My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name - I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity. The charity auction is held in association with SEN (Sports Entertainment Network - a sports talk-back AM radio station) [1]. This afternoon Greg was interviewed on SEN about football cards in general. He gave a good talk, he could probably do some professional radio work if he was interested. Greg’s cards are from the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL (Australian Football League) [2]. The cards used to be sold in “milk bars” (small stores that sold a variety of junk food and some essential food items including milk - most such stores are closed now as they have been replaced by petrol stations and supermarkets) and each pack of ~5 cards had some crewing gum included (which Greg often discarded because he didn’t like it - he should have given it to me, I was not so fussy). The back side of the cards had a jigsaw picture which I have never seen anyone complete (I expect that Greg has assembled at least one jigsaw as he has some sets). Probably the way the cards were collected, traded, etc is very similar to sports based cards from other countries (such as baseball cards in the US). On the animal front, I’ve had a mother cat and four kittens move into the shed in my back-yard. The mother cat has no collar and is not known by anyone in the area so she appears to have been dumped by her owner when she got pregnant. There are four kittens, one is ginger, one is black, and two are mottled part black and part ginger. They are all healthy and friendly and the kittens are all really cute. The kittens have become used to being patted and handled by humans so it will be easy to make them household pets. If an owner is not found for them then they will probably all end up being put to sleep (unfortunately I can’t keep them so I’ll have to deliver them to the local council). If anyone in Melbourne, Australia wants some free cats then I would be happy to deliver them. I’ll supply as many cats as desired. I can’t give away the mother until the kittens have been given away, so if you want the mother cat (dark coloured) then you may have to wait for a while. Judging by the date that I first noticed them (when they were walking around, had their eyes open, and ate solid food) the kittens would have to be at least 7 weeks old. It’s recommended that kittens not be given away before they are 8 weeks old and given that it will probably take a week to organise anything I expect that anyone who reads I don’t think that there is any risk of giving them away too early. Please let me know by email or a comment if you are in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia and want a new pet (or several new pets).

• [1] http://www.sen.com.au/


• [2] http://www.afl.com.au/

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In the last week, I have been witness to and part of many conversations and probably one of my favorite ones was about coffee. My friend reasoned that coffee is as wonderful as it is because of its dependability (unlike, for example, your relatives). You know that for a moderate sum of money, you can drink a drink that makes you happy, alert, and, for some of us, allows us to face the rest of the day on an even keel. It is pure comfort that derives from a form of almost ritualistic dependability. This morning, as I was sipping my coffee, I came across a short blog post by Stanley Fish who certainly does not make me as happy as my morning cup of joe, but I do admire him for his dependability and consistency when it comes to reporting on matters of liberalism. For over 20 years he has dependably written on the quandaries and limit of liberal political ideology and his most recent installment, which focuses primarily on a new book by Paul Starr, is no different. Well, his conclusion strikes just a little differently than the tone of some of his previous works. In the past (or perhaps in some of his longer academic works), Fish’s solution to the problem of competing ideologies is that there are no solutions, just incommensurable ideologies and you gotta sort of duke it out, and the strong man/woman/group wins (see Terry Eagleton for this characterization of Fish’s work. But the ending to this piece is subtly different, a tone and stance I rather prefer: So again, what to do? Lilla s answer is pragmatic rather than philosophical (and all the better for that). All we can do, he says, is cope ; that is, employ a succession of ad hoc, provisional strategies that take advantage of, and try to extend, moments of perceived mutual self-interest and practical accommodation. We need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principles. Now there s a principle we can live with, maybe. What I like about his ending is that it acknowledges there are times when compromise is possible, where a common meeting ground can be forged, however provisional these may be. As someone interested in the politics of consensus and accommodation, I think it is important to recognize that human beings are not simply molded by one set of values but are are often dwelling within various systems (of sometimes contradictory) values. And it is because of this multiplicity that forms of accommodation and consensus emerge and can emerge, signaling a more hopeful politics that derive not from abstract adherence to precept such as tolerance, but from the far messier realm of actual life experience.

Having been reading about Small World Phenomenon (which I've been calling Small World Syndrome for some time now, guess I'll have to change) the other day I was vaguely interested in LOST when I was pointed at it. It doesn't really help model the interconnectedness of the matrix as it's a tree structure AFAICT, but I think it's an fun idea with about as much point as most social networking sites and none of the claims to usefulness. :) I'd heard of Milgram before; my Mum did some stuff around Milgram's Experiment. SWP seems quite a different topic to me - are there similarities I'm missing or is it just the social psychologist equivalent of hacking on kernel code one day and a web app the next?

I went wedding list creating in John Lewis yesterday. It was fun for about 5 minutes and then the novelty of a Palm with a barcode reader wore off. They'd told me to be careful where I pointed it, so I didn't get to see just how good the range was. :( During the lengthy process a Hauppauge MediaMVP caught my eye (it's a hardware MPEG2 decoder with SCART socket, ethernet and remote control - the idea being you stream content to it from your PC and watch it on the TV), reduced from £79.99 to £39.99. I'd considered buying one of these in the past, so I took a closer look. And discovered one marked down to £25.00 at the back. Took it to the checkout to confirm the price, got told it was right, and bought it. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with it just yet. :) I've already got a hardware MPEG2 decoder on the DVB card hooked up to the TV, though the MVP is a fanless device and might make a better choice than the living room PC. mvpmc is a potential option, and there's a plugin for VDR as well. Or there's just the prod it and see what I can make it do approach. It's an IBM PowerPC 405 with 32MB RAM (though only 16M for the OS it seems) and an SMC 91C111 ethernet chip. The interesting bit of the MPEG2 decoder has no source which is a pain though. :( Still. Fun toy! \o/

We spent last week at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan. This was the second year of the festival as well as our second year attending. Unlike last year, there was no “Freedom Festival” organized by Michael Moore-haters this year. Perhaps they are still recovering their debts from last year, when they lost money and had to stop their showing of “Michael Moore Hates America” after discovering it had inappropriate language for the family audience they were targeting. We saw nine films in just five days — four in one day was our max. (Rachele saw one more — The Beauty Academy of Kabul — that I missed, unfortunately, and we gave our tickets to Jesus Camp to Rachele’s parents.) Our selections were:

• Flirting With Disaster
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Men at Work
• Winter Passing
• La Moustache
• Paradise Now
• Innocent Voices
• Viva Zapatero
• The Killing

The one that sticks most in my memory is La Moustache. The essence of the plot is revealed in the first minute of the movie: a man shaves off his mustache. His wife of fifteen years doesn’t notice. In fact, she doesn’t remember he ever had a mustache. While the film starts as vaguely comic, it quickly spirals into a psychic breakdown with a possibly unreliable narrator. It was quite nearly perfect. The beautifully restored virgin print of Monty Python’s Holy Grail was astonishing. The film was shown for free on a large outdoor screen by the lake, and the sound was crystal clear (now in stereo!) no matter where you sat. There are a bunch of scenes everyone always remembers in the Holy Grail. I realized after watching it again that the movie is composed entirely of these memorable scenes. (I had the same feeling watching the Wizard of Oz after a ten to fifteen year hiatus recently.) Finally, Stanley Kubrick’s first film, The Killing (1956) also merits the maximum rating, whatever that is (5.5 stars?). While it lacks the surreal/experimental feel of his later films, Kubrick was already beginning to play with narrative structure and sequencing. The film walks through the events leading to the climax several times, each time from a different character’s point of view. But really it’s just a great heist flick. Mani Haghigi, the Iranian director of Men at Work, had an interesting observation about the festival. Unlike most other film festivals, he, as a director, could just hang out and enjoy the films and the company and not worry about impressing executives and distributors. The festival’s motto is accurate — “Just Great Movies.”

Back from seeing Mountain Stage record a radio show at the Paramount. Dale Jett, Tim O'Brien, the attack mandalin and bass of the Yonder Mountain String Band, Odetta (who has a commanding presence onstage even before she speaks), and Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys. Great fun watching Larry Groce croud them all onstage at the end and arrange an song on the spur of the moment. First time I've been to a radio show. Got me thinking to one of the first times I remember being struck by something on the radio, when we were driving up to the tobacco warehouse one night in Abington in Silas's truck, with its noxious chaw spit can, and I heard this ethereal mountian voice coming out of the radio, sounded 50 years ago and at the same time so immediate. Could have been Ralph Stanley, come to think.. After the show, I humped a dorm-style cube fridge half an hour downhill thru the woods in the dark. But that's a different story..

Well, I finally have a new laptop. Got it yesterday, spent about 3 hours installing and downloading all the software, and then let rsync run all last night to transfer over my home directory. Of course like any good Debian user I've filed a detailed installation report. I'm fairly pleased with the fujitsu p7120 so far. Compared to my old p1100:

• The keyboard feels larger, and the couple of keys that were moved around all make sense, except for delete. The right shift key is enormous, larger than that key is on a regular full size keyboard, and the other non-alphanumerics are also very nicely sized. Even the spacebar is larger than the usual laptop chiclet. I'd not realised how dead my old laptop's keyboard had gotten until keys started falling off; typing on this new one is just fun. Sorry for the length of the resulting blog entry..
• It runs a little bit hotter, but still seems quite nice for a fanless laptop with a fairly modern processor in it (1.2 ghz).
• The screen is much nicer, very bright. Was worried that it would be too reflective, but situations where it is seem rare. It's very nice to be able to see the screen outdoors; I'm writing this in direct sunlight.
• The touch pad is very small, but very responsive. I can't normally use touch pads and I wasn't able to consider buying this laptop until I got a chance to try it out at DebConf. With that said, the lack of a middle mouse button is very annoying, and I'm looking for some way to bind keys in X to a) paste and b) touch pad disable toggle. I'm still having significant problems with reliably dragging to highlight text too, about 10x as slow at is as I was with the old laptop's pointer. You don't realized how often you copy text around that way until it becomes easier to just re-type it.. The two mouse buttons are not very conveniently placed, their positioning makes it hard to do a one-handed click and drag.
• The case doesn't feel as solid as my old laptop's. It's also an inch longer, which makes it seem less safe to toss it in the bottom of my backpack and run around with it than the old laptop, which was basically an indestrictible little lump. All the other changes made to the case design seem like improveents, except they used a blue LED for the power indicator, which like all blue LEDs is too bright to be comfortable at night. I'll probably use some whiteout on it.
• The battery lasts 4.5 hours real usage without any tuning beyond cpufreqd, which is quite nice. I haven't felt the need to add in a bay battery yet; that battery should bring it up to ~11 hours.
• The drive is one of those new really tiny laptop hard drives, and it's whisper-quiet. I have to put my ear right on the bottom of the case to hear it.
• The speakers are quite a lot better (for laptop speakers). The internal dual microphone array seems to not be very sensative at all, I wonder how much work the windows drivers for it do in software? The keyboard sound controls don't work in linux, which is a pity.
• The fingerprint reader and card reader are the only bits not yet supported by linux. If you care about non-free firmware, only the wifi needs that.
• 3D works; I can finally try out most of the new games that have been written in the past 6 years or so. Whee..

<p>I&#8217;ve decided that with the amount of changes my life will be going through in the next few months (of which more in a later post), I should really start blogging again.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve gone looking for something with a pretty web front end, and since I refuse to install the <a href="http://www.php.net/">Abomination</a> on my server, <a href="http://www.typosphere.org/">Typo</a> looked like a pretty good choice.</p> <p>The titles are a nod to two of my favourite authors - Kim Stanley Robinson for &#8220;haecceity&#8221; and Ken Macleod for &#8220;biolog&#8221;, his take on blogs in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&amp;path=ASIN/1841493449&amp;tag=haecceity-21&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=6738">Learning the World</a></p>