I have poor backup habits. It's true, and it's sad, because I had piles of HD failures. I know better. I just don't do better. So here's hoping this new Bandwagon automatic iTunes library backupper is as good as it looks. I could really use me some of that.

• David Brent: “If you don’t know me by now”
• David Hasselhoff: “Hooked on a Feeling”
• Kate Bush: “Wuthering Heights”
  Important update: Wuthering Heights Fan videos!
  • Bedroom Special
  • Chipmunk mime
  • Drunk in a park
  • Another Kate Bush version
  • Guy by a fence
  • Wuthering horse
  • Bad karaoke
  • There are three of them!
  • This one looks like she really means it
  • American Idol/High School
  • Another one
  • Mark plays in on a piano
  • Crappy lip ync
  • One of my favorites: Guy in a smoky bar
  • This one wins most disturbing

And here’s a few I actually like:

• Kraftwerk: “The Robots”
• Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime”
• They Might Be Giants: “Ana Ng”

All gleaned from Pitchfork’s 100 Awesome Music Videos

[This access point] is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community. WiFi.Bedouin is meant to suggest that what are often considered two entirely separate realms - virtual and physical worlds - are actually a much more entangled hybrid space. (emphasis mine)

Essentially the WiFi.Bedouin is a mobile wifi access point that doesn’t connect to the internet. It does have some of it’s own services, but people don’t connect to hotspots to get on the chat room in someone’s backpack, they get connect to check their email, or look something up. Give them a hotspot that doesn’t let them on the internet and you’ll simply piss them off. Which last time I checked didn’t count as reconsidering and questioning notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community.

Of course, those who put useless hotspots in backpacks just to piss people off probably don’t get written about in academic journals very often.

• India: constant and slow growth in all areas.
• Luxembourg: notable income growth, tripled from $22k to $64k in thirty years.
• and Rwanda: fairly consistent population and income, but a life expectancy that ranges from 45 to 24 and back.

Interesting stuff.

There is one major gotcha in the visualization, the income values are highly compressed towards the right side of the scale. On the left a single pixel represents about $10, but on the right one pixel is about $10,000. A needed device to fit all the information in, but it does have a subconscious effect of making low income changes seem much more dramatic.

The news.

The most important and exciting development of the past year is my new daughter Tabitha. She’s awesome and more than a little cute. Really. Cute.

Been very busy with contract work. Which has been a big blessing of provision. I’m also taking a break from free-lance work a while. Which will give me time to get other much needed things done, such as giving this sad neglected crappy website a new lease on life. More on that when it happens.

It’s not my personal news. But it has been very important to my professional life. Ruby on Rails has gone from obscure beginnings to a very worthy version 1.0. Congrats to the team, they deserve all the accolades they’ve been racking up. RoR has taught me so much and provided means to do things I never would have attempted previously. And it got me to try Ruby. I love Ruby!

Where my action is at.

For those of you who care what I’m up to, there are a couple of places on the interweb that I actually update consistently.

• My Flickr: I post pictures here.
• My Delicious: I post links here.

He’s still in process of filling out all the content, but it’s mostly there and he’s got great work. Check it out!

So I’ve been studying up on Celiac at the National Institute of Health(NIH) and it doesn’t look to promising. I’ve got a whole pile of the symptoms:

• Fatigue
• Painful skin rash (called dermatitis herpetiformis). This one sucks.
• Fatigue
• Canker sores.
• Joint pain.
• Fatigue
• Missed menstrual periods. I haven’t had any yet!

Did I mention that I’m tired a lot and runtinely sleep for 13+ hours a night? I’ve also been diagnosed with poor nutritional absorption, but we never figured out why.

The more I read about it the more sure I am that this is my problem. There are tests for it, but I’m going the cheap route. Completely rid my life of Gluten[2] and see if I feel better. To a certain extent I’m just glad to finally have a name for what I’ve been referring to as ‘my disease’ for years.

It’s not that bad really. It’s not like I like bread. Or pasta, or pancakes or pizza or beer or tortilas or soup or cookies or well pretty much all baked or prepared foods. Ok I do like all those things, but if it means being well, then I’m already over it. All of it. The only thing that bothers me is that I’ve instantly become a special needs house guest. Sorry everyone.

I was hoping that someday I’ll be able to eat a piece of pizza or something. But that’s not looking good. The NIH has this delightful bit of consolation:

The The gluten-free diet is a lifetime requirement. Eating any gluten, no matter how small an amount, can damage the intestine.

Woohoo.

Having Celiac is not without it’s positives though. Besides the huge upside of betther health, Ann will let me eat the apple-butter straight from the jar because I don’t have anything I can put it on. :)

Resources

• A great list of Celiac links from the NIH’s MedLine.
• guten-free.org and it’s sister sites: GFlinks for links, GFmall for food vendors, and GFrecipes for recipies.
• del.icio.us/tag/celiac for Celiac related sites as I or anyone else bookmarks them.

Footnotes

1. I don’t advocate misspelling. But if I was going to misspell Celiac I’d spell it Celica and pretend I have a new car.
2. Depending on who you ask, Gluteny is either the third or the 6th deadly sin.

• Jeff Culver’s states in shades of purple.
• USA Today’s county by county national breakdown.
• Update: Robert Vanderbei provides a combination county by county in shades of purple map

Update: The slugman wanted me to pimp his wallpaper. Display it proudly on your computer. Show your support of mildly anthropomorphic slugs sitting on boxes that defy all laws of perspective.

The BBC’s US presidential election: Your views covers a whole range of thoughts.

I have just voted. My daughter and I may have been the only ones in the line not voting for the incumbent. We were conscious and have been for some time that people with less education do not seem to understand a lot of the issues and have no feeling for what life is like overseas. … — Leslie Sarn, Jonesboro, Arizona, USA

Intellectual elitism is alive and well.

Whatever the results, the only guarantee anyone has for these elections is that half my countrymen will disagree with the outcome. — Jenn, California, USA

True. True.

To me the biggest issue is how US democracy has become so perverted. Each campaign has been spending $9 million per day. Thousands of lawyers on both sides ready to do battle anytime now. It’s all utterly obscene. What example is this to the rest of the world? — James, Leeds, UK

Agreed. One of my biggest hopes for this election is that it will be over tonight. But given how there are 23,500 election news stories involving lawyers chances that we’ll have a nice clean election are pretty slim. Welcome to democracy by litigation.

The American voters have no choice - though it is said it’s a democratic country, it is worse than the USSR’s one party rule. … —Farooq, Kuwait

Yes. And both canidates were even in the same ‘secret’ society in college. They and everyone else in both parties are puppets of the illuminati. It’s true. Even the voters here lack free-will. They are forcing me to write this to [bzzt] fnord [bzzt]

Please don’t confuse being anti the ghastly Bush neo-con administration with being anti-American! It’s not the same thing at all. Let’s hope that sanity prevails and the sensible majority of Americans do a spot of regime changing within their own country today. — Anne F, Hertfordshire, UK

My name is Anne Hertfordshire and I approve this regime change. But not that other one, the one with the genocidal dictator. That one is evil.

Not my country, not my politics, not my business. — Adrian Walker, Worthing England

A refreshing sentiment. Particularly in light of programs like this one from the UK’s Guardian to influence Ohio voters.

Counterpoint for this item is provided by the Amerika music video by Rammstien (Link requires iTunes). They even fake the lunar landing.

My favorite commentary of the day though comes from Ernie the attorney’s post How dare you express your opposing political view in my presence!. He even works in an equally insightful bit from novelist Tom Wolfe. The entire post is quoted below, but Ernie’s other election post Getting attention from politicians makes me feel loved is also worth reading.

I’m not saying who I’m voting for, at least not here. But those who know me really well know who I’m voting for. (I am not into using this blog as a pulpit for my personal politial views). The thing that needs to be emphasized is that we have gotten too intolerant of opposing political views.

I found this article about the novelist Tom Wolfe intriguing, not because he seems to support Bush, but because of his observations about the reaction he gets from people when he says anything pro-Bush. For example, at a dinner party he said: “If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.” Then, according to Wolfe

“People looked at me as if I had just said: ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.’ I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.”

I’m going to stay behind too. However, if someone has a spare ticket and a place for me to stay, I’d like to go London too. But not for political reasons. I just want to see London, if that’s okay with everyone.

I would also like to see london. :)

Quoted verbatim:

Goood News: I GOT a new computer but of course with good news there is bad news..

Got a letter about the Riverside Hospital, and it wasn't so great. Yeah...sucks.

And also:

So my party is still on for saturday, and like i said before anyone is invited. uhh im updating from my phone and i dont know how to skip lines. neways, thanks everyone for the balloons Tuesday. My bday was good, cept for one thing that i really wanted to happen and it didnt, but its never going to so oh well. im sick of caring about stupid shit like that so. i dont. im done.

Some people have the most interesting friends.

My father was in Florida with his mother when Charley hit. But thankfully Charley turned inland about 15 miles south of them.

If you use del.icio.us you should use nutr.itio.us.

Web geek tip of the day month:

If you have lynx you can add this alias (which isn’t as exciting as it sounds, but is still useful) to your .profile to dump the HTTP headers of any URL directly to stdout:

alias gethead='lynx -head -dump $1'

And if you have OSX with it’s wonderful CLI(Command Line Interface) paste board tools you can also add this one:

alias getheadpb='lynx -head -dump `pbpaste`'

Perfect for chasing down those Content-type mysteries that I know oh so many of you suffer from.

WARNING TO ADOBE PHOTOSHOP! DO NOT MAKE A FILL TOOL THAT THOMAS KINKADE CAN USE TO FILL THE EARTH AND GROUND AND ATMOSPHERE WITH HIS MASTERPIECES!! HE WILL CLICK ON IT!!