Burnin’

One joy of reading blogs is stumbling upon a new voice that strikes a chord. It doesn’t happen everyday, so when it does, it feels like a genuine discovery. Today, I found Dooce.com via Chicago blogger, Pismire.

Dooce is the work of Heather B. Armstrong, a Stay At Home Mom (SAHM).

She writes, “My parents raised me Mormon, and I grew up believing that the Mormon Church was true. In fact, I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old. I had pre-marital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee. There had better be a special place in heaven for me.

I attended BYU from 1993-1997 and graduated with a degree in English. I firmly believe that BYU is the most horrible place on Earth, worse even than Disneyland. I am no longer a practicing Mormon or someone who believes that Rush Limbaugh speaks to God. My family is understandably disappointed.

This website chronicles my life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up during the pregnancy, to when I became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression I currently suffer. I talk a lot about poop, boobs, my dog, and my daughter.”

Other memorable voices from the 2004 blogosphere include: F Train, Sour Bob, Narayan Nayar, Jim Romenesko, John Perry Barlow and Ana Marie Cox (because no list would be complete without her).

Darby and I watched the documentary Revolution OS tonight. It’s a low budget film written, directed, produced, shot and edited by JTS Moore. Prior to this project, Moore, a Hollywood screenwriter, had little knowledge of hacking, open source politics or the characters involved. A friend suggested the idea for the film.

The level of discourse in the film is quite technical, but the political themes and business opportunities are readily available to the less technically inclined. One area of tension that emerges in the film–and all good films need tension–is the conflict between Richard Stallman’s purist “free software” philosophy and Linus Torvalds’ “open source” execution of that philosophy.

Stallman mentions that free means free as in free speech, not free, as in free beer. He also says he intended for there to be business applications from the very beginning of his work with GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix), his project to replace Sun’s proprietary Unix workstation. A project that pre-dated Linus Torvald’s independent, but related efforts in Finland to construct an operating system kernel. Torvalds’ kernel combined with Stallman’s programs ostensibly made up the first versions of what became known as Linux.

Today’s Linux OS, argues Stallman, ought to be rightly called GNU-Linux. But Linus does not like that option. He sees GNU-Linux as but one bundle or distribution of the operating system, like Red Hat Linux or others available on the market today.

from LA Times: A U.S. Army combat veteran on leave from a unit headed back to Iraq arranged for a friend to shoot him in the leg in an attempt to avoid returning to the war zone, Philadelphia police said Thursday.

Spc. Marquise Roberts, 23, told police he had been shot Tuesday afternoon as he walked past two men arguing on a North Philadelphia street. But police said their investigation found that Roberts actually was shot once in the leg by a friend as part of a scheme to avoid returning to Iraq.

Philadelphia Police Inspector William Colarulo said Roberts was shot by his wife’s cousin, Roland Fuller, 28, in North Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon. Hospital officials called police after Roberts sought medical treatment — standard policy for gunshot wounds, Colarulo said.

More than 5,000 soldiers have been charged with desertion from bases in the U.S. and overseas since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, according to Pentagon statistics.

The military defines desertion as more than 30 consecutive days absent without leave.

I mentioned the other day how the New York area has too many people and not enough space. I’m not about to back off that assessment, but I am willing to offer some perspective. Parts of Long Island are exceptionally nice, for living and visiting. Where I’m at now, in Smithtown, is one such place. Smithtown is an historic village on the north side (near Stony Brook) about 50 miles east of Manhattan.

Yesterday–Christmas Day–the temperature was in the 30s, but it was sunny and therefore mild. To get some exercise, we drove a short distance through the woods and along the Nisseqougue River to Long Beach on Long Island Sound. Long Beach features five plus miles of rock-strewn beach and stunning views across the sound to Connecticut. The views of the sometimes quaint, sometimes grand and always expensive beachfront homes is also interesting.

I’ve been inundated with comment spam, or c-spam, of late (here, and at AdPulp). And when c-spam comes it comes in waves–40, 50, 100, 150 at a time. This nefarious activity poses a significant threat to the blogosphere, in that bloggers will be tempted to shut down comments altogether, rather than try to stay one step ahead of the jackasses who commit these crimes. Take away the back-and-forth of legitimate comments, and comments on comments, and you remove the conversational nature of blogs. Which is why blogging software providers like pMachine, Word Press and Moveable Type must make defeating c-spam a priority for 2005.

While on the topic of online scams, let’s also look at the practice known as phishing. Phishing involves the use of e-mail messages that appear to come from your bank or another trusted business, but are actually from imposters. By the way, phishing has nothing whatsoever to do with the rock group from Vermont.

Phishing e-mails typically ask you to click a link to visit a web site, where you’re asked to enter or confirm personal financial information such as your account numbers, passwords, Social Security number or other data. Although these web sites may appear legitimate, they are not. Thieves can collect whatever data you enter and use it to access your personal accounts.

When you receive these bogus e-mails (and you will), you can forward them to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov, or contact them at www.consumer.gov/idtheft* or 877.IDTHEFT (877.438.4338).

Yesterday was a trip down memory lane for me. We started the morning in Lancaster, PA, where I spent four years pursuing my higher education and a serious beer buzz. Then, we headed to South Street in Philadelphia (I used to live at 6th + Locust) for a cheese steak at Jim’s. The steak was good, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

It took us 5.5 hours to drive from South Street to Smithtown, on Long Island. The drive typically takes 2.5 hours, maybe three. On the way, Darby asked me if I would ever consider living in this region again. Given that I have recently applied for jobs in New Jersey and New York, the inquiry was more than rhetorical.

Early in the journey, I said, “Sure, if the opportunity was right.” A couple hours later, still inching towards New York, I revised my thinking.

“What is architecture anyway? Is it the vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying taste of the various lords of mankind? I think not. No, I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived. So architecture I know to be a Great Spirit…Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is really architecture.” -Frank Lloyd Wright

Since its opening on April 22, 1939, the SC Johnson Wax Administration Building has been a “mecca” for tourists, architects and Frank Lloyd Wright devotees from around the world. Today the building remains in use as the international headquarters for SC Johnson Wax.

The bricks used in the building are unusual in that more than 200 sizes and shapes of brick were made to form the angles and curves used by Wright. Even their color, Cherokee Red, was specified by Wright.

The Great Workroom, which covers nearly one-half acre, is the main office area. Though it has many unique features, two of the most prominent are the slim dendriform columns that support the roof, and glass tubing which replaces conventional windows.

As I stood inside this wonderful building this morning, I felt like a frog ready to emerge from the depths. I know Wright’s columns are meant to evoke a stand of trees, and they do. But the room also evokes a certain amphibious nature, with his “tree tops” spread out like lily pads.

The Choice
by William Butler Yeats

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Thanks to Jon Husband for the poetry pointer.

I love maps. I love blogs. Hence, I’m naturally drawn to maps that pinpoint where the bloggers are.

Click on the map to visit ChicagoBlogMap dot com. From there you can search for Chicago bloggers by their CTA train stop.

John Perry Barlow, former rancher, internet freedom fighter and renowned songwriter reveals quite a lot in his latest blog entry. For one, we now know he attends Burning Man in the black rock desert of northwest Nevada (and here I thought only the cool kids were doing that). He goes on to tell how he’s fighting the Constitutionality of drug charges brought against him. He was taken off a plane bound for New York last year, after authorities allegedly found pot, ’shrooms and Vitamin K in his suitcase.

Here’s a passage from his entry: I was stripped, cavity-searched, and eventually tossed into a small cell with a marvelously odd collection of California’s less fortunate. There I spent most of the remaining day, while I attempted to raise the truly astonishing $25,000 bail upon which my liberty now depended. Finding rescue was tricky. The “phone” in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn’t know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won’t accept collect calls. Furthermore, they’d taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head. Lunch consisted of a slice of baloney between two unadorned slices of Wonder Bread, but I didn’t have much appetite. At some point in the recent past, someone had thrown up in our cell and no one had bothered to clean it up. I was getting what Rudy Giuliani liked to call, during his tenure as the Mean Mom of New York, “a taste of the system.”