I told the nice lady at SuperCuts(tm) that I wanted it “just a little shorter.” And this happened.

Tomorrow at work someone will inevitably say “you got a haircut,” and I’ll inevitably reply, “it happens.” And in a few weeks it’ll be back to normal. It happens.

!>http://farm1.static.flickr.com/168/447156581_09f63933e0_m.jpg!:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/447156581/ Igor sent me a link to a _Times_ article reported from my home town that discusses pay prisons in California as an alternative to standard prison for people convicted of non-violent crime and wililng to pony up for their stay. It is no picnic, but the advantage is clean cells, the ability to bring an iPod, and in some cases the possiblity of working at your normal job during the day and then returning to prison in the evening.

While I didn’t know about this specific program, it doesn’t entirely surprise me, and is actually sort of neat. California is well known for massively overcrowded jails, (more) unsanitary (than usual) conditions, a prison medical system that is dysfunctional, and a major problem on its hands. Much of this can be traced to our three strikes law, as well as the “war” on some drugs.

Continue reading “Not exactly the Park Plaza”

“From the studios of Minnessota Public Radio in St. Paul, I’m Kai Ryssdal.” Wait a second, what? Oh no, MPR, no you don’t. Don’t you dare fuck up Marketplace. I stood by while you tweaked Weekend America, firing Barbara Bogaev because she refused to relocate, and the program has been worse for it. Now this? A show about world commerce centered out of New York, or Washington, or, ya know, Los Angeles is neat, but *St. Paul*? Come on! I wonder how much of the staff survived the move…

*Edit* (9:07pm): False alarm or shape of things to come?

*Edit 2* (4/30 3:48pm): Thanks, Kai. I am happy and relieved. 🙂 Carry on the good work.

An anecdote from Jason DeParle’s fascinating exploration in the _Times Magazine_ of the plight of Overseas Filipino Workers — those who travel abroad to earn money to give their family back home a better life:

As an Islamic state that bans socializing between unmarried women and men, Saudi Arabia held out few hopes for marriage or kids. Rosalie approached her 30th birthday resigned to a dutiful life alone. She celebrated at a Jeddah restaurant with Filipino friends; one of them, knowing they had a private room, disregarded the gender rules by bringing along her nephew, a construction engineer. The nephew, Christopher Villanueva, took Rosalie for an after-dinner walk, trailing her by a few paces in case the religious police happened by. “I was trembling!” Rosalie said. With both of them living in guarded single-sex dorms, their 18-month courtship occurred largely by cellphone. When they flew home in 2002 to marry, they had never been alone.

Great, great _Times_ article about adolescent health care and how the current medical system fails at treating teenagers. There is pediatric care, geriatric care, and normal adult care, but very little specialization in adolescent care, which has a whole different set of challenges.

The biggest problem, and one I can empathize with completely, is that doctors don’t know how to talk to adolescents. They need to get the parents out of the room, they need to talk about life and lifestyle, family situation, school, behaviors, and give productive, medically-based suggestions that are non-judgemental. They need to treat teenagers like adults and give them the information they need. They need to listen actively to problems and work together to come up with solutions. They need to recognize that adolescene is utterly awkward, that everyone is different, and that we each think our problems are unique and life-defining.

To this day I don’t really know how the medical system is supposed to work for me — who do I call if I have a problem, how much information should I be giving the people at the front desk, how private is it? What does the doctor report about me, what goes in various files, what sorts of things do I need to talk about to make sure I get a good standard of care. Should I ask for more tests? Question why I’m getting them? How do I choose my primary care doctor?

Teenagers need to learn how to become good medical consumers, need to learn about how to make the system work for them, need to know that doctors will be there when they need them. In turn, insurance companies need to provide incentives for adolescent care to be thorough and complete, and for more doctors to become specialized in the field.

Tomorrow the plumber is coming to replace my dummy water valves — *dummy water valves* — with real, working ones. This requires shutting off water to the entire building of 40 units, but so it goes. How is it legal to install non-functioning water valves as part of new construction? This building is less than 20 years old! Anyway, once that’s done, I’ll be able to unhook my old, broken washing machine and hook up my new, expensive but nearly identical and non-broken one. And then I can have clean clothes again! Three weeks is a long time to wait for clean clothes. I’ll note here that I wanted to use this opportunity to buy a fancy new stacked washer/dryer combo, but after looking at the prices (expensive!) I chose to just replace my washer with what is basically the same model. I imagine it’ll work just as well, except for the cost of it, the delivery, the warranty, and the plumbing work. Ick. Being a homeowner sucks sometimes.

I’ve had a long love-hate history with the Mac: love the elegance and innovation, hate the lock-in. It’d be very nice to be “pure” and run Linux, and with the newer Ubuntus that has become really easy. I may have finally even found a replacement for iTunes, my biggest stumbling block to moving! Plus its always nice to follow in the footsteps of Mark Pilgrim, if not Cory Doctorow.

I’m getting sick of being locked into Apple apps — I use Apple Mail because I want Spotlight (Linux alternative) and Keychain support (no alternative), Safari (+Saft) is more Mac-like but Firefox is more flexible, iPhoto is meh. I’m ambivalent about my feed reader and my terminal app (buggy) and my torrent client (crashy), and my desktop manager (unstable), I love Adium but Pidgin is fine, TextMate is really nice but esoteric, Vim can still serve all my needs. I love Quicksilver and Growl, and don’t really want to live without them…

I know its bad, but I’ve been relying on the imminent release of Leopard, the shiny new version of OS X, to keep my thoughts away from once again considering my Mac/Linux duality. But there is very little apparently new in the next version, and now its been delayed until October, meanwhile my box is increasingly slow and unstable, and I’m not sure another clean reinstall is really the solution. Meanwhile Ubuntu Feisty is right here, right now, and really darn tempting.

Drat.

In the meeting I was in today with public radio folks and technologists, no one liked the _This American Life_ TV show, strongly preferring the audio-only version with its depth and imagination. Seeing things visualized on screen greatly took away from enjoyment of the show, in their opinion. I don’t agree. I like them both. Not sure which I like better. I think the rich TAL TV imagery is artful and appealing, and the mental soundscapes of the radio show are captivating. I’m going to keep watching and listening.

Yeah, no one knows what I’m talking about. But as I try with little success to suck down Life on Mars from BitTorrent, I think back to when cable modems were new, music was heavily compressed, software was lightweight, bandwidth was plentiful, servers were private, and I started a little something called (∞) the infinity alliance. Good times.

I unpacked my Apple TV unit today. It works about how I expected. Wish the video quality was better. Wish I could get other video into it and didn’t have to sync everything through iTunes. Generally happy with the rest (audio playback and the like), and expect people will hack around some of those problems. Here are my predictions for the product:

* Within three months units will start to die from overheating or some other widespread problem, and lots of angry consumers will start various protest web sites and threaten class action lawsuits. Apple will eventually quietly setup a repair program.
* Within six months Apple will release a more powerful model that can play more types of content and will have the option of a larger hard drive for $50 more.
* By the end of the year there will be a decent amount of 720p content on the iTunes store, a bunch of movies and at least a few TV series.
* It will take Apple far longer than it should to incorporate proper chapter support, alternate language tracks, commentary tracks, and subtitles into their format, iTunes Store content, and on the Apple TV, but they will have made some measurable progress by 2008. Getting at these features will be at least slightly painful because the current remote doesn’t have enough buttons.
* Apple will stick with the stupid gumstick remote, much like they did with the hockey puck mouse, for far longer than it makes sense to do so — at least two years — before finally coming out with something better.

Now to go cancel my cable and put my TiVo Series 3 on Ebay. Man I hope my predictions are true.

Excuse me for being late to this game, in the past I’ve bought and sold software packages which include media, serial numbers, sometimes even USB dongles or other copy protection devices. But now I find myself in an interesting position — a couple months ago I bought a program (Airfoil) to send audio to my AirPort Express. I paid for it with a credit card, downloaded the program from a web site, and entered a serial number I received by email. No physical manifestation of the program to hold and transfer.

Today I got an AppleTV, and no longer need the functionality. The software is fresh and undamaged ;), and I have every intention of deleting it from my computer. I’d like to recover at least a portion of my $25 investment, and would do so by offering the license for sale on eBay. So my two questions would be, first, does the first sale doctrine apply to software licenses like this? And second, will eBay, regardless, yank my listing? Berkfolk?

I got my new Bank of American (ne MBNA) credit card a week ago and today tried to make my first online purchase — buying some Skype credit so that I can call home. After typing the card number Skype gave me a page saying that my card needed to be “verified” by Visa before it could be accepted, then transferred me to a “verifiedbyvisa.com” URL that, oddly enough, resulted in an error page rather than a verification page. Intrigued by what new ridiculous piece of so-called protection software Visa has decided to roll out, I read up on the program. It only works at a few participating sites, participation is determined by the card issuer, and it doesn’t seem to offer any benefits to the consumer *at all* that justify the annoyance. Visa talks about how it makes online transactions “more secure,” but since it only works on a few merchant sites and still requires that you type in your credit card information, it doesn’t protect you from fraudulent online sales, it only protects you, in a few specific instances, from someone trying to use your credit card to, say, by Skype points online. They can still use it by mail, in stores, or at most other web sites.

The best part about the Visa FAQ is the strange evasive non-answers to important questions, like the question about whether Visa’s “zero liability protection” still applies when using the “Verified by Visa” program. This is important because in Europe, where Chip & PIN is becoming the norm, credit card companies are now putting the onus of proof on the cardholder and the merchant, claiming that their two-factor protection (already proven to be flawed by Cambridge University researchers) means that they should no longer be responsible for fraudulent purchases.

Here is what Visa has to say about consumer protection, see if you can make more sense of it than I can:

Will Visa’s Zero Liability policy cover me if someone uses my password to make a purchase using Verified by Visa?
The Zero Liability policy** protects you against the unauthorized use of your Visa card. For further details about the Zero Liability policy and Verified by Visa contact the financial institution that issued your Visa card.

So did I go through the Verified by Visa process and get my card setup to buy Skype minutes? No, I cancelled the transaction. And if I do decide in the future that the hassle of getting some Skype credits is worth it, I’ll use my MasterCard.

Strange things happen to time when you’re reading a book. It moves more slowly, and yet passes more quickly. When you read a good novel and let your imagination roam free the experience is different than working, or watching television, or being otherwise marooned in realtime. Like dreaming, reading is an important escape, a time to reflect and reorganize the jumble inside your head. For me, at least, reading a good book leaves me feeling awed and inspired and refreshed. And so it is so odd that I find myself so easily forgetting to read, or forgetting how to, or forgetting what it is like. I spend my day in front of a screen covered in words, manipulating those words to create new words, modifying those new words to create shapes and colors and more words, words that can be sorted and searched and categorized, all electronically, always dancing from place to place. All day, with the words, but it isn’t the same. The words mean something different when they are dancing.

It is important. Important to remember the difference in the words, the difference between the words that dance and the words that sit still. Important to remember that dancing is something we do every day, but sometimes we must rest, slow time, read the words that stay still on the page. Let them dance, instead, inside of our heads, where time has a different meaning, where the dance is to a more subtle and beautiful song.

Every episode of Veronica Mars disappoints me more than the last. Not because they are bad episodes, but because then could be great episodes. Mistakes were made in season one, but regardless it was amazing and excellent television, brilliant executed, emotionally engaging and well-plotted, a neatly wrapped up novel-like story with all the trimmings. And every disjointed episode thereafter has made me like the show just a bit less.

I would love, love for Mars to turn itself around, but season three is nearing a close and while there have been signs of greatness poking through, none of them have stuck, and the consensus on the boards I read is that most people don’t really expect the show to be around for another season. I can’t point to any one thing that makes us all so unhappy — except perhaps a showrunner who seems to be at least a bit out of touch — but continue to pile on minor disappointments one after another and you’ll slowly wear a man down. At best, on balance, I think Mars has hit neutral buoyancy — its good enough that I want to watch each week, but its problematic enough that each week I finish the episode, sit down for a few minutes to think about it, and invariable start picking it all apart.

In a sad way I’m almost glad that the CW may be putting this show out of is misery. Because there are plenty of people making plenty of average television shows, and, for my money, if you’re not going to strive to be great in what you do each and every day, you might as well not even bother to show up.

We got around to registering SJ’s XO laptop on the Harvard network during tonight’s Harvard Free Culture meeting, and of course the inaugural page load was Berkman. Where the registration form asked for the operating system I typed in "OLPC" with much glee (quiet, you who says the real OS if “Fedora!”)

Rachel writes about a mitsabora (“turning of the bones”) ceremony that she attended in Madagascar. Family and friends gather to dig up the graves of the dead, converse with their bones, and then rebury them.

As we continued to bike the lovely 8 km home to Voloina along the Bay of Antongil, the teacher asked me, “what are mitsaboras like where you come from? France, is it?” “Etats Unis,” I corrected him. “Where? Oh ‘Amerika’, right,” he said. “Where I come from we do not have the same fombas. We don’t hold mitsabora ceremonies,” I told him. He looked surprised. “But what do you do when you are sad about losing a family member? Don’t you want to spend time with them again?” I explained to him that the Betsimisaraka tradition of turning the bones is, in my mind, a wonderful custom, but that where I come from we are afraid of death and it is fady (taboo) to dig up the bodies of people who have died. “When a family member dies we come together and hold a ceremony to celebrate his or her life,” I said in Betsimisaraka, “we even gather afterwards and eat a feast, sort of the way the Malagasy do. But once we place a body in the ground it must stay there.”

He looked puzzled and again asked what ‘Amerikans’ do when they are sad years after losing someone, if they do not unearth the bones of their fathers, sisters and children, and talk with them. I thought about it for a moment and then gave him the only answer I could think of, “Well, we sit at home alone and we cry”. I could tell he disapproved of our method of grieving. “Fetes (celebrations) are much better,” he said, as I nodded in approval.

Check out her complete entry to learn more about this fascinating ceremony.

I’m not into video games, never have been. When Igor got a Wii I gave it a shot, but the little sports games and such get old after a while. So I bought _Zelda_, thinking it’d be fun. Well, it is, I’m learning how to…err…fish, and blow grass reeds to summon falcons, and such. I spent something like an hour trying to convince a stupid cat to go back to its owner. (Hmm, maybe if I throw a pumpkin at it? No. How about if I build a wall of pumpkins to try and guide it? Nope. What if I float it across the river on top of a pumpkin? Hmm, that doesn’t work. Hint: the solution does not involve pumpkins.) After the cat I had to learn how to use a sword and slingshot, then went exploring a bit and got an oil lamp and did a bit of horse riding and beating up various man-eating plants. Oh, and more fishing.

Long story short, I got killed by a stupid bird because there wasn’t any method I could see to pay him for his shop goods, and since I didn’t pay him he attacked me, and when I went to get some healing potion stuff I accidentally got lantern oil instead, which you can’t drink, and in the process the bird pecked at me enough such that a black screen came up and told me “Game Over” (a little blunt there?) and that the game was over. Wow, I paid $45 for this?

Apparently — and don’t laugh at me for being an idiot, I don’t know anything about games — apparently you need to save your game every time you do anything remotely interesting or time consuming. Igor says save every five minutes. Whatever. I never saved anything, and I didn’t exactly expect to meet my early demise at the hands of a Tiki Room reject, so now I have to start back at the beginning and learn to swordfight again and slingshot again and herd goats and fish and deal with that stupid cat all over again. Bah.

Nor do I. I don’t know anything about what it is like to be Iraqi. But this post should give some indication of why it is so hard for us to understand each other. Excerpt:

The other day I finally managed to meet George. He is a man of 57 years old from the USA. I have heard about him from a colleague who praised him as “different from the rest”. So we have invited him to a late lunch around 3 pm — in our timing this is quite normal lunch.

[…] George, who works for a contracting company, said he was American but from “back east”! Which was quite puzzling. And when I enquired about “back east” he said most Americans are proud of their east coast origin. He says that long ago he’s “moved out west” and got married and then got an ugly divorce.

He later settled in California and bought himself a house and remarried. When I asked him about his family and relatives he was taken aback a bit. He said some stayed home (he meant back east) and others “moved around somewhere”! And as George carried on I realized that he always refers to people he knows as “some one I ran into” or “some one I used to know” or “that guy I met”!! And I wondered did he ever have a real friend?

[…] As time progressed I realized that I just could not figure him out. There is this man who is American but from back east. Moved out west and got an ugly divorce. His family moved around somewhere and his friends are either people he ran into or he used to know!! […] When the Iraqi tea was served I began to sympathize with George. It must be hard living like that, and I honestly was looking for ways to make him talk about some nice things that he has done in his life. And when I asked him what does he do when he wants to relax he said he would “get away from it all” and leaves his wife at home and “travels up north” with his dog to fish in a lake by the name of Tahoe. And when I asked him why go there all alone he said so he could have a piece of mind! Which it turned out to be even sadder and it felt so creepy.

I was wondering what happened to Barbara Bogaev, the co-host of Weekend America, who disappeared a couple months ago. According to a leaked internal memo, Minnesota Public Radio is moving half of the operation to St. Paul, and, presumably, Barbara didn’t want to make the move. It’s sad, because part of what makes Weekend America fun and quirky is the interplay between the two hosts, which will be more difficult to achieve when they are not physically sitting next to each other in a studio (or working in the same office). When I got to watch a taping of Marketplace back in August, they were taping Weekend America segments in the next studio over, and it was neat. I sure hope Marketplace isn’t also forced out of the Frank Stanton Studios in Los Angeles. There is something to be said for being the only daily national business news program originating from the West Coast. Not to mention it would be tough to remain affiliated with USC from St. Paul!

!=http://farm1.static.flickr.com/167/380014243_a1279fd287_m.jpg(Great Clock of Westminster)!
Remember back in May when I had the pleasure and good fortune of visiting Europe with my Aunt Linda? A while back I posted some pictures from Scotland, and now here is the follow-up with some interesting bits from London along with pithy commentary. Click on the photo to the left or the title above, start with the first picture (with the soldiers), and follow along on my adventures! Paris photos will appear sometime in the future.