Got 36 big ones laying around? Then you can buy Poet Laureate Carl Sandburg's guitar and a couple of unpublished poems, too. The guitar is an old Martin OM-18 with some hard wear on it.

How to Make Udon
Make your own udon noodles from scratch, starting with nothing but flour, salt and water. The directions are straightforward and easy to follow. Then you can make soup.

I forget where I saw this link, but here it is anyway: The Pop-Up Book of Phobias
Yes, whatever it is you're afraid of - the dentist's drill, fear of falling, fear of spiders - this pop-up book will give you a thrill.

Here's a scary bit: According to the Domain Name Rights Coalition, the recently passed Anti-Cybersquatting Act says that if you register a domain name, and some company has a trademark on that name, they can demand that you turn over the name. If you ask for money, even a refund of your registration fee, they can sue you for $100,000 or more. So if you own a .com domain name, someone can file a trademark and take it away from you. You could file your own trademark, but then you get into the obscure world of trademark law, where things like use it (in a business sense) or lose it apply. The bottom line is that corporations now have first dibs on domain names, and if they take a liking to yours, too bad.

The Abacus: a history, how to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, John Henry-like contests between man/abacus and machine and more...

The Very Radical Business of Long Life and Eternal Youth
There's some amazing research going on. Some animals, such as sea anemones, never age. There seems to be hope that human aging can be changed.
To Gregory Stock, the head of the program of medicine, technology, and society at the University of California at Los Angeles, who championed biotechnology's coming control over nature, defeating death is irresistible. "It's very likely we will not even retain the human form very far into the future," he predicts.

So you think you're a law-abiding citizen? Well I sure hope you found time to read the 944 pages of new federal regulations published yesterday. Apparently this isn't even that unusual - last week 2,568 pages were published - you read all those, right? The new regulations include such vital matters as specifying the size of holes in swiss cheese. I wonder how our republic managed to get along for 225 years without these?

The whole patent thing has reached a new peak of insanity: A US patent was issued in 1999 for the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Now the owner of this patent is trying to enforce it. Our latest patent laws don't require inventions to be original, which would cost money to determine, so lawyers will never lack for work. The Patent Office budget is determined by how many patents they grant, so there's not much incentive there to throw out the bogus ones. It really makes me wonder - it seems like the government is just running off the rails. Politicans concentrate on getting elected and re-elected. The only thing that matters to them is cutting taxes, raising lots and lots of campaign funds, and looking good on TV.
(via Obscure Store)

---

I suppose I should write a conclusion to my experience being Rolfed. I completed the ten sessions last week. I have to say that the effects diminished after the third session. It certainly was not painful, which is the usual rap against Rolfing. It's sometimes uncomfortable to have someone poking you, but that's all. In the end I think it only had a smallish effect. But it was interesting to try.

There's a good article in Slate explaining the California energy crisis. It turns out that they didn't deregulate the electric power industry after all - they changed the regulations in a weird way, so as to take power generation away from the utilities and allow wholesale prices to fluctuate, meanwhile fixing retail prices - a recipe for disaster. The California legislature also taxed companies who bought their own generating equipment, thus making the economy even more dependent on the grid. Also, see Jon Carroll's take on things.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, "There are currently more than 73,000 people awaiting an organ transplant in the U.S. But in 1999, the last year statistics are available for, there were only 5,848 organ donors. On average, 16 people die each day awaiting a life saving organ." I don't understand why we as a nation are so squeamish that we don't allow payment for organs for transplants. Payment for organs could be used to offset funeral expenses, for instance. It's incredible that so many people have to die for this. We seem to allow people to pay for blood and human eggs - why not kidneys and livers, too? Or, we could wait for human nature to change and become more altruistic. Yeah.

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, by Philip Greenspun.

This is why I'm not a writer. I would boil this book down to the following: If you want to have a website that can process a high volume of transactions (hundreds per minute or even per second), base it on an RDBMS such as Oracle, running on an HP Unix box. Make sure the HP has plenty of RAM, enough to contain the whole database, plus a mirrored disk array. Use AOLServer and write your custom procedures in the language tcl. That's it. But if you're a writer, see, you can pad this out to hundreds of pages.

The book is rather fun to read and pretty strange for a computer book. It's full of mostly unrelated color photos taken by the author, who runs the web site photo.net - the rare technical coffee table book. He fills the book with colorful anecdotes which gave me a chuckle. He is hugely prejudiced against Bill Gates and Microsoft, really he seems off his rocker with bitterness here. I can only imagine that it's a case of sour grapes. Here he is, an ace programmer at M.I.T. circa 1980, center of the computer universe, and the PC revolution comes out of left field and takes over. He's a big fan of Unix and especially the vintage Emacs editor (which I used for many years and still use once in awhile), but he's wrong about it being based on Lisp. The original Emacs was based on Teco for the DEC 36-bit computers.

By the way, don't bother with his earlier book, Database Backed Web Sites. It's an earlier edition of the very same book, only he decided to change the name. Most of the book is exactly the same, even the same jokes.

I talked to our ISP NWLink and they suggested I use their authenticated SMTP server to solve our mail-sending problem. The latest version of Eudora supports this and it works! So now we are all set on net access via cable modem. It works great so far - even at its slowest, it's almost ten times faster than a modem. We never could get more than 28.8k to work from this address. Of course, now we're paying for @Home and NWLink both, so that's less than ideal. Hmmmmn...

Hey hey! We just got a cable modem - broadband at last. It's so nice to be able to download pictures and other big files in just a second or two.

Of course I wound up running a speed test which shows a download speed of over 1.1 million bits per second during off hours, and more like 220K in the evening. Now the only problem is email addresses. I can still get to my old email to read it, but if I try to send, I get an error message "relaying denied" which I suppose is a measure to stop spamming. If someone guessed my email password, they could use it to send out spam even if they are not a customer of my ISP.

Since a cable modem is always on, security is a concern. I'm using a hardware firewall. I tested our security with Shield Probe which is free and only takes a minute to run. It found we had some security loopholes from the local network protocol NetBIOS (an ancient IBM atrocity). I turned that off and wound up with a good report.

I found some good Hors d'oeuvres Recipes at iGourmet.com. Except I can't make anything with Camembert without thinking of SCTV.

Nature Does Not Exist
Do you believe in the Balance of Nature, i.e. the idea that if we only leave the natural world alone, all will be well with our planet? Matthew Parris dares to disagree.

Search Systems
Thousands of free searchable public record databases. Unclaimed property, anyone?

How to create the Circle P Copyright for Sound Recording
We're working on the liner notes for a CD project. One problem is the p-in-a-circle symbol needed for copyright of sound recordings. Most fonts don't have it. This web page gives the low down.
UPDATE: Adobe has a font called Bundesbahn 3 which has all the circled letters.

How to hook up an Apple Cinema Display to a Windows (or Linux) PC
A nifty idea. An alternative is to use two monitors, which recent versions of Windows support.

Gibson Custom debuts Birth of Christ tribute guitar
"In honor of the two thousandth anniversary of His coming, the Gibson Guitar Company celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ with its most elaborate tribute guitar ever created--the Tribute to the Birth of Christ. Since July 1st, 2000, Gibson artist and master luthier Bruce J. Kunkel, along with the talented staff of the Custom, Art and Historic division under the direction of General Manager Rick Gembar, has been researching, designing, and crafting this one-of-a-kind tribute to the Son of God. Gibson’s largest and most majestic guitar model, the ’39 Super 400 is the canvas upon which the story of the Savior’s birth is told through paintings, carvings, engravings, and inlay."

Via folk DJ Mike Regenstreif, who says, "I don't care if it rains or freezes..."

Thanks to photographer Tom Rawson for sending this photo of me at guitar camp.

---

The Seattle Press: Ten Reasons Why Sound Transit Should Build a Monorail

Bobby Lee's Steel Guitar Forum finally has its own domain. If you have an interest in any kind of steel guitar (pedal, lap, whatever), this is the place to find out more.