Amy Brady, a professional gamer better known as Valkyrie of Ubisoft Entertainment's team Frag Dolls, planned as of the first week of June to play competitively at the World Series of Video Games event in Louisville, Kentucky. As of the second week of June she planned to compete and protest: as part of WSVG festivities would be the selection of a Miss World Series of Video Games. Brady's first recorded reaction was an expletive. That was "all I have to say," she wrote, "what the heck is this crap?" Brady went further, however, castigating the event's organizers after confirming that Miss World Series of Video Games was model search, and declaiming to young women who would be present in Louisville the moral imperative to boycott. Once in Kentucky, Brady took part in a parody, Mister World Series of Video Games, and as the next WSVG event — one to be held in Dallas — approached, it was rumored that models booked for flights to Texas might have to settle for becoming Miss Something Else.

The weakness of Brady's argument was the unfathomable cause for indignation. Brady cited three offenses the WSVG organizers committed by hosting a beauty contest, on premises, the winner of which would receive a title derived from that of the gaming event itself: first, a thematic departure from gaming; second, a damaging association with women in professional and semi-professional gaming; and third, the high valuation of physical beauty. One week after Louisville, it's still unclear what got Brady so animated as to foment a boycott of the pageant. The first two purported crimes proved non-applicable, while the third remains one in which Brady and her fellows are partially complicit, if only to demonstrate that it isn’t much of a crime after all.

Brady wrote that in Louisville "all the other 'festival' activities" were "gaming related." Presumably her difference stemmed mostly from the event's elevation of "the hottest chick." The WSVG Dallas agenda heralds such "extra-gaming" activities as a tug-of-war, a paper-airplane contest, poker and something called Duct Tape Wars. Not yet forthcoming from Brady has been a warning that an unassuming public will mistakenly and indelibly believe the competitive gaming circuit to be riddled with musclemen, delinquents, gambling addicts and adhesive fetishists.

If Miss WSVG had supplanted the gaming competition one might move to call the "world series" a farce. It didn't. As Brady noted, the pageant was indeed marketed to regular women, those involved in an industry older and eminently more respected than gaming — modeling — and if headlines are any indication, Miss WSVG was crowned in Louisville without having been recognized as heir apparent of electronic entertainment. Brady appealed to WSVG organizers to arrange "a real contest for girl gamers based on all things: a complete package that includes gaming skill and knowledge." There was such a contest, titled Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter: Double Elimination.

There were no entrance restrictions for the double-elimination event but that entrants a) register a two-man team and b) come up with fifteen dollars each. Girls could enter, right off the street and, ugly or not, win the Ghost Recon tournament. Now it so happens that three of the teams were pairs of girls, two of them from Brady's Ubisoft-sponsored Frag Dolls team. The Frag Dolls, for anyone who cares to look closely, are as faithful to the concept of the pitchman as Lucille Ball when she was hawking Philip Morris between skits of home-life burlesque with Desi Arnaz: talent sells. Members are contracted by Ubisoft to be equal parts gamer, editorialist and good looker; which is to say none of them is awkward or thoughtless or unattractive.

One of them acknowledged, when asked, that cause for her hire rested partly on her prior triumph in a contest whose superlative was "sexiest," from scoring that weighed beauty over gaming ability. The contest was "superficial," she remarked, but hardly a reflection of her authenticity since her vocation and avocation alike are gaming. Would she have come as far as she did without the contest? No reason why not, though she wouldn't have gained much had she refused to enter. In addition to a Frag Dolls contract she works in the video gaming industry — despite having once sashayed up and down a catwalk to win one of those contests that are, as Brady put it, "based on looks but appear to be based on gaming."

Girls are not boys. They giggle and groom, and like to be pretty. Occasionally, they try, in public, to be prettier than the next. Brady celebrated this immutable law of biology and culture in her first paragraph. She should have stopped there.

Take a celebrated video game tournament champion with lordly self-regard and a game he can't win, and you get "World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things" by Street Fighter virtuoso David Sirlin. World of Warcraft is game developer Blizzard Entertainment's popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG, inviting players to lead their own fantasy characters through an expansive online realm on open-ended adventures with thousands of other players simultaneously — a costumed scavenger hunt of a video game whose seductive nature has been compared to that of the casino slot machine.

Sirlin had better revise his article lest too many readers decide that it should in fact be titled "World of Warcraft Not Conducive to David Sirlin's Personal Achievement, and Reasons Therefor." In quoting Justice Potter Stewart and Raph Koster to place "fun" in relative terms, Sirlin would deprive himself of his primary argument insofar as "fun," not "work," is subjective. If it is legal and ethical and not meant to be serious, whose business is anyone's frivolity? Yet that is not what Sirlin does: he tells us that "fun" cannot be had without efficiency or purpose — and not just for him, but everyone.

Sirlin identifies himself as an "introvert." Fine. But by his own description he is in fact one particular kind of introvert, a directive and exclusory introvert who is driven by efficiency, competence and achievement — and susceptible, when theorizing on sociology, to projection.

That lack of perception directs Sirlin's principal criticism of World of Warcraft: Blizzard's apparent value of participation, especially commitment of time, over that of singular accomplishments. Sirlin calls it "absurd," which he can, and claims that it "has no connection to anything [he] does in real life," which is probably true. Now, what about everybody else? What does Sirlin think of volunteer organizations, where time and energy is invested not for the sake of dividend or profile, but philanthropy? Or fraternal orders, or congregations, or parishes; wherein older members, when they pass on, are revealed to have quietly attended for fifty, sixty, seventy years? What does Sirlin make of seniority, tenure, or pension? Meritocracy is good; but it is an ideal, and it must contend with the tangible social values of loyalty and commitment.

Sirlin derogates inefficient use of time through the example of a commercial artist who boasts a fast turnaround. The artist generates "ten times more value than an artist of average skill" no matter how long the lesser artist works, he says; and that is true. But Sirlin implies that skill equals speed, prima facie — and that is baloney. Most crafts require periods of abeyance. Oil paint glazing is applied in successive coats, clay dries, plants mature, meat marinates. While the "grind" process of MMORPG leveling may be onerous Sirlin doesn't acknowledge the absence of meritocratic shortcuts in a five-lap race or a marathon. Nor does he seem to know what often constitutes a day of fishing.

World of Warcraft encourages cooperation between groups of players, institutionalizing it with associative guilds — and Sirlin condemns all this with the kind of weird absolutism of Ayn Rand and her (patently ironic) sycophants. His defense is introversion — but it is not so much that as it is pertinacious individualism. And worse still is his insistence on playing a team sport alone. "This game is marginalizing my entire personality type," he pleads. For Heaven's sake, Sirlin, don't play the game. Ah, but what about the great many "brainwashed"? Sirlin's determinism can't save them — yet if that were realistic, all gamers would always play MMORPGs. And they don't. Sirlin's Little Johnny will stay away from World of Warcraft's crowds if he doesn't care for them.

There are some curious errors in definition and contradictions in logic. Sirlin applies the words "tactics" and "strategy" to explanations interchangeably, further softening his argument. They are not synonyms. Tactics is the use of immediate surroundings through methods that suit the moment to meet short-term objectives; strategy is precise, detailed, sagacious and logically coherent planning to meet a long-term objective. Street Fighter is purely tactical; the essence of strategy is a turn-based game. World of Warcraft is probably somewhere in between, but Sirlin hardly helps us with that. Sirlin decries Blizzard's terms of service which proscribe certain activities and expressions, even though "there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech" — when in fact it is the First Amendment that constitutionally guarantees a private entity like Blizzard to regulate its commercial affairs as it wishes. And, finally, we are reminded that World of Warcraft only contravenes Raph Koster's definition of "fun," at the same time Sirlin promises to personally take action and efface alternate definitions of "fun," at the same time Sirlin evangelizes self-reliance.

There is nothing universally appealing about MMORPGs. I find them boring and consumptive. But I haven't a bone to pick, like Sirlin, who typed up a fustian screed when he should have been extruding his frustration in an off-broadway game of Street Fighter. Mr. Sirlin: smash buttons, not paradigms.

I recently made the fruitful acquaintance of the member of Ubisoft Entertainment's video gaming team Frag Dolls whose sobriquet is Jinx. For about a year, ending in December, I was active on the forums constituting the Frag Dolls' online community. Three weeks ago, a fellow in that community was one of several recipients to whom I sent the latest mix of a song by my old band, the Concord. As was reported to me, he had the song both in possession and in mind when Jinx advertised her need for a musician. He told her about my hobby and work; she asked to hear evidence of it; he gave her the mix. Jinx thought enough of it to commission me, for a plenary submission of thanks and an undisclosed material reward that will arrive by post, to compose a short, thematic musical track and a few sound effects for the podcasting — or online broadcasting — that she has taken up as part of her work with Ubisoft.

The track I composed is here. When the request was first made, I thought of contacting Jonn and Gabe, two friends of mine, members of the Concord and writers of music both (Jonn nearing a master's in composition at the New England Conservatory). They compose more freely, extemporaneously, penning original tunes with ease. My labors in music are, like those in all other creative pursuits, amenable to purpose — profiting from inspiration but born of necessity. Musicmaking has always been intimate and especial to me; I am wary of the incidental melody striking another as frivolous. After regular work with a band ended in early 2003 I limited my efforts at new material to scribbling titles, concepts and descriptions of melodies and sounds on scraps of paper. And then, two weeks ago, a fine offer to compose. Well, OK — propensity won out. I did not wish to score The Frag Dolls Theme (Opening Titles). What I completed was received well, its method of construction worth explaining in this space.

Over ten years I have accumulated hundreds and hundreds of sound samples and effects that resulted from digital editing, the balance from five or more years ago in the salad days of recording — swept up by the exhilaration of actually recording on a higher order than a boombox. In the latter Nineties I eschewed, for a time, most proper musical instruments, instead swinging a homemade mallet at whatever object up to which I could sneak a microphone; separating and splicing, culling hiss or noise or the dullest sounds, then using digital effects to make whatever was left otherworldly. A few of them I inserted apropos for this song or that. Most of them I hoarded, waiting for precisely the correct application, as if a sound would be spent upon its placement in multitrack.

Listening to the two-minute piece, one can hear a single synthesizer progression that, as a motif, predominates. It topped a list I made of sounds that should have been titled "What Have I Got?" Nearly a dozen samples in all, they were selected from the list and assembled as a collage — the resulting style atypical for me. My accustomed writing is discursively chromatic and formally compact (such as this piece). The podcast track is succinct, even, but for the odd meter, simple.

The progression is called "Curesque," redolent of something Briton rocker Robert Smith's band might have played in the late 1980s, which Gabe created during a collaborative project he and I began in 1997. He played a simple melody on a keyboard with what might have been a harmonica module. Then, innocently enough, Gabe reversed the recording — instant ethereality. Then he left it alone, intriguing as it was, in favor of more productive material. Months later I adopted the sample with the rest of Gabe's library, and promptly lavished it with effect after effect. De-tuning chorus? Why not. Tremolo phasing? Can't go without. Reverb? Yes, two helpings, if you please. The summer afternoon "Curesque" assumed the form it would hold for six years I remember well, as my repeated playing back of the sample accompanied the approach and passage of a dark, brooding electrical storm. Infatuated with the transmogrification, I clasped the flush harmonies to the end of a song whose writing credit was Gabe's, where they really didn't belong. Now "Curesque" rests comfortably at the center of its very own opus; even in music production are there such things as reflection, contrition and reconciliation. That is, unless Gabe is outraged at the recasting, in which case I shall plead: Ha ha — too late!

The drum track's fundament is one measure from a session recorded five years ago. Eric, the musician behind the kit, was playing an early variation of a Concord song; an A-Major-in-five-four denunciation of the Irish Republican Army that came about when, two years before, I served coffee to a young man who identified himself as a stateside fundraiser for Sinn Fein. A virtuosic drummer, Eric expounded on the basic rhythm in several takes; one of which provided the key measure and another supplying the drum roll used at the ends of phrases. Cadences were played for subdivisions of five quarter notes; yet while the accents are strongest in that signature a given measure is suitable for, with respective elisions, four or three or two. Here I needed one drum loop, and in toto Eric's performance yielded an entire library.

Added to that loop were several close-miked drum samples. A kick, a snare; another kick and snare, suitably altered, for the piece's middle section; and a heavily distorted fill that is both phased and panned in stereo. A third snare drum strike came from a recording session in Athens, Ohio at the end of August, 2001. A dulcet colleague of a friend of mine attending Ohio University had thrown together a band and the band needed a sample disc for entrance to local venues. Intended for jazz, the kit on site sported a husky snare. I enjoyed the session — a generous offer given my inexperience — and that drummer could wield a stick.

The next sound is, if you can believe it, the classical group Anonymous 4. Rather, it was. Such alchemy would only occur to a recordist, as aforementioned, in this case that four women's voices performing sacred medieval polyphony are splendid when played forwards — so they must be sublime when reversed. Done. But, you see, I needed a rhythm complement to an old track of Gabe playing the electric guitar. Using a tool called an "envelope follower," which molds the dynamics of a signal around those of a second signal — my choice was the drum track — I broke the quartet into staccato sixteenths, then arranged it to play in syncopation.

Nomenclature fails the sound entering with the bass. Wary of mimetics, if I am to call it anything I call it the "Violator sound," an eponym drawn from British synth-pop band Depeche Mode's 1990 album — dotted, as you would expect, with a noise similar to this one. When a sine wave makes a glissando from a frequency near the highest reaches of human hearing (20 kilohertz) to one approaching the lowest (20 hertz) in less than 200 milliseconds, it creates a sound appropriate for electronic music when played singly; ineffably conducive to the appeal of same when played in multiples, like two succeeding 32nd notes.

There was an opportunity for humor in an inhale-exhale sequence of anacrusis and downbeat, and I took it. A college friend, one Sergeant Daniel Kissane of the United States Army as last I heard, volunteered his services when I began to toy around with electronic music in the fall of 1998. Those who know Danny will find the "exhale" downbeat sound's original recording characteristic.

I would say, in the words of a bawdily enterprising proprietor, I do not play but rather operate a guitar. Chords, melodies, and singing while strumming and plucking are techniques of which I am capable — you want finesse? May I please introduce you to someone who is not me. With my acoustic guitar in an open D-tuning, the B-string tuned downward to an A, leaving only tonic and dominant, I added to the music two pairs of phosphor bronze accoutrements: jangly rhythm parts, a capo set at the sixth fret and eleventh fret; and a couple scrapes with a brass slide, one musical and the other, well, expressive.

The terms of contract for this undertaking were loose; it is implicit that the original work is mine but that it may be used indefinitely to introduce Jinx's podcasts. What more to indite between yourself and one whom you esteem in person and profession? Were I to be chided over the impracticality of working for nothing I would refer to what I told Jinx: In the spirit of generosity (pro bono work is edifying) and self-interest (I now have for myself an infectious tune made of odds and ends that once lay useless) I composed the music and sounds happily expecting appreciation in return. That and satisfaction, each of which I now have in munificence.

ON APPRECIATING APPRECIATION: Thank you, Jinx.

Britain's Independent is a devotee of the European left and makes no bones about it, so the snide characterization of President Bush's visits and allotment of aid to hurricane-stricken localities that Craig Brett found is what one expects — and if a subscriber, looks forward to — in the paper's pages. The Telegraph is the Conservative Party's paper; the Mirror is Labour's rag. This morning, Jay Nordlinger happened to praise the candor — if not the wisdom — of the press overseas:

This is how it's done in Europe, largely: There's the Socialist newspaper, the Christian Democratic newspaper, the Communist newspaper. Everyone's all nice 'n' labeled, or nice 'n' known. I would prefer that the New York Times, L.A. Times, etc., be objective, disinterested organs, but if they're not going to be, let's be open about it. That is so much better than the pretending so many have engaged in, for so long.

Objectivity in American reporting is a 20th-Century phenomenon, the currency in which anchor-led, corporate news organizations have conducted business in nearly all of living memory. Newspapers of the 1800s were party advocates, sharply partisan and sought after for that reason; the most striking example of this (and the palliative effect of time on politics) would be the Union's widely varying editorial reactions to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Pick up the wrong paper and one found an armful of contrary views.

Yesterday, Michelle Malkin spoke about the blogosphere as a guest on Fox News' the Big Story with John Gibson. Gibson, otherwise firmly on the right, is an old media Tory, soft on Dan Rather and CBS News' travesty; happy to note the network's half-admission of wrongdoing without adding that ten days of evasion came before it. He was derisive of bloggers and tried to bat Malkin around with a straw man about blogging's niche in public discourse, subtly introducing the idea that blogging would replace professional journalism — whereas bloggers actually pride themselves as hobbyist media commentators, making use of deliveries from the milkmen of information like Julia Child. Gibson's insistence of no standards among the internet — a dismissal that sounded very reminiscent of talk radio's critics in the early 1990s — was a direct defense of the American public's decades-long appeal to authority, not veracity, and the slowly fading ideal of fact through trust.

Fact, of course, can only be established by proof. Bloggers defend the legitimacy and integrity of their work primarily by demonstrating the ability and operational inclination to correct oneself immediately and conspicuously. By definition, an agency that performs once a day will correct itself once a day — maybe. But there's more to the example of bloggers, and that is the social inclination to scrupulously maintain a good reputation, precisely because bloggers are "nobodies" who might just post an entry in their pajamas. Online, there is no value in brand name: the dial can turn to any number of places, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of addresses. True, there is some politics, fashion and plain luck in blogging. But like all mediums empowering the individual, where a completely unknown website can be reached just as easily as the internet's most popular page, meritocracy governs bloggers. Respect depends upon accuracy and honesty; as the fall of "the Agonist" blog for plagiarism in early 2003 demonstrated, bloggers who linked to a popular website were just as quick to shame and abandon it when the author violated traditional intellectual principles.

Yet Gibson and his sympathetic guest, foil to Malkin, grinned, aren't there countless nutty sites on the internet? Of course — but how many of these are, partisan differences aside, leading the blogosphere? In the world of "objective," professional journalism, the audience is expected to be satisfied with a by-line: that's how brand-name journalism works. You buy it on their promise for product quality. There's no brand name in the blogosphere. You like it, you link it; if the blog jumps off the deep end or is consistently unreliable, you back away. As James Lileks noted, a blogger links to the original statement he refutes: readers are invited to decide for themselves. Old media all-too-often puts it in their own words. Powerline and Little Green Footballs would not have won the attention they did in discrediting CBS's documents if they weren't right on the money. CBS News tried to ply the American public with claim of entitlement for ten days because that brand name had long since subsumed fact by proof. America should have believed in the forged memos, we were told, just because Dan Rather said so.

Should the American media organizations admit their biases and craft them into mission statements? Maybe; the greatest sin of a partisan press office is omission. I'll argue any day that while Fox News is staffed by many anchors on the right, it daily invites guests on the left to present their case and, most importantly, reports everything. Its competitors, the broadcast networks and CNN, could easily make a separate 24-hour channel out of all the events and information they refuse to cover. The media could take enormous strides forward simply by reporting the news.

But we can all agree old media is kidding itself by seeing the blogosphere as anything but an audience that has now become active, knowledgable and nationally capable in its own right. Gibson's sympathetic guest yesterday went one step too far in the segment, chortling at the excessive "ranting and raving" found regularly on political websites. Excuse me, sir, have you ever watched 24-hour cable news?

Cassini-Huygen's got some more pictures of the never-before-beheld. Give them a look-see.

The internet and click-to-buy is here to stay — which is just as well, since small businesses aren't looking back.

...Or moon. It's a beautiful day in south Titan, and the discovery of cumulus-like methane clouds on Saturn's moon is shaking up the scientific community.

I'm about halfway through a hefty short essay on the party ties that bind, Schwarzenegger Republicans and Andrew Sullivan's goofy warning that the GOP sky is falling. Come back in about an hour. In the meantime, feast your eyes on Cassini-Huygens' latest.

NASA space probe Cassini-Huygens is less than half an hour away from a reverse firing to plunk itself into Saturnine orbit:

During its orbit entry, the probe will fly closer to Saturn than it will at any other moment of its four-year mission to come, giving it the chance to study the planet from about 20,000km away.

"In a sense, Cassini and the Huygens probe are like time machines that will take us back to examine a world we've never seen before, a world that may resemble what our own world was like 4.5 billion years ago," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the European Space Agency mission manager and project scientist for the Huygens probe.

By comparison, our own moon is 384,000 kilometers away and quite a bit smaller than the second-largest planet in the solar system. Cassini will be up close — very close. Let's hope he remembers to pull out the camera. (Streaming webcasts are here.)

FROM JPL MISSION CONTROL: "Godspeed Cassini-Huygens, and may we see you in orbit."

Two weeks ago, space probe Cassini-Huygens took this image of Saturn moon Phoebe from 20,000 miles. Funnily enough, it probably reminds most of us of an ordinary science fiction shot. But this is real. More Cassini exploits here, complete with snap gallery.

The Japanese, original trade name for Speed Racer seems appropriate for this free-market, astronomical triumph:

A privately funded and constructed spaceship returned to California's Mojave Desert today after a successful mission to become the first non-governmental craft to leave the Earth's atmosphere.

SpaceShipOne, financed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites, landed at about 8:15 a.m. California time at the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test center, where it was launched about 90 minutes earlier. The launch and landing were televised.

...If the altitude of 100 kilometers is confirmed, the team will later compete to win the $10 million Ansari X prize. The award was set up by the non-profit X Prize Foundation of Missouri to encourage missions allowing the public to travel into space. To win it, the same craft, able to carry three people, must be successfully launched and landed twice within a two-week period.

In fact, a 100-kilometer crest has been confirmed. Virtual champagne, if it suits your fancy? Glenn Reynolds is starting a roundup of reactions.

In case you missed it: NASA has compressed Opportunity's voyage across the surface of Mars into a still-frame animation. Want to see your tax dollars hard at work? Take a look at "90 Sols in 90 Seconds."

Our full-time construction supervisor's new Latitude D600 laptop arrived today and I'm in the process of breaking it in. A dedicated 2k man, I've never used Windows XP before, so the introductory screens are new to me. Either Microsoft or Dell had a mind to run mellow dance beat on top of a i-v⁶-VII-IV progression and I like it, though it's a little suggestive. Dell computing, brought to you by the Pet Shop Boys?

ACTUALLY: Make that New Order. Or both bands.

IBM researcher and prognosticator, Stuart Feldman:

IBD: What will be happening on the Web in 20 years?

Feldman: You'll see many more of the big macro shifts you're already seeing. Big industries will not only change how they do certain things, but who does them. The definition of what business you're in will start shifting. The meaning of industrial sectors will start changing.

IBD: Can you give an example?

Feldman: In the airline industry, the meaning of what constitutes an airline will change. In 20 years, it will be harder to say if airlines are the people that fly planes, or those who do the computer processing that make the flight possible, or the people that market these flights.

IBD: What do you mean?

Feldman: A single company won't be running an airline. An airline could be made up of several different companies, many of them Web-based. The people that organize the trips won't be the same people that run the planes.

An interesting, if somewhat jargony, look into what is obviously a long and prosperous life ahead of interconnectivity. Six years ago a class I took in Modernism spent a session on the internet — it was quite new in 1998, a repository for goofy fansites, barely used as a medium for commerce and unknown to a great number of Americans, as I had only been introduced to it two years before. As I recall, the tenor of the discussion was probing and tentative; nobody really knew what the internet's potential was, while at the same time the intellectual exchange was still saturated with dystopian fears of losing humanity to electronica. "What good is the internet?" went the professor's question. I answered: it had provided me with more than enough. That school year I was spending great amounts of spare time cobbling together electronic music on my computer. Many of my samples were collected around campus — miking myself banging on metal, clicking wet canvas, pushing sturdy drafting tables across linoleum, the usual — but a notable portion of them were stock samples or loops. I'd start at an audio forum and run through links until I found myself at FTP caches or web catalogs, and download sizeable zipped files of fifty or more rhythm and percussion sounds. Where else could I have found them for free? I can't say — the computing market hadn't produced any discrete, inexpensive, high-capacity media like today's compact discs at that point. I didn't know any people around campus who shared my hobby, much less a tempermental Zip drive.

Frankly, if it weren't for the internet, I could not have accomplished what I did. So I answered that despite all the social, technical and financial pitfalls of the "World Wide Web," as it was marketed in those days, my access to needed tools was more direct than any other known arrangement. "In my line of work," I said, "the internet empowers the individual. It empowers the individual." Decentralization was the vanishing point on networking's horizon then, and is still now. That bodes well for all of us, particularly for trailblazers like Feldman.

Defeating the enemies of freedom just became safer, more effective and infinitely cooler:

Troops can throw it around a corner, through a window, up the stairs, on the roof or in a cave and the rugged Dragon Runner will land on its feet and continue its mission. The Dragon Runner, a 9-pound rear-wheel drive robot, is designed to save lives by allowing tactical troops to "see around the corner" in an urban environment. The 9-pound portable surveillance robot is designed to save service members' lives by allowing tactical troops to "see around the corner" in an urban environment.

Funded by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Office of Naval Research in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the baseline model uses a wireless modem and UHF video transmitter. A rear-mounted handle allows for easy handling and pull-pin power on/off operation. The front-mounted tilting camera provides video feedback.

Army Col. Bruce Jette, director of the Rapid Equipping Force, Fort Belvoir, Va., was one of the first to use the Dragon Runner in the caves of Afghanistan. "We lost a couple of (robots) to improvised explosive devices, but that's OK – it wasn't soldiers. Robotics (in the field) is working."

Technologists routinely overplay their hand by suggesting that tasks requiring the best attributes of humanity — wit, courage, ingenuity and spontaneity — can and should be relegated to robots. Until scientists create cybernetic neural networks that can become greater than the sum of their parts, our metal-and-plastic friends will remain exciting and humorous reflections of ourselves — but only reflections, their intelligence strictly artificial. Death is tragedy; electronic breakdown is not. We might someday build them with enough soul to win the hearts of sentimentalists and judiciaries, but for now robots will do for the most dangerous, perfunctory tasks. Run, Dragon, run.

It's like Gattaca without custom-engineered supermen: Cassini-Huygens nears the planet Saturn. Awe-inspiring photography ensues.

Undisturbed and undeterred, Spirit and Opportunity continue to explore Mars. Opportunity has finally reached a targeted crater, with rock-grinding to begin tomorrow.

Last week Extremetech showed us the computing world's hybrid darling, the small form factor PC case. This week, they show how to put one together. I'm still unsure as to whether assembly is more trouble than portability is worth.

PURTY: Elsewhere on the magazine's website, a PC case roundup just happens to include another microcase, Antec's Aria. These units are not for want of good design aesthetics, that's for sure.

This sounds about right:

Forty percent of U.S. households are expected to own at least one digital camera by the end of 2004 and more consumers are printing their digital pictures at retail shops, according to a recent study.

...Ownership of digital cameras will rise this year by one-third from about 30 percent currently, as consumers become more comfortable with the devices.

My two years of photography classes in college left me with both a respect and admiration for the arduous process of exposing, developing and printing images with analog camera film. But while I'll keep my grandfather's Nikon F as long as it continues to function, the sheer convenience and ever-increasing quality of a digital camera — even a modest Kodak model — made a convert out of me. Yes, all things digital depreciate and pale in comparison with their successors, much more so than analog technology - at some point, however, one needs to simply step onto the train. I've zeroed in on the highly regarded Olympus C-5060, and before my expected trip to Albany in May, I'll be applying a four-year-old gift certificate towards a purchase. I'm looking forward to bringing slices of life to five megapixels near you.

This is as close as you can get these days to building your own laptop: Extremetech Magazine is running a series on small form factor PCs, the latest rage in DIY fashion. Their early favorite is the Athenatech MicroATX A106, selling for a reasonable price on NewEgg. Ain't she a beaut? Extremetech's next installment will discuss how exactly all the necessary hardware will fit in such a tiny tower.

Adding volumes of scientific knowledge of Mars with two government-conceived and administered robot probes is good. Redefining the face of space exploration itself with the private sector is better.

After suffering a systemwide breakdown, Spirit prevailed:

The Spirit rover has completed its primary mission to Mars, yet continues to roll along, moving towards a cluster of hills that could yield more evidence that the planet had a wet past. On Monday, Spirit's 90th full day on Mars, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's unmanned robot and its twin, Opportunity, had accomplished nearly all of the assigned tasks that would make their joint mission a full success.

Adversity, of course, prepares us for the better things in life. Like more adversity:

Spirit is several days into a trek towards a cluster of hills that may contain geologic evidence of a more substantially wet environment, perhaps including layered rocks formed in standing water.

Some of the twin rovers' exploits can be read here and here. Find everything you want to know at NASA's official website. By all standards, Spirit and Opportunity have been a smashing success on the Red Planet. Not bad for the smallest major agency in the federal government, is it?

Glenn Reynolds and James Lileks are on the Hugh Hewitt Show talking weblogs. Glenn Reynolds sounds like Glenn Reynolds. James Lileks sounds like John Billingsley.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter discovered traces of methane, another possible indication of life, on the Red Planet. (Via Rand Simberg.) A rough conversion of methane-to-biospheric activity can be found here.

News-hunting again? Here's another resource for you: the Daily Earth, an online directory of press agencies and newspapers around the world. Like, say, Japan.

I'm currently Googling for aircraft pictures to use in a sign project. I was rather innocently looking for a photograph of Atlantic Aircraft's Atlanta P-W-2. Google gave me this.

Surly bonds of earth got you down? Slip 'em. Spirit and Opportunity are still crawling around on the Red Planet - the volume of stunning photographs and hydrospheric evidence grows.

When Spirit met Bonneville.

Quote of the day:

"I came to admire this machine which could lift virtually any load strapped to its back and carry it anywhere in any weather, safely and dependably. The C-47 groaned, it protested, it rattled, it leaked oil, it ran hot, it ran cold, it ran rough, it staggered along on hot days and scared you half to death, its wings flexed and twisted in a horrifying manner, it sank back to earth with a great sigh of relief - but it flew and it flew and it flew."

- Len Morgan

They won't make another like it.

Yes, Virginia, there are practical applications to the Mars rovers' discoveries:

The Opportunity findings show that the strategy of "follow the water" was the right direction to pursue, said Geoff Briggs, Scientific Director of the Center for Mars Exploration at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

Briggs said that the forthcoming Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry a new generation of instruments to help decipher "in the field" the history of the red planet. The prospect of a returning to Earth soil and rock specimens from Mars next decade, while sure to be scientifically rewarding, would also flex the technology muscle to eventually send humans there...Over the years, Briggs said, robotically returning samples from Mars has been inhibited by two things: high cost and high risk.

The NASA initiative that calls for humans to Mars in the foreseeable future, Briggs said, should give more programmatic support and the funds to make a robotic return sample effort happen before astronaut explorers set foot on the planet.

Granted, most are for future exploration - but pure exploration has rewarded the American public with a wealth of dividends. And if that's not enough, fine: let's spare the killjoy taxpayer and reward the private sector with full privileges to explore space. Aviation wouldn't be what it is today without free enterprise. It's win-win.

The question of life on Mars may remain unanswered, but according to NASA, rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dug up reason for us to believe it to be highly possible:

Water once "drenched the surface" of Mars, NASA scientists announced Tuesday.

..."NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life," James Garvin, a lead NASA scientist, said in a statement. "Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer: Yes."

The astounding success of this mission will be awfully difficult to criticize by those who believe that NASA is the embodiment of throwing good money after bad. And if the public can generally agree that space exploration is a worthy investment, what's to stop a serious discussion on giving the private sector a chance to fully participate, so no one need complain about the difficulty and cost of launching robots and rockets except willing investors?

My copy of the March 2004 National Geographic came in the mail today, and I've just polished off a story about China's monumental difficulties with pollution, entitled "The Price of Growth in China." (Condensed version here.) It's with a mixture of amusement and disappointment that one reads the perspective adopted by such a traditionally morally neutral publication as National Geographic. The magazine's correspondent actually seems puzzled at the inability of a totalitarian-ruled country to properly address not only the physical ramifications of a modern industrial boom but also the resulting legal and humanitarian responsibilities. Cities are wreathed in smog. Workers are at the mercy of their government - at best stingy in terms of recompense, at worst violently uncompromising on labor rights.

To be fair, the Chinese people have never enjoyed the benefit of representative democracy through which to voice their concerns and petitions - indeed, America's rough industrial edges demanded considerable time and social struggle. The country will overcome these conflicts in its own time. But a little more than a slight acknowledgment of the political disparity, the fact that China is still ruled by tyranny, might help the author's attempts to reconcile Beijing's disregard for human life - a little bit like trying to determine the best layout for braille on the driver's side of the dashboard.

It looks as though Spirit and Opportunity won't just be sending us pretty pictures:

Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life.

There is a palpable buzz here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California that something wonderful is about to happen in the exploration of Mars.

...Those findings and their implications are headed for a major press conference, rumored to occur early next week -- but given unanimity among rover scientists and agreement on how and who should unveil the dramatic findings.

NASA is rumored to be staying mum on a wealth of data until it's ready to present. Is - or was - Mars inhabited? Though my intuition tells me that microbiotic lifeforms are almost certain to exist, I won't know before any of the rest of us. Even if this latest Mars missions fails to prove that we are not alone, we shouldn't miss the story already unfolding. Two low-cost, high-risk robot explorations on another planet are in the midst of an unprecedented operational and scientific success. And this is only the beginning of a complete repudiation of Luddites, skeptics and the generally unimaginative. With some luck and a blessing, the public won't forget this latest venture into the grand mystery.

Our new pair of office cameras each have the limited capability to record Quicktime movies. Besides the obvious benefit of documenting the lovely cubicles in which members of our staff live and work, we can easily augment our normal complement of photographs with videos during visits to project sites for surveying, inspection or construction supervision. The engineering world, however, is one of IBM clones, and the native multimedia application is Windows Media Player - which happens to not recognize Apple's Quicktime format.

Here again, technology saved the day. I scoured the internet until I found a reliable, shareware video converter; with it, our onsite teams can return to the office, import their Quicktime .MOV files and effortlessly change them to the .AVI format universally recognized by Windows operating systems. The Kodak cameras' video quality is similar to that of their snapshots - modest - but from location to camera to report, the procedure is seamless and utterly inexpensive. It's not a question of whether easy-to-create video will come in handy; it's a question of just how much.

Opportunity photographed a sunset on Mars.

We get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of space exploration in the latest issue of Cadalyst:

On January 16, 2004, on a clear bright day in space, engineers at ASI (Alliance Spacesystems) in Pasadena, California, held their collective breaths as a project they had poured their best efforts into faced its ultimate test. Given that this proof-is-in-the-pudding event lasted only a handful of seconds and took place 100 million miles away from their Southern California offices, there wasn't much they could do if their pet project proved faulty. But much to their joy and satisfaction, the robotic arm of the Spirit Rover deployed successfully, moving a microscope down for an up-close and personal encounter with the surface of Mars to examine the planet's dust in the closest proximity ever achieved.

This historical event — several years in the making, considering that the project began in November 2000 — owed much of its success to the quality and capability of these engineers' design software-SolidWorks and the appropriately named COSMOSWorks analysis software.

Talk about the Nuclear Family: work on these blueprints for multimillion-dollar appendages were completed not in an Apollo-mission style, fenced-off, high-profile laboratory, but between several cooperating firms contracted by Jet Propulsion Laboratories - linked by e-mail and the internet. A notable portion of work was done from engineers' homes, and the paperless approach reportedly cut labor time in half.

Either I made a discovery or I've finally joined the party: Newslink appears to be the consummate international media nexus, providing access to press agencies from every country in every region of the world. Have you been waiting for someone to take the pains to set up a comprehensive online directory? I'd suggest that tools like these are the secret behind Winds of Change's unmatched war reports, but that's like saying everyone can be Superman by climbing into red and blue tights.

Opportunity continues to rewrite our planetological and geological textbooks. If those rovers were sentient, I'm sure they'd be grateful for the peace and quiet.

You'd think we'd have been able to come to a consensus on this by now:

If you're the PC guy in the family or some other group, you've probably been asked this question: "At night should I turn my computer off?"

Ever since normal people have had computers, this question has made the rounds with a variety of "expert" answers. The early versions presented a trade-off between power consumption and stress on components. Turning the computer on or off, so the theory goes and accurately I believe, is the most physically stressful thing you do to it all day, so I think most experts have advised that it's better to leave the system on.

But in the age of the Internet, and especially in the age of broadband connections, there's a new angle probably more significant in the average case than all that wear and tear stuff. Some would claim that if you have one of those "newfangled" always-on broadband connections, then you're exposing your PC to more attacks than if you were to shut it off during periods of disuse.

In my early years of PC use, long before my junior year of college and first broadband connection, the computer was shut off after every session. I was not connected senior year - I can't quite remember, but considering I lived in a rickety old house with six mates of similarly humble means, I probably shut the computer off. I joined the 24-7 club and remained in for the next three years on the grounds that, as Larry Seltzer explains here, my computer experienced more stress when shut down and power back up. But after moving into my apartment and paying three of what I considered to be exorbitant electricity bills last summer, I decided to put the place into lockdown whenever I went away. I prefer open windows, so I didn't touch the air conditioner once; but I kept the apartment's living room ceiling fan on its highest setting nearly all the time. Before leaving the apartment, my two computers were turned off and the ceiling fan set to its lowest setting or switched off completely.

My bills are currently half the size of those from the summer - the first one to arrive that way came in September, immediately after my decision. My change of habits wasn't a perfectly controlled experiment, but a few conversations reveal that my fan wouldn't necessarily be a resource hog. Besides, the accumulated savings of a few hundred dollars is worth a layman's disagreement with Mr. Seltzer; and I leave server applications to the professionals. When I'm done with the box, "Shut Down" is Windows' best friend.

Q. Why do Mac enthusiasts tend not to be churchgoers?

A. Because they're busy worshiping something else.

Dear God. The roughest rugby game in the history of mankind would be Macphiles against Luddites.

(Now, now - some of my best friends are Mac users!)

Spirit's back in shape, and Opportunity's ready to roam.

Glenn Reynolds links to Rand Simberg, who has the scoop on Bush's space proposals:

However, there's one little item in the budget also mentioned in Keith's report that, while tiny, may be a portent of huge things to come. The budget of the new Office of Exploration is about a billion dollars (less than 10 percent of the total NASA budget), and buried deep within it is a $20 million line item called "Centennial Challenges."

According to the description, the purpose of this is "to establish a series of annual prizes for revolutionary, breakthrough accomplishments that advance exploration of the solar system and beyond and other NASA goals...By making awards based on actual achievements instead of proposals, NASA will tap innovators in academia, industry, and the public who do not normally work on NASA issues. Centennial Challenges will be modeled on past successes, including 19th century navigation prizes, early 20th century aviation prizes, and more recent prizes offered by the U.S. government and private sector."

Key words? "Private sector." It's just a toehold - but in American space exploration, a toehold is the best chance free enterprize has ever had. Excellent work, Mr. Bush.

Last September I raved about a Plug-and-Play external hard drive enclosure made by Taiwanese company Bafo. Make no mistake, I still use two for a rotating backup scheme at the office; but a combination of design flaws and stock shortages have turned me to the Alpha Digital PM-350U2-PCS, pictured above. Refer to the Bafo link for an explanation of what an external enclosure is. The ADI serves its purpose but exceeds the Bafo's performance on four counts. First, connection is problem-free (just make sure you have drivers and the enclosed hard drive jumper is set for Cable Select). Second, the unit is fanless; USB is not the medium for high-usage drives, and so storage operations are better served by the absence of an afterthought component to go on the fritz. Third, because the ADI sports an on/off switch, you can actually control usage of the drive without yanking cables (on that note, one complaint is that the DC input plug fit isn't as snug as I'd like). Fourth, ADI is to be commended for blending utility with style: the enclosure is paneled by plastic-embedded metal. Prime Space Odyssey material. I was disappointed to neither be on a mission to Jupiter nor able to jog around a centrifugal crew cabin.

But it's not my doom. Four Seven viral e-mails have dropped into my inbox over the past twenty-four hours. Killed 'em all.

Manager of entry, descent and landing Rob Manning said it best: "We're on Mars, everybody."

Those who deride NASA as a waste of taxpayer money should keep in mind that the agency does a good job making use of what it receives, even if that means cancelling programs:

NASA has canceled the next service mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, effectively ending Hubble's mission in space after two decades of providing scientists with invaluable photos and data about the universe.

John Grunsfeld, chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said repeatedly Friday that the agency is not killing the Hubble but that it will no longer service the space telescope because of budget problems and safety concerns in the wake of the shuttle Columbia disaster.

Continued service for Hubble would have required expensive updates and testing to the shuttle fleet that are not required for the shuttle's only other job, working on the International Space Station. Those updates arose out of post-Columbia safety concerns: While a damaged shuttle can dock easily with the space station for repairs, there is no such fallback with the Hubble.

"It was a question of looking at the risk elements involved to support the mission," Grunsfeld said. [NASA Administrator] O'Keefe "made the tough decision, and I think it's the right decision."

Of all federal agencies, NASA faithfully operates on a shoestring. One more reason why NASA deserves a little slack - and, on the larger scale, why space exploration belongs in the private sector.

Andrew Sullivan's probably getting some serious reader e-mail. And he passes off to Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook's clever, but personally I'm a little hesitant to instantly drop supporting arguments for Bush's proposal to a guy who bought into the plastic turkey myth. And he seems to imply that a program like Apollo took more time to land men on the moon that it actually did.

But let's take Easterbrook's writing at face value: the crafts vital to the missions can't be built within a light year of the budget. Do you know what's likely to happen? The mission is aborted, like many other well-intentioned NASA projects. With America's political climate one of marked ambivalence, Congress wouldn't pass up the chance to rap the space agency on the knuckles and shut (maybe redirect) the greenback spigot. Landing mission over for an administration or two; no exorbitant amount of additional funding allocated. Where's the boondoggle? Where's the dear-God-we've-saddled-our-children shibboleth materializing? Why is a speck in the budget driving Sullivan crazy, when some of us grandchildren can attest to exactly which existing programs' debts have been saddled on us? [Ones that Bush, or anyone else right now, would be tarred and feathered for decentralizing or simplifying!]

And for that matter: what do Easterbrook and Sullivan want? Keep the shuttles cycling? Money's still being spent - and for what, a lot of people have been wondering for years. With Mercury, Gemini and Apollo still vivid in people's minds today, privatization is probably DOA in Congress. Bush deserves at least a mote of credit for seeking some higher aspirations for NASA.

THIS CAN BE DEBATED CALMLY: Stanley Kurtz and Rand Simberg are in disagreement, but it is most definitely, as Kurtz puts it, "thoughtful."

IN ANOTHER WAY: Sullivan gives it one more look, this one without so much fire and brimstone. Fair enough.

Spirit rolls out at 3:00 AM tomorrow morning.

Homer Hickam, on Bush's coming announcement for NASA's new objectives, in the Wall Street Journal:

All I've got to say is please, for pity's sake, stop worrying about NASA stealing money from your favorite federal program and adding to the deficit. Out of a $2 trillion-plus budget in 2004, human resources programs (Education, Health and Human Services, HUD, Labor, Social Security, etc.) will get an astonishing 34%! In contrast, NASA has the smallest budget of all the major agencies in the federal government. In fact, its budget has represented less than 1% of the total budget each year since 1977 and it will probably never get more than a fraction above that, even with this new plan.

...If the president's space proposals seem overly bold, it's because no president has ever thought it important enough to spend any political capital to see a cogent plan in space all the way through. I don't agree with President Bush about everything but he's starting to remind me of Harry S. Truman. He gets with the program. You can argue with him about what he does and you might even be right, but you can't fault the man for getting out front and leading. That is, after all, what we hire our presidents to do.

Emphasis mine. Were the respondents for a recent poll that illustrates a public ambivalence to space programs told of the infintesimal size of NASA's treasury cut? Of course not. People tend to think a government is spending too much when they haven't the faintest idea how much money is being allocated or where. NASA is doubly cursed: For those that do have an inkling, the intangibles of science frontiers might not stimulate their imaginations as much as frustrate an expectation of money being used for good, solid, concrete things that sit very much on planet Earth, thank you kindly.

Although regulated privatization would, like aviation, produce the best results, the scale of successes achieved by NASA's comparatively small, dedicated staff against its resources, scope of work and inherently dangerous occupation is awing. And its funding remains less than one percent of the budget. Unfortunately, that miracle of public works doesn't make for good politics. So the matter will be hotly debated, occasionally mocked, and for the time being space exploration will - moon/Mars mission or not - stay on the bottom shelf.

SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE: If NASA is busy sending men to the moon and Mars, it won't be throwing money at the rattletrap space shuttle.

Remember how large hard drives from a few years ago seemed? Remember how expensive they actually were? If Moore's Law tells us everything about the doubling of transistors every eighteen months or so, it at least partially explains the millenarian increase of magnetic platter storage capacity every decade. Ten years ago this April, a computer shopper could purchase hard drive space at one dollar a megabyte. Six years before that, a megabyte was worth fifty bucks. Today, it's a dollar for every gigabyte, something Glenn Reynolds noted yesterday as he marveled at the next metric leap for the consumer market, the terabyte.

I've quoted before from the relevant April 1994 article in PC Computing. Here it is in PDF format, entitled "Big Drives in Tiny Packages." The article's coauthors sandwiched two product roundups between their industry observations. One pits the contemporary top-of-the-line models against one another, the other mid-level performers. The price points - hold onto your hat - were $1000 and $500, respectively. My office has a clutch of old hard drives in our little computer junkyard: one 2GB, one 1GB and one 800MB. I don't think I could buy dinner at a bar-and-grill for their combined street prices.

Wisely, the coauthors were careful not to pontificate, disciplined in sticking to facts and product information - for the most part. Nobody can help themselves from making at least one or two conclusions on value, statements that draw knowing chuckles today. Statements like:

Pentiums galloping at 60MHz. Plenty of elbow room in 64MB of RAM. Sprawling vistas from local-bus video. Looks like the pieces for the ultimate desktop have finally come together...the Pentium, running at twice the speed of most 486 chips, gives weary disk drive developers no time to rest on their laurels.

How the world of technology does - and will continue to - change. Petabyte, anybody?

Giving NASA a convergent set of objectives, as we did in the 1960s, is good. Would reaching for new heights be a waste of money? I don't think so. The space program, taking less than half a penny on the dollar in the federal budget, is no boondoggle. If NASA is anything, it's cash and resource-starved, forever at the whim of shortsighted politicians eager to divert money to local pork (to see what I mean, watch the merciless portrayal of a young Walter Mondale in the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, a caricature of many in Congress that can't be too far from reality). So again: renewed vigor in NASA is good. Turbocharging space exploration and related scientific research through regulated privatization, à la the Federal Aviation Administration is better. If success in the former can lead to faith in the latter, I'm satisfied.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," said John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Forty-one years later:

President Bush will announce plans next week to send Americans to Mars and back to the moon and to establish a long-term human presence on the moon, senior administration officials said Thursday night.

Bush doesn't plan to send Americans to Mars anytime soon; rather, he envisions preparing for the mission more than a decade from now, one official said. The president also wants to build a permanent space station on the moon.

The initiatives are part of a broad, new commitment to manned space flight, three officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Beneficial for science, inspiring for mankind. I hope this turns out to be true.

Gabe (and Patrick, for that matter; I remember your work illustrations): investigate this at once. (Via Fishbucket.)

How are you fellows, eh? Haven't seen hide nor hair of you.

While Spirit landed on Mars, Stardust took some choice snapshots of a passing comet. We can safely call that a double-victory for the American space program.

It's come to my attention that my e-mail account may not be accepting all messages - so if you've sent something to me and I haven't yet responded, try again. What the problem is, I don't know. Just imagine: someone on planet Krypton knows what plans a friend or two of mine had for New Year's last night.

Glenn notes a hint of, oh, lip-curling-across-file-sharpened-teeth contempt for weblogs from journalist clubbers in the Editor & Publisher. Spontaneous and decentralized, we're apparently "self-important." Now, the anger of Paid Professional at Visible Amateur is understandable: journalists would have us non-journalists believe that it's difficult to find your work in a periodical. It's not. What is difficult is to find your work in a periodical recognized as excellent, and often. That is, of course, what most journalists are trying - and not quite succeeding - to do all the time. League ball doesn't guarantee a pennant. Blogs are as good as anything to illustrate the second distinction, as well as continuing to chip away at the first, every hour of the day.

Yesterday, Drudge ran as his large-font headline a CBS News story entitled "9/11 CHAIR: ATTACK WAS PREVENTABLE." The premise pushed by the article, insinuating that blame fell pretty squarely on the new Bush administration, was fishy; bloggers and readers looked at the idea from all sides and began a compelling discussion on Instapundit. Today was Instapundit's second crack, and Glenn linked to a second story that satisfactorily defused implications of the first. Advantage? Blogosphere.

Lawrence Reed divulges the secret behind Wilbur and Orville Wright's success one hundred years ago, wisdom that could be applied to the president's anticipated initiative on space travel. Hint: the secret wasn't government.

Iraqis protested against terrorism; Big Media yawned. If a left-friendly cultural stereotype is smashed, will the press cover it? Glenn Reynolds celebrates the fall of broadcast Rome on MSNBC, with a gracious mention of yours truly.

At least several of this site's regular readers, I'll have you know, are fans of Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's witty, nerdish comic Penny Arcade. It's not exactly my kind of humor, though every now and then Holkins and Krahulik have put out some priceless work. But reading taste aside, both artists have my sincere admiration for their side project, if it can even be called that:

One of the comic's biggest targets is the mainstream media and their treatment of game players and the industry. Frankly, they're sick of features on local and national news programs portraying players as morally corrupt, psychotic killers just waiting to go postal on their high school.

...This Christmas they decided to do something about it - something that might give the news media something positive to write about gamers for once. The two geek humorists live near Seattle, so they hooked up with the Seattle Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center to arrange a sort of donation charity thing. The idea was simple: They would set up an Amazon.com Wish List, put a few dozen items on it, and let their readers buy and donate them. Once the presents were delivered, Holkins and Krahulik would cart them all down to the Children's Hospital and give them to the kids. With a little luck, they might deliver one or two hundred toys and games to some sick kids who need to have a little fun.

So, the guys set it up, threw together a simple Web page, called it Child's Play, and put a link to it in the rant that accompanies their thrice-weekly comic. Then something truly incredible happened.

Gamers went nuts buying toys and games. One or two hundred items quickly ballooned out of control.

...We're not just talking about little trinkets here. Sure, there are lots of inexpensive items on the list, but readers have bought dozens of Game Boy Advance systems, Playstation 2s, Xboxes, and GameCubes - as well as child-friendly games to go with them. Some organizations have gotten together to make large purchases or donations. To date, thousands of gamers have donated a total of more than $100,000 worth of toys, games, and cash to help the kids of the Seattle Children's Hospital.

Looks like Chief Wiggles is in a charitable run for his money. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is competition of the best kind.

It's unlikely the United States or its closest allies would ever have allowed the United Nations' less-scrupulous members to take control of the internet, but knowing that the schemers have now tabled a public discussion is a sweeter victory.

And in keeping with Glenn Reynolds' Tech Central Station motif:

You can almost hear Kofi Annan spinning away through space in his executive TIE Fighter.

...To go to the moon:

President Bush wants to send Americans back to the moon — and may leave a permanent presence there — in a bold new vision for space exploration, administration officials said yesterday.

And a permanent presence likely will include robots and communication satellites.

But beyond the nuts and bolts, Bush's call for a to return to space would give Americans something new to hope for - amid a period of permanent anxiety about terrorism.

Colonies! Vision! Robots! You can't imagine how giddy the article made me when I first read it this morning. With a domestic budget in the red, however, and a space program that's as directionless as it is traumatized, I can't see such grand objectives accomplished by the government. How could President Bush celebrate the triumph of America and the promise of space-age mankind in one sweeping gesture? One word, the same word we applied to aviation: privatization.

This isn't exactly the great deal for Microsoft products that consumers are looking for:

Software pirates in Malaysia are selling copies of an early version of the next generation of Microsoft Corp.'s flagship Windows operating system, company officials said Tuesday.

...According to the Business Software Alliance, a U.S.-based industry group, 68 percent of new software used in Malaysia last year was illegal—higher than the global average software piracy rate of 39 percent, but lower than that of some Asian countries, such as China. He didn't elaborate.

He doesn't need to. Commerce with countries struggling with or otherwise completely lacking the rule of law - and thus without robust intellectual property rights - barely qualifies as trade. It's more like controlled theft. The Chinese are oldhands at literally copying foreign designs, from aesthetics to function, and then flooding markets with product clones through willing third parties. Their "work" in the audio industry is so efficient it'd be admirable if it weren't, forgive the pun, patently unethical.

Free trade is impeccable in theory. In order for it to work in practice, an even legal playing field is incumbent on all parties.

A story that really frosts me is rare, but this (recurring) one finally tripped the wire. Consider this push for Totalitarianism Lite as Exhibit A in the presentation of why unelected world governments, especially those populated by despots, are a danger to free humanity:

A global summit scheduled in December may result in a proposal to put the Internet under United Nations control — an idea that has met solid resistance from the United States.

...The World Summit on the Information Society, sponsored by the International Telecommunications Union, the United Nations' key agency on telecommunications, will bring together more than 50 heads of state, along with an expected 5,000 to 6,000 government, business and non-profit representatives from across the globe to discuss in part "the yawning telecommunications gap between emerging economies and the developed world."

"Emerging economies"? Is that a euphemism for entire nations held hostage by jackbooted regimes or the rabble of backwards, dysfunctionally corrupt oligarchies - so more or less a buzzword replacement for "developing countries"? Why yes, I believe it is:

The effort for global control of the Internet is reportedly led by China, which allows its own citizens online access, but it is tightly controlled by a giant firewall and monitored by government surveillance.

China has so far been joined in its efforts by representatives of Syria, Egypt, Vietnam and South Africa, said Ronald Koven, European representative for the World Press Freedom Committee, an international media watchdog based in the United States. Other reports indicate that Russia, India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil may be on board, too.

What a diverse action committee! Three democracies, two of them with room for improvement on accommodating civil rights; a post-Communist, statist republic; and four outright dictatorships. Henhouse - check. Wolves - check, check, check and check.

They say fewer than 3 percent of Africans can even access telecommunications of any kind.

They say fewer than 17 percent of African nations allow access to the ballot box without a hassle, while 48 percent withhold the right to vote altogether. Doesn't it follow, then, that the entire region won't exactly present many stable investments to telecommunications companies?

Currently, the International Corporation of Assigned Network and Numbers, a non-profit corporation with an international board of directors, manages Internet Protocol space allocation, domain names and root server system functions. It does not have content or security control functions.

Critics of the global Internet idea say certain nations like China want to take away ICANN’s duties and place them under governmental auspices, along with increased control over security and content, placing freedom of press and individual freedom of expression at serious risk.

“Those governments don’t have any democracy or free speech, it’s dangerous and we’re trying to stop it,” said Julio Munoz, executive director of the Inter American Press Association in Miami. "Of course we are concerned they will try to manipulate the free flow of information."

Munoz's comments carry a certain comfort with them, especially since this isn't the first would-be usurpation of free media:

“We’re going to send a delegation there — to try and defend the press,” said Munoz, who recalled previously unsuccessful attempts in the 1970s and 1980s for U.N.-led media standards.

Nevertheless, let's give it a good rolling of the eyes. While we're at it, take a good look at the United Nations: elected leaders and strongmen in the same room, fundamentally at odds, deferring to non-representation and subjecting sovereign, self-governed nations to arbitrary demands of the least common denominators.

President Bush is not scheduled to attend the summit, which will be followed by another meeting in Tunisia in November 2005.

The choice of location must have symbolic intent, as there is no freedom of speech in Tunisia.

ADDING IMPRISONMENT TO INSULT AND INJURY: Could China's motives be any more transparent?

My office installation of Outlook Express receives a copy of messages sent to my addresses and opened at home, so the return to work after every holiday begins with sorting through several days'-worth of e-mail I've already read. Although I look wistfully back to the days of 1997 - when browsing through Netscape Communicator continued interrupted by pop-ups, and inboxes were filled only with correspondence you'd invited - I'm relatively unaffected by the noise that less scrupulous people consider commerce. The trickling inflow of spam messages is solved by two mouse clicks every half-hour, and my trusty SpyBot squashes anything particularly nasty on the internet. Exceptions would be mornings like this one, where forty-three out of forty-nine messages were junk. And that's when I share popular opinions like these:

Congress' [anti-spam] bill appears to underestimate just how deeply spam is hated. About 80 percent of consumers want spam banned or limited by law, according to a report from the ePrivacy Group and the Poneman Institute. And 74 percent want a federal do-not-spam list, much like the do-not-call list limiting telemarketing. Another 59 percent want spammers to be punished.

According to the article in Rocky Mountain News, this current attempt at legislation is not the silver bullet desired by the computing public. And to no one's surprise, some companies are playing boths ends against the middle, selling spam filters while opposing strict crackdowns on perpetrators. It'll be a tougher nut to crack than telemarketing, that's for sure. Ah, well: Two more clicks.

Though Glenn Reynolds has repeatedly discouraged visiting his site for a primary news source, I've found that between the obviously wide range of his sources and the abundance of daily posts, one can generally find all the latest headlines alongside some tidbits you otherwise wouldn't have discovered on your own. And in record time. Sound familiar? Instapundit is the closest competitor to Matt Drudge, I've felt for a long time now, and even though Reynolds' relatively gigantic audience of nearly six figures a day is a pittance of that viewing the Drudge Report (one one-hundreth, to be exact), his coverage of news has come to be more valuable and reliable.

Drudge came first. His page, spartan even for late-1997 HTML and virtually unchanged since, easily predated the popularization of web diary programs like Movable Type and the off-the-record, remark-as-you-go demeanor that came with them. At the forefront of the 21st Century's "New Media," Drudge's system is an early prototype, and operates with a separation of editor and reader much closer to that of a newspaper than a weblog. Surely, if we didn't know that Drudge was right of center leaning libertarian, we could read it well enough in the selection and rewording of many linked stories. And if you've ever listened to him on the radio, you'll agree that he more than makes up on the microphone for the infrequency of explicit opinions online.

Yet the Drudge Report maintains a certain editorial silence that - again, much like a newspaper - can't help but imply a certain objectivity. Sometimes Drudge simply posts a headline verbatim; maybe he adds a picture. He might have chosen to start his page with it out of political preference, but just as often he's only reflecting what's in the news; a visitor is taken to the real story encountering a minimum of interpretation. Therein lies the problem. Even if we don't lead ourselves into thinking that Drudge's latest roundup - however first-rate - is the only clutch of hype around the world, we're left with his mirroring of news sources, many of which don't deserve to be linked without questions asked.

Not sure what I mean? Take the big story in London today - or the story that should be, the protests that never were. Nowhere near the promised throngs materialized yesterday, and the promised "100,000" have yet to assemble today. But neither you nor several million people over the last hours would have found that out through Drudge:

Far be it for a guy like Matt Drudge - who's filled in for Rush Limbaugh more than once over the past month - to patronize the BBC, but there it is: a provocative photo linking to a pro-rally story by the public broadcasters. The BBC places projections of total demonstrators by its leftist organizers right next to police estimates (numbers which, I might add, haven't been corroborated by anybody who wouldn't want to see them as high as possible). No explanation of the radicals actually running the event. If someone's single internet stop today were that Drudge Report headline, they'd come away having read only the BBC, with an impression exactly as intended by forces in opposition to Tony Blair and George W. Bush - which is, presumably, that the whole of Great Britain ducked work to thumb their nose at both leaders.

Here's where Instapundit comes in - and comes out ahead. You see, the mass rejection that the left was hoping for fell well short of expectations. Reynolds would have just as easily blogged the event if numbers had reached 100,000. But they didn't, and he blogged the left-in as it flopped. He provided a roundup including witnesses, and even linked the same BBC story as Drudge, putting the damned fluff-piece into proper context.

This isn't the first time the line drawn between Big Media and Alternate Media has separated Drudge from the blogosphere. Over the past year or so have I come to feel that Drudge's technique, once revolutionary, now often provides a megaphone for the same tilted angle from mainstream broadcasters. His site offers a variety of media grabs, but aside from occasional scoops (Bill O'Reilly's "Talkola" admittedly one of the best in recent months), the majority of Drudge's posts are straight from the mainstream media. Many of those linked stories are typically biased or misleading. Drudge may do well in some regard to remove as much bias as he can by keeping commentary on a given story to a minimum; but the consequence of withholding judgment is to leave the article's own spin completely intact. Does that trade-off make for good reporting, "objective" or not?

Time will tell. I can't fathom either pundit losing energy or viewers over the long term - quite the opposite. But it should be interesting to see how the growing popularity of weblogs - helped in no small measure by Instapundit - affects the supremacy Drudge has enjoyed for a few years. And that popularity can be challenged without detriment to the Report - it's not as if people can't check both pages in one sitting. Even though I'll hit Instapundit for headlines right after my Fox News homepage has popped up, the Drudge Report is not far behind. A reverse habit is just as easy to get into. The question is this: how do you want your news?

REVISIONS, REVISIONS: Via IP, Iain Murray links to the above BBC link. The BBC has been correcting the story since early afternoon; first the number of demonstrators drawn was 30,000, then 70,000 and now the hallowed 100,000. Some news outlets are still relaying the number of 70,000 - and to put it politely, I'm still looking for more than rabidly left-wing, British [or otherwise] news companies to report that the leftist-Islamist production company delivered. And actually revealing the event's organizers is unlikely to come from any of the celebrating broadcasters. [Though one must say, even if the rally missed the mark of 100,000 it wasn't quite a flop.] Advantage? The blogosphere over Drudge, I'd reckon, especially since several on the right - including Instapundit - are already recanting. But then old Drudge has moved on to the inherent sexiness of Johnny Depp, which is why, no matter what, we'll always love the Drudge Report.

ONE MORE THING: Thank goodness none of the anticipated [or threatened] violence occurred. No matter how horribly misguided the protesters were today, they were by and large peaceful.

DID I SAY ONE MORE?: Number games aside, here's the real victory, awarded to Bush and Blair by the conservative Telegraph. Much as we little gadflies might have chattered, the nonsense going on in Trafalgar didn't make a lick of difference to a couple of men charged with protecting and expanding the free world. Once the excitement of the past two days passes from the West, only the responsibilities ahead - made plain by the second slaughter of innocents in Turkey - will be left.

Goodbye to an American icon:

The greetings from the president (Jimmy Carter) and U.N. chief (Kurt Waldheim) are way out of date. So is the gold-plated phonograph record that carries them, along with whale songs and frog calls, for any curious aliens who happen to find the vintage spacecraft. But Voyager 1, alert and healthy more than a quarter century after it was launched on a mission to Jupiter and Saturn, is still on the cutting edge. Last week, scientists reported that the spacecraft, now twice as far from the sun as Pluto, has picked up signs of the solar system's distant boundary. It will soon be humanity's first envoy to the stars.

...Now so far from home that the sun is just a bright star and radio signals take 12 hours to reach antennas on Earth, Voyager has enough plutonium in its nuclear-powered electrical generator to keep sending data until 2020. That may be just enough time for it to reach pristine interstellar space and bid its final farewell.

"Launched" right around the time of Voyager, I can feel a sense of time elapse - especially recalling a conversation with my father years ago that ended with him matter-of-factly describing the space probe's fate. It will just keep drifting and drifting, he said. Absent a collision, forever. The end of an era - and to me, a milestone - this might have made me a bit sad if not for the obvious silver lining. You see, when the Borg come, they'll assimilate Jimmy Carter first.

COULDN'T RESIST:

Do you Linux-box on the tweak-geek frontier? March in step with Apple's seamless choreography? Or is Bill Gate's capitalist empire-borne bazaar of hardware and software enough to keep you happy? PC Magazine pits the three major competing operating systems and their driving ethos against one another; answers for today and questions about tomorrow. Give it a read, no matter what your front end - I'd say there's enough bragging material for everybody.

Microsoft presented concepts and working solutions at the Professional Developers Conference 2003 for its next operating system, code-named Longhorn, and the pundits are atwitter. PC Magazine offers a comprehensive look at the respective futures for Microsoft and its competitors on both the Linux and Apple sides. Possibilities, wishful thinking and digital ownership conundrums: it's all there, with more tech jargon to fill two "...For Dummies" book glossaries. Fit a hand around the crown of your head to keep it from spinning, and enjoy the first few glimpses of the next binary frontier.

AND: Glenn Reynolds found the Microsoft-weblog connection. Well, who else?

Hosting Matters, my website host, has been hit by its third Denial-of-Service attack in less than a week. This one left me unable to access my account for nearly all of yesterday. Through midnight last night - and earlier this morning - Movable Type was a ponderous load. Graphics couldn't seem to be found, nor could I contact my FTP cache.

After conversing with tech support, I have the issue mostly resolved: this posting is proof of one challenge defeated, and the other - the menu's graphic interface - might take a little bit more finagling. I just need to configure the correct path.

So, barring any further attacks, posting shall resume as normal. To my tiny yet loyal audience, my apologies and promise for quality blogging in the future.

GOT IT: You can't see it from your end but trust me, Movable Type is back in perfect order and certainly easier on my eyes.

Music file sharing: it apparently can't be dissuaded, but is it ethical? ProRec.com editor, recording engineer and certified computer wonk Rip Rowan makes a point with his usual sharpness.

Switching your preferred net browser to Mozilla or Opera may no longer be considered a simple expression of Gates hate:

The reputation of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been mauled by security experts.

...The self styled 'chief hacking officer' of U.S.-based eEye Digital Security, which has been responsible for the discovery of a plethora of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, says that Internet Explorer has been insecure for a long time.

"It has been a long running theme that at almost any given point there is a remotely exploitable bug in Internet Explorer," he told ZDNet Australia. "It's one of the biggest security risks for most 'Microsoft based' corporations. Microsoft is not fixing these publicly disclosed bugs in any sort of timely manner or more so they seem to just not be fixing them at all."

The article is worth a read and some dedicated thought. I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer three years ago when I tried in vain to use Netscape 6.0 as a functional, viable browser (a sorrily clumsy dud if ever there was one). To be fair, IE hasn't been the source of many headaches since. But given that a few hours were spent between yesterday and Monday getting to the bottom of what turned out to be a coworker's machine infected with QHosts, news like this turns me on to the idea of alternate browsers.

I found a link to this headline, incidentally, on Slashdot.org, where Microsoft and the Borg are considered - at least ethically - one and the same. Clever.

That laptop I've been tussling with has provided a couple of interesting (and wistful) glimpses into the past. A flash of the BIOS actually required an operating system based on DOS - so Windows 2000, which we had recently plunked down on the system for an employee's quick-and-dirty field work, wouldn't do. We don't have a copy of Windows 98 lying around the office, so I turned to an unused, legal copy of Windows 95. There I was, leaving the world of Windows 3.1 for Workgroups behind again - it was very 1996-1997. I successfully flashed the BIOS but, as I explained previously, failed to accomplish my ultimate objective.

Before pressing on - shutting down and removing the Windows 95 installation in the process - I glanced at the hard drive's free byte count. How much disk space did the old software consume? 70 megabytes. 70 megabytes might get you about fifteen MP3s - certainly not a modern Microsoft operating system. A dream, especially on the ancient 4-gigabyte drive. See "streamlined." While it wouldn't hold a candle to the applicability, flexibility and stability of Windows 2000 and (according to some) Windows XP, Windows 95 indeed lived in an age before the dawn of bloatware.

I'm always happy to help out freshly minted bloggers and promote the Axis of Naughty in the same move. So, one and two. Done. I'll keep an eye on the scorecard; you read both weblog entries. If you blog, vote yourself.

The move from CoreComm to Hosting Matters was neither a cinch nor a completed process. First and foremost, the weblog's entry numbering system was thrown completely off by my failure to reset the MySQL database; imported entries were thrown on an existing set - even though I'd deleted all entries in Movable Type - so enumeration was off by over 800.

I've partially fixed the problem; my first entry begins at number one, and I value that for peace of mind. Permalinks inside the uBlog and from other sites, however, will not arrive at their intended destinations: Over the course of blogging, entries that had been deleted or mistakenly duplicated were nevertheless counted in the entry series. For example, if entries 345, 346 and 347 were accidental triplets and I deleted the two excess posts, my next entry would have been 348 (and the correct entry before it would be 345). Imported into a new database, entry 348 would thereafter be identified as 346. Luckily, until today I have preferentially archived posts according to category, so any missed link will end up on the same page as the desired post.

Categories remain the only archive listing on the main index, but as most of them have grown to accumulate months of entries they're beginning to become cumbersome downloads - and a slow page is none too welcome to the innocent surfer looking to follow up on someone's link to a single entry on my site. So I've changed the default permalink to individual archives - a good hack job on my amateur behalf, I'm happy to say, as it was one hell of a coding tug-of-war for Saturday morning.

So then: Isabel's gone, old Sol is back to its rightful skyborne throne, and the uBlog is back to normal operation. Fortune!

"Foremost on any commander's mind," I recall a military historian saying, "was where his men would eat and drink." Equipment for a modern fighting force has certainly expanded and specialized over even the last decades, and the laws of logistics still can and do make or break operations. That makes quite a potential for dangerous confusion. The United States Marine Corps, as always, wants mobility and efficiency. How can it manage that in the growing complexity of weapons and supply technology? By going wireless:

To get their far-from-common job done, the Marines need to do some rather mundane things, like tracking supplies and equipment. Every tank, munition, first-aid kit, and food ration must be accounted for at all times and often in the heat of battle. To do this, the Marines rely on some highly mobile wireless technology. This technology has already been field-tested in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, helping to ensure that troops always have what they need.

...To track all this equipment, wireless networks and handhelds go out with the troops. Designed to be set up in the field, the tracking system "gives us total asset visibility," [Captain Gary] Clement boasts. "Commanders get a view of exactly what equipment they have on hand. They know what their capability is at all times." With real-time inventory data, commanders always know which missions they can support.

The tracking starts long before equipment arrives on the battlefield. At Marine warehouses, supplies are packed into thousands of containers and pallets. A typical pallet may hold 10 or 15 different items. The Marines use 2-D bar codes—which can hold more than 1,000 bytes of information—to tag each pallet with a wealth of information: what items it contains, what its destination is, what truck it should travel on, and so on.

All of this information can be read instantly by any of some 3,000 Symbol PDT 7240 handheld units the Marines purchased from Symbol Technologies. The handhelds, which run on DOS, Microsoft Windows CE, and, most recently, Microsoft Pocket PC, use built-in radios to communicate with a Symbol Spectrum24 wireless network. During the war in Iraq, such networks were set up at half a dozen Marine base camps, each camp having its own transportation management office (TMO) that receives and ships supplies.

...The system must be set up on the fly, so it also must be easily transportable and simple to use. The network equipment and handhelds are packaged in sealed transit cases that resemble large suitcases. All the necessary settings are programmed in flash memory. "Just break open the box, light it up, and you're ready to go," says Tom Roslak, vice president of homeland security for Symbol Technologies.

Plans for Marines' materiel centralization and vital medical information are on the horizon. Much better than a clipboard, no?

A CoreComm beneficiary no more, I've made the switch to Hosting Matters. 20% more disk space, 500% more bandwidth, near-instantaneous technical support at all hours of the day from real experts: all for half of what I paid in a monthly CoreComm bill.

Dig it? Dig it.

UPDATE: The way in which I imported my archives (long story) set the enumeration off, so a few inbound links to entries will hit the archive header instead. Eh, could be worse.

That's one vote for Ilyka.

Not too long ago I noted a startlingly assertive campaign underway by Autodesk to replace the Adobe PDF with the "DWF," a file format that Autodesk boasts to be far superior in its parsing of computer-aided drawing files. Now, I'll admit: I recently began using Acrobat Distiller's add-on soft-printer to prepare AutoCAD files for clients, and the day I found out about all of this, I'd run into some difficulties with a few complicated drawings. Since Adobe Acrobat's PDF files are universal for document exchanges, my assumption was that Adobe and Autodesk might sit down for an intercorporate powwow to work out better communication between CAD files and Acrobat Distiller - all for the benefit of individuals, companies and municipalities who aren't specialized and rely on generic formats to communicate.

I was wrong. Now, commercial death fatwas aren't unheard of; Microsoft has spent the better part of two years trying to smother MP3.com tycoon Michael Robertson's Linux-based operating system called "Lindows." But they're not common occurrences in the market, either. I don't recall any Coke pitch along the lines of "Pepsi is scraped from the bedpans of dysenteric elephants," or a McDonald's ad with old Ronald suggesting "Burger King today, vegetarian tomorrow." Pepto-Bismol gets a reprieve with semi-anonymity when slammed as "the pink stuff." Even Rosie spares Bounty's competitors when she wipes away fruit juice spills at two - no! - three times their capillary action. Most companies realize that lowering the standard for their rivals opens themselves up for the same treatment. It's a touchy business.

So you can imagine my reaction when a coworker showed me this ad he found on the inside back cover of this month's Cadalyst:

Part of me is speechless; the other part is busy figuring that the top-left performer snuck out of a Wim Wenders movie and that the de-unicycled fellow's expression is priceless. What's Autodesk's next step in, er, wooing open-mouthed tech consumers to the DWF?

Whatever may come - for now? Ouch. That's a jab and a haymaker, Adobe. You've got a bit of honor to defend.

UPDATE: My silent prediction that Adobe would give Autodesk's offensive the silent treatment is underscored by the fact that the attack on the PDF may only amount to bizarre fist-shaking:

On Wednesday [September 10, 2003], Adobe announced it had net income of $64.5 million, or 27 cents a share, for the quarter, which ended Aug. 29. That compares with $47.2 million, or 19 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Analysts polled by research firm First Call had predicted income of 25 cents a share. Revenue for the quarter was $319.1 million, compared with $284.9 million a year ago.

Executives attributed the growth to the company's e-paper division, which produces Acrobat and other products based on Adobe's portable document format (PDF). The company revamped the Acrobat line a few months ago, adding a high-end version and a stripped-down product, aimed at getting office workers to use PDF as the standard choice for exchanging documents.

Touché. Adobe defends their honor after all!

Autodesk is picking a fight with Adobe. And starting it with a rabbit punch to the windpipe. Dear Lord.

Like any tale of intrigue, there's sure to be a backstory somewhere. I'll do some digging. In the meantime, you can bet more than a few pocket protectors have had a switchblade added to them.

Search me how it's pronounced, but if you're in the market for an external drive enclosure that's worth every penny, this unit is "boffo":

I bought it last week to aid my company's data-server backup system; it's a loose father-son routine, with modified-file-transfer every night and a backup drive swap every Friday. For about a year, we've simply backed up to a internally mounted removable drive bay (we're a small company; we can get away with it). The only problem is that computer maintenance always comes down to myself, the bay is not hot-swappable (it can't be disconnected while computer is operational), and I've got early risers and late workers alongside me: I don't think we've ever removed the, er, removable drive bay. Given the nominal threat of electrical surges - connected UPS notwithstanding - and viral damage, keeping a data reserve in service at all times is not the safest thing to do.

That all changes with the Plug-and-Play, hot-swappable Bafo BF-2003. I simply attach the enclosure to an AC power supply and connect it to the server via USB 2.0. Recognition takes less than seven seconds; a taskbar icon pops up for monitoring, modifying and ultimately disconnecting my "removable hardware." Removing the drive from the system takes five clicks, including closing two windows - then I detach the USB cable and power coupling, and take the enclosure wherever I like. Swapping drives in and out of the enclosure requires a screwdriver (the metal kind, you know, this is pretty low-stress work) but takes less than two minutes after a little practice.

Want a smart, effective data backup? Buy drives in two, throw one of them into a hot-swappable enclosure like the Bafo. Even the Russian judge would give this hardware better than a 4.5.

FIVE MONTHS LATER: I'm still using two Bafo drives for the office. The unit's internal fan is problematic, however, and is better left disconnected than imitating the sound of a Dremel tool. What's more, Plug-and-Play installation can often be squirrelly, and the lack of an on/off switch doesn't help matters. A project has necessitated the purchase of two more enclosures, and I bought from a different company: Alpha Digital. Even though I have no reason to give up the Bafos, the new enclosures are head and shoulders above them.

Remember Gary Larson's The Far Side daily with the angry dog owner scolding his dog Ginger - the dog's translation of which was, of course, "Blah blah blah Ginger, blah blah blah blah Ginger"? Care of our inventive, Pacific brothers, you too can play Han Solo to your dog's Chewbacca:

With the US release of the Bow-Lingual, Japanese Toy manufacturer Takara Corporation tackles what we'd call the little known 'Dr. Dolittle Market' (i.e. the people who want to talk with the animals). The Bow-Lingual aims to translate "dog" into "English" - converting simple dog barks into phrases printed on the unit's small, portable LCD screen. It's ingenious, innovative, and interesting - but somewhat flawed.

Part of that flaw, explains the article, is that dogs aren't exactly enigmatic or worth $100 of United Nations-style translation. Read on.

Networking makes my head spin: so leave it to PC Magazine to compile the most informative and exciting look ahead to home and business power-networking in the future.

Fantastic reading. My head's going like a centrifuge.

A nerd is nabbed:

A teenager has been questioned about altering the MSBlast worm to make it more devasting, and an arrest is expected.

A teenager suspected of making the devastating MSBlast Internet worm even more potent is expected to be arrested, the Seattle Times has reported, citing two US Justice Department sources.

Shy bookworms can be prevented from pupating into antisocial computer terrorists. Every single one of us knows or knows of someone lost to the easy domination of coded thuggery. This, ladies and gentlemen, this is why high schools hold Sadie Hawkins dances.

UPDATE: Wired published an article in 1999 on the work of Canadian psychologist Marc Rogers, underscoring the perceived hacker bell curve: "The most visible breed of computer cracker is an obsessive middle-class white male, between 12 and 28 years old, with few social skills and a possible history of physical and sexual abuse." Security systems expert Peter Shipley disagreed but, far from a psychologist, offered only a few anecdotes of hackers he's known. A body builder? Drop-dead gorgeous woman? It sounds like Shipley's jonesing for a hacker-infested, utterly bleak, futuristic, plutarchical police state. An interesting debate, in any case.

If you can't beat 'em, impugn 'em:

The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a "capital imperialist" who wants to destabilise the corporation because he "is against everything the BBC stands for".

Only partly true. Murdoch is against much of what the BBC stands for. He sells his news to viewers; the success of his media giant is directly dependent upon a British desire to read the Sun or watch Sky. The BBC enjoys a compulsory television tax. "Destabilization" is, of course, what's known in the private sector as "competition." Who are the imperialists, again?

At last count, heat deaths throughout France were at 3,000. Instapundit reports that the toll has climbed to 10,000. I compared them to Third World levels; considering the example in India I provided, where the press addressed a much smaller disaster with the same tone, France has likely broken records. Frightening.

The real news is that through a combination of poor execution by hackers and expert prevention by authorities, SoBig's latest epidemic will not cause damage and confusion as feared. Now, the prospect of intercontinental hackers with the world at their mercy isn't a concept foreign to the stuff of comic books - especially with the bizarrely extensive lengths to which the perpetrators have gone. The San Francisco Chronicle nevertheless serves us a report that rivals the best of sci-fi, megalomaniac, geostrategic villainy:

A powerful e-mail virus known as SoBig was thwarted Friday as it attempted to change itself, possibly into a more destructive force.

Remove "e-mail," "virus" and "Sobig." Insert, respectively, "radioactive," "lizard" and "Godzilla." What are we talking about, again?

A coordinated defense by commercial and government computer experts illustrates the growing arms race between Internet miscreants, and public and private authorities.

"Arms race"? Will this culminate in a hallmark treaty conference - perhaps a signing of the Network Effluvium Reduction Directive (NERD)?

For days, commercial antivirus wizards and Department of Homeland Security investigators had been working to stop the self-replicating virus, or worm, from infecting computers.

"Antivirus experts" doesn't do them justice, apparently - especially when they're wearing their conical, star-and-moon hats. (Another one.) The Chronicle is up against the weight of cultural assumptions, here: call someone a "wizard," and you'd better expect a certain mental picture.

At noon, all computers worldwide that were infected with SoBig -- more than 100,000, according to Santa Clara antivirus firm Network Associates -- were to make contact with these 20 computers, where experts believe the worm was evidently destined to download more instructions. What those instructions would be, no one knew.

Emphasis mine. Comic book font, plate echo and dissonant orchestral sforzando, stat!

The topic is, of course, serious; and to be fair, most of the article doesn't flirt with DC-Marvel-Kaiju. But once started, a theme needs a solid denouement; and what's SoBig-Con without its exemplar:

"If he's caught, everyone will probably be startled at how sweaty and dull he turns out to be," said George Smith, a senior fellow with Alexandria, Va., think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

Keep your children close, citizens! Every man with a pocket protector is a potential supervillain. We've yet to see the worst.

A SoBig infection in the office has been playing hide-and-seek with us for two days. I may have finally it pinned down, which means I can now turn my attention to a three-step hardware upgrade: the administrative assistant's hard drive went rock-tumbler yesterday; her drive's replacement coincides with an upgrade of our server backup system we've been wanting to implement; and amid the confusion I'll finally give myself a proper, single-partition drive.

Expect link-and-pith during the day while I'm waiting for installations and data transferrals.

Sometimes the right things go wrong:

The [Blaster virus] infection caused computers to reboot frequently or disrupted users' browsing on the internet. But it also packed a second punch.

Computer experts said starting at 12:01 a.m. US time Saturday, infected computers that have not cleaned up the virus would in effect turn into a legion of zombies instructed to repeatedly call up a Microsoft website that houses the software patch. If enough traffic flooded the network, the site could be rendered unreachable and computer users would be unable to access the patch.

But the exploiters of the Microsoft flaw made a mistake themselves. The worm instructed computers to call up http://windowsupdate.com - which is an incorrect address for reaching the actual Microsoft website that houses the software patch. Although Microsoft has long redirected those who visited that incorrect address to the real site - http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com - the company disabled the automatic redirection last Thursday in preparation for the onslaught of infected computers.

Hear the hoofbeats of the Dumb Mistake Cavalry as it rides to the rescue? Remember, Glenn, tomorrow's cybersociopaths with error-extirpation subroutines buried in their skulls won't make these kinds of blunders (though I suppose you might argue that a copy editor would achieve the same thing). Still, caveat emptor, I say.

I'll write on the topic at relative length within the week, if all goes well.

I was walking down the hall, just about to open the restroom door when the lights wavered and dimmed, the elevators beeped madly and the air conditioning ground down to a halt. Emergency lights went on. I turned back to the office where we had a little laugh about building management.

Then the lights went off - and stayed off. People called around, a few family relations phoned the office, and we quickly had a picture of the entire Greater Cleveland area with its lights out.

We all left together. In the parking lot, radios came on. Much of the eastern United States had been affected. Frightening. Everyone wished the other good luck in their impending negotiation of improvised four-way stops and likely gridlock on the highway. I was lucky enough to be able to change my route to swing by the folks' for talk of the town over cold sandwiches (which reminds me, I'll need to canvas my refrigerator). There was absent-minded flicking of lights and corresponding laughter.

But for a brief instant when the office crew heard the news over the radio, no panic; the traffic shuffling through intersections was magnificently well-behaved with only about four-and-a-half bozos jumping someone's turn; my parents and I spent a grand total of ten minutes either talking about or listening to DJs talk about the blackout. Near D.C., my sister wasn't affected; she instructed my mother to send regular reports.

Back to the apartment. I took a hell of a colorful walk, then groped my way to bed with a flashlight.

Lights having come back up here and elsewhere, more than half of the country - those directly affected and everyone worrying about them - must be breathing a sigh of relief. Everyone except those with the cameras, microphones and penchants for journalism-award-winning chaos, that is.

Thought about linking to a story on the War on Terror today? Winds of Change got 'em. Got 'em all.

A good read as always, but...antitrust! Antitrust!

(We know Boardwalk, of course: he's the guy who digs Malamute smoothies. You know - when the GIs say "chow," he's not thinking about MREs.)

Three thousand dead in France from a heat wave with an average that barely crawled above 100 degrees Fahrenheit? In a country of only 60 million, those sound like Third World numbers. Compared to the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which killed nearly 500 inside the urban sprawl, France's death toll percentage is twice that. Stories written about a "race for the last fan" don't help the overwhelming impression of desperation and chaos over there:

Some restaurants and offices have central air-conditioning, known to Parisians as clim (pronounced cleem), short for climatisation. But a surprising number do not. The French will tell you that wild temperature swings are bad for you. Air-conditioners, they say, cause sore throats and cultivate germs.

Temperature heights this summer have been reasonable, so I've managed to keep air conditioning off; even so, I have it in reserve should the humidity and heat decide to play for keeps.

UPDATE: Two-thirds of those killed by the heat died in Paris alone. It's not like a Third World disaster: this is a Third World disaster.

UPDATE II: Third World, 1; France, 0. Last year, a heat wave killed less than 1,000 Indians - out of a billion countrywide. Could the French have been completely unprepared for a twenty-degree rise in average temperatures? ...Er, that's rhetorical.

Busy as anything in the office yesterday, a few of us took time to find the rumored patch that would inoculate our computer system from the up-and-coming "Blaster" worm. Logically, we went straight to Windows Update - no luck. It was when we followed the general link distributed by news reports that we realized we were never in any danger: the patch has been available for all major Microsoft operating systems for nearly a month, and the entire office updated within two days of its release. Bless that pesky "New Updates" system tray icon.

I understand that large organizations contend with hundreds or thousands of computers - many in different locations and at use across numerous work shifts - but to the last one, each giant is supported by a paid tech staff. Given that the worm is beginning to garner headlines that include words like "havoc" and "mayhem," you've got to ask: what have those paid service personnel been doing up until now?

The virus also seems to have targeted individual users, whereas Melissa and ILoveYou tended to go straight for the big fish. That's a shame, especially with the internet becoming a place not at all appropriate for the unprepared. All in all, it's good news for Norton, I'm sure.

My silicon-and-telecommunications-wire tales of woe don't worry me nearly as much knowing that even the most knowledgable and self-sufficient run into stubborn problems.

I know my limits when it comes to computers. Two years ago I was lucky enough to be forced into gutting and overhauling three computers; since that trial-by-fire I've become familiar enough with interior components and corresponding manufacturer quality to build units from scratch. My tasks at work include application and operating system maintenance, and one of my occasionally paying hobbies at home - audio engineering - involves a good deal of tweaking for performance purposes, so I hold valuable non-coding troubleshooting expertise among laymen (e.g., most of the people I know).

Networking and personally dedicated servers are, to me, as fire was to primitive man: I fear it. Simple tasks I can handle, like uploading and downloading, installing Movable Type, changing preferences or permissions at the office, finagling our intranet data server and bumbling through a home network (which is still not quite complete at my apartment). I even managed to set up my MT database in MySQL after abandoning the inevitably disk-limitation-corrupted Berkeley DB; I believe I was following explicit directions for the database but it's still a fuzzy memory of unnatural achievement, not unlike that of a parent who lifts a '70 Chevy Caprice to save his trapped child.

My proficiency ends there. Coding? "Linux Box"? Leave that to the CS graduates - the guys in college whose practical jokes on acquaintances apparently included installing an active-desktop background consisting of a JPEG screenshot of the desktop, with functional shortcuts surreptitiously rearranged. When I install hardware or update drivers, I prefer to let the little man inside flip switches and communicate to me through exchanges that require responses no more complicated than "Back" and "Next," and the occasional "Finish." Not to say I can't doggy-paddle: between third and eighth grade, I taught myself some GW-Basic for a handful of graphic sequences and unfinished text adventures (some relatively impressive results with a random-number combat system, as a matter of fact). And, just last month, I rigged a moldy AT machine with obsolete PCI slots to play the soundtrack from an equally venerable program out through an ancient 8-bit Soundblaster and into my recording equipment. But as I've said before, I know enough to be dangerous and precious little else. I try to stay abreast of new technology and how in the world to use it correctly. It's a fun and unpredictable relationship.

Hats off and best wishes to those of you in a do-si-do with mankind's own silicon embodiment of the 80/20 Rule. "I think I know what I'm doing, therefore I am."

Contrast the time index of this post and the post below - that's how long "server load" has been keeping the poor thing in weblog Purgatory.

Technology updates from Winds of Change. Next they'll be telling us about "high-intensity shafts of radiative energy controlled by on/off operation, composite metal-and-plastic hilts":

Water is critical. People can fast for several weeks without permanent damage, but a week without water will kill you - and drinking contaminated water can be just as deadly. As Jay notes, however, an astonishing new technology is available that could solve these problems as quickly as a few planeloads of the product - a small "magic" bag with gatorade-like powder in it - could get from here to there. It's called a HydroPack (Hat Tip: Joe Maller), has no moving parts, and combines nano-scale membrane technology with the simple principle of forward osmosis. Just throw it into the dirtiest water you can find, let it fill, then sip from the straw. This is a great technology that should be rushed into the military and disaster-relief procurement system post-haste.

Incredible. Integrate them into full-body suits, hire an adept fashion designer, notify the appropriate legal authorities to manufacture them to look like this, and you'll snag the life savings of every last Sci-Fi fan/military gear-wonk. Hand-held, 300MHz+ computers aside, Hydropack is probably the most mind-boggling, straight-from-fiction scientific victory since Fluosol (which doubtlessly inspired The Abyss, bringing us back to the art-life imitation cycle).

The "problem" occurred again - the one that, by virtue of its dogged recurrence, has drawn my typewriting fingers' attention not once but twice before. It goes like this: I try to so much as edit an old entry, save a new one, access my templates, export posts or rebuild my weblog and a famous MySQL error - "Statement has no result columns to bind" - pops up, denying me further usage of uBlog. Sometimes one or more of these symptoms is not present, for instance the error message not appearing, or the template list functional. But by one component failing, the process itself is otherwise hobbled.

This began in February, as soon as I started placing Movable Type's database into MySQL format as opposed to Berkeley Database (and no, I can hardly tell you the internal differences between the two; I know where to put operative folders and little more). It happened off and on, usually once a week or less. But it was irritating, nonetheless: how long could a spell last? Usually, a few hours or a morning. Over the past month, however, outages have lasted entire days.

I've got plenty of reasons not to blog at a given point in time but waiting for some obscure, obstinate wrench in the cogs is not on the list of excuses.

Movable Type's help forum was of only modest help; Benjamin Trott and others have done more than enough with providing every miniature Twain or Fitzgerald an easy, global interface that's just as easily customized as it is instantly recognizable in format - so it's not surprising that they offered only a few thoughts before shrugging their shoulders and advising me to pick up the trail.

So I did. I called my provider, Core Comm, around July 4th: big mistake. The tech was probably already penning in his holiday weekend and gave me a vague promise of either a solution or a report; I let him go without a due time. Another big mistake. I never heard back from him.

The heels of this lapse in customer service coincided with a mysterious absence of the scourge (which now makes a bit of sense, explained below) so I let the matter blow in the wind for the better part of three weeks.

Last Saturday, I was hit with my first all-day-no-blogging experience. I wasn't exactly about to post an epistle, but there was Movable Type, bugging out, and being conscious of the loss was extremely annoying. Something akin to stubbing a toe or waking up with a sore throat; once it's done and you're thoroughly convinced of your less-than-optimal physical state, you compulsively put weight on the gammy foot or swallow hard just to check if the condition may have healed over the past, oh, four minutes or so from any given point in time. So part of the day involved my succumbing to a strange vacuum that lodged itself in my computer room, sucking me inside every time I walked past, followed by my repeated, somewhat arduous clicking of certain execution-function keyboard buttons, followed by consternation and cartoon steam piling out from both my ears. Followed by vain Google searches for that Holy Grail of case history accounts, followed by more consternation, followed by my storming out of the room, in spite of the vacuum. Before the vacuum pulled me back inside again.

Sunday morning, all was well. But for how long? Well, this morning, while getting ready, I was trying to accomplish something extremely innocuous - Movable Type conked out again.

That was enough. I called Core Comm, spoke to a girl named Natalie, and - thankfully - did not need to extract a promise of investigation and diagnosis in a timely fashion. I hung up, satisfied, and waited while I worked.

Within two hours she called back, with a report not unlike what Benjamin Trott surmised: the problem was not caused by Movable Type or the MySQL database themselves. "Server load," she explained, caused by either throughput or disk space limitations, was overwhelming at certain usage periods and subsequently incapacitated communication actions - in this case, my software's communication with the database. That would explain, I thought, the inconsistent nature of the malfunction itself; not to mention the inexplicable, random restoration of operation. Moreover, the week following the Fourth of July appeared to be a popular week for vacations, and I can only assume the liquidity on asphalt roads was matched by smooth conduction through broadband wires.

There was a pleasant, if not exactly cut-and-dried, end to the story. Core Comm was "in the process of making more room for the servers" to handle these excessive usage hours, said Natalie, "and it's an ongoing thing." I tried to pin her down on benchmarks for the project, but she held firm with the "ongoing" aspect of it. Not my favorite scale of measurement, but both "on" and "going" are tonic to the schedule-minded.

When I left for lunch, the outage remained. But now - surprise! - you're reading this. A round of applause, please. My Movable Type installation is okay, my database is intact: Core Comm intends to fix the server problem. Fair enough.

Last night I began considering an alternate layout that will break up the somewhat severe look of the new banner - I'll finish the day's work and get to it at some point today or tomorrow.

Local boy makes good (use of sky photographs he's been compiling over the past three months).

From my browser, downloading is slightly longer - but not by much. Anyone experiencing problems? As much as I'd hate to, I can always downsize the graphics. Or you can always find yourself a good broadband connection - kidding!

UPDATE: Yes, it's far too big on 600 x 800.

UPDATE: Much better.

This story is begging to be found in Drudge's right-hand column. You've got to admit, it'd be one hell of a maintenance call:

However strange the idea may sound, TransOrbital of La Jolla, California is taking [installing data servers on the moon] and other proposals for marrying high-tech and the Earth's only natural satellite seriously. The company is getting ready to send a commercial mission to the moon and intends to send servers, data, handheld computers, and digital cameras along for the ride.

[...]

So is there any point in storing data on a server on the moon? TransOrbital has had companies that want to back up critical data somewhere other than on earth express interest, and is working on ways to make the idea attractive. "We're trying to develop some wider bandwidth laser communications going beyond the communication protocols developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that exist for use in space," Laurie says. "It is feasible to have electronic data on the moon, and to receive it from earth, although delays are implied."

[...]

Laurie is most excited about servers storing data on the moon, though. "The moon is a pretty safe place to store your data," he says.

We'll see how the green lobby handles the prospect of old Luna's beautiful, tranquil, pockmarked, dusty, star-sky, airless and lifeless horizon marred by those unwieldy, dense alloys of human commercial enterprise. If intrusive, stuff them in craters; plenty of craters. With increased traffic, will someone stumble on an old site - might we find out whether or not Alan Shepherd's ball stayed on the fairway? Until then, revel in the possibilities (and piquant asides) provided by spaceflight's customers finally numbering more than the federal government.

Yesterday - all day - the database connection was acting up, so certain archives were unavailable and leaving comments was impossible. My apologies. Luck is with me because this error is intermittent (it hadn't happened for the better part of two weeks) but I'll nevertheless get to the bottom of this.

The Drudge Report has spent the last two days giving headlines to the major networks' assault on morale at home by presenting desertion-level moral in the warzone.

The blogsphere has yet to pick up on it - at least at a big-time level like Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan - but it does appear to have caught some peoples' attention.

What do you think: is Drudge simply gaming for attention and sensation, is he simply conveying what news outlets are reporting, or might he be playing the wily conservative and exposing the panic-button stories as much as possible to hoist the press by its own petard?

It was the First World War that introduced airplanes to a military role and pressed both sides with the desperation of conflict to achieve an unprecedented technological metamorphosis that arguably would not have been possible in peacetime. In 1914 and 1915, pilots rode what the day offered them: canvas-and-wood planes, their roll controlled with a cord system that twisted the wings sympathetically to directional intent, known as wing-warping.

The airplane was initially intended for observation and reconnaissance. Combat usage was minimal and inconsistent; stories tell of early Allied and German pilots waving to each other, briefly enjoying the status of an echelon privileged enough to escape the horror of trench warfare. Inevitably, conflict worked its way into aviation; in the proverbial sense, one man bid good day to another with lead, and the race began.

Firearms and flying machines were a rough match. A pilot's ability to fire was greatly dictated by his imperative need to fly the aircraft; unfortunately, the only logical location for a gun requiring the least distraction and aiming correction - the nose of the plane - invited a dangerous intersection of propeller and bullet. Two-seater scouts allowed for a gunner to fire rear-mounted machine guns, but a restricted field of fire combined with the ponderous gait of the primitive craft amounted to a marginal defense at best.

The Germans revolutionized air combat with the Fokker Eindecker E.1 monoplane in May of 1915. Equipped with a mechanism that synchronized the engine's propeller rotation with a nose machine gun's discharge in order to prohibit a bullet from firing into a propeller blade, a pilot could easily and safely target enemy aircraft. The Fokker Scourge, a direct result of this enormous advantage over the Allies, continued throughout the rest of the year.

Thus began a tight struggle of deadly one-upmanship: the French Nieuport 17 and Spad 13 biplanes - the former light and maneuverable, the latter rugged and fast - utilized the same fire-synchronization technology and, with ailerons for rolling instead of wing-warping veins, immediately outmatched the Eindecker E.3.

The Germans responded in 1916 by introducing the enduring Albatross series and reclaimed air superiority with the well-powered and heavily armed D.1. Months later the British deployed the successful RAF SE5a and the first of the Sopwith series, the Pup. The 1917 Albatross D.3 entered combat as a respected fighter that controlled the skies but the mediocre D.5 allowed the Allies a stumble in technological escalation for the British Sopwith Triplane to rattle German pilots and the Sopwith Camel to reign supreme.

The Camel was idiosyncratic to say the least; deadly to inexperienced pilots but a terrifying weapon at the hands of veterans. Its rotary engine produced a clockwise torque that heavily influenced the plane's handling; left rolls pulled the nose skyward and bled airspeed and right rolls would pull the aircraft in an extremely tight turn, threatening a fatal spin without proper counteradjustments. The characteristics, however, allowed the Camel to outperform even the legendary German triplane, the Fokker Dr.1.

Copied directly from the Sopwith Triplane, the Dr.1 performed with similar strengths and weaknesses; it was underpowered, light and slow but boasted climbing rates and maneuverability that easily flew circles around all aircraft but a well-piloted Camel in a right turn. Unlike its British inspiration - and rather unique unto its own - the Dr.1 lacked a vertical stabilizer and a pilot, using nothing but hard rudder, could simply yaw through a turn nearly as fast as other planes could roll. More heavily armed than the Sopwith Triplane, the Dr.1 succeeded as far more on the battlefield than a competitive technical experiment. Though Manfred von Richthofen - the infamous man we all know, minus the fallacious mustache - made most of his kills at the controls of biplanes, the Dr.1's lethality endeared itself to him in some respect and was the plane the Red Baron rode to the ground to his death in 1918.

The loss of Richthofen came as the Allies were overwhelming a flagging Germany with numerical advantage. Not even the authoritative Fokker D. VII - an airplane that legendarily would be seen in formation on vertical climbs and was indeed the best fighter of the war - could prevent the inevitable collapse of German warmaking. Following the Armistice, in a gesture split between respect, awe, envy and fear, the Allies specifically ordered for the destruction of every D. VII through the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1914, airplanes were sluggish curiousities that were limited with low operational ceilings, climbed poorly and could barely maintain 80 or 90 miles per hour in level flight; by 1918, they were nimble and irrepressible, or else so well-built that they could sustain power dives in excess of 200 miles per hour. In the face of pandemic destruction and death caused by the war, four years managed to accomplish more for aviation technology than the eleven preceding them.

Despite the grim nature of the warrior biplane's inception, American culture has attached a particularly tenacious romance to the thought of a sky staggered with tiny, frail airplanes from a younger world, each piloted by a gentleman without a parachute who, above the faceless slaughter of the front lines, would seek to best his adversary in an aerial duel.

Another employment for aviators in the war were tethered balloons for observation and artillery sighting. Balloons were as predictable as the wind and logistically simple, providing stable, inexpensive platforms for static reconnaissance. More than twenty years before the Hindenburg's crash, design philosophy and industrial convenience resulted in the balloons that weren't hot-air powered to be filled with hydrogen. As with any early modern mechanism, this was an act of placing superior performance over operator safety. Far more buoyant and exceedingly more abundant than helium, hydrogen was, unlike its inert cousin, dangerously flammable.

Precautions were taken. Each side would hoist groups of two or three of them several hundred feet in the air from the front lines, barricade them within a veritable phalanx of zeroed antiaircraft and machine guns, and have crews ready to winch the balloons back down as quickly as possible if aircraft approached. British crews were, not unexpectedly, issued parachutes.

And airplanes came. Using special incendiary bullets to set the gas alight, audacious pilots would brave forbidding walls of flak hurled from below in attempts to flame as many balloons as they could before the balloons reached an altitude point well within deadly range of ground fire.

Reasonably protected, it's natural to conclude that balloons were highly vulnerable sitting ducks. And what with the advances of aviation and sensory technology, one might assume that balloons in wartime are charming relics from lost days of old.

Not quite:

With nearly one hundred years of technological evolution, the aerostat is unmanned, fiber-optic-sensor-packed and rises with the aid of now-accessible helium - but it's a tethered, inexpensive alternative for military monitoring that has shed neither the look nor the function of its predecessor. While we won't see double-winged, canvas-and-wood vehicles in touted defense contracts, some things never change.

Because African and Asian elephants simply aren't good enough:

Scientists hoping to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths are preparing their first frozen DNA samples in a bid to revive the species.

The specimens of bone marrow, muscle and skin were unearthed last August in the Siberian tundra where they had been preserved in ice for thousands of years.

Researchers at the Gifu Science and Technology Centre and Kinki University want to use the genetic material in the cells to clone a woolly mammoth, according to Akira Irytani, a scientist at Kinki University in western Japan.

Staunchly against the cloning of humans for any purpose, I believe that the genetic interpretation of our license to dominion over animals - up to creating bizarro mutants like spider-pigs, giraffe-seals and hyena-maples, of course - is as beneficial to our development as it is utterly fascinating.

Read the article. I'd love to see mammoths bounding about in wildlife refuges.

One little niggling discrepancy - isn't it a bit presumptious, given the particular lack of hard evidence, for the Independent to assume that mammoths were cleaned out not by obviously detrimental climate changes but homo sapiens overhunting?

Oh, wait; that's right. The Independent prefers enlightened opinion over fact for just about everything.

Here's one dead-paper journalist who's confident that both her crowd and their inverted-magnet colleagues could learn quite a bit from the indefatigable blogosphere:

I'm not an expert on blogging, but I am a fan. As a regular visitor to a dozen or so news and opinion blogs, I'm riveted by the implications for my profession. Bloggers are making life interesting for reluctant mainstreamers like myself and for the public, whose access to information until now has been relatively controlled by traditional media.

I say "reluctant mainstreamer" because what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest "tidy desk" memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.

[...]

The best bloggers, who are generous in linking to one another -- alien behavior to journalists accustomed to careerist, shark-tank newsrooms -- are like smart, hip gunslingers come to make trouble for the local good ol' boys. The heat they pack includes an arsenal of intellectual artillery, crisp prose, sharp insights and a gimlet eye for mainstream media's flaws.

Well said, Madam - and, witnessing her own kind's gradual supercession as the media instruments of first response and final thought, her words are borne on humility. She even kept her online column philosophically contradistinguished, pleasantly free of hyperlinks.

UPDATE: A brief, after-read, moment of devil's advocate (unusual for me). Might the hobby-like, for-the-love-of-it nature of today's blogging be the reason for such an inexplicably fraternal community - that if it ever became lucrative, serious bloggers would grow triangular dorsal fins? Perhaps not: hyperlinking is the purest form of flattery, deference and fair representation - and it's what many have recognized as the hallmark of internet commentary.

This is a bit of a chilling screen capture from Truth Laid Bear's Blog Ecosystem. Many more times than I'd prefer to count, the digits in question happen to be the time of day when glancing at a clock:

Brrrrrr. And I'm not even superstitious!

UPDATE: I just realized that this is post number 666 (#685 externally). Rabbit's foot, anyone? I might as well congratulate myself for achieving the most remote blogging coincidence ever before a meteorite thumps me.

Thankfully, the Bush administration is defiant of the axiom, "If the sheriff rides unarmed, the outlaws will, too." Unfortunately, the technological development of weaponry is anyone's game; if the free world does not remain at the forefront of nuclear explosive research, someone will - probably those who would seek to use the devices for offensive leverage, not as a last-resort preventative measure. Says USA Today:

..."Icecap," the test of a bomb 10 times the size of the one that devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, was halted when the first President Bush placed a moratorium on U.S. nuclear tests in October 1992. The voluntary test ban came two years after Russia stopped its nuclear tests.

In the 11 years since, the United States has worked to halt the spread of nuclear weapons around the world and has often touted its own self-imposed restraint as a model for other nations.

Last year the White House released, to little publicity, the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review. That policy paper embraces the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike and on the battlefield; it also says a return to nuclear testing may soon be necessary. It was coupled with a request for $70 million to study and develop new types of nuclear weapons and to shorten the time it would take to test them.

The lack of attention paid may have well been attributed to the fact that most Americans prefer their country to maintain military superiority in all respects. The bomb-cutting game, after all, was simply a dance we played with the Soviets. Now that the Bear is gone, "mutual gestures" with Russia are largely irrelevant - the worst fear today being that her orphan cubs are hawking atomic material because it sells better on the black market than hammer-and-sickle-stamped tractors.

The United States is not in a strategic position where the destruction of an industrial center, such as Hiroshima or Nagasaki, is remotely necessary. Big bombs are deterrent - enter Reagan's brilliant "mutually assured destruction." Future uses of nuclear energy's effortlessly destructive potential come in small packages: tactical nukes.

The main reason offered by the Pentagon is that "rogue" nations such as North Korea, Iran and Libya have gone deep, building elaborate bunkers hundreds of feet underground where their leaders and weapons could ride out an attack by the biggest conventional weapons U.S. forces could throw at them. U.S. officials also theorize that the vaporizing blast of a nuclear bomb might be the only way to safely destroy an enemy's chemical or biological weapons.

The Pentagon says developing new nuclear weapons makes sense in a dangerous world. "Without having the ability to hold those targets at risk, we essentially provide sanctuary," J.D. Crouch, an assistant secretary of Defense, told reporters earlier this year.

[...]

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says nuclear weapons could be crucial tools for destroying chemical and biological weapons stocks without causing wider harm.

"In terms of anthrax, it's said that gamma rays can ... destroy the anthrax spores, which is something we need to look at," Myers told reporters at the Pentagon on May 20. "And in chemical weapons, of course, the heat (of a nuclear blast) can destroy the chemical compounds and make them not develop that plume that conventional weapons might do, that would then drift and perhaps bring others in harm's way."

I put my stake on the answer to Iraq's weapons riddle in highly scattered and easily concealed components couched in clandestine, underground sites. That's Saddam's trick. Nations that are not confronted with authoritative scrutiny, however, would not be required to necessarily dissemble weapons stockpiles and industry; such sites, therefore, would be perfect for the consummate extirpative power of small-scale nuclear bombs.

Incidentally, one must admire the tenacity of journalists to qualify the morality of a nation by placing rogue status under quotations.

And of course, the usual counterargument from the usual sources:

[O]thers argue that moving toward a new generation of nuclear weapons, instead of improving conventional and non-nuclear ways to attack deep targets or chemical weapons sites, is fraught with danger.

"They are opening the door to a new era of a global nuclear arms competition," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. "As we try to turn the tide of nuclear proliferation, the last thing we should suggest is that nuclear weapons have a role in the battlefield, and these weapons are battlefield weapons. This is a serious step in the wrong direction."

Director Kimball should have made his statement to prevent competitive accoutering some millenia ago, when one fur-cloaked homo sapiens knocked his neighbor on the back of the head with a leg bone. Arms races never stop - certainly not with dictators, whose power rests solely on the broadcast of violence, yet dotting the globe. The free world needs a leg up. See the sheriff proverb above.

Winds of Change linked to this rather forceful notch-dropping on blogging, its impact and its longevity.

As an argument, I'd say that it's a bit over the top and in some places needlessly pejorative. The author, I'm sure, didn't mean to denigrate the medium - but truly, blogging has matured, and as Glenn Reynolds explained recently, quite positively so. That can't be overlooked. If blogging has a societal problem, it is, as the essay similarly describes, when bloggers become laptop rappers; blogging seriously about how hip they are, how hopelessly "yesterday" non-blogging media is, and how URL-hatin', sucka HTTPs are stealing game and gots to go down. Even while political weblogs burst daily with for-keeps debate and heated rhetoric on the most controversial, explosive topics, I have yet to stumble upon one and read about the latest developments in some extended, pointless, private feud. Strictly personal weblogs seem to be far more vulnerable to this abuse and, unfortunately, their exploits help paint the picture.

Not that it's unexpected. Like it or not, blogs are extensions of ourselves and most are competitive: if people can't battle for ideas they'll battle for attention, or space, or even the will to continue showing up in the form of snarky hypertext. A few months ago, on a bit of a bad day, I almost made the mistake of falling deep into one of these awful pits of pride and vanity. I scrambled out, literally within minutes, but not without making myself look like a part-time lout (complete with apology e-mail and corrected entry).

However, it's not unfair to say that every human endeavor is at the risk of becoming a chess board or rugby field. Even if you think the loss of innocence is a 20th-Century thing, consider Bill Buckley's verbal scuffle with Gore Vidal in 1968 a very large chomp into a certain apple.

In that sense, the essay in question underestimates not only the staying power of blogging but its eventual place in journalism, commentary and newsmaking. The colossi, print and television, have taken notice and, held by their own ponderous hulk, now reluctantly acknowledge the hirundine bloggers as both pioneers and archaelogists. Thoroughly decentralized, yet wholly and frighteningly focused when great matters arise and the like-minded chatter. Thousands upon thousands have been exposed to authors and other creators who might have remained the sole acquaintance of politico-mag wonks; the wonks still rule in online politics, of course - most people I know who aren't web-savvy haven't the slightest idea who Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Reynolds are - but the stages of separation are evaporating. And the more people go online, the more likely it is they'll inevitably bump into a reference, an article, or a homepage itself.

All this suggests that the endurance of the weblog, particularly the newsworthy weblog, is remarkable. How is it unreasonable, then, for the author of even a modestly attended weblog to feel obligated to his readers? Music, art, writing: a following is a following is a following. It's a blessing, not a nag. To blow an audience off would certainly not be an act of humility.

Natalie, the author, believes that the "the blogging 'community' as it were...is preparing to implode on itself." No, it's inward reflection that we should expect over the coming years: the sieve will come out to separate the dead, failed, and impugned blogs from time to time. A regular molting.

Style, technology and necessity will alter its look and feel, but blogging is established as a concept - so its next challenge is to prove itself through trial, error and success. Fads die out within a few years; is the weblog flashy, creampuff ephemera? Ask Trent Lott and Howell Raines.

From the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology archives, a 1990 symposium with the then-Slight-Radio-Frequency-Delay-Pundit, Dan Quayle and William J. Brennan, Jr.

I've skimmed it; quite compelling, especially considering the event's age. (But what's this, no Prime Directive? Amateurs.) Note that a bill for which Reynolds testified, H.R. 2946, had a companion in the Senate sponsored by the Right Honorable Albert Gore, Jr.

Excellent reading, even for legal lay like myself. Foresight, stay our course.

Movable Type - or, to be fair, my server's MySQL - has held my two morning posts hostage. All day.

Nefarious blogging schemes were totally ruined. If I had a handlebar mustache, I'd be tweaking it. Drat! Curses!

Glenn Reynolds provides an enlightening look at the refreshingly bottomless topic of blog success and individual appeal. A few of his comments resonated with observations I've made over the past month or so. I sent him a letter supportive of the column. The subject-pertinent sections are good enough to reproduce for an entry, certainly.

[Glenn] brought up an interesting point about linking - how it truly has become a litmus test for trustworthy information employed in an argument, and how it is often valued directly by the number of cross-references or corroborations. I link as often as I can, particularly when hammering out some point on a comment-thread-cum-forum.

Of course, an expectation rises out of this in the blogosphere back-and-forth, insofar as "If I can't find it on the web, it must be suspect." Some subjects, unfortunately, are poorly represented on the web - nobody has yet (illegally?) dictated text onto a server or else referenced related sources considerably in their own work. I found this to be true with several topics that have become major discussions online as of late and, in the vacuum left by bloggers unable to find reading material within seconds from Google, this has lead to rampant speculation or worse.

To that end, it'll be interesting to see if the "Online Library" futura-commercials I remember from a decade ago, touting globally accessible information in the totality of a book, pan out. Until then, it's back to a heavy reliance on spine-bound paper to support ideas going straight to the weblog.

Granted, I easily found Francis Fukuyama's elusive "The End of History" speech online (on Google, within minutes); but after poring over an armload of, say, tomes on Japanese Occupation, I'm ready to take the blogosphere and online research with a well-deserved grain of salt. Hey, nothing deserves a pedestal - and by taking its limitations seriously, we're able to appreciate it more deeply.

I just spent the last hour or so cleaning spyware off of the boss' computer. He used his connection for the usual itinerary of innocuous tasks - weather, airport information, news - but after months of browsing with nothing more than an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer (we had neglected to upgrade him), his computer was, as I aptly described, "Dirtier than a Thai whore." All sorts of nasty, registry-embedded launchers, trackers, homepage-hijackers and phantom third-party software that had sought a habitat inside his laptop were immediately uncovered by our trusty copy of Spybot: Search and Destroy. After about a dozen sweeps, half of them before Windows load-up to ensure their separation from memory, we purged the computer of nearly all of them (something seems to be lurking, and we haven't found the silver bullet).

For an essay back in college I argued against the notion that computer media interconnection - which is to say, the internet - would successively deprive humanity of its essence. No, in fact, I was certain that the very stuff of humanity - philanthropy, journalism, scholarship, discovery, commerce, humor, trivial pursuits, peddling, fraud, theft, correspondence, worship, altercations and communication - would eventually master and gild the medium, and turn it into an extension of human activity no more foreign to each of us than a walk beyond our front door.

Some voices - even conservatives - decry what they see as the final shedding of innocence online, though one suspects that these people took early Eighties compuiter-cautionary tales like Wargames with such gigantic doses of salt that they consider the films works of fiction through and through; not to mention ignoring the market for pornography that was infamous by the early 1990s and well-organized only a few years later. Or the semi-psychotic behavior of serial gamers popping up around the same time who could only be restrained from chronic cheating by "No-alteration" policies or outright banning.

A few weeks ago I laughed at the thought of barely recalling those four-year-old memories of what browsing without pop-up windows was like, even pop-up windows for subscriptions or harmless offers from sites we know and trust. But it's a fair assessment, and returns me to my idea: the internet, once a bit of a close-knit community, has finally urbanized. Grant me leeway for a distended analogy: The skyscrapers are there for people who like them, as are the breathtakingly short trips one needs to take on the rapid transit system (critics can say what they want, cross-referenced searches on Google are unbeatable). A nightlife has started up, and you can almost always chat or exchange thoughts with someone of a like wavelength without much searching. The big city isn't for everybody, of course. While some ensconce themselves in it, some commute; and some mortally fear it, preferring to enjoy it through pictures per se, at a distance and at the most vicariously. The internet has its share of crooks, thugs, nutjobs, hobos, prostitutes, cops gone bad and souvenirs from sketchy neighborhoods that don't come out after one wash.

It's not a place for the complacent - probably never was to begin with, but the margin for error today is near zero, and getting closer all the time. For those of us who frequent it happily, the key is to leave naivety behind. Common sense never hurt anyone, anyway; nor did measured wariness ever destroy the enjoyment of everyday life. Being paranoid is many times removed from being a sucker.

A happy medium in perspective makes for the happy medium of webskirting. If you'll excuse me, the boss just called me back: that last bit of crap is giving a hell of a final fight.

UPDATE: It was Gator spyware, fighting me through fire and deep water. Then, I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountainside where he smote it in his ruin. Awful, nasty, purulent spyware. Spybot, incidentally, is a lifesaver.

Stories about the Mars Rovers launching NASA into the next stage of conquering the early mysteries of the Red Planet reminded me that no matter how tumultuous the affairs of men, heads are still turned upward.

Note the time index of the previous entry - yes, I drove it in this morning. My MySQL database is occasionally tempermental. I have no idea as to why - but my disposition to the problem is unquestionable. This drives me up the wall.

I'm waiting on the overwriting - the complete erasure of any and all binary data stored magnetically on a hard disk drive - of my coworker's computer's main drive. It is a ninety-minute process and the first step in upgrading him from Windows 98 Second Edition to Windows 2000. An irregular IT Tech made from serendipity, I welcome this as around the fifteenth time I've overhauled a computer system, one way or another. I've always been lucky enough not to fear computers - I grew up with them and, in fact, enjoy their capabilities quite a bit - but in the spring of 2001 I was given the task of replacing the innards of three work computers. They chugged along like steam engines in 1960, running on Pentium I processors and we were ready to pump them up to Pentium IIIs for many times greater processing speed.

What was necessary? Quite a lot. Before I was ordered to remake the trio, my experience with the inside of a computer was much like a layman in anatomy class: a whole lot of guts to be gawked at, few to be instantly recognized. Lots of small parts and ultimately, an intimidating sight. Upgrading the computers required a replacement of the motherboard and central processing unit - simple enough, but as anyone who has worked with computer software or hardware can confirm, nothing worked out as planned. Every single operation had unique difficulties, a few of them dogged.

In my lack of experience I had no idea how unstable a computer's operating system would become when major drivers like disk controllers, buses and bridges from the previous hardware scheme were suddenly disconnected from any physical function and beset by a slew of new drivers struggling to take their place as primary trains for data trafficking. One computer began reverting to an installation two times removed; another simply failed to start up. Miraculously, I managed to boot both up into network connectivity one last time before madly scraping every last bit of important data onto a safe computer. I then erased both disk drives - using the overwriting software I have now - and installed anew, repeating the process for the third unit.

Problems didn't stop there, of course. The hardware switch made nice, luckily, with the current power sources of all three computers (a luxury I didn't have when I recently upgraded a couple of computers to rip-roaring, energy-demanding Athlon XP screamers). Two of the three, however, saw to it that their 3 1/2" drives be fried to complete unusability; one went so far as to zap its CD-ROM drive and another frustrated me for a week with garbled, Space Invaders-like characters on the boot-up screen before it was determined that the motherboard itself was faulty. Intel obliged, and I was soon back to work.

But by the time I had raced through this silicon gauntlet, I had learned the geography and functions of every internal component. In the nearly ten projects since then - from modifications to units built from scratch - I've come a long way. An accidental tech, I now work to stay current, keeping my eye trained on PC Magazine's and ExtremeTech's reviews, and New Egg's prices. I'm not an expert and you could correctly say that I know well enough to be dangerous - but if hardware finagling were a game of Operation!, I'd do a fair job of keeping poor old Sam's nose from going red.

Here at work today, we thought we'd be enterprising by connecting an old laptop to a wireless network, plopping it onto a Lazy Susan in the conference room before taking turns playing Captain Picard, swinging the laptop around to people we'd just let enter by crying, authoritatively, "Come!," and showing them warp core efficiency flowcharts, personnel reports and starmaps at the edges of nebulae.

But for hardware, we chose Microsoft.

Suffice to say, I used to be quite confident in brushing aside all other complaints, economic or ethical, about Microsoft on grounds that their customer support was without equal. Polite, knowledgable, succinct, dedicated. Never disappointing, always impressive.

Since December, that seems to have changed. I had spent the last twenty minutes on the phone with a support technician before I concluded - myself - that the office terminal had been hit by the Klez virus. But before the conversation ended, I concluded that the fellow didn't know much more about code or operating systems than I did. In fact, I asked him and he answered: "Yeah, you're pretty much right. I have a screen in front of me that tells me the likely problem and steps to take."

Utterly ridiculous - on top of the fact that it took me about four attempts to pry that out of him. My queries of "Why are we doing this?" were met by silence or unconvincing dodges.

When I hung up the phone, I paused for a moment before rolling up the sleeves to clean out the five infected computers, and pondered what could be the fall of Bill Gates' empire. What happened to the computer nerds who used to be at the other end of the phone? Were their big-money positions relegated to some inner tier, now surrounded by a phalanx of off-from-college screen-readers to whom the word "tinker" meant "make 'Critical Stop' a ding instead of a chime" or "change the background to 'centered' instead of 'tiled'"?

After today's day-long ordeal, I may have seen a glimpse of pervasive mediocrity, perhaps intended by Microsoft to save money but more likely leading to a slow, inexorable collapse.

The boss made the first call: we wanted to hook the wireless network's base station into the wired network and set up connectivity software to enable computers on both networks to recognize one another.

The first Microsoft technician wasn't really sure about the whole plan, so he advised the boss to hold for a few minutes while he "Check[ed] it out."

Fifty-seven minutes later, he came back on. "Thank you for calling Microsoft Support for Broadband Wireless Networking, can I take your case number please?"

"You already have my case number," cried the boss, not at all relaxed by nearly an hour of anodyne string ensembles. "You were just talking to me!"

A string of confused half-words bubbled out of the man's mouth, and then, "Uh, what was your problem again?"

"Never mind," shouted the boss, and laid the phone in its cradle with a downward arc, generously exceeding the necessary application of pressure.

We spent about five hours wiggling about with it ourselves before we shrugged our shoulders, gave it an honest, "What the hell," and phoned Microsoft back. I made the call. The second fellow's native language was not English, but in fact the southwestern-most romance language, himself most likely from a country colonized by speakers of this tongue some 3,000-4,000 miles further to the south and west of the origin nation. Unfortunately, during my time on the phone with him, he demonstrated a classic lingual chasm. You see, when the performance value of a language is predicated upon prestissimo tempo and staccato articulation, one who does not speak the native language will be unable to comprehend verbalization that imports a) the rhythm of the native language and b) more than three-quarters of that language's pronunciation patterns into c) a language not at all improved upon by such modifications, even if nominally shared by both parties. In fact, speakers of this second tongue will become d) frustrated and eventually e) silently angry when the heavily accented, mile-a-minute speaker of the first language is f) clearly impatient with the other person's polite requests for several exchanges to be repeated - perhaps an effort to reengage g) more slowly and h) lacking the enunciative artifacts in a previous, unintelligible delivery - and, obtusely, i) does not realize the existence of items "a" through "h."

And, wouldn't you know, the poor fellow didn't solve the problem. At all.

In spite of the reported 250+ daily viewers to this site, I'm not putting chips on any budding IT techs to read this entry. Instead, the company will call on our trusty network printer provider; they're the sort of business that has its fingers in everything and works to supply every need for you. They've succeeded in expanding our relationship before - why not give them the old college try?

And besides, how difficult can it be to outperform Microsoft?

UPDATE: Good news for both our network aspirations and Microsoft's collective behind. "Ron" helped us out. "Ron" was very patient, kind and thorough. "Ron" is a pretty swell guy, so Microsoft gets to live another day.

The only demon indigenous to internet computing I loathe more than spam are pop-up windows. And, I'm sure, we all don't take too kindly to personal information, from passwords to browsing history, surreptitiously nicked from us, to be sold to the highest bidder in quarters too dark to contemplate - a phenomenon known otherwise as "spyware."

Worry no more! PC Magazine recently reviewed a slew of programs dedicated to the identification and elimination of spyware, pop-ups and other niggling little monsters that embed themselves in your registry and throw five offers for the unambiguously annoying and undesirable X-10 pervert security camera upon the instant Google loads up.

Surprisingly - or perhaps not surprisingly, one always wonders if "prevention" companies don't hedge their bets between harassed consumer and insidious marketeer - a good portion of the spy-killers produced either impaired or worthless results (even those with both purchase and subscription fees). It is of genuine distinction, however, that the Editor's Choice happened to be Spybot Search & Destroy, a shareware program cast from the forge of a philanthropic, German silicon wizard Patrick Kolla. It's easy to use, knife-edge succinct and deadly efficient; legitimate programs, such as auto-updaters for applications, can be separated from a compiled blacklist while everything else is pushed into the furnaces of bad-code hell. Don't want the gremlins to sneak back in? Weekly or bi-weekly updates have to this point issued warrants for 247 different programs that scuttle towards computers like deer ticks; with SS&D, Internet Explorer is able to block them at all times during web-skirting. You can even request a message to be sent every time one of the goblins gets swatted away.

After loading and executing the program, I have yet to see a pop-up window boil up from where it shouldn't have. Even if I didn't know the first thing about registries or discerning one automated beacon from another, SS&D could help me along with poignant descriptions - complete with wry, Continental European sarcasm. For the computer-intuitive, this gem is literally a breeze. It's powerful, reliable and free. At the end of every session, feel free to give into the ineludible urge to drop your hard-earned cash into Kolla's deserving tip jar.

"Look, can I have the eggs, bacon, sausage and spam without the spam?"

My story is the story of everyone who owns an e-mail account: each morning, while sifting through messages from contacts that arrived during the night, I delete about two times that number in unsolicited e-mails from undistinguishable sources like johnny 341 qwwxxxuritw, regarding indecipherable subject headings like And will she want the organ?. There's the licentious crowd, the easy money crowd, the vacation-for-two crowd, the crowd who has managed to randomly generate inconspicuous names of people I've nonetheless never heard of, and then the "fine art" website or webring that continually badgers me to plunk down for a John Singer Sargent - or, alternatively, submit my own work. Over the course of an average workday, I'll continue to be offered worthless purported products. I've heard some horror stories about a hundred or more junk mail arrivals; I receive less than twenty between four addresses.

That doesn't mean I'm not driven straight up the wall. I do not request any of these messages; none of my money has been set aside for patronage and, for fear of tapping a viral message, I've never actually opened one of the little scraps. In fact, just yesterday I warily scoped out a soliciation message from Orion's Blue Book, with whom I've done legitimate business in the past and from whom I might expect follow-up correspondance; unfortunately for the Blue Book, the message failed to scream "Orion Blue Book, Not to Worry!" and, thanks to the jokers flooding inboxes with disingenuous references to professional personal business, was nearly deleted.

That nearly crossed the line. I won't say that I'm not inordinately infuriated by spam - it's just that I'm too busy with far more important matters to devote an ounce of brains to the problem when I can effortlessly click twice and be done with the rubbish.

And I'm not entirely convinced that spamming will outlive its unquestionable unprofitability. I've seen the death of productless aggressive advertising: groups of two or three well dressed, fiendishly attractive, college-aged men or women would canvas office buildings in the hopes of browbeating or seducing, respectively, members of the opposite sex in order to build an array of targets for more solicitiation. We never gave them an inch - the girls or the guys - and two years ago, their kind of bad business vanished.

Good riddance (though I'd be happy to meet the women on better terms elsewhere). I have faith that spamming - really, a modern incarnation of the pushy merchant - will fall flat on its face as year after year shows a lack of commercial success; volume of exposure must eventually meet the brass tacks of sales. So while I protest not a bit to see heavy-handed regulation thrown in the face of businesses spending far more time devising methods of violating correspondance traffic than building an irresistable product, I expect to see the institutionalized harassment expire on its own.

Before it's replaced by something else, of course. But we're given a breather in between.

Mysteriously, a mouse variant displays a genetic immunity to cancerous tumors.

National Review Online's homepage has been hacked. Silver lining? We certainly know what our enemies are made of - they're idiots who can't spell "Palestine."

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds notes that this occurred at least as early as this morning. Josh Clayborn plays gumshoe and surmises that, when the hacker's callsign is cross-referenced with a suspicious URL, we're led to believe that the hacker is French.

If it's true - quelle surprise!

UPDATE II: Josh has continued to process information and reports; though I'd agree that the hacker's identity is irrelevant - Chinese hackers, for instance, deface our sites whenever an American-Sino incident occurs - we do have on our hands quite a rousing spring Sunday.

I typed up two fancy posts bright and early this morning when what to my wondering browser should appear - but an error code decrying some "call execute" failure. It pops up periodically, and has apparently nothing to do with Movable Type, instead a hiccup on the server side of things, possibly a result of high traffic.

So as my provision to you for nearly six hours of uBlog deprivation, a pleasant visual tribute to Hanna-Barbara near-classic Grapeape.

That's one sturdy van chassis, I've got to admit. Even if old Grape were of normal ape proportions - the DOT wouldn't have it, would they?

Uncanny what a fantastic phone call with a buddy on the other side of the country can do for the soul. I've kicked back this evening after hanging up; a little bit of (re)mixing, some blogskirting and now - to the soothing Eighties throb of A-ha's Hunting High and Low - I'm crooning pseudo-countertenor while engaging in my occasional inspection of site visitors.

A really interesting activity: my server logs various IP addresses and, when curiousity gets the best of me, I slip them into the Visual Route Server tracker, release the dogs and discover the origin. My friends and I are the easiest to spot: we've hit the site in double digits over the course of a week.

But there are literally hundreds more addresses. Now, I realize that quite a few are webcrawlers and spiders, though certainly not all of them.

Which piques my curiousity even more, tweaking it like the wine-wet rim of a crystal goblet and setting off a sonorant ringing. Yes, indeed - as poetic as it is incessant.

Who's from Dallas? Or Japan? New York City? The City of Angels besides the two friends I have accounted for? I don't deserve a prize for guessing which blips are from Mount Holyoke - but what about the ones from Syracuse? Rochester? Or Egypt? What appears to be a barracks in D.C.? D.C. proper?

One of my favorite pastimes during senior year of college was to perch in a window of my fourth-floor, rotunda painting studio and face the quad - a huge, grass-and-sidewalk courtyard surrounded by Syracuse's finest architecture. When class changes between the various disciplines coincided, a mass of students would walk hither and thither, to and fro. I'd people-watch for a bit, then hop back down and dip my brush for another round of impasto or glazing.

People are watching - reading - me, now. And I'm curious. Very curious. Ahoy! Ahoy - who's out there?

One of my happiest memories from early college is a gaggle of us in the Link Hall Apple computer cluster, commandeering a trio of units and installing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness for which to play the highly entertaining, exquisitely designed real-time strategy game of fantasy battle. A cross between Sim City and Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War - with a dash of Mario World goofy humor - the game was a race to build up a medieval war machine; expanding, across a varied landscape, as necessary to support your hordes of men, magic and siege engines and smash your opponents. Players could choose humans or Tolkien-style orcs. Game units, from lowly peasants and peons to paladins and ogres, would respond in character to a player's clicks and subsequent commands. "Annoyed" responses - a Blizzard trademark - were really what set the game aesthetic apart. Imagine a husky, burly, cold-blooded orc animation who would growl, after several user clicks, "Stop poking me!"

Really, from the name you'd assume the craft of war or some such direct translation: the game was like costume-party rugby with sharp objects.

We played about five times over the course of two years. I always chose orcs, as did Jon. Kyle chose humans, presumably as an extension of his current "good guy" image. Danny, who'd been playing for the better part of a year, always played humans - and never failed to whip us up one side and down the other.

Devin, who bought the game for Apple, played about once. Well, multiplayer, anyway.

It was grand. The salad days of our underclassmen years at Syracuse University and here we were, among the e-mailers on their way to a party (or doing work, not uncommon on campus), playing a video game. We barely knew how to manage; strategies were spotty, games were unpredictable and half the time someone was discovering an obvious facet of gameplay we nevertheless missed in our rush to play. Far more laughs than guile.

Gradually, each of us recovered our lives. I stayed on the Blizzard bandwagon for Starcraft, deity to which I sacrificed a nominal amount of hours my junior year. Three years later, this past winter, curiousity snagged the better of me and I dropped five tens for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Same fun game for a twenty-minute de-stressing, no doubt. Same funny creatures playing for-keeps rugby.

My friends and I were healthy about the whole affair. As with all computer affairs, the allure of Blizzard's games were galvanized by its creation of a gigantic, worldwide gaming system. All the calculator-fiddling weirdos from the Seven Seas could now battle one another - not for fun, mind you, but for win records. I attempted to play online with strangers a few times, quickly realizing that the whole point was nowhere near fun, but more in the general vicinity of animatronic, combative masturbation. Plus a whole load of mongoloid chatspeak, as if the couple of nine-year-olds who hammered me didn't know the keyboard better than the proverbial wife (incongruent analogy given the subjects). The most disturbing sight was during my senior year; the same room as freshman year, the computers having been replaced by off-white Dells. One lone Asian kid, pimply, diminutive. Earlier in the year, he'd been with about five pals playing Starcraft. Now he was alone, at the station in front of me, madly typing in a Blizzard chatroom.

Whats the matter, R you afraid of playing me? the pupa sociopath demanded of an unseen victim. The person capitulated, and played him, and he built all sorts of the same unit and sent said units straight to his opponent's base. Victory.

Yawn. Shiver.

Video games are my alcohol (Booze? What's the point?) and I consider myself a responsible "drinker": just one or two games for the taste.

I admire Blizzard. I fear most of its customers. I enjoy the nutty kitsch of the Orient. Cults are disturbing. So what to make of this:

Park Woe Shik is so serious about computer video games that he carries his personal keyboard and mouse wherever he goes, even on a three-day trip to Irvine this week from his home in Korea. Park, 18, was one of five professional video-game players visiting one of the meccas of computer gaming, Blizzard Entertainment, the Irvine developer behind the popular StarCraft and Warcraft titles. The latest - Warcraft III - was the third-best seller last year in the $1 billion-plus domestic computer-game market. But in Korea, the games are a cultural phenomenon.

Blizzard purportedly jumpstarted the South Korean economy. Professional gamers are celebrities. Since South Korea is several thousand miles away from me, including the breadth of an ocean, I've decided: I'll rejoice. Guardedly.

James Watson, co-identifier of DNA back in 1953, is trying to push the Gattaca game by blaming "stupidity," an adjective not necessarily describing definitive learning handicaps, on bum genes.

"Stupidity" has always been a fairly relative term: it's quite a mistake to attribute a lack of common sense to low cognitive abilities (if that's even how Watson intends the word to be understood). I know quite a few people who weren't college material who, while not in the intellectual realm for discussing theories and principles, are solidly capable of completing a lifelong series of reasoned decisions.

By the same token, I've seen veritable Mensa candidates who would most likely need parental supervision beyond the age of 45.

Watson tips his hand when, later on in the article, he remarks about how grand and ethically benign it would be to make all girls "beautiful"; as if there's a comeliness standard outside the horrid annals of the Jungmadelbund.

Confusing subjective preferences and kooky visions with speculative science is a reliable indication that a scientist may need to undertake the transition from laboratory to rest home.

In a couple of hundred years, a mammoth alien juggernaut will beset the spacebound human race; these invaders will be driven by their deity, "Pneer."

So long, Pioneer. Don't worry - we'll try to find you in several decades.

John Dvorak splits the Joe Millionaire atom by calling it a hoax.

He's right, of course: last week my buddies and I happened to flip it on before we watched Band of Brothers on DVD. Within three seconds I could tell by the predictability of subject interaction and facial expressions that the show was scripted. No girl, however mindless, is guileless enough to allow an onlooker - much less an army of cameras - catch her firing a singing glare at her rivals. And that's just for starters.

I watched about two minutes - not nearly enough to be able to write as tactile a review as Dvorak, but Good God, enough to realize how insulting to the intelligence television can be.

Wasn't so long ago that motherboard BIOS chips ceased to support 5 1/4" drives, was it? Onward, ever upward.

Yesterday, before the uBlog went to hell, I wrote about a Time article written by Gregg Easterbrooke precisely about the Space Shuttle: too expensive, antiquated, idiosyncratic; ultimately dangerous and not worth the nation's time. He made the points, but he obviously sees himself as an unheeded whistleblower - he recently spoke about the danger of the aging Columbia - and so his essay was littered with rhetorical rabbit-punches. He felt it necessary to break empty bottles of ripple over the alcoholic's head.

I'm more inclined to agree with both the position and presentation of Rand Simberg's piece in National Review. It's significantly shorter than Easterbrooke's on details - for instance, Easterbrooke's request that more time be spent learning the essentials of orbit and re-entry, lest we put the "cart before the horse" - but the scope is much clearer. NASA has gone too far without an objective that reflects the changing times. Novelty is gone; so is national greatness. Space travel is part and parcel to the technological development of mankind and, if you'll pardon the leap of faith, meeting others quite like us elsewhere in the cosmos, whose acquaintance will unimaginably broaden our perceptions of life, friend and foe.

NASA needs to check its compass much more than it needs to pretend to a ravenous Congress that spaceflight is perfectly harmless; men and women will always be integral to science, and risk never completely mitigated - but their sacrifices must be unquestionably justified.

Though this is my first blog on the subject, I would consider myself a well-versed amateur in the art of computer affairs. A short conversation during my senior year of college with a professor not much older than myself revealed the very distinct privilege I was given to have been the first generation able to associate my childhood with computers.

Santa finally - though not without a certain measure of humor - answered my years of requests for an Atari with a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 EX for Christmas 1986. Santa had written my sister and I a note, instructing us to snoop around the tree. Christmas and wide-eyed children being what they are, the glittery splendor of yet-wrapped presents managed to glutton-blind the two of us, effectively camouflaging a bright beige monitor and keyboard-drive unit set up on a dining room chair. After an embarrassing thirty seconds of Meg and I completely looking past the computer, then over it, behind it, and past it again, until soon on the verge of shrugging our shoulders and digging into the slightly more recognizable Christmas presents at the base of the tree, my father directed our attention to the space-age spectacle sitting right in front of our faces. He flipped the "on" switch and, MS-DOS startup disk in drive, the Tandy proceeded to run a batch file whose author was immediately apparent (in all caps, no less):

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MEG AND MIKE! I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS COMPUTER, MUCH BETTER THAN OLD ATARI!!!!!

BY THE WAY, WHERE ARE MY MILK AND COOKIES? NO MATTER, I NEED TO WATCH MY WEIGHT FOR MRS. C!

'TIL NEXT YEAR - S.C.

I love my father - er, Santa. Back in the days when the Shack was still attempting to sneak a living from the home computing gravy train, this knockoff of the PCJunior was the quintessential family computer. It was simple; nothing more than a typewriter-sized, keyboard-CPU-and-disk-drive composite piece attached to a monitor. The keyboard gave little action for your flying fingers; those bred on stiff Smith-Coronas would inevitably stuff a few unnecessary letters into every other word. The EX's John Bull heart was a 8086 chip was of the "Golly, it's a horseless carriage" generation which, for those who don't know, managed to put out a thundering 4 megahertz of processing power. Mass-produced models of the same price today deliver, of course, over one gigahertz. Files whose saving time we take for granted would involve at least ten times the wait back then, a user serenaded by the now-nostalgic gree-gronk, gree-gronk, gronk-gronk, gree; gree-gronk, gree-gronk of an accessing 5 1/4" magnetic floppy disk drive. My office computer's 3 1/2" drive emits a similarly antique groan when it operates. If I pay attention (during those times when I actually use it) I'm immediately brought back to 1986. Finally, the Tandy showed its IBM-clone-for-kiddies colors by boasting a three-channel sine/square/sawtooth sound module tied into a white-noise generator. Even for early games, the three channels could be utilized for full triad representation; by the early 1990s, music designers were squeezing entire orchestrations out of it.

With the computer my father had purchased a small assortment of entertainment and educational software; a handful of disks came along with the Tandy and Dad bought four more on his own, one for each family member. Mom, an impeccable typist but to this day a woman who fears computers much like homo-erectus feared fire, was given Typing Tutor. I opened up a copy of Fraction Fever, a representative of the sorts of games many of my generation were fooled into playing on Commodore 64 stations in elementary school. My sister was given King's Quest II: Romance of the Throne, sequel to the game by Sierra On-Line that defined a three-dimensional computer adventure, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown. My father, not to interrupt a string of classics, bought for himself the DIY-space-exploration extravaganza Starflight. I still remember him tearing off the paper and showing the rest of us the sleeve cover, a painting of a lithe little starship gracefully buzzing by the center of the composition, somewhere in the nameless cosmos.

We popped in Fundamentals EX, one of the bundled programs included with the Tandy. The family gathered around to be taught the basics of computer physiology via interactive, graphic presentation. Meg and I found particular joy in playing a maze game which, under the guise of teaching use of the numeric keypad, allowed participants to smack a stocky little mascot "John" into maze walls again and again and again and again. Tough little devil; he'd bump into the wall, fall flat on his backside and then dutifully stand right up for another go.

The Tandy served us well; King's Quest and Starflight provided months of entertainment - the latter an added benefit of sweaty palms when wandering through hostile territory, it was such a powerful game. Through chore-money, Christmas and the occasional lobby success, I saw added to the Tandy's complement games like Lode Runner, Pinball Construction Set, Earl Weaver Baseball, King's Quest IV, Starflight II, and Arcticfox. A collection of BBS-traded games found their way onto choc-a-bloc disks over the years as well, the glorious little time-wasters. I even learned - self-taught - a smattering of GW-Basic and managed to put together pieces of a lewd, prepubescent-male text adventure.

We upgraded the Tandy's memory; we turbocharged its CPU from sessile to ungodly slothfully slow; we added a second disk drive, as two times very little capacity or throughput is, of course, much more efficient.

By 1993, when finally time caught up with frugality and the Tandy could but pitifully handle even the most modest application or game, we replaced it with my father's hand-me-down 286 10MHz machine; to soon be replaced with a 486, eventually upgraded to a Pentium 166; to finally be supplanted by my old 300MHz Gateway buy.

But we've still got the Tandy; it sits in its original box in the basement. My father cleared out his fire-hazard back room in our basement last weekend and opened up a clear path to the Tandy's storage space. Although its main disk drive is iffy, the hunk of Neanderthal computer is still an unofficial family heirloom; God willing the strength of its silicon sinews, I'll be able to bring the antique out for children and grandchildren.

Or myself. There's really nothing like hearing "Greensleeves" played by a trio of sine wave generators.