Lots of stuff going on. I owe it to myself to do a big long post with all the changes, but not yet. Mom, my goal is to get a full update out there by the end of the week!

Love and happiness to all!

Onward

The Decline of Fashion Photography — An argument in pictures — by Karen Lehrman in Slate

Vossa is a new space available to rent for presentations and stuff. Very tricked out, and I may be interested in using this for one of my ventures.

Happy Birthday Leah!

Read this one on Salon: Homeland Insecurity: The fact that U.S. intelligence agencies can’t tell terrorists from children on passenger jets does little to inspire confidence.

Relying on computers to sift through enormous amounts of data, and investigators to act on every alarm the computers sound, is a bad security tradeoff. It’s going to cause an endless stream of false alarms, cost millions of dollars, unduly scare people, trample on individual rights and inure people to the real threats. Good intelligence involves finding meaning among enormous reams of irrelevant data, then organizing all those disparate pieces of information into coherent predictions about what will happen next. It requires smart people who can see connections, and access to information from many different branches of government. It can’t be seen by the various individual pieces of bureaucracy; the whole picture is larger than any of them.

These airline disruptions highlight a serious problem with U.S. intelligence. There’s too much bureaucracy and not enough coordination. There’s too much reliance on computers and automation. There’s plenty of raw material, but not enough thoughtfulness. These problems are not new; they’re historically what’s been wrong with U.S. intelligence. These airline disruptions make us look like a bunch of incompetents who cry wolf at the slightest provocation.

LocalFeeds has an exclusively San Diego Page — how do they do it? — they use GeoURL data combined with RSS data.

It’s also smart enough to list “Nearby Cities” such as El Cajon, Chula Vista, Tijuana, Escondido, Oceanside.

So cool!

Bookmarking for the future…

• http://www.healthnet.com
• http://www.bankwi.com/
• http://www.ehealthinsurance.com/

Bedtime now. More tomorrow. Er… today, later. Much later.

But the laundry is done! (More or less).

Many thanks to those of you who have sent well-wishes since my last big post. The positive thoughts are much appreciated.

Sometimes one must Dance. With a trombone.

Jefferson College of Health Sciences is the new name of the former Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley: College of Health Sciences. Here’s a bit more about the history of the College — many former names and colleges that have merged over time to become this new thing — many tributaries, all forming this new river. I wonder if any of my old instructors are there?

Introduction to ColdFusion Components
ColdFusion Development Forum: Components
MVC for ColdFusion MX
CFSCRIPT Tutorial
Daily Use: Subversion
SQL Server Performance Tips
HTML Forms and JavaScript (a minor reference)

Ballad of the Sneak

WebSanDiego.org – Search this site is currently down with this error:

ht://Dig error
htsearch detected an error. Please report this to the webmaster of this site. The error message is:

Unable to read configuration
file ‘/usr/home/artlung/public_html/_websandiego/cgi- bin/htdig/conf/htdig.conf’

This is another thing I want to add to my list of “things to do.”

The Crypto-Gram for January 15, 2004 is excellent as always. Particularly, read his strong criticisms of current airline security and the color-coded alert system.

Also, I will miss it, but the author of the Crypto-Gram newsletter, Bruce Schneier, will be in town Friday night at San Diego Technical Books promoting his latest book.

What do Rover, The Dot, F1, Office Logo, Mother Nature, Links, Rocky, Merlin, Courtney, and Earl have in common?

• How to wake up with energy in the morning
• Chris Ware: self loathing?
• US Army: Iraq a distraction in War on Terror
• Genetic sexual attraction – peculiar phenomenon, glad this is not my situation!
• PHP OOP
• Ariana Huffington goes off about the conventional wisdom on Dean
• Two Buck Chuck
• Songs that mention Comics
• Do web search engines suppress controversy?
• Projects: one day at a time
• Open Letter to Miramax (they’re bungling great Asian movies, particularly Shaolin Soccer)
• More radio interviews with smart people
• Another Bruce Sterling interview (I can’t get enough!)

Today will be my last day at FinancialAid.com. I’ve enjoyed my tenure there. I’ll have a major announcement next week about what I’m up to next. I’ve talked about it a bit. But for now, I’ll leave you wanting more. Drop me a note if you’re curious.

I’ll be in and out this busy weekend, and will likely not check email much.

So… have a great weekend!

Let’s be careful out there!

I’m on the road. Back in the box late tomorrow. Southern Utah is beautiful, though dry. More this week. Onward via dial-up!

as an INS agent anymore:

The former INS and former U.S. Customs Department were merged into the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the Department of Homeland Security.

I had not realized that. See: US Citizenship and Immigration Services, US Customs & Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security.

I used to love Media Grok, and now maybe this will be cool. Though it says “Guest Blog” — which maybe indicates it is only temporary. The Industry Standard: Guest Blog: Jimmy Guterman – Internet Business News

Civics Department: One Party USA? Read this: America as a One-Party State by Robert Kuttner

My cell phone is currently down, making it rather hard to make or take calls. This is one of the hazards of going all cellular: DOWNTIME!

Still, AIM works.

IDEO Method Cards look like they’re congruent to The Oblique Strategies.

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

The Method Cards are intended as inspiration for practicing and aspiring designers, as well as those seeking creative spark in their work. It’s a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own.

I don’t have either. But I like the idea of both.

I’ve been wanting to build a comprehensive guide comparing PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, etc for some time. Something like: Server-Side Scripting Comparative Anatomy, combined with links out to the documentation on php.net, Macromedia.com, and Microsoft.com. Something one can use to know that rawurlencode(), URLEncodedFormat(), and Server.URLEncode() are the three respective ways to do the same thing in the “big three.”

Point, Counterpoint.

So it is looking like I need about 30 units of Community College work (more or less) to get into UCSD. I talked with a super-nice Transfer Counselor and essentially it looks like 30 units or so will get me in there. My current academic state is sort of ambiguous. I have 90 or so units which contributed to my Associate of Science – but as these were from Virginia, they don’t necessarily transfer, or not, to the UC system. I also have some units from UCLA Extension, from whom I’ve now requested a transcript. Though there’s no guarantee that any of those will transfer. I also have a few additional, much older units from San Diego here, which may transfer (though those were from when I was a paltry 17 and 18 years old, and some are not so hot). Still, they may count for something. So now I’m collating all these things and will talk to a counselor at City or Mesa College about what I can make with all these ingredients. Best case scenario would be TAG or IGETC into UCSD in Spring 2005, but I’d have to have all 30 units in time – unlikely. Likely scenario is to matriculate in Fall of 2005 as a Junior. Likely majors for me include, in no particular order:

• Cognitive Science/Computation B.S.
• Cognitive Science/Human Computer Interaction B.S.
• Biology with a Specialization in Bioinformatics B.S.
• Computing and the Arts B.A.

The goal continues to be Masters degree in 5 years. It looks like I can be enrolled in 2005, plus 2 years is 2007 for my Bachelor’s, which gives me 2 more years for a Master’s if I’m to get it by 2009.

So, we’ll see.

Oh, and I got an “A” in Racquetball, 0.5 Credits, from last semester at City College. So I’m already a student there, really.

I’m sitting in the East Village Coffee House, which is across the street from San Diego City College. On further inspection, I have 26 units of credit from 1987-1989 from the San Diego Community College District. Where these random credits which range from A to F put me, I have no idea. The F obviously don’t count, but the A in Broadcast Studio Operations and the B’s in Cinema as Art/Communication I, Introduction to Philosophy, Beginning Architectural Drafting, General Psychology, Introduction to Radio and Television may. So too may my C’s in Design, Cinema as Art/Comm II, and Principles of Marketing. Yuck.

I was a much different person in 1987-1989. Much less patience for things which I did not enjoy. Less tolerance for teachers who I might not agree with. And mostly, I was lazy and unwilling to work very hard for anything.

It’s funny, in High School and when I was first taking classes in Community College I used to hide my grades from my parents, forge signatures — nasty stuff. That kind of deception makes me cringe now. I have shame for that time, but I learned a lot from that. And I’m a much more open and honest person, particularly since my divorce.

Things are much different now.

Anyway…

So I’m waiting for the transfer office to open up at 10am (usually they open at 8am) — and we can take a looksee.

This is sort of fun.

Next week I begin a new gig in earnest. I’ve gotten… er… three notes asking me what it is. And I’ve complied. And some other friends and family know what’s up. So next week – even more newness!

Stay tuned… and… onward!

Summary: things good: likely candidates for Spring classes: Spanish, Statistics, Java Programming. So we’ll see. Oh, and more than half of my SDCCD credits transfer. My Virginia units will need to be assessed by SDCCD. I’ve been advised by Sassy to fight for those units hard.

Got lots of worksheets and requirements lists on my potential UCSD majors and on IGETC and TAG and am diving in. You know, Bioinformatics is looking much more interesting to me. It’s hard science, it’s programming. It could be really cool. The Cognitive Science/HCI degree also is entrancing and looks doable.

So, as Sassy has succinctly put it, I have a few goals to hit my 5 year goal of a Master’s degree. That’s a Master’s by 2009.

1. Successful Application to UCSD
2. Bachelor’s Degree at UCSD
3. Successful Application for Master’s Degree
4. Master’s Degree

To get step 1, I need to jump through hoops and get my units in a row for TAG and IGETC, and that includes getting my units to City from CHRV College of Health Sciences/Jefferson College of Health Sciences, getting those assessed… and, enroll for some classes for the Spring.

This is fun.

Wow that was fast. My transcripts came from UCLA Extension — really fast. I have 15 units — B in Entry Level Positions in Film Production, and 3 A’s: Digital Backlot: an Introduction to Digital Image Creation for Film & TV; Mac Illustration; and Post-Production for Film and Television.

I don’t think any of it necessarily applies, but it’s nice to see on paper.

So I’m taking some classes at City that will apply for TAG and IGETC for later transferrence to UCSD: Statistics, Java Programming, and I’m the waitlist for Spanish. I enrolled and paid online. It’s a modern age I suppose.

Like I said (or maybe I didn’t), the counselor at City was very helpful.

Okay. Onward.

Macintosh was born 20 years ago

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it”

Source: CNN

2 Million American Children Have Their Own Websites

I remember this videogame
The Ending of Ecco the Dolphin for Sega Genesis

Google groups, formerly Deja News Groups: artlung at earthlink.net; jcrawford at avencom.com; jcrawford at edupoint.com.

gtm; jamisongold; edupoint; avencom; financialaid; bidland — some of these may be spam from “joe jobs”, so beware for content.

America is Not A Christian Nation.

from The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck: “Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a profound tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”

There are some new and cool San Diego pieces over at San Diego Blog.

Well, I think they’re cool. Maybe they’re not. Hah.

I’ve just put up a listing of the most recent posts to websandiego using the RSS library for PHP called Magpie.

http://websandiego.org/recentposts/ is where I’ve put it.

http://websandiego.org/recentposts/source.php is the sourcecode in question. I think it was Steve Eisenberg who noted that YahooGroups provides an RSS Feed for the group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/websandiego/messages/?rss=1

The whole *point* of the syndication thing is to allow this kind of thing, and this is pretty nifty. It uses caching, and supposedly uses conditional GET to make sure the page does not hit yahoo too hard.

I’d love to hear feedback from people about what they think of it or if they have other ideas for how websandiego.org can use RSS. We still have an RSS event calendar on the front page — but that really is dependent on people using the Sharpe calendars. Sadly, it’s hard to get people to use a unified calendar, or even to publish a unified calendar.

Anyone have programming or other feedback?

Or even a better construct for doing alternating colors in a table. 🙂

My clunky code is: if ($counter==0) { $color=$colorOne; $counter++; } else {$color=$colorTwo; counter=0;}

More on Magpie: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

(reposted from websandiego)

Sassy sent me some help for: : “$color = ( $counter % 2 == 0 ) ? $colorOne : $colorTwo; ” — it uses the modulo operator, described .

Thanks Sass!

My father had a weather-related car mishap today. The email my Mom sent describes it as prety scary. Back in Virginia, things are icy and cold and I don’t care for that one bit. With some luck, it looks like the car was not lost, and my Dad got out and to work safely with a colleague.

The weather in San Diego may not be perfect right now — it’s overcast and a bit chilly and sometimes wet — but it’s head and shoulders better than ice, sleet, snow, and cold.

Tease, tease, tease. I just ordered some new business cards from iPrint and they should arrive soon. I’m excited about my new venture. I’m thinking about doing a press release and everything. Something I can send to the likes of freshnews and the t sector — or would that be worthwhile?

I’m still formulating my plans of attack for now, but I have oodles of ideas for how I’m going to be attacking my new, part-time job.

Was that obscure enough?

Ask me to be more obscure!

Sander pointed out to me that the index page of websandiego.org was showing a directory listing. It has now been fixed.

The title of this post is the only proper response to the fact that the front of websandiego.org was a directory listing for about 20 hours.

Thanks for the QA, Sander!

Testing of publishing of an Atom Feed. You won’t see anything yet. Sorry.

Blogger added support for Atom feeds — read more at AtomEnabled.org — it’s not got the same content as the RSS feed, but hey, it’s simple enough.

I’m using PHP code to add Etag and Last-Modified code:

header(“Last-Modified: $myDate”);
header(“Etag: “$myDate””);
header(“Content-Type: text/xml”);

I also added this code in the html of my page:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”https://artlung.com/blog/atom/”>

I need to add an icon as well. So, yeah.

I’ve been reading dive into mark.org, which has been interesting and internecine and internutty.

That was supposed to be funny.

Okay, I’m trying.

…is https://artlung.com/blog/atom/

Check this, on Many-to-Many — Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign? A quote:

The Dean campaign has brilliantly conveyed a message to its supporters, particularly its young ones, that their energy and enthusiasm can change the world. Some of this was by design, but much of it was a function of people looking for something, finding it in Dean, and then using tools like MeetUp and weblogs to organize themselves. The story of the bottom-up and edge-in style adopted by Dean’s staff has been told a thousand times, and it’s a good one.

But what if this style has also created a sense of entitlement or even inevitability about the change? What if communing with fellow believers has created the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes from participation in a shared effort, but hasn’t created a sense of urgency or threat? What if Dean supporters believe that believing is enough, and what if the Dean campaign’s brilliant use of tools to gather the like-minded both online and off has fed that feeling?

I can attest to the fact that online groups can give a sense of self-satisfaction that can make you think more is being accomplished than is a reality. In my websandiego group, for example, often people have a sense that it’s so active and vibrant — the only place they would ever need to market is there on websandiego. The truth is that the vibrancy does not indicate that there’s a huge pool of enthusiastic consumers of XYZ web dev product. And it’s only a tiny slice of all the possible consumers of web dev products in San Diego.

The Presidential race is still early, and I’m looking forward to more competition as it shakes out. So far I’m glad to see Lieberman and Kucinich doing poorly — when I hear them speak, I get irritated.

I have been cautiously supportive of Dean so far, and despite these two early losses — there’s still more to come for thiss year’s election.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Press Release: “Writing Instructor Loses Job for Discussing Iraq War in Class”

Brian Dear sent me this latest silliness of his: Denounce Newswire: Amazon Launches New Social Network Called “Pricekut”: “Customers Can Now See and Comment on the Contents of Other Customers’ Shopping Carts”

I guess you have to be pretty geeky to get it though.

Hey, I just ordered TurboTax for Mac. With luck I should have my taxes done in a few weeks, though I’m still waiting on my W-2 from one of my employers.

The TurboTax (formerly MacinTax) product is really good. Painless, and easy.

The South Eastern Michigan PHP Users Group seems particularly active.

And no, I’m not going to Michigan. 🙂

Backup Brain:

Orkut (what’s Orkut?) was down, but now it’s back up again. Not a member but want to be? Ask.

Later note: uhhh… I meant ask if you and I actually do know each other, virtually or otherwise.

Hee. Yeah, if you know me, ask to be invited, and I’ll let you in on all the fuss.

Remind me to install a Kwiki.

Check with the The Oracle of Starbucks. Silliness.

Read this: BarlowFriendz: The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised:

“This is especially true in a primary campaign where the leading criterion driving candidate preference is the ability to beat the incumbent. Given the relentless hammering he took from the media, Dean was lucky to get 26% of the New Hampshire vote. Even so, Dean may be done for. Or, more to the point, done in. Some will say that he strung his own rope, but it looked more like a media lynching to me. Assuming I’m right about this, why did television want to hang Howard Dean?

I may have an answer. It may be that, once again, we have met the enemy and he is us. By pre-announcing the possibility that this might be The Internet Election, we issued fair warning both to the traditional media and the big money politicos that a threat was at hand.

If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to start defining enough personal realities to contest the great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions presently spent on television campaign ads would start to wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at stake.”

Read it all.

833786 – Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks

“The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER. ”

You know your web browser is buggy and old when you’re telling people not to click on links.

( via http://boingboing.net/ )

Doc Searls says: “Then remember that we’ve only had two primaries so far, and that November is a long way off.”

Citizen of the US? Go read Senator John McCain:

In the State of the Union Address just last night, the President called on us to act “as good stewards of taxpayers dollars.” He asked that, when he sends us the new budget plan, we “focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending, and be wise with the people’s money.” Why wait for that budget? Let’s start right here. Let’s strip all of the pork, all of the earmarks, and all of the good deals for special-interests out of this bill and “be wise with the people’s money” right now. “

I encourage you to read it all.

“Warnock’s Dilemma The act of choosing whether the lack of response to a discussion-list post is because of its brilliance (there’s nothing to add) or because of its stupidity (it doesn’t deserve comment). Named after Brian Warnock, who first described the condition on a Perl list.”

( from Wired 9.10 )

In his latest op-ed, Slouching toward Big Brother, Bruce Schneier asks the questions our politicians and media OUGHT to be asking.

Security is a trade-off. It makes no sense to ask whether a particular security system is effective or not–otherwise you’d all be wearing bulletproof vests and staying immured in your home. The proper question to ask is whether the trade-off is worth it. Is the level of security gained worth the costs, whether in money, in liberties, in privacy or in convenience?

This can be a personal decision, and one greatly influenced by the situation. For most of us, bulletproof vests are not worth the cost and inconvenience. For some of us, home burglar alarm systems are. And most of us lock our doors at night.

Terrorism is no different. We need to weigh each security countermeasure. Is the additional security against the risks worth the costs? Are there smarter things we can be spending our money on? How does the risk of terrorism compare with the risks in other aspects of our lives: automobile accidents, domestic violence, industrial pollution, and so on? Are there costs that are just too expensive for us to bear?

Unfortunately, it’s rare to hear this level of informed debate. Few people remind us how minor the terrorist threat really is. Rarely do we discuss how little identification has to do with security, and how broad surveillance of everyone doesn’t really prevent terrorism. And where’s the debate about what’s more important: the freedoms and liberties that have made America great or some temporary security?

File under “oh those kids today!”

Item 1: Mike Rowe is supposedly making a bundle on eBay by selling legal docs
(though ostensibly only got an MSDN membership and an xbox)

Item 2: The G5 Kid was a big hoax

<Nelson-Muntz>
   Ha Ha.
</Nelson-Muntz>