Yes. Yes I am.

The above is a picture of my wife for some publicity shots for her new website.  She’s been playing out around town with both Jim Gill and Uzuzi of late. We’ll be ready to show off her new site and her full performance calendar in a few days.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…I’ll be in my bunk.

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Keep these around. You’ll be surprised how they apply on a daily basis.

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

[Source: "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum.  See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/ ]

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You can never have too many squirrels. Or was that lizards? Maybe I’m thinking of giant syringes. I forget.

Anyway, if you like squirrels and/or lizards and/or giant syringes you should check out the latest The Secret Lair comic.

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• In Episode 0036 of The Secret Lair, we discuss Iron Man 2, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, and a few other assorted bits and pieces.
• In Episode 004 of From Python Import Podcast we learn why Dave hates Decorators, and discuss whether the Standard Library is the place where code goes to die. Additionally, Mike Pirnat joins us for a revelation about the Zen of Python.

Note: Apologies for the sound quality on both of these shows. My studio equipment is packed for the move, so we had to us my Zoom H4.

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Behold the wonder.

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Three thoughts:

• This has to be a mistake. Ray’s hardly a troublemaker. He doesn’t do spam. He follows the rules.
• Twitter really needs to have a better way of notifying people when they are suspended, just so they can appeal.
• Twitter, as a private company, can do whatever they want. Unlike Scoble, I don’t think they OWE us anything. but boy, it would be nice to have some recourse in cases like this.

I’ll be curious to see how this is resolved. Good luck, Ray.

UPDATE: He was back online as of 4:09pm EDT.

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Why, Ken, I’m glad you asked.

My Summer Reading List for 2010

• Ilium by Dan Simmons: For years people have been telling me that I need to read Dan Simmons’ work. I’ve been told this because my friends know The Canterbury Tales is a favorite of mine, and Simmons’ Hyperion uses a similar storytelling style which I’d likely find interesting. However…I decided to skip Hyperion for now, mostly because I think I want to read it this winter, when I have time to sit and absorb the nuances of the text. Illium struck me as the sort of story I’d love to digest while on vacation: a modern Ph.D. finds himself reenacting the Trojan War on Mars, and takes steps to remedy the situation. That’s summer reading gold, baby.
• 1776 by David McCullough: McCullough’s style has always been accessible, and the fact that he starts the book talking about the situation in Britain after the battles of Lexiginton, Concord, and Bunker/Breed’s Hill caught my attention. It’s a sad state that, in the tale of the American Revolution that is taught in these United States, Britain is just The Villain; we never hear what the situation was over there. Once my attention was caught, I knew I had to see how the author retells the tale.
• Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance: My friend Dave Lockwood gave me this book just before we moved back to Cleveland from Los Angeles, and I’ve been meaning to read it since I put my hands on it. I’ve purposefully left it out while packing my library for the move, and I hope to get to it over vacation.
• The Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton: The trilogy is made up of the novels The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Hamilton’s work, and I found a gorgeous version of the trilogy at Barnes and Noble that I must possess. Once possessing, reading them seems to be the next logical step.
• The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: I’ve been listening to Campbell’s Mythology and the Individual lecture series, and I’ve found it to be stirring some of my creative juices. Stores are beginning to present themselves. Following this with Campbell’s seminal work on the monomyth is a slam dunk.
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon: Yet another one from the “You Gotta Read This” list, I borrowed this from my good friend James, and I really should read it before I’m forced to return it. I read the first chapter, and Chabon’s use of language is just glorious. I am able to lose myself in the style. I anticipate that I’ll finish this one in late August, just as the summer ends.

And now, to echo Ken: what are you reading this summer?

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Out of respect for the British people, I did not attempt an accent.

Thargus thought the time right. He set the lights to full strength and flailed and gnashed and roared as he’d been practising. He felt rather silly, but the performance seemed to be working. The human, one hand steadying its spin, looked on intensely. It moved the white stick up to its mouth, breathed in, and then stabbed the stick out against the sac wall. “Don’t be afraid,”  Thargus said, meaning the opposite. He’d seen the trick on old films stored in the moss-brain when humans always said one thing and meant another like “We’re safer if we split up.” The human exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I’m not,” it said. That didn’t sound right. Thargus considered his response while staring at the human. It sure was ugly. A patchwork of dirty synthetics over the majority of its body, and on top of its pudgy, pink head, strand upon strand of greasy hair. Ugh!  Thargus felt sick. “Be afraid, then,” he said. “Why, are you going to eat me?” Thargus didn’t feel comfortable telling an outright lie, but that didn’t mean he needed to be too honest. “I might.”

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This would not be nearly as funny to me had I not worked at a startup or two when “social” was on the upswing. Those of you who have done the same….you’ll understand.

(Note…the end is NSFW for language. Use headphones.)

(Thanks to J.C. for passing this one on.)

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I want to thank Bridget Stewart, David Mead, Brad Colbow, Brad Dielman, Dave, and Joe Fiorini for being good sports when I turned them into my Living Web Application demonstration at the end of the talk.

Exploring Django, part 1 from Christopher T. Miller on Vimeo.

For part 2, I’m thinking about drafting some of the members of the Cleveland Python meetup to join me, and we’ll have the meeting break into groups and write a simple Django app from scratch.

(Note: Rewatching this, I realize a made a few errors. Oops. Boy, was I tired. I apologize to the Django team if I got anything horribly wrong.)

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Here are some of the articles you’ve been missing if you haven’t subscribed to The Secret Lair website.

• Civil Discourse: An Art in Need of Artists: Last week, renowned film critic Roger Ebert posted an article titled “Video games can never be art,” in which he posited that video games are not art and will not become art during the lifetime of any gamer drawing breath today. As one might imagine—especially if one is an avid video game player…
• Review: Halting State by Charles Stross: On my recent trip to Atlanta, I took along my copy of Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives. I finished it (review to come on an upcoming episode of the podcast), and was looking for something to read on the flight home. There, on the bottom shelf of the smallest SF section I’d ever seen was …
• Unfinished: Stacks of Shame: What do Stephen King’s The Stand, Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity, Jim Butcher’s Fool Moon and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley all have in common? I haven’t finished them. I have dozens of books at home that I’ve never even begun…
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Episode 101: Confession time: Until last night, I’d never seen a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m pretty sure I saw the movie once upon a yesterday (I vaguely remember Rutger Hauer being in it), but the television series came and went and had absolutely no impact on my life…
• The Frugal Geek: I am routinely bewildered by how much my friends spend on games. Games are not cheap.  Perhaps I have become so, and that is the problem. Still…cheap, I feel, is the wrong word to describe someone who is careful with how they spend their money.  Let’s look at the definition of an alternative word, frugal…
• Ask The Overlords: Where to Find Work as a Stripper?: Hello everyone, I’d like to know if anyone has a recommendation about a good town or city for me to get work as a stripper. I recently lost my waitress job and…
• Eight Swords that will Kick Your Ass: Legends are made by powerful heroes wielding magnificent blades; here’s a list of some of our favorites.

Convinced?   Subscribe at http://www.thesecretlair.com/main/feed/.

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Read the full story: http://www.khou.com/news/Candy-Gets-Third-Grader-A-Weeks-Detention-93033319.html

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• Robert Wilonsky

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As a research tool, Goodman has developed a computer programming language called Church — after the great American logician Alonzo Church — that, like the early AI languages, includes rules of inference. But those rules are probabilistic. Told that the cassowary is a bird, a program written in Church might conclude that cassowaries can probably fly. But if the program was then told that cassowaries can weigh almost 200 pounds, it might revise its initial probability estimate, concluding that, actually, cassowaries probably can’t fly.

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Obama’s victory was achieved because his team played the old game brilliantly. Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, his team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs), and the insurance industry (with the promise (and in this moment of celebration, let’s ignore the duplicity in this) that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in “bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits.” Obama didn’t “push[] back on the undue influence of special interests,” as he said today. He bought them off. And the price he paid should make us all wonder: how much reform can this administration — and this Nation — afford?

read more…

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The suggestion?  Thumbtacks.

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Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex”.

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

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A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Kirkpatrick’s response is spot on:

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.” I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Why is Facebook changing their tune?  Money, baby. Money. At first, it might have been helping people stay in contact. Now, however, with 350 million people giving their personal information to the system, Facebook stands to gain…if they can convince everyone who uses their service that they do not need privacy anymore. Kirkpatrick continues:

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people. Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too…. …Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it. I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true.

Just because a service is free to you does not mean you have to give it everything you are. They are trying to make millions off of your personal information. Better, they didn’t have to pay you one red cent for it.

Is that right? Is that fair and honest? Is that in your best interest?

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