definitely interested.

Posts Tagged ‘scheming’

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A World of Opportunities

In Stating the Obvious, learning, linux on August 28, 2009 at 3:47 pm

I’ve been kicking around the right way to announce a thing I announced to my colleagues a week ago. That thing being that I’m leaving Gotham Gazette. The reasons are both simple and complex, but the simplest is that the publication really, really needs someone to evaluate web analytics tools not someone to tackle the big, fun, challenging question of why New Yorkers aren’t more interested in public policy. Well, I think they do need the latter, but fundamental scarcity of resources means that the former is winning out.

These are good questions, though. The civic engagement ones, I mean. Is it because we think policy is impenetrable and our legislators are all bought? Is it because we don’t notice that land use decisions matter until developers are breaking ground on a sky rise across the street? That we think the game is won already? I’m not sure, but I think changing the way people think about local policy is a really interesting part of our project here.
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Peter Moore’s DIY Panniers

In various on February 12, 2009 at 6:26 pm

I was just going to bookmark this, file under “I’d like to …” but then I noticed that the URL was really to a page in the Way Back Machine and the original site had been domain squatted. So I’m going to go ahead and shamelessly reprint the plans here. The drawing appears to be copyright Peter Moore, 2002. You might just want the photos.
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Free as in lunch (dating the hive mind)

In various on November 30, 2008 at 8:10 pm

When the free lunch comes with a seminar on affiliate marketing opportunities and other ways to make a buck with pyramid schemes, it is a very special kind of free, nothing like kittens or beer or flying birds or freedom. Google is that kind of free, whether you believe that or not. And, I’m falling for Google Calendar. I’ve fallen. Fallen so hard that I’m documenting it for you.Because one thing it does nicely is import events from a CSV file. The catch is that if your CSV file is set up wrong, you just get an error that says “Sorry, Calendar is unavailable right now” when that isn’t the problem at all. So, if you tried to be sneaky and note the required fields with an asterisk or a wee “(required)” you’ll just be told to come back later. You won’t be told that Google can’t read your document.

Anyway. This Works.

Here’s the thing: today, Google is hanging on strong. But we’ve been over this with Flickr and del.icio.us. You may recall that both were acquired by Yahoo in the last year or two. And you may recall that Yahoo was about to be bought by Microsoft back in May, a buying that didn’t happen when Yahoo stock was at $37/share. Last I checked it was hovering around $9/share (actually, it is back up to 11). My sources (okay, the guy on the bus) say that the campus and soda machines are worth about $8/share which means that somewhere around $8 it starts to be worth it to takeover the whole thing and start selling off the chairs at a yard sale. Which means that I have no idea who is going to “own” Flickr or del.icio.us in six months. Not me, I know that, because neither is free.

So I’m trying to migrate. It helps that Yahoo’s system means that I am never entirely sure how to log in to my Flickr account anymore. I don’t take notes when I do login. I can never remember my username (actually, I have two). So I installed Gallery and if I ever figure out how to it to talk to Ubuntu in the webdav tongue, I might actually use it. And I’m trying to figure out a good substitute for del.icio.us, which is now just “delicious” anyway, which is lame.

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I was hoping for a challenge. This isn’t any fun.

In various on November 30, 2008 at 7:41 pm

free association, that was. I’m not even going to explain. I tried, this morning, to go off on a decadent adventure in the freezing rain but it didn’t work out as I had planned. Choice Greene turns out not to have seats, the expanded Pioneer still doesn’t sell cranberries and there was a line out the door at Choice. So my own living room it is. We did finally turn on the heat.

Oliver wrote, though. mailx v. mutt

I’ve been playing around with some shell scripting on my laptop and reading about command line email clients. The book I have talks about mail and mutt but only talks about how to read and send email with them,
mutt seems pretty good for sending but with out the program on my laptop I don’t know if it will retrieve them too. Do you know of any such programs that can download the messages from a pop or imap server? When we get to Guam in a week I’ll try downloading those two programs and looking at the help and man files but since time in port is so limited I figured I should make sure I’m getting the packages I need now since I’ll next have web access around the 22nd of December.

I envy his high seas. My people are mutt people when they aren’t using Eudora. I haven’t used Mutt since I worked at bway.net, and I found it frustrating because it wasn’t Pine and Pine was better because I knew how to use it. Funny how that works.

Mutt, though, ought to be a functional IMAP client. This is a good rundown of how to connect, but I think you are saying you want to store your IMAP messages offline. Store a copy.

Marius Gedminas, a generally helpful person and the author of a handful of generally useful tools, wrote a good response to some questions about fetchmail and mutt and IMAP that actually spells out some common points of confusion really well. So that might be helpful, just in terms of putting things in context. Another good read is Dave who eventually gives up, but first stews up a combination of mutt, UW IMAP, Isync and mairix.

I should dig in a little deeper. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Vineyard by Bicycle (with new notes added)

In various on August 19, 2008 at 1:31 pm

An update on a question previously posed here: is there a way to get ourselves and our bicycles to Martha’s Vineyard in one piece?

Sure. If you’re a gambler. Contrary to their published policy (which I can’t seem to load this morning) Peter Pan/Bonanza’s bicycle policy is at the whim of their driver. At Port Authority, we were told first that there was no need to box our bikes, if we could fit them they’d fit them but we’d have to board last and they couldn’t promise they would fit. So we waited. And then another station agent told us that there was no way she could fit bikes on the bus because it was full and no we couldn’t look and no we couldn’t box them.

So screw it. We demanded a refund, rode to Chinatown, took the Fung Wah to Boston, where there was a bus to Hyannis waiting. Unfortunately, it was close to 10 PM, which was going to put us in Hyannis comfortably six hours before the next ferry. If we were slick we probably could have found a Super8 Motel in Hyannis but we decided instead to venture out into the Boston rain. Anyhow, the Hyannis ferry costs $40 per-bicyclist, which is a long way from the $10.50 we paid for passage from Woods Hole. Lucky for us, Jeff wasn’t really out of town, he’d just gone out to dinner without his cell phone. A thing I’d normally commend, but not when I’m scrambling to find a dry couch in Boston and Miss Priss is off in Florida. So a couch stay later we were back at South Station trying to sweet talk our bikes onto the Peter Pan to Woods Hole. Something I’ve noticed about Peter Pan drivers (Peter Pan has acquired Bonanza, you see) is that they’re a universally miserable lot. Bitter and mean, even when they’re being nice.

I don’t think it was a bad shake, to take a late bus to Boston and an early bus to the ferry, but I could have skipped the ride up to Port Authority to be hollered at and then the ride back downtown. Policy or no, the Fung Wah fit four bicycles and, while I wouldn’t call them nice about it (or about anything), they were certainly efficient and accommodating.

My advice for getting to Woods Hole? Bring your pedal wrench, just in case, and don’t aim for the last bus. I still think that Fung Wah to Boston was a far better bet than trying to board the Bonanza bus at Port Authority. There was plenty of room on the Bonanza to Woods Hole. My second tidbit is not to aim for the very last ferry. Leave open the option of waiting for the next bus. Help load luggage to make sure you’re stacking things tightly and be prepared to take responsibility for maneuvering your bike on to the bus yourself. Keep in mind that while the Fung Wah seems to have very high luggage bays that fit an upright bicycle almost comfortably, Peter Pan/Bonanza bays are a lot smaller.

We didn’t ever look into the Providence ferry option. There’s a boat from Providence for $58 with bicycle, but if you take a cheap bus to Providence, the sum total could come to less than what we paid ($73 for Woods Hole to NYC). Unfortunately, all the cheap buses to Providence seem to be phantoms. I think there are plenty of Chinatown bus options that are not yet on the interweb, though.

The other sneak attack we might have tried: Peter Pan does offer priority boarding if you reserve online.

Getting home was easier because we knew the score and the security is much more minimal in the Woods Hole Parking lot so I could just climb in the cargo bay myself and start rearranging bags to ensure space. The bus driver at the transfer in Bourne (where we got on a Providence/NYC bus) was predictably curmudgeonly and advised us that he couldn’t promise that we and our bicycles wouldn’t be thrown off in Providence if there wasn’t room. My suspicion that they wouldn’t actually kick us off the bus proved well founded and we got all the way to Port Authority, bikes intact, in time to stop at Azuri and ride down the Hudson River Greenway, nap in the grass and have a whole nother dinner with Mike and Mary.

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Ask Cherry Crush (really!)

In various on May 22, 2008 at 7:12 pm

I’ve got two things up my sleeves:

  1. it’s what’s for dinner. When I was little, sometimes we were not allowed to ask what was for dinner. I never understood. Now I understand. Sometimes when you’re cooking dinner you don’t want to say what you are making because that could open the door to suggestions you don’t want to hear. Sometimes. Sometimes if I’ve been getting a lot of sleep and practicing yoga and capoeira and reading fiction and generally not stressing myself out, I don’t have this problem. My mother says that if I’m going to be nice to my eventual children I probably have to be less stressed out. She knows a thing or two, my mother does. Meantime, I’m thinking of starting a recipe blog about just eating food. Arif has one, it is pretty good. I’m secretly thinking of setting up a wordpress multi-author blog for the Clinton Hill CSA to allow lots of members to maintain cooking blogs.
  2. Hide and Sed with Reggie’s Ex or maybe Ask me anything, I’m a regular expert. Either way, you submit a question about whether it is possible to transform some heap of data and I’ll suggest a few ways to do it with regular expressions or Calc functions. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

PS, I don’t know why my stupid tag cloud doesn’t work. I can’t figure it out. I’ve tried and tried. Grr.

PPS, Speaking of eventual children (and no, this isn’t a veiled message or anything) some time ago I took to keeping eventual children at bay through a careful program of Fertility Awareness. I gave up eventually–it is one thing to take your temperature every morning at the same exact time if you’re trying to figure out why you keep getting your period when you’re looking to get knocked up. It is another thing to take your temperature every morning at the same exact time for five years with no end in sight just to avoid more conventional prophylactics. I’m glad I know a lot more about women’s health. I’m glad I put the thermometer back in the medicine cabinet, too. All of which is a big lead up to saying that Princess Melissa seems to be blogging again and since she is actively trying to get herself in a family way, her post on Fertility Awareness is hysterical. I think so anyway.

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Shorts

In various on March 4, 2008 at 3:24 pm

Things I’ve been meaning to articulate, (and in Magstock Style, I invite you to vote for your favorite followup.)

  1. This morning, the woman who passed me on Jay Street and said something so huffy and with such a terse look on her face I that I heard “bitch, you suck” before I realized that the actual words out of her mouth were “nice boots.” Right. Thanks. I do love New Yorkers.
  2. Where We Are Now, hope, change, mania and haters and how to talk about what it is that we’re all hoping for, what we think that change will bring. Something concrete that we can use to actually look back at this moment and measure success.
  3. Finally getting my own slot on the Idea Lab. And screwing up the grammar in my first post.
  4. Art, civic participation, conversations about consumerism (and maybe a little bit about why the really good stuff always seems to happen off line, or at least out of the public square.)
  5. A panel last night that was about two very different things and couldn’t quite find its way to a conversation, but got me thinking a lot anyway. Also, about salons, civics conversations, public spaces and how it isn’t easy to create a place where people come together to talk about ideas, but Beka, Winnie and Jason are here to tell you it isn’t that hard either.
  6. Zack Exley on faith, study and Christians, and why Speaking of Faith is one of my favorite shows.
  7. Savitri on creating our own faith.

And later, maybe someone can explain how I loused up my style sheet again such that lists aren’t. Feh.

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Escape from New York

In various on February 18, 2008 at 4:15 am

The Ashram was a little funky, and I’m not sure I’d go there without Ana and Foca to back me up … I can’t say that and then link to them, can I? … especially since my efforts to find any details about the rumored eucalyptus sauna came to naught. I’d link to the part on their website where the same was promised, but then I’d have to link to them and they’d catch me saying bad things about how no one seemed really happy. I’m used to blissed out yogis. I’m not used to whole dining rooms full of people who seem kind of put out to be sharing the room with you. And that was before we stayed up all night dancing and building human pyramids so it can’t be that they already knew we were going to keep them up all night. (Hold up: I was trying to sleep, too.) However, it was less than 5 miles from Harriman Station on the Port Jervis line, which qualifies it for bicycle escape status, even if I took a cab from the train on Friday, myself.

I’m still looking for low key places to stay that are with in reach of both trees and the train.

I’m also (new this week) looking for ways to get our asses to Martha’s Vineyard this summer. Sumner (of the gorgeous rings–funny how you can forget a thing you wear every day until someone complements it and you remember that it is beautiful) invited us to visit but last summer we were through planning anything. So this summer we want to go see him and chill and ride our bikes and people keep telling me that we’d have to fly to the vineyard, which is crazy talk. Or drive (also. crazy talk.) I know (from Robert Moses, who knew) that if you don’t want the masses to descend, en masse, upon your idyllic retreat, you shouldn’t allow mass transit to approach, but there has to be a way for two hardy cyclists to make the journey with neither an auto nor a security line with no bag of peanuts at the other side. Right?

Seems like there are ferries from North Kingstown (RI), New Bedford (where they read Moby Dick aloud, so maybe we could stop there?), Hyannis, Woods Hole and sometimes Montauk. I’ve heard stories of the Montauk ferry, they all seem to revolve around retching overboard, a thing I’ve never done and could live without, truth be told. The Rhode Island ferry purports to be just 15 miles from Amtrak, which is a trek, but not impossible. Can we do better?

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Mornin’ Sunshine

In various on February 1, 2008 at 3:27 pm

What I want to know today:

Where is worth eating near the Natural History Museum?

Where can I find a really good bran muffin near City Hall?

Why isn’t anyone pointing out that the only contender who actually had a halfway interesting urban agenda might have been forced out of the race by a whole lot of rural primaries? DMI is rocking their urban issues meme and GG is about to come out with a story, subject of: same, and no one seems to be pointing out that talking about cities won’t get you anywhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Wyoming. Nevada, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Maine: not so much with the density. Granted, I’m actually lying about Florida and Michigan a little bit. They’ve got real cities, and Florida ranks pretty high when you rank states by urbanness. Still, the early race is a rural race.

I always bought into the convoluted fairness of the Iowa caucuses, it made a little of sense to me in a “if you don’t think about it too much” kind of way, and since electoral politics have never really captured my heart, I stopped about there. While I was home, though, my mother (who is pretty much always right. really.) said something offhand and I realized that there probably is something to the argument that the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries give undo clout to the needs of a pretty small minority of the American population. And that one of the repercussions is that the candidates who want to talk about cities don’t get much traction.

So that is what I’m thinking this morning. I’ll confess that the three (bran muffin, MNH, presidents) are taking up near abouts equal space.

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Art Radio

In various on August 8, 2007 at 5:21 pm

For the first time in a decade, the FCC is opening up an application window to distribute much of the remaining Full Power FM spectrum to non-profit groups, but Free 103 is thinking about applying for a license, which is truly exciting stuff:

In October, the Federal Communications Commission will allow applications for full-power educational radio stations. free103point9 has been working with a few national non-profit groups to see if there is room on the dial in upstate New York for such a station.

We recently got back a preliminary engineering study that shows that there is room for such a station covering almost all of Greene County, and about half of Columbia County, and the very south part of Albany County. The signal reaches very close to Ulster County, especially near I-87 and the Hudson River. The cities of Cairo, Hudson, Catskill and Coxsackie are all well-covered, and the area extends all the way to Chatham and the Taconic Parkway.

That’s all the good news. The bad news is we have very little time, and need to raise a good deal of money quickly to apply for the frequency. To apply, you need to have a full-fledged engineering report done, and you need a broadcast lawyer to fill out the application (the FCC throws out applications if even one line is filled out incorrectly). This costs between $5000 and $8000.

So we are asking you to pledge whatever you can to help bring an art radio station to upstate New York. Anyone pledging money will be in on the first decisions that will shape the station. You want to do a show? No problem. You want to help decide what shows are on, and what direction the station takes, then donate now.

free103point9 will make our new Study Center in Acra, New York the studio for the station, and we want to make sure it is an important voice for local artists of all types, as well as meeting educational, journalistic and musical needs in the community.

Please e-mail Tom Roe at tr @ free103point9.org to make a pledge for whatever amount you can promise. We will only collect on the pledges if we raise enough money to pay for the engineering study and the broadcast lawyer. There’s no guarantee we will get the station just by applying — a church group or a public radio giant could be stiff competition — but we think we have a good chance and the payoff is worth the risk.

We will hold an organizational meeting for anyone interested, this Thursday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m. at free103point9′s Wave Farm, in the Study Center, for anyone interested in helping organize these efforts. We will stream the meeting on the internet if you cannot attend in person, at www.free103point9.org.

Basically, by Aug. 15 we need to have the money raised, and get the engineers and lawyers working to meet the October deadline.

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Born of the Bubble (ask Cherry Crush)

In various on February 5, 2007 at 4:17 pm

A few folks have asked for this, and so I am sharing it. With you, my dear readers. Here is what I know:

Buying a home is usually a smart idea. You can use all kinds of rent vs. own calculations, but the big truth is that unless you own your home, you live at the whim of the rental market. I know very few people who have enough money saved to make a down payment on a home, and you can all consider this your consolidated lecture. Financial security isn’t magic. It takes planning and saving. I have never met anyone who regrets having put money aside, but I know a lot of people, some of them a lot older than me, who are suddenly confronting the precariousness of renting. One friend, now in his sixties, told me about how he used to think he was so smart, watching his siblings struggle to make mortgage payments while he lived in his shared home with his roommates and his super cheap rent. He was free, liberated from the guy lines of the banking industry. They were bougie suckers. Hah!

Fast forward twenty years, and he watched as his siblings paid off their mortgages right about the time that he realized he was tired of negotiating with roommates. Today, he can’t quite afford a home of his own, and he’s feeling a little stuck. He’ll roll with it, but he regrets not being more proactive when he had the chance.

Yes, real estate in Brooklyn is outrageously expensive. Almost as outrageous as San Francisco. That doesn’t mean you can’t afford to buy. Buy what you can afford and take it from there. Renting is a fine way to live in the short term, but unless you’ve got some kind of rent controlled love shack, you need to think long term. (and, even if you are rent regulated, do you really want to stake your financial security on the continued vigilance of DHCR? I wouldn’t.)

Right now, today, if you have good credit, 20% to put down and a verifiable and stable income, you can get a fixed rate mortgage at 6%. For every missing piece, the interest rate goes up a bit. Getting a morgage isn’t any more complex than that. A mortgage broker might be able to get you a better deal, but the real challenge comes when you don’t have good credit or a verifiable income or cash to put down. I don’t know how to help you with those things, I’ve always been a by the book kind of a woman.

If you are counting on rental income to pay the mortgage, the bank won’t let you count on more than 75% of prevailing market rents. They know a thing or two about real estate and tenants. Figure they are about right and don’t count on getting higher than market rents or never having any vacancies.

You can find a thousand articles about tenancy-in-common gone awry, but they all have one thing in common–people didn’t communicate and they didn’t put things in writing. Do business with people you trust, yes, but there is no better way to be sure that everyone is on the same page than putting it all in writing. Be real. Marriages fall apart after 20 years. 30 years. People change. If you are investing in a home, don’t just trust anyone. Trust people, yes, but seal your trust with a sign on the line that is dotted.

Mortgage payments are a complicated thing, but roughly figure this:

a=(P*(r/12))/(1-(1+(r/12))^(0-n))

wherein a= monthly payment, r= rate, P= principal (if you are feeling dense, that would be the purchase price minus your downpayment …), n= term in months (there are 12 in a year …)

Property Tax in NYC is an arbitrary beast, water is expensive, so is heat. Those aren’t minor expenses. The attached spreadsheet includes realistic numbers for a house I recently looked at, but you should do your own homework. The department of finance has records online, so does the Department of Buildings. Property Shark is a great resource, too.

(OpenOffice Mortgage Calculator | Excel Mortgage Calculator)

Confidential to JF, you can usually use some of a retirement savings plan towards the purchase of your first home. Might be only $10,000 that you can use, though. At one point recently I was looking at a chart that broke it down for me, but I can’t find it right now.

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I want money. That’s what I want.

In various on November 30, 2006 at 4:28 pm

DKG has at various points talked about projects designed to “fix” email (which is fundamentally broken by spam) that would charge a penny a message. The idea is that when you start adding a nominal cost per message, spam becomes a wee bit more costly. Some smarty pants out there have even floated an incredibly complex proposal for a bonded system, where it costs me a nickel to send you an email, and if you accept my email, I’ll get my nickel back. So I can spam you, but I have to pay for the privilege, while sending real mail is entirely free. Or costs a nickel sometimes, like when you write a nasty late night letter to someone you don’t like and they decided to keep your nickel to be spiteful.

Fundamentally, it sounds like a good idea. Or at least an interesting one. Logistically, it starts to fall apart quickly, but I’m more of an idea person so I’m still interested.

Since we rebuilt the NOSI site, kicked out a zillion spam accounts, and cleaned out seven zillion spam comments, we get about six new user acount per day on NOSI.net. Once a week, a real person requests an account, so I don’t want to just delete the account requests wholesale, I actually look at all of them. Or some of them. Michelle looks at some of them. Most of the requests are pure spam and they piss me off. I’ve been thinking that it is time to institute a nominal fee for drupal site accounts. We could keep the money for NOSI or just give it back if you don’t put seventeen links to various reduced price pharmaceuticals in your signature. According to my records, if we had a dollar for every account on the NOSI site, we’d be rich right about now. Would you pay a dollar to comment on the NOSI site?

(While we’re on the subject of me and my bright ideas, another great idea of mine is a variation on Andy Singer’s car alarm that fits comfortably around your neck and jolts you with an electric shock every time someone touches your precious vehicle. I am hoping the persuade someone to introduce a bill in the City Council that would require all car horns to sound exactly as loud inside your vehicle as outside. So Pepsi Truck Guy wants to say hello to Other Pepsi Truck Guy? Fine. And he can go deaf doing it. And every SUV with Jersey plates throwing a horn-hitting-tantrum in his rush to get to the next red light? I want him to wake the baby sleeping in the back seat. It might be easier if the NYPD could figure out how to enforce existing laws that do say your horn is for e-m-e-r-g-e-n-c-i-e-s and not general communication, but that will never happen. I haven’t actually gotten past my ow fantasy stage on this one. The car alarm folks have gotten a wee bit farther–there is actually technology that, while it doesn’t deliver electroshock therapy, does ring on your key chain instead of out in the street.)

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Covetousness isn’t so much a sin as …

In various on October 6, 2006 at 3:04 pm

a major source of distraction. I know I’ve talked about this before, I want it so bad I had to password protect it, but the Freitag Factory is back:

Freitag FreitagFreitag

Thanks for catching that one, Scott.

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Home Pages in Word Press

In various on September 13, 2006 at 4:56 pm

I just did some Word Press fiddling for a friend’s Chiropractic Practice, in Minnesota, and I am knee deep in trying to build a new and much, much better site for the Youth Bicycle Education Network (okay, okay, you can peek if you must. it isn’t some kind of big secret), and I have learned a few things:
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Handy, This Blog Thing

In various on June 9, 2006 at 1:41 pm

This blog thing is handy, I tell you. Seems like I just put up a list of things on my mind and then total strangers (and some old friends, but it is the total strangers that get me) they tell me the answer.

So this week, on my mind, besides for “where can I have a massively large wedding ceremony in New York City without spending an arm and a leg?” is …

rss aggregator I want a free standing, pretty (yes, pretty) RSS aggregator for Gnome. I don’t want a mozilla plugin, I have one of those.

sendmail I foolishly installed sendmail because I was testing out Evolution, which I am here to tell you sucks, and it kept crashing (see what I mean? sucks.) and so I kept setting out to use bug buddy, which wants you to have send mail installed, or else it leaves this totally useless text file on your desktop and you still have to go through the bug reporting system, you can’t just upload the bug buddy report. So I was thinking “sendmail.” Also, since my ISP is touchy about ole port 25, I was having trouble with SMTP. In Evolution. Not in Thunderbird, which does not suck, and which works just fine. Okay, so I started installing sendmail and realized that I could spend a lot of time for no reason and I instead went about migrating to Thunderbird (below). Now, however, when I start up Brhams hits a few sendmail snags, launching sendmail (which was never configured). That annoys me, because it means Brahms takes longer to boot. So, do I just apt-get remove sendmail, do I configure it properly, or do I take it out of init.d (and what is the right way to do that?).

Thunderbird Fun fact: if you are handy with a command line, migrating to Thunderbird from Evolution is easy as pie, even if you are a person with many folders. You have to use the internets to find your Evolution mail folders, but then you just have to copy everything over to where Thunderbird wants your mail stored, and do a lot of deleting. (If you’ve already got Thunderbird running, you might want to be careful about this, you can definitely screw things up here at the Velo, Rapido school of hacking.) But what I did, was I moved all the mail files/folders from my Evolution folder .evolution/mail/local/ to my Thunderbird folder .mozilla-thunderbird/330inone.default/Mail/Local Folders/
 and then went through and deleted everything with “ev-summary” or “ibex” or “cmeta” in the title (you can construct a nice “find” statement for that) When I was done, all my mail was where I expected it. Like I said, I am aces when it comes to trashing things, so take all my advice with a grain of salt. But most folks said it couldn’t be done, the Thunderbird migration. The only catch was that when I next downloaded my email, I got every message in my inbox anew.

wireless support in Ubuntu is weak I have a wireless network at home. It is password protected. The key is not somehting I can remember off the top of my head. I want to store it in my computer and come back to it, but basically everytime I leave Kohlrabi (our network) Brahms forgets the password. I don’t really understand why Gnome or Ubuntu can’t save network passwords. It should. It is freaking annoying that it doesn’t.

Ouch, that was Loud I need to figure out the sound stuffs on this computer. Partly, I just want it to stop beeping all the dang time, though I like the “you have mail” beep. What I really want, though, is to tell it *not* to pester me while I’m on Skype. Somehow, I want to be allowed to have Skype override all the other sounds on my computer so that I don’t have beeping while I’m on the phone. This one, I haven’t even looked at yet. Just so you know.

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Question of the Week

In various on June 2, 2006 at 12:53 pm

I want to advise my readers (all four of you, three with my father out of town), that I, Amanda, am capable of heretofore unheard of digressions. For instance: ever since we announced our engagement, people have been asking us what we want for an engagement gift. We don’t know. The things we want in a more general sense include a large funnel (with maybe an inch opening) that is suited to decanting dry beans or flour. And a house. So we’re good on the 75 cent gifts and the $750,000 gifts, but that middle range, we don’t want much. We’re both working adults. We have a colander, a very nice one. We have a full set of All Clad pans and an iron skillet and two nice ladles and six teapots (yes. six.) and a nearly complete set of china.

So I’m trying to make a list of things we want, and thanks to Carrie McClaren I found this site, FindGift.com, which will let you register for gifts in a general way (we need a cutting board. you can buy a sustainably harvested bamboo one that was made by some radical collective in Chiapas where they don’t even grow bamboo and it is probably an invasive species, or you can buy one at Crate and Barrel or Target or you can make one in shop class. I care a little, but since I can’t register at the “radical Chiapas collectives boutique” I don’t see why I need to tell someone where to buy a cutting board from.) FindGift.com wants to know what our wedding website is and we don’t have one yet, and I’m trying to make one but I’m still finding my bearings on this new computer, so I don’t have a favorite text editor with syntax color coding yet, with which to write simple HTML “Later this will be our wedding website. It isn’t yet.” for now.

I have Quanta, but it is written for KDE, and I’m realizing I don’t really know what that means. Leaving aside the fact that what really interests me about getting married is the implications of running KDE applications on Gnome, what are those implications?

I know it has something to do with libraries, graphical something maybe? Programming libraries? Qt vs GTK+. They are, um, different.

I think that what it means to run Quanta on Gnome is that I’ve got to add and run a whole separate library (what does that mean, in English, though?) to support Quanta. That Library’d be there already in KDE. Which is perhaps why Knotes takes so long to load? (I like it better than Gnome’s stickies app).

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movies please

In various on November 24, 2005 at 9:01 am

Anne recommends Control Room and Gunner Palace for some good Iraq war context. I am trying to build up my list of movies to see and taking suggestions. They don’t have to be about Iraq or about war or even educational (though the only other movie on my list right now, Whale Rider is also a documentary [it is not a documentary, check. Thanks maggie]), they just have to be worth watching.

For bonus points, I am also looking for reading for my upcoming trip to Cape Town. I just finished Hugh Masekela’s autobiography, Still Grazing, which made me realize that I know very little about the history of apartheid. Once upon a time, I knew a lot about it, and I need to find some books that will help me think about South Africa all over again.

I never saw Long Night’s Journey into Day, the 1999 documentary about the South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, which might be a good place to start. I was overwhelmed by Cry Freedom when I was 14, I wonder what I would think of it today.

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Mapping, and Thinking About Maps

In various on November 11, 2005 at 10:02 am

This is a thing I’d like to put more energy into …

http://civicmaps.org/?q=node/92

http://civicmaps.org/?q=node/91

http://civicmaps.org/?q=node/90

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Concrete Rituals

In various on October 24, 2005 at 7:23 am

When: Wednesday, October 26th 2005 7pm

Ends: 9pm

Where: Bar Thirteen
35 East 13th St. at University Place, New York, NY

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To the Danger Makers,
You are invited to join The Concrete Rituals.

Link: http://www.concreterituals.com

You probably already know this, but we’re fucked. It’s not the type of fucked that can be fixed by voting, blogging, protesting, donating, or drinking until delirious. We’ve tried all that. We’re still fucked. This goes deeper.

Our nation is cursed.

It all became clear after the second hurricane hit, after the second war erupted, after the second tower fell. It all became clear in the path of the H2, in the glare of the Jackson trial, in the face of the new Pope. It all became clear in the seconds after the second election. We are a nation crumbling under the curse of fiasco. Despite many attempts to turn it around we continue to fail fantastically. So now it’s time to try something wildly different.

Welcome to the Concrete Rituals.

>From Halloween Night to Fat Tuesday we will be hosting one hundred twenty one nights of art, ritual and wild abandon to lift the fiasco from this cursed nation. These rituals will be tiny and vast, sincere and preposterous, beautiful and drastic and all in the streets. Anyone can create a ritual and we hope everyone will.

This is how we save ourselves.

The start of this is obvious. Halloween. New York City. A Renegade Parade. A night of fire and brimstone and elaborate walking effigies. We bring the battling tribes, brown-bag-liquor, big brass bands and back-pack stereos. You bring the nefarious energy, your elaborate costume and others like you.

Our first ritual will be:
The Ash Masquerade, October 31st

This is not just a party, or a passive night of performance watching. You are invited to be with us, in the NYC Halloween parade and on to an undisclosed after-location.
You are the artstar and the street is your stage.

For the artist call see:

http://www.concreterituals.com

To parade with us come to our artist meeting where we will go over the plan of action, performance aspects, costumes and the big surprise at the end. This is less a meeting and
more of a pre-performance party.

Everyone is welcome, regardless of experience.

Come to:
Bar Thirteen : 35 East 13th St. @ University Place
Wednesday, October 26th : 7pm to 9pm

Come late if you need to.
Two for one drink specials, just for us.

More details on this project will be posted next week.
You are the danger makers and this is your era.