Got into a big emotional exchange of harsh words today, in which I was accused of ignoring someone's emails and being ageist and sexist. I got defensive, whined about how busy I am, how deluged in email I am every day, but as the discussion continued specific emails got mentioned that I was almost certain I had never ever seen at all. Eventually I figured out they had been caught in my spam filter. About 10 in all emails from this person had been false positived in the last month or so. dammit. In my desparate attempts to curtail spam I think I have become too extreme in my spamassassin rules score settings. goddammit.

been reluctantly trying to learn more about CSS. not sure why. i guess i thought it would be useful for this site i'm setting up for Villa Ingenio, a neighborhood in Bolivia where some of the computers for Bolivia project computers are going to.

anyway i really should read this: Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models

but have not had time yet.

The blogosphere has been actively chattering about 6-apart's new MT licensing. I hadn't really thought too much about it but I started to today and its a pain in the ass. Even after this announcement from 6-apart, with changes in their new liscensing, it is still not acceptable.

What really is frustrating to me is I'd like to switch but there doesnt look to be any other blog tool written in perl that has all the features I want. I hate PHP but all the best tools seem to be written in that. grr.

hey man,

i enjoyed the party saturday. it was cool! lots of cool people. you have quite a variety of people you know. i was sort of thrown into a surreal
moment of shock, though, at one point when i was talking with one
guy, your friend from the sweatlodge whose name i forgot - the
guy who was tending the grill most of the time. i mentioned how i
knew you and he asked what war tax resistance was and i explained it and he
asked whether i was against 'the war' and i of course said yes
and he went into this rant about taking care of 'them' and how
'they' were out to get us. i asked if he was joking and he said
no, and that he was a warrior and that basically all the muslims
had to be destroyed cuz they had sworn to kill us all, etc etc. i
wanted to just lash out and say, "you are a freaking wacko,
dude," but nonviolently held my toungue and just said "well, we
can all think whatevver we want..." i was sitting there just
stunned and even after i ended that exchange for like an hour
afterward i was still sort of in this weird shocked state, i kept
wondering how this guy could be a friend of yours! i guess you
don't talk politics much at the sweatlodge?

I wiped out and hurt myself last night while zoobombing. It sucked and still sucks. Lots of scrapes all over and my left hand is all swollen up. my fingers still work pretty normal so i can type, luckily, but i have a hard time gripping anything firmly.

Hopefully this is nothing serious and it will heal up on its own soon, cuz, suprise, i have no insurance.
I'm lucky, though, it could have been a lot worse.
Ironically, this was my first bomb with a helmet. The other five times my head was bare. I didn't hit my head last night, so it wouldn't have mattered.

My bike's totally fine, too, except i broke my front light. Like i said, i was really lucky.

On the way home i was having all these negative thoughts about zoobombing and other idle decadent things we do in our "spare time" - in Bolivia people are hurting themselves while putting up roadblocks and running from soldiers, meanwhile we're up here making up stupid meaningless ways to put ourselves in danger. sigh.

Just found a cool site/blog about using bicycles with wireless connections to protest the RNC in NYC this summer. It's called Bikes Against Bush. Nice to see geekiness, bikes, and anti-bush activism all tied together.

Too bad I'm lately leaning toward NOT going to the RNC protests. I feel like my focus is south, Bolivia and latin america in general. I want to go back this winter and I have to concentrate on that and the computers for Bolivia project. I can't think of how I could be that useful in New York other than as just another body on the street, holding a video camera that MIGHT shoot something unique but probably won't.

So now someone has discovered a virus that infects mobile phones. Just what we need. Another reason not to buy another mobile, I guess. I've been thinking about it for months.

As Thoreau once said, "We have become the tools of our tools."

sigh.

Today is Bloomsday, and in fact is the 100th bloomsday, the day that is the day James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.

I read Ulysses years ago, liked it but I'm sure I didn't get as much out of it as I could have. It took me 8 months, and I was pushing it even at that.

However one passage from it has stuck with me lucidly ever since, furnishing me with a phrase I repeat to myself often when appropriate it. I don't quite remember the context, some moment when Leopold Bloom is thinking about all the people that die every day around the world, and he says "shoving them under doublequick"... or something like that. Such a powerful, but brutally simple, thought.

This article explains how to use your iPod to make a pirate radio station.

There's lots of great ideas for what to do with such a portable FM transmitter. One of my favorite is:

We usually keep a couple tracks of silence ready to go, ever get stuck at a stop light for like 10 minutes and the dude in the next car is blasting the radio? With the super easy iPod interface you can quickly get to the station he

• steev's blog

Ok I know I just blogged about Mark Morford the other day but this particular column of his is really extragreat. doubleplusgood. He is my new favorite writer ever. Well, not really, but he's so freaking great, so clever and zillion miles an hour and cynical and yet so idealistic and outraged, he's like if Mark Leyner wrote for a newspaper and was really really angry all the time.

But the good thing about this particular installment of his column is that it ends happy. It basically says, let's be optimistic and happy, no matter how bad things seem to be, because to just be stressed out and fearful and angry and paranoid all the time will destroy us.

And that's an important thing to remember.