Lee.org

I was at a party a while ago. Things were getting a little racy and we were talking about the kinds of sex we were into. One guy got overly bold/eager/green and said,I’m open to pretty much anything.” Jumping right in, I asked him with deadpan inquisitiveness , “What about catheterization*?” It took a moment for the image to fully form in his mind of what I was suggesting. Then he laughed nervously and said, “Umm. Err. Well, maybe not ‘anything’.” The whole room laughed. It became a big/funny subject for the evening. “Hello, my name is Lee. And no, I’m not into catheterization.”

* The practice of putting a catheter up your urethra for pleasure. (Yea, it squicks me too.)

That vignette brings up today’s kink… Girls Stuck in the Mud. My sister told me about this web site and… ooo eee, it got me hot.. or maybe it wigged me out… or maybe it’s such a taboo subject that I don’t know WHAT to think. Or maybe it’s just so messed up that it short circuited my brain into thinking that it was a bucket of delectable flax seed.

Check it out: http://www.carstuckgirls.com

Click on each thumbnail:

I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: who buys such videos?

• Highway stalker wanna-be’s?
• Members of the towing industry?
• Rookie policemen?
• Tired do-gooders?

And why did I grab so many thumbnails? Maybe I like flax.

Molls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.

I reallythought this thought this Ambient Orb thing was a joke when I first saw it. But then I saw that it’s really sold in Brookstone and uses the Airmessage pager network to receive updates! Cool.

I just thought this issue with scale was kind of cool. Lifted from SETI@Home.

There’s a third type of incorrect result that occurs, too. Sometimes, very rarely, a computer will get the wrong answer to a calculation for no apparent reason. This appears to happen about one out of every 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations. If you let your computer run SETI@home for a thousand years, it would get the wrong answer once. (Of course by then your computer would have failed for some other reason). But since SETI@home gets a thousand years of CPU time every day, we see one or more of these failures per day.

I saw the tail end of this movie at Arisia 2 weeks ago. It’s fantastic. As I told the writer/director after the show, “It really pushed a button.” …. “I didn’t expect to cry at the con. Thank you.”

I wrote to a couple indie movie theaters, asking them to show the film.

You should see Robot Stories.

I got a cell phone about a month ago with Jabra Freespeak bluetooth earpiece… I also got an antenna so I could get reception in my basement bedroom.

The antenna works pretty well. In the downstairs of the house, I get 0-1 bar of cell phone strength, and the sound gets flakey if I move the phone while I’m talking. With the antenna, I get 1-3 bars and it doesn’t get flakey. Of course, I now have a 2′ antenna in the corner of the room and a wire going from my phone to the antenna….

The Jabra bluetooth thingy is great. Sound quality is very good, wearability is excellent, it never cuts out, it’s convenient. I’ve had a little bit of trouble figuring out where the sound is going to go to: the handset or the earpiece. Maybe that was user error.. maybe. Carrying 2 items instead of 1 is a little bit of a bother. It takes a few seconds to put the earpiece on so when a call comes in, I have to scurry to find the earpiece. But hey. Maybe when I become fully assimilated, I’ll just leave the earpiece in all the time. I’d recommend it. Especially since I got mine for free with my bluetooth enabled phone. I hear these things retail for $100.

I think my first Arisia was in 1991. That’s a lot of conning… This year, I just went to a few events. And actually… hmm. I didn’t make it to a single of the 420 or so panels. I planned on making it to 5 or 10 but… hey.

So here are my favorites:

• Artist Guest of Honor Arthur Ganson’s machines (he’s got some really nice videos of his work online). He gave a talk with videos and had some pieces at the Art Show. Cool.
• Writer Guest of Honor Tim Powers talking about how his genre was crap and that everybody knows it. That was a very adventurous premise for a talk and it worked out very well. Witty, funny, fun, interesting.
• Freedom Guest of Honor Eric Raymond’s speech. Some talking points I remember most are:

– He had fashion advice for geeks. In business dealings with non-techies, you should look like (and he admits that he borrowed this term from someone else, but then he also borrowed the term “open source” and did well with that, but I digress…) you should look like “a prince from another country”. If you try to wear a suit, you’ll just look like a junior executive. And their job is to go fetch coffee and get shat upon. Instead, wear Landsend loafers and expensive casual shirts and the like.

– Don’t use gushy emotions to market your product. Use fear, greed, vanity, and desire for control. Don’t say, “Buy open source because it’s good for the world.” Instead say, “Use open source because the driving motivation for closed source companies is to trap you in a proprietary environment and then raise prices. If your closed source provider goes belly-up, you’re in big trouble! Open source software is free and it works, today. If you want a new feature, your costs will be easily identifiable.”

– Middle management’s job is to say “no”. So don’t talk to middle management. They are “organizational conservators”. People at the bottom can do things but not make decisions. People at the top can make decisions but not do things. Talk to the top.

– If you’re selling a big idea, forget about advertising in technical papers. Go for the money-people, Wall St. Journal etc. Technical magazines don’t get read by decision makers.

It was also very interesting to see that there were 2 polyamory panels at Arisia.

I had wanted to see: Microcontrollers, Reading – Cecilia Tan, Origami, Icehouse Games demo, Foam Carving, Dr. Seuss, Special Filk Guest Concert: Tom Smith, The Golden Days of Classic Arcade, Internet Governance: Who Rules the Net?, What’s Up With Copyright These Days, The Digital Millenium Copyright Act at 5, Commissioned Art, Slide Show – Casting in Bronze, Are Radio Plays Dead?, Masquerade.

This 13 year old kid in Texas got suspended for figuring out how to do a “net send”. That’s not right. So I sent him a letter:

Lee C. Sonko
[address removed]

Vampire & Cowgirl [address from the nightmare candles website]
Po Box 1203
Hurst, Tx 76053

Carl,

We don’t know each other but I wanted to write you a real ink and paper note to offer you and your family support, and reaffirm your suspicion that your teachers are being ninnies on this whole Net Send issue.

Rock on,

Lee Sonko
http://lee.org

And a fax to the school…

Lee C. Sonko
[address removed]

Principal Tommy Rollins [address from the school’s website]
North Richland Middle School
4800 Rufe Snow Dr
North Richland Hills, TX 76180
Phone: (817) 547-4200
Fax: (817) 581-5372

Concerning the matter of Carl Grimmer’s suspension for using the “net send” computer command:

I’m sure that you have, by now researched what Carl did in the computer lab and know what his intentions likely were.

If you set the example of severely punishing students for learning independently, you’ll get exactly what you demand of your students.

Thank you for your consideration,
Lee C. Sonko

The original story:
Fort Worth Star Telegram

Other websites:
Dave’s Good Stuff
The Opinion Journal from The Wall Street Journal
MetaFilter
Fark
SLASHDOT

PPG showed this to me. From :The New York Times

Gallery Show Seeks the Art in Spam, Seen Through the Eyes of the Future

January 26, 2004
By SAUL HANSELL

The discordant verse, in simple black letters on white paper, is in keeping with the basement alternative art gallery in which it hangs:
———————————————-
victorious tank tepid conservatism veldt

cerulean carl
frontal decry brennan
———————————————-
It may seem the work of a striving, if cryptic, poet. But it is an excerpt from the nonsense words found in a junk e-mail message, as captured in a Manhattan exhibit that tries to make art out of spam.

The exhibit, titled “Reimagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils From the Golden Age of Spam,” is at Spaceworks at the Tank, a gallery and performance space on West 42nd Street devoted to experimental works.

Jesse Jarnow, one of the curators, said the name was inspired by a display he saw at the American Museum of Natural History on the Ordovician period, an era that ended about 445 million years ago, when the earth was dominated by primitive sea creatures.

“They had all these brightly colored snails,” he said. “But they don’t really know what it was really like.”

Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam. Motifs include the random text typically added to the end of spam to avoid being discarded by spam-finding filter programs, which the exhibit presents as the work of the “great writers of the ‘Ordovician Gothic.’ ”

The accompanying text notes that “this school of writers emphasized playful literary juxtaposition, frequently casting aside the period’s typical syntax in order to achieve a more visceral form.”

Using the sort of displays common in natural history
museums, the exhibit examines other aspects of the world as captured in the amber of spam. Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. “It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,” the exhibit commentary says. “If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.”

The spam exhibition will be on display through Feb. 15 at Spaceworks at the Tank, 432 West 42nd Street. It is open Thursdays and Fridays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m., and during performances.

The weeks fly by too quick!

Originally was planning on spending just a day or so at PPG’s. Spent all weekend. It was a [insert above title here]. Friday night we went out to the movies… but didn’t go out :-). I brought the movies home… popcorn, hot dogs, those awful nachos and gooey cheese-food-product, Yoo Hootm , way too much sweet/salty snack food and soda. Watched “Insomnia”… in the original Norwegian. Creepy, alien, scary, bad people, good movie. PPG’s friend Ci came over and we talked and had fun. During-which I made this chocolate-chocolate-chocolate cake-thing that was SUPPOSED to be an insomnia-inducing agent related to the movie but I didn’t get around to it til Saturday. It was only “ok”, not terrific, but VERY chocolaty! Ingredients: 1/2 lb semi-sweet chocolate, 1/2 lb bittersweet chocolate, 10 tbsp butter, 5 eggs (with soft peaks and folding involved) 1/4 tsp cream of tartar…. and that’s it! Instead of going out Saturday night, we stayed in. HURRAY! We were supposed to go out to this thing in NYC or this other thing in North Jersey to support various friends… but WE DIDN’T WANT TO. So we didn’t. We stayed home and made candles and talked instead! Oh, did I mention that PPG and I didn’t get out of bed until noon on Saturday? :-) Sunday we forced ourselves up by … I don’t even remember… before noon. And went out on fun errands (“BRRR IT’S COLD!”) that turned unhappyish when the reverse-beeper on the forklift at Home Depot was WAY TOO LOUD and just wouldn’t stop. And that Home Depot is BACKWARDS! You walk in and the lighting section is in front of you… kind of, but the rest of the store is off to your RIGHT instead of the left! But even still, there were some little aisles off to the left that weren’t the seasonal shelves. It was very confusing. And someone stole our cart but not the stuff in it! Weird and nose-crinkling bad! GRR! But the fish in PetSmart helped calm us down. And then we went to a Pizzaria where they were nice and it was quiet and the cappuccino tasted like cappuccino and not a mocha-frappe-choco-cara-frotha-ccino. And even though their stromboli was really a calzone, it was a good calzone. And they had home made cheesecake, made by the owner of the place and even though we didn’t have any, it looked really good. Ninette’s Italian Restaurant saved us!

So we went home and did all the things we fetched things to do. Put up an Ikea door pot-top holder, nailed x-mas lights under the counter, formed this steel-sheet-come-blackboard onto a structural pillar (it looks slick!) set up an electric kitty litter scooper-thing (also good) put a night-light in the bathroom (looks good but 4 watts of compact fluorescent is a surprisingly large amount of light!), put up a hanging ironing board, talked about all kinds of fun things and played with her new Forever Flashlight (which works pretty darn good, especially for where we tried using it!).

And then we went to sleep, and got up the next morning and here I am!