So, Heinz is supposedly* putting together a USB mini-microwave so you can heat up a lot of beans at your desk. Jesus. Beanzawave?!? Really?

Imaginary Heinz Marketing Conference Call

Drone A: We’ve come up with a brilliant plan to sell more beans to office workers?
Drone B: Really? Edgy new ad campaign? Deal with office building convenience stores.
Drone A: No. Fuck that! Think really big. Like huge but smaaaall at the same time.
Drone B: Does this have something to do with Wal-Mart?
Drone A: No! Shit. This is about a computer powered mini microwave that revolutionizes the way that people eat beans at work without ever leaving their desks.
Drone B: shoots Drone B. Turns gun on self.

Pure, unadulterated awesome! I’m sure a Nobel nomination will be forthcoming as soon as the ether wears off.

* I say supposedly because part of me is fairly certain that this will surface within the next few days as a viral campaign instead of the comedy gold marketing that it is now. Curses.

In another lifetime, when there was no child in the house and no earth shattering financial obligations threatening to annoy us with calls from wronged creditors, I wrote a lot. My recent posts have demonstrated that straying away from writing anything more substantive than Post-It notes for years at a time does not make attempts at resuming aforementioned practice seem much more than a contest against the inevitability of a vacuous middle age entirely removed from academia. I don’t mention academics because I feel they’re necessary in order to write well enough but because focus is much easier to attain when driven by the fear of humiliation and failure.

There may be an admission of mortality concealed in there somewhere — the not so devastating resignation that comes with the realization that you’re never going to do anything great or interesting to more than a handful of people that you already know. I’m trying to disprove the (my own) notion that this surrender to suckiness is inevitable yet still avoid editing like the curse on the drinking class that it is. Is the moral of the story to gleefully embrace mediocrity? Not really but I’m coming to terms with the idea that it beats an utter lack by a wide margin. ‘Missing’ fear and failure as a sincere motivator that produces the good stuff is another thing entirely that I’ll avoid discussing for the sake of keeping up the whole dignity facade.

I’m guessing that I’m one of the few who finds the news that Wordpress themes are also included in the GPL license that covers its original release. I originally switched (in a matter of hours) from Movable Type to Wordpress because of the MP licensing flap. I don’t like using tools that can be yanked out from underneath me. I’m sure someone is going to bring up my generalized ambivalence towards Mono here as a point of argument but they’re two different animals: ambiguous threats to act on unnamed patents on a project that generally uses the more permissive FOSS licenses for its work and something that seemed an awful lot like a bait and switch at the time.

Again, all the folks who do the actual smashing of thumbs work on WP are to be thanked and congratulated for sticking with the license and checking with SFLC to clarify how the GPL impacts third party themes. Theme developers who are all pissed about WP.org ‘fucking you over’ should consider that staying true to the spirit of the GPL in the organization of promoted plug-ins and themes has less to do with you than ‘us’.

Very little of the exciting variety happened today so I’m forced by laziness, apathy, and the ridiculous notion management types have that actual work-related work be performed while at work to just dump some links. I’m also trying to get to bed earlier this week as my band is playing its second show this Friday and the holiday weekend doesn’t foster a whole lot of extra sleeping opportunities especially when the loudest member of the household refuses to sleep later than 6 a.m. Bummer.

1. Illinois town is ditching those annoying cameras to catch red light runners. I think this is a good thing. Not because I think that arrogant sons of bitches have some deity granted right to drive like the slack jawed cromagnons that they’re socially related to but because they don’t do anything positive in terms of safety. I guess if you count higher incidences of traffic ticketing as safety because it provides a larger pool of funds to put more fucking pigs police on the streets then you might be a bigger fan of this idea than I am. It seems like the installation of cameras at dangerous intersections has become a panacea of sorts for removing them from public discussion. I don’t understand why more haven’t converted these installations into ways to gather information about how actual accidents happen and allowing engineers to fix faulty designs.

2. Rumors are brewing about Apple severing ties with Nvidia. This might be good as even the dedicated cards in the MBP laptops are kind of anemic. I’m hoping that they’ll introduce a better choice or encourage an upstart to come up with something interesting or innovative rather than incremental ‘more frames and fifteen fans’ bumps in speed and memory. None of that will ever happen but it’s sometimes nice to think about. Either way, maybe a rift would do something to shake Apple out of the complacency it has towards video performance. Well designed and implemented doesn’t just mean the case.

3. While trying to clean up and de-cruft my Wordpress install (like the one the makes the stuff you’re reading || local) I found a draft that I wrote just before I quit my previous job. It’s hard to recall how much I hated that environment and how hopeless it made me by the end of each day but reading that spilled cup of bile certainly helped. I’m not going to publish it because it was just angry/bitter ranting and I’m 100% positive Jonathan Livingston Fucking Seagull style these days. Also, I don’t exaggerate. Ever.

That said, my cat snores really fucking loudly.

Too busy to spend much time playing on the web today which is typical for the start of the work week but disheartening nonetheless. I’ve barely spent more than a few minutes in front of a (functioning) computer today but here are some things I noticed:

1. As much as I’ve tired of the ridiculous fear mongering over Mono being included in package sets (it’s not a default install, okay?) and the resulting forum vomiting that has taken place since (this has also spread to identi.ca and the like as well with a million different posts TinyURLing the rms opinion on the subject), I do enjoy it when people come up instructions on how to exorcise all of the imaginary bogeymen from your install rather than just spastically spamming the hell out of every Linux news site with unrelated comments on any given post. On the other side of the coin, you’ve got stuff like Mononono which just breaks the dependency tree in dpkg to make sure no demons get in. To be fair, it’s a good implementation of a terrible idea. Good/bad work.

2. I had no idea that up until recently it was illegal to collect rainwater in Colorado. It becomes sort of comical when cast in terms of water rights and property ownership but I’m happy that it’s been removed from law. The fact that 97% of precipitation was getting no where near streams and rivers is a study that should’ve been done long before people were concealing their water collection barrels but this is still a happier outcome for all parties involved.

3. Box-Look is a theme site for all of your favorite minimalist window managers of the *box variety and some pekwm stuff as well. I’m not living in Fluxbox nearly as often as I did in the past but it’s still exciting to have all kinds of eye candy that doesn’t weigh heavily on your processor to organized into a single place.

The weird pissing fight that this current Mono controversy has become had a reality check in the form of rms posting a cautionary note about dependence on Mono applications in case some sort of magic bullet patent is fished out of cold storage to fuck with Mono. This is a measured and sane warning from a person I respect tremendously but the response to it has been largely to read the first three lines and proclaim righteous victory over the oppressive forces of whoever is supposed to be a tool of the evil empire this month.

So, here are some things you should consider before shooting off your stupid mouth:

1. C#’s specification (the HIV to Mono’s AIDS if you’re batshit crazy) is recognized as an ECMA standard specification is is not in fact some kind of nutty language library neutron bomb created to rid the world of Linux.

2. The GNU project actually has their own version of this functionality called Portable.NET. Chances are given that C# is a specification and not a curse muttered by an Egyptian king before his death should some legal action be taken against Mono implementation that existing applications could be adapted to use the GNU runtime.

3. I have absolutely nothing to say about the Ubuntu forum controversies because I avoid both that distribution and its acolytes like the plague on common sense that they are.

I still haven’t had the spare brain cells to look too closely at the actual client level implementation of Opera Unite (as I’m seldom on either a Windows machine or my MBP with the exception of using it to play World of Warcraft long enough to really monkey with a technology that isn’t crucial to either my work or my play) but I do intend to mess with it sometime after the next major project is close to buttoned up.

One of the places where I’ve found a huge amount of useful information is Opera Unite HowTo’s which is assembled by someone interested in the technology and isn’t tied directly to Opera so it’s a pretty interesting take on what Unite is capable of.Despite being all but peed on by most FOSS advocates (and I include myself in this vast and shadowy generalization) Opera has managed to assemble an awesome community of users who come up with all sorts of cool ways to take advantage of the Opera toolbox. It’s very heartening.

Summer is traditionally the season of reading if you’re to believe the marketing hype. I’m with them on this as I too savor the feeling of cheap mass market paperback pages sticking to my fingers and reading while having the ravages of the scorching sun soothing by voracious insects biting me. Anyway, the summer often brings with it something vaguely interesting in publishing sphere and, in this case, it comes via The Smart Set’s notes about the domestic reissue of Dan Fante’s books in tandem with the publication of an anniversary edition of John Fante’s Ask The Dust.

If you’re not familiar with Dan Fante’s stuff it’s probably because most of it hasn’t been published in the United States and here we only read shit that could feasibly transcribed from shows produced by the Lifetime network at least until the author has been dead for 25 years or more. The interesting question that prefaces (slick, no?) all of this is actually posed by Nick Mamatas in his piece: is the American readership really ready for either of the Fantes’ jerks? I just ordered two of the reissues since I’ve only read Chump Change on loan from a friend with the sufficient loose income to buy trade paper imports. I’m looking forward to being able to potentially read these books more than once but I’m curious about how they’ll be received since Dan Fante’s subject matter immediately makes him a sure shelf mate with Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. That probably isn’t the best thing for an author hoping to be read as the usual suspects that shop that section are typically more interested in being seen with a book than the actual substance of the book. The problem here is whether you want book publishers getting all freaked out by previously inaccessible authors failing to suddenly bring in a gazillion dollars in book sales and whether or not (as Mamatas mentions in his article) the book chain stores are going to sell these books or not.

All that aside, it’s good to finally have these books accessible in the United States and given a shot for inclusion in mainstream bookstores. Here’s hoping that things work out for the best and hoping Dan remains productive no matter what the outcome.

This probably doesn’t matter to you at all if you’re not one of the legion of slack jawed, sleep deprived, gear perverts latched onto the massive teat of World of Warcraft but Opera and Elitist Jerks have put together a special edition of the browser all configured to make you wet your pants (if you’re into Elitist Jerks at all) and maybe even use a browser that doesn’t totally suck. Unfortunately, you’ll need to use one of the more sucky operating systems in order to use it as it’s only available for Windows and OS X. I’ll probably take it for a test drive when I get home tonight as switching to the XP side of the KVM makes me twitchy.

Later that night:

I installed the Elitist Jerks browser on a Windows XP box at work and on my Apple laptop at home. It’s Opera so that is a plus and also has a ton of categorized links to WoW related sites (although many of them are official forums) and preconfigured RSS feeds for an equal number of useful news sites. Obviously all of this would be much more helpful if you’re running raids and playing the game with progression in mind. A year ago I would’ve found this ridiculously handy but now it just makes me wish I had more time to play.

Also, heads up to Wow.com for bringing this somewhat amusing development to my often straying attention.

Microsoft versus email marketers. No matter who wins we all lose. I like the idea of scripts not running in mail clients on a surfboard made of bleached human skulls and Internet Explorer. I have no love for the concept that HTML constructs may be replaced by word art or worse. Mail is for reading not fucking clicking around in but thanks for playing.

The Andy Rooney of the web has decided that password masking (you know, part of the form standard in HTML) is a bad thing. I guess he and his merry band of sycophants decided that making shoulder surfing even easier than the eyes-follow-fingers-on-keys method will really help old guys correctly type in their passwords. Brilliant, fucktard, brilliant. I also love how he summarizes the masking as an impairment to ‘visual feedback’ because login failed is only apparent to the clairvoyant. The kind of users he represents are the kind of users you don’t want (also known as the type who use your lack of security to the fullest and then litigate with you over it) and he manages to third party condescend to them in effigy. Grrrr.

Lenovo making some pretty smart keyboard changes on future ThinkPads. The Escape key on my IdeaPad is microscopic and it is a key that I hit probably 200 times a day when I’m not accidentally jamming down F1 mistakenly. Now all we need to do is rid keyboards of the seldom used (other than many CAD programs) caps lock key and put the control back where god intended it to live. Being a pretty heavy Emacs user makes me wish that laptop keyboards would give me, as opposed to the shouters, a fucking break at some point. I hit the control key purposefully more often than you hit the caps lock key accidentally.

That is all. Take the rest of the night off and enjoy drinking yourself to sleep..

Since crying foul on the use of Mono in basic distribution installs is apparently the new cool thing to do: I encourage you to read the Mono project’s licensing page wherein they explain that they’ve actually thought about software patents, possibly before you even personally invented Ubuntu to be cooler than all your friends, and have a pretty thorough explanation of what their exit strategy might be if the bloody shirt of software patents ever gets waved around.

Sound good? Gooood. Now you can go back to ranting about how KDE4 is causing people to turn into werewolves. Awesome.

I like it when freely available resources have a purpose other than simply providing free shit for people to overuse. Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon is a great example of this. While it is a collection of Creative Commons licensed images, it also seeks to be culturally relevant for the purpose of language learning. This collection is driven by a real goal that intrinsically requires participation from folks all over the world. The site’s creator has this to say on the front page:

As a language teacher and learner, I always seek to connect language, culture, and meaning. This site represents my interest to not only write about language learning, but provide concrete examples.

Our world rich in diversity, both linguistic and visual, and often the connection between word and image can be lost. As commercial globalization brings the world together through ‘common products’, we sometimes forget how our visual perception of the world affects our use of words and the meanings they convey.

It might not be immediately useful for many people in the United States but for linguistics and teachers of language looking for visual learning aids this will develop into a very valuable collection available for ready use. To me, that is really what it is all about.

Unless you actually use Opera (I do! I do!) and leave the default settings in place (I’m lame, I’m lame) you may not have heard much about the whole Freedom page rumor-ocalypse. Luckily the announcement is supposed to come tomorrow so I can stop reading weird and paranoid speculation and momentarily wonder if the paranoid/insane are incorrect.

The text hidden in the page source is up to this now:

We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer. Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things. But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers. Today, millions of people are connected together in a great web …

I imagine this means that the embedded server everyone has been frantically wishing into existence might actually happen. What this means in reality is that a lot of us are going to spend huge amounts of time fucking around with new builds of Opera tomorrow and then be bitterly disappointed that the new version of the client doesn’t poop out unicorns

Mark your calendars, kids: MySQL has a release plan that doesn’t look like soup and likely won’t add totally broken (they call it alpha but hey) shit into stable releases. It’s quite an innovation. All sarcasm aside, whew and good work.

I’m tired and no amount of this brutally strong press of Peets French Roast I just made is going to keep me vertical for very much longer so I’m just going to dump some links with minimal explication. I’m trusting that most of you can read.

1. Jo Shields eloquently and more calmly than the situation really calls for explains why Mono isn’t going to be the undoing of FOSS by raining MSFT-dependence and a hail of lawyers down upon our heads. I admire people with this much patience and goodwill in them. When you’re essentially dealing with a bunch of Ubuntards who got all bunched up on a couple different sites about the evil conspiracy to keep them down as users by including functional and quickly expanded software as part of the default set of packages included in the installation, one shouldn’t feel obligated to explain your motivations to a bunch of lusers who blatantly accuse you of being a shadowy MSFT operative for making software using libraries that share functionality with MSFT product. It reminds me a little bit of what we called ‘taste vegans’: people who couldn’t stand the idea of eating fake meat product because it simulated the taste of animal products. Whatever makes you feel better about your shallow understanding of the topic at hand I guess.

2. The generation of purposely corrupted Office documents for the purpose of extending assignment deadlines for profit is kind of amusing. I can’t find much disdain for this service because it provides props for potentially hilarious dramas more or less. If you’re not clever enough to do something really technologically advanced like twiddling system time before handing in the real assignment then you’re sort of asking for it.

3. I guess that’s really it. Now it is time for sleep. I hate you sleep.