Keep ’em separated

If you read manuals, you probably already know this. But apparently some cable modems—at least the model supplied to us by AT&T Broadband—react badly when placed near a wireless hub, such as my graphite AirPort Base Station. For me the problem manifested itself as dropped packets (meaning generally slow traffic) and ultimately a complete disconnect about twenty minutes after cycling the power on the cable modem. Ever since the broadband tech told me about the potential RF interference effect in the cable modem and I moved the base station further away, I’ve had no further problems—performance is back to really good.

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Puttering

Spent the day yesterday doing a lot of not much at all. Helped my mother-in-law and Lisa in the garden; took them to Ikea with us (most targeted visit ever: 45 minutes in and out), then to Ivar’s Salmon House for dinner. You can get salmon any way you like as long as it’s alder-smoked. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.

Today Lisa’s dad and I assembled the things that were purchased at Ikea yesterday while Lisa bought more stuff at Sears. Then we all basically collapsed.

When Copyright Attacks

I’ve been waiting to add this link until I found out more about the case, but I’ve finally linked to the website of Eldred v. Ashcroft over the issue of the challenge to the Sonny Bono Extension of Copyright act, which extended by 20 years both existing and future copyrights. The tradeoff of copyright is between the rights of the creator and the rights of the public, a balance which this suit alleges has been tipped unfairly in favor of the creators at the expense of the public’s rights. I urge you, if you are a creator or consumer of any kind of content, a user of libraries, or a reader of electronic texts, check out the site. The archive of materials about the case is richer than anything I could possibly say here.

Except to point to Aaron Swartz’s summary of the Justice Department’s response to the suit, which was essentially to say, “You don’t have a right to question this law.”
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Visitors from the East

My in-laws flew into SeaTac last night. Unlike our last flight, there was no lost luggage. We loaded them into my car and swept them to our house so they could ooh and aah before we tucked them into bed.

This is a big visit for a couple of reasons:

  1. This is the first visit by any of our family to the house.
  2. My father in law is the reason we went through all the renovations on our guest bathroom. It’s kind of a payoff to have him finally using it.
  3. This is also the first time that the older portion of the house (the guest bedrooms) gets a real shakedown.
  4. Finally, Lisa’s mom can help us figure out what the heck to do in our garden. We don’t know very much about gardening; she ran a $500K gardening budget at their retirement community.

They’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so my late night blogging activity will be curtailed. (It probably would be anyway, as AT&T Broadband has been really flaky recently–download speeds of 1.5K/sec last night, no connection at all this morning!)

Clues for bad drivers…

…like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as “you are not as good a driver as you think you are,” “SUVs are not suits of armor,” and my favorite, “If you’ve been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate.” (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.)

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The currency of the web, in an increasingly real sense

Jill Walker: Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, a very cool paper presented in June 2002 at the ACM Hypertext conference in Baltimore. The paper argues for a “political economy” of value created by links.

Whereas most valuation models for the web start from the advertising assumptions that impressions (views of the ad) are the basis for value, links to sites have value independent of the impression or even the clickthrough value. This is because of Google and other search engines that value the source and target pages of links through the link itself. Links are currency that may give value to giver and recipient: by linking to this article, I share some of my PageRank with it (and vice versa). This makes the article more visible in search engines and therefore more discoverable. How much is that worth???

There are a lot of people talking about this, including Roland Tanglao, and Jim McGee; thanks to Jim for the pointer.
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Happy birthday, Mom

My mom, who continues to be one of the most amazing women I know along with my wife and my sister, turns … well, discretion forbids. Anyway, it’s her birthday, and if you know her drop her a line and wish her well. One of the things that makes me unhappiest about being on this coast is that I can’t drop in on her without a lot of advance planning, but I know she and my dad will be throwing a great party tonight before she takes off for my cousin’s wedding in Pennsylvania tomorrow. So happy birthday, Mom!

What color is your philosophy?

Greg: Alex Cockburn, Arbiter of Black Authenticity. Greg unleashes some pointed thought on the issue of whether one can be “black in skin tone but not in philosohy” (I’m paraphrasing). Greg sez:

…you get to spell out what my fellow Alabamans — Condolezza Rice and Cynthia Tucker — and I have in common save skin tone, good looks and a firm conviction that Dreamland cooks the best barbecue ever.

And maybe then you can help me figure out why you and Pat Buchanan don’t seem to think much alike. How am I supposed to know which one of you is philosophially white?

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An administration incapable of telling the truth?

Paul Krugman in the New York Times: The Memory Hole. Krugman discusses the origins of the “trifecta” quote (about Bush’s statement that he said he would only let the budget go into deficit in case of war, recession or national emergency; there’s no evidence he ever promised any such thing). Now evidence that OMB and other agencies may not be telling the truth in new budget deficit projections just disappears.

Every government tries to make excuses for its past errors, but I don’t think any previous U.S. administration has been this brazen about rewriting history to make itself look good. For this kind of thing to happen you have to have politicians who have no qualms about playing Big Brother; officials whose partisan loyalty trumps their professional scruples; and a press corps that, with some honorable exceptions, lets the people in power get away with it.

Lucky us: we hit the trifecta.

Thanks to Brendan Nyhan at Spinsanity for the link.

Update: Forgot I wrote about the trifecta already; just linked it in.
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Cool morning, gray skies

This area never fails to surprise me. The morning is cool and gray here, but light. Driving in this morning the local DJ announces a request from an Internet listener in LA. The car hums up 520, almost a shame to take the freeway for such a short hop but it brings my gas mileage up to 21.5 for the trip.

Driving down 40th Street onto the Microsoft campus, traffic stops. What’s going on? A line of ducks, five ducklings following their mother, are crossing from where a drainpipe emerges from the edge of campus to the wooded apartment complex on the other side. Jeff Tweedy sings “I am trying to break your heart.”