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Thursday, November 30 2000

Whacked Out!

Over at Funny SF, Sandy has put up scans of Whacked Out Magazine, "the magazine of really, really literate sf." Funny stuff.

Friday, November 24 2000

Mayhem 2000 - Florida takes its toll

The Onion, "America's Finest News Source," has the best current coverage of the death, looting, and power-grabs occurring in the wake of America's electoral nightmare. Headlines:

• Recount Reveals Nader Defeated
  
• NBC News Reverses Report of Gore's Death
  
• Bush Executes 253 New Mexico Democrats
  
• Serbia Deploys Peacekeeping Forces to U.S.
  
• Clinton Declares Self President For Life
  

Saturday, November 18 2000

Phil Agre's election links

Phil Agre is collecting links to newspaper articles about the election screwup in Florida. He's a Gore supporter, but the articles he links to aren't universally supportive of Gore; just mostly so.

Friday, November 17 2000

Marketing to Doctors

NYT talks about privacy and marketing issues as it affects doctors. The American Medical Association compiles information (including prescribing histories) on almost all doctors in the U.S. (even those who are not part of the association) and sells that information to pharmaceutical companies; those companies, in turn, use the information to determine which doctors to target their marketing messages to, and which doctors to give honorariums, gifts, and presentations to in the hopes that the doctors will prescribe their medicines more (in politics, they'd call it "lobbying"). An analysis of 29 studies indicates that doctors do, indeed, change their prescribing behavior based on this marketing (i.e., they're human).

Thursday, November 16 2000

Drop the Fry

12-year-old girl arrested in DC subway system for eating french fries. Part of a zero-tolerance policy towards eating and drinking on the subway. I generally got annoyed when I'd be riding DC's subway and someone started eating; first of all, if I was close enough, I had to deal with smelling someone else's food, second of all, because I didn't know if the eater would leave their wrappers (or uneaten food) on the subway.

Of course, I sometimes drank out of my water bottle when I took my bike on the Metro; which, though it was odorless and there was no chance I'd leave the bottle on the train, was against Metro policy/the law.

Wednesday, November 15 2000

Ben Stein on the Web

Ben Stein (of Win Ben Stein's Money and Ferris Bueller's Day Off) on the problem with doing comedy on the Web. The problem - a live comedian (or one being taped) interacts with an audience immediately; on the Internet, there is no interaction. (Not the kind a comedian needs, anyway.)

Tuesday, November 14 2000

Strange Marketing?

So I typed the URL crackwhore.com into my browser (don't ask). Not sure what I expected; what I got was this bizarre graphic: a Quake symbol, the words "Clan Crackwhore", and two blurry brown skeletal heads.

First thought: "Quake kids with too much time on their hands."

Click through. Checked out the first Clan member, China. Nice (alluring) pic. Checked out another. And another. And another. And another. All close-to-30, attractive, Quake-playing women with likes ranging from "brainiacs" to "the weight of a well-balanced whip." Then I click on Mac Daddy, their "inspiration," the "super-freak."

Second thought: "One Quake kid with an active imagination and too much time on his hands."

Over to allwhois.com, to find out who actually owns the domain. Answer: Gamespy.com, a gaming site.

Third thought: "Dot-com with an interesting marketing campaign, and employees with too much time on their hands."

Back to piou.org, write up entry for weblog.

Final thought: "Why am I writing this? I don't have enough time on my hands."

(OK - why surf to crackwhore.com? Co-worker mentioned South Park today; sitting here, recalled this, and recalled one of the running gags of the show - Cartman's mom being in CrackWhore mag. And, as I tend to look up domain names with a tie-in to recent media or news - say floridarecount.com (interesting) or elian.com (not a real Elian Gonzalez (remember him?) site, but linked to one) - it seemed worth looking at.

Sunday, November 12 2000

Powazek redesigns the Palm Beach ballot

Derek Powazek, web dude, has done a redesign of the confusing Palm Beach ballot.

Friday, November 10 2000

DIY Culture at CalTech

The Chronicle has an interesting piece on computer culture at CalTech, and the do-it-yourself ethic there: freshmen buying cheap hardware and putting it together themselves to build fast computers. Also mentions the cavalier attitude towards software piracy.

Thursday, November 9 2000

The election

After getting off work on Tuesday, having read (according to Salon and CNN) that Gore had won Florida and Michigan (2 of the 3 swing states the pundits had said would put him on the path to victory), I had a smile on my face. (I had actually voted for Nader, via absentee ballot, in Maryland, a state which ended in Gore's column, as has California, where I am now.) I walked up Market Street, looking for a bar ("pub") that would have the election on. (In 1998, I spent election evening with J. and his verbal-sparring-partner-at-the-time-whose-name-I've-forgotten at a gathering of Republicans (who are and were not my tribe) in a DC bar, watching as they lost seats in both chambers of Congress, and speculating about whether it's easier to get laid at a Republican function or a Democratic one. K., who we had invited to come down out of Maryland for the evening, didn't show. (It has nothing to do with either election, but K., who had known me since college, never told me she was bi-but-mostly-gay; she told J. the night I introduced the two (when her companion of the particular evening picked up a copy of the Washington Blade). Very few people have come out directly to me; I tend to find out through friends.)

I found no likely haunts. So I took the bus up to where I'm staying (lower Pacific Heights, near the Filmore), and walked around a bit; found a bar, Harry's, that had the election on. (They also had Lauryn Hill on, but a fellow results-watcher convinced the bartender not to put on another CD when Miseducation finished.) (Wow. Hadn't realized Charles Isbell was still doing hip-hop reviews.) Ordered dinner, had several beers over the course of several hours, and watched as Florida's 25 votes were taken out of Gore's electoral tally, and called too close. When Republicans started showing up at the bar and it got crowded, I went home. Worked on DNS (I was updating to the most recent non-9.0 patch) for my machine and listened to the CNN news feed all night, until 5am Pacific, 2am Eastern. Which means I heard the commentary from the talking heads as the race grew tighter, approaching 270 for each candidate; and my heart sank when I heard them declare that George W. Bush would be our next president. The pundits kept talking, about the concession phone call they imagined Gore would be making to Bush; the news that Gore had made the call; the news that Gore was coming to his supporters' rally to make his concession speech; and then - the news that a Florida election official had called both campaigns to tell them despite what the news networks said, his state was too close to call.

Gore took back the concession; some of the pundits half-apologized for the media's screw-up, while others ignored the problems they'd caused that night; and I went to sleep, having completed my upgrade to BIND 8.2.2-P5. (And, realizing I was - excited - about the election, thought back to my first comment back at the bar when Florida was taken out of Gore's column: "The networks want to call it close to make sure they get good ratings.")

Phil Agre, who really should be paid to just write/moderate Red Rock Eater News, has a series of messages regarding the election; first 2 links are post-Election Day, third is pre-ED, about the "new science of character assassination" (his take on media coverage of the campaign.)

• Florida.recount1
  
• Democrats.com.Launch
  
• The.New.Science.of.C
  

Sunday, November 5 2000

More word origins

The Word Detective (online version of the newspaper column) is a funny collection of word origins. Current column talks about "maverick," "gobbledygook", "a horse apiece" ("a horse of peas")...

Friday, November 3 2000

Halloween in the Castro

Along with an estimated 200,000 people (it was crowded) I spent Halloween night on Castro Street in San Francisco. I bought my costume the Saturday before; camouflage pants, camo shirt, camo t-shirt, camo hat, combat boots. Decided against dog tags. At the Saturday night Halloween party I went to, that was it; for Castro Street, I added a bloodied (ketchuped) bandage over one eye. It was a fun coupla hours; lots of great costumes, which left me wishing for my camera which is still packed up in a box in Maryland. Supersnail.com has pictures from last year. Backdoor.com has pictures from back in 1976.

Thing that pissed me off about Halloween here, though: there was supposed to be a DJ group at Castro Street spinning tunes; apparently, they were moved to the Civic Center, without much fanfare.

Radiation everywhere...

Salon has a long article on Punta Arenas, Chile, a city which is now getting much more UVB radiation from the sun than it used to, due to the deterioration of the ozone layer near the South Pole. Just as the Internet is bringing the world closer together, so is our shared environment; according to this article (and I can't think of any good reason to doubt it), environmental scientists in general agree that the depletion of the ozone layer at the South Pole, and the tendril of that hole that's extended all the way to Chile, are the result of human behavior. Recently, 2 PBS series (NOVA and Frontline? Nature and Frontline?) had a good show dealing with environmental issues and the ozone layer; the gist of which seemed to be, it's almost certain that we're causing a reduction in ozone. Whether this will be a good or bad thing overall remains to be seen. For the people in Punta Arenas, at least - who're getting much more exposure than they're used to - it's a bad thing. Do the nations of the world that contributed the most to their situation owe them some compensation?

Radiation piece 2: ZDNet has a story about a study, discredited by the UK government, that suggests that using earphones for cellphones send more radiation to the brain than just using the cellphones themselves. Tangential quote from the article: "Scientists agree that electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones does warm brain tissue, that some strains of mice have developed cancer in tests in Australia and Finland, and that others become disorientated [sic]... it remains unproven that mobile phones pose a human health risk."

Wednesday, November 1 2000

Anna Deavere Smith

Salon has an interview with Anna Deavere Smith about her new book/memoir. I remember seeing a televised version of her one-woman play, Fires in the Mirror, sometime in the early 80s on PBS; super-impressive. It was the first of her one-woman shows in which she interviews numerous people around a tense situation, and portrays people on all sides of the issue to her audience - with their words, their voices, their mannerisms. Impressive enough that I bought a copy (which turned out to be an audiotape; apparently no videotape was for sale). I'll probably go see her when she swings through SF on her book tour.

Not to be confused with Anna Nicole Smith. (I've always wanted to se the two of them in a Celebrity Death Match.)

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...