ArtLung Blog

Penguin Project: Go on an adventure in Antarctica!

2008-11-19T14:29:01Z

My friend Pinguino is going on a trip to Antarctica and is inviting cool folks to go with her, check it out!

Here’s more info:

You could party in Vegas, Ibiza, Rio, Bangkok, Sydney, or even Marrakesh. But one continent remains overlooked when it comes to having a good time. That’s right, we’re talking about Antarctica. Could you imagine a better adventure? Twenty of your best friends sailing to the furthest destination in the world, partying the whole way. Being surrounded by tens of thousands of penguins, dancing on a glacier. An overnight camping trip or an ocean plunge, resulting in stories you could retell a thousand times. We’re going, and we want you to come with us.

Through the next year, we’ll be drawing 1,000 penguins on postcards. Each penguin will be photographed and posted online. They’ll be put up for “adoption,” and we’ll bring them all to Antarctica and take pictures of them there. When we return to Tierra Del Fuego in South America, we’ll mail the penguins to everyone that adopted them.

This is the Penguin Project. We’ll be updating this site regularly, so check back often!

If you’re interested in coming along, please email penguinpalace@gmail.com

I Like The Way You Move

2008-11-18T14:50:57Z

Actually, I like the way Leah hustles to find us a place to move to. Same difference.

We found a new place, slightly less money, again on this side of Moorpark, very much within target range of the kids, a very humane home. Leah found this one and did the legwork all by herself. I needed only to go over yesterday and sign a lease and take a look.

We did some looking together as well, and we did our thing where we drive around looking for rentals that have not made it to Craigslist, The Kitty Letter, and the Ventura County Star. Mostly we ended up with places in Simi Valley (further from the kids!) that we were not crazy about, or places in Moorpark that were too expensive or too small. Add to that, the places we sort of liked and applied for we were rejected for last week. I suspect that our spotty credit in a “questionable” economic climate has people very skittish. We’ve paid rent on-time and with a great track record for good communication with our landlords for 2 years, and my income track record for those two years has been great. And yet, skittish. Ah well, the worm turned starting this past weekend and we started getting offers of houses. And though it was difficult, we turned down two before we took this one. We also turned down one that ended up being very questionable—the owners were in danger of foreclosure and thus could only offer us month-to-month.

Why are we moving? The owners of our current place moved away for a job they were getting more money for. They were underwater in the house, and we took it on. We like the place. We like the Real Estate guy who showed it to us. We were enjoying the house, but then a month ago we got word the owners would like to return to the house, have us break the lease (for a premium), and we would need to move. We put it off for a while and that’s where we are at two weeks ago. Since then it’s been searching.

It feels good to have an answer to the question: “where are you living next?” I’m not sure how we could have handled this differently next time, maybe not agreed to move? Or maybe given ourselves more time for the finding, choosing and accepting a house? At any rate, I’m glad it’s working out.

We’re moving this week, and Leah is managing that process as well. Go Leah!

Looking at the financial mess as the end of the excesses of the 1980s

2008-11-15T23:57:28Z

Michael Lewis’ story The End is an engaging, enraging read. It posits that the recent crash of Wall Street financial firms is the end of what he had seen working as a trader in the 1980s. He documented his experiences in the book Liar’s Poker. This followup is a must-read.

Some excerpts:

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn’t sink Wall Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer’s campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they’d have vanished long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.

There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane.

“I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”

Harboring suspicions about people’s morals and telling investors that companies don’t deserve their capital wasn’t, in the 1990s or at any other time, the fast track to success on Wall Street.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.” This wasn’t Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody’s, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the company’s C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by one Vincent Daniel, from Queens.

Read it.

Predicting the meltdown

2008-11-15T15:51:49Z

Peter Schiff ends up prophetic, while everyone on the shows in this video treats him as a Cassandra.

via Open Culture and Paul Kedrosky.

LDS and Proposition 8

2008-11-14T00:42:04Z

Some various responses to Proposition 8 of note. I’m sad at the rhetoric, I was sad about the proposition, and I feel The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have done themselves a disservice in this matter.

Mormons Resigning Despite Strong Heritage, Citing ‘Hatred’ by LDS Church

Mormons Stole Our Rights

danah boyd has the most measured, unhappy, but constructive response I’ve seen: post-Prop 8: seek an education-based reversal, not a legal challenge

Redesigning Drupal.org in the open

2008-11-14T16:42:41Z

Drupal.org, Design Iterations, and Designing in the open is a remarkable post by Mark Boulton about the process of redesigning a website—in this case drupal.org—with radical transparency. This is incredible and groundbreaking work, applying the modes of open source to design. Surprising that it has not devolved into design-by-committee.

Handicraft Guide to Cartooning for Armed Forces Personnel

2008-11-14T15:32:27Z

What a great find from the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive. In 16 pages, it communicates a lot; though, the section on “racial symbols” makes me uncomfortable.

War of the Worlds 2.0

2008-11-13T22:33:58Z

On Halloween I participated in a wonderful, strange experiment called War of the Worlds 2.0 on twitter. Here’s the story of how it came to be, from Kris Kowal.

My entries can be found by doing a search on search.twitter.com: “wotw2 from:artlung”. I’ve always been a fan of the idea of Orson Welles hacking the radio audience in 1939, and loved the tie-in between that story and Buckaroo Banzai.

Here’s the wrap up: War of the Worlds 2.0 – The Post Mortem. Mack Reed also has a wonderful post that thinks deeply, if at a thousand miles an hour—about what it means and what it’s about. I think he’s right on target. Read Kris’ post too, and follow the links contained therein. Great stuff about a fun event.

That night we actually went to a football game Tyler played in, and Leah would ask me what was happening, and I’d say “we’re trapped in a tripod net, slung below—we’re headed north but I suspect the tripod will return.” It was an enjoyable consensual hallucination.

Santa Barbara Drupal Meet

2008-11-14T15:35:05Z

Last night I attended a meetup about Drupal in Santa Barbara. I had wondered whether this was something that would be worthwhile to drive to, considering the distance. Turned out it was no further than a drive down to Los Angeles for a meeting, which I’m more than happy to do when something interests me. It was an hour and a half drive, and that includes time getting gas. I’m very appreciating to Markus Sandy’s twitter stream, that’s how I found out about it.

I learned a lot. I think I’m getting a much better high-level understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and peculiarities of Drupal. It started some time back with some Drupal, and I’m thankful to my last job for getting me some more in-depth experience. I also learned a lot from DrupalCampLA.

Markus has already blogged about it!

Also, in terms of drupal, it’s all about the modules. Some modules that I want to check on (or refresh my memory of) are: cck, project, project_issue, book, blogapi, jstools, notifications, ubercart, word2web. We also talked about some of the history between Drupal and Acquia and the relationship between them, which I found quite helpful. We also discussed the perennial issue: WYSIWYG edititors and their incredible promise but sad lack of performance: FCKEditor, TinyMCE, TinyTinyMCE, and YUI Rich Text Editor.

I’m happy to have met the folks last night, it was an interesting group with varied backgrounds. I got a lot out of it and will be looking more seriously at Drupal and other groups that meet in Santa Barbara. “Worth the trip” is how I look at it.

Update: Markus has compiled a short video of the event

Ventura County Tech.com

2008-11-13T15:01:34Z

Latest mini-project of mine—an effort to figure out what companies are out here in Ventura County. If you know of a tech/internet/etc company, or a user group, or anything else relevant, please do drop a line!