flyingzumwalt

I scribbled this entry into a pocket-sized notebook during a period when I was living in a partially-converted barn. The closest indoor plumbing was 40 yards away, across a gravel parking lot, but I had a space heater and a fast DSL connection. I liked that room.

I have ants in my bedroom.

My sister and I had a good laugh over the phone when I noticed a troupe of ants attempting to take over my desk. I worried that I might accidentally crush them. She mused that most people would just smoosh them and have it over with.

Now it’s been two weeks since the troupe arrived. Their numbers have neither increased nor decreased. There are about 12 of them. Somehow, they continue to discover trace amounts of sugar in unexpected places. Earlier this week I started hearing a periodic popping noise off in the corner of my desk. I assumed that the ants were just walking noisily. Yesterday I discovered the source of the noise. My new tenants had found an abandoned package of Pop Rocks beneath a pile of papers.

When I take away their treats, all but one of the ants scatter. The biggest ant remains and gnashes its pincers at me. When I blow in its face, it gets pissed off and runs at me as if to attack.

Today they took over my teacup. They were sucking sweet milky drops from the spent teabag. I picked up the cup and dumped it outside. The big one bit me.

The ants are all afraid of the screen on my laptop. I can actually chase them with it, when nothing else seems to phase them. I wonder if I should be frightened too.

tags: ants living pincers poprocks

>The other day, I was thinking about the idea of a “videophone” and I had to laugh. Back in the day, we would watch movies like BladeRunner and think “Yeah. Won’t that be cool when we have video phones.” It never occurred to us that a video “call” would be made through any sort of device other than a special phone.

Twice a week, I log into a conference call with participants in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, and London. We regularly talk for over an hour while also exhanging text messages and files over an encrypted connection. The brilliant bit is that these sessions don’t cost us anything. That’s right. It’s completely free because we all log in through Skype. In addition to being free, it’s also completely portable as long as we can get to a laptop with a broadband internet connection. Once, I dialed in from a coffee shop. Rather than disturbing my fellow coffee drinkers, I wrote my comments into an IM session while listening to everyone else via headphones.

We don’t even have to worry about OS interoperability. Half of us use Macs, half are running Windows XP. It’s never caused a problem, even when we pass files back and forth through the Skype session.

Even when I need to get ahold of someone who’s offline, I get to do it for cheap using SkypeOut. I just spent 31 minutes on a call to a land line in London. It cost me €0.544. That’s €0.017 per minute. In January, it cost me less than €3.00 to talk for an hour with my friend Raj in his hotel room in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Our team of collaborators started using Skype to communicate across the Atlantic about a year ago. At that point, it was terribly unstable. SkypeOut was useless because it introduced a painful lag. It made me feel like the person on the other end was mad at me (because there were lots of awkward pauses after I said anything). At the time, Skype also didn’t support conference calling on Macs. I was cautiously skeptical of the tool, waiting for it to be proven before singing any praises. Since then, they have really gotten their stuff together. The fact that now you can call any US phone for free makes it indispensable.

That’s all well and nice, but I want (group) video chat. Now.
In true American form, I can’t be satisfied with a wonderful thing. Instead, I turn my head and look for more. I don’t want to just have a file-sharing audio conference every Wednesday. I want to see the people I’m talking to, and I want to do it for free. This is where the technology just hasn’t caught up with us, but it’s close. If we were all on Macs running OS X, we could use iChat AV to have videoconferences with up to 10 people, passing the info over the Jabber Protocol. Sadly, to date nobody has released a Jabber client on Windows that can handle group video chat sessions. The solution is a-brewing though.

My only question is who will get it done first.

tags: skype jabber ichat videoconference

>http://www.sahana.lk/

“Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.”

SourceForge Project of the Month for June 2006: http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2006-06.php

>The existence of external phenomena and the existence of a creator God are equally impossible to prove or disprove. The only difference is that the difficulty of establishing the latter is more noticeable.

External Phenomena: (1) Phenomena which are perceived to be external to the mind. (2) Events and objects that are ultimately material in nature and thus inherently existent beyond the realm of the mind, mental activity, and mental experience.

tags: buddhist philosophy mind mindandlife theology deism religion

> I wanted to put a photo of myself in my profile (seemed prudent), but in order to do that I had to post it in a blog entry first. There you have it.

>Get a load of this epic saga of Medical Ethics brewing in Seattle.

Basically, doctors tried to force Tina Marie Carlsen to allow them to put implants into her baby, Riley, so that he could undergo dialysis. Carlsen refused, insisting that she wanted to seek non-surgical alternatives or alternatives that don’t involve dialysis (the details are unclear in the current news articles). The state responded by taking custody of Riley and moving to perform the surgery without Carlsen’s consent. To prevent the surgery, Carlsen abducted Riley from the hospital. This resulted in her being declared a Kidnapper, hunted down by the State, and thrown in jail for five days without being allowed access to her baby. Meanwhile, the doctors are again planning to do the surgery without Carlsen’s consent.

Carlsen was hunted down by the State because they believed that the baby was in imminent danger if he didn’t receive immediate treatment. Now, after the fact, the Hospital is admitting that Riley was not actually in imminent danger at all. Now the State is trying to wash their hands of the situation, implying that they were misled. More imporantly, possibly Carlsen has/had time to seek out alternative treatment for her baby?

What were Carlsen’s medical alternatives? Why doesn’t she want her baby on dialysis? Nobody seems to be giving a clear answer to these questions.

I can’t wait for Anderson Cooper or Nightline to sniff this one. I want info.

It’s been hard to find an article that gives a good breakdown of the situation, but here are two pretty good ones:

Mother, doctors fight over care: Kansas City Star, MO, June 29, 2006
Off track over baby’s welfare: Seattle Times, June 29, 2006

People have set up a website in support of Carlsen and her baby: http://www.helpbabyriley.com/

Wild stuff man.

tags: medicine dialysis baby riley seattle surgery ethics kidnapping