overstated

After a month of no posting, overstated.net went completely silent. People around the world started to wonder if Cameron would emerge from a shell of silence, or if perhaps something serious had happend. Then he started talking about himself in the third person, and people really started to worry.

When I first started my weblog, I was constantly worried about keeping up with my peeps. If I didn’t post for a day or a week, I started to feel like I was letting someone down, mostly myself I guess. The reality is that some periods of one’s life are easily reflected upon, and others aren’t. I’m not here to make excuses, promises, or any other socially binding statements. I’m just happy that I’m finally writing this.

Recently I took some tests, got obsessed with Gentoo, and went to Detroit.

It’s actually kind of nice to start from an empty slate.

Administrators in auto city are baffled at recent reports showing Detroit having more than twice as many pedestrian deaths per capita than it’s nearest competitor, New York City.

Detroit is the first place I have ever encountered the mysterious “Red means stop!” and “Red still means stop!” signs, posted at nearly every big intersection in the city. I assumed they were an exaggeration to affect a local problem, not an attempt to address a plague.

I don’t mean to get all semiotic up in this mug, but what else could red mean if it didn’t mean stop? Perhaps these offensive drivers simply misinterpreted it as the color of blood. Who’s to blame here, bad drivers, or an overloaded sign system?

Detroit Free Press: Detroit tops U.S. big cities in rate of pedestrian deaths

Introduced to the Crayola line in 1903, Burnt Sienna is now number 44 in their top 50 colors (men rank burnt sienna #39 while women find it a less attractive #53). For its 100th anniversary, Crayola will be choosing four new colors and retiring 4 of the standards—one of those singled out is none other than burnt sienna.

Whenever someone asks me for a color, for some reason or another the phrase burnt sierra pops into my head. It’s not a particularly spectacular color, maybe not even in my top 10, but there’s something about that name, a mysterious combination of words that evokes much more than a color swatch: an object, an outdoor scene, a simpler way of living.

It’s not just me that is swayed by its subtle imagery: there’s a band, a band from Texas, a band from Japan, a record label, a book, and of course, a weblog. There might even be a Mr. Burnt Sienna roaming around somewhere, and if not it’s a great fucking name for a kid.

It seems that there’s a lot more to a color than just color. It can be a whole cultural universe, filled with people, places, and lots of bands. In these terms, I can’t see how BS would be threatened at all. But alas, I’m worried that when judged for its hue alone, a sad, rusty-red mixed with crappy-brown, it stands no chance against a periwinkle or razzamatazz. And in ten or twenty years, no one will even understand me when it pops into my head.

Save Burnt Sienna!

Everyone has their sources for material, the coveted ubersites we depend on to give us special mojo that impresses other people. There’s one place I depend on more than any other, B3TA.

Every week Rob Manuel and friends send an email update that I inevitably end up chopping to bits and IMing to all of my friends. So you’re asking, why is he giving away his best source? Because it’s over. As soon as your “source” has members making advertisements for VH1, it’s over. B3TA has been growing, and they’ll probably bust soon, and what better way to pave your way from small to massive than with a “best of” dedicated to your underground years. So here it is:

B3TA – “The best of …. “

Almost all of the sites that had me in stitches are there, including Joel Veitch’s Destiny’s Child, the Giant Bee Song, Bonsai Kitten, Emotion Eric… the list goes on. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of the freshest, finest memes.

I think one of the reasons the web is such a mish-mash of badly coded HTML and lazy programming is simply that the whole idea of compliancy lacks excitement and fun. What’s in it for me? If I work my ass off and pay attention to all the specs, I might just make the mark of standard. Sure, we’re just talking about the underlying structure, but who wants to be standard? It just sounds so blah-average and uncreative it makes me want to puke (much less actually do the work).

I think the W3C and all other standards organizations should change the language around compliancy. Jazz it up a bit. Make it fun for the whole family. Maybe instead of complying to standards, we should be frolicking to agreeability!! I’m having a better time already.

I was frolicking so much today that I completely frolicked my site into agreeability with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional thing. Check me out on the lower left.. every single page on overstated is agreeable! Let’s all grab hands like the kids above and frolick our way to a compli.. I mean a more agreeable web.

Oh boy do I have lots to talk about. Most importantly, this weblog has moved over to my new web server, which will shortly be hosting Blogdex among other things. My lack of updates as of late has been due to two things:

1. I was cramming for my general exam oral defense, which occurred last Wednesday, and was completed successfully and
2. I have been installing a couple of new servers to finally migrate all my web projects onto Apache, which included familiarizing myself with Debian and getting apache to work with suexec. Ouch for my social life.

To say the least, I’m back, and should be returning to my regular schedule, posting 5 times on one day every week when I suddenly realize I’m not being the exemplary weblogger. Or something like that.

Soon to come: a response to the Media Lab Wired article and an update on research.

Some people have fond memories of their first bike or their first record player; I get that warm nostalgic feeling when I think about our family’s first portable computer. My dad purchased an Osborne 1 when I was only a wee little tike, a big monster of a suitcase box that used some mysterious thing called CP/M to make video games and print words out on its tiny little screen.

It’s funny that some stupid, clunky piece of techno-memorabilia could cause such a torrent of emotions and memories. But you have to admit, it is kind of cute in its antiqueness with a little bubbly screen and extra-spacious keyboard. It makes me wonder, in the day of ATX cases and LCD screens, will kids of this generation share my experience? I’d assume not, but I guess I’m just jealously guarding my unique suitcase-computer.

Maybe Apple has it right: these digital artifacts aren’t just tools, they’re objects that are part of our personal experiences, things we become attached to. I’d much rather bond with a Mac Classic than a vanilla PC. But I guess not everyone is the same.. hell, the second world lasted for quite some time.

Anyway, I’m in mourning today, as Adam Osborne, eccentric engineer and inventor of the portable (luggable) computer passed away at 64.

Yahoo News: Adam Osborne, Portable Computer Pioneer, Dead at 64

Dave Barry’s weekly column this week, titled Joking around with Oscar and Steve recounts the process of aiding Steve Martin in constructing his award show monologue. After receiving an email from Steve:

Dave’s response: “The Oscars? (Bad word) YES.” The resulting description is interesting; I always wondered how these speeches were constructed, how many people are involved, and who is in charge. Two points of interest: one, Steve Martin, like myself, says “ya, ya, ya” to connote “no,” and the funniest joke of the sessions missed the cut:

This story seemed like oddments material, but that joke made me piss myself so I had to push it front and center. (via gawker)

The Center for Democracy and Technology has completed a controlled experiment in email address acquisition and use in unsolicited commercial emails (UCE). The methodology was simply to post new email addresses in a number of different public locations, and see how much spam each of these addesses receives. Their report, titled “Why Am I Getting All This Spam?” comes to a number of interesting conclusions:

• Every public, plaintext email address recieves some spam. The number of messages is correlated with the popularity of the site.
• Obscured addresses (either as human readable or HTML-obscured) receives absolutely no spam
• Removing a plaintext address from the web significantly reduces the number of spam emails that address receives

Some of the non-web methods of acquisition might not have been as noticeable due to the short period of study (6 months).

While I’m bogged down with generals preparation, instead of disappearing for two weeks I’ll inundate ya’ll with the best nuggets I come across. Last night I was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and having the spine-tingling experience of having someone communicate exactly the thoughts I’d been having over the past few weeks (only much more succinctly and eloquently, of course). On the topic of how identity is perceived:

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this “who” in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the “who,” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimōn in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.

And a complete surprise, Arendt seems to have conceived of social networks before Jane Jacobs or Stanley Milgram (1958 for Arendt vs. 1962 for Jacobs):

The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact.

But more importantly, she describes the relationship between the identity of the individual and the ties that they encounter. I can’t seem to find anything on the web relating this passage to the history of social networks as a discipline, but then again I’m sure many people invented them even earlier.