There are some people I know – even some readers of this not-so-anonymous blog – who blog about any number of things that would normally be confined to either their subconscious or chatted over a neighbor’s fence (perhaps over a fabulous martini). In the case of work-related gossip, I would wager that if you are going to involve yourself in such an endeavor, it is best to do this anonymously. So, whilst trolling through MeFi earlier this morning, I happened upon a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

One thing they don’t mention here is that any traffic (read: email) that you send using your company’s email servers is their property and so you should not consider your work email “private”. That is what a Gmail account is for!

While they do mention “limiting the audience” of your blog, I have found that unless you restrict your readership manually, anyone and everyone you know will eventually stumble upon your blog. My furthest stretch has been the dairy farmer that lived down the country road in Botetourt County, Virginia, where my great-uncle Joe lives. He mentioned to my Uncle Joe that he had read a website about my and Kelly’s adventures in Eagle Rock, VA. This should underscore how important not giving away your particulars is when attempting to stay anonymous. The careful and intrepid information-seeker will no-doubt attempt to put together a sketch of you through the scraps of info they can find on the internet. For example — I once had a man keep calling my house and requesting that he speak with Pablo Escobar (the now-deceased Columbian druglord). After a pair of short calls, I decided to find out just who my caller was, only armed with his phone number. Thanks to reverse phone directories, Google, and some luck, I found his name, address, his AOL username (which could be contacted via AIM), his homepage, highschool, job history, etc, etc. That turned his next call into an hour-long tango of “I know more about you than you probably ever cared me to know”. I really just wanted the guy to quit calling the house at all hours, but I figured I might as well have fun with it.

So — take care out there on the Intarweb. It is a wild and wonderful place. But, as with most wild and wonderful places, you could be eaten by bears (and by eaten by bears, I mean your job or life could be mauled. Not by bears, but by people who just don’t get the joke).

“With super-powers comes super-responsibility”


– “The Amazing Strobe”

After nearly 6 months of building, I have finally completed my Allegro-Lite sailplane! I started at the beginning of November last year, and just this week finished it up. It’s a great feeling to finally get something like this done, and just in time for soaring season! To celebrate, I have started cleaning up my shop downstairs to make way for the ship I’m going to use for the Louisville Area Soaring Society’s Speed 400 F5J Electric Sailplane Competition coming up in August.

Anyway, back to the Allegro-Lite — it’s a really cool plane, from a completely nerdy point of view. You see — most “competitive” (meaning “efficient”) model sailplanes these days are really expensive — they involve things like hi-load foam, Kevlar, carbon-fiber, and generally a lot of expensive composite materials. Those materials can make things really strong, and yet really light — which is something you need for a really efficient wing on a plane. Well — the Allegro-Lite is an exception because A) it’s made from wood with some carbon fiber (not terribly expensive, B) it is really light and C) despite the previous two things, it is REALLY strong! The design is completely free to the public (courtesy of Dr. Mark Drela from MIT), and there are plenty of other Drela-devotees around to offer help, and in the case of the Allegro-Lite, a near-complete walkthrough. I’ve even pitched in myself with a build gallery with annotations.

So, this summer I intend on getting out and flying as much as I can, and competing as often as I can in regional contests. The Allegro-Lite will be along for the tow as well!

Well, I guess my blog has hit the big-time. Regular, observant visitors may have noticed some “SPAM” comments showing up recently on the “recent comments” over there to the right. Bankruptcy loans and Texas Hold-Em poker are the subjects du jour. Having done a little reasearch, I believe these comments to have been placed not by humans, but by robots. The mechanical bane of mankind, I say! Well, in an attempt to “nip [this problem] in the bud”, I have implemented ANTI-ROBOT MEASURES on the comment system. This system is know in the industry as a “CAPTCHA“.

What does CAPTCHA mean? Well, it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. You know those little boxes with the squiggly letters and numbers you are asked to fill in before you can proceed with a form on the internet? That is a captcha. It’s used to prevent robots from crawling through, say, lists of available tickets on TicketMaster. The term “Turing Test” is a generic name for any test that is capable of determining if the subject being tested has the presence of mind or intelligence. (“Intelligence” in this case means being able to think on its own, and not have to follow a set of logic rules, as robots do).

Please give the comments system a run-through, and feel free to email me if you have any problems.

For you, gentle reader, I bring recommendations of rock…

• …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Worlds Apart

  They got my unpublished “Best Name in Rock” award back in 2004, and yeah, so I gave their prior album “Source Tags & Codes” about 2 minutes of attention back in 2003(?), and never listened to it again. Looks like I’m making another of my apologies to rock bands again… Worlds Apart rules in so many varied ways. They’ve got a sorta nerdy thing going on, but they bring the rock right along with it. Archaeology + sociology + rockology = AYWKUBTTOD?

• Death From Above 1979, You’re A Woman, I’m a Machine

  DFA 1979 is two Canadian guys with a synthesizer and a bass guitar. Now, normally, that is usually just spelled out D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R, but not this time, oh no! I think I described it to Najati as “dance-inspired noise rawk”, and I think that just about sums it up. Like 75% noise rawk, 25% ass-shakery. It’s all good.

• Sleater-Kinney, The Woods (Advance Copy)

  Yeah, so I got a copy of this via a lil’ birdie. The girls of Sleater-Kinney have asked very nicely for those folks who are currently dealing it over the intarweb to kindly cut it out. However, since my deed has already been done, and I have listened to it in its entirety — I’ll say this: It rules. In their letter to the pirates, they mentioned that the record “is a response to the deadening and watering down of music”, and I can’t agree more. It’s noisy, loud and far more thrashing as any of their previous records. We likes it very much.

• Sunday Nights – The Songs of Junior Kimbrough

  Junior Kimbrough is credited by Dan Auerbach of the Blakc Keys as “his first record purchase”, and he has created a number of contemporary blues classics that inspired many, from Iggy Pop (who appears on the album with The Stooges) to the White Stripes (not to mention the Black Keys). This various-artists tribute lines up like a hipster funeral wake for Kimbrough. Cat Power, Iggy Pop & The Stooges, Mark Lanegan, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, etc. Some really fantastic tracks on here, especially from The Stooges, Cat Power and The Black Keys.

…I am in no way a white supremacist or a member of any Aryan group. Further, I would like to thank the intarweb at large for making me have to make statements like that.

It would seem that someone from the intarweb took my posting entitled “the pride of the species” to mean that I endorse Aryanism. Long story short on that posting was that the The Smoking Gun had posted a photo about the “scariest con ever”, and I had related that to my own overly-elaborate plan for the now-legendary “Goat House“, which is (of course) a reality TV-show wherein Death Row inmates battle it out each week in a bleek, unadorned house for a goat which is inserted (dropped through the ceiling) weekly.

You may notice comments from a “Callie” on the sidebar over there. Well, I also received a strange email from a one Calista Alvaraz, the contents are here exposed:

From: Calista Alvaraz

Date: 3/8/2005 5:42 PM

To: ben@XXXXXX

are you proud to be who you are?? i am in jail rite now… doin time for hate crimes are you about you skin as you put out???? let me know what is your deal.. pride power justice supremacy or what?? i am skin for life from a orginization called save our skins or S.O.S hit me up …

So – for the record – I don’t endorse such things, and frankly I don’t see how you could assume that I endorse Aryanism or any sort of white-power credo. I talked about putting him on a show called “Goat House” wherein death-row inmates battled it out for a goat a week for chrissakes. So, sorry, I gave at the office.

P.S. – If you should happen to make it to Death Row, please do contact me regarding “Ladies Goat House”

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Man — not a month goes by that I don’t find myself apologizing to one band or another for not listening. I’ve publically acknowledged this before, but now I’ve got to do it again. This time, it’s Death from Above 1979. I had seen their music being bandied about with furious intensity over on IndieTorrents, and I had read the Pitchfork review of You’re a woman, I’m a machine a while back. I thought that it was probably just a bunch of indie-hipster saber-rattling, but o’ how I was wrong. These pair of canucks throw down the beat-infused noise rawk! Go and find yourself a show or a file on their website.

A couple of years ago, at the urging of Najati, I read Joe Sacco’s account of life in the Palestinian state, aptly entitled “Palestine”. Sacco is an award-winning journalist, which is kind of odd because his medium is not newspaper or television or even radio, but rather the graphic novel. “Comm-ick books” you might say, but if you’d give over an hour or two to read “Palestine,” you’d think differently. “Palestine” details the day-to-day struggles of the ordinary people in the Palestinian state in the early 1990′s (before the most recent intifada) with unusual detail — gritty, gruesome, and often comic.

This time, he has published a short 8-page report from Iraq alongside American troops, entitled
Complacency Kills (32meg PDF). Again, he manages to detail the real-life details of war and its effects on the average person with stark detail and wry humor. Well worth the read.

If you are interested in any of Sacco’s stuff, I highly suggest good ol’ Fantagraphics. Also, here is a good interview with Joe Sacco.

“Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” — Harvey Pekar.

So, I sat down this morning to read through the
>Radio Controlled Soaring Exchange emails that I receive on a daily basis, and noted that there was an obit for a guy named Jef Raskin. His connection to soaring is that he was one of the first guys (perhaps the first) to kit an all-foam “slope-flyer” plane called the “Anabat” in the early 80s. Foam and tape planes are now extremely common in the hobby, and the Anabat was, up until a few years ago, still manufactured.

However, upon reading the press release on his passing I found that he also was an Apple employee (the 31st), and among other things, he invented the “click-and-drag” inteface that we now take for granted. He also apparently named the “Macintosh” after his favorite variety of apple (the McIntosh). Raskin also recently (2000) wrote a book called “The Humane Interface“, which has apparently been well-received as a textbook for interface designers.

Again, this hobby of mine never ceases to amaze me by the amazing people that it attracts. For a great article/interview with Raskin check this out: The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin, by Berkeley Groks, a weekly radio science program in Berkely, CA.

update: Forbes has a nice little article on Raskin — Who Can Really Take Credit For The Mac?, and here is a great link for all-things-Raskin: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.html. That also includes a page on his model airplane designs. Early use of CAD!

further update: Geoff would like to mention that Raskin was also a HAM, as evidenced by this photo with a HF transceiver in the background. A man of many, many geeky hobbies!

As much as I hate to do it — I’m putting my Fender Performer 650 guitar amp up for sale on the eBay. One of my first big purchases ever, I bought this thing when I was 17 new with the help of my mum. It was hell-of-loud, and never turned up past 3 (maybe even 2 1/2). Anywho — doing some research on teh intarweb shows that it was and still is a very well-liked amp, being that it’s so loud and only weighs some 40 pounds, has an effects loop, and has TUBED distortion. Tubes! In this day and age! Of course. Nothing beats vacuum tubes when it comes to powering soul-crushing rock machines.

I found a bunch of reviews for it online, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was and is well-liked, well-reviewed, well-respected and maintains a decent resale value. By the way — if anyone within driving distance (50 miles) of Louisville wants it, let me know. We’ll make a deal and forgo the shipping.

Meanwhile, I want this and one of these.

What it is, cats and kittens! I know I’m posting late for Fat Tuesday, but I made this hell-of-tasty Chicken Sauce Piquant dish for work’s Mardi Gras luncheon last night, and I had to make sure it was a winner before I went public with it.

ben’s chicken sauce piquant

ingredients

• 4-6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1/2 cup + 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 chopped onion
• 2 chopped green bell peppers
• 2 tablespoons minced jalapenos (more or less to your taste)
• 4 regular cans of diced tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons of minced garlic
• 2 tablespoons thyme
• 2 tablespoons oregano
• 6 bay leaves
• 2 quarts of chicken stock (either from liquid stock or bouillion cubes)
• salt
• creole seasoning to taste
• crushed red pepper to taste
• fresh ground pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons parsley

Step one: Make the chicken

Put the 4-6 chicken breasts, 2 quarts of chicken stock, 1tbsp thyme, 1tbsp garlic, 1tbsp oregano and 3 bay leaves into a large pot.
Bring to a boil, and then simmer over low heat for an hour, or until chicken juices run clear.
After the chicken is done, remove the breasts from the stock, and shred roughly with a fork.

Step two: Make the sauce piquant

In a sautee pan, heat the 4 tbsps of olive oil over high heat.
Add the onions, green pepper, jalapenos, garlic, thyme and oregano.
Season with salt and pepper to taste (I prefer the pepper).
Saute for two minutes, or at least until the onions turn clear.
Stir in tomatoes, bay leaves, Creole seasoning to taste, pinch of crushed red pepper and 1 quart of the remaining stock.
Bring to a boil and cook for 5 minutes.
Reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
Remove from heat and transfer this mixture to a blender and drizzle the 1/2 cup of oil into the mix while it’s running.
Transfer to crock-pot or whatever vessel you choose and stir in parsley and chicken.

Voila!

I loosely based this on an Emeril recipe for sauce piquant, but despite my loathing for that guy, I did think in my head “BLAM!” as I threw in the jalapenos. Note: yes, I know he says BAM, but BLAM is much more awesome.