Dan Seto j20000204

Week of 31 January through 04 February, 2000
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Jump to Last Update: Friday 12:00 noon HST

Intellectual Exercises. The back channel emails between the Daynoters over the weekend centered on the origin of the brassiere [French, = child's vest] and toilet [French 'cloth, wrapper',] and whether or not people can tell if Robert Bruce Thompson is telling the truth about the each. I couldn't possible comment.<G>

Meltdown. No, I'm not talking about the Stupor Bowel (well, at least for two-and-a-half quarters). I'm talking about the America's Cup yacht AmericaOne. After squaring up the matches 1 - 1, the "wheels" came off and they lost the next two races. Race number two by withdrawing after multiple equipment failures and amazingly inept sailing. Race number three, after sailing a brilliant race up to the last mark, failing to give right-of-way to Prada and almost causing a collision (the same, amazingly inept mistake as in race 2). At this point, even though Prada may be sailing slower, they are sailing smarter. Who would'a thunk?

The only thing worse than watching the races was having to listen to the commentary by the ESPN2 announcers. It's like they are watching a different race from what is being shown on TV. When it was obvious in Race 2 that AmericaOne had a catastrophic equipment failure, they were saying it was bad sailing. And when it was bad sailing, they weren't saying anything. The closest comparison I can think of is when the Challenger space shuttle exploded, the announcer, for a few seconds did not appear to be watching what was happening on the screen while telling us of various irrelevant data points (i.e. altitude, etc.) all the while the Challenger was disintegrating into a million pieces. Sigh.

Utanium, Itanium, We all Tanium. The Register is saying Intel will ship their McKinley chip (follow-on to the Itanium) before the Itanium itself ships. If true, it points to AMD's success with its own Sledgehammer 64-bit chip, thus forcing Intel's hand. See the story here.

Illinois Execution Moratorium. Noting that the death penalty process in Illinois (one of 38 states with the death penalty) is "fraught with errors,..." Gov. George Ryan today instated a moratorium on all executions, until a commission he is to appoint, can review the system. The governor pointed out that, of the last 25 individuals sentenced to death in his state, 13 were subsequently cleared of the crime they had been convicted of. This is slightly less than a 50% accuracy rate in a system that does not allow for any mistakes. Get the full story here.

History. This is Black History Month. And on this day, in 1960, four Black students sat down at a Greensboro, N. Carolina lunch counter for a cup of coffee. It is a sad commentary that, that event was worthy of a making the news. See the New York Times (you have to register first) article about that day here.

ET, Call Home. Well, you didn't think I was going to ignore this story did you? Evidence is growing that the Mars lander is at least alive, if not well. Stanford University announced picking up a very faint signal last week. This week, observatories in England, Italy, and the Netherlands join the hunt. However, NASA is saying that even if contact is made, it is doubtful that any meaningful experiments could be conducted at this point. See the story here (this is also from the NY Times so you need to register).

Hollywood Buzz II. First it was the movie "Pearl Harbor" coming in April to spend $130 million USD to film. Next up is "Windtalkers." This one stars Nicolas Cage and is about the how the US, in WWII, used Navajo Indians to send messages coded in their language. A language, that they say, was known only by the Navajo and a handful of others. The locations here will be used to stand in for Saipan. It is amazing that Hawai'i has enough different environments to stand in for everything from Africa (see "Mighty Joe Young") to South America (see "Raiders of the Lost Ark") to Jurassic Park.

Emergency Yikes! All systems stop! Full emergency reverse! What a way to wake up in the morning! My friend Bo Leuf got my heart jump started this morning with his comments about my note on the Illinois moratorium on executions yesterday (see above). Let me clarify by copying my email to him this morning:

Back-Channel Backed-Up. I think I need to get some industrial strength drain cleaner and apply it liberally to both the Daynotes mail server and my host site. I tried sending an email this morning to the gang and had it bounced back:

Sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't. As I don't have control over either mail server I can say it wasn't me that done it. But then, I can't fix it either. To Tom/Matt: That's why we cc: people. We know the list fails sometimes and sometimes it's probably our own mail servers. Either way, the mail must go through.

Pro Bowel, err Bowl. Todays begins the festivities leading up to the Pro Bowl American football game here in Hawai'i. Events include various charity events to support kids and anti-drug use rallies. While there are still 1,500 tickets left as of yesterday, they will be gone way before Sunday's game. Of the 20 Pro Bowls played here, all except one (the strike shortened 1982 season) have been sell outs.

Players of note scheduled to be in the game include Rams QB Kurt Warner and San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau. Seau subs in for Baltimore's Ray Lewis. Lewis is otherwise detained in an Atlanta jail for a double murder. Perhaps he should move to Illinois.

Staring into the Abyss. Come Back Kid Americas Cup skipper Paul Cayard pulled off a hard fought win to tie the best of nine series three all (after being down 3-1). The delta at the finish? Nine seconds. This after sailing 18.5 miles (29.8 km).

Homeward Bound. The Pacific Voyaging Society trans-Pacific sailing canoe Hokule'a is getting ready to sail home from Tautira, Tahiti. They are on a return voyage back from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The thing that is special about Hokule'a is how they navigate. They use the stars at night and the wind, waves, and other natural phenomena during the day. Hokule'a is used as a proof of concept that Polynesians were regularly sailing across the Pacific hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus was born.

8:30am Update Due to continuing problems with email services at 9netave.com (which hosts this site), I've changed my email address. My new address is dseto@itool.com. This address is provided through the generous services of Matt Beland of itool.com If you are in need of a web site hosting service, check them out.

Jury Duty. As you may have noticed around here, some days there's more and some days there's less. The reason for most of that is the opening of the Legislature. Once they get going, things get very busy around here. Turn around times are typically less than one day. And the stakes are very serious. So you had better do it right, but also fast.

Fast and right are usually mutually exclusive terms. And we are no different from anyone else, so mistakes occur. We do our best, but the pressure to get the work done RIGHT NOW, regardless of accuracy, is extremely high. Imagine the concentration required to drive a Formula 1 race car. Then imagine having to do that everyday, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Since I wrote the book (literally) on jury duty in Hawai'i, any and all bills relating to juries pass across my desk. Yes, the testimony I write is just a recommendation and it's up to the Administrative Director of the Courts and the Chief Justice to decide whether they want to use my recommendations. But more times than not, they do. And when they do, everything is on the line. Mistakes, while understandable, are not taken lightly. If what we say to the Legislature is not correct, our credibility is reduced or lost. And in politics, if you don't have credibility, you can't get what you need done, done.

So please excuse me if things get a little short here sometimes. I'm driving as fast as I can.

Naming Names. There's a thoughtful piece in the UK Times Opinion page here. It talks about the use of un-named sources and pejorative blind quotes and why you shouldn't do that. It's nice to see that the press does think about such things.

Mail Bouncing. I'm back to looking for a host for my web site. As long-time readers of my pages know, I started looking before and kind of got side-tracked doing other things. If my Road Runner service would give me a static IP address I would gladly setup my own servers (web and email). But they want something like $350 USD/month for that. And ADSL (256k up and 64k down) here is twice what I pay for Road Runner now ($39.95/month USD).

So, that means I have to use someone else to host my site. Obviously, it would be nice if there were local companies that host for a reasonable charge. But I haven't found any. Most appear to be directed towards commercial businesses. So a mainland host it is to be. The two top runners, based on recommendations from the Daynotes Gang is itool and pair.com. Itool appears to be aimed towards newbies and pair seems to be more traditional (albeit you have to add on for more mail boxes and choose the "webmaster" option to get CGI access).

But, before I can do anything, I need to get my contact address changed with NSI. My site is registered through them (at the time they were the only game in town) and they have an old address. Now, they have these great <NOT> templates that you fill out and then email to them. But the default authentication scheme is via the contact email address. That is, they check to make sure the request is coming from the email address listed as the contact. So if the contact address has changed, you can't use the template. What you end-up doing is faxing to them a page authorizing them to make the change. That's what I did yesterday. I have not heard back from them as of yet. But once that is cleared up, I can them request a change in primary and secondary DNS and point to a new host. Sigh.

Have a Ball. Over at Nature, you might want to check out their article on ball lightening (see here).

I Can See Clearly Now. The New York Times has an interesting article on making the type you see on your screen clearer. It seems that several companies, including Microsoft, are looking at enhancements for those who use LCD monitors/laptops by changing how each letter is formed. Get the story here (as usual, the NY Times requires a one-time free registration).

It's Friday! Our network was down when I came in this morning (6:30am). No network, no update. What was interesting is that the error Win98SE had was that the NIC was not working and needed to be reconfigured. I spent about 30 minutes testing the NIC and then removing it (via system panel) and then reinstalling after rebooting. This didn't help (well, duh). The next step was to open the case and pull the card. While I was working on that, word came down that it was a network-wide problem caused by [snip, names removed to protect the guilty - Ed.]. Sigh.

Template Hell. NSI got back to me to via two emails. One saying I needed to confirm the change I had faxed to them yesterday and the other saying the modifications have been completed. Heck if I know what they mean by the second, given the first, so just to be safe, I send off the confirmation via email. At some point, I will have this straightented out. But not so far. I checked the whois at network solutions and they still have the old information. Really Big Sigh. Once I have the registration updated, I will open an account at pair.com (heck, I may open one anyway now) there will be a transition period whereby you may have to type in an IP address (rather than seto.org) for a couple of days while the change is propagated through the various routing tables out there. You may remember something similar happening when fellow Daynoter Brian Bilbrey registered his domain. But don't worry about that until I tell you to.<g>

TGIF. The update to my contact email address at NSI is done. Thank God. It was updated on 4-Feb-2000 at 14:29:49 EST. So, now I can go forward with opening a new host account. As noted earlier, the choice was between itool.com and pair.com. Itool is geared towards non-technical people who don't have the time or resources to become so. Unfortunately, you pay for the hand-holding [nothing in life is free - Ed.]. So, I decided to try pair.com, which comes highly recommended by Robert Bruce Thompson and Dr. Jerry Pournelle, instead. The on-line sign-up process went well and hopefully, within a week or two, the site will be up and running. At that time I will let you know what the IP address is. Thanks for hanging in there during this trying time.

Misc. Ramblings