's just a negative that doesn't belong in the school." What's completely wrong with this point of view is that many people can say the same thing about the Christian Club. If the Satanist's Club is to not be allowed in school then the Christian Club should also be banned. It's called religious tolerance. Yay for the First Ammendment.

Leonard has a list of how some web sites are rendering in the web browser for the T-Mobile Sidekick. HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AvantGo 3.2; ProxiNet; Danger hiptop 1.0).

Why Is It So Hard to Get a Cab in This Town? (San Francisco)

Someone said recently (I'm paraphrasing), "A weblog feels naked without a photo." I agree. Expect more photos on CamWorld in the future.

National Review: Misunderstanding the U.S.

I am really, really tempted to buy a T-Mobile Sidekick, but I may wait for the Nokia 3650 which comes out next spring. A color screen and Bluetooth capabilities are two very big selling points. However, I still think the QWERTY keyboard of the Hiptop is it's best feature. [Thanks randomfoo]

IHT: Disaster in Botswana. "An astonishing 39 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS." Yikes.

Today I mentally ...

Today I mentally referred to my stomach as my "food parser." I think I need to stop coding for a couple days.

Did I really just see a commercial for a cell phone toothbrush? Yes, I did. But it's only a toothbrush shaped like a cell phone. I thought for a minute there that Crest had pushed the technology convergence envelope just a little too far.

Someone has collected the worst .sigs on Slashdot. Some of these are just plain awful.

I've received some feedback about my HTML-to-RSS inquiry. As one reader noted, it's not a non-trivial thing to do but there appears to be a number of people working on solutions.

• Eric Vitiello's Slurp (scroll down)
• MyRSS.com (CamWorld feed)
• Syndic8.com (CamWorld feed)
• blog.rssengine.com (appears to be scraping)
• Blogfeed (looks like a great solution)

I agree with this article about Apple's missed opportunity with iTools and their new .Mac services. A price of $99.95 a year for a few web services is far too steep. I would be willing to pay $19.95 (or maybe even $30) a year to keep my account active, but I'm not going to pay $100 for some services I'm not ready to use yet. Looking at the number of people who have signed up, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Salon: Radio killed the radio star.

Today after work I will be stopping at the conveniently located T-Mobile store near my apartment and checking out the Danger Hiptop. I think afterwards, the sales guys will help me drop a concrete block onto my SprintPCS phone.

Bad news. The T-Mobile Sidekick, which is their name for Danger's HipTop device (note the word "blog" in the navigation), only works on the U.S. network and not internationally as I had assumed. This is enough of a problem for me to not trade in my SprintPCS Samsung SCP-5150 phone just yet. I will wait until T-Mobile releases a dual-band version of the Sidekick that works internationally. I was also told that each store only received 5 phones, which sold out almost immediately and there are wait-lists of 10-50 people.

For the open-minded there is MasturbateForPeace.com, with such catchy slogans as "I Cum in Peace" and "War is Out, Pound Your Trout." Heh!

No matter how many times I see it, this image of AmericaWorld cracks me up every time. The sad truth is that a lot of people might not see the humor in this.