18 September 04
Birth of an Urban Legend?
There’s a story whizzing around the internet that it’s possible to break in to Kryptonite U-locks for bikes with a simple ballpoint pen. I was just at my mother’s and she announced this latest catastrophe to me, admonishing me for not keeping up to date with dangers OUT THERE, like shark attacks and sleeping-bag murders. (I lock my bike with a Kryptonite, which cost me $56 some time ago. I have no plans in the near future to swim in shark-infested waters OR sleep on the beach in a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t exactly placate her.)
I was hoping to be able to post a short film of me breaking into my own lock, but it seems we don’t have the right kind of ballpoints (Bic) in the house. A friend visiting from Edinburgh produced a Bic but it’s an English octagonal version, not round, in shape. So my feeble attempts at empiricism and the high-tech display thereof are foiled this time.
The local bike community remains skeptical, having attempted and failed to break into various locks.
So Martin’s recommendation on waking Sunday morning was to sell stock in Kryptonite, buy stock in Bic
17 September 04
Delicious
Once again, I fall behind the times. It is only this week that I discovered the site del.icio.us. The author of the site describes as a social bookmarks manager. Basically, it’s a website where you can store your webpage bookmarks. This is definitely useful if you use multiple computers since you can have access to your bookmarks from any computer online.
But what makes the approach of the site novel is that you also have access to everybody else’s bookmarks. On the front page, there is a list of the most recently added bookmarks to the system by anybody, and on the side there is a list of the popular topics by keywords. When you post a bookmark, you may enter a list of your own keywords to describe it. It’s intriguing how the whole community starts to converge on using the same keywords for common topics.
It’s a great way to find new webpages on themes you’re interested in, as well as folks who track the same topics you do.
16 September 04
Mojo Crow
My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center have yet to catch their first crow—a live one, that is. (There have been plenty of dead ones brought in testing positive for West Nile Virus.) Crows are highly intelligent and not easily duped into captivity. So today Yvette set up Mojo Crow in one of the straw bales outside my window.
Mojo Crow is a plastic, life-size battery-operated crow whose wings rotate manically like those plastic flamingoes you see on people’s lawns.
Within five minutes of Mojo’s epileptic frenzy, there were over 200 crows circling high and cawing. They continued to caw as they landed in the eucalyptus trees nearby. But they didn’t come anywhere near, figuring that whatever had gotten to poor Mojo was probably going to do them in too. Mojo might have to be retired and something else will have to be tried. I’m glad I’m not the one having to catch them: this is really tough.
In other wacky news today, a Dodger baseball fan spent $25,000 buying out all the seats in a section of Dodger stadium beyond right field on the off chance that slugger Barry Bonds might hit his 700th home run there later this month (in which case the ball would be worth a great deal more than the $25,000). Well, Barry’s likely to get there well before then, so our enterprising fan has been selling the tickets for well over three times what he paid for them.
15 September 04
Questing For Bookshops
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Places for Books.
These next two weekends we’re busy so any field trip to Powell’s will have to wait for a while. But such an imagined trip leads one to ask where are the truly great bookstores, the ones worth making long journeys to visit? Powell’s is clearly one, but others? Here are a couple of resources that may help.
Evelyn C. Leeper edits an annotated list of bookstores of the world. This list seems fairly comprehensive and is updated frequently.
More selectively, Robert Teeter has a personal bookstore hall of fame. I’m glad to see I’ve been to a few of them.
I’m sure there are other such lists out there, but this is a start.
14 September 04
Ivan
My brother used to live in New Orleans, where he and one of his many international roommates washed windows for a living (he had just finished university in England and this was his first stop in the U.S.). They lived in the French Quarter, in an apartment with high ceilings and exposed brick walls.
He’s fetched up in Juneau, Alaska many years, and many stops, later. But he and his wife are in New Orleans now, visiting following a conference she’s been attending. One of the largest hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic is heading their way. I hope they decide to leave sooner rather than later; New Orleans could be a swimming pool of sewage, industrial waste, and floating coffins. Not likely, but possible. I’d rather they not be around to find out.
(Postscript, September 15: They’re safe in Seattle, will finish their vacation there and head home on Saturday.)
13 September 04
Neurodiversity
According to Word Spy, neurodiversity is defined as the variety of non-debilitating neurological behaviors and abilities exhibited by the human race. The earliest citation for this word is by Judy Singer in 1999:
For me, the key significance of the ‘autistic spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. The ‘neurologically different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability. The rise of neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for-granted assumptions that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way (unless visibly disabled) are being dissolved.
Here is a wonderfully comprehensive site on neurodiversity. (From Metafilter.)
12 September 04
Lila’s New Assignment
Long-time readers of Feathers of Hope will recall that this time last year I was hobbling about in a high-tech cast known as a camwalker, following the surgical reattachment of my Achilles tendon to itself, and that this hobbling was speeded up considerably by the appearance of Lila in my life.
Lila is a tricycle put together from recycled bits of other bicycles by the ingenious hands of Peter Wagner, of Whymcycles fame. I was able to bungee my crutches on the front and cycle the two miles to work and back, surrounded by pink and purple, ringing that outrageous bell when I needed to warn unsuspecting pedestrians that I was coming along and was much wider than the average bike.
Lila needs to get her parking break fixed and her front chain reattached (she’s technically a tandem, the person in front perched precariously on the edge of the universe, like Wave here at left), and then she’ll be off to help the next person whose ability to ride a normal bicycle is somewhat compromised. We bundled her over to West Davis today. I’ll miss seeing this cheerful contraption by our front door to welcome us home…
11 September 04
Bloggers Do The Berkeley Bookstore Beat
Today we travelled by train to Berkeley to meet up with bloggers Chris from Creek Running North, Siona from Nomen est Numen, and Maria from Alembic. Our aim was to visit Berkeley bookstores, of which there are a plethora, too many to do in a day, but no matter. We first walked up to Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, the largest and most famous of Berkeley bookstores, where we browsed for an hour, several of us emerging with more books than intended. Siona brought her own lunch so we wanted to eat outside, so we picked up take-out Indian from a restaurant on Telegraph (walk 500 yards in Berkeley, you’ll find an eatery that meets the needs of the moment) and had our lunch by Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. The Indian food made for a messy picnic, but was very good. Meanwhile the Cal marching band was warming for the football game later on in the afternoon. (A bit of Aggie Pride here—I think the UC Davis Marching Band-Uh is better).
Chris had to leave early, but the rest of walked down Shattuck to the used bookstore Pegasus, where I found a book on line-and-wash (our third art book purchase of the day). Our return trek netted us an office supply store (complete with Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks, as well as Lamy and Stypen fountain pens—Maria bought a Lamy pen), as well a decent espresso place by the BART station.
Too many things to do in Berkeley as usual. No chance to visit art stores, alas. We even found a very intriguing new restaurant half-a-block from BART—Ristorante Raphael, kosher Italian vegetarian food. But we were full from our Indian meal, so it will wait for next time.
These blogger bookstore outings are quite fun. Perhaps we should all next go on a field trip to Powell’s!
10 September 04
Cataloging Images
As Numenius mentioned recently, we’re starting to get overwhelmed with electronic clutter, especially digital images.
I installed a copy of iView Media Pro at work on Tuesday—in order to start sorting through the Wildlife Health Center’s thousands of images that I need to use in my work every day. They’re on my hard drive, they’re on CD’s, they’re everywhere. I rarely get enthusiastic about software: it’s there to do a job, and if it doesn’t do it well I get irritated (if it’s Microsoft Word I get riproaring furious), but mostly I just get on with my tasks.
iView gets my enthusiastic vote for most labor-saving device I’m likely to come across this year. If you’ve got pictures coming out your USB lugholes, this might be something to try.
9 September 04
El Diccionario del Besbol
This resource came in handy this evening, before attending my Spanish class.
From the National Baseball Hall of Fame