Sex, Drugs & Unix

Friday, October 21st

You down with OPB?

Toi Sennhauser, probably can't get a permit from the Seattle Health Department, for her choice of yeast source, though she certainly has figured out the Global Microbrand thing. (Perhaps thats a Global Microbrew as well.)

If she starts making bread, I'm claiming first dibs on the semi-obvious "bun in the oven" joke.

Wouldn't you just LOVE IT if a beautiful girl in a freaky cleavage-poppin' Oktoberfest outfit handed you a nice icy cold beer RIGHT NOW? Mmm, beer! Would you still drink it if I told you that Toi made that beer with yeast from her own vagina? That she made a keg of homebrew, called "Toi Sennhauser's OPB—Original Pussy Beer"?

This takes "Markets are conversations" in an entirely new direction. If you didn't get that, go look up "conversation" in a dictionary and you will note that its a polite way of saying "to fuck". Even Ms. Sennhauser says, "Humanity was built on beer and conversation. Please enjoy both.", though I'm not sure to which definition "conversation" she is referring. Perhaps she is being less that specific with intent.

Toi Sennhauser was born in Thailand in 1977 and raised in Thailand and Austria. She moved to the United States in 1997 where she attended the University of Washington, finishing with a BFA in sculpture. She currently resides in Seattle with her husband. Her future plans include an MFA for sculpture and becoming a kick-ass culinary chef.

Jim on 10.21.05 @ 01:20 PM PST [link]

Thursday, October 20th

Free WiFi in public places

Seeing this photo, linked off Doc's blog, reminds me that Katz's Deli (the one in Austin, which recently filed for chapter 11 protection"), was, quite likely the first resturant in the world with a commercial class WiFi installation backed by a T1 line.

And it was free (at least until Wayport took it out after I left the company.)

It would appear that someone has put 'Free WiFi' back in Katz's.

But this guy just doesn't get it. Nobody was whining about not being able to find a 'free AP' at will. The conversation was about the failed business model of "for pay" WiFi, asshole.

Jim on 10.20.05 @ 03:21 PM PST [link]

HTML O' the day

Apparently, God likes dogs.

Astrology coming soon to a science class near you.

It's a big ad!

As new immigrants arrive in already diverse neighborhoods, the
language they embrace isn't always English. Honduran cooks learn
Mandarin. Mexican clerks learn Korean. Most often, people learn
Spanish.

After all, you don't find many Chinese academics on Taiwan
studying and writing about Yiddish.

[JOTD:
A tourist from Israel strolls into a Jewish deli. To his surprise,
the man behind the counter is Chinese. To his greater surprise,
the counterman addresses him in perfect Yiddish. Too stunned
to comment, the tourist places his order and they make small
talk about the weather. The tourist can't get over the guy's
perfect fluency and inflection -- a shrug here, a "nu" there.

As he pays for his order, he asks the cashier how in the world
they found a Yiddish-speaking Chinese man.

"Not so loud!" says the cashier. "He thinks we're teaching him
English!" -- Andy Lee]

There's a rumble in Brighton tonight
Ringside seats for the neighborhood fight,
There ain't a Godddamn thing that the cops can do,
There's a rumble in Brighton tonight.
-- Stray Cats

"My goal is to do all of the work it takes to be explaining to
the Supreme Court in 2025 why broadcasting is unconstitutional."
...
"Engineers want people to be good," Faulhaber says. "Economists
assume everybody is bad. And guess what? We're right."

... until there's an Alaskan brown bear riding shotgun and, man,
he is really ticked.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a
widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of
sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as
the date and time a document was printed.

She set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become.

Does Mr. Reinhardy like this trend? Oh no, he does not.
Jim on 10.20.05 @ 02:25 PM PST [link]

Monday, October 17th

Spokane: Clusterfuck city

James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" and rancour of Clusterfuck Nation, was in Spokane a couple years ago. I remember the conference (I didn't attend, but it was a "Big Deal").

Apparently he wasn't impressed by Spokane (or its people), either:

I need to state this broadly -- perhaps too broadly for some -- because it includes a number of views which all derive from the same notion: that human nature is something apart from the rest of nature. Paradoxically, this idea expresses something very similar to the mentality of single-use zoning which underlies the fiasco of suburbia in the first place -- that human nature and the rest of nature occupy separate and irreconcilable zones.

This was illustrated not long ago, when I was invited to an urban design conference in Spokane. Several guys from the city planning office met me at the airport and then proceeded to take me on a "tour of Spokane." Only we didn't get to the city. Instead, we went by car from one scenic view-point to another on the bluffs along the Spokane River. We'd motor along, then all get out of the van and the chief planner would say, with a great sweeping arm gesture, "Look at the magnificent view!" What I realized after a while was that to them all issues of urban design came down to one thing: scenery. Not streets and blocks, not building facades, sidewalks or planting strips. Just scenery. You could have imprisoned these clowns in any basement with a wall-sized photo of Mount Rainier, and they would have been just as delighted. And you could see the results of this mentality in their work: everything built after 1950 in the area was a single-use pod of one sort or another, including the ghastly hotel "complex" where I stayed.

It was shocking to realize how delusional they were, and how deeply it compromised their professional competence.

Jim on 10.17.05 @ 05:53 AM PST [link]

Thursday, October 13th

What will you do when its all free?

Once more into the breech. I asked Wayport's board this question back in the summer of 2000. Its been five years, and now we have the hoteliers demanding Free WiFi:

What Wyndham Hotels and Resorts along with other hotel chains found is that if you make Internet access free you go from “the needs of the minority” as the Dorchester technology director described it to the needs of the majority: Wyndham saw usage quadruple when they made Internet access free to members of their no-cost affinity club.

Eric D. Horodas, the president of Greystone Hospitality, a San Francisco hotel company, was not buying that. “I am very annoyed when I check into a high-end hotel and find I have to pay extra to connect to the Internet,” he said. Business travelers, he said, should “demand complimentary Internet access.”

Wayport is so very fucked. I'm waiting for McDonalds to go free.
Jim on 10.13.05 @ 03:00 AM PST [link]

Tuesday, October 4th

WiMax in a spectrum crunch

I'm sure I've made similar points to those in this article here, in the past. Its no secret that WiMax is no more reliable in unlicensed spectrum than is WiFi. You just can't fix physical layer issues with modulation strategies and a more sophisticated MAC layer.

In other news, I heard through the grapevine that Vivato has received another wad of cash from Intel, and that Chris DeMarche and his buddy Ron are back at Vivato. They both got launched out of the company back in March, having been hired only a year earlier.

More rumor-mongering says that Regent Pacific Management put some of their own money in Vivato.

With the return of Chris Demarche and Ron Rudokas, I'd bet large that Vivato will shortly start burning through its (now quite ancient) inventory to "build out" second and third tier cities to follow the recent "land grab" mentality, in the process turning Vivato into a WISP, the working name for which I propose as "Vivastard". Click the link if you don't get the reference.

Note that I predicted similar back in May. Look for the Intel money to get a beam-former WiMax transition product out as well.

And I see the water in Spokane is still full of things you'd rather not injest. Might it be that someone in Spokane is poisoning the water?

Jim on 10.04.05 @ 02:44 PM PST [link]

October 2005
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31