October 2002

Poli Sci Lite
Talking To Your Kids About Fascism

Free Photos
The NOAA Photo Library has lots of great free clipart/stock photos. I think of stock photography and clip art interchangeably. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has so many cool images. Mmmmm, weather.

Turn The Tables on Telemarketers
The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy. Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance. (from John)

This is New York (Sassy should like this one)
This New York Primer makes me laugh.

From the Faith Department
Is “Freethinker” Synonymous with Nontheist?

See also: Religion for previous thoughts on this.

San Diego Bloggers
The San Diego Bloggers page has been modified a but more, including sidebars for Netscape 6-7/Mozilla, Macintosh Internet Explorer, and a bookmarklet for Windows Internet Explorer. The same old badges are there, and there are even more great San Diego area blogs to browse. Check them out now!

ArtLung.com Site Changes

New Words
Back in early September, Ben Forta, Cold Fusion guru spoke at UCSD on Cold Fusion MX and other things. I’ve (uh, finally) written up my notes and they may be of value to someone. Feel free to check them out at:

Misc: Ben Forta Speaks.

It may, perhaps, possibly, be of interest to folks out there. The most compelling stuff was definitely the web services capabilities of CFMX. And Forta is a great speaker overall.

Updated Words
My piece on words called I am a Frank Zappa Fan was updated with several excellent links to painlessly find out more about Frank.

RSS
I’ve added an RSS XML addition to the blog. It’s not strictly speaking a full RSS Feed but it will do for now as it will update when the blog is updated.

Referers
The blog has had a referers page for a while. Now the home page of ArtLung.com has its own Referers Page.

New Header
Regular readers may have noted the new header on the blog which was put in place on 18 Oct 2002. It features an image of my very own right iris as taken by Jon Miles of Miles Research. It’s really nifty to get closeup images of your own iris like that.

Other Geeky Stuff

PHP Database Abstraction Layers:
» PEAR::DB
» PEAR::MDB
» Metabase
» AdoDB

OS X
O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference Report from the estimable TidBITS

Mozilla Development
The book Creating Applications with Mozilla is available online.

.NET
Alan Cooper on Dot Net

Woz
This Steve Wozniak article is worth a read. Woz was a prime mover at the beginning of Apple’s history. Very interesting cat.

Kynn!
This review of Kynn’s CSS in 24 Hours is pretty cool. Go Kynn!

CF
CFML Reference

OSX Shareware
AudioHijack is an excellent piece of shareware that will let you record whatever audio is playing on your Mac to an AIFF file. Very cool.

L.A. (Being A Recap Of Last Weekend’s Trip to Los Angeles):

On Sunday Erin and Jenny and I went to Los Angeles. It was quite fun. On the way I some Wireless (WiFi aka 802.11b aka AirPort) Access Point scanning. Driving north on Interstate 5 (we call them “freeways” in California) I turned on my clamshell iBook in Orange County. MacStumbler almost immediately started alerting me to APs. I was quite surprised that driving at freeway speeds we would spot any. Obviously at freeway speeds there was no time to join any of these networks and use their net connections, but it was enough time to “see” them. So this makes me want to do more “war-driving” – just to see what’s out there. Supposedly the government wants to make this illegal, but it’s illegal to use computer resources – wardriving strikes me more like mapping or exploring. It’s certainly not nefarious when practiced by someone who is merely curious.

Anyway, we went to several places, here are my brief experiences of them:

World Book & News: Greatest newsstand ever, still. On Cahuenga just off Hollywood Blvd. No real finds, but it was cool.

Amoeba Music: Massive new record store (part of a small chain) on Sunset and Cahuenga – near the site of the Cinerama Dome. Great record store with excellent new and used sections – lots of DVDs, including import/non-US encoded/region discs. Definitely a place I’d return to. They had some Zappa vinyl that made me think twice about abandoning vinyl. I have no turntable – so who needs vinyl now? Maybe when I make my millions.

Canter’s Deli: Pastrami delights. Classic.

Aron’s Records: On North Highland Avenue North of Sunset Blvd, worth a visit. Much smaller than Ameoba, but with great quality.

Giant Robot: West of the 405 on Sawtelle. Very excellent and clever merchandise, but too expensive.

Santa Monica Promenade: Always fun for a visit.

Hennessey + Ingalls: Great art & architecture bookstore. Also in the category of “when I get rich, I’ll buy lots” – just looking for books I can look for at the library this trip.

It was a great trip.

Lura says, about San Diego Blog Meetups:

A popular person needs to organize this so as to draw from a larger base. Joe, I nominate you. Be our leader, our local hero. Please take these ideas as your own and make this whole thing work better.

Let me think about it. If folks have ideas about how to handle this, or want to be notified if something happens with this, please drop me a note. I have some possible ideas – probably a simple notification list that sends out notes on some regular basis that it’s happening, and by soliciting feedback in the form of locations or whatever… So many ideas, so little time…