Monday, January 28, 2002

Listening to Joe Jackson tonight. It's more than a little reversal. The summer of 1979, I spent the summer shoveling shrimp, and listening to a pathetic AM station in southern Washington that for some reason played Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him". God I hated that song. The lyrics didn't even rhyme. Fast forward, five years through one marvelously progressive roommate. I impersonated a doctor to get into a Joe Jackson concert in Santa Cruz. While, Joe Jackson didn't think much of his concert there, I enjoyed it tremendously. I am not sure what made me stop and listen. I am glad I did. 9:53:54 PM     Comment []

I've got to admit, I don't really understand Garth's approach. I am guessing, however, that it results from ambiguities on where you can reroute around UserLand code. As an old hand with Frontier, I now how to work back to the top of UserLand's code and divert it where I need to. Unfortunately in Radio finding this point is difficult. My first thought was that it is there in your "index.txt" file, however, this isn't clear. Actually, I think that you have to step up to the Radio responder to find where you can safely step out. So short of writing a new responder, you are stuck with Radio code. 5:16:08 PM     Comment []

radio.macros.imageRef() has been updated to include an "alt" parameter. It may seem a trivial, but the alt attribute is important for non-sighted web users. Thanks to UserLand for providing this. 4:30:54 PM     Comment []

More on Birds We've got lots robins are migrating through. On Fridays' walk through the neighborhood they were getting drunk on berries an pooping on the lawn and sidewalks of our Congresswomen's home. (don't try this at home.) I saw the little vireo/kinglet again. It is either a Hutton's Vireo or a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, but I haven't gotten a good enough look to tell which. The size would suggest the kinglet, but I need a good look at the wing bars. Apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. After looking at the site above, I am betting that I am seeing the kinglet. 1:36:37 PM     Comment []

The previous images where added using the new MyPictures tool from UserLand. This is a very slick way of adding images to your weblog. Drop an image into the Radio Upsteam folder in your Pictures folder (in Mac OS X, its some other folder in Windows) and they are moved to your Radio website folder and upstreamed to your weblog. As this happens a <img> tag is dropped into the editing window of your Radio homepage so you can post the image to your weblog. 12:44:03 PM     Comment []

Internal sedimentary structures produced by antidunes. The image is a positive print of an xray-radiograph taken of a box core from a stream that was manipulated to produce antidunes under aggrading* conditions. The scale bar in the line drawing is 13 cm long. * aggrading means sand was accumulating on the the stream bed, so that the stream bed was building up with time. Some amount of aggradation is necessary to preserve sedimentary structures until the sediments become rock. 12:23:43 PM     Comment []

Candidates Forum Candidates running for Mayor and for City Council Districts 7 and 9 will be at a Candidates Forum, Jan 29 from 7 to 9 PM at the Santa Clara Valley Water District board room, 5700 Almaden Exp., San Jose. 10:13:23 AM     Comment []

I am sure that this has already made the email rounds, but I enjoyed it so much I thought I would share it. As usual with these things, it came to me third or fourth hand, so I have no way of knowing who to credit: Enron Explained It begins by offering succinct time-tested definitions of the way various political systems, past and present, have functioned. To wit: Under feudalism, you have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk. Under fascism, you have two cows. The government seizes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk. Under communism, you have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government owns all the milk. Under capitalism, you have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiples; you sell out, invest the money and retire on the income. With Enron, you have two cows. You borrow 80% of the forward value of the two cows from your bank, then buy another cow with 5% down and the rest financed by the seller on a note, bearing interest at twice the prime, callable if the market cap of your publicly listed company, whose stock you've put up as collateral, goes below $20 billion. You sell the three cows to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at a second bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated unit, so that you get four cows back, plus a tax exemption for five cows. To continue: The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Islands firm secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report trumpets that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. All of the above transactions are cheerfully blessed by your independent auditors, who, of course, served as consultants on said transactions, but only after the fact. You're all set now to disclose, via press release and conference call with analysts, that Enron, a major owner of cows, will begin trading cows over the Web. Analysts proclaim Enron the prototypical New Economy company, bull the shares to the moon, enabling you to sell huge gobs of the stock and use part of the proceeds to buy a top-of-the-line shredding machine. 10:01:17 AM     Comment []