Gray Watson's Blog -- October 2004

I've found that blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often.

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October 29, 2004   

• So we are 4 days and counting till the election. I'm starting to get butterflies. I'm also starting to get optimistic. The polls are starting to shift towards Kerry and we'll see what the "unlikely voters" and the new registrants do on 11/2.

October 28, 2004   

• WOW! The Boston Red Sox won the World Series last night. Woke up Tim so he could witness history. How exciting! He was angry when I jumped up after the 3rd out in the 9th and did a little dance. They really played well and I love their team work and "bunch of idiots" mentality. Reminds me of the 2001 Patriot team. Signs at the stadium: Curse RIP, 1918 Is History, We Forgive Bill Buckner, Is This Heaven? I also took snapshots of all of the news home pages showing Red Sox stories at 00:30 EDT.
• Another day up in Salem NH. Worked on another computer trying to fix the network card. Did some phone calls. Ran some computers over to the new Derry office. Did some visibility holding signs by an intersection. Took out the trash. Whatever needs to be done. They sent me down to a printer in Woburn to pick up some really cool looking Red Sox and Kerry signs that I took to Manchester, NH.
• Yesterday I downloaded and posted a list of side-by-side endorsements for Bush and Kerry. It makes interesting reading. When it was posted online, it showed pages of Bush and then, at the bottom, were pages of Kerry. It looked so one sided that I wondered if it was done on purpose.

October 27, 2004   

• Another long day up in Salem NH working for Kerry. Someone came into the office today and said that the Bushies had there signs out on an intersection so we all piled into cars and got out there. I struck up a conversation with some women holding Bush signs next to me. Took them a couple of minutes before the vitriol to temper. The woman next to me said that she would never again vote Democratic because we were stealing and defacing their signs. I old her that we had sheets on our walls of people who had their Kerry signs stolen but she wouldn't believe me. But after 30 minutes or so we were chatting amiably.
• The almost always hilarious Onion magazine has put out their 2004 Election Guide. Very funny.

  MIAMI, FL -- With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3.

  Uh, the elections on on November 2nd in case anyone doesn't get the joke. Other titles include: "Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected", "Hundreds Of Republicans Injured In Rush To Discredit Kerry", and "Kerry Vows To Raise Wife's Taxes".
• This is old news now but a huge cache of explosives has vanished from a site in Iraq. Kerry is already using it on the campaign trail.

  The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

• The Washington Post endorses Kerry.

  Experts tell us that most voters have had no difficulty making up their minds in this year's presidential election. Half the nation is passionately for George W. Bush, the pollsters say, and half passionately for John F. Kerry -- or, at least, passionately against Mr. Bush. We have not been able to share in this passion, nor in the certainty. As readers of this page know, we find much to criticize in Mr. Bush's term but also more than a few things to admire. We find much to admire in Mr. Kerry's life of service, knowledge of the world and positions on a range of issues -- but also some things that give us pause. On balance, though, we believe Mr. Kerry, with his promise of resoluteness tempered by wisdom and open-mindedness, has staked a stronger claim on the nation's trust to lead for the next four years.

October 26, 2004   

• The new Treo 650 has been seen in the wild. It has Bluetooth, a higher resolution LCD screen, a faster processor, and a removable battery. Looks pretty slick.

October 25, 2004   

• The war of the lawyers continues as Ohio Republicans are trying to invalidate voters. It sounds bad but unfortunately, the Democratic party has a long history of "over registration" and double voting to live with. I certainly think that there needs to be people watching closely for fraud but we must error on the side of letting people's votes be counted.

  Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

• Worked up in Salem doing a variety of tasks. Drove around two 6 town halls to get the latest lists of absentee voters. Then made a number of calls two people who had already volunteered to confirm that they are working with us in the Salem/Derry area. Seems that inner-party politics is rearing its head because the Boston Kerry office has said that they are going to be calling our volunteer lists. God knows why they need them. Got into a fight with the woman who runs the office because she was considering this list of names/numbers on her wall as the master list instead of the spreadsheet that a volunteer was keeping up to date. "I've been doing it this way for 20 years". Yeah but multiple people have to work from this list and we can't read your writing. What an idiot.
• Came back last night after being in Pittsburgh for a ceremony for my little niece Shivani. So cute. Her mom, my brother's wife, is Indian and they have a hair cutting ceremony where the baby's head is shaved. Tim, my son, would not have been an issue because he was basically bald until he was 2 but Shivani had a head of dark hair. She did great and managed to look even cuter with a buzz cut. She is just on the verge of crawling and I'm sure we'll get a full report in a week or two.
• Interesting. The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth. Most seem pretty reasonable. Maybe there are 111 and these are only the ones that they can print. I liked this one.

  10) Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.

  This implies, I guess, that human animals are a different story. Oh, and this one sounds pretty sane too.

  11) When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.

• Interesting blog of audio, visual, and text material being removed from the Whitehouse web site either because of the election or in preparation of Bush's removal.

  As reported previously here, here and here, it looks like the scrubbing of various historical documents and other elements of the White House Website is continuing! And may be wider and more systematic than previously known.

October 22, 2004   

• Wow! Over 7,000 people have already expressed an interesting in flying on SpaceShipOne after it becomes Virgin Galactic. This is the continuation of Burt Rutan's space program being run by Scaled Composites. They will be building 5 spacecrafts for Virgin each of which will be able to take 5 or 9 passengers on the 3.5 hour trip into space -- the actual time of weightlessness will be less than 5 minutes. I'm not sure if I'd go for that price. I'm sure it will come down however after competition comes up to speed.
• Paper talking about data processing on large computing clusters. Haven't read it but it looks interesting. Supposedly the theory behind google.
• Wow. Up to 1 terrabyte of RAM in a drive unit. 2 million random I/O requests per second. 12 gigabytes per second of random sustainable data bandwidth. Requires 5 kilowatts of power.

October 21, 2004   

• Good day working for the Salem Kerry office. They are making me the visibility coordinater for events up to and including election day. It means I have to make sure volunteers are around with signs in visible places in the area and at the polls on 11/2. Finally started doing some telephone calling. It's tough work because most people are angry to be bothered. But we need to be able to remind people about the election, make sure they have a ride, and provide them information about the candidate if they are unsure. They have databases where voters can be coded as refusing to talk or not interested and they will never be called again. It is a necessary evil I guess.

October 20, 2004   

• Bit the bullet and swapped out their firewall box for an OpenBSD server up in the Salem NH Democratic office. The server provides DHCP, windows share, NAT, and firewall. Also figured out that the network line from the closet out to the main array of computers was bad. It was losing a lot of packets across this one cable which was wrapped in power lines. I remade it which solved a ton of problems.

October 19, 2004   

• Depressing article about George Bush's conviction.

  "This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."

• 2nd day up in Salem. Got a couple more computers wired up on the net. Did some data entry of voter information. Fought with some networking problems which seem to be tied to a dumb D-link piece-o-crap router. Ran some network cable over to a work area. Answered the phones. Got a network printer up for all of their desktops. Basic stuff.
• Good article about hackers. I guess by now I consider myself more of a software engineer but I certainly do revert to hacking often.

  The noun "hack" also has two senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult. It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.

• Put out a quick 5.4.2 release of my dmalloc library to fix some bugs in the morning.

October 18, 2004   

• 

  So my first day up in Salem New Hampshire working for the Kerry campaign. Massachusetts is pretty much locked up for Kerry so the action is up North. Lot of dedicated people in there for sure. They had me drive around to a number of town clerks offices to get some documentation and I worked on trying to improve their Internet connection which is terrible. It's very pretty now that the leaves are changing.

  So their network connection is terrible -- probably due to their location at the end of a Comcast cable run. I decided to walk around the local businesses to see if we could piggy-back. The mortgage company has a T1 upstairs as well as a picture of George W on their bulletin board. Oh well.

October 15, 2004   

• Here's another great URL John Kerry is a Douchebag but I'm Voting for Him Anyway. This guy has obviously moved more into Kerry's camp now that he's seen him in action during the debates.
• Here's a very funny site entitled Kerry Haters for Kerry. They have a bunch of stuff in there including some bumper stickers. Couple caught my eye: "Better Flip-Flop Than Flop" and "Why Not the Long Face?". Too funny.
• So I'm taking a leave of absence to be working for the Kerry campaign in southern New Hampshire until the election. I will be probably either a) rarely updating my blog or b) using it to share with you (and myself in posterity) my experiences during the next weeks. I hope it is b). Stay tuned.
• This site talks about boycotting Sinclair Broadcast Group because they are forcing their affiliates to broadcast a program about Kerry days before the election. It is coopting of "news" journalism at its worst. Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman said on a CNN interview that John Kerry and the Democrats are like "holocaust deniers" and that if the Sinclair stunt is an "in-kind donation to George Bush" then "every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is an in-kind donation to John Kerry". Here's more information about the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
• Great interview with investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

  The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

• Wow. Great quote from Edward Abbey: "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government".

October 13, 2004   

• Just put up a new brain teaser entitled Bad Shipping on my teasers page. It's a tough one. Monty sent it to me last night and it took me a good hour to solve it.
• They may be hiding the senior Al-Qaida members in Jordan the BBC reports. Jordan is denying this however.

  A Haaretz correspondent has learned from international intelligence sources that the CIA is running a top-secret interrogation facility in Jordan, where the detainees - considered Al-Qaida's most senior cadre - are being held... A report on these prisoners issued Tuesday by the Human Rights Watch organization claims they are being held somewhere so secret that U.S. President George Bush asked the CIA heads not to report it to him.

• Scary story alleging that voter registration forms were thrown out by a registration company, Voters Outreach of America.

  [An employee of a private voter registration firm] says he got into a beef with the company over a pay dispute, and witnessed his bosses ripping up registration forms that had been filed by democrats. "They were thrown away in the trash. I grabbed them out," said Eric Russell. One of those forms belonged to Daren Gray, who was shocked to learn that the re-registration form he filled out was never turned in.

• Interesting story from the Guardian about a peasant photographer Li Tianbing in China. Here are some of Li's pictures.

  Li estimates he has taken 300,000 pictures of village weddings, communist party meetings and spring festival family gatherings using the most natural facilities. Developing the prints, he works with chopsticks by the light of a candle inside a red paper lantern. For enlargement, he shortens the height of a pipe from the ceiling that lets in an adjustable circle of light. "It doesn't get much more basic," says Li. "But you have to take account of the weather, which can be tricky. On a sunny day, you only need to open the door for one or two seconds to expose the film. But you need a bit longer when the clouds roll in."

October 12, 2004   

• Hosted one of the MoveOn.org's Vote for Change house parties at my place last night. Very uplifted to meet so many kindred spirits who are as passionate as I about working to vote Bush out of office on November 2nd. We watched the Vote for Change concert with Springsteen, Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., and the Dixie Chicks and wrote letters to folks in the swing states. I've not physically written that much in a long, long time.
• Here's a brutal piece about the horrors of war and the anguish of returning home regarding soldiers returning from Iraq. And to think that we didn't do everything in our power to avoid it.

  "There are no clear enemy lines," says Steve Robinson, the film's narrator and executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "The battlefield completely surrounds the soldier: it's above you, it's below you, it's to the left, it's to the right. It's 360 degrees you don't know where the enemy is. That is an incredible amount of pressure to operate under." Robinson believes that post-traumatic stress disorder will be this war's most destructive legacy, just as Agent Orange afflicted Vietnam veterans for decades, and Gulf War Syndrome still sickens soldiers who served during the first Iraq war.

October 8, 2004   

• Wow. Missed this story too. Bush had some sort of box under his jacket in the back during the first debate. There's speculation that Karl Rove was talking to him using some sort of concealed receiver. Here's another story from the Guardian with more information about possible wireless receivers.

  "Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up - and broadcast to surprised viewers - the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them.

• Oh man does this site rock. During the first presidential debates, Kerry talked about the lack of coalition and that Britain is the only one who is helping us in Iraq. Bush pounced triumphantly saying "you forgot poland". Kerry then went on to mention that Poland has some small number of troups over there that we pay them for, feed, supply, and transported there. This site is just awesome. It's a compelte parody of the "you forgot poland" line with a lot of hacked images with pictures of poland inserted.

October 7, 2004   

• I remember a couple of years back finding some sites which "prove" that the moon landings were staged. One of the interesting bits of "evidence" presented was that we have yet to see a picture from the earch or a satelite of the landing sites on the moon. Interesting question. We decided to figure out what resolution the Hubble space telescope had and we figured out that at the distance from the hubble to the moon there is a 10m/pixel resolution. We figured that at least you would need a 1m/pixel resolution to see the landing sites.
• This is cool. Back in 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts put a laser ranging retroreflector array in the Sea of Tranquillity. They shine a laser through a very carefully aimed telescope and then using specialized equipment then can detect the return signal which is only 1 photon every few seconds. They are able to measure the moon's distance to within 3cm of accuracy. With this information, scientists now believe that the moon as a liquid core. Did not know that.
• So I bought some DVD-R, cases, and labels today. With the help of my Mac G4, Imovie, and IDVD, I am wandering into the DVD burning realm to document the cable coverage of the two SpaceShipOne launches over the last 10 days. Pretty cool. Imovie is an excellent program for most basis video editing but it still takes time to import, edit, tune, and export movies. IDVD is pretty good but I still fight with the interface a bit -- this may improve as I use it more. Certainly I would not run iDVD without at least a G4 and 512mb. Still, I'm looking forward to checking one of my burned DVDs this evening.
• So I missed the fact the other night that Cheney mentioned factcheck.com not .org which he probably meant. The guys who own factcheck.com have now redirected their URL to an anti-bush site georgesoros.com. Of course, both factcheck.com, factcheck.org, and georgesoros.com are all melting under the load. But still funny. We were laughing at work picturing the system administrator choking on his dinner and rewinding his Tivo to hear Cheney say his domain name before breaking out into a cold sweat and calling his ISP to try and contain the deluge.
• Cool picture of hurricane Ivan from the International Space Station.
• So there is a space elevator competition next year. Space elevators have been proposed for years as an alternative to rocket launches. Wires would be run from a space station anchored with a large mass (maybe from an asteroid) down to the ground. Vehicles could then travel along the wires to get into space. The problem is the weight of the system. The wires need to be super strong and super lightweight otherwise the weight of the miles of cables would pull any orbiting mass back down to earth. They are talking about using carbon nanotube composites to make the ribbon. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story about this in his Fountains of Paradise (isbn.nu.
• A while back I stumbled onto this PCI card which emulates a VGA card and PS/2 keyboard over a serial port. Basically it lets you drive your computer from a serial console and is operating system independent. Very cool.
• A friend works at a company with a large number of hosted machines. They have been experimenting with 32-bit versus 64-bit opterons boxes and have found that in 32-bit mode, they comsume something like 120 watts and in 64-bit mode they consume 90watts more. Wild!
• Another great product from Thinkgeek.com. This time it's a PC EZ-Bake oven. Unfortunately, it's an April Fool's joke or something.
• In 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from the German Foreign Minister offering the Mexican government United States territory in return for joining the German cause. Woodrow Wilson was elected President for a second term, largely because of the slogan "He kept us out of war". The telegram helped fuel anti-German opinion in American and drew the US into the war. Code breaking experts say that it is one of the most important cryptanalysis in history.
• Jimmy Carter speaks about the Florida election disaster in 2000 and why it might happen again next month. Foxes left to guard the hen house for sure. What a disaster.

October 6, 2004   

• John Perry Barlow's comments about how he's supporting Kerry anyway. He furious, as am I, with the idea that Kerry and the Democrats have not been able to crush "worst administration in [his] lifetime". I think that it shows some basic problems with our politics and politicians.

  Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst administration in my lifetime is unfathomable. The systematic ineptitude of his campaign organization so far fills me with grave concerns about his ability to form an administration that wouldn't make us nostalgic for Gerald Ford's.

• Hilariously cool video showing this asian dude wailing on an electric drum keyboard unit. How about drums!
• Pretty wild interactive light floor invented by a former Lycos Employee. Interesting concept. This event looks particularly bizarre.
• Here is the Memorandum of Understanding for the debates. It is a 32 page agreement between Bush and Kerry campaigns covering every aspect of the three Presidential debates and one Vice-Presidential debate.
• Fascinating article comparing drunk drivers to drivers using cell phones.

  When drivers were conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell-phone, their braking reactions were delayed and they were involved in more traffic accidents than when they were not conversing on the cell phone. By contrast, when drivers were legally intoxicated they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking. When controlling for driving conditions and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited greater impairment than intoxicated drivers.

  Wow. No difference between hands-free and hand-held which argues that it is cognitive impairment, not the mechanics of the phone which are at fault.
• Encouraging article from MSNBC about the response to the first presidential debats and how Kerry's solid performance has evaporated the Bush lead.

  With a solid majority of voters concluding that John Kerry outperformed George W. Bush in the first presidential debate on Thursday, the presidents lead in the race for the White House has vanished, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. In the first national telephone poll using a fresh sample, NEWSWEEK found the race now statistically tied among all registered voters, 47 percent of whom say they would vote for Kerry and 45 percent for George W. Bush in a three-way race.

October 5, 2004   

• Watched the Vice Presidential debate last night. Chenney is a lot better than Bush at explaining the administration's policies. I give Chenney the edge on foreign policy but Edwards was much stronger when the debate shifted away from security and terrorism. Overall I'd say it was a draw with both sides taking and making hits.
• Oh. My. God. A musical version of the Last Starfighter is opening off-Broadway. Wow. And people will pay money to go see it?
• Disgusting story about how Comcast is the spamming capital of the world.

  Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers.

  This implies that people's home systems are sending out tons and tons of spam messages every day. Comcast knows and is not doing anything about it. Can you say lawsuit?

October 4, 2004   

• I was working on an Imovie last night into the wee hours of the footage from CNN of the first X-Prize launch of SpaceShipOne. Fun. I hope to put out my DVD to a couple of friends soon.
• SpaceShipOne made the google image. Cool!
• I flew out west on JetBlue. I was very impressed. US$99 each way from Boston to Long Beach, CA.. No meals but drinks and snacks. They give you the can of soda not a half glass. The pilot made announcements about the flight while standing at the front of the plane when coming home. We unloaded and loaded in Long Beach from both ends of the aircraft. A lot of innovation and efficiency. I'll be flying them again.
• So I wore my He's Still Free, What About You tshirts on my flight out and back from Long Beach on JetBlue without incident. On the way out one of the TSA security folks said "oh cool t-shirt". On the way back the woman working the xray asked if I wore that specifically when I was flying and I said yes. I also got complements from other passengers and a stewardess.
• The free radio station in Santa Cruz was shutdown by the FCC. I love how they had their guns drawn when they went into the building. Those damn radio commies!

  Santa Cruz, CA- Yesterday, at about 9:20 am, agents of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pulled the plug on Free Radio Santa Cruz, an unlicensed, low-power fm radio station which began broadcasting in the spring of 1995 to return community control and accountability to our local media. The FCC action came about an hour after more than a dozen agents from the US Marshals Office, some carrying assault rifles,"secured" the property of the Zami student housing co-op on Laurel Street, where the station had been broadcasting for about 5 months. US Marshals stormed the building, and forced the residents outside, some in their pajamas.

• Just finished blogging the X-Prize winning flight of SpaceShipOne. Pilot Brian Binnie flew Burt Rutan's ship up to 368,000ft shattering the X15 height record and winning the US$10m X-Prize.
• Back home from a west coast vacation. I went out there as a space geek to watch the first launch of SpaceShipOne in its attempt to win the X-Prize. Here's my diary of the event. Here's the press release from the launch. Lots of fun!

  It's official: X-Prize officials say Mike Melvill climbed to 337,500 feet this morning. That's almost two miles higher than he needed to fly to meet the first objective of the $10 million first prize. As for the unintended series of rolls, Melvill told reporters at the Mojave Spaceport Wednesday, "It was probably something I did." He suggested that he might have inadvertently stepped on the rudder pedal during the spacecraft's boost phase. He said the whole thing was "kinda cool."

• I strongly recommend the fabulous Black Sky: The Race for Space program on the discovery channel. It chronicles Burt Rutan and Scaled Composite's bid to build and fly the first privately funded vehicle to go higher than 100km. Part 2 is being shown on 10/7, from 9-10pm ET/PT. Part 1 is being rerun on 10/10, at 4pm ET.

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