6.5, baby
OK, it took an earthquake to get me blogging again. It lasted about 15 seconds or so; I heard something that sounded like some heavy equipment was getting rolled on the floor above ours, then a sound like flakes of plaster falling. I didn't realize what it was until Les, whose cube faces mine, said "earthquake". We all stood up and you could feel the building swaying. I called S. in Santa Cruz, who was standing in line at the Post Office. She said she didn't feel a thing. Mike H.'s wife in Fremont didn't either. But Les' wife did in San Mateo and so did someone in the 23rd floor of an SF office building.

Update: The epicenter was apparently about 11 km NE of San Simeon. The USGS is now reporting a 4.7 aftershock in the same area. Go here for more details. Apparently they felt it in LA, too.

Update: The official count is now 11 aftershocks of magnitude 3.9-4.7. I wonder what's it like to watch Hearst Castle sway?

Local Hero
Santa Cruz librarian Anne M. Turner wins Jane Magazine's Bad-Ass Loudmouth (scroll down about halfway) award for “reinforcing her citywide policy to shred library records every day in protest of the privacy-invading PATRIOT Act, which gives the government the right to find out which books people check out and anything else they're curious about”.

Another new blog
Terry Teachout's About Last Night, a journal on art in that Big City On The Other Coast. Courtesy of Asymmetrical Information.

Apparently, I too would be the The GashlyCrumb Tinies if I were an Edward Gorey Book. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..."

New Blog
Here's a really interesting new blog I just discovered, courtesy of Halley Suitt's weblog. Read this and then this.

More John Adams
The thing I don't admire about Adams was his support, however reluctant, for the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Collectively, they were the Patriot Act of their day. Adams let himself be persuaded into signing the bills by the High Federalists (led by Hamilton), his wife Abigail (whose usual good sense was trumped by her anger at the scurrilous criticism of her husband in Republican papers like the Aurora), and Adams' own vanity. While he proved mostly unwilling to use the provisions of the acts to either expel aliens or suppress dissent, his support for them ultimately hurt him. The Sedition Act was used to justify the arrests of 25 men who were either editors or associated with Republican newspapers. The men were jailed and their papers shut down. This resulted in a public outcry against the acts and contributed to the victory of Jefferson and the Republicans in the election of 1800.

There was little doubt then, and none now, that the Acts were designed to destroy opposition to the Federalist party and its agenda. Adams was not complicit in this; but he let himself be used. Fortunately, the effort backfired. But the passage of the Acts set a precedent that has, at least implicitly, been used to bulwark similar efforts of questionable constitutionality.

Japes, ribald
Sweet Fancy Moses is back, just when I'd given it up for dead. OK, it came back 3 weeks ago, and I'm as out of it as ever. But you might find this amusing.

Now, if only Suck would come back.

Desktop Linux
David Weinberger echoes my misgivings about Linux as an OS for non-geeks, this time from the point of view of a regular user.

The Archetypal Patriot
I've been listening to an abridged recording of David McCullough's biography of John Adams as part of my continuing reading about the Founding Brothers (as John Joseph Ellis called them). Adams is a fascinating character whose greatness I'd never fully appreciated. While I think that the author is a little too much in love with his subject, and I'd like to have heard the sections about Adams' diplomatic missions immediately before and after the peace of 1783, I greatly enjoyed it and want to read the entire book someday. But first, I'd like to read Cappon's The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

For me, the most admirable thing about Adams was his integrity. Two incidents in his career illustrate that integrity. The first was his successful defense of the British captain and the British soldiers (in two separate trials) who were accused of murder in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Thirty years later, his efforts as President led to a treaty with France that preserved peace, in spite of the opposition of much of his own Federalist party led by Alexander Hamilton. He was criticized, even attacked, by many for his actions in both of these events - a difficult thing for someone as sensitive and vain as Adams. But he stuck to his principles regardless of the outcome. And while the outcome of the first ultimately enhanced his reputation, the second probably cost him a second term as president.

Catching Up
It's been a while since I've had time to blog. I actually wrote this over a week ago but never published it; but I wanted to contrast it with the post above about John Adams...something about how deeds matter more than words, and how real patriotism isn't a fashion that the self-righteous get to wear.

There's something about the prose in this essay that really irritates me, even though I agree with many of the points the writer is trying to make. It's the hectoring arrogance of the tone, I think - the ways the author seeks to cut off possible arguments an imaginary reader might make instead of just making his point, as if he's worried his argument won't stand up on its own.

I also like being lectured about patriotism by someone who I suspect never actually served their country about as much as I like being lectured on morality by, say, William Bennett. Self-righteousness always strikes me as a particularly unattractive character trait. Patriotism isn't about what you say. Displaying the flag doesn't make you a patriot any more than attending church on Sunday makes you a true Christian. Serving your country - in any of the myriad of ways that you can render service - makes you a patriot. Deeds, not words, not acts done strictly for show, are the real measure of patriotism.

A Home in Paradise
Oh, and the other thing that's been keeping me busy is that we just bought a house. This picture doesn't do it justice - it's lovely - so I'll try to post a better one tomorrow




Here's the Bougainvilla on the side:

Too Busy To Blog
I've spent most of the weekend reinstalling the Brick (my aging, 4.5kg Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop) because I'd bought a 802.11b wireless card (Netgear MA401) for it and figured I'd finally get around to upgrading to SuSE Linux 8.1 (esp. since 9.0 is about to come out).

It's been painful, especially compared to the ease of getting my iMac up and going. Like having to rebuild the kernel in order to run Oracle. And downloading the Yast2-nis-client -2.6.14-120.noarch.rpm because the shipped version (2.6.14-58) errors out during install. And changing "bind prism2_cs" to "bind orinoco_cs" in /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf because the MA401 uses the Orinoco chipset, not the Prism chipset. But you knew that, right? I'll leave out the rest, but there's a lot more.

I love Linux. But it still has a really long way to go. When I can install a distribution error-free and then get Mozilla, Oracle, Java, Netbeans, Apache, MoveableType, MySQL, TCL/TK, etc., installed (I want the latest versions, not the shipped ones), configured, tweaked to suit my preferences, and ready for business within 8 hours - without hair-tearing and endless Google searches - I'll be happy, and I'll believe Linux is ready for prime time. But until then, the "Geeks Only" sign needs to stay up.

On the plus side, I actually like Gnome now that they've added Nautilus and some of the other Eazel stuff. And I still really hate the loathsome monstrosity that is KDE, absolutely the worst, ugliest GUI this side of Windows 2.0 (yes, I'm old enough to have seen and scorned both 1.0 and 2.0 when they came out). KDE looks and feels like some brain-damaged script kiddie's idea of a UI - which, I assume, is the core constituency for its user base.

I'll probably end up going back to WindowMaker since all I do is use Netbeans, Mozilla, and shell windows - plus I like the minimalism - but it's nice to see that some real progress is being made here.

But it still all needs a lot more polish before normal folks (as opposed to geeks like me) can use it.

Headlines
“Schwarzenegger Elected First Horseman Of The Apocalypse”
“Lieberman Pledges To Gloss Over The Boring Issues”
“Ashcroft Chases Down, Loses CIA Leak Suspect In Alley Behind White House”
“OutKast Universally Accepted”

You just gotta love the Onion

Another Iceberg Sighting
Dan Gillmor, from his perch up in the crow's nest, sees it too:

It's called the European Technology Rountable Exhibition, but a significant portion of the discussion here has been about the awakened giant to the east. Again and again, the conversation has turned to the opportunities -- and, to many, the threats -- China represents for the technology community.

I'm not feeling threatened, mind you. But I think this is a very interesting phenomena that bears watching. Communism won't ever succeed, anywhere. But who says China has to remain Communist?

Self-Absorbed Stupidity
Ok, I'm reading Instapundit - always a mix of the interesting and the ideological - and I come across this bit:

INSTAPUNDIT SHUT DOWN BY AL QAEDA? That's the report -- actually saying that the DoS attack that shut me down, along with some others, last night was aimed at someone else, but came from Al Qaeda-affiliated websites.

This was quickly debunked by someone from HostingMatters, the affected hosting service. The "report" mentioned in the quote comes from a site called Little Green Footballs, one of more moronic ideo-blogues I've come across. (and no, I can't be bothered to link to it).

Sheesh. Can you get any more self-absorbed than that? Of course, these are the guys who are always railing about loony liberal conspiracy theories. Now, it is possible that Internet Haganah, the site in question - which apparently specializes in identifying and working to shut down sites that support Islamic extremism - may be undergoing a DoS attack because of its mission. And it's possible that the attack is sponsored by Islamic extremists, because, let's face it, any idiot of any stripe can be a script kiddie. Or it could actually be a bored script kiddie in Illinois. Or Finland. Or China. Or someone else entirely.

But the real story - the one that's actually worth talking about - is that this particular site appears to be under attack. Not "Al Quaeda is going after all us God-fearing, patriotic right-wing sites because we're so important and so dangerous to their cause". This is just another example of the bloated self-congratulation/triumphalism that's become an increasingly annoying meme in the blogging subculture in the past year or so. It's awfully similar to a similar meme running around just a few years back - you know, the one where the VC's/entrepreneurs/techies/visionaries were running around congratulating themselves on inventing the "new economy".

Yes, blogging is interesting and important. But it's still a relatively small phenomenom in a very large and diverse culture. So get over yourselves. And please try to say something interesting (hint: more navel-gazing about blogging does not fall into the "interesting" category. Nor does describing positions or policies you don't agree with as "near-treasonous". Going all Ann Coulter tends to preclude intelligent discussion on just about any topic).

But, of course, they won't get over themselves. Clay Shirky was right when he wrote that “The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”.

*

Globalization - Another tip of the iceberg
China Puts Man Into Space (via Instapundit).

Now, I don't believe any Communist government will ever succeed over the long term, and China has lots of problems, not the least of which is circa-1964 Brezhnev-style government corruption. But what if the Chinese someday decide that the Mandate of Heaven demands some form of representative democracy?

What if India during this same time got its own problems with corruption under control, deep-sixed the caste system, reduced poverty, and starting educating most or all of its people?

And what if we decided to avoid dealing with the corruption of our own political system, stifle innovation, pursue economic policies that result in economic inequality, and spend our money maintaining the legions at the edges of the empire?

AppleMania
My new 20GB iPod just arrived, so my order from Apple (iMac, Airport base station, and iPod) is complete. I've gotten pretty blase about computer hardware over the years. But I haven't been this excited about a piece of hardware since I got my first 10-MB hard drive in 1986. More later.

CalPolitics
There's a voice in my head that's suggesting that a different result on the recall - one that ended up keeping Gray Davis in office - would have been a mandate to continue the corrupt business-as-usual nature of California state politics, at least until things got so bad that they couldn't be ignored. While I still think that the recall mechanism is a dangerous tool that has no legitimate place in representative democracy (certainly the Founders didn't think it desirable or necessary), I find it impossible to dismiss this line of thought.

And that thought process further suggests that one of two things could happen. One, Schwarzenegger's administration succeeds in bringing about real reform and turns around California governance; or, two, Schwarzenegger's adminstration fails miserably and triggers an even more impassioned revolt by the electorate - eventually leading to real reform and a turnaround in the quality of governance. I'd prefer the former to the latter, of course. A failing administration probably means lots of Californians suffer, economically and otherwise. So here's hoping for the best.

I was glad to see that Arnold got a significant percentage of the votes, in effect getting more than Davis did. This at least legitimizes the election; if he'd gotten more votes than anyone else, but fewer votes than voted No on the recall it would have something less than a mandate. But it is a real mandate, and it will be interesting to see what he does with it.

The local papers are full of news about the transition team. Much is being made of the bi-partisan composition of the team, which is supposed to find the "best and brightest" for the new administration. Best quote from the link above: "It's part symbolic, and it's part genuine outreach,'' said Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. But Pitney, paraphrasing James Madison, said, ``the larger the group, the smaller the number that will decide the proceedings.''

The most interesting bit to me is the decision to bring in an auditor to assess the real state of the deficit. I've written before about how Ann Richards saved the Texas state government $6 billion by instituting a vigorous auditing program. Is it possible that significant savings can be achieved here as well?

Unfortunately another, more cynical, voice in my head suggests that the Schwarzenegger administration will neither scale the heights nor fall into the abyss. Instead, they'll muddle through, enacting some reforms, doling out political favors to their most important constituents, and putting significant time and energy towards helping GWB's reelection campaign in 2004. Here's one quote supporting this thesis: “...his (Arnold's) vast personal wealth did not stop him from accepting roughly $9.2 million in contributions from some of state government's most well-established insiders despite a pledge not to take contributions from "special interests." The largest portion...came from businesses, executives and their families in the real estate, financial services and transportation industries. ”

Dittoed
I despise everything Rush Limbaugh stands for, but I've got nothing against him personally and I hope he's able to recover from his current problems. On the other hand, I'm glad to see ESPN/Disney/ABC with egg on their faces after their cynical attempt to create controversy and boost ratings by giving him a forum.

After all, idiots like Limbaugh are easily identified and dismissed by thinking adults. But the cynical manipulations, pandering, and biases of the major media are much more subtle and much easier to take for granted, so it's always good to see their machinations fail miserably and publicly.

CalPolitics
So one of Arnie's first acts is to go on the Tonight show.

Ahhh, democracy...

Enron
And speaking of energy company fraud, are we ever going to see indictments of Lay and Skilling? There is something happening on that front. And here's one more possible way for it to happen.