4th of July at Gas Works Park, Seattle

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Even after having seen it almost every year since I’ve been down here, it always amazes me just how many people can fit into Gas Works Park for the annual July 4th fireworks show over Lake Union.

July 4th at Gas Works Park

While in past years I’ve headed down to the park just a few hours before the show was scheduled to begin, this year Prairie and I decided to make a day of it. We packed up books, munchies, and lots of sunscreen, and headed out to Gas Works Park just about the time they opened the gates at noon. We managed to find a parking spot relatively close, only about six blocks away from the entrance, wandered our way in, and started the process of staking out a spot for the day.

Initially we set ourselves up on the side of the hill overlooking the lake, but I took a moment to go explore, remembering where I’d been the year before. Sure enough, the lawn on the other side of the old gas works looked far more inviting — less people, quieter, and still with a perfect view of the barge that the fireworks are launched from — and we soon moved over there.

A boy talks with a police officer

The rest of the day was very pleasant. Reading, napping, enjoying the sun, and a lot of people watching. I’d occasionally wander around the park with my camera, snapping random pictures of the families out enjoying the day, then find my way back to our spot to flop back down again. We’d hit Twice Sold Tales on Broadway the day before, so we were both set with reading material for the day — Prairie with a few Stephen King novels and Roald Dahl books, and myself with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, a fantasy series I’d enjoyed as a kid and have wanted to re-read for a while.

Blowing bubbles

Prairie had also brought along a couple bottles of bubble fluid, which soon caught the attention of a couple little boys seated near us on the lawn. Initially happy to run along and pop all the bubbles they could, soon they decided that they wanted to blow bubbles too, and I suddenly had the younger of the two standing next to me, declaring that it was his turn to blow. I let him blow some bubbles while his brother popped them, then they switched…but it wasn’t long before each of them had appropriated one of our bottles of bubbles and were quite happily wandering around, sending bubbles floating across the sky.

Kites over the hill

Kites, of course, are always a popular summertime activity, and Gas Works Park generally has the perfect amount of wind for perfect kite flying. While most people lined up on the side of the hill to fly their kites, you could easily find them popping up from among the crowds throughout the park, and we had one little girl just in front of us who spent a good portion of the day flying her kite — or running back and forth trying to get it back up into the air when the breeze died down for a few moments.

Lake Union in the evening

Eventually the sun started to set, and the open spots on the ground started to fill as all the people wandering around the park grounds filtered in to find seats to watch the fireworks. The one slight down side to the day was that now that I’m using a fancier camera than my old point-and-shoot, I had to guess at the correct settings to use for catching pictures of the fireworks…and as I found out when I got home, I didn’t guess quite correctly. A slight disappointment, as it was a good display, and I’ve gotten some rather surprisingly good fireworks shots in the past, but not a terribly big deal all told.

Once the show was over, Prairie and I just stuck around in our spot for as long as we could to let the first major crush of people leave. Getting home took a while, of course, with post-show traffic backed up all over the place, but it didn’t seem to be nearly as bad as we’d feared (I’d never driven to and from the show before, always either taking the bus or walking with friends), and we made it home right about midnight, almost twelve hours to the dot after we’d left that morning.

(Interestingly enough, Prairie and I both noticed that while there were Kerry supporters out in full force, there were no Bush/Cheney signs, campaigners, or anything of the like at all that we could see. Not that I’m complaining in the least, I was just somewhat pleasantly surprised by that.)

All in all, a very good day. Hopefully all of you had an equally enjoyable Fourth (for those of you that celebrate it — otherwise, I hope you at least had a good day). And for those of you who get today off of work — I’m jealous!

iTunes: “Magnificat” by Industrial Monk from the album Magnificat (1998, 8:55).

Independence Day

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Have a happy and safe 4th of July, everyone.

US Flag

iTunes: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Mormon Tabernacle Choir from the album Sony Classical: Great Performances 1903-1998 (1958, 4:44).

Fahrenheit 9/11

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At this point, writing up much of a review is more or less pointless. If you’re of a mind to see this film, you’re quite likely to already, and if you’re not planning on seeing it — well, you should.

Most of what was in Fahrenheit 9/11 I knew about already, of course, having been trolling the various political sites regularly for a while now. The single biggest bit that I didn’t know much about beforehand was shots of the protests in DC during Bush’s inauguration. I’m not in the least surprised that there were protests, I just wasn’t paying as much attention to the news back then, and hadn’t heard much about what happened.

I was also very impressed by how Moore handled the day of the attacks. Rather than show us the same footage of the airplanes hitting the towers that we’ve seen time and time again, he stayed with footage of the reactions of people in the street as they gazed up at the towers, and later, as they moved through the streets, ash and papers floating down around them out of the sky. Far more effective and powerful than if he’d stuck to footage that we’d already seen enough times to become at least somewhat inured to the horror.

I was also a little surprised at some of the things that weren’t mentioned in the film. At one point, Moore mentions some of the member nations that joined the US in the “Coalition of the Willing” for the attack against Iraq, calling out a few that didn’t actually have any military forces to contribute. What he didn’t choose to mention, though, was something that I looked into at one point — the human rights records of the member nations. Rather disturbing to see what some of our partners in “fighting for democracy” are doing on their own turf.

My one real worry about the film is that it’s going to be preaching to the choir for most of its run. At least now, in its initial theatrical run, it’s far more likely that the majority of the people seeing it are people like me, who don’t need to be convinced that Bush needs to go. If Moore and Lion’s Gate/Miramax can get Fahrenheit 9/11 into the video market by mid-to late September or early October, though, the increased exposure of rentals might end up reaching a far wider range of people who aren’t as likely to bother seeing it in the theatre.

One can hope, at least.

iTunes: “Instruments of Darkness” by Art of Noise, The from the album Best of Rave, The Vol. 1 (1991, 3:40).

Eau de Power Mac

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Any perfume connoisseurs out there?

Taste and scent specialists International Flavors and Fragrances have partnered with fashion and art magazine Visionaire to produce a special fragrance capturing the scent of computers — specifically, “the headspace in the Apple computer store in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.”

Should you want to sample this paragon of computing and olfactory perfection, you can order the “Scent” issue of Visionaire, which comes with not just the Gigabyte perfume, but twenty other specially commissioned scents (Cold, Noise, Heat, Hunger, 2AM, Sadness, Success, Violence, Softness, Electricity, Mother, Wasteland, Fear, Fetish, Strange, Drunk, Wet, Space, Broken Glass, and Instinct) from the company’s website for the low, low price of…\$175 (plus \$25 for shipping).

Y’know, if it weren’t so far out of my budget, I’d pick one up just to find out what all these things smell like. \$200 is a bit rich for my blood, though.

(via As the Apple Turns)

iTunes: “Girl Trouble” by Violent Femmes from the album Why Do Birds Sing? (1991, 2:58).

9/11 ≠ Iraq

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Designs on the White House has been running a t-shirt design contest, and they’ve just announced the winners. Some good shirts in there, I’m hard pressed to find a favorite.

This just might be it, though:

I was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy and all I got was this lousy president.

iTunes: “New Jersey Turnpike” by Anderson, Laurie from the album United States Live (1984, 11:19).

Hagar the Horrible

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In the midst of a Seattle P-I article about trying to convince more young women to vote comes this little tidbit of information:

This week, Cavendish said, the falling piece of sky was Bush’s reappointment of “Hagar the Horrible” — W. David Hagar — to the influential Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the FDA.

…there were the 25,000 pro-choice activists who pleaded with Bush not to make this move.

Hagar, Time magazine reports, refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. And in his book, “Stress and the Woman’s Body,” (co-written with his wife, Linda) he recommends reading Scripture as treatment for premenstrual pain.

More urgent to young women is the fact that Hagar used his position on the reproductive health committee to oppose the otherwise overwhelmingly approved vote to recommend over-the-counter sale of the morning-after contraceptive Plan B. The vote to approve the sale of Plan B was then overruled by the Bush administration.

Old white men using religion to dictate what young women can and can’t do with their bodies. And people say that there’s no reason to vote?

I read something earlier this week — unfortunately, I don’t remember where — that gave me pause to think. One of the tactics that the right has used to counter the “Pro-Choice” designation of abortion rights activists has been to deem themselves “Pro-Life”, implying that Pro-Choice equates to “Anti-Life” or “Pro-Death”.

Given Bush’s track record of sending more people to their executions while he was Governor of Texas, plus his railroading America into sending almost 1000 soldiers to their deaths in an unjust war, can he really campaign on a “Pro-Life” platform?

iTunes: “Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury” by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, The from the album Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury (1992, 3:47).

Bush ad equates Kerry, Gore and Moore with Hitler

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To be entirely honest, I’m torn between being disgusted by this latest video from the Bush campaign, and outright laughing at how spectacularly it could — and should — backfire on them.

Six months ago, MoveOn.org held a contest to find the best amateur ad against President Bush. The group invited people to make ads and submit them to its Web site. Some idiot spliced images of Bush together with images of Adolf Hitler, evidently trying to make Bush look like a warmonger. His submissions, which arrived with 1,500 others—too many to be screened quickly—were posted on the contest Web site. As soon as MoveOn.org leaders realized what was in the ad, they removed and denounced it.

The Bush campaign, outraged by the mixture of Nazi images with images of an American politician, has decided that the best response to this offense is to repeat it.

[…]

How does the Bush camp identify the Hitler footage? “Sponsored by Moveon.Org” says a label on the first Hitler clip, evidently put there by the miscreants who submitted the ad. “Images from Moveon.Org ad” says the Bush campaign’s label on the second Hitler clip. The only organization that doesn’t identify the clips as a “Moveon.org ad” is MoveOn.org, which denounced the ad and never “sponsored” it. But never mind. Instead of apologizing for this implicit misrepresentation of sponsorship, the Bush campaign has made the misrepresentation explicit. “The following video contains remarks made by and images from ads sponsored by Kerry Supporters,” says a graphic appended to the beginning of the video.

The Bush campaign’s claim that the amateur Hitler ads represent “John Kerry’s Democratic Party” is laughable. Kerry didn’t control MoveOn.org, and MoveOn.org didn’t make the ads. When the ads were submitted, the membership of MoveOn.org largely supported Dean, the candidate who had nearly wiped Kerry off the map. Kerry had just mortgaged his house to get the cash Democrats were refusing to give him. The suggestion that he controlled the party is preposterous—but only slightly more preposterous than the suggestion that Kerry is responsible what Dean and Gephardt said while running against him, or what Gore and Moore said while supporting candidates who were running against him. Not to mention that the question Gore poses in the ad—“How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?”—is well warranted.

I really can’t see this clip doing any good for Bush’s campaign — and hence, I think it should be broadcast round-the-clock, during every commercial break of every major news broadcast, television show, and sporting event.

But that’s just me.

(via Len)

iTunes: “Thoughts and Words” by Supersoul from the album Secret Broadcast – Pirate Radio USA (1998, 4:48).

Unintended consequences

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A few months ago, I was contacted by a writer for a national magazine who wanted to interview me regarding my fallout with Microsoft. Turns out that the magazine he writes for was planning a story on some of the things that can suddenly and unexpectedly go wrong when weblogging (such as blogging yourself right out of a job). I was one of a few different webloggers interviewed for the story, and we spent about two days doing the interview in two phone sessions. It seemed to go pretty well, though at times I wondered if my story was a little on the boring side — no book offers, movie deals, incredible job offers or anything along those lines, just the incident itself and then life proceeded more or less as it normally does.

In any case, the interview was fun to do, and I was looking forward to eventually having my story (and possibly my photo) pop up on newsstands across America. Unfortunately, at the time the Powers That Be eventually decided that there wasn’t quite enough material (not just with me, but with all the other webloggers that were interviewed) for a full feature, and the story was shelved.

However, it appears that it’s possible that not all is lost. I got an e-mail yesterday from the reporter who interviewed me letting me know that there is an attempt being made to resurrect the story! To do so, though, they’re looking for more material — and here’s where you all come in, if you’re able and willing.

They’d like to expand the scope of the story to go beyond just employment difficulties, and include stories from people who have suddenly found their relationships affected by their weblogs. Here’s the note I got from the reporter:

Hey! The editors…are trying to ressurect our blogging story. So I just wanted to let you know that all hope has not been lost.

BUT, we’re desperately trying to find other “My Blog Ruined My Life” stories, esp. ones that have more to do with relationships than employment.

Can you please recommend any major blogging sites where I should look, or to contact their administrators, or, if you can tap into your readers and ask them if they’ve ever had a romantic/dating blowout w/ someone because of their blog — that’d be helpful.

Now, as I put this post together, I realize that this may strike some people as being rather sordid and muckraking — and, to be honest, for all I know it may be. However, at the time I was interviewed, that was not at all the impression I got from the gentleman who interviewed me. Yes, we were talking about some very unfortunate events in my life for a story about weblogging which focused on the problems that weblogs could cause, but at the time, I didn’t get the feeling that it was going to be overly sensationalistic in nature. It’s entirely possible that with the change of focus of the article, the tone may change as well — which, admittedly, would be something of a shame.

I’d hate to eventually find out that the final story focused solely on the “dark side” of weblogging, painting a picture of webloggers as a legion of sad, jobless and loveless souls pouring their hopes, dreams and inspirations out through their keyboards and onto the web in a desperate attempt to find justification and company in the few kindred souls that might end up poring over their writings in the wee hours of the morning, the wan light of the monitor washing over their skin as they avoid the troubling dreams that they know await them when they fall asleep.

(Whee — I like that. But anyway…)

Of course, I’m merely an interviewee, and as such, won’t really know what the final article will be like until it finally sees the light of day and hits the newsstands. But, really, I’d like to see the story come out, and so I turn to you, my loyal readers. If you know of any good resources or any potential interview subjects that may be willing to tell their stories, I’d love to hear about them so that I could pass them on to the reporter.

I’m sure that the venerable LiveJournal is a veritable fount of such stories, but I’m not active enough with LJ to know where too look or which communities to poke into. There’s also the web at large and the multitude of TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger, and other assorted weblogging/journaling tools, but I don’t know of any stories that fit the bill off the top of my head.

So — anyone have some good pointers?

Update: I just sent the following to the reporter, expressing some of my concerns with the apparent new direction the article may be taking. Hopefully I’m not shooting myself in the foot and editing myself right out of the article with this, but the more I thought about it, the more it started to concern me.

I do have one concern, though, which I touch upon in my post (and which, admittedly, could be entirely unfounded…or even if it’s not, it may not be something you have any control over). At the time you interviewed me, I never got the impression that this was going to be an overly sensationalistic story, though it was dealing with some unfortunate circumstances. However, expanding the scope to include relationship issues, coupled with the “my blog ruined my life” concept — well, I now worry a bit that the story may end up painting a rather unflattering portrait of weblogs and webloggers in general.

While weblogs are becoming more known and more popular, there is still a large segment of the general population that sees them as nothing more than online journals for angst-ridden teenagers to whine to the world (often doing so with absolutely atrocious and nearly unreadable grammar, slang, and ”leet-speak’). One of the reasons your story interested me when you first contacted me (at a time when, to be honest, I was getting rather tired of rehashing the events around my dismissal) was that I got the impression that it was going to look at both the bad and the good of the situation and the aftermath, both for myself and for the other webloggers being contacted for the article. Now, though, I’m a little less sure of the tack that the final article will be taking.

Of course, I’m quite aware that I may be reading too much into what you sent me (and even if I’m not, it may be out of your hands). All in all, I’m just hoping for a good article, and wanted to let you know of some of my concerns. However it turns out, good luck with the current round of searching, and should I get any worthwhile pointers from the post on my site, I’ll pass them your way.

Spider Man 2

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Completely on a whim tonight after getting home from work, I decided to head down to see if I could get into an opening-night showing of Spider Man 2. Grabbed a book for the pre-show wait, wandered down to the theater…and apparently the 11pm show that I picked wasn’t the most popular show around, as there were only three people already waiting when I showed up around 10:30pm, and by the time the show started, the theater was only about half full.

Not that that’s really anything to complain about, of course, since it got me choice seating. :)

Overall, Spider Man 2 is a lot of fun. Walking home and turning it over in my head, I kept coming back to the same basic thoughts I had about Spider Man, to the point where I was starting to wonder if I could simply re-post my thoughts about the first film. Obviously, I’m not doing that — not least because after re-reading my Spider Man post, I’m not quite as wild about Spider Man 2 as I was about the first — but there are some definite similarities.

In both films, the action is in many ways the true star of the film. Tobey Maguire is still perfect as Peter Parker/Spider Man, Kirsten Dunst is still oh-so-yummy as Mary Jane, and Alfred Molina absolutely steals the show as Doc Ock. Once again, though, it’s Sam Raimi‘s direction that shines through, and I really don’t think these films would be anywhere near as enjoyable with anyone else at the helm.

Doctor Otto Octavius is every bit as cool as I was hoping he’d be. The effects work on his cybernetic tentacles was incredibly done, and a character that stood a very good chance of ending up little more than laughable in being transitioned from the printed page to the screen instead became a very credible villain. In updating the good doctor to today’s world, the filmmakers dropped the idea of his controlling his extra arms telepathically (which I believe was the original idea) and instead have the arms controlled via a cybernetic link directly into the doctor’s spinal column. One of the tweaks I liked a lot was the addition of video cameras in the center of each arm’s ‘hand’, giving Doc Ock the ability to see anything one of his arms was pointing at. Nicely done, and it very much helps explain his ability to keep track of events going on around him during some of the melees that he and Spidey get into.

While the action sequences in general are certainly the high points of the movie — each of the battles between Spidey and Doc Ock are a blast to watch — there was one sequence that was by far my favorite. Just after the accident that permanently fuses the tentacles to Doc Ock’s body, he is taken to a hospital where surgeons plan to amputate the cybernetic apparatus in an attempt to save his life. The tentacles suddenly spring to life, and we’re thrust in to Sam Raimi at his lunatic best in a sequence that in many ways could be cut directly into The Evil Dead. With no music, the soundtrack filled with nothing but the screams, crashes, and general mayhem as the tentacles wreak havoc in the operating theater, Raimi pulls out all the stops and gives us all the crazy camera angles, whip-pans, zooms, and visual insanity that made the action sequences in The Evil Dead so much fun, and this fanboy ate up every single second of it.

As with the first film, though, Spider Man 2 is certainly not without its flaws. The abortive romance between Peter Parker and MJ often seems to just drag the film to a sudden halt whenever we switch back to their relationship — where Spider Man had a tendency to get overly-sappy, Spider Man 2 fails to give us any real reason why MJ would have any interest in Peter Parker at all. While the subplot is a necessity, both in motivating the characters to take some of their actions and in staying true to the original comic, it consistently fails to ever really engage the audience, and we’re left waiting for the villain to show up just to make things interesting again.

However, the biggest flaw for me was that the last ten minutes or so of the film didn’t feel like they were wrapping up the events at all — rather, it comes across as an extended trailer for the inevitable Spider Man 3. A pity, really, as even with its flaws, I’d definitely enjoyed the movie itself, and I ended up leaving the theater with a slightly sour feeling, as if the only thing missing before the credits rolled was a big “TO BE CONTINUED…” message splashed across the screen. These days, we all know that there’s likely going to be another chapter in the saga. Do we really need to have it beaten into our heads? Ah, well.

iTunes: “Pump Up the Volume” by M/A/R/R/S from the album Pump Up the Volume (1987, 7:12).

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Daring Fireball on Dashboard and Konfabulator

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I haven’t poked my head into the Dashboard versus Konfabulator brouhaha for two reasons: firstly, I’m not a user of Konfabulator (looked at it, decided that it used far too much screen real estate for too little functionality, and that was that); and secondly, the whole thing seemed patently ridiculous to me.

However, John Gruber — who is far more qualified than I am to expound upon such things in any case — has done a masterful job of explaining why this is really a non-issue.

A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.

Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea.

Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh — conceived by Bud Tribble and engineered (mostly) by Andy Hertzfeld.

[…]

The post-WWDC peanut gallery is atwitter with the idea that Tiger’s Dashboard is a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator. You can’t read anything about Dashboard without hearing that it’s a Konfabulator rip-off.

Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they’re doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a “widget” is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.

The Mac community needs two things: more commentators like Gruber, and more people who listen to commentators like Gruber.

iTunes: “Goddess” by Soho from the album Goddess (1990, 5:13).