2004

Changes

My house went on the market yesterday. The sign went up in the yard today.

I’ve been in this house since 1997, a long time for some people. But I spent the first 18 years of my life at the same address, and I think this has shaped my attitude towards moving (in a word: don’t). There are a few reasons for this move, but economic ones are probably foremost: Gwen and I have some debt, and the property taxes on this place are just not affordable. And there’s a huge amount of equity tied up in the house, because it has roughly doubled in value since I bought it. We expect to sell the house for a pretty good chunk of change, pay off most of our debt, move into something cheaper and still have a lot of money in the bank. I like this house, and I love this neighborhood–wherever we move next, it’s almost certain to hurt our quality of life in terms of neighbors, ready access to places we like to go, etc. So I feel a bit cornered into making this move, and I have a diffuse resentment at the circumstances that have me cornered.

But I’m not all negative about this. The move is also an opportunity to start fresh, which is good. The part of town we’re looking at most closely (78702) is on the leading edge of an intense revitalization, so it may turn out pretty nice in a few years, and will probably prove to have been a good investment. Gwen and I do not know what our next home will be–we’re considering a few options, including buying an empty lot and building a new home on it. This, obviously, would be a big step into the unknown, and if any members of my adoring public have specific advice, I’d appreciate it.

Gwen and I have talked about the whole issue of gentrification. We’re being gentrified out of our current house–not that this neighborhood was remotely undesirable before, but our incomes have hardly kept pace with the increasing property values and property taxes. We may well be the gentrifiers rather than the gentrifiees at our next place. Is that ethical?

Debate reaction

I wasn’t thrilled with Kerry’s performance, but he did a better job than Bush. Bush was frequently agitated and occasionally at a loss for words. Kerry, who is usually at a loss for brevity, was cool and reasonably concise. Since the value of these debates is as much in the visceral reactions that people have as in the policy points scored, Bush lost ground.

In terms of policy points, commands of facts, etc, one’s analysis almost gets reduced to a question of “who do you want to believe?”. This is, of course, ridiculous–as if there is no objective reality–but partisans will believe who they want to believe, and undecideds will make up their mind based on gut reactions. Both sides exaggerated or mis-stated numbers. The post-mortems have not taken the president to task for the bigger problems in his points–his continued insistence on the Iraq/Al Quaeda links, though Kerry did. Kerry missed an obvious scoring opportunity when discussing the run-up to war: Bush repeatedly insisted we needed to go into Iraq to remove the WMDs. Kerry never asked “what WMDs?? (in The Daily Show’s wrapup, Jon Stewart did ask). Bush has to run on his record–talking about what he will do invites the question “why aren’t you doing it now?”. Kerry has the luxury of talking about what he will do without really being held to account. The tack that he took, of engaging more closely with allies, doesn’t seem likely to gain traction with most people.

The post-debate wrapup (we watched the debate on NBC) struck me as absurd: the network invited each side to give its own spin. This is not acting as a news organization: this is acting as a clearinghouse for press releases.

No soup for you!

Last night I saw an ad placed by the Center for Consumer Freedom, an astroturfing, misleading bunch of asshats. The premise behind the ad is that someone, somewhere, is trying to take away your right to stuff your face with Heart-Attack Specials, McCrispeties, and Munchee-os. The ad actually features the Soup Nazi (from Seinfeld) doing his schtick. The website actually uses phrases like “food fascists.” Both the ad and the website are trying to whip up hysteria surrounding problems that do not exist.

While there have been a couple cases of people suing McDonald’s for their obesity, these have been thrown out of court. This organization is clearly a sort of pre-emptive strike against any further actions to hold major food manufacturers accountable for the content of their products. It’s hard to imagine that bad food will be regulated the way tobacco and alcohol are, the terrifying future that fast-food fearmongers foretell. Restaurant food (like tobacco and alcohol) does not even carry labeling disclosing its contents, and the fast-food lobby is a hell of a lot better organized and funded than the, uh, lobby for people who don’t like fast food.

Apparently these industry tools have set up a sort of link farm, with websites to bash the Center for Science in the Public Interest, another to tell the inside story behind such radical groups as the Sierra Club.

On their “about us” page, they say they are “supported by restaurants, food companies and more than 1,000 concerned individuals.” What concerns me (among other things) is that food companies may include industrial ranching operations, which receive government subsidies. Meaning that, in some way, my tax dollars are funding these clowns.

Code 46

Released with no fanfare that I know of, Code 46 is one of the best SF movies I’ve seen in a long time.

The movie tells of a bustling, gleaming future where everyone in the world speaks perfect English, liberally sprinkled with Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese (five of the six official UN languages–I didn’t notice any Russian). It’s a world that looks very much like our world today–the same cars and clothes, though the cities are perhaps shinier.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who doesn’t want it spoiled, so I’ll discuss the rest of it inside. Go watch it and then read the rest of this post.

Allegro non Troppo

Continuing its fine tradition of showing movies with live sound, the Alamo had a showing of the animated feature Allegro non Troppo, accompanied by Peter Stopchinski and another three musicians, who played variations on the music in original score. These were quite good–they fit with the action on the screen, and nodded in the direction of the originals without being retreads. But I have to say, you can’t do justice to Bolero (or anything like it) with a quartet.

I’d seen Allegro non Toppo back in high school. It was great seeing it again, and the live accompaniment was a real treat.

Stonehenge

Out in Hunt, Texas, not far from Kerrville, there is a reproduction of Stonehenge.

I first encountered it in 1999, when Jenny and I were working on a book about bike touring (never completed). She and I were out on a very long, difficult, and inadequately hydrated (but beautiful) ride that we referred to as the “Mountain Home butt-grinder.” We were well into the ride, and feeling very discouraged in general when we rounded a bend, I looked up, and exclaimed “Holy shit, it’s Stonehenge!” Watched over by a pair of Easter Island heads, no less.

A couple weekends ago, Gwen and I went to a wedding out in Hunt, right near Stonehenge. This time, I had my camera.

stonehenge in Hunt, Texas

More photos inside

Date authentication

In the slow-motion controversy over the gaps in the record of GW’s Texas Air National Guard Duty, the latest wrinkle has been the emergence of some damning documents that some people are concerned might be forgeries. While I’d be delighted to see Bush publicly embarrassed for shirking his military duty, I have to admit that the documents do look suspicious, and if they are forgeries, whoever is responsible is really fucking stupid.

But enough about all that. This got me thinking: today in the electronic world, there are ways to prove that you are the author of a document. But is there a way to prove that you authored the document on a certain date?

Currently, I don’t think there is a verifiable way to do this. But I can imagine a system that would make it possible.

First, we need to review the general ideas behind public-key cryptography (often abbreviated PKI, for “public-key infrastructure”). Traditional cryptography encoded a text using a single key, and both sender and recipient had to have copies of this key. Moving the keys securely was obviously a very serious problem.

PKI solves this. Everybody has two keys: a public key and a private key. The operations of these keys are complementary: a document encrypted with one’s public key can only be decrypted with the private key. So anybody can look up your public key, and secure the document so that only you can read it. Conversely, a document encrypted with one’s private key can only be decrypted with one’s public key. This allows you to “sign” a document electronically: your public key can be considered well-known, and can only be paired to your private key, so if a document can be decrypted by your public key, that’s evidence that it was encrypted with your private key, and either you wrote it or you left your private key lying around for someone to abuse.

Another important concept is the “secure hash.” A secure hash is a relatively short string of gibberish that is generated based on a source text. Each hash is supposed to be unique for each source text. It is trivial to generate the hash from the source text, but effectively impossible to work out what the source text might be based on the hash. Hashes can be used as fingerprints for documents. (Recently, a “collision” was discovered in a hashing algorithm, meaning two source texts resulted in the same hash, but it would still be effectively impossible to work out the source text or texts from any given hash.)

Now, PKI is fine for authenticating authorship, but doesn’t authenticate date of authorship. Not without some help.

PKI relies on key-servers that allow you to look up the public key of other crypto users. Imagine if we set up trusted date-servers to authenticate that a document was actually written when we claim it was written. It might work something like this: An author wishing to attach a verifiable date of authorship to a document sends a hash of that document to a trusted date-server. The date-server appends the current time and date to the hash, encrypts it under its own private key, and sends it back as a “dateprint. The author can then append the dateprint to the original document. If anyone ever doubts that the document was authored on the claimed date, they can decrypt the dateprint using the date-server’s public key; this will give them the claimed date and the document hash. The skeptic then takes a hash of the current document and compares it to the hash contained in the dateprint: if they match, then the current document is identical to the one submitted for dateprinting.

The new iMac

Everyone else is talking about it, so why not me?

There are two categories of reactions to Apple products: emotional and rational. Most technology companies don’t evoke much of an emotional reaction, and when they do, I suspect it’s more often negative than otherwise. But Apple’s got the kavorka. You can look at the spec sheets and form a reasoned opinion of their machines, but before you do that, you have to get through the visceral response.

My gut reaction to the new iMac was mild disappointment. Don’t get me wrong–in the grand scheme of things, I like it. But the fact that so many people did such a good job of predicting what the new machine would look like suggests a lack of inspiration at Apple. The new design is clean, uses almost no desk space, and probably will prove to have a host of merits once people start getting them on their desks. But it doesn’t wow me the way its “iLuxo” predecessor did: that machine, although the base did look a little clunky, had an innovative, unexpected design. Another surprising disappointment about the new iMac is that it is plainly a step backwards in terms of ergonomics: the iLuxo’s screen could be moved in three degrees of freedom; the new, in one (two if you put it on a lazy susan). This may have been a cost-cutting move (those swingarms must have been expensive). Apple may have discovered that most people didn’t really take advantage of all that adjustability, and chose to invest in other features. I wonder.

I’d been planning on making my next Mac a powerbook, but I could see using this iMac instead. Which brings me to my other point: the rational side. It’s interesting looking at the tradeoffs Apple made in speccing this machine, to reach a price point and/or to avoid cannibalizing sales from other machines. In many ways, the iMac seems to be best compared to the 17″ Powerbook in terms of value for money. They both have the same screen, which accounts for a disproportionate amount of their price. Here’s a quick comparison of some major features for the base 17″ iMac and the 17″ Powerbook (the better spec shown in bold):

  iMac Powerbook
CPU 1.6 GHz G5 1.5 GHz G4
Ethernet 10/100 10/100/1000
Firewire 400 800
Video NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
Video out Analog, mirror Digital, 2nd display
Portability OK Good
Bluetooth Optional Standard
Wifi Optional Standard
Optical drive Combo drive Super drive
Price US$1300 US$2900

Updating the iMac to add Bluetooth, Wifi, and a Superdrive gets it up to about $1600, still a lot less than the powerbook. Apple is charging a huge premium for portability (which is kind of weird, because the iBook is a pretty good deal) and a few geeky features. The G5 chip itself probably could command a premium for its performance benefit, but in reality is cheaper than the G4 (though the supporting circuitry may not be). This suggests to me that Apple’s pricing on the 17″ Powerbook is out of line.

New Jersey double-header

After too many weekends devoted to productive house-drudgery, tt was a two-movie weekend for Gwen and me.

On Friday, we saw Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. Some simplify this down to a pot-humor movie, others point out the significance of having the audience identify with Asian-American leads. Both are fair points, I suppose, but the movie mostly made me think of After Hours: a surreal overnight journey. With pot and low humor, yeah. Anyhow, it’s very funny, and falls into my “much better than it needs to be” category.

Number two on our viewing list was Garden State, also a surreal trip through New Jersey in its own way, but a story driven much more by characters than situations. And although it has plenty of funny moments, the movie isn’t a comedy. It’s more complex than that, and so is my reaction to it. While it’s worth seeing, there’s a lot about it that seems out of kilter. The lead character (played by the writer/director) moves through life with his emotional affect tamped down by pharmaceuticals; in some ways, that’s how the whole movie felt. Perhaps this was intentional, but in many cases, I suspect its the result of hack editing. Characters become important without the audience knowing whether we’re suppose to like them or not (and I don’t think this is an intentional effort to keep the audience off-balance), and characters develop strong relationships without the audience seeing how strong they are. Symbolically freighted elements–like a boat out of water at the bottom of a quarry–parade before us with no particular relevance to the rest of the picture. So the audience feels these events and tableaux pass by without really getting emotionally engaged in them, just mildly amused. But there’s still plenty to like: the dialog is good, the surreal quality is interesting, and Natalie Portman is a superstar waiting to happen.

One thing about Garden State that struck me was the soundtrack. Almost every incidental song was something I know and like; at least half are already in my music collection. “Damn, they have just nailed my demographic/psychographic makeup here!” I said to myself, and it annoyed me: as Douglas Coupland wrote, “I am not a target market.”

Toll roads

Talk of toll roads have been much in the air around Austin lately, after CAMPO proposed a plan to convert segments of almost every area highway into a toll road.

Proposed tollroads map

(source: CAMPO “Adopted Tollroads Amendments.” Click for larger version)

My visceral reaction to this was negative, which surprised me: I’ve always been in favor of less driving, less sprawl, and honest road-pricing. Toll roads are consistent with all of these goals. So I decided to give the matter more thought, and I’m still against it in this case. Why?

Tolls seem to be imposed for one of a few reasons: to ration access to overused facilities (Singapore and London have applied road-pricing to downtown roads), to pay for expensive infrastructure, such as bridges, and as a general revenue-enhancement trick. The first two of these are reasonable, the last is unsurprising but infuriating. None of these apply to the current plan, except for the third, in an oblique way.

Although this plan issues from CAMPO, it benefits the Texas Department of Transportation. CAMPO is acting as TxDOT’s fall-guy. It is important to understand a few things about TxDOT:

  1. TxDOT does not exist primarily to improve general transportation in Texas: if it doesn’t involve new-road construction, they’re not particularly interested.
  2. TxDOT does not exist to maximize road-transport efficiency in Texas: they are really the Texas Department of Corporate Welfare for Construction Companies.
  3. TxDOT is the only state or local organization that takes planning seriously. Unfortunately, their planning reflects their warped perspectives. Other state and local agencies take their planning cues from TxDOT.

In most cases where toll roads are introduced, there’s a toll-free alternative. The CAMPO plan is no exception: new segments of non-tolled roads will be built alongside the tolled sections to be introduced. In other words, TxDOT gets to build more roads. So this is a boondoggle. It also means we’ll have the environmental fights over more green land getting paved over–in theory, this means there might not be untolled alternatives to the tolled sections. Assuming there are, though, one wonders how many people will use the toll roads. And the whole project promises to be expensive: $1.7 billion. Perhaps the tolls will pay for that. I wonder.

Another reason is the bait-n-switch feeling the plan leaves in my mouth. Although I live in central Austin, and live most of my life in central Austin, even I find myself increasingly dragged to the fringes of the city because that’s where so much retail has moved to. Austin, for worse (definitely not for better) has grown up with a sprawl-oriented model of development, and everyone who lives here (short of Amy Babich) in some way must accommodate that. Now CAMPO tells us, now that we’ve been suckered into this topology, that we’ll have to pay for that trip out to the Salt Lick, down to my friend’s place in Oak Hill, over to the bike store on 360, out to the UPS station.

Finally, most people don’t like pay-as-you-go. We don’t want to think about the money being taken away from us each time we use a service: we’d rather pay a big upfront fee (even if it’s more than we’d otherwise pay) and not have to worry about it after that. While some moderation in road use would certainly be a good thing, demand for the roads is probably more inelastic than a smoker’s demand for cigs.

Craigslist

If you haven’t checked out Craigslist (many regional sites, including one for Austin), you should. It’s a phenomenal marketplace.

A lot of people use it for casual sex hookups, and hey, if I knew about that aspect of it back when I was single, who knows? But it’s also great for getting rid of stuff that has a little too much value to donate or throw out. I’ve posted several items for prices that are probably about 1/3rd to 1/5th what the item would cost new and gotten nibbles within a few hours, and sold the item within about a day. No fuss, no muss, and a lot easier than ebay. The posting process is dead-simple.

It’s got RSS feeds for each classified section, so if you want to tune in to, say, the new listings for old computers, you can do that. And it’s even got entertainment value in the hye-larious best of craigslist section

Covers

Gwen IMs me and tells me to turn on KUT. I start KUT’s stream and listen. Some Indian-influenced spacey dance music with a twangy sitar. Fun. I don’t recognize it at first, but after 20 seconds or so, there’s an unmistakable hook.

Turns out the track I’m listening to is “From Rusholme with Love” by Mint Royale, but the sound is straight from a 1971 number called “Zoom” by the late Volker Kriegel, which I recognize from the compilation Bombay Jazz Palace.

Usually, when a band does a cover, they keep the same name on the song, or at least tip their cap in the original artist’s direction. No sign of that here. Does that make it a cover or a ripoff?

Margins of error

If you haven’t checked out Electoral Vote, do so. It has daily updates on all the polls, and shows how the electoral vote is shaping up in map form, along with histories, spreadsheets, a real info-junkie’s dream.

A lot of the states are shown as statistical ties or near ties, meaning that one candidate’s advantage is less than the margin of error. But today, Kevin Drum shows us how this is misleading. When an advantage is less than the margin of error, it doesn’t mean “oh, we really can’t tell,” it means that we’re simply less confident about the data. That margin of error does not becloud all differences smaller than it. Go read Kevin’s post: it’s informative.

Rajamani at One World Theater

Gwen’s been a fan of Oliver Rajamani for quite some time, so when she found out he was having a CD release party at One World Theater, she figured it would be a good show and a good excuse to see what that venue is like for a relatively low ticket price.

The show was pretty good. I have mixed feelings about Rajamani’s music: he’s good at what he does, and I do enjoy some of his stuff, but some of it gets into these aimless, hypnotic jams that don’t do much for me. But when he’s good, he’s good. He had a good band assembled around him, too, including an acquaintance, Steve Marcum (one of the original instigators behind the full-moon drum circle). He also had Nagavalli Medicharla, a female vocalist, on stage with him. She wasn’t in the show much, but she was one of the high points–she has a voice that really makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I’m looking forward to hearing the album, as I expect it will probably edit the rambling bits out.

Neither Gwen nor I had ever been to the theater before. While the grounds are great, and the building is really interesting from the outside, the room itself is no great shakes. The acoustic seemed fine, and there didn’t seem to be many bad seats in the house, but we were expecting something a little more interesting. Gwen pointed out that the wings set up on stage were obvious afterthoughts that didn’t fit in with the rest of the building at all.

After the show, there was a reception downstairs, where I ran into one of my Japanese teachers from back in the day and one of my fellow fire-freaks.

The Bourne Supermacy

Dumb name, decent flick. The Bourne Supremacy is another action-type movie that doesn’t require excessive neural activity to enjoy, but it does have car chases, including one in which an improbably sturdy Russian cab acquits itself admirably against the entire Moscow police department and an assassin in a Mercedes SUV.

Matt Damon had an interesting role in that he had very few lines — most of the acting was in his face.