AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/7/2002 04:08:16 AM ----- BODY:
-- but listen, what was horrible was that I know every step in that house. I know how many steps it takes to come down the stairs or to cross the living room. I can't tell you the number but I know, but these steps I heard in the darkness, they were regular and even, not in a hurry but what was terrible, they kept reaching places too soon. I know the sound. I know how the sounds change when you step from the front hall into the living room, or passing the dining room or off the last stair and . . . but these steps kept arriving too soon, not hesitating anywhere and not in a hurry, but if you take regular even steps, and there weren't enough of them.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/6/2002 07:17:57 PM ----- BODY: Confidential to Greg: update, update, update! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/22/2002 01:48:47 AM ----- BODY: It was the sort of dark, cold, dry night that I used to love when I was a kid in Maine. The stars were out in such force you could see them as a shimmering blanket behind the brighter stars.

My mother and I were standing in the driveway, a third of the way down to the street, looking to the west. The power must have been out; there were no electric lights anywhere that I could see, not in front of the Kennedys, nor in front of Clyde's. There was nothing but the sharp, ragged black edge of the treeline and the amazing shine of the sky.

We looked west and saw shooting stars, once every so often and then more and more with greater frequency, oddly shooting at sharper and sharper angles, as if in to the place where the trees hide the curve of the road, until they came straight down into the gap where the road was to go.

I must have been very young. The road came to a halt just beyond those trees, then, though they extended it into a loop a few years later. Mom looked young, too, and her eyes shone with the stars and the sudden cold blue flame of the shooters.

We turned suddenly, to the east behind us, after the shooters had stopped coming. In that strange oneiric immediate way, we were behind the house, looking up at Casseopeia and Cephus, the queen and king.

Like fresh fireworks, the larger stars went supernova, filling the skies with light of all colors; then the smaller stars, like a wave of aurorae. The wind came up low and cold.

I still felt safe, then; I knew that the stars were far away; I knew that this had happened a long time ago. I knew that it might have surprised someone now long dead but that it would be a very long time, indeed before we felt the wake. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/22/2002 01:28:59 AM ----- BODY: The ancient Greeks used drama as a source of artificial catharsis. We use drama to sell asthma medicine. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/14/2002 11:52:35 AM ----- BODY: Well, it's been quite a few weeks. Went on a whirlwind trip to NYC, Maine, Ithaca, and Syracuse just after Christmas, and wore ourselves out driving. Got caught in a snowstorm thirty miles out of South Hill, VA, and it took us five hours to drive the eighty miles home. The snow is all but gone from Raleigh, except for the occasional snowbank in a parking lot. And I've just finished up the author review of my book, so I can return to some semblance of a normal life now. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/23/2001 10:02:00 PM ----- BODY: Yet another fantastic article from Larry Lessig, in which he argues that despite the American urge to think of the Commons as a place where only Tragedy may occur, there are many communal properties whose resources may not be depleted, among them the Internet. However, by fencing off the commons its power is limited, its power to spur innovation and to encourage massive distributed efforts, its power to let the results of those efforts spread. I'm writing this from a laptop which is connected via a RoadRunner cable modem to the Internet. It is connected to the local network by way of an 802.11b Apple Airport, which Heather was also using. In the future, this perfectly sane use of the network will likely be illegal. It may not be enforceable, but it will likely be illegal. So we will need to develop ways to form grassroots efforts to stand against the misguided greedheads who want to screw with the thing that made the Internet great. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/19/2001 11:14:52 AM ----- BODY: I'm in a bit of a quandary regarding what to think about John Walker, the American who joined the Taliban in what seems to be a complete rejection of the dippy Marin County liberality he was steeped in.

One the one hand, we could dig a hole and then push a wall over onto him and let him suffocate, but that's what the Taliban used to do to homosexuals, so that's not quite fair - we don't know whether Walker is a homosexual, and can assume he isn't, or at least did not practice while he was with the Taliban for fear of death.

On the other hand, perhaps we should take him out to the Meadowlands or some relatively large stadium and let the family of the CIA officer killed in the Mazar e Sharif prison riots put a bullet in the back of his head. After all, that's how the Taliban dealt with uppity women. But, again, Walker is not a woman, so perhaps that isn't a fair treatment either.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the forms of justice favored by the Taliban, the group of ignorant fundamentalists in whose favor Walker rejected America. I'm afraid we're just going to have to suffer dippy pronouncements like "he was just following his path" and "he's a good kid, just a little confused" for the duration of a celebrity trial on par with the OJ case, and then they'll let him go free to write his book and do Oprah. I'd love to see Oprah ask Walker how The Autobiography of Malcolm X drove him into the arms of Islam, though. That'd be a hoot. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/17/2001 12:05:14 AM ----- BODY: We just got back a while ago, from a four-day trip to Vandergrift, PA, home of Heather's father's family. We got to see Heather's grandmother, who is still a sweet lady even if she doesn't remember who any of us are. We hung out with Uncles Larry and Bill, Aunts Cookie and Ruth, and their children and grandchildren, visited some sort of strange light show, had a wonderful breakfast at a place called A Touch of Country, where Heather had scrapple (not brains and eggs, as it is down here, but some sort of mix of corn and sausage that tastes about like you'd expect Indian pudding would, only not very good) and I had the best French Toast I've had in years. Traveled up and down a lot of mountains; Route 30 has several 9% grades and a few 8% grades, enough to make my ears pop several times over the course of the trip. Now, I'm going to sleep in my own bed and celebrate that fact by actually managing to wriggle my toes around near the bottom without poking them out of the covers. Next week: technical edits and author review. Lots of it. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/11/2001 09:38:49 PM ----- BODY: Had a great weekend. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can invite all of my friends over to my house, get them good and silly drunk, and then let them all talk to eachother. This, in my mind, is an achievement, because all of my life I've had friends from all across the spectrum: burnouts and geeks, rich and poor, introverted readers and people who'd rather play baseball, hackers and the kids who beat them up, and so on. They really never understood why I was friends with the others, and I had a hard time understanding why, if I could get along with them, they couldn't get along with each other. So, this weekend, we invited two dozen people over to the house for a cocktail party, and everyone came who was in town. And a good time was had by all. And if you were one of the all who came, and left a black leather jacket here, drop me a line and I'll make sure you get it back. Heh. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/11/2001 09:19:35 PM ----- BODY: Me? I've always been like this. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/2/2001 09:50:06 PM ----- BODY: See, the Internet isn't that bad... -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/1/2001 10:13:17 PM ----- BODY: When I was a kid, we read Silver Burdett textbooks like "Mysterious Wysteria" and "Air Pudding and Wind Sauce". One of the stories I read back in second grade (I was reading a bit ahead) was about an elderly woman and her grandson (?); the woman was obviously not going to live to see the next time the Leonids came around, and there was a huge build up followed by her missing them, stuck in a subway or something. I was reminded of it after missing the Leonids this time around.

Anyway, I can't remember which story it was, and searches have not revealed tables of contents or even a complete list of the books available. I'd love to have a list, on the off chance that someone out there shared the same textbooks. I can remember "Air Pudding and Wind Sauce", "Mysterious Wysteria", "Silver Twist", and "Cinnamon Peaks", but that's it. They had companion workbooks, but I don't remember them very well. Something about the Doppelganger Gang? One of the books had an excerpt from Theodore Taylor's The Cay, I remember, and they were stuffed with poetry and short stories. I loved to read, but it didn't hurt that so many of the collections I encountered were so good. Anyway, if anyone else remembers this stuff, drop me a line. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/26/2001 07:16:22 PM ----- BODY: Let's see. Our offices were burglarized sometime Tuesday morning (yes, they got several laptops, though not mine, which I had with me). Tuesday sucked, as we all sat around the big conference table and tried not to smudge the fingerprints that it turns out weren't there anyway. Maybe Dell will get us replacement laptops by the time we go on vacation for the Christmas holiday

Thanksgiving was a blur. Stuffed ourselves silly on great turkey and trimmings at Heather's dad's, and came home to get shocked out of our trypotphan-fueled stupors with the news that Heather's mom had suffered a stroke the same day. So, we spent Friday and Saturday in Wilmington, by Agnes' bedside, and came home Saturday evening to a quiet meal (I don't even remember what we ate at this point). Big pot of gumbo from Pableaux's recipe book on Sunday, with Stacie and Rahul, talking about world events on the porch with mom, and thence to the airport Monday morning.

Perhaps this week will be less exciting. The only good news is that Aggie will likely recover in a few weeks, with a bit of speech therapy. She's a fighter, and we're all pulling for her. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/15/2001 11:00:19 AM ----- BODY: George W. Bush: just like Richard M. Nixon, only without the smile, the intelligence, or having been legitimately elected by the populace. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/13/2001 03:38:32 PM ----- BODY: I wrote the following a week or so ago, in response to a message from my expatriate, Thailand-dwelling brother, which reflected his sense of shame at being an American, at being associated with the ongoing bombing of the cities of Afghanistan, at feeling like he had to defend the actions of his country when the only actions currently under consideration are military in nature.

All I'm trying to say, in reaction to your statements about being ashamed to be an American right now, is that there are still things our country has done that you can be proud of. There are still ideals and principles that our country and the tradition in which it was born try to foster in the face of what may well be a natural tendency away from such things: freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, the separation of church and state, the belief in hard work and smart investment of time and thought in order to create wealth where none existed before and to use that wealth to raise the standard of living.

Yes, with the development of wealth comes a tendency to want to protect it against any threat, regardless of what ideals you might use to prop up those efforts to protect it. But remember that along with the bombs we have dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden, we have rebuilt economies, often even restructured societies to allow for the same principles we hold dear to flourish. Our fear in the light of our failure in the Cold War came at the expense of societies that should have also benefited from such largesse.

We should have tried to help rebuild Afghanistan in 1989, but we would have been accused of meddling.

We should have killed Hussein and tried to help rebuild Iraq, but toppling Hussein would have resulted in a situation where such efforts would have been hampered by instability in the region.

One thing you must remember is that with our wealth and power comes much discontent and jealousy and envy and even simple acts of kindness are viewed with suspicion. When we enjoy our power, we are said to be arrogant. When we do not, we are said to be weak. When we are kind, it is seen to be for purposes beyond humanitarian concern, but when we withdraw our kindness it is an evil that cannot be defended, an act of abandonment. If we defend our interests, we're called the Great Satan but when we do not, everyone loses. We mocked Bush the Elder for his mucking about in Iraq, and unseated him on a cry of "it's the economy, stupid", and then spent eight years turned inwards, or at least in rapt attention of our own Hemisphere, and look where that got us.

I personally think that we should stop bombing during Ramadan, as a gesture of respect to the Islamic community. I also think that we should be on the ground, shooting every Taliban who has any bullets left, blowing up caves that hide Arab murderers, but I think the bombs should stop, at least in the cities, and that there should be a massive humanitarian aid project in its place. I think we should work to help the Afghan people set up a government that doesn't kill its own women and beat its own men. I think that the country should be built up with massive works projects, a New Deal for Afghanistan. I think we should show that the application of wealth and power to a good cause, the cause of restoring freedom, stability, respect for basic human rights, trade unfettered by arbitrary tolls demanded by warlords and gun-toting thugs. But if we accomplished all of that, it would be forgotten, people would just say "they only did it for the pipeline".

And that's what pisses me off. And maybe they're right - we certainly don't seem to do it here, in our own cities, where there are poor and starving and homeless. Or maybe we do, and we meet with the same success because the problem isn't as simple as we'd like to think it is. Maybe twenty years of fighting tyrants big and small has made it impossible for any Afghani still left in the country to consider peace an option. I don't know.

I do have to believe that we are trying not to kill civilians, Ken. Not that we are not killing any, but that we are trying to kill as few as possible. And I don't doubt for a moment that the Taliban are putting tanks near schools and hospitals and mosques, that they are stealing humanitarian aid from the people they are supposed to help and protect, that they are deserving of death for harboring bin Laden and for their sheer ignorance. (I also think there are plenty of folks here who ought to be flogged or beaten for being ignorant, murderous thugs, FWIW).

Can you tell I'm frustrated? I'm finding that educating myself about this stuff isn't sufficient, that finding out why the world hates us doesn't necessarily help me understand how to fix it, and doesn't necessarily mean that the reasons are clear or true. I'm convinced that a good chunk of the people in the world hate us because it's convenient and they're ignorant, poverty-stricken and don't even know the good we're capable of, or choose to ignore it. By the same token, many hate us for the evil we've done. But there's a gray area between knowledge of the evil we've done and the ignorance of the good that makes me pause. And I don't have an answer for whether that can be fixed, and if so, how we would go about it.

Love, Steve -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/12/2001 11:40:59 PM ----- BODY: Funny, it turns out I'm living with somebody, she apparently co-owns a Web shop with me, and she's very nice. She kindly took the past three days to reintroduce herself. I'm thinking this post-book time is going to be quite enjoyable, indeed. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/9/2001 06:01:46 AM ----- BODY: Three more pages, and the book will be done. Woo-hoo! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/7/2001 01:50:59 PM ----- BODY: Rebecca and I are quoted in this article about the role of Weblogs in the provision of information relevant to the September 11th attacks. The reporter did a good job of cutting down my long and tedious rant into a couple of representative sound bites (thanks, Rachel!) I just hope webloggers don't mind being called "amateurs and dilettantes". Heh. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/4/2001 07:16:24 PM ----- BODY: I don't really think it's too much to ask of the United States armed forces that they not bomb Red Cross buildings more than once, do you? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/28/2001 05:51:23 PM ----- BODY: Two good pieces: How To Lose a War, by Frank Rich (NYTimes, registration required), and Russ Feingold's statement on new anti-terrorism statutes. I wish I could vote for Leahy and Feingold. Too bad the best I can do is vote against Helms. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/22/2001 03:25:46 AM ----- BODY: Good weekend, from a house standpoint. Patched the corner of the kitchen eaves where some home-wrecking squirrel had eaten a hole in the house; first covered everything up with aluminum flashing and then went back over the nail and screw holes with duct tape. It won't keep everything out, but hopefully most of the rain and dwelling-eating squirrels will be kept at bay. Spent a lot of time on the upstairs bathroom; the grout was bad and we want to be able to have people visit over the holidays, so I Dremeled out the old grout, washed everything down with Tilex and scouring gel, and got a new shower head. We'll wait for it to dry and then put in the new grout. Heather put in bulbs and various perennials, and I swept the porch. All in all, a good physical weekend, cleared my head for the last big push on getting the book done. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/18/2001 09:20:12 PM ----- BODY: So, I've been reading the transcripts of the daily briefings given by the DoD, and aside from the usual bureaucratic doublespeak we've come to expect, one thing has stood out, and at some surprise to me. These guys - Rumsfeld, Myers, and the rest - are really funny. I expected a great deal of poker-up-the-ass seriousness and discipline, battle-hardened and chair-softened posturing, and the like. Instead, we get exchanges like the following:
Q: Sir, as I understand it, the limitations of these briefings are that you discuss not today's operations nor tomorrow's, but previous - yesterday and previous. Am I correct about that?

Rumsfeld: Uh-oh I have a feeling something's going to happen next. (Laughter.)

Gen. Myers: I think the hook - well, I think we just got the - the hook is being set. (Laughter continues.)

Rumsfeld: I don't know. I mean -

Q: You give me too much credit, sir. (Laughter.) My question is, has there been yesterday or previously U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan in this operation?

Rumsfeld: We have decided that until we have an activity that is significant and noticeable, that it's probably not useful to get into those kinds of questions, because they can change from time to time.

Q: What about forward air controllers?

Rumsfeld: The answer can change from time to time.

Q: Forward air controllers, Mr. Secretary, on the ground.

Rumsfeld: I'll stick with my answer. I liked it.
It's a shame that the press has to filter out all the fun along with all the important information and analysis and context. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/16/2001 04:19:56 AM ----- BODY: <longish snip> because of blogger barf several days ago...here's the end, though:

Some will die, and some will kill, and some will grieve, and some will seek justice for what has been done. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/11/2001 05:25:30 PM ----- BODY: The Falwell/Robertson/bin Laden Quiz. Can you identify which sociopathic fundamentalist said what? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/2/2001 10:07:56 PM ----- BODY: So this is where the debate is. I'm trying to temper my amusement at the whole debacle by trying to figure out why anyone would care what either of these guys have to say about what's going on right now, or why I should worry about what they think of one another. I enjoy Hitchens because he's not afraid to say what's on his mind, even if it borders on the ridiculous, offensive, and self-destructive. He looks to be the sort of man who enjoys a good joke. Chomsky, on the other hand, is a sophist in the service of the humorless; compassionate, sure, but the sort of man who makes me want to leave the party. Surely they can do better than this. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/2/2001 02:41:04 AM ----- BODY: Robert Fisk's article expressing suspicion about the documents found by the FBI suggests that phrases such as "the time of Fun and waste" reflect a poor understanding of Islam and the Qur'an, yet this selection from "Cattle", 6.32, may be a clue:
The life of this world is but a sport and a pastime. Surely better is the life to come for those that fear God. Will you not understand?
The aforementioned University of Michigan translation is as follows:
And this world's life is naught but a play and an idle sport and certainly the abode of the hereafter is better for those who guard (against evil); do you not then understand?
I don't know, but it seems as though "the time of Fun and waste" may well refer to "play and idle sport" or "sport and a pastime". In both translations is seems clear that the context is the comparison between this life and the next. Anyway. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/1/2001 01:48:36 PM ----- BODY: Another Qur'an quote, this time selected by my expatriate brother in Thailand:
And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers. (The Cow, 2.191)
His quote comes from the searchable, online translation at the University of Michigan. Funny thing is that my translation here uses "idolatry" in the place of "persecution", and "bloodshed" in the place of "slaughter", among other differences (from The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, Penguin Books 1995 edition:
Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is more grievous than bloodshed. But do not fight them within the precincts of the Holy Mosque unless they attack you there; if they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded: but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful.
No surprise, then, the injunction against attempts at translation. Either the translators are universally terrible, or the original is too damned difficult to read clearly and/or translate, or both.

One thing I've been curious about: how much has Arabic changed since the seventh century? Aramaic (the language of the early Christian Gospels) is a dead language, as far as I know; Greek has changed significantly; Latin (the language of the Vulgate) gave rise to Italian, Spanish, French, and even the language of lawyers and doctors; few people in the West could speak any of these languages if suddenly transported back into anno domini 0; I wonder how the Arab people would fare if they had to speak to Mohammed himself?

What other things are lost in translation? What meanings are lost as a language evolves beyond the day it was first captured and put to paper?

And why, of all things, is the Qur'an littered with exhortations to violence, closely followed by either an affirmation of Allah's might and wisdom, or an affirmation of Allah's mercy and forgiveness? I haven't yet seen any mention of his might and mercy, or his forgiving wisdom. Always mighty and wise or forgiving and merciful, never both at the same time. Ah, well. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/1/2001 01:27:52 PM ----- BODY: Paul Ford rocks. From a recent entry about phone trouble, I give you the following evidence:
A pudgy man ascended the pole and began to probe the rusted box with squeaking machines. After almost an hour of squeaks and whistles, he said, ``holy fucking shit'' and pulled a large, empty squirrel's nest, which he threw to the ground. He then threw handfuls of exposed, gnawed copper wires after it, and said, ``it was squirrels!''

Standing in the waning light of the apartment building's backyard, I imagined several angry squirrels in turbans, each piloting a tiny propeller plane straight into my phone box. One of the squirrels was named Nuthammad.

I am sorry, but that is what I imagined.
It feels so good to laugh, to be exposed to the absurd instead of the intractably depressing. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/30/2001 12:58:55 AM ----- BODY: From The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, Penguin Books 1995 edition:
"Women" 4:29

Do not kill yourselves. God is merciful to you, but he that does that through wickedness and injustice shall be burned in fire. That is easy enough for God.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/28/2001 10:42:21 AM ----- BODY: From The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, Penguin Books 1995 edition:
"The Cow" 2:79

Woe to those that write the scriptures with their own hands and then declare: 'This is from God,' in order to gain some paltry end. Woeful shall be their fate, because of what their hands have written, because of that which they have gained!
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/27/2001 07:12:01 PM ----- BODY: If, like me, you've managed to block the images of the towers and planes of Tuesday from your mind, but want some way to understand what it could have possibly been like for the people who managed to escape, what it was like on the ground, and so forth; if only to remind yourself of the reality of it all, then I recommend these amazing pictures taken inside the WTC during the evacuation. The site is a mirror of this site. I couldn't make the links at the bottom work, so you may need to modify the URL in the Location: field yourself (just go from "default.asp" to "default2.asp", etc. through "default6.asp"). Amazing. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/27/2001 04:31:36 PM ----- BODY: More censorship. Fuck ABC if they silence a man who started his show by saying the following:
I do not relinquish, nor should any of you, the right to criticize, even as we support, our government. This is still a democracy, and they're still politicians ... Political correctness itself is something we can no longer afford. Feelings are gonna get hurt so that actual people won't, and that will be a good thing.
Who are the real cowards here? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/26/2001 04:33:28 PM ----- BODY: Let's make this the era of collateral repair, says George Monbiot. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/26/2001 12:40:49 PM ----- BODY: Great. The censorship is starting already . I mean, on top of the insipid myopia of the mainstrea news outlets, that is. Sure, VOA has no responsibility to present enemy propaganda, but it seems to me that by denying anyone glimpses into these guys' heads, we're just missing an opportunity to fight back with our own responses; to understand perhaps a bit better what we're up against. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/25/2001 08:53:05 AM ----- BODY: Had a dream last night where I was sitting on the rocky beach, and it was getting towards sunset when all of a sudden the fog came in, like a bomb blast, some sixty knots or more; just a fine edged mist, still not so thick you couldn't see through it, but thick enough you could see it coming and be surprised that it didn't knock you over as it engulfed you. I remember running from the beach to the complex (some strange oneiric blend of a web conference and an action movie with lots of raised wood platforms: think the bar in Crouching Tiger spread over the coast of down east Maine) when the second wave of fog and mist hit, thicker this time, and with enough force to rock the wooden platforms. The third wave woke me up. I have no idea what it was, but was left with the feeling that it had all the force and scope of a natural event like a volcano, or a hurricane. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/23/2001 09:10:48 PM ----- BODY: Spent yesterday stripping the paint off the fireplace in the empty room upstairs, which I plan to turn into a study. Felt better to do something physical, using my whole body; today I'm paying for it with sore muscles and the physical exhaustion I've been hoping would finally supplant the mental exhaustion of the past couple of weeks. I'll post some before/after pictures soon.

Went to Wilmington today to witness the baptism of Heather's niece, Leah Elizabeth. Not a bad ceremony, though the point of the sermon was lost on me. Oh, well. I suppose any chance to stress tolerance can't be all bad. And I must admit I've been surprised at how much singing goes on in church. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/21/2001 01:54:15 PM ----- BODY: If you've ever flown on an airplane and ever intend to do so again, or know someone who has or will, please make them read this piece by Peter Hannaford in the Washington Times, which suggests ways in which you, as a passenger, can fight back in the event that another hijacking occurs, heaven forfend, on your plane. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/21/2001 11:20:02 AM ----- BODY: Phil Agre on the ramifications of the permanent war against terrorism:
During the Cold War, it seemed as though anybody in the world could get their opponents killed by calling them communists; will the same now be true of anyone who is called a terrorist?
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/21/2001 10:51:46 AM ----- BODY: Well, which will it be? Gandhi, Caesar, Kojak, Bronson, Bugs, or Strangelove? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/19/2001 12:57:30 PM ----- BODY: Christopher Hitchens' response to Tuesday:
There will be a great deal of pugnacious talk to be endured in the next few days. Much of what is said by the cable bombardiers will be worthless, or bluff. But the overused words "civilised world" seem to me appropriate. You could see the civilised world in the streets of Manhattan yesterday, as people of all faiths and shades kept calm, kept moving, kept in touch and kept up their solidarity. This is a strength that the sadists and fanatics do not possess and cannot emulate.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/19/2001 08:23:58 AM ----- BODY: You won't see any flags or "God Bless America"s on this site. Mindless, fervid nationalistic sentiment and slavish obedience to religious doctrines are among the factors that led us to this horrible situation. Sure, I'm an American citizen, and enjoy the benefits of said citizenship just as we have recently been shown their fragility. But I'm alarmed by the fervor of my fellow citizens as they whip themselves into nationalistic and religious frenzies. Tolerance is also an important step in learning how to get along with one another, it might help abolish some of the ignorance that abounds, as is evident by the moron in Arizona who shot a Sikh the other day, mistaking him for an "Arab".

But I can't help but wonder, as I read pathetic attempts to justify belief systems, posing as attempts to educate, such as this laughably self-contradictory discussion of why Muslims can use the star and crescent but no other graven images, why bother? It seems wasteful and shameful to spend such energies trying to make up for the failings of a fallable system, rooted in language, just because of an even more shameful belief that some words are somehow more "holy" (watch for tautologies) than others. Come on, people.

Not that I'm singling out the adherents of Islam, either. The Bible has as many interpretations as it does readers. Even the definition of what constitutes the Bible differs widely among adherents. How can we say "this is a Holy book" when we can't even agree on which chapters it should contain?

I remember shuddering when Bush read Psalm 23 in his speech on (Wednesday?); admittedly first because he was citing the Bible after being attacked by a radical Islamic organization, but then because he used the translation from the New International Version. I can't wait for an even more dumbed down version. Later, I laughed at the contradictions: annoyed because he resorted to religious references, I was even more annoyed because he chose what, for me, was the translation with the least power and beauty.

Words and other symbols are only as useful as their current power to suggest or invoke recognition in others. Arbitrary, impermanent, they are but tools among many. Don't believe words are arbitrary? Read a translation. Don't believe they are impermanent? Read Chaucer, or Les Chansons de Roland. Don't believe their power rests in their ability to invoke recognitions in others? Don't think of a pink elephant.

So I bristle at the thought that at this, a time when we should be examining our own failures: failures to protect, failures to avoid causing harm to others, failures to understand; we seem to be instead mindlessly reaffirming a misguided faith in nations or words supposed to be holy because they themselves claim holiness.

Not that words cannot have power: consider Bush's poor choice of words (as if that were any surprise to anyone) in calling the effort to bring the people behind the attacks to justice a crusade. Would it have been any better if he'd used jihad? But let us not forget that such power is as much in involuntary recognitions and connotations as it is in our submission to those recognitions and refusal to reconsider, to weigh, to judge how those words will affect us.

Is nobody picking up on the fact that one of the reasons bin Laden is so mad is that the United States military occupies Saudi Arabia, home of the two "holiest" cities of Islam? (I'm still not sure why anyone could consider a city holy; in my experience they have been much less pure than say, a grove of birches or a clean rock face.) Or that Israel continues to occupy, with our help, the capital of Palestine, East Jerusalem, yet another holy city? And yet, instead of thoroughly mocking the practice of treating the dead words in a book, or the idea that a filthy collection of buildings might be a rather poor object of our insane affections, we jump up and play hymns and wave flags from our car aerials even as the waves coming into those aerials tell of the follies that follow from so doing.

As if that weren't enough, as usual, we appear to be ignoring the loss of people of other nationalities in the attacks on the World Trade Center; "thousands dead, mostly American" is how this would have been reported had the attack not been on American soil.

I'll end this with a plea. Be tolerant of others. Their belief systems are, for the most part, just as screwed up as yours, just as rooted in contradiction, the misguided and arbitrary application of value, and irrational webs of self-deceit. They represent the hopes and dreams of people like you, who are equally enslaved to their expressions of those hopes, arbitrary and impermanent they may be. And it is still possible to learn from others, but only if you're not afraid to learn about yourselves first.

You are not alone in your grief. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/15/2001 07:12:06 PM ----- BODY: I find myself trying to take care of small things. Paying bills. Washing dishes. Doing laundry. Tomorrow morning, I will mow the lawn and trim the hedges. I will cut down the snaking ivy that is entwined in the shutters on the south side of the den.

Heather is on her way back from picking up the cats, and I'm off to go get groceries. We were gone for almost a month, so there's nothing in the house to eat. From my vantage point in the kitchen, I can see that something new is blooming in the backyard, along with a few thousand weeds.

I'd just really like to get these images out of my head; the images of planes flying into buildings; the images of that idiot Bush fumbling for words in front of the Pentagon and asking for even more power than he has already; the images of bigotry and hatred and stubborn refusal to understand.

Driving south Thursday, I'd bite my knuckle every time something awful or touching or hateful or sad came on the radio. Yesterday, I had a huge bruise there and it was tender to the touch. Today, it seems to be fading. Maybe healing does come with time.

One of these days, maybe I'll get some time to deal with the grief over my aunt, who passed away last week. The most awful feeling is knowing that I'm very lucky compared to many. On top of it all, I sit here feeling guilt for the sadness, knowing that others' worlds have changed far more than mine in the past week.

Ah, well. I'll keep trying like a good bhikku, and spend my time caring for the little things. So much to say, so little sense in saying any of it just yet. Cut wood, carry water. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/14/2001 01:05:21 PM ----- BODY: Oh, I thought it was terrorists, responding in part to poorly formulated and miserably implemented U. S. Middle Eastern policy. Turns out it was all those fairies, baby killers, feminazis, and liberals we've been harboring here in the States that brought God's anger upon us. Let's hope this finishes off Falwell and Robertson for good. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/14/2001 03:22:44 AM ----- BODY: Itinerary:
Home. And safe. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/10/2001 05:07:23 AM ----- BODY: Heather and I are back from Web2001. Some random thoughts follow, to be subsequently followed by a more detailed post to [wd]. But for now, given that I've been in the air for more than ten hours, am suffering from jetlag, and am flying out to Maine (again) for a funeral tomorrow at noon, this will have to do for now.

Met several folks from the list, and had a wonderful discussion with Dawn about Julian Jaynes and the vagaries of a religious studies education. John Dowdell really does own a grey fedora.

Fray Day 5 was a blast. I only wish I'd had the presence of mind to talk to the people about how not all Maine stories are endless. My aunt Peg died late last week, after a long battle with breast cancer, having decided to call off chemo and end things on her own terms.

Met Jessamyn. Perhaps she'll come visit us (hint, hint) so we can chill out on the porch and have a discussion beyond "hey, you're Steve" and "hey, you're Jessamyn".

Apologies to Lance for taunting the wait staff at Absinthe by loudly crying out "that is not the vichysoisse".

Thanks to Shauna for the par-tay. It's always good to see Owen, Lance, Molly, and the gang.

Met the delightful Kate at lunch, and only wish I'd had more time to talk to Michael about hacking sendmail. I swear, I want to know more about what you're up to. It was just a hard week.

Wish I could have spent more time with Matt and Ev and Jason and Meg and Scott and Derek and Heather and Dori and Molly and Nick and Cam and Betty and Jeff and Leslie and everyone else.

People build little (and not so little) stone sculptures on the beach at Crissy Point. Excellent. Oh, and windburn and sunburn. And a great way to spend a Labor Day Monday.

Someday, I'll get to talk to Stewart Brand about the assignation of value and how impermanence lends a value that archival and longterm views do not. More than I did at the conference, I mean. Jazz, Basho, and the stone sculptures at Crissy Field.

Shin splints.

Met a friend of Jeremy's (who happened to be with Jessamyn) and we talked about CFD and Ex Number Five. Hi to Jeremy!

If you're looking for the demo from the DHTML class, give me a few days to test it before deploying it live and it'll be on the main hesketh.com site. Until then, here it is. Could be next week. Cut me some slack.

The Jug Shop rules. Maraschino liqueur is weird. Pear brandy is even weirder.

In-room broadband rocks.

Thanks to the forward-thinking people who set up Airport in the Online Lounge and the Press Lounge. Next year: sell 802.11b cards on the floor and make sure everyone has access from everywhere.

I'm donating the entirety of my tax "rebate" to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I dare you to do the same. More later. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/4/2001 12:18:44 AM ----- BODY: Just a reminder, kids. Unix time_t tops a billion this Saturday at 9:46:40 PM. Cherish this historic moment by running the command:

date +"%s"

over and over again until you see ten digits :) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/3/2001 01:52:08 PM ----- BODY: Heather and I are in SF for Web2001. If you're in town, drop us a line and maybe we can get together. I know several folks from [wd] are here as well, so hopefully we'll be able to negotiate a meeting of the minds. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/31/2001 07:26:18 PM ----- BODY: In 1872, a panoramic map of Raleigh, North Carolina was commissioned and issued by C. Drie, mapmaker and publisher. Our house is on it, though in a somewhat smaller form (the porch doesn't wrap all the way around, what we now call the "den" but which was then the kitchen is not yet attached to the house, etc.) You can see this in the following picture, and in the picture below that you can see our house relative to the rest of 1872 Raleigh. For more information, including a zoomable map, click on either image.

house, 1872
Raleigh, NC, 1872
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/29/2001 10:39:23 PM ----- BODY: Something fun Heather sent me a long time ago, recently rediscovered in a drawer full of memories:
THANK YOU ST. JUDE for talking Daddy out of getting a nipple ring. He just never thinks about the next time he'll have to get defibrillated. Love, Nelthilta.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/28/2001 11:36:15 AM ----- BODY: Just got back from Maine Sunday night; we were gone for almost ten days. First time since 1996 I've gone that long without checking email. I have some pictures, which I will post at some point soon, once I've rotated and cropped and so forth. I also updated Sid's diary, which I had let lapse for far too long (almost two months!) as we stayed for three or four days in Jonesboro at the camp, spent a couple of days hanging around the cottage on Mason's Bay, walking on the rocks and watching for seals, and put a new back door on the camp (the old one was rotted). So I spent quite a lot of time thinking about Sid and what things must have been like in the early days.

Also visited Saugus Iron Works in Saugus, Mass., where, in 1646, my oldest ancestor in the New World came to work as a collier (burning wood to make charcoal to feed the iron works). Thomas Look went to Nantucket after the works, where he was a "half-share" in the original purchase of the island from the natives. Seems he didn't enjoy his underprivileged status as a half-share man (he didn't own anything, and was just an executor of sorts for one of the original owners, but was still expected to improve the island and act like he actually owned land; very medieval) so he moved on to Martha's Vineyard, where he died and is buried (at Tisbury). Didn't get to take a ferry to Nantucket or the Vineyard, but maybe next trip. I did get to see them make a nail from nail rod wrought iron, and kept it. I'm considering maybe pitching a book discussing the history of the nail. It's surprising how valuable they were back then: they used to burn houses down if a family was moving, just to recover the nails.

Also got to see my grandfather (92 years old as of July 4); he's looking good. Spent a day driving around Moosehead and environs trying to sight a moose (Heather's never seen one, and disbelieves in their existence). Didn't see any, though. The lake was beautiful, a dark blue surrounded by dark green.

Put 1200 miles on the rental, a Chevy Camaro convertible that Alamo gave us after Thrifty tried to screw us out of the Sebring we'd reserved: "We have two neons and a minivan"; fortunately Thrifty has to pay for the difference or risk a lawsuit for bait and switch. Like I'm going to spend my first ten day vacation in five years hunched over in a frigging Dodge Neon. Feh.

All in all, a great vacation. The noise in my head stopped for almost the entire time, and we ate like barons. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/4/2001 05:04:10 PM ----- BODY: Screw this. We're going to the beach. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/4/2001 02:11:51 PM ----- BODY: Ev has fixed the error I was bitching about a few weeks ago. Thanks, Ev! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/19/2001 12:13:51 PM ----- BODY: So, I have a lot to say about the book I just finished reading, but I'm saving it up for when I feel like I'll be able to do it justice. (Don't you wish I did that more often?) Instead, I'm going to offer a quick rant about Show-stopper!, by G. Paschal Zachary, which tells the story of the creation of Windows NT in such miserable prose that I can hardly decide which is more offensive: David Cutler, or the way his story is being told. Never mind the abundance of glossing over excellent opportunities to tell the truth, or the way that the author seems to know little of computing, or the way that he seems to misstate the simplest of technical terminology using the most idiotic metaphors, or the way that those metaphors seem to stand in the way of communicating even the simplest of facts (e.g., he mischaracterizes the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit over the GUI as though Apple sued MS for stealing source code, he compares APIs to "secret handshakes", etc.) The only real joy to be had from reading the book is getting to see what complete assholes Cutler and his crew were, and to get still more corroborating evidence for how Microsoft screwed everyone they ever worked with (IBM being the primary example in this book; the decision to lie to IBM and develop NT internally while pretending to devote resources to OS/2 is described as a "bold stroke", as opposed to a stab in the back to the company that basically launched MS into stock market heaven) No, I take that back. The only joy to be found in the book is when you get to hear about how Cutler basically thought DOS sucked along with everything else MS had produced up to the day they hired him. Not recommended. Why they compared this book to Soul of a New Machine, I'll never know. It's awful. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2001 05:57:11 PM ----- BODY: I can't help but think that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Of course, I don't own any oil wells. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2001 05:31:48 PM ----- BODY: The book is coming along. It's been slow going, so far, and we're behind by about a week or two. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2001 05:27:54 PM ----- BODY: Give me a quarter and I won't pull your ponytail.

in memory of Robert Lequeux Smith
(8/30/1914-7/1/2001)
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2001 05:26:25 PM ----- BODY: Sorry for the lack of updates to Sid's Diary. It's funny - if you don't use Blogger for a while, the cookie expires and when you try to use a bookmark to get to your various blogs, you get a stupid ASP error. Is it so hard to check for a cookie value before returning an error? Jesus. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/25/2001 03:11:48 PM ----- BODY: Here's a pleasant sort of flashback. See, layoffs aren't so bad, necessarily. Here's just a few of the relative success stories from among the many spawned by layoffs at my old company, imonics. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/21/2001 01:18:38 PM ----- BODY: One of the weird things about living on the edge (but inside) of a historic neighborhood is that from time to time, you get bizarre offers like the one I found clothespinned to my mailbox this morning. It's a Photoshopped- and- filtered picture of my house, from the vantage point of the sidewalk across the street out front. Printed on a greeting card. And for only $45, they'll print me up another 30 of them. Or, for $12, I can get a card with a picture of either the Governor's Mansion or the Heck-Andrews House. I keep telling my house, "buck up, old fella - some day, people will pay ten bucks for a greeting card with your picture on it." What I don't tell my house is that by then, people will be paying $142 for the Heck-Andrews cards. Why make him worry? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/20/2001 05:28:33 PM ----- BODY: OK, now that that's settled, I want one of these funky helmets. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/20/2001 12:42:09 AM ----- BODY: Shigeru Mizuki, a Japanese veteran who lost an arm in combat, fears rearmament if Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's push to break with decades of official pacifism succeeds. (New York Times, 06/19/2001) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/16/2001 03:37:46 AM ----- BODY: I first met Heather ten years ago, in a bar at Syracuse that held all my dreams. Now, we hold those dreams in common. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/16/2001 03:35:47 AM ----- BODY: Sorry, I've been busy. Busy writing, busy taking care of the servers, busy writing, busy fixing the busted sprinkler system, whose broken heads I find (with help from Heather, in her bare feet dancing on wet spots on the lawn) by looking for the puddles. Busy thinking about the Web, and the Net, and the dream I thought I'd found when, as an underemployed liberal arts grad, I discovered that the community I'd sought all through college only to find a few drunken philosopher geniuses and a lot of drunken idiots paying too much for the privilege of pasting "Syracuse University" into the rear windows of their cars, that community was a myth. When I first got on the Net, I hated it fiercely from my seat at the computing cluster at the Schine Student Center, watching the IBM interface with the VAX that held all my mail; when I first got on Usenet (my only experience of which had been as printouts from an alt. group about designer smart drugs a friend of a friend had collected) I found comp.text.sgml, a place where smart people had as their only outlet a text-only, 80 cpl medium that forced their thoughts into sharp relief. I read about Joey and Carl and the folks at Suck, and am disappointed to learn that Joey bought a Lexus with his earnings from Suck, as though the Net dreams they mocked were going to keep on paying for their luxury autos. It's ten years later, ten years spent learning and working and hoping and generally supposing that the dream would end, that any rebuttal of the puritanical impulse on my part would bring about the end prematurely, ten years of fighting myself to keep from thinking that somehow I'd made it and all would be okay from now on. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/6/2001 11:20:59 AM ----- BODY: The actual installation process is fairly straightforward, although as with all such activities, care must be taken to prevent creating a brick. - Chris Halsall, on installing Linux on an iPaq. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/3/2001 01:13:48 AM ----- BODY: Oh - and - I dyed my hair red. Just for kicks. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/3/2001 01:01:56 AM ----- BODY: Spent the day doing yard work. Raked the front yard, fertilized, and Heather mowed. Trimmed the hedges. Beat the porch such that it is no longer hanging off the end of the curtain; used PT lumber to brace it. Looks like it's rotted out a bit, though, so I expect we'll have to rebuild at least that end of the porch at some point. I have blisters (it's been a long time since I swung a hammer) but it's not bad. Tomorrow: the back yard. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/3/2001 12:39:35 AM ----- BODY: On the way in to work on Friday, I heard a National Weather Service announcement informing me that I was driving directly into a tornado. The cool thing was that the announcement was in the same computer-generated voice as Radiohead used for "paranoid android". Even better was that they apparently misspelled "window", such that the sequence that was supposed to say "stay away from windows" sounded like "stay away from weirdos". For the record, the tornado passed within half a mile of us, hitting the fairgrounds and Meredith College but leaving old Brickhaven alone. Some amazing skies, though. And torrential downpours. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/3/2001 12:34:29 AM ----- BODY: We went to a seafood joint the other night. It was fun.

H: Oh, look - "garden oysters - I wonder what they are."
S: "rabbit testicles? Just a guess." -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/31/2001 11:41:39 AM ----- BODY: A note about the "six bits" thing below: I'm used to thinking in terms of C-style arrays, whose index begins at offset zero. So, if I am 31 years old right now, I can contain the value corresponding to my age in an array of size 25, or 0..31. Once I turn 32, I will need an array of size 26, as 32 steps over the bounds of the array described previously. Sure, there are 32 places in an array of size 25, but I begin with zero, not with one. In order to store the value 32 in such a scheme, you need 33 places, which bumps you up to 26. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/26/2001 12:37:15 AM ----- BODY: Believe it or not, I'm not on hiatus. Just busy. We moved all of our clients from our old co-location provider to our new co-location provider in less than a week, with a few days last week to iron out the inevitable problems. I've been dreaming about compiling different versions of Apache. I signed a deal with Hungry Minds (formerly IDG) to write the Dynamic HTML Bible with Scott Andrew LePera and Eric Costello. I wrote an article for Web Techniques, and another (see the left column) for O'Reilly Network. I've been trying to decipher sendmail's insane configuration file in an effort to block spam. I no longer feel like a pounded turd, but I'm still pretty wiped out from the last week. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/22/2001 02:19:24 AM ----- BODY: Yesterday, I turned thirty-one. Yep, one more year and I'll roll over to six bits. On the positive side, the doctor says we don't have lead poisoning. On the negative side, that doesn't leave much to explain why I've felt like a pounded turd for the past month or so. So, I'll go on the record as saying it was a combination of stress, dengue fever, allergies, and the like that made me spend my 371st month on the planet getting dizzy when I stood up. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/8/2001 11:21:49 AM ----- BODY: A year ago, I started posting regularly to this weblog (and have more or less kept it up, much to my surprise). A year ago, I had just purchased a Web-enabled cell phone, which I haven't used at all as a Web-enabled cell phone, because the interface sucks. A year ago, I earned out my advance on the Dynamic HTML GUIs book, and now I'm starting on another one. A year ago, I saw Sleepy Hollow, read Code, and decided for fresh, not fried, spring rolls. The reason I make such a fuss about this now is that it is the very reason I started the weblog in the first place. I wanted to be able to refer back to something that would allow my memories to mesh with a calendar. Too much has happened over the past ten years that I'll never be able to put into order; it will remain in a state of perpetual disarray, taunting me with questions about what happened first, what influenced what, who and when. I don't know if I'll ever be able to sort of the whys and wherefores, but it'd be nice to be able to go back and say "Oh, that was just after I saw Gladiator and before I released the updated Namespace Project and at the same time that I realized I felt a lack of modern heroes. That sort of thing. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/2/2001 01:02:32 PM ----- BODY: There's a song by New Model Army that contains the lyric "looking for family, looking for tribe". I'm reading Cry, the Beloved Country now, and it's got me thinking about tribe, and customs, and their destruction by the rapid pace of industrial and now information-driven life. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/28/2001 10:33:44 PM ----- BODY: Busy day. Trimmed the hedges in the front yard, replaced a whole bunch of light bulbs that all mysteriously burned out at once, sprayed herbicide on the front yard, raked, did lots of laundry. Hey, it's not very exciting, but it's what I did today. The Tucker House (huge manse next door that plays host to a slew of events, mostly wedding receptions and the like) opened up today as well, so there was lots of activity next door. Hope they didn't mind the smell of the herbicide. Tomorrow: rake the back yard, more herbicide. Tonight: guitars on the porch with Brent. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/24/2001 03:08:19 AM ----- BODY: By the way, the last few posts were made from my Airport-enabled Powerbook from my porch, since I upgraded my Airport base station with a Lucent Range Extender Antenna, per these instructions. I didn't have a Dremel tool, so it took me a bit longer to upgrade, being forced to resort to using wire cutters and a drill to grind out the hole in the case and trim away the necessary room for the strain relief in the antenna cord. But I'm sitting quite happily in my favorite rocker, wireless access to which was once blocked by several large appliances in the line of sight from the base station. So, hey, score one for technology. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/24/2001 02:50:16 AM ----- BODY: Glenn rocks. I hadn't seen this piece by Fred Moody yet, but I'm glad I have now. Sort of. My experience writing a book wasn't quite as bad as all that; IDG let me write a book that combined, to some good effect, some introductory material on user interface design and some relatively advanced work on dealing with the insane incompatibilities in DHTML implementations in the 4.0 generation of Web browsers, and I even made a little money on the deal. I managed to get more work writing and editing as a result, though to be fair, I'd done quite a bit of editing beforehand, and it's not entirely clear that the book made much difference in the final analysis, and I have been able to make still more money doing something I enjoy (writing about technology) for folks that actually do pay on time, and despite the fact that when it all comes down, I made less than minimum wage for the hundreds of hours I spent writing and building the book's support Web site, it was a good experience for me. If nothing else, it taught me that I enjoy helping other people write books far more than I enjoy writing them myself, and self-knowledge is good, right? Now I just have to figure out whether I really want to write another, longer and more detailed, book on a similar topic. I'm still not completely sure I do, but I'm doing my best to keep my options open. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/24/2001 02:20:26 AM ----- BODY: It's true. Some people are just dumb as fucking bricks. Come on, now. We're expected to believe that Klebold and Harris wouldn't have killed those kids at Columbine if only they hadn't been exposed to Doom? What about the Gulf War, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Israel, Rwanda, etc.? Doesn't anyone think that maybe being surrounded by violence in the greater world around them, having uncaring or neglectful parents, doctors prescribing drugs with suspected links to aggressive behavior in depressives might have had something to do with it? Five billion dollars in punitive damages against game companies? And what's this about "sex-oriented Web sites"? Who's the real target here? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/23/2001 02:14:16 PM ----- BODY: Oh, and by the way: hello to all you Brill's-Content-sidebar-reading visitors. I, um, hope you like the site. But if you don't, that's okay, too. There are several million other sites you might like, and which I encourage you to try. Most importantly, I would encourage you not to get sucked into the filtered world of spoon-fed news, entertainment, and corporate spin the larger sites tend to offer. Think for yourself, start a site of your own, point to things you like, write about everything, record it for posterity or for the sake of affording yourself a bit of time to reflect before reacting. Perhaps if you do that, we won't be trapped in a world where a fake pop star's fake boobs are more important than race riots in Ohio or trickle-down revival tax policies or the theft of elections or international standoffs between nuclear powers. Maybe not. But I can dream. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/23/2001 02:06:40 PM ----- BODY: So, do you suppose these two things have anything in common?

U. S. gas prices make a record leap
Exxon Mobil Profits Up 51%

Nah, probably not. Must be all those bozos driving SUVs. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/15/2001 08:30:44 PM ----- BODY: I've been finding out a lot about my brother lately, through reading his writings. Such as The Supreme Fascist, for example, which made me cry. Or Allie Escritoire, which made me laugh, the fun with French notwithstanding. Or May Heaven Abound With Pralines. Or Wherein Dwell God and His Angels, which made me stare into the distance and took me quite away from my kitchen and shiny laptop. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/12/2001 10:32:07 PM ----- BODY: We made fried chicken tonight, and when the chicken was done Heather drained off the oil into a Mason jar. After she spooned out the little chicken bits that were left in the oil, I noticed a single piece of chicken, maybe the size of a pea, was still cooking in the oil, little bubbles forming on its top edge. It kept swimming up as the bubbles formed and when one would break free and zip to the surface, it would fall a bit until another bubble would form, and so on, ad infinitum, all to a soundtrack of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed, you Black Emperor!; at the end of the title song, a crescendo that took seventeen minutes to build, like the best Glenn Branca, the little piece of swimming chicken dropped to the bottom of the oil. It was pure magic, the likes of which you only encounter every so often and then only when you're paying attention.

Wow. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/9/2001 11:27:15 AM ----- BODY: Had a hot weekend here (last week, it was in the forties and fifties; yesterday was in the high eighties and low nineties) but managed to get a lot done. We moved the porch swing from the southern end of the porch, where it blocked easy access to the ell, to the northern end, where it looks better. Still have to get used to the rocking chairs being on the southern end, but I think I'm going to like it. It changes the dynamic a lot; instead of two chairs, then the door, then two more, it's porch swing, door, four chairs. We really need to get a little table or two, though, to set drinks and sandwiches down on while you rock. Got a new portable drill, as its impossible to find battery packs for my old portable drill anymore. The relentless march of progress? I don't know. But it does seem to last longer, charge faster, and generally drill faster than the old one, so hey.

Spent most of the weekend at work, backing up our Windows 2000 box (Xena) which is serving as a PDC for our Samba network because Microsoft changed the authentication in Windows 2000 and Win2K clients can't authenticate against Samba 2.0.7. So, we're building out a samba-TNG server to replace Xena, so we can move Xena (in her new role as Linux Web/DNS/mail server) into our new co-lo facility and migrate everyone off our ancient server before our current co-lo provider turns the lights off. Whee. Score one for open source, and one against Microsoft. While I was backing things up, I also rewired the rack (this time using cables that match the color of the port they're plugged into, and with labeled ends to facilitate finding them properly without having to snake through the wire management crap). Lots of stuff to catch up on that should have been done months ago. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/9/2001 11:10:13 AM ----- BODY: Speaking of Javascript, it turns out I was one of the runners-up in the Danny Goodman 20th Anniversary Celebration Caption Contest. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/7/2001 10:10:15 AM ----- BODY: And another piece for O'Reilly Network, this time about the history of JavaScript. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/5/2001 07:00:18 PM ----- BODY: O'Reilly Network just published my wrapup of SXSW, though in reality everyone keeps referring to it as a "state of the Web address", and it doesn't have much to do with SXSW at all. It's a bit dense, but cut me some slack. March was a difficult month. April's shaping up a little better, so far. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/31/2001 06:52:31 AM ----- BODY: The reason I'm up at 6am? I just woke up from a dream where I had parked my truck in the parking lot of a bar in Austin (SxSW, natch) where you had to walk through a metal detector to enter, and C@rl had replaced it with a life-size plastic replica. So, caught in an excellent, if disturbing, practical joke, but still unable to find my truck, and denied the possibility of revenge (as C@rl was inside the bar, with all of my friends, so just walking in and shooting him would have been more difficult, and of course was ruled out completely by the metal detector) I woke up sweating, my heart pounding so hard that the resonance was knocking the headboard of the bed against the wall, in perfect time with my heartbeat. Sometimes I worry that my imagination is completely shot. I mean, how much more transparent could the symbolism be? And what became of that Maker on the rocks I ordered before I found my truck had been replaced by a plastic replica? Why was I driving my truck in Austin, anyway? I always fly and stay in hotels. Why was it that my wallet was stuffed above the visor of a truck I didn't even recognize? Why did we rush to finish our drinks before two o'clock? Why wasn't C@rl even in the dream? Who was that little girl that everyone kept handing around like a handbag, and why was she smarter than everyone there? So many questions, but my heart has calmed down enough that I'm going to try to go back to sleep. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/30/2001 01:22:11 PM ----- BODY: Main Entry: 1trust
Pronunciation: 'tr&st
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse traust trust; akin to Old English trEowe faithful -- more at TRUE
Date: 13th century
1 a : assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something
b : one in which confidence is placed
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/29/2001 07:01:22 PM ----- BODY: Hey, weblogs are just decentralized geocities and angelfire! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/26/2001 04:38:08 PM ----- BODY: In the spirit of such things, I offer you my very own failed McSweeny's submission:

Dear McSweeney's:

Things just get weirder as time goes on. And, to serve as fodder for those who believe that the whole mess is some grand government conspiracy, I offer the following tale. Even though the post office is not, properly so-called, a governmental organization anymore, the FBI is, and that's how I can get away with making the foregoing comparison.

I was born in upstate New York, at the Onondaga Community General Hospital, to Maine parents, in 1970. We returned to Maine in 1974, (there's a whole lot of autobiographical nonsense missing here, including the birth of my younger brother, three years spent in Indiana, and a funny story about my mother being solicited at her front door by a grave plot salesman, but I will spare you the details as they are not particularly cogent nor are they applicable to the story I'm trying to tell.)

When we moved into our new house, in Maine, our mailing address was Rural Route 2, Box 194G, although we were the third house on what was then a dead-end subdivision road. I've never been able to figure that 'G' out. After a few years of this madness, the Post Office decided that it would be funnier if we had mailing addresses that mapped more or less directly to the location of the house (and/or mailbox, which is an important detail, not to be overlooked) so we became 3 Fairwind Drive for all intents and purpose, practical or otherwise. Mostly, it was a way of guaranteeing that our mail would be delivered properly, but we used it for other things as well, and dutifully painted out the old "194G" adhesive stickers (or peeled them off, I don't remember - I was still pretty young and unconcerned with such worldly things) and painted "3 Champeon" on the box. Or maybe we bought a new mailbox. At any rate, this was the longest we lived at the same mailing address.

Some time later, when I was in high school, no, wait.

I should mention for those to whom the blindingly obvious is obscured by drink or short attention spans that the house hadn't moved an inch, nor had we moved from it.

There. Some time later, when I was in high school, the Town got a new Postmaster, and it was decreed that the practice of having mailing addresses that corresponded to the:
was limiting and made it difficult for those who sorted the mail to keep up with all the changes, additions, and so forth. I should add that the town in which I lived has had a population of somewhere in the neighborhood (heh) of 2200 people for as long as I've kept track.

Not much changes in the town but the addresses (and the mailboxes, which are sometimes run over by snowplows).

But back to my story. The new Postmaster with his high-falutin ideas decreed that our slumbering town would return to the Rural Route system, abandoning the well-liked and sensible "number, street" scheme for one in which our address was redefined as "Rural Route 2, Box 524". This, in itself, was inoffensive, though confusing, as now we had a mailing address and a street address (which we continued to give out for the purposes of pizza delivery, for example), and they were different. We decided to keep the "Three" we'd nailed to the side of our house, in any case, as it made more sense to us, and was a lot cheaper than "Rural Route Two Box Five Two Four", which would have taken up most of the available space on the side of the house nearest our front door, which nobody uses anyway, but still, out of the principle of the thing we refused obstinately to embrace such unwelcome changes.

Those of you who have had your address change for less onerous and bureaucratic reasons will sympathize with us at this point, as you will no doubt be familiar with the process of filling out Change of Address forms, having to check the box on the back of envelopes that says "address change", supplying your new address, and waiting two or three months for the changes to filter through billing, to shipping, and so on, in the meantime raising holy old Hell with your magazine subscriptions. I don't think Boy's Life magazine ever caught up, but that's okay, as it was a gift from a grandparent and I never did like it much anyway.

So, things continued on in this manner for a few years, and life had returned more or less to normal when, last year, it was decided that the Rural Route approach was not going to work with the new 911 system, though it was never explained why. So, a suitable board was convened, and my mother invited to participate, to discuss the renumbering of the streets in a manner that would appease the FBI and other powers that be. My mother did her best, but it was clear from the outset that the board was led by insane people with no regard for the sensible.

One proposal involved renaming every street in town; another suggested the use of GPS systems and students to measure the frontage of lots along each road, assigning a number every fifty yards, or feet, or something. The upshot was that the venerable mailing address of my old home in Maine changed again, from Rural Route 2 Box 524 to 27 Fairwind Drive. As we had been using the "3 Fairwind Drive" address as a street address over and against the mailing address for years, this caused no end of heartache for mom. Now we had a mailing address that conflicted with established notions of our street address, and there didn't appear to be any way around it.

My grandmother died (she was old) a few weeks ago, and out of respect and possibly concern for her everlasting soul, my mother's next-door neighbor Mary purchased a year's worth of prayer from the Vatican. My grandmother wasn't Catholic, except in the sense that we all are, but we figured it'd do no harm to have some Monsignor pray for her, especially given that the prayers have already been paid for, check cashed, and so forth. Thing is, Mary had the official notice from the Holy See sent to what she thought was our mailing address: 33 Fairwind Drive. When the notice was returned to her (Mary), by a humorless Post Office, marked "Undeliverable: No Such Address", she called my mom and said that she (Mary) would drop it off in her (my Mother's) mailbox after the mailman came by. Mary's been living there for twenty-five years, and takes a daily walk around the subdivision. So it wasn't a big deal.

It's a funny world.

Regards &c.,
Steve

P.S.: This is all true, with the possible exception of the thing about Boy's Life magazine, which I may have simply cancelled when I dropped out of Cub Scouts. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/20/2001 08:16:23 PM ----- BODY: I was once an "artist". I made drawings, beautifully rendered reproductions of old photographs, new photographs, and original works, done up in graphite and pen and ink. Some even for money, though that was an uncomfortable side effect of the fact that people wanted to pay me for them. When I went away to college, where I was paying for the privilege of trading in my chance at a liberal arts education for a trade school education, I started to notice the long line of bodies waiting for a chance to be interns and win their shot at the gold ring (no brass here, thanks), I also noticed how many of them were lazy, using a slim talent to justify calling everything they touched "art". I was always more in it for the experience, the feeling of losing oneself in the activity, than for the finished product. Of course, it was a wordless conversation; there was no way that I could find to have that experience without a pencil in my hand. Later, I realized that I enjoyed the experience far more than I did the product and that others, who could balance the presence of mind necessary to properly develop their technique with the pure enjoyment of it, had outstripped me in skill and were far more likely to make it into the internship of their dreams; still later, I realized that I had never managed to outgrow the love of fully participating in the act of creation. So I put my pencils and brushes and pens away. I still have them, though. They're in a box in my living room closet. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/19/2001 06:05:08 PM ----- BODY: Also: fish tacos at Gueros; talking community with Sarah, Shauna, and Rebecca outside while we wait for our seats; had an amazing talk with David from Moreover about mod_perl and XML in general; black cuba libres (with tequila, not rum); found out that Jodi is a porn queen; Jason is serious about that "hot dish" thing (tater tots?); argued religion with The Veen at Lane's, while everyone else watched a movie of a monk who fought off his foes with an unexpected weapon (I can see Taylor now, saying "I've got a set of Monk's Testicles with +8 against ninja!"); chatted with David Hudson about being an American (and a father) in Berlin; chatted with Dinah about documentation; gave Halcyon a hug (duh); called Cory Doctorow a freak in the "Weblogs in Business" panel (sorry, Cory, you know I was just making a point, and no offense intended ;) OK, that's enough, This is starting to sound like a freaking high school yearbook...

In other news, I just ordered two more rocking chairs for the front porch (for guests). -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/15/2001 02:46:00 PM ----- BODY: SxSW was a blast this year. In no particular order, three panels, mostly very well received; Courtney proposed to Lane at Fray Cafe, and was accepted, whereas I told a story and got heckled. But Heather Champ liked the story, so not all was lost. Drinks on the roof for the Adaptive Path party; more great Mexican food than you can shake a stick at; spent the last day with Pableaux (can you say oeuvos rellenos? yum!); got stamped by Amanda for evolt; Susan dropped off a copy of a book club circular with a screenshot of this site promoting Veen's new book; and more. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/7/2001 12:51:21 AM ----- BODY: Some people write because they have excellent imaginations and because as a result, worlds spill from their fingertips whenever they pick up a pen or approach a keyboard. I write because I have a difficult time remembering the experiences I've had, to say nothing of those I imagined. For some reason, writing about them gives them a life beyond the frail wisps my memory holds in shadowy halls. Is it wrong to want immortality for the relics of your life, if you yourself cannot have it? Is it wrong to even want your memories to last as long as you do, and stay fresher in your mind than the body that houses them all? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/5/2001 11:39:23 AM ----- BODY: Spring in North Carolina has brought, among other things, a sudden flowering of ornamental pear trees all over the city, particularly down the street from the house, in front of and surrounding the governor's mansion. It is simply beautiful; a bright and pleasant reminder that summer is on its way. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/28/2001 08:13:12 PM ----- BODY: "Unfortunately, you can't turn these people into servers." (nytimes, registration required)

The first piece of writing I've seen that suggests the obvious: one of the things driving the "economic downturn" (or at least the layoffs that are blasting away at consumer confidence levels) is an increase in efficiency enabled by the corporate use of Internet technology. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/27/2001 09:23:45 PM ----- BODY: Back in 1994, I got my dream job.

I was being paid, more money than I had ever seen in my life, to sit in a cubicle, surrounded by programmers in their cubicles, and hack Perl on a Sun box.

I had been given six months to write a Perl script that would read an ICD-9 input file and a CPT-4 input file and create a lookup table and potentially a crosswalk between the diagnostic codes (ICD) and procedural codes (CPT).

I had been told to use the time wisely, and learn as much as I could about anything that interested me, as long as we could later go to the President of the company and explain to him how he could sell it. It was an amazing time.

I found some of my old code on a floppy the other week, when I was moving out of my apartment (where I had lived since just before I got this amazing job) into my new house. Tonight, I finally fished out the floppy and mounted it on one of my Linux boxes here at work.

I suppose I had expected the code to be more familiar to me, more raw. I expected it to reveal a vast difference between how I thought and structured my programs then, and how I do now. I expected to see signs of massive growth, it being seven year old code and all. Unfortunately, with the exception of some basic stylistic differences (I used to line up the braces of a block with the first character of the statement that started the block, whereas now I tend to put the first brace on the end of the first line) and some basic naming conventions (using camelCase for function names and under_scores in variable names) it really wasn't all that different from what I'd write today, if I were given the same task.

On the one hand, it probably wouldn't take me anywhere near as long to write the same script now. So I suppose I should take that into account. But it still seems strange, like a reminder of how shallow my skills are, and how I've spent far more time broadening my knowledge base than deepening it.

On the other hand, I know how to do a lot more now, and better, and faster.

And I just bought a big old house, and co-own a company, and work with cool people doing cool things and I have a lot more control over my life than I did then. Back then, I was at the mercy of the whims of crazy people and senseless corporations. Now, I'm the crazy person forcing my whims on everyone else. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/27/2001 02:50:42 PM ----- BODY: I wish I hadn't read Michael Chrichton's Timeline, because one of the characters makes a side comment to the effect that the Middle Ages were a lot quieter with respect to background noise (such as automobiles, humming fans, refrigerator compressors, radios, airplanes, industrial machinery of all kinds, and so forth). Ever since I read that, mired in the middle of a description of an idyllic summer's day, I've been unable to ignore all the background noise around me. I find myself thinking about playing music to drown out the fan and disk drive noise of the computer I'd be using to play the music, which strikes me as completely absurd, since I won't be reducing the noise level, just obscuring it with more ordered noise.

I keep wishing I were somewhere quiet. That's all. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/26/2001 12:44:39 AM ----- BODY: Today, we finished putting the pipe insulation on the...well, yes, on the pipes. In the crawlspace. Heather helped, which was a pleasant surprise, as I had intended to do it all myself. It certainly made the work go faster, and we got it done in about an hour. We also figured out why it is so cold in our bathroom: there is very little insulation under the floor. So, looks like we go back to Home Depot or wherever and buy rolls and rolls of insulation.

Also on the home maintenance docket today: fixed the storm edging on the front door, glued an old CD rack back together, unpacked some more boxes, and moved the old chest into the back room (we got a new chest for our bedroom, so I finally migrated my clothes into it and Heather is using the old one).

This is the chest I bought when I decided my Kerouacian days of road trips and devil-may-care crazy living were probably over, and when I get tired of storing my underwear in old waxed cardboard longneck beer cases (which worked surprisingly well, FWIW). I bought a truck, which I still have, back in 1996, for the express purpose of buying the chest of drawers and bringing it home myself. And yes, I know I'm probably the only person alive who bought a truck just so he could throw out some old beer boxes. Thing is, I ended up keeping them anyway, and just today I unpacked them one more time while moving even more crap into the little chest/bedside table I just got. I figure I'll be about eighty and they'll send me off to the retirement home with four pair of socks and matching underwear, stuffed in an old heavy-duty waxed cardboard longneck beer box. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/26/2001 12:32:39 AM ----- BODY: Had a big shrimp boil with Rahul and Stace yesterday, filled up on corn and potatoes and crab dip then played spades until the idea of partners seemed like a detriment to continued goodwill, then switched to hearts and played into the early morning.

Earlier in the day we hung the bicycles in the back. There was much wringing of hands and measuring of clearances before the drilling commenced, so as to make it easier to hang the hooks; unfortunately, we didn't consider the effect of gravity on a bicycle being suspended by its rear wheel—seems the center of gravity is towards the center bar. My bicycle is higher up and towards the house (the roof inside the back porch has a 15 degree slant downwards towards the backyard) and then the other bicycle is towards the front and lower, and then both of them are secured with a cable lock and an eye hook drilled into the wall, between the seats. Oh, well. The rig seems to work okay, even if not exactly as intended. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/23/2001 10:14:14 AM ----- BODY:
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/21/2001 08:28:25 PM ----- BODY: Cable modems are good. BroadJump install software is bad. (Why can't they just include a loose piece of paper in the fifty pounds of installation materials that says "If you know what you're doing, just set your TCP stack to use DHCP and reset the cable modem."?) At any rate, happy Steve has fat pipe to Internet. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/18/2001 10:05:12 PM ----- BODY: Sorry for the long delay between updates to Sidney's diary. Life intrudes. I spent almost one day out of four last weekend either sitting in an airport or in an airplane. Went to SF Friday, had Advisory Board meeting Saturday, came back Sunday, flew to Atlanta for Thunder Lizard Monday and back Tuesday night. Got a bad cold Tuesday, mostly due to the combination of flying and poor sleep, and it's still with me. Spent the last couple of days entertaining Derek, who was speaking in Charlotte and stayed with us afterwards. Tonight is a lazy sleepy night. Saw Shadow of the Vampire and am still trying to decide if I liked it. It was inarguably unsettling, at any rate - Dafoe is amazing as Nosferatu. Anyway, just a bit loopy, trying to catch up on the mundane facts of my existence, and figured I'd drop a note here. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/8/2001 04:08:12 PM ----- BODY: Oh, now this is brilliant. Apparently, the folks at Amazon haven't read my article on Cross-Site Scripting.

-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/7/2001 10:50:40 AM ----- BODY: Whee. The nice folks at Blog you! Blog you! Blog you! think this site has "unnotable content"! I'd agree. Thanks, and good day. I suspect they only bothered to review this site because they couldn't find another J. (Besides, my favorite feedback of this sort came a few months ago, from someone who simply wrote "no". Why say anything else? Why say anything at all? People talk too damn much anyway.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/6/2001 03:03:29 AM ----- BODY: Saw The Big Kahuna yesterday (and the day before - I watched it twice). Excellent movie. It has me thinking about life... and death. While up on the roof yesterday, picking pecans and leaves out of the gutters and sweeping the leaves off the roof, I thought about nothing but sweeping and pecans. It was a sort of bliss I hadn't felt in a while. Pure action, no thought. As close as I've come to zen in quite a while, I'd say.

I came in to move the webdesign-L list to a new server and a new domain, and was told by an unsubscribing member that they were leaving because I was "petty". This on the heels of another member crowing that he loved spam and that he'd do it again. I don't know. I've been giving of myself for almost four years, spending time I could be spending doing instead of thinking, being instead of worrying about who I have become or who I want to be, giving instead of taking. Sure, I've benefited from it, I think - I know more than I did, I'm far more tolerant than I was, I care more about people, real people and their problems, than I ever did. All I ask is that they don't make it harder on me as a result, that they think and try and achieve.

Some have, so I can't really complain. I only wish the others would leave quietly and save their ignorant, hurtful comments for their cube-mates and others, and recognize that if they don't find what they're looking for, if they find what they didn't want, that they leave quietly and peacefully and understand that every time they refuse to take a more difficult, but more rewarding course, they sear something inside of me. Every time I have to deal face to face with someone's ignorance and they cover it up with a closing remark that makes me question why I bother, it hurts those who really care.

In less than two months, I will have put four years of time and effort into something that anyone can ruin for me in an ill-worded sentence. What's the point in that?

Perhaps that's my lesson - that it shouldn't have to ruin anything, that I should move on and see these ignorant bastards for what they are, and get over it. But it still hurts. And if I didn't think that fifteen hundred other people still had a chance to learn and to prosper as a result of something I nurtured into being and sustained, I'd give it all up in a heartbeat for a day on the roof with no thoughts at all. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/6/2001 12:19:17 AM ----- BODY: Sore from yesterday. I forgot to mention that someone stopped me on the way out of the rent-a-movie place and asked me for directions to a church. That's, what, ten people in two weeks? I've gotta start spending more time outside to get my average up to one per day, I guess. And no more time in the backyard. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/5/2001 01:09:02 AM ----- BODY: Good weekend. Furnished the house, mostly. Swept the porch. Met a neighbor (Benny) who is painting his house grey. Cleaned the glass in the lamps on the porch and front storm door. Cleaned the gutters, which is to say I restored them to service as gutters, from their (apparently rather lengthy) hiatus as pecan and leaf traps. We now have two rather large baskets and half a brown paper grocery bag (the big ones) filled with pecans. Raked nine-tenths of the backyard before it started to really rain. Swept the leaves off the roof in the back. Prepared for the final onslaught of pipe insulation (we needed some 3/4" insulation for the sinks) and generally played handyman. Removed old switch for flourescent lamp above countertop in kitchen, the lamp having been removed last weekend. Replaced switch with outlet. Learned valuable lesson in trust when Heather reminded me to check the wires with the voltage meter before grasping a hold of them, then spent ten minutes trying to figure out which breaker it was, anyway, that turned off the juice to that particular receptacle... I can hardly feel my thumbs. (Not from the shock, which I avoided, but from the raking, which I did not.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/2/2001 12:45:09 PM ----- BODY: DSL Update: It's all about "bridge taps". Sigh. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/2/2001 11:17:31 AM ----- BODY: Oh, and we're going through our own little DSL nightmare. I feel so much closer to others who have had the same problems. It took Bell South two weeks to update our address properly after moving our old phone number to the new house, so COVAD couldn't provision the line until the address was updated, and when finally, two weeks later, the address was updated, COVAD said the loop was too long, despite what Earthlink, Bellsouth, and DSLReports said. So the drama isn't played out yet... -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 2/2/2001 10:22:48 AM ----- BODY: Long week, so just a few random observations. We now have two rocking chairs on the porch. We are entirely moved in and mostly unpacked. I emailed someone from Wake County Animal Control about the squirrel and was told to look up "Critter Control" in the Yellow Pages. I guess it's a good thing we're in the city, else I might have been told to look up "Fine Dining". Hardwood floors need to be swept. Often, apparently. Pipe insulation is a good thing, but it only makes a difference if you insulate all of your hot water pipes (I got halfway before I gave in). I raked the front yard; felt good. I don't know how good it will feel to rake the backyard - it's a lot bigger. People on the Internet are very excited about "Compost!", as am I. But not with quite the same depth of feeling. We've only been here what, a week and a half? I've already given nine people directions (Capital Bridal, Glenwood Ave., Glenwood Ave., Capital Blvd., Broughton High School, Crabtree Mall, Durham(!), Glenwood Ave., and Crabtree again.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/26/2001 05:32:44 PM ----- BODY: Heh. dumb motherfucker. (For an explanation, see what comes up when you search for the linked phrase at google, and see the HugeDisk story that spawned the whole thing.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/23/2001 11:38:05 PM ----- BODY: My latest article, Modifying Styles, for Apple's Internet Developer site, is finally online. Enjoy. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/23/2001 11:23:23 PM ----- BODY: We're officially moved into the new house. Apparently, someone else took residence before we did, though: there appears to be a squirrel or some other vermin eating away at the corner of the eaves in the back of the kitchen (!) and making himself a little apartment in there. Ah, well. Welcome to home ownership, I guess :)

On the bright side, I drove a 24 foot Ryder truck on Saturday and only killed a lampshade. Not bad by any standard, in my opinion. It'd been years since I drove a truck that big. (I used to drive oil trucks in high school, though not for any long distance. It's funny how I'd remembered everything but how the simple brute force of inertia can keep a big truck going for miles.)

Of course, Heather and I are discovering many muscles we didn't even know we had, much less know could ache as bad as they do. But we're moved in, we have everything but the plants and the TV, and we spend our nights getting used to the noises the house makes. The cats are finally brave enough to come out from under the clawfoot bathtub, where they cowered in mortal terror for the first day. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/17/2001 11:05:10 AM ----- BODY: I always thought I learned the most from the people who got angry with me for being ignorant. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/13/2001 01:46:05 AM ----- BODY: I have no King, period. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have much of a president, either. And our judicial system seems to be about to take on a fairly radical swing towards ignorance and mean-spiritedness. I wonder if Ashcroft has ever read any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson (doubted Christianity), Benjamin Franklin (Deist, believed in an otiose God - a Creator with no hand in human affairs), George Washington (a search of his papers at the Library of Congress reveals two mentions of Jesus, both in other peoples' last wills and testaments), or the Federalist Papers, which don't mention Jesus at all. Funny, that. Anyway, where do all these beady-eyed, evil-minded, ignorant old white guys come from?

Sorry. I just watched episode one of Eyes on the Prize, and my mind is still reeling with the thought that Emmet Till's murderers went free, that people once wore Klan outfits without masks and said "nigger" when referring to men far more educated than they were, and that sort of thing. So Ashcroft and his ilk put me in a foul mood. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/11/2001 01:49:11 PM ----- BODY: Metcalfe's Law:
the power of a network grows by the square of the size of the network
Champeon's Elitist Corollary:
due to limitations in the capabilities of a consistent percentage of the nodes, the power of a network remains constant regardless of growth.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/9/2001 10:39:22 AM ----- BODY: Surprise snow last night. Not enough to stick, and it's already melted off the road and lawn in the sun, but a dusting clings to the shadowy places. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/6/2001 12:47:32 AM ----- BODY: Just saw Little Big Man again. I think my favorite scene in all of cinema is when Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) goes to die, and it starts raining. He sits up, woken by the rain, and asks:

"Am I still in this world?"

Little Big Man/Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) answers:

"Yes, grandfather."

And Lodge Skins sits back and says:

"Euugh."
"Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't." -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/5/2001 10:16:29 AM ----- BODY: Apparently, I'm a superhero. Well, I wouldn't take it that far, but Meryl Evans has some nice things to say about hesketh.com and our involvement in the Web Standards Project. Thanks, Meryl! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/4/2001 03:06:19 PM ----- BODY: Heather and I had dinner with the former owner of our new house last night, and we learned a bit of the house's history and evolution. It's amazing to me how much I missed during the two inspections. For example, the den was doubled in size a dozen years ago - which is evident by the differences in the foundation underneath, the siding, the dark strip of wood between the old and new hardwood floors, and so forth. The kitchen is believed to have been added ten years after the house was built, and it seems that the wrap-around portion of the front porch was added at the same time - again, evident by the seams between the porch ceiling and floor of each half. Oh, and it turns out that as late as 1986, the house was divided into three different apartments... you can tell where the old walls and bathrooms, etc. were by looking at the old nailholes in the floor. I'm relishing the near-constant opportunity to pay attention to things I usually take for granted. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/2/2001 10:58:23 PM ----- BODY: Instead of a year-end retrospective, I'm doing a year-long retrospective. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 1/2/2001 01:44:28 PM ----- BODY: I've redesigned. I just decided to reuse the old design. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/26/2000 11:55:35 AM ----- BODY: So, it seems there are several (meaning three or so) pecan trees in the backyard of the new house. Consider this an official request for pecan pie recipes—Heather and I will try them out and report back on which pie is best.

I mean, we've got a lot of pecans in the backyard... -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/24/2000 09:57:03 AM ----- BODY: Twenty Questions about the travesty of law we witnessed a couple weeks ago. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/24/2000 12:22:56 AM ----- BODY: Give us grateful hearts
and make us ever mindful
of the needs of others.


Consider this a reminder to myself. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/19/2000 07:53:21 PM ----- BODY: I am now officially on vacation. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/13/2000 01:07:11 PM ----- BODY:
If we assume—as I do—that the members of that court and the judges who would have carried out its mandate are impartial, its decision does not even raise a colorable federal question.

What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

I respectfully dissent.
from Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion, which everyone interested in the outcome of the US presidential elections should read. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/11/2000 12:17:58 PM ----- BODY: QED. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/5/2000 03:21:34 PM ----- BODY: Yet another WaSP Press Release, this time expressing hope for the future. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 12/3/2000 01:29:48 PM ----- BODY: So, Heather and I have been house hunting for about six years, in one form or another, but only recently we got serious about it: hired a home buyer's agent, spent the past two months driving around Raleigh looking at some beautiful (and some not-so-beautiful) houses, and generally despaired of ever finding what we wanted. Basically, we wanted a Victorian with fireplace and usable porch, a big kitchen, and enough bedrooms to put up guests (our parents, siblings, and any other visitors from among our online friends). The rest was pretty much optional, but we figured hardwood floors and a clawfoot bathtub would be nice touches.

Anyway, as the last event of what has been a hellacious month, we walked through a house (number four of six that day) that was just what we wanted. An 1871 Victorian in the Federal style, well-maintained, two stories, three bedrooms and three and a half baths, cedar closet, fireplaces in every bedroom and formal rooms (they don't work but we're going to see about fixing them so they do), huge kitchen, wrap-around porch, new screen room on the back, decent sized yard, off-street parking, etc. And it's only two blocks from the Krispy Kreme in Historic Oakwood, in downtown Raleigh.

We went ahead and made an offer, at about 5% below asking, and it was accepted, much to our surprise. We just have to rent the house back to the current occupant for the next month, until her townhouse is ready.

So, needless to say, we're pretty excited. Not to mention amazed at the prospect of becoming property owners after so many years of renting. I was doing the math yesterday and we've already spent more in rent in the past six years than my mother spent on her house in 1974. And what do we have to show for it? A fridge with a broken icemaker, a leaky bathtub enclosure, and worn out indoor/outdoor carpets. Heh.

But no more! Soon, any and all who visit our lovely home in the heart of the South will be greeted by an amiable old fella in seersucker, rocking on a porch and sucking back a mint julep. At least, once it stops snowing and returns to normal around here. :) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/30/2000 02:13:50 PM ----- BODY: OK, you can all stop sending me the URL for this map of weblogs. :) Thanks, though. (I still think it's a good idea and something that needs to be more up to date, but the map at Bird on a Wire is a start...) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/30/2000 01:54:48 AM ----- BODY: A night at the Inn Complete, presented as a chat script:

michaelp: Dogs can't feel suffering; suffering is only possible for beings that have a sense of the future.
schampeo: What does he mean by that?
justin: it means he beats his dog and I don't.
justin: give me a beer.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/30/2000 12:00:23 AM ----- BODY: Make your own Red Meat comix. Enjoy. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/29/2000 06:03:41 PM ----- BODY: Curious: within five minutes of eachother, I got two messages asking me if: Perhaps the time is right for a blogger map? Sort of like the old network diagram, only plotted on a map. I know that the DNS has a way to check for geographical location of a server, if the server supports it via an LOC record, but that's not necessarily the most reliable indicator. Perhaps everyone can just put a simple location line on their blog, say:
<span class="location">Raleigh, NC</span>
or something. Then we could spider them all and build a map. Just a thought. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/28/2000 11:13:40 PM ----- BODY: Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the "growth rings" piece. Even the folks who weren't sure quite what to make of it. I'm not sure what to make of it, either, so don't let that bother you. Heather said tonight that I always wanted my life to read like a great story, and I suppose she's right. Sure makes it hell on me during the times when the writing is stilted and repetitive, the character development is lagging, and the plot seems to wander. But there are times when my life and the story of it both take on a magical quality, a transcendent escape from time and the mundane, and that's when it seems all worth while. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/27/2000 04:20:20 PM ----- BODY: We in the United States do not deserve self-government if we allow such practices to continue. This is ridiculous. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/27/2000 01:34:15 PM ----- BODY: The immigration authorities at his disembarkation had not been satisfied to leave a blank after the word Profession on their papers as he had done on his passport. (That passport, official proof of his existence, racing after him, somewhere behind in the desert!) They had said: "Surely monsieur must do something." And Kit, seeing that he was about to contest the point, had interposed quickly: "Ah, yes, Monsieur is a writer, but he is modest!" They had laughed, filled in the space with the word ecrivain, and made the remark that they hoped he would find inspiration in the Sahara. For a while, he had been infuriated by their stubbornness in insisting upon his having a label, an etat-civil. Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day's thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning —namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated.

(from The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/25/2000 11:33:02 PM ----- BODY: Just by way of having found it out and wanting to share: the King James version of the Bible contains the word "smart" just once, and (according to Merriam-Webster) it means:

Main Entry: 2 smart
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: Middle English smerten, from Old English smeortan; akin to Old High German smerzan to pain
Date: 13th century
1 : to cause or be the cause or seat of a sharp poignant pain; also : to feel or have such a pain
2 a : to feel or endure distress, remorse, or embarrassment <smarting from wounded vanity -- W. L. Shirer>
b : to pay a heavy or stinging penalty <would have to smart for this foolishness>

Well, draw your own conclusions. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/23/2000 12:14:12 AM ----- BODY: I wrote this a few years ago. I like it. Or, to be more accurate, I will have to tell a story. My friend Dale and I were sitting in my rented room in North Raleigh, drinking cheap beer and listening to music. I put on Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and played "Shelter From The Storm", and asked Dale if he liked it. His response: "that's like asking me if I like the Atlantic Ocean". I always liked that response.

Heather's grandmother Janie died a couple of days ago. Tomorrow, I go to have Thanksgiving with Heather's dad and his family. Saturday I go to say my goodbyes to Janie. By way of explanation, I give you this.

I like it.


Both cycle and straight line, smooth, broken and filled, with phase shifts and quanta, growth is a process. So many of my memories have taken on that unreal photographic feel, that glossy finish, like varnish, backed with rough paper.

How could I remember what I looked like?

I was ten years old when my father left. A scared-looking kid with a mop of unruly brown hair grinning sans teeth at the camera, slightly cross-eyed. The smell of libraries - paper and dust, mote-filled sunlit windows, and the coming of night. The feel of empty spaces. The dampness of tears. The swirl of not knowing what comes next. The awful churn of finding out.

I was fourteen when I took my first bus ride to high school. Cold, the first days of autumn, rainy, new clothes. And yet still not quite fashionable enough, though I took great pains. I walked through the much taller trees, wet branches tugging at my new windbreaker, trying hard not to trip over the roots underfoot. A skinny, so much taller, tired-looking kid with great circles under my eyes. Rings.

My first moment of transcendence came in a rocking chair, listening to reel-to-reel tapes of the Beatles while the wood fire roared and my bones stopped hurting. The grain of the wooden arms of the chair showed through the worn places on its edges. I think I must have been half-awake before. I know I was about eight years old. Not suddenly, but like an awakening, I stopped hurting. At least for a while.

I met my best friend in the woods behind my house, which was behind his house, too, as it turned out. I was four. He was tanned, a year older, athletic already, and said certain words funny. He was from upstate New York, I of Maine parents returned from Syracuse and Indiana. My brother was less than a year old. My friend and I shared the same name and played guns, read Sgt. Rock comics, and rode our bicycles in dangerous ways. I borrowed from his greatness. Sometimes I wonder whether I ever paid him back. A smiling, confident teen, with the onset of rings under his eyes and fear. Growth rings.

The feeling of building a wood fire to thaw frozen toes. Impatience during a time when you must be patient or you will reap no reward. Fires go out if started improperly. They are much harder to start again. Cold cheeks and hot cocoa. The memory of black ice beneath the snow, now far away. The slow crackle of the tinder, the gentle, lazy float of the ashes upward into the flue.

Steve used to build treehouses. He said later that he wanted to be an architect. He's managing a restaurant now. The difference between building and sustaining is clear, isn't it?

One of our friends drank a bottle of Jack Daniels before a concert, and they couldn't wake him up. The smell of the summer backseat of a car, sitting unstarted under the shade tree, after Steve left for indoctrination at the maritime academy. He was crucified by quarrelsome parents and his peers. I got to keep his speakers when they sold the car out from under him. Another friend showed up for the radar detector. The cold haunting of the backseat where Mark died. In eighty degree summer's end weather.

I took to wearing army pants and smoking in my car. We wore Polo to hide the gasoline, diesel, kero and LP smells because washing couldn't get rid of a night job at a convenience store. And we only had a few hours before curfew. I learned to deal with people. My brother worked there for four years. My friend Mike broke his leg, a greenstick fracture, and got hooked on morphine. He later apologized, as if it were necessary.

Steve and I used to listen to AC/DC and the Kinks, riding around in his truck, on backwoods roads, up powerlines and down shady bowers, spitting gravel from the tires as if we owned the stones themselves.

"Oh, the stories
have been told
of kings and days of old
but there's no
England now."

We would no sooner build a treehouse than tear it down for the wood to build the next one. We always wrecked the best wood in the process, and had to go on midnight raids to get more. He would play the music loud if he was really upset. We couldn't talk, that way, and I have always wondered and will always wonder if we could have said anything that would have changed the way things turned out.

My brother speaks of our common fear, of being abandoned with caring, but simple, friends of the family, who didn't understand us. Of looking out a picture window for the telltale square headlights of my mother's car, home from work lets go get pizza. We fought to be ourselves, turning in the process. You cannot fight to remain yourself if it is not a fighter you hope to preserve. I survived, as did he. His writing speaks of reaching out, only to find the distance too great.

"I am left with eggs and ice cream...
at the frantic pace of the city."

A girlfriend was attacked by squirrels, of all things. She had left a bar of Toblerone in an open window, and the chocolate-mad rodents tore through her room. My roommate drank Early Times whiskey and stayed up until morning typing away at an old Remington, thinking all the while of his father, killed by thieves in his cab. His aunt attempted suicide. His mother paid his bills on time. He worked sporadically on a quilt which celebrated the freedom of the African-American, laughed along with Howard Stern, and ate his Super Size fries with lots of Diamond Crystal salt. It stuck better to the fries, he said.

My car, filled with all of my earthly belongings, bounced unmercifully on the old concrete seams on Interstate 81, headed south. I never thought I'd make it. I even stopped to hacksaw part of my fender away so as to avoid losing a tire. Maryland was a dream of flowers, Virginia a horse-filled cloud. I remember driving through the trees coming into North Carolina, my home, and being reminded of the fall in New England, though the leaves had not yet begun to turn.

The larger trees had blown down, tipped over from the wind as the rain softened their grip on the red clay soil. Their entire root systems lay exposed, as the trees lay dead in the forest. The younger trees, oddly, didn't pull out of the ground, but broke off about halfway up. Hurricane. Taking both young and old with it, but in slightly different ways.

My grandfather died. I remember varnish. Salt tears and fear, and golden light reflecting through my watery eyes off old and polished wood. My grandmother died. I purchased a suit on credit. My family is very old, so there are lots of good examples of how the stones fade in the acid rain. I have no high expectations. I am content, watching the spreading canopy of faraway limbs. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/22/2000 11:39:02 AM ----- BODY: OK, cool. The idiots at it&t have categorized this site under Offices of Physicians (except Mental Health Specialists), which we know is silly. I was really curious as to how things would fall. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/21/2000 01:22:21 PM ----- BODY: “Literally, every ballot counts. We’re down to that,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, associate director of the Florida Institute of Government at Florida State University.

Well, duh. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/21/2000 12:11:36 AM ----- BODY: If anyone ever asks me whether a Hindu wedding is more fun than a Catholic wedding, I can finally answer. Saturday was spent helping my friends Rahul and Stacie do the wedlock thing, first (at nine in the morning) the excellent twelve-ritual Hindu wedding, complete with color commentary from Rahul's uncle ("Okay, here's a real Kodak moment, everyone!" and "This next step involves tying a bracelet around Stacie's wrist. Oops, it looks like Rahul is having trouble. Stacie, on the other hand, is doing fine. Looks like we know who the smart one in this family is..."). It was a blast. The Catholic ceremony, on the other hand, was sparse and somewhat chilling by comparison, though beautiful in an austere way, and frankly couldn't hold a candle to the rich symbolism and laid-back nature of the earlier. Suffice it to say that we ended the night with Cuban cigars and Dewar's, and generally had a great time. So here's wishing Rahul and Stacie the best of luck and a long, happy life together. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/16/2000 10:31:51 AM ----- BODY: Yesterday, I got a great offer from it&t international business directories. They sent it air mail, so I'm really impressed so far. I open the delicate, tissue-thin envelope, to find an even more delicate, tissue-thin order form. And what is it they're offering me? Why, to have the champeon.com domain (aka "Champeon Family Domain") listed in their directory, under NAICS category 23595, "Building Equipment and Other Machinery Installation Contractors", with old, outdated phone and fax numbers, obviously scraped from an old copy of the whois database. (I moved my domains from NSI to register.com this summer, because NSI believes that customer service involves hiring the mentally deficient and then making their customers wait an hour on hold to talk to them.)

The kicker: if I respond within 14 days, I save an amazing $29.94 off the regular price of $998.00!

I wonder if they'd list this domain under "Clam Dip and Other Delights"? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/13/2000 01:36:00 PM ----- BODY: As part of my long-standing campaign against redundancy, I'd just like to chime in here and say that I love the idea of request handlers mapped to backend processes. For example, if you have a script named 'login.cgi', and you're used to placing stuff in /cgi-bin/, you end up with /cgi-bin/login.cgi - it's so much shorter to just map /login to that script (or to a mod_perl module that performs the same function, only faster and more efficiently). OK, I admit it. I'm a freak about this stuff. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/12/2000 01:33:56 AM ----- BODY: On the off chance (highly unlikely!) that any spammers are scraping this site, please send all unsolicited bulk email here. Morons. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/10/2000 11:14:14 AM ----- BODY: I'd just like to say for the record that I'm nauseous at the thought that the Republicans would accuse anyone of trying to "politicize" an irregular ballot; that they would suggest that a slow, reasonable resolution of the affair is "illegal" or "a challenge to democracy"; that they would try to force Gore to concede before all the results were in and tallied in a very close race; or that they would suggest that asking for a recount in a close race is just the beginning of a slippery slope towards endless recounts. I've read or heard all of these things in the past two days, from folks like George W. Bush, who seems to think that such comments will help him rule, from James Baker, who seems to think that democracy should be a rough-and-tumble, basketball game sort of thing, from Bush campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes, who seems to think that legality is something that should be both strict when it favors her cause and slack when it may not, and from others.

All I can think is that the Republicans are running scared and using every dirty trick in their lawyers' books to keep their tenuous hold on power that is not even theirs by rights according to the same laws that their candidate will be asked to preserve, protect, and defend. To say nothing of the worry that they seem to be fundamentally worried about the fact that it's a bunch of blacks, West Indians and Jews who may hold the key to unseating them -- something they should have thought of before, in my opinion.

I sincerely hope that Bush and his supporters do not honestly believe that finding out the true will of the people is something that "undermines the constitutional process of selecting the President", and that we should accept the faulty data resulting from a poorly designed ballot (on thousands of which, apparently, elderly Jews voted for a Nazi sympathizer and for Vice President Gore, which any sane person can see is probably a mistake being corrected) rather than allowing for another vote. Nothing, in my mind, would undermine the constitutional process for electing the leader of this country like knowing that said leader would rather retain power than find out the truth. Even Nixon resigned when it was obvious to all that he was lying to protect his own interests. Bush hasn't even been elected yet and I've lost all hope of ever being able to respect him as a leader. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 11/7/2000 08:12:49 PM ----- BODY: OK, now I'm back from SF. Whirlwind week; summary to follow. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/30/2000 02:59:55 PM ----- BODY: OK, I'm in SF. More reports as the interesting stuff happens. If you are in SF and want to get up with me, give me a call on my cell (919 395-4851). I'll be speaking Wednesday morning (Growing Online Communities), Wednesday afternoon (on the W3C), on a panel Thursday noon (How and Why of Computer Books), judging the Cool Site in a Day competition Thursday evening, and on Bryan Boyer's Web Apps panel on Friday. Hope to see friends in the audience. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/27/2000 01:32:32 PM ----- BODY: Not much activity here lately, I know. I've been busy. I'm still busy. I'm going to be even busier next week. On the bright side, it's a vacation of sorts, and I'll be in SF. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/24/2000 05:39:22 PM ----- BODY: Call me an ignorant, lazy programmer, but I'll be damned if I use e-mail. My copy of Ed Krol's Whole Internet, dating back to 1993, uses "email", and I see no reason to change. Next thing you know, Tony is going to tell us that it should more properly be spelled "Molly-guards". (Funny thing is, that's how the Jargon File lists it, but not how O'Reilly's own author info page uses it. I guess the-re re-ally is no standard way to spe-ll- the-se words...) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/24/2000 04:41:56 PM ----- BODY: Dick Cavett can not only moonwalk, but he's also playing the Narrator in the upcoming Broadway revival of Rocky Horror. Let's see Jay Leno do that. One of the items in the perennial list of "Things About Today's Graduates" that always makes us feel hideously old and obsolete should be: "today's graduates will never have known the thrill of intelligent late night talk shows, except for Letterman, which they watch for Know Your Cuts of Meat, not Stupid Pet Tricks." I still lament the passing of Tom Snyder as a late night presence. There's nothing quite like ending your day with an agreeably dorky guy with the world's worst combover, listening to him talk about how he's going to get plowed on chilled vodka and play with his trains after the show. I don't have cable, can you tell? Nowadays, it's a choice between that idiot Kilborn and tarot psychics. (Of course, there's always PI, but come on, late night should be for chilling with artificially tanned old guys with a million friends, not watching Marilyn Manson argue with soccer moms.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/22/2000 08:37:45 PM ----- BODY: So, Building DHTML GUIs ended up on a list of burned books. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/22/2000 07:59:49 PM ----- BODY: Today, I saw a shiny, waxed white Chrysler New Yorker today with a "Tupperware" sticker in the back window and the telltale signs of one of those little chrome-plated plastic fish that had been removed from the rear of the car. From this I can only conclude that the owner found Tupperware a more exciting and spiritually rewarding enterprise than Christianity. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/16/2000 11:51:21 AM ----- BODY: This morning, I spent ten minutes sitting in my truck in the parking lot of the building where I work, just watching a spider build a web in the cab, between the windshield and the passenger side door. It ran scurrying from one side of the windshield to the other, and then began to spin. On the passenger side, near the window, there was a fly, buzzing in that stupid way flies have, against the window and the post that separates the window and windshield. The spider scurried, the fly buzzed and bumped, the spider spun. I kept thinking that it would be great to just grab the stupid fly and give it to the spider, save him the trouble of building a web that I'd just brush away in seconds anyway.

As I sat, watching, I listened to Temple of the Dog playing "Hunger Strike", which always takes me back to the house on the Toggenberg road; the chill coming down with that feeling of inevitability that autumn always brings, Bob screaming to the voice on the radio "just get a fucking job if you're hungry!", which, of course, missed the point entirely, but then, Bob wasn't the sort to sit and contemplate. Bob got things done, or got others to get them done; he drank his Budweiser with a purpose, he drove his truck with a purpose, he drove his hammer with a purpose. I doubt that he ever spent any time at all watching spiders and flies, and if he did, I doubt that he had any sympathies one way or the other.

There's no point, really, just filling you in on my morning. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/14/2000 09:58:16 PM ----- BODY: If you type "lonely" into the address/location field of a browser, it takes you to a hardcore porn site. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/11/2000 05:52:29 PM ----- BODY: Help Dinah defeat a spammer. If, over the past day or so, you received email purportedly from:
<dinah@metagrrrl.com>:
with the subject line "Strong volume" or "Going strong" promoting "Executive Help Services, Inc. (EHSV)" and ClickIncomes ..., please keep it and forward a copy

with complete headers to Dinah. She's suing the bastards, and more power to her. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/8/2000 11:40:48 PM ----- BODY: Note to self: read this before voting in the ICANN general elections... -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/8/2000 11:03:04 PM ----- BODY: A one liter bottle of Glenfiddich (empty) contains roughly $15 worth of pennies. Mine contained $14.67 (including one Canadian penny and one dime, which I've valued here at $0.01, for science.) I'm not sure if that's enough to buy a new (full) bottle of Glenfiddich to replace it with, but I have a pretty good feeling about this 750 mL Bombay Sapphire gin bottle that's half full of dimes... -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/6/2000 11:23:56 AM ----- BODY: Does anyone else think it odd that after more than a dozen years of brutal oppression by Milosevic and the state, the first thing protestors do when the government falls is dress up like policemen? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/4/2000 12:27:35 AM ----- BODY: A long, miserable day of bugfixing and wrestling with CPAN. It's good to be home. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 10/1/2000 01:51:51 AM ----- BODY: Wow, this site looks like baby turds in Netscape Communicator 4.7 for LinuxPPC... Looks like I need to tune my X config. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/28/2000 10:33:08 AM ----- BODY: I have not (and will not) win a TiVo. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/20/2000 05:29:51 PM ----- BODY: Oh, now this is fucking brilliant.
A federally created commission studying online child protection will recommend to Congress that an independent research bureau be created to review filtering software and may also push for a special kid-friendly Internet zone, its chairman says.
special kid-friendly Internet zone? What are these people smoking?
Telage said there is a "50-50 shot" that new Web domain categories could be created, like ".kids," reserved for kid-friendly content. Others have advocated ".xxx" for adult sites, although Telage said the commission has free-speech reservations about that suggestion.
Well, thank heaven they don't want to isolate smut to its own corner of the Internet. They'd rather force non-smut providers to buy domains in a new ".kids" TLD, instead of relying on a filter so simple it would destroy the criminals that make blocking/filtering software. They'd rather allow Disney and the like to dumb down what anyone under 18 can see. Oh, my aching head. Is it any surprise that the head of this commission is a former NSI executive? And we're letting Donna Rice tell us how to fight immoral content? Donna "There goes Gary Hart's Campaign" Rice? What next? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/20/2000 02:14:09 PM ----- BODY: Current geek toy: MacOS X. I just got my copy of the beta (along with a mouse I didn't order, instead of the spare AC adapter I did order, but Apple's being nice and letting me keep the mouse, yay!) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/20/2000 12:14:49 PM ----- BODY: I've been thinking about the whole mp3 brouhaha lately (and spending a lot of time with Macster, searching out new music, and doing research at allmusic -- thanks to Jeff for the pointer) and it strikes me that the problem the RIAA et al. have isn't with publicly traded music per se, but with a loss of control over the packaging/distribution. They've been distributing and promoting albums and singles, selected for their commercial impact (and for radio airplay) for so long that the prospect of people being able to choose which songs to listen to must frighten them to death. It's not just about loss of revenue (studies have shown that music sales are up since Napster launched, for example) but rather about loss of control.

Maybe this is obvious to some folks, but it struck me -- as I was cherry-picking music from various albums based on recommendations from reviews at allmusic -- that the music industry, just like the advertising industry, needs to be able to leverage the awesome statistical power of knowing what people are actually consuming. Take a service like cddb (now Gracenote), for example, which sells (or otherwise makes available) aggregate statistical data on what CDs you're listening to, based on a scrubbed dataset resulting from your inserting a CD into your PC (if you're running software that queries the cddb service for song titles). MP3s already contain this data, so there is no need to query anyone's database. The statistics that cddb provides are just part of the picture. I have to wonder whether Napster's endgame is to either sell information regarding what was downloaded to the music industry, or whether they are maneuvering to be purchased by the music industry or one of its major players. In any case, it's a massive reversal of power for the industry. They're used to being able to promote a no-talent halfwit like Britney Spears, while ignoring entire genres.

I've learned more about the kind of music I like in the past month (thanks to allmusic and amazon and Napster) than I had in the past ten years. I'm taking my first tentative steps towards actually collecting music based on genre, rather than sticking with tried and true favorites (I always liked fugazi, for instance, but now I'm listening to Rites of Spring, Knapsack, Christie Front Drive, Get Up Kids, Falling Forward, Jimmy Eat World, and the Promise Ring, all of whom play music in the same vein, and most of whom I am finding I really enjoy -- without help from the insane control policies of the old school distribution channels. I don't think I could even buy most of this stuff at Tape World in Bangor. Heh.) It's immensely liberating, and it's helping me get out of the ruts I'd fallen into (there are only so many times you can listen to the same two Toad the Wet Sprocket albums, even if you do really like Covered In Roses...) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/19/2000 01:31:42 PM ----- BODY: OK, just one complaint: why do people call AOL an Internet company? It's not. It never has been. It's a giant, proprietary BBS. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/19/2000 02:06:54 AM ----- BODY: Est res magna tacere -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/18/2000 03:05:01 PM ----- BODY: Here's a little something I wrote for Webdesign-L back in April of 1999, when Jamie Zawinski resigned from the Mozilla project. I only call your attention to it because Dinah recently reposted it to her blog, with my permission, and I think it's worth reposting. Unfortunately, developer.com has screwed up their archives so badly that the article I wrote for them, discussing Mozilla (where I interviewed Jamie) is nowhere to be found. (sigh) If I can find the original, I'll repost it somewhere.

The post follows:

Oddly enough, I wouldn't have heard of jwz if I hadn't been rooting around the underbellies of various technologies. I first became aware of him after reading the XDefaults file for Navigator for X Windows, which remains one of the best, most thoroughly commented things I've ever seen. And it's only a set of property values used by Navigator, and to top that, he starts out by saying that XDefaults files are dangerous and difficult to keep in sync with the applications to which they are supposed to apply. It's not even /code/, for heaven's sake :) He took the initiative to make a statement about the use and applicability of a given form of technology, something he didn't have to do, and did it well. I have an enormous respect for him on that basis. Everything I've seen that he's had a hand in reflects this commitment. It's inspiring, to me, anyway.

Later, I found about:jwz, xkeycaps, and various other excellent hacks that were his fault. And of course, the fact that he can apparently code, write, design, and build bookshelves out of Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse specials, only increases my admiration ;)

I wrote an article on Mozilla.org for developer.com a year ago, and got a chance to interview him. What I found was that he is obviously deeply concerned with the standards process, though we disagreed on the nature of the browser as a tool - he took the tack that standards documented what worked, and allowed everyone else to implement them the same way. Straight IETF dogma, but it's what worked for twenty years.

I took the tack that things were moving too fast to rely on post-hoc docs, and that the W3C was trying to synchronize development /before/ the software was released, rather than later, because the Web is more than just a word processor or text editor - the universality of the medium demands it. He was kind enough to write back and thank me for the chance to address some of the issues, and noted that it was good to see them presented from another perspective.

I don't know if it's just the timing, or the context (Netscape gobbled up by AOL, the InterNIC transformed into a billboard for Network Solutions - "the dot com company", the MS antitrust trial, and the release of IE5 with an obvious contempt for full standards support) but I'll admit that it wasn't just the /fact/ that Jamie quit both Netscape and Mozilla.org, but the fact that he was so conscientious about documenting his reasons, that struck me with such force. In the midst of mass dissembling, Jamie took some time to speak his mind.

I've always thought that the key to understanding the US Declaration of Independence, and the thing that separated it from any other manifesto, was the up-front statement of the belief that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should document the causes which impel them to the separation". Jamie, in his writings about his resignation, reflects this ideal, and I respect him for taking the time to document his dissatisfaction, when, as many have pointed out, he could have just taken the money and played the hermit.

Now, back to the issue at hand - is this representative of a sea change in the culture and fundamental workings of the Internet? No, probably not. It's symptomatic, perhaps, but not a turning point.

But Network Solutions isn't about to document why it took over the InterNIC, Microsoft isn't going to give us anything that isn't spun through lawyers or marketing staff, and Postel is dead and will tell no tales. Even Eric Raymond, who seems to be buckling under the pressures of representing an anarchy, has left a set of excellent discussion - both theoretical and pragmatic - of why he is such a strong believer in the Open Source movement.

I think the important lesson here is that we can only expect to hear the truth, or at least a declaration of "the causes which impel", from committed individuals. Companies are not in the business of providing philosophy, at least not unless there is a business plan and sound financials to back it up. No surprises here, I know.

But when Jamie writes that an organization should be judged on its behavior /as/ an organization, like AOL with regard to censorship, and even manages to make a case without attacking the practices of a /single/ company, placing the behavior into context of the whole, we should listen. He has the freedom now to speak his mind on issues that affect us all, and he presents a solid case damning them, without a lot of romantic claptrap.

I dunno - I suppose I'm rambling now, but I wanted to make those points. It's really easy to say "Microsoft is evil", or "AOL is run by the Bavarian Illuminati", or "corporations are soulless". I know :-) I've done it on occasion. It's a lot harder to treat a subject with the distance required in order to represent it fairly. The former allows us to blow off steam, essentially a selfish act. The latter, if done properly, is a gift to the society in which we all live.

It's up to all of us to determine whether we like the new Internet, where commercial interests control the vast majority of "respectable" information sources, where advertising and editorial are somewhat loosely defined, but still hide behind the illusion of objectivity, where the machinations of the old guard (the W3C, IETF, and similar organizations) are cast aside by standards-flouting corporations with deep pockets. And whether we, either as individuals or acting on unified fronts, can do anything to change it.

Even the Melissa virus has been played as yet another argument for why you should trust the commercial interests and big name news outlets - you never know, after all, who's being malicious when they provide information on the Web and Usenet. It frightens me to think that the underlying rationale boils down to "we're respectable, you know our brand, never mind the ad banners". And, of course, such a statement also suggests that you can't trust anybody but the big names.

There was a story on slashdot a week ago discussing a case of rape where a woman met a man online, and then met in person. The details are graphic, but the overwhelming message was that police dismissed the case because of the Internet factor - saying, in essence, that she must have wanted to be beat up and violated - after all, she led the man on in AOL chat.

We still have a long way to go if we're to fully integrate the Net into the fabric of everyone's daily lives. I still refuse to distinguish in conversation whether a given conversation took place in email - I talked to someone, regardless of the medium. I'm better friends with people I've never met in "real life" than I am with people I've known for years, and probably spend more time deepening those online friendships. But if I can't make my family understand the positive side-effects of this strange ethereal existence, how can we expect to tame the evils?

Perhaps by trying to speak our truths, we can at least sleep easy at night, knowing that we've not allowed ourselves to be silenced in a medium which above all allows the individual the same /chance/ to speak or write. Even if the large-scale corporate mouthpieces drown out our messages with long streams of carefully spun nothingspeak, framed by ad banners on a distracting 30-second refresh.

And perhaps we can all find a place where we feel strongly about what we are doing and don't need to struggle with the issues that finally drove Jamie to hang it up this time around. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/18/2000 10:50:32 AM ----- BODY: I guess Brewer, Maine had an enlightened bunch of teachers, at least at the high school, because I never said the pledge of allegiance and nobody ever gave me any static for it. Of course, I never tried to drown it out by singing revolutionary workers' party songs or anything, but hey.

The thing is, it's always embarrassing to see two wildly ignorant people argue over something they obviously don't know anything about. I'm all for education, as anyone who knows me will attest. But it seems to me that the real problem here isn't with the kid who wants to sit silently, or with the principal who doesn't appear to know anything about the law, but with the idiot teacher who decided to call attention to the kid and create the whole scene in the first place. So, the school is punishing the kid. Stupid. There is nothing worse in the world than a stupid teacher, no more horrifying a potential for the blind abuse of authority. The principal is just trying to keep order, probably bored stiff and overworked. The kid is just trying not to buckle under to mindless conformity; to establish or preserve a sense of herself as an individual. But the teacher -- the teacher has no excuse for being so fucking dumb. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/18/2000 12:55:09 AM ----- BODY: Today was a good day. Nap, bike ride, good steak, and what more can you say? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/14/2000 04:23:05 PM ----- BODY: Boy, that [NEW SEX TOY]... He's always coming up with something funny. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/13/2000 05:59:27 PM ----- BODY: -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/13/2000 11:15:07 AM ----- BODY: There is now a really ugly full archive listing for this site. Eventually, I will clean it up and make it so damn pretty it will make your heart swell, but for now, it's just functional. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/12/2000 04:32:16 PM ----- BODY: Because using the Web for bizarre DHTML and Java experiments beats working. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/12/2000 12:36:12 AM ----- BODY: So I'm posting the last entry, typing into my powerbook on my front steps, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the cool night air, and one of my neighbors -- a vaguely unsettling guy with a ferret and a crazy brother who lives directly across the street -- comes sauntering over, drinking a 32oz Icehouse and smoking some handrolled substance. He says "I thought you were watching television, until I saw the Apple on the back." He asked if it was digital, to which I wasn't sure how to reply, since most computers are, nowadays, after all. So I said I was surfing, and we chatted briefly about wireless networking and commented on the cool night air.

I never know what to say to people. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/12/2000 12:28:58 AM ----- BODY: I never know what to say to really smart people. This struck me as profound until I realized I rarely know what to say to really dumb people, either. But maybe it's just that with people on the extremes of intelligence, I can't help but wonder "what goes on in your head?" -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/11/2000 07:58:50 PM ----- BODY: Incidentally, I've decided not to credit anyone with the links I found via some other site, because 1) it really shouldn't matter and 2) I never find anything on my own, anyway, so you should just tack on an implicit "props to so-and-so who found this and linked to it so that Steve could find it and pass it on to you" to every link I provide. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/11/2000 07:53:25 PM ----- BODY: Back in the early nineties, I saw an all-night animation festival in Syracuse. (Actually, I tried to see them all, but that's not relevant). Anyway, one of the pieces was by Jan Swankmejer, and the handy mimeographed guide had this to say about the clip: "time your trip so you're peaking right about now."

That's what Nosepilot reminds me of. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/8/2000 04:40:00 PM ----- BODY: I find myself having to fight the impulse to express my discontent with the current state of affairs in terms of how "things were so much better when...". Why should it matter that the current state of affairs is worse than it was before? The point is that things are not how we want them to be. Focusing on the past, as if through a rose-colored lens, only opens up the discussion to how such sentiments neglect the other things that were also worse "back when". If you complain about things being bad, without drawing comparisons to the past, does it make it easier to keep the discussion focused on the way things are now, and how they should be in the future? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/6/2000 12:25:55 PM ----- BODY: Looks like all of those secure connectivity tools I've been using are legal now. That's good. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/5/2000 01:24:41 PM ----- BODY: Well, I'm glad the the election is focusing on basic human anatomy. Now all we need is for one of the candidates to make a really good purple-vein dick joke at the expense of one of the other candidates, and we'll have covered all the bases. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/5/2000 11:28:49 AM ----- BODY: H: "No, Mara, no! Mara, there are times it's appropriate to try to get into the closet, and there are times when it is not."
Me, half asleep: "This is one of those times."

I'm so much more fun when I'm asleep. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 9/3/2000 11:32:48 AM ----- BODY: I waver between being depressed by the sheer stupidity of the masses and being pissed off that I can't do more to change it. Someday, I'd like to be able to add "being bemused at the folly of mankind" to that dipole, but for now I still care too much. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/30/2000 01:23:27 PM ----- BODY: It seems that Media Nugget got a review in the October issue of Playboy magazine. They mention one of my reviews, Thomas Pynchon's V., as an example of the "offbeat" picks you may find there. Heh.

media nugget in playboy -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/29/2000 12:50:27 PM ----- BODY: Just got back from three days at the Outer Banks, and I have my yearly geek sunburn. Spent the weekend swimming and eating and drinking and generally staying away from the Internet. Everyone should try it once in a while. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/22/2000 12:12:09 AM ----- BODY: RIP DeepLeap. My sincere condolences to Bryan, Lane, Ben, and the rest of the deepleap crew. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/17/2000 12:15:38 AM ----- BODY: Today, the powerlines outside the office caught fire. Fortunately, nothing else did. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/15/2000 12:47:22 AM ----- BODY: Lots of movies. Saw Stigmata last night, probably the most visually compelling movie I've seen since Prospero's Books. Tonight we saw Faust, Jan Swankmajer's adaptation of the Geothe play, pretty wild. I love Czech animation. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/11/2000 10:29:13 AM ----- BODY: Walking back to the car from the Rathskeller last night, saw a flyer stapled haphazardly to a graffiti wall; whoever stapled it must have had someone hold the staples barehanded while they hammered them in with the heel of the staple gun. There must have been twenty staples in the top left hand corner, and the flyer was hung crooked, to boot. I wouldn't have noticed this at all, especially in the midst of the thousands upon thousands of staples, tacks, other pieces of old flyer, and so on, but this one read:
FREE TREATMENT FOR OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER
And all I could think was, "Oh, man... if that doesn't draw them in, I don't know what will." -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/10/2000 06:39:58 PM ----- BODY: WebDC went really well, I'll summarize the panel as best I can sometime over the next day or so. Brian and Emma and Jeffrey were all fantastic and I'm grateful to them for coming on such short notice (even if Jeffrey and Brian had ulterior motives). -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/8/2000 03:07:20 AM ----- BODY: Oh, and I'll be in Washington, D.C. tomorrow night and Wednesday, speaking at WebDC. I'll be running a panel entitled "Growing Online Community", featuring Jeffrey Zeldman and Brian Platz from A List Apart and Emma Taylor of NerveCenter. Should be a lot of fun. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/7/2000 06:55:58 PM ----- BODY: Dori links to Jakob, who draws strange conclusions regarding Doc's experiences with Amazon, or, more properly, without them; Doc links to Dave, who has more to say, and also back to Jakob, who is merely quoting Glenn, who runs a great service; Dori also links to me, talking about my experience with amazon's associates program (among others), though that post is out of date.

Basically, here's the deal. My book site has a bibliography. I'm signed up for five or six affiliate programs. I have a script that allows visitors to configure a favorite bookseller, so that if they click on a link from my book's icon or any of the books in the bibliography, they're redirected to that bookseller's site, instead of my favorite site. It's an exercise in flexibility and DHTML-powered user preference. Whee! Between March of last year and April of this year, I had Amazon configured as the default choice for an online bookseller if the user didn't choose otherwise. In April, I changed it to fatbrain, in protest of Amazon's patent strategy. Following me so far? Good.

Every quarter since the book was published, I've made a hundred bucks or so from Amazon, for books that people buy at Amazon either right after clicking on one of my affiliate links, or sometime thereafter. It's small change, especially considering the work I put into setting everything up, but I was curious about how it all worked, and I wanted to play with DHTML as a way to remember and apply user preferences to something, and this seemed like a pretty good application. Anyway, this quarter, I made fifty bucks from Fatbrain; the first time I ever made anything from them, and only made half as much from Amazon. So, apparently, the default choice does matter. But not by much. Even though my default choice is fatbrain, only 4 referral items were sold via fatbrain this quarter, as opposed to two dozen referrals via amazon. So people appear to be using the default at least part of the time. Or maybe they just like fatbrain, given the whole amazon patent thing.

Or, maybe it's people who've clicked through links from this site, where I haven't gotten around to setting up the "pick your own bookseller" link just yet (so the redirects always go to fatbrain). Hard to tell, as fatbrain's reporting isn't very detailed. If I get some time, maybe I'll dig into this a bit more and see what patterns emerge. For all I know, it just means people aren't visiting my book site much anymore, though that doesn't jibe with my stats...

In any case, Amazon.com salesranks don't mean diddly. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/7/2000 02:26:40 PM ----- BODY: So, the presidential tickets are shaping up, and it looks like Dubya has chosen a cadaverous banker and Gore has chosen a self-righteous moralist (who is actually proud of his relationship with William Bennett, if that answers your question). It's too bad he's Jewish; this will draw too much attention from the fact that he's a scary moralist freak in his own right, regardless of his religion. And does this really make anybody feel better about Gore? His wife is a scary moralist freak, now his running mate is, too. Whee.

I'm voting for Pogo. Screw this whole carnival. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/6/2000 02:15:44 AM ----- BODY: 'Possums have to be the world's most ungainly looking creatures. All the charm of a rat, with the speed of a sloth and the face of a ferret. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/5/2000 07:32:41 PM ----- BODY: If you're looking for my take on Greg's redesign, it's right here. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 8/4/2000 09:46:35 PM ----- BODY: It's amazing what you can find when you're digging through your old email. Apparently, I wrote this on July 18, 1994, when I was supposed to be working. I've included it in its entirety, for comparison's sake.

Date: Mon, 18 Jul 94 19:28:44 EDT
From: schampeo@gateway.bsis.com
To: dholmes@gateway.bsis.com
Subject: as a child...


...I was coerced into running for the office of the President of the fifth grade class, North Orrington Elementary School. I accepted the nomination with grace and bewilderment, and asked myself, "of what possible use could this be?" The way I saw it, not only were we too young, but far too disinterested in anything having to do with the executive powers that were sure to result from an election -- save maybe doing something about the incessant Sherwin-Williams "History of America" series of films, which taught us a great deal about the reconstructed interiors of the boyhood homes of the Great Men in History. This was a time of Atari and Star Castle, Defender and Asteroids, which offered us far more chance to change our little part of the universe through valor and the development of pyschomotor skills. What use could an election and an empty, meaningless office possibly be?

As the election progressed, I realized that it was far more exciting for the Grups than for the children, who tended towards tyranny and pettiness anyway, and had no need for the introduction of partisan politics into their well-defined and elaborately held social order. First came promises of better school lunches, then chocolate milk in drinking fountains, and finally the suspension of school for good. I lamely dragged along, not wanting to commit to such grandiose and empty sloganeering, fearing that I might be held to my word as I had seen critics of the current US President, Jimmy Carter, hold him to his. Reagan was running strong, riding a wave of popular support that finally culminated in the release of the Iranian hostages, who had been held for 444 days in the most demeaning displays of crudity and resentment. My slogan? "I will try." Honest enough, I thought. I couldn't see what else.

My principal, Mr. Edmund Chmielewski, found that unbearably funny, expressing his joy at the naivete one day while clapping me on the back and bragging me up to a visitor as "one of his best boys." I didn't like Mr. C. He smelled of beets and sour aftershave. I have since forgotten his face. "Steve," he said, while clapping me on the back with a sweaty, fat hand, whose moistness soaked through the thin cotton shirt I was wearing, "you already try my patience!" He laughed, as did the visitor. I turned and tried to go back to the drinking fountain where he had cornered me. I could still smell the sourness of him and asked to be excused so that I might go to the bathroom. He paused to introduce the visitor, and I mumbled something low and probably inappropriate before running to the boys room, the pass banging against my leg as I ran.

I was very interested in astronomy at the time, having been following the stars and planets through a KMart telescope (refractor, maximum magnification 50x) -- I had seen Jupiter and Saturn, the moons that Galilei had seen so many centuries ago, and the rings that still mystified... the prize for me was to see the elusive sister planet, Venus.

Where I lived was heavily wooded, and the sun rose almost an hour later through the trees and over the hill than everywhere else in the area. I had to get up very early to see Venus, due to its being closer to the sun than we are. It was difficult to catch it until it became the evening star. I wanted to see its crescent sun-brightness at its slimmest, in the morning.

The night before the election, I climbed to the roof of my house, all bundled up in old blue hooded sweatshirt and two pairs of socks to fight off the chill of dawn and her mists. It was three-thirty, an hour before sunrise, and I had managed to get up to the roof without waking my parents, hauling the telescope with me as if it were an offering, or a passkey. I trained it on the part of the sky where she was sure to rise, oblique to the sun who was to follow, outshining her.

And I waited. The earth spun slowly round, sending Ursa Major and its multiple-star systems below the treeline, bringing into view Scorpio, the scorpion, and spinning Cassiopeia until she no longer looked like a W, but rather a sort of backwards Sigma. I watched the skies and wondered how far they were from me.

My father never came out, not even when his usual early morning routine was scheduled to begin. He was sick, I think. He left within the year.

So I kept waiting for the Goddess, the Morning Star, to rise through the trees, and finally I was awarded with a glimpse, in a sky the color of melons, or maybe guava. I watched her until her curve was indistinguishable from the blue of the sky, and then sat and watched the sun rise, liking the way its rays felt on my face and arms.

I was later told that my teacher had cast a vote for me, out of both sympathy and to act as my vote, assuming that I cared whether or not Amy Henderson beat me by a unanimous cast. She had mentioned something about tradition, how Washington was supposed to remain the only unanimously elected President of our great nation, but I knew her better than that. She had to do that because she had already chosen the ones who were to have the responsibility of counting the ballots, and she knew that they might talk.

As for me, I had seen the Morning Star, I had not learned a useful thing, I had been up all night and I had seen the sun rise.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/30/2000 04:24:34 PM ----- BODY: This is really cool. I have an unfinished project involving Chernoff Faces and rstatd that works along a similar principle; perhaps this will spur me on to finish it. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/30/2000 12:47:00 AM ----- BODY: To Do: write up a history of my life as a programmer, including which languages I learned and when, in a futile attempt to place some order on the past seven (or twenty, depending on how you look at it) years of my life.Here's a quick rundown, though: TRS-80 Model III BASIC, SGML, scheme, regular expressions (Author/Editor, then Perl), Perl, C shell, Postscript, TCL,Visual Basic, Applescript, C, Java, C++, LISP (Emacs and Clisp), Pascal, SQL, Javascript, CSS, bourne shell, HahtTalk Basic, sendmail config, Cold Fusion, expect (TCL, really), XML, DHTML (Javascript and CSS, really), Python? Smalltalk? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/29/2000 07:55:46 PM ----- BODY: I hate seagulls, so growing up I never bothered to cut those plastic sixpack holders so as to avoid ensnaring the vicious wharf rats with wings when the miserable scavengers tried to eat them at the dump. But it was pointed out to me fairly recently that ducks, which I like, will often fall victim to man's callous disregard in this respect, and so I've started to cut the damn things to there are no loops left.

My question, nay, challenge, to you: what is the fewest number of cuts you should have to make in order that no closed loops remain? (I'm talking about the kind that my Coca-cola comes with, here, with six big loops, three on each side, and two middle-sized loops between the six, and two smaller loops between each of the big loops). For the purposes of this discussion, it is to be assumed that a "cut" starts at one side of a piece of plastic and ends on the other. To refer to each loop, let's use the handy shortcuts "A,B,...F" for the big loops, "i,ii,...vi" for the small loops, and "1,2" for the medium sized loops. So, then, a cut that severs the large loop in the top left corner would be "outside-A-inside", and a cut that severs the smallest loop in the lower right might be "inside-F-vi". -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/28/2000 01:33:56 PM ----- BODY: Take Back Vermont from the people with those stupid signs. (Go, J!) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/26/2000 02:41:40 PM ----- BODY: Fun with Google:
Well, I guess that settles that. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/24/2000 07:14:17 PM ----- BODY: It's funny the way it seems like old friends from different periods in your life should have known each other, after all, they knew you, right? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/24/2000 02:32:03 PM ----- BODY: I'd like to say that Apple's Airport rocks. I'm writing this from my new powerbook G3, running LinuxPPC (YellowDog Champion Server 1.2, kernel version 2.2.17pre10, fvwm2, etc.) — all wireless. I'm actually sitting at the conference table, completely unplugged. This is so cool. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/22/2000 02:41:51 AM ----- BODY: How dull it is to to pause, to make an end,
to rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/21/2000 07:10:14 PM ----- BODY: One feature I'd love to see on deja.com: a link from every post to babelfish, so if I find something that looks promising, but happens to be in German, I can translate it on the fly without having to copy and paste the URL (making sure to strip it down to just the barebones URL, without all of the session info, etc.) into the Babelfish interface. That would be cool. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/21/2000 04:33:07 PM ----- BODY: Heh. I'm inspiring. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/21/2000 02:59:56 AM ----- BODY: After watching Apollo 13, I was filled with a sense that anything was possible. Thanks to Matt, I just watched the first four episodes of From the Earth to the Moon on DVD, and I now find myself filled with a sense that I was right, but I now have a much stronger sense of the toll that such heroics exact.

I'm obsessed lately, with the idea that there is something missing in my life, my generation, my upbringing, and my sense of self. The discipline, the bravery, the sheer effort of will, the astounding advances in technology that are the result of intelligent and at times somewhat plodding thought and activity, solving small problems one at a time in order to achieve great things. We are governed, in my opinion, by a sense that great efforts (and, it would seem, great wealth) are easy, that we can, through some blazing insight, accomplish more than the tireless pursuit of small excellences will bring. Maybe it's just me; I was for a time intending to be an artist, and believed all the idiotic myths of the artist as Vasari and the Modernists would have had us believe, the ubermensch that transcended all earthly hindrances to deliver a flashing vision of the divine. For a time after that belief in mythology was ruptured, first by psychology and sociology, and then later by sudden acquaintance with the pathetic idiocy of man as political animal, as egotistical self-serving seeker of transitory pleasure, I flirted with mysticism and the idea that logic could save us from ourselves. A quick tour through the joyless existence that many unemployed and underemployed liberal arts graduates endure made me take stock and realize that the basic necessities (food, shelter, love, and friendship) can drive anyone to abandon even their most cherished beliefs in an effort to survive, to thrive, and to be happy. Later still, I found that one can compromise, can still manage to seek the ideal through engaging the mundane.

I'm still trying to figure it all out. For me, that means spending time with history, with education, with service. I'm still very impatient, undisciplined, lazy. I am still filled with unnamed rage, with the irrational hope that insights and art will triumph, that justice will prevail, and that my efforts to achieve some form of greatness will be rewarded and recognized. In the meantime, I struggle with my own self doubt and a feeling that success must come as my due, not through prolonged and intense (and sometimes even insensibly boring) activity, even though I resist. I'm trying. I'm doing my best to remember that I have to be kind, compassionate, and patient. I seek out examples, in an effort to find someone or something that I can emulate, that will teach me lessons I need to learn. And while it continues to stare me in the face, I continue to be overwhelmed by the noise in my head, the thoughts that plague me like mosquitos, that I'm not worth it, that my value is on par with the same myths that led me to paint and draw and write. But I keep trying. And that's something,right? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/20/2000 12:13:55 PM ----- BODY: I love Emo Philips. I was curious what he'd been up to, but I'm not surprised he's found a more accepting audience in the British. (Thanks to Steve Sharp for the URL.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/20/2000 03:49:35 AM ----- BODY: Oh, and I got a powerbook today. With airport. I really like this wireless networking thing. Now if they could work on the wireless power supply, without exposing small animals walking around the AirPlug to death by shortwave radiation, I'd be really happy. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/20/2000 03:42:06 AM ----- BODY: A few observations upon revisiting my old fascination with P. J. O'Rourke, and applying his attitude to the things that trouble my soul from day to day:
More later, perhaps. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/18/2000 03:08:53 AM ----- BODY: Oh, and I spent some time this afternoon fixing bugs in the DHTML GUIs dynamic poetry game, so it will work in IE5/Mac. Not all there yet (there are some problems with the tab widget, for example) but it's coming. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/18/2000 02:52:07 AM ----- BODY: So I built my first real, useful Macintosh application tonight. Oh, sure, it doesn't really do anything useful yet, but that's just because I haven't written the Palm conduit that will use the preferences file this application lets you create. :^)

Maybe now I will be able to sleep without counting out memory locations all night... (0x07BD4A50, 0x07BD4a60, ...) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/16/2000 12:31:26 PM ----- BODY: Ya know, if there had been a better comics store in Bangor, I'd have read more X-Men. As it stood, I only got second-hand Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank comix, which is good if the woods behind your house are infested with Nazi machine gun nests, but not much help dealing with your status as a mutant. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/15/2000 08:04:25 PM ----- BODY: It looks like I'll be speaking at WebDC in August, talking about how to design for community. Should be a lot of fun. I'll also be in San Fran in November, leading up a panel on Web applications and DHTML and another panel on growing online community (I led a similar panel in Chicago earlier this year, and it was a lot of fun and very instructive.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/12/2000 01:45:41 PM ----- BODY: Well, I guess this shows how good Metallica's chances are. (screenshot from ZDNet) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/11/2000 02:06:55 AM ----- BODY: I think the person who was writing Inside Macintosh: Memory had just seen the infamous Dr. Seuss Technical Manual when they wrote this:
Even if MoveHHi succeeds in moving a block to the top area of the heap, unlocking or deleting locked blocks can cause fragmentation if you don't unlock or delete those blocks beginning with the lowest locked block. A relocatable block that is locked at the top area of the heap for a long period of time could trap other relocatable blocks that were locked for short periods of time but then unlocked.

This suggests that you need to treat relocatable blocks locked for a long period of time differently from those locked for a short period of time. If you plan to lock a relocatable block for a long period of time, you should reserve memory for it at the bottom of the heap before allocating it, then lock it for the duration of your application's execution (or as long as the block remains allocated). Do not reserve memory for relocatable blocks you plan to allocate for only short periods of time. Instead, move them to the top of the heap (by calling MoveHHi) and then lock them.
Read it aloud. It's like Joyce that way. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/11/2000 01:49:22 AM ----- BODY: I'm not really Jason Kottke, but I do have really short hair now. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/10/2000 01:39:22 PM ----- BODY: I am Jason Kottke. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/10/2000 01:17:42 AM ----- BODY: Last night (Saturday) Brent, Matt, Heather and I went to a tapas place downtown called the Warehouse, ostensibly to munch on some side plates before finishing the night with some beer and pool at the Stingray. We hadn't even gone in the place when some shirtless black guy walked by and bummed a cigarette from Matt, who has yet to adjust to the peculiar accent, so he may have seemed a bit taken aback. At any rate, this drew the attention of a couple of cops, who hassled the poor guy, making us uncomfortable; then one of the door people started hassling Brent about his cup of Cup a Joe coffee, saying that he couldn't bring it into the restaurant. Brent hadn't even sipped from it, so he reacted as any sane person would when she told him she could either take it from him, or he couldn't come in, but he couldn't drink it on the premises: he asked how far the premises extended, so he could finish his coffee off the grounds (sorry).

This minor act of resistance drew the attention of the cops, who started circling around him like he was some crackhead with a broken bottle. I haven't had to deal with cops very often lately, and this moderate act of aggression on their part made my heart race and the blood pound in my ears. I was freaking out, breathing heavily and all, ready to fly, but they managed to work things out. Brent crossed the street with the rest of us, where he finished his coffee in relative peace, and then we handed the (now empty) cup to the harpy at the door. It took me almost half an hour to come down from the adrenaline rush. I've got better places to go, where we don't get hassled by cops for drinking fucking coffee on the sidewalk, and where the bouncers at the door don't look like they were pulled from special forces duty or stadium security detail.

The fact that I'd spent most of the day listening to Ian MacKaye sing "distrusted; I look for wires when I'm talking to you; you'd make a great cop!" probably didn't help my mood any.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2000 03:54:06 PM ----- BODY: As I was walking home this evening, a little girl was riding her bike in the middle of the street. She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to peddle. It reminded me of when I was little and how badly I wanted a bicycle but couldn't get one. My parents wouldn't let me have a bike until I was 12; my mom was too afraid I'd hurt myself. I'd pass the bike section in the store and just look, having given up asking my parents about it long ago. I eventually did get one after much pleading and begging. Amazingly, getting my driver's license at 16 and the subsequent borrowing of the family car passed without incident. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/7/2000 01:06:06 AM ----- BODY: How would you try to explain abstraction to a child? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/6/2000 11:58:39 AM ----- BODY: Fireworks, bourbon, homemade blueberry porter, etc. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 7/1/2000 04:51:29 PM ----- BODY: This weblog is now encoded in XHTML, the reformulation of HTML in XML that is the future of HTML (according to the W3C). -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/30/2000 02:37:03 PM ----- BODY: Cough, cough. cough, sniff. cough. hack, spit, cough. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/30/2000 01:36:14 AM ----- BODY: Glenn is doing something very cool with astounding web, namely providing a place for Web site critique free from the taint of commercialism (e.g., CSotD, the Webbies) and which promises to be kept current (HighFive being a good example to the contrary). I don't care much for message boards, otherwise I'd be more involved in Astounding, but I wish Glenn luck and am glad to see his project launch. Check it out. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/30/2000 12:52:40 AM ----- BODY: Sick again, this time with a head cold. Well, that and the side effects of drinking an entire gallon of orange juice. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/26/2000 03:07:32 PM ----- BODY: I'm sorry, but every time I read something about Microsoft embracing open technologies, I shudder. One of the benefits of open source is that you don't have the same issues of trust you would have with proprietary tech: I don't trust Microsoft, but I do trust the Linux community, to do the right thing from a technical perspective. The whole open source movement isn't about being able to read and modify source code, it's about software that isn't subservient to marketing decisions that often cripple and deform the technical aspects of a system. I don't want to hear about how Microsoft is embracing the technologies that define the future of the Internet, I want proof that they'll respect the fundamental rules of the open software game, and chief among them is interoperability. So far, however, all I've seen are implementations that exclude or lock out or cripple systems they view as competitors, even when those systems are simply trying to make it possible for you to get the job done. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/24/2000 02:16:30 AM ----- BODY: Looks like the permalinks are working, thanks to a nice eighty-line mod_perl hack. If I get up enough gumption, I may even highlight the entry being linked to. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/23/2000 05:27:48 PM ----- BODY: I have no lint between my toes, because I went out and bought a pair of Birkenstocks about a month ago. So far, my hippification has proceeded in stages: I had an 18-inch-long ponytail when I was in college, but no birks. I cut my hair in 1996, much to the chagrin of my employees (who just knew this meant I had sold out and was looking for another job), because I had taken up swimming to try to relieve the stress. There's nothing uglier than a skinny guy with a programmer's paunch and a wet ponytail.

Well, except maybe a guy with all of the above, eating a bug.

Seriously, though, I sincerely hope that nobody reading this thing is expecting new insights or fascinating commentary, or BenBrown-esque epic tales of rockstardom; I'm doing my best to avoid the snarky-comment-and-a-link style of posting URLs I found on someone else's 'blog; and my life just isn't that interesting. I'll see what I can do to provide a more in-depth explanation of the whys and wherefores soon.

In the meantime, here's a little something I posted to metafilter, on the topic of what makes or breaks an online community. You'll have to scroll down a bit to see what I added, but I recommend you read the whole thing, especially if you're a metafilter member. Online community is something in which I have a pretty substantial vested interest, for various reasons, which I'll try to elaborate upon in more detail as time goes on. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/23/2000 11:40:22 AM ----- BODY: There is nothing on earth that floats as well as cat barf. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/22/2000 11:57:48 PM ----- BODY: Don't you just feel silly when you go to make an omelet and the second egg you try to crack into the frypan turns out to be hardboiled?

Trust me. You do. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/20/2000 05:41:15 PM ----- BODY: For some reason, I seem to have contracted the achy feverish dizzy blahs. So, I see a lot of liquids and rest in my immediate future. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/19/2000 02:57:51 AM ----- BODY: Went on a late night cigarette run, and there was a guy standing in front of the window (with one of those drawers where they take your cash) playing a didgeridoo. The woman behind the drawer didn't understand what I meant when I asked for a carton, so I got three packs. The didgeridoo guy kept pointing at his face and saying 'beautiful', over and over again, between blasts on the didgeridoo. Finally, he says "check out her cheeks, man, she's from Africa. Ritual...tribal...scarification. Just beautiful, man." And sure enough, she had starburst scars on her cheeks, just below her eyes. The he hit me up for a pack of cigarettes.

I gotta do a better job of keeping stocked. I went out for smokes and got late night didgeridoo and tribal scarification. I can only wonder what the woman must have been thinking, confronted with a bleary-eyed smoker trying to buy ten packs of cigarettes at once, while aboriginal Australian wind instruments played in the background. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/18/2000 09:04:30 PM ----- BODY: From the manpage for the Mutt rc file:

indent_string
Type: string
Default: "> "

Specifies the string to prepend to each line of text quoted in a message to which you are replying. You are strongly encouraged not to change this value, as it tends to agitate the more fanatical netizens.

Hey, they're talking about me! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/18/2000 03:13:10 AM ----- BODY: Me: (sitting quietly waiting for Brent to finish compiling the new kernel for the latest server in our server farm)
Brent: chuckle
Me: (looking up)
Brent: (giggling maniacally) man, this box is sick-ass fast...
Me: (grinning)
Brent: Have you tried untarring something on this box? This is sick-ass fast.
-------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/17/2000 08:04:17 PM ----- BODY: Looks like my patch to qpopper made it into the 3.1b2 build. Basically, it adds support for Dynamic Relay Authorization Control, a way for people checking their mail via POP to send mail without getting tagged as a spammer. Pretty cool stuff, and solved a problem that was making me crazy: many of the folks who use my mail server also use dialup lines, and recent versions of sendmail block relaying from those hosts. This way, all you have to do is check mail via POP and then you can send mail via SMTP for the next half an hour or so. Coming next: SMTP AUTH. Whee! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/16/2000 06:51:59 PM ----- BODY: It cracks me up when webloggers use form elements in their posts.










Especially when you can't do anything with them. :) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/16/2000 03:51:38 PM ----- BODY: Happiness is a new 10/100 SuperStack switch, for dedicated switched full duplex 100Mbps Ethernet in the office. :) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/15/2000 09:02:26 PM ----- BODY: Courtesy Yahoo, for the children:
Yahoo! is concerned about the safety and privacy of all its members, particularly children. Yahoo! abides by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Under this law, the age you have indicated in your public profile ... indicates that you need to get a parent's permission to register and continue to use Yahoo!'s personalized services.
Call me cynical, but I doubt that Yahoo has forgotten that I'm thirty. Oh, and here's more:
I'm an adult. Why does Yahoo! think I'm a child?
If you're an adult, you may still be blocked from signing in or registering for several reasons: If you're blocked, click "Verify Your Age" at the bottom left of the prompt screen. We will ask you for credit card information, which we use to certify that you're an adult.
Heh. This is rich. I need Adult Check[tm] so I can check my spamtraps.

The likely explanation is that they used Equifax or one of those other credit reporting agencies (if there are any left that aren't already owned by Equifax, that is), and those agencies still haven't corrected my age. Last credit report I got had it down as 5/1/1970, which was incorrect. Looks like it's time to get another credit report and fix it once and for all. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/15/2000 07:56:07 PM ----- BODY: OK, so all I need is a tattoo of a specific pattern and people can write on me with a special pen in order to send me email. Cool! What happens if I'm bloated, though? Or if I get a scar? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/15/2000 04:20:29 PM ----- BODY: Driving home last night from northwest Raleigh, Heather and I took Ebenezer Church road and saw three deer: two does and a yearling, rising up out of the mist on the sides of the road. I love that we live in a city that's still small enough that you see deer.

Of course, I could live without all the dead possum. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/15/2000 04:01:20 PM ----- BODY: It's funny. Just a little while ago, Filipino investigators were saying they couldn't file charges of computer crime against the Love Bug suspect, because the Philippines doesn't have any laws against computer crime. They were just going to charge him with fraud. So now they're delaying the charges because they want to investigate more. I've got an idea: why not charge Microsoft with negligence instead? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/14/2000 12:30:28 AM ----- BODY: Whirlwind weekend. Tired dart arm. Wind still blowing through my hair. Sun still in my eyes.

We're approaching the part of summer here that makes me want to take three showers a day, just to cool off my poor head. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/12/2000 06:08:47 PM ----- BODY: Domain not found locally, but Registry points back to local DB.
Local whois DB must be out of date.


I just love Network Solutions. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/7/2000 11:32:38 PM ----- BODY:
The single most useful thing about the Internet is that it facilitates using Linux. To use Linux, you need so much goddamn technical information that if you don't have a really good source of technical support, you're just screwed.
Neal Stephenson talking about the Internet in Time Digital. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/7/2000 04:30:48 PM ----- BODY: So, I've been asking people lately what they do to find focus, or flow, when they're working. It seems like I've been unable to get into that wonderful state lately, despite the best efforts of my entire music collection, coffee, Coca-cola, nicotine, and closing the door to my office. What works for you? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/6/2000 07:01:48 PM ----- BODY: Have I mentioned lately that I love Apache? This is a snippet from one of my error logs, where I'd telnetted into the server directly to test something and forgot to provide a Host: header.

client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2068 section 9, and 14.23)

Chapter and verse from the relevant RFC! :^) Now that's an error message. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/6/2000 03:10:29 PM ----- BODY: I'm starting to get really depressed about the fact that many people on the Internet simply have no idea how to use email effectively, and in a manner that isn't completely illegible and annoying to the rest of us. Come on, people. Open your eyes and stop being so damned thick. Stop using HTML (aka "multipart/alternative"), stop using mail clients that include the entire thread with every reply, learn how to use quoting, how to trim your replies, and realize that you're only making yourself look like an idiot by refusing to follow simple email etiquette. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/6/2000 03:10:00 AM ----- BODY: OK, I redesigned a bit. I added permalinks a while ago, but due to the fact that I'm using Blogger to create include files rather than complete HTML files (one blog for each of "reading list", "soundtrack", and this column here) the archives are completely hosed. I'll figure it out eventually. Or I'll ditch the permalinks. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/6/2000 01:14:19 AM ----- BODY: The only thing more depressing than the fact that Gary Zukav wrote a mind-bogglingly stupid book called The Seat of the Soul, (where he makes claims along the lines of "extinction is bad, but only because killing an entire species wipes out a single soul, because animals have a group soul, whereas humans, being so much better, have individual souls") is the fact that it's been ten years since he wrote it and it's still a best-seller.

The only thing I can think is that the government went around feeding lead paint chips to kids in trailer parks, and then gave them gift certificates to Amazon. I mean, can you explain it? The man is an obvious danger and should be flogged. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/5/2000 01:07:21 AM ----- BODY: The Namespace Project has been updated. Now with animated GIFs showing the disappearance of available two-character domain names! -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/4/2000 11:53:21 AM ----- BODY: Neal Stephenson would love this story of an offshore data haven in England. I find it interesting that the founders allow anything but bulk email and child pornography (and, presumably, bulk email advertising child pornography), but I have to wonder about the whole idea. The comment by the former SEC spook brings it into sharp relief: having an alternate money system is fine, but you still have to convert to some known standard at some point. Or do you just buy gold? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/3/2000 01:49:06 AM ----- BODY: Sleepy Hollow is a beautiful movie. It's a far cry from Vincent, though. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/2/2000 11:39:12 AM ----- BODY: I wonder what would have come of the investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination had the Web been around at the time. Imagine: streaming video of the Zapruder film on a thousand Web sites. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/2/2000 01:55:37 AM ----- BODY: There's nothing that inspires pathos quite like a bumper sticker that reads "truely blessed". -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/2/2000 01:26:21 AM ----- BODY: The only DVD I own: Blade Runner: The Director's Cut. (What, you were expecting the Matrix? Come on now.) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/1/2000 02:22:30 AM ----- BODY: You didn't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway: For more of my varied tastes, you should visit Media Nugget of the Day, and drop Harold a line asking him to keep his weblog going, lest an entire generation grow up not knowing the glory that was Offhand Remarks. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/1/2000 01:38:48 AM ----- BODY: In the fine tradition established by PeterMe, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you all to pronounce jeblog as "crepe paper dongle fuzz". I mean, hey – nobody pronounces these things "WEE-blogs", do they? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 6/1/2000 01:36:26 AM ----- BODY: I suppose I should start another log for all the movies I watch, seeing as how that's basically how I spend my downtime: Anyway, until I do that, you're just going to have to suffer through fishing the movie references out of the main jeblog.

Saw Man on the Moon last night. Jim Carrey does a decent job of playing Andy Kaufmann; he even made me forget that he'd played so many completely stupid roles. And that, my friends, is a triumph. But the thing that struck me about Andy was that here's a guy who was basically hacking the system. A culture jammer inspiration to us all. And what's not to like about that? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/30/2000 08:05:24 PM ----- BODY: I promised myself that I wouldn't link to other weblogs from this weblog (unless it made sense, as it did when referring to Ms. Champ's mention of Basho) and I intend to keep that promise. I did not, however, take any sort of vow not to link to another site, despite my intentions of making this a catalogue of what runs through my cranium. At present, very little of value is actually running through my mind, and I blame David Sedaris. So you may as well forget about getting anything done for, oh, the rest of the day. And into tomorrow. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/30/2000 06:26:47 PM ----- BODY: Everyone should join ICANN as a Member at Large, if only to do your part to prevent the DNS from becoming even more broken and stupid than it already is. If nothing else, you can absolve yourself of responsibility for not doing anything to combat the continued arbitrary abuses by an unconstitutional body of the network that so many of us count on as part of our livelihoods. Learn more. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/30/2000 06:13:32 PM ----- BODY: Also, I'd like to add that this site was using the deep yellow long before that Kottke punk even had a weblog. Just because it went for more than two years without an update doesn't mean I relinquished control over my brand. :) -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/30/2000 05:58:36 PM ----- BODY: Just a note to all the bloggeurs who have noticed that this project constitutes one of the signs of a coming apocalypse:

"Heh." -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/30/2000 02:18:04 AM ----- BODY: Thai spring rolls: fresh, not fried. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/29/2000 03:21:54 PM ----- BODY: Something that makes me happy: the icons used by IE5/Mac and Transmit to represent files in the process of being downloaded. They have a status bar built right in, so you can be downloading in the background and glance at the file's icon on the desktop (or wherever) and get a sense of how far it has left to go. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/29/2000 02:26:45 AM ----- BODY: Saw Gladiator tonight. If you are pining for an epic, this is it. It got me thinking about the dearth of heroic figures in modern life. Russell Crowe does an amazing job as Maximus, but then, he always played a great bad-ass. Email me if you understand the joke. I'll just mention the delicious irony of a spectacular movie about the evil of the spectacle; the pleasure of the mob as political tool. Ridley Scott must have really enjoyed himself, on a number of levels. I left the theatre with an andrenaline rush; I lamented (and continue to lament) the general lack of catharsis in democratic theatre.

But seriously, it's long been a topic of concern for me that we seem to have lost, as a generation, or even as a series of generations, the sense of the hero as a role model, as one who illustrates through their life the themes and major struggles of an era. Our heroes all have huge endorsement contracts for athletic shoes. But what remains, outside of the Michael Jordans, is always torn into pieces, shown to the supermarket waiting line public as human, or worse. We need a few heroes who illustrate the virtues that greater generations than ours held dear. We need people who are greater than ourselves, that we may be greater as well. The Puritans used to name their children after virtues: Chastity, Faith, Charity, Hope, etc. We name ours after vacuous television stars. I named my cats after goddesses (Mara, Nokomis). I tried :)

Do you have any heroes? -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/28/2000 02:29:04 PM ----- BODY: Watched the late-night movie last night (we don't have cable, so when 1am rolls around, it's slim pickings). I was astonished to find that we live in such a screwed up world: during the climactic scene of Boyz n the Hood, when Doughboy is getting ready to plug the guy who killed his brother, he says "roll your ass over" or something. The wizards at news channel 11 censored this, turning it into "roll your butt over", but went ahead and showed Doughboy shooting him in the head. Whee. If there's one thing worse than censorship, it's censorship that's poorly implemented. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/27/2000 06:20:37 PM ----- BODY: OK, here's a start to the reading list. Lots more to add, but this is a beginning. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/27/2000 05:00:55 PM ----- BODY: Let's see, what else has been going on in my life? I turned thirty on last Saturday. My book finally earned out its advance. I need to eat more leafy green vegetables. It's been hot here (in the high nineties) for the past two or three weeks. I'll put up a list of what I'm reading later, mostly it's been Palm Pilot programming stuff, the Macsbug reference, and John Levine's Linkers and Loaders, which is really interesting. Oh, and I'm working on updating the namespace project. More on that when I'm further along. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 5/27/2000 04:55:55 PM ----- BODY: I got a Web-enabled cell phone the other day. I'm really looking forward to doing something functional with it, instead of just using it to consume information on stock quotes. Brent and I are planning to use them to help us with our systems administration. Right now, if someone scans our Web server, looking for security holes, which they do quite often, I get email sent to my old cell phone with a message that usually says "abuse". Not much help, and only serves to get me running to the nearest terminal. What I'd like to see is my phone beep, send me to the URL in an email message using my minibrowser, and have the site display all relevant information about the abuse: IP address, what they were looking for, which trap they tripped, where they came from, etc. And then I'd like the ability to block them (using ipchains or something) right from the cell phone. I figure it'll take a day or so to put together; WML is easy. I just have to learn how to use the phone first. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 4/5/2000 01:07:43 AM ----- BODY: It's been (Tuesday, Monday, Sunday, Saturday night...) more than three days since I had a cigarette and my nerves are completely shot. Fortunately, the dengue fever I had for the past three days seems to have gone into my stomach (from its much more irritating former residence in my head).

It wasn't really dengue fever - it was just a head cold. But I did get headaches. -------- AUTHOR: steven champeon DATE: 3/25/2000 09:55:45 PM ----- BODY: Well, kids, I've finally sold my soul. I blame the Matts. --------