Targetted again

Horrible news from Cairo. A bomb was detonated near the Egyptian Museum today and, in a separate incident, tourists were attacked on a bus elsewhere in the city. This just a few weeks after a popular bazaar was bombed. I fear that the stunning tourism turnaround that Egypt achieved after the 1997 terrorist massacres is officially over.

Infuriating. Especially given the handle that Egyptian authorities seemed to have on security over the last few years.

April 29, 2005

in Art & Design

Tinkertoy iceberg

I finally got a chance to stop by the Art Institute last night to see an installation by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. The exhibit is a two-story nylon lattice fabricated from a radar/sonar scan of an actual iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. Basically he’s taken a structure that is solid for a moment in time (it calves, melts, sinks, reforms), mapped it, broken it down to its wireframe, and created it using rapid prototyping techniques. The result is a complex natural polygon that floats inside a stairwell at the ARTIC.

Much of my work involves scanning artifacts that have not changed in eons in order to most realistically reproduce and preserve them. Which is why Manglano-Ovalle’s process — scanning an ever-changing structure to break it down to its basic geometry and build it back up — is a bit of an intellectual delight.

My friend Craig noticed this little detail. Manglano-Ovalle includes a 512MB memory key in the lattice. A docent noted that all the data from the iceberg scan is contained on that key.

As a bonus we popped down to see the stunning Photo-Respirations exhibit. Tokihiro Sato uses long exposure times, a flashlight (by night), and a sun-reflecting mirror (by day) to create eerie scenes puntucated with will-o’-the-wispy blurs of light. Definitely worth a look.

Thanks for the tip, Matt.

April 27, 2005

in Chicago

Hizzoner

So I says to Da Mayor, I says, “Give ’em hell in Congress, sir.” He says “I’ll try.” He turns to exit as the plane door opens and we walk down the jet bridge to go our separate ways into D.C.

I wonder how he did?

April 27, 2005

in Chicago

Four things my cabbie said to me last night

“Your address is the same number as this cab. I’ve been lookin’ at it [the number] all day. Mind if I pull over and buy a Lotto ticket?”
“Corrupt? Like someone slipped pornography in?” Referring to the the error message about a corrupt file in an aborted boot sequence of Windows 2000 on the tourist info LCD panel.
“You see those people standing there staring at the wall under the highway? They are worshipping some image of the Virgin Mary in a water stain. Man, shit, she’s been poppin’ up a lot lately, hasn’t she? If you ask me, she ain’t a virgin no more. Maybe that’s why she keeps comin’ ’round. Why else would she keep appearing to all us sinners? We like to have sex. That’s it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some guy humpin’ that wall, sayin’ ‘she ain’t a virgin no more!'”
“Can you believe these gas prices? I tell you what, how come you only ever see one gas tanker filling up the pumps but you can select three different octanes? I think it is all the same gas. They just charge you three different prices.”

April 26, 2005

in Notes

Cingularly interesting

Today when calling to cancel a phone account I arrived at a fork in the voice menu path where I had to declare my reason for calling. Once it was confirmed that I wanted to cancel the line would transfer and then after a short wait I would be informed that the system was experiencing difficulties and that I should call back later. Yet, if I called in and declared some other reason — billing question, for instance — I got right through to an agent. I tried this three times and each time when I wanted to cancel (and I used slightly different terms each time) the system was experiencing difficulty. That just seems too baldly nefarious to be believable, but there it is. And no you can’t cancel an account online. That’s be way too easy.

Oh, and when did voice menu systems go from passionless monotone to Katie Couric chirpy? I’ll take robo-operator any day.

April 26, 2005

in Chicago

Crayon box morning

Last night I was thinking how much the front page needed some color. I had to look no further than a few spring gardens on the walk to the L this morning.

April 25, 2005

in Housekeeping
1 Comment

Stabbed in the trackback

A while ago I installed a small script that disallows comments on this blog that are not actually typed in. That is, it looks for multiple keystrokes as opposed to one single dump of text — the behavior of a spambot (or someone who copies-and-pastes comments wholesale). It has stopped 100% of the spam I used to deal with daily.

Alas, the scourge of trackback spam persists. Does anyone know of anything that will effectively block trackback spam? Ideally it too would be a keystroke-based defense, but anything that really works would do. I’d hate to have to shut off trackbacks as they are one of the most innovative things about blogs!

Help?

April 24, 2005

in Web

Olde media vs. the blogosphere

I must heartily second this rant at Whole Lotta Nothing.

For the new year I promised myself (#4) that I would not make fun of sites that position blogs and the “mainstream” media diametrically, but after reading this I think I’ll go back to heckling.

Here’s an axiom to live by. If you have to cast an issue as good vs. evil, you’re probably masking your own insecurity or the indefensibility of your position.

April 23, 2005

in Notes

Favorite things, part the third

Aerolatte – This little gizmo is neither a sexual aid nor a hair removal device, though it looks like both. Warm some milk in the microwave then whip it with the Aerolatte and pour into coffee. Instant latte, no Starbucks or foaming machine. I don’t drink latte, but I find myself grabbing it just to stir in sugar. Automate everything!

Stair Basket – With house lots only 25 feet wide a lot of Chicago living happens on multiple levels. Add to that the amount of crap that accumulates and is dispersed around the place with two kids and you quickly find yourself piling stuff up on the stairs to remind you to take it up or down. Add in general clutziness and perhaps drunkenness and you have a real hazard. That’s where the stair basket comes in. Now you only have one large thing to break your ankle on as opposed to lots of little things.

Greasemonkey – I join many people in thinking this is the greatest Firefox extension ever. Basically it allows people to write small Javascripts that do some amazing things. My favorites include always providing a download link for embedded movies, stripping the margin crud from Boing Boing, and adding Netflix links to IMDB. But far and away my favorite Greasemonkey script is the Chicago Transit Authority hack of Google Maps. Now in addition to the street and satellite view you can switch to a CTA view that shows you where your address is on the subway grid. Wonderful.

Smarterchild – At work our internal chat client has about a half-dozen bots that can do your bidding for you (fetching addresses, monitoring feeds, etc.) so I was pleased to see this ability on the open interweb. I find myself using Smarterchild most often simply to pop up a reminder at a given time. Smarterchild is my friend.

Plaxo – I was initially very skeptical of this service. Storing all your contacts externally is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. But I am a convert now. Plaxo has a great interface, an online version (so you’re not stuck using Outlook), a phone synch option, and — this is important — it does not require your contacts to register with Plaxo to use it. I have reconnected with three or four people that I had lost touch with simply because of the one-to-many update requests you can manage with Plaxo. That alone is worth the cost. Which is $0.