dsandler.org

Techdirt notes that Tim Berners-Lee hates all the new top-level domains too.

Japanese for the Western Brain.

I love pencil sketches, draft scripts, internal memos, and test-market product experiments. JBX is one such test, a slicked-up version of Jack in the Box, currently instantiated only twice in Jack’s hometown of San Diego. The idea: better cuisine + shiny décor = yuppie-magnetic fast-food. (Or, you know, whatever we call Young Urban Professionals now.)

Further reading: JBX project background, anecdote and photos (source of above shots), menu scans.

See, this is why I still like Colin Powell. (Videos here.)

Yahoo! explains its DomainKeys anti-spam proposal in detail, using pretty pictures. (Basic idea: All messages will now be PKI-signed by the source MTA; public keys will be stored in DNS, of all places.)

An interesting side-effect of the protocol as described in the DomainKeys RFC is that message header order now becomes significant. Because the headers are signed along with the rest of the message (a crucial detail, since you want to sign the “From:” header most of all), the spec explains that any headers that occur before DomainKeys-Signature: are not included in the signature. (To verify a message, find the last occurrence of this magic signature header, and then verify the signature embedded in that header against the computed signature of all subsequent headers plus the message body.) I don’t know of any other usage of RFC822/2822 email that places this sort of restriction on header ordering, and I know for a fact that there are MTAs out there that aren’t always careful about keeping headers in sequence. (Fortunately these all seem to be end-user mail apps, but you never know.)

Stream-of-consciousness though they may frequently be, I have never read a book or an essay by Kurt Vonnegut that didn’t connect with me in some way. His essay, “Cold Turkey”, published last week, is no exception.

The best part, the thesis, is quoted below. Unfortunately it’s also the punchline of sorts, so if you don’t like reading mystery novels back-to-front you ought probably to just go read the essay from the beginning.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

This came up again at work.

to lie (to tell untruths)

present tense: I lie, I am lying
past tense: I lied, I was lying

to lie (to recline) — intransitive verb

present tense: I lie down, I am lying down
past tense: I lay down, I was lying down
perfect past: I have lain on my bed

to lay (to spread something out) — transitive verb

present tense: I lay the table, I am laying the table
past tense: I laid the table, I was laying the table
perfect past: I have laid the table

(I feel honorbound to reference my source for this handy table, though it’s not exactly worksafe reading.)

Seattle’s new public library, designed by Rem Koolhaas. [photo gallery]

“A gas station in Menlo Park, California, displays a sign that says it all.” —CNN story

Hey, our car turned red! (Actually, it’s just the loaner from the dealer while they put the security system in ours.) Note that the loaner is officially “pimped out”, on account of totally unnecessary interior lighting effects.

Update:

Slashdot is currently carrying a story about ‘project weblogs’ as described in CIO Magazine as “plogs”. I thought the word “plog” sounded cute when I used it to describe my stripped-down, Palm- and phone-friendly weblogging app, but to see it used not as a product name but as a neologism (ill-conceived of “project log”, apparently) gives the word a bitter, Diet Coke sort of taste. Blech. (Update: a Slashdot reader notes some prior uses of the word.)

From our weekend jaunt to San Antonio: Erin, displeased with the Spurs’ lackluster performance against the Lakers on Saturday night. (We watched the first half from Rita’s, an overpriced margarita bar on the Riverwalk.)

Ray Bradbury is inspiring and eloquent as ever in his testimony to the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond. ‘There’s a scene in ‘Moby Dick,’ where Ahab is going after the white whale, and Starbuck says to him, ‘Where’s the profit in this?’ And Ahab touches his heart and he says, ‘The profit is here, man, the profit is here.’”

“Honey, our boy is a maladjusted menace. They’re always sending him home for something—beating up other children, stealing their money, poking them in the eyes and forcing their heads into toilets!”

“Yes, I know, dear. I think the only thing for him is to send him off to the military academy. I’m sure the Army will know what to do with young Johnny.”

A thorough breakdown, from sketches to CSS, of the recent redesign of the Blogger website and brand. The new Google/Blogger team also added a number of snappy new features to the world’s oldest weblog publishing service, including an email gateway—something I’ve depended upon in my own journal system for years.

Doppler radar progression.

Today’s storm is approaching, with moisture and storm energy conveying generally northeast. But there’s a really weird front line, a southeastern frontier, that is—for the moment—protecting the Houston area. It’s like there’s a high-pressure bubble over the coastal cities that’s fending off the storm. But successive Doppler radar snapshots show the storm’s high-intensity leading edge slowly encroaching…

We got to talking at the office about certain more or less scientific treatments about near-term global climate change. It occurred to us, though, that we knew all the stories about how an ice age might start (mostly revolving around the shutdown of the Global Oceanic Conveyor), but none of us knew how ice ages end. The Climate Cycles section of UCSD’s Climate Change course materials proved very informative in this regard. (The deglaciation theory revolves around the potential energy present in ice when accumulated in large deposits on the planet.)

“Proust thought that the sense of smell was the most evocative of memory, and apparently there’s some modern science to support the idea. But Proust never had the experience of seeing his ex-girlfriend’s car.”

May 27, 1994

FRIENDS

“Pilot”

PILOT PERFORMANCE: Weak

SHOW PREDICTOR: 41 Percentile

The Smoking Gun: “A Failing Grade For ‘Friends’: Sitcom was trashed in confidential 1994 NBC research report.”

While we’re on the topic of zippy little fuel-efficient autos: Hybrid Cars Don’t Live Up to Mileage Claims. Referenced: Pete Blackshaw’s hybrid blog in which he fails to get a straight answer from Honda. “My Honda Civic hybrid car barely gets 32 MPG, ridiculously less than the advertised 47-48 advertising mileage.”

In lieu of shiny new car photos, I offer these surreptitious snaps from our Scion xA test drive. (Erin was a little uneasy at the time about taking photos of a car that wasn’t ours. But, hey, now it is ours!)