Since Baa Camp there's been a vast amount of interest in building a free wireless network in Wellington. It's awesome to see this interest take hold even if it does feel like a timewarp back to 2001 in Portland.

At the same time I'm hearing that Personal Telco is continuing to kick ass in Portland as MetroFi drops the ball, rock on guys.

Portland, Ore., considers its options with MetroFi's stalled network: The city of Portland alerted MetroFi in February that it considers the company "in default of contract," according to the (Portland) Oregonian. MetroFi told the paper that his firm won't be finishing the network without "financial support form the city and left open the possibility MetroFi will shut off the entire system." CEO Chuck Haas also seems to have sworn off ad-supported Wi-Fi, something the company switched to years ago, deciding there's truly not enough revenue there to turn a profit. Local group Personal Telco may move into a more leading role, given their steady work while MetroFi fiddled with their business model.

The Oregonian's blog cites some items from the 6 Feb. 2008 letter sent by Portland to MetroFi, noting a lack of ongoing communication and maintenance, as well as a failure to provide information about its advertising partner MSN's privacy practices.

Source: http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008284.html

Jason McArthur has been collecting old video footage of Personal Telco and putting it up on YouTube. Very cool, thanks for the trip down memory lane!

"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

The text doesn't mention the breast augmentation, but the illustrations intentionally show Mom's breasts to be fuller and higher. "I tried to skirt that issue in the text itself," says Salzhauer. "The tummy lends itself to an easy explanation to the children: extra skin and can't fit into your clothes. The breasts might be a stretch for a six-year-old."

The book doesn't explain exactly why the mother is redoing her nose post-pregnancy. Nonetheless, Mom reassures her little girl that the new nose won't just look "different, my dear—prettier!"

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/132240/page/2

Oh. My. God. I'm all for talking to children, and I guess this is better then nothing, but ... <vomit> ...

I guess it's a fine line though, if a book like this is going to be of any practical use, it's got to be non-threatening to the parent or they will never use it.

<sigh> ...

On my Mac laptop I have these as the twenty most used commands:

overkill(shand)$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -20
847 ls
646 cd
332 svn
317 sudo
295 ping
185 port
176 rm
174 ssh
159 scp
159 ifconfig
155 vi
148 host
139 man
138 less
119 p
114 find
101 l
95 open
90 echo
86 pass

And on my Debian Linux server I have this:

maxx(root)# history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -20
1610 ls
1052 cd
635 less
460 grep
340 sudo
322 vi
321 l
311 rcsedit
216 for
201 host
195 cat
166 mkroot
154 tail
154 mv
152 rm
139 svn
127 cp
123 apache2ctl
118 find
115 apt-cache

Most of this is pretty straight forward the only interesting ones are:

• "port" is the command line utility from MacPorts for managing packages

• "l" is the standard "ls -l" alias which everybody has:

  l() { ls -l $* | more; }
  
  

• "p" is a slightly fancy alias which basically does "ps -efww | grep" but with some cross platform smarts:

  p() { 
      if [ $LINUX ]; then 
          OPTIONS="-efww"; 
      elif [ $IRIX ] ; then
          OPTIONS="-ef";
      elif [ $DARWIN ]; then
          OPTIONS="-Ajww";
      fi
      if [ ! $1 ]; then
          ps ${OPTIONS} | more
      else
          ps ${OPTIONS} | grep -i $1 | more
      fi;
  }
  
  

• "rcsedit" is the standard sysadmin wrapper script for making editing files with RCS easy.

• "mkroot" is what I use to become root and keep my personalised environment (because modifying root's environment is a bad thing):

  alias mkroot='sudo bash --rcfile ~/.bash_profile'
  
  

• "pass" is a script I use for managing my passwords in a GPG encrypted file

Though it doesn't make this list, "spex" is another great alias which I use for remembering obscure and useful command lines.

spex () { curl --silent -A Firefox "http://www.spack.org/wiki/CommandLine?action=raw" | grep :: | grep --color -i $1; }

Chelsea Hotel #2
By Leonard Cohen

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.
Ah but you got away, didn't you babe,
you just turned your back on the crowd,
you got away, I never once heard you say,
I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you
and all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music."

And then you got away, didn't you babe...

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that's all, I don't even think of you that often.

There was the sole indiscretion, in my professional life, that I deeply regret, because I associated a woman's name with a song, and in the song I mentioned, I used the line "giving me head on an unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street", and I've always disliked the locker room approach to these matters, I've never spoken in any concrete terms of a woman with whom I've had any intimate relationships. And I named Janis Joplin in that song, I don't know when it started, but I connected her name with the song, and I've been feeling very bad about that ever since, it's an indiscretion for which I'm very sorry, and if there is some way of apologising to the ghost, I want to apologise now, for having committed that indiscretion.

Source: http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/bbctrans.htm

I just logged into the Alaska Airlines web site to claim some mileage points from my recent flights and was greeted with this message:

Our system is currently unavailable for planned maintenance due to a system cutover from April 14th to April 22nd. The information you are viewing is current as of April 13, 2008. This account is not available for award redemption or updating through this website, by calling reservations, or Customer Care. Any flights flown during our system outage will reflect on your MyAccount shortly after April 22nd.

A customer facing outage of over a week for planned maintenance?! At least I can still view my account details ... maybe I've time warped back to '97?

Last election I made the mistake of signing up for email updates on Howard Dean's campaign. It seems this was granting permanent permission for them to send me email. After all, they are important politicians, I should pay attention to what they say ... right?

Here's what's wrong with their unsubscription process:

1. When you receive a letter from the democratic party they include a link to be unsubscribed. That's a good start.

2. Unfortunately when you go to the URL you have to know what email address you originally signed up with. Because I know how to read "Received:" headers that's not a problem for me, but I pity the punter.

3. Once you enter your email address and click the "Process Unsubscribe" button it informs you you that you will need a confirmation code to unsubscribe.

   <sarcasm>I'm sure there are lots of people trying to fraudulently unsubscribe others from democrat email, makes perfect sense.</sarcasm>.

4. Once you receive your confirmation code and put it into their web site they inform you that you have been unsubscribed but that your request may take up to 12 hours to complete. Twelve hours to complete ... this is backing up my time travel theory!

5. And the grand finale of this glorious experience? It doesn't work, they keep sending you email ...

I've been in Los Angeles getting some gear ready for a shoot. This morning I went down to the local cafe to get some coffee and a muffin. As the girl handed me the coffee lid she said, "it's made of biodegradable material so it's a bit fragile, if you need another one, lemme know".

I wish the smug bastard was wrong occasionally:

When the brown alternative begins disappearing wholesale, when that's simply unavailable and we have to live Corporate Green, then green will not be sexy. No, Green will just be what there is. Brown could not be sustained. So Brown died. Green will work better eventually, but when we first get it, the alpha-rollout of a sustainable world... man, is that ever going to suck. I own some eco-chic shoes. I had to stop wearing them because they were rotting right off of my feet. It'll be like that, okay? Only more so. We're not gonna win pretty; we are gonna win kinda ugly, frankly – but we are winning.

PS. This is not a complaint, this is humour.