canspice.org

(I wrote this last night while I didn’t have any internet access.)

I turned on the TV. It tuned to the hotel channel. I flipped up to try to find something interesting. Five channels up, CNN. Earthquake in Hawaii. 6.6. I phoned home. “All circuits are busy.” I called work. No answer. I called Tim & Frossie. Busy. I called home again. Alice answered after three rings. No damage at home, other than our computer’s UPS seems to have done its job and sacrificed itself to save the computer.

It’s hard being away from home during an emergency. Naturally, you feel isolated, separated. I don’t know how things are back home. I don’t know what’s going on at work, the servers have been down since I landed in Tucson. All I know was obtained from Alice and CNN — personal information from Alice, state-wide information from CNN.

The strongest earthquake to hit Hawaii in twenty years hit as I flew from Los Angeles to Tucson. A 6.6 earthquake struck at 7:07am, followed by another large shake and another twenty or so aftershocks. Governor Linda Lingle issued a disaster declaration for the entire state. Roads have been damaged around the island of Hawaii, and the belt highway has been closed because of landslides. Luckily, nobody died.

The last large earthquake to hit Hawaii was in July 2005, and coincidentally enough I was out of the state for that one as well. I should really stop leaving Hawaii.

It’s now half past ten and I’m watching CNN. They’re on the phone with some “E-News Anchor” named Giuliana Depandi who apparently said to her boyfriend the night before, while watching a TV special on earthquakes and tsunamis while vacationing on Maui, “They don’t get earthquakes in Hawaii, do they?” And according to her earthquakes are rare in Hawaii.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Hawaii’s built on a fucking volcano chain. There’s daily earthquakes under Kilauea. There’s usually one felt every week. How fucking stupid do you have to be to think that Hawaii doesn’t get earthquakes? Jesus! Why do they let people like this on television? Go back to your “E-News” and leave proper reporting to people that have brains, Ms. Depandi.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m flying to Tucson, the Brett Favre of American cities, to attend ADASS 2006. This will give me a good chance to see Alasdair again, amongst others.

With luck my co-worker Sam will be able to join me, having already missed his flight. This is what he gets for making fun of my early departure time from Tucson back to Hilo — 6:15am. :-)

The Washington Times is running a story about how today is an especially unlucky Friday the 13th because the numbers in the date all add up to thirteen. Write out the date in ISO 8601 date format and it’s 2006-10-13. 2+6+1+1+3=13.

Now read that article and see if you can spot the inaccuracies.

Read it? Did you spot the most obvious one, that it’s not 1996? That’s right, according to Heinrich Hemme, the physicist quoted in the article, the last time this happened was January 13, 1520. Or, as it’s put in the article, 476 years ago. Note that 1520+476=1996, not 2006.

I’ll bet most readers didn’t spot the other inaccuracy. It turns out that it wasn’t 476 years since the last double-whammy Friday the 13th. It’s only been nine months. That’s right, January 13, 2006 was a Friday. Write that out in ISO 8601 and it’s 2006-01-13.

The Slashdot summary is rather funny, as it says that “the digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13 — whether you write it in the US or the European form.” Imagine that: commutativity under addition holds on both sides of the Atlantic!

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror debated putting advertisements on his blog. Having recently done so, I can understand where Mr. Atwood is coming from. His points are good, and are worth responding to and debating.

Being able to stand behind the ads that appear on your website is important. In some sense, the ads that appear on your website reflect upon your website. Sleazy and scam-ridden ads only help to bring down the tone and tenor of your site. Going with Google AdSense, it’s harder (or rather, impossible) to hand-pick the ads, as they’re keyed off the topics of the page on which they appear. This necessarily means that the reflection relationship goes the other way around: your website dictates the tone and tenor of the advertisements. I think that if you post good content about decent subjects, then the ads will reflect that.

But depending on your subject matter, I can see where this can become a problem. An example would be the ads on the EVE-Online forum at arsclan.net. Odds are the ads are going to be people trying to sell ISK (or in-game currency) for money, which is against EVE-Online’s user agreement. Players using these services could get banned for this, and rather indirectly arsclan.net could be responsible.

Mr. Atwood’s second point, limit the number of ads, is obvious. Nobody really likes ads, and a shotgun effect on websites really turns people off. If you want to keep your readers happy, limit the ads to one (or in rare cases two) blocks of ads.

I disagree with Mr. Atwood’s third point, which is that advertising changes the nature of your blog, turning it into a commercial endeavour. While I’m fully aware that “anecdote” is not the singular of “data”, but I haven’t changed my habits since ads went up here again. His point is probably true if you’ve taken advertising money from one company, as you would probably feel pressure to give them more favourable press. Alasdair touched upon this, and his point is a good one: you should always take everything with a pinch of salt. Try to pay attention to where ad money is coming from, and if a photography website constantly slags off Nikon while advertising for Canon, you know something’s fishy.

I feel the biggest rule of advertising on blogs is that you shouldn’t piss off your loyal readers. Although I haven’t looked at the logs, I’m fairly confident that the majority of the repeat visitors to my blog read stories either on the front page or through the RSS feed, neither of which have advertisements on them. I do know that the majority of non-repeat visitors, those who come in through search engines, see single posts, and those are the only pages that have ads on them. And those pages only have one block of ads, they’re coloured to match the style here, and they’re not smack in the middle of a story. That’s how you advertise on blogs.

Whether or not this actually makes money is another story. =)

I got a natural inclination, I got nothing against it, I got nothing against my generation.

I hope I don’t die before I get old, I really hope I don’t catch a cold, I hope this general malaise doesn’t catch hold.

Yeah, I wasn’t born in a manger, I wasn’t born yesterday. I wish I was a forest ranger, I’d ride around on my horse all day, and put out illegal fires, put your garbage in the trash can, treat the forest with respect.

I’d be a, a man in a beige suit, I’d lean on my post, now that the morning’s over, it’s time to let them sprinklers hose.

I got a new bike, it’s done in the Dutch style. I’m gonna take it home with me, I’ll make my neighbours smile. They’ll say “Hey look at the rock star, he’s driving his bicycle that he got in The Netherlands…” Nothing rhymes with bicycle.

I got me thirteen children, I’m going for some kind of record, because otherwise how do we know joy? And I can’t think of anything that rhymes with record.

I wanna be like Gerard Depardieu. I wanna go to film festivals. I wanna drink martinis out of women’s bellybuttons. And nothing rhymes with festival.

Man, why do I keep going with these three-syllable words?

Okay, I’ve wasted enough of your time, we’re way past the curfew, they’re going to release the dogs in about two minutes, doberman pinschers, belgian sheepdogs, german shepherds, rottweilers, pitbulls, all manner of killing machine, grizzly bears and cougars, and, and angry housewives and generally bratty children and they all come in and they’ll gobble you up and send you on a… fuck it, okay, good-bye, good night, thank you to [unknown] and thanks to the Tivoli, and thanks to you and thanks to me and have a great summer and don’t let the bedbugs bite and take care of each other.

Pale as a lightbulb, hanging on a wi… Oh yeah, and say hi to Dave the merchandise guy. On your way out. He’s gonna sail around the world. By himself. He’s got plans. You can see it in his eyes.

– Performed by The Tragically Hip at Tivoli in Utrecht, Netherlands on 12 May 1997.

I watched my first complete NASCAR race today, the ARCA RE/MAX Food World 250 at Talladega. I’ve never watched a more boring race, and I’ve seen my share of boring races this year.

Nothing happens on the track! There’s passing, but it’s not passing as Formula One fans are used to. A pass in Formula One can typically be summed up by two phrases: “brown shorts” and “large attachments”. A pass in this NASCAR thing can be summed up by one phrase: “highway driving”, and I’m not talking an Audi TT overtaking a Trabant here either, I’m talking Granny Smith overtaking Granny Jones who’re both driving their 1979 Lincoln Continental Town Cars at 40 in a 55 zone. You want passing, you watch Fernando Alonso passing Michael Schumacher on the outside of 130R at Suzuka at 200mph. That’s a brown shorts moment. Not one single pass in NASCAR can even compare with that. And that’s one pass in one race!

Why in God’s name do people watch NASCAR? It’s not racing. Take Montoya’s comments after qualifying second:

“They told me come out of the pits and just floor it and run as high as you can. And when you’ve got to start the second lap, just aim at the apron and stay low.

“That’s all you’ve got to do.”

Christ almighty.

Sure, they go fast. Sure, they wreck well. But race? Hardly.

Yes, Montoya’s an experienced racer, but it says something about the level of “racing” when a guy can go from only being in a NASCAR car once (back in 2003 he and Rob Gordon swapped cars for an exhibition at Indy) to racing in three months.

For the record, Montoya led the first ten or eleven laps, got tapped at the beginning of a crash on lap 35 and did a good job of saving his car, pitted four times for repairs, then finished third when the race was called on account of darkness.

That last phrase, “called on account of darkness”, shows you how ass-up-head the organizers must be. Can’t start a race a little earlier in the day? What’s next, can’t race in the rain? Oh snap, they can’t!

Luckily for me I got to watch qualifying for the 2006 Japan Grand Prix to purge my mind of the horrible NASCAR race. Dear lord, they turn right! Even watching Jarno Trulli do a qualifying lap was more exciting than that entire other race.

I like Juan Montoya, but he’s not enough to get me to watch another NASCAR “race”. Now whenever I watch a boring Formula One race I’ll remember this race and thank the gods that it’s not this boring. Or idiotic.

It felt good, it felt good, it felt really good, yeah! I’ve gone gun crazy, I’ve gone gun crazy! Yeah, sure, sure I have!

Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn.

That’s right. It’s called “self-identification”. You need more practice doing this than you need to fire a gun. I’m still not quite good enough yet. I rub when I should pull. I rub and chafe, when I should firmly grasp and pull.

It’s blue. It’s shiny. It’s powerful. I got it in Detroit. I have this inclination to use it. What did I buy it for?!

But before I go…

– Performed by The Tragically Hip at Landsdowne Park in Ottawa, Ontario on 26 July 1993.

Arr! ’tis too late fer Talk Like A Pirate Day, but Pirate Monkeyness has released an English t’ Pirate Translator widget fer Dashboard. ’tis pretty awesome fer all yer piratical translatin’ needs. Yo ho ho an’ a bottle o’ rum! This post was translated usin’ th’ widget, so ye can see how good a job it does. Surrender!

This widget gets five out o’ five stars. Blimy!

Full-scale war has broken out in the Eve universe! Usually wars are piddly little things between inconsequential corporations that nobody notices. This time the comm channels are abuzz with the news: Band of Brothers (BoB) has declared war on the Ascendent Frontier (ASCN). This one looks to be a doozy, as BoB is one of the best fighting alliances in the universe (some might say the best) and ASCN is one of the largest alliances. ASCN has tremendous industrial strength, so trying to win a war of attrition probably isn’t in BoB’s interests.

Apparently BoB’s preparing to lay seige to the GQ2S system, warning corporations that are in there that they should leave immediately. The universe map is alight with red and orange blobs in the south signifying blown-up ships.

This war’s going to make history. Some are calling it the Great Southern War. I think it might get even larger as BoB devotes more resources to the southern front and pulls them from its northern flank, leaving themselves open to invasion from northern alliances.

Luckily I and my corporation have nothing to do with either ASCN or BoB, so we’re well out of it.