Category Archives: Personal

Looking Forward To Next Week’s Bioinformatics Conference

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I really regretted not going to last year’s O’Reilly Bioinformatics Conference — so when it became time for this year’s conference, I remembered not going to make the same mistake twice.
Jim Kent (who rocked last year’s OSCON will be one of the Keynote’s next week.
I’ll be there Tuesday-Thursday next week and video taping the keynotes and some of the speakers and press conferences.
If you’re interested in learning how to use your computer programming skills to like, save the world and stuff, you might want to check it out.
Oh yeah — these companies are hiring too. They’re always hiring, and growing.
Friendly bunch too 🙂
Anyway, I’ll be posting some pre-conference info here after I finish my other back up of projects (like the radio show on crowd control, which I am still working on, but which turned out to be more work than I bargained for editing everything together nicely and providing good information about who’s on the tape, etc.)

Phone Message To Me From Timothy Leary In 1995

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Things are really getting interesting now that I have my camera hooked up to the stereo (with an analog cassette player).
Fifteen years of cassette archives. Yowza.
Here’s Timothy Leary leaving a message on my voicemail in August 1995 to thank me for the work I did on his graphic novel, Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel.
(Note: this file is an MP3 from a cassette tape I managed to record the voicemail on to in 1995 (through a crude patch into a friend’s computer) — and then back out from his computer onto a cassette tape.
And all that — only so I could play it back into a video camera and recapture it into a computer seven years later. Funny, isn’t it?

Back From A Break

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I’m making those MP3s of the KQED radio show on crowd estimation, and then I’ll be linking to a ton of stuff I’ve been working on this last week, including an interview from MLK Day with Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (that I recorded off of my local news channel), an interview with Bill Gates Senior speaking out against abolishing our country’s death tax (and catching the Shrub in another bunch of lies) on Bill Moyers’ NOW show — along with just a ton of news articles I’ve been collecting over the last few days.

Update On Various Info You Might Be Waiting For

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So yeah I’m still pissed off about the Eldred decision , but the style of this weblog is really more of a technical and design issue for me to iron out over the next few days.
I’ll be upset about the Eldred decision for at least the next 18 years (until things start going into the public domain again — and that’s if we’re lucky and more extensions haven’t been passed by Congress before then).
I’ve decided to upgrade a number of things about my style and templates while I’m at it.
I’ll also be updating the video index over the next few days (which doesn’t deserve to be linked to at this point, being so out of date.)
Sorry for the delay – but I will be putting together a single page on my peace site devoted to last Saturday’s protest.
I’ll also be updating my INS Detainee Protest site with updates from the last week of special registrations.
(Note: All this after I do some “real” work and pay a few bills updating things over at the XML.com Resource Guide…)
I’m also very serious about making a movie about how many people were present at last weekend’s protest. I need a group of about 50 people to do it right (because there were at least that many people across Market Street at Embarcadero for 3-4 hours. I just want to show the photographic evidence, and have fifty people saying they were there and everything’s on the level, etc. So we can come up with a figure that at least most reasonable people can be happy with. Email me at lisarein@finetuning.com if you’re interested in participating or in filming the activity yourself when I put it together for your own website, film or tv program.

Good Morning!

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A lot going on today. I’m already overwhelmed as usual 🙂
Lots of great stuff going up here today. Shrub a plenty — with a little Ozzy Osbourne thrown in for flavor.
And of course footage from Tuesday and from later today of the
INS Detainee Protests. (Tomorrow’s the big day for nationwide protests at INS Buildings across the country.)
I’ll be adding a letter soon to the site so you can FAX/email/call
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

I’ve decided that if Nancy Pelosi won’t listen to thousands of letters from concerned citizens all across the country over this issue, perhaps no one will.
As the leader of the Democratic Party, it seems like a great issue for Nancy to step up to the plate on.
Also I’ll be launching a new category that I hope will become one of my most popular yet (giggle).
Back soon.

Did You Send Me Email Sunday Night?

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Did you send me email Sunday night? I probably never got it then. My email sys admin told me yesterday about a small mishap.
Note: In general, if I don’t write you back within 48 hours, something’s gone amiss (either with my mail or with my brain 🙂 — so if it’s important, I hope everyone knows to just send me another note reminding me about whatever it is…

Happy New Year: Welcome To The Uh-Oh’s

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John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh’s.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh…
I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say “Uh-Oh?” Or, at the very least, something that translated into “Uh-Oh?”
Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.
Second plane. Uh-Oh.
America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.
As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don’t need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh’s visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.
So, the next time you’re looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it’s a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective – as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties – to evoke their essential flavor.

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Ms. Magazine Blogs The Radar

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Yes I am getting a kick out of this. Thanks for asking:
Ms. Musings

She is wary of generalizations, however, admitting that many women, such as Leslie Veen, Lisa Rein, and Lynne Kiesling, are writing about current political, legal and economic issues. Guernsey, in fact, sees her own blogging about technology as

NYT On Women In Blogging

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Wow! I got a mention in the New York Times. How totally cool.
Telling All Online: It’s a Man’s World (Isn’t It?)
By Lisa Guernsey, for the NY Times.

But women’s blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)
Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.
“I think that what’s happening is that we’re meeting in the middle,” Ms. Frankonis said. “The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues.”

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Notes from the “Day After” Nov 5, 2002

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Notes I forgot to upload from November 6, 2002:
I had no idea until this afternoon that an aquaintance of mine was a poll volunteer for every election. I, of course, wish that I had known that before yesterday’s election, so I could have asked him about the process ahead of time. (Or, for that matter, I wished I’d have asked the volunteers at my polling precinct more questions about everything, in retrospect.)
He said that everything went pretty smoothly at his station yesterday. They didn’t run out of ballots or anything like that . He did, however, “have to keep telling the other volunteers to stop sending people away.”
He said that it was his understanding that, even if your name is not on the list, that they are supposed to give you a “provisional” ballot and let you vote and include an explanation of the circumstances. When the people that count the votes get the ballot, they can look you up in the database, and if they can verify that you are currently registered in the database, your vote will count.
The number one question I am asked on a regular basis from people is what to do if they move and didn’t re-register at their new address. Just yesterday I told a lady in a coffee shop that I didn’t know what to do in that situation and that she “might be out of luck.” It seems like this is believed to be the case by most of the General Public — although I am going to need to find out for sure.
Well my poll volunteer acquaintance (who asked that his name be witheld because he was worried about getting into trouble if he was wrong about any of this) believes that this is not the case. That you can vote with a provisional ballot and they can look you up in the database, if you were registered previously, and just changed addresses, you should still be registered.
RE: ID — It was his understanding that they are NOT supposed to require ID for anyone whose name is on the list. ID was requested as a means of providing a current address for the people who hadn’t re-registered under the new address. If the people didn’t have ID, they could provide two pieces of mail to show they had received mail at the address they claimed to reside at.
Even if the person cannot provide any of these things, it was his’s understanding that you have to let people vote. You can’t turn anyone away.
This all just reminds me that I need to register to be a poll worker, so I can understand more about how everything works.