this one's for the right to petition

too bad, it was shaping up to be a great read  

a ton of research boiled down into simple charts; see also: Kottke's explanation of how it's made  

the best gaming podcast interviews Desert Bus for Hope, plus a lovely Olly Moss poster  

So Bob and his dog Stain got run over by a garbage truck today. Literally, like in a MAD Magazine cartoon.

I found this out because I was reading in the patio when my phone said "DING" and the message was a Facebook update. A few of my friends I have set to text me when they update. Bob's one of them. His update was, basically: "Stain and I hit by truck. No phone. At home. Bloody mess. HALP"

I zipped over there to find them both bloody and shocked. A garbage truck had essentially parked on Stain's front paws and he was licking them mournfully. Bob was a bit of a scratch and dent himself. The kitchen looked, as Bob put it, "like Charlie Manson came over for lunch."

So far, so good. Remains to be seen how badly Stain's paw is injured. Bob appears intact.

This is an example of the power of the Internet, though. With no minutes left on his prepaid phone, the $200 netbook plus some neighbor's wifi plus facebook plus text alerts meant that several people immediately saw an alarm. Daniel turned around and biked back from Seal Beach on that alarm, I went across town here, and half a dozen other people immediately responded.

Here's to a fast healing dog.

I got this email from Sears today:

WHOOPS! The email we sent you Monday had the wrong TV offer in it! We are not offering a Panasonic 54" class 1080p 600Hz plasma HDTV for $399.99. We apologize for this mistake and assure you that we are taking every step to make sure it doesn?t happen again.

The offer that we currently have is a Panasonic 54" class 1080p 600Hz plasma HDTV for $1099.99.

Some Thad or Tad or Katie or Caitlin "Email Blast Coordinator" didn't enhance revenue today.

Email thread.

Boss: Everyone can leave early today.

Coworker #1: Awesome! Everyone have a great holiday! Anyone having a turducken?

Coworker #2 [Vegetarian, not native English speaker]: I think I might instead try a Tofucken !

Thread: ended

Some readers have emailed asking me for more specifics about how to run WordPress offline, like I suggested in my last post. So I spent a couple of hours struggling with it last night to get a sense of what it would take. This is an almost useless and jargon-packed summary, but my hope is that some intrepid WP user may try following these steps and use them as a starting point for a proper HOWTO. If you want comments, you'll need to switch from whatever is built in to WordPress to an outside JavaScript-based service like disqus. Disqus can import your existing comments when you set it up. Disclaimer: I have never used this service and know nothing about it - there may be better alternatives. Set up WordPress on the machine where you want to do your writing and editing. The WP site has copious instructions for all kinds of installation scenarios.
Configure WP to use 'fancy' permalinks - not the default, which uses query string parameters. Basically, if there's a question mark in the URL, you can't mirror the site. If you're on OS X, you will now have to struggle with mod_rewrite and .htaccess permissions for a while. Configure WP to allow robots access (otherwise wget will not work in the next step). Use wget to crawl your new blog and turn it into a bunch of static files: wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links http://your.local.url/ What this does is explained in detail here. I've left off some unnecessary flags. Set up apache on your blog server to serve static content from wherever you want your blog files to live. Now copy over the static files you created with wget to their new home on the remote machine using a secure transfer method like rsync or sftp. Laugh in the face of mankind / email me about why this didn't work. Good luck, and please let me know if you are able to follow these steps and produce a more helpful HOWTO that I can link to.

I am going to break with seven years of precedent and indulge in a little bit of blog software wank. Recently an exploit has surfaced in WordPress, a popular kind of blog software. If you run WordPress on a public server, an attacker can get full access to your site and do nasty things, up to and including deleting all your data. If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is 'be extremely zealous about updating your software', which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration. If you listen to me, the answer is much simpler. Do not run this kind of software on a public server. Either host your blog with a competent centralized site (like LiveJournal or Blogger) that takes the burden of upgrading, backing up and patching off your hands, or use whatever personal publishing software you like (WordPress, Movable Type, and so on), but keep it on a local machine. You can use a program like wget or curl to generate a flat HTML version of your website from this local version, and then upload these files to your public server to share them with the world. Now there is no way you can get hacked, because your server is just serving static files. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about your site ever going down because of database problems or excessive load. And as another bonus, you now have a remote backup of your blog. If you want comments or other fanciness (why??), you might need a little more complicated setup than this. But the basic idea of keeping your administrative interface off the internet will save you endless angst as these exploits keep coming. WordPress has an especially terrible track record with security, but all these programs are just accidents waiting to happen. If you have a blog setup that you think is insecure but don't know how to begin fixing it, feel free to email me and I will do my best to point you at an answer.

Because of the internet, the first Romanian words I ever learned were about love and linden trees. Now that I've been living in the country for a while, I thought I would check to see how many other Numa Numan secrets were within my understanding: Alo? Salut! Sunt eu, un haiduc și te rog iubirea mea primește, fericirea. Alo? Alo! Sunt eu, Picasso. Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic. Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei, Nu mă, nu mă iei, Nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei, Chipul tău și dragostea din tei mi-amintesc de ochii tăi. Te sun sa-ți spun ce simt acum. Alo, iubirea mea. Sunt eu, fericirea. Alo? Alo! Sunt iarași eu, Picasso. Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic. Nu foarte bine...

Dear Log, Yup, it's that time of year, folks! It's not exactly cheery, and I'm already in not a great mood. [Youtube video, 2½ video min, of the author reading it.] William S. Burroughs
"The Thanksgiving Prayer" For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986 Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts. Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison. Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger. Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot. Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes. Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for the KKK. For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches. For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers. Thanks for laboratory AIDS. Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs. Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind their own business. Thanks for a nation of finks. Yes, thanks for all the memories— alright let's see your arms! You always were a headache and you always were a bore. Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. Here's some sparse explanatory notes, for folks who might not get some of the more cryptic references, because of being not an American, not old enough, and/or not familiar enough with some of Burroughs's various personal stylistic tics. Dillinger — "idolized by some as a modern-day Robin Hood." -Wikipedia entry wild turkey — a species that European Americans hunted to (relative) near-extinction.  Now very numerous. passenger pigeons — a species that European Americans hunted from a population in the hundreds of millions(!), to complete extinction. (The last known one of them died a few months after Burroughs was born.) bison — species wastefully/pointlessly massacred by the millions, in the 19th century. KKK (Ku Klux Klan) — a radical racist organization (or factions of), originally Southern.  Now has ties to Neo-Nazi groups. "notches" — a lawman proud of killing a black person would file/carve a notch onto their gun, for each kill. "laboratory AIDS" — as late as 1986, it was a conspiracy theory with at least some plausibilty that AIDS was a synthetic virus— and either released accidentally; or deliberately, possibly targeted at the (first) groups to be devastated by it, gay men and junkies.  This reference is a definite piece of bathos, making an otherwise "as true today..." work into something very much stapled into the early 80s.  Mentally edit out that line, much better that way. In 1969, President Nixon declared a "War against Drugs", i.e., vigorous police action against drugs.  That's why you can't find drugs anywhere anymore. "Show us your arms" — searching someone to see whether they are or were, a junkie; the arms would show scarred/bruised arms. "Last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams": very, very open to interpretation– especially on seeing the Youtube video, and knowing some of Burroughs's work... Interpretation which, after reading Youtube comments there, I don't think I particularly want to hear any more of. Burke, 2009 I think I'll go for a walk.  There's a lake that I like to go talk to/at.  Tonight, maybe yell at.

Dear Log, Today is Thanksgiving Day for all Earthicans. I prefer to think of today as a great chance to collectively thank Native Americans, who have been spending millennia crafting some of the world's sanest and sauciest languages. But their most famous undertaking has been how they've been making some of the best food on the planet: twisting genes to turn corn from a scrawny grass into a lucious sweet grain; turning potatoes from a marble-sized weed-root into a hundred varieties that you can happily live on (and get drunk on); and coaxing chili peppers from a weird acrid seed-pod into the world-wrapping glory that they are today. And that's to say nothing of the whole of Mexican (and New Mexican) cooking, or of the delights of thousands of weird drugs: Cocaine! Ayahuasca! Magic mushrooms! Maple syrup! And that's just the stuff you've heard of, the stuff that got around. I've travelled here and there and I've stumbled on some great stuff that stayed local: sumac-berry punch; ooligan grease; rice with black seaweed; glasswort salad; blue atole; herring eggs on spruce branches; dried black seaweed, great just to chew on. Mmmmmm. Now I'm almost hungry.

Dear Log, To everyone outside the US and Canada, happy Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is a late-autumn Thursday dinner party generally for family, or friends. Myth has it that it dates to the 1600s when a general European harvest-time feast was Established by USA Holy Pilgrims.  They decreed a Solemn and Joyous Observance of having harvested barely enough, or maybe-not enough, food to get them thru winter; so they also begged/grifted the friendly locals, Natives, into keeping them from potentially starving: the locals gave gifts of native foods, and showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn and other foods that the Natives had put a few thousand years' work into genetically optimizing for hardiness and nutritive yield. (That's the myth.  The truth is different— some parts messier, some more tame, some simply contradictory.) But these days: The traditional main course of the meal is a bigger-than-your-head turkey, which I think tastes like cardboard no matter how you prepare it; and in this case, the normal preparation is to bake it for hours and hours.  Unfamiliarity with how long it takes to bake this thoroughly often leads to undercooked meat in places, which can lead to salmonella et al. A recent fad has been to try to deep-fry the turkey.  A very common result is splattering searing hot oil on everyone, and possibly catching the house on fire. People also eat "cranberry sauce" which is not a sauce, but basically like an over-thick jam made with cranberries (which are like small cherries) and containing a massive amount of sugar to offset the bitter taste of the cranberries.  That is rarely served except during a Thanksgiving meal.  Most people just buy a can of it. There is also "the stuffing", which starts out as smallish chunks of bread mixed up with seasoning, and stuffed into the HOLLOWED-OUT INTERNAL BODY CAVITY of the turkey, to absorb heat and grease from the process of baking the turkey.  This stuffing is later spooned out, and is served as an actually quite tasty glop. Skillfully slicing the turkey meat apart is called "carving", and is a grand task, jocularly but skillfully performed by the α-male. To keep the turkey from turning into a papery husk as it is being cooked for hours and hours, it is routinely "basted" with a large plastic syringe, where you draw up fat from the bottom of the pan (which has dripped off the turkey), and squirt it out on top of the turkey. (Also: supposedly these oversized large plastic syringes can also be bought and used for at-home on-the-cheap artificial insemination!  That is not part of the traditional holiday.)

Apparently McDonald's is closed today. Thanksgiving McNuggetini: DENIED.
(Previously.)