Yesterday, my grandmother was evacuated from her house in San Diego and told to flee the oncoming brush fire. So far, her house remains standing. The rest of my family is just trying to cope with the unbreathable air and the miserable heat. My mother took the preceding picture from her backyard yesterday morning, before the last bits of blue sky disappeared. She says that ash has been falling like snow for nearly 24 hours now. It is not unusual for me to feel glad that I am not in San Diego, but today, whoa Nellie am I ever glad I'm not in San Diego.

Over on Slashdot, they're talkin' about how the makers of Gator — a truly nasty bit of behind-your-back software that sits on your system and launches pop-up ads — have forced a Web site to stop referring to their product as "spyware."

Actually, I've got no problem with that. Gator is not spyware: It does not spy on you. But it is a fucking parasite that, when teamed up with other parasites, can bring a system to its knees. The last time I was visiting my folks, I did a simple run of Ad-aware on their system, and it was hit city. Unacceptable. Unacceptable that their computing environment was letting this go on without their even knowing. more...

Roger Ebert has a few thoughts about leaf blowers, rakes, the President, and the way things used to be.

Proper old-school "underground" net.radio is not dead. SomaFM proves it. We're talking commercial-free, fantastic listening here. I frequently mainline their Groove Salad stream during work hours, and have just discovered Beat Blender for nighttime. If you're feeling silly — or better yet, if you aren't feeling silly, but you wouldn't mind it — listen to the Secret Agent stream and pretend you're stuck in an old B-movie. Oodles of fun.

The tunes are amazing, and the tech is righteous: No bitchy-hoggy Real or Windows Media players needed here. Just WinAmp or Foobar2000 or Audion or iTunes or XMMS to decode a simple mp3 stream. Click and listen. (And don't overlook the handy Amazon-linked song histories available at the SomaFM site.)

[Through Groove Salad, the Supreme Beings of Leisure just sang "Nothin' Like Tomorrow" to me. Word.]

Most of the country celebrates Columbus Day today. Berkeley wishes you a happy Indigenous Peoples Day.

If you translate Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back into Latin, and then do a literal translation back into English, you get something like this:

Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.
For who, colleagues, would not admit,
Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body
Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits
So that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches
Have been deeply stuffed with buttock?

[found on jwz]

This is a geek-rights issue that could impact anyone who watches TV, so listen up. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides some background:

The future of television is digital. In fact, the FCC has already said that television manufacturers will be required to include digital television (DTV) tuners in their sets after 2007. You may not have heard much about DTV yet, but Hollywood is already there, lobbying the FCC for regulations that will force "content protection" technology into every DTV device, including televisions, PVRs (including digital TiVos), and any computer that touches a DTV signal. more...

I voted this morning, but after reading this article by an ex-coworker of mine, I am not at all convinced that my vote will be counted. There could be all sorts of shenanigans afoot, and we'd never, ever know.

For the Beatles fans in the audience: An interview with Sir John Lennon, regarding, among other things, the 1980 assassination of Paul McCartney.

[found on The Morning News]

I'd like to humbly beg my readership's indulgence, for I need to ask a favor. I've got some traffic-reporting software running here on mahnamahna.net, and I'm not sure I can believe what it is telling me. Therefore:

If you are a regular (or semi-regular) reader of this blog, I implore you to take twenty seconds out of your day and add a comment (content not important) to this entry. If you wish to remain an anonymous lurker-type, please consider posting a comment under a pseudonym. This is honor system stuff, obviously: Please post just one comment. But please, play this dumb little game just this once, so I can get a real handle on how many people are reading.

I thank you all in advance. Now let's see that "comments" number climb.