Arc v' September 2004

At long last, I finished it up and handed it off to RRRon: aodl now has a tape in the Recycled Music family from RRRecords.

Recycled Music is a great way to get strange works from assorted noise artists for cheap. The music comes copied over some random tape (ie - Skid Row, Beethoven, TV Sound Effects), with packing tape or some other solid sticking surface slapped over it enough to cover the cassette's "do-not-record" notches, with the artists name written in marker on this surface. Junk art for junk music. And I have to admit that for certain types of music, tape is such a lovely format.

Drop the $4.00. Have a good time.

Utah Valley State College, in the heart of Utah County which is home to Provo, Brigham Young University, and a heavily conservative LDS population, has invited Michael Moore to come speak at the college. And of course, people are freaking out. Instead of just deciding "we don't agree with this guy, we won't go," there are now millions of dollars of funding that are at stake. What makes it even more ridiculous is that parents are getting involved:

Kay Anderson, father of a UVSC student who lives next to Sederburg, called his appearance an insult to the community.

"I should not have to send my children to a private university to get a conservative education when I live in a conservative community and have a state college in my back yard that is paid for by conservative taxpayers and donors," he said. "A balanced education does not require we teach our children to be so open-minded that their brains fall out."

Anderson made a $25,000 offer to the college to not have Moore appear. His offer, however, was booed down. Still, UVSC says, it [the coming Moore appearance] has not helped our fund raising.

This is ridiculous, but sadly all too typical of the current political climate. I hate it. Neither of the two major sides are free from guilt, or anywhere close to it. The situation has ratcheted monstrously out of hand, and political debate is dead (and the upcoming Presidential debates will be, I'm sure, travesties to the very notion of debate). The UVSC situation, however, is particularly saddening. Maybe it's because it's my own state, and I had hoped for better. I'm not saying that everyone should march along blindly to Michael Moore's drum; but they should also not blindly march against it.

I'm surprised that Mormons, at least in this state, run so conservative. Maybe it's because The Right has laid claim to religion and has done so much work to paint The Left as godless miscreants. But the LDS church is a very liberal organization, at least in its execution. It has even been rigidly socialist in its past, and if I recall correctly, church scripture says that socialist days could very well come again. Beyond that, it's very much a culture of "help they neighbor." Wards and Stakes often take great care of their members. When a family is having a hard time, their is often plenty of food and support and even financial aid. Members are taxed through an exceptionally well run tithing system, and once a month members are encouraged to fast for a day and donate the money they would have spent on food to the church. The church has a large and incredibly well run aid network, able to deploy food and supplies worldwide efficiently and effectively, and sits on large piles of supplies for their members and for the needy. The church has plenty of social programs, including employment aid (through their thrift stores, 'welfare square', and more) and youth programs. And they're so well run and generally supportive that they decried Bush's "faith based initiatives" program, stating that they did not need any special consideration or help from the federal government for their programs. The LDS church is its own well run government.

So there are many liberal and progressive underpinnings here, which include helping progress the community by giving aid to those who most deserve it. Yes, their belief structure may seem a little strange to you - but Mormons are on track to becoming a world religion on their own (not lumped under the blanket nom of 'christianity') in the next few decades. And I personally find all religion to be a bit strange. But the church itself is, at its heart, an rather good institution. How its members interpret the churches teachings, however, is another thing entirely. And Mormons do have way too much influence over local laws (it's way too hard to get a good drink here).... I don't know where I'm going with this, really. I think I'm just surprised by the behavior of many of the church's members. I remember being in a sunday school class and during the casual banter before class the topic of Jehovah's Witnesses came up. There had been some Jehovah's Witnesses canvassing the neighborhood recently. Everyone was making fun of them, and telling different stories of how they got rid of them. Some were downright rude. What surprised me greatly was that probably earlier that day I had heard (in the same church, with the same people) Missionary stories. Many young Mormons, particularly men, go on missions to spread the gospel door to door. And they come back and tell of the good times and the bad. So I sat in that class hearing them mock the Jehovah's Witnesses, and I couldn't help but think "wouldn't you be furious if people were talking like this about our missionaries? won't it be rough on you if you go and people treat you like this?" The situation became another nail in the coffin that was my interest in church.

Live and let live. Love one another. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These are all fairly fundamental gospel tenets for most religions, as far as I remember them. In fact, wasn't that the pure gospel of Jesus? "As I have loved you, love one another." Why is there such a strong swath of the so-called religious right that has such a hard time living these precepts? You can't feel rage over images of parts of the Muslim world celebrating the September 11th attacks, and then get excited over the first images of the Shock and Awe campaign against Baghdad. If you're happing when we bomb someone else, you've got to accept that there are people that are just as happy to bomb us. It's a sad fact. Things balance themselves out this way. The terrible notion of innocent hostages being beheaded should sicken you. But you better not be one of these jackasses that then says the torture at Abu Ghraib was just like a college fraternity prank. Some people see the Abu Ghraib pictures and think just a few poor kids should be punished (lightly) for it, and then will see pictures or news about an American hostage being beheaded and say (I shit you not - I've seen this happen and heard these words): "we've just got to nuke everybody there to sand." It's this attitude that is going to get ALL OF US killed. And it's certainly not going to convert me to your party / belief system / whatever.

I just don't get it.

I was about to remove Guido's weblog from my subscription list in NetNewsWire, since it hasn't been updated in months and months, when I came across his review of Jef Raskin's book, The Humane Interface. I thought it was worth looking at again. At the very least, I wanted to remind myself of this review's existence.

Through some chain of random clicking, I came across this: Using the SQLObject Support package. It covers sqlos, a package than can be installed into Zope 3 that provides support for the lightweight Python O-R mapper SQLObject. What chiefly interests me is how sqlos demonstrates Zope 3's adaptability by adding in container objects whose subobjects are retrieved out of an RDBMS instead of the ZODB. At my business, we have a framework/system for data management that takes a different approach than object-relational mapping, and I've long hoped that it would be (relatively) easy to tie it in to Zope 3. We have a thin Zope 2 adaptation layer already, but Zope 3 is engineered better for this sort of integration, particularly for the applications that we're building on this system.

aodl, Sin Salt and Gin

A new autumn single (mp3) from aodl. Harsh noise and power electronics to punch your way into fall.

In a photo-op with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi yesterday, President Bush said that the CIA was just guessing as to what the conditions might be like, in post-invasion Iraq. In particular is the guess that the county would slip into Civil War.

{ Cue Sound of Head Exploding }

Just guessing?! Well, I guess it is obvious that our intelligence agencies have had some major gaffes lately. I suppose they were just guessing about the weapons of mass destruction too. I suppose they were just guessing that no nuclear secrets have spread out of Pakistan to every country in the region except Iraq!

So far, this seems to be the only [public] thing the CIA has gotten right - that Iraq could very well split into civil war. Leave it to the administration to point out that one thing as just a damn guess, and all of the other supposed evidence used as justification for invasion as irrefutable fact.

From the fine folks at Ranchero comes the beta of MarsEdit, a dedicated Weblog editor. If you have a current NetNewsWire license, MarsEdit is free. It also picks up your current NetNewsWire 1.x editor preferences and drafts.

So far, given that this is my first post in it, I like it.

And it uploads images too (mmm, 110 film!):

Update: NetNewsWire 2.0 public beta is also released.

I installed more RAM in my iMac G5 last night. It was an interesting, and fairly painless, experience. I put down a blanket and placed the machine face down, and found the three captive screws on the base of the computer/display. The screws came out smoothly and (nicely) remained captive so that I didn't have to keep track of them. Then I pried the entire back of the machine off to behold the beast inside. The G5 chip and its cooling mechanism do dominate a fair amount of the machine. The RAM slots were easy to find and the new DIMM went into place without problems. Putting the base back on and plugging the machine back in took just a couple of minutes, and reboots on these machines are lightning quick. I was impressed with the whole experience, which was basically on par with my upgrade experience on my old iMac DV if not better (it's cool seeing all of the parts in the machine).

According to Apple, the iMac G5 is the most user serviceable iMac ever, and the list of what can be replaced by hand is pretty impressive considering how closed off previous generations were. I wonder if in the future, Apple or other dealers will offer replacement mid plane assembly boards with faster G5 chips or improved video chips and ram? It doesn't seem terribly likely, but it is nice to know that I have a few options to hopefully sustain the life of this machine should I need to.

Then again - except for its video card, I've never had any real complaint about my venerable iMac DV SE 400. Over the last 4.5 years, the only problem has been its front power switch, and that itself was rarely an issue.

My new iMac G5 (17") arrived today. It's the lowest end model, but I'm still surprised at what Apple was able to pack into this machine for what it costs. For the same price as the current 20" Cinema Displays, one gets a 17" display that happens to also host a computer inside itself, for about $500 less than the 17" iMac G4. And a couple hundred dollars less than the iMac G3 (DV SE/400) that the new one is replacing.

With the G5 systems, starting with the Power Mac towers, Apple finally got around to including a transfer feature in the installation process. Using FireWire, the transfer process mounts your old Mac as a disk, and transfers over what you select (in the grouping of "applications", "files and folders", "accounts", "network settings", etc). It brought over my home folder perfectly, including all of my Unix settings (particularly - my .ssh directory), and all other applications and support files seemed to transfer over just fine. I had to dig up my license again for one application, that I assume does some tie in with the hardware of the machine. Other licenses transferred over fine, along with just about all of my settings, including Safari cookies and everything. Logging in to the new machine after the transfer was basically just like using the old one, only I have more screen real estate now and the system is certainly more perky. While I could have moved all of those files myself, it was nice having the system do it all for me. For less experienced Mac users, who may not know about the Library / Application Support folders, it should prove to be a very nice experience (so long as they have a FireWire cable on hand and a FireWire capable Mac is what they're replacing).

But the main treat with the iMac G5 is the computer itself. As someone who loves aesthetic minimalism, this has me whimpering with delight. Like the iMac G4, the tilt of the display is easy yet solid. The aluminum stand is well weighted and centered inside the computer. A nice surprise is that the base stand rotates easily and keeps its center. Granted, it's not as smooth of a movement as the floating arm that held the iMac G4's display floating in space, but I don't think it's a bad tradeoff. It's still a considerably smoother than any adjustable CRT stand that I've used.

The speakers are admirable. They don't sound quite as nice, in my opinion, as the speakers in the G3 iMac DV's. However, unlike the iMac G4, you do not need to use (or buy, if you went for the cheap model) extra speakers in order to get stereo sound. In an admirably small space for a desktop computer, Apple has built perhaps their most attractive system yet.