Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Loons - There as a time in this great country of ours when crackpot really stood for something, maybe we can get back to our roots.

Stop Energy - If your going to engage in satirical charactatures of proffessionals then at least be sure you get the formating right. He could have had so much fun with the security implications section of the RFC. What a waste.

Inside Treo - This was a big help in letting me supress my overwhelming desire to take my Treo apart, but then I can’t find the jeweler’s screw driver either.

Winter weather - Stop freeloading on that oppressive goverment weather monopoly get custom free enterprise weather online now!

VoIP vendor - Some people seem to be confused about the quality signature of boadband IP, might as well sell them phone service. Ok for a second line of the kid though.

Winter tires - are starting to seem like a very attractive idea around here

Food insects - “let them eat cake” is so old fashion.

G4 Powerbook Battery Reset? - My powerbook batter stopped taking a charge. A new one is $150 +/- $40. Bought a used one on eBay for $60. It appears that battery failure of this kind is often a problem with resetting the chargering system’s model of the battery. Frustrating not to know if this old battery is really useless or not.

Warchalk your cell phone? - apparently in some parts of the world people stand around on the street and will sell you some time on their cellphone. Now if we just add standard way to indicate your willing to do this, say a hanky in your left jeans pocked [:-)], then all of us who carry cell phones could make a little money on the side.

A few new nieghbors showed up in the last 24 hours, and one notices that Amazon will give you a window into what they know about you by going this link.

Fun boondoggle for the blog. Adding this to the home page,

  <meta name="ICBM" content="42.41528,-71.15694">
  <meta
    name="DC.title"
    content="Ascription is an Anthema to any Enthusiasm">
  <meta name="geo.position" content="42.41528;-71.15694">

and then doing the right magic at http://geourl.org/ registers the site in their geographic database. Among the fun that enables is that you can find out who the
neighbors are. You can even get a RSS feed for them. Not very many sites using this yet; darn.

Of course you should put your own location into that code fragment. Topozone is a good place to figure that out.

Of course none of that is as much fun as Geocaching, or playing with the reverse phone book and the show neighbors feature.

Update. This is becoming quite popular; so the default list of sites is a little long. You can reduce the radius the list includeds by adding a dist=100 argument to those URLs. That will limit the radius to 100 miles rather than the default of 500. The ones above have that change now.

Excellent Quiz from Kieran Healy’s weblog.

Much of the liturature on communities argues that modernity is at fault for distroying lots of communities. On the one hand I agree with whole heartedly. Modern life, particularly technological progress, thrives on tearing down the boundries between niches. This often lays waste to the communities that reside inside those bubbles. Modern life is for ever serving up great displacements. These days the nostolgic refugee lives in us all.

On the other hand I’d argue that, like cities, modern technology has allowed numerous communities of common interest to come into being that previously could never achieve sufficent scale to thrive. The modern mega-city offers a community for any enthusiasm. The internet’s only made your options richer still.

The frameworks of modern life, like cities, allow you to reside in dozens of communities. They free you from being dependent on a single community for the entire range of goods and services that constitute your life. This diversified portfolio of communities appears to provide some compensation for the extremely high probablity that modern life will displace you from any particular one of the communties you life inside.