I’ve mentioned a few times how much I like Mocoloco.com. Recently they posted a piece about some beautiful wall treatments by an artist named Jennifer Prichard. Check out the photos – she hand throws porcelain shapes and then affixes them by the thousands to walls in very organic looking shapes. It’s excellent stuff, I’d love to have a wall in my house get a treatment like this.

Well, it’s been a couple of days. First, I’ve been sick. Some kind of stomache flu. I ingest, it comes back up within 30 minutes or so. Not fun. Fortunately it’s very slow at work so I could take today off and be more comfortable at home. I did have to go to work for several meetings yesterday though and was miserable. I managed to leave around 2PM at least.

You might have noticed it was awfully quiet around here over the holidays. While part of this was simply a function of the season, and part of this was because I got World of Warcraft and couldn’t drag myself away from it, part of it was also that I expended a lot of geek energy building a machine to replace the server hosting my web stuff. This was precipitated by the fact that comment spammers were destroying my site and there was no clean path to fixing this. I’d actually been planning to migrate boxes for quite a while – in fact I bought the replacement box well over a year ago – but between changing jobs, moving, and the complexities of migrating all my content I never managed to get around to it. Err, that is, until now. The new box is in fact up and running in a very preliminary fashion. Many (many!) things are still broken, some very badly, but it’s functional at this point. There were a number of issues I had to get over or which are still troubling me, to wit: (click to read the full post, it’s rather long)
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…at about 1100 feet in the tongue mountain range and you heard that coming from above, loud and then every bird in the vicinity took wing, all achatter, then you heard it again? If you were me you’d find that your instincts took over and you would immediately flee the vicinity. This happened about 2 weeks ago. I was making my way down to 5th point (although I thought I was heading to 5 mile peak, but that’s another story – time to really learn how the GPS actually works!) when I heard this, and the moment I heard it the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my flee instinct took over – I started heading right back towards the trailhead.

At the time I thought it must have been a bear, despite the late date. The winter’s been very mild so far so I figured it just hadn’t begun hibernating yet. It didn’t sound like any bear I had ever heard, but what else could it be? Many chats with friends later and I’ve concluded it was probably an ultra-rare mountain lion, mostly because of the page of audio recordings I’ve linked to – nothing else sounded as close to what I heard as the link I posted above – and because of conversations with a biologist at Skidmore and a colleague at Bowdoin. I saw absolutely nothing. The sound was coming from a ridgeline up above me by at least 100 feet, and aside from the growl like noises repeating twice I heard nothing either. But man, it was a spooky thing to hear out in the woods by yourself, whether it was a mountain lion or not.

The biologist here at Skidmore reported it to a friend of his who works in the fish and game department. They’re not unheard of in this region, they’re just exceedingly rare and as far as I am aware there have been only a couple of actual sightings, so in a sense I was lucky even if I didn’t actually see it. I’d really rather not run into one though, at least not until my dog is old enough to help me fend it off. Meantime I’m buying a can of pepper spray to bring with me on my hikes.

Everyone knows the story of the printing press and how its invention led to an explosion of human creativity and the rapid advancement of civilization. The modern day equivalent, the internet, is being strangled by copyright. I’ve ranted and ranted about this and I’m going to do it again. We have the potential at this moment in time to embrace another great leap forward – the sum of human knowledge can be at everyone’s fingertips. Except. Except that the western notion of copyright, less than a hundred years old, is stifling the ability of companies like Google to get this material online for us. I don’t know what the path out of this dilemma is. Of course publishers and authors need to be compensated for their work (though as longtime readers know, just like with music and video, I question the contributions publishers will have to the process of creation and distribution going forward). But if I had to choose between compensation and freedom of information, right this moment, I would choose freedom of information. The money flow will sort itself out – it always does – and the freedom of information will inexorably lead us to the info-nirvana I’m obsessed with.

End rant. The only thing I can think to suggest to folks, aside from making your representatives aware of these issues, is to give money to the EFF.

I’m not actually obsessed by google, it’s just that they’re doing so much cool stuff. Today’s mention is about something I’ve touched on in the past – the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. Everyone’s getting used to the notion of google as one’s adjunct brain – who starred in casablanca opposite Bogart? How many home runs did Reggie Jackson hit in ’79? What’s the population of Saratoga Springs, NY? – all of these answers are yours in about the amount of time it takes to type the question. What we need is more content, specifically the content that’s locked away in books (we’ll get to the content in movies and other multimedia later). Anyway google announced today that they’ve signed a deal with the University of Michigan to put the full text of every book in the University’s library online. 7 million books, fully searchable. On the one hand this is just the tip of the iceberg – 7 million books sounds like a lot but it’s really not in the scheme of things. On the other hand this is huge in terms of precedent. I hope this leads to a cascade of follow up projects – surely Microsoft will want to get into the game and they’ve got deep enough pockets to do it.

The downside of this is that it will take years to achieve, but it’s a start, a very auspicious one at that. Go google!

I worked with a lot of cool people when I was at Bowdoin College. One of them was Mike Kolster, who has a website that he posts images to daily. This image is just a great shot. I love his site, I just wish he had larger dimension images available so I could use them as desktop backdrops, and attaching the site to a print making service, or just selling prints of his images, would be great. I’d buy them for sure. He and I talked a little about such things when I was there, I should drop him an email and remind him. Oh, and Mike is also featured on Bowdoin’s homepage at the moment, cool kudos for him.

Google continues to produce cool stuff. We’re all familiar by now with our browsers trying to autocomplete URLs for us – start typing ‘www.eb’ and the browser will suggest a set of possibilities, including say ‘www.ebay.com.’ While it can occasionally be annoying, generally this is useful feature. Now imagine if your search engine did it for you. Or don’t bother trying to imagine, just go try it for yourself. I am amazed at how quickly this is streaming data down to my browser. I’m also convinced at this point that the world’s cleverest programmers work for Google.

This is for my own uses as I try and acclimate to the climate here in upstate NY. This week was the first real storm of the season – about 3 inches of snow followed by sleet and freezing rain, then thankfully extended rains to wash it all away. The roads were terrible one night, otherwise this was a minor storm.

In roughly 12 years in Maine I never really got used to the fact that Spring doesn’t show up until May. It was April when I was a kid. We’ll see where it is here in the Adirondacks. So far the winter here has been really mild. I was hiking up above 1500′ in the tongue mountain range on sunday in ~50 degree temperatures. I think this is national but it’s definitely at odds with the average winter in Maine, where by this time of year the temperatures were routinely below freezing.

Anyway to close this off I’ll also observe that my new car is terrible in the snow. I intentionally took the roughest back road home to test how things went. The impending arrival of my new dog and the expenses related to same have left me dead broke, which means no snow tires for me. My conclusion? I will be creeping along at 5MPH a lot this winter, and the chances of me getting stuck are very high. Ugh.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a Friday fun link. Today it’s another mention of the most excellent c-evo. This is an excellent, lightweight riff on the original PC game civilization. PC only unfortunately, and mind that you have to download a graphical tile set as well as the binary in order to play, but this is an excellent little turn based strategy game and it has evolved nicely since the last time I linked to it. Get playing!

(Non PC users can go grab the equally excellent freeciv, which runs on most platforms. And note how they have changed their site website over to a mediawiki instance, very cool).

I needed to figure that out today, the third day in a row I had bizarre file format questions. And no, I don’t mean .asf the windows streaming media format. In this case it turned out to be a binary file type from a dos-based statistics package. An emeritus faculty member had brought it in and wanted to print. I figured out how to manage this after stumbling across filext, a website devoted to cataloging all known file extensions. It’s got a pretty impressive database of filetype, including my unknown ~15 year old dos file. I wonder how long it will be until digital forensics becomes part of the curriculum in archaeology courses, clearly the need for the skillset will be there. Anyway stash a bookmark to filext away, it’s definitely a very handy site.